affi ■ & £SBH ;,',.: ;.. r : ^ 1 m ."• JBL u. \ 137 Book IX 155 Book X 182 Book XI 203 Book XII 218 Introduction to the Homilies on Psalms I., LIII., CXXX 235 Homilies on the Psalms. Psalm I 236 Psalm LIII. (LIV.) 243 Psalm CXXX. (CXXXI.) 247 Index. I. Index of Subjects 249 II. Index of Texts 256 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers. St. Hilary of Poitiers is one of the greatest, yet least studied, of the Fathers of the Western Church. He has suffered thus, partly from a certain obscurity in his style of writing, partly from the difficulty of the thoughts which he attempted to convey. But there are other reasons for the comparative neglect into which he has fallen. He learnt his theology, as we shall see, from Eastern authorities, and was not content to carry on and develope the traditional teaching of the West; and the disciple of Origen, who found his natural allies in the Cappadocian school of Basil and the Gregories ', his juniors though they were, was speaking to somewhat unsympathetic ears. Again, his Latin tongue debarred him from influence in the East, and he suffered, like all Westerns, from that deep suspicion of Sabellianism which was rooted in the Eastern Churches. Nor are these the only reasons for the neglect of Hilary. Of his two chief works, the Homilies 2 on the Psalms, important as they were in popularising the allegorical method of interpretation, were soon outdone in favour by other commentaries ; while his great controversial work on the Trinity suffered from its very perfection for the purpose with which it was composed. It seems, at first sight, to be not a refutation of Arianism, or of any par- ticular phase of Arianism, but of one particular document, the Epistle of Arius to Alexander, in which Arian doctrines are expressed; and that a document which, in the constantly shifting phases of the controversy, soon fell into an oblivion which the work of Hilary has nearly shared. It is only incidentally constructive ; its plan follows, in the central portion, that of the production of Arius which he was controverting, and this negative method must have lessened its popularity for purposes of practical instruction, and in competition with such a masterpiece as the De Trinitate of St. Augustine. And furthermore, Hilary never does himself justice. He was a great original thinker in the field of Christology, but he has never stated his views systematically and completely. They have to be laboriously reconstructed by the collection of passages scattered throughout his works ; and though he is a thinker so consistent that little or no conjecture is needed for the piecing together of his system, yet we cannot be surprised that full justice has never been done to him. He has been regarded chiefly as one of the sufferers from the violence of Constantius, as the composer of a useful conspectus of arguments against Arianism, as an unsuccessful negotiator for an understanding between the Eastern and Western Churches ; but his sufferings were as nothing compared to those of Athanasius, while his influence in controversy seems to have been as small as the results of his diplomacy. It is not his practical share, in word or deed, in the conflicts of his day that is his chief title to fame, but his independence and depth as a Christian thinker. He has, indeed, exerted an important influence upon the growth of doctrine, but it has 1 An actual dependence on Gregory of Nyssa has sometimes been ascribed to Hilary. But Gregory was surely too young for this. He may himself have borrowed from Hilary; but more VOL. IX. probably both derived their common element from Eastern writers like Basil of Ancyra. 2 This is certainly the best translation of Tractatus; the word is discussed on a later page. INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. been through the adoption of his views by Augustine and Ambrose ; and many who have profited by his thoughts have never known who was their author. Hilary of Poitiers, the most impersonal of writers, is so silent about himself, he is so rarely mentioned by contemporary writers — in all the voluminous works of Athanasius he is never once named, — and the ancient historians of the Church knew so little con- cerning him beyond what we, as well as they, can learn from his writings, that nothing more than a very scanty narrative can be constructed from these, as seen in the light of the general history of the time and combined with the few notices of him found elsewhere. But the account, though short, cannot be seriously defective. Apart from one or two episodes, it is eminently the history of a mind, and of a singularly consistent mind, whose antecedents we can, in the main, recognise, and whose changes of thought are few, and can be followed. He was bom, probably about the year 300 a.d. 3, and almost certainly, since he was afterwards its bishop, in the town, or in the district dependent upon the town, by the name of which he is usually styled. Other names, beside Hilarius, he must have had, but we do not know them. The fact that he has had to be distinguished by the name of his see, to avoid confusion with his namesake of Aries, the contemporary of St. Augustine, shews how soon and how thoroughly personal details concerning him were forgotten. The rank of his parents must have been respectable at least, and perhaps high ; so much we may safely assume from the education they gave him. Birth in the Gallic provinces during the fourth century brought with it no sense of provincial inferiority. Society was thoroughly Roman, and education and literature more vigorous, so far as we can judge, than in any other part of the West. The citizen of Gaul and of Northern Italy was, in fact, more in the centre of the world's life than the inhabitant of Rome. Gaul was in the AVest what Roman Asia was in the East, the province of decisive importance, both for position and for wealth. And in this prosperous and highly civilised community the opportunities for the highest education were ample. We know, from Ausonius and otherwise, how complete was the provision for teaching at Bordeaux and elsewhere in Gaul. Greek was taught habitually as well as Latin. In fact, never since the days of Hadrian had educated society throughout the Empire been so nearly bilingual. It was not only that the Latin-speaking West had still to turn for its culture and its philosophy to the literature of Greece. Since the days of Diocletian the court, or at least the most important court, had resided as a rule in Asia, and Greek had tended to become, equally with Latin, the language of the courtier and the administrator. The two were of almost equal importance; if an Oriental like Ammianus Marcellinus could write, and write well, in Latin, we may be certain that, in return, Greek was familiar to educated Westerns. To Hilary it was certainly familiar from his youth ; his earlier thoughts were moulded by Neoplatonism, and his later decisively influenced by the writings of Origen 4 . His literary and technical knowledge of Latin was also complete 5 . It would 3 The latest date which I have seen assigned for his birth is 320, by Fechtrnp, in Wetzcr-Welte's Encyclopaedia. But this is surely inconsistent with his styling Ursacius and Valcns, in his first Epistle to Constantine, ' ignorant and unprincipled youths. This was written about the year 355, before Hilary knew much of the Arian controversy or the combatants, and was ludicrously inappropriate, for Ursacius and Valcns were elderly men. He had found the words cither in some of Athanasius' writings or in the records of the Council of Sardica, and borrowed them without enquiry. He could not have done so had he been only some thirty-five years of age ; at fifty-five they are natural enough. 4 It is impossible to agree with Zingerlc (Comment. WSlfflm. p. 218) that Hilary was under the necessity >>f using a < Ircek and Latin Glossary. Such a passage as Tract, in Ps. exxxviii. 43, to which he appeals, shews rather the extent than the smallncss of Hilary's knowledge of Greek. What he frankly confesses, there as elsewhere, is ignorance of Hebrew. The words of Jerome (£/• 34. 3 (•) about Hilary's friend, the presbyter Heliodorus, to whom he used to refer for explanations of Origen on the Psalms, are equally incapable of being employed to prove Hilary's defective Greek. Heliodorus knew Hebrew, and Hilary for want of Hebrew found Origin's notes on the Hebrew text difficult to understand, and for this reason, according to Jerome, used to consult his friend ; not because he was unfamiliar with Greek. 5 His vocabulary is very poorly treated in the dictionaries; one of the many signs of the neglect into which he has fallen, There are at least twenty-four words in the TractatUi THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. iii require wide special study and knowledge to fix his relation in matters of composition and rhetoric to other writers. But one assertion, that of Jerome 6 , that Hilary was a deliberate imitator of the style of Quintilian, cannot be taken seriously. Jerome is the most reckless of writers ; and it is at least possible to be somewhat familiar with the writings of both and yet sec no resemblance, except in a certain sustained gravity, between them. Another description by Jerome of Hilary as 'mounted on Gallic buskin and adorned with flowers of Greece' is suitable enough, as to its first part, to Hilary's dignified rhetoric ; the flowers of Greece, if they mean embellishments inserted for their own sake, are not perceptible. In this same passage 7 Jerome goes on to criticise Hilary's en- tanglement in long periods, which renders him unsuitable for unlearned readers. But those laborious, yet perfectly constructed, sentences are an essential part of his method. Without them he could not attain the effect he desires; they are as deliberate and, in their way, as successful as the eccentricities of Tacitus. But when Jerome elsewhere calls Hilary 'the Rhone of Latin eloquence 8 ,' he is speaking at random. It is only rarely that he breaks through his habitual sobriety of utterance; and his rare outbursts of devotion or denunciation are perhaps the more effective because the reader is un- prepared to expect them. Such language as this of Jerome shews that Hilary's literary accomplishments were recognised, even though it fails to describe them well. But though he had at his command, and avowedly employed, the resources of rhetoric in order that his words might be as worthy as he could make them of the greatness of his theme 9, yet some portions of the De Triniiate, and most of the Homilies on the Psalms are written in a singularly equable and almost conversational style, the unobtrusive excellence of which manifests the hand of a clear thinker and a practised writer. He is no pedant ', no laborious imitator of antiquity, distant or near ; he abstains, perhaps more completely than any other Christian writer of classical education, from the allusions to the poets which were the usual ornament of prose. He is an eminently businesslike writer; his pages, where they are unadorned, express his meaning with perfect clearness ; where they are decked out with antithesis or apostrophe and other devices of rhetoric, they would no doubt, if our training could put us in sympathy with him, produce the effect upon us which he designed, and we must, in justice to him, remember as we read that, in their own kind, they are excellent, and that, whether they aid us or no in entering into his argument, they never obscure his thought. Save in the few passages when cor- ruption exists in the text, it is never safe to assert that Hilary is unintelligible. The reader or translator who cannot follow or render the argument must rather lay the blame upon his own imperfect knowledge of the language and thought of the fourth century. Where he is stating or proving truth, whether well-established or newly ascer- tained, he is admirably precise ; and even in his more dubious speculations he never cloaks a weak argument in ambiguous language. A loftier genius might have given us in language inadequate, through no fault of his own, to the attempt some intimations of remoter truths. We must be thankful to the sober Hilary that he, with his strong sense of the limitations of our intellect, has provided a clear and accurate statement of the case against Arianism, and has widened the bounds of theological knowledge by reasonable deductions from the text of Scripture, usually convincing and always Psalmos which are omitted in the last edition of Georges' lexicon, and these good Latin words, not technical terms invented for purposes of argument. Among the most interesting is quotiensqiie for qiiolienscnmque ; an unnoticed use is the frequent cum quando for quandoquidem. Of Hilary's other writings there is as yet no trustworthy text ; from them the list of new words could at I i t 1- - doubled. 6 Ep. 70, s, ad Magnum. 7 Ep, 58, 10, ad Panlinum. 8 Coniiu. in Gall. ii. pre/. 9 Cf. Tract, in Ps. xiii. 1, Trin. i. 38. 1 Yet he strangely reproaches his Old Latin Bible with the use of nimis for italdc. Trad, in Ps. exxxviii. 38. This em- ployment of relative for positive terms had been common in literature for at least a century and a half. 2 IV INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. His training as a writer and thinker had certainly been accomplished before his con- version. His literary work done, like that of St. Cyprian, within a few years of middle life, displays, with a somewhat increasing maturity of thought, a steady uniformity of language and idiom, which can only have been acquired in his earlier days. And this assured possession of literary form was naturally accompanied by a philosophical training. Of one branch of a philosophical education, that of logic, there is almost too much evidence in his pages. He is free from the repulsive angularity which sometimes disfigures the pages of Novatian, a writer who had no great influence over him ; but in the De Trinitatc lie too often refuses to trust his reader's intelligence, and insists upon being logical not only in thought but in expression. But, sound premisses being given, he may always be expected to draw the right conclusion. He is singularly free from confusion of thought, and never advances to results beyond what his premisses warrant. It is only when a false, though accepted, exegesis misleads him, in certain collateral arguments which may be surrendered without loss to his main theses, that he can be refuted ; or again when, in his ventures into new fields of thought, he is unfortunate in the selection or combination of texts. But in these cases, as always, the logical processes are not in fault ; his deduction is clear and honest. Philosophy in those days was regarded as incomplete unless it included some knowledge of natural phenomena, to be used for purposes of analogy. Origen and Athanasius display a considerable interest in, and acquaintance with, physical and physiological matters, and Hilary shares the taste. The conditions of human or animal birth and life and death are often discussed 2 ; he believes in universal remedies for disease 3 , and knows of the em- ployment of anaesthetics in surgery 4 . Sometimes he wanders further afield, as, for instance, in his account of the natural history of the fig-tree 5 and the worm 6 , and in the curious little piece of information concerning Troglodytes and topazes, borrowed, he says, from secular writers, and still to be read in the elder Pliny ?. Even where he seems to be borrowing, on rare occasions, from the commonplaces of Roman poetry, it is rather with the interest of the naturalist than of the rhetorician, as when he speaks in all seriousness of ' Marsian enchantments and hissing vipers lulled to sleep 8 ,' or recalls Lucan's asps and basilisks of the African desert as a description of his heretical opponents 9. Perhaps his lost work, twice mentioned by Jerome 1 , against the physician Dioscorus was a refutation of physical arguments against Christianity. Hilary's speculative thought, like that of every serious adherent of the pagan creed, had certainly been inspired by Neoplatonism. We cannot take the account of his spiritual progress up to the full Catholic faith, which he gives in the beginning of the De Trinitate, and of which we find a less finished sketch in the Homily on Psalm lxi. § 2, as literal history. It is too symmetrical in its advance through steadily increasing light to the perfect knowledge, too well prepared as a piece of literary workmanship — it is indeed an admirable example of majestic prose, a worthy preface to that great treatise — for us to accept it, as it stands, as the record of actual experience. But we may safely see in it the evidence that Hilary had been an earnest student of the best thought of his day, and had found in Neoplatonism not only a speculative training but also the desire, which was to find its satisfaction in the Faith, for knowledge of God, and for union with Him. It was a debt which Origen, his master, shared with him ; and it must have been because, as a Neoplatonist feeling after the truth, he found so much of common ground in Origen, that he was able to accept so 2 E.g. Trin. v. II, vii. 14, ix. 4. 3 Trin. ii. 22. 4 Trin. x. 14. This is a very remarkable allusion. Celsus, vii. /;•<»•/!, confidently assumes that all surgical operations must be painful. S Count, in Matt. xxi. 8. * Trin. xi. 15. 7 Tract, in Ts. cxviii. A in. 16 ; it is from Plin. N.H. 37, 32. 8 Tract, in Ts. Kii. 3. It suggests Virgil, Ovid, Silius, and others. 9 Trin. vii. 3. ' Rp. 70, 5, Vir. III. 100. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. fully the teaching of Alexandria. But it would be impossible to separate between the lessons which Hilary had learnt from the pagan form of this philosophy, and those which may have been new to him when he studied it in its Christian presentment. Of the influence of Christian Platonism upon him something will be said shortly. At this point we need only mention as a noteworthy indication ^f the fact that Hilary was not unmindful of the debt, that the only philosophy which he specifically attacks is the godless system of Epicurus, which denies creation, declares that the gods do not concern themselves with men, and deifies water or earth or atoms 2 . It was, then, as a man of mature age, of literary skill and philosophical training, that Hilary approached Christianity. He had been drawn towards the Faith by desire for a truth which he had not found in philosophy; and his conviction that this truth was Christianity was established by independent study of Scripture, not by intercourse with Christian teachers ; so much we may safely conclude from the early pages of the De Trinitate. It must remain doubtful whether the works of Origen, who influenced his thought so profoundly, had fallen into his hands before his conversion, or whether it was as a Christian, seeking for further light upon the Faith, that he first studied them. For it is certainly improbable that he would find among the Christians of his own district many who could help him in intellectual difficulties. The educated classes were still largely pagan, and the Christian body, which was, we may say, unanimously and undoubtingly Catholic, held, without much mental activity, a traditional and inherited faith. Into this body Hilary entered by Baptism, at some unknown date. His age at the time, his employment, whether or no he was married 3 , whether or no he entered the ministry of the Church of Poitiers, can never be known. It is only certain that he was strengthening his faith by thought and study. He had come to the Faith, St. Augustine says*, laden, like Cyprian, Lactantius and others, with the gold and silver and raiment of Egypt ; and he would naturally wish to find a Christian employment for the philosophy which he brought with him. If his horizon had been limited to his neighbours in Gaul, he would have found little en- couragement and less assistance. The oral teaching which prevailed in the West fur- nished, no doubt, safe guidance in doctrine, but could not supply reasons for the Faith. And reasons were the one great interest of Hilary. The whole practical side of Chris- tianity as a system of life is ignored, or rather taken for granted and therefore not discussed, in his writings, which are ample enough to be a mirror of his thought. For instance, we cannot doubt that his belief concerning the Eucharist was that of the whole Church. Yet in the great treatise on the Trinity, of which no small part is given to the proof that Christ is God and Man, and that through this union must come the union of man with God, the Eucharist as a means to such union is only once introduced, and that in a short passage, and for the purpose of argument 5 . And altogether it would be as' impossible to reconstruct the Christian life and thought of the day from his writings as from those of the half-pagan Arnobius. To such a mind as this the teaching which ordinary Christians needed and welcomed could bring no satisfaction, and no aid towards the interpretation of Scripture. The Western Church was, indeed, in an almost illogical position. Conviction was in advance of argument. The loyal practice of the Faith had led men on, as it were by intuition, to apprehend and firmly hold truths which the more thoughtful East was doubtfully and painfully approaching. Here, again, Hilary would be out of sympathy with his neighbours, and we cannot wonder that in such a doctrine 3 Tract, in Ps. i. 7, lxi. 2, Ixiii. 5, &c. As usual, Hilary does not name his opponents. 3 Hilary's legendary daughle. Abra, to whom he is said to generally abandoned by the best authorities, e.g. by Fechtrup, the writer, in Wetzer-Welte's Encyclopaedia, of the best short life of Hilary. have written a letter printed in the editions of his Works, is now I 4 J)e Doctr, Chr. ii. 40. S Trin. viii. 13—17. VI INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. as that of the Holy Spirit he held the conservative Eastern view. Nor were the Latin- speaking Churches well equipped with theological literature. The two 6 great theologians who had as yet written in their tongue, Tertullian and Novatian, with the former of whom Hilary was familiar, were discredited by their personal history. St. Cyprian, the one doctor whom the West already boasted, could teach disciplined enthusiasm and Chris- tian morality, but his scattered statements concerning points of doctrine convey nothing more than a general impression of piety and soundness; and even his arrangement, in the Testimonial of Scriptural evidences was a poor weapon against the logical attack of Arianism. But there is little reason to suppose that there was any general sense of the need of a more systematic theology. Africa was paralysed, and the attention of the Western provinces probably engrossed, by the Donatist strife, into which questions of doctrine did not enter. The adjustment of the relations between Church and State, the instruction and government of the countless proselytes who flocked to the Faith while toleration grew into imperial favour, must have needed all the attention that the Church's rulers could give. And these busy years had followed upon a generation of merciless persecution, during which change of practice or growth of thought had been impossible ; and the confessors, naturally a conservative force, were one of the dominant powers in the Church. We cannot be surprised that the scattered notices in Hilary's writings of points of discipline, and his hortatory teaching, are in no respect different from what we find a century earlier in St. Cyprian. And men who were content to leave the superstructure as they found it were not likely to probe the foundations. Their belief grew in definiteness as the years went on, and faithful lives were rewarded, almost un- consciously, with a deeper insight into truth. But meanwhile they took the Faith as they had received it ; one might say, as a matter of course. There was little heresy within the Western Church. Arianism was never prevalent enough to excite fear, even though repugnance were felt. The Churches were satisfied with faith and life as they saw it within and around them. Their religion was traditional, in no degenerate sense. But such a religion could not satisfy ardent and logical minds, like those of St. Hilary and his two great successors, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine. To such men it was a necessity of their faith that they should know, and know in its right proportions, the truth so far as it had been revealed, and trace the appointed limits which human knowledge might not overpass. For their own assurance and for effective warfare against heresy a reasoned system of theology was necessary. Hilary, the earliest, had the great- est difficulty. To aid him in the interpretation of Scripture he had only one writer in his own tongue, Tertullian, whose teaching, in the matters which interested Hilary, though orthodox, was behind the times. His strong insistence upon the subordination of the Son to the Father, due to the same danger which still, in the fourth century, seemed in the East the most formidable, was not in harmony with the prevalent thought of the West. Thus Hilary, in his search for reasons for the Faith, was practically isolated; there was little at home which could help him to construct his system. To an intellect so self-reliant as his this may have been no great trial. Scrupulous though he was in confining his speculations within the bounds of inherited and acknowledged truth, yet in matters still undecided he exercised a singularly free judgment, now advanc- ing beyond, now lingering behind, the usual belief of his contemporaries. In following out his thoughts, loyally yet independently, he was conscious that he was breaking what was new ground to his older fellow-Christians, almost as much as to himself, the convert 6 This is on the assumption, which scans probable, that Iren.xus was not yet translated from the Greek, lie certainly influenced Tertullian, and through him Hilary; and his doctrine of the recapitulation of mankind in Christ, reappearing as it docs in Hilary, though not in Tertullian, suggests that our writer had made an independent study of Ircnxus. Even if the present wretched translation existed, he would certainly read the Greek. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. vii from Paganism. And that ho was aware of the novelty is evident from the sparing use which he makes of that stock argument of the old controversialists, the newness of heresy. He uses it, e.g., in Trin. ii. 4, and uses it with effect ; but it is far less prominent in him than in others. For such independence of thought he could find precedent in Alexandrian theology, of which he was obviously a careful student and, in his free use of his own judgment upon it, a true disciple. When he was drawn into the Arian controversy and studied its literature, his thoughts to some extent were modified ; but he never ceases to leave upon his reader the impression of an Oriental isolated in the West. From the Christian Platonists of Alexandria? come his most characteristic thoughts. They have passed on, for instance, from Philo to him the sense of the importance of the revelation contained in the divine name He that is. His peculiar doctrine of the impassibility of the in- I carnate Christ is derived, more probably directly than indirectly, from Clement of Alexandria. But it is to Origen that Hilary stands in the closest and most constant relations, now as a pupil, now as a critic. In fact, as we shall see, no small portion of the Homilies on the Psalms, towards the end of the work, is devoted to the controverting of opinions expressed by^Qrigen ; and by an omission which is itself a criticism He - completely ignores one of that writer's most important contributions to Christian thought, the mystical interpretation of the Song of Songs. It is true that Jerome 8 knew of a commentary on that Book which was doubtfully attributed to Hilary ; but if Hilary had once accepted such an exegesis he could not possibly have failed to use it on some of the numerous occasions when it must have suggested itself in the course of his writing, for it is not his habit to allow a thought to drop out of his mind ; his characteristic ideas recur again and again. In some cases we can actually watch the growth of Hilary's mind as it emancipates itself from Origen's influence; as, for instance, in his psychology. He begins (Comm. in Matt. v. 8) by holding, with Origen and Tertullian, that the soul is corporeal ; in later life he states expressly that this is not the case 9. Yet what Hilary accepted from Origen is far more important than what he rejected. His strong sense of the dignity of man, of the freedom of the will, his philosophical belief in the inseparable connection of name and thing, the thought of the Incarnation as primarily an obscuring of the Divine glory *, are some of the lessons which Origen has taught him. But, above all, it is to him that he owes his rudimentary doctrine concerning the Holy Spirit. Hilary says nothing inconsistent with the truth as it was soon to be universally recognised ; but his caution in declining to accept, or at least to state, the general belief of Western Christendom that the Holy Spirit, since Christians are baptized in His Name as well as in that of Father and Son, is God in the same sense as They, is evidence both of his independence of the opinion around him and of his dependence on Origen. Of similar dependence on any other writer or school there is no trace. He knew Tertullian well, and there is some evidence that he knew Hippolytus and Novatian, but his thought was not moulded by theirs ; and when, in the maturity of his powers, he became a fellow-combatant with Athanasius and the precursors of the great Cappadocians, his borrowing is not that of a disciple but of an equal. There is one of St. Hilary's writings, evidently the earliest of those extant and probably the earliest of all, which may be noticed here, as it gives no sign of being written by a Bishop. It is the Commentary on St. Matthew. It is, in the strictest sense, a commentary, and not, like the work upon the Psalms, a series of exegetical discourses. It deals with the text of the Gospel, as it stood in Hilary's Latin version, without comment or criticism upon its peculiarities, and draws out the meaning, chiefly allegorical, not of the whole Gospel, 7 Dr. Bigg's Bampton Lectures upon them are full of hints I 9 E.g. Tract, tit Ps. exxix. 4f. for the student of Hilary. * Vir. 111. 100. I « E.g. Trin. ix. 6. vm INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. but apparently of lections that were read in public worship. A few pages at the beginning and end are unfortunately lost, but they cannot have contained anything of such importance as to alter the impression which we form of the book. In diction and grammar it is exactly similar to Hilary's later writings; the fact that it is, perhaps, somewhat more stiff in style may be due to self-consciousness of a writer venturing for the first time upon so important a subject. The exegesis is often the same as that of Origen, but a comparison of the several passages in which Jerome mentions this commentary makes it certain that it is not dependent upon him in the same way as are the Homilies on the Psalms and Hilary's lost work upon Job. Yet if he is not in this work the translator, or editor, of Origen, he is manifestly his disciple. We cannot account for the resemblance otherwise. Hilary is independently working out Origen's thoughts on Origen's lines. Origen is not named, nor any other author, except that he excuses himself from expounding the Lord's Prayer on the ground that Tertullian and Cyprian had written excellent treatises upon it 2 . This is a rare exception to his habit of not naming other writers. But, whoever the writers were from whom Hilary drew his exegesis, his theology is his own. There is no immaturity in the thought; every one of his characteristic ideas, as will be seen in the next chapter, is already to be found here. But there is one interesting landmark in the growth of the Latin theological vocabulary, very archaic in itself and an evidence that Hilary had not yet decided upon the terms that he would use. He twice 3 speaks of Christ's Divinity as ' the iheotes which we call deltas.' In his later writings he consistently uses divinitas, except in the few instances where he is almost forced, to avoid intolerable monotony, to vary it with deltas; and in this commentary he would not have used either of these words, still less would he have used both, unless he were feeling his way to a fixed technical term. Another witness to the early date of the work is the absence of any clear sign that Hilary knew of the existence of Arianism. He knows, indeed, that there are heresies which impugn the Godhead of Christ'', and in consequence states that doctrine with great precision, and frequently as well as forcibly. But it has been pointed out 5 that he discusses many texts which served, in the Arian strife, for attack or defence, without alluding to that burning question : and this would have been impossible and, indeed, a dereliction of duty, in Hilary's later life. And there is one passage 6 in which he speaks of God the Father as ' He with (or ' in ') Whom the Word was before He was bom.' The Incarnation is spoken of in words which would usually denote the eternal Generation : and if a candid reader could not be misled, yet an opportunity is given to the malevolent which Hilary or, indeed, any careful writer engaged in the Arian controversy would have avoided. The Commentary, then, is an early work, yet in no respect unworthy of its author. But though he had developed his characteristic thoughts before he began to write it, they are certainly less prominent here than in the treatises which followed. It is chiefly remarkable for its display of allegorical ingenuity. Its pages are full of fantastic interpretations of the kind which he had so great a share in introducing into Western Europe ?. He started by it a movement which he would have been powerless to stop ; that he was not altogether satisfied with the principle of allegory is shewn by the more modest use that he made of it when he composed, with fuller experience, the Homilies on the Psalms. It is, perhaps, only natural that there is little allegorism in the De Trinitate. Such a hot-house growth could not thrive in the keen 2 Comm. in Matt. v. I. It may be mentioned that the chap- ters of the Commentary do not coincide with those of the Gospel, 3 Comm. in Matt. xvi. 4, thcoictam quam deitatem Latini KUttCUfant, xxvi. 5, thcoictam quam deitatem nunCHpamits. The strange accusative thcoictam makes it the more probable that we have here a specimen of the primitive Greek vocabulary of Latin Christendom of which so few examples, e.g. Baptism and liucharist, have survived. Cyprian had probably the chief share in destroying it ; hut the subject has never been examined as it deserves. 4 So especially xii. 18. There is similarly a possible allusion to Marccllus' teaching in xi. 9, which, however, may equally well be a reminiscence of some cognate earlier heresy. 5 Maffei's Introduction, § 15. 6 xxxi. 2,/>cnes quem crat antcquam nasccrctur. 7 See Ebert, LUteratur des Mittelaltcrs, i. 139. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. ix air of controversy. As for the Commentary on St. Matthew, its chief influence has been indirect, in that St. Ambrose made large use of it in his own work upon the same Gospel. The consideration of Hilary's use of Scripture and of the place which it held in his system of theology is reserved for the next chapter, where illustrations from this Commentary are given. About the year 350 Hilary was consecrated Bishop of Poitiers. So we may infer from his own words 8 that he had been a good while regenerate, and for some little time a bishop, on the eve of his exile in 356 a.d. Whether, like Ambrose, he was raised directly from lay life to the Episcopate cannot be known. It is at least possible that this was the case. His position as a bishop was one of great importance, and, as it must have seemed, free from special difficulties. There was a wide difference between the Church organisation of the Latin-speaking provinces of the Empire (with the exception of Central and Southern Italy and of Africa, in each of which a multitude of insignificant sees were dependent upon the au- tocracy of Rome and Carthage respectively) and that of the Greek-speaking provinces of the East. In the former there was a mere handful of dioceses, of huge geographical extent ; in the latter every town, at least in the more civilised parts, had its bishop. The Western bishops were inevitably isolated from one another, and could exercise none of that constant surveillance over each other's orthodoxy which was, for evil as well as for good, so marked a feature of the Church life of the East. And the very greatness of their position gave them stability. The equipoise of power was too perfect, the hands in which it was vested too few, the men themselves, probably, too statesmanlike, for the Western Church to be infected with that nervous agitation which possessed the shifting multitudes of Eastern prelates, and made them suspicious and loquacious and disastrously eager for compromise. It was, in fact, the custom of the West to take the orthodoxy of its bishops for granted, and an external impulse was necessary before they could be overthrown. The two great sees with which Hilary was in immediate relation were those of Aries and Milan, and both were in Arian hands. But it needed the direct incitation of a hostile Emperor to set Saturninus against Hilary ; and it was in vain that Hilary, in the floodtide of orthodox revival in the West, attacked Auxentius. The orthodox Emperor upheld the Arian, who survived Hilary by eight years and died in possession of his see. But this great and secure position of the Western bishop had its drawbacks. Hilary was conscious of its greatness 9, and strove to be worthy of it ; but it was a greatness of responsibility to which neither he, nor any other man, could be equal. For in his eyes the bishop was still, as he had been in the little Churches of the past, and still might be in quiet places of the East or South, th e sole pr iest, sa cerdos ', of his flock. In his exile he reminds the Emperor that he is still distributing the communion through his presbyters to the Church. This survival can have had none but evil results. It put both bishop and clergy in a false position. The latter were degraded by the denial to them of a definite status and rights of their own. Authority without influence and information in lieu of knowledge was all for which the former could hope. And this lack of any organised means of influencing a wide-spread flock — such a diocese as that of Poitiers must have been several times as large as a rural diocese of England — prevented its bishop from creating any strong public opinion within it, unless he were an evangelist with the gifts of a Martin of Tours. It was impossible for him to excite in so unwieldy a district any popular enthusiasm or devotion to himself. Unlike an Athanasius, he could be deported into exile at the Emperor's will with as little commotion as the bishop of some petty half- Greek town in Asia Minor. 8 Syn. 91 ; regencratns friiiem et iti eJ>iscopatu aliquantis- per manens. The renderings ' long ago ' and ' for some time ' in this translation seem rather too strong. 9 E.g. Trin. viii. i. The bishop is a prince of the Church. 1 Sacerdos in Hilary, as in all writers till near the end of the fourth century, means ' bishop ' always. xn INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. are outside, and therefore he has nothing to do with them. But Arianism, as represented by an Auxentius or a Saturninus, is an internum malum 8 ; and to the extirpation of this 'inward evil' the remaining years of his life were to be devoted. His own devotion, from the time of his conversion to the Catholic Faith, which almost all around him held, was not the less sincere because it did not find its natural expression in the Nicene Creed. That document, which primarily concerned only bishops, and them only when their orthodoxy was in question, was hardly known in the West, where the bishops had as yet had little occasion for doubting one another's faith. Hilary had never heard it, — he can hardly have avoided hearing of it, — till just before his exile. In his earlier conflicts he rarely mentions it, and when he does it is in connection with the local circumstances of the East. In later life he, with Western Christendom at large, recognised its value as a rallying point for the faithful ; but even then there is no attachment lo the Creed for its own sake. It might almost seem that the Creed, by his defence of which Athanasius has earned such glory, owed its original celebrity to him rather than he to it. His unjust persecution and heroic endurance excited interest in the symbol of which he was the champion. If it were otherwise, there has been a strange conspiracy of silence among Western theologians. In their great works on the Trinity, Hilary most rarely, and Augustine never, allude to it ; the Council of Aquileia, held in the same interests and almost at the same time as that of Constantinople in 38r, absolutely ignores it 9. The Creed, in the year 355, was little known in the West and unpopular in the East. Even Athanasius kept it somewhat in the background, from reasons of prudence, and Hilary's sympathies, as we shall see, were with the Eastern School which could accept the truth, though they disliked this expression of it. The time had now come for Hilary, holding these views of Arianism and of the Faith, to take an active part in the conflict. We have seen that he was not at Milan ; he was therefore not personally compromised, but the honour of the Church compelled him to move. He exerted himself to induce the bishops of Gaul to withdraw from communion with Saturninus, and with Ursacius and Valens, disciples of Arius during his exile on the banks of the Danube thirty years before, and now high in favour with Constantius, and his ministers, we might almost say, for the ecclesiastical affairs of the Western provinces. We do not know how many bishops were enlisted by Hilary against Saturninus. It is probable that not many would follow him in so bold a venture; even men of like mind with himself might well think it unwise. It was almost a revolutionary act; an importation of the methods of Eastern controversy into the peaceful West, for this was not the constitutional action of a synod but the private venture of Hilary and his allies. However righteous and necessary, in the interests of morality and religion, their conduct may have seemed to them, to Constantius and his advisers it must have appeared an act of defiance to the law, both of Church and State. And Hilary would certainly not win favour with the Emperor by his letter of protest, the First Epistle to Constantius, written about the end of the year 355. He adopts the usual tone of the time, that of exaggerated laudation and even servility towards the Emperor. Such language was, of course, in great measure conventional ; we know from Cicero's letters how little superlatives, whether of flattery or abuse, need mean, and language had certainly not grown more sincere under the Empire. The letter was, in fact, a singularly bold manifesto, and one which Hilary himself must have foreseen was likely to bring upon him the 8 Triii. vii. 31 9 There is much more evidence to this effect in Rcutcr, A ugustinisckt SluJicn, p. 182 f. It was probably due to jealousy between West and East ; cf. the way in which John of Jerusalem ignored the African decision in Pclagius' case. But the West was ignorant, as well as jealous, of the East. Even in his last years, after his sojourn in Asia Minor, Hilary believed that Jerusalem was, as had been prophesied, an uninhabited ruin; Tr. in Ps. exxiv. § 2, exxxi. §§ 18, 23, cxlvi. § 1. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xiii punishment which had befallen the recusants at Aries and Milan. He begins (§ i) in studiously general terms, making no mention of the provinces in which the offences were being committed, with a complaint of the tyrannical interference of civil officers in religious matters. If there is to be peace (§ 2), there must be liberty ; Catholics must not be forced to become Arians. The voice of resistance was being raised ; men were beginning to say that it was better to die than to see the faith defiled at the bidding of an individual. Equity required that God-fearing men should not suffer by compulsory intercourse with the teachers of execrable blasphemy, but be allowed bishops whom they could obey with a good conscience. Truth and falsehood, light and darkness could not combine. He entreated the Emperor to allow the people to choose for themselves to what teachers they would listen, with whom they would join in the Eucharist and in prayer for him. Next (§ 3) he denies that there is any purpose of treason, or any discontent. The only disturbance is that caused by Arian propagators of heresy, who are busily engaged in misleading the ignorant. He now (§ 4) prays that the excellent bishops who have been sent into exile may be restored ; liberty and joy would be the result. Then (§ 5) he attacks the modern and deadly Arian pestilence. Borrowing, somewhat incautiously, the words of the Council of Sardica, now twelve years old, he gives a list of Arian chiefs which ends with "those two ignorant and unprincipled youths, Ursacius and Valens." Communion with such men as these, even communion in ignorance, is a participation in their guilt, a fatal sin. He proceeds, in § 6, to combine denunciation of the atrocities committed in Egypt with a splendid plea for liberty of conscience; it is equally vain and wicked to attempt to drive men into Arianism, and an enforced faith is, in any case, worthless. The Arians (§7) were themselves legally convicted long ago and Athanasius acquitted; it is a perversion of justice that the condemned should now be intriguing against one so upright and so faithful to the truth. And lastly (§ 8) he comes to the wrong just done at Milan, and tells the well-known story of the violence practised upon Eusebius of Vercelli and others in the ' Synagogue of malignants,' as he calls it. Here also he takes occasion to speak of Paulinus of Treves, exiled for his resistance at Aries two years before, where he "had withstood the monstrous crimes of those men." The conclusion of the letter is unfortunately lost, and there are one or more gaps in the body of it ; these, we may judge, would only have made it more unacceptable to Constantius. It was, indeed, from the Emperor's point of view, a most provocatory Epistle. He and his advisers were convinced that compromise was the way of peace. They had no quarrel with the orthodoxy of the West, if only that orthodoxy would concede that Arianisers were entitled to office in the Church, or would at least be silent ; and they were animated by a persistent hatred of Athanasius. Moreover, the whole tendency of thought, since Constantine began to favour the Church, had run towards glorification of the Emperor as the vice-gerent of God ; and the orthodox had had their full share in encouraging the idea. That a bishop, with no status to justify his interference, should renounce com- munion with his own superior, the Emperor's friend, at Aries ; should forbid the officers of state to meddle in the Church's affairs, and demand an entirely new thing, recognition by the state as lawful members of the Church while yet they rejected the prelates whom the state recognised ; should declare that peace was impossible because the conflicting doctrines were as different as light and darkness, and that the Emperor's friends were execrable heretics ; should assert, while denying that he or his friends had any treasonable purpose, that men were ready to die rather than submit ; should denounce two Councils, lawfully held, and demand reinstatement of those who had opposed the decision of those Councils; should, above all, take the part of Athanasius, now obviously doomed to another exile; — all this must have savoured of rebellion. And rebellion was no imaginary danger. xiv INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I. We have seen that Magnentius had tried to enlist Athanasius on his side against the Arian Emperor. Constantius was but a new ruler over Gaul, and had no claim, through services rendered, to its loyalty. He might reasonably construe Hilary's words into a threat that the orthodox of Gaul would, if their wishes were disregarded, support an orthodox pretender. And there was a special reason for suspicion. At this very time Constantius had just conferred the government of the West upon his cousin Julian, who was installed as Caesar on the 6th November, 355. From the first, probably, Constantius distrusted Julian, and Julian certainly distrusted Constantius. Thus it might well seem that the materials were ready for an explosion ; that a disloyal Cresar would find ready allies in discontented Catholics. We cannot wonder that Hilary's letter had no effect upon the policy of Constantius. It is somewhat surprising that several months elapsed before he was punished. In the spring of the year 356 Saturninus presided at a Council held at Beziers, at which Hilary was, he tells us, compelled to attend. In what the compulsion consisted we do not know. It may simply have been that he was summoned to attend ; a summons which he could not with dignity refuse, knowing, as he must have done, that charges would be brought against himself. Of the proceedings of the Synod we know little. The complaints against Hilary concerned his conduct, not his faith. This latter was, of course, above suspicion, and it was not the policy of the court party to attack orthodoxy in Gaul. He seems to have been charged with exciting popular discontent ; and this, as we have seen, was an accusation which his own letter had rendered plausible. He tried to raise the question of the Faith, challenging the doctrine of his opponents. But though a large majority of a council of Gallic bishops would certainly be in sympathy with him, he had no success. Their position was not threatened ; Hilary, like Paulinus, was accused of no doctrinal error, and these victims of Constantius, if they had raised no questions concerning their neighbours' faith and made no objections to the Emperor's tyranny, might also have passed their days in peace. The tone of the episcopate in Gaul was, in fact, by no means heroic. If we may trust Sulpicius Severus 1 , in all these Councils the opposition was prepared to accept the Emperor's word about Athanasius, and excommunicate him, if the general question of the Faith might be discussed. But the condition was evaded, and the issue never frankly raised ; and, if it was cowardly, it was not unnatural that Hilary should have been condemned by the Synod, and condemned almost unanimously. Only Rodanius of Toulouse was punished with him ; the sufferers would certainly have been more numerous had there been any strenuous remonstrance against the injustice. The Synod sent their decision to the Csesar Julian, their immediate ruler. Julian took no action ; he may have felt that the matter was too serious for him to decide without reference to the Emperor, but it is more likely that he had no wish to outrage the dominant Church feeling of Gaul and alienate sympathies which he might need in the future. In any case he refused to pass a sentence which he must have known would be in accordance with the Emperor's desire ; and the vote of the Synod, condemning Hilary, was sent to Constantius himself. He acted upon it at once, and in the summer of the same year, 356, Hilary was exiled to the diocese, or civil district comprising several provinces, of Asia.~^ We now come to the most important period of Hilary's life. He was already, as we have seen, a Greek scholar and a follower of Greek theology. He was now to come into immediate contact with the great problems of the day in the field on which they were being constantly debated. And he was well prepared to take his part. He had formed his own convictions before he was acquainted with homoousion, homoiousion or the Niccne 1 Chron. ii. 39. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. xv Creed 2 . He was therefore in full sympathy with Athanasius on the main point. And his manner of treating the controversy shews that the policy of Athanasius was also, in a great measure, his. Like Athanasius, he spares Marcellus as much as possible. We know that Athanasius till the end refused to condemn him, though one of the most formidable weapons in the armoury of the Anti-Nicene party was the conjunction in which they could plausibly put their two names, as those of the most strenuous opponents of Arianism. Similarly Hilary never names Marcellus 3 , as he never names Apollinaris, though he had the keenest sense of the danger involved in either heresy, and argues forcibly and often against both. Like Athanasius again, he has no mercy upon Photinus the disciple, while he spares Marcellus the master; and it is a small, though clear, sign of dependence that he occasionally applies Athanasius' nickname of Ariomatiihc, or ' Arian lunatics,' to his opponents. It is certain that Hilary was familiar with the writings of Athanasius, and borrowed freely from them. But so little has yet been done towards ascertaining the progress of Christian thought and the extent of each writer's contribution to it, that it is impossible to say which arguments were already current and may have been independently adopted by Hilary and by Athanasius, and for which the former is indebted to the latter 4 . Yet it is universally recognised that the debt exists; and Hilary's greatness as a theologians, his mastery of the subject, would embolden him to borrow and adapt the more freely that he was dealing as with an equal and a fellow-combatant in the same cause. Athanasius and Hilary can never have met face to face. But the eyes and the agents of Athanasius were everywhere, and he must have known something of the exile and of the services of Hilary, who was, of course, well acquainted with the history of Athanasius, though, with the rest of Gaul, he may not have been whole-hearted in his defence. Ami now he was the mere likely to be drawn towards him because this was the time of his approxi- mation to the younger generation of the Conservative School. For it is with them that Hilary's affinities are closest and most obvious. The great Gaggr^gsiang were devoted Origenists — we know the service they rendered to their master Dy the publication of the Philocalia, — and there could be no stronger bond of union between Hilary and themselves. They were the outgrowth of that great Asiatic school to whi ch the n ame of Semiarians, somewhat ijn kindly giyj m_FyI^pJphaiiius, has clung, and which was steadily increasing in influence over the thought of Asia, the dominant province, at this time, of the whole Empire. Gr egory of N azianzu s, the eldest of the three great writers, was probably not more than twenty-five years of age when Hilary was sent into exile, and none of them can have seriously affected even his latest works. But they represented, in a more perfect form, the teaching of the best men of the Conservative School; and when we find that Hilary, who was old enough to be the father of Basil and the two Gregories, has thoughts in common with them which are not to be found in Athanasius, we may safely assign this peculiar teaching to the influence upon Hilar y, predisposed by his loyalty to Origen to listen to the representatives of the flrigenist tradition, of this school of theology. We see one side of this influence in Hilary's understatement of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost. The Semiarians were coming to be of one mind with the Nicencs as to the consubstantial Deity of the Son ; none of them, in all probability, at this time would have admitted the 2 Syn. 91. 3 This sparing of Marcellus, in the case of a Western like Hilary, may have been a concession to the incapacity of the West, e.g. Julius of Rome and the Council of Sardica, to see his error. But this is not so likely as that it was a falling in with the general policy of Athanasius, as was the rare mention of the homoouslon ; cf. Gwatkin, op. cit. 42 n. Hilary was sin- gularly independent of Western opinion, and his whole aim was to win the East. 4 No such examination seems to have been made as that to which Renter in his admirable Attgust'mische Studien has sub- jected some of the thoughts of St. Augustine. 5 Harnack, Dogmengeschichie, ii. p. 243 n. (cd. ?). Hilary is, ' making all allowance for dependence on Athanasius, an inde- pendent thinker, who has, indeed, excelled the bishop of Alex- andria as a theologian.' XVI INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. consubstantial Deity of the Spirit, and the unity of their School was to be wrecked in future years upon this point. The fact that Hilary could use language so reserved upon this subject must have led them to welcome his alliance the more heartily. Neither he nor they could foresee the future of the doctrine, and both sides must have sincerely thought that they were at one. And, indeed, on Hilary's part there was a great willingness to believe in this unity, which led him, as we shall see, into an unfortunate attempt at ecclesiastical diplomacy. Another evidence of contact with this Eastern School, but at its most advanced point, is the remarkable expression, ' Only-begotten God,' which Hilary 'employs with startling freedom, evidently as the natural expression of his own inmost thought 6 .' Dr. Hort, whose words these are, states that the term is used by Athanasius only twice, once in youth and once in old age ; but that, on the other hand, it is familiar to two of the Cappadocians, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa. They must have learned it from some Asiatic writer known to Hilary as a contemporary, to them as successors. And when we find Hilary ' rejecting the baptism of heretics, and so putting himself in opposition to what had been the Roman view for a century and that of Gaul since the Council of Aries in 314, and then find this opinion echoed by Gregory of Nazianzus 8 , we are reminded not only of Hilary's general independence of thought, but of the circumstance that St. Cyprian found his stoutest ally in contesting this same point in the Cappadocian Firmilian. A comparison of the two sets of writings would probably lead to the discovery of more coincidences than have yet been noticed ; of the fact itself, of ' the Semiarian influence so visible in the De Synodis of Hilary, and even in his own later work 9,' there can be no doubt. With these affinities, with an adequate knowledge of the Greek language and a strong sympathy, as well as a great familiarity, with Greek modes of thought, Hilary found himself in the summer of the year_j£6__an exile in Asia Minor. It was exile in the most favourable circumstances. He was still bishop of Poitiers, recognised as such by the government, which only forbade him, for reasons of state ostensibly not connected with theology, to reside within his diocese. He held free communication with his fellow-bishops in Gaul, and was allowed to administer his own diocese, so far as administration by letter was possible, without interruption. And his diocese did not forget him. We learn from Sulpicius Severus * that he and the others of the little band of exiles, who had suffered at Aries, and Milan, and Beziers, were the heroes of the day in their own country. That orthodox bishops should suffer for the Faith was a new thing in the West; we cannot wonder that subsidies were raised for their support and delegations sent to assure them of the sympathy of their flocks. To a man like Hilary, of energy and ability, of recognised episcopal rank and unimpeached orthodoxy, the position offered not less but more oppor- tunities of service than hitherto he had enjoyed. For no restriction was put upon his movements, so long as he kept within the wide bounds allotted him. He had perfect leisure for travel or for study, the money needed for the expense of his journeys, and something of the glory, still very real, with which the confessor was invested. And his movements were confined to the very region where he could learn most concerning the question of the hour, and do most for its solution. In fact, in sending Hilary into such an exile as this, Constantius had done too much, or too little; he had injured, and not advanced, his own favourite cause of unity by way of compromise. In this instance, as in those of Arius and Athanasius and many others, exile became an efficacious means for 6 Hort, Two Dissertations, p. 27. 7 / rill. \ ni- f - B Cf. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 130. ■ Hi , p. 150. It would not l>c fair to judge Hilary by the de Synodis alone. The would-be diplomatist, in his eagerness to bring about a reconciliation, is not quite just either to the facts or to his own feelings. 1 Citron- ii. 30. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xvii the spreading and strengthening of convictions. If Hilary had no great success, as we shall see, in the Council which he attended, yet his presence, during these critical years, in a region where men were gradually advancing to the fuller truth cannot have been without influence upon their spiritual growth ; and his residence in Asia no doubt confirmed and enriched his own apprehension of the Faith. It is certain that Hilary was busily engaged in writing his great work upon the Trinity, and that some parts of it were actually published, during his exile. But as this work in its final form would appear to belong to the next stage of Hilary's life, it will be well to postpone its consideration for the present, and proceed at once to his share in the conciliar action of the time. We have no information concerning his conduct before the year 358, but it is necessary to say something about the important events which preceded his pub- lication of the Be Synodis and his participation in the Council of Seleucia. It was a time when new combinations of parties were being formed. Arianism was shewing itself openly, as it had not dared to do since Nicsea. I n 357 H ilary's adversaries, Ursacius and Valens, in a Synod at Sirmium, published a creed which was Arian without concealment ; it was, indeed, as serious a blow to the Emperor's policy of compromise as anything that Athanasius or Hilary had ventured. But it was the work of friends of the Emperor, and shewed that, for the moment at any rate, the Court had been won over to the extreme party. But the forces of Conservatism were still the strongest. Within a few months, early in 35S, the great Asiatic prelates, soon to be divided over the question of the Godhead of the Holy Spirit but still at one, Basil of Ancyra, Macedonius and others, met at Ancyra and repudiated Arianism while ignoring, after their manner, the Nicene definition. Then their delegates proceeded to the Court, now at Sirmium, and won Constantius back to his old position. Ursacius and Valens, who had no scruples, signed a Conservative creed, as did the weak Liberius of Rome, anxious to escape from an exile to which he had been consigned soon after the banishment of Hilary. It was a great triumph to have induced so prominent a bishop to minimise — we cannot say that he denied — his own belief and that of the Western churches. And the Asiatic leaders were determined to have the spoils of victory. Liberius, of course, was allowed to return home, for he had proved compliant, and the Conservatives had no quarrel with those who held the homoousion. But the most prominent of the Arian leaders, those who had the courage of their conviction, to the number, it is said, of seventy, were exiled. It is true that Constantius was quickly persuaded by other influences to restore them ; but the theological difference was embittered by the sense of personal injury, and further conflicts rendered inevitable between Conservatives and Arians. It was with this Conservative party, victorious for the moment, that Hilary had to deal. Its leaders, and especially Basil of Ancyra, had the ear of the Emperor, and seemed to hold the future of the Church in their hands. Hilary was on friendly terms with Basil, widi whom, as we have seen, he had much in common, and corresponded on his behalf with the Western Bishops. He was, indeed, by the peculiar combination in him of the Eastern and the Western, perhaps the only man who could have played the part he undertook. He was thoroughly and outspokenly orthodox, yet had no prejudice in favour of the Nicene definition. He would have been content, like the earlier generation of Eastern bishops,: with a simple formulary; the Apostles' Creed, the traditional standard of the West, satisfied the exigencies even of his own precise thought. And if a personal jealousy of Athanasius and his school on the part of the Asiatic Conservatives was one of the chief obstacles to peace, here again Hilary had certain advantages. We have seen that there was no personal communication between him and Athanasius; he could ignore, and may even have been ignorant of, the antipathy of Asia to Alexandria. And he was no absolute follower of Athanasius' teaching. We saw that in some important respects he was an independent vol. ix, c xviii INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. thinker, and that in others he is on common ground with the Cappadocians, the heirs of the best thought of such men as Basil of Ancyra. Nor could he labour under any suspicion of being involved in the heresy of Marcellus. It was an honourable tradition of Eastern Christendom to guard against the recrudescence of such heresy as his, which revived the fallacies of Paul of Samosata and of Sabellius, and seemed in Asia the most formidable of all possible errors. Marcellus had forged it as a weapon in defence of the Nicene faith ; and if his doctrine were among the most formidable antagonists of Arianism, it may well have seemed that there was not much to choose between the two. And while Athanasius had never condemned Marcellus, and the West had more than once pronounced him innocent, the general feeling of the East was decisively against him, and deeply suspicious of any appearance of sympathy with him. And further, by one of those complications of personal with theological opposition which were so sadly frequent, Basil was in possession of that very see of Ancyra from which the heretic Marcellus had been expelled. Hilary, who was unconcerned in all this, saw a new hope for the Church in his Asiatic friends, and his own tendencies of thought must have been a welcome surprise to them, accustomed as they were to suspect Sabellianism in the West. The prospect, indeed, was at first sight a fair one. The Faith, it seemed, might be upheld by imperial support, now that it had advocates who were not prejudiced in the Emperor's eyes as was Athanasius ; and Athanasius himself, accredited by the testimony of Asia, might recover his position. Yet Hilary was building on an unsound foundation. The Semiarian party was not united. Hilary may not have suspected, or may, in his zeal for the cause, have concealed from himself the fact, that in the doctrine of the Holy Ghost there lay the seeds of a strife which was soon to divide his allies as widely as Arius was separated from Athanasius. And these allies, as a body, were not worthy supporters of the truth. There were many sincere men among them, but these were mixed with adventurers, who used the conflict as a means of attaining office, with as few scruples as any of the other prelates who hung around the court. But the fatal obstacle to success was that the whole plan depended on the favour of Constantius. For the moment Basil and his friends possessed this, but their adversaries were men of greater dexterity and fewer scruples than they. Valens and Ursacius and their like were doing their utmost to retrieve defeat and enjoy revenge. It is significant that Athanasius, as it seems, had no share in Hilary's hopes and schemes for drawing East and West together. He had an unrivalled knowledge of the circumstances, and an open mind, willing to see good in the Semiarians; had the plan contained the elements of success it would have received his warm support. Hilary threw himself heartily into it. He travelled, we know, extensively; so much so, that his letters from Gaul failed to reach him in the year 358. This was a serious matter. We have seen that the exiles from the West had derived great support from their flocks. Hilary's own weight as a negotiator must have depended upon the general knowledge that he did not stand alone, but represented the public opinion of a great province. For this reason, as well as for his own peace of mind, it must have been a welcome relief to him to learn, when letters came at last, that his friends had not forgotten or deserted him; and he seized the opportunity of reply to send to the bishops of all the Gallic provinces and of Britain the circular letter which we call the De Synodis, translated in this volume. The Introduction to it, here given, makes it unnecessary to describe its contents. It may suffice to say that it is an able and well-written attempt to explain the Eastern position to Western theologians. He shews that the Eastern creeds, which had been composed since the Nicene, were susceptible of an orthodox meaning, and felicitously brings out their merits by contrast with the unmitigated heresy of the second creed of Sirmium, which he cites at full length. It must be admitted that there is a certain amount of special pleading; that his eyes are resolutely shut to any other aspect of the documents than that which he is commending to the attention of his readers in Gaul. And he is as boldly original in his THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xix rendering of history as of doctrine. He actually describes the Council of the Dedication, which confirmed the deposition of Athanasius and propounded a compromising creed, definitely intended to displace the Nicene, as an 'assembly of the saints 2 .' The West, we know, cared little for Eastern disputes and formularies. There can have been no great risk that Hilary's praise should revolt the minds of his friends, and as little hope that it would excite any enthusiasm among them. This description, and a good deal else in the Be Synodis, was obviously meant to be read in the land where it was written. When all possible allowance is made for his sympathy with the best men among the Asiatics, and for the hopefulness with which he might naturally regard his allies, it is still impossible to think that he was quite sincere in asserting that their object in compiling ambiguous creeds was the suppression of Sabellianism and not the rejection of the homoousiou. Yet it was natural enough that he should write as he did, for the prospect must have seemed most attractive. If this open letter could convince the Eastern bishops that they were regarded in the West not with suspicion, as teachers of the inferiority of Christ, but with admiration, as steadfast upholders of His reality, a great step was made towards union. And if Hilary could persuade his brethren in Gaul that the imperfect terms in which the East was accustomed to express its faith in Christ were compatible with sound belief, an approach could be made from that side also. And in justice to Hilary we must bear in mind that he does not fall into the error of Liberius. It was a serious fault for a Western bishop to abandon words which were, for him and for his Church, the recognised expression of the truth ; it was a very different matter to argue that inadequate terms, in the mouth of those who were unhappily pledged to the use of them, might contain the saving Faith. This latter is the argument which Hilary uses. H e urges t he East to advance to the definiten ess of the Nicene confession ; he urges the West to welcome the first signs of RiirJ2_aii ndvnncj^ and mea ntipieZtO—recognise theZiruth tliaf vvas^ahj-c oncealed in t heir am biguous docum ents. The attempt was a bold one, and met, as was inevitable, with severe criticism from the side of uncompromising orthodoxy, which we may for the moment leave unnoticed. What Athanasius thought of the treatise we do not know ; it would be unsafe to conjecture that his own work, which bears the same title and was written in the following year, when the futility of the hope which had buoyed Hilary up had been de- monstrated, was a silent criticism upon the De Synodis of the other. It is, at least, a success in itself, and was a step towards the ultimate victory of truth; we cannot say as much of Hilary's effort, admirable though its intention was, and though it must have contributed something to the softening of asperities. But Alexandria and Gaul were distant, and while the one excited repugnance in the Emperor's mind, the other had little influence with him. The decision seemed to lie in the hands of Basil of Ancyra and his colleagues. The men who had the ear of Constantius, and had lately induced him to banish the Arians, must in consistency use their influence for the restoration of exiles who were suffering for their opposition to Arianism ; and this influence, if only the West would heartily join with them, would be strong enough to secure even the restoration of Athanasius. Such thoughts were certainly present in the mind of Hilary when he painted so bright a picture of Eastern Councils, and represented Constantius as an innocent believer, once misguided but now returned to the Faith \ From the Semiarian leaders, controlling the policy of Constantius, he expected peace for the Church, restoration of the exiles, the suppression of Arianism. And if to some extent he deceived himself, and was willing to believe and to persuade others that men's faith and purpose differed from what in fact it was, we must remember that it was a time of passionate earnestness, when cool judgment concerning friend or foe was almost impossible for one who was involved in that great conflict concerning the Divinity of Christ. - Syn. 32. 3 lb. 78. C Z xx INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. But the times were not ripe for an understanding between East and West, and the Asiatics in whom Hilary had put his trust were not, and did not deserve to be, the restorers of the Church. Their victory had been complete, but the Emperor was inconstant and their adversaries were men of talent, who had once guided his counsels and knew how to recover their position. The policy of Constantius was, as we know, one of compromise, and it might seem to him that the prevailing confusion would cease if only a sufficiently comprehensive ! formula could be devised and accepted. ' Specious charity and colourless indefiniteness 4 ' was the policy of the new party, formed by Valens and Arians of every shade, which won idie favour of Constantius within a year of the Semiarian victory. They had been mortified, had been forced to sign a confession which they disbelieved, many of them had suffered a momentary exile. Now they were to have their revenge ; not only were the terms of communion to be so lax that extreme Arianism should be at home within the Church, but, as in a modern change of ministry, the Semiarians were to yield their sees to their opponents. To attain these ends a Council was necessary. The general history of the Homoean intrigues, of their division of the forces opposed to them by the as- sembling of a Western Council at Rimini, of an Eastern at Seleucia, and their apparent triumph, gained by shameless falsehood, in the former, would be out of place. Hilary and his Asiatic friends were concerned only with the Council which met at Seleucia in September, 359. The Emperor, who hoped for a final settlement, desired that the Council should be as large as possible, and the governors of provinces exerted themselves to collect bishops, and to forward them to Seleucia, as was usual, at the public expense. Among the rest, Hilary, who was, we must remember, a bishop with a diocese of his own, and of unimpugned ortho- doxy, exiled ostensibly for a political offence, received orders to attend at the cost of the State 5 . In the Council, which numbered some 160 bishops, his Semiarian friends were in a majority of three to one; the uncompromising Nicenes of Egypt and the uncompromising Arians, taken together, did not number more than a quarter of the whole. Hilary was wel- comed heartily and, as it would seem, unanimously; but he had to disclaim, on behalf of the Church in Gaul, the Sabellianism of which it was suspected, and with some reason after the Western welcome of Marcellus. He-stated lajsjait h to th e satisfaction of the Council in acc ordance with the Ni>.pnf _£onJrss[on 6 . We cannot doubtThat he rmuRTuse of its very words, for Hilary was not the man to retreat from the position he held, and the terms of his alliance with the school of Basil of Ancyra required no such renunciation. The proceedings of the Council, in which Hilary took no public part, may be omitted. The Semiarians, strong in numbers and, as they still thought, in the Emperor's favour, swept everything before them. They adopted the ambiguous creed of the Council of the Dedication, — that Council which Hilary had lately called an 'assembly of the Saints' — for the Nicenes were a powerless minority; and they repeated their sentence of excommunication upon the Arians, who were still fewer in number. They even ventured to consecrate a successor to Eudoxius, one of the most extreme, for the great Church of Antioch. Then the Council elected a commission often of the leaders of the majority to present to the Emperor a report of its proceedings, and dispersed. In spite of some ominous signs of obstinacy on the part of the Arians, and of favour towards them shewn by the government officials, they seemed to have succeeded in establishing still more firmly the results attained at Ancyra two years before, and to have struck another and, as they might hope, a more effectual blow at the heretics. But when the deputation, with whom Hilary travelled, reached Constantinople, they found that the position was entirely different from their expectation. The intriguing party, whose aim was to punish and displace the Semiarians, had contrived a double treason. They misrepresented the Western Council to the Emperor as in agreement with themselves; 4 Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 163. 5 Snip. Sev. Chron. ii- 4:. 6 Snip. Sev. ii. 4 j, iuxta en, qu, They must not condemn as presumptuous or profane the Niccne confession, but eschew it as giving occasion to attacks upon the Faith and to denials of the truth on the ground of novelty. There is danger lest innovation creep in, excused as improvement of this creed ; and emendation is an endless process, which leads the emenders to condemnation of each other. Hilary now (g 8) professes his sincere admiration of Constantius' devout purpose and earnestness in seeking the truth, which he who denies is antichrist, and he who feigns is anathema. He entreats the Emperor to allow him to expound the Faith, in his own presence, before the Council which was now debating the subject at Constantinople. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xxiii His exposition shall be Scriptural ; he will use the words of Christ, Whose exile and Whose bishop he is. The Emperor seeks the Faith ; let him hear it not from modem volumes, but from the books of God. Even in the West it may be taught, whence shall come some that shall sit at meat in the kingdom of God. This is a nutter not of philosophy, but of the teaching of the Gospel. He asks audience rather for the Emperor's sake and for God's Churches than for himself. He is sure of the faith that is in htm ; it is God's, and he will never change it. But (§ 9) the Emperor must bear in mind that every heretic professes that his own is the Scriptural doctrine. So say Marccllus, Fhotinus, and the rest. He prays (§ 10) for the Emperor's best attention; his plea will be for faith and unity and eternal life. He will speak in all reverence for Constantius' royal position, and for his faith, and what he says shall tend to peace between East and West. Finally (§ 11) he gives, as an outline of the address he proposes to deliver, the series of texts on which he will base his argument. This is what the Floly Spirit has taught him to believe. To this faith he will ever adhere, loyal to the Faith of his fathers, and the creed of his Baptism, and the Gospel as he has learnt it. In this address, to which we cannot wonder that Constantius made no response, there is much that is remarkable. There is no doubt that Hilary's exile had been a political measure, and that the Emperor, in this as in the numerous other cases of the same kind, had acted deliberately and with full knowledge of the circumstances in the way that seemed to him most conducive to the interests of permanent peace. Hilary's assumption that Constantius had been deceived is a legitimate allusion, which no one could misunderstand, to a fact which could not be respectfully stated. That he should have spoken as he did, and indeed that he should have raised the subject at all, is a clear sign of the uncertainty of the times. A timorous appeal for mercy would have been useless ; a bold statement of innocence, although, as things turned out, it failed, was an effort worth making to check the Homoean advance. Saturninus, as we saw, was one of the Court party among the bishops ; and he was an enemy of Julian, who was soon to permit his deposition. Julian's knowledge of Hilary can have been but small ; his exile began within a month or two of the Caesar's arrival in Gaul, and Julian was not responsible for it. For good or for evil, he had little to say in the case. But the suspicions were already aroused which were soon to lead to Julian's revolt, and Constantius had begun to give the orders which would lessen Julian's military force, and were, as he supposed, intended to prepare his downfall. To appeal to Julian and to attack Saturninus was to remind Constantius very broadly that great interests were at stake, and that a protector might be found for the creed which he persecuted. And his double mention of the West (§§ 8, 10) as able to teach the truth, and as needing to be reconciled with the East, has a political ring. It suggests that the Western provinces are a united force, with which the Emperor must reckon. The fact that Constantius, though he did not grant the meeting in his own presence with Saturninus, which Hilary had asked for, yet did grant the substance of his prayer, allowing him to return without obstacle to his diocese, seems to shew that the Emperor felt the need for caution and concession in the West. The theological part of the letter is even more remarkable. Its doctrine is, of course, exactly that of the Dc Trinitate. The summary of Scripture proofs for the doctrine in § n, the allusion to unlearned fishermen who have been teachers of the Faith s , and several other passages, are either anticipations or reminiscences of that work. But the interest of the letter lies in its bold proposal to go behind all the modern creeds, of the confusion of which a vivid picture is drawn, and revert to the baptismal formula. Here is a lead- ing combatant on the Catholic side actually proposing to withdraw the Nicene confes- 8 Cf. Trin. ii. 13 ff. xxiv INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. sion : — ' Amid these shipwrecks of faith, when our inheritance of the heavenly patri- mony is almost squandered, our safety lies in clinging to that first and only Gospel Faith which we confessed and apprehended at our Baptism, and in making no change in that one form which, when we welcome it and listen to it, brings the right faith 9 I do not mean that we should condemn as a godless and blasphemous writing the work of the Synod of our fathers ; yet rash men make use of it as a means of gainsaying ' (§ 7). The Nicene Creed ', Hilary goes on to say, had been the starting-point of an end- less chain of innovations and amendments, and thus had done harm instead of good. We have seen that Hilary was not only acting with the Semiarians, but was nearer to them in many ways than he was to Athanasius. The future of his friends was now in doubt; not only was their doctrine in danger, but, after the example they had them- selves set, they must have been certain that defeat meant deposition. This was a concession which only a sense of extreme urgency could have induced Hilary to make. Yet even now he avoids the mistake of Liberius. He offers to sign no compromising creed ; he only proposes that all modern creeds be consigned to the same oblivion. It was, in effect, the offer of another compromise in lieu of the Homoean ; though Hilary makes it perfectly clear what is, in his eyes, the only sense in which this simple and primitive confession can honestly be made, yet assuredly those whose doctrine most widely diverged would have felt able to make it. That the proposal was sincerely meant, and that his words, uncom- promising as they are in assertion of the truth, were not intended for a simple defiance of the enemy, is shewn by the list of heretics whom he advances, in § 9, in proof of his contention that all error claims to be based on Scripture. Three of them, Montanus, Manichseus and Marcion, were heretics in the eyes of an Arian as much as of a Catholic ; the other three, Marcellus, Photinus and Sabellius, were those with whom the Arians were constantly taunting their adversaries. Hilary avoids, deliberately as we may be sure, the use of any name which could wound his opponents. But bold and eloquent and true as the appeal of Hilary was, it was still less likely that his petition for a hearing in Council should be granted than that he should be allowed to disprove the accusations which had led to his exile. The Homoean leaders had the victory in their hands, and they knew it, if Hilary and his friends were still in the dark. They did not want conciliation, but revenge, and this appeal was foredoomed to failure. The end of the crisis soon came. The Semiarian leaders were deposed, not on the charge of heresy, for that would have been inconsistent with the Homoean position and also with their acquiescence in the Homoean formula, but on some of those complaints concerning conduct which were always forthcoming when they were needed. Among the victims was not only Basil of Ancyra, Hilary's friend, but also Macedonius of Constantinople, who was in after days to be the chief of the party which denied the true Godhead of the Holy Ghost. He and his friends were probably unconscious at this time of the gulf which divided them from such men as Hilary, who for their part were content, in the interests of unity, with language which understated their belief, or else had not yet a clear sense of their faith upon this point. In any case it was well that the final victory of the true Faith was not won at this time, and with the aid of such allies ; we may even regard it as a sign of some short-sightedness on Hilary's part that he had thrown himself so heartily into their cause. But he, at any rate, was not to suffer. The two Eastern parties, Homoean and Semiarian, which alternately ejected one another from their sees, were very evenly balanced, ami though Gonstantius was now on the side of the former, his friendship was not to be B Reading habtt for habto, but the text is obscure. [ on to say, used the pretext of novelty to destroy the Gospel. . " It is true that the Nicene Counul is not named here, but The Council of Nicxa was thirty-five years before, and i= very 7 \g the allusion is obvious. The Conservatives had actually objected accurately described as a ' Synod of ou r fathers.' THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xxv trusted. The solid orthodoxy of the West was an influence which, as Hilary had hinted, could not be ignored ; and even in the East the Nicenes were a power worth conciliating. Hence the Homoeans gave a shave of the Semiarian spoils to them 2 ; and it was part of the same policy, and not, as has been quaintly suggested, because they were afraid of his arguments, that they permitted Hilary to return to Gaul. Reasons of slate as well as of ecclesiastical interest favoured his restoration. In the late revolution, though the Faith had suffered, individual Catholics had gained. But the party to which Hilary had attached himself, and from which he had hoped so much was crushed : and his personal advantage did not compensate, in his eyes, for the injury to truth. He has left us a memorial of his feelings in the pivecliveagainii 'JZgns ta alius , one of the bitterest documents of a controversy in which all who engaged were too earnest to spare their opponents. It is an admirable piece of rhetoric suffused with passion, not the less spontaneous because its form, according to the canons of taste of that time, is perfect. For we must remember that the education of the day was literary, its aim being to provide the recipient with a prompt and felicitous expression of his thoughts, whatever they might be. The Invective was certainly written in the first place as a relief to Hilary's own feelings; he could not anticipate that Constantius had changed his views for the last time; that he would soon cease to be the master of Gaul, and would be dead within some eighteen months. But the existence of other attacks upon Constantius, composed about this time, makes it probable that there was some secret circulation of such documents ; and we can as little accuse the writers of cowardice, when we consider the Emperor's far-reaching power, as we can attribute to them injustice towards him. The book begins with an animated summons to resistance : — ' The time for speech is come, the time of silence past. Let us look for Christ's coming, for Antichrist is already in power. Let the shepherds cry aloud, for the hirelings are fled. Let us lay down our lives for the sheep, for the thieves have entered in and the ravening lion prowls around. With such words on our lips let us go forth to martyrdom, for the angel of Satan has transfigured himself into an angel of light.' After more Scriptural language of the same kind, Hilary goes on to say (§ 2) that, though he had been fully conscious of the extent of the danger to the Faith, he had been strictly moderate in his conduct. After the exiling of orthodox bishops at Aries and Milan, he and the bishops of Gaul had contented themselves with abstaining from communion with Saturninus, Ursacius and Valens. Other heretical bishops had been allowed a time for repentance. And even after he had been forced to attend the Synod of Be'ziers, refused a hearing for the charges of heresy which he wished to bring, and finally exiled, he had never, in word or writing, uttered any denunciation against his opponents, the Synagogue of Satan, who falsely claimed to be the Church of Christ. He had not faltered in his own belief, but had welcomed every suggestion that held out a hope of unity; and in that hope he had even refrained from blaming those who associated or worshipped with the excommunicate. Setting all personal considerations on one side, he had laboured for a restoration of the Church through a general repentance. This reserve and consistency (§ 3) is evidence that what he is about to say is not due to personal irritation. He speaks in the name of Christ, and his prolonged silence makes it his duly to speak plainly. It had been happy for him had he lived in the days of Nero or Decius (§ 4). The Holy Spirit would have fired him to endure as did the martyrs of Scripture ; torments and death would have been welcome. It would have been a fair fight with an open enemy. But now (§ 5) Constantius was Antichrist, and waged his warfare by deceit and flattery. It was scourging then, pampering now; no longer freedom in prison, but slavery at court, and gold as deadly as the sword had - Cf. Gw.-.tkin. Studies of Arianism, p. 182. XXVI INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. >ll been ; martyrs no longer burnt at the slake, but a secret lighting of the fires of hell. All that seems good in Constantius, his confession of Christ, his efforts for unity, his severity to heretics, his reverence for bishops, his building of churches, is perverted to evil ends. He professes loyalty to Christ, but his constant aim is to prevent Christ from being honoured equally with the Father. Hence (§ 6) it is a clear duty to speak out, as the Baptist to Herod and the Maccabees to Antiochus. Constantius is addressed (§ 7) in the words in which Hilary would have addressed Nero or Decius or Maximian, had he been arraigned before them, as the enemy of God and His Church, a persecutor and a tyrant. But he has a peculiar infamy, worse than theirs, for it is as a pretended Christian that he opposes Christ, imprisons bishops, overawes the Church by military force, threatens and starves one council (at Rimini) into submission, and frustrates the purpose of another (Seleucia) by sowing dissension. To the pagan Emperors the Church owed a great debt (§ 8); the Martyrs with whom they had enriched her were still working daily wonders, healing the sick, casting out evil spirits, suspending the law of gravitation 3. But Constantius' guilt has no mitigation. A nominal Christian, he has brought unmixed evil upon the Church. The victims of his perversion cannot even plead bodily suffering as an excuse for their lapse. The devil is his father, from whom he has learnt his skill in misleading. He says to Christ, Lord, Lord, but shall not enter the kingdom of heaven (§ 9), for he denies the Son, and therefore the fatherhood of God. The old persecutors were enemies of Christ only; Constantius insults the Father also, by making Him lie. He is a wolf in sheep's clothing (§ 10). He loads the Church with the gold of the state and the spoil of pagan temples ; it is the kiss with which Judas betrayed his Master. The clergy receive immunities and remissions of taxation : it is to tempt them to deny Christ. He will only relate such acts of Constantius' tyranny as affect the Church (§ n). He will not press, for he does not know the offence alleged, his conduct in branding bishops on the forehead, as convicts, and setting them to labour in the mines. But he recounts his long course of oppression and faction at Alexandria ; a warfare longer than that which he had waged against Persia *. Elsewhere, in the East, he had spread terror and strife, always to prevent Christ being preached. Then he had turned to the West. The excellent Paulinus had been driven from Treves, and cruelly treated, banished from all Christian society s, and forced to consort with Montanist heretics. Again, at Milan, the soldiers had brutally forced their way through the orthodox crowds and torn bishops from the altar ; a crime like that of the Jews who slew Zacharias in the Temple. He had robbed Rome also of her bishop, whose restoration was as disgraceful to the Emperor as his banishment. At Toulouse the clergy had been shamefully maltreated, and gross irreverence committed in the Church. These are the deeds of Antichrist. Hitherto, Hilary has spoken of matters of public notoriety, though not of his own observation. Now (§ 12) he comes to the Synod of Seleucia, at which he had been present. He found there as many blasphemers as Constantius chose. Only the Egyptians, with the exception of George, the intruder into the See of Athanasius, were avowedly Homoousian. 3 ' Bodies lifted up without support, women hanging by the feet without their garments falling about their face.' The other references which the Benedictine editor gives for this curious statement are evidently borrowed from this of Hilary. From the time of the first Apologists exorcism is, of course, constantly ap- pealed to as an evidence of the truth of Christianity, but usually in somewhat perfunctory language, and without the assertion that the writer has himself seen what he records. Hilary himself docs not profess to be an eye-witness. 4 This is a telling point. Constantius had been notoriously unsuccessful in his Persian Wars. 5 The text is corrupt, but it is not probable that Hilary means that Paulinus was first relegated to Plnygia and then to some pagan frontier district, if such there was. It is quite in Hilary's present vein to assume that because the Montanists were usually called after the province of their origin, in which they were still numerous, therefore all Phrygians were heretics and outside the pale of Christendom. If hordco be read for horrco the passage is improved. Paulinus had cither to be satisfied with rations of barley bread, the food of slaves, or else to beg from the heretics. Such treatment is very improbable, when we remember Hilary's own comfort in exile. But passions were excited, and men be- lieved the worst of their opponents. We may compare the false- hood-, in Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, and in Neil's Puri- tans, which were eagerly believed in and after our own Civil War. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xxvii Yet of the one hundred and five bishops who professed the Homocousian Creed, he found 'some piety in the words of some.' But the Anonioeans were rank blasphemers \ he gives, in § 13, words from a sermon by their leader, Eudoxius of Antioch, which were quoted by the opposition, and received with the abhorrence they deserved. This party found (§ 14) that no toleration was to be expected for such doctrines, and so forged the Homocan creed, which condemned equally the homooucion, the homoiousion and the anomoion. Their insincerity in thus rejecting their own belief was manifest to the Council, and one of them, who canvassed Hilary's support, avowed blank Arianism in the conversation. The large Homoeousian majority (§ 15) deposed the authors of the Homoean confession, who flew for aid to Constantius, who received them with honour and allowed them to air their heresy. The tables were turned ; the minority, aided by the Emperor's threats of exile, drove the majority, in the persons of their ten delegates, to conform to the new creed. The people were coerced by the prefect, the bishops threatened within the palace walls; the chief cities of the East were provided with heretical bishops. It was nothing less than making a present to the devil of the whole world for which Christ died. Constantius professed (§ 16) that his aim was to abolish unscriptural words. Cut what right had he to give orders to bishops or dictate the language of their sermons? A new disease needed new remedies ; warfare was inevitable when fresh enemies arose. And, after all, the Homoean formula, 'like the Father,' was itself unscriptural. Scripture is adduced (§ 17) by Hilary to prove that the Son is not merely like, but equal to, the Father; and (§ iS) one in nature with Him, having (§ 19) the form and the glory of God. This 'likeness' is a trap (§ 20) ; chaff strewn on water, straw covering a pit, a hook hidden in the bait. The Catholic sense is the only true sense in which the word can be used, as is shewn more fully, ^y arguments to be found in the De Trinitate , in £JT~2i, 22. And - now he asks Constluitius (§23) the "plain question^ what his creed is. He has made a hasty progress, by a steep descent, to the nethermost pit of blasphemy. He began with the Faith, which deserved the name, of Nicasa ; he changed it at Antioch. But he was a clumsy builder ; the structure he raised was always falling, and had to be constantly renewed ; creed after creed had been framed, the safeguards and anathemas of which would have been needless had he remained steadfast to the Nicene. Hilary does not lament the creeds which Constantius had abandoned (§ 24) ; they might be harmless in themselves, but they represented no real belief. Yet why should he reject his own creeds ? There was no such reason for his discontent with them as there had been, in his heresy, for his rejection of the Nicene. This ceaseless variety arose from want of faith ; ' one Faith, one Baptism,' is the mark of truth. The result had been to stultify the bishops. They had been driven to condemn in succession the accurate homoousion and the harmless homoiousion, and even the word ousia, or substance. These were the pranks of a mere buffoon, amusing himself at the expense of the Church, and compelling the bishops, like dogs returning to their vomit, to accept what they had rejected. So many had been the contradictory creeds that every one was now, or had been in the past, a heretic confessed. And this result had only been attained (§ 26) by violence, as for instance in the cases of the Eastern and African bishops. The latter had committed to writing their sentence upon Ursacius and Valens ; the Emperor had seized the document. It might go to the flames, as would Constantius himself, but the sentence was registered with God. Other men (§ 27) had waged war with the living, but Constantius extended his hostility to the dead ; he con- tradicted the teaching of the saints, and his bishops rejected their predecessors, to whom they owed their orders, by denying their doctrine. The thre e hundred and eighteen a t Nicsea were anathema to him, and his own father who had presided there. Yet though he might scorn the past, he could not control the future. The truth defi ned at Nic aga. had been solemnly committed to writing and remained, however Constantius might contemn XXVIll INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. \ it. 'Give car,' Hilary concludes, ' to jJie_holy nieaniiTg o f the words, to the unalterab le fVtojI-pinniinn r,[ the C hurch, to the faith which tliyjather avowed, to~the sure hope in which man must put his trust, the universal conviction of the doom of heresy ; and learn therefrom that thou art the foe of God's religion, the enemy of the tombs of the saints 6 , the rebellious inheritor of thy father's piety.' Here, again, there is much of interest. Hilary's painful feeling of isolation is manifest. He had withdrawn from communion with Saturninus and the few Allans of Gaul, but has to confess that his own friends were not equally uncompromising. The Gallic bishops, with their enormous dioceses, had probably few occasions for meeting, and prudent men could easily avoid a conflict which the Arians, a feeble minority, would certainly not provoke. The bishops had been courteous, or more than courteous; and Hilary dared not protest. His whole importance as a negotiator in the East depended on the belief that he was the representative of a harmonious body of opinion. To advertise this departure from his policy of warfare would have been fatal to his influence. And if weakness, as he must have judged it, was leading his brethren at home into a recognition of Arians, Constantius and his Homoean counsellors had ingeniously contrived a still more serious break in the orthodox line of battle. There was reason in his bitter complaint of the Emperor's generosity. He was lavish with his money, and it was well worth a bishop's while to be his friend. And of this expenditure Nicenes were enjoying their share, and that without having to surrender their personal belief, for all that was required was that they should not be inquisitive as to their neighbours' heresies. But Niccne bishops, of an accommodating character, were not only holding their own ; they were enjoying a share of the spoils of the routed Semiarians. It was almost a stroke of genius thus to shatter Hilary's alliance ; for it was certainly not by chance that among the sees to which Nicenes, in full and formal communion with him, were preferred, was Ancyra itself, from which hi s chosen friend Basil had bee n_ejected. Disgusted though Hilary must have been with such subservience, and saddened by the downfall of his friends, it is clear that the Emperor's policy had some success, even with him. His former hopes being dashed to the ground, h e now turns^ dilxjin_iii terest he had neve r befor e shewn, to the Nicene Crord as a bulwark of the Faith. And we can see the same feeling at work in his very cold recognition that there was 'some piety in the words of some' among his friends at Seleucia. It would be unjust to think of Hilary as a timeserver, but we must admit that there is something almost too businesslike in this dismission from his mind of former hopes and friendships. He looked always to a practical result in the establishment of truth, and a judgment so sound as his could not fail to see that the Asiatic negotiations were a closed chapter in his life. And his mind must have been full of the thought that he was returning to the West, which had its own interests and its own prejudices, and was impartially suspicious of all Eastern theologians; whose 'selfish coldness?' towards the East was, indeed, ten years later still a barrier against unity. If Hilary was to be, as he purposed, a power in the West, he must promptly resume the Western tone; and he will have succumbed to very natural infirmity if, in his disappointment, he was disposed to couple together his allies who had failed with the Emperor who had caused their failure. The historical statements of the Invective, as has been said, cannot always be verified. The account of the Synod of Seleucia is, however, unjust to Constantius. It was the free c Hilary had previously (§ 27) asserted that ' the .Apostle lias taught us to communicate with the tombs of the saints.' This is an allusion to Rom. xii. 1/5, with the strange reading ' tombs' for 'necessities' (pi/etai; for \pcun9), which lias, in fact, con- siderable authority in the MSS. of the New Testament and in llie Latin Christian writers. How far this reading may have been the cause, how far the effect, of the custom of celebrating the Eucharist at the tomhs of Martyrs, it is impossible to say. The custom was by this time more than a century old, and one of its purposes was to maintain the sense of unity with the saints of the past. Constantius, by denying their doctrine, had made himself their enemy. 7 Gwatkin, Studies 0/ A nanism, p. 244. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xxix expression of the belief of Asia, and if heretics were present by command of the Emperor, an overwhelming majority, more or less orthodox, were present by the same command. But the character and policy of Constantius are delineated fairly enough. The results, disastrous both to conscience and to peace, are not too darkly drawn, and no sarcasm could be too severe for the absurd as well as degrading position to which he had reduced the Church. But the Invective is interesting not only for its contents but as an illustration of its writer's character. Strong language meant less in Latin than in English, but the passionate earnestness of these pages cannot be doubted. They are not more violent than the attacks of Athanasius upon Constantius, nor less violent than those of Lucifer ; if the last author is usually regarded as pre-eminent in abuse, he deserves his reputation not because of the vigour of his denunciation, but because his pages contain nothing but railing. The change is sudden, no doubt, from respect for Constantius and hopefulness as to his conduct, but the provocation, we must remember, had been extreme. If the faith of the Fathers was intense and, in the best sense, childlike, there is something childlike also in their gusts of passion, their uncontrolled emotion in victory or defeat, the personal element which is constantly present in their controversies. Though, henceforth, ecclesiastical policy was to be but a secondary interest with Hilary, and diplomacy was to give place to a more successful attempt to influence thought, yet we can see in another sphere the same spirit of conflict ; for it is evident that his labours against heresy, beside the more serious satisfaction of knowing that he was on the side of truth, are lightened by the logician's pleasure in exposing fallacy. The deposition of the Semiarian leaders took place v ery early in the year 360, and Hilary^dismissal homewards, one of the same series of measures, must soon have followed. If he had formed the~pTah of his Invective before he left Constantinople, it is not probable that he wrote it there. It was more probably the employment of his long homeward journey. His natural route would be by the great Egnatian Way, which led through Thessalonica to Durazzo, thence by sea to Brindisi, and so to Rome and the North. It is true that the historians, or rather Rufinus, from whom the rest appear to have borrowed all their knowledge, say that Illyricum was one sphere of hi s labours fo r the restoration of th e Fa ith. But a journey by land through IlIyricumTThe country of Valens and Ursacius and thoroughly indoctrinated with Arianism, would not only have been dangerous but useless. For Hilary's purpose was_t o confirm the faithful amo ng the bishops and to win back to orthodoxy th ose wlioJiad been termriseioi: deceived into error, and thus to_cement a new confederacy against the Homoeans ; not to make a vain assault upon what was, for the present, an impregnable position. And though the Western portion of the Via Egnatia did not pass through the existing political division called Illyricum, it did lie within the region called in history and literature by that name. Again, the evidence that Hilary passed through Rome is not convincing; but since it was his best road, and he would find there the most important person among those who had wavered in their allegiance to truth, we may safely accept it. He made it his business, we arelo]d 8 t to exhort the-Churches through which he passed to abjure heresy and return to the true faith. But we know nothing of the places through which he passed before reaching Rome, the see of Liberius, with whom it was most desirable for him to be on friendly terms. Liberius was not so black as he has sometimes been painted, but he was not a heroic figure. His position was exactly that of many other bishops in the Western lands. They had not denied their own faith, but at one time or another, in most cases at Rimini, they had admitted that there was room in the same communion for Arian bishops and for themselves. In the case of Liberius the circumstances are involved in some obscurity, but it is clear that he had, in order to obtain remission of his exile, taken a position Rufinus, /fist. Ec:l. i. 30, 31, and, dependent on him, Socrates iii. io, and Sozomen v. 13. xxx INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. which was practically that of the old Council of the Dedication 9. Hilary, we remember, had called that Council a 'Syijod of the, Joints,' when speaking of it from the Eastern point of view. But he had never stooped to such a minimising of the Faith as its words, construed at the best, involved. Easterns, in their peculiar difficulties, he was hopeful enough to believe, had framed its terms in a legitimate sense ; he could accept it from them, but could not use it as the expression of his own belief. So to do would have been a retrograde step ; and this step Liberius had taken, to the scandal of the Church. Yet he, and all whose position in any way resembled his — all, indeed, except some few incorrigible ringleaders — were in the Church ; their deflection was, in Hilary's words, an ' inward evil.' And Hilary was no Lucifer ; his desire was to unite all who could be united in defence of the truth. This was the plan dictated by policy as well as by charity, and in the case of Liberius, if, as is probable, they met, it was certainly rewarded with success. Indeed, according to Rufinus, Hilary was successful at every stage of his journey. Somewhere on his course he fell in witli Eusebius of Vercelli, who had been exiled at the Council of Milan, had passed his time in the region to the East of that in which Hilary had been interned, and was now profiting by the same Homocan amnesty to return to his diocese. He also had been using the opportunities of travel for the promotion of the Faith. lie had come from Antioch, and therefore had probably landed at or near Naples. He was now travelling northwards, exhorting as he went. His encounter with Hilary stimulated him to still greater efforts; but Rufinus tells us 1 that he was the less successful of the two, for Hilary, 'a man by nature mild and winning, and also learned and singularly apt at persuasion, applied himself to the task with a greater diligence and skill.' They do not appear to have travelled in company ; the cities to be visited were too numerous and their own time, eager as they must have been to reach their homes, too short. But their journey seems to have been a triumphal progress ; the bishops were induced to renounce their compromise with error, and the people inflamed against heresy, so that, in the words of Rufinus 2 , 'these two men, glorious luminaries as it were of the universe, flooded Illyricum and Italy and the Gallic provinces with their splendour, so that even from hidden nooks and corners all darkness of heresy was banished.' In the passage just quoted — Rufiivus directly_connects the p ublica tion, of Hilary's m asterpiece , usually called tho^ De Tr initate, with this work of reconciliation. After speaking of his success in~ir7~n~e proceeds, 'Moreover he published his' books Concerning the Faith, composed in a lofty style, wherein he displayed the guile of the heretics and the deceptions practised upon our friends, together with the credulous and misplaced sincerity of the latter, with such skill that his ample instructions amended the errors not only of those whom he encountered, but also of those whom distance hindered him from meeting face to face.' Some of the twelve books of which the work is composed had certainly been published during his exile, and it is possible that certain portions may date from his later residence in Gaul. But a study of the work itself leads to the conclusion that Rufinus was right in the main in placing it at this stage of Hilary's life; this was certainly the earliest date at which it can have been widely influehTTal. The title which Hilary gave to his work as a whole was certainly Dc Fide, Concerning the Faith, the name by which, as we saw, Rufinus describes it. It is probable that its con- troversial purpose was indicated by the addition of contra Arianos; but it is certain that its present title, De Trinitate, was not given to it by Hilary. The word Trinitas is of extra- ordinarily rare occurrence in his writings; the only instances seem to be in Trin. i. 22, 36, where he is giving a very condensed summary of the contents of his work. In the actual course of his argument the word is scrupulously avoided, as it is in all his other writings. In 9 Cf. Dr. Bright, Waymarks, p. 217 «. ■ Hist. EccJ. i. 30, 31. 2 Op. cit. i. 31. The recantation of Liberius and of llic Italian bishops may be read in Hilary's i?tli Fr.ipment. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xxxi this respect he resembles Athanasius, who will usually name the Three Persons rather than employ this convenient and even then familiar term. There may have been some undesirable connotation in it which he desired to avoid, though this is hardly probable; it is more likely that both Athanasius and Hilary, conscious that the use of technical terms of theology was in their times a playing with edged tools, deliberately avoided a word which was unnecessary, though it might be useful. And in Hilary's case there is the additional reason that to his mind the antithesis of truth and falsehood was One God or Two Gods*; that to him, more than to any other Western theologian, the developed and c dearly expressed thought of Three coequal Persons was strange. Since, then, the word and the thought were rarely present in his mind, we cannot accept as the title of his work what is, after all, only a mediaeval description. The composite character of the treatise, which must still for convenience be called the De Trinitate, is manifest. The beginnings of several of its books, which contain far more preliminary, and often rhetorical, matter than is necessary to link them on to their pre- decessors, point to a separate publication of each; a course which was, indeed, necessary under the literary conditions of the time. This piecemeal publication is further proved by the elaborate summaries of the contents of previous books which are given as, e.g., at the beginning of Trin. x. ; and by the frequent repetition of earlier arguments at a later stage, which shews that the writer could not trust to the reader's possession of the whole. Though no such attention has been devoted to the growth of this work as Noeldechen has paid to that of the treatises of Tertullian, yet some account of the process can be given. For although Hilary himself, in arranging the complete treatise, has done much to make it run smoothly and consecutively, and though the scribes who have copied it have probably made it appear still more homogeneous, yet some clues to its construction are left. The first is his de- scription of the fifth book as the second (v. 3). This implies that the fourth is the first; and when we examine the fourth we find that, if we leave out of consideration a little preliminary matter, it is the beginning of a refutation of Arianism. It states the Arian case, explains the necessity of the term homoousios, gives a list of the texts on which the Arians relied, and sets out at length one of their statements of doctrine, the Epistle of Alius to Alexander, which it proceeds to demolish, in the remainder of the fourth book and in the fifth, by arguments from particular passages and from the general sense of the Old Testament. In the sixth book, for the reason already given, the Arian Creed is repeated, after a vivid account of the evils of the time, and the refutation continued by arguments from the New Testament. In § 2 of this book there is further evidence of the composite character of the treatise. Hilary says that though in the first book he has already set out the Arian manifesto, yet he thinks good, as he is still dealing with it, to repeat it in this sixth. Hilary seems to have overlooked the discrepancy, which some officious scribe has half corrected 5 . The seventh book, he says at the beginning, is the climax of the whole work. If wc take the De Trinitate as a whole, this is a meaningless flourish ; but if we look on to the eighth book, and find an elaborate introduction followed by a line of argument different from that of the four preceding books, we must be inclined to think that the seventh is the climax and termination of what has been an independent work, consisting of four books. And if we turn to the end of the seventh, and note that it alone of all the twelve has nothing that can be called a peroration, but ends in an absolutely bald and businesslike manner, wc arc almost forced to conclude that this is because the peroration which it once had, as the climax of the work, was unsuitable for its new position and has been wholly removed. Had Hilary written this book as one of the series of twelve, he would certainly, according to all rules of literary li.g. '"«• 1. 17. . which we call first, though, as we saw, in v. 3 he speaks of our S Similarly in iv. 2 he alludes to the first book, meaning that I fifth as his second. xxxii INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. propriety, have given it a formal termination. In these four books then, the fourth to the seventh, we may see the nucleus of the De Triniiatc ; not necessarily the part first written, for he says (iv. x) 6 that some parts, at any rate, of the three first books are of earlier date, but that around which the whole has been arranged. It has a complete unity of its own, following step by step the Arian Creed, of which we shall presently speak. It is purely controversial, and quite possibly the title Contra Arianos, for which there is some evidence, really belongs to this smaller work, though it clung, not unnaturally, to the whole for which Hilary devised the more appropriate name De Fide. Concerning the date of these four books, we can only say that they must have been composed during his exile. For though he does not mention his exile, yet he is already a bishop (vi. 2), and knows about the homoousion (iv. 4). We have seen already that his acquaintance with the Nicene Creed began only just before his exile ; he must, therefore, have written them during his enforced leisure in Asia. In the beginning of the fourth book Hilary refers back to the proof furnished in the previous books, written some time ago, of the Scriptural character of his faith and of the unscriptural nature of all the heresies. Setting aside the first book, which docs not correspond to this description, we find what he describes in the second and third. These form a short connected treatise, complete in itself. It is much more academic than that of which we have already spoken ; it deals briefly with all the current heresies (ii. 4 ft"), but shews no sign that one of them, more than the others, was an urgent danger. There is none of the passion of conflict; Hilary is in the mood for rhetoric, and makes the most of his opportunities. He expatiates, for instance, on the greatness of his theme (ii. 5), harps almost to excess upon the Fisherman to whom mysteries so great were revealed (ii. 13 ft".), dilates, after the manner of a sermon, upon the condescension and the glory manifested in the Incarnation, describes miracles with much liveliness of detail (iii. 5, 20), and ends the treatise (iii. 24 — 26) with a nobly eloquent statement of the paradox of wisdom which is folly and folly which is wisdom, and of faith as the only means of knowing God. The little work, though it deals professedly with certain heresies, is in the main constructive. It contains far more of positive assertion of the truth, without reference to opponents, than it does of criticism of their views. In sustained calmness of tone — it recognises the existence of honest doubt (iii. 1), — and in literary workmanship, it excels any other part of the De Trinitate, and in the latter respect is certainly superior to the more conversational Homilies on the Psalms. But it suffers, in comparison with the books which follow, by a certain want of intensity ; the reader feels that it was written, in one sense, for the sake of writing it, and written, in another sense, for purposes of general utility. It is not, as later portions of the work were, forged as a weapon for use in a conflict of life and death. Yet, standing as it does, at the beginning of the whole great treatise, it serves admirably as an introduction. It is clear, convincing and interesting, and its eloquent peroration carries the reader on to the central portion of the work, which begins with the fourth book. Except that the second book has lost its exordium, for the same reason that the seventh has lost its conclusion, the two books are complete as well as homogeneous. Of the date nothing definite can be said. There is no sign of any special interest in Arianism ; and Hilary's leisure for a paper conflict with a dead foe like Ebionism suggests that he was writing before the strife had reached Gaul. The general tone of the two books is quite consistent with this ; and we may regard it as more probable than not that they were composed before the exile; whether they were published at the time as a separate treatise, or laid on one side for a while, cannot be known ; the former supposition is the more reasonable. The remaining books, from the eighth to the twelfth, appear to have been written 6 i.e. in the passage introduced as a connecting link with the books which now precede it, when the whole work was put into its present shap :, THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF FOITIERS. xxxiii continuously, with a view to their forming part of the present connected whole. They were, no doubt, published separately, and they, with books iv. to vii., may well be the letters (stripped, of course, in their permanent shape of their epistolary accessories) which, Hilary feared, were obtaining no recognition from his friends in Gaul. The last five have certain references back to arguments in previous books ?, while these do not refer forward, nor do the groups ii. iii. and iv. — vii. refer to one another. But books viii. — xii. have also internal references, and promise that a subject shall be fully treated in due course 8 . We may therefore assume that, when he began to write book viii., Hilary had already determined to make use of his previous minor works, and that he now proceeded to complete his task with constant reference to these. Evidences of exact date are here again lacking; he writes as a bishop and as an exile 9, and under a most pressing necessity. The preface to book viii., with its description of the dangers of the time and of Hilary's sense of the duty of a bishop, seems to represent the state of mind in which he resolved to construct the present De Trinitate. It is too emphatic for a mere transition from one step in a continuous discussion to another. Regarding these last five books, then, as written continuously, with one purpose and with one theological outlook, we may fix an approximate date for them by two consider- ations. They shew, in books ix. and x., that he was thoroughly conscious of the increasing peril of Apollinarianism. They shew also, by their silence, that he had determined to ignore what was one of the most obvious and certainly the most offensive of the current modes of thought. There is no refutation, except implicitly, and no mention of Anomoeanism, that extreme Arianism which pronounced the Son unlike the Father '. This can be explained only in one way. We have seen that Hilary thinks Arianism worth attack because it is an ' inward evil;' that he does not, except in early and leisurely work such as book ii., pay any attention to heresies which were obviously outside the Church and had an organization of their own. We have seen also that the Homoeans cast out their more honest Anomoean brethren in 359. The latter made no attempt to retrieve their position within the Church ; they proceeded to establish a Church of their own, which was, so they protested, the true one. It was under Jovian (a.d. 362 — 363) that they consecrated their own bishop for Constantinople 2 ; but the separation must have been visible for some time before that decisive step was taken. Thus, when the De Trinitate took its present form, Apollinarianism was risen above the Church's horizon and Anomoeanism was sunk below it. We cannot, therefore, put the completion of the work earlier than the remission of Hilary's exile ; we cannot, indeed, suppose that he had leisure to make it perfect except in his home. Yet the work must have been for the most part finished before its writer reached Italy on his return ; and the issue or reissue of its several portions was a natural, and certainly a powerful, measure towards the end which he had at heart. There remains the first book, which was obviously, as Erasmus saw, the last to be composed. It is a survey of the accomplished task, beginning with that account of Hilary's spiritual birth and growth which has already been mentioned. This is a piece of writing which it is no undue praise to rank, for dignity and felicity of language, among the noblest examples of Roman eloquence. Hooker, among English authors, is the one whom it most suggests. Then there follows a brief summary of the argument of the successive books, and a prayer for the success of the work. This reads, and perhaps it was meant to read, as though it were a prayer that he might worthily execute a plan which as yet existed only in his brain ; but it may also be interpreted, in the more natural sense, as a petition that his hope might not be frustrated, and that his book might appear to others what he trusted, 1 E.g. ix. 31 to iii. 12, ix. 43 to vii. 17. 8 E.g. x. 54 in. 9 viii. 1, x. 4. VOL. IX, 1 This heresy is not even mentioned in xii. 6, where the open- ing was obvious. 2 Dr. Gwmkin, Studies 0/ Arianism. p. 726. XXXIV INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. in his own mind, that it was, true to Scripture, sound in logic, and written with that lofty gravity which befitted the greatness of his theme. After speaking of the construction of the work, as Hilary framed it, something must be said of certain interpolations which it has suffered. The most important are those at the end of book ix. and in x. 8, which flatly contradict his teachings. They are obvious intrusions, imperfectly attested by manuscript authority, and condemned by their own character. Hilary was not the writer to stultify himself and confuse his readers by so clumsy a device as that of appending a bald denial of its truth to a long and careful exposition of his characteristic doctrine. Another passage, where the scholarship seems to indicate the work of an inferior hand, is Tiin. x. 40, in which there is a singular misunderstanding of the Greek Testament 4 . The writer must have known Greek, for no manuscript of the Latin Bible would have suggested his mistake, and therefore he must have written in early days. It is even possible that Hilary himself was, for once, at fault in his scholarship. Yet, at the most, the interpolations are few and, where they seriously affect the sense, are easily detected 3. Not many authors of antiquity have escaped so lightly in this respect as Hilary. Hilary certainly intended his work to be regarded as a whole ; as a treatise Concerning the Faith, for it had grown into something more than a refutation of Arianism. He has carefully avoided, so far as the circumstances of the time and the composite character of the treatise would allow him, any allusion to names and events of temporary interest ; there is, in fact, nothing more definite than a repetition of the wish expressed in the Second Epistle to Constantius, that it were possible to recur to the Baptismal formula as the authoritative statement of the Faith 6 . It is not, like the De Synodis, written with a diplo- matic purpose; it is, though cast inevitably in a controversial form, a statement of permanent truths. This has involved the sacrifice of much that would have been of immediate service, and deprived the book of a great part of its value as a weapon in the conflicts of the day. But we can see, by the selection he made of a document to controvert, that Hilary's choice was deliberate. It was no recent creed, no confession to which any existing body of partisans was pledged. He chose for refutation the Epistle of Alius to Alexander, written almost forty years ago and destitute, it must have seemed, of any but an historical interest. And it was no extreme statement of the Arian position. This Epistle was ' far more temperate and cautious i ' than its alternative, Arius' letter to Eusebius. The same wide outlook as is manifest in this indifference to the interests of the moment is seen also in Hilary's silence in regard to the names of friends and foes. Marcellus, Apollinaris, Eudoxius, Acacius are a few of those whom it must have seemed that he would do well to renounce as imagined friends who brought his cause discredit, or bitter enemies to truth and its advocates. But here also he refrains; no names are mentioned except those of men whose heresies were already the commonplaces of controversy. And there is also an absolute silence concerning the feuds and alliances of the day. No notice is taken of the loyalty of living confessors or the approximation to truth of well-meaning waverers. The book contains no sign that it has any but a general object; it is, as far as possible, an impersonal refutation of error and statement of truth. This was the deliberate purpose of Hilary, and he had certainly counted its cost in immediate popularity and success. For though, as we have seen, the work did produce, as it deserved, a considerable effect at the time of its publication, it has remained ever since, in spite of all its merits, in a certain obscurity. There can be no doubt that this is largely due to the Mezentian union with such a document as Alius' Epistle 3 Cf. Gore's Dissertations, p. 134. 4 St. Luke xxii. 32, where cSc>/#»ji> is translated as a passive. Christ it entreated for Peter. There seems to be no parallel in I iiin theol ij?v. 5 E.g. the cento from the Dc Trinitatc attached to the In- vective against Constantius. ii. 1. 7 Newman, Avians of the Fourth Cen.'irv, i:. v. j. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xxxv to Alexander of the decisively important section of the De Trinitate. The books in which that Epistle is controverted were those of vital interest for the age ; and the method which Hilary's plan constrained him to adopt was such as to invite younger theologians to compete with him. Future generations could not be satisfied with his presentation of the case. And again, his plan of refuting the Arian document point by point 8 , contrasting as it does with the free course of his thought in the earlier and later books, tends to repel the reader. The fourth book proves from certain texts that the Son is God ; the fifth from the same texts that He is true God. Hence this part of the treatise is pervaded by a certain monotony ; a cumulative impression is produced by our being led forward again and again along successive lines of argument to the same point, beyond which we make no progress till the last proof is stated. The work is admirably and convincingly done, but we are glad to hear the last of the Epistle of Alius to Alexander, and accompany Hilary in a less embarrassed enquiry. Yet the whole work has defects of its own. It is burdened with much repetition ; subjects, especially, which have been treated in books ii. and iii. are discussed again at great length in later books 9. The frequent stress laid upon the infinity of God, the limitations of human speech and knowledge, the consequent incompleteness of the argument from analogy, the humility necessary when dealing with infinities apparently opposed ', though it adds to the solemnity of the writer's tone and was doubtless necessary when the work was published in parts, becomes somewhat tedious in the course of a continuous reading. And something must here be said of the peculiarities of style. We saw that in places, as for instance in the beginning of the De Trinitate, Hilary can rise to a singularly lofty eloquence. This eloquence is not merely the unstudied utterance of an earnest faith, but the expression given to it by one whom natural talent and careful training had made a master of literary form. Yet, since his training was that of an age whose standard of taste was far from classical purity, much that must have seemed to him and to his contemporaries to be admirably effective can excite no admiration now. He prays, at the end of the first book, that his diction may be worthy of his theme, and doubtless his effort was as sincere as his prayer. Had there been less effort, there would certainly, in the judgment of a modern reader, have been more success. But he could not foresee the future, and ingenious affectations such as occur at the end of book viii. § i, ivipietati insolenti, ct insolentia vaniloqitce, et vaniloquio seditcenti, with the jingle of rhymes which follows, are too frequent for our taste in his pages 2 . Sometimes we find purple patches which remind us of the rhetoric of Apuleius 3 ; sometimes an excessive display of symmetry and antithesis, which suggests to us St. Cyprian at his worst. Yet Cyprian had the excuse that all his writings are short occasional papers written for immediate effect ; neither he, nor any Latin Christian before Hilary, had ventured to construct a great treatise of theology, intended to influence future ages as well as the present. Another excessive development of rhetoric is the abuse of apostrophe, which Hilary sometimes rides almost to death, as in his addresses to the Fisherman, St. John, in the second book'*. These blemishes, however, do not seriously affect his intelligibility. He has earned, in this as in greater matters, an unhappy reputation for obscurity, which he has, to a certain extent, deserved. His other writings, even the Commentary on St. Matthew, are free from the involved language which sometimes makes the De Trinitate hard to understand, and often hard to read with pleasure. When Hilary was appealing to the Emperor, or addressing his own flock, as in the Homilies on the Psalms, he has command of a style which is always clear, stately on occasion, never weak or s v. 6. 9 E.g. bk. iii. is largely reproduced in ix. ; ii. 9 f. = xi. 46 f. 1 E.g. i. 19, ii. 2, iii. 1, iv. 2, viii. 53, xi. 46 f. = Cf. v. 1 (beginning of column 130 in Migne), x. 4. 3 E.g. v. 3/7,:. 4 Cf. Ad Const, ii. 8, in writing which his own words in the De Trinitate must have come into his mind. He had probably- borrowed the thought from Origen, contra Celsum, i. 62. Similar apostrophes are in v. 19, vi. 19 f, 33. (12 XX XVI INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. bald ; in these cases he resisted, or did not feel, the temptation to use the resources of his rhetoric. These, unfortunately, had for their result the production of sentences which are often marvels of grammatical contortion and elliptical ingenuity. Yet such sentences, though numerous, are of few and uniform types. In Hilary's case, as in that of Tertullian, familiarity makes the reader so accustomed to them that he instinctively expects their recurrence ; and, at their worst, they are never actual breaches of the laws of the language. A translator can hardly be an impartial judge in this matter, for constantly, in passages where the sense is perfectly clear, the ingenuity with which words and constructions are arranged makes it almost impossible to render their meaning in idiomatic terms. One can translate him out of Latin, but not into English. In this he resembles one of the many styles of St. Augustine. There are passages in the De Trinitate, for instance viii. 27, 28, which it would seem that Augustine had deliberately imitated ; a course natural enough in the case of one who was deeply indebted to his predecessor's thought, and must have looked with reverence upon the great pioneer of systematic theology in the Latin tongue. But this involution of style, irritating as it sometimes is, has the compensating advantage that it keeps the reader constantly on the alert. He cannot skim these pages in the comfortable delusion that he is following the course of thought without an effort. The same attention which Hilary demands from his readers has obviously been bestowed upon the work by himself. It is the selected and compressed result not only of his general study of theology, but of his familiarity with the literature and the many phases of the great Arian controversy 5 . And he makes it clear that he is engaged in no mere conflict of wit ; his passionate loyalty to the person of Christ is the obvious motive of his writing. He has taken his side with full conviction, and he is equally convinced that his opponents have irrevocably taken theirs. There is little or no reference to the existence or even the possibility of doubt, no charitable construction for ambiguous I creeds, hardly a word of pleading with those in error 6 . There is no excuse for heresy ; it is mere insanity, when it is not wilful self-destruction or deliberate blasphemy. The battle is one without quarter; and sometimes, we must suspect, Hilary has been misled !in argument by the uncompromising character of the conflict. Every reason advanced for a pernicious belief, he seems to think, must itself be bad, and be met with a direct negative. And again, in the heat of warfare he is led to press his arguments too far. Not only is the best and fullest use of Scripture made — for Hilary, like Athanasius, is marvellously imbued with its spirit as well as familiar with its letter — but texts are pressed into his service, and interpreted sometimes with brilliant ingenuity ?, which cannot bear the meaning assigned them. Yet much of this exegesis must be laid to the charge of his time, not of himself; and in the De Trinifate, as contrasted with the Homilies on the Psalms ; he is wisely sparing in the use of allegorical interpretations. He remembers that he is refuting enemies, not conversing with friends. And his belief in their conscious insincerity leads to a certain hardness of tone. They will escape his conclusions if they possibly can ; he must pin them down. Hence texts are sometimes treated, and deductions drawn from them, as though they were postulates of geometry ; and, however we may admire the machine-like precision and completeness of the proof, Ave feel that we are reading Euclid rather than literature 8 . But this also is due to that system of exegesis, fatal to any recognition of the eloquence and poetry of Scripture, of which something- will be said in the next chapter. These, after all, are but petty flaws in so great a work. Not only as a thinker, but as a pioneer of thought, whose treasures have enriched, often unrecognised, the pages 5 Cf. x. 57 in. c An instance is xi. 24 in. 7 E.g. in his masterly treatment, from his point of view, of the Old Testament Theophanies, iv. 15 f. 8 Cf. viii. 26 f. ix, 41. THE LIKE AND WRITINGS OE ST. HILARY OE POITIERS, xxxvii of Ambrose and Augustine and all later theologians, he deserves our reverence. Not without reason was he ranked, within a generation of his death, with Cyprian and Ambrose, as one of the three chief glories of Western Christendom 9. Jerome ami Augustine mention him frequently and with honour. This is not the place to summarise or discuss the contents of his works ; but the reader cannot fail to recognise their great and varied value, the completeness of his refutation of current heresies, the convincing character of his presentation of the truth, and the originality, restrained always by scrupulous reverence as well as by intellectual caution, of his additions to the speculative development of the Faith. We recognise also the tenacity with which, encumbered as he was with the double task of simultaneously refuting Arianism and working out his own thoughts, he has adhered to the main issues. He never wanders into details, but keeps steadfastly to his course. He refrains, for instance, from all consideration of the results which Arianism might produce upon the superstructure of the Faith and upon the conduct of Christians ; they are undermining the foundations, and he never forgets that it is these which he has undertaken to strengthen and defend. Our confidence in him as a guide is increased by the eminently businesslike use which he makes of his higher qualities. This is obvious in the smallest details, as, for instance, in his judicious abstinence, which will be considered in the next chapter, from the use of technical terms of theology, when their employment would have made his task easier, and might even, to superficial minds, have enhanced his reputation. We see it also in the talent which he shews in the choice of watchwords, which serve both to enliven his pages and to guide the reader through their argument. Such is the frequent antithesis of the orthodox unitas with the heretical unio, the latter a harmless word in itself and used by Tertullian indifferently with the former, but seized by the quick intelligence of Hilary to serve this special end * ; such also, the frequent ' Not two Gods but One %' and the more obvious contrast between the Catholic utium and the Arian times. Thus, in excellence of literary workmanship, in sustained cogency and steady progress of argument, in the full use made of rare gifts of intellect and heart, we must recognise that Hilary has brought his great undertaking to a successful issue ; that the voyage beset with many perils, to use his favourite illustration, has safely ended in the haven of Truth and Faith. Whether the De Trinitate were complete or not at the time of his return to Poitiers, after the triumphal passage through Italy, its publication in its final form must very shortly have followed. But literature was, for the present, to claim only the smaller share of his attention. Heartily as he must have rejoiced to be again in his home, he had many anxieties to face. The bishops of Gaul, as we saw from the Invective against Constantius, had been less militant against their Arian neighbours than he had wished. There had been peace in the Church ; such peace as could be produced by a mutual ignoring of differences. And it may well be that the Gallican bishops, in their prejudice against the East, thought that Hilary himself had gone too far in the path of conciliation, and that his alliance with the Semiarians was a much longer step towards compromise with heresy than their own prudent neutrality. Each side must have felt that there was something to be explained. Hilary, for his part, by the publication of the De Trinitate had made it perfectly clear that his faith was above suspicion ; and his abstinence in that work from all mention of existing parties or phases of the controversy shewed that he had withdrawn from his earlier position. He was now once more a Western bishop, concerned only with absolute truth and the interests of the Church in his own province. But he had to reckon with the sterner champions of the Nicene faith, who 9 Orosius, Afol. i. i E.g. iv. 42j?«. 2 E.g. i. 17. xxxviii INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. had not forgotten the Dc Synodis, however much they might approve the De Trinitaie. Some curious fragments survive of the Apology which he was driven to write by the attacks of Lucifer of Cagliari. Lucifer, one of the exiles of Milan, was an uncompromising partisan, who could recognise no distinctions among those who did not accept the Nicene Creed. All were equally bad in his eyes; no explaining away of differences or attempt at conciliation was lawful. In days to come he was to be a thorn in the side of Athanasius, and was to end his life in a schism which he formed because the Catholic Church was not sufficiently exclusive. We, who know his after history and turn with repugnance from the monotonous railing with which his writings, happily brief, are filled, may be disposed to underestimate the man. But at the time he was a formidable antagonist. He had the great advantage of being one of the little company of confessors of the Faith, whom all the West admired. He represented truly enough the feeling of the Latin Churches, now that the oppression of their leaders had awakened their hostility to Arianism. And vigorous abuse, such as the facile pen of Lucifer could pour forth, is always interesting when addressed to prominent living men, stale though it becomes when the passions of the moment are no longer felt. Lucifer's protest is lost, but we may gather from the fragments of Hilary's reply that it was milder in tone than was usual with him, Indeed, confessor writing to confessor would naturally use the language of courtesy. But it was an arraignment of the policy which Hilary had adopted, and in which he had failed, though Athanasius was soon to resume it with better success. And courteously as it may have been worded, it cannot have been pleasant for Hilary to be publicly reminded of his failure, and to have doubts cast upon his consistency ; least of all when he was returning to Gaul with new hopes, but also with new difficulties. His reply, so far as we can judge of it from the fragments which remain, was of a tone which would be counted moderate in the controversies of to-day. He addresses his opponent as ' Brother Lucifer,' and patiently explains that he has been misunderstood. There is no confession that he had been in the wrong, though he fully admits that the term homoiousion, innocently used by his Eastern friends, was employed by others in a heretical sense. And he points out that Lucifer himself had spoken of the ' likeness ' of Son and Father, probably alluding to a passage in his existing writings 3. The use of this tic quoque argument, and a certain apologetic strain which is apparent in the reply, seem to shew that Hilary felt himself at a disadvantage. He must have wished the Asiatic episode to be forgotten ; he had now to make his weight felt in the West, where he had good hope that a direct and uncom- promising attack upon Arianism would be successful. For a great change was taking place in public affairs. When Hilary left Constantinople, early in the spring of the year 360, it was probably a profound secret in the capital that a rupture between Constantius and Julian was becoming inevitable. In affairs, civil and ecclesiastical, the Emperor and his favourite, the bishop Saturninus, must have seemed secure of their dominance in Gaul. But events moved rapidly. Constantius needed troops to strengthen the Eastern armies, never adequate to an emergency, for an im- pending war with Persia ; he may also have desired to weaken the forces of Julian. He demanded men ; those whom Julian detached for Eastern service refused to march, and proclaim Julian Emperor at Paris. This was in May, some months, at the least, before Hilary, delayed by his Italian labours in the cause of orthodoxy, can have reached home. Julian temporised ; he kept up negotiations with Constantius, and employed his army in frontier warfare. But there could be no doubt of the issue. Conflict was in- evitable, and the West could have little fear as to the result. The Western armies were the strongest in the Empire ; it was with them that, in the last great trial of strength, 3 Cf. Kriigcr, Luti/tr Disclto/von Ca/aris, p. 30. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OK POITIERS, xxxix Constantino the Great had won the day, and the victory of his nephew, successful and popular both as a commander and an administrator, must have been anticipated. Julian's march against Constantius did not commence till the summer of the year 361 ; but long before this the rule of Constantius and the theological system for which he stood had been rejected by Gaul. The bishops had not shunned Saturninus, as Hilary had desired ; most of them had been induced to give their sanction to Arianism at the Council of Rimini. While overshadowed by Constantius and his representative Saturninus, they had not dared to assert themselves. But now the moment was come, and with it the leader. Hilary's arrival in Gaul must have taken place when the conflict was visibly impending, and he can have had no hesitation as to the side he should take. Julian's rule in Gaul began but a few months before his exile, and they had probably never met face to face. But Julian had a well earned reputation as a righteous governor, and Hilary had intro- duced his name into his second appeal to Constantius, as a witness to his character and as suffering in fame by the injustice of Constantius. We must remember that Julian had kept his paganism carefully concealed, and that all the world, except a few intimate friends, took it for granted that he was, as the high standard of his life seemed to indicate, a sincere Christian. And now he had displaced Constantius in the supreme rule over Gaul, and Saturninus, who had by this time returned, was powerless. We cannot wonder that Hilary continued his efforts; that he went through the land, everywhere inducing the bishops to abjure their own confession made at Rimini. This the bishops, for their part, were certainly willing to do ; they were no Arians at heart, and their treatment at Rimini, followed as it was by a fraudulent misrepresentation of the meaning of their words, must have aroused their just resentment. Under the rule of Julian there was no risk, there was even an advantage, in shewing their colours; it set them right both with the new Emperor and with public opinion. But it was not enough for Hilary's purpose that the ' inward evil ' of a wavering faith should be amended ; it was also necessary that avowed heresy should be expelled. For this the co-operation of Julian was necessary ; and before it was granted Julian might naturally look for some definite pronouncement on Hilary's part. To this conjuncture, in the latter half of the year 360 or the earlier part of 361, we may best assign the publication of the Invective, already described, against Constan- tius. It was a renunciation of allegiance to his old master, not the less clear because the new is not mentioned. And with the name of Constantius was coupled that of Saturninus, as his abettor in tyranny and misbelief. Julian recognised the value of the \ Catholic alliance by giving effect to the decision of a Council held at Paris, which de- posed Saturninus. Hilary had no ecclesiastical authority to gather such a Council, but his character and the eminence of his services no doubt rendered his colleagues will- ing to follow him ; yet neither he nor they would have acted as they did without the assurance of Julian's support. Their action committed them irrevocably to Julian's cause ; and it must have seemed that his expulsion of Saturninus committed him irrevocably to the orthodox side. Yet Julian, impartially disbelieving both creeds, had made the ostensible cause of Saturninus' exile, not his errors of faith, but some of those charges of misconduct which were always forthcoming when a convenient excuse was wanted for the banish- ment of a bishop. Saturninus was a man of the world, and very possibly his Arianism was only assumed in aid of his ambition ; it is likely enough that his conduct furnished sufficient grounds for his punishment. The fall of its chief, Sulpicius Severus says, destroyed the party. The other Arian prelates, who must have been few in number, submitted to the orthodox tests, with one exception. Paternus of Perigord, a man of no fame, had the courage of his convictions. He stubbornly asserted his belief, and shared the fate of Saturninus. Thus Hilary obtained, what he had failed to get in the case of the more prominent offender, a clear precedent for the deposition of bishops guilty of Arianism. xl INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. The synod ical letter, addressed to the Eastern bishops in reply to letters which some of them had sent to Hilary since his return, was incorporated by him in his History, to be mentioned hereafter 4. The bishops of Gaul assert their orthodoxy, hold Auxentius, Valens, Ursacius and their like excommunicate, and have just excommunicated Saturninus. By his action at Paris, so Sulpicius says, Hilary earned the glory that it was by his single exertions that the provinces of Gaul were cleansed from the defilements of heresy * a . These events happened before Julian left the country, in the middle of the summer of 361, on his march against Constantius ; or at least, if the actual proceedings were sub- sequent to his departure, they must have quickly followed it, for his sanction was neces- sary, and when that was obtained there was no motive for delay. And now, for some years, Hilary disappears from sight. He tells us nothing in his writings of the ordinary course of his life and work; even his informal and discursive Homilies cast no light upon his methods of administration, his successes or failures, and very little on the character of his flock. There was no further conflict within the Church of Gaul during Hilary's lifetime. The death of Constantius, which happened before Julian could meet him in battle, removed all political anxiety. Julian himself was too busy with the revival of paganism in the East to concern himself seriously with its promotion in the Latin- speaking provinces, from which he was absent, and for which he cared less. The orthodox cause in Gaul did not suffer by his apostasy. His short reign was followed by the still briefer rule of the Catholic Jovian. Next came Valentinian, personally orthodox, but steadily refusing to allow depositions on account of doctrine. Under him Arianism dwindled away ; Catholic successors were elected to Arian prelates, and the process would have been hastened but by a few years had Hilary been permitted to expel Auxentius from Milan, as we shall presently see him attempting to do. This was his last interference in the politics of the Church, and does not concern us as yet. His chief interest henceforth was to be in literary work ; in popularising and, as he thought, improving upon the teaching of Origen. He commented upon the book of Job, as we know from Jerome and Augustine. The former says that this, and his work on the Psalms, were translations from Origen. But that is far from an accurate account of the latter work, and may be equally inaccurate concerning the former. The two fragments which St. Augustine has preserved from the Commentary on Job are so short that we cannot draw from them any conclusion as to the character of the book . If we may trust Jerome, its length was somewhat more than a quarter of that of the Homilies on the Psalms 5 , in their present form. It it unfortunate, but not surprising, that the work should have fallen into oblivion. It was, no doubt, allegorical in its method, and nothing of that kind could survive in competition with Gregory the Great's inimitable Moralia on Job. Hilary's other adaptation from Origen, the Homilies on the Psalms, happily remains to us. It is at least as great a work as the De Tiinitale, and one from which we can learn even more what manner of man its writer was. For the De Trinitate is an appeal to all thoughtful Christians of the time, and written for future generations as well as for them ; characteristic, as it is, in many ways of the author, the compass of the work and the stateliness of its rhetoric tend to conceal his personality. But the Homilies 6 on the Psalms, which would seem to have 4 Fragment xl. 4» Chron. ii. 45. 5 Jerome, A/>ol. atlv. Rufinum, i. 2, says that the total length of the Commentaries on Job and the Psalms was about 40,000 lines, i.e. Virgilian hexameters. The latter, at a rough estimate, must be nearly 35,000 lines in its present state. But Jerome, as we shall see, was not acquainted with so many Homilies as have come down to us; we must deduct about 5,000 lines, and this will leave 10,000 for the Commentary on Job, making it two- sevenths of the length of the other. Jerome, however, is not careful in his statement of lengths ; he calls the short Dc Synodis 'a very long booh,' /;/■ v - 2> s Tractatus ought to be translated thus. It is the term, and the only term, used so early as this for the bishop's addicss to the congregation ; in fact, one might almost say that true/are, tractatus in Christian language had no other meaning. It is an anachronism in the fourth century to render firadicare by ' preach ; ' cf. Duchesne, Liber Fontijicalis, i. 126. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xli reached us in the notes of a shorthand writer, so artless and conversational is the style, shew us Hilary in another aspect. He is imparting instruction to his own familiar congregation; and he knows his people so well that he pours out whatever is passing through his mind. In fact, he seems often to be thinking aloud on subjects which interest him rather than address- ing himself to the needs of his audience. Practical exhortation has, indeed, a much smaller space than mystical exegesis and speculative Christology. Yet abstruse questions are never made more obscure by involution of style. The language is free and flowing, always that of an educated man who has learnt facility by practice. And here, strange as it seems to a reader of the De Trinitate, he betrays a preference for poetical words 7 , which shews that his renunciation of such ornament elsewhere is deliberate. Yet, even here, he indulges in no definite reminiscences of the poets. There remains only one trace, though it is sufficient, of the original circumstances of delivery. The Homily on Psalm xiv. begins with the words, 'The Psalm which has been read.' The Psalms were sung as an act of worship, not read as a lesson, in the normal course of divine service ; and therefore we must assume that the Psalm to be expounded was recited, by the lector or another, as an introduction to the Homily. We need not be surprised that such notices, which must have seemed to possess no permanent interest, have been edited away. Many of the Homilies are too long to have been delivered on one or even two occasions, yet the ascription of praise with which Hilary, like Origen, always concludes 8 has been omitted in every case except at the end of the whole discourse. This shews that Hilary himself, or more probably some editor, has put the work into its final shape. But this editing of the Homilies has not extended to the excision of the numerous repetitions, which were natural enough when Hilary was delivering each as a commentary complete in itself, and do not offend us when we read the discourse on a single Psalm, though they certainly disfigure the work when regarded as a treatise on the whole Psalter. It is probably due to the accidents of time that our present copies of the Homilies are imperfect. We are, indeed, better off than was Jerome. His manuscript contained Homilies on Psalms i, 2, 51 — 62, 118 — 150, according to the Latin notation. We have, in addition to these, Homilies which are certainly genuine on Psalms 13, 14, 63 — 69 ; and others on the titles of Psalms 9 and 91, which are probably spurious 9. Some more Homilies of uncertain origin which have been fathered upon Hilary, and may be found in the editions, may be left out of account. In the Homily on Psalm 59, § 2, he mentions one, unknown to Jerome as to ourselves, on Psalm 44 ; and this allusion, isolated though it is, suggests that the Homilies contained, or were meant to contain, a commentary on the whole Book of Psalms, composed in the order in which they stand. There is, of course, nothing strange in the circulation in ancient times of imperfect copies ; a well-known instance is that of St. Augustine's copy of Cyprian which did not contain an epistle which has come down to us. This series of Homilies was probably continuous as well as complete. The incidental allusions to the events of the times contain nothing inconsistent with the supposition that he began at the beginning of the Psalter and went on to the end. We might, indeed, construe the language of that on Psalm 52, § 13, concerning prosperous clergy, who heap up wealth for themselves and live in luxury, as an allusion to men like Saturninus, but the passage is vague, and a vivid recollection, 1 E.g. fundamen, Tr. in Ps. cxwiii. 10, gemten, exxxiv. i, revolubilis, ii. 33, pcccamcn, ii. 9 Jin. and often. The shape of sentences, though simple, is always good ; to take one test word, scrpe, which was almost if not quite extinct in common use, occurs fairly often near the end of a period, where it was needed for rhythm, v/hich/refuenter would have spoiled, Some Psalms, e.g. xiii., xiv., are treated more rhetorically than others. 8 Psalm li. is the only exception, due, no douht, to careless transcription. The Homilies on the titles of Psalms ix. and xci, do not count ; they are probably spurious, and in any case are incomplete, as the text of the Psalms is not discussed. 9 So Zingcrle, Preface, p. xiv, to whom we owe the excellent Vienna Edition of the Homilies, the only part of Hilary's writings which has as yet appeared in a critical text. The writer of the former of these two Homilies, in § 2, says that the title of a Psalm always corresponds to the contents. This is quite contrary to Hilary's teaching, who frequently points out and ingeniously explains what seem to him to be discrepancies. xhi INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. not a present evil, may have suggested it. More definite, and indeed a clear note of time, is the Homily on Psalm 63, where heathenism is aggressive and is become a real danger, of which Hilary speaks in the same terms as he does of heresy. This contrasts strongly with such language as that of the Homily on Psalm 67, § 20, where the heathen are daily flocking into the Church, or of that on Psalm 137, § 10, where paganism has collapsed, its temples are ruined and its oracles silent ; such words as the former could only have been written in the short reign of Julian. Other indications, such as the frequent warnings against heresy and denunciations of heretics, are too general to help in fixing the date. On the whole, it would seem a reasonable hypothesis that Hilary began his connected series of Homilies on the Psalms soon after his return to Gaul, that he had made good progress with them when Julian publicly apostatised, and that they were not completed till the better times of Valentinian. He was conversing in pastoral intimacy with his people, and hence we cannot be surprised that he draws, perhaps unconsciously, on the results of his own previous labours. For instance, on Psalm 61, § 2, he gives what is evidently a reminiscence, yet with features of its own and not as a professed autobiography, of his mental history as described in the opening of the De Trinitate. And while the direct controversy against Arianism is not avoided, there is a manifest preference for the development of Plilary's characteristic Christology, which had already occupied him in the later books of the De Trinitate. We must, indeed, reconstruct his doctrine in this respect even more from the Homilies than from the De Trinitate ; and in the later work he not only expands what he had previously suggested, but throws out still further suggestions which he had not the length of life to present in a more perfect form. Put the Homilies contain much that is of far less permanent interest. Wherever he can ', he brings in the mystical interpretation of numbers, that strange vagary of the Eastern mind which had, at least from the time of Irenreus and the Epistle of Parnabas, found a congenial home in Christian thought. This and other distortions of the sense of Scripture, which are the result in Hilary, as in Origen, of a prosaic rather than a poetical turn of mind, will find a more appropriate place for discussion at the beginning of the next chapter. Allusions to the mode of worship of his time are very rare 2 , as are details of contemporary life. Of general encour- agement to virtue and denunciation of vice there is abundance, and it repeats with striking fidelity the teaching of Cyprian. Hilary displays the same Puritanism in regard to jewelry as does Cyprian 3, and the same abhorrence of public games and spectacles. Of these three elements, the Christology, the mysticism, the moral teaching, the Homilies are mainly compact. They carry on no sustained argument and contain, as has been said, a good deal of repetition. In fact, a continuous reader will probably form a worse impression of their quality than he who is satisfied with a few pages at a time. They are eminently adapted for selection, and the three Homilies, those on Psalms 1, 53 and 130, which have been translated for this volume, may be inadequate, yet are fairly representative, as specimens of the instruction which Hilary conveys in this work. It has been said that the practical teaching of Hilary is that of Cyprian. But this is not a literary debt +; the writer to whom almost all the exegesis is due, by borrowing of substance or of method, is Origen, except where the spirit of the fourth century has been at work. Yet other authors have been consulted, and this not only for general information, as in the case, already cited, of the elder Pliny, but for interpretation of the Psalms. For instance, a strange legend concerning Mount Herraon is cited on Psalm 132, § 6, from a writer whose name Hilary does not know; and on Psalm 133, §4, he has consulted several writers and rejects the opinion of them all. Put these authorities, whoever they may have been, were of little 1 E.g. in the Instruction or discourse preparatory to the Ilomi- lies, and in the introductory sections of that on Ps. 118 (119). a E.g. Instr. in Ps., g 12, tlic fifty days of rejoicing during which Christians must not prostrate themselves in prayer, nor fast 3 Vs. nS.Ain., § 16. 4 The account of exorcism given on Ps. 64, § :o, su Cyprian, Ad. Don. s> hut the subject is such a commonplace that nothing definite can be said. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xliii importance for his purpose in comparison with Origcn. Still we can only accept Jerome's assertion that the Homilies are translated from Origcn in a qualified sense. Hilary was writing for the edification of his own flock, and was obliged to modify much that Origcn had said if he would serve their needs, for religious thought had changed rapidly in the century which lay between the two, and a mere translation would have been as coldly received as would a reprint of some commentary of the age of George II. to-day. And Hilary's was ajnind too active and independent to be the slave of a traditional interpretation. We must, therefore, expect to find a considerable divergence ; and we cannot be surprised that Hilary, as he settled down to his task, grew more and more free in his treatment of Origen's exegesis. Unhappily the remains of Origen's work upon the Psalms, though considerable, are fragmentary, and of the fragments scattered through Catena no complete or critical edition has yet been made. Still, insufficient as the material would be for a detailed study and comparison, enough survives to enable us to form a general idea of the relation between the two writers. Origen 5 composed Homilies upon the Psalter, a Commentary upon it, and a summary treatise, called the Enchiridion. The first of these works was Hilary's model ; Origen's Homilies were diffuse extemporary expositions, ending, like Hilary's, with an ascription of praise. It is unfortunate that, of the few which survive, all treat of Psalms on which Hilary's Homilies are lost. But it is doubtful whether Hilary knew the other writings of Origen upon the Psalter. We have ourselves a very small knowledge of them, for the Catena are not in the habit of giving more than the name of the author whom they cite. Yet it may well be that some of the apparent discrepancies between the explanations given by Hilary and by Origen are due to the loss of the passage from Origen's Homily which would have agreed with Hilary, and to the survival of the different rendering given in the Commentary or the Enchiridion ; some, no doubt, are also due to the carelessness and even dishonesty of the compilers of Catena in stating the authorship of their selections. But though it is possible that Hilary had access to all Origen's writings on the Psalms, there is no reason to suppose that he possessed a copy of his Hexapla. The only translation of the Old Testament which he names beside the Septuagint is that of Aquila ; he is aware that there are others, but none save the Septuagint has authority or deserves respect, and his rare allusions to them are only such as we find in Origen's Homilies, and imply no such exhaustive knowledge of the variants as a possessor of the Hexapla would have. A comparison of the two writers shews the closeness of their relation, and if we had Origen's complete Homilies, and not mere excerpts, the debt of Hilary would certainly be still more manifest. For the compilers of Catcncc have naturally selected what was best in Origen, and most suited for short extracts ; his eccentricities have been in great measure omitted. Hence we may err in attributing to Hilary much that is perverse in his comments; there is an abundance of wild mysticism in the fragments of Origen, but its proportion to the whole is undoubtedly less in their present state than in their original condition. Hilary's method was that of paraphrasing, not of servile translation. There is apparently only one literal rendering of an extant passage of Origen, and that a short one c ; but paraphrases, which often become very diffuse expansions, are constant ?. But a just comparison between the two must embrace their differences as well as their resemblances. Hilary has exercised a silent criticism in omitting many of Origen's textual disquisitions. He gives, it is true, many various readings, but his confidence in the Septuagint often renders him indifferent in regard to 5 He is here cited by the volume and page of the edition 1jy Lommatzsch. His system of interpretation is admirably de- scribed in the fourth of Dr. Bigg's Bampton Lectures, The Chris- tian Platcnists of Alexandria. 6 Hil. Tr. in Ps. 13, § 3, his igitur ita grassantibtts, sq. = Origen (cd. Lommatzsch) xii. 30. 7 E.g. Instr. in Ps., § 15 = Origen in Eusebius, H.E. vi. 25 (Philocalia 3), Hilary on Ps. 51, §§3, 7 = Origen xii. 353, 354, and very often on Ps. 118(119), e.g. the Introduction = Or. xiii. 67 f ., Alepk, § 12 = ib. 70, Beth, § 6 = it. 71, Caph, §§ 4, 9 = ib. 82, 83, &c. xliv INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. >p divergencies which Origen had taken seriously. The space which the latter devotes to the Greek versions Hilary employs in correcting the errors and variations of the Latin, or in explaining the meaning of Greek words. But these are matters which rather belong to the next chapter, concerning, as they do, Hilary's attitude towards Scripture. It is more significant of his tone of mind that he has omitted Origen's speculations on the resurrection of the body, preserved by Eplphanius 8 , and on the origin of evil 9. Again, Origen delighfs to give his readers a choice of interpretations ; Hilary chooses one of those which Origen has given, and makes no mention of the other. This is his constant habit in the earlier part of the Homilies ; towards the end, however, he often gives a rendering of his own, and also mentions, either as possible or as wrong, that which Origen had offered. Or else, though he only makes his own suggestion, yet it is obvious to those who have Origen at hand that he has in his mind, and is refuting for his own satisfaction, an alternative which he does not think good to lay before his audience '. A similar liberty with his original occurs in the Homily on Psalm 135, § 12: — 'The purposes of the present discourse and of this place forbid us to search more deeply.' This must have seemed a commonplace to his hearers; but it happens that Origen's speculations upon the passage have survived, and we can see that Hilary was rather making excuses to himself for his disregard of them than directly addressing his congregation. Apart from the numerous instances where Hilary derives a different result from the same data, there are certain cases where he accepts the current Latin text, though it differed from Origen's Greek, and draws, without any reference to Origen, his own conclusions as to the meaning 2 . These, again, seem to be confined to the latter part of the work, and may be the result of occasional neglect to consult the authorities, rather than a deliberate departure from Origen's teaching. But the chief interest of the comparison between the writings of these two Fathers upon the Psalms lies in the insight which it affords into their respective modes of thought. Fragmentary as they are, Origen's words are a manifestly genuine and not inadequate expression of his mind ; and Hilary, a recognised authority and conscious of his powers, has so moulded and transformed his original, now adapting and now rejecting, that he has made it, even on the ground which is common to both, a true and sufficient representation of his own mental attitude. The Roman contrasts broadly with the Greek. He constantly illus- trates his discourse with historical incidents of Scripture, taken in their literal sense; there are few such in Origen. Origen is full, as usual, of praises of the contemplative state ; in speculation upon Divine things consists for him the happiness everywhere promised to the saints. Hilary ignores abstract speculation, whether as a method of interpretation or as a hope for the future, and actually describes 3 the contemplation of God's dealings with men as merely one among other modes of preparation for eternal blessings. In the same discourse he paraphrases the words of Origen, ' He who has done all things that conduce to the knowledge of God,' by 'They who have the abiding sense of a cleansed heart 4 .' Though he is the willing slave of the allegorical method, yet he revolts from time to time against its excesses in Origen; their treatment of Psalm 126, in the one case practical, in the other mystical, is a typical example 5 . Hilary's attention is fixed on concrete t hings ; the enemies denounced in the Psalms mean for him the heretics of the day, while Origen had recognised in them the invisible agency of evil spirits 6 . The words 'Who teacheth my hands to fight' suggest to Origen intellectual weapons and victories ; they remind Hilary of the ' I have 8 Uteres. 64, 12 f. 9 Origen xiii. 134. Hilary lias omitted thia from his Homily on Ps. 134, J 12. 1 Instances of such independence arc Ps. 11S, Daleth, § 6 (xiii. 74), 119, § 15 {it, 108), 122, § 2 {it, 112), 133, 5 3 {it. 131). The references to Origen are in brackets. 2 E.g. Ps. 118, Ilct/i, § 10, i2i, § 1 ; Origen xiii. 80, 11 1. 3 Ps. 11 8, Gimtl, §21. 4 Origen xiii. 72 ; Hilary, Ps. 118, Gimcl, § t. 5 Cf. also Ps. 118, Hcth, % 7, Koph, % 4, with Origen xiii. 79, 98. Here again the spirit of independence manifests itself towards the end of the work. c Cf. Ps. iiR, Samcc/t, § 6 Origen xiii. 92. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. xlv overcome the world ' of Christ 7. In fact, the thought of Hilary was so charged with definite convictions concerning Christ, and so impressed with their importance, that his very earnest ness and concentration betrays him into error of interpretation. It would be an insufficient, yet not a false, contrast between him and Origen to say that the latter distorts, with an almost playful ingenuity, the single words or phrases of Scripture, while Hilary, with masterful indifference to the principles of exegesis, will force a whole chapter to render the sense which he desires. And his obvious sincerity, his concentration of thought upon one great and always interesting doctrine, his constant appeal to what seems to be, and sometimes is, the exact sense of Scripture, and the vigour of his style, far better adapted to its purpose than that of Origen ; all these render him an even more convincing exponent than the other of the bad system of interpretation which both have adopted. Sound theological deductions and wise moral reflections on every page make the reader willing to pardon a vicious method, for Hilary's doctrine is never based upon his exegesis of the Psalms. No primary truth depends for him upon allegory or mysticism, and it may be that he used the method with the less caution because he looked for nothing more than that it should illustrate and confirm what was already established. Since, then, the permanent interest of the work is that it shews us what seemed to Hilary, as a representative of his age, to be the truth, and we have in it a powerful and original presentation of that truth, we can welcome, as a quaint and not ungraceful enlivening of his argument, this ingenuity of misinterpretation. And we may learn also a lesson for ourselves of the importance of the doctrine which he inculcates with such perseverance. Confronting him as it did, in various aspects, at every turn and in the most unlikely places during his journey through the Psalter, his faith concerning Christ was manifestly in Hilary's eyes the vital element of religion. The Homilies on the Psalms have never been a popular work. Readable as they are, and free from most of the difficulties which beset the De Trinitate, posterity allowed them to be mutilated, and, as we saw, only a portion has come down to us. Their chief influence, like that of the other treatise, has been that which Hilary has exercised through them upon writers of greater fame. Ambrose has borrowed from them liberally and quite uncritically for his own exposition of certain of the Psalms ; and Ambrose, accredited by his own fame and that of his greater friend Augustine, has quite overshadowed the fame of Hilary. The Homilies may, perhaps, have also suffered from an undeserved suspicion that anything written by the author of the De Trinitate would be hard to read. They have, in any case, been little read; and yet, as the first important example in Latin literature of the allegorical method, and as furnishing the staple of a widely studied work of St. Ambrose, they have profoundly affected the course of Christian thought. Their historical interest as well as their intrinsic value commands our respect. In his Homily on Psalm 138, § 4, Hilary briefly mentions the Patriarchs as examples of faith, and adds, ' but these are matters of which we must discourse more suitably and fully in their proper place.' This is a promise to which till of late no known work of our writer corresponded. Jerome had, indeed, informed us ? a that Hilary had composed a treatise entitled De Mysteriis, but no one had connected it with his words in the Homily. It had been supposed that the lost treatise dealt with the sacraments, in spite of the facts that it is Hilary's custom to speak of types as 'mysteries,' and that the sacraments are a theme upon which he never dwells. But in 1887 a great portion of Hilary's actual treatise on the Mysteries was recovered in the same manuscript which contained the more famous Pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Silvia of Aquitaine 8 . It is a short treatise of two books, unhappily mutilated at the beginning, in the middle and near the end, though the peroration has survived. The title is 7 Ps. 143, § 4; Origen xiii. 149. 7 a Vir. III. 100. 8 J. F. Gamunini, S. Hilnrii Tractatus de Mysteriis et Hyinni, etc., 410.. Rome, 1887. The De Mysteriis occupies pp. 3—28. xlvi INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. lost, but there is no reason to doubt that Jerome was nearly right in calling it a tracta'its, though he would have done belter had he used the plural. It is written in the same easy style as the Homilies on the Psalms, and if it was not originally delivered as two homilies, as is probable, it must be a condensation of several discourses into a more compact form. The first book deals with the Patriarchs, the second with the Prophets, regarded as types of Christ. The whole is written from the point of view with which Hilary's other writings have made us familiar. Every deed recorded in Scripture proclaims or typifies or proves the advent of the incarnate Christ, and it is Hilary's purpose to display the whole of His work as reflected in the Old Testament, like an image in a mirror. He begins with Adam and goes on to Moses, deriving lessons from the lives of all the chief characters, often with an exercise of great ingenuity. For instance, in the history of the Fall Eve is the Church, which is sinful but shall be saved through bearing children in Baptism 9; the burning bush is a type of the endurance of the Church, of which St. Paul speaks in 2 Cor. iv. 8 1 ; the manna was found in the morning, the time of Christ's Resurrection and therefore of the reception of heavenly food in the Eucharist. They who collect too much are heretics with their excess of argument 2 . In the second book we have a fragmentary and desultory treatment of incidents in the lives of the Prophets, which Hilary ends by saying that in all the events which he has recorded we recognise ' God the Father and God the Son, and God the Son from God the Father, Jesus Christ, God and Man 3 .' The peroration, in fact, reads like a summary of the argument of the De Trinitate. Of the genuineness of the little work there can be no doubt. Its language, its plan, its arguments are unmistakeably those of Hilary. The homilies were probably delivered soon after he had finished his course on the Psalms, of which they contain some reminiscences, such as we saw are found in the later Homilies on the Psalms of earlier passages in the same. In all probability the subject matter of the De Mystaiis is mainly drawn from Origen. It is too short, and too much akin to Hilary's more important writings, to cast much light upon his modes of thought. He has, indeed, no occasion to speak here upon the points on which his teaching is most original and characteristic. In this same manuscript, discovered by Gamurrini at Arezzo, are the remains of what professes to be Hilary's collection of hymns. He has always had the fame of being the earliest Latin hymn writer. This was, indeed, a task which the circumstances of his life must have suggested to him. The conflict with Arianism forced him to become the pioneer of systematic theology in the Latin tongue; it also drove him into exile in the East, "where r he' must have acquainted himself with the controversial use made of hyranody by the Arians. Thus it was natural that he should have introduced hymns also into the West. But if the De Trinitate had little success, the hymns were still more unfortunate. Jerome tells us that Hilary complained of finding the Gauls unteachable in sacred song*; and there is no reason to suppose that he had any wide or permanent success in introducing hymns into public worship 6 . If Hilary must have the credit of originality in this respect, the honour of turning his suggestion to account belongs to Ambrose, whose fame in more respects than one is built upon foundations laid by the other. And if but a scanty remnant of the verse of Ambrose, popular as it was, survives, we cannot be surprised that not a line remains which can safely be 9 Ed. Gamurrini, p. 5. ' lb. p. 17. 2 lb. p. 21 ; there is the not uncommon piny on the two senses of colligcrc. 3 lb. p. 27. 4 It must be confessed that some authorities refuse to regard this work as the De MysUriis of Hilary. Among these is Ebert, Litteratur des Mittclalters, p. 142, who admits that the matter ml ;ht be Hilary's, but denies that the manner and style are his. 5 Comm. in Efi. nil Gal. ii. foe/. : Ililarhts in hywnorum car- mine Gal/os indocile! vocat. This may mean that Hilary actually U ed ii" 1 words 'stubborn Gauls' in one of his hymns. There would be nothing extraordinary in this ; the early efforts, and cs. pecially those of the Arians which Hilary imitated for a better purpose, often departed widely from the propriety of later composi- tions, as wc shall sec in one of those attributed to Hilary himself. 6 It is true that the Fourth Council of Toledo (a.d. 633) in its 13th canon couples Hilary with Ambrose as the Writer of hymns in actual use. But these canons arc verbose productions, and this may be a mere literary flourish, natural enough in coun- trymen and contemporaries of Isidoic of Seville, who Knew, no doubt from Jerome's Viri lllttitres, that Hilary was the first Latin hymn writer. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xlvii attributed to Hilary, though authorities who deserve respect have pronounced in favour of more than one of the five hymns which we must consider. Hilary's own opinion concerning the use of hymns can best be learnt from his Homilies on Psalms 64 and 65. In the former (§ 12) the Church's delightful exercise of singing hymn s at morning and evening is one of the chief tokens which she has of ( lod's mercy towards her. In the latter (§ 1) we are told that sacred song requires the accompaniment of instrumental harmonies; that the combination to this end of different forms of service and of art produces a result acceptable to God. The lifting of the voice to God in exultation, as an act of spiritual warfare against the devil and his hosts, is given as an example of the uses of hymnody (§ 4). It is a means of putting the enemy to flight ; ' Whoever he be that takes his post outside the Church, let him hear the voice of the people at their prayers, let him mark the multitudinous sound of our hymns, and in the performance of the divine Sacraments let him recognise the responses which our loyal confession makes. Every adversary must needs be affrighted, the devil routed, death conquered in the faith of the Resurrection, by such jubilant utterance of our exultant voice. The enemy will know that this gives pleasure to God and assurance to our hope, even this public and triumphant raising of our voice in song.' Original composition, both of words and music, is evidently in Hilary's mind ; and we can see that he is rather recommending a useful novelty than describing an established practice. It is a remarkable coincidence that the five hymns which are called his are, in fact, a song of triumph over the devil, and a hymn in praise of the Resurrection, which are, so their editor thinks, actually alluded to in the Homily cited above; a confession of faith; and a morning hymn and one which has been taken for an evening hymn. These are exactly the subjects which correspond to Hilary's description. But, when we come to the examination of these hymns in detail, the gravest doubts arise. The first three were discovered in the same manuscript to which we owe the Dc Mystcriis. They formed part of a small collection, which cannot have numbered more than seven or eight hymns, of which these three only have escaped, not without some mutilation. That which stands first is the confession of faith, the matter of which contains nothing that is inconsistent with Hilary's time. But beyond this, and the fact that the manuscript ascribes it to Hilary, there is nothing to suggest his authorship. It is a dreary production in a limping imitation of an Horatian metre ; an involved argumentative statement of Catholic doctrine, in which it would be difficult to say whether verse or subject suffers the more from their unwonted union. The sequence of thought is helped out by the mechanical device of an alphabetical arrange- ment of the stanzas, but even this assistance could not make it intelligible to an ordinary congregation ?. And the want of literary skill in the author makes it impossible to suppose that Hilary is he ; classical knowledge was still on too high a level for an educated man to perpetrate such solecisms. In the same manuscript there follow, after an unfortunate gap, the two hymns to which it has been suggested that Hilary alludes in his Homily on Psalm 65, those which celebrate the praises of the Resurrection and the triumph over Satan. The former is by a woman's hand, and the feminine forms of the language must have made it, one would think, unsuitable for congregational singing. There is no reason why the poem should not date from the fourth century ; indeed, since it is written by a neophyte, that date is more probable than a later time, when adult converts to Christianity were more scarce. It has considerable merits; it is " Two of the simplest stanzas are as follows : — | Extra quani capere potest Felix qui potuit fide '. It is written in stanzas of six lines in the MS. ; the metre is the mens hnmana res tantas penitus : second Asclepiad. Gamurrini, the discoverer, and Fechtrtip (in manet Filius in Patre, credulus assequi, \\'ct/er Welte's Encyclopaedia) regard it as the work of Hilary, rursus quern penes sit Pater ut incorporeo ex Deo | but the weight of opinion is against them, digitus, qui genitus est profectus fuerit F litis in Deum. primogenitus Dei. xlvi 111 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. fervid in tone and free in movement, and has every appearance of being the expression of genuine feeling. It is, in fact, likely enough that, if it were written in Hilary's day, he should have inserted it in a collection of sacred verse. Concerning its authorship the suggestion has been made 8 that it was written by Florentia, a heathen maiden converted by Hilary near Seleucia, who followed him to Gaul, lived, died, and was buried by him in his diocese. The story of Florentia rests on no better authority than the worthless biography of Hilary, written by Fortunatus, who, moreover, says nothing about hymns composed by her. Neither proof nor disproof is possible : unless we regard the defective Latinity as evidence in favour of a Greek origin for the authoress. The third hymn, which celebrates the triumph of Christ over Satan, may or may not be the work of the same hand as the second. It bears much more resemblance to it than to the laborious and prosaic effusion which stands first. The manuscript which contains these three hymns distinctly assigns the first, and one or more which have perished, to Hilary: — ' Incipiunt hymni eiusdem.' Whether a fresh title stood before the later hymns, which clearly belong to another, we cannot say ; the collection is too short for this to be probable. It is obvious that, if we have in this manuscript the remains of a hymn-book for actual use, it was, like ours, a compilation ; brief as it was, it may have been as large as the cumbrous shape of ancient volumes would allow to be cheaply multiplied and conveniently used. Many popular treatises, as for instance some by Tertullian and Cyprian, were quite as short. Who the compiler may have been must remain unknown. We must attach some importance to the evidence of the manuscript which has restored to us the De Mysteriis and the Pilgrimage of Silvia ; and we may reasonably suppose that this collection was made in the time, and even with the sanction, of Hilary, though we cannot accept him as the author of any of the three hymns which remain. The spurious letter to his imaginary daughter Abra was apparently written with the ingenious purpose of fathering upon Hilary the morning hymn, Lucis Largitor splendide. This is a hymn of considerable beauty, in the same metre as the genuine Ambrosian hymns. But there is this essential difference, that while in the latter the rules of classical versification as regards the length of syllables are scrupulously followed, in the former these rules are ignored, and rhythm takes the place of quantity. This is a sufficient proof that the hymn is of a later date than Ambrose, and, a fortiori, than Hilary. There remains the so-called evening hymn, which has been supposed to be the companion to the lasts. This, again, is alphabetical, and contains in twenty-three stanzas a confession of sin, an appeal to Christ and an assertion of orthodoxy. The rules of metre are neglected in favour of an uncouth attempt at rhythm. Latin appears to have been a dead language to the writer \ who adorns his lines with little pieces of pagan mythology, and whose taste is indicated by his description of heretics as 'barking Sabellius and grunting Simon.' The hymn is probably the work of some bombastic monk, perhaps of the time of Charles the Great ; unlike the other four, it cannot possibly date from Hilary's generation. Omitting certain fragments of treatises of which Hilary may, or may not, have been the author 2 , we now come to his attack upon Auxentius of Milan, and to the last of 8 By Gamurrini in Studi e document!, 1884, p. 83 f. 9 Printed in full by Mai, Patrum Nova Bifrliol/tcca, p. 490. He suspends judgment, and will not say that it is unworthy of Hilary. The Benedictine editor, Coustant, gives a few stanzas as specimens, and summarily rejects it. • The four quarters of the universe are ortus, cccas/ts, aqitilo, septentrio; one of these last must mean the south. This would point to some German land as the home of the author ; in no country of Romance tongue could such an error have been per- petrated. Perire is used for perdere, but this it not unparalleled. ■ In Mai's Patrum Nova Hildiotheca, vol. i., is a short treatise on the Genealogies of Christ. The method of interpretation is the same as Hilary's, but the language is not his ; and the terms used of the Virgin in §§ n, 12, are not so early as the fourth century. In the same volume is an exposition of the beginning of St. John's Gospel in an anti-Arian sense. In spite of some difference of vocabulary, there is no strong reason why this should not be by Hilary; cf. especially, §§ 5 — 7. Mai also prints in the same volume a short fragment on the Paralytic (St. Matt. ix. 2), too brief for a judgment to be formed. In Pitra's Spkilegium Solcsmeiise, vol. i.» is a brief discussion on the first chapters of Genesis, dealing chiefly with the Fall. It appears, like the Homi- lies on the Psalms, to be the report of some extemporary ad- dresses, and is more likely than any of the preceding to be the THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, xlix his complete works. Dionysius of Milan had been, as we saw, a sufferer in the same cause as Hilary. But he had been still more hardly treated ; he had not only been exiled, but his place had been taken by Auxcntius, an Eastern Arian of the school favoured by Constantius. Dionysius died in exile, and Auxcntius remained in undisputed possession of the see. He must have been a man of considerable ability; perhaps, as we have mentioned, he was the creator of the so-called Ambrosian ritual, and certainly he was the leader of the Arian party in Italy and the further West. The very fact that Constantius and his advisers chose him for so great a post as the bishopric of Milan proves that they had confidence in him. He justified their trust, holding his own without apparent difficulty at Milan and working successfully in the cause of compromise at Ariminum and elsewhere. Athanasius mentions him often and bitterly as a leader of the heretics ; and he must be ranked with Ursacius and Valens as one of the most unscrupulous of his party. While Constantius reigned Auxentius was, of course, safe from attack. But at the end of the year 364 Hilary thought that the opportunity was come. Since his last entry into the conflict Julian and his successor Jovian had died, and Valentinian had for some months been Emperor. He had just divided the Roman Empire with his brother Valens, himself choosing the Western half with Milan for his capital, while he gave Constantinople and the East to Valens. The latter was a man of small abilities, unworthy to reign, and a convinced Arian ; Valentinian, with many faults, was a strong ruler, and favoured the cause of orthodoxy. But he was, before all else, a soldier and a statesman ; his orthodoxy was, perhaps, a mere acquiescence in the predominant belief among his subjects, and it had, in any case, much less influence over his conduct than had Arianism over that of Valens. It must have seemed to Hilary and to Eusebius of Vercelli that there was danger to the Church in the possession by Auxentius of so commanding a position as that of bishop of Milan, with constant access to the Emperor's ear ; and especially now that the Emperor was new to his work and had no knowledge, perhaps no strong convictions, concerning the points at issue. As far as they could judge, their success or failure in displacing Auxentius would influence the fortunes of the Church for a generation at least. It would, therefore, be unjust to accuse Hilary as a mere busy-body. He interfered, it is true, outside his own province, but it was at a serious crisis ; and his knowledge of the Western Church must have assured him that, if he did not act, the necessary protest would probably remain unmade. Hilary, then, in company with his ally Eusebius, hastened to Milan in order to influence the mind of Valentinian against Auxentius, and to waken the dormant orthodoxy of the Milanese Church. For there seems to have been little local opposition to the Arian bishop : no organised congregation of Catholics in the city rejected his communion. On the other hand, there was no militant Arianism: the worship conducted by Auxentius could excite no scruples, and in his teaching he would certainly avoid the points of difference. He and his school had no desire to persecute orthodoxy because it was orthodox. From their point of view, the Faith had been settled in such a way that their own position was unassailable, and all they wished was to live and to let live. And we must remember that the Council of Rimini, disgraceful as the manner was in which its decision had been reached, was still the rule of the Faith for the Western Church. Hilary and Eusebius had induced a multitude of bishops, amid the applause of their flocks, to recant ; but private expressions of opinion, however numerous, could not erase the definitions of Rimini from work of Hilary. It is quite in his style, but the contents are unimportant. But wc must remember that the scribes were rarely content to confess that they were ignorant of the name of an author whom they transcribed; and that, being as ill-furnished with scruples as with imagination, they assigned everything that came to hand to a few familiar names. Two further works VOL. IX. 1 ascribed to Hilary are obviously not his. Pitra, in the volume already cited, has printed considerable remains of a Commentary on the Pauline Epistles, which really belongs to Theodore of Mopsuestia ; and a Commentary on the seven Canonical Epistles, recently published in the Spiciltgium Casincnsc, vol. iii., is there attiibuted, with much reason, to his namesake of Aries. INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. station was not much less prominent than that of Athanasius himself, and his ejection on purely theological grounds. Constantius himself had rarely been so bold ; his acts of oppression, as in Hilary's case, were usually cloaked by some allegation of misconduct on the victim's part. But Auxentius had more than the character of Valens and political consider- ations on which to rely. In the forefront of his defence he put the Council of Rimini. This attack by Hilary and his friends was, according to him, the attempt of a handful of men to break up the unity attained by the labours of that great assembly of six hundred bishops \ He declared his firm assent to all its decisions; every heresy that it had condemned he condemned. He sent with his address a copy of the Acts of the Council, and begged the Emperor to have them read to him. Its language would convince him that Hilary and Eusebius, bishops long deposed, were merely plotting universal schism. This, with his own account of the proceedings before the commission and a short statement of his belief, forms his appeal to the Emperor. It was composed with great skill, and was quite unanswerable. His actual possession of the see, the circumstances of the time, the very doctrine of the Church — for only a Council could undo what a Council had done — rendered his position unassailable. And if he was in the right, Hilary and his colleague were in the wrong. Nothing but success could have saved them from the humiliation, to which they were now subjected, of being expelled from Milan and bidden to return to their homes, while the Emperor publicly recognised Auxentius by receiving the Communion at his hands. Yet morally they had been in the right throughout. The strong legal position of Auxentius and the canons of that imposing Council of six hundred bishops behind which he screened himself had been obtained by deliberate fraud and oppression. He and his creed could not have, and did not deserve to have, any stability. Yet Valentinian was probably in the right, even in the interests of truth, in refusing to make a martyr of Auxentius. There would have been reprisals in the East, where the Catholic cause had far more to lose than had Arianism in the West ; and general considerations of equity and policy must have inclined him to allow the Arian to pass the remainder of his days in peace. But we cannot wonder that Hilary failed to appreciate such reasons. He had thrown himself with all his heart into the attack, and risked in it his public credit as bishop and confessor and first of Western theologians. Hence his published account of the transaction is tinged with a pardonable shade of personal resentment. It was, indeed, necessary that he should issue a statement. The assault and the repulse were rendered conspicuous by time and place, and by the eminence of the persons engaged ; and it was Hilary's duty to see that the defeat which he had incurred brought no injury upon his cause. He therefore addressed a public letter 'to the beloved brethen who abide in the Faith of the fathers and repudiate the Arian heresy, the bishops and all their flocks.' He begins by speaking of the blessings of peace, which the Christians of that day could neither enjoy nor promote, beset as they were by the forerunners of Antichrist, who boasted of the peace, in other words of the harmonious concurrence in blasphemy, which they had brought about. They bear themselves not as bishops of Christ but as priests of Antichrist. This is not random abuse (§ 2), but sober recognition of the fact, stated by St. J ohn, that there are many Antichrists. For these men assume the cloak of piety, and pretend to preach the Gospel, with the one object of inducing others to deny Christ. It was (§ 3) the misery and folly of the day that men endeavoured to promote the cause of God by human means and the favour of the world. Hilary asks bishops, who believe in their office, whether the Apostles had secular surjport when by their preaching they converted the greater part of mankind. They were not adorned with palace dignities; scourged and fettered, they sang their hymns. It was in obedience to no royal edict that Paid gathered a Church for Christ; 5 This was a gross exaggeration. They cannot have been I that the Homoeau decision was only obtained by fraud, as Auxen- more than 400, and probably were less. Ami we must n mi well knew, THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. liii he was exposed to public view in the theatre. Nero and Vespasian and Decius were no patrons of the Church ; it was through their hatred that the truth had thriven. The Apostles laboured with their hands and worshipped in garrets and secret places, and in defiance of senate or monarch visited, it might be said, every village and every tribe. Yet it was these rebels who had the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven ; the more they were forbidden, the more they preached, and the power of God was made manifest. But now (§ 4) the Faith finds favour with men. The Church seeks for secular support, and in so doing insults Christ by the implication that His support is insufficient. She in her turn holds out the threat of exile and prison. It was her endurance of these that drew men to her; now she imposes her failh by violence. She craves for favours at the hands of her communicants ; once it was her consecration that she braved the threatenings of persecutors. Bishops in exile spread the Faith ; now it is she that exiles bishops. She boasts that the world loves her ; the world's hatred was the evidence that she was Christ's. The ruin is obvious which has fallen upon the Church. The reason is plain (§ 5). The time of Antichrist, disguised as an angel of light, has come. The true Christ is hidden from almost every mind and heart. Antichrist is now obscuring the truth that he may assert falsehood hereafter. Hence the conflicting opinions of the time, the doctrine of Arius and of his heirs, Valens, Ursacius, Auxentius and their fellows. Their preaching of novelties concerning Christ is the work of Antichrist, who is using them to introduce his own worship. This is proved (§ 6) by a statement of their minimising and prevaricating doctrine, which lias, however, made no impression upon the guileless and well-meaning laity. Then (§§ 7 — 9) comes Hilary's account of his proceedings at Milan, strongly coloured by the intensity of his feelings. The Emperor's first refusal to interfere with Auxentius is a 'command that the Church of the Milanese, which confesses that Christ is true God, of one divinity and substance with the Father, should be thrown into confusion under the pretext, and with the desire, of unity.' The canons of Rimini are described as those of the Thracian Nicaea ; Auxentius' protest that he had never known Arius is met by the assertion that he had been ordained to the presbyterate in an Arian Church under George of Alexandria. Hilary refuses to discuss the Council of Rimini ; it had been universally and righteously repudiated. His ejection from Milan, in spite of his protests that Auxentius was a liar and a renegade, is a revelation of the mystery of ungodliness. For Auxentius (§§ 10, n) had spoken with two contrary voices ; the one that of the confession which Hilary had driven him to sign, the other that of Rimini. His skill in words could deceive even the elect, but he had been clearly exposed. Finally (§ 12) Hilary regrets that he cannot state the case to each bishop and Church in person. He begs them to make the best of his letter; he dares not make it fully intelligible by circulating with it the Arian blasphemies which he had assailed. He bids them beware of Antichrist, and warns against love and reverence for the material structure of their churches, wherein Antichrist will one day have his seat. Mountains and woods and dens of beasts and prisons and morasses are the places of safety; in them some of the Prophets had lived, and some had died. He bids them shun Auxentius as an angel of Satan, an enemy of Christ, a deceiver and a blasphemer. 'Let him assemble against me what synods he will, let him proclaim me, as he has often done already, a heretic by public advertisement, let him direct, at his will, the wrath of the mighty against me; yet, being an Arian, he shall be nothing less than a devil in my eyes. Never will I desire peace except with them who, following the doctrine of our fathers at Niccea, shall make the Arians anathema and proclaim the true divinity of Christ.' These are the concluding words of Hilary's last public utterance. We see him again giving an unreserved adhesion, in word as well as in heart, to the Nicene confession. It was the course dictated by policy as well as by conviction. His cautious language in earlier days had done good service to the Church in the East, and had made it easier for those who had compromised themselves at Rimini to reconcile themselves with him and with the truth for liv INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. which he stood. But by this time all whom he could wish to win had given in their adhesion; Auxentius and the few who held with him, if such there were, were irreconcileable. They took their stand upon the Council of Rimini, and their opponents found in the doctrine of Niccea the clear and uncompromising challenge which was necessary for effective warfare. But if Hilary's doctrinal position is definite, his theory of the relations of Church and State, if indeed his indignation allowed him to think of them, is obscure. An orthodox Emperor was uphold- ing an Arian, and Hilary, while giving Valentinian credit for personal good faith, is as eager as in the worst days of Constantius for a severance. We must, however, remember that this manifesto, though it is the expression of a settled policy in the matter of doctrine, is in other respects the unguarded outpouring of an injured feeling. And here again we find the old perplexity of the 'inward evil.' Auxentius is represented as in the Church and outside it at the same time. He is an Antichrist, a devil, all that is evil j but Hilary is threatened and it is the Church that threatens, submission to an Avian is enforced and it is the Church which enforces it 6 . And if Auxentius had adhered to the confession which Hilary had induced him to sign, all objection to his episcopate would apparently have ceased. The time had not come, if it ever can come, for the solution of such problems. Meantime Hilary did his best, so far as words could do it, to brush aside the sophistries behind which Auxentius was defending himself. The doctrine of Rimini is named that of Nicaga, in Thrace, where the discreditable and insignificant assembly met in which its terms were settled ; the Church of Alexandria under the intruder George is frankly called Arian. It was an appeal to the future as well as an apology for himself. But certainly it could not move Valentinian, nor can Hilary have expected that it should. And, after all, Valentinian's action was harmless, at least. By Hilary's own confession, Auxentius had no influence for evil over his flock, and these proceedings must have warned him, if he needed the warning, that abstinence from aggressive Arianism was necessary if he would end his days in peace. The Emperor's policy remained unchanged. At the Roman Council of the year 369 the Western bishops formally annulled the proceedings of Rimini, and so deprived Auxentius of his legal position. At the same time, as the logical consequence, they condemned him to deposition, but Valentinian refused to give effect to their sentence, and Auxentius remained bishop of Milan till his death in the year 374. He had outlived Hilary and Eusebius, and also Athanasius, the promoter of the last attack upon him; he had also outlived whatever Arianism there had been in Milan. His successor, St. Ambrose, had the enthusiastic support of his people in his conflicts with Arian princes. The Church could have gained little by Hilary's success, and yet we cannot be sure that, in a broad sense, he failed. So resolute a bearing must have effectually strengthened the convictions of Valentinian aad the fears of Auxentius. There remains one work of Hilary to be considered. This was a history of the Arian controversy in such of its aspects as had fallen under his own observation. We know from Jerome's biography of Hilary that he wrote a book againt Valens and Ursacius, containing an account of the Councils of Rimini and Seleucia. They had been his adversaries throughout his career, and had held their own against him. To them, at least as much as to Constantius, the overthrow of his Asiatic friends was due, and to them he owed the favour, which must have galled him, of permission to return to his diocese. Auxentius was one of their allies, and the failure of Hilary's attack upon him made it clear that these men too, as subjects of Valentinian, were safe from merited deposition. Their worldly success was manifest ; it was a natural and righteous task which Hilary undertook when he exposed their true character. It was clear that while Valens and Valentinian lived — and they were in early middle life— there would be an armed peace within the Western Church ; that the overthrow of bishop by bishop in theological strife would be 054. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lv forbidden. The pen was the only weapon left to Hilary, and he used it to give an account of events from the time of that Council of Aries, in the year 353, which was the beginning for Gaul of the Arian conflict. He followed its course, with especial reference to Ursacius and Valens, until the year 367, or at least the end of 366; the latest incident recorded in the fragments which we possess must have happened within a few months of his death. The work was less a history than a collection of documents strung together by an explanatory narrative. It is evident that it was not undertaken as a literary effort ; its aim is not the information of future generations, but the solemn indictment at the bar of public opinion of living offenders. It must have been, when complete, a singularly businesslike production, with no graces of style to render it attractive and no generalisations to illuminate its pages. Had the whole been preserved, we should have had a complete record of Hilary's life ; as it is, we have thirteen valuable fragments 7 , to which we owe a considerable part of our general knowledge of the time, though they tell us comparatively little of his own career. The commencement of the work has happily survived, and from it we learn the spirit in which he wrote. He begins (Fragment i. §§ 1, 2) with an exposition of St. Paul's doctrine of faith, hope, and love. He testifies, with the Apostle, that the last is the greatest. The inseparable bond, of which he is conscious, of God's love for him and his for God, has detached him from worldly interests. He, like others (§ 3), might have enjoyed ease and prosperity and imperial friendship, and have been, as they were, a bishop only in name and a burden upon the Church. But the condition imposed was that of tampering with Gospel truths, wilful blindness to oppression and the condonation of tyranny. Public opinion, ill-informed and unused to theological subtleties, would not have observed the change. But it would have been a cowardly declension from the love of Christ to which he could not stoop. He feels (§ 4) the difficulty of the task he undertakes. The devil and the heretics had done their worst, multitudes had been terrified into denial of their convictions. The story was complicated by the ingenuity in evil of the plotters, and evidence was difficult to obtain. The scene of intrigue could not be clearly delineated, crowded as it was with the busy figures of bishops and officers, putting every engine into motion against men of apostolic mind. The energy with which they propagated slander was the measure of its falsehood. They had implanted in the public mind the belief that the exiled bishops had suffered merely for refusing to condemn Athanasius ; that they were inspired by obstinacy, not by principle. Out of reverence for the Emperor, whose throne is from God (§ 5), Hilary will not comment upon his usurped jurisdiction over a bishop, nor on the manner in which it was exercised ; nor yet on the injustice whereby bishops were forced to pass sentence upon the accused in his absence. In this volume he will give the true causes of trouble, in comparison of which such tyranny, grievous though it be, is of small account. Once before — this, no doubt, was at Be'ziers — he had spoken his mind upon the matter. But that was a hasty and unprepared utterance, delivered to an audience as eager to silence him as he was to speak. He will, therefore (§ 6), give a full and consecutive narrative of events from the Council of Aries onwards, with such an account of the question there debated as will 7 There are fifteen in the collection, but the second and third, which are as long as all the rest together, and are obviously ex- tracts from the same work, are not by Hilary. He expressly says (Fragm. i. § 6) that he will commence with the Council of Aries and the exile of Paulinus. These documents narrate at great length events which began six years earlier, and with which Hilary and his province had no direct concern. This proves course, notorious that he never did so ; the mistake is one which Hilary could not possibly have made. None the less, these frag- ments are, both in themselves and in the documents which they embody, one of our most important authorities for the transactions they narrate, and are indisputably contemporary and authentic. Nor is there any reasonable doubt as to the genuineness of the thirteen. Those of them which reveal the inconstancy of Liberius that the fragments are not a portion of the Liber adversus Ursa- have been assailed by some Roman Catholic writers, though they cium et Valentcm. Internal evidence proves not less clearly that they cannot be excerpts from some other work of Hilary. In Fragm. ii. § 21 we are told that, apparently in the year 349, Athanasius excommunicated Marcellus of Ancyra. It is, of are accepted by others. The same suspicion has extended to others among the fragments, because they arc found in company with these revelations concerning Liberius. But the doubts have been suggested by the wish to disbelieve. lvi INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER I. shew the true merits of Paulinus, and make it clear that nothing less than the Faith was at stake. He ends his introduction (§ 7) by warning the reader that this is a work which needs to be seriously studied. The multitude of letters and of synods which he must adduce will merely confuse and disgust him, if he do not bear in mind the dates and the persons, and the exact sense in which terms are used. Finally, he reminds him of the greatness of the subject. This is the knowledge of God, the hope of eternity; it is the duty of a Christian to acquire such knowledge as shall enable him to form and to maintain his own conclusions. The excerpts from the work have evidently been made by some one who was interested in Italy and Illyricum rather than in Gaul, and thought that the documents were more important than the narrative. Hence Hilary's character is as little illustrated as the events of his life. Nor can the date of the work be precisely fixed. It is clear that he had already taken up his final attitude of uncompromising adherence to the Nicene Symbol ; that is to say, he began to write after all the waverers had been reclaimed from contact with Arianism. He must, therefore, have written the book in his latest years; and it is manifest that after he had brought the narrative down to the time of his return from exile, he continued to add to it from time to time even till the end of his life. For the last incident recorded in the Fragments, the secession from the party of Valens and Ursacius of an old and important ally, Germinius of Sirmium, must have come to his knowledge very shortly before his death. He had had little success in his warfare with error ; if he and his friends had held their own, they had not succeeded either in synod or at court in overthrowing their enemies; and it is pleasant to think that this gleam of comfort came to brighten the last days of Hilary 8 . The news must have reached Gaul early in the year 367, and no subsequent event of importance can have come to his knowledge. But though we have reached the term of Hilary's life, there remains one topic on which something must be said, his relation to St. Martin of Tours. Martin, born in Pannonia, the country of Valens and Ursacius, but converted from paganism under Catholic influences, was attracted by Hilary, already a bishop, and spent some years in his society before the outbreak of the Arian strife in Gaul. Hilary, we are told, wished to ordain him a priest, but at his urgent wish refrained, and admitted him instead to the humble rank of an exorcist. At an uncertain date, which cannot have long preceded Hilary's exile, he felt himself moved to return to his native province in order to convert his parents, who were still pagans. He succeeded in the case of his mother and of many of his countrymen. But he was soon compelled to abandon his labours, for he had, as a true disciple of Hilary, regarded it as his duty to oppose the Arianism dominant in 8 This correspondence which Hilary has preserved (Fragm. I to neighbouring bishops, which they trust will be proved ground- siii. — xv.) is interesting .is shewing how difficult it must have been less. Germinius made no direct reply to this letter, but addicsscd for the laity to determine who was, and who was not, a heretic, a manifesto to a number of more sympathetic bishops, containing when all parties used the same Scriptural terms in commendation the Scriptural proofs of the divinity of Christ, and recalling the of themselves and condemnation of their opponents. It begins fact that the Homoean leaders, before their own victory, had with a public letter in which Germinius makes a declaration of acquiesced in the Homoeousian confession. Any teaching to the faith in Homoeousion terms, without any mention of the reasons contrary is the work, not of Cod, but of the spirit of this world; which had induced him to depart from the Homoean position, and he entreats those whom he addresses to circulate his letter This is followed by a reproachful letter, also intended for pub- as widely as possible, lest any should fall through ignorance into licity, from Valens, Ursacius, and others. They had refused the snares of the devil. Germinius was assured of safety in to attend to the rumour of his defection ; but now are compelled, writing thus. Valenti mail's support of Auxentius had proved by his own published letter, to ask the plain question, whether that bishops might hold what opinions they would on the gieat or no he adheres to ' the Catholic Faith set forth and confirmed question, provided they were not avowed Arians. Germinius had by the Holy Council at Rimini.' If he had added to the Homoean been a leader of the Homoean party, and it is at least possible formula, which was that the Son is ' like the Father,' the words that his change of front was due to his knowledge that the Em- 'in substance' or 'in all things,' he had fallen into the justly pcror, though he would not eject Homoeans, had no sympathy condemned heresy of Basil of Ancyra. They demand an explicit with them and would allow them no influence. In fact, the statement that he never had said, and never would say, anything smaller the share of conscience, the greater the historical interest of the kind; and warn him that he is gravely suspected, com- of Germinius' action as shewing the decline of Homoean influence plaints of his tcaJiing having been made by certain of his clergy in the West. THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lvii the province. Opposition to the bishops on the pari of a man holding so low a station in the Church was a civil as well as an ecclesiastical offence, and Martin can have expected no other treatment than that which he received, of scourging and expulsion from the province. Hilary was by this time in exile, and Martin turned to Milan, where the heresy of the intruder Auxentius called forth his protests, which were silenced by another expulsion. He next retired to a small island off the Italian coast, where he lived in seclusion till he heard of Hilary's return. He hastened to Rome, so Fortunalus tells us, to meet his friend, but missed him on the way ; and followed him at once to Poitiers. There Hilary gave him a site near the city, on which he founded the first monastery in that region, over which he presided for the rest of Hilary's life and for four years after his death. In the year 371 he was consecrated bishop of Tours, and so continued till his death twenty-five years later. It is clear that Martin was never able to exert any influence over the mind or action of Hilary, whose interests were in an intellectual sphere above his reach. But the courage and tenacity with which Martin held and preached the Faith was certainly inspired to some considerable extent by admiration of Hilary and confidence in his teaching. And the joy which Hilary expresses, as we have seen, in his later Homilies on the Psalms over the rapid spread of Christianity in Gaul, was no doubt occasioned by the earlier triumphs of Martin among the peasantry. The two men were formed each to be the complement of the other. It was the work of Hilary to prove with cogent clearness to educated Christians, that reason as well as piety dictated an acceptance of the Catholic Faith ; the mission of Martin was to those who were neither educated nor Christian, and his success in bringing the Faith home to the lives and consciences of the pagan masses marks him out as one of the greatest among the preachers of the Gospel. Both of them actively opposed Arianism, and both suffered in the conflict. But the confessorship of neither had any perceptible share in promoting the final victory of truth. Their true glory is that they were fellow-labourers equally successful in widely separate parts of the same field; and Hilary is entitled, beyond the honour due to his own achievements, to a share in that of St. Martin, whose merits he discovered and fostered. We have now reached the end of Hilary's life. Sulpicius Severus9 tells us that he died in the sixth year from his return. He had probably reached Poitiers early in the year 361 ; we have seen that the latest event recorded in the fragments of his history must have come to his knowledge early in 367. There is no reason to doubt that this was the conclusion of the history, and no consideration suggests that Sulpicius was wrong in his date. We may therefore assign the death of Hilary, with considerable confidence, to the year 367, and probably to its middle portion. Of the circumstances of his death nothing is recorded. This is one of the many signs that his contemporaries did not value him at his true worth. To them he must have been the busy and somewhat unsuccessful man of affairs; their successors in the next generation turned away from him and his works to the more attractive writings and more commanding characters of Ambrose and Augustine. Yet certainly no firmer purpose or more convinced faith, perhaps no keener intellect has devoted itself to the defence and elucidation of truth than that of Hilary : and it may be that Christian thinkers in the future will find an inspiration of new and fruitful thoughts in his writings. 9 Chron. ii. 45. Ivm INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER II. The Theolocy of St. Hilary of Poitiers. This Chapter offers no more than a tentative and imperfect outline of the theology of St. Hilary; it is an essay, not a monograph. Little attempt will be made to estimate the value of his opinions from the point of view of modem thought ; little will be said about his relation to earlier and contemporary thought, a subject on which he is habitually silent, and nothing about the after fate of his speculations. Yet the task, thus narrowed, is not without its difficulties. Much more attention, it is true, has been paid to Hilary's theology than to the history of his life, and the student cannot presume to dispense with the assistance of the books already written '. But they cannot release him from the necessity of collecting evidence for himself from the pages of Hilary, and of forming his own judgment upon it, for none of them can claim completeness and they differ widely as to the views which Hilary held. There is the further difficulty that a brief statement of a theologian's opinions must be systematic. But Hilary has abstained, perhaps deliberately, from con- structing a system ; the scattered points of his teaching must be gathered from writings composed at various times and with various purposes. The part of his work which was, no doubt, most useful in his own day, his summary in the De Trinitate of the defence against Arianism, is clear and well arranged, but it bears less of the stamp of Hilary's genius than any other of his writings. His characteristic thoughts are scattered over the pages of this great controversial treatise, where the exigencies of his immediate argument often deny him full scope for their development; or else they must be sought in his Commentary on St. Matthew, where they find incidental expression in the midst of allegorical exegesis ; or again, amid the mysticism and exhortation of the Homilies on the Psalms. It is in some of these last that the Christology of Hilary is most completely stated ; but the Homilies were intended for a general audience, and are unsystematic in construction and almost conversational in tone. Hilary has never worked out his thoughts in consistent theological form, and many of the most original among them have failed to attract the attention which they would have received had they been presented in such a shape as that of the later books of the De Trinitate. This desultory mode of composition had its advantages in life and warmth of present interest, and gives to Hilary's writings a value as historical documents which a formal and comprehensive treatise would have lacked. But it seriously increases the difficulty of the present undertaking. It was inevitable that Hilary's method, though he is a singularly consistent thinker, should sometimes lead him into self-contradiction and sometimes leave his meaning in obscurity. In such cases probabilities must be balanced, with due regard to the opinion of former theologians who have studied his writings, and a definite conclusion must be given, though space cannot be found for the considerations upon which it is based. But though the writer may be satisfied that he has, on the whole, fairly represented Hilary's belief, it is impossible that a summary of doctrine can be an adequate reflection of a great teacher's mind. Proportions are altogether changed ; a doctrine once stated and then dis- missed must be set down on the same scale as another to which the author recurs again 1 Those which have been in constant use in the preparation of this chapter have been an excellent article by Th. Fdrster in the ThcologUche Studicn und Kriliktn for 1888, p. 645 ff., and two full and valuable papers by Dr. Baltzer on the Thcologie and Cliristologie of Hilary in the Prog ramm of the Rottweil Gym- nasium for 1879 and 1889 respectively. I have unfortunately not had access to Wirthmullcr's work, Die Lckrc d. hi. Hit. titer die Selbsleiiliinsserung Christi, but the citations in Baltzer and Schwanc give some clue to its contents. The Introduction to the Benedictine edition is useful, though its value is lessened by an evident desire to make Hilary conform to the accepted opinions of a later age. Dorner's great work on the Doctrine oj the Person 0/ Christ, in the English translation, with the Dogmcngesehichtt of Schwane (cd. z, 1S95) and that of Harnack (ed. 3, i3tj j) have also been constantly and profitably consulted. Indebtedness to other works is from time to time acknowledged in the notes. The theology of st. Hilary of poitiers. lix and again with obvious interest. The inevitable result is an apparent coldness and stiffness and excess of method which does Hilary an injustice both as a thinker and as a writer. In the interests of orderly sequence not only must he be represented as sometimes more consistent than he really is,~T3uf the "play of thought, the undeveloped suggestions, often brilliant in their originality, the striking expression given to familiar truths, must all be sacrificed, and with them great part of the pleasure and profit to be derived from his writings. For there are two conclusions which the careful student will certainly reach ; I the one that every statement and argument will be in hearty and scrupulous consonance I with the Creeds, the other that, within this limit, he must not be surprised at any ingenuity ! or audacity of logic or exegesis in explanation and illustration of recognised truths, and especially in the speculative connection of one truth with another. But the evidence that Hilary's heart, as well as his reason, was engaged in the search and defence of truth must be sought, where it will be abundantly found, in the translations given in this volume. The present chapter only purposes to set out, in a very prosaic manner, the conclusions at which his speculative genius arrived, working as it did by the methods of strict logic in the spirit of eager loyalty to the Faith. In his effort to render a reason for his belief Hilary' s, constant appeal is to Scripture ; and he avails himself freely of the thoughts of earlier theo logia ns. But he neveF makes himsg H. their s lave"; he is not the~~avowed adherent of any school, and never cites the na mes of those whose arguments he adopts. These he adjusts to his own system of thought, and presents for acceptance, not on authority, but on their own merits. For Scripture, ho wever, he has an unboun ded reverence. Everything" that he believes, save the" fundamental truth of Theism, of which man has an innate consciousness, being unable to gaze upon the heavens without the conviction that God exists and has His home there 2 , is directly derived from Holy Scripture. Scripture for Hilary means the Septuagint for the Old Testa- ment, the Latin for the New. He was, as we saw, no Hebrew Scholar, and had small respect either for the versions which competed with the Septuagint or for the Latin rendering of the Old Testament, but there is little evidence 3 that he was dissatisfied with the Latin of the New ; in fact, in one instance, whether through' habitual contentment with his Latin or through momentary carelessness in verifying the sense, he bases an argument on a thoroughly false interpretation +. Of his relation to Origen and the literary aspects of his exegetical work, something has been said in the former chapter. Here we must speak of his use of Scripture as the source of truth, and of the methods he employs to draw out its meaning. In Hilary's eyes the two Testaments form one homogeneous revelation, of equal value throughout 5 , and any part of the whole may be used in explanation of any other part. The same title of bcatissimus is given to Daniel and to St. Paul when both are cited in Comiu. in Matt. xxv. 3 ; indeed, he and others of his day seem to have felt that the Saints of the Old Covenant were as near to themselves as those of the New. 1 Not many years had passed since Christians were accustomed to encourage themselves to martyrdom, in default of well-known heroes of their own faith, by the example of Daniel and his companions, or of the Seven Maccabees and their Mother. But Scripture is not only harmonious throughout, as Origen had taught ; it is also never otiose. It never repeats itself, and a significance must be sought not only in the smallest differences of language, but also in the order in which apparent synonyms occur 6 ; in fact, every detail, and every sense 2 Tr. in Ps xxii. 2, 4. 3 As e.g. Trin. vi. 45. 4 St. John v. 44 in Trin. ix. 22, 5 Thus the Book of Baruch, regarded as part of Jeremiah, is cited with the same confidence as Isaiah and the other pro- phets in Trin. v. 39. 6 E.g. Tr. in Ps. cxviii. Alcph. i, exxviii. 12, exxxi. 8. It must be confessed that Hilary's illustrations of the principle are not always fortunate. \i INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. "^ in which every detail may be interpreted, is a matter for profitable enquiry >. Hence, the text of Scripture not only bears, but demands, the most strict and literal interpretation. Hilary's explanation of the words, • My soul is sorrowful even unto death,' in Tract, in Ps. cxli. 8 and Trin. x. 36, is a remarkable instance of his method 8 ; as is the argument from the words of Isaiah, ' We esteemed Him stricken,' that this, so far as it signifies an actual sense of pain in Christ, is only an opinion, and a false one 9. Similarly the language of St. Paul about the treasures of knowledge hidden in Christ is made to prove His omniscience on earth. Whatever is hidden is present in its hiding-place ; therefore Christ could not be ignorant '. But this close adherence to the text of Scripture is combined with great boldness in its interpretation. Hilary does not venture, with Origen, to assert that some passages of Scripture have no literal sense, but he teaches that there are cases when its statements have no meaning in relation to the circumstances in which they were written 2 , and uses this to enforce the doctrine, which he holds as firmly as Origen, that the spiritual meaning is the only one of serious importance 3 . All religious truth is contained in Scripture, and it is our duty to be ignorant of what lies outside it 4 . But within the limits of Scripture the utmost liberty of inference is to be admitted concerning the purpose with which the words were written and the sense to be attached to them. Sometimes, and especially in his later writings, when Hilary was growing more cautious and weaning himself from the influence of Origen, we are warned to be careful, not to read too much of definite dogmatic truth into every passage, to consider the context and occasion s. Elsewhere, but this especially in that somewhat immature and unguarded production, the Commentary on St. Matthew, we find a purpose and meaning, beyond the natural sense, educed by such considerations as that, while all the Gospel is true, its fact s are often so stated as to be a prophecy as well as a history; or that part of an event is sometimes suppressed in the 1... native in order to make the whole more perfect as a prophecy 6 . But he can derive a lesson not merely from what Scripture says but also from the discrepancies between the different texts in which it is conveyed to us. Hilary had learnt from Origen to regard the Septuagint as an independent and inspired authority for the revelation of the Old Testament. Its translators are 'those seventy elders who had a knowledge of the Law and of the Prophets which transcends the limitations and doubtfulness of the letter 7. His confidence in their work, which is not exceeded by that of St. Augustine, encourages him to draw lessons from the differences between the Hebrew and the Septuagint titles of the Psalms. For instance, Psalm cxlii. has been furnished in the Septuagint with a title which attributes it to David when pursued by Absalom. The contents of the Psalm are appropriate neither to the circumstances nor to the date. But this does not justify us in ignoring the title. We must regard the fact that a wrong connection is given to the Psalm as a warning to ourselves not to attempt to discover its historical position, but confine ourselves to its spiritual sense. And this is not all. Another Psalm, the third, is assigned in the Hebrew to the same King in the same distress. But, though this attribution is certainly correct, here also we must follow the leading of the Septuagint, which was led to give a wrong title to one Psalm lest we should attach importance to the correct title of another. In both cases we must fix our attention not on the afflictions of David, but on the sorrows of Christ. Thus, negatively if not positively, the Septuagint must guide our judgment 3 . But Hilary often goes even further, and ventures upon a purely subjective Y- / 7 Thus in Trin. xi. 15, in commenting on Ps. xxii. 6, he puts forward two alternative theories of the generation of worms, only one of which can be true, while both may be false. Cut he uses both, to illustrate two truths concerning our Lord. 8 Cf. also Trin. x. 67. 9 Tr. in Ps. exxxviii. i. 1 Trin. ix. 62. There is a similar argument in § 63 3 E.g. Tr. in Ps. exxv. 1. 3 Cf. Tr. in Ps. cxlii. 1. 4 Tr. in J's. exxxii. 6. 5 E.g. 'Jr. in J's. lxiii. 2 ; Trin. iv, 6 Coiiim. in Matt. xix. 4, xxi. 13. 7 Tr. in J's. cxlii. 1 ; cf. ii. exxxi. 24, exxxiii. 4, cl. I. 8 Similar arguments arc often used ; cf. Jr. in J's. cxlv. 1. THE THEOLOGY OE ST. HILARY OE POITIERS. lxi 7 interpretation, which sometimes gives useful insight into the modes of thought of Caul in the fourth century. For instance, he is thoroughly classical in taking it for granted that the Psalmist's words, ' I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,' cannot refer to the natural feature ; that he can never mean the actual mountains bristling with woods, the naked rocks and pathless precipices and frozen snows'. And even Gregory the Great could not surpass the prosaic grotesqueness with which Hilary declares it impious to suppose that God would feed the young ravens, foul carrion birds ' ; and that the lilies of the Sermon on the Mount must be explained away, because they wear no clothing, and because, as a matter of fact, it is quite possible for men to be more brightly attired than they 2 . Examples of such reasoning, more or less extravagant, might be multiplied from Hilary's exegetical writings; passages in which no allowance is made for Oriental imagery, for poetry or for rhetoric 3. But though Hilary throughout his whole period of authorship ivses the mystical method of interpretation, never doubting that everywhere in Scripture there is a spiritual meaning which can be elicited, and that whatever sense, consistent with truth otherwise ascertained, can be extracted from it, may be extracted, yet there is a manifest increase in sobriety in his later as compared with his earlier writings. From" the riotous profusion of mysticisms in the Commentary on St. Matthew, where, for instance, every character and detail in the incident of St. John Baptist's death becomes a symbol, it is a great advance to the almost Athanasian cautiousness in exegesis of the De Trinitate ; though even here, especially in the early books which deal with the Old Testament, there is some extravagance and a very liberal employ- ment of the method ■>. His reasons, when he gives them, are those adduced in his other writings ; the inappropriateness of the words to the time when they were written, or the plea that reverence or reason bids us penetrate behind the letter. His increasing caution is due to no distrust of the principle of mysticism. Though Hilary was not its inventor, and was forced by the large part played by Old Testament exegesis in the Arian controversy to employ it, whether he would or not s, yet it is certain that his hearty, though not indiscriminate 6 , acceptance of the method led to its general adoption in the West. Tertullian and Cyprian had made no great use of such speculations ; Ir ciireus p robably lia^J[ttle__.infliience. It was the introduction of Origen's thought to Latin Christendom by Hilary and his contemporaries which set the fashion, and none of them can have had such influence as Hilary himself. It is a strange irony of fate that so deep and original a thinker should have exerted his most permanent influence not through his own thoughts, but through this dubious legacy which he handed on from Alexandria to Europe. Yet, within certain limits, it was a sound and, for that age, even a scientific method; and Hilary might at least plead that he never allowed the system to be his master, and that it was a means which enabled him to derive from Scriptures which otherwise, to him, would be unprofitable, some measure of true and valuable instruction. It never moulds his thoughts; at the most, he regards it as a useful auxiliary. No praise can be too high for his wise and sober marshalling not so much of texts as of the collective evidence of Scripture concerning the relation of the Father and the Son in the Dc Trinitate; and if his Christology be not equally convincing, it is not the fault of his method, but of its application 7. 9 Tr. in Ps. exx, 4. 1 lb. cxlvi. 11. 2 Comiii. in Matt. v. 11. 3 E.g. Comm. in Malt, xviii. 2 ; Tr. inPs. cxix. 20, exxxiv. 12, exxxvi. 6, 7 ; Trin. h'Tj?) 4 E.g. Trin. i. 6. 5 The unhesitating use of the Thcophanies of the Old Tes- tament as direct evidence for the divinity of Christ is noteworthy. Similar to the usual proofs for the distinction of Persons within the Trinity, from the alternate use of plural and singular, are the arguments in Tr. in Ps. cxviii., lod, 5, exxvii. 4. 6 It is worth notice that lie makes no use of Origen's mystical interpretation of the Canticles. Silence in such a case is itself a criticism. TComparc such a passage as Trin. x. 24 with his use of the proof-texts against Aiianisni. lxii INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. ■? ^? We cannot wonder that Hilary, who owed his clear dogmatic convictions to a careful and independent study of Scripture, should have wished to lead ethers to the same source of knowledge. Me couples it with the Eucharist as a second Table of the Lord, a public means of grace, which needs, if it is to profit the hearer, the same preparation of a pure heart and life 8 . Attention to the lessons read in church is a primary duty, but private study of Scripture is enforced with equal earnestness 9. It must be for all, as Hilary had found it for himself, a privilege as well as a duty. His sense of the value of Scripture is heightened by his belief in the sacredness of language. Names belong inseparably to the things which they signify; words are themselves a revelation. This is a lesson learnt from Oiigen ; and the false antithesis between the nature and the name of God, of which, according to the Arians, Christ had the latter only, made it of special use to Hilary 1 . But if this high dignity belongs to every statement of truth, there is the less need for technical terms of theology. The rarity of their occurrence in the pages of Hilary has already been mentioned. 'Trinity' 2 is almost absent, and ' Person ' 3 hardly more common ; he prefers, by a turn of language which would scarcely be seemly in English, to speak of the ' embodied ' Christ and of His 'Embodiment,' though Latin theology was already familiar with the 'Incarnation*. 1 In fact, it would seem that he had resolved to make himself independent of technical terms and of such lines of thought as would require them. But he is never guilty of confusion caused by an inadequate vocabulary. He has the literary skill to express in ordinary words ideas which are very remote from ordinary thought, and this at no inordinate length. No one, for instance, has developed the idea of the mutual indwelling of Father and Son more fully and clearly than he; yet he has not found it necessary to employ or devise the monstrous ' circuminsession ' or ' perichoresis ' of later theology. And where he does use terms of current theology, or rather metaphysic, he shews that he is their master, not their slave. The most important idea of this kind which he had to express was that of the Divine substance. The word ' essence ' is entirely rejected 5 ; 'substance' and 'nature' are freely used as synonyms, but in such alternation that both of them still obviously belong to the sphere of literature, and not of science. They are twice used as exact alternatives, for the avoidance of monotony, in parallel clauses of Trin. vi. 18, 19. So also the nature of fire in vii. 29 is not an abstraction; and in ix. 36 fin. the Divine substance and nature are equivalents. These are only a few of many instances 6 . Here, as always, there is an abstention from abstract thoughts and terms, which indicates, on the part of a student of philosophy and of philosophical theology, a deliberate narrowing of his range of speculation. We may illustrate the purpose of Hilary by comparing his method with that of the author of a treatise on Astronomy without Mathematics. But some part of his caution is probably due to his sense of > 8 7V. in Ps. exxvii. 10. 9 E.g. Tr. in Ps. xci. 10, cxviii. lod, 15, exxxiv. 1, exxxv. 1. ' E.g. Trin. vii. 13; and cf. the argument, winch is also Athanasian, of vii. 31." -• Beside the" passages mentioned on p. xxx., it only occurs in the Inslructio Psalmorum, § 13- 3 The translation of the Dc Trinitate in this volume may give a somewhat false impression in this respect. For the sake of conciseness the word Person has been often used in the English where it is absent, and absent designedly in the Latin. The word occurs Trin. iii. 23 in., iv. 42, v. to, 26, vii. 39, 40, and in a few other places. 4 Concorporatio, Comm. in Matt. vi. j ; corforatio, Tr. in Ps. i. 14, ii. 3, and often ; corforatus Dens, Comm. in Matt. iv. 14, Tr. in Ps. Ii. iC ; corf>eralitas, Comm. in Matt. iv. i( (twice)) Instr. Ps. vi. In the /V Trinitatt he usually prefers a periphrasis ;—nssum/ta cart), assumpsit carncm. Corfioratio is used of man's dwelling in a body in T>in. xi. 15, and Dt Mysteriis, cd. Gamurrini, p. 5. 5 It occurs in the De Synodis Cg, but in that work Hilary is writing as an advocate in defence of language used by others, not as the exponent of his own thoughts. It also occurs once or twice in translations from the Greek, probably by another hand than Hilary's ; but from his own authorship it is completely absent. 6 Trin. v. 10, Syn. 69, ' God is One not in Person, but in nature;' Trin. iv. 42, ' Not by oneness of Person but by unity of substance ;' vi. 35, 'the birth of a living Nature from a living Nature.' Often enough the substance or nature of God or Christ is simply a periphrasis. The two natures in the Incarnate Christ are alio mentioned, though, as we shall see, Hilary here A-o avoids a precise nomenclature. THE THEOLOGY OE ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. 1X111 the inadequacy of the terms with which Latin theology was as yet equipped, and of the danger, not only to his readers' faith, but to his own reputation for orthodox)-, which might result from ingenuity in the employment or invention of technical language. Though, as we have seen, the contemplative state is not the ultimate happiness of man, yet the knowledge of God is essential to salvation ? ; man, created in God's image, is by nature capable of, and intended for, such . knowledge* and Christ came to impart it, the necessary condition on the side of humanity being purity of mind 8 , and the result the elevation of man to the life of God. Hilary does not shrink from the emphatic language of the Alexandrian school, which spoke of the 'deification' of man; Clod, he says, was born to be man, in order that man might be born to be God 9. If this end is to be attained, obviously what is accepted as knowledge must be true; hence the supreme wickedness of heresy, which destroys the future of mankind by palming upon them error for truth ; the greater their dexterity the greater, because the more deliberate, their crime. And Hilary was obviously convinced that his opponents had conceived this nefarious purpose. It is not in the language of mere conventional polemics, but in all sincerity, that he repeatedly describes them as liars who cannot possibly be ignorant of the facts which they misrepresent, inventors of sophistical arguments and falsifiers of the text of Scripture, conscious that their doom is sealed, and endeavouring to divert their minds from the thought of future misery by involving others in their own destruction *. He fully recognises the ability and philosophical learning displayed by them ; it only makes their case the worse, and, after all, is merely folly. But it increases the difficulties of the defenders of the Faith. For though man can and must know God, Who, for His part, has revealed Himself, our knowledge ought to consist in a simple acceptance of j the precise terms of Scripture. The utmost humility is necessary; error begins when men grow inquisitive. Our capacity for knowledge, as Hilary is never tired of insisting, is so limited that we ought to be content to believe without defining the terms of our belief. For weak as intellect is, language, the instrument which it must employ, is still less adequate to so great a task 2 . Heresy has insisted upon definition, and the true belief is compelled to follow suit 3'. '"Here again, in the heretical abuse of technical terms and of logical processes, we find a reason for the almost ostentatious simplicity of diction which we often find in Hilary's pages. He evidently believed that it was possible for us to apprehend revealed truth and to profit fully by it, without paraphrase or other explanation. In the case of one great doctrine, as we shall see, no necessities of controversy compelled him to develope his belief; if he had had his way, the Faith should never have been stated in ampler terms than ' I believe in the Holy Ghost.' In a great measure he has succeeded in retaining this simplicity in regard to the doctrine of God. He had the full Greek sense of the divine unity ; there is no suggestion of the possession by the Persons of the Trinity of contrasted or complementary qualities. The revelation he would defend is that of God, One, perfect, infinite, immutable. This absolute God has manifested Himself under the name ' He that is,' to which Hilary constantly recurs. It is only through His own revelation of Himself that God can be known. But here we are faced by a difficulty; our reason is inadequate and tends to be fallacious. The argument from an alogy, which we should naturally use, cannot be a sufficient guide, since it must proceed fr om the fi nite to the infinite. Hilary has set this forth with great force and frequency, and with a "picturesque variety of illustration. Again, our partial glimpses of the truth are often in apparent contradiction ; when this is the case, wc need to be on our guard against the 7 Tr. in Ps. exxxi. 6, 'The supreme achievement of Christ was to render man, instructed in the knowledge of God, worthy to be Cod's dwelling-place ;' cf. ib. % 23. 8 TV. in Ps. cxviii., Aleph,, § 1. •> Trin. x 7. 10; Trin. v. 1, 26, vi. 46 ft. , viii. 3;, 'tivtn vitio co temptation to reject one as incompatible with the other. We must devote an equal attention to each, and believe without hesitation that both are true. The interest of the De Trinitate is greatly heightened by the skill and courage with which Hilary will handle some seeming- paradox, and make the antithesis of opposed infinities conduce to reverence for Him of Whom they are aspects. And he never allows his reader to forget the immensity of his theme ; and here again the skill is manifest with which he casts upon the reader the same awe with which he is himself impressed. Of God as Father H ilary has little that is new to say. He is called Father in Scripture; therefore He is Father and necessarily has a Son. And conversely the fact that Scripture speaks of God the Son is proof of the fatherhood. In fact, the name ' Son ' contains a revelation so necessary for the times that it has practically banished that of 'the Word,' which we should have expected Hilary, as a disciple of Origen, to employ by preference t. But since faith in the Father alone is insufficient for salvations, and is, indeed, not only insufficient but actually false, because it denies His fatherhood in ignoring the consubstantial Son, Hilary's attention is concentrated upon thej-e lation between these two Persons. This relation is one of eternal nuipial j ndwelling, or ' perichoresis,' as it has been called, rendered possible by Their oneng££_ of nature and by the infi nity of Both. The thought is worked out from such passages as Isaiah xlv. 14, St. John xiv. iT, with great cogency and completeness, yet always with due stress laid on the incapacity of man to comprehend its immensity. Hilary advances from tins scriptural position to the profound conception of the di vine self-consciousnes s as consisti ng in-3P hcir mu t ua 4-recog nition . Eagk- occs H -mi^ elf in His perfect image, which must be c oeternal w jth Himself. In Hilary this is only a hint, one of the many thoughts which the urgency of the conflict with Arianism forbade him to expand. But Dorner justly sees in it 'a kind of speculative construction of the doctrine of the Trinity, out of the idea of the divine self- consciousness 6 .' The Arian controversy was chiefly waged over the question of the eternal generation of the Son. By the time that Hilary began to write, every text of Scripture which could be made applicable to the point in dispute had been used to the utmost. There was little or nothing that remained to be done in the discovery or combination of passages. Of that controversy Athanasius was the hero ; the arguments which he used and those which he refuted are admirably set forth in the introduction to the translation of his writings in this series. In Avriting the De Trinitate, so far as it dealt directly with the original controversy, it was neither possible nor desirable that Hilary should leave the beaten path. His object was to provide his readers with a compendious statement of ascertained truth for their own guidance, and with an armoury of weapons which had been tried and found effective in the conflicts of the day. It would, therefore, be superfluous to give in this place a detailed account of his reasonings concerning the generation of the Son, nor would such an account be of any assistance to those who have his writings in their hands. Hilary's treatment of the Scriptural evidence is very complete, as was, indeed, necessary in a work which was intended as a handbook for practical use. The Father alone is unbegotten ; the Son is truly the Son, neither created nor adopted. The Son is the Creator of the worlds, the Wisdom of God, Who alone knows the Father, Who manifested God to man in the various Theophanies of the Old Testament. His birth is without parallel, inasmuch as other births imply a previous non-existence, while that of the Son is from eternity. For the generation on the part of the Father and the birth on the part of the Son are not connected as by 4 Deus Verbutn often ; Verbum alone rarely, if ever. Dorner, with his iteration of Logos,' gives an altogether false impression of Hilary's vocabulary. 5 Trin. i. 17 ami often 6 Doctrine of the Person of Christ, I. ii. p. 302, English translation. The passages to which he refers are C0111111. in Matt. xi. 12 ; Tr. in Vs. xci. 6 ; Trin. ii. 3, ix. 69. There is a good, though brief, statement of this view in Mason's Faith 0/ the Gospel, p. 56. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lxv a temporal sequence of cause and effect, but exactly coincide in a timeless eternity i. Hilary repudiates the possibility of illustrating this divine birth by sensible analogies ; it is beyond our understanding as it is beyond time. Nor can wc wonder at this, seeing that our own birth is to us an insoluble mystery. T he eternal birth of the Son is the ex- })tessio n of the et ernal nature of God. It is the nature of the One that He should be Father, of the Other that He should be Son ; this nature is co-eternal with Themselves, and therefore the One is co-eternal with the Other. Hence Athanasius had drawn the conclusion that the Son is ' by nature and not by will 8 ; not that the will of God is contrary to His nature, but that (if the words may be used) there was no scope for its exercise in the generation of the Son, which came to pass as a direct consequence of the Divine nature. Such language was a natural protest against an Arian abuse ; but it was a departure from earlier precedent and was not accepted by that Cappadocian school, more true to Alex- andrian tradition than Athanasius himself, with which Hilary was in closest sympathy. In their eyes the generation of the Son must be an act of God's will, if the freedom of Om- nipotence, for which they were jealous, was to be respected; and Hilary shared their scruples. Not only in the De Synodis but in the De Trinitatc^ he assigns the birth of the Son to the omnipotence, the counsel and will of God acting in co-operation with His nature. This two-fold cause of birth is peculiar to the Son ; all other beings owe their existence simply to the power and will, not to the nature of God '. Such being the relation between Father and Son, it is obvious that They cannot differ in nature. The word ' birth,' by which the relation is described, indicates the transmission of nature from parent to offspring; and this word is, like 'Father' and 'Son,' an essential part of the revelation. The same divine nature or substance exists eternally and in equal perfection in Both, un- begotten in the Father, begotten in the Son. In fact, the expression, ' Only-begotten God,' may be called Hilary's watchword, with such 'peculiar abundance 2 ' does it occur in his writings, as in those of his Cappadocian friends. But, though the Son is the Image of the Father, Hilary in his maimer thought, when free from the influence of his Asiatic allies, is careful to avoid using the inadequate and perilous term ' likeness ' to describe the relation 3 . Such being the birth, and such the unity of nature, the Son must be very God. This is proved by all the usual passages of the Old Testament, from the Creation onwards. These are used, as by the other Fathers, to prove that the Son has not the name only, but the reality, of Godhead ; the reality corresponding to the nature. All things were jnade thro u^hJjmT^ut_oLnothing ; therefore He is Almighty as the Father is Almighty. , ; If man is made in the image of Both, if one Spirit belongs to Both, there can be no difference of nature between the Two. But They are not Two as possessing one nature, like human father and son, while living separate lives. God is One, with a Divi nity undivided an d indiv i sible-* ; and Hilary is never weary of denying the Arian charge that his creed involved the worship of two Gods. Nojinajfigiejjrom creajted_things ca n explain this unity. Tree and branch, fire and heat, source and stream can only illustrate Their inseparable co-existence ; such comparisons, if pressed, lead inevitably to error. The true unity of Father and Son is deeper than this ; deeper also than any unity, however perfect, of will with will. For it is a n eternal mutual indwellin g, Each perfectly enn-c- sponding with and comprehending and containin g the Other, a ncTHimself in the Other ; 7 Trin. xii. 21, ' the birth is in the generation and the genera- lion in the birth.' 8 Discourses against the Arians, iii. 58 ff. ; see Robertson's notes in the Athanasius volume of this series, p. 426. 9 E.g. Syn. 35, 37, 59, Trin. iii. 4, vi. 21, viii. 54. 1 Cf. Baltrer, Thcologied. hi. Hit. p. 19 f. 2 Hort, Tivo Dissertations, p. 21, and cf. p. xvi., above. vor.. IX. 3 It constantly appears, though with all due safeguards, in the De Synodis, where sympathy as well as policy impelled him to approximate to the language used by his friends. Similarly in Trin. iii. 23, he argues, from the admitted likeness, that there can be no difference. But, as we saw, this part of the De T?ini- tate is probably an early work, and does not represent Hilary's later thought. 4 Trin. v. 38. lxvi INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. and this not after the manner of earthly commingling of substances or exchange of pro- pel ties. The only true comparison that can be made is with the union between Christ, in virtue of His humanity, and the believer 5 ; such is the union, in virtue of the Godhead, between Father and Son. And this unity extends inevitably to will and action. Since the Father is actin g in al l that-tbe--Sori__does, the Son is a^tm£_irv- all -Jh^JhaJFathjej^d^T; seen Me hath seen the Father? This doctrine reconciles all our Lord's statements in the Gospel of St. John concerning His own and His Father's work. But, notwithstanding this unity, there is a true numerical duality of Person. Sabellius, we must remember, had held for two generations the pie-eminence among heretics. To the Greek-speaking world outside Egypt the error which he and Paul of Samosata had taught, that God is one Person, was still the most dangerous of falsehoods ; the supreme victory of truth had not been won in their eyes when Arius was condemned at Nicrea, but when Paul was deposed at Antioch. The Nicene leaders had certainly counted the cost when they adopted as the test of orthodoxy the same word which Paul had used for the inculcation of error. But the homooitsioji, however great its value as a permanent safeguard of truth, was the immediate cause of alienation and suspicion. And not only did it make the East misunderstand the West, but it furnished the Arians with the most effective of instruments for widening the breach between the two forces opposed to them. They had an excuse for calling their opponents in Egypt and the West by the name of Sabellians, the very name most likely to engender distrust in Asia 6 . Hilary, who could enter with sympathy into the Eastern mind and had learnt from his own treatment at Seleucia how strong the feeling was, labours with untiring patience to dissipate the prejudice. There is no Arian plea against which he argues at greater length. The names 'Father' and 'Son,' being parts of the revelation, are convincing proofs of distinction of Person as well as of unity of nature. They prove that the nature is the same, but possessed after a different manner by Each of the Two ; by the One as ingenerate, by the Other as begotten. The word ' Image,' also a part of the revelation, is another proof of the distinction; an object and its reflection in a mirror are ob- viously not one thing. Again, the distinct existence of the Son is proved by the fact that He has free volition of His own ; and by a multitude of passages of Scripture, many of them absolutely convincing, as for instance, those from the Gospel of St. John. But these two Persons, though one in nature, are nol cqu.aLin dignity. The Father is greater than the Son ; greater not merely as compared to the incarnate Christ, but as compared to the Son, be- gotten from eternity. This is not simply by the prerogative inherent in all paternity; it is be- cause the Father is self-existent, Himself the Source of all being 7 . With one of his happy phrases Hilary describes it as an inferiority generatione, non gcnere z ; the Son is one in kind or nature with the Father, though inferior, as the Begotten, to the Unbegotten. But this inferiority is not to be so construed as to lessen our belief in His divine attributes. For instance, when He addresses the Father in prayer, this is not because He is subordinate, but because He wishes to honour the Fatherhood 9; and, as Hilary argues at great length ', the end, when God shall be all in all, is not to be regarded as a surrender of the Son's power, in the sense of loss. It is a mysterious final state of permanent, willing submission to the Father's will, into which He enters by the supreme expression of an obedience which has never failed. Again, our Lord's language in St. Mark xiii. 32, must not be taken as signifying ignorance on the part of the Son of His Father's purpose. For, according to St. Paul (Col. ii. 3), in Him are hid all the 4 5 Tr'ui. viii. 13 ff. ' ( 1'. Snip Sev., Chron.W. 42 foi the Eastern suspicion that the West held a trionyiitti ««/■»;— one Person under three names. Sulpii ius ascribes it to Arian slander, but its causes lay deeper than this. 7 This was the doctrine of all the earlier theologians, «oon to be displaced in the stress of controversy by the opinion that the inferiority concerns the Son only as united with man. Sec the citations in Westcott's Cos/cl of St. John, additional note to xiv. 28. 8 TV. in rs. exxxviii. 17. 9 lb. cxli. 6. 1 Trii^ xi ?i ff , on 1 Cor XV 21 IT. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. Ixvn treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and therefore He must know the day and hour of judg- ment. He is ignorant relatively to us, in the sense that He will not betray His Father's secret 2 . Whether or no it be possible in calmer times to maintain that the knowledge and the ignorance are complementary truths which finite minds cannot reconcile, we cannot wonder that Hilary, ever on the watch against apparent concessions to Arianism, should in this instance have abandoned his usual method of balancing against each other the apparent contraries. His reasoning is, in any case, a striking proof of his intense conviction of the co-equal Godhead of the Son. Such is Hilary's argument, very briefly stated. We may read almost all of it, where Hilary himself had certainly read it, in the Discourses against the Arians and elsewhere in the writings of Athanasius. How far, however, he was borrowing from the latter must remain doubtful, as must the question as to the originality of Athanasius. For the con- troversy was universal, and both of these great writers had the practical purpose of col- lecting the best arguments out of the multitude which were suggested in ephemeral literature or verbal debate. Their victory, intellectual as well as moral, over their ad- versaries was decisive, and the more striking because it was the Arians who had made the attack on ground chosen by themselves. The authority of Scripture as the final court of appeal was their premiss as well as that of their opponents ; and they had selected the texts on which the verdict of Scripture was to be based. Out of their own mouth they were condemned, and the work done in the fourth century can never need to be re- peated. It was, of course, an unfinished work. As we have seen, Hilary concerns him- self with two Persons, not with three ; and since he states the contrasted truths of plurality and unity without such explanation of the mystery as the speculative genius of Augustine was to supply, he leaves, in spite of all his efforts, a certain impression of excessive dualism. But these defects do not lessen the permanent value of his work. Indeed, we may even assert that they, together with some strange speculations and many instances of wild inter- pretation, which are, however, no part of the structure of his argument and do not affect its solidity, actually enhance its human and historical interest. The De Trinitate remains ' the most perfect literary achievement called forth by the Arian controversy 3.' Hiriierto we have been considering the relations within the Godhead of Father and Son, together with certain characters which belong to the Son in virtue of His eternal birth. We now come to the more original part of Hilary's teaching, which must be treated in greater detail. Till now he has spoken only of the Son ; he now comes to speak of Christ, the name which the Son bears in relation to the world. We have seen that Hilary regards the_Son as the Creator''. This was proved for him, as for Athanasius, by the passage, Proverbs viii. 22, which they read according to the Septuagint, ' The Lord hath created Me for the beginning of His ways for His Works 5 .' These words, round which the controversy raged, were interpreted by the orthodox as implying that at the time, and for the purpose, of creation the Father assigned new functions to the Son as His representative. The gift of these functions, the exercise of which called into existence- orders of being inferior to God, marked in Hilary's eyes a change so definite and important in the activity of the Son that it deserved to be called a second birth, not ineffable like the eternal birth, but strictly analogous to the Incarnation. This last was a creation, which brought Him within the sphere of created humanity; the creation of Wisdom for the beginning of God's ways had brought Him, though less closely, into the same relation 6 , and L tAs, > *****" ■ 2 Trill, ix. 58 ff. 3 Bardcnhcwer, Patrologic, p. 377. ■ « 4 This is one of Hilary's many reminiscences of Origen. Athanasius brought the Father into direct connection with the world; cf. Harnack, Dogmengesch. ii. 206 (ed. 3). 5 Trin. xii. 35 ff. The passage is treated at much greater length in Athanasius' Discourses against the Arians, ii. 18 fir. , where see Robertson's notes. 6 Trin. xii. 45; at the Incarnation Christ is 'created in the body,' and this is connected with His creation for the beginning of the ways of God. f 2 1XV111 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. the Incarnation is the completion of what was begun in preparation for the creation of the world. Crgati on js the mode b y which finite being begins, and the beginning of each stage in the connection betwe en the infinite Son and His creatures is 'caTTecT, from the one- joint of vi ew, a creation, from flYe other,- a~ "birth": We" cannot ""rariTo" see here an anticipation of the opinion tKaT^^ttre—true PfoFevangelium is the revelation of Creation, or in other words that the Incarnation was independent of the Fall ?,' for the Incarnation is a step in the one continuous divine progress from the Creation to the final consummation of all things, and has not sin for its cause, but is part of the original counsel of God 8 . Together with this new office the Son receives a new name. Henceforth Hilary calls Him Christ ; He is Christ in relation to the world, as He is Son in relation to the Father. From the beginning of time, then, the Son becomes Christ and stands in immediate relation j to the world ; it is in and through Christ that God is the Author of all things 9, and the title of Creator strictly belongs to the Son. This beginning of time, we must remember, is hidden in no remote antiquity. The world had no mysterious past ; it came into exist- ence suddenly at a date which could be fixed with much precision, some 5,600 years before Hilary's day ', and had undergone no change since then. Before that date there had been nothing outside the Godhead ; from that time forth the Son has stood in constant relation to the created world. Christ, for so we must henceforth call Him, has not only sustained in bein°- the universe which He created, but has also imparted to men a steadily increasing knowledge of God. For such knowledge, we remember, man was made, and his salvation depends upon its possession. All the Theophanies of the Old Testament are such revelations by Him of Himself; and it was He that spoke by the mouth of Moses and the Prophets. But how- ever significant and valuable this Divine teaching and manifestation might be, it was not complete in itself, but was designed to prepare men's minds to expect its fulfilment in the Incarnation. Just as the Law was preliminary to the Gospel, so the appearances of Christ in human form to Abraham and to others were a foreshadowing of the true humanity which He was to assume. They were true revelations, as far as they went; but their purpose was not simply to impart so much knowledge as they explicitly conveyed, but also to lead men on to expect more, and to expect it in the very form in which it ulti- mately came 2 . For His self-revelation in the Incarnation was but the treading a»ain of a familiar path. He had often appeared, and had often spoken, by His own mouth or by that of men whom He had inspired ; and in all this contact with the world His one object had been to bestow upon mankind the knowledge of God. With the same object He became incarnate ; the full revelation was to impart the perfect knowledge. He became man, Hilary says, in order that we might believe Him ; — ' to be a Witness from anion? us to the things of God, and by means of weak flesh to proclaim God the Father to our weak and carnal selves 3.' Here again we see the continuity of the Divine purpose, the fulfilment of the counsel which dates back to the beginning of time. If man had not sinned, he would still have needed the progressive revelation; sin has certainly modified Christ's course upon earth, but was not the determining cause of the Incarnation. The doctrine of the Incarnation, or Embodiment as Hilary prefers to call it, is presented very fully in the De Trinitaie, and with much originality. The Godhead of Christ is secured by His identity with the eternal Son and by the fact that at the very time of His humilia- 7 Wcstcott, essay on 'The Gospel of Cieation,' in his edition of St. John's Epistles, where, however, Hilary is not mentioned. 8 Cf. Trin. xi. 49. 9 Trin. ii. C), xii. 4, &c. lie is also often named Jesns Christ in this connection, e.g. Trin. iv. 6. ' According to Eusebius' computation, which Hilary would probably accept without dispute, there were 5,228 years from the Creation to our Lird's commencement of His mission in the :5th year of Tiberius, a.d. 29. 2 E.g. Trin. iv. 27 ; Tr. in Ps. Ixviii. 15. 3 Trin. iii. 9 ; cf. St. John xvii. 3. fv/&- THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lxix tion upon earth He was continuing without interruption His divine work of maintaining the existence of the worlds *. Indeed, by a natural protest against the degradation which the Arians would put upon Him, it is the glory of Christ upon which Hilary lays chief stress. And this is not the moral glory of submission and self-sacrifice, but the visible glory of miracles attesting the Divine presence. In the third book of the Di Trinitate the miracles of Cana and of the feeding of the five thousand, the entrance into the closed room where the disciples were assembled, the darkness and the earthquake at the Crucifixion, are the proofs urged for His Godhead ; and the wonderful circumstances surrounding the birth at Bethlehem are similarly employed in book ii. s Sound as the reasoning is, it is typical of a certain unwillingness on Hilary's part to dwell upon the self-surrender of Christ ; he prefers to think of Him rather as the Revealer of God than as the Redeemer of men. But, apart from this preference, he constantly insists that the Incarnation has caused neither loss nor change of the Divine nature in Christ 6 , and proves the point by the same words of our Lord which had been used to demonstrate the eternal Sonship. And the assump- tion of flesh lessens His power as little as it degrades His nature. For though it is, in one aspect, an act of submission to the will of the Father, it is, in another, an exertion of His own omnipotence. No inferior power could appropriate to itself an alien nature ; only God could strip Himself of the attributes of Godhead 7 . But the incarnate Christ is as truly man as He is truly God. We have seen that He is 'created in the body'; and Hilary constantly insists that His humanity is neither fictitious nor different in kind from ours 8 . We must therefore consider what is the con- stitution of man. He is, so Hilary teaches, a physically composite being ; the elements of which his body is composed are themselves lifeless, and man himself is never fully alive 9. According to this physiology, the father is the author of the child's body, the maternal function being altogether subsidiary. It would seem that the mother does nothing more than protect the embryo, so giving it the opportunity of growth, and finally bring the child to birth \ And each human soul is separately created, like the universe, out of nothing. Only the body is engendered ; the soul, wherein the likeness of man to God consists, has a nobler origin, being the immediate creation of God 2 . Hilary does not hold, or at least does not attach importance to, the tripartite division of man ; for the purposes of his philosophy we consist of soul and body. We may now proceed to consider his theory of the Incarnation. This is based upon the Pauline conception of the first and second Adam. Each of these was created, and the two acts of creation exactly correspond. Christ, the Creator, made clay into the first Adam, who therefore had an earthly body. He made Himself into the second Adam, and therefore has a heavenly Body. To this end He descended from heaven and entered into the Virgin's womb. For, in accord- ance with Hilary's principle of interpretation 3, the word ' Spirit ' must not be regarded as necessarily signifying the Holy Ghost, but one or other of the Persons of the Trinity as the context may require ; and in this case it means the Son, since th e qiiestJQiT_js_nfj'" act_oX_crejtfu^ i _and He, and none other, is the Cre ator. Moreover, the correspondence between the two Adams would be as effectually broken were the Holy Ghost the Agent in the conception, as it would be were Christ's body engendered and not created. Thus 4 Trin. ii. 25 and often. 5 Trin. ii. 27. The same conclusion is constantly drawn in the Com/it. in Matt. 6 E.g. Trin. ix. 4, 14, 51 ; Tr. in Ps. ii. 11, 25. 7 Trin. ii. 26, xii. 6, &c. 8 E.g. Tr. in Ps. exxxviii. 3. 9 This, in contrast with God, Who is Life, is proved by the fact that certain bodily growths can be removed without our being conscious of the operation ; Trin. vii. 28. 1 Cf. Trin. vii. 28, x. 15, 16. Similarly in the Eumeiiidcs 637, /Eschylus makes Apollo excuse Orestes' murder of Clyta;m- nestra on the ground that the mother is not the parent, but only the nurse of the germ. This is contrary to Aristotle's teaching; VEschylus and Hilary evidently represent a rival current of ancient opinion. - Trin. x. 20. In Tr. in Ps. cxviii. , loci, 6, 7, this thought is developed. Man has a double origin. First, he is made after the likeness of God. This is the soul, which is immaterial and has no resemblance and owes no debt, as of effect to cause, to any other nature (i.e. substance) than God. It is not His like- ness, but is after His likeness. Secondly, there is the body, composed of earthly matter. 3 Trin. ii. 3of., viii. 23 f. lxa INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. He is Himself not only the Author but (if the word may be used) the material of His own body 4 ; the language of St. John, that the Word became flesh, must be taken literally. It would be insufficient to say that the Word took, or united Himself to, the flesh s. But this creation of the Second Adam to be true man is not our only evidence of His humanity. We have seen that in Hilary's judgment the mother has but a secondary share in her offspring. That share, whatever it be, belongs to the Virgin ; she contributed to His growth and to His coming to birth 'everything which it is the nature of her sex to impart 6 .' But though Christ is constantly said to have been born of the Virgin, He is habitually called the 'Son of Man,' not the Son of the Virgin, nor she the Mother of God. Such language would attribute to her an activity and an importance inconsistent with Hilary's theory. For no portion of her substance, he distinctly says, was taken into the substance of her Son's human body • \ and elsewhere he argues that St. Paul's words 'made of a woman' are deliberately chosen to describe Christ's birth as a creation free from any commingling with existing humanity 8 . But the Virgin has an essential share in the fulfilment of prophecy. For though Christ without her co-operation could have created Himself as Man, yet He would not have been, as He was fore-ordained to be, the Son of Man o. And since He holds that the Virgin performs every function of a mother, Hilary avoids that Valentinian heresy according to which Christ passed through the Virgin ' like water through a pipe V for He was Himself the Author of a true act of creation within her, and, when she had fulfilled her office, was born as true flesh. Again, Hilary's clear sense of the eternal personal pre-existence of the Word saves him from any contact with the Monarchianism combated by Hippolytus and Tertullian, which held that the Son was the Father under another aspect. Indeed, so secure docs he feel himself that he can venture to employ Monarchian theories, now rendered harmless, in explanation of the mysteries of the Incarnation. For we cannot fail to see a connection between his opinions and theirs ; and it might seem that, confident in his wider knowledge, he has borrowed not only from the arguments used by Tertullian against the Monarchian Praxeas, but also from those which Tertullian assigns to the latter. Such reasonings, we know, had been very prevalent in the West; and Hilary's use of certain of them, in order to turn their edge by showing that they were not inconsistent with the fundamental doctrines of the Faith 2 , may indicate that Monarchianism was still a real danger. Thus the Son becomes flesh, and that by true maternity on the Virgin's part. But man is more than flesh ; he is soul as well, and it is the soul which makes him man instead of matter. The soul, as we saw, is created by a special act of God at the beginning of the separate existence of each human being ; and Christ, to be true man and not merely true flesh, created for Himself the human soul which was necessary for true humanity. He had borrowed from the Apollinarians, consciously no doubt, their interpretation of one of their favourite passages, 'The Word became flesh'; here again we find an argument of heretics rendered harmless and adopted by orthodoxy. For the strange Apollinarian * Trin. x. i6, caro nan aliunde originem sumpscrat quam ex Vcrbo, and ib. 15, 18, 25. Dorncr, I. ii., p. 403, n. 1, points out that this is exactly the teaching of Gregory of Nyssa. 5 This view that the conception by the Holy Glicst means conception by the Son is consistently held by Hilary throughout his writings. It appears in the earliest of them; in Co/11111, in Mall. ii. 5, Christ is ' born of a woman ; . . . made llcsh through the Word.' So in Trin. ii. 24, lie is ' born of the Virgin and of the Holy Ghost, Himself ministering to Himself in this oper- ation. . . . By His own, that is God's, overshadowing power He sowed for Himself the beginnings of His body and ordained that His flc.h should commence to exist ;' and Trin. x. 1G. 6 Trin. X. 16; cf. it. 17. In the Instriulio Tsaliuoruin, % 6, he speaks in more usual language ; — adventus Domini ex virgin! in hoiiiincm firocrcandi, and so also in some other passages. Dorner's view (I. ii. 403 f. and note 74, p. 533) differs from that here taken. Hut he is influenced (see especially p. 404) by the desire to save Hilary's consistency rather than to state his actual opinion. And Hilary was too early in the field, too anxiously employed in feeling his way past the pitfalls of heresy, to escape the danger of occasional inconsistency. 7 Trin. iii. 19, pcr/cclum ipsa de suis non iiniiiinuia gent* ravit. So ii. ii. 25, unigtniius Dcus .... Virginia uttro in- serins accrescil. He grew there, but nothing more. In I'ir- ginem exactly corresponds to ex Virginc. 8 Trin. xii. 50 ; it would be a watering of the sense to regard coiiiniixlio in this passage as simply equivalent to coitio. 9 Trin. x. 16. ' Irenaeus, i. 1, 13. 2 He often and emphatically repudiates the use which the Monarchians made of them, e.g. Trin. iv. 4. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lxxi denial to Christ of a human soul, and therefore of perfect manhood, is -not only expressly contradicted \ but repudiated on every page by the contrary assumption on which all Hilary's arguments are based. Christ, then, is 'perfect man', of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting,' for Whom the Virgin has performed the normal functions of maternity. But there is one wide and obvious difference between Hilary's mode of handling the matter and that with which we are familiar. His view concerning the mother's office forbids his laying stress upon our Lord's inheritance from her. Occasionally, and without emphasis, he mentions our Lord as the Son of David, or otherwise introduces His human ancestry s, but he never dwells upon the subject. He neither bases upon this ancestry the truth, nor deduces from it the character, of Christ's humanity. Such is Hilary's account of the facts of the Incarnation. In his teaching there is no doubt error as well as defect, but only in the mode of explanation, not in the doctrine explained. It will help us to do him justice if we may compare the theories that have been framed concerning another great doctrine, that of the Atonement, and remember that the strangely diverse speculations of Gregory the Great and of St. Anselm profess to account for the same facts, and that, so far as definitions of the Church are concerned, we are free to accept one or other, or neither, of the rival explanations. Christ, then, Who had been perfect God from eternity, became perfect Man by His self-wrought act of creation. Thus there was an approximation between God and man ; man was raised by God, Who humbled Himself to meet Him. On the one hand the Virgin was sanctified in preparation for her sacred motherhood 6 ; on the other hand there was a condescension of the Son to our low estate. The key to this is found by Hilary in the language of St. Paul. Christ emptied Himself of the form of God and took the form of a servant ; this is a revelation as decisive as the same Apostle's words concerning the first and the second Adam. The form of God, wherein the Son is to the Father as the exact image reflected in a mirror, the exact impression taken from a seal, belongs to Christ's very being. He could not detach it from Himself, if He would, for it is the property of God to be eternally what He is ; and, as Hilary constantly reminds us, the continuous existence of creation is evidence that there had been no break in the Son's divine activity in maintain- ing the universe which He had made. W hile He was in t he cradle Fie uph ghjjJiej yprld s 7 . Yet, in some real sense, Christ emptied Himself of this form of God 8 . It was necessary that He should do so if manhood, even the sinless manhood created by Himself for His own Incarnation, was to co-exist with Godhead in His one Person 9. This is stated as distinctly as is the correlative fact that He retained and exercised the powers and the majesty of His nature. Thus it is clear that, outside the sphere of His work for men, the form and the nature of God remained unchanged in the Son ; while within that sphere the form, though not the nature, was so affected that it could truly be said to be laid aside. But when we come to Hilary's explanation of this process, we can only acquit him of incon- sistency in thought by admitting the ambiguity of his language. In one group of passages lie recognises the self-emptying, but minimises its importance ; in another he denies that our Lord could or did empty Himself of the form of God. And again, his definitions of the word ' form ' are so various as to be actually contradictory. Yet a consistent ^ pOw 3 E.g. T>i)t. x. 22 in. The human soul is clearly intended. Schwane, ii. 268, justly praises Hilary for greater accuracy than his contemporaries in laying stress upon each of the constituent elements of Christ's humanity, and especially upon the soul ; in this respect following Tcrtullian and Origen. ■t In Trin. x. 21 f. is an argument analogous to that of the De Synodis concerning the Godhead. Christ is Man because He is perfectly like man, just as in the Homceusian argument He is God because He is perfectly like God. 5 E.g. Comin. in Matt. i. ; Tr. in Ps. Ixviii. ig, 6 Trin. ii. 26. 7 lb. viii. 45, 47, ix. 14, &c. 8 This 'evacuation' or 'exinanition ' is represented in Tr, in Ps. Ixviii. 4 by the more precise metaphor of a vessel drained of its liquid contents. 9 Hilary has devoted his Homily on Psalm Ixviii. to this subject. In § 25 he asks, ' How could He exist in the form of man while remaining in the form of God?' There are many equally emphatic statements throughout his writings. Ixxn INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. sense, and one exceedingly characteristic of Hilary, can be derived from a comparison of his statements ■ ; and in judging him we must remember that we have no systematic exposition of his views, but must gather them not only from his deliberate reasonings, but sometimes from homilctical amplifications of Scripture language, composed for edification and without the thought of theological balance, and sometimes from incidental sayings, thrown out in the course of other lines of argument. To the minimising statements belongs I lis description of the evacuation as a 'change of apparel 2 ,' and his definition of the word 'form' as meaning no more than 'face' or ' appearance V as also his insistence from time to time upon the permanence of this form in Christ, not merely in His supramundane relations, but as the Son of Man ■>. On the other hand Hilary expressly declares that the ' concurrence of the two forms 5 ' is impossible, they being mutually exclusive. This repre- sents the higher form, that of God, as something more than a dress or appearance which could be changed or masked ; and stronger still is the language used in the Homily on Psalm lxviii. There (§ 4) he speaks of Christ being exhausted of His heavenly nature, this being used as a synonym for the form of God, and even of His being emptied of His substance. But it is probable that the Homily has descended to us, without revision by its author, in the very words which the shorthand writer took down. This mention of 'substance' is unlike Hilary's usual language, and the antithesis between the substance which the Son had not, because He had emptied Himself of it, and the substance which He had, because He had assumed it, is somewhat infelicitously expressed. The term must certainly not be taken as the deliberate statement of Hilary's final opinion, still less as the decisive passage to which his other assertions must be accommodated; but it is at least clear evidence that Hilary, in the maturity of his thought, was not afraid to state in the strongest possible language the reality and completeness of the evacuation. The reconciliation of these apparently contradictory views concerning Christ's relation to the form of God can only be found in Hilary's idea of the Incarnation as a ' dispensation,' or series of dispensations. The word and the thought are borrowed through Tertullian 6 from the Greek ' economy ' ; but in Hilary's mind the notion of Divine reserve has grown till it has become, we might almost say, the dominant element of the conception. This self-emptying is a dispensation ?, whereby the incarnate Son of God appears to be, what He is not, destitute of the form of God. For this form is the glory of God, concealed by our Lord for the purposes of His human life, yet held by Hilary, to a greater extent, perhaps, than by any other theologian, to have been present with Him on earth. In words which have a wider application, and must be considered hereafter, Hilary speaks of Christ as 'emptying Himself and hiding Himself within Himself 8 .' Concealment has a great part to play in Hilary's theories, and is in this instance the only explanation consistent with his doctrinal position 9. Thus the Son made possible the union of humanity with Himself. He 'shrank from God into man * ' by an act not only of Divine power, but of personal Divine will. He Who did this thing could not cease to be what He had been before ; hence His very deed in submitting Himself to the change is evidence of His unchanged continuity of existence 2 . ' Baltzer and Schwane have been followed in this matter, in opposition to Dorncr. 2 Trin. ix. 3S, habitus demutatio, and similarly /'/>. 14. 3 TV. in Ts. lxviii. 25. * E.g. Trin. viii. 45. 5 Trin. ix. 14, eoncursus uiriusgut forma, 6 It is very characteristic that it lies outside Cyprian's voca- bulary and range of ideas. 7 Trin. ix. 38 /«. , and especially id, 39. The unity of glory departed through Ilis obedience in the Dispensation. 8 Trin. xi. 48 ; cf. the end of this section and xii. 6. 9 Cf. Baltzer, Christologie, p. 10 f. , Schwane, p. 272 f. Other explanations which have been suggested are quite inadmissible. Dorner, p. 407, takes the passage cited above about 'substance' too seriously, and wavers between the equally impossible inter- pretations of ' countenance ' and 'personality.' FSrster(I.C. p. 659) understands the word to mean ' mode of existence." Wirthmuller, cited by Schwane, p. 273, has the courage to regard 'form of God' and 'form of a servant' as equivalent to Divinity and humanity. 1 Trin, xii. 6, decedtrt c.x Deo in hominciit. Perhaps it should be decider e, as in Jr. in Ts. lxviii. 4. 2 Tr. in Ps. lxviii. 25. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. ixxm And furthermore, His assumption of the servant's form was not accomplished by a single act. His wearing of that form was one continuous act of voluntary self-repression 3, and the events of His life on earth bear frequent witness to His possession of the powers of God. Thus in Him God is united with man ; these two natures form the ' elements ' or 'parts' of one Person *. The Godhead is superposed upon the manhood; or, as Hilary prefers to say, the manhood is assumed by Christ 5, And these two natures are not confused 6 , but simultaneously coexist in Him as the Son of Man 7. There are not two Christs 8 , nor is the one Christ a composite Being in such a sense that He is intermediate in kind between God and Man. He can speak as God and can also speak as Man ; in the Homilies on the Psalms Hilary constantly distinguishes between His utterances in the one and the other nature. Yet He is one Person with two natures, of which the one dominates, though it does not extinguish, the other in every relation of His existence as the Son of Man 9. Every act, bodily or mental, done by Him is done by both natures of the one Christ. Hence a certain indifference towards the human aspects of His life, and a tendency rather to explain away what seems humiliation than to draw out its lessons '. And Hilary is so impressed with the unity of Christ that the humanity, a notion for which he has no name 2 , would have been in his eyes nothing more than a collective term for certain attributes of One Who is more than man, just as the body of Christ is not for him a dwelling occupied, or an instrument used, by God, but an inseparable property of Christ, Who personally is God and Man. Hence the .body of Christ has a character peculiar to itself. It is a heavenly body 3 , because of its origin and because of its Owner, the Son of Man Who came down from heaven, and though on earth was in heaven still *. It performs the functions and experiences, the limitations of a human body, and this is evidence that it is in every sense a true, not an alien or fictitious body. Though it is free from the sins of humanity, it has our weaknesses. But here the distinction must be made, which will presently be discussed, between the two kinds of suffering, that which feels and that which only endures. Christ was not conscious of suffering from these weaknesses, which could inflict no sense of want of weariness or pain upon His body, a body not the less real because it was perfect. He took our infirmities as truly as He bore our sins. But He was no more under the dominion of the one than of the others. His body was in the likeness of ours, but its reality did not consist in the likeness 6 , but in the fact that He had created it a true body. Christ, by virtue of His creative power, might have made for Himself a true body, by means of which to fulfil God's purposes, that should have been free from these infirmities. It was for our sake that He did not. There would have been a true body, but it would have been difficult for us to believe it. Hence He assumed one which had for habits 3 Trin. xi. 48, 'emptying Himself might have been a single pet; 'hiding Himself within Himself was a sustained course of conduct. 4 Genus is fairly common, though much rarer than natura; pars occurs in Trin. xi. 14, 15, and cf. ii. 40. Elcmenta is, I think, somewhat more frequent. 5 Trin. xi. 40, naturte assumpti corporis nostri natura paterucz divinitatis iirvccta. Conversely, Trin. ix. 54, nova natura in Deuiu illata. But such expressions are rare ; hpmi- nem ad sumpsit is the normal phrase. In Tr. in Ps. lxviii. 4, he speaks as if the two natures had been forced to coalesce by a Power higher than either. But, as we have seen, in this part of the Homily Hilary's language is destitute of theological ex- actness. 6 Tr. in Ps. liv. 2. i E.g. Trin. ix. n, 39, x. 16. The expression utriusque natura persona in Trin. ix. 14 is susceptible of another inter- pretation. 8 E.g. Trin. x. 22. 9 Trill, x. 22, quia totus hominis filius totus Deifitius sit. 1 Cf. Gore's Dissertations, p. 138 f. But Hilary, though he shares and even exaggerates the general tendency of his time, has also a strong sense of the danger of Apollinarianism. 2 Homo assumptus is constantly used, and similarly homo noster for our manhood, e.g. Trin. ix. 7. This often leads to an awkwardness of which Hilary must have been fully conscious, though he regarded it as a less evil than the use of an abstract term. 3 Corpus celeste, x. 18. 4 Tr. in Ps. ii. ti, from St. John iii. 13. 5 Trin. x. 47 f. ; Tr. in Ps. exxxviii. 3. 6 Trin. x. 25. Uc*. k. X X 1 V Or-A^*0 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. I what arc necessities to us, in order to demonstrate to us its reality 7. It was foreordained that He should be incarnate; the mode of the Incarnation was determined by considerations of our advantage. The arguments by which this thesis is supported will be stated presently, in connection with Hilary's account of the Passion. It would be difficult to decide whether he has constructed his theory concerning the human activities of our Lord upon the basis of this preponderance of the Divine nature in His incarnate personality, or whether he has argued back from what he deems the true account of Christ's mode of life on earth, and invented the hypothesis in explanation of it. In any case he has had the courage exactly to reverse the general belief of Christendom regarding the powers normally used by Christ. AVe are accustomed to think that with rare exceptions, such as the Transfiguration, He lived a life limited by the ordinary conditions of humanity, to draw lessons for ourselves from His bearing in circumstances like our own, to estimate His condescension and suffering, in kind if not in degree, by our own consciousness. Hilary regards the normal state of the incarnate Christ as that of exaltation, from which He stooped on rare occasions, by a special act of will, to self-humiliation. Thus the Incarnation, though itself a declension from the pristine glory, does not account for the facts of Christ's life; they must be explained by further isolated and temporary declensions. And since the Incarnation is the one great event, knowledge and faith con- cerning which are essential, the events which accompany or result from it tend, in Hilary's thought, to shrink in importance. They can and must be minimised, explained away, regarded as 'dispensations,' if they seem to derogate from the Majesty of Him Who was incarnate. When we examine the interpretation of Scripture by which Hilary reaches the desired conclusions we find it, in many instances, strange indeed. The letter of the Gospels tells us of bodily needs and of suffering ; Christ, though more than man, is proved to be Man by His obvious submission to the conditions of human life. But according to Hilary all human suffering is due to the union of an imperfect soul with an imperfect body. The soul of Christ, though truly human, was perfect ; His body was that of a Person Divine as well as human. Thus both elements were perfect of their kind, and therefore as free from infirmity 8 as from sin, for affliction is the lot of man not because he is man, but because he is a sinner. In contrast with the squalor of sinful humanity, glory surrounded Christ from the Annunciation onward throughout His course on earths. Miracle is the attestation of His Godhead, and He Who was thus superior to the powers of nature could not be subject to the sufferings which nature inflicts. But, being omnipotent, He could subject Himself to humiliations which no power less than His own could lay upon Plim, and this self-subjection is the supreme evidence of His might as well of His goodwill towards men. Gojh ^and only God, could occu py at once the rvadlean d the throne o n high r . Thus in emphasizing the humiliation Hilaiy is extolling the rnajesty of Christ, andrcTuTing the errors of Arianism. That school had made the most of Christ's sufferings, holding them a proof of His inferiority to the Father. In Hilary's eyes His power to condescend and His final victory are equally conclusive evidences of His co-equal Divinity. But if He stoops to our estate, and is at the same lime God exercising His full prerogatives, here again there must be a ' dispensation.' He was truly subject to the limitations of our nature ; that is a fact of revelation. But He was subject by a succession of detached acts of self-restraint, culminating in the act, voluntary like the others, of His death 2 . Of His acceptance of the ordinary infirmities of humanity we have already spoken. Hilary gives the same explanation of the Passion as he does of the thirst or C ktf 1 7 Trin. x. 24. The purpose of the Old Testament Theopha- nies, it will be remembered, was the same. Goil appeared as Man, in order to make men familiar with ihe future reality and so more ready to believe. See Trin. v. 17. 8 Trin. x. 14, 15. 9 Trin. ii. 26 (., iii. 18 f. and often, especially In the Comllt. in Matt. ' E.g. Trin. ix. 4, xi. 48. ' U>. x. :i, 61. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lxxv weariness of Christ. That He could suffer, and that to the utmost, is proved by the fact that He did suffer; yet was He, or could He be, conscious of suffering? For the fulfilmen t of the Divine purpose, for our assurance of the reality of His work, the acts had to be done; but it was sufficient that they should be done by a dispensation, in other words, that the events should be real and yet the feelings be absent of which, had the events happened to us, we should have been conscious. To understand this we must recur to Hilary's theory of the relation of the soul to the body. The former is the organ of sense, the latter a lifeless thing. But the soul may fall below, or rise above, its normal state. Mortification of the body may set in, or drugs be administered which shall render the soul incapable of feeling the keenest pain 3. On the other hand it is capable of a spiritual elevation which shall make it unconscious of bodily needs or sufferings, as when Moses and Elijah fasted, or the three Jewish youths walked amid the flames 4 . On this high level Christ always dwelt. Others might rise for a moment above themselves ; He, not although, but because He was true and perfect Man, never fell below it. He placed Himself in circumstances where shame and wounds and death were inflicteS upon Him ; He had lived a life of humiliation, not only real, in that it involved a certain separation from God, but also apparent. But as in this latter respect we may no more overlook His glory than we may suppose Him ignorant, as by a dispensation He professed to be 5 , so in regard to the Passion we must not imagine that He was inferior to His saints in being conscious, as they were not, of suffering 6 . So far, indeed, is He from the sense of suffering that Hilary even says that the Passion was a delight to Him 7, and this not merely in its prospective results, but in the consciousness of power which He enjoyed in passing through it. Nor could this be surprising to one who looked with Hilary's eyes upon the humanity of Christ. He enforces his view sometimes with rhetoric, as when he repudiates the notion that the Bread of Life could hunger, and He who gives the living water, thirst 8 , that the hand which restored the servant's ear could itself feel pain 9, that He Who said, ' Now is the Son of Man glorified,' when Judas left the chamber, could at that moment be feeling sorrow ', and He before Whom the soldiers fell be capable of fear 2 , or shrink from the pain of a death which was itself an exertion of His own free will and power 3. Or else he dwells upon the general character of Christ's manhood. He recognises no change in the mode of being after the Resurrection ; the passing through closed doors, the sudden disappearance at Emmaus are typical of the normal properties of His body, which could heal the sick by a touch, and could walk upon the waves ■*. It is a body upon the sensibility of which the forces of nature can make no impression whatever ; they can no more pain Him than the stroke of a weapon can affect air or water s • or, as Hilary puts it elsewhere, fear and death, which have so painful a meaning to us, were no more to Him than a shower falling upon a surface which it cannot penetrate 6 . It is not the passages of the Gospel which tell of Christ's glory, but those which speak of weakness or suffering that need to be explained ; and Hilary on occasion is not afraid to explain them away. For instance, we read that when our Lord had fasted forty days and forty nights ' He was afterward an hungred.' Hilary denies that there is a connection of cause and effect. Christ's perfect body was unaffected 3 Triti. x. 14. 4 Comm. in Matt. iii. 2 ; Tritt. x. 45. The freedom of Chris- tian martyrs from pain is frequently noticed in early writers. 5 Cf. p. Ixvi. 6 Hilary was undoubtedly influenced more than he knew by the Latin words pati and dolcrc, the one purely objective, the other subjective. By a line of thought which recalls that of Mozley concerning Miracles he refuses to argue from our ex- perience to that of Christ. That He suffered, in the sense of having wounds and death inflicted upon Him, is a fact ; that He was conscious of suffering is an inference, a supposition (pntatur dolere quia patitur, Tr. in Ps. exxxviii. 3, fallitur ergo kitmana cvstiiuationis opinio putatts hunc dolere quod patitur, Tritt. x. 47), and one which we are not entitled to make. In fact, the passage last cited states that He has no uaticra dolendi ; so also x. 23, 35, and cf. Tr, in Ps. Iiii. 12. Or, as Hilary puts it, Triu. x. 24, He is subject to the natures passionum not to their iniurix. 7 Tr. in Ps. exxxviii. 26. 8 Trin. x. 24. 9 lb. 28. 1 lb. 29. 2 lb. 27. 3 lb. 11. 4 lb. 23. These instances of His power are used as a direct proof of Christ's incapacity of pain. Hilary is willing to confess that He could feel it, if it be shewn that we can follow Him in these respects. 5 lac. cit. 6 Tr. in Ps- liv. 0. lxxvi INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. 1 by abstinence ; but after the fast by an exertion of His will He experienced hunger i. So also the Agony in the Garden is ingeniously misinterpreted. He took with Him the three Apostles, and then began to be sorrowful. He was not sorrowful till He had taken them ; they, not He, were the cause. When He said, ' My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,' the last words must not be regarded as meaning that His was a mortal sorrow, but as giving a note of time. The sorrow of which He spoke was not for Himself but for His Apostles, whose flight He foresaw, and He was asserting that this sorrow would last till He died. And when He prayed that the cup might pass away from Him, this was no entreaty that He might be spared. It was His purpose to drink it. The prayer was for His disciples that the cup might pass on from Him to them ; that they might suffer for Him as martyrs full of hope, without pain or fear 8 . One passage, St. Luke xxii. 43, 44, which conflicts with his view is rejected by Hilary on textual grounds, and not without some reason 9. He had looked for it, and found it absent, in a large number of manuscripts, both Greek and Latin. But perhaps the strangest argument which he employs is that when the Gospel tells us that Christ thirsted and hungered and wept, it does not proceed to say that He ate and drank and felt griefs 1 . Hunger and thirst, eating and drinking, were two sets of dispensations, unconnected by the relation of cause and effect ; the tears were another dispensation, not the expression of personal grief. If, as a habit, He accepts the needs and functions of our body, this does not render His own body more real, for by the act of its creation it was made truly human ; His purpose, as has been said, is to enable us to recognise its reality, which would otherwise be difficult *. If He wept, He had the same object; this use of one of the evidences of bodily emotion would help us to believe 2 . And so it is throughout Christ's life on earth. He suffered but He did not feel. No one but a heretic, says Hilary, would suppose that He was pained by the nails which fixed Him to the Cross 3. It is obvious that Hilary's theory offers a perfect defence against the two dangers of the day, Arianism and -Apollinarianism. The tables are turned upon the former by emphatic insistence upon the power manifested in the humiliation and suffering of Christ. That He, being what He was, should be able to place Himself in such circumstances was the most impressive evidence of His Divinity. And if His humanity was endowed with Divine properties, much more must His Divinity rise above that inferiority to which the Arians consigned it. Apollinarianism is controverted by the demonstration of His true humanity. No language can be too strong to describe its gtories ; Tatrt the true wonder is not that Christ, as God, has such attributes, but that He Who has them is very Man. The theory was well adapted for service in the controversies of the day; for us, however we may admire the courage and ingenuity it displays, it can be no more than a curiosity of doctrinal history. Yet, whatever its defects as an explanation of the facts, the skill with which dangers on either hand are avoided, the manifest anxiety to be loyal to established doctrine, deserve recognition and respect. It has been said that Hilary ' constantly withdraws in the second_dause what he has assertedJn_Jhe_f^rsM, , and in a sense it is true. For many~oT~his statementsmighTmake hhrTseem the advocate of an extreme doctrine of Kenosis, which would represent our Lord's self-emptying as 7 Coium. ill Matt. iii. ;. '•'■ //■. xxxi. 1—7. These were not immature speculations, aban- doned !>y a riper judgment. The explanation of 'even unto death 1 is repeated, and that concerning the cup implied, in fi in. x. 36. 37- 9 Trill, x. 41. WcstcoU and Hort insert it within brackets. Even if the passage be retained, Hilary has an explanation which agrees with his theoiy. 9« lb. 54. » loc. cit., Tr. in Ps. liii. 7 ■ In TV. in Ps. liii. 7, there is also the moral purpose. lie prays humbly. His prayer expresses no need of His own, but is meant to tcacli us the lesson of meekness. 3 Trin. x. 45. Yet Hilary himself is not always consistent. In the purely homiletical writing of Tr. in Ps. Ixviii. 1, he dwells upon Christ's endurance of pain. Ilis argument obliged Him to emphasize the suffering ; it was natural, though not logical, that he should sometimes insist also upon the feeling. 4 Harnack, Dogmtttgtsch. ii. 301 «. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. ixxvn complete. But often expressed and always present in Hilary's thought, for the coherence of which it is necessary, is the correlative notion of the dispensation, whereby Christ seemed for our sake to be less than He truly was. Again, Hilary has been accused of 'sailing somewhat close to the cliffs of Docetism V but all admit that he has escaped shipwreck. Various accounts of his teaching, all of which agree in acquitting him of this error, have been given; and that which has been accepted in this paper, of Christ by the very per- \ fection of His humanity habitually living in such an ecstasy as that of Polycarp or Pcrpetua at their martyrdom, is a noble conception in itself and consistent with the Creeds, though it cannot satisfy us. In part, at any rate, it belonged to the lessons which Hilary had learned from Alexandria. Clement had taught, though his successor Origen rejected, the impassibility of Christ, Who had eaten and drunk only by a 'dispensation'; — ' He ate not for the sake of His body, which was sustained by a holy power, but that that false notion might not creep into the minds of His companions which in later days some have, in fact, conceived, that He had been manifested only in appearance. He was altogether im- passible ; there entered from without into Him no movement of the feelings, whether pleasure or pain V Thus Hilary had what would be in his eyes high authority for his opinion. But he must have felt some doubts of its value if he compared the strange exegesis and forced logic by which it was supported with that frank acceptance of the obvious sense of Scripture in which he takes so reasonable a pride in his direct controversy with the Arians. And another criticism may be ventured. In that controversy he balances with scrupulous reverence mystery against mystery, never forgetting that he is dealing with infinities. In this case the one is made to overwhelm the other ; the infinite glory ex- cludes the infinite sorrow from his view. Here, if anywhere, Hilary needs, and may justly claim, the indulgence he has demanded. It had not been his wish to define or explain ; he was content with the plain words of Scripture and the simplest of creeds. But he was compelled by the fault of others to commit a fault ' ; and speculation based on sound principles, however perilous to him who made the first attempt, had been rendered by the prevalence of heresy a necessary evil. Again, we must bear in mind that Hilary was essentially a Greek theologian, to whom the supremely interesting as well as the supremely important doctrine was that God became Man. He does not conceal or undervalue the fact of the Atonement and of the Passion as the means by which it was wrought. But, even though he had not held his peculiar theory of impassibility, he would still have thought the effort most worth making not that of realising the pains of Christ by our experience of suffering and sense of the enormity of sin, but that of apprehending the mystery of the Incarnation. For that act of condescension was greater, not only in scale but in kind, than any humiliation to which Christ, already Man, submitted Himself in His human state. Christ, Whose properties as incarnate are thus described by Hilary, is one Person. This, of course, needs no proof, but something must be said of the use which he makes of the doctrine. It is by Christ's own work, by an act of power, even of violence 8 , exercised by Him upon Himself, that the two natures are inseparably associated in Him ; so in- separably that between His death and resurrection His Divinity was simultaneously present with each of the severed elements of His humanity?. Hence, though Hilary frequently 5 The words are Forster's, op. cit. p. 662, and are accepted as representing their opinion by Bardenhewer, Patrologie, p. 382, and Baltzer, Christologie, p. 32. 6 Strom, vi. § 71. Bigg, Christian Platonists, p. 71, gives other sources, by which Hilary is less likely to have been in- fluenced, from which he may have derived this teaching. This is not the only coincidence between him and Clement. 7 Trin. ii. 2, in vitiitm vitio coarcttfmur alieno. 8 Tr. in Ps. Ixviii. 4. The unity is also strongly put in Trin. viii. 13, x. 61. 9 Trin. x. 34. This was Hilary's deliberate belief. But in earlier life he had written rashly of the Holy Spirit (i.e. God the Son) surrendering His humanity to be tempted, and of the cry upon the Cross 'testifying the departure of God the Word from Him' (Co/run. in Matt. iii. 1, xxxiii. 6). This, if it had represented Hilary's teaching in that treatise, would have proved Jxxvm INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. discriminates between Christ's utterances as God and as Man ', he never fails to keep his reader's attention fixed upon the unity of His Person. And this unity is the more obvious because, as lias been said, the Manhood in Christ is dominated by the Godhead. Though we are not allowed to forget that He is truly Man, yet as a rule Hilary prefers to speak in such words as, ' the only-begotten Son of God was crucified 2 ,' or to say more briefly, ' God was crucified 3.' Judas is ' the betrayer of God 4 ; ' ' the life of mortals is renewed through the death of immortal God 5 .' Such expressions are far more frequent than the balanced language, ' the Passion of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord 6 ,' and these again than such an exaltation of the manhood as ' the Man Jesus Christ, the Lord of Majesty • .' But once, in an unguarded moment, an element of His humanity seems to be deified. Hilary never says that Christ's body is God, but he speaks of the spectators of the Crucifixion 'contemplating the power of the soul which by signs and deeds had proved itself God V But though distinctions may be drawn, and though for the sake of emphasis and brevity Christ may be called by the name of one only of His two natures, the essential fact is never forgotten that He is God and man, one Person in two forms, God's and the servant's. And these two natures do not stand isolated and apart, merely contained within the limits of one personality. Just as we saw that Hilary recognises a complete mutual indwelling and interpenctration of Father and Son, so he teaches that in the narrower sphere of the Incarnation there is an equally exact and comprehensive union of the Godhead and Manhood in Christ. Jesus is Christ, and Christ is Jesus 9. Not merely is the one Christ perfect Man and perfect God, but the whole Son of Man is the whole Son of God *. So far is His manhood from being merged and lost in His Divinity, that the extent of the one is the measure of the other. We must not imagine that, simultaneously with the incarnate, there existed a non-incarnate Christ, respectively submitting to humiliation and ruling the worlds ; nor yet must we conceive of one Christ in two unconnected states of being, as though the assumption of humanity were merely a function analogous to the guid- ing of the stars. On the contrary, the one Person is coextensive with all infinity, and all action lies within His scope. Whatever He does, whether it be, or be not, in relation to humanity, and in the former case whether it be the exaltation of man- hood or the self-emptying of Godhead, is done ' within the sphere of the Incarnation 2 ,' the sphere which embraces His whole being and His whole action. The self-emptying itself was not a self-determination, instant and complete, made before the Incarnation, but, as we saw, a process which continued throughout Christ's life on earth and was ac- tive to the end. For as He hung, deliberately self-emptied of His glory, on the Cross, He manifested His normal powers by the earthquake shock. His submission to death was the last of a consistent series of exertions of His will, which began with the Annun- ciation and culminated in the Crucifixion. it heretical ; Init the whole tcnour of the commentary proves that this was simply carelessness. In the Homilies on the Psalms he also writes somewhat loosely on occasion; e.g. liii. 4 ./?«., where he mentions Christ's/brmer nature, i e. the Divinity, and it. 5, where he speaks of ' Him Who after Veins God (ex Deo) had died as man.' But only malevolence could give an evil interpretation to these passages, delivered as they were for the edification of Hilary's flock, and with no thought of theological accuracy. It is, indeed, quite possible that they were never revised, or even intended, for publication hy him. 1 E.g. Trin. ix. 6, and often in the Homilies on the Psalms, as exxxviii. 13. 2 Tr. in Ps. liii. 12. 3 lac. cit. 4 Tr. in Ps. exxxix. 15. 5 Trin. x. 63. Similarly in Tr. in Ps. lxvii. 21, he speaks of ' the pas i"n, the cross, the death, the burial of God.' 6 Tr. in Ps. liii. 4. 1 Trin. \\. 3. 8 Tr. in Ps. cxli. 4. There is no evidence that the text is corrupt, though the words as they stand are rank Apollinarianism, and the more significant as dating from the maturity of Hilary's thought. But here, as often, we must remember that the Homi- lies are familiar addresses. 9 Trin. x. 52. We must remember not only that heretical distinctions had been made, but that Christ is the name of the Son in prctcmporal relation to the world (see p. lxvii.), as well as in the world. 1 lb. 22, 52. = Cf. Gore, Dissertations, p. 211. It is in relation to the self- emptying that Hilary use', such definite language ; Trin. xi. 48, intra siiam ipse vaciicfactus fotcstatem . . . . Se ipsvm intra si vaenrfaciens continmi : xii. 6, se evaettnvii in stti ■ huL THE THEOLOGY OE ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. IXX1X Hilary estimates the cost of the Incarnation not by any episodes of Christ's life on earth, but by the fact that it brought about a real, though partial, separation or breach 3 within the Godhead. Henceforward there was in Christ the nature of the crea- ture as well as that of the Creator ; and this second nature, though it had been assumed in its most perfect form, was sundered by an infinite distance from God the Father, though indissolubly united with the Divinity of his Son. A barrier therefore was raised between them, to be overcome in due time by the elevation of manhood in and through the Son. When this elevation was complete within the Person of Christ, then the separation between Him and His Father would be at an end. lie would still have true humanity, but this humanity would be raised to the level of association with the Father. In Hilary's doctrine the submission of Christ to this isolation is the central fact of Christianity, the supreme evidence of His love for men. Not only did it thus isolate Him, truly though partially, from the Father, but it introduced a strain, a ' division ' * within His now incarnate Person. The union of natures was real, but in order that it might become perfect the two needed to be adjusted ; and the humiliation involved in this adjustment is a great part of the sacrifice made by Christ. There was conflict, in a certain sense, within Plimsclf, repression and concealment of His powers. But finally the barrier was to be removed, the loss regained, by the exaltation of the manhood into harmonious association with the Godhead of Father and of Son 5 . Then He Who had become in one Person God and Man would become for ever fully God and fully Man. The humanity would gain, the Divinity regain, its appropriate dignity 6 , while each retained the reality it had had on earth. Thus Christ's life in the world was a period of transition. He had descended; this was the time of preparation for an equal, and even loftier, ascent. We must now consider in what the preparation consisted ; and here, at first sight, Hilary has involved himself in a grave difficulty. For it is manifest that his theory of Christ's life as one lived without effort, spiritual or physical, or rather as a life whose exertion consisted in a steady self- accommodation to the infirmities of men, varied by occasional and special acts of con- descension to suffering, excludes the possibility of an advance, a growth in grace as well as in stature, such as Athanasius scripturally taught 7. We might say of Hilary, as has been said of another Father, ' under his treatment the Divine history seems to be dissolved into a docetic drama 8 .' In such a life it might seem that there was not merely no possibility of progress, but even an absence of identity, in the sense of continuity. The phenomena of Christ's life, therefore, are not manifestations of the disturbance and strain on which Hilary insists, for they are, when, rightly considered, proofs of His union with God and of His Divine power, not of weakness or of partial separation. It would, indeed, be vain for us to seek for sensible evidence of the process of adjustment, for it went on within the inmost being of the one Person. It did not affect the Godhead or the Manhood, both visibly revealed as aspects of the Person, but the hidden relation between the two. Our knowledge assures us that the process took place, but it is a knowledge attained by inference from what He was before and after the state of transition, not by observation of His action in that state. Both natures of the one Person were affected; 'everything' — glory as well as humiliation — ' was common to the entire Person at every moment, though to each aspect in its own distinctive manner.' The entire Person entered into inequality with Himself; the actuality of each aspect, during the state of humiliation, fell short of its idea — of the idea of the Son, of the idea of the perfect man, of the idea of the God-man. It was >. 3 OffiasiOf Trin. ix. 38. 1 Trin. ■•:. 22, A sc diviiiuus. 6 Trin. ix. 6. On earth Christ He js tot us Dais and tot its h.01110. 5 E.g. Trin. ix. 38. Deus and homo; in glory 7 E.g. Discourses against the Arians, iii. 53, p. 422 of the translation in this series. 8 Dp. Westcott on Cyril of Alexandria in St. John's Gospel (Speaker's Commentary) p, \. v. lxxx INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. not merely the human aspect that was at first inadequate to the Divine ; for, through the medium of the voluntary ' evacuatio,' it dragged down the Divine nature also, so far as it permitted it, to its own inequality?.' Such is the only explanation which will reconcile Hilary's various, and sometimes obscure, utterances on this great subject. It is open to the obvious and fatal objection that it cuts, instead of loosening, the knot. For it denies any connection between the dispensation of Christ's life on earth and the mystery of His assumption and exaltation of humanity ; the one becomes somewhat purposeless, and the other remains unverified. But it is at least a bold and reverent speculation, not inconsistent with the Faith as a system of thought, though no place can be found for it in the Faith, regarded as a revelation of fact. It was on behalf of mankind that this great sacrifice was made by the Son. While it separated Him from the Father, it united Him to men. We must now consider what was the spiritual constitution of the humanity which He assumed, as we have already considered the physical Man, as we saw (p. lxix.) is constituted of body and soul, an outward and an inward substance, the one earthly, the other heavenly 1 . The exact process of his creation has been revealed. First, man — that is, his soul — was made in the image of God; next, long afterwards, his body was fashioned out of dust ; finally by a distinct act, man was made a living soul by the breath of God, the heavenly and earthly natures being thus coupled together 2 . The world was already complete when God created the highest, the most beautiful of His works after His own image. His other works were made by an instantaneous com- mand; even the firmament was established by his hand*; man alone was made by the Jiands of God ; — ' Thy hands have made me and fashioned me.' This singular honour of being made by a process, not an act, and by the hands, not the hand or the voice, of God, was paid to man not simply as the highest of the creatures, but as the one for whose sake the rest of the universe was called into being 4 . It is, of course, the soul, made after the image of God, which has this high honour ; an honour which no length of sinful ancestry can forfeit, for each soul is still separately created. Hence no human soul is akin to any other human soul ; the uniformity of type is secured by each being made in the same pattern, and the dignity of humanity by the fact that this pattern is that of the Son, the Image of God. But the soul pervades the whole body with which it is associated, even as God pervades the universe 5 . The soul of each man is individual, special to himself; his brotherhood with mankind belongs to him through his body, which has therefore something of universality. Hence the relation of mankind with Christ is not through his human soul ; it was ' the nature of universal flesh ' which He took 6 that has made Him one with us in the Incarnation and in the Eucharist ?. The reality of His body, as we have seen, is amply secured by Hilary ; its universality is assured by the absence of any individual human paternity, which would have isolated Him from others 8 . Thus He took all humanity into His one body; He is the Churchy, for He contains her through the mystery of His body. In Him, by the same means, ' there is contained the congregation, so to speak, of the whole race of men.' Hence He spoke of Himself as the City set on a hill; the inhabitants are mankind 1 . But Christ not only 9 Dorner, I. ii. 415. The liberty has been taken of putting 'Himself for 'itself.' On the same page Dorner speaks of an 'ever increasing return of the Logos into equality with Him- self.' This is a contradiction of his own explanation. God has become God-man. He could not again become simply the Logos. The key to Hilary's position is the double nature of Christ. The Godhead and the Manhood are aspects in revelation, ab- stractions in argument. That which connects them and gives them reality is the one Person, the object of thought and faith. « Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Iod, 6, exxix. 5. ■ lb. exxix. 5. 3 Isai. xlv. 12, the Old Latin, translated from the LXX., having the singular. This characteristic piece of exegesis is in Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Iod, 5 ; cf. ii. 7, 8. •» lb. Iod, 1. 5 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Kofih, 8. 6 lb. Ii. 16, naturam in se univcrsa carnis adsumpsit, ib. liv. 9, univcrsitatis nostra 1 caro est /actus ; so also Trin. xi. id in., and often. 7 This latter is the argument of Trill, viii. 13 f. 8 Trin.ii. 24; in Him there is the universi generis liumani corpus because He is liomo /actus ex virginc. 9 Tr. in Ps. exxv. 6. «^^" — " 1 Coinin. in Matt. iv. 12; halitatio, as is often the case in late Latin with abstracts, is collective. Hilary also speaks of THE THEOLOGY QE ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lxxxi — embraces all humanity in Himself, but ■the archetype after Whom, and the final cause for Whom, man was made. Every soul, when it proceeds from the hands of God, is pure, free and immortal, with a natural affinity and capacity for good 2 , which can find its satisfaction only in Christ, the ideal Man. But if Christ is thus everything to man, humanity has also, in the foreordained purpose of God, something to confer upon Christ. The temporary humiliation of the Incarnation has for its result a higher glory than He possessed before 3, acquired through the harmony of the two natures. The course of this elevation is represented by Hilary as a succession of births, in continuation of the majestic series. First there had been the eternal generation of the Son ; then His creation for the ways and for the works of God, His appointment, which Hilary regards as equivalent in importance to another birth, to the office of Creator; next the Incarnation, the birth in time which makes Him what He was not before, namely Man**, This is followed by the birth of Baptism, of which Hilary speaks thrice 5 . He read in "St. Matthew iii. 17, instead of the familiar words of the Voice from heaven, 'Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee.' This was in his judgment the institution of the sacrament of Baptism ; because Christ was baptized, we must follow His example. It was a new birth to Him, and therefore to us. lie had been the Son; He became through Baptism the perfect Son by this fresh birth 6 . It is difficult to see what Hilary's thought was ; perhaps he had not defined it to himself. But, with this reading in his copy of the Gospel, it was necessary that he should be ready with an explanation ; and though there remained a higher perfection to be reached, this birth in Baptism might well be regarded as a stage in the return of Christ to His glory, an elevation of His humanity to a more perfect congruity with His Godhead. This birth is followed by another, the effect and importance of which is more obvious, that of the Resurrection, ' the birthday of Hjsjiumanity to glory ?.' By the Incarnation He had lost unity with the Father ; but the created nature, by the assumption of which He had disturbed the unity both within Him- self and in relation to the Father, is now raised to the level on which that unity is again pos- sible. In the Resurrection, therefore, it is restored ; and this stage of Christ's achievement is regarded as a new birth 8 , by which His glory becomes, as it had been before, the same as that of the Father. But now the glory is shared by His humanity ; the servant's form is promoted to the glory of God 9 and the discordance comes to an end. Christ, God and Man, stands where the Word before the Incarnation stood. In this Resurrection, the only step in this Divine work which is caused by sin, His full humanity partakes. In order to satisfy all the conditions of actual human life, He died and visited the lower world ' ; and also, as man shall do, He rose again with the same body in which He had died 2 . Then comes that final state, of which something has already been said, when God shall be all in all. No further change will be possible within the Person of Christ, for his humanity, already in harmony with the Godhead, will now be transmuted. The whole Christ, Man as well as God, will become wholly God. Yet the humanity will still exist, for it is inseparable from the Divinity, and will consist, as before, of body and soul. But there will be nothing earthly or fleshly left in the body ; its nature will be purely spiritual 3. The only form in which Hilary can express this result is the seeming paradox that Christ will, by virtue of the final subjection, ' be and continue what He is not 4 .' By this return of y Christ as gerens nos, Trin. x. 25, which recalls the gestans of Tertullian and the portans of Cyprian. 2 Tr. in Ps. ii. 16, lvii. 3, lxii. 3, and often. 3 Trin. xi. 40 — 42. 4 Tr. in Ps. ii. 27. 5 Comm. in Matt. ii. 6 ; Tr. in Ps. ii. 29 ; Trin. viii. 25. Yet he twice (Trin. vi. 23; Tr. in Ps. exxxviii. 6) gives the ordinary text, without any hint that he knew of an important VOL. IX. . 6 Tr. in Ps. ii. 29, ipse Deo renascebatnr in filiiwi perfect urn. Trin. viii. 25, perfecta nativitas. 7 Dorner, I. ii. 417. Dorner overlooks the birth in Baptism. 8 Tr. in Ps. ii. 27, liii. 14. 9 lb. exxxviii. 19. ' lb. liii. 14. 2 lb. lv. 12. 3 Triii. xi. 40, 49. 4 //'. 40, habens in sacrnmento subiectionis esse ac tnanere quod non est. lxxxii INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. the whole Christ into perfect union with God, humanity attains the purpose of its creation. He was the archetype after Whose likeness man was fashioned, and in His Person all the possibilities of mankind are attained. And this great consummation not only fulfils the destinies of humanity ; it brings also an augmentation of the glory of Him Who is glorified in Christ s. In the fact that humanity is thus elevated in Christ consists the hope of individual men. Man in Him has, in a true sense, become God 6 ; and though Hilary as a rule avoids the phrase, familiar to him in the writings of his Alexandrian teachers and freely used by Athanasius and other of his contemporaries, that men become gods because God became Man, still the thought which it conveys is constantly present to his mind. As we have seen, men are created with such elevation as their final cause ; they have the innate certainty that their soul is of Divine origin and a natural longing for the knowledge and hope of things eternal 7, But they can only rise by a process, corresponding to that by which the humanity in Christ was raised to the level of the Divinity. This process begins with the new birth in the one Baptism, and attains its completion when we fully receive the nature and the knowledge of God. We arc to be members of Christ's body and partakers in Him, saved into the name and the nature of God s . And the means to this is knowledge of Him, received into a pure mind?. Such knowledge makes the soul of man a dwelling rational, pure and eternal, wherein the Divine nature, whose properties these are, may eternally abide X Only that which has reason can be in union with Him Who is reason. Faith must be accurately informed as well as sincere. Christ became Man in order that we might believe Him ; that He might be a witness to us from among ourselves touching the things of God -. We have now followed Hilary through his great theory, in which we may safely say that no other theologian entirely agrees, and which, where it is most original, diverges most widely from the usual lines of Christian thought. Yet it nowhere contradicts the accepted standards of belief; and if it errs it does so in explanation, not in the statement of the truths which it undertakes to explain. Hilary has the distinction of being the only I one of his contemporaries with the speculative genius to imagine this development ending in the abolition of incongruity and in the restoration of the full majesty of the Son and of man with Him 3. He saw that there must be such a development, and if he was wrong in tracing its course, there is a reverence and loyalty, a solidity of reasoning and steady grasp of the problems under discussion, which save him from falling into mere ingenuity or ostentation. Sometimes he may seem to be on the verge of heresy; but in each case it will be found that, whether his system be right or no, the place in it which he has found for an argument used elsewhere in the interests of error is one where the argument is powerless for evil. Sometimes— and this is the most serious reproach that can be brought against him — it must seem that his theology is abstract, moving in a region apart from the facts of human life. It must be admitted that this is the case ; that though, as we shall presently sec, Hilary had a clear sense of the realities of temptation and sin and of the need of redemption, and has expressed himself in these regards with the fervour and practical wisdom of an earnest and experienced pastor, still these subjects lie within the sphere of his feelings rather than of his thought. It was not his fault that he lived in the days before St. Augustine, and in the heat of an earlier controversy; and it is his conspicuous merit that in his zeal for the Divinity of Christ he traced the Incarnation back beyond the beginning of sin and found its motive in God's eternal 5 Trin. xi. 42, inerementum glariftcati in co Dei. ' 1 .. Trin. ix. .(, x. 7. 3 'Jr. in t's. lxii. ); cf. Comm. in Matt. Jtvi. 5. 8 Tr. in /'(. Ivi. 7, liii. 5. We must remember the importance of names in Hilary's eyes. They are not arbitrary symbols, but 1- Ions ' < nlially 1- tin objc 1 ts which they i jnifj . Had thi re been no .in, fi mi which man needed to be saved, lie would 1 11 nub oil r.iisiir* lo this name and nature. 9 //'. cxviii , l:V/'A. 1. exxxi. 6. ' . exxxi 3 Trin. iii. 5 FOrster, o/>. cit. THE THEOLOGY OE ST. HILARY OE POITIERS. lxxxiii purpose of uniting man to Himself. He docs not estimate the condescension of Christ by the distance which separates the Sinless from the sinful. To his wider thought sin is not the cause of that great sequence of Divine acts of grace, but a disturbing factor which has modified its course. The measure of the love of God in Christ is the infinity He overpassed in uniting the Creator with the creature. But before we approach the practical theology of Hilary something must be said of his teaching concerning the Third Person of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is little developed in his writings. The cause was, in part, his sympathy with Eastern thought. The West, in this as in some other respects, was in advance of the contemporary Greeks ; but Hilary was too independent to accept conclusions which were as yet un- reasoned 4 . But a stronger reason was that the doctrine was not directly involved in the Arian controversy. On the main question, as we have seen, he kept an open mind, and was prepared to modify from time to time the terms in which he stated the Divinity of our Lord ; but in other respects he was often strangely archaic. Such is the case here; Hilary's is a logical position, but the logical process has been arrested. There is nothing in his words concerning the Holy Spirit inconsistent with the later definitions of faith 5 , and it would be unfair to blame him because, in the course of a strenuous life devoted to the elucidation and defence of other doctrines, he found no time to develope this ; unfair also to blame him for not recognising its full importance. In his earlier days, and while he was in alliance with the Semiarians, there was nothing to bring this doctrine prominently before his mind ; in his later life it still lay outside the range of controversy, so far as he was concerned. Hilary, in fact, preferred like Athanasius to rest in the indefinite terms of the original Nieene Creed, the confession of which ended with the simple ' And in the Holy Ghost.' But there was a further and practical reason for his reserve. It was a con- stant taunt of the Arians that the Catholics worshipped a plurality of Gods. The frequency and emphasis with which Hilary denies that Christians have either two Gods or one God in solitude proves that he regarded this plausible assertion as one of the most dangerous weapons wielded by heresy. It was his object, as a skilful disputant, to bring his whole forces to bear upon them, and this in a precisely limited field of battle. To import the question of the Holy Spirit into the controversy might distract his reader's attention from the main issue, and afford the enemy an opening for that evasion which he constantly accuses them of attempting. Hence, in part, the small space allowed to so important a theme; and hence the avoidance, which we noticed, of the very word 'Trinity.' The Arians made the most of their argument about two Gods; Hilary would not allow them the opportunity of imputing to the faithful a belief in three. This might not have been a sufficient inducement, had it stood alone, but the encouragement which he received from Origen's vagueness, representative as it was of the average theology of the third century, must have predisposed him to give weight to the practical consideration. Yet Hilary has not avoided a formal statement of his belief. In Trin. ii. §§ 29 — 35, which is, as we saw, part of a summary statement of the Christian Faith, he sets it forth with Scripture proofs. But he shows clearly, by the short space he allows to it, that it is not in his eyes of co-ordinate importance with the other truths of which he treats. And the curious language in which he introduces the subject, in § 29, seems to imply that he throws it in to satisfy others rather than from his own sense of its necessary place in such a statement. The doctrine, as he here defines it, is that the Holy Spirit undoubtedly exists; the Father and the Son arc the Authors of His being, and, since He is joined with Them in our confession, 4 Cf. Harnack, Dogmengesch. ii. 2S1. Cut Harnack is unjust I 5 Gwatkiu, Studies of Ariatiism, p. 206 n. ' Hilary's belief in saying that Hilary had not made up his own mind. in the deity of the Holy Spirit is hardly more doubtful than St. John's : yet he nowhere states it in so many words,' lxxxiv INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. He cannot, without mutilation of the Faith, be separated from Them. The fact that He is given to us is a further proof of His existence. Yet the title 'Spirit' is often used both for Father and for Son; in proof of this St. John iv. 24 and 2 Cor. iii. 17 are cited. Yet the Holy Spirit has a personal 6 existence and a special office in relation to us. It is through Him that we know God. Our nature is capable of knowing Him, as the eye is capable of sight ; and the gift of the Spirit is to the soul what the gift of light is to the eye. Again, in xii. §§ 55, 56, the subject is introduced, as if by an after thought, and even more briefly than in the second book. As he has refused to style the Son a creature, so he refuses to give that name to the Spirit, Who has gone forth from God, and been sent by Christ. The Son is the Only-begotten, and therefore he will not say that the Spirit was begotten ; yet he cannot call Him a creature, for the Spirit's knowledge of the mysteries of God, of which He is the Interpreter to men, is the proof of His oneness in nature with God. The Spirit speaks unutterable things and is ineffable in His operation. Hilary cannot define, yet he believes. It must suffice to say, with the Apostle, simply that He is the Spirit of God. The tone of § 56 seems that of silent rebuke to some excess of definition, as he would deem it, of which he had heard. To these passages must be added another in Trin. viii. 19 f, where the possession by Father and Son of one Spirit is used in proof of Their own unity. But in this passage there occur several instances of Hilary's character- istic vagueness. As in ii. 30, so here we are told that ' the Spirit ' may mean Father or Son as well as Holy Ghost 7, and instances are given where the word has one or other of the two first significations. Thus we must set a certain number of passages where a reference in Scripture to the Holy Spirit is explained away against a number, certainly no greater, in which He is recognised : and in the latter we notice a strong tendency to understate the truth. For though we are expressly told that the Spirit is not a creature, that He is from the Father through the Son, is of one substance with Them and bears the same relation to the One that He bears to the Other s , yet Hilary refuses with some emphasis and in a conspicuous place, at the very end of the treatise, to call Him God. But both groups of passages, those in which the Holy Ghost is recognised and those in which reason is given for non-recognition, are more than counterbalanced by a multitude in which, no doubt for the controversial reason already mentioned, the Holy Spirit is left unnamed, though it would have been most natural that allusion should be made to Him 9. We find in Hilary ' the premisses from which the Divinity of the Holy Ghost is the necessary conclusion * ; ' and there is reason to believe that he would have stated the doctrine of the Procession in the Western, not in the Eastern, form 2 ; but we find a certain willingness to keep the doctrine in the background, which sufficiently indicates a failure to grasp its cardinal importance, and is, however natural in his circumstances and however interesting as evidence of his mode of thought, a blemish to the De Trinitate, if we seek in it a balanced exposition of the Faith 3. We may now turn to the practical teaching of Hilary. Henceforth he will be no longer the compiler of the best Latin handbook of the Arian controversy, or the some- what unsystematic investigator of unexplored regions of theology. We shall find him c If the word may be admitted for the sake of clearness. ' 3 The work by Tertullian in which the doctrine of the Spirit Hilary never calls the Spirit a Person. is most fully brought out ; in which, in fact, He is first expressly 7 §§ 23, 25, 30; so also ix. 69 and notably in x. 16. Similarly named God, is the Adversus Praxean. It was written after his in C0111111 in Matt. iii. 1, the Spirit means Christ. secession from the Church, ami Hilary, upon whom it had more 8 Trin. viii. 20, ix. 73 fin., and especially ii. 4. This last is influence than any other of Tertullian's writings, may have sus- not a reference to the Macedonian heresy, but to the logical pectcd that this teaching was the expression of his Montanism result of Arianism. rather than a legitimate deduction from Scripture, and so have 9 Trin. i. 17, v. 1, 35, vii. 8, 3r, viii. 31, 36, x. 6 &c. " misled by over caution. He may also have been influenced ■ Baltzer, Tkeologie da hi, llilarius, p. si. >'>' 5U< * 1 '" 11 ' ■'' passages as Rev. xiv. 1, where the Spirit is 2 Trin. viii. 21, xii. 35, unnamed. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF l'OFITERS. lxx.w often accepting the common stock of Christian ideas of his age, without criticism or attempt at improvement upon them ; often paraphrasing in even more emphatic language emphatic and apparently contradictory passages of Scripture, without any effort after harmony or balance. Yet sometimes we shall find him anticipating on one page the thoughts of later theologians, while on another he is content to repeat the views upon the same subject which had satisfied an earlier generation. His doctrine, where it is not traditional, is never more than tentative, and we must not be surprised, we must even expect, to find him inconsistent with himself. No subject illustrates this inconsistency better than that of sin, of which Hilary gives two accounts, the one Eastern and traditional, the other an anticipation of Augustinianism. These are never compared and weighed the one against the other. In the passages where each appears, it is adduced confidently, without any reservation or hint that he is aware of another explanation of the facts of experience. The more usual account is that which is required by Hilary's doctrine of the separate creation of every human soul, which is "ood, because it is God's immediate work, and has a natural tendency to, and fitness for, perfection. Because God, after AVhose image man is made, is free, therefore man also is free; he has absolute liberty, and is under no compulsion to good or to eviK The sin which God foresees, as in the case of Esau, He does not foreordains. Punishment never follows except upon sin actually committed ; the elect are they who show themselves worthy of election 6 . But the human body has defiled the soul ; in fact, Hilary sometimes speaks as though sin were not an act of will but an irresistible pressure exerted by the body on the soul. If we had no body, he says once, we should have no sin ; it is a ' body of death ' and cannot be pure. This is the spiritual meaning of the ancient law against touching a corpse 7 . When the Psalmist laments that his soul cleaveth to the ground, his sorrow is that it is inseparably attached to a body of earth 8 ; when Job and Jeremiah cursed the day of their birth, their anger was directed against the necessity of living surrounded by the weaknesses and vices of the flesh, not against the creation of their souls after the image of God ?. Such language, if it stood alone, would convict its author of Manicheanism, but Hilary elsewhere asserts that the desire of the soul goes half-way to meet the invitation of sin 9 a , and this latter in his normal teaching. Man has a natural proclivity to evil, an inherited weakness * which has, as a matter of experience, betrayed all men into actual sin, with the exception of Christ 2 . Elsewhere, however, Hilary recognises the possibility, under existing conditions, of a sinless life. For David could make the prayer, ' Take from me the way of iniquity ; ' of iniquity itself he was guiltless, and only needed to pray against the tendency inherent in his bodily nature 3 . But such a case is altogether exceptional ; ordinary men must confide in the thought that God is indulgent, for He knows our in- firmity. He is propitiated by the wish to be righteous, and in His judgment the merits of good men outweigh their sins *. Hence a prevalent tone of hopefulness about the future state of the baptized ; even Sodom and Gomorrah, their punishment in history having satisfied the righteousness of God, shall ultimately be saved 5 . Yet God has a perfect, immut- able goodness of which human goodness, though real, falls infinitely short, because He is steadfast and we are driven by varying impulses 6 . This Divine goodness is the standard and the hope set before us. It can only be attained by graced and grace is freely offered. But just as the soul, being free, advances to meet sin, so it must advance to meet grace. Man must take the first step ; he must wish and pray for grace, and then perseverance in ' 4 E.g. Tr. in Ps. ii. 16, li. 23. 5 lb. lvii. 3. 6 It. cxviii., Tel/t, 4, lxiv. 5. 7 lb. cxviii., Gimel, 3, 4. 8 lb,, Daleth, 1. 9 lb. cxix. 19(12). 9» lb. lxviii. 9. 1 E.g. it. cxviii., .//■//;, 8, lii. 12. Natura iiifirmitalis is a favourite phrase. 2 E.g. ii. lii. 9, cxviii., Glutei, 12, Vau, 6. 3 lb. cxviii. Daleth, 8 ; cf. He, 16. 4 lb. lii. 12. 5 lb. lxviii. 22, based on St. Matt. x. 15. 6 //'. lii. 11, 12. 7 E.g. ib. cxviii., Prolog. 2, Aleplt, 12, Plu, 8. ixxxvi Introduction, chaptur it. faith will be granted him s , together with such a measure of the Spirit as he shall desire and deserve'. He will, indeed, be able to do more than he need, as David did when he spared and afterwards lamented Saul, his worst enemy, and St. Paul, who voluntarily abstained from the lawful privilege of marriage'. Such is Hilary's first account, 'a naive, undeveloped mode of thought concerning the origin of sin and the state of man 2 .' Its ii consistencies are as obvious as their cause, the unguarded homiletical expansion of isolated passages. There is no attempt to reconcile man's freedom to be good with the fact of universal sin. The theory, so far as it is consistent, is derived from Alexandria, from Clement and Origen. It may seem not merely inadequate as theology, but philosophical rather than Christian ; and its aim is, indeed, that of strengthening man's sense of moral responsibility and of heightening his courage to withstand temptation. Cut we must remember that Hilary everywhere assumes the union between the Christian and Christ. While this union exists there is always the power of bringing conduct into conformity with His will. Conduct, then, is, comparatively speaking, a matter of detail. Sins of action and emotion do not necessarily sever the union; a whole system of casuistry might be built upon Hilary's foundation. But false thoughts of God violate the very principle of union between Him and man. However abstract they may seem and remote from practical life, they are an insuperable barrier. For intellectual harmony, as well as moral, is necessary; and error of belief, like a key moving in a lock with whose wards it does not correspond, forbids all access to the nature and the grace of God. A good example of his relative estimate of intellectual and moral offences occurs in the Homily on Psalm i. §§ 6 — 8, where it is noteworthy that he does not trace back the former to moral causes 3 . Against these, the expressions of Hilary's usual opinion, must be set others in which he anticipates the language of St. Augustine in the Pelagian controversy. But certain deductions must be made, before we can rightly judge the weight of his testimony on the side of original sin. Passages where he is merely amplifying the words of Scripture must be excluded, as also those which are obviously exhibitions of unguarded rhetoric. For instance such words as these, ' Ever since the sin and unbelief of our first parent, we of later generations have had sin for the father of our body and unbelief for the mother of our soul V contradicting as they do Hilary's well-known theory of the origin of the soul, cannot be regarded as giving his deliberate belief concerning sin. Again, we must be careful not to interpret strong language concerning the body (e.g. Tr. in Ps. cxviii , CaJ>/i, $fin), as though it referred to our whole complex manhood. But after all deductions a good deal of strong Augustinianism remains. In the person of Adam God created all mankind, and all are implicated in his downfall, which was not only the beginning of evil but is a continuous powers. Not only as a matter of experience, is no man sinless, but no man can, by any possibility, be free from sin r '. Because of the sin of one sentence is passed upon alD ; the sentence of slavery which is so deep a degradation that the victim of sin forfeits even the name of man 8 . But Hilary not only states the doctrine; he approaches very nearly, on rare occasions, to the term 'original sin 9.' It follows that nothing less than a regeneration, the free gift of God, will avail ' ; and the grace by which the Christian must be maintained is also His spontaneous 8 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., He, 12, .Vim, 20. Dut in the foimcr pas sage I lie perseverance also depends upon tile Christian. 9 Trill- ii. 35- ' TV. in Ps. CXVlti., Xilll, 11 f. » I 1 '. iister, lot cit. 3 So alsj the sin against llie Holy Ghost is primarily intel lcctnal, not ctliieal ; Comm. in Malt. v. 15, xii. 17. ■1 //>. x. 23. ■> 5 Trin. iv. 21 ; Tr. in Ps, I xyi, 2 ; Comm. in Matt, xviii. 8, 6 Tr. in Pi. cxviii., lie, 16. • 7 Tr ill Ps. lix, 4 in. 8 lb. c\lii. 6, cxviii., lod, 2. In regard to the latter |u we must remember one: more what importance Hilary attaches to names. 9 Co.inif. in Mill. x. :(, originis nostra p eccata j Tr. in Ps. cxviii , / 11: 6, scsi sub /Vn.i ■: ngmc c- sni' feccal'i &&* sc esc iiitum. Other passages must be cited from quotations in St. Augustine, but FSrster, p. 676, has Riven reason for doubting II ilary's authorship. 1 E.;. Comm. in Malt. x. 24. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lxxxvii and unconditional gift. Faith, knowledge, Christian life, all have their origin and their maintenance from Him'. Such is a brief statement of Hilary's position as a forerunner of St. Augustine. The passages cited are scattered over his writings, from the earliest to the latest, and there is no sign that the more modern view was gaining ground in his mind as his judgment ripened. He had no occasion to face the question, and was content to say whatever seemed obviously to arise from the words under discussion, or to be most profitable to his audience. His Augustinianism, if it may be called so, is but one of many instances of originality, a thought thrown out but not developed. It is a symptom of revolt against the inadequate views of older theologians ; but it had more influence upon the mind of his great successor than upon his own. Dealing, as he did, with the subject in hortatory writings, hardly at all, and only incidentally, in his formal treatise on the Trinity, he preferred to regard it as a matter of morals rather than of doctrine. And the dignity of man, impressed upon him by the great Alexandrians, seemed to demand for humanity the fullest liberty. We may now turn to the A tonemen t, by which Christ has overcome sin. Hilary's language concerning it is, as a rule^ simply Scriptural 3. He had no occasion to discuss the doctrine, and his teaching is that "which was " "traditional in his day, without any such anticipations of future thought as we found in his treatment of sin. Since the humanity of Christ is universal, His death was on behalf of all mankind, ' to buy the s alvation o f the whole human race by the offering of thisj ioly and perfect V ictim *.' His last cry upon the "Cross was the iJ^presslorT of His sorrow that some would not profit by His sacrifice; that He was not, as He had desired, beaj2njr_jhe_jiins_af_allJ- He was able to take them upon Him because He had both natures. His manhood could do what His Godhead could not ; it could atone for the sins of men. Man had been overcome by Satan ; Satan, in his turn, has been overcome by Man. In the long conflict, enduring through Christ's life, of which the first pitched battle was the Temptation, the last the Crucifixion, the victory has been won by the Mediator in the flesh 6 . The devil was in the wrong throughout. He was deceived, or rather deceived himself, not recognising what it was for which Christ hungered '. The same delusion as to Christ's character led him afterwards to exact the penalty of sin from One Who had not deserved it 8 . Thus the human sufferings of Christ, unjustly inflicted, involve His enemy in condemnation and forfeit his right to hold mankind enslaved. Therefore we are set free 9, and the sinless Passion and death are the triumph of the flesh over spiritual wickedness and the vengeance of God upon it *. Man is set free, because he is justified in Christ, Who is Man. But the fact that Christ could do the works necessary to this end is proof that He is God. These works included the endurance of such suffering — in the sense, of course, which Hilary attaches to the word — as no one who was not more than man could bear. Hence he emphasises the Passion, because in so doing he magnifies the Divine nature of Him Who sustaine d it 2 . He sets forth the sufferings in the light of deeds, of displays of power 3, the greatest wonder being that the Son of God should have made Himself passible. Yet though it was from union with the Godhead that His humanity possessed the purity, the willingness, the power to win this victory, and though, in Hilary's words, it was immortal God Who died upon the Cross, still it was a victory won not by God but by the flesh*. But the Passion must not be regarded simply as an attack, ending in his own overthrow, made by Satan upon Christ. It is also a free satisfact ion o ffered to God. by Christ as Man. i n_orderjhat His sufferings might release usjrom the punishment we had deserved, being accepted instead of ours 5. This latter was a thought peculiarly 3 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Van, 4, Lame:/, 1 ; cf. Nun, 20. 3 E.g. Trin. ix. 10 ; Tr. in Ps. exxix. 9. . i» Tr. in Ps. liii. it, fm. 5 Comm. in Malt, xxxiii. 6. 6 Ib - '»• 2 - 1 !l>. iii. 3. s Tr. in Ps. Ixviii. 8. 9 Tr. in Ps. lxi. 2. » Trin. ix. 7. 2 E.g. Trin. x. 23, 47 in. 3 E.g. ib. x. tr. 4 Coniiu, in Matt. iii. 2. S E.g. Tr, in Ps. liii. 12, 13 (translated iu this volume) IXXXV111 INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. characteristic of the West, and especially of St. Cyprian's teaching ; but Hilary has had his share in giving prominence to the propitiatory aspect of Christ's self-sacrifice 6 . Yet it must be confessed that the death of Christ is somewhat in the bacTcgfound~7 that Hilary is less interested in its positive value than in its negative aspect, as the cessation from earthly life and the transition to glory. Upon this, and upon the evidential importance of the Passion as a transcendent exertion of power, whereby the Son of God held Himself down and constrained Himself to suffer and die, Hilary chiefly dwells. The death has not, in his eyes, the interest of the Resurrection. The reason is that it does not belong to the course of the Incarnation as fore-ordained by God, but is only a modification of it, rendered necessary by the sinful self-will of man. Had there been no Fall, the visible, palpable flesh would still have been laid aside, though not by death upon the Cross, when Christ's work in tire world was done ; and there would have been some event corresponding to the Ascension, if not to the Resurrection. The body, laid aside on earth, would have been resumed in glory ; and human flesh, unfallen and therefore not corrupt, yet free and therefore corruptible, would have entered into perfectly harmonious union with His Divinity, and so have been rendered safe from all possibility of evil. The purpose of raising man to the society of God was anterior to the beginnings of sin ; and it is this broader conception that renders the Passion itself intelligible, while relegating it to a secondary place. But Hilary, though as a rule he mentions the subject not for its own sake but in the course of argument, has as firm a faith in the efficacy of Christ's death and of His continued intercession in His humanity for mankind 7 as he has in His triumphant Resurrection. In regard to the manner in which man is to profit by the Atonement, Hilary shews the same inconsistency as in the case of sin. On the one hand, he lays frequent stress on knowledge concerning God and concerning the nature of sin as the first conditions of salvafiorr; on the other, he insists, less often yet with equal emphasis, upon its being God's spontaneous gift to men, to be appropriated only by faith. We have already seen that one of Hilary's positions is that man must take the first step towards God; that if we will make the beginning He will give the increase 8 . This increase is the knowledge of God imparted to willing minds 9, which lifts them up to piety. He states strongly the superiority of knowledge to faith ; — " There is a certain greater effectiveness in knowledge than in faith. Thus the writer here did not believe; he knew 1 . For faitli has the reward of obedience, but it has not the assurance of ascertained truth. The Apostle has indicated the breadth of the interval between the two by putting the latter in the lower place in his list of the gifts of graces. ' To the first wisdom, to the next knowledge, to the third faith ' is his message 2 ; for he who believes may be ignorant even while he believes, but he who has come to know is saved by his possession of knowledge from the very possibility of unbelief 3 ." This high estimation of sound knowledge was due, no doubt, to the intellectual character of the Arian conflict, in which each party retorted upon the other the charge of ignorance and folly ; and it must have been confirmed by the observation that some who were conspicuous for the misinterpretation of Scripture were notorious also for moral obliquity. There was, however, that deeper reason which influenced all Hilary's thought; the conviction that if there is to be any harmony, any understanding between God and the soul of man, it must be a perfect harmony and understanding. And knowledge is pre-eminently the sphere in which this is possible, for the revelation of God is clear and precise, and unmistakeable in its import 4 . Put there was another, a directly practical « Cf. Harnack, ii. 177 ; Scliwane, ii. 271. 7 E.g. Tr. hi Ps. liii. 4. 8 Cf. p. \xxxv./iu. In Tr. in Ps. cxviil., Nun, 20, Hilary says 'the reward of the consummation attained depends upon the initiative of the will ;' so also Tiin. i. it. 9 Tr. in Ps. ii. 40. 1 Hilary is commenting on the words, ' I know, O Lord, that Thy judgments are right.' 2 1 Cor. xii. S. 3 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., lod, is. 4 E.g. Trin. x. 70, xi. 1. THE THEOLOGY OE ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. lxxxix reason for this insistence. Appr ehens i on of Divine truths is the unfailin g test of a Christian mind; conduct changes and faith varies in intensity, but the facts of religion remain the same, and the believer can be judged by his attitude towards them. Hence we cannot be surprised that Hilary maintains the insufficiency of ' simplicity of faith,' and ranks its advocates with heathen philosophers who regard purity of life as a substitute for religion. God, he says, has provided copious knowledge, with which we cannot dispense 5 . But this knowledge is to embrace not only the truth concerning God, but also concerning the realities of human life. It is to be a knowledge of the fact that sins have been committed and an opening of the eyes to their enormity 6 . This will be followed by confession to God, by the promise to Him that we will henceforth regard sin as He regards it, and by the profession of a firm purpose to abandon it. Here again the starting-point is human knowledge. When the right attitude towards sin, intellectually and therefore morally, has been assumed, when there is the purpose of amendment and an earnest and successful struggle against sensual and worldly temptations, then we shall become 'worthy of the favour of God 7.' In this light confession is habitually regarded 8 ; it is a voluntary moral act, a self-enlightenment to the realities of sin, necessarily followed by repugnance and the effort to escape, and antecedent to Divine pardon and aid. But in contrast to this, Hilary's normal judgment, there are passages where human action is put altogether in the background. Forgiveness is the spontaneous bounty of God, overflowing from the riches of His loving-kindness, and faith the condition of its bestowal and the means by which it is appropriated 9. Even the Psalmist, himself perfect in all good works, prayed for mercy; he put his whole trust in God, and so must we '. And faith precedes knowledge also, which is unattainable except by the believer 2 . Salvation does not come first, and then faith, but through faith is the hope of salvation ; the blind man believed before he saw 3. Here again, as in the case of sin, we have two groups of statements without attempt at reconciliation ; but that which lays stress upon human initiative is far more numerous than the other, and must be regarded as expressing Hilary's underlying thought in his exhortations to Christian conduct, to his doctrine of which we may now turn. We must first premise that Christ's work as our Example as well as our Saviour is fully recognised. Many of his deeds on earth were done by way of dispensation, in order to set us a pattern of life and thought 4 . Christian life has, of course, its beginning in the free gift of Baptism, with the new life and the new faculties then bestowed, which render possible the illumination of the soul 5 . Hilary, as was natural at a time when Baptism was often deferred by professed Christians, and there were many converts from paganism, seems to contemplate that of adults as the rule ; and he feels it necessary to warn them that their Baptism will not restore them to perfect innocence. In fact, by a strange conjecture tentatively made, he once suggests that our Baptism is that wherewith John baptized our Lord, and that the Baptism of the Holy Ghost awaits us hereafter, in cleansing fires beyond the grave or in the purification of martyrdom 6 . Hilary nowhere says in so many words that while Baptism abolishes sins previously committed, alms and other good deeds perform a similar office for later offences, but his view, which will be presently stated, concerning good works shews that he agreed in this respect with St. Cyprian ; neither, however, would hold that the good works were sufficient in ordinary cases without 5 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., prolog. 4. 6 lb. exxxv. 3; con/cssio is paraphrased by firo/essa cognitio. Similar language is used in exxxvii. 2 f. 7 lb. ii. 38; cf. lii. 12 in., cxix. n (4). 8 It is always confession to God directly. There is no hint of public or ceremonial confession, or of absolution. Rut Hilary's abstinence from allusion to the practical system of the Church is so complete that no argument can ever be drawn from his silence as to the existence, or the importance in his eyes, of her institutions. 9 Tr. ill Ps. Ixvi. 2, lvi. 3. 1 lb. cxviii., Koph, 6. 2 Triti. i. 12. 3 Coinm. in Matt. ix. g. 4 E.g. Tr. in Ps. liii. 7. 5 E.g. Trin. i 18. 6 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Gimel, 5. Hilary never mentions Con- firmation. xc INTRODUCTION. CHATTER II. the further purification. Martyrdoms had, of course, ceased in Hilary's day throughout the Roman empire, but it is interesting to observe that the old opinion, which had such power in the third century, still survived. The Christian, then, has need for fear, but lie has a good hope, for all the baptized while in this world are still in the land of the living, and can only forfeit their citizenship by wilful and persistent unwoi thiness i. The means for maintaining the new life of effort is the Eucharist, which is equally necessary with Baptism 8 . But the Eucharist is one of the many matters of practical importance on which Hilary is ahnost__silent. having nothing new to say, and being able to assume that his readers andhearers were well informed and of one mind with himself. His reticence is never a proof that he regarded them with indifference. The Christian life is thus a life of hope and of high possibilities. But Hilary frankly and often recognises the serious short-comings of the average believers of his day '. Some- times, in his zeal for their improvement and in the wish to encourage his flock, he even seems to condone their faults, venturing to ascribe to Cod what may almost be styled mere good-nature, as when he speaks of God, Himself immutable, as no stern Judge of our changefulness, but rather appeased by the wisli on our part for better things than angry because we cannot perform impossibilities. But in this very passage * he holds up for our example the high attainment of the Saints, explaining that the Psalmist's words, ' There is none that doeth good, no not one,' refer only to those who are altogether gone out of the way and become abominable, and not to all mankind. Indeed, holding as he does that all Christians may have as much grace from God as they will take % and that the conduct which is therefore possible is also necessary to salvation, he could not consistently maintain the lower position. In fact, the standard of life which Hilary sets in the Homilies on the Psalms is very high. Cleanness of hand and heart is the first object at which we must aim 3, and the Law of God must be our delight. This is the lesson inculcated throughout his discourses on Psalm cxix. He recognises the complexity of life, with its various duties and difficulties, which are, however, a privilege inasmuch as there is honour to be won by victory over them ■» ; and he takes a common-sense view of our powers and responsibilities s. But though his tone is buoyant and life in his eyes is well worth living for the Christian 6 , he insists not merely upon a general purity of life, but upon renunciation of worldly pleasures. Like Cyprian, he would apparently have the wealthy believer dispose of his capital and spend his income in works of charity, without thought of economy >. Like Cyprian, again, he denounces the wearing of gold and jewellery 8 , and the attendance at public places of amusement. Higher interests, spiritual and intellectual, must take the place of such dissipation. Sacred melody will be more attractive than the immodest dialogue of the theatre, and study of the course of the stars a more pleasing pursuit than a visit to the racecourse 9. Yet strictly and even sternly Christian as Hilary is, he does not allow us altogether to forget that his is an age with another code than ours. Vengeance with him is a Christian motive. He takes with absolute litcralness the Psalmist's imprecations 1 . Like every other emotion which he expresses, that of delight at the punishment of evil doers ought to have a place in the Christian soul. This was an inheritance from the days of persecution, which were still within the memory of living men. Cyprian often encourages the confessors to patience by the prospect of seeing the wrath of God upon their enemies ; but he never gives so 7 Tr. in Ps. li. 16, 17. 8 E.g. it. exxxi. 23 J Triu. viil. 13. The latter is the only passage in Hilary's writings in which the subject is discussed at length ; ami even here it is not introduced for its own saki . 9 E.g. Tr. in Ps. i. of., cxviii., Kofih, 0. Conduct in church was not more exemplary than outside. The most innocent em- ployment which he attributes to many of his people during the reading of the lessons is the casting up of their business accounts />. in Ps. exxxv. 1. 1 Tr. in Ps. lii. 9—12. a Triu. ii. 35. 3 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., .-//,•//;, 1; 4 It, The, 9. 5 lb. i. 12. 6 E.g. Triu. i. 14, VI. 19. 7 lb. li. 21. 8 lb. cxviii., Ain, 16, 17. <) lb., lie, 1 1. ' E.g. it. liii. 10. TrtE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. xci strong expression to the feeling as Hilary does, when he enforces obedience to our Lord's command to turn the other cheek by the consideration that fuller satisfaction will be gained if the wrong be stored up against the Day of Judgment '. There is something hard and Puritan in the tone which Hilary has caught from the men of the times of persecution ; and his conflict with heretics gave him ample opportunity for indulgence in the thought of vengeance upon them. This was no mere pardonable excitement of feeling ; it was a Christian duty and privilege to rejoice in the future destruction of his opponents. But there is an even stranger difference between his standard and ours. Among the difficulties of keeping in the strait and narrow way he reckons that of truthfulness. A lie, he says, is often necessary, and deliberate falsehood sometimes useful 3. We may mislead an assassin, and so enable his intended victim to escape ; our testimony may save a defendant who is in peril in the courts ; we may have to cheer a sick man by making light of his ailment, Such are the cases in which the Apostle says that our speech is to be 'seasoned with salt.' It is not the lie that is wrong; the point of conscience is whether or no it will inflict injury upon another. Hilary is not alone in taking falsehood lightly 1 , and allowance must be made for the age in which he lived. And his words cast light upon the history of the time. The constant accusations made against the character and conduct of theological opponents, which are so painful a feature of the controversies of the early centuries, find their justification in the principle which Hilary has stated. No harm was done, rather a benefit was conferred upon mankind, if a false teacher could be discredited in a summary and effective manner; such was certainly a thought which presented itself to the minds of combatants, both orthodox and heterodox. Apart from these exceptions, which, however, Hilary would not have regarded as such, his standard of life, as has been said, is a high one both in faith and in practice, and his exhortation is full of strong common sense. It is, however, a standard set for educated people ; there is little attention paid to those who are safe from the dangers of intellect and wealth. The worldliness which he rebukes is that of the rich and influential ; and his arguments are addressed to the reading class, as are his numerous appeals to his audience in the Homilies on the Psalms to study Scripture for themselves. Indeed, his advice to them seems to imply that they have abundant leisure for spiritual exercises and for reflection. Put he does not simply ignore the illiterate, still mostly pagans, for the work of St. Martin of Tours only began, as we saw, in Hilary's last days ; in one passage at least he speaks with the scorn of an ancient philosopher of ' the rustic mind,' which will fail to find the meaning of the Psalms 5 . Hilary is not content with setting a standard which his flock must strive to reach. He would have them attain to a higher level than is commanded, and at the same time constantly remember that they are failing to perform their duty to God. This higher life is set before his whole audience as their aim. He recognises the peculiar honour of the widow and the virgin 6 , but has singularly little to say about these classes of the Christian community, or about the clergy, and no special counsel for them. The works of supererogation — the word is not his — which he preaches are within the reach of all Christians. They consist in the more perfect practice of the ordinary virtues. King 2 Tr. in Ps. exxxvii. 16. Cf. Trin. x. 55, where lie refuses docs not represent his mouthpiece as a model of virtue. It i, to believe that it was with real sorrow that our Lord wept over more significant that Tcrtullian, Pud. 19, classes breach of trust and lying among slight sins which may happen to any one any day. This was in his strictest and most censorious period. There are grave difficulties in reconciling some of Cyprian's statements concerning his opponents with one another and with probability, but he has not ventured upon any general extenuation of the vice. 5 Tr. in Ps. exxxiv. 1. 6 lb. exxxi. 24, exxvii. 7, and especially cxviii , Xun, 14. Jerusalem, that godless and murderous city. His tears were a ' dispensa-tion.' 3 Tr. in Ps. xiv. io, est cnim ncecssarium plcrumque men- dacium, ct nonnunquam falsitas utilis est. The latter apparently refers to his second example. 4 Hcrmas, Mand. iii. _?, confesses to wholesale lying; he had never heard that it was wrong. Bat the writer of the Shepherd xcn INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. David 'was not content henceforth to be confined to the express commands of the Law, nor to be subject to a mere necessity of obedience.' ' The Prophet prays that these free-will offerings may be acceptable to God, because the deeds done in compliance to the Law's edict are performed under the actual compulsion of servitude ?. As an instance he gives the character of David. His duty was to be humble; he made himself humble exceedingly, thus doing more than he was legally bound to do. He spared his enemies so far as in him lay, and bewailed their death; this was a free service to which he was bound by no compulsion. Such conduct places those who practice it on the same level with those whose lives are formally consecrated; the state of the latter being regarded, as always in early times, as admirable in itself, and not as a means towards higher things. Vigils and fasts and acts of mercy are the methods advocated by Hilary for such attainment. But they must not stand alone, nor must the Christian put his trust in them. Humility must have faith for its principle, and fasting be combined with charity 8 . And the Christian must never forget that though he may in some respects be doing more than he need, yet in others he is certainly falling short. For the conflict is unceasing ; the devil, typified by the mountains in the Psalm, has been touched by God and is smoking, but is not yet burning and powerless for mischiefs. Hence there is constant danger lest the Christian fall into unbelief or unfruitfulness, sins equally fatal * ■ he must not trust in himself, either that he can deserve forgiveness for the past or resist future temptations 2 . Nor may he dismiss his past offences from his memory. It can never cease to be good for us to confess our former sins, even though we have become righteous. St. Paul did not allow himself to forget that he had persecuted the Church of Gods. But there is a further need than that of penitence. Like Cyprian before him and Augustine after him, Hilary insists upon the value of alms in the sight of God. The clothing of the naked, the release of the captive plead with God for the remission of our sins 4 ; and the man who redeems his faults by alms is classed among those who win His favour, with the perfect in love and the blameless in faith 5 . Thus the thought of salvation by works greatly preponderates over that of salvation by grace. Hilary is fearful of weakening man's sense of moral responsibility by dwelling too much upon God's work which, however, he does not fail to recognise. Of the two great dangers, that of faith and that of life, the former seemed to him the more serious. God's requirements in that respect were easy of fulfilment ; He had stated the truth and He expected it to be unhesitatingly accepted. But if belief, being an exertion of the will, was easy, misbelief must be peculiarly and fatally wicked. The confession of St. Peter, the foundation upon which the Church is built, is that Christ is God 6 ; the sin against the Holy Ghost is denial of this truth ?. These are the highest glory and the deepest shame of man. It does not seem that Hilary regarded any man, however depraved, as beyond hope so long as he did not dispute this truth ; he has no code of mortal sins. But heresy concerning Christ, whatever the conduct and character of the heretic, excludes all possibility of salvation, for it necessarily cuts him off from the one Faith and the one Church which are the condition and the sphere of growth towards perfection; and the It is in this passage that His antithesis is between 7 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Nun, 13, 15 Hilary gives his views most fully. legiiima and voluntaria, 8 I.e. Nun, 14, Comm. in Matt. v. 2. In the latter 1 there is a piece of practical advice which shews that public fasts were generally recognised. Hilary tells his readers that they must not take literally our Lord's command to anoint themselves when they fast. If they do, they will render themselves con- spicuous and ridiculous. The passage, Comm. in Mutt, xxvii. 5, 6, on the parables of the Virgins with their lamps and of the Talents cannot be taken, as by Forsler, as evidence that Hilary rejected the later doctrine of the supererogatory righteousness of the S.iiiUs. lie is speaking of the impossibility of contem- poraries conveying righteousness to one another in the present life, and his words have no bearing on that doctrine. 9 Tr. in Ps. cxliii. ir. » lb. li. 16. 3 E.g. ib. lxi. 6, cxviii., He, 12, Nun, 20, A'o/.'i, 6. 3 lb. CXXXV. .|. 4 lb. li. 31. 5 lb. cxviii., Lamed, 15. Similar passages arc faiily numer- ous; e.g. Comm. in Matt. iv. 26. 6 Trin. vi. 36. 7 Comm. in Matt. xii. 17, xxxi. 5. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. xciii severance is just, because misbelief is a wilful sin. Since, then, compliance or non-com- pliance with one of God's demands, that for faith in Mis revelation, depends upon the will, it was natural that Hilary should lay stress upon the importance of the will in regard to God's other demand, that for a Christian life. This was, in a sense, a lighter requirement, for various degrees of obedience were possible. Conduct could neither give nor deny faith, but only affect its growth, while without the frank recognition of the facts of religion no conduct could be acceptable to God. Life presents to the will a constantly changing scries of choices between good and evil, while the Faith must be accepted or rejected at once and as a whole. It is clear from Hilary's insistence upon this that the difficulties, apart from heresy, with which he had to contend resembled those of Mission work in modem India. There were many who would accept Christianity as a revelation, yet had not the moral strength to live in conformity with their belief. Of such persons Hilary will not despair. They have the first essential of salvation, a clear and definite acceptance of doctrinal truth ; they have also the offer of sufficient grace, and the free will and power to use it. And time and opportunity are granted, for the vicissitudes of life form a progressive education ; they are, if taken aright, the school, the training-ground for immortality s . This is because all Christians are in Christ, by virtue of His Incarnation. They are, as St. Paul says, complete in Him, furnished with the faith and hope they need. But this is only a preparatory completeness ; hereafter they shall be complete in themselves, when the perfect harmony is attained and they are conformed to His glory 9. Thus to the end the dignity and responsibility of mankind is maintained. But it is obvious that Hilary has failed to correlate the work of Christ with the work of the Christian. The necessity of His guidance and aid, and the manner in which these are bestowed, is sufficiently stated, and the duty of the Christian man is copiously and eloquently enforced. But the importance of Christ's work within Himself, in harmonising the two natures, has withdrawn most of Hilary's attention from His work within the believing soul ; and the impression which Hilary's writings leave upon the mind concerning the Saviour and redeemed mankind is that of allied forces seeking the same end but acting independently, each in a sphere of its own. There still remains to be considered Hilary's account of the future state. The human soul, being created after the image of God, is imperishable ; resurrection is as inevitable as death l . And the resurrection will be in the body, for good and bad alike. The body of the good will be glorified, like that of Christ ; its substance will be the same as in the present life, its glory such that it will be in all other respects a new body 2 . Indeed, the true life of man only begins when this transformation takes place 3. No such change awaits the wicked; we shall all rise, but we shall not all be changed, as St. Paul says 4 . They remain as they are, or rather are subjected to a ceaseless process of deterioration, whereby the soul is degraded to the level of the body, while this in the case of others is raised, either instantly or by a course of purification, to the level of the soul 5. Their last state is vividly described in language which recalls that of Virgil ; crushed to powder and dried to dust they will fly for ever before the wind of God's wrath 6 . For the thoroughly good and the thoroughly bad the final state begins at the moment of death. There is no judgment for either class, but only for those whose character contains elements of both good and evil ?. But perfect goodness is only a theoretical possibility, and Hilary is not certain of the condemnation of any except wilful unbelievers. Evil is mingled in varying proportions with good in the character of men at large; God can detect it in the very best. All therefore 3 Trin. i. 14. 9 lb. ix. 8, commenting on Col. ii. 10. I 5 Comm. in Matt. x. 19. 6 T>: in I's. i. 19. 1 Tr. in Ps. Ii. 18, lxiii. 9. = lb. ii. 41. 7 lb. i. 19 flf., translated in this volume. For the good, see i lb, cxviii., Gimel, 3. 4 lb. lii, 17, ' Jo/,'', lvii. 7; for the bad, lvii. 5, Trin. \i j. xciv INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. need to be purified after death, if they arc to excapc condemnation on the Day of Judgment. Even the Mother of our Lord needs the purification of pain ; this is the sword which should pierce through her soul 3 . All who are infected by sin, the heretic who has erred in ignorance among them 9, must pass through cleansing fires after death. Then comes the general Resurrection. To the good it brings the final change to perfect glory; tie bad will rise only to return to their former place l . The multitude of men will be judged, and after the education and purification of suffering to which, by God's mercy, they have been submitted, will be accepted by Him. Hilary's writings contain no hint that any who are allowed to present themselves on the Day of Judgment will then be rejected. We have now completed the survey of Hilary's thoughts. Many of these were strange and new to his contemporaries, and his originality, we may be sure, deprived him of some of the influence he wished to exert in the controversies of his day. Yet he shared the spirit and entered heartily into the interests and conflicts of his ago, and therefore his thoughts in many ways were different from our own. To this we owe, no doubt, the preservation of his works ; writings which anticipated modern opinion would have been powerless for good in that day, and would not have survived to ours. Thus from his own century to ours Hilary has been somewhat isolated and neglected, and even misunderstood. Yet he is one of the most notable figures in the history of the early Church, and must be numbered among those who have done most to make Christian thought richer and more exact. If we would appreciate him aright as one of the builders of the dogmatic structure of the Faith, we must omit from the materials of our estimate a great part of his writings, and a part which has had a wider influence than any other. His interpretation of the letter, though not of the spirit, of Scripture must be dismissed ; interesting as it always is, and often suggestive, it was not his own and was a hindrance, though he did not see it, to the freedom of his thought. Yet his exegesis in detail is often admirable. For instance, it would not be easy to overpraise his insight and courage in resisting the conventional orthodoxy, sanctioned by Athanasius in his own generation and by Augustine in the next, which interpreted St. Paul's ' First-born of every creature ' as signifying the Incarnation of Christ, and not His eternal generation 2 . We must omit also much that Hilary borrowed without question from current opinion ; it is his glory that he concentrated his attention upon some few questions of supreme importance, and his strength, not his weakness, that he was ready to adopt in other matters the best and wisest judgments to which he had access. An intelligent, and perhaps ineffective, curiosity may keep itself abreast of the thought of the time, to quote a popular phrase ; Hilary was content to survey wide regions of doctrine and discipline with the eyes of Origen and of Cyprian. This limitation of the interests of a powerful mind has enabled him to pene- trate further into the mysteries of the Faith than any of his predecessors; to points, in fact, where his successors have failed to establish themselves. We cannot blame him that later theologians, starting where he left off, have in some directions advanced further still. The writings of Hilary are the quarry whence many of the best thoughts of Ambrose and of Leo are hewn. Eminent and successful as these men were, we cannot rank them with Hilary as intellectually his equals; we may even wonder how many of their conclusions they would have drawn had not Hilary supplied the premisses. It is a greater honour that the unrivalled genius of Augustine is deeply indebted to him. Nor may we blame him, save lightly, for some rashness and error in his speculations. He set out, unwillingly, as we know, but not half-heartedly, upon his novel journey of exploration, lie had not, as we have, centuries of criticism behind him, and could not know that some of the TV. in /'■>•• c.vviii., Giwcl, 12. 9 Trin. vi, 3. ' TV. in Pi. lii. 17, Ixix. 3. -' T>in- viii. 50 : TV. in Ps. ii- 28. Cf. Light foot 011 Co!, i. 15. THE THEOLOGY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS. xcv avenues lie followed would lead him astray. It may be that we are sober because wc are, in a sense, disillusioned ; that modern Christian thought which starts from the old premisses tends to excess of circumspection. And certainly Hilary would not have earned his fame as one of the most original and profound of teachers, whose view of Christology is one of the most interesting in the whole of Christian antiquity 3 , had he not been in- spired by a sense of freedom and of hope in his quest. Yet great as was his genius and reverent the spirit in which he worked, the errors into which he fell, though few, were serious. There arc instances in which he neglects his habitual balancing of corresponding infinities ; as when he shuts his eyes to half the revelation, and asserts that Christ could not be ignorant and could not feel pain. And there is that whole system of dispensations which he has built up in explanation of Christ's life on earth ; a system against which our conscience and our common sense rebel, for it contradicts the plain words of Scripture and attributes to God ' a process of Divine reserve which is in fact deception V We may compare Hilary's method in such cases to the architecture of Gloucester and of Sher- borne, where the ingenuity of a later age has connected and adorned the massive and isolated columns of Norman date by its own light and graceful drapery of stonework. We cannot but admire the result ; yet there is a certain concealment of the original de- sign, and perhaps a perilous cutting away of the solid structure. But, in justice to Hilary, tve must remember that in these speculations he is venturing away from the established standards of doctrine. When he is enunciating revealed truths, or arguing onward from them to conclusions towards which they point, he has the company of the Creeds, or at least they indicate the way he must go. But in explaining the connection between doc- trine and doctrine he is left to his own guidance. It is as though a traveller, not content to acquaint himself with the highroads, should make his way over hedge and ditch from one of them to another ; he will not always hit upon the best and straightest course. But at least Hilary's conclusions, though sometimes erroneous, were reached by honest and reverent reasoning, and neither ancient nor modern theology can afford to reproach him. The tendency of the former, especially uoo\ hatGo the Son should be asserted to be born not of God the Father, but of nothing, as the first creatures were, or of another essence than God, as the later creatures. And further that in saying the Father was greater in hojiour, d ignit y, spl endou r and majesty, they implied that the Son lacked those things which con- stitute the Father's superiority. Lastly, that while it is affirmed that His birth is unknow- that men should hold their peace about^o^ooi; aum and oatnovai oi'. they determined lhatGod able, we were commanded by this Compulsory Ignorance Act not to know that He is of God : just as if it could be commanded or decreed that a man should know what in future he is to be ignorant of, or be ignorant of what he already knows. I have subjoined in full this pesTJlen t and g odless blasphemy, though against mywill, to facilitate a more complete knowledge of the worth and reason of the replies made on the opposite side by those Easterns who endeavoured to counteract all the wiles of the heretics according to their understanding .and comprehension. A copy of the Blasphemia composed at SirmiUML- by Osius and Potamius. 11. Since there appeared to be some mis- understanding respecting the faith, all points have been carefully investigated and discussed at Sirmium in the presence of our most rever- end brothers and fellow-bishops, Valens, Ur- sacius and Germinius. It is evident that there is one God, the Father Almighty, according as it is believed throughout the whole world ; and His only Son Jesus Christ our Saviour, begotten of Him before the ages. But we cannot and ought not to say that there are two Gods, for the Lord Himself said, / will go unto My Father and your Father, unto My God and your God*. So there is one God over all, as the Apostle hath taught us, Is lie the God 0/ the Jews only 1 Is He not also of the Gentiles ? Yes, of the Gentiles also : seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and the uncir- cumcision through faith. And in all other things they agreed thereto, nor would they allow any difference. But since some or many persons were dis- turbed by questions concerning substance, called in Greek ovaia, that is, to make it under- stood more exactly, as to bjioovaio v. or what is called ojjMMwnov, there ought to be no mention madToTthese at all. Nor ought any exposition to be made of them for the reason and consideration that they are not contained in the divine Scriptures, and that they are above man's understanding, nor can any man declare the birth of the Son, of whom it is written, Who shall declare Bis generation s ? For it is plain that only the Father knows how He begat the Son, and the Son how He was begotten of the Father. There is no question that the Father is greater. No one can doubt that the Father is greater than the Son in honour, dignity, splendour, majesty, and in the very name of Father, the Son Himself testifying, He that sent Me is greater than 1 6 . And no one 4 John xx. 17. 5 Is. liii. 8. 6 John xiv. 28. ON THE COUNCILS. 1 is ignorant that it is Catholic doctrine that there are two Persons of Father and Son ; and that the Father is greater, and that the Son is subordinated to the" Father, together with all things which the Father has subordinated to Him, and that the Father has no beginning and is invisible, immortal and impassible, but that thejaon has been begotten of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, and that the generation of this Son, as is aforesaid, no one knows but His Father. And that the Son of God Himself, our Lord and God, as we read, took flesh, that is, a body, that is, man of the womb of the Virgin Mary, of the Angel an- nounced. And as all the Scriptures teach, and especially the doctor of the Gentiles him- self, He took of Mary the Virgin, man, through whom He suffered. And the whole jaith is su mmed up and secured in '-this, ^that_ _the T rinity must al ways be preserved, as :w_e^igad irL^lb_e_Gospel, Go ye and baptize all nations in the Name of the Father, and of tlie^Son^jind of the_Holy Ghosf. Complete and perfect is the number of the Trinity. No w the Paracl ete, the Spirit, is Hnrnimh— the, £cm • Who was~seht and came according to His promise in order to instruct, teach and sanctify the apostles and all believers. 12. After these many and most impious statements had been made, the Eastern bishops on their side again met together and composed definitions of their confession. Since, however, we have frequently to mention th e word s esse nce and substance, we must determine the meaning of essence, lest in discussing Jacts we prove ignofJTnt of the significatio n ot out- works'. Ess ence r5~3~feality which is, or t h e reality ot those things from which it is, and which sub sists inasmuch as it is permanen t. Now we can speak of the essence, or nature, or genus, or substance of anything. And the strict reason why the word essence is employed is because it h always. But this is i dentic al with su bstanc e^ because a th ing_ which lS y-ne- ces sarily subsists in its elf, an"dwhatever_thus subsists possesses unquestionably a permanent geTTrjsrrratTJl'e or substance! When, therefore, we~iayTrTa1r-ess~ettce ""signifies nature, or genus, or substance, we mean the essence of that thing which permanently exists in the nature, genus, or substance. Now, therefore, let us review the definitions of fa ith drawn up by the Easterns; I. " If any one hearing that the Son is the image of the invisible God, says that the image of God is the same as the invisible God, as though refusing to confess that He is truly Son : let him be anathema." is be \ with^ 13. Hereby is excluded the assertion o.' those who wish to represent the relationship of Father and Son as a matter of names, in asmuch as every image is similar in species to that of which it is an image. For no one is himself his own image, but it is necessary that the image should demonstrate him ol whom it is an image. So an image is the figured and indistinguishable likeness of one thing equated with another. Therefore the Father is, and the So n is^ because the Son is the image of the Father : and he who is an image, if he is to be truly an image, must have in himselt his or > t>e truly a n 1 5n«inaTs ~spe species, n ature and ess ence in virtue of the fac.t thnr hp is ap image. II. "And if any one hearing tlte Son say, As the Father hath life in Himself so also hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself % , shall say that He who has received life from the Father, and who also declares, / live by the Father**, is the same as He who gave life: let him be anathema." 14. The person of the recipient and of the giver are distinguished so that the same should not be made one and sole. For since he is under anathema who has believed that, when recipient and giver are mentioned one solitary and unique person is implied, we may not suppose that the selfsame person who gave received from Himself. For He who lives and He through whom He lives are not identical, for one lives to Himself, the other declares that He lives through the Author of His life, and no one will declare that He who enjoys life and He through whom His life is caused are personally identical. III. " And if any one hearing that the Only- begotten Son is like the invisible God, denies that the Son who is the image of the invisible God (whose image is understood to include essence) is Son in essence, as though deny- ing His true Sonship : let him be anathema." 15. It is here insisted that the nature is indistinguishable and entirely similar. For since He is the Only-begotten Son of God and the image of the invisible God, it is necessary that He should be of an essence similar in species and nature. Or what dis- tinction can be made between Father and Son affecting their nature with its similar genus, when the Son subsisting through the nature begotten in Him is invested with the properties of the Father, viz., glory, worth, power, invisibility, essence? And while these prerogatives of divinity are equal we neither understand the one to be less because He is Son, nor the other to be greater because 7 Matt, xxviii. ig. John v. 26. 9 lb. vi. 57. 8 DE SYNODIS. He is Father : since the Son is the image of the Father in species, and not dissimilar in genus ; since the similarity of a Son begot- ten of the substance of His Father does not admit of any diversity of substance, and the Son and image of the invisible God embraces in Himself the whole form of His Father's divinity both in kind and in amount : and this is to be truly Son, to reflect the truth of the Father's form by the perfect likeness of the nature imaged in Himself. IV. "And if any one hearing this text, For as the Father hath life in Himself, so also He hath given to the Son to have life in Himself 1 ; denies that the Son is like the Father even in essence, though He testifies that it is even as He has.said ; let him be anathema. For it is plain that since the life which is understood to exist in the Father signifies substance, and the life of the Only-begotten which was be- gotten of the Father is also understood to mean substance or essence, He there signifies a likeness of essence to essence." 1 6. With the Son's origin as thus stated is connected the perfect birth of the undivided nature. For what in each is life, that in each is signified by essence. And in the life which is begotten of life, i.e. in the essence which is born of essence, seeing that it is not born unlike (and that because life is of life), He keeps in Himself a nature wholly similar to His original, because there is no diversity in the likeness of the essence that is born and that begets, that is, of the life which is possessed and which has been given. For though God begat Him of Himself, in likeness to His own nature, He in whom is the unbegotten like- ness did not relinquish the property of His natural substance. For He only has what He gave ; and as possessing life He gave life to be possessed. And thus what is born of essence, as life of life, is essentially like itself, and the essence of Him who is begotten and of Him who begets admits no diversity or unlikeness. V. "If any one hearing the words formed or created it and begat me spoken by the same lips 2 , refuses to understand this begat me of likeness of essence, but says that begat me and formed me arc the same : as if to deny that the perfect Son of God was here signified as Son under two different expressions, as Wisdom has given us to piously understand, and asserts that formed me and begat me only imply forma- tion and not sonship : let him be anathema." 17. Those who say that the Son of ('.ml is only a creature or formation are opposed John v. 26. - Prov. viii. 22. by the following argument. For this profane presumption of the impiety of heretics is based on the fact that they say they have read The Lord formed or created me, which seems to imply formation or creation ; but they omit the following sentence, which is the^key to the first, and from the first wrest authority for their iijmious statement that the Son is a creature, because~~WisTlom has said that she was created. But if she were created, how could she be also born? For all birth, of whatever kind, attains its own nature from the nature that begets it : but creation takes its beginning from the power of the Creator, the Creator being able to form a creature Jrom aothujg . So Wisdom, who said that she was created, does in the next sentence say that she was also begotten, using thf L.word c reation of the arr _of the _cha^4ffdesg_nat_nre of her Parent, which nature, unlike the manner and wont of human parturition, without any detri- ment or change of self created from itself what it begat. Similarly a Creator has no need of passion or intercourse or parturition. And that which is creajted _out o f_QOthing begins to exist__at^ a d efinite moment. And He who creates makes His obje ct th rough H is niere p ower, and creat ion is the wo rk ofj night, not th e birth of a n ature from a nature~thTaFbege_ts oL_ But because" the Son of God was not begotten after the manner of corporeal child- bearing, but was born perfect God of perfect God ; therefore Wisdom says that she was created, excluding in her manner of birth every kind of corporeal process. 18. Moreover, to shew that she possesses a nature that was born and not created, Wisdom has added that she was begotten, that by declaring that she was created and also begotten, she might completely explain her birth. By speaking of creation she implies that the nature of the Father is changeless, and she also shews that the substance of her nature begotten of God the Father is genuine and real. And so her words about creation and generation have explained the perfection of her birth : the former that the Father is changeless, the latter the reality of her own nature. The two things combined become one, and that one is both in perfection : for the Son being born of God without any change in God, is so born of the Father as to be created ; and the Father, who is changeless in Himself and the Son's Father by nature, so forms the Son as to beget Him. Therefore the heresy which has dared to aver that the Son of God is a creature is condemned because while the fust statement shews the impassible perfection of the divinity, the second, which asserts His natural generation, crushes the ON THE COUNCILS. V i mpiftys opinion that He was created out of nothing. VI. "And if any one grant 'the Son only a likeness of activity, but rob Him of the like- ness of essence which is the corner-stone of our faith, in spite of the fact that the Son Himself reveals His essential likeness with the Father in the words, For as the Father hath life in Himself, so also hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself \ as well as His likeness in activity by teaching us that What things soever the Fa/her doeth, these also doeth the Son likezvise*, such a man robs himself of the know- ledge of eternal life which is in the Father and the Son, and let him be anathema." 19. The heretics when beset by autho- ritative passages in Scripture are wont only to grant— that t he Son is like the Father in mignFwrTile theyTTeprive Him of siiTnTarity of nature. This is foolish and impious, forlhey drJTiot understand that similar might can only be the result of a similar nature. For a lower nature can never attain to the might of a higher and more powerful nature. What will the men who make these assertions say about the omnipotence of God the Father, if the might of a lower nature is made equal to His own ? For they cannot deny that the Son's power is the same, seeing that He has said, What things soever the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. No, a similarity of nature follows on a simi- larity of might when He says, As the Father hat h life in Him self, so also hath Jle given to the Son to have li fe in Hi mself. I n life is im- plie d nature and essenc e ; this, Christ teaches, has been given Him to have as the Father hath. Therefore similarity of life contains similarity of might : for there cannot be simi- larity of life where the nature is dissimilar. So it is necessary that similarity of essence follows on similarity of might : for as what the Father does^jthe Son does also, so the life_that the Father has He has given to the Son to have likewise. Therefore we condemn the rash^ajid_impious statements of those who confess a smuTaTity~~oFlhighT but have dared to preach a dissimilarity of nature, since it is the chief ground of our hope to confess that in the Father and the Son there is an identical divine substance. VII. " And if any one professing that he believes that there is a Father and a Son, says that the Father is Father of an essence unlike Himself but of similar activity; for speaking profane and novel words against the essence of the Son and nullifying His true divine Sonship, let him be anathema." 20. By confused and involved expressions the heretics very frequently elude the truth and secure the ears of the unwary by the mere sound of common words, such as the titles Father and Son, which they do got truthfully natural and genuin e com- for they are aware that utter to express a murfity of essence 3 John v. a6. 4 lb. v. 19. GocT is called the Father of all creation, and remember that all the saints are named sons of God. In like manner they declare that the relationship between the Father and the Son resembles that between the Father and the universe, so that the names Father and Son areratlTef tifufcintrnn real. For the names areTtituiar if the Persons* have a distinct nature of a different essence, since n o reality can be att ached to the name of father unless it be b ased on tne natu re 01 his orlspring. So the Father_can not Fe called F ather 'of an__alien suljstanclTunlike His_own, for a perfect birth manifests no diversity between itself and the original substance. Therefore we repu diate-a ll the imp ious ^asse rtions that the Father is Father 1 ot~ar" t 5ofir begotterr~c^Himse5-an(l yet not of His own nature. We shall not call God Father for having - a creature like Him in might and activity, but for begetting a nature of an essence not unlike or alien to Himself : for a natural birth does not admit of any dis- similarity with the Father's nature. Therefore those are anathema who assert that the Father is Father of a nature unlike Himself, so that something other than God is born of God, and who suppose that the essence of the Father degenerated in begetting the Son. For so far as in them lies they destroy the very birthless and changeless essence of the Father by daring to attribute to Him in the birth of His Only- begotten an alteration and degeneration of His natural essence. VIII. " And if any one understanding that the Son is like in essence to Him whose Son He is admitted to be, says that the Son is the same as the Father, or part of the Father, or that it is through an emanation or any such passion as is necessary for the procreation of corporeal children that the incorporeal Son draws His life from the incorporeal Father : let him be anathema." 21. We have always to beware of the vices of particular perversions, and countenance no opportunity for delusion. For many heretics say that the Son is like the Father in divinity in order to support the theory that in virtue of this similarity the Son is the same Person as the Father : for this undivided similarity ap- pears to countenance a belief in a single monad. For what does not differ in kind seems to retain identity of nature. 22. But birth does not countenance this X 10 DE SYNODIS. vain imagination; for such identity without differentiation excludes birth. For what is born has a father .who -eaused its birth. """Nor because the divinity of HffrT who is being born is inseparable from that of Him who begets, are the Begetter and the Begotten the same Person ; while on the other hand He who is born and He who begets cannot be unlike. He is therefore anathema who shall proclaim a similarity of nature in the Father and the Son in order to abolish the personal meaning of the word Son : for while through mutual likeness one differs in no respect from the other, yet this very likeness, which does not admit of bare union, confesses both the Father and the Son because the Son is the change- less likeness of the Father. For the Son is not part of the Father so that He who is born and He who begets can be called one Person. Nor is He an emanation so that by a continual flow of a corporeal uninterrupted stream the flow is itself kept in its source, the source being identical with the flow in virtue of the successive and unbroken con- tinuity. But the birth is perfect, and remains alike in nature; not taking its beginning ma- terially from a corporeal conception and bear- ing, but as an incorporeal Son drawing His existence from an incorporeal Father according to the likeness which belongs to an identical nature. IX. "And if any one, because the Father is never admitted to be the Son and the Son is never admitted to be the Father, when he says that the Son is other than the Father (because the Father is one Person and the Son another, inasmuch as it is said, There is another that beareth witness of Me, even the Father who sent Me 5 ), does in anxiety for the distinct personal qualities of the Father and the Son which in the Church must be piously understood to exist, fear that the Son and the Father may sometimes be admitted to be the same Person, and therefore denies that the Son is like in essence to the Father : let him be anathema." 23. It was said unto the apostles of the Lord, Be ye wise as serpents, and harmless as doves 6 . Christ therefore wished there to be in us the nature of different creatures : but in such a sort that the harmlessness of the dove might temper the serpent's wisdom, and the wisdom of the serpent might instruct the harm- lessness of the dove, and that so wisdom might be made harmless and harmlessness wise. This precept has been observed in the expo- sition of this creed. For the former sentence of which we have spoken guarded against the S John v. 32. 6 Malt, x. 16. teaching of a unity of person under the cloak of an essential likeness, and against the denial of the Son's birth as the result of an identity of nature, lest we should understand God to be a single monad because one Person does not differ in kind from the other. In the next sentence, by harmless and apostolic wisdom we have again taken refuge in that wisdom of the serpent to which we are bidden to be conformed no less than to the harm- lessness of the dove, lest perchance through a repudiation of the unity of persons on the ground that the Father is one Person and the Son another, a preaching of the dis- similarity of their natures should again take us unawares, and lest on the ground that He who sent and He who was sent are two Persons (for the Sent and the Sender cannot be one Person) they should be considered to have divided and dissimilar natures, though He who is born and He who begets Him cannot be of a different essence. So we p reser v g in Fath er and in Son the like- n p^^hTan^xdpntiral__jTa tnrp^ jhrougtr an— €S- qpnhnl hjrth : yet the si rnilarity.of nature does nnf- injur? pprfrmfd'ty h y ..imping Ibii Sent and tft€-Sender tQ_be_bu.t-Que. Nor do wedo away with the similarity of nature by admitting dis- tinct personal qualities, for it is impossible that the one God should be called Son and Father to Himself. So then the truth as to the birth supports the similarity of essence and the similarity of essence does not under- mine the personal reality of the birth. Nor again does a profession of belief in the Be- getter and the Begotten exclude a similarity of essence ; for while the Begetter and the Be- gotten cannot be one Person, He who is born and He who begets cannot be of a different nature. X. " And if any one admits that God be- came Father of the Only-begotten Son at any point in time and not that the Only-begotten Son came into existence without passion be- yond all times and beyond all human calcu- lation : for contravening the teaching of the Gospel which scorned any interval of time between the being of the Father and the Son and faithfully has instructed us that In the beginning tvas the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ?, let him be anathema." 24. It is a pious saying that the Father is not limited by times : fo r the true niej ijjirjg of the name of la ther ^vhirh hp i^p je before tun e bewail surp asses comprehension. Al- though religio n tcafllu:s Us to uscnTie to Him this name of Father through which comes the 7 John i. 1. ON THE COUNCILS. il impassible origin of the Son, yet He is not bound in time, for the eternal and infinite IGod cannot be understood as having become \a Father in time, and according to the tea'ch- |ing of the Gospel the Only-begotten God the Word is recognized even in the beginning rather to be with God than to be born. XI. " And if any one says that the Father is older in time than His Only-begotten Son, and that the Son is younger than the Father : let him be anathema." 25. The essential likeness conformed to the Father's essence in kind is also taught to be identical in jim_e : lest He who is the image of God, who is the Word, who is God with God in the beginning, who is like the Father, by the insertion of time between Himself and the Father should not have in Himself in perfection that which is both image, and Word, and God. For if He be proclaimed to be younger in time, He has lost the truth of the image and likeness : for that is no longer likeness which is found to be dissimilar in time. Fo r that very fact that G od is. Father prevents tnere being any ti me in which _Jie was not Father : conseque ntly th ere can be no time in the Son's existe_nce_in which He was not Son. Wherefore we must neither call the Father older than the Son nor the Son younger than the Father : for the true mean- ing of neither name can exist without the other. XII. "And if any one attributes the time- less substance (i.e. Person) of the Only-be- gotten Son derived from the Father to the unborn essence of God, as though calling the Father Son : let him be anathema 8 ." 26. The above definition when it denied that the idea of time could be applied to the birth of the Son seemed to have given an occasion for heresy (we saw that it would be monstrous if the Father were limited by time, but that He would be so limited if the Son were subjected to time), so that by the help of this repudiation of time, the Father who is un- born might under the appellation of Son be pro- claimed as both Father and Son in a single and unique Person. For in excluding time from the Son's birth it seemed to countenance the opinion that there was no birth, so that He whose birth is not in time might be con- 8 Substan tia is in this pa ssage used as the e quivalent of Peistm. The word was used by TertulIianTn the sense - of oueria, and^this early Latin use of the word is the use which eventually prevailed. The meaning of the word in Hilary is influenced by its philological equivalent in Greek. At the beginning of the fourth century iTrocrTao-is was used in the same sense as ovaia. The latter word meant ' reality,' the former word ' the basis of existence.' Athanasius, however, began the practice of restricting irrooraffts ,Bs ' 1 '' ' "1 1 Ilihry rnn~rqiiri)t'y hrrii mr- \jlliiiM!ltU'i\\ tlii> now ntncc-ofthe word un-rig-rag-is. The Alex- andrine Council of 362 sanctioned as allowable the use of unw- Too-i? in the sense of Person, and by the end of the century the old usage practically disappeared. sidered not to have been born at all. Where- fore, lest at the suggestion of this denial of time the heresy of the unity of Persons should insinuate itself, that i mpiet y is condemned which dares to refer the" timeless birth to the unique and singular Person of the unborn essence. For it is one thing to be outside time and another to be unborn ; the first admits of birth (though outside time), the other, so far as it is, is the one sole author from eternity of its being what it is. 27. We have reviewed, beloved brethren, all the definitions of faith made by the Easteca — bishops which they formulated in their assembly against the recently emerging heresy. And we, as far as we have been able, have adaptexl the^vvoLding of^ur~ex- posT tidrf to express their meaning, following their diction rat her than^ desir ing to be thought the originators of njrw_j}hrases. In these words lhey'de cree~the principles of thei r co nscienc e and a l ong ma inta ined doctrin e against a new and j>rofan e impiety ] Those who compiled this heresy at Slrmium, or ac- cepted it after its compilation, they have thereby compelled to confess their ignorance and to sign such decrees. T here the_ Son— is the perfect image of the Father : there under tffeaTialities of an identical essenceTthe Person "Of the Son is not annihilate d ancT con fo unde d with the Father : there the Son is declared to be inia~ge~of the fathe r in virtue ofa re al likeness, and does n ot differ in substance fro m the Father, whose im age He is : there on account ot the lite which the Father has and the life which the Son has received, the Father can have nothing different in substance (this being implied in life) from that which the Son received to have : there the begotten Son is not a creature, but is a Person undistinguished from the Father's nature : there, just as an identical might belongs to the Father and the Son, so their essence admits of no difference : there the Father by begetting the Son in no wise degenerates from Himself in Him through any difference of nature : there, though the likeness of nature is the same in each, the proper qualities which mark this likeness are re pugnant Jto_a confusion of Persons, so that there is not 7rnlT~5Trb5TSTing — Persoh who is called both Father and Son : there, though it is piously affirmed that there is both a Father who sends and a Son who is sent, yet no distinction in essence is drawn between the Father and the Son, the Sent and the Sender : there the truth of God's Fatherhood is not bound by limits of time : there the Son is not later in time : there beyond all time is a per- fect birth which refutes the error that the Son could not be born. 12 Dli bYNODlS. 28. Here, beloved brethren, is the entire creed which was published by some Easterns, few in proportion to the whole number of bishops, and which first saw light at the very time when you repelled the introduction of this heresy. The reason for its promulgation was the fact that they were bidden to say nothing of the 6fioov(rto». But even in former times, throughTihe ' Urgency of these numerous causes, it was necessary at different occasions to com- pose other creeds, the character of which will be understood from their wording. For when you are fully aware of the results, it will be easier for us to bring to a full consummation, such as religion and unity demand, the argu- ment in which we are interested. An exposition of the faith of the Church made at the Council held on the occasion of the Dedica- tion of the c/uiJ^h~al__ Aj!lioch by ninety-seven bishops there present, because of suspicions felt as to the orthodoxy of a certain bishop °. 29. " We believe in accordance with evan- gelical and apostolic tradition in one God the Father Almighty, the Creator, Maker and Dis- poser of all things that are, and from whom are all things. "And in one Lord Jesus Christ, His Only- begotten Son, God through whom are all things, who was begotten of the Father, God x)fGod, whoieJicji^jyJaoJejGod, One of One, perlect God of perfect God, King of King, Lord of Lord, the Word, the Wisdom, the Life, true Light, true Way, the Resurrection, the Shepherd, the Gate, unable to change or alter, the unvarying image of the essence and might and glory of the Godhead, the first-born of all creation, who always was in the begin- ning with God, the Word of God, according to what is said in the Gospel, and the Word was God, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things subsist, who in the last days came down from above, and was born of a virgin according to the Scriptures, and was made the Lamb 1 , the Mediator be- tween God and man, the Apostle of our faith, and leader of life. For He said, / came down 9 The Council at Aulioch of 341, generally known as the Dedication Council, assembled for the dedication of the great cathedral church which had been commenced there by the em- peror Cunstantine, who did not live to see its completion. Four creeds were then drawn up, if we reckon a document which was drawn up at Antioch by a continuation of the Council in the following year. The second, and most important, of these creeds became the creed of the Semi-Nicene party. Capable of a wholly orthodox interpretation, it was insufficient of itself to repel Arian- ism, but not insufficient to be used as an auxiliary means of oppos- ing it. Hilary throughout assumes thai ii is nut to be interpreted in an Arian sense, and uses it as an introduction to Nicenc theology. 1 Lamb is Hilary's mistake for Man. He doubtless re. id the original in a Greek manuscript which had the word avBpunov written in its abbreviated form <1k>k. This would readily be mistaken for the word apviov, Iamb. The Latin word used by Hilary as a substitute for Apostle is pracdestinatus, for which word it seems impossible to account. from heaven, not to do Mine own will, but t/u will of Him that sent me 2 . Who suffered and rose again for us on the third day, and as- cended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father, and is to come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead. "And in the Holy Ghost, who was given to them that believe, to comfort, sanctify antl perfect, even as our Lord Jesus Christ ordained His disciples, saying, Go ye, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost', manifestly, that is, of a Father who is truly Father, and clearly of a Son who is truly Son, and a Holy Ghost who is truly a Holy Ghost, these words not being set forth idly and with- out meaning, but carefully signifying the Person, and order, and glory of each of those who are named, to teach us that they are three Persons, but in agreement one. 30. " Having therefore held this faith from the beginning, and being resolved to hold it to the end in the sight of God and Christ, we say anathema to every heretical and per- verted sect, and if any man teaches contrary to the wholesome and right faith of the Scrip- tures, saying that there is or was time, or space, or age before the Son was begotten, let him be anathema. And if any one say that the Son is a formation like one of the things that are formed, or a birth resembling other births, or a creature like the creatures, and not as the divine Scriptures have affirmed in each passage aforesaid, or teaches or pro- claims as the Gospel anything else than what we have received : let him be anathema. For all those things which were written in the divine Scriptures by Prophets and by Apostles we believe and follow truly and with fear." 31. Pprliapg Hiic rrppfl has not spnWpn ex- pre ssly enough of the identical similari ty of the " _ Father ana tne^ bon, especially in conclud ing that the names Father, Son and Holy Ghost referred to the Person and order and glory of each of those who are named to leach us that they are three Persons, but in agreement one. 32. But in the first place we must remember that the bishops did not assemble at Antioch to oppose the heresy which has dared to declare that the substance of the Son is unlike that of the Father, but to oppose that which, in spite of jJ*e-_Council of Nicaea, presumed to attribute the three names to the Father. Of this we will treat in its proper place. I recollect that at the beginning of my argu- ment I besought the patience and forbearance of my readers and hearers until the completion John vi. 38. 3 Matt, xxviii. 1 ). ON THE COUNCILS. 13 \ of my letter, lest any one should rashly rise to judge me before he was acquainted with the entire argument. I ask it again. This assembly of the saints wished to strike a blow at that i mpiety which by a mere counting ._/_of names evfttes the truth as to the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost; which represents that there is no ..personal cause for each na jne, ahcr" by a false use "oMhese names - makesthe triple nomenclature imply only one \ Person, so that the Father alone could be also caTTecTTDofli - Holy Ghost and Son. Conse- quently they declared there were three sub- stances, meanin g three sub sistent Tersons,!rncI ndfcJJierebyl-Lntroducing any dissimilarity of essence to separate the substance of Father and Son. For the words to teach us that they are three in substance, but in agreement one, are free from objection, because as the Spirit is also named, and He is the Paraclete, it is more fitting that a unity of agreement should be asserted than a unity of essence based on likeness of substance. 33. Further the whole of the above state- ment has drawn no distinction whatever be- tween the essence and nature of the Father and the Son. For when it is said, God of God, whole God of whole God, there is no room for doubting that whole GjKLia_-boxrL_Qf_ who le God. For -th g nature o f tiod who is of God admi ts of no difference, and »&— m- o f whole God Hp ifi i" a11 '" wlVJc h-Jj ie Fath er is^ One of One excludes the passions of 1 a human birth and conception, so that since He is One of One, He comes from no other source, nor is different nor alien, for He is One of One, perfect God of perfect God. Except in having a cause of its origin His birth does not differ from the birthless nature ; since the perfection of both Persons is the same. King of King. A power that is ex- pressed by one and the same title allows no dissimilarity of power. Lord of Lord. In ' Lord ' also the lordship is equal : there can be no difference where domination is confessed of both without diversity. But plainest of all is the statement appended after several others, unable to change or alter, the unvarying image of the Godhead and essence and might and •^ glory. For _as God of God, whol e God o f w hole God / Oneot une, periect Gocforperfect G oa, iv'lng 'ot King ancTLord o f Lord, since in all trrafr-glory and nature of^T^rTX&eadrin whi£h___th e Father eve r abides, the Son born of HmxZ aTsb subsis ts~T~He derives this also from the Father's substance that He is unable to change. For in His birth that nature from which He is born is not changed; but the Son has maintained a changeless essence since His origin is in a changeless nature. For though He js_a n im age, yet the im age canno t alter, since m Him was born tne image ol the Father's essence, and there could not be in Him a change of nature caused by any unlike- ness to the Father's essence from which He was begotten. Now when we are taught that He was brought into being as the first of all creation, and He is Himself said to have always been in the beginning with God as God the 'Word, the fact that He was brought into being shews that He was bom, and the fact that He always was, shews that He is not separated from the Father by time. There- f ore this Council by dividing the three*~suT> stances, which it did to exclu de a monad Go d w ith a threetoIcTtitle, did not introduce any s eparation of substance between the Fath er a nd the So n. The whole exposition of faith makes no distinction between Father and Son, the Unborn and the Only-begotten, in time, or name, or essence, or dignity, or domination. But our c ommon conscien ce demands_that we should* gain a knowledge of the other creeds of the same Eastern bishops, composed at different times and places, that by the study of many confessions we may understand the sincerity of their faith. The Creed according to the Council of the East. 34. " We, the holy synod m et in Sardica from different provinces 6f the Last, namely, Thebais, Egypt, Palestine, Arabia, Phoenicia, Ccele Syria, Mesopotamia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Paphlagonia, Galatia, Bithynia and Hellespont, from Asia, namely, the two pro- vinces of Phrygia, Pisidia, the islands of the Cyclades, Pamphylia, Caria, Lydia, from Europe, namely, Thrace, Haeinimontus 4 , Mcesia, and the two provinces of Pannonia, have set forth this creed. "We believe in one God, the Father Al- mighty, Creator and Maker of all things, from whom all fatherhood in heaven and earth is named : " And we believe in His Only-begotten Son our Lord Jesus Christ, who before all ages was begotten of the Father, God of G od, Light of Light, through whom~~~were made att— things—which are in heaven and earth, visible and invisible : who is the Word and Wisdom and Might and Life and true Light : and who in the last days for our sake was incarnate, and was born of the holy Virgin, who was crucified and dead and buried, And rose from the dead on the third day, And 4 Mount Haemus is the mountain range which at this period formed the boundary between the provinces of Thracia and Ma- sia Inferior. Haemimontus was grouped with Mcesia Inferior under the Vicarius of Thrace. 14 DE SYNODIS. was received into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father, And shall come to judge the quick and the dead and to give to every man according to his works : Whose kingdom remaineth without end for ever and ever. For He sitteth on the right hand of the Father not only in this age, but also in the age to come. " We believe also in the Holy Ghost, that is, the Paraclete, whom according to His promise He sent to His apostles after His return into the heavens to teach them and to bring all things to their remembrance, through whom also the souls of them that believe sincerely in Him are sanctified. " But those who say that the Son of God is sprung from things non-existent or from another substance and not from God, and that there was a time or age when He was not, the holy Catholic Church holds them as aliens. Like- wise also those who say that there are three Gods, or that Christ is not God and that before the ages He was neither Christ nor Son of God, or that He Himself is the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, or that the Son is incapable of birth ; or that the Father begat the Son without purpose or will : the holy Catholic Church anathematizes." 35. In the exposition of this creed, concise but complete definitions have been employed. For in condemning those who said that the Son sprang from things non-existent, it attri- buted to Him a source which had no begin- ning but continues perpetually. And lest this source from which He drew His permanent birth should be understood to be any other sub- stance than that of God, it also declares to be blasphemers those who said that the Son was born of some other substance and not of God. And so since He does not draw His sub- sistence from nothing, or spring from any other source than God, it cannot be doubted that He was born with those qualities which are God's ; since the Only-begotten essence of the Son is generated neither from things which are non-existent nor from any other substance than the birthless and eternal substance of the Father. But the creed also rejects intervals of times or ages : on the assumption that He who does not differ in nature cannot be separ- able by time. 36. On every side, where anxiety might be felt, approach is barred to the arguments of heretics lest it should be declared that there is any difference in the Son. For those are anathematized who say that there are three Gods : because according to God's true nature His substance does not admit a number of applications of the title, except as it is given to individual men and angels in recognition of their merit, though the substance of their nature and that of God is different. In that sense there are consequently many gods Furthermore in the nature of God, God is one, yet in such a way that the Son also is God, because in Him there is not a different nature : and since He is God of God, both must be God, and since there is no difference of kind between them there is no distinction in their essence. A number of titular Gods is rejected ; because there is no diversity in the quality of the divine nature. Since there- fore he is anathema who says there are many Gods and he is anathema who denies that the Son is God ; it is fully shewn that the fact that each has one and the same name arises from the real character of the similar substance in each : since in confessing the Unborn God the Father, and the Only-begotten God the Son, with no dissimilarity of essence between them, each is called God, yet God must be believed and be declared to be one. So by the diligent and watchful care of the bishops the creed guards the similarity of the nature begotten and the nature begetting, confirming it by the application of one name. 37. Yet to prevent the dec laration of one God seeming to affirm that God is a solitary monad without offspring of His own, it 1m- fnediately' condemns the rash suggestion that because God is one, therefore God the Father is one and solitary, having in Himself the name of Father and of Son : since in the Father who begets and the Son who comes to birth one God must be declared to exist on account of the substance of their nature being similar in each. The jaith of th e saints knows nothing of the Son being inca"pable _ of birth : because the nature of the Son only draws its existence from birth. But the nature of the birth is in Him so perfect that He who was born of the substance of God is born also of His purpose and will. For from His will and purpose, not from the process of a cor- poreal nature, springs the absolute perfection of the essence of God born from the essence of God. It follows that we should now con- sider that creed which was compiled not long ago when Photinus was deposed from the episcopate. A copy of the creed composed at Sirmium by the Easterns to oppose Photinus. 38. " We believe in one God the Father Almighty, the Creator and Maker, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and in earth is named. " And in His only Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the Father before all ages, God of God, Light of Light, through whom < ON THE COUNCILS. 15 all things were made in heaven and in earth, visible and invisible. Who is the Word and Wisdom and Might and Life and true Light : who in the last days for our sake took a body, And was born of the holy Virgin, And was crucified, And was dead and buried : who also rose from the dead on the third day, And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father, And shall come at the end of the world to judge the quick and the dead ; whose kingdom continueth without end, and remaineth for perpetual ages. For He shall be sitting at the right hand of the Father, not only in this age, but also in the age to come. " And in the Holy Ghost, that is, the Para- clete, whom according to His promise He sent to the apostles after He ascended into heaven to teach them and to remind them of all things, through whom also are sanctified the souls of those who believe sincerely in Him. I. " But those who say that the Son is sprung from things non-existent, or from an- other substance and not from God, and that there was a time or age when He was not, the holy Catholic Church regards as aliens. II. " If any man says that the Father and the Son are two Gods : let him be anathema. III. "And if any man says that God is one, but does not confess that Christ, God the Son of God, ministered to the Father in the crea- tion of all things : let him be anathema. IV. " And if any man dares to say that the Unborn God, or a part of Him, was born of Mary : let him be anathema. V. " And if any man say that the Son born of Mary was, before born of Mary, Son only according to foreknowledge or predestination, and denies that He was born of the Father before the ages and was with God, and that all things were made through Him : let him be anathema. VI. " If any man says that the substance of God is expanded and contracted : let him be anathema. VII. "If any man says that the expanded substance of God makes the Son ; or names Son His supposed expanded substance : let him be anathema. VIII. " If any man says that the Son of God is the internal or uttered Word of God : let him be anathema. IX. " If any man says that the man alone born of Mary is the Son : let him be ana- thema. X. " If any man though saying that God and Man was born of Mary, understands thereby the Unborn God : let him be anathema. XL " If any man hearing The Word was made Flesh s thinks that the Word was trans- formed into Flesh, or says that He suffered change in taking Flesh : let him be anathema. XII. " If any man hearing that the only Son of God was crucified, says that His divinity suffered corruption, or pain, or change, or diminution, or destruction : let him be anathema. XIII. "If any man says Let us make man was not spoken by the Father to the Son, but by God to Himself: let him be anathema. XIV. " If any man says that the Son did not appear to Abraham, but the Unborn God, or a part of Him : let him be anathema. XV. " If any man says that the Son did not wrestle with Jacob as a man, but the Unborn God, or a part of Him : let him be anathema. XVI. " If any man does not understand The Lord rained from the Lord to be spoken of the Father and the Son, but that the Father rained from Himself: let him be anathema. For the Lord the Son rained from the Lord the Father. XVII. " If any man says that the Lord and the Lord, the Father and the Son are two Gods, because of the aforesaid words : let him be anathema. For we do not make the Son the equal or peer of the Father, but under- stand the Son to be subject. For He did not come down to Sodom without the Father's will, nor rain from Himself but from the Lord, to wit by the Father's authority ; nor does He sit at the Father's right hand by His own authority, but He hears the Father saying, Sit thou on My right handi. XVIII. " If any man says that the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are one Person : let him be anathema. XIX. "If any man speaking of the Holy Ghost the Paraclete says that He is the Unborn God : let him be anathema. XX. " If any man denies that, as the Lord has taught us, the Paraclete is different from the Son; for He said, And the Father shall send you another Comforter, whom L shall ask 8 .• let him be anathema. XXI. "If any man says that the Holy Spirit is a part of the Father or of the Son : let him be anathema. XXII. "If any man says that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are three- Gods : let him be anathema. XXIII. " If any man after the example of the Jews understands as said for the destruc- tion of the Eternal Only-begotten God the words, L am the first God, and L am the last 5 John i. 14. 6 Gen. i. 26. John xiv. 16. 7 Ps. cix 1. i6 DE SYNODIS. God, and beside Me there is no God 9, which were spoken for the destruction of idols and them that are no gods : let him be anathema. XXIV. " If any man says that the Son was made by the will of God, like any object in creation : let him be anathema. XXV. " If any man says that the Son was born against the will of the Father : let him be anathema. For the Father was not forced against His own will, or induced by any neces- sity of nature to beget the Son : but as soon as He willed, before time and without passion He begat Him of Himself and shewed Him forth. XXVI. "If any man says that the Son is incapable of birth and without beginning, saying as though there were two incapable of birth and unborn and without beginning, and makes two Gods : let him be anathema. For the Head, which is the beginning of all things, is the Son ; but the Head or beginning of Christ is God : for so to One who is without beginning and is the beginning of all things, we refer the whole world through Christ. XXVII. "Once more we strengthen the understanding of Christianity by saying, If any man denies that Christ who is God and Son of God, personally existed before time began and aided the Father in the perfecting of all things; but says that only from the time that He was born of Mary did He gain the name of Christ and Son and a beginning of His deity : let him be anathema." 39. The necessity of the moment urged the Council to set forth a wider and broader ex- position of the creed including many intricate questions, because the heresy which Eiarjtinus was reviving was sapping our Catholic home by many secret mines. Their purpose was to oppose every form of stealthy subtle heresy by a corresponding form of pure and unsullied faith, and to have as many complete explan- ations of the faith as there were instances of peculiar faithlessness. Immediately after the universal and unquestioned statement of the Christian mysteries, the explanation of the faith against the heretics begins as follows. I. "But those who say that the Son is sprung from things non-existent, or from an- other substance and not from God, and that there was a time or age when He was not, the holy Catholic Church regards as aliens." 40. What ambiguity is there here? What is omitted that the consciousness of a sincere faith could suggest ? He does not spring from things non-existent : therefore His origin has existence. There is no other substance ex- tant to be His origin, but that of God : there- fore nothing else can be born in Him but all <> Isai. xliv. 6. that is God ; because His existence is not from nothing, and He draws subsistence from no other source. He does not differ in time: therefore the Son like the Father is eternal. And so the Unborn Father and the Only- begotten Son share all the same qualities. They are equal in years, and that very simi- larity between the sole-existing paternal essence and its offspring prevents distinction in any quality. II. "If any man says that the Father and the Son are two Gods : let him be anathema. III. "And if any man says that God is one, but does not confess that Christ who is God and eternal Son of God ministered to the Father in the creation of all things : let him be anathema." 41. The very statement of the name as our religion states it gives us a clear insight into the fact. For since it is condemned to say that the Father and the Son are two Gods, and it is also accursed to deny that the Son is God, any opinion as to the substance of the one being different from that of the other in asserting two Gods is excluded. For there is no other essence, except that of God the Father, from which God the Son of God was born before time. For since we are compelled to confess God the Father, and roundly declare that Christ the Son of God is God, and be- tween these two truths lies the impious con- fession of two Gods : They must on the ground of their identity of nature and name be one in the kind of their essence if the name of their essence is necessarily one. IV. " If any one dares to say that the Unborn God, or a part of Him, was born of Mary : let him be anathema." 42. The fact of the essence declared to be one in the Father and the Son having one name on account of their similarity of nature seemed to offer an opportunity to heretics to declare that the Unborn God, or a part of Him, was born of Mary. The danger was met by the wholesome resolution that he who declared this should be anathema. For the unity of the name which r eligio n employs and which is based on the exact similarity of their natural essence, has not repudiated the Person of the begotten essence so as to represent, under cover of the unity of name, that the substance of God is singular and undifferen- tiated because we predicate one name for the essence of each, that is, predicate one God, on account of the exactly similar substance of the undivided nature in each Person. V. " If any man say that the Son existed before Mary only according to foreknowledge or predestination, and denies that He was born of the Father before the ages and with ON THE COUNCILS. 17 God, and that all things were made through Him : let him be anathema." 43. While denying that the God of us all, the Son of God, existed before He was born in bodily form, some assert that He existed according to foreknowledge and predestina- tion, and not according to th e essence of a pe rsonally subsisteTflHTat ure : that is, TTe- cause the Father predestined the Son to have existence some day by being born of the Virgin, He was announced to us by the Father's foreknowledge rather than born and existent before the ages in the substance of the divine nature, and that all things which He Himself spake in the prophets concerning the mysteries of His incarnation and passion were simply said concerning Him by the Father according to His. foreknowledge. Con- sequently this perverse doctrine is condemned, so that we know that the Only-begotten Son of God was born of the Father before 'all worlds, and formed the worlds and all creation, and that He was not merely predestined to be born. VI. " If any man says that the substance of God is expanded and contracted : let him be anathema." 44. To contract and expand are bodily af- fections : but God who is ^ Spirit and breathes where He listeth, does not expand or contract Himself through any change of substance. Re- maining free and outside the bond of any bodily nature, He supplies out of Himself what He wills, when He wills, and where He wills. Therefore it is impious to ascribe any change of substance to such an unfettered Power. VII. "If any man says that the expanded substance of God makes the Son, or names Son His expanded substance : let him be anathema." 45. The above opinion, although meant to teach the immutability of God, yet prepared the way for the following heresy. Some have ventured to say that the Unborn God by ex- pansion of His substance extended Himself as far as the holy Virgin, in order that this ex- tension produced by the increase of His nature and assuming manhood might be called Son. They denied that the Son who is perfect God born before time began was the same as He who was afterwards born as Man. Therefore the Catholic Faith conjkmiis_a_U denial of the immutability of the Father and o 7jgenm T tlLjpi..substance the Son VIII. "If any man says that the Son is the internal or uttered Word of God : let him be anathema." 46. Heretics, destroying as far as in them lies the Son of God, confess Him to be only the word, going forth as an utterance from the VOL. IX. speaker's lips and the unembodied sound o! an impersonal voice : so that God the Father has as Son a word resembling any word we utter in virtue of our inborn power of speaking. Therefore this dangerous deceit is condemned, which asserts that God the Word, who was in the beginning with God, is only the word of a voice sometimes internal and sometimes expressed. IX. " If any man says that the man alone born of Mary is the Son : let him be ana- thema." We cannot declare that the Son of God is born_ o f~Mary~wlthout~~fIecraring Him~~fo~~b e both Man and GoTf. But lest the declaration that He is both God and Man should give occasion to deceit, the Council immediately adds, X. " If any man though saying that God and Man was born of Mary, understands thereby the Unborn God : let him be ana- thema." 47. Thus is preserved both the name and power of the divine substance. For since he is anathema who says that the Son of God by Mary is man and not God ; and he falls under the same condemnation who says that the Un- born God became man : God made Man is- not denied to be God but denied to be the Unborn God, the Father being distinguished from the Son not under the head of nature or by diversity of substance, but only by such pre-eminence as His birthless nature gives. XI. " If any man hearing The Word was made Flesh thinks that the Word was trans- formed into Flesh, or says that He suffered change in taking Flesh : let him be ana- thema." 48. This preser\rejL the dignity of th e God- head_L so that in_d_ie_fact that the Word was ma4e^Flesh, the-W ord, in becoming Flesh, has not losTThTough being Flesh jwh at constitut ed th^_ Word7 ~nor has become transformed into Flesh, so as^~t o cease — to — be__Lhe ^WofS"; but~ the Word was made Flesh " in order that the Flesh might begin to be what the Word is. Else whence came to His Flesh miraculous power in working, glory on the Mount, knowledge of the thoughts of human hearts, calmness in His passion, life in His death ? God knowing no change, when made Flesh lost nothing of the prerogatives of His XII. " If any man hearing that the only Son 1 The Flesh, without ceasing to be truly flesh, is represented as becoming divine like the Word. That is, the humanity be- comes so endowed with power, and knou ledge, and holiness through the unction of the Holy Ghost that its natural properties are "deified." These and similar phrases are freely used by the Fathers of the fourth century, and may be compared with John i. 14, and 2 Pet i 4 DE SYNODIS. of God was crucified, says that His divinity suf- fered corruption or pain or change or diminu- tion or destruction : let him be anathema." 49. It is clearly shewn why the Word, though He was made Flesh, was nevertheless not transformed into Flesh. Though these kinds of suffering affect the infirmity of the flesh, yet God the Word when made Flesh could not change under suffering. Suffering and change are not identical. Suffering of every kind causes all flesh to change through sensitive- ness and endurance of pain. But theJVprrJ th at was made Flesh, although He madeHmi" - Sg lf subject to suffering, was nev e rtheless un - changed by th e liability to suff er. For He was able jo sutler, and yet _ the_Word was__rjot passible, Passibility denotes" a rfaTurlTthat is welra ; but suffering in itself is the endurance of pains inflicted, and since the Godhead is immutable and yet the Word was made Flesh, such pains found in Him a material which they could affect though the Person of the Word had no infirmity or passibility. And so when He suffered His Nature remained immutable, because like His Father, His Person is of an impassible essence, though it is born 2 . XIII. "If any man says Let us make man's was not spoken by the Father to the Son, but by God to Himself: let him be anathema. XIV. " If any man says that the Son did not appear to Abraham *, but the Unborn God, or a part of Him : let him be anathema. XV. " If any man says that the Son did not wrestle with Jacob as a man s, but the Unborn God, or a part of Him : let him be anathema. XVI. " If any man does not understand The Lord rained from the Lord 6 to be spoken of the Father and the Son, but says that the Father rained from Himself: let him be anathema. For the Lord the Son rained from the Lord the Father." 50. These points had to be inserted into the creed because Photinus, against whom the synod was held, denied them. They were in- serted lest any one should dare to assert that the Son of God did not exist before the Son of the Virgin, and should attach to the Unborn God with the foolish perversity of an insane heresy all the above passages which refer to the Son of God, and while applying them to 2 Passibility may not be affirmed of the divine nature of Christ which is incapable of any change or limitation within itself. At the same time the Word may be said to have suffered inasmuch as the suffering affected the flesh which He assumed. This subject was afterwards carefully developed by St. John of Damascus jrepi opfloiofou iri'areuf, III. 4. In c. 79, Hilary criti- cises the Arian statement that the Son "jointly suffered," a word which meant that the divine nature of the Son shared in the suffering!! which were endured by His humanity. This phrase, lil&& /f" ■\ *y 10 DE SYNODIS. not from an act of will after the manner of creatures. XXV. " If any man says that the Son was born against the will of the Father : let him be anathema. For the Father was not forced against His own will, or induced against His will by any necessity of nature, to beget His Son j but as soon as He willed, before time and without passion He begat Him of Himself and shewed Him forth." 59. Since it was taught that the Son did not, like all other things, owe His existence to God's will, lest He should be thought to derive His essence only at His Father's will and not in virtue of His own nature, an opportunity seemed thereby to be given to heretics to attribute to God the Father a necessity of be- getting the Son from Himself, as though He had brought forth the Son by a law of nature in spite of Himself. But such liability to be acted upon does not exist in God the Father : in the ineffable and perfect birth of the Son it was neither mere will that begat Him nor was the Father's essence changed or forced at the bidding of a natural law. Nor was any sub- stance sought for to beget Him, nor is the nature of the Begetter changed in the Be- gotten, nor is the Father's unique name affected by time. Before all time the Father, out of the essence of His nature, with a desire that was subject to no passion, gave to the Son a birth that conveyed the essence of His nature. XXVI. "If any man says that the Son is incapable of birth and without beginning, speaking as though there were two incapable of birth and unborn and without beginning, and makes two Gods : let him be anathema. For the Head, which is the beginning of all things, is the Son ; but the Head or beginning of Christ is God : for so to One who is without beginning and is the beginning of all things, we refer the whole world through Christ." 60. To declare the Son to be incapable of birth is the heightjif^impiety. God would no longer be One : for the nature of the one Un- born God demands that we should confess that God is one. Since therefore God is one, there cannot be two incapable of birth : be- cause God is one (although both the Father is God and the Son of God is God) for the very reason that i scalability of b irth is the only quilky__that canlSeTong_to_one Person only. The Soif is God tor the very reason that He derives His birth from that essence which can- not be born. Therefore our holy faith rejects the idea that the Son is incapable of birth in order to predicate one God incapable of birth and consequently one God, and in order to embrace the Only-begotten nature, begotten from the unborn essence, in the one name of the Unborn God. For the Head of all things is the Son : but the Head of the Son is God. And to one God through this stepping-stone and by this confession all things are referred, since the whole world takes its beginning from Him to whom God Himself is the beginning. XXVII. "Once more we strengthen the understanding of Christianity by saying, If any man denies that Christ, who is God and the Son of God, existed before time began and aided the Father in the perfecting of all things ; but says that only from the time that He was born of Mary did He gain the name of Christ and Son and a beginning of His deity : let him be anathema." 61. A condemnation of that heresy on ac- count of which the Synod was held necessarily concluded with an explanation of the whole AA faith that was being opposed. This heresy / a falsely stated that the beginning of the Son o\/ 7 God dated from His birth of Mary. Accojd^ ing__to evange l ical and aposto li c, doctrin e the corner-sfem e ^oj ^Tur faith is that j Ktr Lorfl~Te"sus Chris£"who is uod and Son of God, cannot 1A r \ Be" sep arated f rom thg^ rather in_title__or poweToF difference of substance or interv al ofTirhlT ~t527"You perceive that the truth has been sought by many paths through the advice and opinions of different bishops, and the ground of their views has been set forth by the separate declarations inscribed in this creed. Every separate point of heretical assertion has been successfully refuted. The infinite a nd b oundless God ca nnot be made__c^xuir€-" h cnsiblc -ky a iew~~wTTrrJg --uiLJium anspee ch. Brgyity often misleads both learner and teacher, and a concentrated discourse either causes a subject not to be understood, or spoils the meaning of an argument where a thing is hinted at, and is not proved by full demonstration. The bishops fully understood this, and therefore have used for the purpose of teaching many definitions and a profusion of words that the "ordinary understanding nlight find no difficulty, but that their hearers might be saturated with the truth thus differ- entfly_expT5S5ed, and that In treating of divine things these adequate and manifold definitions might leave no room for danger or obscurity. 63. You must not be surprised, dear bre- thren, that so many creeds have recently been written. The frenzy of heretics makes it neces- sary. The danger of the Eastern Churches is so great that it is rare to find either priest 01 layman that belongs to this faith, of the ortho- doxy of which you may judge. Certain in- dividuals have acted so wrongly as to support the side of evil, and the strength of the wicked A»\> 2A has been increased by the exile of some of the bishops, the cause of which you are acquainted with. I am not speaking about distant events or writing down incidents of which I know nothing : I have heard and seen the faults which we now have to combat. They are not laymen but bishops who are guilty. Except the bishop Eleusfus * aticTTiis few comrades, the greater part of the ten provinces of Asia, in which I am now staying, really know not God. Would that they knew nothing about Him, for their ignorance would meet with a readier pardon than their detraction. These, fa ithful bishops do n nf keep silenrp in th fir piiin^___The y seek for the un ity of that faith of which others have long since ro bTTed them . , The necessity of a unitecT exposition oFlhat faith was first felt when Hosius forgot his i former deeds and words, and af fresh yet fester- ing heresy broke out at Sirmium. Of Hosius I say nothing, I leave his conduct in the back- ground lest man's judgment should forget what once he was. But everywhere there are scan- dals, schisms and treacheries. Hence some of those who had formerly written one creed were compelled to sign another. I make no complaint against these long-suffering Eastern bishops, it was enough that they gave at least a compulsory assent^ to the faith after they had once been wTITTng to blaspheme. 1 think it a subject of congratulation that a single peni- tent should be found among such obstinate, ' blaspheming and heretical bishops. But, bre- thren, you enjoy happiness and glory in the Lord, who meanwhile retain and conscien- tiousl y co nfess the ' whole"~apostoli c faith, and have hitherto been ignora nt ofwritten creeds. You — ha^e_jiot_need ed the letter, f or you a bound ed|n_the spirit^ You required not the office oTa hand to write what you believed in your hearts and professed unto salvation. It was unnecessary for you to read as bishops what you held when new-born converts. But necessity has introduced the custom of ex- pounding creeds and signing expositions. Where the conscience is in danger we must use the letter. Nor is it wrong to write what it is wholesome to confess. 64. Kept always from guile by the gift of the Holy~ 5pirir, we; crjnTess~alrd- j vvii[c uf u ur ow n will that there aTje*riot~two God^ buTone G od ; nor do w e therefore deny that the Son 1 Eleusius is criticised by Socrates II. 40, for disliking any attempt at a repudiation of the "Dedication'' creed of 341, although the "Dedication" creed was little better than a repu- diation of the Nicene creed. He was, in fact, a semi-Arian. but his vigorous opposition to the extreme form of Arianism and the hopefulness witli which Hilary always regarded the semi-Arians, here invest him with a reputation for the " true knowledge of God." In 381 he refused to accept the Nicene creed or take part in the Council of Constantinople. of_God is also Go d ; for He is God of God . Ave deny that there are two incapable ot birth, because God is one through the prerogative of being incapable of birth ; nor does it follow that the Unbegotten is not God, for His source is the Unborn substance. There is not one subsistent Person^but a similar sub r stance in both Persons. There is not one " name of God applied to dissimilar natures, but a wholly similar essen ce belonging to one name and nat ure! O ne is" n ot superio r to the" other^on account of the kind oM^is substance, bufone is subject to the other because Jx>rn of the otheTxy The Fathe YTs greater because He is Father, the Son~~ig~rror— the lcs sbg" cause He is Son7 The difference is_o_ne lot o f a nature is not affecte* the m eaning of a name and We confess that thcr'ather by time, but do not deny that the Son is equally eternal^w e assert that the Father i s in the Son because the Son has nothing in Himself unlike the Father ^we confess that th e Son is in the Father be ovuse the existenc e oi the Son is not iro m any other source. We recognize that their n ature is i mutual and s imilar because equ al : 'we do not think them to be on e Person because they are one: we declare that they are through the similarity of an identical nature on e, in such a w ayTtbiit they nevertheless are not one P erson. 65. I have expanded, ""beloved brethren, my belief in our common faith so far as our wonted W y 1^ human speech permitted and the Lord, whom I Tiave eveT~besought,~ai He is my witness, has -gi ven me powe r. If I have said too little, nay, ifT have said almost nothing, I ask you to remember that it is nxtt_belief but words t hat are lacki ng. Perhaps 1 shall thereby prove that my human nature, though not my will, is weak : and I p ardon my human nature if it canno t speak as it would of Go d, _.for_it" i senough lor its salvation to have believed t he things oi G od: 66. Since your faith and mine, so far as I am conscious, is in no danger before God, and I have shewn you, as you wished, the creeds that have been set forth by the Eastern bishops (though I repeat that they were few in number, for, considering how numerous the Eastern Churches are, that faith is held by few), I have also declared my own convicti ons ab out divine things, according to the doctr ine of the apostl es. It remains lor you to in- vestigate without suspicion the points that mislead the unguarded temper of our simple minds, for there is now no opportunity left of hearing. And although I shall no longer fear that sentence will not be passed upon me in accordance with the whole exposition of the creed, I ask you to allow me to express y y *) "*> 9 ^r 1 /Y"™ 22 DE SYNODIS. a wish that I may not have the sentence passed until the exposition is actually completed. 67. Many of us, beloved brethren, declare the substance of the Father and the Son to be one in such a spirit that I consider the statement to be quite as much wrong as right. The expression contains both a conscientious conviction and the opportunity for delusion. If we assert the one substance, understanding it to mean the likeness of natural qualities and such a likeness as includes not only the species but the genus, we assert it in a t ruly .relig ious s pirit,, prxmded we beli eve__that thebne 'sub- sta nce s jgpifip^~^icji_^ siniil itu^^b7~qu"ah'ties that thaunity is not the~ unity of a mon ad_but of equal s? By equality 1 mean exact similarit VTfmTt; s p that the likeness may be called an equality^ p rovided that the equality imply unity beca use i t implies a ^-X£UiaL-pair, anr j that th e u rrrty whi'oh iinplips np eq ual pair be not_ wr£si£il to m ean a single Perso m Therefore thew_on£ s ubstance will be asserted pio us ly if it does no. Labolish the subsistent p^ei^onaTity or divide the one substance into tw o, lor their substanc e hy thetr jje _character of the Son's birth and bv t h eir riptnrni hL-pnc^ s is so tre e from diff erence 68. But if we attribute one substance to the Father and the Son to teach that there is a solitary personal existence although de- noted by two titles : then though we confess the Son with our lips we do not keep Him in our hearts, since in confessing one substance we then really say that the Father and the Son constitute one undifferentiated Person. Nay, there immediately arises an opportunity for the erroneous belief that the Father is divided, and that He cut off a portion of Himself to be His Son. That is what the heretics mean when they say the substance is one : and the There is also atTfird error. When the Father and the Son are said to be of one substance this is thought to imply a prior substance, which the two equal Persons both possess. assumed by two and which is called one be- cause it was one before it was severed into two. Where then is there room for the Son's birth ? Where is the Father or the Son, if these names are explained not by the birth of the divine nature but a severing or sharing of one anterior substance ? 69. Therefore amid the numerous dangers which threaten r. ttp faith , br evi t y of word s must be employed sparingly, lest what is pio usly meant - be Ihuughl to be impiousl y expressed, and a wordTie judg ed guilty of occasioning heresy when it has beenjiaed in conscientious and unsuspecting innocence. A Catholic about to state that the substance of the Father and the Son is one, must not begin" at that point : nor hold this, word all im pnrMr^ asThough true faith did not e xist whejethewnrd . was not used. He will be safe in assertingfhe "one substance if he has first said that the Father is unoegotten, that the SlmTs^borri, that He dr aws His person al subsist ence fro m the' f ather, that He is lik e the Father in might, honour and nature, that He^ if subject to the Father as to the Autho r of His hping, that He did not commit robbery by. making Himself equal, with God, in whose form He remained, that He was obedient unto death. He did not spring from nothing, but was born. He is not incapable of birth but equally eternal. He is not the Father, but the Son begotten of Him. Hg— is— n ot a ny — portion of Grid, but is vj jo^ e' God . He is no t Himself the^sourc e'but the image; the image of_God b orn ol God to be Go d. He is ^noTa cr g?Ttur e _ but is G od. Not _ano_iher n^rimtliekhid TTi' His substance , "buTt he on e. T^od in~vlrtue of the essence oT H is exactl y s ujiUaT^ubstan ce. G. gcl is not one-uxP'erson but in naTure^ for the Born and the Begetter terminology of our good confession so gratifies have nothing different or unlike. After saying them that it aids__heresy when the word 4^ss..all this, he does n ot err in declaring one sub - nmrjnc is IpftJ^tseTfT mTo^fined and ambiguo us, st ance of the Faiher and th e__Son. Nay, if he now denies the one substance he sins. 70. Therefore let no one jthink that_our_ word s_were meant to denyTlig^Dne "slujslance. We are giving the very reason why it "houl *f Consequently the word implies three things, 1 not be denied. Let no one think thatjhe one original substance and two Persons, who/ worriought to be used by itself and une" are as it were fellow-heirs of this one substance! p ljjnecT Otherwise the word~ o/row crioy is nof For as two fellow-heirs are two, and the'iused in*ct t cligi ous spir it I wii rno^n7tTn~eJ .o heritage of which they are fellow-heirs is ri eai that Cmi st l "was born of \lary unless" I anterior to them, so the two equal Persons might appear to be sharers in one anterior substance. The assertion of the one substance of the Faiher and the Son signifies cither that there is one Person who has two titles, or one divided substance that has made two imperfect substances, or that there is a third prior substance which has been usurped and , 1 lso "gggrj frrttie~ begi nning was the II ord, a nd th e ~Word was ~Go d' r . 1 will not hear Crnist was hungry, unless I hear that after His fast of forty days He said, Man doth not live by bread alone 3. I will not hear He thirsted unless I also hear, Whosoever drinketh of the ivater b 3 John i. 1. 3 Matt. iv. 4. ON THE COUNCILS. 23 that I shall she him shall never thirst*. I will ^ not hear Christ suffered unless I hear, The hour | itjtg TIiis fact we ma is come that the Son of man should be glorified 's. I will not hear He died unless I hear He rose again. LeJ_us-bring- fo rward no n isolated poi nt of the d ivine mysteries to ro useTthe su spicion s of our "hearers and give an occasion to - Ehe blaspliehiers. "We "must first. preach the birth and subordination of the Son and the likeness then ■ •y of His "nature, and then" we may preach in godly fashion that the Father and the Son" are oTone substance. 1 do not personally under- stand why we ought to preach before every- thing else, as the most valuable and important of doctrines and in itself sufficient, a truth which cannot be pijmsly preached before other truths, although it is i mpiou s to deny it after them. 7T JRplovprl hrpthi-pn, wp must n ot deny t hat there is one substance of the Father and th e !Son,~But we must not,jleclace--il_withoi it e king our reas ons- The one substance must be derivgtJ HVom- the true character of the be- gotten nature, n ot from any division, any c on- fu sion of P ersons , any sha ring of an anterior substance. It may be right tbasserTflie one substance, it may be right to keep silence about it. You believe in the birth and you believe in the likeness. Why should the word cause mutual suspicions, when we view the fact in the same way? Let us believe and say that there is one substance, but in virtue of the true character of the nature and not to imply a blasphemous unity of Persons. Let the oneness he c]ue_to the fact that thereare sinnla r_ Persons an d not a soht ijy~Fersoh". 72. But perTjap ^the w orjTlWlB taTiTv may n ot seem fully ap pro p riate. If so, I ask how I tan express the equality of one Person with the other except by such a word ? Or is to be like not the same thing as to be equal? If I say the divine nature is one I am sus- pected of meaning that it is undifferentiated : if I say the Persons are similar, I mean that I compare wha t is exact ^^e I ask what position equal 'holds Between like and one? I enquire whether it means similarity rather than singularity. F.qiiajit y doesnot exist be- tw een things un l i ke , nofdoes s"imTraTlty~exist j n one. What is "the difference between those that are similar and those that are equal ? Can one equal be 'distinguished from the other? So those who are equal are not unlike. If then those who are unlike are not equals, what can those who are like be but equals ? 73- T herefore, beloved brethren, in decla r- in g that t he So n isTilcg in aTTthings to~~th e Father, we declare nothing' else than thaFTie is equal. Likeness means perfect equality, rTToIy Scriptures, And Adam lived two hundred and thirty years, and begat a son according to his own image and according to his own likeness ; and called his name Sclh 6 . I ask what was the nature of his likeness and image which Adam begat in Seth? Remove bodily infirmities, remove the first stage of conception, remove birth-pangs, and every kind of human need. I ask whether this likeness which exists in Seth differs in nature from the author of his being, or whether there was in each an essence of a different kind, so that Seth had not at his birth the natural essence of Adam? Nay, he had a likeness to Adam, even though we deny it, for his nature was not different. This like- ness of nature in Seth was not due to a nature of a different kind, since Seth was begotten from only one father, so we see that a likeness of nature renders things equal because this likeness betokens an exactly similar essence. Therefore every son by virtue of his natural birth is the equal of his father, in that he has a natural likeness to him. And with regard to the nature of the Father and the Son the blessed John teaches the very likeness which Moses says existed between Seth and Adam, a li keness which is tins equality of nature. lauty ought 4 John iv. 13. 5 lb. xii. 23. He says, Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill Him, because He not only had broken the Sabbath, but said also that God was His father, making Himself equal with God ?. Why do we allow minds that are dulled with the weight of sin to interfere with the doctrines and sayings of such holy men, and impiously match our rash though sluggish senses against their im- pregnable assertions? According to Moses, Seth is the likeness of Adam, according to John, the Son is equal to the Father, yet we seek to find a third impossible something between the Father and the Son. He is like the Father, He is the Son of the Father, He is born of Him : this fact alone justifies the assertion that they are one. 74. I am aware, dear brethren, that there are some who confess the likeness, but deny the equality. Let them speak as they will, and insert the poison of their blasphemy into ignorant ears. If they say that there is a dif- ference between likeness and equality, I ask whence equality can be obtained ? If the Son is like the Father in essence, might, glory and eternity, I ask why they decline to say He is equal ? In the above creed an anathema was pronounced on any maii who should say that the Father was Father of an essence unlike Himself. Therefore if He gave to Him whom if 6 Gen. v. 3. 7 John v. 18. 2 4 DE SYNODIS. He begat without effect upon Himself a nature which was neither another nor a different nature, He cannot have given Him any other than His own. Likeness then is the sharing of what is one's own, the sharing ot on e's own _is equality^ and equality admits of~no d ifference * . those things which do not dirter at all are one. So the Ji ather and the Son__ are oftfeyjiot by unity of Perso n bu t by equality of nature. 75. A lthough general conviction and divine a u thorify sanction no d ifference between hke- n £ss and equality, since both Moses and John would Ie"aTr~"us to believ e the Son is like the F ather and also H is equal, yetlet us cohsuTer whether the Lord, when the Jews were angry with Him for calling God His Father and thus making Himself equal with God, did Himself teach that He was equal with God. He says, The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do 1 *. He shewed that the Father originates by saying Can do nothing of Himself He calls attention to His own obe- dience by adding, but what He seeth the Father do . T ^ere is no difference of roifdvt He say s 1 Te can' d nnnthjngj ihat He does not se e. 1 ) e cause it is His na ture and not His sig ht l hat ffives Him pow er! ±5ut His obedience consists in His being able only when He sees. And so by the fact that He has power when He sees, He shews that He does not gain power by seeing but claims power on the authority of seeing. The natural might does. n ot differ in Father and_ Son, the S on' s equali ty o fpower with the Father n ot b eing due to any increase or advance ol the Son's" nature butto th e frather^ franmlg In short that honour which the Son's subjection retained for the Father belongs equally to the Son on the strength of His nature. He has Himself added, What things soever He doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise?*. Surely then the like- ness implies equality. Certainly it does, even though we deny it : for these also doeth the Son likewise. Are not things done likewise the s'ame ? Or do not the same things admit equality ? Is there any other difference between likeness and equality, when things that are done likewise are understood to be made the same ? Unless perchance any one will deny that the same things are equal, or deny that similar things are equal, for things that are done in like manner are not only declared to be equal but to be the same things. 76. Therefore, brethren, likeness of nature 8 Proprieteu, or sharing one's own. The word f>rojirictas is not here used in a technical sense. In its technical sense fro- prietas or iSiorrjs signifies the special property of each Person ol the Godhead, and the word is used to secure the distinctions of the three Persons and exclude any Sabellian misunderstanding. 9 John v. 19. 9" II). can be attacked by no cavil, and the Son cannot be said to lack the true qualities of the Father's nature because He is like Him. N o real likeness exists — where there is no" equality of nature , and — equality of -^jiature canno t_ exist unless it imply unity, not unity of_p erson b ut of kind. It is right to believe, \j r ejigio us to leel, and wholesome to confess, th at 'We do not deny that the substance of tjiEL^F ather and the Son~~is"" one because it is-^jm ilar, and that it is similar because th ey ate_one. 77. Beloved, after explaining in a ijakhful and gcudlyjnanne r the mean ing of the phiases one substance, in "Greek dfiooiffiov, and similar substance or ojxoiovviov, and shewing very com- pletely the faults__whi ch may arise from, a d ejieitful brevity or" dangerous simpl ici ty_ of l anguage, it only remains for me to address myself to the holy bishops of the East. We have no longer any mutual suspicions about our faith, and those which before now have been due to mere misunderstanding are being cleared away. They will pardon me if I pro- ceed to speak somewhat freely with them on the basis of our common faith. 78. Ye who have begun to be eager for apost olic an d__^y^ji gelicaL ,dilctrine, ki ndled b y. the ..rue, of faith amid the thick darkness of a night oTTiePesy, with how great a hope of recalling the t rue faith have you inspired us by consistervtly~checking the bold attack of infidelity ! In former days it was only in obscure corners that our Lord Jesus Christ was denied to be the Son of God according to His nature, and was asserted to have no share in the Father's essence, but like the creatures to have received His origin from things that were not. But the heresy now bursts forth— backed J2y__civil authority, and what it once muttered in secret it has of late boasted of in open triump h. Whereas in former times it has tried by secret mines to creep into_the Catholic Church, it has now put forth every power of this world in the fawning manners of a false rel igion. For the perversity of these men has been so audacious that when they dared not preach this doctrine publicly themselves, they beguiled the Emperor to give them hearing. For they did beguile an ignorant sovereign so successfully that though he was busy with war he expounded their infidel creed, and before he was regen- erate by baptism imposed a form of faith upon the churches. Opposing bishops they drove into exile. They drove me also to wish for exile, by trying to force me to commit blasphemy. May I always be an exile, if only the truth begins to be preached again! I thank God that the Emperor, through your warnings, f 10 efb ON THE COUNCILS. \l* acknowledged his ignorance, and through these your definitions of faith came to recognize an error which was not his own but that of his advisers. He freed himself from the re- proach of i mpiety in the eyes of God and men, when he "respectfully received your embassy, and after you had won from him a confession of his ignorance, shewed his knowledge of the hypocrisy of the men whose influence brought him under this reproach. 79. These are deceivers, I both fear and believe they are deceivers, beloved brethren ; for they have ever deceived. This very docu- ment is marked by hypocrisy. They excuse themselves for having desired silence as to oixooitnov and ofxowvcTtov on the ground that they taught that the meaning of the words was identical. Rustic bishops, I trow, and untutored in the significance of 6/ where it is said to be one of those points on which a Christian can afford to be ignorant. According to the Septuagint, Methuselah lived for fourteen years after the deluge, so that more than ' eight souls ' survived, and 1 Pet. iii. 20, appeared to be incorrect. Ac- cording to the Hebrew and Vulgate there is no difficulty, as Methuselah is there represented as dying before the deluge. ment, wc must, if it seems fit, abolish all the divine and holy Gospels with their message of our salvation, lest their statements be found inconsistent ; lest we should read that the Lord who was to send the Holy Spirit was Himself born of the Holy Spirit ; lest He who was to threaten death by the sword to those who should take the sword, should before His passion command that a sword should be brought ; lest He who was about to descend into hell should say that He would be in para- dise with the thief; lest finally the Apostles should be found at fault, in that when com- manded to baptize in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, they bap- tized in the name of Jesus only. I speak to you, brethren, to you, who are no longer nour- ished with milk, but with meat, and are strong 9. Shall we, because the wise men of the world have not understood these things, and they are foolish unto them, be wise as the world is wise and believe these things foolish? Because t hey are hid d en from the pc nrjles s. shall we refu se tq _s hme with the truth of a doctrine which we~uh derstand t We prejudice tlie cause of divine doctrines when we think that they ought not to exist, because some do not regard them as holy. If so, we must not glory in the cross of Christ, because it is a stumbling-block to the world ; and we must not preach death in connection with the living God, lest the godless argue that God is dead. 86. Some misunderstand oix oovcnov ; does that preve nt me from understan ding, it f The Samosatene was wrong in using the word onoovaiov; does that make the Arians right in denying it? Eighty bishops once rejected it; but th ree hundred and eig ht ee n recently ac- cepted ~i£ And lor my own part I think the number sacred, for with such a number Abra- ham overcame the wicked kings, and was blessed by Him who is a type of the eternal priesthood. The former disapproved of it to oppose a heretic : the latter surely approved of it to oppose a heretic. The authority of the fathers is weighty, is the sanctity of their successors trivial ? If their opinions were con- tradictory, we ought to decide which is the better : but if both their approval and dis- approval established the same fact, why do we carp at such good decisions ? 87. But perhaps you will reply, 'Some of those who were then present at Nicasa have now decreed that we ought to keep silence about the word dfxoouaiuv.' Against my will I must answer : Do not the very same men rule that we must keep silence about the word ofioiovcriov ? I beseech you that there may be / 9 Heb. v. 12. 28 DE SYNODIS. found no one of them but Hosius, that old man who lovesa^peaceful gravetob well, whu shall be found to think7~trrat~we ought to keep silence about both. Amid the fury of the heretics into what straits shall we fall at last, if while we do not accept both, we keep neither? For there seems to be n o impiety in saying that since neither is found "in Scrip- ture, we ought to confess neither or both. 88. Holy brethren, I understand b y 6/j.q- ovawv God of God, not of _ an essence th at is' unlike, not divided but "born, and that the Soj l has a birt h which is un ique, of the su b- sta nce of the unborn Uod, that He i s_begotten yeT co-eternal and wholly_jike_jhp~FaTher. I believed t his be fore 1 KTTew the word oiioovvio v, buTit grea tly helpe d my belie f. Why do you condemn my iaith when 1 express it by 6fio- ovcriov while you cannot disapprove it when expressed by o^oiovcnov ? For you condemn my faith, or rather your own, when you condemn its verbal equivalent. Do others misunder- stand it ? Let us join in condemning the misunderstanding, but_^ no^_d^priye__ojar_Jaith of its_security. Do you think we musT sub- scribe IxTThe Samosatene Council to prevent any one from using o^oovuwv in the sense of Paul of Samosata? Then let us also subscribe to the Counci l of N fcaea, jo that the Ariahs may noFTmpugn the word. Have we to fear that dpoiovciiou does not imply the same belief as oixoovaiovl Let us decree that there is no difference between being of one or of a similar substance. Th e word ojx oovtnov ca n be unde r- stoad_ jn a wr ong sen se. .Let us prove JEaTit can be understood ifTa v ery good s ense. We_ h old one andthe same sacred truths I beseech you that we should agree that this" truth, which is one and the same, should be regarded as sacred. Forgive me, brethren, as I have so often asked you to do. Y-ou _are n ot Arians : whysh^uld_you be thought to be^&fiahs Jjy denying_th iQ^oovmov^ } 89. But you say : ' The ambiguity of the word 6\ioov(tiov troubles and offends me.' I pray you hear me again and be not offended. J am troubled by the inadequacy of the word fyo^. ovaiov. TvT^ny_de£eptionji comfi from similari ty. I distrust vessels pfated with gold, ToT" I may be deceived by the metal underneath : and yet that which is seen resembles gold. I distrust anything that looks like milk, lest that which is offered to me be milk but not sheep's milk: for cow's milk certainly looks like it. Sheep's milk cannot be really like sheep's milk unless drawn from a sheep. Tru£— Uk-ciiess belomis to _a true natural con- nec^um~-ihrt_wjirr< t he true natural connection e*r>ts, lhe^jjjoouo^oi^s-4mj)he(r. It _is a like- ness according to essence when one piece of m&taU&Jjke anot h er an d not plated, if milk which is of the same colour as other milk is not different in taste. No thing can be lik e goldbut _gold. or like milk that did_ jTojJ2elong to that species . I have often been deceived by the colour of wine : and yet by tasting the liquor have recognized that it was of another kind. I have seen meat look like other meat, but afterwards the flavour has revealed the difference to me. Yes, I fear those resemblances which are not due to a unity of nature. 90. I am afraid, brethren, of, the br ood of hprpsjps whirh^nre successively producecT^n theJEast : and I have^airea^ly~r^aTf^v1iaTT~~tell you I fear. There was nothing whatever sus- picious in the document which some of you, with the assent of certain Orientals, took on your embassy to Sirmium to be there sub- scribed. But some misunderstanding has arisen in reference to certain statements at the be- ginning which I believe you, my holy brethren, Fjasi) , Eustathiu s, and Eleusius, omitted to mentiorTlest they should give "offence. If it was right to draw them up, it was wrong to bury them in silence. But if they are now unmentioned because they were wrong we must beware lest they should be repeated at some future time. Out of consideration for you I have hitherto said nothing about this: yet you know as well as I do that this creed was not identical with the creed of Ancyra. I am not talking gossip : I possess a copy of the creed, and I did not get it from laymen, it was given me by bishops. - 91. I pray you, brethren, remove all sus- picion and leave no occasion for it. Ta_ap- p rove of ouoLovat ov, we need not disapprove of ojxoovvwv. Let~uTHftTin1r~ut the many holy prelates now at rest : what judgment will the Lord pronounce upon us if we now say an- athema to them ? What will be our case if we push the matter so far as to deny that they were bishops and so deny that we are ourselves bishops ? We were ordained by them and are their successors. Let us renounce our epis- copate, if we took its office from men under anathema. Brethren, forgive my anguish : it is a n impiou s^act that you are attempting. I cannot endure to hear the m an anathematize d wli?r^Ty7rT7FmTmrnnmid^ sen je. N olauhTcan bejo und wTfl71T\voi-d which do es n o harm to the meaning of reli gion. I do not know the word <>iioiovatoi; or understand it, unless it confesses a simi larity of essenc e. I call the God of heaven and earth to witness, that w hen I had heard neit her word^ nwbelief was always such that I should have interpr eted 6ixoiovit iov by oixouvaw v. That is7T~beneve£i that iTnTttrrTF?-()iil(l U" similar according to nature / 1 » ON THE COUNCILS. 29 •. / unless it was of the same nature . Though long ago regenerate" in Daptlsin7~an7l for some time a bishop, I never heard of th e_Nic cno cre ed u ntil Tw a s goingjnto exil eT"b~ut the Gospel s an£L Ei)ist!es sugg ested to me t he meaning of ofjiooiaiov and 6ixowv(Tiov7 Our desire is sacred. L~et~Ti5~ not condemn the fathers, let us not encourage heretics, lest while we drive one . heresy away, we nurture another. After th e llCouncil of Nicsea our fathers interpreted the the interpretation, let Us consult together. Between us we~~can—thor oughIy cstabTis h~~fhe faith, so that what has been well settled need not be disturbed, and what has been misunder- stood may be removed. 92. Beloved brethren, I have passed beyond the bounds of courtesy, and forgetting my modesty I have been compelled by my affec- tion for you to write thus of many abstruse matters which until this our^3ge~"were~"u n- altenip t gd and left in sile nce. I have spoken what I myself believed, conscious that I owed it as my soldier's service to the Chu rch to send to you in accordanc e with~ the tea ching of the Gospel by these letters the voiceof the office which I hold in Christ. It is yours to discuss, to provide and to act, that the inviolable fidelity in which you stand you may still keep with conscientious hearts, and that you may continue to hold what you hold now. Remember my exile in your holy prayers. I do not know, now that I have thus expounded the faith, whether it would be as sweet to return unto you again in the Lord Jesus Christ as it would be full of peace to die. That our God and Lord may keep you pure and undefiled unto the day of His appearing is my desire, dearest brethren. INTRODUCTION TO THE DE TRINITATE. Since the circumstances in which the De Trinitate was written, and the character and object of the work, are discussed in the general Introduction, it will suffice to give here a brief summary of its contents, adapted, in the main, from the Benedictine edition. Book I. The treatise begins with St. Hilary's own spiritual history, the events of which are displayed, no doubt, more logically and symmetrically in the narrative than they had occurred in the writer's experience. He tells of the efforts of a pure and noble soul, impeded, so far as we hear, neither by unworthy desires nor by indifference, to find an adequate end and aim of life. He rises first to the conception of the old philosophers, and then by successive advances, as he learns more and more of the Divine revelation in Scripture, he attains the object of his search in the apprehension of God as revealed in the Catholic Faith. But this happiness is not the result of a mere intellectual knowledge, but of belief as well. In §§ i — 14 we have this advance from ignorance and fear to knowledge and peace. And here he might have rested, had he not been charged with the sacerdotal (i.e., in the language of that time, the episcopal) office, which laid upon him the duty of caring for the salvation of others. And such care was needed, for (§§ 15, 16) heresies were abroad, and chiefly two ; the Sabellian which said that Father and Son were mere names or aspects of one Divine Person, and therefore there had been no true birth of the Son ; and the Arian (which, however, Hilary rarely calls by the name of its advocate, preferring to style it the ' new heresy ') asserting more or less openly that the Son is created and not born, and therefore is different in kind from the Father, and not, in the true sense, God. Hilary declares (§ 17) that his purpose is to refute these heresies and to demonstrate the true faith by the evidence of Scripture. He demands from his hearers a loyal belief in the Scriptures which he will cite; without such faith his arguments will not profit them (§ 18); and in § 19 he warns them of the li mits of t hej.rgument from analogy, which he must employ, inadequate as it is_in_cespect of the finite illustrations whic h he must use to expresTthe infinite. Then in § 20 he speaks with a modest pride of his careful marshalling of the arguments which shall lead his readers to the right conclusion, and in §§ 21 — 36 he gives a summary of the contents of the work. He concludes the first Book (§§ 37, 38) with a prayer which expresses his certainty that what he holds is the truth, and entreats the Father and the Son that he may have the eloquence of language and the cogency of reasoning needed for the worthy presentation of the truth concerning Them. Book II. He begins with the command to baptize all nations (St. Matt, xxviii. 19) as a summary of the faith ; this by itself would suffice were not explanations rendered necessary by heretical misrepresentations of its meaning. For (§§ 3, 4) heres y is the result of Scripture misunders tood ; and here we must notice that Scripture is regarded as ground common lo both sides. All accept it as literally true, and combine its texts as will best 32 INTRODUCTION TO THE DE TRINITATE. serve their own purposes. Hilary, regarding all heresies as one combined opposition to the truth, makes the two objections that their arguments are mutually destructive, and that they are modern. Then in § 5 he expresses the awe with which he approaches the subject. The language which he must use is utterly inadequate, and yet he is compelled to use it. In §§6, 7 he begins with the notion of God as Father; in .§§8— n he proceeds to that of God the Son. He states the faith as~lTTnTIsTT)e believed; it is not enough (§§ 12, 13) to accept the truth of Christ's miracles. The mystery, as it is revealed in St. John i. 1 — 4, must be the object of faith. In §§ 14—21 he expounds this passage in the face of current objections, and then triumphantly asserts that all the efforts of heresy are vain (§ 22). He advances proof-texts in § 23 against each objector, and then points out in §§ 24, 25 our indebtedness to the infinite Divine condescension thus revealed. For, in all the hmniliation to w hich Christ stooped tiie Div ine Majesty was still inseparably HisTanof was manifested both in the circumstances of His birth and in His life on earth (^"26 — 28). The book concludes (§§ 29 — 35) with a statement of the^doctiine of the Holy j^host, as perfect as in the undeveloped state of that doctrine was possible. Book III. In §§ 1 — 4, the words, / in the Father and the Father in Me, are taken as typical. Man cannot comprehend, but o nly. apprehend them. So far as they are explicable Hilary explains them. But God's self-revelation is always mysterious. The miracles of Christ are inexplicable (§§ Szz§) \ tnis is God's way, and meant to check pre- sumption. Human wisdom is limited, and when it passes its bounds, and invades the realm of faith, it becomes folly. Next, in §§ 9—17, the passage, St. John xvii. 1 ff., is explained as proving that in the One God there are the Persons of Father and of Son, and as revealing God in the aspect of the Father. Then, in §§ 18 — 21, the wonderful deeds of Christ are put forth as an evidence of His wonderful birth. We must not ask how He can be coeternal with the Father, for it is in vain that we should ask how He coukTpass through the closed door. Either question is mere presumption. The revelation which Christ makes (§§ 22, 23) is that of God as His Father ; Unum sunt, non Un its. And finally, in §§ 25, 26, he returns to the futility of reasoning. True wisdom is to believe where we cannot comprehend ; we must trust to faith, not to proof. Book IV. This book is in a sense the beginning of the treatise, and is sometimes cited later on as the first. Its three predecessors, he says in § 1, had been written some time before. They had contained a statement of the truth concerning the Divinity of Christ, and a summary refutation of the various heresies. He now commences his main attack upon Arianism. First (§ 2) he repeats what his difficulty is; that Jumian langu age and thought cannot cope with the Infinite. Then (§ 3) he tells how the Arians explain away the eternal Sonship of Christ. As a defence against this tampering with the truth, the Church has adopted the term Homoousion (§§ 4 — 7) ; Hilary explains and defends its use. In § 8 he shews, by a collection of the passages of Scripture which they wrest to their own purposes, that such a definition is necessary, and in §§ 9, 10 that their use of these passages is dishonest. In § 1 1 he tells us exactly what the Arian teaching is, and sets it forth in one of their own formularies, the Epistola Arii ad Alexandrian (§§ 12, 13). In § 14 this doctrine is denounced ; it does not explain, but explains away. The proclamation made through Moses, Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is One, upon which the Arians take their stand, reveals only one aspect of the truth (§ 15). It does not exhaust the truth; for God is represented as not one solitary Person in the history of creation ($§ 16 — 22), in the life of Abraham (§§ 23 — 31), and in that of Moses (§§ 32 — 34). And this again is the teaching of the Prophets, as is shewn by passages selected from Isaiah, Hosea, and Jeremiah (§§ 35 — 42). INTRODUCTION TO THE DE TRINITATE. 33 All the evidence thus collected shews that in the Godhead there is both Father and Son, and that the Son is God. Book V. Hilary now points out (§ i) the controversial strength of the Arian position. If he is silent in face of their assertion, they will claim that he agrees with them that the Son is God only in some inferior sense. On the other hand, if he opposes them, he will seem to be contradicting the Mosaic revelation of the Divine unity. In § 2 he recapitulates the argument of Book IV., that the witness^of Scripture proves that God is not a solium' Person ; */ that, as he says, there \?,_GojLaii d God . But the Arians had a further loophole; their creed asserted (^3) one true God. They might argue that Christ is indeed God, but of a nature different from that of the Father. In refutation of this Hilary goes once more through the history of creation (§§ 4 — 10), proving that the narrative reveals not only the Son's share in that work, but also His equality and oneness of nature with the Father ; in other words, that He_Js^not only God but true God. The same truth is demonstrated from the life of Abraham (§§ n — 16). Moreover, these self- revelations of the Son (as the Angel, on various occasions) are anticipations of the Incarnation. He was first seen in flesh, afterwards born in flesh. The Arians concentrate their attention on the humble conditions of Christ's human life, and so, from want of a comprehensive view, fail to discern His true Godhead. But Hilary will not anticipate the evidence of the Gospels (§§ 17, 18). He returns to the Old Testament, and proves his point from Jacob's visions (§§ 19, 20), and by the revelations made to Moses (§§ 21 — 23). After a summary and an enforcement of the preceding argu- ments (§§ 24, 25), he proceeds to prove from certain passages of Isaiah that the Prophe t recognised the Son as true Go d (§§ 26— 31), and that St. Paul understood him in that sense (§§ 3 2 > 33)- Then, in §§ 34, 35, the result which has been attained is dwelt upon. Hilary shews that it is the Arians who fail to recognise the one true God ; for Christ is true God, yet not a second God. Finally, in §§ 36 — 39, Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah are adduced as testifying that Christ is God from God, and God in God. Book VI. Hilary begins by lamenting the wide extension of Arianism ; his love for souls leads him to combat the heresy, whose insidiousness makes it the more dangerous (§§ 1 — 4). He repeats in §§ 5, 6 the same Arian creed which he had given in Book IV. The heretics here gain the appearance of orthodoxy by condemning errors inconsistent with their own ; and this condemnation is designed to cast upon the Catholic faith the suspicion of complicity in such errors. Hence he must postpone his appeal to the New Testament till he has examined them (§§ 7, 8). Accordingly in §§9 — 12 he explains successively the doctrines of Valentinus, Manichaeus, Sabellius and Hieracas, and shews that the Church rejects them all, as she does (§13) the doctrine which the Arians in their creed have falsely assigned to her. Their object is to deny that the Son is coeternal with the Father and of one substance with Him (§§ 14, 15); but this denial is clean contrary to Scripture, which it is blasphemy to oppose (§§ 16, 17). The Arians would make a creature of Christ (§ 18), to Whom, in §§ 19 — 21, Hilary turns with an impassioned declaration of certainty that He is very God. He then resumes the argument, and proves that Christ is Son by birth, not by adoption, from the words both of Father and of Son as recorded in the Gospel (§§ 22 — 25). This is confirmed (§§ 26, 27) by the Gospel account of His acts, which are otherwise inexplicable. The argument is clenched by a discussion of St. John vii. 28, 29, and viii. 42 (ij§ 28 — 31). The true Sonship of Christ is further proved by the faith of the Apostles, whose certainty increased with their knowledge (§§ 31 — 35), and especially by that of St. Peter (§§ 36—38), of St. John (§§ 39-43), and of St. Paul (§§ 44, 45). To reject such a weight of testimony is to prefer Antichrist to Christ (§ 46). And, moreover, vol. ix. p 34 INTRODUCTION TO THE DE TRINITATE. we have the witness of those for whom He wrought miracles, of devils, of the Jews, of the Apostles in peril on the sea, of the centurion by the Cross, that Christ is truly the Son of God (§§ 47 — 52). Book VII. The Arians are adepts at concealing their meaning; at the use of Scripture terms in unscriptural senses (§ 1). They have already been refuted by the proof that Christ is the true and coeternal Son ; and Hilary now advances to the proof of the true Divinity of Christ, which is logically inseparable from His true Sonship (§ 2). But the danger is great lest, in attacking one heresy, he should use language which would sanction others (§ 3). Yet the truth is one, while heresies are manifold. Each of them can be trusted to demolish the others, while none can establish its own case. He illustrates this by the mutually destruc- tive arguments of Sabellius, Arius and Photinus (§§ 5 — 7). Christ is proved to be God by the name God which is given Him in Scripture : The Word was God ( §§ 8, 9). The name is His in the strict sense, and not any derivative meaning (§§ 10, 11). Yet Father and Son are not two, but one God (§ 13). Being the Son of God, He has the nature of God, and therefore is God (§§ 14 — 17), and yet not one Person with the Father (§ 18). Again, His power, manifested in His works, proves His Godhead (§ 19), as does the fact that all judgment has been given Him by the Father (§ 20). Christ's own words display the truth (§ 21). The Arians are blind to the plain sense of Scripture, and are more blasphemous than the Jews ; Christ's reply to the latter meets the objections of the former (§§ 22 — 24). He asserts His unity with the Father (§ 25), and makes His works the proof (§ 26). The Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father (§ 27) : this is illustrated by the transmission of physical properties from parent to child and from flame to flame (§§ 28 — 30). In fact, the Catholic is the only rational explanation of the words of Scripture (§§ 31, 32). Again (§§ t,^ — 38), the way to the Father is through the Son, and knowledge of the Son is knowledge of the Father. This would be impossible, were not the Son God in the same sense in which the Father is God. Thus the contrary doctrines of Sabellius and of Arius are confuted ; there is neither one Person, nor yet two Gods (§§ 39, 40). Christ calls upon us to believe the truth, and belief is not only possible but reasonable (§ 41). Book VIII. Piety is necessary in a Bishop, but he needs also knowledge and dia- lectical skill in the face of such heresies as were rampant in Hilary's day 5 for the heretics outdo the orthodox in zeal, and are masters in the art of devising pitfalls for the unwary reasoner (§§ 1 — 3). He maintains (§ 4) that hitherto he has established his case ; and now turns in § 5, to the Arian interpretation of / and the Father are One, as meaning that They are one in will, not in nature. The fallacy of this is shewn by a comparison of the unity of Christians in Christ (§§ 7 — 9) ; a unity which is confessedly one of nature, yet is not more natural than that of Father and Son, of which it is a type (§ ro). And indeed the words, / and the Father are One, are ill-adapted to express a mere harmony of will (§ ti). This gift of unity of nature could not be given, as it is, through the Incarnation and the Eucharist, to Christians, unless the Givers Themselves possessed it ; i.e. unless Father and Son were One God (§§ 12 — 14). As a matter of fact, we have a perfect union, through the mediation of Christ, with the Father; and it is a unity of nature, a permanent abiding; an assurance to us of the indwelling of Father in Son and Son in Father, and of the fact that Christ is not a creature, one in will with the Father, but a Son, one in nature with Him (§§ 15 — 18). For, again (§§ 19 — 21), the Mission of the Holy Ghost is jointly from the Father and the Son; He is^called sometimes the Spirit of the Father, sometimes the Spirit of the Son, and this is a further proof of the unity in nature of Father and Son. Hilary now enquires (§§22 — 25) into the senses in which Scripture speaks of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes this INTRODUCTION TO THE DE TRINITATE. 35 title is given to the Father, sometimes to the Son, in both cases to save us from corporeal conceptions of God. But it is also used, in the strict sense, of the Paraclete, as on the day of Pentecost. Now the Divine Spirit dwells in Christians ; but this Spirit, whether styled the Spirit of God, or the Spirit of Christ, or the Spirit of Truth, proceeding from the Father and sent by the Son, is only one Spirit. Hence the Godhead is One, and the nature of the Persons within that Godhead one also (§§ 26, 27). He next points out (§ 28) that the Arians are inconsistent in worshipping Christ, and yet styling Him a creature ; for thus they fall under the curse of the Law, and forfeit the Holy Spirit. Again (§§ 29 — 34) the powers and graces bestowed by God are described indiscriminately as gifts of one or another Person in the Godhead. T he S on, therefore, as a Giver, must be one with the Father, Who is also a Giver, and one with the Spirit. 'Thexejs^ One God and One Lord (§ 35); if we deny that the Son is God, we must also deny that the Father is Lord; which is absurd. They are One God. with one Spirit, but not one Person (§ 36). St. Paul expressly says that Christ is God over all ; an expression which must, like all the Apostle's teaching, bear the Catholic sense, and is incompatible with Arianism (§§ 37 — 39). The supporters of Arianism are thus alien from the faith (§ 40). After a restatement of the truth (§ 41), Hilary proceeds to deduce the Divine nature of the Son from the fact that He has been sealed by the Father (§§ 42 — 45). This _sealing makes Him the Father's counterpart, Whose Image He thus becomes, though in the form of a servant. If He were thus the Image of God after His Incarnation, how much more before that condescension (§ 46). In § 47 he again denies that this teaching reduces the Father and the Son to one Person ; and then (§§ 48 — 50) works out the sense in which Christ is the Image of God. It means that They are of one nature and of one power, and that the Son is the Firstborn, through Whom all things were created. But creation and also reconciliation is the joint work of Father and Son (§ 51). Christ could not have stated more explicitly than He has done His unity with the Father; the recognition of this truth is the test of the true Church (§ 52). Heresy is blind to the essential difference between the life-giving Christ and the created universe, which owes its life to Him (§ 53). In Him dwells the whole fulness of t he Godhead b odily. The In- dweller and the Indwelt are Both Persons, yet are One"TJod^and the whole Godhead dwells in EaclTXl34^|S)r "— Book IX. After a summary (§ 1) of the results already obtained, Hilary returns, in § 2, to certain of the Arian proof-texts, and warns his readers that their life depends on the recognition in Christ of true God and true man, for it is this twofold nature which makes Him the Mediator (§ 3). Universal analogy and our consciousness of the capacity to rise to the life in God convince us of these two natures in Him, Who makes this rise possible (§ 4). But heresy lays hold of words spoken by Christ Incarnate, appropriate to His humility as Man, and assigns them to Him in His previous state ; thus they make Him deny His true Godhead. But His utterances before the Incarnation, during His life on earth, and after His return to glory, must be carefully distinguished (§§ 5, 6). Hilary now examines the aims and achievements of Christ Incarnate, and shews that His work for men was a Divine work, accomplished by Him for us only because He was throughout both God and Man, the two natures in Him being inseparable (§§ 7 — 14). After reaching this conclusion from a general survey of Christ's life on earth, he examines in the light of it the Arian arguments from isolated words. They assert that Christ refused to be called Good or Master. He refused neither title, and yet declared that both belong to God only (§§ 15 — 18). And, indeed, He could not have associated Himself more closely than He did with the Father, while yet He kept His Person distinct (§ 19). The Father Himself bears witness to the Son ; and the sin and loss of the Jews is this, that, seeing the Father's works done by Christ, p 2 3° INTRODUCTION TO THE DE TRINITATE. they did not see in Him the Son (§§ 20, 21). The honour and glory of Christ is inseparable from that of God (§§ 22, 23). The Scribe did well to confess the Divine unity, but was still outside the Kingdom because He did not believe in Christ as God (§§ 24 — 27). Next, the Arian argument from the words, This is life eternal, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent, is refuted by comparison with cognate passages (§§ 28 — 35). For, indeed, if the Father be the only true God, the Son must also be the only true God (§ 36). That Divine nature which is common to Father and Son is subject to no limitations, and the eternal generation can be illustrated by no analogy of created things (§ 37)- Christ took humanity, and, since the Father's nature did not share in_lh4sj— the unity was so far impaired. But humanity has been raised in Christ to God ; and this could only be because His unity in the Divine nature with the Father was perfect. , Otherwise the flesh which Christ took could not have entered into the Divine glory (§ 38). There_.is_J3ul.-QU e glory o _f Father and - of_Son ; the Son sought in the Incarnation not glory for the Word but for the flesh (§§39, 40). The glory of Father and Son is one; in that unity the Son bestows, as well as receives, glory (§§ 41, 42), and this glory, common to Both, is evidence that the Divine nature also is common to Both (§ 42). Again, the Arians allege the words, The Son can do nothing of Himself, which Hilary shews, by an examination of the context, to be a support of the Catholic cause (§§ 43 — 46). The Son does the Father's work, not under compulsion as an inferior, but because They are One. His will is free, yet in perfect harmony with that of the Father, because of their unity of nature (§§ 47 — 50). The Asians also appeal to the text, The Father is greater than I. The--F!atlT er is, in fact 1 _greater, first as~betng the Unbegotten, and secondly inasmuch as the Son has condescended to the state of man, yet without forfeiting His Godhead (§ 51). But He is not greater in nature than the Son, Who is His Image; or rather, the Begetter is the greater, while the Son, as the Begotten, is not less than He, for, although begotten. He had no beginning of existence (§§ 52 — 57). Next, the allegation of ignorance, based on St. Mark xiii. 32, and therefore of difference in nature from God Omniscient is refuted (§§ 58 — 62), both by express statements of Scripture and by a consideration of the Divine character. It is only in figurative senses that God is stated in the Old Testament sometimes to come to know, sometimes to be ignorant of, particular facts (§§ 63, 64). And so it is with Christ ; His ignorance is but a wise and merciful concealment of knowledge (§§ 65 — 67). Yet the Arians, though they admit that Christ, being superior to man, knows all the secrets of humanity, assert that He cannot penetrate the mysteries of God (§ 68). But Christ expressly declares that He can and does, for Each is in the Other and is mirrored in the Other (§ 69). The ignorance can be nothing but concealment. Only the Father knows, i.e. He has told none but the Son ; the Son does not know, i.e. He wills not to reveal His knowledge (§§ 7°. 7 1 )- Cod is unlimited; unlimited therefore in knowledge. The nature of Father and Son being one, it is impossible that the Son should be ignorant of what the Father knows. As in will, so in knowledge, They are One (§§ 72 — 74). And the Apostles, by repeating their question after the Resurrection, shew that they were aware that His ignorance meant reserve. And Christ did not, this time, speak of ignorance, though He withheld the knowledge whlcrrthey asked (§ 75). 7^ Book X. ^Theological differences are not the result of honest reasoning, but of reasoning distorted, as in the rase of the Arians, by preconceived opinions, whose cause is sin and their result hypocrisy (§§ 1 — 3). Hilary has fallen on the evil times foretold by the Apostle; truth is banished and so is he, yet his sufferings do not affect his joy in the Lord (§ 4). In the preceding books he has stated the exact truth, of which he now gives a summary (§§ 5 — 8). But the further objection is raised that, while God is impassible, Christ in His Passion suffered fear and pain (§ 9). But He Who taught others not to fear deatli could not fear INTRODUCTION TO THK DE TRIN1TA TIC. o/ it Himself (§ 10). He died of His own free will, knowing that in three days His Body and Spirit would rise again (§§ n, 12). Nor did He fear bodily tortures, for pain is an affection of the weak human soul, which inhabits our body, and is not felt by the body itself (§§ 13, 14). And, although the Virgin fulfilled entirely the part of a human mother, yet the Begetter was Divine. Christ, when He took the form of a servant, remained still in the form of God, and was born perfect even as the Begetter was perfect, for Mary was not the cause, but only the means, of His human life (§§ 15, 16). St. Paul draws a clear distinction between the First Man, who was earthy, and the Second Man, Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, and in Whom what is Flesh, in one aspect, is Bread from heaven in another (§§ 17, 18). He is therefore perfect Man as well as perfect God, and did not inherit the flesh or the soul of Adam. His whole human nature is derived from the Holy Ghost, by Whom the Virgin conceived (§§ 19, 20). Again (§21) the Arians argue that the Word was in Jesus in the same sense in which the Spirit was in the Prophets, and reproach the Catholics with denying the true humanity of Christ. Hilary replies that just as Christ was the cause of the birth of His own human Body, so He was the Author of His own human Soul : for no soul is transmitted. Thus His human nature is complete ; He has taken the form of a servant, but all the while He is in the form of God, i.e. He Who is God and also Man is one Christ, Who was born and died and rose (§ 22). In all this He endured passion but not pain, even as air or water, if pierced by a blow, is unaffected by it. The blow is real, and the Passion was real ; but it was not inflicted on our limited humanity but on a human nature which could walk on water and pass through locked doors (§ 23). If it be argued that He wept, hungered, thirsted, Hilary answers that He could wipe away tears and supply needs, and therefore was not subject to them ; that though He endured them, as true Man, He was not affected by them. Such sufferings are habitual with men, and He endured them to shew that He had a true Body (§ 24). For such a Body He had, although (since He was not conceived in sin) one free from the defects of our bodies ; not sinful flesh, but only the likeness of sinful flesh. Foi He was the Word made Flesh, and continued to be true God as He had been before (§§ 25, 26). The Lord of glory suffered neither fear nor pain in His Passion, as is shewn by the powers which He exercised on the verge of death (§§ 27, 28). His utterances in the Garden and on the Cross are not evidences of pain or fear, for they may be matched by lofty expressions of calmness and hope (§§ 29 — 32). Thus no proof of fear or pain or weakness can be drawn from the circumstances of the Passion. Nor was the Cross a shame, for it was His road from humiliation to glory (§ 33), nor the descent to hell a degradation, for all the while He was in heaven. How different the faith of the Thief on the cross to that of the Arian ! (§ 34). The argument is summed up in § 35. Next the Agony is considered. Christ does not say that He is sorrowful on account of death, but unto death. It is anxiety on the Apostles' account, lest their faith should fail ; a fear which reached to His death, not beyond, for He knew that after His death His glory would revive their faith. This was the fear in which He was comforted by the Angel ; for Himself He was fearless, being conscious of His Godhead (§§ 36—43). He was free from pain and fear, for it is the sinful body which transmits these affections to the soul. Yet even human bodies rise sometimes superior to them, e.g. Daniel and other heroes of faith : how much more Christ (§§ 44—46). In the same way we must understand His bearing our suffering and our sin (§ 47), for, as St. Paul says, His Passion was itself a triumph (§ 48). The complaint that He was forsaken by the Father is similarly explained (§ 49). The purpose of the Arian arguments is to displace the truth of Christ as very God and very man in favour of one or other heretical hypothesis, all ol which the Church rejects (§§ 50—52). Our reason must recognise its limitations and be content to believe, without understanding, apparently contradictory truths (§§ 53, 54). Christ weeping over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus is equally inexplicable, yet certain 38 INTRODUCTION TO THE DE TRINITATE. (§§ 55> 5 6 )- His laying down and taking again His life is accounted for by the two natures inseparably united in one Person (§§ 57 — 62). After a short summary (§ 63) he returns tp_the union of two natures, which is the stumbling-block of worldly wisdom (§ 64), and shews it to be the only reasonable explanation of the facts (§§ 65, 66). As St. Paul says, our belief must be according to the Scriptures ; the necessity and the rewards of faith (§§ 67 — 70). The seeming infirmity of Christ was assumed for our instruction and for our salvation. / Book XL The Faith is one, even as GodjsJDne ; but the faiths of heretics are many (§§ 1, 2). Hilary has naw^d^monstratecTthe truth about Christ, so that it cannot be denied ; it is attested also by miracles even in his own day (§ 3). The Arians preach another, a created Christ ; and in making Christ a creature they proclaim another God, not a Father but a Creator (§ 4). The Son, as the Image, is of one nature with the Father; if He is inferior He is not the Image (§ 5). But the Arians explain the oneness away by arguments from His condescension to our estate (§ 6), and, even after His Resurrection, plead that He confesses His inequality. They argue thus from 1 £ox.Jtv. .24 — 28, a passage to which the rest of this book is devoted (§§ 7, 8). But we must recognise the mysteriousness of the truth, accepting the two sides of it, both clearly revealed though we cannot reconcile them (§ 9). They regard only one aspect ; Hilary in reply proves once more that Christ is both born from God, and Himself God (§§ 10 — 12). But at His Incarnation He began to have as Lord the God Who had been His Father eternally (§ 13), and when He said that He was ascending to His God, He spoke as when He calls us His brethren (§§ 14, 15). Thus there are two senses in which God is the Father of Christ; and He Who is Father to Christ the Son is Lord to Christ the Servant (§§ 16, 17). And it was to Him as Servant that the Psalmist said, Thy God hath anointed Thee; the words would have no meaning if addressed to Him as Son (§§ 18, 19). It is through this lower nature that He is our Brother and God our Father, and He the Mediator (§ 20). But it is argued that His subjec- tion at the last and the delivery of the kingdom to the Father is a proof of inequality. The passage must be taken as a whole (§§ 21, 22). There are some truths which it is difficult for man to grasp, and if we misunderstand them we must not be ashamed to confess our error (§§ 23, 24). In this passage the Arians aid their case by changing the order of the prophecy (§§ 2 S — 2 7)- The en< l means a fi na l ar >d enduring state, not the coming to an end (§ 28), and though He -delivers up the kingdom He does not cease to reign (§ 29). His subjection to the Father and the subjection of all things to Him is next considered ; in one sense it is figurative language, in another it proves the unity of Father and Son. The subjection of the Son means His partaking in the glory of the Father (§§ 30 — 36). The Transfiguration shews the glory of Christ's Body; a glory which the faithful shall share (§§ 37, 38). The righteous are His kingdom, which He, as Man, shall deliver to the Father, for By man came also thi resurrection of the dead (§ 39). And at last God shall be all in all, humanity in Chris! not being discarded, but glorified and received into the Godhead (§ 40). Christ, as well as St. Paul, has foretold this (§§ 41, 42). The Arian misrepresentation of this truth is mere folly (§ 43). Any rational explanation must assume that God's majesty cannot be augmented, even as it cannot be measured (§§ 44, 45), while our reason is limited, and so contrasted with the Divine infinity. God cannot become greater than He was in becoming All in all. Father and Son, after as before, must Each be as He was (§§ 46 — 48). All was done for us that we might be glorified, being conformed to the likeness of Him Who is the Image of the Father (§ 49). Book XII. Hilary gives a final explanation of the great Arian text, The Lord created me for a beginning of His ways ; the words must not be taken literally. Christ is not created, INTRODUCTION TO THE DE TRINITATE. 39 but Creator (§§ 1 — 5). If He is a creature, the Father also is a creature, for They are One in nature and in honour (§§ 6, 7). The similar passage, I begat Thee from the womb, is figurative; elsewhere God's Hands and Eyes are spoken of. The sense is that the Son is God from God (§§8 — 10). Nor was Christ made; He is the Son, not the handiwork, of the Father (§§ n, 12). And His Sonship is immediate, not derivative like ours, or like that of Israel His firstborn. This latter kind of sonship has a definite beginning of existence, and an origin out of nothing (§§ 13 — 16). The Arian arguments fail to prove that the Sonship of Christ has either of these characters (§§ 17, 18). Truth is to be attained not by self- confident arguing but by faith (§ 19), yet it is not enough for us to avoid their reasonings; we must overthrow them (§ 20). The Son was born from eternity, being the Son of the eternal Father (§ 21). The objection that sonship involves beginning does not hold in His case (§§22, 23). The Son has all that the Father has; He has therefore eternity and an unconditioned existence (§ 24). He is from the Eternal, and therefore eternal Himself; from the EtenTa^'anoTTlTerefore not from nothing. Reason cannot grasp, and therefore cannot refute, this. We must not assert that there was a time before He was born, a time when He was not (§§ 25 — 27). We must not argue, from the analogy of our own birth, that the truth is impossible (§ 28), nor that, because of His eternal existence, the Son was not born (§§ 29 — 32). Again, the Arians deny the eternal Fatherhood of God ; He always existed, they say, but was not always the Father. This contradicts Scripture (§§ 33, 34). They argue that Wisdom is said to be the first of God's creatures ; but creation, in this sense, is a synonym for generation, and Wisdom was antecedent to creation (§§ 35 — 38). Wisdom is coeternal with God (§ 39), and shared His eternal purpose of creation (§§ 40, 41). Nor may we believe that Christ was begotten simply in order to perform the creative work, as God's Minister, for Wisdom took part in the design as well as in the execution (§§ 42, 43). And again, Wisdom is spoken of as created, as an indication of Her control over created things (§ 44). The creation to be a beginning of God's ways is a separate event from the eternal generation. It means that Christ, as the Way of Life, under the Old Covenant took the semblance, under the New Covenant the substance, of the creature man, to lead us into the way. The two senses must not be confused (§§ 45 — 49). Yet mere inaccuracy of speech, without heretical intent, is not unpardonable (§ 50). After a final assertion (§ 51) of faith in Christ as God from God, the eternal Son, Hilary appeals to the Almighty Father, declaring his creed, his consciousness of human infirmity and of the need of faith (§§ 52, 53). The Son is the Only-begotten of God, the Second because He is the Son (§ 54). The Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and is sent by the Son. He also is no creature, but of one nature with the God Whose mysteries He knows, and ineffable like Him Whose Spirit He is (§ 55). Finally, Hilary prays that, as he was baptized, so he may remain in the faith of Three Persons in One God. *l-r ON THE TRINITY. BOOK I. i. When I was seeking an employment adequate to the powers of human life and righteous in itself, whether prompted by nature or suggested by the researches of the wise, whereby I might attain to some result worthy of that Divine gift of understanding which has been given us, many things occurred to me which in general esteem were thought to render life hoth useful and desirable. And especially that which now, as always in the past, is regarded as most to be desired, leisure combined with wealth, came before my mind. The one without the other seemed rather a source of evil than an opportunity for good, for leisure in poverty is felt to be almost an exile from life itself, while wealth possessed amid anxiety is in itself an affliction, rendered the worse by the deeper humiliation which he must suffer who loses, after possessing, the things that most are wished and sought. And yet, though these two embrace the highest and best of the luxuries of life, they seem not far removed from the normal pleasures of the beasts which, as they roam through shady places rich in herbage, enjoy at once their safety from toil and the abundance of their food. For if this be regarded as the best and most perfect conduct of the life of man, it results that one object is common, though the range of feelings differ, to us and the whole unreasoning animal world, since all of them, in that bounteous provision and abso- lute leisure which nature bestows, have full scope for enjoyment without anxiety for pos- session. 2. I believe that the mass of mankind have spurned from themselves and censured in others this acquiescence in a thoughtless, ani- mal life, for no other reason than that nature herself has taught them that it is unworthy of humanity to hold themselves born only to gratify their greed and their sloth, and ushered into life for no high aim of glorious deed or fair accomplishment, and that this very life was granted without the power of progress towards immortality; a life, indeed, whicli then we should confidently assert did not deserve to be regarded as a gift of God, since, racked by pain and laden with trouble, it wastes itself upon itself from the blank mind of infancy to the wanderings of age. I believe that men, prompted by nature herself, have raised themselves through teaching and prac- tice to the virtues which we name patience and temperance and forbearance, under the conviction that right living m eans right action and rig ht though t, and that Immortal God has not given Iifeonly to end in death ; for none can believe that the Giver of good has be- stowed the pleasant sense of life in order that it may be overcast by the gloomy fear of dying. 3. And yet, though I could not tax with folly and uselessness this counsel of theirs to keep the soul free from blame, and evade by foresight or elude by skill or endure with patience the troubles of life, still I could not regard these men as guides competent to lead me to the good and happy Life. Their precepts were platitudes, on the mere level of human impulse ; animal instinct could not fail to comprehend them, and he who understood but disobeyed would have fallen into an insanity baser than animal unreason. More- over, my soul was eager not merely to do the things, neglect of which brings shame and suffering, but to know the God and Father Who had given this "great gift, to Whom, it felt, it owed its whole self, Whose service was its true honour, on Wtfoin all its hopes were fixed, in Whose lovingkindness, as in a safe home and haven, it could rest amid all the troubles of this anxious life. It was inflamed with a passionate desire to apprehend Him or to know Him. 4. Some of these teachers brought forward large households of dubious deities, and under the persuasion that there is a sexual activity in divine beings narrated births and lineages from god to god. Others asserted that there were gods greater and less, of distinction propor- ON THE TRINITY. — BOOK I 4i $ donate to their power. Some denied the existence of any gods whatever, and confined their reverence to a nature which, in their opinion, owes its being to chance-led vibrations and collisions. On the other hand, many followed the common belief in asserting the existence of a God, but proclaimed Him heedless and indifferent to the affairs of men. Again, some worshipped in the elements of earth and air the actual bodily and visible forms of created things; and, finally, some made their gods dwell within images of men or of beasts, tame or wild, of birds or of snakes, and confined the Lord of the universe and Father of infinity within these narrow prisons of metal or stone or wood. These, I was sure, could be no exponents of truth, for though they were at one in the absurdity, the foulness, the impiety of their observances, they were at variance concerning the essential articles of their senseless belief. My soul was distracted amid all these claims, yet still it pressed along that profitable road which leads inevitably to the_ _trjig. Jcn owledge of G od. It could not hold that neglect of a world created by Himself was worthily to be attributed to God, or that deities endowed with sex, and lines of begetters and begotten, were com- patible with the pure and mighty nature of the Godhead. Nay, rather, it was sure that that which is Divine and eternal must be one without distinction of sex, for that whi ch is self-existent cannot have left outside itself anything superior to itself. Hence omni- potence and eternity are the possession of One only, for omnipotence is incapable of degrees of strength or weakness, and eternity of priority or succession. In God we must worship absolute eternity and absolute power. 5. While my mind was dwelling on these and on many like thoughts, I chanced upon the books which, according to the tradition of the Hebre wjaith, were written by Mose simd the'prophetsTand found in them words spoken by God the Creator testifying of Himself ' I am that I am, and again, He that is hath sent me unto you' 1 .'' I confess that I was amazed to find in them an in dica tion concern- i ng God so exact that it expressed in thetllrms best adapted to human understanding an unattainable, insight into the mystery of the Divine nature. For no property of God which the mind can -grasp is more characteristic of Him than existe nce, since existence, in the absoUite_§_ensej cannot be^fecficated of that whicKshall come to an end, or of that which has had a beginning', and He who now joins continuity of being with the possession of perfect felicity could not in the past, nor can in the future, be non-existent ; for whatsoever is Divine can neither be originated nor de- stroyed. Wherefore, since God's^ eternity is inseparable, -from Himself, it wasworfliy - of Him to reveal this one thing, that He is, as the assurance of His absolute eternity. "6. For such an indication of God's in- finity the words ' I am that I am ' were clearly adequate ; but, in addition, we needed to appr ehend the o peration of His majesty and power. F or while™ 'absolute existence is peculiar to Him Who, abiding eternally, had no beginning in a past however re- mote, we hear again an utterance worthy of Himself issuing from the eternal and Holy God, Who says, Who holdeth the heaven in H is palm and the earth in His hand 2 , and again, The~h~edven is My throne 'and the earth is the footstool of My feet. What house will ye build Me or what shall be the place of My rest 3? The whole heaven is held in the palm of God, the whole earth grasped in His hand. Now the i5LQxd_pjL_G_od, profitable as it is to the_cur- sory thought nf a pious , ini nH. reveals a deeper rr jeaning to the n_atienr~s~tiide nt than to the momentary hearer. For this heaven which is held in the pami of God is also His throne, and the earth which is grasped in His hand is also the footstool beneath His feet. This was jiot written that from throne and footstool, m etapho rs drawn from the posture of one silTfHg", we should conclude that He has exten- sion in space, as of a body, for that which is His throne and footstool is also held in hand and palm by that infinite Omnipotence. It was written that in all born and created things God might be known within them and without, overshadowing and indwelling! surrounding all and interfused through all, since palm and hand, which hold, reveal the might of His ex- t ernal cont rol, while throne and footstooTfBy their support of a sitter, display the sub- servience of outward things to One wkhinVVho, H imself -outside them, encloses all in~"His gras p, v et dwells with in the external world which is His oW~ "TnTh~ts~"wf5e doe^ God, from within and from without, control and correspond to the universe; being infinite He is present in all things, in Him Who is infinite all are included. In devout thoughts such as these my soul, engrossed "TTi the pursuit of truth, took its delight. For it seemed that the greatness of Goi Lso far surpassed the mental powers of Mis handiwork, that however far the limited mind of man might strain in the hazardous K JU-- j 1 Exod. iii. 14. Isai. xl. 12. 3 lb. lxvi. i, 2. N/ r .-- > 42 DE TRINITATE. t effort to define Mini, the gap was not lessened between the" finite nature which struggled and the boundless infinity that lay beyond its ken ■'. I had come by reverent reflection on my own part to understand this, but I found it confirmed by the words of the prophet, Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? Or whither shall I flee from Thy face 1 If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there ; if I go down into hell, Thou art there also ; if I have taken my wings before dawn and made my dwelling in the uttermost parts of the sea {Thou art there). For thither Thy hand shall guide me and Thy right hand shall hold me s. The^e_jsjiQ_snj 1 cewher£_God is no t ; space does not exist apart from Him. He is in heaven, in hell, beyond the seas ; dwelling in all things and enveloping all. Thus He embraces, and is embraced by, the universe, confined to no part of it but pervading all. 7. Therefore, although my soul drew joy k from the apprehension of t his august and unfath omable Mipjl because it could w orsh ip as its own Father" and Creator so limitless an In finity, vet with a still more~~eager desire" it sought to know the true a spect of its infinite and eternal Lord, thaT it might be able to believe that that immeasurable Deity was apparelled in splendour befitting tbe _ beau ty of His wisdom. Then, while the devout soul was baffled and astray through its own leebie- ness, it caught from the prophet's voice this scale of comparison for God, admirably ex- pressed, By the greatness of His works and the beauty of the things that He hath made the Creator of worlds is rightly discerned**. The Creator of great things is supreme in greatness, of beautiful things in beauty . Since the work transcends our thoughts" ah 1 thought must be transcended byllfeMaker. ThusTfeaverTancT air and earth and seas are fair : fair also the whole universe, as the Greeks agree, who from its beautiful ordering call it Kaa/xos, that is, order. But if our thought can estimate this beauty of the universe by a natural instinct — an instinct such as we see in certain birds and beasts whose voice, though it fall below the level of our understanding, yet has a sense clear to them though they cannot utter it, and in which, since all speech is the expression of some thought, there lies a meaning patent to them- selves — must not the Lor d of this universa l beauty be rcTfl ffrnsed as Himself most beau - JjllL Lamid all tne beauty that s»l'rounds_ Hnn"? For d unigh the splendour ot His eternal glo ry o vertax our min d's hpsr powers, it cannot ta il to see that He is beautiful. We must in truth * Reading mens/inita and natunr finitatcm for the injiuila and infimtatem of Uic Benedictine Kditi«n. 5 Ps. exxxviii. (exxxix.) 7 — 10. 5* Wisd. xiii. 5. at with f f. v 8r~TrTiTs myinTnayfull of these results which confess that God is most beautiful, and that with a ^jjt tfty wh ich lliniufh "r transcend our prehension, forces itbe iT lluun our neivep r by its own reflection and the teaching of Scrip- ture it had attained, rested with assurance, as on some peaceful watch-tower, upon that glori- ous conclusion, recognising that its true nature made it capable of one homage to its Creator, and of none other, whether greater or less ; the homage namely of conviction that_J±is-is a greatness trip vastjorcmr rM m p. r i'.hg n ^ n J^J ir not, for qw feffrh. For~"a re asonable" fa ith is aki n to reason and flrrept .s its aid, even though that same reason cannot cope with the vast- ness of eternal Omnipotence. 9. Beneath all these thoughts lay an in- stinctive hope, which strengthened my asser- tion of the faith, in some perfect blessedness t - hereafter to be earned by devout ^nou ghts coii7^rinngjjod_^^ the reward, as"iFwere, that awaits the triumphant warrior. For true faith in God would pass unrewarded, if the soul be destroyed by death, and quenched in the extinction of bodily life. Even unaided reason pleaded that it was u nworthy of Go d to usher man into an exist- ence which has some share of His thought and wisdom, only to await the sentence of life withdrawn and of eternal death ; to create him out of nothing to take his place in the world, only that when he has taken it he may perish. For, on the only rational theory of creation, \ its purpose was that things non-existent should I come into being, not that things existing I should cease to be. 10. Yet my soul was weighed down with fear both for itself and for the body. It retained a firm conviction, and a devout loyalty to the true faith concerning God, but had come to harbour a deep_anxiety concerning itself and the bod ily ci welling" which must, it thought, share its destruction. While in this state, in addition to its knowledge of the teaching of the Law and Prophets, it learned the truths taught by the Apostle in the Gospel ; — In the beginning zaas the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All tilings were made through Him, and without Him 7i>as not anything made. That which was made in Him is life 6 , and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness apprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came for witness, that he might bear witness of the light. That was the true light, which lighteneth every matt that comet h 6 Cf. Hilary's explanation of this passage in Book ii. §§ 19, 20. ON THE TRINITY. — BOOK 1. 4j -^ into this world. He was in the world, and the world 7oas made through Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His ozvn things, and they that were His own received Him not. But to as many as received Him He gave power to become sons of God, even to them that believe on His Name ; which were bom, not of blood, nor of the will of man, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt anwiig us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the Only-begotten from the Father, fttll of Here tVaesoul makes an grace and truths. a dvance beyond the attainment of its natur al Opacities, is taught more than it ha d dreamed For it learns that Its Creator c once rning God. is Go d oi God ; it hears that the Word is God and was with God in the beginning. It comes to understand that the Light of the world was abiding in the world and \ that the world knew Him not ; that He came to His own possession and that they that were His own received Him not ; but that they who do receive Him by virtue of their faith advanc e to be sons of God, being born not of the embrace~6Ttne flesh nor of the conception of the blood nor of bodily desire, but of God ; finally, it learns that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and- that His glory was seen, which, as of the Only- begotten from the Father, is perfect through grace and truth. ii. Herein my soul, trembling and dis- tressed, found a hope wider than it had i imagined. First ca me i ts jntroduction to trie knowledge of God t he Galilei." Then it learnt that the" eternity and lTTftrrity and beaulv which, ^ and beaut y w by the lighTot natural reason, it had attributed to its Creator belonged also to God the Only begotten. It did not disperse its faith among a plurality of deities, for it heard that He is God of God ; nor did it fall into the error of attributing a difference of nature to this God of God, for it learnt that He is full of grace and truth. Nor yet did my soul pe r- ..eive^ any thing contrary to re aso n in God of God, sinceHe was revealed as havin g been in~tne beginmng~God with God. It saw that there are very~few who attain to the know- ledge of this saving faith , though its reward be great, for e'ven His own received Him not, though they who receive Him are promoted to be sons of God by a birth, not of the flesh but of faith. It learnt also that this sonship to God is not a compulsion but a possibility, for, while the Divine gift is offered JLoall, it is no heredity inevitably imprinted * but a prize awarded to willing choice. And lest this very truth that whosoever will may become a son of God should stagger the weakness 7 St. John i. i — 14. of our faith (for most we desire, but least expect, that which from its very greatness we find it hard to hope for), Godthe Word became flesh, that through His Incarnation our flesh might attain to union with God the Word. And lest we should think that this incarnate Word was some other than God the Word, or that His flesh was of a body different from ours, He dwelt among us that by His dwelling He might be know n as the ind well- ing God, and, by His dwelling among us, known as God inc arnate in no other flesh t han our own, "and moreover, though He had condescended to take our flesh, not destitute of His own attributes ; for He, the Only- begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth, is fully possessed of His own attributes and; t r uly endowed with our s. 12. This lesson in the Divine mysteries was gladly welcomed by my sou l, no w drawing n ear throyghjth e fles h to God , Called to new birth throu ^rilanh , ehtrusteefwith liberty and power to win the' heavenly r egen eration, con- scious of the love of its Fatherland Creator, sure that He would not annihilate a creature whom He had summoned out of nothing into life. -^And it could estimate how high a re the se truth s nbnvp fhp me ntal vTsTon ntm.-m ; for the reason which deals with the common objects of thought can conceive of nothing as existent beyond what it perceives within itself or can create out of itselfi^My soul measured the mighty workings of God, wrought on the scale of His eternal omnipotence, not by its ow n power s of perception but by a bu jqrnti^ s o fo rth ;~ -aft d th c rcf ore^re Tused to djs - believeTJJec ause jt could not un derstand, tliaj Go dTwaTiu the begiiiiiiiig~wttn~God, and that the Word became flesh and" dwelt among us, but bore in mind the truth that with the willjq believe would come the power to under- stand. 13. And lest the soul should stray and linger in some delusion of heathen philosophy, it receives this further lesson of perfect loyalty to the holy faith, taught by the Apostle in words inspired : — Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ ; for in Him divelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and ye are made full in Him, Which is the Head of all principality and power ; in Whom ye tvere also circumcised with a circumcision not made with hands, in putting off the body of the flesh, but with the circumcision of Christ; buried with Him in Baptism, wherein also ye have risen again through faith in the working of God, Who raised Him from the dead. And you, when ye were dead in sins and in the 44 DE TRINITATE. OJj uncircumcision of your flesh, He hath quickened with Him, having forgiven you all your sins, blotting out the bond which was against us by its ordinances, which ivas contrary to us ; and He hath taken it out of the way, nailing it to the Cross ; and having put off the flesh He made a shoiv of powers openly, triumphing over them through confidence in Himself % . Steadfa st faith rejects the vain subtleties o f ffml osophic enqui ry ; truth refuses to be van- quished by these~treacherous devices of human folly, and enslaved by falsehood. It will not confine God within the limits which hou nd qut common reas on, nor judge after the ruaimems oj ih'e world concerning Christ, in Whom dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, and in such wise that the utmost efforts of the earthly mind to comprehend Him are baffled b y that immeasurable Eternity and Omnipotence, My soul judged of Him as One Who, drawing us upward to partake of His own DivhTe"" natufe'; has loosened henceforth the bond of bodily observances ; Who, unlike the Symbolic Law," has initiated us into no rites of mutilating the flesh, but Whose purpose is that our spirit, circumcised from vice, should purify all the natural faculties of the body by abstinence from sin, that we being buried with His Death in Baptism may return to the life of eternity (since regener- ation to life is death to the former life), and dying to our sins be born again to immor- tality, that even as He abandoned His iraraor- tality to die for us, so should we awaken from / death to immortality with Him. For Hp J took upon Hir n the flesh [ n which we hay e that by wearing ourflesh He might blotted out through death the sentence of death, that by a new creation of our race in Himself He might sweep away the penalty | appointed by the former Law. He let them nail Him to the cross that He might nail to the curse of the cross, and abolish, all the curses to which the world is condemned. He s uffered as man to the utmost that He might put powers to shame. For Scripture had fore- told that He Who is God should die; that the victory and triumph of them that trust in Him lay in the fact that He, Who is immortal and cannot be overcome by death, was to die that mortals might gain eternity. These deeds of God, wrought in a manner beyond > *our comprehension, cannot, I repeat, be under- stood by our natural faculties, for the work of the Infinite ancTETernal can only be grasped by an infinite inldHgence. Hence, just as « Col. ii. 8—15. Oft** the truths that God became man, that the Immortal died, that the Eternal was buried, do not belong to the ratio nal ord er but arc an unique work of power," so on the other hand it is an effect not of intellect but of omni- potence that He Who is man is also God, that He Who died is immortal, that He Who was buried is eternal. We, then, are raised together by God in Christ through His death. But, since in Christ there is the fulness of the Godhead, we have herein a revelation of God the Father joining to raise us in Him Who died ; and we must confess that Christ_Jesus is jaane other than^G od in all the~luTness_ of the_Deity. 14. In this calm assurance of safety did my soul gladly and hopefully take its rest, and feared so little the interruption of death, that death seemed only a name for eternal life. And the life of this present body was so far . from seeming a burden or affliction that it was regarded as children regard their alphabet, sick men their draught, shipwrecked sailors their swim, young men the training for their pro-j fession, future commanders their first campaign; that is, as an endurable submission to present necessities, bearing the promise of a blissful immortality. And further, J_began Jo proclaim thr. g p t-rptfog ip which_ my soul ha d a personal f ajthL. a s a duty _of the episcopate w hich had been laid uponjie^ emplo ying my office , to promote the, salvation of all men . 15. While I was thus engaged there came to light certain fallacies of rash and wicked men, .hopeless for themselves and merciless towards Others, who made thf-i r— awn feeble, nat ure the measure oL_the might of God's najjlie. They claimed, not that they had ascended to an infinite knowledge of infinite things, but that they had reduce d all knowl edge, undefined be fore, vyilJiin_th^^6peof o r dmarv r^asoTT and fi-a ^d the limits ot theja fth. Whereas the tru e wofj^ ot religion is aservice of obedienc e ; ~and these were men heedless ot their (Twn weak- ness, reckless of Divine realities, who under- took to improve upon the teaching of God. 16. Not to touch upon the vain enquiries of other heretics — concerning whom however, when the course of my argument gives occa- sion, I will not be silent — there are those who ta mper with t he faith o f the Gospel 5 y denying, uncler the cloak ot loyalty to theJJiie God, the bir th ot (Jod tTPe Only-beg otten. They assert that there was an extension of God into man, not a descent ; that He, Who for the season that He took our flesh was Son of Man, had not been previously, nor was then, Son of God ; that there was no Divine birth in His case, but an identity of Begetter and Begotten ; and (to maintain what they consider a perfect loyalty r*>^i Ut (h-^3 ■ ON THE TRINITY. — ROOK I. 45 vsta "/in] he may expand his thoughts till they are worthy of the theme, not hims"bn though he be aware that he is partaker of the Divine nature, as the holy apostle Peter says in his second Epistle ', ye t he must not measur e the Divine nature by the limitations of his o wn, rn7re~t^o^assertions concerning Himself V My prime object is by~trre~ctear assertions of prophets and evan- gelists to refute the insanity and ignorance of men who use the unity of God (in itself a pious and profitable confession) as a cloak for their denial either that in Christ God was born, or else that He is very God. Their purpose is to isolate a solitary God at the heart of the faith by makmg^Cnrist, though mighty, only a creature ; because, so they allege, a birth of God widens the believer's faith into a trust in more gods than one. But we, divinely taught to confess neither two Gods nor yet a s olitary God , will adduce the evidence of the Gospels aricl' the prophets for our confession of God the Father and God the Son, unite d, not con- founded, in our faith. We will not admit Their identity nor allow, as a compromise, that Christ is God in some imperfect sense ; for God, born of God, cannot be the same as His Father, since He is His Son, nor yet "can He be different in nature. 18. And you, whose warmth of faith and p assion for a tr uth unknown to the world and its philosopher's shall prompt to read me, must remember to eschew the feeble ajid__baseless conjectur es of ea rthly mindsTlunTTn" devout willingness to learn must break down the bar- riers of prejudice and half-knowledge* The jjew_ faculties of the regenerate intellect are needed; each~must "have h is unde rs tandi ng enlig htened by the hea verdygift . imparte d to the souU First he must take liisstand upon the^sure ground /\J b y the scale of His own g lorious self-revelation. For he is the best student who doe5Trot : -rea d his thoughts into the book^Tiut lets it reveal i ts own ; who" draws from it its sense, a nd does r I not import his own into it, nor for ce upon it s words a "mean i^~wtrrcirlTe had determined was t he rig JatTone before he opened Tts pages. Sin ce t h e n we a r e t o dibcoui r s^~oTllTe~t"hin"gs of God, let us assume tha t God has full knowle dge ofHjnoself, and bovv with hum ble r everence to ffis word s. For He Wh onl-we can only kneny U lfoTrglT*" , His~r3wh utl^ ranrpg witness cjjncernin jTHirnselL-. 19. It in our discussion of the nature and birth of God we. adduce certain analogi es, let no one suppose that such comparisons are perfect and complete. There can be" no comparison between God and earthly things, yet the weakness of our understanding forces us to seejc for illustrations from a low er spjiere t o explain our meaning about lomgr~tTjemes. The course of daily life shews how our ex- perience in ordinary matters enables us to form conclusions on unfami liar subjects. We must therefore regard any comp_arison as- helpful, to | mar^rather than a s. descriptive of God, since it su ggests, rather than exhau sts, the jsense we s eek. ' N or let such a comparison be thought too bold when it sets side by side carnal and spiritual natures, things invisible and things palpable, since it avows itself a necessary aid to the weakness of the human mind, and deprecates the condemnation due to an im- perfect analogy. On this principle I proceed with my task, intending to use th e te rms^ s uprjlied by God, yet colouring my argument WTtn 'illustrations drawn from human life. 20. And first, I have so laid out the plan of the whole work as to consult the advantage of the reader by the logical order in which its books are arranged. It has been my resolve to publish no half-finished and ill-considered treatise, lest its disorderly array should re- semble the confused clamour of a mob of peasants. And since no one can scale a pre- cipice unless there be jutting ledges to aid his progress to the summit, I have here set down 6^ \ » Ju*^ 1 '' - c> 4 c DE TRINITATE. .1 in order the primary outlines of our ascent, leading our difficult course of argument up the easiest path ; not cutting steps in the face of the rock, but levelling it to a gentle slope, that so the traveller, almost without a sense of effort, may reach the heights. 21. Thus, after the present first book, the second expounds the mystery '^flhe D ivine birth", that those who shall be baptized in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost may know the true Names, and not be perplexed about their sense but accu- rately informed as to fact and meaning, and so receive full assurance that in the words which are used they have the tnie Names ,, a p rM-hat those Names involve the truth. 22. "After tliis short and simple discourse concerning the Trinity, the third book makes further progress, sure though slow. Citing the greatest instances of Hisj>o\yer, it brings within the range of faith's understanding that saying, in itself beyond our comprehension, / in the Father and the Father in Me 2 , which Christ utters concerning Himself. Thus truth beyond the dull wit of man is the prize of faith equipped with reason and knowledge ; for neither may we doubt God's Word concerning Himself, nor can we suppose that the devout reason is incapable of apprehending His might. 23. The fourth book starts with the doctrines of the heretics, and disowns complicity in the fallacies whereby they are tr aducing th e faith of the Church. It publishes' that infidel creed which a number of them have lately pro- mulgated 3, and exposes the dishonesty, and therefore the wickedness, of their arguments from the Law for what they call the unity of God. It sets out the whole evidence of Law and Prophets to demonstrate th e inipjff y of asserting the unity of God to the exclusion of the Godhead of Christ, and the treason of alleging that if Christ be God the Only- begotten, then God is not one. 24. The fifth book follows in reply the sequence of heretical assertion. They had falsely declared that they followed the Law in the sense which they assigned to the unity of God, and that they had proved from it that the true God is of one Person ; and this in order to rob the Lord Christ of His birth by their conclusion concerning the One_true__God, for birth is the evidence of origin. In answer I as- sert, step by step, what they deny ; for from the Law and the Prophets I demonstrate that there are not two gods, nor one isolated true God, neither perverting the faith in the Divine unity nor denying the birth of Christ. And since they * St. John x. 38. Ill' letter of Alius to Alexander ; Hook i v.. ' 2 i 13. say that the Lord Jesus Christ, created rather than born, bears the Divine Name by gift and not by right, I have proved His true Divinity from the Prophets in such a way that, He being acknowledged very. God, the assurance of His inherent Godhead shall hold us fast to the certainty that God is One. 25. The sixth book reveals the full deceit- fulness of this heretical teaching. To win credit for their assertions they denounce the impious doctrine of heretics : — of Vnlqn ji nns, to wit, and Sabellius and Manichaeus and Hieracas, and appropria te the g odl y language 0L.lheXlhj.1rch as a cdveTTof thenDlasphemy. They reprove and alter the language of these heretics, correcting it into a vague resemblance to orthodoxy, in order to suppress the holy faith while apparently denouncing heresy. But we state clearly what is the language and what the doctrine of each of these men, and acquit the Church of any complicity or fellowship with condemned heretics. Their words which de- serve condemnation we condemn, and those which claim our hujn b le accepta nce we accept. Thus that Divine Sohship of Jesus Christ, which is the object of their most strenuous denial, we prove by the witness of the Father, by Christ's own assertion, by the preaching of Apostles, by the faith of believers, by the cries of devils, by the contradiction of Jews, in itself a confession, by the recognition of the heathen who had not known God ; and all this to rescue from dispute a truth of which Christ had left us no excuse for ignorance. 26. Next the s even th book, starting from the basis of a true faith now attained, delivers its verdict in the great debate. First, armed with its souiid -ajj4-4«xxuitmy^rjib le proo t pt th e impregnable faith, it takes part in the confiict^^raJxn^ljgULeen Sabellius and Hetyon and these opponents of the true Godhead. It joins issue with S abell ius on his denial of the pre-existence of Christ, and with his as- sailants on their assertion that He is a creature. Sabellius overlooked the eternity of the Son, but believed that true God worked in a human body. Our present adversaries deny that He was born, assert that He was created, and fail to see in His deeds the works of very God. What both sides dispute, we believe. Sabellius denies that it was the Son who was working, and he is wrong ; but he proves his case triumphantly when he alleges that the work done was that of true God. The Church shares his victory over those who deny that in Christ was very God. But when Sabellius denies that Christ existed before the worlds, his adversaries prove to conviction that Christ's activity is from everlasting, and we are on their side in this confutation of £' \> *>-*- M- , as- l> is ^ u '> L >- ' _s ^/>Hf v V ON THE TRINITY. — BOOK I. 47 /< Sabellius, who recognises true God, but not God the Son, in this activity. And our two previous adversaries join forces to refute Hebion , the second demonstrating the eternal extsTence of Christ, while the first proves that His work is that of very God. Thus_the her etics overth row one another, while " the Church, as against Sabellius, against those who call Christ a creature, against Hebion, bears witness that the Lord Jesus Christ is very God of very God, born before the worlds and born in after times as man. 27. No one can doubt that we have taken the course o f true revere nce an d of soun d doctrme ^ when, alter proving from Law and 'Prophets first that Christ is the Son of God, and next that He is true God, and this without breach of the mysterious unity, we proceed to support the Law and the Prophets by the evidence of the Gospels, and prove from them also that He is the Son of God and Himself very God. It is the easiest of tasks, after demonstrating His right to the Name of S on, to shew that the Name truly describes His relation to the Father ; though indeed uni- versal usage regards the granting of the name of son as convincing evidence of sonship. But, to leave no loop-hole for the trickery and deceit of these traducers of the true birth of God the Only-begotten, we have used His true Godhead as evidence of His true Son- ship ; to shew that He Who (as is confessed by all) bears the Name of Son of God is actually God, we have adduced His Name, His birth, His nature, His power, His asser- tions. We have proved that His Name is an accurate description of Himself, that the title bT Son "if an evidence of birth, that in His birth He retained His Divine Nature, and with His nature His power, and that that power manifested itself in conscious and deliberate self-revelation. I have s_et dow n the . Gospel proofs o feach several point 2 _she.w- ing__how_ _His selt -reveiation displays _ jjis p ower, h o w His p owe r reveals Hlsnatur e, h ow His nature is Hts~T5y birthright, andjfrom "is birth comes HirtrtfeToTRFname of Son. TKuS^eve ry whisper o f-bi aspheiuy i s silen ced, for the Lord Jesus Christ Himself by the witness of His own mouth has taught us that He is, as His Name, His birth, His nature, His power declare, in the true sense of Deity, very God of very God. 28. While its. two predecessors have been devoted to the confirmation of the faith in Christ as Son of God and true God, the eiflh^h book_is taken up with the proof of the unity ofGocLshewing that this unity is consistent mg that thig _unity is cons with the birth of the Son, and that the birth involves no duality in the Godhead. First it exposes the sophistry with which these heretics have attempted to avoid, though they could not deny, the confession of the real existence of God, Father and Son ; it de- molishes their helpless and absurd plea that in such passages as, And the multitude of I 'hem that believed were one soul and heart*, and again, He that plant eth and He that watereth are one s, and Neither for these only do I pray, but for them also that shall believe on Me through their word, that they may all be one, even as Thou, Fa/her, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us 6 , a unity of will and mind, not of Divinity, is expressed. From a consideration of the true sense of these texts we shew that they involve the reality of the Divine birth ; and then, display- ing the whole series of our Lord's self-revela- tions, we exhibit, in the langua ge of Ap ostles a nd in the very words of the H oly Spirit, the whole and perfect mj'stery oFTTfe - glory of God as Father and as Only-begotten Son. Because there is a Father we know that there is a Son ; in that Son the Father is manifested to us, and hence our certainty that He is born the Only-begotten and that He is very God. 29. In matters essential to salvation it is not enough to advance the proofs which faith supplies and finds sufficient. Arguments whic h we h ave not tested may delu d e us into a mis - a pprehension of the ^meaning, of our own words, u nle ss we" t ake the offensive by - ex- p osing the hollowness ot the enem y's proofs, and so esta blish our own faith upon the de- mdhstrated"ab~s"u rdity 01 hfe The ninth boo k , theretore, is employed in refuting the""argu- ments by which the heretics attempt to in- validate the birth of God the Only-begotten ; — heretics who ignore the mystery of the revela- tion hidden from the beginning oFthe world, and forget that the Gospel faith proclaims th e u nion of God and man. For their denial that our Lord J esus Christ is God, like unto God and equal with God as Son with Father, born of God and by right of His birth subsisting as veryS pirit, they are accustomed to appeal to such words of our Lord as, Why callest thou Me good? None is good save One, even GodT. They argue that by His reproof of the man who called Him good, and by His assertion of the goodness of God only, He excludes Himself from the goodness of that God Who alone is good and from that true Divinity which belongs only to One. With this text their blasphemous reasoning connects another, And this is life eternal that they should 4 Acts iv. 32 : in this and the following passages unum is read. 5 i Cor. iii. 8. « St. John xvii. 20, 21. 7 St. Luke xviii. iq. \l