other · 310 · Nicomedia
Diocletian had brought him to Nicomedia as professor of rhetoric, and there were so few Latin speakers in the city that Jerome says he had almost no pupils. Then the persecution began in the capital he was living in, he gave up the chair, and he wrote instead. The Institutes are aimed squarely at the educated pagan: they argue that the philosophers were groping at something they could not reach, that false religion and false wisdom fail in the same way, and that justice is the thing paganism cannot supply. The style is the point as much as the argument — this is a rhetorician writing for people who would judge a book by its Latin, and it is why the humanists a thousand years later read him before they read almost any other father. His theology is another matter; Jerome, who admired the prose, remarked that he was better at demolishing than at building.
To write, for educated pagans, the book that would make Christianity look like a philosophy rather than a superstition — in the Latin they respected.
Seven books that Renaissance humanists called the Christian Cicero, and the first systematic exposition of the faith in Latin.