History of the manus ministrae, from Cicero to Arnobius
Rey, Sarah
History of the manus ministrae, from Cicero to Arnobius - 2023.
30
In Greco-Roman antiquity, human anatomy was long admired, and the hands in particular were deemed worthy of praise. They were seen as the hallmark of a humanity considered superior to other creatures. The effective image of “hands that serve” (manus ministrae), conceived in the first century BC, circulated for over three hundred years. It is a Ciceronian legacy: it is in De natura deorum that Cicero attributes to Balbus a long speech in praise of this part of the body, which was marked by Aristotelian finalism, as expressed in Book IV of the treatise On the Parts of Animals. The topos of the “hands that serve” found an immediate echo, and was then revived centuries later in Christian texts from the beginning of the fourth century, both by Lactantius in his treatise De opificio Dei, and by Arnobius of Sicca, who proposes a radical bifurcation in his Adversus Nationes: with him, the manus ministrae are no longer glorified and the gifts of Creation are queried; the rhetor rejects any form of anthropocentrism. The ambiguities of apologetics as a literary genre in which traditions intersect are revealed in this denunciation. A few decades before Jerome, Arnobius seems to reproach himself for being closer, thanks to his intellectual background, to Cicero than to Christ.
History of the manus ministrae, from Cicero to Arnobius - 2023.
30
In Greco-Roman antiquity, human anatomy was long admired, and the hands in particular were deemed worthy of praise. They were seen as the hallmark of a humanity considered superior to other creatures. The effective image of “hands that serve” (manus ministrae), conceived in the first century BC, circulated for over three hundred years. It is a Ciceronian legacy: it is in De natura deorum that Cicero attributes to Balbus a long speech in praise of this part of the body, which was marked by Aristotelian finalism, as expressed in Book IV of the treatise On the Parts of Animals. The topos of the “hands that serve” found an immediate echo, and was then revived centuries later in Christian texts from the beginning of the fourth century, both by Lactantius in his treatise De opificio Dei, and by Arnobius of Sicca, who proposes a radical bifurcation in his Adversus Nationes: with him, the manus ministrae are no longer glorified and the gifts of Creation are queried; the rhetor rejects any form of anthropocentrism. The ambiguities of apologetics as a literary genre in which traditions intersect are revealed in this denunciation. A few decades before Jerome, Arnobius seems to reproach himself for being closer, thanks to his intellectual background, to Cicero than to Christ.
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