The Translation of Greek Philosophical Terminology in Marius Victorinus’ Opera Theologica: A Quantitative and Qualitative Study

Abstract

The article collects and analyses philosophical terms formed in Latin by fourth-century rhetorician and philosopher Marius Victorinus (c. 285–360s C.E.) as a result of his translation from Greek sources. The study examines primarily his theological treatises: the Ad Candidum Arianum (De Generatione Divini Verbi) and the Adversus Arium. It undertakes a quantitative and qualitative examination of these terms by studying two linguistic mechanisms which constitute ‘term-formation’ in Latin: lexical innovation and lexical augmentation. Both functioned as important linguistic and conceptual devices in Victorinus’ translations. The article also examines the theological contexts of certain metaphysical terms to understand further their similarities and differences, not only in Victorinus’ translations, but also in earlier uses of central Latin philosophical terms, e.g., essentia and substantia. The article concludes that Victorinus was more didactic than his philosophical predecessors such as M. Tullius Cicero, Seneca the Younger or Apuleius of Madaura, preferring literal translation (particularly morphological calquing) rather than semantic extensions or metaphorical usages (lexical augmentation). By using neologisms formed using derivational word-formation processes and, on rare occasions, loan-words from Greek, Victorinus adopted an approach of adapting Greek terminology with a high degree of precision in Latin, from a range of sources including Christian, Neo-Platonist, and Gnostic authors. He thereby introduced a new Christological vocabulary in the Latin tradition, making him a significant intellectual figure of the fourth and fifth centuries. Although by no means as dominant as others, such as Augustine or Boethius, Victorinus would nonetheless come to exert influence over later Christian philosophers in the Latin West, particularly during the Scholastic period of the Middle Ages.

1. Introduction

In 1957, Pierre Hadot proposed to compile the philosophical vocabulary of the Neo-Platonic rhetorician turned Christian author Marius Victorinus (c. 285–360s C.E.).¹ The aim was ‘to provide the correspondences between Latin and Greek terms’; a lexicon in which one might find ‘not only the Greek words used by Victorinus himself, but also those Greek terms corresponding to Latin ones, which were clearly assigned by some measure of certitude or probability’.² This would be entitled Thèmes et vocabulaire de Marius Victorinus. The complete work would never materialise.³ Before Hadot, Souter and Bruce had collected some first-attested Latin terms in Victorinus’ works, as well as Greek loan-words.⁴ Both studies were incomplete and, occasionally, erroneous.⁵ Yet it is clear that scholars of Victorinus, as far back as Jerome,⁶ have taken a close interest in the obscurity of his vocabulary, largely due to its novelty. However, as Hadot acknowledged (1957: 197), first attestations alone do not provide a complete picture of Victorinus’ contributions to Latin philosophical vocabulary. What is required is a study of the terms in context, introduced in his translations from specific Greek source terms, and an analysis of how, and for which purposes, these terms were employed throughout his opera theologica.

This article adds to the research of Baltes, Campos, Clarke, and Tommasi but confines itself to the main works of his extant Christian writings: the Opus ad Candidum (also entitled the De Generatione Divini Verbi) and the Adversus Arium. ⁷ Within these are specific metaphysical debates regarding Christology and Trinitarianism, both of which were contentious doctrines in Victorinus’ time.⁸ In these debates, he furnishes his readers with extensive translations of Greek philosophical terms in his arguments against Arianism, especially in the formulation of the Trinity.

One of the principal reasons to examine Victorinian vocabulary and translation in more detail is to contextualise his practices in a tradition of metaphysical disputes, beginning in pagan philosophy and continuing through the doctrinal debates of the early Church. An understanding of the diachrony of central Greek expressions of Trinitarian doctrine, and their Latin equivalents, therefore provides a basis on which to evaluate Victorinus’ broader theological project within a tradition of Latin philosophical translation. The collected philosophical terms below will assist researchers of Victorinus and related Christian authors with further resources with which to analyse this difficult metaphysical terminology. It also means that these theological works of Victorinus’ become more valuable for a study of this kind than others (e.g., his Ars Grammatica or Scriptural commentaries).⁹

A further aim of the article is to examine a selected number of his translations that might be classified as ‘first attestations’, with some qualified confidence, and to study the process of ‘term-formation’ that led to their introduction into the Latin lexicon. Tommasi's (1998 and 2006) research has provided useful studies of Victorinian vocabulary by examining potential Greek philosophical sources, in particular regarding the relationship between Victorinus’ Neo-Platonism and its Gnostic influences. To recognise how Victorinus constructed his own terminology we ought to first examine the linguistic choices he adopted when introducing novel terms into Latin. In addition to linguistic observations, this paper will also use a broader analysis of the theological arguments in which Victorinus’ terminological translations were used. This clarifies some of the terminology-laden arguments he prosecuted in order to express his arguments on the consubstantiality of the Trinity. It is intended that this paper will provide the groundwork for a more detailed discussion of ‘lexical innovation’ or ‘lexical augmentation’ in the philosophical terminology of Victorinus and other Late Antique authors in Latin, and that it will demonstrate how these mechanisms were employed in the expression of disputed doctrinal debates of the fourth century.

2. Methodology and Key Definitions

The analysis which follows studies the translation techniques Victorinus employed in introducing novel Latin words or meanings based upon Greek originals and how these compared with earlier authors composing philosophical and theological texts in Latin (chiefly Cicero, Seneca, Apuleius, and Tertullian). The main component of the methodology is ‘term-formation’, as discussed in Langslow (2000: viii) as, ‘embracing all linguistic processes that lead to the creation of new terms in Latin’. Two of these processes include lexical ‘innovation’ and ‘augmentation’. In defining these mechanisms, I adopt the taxonomy proposed by Fruyt (2009).¹⁰ Her research has suggested that neologised forms entered Latin largely through individual or technical contexts and many of them were ‘ephemeral’.¹¹ Fruyt's scheme runs as follows:

1. 1. Lexical innovations enter via three main processes:

   1. a) borrowings of a signifier (‘les emprunts de signifiant’), e.g. borrowings that retain the phonology or orthography of the source language;

   2. b) morphological calques (‘calques morphologiques’); and

   3. c) semantic calques (‘calques sémantiques’).

2. 2. These mechanisms relate to ‘innovation’ to varying degrees, either by introducing a new:

   1. (a) sequence of phonemes into the target language;

   2. (b) term created out of existing morphemes in the target language; or

   3. (c) semantic layer by expanding what a pre-existing term signifies in the target language.

‘Lexical innovation’ is confined to 1b; that is, a term created from either of two forms of neologism: calquing or ‘sense translation’. Calques in this instance can be more precisely labelled as ‘morphological calques’ (‘calques morphologiques’), terms which result from translating ‘morphologically complex foreign expressions by means of novel combinations of native elements that match the meanings and the structure of the foreign expressions and their component parts’.¹² A ‘sense’ translation, also known as a loan-rendition,¹³ is another type of lexical innovation, which involves a new form which adapts the sense of the original term by a combination of native elements in the target language, but whose morphemes do not directly calque those in the source language. These are rare in Victorinus, but there are examples such as exsistentialis (from exsistentia) for ὑπαρκτός.¹⁴

The second mechanism, lexical augmentation, includes what Fruyt refers to as a calque sémantique (1c and 2c), and is perhaps more interesting as a translation practice. Under this category falls a range of labels, e.g., loan-translation, semantic extension, or semantic shift. Durkin defines a loan-translation as the replication of the structure of a foreign-language word or expression by use of synonymous word forms in the borrowing language.¹⁵ Some scholars in the field of modern linguistics have suggested a difference between a calque and loan-shift in that the former consists of a morpheme-by-morpheme translation of a morphologically complex expression, whereas a loan-shift represents a purely semantic transfer consisting entirely of ‘native material whose meaning has been shifted to encompass an introduced concept’.¹⁶ Lexical augmentation in the creation of Latin philosophical terms was common, notably in Cicero's practice, which relied on the addition of a novel semantic layer to an established word.¹⁷ Nicolas studied this phenomenon in Cicero's works, observing that, of his semantic calques (‘calques sémantiques’) or loan-shifts,¹⁸ many ought to be counted as genuine neologisms given their newfound technical contexts.¹⁹ I have chosen not to include in this analysis ‘phrasal terms’ or translations of a single Greek word with, for instance, prepositional phrases. So in Adv. Ar. 2.1.24f, where Victorinus renders ἀνούσιον with sine substantia and ὑπɛρούσιον with supra substantiam, these are not included as ‘terms’ for the purposes of this study. These kinds of translations are, however, interesting in their own right since we observe how Victorinus vacillated, albeit rarely, between the use of phrasal terms and individual words (lexical innovations or augmentations). For example, while rendering ἀνούσιος with the coinage insubstantialis in Ad Cand. 13.9, he later chooses to use the phrase sine substantia in the Adv. Ar. treatise.

I now proceed to outline the Latin tradition of philosophical translation from Greek preceding Victorinus. This will assist when comparing his approaches to term-formation in Latin with those of his predecessors.

3. Tradition of Translation: Greek Philosophical Vocabulary in Latin

Recent scholars have proffered various opinions on the relative importance of Victorinus to the development of Christian philosophy in the fourth century. Nares observed that it was in the elegance of Victorinus’ prose compositions that the combination of Platonism and the Christianity of the Latin West took place.²⁰ Schanz and Monceaux highlighted the breadth of Victorinus’ work: his translations and original compositions on the topics ranging from rhetoric, grammar, and logic, up to his Christian period (c. 355–70), the latter period predominantly concerned with countering the doctrines of the Arians.²¹ Sister Clark noted that the fourth century was one of deep conflict between pagans and Christians, which she summarises as ‘the renaissance of pagan culture [and] the birth of Christian culture,’ at the crossroads of which stood Victorinus.²² Writing in the wake of the First Nicean Council, Victorinus composed his anti-Arian tracts in a transitional period between the traditions of classical Rome, the new trends in Neo-Platonic thought, found in e.g. Plotinus (c. 204/5–270 C.E.) and Porphyry (c. 234–305), and the vociferous doctrinal controversies within the Church.²³ He was therefore well-placed to exert particular influence on the terminology of Christian philosophy, particularly Trinitarianism and, to be sure, we find that, as Church doctrine developed into the medieval and Renaissance periods, many sixteenth-century scholars would later adopt Victorinus’ terminology in varying measures.²⁴ Bruce suggested that we ought to consider Victorinus as standing alongside ‘Cicero and Tertullian as creator of a new Latin vocabulary. …Victorinus was in considerable measure the author of the vocabulary of the schoolmen.’²⁵ Yet, if authors like Cicero, Tertullian, and Victorinus had effectively sown the seeds of early Christian philosophy before Augustine, Victorinus’ fate was mostly to remain in obscurity during Late Antiquity.²⁶ And yet his efforts in translating quosdam platonicorum libros ²⁷ had tangible repercussions for later Latin-speaking Church fathers.²⁸ Augustine found his conversion to Christianity chiefly through the readings of Neo-Platonists such as Porphyry in Latin due to Victorinus’ Latin translations of them.²⁹ Boethius reports that Victorinus translated Porphyry's introduction to Aristotle's Categoriae (named the Isagoge), with an eight-book commentary (according to Cassiodorus),³⁰ as well as the Categoriae text of Aristotle's.³¹ He also provided a commentary of Cicero's Topica ³² and, perhaps, a translation of Aristotle's Πɛρὶ Ἑρμηνɛίας.³³ All of these, except what is preserved in various testimonia, have been lost.

The tradition of translating and re-interpreting Greek philosophical terms into Latin remained unbroken from, at least, Lucretius and Cicero up until Boethius and accelerated over time. In Cicero there was an ad hoc,³⁴ but significant, re-interpretation of Greek philosophy, which would influence later writers such as Seneca and Apuleius. His (partial) version of Plato's Timaeus, for instance, demonstrated a careful but creative translator, rendering the philosophical terms using the lexical (and rhetorical) resources of Latin to their full extent, often imbuing existing terms with new meanings to prevent his translation becoming too dense with technical and unfamiliar vocabulary.³⁵ Where Cicero resorted to neology, his natural rhetorical instincts were at play in his use of well-honed stratagems such as variatio, captatio benevolentiae, and praeteritio to ease his readers into accepting the ambitiousness of his lexical innovations in Latin. He was conscious of his philosophica as independent literary works designed for a well-educated Roman audience, and his translations of Greek technical terminology were guided by principles of style and intelligibility and balanced against the need for care in articulating the expressions of his Greek sources.³⁶

In the second century C.E., Apuleius, like Cicero, preferred the use of existing morphological resources of Latin to create novel terms and meanings when translating Greek philosophy.³⁷ He was reluctant to employ Greek loan-words outright and relied on morphological calques, sense translations and existing Latin words for novel applications. However, like Victorinus, Apuleius was not Italian by birth but was born in the Roman provinces (in this case, North Africa).³⁸ Though the vocabulary Apuleius introduced in Latin would never exert the same influence as Cicero, his translations of Greek affected the writings of major Christian figures such as Tertullian and Augustine.³⁹ There is also the fact that Apuleius was, much like Victorinus, three writers at once: a rhetorician, a literary figure, and a Platonist.⁴⁰ The intersection of these personas produced a novel approach to the interpretation of Greek philosophy (especially Latin Platonism) and its renovation into his native vernacular.⁴¹ For Apuleius, it was not simply a didactic matter of recapitulating Platonic doctrines for students or educated Roman elites, but rather a matter of making sense of these concepts and renovating them in his own way. He brought Greek philosophical expressions into new Latin contexts and blended Stoicism and Aristotelian thought in his translations.⁴²

In the post-classical periods, the development of new schools of thought such as Neo-Platonism required the continuation of the former tradition, with Victorinus, inter alios, taking it upon himself to reinterpret these philosophical trends into his own vernacular.⁴³ With this lineage of translation came the accompanying contributions to Latin's philosophical word-stock, filling the metaphorical – yet no less genuine – topos of the patrii sermonis egestas, oft-repeated in Latin authors since Lucretius. In this context, Victorinus was not unprecedented compared with his precursors. He was another rhetorician-turned-philosopher continuing the project initiated in the late Republican era and taken up in earnest by Latin-speaking authors in the Roman provinces throughout the post-Classical era, especially from North Africa. His exceptionality lay rather in his effect upon (particularly pedagogical) strands of Christian doctrine, as well as the language of logic and metaphysics into the Middle Ages,⁴⁴ only to be rivalled by Boethius.⁴⁵

4. Collection of Lexical Data

The Victorinian terms collected below are the results of both lexical innovation and lexical augmentation mechanisms, directly or indirectly corresponding to specific Greek words.⁴⁶ This is the first step in a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the vocabulary first found in Victorinus. For the most part, the terms have been sourced from Victorinus’ theologica, although some other works (e.g., his translation of Porphyry's Isagoge, preserved in Boethius, and the De Definitionibus) also serve as sources. I include in some references the letters of the fictional Candidus the Arian to Victorinus and all terms in this work I attribute to Victorinus.⁴⁷ His grammatical corpus has not been included in the analysis. Similar word-lists can be found in the works of e.g. Hadot (1968: 169–72; 1971: 383–92) and Campos (1971), though these are of a different scope. The data below represent the first compilation into a single resource of Latin first attestations found in Victorinus’ theological works and their equivalents in Greek, together with a description of their morphological characteristics. It should not be construed as exhaustive for two reasons: (i) The terms chosen are only those from which we can deduce direct or indirect equivalence with a Greek original (e.g., from a Neo-Platonic or Christian source); and (ii) The scope of this study is almost exclusively confined to Victorinus’ theological treatises. In total, 35 lemmata have been collected. Those with the symbol ‡ indicate hapaxes and with asterisks (*) indicate lexical augmentations (established terms with new technical meanings added, e.g., semantic calques; see 1c of Fruyt's scheme discussed above in section 2). Those with superscript ^MC indicate morphological calques (1b of Fruyt's scheme), and those with ^ST indicate ‘sense translations’ (also labelled a ‘loan-rendition’, see discussion above).

• -ia

• beneolentia ^MC (ɛὐωδία) > beneolens + -ia (Adv. Ar. 1.53.18; 4.25.42)⁴⁸

• cognoscentia ^ST (γνῶσις) > cognoscens + -ia (Ad Cand. 1.13;⁴⁹ Adv. Ar. 1.31.36, passim)

• consistentia* (σύστασις) > consistens + -ia (Adv. Ar. 1.49.22)⁵⁰

• effulgentia ^MC (ἀπαύγασμα) > ex- + fulgens + -ia (Candid. epist. 4.9; Adv. Ar. 1.27.18)⁵¹

• praenoscentia ^MC (πρόγνωσις) > prae- + noscens + -ia (Adv. Ar. 1.33.12)⁵²

• refulgentia* (ἀπαύγασμα) > re- + fulgens + -ia (Candid. epist. 4.9; Adv. Ar. 1.27.18)

• subintelligentia ^MC ‡ (ὑπόνοια) > sub- + intellegens + -ia (Ad Cand. 5.8; 5.10)

• -alis/-aliter

• consubstantialis ^MC (ὁμοούσιος) > con- + substantia + -alis (Adv. Ar. 2.10–11, passim)

• exsistentialis ^ST (ὑπαρκτός) > exsistentia + -alis (Adv. Ar. 3.18.14)

• inexsistentialiter ^ST (ἀνυπάπκτως) > in- + exsistentialis + -ter (Adv. Ar. 1.50.25)⁵³

• insubstantialis ^MC (ἀνούσιος) > in- + substantia + -alis (Ad Cand. 13.9)⁵⁴

• -tio /-atio

• indeterminatio ^MC ‡ (ἀοριστία) > in- + determinatus + -tio (Adv. Ar. 4.23)

• unitio ^MC (ἕνωσις) > unus + -tio (Adv. Ar. 1.33.30)⁵⁵

• -bilis/-biliter

• impassibiliter ^MC (ἀπαθῶς) > in- + passibilis + -ter (Adv. Ar. 1.41.26)⁵⁶

• indiscernibilis ^MC (ἀδιάκριτος) (cf. indiscretus) > in- + discerno + -bilis (Adv. Ar. 1.49.19; 4.23.14)⁵⁷

• intellectibilis ^MC (νοητός) > intellectus + -bilis (Ad Cand. 7.13; Adv. Ar. 1.24.16, passim)

• -ivus⁵⁸

• constitutivus ^MC (συστατικός) > constitutus + -ivus (Ad Cand. 19.1; defin. p. 25.24)⁵⁹

• descriptivus ^MC (ὑπογραφικός) de- + scriptus + -ivus (defin. p. 38.8)

• postnativus ^MC ‡ (ὑστɛρογɛνής) > post- + nativus (Isag. 21.14)

• -tas/-itas

• alteritas ^MC (ἑτɛρότης) > alter + -itas (Adv. Ar. 1.23.13, passim)

• essentialitas ^MC (ὀντότης) > essentialis + -tas (Adv. Ar. 3.7.12)

• exsistentialitas ^ST ‡ (ὑπαρκτότης) > exsistentialis + -tas (Adv. Ar. 3.7.12, passim)

• filietas ^MC (υἱότης) > filius + -tas (Ad Cand. 30.36; Adv. Ar. 1.24.3, passim)

• identitas ^MC (ταὐτότης) > idem + -itas (Adv. Ar. 1.48.25, passim)

• inqualitas ^MC (ἄποιος) > in- + qualitas (Adv. Ar. 1.49.22)

• substantialitas ^MC (οὐσιότης) > substantialis + -tas (Adv. Ar. 1.50.18, 3.7.12, passim)

• unalitas ^ST ‡ (ἑνάς/μόνος) > unus + -alis + -tas (Adv. Ar. 1.49.9, passim)⁶⁰

• vitalitas* (ζωότης) > vitalis + -tas (Adv. Ar. 4.5.37)

• Miscellaneous

• adintellego ^MC ‡ (προσνοέω) > ad- + intellego (Adv. Ar. 1.42.12)

• imparticipatus ^MC (ἀμέθɛκτος) > in- + participatus (Adv. Ar. 4.19.10)⁶¹

• indiscretus* (ἀδιάκριτος) > in- + discretus (Adv. Ar. 4.20.16)⁶²

• praeaeternus ^MC (προαιώνιος) > prae- + aerternus (Adv. Ar. 1.56)

• praenoscor ^MC (προɛπινοέομαι) > prae- + noscor (Isag. 21.12)

• praeprincipium ^MC ‡ (προαρχή) > prae- + principium (Adv. Ar. 1.33.9, passim)⁶³

• proexsilio ^MC (ἐκπροθρῴσκω) > pro - + exsilio (Adv. Ar. 1.50.22)⁶⁴

5. Quantitative Analysis

The collected data suggest that Victorinus favoured the creation of new terms using morpheme-for-morpheme calques (‘calques morphologiques’, as in Fruyt's scheme above) of Greek terms wherever he was required to express these in Latin (e.g., indeterminatio: ἀοριστία). Substantives were the favoured part of speech translated from Greek to Latin, constituting 19 of the 35 lemmata collected above, with adjectives or adverbs totalling 13. Victorinus’ preference for literal translation was a kind of didacticism, which explains the productivity of his vocabulary among later Scholastic authors. The preference for didactic translation also distinguishes him from predecessors such as Cicero writing in classical Latin, who favoured a balance between the use of existing lexical material (semantic calquing and sense translation) and literal morphological calquing or the importation of loan-words. Victorinus occasionally had recourse to loan-words (e.g., ὁμοούσιος),⁶⁵ but this was largely for specific doctrinal reasons. However, even when relying on the Greek, he was not averse to providing a Latin equivalent through lexical innovation (hence consubstantialis). However, over a quarter of all the terms were formed from freer processes of translation: sense translation (or loan-renditions) and lexical augmentation (or ‘calques sémantiques’, per Fruyt's scheme above). This suggests that Victorinus had occasion to use the existing Latin lexicon of his time (augmentation) or native elements to form a new term, not directly calquing the Greek source term but certainly influenced by it (sense translation). The latter is ‘a more dynamic and imaginative kind of calque’.⁶⁶

Table 1: Summary of translation techniques from Greek terms in the Ad. Cand. and Adv. Ar.

6. Qualitative Analysis

In the translation of Greek, earlier Latin authors would often use rhetorical stratagems when introducing novel terminology, feigning a politeness to readers and seeking rhetorical permission for coinages, for instance, the use of phrases such as ut ita dicam, si placet or simply quasi x (= neologism) to soften the obtrusiveness of a new word.⁶⁷ Cicero and Apuleius would also insert their own coinages along with other established terms as a form of multiple translation to render a single Greek word.⁶⁸ When it came to lexical augmentations too, one mechanism Cicero favoured was the use of metaphor, extending a common Latin word's semantic field by the use of figurative language. For instance, the imagery of the artifex and aedificator in his Timaeus translation, used to render the mythical δημιουργός and abstract τὸ αἴτιον of the Platonic creation narrative.⁶⁹ By contrast, Victorinus does not use rhetorical techniques, nor does he feel the need to apologise for neologisms or mollify their use for the benefit of his readers. He also rarely adopts metaphorical translations in extending the meaning of a Latin word⁷⁰ and seldom glosses Greek terms with periphrases to ameliorate the strangeness of his coinages.⁷¹ It is, perhaps, for these reasons that Jerome describes Victorinus’ Latin vocabulary as follows: scripsit adversus Arium libros more dialectico valde obscuros, qui nisi ab eruditis non intelliguntur (De vir. ill. 101). His work was not intended for a general audience, which might explain the unapologetic way he introduces such unfamiliar vocabulary. Rather, it was a kind of advanced didactic writing for subject-matter experts or students studying the metaphysical debates of the time period.⁷² As discussed below (Adv. Ar. 3.7), there are occasions when Victorinus expressly draws the reader's attention to the novelty and abstractness of certain Latin terms he employs to render Greek, but rarely does he resort to Ciceronian rhetorical strategies such as praeteritio or captatio benevolentiae.⁷³ Victorinus’ terminology also followed established Latin morphological conventions of composition and derivation, avoiding what Fruyt describes as, ‘les emprunts de signifiant’ (1a above) nor outright nonce-formations or compound words.⁷⁴ The first-attested Greek loan-words in Victorinus appear to be confined to his Ars Grammatica predominantly, in his discussions of Greek metrical vocabulary. These types of termini technici are not included in this study.⁷⁵ In such contexts, he was not hesitant in introducing a Greek term and transliterating it into Latin, although in most of these instances, where the loan appears for the first time transliterated into Latin, Victorinus generally glosses it.

The formations in -ia and -tas were more productive in Victorinus than Classical abstract substantives in -tio. The -ia suffix is a versatile morpheme in Victorinus’ hands, with a range encompassing the Greek -ια/-ία, -σις, and -μα. Cicero used it in a similar way, albeit more sparingly, limiting the equivalence to the -ια/-ία and -σις suffixes and placing greater reliance on -tio as correspondent with -ια/-ία, -σις, and -μα.⁷⁶ Imparticipatus, perhaps translating ἀμέθɛκτος or ἀμɛθɛξία, is formed along similar lines to the practice of Latin translators of Irenaeus in the term infiguratus for ἀνɛίδɛος (Iren. 1.15.5), a term which Victorinus also uses for the same Greek expression, both applied to descriptions of God's being.⁷⁷

Ontological Terminology

Two principal Latin terms in Victorinus’ vocabulary, used as tools in his philosophical vocabulary to underscore the unity of the Trinity, are exsistentialitas and essentialitas. The notion of ‘existence’ incorporates the physical reality of a thing, for instance Christ's human form and the distinguishing accidents of a thing. ‘Essentiality’ is the intrinsic characteristic or essence of a thing (Christ's divinity, man's humanity, etc.). The term derives from essentia, a calque of οὐσία, first attributed to Cicero, according to Seneca (Ep. 58.6), and later used (again, according to Seneca) by the orator C. Papirius Fabianus.⁷⁸ The adjectival derivative essentialis is decisively post-Classical and appears exclusive to Christian writers.⁷⁹ The substantive essentialitas is unattested prior to Victorinus and is perhaps derived from the adjectival form essentialis, attested first in some uncertain letters of Ambrose, contemporary with or slightly earlier than Victorinus’ own writings. The derivatives of exsistentia ⁸⁰ in Victorinus’ terminology include the adjectival, nominal, and adverbial derivatives exsistentialis, exsistentialitas, and exsistentialiter, all occurring first in his anti-Arian works. The manner in which the abstract nouns are introduced is noteworthy:

Therefore no-one may separate the Holy Spirit … because it is itself also of the Father and because it is also itself of the Son (which is of the Father). They are then after that which is ‘to be’, that is exsistentia or substantia, or (if by some fear of [these terms’] notoriety) you may use a higher register and say either exsistentialitas or substantialitas, that is ὑπαρχτότητα, οὐσιότητα, ὀντότητα.

Adv. Ar. 3.7.6–12.⁸¹

Victorinus signals that one may figuratively ‘ascend’ into an abstract realm of linguistic expression (conscendas) and uses the substantives with the -tas suffixes to render the triad of theological terms ὑπαρκτότης, οὐσιότης, and ὀντότης. In the passage, he provides the three Greek synonyms for only the two of his Latin lexical innovations, conflating the terminology to a certain degree. The sense of the passage appears to be that God has both ‘substance’ and ‘essence’ and hence the conflation of the Greek terms. In Adv. Ar. 1.30, Victorinus acknowledges the interchangeable usage of the terms in his time.⁸² Similarly, in Adv. Ar. 2.6, he writes why the distinction is not necessary when discussing the ‘being’ of God or Christ: nihil interest, utrum ὑπόστασιν … intellegamus an οὐσίαν, dummodo id significetur quod ipse deus est. However, earlier in the same work Victorinus summarises his views of the doctrine of the Trinity and we find exsistentia and substantia are distinct. In Adv. Ar. 1.30, he discusses how the ‘wise men’ and the ‘ancients’ (sapientes et antiqui) defined the terms:

They define exsistentia and exsistentialitas as pre-existing subsistence, without accidents, i.e., those things which themselves, pure and without addition, subsist in that which is only being. But they define substantia as the subject taken with all the accidents, which are inseparably existent in the substance itself.⁸³

Adv. Ar. 1.30.21–26

This distinction is found in Tertullian, with the notion of substantia and its derivatives referring to the physical predication rather than the moral or spiritual. So in the Res. 45, 15: ‘We claim that both the oldness of man and his newness imply not a substantial (sc. physical) but a moral difference’ (tam vetustatem hominis quam novitatem ad moralem non ad substantialem differentiam defendimus).⁸⁴ Victorinus seems nonetheless aware of the distinction in the Latin philosophical tradition. However, can we use Adv. Ar. 3.7 to understand exsistentialitas as the translation of ὑπαρκτότης and substantialitas of οὐσιότης? We might turn to other non-theological works of his to find that he did recognise a distinction between the two and, through some inductive reasoning, we may construe exsistentialitas as corresponding to ὑπαρκτότης in the Adv. Ar. In De Definitionibus (p. 7, 16 and p. 16, 18, Stangl), Victorinus translates οὐσιώδης with substantialis to refer to the ‘essential’ characteristic (what he calls the genus) of a thing, rather than its accidents (differentiae).⁸⁵ Not to be confused with Aristotle's primary and secondary substances,⁸⁶ Victorinus construes the ‘genus’ as the prima definitio, the ‘first’ substantia of being, whereas material corporality was a secondary kind of substantia. In the passage above, we might understand substantialitas as a translation of οὐσιότης in the same vein as the translation of οὐσιώδης in the De Definitionibus. This leaves ὑπαρκτότης corresponding with exsistentialitas, and as for essentialitas, it appears that exsistentialitas was viewed as synonymous with it, as implied in Adv. Ar. 4.5: ergo ὀντότης, id est, exsistentialitas, vel essentialitas.

Although Victorinus conflates many of these terms to denote ‘being’ in general, he is aware of, and plays upon, a distinction, at least for the purpose of his Trinitarian theory. So in Adv. Ar. 4.33.31–3: ita tamen ut, quomodo pater et filius unum cum sint, sit tamen pater, sit etiam filius, exsistentia unusquisque sua, sed ambo una eademque substantia. Earlier (Adv. Ar. 1.31), Victorinus wrote that the specific ‘substance’ of God and Christ are certain things which Scripture tell us, namely lumen and spiritus, and both of these are shared between the two, but he also argues ‘light’ is a form of God's οὐσία (Adv. Ar. 2.7). Despite the confusion in the use of ontological labels, we can resolve this with the conceptualisation noted above in the De Definitionibus: the prima definition of God is, for Victorinus, vita and lumen, essence or ‘first substantia’. His material existence became the Son, who, though assuming the accidents of a male individual on earth, was divine and participatory in God's ‘life’ and ‘light’ (sc. οὐσία). Note also that Victorinus’ terminology (and that of other Christian writers of his time and later) acknowledges a distinction between the subsistences (exsistentiae) of God and Christ and the shared substantia that binds them.⁸⁷ We may view exsistentialitas and essentialitas as denoting the ‘reality’ of a thing's being (ὑπαρκτότης or ὀντότης),⁸⁸ whereas substantialitas refers to a thing's what-ness (quid sit) and ‘essentiality’ (οὐσιότης).⁸⁹

Let us consider Victorinus’ use of the substantia element in his derived metaphysical terminology and how it aligned with (or differed from) the tradition before him. Two studies are useful as a more complete background to what follows, namely Arpe (1941) and Dörrie (1976: 13–69), the latter examining the diachrony of ὑπόστασις more generally. A glance at the Oxford Latin Dictionary's entry on the word is of little help, with the various meanings often incongruously defined, e.g.: ‘1. The quality of being real or having an actual existence; also, of having a corporeal existence’ and ‘2. (usu, w. ref, to absts.) Underlying or essential nature, make-up, constitution, that which makes a thing what it is.’ We can accept that the aims of lexicographers are not those of philosophers, but the conflation of English terms like ‘underlying’, ‘real’, ‘essential’, ‘actual’, ‘corporeal’ etc. all add to the confusion.⁹⁰ Yet this confusion cannot be blamed on the compilers of a dictionary, given the way in which the earliest usages of the term in a philosophical sense are confused. In Seneca, the term is applied (the first in Latin literature apparently) to the ‘being’ of all things in letter 58 of his Epistulae Morales when outlining Platonic ontology. Seneca's use in this letter is so broad as to be practically useless, conflating substantia with ὑπόστασις, τὸ ὄν and οὐσία in the space of a few lines. Arpe (1941: 67) holds that we can infer in Seneca that he was either translating (directly or indirectly) the expression ὑπόστασις, and this might have been the case, but Seneca's writings do not give us any definitive equivalence.⁹¹ In Quintilian, the term applies to homines, res, and mental concepts (Inst. 6, praef. 7), similarly without distinction. In legal terminology, the sense of the word could refer to the concept of property or real goods, so the Vocabularium Iurisprudentiae Romanae (vol. 5) defines substantia in a fourfold manner: 1. Material; 2. Force, effect; that which is, not which appears to be; 3. Quantity, sum, that which is contained in some aggregate of things or persons; and 4. Goods, patrimony. By Tertullian's period (c. 155–220 C.E.), the interpretation of substantia proved to be a decisive indication of the term's gradual disentanglement in Latin when referring to the Greek expressions οὐσία and ὑπόστασις, though his use of it remained somewhat ‘elastic’.⁹²

Before looking at Tertullian's formulation, we might compare the metaphysical terminology of the Trinity in the Greek-speaking works of the Byzantine bishop Basil of Caesarea (330–379 C.E.), who interpreted οὐσία as a vague expression (Ep. 38: ὁ ἀόριστος τῆς σημασίας) denoting ‘essence’, perhaps synonymous with Aristotle's secondary ‘substance’.⁹³ However, ὑπόστασις, for Basil, was closer to ‘subsistence’ (res subsistens in later Church theology) or some individual reality.⁹⁴ When it came to articulating these concepts in Latin, Tertullian's substantia applies generally to, as Braun describes it, ‘telle ou telle réalité concrètement et individuellement existante’, but also to non-physical ‘realities’ such as the soul, angelica substantia, among others.⁹⁵ In all cases, it must be kept in mind that Tertullian's substantia denoted a thing's ‘fundamental reality’ (res).⁹⁶ Stead suggested that, since Tertullian was attempting to refute Monarchianism,⁹⁷ his usage of substantia apropos the Trinity cannot be in the Aristotelian sense of the πρώτη οὐσία. This was because, Stead argues, if his arguments for una substantia (Adv. Prax. 2.4) were construed as chronological (i.e., primary versus secondary substance), this would actually confirm the Monarchian view that God was singular and not of three persons.⁹⁸ Stead's assertion perhaps assumes that una substantia referred to something like a single, primary ‘person’ in a corporeal sense, whence arose the Son and the Holy Spirit. It is rather that there is a single res or reality of the Trinity, manifest through three distinct personae simultaneously.⁹⁹ Tertullian construed the single substantia of the Father as Basil and Origen had construed the οὐσία.¹⁰⁰ He understands οὐσία as a thing's ‘reality’ and employs substantia rather than essentia – a key semantic difference (‘essence’, properly construed, is the second Aristotelian category whereas substantia seems to encompass both first and second categories).¹⁰¹ In Tertullian's formulation, God's reality was indisputable and the same applied to that of the Son and the Holy Spirit. All three share one substantia but have always manifested themselves through three distinct forms (what Tertullian described with personae). In the Greek formulation, Basil's interpretation eventually became that the ὑπόστασις may be pluralised (into three ὑποστάσɛις or ‘realities’ or ‘persons’), whereas the οὐσία may not (a single divine ‘essence’, shared by all three realities [ὑποστάσɛις] of the Trinity, just as all Pauls share the common essence of being ‘man’ or ‘animal’ etc.).¹⁰² For Tertullian, ὑποστάσɛις was correspondent with personae and οὐσία with substantia. Thus, whereas Greek-speaking Christian thinkers such as Basil construed οὐσία as the ‘essence’, a more general referent synonymous with Aristotle's secondary category of ‘substance’, Tertullian understood οὐσία as indisputable ‘reality’, i.e., as Aristotle's primary category of ‘substance’.

Victorinus’ terminology follows in this tradition, attempting to refute certain heresies (in this case Arianism) by the use of substantia in a specific way. Substantia, for Victorinus, comes to signify not the physical ‘reality’ of a thing, but rather its underlying and essential nature (οὐσία), characteristic or ‘genus’, which makes a thing what it is. Christ is divine because he is of a divine substantia, although his outward reality (what Tertullian had called the persona) was that of a man. So we might expect that those terms in Greek dealing with essence or essentiality (οὐσία and its derivatives) would be translated with substantia and its derivatives. A survey of the translations shows that this is, in fact, exactly what we see, with occasional conflation with the Greek notion of ὑπόστασις.¹⁰³

It is understandable that substantia and its derivatives might be conflated in Victorinus with what is the morphological equivalent of ὑπόστασις in Greek. However, the (apparent) confusion lies in the distinction between substantialitas and ὑπαρκτότης, since both have similar forms and the Latin term could, feasibly, be a morphological calque of the Greek (sub = ὑπό and stantia = ἀρχή), just as substantia could be a calque of ὑπόστασις. Victorinus, however, uses ex(s)isto (from which, exsistens, exsistentia, exsistentialitas) as conceptually closer to ὑπάρχω (ὑπαρκτότης). His theory is that a thing's essence is that which ‘stands beneath’ it (substantia).¹⁰⁴ Yet that which is corporeally there is perceptible, i.e., something which ‘stands out’ (exsisto), due to the accidents or physical characteristics which are inseparably linked to its underlying reality (cf. Adv. Ar. 1.30). Similarly in Greek, that which already exists is ‘established under’ (ὑπό- + ἀρχή), which is, for Victorinus, its exsistentialitas.¹⁰⁵

Figure 1: Schema of Victorinus’ Ontological Terminology in the Opera Theologica.

There is additionally a broader issue as to why Victorinus made the switch from the singular essentia to substantia. This concerns the centrality of the Greek term ὑπόστασις in the fourth century C.E. to the Arians, who held that God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit possessed separate ὑποστάσɛις.¹⁰⁶ Victorinus was not only balancing the weight of tradition in Latin metaphysical terminology regarding substantia but also seeking to wrest control of the term from the Arians in their demarcation of the ὑποστάσɛις of the Son and the Holy Spirit from God's insubstantialis existence. If Victorinus was to continue the arguments of Greek apologists such as Athanasius of Alexandria and their defence of the unity of the Trinity's ὑπόστασις,¹⁰⁷ then the move from essentia to substantia (and so from οὐσία to ὑπόστασις) as the underlying essentiality of God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit was imperative to reclaiming this doctrinal ground.¹⁰⁸ This shift would have some influence on later Latin authors, but in general, Victorinus’ attempts at a kind of terminological paradigm shift with respect to οὐσία to ὑπόστασις found few imitators.¹⁰⁹

7. Conclusion

Like earlier Latin philosophers before him, Victorinus was aware of the contingencies of his native language in the creation of novel philosophical terminology. He favoured common Latin abstract suffixes, such as -ia, -alis and -tas, to create what I have labelled ‘lexical innovations’, i.e., neologisms through derivation as a result of morphological calquing and, to a lesser extent, sense translation. Through a quantitative analysis of morphological calques in Victorinus’ translations, we saw that he was inclined towards a more didactic or literal approach when rendering Greek terms rather than relying on semantic extensions (lexical augmentation, 11.5 percent of the collected lemmata), as compared to Cicero or Seneca. By examining specific terms such as exsistentialis and substantialis, we also found that Victorinus differed from some of the Christian authors who preceded him. He employed substantia as approximating the Greek οὐσία ‘essence’ rather than ὑπόστασις ‘subsistence’, the latter being more conceptually proximate, in Victorinus’ terminology, to exsistentia and subsistentia, that is, corporeal ‘existence’. This was as much a conceptual problem as it was a method of refuting Arian doctrine of his era regarding the Trinity. The findings of this study suggest Victorinus was a philosopher trained in the linguistic sensitivities required to translate closely the Neo-Platonic vocabulary he had studied from various Greek sources. He used considerable care in applying this knowledge to a literal method of translating Greek philosophical terms into Latin to counter the influence of Arianism during the important Trinitarian disputes of the fourth century C.E.