Arnobius of Sicca (died c. 330) was an Early Christian apologist,
during the reign of Diocletian (284-305). According to Jerome's
Chronicle, Arnobius, before his conversion, was a distinguished
Numidian rhetorician at Sicca Veneria (El Kef, Tunisia), a major
Christian center in Proconsular Africa, and owed his conversion to
a premonitory dream. Arnobius writes dismissively of dreams in his
surviving book, so perhaps Jerome was projecting his own respect
for the content of dreams. According to Jerome, to overcome the
doubts of the local bishop as to the earnestness of his Christian
belief he wrote (ca 303, from evidence in IV:36) an apologetic work
in seven books that St. Jerome calls Adversus Gentes but which is
entitled Adversus Nationes in the only (9th-century) manuscript
that has survived. Jerome's reference, his remark that Lactantius
was a pupil of Arnobius and the surviving treatise are all that we
know about Arnobius. Against the Pagans was composed in response to
Diocletian's persecution of Christians, and was a rebuttal to Pagan
arguments why the persecution was justifiable. The book we have
shows little sign of having been revised by a Christian bishop and
is all the better for giving an unvarnished view of the opinions of
an enthusiastic recent convert. Arnobius, "a practitioner of the
coarse and turgid style that is called African," is a vigorous
apologist for the Christian faith, more earnest in his defence of
Christianity than perfectly orthodox in his tenets. His book has
been occasioned by complaints that the Christians had brought the
wrath of the gods on Ancient Rome. Thus, he holds the heathen gods
to be real beings, but subordinate to the supreme Christian God; in
a streak of gnosticism, he affirms that the human soul (Book II, 14
- 62) is not the work of God, but of an intermediate being, and is
not immortal by nature, but capable of putting on immortality as a
grace. Never specifically identifying his pagan adversaries, some
of whom may be straw men, set up to be demolished, Arnobius defends
and expounds the rightness of monotheism and Christianity (deus
princeps, deus summus) and the divinity of Christ, by adducing its
rapid diffusion, its influence in civilizing barbarians and its
consonance with the best philosophy. Christianizing Plato, he
refutes pagan idolatry as filled with contradictions and openly
immoral, and to demonstrate this point, his Books III through V
abound with curious information gathered from reliable sources
(e.g. Cornelius Labeo) concerning the forms of idolatrous worship,
temples, idols, and the Graeco-Roman cult practice of his time, to
the historian and mythographer's cautious delight, but all held up
by Arnobius for Christian ridicule.
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