Arnobius of Sicca

Arnobius taught rhetoric at Sicca Veneria, a town in the Roman province of Numidia in North Africa, in the years around AD 300. He was good at it and well known for it, and for most of his life he used that skill against Christians.

Jerome, writing his catalogue of Christian authors a century later, tells the story that made Arnobius famous. Arnobius was converted, by dreams, Jerome says, and went to the local bishop asking for baptism. The bishop refused. This was the man who had spent years arguing the church down in public; his word was not enough.

So Arnobius wrote his proof. The result is Adversus Nationes, Against the Nations, in seven books, composed most likely between 297 and 303, in the last years before Diocletian's persecution broke over the African church.

It is an odd, energetic, uneven book, and its oddness is the point. Arnobius argues like a man who has only just come over and still thinks in the categories he was trained in. He knows Roman religion from the inside, the festivals, the temple accounts, the embarrassing old myths about the gods that educated pagans preferred not to discuss, and he lays it all out. He answers the standard charge that Christians had brought disaster on the empire by pointing out that wars, plagues, and famines are older than the church. He defends Christ against the accusation of being a mere magician.

His theology is his own and often not the church's. He is unclear about the soul's immortality, treating it as something granted rather than owned; he says little about the Old Testament and seems not to have known it well. Later readers noticed. But nobody has ever doubted the force of the writing or the value of what it preserves, for the details of Roman cult practice it is one of the best sources that survive.

His pupil was Lactantius, who went on to become the most polished Latin Christian writer of the age and the tutor of Constantine's son. The teacher of rhetoric had produced something after all.

Arnobius died around 330, having lived to see the persecution he wrote on the eve of, and the peace that followed it.

Sources: Jerome, On Illustrious Men 79 and Chronicle; Arnobius, Against the Nations (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.