Welcome to the Marius Victorinus Web Site. This site is intended to provide an online resource for the Marius Victorinus Reading Group here at Marquette Univeristy as well as offering other interested students of Marius Victorinus (or Latin Trinitarian theology) opportunity for discussion. To that end we invite you especially to visit the message center and posting board--feel free to join any of the discussion threads, or even to begin your own. The other feature of this site is the Reading Group Session Notes which reflect the conclusions of our weekly discussion. We feel like we are doing important work on Victorinus and invite you to read and offer your own comments in the message center. In addition, we will eventually post Victorinus resources, including reviews of contemporary Victorinus scholarship, background documents and links to other Latin Trinitarian theology web sites. So check back often, and be sure to check the What's New page for site updates. p.s. If you want another look at the Augustine quote from the entryway, click here.

The Marius Victorinus Reading Group

Since May of 1998 a few graduate students in the Department of Theology at Marquette University have been meeting with Dr. Michel Rene Barnes to read and discuss Marius Victorinus' Against Arius. This is a small and informal group of people, never numbering more than seven, who meet every week or two. We are reading Against Arius carefully, usually covering a paragraph or two at each of our ninety-minute meetings. The style or method of reading is to place Victorinus' theology within the context of mid-fourth century Latin trinitarian polemics: in practice this means connecting and comparing what he says with other western trinitarian writings of the mid-fourth century. The dominant scholarly portrait of Victorinus has been of someone who not only had little if any influence on later Latin trinitarian theology, but who also operated largely outside the mainstream of mid-fourth century Latin trinitarian theology. As the recent discussion notes reveal, such an understanding of the character of Victorinus' trinitarian theology is not borne out in the substance of his writings.

Who was Marius Victorinus?
by John Voelker, Marquette University

Marius Victorinus (ca. AD 280-365), often called "the Augustine before Augustine," was a famous rhetor and philosopher in fourth-century Rome, so well-known as a brilliant tutor to the Roman aristocracy that he was honored with a statue in the Forum of Trajan while still living, a nearly unheard-of tribute. Almost all we know of Victorinus' life comes from the panegyric given him by Augustine in Confessions VIII,ii,3-v,10, one of three moving examples which Augustine found compelling for his own conversion. After gaining such renown over a lifetime of scholarship and teaching, Victorinus converted to Christianity around 355, during the time when Homoian theology was about to become the officially decreed Christology of the Empire. This conversion and subsequent public profession of faith led Victorinus eventually to abandon his chair of rhetoric in 362 following Julian's edict forbidding Christians to teach. Before his conversion Victorinus' works had been grammatical and philosophical in nature; his thorough understanding of Platonism was matched with superior language skills in both Latin and Greek. After his conversion he turned his intellectual ardor toward trinitarian theological and exegetical works. He is most known for a series of anti-Arian works, especially the longest of those works, Against Arius, which comprises four books. When dealing with such technical subjects as a defense of the Nicene homoousios, Victorinus makes recourse to rather recondite commentary framed in terms of his Platonist-Porphyrian language (which is why Jerome dismissed Victorinus' writings as being rather unintelligible) without totally escaping his Latin theological tradition. Victorinus also left behind commentaries on the Pauline epistles to the Galatians, Ephesians and Philippians (commentaries on Romans and I and II Corinthians have not survived), and was the first commentator on Paul in the Latin language. Though passing mentions of Marius Victorinus in patristic scholarship usually acknowledge his influence upon Augustine, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Bede, Alcuin and Isidore of Seville, and despite such a memorable conversion and sophisticated trinitarian theological treatises, Victorinus nonetheless remains underappreciated today in the on-going re-mapping and expanding understanding of fourth century trinitarian theology.

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