We have seen also that the Homoeans cast out their more holiest Anomœan 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; 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 Anomœanism was sunk below it. We cannot, therefore, put the completion of the work earlier shall 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, 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 teaching. 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 Trin. x. 40, in which there is a singular misunderstanding of the Greek Testament. 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. 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. It is not, like the De Synodis; written with a diplomatic 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 Arius 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’ 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.
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