ABSTRACT
Marius Victorinus, in some ways a precursor of Augustine, was a late convert to Christianity, who defended the Nicene doctrine of the Trinity by highly original arguments, the linchpin of which is the Father’s power of self-motion or autoextension. He draws eclectically on philosophical sources, among which we must certainly include the teaching of Porphyry, though his salience has sometimes been exaggerated. Apophaticism may be included among his Platonizing tendencies; on the other hand, his grounding of the threefold nature of God in the “intelligible triad” of Being, Life and Mind suggests that he was also indebted to Sethian Gnosticism, a school cognate with Neoplatonism but treated with hostility by Plotinus.
