Saint Victorinus of Pettau

Poetovio was a Roman town on the river Drava. The 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia, writing when it lay in Austrian Styria, calls it Pettau; the Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it now, calls it Ptuj in Pannonia, in present-day Slovenia. ¹³ Victorinus was its bishop, and he flourished, the encyclopedia says, about 270. ¹

His surname has caused trouble. The Martyrology long called him Pictaviensis, the encyclopedia says, which for centuries made people think he belonged to Poitiers in France. ¹ Until the seventeenth century he was also confused with Victorinus Afer, the African rhetorician who taught at Rome and became a Christian in old age, a different man whom Jerome lists separately. ¹²

He was born, the encyclopedia says, on the borders of the Eastern and Western Empires, and spoke Greek better than Latin. ¹

Almost everything known of his work comes from Jerome. In his Lives of Illustrious Men he writes: "Victorinus, bishop of Pettau, was not equally familiar with Latin and Greek. On this account his works though noble in thought, are inferior in style." ² He lists commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Habakkuk, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and the Apocalypse, a book against all heresies, "and many others." ²

Jerome came back to him more than once, never quite comfortably. Writing to Paulinus of Nola, he said that "Victorinus, although he has the glory of a martyr's crown, yet cannot express what he knows." ⁴ To the Roman orator Magnus, who had asked why Jerome quoted pagan literature in his writings, he said that "the Martyr Victorinus though as a writer deficient in learning is not deficient in the wish to use what learning he has." ⁵

In a third letter, defending his own use of Origen, Jerome named Victorinus among those "who have merely followed and expanded Origen in their explanation of the scriptures." ⁶ He was making a point about himself, but it says something about Victorinus too: a Latin bishop on the frontier, reading the great Greek interpreter and carrying his work into Latin. ⁶

All his works have disappeared, the encyclopedia says, except extracts from the commentaries on Genesis and the Apocalypse, "if indeed these texts are really a remnant of his works, concerning which opinions differ." ¹ The Apocalypse commentary that bears his name moves through the book verse by verse. ⁷

One passage in it has had a long life. On the four living creatures around God's throne, it explains that the lion is Mark, whose Gospel opens with a voice crying in the wilderness; the man is Matthew, who begins with Christ's human genealogy; the calf is Luke, who begins with the priest Zechariah at the sacrifice; and the eagle is John, who soars at once to the Word of God. ⁷ The six wings of each creature, it says, are the testimonies of the Old Testament, without which the announcement of the New "gains no faith." ⁷

The commentary also says that John saw his visions on Patmos, where Domitian had condemned him to work in the mines, and gave the book to the Church after Domitian was killed and he was released. ⁷ It reads the seven kings of the seventeenth chapter as Roman emperors, with Domitian as the one reigning when the book was written. ⁷

A short treatise On the Creation of the World also comes down under his name. ⁸ It works through the seven days and draws the Church's week from them. ⁸ Because Christ was taken prisoner by a quaternion of soldiers, it says, Christians keep the fourth day as a station or fast; the sixth is kept the same way for the Passion; and a rigorous fast comes before Sunday, "that on the Lord's day we may go forth to our bread with giving of thanks." ⁸

It is full of sevens, the seven spirits, seven churches, seven golden candlesticks, and it lays the life of Christ against the days of creation: on the day the dragon seduced Eve, the angel brought the good news to Mary, and on the day the light was made, Christ rose from the dead. ⁸

The same treatise says that "that true Sabbath will be in the seventh millenary of years, when Christ with His elect shall reign." ⁸ This is the belief, held by a number of early writers, that Christ would reign on earth with his saints for a thousand years before the end. Jerome names Victorinus among its followers, with Irenaeus, Tertullian and Lactantius. ²

The encyclopedia does not soften it. Victorinus, it says, "shared the errors of the Millenarians," and for that reason Pope Gelasius ranked his works with the apocrypha. ¹ It also says that two poems once printed as his, On Jesus Christ and On the Pasch, are certainly not his. ¹

Jerome ends his entry with a single sentence: "At the last he received the crown of martyrdom." ² The encyclopedia dates it probably to 303, under Diocletian, and the Martyrology, translated here, says he was crowned with martyrdom during the persecution of the emperor Diocletian. ¹³ None of the sources tells how he died or where. ¹²³

The Martyrology's entry, also translated here, remembers him first as a writer: Saint Victorinus, bishop of Ptuj in Pannonia, "who published many writings of exegesis of Holy Scripture." ³

No source used for this page names a patronage for Saint Victorinus of Pettau, and none is claimed here. He is remembered as a bishop, an interpreter of Scripture and a martyr. ²³

Saint Victorinus of Pettau's feast day is November 2. The encyclopedia says the Roman Martyrology registers him under that day, and the Martyrology as the Italian bishops print it commemorates him then. ¹³ November 2 is also All Souls' Day, the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, which heads the Martyrology's page for that day. ³ The day of his death is not known. ¹

Jerome could not leave his style alone, and said so three times. ²⁴⁵ Each time he also said that Victorinus was a martyr. ²⁴⁵ A bishop writing in his second language, in a frontier town, set out to explain most of the Bible, and the thing remembered about his writing is that it was clumsy. ¹²

Some of what he believed the Church did not keep, and the encyclopedia says so plainly. ¹ What the Church did keep is what the Martyrology chose to say about him: that he wrote a great deal about Holy Scripture and died for Christ. ³

His reading of the four living creatures as the four Gospels, each known by how it begins, is a reader's idea, the kind that comes from going over the opening lines of each book until they become a face. ⁷