Gaius Marius Victorinus

Marius Victorinus was born in Roman Africa around the year 290 and made his career in Rome as a teacher of rhetoric, the top of the academic profession in the fourth century. He was good enough that a statue of him was erected in the Forum of Trajan, an honor granted to very few. He wrote textbooks on grammar and logic, commented on Cicero, and translated Plotinus and Porphyry into Latin.

Those translations mattered more than he could have known. They are almost certainly the "books of the Platonists" that Augustine says he read at Milan, the books that broke his materialism and prepared him to read Paul.

Victorinus had spent his life defending the old gods in argument. Then, an old man, he began reading the Scriptures. He told his friend Simplicianus privately that he was already a Christian. Simplicianus said he would not believe it until he saw him in church. Victorinus laughed and asked whether it is walls that make Christians. But the reading kept working on him, and eventually he told Simplicianus: let us go to the church, I want to be made a Christian.

When the time came for his profession of faith, the Roman clergy offered to let him make it privately, as they sometimes did for people of rank who would be embarrassed. He refused. He climbed the platform in front of the whole congregation and recited the creed aloud, and Augustine says the people whispered his name to each other in astonishment and then broke into cheering.

Augustine tells the story in the eighth book of the Confessions, and tells it because it was one of the things that finally moved him. The example of a famous old professor humbling himself in public was, by his own account, part of what pushed Augustine over the edge in the garden at Milan.

In 362 the emperor Julian issued an edict barring Christians from teaching classical literature. Victorinus closed his school rather than comply, at the end of a long career.

He spent his last years writing theology: treatises and hymns against the Arians, arguing the Son's full deity in Neoplatonic terms, and the first Latin commentaries on Paul's letters, on Galatians, Ephesians and Philippians. They are difficult and were little read. He died about 364.

Sources: Augustine, Confessions, book VIII; Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 101, and Chronicle; Marius Victorinus, Theological Treatises on the Trinity and Commentaries on Galatians, Ephesians and Philippians.