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 Arius’ Epistle 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, 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 Arius 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. 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 opposed90, 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. § 1, impietati insolenti, et insolentiæ vaniloquæ, et vaniloquio seducenti, with the jingle of rhymes which follows, are too frequent for our taste in his pages. Sometimes we find purple patches which remind us of the rhetoric of Apuleius; 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 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. 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 creeds, hardly a word of pleading with those in error. 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 Trinitate, 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, we feel that we are reading Euclid rather than literature. 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.
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