‘Veritatem sparsam…colligere’ (Diuinae Institutiones, VII, 7, 4) : des fragments païens pour preuves de la vérité chrétienne dans l’apologie de Lactance. Lactance vs Eusèbe
Résumé
Countless fragments of texts run through the apologetic sums composed by Lactance and Eusebius of Caesarea, the first, a lay Latin, the second, a Greek bishop, who, a few years apart at the beginning of the 4th century, both awaited and then experienced the official recognition of Christianity by the Roman authorities, gave a new and powerful impetus to the defence of their religion, and made Constantine, each in his own way, their champion. These fragments sometimes represent remnants of otherwise lost works, which are therefore precious to us because of the testimony they provide. But above all, they are quotations that these two apologists have exploited for the benefit of the Christian message, by proceeding by "decontextualizing" and reinterpreting their statements according to the recognized capacity of Christianity to be able to summarize the history of the world and of man, consequently, to renew the meaning of its culture. But the process and its conditioning differ in these two authors: Lactance uses the quotations to argue and dialectically lead his reader, through a logic of confrontation between texts, belief and doctrine, to recognize the authority of the Bible - which this Latin and "Ciceronian" reader denigrates -, and to bring back, in doing so, the pagan "dissonances" to Christian unity. Eusebius relies on the authority of this text as an asset allowing him to position himself as an author in the intellectual sphere: he establishes, as a representative of the ecclesiastical institution, the norm for a Christian reading of pagan authors - in particular Plato - which he systematizes in a series of doctrinal sections.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator