Bishop Avitus to the most illustrious Arigius. I know indeed with what affection of devotion you wished me to come to the common festivities, yet in such a way that you ought to have believed me one who would only rejoice with you, not one who would be of any profit. For while priests both great in merit and many in number met you worthily and eagerly, I alone am stricken with loss, who do not deserve to share in the joys of so singular a patron.
To whom, had my presence come to pass according to my desire, I would, as I had wished, have heard from any worthy of eloquent speech words concerning the praise of so great a work — men who, having inspected all the members of the lofty fabric, could fittingly credit to its builder: in the quality of its arrangements, elegance; in the lavishness of its expenditure, self-sacrifice; in the proportion of its dimensions, harmony; in its spaces, expansiveness; in its summits, loftiness; in its lowliness, firmness; and could burnish with praises the dignity of the marbles, from which only envy of their size withholds the name of gems; and the daylight, as it were gathered and enclosed by human industry, enlivened by the profit of gleaming metals with light; and how, amid all these splendours, are worthily borne in the relics, of which the world is unworthy.
These things, therefore, to be magnified, I had rightly conceded to better speakers. Yet my discourse was going to claim its own peculiar reward, recalling above all that time when, amid the most savage storms of upheavals, you brought the firm solidity of the completed work safely to the harbour of its dedication — like unconquered helmsmen, while the perils of shipwreck shrieked around on every side — while I, as you recall from our common necessity, was rendering tears instead of joys: for which work, in the very ardour of its untimely renewal, the reckoning of the causes being weighed, I urge myself no less to heap up praise than to lament:
for it was not as of a bride, to be joined in any way whatever to such a bridegroom to whom she had been betrothed — even though the instruments of adornment were greatly desired — but rather the weapons of ravishers had to be feared more. Wherefore, all these things being weighed in counsel, you altered a brave man's manner of constancy, and, laying aside the boldness of secular leadership in which you most aptly flourish, you overcame by holy fear whatever measure of danger had pressed upon you from the adverse side. Wherefore let everyone who beholds the joyfulness set before him praise the past haste. A security snatched from adversity befits your arrangements. It was fitting that ours should first come to be, which it so pleased to adorn in such a manner.
But as for me — that I do not fully enjoy the sight of these things — you perceive, even if it be left unspoken, both what cause brings it about, and what noble patrons and what manner of judges are concerned. For the festival of the Apostles lives with a special zeal among your people of Vienne, amid the days of the annual martyrdom. I have an obligation of presence at the time at which the dedication of those men seems to be enjoined upon the day of the passion of the little structure which you know, since there is nothing to which your affection could not direct my mind. Excusing the absence of my little flock, I would set my own singular case before custom, were it not that, as you know, among our very penitents an eager fervour would long since have shaped a neighbouring vice and an uproar;
since ambition would draw off some of ours, a more youthful anxiety others, and gluttony many. I feared lest perhaps, if there were even a few whom the zeal of gentleness, avoiding what was foreign, would gather rather to their own festival, in the mind of some — as is wont in such disturbance — those impulses, as though embodied through my absence, might make it thought that on that very day the course of our devotion was being omitted, on which the several parties seemed to be established. Whence we merit an excuse. If you have recognized my reasoning, pardon me; recognize the common festival by the recollection of things past and by the fullness of things present; celebrate it by the offices of the absent as much as of the present.
I trust in the mercy of our God that, even to me in this place, he will at some more opportune time grant an approach of the word — to those to whom he has granted the more adorned effect of a doubled consecration.