[7] And an angel descending from the rising of the sun: he speaks of the Prophet Elijah who is coming before the time of Antichrist, for the restoring and strengthening of the churches against the overwhelming persecution. We read of this in the opening of the books of the Old Testament and the new prophecy, for the Lord says through Malachi: Behold, I am sending to you Elijah the Tishbite, to turn back the heart of the father to the son, and the heart of a man to his neighbor, that is, to Christ through repentance; to turn back the heart of the father to the son: the time of a second calling, to recall the Jews to the faith of the following People. And therefore he also shows the number of the Jews, and the great multitude of the gentiles, who will believe.
Category Archives: Patristica
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Victorinus: In Apocalypsin (6.1-7)
[6.1] The unsealing of the seals is, as we have said, the opening of the Old Testament predictions and the announcement of what will happen in the end times; of which, although prophetic Scripture speaks by a single seal, yet, as all the seals are opened, the prediction has its order. Now, as he says, is opened the first seal; he saw a white horse, and the crowned rider has a bow: for this happened at first; for after our Lord ascended to heaven and opened everything, he sent the Holy Spirit, whose words, through preachers, are like arrows piercing the hearts of men, and conquering disbelief. The crown on the head of the preachers is promised by the Holy Spirit. Of the other three horses, the Lord, showing in the Gospel war, famine, and disease, plainly indicated the prediction. And therefore he says one of the animals, because all four are one. And come and see: come is said to one invited to the faith, and see is said to him who did not see. Therefore the white horse is the word of preaching sent into the world with the Holy Spirit; for the Lord says: This Gospel will be preached in all the world of the earth as a witness to all nations, and then will the end come.
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Victorinus: In Apocalypsin (5.1-3)
[5.1] And in the hand of the one sitting upon the judgment-seat was a book, written on the inside, sealed with seven seals: they signify the Old Testament, which is placed in the hand of our Lord, who has received judgment from the Father. He says, A herald cried out, whether anyone was worthy to open the book and remove its seals, and no one was found worthy, neither in heaven, nor in the earth, nor under the earth. For to open the Testament is to suffer, and to conquer death for men. To be worthy of this no one was found, neither among the angels in heaven, nor among men in the earth, nor among the souls of the saints in rest, none but Christ the Son of God alone, Whom he says he saw: a lamb as though slaughtered, having seven horns in number. About Him was predicted whatever the Law reflected about Him through the offerings and sacrifices, which was necessary for Him to accomplish. And because He was the testator and conquered death, it was just that He was made the heir of God, that he might also possess the substance of the one dying, that is, the members of humanity.
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Victorinus: In Apocalypsin (4.1-7)
[4.1] He says an open door in heaven: the preaching of the New Testament was seen by John, and it was said to him: Come up here. When it is depicted opened, it is obvious that it had previously been closed to men. But it was sufficiently and fully opened, when Christ ascended bodily to the Father. And the voice which he heard, when it said that he was talking with him: without contradiction it reproves the stubborn. He who is coming is He who spoke through the Prophets. For John was of the circumcision, and all that People which heard the preaching of the Old Testament was edified by that Voice. He says, For that voice which I heard, it said to me: Come up here: that is Jesus Christ whom he shows seen as a little before as a son of man among the golden lampstands. And now henceforth he recalls those things which were predicted in similitudes through the Law, and by these scriptures he connects all the earlier Prophets, and opens up the Scriptures. And because afterward our Lord invited to heaven all believing in His name, He immediately poured out the Holy Spirit, who brings men to heaven, he says: Immediately I was in the Spirit. And when the mind of the faithful is opened by the Holy Spirit, he makes obvious to them what also was predicted to those before.
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Victorinus: In Apocalypsin (3.1-3)
[3.1] The fifth kind, selection, or conduct of the saints, shows negligent men, doing other than they should in the world, foolish works, Christian in name only. And therefore he exhorts them, if they can turn back from dangerous negligence, to be saved. He says: Be strong for those who are dying; for I have not found your works full before my God. For it is not enough for a tree to live, and flourish, but not have fruit, as it is not enough to be called a Christian, and to confess Him, but not have Christian works.
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Victorinus: In Apocalypsin (2.1-4)
[2.1] Indeed, in his first letter he says, I know your suffering and works and your patience, I know you are suffering and see your works and patience: do not think I remain far (or ‘for long’) away from you. And that you cannot bear evil people, and that those who say they are apostles, you discovered them liars, and you have patience according to My name. All these belong to praise, and not mediocre praise. But also such men and of such a kind, and the selection of such men, indicates that every one of them must be admonished so that they are not deprived of good things. He says he has a few things against them, saying: You have abandoned your earlier love: remember from where you have fallen. He who falls, falls from a height, and therefore he says from where, for at all times until the end works of love are to be practiced, with is the greatest commandment. Finally, unless this is done, was threatened to move the lampstand from its place, that is, to scatter the people. For you hate the works of the Nicolaitans which I also hate; you have this, this belongs to praise. For the works of the Nicolaitans: before this time, false and disease-bearing men, ministers in the name of Nicolaus, made for themselves a heresy, (saying) that something devoted (to an idol) may be exorcized and eaten, and that whoever had fornicated could receive the peace on the eighth day. Therefore he praises those to whom he has written, to whom, such and so great men, he has promised that tree of life which is in the garden of God.
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Victorinus: In Apocalypsin (1.5-8)
[1.5] His voice was like the voice of many waters. Many waters are to be understood as peoples, or also the gift of baptism, which He gave as a commandment, spread out by the Apostles for the salvation of men. His feet like gold-copper, as though burning in a furnace. It says the Apostles, who were burned in suffering, preached His word; through them, in fact, the preaching went out (lit. ‘walked’); they were well-named “feet.” See where the prophet anticipated this, saying: We will worship where His feet have stood, for where they first stood the Church was also established, that is Judea; there will all the saints be gathered and worship their God.
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St Victorinus of Poetovio: In Apocalypsin
My next treat on the translation front is the earliest preserved full commentary on the Apocalypse, written in Latin by Victorinus, bishop of Poetovio (now the charmingly named Ptui in Slovenia; also known as Pettau or Pettavium), who was martyred in the Great Persecution of Diocletian in 304. The commentary was composed not long after the Valerian Persecution, so about 260. St Jerome actually found his writings to be of great value, not just for the reason that he produced the earliest Biblical exegetical writings in Latin, but that he considered Victorinus a fine exegete in the tradition of Hippolytus and Origen.
This is a complicated work. Victorinus was of a chiliastic/millennialistic bent, a position which was later decided to be mistaken by the Church at large. Because this chiliasm/millennialism appears especially prominently in the latter chapters of the commentary, Jerome took it upon himself to edit those chapters, including a more orthodox interpretation and introducing some other changes throughout the commentary. So, essentially there are two different versions of the complete work, which are only widely divergent in the material covering chapters 20 and 21 of the Apocalypse, and a short prologue by Jerome. I’ll provide here a full translation of Victorinus’ original, then of Jerome’s chapters 20-21, and then Jerome’s prologue. Jerome’s full version is given a rather old (and not very good, I think) English translation in the widely available Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers collection. So far as I know, this will be the first English translation of Victorinus’ original.
The text I’m using is that of Martine Dulaey, Sources Chrétiennes no. 423 (Les Éditions du Cerf, 1997). I had originally started out (in 1999!) on a translation of In Apocalypsin, not knowing of the textual difficulties, using the Patrologia Latina text, which provides Jerome’s version. Once I learned of those textual difficulties, I started to correct my earlier translation from the Haussleiter edition of Victorinus’ original, but only managed to create a hopeless mess of red ink and scribbles on formerly legible pages. So, I’m starting from scratch. Citations and allusions as indicated by Dulaey in the Latin by bolding will be italic in my translation. Please note that these Biblical quotations are somewhat loose on the part of Victorinus, and also represent a Latin translation similar to the Vetus Latina, a pre-Vulgate version, of the Apocalypse, but not identical. At this stage, I’m not providing the references of the citations, or doing any pretty formatting and whatnot. I’ll do that later.
Here we go!
Continue reading “St Victorinus of Poetovio: In Apocalypsin”
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Become a dead man
A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, ‘Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.’ So the old man said, ‘Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.’ The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, ‘Didn’t they say anything to you?’ He replied, ‘No.’ The old man said, ‘Go back tomorrow and praise them.’ So the brother went away and praised them, calling them, ‘Apostles, saints and righteous men.’ He returned to the old man and said to him, ‘I have complimented them.’ And the old man said to him, ‘You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.’
Abba Macarius the Great, saying 23, p. 132, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers.
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Full First Clement
That was a real pleasure. I’ve posted a page with the complete text of my translation of 1 Clement here. For now, the text is identical to the serial installments I’ve posted here on the blog. Eventually I’ll break it down into paragraphs, changing the numbering to something less obtrusive, and insert the references and maybe a very few notes. I’ll also write a short introduction at some point. Right now I want to keep the translation momentum going.
For those who are too busy to read that very long letter, here’s the scoop. The Roman church was requested to intervene by some people in the Corinthian church. It took some time for the Roman church to respond, because there was an intervening period of persecution. This letter is the response. The situation in Corinth appears to be that some innovating younger men who were probably good talkers managed to convince the church that they should be running things at Corinth instead of the elders who succeeded those appointed by the apostles. These young men apparently had very high opinions of themselves. In this letter, constant reference is made to “humble-mindedness” (ταπεινοφροσυνη), the character trait that the author particularly wants these young men to attain. Even so, however, the author suggests the solution is for the young men to leave the Corinthian church for other churches, where they would (supposedly) be welcome, and, it is inferred, without the support base that made them such a problem in the first place, Corinth being apparently prone to factionalism, as was historically known from even the Paul/Kephas/Apollos factions mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, referenced even by the author here. One of the most striking things about this reference is that when the author tells the Corinthians to “take up Paul’s letter,” he is referring, of course, to the original letter itself, not to one of the copies. Wow. This letter, 1 Clement, was apparently successful, as we don’t hear any more about factionalism in the Corinthian church. It seems they’d learned their lesson.
The timing of the letter is an interesting subject. Although I’d always remained an agnostic on whether the letter was written sometime before 70 AD or around 96 AD, I am no longer. Throughout the letter, there is a logical consistency in the usage of verb tenses, quite modern, probably in keeping with a Roman familiarity with the usage of tenses in classical Latin (comparing, say, Caesar or Cicero with Tertullian or Jerome and you’ll see the difference; the latter were affected by the somewhat looser particularity of tenses represented in Greek as opposed to Latin, which English usage follows to a large degree, as well). This aspect plays a role in understanding the timing of the letter when, in 41.2, sacrifices at the Jerusalem Temple are described in the present tense. This is really the clincher, rather than being equivocal, as the references to “elders” in both Corinth and Rome are, and the reference late in the letter, at 63.3, describing some who’d been believer “from youth to old age” — “old age” being relative, the period covered by such aging could be a mere twenty to thirty years. Very importantly, while we do know about a very intense persecution of Christians in Rome during Nero’s reign, we’re finding that there isn’t much evidence at all for persecution of Christians in Rome or abroad during the reign of Domitian. It is a general persecution of Christians in Rome during the reign of Domitian which has been the lynchpin for a late date for First Clement. Anyhow, I seem to be in quite good company in preferring the earlier date. As Mike Aquilina noted, the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, [dead link] (see particularly note 27), as was John A. T. Robinson.
Why is the letter associated with Clement, who is mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Philippians (4.3), written sometime during Paul’s first imprisonment in Rome in 60-62 (see here on the dates)? The answer is, as a Jewish man famously sang, “Tradition!”
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