Arnobius

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Arnobius of Sicca was a Christian apologist of Roman North Africa, active around the year 300, remembered for a single surviving work: Adversus Nationes, “Against the Pagans,” in seven books. Almost everything known of his life comes from a few sentences in Jerome, who reports that Arnobius taught rhetoric at Sicca Veneria in proconsular Africa and counted the later apologist Lactantius among his pupils.

Jerome adds a story that the work was written to prove a conversion. Arnobius, he says, had been a vehement opponent of Christianity until dreams turned him toward it; when he asked the local bishop for baptism, the bishop, distrusting so sudden a change, demanded proof of his sincerity, and Arnobius produced the Adversus Nationes as his credential. The tale cannot be confirmed, and modern scholarship treats it cautiously — it is the kind of conversion narrative the period liked to tell — but the text itself reads like the work of a recent arrival, fluent in pagan learning and not yet steeped in the church’s own.

That unevenness is what makes the book unusual. Arnobius defends Christianity chiefly by attacking the gods of Rome: he piles up the myths and rites in their coarsest detail, ridicules the anthropomorphism of the deities, and argues that the calamities blamed on the Christians were never absent before them. In the course of the assault he records cult practice, temple lore, and the opinions of earlier writers with a thoroughness that has made him, against his own intention, one of the fuller sources for Roman religion of his day. His own positive theology is thin and in places idiosyncratic. He says little of the Old Testament, seems unsure of the soul’s natural immortality, and holds that souls occupy a middle nature, neither plainly mortal nor plainly divine — positions later readers found difficult to square with orthodoxy. The work shows the imprint of contemporary Platonism, though scholars dispute how much.

The Latin Christian apologetic tradition in Africa runs from Tertullian through Cyprian to Arnobius and his pupil Lactantius, and Arnobius sits awkwardly within it: rhetorically practiced, doctrinally underformed, writing under the pressure of the Diocletianic persecution that opened in 303. He is usually dated to those years and is held to have died around 330. The single manuscript that preserved his text also preserves, appended to it, the Octavius of Minucius Felix — an accident of transmission that long entangled the two works in the same scholarly puzzles. What survives, then, is one book by a man caught between two worlds, arguing his way out of the one he knew best.

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