Arnobius

Arnobius of Sicca (ca 303 A.D.) was a Christian apologist, during the reign of Diocletian (284-305). According to Jerome's Chronicle Arnobius before his conversion was a distinguished rhetorician at Sicca Venerea 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 (De Viris Illustribus, lxxix) Adversus Gentes but which is entitled Adversus Nationes in the only (9th-century) manuscript that has survived. Jerome's reference and the surviving treatise are all that we know about Arnobius.

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 is a vigorous apologist for the Christian faith, more earnest in his defence of Christianity than correct in his tenets. His book is occasioned by complaints that the Christians had brought the wrath of the gods on Rome. Thus, he holds the heathen gods to be real beings, but subordinate to the supreme Christian God; 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. Arnobius defends and expounds the noble monotheism of Christianity (deus princeps, deus summus), the divinity of Christ, proved by its rapid diffusion, its influence in civilizing barbarians and its consonance with the best philosophy. Christianizing Plato, Heathen idolatry he refutes as filled with contradictions and openly immoral, and to demonstrate that, to the historian's cautious delight, his Books III - V abound with curious information gathered from reliable sources (e.g. Cornelius Antistius Labeo) concerning the forms of idolatrous worship, temples, idols, and the Graeco-Roman cult practice of his time, all correctly held up for Christian ridicule and the education of modern mythographers.