Avitus of Vienne

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Saint Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus of Vienne
Born	c. 470
Died	February 5, 523
Venerated in	Roman Catholic Church
Feast
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Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, Saint Avitus, was bishop of Vienne in Gaul (c. 494 – February 5, 523).

1 Family
2 Life
3 Notes
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Family

Avitus was born of a prominent Gallo-Roman family.

His father was Ecdicius the son of emperor Avitus, thus he was the grandson of the emperor.^{[citation needed]}

Episcopal honors were hereditary, his father Isychius preceded him as bishop of Vienne.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Life

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)^[1] and on a long poem, De spiritualis historiae gestis, in classical hexameters, in five books, dealing with the Biblical themes 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, as primary sources of 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.

The Catholic Encyclopedia states that Avitus is not the author of the so-called Dialogues with King Gundobad, written to defend the Catholic faith against the Arians, which purports to represent the famous Colloquy of Lyon in 449. Instead, the contributor to that reference work states that it is a forgery of the Oratorian, Jérome Viguier, who also forged a letter purporting to be from Pope Symmachus to Avitus.

[edit] Notes

^ He was one of four fifth to sixth-century Gallo-Roman aristocrats whose letters survive in quantity: the others are Sidonius Apollinaris, prefect of Rome in 468 and bishop of Clermont (died 485), Ruricius, bishop of Limoges, (died 507) and Magnus Felix Ennodius of Arles, bishop of Ticinum (died 534). All of them were linked in the tightly-bound aristocratic Gallo-Roman network that provided the bishops of Catholic Gaul. See Ralph W. Mathisen, "Epistolography, Literary Circles and Family Ties in Late Roman Gaul" Transactions of the American Philological Association 111 (1981), pp. 95-109.

[edit] References

The letters and other prose works have been edited and translated by Danuta R. Shanzer and Ian Wood, 2002, the first complete translation in English: Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose ISBN 0-85323-588-0