The Supreme God and Saturn

The Adversus nationes was written during a period of great religious conflict and competition. Two very powerful forces were simultaneously confronting the Christian Church in North Africa: the Roman Empire and the cult of Saturn. This chapter suggests that in Arnobius, one can glimpse a few impacts which resulted from the most cataclysmic event in North Africa up to his time. God depicted as the lord of nature and the agrarian processes, who sends the rains, blesses the crops, and has created the sun to make things grow, is a conception of deity which indeed comprises a small but very important part of Arnobius' overall understanding of the manner in which the Christian God providentially relates himself to man and his world. The immediate Christian source underlying this concept is the De bono patientiae of Cyprian. Whether Arnobius has carried with him any former pagan religious concepts into his Christian views of the agrarian lordship of the deity is not ascertainable, but certainly possible in light of the conceptual parallels noted above with the Saturn cult.

Aesthetics · Agrarian society · Agriculture · Ancient history · Archaeology · Cult · Parallels · Period (music) · Saturn · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Philosophy