NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Theology of St. Hilary of Poitiers. Part 2

 

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 theologians. But he never makes himself their slave; he is not the avowed adherent of any school, and never cites the names 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, however, he has an unbounded 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, is directly derived from Holy Scripture. Scripture for Hilary means the Septuagint for the Old Testament, 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 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, and any part of the whole may be used in explanation of any other part. The same title of beatissimus is given to Daniel and to St. Paul when both are cited in Comm. 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. 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; in fact, every detail, and every sense 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; 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. 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, 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. All religious truth is contained in Scripture, and it is our duty to be ignorant of what lies outside it. 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. 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 facts 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 narrative in order to make the whole more perfect as a prophecy. But he can derive a lesson not merely from what Scripture says but also from the discrepancies between 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. 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 judgement. But Hilary often goes even further, and ventures upon a purely subjective interpretation, which sometimes gives useful insight into the modes of thought of Gaul 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. 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.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Theology of St. Hilary of Poitiers. Part 1

 

Chapter II.—The Theology 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 modern 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 constructing 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 dismissed must be set down on the same scale as another to which the author recurs again 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, but 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 the 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; the one that every statement and argument will be in hearty and scrupulous consonance 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.

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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. 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 the province. Opposition to the bishops on the part 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 Fortunatus 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 Severus 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.

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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 against 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 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 Arles, 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, 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 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, 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  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, 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 Béziers—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, give a full and consecutive narrative of events from the council of Arles onwards, with such an account of the question there debated as will shew the true merits of Paulinus, and make it clear that nothing less than the Faith was at stake. He ends his introduction 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

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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 Nicæa; 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 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  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 prison 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 Nicæa, 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 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 irreconcilable. They took their stand upon the Council of Rimini, and their opponents found in the doctrine of Nicæa 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 upholding 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; but Hilary is threatened and it is the Church that threatens, submission to an Arian is enforced and it is the church which enforces it. 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 Nicæa, 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 and the fears of Auxentius.

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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 brethren 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, but sober recognition of the fact, stated by St. John, 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  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 support 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 Paul gathered a Church for Christ; 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 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 faith 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 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 by a statement of their minimising and prevaricating doctrine, which has, however, made no impression upon the guileless and well-meaning laity. Then comes Hilary’s account of his proceedings at Milan, strongly coloured by the intensity of his feelings.

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 Hilary’s account of the proceedings must certainly be accepted. But, though his moral and dialectical victory was complete, it is obvious that he had gained no advantage for his cause. He had taunted Auxentius as an adherent of Arius. Auxentius had an immediate reply, which put his opponent in the wrong. We cannot doubt that he spoke the truth, when he said that he had never known Arius; and it certainly was the case, that in the early years of the fourth century, inadequate statements of the doctrine of the Trinity were widely prevalent and passed without dispute. It was also true that the dominant faction at the court of Constantius, of which Auxentius had been a leader, had in the most effectual way disclaimed complicity with Arianism by ejecting its honest professors from their sees and by joining with their lips in the universal condemnation of the founder of that heresy. But if this was their shame, it was also, in such circumstances as those of Auxentius, their protection. And Auxentius held one of the greatest positions in the church, and even in the state, now that Milan was to be, so it seemed, the capital of the West. The spirit of the government at that time was one of almost Chinese reverence for official rank; and it must have seemed an outrage that the irresponsible bishop of a city, mean in comparison with Milan, should assail Auxentius in such terms as Hilary had used. 

Even though he had admitted, instead of repudiating, the affinity with Arius, there would have been an impropriety in the use of that familiar weapon, the labelling of a party with the name of its most discredited and unpopular member. We may be sure that Auxentius, a man of the world, would derive all possible advantage from this excessive vehemence of his adversary. In the debate itself, where Hilary would have the advantage not only of a sound cause, but of greater earnestness, we cannot be surprised that he won the victory. Auxentius was probably indifferent at heart; Hilary had devoted his life and all his talents to the cause, but such a victory could have no results, beyond lowering Auxentius in public esteem and self-respect. It does not appear from his words or from those of Hilary, that the actual creed of Rimini was imported into the dispute. It was on it that Auxentius relied; if he did not expressly contradict its terms, the debate became a mere discussion concerning abstract truth. The legal standard of doctrine was no more affected by his unwilling concession than it had been a few years before by the numerous repudiations, prompted by Hilary and Eusebius, of the vote given at Rimini. The confession which Hilary annexed in triumph to his narrative was the mere incidental expression of a private opinion, which Auxentius, in his further plea, could afford to leave unnoticed.

The commissioners no doubt made their report privately to the Emperor. We do not know its tenour, but from the sequel we may be sure that they gave it as their opinion that Auxentius was the lawful bishop of Milan. Some time passed before Valentinian spoke. Whether Hilary took any further steps to influence his decision is unknown; but we possess a memorial addressed ‘to the most blessed and glorious Emperors Valentinian and Valens’ by Auxentius. The two brothers were, by mutual arrangement, each sovereign within his own dominion, but they ruled as colleagues, not as rivals; and Auxentius must have taken courage from the thought that it would seem unnatural and impolitic for the elder to seize this first opportunity of proclaiming his dissent from the cherished convictions of the younger, by degrading one of the very school which his brother delighted to honour. For what had been proposed was not the silent filling of a vacant place, but the public ejection of a bishop whose 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 considerations on which to rely. In the forefront of his defence he put the Council of Rimini.

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The immediate predecessor of Auxentius was the Catholic Dionysius, and we cannot suppose that this is a fair description of Hilary’s followers. But it is probable that the malcontents were not numerous, for none but enthusiasts would venture into apparent schism on account of a heresy which was certainly not conspicuous. How long Hilary was allowed to continue his efforts is unknown. Valentinian reached Milan in the November of 364, and left it in the Autumn of the following year; and before his departure his decision had frustrated Hilary’s purpose. We only know that, as soon as the matter grew serious, Auxentius appealed to the Emperor. There was no point more important in the eyes of the government than unity within the local Churches, and Auxentius, being formally in the right, must have made his appeal with much confidence. His success was immediate. The Emperor issued what Hilary calls a ’grievous edict,’ the terms of which Hilary does not mention. He only says that under the pretext, and with the desire, of unity, Valentinian threw the faithful Church of Milan into confusion. In other words, he forbade Hilary to agitate for a separation of the people from their bishop.

But Hilary, silenced in the city, exerted himself at court. With urgent importunity, he tells us, he pressed his charges against Auxentius, and induced the Emperor to appoint a commission to consider them. In due time this commission met. It consisted of two lay officials, with ‘some ten’ bishops as assessors. Hilary and Eusebius were present, as well as the accused. Auxentius pleaded his own cause, beginning with the unfortunate attack upon his adversaries that they had been deposed by Council, and therefore had no locus standi as accusers of a bishop. This was untrue; Hilary, we know, had been banished, but his see had never been declared vacant, nor, in all probability, had that of Eusebius. They were not intruders, like Auxentius, though even he had gained some legality for his position from the death of Dionysius in exile. The failure of this plea was so complete that Hilary, in his account of the matter, declares that it is not worth his while to repeat his defence. Next came the serious business of the commission. This was not the theological enquiry after truth, but the legal question whether, in fact, the teaching of Auxentius was in conformity with recognised standards. 

Hilary had asserted that his creed differed from that of the Emperor and of all other Christians, and had asserted it in very unsparing language. He now maintained his allegation, and, in doing so, gave Auxentius a double advantage. For he diverged into the general question of theology, while Auxentius stuck to the letter of the decisions of Rimini; and the words of Hilary had been such that he could claim to be a sufferer from calumny. Hilary’s account of the doctrinal discussion is that he forced the reluctant Auxentius by his questions to the very edge of a denial of the Faith; that Auxentius escaped from this difficulty by a complete surrender, to which Hilary pinned him down by making him sign an orthodox confession, in terms to which he had several times agreed during the course of the debate; that Hilary remitted this confession through the Quæstor, the lay president of the commission, to the Emperor. This document, which Hilary says that he appended to his explanatory letter, is unfortunately lost. The brief account of the matter which Auxentius gives is not inconsistent with Hilary’s. He tells us that he began by protesting that he had never known or seen Arius, and did not even know what his doctrine was; he proceeded to declare that he still believed and preached the truths which he had been taught in his infancy and of which he had satisfied himself by study of Scripture; and he gives a summary of the statement of faith which he made before the commission. But he says not a word about the passage of arms between Hilary and himself, of his defeat, and of the enforced signature of a confession which contradicted his previous assertions.

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‘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 Mysteries 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 last. 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, we now come to his attack upon Auxentius of Milan, and to the last of 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 Auxentius, an Eastern Arian of the school favoured by Constantius. Dionysius died in exile, and Auxentius 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 any 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 organized 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 the records of the Church. It was not till the year 369 that a Council at Rome expunged them. The first object of the allies was to excite opposition to the Arian, and in this they had some success. Auxentius, in his petition to the Emperor, which we possess, asserts that they stirred up certain of the laity, who had been in communion neither with himself nor with his predecessors, to call him a heretic. 

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Hilary’s own opinion concerning the use of hymns can best be learnt from his Homilies of Psalms 64 and 65. In the former the Church’s delightful exercise of singing hymns at morning and evening is one of the chief tokens which she has of God’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. 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 De Mysteries. 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 unwanted union. The sequence of thought is helped out by the mechanical device of an alphabetical arrangement 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 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 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:

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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 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. 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 lost, but there is no reason to doubt that Jerome was nearly right in calling it a tractatus, though he would have done better 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; the burning bush is a type of the endurance of the Church, of which St. Paul speaks in 2 Cor. iv. 8; 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. 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.’ 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 unmistakably 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 Mysteriis 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 he must have acquainted himself with the controversial use made of hymnody 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. 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 attributed to Hilary, though authorities who deserve respect have pronounced in favour of more than one of the five hymns which we must consider.

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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 illustrates 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 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.’ 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. Hilary’s attention is fixed on concrete things; 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. The words ‘Who teacheth my hands to fight’ suggest to Origen intellectual weapons and victories; they remind Hilary of the ‘I have overcome the world’ of Christ. In fact, the thought of Hilary was so charged with definite convictions concerning Christ, and so impressed with their importance that his very earnestness 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.

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Unhappily the remains of Origen’s work upon the Psalms, though considerable, are fragmentary, and of the fragments scattered through Catenæ 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 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 Catenæ 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 Catenæ 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 Catenæ 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; 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 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 Epiphanius, and on the origin of evil. Again, Origen delights 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. 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.

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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 Hilary’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. But 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 Irenæus and the Epistle of Barnabas, 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, as are details of contemporary life. Of general encouragement 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, 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 Hermon 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. But these authorities, whoever they may have been, were of little importance for his purpose in comparison with Origen. Still we can only accept Jerome’s assertion that the Homilies are translated from Origen in a qualified sense. Hilary was writing for the edification of his own flock, and was obliged to modify much that Origen 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 a mind 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.

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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, in their present form. It is 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 Trinitate, 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 on the Psalms, which would seem to have 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 addressing 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, 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 rector 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, 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 1, 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 spurious108. 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, 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.