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, the first two of which contain the philosophical and theological proofs of the soul’s spirituality, while the third is devoted to refuting part of a letter (the third: ed. by A. Engelbrecht, in CSEL, XXI [1891], pp. 168 ff.) by Faustus of Riez, in which this authoritative bishop, taking up a thesis of Tertullian (De anima) and John Cassian (Collationes patrum, VII, 13), maintained that everything existing in the world, and therefore the soul as well, is corporeal. Faustus’s work had achieved wide circulation, since it had been made into a pamphlet under the title Adversus eos qui dicunt in creaturis esse aliquid incorporeum.
Two Letters by C. M. are also extant, one to the rhetor Sapaudus, the other to Sidonius Apollinaris; but, although—as appears to be the case—the praises they bestow on him are greatly exaggerated, as Sidonius and Gennadius assert, this Viennese priest must have written a good deal, being learned in sacred and profane matters and acquainted with Greek and Latin literature. And he wrote not only in prose, but also in verse. Nothing else, however, survives from him. In a manuscript of Gennadius’s De viris illustribus, Vat. 2077, we read: “Scripsit Claudianus Viennensis et alia nonnulla, inter quae et hymnum de Passione Domini, cuius principium est Pange lingua gloriosi”; this information is absent from the other manuscripts. In a letter (IV, 3, 8: ed. Luetjohann-Leo-Mommsen in MGH, Auctores antiquissimi, VIII, Berlin 1887, p. 55), Sidonius praises one of his hymns in emphatic terms. But the attribution to him of the hymn beginning with the same words, which is found among the poems of Venantius Fortunatus, is mere fantasy; other poems in Latin and Greek have likewise been falsely attributed to him, among them some by Claudius Claudianus, which, wrongly, seemed unsuitable for this pagan poet.
The language of this writer, with its peculiar ἀπαξ εἰρημένα, its neologisms, lexical alterations, and arbitrary constructions, enables us sufficiently to judge whether or not such attributions are well founded.