HistoricalChristian.Faith

Lactantius on the Nephilim

Dates: c. 310 · Wikipedia
Summary: Lactantius, tutor to Constantine's son and the first to lay out Christian doctrine systematically in Latin, makes the Genesis 6 fall the very "fountain of errors" behind pagan religion. God sent angels to guard mankind; the devil "polluted them by intercourse with women," and they "fell to the earth." Their offspring — "neither angels nor men, but bearing a kind of mixed nature" — became the earthly demons, "the authors of all the evils which are done," who insinuate themselves into bodies and are worshipped as gods. It is the fullest Latin statement of the Enochic tradition before Augustine turned the West toward the Sethite reading.

Claims & evidence

The guardian angels were polluted by women and fell; their mixed offspring became demons

God in His forethought … sent angels for the protection and improvement of the human race; and inasmuch as He had given these a free will, He enjoined them above all things not to defile themselves with contamination from the earth … Therefore, while they abode among men, that most deceitful ruler of the earth, by his very association, gradually enticed them to vices, and polluted them by intercourse with women. Then, not being admitted into heaven on account of the sins into which they had plunged themselves, they fell to the earth … But they who were born from these, because they were neither angels nor men, but bearing a kind of mixed nature, were not admitted into hell, as their fathers were not into heaven. Thus there came to be two kinds of demons; one of heaven, the other of the earth. The latter are the wicked spirits, the authors of all the evils which are done, and the same devil is their prince.

— The Divine Institutes, Book II, Chapter XV (Of the Corruption of Angels, and the Two Kinds of Demons), source. Lactantius preserves the 1 Enoch schema — fallen guardian angels, hybrid offspring, demons sprung from them — and makes it the explanatory root of idolatry: these "earthly" demons "insinuate themselves into the bodies of men," then "worship the wise demons as gods of the earth."

Notes

• Lactantius is the leading early-fourth-century Latin witness to the angelic reading, writing under Constantine — within a generation of Augustine, who would reject precisely this construction and steer the Latin West to the Sethite view.
• His "two kinds of demons" — one heavenly (the fallen angels), one earthly (their giant-born offspring) — is the Enochic demonology shared with Athenagoras and Commodian, and incompatible with a purely human (Sethite) reading — one of the early witnesses weighed on the are the unclean spirits the dead Nephilim? argument (assessment: contested).