Apologist Arnobius, a Christian rhetorician from Sicca Veneria

Abstract

The article is devoted to one of the most interesting Christian apologists of the turn of the 3rd and 4th centuries from the Afri-can city of Sicca Veneria — Arnobius. Being a pagan and a teacher of rhetoric, he converted to Christianity after the Great Persecution of Diocletian and wrote an extensive work in defense of the Christian faith as confirmation of his new views, known as “Seven Books Against the Pagans”. This Christian apology is a unique example of an essay composed independently of the pre-ceding Christian tradition. Apparently, Arnobius did not have ac-cess to the texts of Sacred Scripture when he wrote it and could not fully rely on the works of preceding Christian authors. The apology is largely devoted to a systematic exposition of the cri-tique of classical paganism, which was characteristic not only of ecclesiastical but also philosophical works. The aim of this arti-cle is to reconstruct Arnobius' worldview, based on which one can judge what he taught as a teacher of rhetoric at the beginning of the 4th century. This allows us to recreate the picture of the educational environment in the Roman provincial town of that time. Arnobius actively uses the writings of Greek and Roman authors, which, as it seems, were his main teaching material. The article raises the question of the relationship between the rhetori-cal school and the Christian community in an ancient city. Tradi-tionally, Arnobius' acquaintance with Christianity is considered from the moment of his conversion to the new faith, but the anal-ysis of his apology suggests that the version of Christianity he proposed was not born by chance and was the product of deep creative search, which allows us to reassess the teaching of rheto-ric in provincial urban spaces. Moreover, it is evident that the conflict between Arnobius and the church initially went beyond the line of paganism-Christianity, and the apologist was closer to the Eastern idealistic model of church doctrine, which was not typical for Roman North Africa.