2026 Theses Doctoral

Body Language: Lactantius and the Corporeal

Swan, Marissa K.

This dissertation brings together Lactantius’ De opificio Dei (hereafter Opif.) and his De mortibus persecutorum (hereafter De mort. pers.), and puts these two texts in dialogue with one another for the purpose of showing how Lactantius’ treatment of imperial bodies in the latter cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration his treatment of the body in the former.

In reading these two texts together, I diverge from their traditional treatment as two separate, wholly disparate treatises that take part in different genres and have dissimilar aims. More specifically, I position the seemingly healthy, whole, and perfectly constructed body found in Opif. as a backdrop against which to read the diseased and disfigured imperial bodies of the persecutors. In doing so I show how De mort. pers. enacts the theological anthropology articulated in Opif., and how both corporeal order and disorder become a visible disclosure of divine existence. The persecutors’ corporeal decay is not simply a product of invective or moralizing rhetoric, but the explicit inversion of the ideal body crafted by the Christian god—making their physical disintegration a sign of cosmic disorder and a vindication of Christian truth.

With this as its methodological foundation, this dissertation asks the following questions: What does it mean that Opif., a text emerging from a moment of political instability and religious persecution, turns so insistently to the body—not just as a biological entity, but as a locus of knowledge, an ontological landscape upon which important truths about what it means to be a person become inscribed? What does Lactantius’ approach to and use of the human form reveal about his understanding of the world—its structure, its values, and his own position within its unfolding narrative?

In Chapter 1, I establish my methodological foundation. I show how the body in antiquity was read, interpreted, and scrutinized through frameworks borrowed from medicine, and I therefore argue that Lactantius, although not a doctor, adopts diagnostic modes of seeing that mimic those employed by physicians. In Chapter 2, I analyze Lactantius’ systematic examination of the ideal human body in his Opif.. This body establishes the corporeal ideal that becomes the evaluative metric for the bodies depicted in his De mort. pers.. In Chapter 3, I turn to the grotesque, swollen, and decaying bodies of the pagan emperors. Here I show the way in which their corporeal disintegrations enact the theological anthropology articulated in Lactantius’ earlier treatise.