INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS.

ST. HILARY of Poitiers is one of the greatest, yet least studied, of the Fathers of the Western Church. He has suffered from this, partly due to a certain obscurity in his writing style and partly due to the difficulty of the thoughts he attempted to convey. But there are other reasons for the comparative neglect into which he has fallen. As we shall see, he learned his theology from Eastern authorities and was not content to merely continue and develop the traditional teaching of the West. As a disciple of Origen who found his natural allies in the Cappadocian school of Basil and the Gregories Refers to Basil the Great and the brothers Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus (his juniors though they were), he was speaking to somewhat unsympathetic ears. Furthermore, his Latin tongue barred him from influence in the East, and he suffered, like all Westerns, from that deep suspicion of Sabellianism A heresy that denied the distinction of the persons in the Trinity that was rooted in the Eastern Churches.

Nor are these the only reasons for the neglect of Hilary. Of his two chief works, the Homilies Original: "Tractatus" on the Psalms—important as they were in popularizing the allegorical method of interpretation—were soon eclipsed in popularity by other commentaries. Meanwhile, his great controversial work on the Trinity suffered from its very perfection for the specific purpose with which it was composed. At first sight, it appears not as a refutation of Arianism The doctrine that the Son is subordinate to the Father in general, or of any particular phase of it, but of one specific document: the Epistle of Arius to Alexander, in which Arian doctrines are expressed. That document soon fell into an oblivion which the work of Hilary nearly shared as the controversy shifted. Hilary's work is only incidentally constructive; its plan follows, in the central portion, that of the production of Arius which he was attacking. This negative method must have lessened its popularity for practical instruction when compared to a masterpiece like the De Trinitate of St. Augustine.

Furthermore, Hilary never does himself justice. He was a great original thinker in the field of Christology, but he never stated his views systematically and completely. They must be laboriously reconstructed by collecting passages scattered throughout his works. Although he is a thinker so consistent that little or no conjecture is needed to piece together his system, we cannot be surprised that full justice has never been done to him. He has been regarded chiefly as one of the sufferers from the violence of the Emperor Constantius, as the composer of a useful summary of arguments against Arianism, or as an unsuccessful negotiator for an understanding between the Eastern and Western Churches. Yet his sufferings were nothing compared to those of Athanasius, and his influence in controversy seems to have been as small as the results of his diplomacy. It is not his practical share, in word or deed, in the conflicts of his day that is his chief title to fame, but his independence and depth as a Christian thinker. He has, indeed, exerted an important influence upon the growth of doctrine, but it has...

¹ An actual dependence on Gregory of Nyssa has sometimes been ascribed to Hilary, but Gregory was surely too young for this. He may himself have borrowed from Hilary, but more probably both derived their common element from Eastern writers like Basil of Ancyra.
² This is certainly the best translation of Tractatus; the word is discussed on a later page.