But the incarnate Christ is as truly man as He is truly God. We have seen that He is ‘created in the body’; and Hilary constantly insists that His humanity is neither fictitious nor different in kind from ours. We must therefore consider what is the constitution of man. He is, so Hilary teaches, a physically composite being; the elements of which his body is composed are themselves lifeless, and man himself is never fully alive. According to this physiology, the father is the author of the child’s body, the maternal function being altogether subsidiary. It would seem that the mother does nothing more than protect the embryo, so giving it the opportunity of growth, and finally bring the child to birth. And each human soul is separately created, like the universe, out of nothing. Only the body is engendered; the soul, wherein the likeness of man to God consists, has a nobler origin, being the immediate creation of God. Hilary does not hold, or at least does not attach importance to, the tripartite division of man; for the purposes of his philosophy we consist of soul and body.
We may now proceed to consider his theory of the Incarnation. This is based upon the Pauline conception of the first and second Adam. Each of these was created, and the two acts of creation exactly correspond. Christ, the Creator, made clay into the first Adam, who therefore had an earthly body. He made Himself into the second Adam, and therefore has a heavenly Body. To this end He descended from heaven and entered into the Virgin’s womb. For, in accordance with Hilary’s principle of interpretation, the word ‘Spirit’ must not be regarded as necessarily signifying the Holy Ghost, but one or other of the Persons of the Trinity as the context may require; and in this case it means the Son, since the question is of an act of creation, and He, and none other, is the Creator. Also, correspondence between the two Adams would be as effectually broken were the Holy Ghost the Agent in the conception, as it would be were Christ’s body engendered and not created. Thus lxx He is Himself not only the Author but (if the word may be used) the material of His own body; the language of St. John, that the Word became flesh, must be taken literally. It would be insufficient to say that the Word took, or united Himself to, the flesh.
But this creation of the Second Adam to be true man is not our only evidence of His humanity. We have seen that in Hilary’s judgment the mother has but a secondary share in her offspring. That share, whatever it be, belongs to the Virgin; she contributed to His growth and to His coming to birth ‘everything which it is the nature of her sex to impart.’ But though Christ is constantly said to have been born of the Virgin, He is habitually called the ‘Son of Man,’ not the Son of the Virgin, nor she the Mother of God. Such language would attribute to her an activity and an importance inconsistent with Hilary’s theory. For no portion of her substance, he distinctly says, was taken into the substance of her Son’s human body; and elsewhere he argues that St. Paul’s words ‘made of a woman’ are deliberately chosen to describe Christ’s birth as a creation free from any commingling with existing humanity. But the Virgin has an essential share in the fulfilment of prophecy. For though Christ without her co-operation could have created Himself as Man, yet He would not have been, as He was fore-ordained to be, the Son of Man. And since He holds that the Virgin performs every function of a mother, Hilary avoids that Valentinian heresy according to which Christ passed through the Virgin ‘like water through a pipe,’ for He was Himself the Author of a true act of creation within her, and, when she had fulfilled her office, was born as true flesh.
Again, Hilary’s
clear sense of the eternal personal pre-existence of the Word saves him from
any contact with the Monarchianism combated by Hippolytus and Tertullian, which
held that the Son was the Father under another aspect. Indeed, so secure does
he feel himself that he can venture to employ Monarchian theories, now rendered
harmless, in explanation of the mysteries of the Incarnation. For we cannot
fail to see a connection between his opinions and theirs; and it might seem
that, confident in his wider knowledge, he has borrowed not only from the
arguments used by Tertullian against the Monarchian Praxeas, but also from
those which Tertullian assigns to the latter. Such reasonings, we know, had
been very prevalent in the West; and Hilary’s use of certain of them, in order
to turn their edge by showing that they were not inconsistent with the
fundamental doctrines of the Faith, may indicate that Monarchianism was
still a real danger.
Thus the Son becomes flesh, and that by true maternity on the Virgin’s part. But man is more than flesh; he is soul as well, and it is the soul which makes him man instead of matter. The soul, as we saw, is created by a special act of God at the beginning of the separate existence of each human being; and Christ, to be true man and not merely true flesh, created for Himself the human soul which was necessary for true humanity. He had borrowed from the Apollinarians, consciously no doubt, their interpretation of one of their favourite passages, ‘The Word became flesh’; here again we find an argument of heretics rendered harmless and adopted by orthodoxy. For the strange Apollinarian lxxi denial to Christ of a human soul, and therefore of perfect manhood, is not only expressly contradicted, but repudiated on every page by the contrary assumption on which all Hilary’s arguments are based. Christ, then, is ‘perfect man, of a reasonable soul and Human flesh subsisting,’ for Whom the Virgin has performed the normal functions of maternity. But there is one wide and obvious difference between Hilary’s mode of handling the matter and that with which we are familiar. His view concerning the mother’s office forbids his laying stress upon our Lord’s inheritance from her.
Occasionally, and without emphasis, he mentions our Lord as the Son of David, or otherwise introduces His human ancestry, but he never dwells upon the subject. He neither bases upon this ancestry the truth, nor deduces from it the character, of Christ’s humanity. Such is Hilary’s account of the facts of the Incarnation. In his teaching there is no doubt error as well as defect, but only in the mode of explanation, not in the doctrine explained. It will help us to do him justice if we may compare the theories that have been framed concerning another great doctrine, that of the Atonement, and remember that the strangely diverse speculations of Gregory the Great and of St. Anselm profess to account for the same facts, and that, so far as definitions of the Church are concerned, we are free to accept one or other, or neither, of the rival explanations.
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