Book Two Of The Origin Of Error

Book Two of the Divinae Institutiones, often given the subtitle De Origine Erroris or On the Origin of Error, is one of the earliest books in the seven volume defense of Christianity that Lactantius wrote in the early fourth century. The larger work was aimed at educated pagan readers in the late Roman Empire who knew their classical philosophy and their traditional religion, and Book Two takes up the foundational question of where pagan religion went wrong and how the rituals and beliefs of Greek and Roman civic religion came to occupy the place that the worship of the true God should have held.

Lactantius works through an extended account of the origins of polytheism, the development of idol worship, the role of human invention and imagination in the creation of the various deities of the classical world, and the wider intellectual and moral consequences of a religious tradition that had lost contact with the original truth about God. He draws on classical sources, including the philosophical critics of popular religion among the Greek and Roman writers themselves, to show that even the educated pagans of his own era could see the inadequacy of the religious system they were participating in.

The argument is structured to lead the reader toward Christianity not as a foreign imposition but as the natural recovery of the religious truth that pagan philosophy had pointed toward but never quite reached. Lactantius is careful to acknowledge the genuine moral and intellectual achievements of the pagan tradition, particularly in the Stoic and Platonic schools, while arguing that the religious side of pagan culture had been corrupted by errors that only revelation could correct.

The book is in the formal Latin style of late antiquity, with the polished prose that earned Lactantius the nickname the Christian Cicero in the Renaissance. For students of late antiquity, of patristic literature, of the long history of Christian engagement with classical paganism, or of the wider development of Western theology in its formative period, Book Two is essential. The English translation is generally readable and the historical importance of the work is significant. Anyone working with the text in a serious way will want a good edition with notes that flag Lactantius’s sources and the contemporary controversies he was responding to.