Arnobius of Sicca
Home > Church Fathers > Arnobius of Sicca Arnobius of Sicca At a Glance Treatise Genre: (4/5) ***** Reliability of Dating: (3/5) *** Length of Text: Greek Original Language: Ancient Translations: Modern Translations: English Estimated Range of Dating: 297-310 A.D. Chronological List of Early Christian Writings Discuss this text on the Early Writings forum. Text The Seven Books of Arnboius Against the Heathen The Seven Books of Arnobius Ad Gentes Resources Catholic Encyclopedia: Arnobius Offsite Links Wace: Arnobius Schaff: Arnobius Apuleius Christianus Roman Household Deities in the Latin Christian Writers: Tertullian, Arnobius, and Lactantius Book Review: Arnobe. Contre les gentiles (Contre les paens).
Arnobius of Sicca Was a Feminist Arnobius of Sicca, God the Father and Souls Books Lewis Ayres, Frances Young, and Andrew Louth, Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, pp. 259-265 Siegmar Dpp and Wilhelm Geerlings, Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, pp. 51-52 Claudio Moreschini and Enrico Norelli, Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature, Vol. 1, pp. 392-396 Johannes Quasten, Patrology (4 Volume Set), Vol. 2, pp. 383-392 Recommended Books for the Study of Early Christian Writings Information on Arnobius of Sicca Claudio Moreschini writes, "The work Against the Pagans (Adversus nationes) was written under Diocletian. More precisely, since reference is made (4.36) to some specific measures such as the destruction of churches and the sacred books, it was written during the persecution, between 304 and 310.
The first three books may hve been written earlier, and its seems that books 1 and 2 may go back to 297-300. Like all defenses of Christianity, the Against the Pagans is both a defense and a polemical work." (Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature, vol. 1, p. 393) R. Jakobi writes, "The circumstances of the writing as described by Jerome, chr. a. 327 (a dream as occasion for Arnobius's conversion, and the composition of the work as pledge of faith in order to receive baptism from the bishop) ought not to be taken as historical imaginative embellishments: from a codicological examination of the acephalous archetype of the ms. tradition, Paris BN lat. 1661 (9th c.), scholars have concluded to the loss not only of a title (inscriptio) but also of an extensive preface, the content of which could have been the source of Jerome's biographical data.
According to Jerome, the work enjoyed wide favor with the public, which after the victory of Christianity could have had more of an aesthetic interest in Arnobius's eloquence, praised by Jerome (in Is. 8 praef.), and in his rhetorical rebuttal strategies, and was ready to dispense with a systematics and orthodoxy of a textbook kind. The heterodoxies to be met with in books 1 and 2 were the occasion for the work to be condemned as 'apocryphal' in the Decretum Gelasianum (320). This assessment explains the break in reception: Only one Carolingian ms., the Parisinus, from northern Italy, has been shown to exist, and of this again only one copy (Brussels B. Roy. 10846-47, 11th c.) is known.
In the ms. tradition the Octavius of Minucius Felix has been passed down as book 8 of the adv. nat.; given the common origin of the two authors we may accept a North African model for their transmission in antiquity. With the exception of the 17th and 18th century, when Arnobius's agnosticism, which was useful to Cartesianism, gave him an influence among French theologians, the work has remained an object rather of philological interest, which since early modern times (and contrary to its author's intention) has used nat. as a quarry of lost sources of pagan theology." (Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, pp. 49-50) J. Quasten writes, "Mention should be made of the sources which Arnobius employed in the composition of his work.