Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Avitus of Vienne (c. 450-519) Interpreting the Fourth Servant Hymn as Isaiah Prophesying of the Hypostatic Union

  

12. Instead, come, holy Isaiah, a prophet in your own time, yet an evangelist of ours! Come swiftly to protect the salvation of Christians against the lies of Eutyches! It would be no hardship to say, indeed to swear of Christ. ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows . . . and with his stripes we are healed.’ While the ability to heal was not certain, it was a fact that he took upon himself willingly to suffer for us. IF indeed he himself truly ‘carried our sorrows’, then we too are now secure that it was not a trumped-up phantasm that tolerated real pains. And if we have been healed with his tripes, in vain does lying envy begrudge me that health brought to me. Furthermore by any definition it is only reasonable to conclude that a fabrication, because it was faked, could not be alive. But even in these words of the prophet clear evidence of the double nature of his substance is found. ‘Surely he hath borne our briefs, and carried our sorrows . . . and with his stripes we are healed.’ These things are two, of which God alone could not do both, nor man alone. God could do one, man the other. When the prophet says ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows’, he was clearly alluding to one being that consisted both of godhead and of a body. He alone healed the diseases that the wounded descendants of Adam caught from the wound that was their corrupt origin. He alone healed who had made the healthy being in the first place. He carried our sorrows who could not sweat through the battles of the Passion, except by enduring tortures and pain. Therefore that we have evil in nature, God bore it; that we suffer evil in our body, Christ bore it to the bitter end. (Avitus of Vienne, Eutychianam haeresim Book 2, in Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose [trans. Danuta Shanzer and Ian Wood; Translated Texts for Historians; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002], 117-18)

 


 

To Support this Blog:

 

Paypal

Venmo

Amazon Wishlist

Blog Archive