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.

Sicca Veneria — the modern El Kef, in the high plains of Tunisia — was an old colony with a temple to a Venus of Punic descent, a Latin-speaking town deep in the Numidian interior where a man could make a career teaching the sons of landowners to declaim. Arnobius was such a man, a professional rhetorician of the late third century, by his own showing steeped in Latin letters and Roman cult and reaching Christian belief only late. The chronology is loose. He had become a Christian by about 300; he was an old hand at the schools, not a young convert; and he is held to have died around 330. Outside Jerome and the book itself, the record is silent — no inscriptions, no contemporary mention, no second work. He is one of those figures who exist almost entirely as a text.

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 — a book written, in effect, as an audition for the catechumenate. The tale cannot be confirmed, and modern scholarship treats it cautiously. It is the kind of conversion narrative the period liked to tell, with its premonitory dream and its skeptical bishop, and there is a sharp internal objection to it: in the Adversus Nationes Arnobius himself speaks dismissively of dreams as a route to truth, which sits oddly with a dream-conversion of his own. The book, besides, bears no marks of hasty composition or of correction by a churchman’s hand. Yet whatever the dream was worth, the text itself reads like the work of a recent arrival — fluent in pagan learning and not yet steeped in the church’s own.

A convert’s polemic that preserves what it attacks

That unevenness is what makes the book unusual. Arnobius defends Christianity chiefly by going on the offensive against the gods of Rome. He piles up the myths and rites in their coarsest detail — the loves and quarrels and humiliations of the deities, the indignities of the temple calendar — and turns each against the respectability the cults claimed for themselves. He ridicules the anthropomorphism of gods who eat, sleep, lust, and bleed; he presses the charge that a divinity worth the name cannot be born, cannot be wounded, cannot be carved. And he answers the standing accusation of his day, that the calamities of the empire had multiplied since the Christians appeared and were owed to their refusal of the old worship. Not so, he argues at length: the disasters blamed on the new religion were never absent before it, and the gods, if they existed and cared, had presided over a long history of plague, war, and ruin without complaint from their devotees.

The seven books fall into a rough order. The first two stand on the defensive, clearing Christianity of the charges laid against it and setting out, in the long second book, Arnobius’s account of the human soul. The remaining five go over to the attack: books three through five take apart the anthropomorphism of the gods, the indecency of the myths, and the allegorical readings by which the learned tried to rescue both, while the last two turn on the apparatus of worship itself — the images, the temples, the sacrifices and ceremonial through which Rome honored its deities. The architecture is that of a forensic speech, the convert prosecuting his former allegiance book by book, and the structure betrays the rhetorician: a man trained to dispose his arguments who has simply pointed the whole machinery of the schools back against the world that built it.

The polemic is wholesale, and in being wholesale it is indiscriminately learned. To attack a cult one must describe it, and Arnobius describes a great many. In the course of the assault he records cult practice, temple lore, festival and image and sacrifice, and the opinions of earlier antiquarian writers on Roman religion, with a thoroughness that has made him, against his own intention, one of the fuller Latin sources for the pagan worship of his day. He preserves rites and divine names that would otherwise be thin in the record; he transmits the matter of lost handbooks on the gods. The deities he means to demolish — the smith-god Vulcan, the lord of the dead Pluto, the goddess of right order Themis, and the long roster of Rome’s idol-worship — survive in his pages precisely because he wished them gone. The book is a hostile witness, and hostile witnesses are often the most circumstantial. Where a devotee might pass over the embarrassing detail, the polemicist lingers on it, and so the Adversus Nationes keeps alive a quantity of Roman religious matter that its author would have been glad to see lost.

Thin theology, the soul of middle nature

His own positive theology is thin and in places idiosyncratic. He says little of the Old Testament and shows scant grasp of the church’s developing dogmatics; his Christianity is more a set of polemical convictions than a system. Where he turns constructive — above all in the long second book — he produces a doctrine of the soul that later readers found hard to square with orthodoxy. Souls, for Arnobius, are not the direct handiwork of the supreme God but the product of some intermediate maker; they are of a middle nature, neither plainly mortal nor plainly divine. They do not possess immortality by their own constitution. What endless life they may reach is not a property they own but a gift — a grace held out by God and, for the soul that fails of it, withheld, so that the alternative to salvation is not eternal torment but extinction. This is far from the confident Platonizing affirmation, common among the educated of his age, that the soul is deathless by nature and stands next in rank to the divine. Against that affirmation Arnobius set his face. He named its holders the new men — the viri novi, philosophers of his own time whose teaching on the soul’s native divinity he treated as a fresh error rather than ancient wisdom, and whose certainty he meant to puncture by insisting on the soul’s poverty and dependence.

The intellectual coloring of all this is disputed. The work plainly shows the imprint of contemporary Platonism, and the philosophy it argues against is the Platonism of the schools in its later, Neoplatonic phase — yet how deeply Arnobius drank from that well, and through what channels, scholars do not agree. Some read him as himself a Platonist of a sort, using Platonic weapons against Platonic conclusions; some see a man who had read the Neoplatonists chiefly to refute them. The most sustained modern argument places his attack squarely against the anti-Christian writings of Porphyry of Tyre, the great Neoplatonic critic of the new religion, with Arnobius turning one Porphyrian work against another to expose their contradictions — and reaching Porphyry in part through the Latin antiquarian Cornelius Labeo, of the preceding generation, who had gathered such material. On this reading the Adversus Nationes is not a generic broadside but a specific reply, the Christian rhetorician answering the pagan philosopher across the same theurgic and metaphysical ground. What is clear is that Arnobius declined the easy Christian flattery of Plato. He would not borrow the immortal soul to make conversion attractive; he preferred a soul precarious enough to need a god.

The African apologetic line

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. Tertullian a century earlier had set the combative tone and much of the vocabulary; Cyprian, bishop and martyr, had given the African church its model of pastoral authority; Lactantius, the pupil, would carry the same anti-pagan arguments into a far more polished Latin and a far more secure place in the church, his Divine Institutes read where his teacher’s rougher book was set aside. Between them Arnobius is the irregular middle term: a convert defending a faith he had only lately joined, his learning all in the world he was renouncing, his theology improvised under threat.

He is usually dated to the persecution years. Internal evidence — a passage in the fourth book — points to about 303, and the closing books appear to have been finished while the persecution still ran, sacrifice a live and present compulsion rather than a memory, perhaps in the first half of 305. That setting explains much: the urgency, the indifference to fine doctrine, the sense of a man assembling every weapon to hand. It is the work of someone arguing for his life and his standing at once, in a moment when refusing the gods could cost a Christian both. The unevenness that makes the book a poor systematic theology makes it a vivid document of its hour.

Text, transmission, and scholarship

Arnobius survived by the narrowest of threads. The Adversus Nationes comes down in a single ninth-century manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 1661 — well written but, as editors have long complained, badly corrupt, leaving the text open to conjecture at many points; the only other witness, a copy at Brussels, is a mere transcript of the Paris book and adds nothing independent. That same Paris codex carries, appended to Arnobius as though it were an eighth book of his, the Octavius of Minucius Felix — the elegant earlier dialogue defending Christianity. The accident of transmission bound the two works together for centuries and entangled them in the same scholarly puzzles, including the long-argued question of which author borrowed from which, a question that arose largely because the manuscript filed them as one. Jerome, it is worth noting, calls the work Adversus Gentes; the title Adversus Nationes is the manuscript’s own.

The critical tradition is dense. A. Reifferscheid produced the standard nineteenth-century edition in the Vienna Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL 4, 1875); C. Marchesi’s edition in the Turin Corpus Paravianum followed in the twentieth century; and a modern critical text with French translation and full commentary was carried out by Henri Le Bonniec and Bernard Fragu in the Budé series, the Collection des Universités de France, from 1982 onward. The full English version remains that of Hamilton Bryce and Hugh Campbell, The Seven Books of Arnobius Adversus Gentes (Edinburgh, 1871), reprinted in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. VI and freely available. The first full-scale modern monograph is Michael Bland Simmons, Arnobius of Sicca: Religious Conflict and Competition in the Age of Diocletian (Oxford, 1995), which makes the case for the Porphyrian frame and for placing Arnobius in the Platonic rather than the Epicurean line — the reading that has since organized much of the debate over his sources and his strange doctrine of the soul, itself the subject of the concentrated treatise that fills the heart of his second book.

What he left is one book by a man caught between two worlds, arguing his way out of the one he knew best.

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