Bishop Avitus of Vienne is one of the great authors of the biblical
epic genre in Late Antiquity. His epos De spiritalis historiae gestis
consists of five books. Until now, there are only unsufficient models in
the science regarding the coherence between these, because most of the
papers and researches are only based on philological items without
focussing on the conception of the complete work and its theology. This
being one of the reasons why this epos is often poorly evaluated.
However, the connection between the books is provided by the alternation
of 'sin stories' and 'order stories'. Thus, my working assumption is
that in a very paradoxical way the elimination of order by the sin is
the structural principle of the epos. In my contribution I would like to
show that the epos is a poem about the good and the bad, probably in
the tradition of Augustine. Therefore, just like the church father, the
epic poem illustrates that the good cannot exist without the bad and,
even further, that the malum has a regulatory effect within the
cosmology.
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