NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 30

 

‘Whether a fresh title stood before the later hymns, which clearly belong to another, we cannot say; the collection is too short for this to be probable. It is obvious that, if we have in this manuscript the remains of a hymn-book for actual use, it was, like ours, a compilation; brief as it was, it may have been as large as the cumbrous shape of ancient volumes would allow to be cheaply multiplied and conveniently used. Many popular treatises, as for instance some by Tertullian and Cyprian, were quite as short. Who the compiler may have been must remain unknown. We must attach some importance to the evidence of the manuscript which has restored to us the De Mysteries and the Pilgrimage of Silvia; and we may reasonably suppose that this collection was made in the time, and even with the sanction, of Hilary, though we cannot accept him as the author of any of the three hymns which remain.

The spurious letter to his imaginary daughter Abra was apparently written with the ingenious purpose of fathering upon Hilary the morning hymn, Lucis Largitor splendide. This is a hymn of considerable beauty, in the same metre as the genuine Ambrosian hymns. But there is this essential difference, that while in the latter the rules of classical versification as regards the length of syllables are scrupulously followed, in the former these rules are ignored, and rhythm takes the place of quantity. This is a sufficient proof that the hymn is of a later date than Ambrose, and, a fortiori, than Hilary. There remains the so-called evening hymn, which has been supposed to be the companion to the last. This, again, is alphabetical, and contains in twenty-three stanzas a confession of sin, an appeal to Christ and an assertion of orthodoxy. The rules of metre are neglected in favour of an uncouth attempt at rhythm. Latin appears to have been a dead language to the writer, who adorns his lines with little pieces of pagan mythology, and whose taste is indicated by his description of heretics as ‘barking Sabellius and grunting Simon.’ The hymn is probably the work of some bombastic monk, perhaps of the time of Charles the Great; unlike the other four, it cannot possibly date from Hilary’s generation.

Omitting certain fragments of treatises of which Hilary may, or may not, have been the author, we now come to his attack upon Auxentius of Milan, and to the last of his complete works. Dionysius of Milan had been, as we saw, a sufferer in the same cause as Hilary. But he had been still more hardly treated; he had not only been exiled, but his place had been taken by Auxentius, an Eastern Arian of the school favoured by Constantius. Dionysius died in exile, and Auxentius remained in undisputed possession of the see. He must have been a man of considerable ability; perhaps, as we have mentioned, he was the creator of the so-called Ambrosian ritual, and certainly he was the leader of the Arian party in Italy and the further West. The very fact that Constantius and his advisers chose him for so great a post as the bishopric of Milan proves that they had confidence in him. He justified their trust, holding his own without apparent difficulty at Milan and working successfully in the cause of compromise at Ariminum and elsewhere. Athanasius mentions him often and bitterly as a leader of the heretics; and he must be ranked with Ursacius and Valens as one of the most unscrupulous of his party. While Constantius reigned Auxentius was, of course, safe from attack. But at the end of the year 364 Hilary thought that the opportunity was come. Since his last entry into the conflict Julian and his successor Jovian had died, and Valentinian had for some months been Emperor. He had just divided the Roman Empire with his brother Valens, himself choosing the Western half with Milan for his capital, while he gave Constantinople and the East to Valens. The latter was a man of small abilities, unworthy to reign, and a convinced Arian; Valentinian, with many faults, was a strong ruler, and favoured the cause of orthodoxy. But he was, before all else, a soldier and a statesman; his orthodoxy was, perhaps, a mere acquiescence in the predominant belief among his subjects, and it had, in any case, much less influence over his conduct than had Arianism over that of Valens. It must have seemed to Hilary and to Eusebius of Vercelli that there was danger to the Church in the possession by Auxentius of so commanding a position as that of bishop of Milan, with constant access to the Emperor’s ear; and especially now that the Emperor was new to his work and had no knowledge, perhaps no strong convictions, concerning the points at issue. As far as they could judge, their success or failure in displacing Auxentius would influence the fortunes of the Church for a generation at least. It would, therefore, be unjust to accuse Hilary as a mere busy-body. He interfered, it is true, outside his own province, but it was at a serious crisis; and his knowledge of the Western Church must have assured him that, if he did not act, the necessary protest would probably remain unmade.

Hilary, then, in company with his any Eusebius, hastened to Milan in order to influence the mind of Valentinian against Auxentius, and to waken the dormant orthodoxy of the Milanese Church. For there seems to have been little local opposition to the Arian bishop: no organized congregation of Catholics in the city rejected his communion. On the other hand, there was no militant Arianism; the worship conducted by Auxentius could excite no scruples, and in his teaching he would certainly avoid the points of difference. He and his school had no desire to persecute orthodoxy because it was orthodox. From their point of view, the Faith had been settled in such a way that their own position was unassailable, and all they wished was to live and to let live. And we must remember that the Council of Rimini, disgraceful as the manner was in which its decision had been reached, was still the rule of the Faith for the Western Church. Hilary and Eusebius had induced a multitude of bishops, amid the applause of their flocks, to recant; but private expressions of opinion, however numerous, could not erase the definitions of Rimini from the records of the Church. It was not till the year 369 that a Council at Rome expunged them. The first object of the allies was to excite opposition to the Arian, and in this they had some success. Auxentius, in his petition to the Emperor, which we possess, asserts that they stirred up certain of the laity, who had been in communion neither with himself nor with his predecessors, to call him a heretic. 

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 29

 

Hilary’s own opinion concerning the use of hymns can best be learnt from his Homilies of Psalms 64 and 65. In the former the Church’s delightful exercise of singing hymns at morning and evening is one of the chief tokens which she has of God’s mercy towards her. In the latter (§ 1) we are told that sacred song requires the accompaniment of instrumental harmonies; that the combination to this end of different forms of service and of art produces a result acceptable to God. The lifting of the voice to God in exultation, as an act of spiritual warfare against the devil and his hosts, is given as an example of the uses of hymnody. It is a means of putting the enemy to flight; ‘Whoever he be that takes his post outside the Church, let him hear the voice of the people at their prayers, let him mark the multitudinous sound of our hymns, and in the performance of the divine Sacraments let him recognise the responses which our loyal confession makes. Every adversary must needs be affrighted, the devil routed, death conquered in the faith of the Resurrection, by such jubilant utterance of our exultant voice. The enemy will know that this gives pleasure to God and assurance to our hope, even this public and triumphant raising of our voice in song.’ Original composition, both of words and music, is evidently in Hilary’s mind; and we can see that he is rather recommending a useful novelty than describing an established practice. It is a remarkable coincidence that the five hymns which are called his are, in fact, a song of triumph over the devil, and a hymn in praise of the Resurrection, which are, so their editor thinks, actually alluded to in the Homily cited above; a confession of faith; and a morning hymn and one which has been taken for an evening hymn. These are exactly the subjects which correspond to Hilary’s description.

But, when we come to the examination of these hymns in detail, the gravest doubts arise. The first three were discovered in the same manuscript to which we owe the De Mysteries. They formed part of a small collection, which cannot have numbered more than seven or eight hymns, of which these three only have escaped, not without some mutilation. That which stands first is the confession of faith, the matter of which contains nothing that is inconsistent with Hilary’s time. But beyond this, and the fact that the manuscript ascribes it to Hilary, there is nothing to suggest his authorship. It is a dreary production in a limping imitation of an Horatian metre; an involved argumentative statement of Catholic doctrine, in which it would be difficult to say whether verse or subject suffers the more from their unwanted union. The sequence of thought is helped out by the mechanical device of an alphabetical arrangement of the stanzas, but even this assistance could not make it intelligible to an ordinary congregation. And the want of literary skill in the author makes it impossible to suppose that Hilary is he; classical knowledge was still on too high a level for an educated man to perpetrate such solecisms.

In the same manuscript there follow, after an unfortunate gap, the two hymns to which it has been suggested that Hilary alludes in his Homily on Psalm 65, those which celebrate the praises of the Resurrection and the triumph over Satan. The former is by a woman’s hand, and the feminine forms of the language must have made it, one would think, unsuitable for congregational singing. There is no reason why the poem should not date from the fourth century; indeed, since it is written by a neophyte, that date is more probable than a later time, when adult converts to Christianity were more scarce. It has considerable merits; it is fervid in tone and free in movement, and has every appearance of being the expression of genuine feeling. It is, in fact, likely enough that, if it were written in Hilary’s day, he should have inserted it in a collection of sacred verse. Concerning its authorship the suggestion has been made that it was written by Florentia, a heathen maiden converted by Hilary near Seleucia, who followed him to Gaul, lived, died, and was buried by him in his diocese. The story of Florentia rests on no better authority than the worthless biography of Hilary, written by Fortunatus, who, moreover, says nothing about hymns composed by her. Neither proof nor disproof is possible: unless we regard the defective Latinity as evidence in favour of a Greek origin for the authoress. The third hymn, which celebrates the triumph of Christ over Satan, may or may not be the work of the same hand as the second. It bears much more resemblance to it than to the laborious and prosaic effusion which stands first. The manuscript which contains these three hymns distinctly assigns the first, and one or more which have perished, to Hilary:

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 28

 

In his Homily on Psalm 138, 4, Hilary briefly mentions the Patriarchs as examples of faith and adds, ‘but these are matters of which we must discourse more suitably and fully in their proper place.’ This is a promise to which till of late no known work of our writer corresponded. Jerome had, indeed, informed us that Hilary had composed a treatise entitled De Mysteriis, but no one had connected it with his words in the Homily. It had been supposed that the lost treatise dealt with the sacraments, in spite of the facts that it is Hilary’s custom to speak of types as ‘mysteries,’ and that the sacraments are a theme upon which he never dwells. But in 1887 a great portion of Hilary’s actual treatise on the Mysteries was recovered in the same manuscript which contained the more famous Pilgrimage to the Holy Places of Silvia of Aquitaine. It is a short treatise of two books, unhappily mutilated at the beginning, in the middle and near the end, though the peroration has survived. The title is lost, but there is no reason to doubt that Jerome was nearly right in calling it a tractatus, though he would have done better had he used the plural. It is written in the same easy style as the Homilies on the Psalms, and if it was not originally delivered as two homilies, as is probable, it must be a condensation of several discourses into a more compact form. The first book deals with the Patriarchs, the second with the Prophets, regarded as types of Christ. The whole is written from the point of view with which Hilary’s other writings have made us familiar. Every deed recorded in Scripture proclaims or typifies or proves the advent of the incarnate Christ, and it is Hilary’s purpose to display the whole of His work as reflected in the Old Testament, like an image in a mirror. He begins with Adam and goes on to Moses, deriving lessons from the lives of all the chief characters, often with an exercise of great ingenuity. For instance, in the history of the Fall Eve is the Church, which is sinful but shall be saved through bearing children in Baptism; the burning bush is a type of the endurance of the Church, of which St. Paul speaks in 2 Cor. iv. 8; the manna was found in the morning, the time of Christ’s Resurrection and therefore of the reception of heavenly food in the Eucharist. They who collect too much are heretics with their excess of argument. In the second book we have a fragmentary and desultory treatment of incidents in the lives of the Prophets, which Hilary ends by saying that in all the events which he has recorded we recognise ‘God the Father and God the Son, and God the Son from God the Father, Jesus Christ, God and Man.’ The peroration, in fact, reads like a summary of the argument of the De Trinitate. Of the genuineness of the little work there can be no doubt. Its language, its plan, its arguments are unmistakably those of Hilary. The homilies were probably delivered soon after he had finished his course on the Psalms, of which they contain some reminiscences, such as we saw are found in the later Homilies on the Psalms of earlier passages in the same. In all probability the subject matter of the De Mysteriis is mainly drawn from Origen. It is too short, and too much akin to Hilary’s more important writings, to cast much light upon his modes of thought. He has, indeed, no occasion to speak here upon the points on which his teaching is most original and characteristic.

In this same manuscript, discovered by Gamurrini at Arezzo, are the remains of what professes to be Hilary’s collection of hymns. He has always had the fame of being the earliest Latin hymn writer. This was, indeed, a task which the circumstances of his life must have suggested to him. The conflict with Arianism forced him to become the pioneer of systematic theology in the Latin tongue; it also drove him into exile in the East, where he must have acquainted himself with the controversial use made of hymnody by the Arians. Thus it was natural that he should have introduced hymns also into the West. But if the De Trinitate had little success, the hymns were still more unfortunate. Jerome tells us that Hilary complained of finding the Gauls unteachable in sacred song; and there is no reason to suppose that he had any wide or permanent success in introducing hymns into public worship. If Hilary must have the credit of originality in this respect, the honour of turning his suggestion to account belongs to Ambrose, whose fame in more respects than one is built upon foundations laid by the other. And if but a scanty remnant of the verse of Ambrose, popular as it was, survives, we cannot be surprised that not a line remains which can safely be attributed to Hilary, though authorities who deserve respect have pronounced in favour of more than one of the five hymns which we must consider.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 27

 

But the chief interest of the comparison between the writings of these two Fathers upon the Psalms lies in the insight which it affords into their respective modes of thought. Fragmentary as they are, Origen’s words are a manifestly genuine and not inadequate expression of his mind; and Hilary, a recognised authority and conscious of his powers, has so moulded and transformed his original, now adapting and now rejecting, that he has made it, even on the ground which is common to both, a true and sufficient representation of his own mental attitude. The Roman contrasts broadly with the Greek. He constantly illustrates his discourse with historical incidents of Scripture, taken in their literal sense; there are few such in Origen. Origen is full, as usual, of praises of the contemplative state; in speculation upon Divine things consists for him the happiness everywhere promised to the saints. Hilary ignores abstract speculation, whether as a method of interpretation or as a hope for the future, and actually describes the contemplation of God’s dealings with men as merely one among other modes of preparation for eternal blessings. In the same discourse he paraphrases the words of Origen, ‘He who has done all things that conduce to the knowledge of God,’ by ‘They who have the abiding sense of a cleansed heart.’ Though he is the willing slave of the allegorical method, yet he revolts from time to time against its excesses in Origen; their treatment of Psalm 126, in the one case practical, in the other mystical, is a typical example. Hilary’s attention is fixed on concrete things; the enemies denounced in the Psalms mean for him the heretics of the day, while Origen had recognised in them the invisible agency of evil spirits. The words ‘Who teacheth my hands to fight’ suggest to Origen intellectual weapons and victories; they remind Hilary of the ‘I have overcome the world’ of Christ. In fact, the thought of Hilary was so charged with definite convictions concerning Christ, and so impressed with their importance that his very earnestness and concentration betrays him into error of interpretation. It would be an insufficient, yet not a false, contrast between him and Origen to say that the latter distorts, with an almost playful ingenuity, the single words or phrases of Scripture, while Hilary, with masterful indifference to the principles of exegesis, will force a whole chapter to render the sense which he desires. And his obvious sincerity, his concentration of thought upon one great and always interesting doctrine, his constant appeal to what seems to be, and sometimes is, the exact sense of Scripture, and the vigour of his style, far better adapted to its purpose than that of Origen; all these render him an even more convincing exponent than the other of the bad system of interpretation which both have adopted. Sound theological deductions and wise moral reflections on every page make the reader willing to pardon a vicious method, for Hilary’s doctrine is never based upon his exegesis of the Psalms. No primary truth depends for him upon allegory or mysticism, and it may be that he used the method with the less caution because he looked for nothing more than that it should illustrate and confirm what was already established. Since, then, the permanent interest of the work is that it shews us what seemed to Hilary, as a representative of his age, to be the truth, and we have in it a powerful and original presentation of that truth, we can welcome, as a quaint and not ungraceful enlivening of his argument, this ingenuity of misinterpretation. And we may learn also a lesson for ourselves of the importance of the doctrine which he inculcates with such perseverance. Confronting him as it did, in various aspects, at every turn and in the most unlikely places during his journey through the Psalter, his faith concerning Christ was manifestly in Hilary’s eyes the vital element of religion.

The Homilies on the Psalms have never been a popular work. Readable as they are, and free from most of the difficulties which beset the De Trinitate, posterity allowed them to be mutilated, and, as we saw, only a portion has come down to us. Their chief influence, like that of the other treatise, has been that which Hilary has exercised through them upon writers of greater fame. Ambrose has borrowed from them liberally and quite uncritically for his own exposition of certain of the Psalms; and Ambrose, accredited by his own fame and that of his greater friend Augustine, has quite overshadowed the fame of Hilary. The Homilies may, perhaps, have also suffered from an undeserved suspicion that anything written by the author of the De Trinitate would be hard to read. They have, in any case, been little read; and yet, as the first important example in Latin literature of the allegorical method, and as furnishing the staple of a widely studied work of St. Ambrose, they have profoundly affected the course of Christian thought. Their historical interest as well as their intrinsic value commands our respect.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 26

 

Unhappily the remains of Origen’s work upon the Psalms, though considerable, are fragmentary, and of the fragments scattered through Catenæ no complete or critical edition has yet been made. Still, insufficient as the material would be for a detailed study and comparison, enough survives to enable us to form a general idea of the relation between the two writers. Origen composed Homilies upon the Psalter, a Commentary upon it, and a summary treatise, called the Enchiridion. The first of these works was Hilary’s model; Origen’s Homilies were diffuse extemporary expositions, ending, like Hilary’s, with an ascription of praise. It is unfortunate that, of the few which survive, all treat of Psalms on which Hilary’s Homilies are lost. But it is doubtful whether Hilary knew the other writings of Origen upon the Psalter. We have ourselves a very small knowledge of them, for the Catenæ are not in the habit of giving more than the name of the author whom they cite. Yet it may well be that some of the apparent discrepancies between the explanations given by Hilary and by Origen are due to the loss of the passage from Origen’s Homily which would have agreed with Hilary, and to the survival of the different rendering given in the Commentary or the Enchiridion; some, no doubt, are also due to the carelessness and even dishonesty of the compilers of Catenæ in stating the authorship of their selections. But though it is possible that Hilary had access to all Origen’s writings on the Psalms, there is no reason to suppose that he possessed a copy of his Hexapla. The only translation of the Old Testament which he names beside the Septuagint is that of Aquila; he is aware that there are others, but none save the Septuagint has authority or deserves respect, and his rare allusions to them are only such as we find in Origen’s Homilies, and imply no such exhaustive knowledge of the variants as a possessor of the Hexapla would have.

A comparison of the two writers shews the closeness of their relation, and if we had Origen’s complete Homilies, and not mere excerpts, the debt of Hilary would certainly be still more manifest. For the compilers of Catenæ have naturally selected what was best in Origen, and most suited for short extracts; his eccentricities have been in great measure omitted. Hence we may err in attributing to Hilary much that is perverse in his comments; there is an abundance of wild mysticism in the fragments of Origen, but its proportion to the whole is undoubtedly less in their present state than in their original condition. Hilary’s method was that of paraphrasing, not of servile translation. There is apparently only one literal rendering of an extant passage of Origen, and that a short one; but paraphrases, which often become very diffuse expansions, are constant. But a just comparison between the two must embrace their differences as well as their resemblances. Hilary has exercised a silent criticism in omitting many of Origen’s textual disquisitions. He gives, it is true, many various readings, but his confidence in the Septuagint often renders him indifferent in regard to divergencies which Origen had taken seriously. The space which the latter devotes to the Greek versions Hilary employs in correcting the errors and variations of the Latin, or in explaining the meaning of Greek words. But these are matters which rather belong to the next chapter, concerning, as they do, Hilary’s attitude towards Scripture. It is more significant of his tone of mind that he has omitted Origen’s speculations on the resurrection of the body, preserved by Epiphanius, and on the origin of evil. Again, Origen delights to give his readers a choice of interpretations; Hilary chooses one of those which Origen has given, and makes no mention of the other. 

This is his constant habit in the earlier part of the Homilies; towards the end, however, he often gives a rendering of his own, and also mentions, either as possible or as wrong, that which Origen had offered. Or else, though he only makes his own suggestion, yet it is obvious to those who have Origen at hand that he has in his mind, and is refuting for his own satisfaction, an alternative which he does not think good to lay before his audience. A similar liberty with his original occurs in the Homily on Psalm 135, 12:—‘The purposes of the present discourse and of this place forbid us to search more deeply.’ This must have seemed a commonplace to his hearers; but it happens that Origen’s speculations upon the passage have survived, and we can see that Hilary was rather making excuses to himself for his disregard of them than directly addressing his congregation. Apart from the numerous instances where Hilary derives a different result from the same data, there are certain cases where he accepts the current Latin text, though it differed from Origen’s Greek, and draws, without any reference to Origen, his own conclusions as to the meaning. These, again, seem to be confined to the latter part of the work, and may be the result of occasional neglect to consult the authorities, rather than a deliberate departure from Origen’s teaching.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 25

 

He was conversing in pastoral intimacy with his people, and hence we cannot be surprised that he draws, perhaps unconsciously, on the results of his own previous labours. For instance, on Psalm 61,  2, he gives what is evidently a reminiscence, yet with features of its own and not as a professed autobiography, of his mental history as described in the opening of the De Trinitate. And while the direct controversy against Arianism is not avoided, there is a manifest preference for the development of Hilary’s characteristic Christology, which had already occupied him in the later books of the De Trinitate. We must, indeed, reconstruct his doctrine in this respect even more from the Homilies than from the De Trinitate; and in the later work he not only expands what he had previously suggested, but throws out still further suggestions which he had not the length of life to present in a more perfect form. But the Homilies contain much that is of far less permanent interest. Wherever he can, he brings in the mystical interpretation of numbers, that strange vagary of the Eastern mind which had, at least from the time of Irenæus and the Epistle of Barnabas, found a congenial home in Christian thought. This and other distortions of the sense of Scripture, which are the result in Hilary, as in Origen, of a prosaic rather than a poetical turn of mind, will find a more appropriate place for discussion at the beginning of the next chapter. Allusions to the mode of worship of his time are very rare, as are details of contemporary life. Of general encouragement to virtue and denunciation of vice there is abundance, and it repeats with striking fidelity the teaching of Cyprian. Hilary displays the same Puritanism in regard to jewelry as does Cyprian, and the same abhorrence of public games and spectacles. Of these three elements, the Christology, the mysticism, the moral teaching, the Homilies are mainly compact. They carry on no sustained argument and contain, as has been said, a good deal of repetition. In fact, a continuous reader will probably form a worse impression of their quality than he who is satisfied with a few pages at a time. They are eminently adapted for selection, and the three Homilies, those on Psalms 1, 53 and 130, which have been translated for this volume, may be inadequate, yet are fairly representative, as specimens of the instruction which Hilary conveys in this work.

It has been said that the practical teaching of Hilary is that of Cyprian. But this is not a literary debt; the writer to whom almost all the exegesis is due, by borrowing of substance or of method, is Origen, except where the spirit of the fourth century has been at work. Yet other authors have been consulted, and this not only for general information, as in the case, already cited, of the elder Pliny, but for interpretation of the Psalms. For instance, a strange legend concerning Mount Hermon is cited on Psalm 132, 6, from a writer whose name Hilary does not know; and on Psalm 133,  4, he has consulted several writers and rejects the opinion of them all. But these authorities, whoever they may have been, were of little importance for his purpose in comparison with Origen. Still we can only accept Jerome’s assertion that the Homilies are translated from Origen in a qualified sense. Hilary was writing for the edification of his own flock, and was obliged to modify much that Origen had said if he would serve their needs, for religious thought had changed rapidly in the century which lay between the two, and a mere translation would have been as coldly received as would a reprint of some commentary of the age of George II. to-day. And Hilary’s was a mind too active and independent to be the slave of a traditional interpretation. We must, therefore, expect to find a considerable divergence; and we cannot be surprised that Hilary, as he settled down to his task, grew more and more free in his treatment of Origen’s exegesis.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 24

 

This was his last interference in the politics of the Church, and does not concern us as yet. His chief interest henceforth was to be in literary work; in popularising and, as he thought, improving upon the teaching of Origen. He commented upon the book of Job, as we know from Jerome and Augustine. The former says that this, and his work on the Psalms, were translations from Origen. But that is far from an accurate account of the latter work, and may be equally inaccurate concerning the former. The two fragments which St. Augustine has preserved from the Commentary on Job are so short that we cannot draw from them any conclusion as to the character of the book. If we may trust Jerome, its length was somewhat more than a quarter of that of the Homilies on the Psalms, in their present form. It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that the work should have fallen into oblivion. It was, no doubt, allegorical in its method, and nothing of that kind could survive in competition with Gregory the Great’s inimitable Moralia on Job.

Hilary’s other adaptation from Origen, the Homilies on the Psalms, happily remains to us. It is at least as great a work as the De Trinitate, and one from which we can learn even more what manner of man its writer was. For the De Trinitate is an appeal to all thoughtful Christians of the time, and written for future generations as well as for them; characteristic, as it is, in many ways of the author, the compass of the work and the stateliness of its rhetoric tend to conceal his personality. But the Homilies on the Psalms, which would seem to have reached us in the notes of a shorthand writer, so artless and conversational is the style, shew us Hilary in another aspect. He is imparting instruction to his own familiar congregation; and he knows his people so well that he pours out whatever is passing through his mind. In fact, he seems often to be thinking aloud on subjects which interest him rather than addressing himself to the needs of his audience. Practical exhortation has, indeed, a much smaller space than mystical exegesis and speculative Christology. Yet abstruse questions are never made more obscure by involution of style. The language is free and flowing, always that of an educated man who has learnt facility by practice. And here, strange as it seems to a reader of the De Trinitate, he betrays a preference for poetical words, which shews that his renunciation of such ornament elsewhere is deliberate. Yet, even here, he indulges in no definite reminiscences of the poets.

There remains only one trace, though it is sufficient, of the original circumstances of delivery. The Homily on Psalm xiv. begins with the words, ‘The Psalm which has been read.’ The Psalms were sung as an act of worship, not read as a lesson, in the normal course of divine service; and therefore we must assume that the Psalm to be expounded was recited, by the rector or another, as an introduction to the Homily. We need not be surprised that such notices, which must have seemed to possess no permanent interest, have been edited away. Many of the Homilies are too long to have been delivered on one or even two occasions, yet the ascription of praise with which Hilary, like Origen, always concludes, has been omitted in every case except at the end of the whole discourse. This shews that Hilary himself, or more probably some editor, has put the work into its final shape. But this editing of the Homilies has not extended to the excision of the numerous repetitions, which were natural enough when Hilary was delivering each as a commentary complete in itself, and do not offend us when we read the discourse on a single Psalm, though they certainly disfigure the work when regarded as a treatise on the whole Psalter.

It is probably due to the accidents of time that our present copies of the Homilies are imperfect. We are, indeed, better off than was Jerome. His manuscript contained Homilies on Psalms 1, 2, 51–62, 118–150, according to the Latin notation. We have, in addition to these, Homilies which are certainly genuine on Psalms 13, 14, 63–69; and others on the titles of Psalms 9 and 91, which are probably spurious108. Some more Homilies of uncertain origin which have been fathered upon Hilary, and may be found in the editions, may be left out of account. In the Homily on Psalm 59, 2, he mentions one, unknown to Jerome as to ourselves, on Psalm 44; and this allusion, isolated though it is, suggests that the Homilies contained, or were meant to contain, a commentary on the whole Book of Psalms, composed in the order in which they stand. There is, of course, nothing strange in the circulation in ancient times of imperfect copies; a well-known instance is that of St. Augustine’s copy of Cyprian which did not contain an epistle which has come down to us. This series of Homilies was probably continuous as well as complete. The incidental allusions to the events of the times contain nothing inconsistent with the supposition that he began at the beginning of the Psalter and went on to the end. We might, indeed, construe the language of that on Psalm 52,  13, concerning prosperous clergy, who heap up wealth for themselves and live in luxury, as an allusion to men like Saturninus, but the passage is vague, and a vivid recollection, not a present evil, may have suggested it. More definite, and indeed a clear note of time, is the Homily on Psalm 63, where heathenism is aggressive and is become a real danger, of which Hilary speaks in the same terms as he does of heresy. This contrasts strongly with such language as that of the Homily on Psalm 67,  20, where the heathen are daily flocking into the Church, or of that on Psalm 137,  10, where paganism has collapsed, its temples are ruined and its oracles silent; such words as the former could only have been written in the short reign of Julian. Other indications, such as the frequent warnings against heresy and denunciations of heretics, are too general to help in fixing the date. On the whole, it would seem a reasonable hypothesis that Hilary began his connected series of Homilies on the Psalms soon after his return to Gaul, that he had made good progress with them when Julian publicly apostatised, and that they were not completed till the better times of Valentinian.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 23

 

We cannot wonder that Hilary continued his efforts; that he went through the land, everywhere inducing the bishops to abjure their own confession made at Rimini. This the bishops, for their part, were certainly willing to do; they were no Arians at heart, and their treatment at Rimini, followed as it was by a fraudulent misrepresentation of the meaning of their words, must have aroused their just resentment. Under the rule of Julian there was no risk, there was even an advantage, in shewing their colours; it set them right both with the new Emperor and with public opinion. But it was not enough for Hilary’s purpose that the ‘inward evil’ of a wavering faith should be amended; it was also necessary that avowed heresy should be expelled. For this the co-operation of Julian was necessary; and before it was granted Julian might naturally look for some definite pronouncement on Hilary’s part. To this conjuncture, in the latter half of the year 360 or the earlier part of 361, we may best assign the publication of the Invective, already described, against Constantius. It was a renunciation of allegiance to his old master, not the less clear because the new is not mentioned. And with the name of Constantius was coupled that of Saturninus, as his abettor in tyranny and misbelief. Julian recognised the value of the Catholic alliance by giving effect to the decision of a Council held at Paris, which deposed Saturninus. Hilary had no ecclesiastical authority to gather such a Council, but his character and the eminence of his services no doubt rendered his colleagues willing to follow him; yet neither he nor they would have acted as they did without the assurance of Julian’s support. Their action committed them irrevocably to Julian’s cause; and it must have seemed that his expulsion of Saturninus committed him irrevocably to the orthodox side. Yet Julian impartially disbelieving both creeds, had made the ostensible cause of Saturninus’ exile not his errors of faith, but some of those charges of misconduct which were always forthcoming when a convenient excuse was wanted for the banishment of a bishop.

Saturninus was a man of the world, and very possibly his Arianism was only assumed in aid of his ambition; it is likely enough that his conduct furnished sufficient grounds for his punishment. The fall of its chief, Sulpicius Severus says, destroyed the party. The other Arian prelates, who must have been few in number, submitted to the orthodox tests, with one exception. Paternus of Périgord, a man of no fame, had the courage of his convictions. He stubbornly asserted his belief, and shared the fate of Saturninus. Thus Hilary obtained, what he had failed to get in the case of the more prominent offender, a clear precedent for the deposition of bishops guilty of Arianism. 

The synodical letter, addressed to the Eastern bishops in reply to letters which some of them had sent to Hilary since his return, was incorporated by him in his History, to be mentioned hereafter. The bishops of Gaul assert their orthodoxy, hold Auxentius, Valens, Ursacius and their like excommunicate, and have just excommunicated Saturninus. By his action at Paris, so Sulpicius says, Hilary earned the glory that it was by his single exertions that the provinces of Gaul were cleansed from the defilements of heresy.

These events happened before Julian left the country, in the middle of the summer of 361, on his march against Constantius; or at least, if the actual proceedings were subsequent to his departure, they must have quickly followed it, for his sanction was necessary, and when that was obtained there was no motive for delay. And now, for some years, Hilary disappears from sight. He tells us nothing in his writings of the ordinary course of his life and work; even his informal and discursive Homilies cast no light upon his methods of administration, his successes or failures, and very little on the character of his flock. There was no further conflict within the Church of Gaul during Hilary’s lifetime. The death of Constantius, which happened before Julian could meet him in battle, removed all political anxiety. Julian himself was too busy with the revival of paganism in the East to concern himself seriously with its promotion in the Latin-speaking provinces, from which he was absent, and for which he cared less. The orthodox cause in Gaul did not suffer by his apostasy. His short reign was followed by the still briefer rule of the Catholic Jovian. Next came Valentinian, personally orthodox, but steadily refusing to allow depositions on account of doctrine. Under him Arianism dwindled away; Catholic successors were elected to Arian prelates, and the process would have been hastened but by a few years had Hilary been permitted to expel Auxentius from Milan, as we shall presently see him attempting to do.

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 22

 

These, after all, are but petty flaws in so great a work. Not only as a thinker, but as a pioneer of thought, whose treasures have enriched, often unrecognised, the pages of Ambrose and Augustine and all later theologians, he deserves our reverence. Not without reason was he ranked, within a generation of his death, with Cyprian and Ambrose, as one of the three chief glories of Western Christendom. Jerome and Augustine mention him frequently and with honour. This is not the place to summarise or discuss the contents of his works; but the reader cannot fail to recognise their great and varied value, the completeness of his refutation of current heresies, the convincing character of his presentation of the truth, and the originality, restrained always by scrupulous reverence as well as by intellectual caution, of his additions to the speculative development of the Faith. We recognise also the tenacity with which, encumbered as he was with the double task of simultaneously refuting Arianism and working out his own thoughts, he has adhered to the main issues. He never wanders into details, but keeps steadfastly to his course. He refrains, for instance, from all consideration of the results which Arianism might produce upon the superstructure of the Faith and upon the conduct of Christians; they are undermining the foundations, and he never forgets that it is these which he has undertaken to strengthen and defend. Our confidence in him as a guide is increased by the eminently businesslike use which he makes of his higher qualities. This is obvious in the smallest details, as, for instance, in his judicious abstinence, which will be considered in the next chapter, from the use of technical terms of theology, when their employment would have made his task easier, and might even, to superficial minds, have enhanced his reputation. We see it also in the talent which he shews in the device of watchwords, which serve both to enliven his pages and to guide the reader through their argument. Such is the frequent antithesis of the orthodox unitas with the heretical unio, the latter a harmless word in itself and used by Tertullian indifferently with the former, but seized by the quick intelligence of Hilary to serve this special end; such also, the frequent ‘Not two Gods but One,’ and the more obvious contrast between the Catholic unum and the Arian unus. Thus, in excellence of literary workmanship, in sustained cogency and steady progress of argument, in the full use made of rare gifts of intellect and heart, we must recognise that Hilary has brought his great undertaking to a successful issue; that the voyage beset with many perils, to use his favourite illustration, has safely ended in the haven of Truth and Faith.

Whether the De Trinitate were complete or not at the time of his return to Poitiers, after the triumphal passage through Italy, its publication in its final form must very shortly have followed. But literature was, for the present, to claim only the smaller share of his attention. Heartily as he must have rejoiced to be again in his home, he had many anxieties to face. The bishops of Gaul, as we saw from the Invective against Constantius, had been less militant against their Arian neighbours than he had wished. There had been peace in the Church; such peace as could be produced by a mutual ignoring of differences. And it may well be that the Gallican bishops, in their prejudice against the East, thought that Hilary himself had gone too far in the path of conciliation, and that his alliance with the Semiarians was a much longer step towards compromise with heresy than their own prudent neutrality. Each side must have felt that there was something to be explained. Hilary, for his part, by the publication of the De Trinitate had made it perfectly clear that his faith was above suspicion; and his abstinence in that work from all mention of existing parties or phases of the controversy shewed that he had withdrawn from his earlier position. He was now once more a Western bishop, concerned only with absolute truth and the interests of the Church in his own province. But he had to reckon with the sterner champions of the Nicene faith, who had not forgotten the De Synodis, however much they might approve the De Trinitate. Some curious fragments survive of the Apology which he was driven to write by the attacks of Lucifer of Cagliari. Lucifer, one of the exiles of Milan, was an uncompromising partisan, who could recognise no distinctions among those who did not accept the Nicene Creed. All were equally bad in his eyes; no explaining away of differences or attempt at conciliation was lawful. In days to come he was to be a thorn in the side of Athanasius, and was to end his life in a schism which he formed because the Catholic Church was not sufficiently exclusive. We, who know his after history and turn with repugnance from the monotonous railing with which his writings, happily brief, are filled, may be disposed to underestimate the man. But at the time he was a formidable antagonist. He had the great advantage of being one of the little company of confessors of the Faith, whom all the West admired. He represented truly enough the feeling of the Latin Churches, now that the oppression of their leaders had awakened their hostility to Arianism. And vigorous abuse, such as the facile pen of Lucifer could pour forth, is always interesting when addressed to prominent living men, stale though it becomes when the passions of the moment are no longer felt. Lucifer’s protest is lost, but we may gather from the fragments of Hilary’s reply that it was milder in tone than was usual with him. Indeed, confessor writing to confessor would naturally use the language of courtesy. But it was an arraignment of the policy which Hilary had adopted, and in which he had failed, though Athanasius was soon to resume it with better success. And courteously as it may have been worded, it cannot have been pleasant for Hilary to be publicly reminded of his failure, and to have doubts cast upon his consistency; least of all when he was returning to Gaul with new hopes, but also with new difficulties. His reply, so far as we can judge of it from the fragments which remain, was of a tone which would be counted moderate in the controversies of to-day. He addresses his opponent as ‘Brother Lucifer,’ and patiently explains that he has been misunderstood. There is no confession that he had been in the wrong, though he fully admits that the term homoiousion, innocently used by his Eastern friends, was employed by others in a heretical sense. And he points out that Lucifer himself had spoken of the ‘likeness’ of Son and Father, probably alluding to a passage in his existing writings. The use of this tu quoque argument, and a certain apologetic strain which is apparent in the reply, seem to shew that Hilary felt himself at a disadvantage. He must have wished the Asiatic episode to be forgotten; he had now to make his weight felt in the West, where he had good hope that a direct and uncompromising attack upon Arianism would be successful.

For a great change was taking place in public affairs. When Hilary left Constantinople, early in the spring of the year 360, it was probably a profound secret in the capital that a rupture between Constantius and Julian was becoming inevitable. In affairs, civil and ecclesiastical, the Emperor and his favourite, the bishop Saturnine, must have seemed secure of their dominance in Gaul. But events moved rapidly. Constantius needed troops to strengthen the Eastern armies, never adequate to an emergency, for an impending war with Persia; he may also have desired to weaken the forces of Julian. He demanded men; those whom Julian detached for Eastern service refused to march, and proclaim Julian Emperor at Paris. This was in May, some months, at the least, before Hilary, delayed by his Italian labours in the cause of orthodoxy, can have reached home. Julian temporised; he kept up negotiations with Constantius, and employed his army in frontier warfare. But there could be no doubt of the issue. Conflict was inevitable, and the West could have little fear as to the result. The Western armies were the strongest in the Empire; it was with them that, in the last great trial of strength, Constantine the Great had won the day, and the victory of his nephew, successful and popular both as a commander and an administrator, must have been anticipated. Julian’s march against Constantius did not commence till the summer of the year 361; but long before this the rule of Constantius and the theological system for which he stood had been rejected by Gaul. The bishops had not shunned Saturninus, as Hilary had desired; most of them had been induced to give their sanction to Arianism at the Council of Rimini. While overshadowed by Constantius and his representative Saturninus, they had not dared to assert themselves. But now the moment was come, and with it the leader. Hilary’s arrival in Gaul must have taken place when the conflict was visibly impending, and he can have had no hesitation as to the side he should take. Julian’s rule in Gaul began but a few months before his exile, and they had probably never met face to face. But Julian had a well earned reputation as a righteous governor, and Hilary had introduced his name into his second appeal to Constantius, as a witness to his character and as suffering in fame by the injustice of Constantius. We must remember that Julian had kept his paganism carefully concealed, and that all the world, except a few intimate friends, took it for granted that he was, as the high standard of his life seemed to indicate, a sincere Christian. And now he had displaced Constantius in the supreme rule over Gaul, and Saturninus, who had by this time returned, was powerless. 

NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH—SECOND SERIES—The Life and Writings of St. Hilary of Poitiers Part 21

 

This was the deliberate purpose of Hilary, and he had certainly counted its cost in immediate popularity and success. For though, as we have seen, the work did produce, as it deserved, a considerable effect at the time of its publication, it has remained ever since, in spite of all its merits, in a certain obscurity. There can be no doubt that this is largely due to the Mezentian union with such a document as Arius’ Epistle to Alexander of the decisively important section of the De Trinitate. The books in which that Epistle is controverted were those of vital interest for the age; and the method which Hilary’s plan constrained him to adopt was such as to invite younger theologians to compete with him. Future generations could not be satisfied with his presentation of the case. And again, his plan of refuting the Arian document point by point, contrasting as it does with the free course of his thought in the earlier and later books, tends to repel the reader. The fourth book proves from certain texts that the Son is God; the fifth from the same texts that He is true God. Hence this part of the treatise is pervaded by a certain monotony; a cumulative impression is produced by our being led forward again and again along successive lines of argument to the same point, beyond which we make no progress till the last proof is stated. The work is admirably and convincingly done, but we are glad to hear the last of the Epistle of Arius to Alexander, and accompany Hilary in a less embarrassed enquiry.

Yet the whole work has defects of its own. It is burdened with much repetition; subjects, especially, which have been treated in books ii. and iii. are discussed again at great length in later books. The frequent stress laid upon the infinity of God, the limitations of human speech and knowledge, the consequent incompleteness of the argument from analogy, the humility necessary when dealing with infinities apparently opposed90, though it adds to the solemnity of the writer’s tone and was doubtless necessary when the work was published in parts, becomes somewhat tedious in the course of a continuous reading. And something must here be said of the peculiarities of style. We saw that in places, as for instance in the beginning of the De Trinitate, Hilary can rise to a singularly lofty eloquence. This eloquence is not merely the unstudied utterance of an earnest faith, but the expression given to it by one whom natural talent and careful training had made a master of literary form. Yet, since his training was that of an age whose standard of taste was far from classical purity, much that must have seemed to him and to his contemporaries to be admirably effective can excite no admiration now. He prays, at the end of the first book, that his diction may be worthy of his theme, and doubtless his effort was as sincere as his prayer. Had there been less effort, there would certainly, in the judgment of a modern reader, have been more success. But he could not foresee the future, and ingenious affectations such as occur at the end of book viii. § 1, impietati insolenti, et insolentiæ vaniloquæ, et vaniloquio seducenti, with the jingle of rhymes which follows, are too frequent for our taste in his pages. Sometimes we find purple patches which remind us of the rhetoric of Apuleius; sometimes an excessive display of symmetry and antithesis, which suggests to us St. Cyprian at his worst. Yet Cyprian had the excuse that all his writings are short occasional papers written for immediate effect; neither he, nor any Latin Christian before Hilary, had ventured to construct a great treatise of theology, intended to influence future ages as well as the present. Another excessive development of rhetoric is the abuse of apostrophe, which Hilary sometimes rides almost to death, as in his addresses to the Fisherman, St. John, in the second book. These blemishes, however, do not seriously affect his intelligibility. He has earned, in this as in greater matters, an unhappy reputation for obscurity, which he has, to a certain extent, deserved. His other writings, even the Commentary on St. Matthew, are free from the involved language which sometimes makes the De Trinitate hard to understand, and often hard to read with pleasure. When Hilary was appealing to the Emperor, or addressing his own flock, as in the Homilies on the Psalms, he has command of a style which is always clear, stately on occasion, never weak or bald; in these cases he resisted, or did not feel, the temptation to use the resources of his rhetoric. These, unfortunately, had for their result the production of sentences which are often marvels of grammatical contortion and elliptical ingenuity. Yet such sentences, though numerous, are of few and uniform types. In Hilary’s case, as in that of Tertullian, familiarity makes the reader so accustomed to them that he instinctively expects their recurrence; and, at their worst, they are never actual breaches of the laws of the language. A translator can hardly be an impartial judge in this matter, for constantly, in passages where the sense is perfectly clear, the ingenuity with which words and constructions are arranged makes it almost impossible to render their meaning in idiomatic terms. One can translate him out of Latin, but not into English. In this he resembles one of the many styles of St. Augustine. There are passages in the De Trinitate, for instance viii. 27, 28, which it would seem that Augustine had deliberately imitated; a course natural enough in the case of one who was deeply indebted to his predecessor’s thought, and must have looked with reverence upon the great pioneer of systematic theology in the Latin tongue. But this involution of style, irritating as it sometimes is, has the compensating advantage that it keeps the reader constantly on the alert. He cannot skim these pages in the comfortable delusion that he is following the course of thought without an effort.

The same attention which Hilary demands from his readers has obviously been bestowed upon the work by himself. It is the selected and compressed result not only of his general study of theology, but of his familiarity with the literature and the many phases of the great Arian controversy. And he makes it clear that he is engaged in no mere conflict of wit; his passionate loyalty to the person of Christ is the obvious motive of his writing. He has taken his side with full conviction, and he is equally convinced that his opponents have irrevocably taken theirs. There is little or no reference to the existence or even the possibility of doubt, no charitable construction for ambiguous creeds, hardly a word of pleading with those in error. There is no excuse for heresy; it is mere insanity, when it is not wilful self-destruction or deliberate blasphemy. The battle is one without quarter; and sometimes, we must suspect, Hilary has been misled in argument by the uncompromising character of the conflict. Every reason advanced for a pernicious belief, he seems to think, must itself be bad, and be met with a direct negative. And again, in the heat of warfare he is led to press his arguments too far. Not only is the best and fullest use of Scripture made—for Hilary, like Athanasius, is marvellously imbued with its spirit as well as familiar with its letter—but texts are pressed into his service, and interpreted sometimes with brilliant ingenuity, which cannot bear the meaning assigned them. Yet much of this exegesis must be laid to the charge of his time, not of himself; and in the De Trinitate, as contrasted with the Homilies on the Psalms; he is wisely sparing in the use of allegorical interpretations. He remembers that he is refuting enemies, not conversing with friends. And his belief in their conscious insincerity leads to a certain hardness of tone. They will escape his conclusions if they possibly can; he must pin them down. Hence texts are sometimes treated, and deductions drawn from them, as though they were postulates of geometry; and, however we may admire the machine-like precision and completeness of the proof, we feel that we are reading Euclid rather than literature. But this also is due to that system of exegesis, fatal to any recognition of the eloquence and poetry of Scripture, of which something will be said in the next chapter.