Avitus of Vienne
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Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, Saint Avitus, was bishop of Vienne in Gaul (ca 494 - February 5, 523 ? ).
Avitus was born of a prominent Gallo-Roman family closely related to the Emperor Avitus and other illustrious persons, and in which episcopal honors were hereditary (his father Isychius preceded him as bishop of Vienne). In difficult times for the Catholic faith and Roman culture in Southern Gaul, Avitus pursued with earnestness and success the extinction of Arianism among the Burgundians. He won the confidence of King Gundobad, and converted his son, King Sigismund (516-523).
The literary fame of Avitus rests on his many surviving letters (his recent editors make them ninety-six in all) and on a long poem, De spiritalis historiae gestis, in classical hexameters, in five books, dealing with the Scriptural narrative of Original Sin, Expulsion from Paradise, the Deluge, the Crossing of the Red Sea. The first three books offer a certain dramatic unity; in them are told the preliminaries of the great disaster, the catastrophe itself, and the consequences. The fourth and fifth books deal with the Deluge and the Crossing of the Red Sea as symbols of baptism. Avitus deals freely and familiarly with the Scriptural events, and exhibits well their beauty, sequence, and significance. He is one of the last masters of the art of rhetoric as taught in the schools of Gaul in the 4th and 5th centuries. His poetic diction, though abounding in archaisms and rhythmic redundancy, is pure and select, and the laws of metre are well observed. It is said that Milton made use of his paraphrase of Scripture in writing Paradise Lost. Avitus also wrote a poem for his sister Fuscina, a nun, praising virginity.
The letters of Avitus are of considerable importance for the ecclesiastical and political history of the years between 499 and 518, for early Merovingian political, ecclesiastical, and social history. Among them is a famous letter to Clovis on the occasion of his baptism. The letters document the close relations between the Catholic Bishop of Vienne and the Arian king of the Burgundians, the great Gundobad, and his son, the Catholic convert Sigismund.
There was once extant a collection of his homilies and sermons, but they have all perished except for two, and some fragments and excerpts from others.
Avitus is not the author of the so-called Dialogues with King Gundobad, written to defend the Catholic Faith against the Arians, and purports to represent the famous Colloquy of Lyon in 449. It is a forgery of the Oratorian, Jérome Viguier, who also forged a letter purporting to be from Pope Symmachus to Avitus.
External links and references
- The letters and other prose works have been edited and translated by Danuta R. Shanzer and Ian Wood, 2002 [1] (http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13894.html), the first complete translation in English.
- Headings of the letters (http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/toc/13894.html)
- Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02161c.htm): St. Avitus
- Christian Classics Ethereal Library: (http://www.ccel.org/w/wace/biodict/htm/iii.i.xcvi.htm)Brief biography of Avitus