BOOK THREE (A)
Preface As stated above, this document is said to have been written by the bishops some time beforehand, and then presented by the archbishop of Carthage, the saintly Eugenius, as Bishop Victor himself pointed out: ante nostri praevidentes, labellum de fide conscripserant (‘beforehand our bishops had foreseen this and had written a short work on faith’). This may have been the work of the ten bishops chosen to represent the rest, but they had little chance to do so before the finale, and only one could have written the final version. Quite possibly the earlier author was the erudite bishop of Vita, who was clearly a trusted observer (as we have seen in his work with Eugenius and his prison visitations). With his many pastoral duties, it seems quite unlikely that Eugenius could have written so long a statement before the proceedings began. But if the first draft did perhaps derive from the ten bishops or even from the archbishop, the bishop of Vita certainly expanded and revised it for literary presentation. It deserves to be included now as an interesting description of the Catholic faith at this important period of occupation and schism in the sixth century. It should be noted also that at the beginning of book 4, the pamphlet is referred to as noster libellus (‘our little book’) and this certainly suggests Victor, who regularly used the first person plural to describe himself, and the author’s self-depreciatory diminutive libellus suggests him also. If the selected ten bishops or the archbishop himself had written it, a third person plural or singular would have been used (episcoporum, or Eugenii). In fact the self-depreciation continues as Victor describes the Catholic defense in a lukewarm manner as satis decenter sufficienterque conscriptum (‘composed aptly enough and not too long’). He would have been far more eulogistic, if his hero Eugenius or the courageous bishops had in fact written this very polished statement. For a comparison, my translation of Ambrose’s De Fide Orthodoxa Contra Arianos alias De Filii Divinitate et Consubstantialitate will be included after this one as book 3 (b).
