CLAUDIANUS MAMERTUS. - He was a priest at Vienne in the Dauphiné, where he died in 473 or 474.
Around 470 he wrote De statu animae in 3 books, of which the first two contain the philosophical and theological proofs of the spirituality of the soul, while the third is devoted to refuting part of a letter (the third: ed. by A. Engelbrecht, in CSEL, XXI [1891], p. 168 ff.) of Faustus of Riez, in which this authoritative bishop, taking up a thesis of Tertullian (De anima) and of John Cassian (Collationes patrum, VII, 13), maintained that everything that exists in the world, and therefore also the soul, is corporeal. Faustus's writing had enjoyed great diffusion, because a pamphlet had been made of it under the title Adversus eos qui dicunt in creaturis esse aliquid incorporeum.
Of C. M. there are also two Letters, one to the rhetor Sapaudus, another to Sidonius Apollinaris; but, as Sidonius and Gennadius affirm, even though the praises they bestow on him are — as it appears — greatly exaggerated, this priest of Vienne must have written a good deal, erudite as he was in sacred and profane matters and a connoisseur of Greek and Latin letters. And he wrote not only in prose but also in verse. But nothing else of his is extant. In a codex of the De viris illustribus of Gennadius, the Vat. 2077, one reads: « Scripsit Claudianus Viennensis et alia nonnulla, inter quae et hymnum de Passione Domini, cuius principium est Pange lingua gloriosi »; this notice is lacking in the other codices. Sidonius in a letter (IV, 3, 8: ed. Luetjohann-Leo-Mommsen in MGH, Auctores antiquissimi, VIII, Berlin 1887, p. 55) emphatically praises a hymn of his. But that the hymn which begins with the same words and which is found among the poems of Venantius Fortunatus should be attributed to him is a mere fantasy; other poems in Latin and in Greek have also been falsely attributed to him, among them some of Claudius Claudianus, which, wrongly, seemed not to suit this pagan poet.
The language of this writer, with its peculiar ἀπαξ εἰρημένα, its neologisms, its lexical alterations, its arbitrary constructions, puts us sufficiently in a position to judge of the soundness or otherwise of such attributions.
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Aurelio Giuseppe Amatucci