Arnobius

• 1. Introduction

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  Arnobius died around the year 330, and almost nothing about his life can be confirmed. What survives is a single manuscript, a few lines in Jerome's Chronicle, and a seven-book argument for a faith he had only recently joined. Together, these fragments raise questions that still have no satisfying resolution.

  Jerome's Chronicle records that Arnobius was a distinguished teacher of rhetoric at Sicca Veneria, now called El Kef in Tunisia. He was of Berber origin, and Sicca Veneria stood as a major Christian center in the province of Proconsular Africa. He had built a career on argument and public persuasion. Then, according to Jerome, a premonitory dream disrupted that life and drew him toward Christianity.

  In his own surviving book, Arnobius writes dismissively of dreams. Jerome's account and Arnobius's own text stand in quiet contradiction. Whether the dream was real, embellished by Jerome, or something Arnobius later wished to downplay cannot now be resolved.

  The bishop of Sicca Veneria doubted the sincerity of his conversion. He demanded proof. What Arnobius produced in response turned out to be far stranger and more original than a routine defence of the faith.

• 2. A Book Under Pressure

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  Diocletian's apologists put a specific charge to Christians: that by abandoning Rome's traditional gods, they had drawn divine anger down on the empire. Adversus nationes was composed as a direct reply to that accusation. Evidence within the text, specifically in book IV section 36, dates the composition to around 303.

  Jerome refers to the work by a different name, Adversus gentes, in his own writings. The title Adversus nationes appears only in the surviving manuscript. Jerome also records, without further detail, that the early Christian writer Lactantius had been a pupil of Arnobius. Those two items from Jerome and the treatise itself are the only facts about Arnobius that history has transmitted.

  The theology Arnobius then constructed was, to say the least, unexpected.

• 3. The Soul and the Gods

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  Sections 14 through 62 of Book II lay out Arnobius's argument about the human soul. He holds that the soul is not the work of God but of an intermediate being. It is not immortal by nature, but it can put on immortality as a form of grace.

  Arnobius turns this position into a moral argument. If souls were naturally immortal, he reasons, people would feel no need to act well. A belief in automatic survival would, in his view, have a harmful effect on human behavior.

  Arnobius never names his specific pagan opponents anywhere in the text. Some of those opponents appear to be invented figures, set up as targets to be demolished. Despite this, the core arguments are clear. Arnobius defends monotheism, asserts the divinity of Christ, and points to Christianity's rapid diffusion as a form of evidence.

  Regarding the traditional gods, Arnobius holds that they are real beings. But they are subordinate to the supreme God of Christianity, whom he addresses with the Latin phrases deus princeps and deus summus. He also credits Christianity with civilizing peoples outside the Roman world, and he describes the new faith as being in consonance with Platonism.

  Tucked within the treatise is an argument no one had made in quite this way before. It would only receive its famous name many centuries later.

• 4. Pascal Before Pascal

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  Book II section 4 of Adversus nationes contains the first known version of what would later be called Pascal's Wager. Arnobius did not have that name. He was making a case about rational choice under conditions of religious uncertainty.

  Arnobius frames the choice in terms of risk and reward. When the future cannot be known, which of two uncertain paths should a person take? The path that offers some hope, he argues, is more rational than the path that offers none.

  He states his argument in these words: "Since, then, the nature of the future is such that it cannot be grasped and comprehended by any anticipation, is it not more rational, of two things uncertain and hanging in doubtful suspense, rather to believe that which carries with it some hopes, than that which brings none at all?"

  If the faith turns out to be false, Arnobius writes, the believer loses nothing. If it proves true and has been rejected, the cost is "the greatest loss, even the loss of salvation." Arnobius did not quote directly from the Gospels anywhere in the treatise.

• 5. Pagan Sources, Thin Scripture

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  Arnobius wrote as a recent convert, and it shows. He knew nothing of the Old Testament. In the New Testament, he was familiar only with the life of Christ.

  Lucretius had shaped his thinking considerably, as had Plato. These were the classical authors he had studied long before Christianity entered his life. His knowledge of Greek mythology came from the Protrepticus, the work of Clement of Alexandria. For Roman mythology, he relied on Cornelius Labeo, a writer of the preceding generation who had attempted to restore Neoplatonism.

  Cornelius Labeo served as a source for Arnobius's treatment of pagan worship more broadly. In books III through V of the treatise, Arnobius describes temples, idols, and the cult practices of Graeco-Roman religion. Books VI and VII cover sacrifices and the worship of images.

  Revilo P. Oliver described Arnobius's prose as that of "a practitioner of the turgid and coarse style that is called African." That style did not prevent him from amassing substantial detail about pagan religious life.

  Every detail Arnobius preserved about pagan practice reached us through a single act of medieval scribal copying.

• 6. A Single Manuscript

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  The only surviving copy of Adversus nationes is a ninth-century manuscript held in Paris. A second copy exists in Brussels, but it is regarded as a poor transcription of the Paris original. Without those two documents, the work would be entirely lost.

  The Paris manuscript also contains the Octavius of Marcus Minucius Felix, another early Christian apologetic text. The two works traveled through the medieval world together. Whether this was a deliberate pairing or an accident of scribal convenience is not recorded.

  Arnobius wrote around 303, arguing a wager no one had framed quite that way before. That argument has outlasted almost everything else about him.