Biblical and Pastoral Poetry

"Avitus's most frequently read and most famous work is his biblical epic, the Spiritual History (De spiritalis historiae gestis), which, along with a later work on virginity addressed to his sister Fuscina, represents the sum total of his surviving poetry. Despite the frequent presence of exegetical material, the Spiritual History remains a narrative poem, in which each section into which the poem falls (books 1-3, book 4, and book 5) owes its continuity to chronological progression, not to a sequence of argument. The poem does not aspire to follow faithfully the sequence of the biblical narrative. While the events of books 1-3 are continuous, books 4 and 5 contain discrete episodes without any immediate chronological relationship with what has gone before. Instead, the connection is thematic: the first three books pivot on the Fall and its consequences, the last two books present contrasting narratives of redemption. The connection is made explicit at the end of the Spiritual History: the stain of sin humanity incurred by the crime of the first couple is washed away by baptism, symbolized by the waters of the Red Sea, and in book 4 by the waters of the Flood, from which a new offs