On the Anger of God

Contents

Reading pages: 1.1–9.8 · 10.1–13.25 · 14.1–22.8 · 23.1–23.14

1. 1.1Many, following some philosophers, think God is never angry, either because he only does good or because he cares for nothing.
2. 1.2This error threatens human life and must be refuted.
3. 1.3Lactantius claims no wisdom of his own but follows God's teaching, since God alone knows and reveals secrets.
4. 1.4Philosophers tried to reach truth by guesswork, but the human mind, shut in the body, cannot; knowledge belongs to God.
5. 1.5We need a light from outside ourselves to drive away our darkness.
6. 1.6God is the mind's light; without him all is error, as Socrates admitted when he said he knew only that he knew nothing.
7. 1.7Socrates saw in part that there is no human wisdom, as he said at his trial according to Plato.
8. 1.8If there is no human wisdom, true wisdom is divine and belongs to God alone.
9. 1.9We must know God, the invisible Creator in whom alone is truth, whose religion is attacked by those without true wisdom.
10. 2.1There are many steps up to the truth, and those dazzled by it fall back.
11. 2.2The three steps are rejecting idols, knowing the one Creator God, and knowing his messenger, Christ, who teaches righteousness.
12. 2.3One can fall from any of these steps unless one stands firm.
13. 2.4Some fall from the first step: rejecting idols, they worship the heavens and elements instead of God.
14. 2.5Some fall from the second step: knowing one God, they deny him any form or emotion, as the philosophers taught.
15. 2.6Some fall from the third step: they reject Christ or receive him wrongly, as the heretical sects do.
16. 2.7This treatise answers those who say God neither favors nor is angry but rests untroubled.
17. 2.8Others allow God kindness but not anger; all philosophers deny him anger.
18. 2.9There are four possibilities: God has anger only, neither, favor only, or both.
19. 2.10The truth must lie in one of these four, so each will be examined.
20. 3.1No one holds that God has anger only, for a God who can harm but not help is unworthy.
21. 3.2A God who only did evil would be an executioner, not a judge, and would leave no hope of salvation.
22. 3.3If God caused only evil, another god would be needed as the source of good.
23. 3.4Since there is no other god, a God able only to harm is absurd, and no one has ever claimed it.
24. 3.5This first option being excluded, Lactantius moves on.
25. 4.1Epicurus denied God both anger and kindness, seeing that one implies the other.
26. 4.2To spare God any vice, Epicurus stripped him of virtue, saying he is blessed because he cares for nothing.
27. 4.3A god without movement, will, or action would be no god at all.
28. 4.4God's worthiest work is to govern the world and care for mankind.
29. 4.5A God deaf to prayer and blind to worship would have no blessedness; providence is what is most proper to him.
30. 4.6Denying God's care and providence amounts to denying that he exists.
31. 4.7Cicero reports Posidonius's view that Epicurus was really an atheist who kept the gods in name only.
32. 4.8If Epicurus said one thing and meant another, he was a double-tongued deceiver.
33. 4.9Epicurus erred not by deceit but by following one plausible premise to its consequences.
34. 4.10Having denied God anger, Epicurus was forced to deny him every emotion.
35. 4.11Without anger there is no favor, and then no joy, grief, or pity either.
36. 4.12If God has no emotion, he has no care or providence either.
37. 4.13Epicurus stopped short of the conclusion his argument required: that God does not exist.
38. 4.14His silence could not save him: denying God's anger ends in denying God.
39. 4.15Only the wicked, hoping to sin unpunished, believe it; Lactantius turns to the third view.
40. 5.1The Stoics and others hold that God has kindness but no anger.
41. 5.2Their popular argument is that anger is a disturbance of mind, unworthy of the calm and holy God.
42. 5.3If anger, with its blazing eyes and trembling lips, disgraces a wise man, how much more would it disgrace God?
43. 5.4An angry ruler destroys cities; an angry God, with power over all, would destroy everything.
44. 5.5Without anger, God would be simply gentle, gracious, and a preserver.
45. 5.6Only so, they argue, could he be the common Father and the Best and Greatest.
46. 5.7If a benefactor among men is praised as godlike, how much more should God himself be purely a benefactor?
47. 5.8This view is closer to the truth but still mistaken.
48. 5.9If God is not angry with the wicked, he cannot love the righteous; with opposites, it is both or neither.
49. 5.10Love of the good and hatred of evil go together.
50. 5.11As loving life means hating death, loving good means hating evil.
51. 5.12A master rewards a good slave and punishes a bad one, so that both serve as examples to others.
52. 5.13Whoever loves also hates; some deserve love,
53. 5.14and some deserve hatred; love confers good and hatred inflicts evil.
54. 5.15Both views are false, though the Stoics at least keep the better half; the Epicureans fall into total error.
55. 5.16Epicurus should have argued the other way: since God shows favor, he must also be angry.
56. 5.17One should reason from the certain (God's kindness) to the uncertain (his anger), not the reverse.
57. 6.1Since the other views fail, the truth must be the one no philosopher defended: God shows favor and therefore also anger.
58. 6.2This is the hinge of religion: without favor God deserves no honor, and without anger no fear.
59. 7.1Philosophers have erred much, but none ever said that man is no different from the beasts.
60. 7.2Only ignorant, beastlike men who want to live for pleasure say they are no different from animals.
61. 7.3Everyone can see that there is something divine in man.
62. 7.4Even man's upright body shows he is not a beast, whose nature is bent toward the ground.
63. 7.5Upright man looks toward heaven, and his reason recognizes God's reason.
64. 7.6As Cicero says, man alone knows God; religion is the chief, perhaps only, difference between men and beasts.
65. 7.7Animals have something like speech: they recognize, quarrel with, and greet one another by sounds.
66. 7.8Their sounds, meaningless to us, are words to them.
67. 7.9Animals too show signs of joy that resemble laughter.
68. 7.10Some animals show foresight, digging extra exits from their dens.
69. 7.11Ants and bees, as Virgil says, store up food for winter.
70. 7.12Animals share a likeness of every human trait except religion, which is found in man alone.
71. 7.13Righteousness, which includes the worship of God, belongs to man alone; without it he lives like a beast in human shape.
72. 7.14Since knowing God is what sets man apart, human nature cannot be mistaken in it.
73. 7.15Since knowledge of God is man's distinctive mark, religion cannot be abolished.
74. 8.1Religion collapses if we accept Epicurus's view, voiced by Lucretius, that the gods live apart, untouched by our service or by anger.
75. 8.2If God gives nothing in return, all worship and offerings are foolish.
76. 8.3As Cicero says, a god who cares for no one deserves only a farewell, since he can be gracious to no one.
77. 8.4Such a god might as well depart, since he helps no one.
78. 8.5If God does not care, nothing stops us from secret crime whenever we can escape the law.
79. 8.6Epicurus's view destroys religion, and with it the order of life.
80. 8.7Religion rests on fear, and there is no fear of a God who is never angry.
81. 8.8Without religion life fills with crime; conscience restrains us when we believe God sees our deeds and hears our thoughts.
82. 8.9Some say belief in God is merely useful, a terror from above to restrain secret sin.
83. 8.10On that view all religion is an invention of wise men to keep order; Lactantius will answer briefly.
84. 9.1The early philosophers agreed on providence until Protagoras said he did not know whether there were gods.
85. 9.2The Athenians exiled Protagoras and burned his books; his uncertainty needs no refutation.
86. 9.3Socrates, Plato, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics all affirmed providence.
87. 9.4Epicurus admitted a god but denied providence, making the world a chance clumping of atoms, which is self-contradictory.
88. 9.5A God must know past, present, and future; that is providence.
89. 9.6God and providence stand or fall together.
90. 9.7Later, Diagoras and Theodorus, lacking anything new to say, denied God altogether, against all their predecessors.
91. 9.8These atheists can be refuted by reason and authority, but briefly.
92. 10.1Those who deny providence say the world arose either from atoms colliding at random or from a mindless nature, as Strato held.
93. 10.2Both views are empty; ignorance of the truth breeds such inventions.
94. 10.3No one has ever seen the atoms; Leucippus, who invented them, said things no sick man would rave.
95. 10.4Leucippus rejected the four elements and posited invisible first principles.
96. 10.5Leucippus called them atoms, uncuttable, and gave them different shapes to explain variety.
97. 10.6The theory hardly deserves refutation, but Lactantius will answer it.
98. 10.7Smooth, round atoms could not stick together, any more than millet grains.
99. 10.8But hooked or angular atoms could be cut, and so would not be atoms, and would be visible.
100. 10.9The atomists say atoms dance in the void like dust in sunlight and form everything, even the world.
101. 10.10The atomists even claimed there are countless worlds.
102. 10.11Where did the atoms come from, and what supplied enough of them for countless worlds?
103. 10.12Setting aside other worlds, consider the claim that everything in ours is made of atoms.
104. 10.13If atoms made everything, nothing would need its own seed, and things would form in mid-air.
105. 10.14Plants need earth, roots, water, and seed, not just atoms.
106. 10.15Each thing has its own nature and seed from the beginning, so nothing comes from atoms.
107. 10.16Lucretius himself argued that everything needs its own seed, which undercuts his atomism.
108. 10.17Lucretius contradicted himself; fixed seeds show nothing comes from atoms.
109. 10.18Fire struck from cold flint and iron cannot be explained by atoms of fire hidden within.
110. 10.19A globe of water can kindle fire from sunlight; must water then contain fire?
111. 10.20Breath and vapor condense into water, and mist into clouds and rain.
112. 10.21Where are the atoms of water in vapor, breath, or wind?
113. 10.22The careful design of animal bodies rules out chance.
114. 10.23Even if bodies came from atoms, mind and memory cannot; and "smaller" atoms imply atoms are divisible.
115. 10.24If visible things came from visible atoms, someone would see them.
116. 10.25Rational order cannot come from irrational collision; the world's wonderful reason must be due to divine providence.
117. 10.26If a statue needs an artist, how much more a living man, whom no art can copy in motion or sense?
118. 10.27No craftsman can make a heart, a voice, or wisdom; it is madness to credit atoms with them rather than God.
119. 10.28The Epicureans exempt their gods from being made of atoms.
120. 10.29If something exists that atoms did not make, why not everything else?
121. 10.30Mockingly: without atoms making heaven, the Epicurean gods would have had nowhere to live.
122. 10.31What plan made the atoms form earth below and a star-adorned heaven above?
123. 10.32No one who sees such wonders can think them made from mere crumbs without providence.
124. 10.33It is a marvel that anyone taught this, or that Democritus and Epicurus believed it.
125. 10.34Others say mindless nature made the world, but whatever makes must have will or knowledge.
126. 10.35What lacks sense cannot make sentient creatures or the providently ordered heavens.
127. 10.36Chrysippus argued that whatever made the heavens, which man cannot make, must surpass man in wisdom and power.
128. 10.37Only God can be this maker; mindless nature can do nothing.
129. 10.38A nature with counsel, reason, and power is simply God by another name.
130. 10.39Why then did atoms or nature make mountains of marble but never a house or a statue?
131. 10.40Atoms trying every combination should have produced buildings too.
132. 10.41God made what man cannot, including man, to whom he gave a share of his wisdom so that man could make what he needs.
133. 10.42Without a governing God, where could the intelligent human mind have come from?
134. 10.43Man's body is from the earth, but his wise, ruling soul can only come from a wise source.
135. 10.44As the soul governs the body, God governs the world.
136. 10.45Cicero says souls have no earthly origin and contain nothing earthly, watery, airy, or fiery.
137. 10.46Memory, mind, and foresight are divine and can come to man only from God.
138. 10.47Since nearly all the great philosophers affirm providence, the claim that religion was invented by wise men to frighten the ignorant is false.
139. 10.48If the wise invented religion to deceive, they were not wise, for the wise do not lie.
140. 10.49How could such lies have fooled Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, Zeno, and Aristotle?
141. 10.50There is a divine providence that made and governs all things.
142. 10.51The world's vastness, order, and constancy require a provident maker and ruler.
143. 10.52What is rational comes from reason, reason belongs to God, and so the rational world was made by God.
144. 10.53Since God made and rules the world, religion is rightly owed to him.
145. 11.1Next: is providence the work of many gods or of one?
146. 11.2As the Institutes showed, divine power divided among many would be diminished, and so mortal.
147. 11.3God is one, with complete power; many gods would each lack what the others had.
148. 11.4As a house, ship, herd, or hive has one ruler and the sky one sun, the world has one ruler.
149. 11.5Virgil too speaks of one mind moving the whole world, as one mind rules one body.
150. 11.6All divine power is in one God, too great for words or senses.
151. 11.7The many gods were once men, great early kings honored after death for their benefits to mankind.
152. 11.8Early Greek writers, and Euhemerus and Ennius, show that the gods and goddesses were once human.
153. 11.9Cicero, following them, demolished the public cults but could not supply the true religion.
154. 11.10Cicero confessed he could refute error more easily than find truth, which human reason alone cannot reach.
155. 11.11Plato's Timaeus teaches one God, the source of all, beyond thought and speech.
156. 11.12Hermes Trismegistus, whom Lactantius thinks older than Plato and Pythagoras, also teaches one God.
157. 11.13Socrates in Xenophon and Plato in the Laws say God's nature is beyond inquiry.
158. 11.14Pythagoras and Antisthenes also taught one God.
159. 11.15Aristotle and Zeno, under other names, also agreed on one ruling power.
160. 11.16Though many confess one God, no one seeks to worship him, believing he is never angry; without fear there is no religion.
161. 12.1Lactantius returns to his main subject.
162. 12.2Without religion we lose wisdom, which is knowing God, and righteousness, which needs God's restraint.
163. 12.3Without religion and righteousness men become worse than beasts, which at least spare their own kind.
164. 12.4Without fear of God, man is the cruelest of creatures.
165. 12.5Fear of God alone holds society together, and it vanishes if God is thought never angry; next, why the world was made.
166. 13.1The Stoics rightly say the world was made for man, since everything in it serves him.
167. 13.2Fire, water, land, and sea all serve human needs.
168. 13.3The heavens too serve man by making the earth fertile.
169. 13.4The sun's courses give day and night, winter and summer, for the fertility of the earth.
170. 13.5The moon measures the months and lights the night for travel and work.
171. 13.6The stars mark the seasons and guide sailors.
172. 13.7Winds bring rain for crops everywhere; but, one might ask, did God also labor for the beasts?
173. 13.8The animals too were made for man's use, as food, clothing, and labor.
174. 13.9The Academics ask why, if all was made for man, so much in nature is harmful.
175. 13.10The Stoics foolishly replied that the use of such things will be discovered in time.
176. 13.11What use are mice, roaches, and snakes? A medicine against the harm they do is no answer.
177. 13.12Better no viper at all than a cure for its bite made from its ashes.
178. 13.13The true answer: God made man in his image and gave him wisdom, which needs both good and evil to discern between them.
179. 13.14Choosing the good requires knowing and rejecting the evil.
180. 13.15Wisdom works by seeking the good and rejecting the evil.
181. 13.16Without evils to guard against, wisdom would have nothing to do.
182. 13.17If only goods existed, man would need no more wisdom than infants at a feast of wholesome food.
183. 13.18Mix in poison, and the children need wisdom to choose between good and evil.
184. 13.19It is chiefly because of evils that we need wisdom and are rational.
185. 13.20This also answers Epicurus's dilemma: God either wills to remove evil and cannot, or can and will not, or neither, or both.
186. 13.21Each option seems to make God weak or envious, except the last, which raises the question where evil comes from.
187. 13.22This argument unsettles many defenders of providence, but Lactantius will easily answer it.
188. 13.23God can remove evil but does not, because he gave wisdom, which leads to knowing God and to immortality, the highest good.
189. 13.24Remove evil, and wisdom and virtue, which consist in overcoming evil, would vanish too.
190. 13.25Removing evils would cost us our greatest good; both evil and good were set before us for man's sake.
191. 14.1God made the world for man, and man for himself, as priest of his temple and beholder of his works.
192. 14.2Man alone was given reason, upright stature, and speech so that he might know, contemplate, and praise God, and all things were subject to him so that he would be subject to God.
193. 14.3Since God made man his worshiper and lord of creation, we must love God and also our fellow man.
194. 14.4Man was made for religion and righteousness, as Cicero says: we are born for justice.
195. 14.5God wills everyone to honor him as Father and love others as brothers; in these two lies all righteousness.
196. 14.6Whoever ignores God or harms others breaks the divine law and his own nature.
197. 15.1Why, if man was made for righteousness, does he sin?
198. 15.2God permits evil so that good may shine, since opposites define each other, as the world itself is made of opposites.
199. 15.3Man is made of opposing soul and body: the soul heavenly, eternal, and good; the body earthly, mortal, and inclined to evil.
200. 15.4Because human nature became corrupt, a law was needed to forbid vice and command virtue.
201. 15.5Since there are good and evil deeds, God must respond with favor to the one and anger to the other.
202. 15.6Epicurus objects that a God with joy and anger must also have fear, lust, and every other human weakness.
203. 15.7Anger does not imply fear, nor joy grief; and God's condition must be considered, not a "nature," since he was never born.
204. 15.8Man fears because he can be harmed; God cannot be harmed and so cannot fear.
205. 15.9Sexual desire exists in man because, being mortal, he needs another sex to continue the race.
206. 15.10God, immortal and alone, has no need of sexual desire or offspring.
207. 15.11Likewise envy and greed belong to man, not God.
208. 15.12Favor, anger, and pity, however, rightly belong to God, who uses them to preserve the world.
209. 16.1Men in trouble appeal to God, so God has reason for pity and helps them.
210. 16.2Many worship and serve God with prayer and good works, so he has reason to show favor.
211. 16.3Since God is beneficent and not ungrateful, he must reward those who live holily.
212. 16.4Others are criminals who commit every crime and despise the law and God.
213. 16.5God must be angered by the wicked and punish them to protect the good; his anger is itself a kindness.
214. 16.6Both those who allow God favor but not anger, and those who deny him any emotion, are wrong.
215. 16.7God lacks the emotions of vice, such as lust and envy, but truly has those of virtue: anger at the wicked, love for the good, pity for the afflicted.
216. 16.8Without God's anger and favor, the world would fall into lawless violence; because people expect judgment, virtue thrives and crime is rarer.
217. 16.9Why the wicked often prosper will be considered later; first, whether God is angered by wickedness.
218. 17.1If God cares for nothing, either he has no power or he despises the world he made.
219. 17.2If God is always at rest, who governs the world? And a living being can only rest in sleep or death.
220. 17.3Even in sleep the mind is active, dreaming while the body rests.
221. 17.4Only death is endless rest; the living God is ever active in governing the world and watches over each person's deeds.
222. 17.5God's will is his law; those who keep it are dear to him, and he must be angry with those who violate it.
223. 17.6To call punishment harm would make just laws and judges harmful too.
224. 17.7Just punishment protects the good; the one who truly harms is he who harms the innocent or spares the guilty.
225. 17.8A master who let rebellious slaves seize his goods unpunished would not be wise or patient, but senseless.
226. 17.9Cicero asks whether a father who spared a slave who murdered his family and burned his house would be merciful or monstrous.
227. 17.10Pardoning such crimes is cruelty; so God's virtue requires that injustice move him.
228. 17.11The world is God's house and men his servants; he must be indignant when they mock his name and do evil.
229. 17.12Anger can be reasonable; the Stoics wrongly wished to root it out, the Peripatetics only to moderate it.
230. 17.13The philosophers' definitions of anger, collected by Seneca, all describe it as a desire for revenge.
231. 17.14Vengeful anger comes from injury and pain; it is found in frail man, not in God, who cannot be hurt.
232. 17.15Just anger is not a desire for revenge, since it does not arise from personal injury.
233. 17.16Leaving judges aside, we are rightly roused to correct those under our authority when they do wrong.
234. 17.17The good man is displeased by evil and rises to correct it, not for his own sake but to keep discipline,
235. 17.18correct behavior, and curb license; this just anger exists in God, from whom man learned it.
236. 17.19As we correct those in our charge, God must restrain the sins of all, and so must be angry.
237. 17.20Anger should be defined as the mind's movement to restrain sin, not, as Cicero put it, lust for revenge.
238. 17.21Furious anger is wholly vicious, but corrective anger is useful and necessary, for man and God alike.
239. 18.1No one can see wrongdoing calmly; a judge may, since crimes come to him secondhand and he applies the law's sentence, not his own.
240. 18.2When our own household does wrong, we must be indignant, for sin is shameful to see.
241. 18.3Never to be angry means approving sin or shirking correction; constant leniency ruins the wrongdoers and causes endless trouble.
242. 18.4Archytas is praised for sparing a negligent steward because he was too angry to punish him.
243. 18.5But as Plato says, punishment aims to prevent future wrong, so Archytas set a bad example.
244. 18.6Slaves of such a master would commit serious wrongs to anger him and so escape punishment.
245. 18.7He should have waited until his anger cooled and then punished in measure.
246. 18.8Punishment should be delayed, not cancelled; otherwise small faults are punished and great ones go free.
247. 18.9Archytas's restraint only let a bad slave rejoice at his master's anger.
248. 18.10God gave the soul emotions for life's needs: desire for procreation, anger for restraining wrongdoing.
249. 18.11Those who misuse desire for lust also misuse anger for harm, raging at the innocent and causing tragedies.
250. 18.12Restraining anger against an equal is praiseworthy, but failing to correct slaves and children is a sin; there anger should even be roused.
251. 18.13What is true of man applies to God, who made man in his likeness; Lactantius sets aside the question of God's form.
252. 18.14Man's mind shows he is made in God's likeness, but his earthly frailty leads him into vice unless God teaches him righteousness.
253. 19.1Man is soul and body, and the virtues of the one fight the vices of the other.
254. 19.2When the soul masters desire, man is truly like God, which shows the soul is immortal.
255. 19.3Most yield to pleasure's sweetness, bind themselves to earthly things, and lose the divine gift.
256. 19.4Those who obey God, scorn bodily desires, and keep righteousness God recognizes as like himself.
257. 19.5God, who gave a holy law, must be angry when it is despised and pleasure preferred to virtue.
258. 19.6As ruler, provider, and father of all, God delights in virtue and is moved by vice: he loves the righteous and hates the wicked.
259. 19.7Some say God simply set fixed rewards and punishments; but what of a just man like Aristides who ignores God himself?
260. 19.8God can be angry at such pride, and still more at a sinner who despises both law and lawgiver.
261. 19.9Unlike a human judge, God, author of his own law, is free to pardon.
262. 20.1The wicked often prosper because, like runaway slaves, they live without discipline, while the godly are kept under it.
263. 20.2Hardship proves virtue; the sinner should not expect lasting impunity, for, as Ovid says, no one is happy before his death.
264. 20.3No one escapes God's judgment, alive or dead; he can humble the living and punish the dead forever.
265. 20.4If God punished every sin at once, no one would survive, for everyone sins.
266. 20.5Because our flesh is so prone to sin, God is supremely patient and holds back his anger.
267. 20.6Many sinners have later become righteous, which could not happen if every sin were punished at once.
268. 20.7Human laws miss many whose sins are hidden or who escape by bribery or influence.
269. 20.8If God condemned everyone who escapes human justice, hardly anyone would remain.
270. 20.9Idolatry alone would justify destroying mankind, since men worship handmade figures instead of the living God.
271. 20.10Made upright to look to heaven, men chose to bow to the earth like beasts.
272. 20.11The idolater turns from heaven to worship things made of the earth he should tread on.
273. 20.12God's patience leads many to repent, abandon idols, and acknowledge the one God.
274. 20.13Yet God's patience ends: he punishes, however late, those he sees are incorrigible.
275. 21.1One last objection: God even forbids man to be angry.
276. 21.2Man's anger must be curbed because it is often unjust and impulsive.
277. 21.3Man's anger needs restraint lest he commit crimes; God's anger is never impulsive or undeserved. But there is more to say.
278. 21.4If God forbade all anger, he would be faulting his own creation, since he gave man the capacity for anger.
279. 21.5God forbids not anger itself but staying angry; human anger should be short-lived,
280. 21.6lest enmity become permanent; "be angry and do not sin" moderates anger rather than uprooting it.
281. 21.7The God who permits anger is himself angry, and the God who commands quick reconciliation is himself easily appeased.
282. 21.8God's anger, like God, is eternal, but it is always under his control, never ruling him.
283. 21.9God's anger does not remain against the repentant, since he commands reconciliation before sunset; it remains only against those who never cease sinning.
284. 21.10God is appeased not by sacrifices but by changed lives; he delays punishment so that sinners may repent.
285. 22.1Lactantius concludes his case to Donatus that God can be angry.
286. 22.2Like Cicero in the Tusculans, Lactantius ends with divine testimonies, since without religion men become like beasts.
287. 22.3The prophets, full of the Spirit, speak of God's favor to the righteous and anger against the wicked; but philosophers need arguments.
288. 22.4Since philosophers trust human authority over divine, Lactantius will cite testimonies they cannot reject.
289. 22.5Many authors, Greek and Roman, record many Sibyls, the Erythraean being the most famous.
290. 22.6Fenestella reports that the Senate brought the Erythraean Sibyl's verses to Rome and placed them in the restored Capitol.
291. 22.7The Erythraean Sibyl says the eternal Creator rewards the good and rouses his wrath against the wicked.
292. 22.8The Sibyl warns against idolatry, adultery, sex between males, and killing children, for God is angry with those who sin.
293. 23.1Since there were several Sibyls, one testimony may not suffice.
294. 23.2The Cumaean Sibyl's books are secret, but those of the others are freely available.
295. 23.3Another Sibyl announces God's great wrath coming on a disobedient world.
296. 23.4Another Sibyl says God sent the flood in his anger at human wickedness.
297. 23.5The Sibyl foretells a future burning of the world in God's wrath, as Ovid also says of Jupiter:
298. 23.6Ovid: fate foretells a time when sea, earth, and heaven will burn.
299. 23.7The Sibyl also says God is appeased by repentance and will cease his wrath if people practice piety.
300. 23.8Another Sibyl urges love for God the Creator, lest his anger destroy mankind.
301. 23.9So the philosophers are wrong to praise God as free of anger, stripping him of what upholds his majesty.
302. 23.10Without fear, earthly rule collapses; a king or anyone without anger would be robbed and mocked.
303. 23.11Much less can God's heavenly rule stand without anger and fear.
304. 23.12Even Apollo's oracle at Miletus says earth, heaven, sea, and demons tremble before God the King.
305. 23.13If God were merely gentle, why would all creation tremble at him? All rule rests on fear, and fear on anger.
306. 23.14Where there is no anger there is no rule; therefore let no one despise God, but love him as Father, fear him as Lord, live righteously, share wealth, and keep the heart as his temple, so as to have him always gracious and never angry.