In the fact that humanity is thus elevated in Christ consists
the hope of individual men. Man in Him has, in a true sense, become God; and
though Hilary as a rule avoids the phrase, familiar to him in the writings of
his Alexandrian teachers and freely used by Athanasius and other of his
contemporaries, that men become gods because God became Man, still the thought
which it coveys is constantly present to his mind. As we have seen, men are
created with such elevation as their final cause; they have the innate
certainty that their soul is of Divine origin and a natural longing for the
knowledge and hope of things eternal. But they can only rise by a process,
corresponding to that by which the humanity in Christ was raised to the level
of the Divinity. This process begins with the new birth in the one Baptism, and
attains its completion when we fully receive the nature and the knowledge of
God. We are to be members of Christ’s body and partakers in Him, saved into the
name and the nature of God. And the means to this is knowledge of Him,
received into a pure mind. Such knowledge makes the soul of man a dwelling
rational, pure and eternal, wherein the Divine nature, whose properties these
are, may eternally abide. Only that which has reason can be in union with
Him Who is reason. Faith must be accurately informed as well as sincere. Christ
became Man in order that we might believe Him; that He might be a witness to us
from among ourselves touching the things of God.
We have now followed Hilary through his great theory, in which
we may safely say that no other theologian entirely agrees, and which, where it
is most original, diverges most widely from the usual lines of Christian
thought. Yet it nowhere contradicts the accepted standards of belief; and if it
errs it does so in explanation, not in the statement of the truths which it
undertakes to explain. Hilary has the distinction of being the only one of his
contemporaries with the speculative genius to imagine this development ending
in the abolition of incongruity and in the restoration of the full majesty of
the Son and of man with Him. He saw that there must be such a development,
and if he was wrong in tracing its course, there is a reverence and loyalty, a
solidity of reasoning and steady grasp of the problems under discussion, which
save him from falling into mere ingenuity or ostentation. Sometimes he may seem
to be on the verge of heresy; but in each case it will be found that, whether
his system be right or no, the place in it which he has found for an argument
used elsewhere in the interests of error is one where the argument is powerless
for evil. Sometimes—and this is the most serious reproach that can be brought
against him—it must seem that his theology is abstract, moving in a region
apart from the facts of human life. It must be admitted that this is the case;
that though, as we shall presently see, Hilary had a clear sense of the
realities of temptation and sin and of the need of redemption, and has
expressed himself in these regards with the fervour and practical wisdom of an
earnest and experienced pastor, still these subjects lie within the sphere of
his feelings rather than of his thought. It was not his fault that he lived in
the days before St. Augustine, and in the heat of an earlier controversy; and
it is his conspicuous merit that in his zeal for the Divinity of Christ he
traced the Incarnation back beyond the beginning of sin and found its motive in
God’s eternal lxxxiii purpose of uniting man to Himself. He does not estimate
the condescension of Christ by the distance which separates the Sinless from
the sinful. To his wider thought sin is not the cause of that great sequence of
Divine acts of grace, but a disturbing factor which has modified its course.
The measure of the love of God in Christ is the infinity He overpassed in
uniting the Creator with the creature.
But before we approach the practical theology of Hilary
something must be said of his teaching concerning the Third Person of the
Trinity. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is little developed in his writings.
The cause was, in part, his sympathy with Eastern thought. The West, in this as
in some other respects, was in advance of the contemporary Greeks; but Hilary
was too independent to accept conclusions which were as yet unreasoned. But
a stronger reason was that the doctrine was not directly involved in the Arian
controversy. On the main question, as we have seen, he kept an open mind, and
was prepared to modify from time to time the terms in which he stated the
Divinity of our Lord; but in other respects he was often strangely archaic.
Such is the case here; Hilary’s is a logical position, but the logical process
has been arrested. There is nothing in his words concerning the Holy Spirit
inconsistent with the later definitions of faith, and it would be unfair to
blame him because, in the course of a strenuous life devoted to the elucidation
and defence of other doctrines, he found no time to develope this; unfair also
to blame him for not recognising its full importance. In his earlier days, and
while he was in alliance with the Semiarians, there was nothing to bring this
doctrine prominently before his mind; in his later life it still lay outside
the range of controversy, so far as he was concerned. Hilary, in fact,
preferred like Athanasius to rest in the indefinite terms of the original
Nicene Creed, the confession of which ended with the simple ‘And in the Holy
Ghost.’ But there was a further and practical reason for his reserve.
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