Though, as we have seen, the contemplative state is not the ultimate happiness of man, yet the knowledge of God is essential to salvation; man, created in God’s image, is by nature capable of, and intended for, such knowledge, and Christ came to impart it, the necessary condition on the side of humanity being purity of mind, and the result the elevation of man to the life of God. Hilary does not shrink from the emphatic language of the Alexandrian school, which spoke of the ‘deification’ of man; God, he says, was born to be man, in order that man might be born to be God. If this end is to be attained, obviously what is accepted as knowledge must be true; hence the supreme wickedness of heresy, which destroys the future of mankind by palming upon them error for truth; the greater their dexterity the greater, because the more deliberate, their crime. And Hilary was obviously convinced that his opponents had conceived this nefarious purpose. It is not in the language of mere conventional polemics, but in all sincerity, that he repeatedly describes them as liars who cannot possibly be ignorant of the facts which they misrepresent, inventors of sophistical arguments and falsifiers of the text of Scripture, conscious that their doom is sealed, and endeavouring to divert their minds from the thought of future misery by involving others in their own destruction. He fully recognises the ability and philosophical learning displayed by them; it only makes their case the worse, and, after all, is merely folly. But it increases the difficulties of the defenders of the Faith. For though man can and must know God, Who, for His part, has revealed Himself, our knowledge ought to consist in a simple acceptance of the precise terms of Scripture.
The utmost humility is necessary; error begins when men
grow inquisitive. Our capacity for knowledge, as Hilary is never tired of
insisting, is so limited that we ought to be content to believe without
defining the terms of our belief. For weak as intellect is, language, the
instrument which it must employ, is still less adequate to so great a task.
Heresy has insisted upon definition, and the true belief is compelled to follow
suit. Here again, in the heretical abuse of technical terms and of logical
processes, we find a reason for the almost ostentatious simplicity of diction
which we often find in Hilary’s pages. He evidently believed that it was
possible for us to apprehend revealed truth and to profit fully by it, without
paraphrase or other explanation. In the case of one great doctrine, as we shall
see, no necessities of controversy compelled him to develope his belief; if he
had had his way, the Faith should never have been stated in ampler terms than
‘I believe in the Holy Ghost.’
In a great measure he has succeeded in retaining this
simplicity in regard to the doctrine of God. He had the full Greek sense of the
divine unity; there is no suggestion of the possession by the Persons of the
Trinity of contrasted or complementary qualities. The revelation he would
defend is that of God, One, perfect, infinite, immutable. This absolute God has
manifested Himself under the name ‘HE THAT IS,’ to which Hilary constantly
recurs. It is only through His own revelation of Himself that God can be known.
But here we are faced by a difficulty; our reason is inadequate and tends to be
fallacious. The argument from analogy, which we should naturally use, cannot be
a sufficient guide, since it must proceed from the finite to the infinite.
Hilary has set this forth with great force and frequency, and with a
picturesque variety of illustration. Again, our partial glimpses of the truth
are often in apparent contradiction; when this is the case, we need to be on
our guard against the temptation to reject one as incompatible with the
other. We must devote an equal attention to each, and believe without
hesitation that both are true. The interest of the De Trinitate is greatly
heightened by the skill and courage with which Hilary will handle some seeming
paradox, and make the antithesis of opposed infinities conduce to reverence for
Him of Whom they are aspects. And he never allows his reader to forget the
immensity of his theme; and here again the skill is manifest with which he
casts upon the reader the same awe with which he is himself impressed.
Of God as Father Hilary has little that is new to say. He is
called Father in Scripture; therefore He is Father and necessarily has a Son.
And conversely the fact that Scripture speaks of God the Son is proof of the
fatherhood. In fact, the name ‘Son’ contains a revelation so necessary for the
times that it has practically banished that of ‘the Word,’ which we should have
expected Hilary, as a disciple of Origen, to employ by preference. But since
faith in the Father alone is insufficient for salvation, and is, indeed, not
only insufficient but actually false, because it denies His fatherhood in
ignoring the consubstantial Son, Hilary’s attention is concentrated upon the
relation between these two Persons. This relation is one of eternal mutual
indwelling, or ‘perichoresis,’ as it has been called, rendered possible by
Their oneness of nature and by the infinity of Both. The thought is worked out
from such passages as Isaiah xlv. 14, St. John xiv. 11, with great cogency and
completeness, yet always with due stress laid on the incapacity of man to
comprehend its immensity. Hilary advances from this scriptural position to the
profound conception of the divine self-consciousness as consisting in Their
mutual recognition. Each sees Himself in His perfect image, which must be
coeternal with Himself. In Hilary this is only a hint, one of the many thoughts
which the urgency of the conflict with Arianism forbade him to expand. But
Dorner justly sees in it ‘a kind of speculative construction of the doctrine of
the Trinity, out of the idea of the divine self-consciousness.
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