Theological Treatises on the Trinity
Overview
Marius Victorinus, a contemporary of St. Ambrose and one who had considerable influence on St. Augustine—he has been styled “an Augustine before Augustine”—is an important fourth-century Neoplatonist. Before his conversion to Christianity Marius Victorinus wrote commentaries on works of Cicero and translated Aristotle’s tracts on logic and some Neoplatonic books into Latin.
After his conversion, probably AD 354, he turned his vast learning to the composition of theological treatises in refutation of Arianism and the errors of Ursacius and Valens expressed in the Creed of Sirminum (357) as well as those of Basil of Ancyra and of the Homoeans in the credos of Sirmium and Rimini in 359.
The Theological Treatises on the Trinity contain the following: two letters, one from Candidus the Arian to the Rhetor Marius Victrorinus and the addressee’s reply. Both documents are quite probably literary devices helping to bring into sharp focus the matters under discussion. These are followed by four books Against Arius, a short treatise demonstrating the necessity of accepting the term homoousios (of the same substance), and three Hymns, mostly in strophic structure, addressed to the Trinity and explaining the names and functions of the divine Persons in salvation history. In the Treatises, Marius Victorinus adopts, in addition to the then traditional arguments, Neoplatonic concepts—adapted probably from Porphyry—to present a systematic explanation of the Trinity. Posthumous influences of the Treatises are discernible in works of Alcuin.
The present translation is made from the latest critical text and has profited greatly from the vast erudition of Pierre Henry and Paul Hadot.
For The Fathers of the Church series in its entirety, see Fathers of the Church Series (127 vols.).
Key Features
- Quality translation of Marius Voctorinus’ teaching, suitable for modern scholarship
- Introduction provides background on both the author and the era in which he wrote, refuting Arianism
- One of 127 published volumes in a well-respected series on the Church Fathers
Top Highlights
“That God is this, that Christ is this has been sufficiently shown: ‘The Father lives and I live.’37 ‘The Father has life in himself and he has given to the Son also to have life in himself.’38 ‘All things that the Father has, he has given to me.’39 By these testimonies and others we often prove that the same things are in the Father and in the Son, and that this is always and from eternity; and on that account this was called homoousion (consubstantial).” (Page 208)
“And after awhile he says: ‘And if they had stood in my substance.’245 But for ‘in substance’ they write ‘subsistence,’ not ‘in substance.’ But if someone understands the meaning exactly, he finds nothing other than this: if someone stood in that which is the ‘to be’ of God, that is ‘in substance,’ immediately he sees his Logos because the Son is homoousios (consubstantial) with him.” (Page 139)
“The divine begetting does not contradict God’s immutability and impassibility, for divine action does not introduce change when agere is implicit in the divine Esse; and the Son as begotten is not passible, because it is really God who is begotten, one therefore who is the cause of his own begetting.” (Page 13)
“The word homoousion35 appears in the Enneads36 of Plotinus, but there it refers to the Intelligible Triad, not to the One.” (Page 10)
“As the first Latin writer to compose a systematic metaphysical treatise on the Trinity” (Page 5)
- Title: Theological Treatises on the Trinity
- Author: Marius Victorinus
- Series: The Fathers of the Church
- Volume: 69
- Publisher: Catholic University of America
- Print Publication Date: 1981
- Logos Release Date: 2014
- Pages: 384
- Era: era:ante-nicene
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Theology › Collected works--Early church, ca. 30-600; Trinity › Collected works; Arianism › Collected works
- ISBNs: 0813200695, 9780813200699
- Resource ID: LLS:LGCLTRTSSTRNTY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T20:13:34Z
