A Great Sign

Pillar III · Fathers, Saints & Teachers

St. Victorinus of Pettau on the Apocalypse

Around the year 300, a bishop on the Drava River wrote the oldest Latin commentary on Revelation that survives. St. Victorinus read the book as a word to the whole Church, and he taught a key that readers still use: its visions do not march forward in order, but return again and again to the same times, each time filling in more. Soon after, he gave his life for Christ.

The commentaryRead the commentary (New Advent)

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At a glance

WhoSt. Victorinus (died c. 304), bishop of Poetovio in the Roman province of Pannonia. The town is Ptuj, in present-day Slovenia, the same land from which this site takes its .si address. The old Catholic Encyclopedia notes that, born on the border of the Greek East and the Latin West, he knew Greek better than Latin.
StandingFather of the Church Saint and martyr martyred under Diocletian, probably in 304 (some sources say 303). St. Jerome ends his note on him: “At the last he received the crown of martyrdom” (Lives of Illustrious Men 74).
The workCommentary on the Apocalypse, the earliest surviving Latin commentary on Revelation. St. Jerome lists commentaries by him on many books of the Bible; of these, only the work on the Apocalypse has come down to us.
The textWhat we read is not quite what Victorinus wrote. St. Jerome later revised the commentary, removing its millenarianism and smoothing its Latin. The English translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers (vol. 7, trans. Robert Ernest Wallis), the one quoted here, renders that revised form. The earlier text was published by Johannes Haussleiter in 1916 (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 49).
WeightA precious early witness to how the Church read Revelation. On several details, such as the second witness, the return of Nero and the thousand years, he gives his own opinions, and the Church has not adopted them.

Why Victorinus matters here

Victorinus is the first Latin-speaking Christian whose reading of Revelation we can still hold in our hands. He does not treat the book as a timetable. For him it is a letter to the one Catholic Church, unveiling Christ and the Gospel, and preparing believers for persecution. Many of his readings, such as the woman of chapter 12 as the Church and the living creatures as the four Gospels, became part of the Church's common way of reading the book.

He is also a reminder that a Father can be both a treasure and fallible. He was a millenarian, expecting an earthly reign of Christ with the saints, and he thought the Antichrist would be Nero raised from the dead. The Church kept his insight and let those opinions go (CCC 676).

The commentary, chapter by chapter

Quotations are from the ANF translation at New Advent, with chapter pages at CCEL. Remember that this is the revised text.

On chapter 1 · The seven churchesPatristic readingUnfolding
“In the whole world Paul taught that all the churches are arranged by sevens, that they are called seven, and that the Catholic Church is one.”
Reading
Why seven churches, when there were many more in Asia? Victorinus answers that seven is the number of fullness. Just as St. Paul wrote to seven churches and no more, John's seven letters speak to the whole Church in every place. What Christ says to Ephesus or Laodicea, he says to all.
Why unfolding
The letters to the churches are not only history. Their praise and their warnings are addressed to the Church in every age, and so to us (Revelation 2–3).
On chapter 4 · The elders and the four living creaturesPatristic readingUnfolding
“The four living creatures are the four Gospels.”
Reading
Around the throne John sees “twenty-four elders” and four creatures: “The first creature resembled a lion, the second was like a calf, the third had a face like that of a human being, and the fourth looked like an eagle in flight” (Revelation 4:4, 7). For Victorinus, “The four and twenty elders are the twenty-four books of the prophets and of the law,” witnesses to the judgment. The creatures are the Gospels: the man is Matthew, the lion Mark, the calf Luke, and the eagle John, who rises on high to speak of the Word.
Note
The Fathers did not all match the creatures to the same Evangelists; St. Irenaeus, for example, paired them differently. The pairing Victorinus gives is the one later made familiar in the West by St. Jerome, and it is the one Christian art still uses. What the Fathers agreed on is the deeper point: one Gospel in four forms, before the throne of God.
On chapters 7–8 · How to read the visionsPatristic teachingMystery
“We must not regard the order of what is said, because frequently the Holy Spirit, when He has traversed even to the end of the last times, returns again to the same times, and fills up what He had before failed to say.”
Reading
This is Victorinus's great key to Revelation. The seals, the trumpets and the bowls are not three consecutive chapters of future history. The Spirit runs to the end, then goes back and tells the story again from another side. As he puts it: “Nor must we look for order in the Apocalypse; but we must follow the meaning of those things which are prophesied.”
Afterward
Later readers named this principle recapitulation. Tyconius made it one of his rules for reading Scripture, and St. Augustine handed those rules on (On Christian Doctrine, Book 3). Many Catholic interpreters still read Revelation this way, as repeated views of the one time between Christ's first and second coming.
Why mystery
The Church has not prescribed one method for the structure of Revelation. Recapitulation is a respected and very ancient reading, not a definition.
On chapter 11 · The two witnessesPatristic opinionMystery
Reading
God says, “I will commission my two witnesses to prophesy for those twelve hundred and sixty days, wearing sackcloth” (Revelation 11:3). One, Victorinus takes for granted, is Elijah, who did not die (2 Kings 2:11) and whose return Malachi foretold. As for the other: “Many think that there is Elisha, or Moses, with Elijah; but both of these died”. He gives instead the view of “all our ancients” that the second witness is Jeremiah, pointing to God's word at his call, “Before I formed you in the belly I knew you”.
Why mystery
Here the Fathers differed. Many other early writers named Enoch and Elijah, the two men Scripture says were taken up without dying. Victorinus's choice of Jeremiah is his own opinion and that of the teachers he followed. The Church has not decided who the witnesses are, or whether they are two individuals at all; many readers see in them the Church's prophetic witness.
On chapter 12 · The woman clothed with the sunPatristic readingUnfolding
“The woman clothed with the sun, and having the moon under her feet, and wearing a crown of twelve stars upon her head… is the ancient Church of fathers, and prophets, and saints, and apostles.”
Reading
The woman is the one People of God from the patriarchs to the apostles, and her child is Christ. The great eagle's wings that carry her into the desert are “the gift of prophets” given to the Church. Victorinus does not speak here of Mary; later Fathers and the Church's liturgy saw Mary in the woman as well, the Mother of the Messiah and image of the Church.
See also
The study of Revelation 12 and the Fathers on Revelation 12.
On chapters 13 and 17 · The beast and the legend of NeroPatristic opinionFuture
“Now that one of the heads was, as it were, slain to death, and that the stroke of his death was directed, he speaks of Nero.”
Reading
The beast rising from the sea, Victorinus says, “signifies the kingdom of that time of Antichrist, and the people mingled with the variety of nations.” The second beast is “the great and false prophet who is to do signs,” who makes people take the mark of the beast's name. On chapter 17 he counts the seven kings as Roman emperors, reckoning from Galba to Domitian, “since then reigned Cæsar Domitian” when John wrote. The beast that was and will return is Nero: “Him therefore, when raised up, God will send as a worthy king, but worthy in such a way as the Jews merited.”
What he got wrong
Victorinus is drawing on a rumor widespread in his world: that Nero, the first emperor to persecute the Church, had not really died, or would come back. Nero has not returned, and the Church has never adopted the idea. A century later St. Augustine reported the same view and replied, “I wonder that men can be so audacious in their conjectures” (City of God 20.19). What remains true is the shape of the vision: a final, worldly power set against God, and a false prophet who serves it (CCC 675).
See also
The beast of Revelation 13 at The Lamb's Victory; the little horn of Daniel 7.
On 13:18 · The number of the beastPatristic opinionMystery
Reading
The commentary lists names whose letters add up to 666: in Greek, Teitan, a name for the sun-god (a guess St. Irenaeus had already reported), and Antemos; and in Latin, DICLUX, built on lux, “light.” The name fits by contrast, he explains: the Antichrist is cut off from the light of heaven, yet passes himself off as an angel of light, “daring to call himself light.” A further name in the text, Genserikos, offered as “another name in Gothic,” cannot be from Victorinus: Genseric, king of the Vandals, lived in the fifth century, long after his death. It is a sign of the later hands through which the commentary passed.
Why mystery
These are guesses, and this site presents them only as guesses. St. Irenaeus, an older witness, warned that it is safer to wait for the fulfillment than to stake anything on a name (Against Heresies 5.30.3). The Church has never identified the number with anyone, and no one should.
On chapters 20–22 · The thousand yearsPatristic opinionMystery
What Victorinus held
Victorinus was a millenarian. He expected that, after the resurrection, Christ would reign on earth with the saints for a thousand years before the end. St. Jerome, who admired him, names him among those who held this view: “Tertullian also in his work On the hope of the faithful, Victorinus of Petau and Lactantius follow this view” (Lives of Illustrious Men 18).
What the revised text says
The text we have says nearly the opposite. Its comment on chapter 20 reads the thousand years as the present age: “Those years wherein Satan is bound are in the first advent of Christ, even to the end of the age,” and “the first resurrection is now of the souls that are by the faith.” Its comment on chapters 21–22 adds: “Therefore they are not to be heard who assure themselves that there is to be an earthly reign of a thousand years; who think, that is to say, with the heretic Cerinthus.” These are St. Jerome's corrections, written into the commentary of a man who had believed what they reject. Even the nineteenth-century American editor noticed a passage in chapter 17 “apparently in conflict” with what the author says elsewhere.
Why mystery
The precise meaning of the thousand years is not defined. What the Church has settled is the error: she “has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism” (CCC 676). On this point the revision, not the original, is the voice the Church followed. See St. Augustine on the thousand years.
Which Victorinus are we reading?The commentary survives in more than one form. The earliest, published by Haussleiter in 1916 from a Vatican manuscript, is closest to what Victorinus wrote. St. Jerome's revision removed the millenarianism and borrowed material largely from the North African writer Tyconius. Still later versions expanded it further. The English text online is Jerome's form, so where this page quotes it on the thousand years, it is quoting Jerome's correction in Victorinus's name. Jerome corrected the work, yet he still gave its author an honored place among the Church's writers and remembered him as a martyr (Lives of Illustrious Men 74).

For reflection

The same story, told again

Victorinus teaches that the Spirit tells the story of the Church more than once, each time with something more to show. Where in my own life has God brought me back to a lesson I thought I had finished, to fill in what I had missed? Can I receive that as mercy rather than failure?

Sources

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