Date of Award
5-11-2025
Date Published
June 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Religion
Advisor(s)
Virginia Burrus
Keywords
Divine Institutes;freedom of religion;genealogy of religion;humanity;Lactantius;Platonism
Subject Categories
Chemical Engineering | Engineering
Abstract
In “Genealogies of Religion & Humanity in the Divine Institutes of Lactantius”, I revisit the thought of Lactantius, an early-fourth century statesman from Roman North Africa, later named the “Christian Cicero.” I explore the role that his magnum opus, the Divine Institutes — written in protest to the “Great Persecution” of Christians under Diocletian — has played in histories of the Christianization of the Roman Empire and of the emergence of “religion” and “humanity” as anti-imperialist concepts. Building on the work of Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, I track Lactantius’s philosophical, political, and juridical arguments to recover how the Divine Institutes fashions joint concepts of religion and humanity to advocate for peaceful resistance to tyranny and for freedom from religious coercion. Ultimately, I demonstrate how Lactantius establishes the earliest extant concept of religion as a critique of ancient philosophy and its justifications of empire and violence, and I unfold Lactantius’s comprehensive argument for religious liberty as a “human right” under the auspices of a novel legal formula he calls “the law of humanity and kinship”. This framework is crucial for clarifying how Lactantius’s concept of “true religion” has been misconstrued in scholarly tradition as a simple expression of Christian triumphalism, which has foreclosed its more radical interpretive potentialities and obscured its historical import. Overall, I aim in this dissertation to contribute to the understanding of Lactantius and of how his concepts of religion and humanity resisted the making of Christian empire, contrary to typical scholarly interpretations in the context of theology, church history, and the intellectual histories of religion and philosophy. Moreover, filling a lacuna in scholarship, it lays groundwork toward illuminating the historical process by which, and possible reasons for which, concepts of religion and humanity fell out of general use during the Middle Ages following Augustine, and it lays the groundwork for tracing how the Lactantian concepts of religion and humanity influenced early modern and modern proponents of humanism and religious freedom in underexplored ways that may yet remain in play today. Readers with an interest in the following key topics may find this dissertation of particular use, not limited to but including: Lactantius and Cicero; Diocletian and Constantine; Edict of Milan; late antiquity and classical reception history; history of Christianity; history of concepts of religion, justice, humanity, servitude and liberty; history of philosophy, Stoicism, Platonism, and theurgy; Hermeticism; varieties of monotheism; Roman political philosophy and jurisprudence; rhetoric, dialogue, persuasion, and coercion; and history of human rights law.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Kimmel, Daniel J., "Genealogies of Religion & Humanity in the Divine Institutes of Lactantius" (2025). Dissertations - ALL. 2102.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/2102
