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)
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