Arnobius the Younger

ARNOBIUS THE YOUNGER. - Christian writer, probably a monk, who lived in Rome around the middle of the 5th century; perhaps a native of Gaul. The scanty and uncertain data we have about his life are matched by an equal uncertainty about his work as a writer, which more recent scholarship, chiefly through the efforts of the Benedictine G. Morin, has sought to reconstruct. Besides some Commentarii in Psalmos (PL 53, 486 and 552), he is probably the author of some insignificant Expositiunculae in Evangelium (ed. by G. Morin in Anecdota Maredsolana, III, 3, Maredsous 1903, pp. 129-51) and of the Conflictus Arnobii catholici cum Serapione Aegyptio (PL 73, 569-80), a superficial polemic against the Monophysites. Morin also attributes to him a Libellus ad Gregoriam (ed. by G. Morin, in Etudes, textes, découvertes, I, Maredsous 1913, pp. 383-439), a pamphlet already attributed to John Chrysostom, in which the Roman lady Gregoria is shown the way to recover the happiness of married life, and the treatise in three books Praedestinatus (PL 73, 587-672). The importance of these works lies in the stance taken in them, especially in the Commentarii and the Praedestinatus, on the debated question of grace and predestination, in more or less open opposition to the extreme ideas professed by St. Augustine in his polemic against the Pelagians, especially against Julian of Eclanum.

From an examination of the Praedestinatus it emerges that A. is rather a Semi-Pelagian than a Pelagian in the manner of Julian of Eclanum, and that he presents, as the creed of a supposed predestinarian heresy, a composition of his own designed to discredit Augustinian doctrines. The spiritual stance of the author of the Commentaries on the Psalms is no different, although it is closer to orthodoxy, in that the harm done to humanity by original sin is acknowledged and deplored; an evident link between the two works is the high regard in which both hold the ascetic ideal and the continent life. Everything therefore leads to the conclusion that the author is one and the same. There remains the problem of seeing how the same author could, in the Conflictus, subscribe to the Augustinian theses. Morin thinks that the author freed himself from the ideas of Pelagius "according as the ever clearer action of Roman authority... showed him the expediency of doing so."

Mario Niccoli