Saint Avitus of Vienne

His full name was Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus. ¹² Thomas Shahan, in the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia, says he came of a prominent Gallo-Roman family "closely related to the Emperor Avitus," in which "episcopal honors were hereditary." ¹ Alban Butler says he was born in Auvergne; Benedetto Cignitti, whose biography is on Santi e Beati, says he was born at Vienne about 450, of a senatorial family from Auvergne to which Sidonius Apollinaris also belonged. ²⁴

His parents were the senator Hesychius and Audentia, who, Cignitti says, vowed continence after the birth of their fourth child, Fuscina. ⁴ Fuscina became a nun at twelve, and a brother, Apollinaris, became bishop of Valence and is honored as a saint. ⁴ Avitus was baptized by Saint Mamertus, whom he called "his predecessor and his spiritual father from baptism," in the Latin Cignitti quotes, translated here. ⁴

Cignitti says Avitus married and had children, and that at about forty, perhaps widowed, he gave his property to the poor and withdrew to a monastery at the gates of Vienne. ⁴ His father had meanwhile become bishop of Vienne after Mamertus, and when Hesychius died about 490, Avitus was called to succeed him. ²⁴ Butler, in his life of Mamertus, calls Avitus the disciple and successor of that bishop. ⁶

Vienne was then a city of the Burgundians, whose kings were Arians, denying the divinity of Christ. ¹⁴ Godefroid Kurth, in the encyclopedia's article on Clovis, calls Gundobad king "of Vienne." ⁵ Shahan says Avitus "won the confidence of King Gundobad," and Butler that Gundobad, though an Arian, held him in great veneration and was convinced by him, but dared not become a Catholic "for fear of giving offence to his subjects." ¹² Cignitti says Avitus wrote him many letters to explain the Catholic faith, and without converting him won his esteem and his tolerance. ⁴

Butler tells of a public conference at Lyons in which Avitus "reduced the Arian bishops to silence" in the king's presence, and says the text of it is in the Spicilegium. ² Shahan says that the "Dialogi cum Gundobado Rege" printed there are not by Avitus at all, but a forgery by the Oratorian Jérôme Viguier, as Julien Havet demonstrated in 1885. ¹

Early in his episcopate Avitus helped ransom the Ligurians whom the Burgundians had carried off as captives across the Alps. ²⁴ Cignitti dates it to 494 and says his gift allowed Bishop Epiphanius of Pavia to free many thousands. ⁴

His greatest success was the king's son. ¹⁴ Butler, in his life of Saint Sigismund, says that prince "embraced the catholic faith through the instructions of St. Alcimus Avitus, bishop of Vienne." ⁶ The sources disagree on when. Cignitti says Sigismund became a Catholic with his family in 493, long before he succeeded his father in 516; Butler's life of Avitus has Gundobad die in 516 and then says, "His son and successor, Sigismund, was brought over by St. Avitus to the Catholic faith." ⁴²

Butler says that when Sigismund had his own son Sigeric put to death on a false charge, Avitus "inspired him with so great a horror of his crime" that he rebuilt the abbey of Saint-Maurice at Agaunum and ended his life a penitent. ² Cignitti says Avitus restored churches and monasteries, Agaunum above all. ⁴ The Avitus whom Gregory of Tours has plead for Sigismund's life in 523 is a different man, an abbot of Micy, near Orléans. ⁴

When the Frankish king Clovis was baptized at Reims, at Christmas 496, Avitus wrote to him. ⁵⁴ Shahan calls it "the famous letter to Clovis." ¹ Cignitti says Avitus saw the conversion of the Franks as the death blow to Arianism in Gaul, and quotes the letter in Latin; translated here, its best-known line reads, "Your faith is our victory." ⁴

Shahan says that, like Ennodius of Pavia, he was "strenuous in his assertion of the authority of the Apostolic See as the chief bulwark of religious unity." ¹ When Pope Symmachus was under attack in Rome, Avitus wrote on behalf of the bishops of Gaul to the senators Faustus and Symmachus, and Shahan quotes him: "If the pope," he says, "is rejected, it follows that not one bishop, the whole episcopate threatens to fall." ¹⁴ Cignitti says he was a friend of Pope Hormisdas and followed his efforts to end the Acacian schism with Constantinople. ⁴

He wrote against the Eutychians and against the Semipelagianism of Faustus of Riez. ¹⁴ In 517 he presided at the council of Epaon, which Butler says framed forty canons of discipline and placed at Yenne, on the Rhone; Cignitti places Epaon at Saint-Romain-d'Albon and says the council gave the Burgundian Church its organization. ²⁴

His literary fame, Shahan says, "rests on a poem of 2,552 hexameters, in five books," on the creation and fall, the Flood and the crossing of the Red Sea, the last two read as figures of baptism. ¹ Shahan calls him "one of the last masters of the art of rhetoric as taught in the schools of Gaul," and reports the claim that Milton used the poem in writing Paradise Lost; Cignitti says only that Milton perhaps drew on it. ¹⁴

He also wrote 666 hexameters in praise of virginity for his sister Fuscina, a treatise against Eutyches, and homilies, of which only two survive whole, among them one on the Rogation Days that Mamertus had instituted. ¹⁴⁶ Shahan counts "about eighty-seven" letters; Cignitti says seventy-eight have come down to us, apart from twenty of doubtful authorship. ¹⁴

The year is uncertain. ¹⁴ Shahan gives "about 518," though some, he says, place it as late as 525 or 526; Butler gives 525. ¹² Cignitti reports the evidence: his anonymous Life says he died while Anastasius was still emperor, that is, before July 1, 518, and none of his letters is later than 517; Ado of Vienne has him outlive Sigismund, who was killed in 523, but Cignitti thinks Ado confused him with Avitus of Micy. ⁴

The day is not in doubt. ⁴ Cignitti says the Martyrology of Jerome and the liturgical tradition of Vienne both give February 5. ⁴ Butler says he was buried in the collegiate church of Our Lady at Vienne; Cignitti, outside the walls of Vienne in the church of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul, where his epitaph was preserved. ²⁴

No source used here names Saint Avitus of Vienne patron of anything. ¹²⁴

Saint Avitus's feast is February 5, the day of his death. ⁴ The Roman Martyrology commemorates him that day, saying, in translation, that "by his faith and labors, in the time of King Gundobad, Gaul was defended from the spread of the Arian heresy." ³ Butler adds that the collegiate church at Vienne where he says Avitus was buried kept him on August 20. ²

He spent his episcopate under a king he could not convert, and kept writing to him anyway, and won not the king but his trust. ¹⁴ The son came over, and the kingdom with him in time. ⁴⁶

When that son did a terrible thing, Avitus did not soften it, and Sigismund spent the rest of his life in penance. ²

He was a scholar and a poet, and he used both for the unity of the Church: a defense of the pope from far-off Gaul, a letter of welcome to a newly baptized king, verses for his sister in her convent. ¹⁴