It is obvious that Hilary’s theory offers a perfect defence against the two dangers of the day, Arianism and Apollinarianism. The tables are turned upon the former by emphatic insistence upon the power manifested in the humiliation and suffering of Christ. That He, being what He was, should be able to place Himself in such circumstances was the most impressive evidence of His Divinity. And if His humanity was endowed with Divine properties, much more must His Divinity rise above that inferiority to which the Arians consigned it. Apollinarianism is controverted by the demonstration of His true humanity. No language can be too strong to describe its glories; but the true wonder is not that Christ, as God, has such attributes, but that He Who has them is very Man. The theory was well adapted for service in the controversies of the day; for us, however we may admire the courage and ingenuity it displays, it can be no more than a curiosity of doctrinal history. Yet, whatever its defects as an explanation of the facts, the skill with which dangers on either hand are avoided, the manifest anxiety to be loyal to established doctrine, deserve recognition and respect. It has been said that Hilary ‘constantly withdraws in the second clause what he has asserted in the first,’ and in a sense it is true.
For many of his statements might make him seem the advocate of an extreme doctrine of Kenosis, which would represent our Lord’s self-emptying as lxxviicomplete. But often expressed and always present in Hilary’s thought, for the coherence of which it is necessary, is the correlative notion of the dispensation, whereby Christ seemed for our sake to be less than He truly was. Again, Hilary has been accused of ‘sailing somewhat close to the cliffs of Docetism,’ but all admit that he has escaped shipwreck. Various accounts of his teaching, all of which agree in acquitting him of this error, have been given; and that which has been accepted in this paper, of Christ by the very perfection of His humanity habitually living in such an ecstasy as that of Polycarp or Perpetua at their martyrdom, is a noble conception in itself and consistent with the Creeds, though it cannot satisfy us. In part, at any rate, it belonged to the lessons which Hilary had learned from Alexandria. Clement had taught, though his successor Origen rejected, the impassability of Christ, Who had eaten and drunk only by a ‘dispensation’;—‘He ate not for the sake of His body, which was sustained by a holy power, but that that false notion might not creep into the minds of His companions which in later days some have, in fact, conceived, that He had been manifested only in appearance. He was altogether impassible; there entered from without into Him no movement of the feelings, whether pleasure , or pain.’
Thus Hilary had what would be in his
eyes high authority for his opinion. But he must have felt some doubts of its
value if he compared the strange exegesis and forced logic by which it was
supported with that frank acceptance of the obvious sense of Scripture in which
he takes so reasonable a pride in His direct controversy with the Arians. And
another criticism may be ventured. In that controversy he balances with
scrupulous reverence mystery against mystery, never forgetting that he is
dealing with infinities. In this case the one is made to overwhelm the other;
the infinite glory excludes the infinite sorrow from his view. Here, if
anywhere, Hilary needs, and may justly claim, the indulgence he has demanded.
It had not been his wish to define or explain; he was content with the plain
words of Scripture and the simplest of creeds. But he was compelled by the
fault of others to commit a fault288; and speculation based on sound
principles, however perilous to him who made the first attempt, had been
rendered by the prevalence of heresy a necessary evil. Again, we must bear in
mind that Hilary was essentially a Greek theologian, to whom the supremely
interesting as well as the supremely important doctrine was that God became
Man. He does not conceal or undervalue the fact of the Atonement and of the
Passion as the means by which it was wrought. But, even though he had not held
his peculiar theory of impassibility, he would still have thought the effort
most worth making not that of realising the pains of Christ by our experience
of suffering and sense of the enormity of sin, but that of apprehending the
mystery of the Incarnation. For that act of condescension was greater, not only
in scale but in kind, than any humiliation to which Christ, already Man,
submitted Himself in His human state.
Christ, Whose properties as incarnate are thus described by Hilary, is one Person. This, of course, needs no proof, but something must be said of the use which he makes of the doctrine. It is by Christ’s own work, by an act of power, even of violence, exercised by Him upon Himself, that the two natures are inseparably associated in Him; so inseparably that between His death and resurrection His Divinity was simultaneously present with each of the severed elements of His humanity. Hence, though Hilary frequently lxxviiidiscriminates between Christ’s utterances as God and as Man, he never fails to keep his reader’s attention fixed upon the unity of His Person. And this unity is the more obvious because, as has been said, the Manhood in Christ is dominated by the Godhead. Though we are not allowed to forget that He is truly Man, yet as a rule Hilary prefers to speak in such words as, ‘the only-begotten Son of God was crucified,’ or to say more briefly, ‘God was crucified.’ Judas is ‘the betrayer of God;’ ‘the life of mortals is renewed through the death of immortal God.’ Such expressions are far more frequent than the balanced language, ‘the Passion of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord,’ and these again than such an exaltation of the manhood as ‘the Man Jesus Christ, the Lord of Majesty.’ But once, in an unguarded moment, an element of His humanity seems to be deified. Hilary never says that Christ’s body is God, but he speaks of the spectators of the Crucifixion ‘contemplating the power of the soul which by signs and deeds had proved itself God.’
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