Arnobius Against Pagans: A Converted Critique

What does it take to truly convince someone you’ve changed? For Arnobius of Sicca, a North African rhetoric teacher who had spent years publicly attacking Christianity, the answer was a 7-book philosophical treatise. Written around 303 CE to prove the sincerity of his conversion to a skeptical local bishop, Adversus Nationes – commonly known as Against the Pagans – became one of the most intellectually unusual works of early Christian apologetics. What makes it especially compelling is its author’s background: Arnobius did not write as a lifelong believer. He wrote as a convert who understood paganism from the inside, and who used that insider knowledge to dismantle it from without.

Who was Arnobius of Sicca? 🔗

Arnobius (died c. 330 CE) was a Berber rhetorician of considerable reputation who taught in Sicca Veneria, in what is now Tunisia, during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. Among his students was Lactantius, who would himself become a major Christian apologist. For much of his professional life, Arnobius was not only a committed pagan but an active opponent of Christianity – someone who lectured against the new faith. His conversion, which Jerome attributes to a premonitory dream, was so sudden and so dramatic that the local Christian bishop refused to believe it. The church at Sicca demanded proof of sincerity before granting him baptism. The result was Against the Pagans.

This origin story matters philosophically. Arnobius was not writing with decades of theological training behind him. He appears to have known very little of the Old Testament, and his knowledge of the New was largely confined to the life of Christ. He drew heavily on pagan sources – Plato, Lucretius, Cicero, Varro – often more than on Scripture. The result is a text that reads less like orthodox Christian doctrine and more like a pagan philosopher using his own intellectual toolkit to argue for a radically different worldview.

Against the Pagans: structure and purpose 🔗

The work is divided into seven books of varying length. The first two books are devoted to defending Christianity against pagan criticisms, while the remaining five turn the attack outward – targeting Neoplatonism, anthropomorphic mythology, idol worship, temple rituals, and pagan sacrificial ceremonies. One of the key charges Arnobius had to answer was that Christians, by abandoning the traditional Roman gods, had invited divine punishment upon the empire. He countered this not with theological argument alone but by exposing the internal contradictions and moral absurdities of pagan religion itself.

As the scholarly resource Judaism and Rome notes, the work is best understood not as a defence of Christianity so much as a vigorous counter-attack on pagan religious thought, deploying a detailed knowledge of Latin literature and Roman myth. Arnobius draws on an extraordinary range of sources: fifteen citations of Varro, fourteen of Plato, along with Aristotle, Lucretius, Cicero, and even some familiarity with Hermeticism and Neo-Platonism. He also shows awareness of the Chaldean Oracles and the magical papyri of his time. This is not a man quoting the Bible – it is a classical scholar using the pagan canon to unravel paganism itself.

The nature of God: the supreme, ineffable first cause 🔗

Arnobius’ theology of God is among the most elevated in early Christian thought. In his framework, God is described as the First Cause, the Father and Lord of all things, unborn, omnipresent, infinite, incorporeal, and passionless – a being knowable only as the Ineffable. God’s very existence is treated not as something to be proved but as a philosophical postulate, the foundation upon which every other argument rests.

This conception directly challenges the pagan pantheon. The gods of Rome and Greece – passionate, jealous, physically described, morally questionable – cannot, for Arnobius, be the ultimate divine principle. He does not deny their existence outright; rather, he subordinates them entirely. Arnobius holds the pagan gods to be real beings, but wholly subordinate to the supreme Christian God – a move that strips them of ultimate authority while acknowledging what pagans already believed. It is a rhetorician’s strategy as much as a theological one: you do not always win arguments by denying the other side’s premises, but by reordering them.

The intermediate creator: a demiurge below God 🔗

One of the most philosophically striking – and theologically irregular – positions in Against the Pagans is Arnobius’ treatment of creation. Rather than attributing all of creation directly to God, Arnobius hesitates. He proposes that certain created things, including the human soul and lower animals such as insects and reptiles, are not the direct work of the supreme God but of an intermediate creator – a lesser creative being positioned between God and the material world.

This idea has clear roots in Platonic philosophy, specifically in the figure of the Demiurge described in Plato’s Timaeus – a craftsman-god who shapes the material world according to eternal forms, but who is not himself the ultimate source of being. Arnobius, deeply influenced by his reading of Plato, appears to have imported this concept into his Christian framework without fully resolving the tension it creates. If the soul is made by an inferior being, not by God directly, what does that say about the soul’s dignity or its relationship to the divine?

This is not a minor theological quibble. It places Arnobius in a position that later orthodoxy would struggle with. Scholars have noted a streak of Gnosticism in this position – Gnosticism being a broader movement that often posited an inferior craftsman-god responsible for the flawed material world, distinct from the transcendent true God. Whether Arnobius was consciously drawing on Gnostic ideas or simply working through Platonic philosophy in an unsystematic way remains debated. What is clear is that his conversion was recent enough that he had not yet absorbed – or been corrected by – the full weight of developing Christian doctrine.

The mortality of the soul: rejecting pagan immortality 🔗

Perhaps the most counterintuitive argument in Against the Pagans is Arnobius’ rejection of the soul’s natural immortality. For most people today, the idea that the soul is immortal seems like a quintessentially religious claim. But Arnobius inverts the expectation entirely: it is the pagans, specifically the Platonists, who insist on natural immortality, and it is Arnobius the Christian who denies it.

His argument spans a long and significant section of Book II (sections 14-62). For Arnobius, the soul is not inherently immortal – it does not carry immortality as an intrinsic property simply by virtue of being a soul. Instead, the soul is capable of receiving immortality only as a gift of grace from God. This is a crucial distinction. Natural immortality, in Arnobius’ view, would mean that the soul belongs to itself, that it is self-sufficient and therefore independent of God. That independence is precisely what he wants to deny.

He goes further. Arnobius argues that belief in the soul’s natural immortality would tend to remove moral restraint and have a harmful effect on human life. If the soul is going to persist regardless of what it does, why behave well? The stakes collapse. By making immortality conditional – something received through relationship with God rather than possessed by nature – Arnobius creates a theology where ethics and eschatology are tied together. How one lives matters, because continued existence is not guaranteed but granted.

This position also serves as a pointed critique of Greek philosophy. The Platonic tradition, especially as developed by figures like Plotinus, had made the soul’s immortality a cornerstone of its metaphysics. For Arnobius, this is not enlightenment but arrogance – the mistake of treating a contingent creature as if it were self-sustaining.

Experiential knowledge and the limits of philosophy 🔗

Underlying Arnobius’ critique of paganism is a deeper epistemological claim: that the kind of knowledge the pagan philosophers claimed to possess – abstract, speculative, systematically derived – is inadequate for understanding the divine. In Book II, he launches a remarkable attack on the value of philosophical and scientific investigation as a path to truth about God. This has led scholars to describe him as possibly the first Christian apologist to ground religious conviction in a form of philosophical skepticism – using doubt about human reason’s limits to justify faith rather than undermining it.

The point is not that reason is worthless, but that unaided reason cannot reach the divine. Pagan philosophers argued endlessly about the nature of the soul, the first principles of reality, the structure of the cosmos – and reached no consensus. For Arnobius, this failure is itself the evidence. The knowledge that matters is experiential: it comes through encounter with Christ, through the lived reality of Christian community and witness. The rapid spread of Christianity across diverse cultures, its capacity to transform people widely regarded as barbarians, and the willingness of martyrs to die for it – these are, for Arnobius, more persuasive than any syllogism.

Pascal’s Wager – centuries before Pascal 🔗

One further contribution of Against the Pagans deserves attention. In Book II, section 4, Arnobius anticipates what would become famously known as Pascal’s Wager by well over a thousand years. He argues that when facing uncertainty about religion, the rational choice is to commit to the faith that offers hope, because if it turns out to be false there is no loss, while rejecting it and being wrong carries the greatest possible cost. This is not merely a rhetorical flourish – it reflects his broader epistemological stance that where certainty is unavailable, rational risk assessment should guide belief. For a man trained in rhetoric and steeped in philosophy, it is a characteristically precise argument.

Arnobius’ legacy: orthodox enough, unorthodox enough 🔗

Arnobius was never fully embraced by the institutional church. His limited knowledge of Scripture, his quasi-Gnostic position on the soul’s origin, and his mortal soul doctrine put him at the edges of what later orthodoxy would accept. In the fifth century, Pope Gelasius placed his work on the index of suspect writings. Yet he was never condemned outright, and his work survived – in a single ninth-century manuscript in Paris, with a poor copy in Brussels – because it preserved extraordinary detail about pagan religious practices that no other source provides. Books III through V are a treasure trove for historians of Roman religion, documenting temple rituals, mythological variants, and cult practices that would otherwise be lost.

His philosophical significance lies precisely in his irregularity. Arnobius shows us early Christianity not as a finished system but as a living intellectual struggle – a tradition still working out what it believed about the soul, about creation, about the relationship between Greek philosophy and revealed faith. His position on the intermediate creator and the mortality of the soul are not failures of orthodoxy so much as honest attempts by a newly converted pagan intellectual to think through the implications of his new commitments using the only intellectual tools he had: the full weight of classical philosophy.

What do you think? If immortality must be received as grace rather than possessed by nature, does that change how we think about the relationship between morality and belief? And given that Arnobius wrote his greatest work to prove his sincerity to a skeptical bishop – does the origin of a philosophical argument affect how seriously we should take it?

References

1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Arnobius-the-Elder
2. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/wace/biodict.html?term=arnobius
3. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01746c.htm
4. https://www.judaism-and-rome.org/arnobius-against-pagans-i5
5. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hwd/a/arnobius.html
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnobius
7. https://pdfcoffee.com/arnobius-against-pagans-pdf-free.html