Gaius Marius Victorinus (also known as Victorinus Afer, 4th century), Roman grammarian, rhetorician and neo-Platonic philosopher, an African by birth (whence his surname Afer), lived during the reign of Constantius II. He taught rhetoric at Rome (one of his pupils being Jerome), and in his old age became a convert to Christianity. His conversion is said to have greatly influenced that of Augustine of Hippo. When the emperor Julian published an edict forbidding Christians to lecture on polite literature, Victorinus closed his school. A statue was erected in his honour as a teacher in the Forum Trajanum. His translations of Platonic writers are lost, but the treatise De Definitionibus is probably by him and not by Boethius, to whom it was formerly attributed. His manual of prosody, in four books, taken almost literally from the work of Aelius Aphthonius, is extant. It is doubtful whether he is the author of certain other extant treatises attributed to him on metrical and grammatical subjects. His commentary on Cicero's De Inventione is very diffuse, and is itself in need of commentary. His extant theological writings include commentaries on Galatians, Ephesians and Philippians; De Trinitate contra Arium; Ad Justinum Manichaeum de Vera Came Christi; and a little tract on "The Evening and the Morning were one day" (the genuineness of the last two is doubtful). Some Christian poems under the name of Victorinus are probably not his. He retained his Neoplatonic philosophy after becoming Christian, and in Liber de generatione divini Verbi he states that God is above being, and thus it can even be said that He is not. "Since God is the cause of being, it can be said in a certain sense, that God truly is (vere ων), but this expression merely means that being is in God as an effect is in an eminent cause, which contains it though being superior to it"[1] He was also a very original thinker in terms of Christian dogmatics. His exposition of the doctrine of trinity in Adversus Arium 1B is unprecedented in earlier Christian philosophy. There are heated discussions concerning the sources of his trinitarian concept. This matter is obscure, but several interesting theories have been made, including a spectacular and elaborate, though doubtful, one by Pierre Hadot in his work "Porphyry and Victorinus".
References
- ^ Gilson, E.: "Being and Some Philosophers", page 32. Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952; cf. Victorinus, "Liber de generatione Verbi divini", in Migne, Patrologia Latina, VIII, col. 1022
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Godhard Geiger, C. Marius Victorinus Afer, ein neuplatonischer Philosoph, Metten, 1888.
- Karl Felix Halm, Rhetores Latini Minores, 1863.
- Heinrich Keil, Grammatici Latini, vi.
- G. Koffmann, De Mario Victorino philosopho Christiano, Breslau, 1880.
- J. P. Migne, Cursus Patrologiae Latinae, viii.
- Martin Schanz, Geschichte der römischen Litteratur, iv. I, 1904.
- Reinhold Schmid, Marius Victorinus Rhetor and seine Beziehungen zu Augustin, Kiel, 1895.
- Gore, Dictionary of Christian Biography, iv.
- Teuffel, History of Roman Literature, 1900, 408.
