We may now turn to the practical teaching of Hilary.
Henceforth he will be no longer the compiler of the best Latin handbook of the
Arian controversy, or the somewhat unsystematic investigator of unexplored
regions of theology. We shall find him lxxxvoften accepting the common stock of
Christian ideas of his age, without criticism or attempt at improvement upon
them; often paraphrasing in even more emphatic language emphatic and apparently
contradictory passages of Scripture, without any effort after harmony or
balance. Yet sometimes we shall find him anticipating on one page the thoughts
of later theologians, while on another he is content to repeat the views upon
the same subject which had satisfied an earlier generation. His doctrine, where
it is not traditional, is never more than tentative, and we must not be
surprised, we must even expect, to find him inconsistent with himself.
No subject illustrates this inconsistency better than that of sin, of which Hilary gives two accounts, the one Eastern and traditional, the other an anticipation of Augustinianism. These are never compared and weighed the one against the other. In the passages where each appears, it is adduced confidently, without any reservation or hint that he is aware of another explanation of the facts of experience. The more usual account is that which is required by Hilary’s doctrine of the separate creation of every human soul, which is good, because it is God’s immediate work, and has a natural tendency to, and fitness for, perfection. Because God, after Whose image man is made, is free, therefore man also is free; he has absolute liberty, and is under no compulsion to good or to evil. The sin which God foresees, as in the case of Esau, He does not foreordain. Punishment never follows except upon sin actually committed; the elect are they who show themselves worthy of election.
But the human body has defiled the soul; in fact, Hilary sometimes speaks as though sin were not an act of will but an irresistible pressure exerted by the body on the soul. If we had no body, he says once, we should have no sin; it is a ‘body of death’ and cannot be pure. This is the spiritual meaning of the ancient law against touching a corpse. When the Psalmist laments that his soul cleaveth to the ground, his sorrow is that it is inseparably attached to a body of earth; when Job and Jeremiah cursed the day of their birth, their anger was directed against the necessity of living surrounded by the weaknesses and vices of the flesh, not against the creation of their souls after the image of God. Such language, if it stood alone, would convict its author of Manicheanism, but Hilary elsewhere asserts that the desire of the soul goes half-way to meet the invitation of sin, and this latter in his normal teaching. Man has a natural proclivity to evil, an inherited weakness which has, as a matter of experience, betrayed all men into actual sin, with the exception of Christ. Elsewhere, however, Hilary recognises the possibility, under existing conditions, of a sinless life. For David could make the prayer, ‘Take from me the way of iniquity;’ of iniquity itself he was guiltless, and only needed to pray against the tendency inherent in his bodily nature. But such a case is altogether exceptional; ordinary men must confide in the thought that God is indulgent, for He knows our infirmity.
He is propitiated by the wish to be righteous, and in His judgment the merits of good men outweigh their sins. Hence a prevalent tone of hopefulness about the future state of the baptized; even Sodom and Gomorrah, their punishment in history having satisfied the righteousness of God, shall ultimately be saved. Yet God has a perfect, immutable goodness of which human goodness, though real, falls infinitely short, because He is steadfast and we are driven by varying impulses. This Divine goodness is the standard and the hope set before us. It can only be attained by grace, and grace is freely offered. But just as the soul, being free, advances to meet sin, so it must advance to meet grace. Man must take the first step; he must wish and pray for grace, and then perseverance in lxxxvi faith will be granted him, together with such a measure of the Spirit as he shall desire and deserve. He will, indeed, be able to do more than he need, as David did when he spared and afterwards lamented Saul, his worst enemy, and St. Paul, who voluntarily abstained from the lawful privilege of marriage. Such is Hilary’s first account, ‘a naive, undeveloped mode of thought concerning the origin of sin and the state of man.’ Its inconsistencies are as obvious as their cause, the unguarded homiletical expansion of isolated passages.
There is no attempt to reconcile
man’s freedom to be good with the fact of universal sin. The theory, so far as
it is consistent, is derived from Alexandria, from Clement and Origen. It may
seem not merely inadequate as theology, but philosophical rather than
Christian; and its aim is, indeed, that of strengthening man’s sense of moral
responsibility and of heightening his courage to withstand temptation. But we
must remember that Hilary everywhere assumes the union between the Christian
and Christ. While this union exists there is always the power of bringing
conduct into conformity with His will. Conduct, then, is, comparatively
speaking, a matter of detail. Sins of action and emotion do not necessarily
sever the union; a whole system of casuistry might be built upon Hilary’s
foundation. But false thoughts of God violate the very principle of union
between Him and man. However abstract they may seem and remote from practical life,
they are an insuperable barrier. For intellectual harmony, as well as moral, is
necessary; and error of belief, like a key moving in a lock with whose wards it
does not correspond, forbids all access to the nature and the grace of God. A
good example of his relative estimate of intellectual and moral offences occurs
in the Homily on Psalm i. 6–8, where it is noteworthy that he does not trace
back the former to moral causes.
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