NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 17

 

The deposition of the Semiarian leaders took place very early in the year 360, and Hilary’s dismissal homewards, one of the same series of measures, must soon have followed. If he had formed the plan of his invective before he left Constantinople, it is not probable that he wrote it there. It was more probably the employment of his long homeward journey. His natural route would be by the great Egnatian Way, which led through Thessalonica to Durazzo, thence by sea to Brindisi, and so to Rome and the North. It is true that the historians, or rather Rufinus, from whom the rest appear to have borrowed all their knowledge, say that Illyricum was one sphere of his labours for the restoration of the Faith. But a journey by land through Illyricum, the country of Valens and Ursacius and thoroughly indoctrinated with Arianism, would not only have been dangerous but useless. For Hilary’s purpose was to confirm the faithful among the bishops and to win back to orthodoxy those who had been terrorised or deceived into error, and thus to cement a new confederacy against the Homoeans; not to make a vain assault upon what was, for the present, an impregnable position. And though the Western portion of the Via Egnatia did not pass through the existing political division called Illyricum, it did lie within the region called in history and literature by that name. Again, the evidence that Hilary passed through Rome is not convincing; but since it was his best road, and he would find there the most important person among those who had wavered in their allegiance to truth, we may safely accept it. He made it his business, we are told, to exhort the Churches through which he passed to abjure heresy and return to the true faith. But we know nothing of the places through which he passed before reaching Rome, the see of Liberius, with whom it was most desirable for him to be on friendly terms. Liberius was not so black as he has sometimes been painted, but he was not a heroic figure. His position was exactly that of many other bishops in the Western lands. They had not denied their own faith, but at one time or another, in most cases at Rimini, they had admitted that there was room in the same communion for Arian bishops and for themselves. In the case of Liberius the circumstances are involved in some obscurity, but it is clear that he had, in order to obtain remission of his exile, taken a position  which was practically that of the old Council of the Dedication. Hilary, we remember, had called that Council a ‘Synod of the Saints,’ when speaking of it from the Eastern point of view. But he had never stooped to such a minimising of the Faith as its words, construed at the best, involved. Easterns, in their peculiar difficulties, he was hopeful enough to believe, had framed its terms in a legitimate sense; he could accept it from them, but could not use it as the expression of his own belief. So to do would have been a retrograde step; and this step Liberius had taken, to the scandal of the Church. Yet he, and all whose position in any way resembled his—all, indeed, except some few incorrigible ringleaders—were in the Church; their deflection was, in Hilary’s words, an ‘inward evil.’ And Hilary was no Lucifer; his desire was to unite all who could be united in defence of the truth. This was the plan dictated by policy as well as by charity, and in the case of Liberius, if, as is probable, they met, it was certainly rewarded with success. Indeed, according to Rufinus, Hilary was successful at every stage of his journey. Somewhere on his course he fell in with Eusebius of Vercelli, who had been exiled at the Council of Milan, had passed his time in the region to the East of that in which Hilary had been interned, and was now profiting by the same Homoean amnesty to return to his diocese. He also had been using the opportunities of travel for the promotion of the Faith. He had come from Antioch, and therefore had probably landed at or near Naples. He was now travelling northwards, exhorting as he went. His encounter with Hilary stimulated him to still greater efforts; but Rufinus tells us that he was the less successful of the two, for Hilary, ‘a man by nature mild and winning, and also learned and singularly apt at persuasion, applied himself to the task with a greater diligence and skill.’ They do not appear to have travelled in company; the cities to be visited were too numerous and their own time, eager as they must have been to reach their homes, too short. But their journey seems to have been a triumphal progress; the bishops were induced to renounce their compromise with error, and the people inflamed against heresy, so that, in the words of Rufinus, ‘these two men, glorious luminaries as it were of the universe, flooded Illyricum and Italy and the Gallic provinces with their splendour, so that even from hidden nooks and corners all darkness of heresy was banished.’

In the passage just quoted Rufinus directly connects the publication of Hilary’s masterpiece, usually called the De Trinitate, with this work of reconciliation. After speaking of his success in it, he proceeds, ‘Moreover he published his books Concerning the Faith, composed in a lofty style, wherein he displayed the guile of the heretics and the deceptions practiced upon our friends, together with the credulous and misplaced sincerity of the latter, with such skill that his ample instructions amended the errors not only of those whom he encountered, but also of those whom distance hindered him from meeting face to face.’ Some of the twelve books of which the work is composed had certainly been published during his exile, and it is possible that certain portions may date from his later residence in Gaul. But a study of the work itself leads to the conclusion that Rufinus was right in the main in placing it at this stage of Hilary’s life; this was certainly the earliest date at which it can have been widely influential.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 16

 

To advertise this departure from his policy of warfare would have been fatal to his influence. And if weakness, as he must have judged it, was leading his brethren at home into a recognition of Arians, Constantius and his Homoean counsellors had ingeniously contrived a still more serious break in the orthodox line of battle. There was reason in his bitter complaint of the Emperor’s generosity. He was lavish with his money, and it was well worth a bishop’s while to be his friend. And of this expenditure Nicenes were enjoying their share, and that without having to surrender their personal belief, for all that was required was that they should not be inquisitive as to their neighbours’ heresies. But Nicene bishops, of an accommodating character, were not only holding their own; they were enjoying a share of the spoils of the routed Semiarians. It was almost a stroke of genius thus to shatter Hilary’s alliance; for it was certainly not by chance that among the sees to which Nicenes, in full and formal communion with him, were preferred, was Ancyra itself, from which his chosen friend Basil had been ejected. Disgusted though Hilary must have been with such subservience, and saddened by the downfall of his friends, it is clear that the Emperor’s policy had some success, even with him. His former hopes being dashed to the ground, he now turns, with an interest he had never before shewn, to the Nicene Creed as a bulwark of the Faith. And we can see the same feeling at work in his very cold recognition that there was ‘some piety in the words of some’ among his friends at Seleucia. It would be unjust to think of Hilary as a timeserver, but we must admit that there is something almost too businesslike in this dismission from his mind of former hopes and friendships. He looked always to a practical result in the establishment of truth, and a judgment so sound as his could not fail to see that the Asiatic negotiations were a closed chapter in his life. And his mind must have been full of the thought that he was returning to the West, which had its own interests and its own prejudices, and was impartially suspicious of all Eastern theologians; whose ‘selfish coldness’ towards the East was, indeed, ten years later still a barrier against unity. If Hilary was to be, as he purposed, a power in the West, he must promptly resume the Western tone; and he will have succumbed to very natural infirmity if, in his disappointment, he was disposed to couple together his allies who had failed with the Emperor who had caused their failure.

The historical statements of the Invective, as has been said, cannot always be verified. The account of the Synod of Seleucia is, however, unjust to Constantius. It was the free expression of the belief of Asia, and if heretics were present by command of the Emperor, an overwhelming majority, more or less orthodox, were present by the same command. But the character and policy of Constantius are delineated fairly enough. The results, disastrous both to conscience and to peace, are not too darkly drawn, and no sarcasm could be too severe for the absurd as well as degrading position to which he had reduced the Church. But the invective is interesting not only for its contents but as an illustration of its writer’s character. Strong language meant less in Latin than in English, but the passionate earnestness of these pages cannot be doubted. They are not more violent than the attacks of Athanasius upon Constantius, nor less violent than those of Lucifer; if the last author is usually regarded as pre-eminent in abuse, he deserves his reputation not because of the vigour of his denunciation, but because his pages contain nothing but railing. The change is sudden, no doubt, from respect for Constantius and hopefulness as to his conduct, but the provocation, we must remember, had been extreme. If the faith of the Fathers was intense and, in the best sense, childlike, there is something childlike also in their gusts of passion, their uncontrolled emotion in victory or defeat, the personal element which is constantly present in their controversies. Though, henceforth, ecclesiastical policy was to be but a secondary interest with Hilary, and diplomacy was to give place to a more successful attempt to influence thought, yet we can see in another sphere the same spirit of conflict; for it is evident that his labours against heresy, beside the more serious satisfaction of knowing that he was on the side of truth, are lightened by the logician’s pleasure in exposing fallacy.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 15

 

 At Toulouse the clergy had been shamefully maltreated, and gross irreverence committed in the Church. These are the deeds of Antichrist. Hitherto, Hilary has spoken of matters of public notoriety, though not of his own observation. Now he comes to the Synod of Seleucia, at which he had been present. He found there as many blasphemers as Constantius chose. Only the Egyptians, with the exception of George, the intruder into the See of Athanasius, were avowedly Homoousian. 

Yet of the one hundred and five bishops who professed the Homoeousian Creed, he found ‘some piety in the words of some.’ But the Anomœans were rank blasphemers; he gives, in, words from a sermon by their leader, Eudoxius of Antioch, which were quoted by the opposition, and received with the abhorrence they deserved. This party found  that no toleration was to be expected for such doctrines, and so forged the Homoean creed, which condemned equally the homoousion, the homoiousion and the anomoion. Their insincerity in thus rejecting their own belief was manifest to the Council, and one of them, who canvassed Hilary’s support, avowed blank Arianism in the conversation. The large Homoeousian majority deposed the authors of the Homoean confession, who flew for aid to Constantius, who received them with honour and allowed them to air their heresy. The tables were turned; the minority, aided by the Emperor’s threats of exile, drove the majority, in the persons of their ten delegates, to conform to the new creed. The people were coerced by the prefect, the bishops threatened within the palace walls; the chief cities of the East were provided with heretical Bishops. It was nothing less than making a present to the devil of the whole world for which Christ died. Constantius professed that his aim was to abolish unscriptural words. But what right had he to give orders to bishops or dictate the language of their sermons? A new disease needed new remedies; warfare was inevitable when fresh enemies arose. And, after all, the Homoean formula, ‘like the Father,’ was itself unscriptural. Scripture is adduced  by Hilary to prove that the Son is not merely like, but equal to, the Father; and one in nature with Him, having  the form and the glory of God. This ‘likeness’ is a trap; chaff strewn on water, straw covering a pit, a hook hidden in the bait. The Catholic sense is the only true sense in which the word can be used, as is shewn more fully, by arguments to be found in the De Trinitate, in 21, 22. And now he asks Constantius the plain question, what his creed is. He has made a hasty progress, by a steep descent, to the nethermost pit of blasphemy. He began with the Faith, which deserved the name, of Nicæa; he changed it at Antioch. But he was a clumsy builder; the structure he raised was always falling, and had to be constantly renewed; creed after creed had been framed, the safeguards and anathemas of which would have been needless had he remained steadfast to the Nicene. 

Hilary does not lament the creeds which Constantius had abandoned; they might be harmless in themselves, but they represented no real belief. Yet why should he reject his own creeds? There was no such reason for his discontent with them as there had been, in his heresy, for his rejection of the Nicene. This ceaseless variety arose from want of faith; ‘one Faith, one Baptism,’ is the mark of truth. The result had been to stultify the bishops. They had been driven to condemn in succession the accurate homoousion and the harmless homoiousion, and even the word ousia, or substance. These were the pranks of a mere buffoon, amusing himself at the expense of the Church, and compelling the bishops, like dogs returning to their vomit, to accept what they had rejected. So many had been the contradictory creeds that every one was now, or had been in the past, a heretic confessed. And this result had only been attained  by violence, as for instance in the cases of the Eastern and African bishops. The latter had committed to writing their sentence upon Ursacius and Valens; the Emperor had seized the document. It might go to the flames, as would Constantius himself, but the sentence was registered with God. Other men  had waged war with the living, but Constantius extended his hostility to the dead; he contradicted the teaching of the saints, and his bishops rejected their predecessors, to whom they owed their orders, by denying their doctrine. The three hundred and eighteen at Nicæa were anathema to him, and his own father who had presided there. Yet though he might scorn the past, he could not control the future. The truth defined at Nicæa had been solemnly committed to writing and remained, however Constantius might condemn it. ‘Give ear,’ Hilary concludes, ‘to the holy meaning of the words, to the unalterable determination of the Church, to the faith which thy father avowed, to the sure hope in which man must put his trust, the universal conviction of the doom of heresy; and learn therefrom that thou art the foe of God’s religion, the enemy of the tombs of the saints, the rebellious inheritor of thy father’s piety.’

Here, again, there is much of interest. Hilary’s painful feeling of isolation is manifest. He had withdrawn from communion with Saturninus and the few Arians of Gaul, but has to confess that his own friends were not equally uncompromising. The Gallic bishops, with their enormous dioceses, had probably few occasions for meeting, and prudent men could easily avoid a conflict which the Arians, a feeble minority, would certainly not provoke. The bishops had been courteous, or more than courteous; and Hilary dared not protest. His whole importance as a negotiator in the East depended on the belief that he was the representative of a harmonious body of opinion.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 14

 

The book begins with an animated summons to resistance:—‘The time for speech is come, the time of silence past. Let us look for Christ’s coming, for Antichrist is already in power. Let the shepherds cry aloud, for the hirelings are fled. Let us lay down our lives for the sheep, for the thieves have entered in and the ravening lion prowls around. With such words on our lips let us go forth to martyrdom, for the angel of Satan has transfigured himself into an angel of light.’ After more Scriptural language of the same kind, Hilary goes on to say that, though he had been fully conscious of the extent of the danger to the Faith, he had been strictly moderate in his conduct. After the exiling of orthodox bishops at Arles and Milan, he and the bishops of Gaul had contented themselves with abstaining from communion with Saturninus, Ursacius and Valens. Other heretical bishops had been allowed a time for repentance. And even after he had been forced to attend the Synod of Béziers, refused a hearing for the charges of heresy which he wished to bring, and finally exiled, he had never, in word or writing, uttered any denunciation against his opponents, the Synagogue of Satan, who falsely claimed to be the Church of Christ.

He had not faltered in his own belief, but had welcomed every suggestion that held out a hope of unity; and in that hope he had even refrained from blaming those who associated or worshipped with the excommunicate. Setting all personal considerations on one side, he had laboured for a restoration of the Church through a general repentance. His reserve and consistency is evidence that what he is about to say is not due to personal irritation. He speaks in the name of Christ, and his prolonged silence makes it his duty to speak plainly. It had been happy for him had he lived in the days of Nero or Decius. The Holy Spirit would have fired him to endure as did the martyrs of Scripture; torments and death would have been welcome. It would have been a fair fight with an open enemy. But now Constantius was Antichrist, and waged his warfare by deceit and flattery. It was scourging then, pampering now; no longer freedom in prison, but slavery at court, and gold as deadly as the sword had been; martyrs no longer burnt at the stake, but a secret lighting of the fires of hell. All that seems good in Constantius, his confession of Christ, his efforts for unity, his severity to heretics, his reverence for bishops, his building of churches, is perverted to evil ends. He professes loyalty to Christ, but his constant aim is to prevent Christ from being honoured equally with the Father. Hence it is a clear duty to speak out, as the Baptist to Herod and the Maccabees to Antiochus.

Constantius is addressed in the words in which Hilary would have addressed Nero or Decius or Maximian had he been arraigned before them, as the enemy of God and His Church, a persecutor and a tyrant. But he has a peculiar infamy, worse than theirs, for it is as a pretended Christian that he opposes Christ, imprisons bishops, overawes the Church by military force, threatens and starves one council (at Rimini) into submission, and frustrates the purpose of another (Seleucia) by sowing dissension. To the pagan Emperors the Church owed a great debt; the Martyrs with whom they had enriched her were still working daily wonders, healing the sick, casting out evil spirits, suspending the law of gravitation. But Constantius’ guilt has no mitigation. A nominal Christian, he has brought unmixed evil upon the Church. The victims of his perversion cannot even plead bodily suffering as an excuse for their lapse. The devil is his father, from whom he has learnt his skill in misleading. He says to Christ, Lord, Lord, but shall not enter the kingdom of heaven, or he denies the Son, and therefore the fatherhood of God.

The old persecutors were enemies of Christ only; Constantius insults the Father also, by making Him lie. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He loads the Church with the gold of the state and the spoil of pagan temples; it is the kiss with which Judas betrayed his Master. The clergy receive immunities and remissions of taxation: it is to tempt them to deny Christ. He will only relate such acts of Constantius’ tyranny as affect the Church. He will not press, for he does not know the offence alleged, his conduct in branding bishops on the forehead, as convicts, and setting them to labour in the mines. But he recounts his long course of oppression and faction at Alexandria; a warfare longer than that which he had waged against Persia. Elsewhere, in the East, he had spread terror and strife, always to prevent Christ being preached. Then he had turned to the West. The excellent Paulinus had been driven from Treves, and cruelly treated, banished from all Christian society, and forced to consort with Montanist heretics. Again, at Milan, the soldiers had brutally forced their way through the orthodox crowds and torn bishops from the altar; a crime like that of the Jews who slew Zacharias in the Temple. He had robbed Rome also of her bishop, whose restoration was as disgraceful to the Emperor as his banishment.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 13

 

Hilary avoids, deliberately as we may be sure, the use of any name which could wound his opponents. But bold and eloquent and true as the appeal of Hilary was, it was still less likely that his petition for a hearing in Council should be granted than that he should be allowed to disprove the accusations which had led to his exile. The Homoean leaders had the victory in their hands, and they knew it, if Hilary and his friends were still in the dark. They did not want conciliation, but revenge, and this appeal was foredoomed to failure. The end of the crisis soon came. The Semiarian leaders were deposed, not on the charge of heresy, for that would have been inconsistent with the Homoean position and also with their acquiescence in the Homoean formula, but on some of those complaints concerning conduct which were always forthcoming when they were needed. Among the victims was not only Basil of Ancyra, Hilary’s friend, but also Macedonius of Constantinople, who was in after days to be the chief of the party which denied the true Godhead of the Holy Ghost. He and his friends were probably unconscious at this time of the gulf which divided them from such men as Hilary, who for their part were content, in the interests of unity, with language which understated their belief, or else had not yet a clear sense of their faith upon this point. In any case it was well that the final victory of the true Faith was not won at this time, and with the aid of such allies; we may even regard it as a sign of some short-sightedness on Hilary’s part that he had thrown himself so heartily into their cause. But he, at any rate, was not to suffer. The two Eastern parties, Homoean and Semiarian, which alternately ejected one another from their sees, were very evenly balanced, and though Constantius was now on the side of the former, his friendship was not to be trusted. The solid orthodoxy of the West was an influence which, as Hilary had hinted, could not be ignored; and even in the East the Nicenes were a power worth conciliating. Hence the Homoeans gave a share of the Semiarian spoils to them; and it was part of the same policy, and not, as has been quaintly suggested, because they were afraid of his arguments, that they permitted Hilary to return to Gaul. Reasons of state as well as of ecclesiastical interest favoured his restoration.

In the late revolution, though the Faith had suffered, individual Catholics had gained. But the party to which Hilary had attached himself, and from which he had hoped so much was crushed; and his personal advantage did not compensate, in his eyes, for the injury to truth. He has left us a memorial of his feelings in the Invective against Constantius, one of the bitterest documents of a controversy in which all who engaged were too earnest to spare their opponents. It is an admirable piece of rhetoric suffused with passion, not the less spontaneous because its form, according to the canons of taste of that time, is perfect. For we must remember that the education of the day was literary, its aim being to provide the recipient with a prompt and felicitous expression of his thoughts, whatever they might be. The invective was certainly written in the first place as a relief to Hilary’s own feelings; he could not anticipate that Constantius had changed his views for the last time; that he would soon cease to be the master of Gaul, and would be dead within some eighteen months. But the existence of other attacks upon Constantius, composed about this time, makes it probable that there was some secret circulation of such documents; and we can as little accuse the writers of cowardice, when we consider the Emperor’s far-reaching power, as we can attribute to them injustice towards him.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 12

 

In this address, to which we cannot wonder that Constantius made no response, there is much that is remarkable. There is no doubt that Hilary’s exile had been a political measure, and that the Emperor, in this as in the numerous other cases of the same kind, had acted deliberately and with full knowledge of the circumstances in the way that seemed to him most conducive to the interests of permanent peace. Hilary’s assumption that Constantius had been deceived is a legitimate allusion, which no one could misunderstand, to a fact which could not be respectfully stated. That he should have spoken as he did, and indeed that he should have raised the subject at all, is a clear sign of the uncertainty of the times. A timorous appeal for mercy would have been useless; a bold statement of innocence, although, as things turned out, it failed, was an effort worth making to check the Homoean advance. Saturninus, as we saw, was one of the Court party among the bishops, and he was an enemy of Julian, who was soon to permit his deposition. Julian’s knowledge of Hilary can have been but small; his exile began within a month or two of the Cæsar’s arrival in Gaul, and Julian was not responsible for it. 

For good or for evil, he had little to say in the case. But the suspicions were already aroused which were soon to lead to Julian’s revolt, and Constantius had begun to give the orders which would lessen Julian’s military force, and were, as he supposed, intended to prepare his downfall. To appeal to Julian and to attack Saturninus was to remind Constantius very broadly that great interests were at stake, and that a protector might be found for the creed which he persecuted. And his double mention of the West  as able to teach the truth, and as needing to be reconciled with the East, has a political ring. It suggests that the Western provinces are a united force, with which the Emperor must reckon. The fact that Constantius, though he did not grant the meeting in his own presence with Saturninus, which Hilary had asked for, yet did grant the substance of his prayer, allowing him to return without obstacle to his diocese, seems to shew that the Emperor felt the need for caution and concession in the West.

The theological part of the letter is even more remarkable. Its doctrine is, of course, exactly that of the De Trinitate. The summary of Scripture proofs for the doctrine in, the allusion to unlearned fishermen who have been teachers of the Faith, and several other passages, are either anticipations or reminiscences of that work. But the interest of the letter lies in its bold proposal to go behind all the modern creeds, of the confusion of which a vivid picture is drawn, and revert to the baptismal formula. Here is a leading combatant on the Catholic side actually proposing to withdraw the Nicene confession:—‘Amid these shipwrecks of faith, when our inheritance of the heavenly patrimony is almost squandered, our safety lies in clinging to that first and only Gospel Faith which we confessed and apprehended at our Baptism, and in making no change in that one form which, when we welcome it and listen to it, brings the right faith. I do not mean that we should condemn as a godless and blasphemous writing the work of the Synod of our fathers; yet rash men make use of it as a means of gain saying’. The Nicene Creed, Hilary goes on to say, had been the starting-point of an endless chain of innovations and amendments, and thus had done harm instead of good. We have seen that Hilary was not only acting with the Semiarians, but was nearer to them in many ways than he was to Athanasius. The future of his friends was now in doubt; not only was their doctrine in danger, but, after the example they had themselves set, they must have been certain that defeat meant deposition. This was a concession which only a sense of extreme urgency could have induced Hilary to make. Yet even now he avoids the mistake of Liberius. He offers to sign no compromising creed; he only proposes that all modern creeds be consigned to the same oblivion. It was, in effect, the offer of another compromise in lieu of the Homoean; though Hilary makes it perfectly clear what is, in his eyes, the only sense in which this simple and primitive confession can honestly be made, yet assuredly those whose doctrine most widely diverged would have felt able to make it. That the proposal was sincerely meant, and that his words, uncompromising as they are in assertion of the truth, were not intended for a simple defiance of the enemy, is shewn by the list of heretics whom he advances, in, in proof of his contention that all error claims to be based on Scripture. Three of them, Montanus, Manichæus and Marcion, were heretics in the eyes of an Arian as much as of a Catholic; the other three, Marcellus, Photinus and Sabellius, were those with whom the Arians were constantly taunting their adversaries. 

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 11

 

 Hilary, of course, had no official position, and could speak only for himself. The Western Church seemed to have decided against its own faith, and the decision of the East, represented by the ten delegates, was not yet declared, though it must have been probable that they would succumb to the pressure exercised upon them, and desert their own convictions and those of the Council whose commission they held. In these circumstances Hilary had the courage, which we cannot easily overestimate, to make a personal appeal to Constantius. It is evident that as yet he is hopeful, or at least that he thinks it worth while to make an attempt. He writes with the same customary humility which we found in his former address to the Emperor. Constantius is ‘most pious,’ ‘good and religious,’ ‘most gracious,’ and so forth. The sincerity of the appeal is manifest; Hilary still believes, or is trying to believe, that the Emperor, who had so lately been on the side of Basil of Ancyra and his friends, and had at their instigation humiliated and exiled their opponents, has not transferred his favour once more to the party of Valens. The address is written with great dignity of style and of matter. Hilary begins by declaring that the importance of his theme is such that it enforces attention, however insignificant the speaker may be; yet  his position entitles him to speak. 

He is a bishop, in communion with all the churches and bishops of Gaul, and to that very day distributing the Eucharist by the hands of his presbyters to his own Church. He is in exile, it is true, but he is guiltless; falsely accused by designing men who had gained the Emperor’s ear. He appeals to Julian’s knowledge of his innocence; indeed, the malice of his opponents had inflicted less of suffering upon himself than of discredit upon the administration of Julian, under which he had been condemned. The Emperor’s rescript sentencing Hilary to exile was public; it was notorious that the charges upon which the sentence was based were false. Saturninus, the active promoter, if not the instigator, of the attack, was now in Constantinople. Hilary confidently promises to demonstrate that the proceedings were a deception of Constantius, and an insult to Julian; if he fails, he will no longer petition to be allowed to return to the exercise of his office, but will retire to pass the rest of his days as a layman in repentance. To this end he asks to be confronted with Saturninus, or rather takes for granted that Constantius will do as he wishes. He leaves the Emperor to determine all the conditions of the debate, in which, as he repeats, he will wring from Saturninus the confession of his falsehood. 

Meanwhile he promises to be silent upon the subject till the appointed time. Next, he turns to the great subject of the day. The world’s danger, the guilt of silence, the judgment of God, fill him with fear; he is constrained to speak when his own salvation and that of the Emperor and of mankind is at stake, and encouraged by the consciousness of multitudes who sympathise with him. He bids the Emperor  call back to his mind the Faith which (so he says) Constantius is longing in vain to hear from his bishops. Those whose duty is to proclaim the Faith of God are employed, instead, in composing faiths of their own, and so they revolve in an endless circle of error and of strife. The sense of human infirmity ought to have made them content to hold the Faith in the same form of words in which they had received it. At their baptism they had professed and sworn their faith, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; doubt or change are equally unlawful. Yet men were using the sacred words while they dishonestly assigned to them another meaning, or even were daring to depart from them. Thus to some the three sacred Names were empty terms. Hence innovations in the statement of the Faith; the search for novelties took the place of loyalty to ancient truth, and the creed of the year displaced the creed of the Gospels. Every one framed his confession according to his own desire or his own character; while creeds were multiplying, the one Faith was perishing. Since the Council of Nicæa  there had been no end to this writing of creeds. So busily were men wrangling over words, seeking novelties, debating knotty points, forming factions and pursuing ambitions, refusing to agree and hurling anathemas at one another, that almost all had drifted away from Christ. 

The confusion was such that none could either teach or learn in safety. Within the last year no less than four contradictory creeds had been promulgated. There was no single point of the Faith which they or their fathers had held upon which violent hands had not been laid. And the pitiful creed which for the moment held the field was that the Son is ‘like the Father’; whether this likeness were perfect or imperfect was left in obscurity. The result of constant change and ceaseless dispute was self-contradiction and mutual destruction. This search for a faith  involved the assumption that the true Faith was not ready to the believer’s hand. They would have it in writing, as though the heart were not its place. Baptism implied the Faith and was useless without its acceptance; to teach a new Christ after Baptism, or to alter the Faith then declared, was sin against the Holy Ghost. The chief cause of the continuance of the present blasphemy was the love of applause; men invented grandiloquent paraphrases in place of the Apostles’ Creed, to delude the vulgar, to conceal their aberrations, to effect a compromise with other forms of error. They would do anything rather than confess that they had been wrong. When the storm arises  the mariner returns to the harbour he had left; the spendthrift youth, with ruin in prospect, to the sober habits of his father’s home.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 10

 

But the times were not ripe for an understanding between East and West, and the Asiatics in whom Hilary had put his trust were not, and did not deserve to be, the restorers of the Church. Their victory had been complete, but the Emperor was inconstant and their adversaries were men of talent, who had once guided his counsels and knew how to recover their position. The policy of Constantius was, as we know, one of compromise, and it might seem to him that the prevailing confusion would cease if only a sufficiently comprehensive formula could be devised and accepted. ‘Specious charity and colourless indefiniteness58’ was the policy of the new party, formed by Valens and Arians of every shade, which won the favour of Constantius within a year of the Semiarian victory. They had been mortified, had been forced to sign a confession which they disbelieved, many of them had suffered a momentary exile. Now they were to have their revenge; not only were the terms of communion to be so lax that extreme Arianism should be at home within the Church, but, as in a modern change of ministry, the Semiarians were to yield their sees to their opponents. To attain these ends a Council was necessary. The general history of the Homoean intrigues, of their division of the forces opposed to them by the assembling of a Western Council at Rimini, of an Eastern at Seleucia, and their apparent triumph, gained by shameless falsehood, in the former, would be out of place. 

Hilary and his Asiatic friends were concerned only with the Council which met at Seleucia in September, 359. The Emperor, who hoped for a final settlement, desired that the Council should be as large as possible, and the governors of provinces exerted themselves to collect bishops, and to forward them to Seleucia, as was usual, at the public expense. Among the rest, Hilary, who was, we must remember, a bishop with a diocese of his own, and of unimpugned orthodoxy, exiled ostensibly for a political offence, received orders to attend at the cost of the State. In the Council, which numbered some 160 bishops, his Semiarian friends were in a majority of three to one; the uncompromising Nicenes of Egypt and the uncompromising Arians, taken together, did not number more than a quarter of the whole. Hilary was welcomed heartily and, as it would seem, unanimously; but he had to disclaim, on behalf of the Church in Gaul, the Sabellianism of which it was suspected, and with some reason after the Western welcome of Marcellus. He stated his faith to the satisfaction of the Council in accordance with the Nicene confession. We cannot doubt that he made use of its very words, for Hilary was not the man to retreat from the position he held, and the terms of his alliance with the school of Basil of Ancyra required no such renunciation. 

The proceedings of the Council, in which Hilary took no public part, may be omitted. The Semiarians, strong in numbers and, as they still thought, in the Emperor’s favour, swept everything before them. They adopted the ambiguous creed of the Council of the Dedication,—that Council which Hilary had lately called an ‘assembly of the Saints’—for the Nicenes were a powerless minority; and they repeated their sentence of excommunication upon the Arians, who were still fewer in number. They even ventured to consecrate a successor to Eudoxius, one of the most extreme, for the great Church of Antioch. Then the Council elected a commission of ten of the leaders of the majority to present to the Emperor a report of its proceedings, and dispersed. In spite of some ominous signs of obstinacy on the part of the Arians, and of favour towards them shown by the government officials, they seemed to have succeeded in establishing still more firmly the results attained at Ancyra two years before, and to have struck another and, as they might hope, a more effectual blow at the heretics.

But when the deputation, with whom Hilary travelled, reached Constantinople, they found that the position was entirely different from their expectation. The intriguing party, whose aim was to punish and displace the Semiarians, had contrived a double treason. They misrepresented the Western Council to the Emperor as in agreement with themselves;  and they sacrificed their more honest colleagues in Arianism. They hated those who, like Basil of Ancyra, maintained the homoiousion, the doctrine that the Son is of like nature with the Father; the Emperor sincerely rejected the logical Arianism which said that He is of unlike nature. They abandoned their friends in order to induce Constantius to sacrifice his old Semiarian advisers; and proposed with success their new Homoean formula, that the Son is ‘like the Father in all things, as Scripture says.’ His nature is not mentioned; the last words were a concession to the scruples of the Emperor. We shall see presently that this rupture with the consistent Arians is a matter of some importance for the dating of Hilary’s De Trinitate; for the present we must follow the fortunes of himself and his allies. He had journeyed with them to Constantinople. This was, apparently, a breach of the order given him to confine himself to the diocese of Asia; but he had already been commanded to go to Seleucia, which lay beyond those limits, and his journey to Constantinople may have been regarded as a legitimate sequel to his former journey. In any case he was not molested, and was allowed to appear, with the deputation from Seleucia, at the Court of Constantius. For the last two months of the year 359 the disputes concerning the Faith still continued. But the Emperor was firm in his determination to bring about a compromise which should embrace every one who was not an extreme and conscientious Arian, and the Homoean leaders supported him ably and unscrupulously. They falsified the sense of the Council of Rimini and denied their own Arianism, and Constantius backed them up by threats against the Seleucian deputation.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES— The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 9

 

Hilary threw himself heartily into it. He travelled, we know, extensively; so much so, that his letters from Gaul failed to reach him in the year 358. This was a serious matter. We have seen that the exiles from the West had derived great support from their flocks. Hilary’s own weight as a negotiator must have depended upon the general knowledge that he did not stand alone, but represented the public opinion of a great province. For this reason, as well as for his own peace of mind, it must have been a welcome relief to him to learn, when letters came at last, that his friends had not forgotten or deserted him; and he seized the opportunity of reply to send to the bishops of all the Gallic provinces and of Britain the circular letter which we call the De Synodis, translated in this volume. The Introduction to it, here given, makes it unnecessary to describe its contents. It may suffice to say that it is an able and well-written attempt to explain the Eastern position to Western theologians. He shews that the Eastern creeds, which had been composed since the Nicene, were susceptible of an orthodox meaning, and felicitously brings out their merits by contrast with the unmitigated heresy of the second creed of Sirmium, which he cites at full length. It must be admitted that there is a certain amount of special pleading; that his eyes are resolutely shut to any other aspect of the documents than that which he is commending to the attention of his readers in Gaul. And he is as boldly original in his xixrendering of history as of doctrine. He actually describes the Council of the Dedication, which confirmed the deposition of Athanasius and propounded a compromising creed, definitely intended to displace the Nicene, as an ‘assembly of the saints.’ The West, we know, cared little for Eastern disputes and formularies. There can have been no great risk that Hilary’s praise should revolt the minds of his friends, and as little hope that it would excite any enthusiasm among them. This description, and a good deal else in the De Synodis, was obviously meant to be read in the land where it was written. 

When all possible allowance is made for his sympathy with the best men among the Asiatics, and for the hopefulness with which he might naturally regard his allies, it is still impossible to think that he was quite sincere in asserting that their object in compiling ambiguous creeds was the suppression of Sabellianism and not the rejection of the homoousion. Yet it was natural enough that he should write as he did, for the prospect must have seemed most attractive. If this open letter could convince the Eastern bishops that they were regarded in the West not with suspicion, as teachers of the inferiority of Christ, but with admiration, as steadfast upholders of His reality, a great step was made towards union. And if Hilary could persuade his brethren in Gaul that the imperfect terms in which the East was accustomed to express its faith in Christ were compatible with sound belief, an approach could be made from that side also. And in justice to Hilary we must bear in mind that he does not fall into the error of Liberius. 

It was a serious fault for a Western bishop to abandon words which were, for him and for his Church, the recognised expression of the truth; it was a very different matter to argue that inadequate terms, in the mouth of those who were unhappily pledged to the use of them, might contain the saving Faith. This latter is the argument which Hilary uses. He urges the East to advance to the definiteness of the Nicene confession; he urges the West to welcome the first signs of such an advance, and meantime to recognise the truth that was half-concealed in their ambiguous documents. The attempt was a bold one, and met, as was inevitable, with severe criticism from the side of uncompromising orthodoxy, which we may for the moment leave unnoticed. What Athanasius thought of the treatise we do not know; it would be unsafe to conjecture that his own work, which bears the same title and was written in the following year, when the futility of the hope which had buoyed Hilary up had been demonstrated, was a silent criticism upon the De Synodisof the other. It is, at least, a success in itself, and was a step towards the ultimate victory of truth; we cannot say as much of Hilary’s effort, admirable though its intention was, and though it must have contributed something to the softening of asperities. But Alexandria and Gaul were distant, and while the one excited repugnance in the Emperor’s mind, the other had little influence with him. 

The decision seemed to lie in the hands of Basil of Ancyra and his colleagues. The men who had the ear of Constantius, and had lately induced him to banish the Arians, must in consistency use their influence for the restoration of exiles who were suffering for their opposition to Arianism; and this influence, if only the West would heartily join with them, would be strong enough to secure even the restoration of Athanasius. Such thoughts were certainly present in the mind of Hilary when he painted so bright a picture of Eastern Councils, and represented Constantius as an innocent believer, once misguided but now returned to the Faith. From the Semiarian leaders, controlling the policy of Constantius, he expected peace for the Church, restoration of the exiles, the suppression of Arianism. And if to some extent he deceived himself, and was willing to believe and to persuade others that men’s faith and purpose differed from what in fact it was, we must remember that it was a time of passionate earnestness, when cool judgment concerning friend or foe was almost impossible for one who was involved in that great conflict concerning the Divinity of Christ.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES— The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 8

 

It is certain that Hilary was busily engaged in writing his great work upon the Trinity, and that some parts of it were actually published, during his exile. But as this work in its final form would appear to belong to the next stage of Hilary’s life, it will be well to postpone its consideration for the present, and proceed at once to his share in the conciliar action of the time. We have no information concerning his conduct before the year 358, but it is necessary to say something about the important events which preceded his publication of the De Synodis and his participation in the Council of Seleucia.

It was a time when new combinations of parties were being formed. Arianism was shewing itself openly, as it had not dared to do since Nicæa. In 357 Hilary’s adversaries, Ursacius and Valens, in a Synod at Sirmium, published a creed which was Arian without concealment; it was, indeed, as serious a blow to the Emperor’s policy of compromise as anything that Athanasius or Hilary had ventured. But it was the work of friends of the Emperor, and shewed that, for the moment at any rate, the Court had been won over to the extreme party. But the forces of Conservatism were still the strongest. Within a few months, early in 358, the great Asiatic prelates, soon to be divided over the question of the Godhead of the Holy Spirit but still at one, Basil of Ancyra, Macedonius and others, met at Ancyra and repudiated Arianism while ignoring, after their manner, the Nicene definition. Then their delegates proceeded to the Court, now at Sirmium, and won Constantius back to his old position. Ursacius and Valens, who had no scruples, signed a Conservative creed, as did the weak Liberius of Rome, anxious to escape from an exile to which he had been consigned soon after the banishment of Hilary. It was a great triumph to have induced so prominent a bishop to minimise—we cannot say that he denied—his own belief and that of the Western churches. And the Asiatic leaders were determined to have the spoils of victory. Liberius, of course, was allowed to return home, for he had proved compliant, and the Conservatives had no quarrel with those who held the homoousion. But the most prominent of the Arian leaders, those who had the courage of their conviction, to the number, it is said, of seventy, were exiled. It is true that Constantius was quickly persuaded by other influences to restore them; but the theological difference was embittered by the sense of personal injury, and further conflicts rendered inevitable between Conservatives and Arians.

It was with this Conservative party, victorious for the moment, that Hilary had to deal. Its leaders, and especially Basil of Ancyra, had the ear of the Emperor, and seemed to hold the future of the Church in their hands. Hilary was on friendly terms with Basil, with whom, as we have seen, he had much in common, and corresponded on his behalf with the Western Bishops. He was, indeed, by the peculiar combination in him of the Eastern and the Western, perhaps the only man who could have played the part he undertook. He was thoroughly and outspokenly orthodox, yet had no prejudice in favour of the Nicene definition. He would have been content, like the earlier generation of Eastern bishops, with a simple formulary; the Apostles’ Creed, the traditional standard of the West, satisfied the exigencies even of his own precise thought. And if a personal jealousy of Athanasius and his school on the part of the Asiatic Conservatives was one of the chief obstacles to peace, here again Hilary had certain advantages. 

We have seen that there was no personal communication between him and Athanasius; he could ignore, and may even have been ignorant of, the antipathy of Asia to Alexandria. And he was no absolute follower of Athanasius’ teaching. We saw that in some important respects he was an independent thinker, and that in others he is on common ground with the Cappadocians, the heirs of the best thought of such men as Basil of Ancyra. Nor could he labour under any suspicion of being involved in the heresy of Marcellus. It was an honourable tradition of Eastern Christendom to guard against the recrudescence of such heresy as his, which revived the fallacies of Paul of Samosata and of Sabellius, and seemed in Asia the most formidable of all possible errors. Marcellus had forged it as a weapon in defence of the Nicene faith; and if his doctrine were among the most formidable antagonists of Arianism, it may well have seemed that there was not much to choose between the two. And while Athanasius had never condemned Marcellus, and the West had more than once pronounced him innocent, the general feeling of the East was decisively against him, and deeply suspicious of any appearance of sympathy with him. And further, by one of those complications of personal with theological opposition which were so sadly frequent, Basil was in possession of that very see of Ancyra from which the heretic Marcellus had been expelled. Hilary, who was unconcerned in all this, saw a new hope for the Church in his Asiatic friends, and his own tendencies of thought must have been a welcome surprise to them, accustomed as they were to suspect Sabellianism in the West. The prospect, indeed, was at first sight a fair one. The faith, it seemed, might be upheld by imperial support, now that it had advocates who were not prejudiced in the Emperor’s eyes as was Athanasius; and Athanasius himself, accredited by the testimony of Asia, might recover his position. 

Yet Hilary was building on an unsound foundation. The Semiarian party was not united. Hilary may not have suspected, or may, in his zeal for the cause, have concealed from himself the fact, that in the doctrine of the Holy Ghost there lay the seeds of a strife which was soon to divide his allies as widely as Arius was separated from Athanasius. And these allies, as a body, were not worthy supporters of the truth. There were many sincere men among them, but these were mixed with adventurers, who used the conflict as a means of attaining office, with as few scruples as any of the other prelates who hung around the court. But the fatal obstacle to success was that the whole plan depended on the favour of Constantius. For the moment Basil and his friends possessed this, but their adversaries were men of greater dexterity and fewer scruples than they. Valens and Ursacius and their like were doing their utmost to retrieve defeat and enjoy revenge. It is significant that Athanasius, as it seems, had no share in Hilary’s hopes and schemes for drawing East and West together. He had an unrivalled knowledge of the circumstances, and an open mind, willing to see good in the Semiarians; had the plan contained the elements of success it would have received his warm support.