Marius Victorinus
African-born rhetorician who taught in Rome in the middle of the fourth century and converted to Christianity late in life. His translations of Neoplatonic works shaped the young Augustine, and his conversion, narrated to Augustine in the Confessions, became one of the best-known accounts of a Roman intellectual entering the church. He wrote the earliest surviving Latin commentaries on the letters of Paul and a set of treatises defending the Nicene understanding of the Trinity.
Biography
Gaius Marius Victorinus (around 285 to 365 AD), sometimes called Victorinus Afer, was born in Roman Africa and made his career in Rome as a teacher of rhetoric. He belonged to the world of the professional grammarians and rhetors who trained the sons of the Roman elite, and he reached the top of that profession. Jerome records that in 354 AD a statue of Victorinus was set up in the Forum of Trajan, a public honor that marks how high his standing had risen among the educated class of the capital.
Before his conversion Victorinus was steeped in Greek philosophy, and he translated a number of Neoplatonic works into Latin. Augustine, who read some of these translations at Milan, calls them the "books of the Platonists" (libri Platonicorum) and credits them with reshaping his own thinking shortly before he became a Christian. Through this work Victorinus helped carry the vocabulary and arguments of Plotinus and Porphyry into a Latin readership that could not manage the Greek originals.
Late in life Victorinus became a Christian. Augustine devotes a passage of the eighth book of the Confessions to the story, which he heard from the elderly priest Simplicianus, who had known Victorinus in Rome. According to that account Victorinus first told Simplicianus privately that he already considered himself a Christian, and Simplicianus answered that he would not believe it until he saw him in the church. Victorinus then made a public profession of faith before the Roman congregation, declining the offer to make it privately, a step Augustine presents as a turning point that helped move him toward his own decision.
In 362 AD the emperor Julian issued an edict barring Christians from teaching the classical curriculum of grammar and rhetoric. Rather than abandon his faith, Victorinus gave up his chair and closed his school. This resignation, near the end of a long career, is one of the few securely dated events of his life and shows the practical cost the edict imposed on Christian teachers.
After his conversion Victorinus turned his training as a philosopher and rhetorician to the defense of Nicene doctrine against the Arians. He wrote the treatise Adversus Arium in four books, along with shorter works including De Generatione Divini Verbi and De Homoousio recipiendo, and he carried on a written exchange with the Arian Candidus. He also composed three hymns on the Trinity. These works apply the language of Neoplatonic metaphysics to the relation of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and they defend the term homoousios, "of one substance," that the Council of Nicaea had used of the Son.
Victorinus also wrote commentaries on the letters of Paul, of which those on Galatians, Philippians, and Ephesians survive. These are the earliest surviving Latin commentaries on Paul and precede the better-known commentators of the following generations. Alongside his theological and exegetical writing he continued the grammatical and philosophical work of his earlier career, producing an Ars grammatica and Latin versions of Aristotle's Categories and of Porphyry's Isagoge, the standard introduction to logic that would be read in the Latin schools for centuries.
Why Victorinus Matters
Victorinus was the first Latin writer to bring the metaphysics of Neoplatonism to bear systematically on the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity. Where earlier Latin theology had drawn mainly on the categories of Roman law and rhetoric, Victorinus used the language of being, procession, and substance that he knew from Plotinus and Porphyry to argue that the Son is of one substance with the Father. His anti-Arian treatises are difficult and technical, and they were not widely read in later centuries, but they represent the earliest sustained attempt in Latin to give the Nicene confession a philosophical account.
His influence on Augustine runs along two lines. First, the translations of the Platonists that Augustine read at Milan came, at least in part, from Victorinus, and Augustine names that reading as a decisive step in his intellectual approach to Christianity. Second, the story of Victorinus's own conversion, told to Augustine by Simplicianus, gave him the example of a famous Roman intellectual who had made a public profession of faith. Augustine sets that example directly before his own conversion in the Confessions, so that Victorinus figures in the narrative both as a translator and as a model.
Victorinus's commentaries on Galatians, Philippians, and Ephesians are the earliest surviving Latin commentaries on the letters of Paul. They begin a tradition of Latin Pauline exegesis that would be continued by later writers, and they show a reader trained in rhetoric working through Paul's arguments with the tools of his profession. Their survival gives a view of how Paul was being read in Latin in the middle of the fourth century, before the commentaries that came after them.
His grammatical and logical works had a separate afterlife. By translating Aristotle's Categories and Porphyry's Isagoge into Latin, Victorinus helped set the terms in which logic was studied in the West, and later writers on logic drew on this body of work. In him the roles of grammarian, translator of philosophy, biblical commentator, and Trinitarian theologian meet in a single figure, which makes his career a point where the classical schools and the Latin church can be seen in direct contact.
Complete Works in English
Free to readEvery surviving work, translated in full and free to read, from our Patrologia Latina project.
