God was not, as Epicureans believed, entirely absorbed within the orbit of divine pleasures and hence indifferent to the fate of humans. Instead, as Lactantius wrote in a celebrated work written in 313 ce, God cared about humans, just as a father cared about his wayward child. And the sign of that care, he wrote, was anger. God was enraged at man—that was the characteristic manifestation of His love—and wanted to smite him over and over again, with spectacular, unrelenting violence.
