THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS.

it would require wide special study and knowledge to fix his relation in matters of composition and rhetoric to other writers. But one assertion, that of Jerome⁶, that Hilary was a deliberate imitator of the style of Quintilian, cannot be taken seriously. Jerome is the most reckless of writers; it is possible to be somewhat familiar with the writings of both and yet see no resemblance between them, except in a certain sustained gravity. Another description by Jerome of Hilary as "mounted on a Gallic buskin A term referring to the high-soled shoes worn by tragic actors, denoting a grand or elevated style and adorned with flowers of Greece" is suitable enough, as to its first part, regarding Hilary’s dignified rhetoric; the "flowers of Greece," if they mean embellishments inserted for their own sake, are not perceptible. In this same passage⁷ Jerome goes on to criticize Hilary’s entanglement in long periods, which renders him unsuitable for unlearned readers. But those laborious, yet perfectly constructed, sentences are an essential part of his method. Without them, he could not attain the effect he desires; they are as deliberate and, in their way, as successful as the eccentricities of Tacitus. But when Jerome elsewhere calls Hilary "the Rhone of Latin eloquence⁸," he is speaking at random. It is only rarely that he breaks through his habitual sobriety of utterance; and his rare outbursts of devotion or denunciation are perhaps the more effective because the reader is unprepared to expect them. Such language as this of Jerome shows that Hilary’s literary accomplishments were recognized, even though it fails to describe them well.

But though he had at his command, and avowedly employed, the resources of rhetoric so that his words might be as worthy as he could make them of the greatness of his theme⁹, some portions of the De Trinitate and most of the Homilies on the Psalms are written in a singularly equable and almost conversational style. The unobtrusive excellence of this style manifests the hand of a clear thinker and a practiced writer. He is no pedant¹, no laborious imitator of antiquity, distant or near; he abstains, perhaps more completely than any other Christian writer of classical education, from the allusions to the poets that were the usual ornament of prose. He is an eminently businesslike writer; his pages, where they are unadorned, express his meaning with perfect clearness. Where they are decked out with antithesis, apostrophe, and other rhetorical devices, they would no doubt, if our training could put us in sympathy with him, produce the effect he designed. We must, in justice to him, remember as we read that they are excellent in their own kind, and that whether or not they aid us in entering into his argument, they never obscure his thought. Save in the few passages where the text is corrupt, it is never safe to assert that Hilary is unintelligible. The reader or translator who cannot follow or render the argument must rather lay the blame upon his own imperfect knowledge of the language and thought of the fourth century. Where he is stating or proving truth, whether well-established or newly ascertained, he is admirably precise; and even in his more dubious speculations he never cloaks a weak argument in ambiguous language. A loftier genius might have given us—in language inadequate to the attempt, through no fault of his own—some intimations of remoter truths. We must be thankful to the sober Hilary that he, with his strong sense of the limitations of our intellect, has provided a clear and accurate statement of the case against Arianism The doctrine that the Son is subordinate to the Father and has widened the bounds of theological knowledge by reasonable deductions from the text of Scripture, usually convincing and always suggestive.

6: Ep. 70, 5, ad Magnum.
7: Ep. 58, 10, ad Paulinum.
8: Comm. in Gall. ii. pref.
9: Cf. Tract. in Ps. xiii. 1, Trin. i. 38.
1: Yet he strangely reproaches his Old Latin Bible with the use of nimis for valde, Tract. in Ps. cxxxviii. 38. This employment of relative for positive terms had been common in literature for at least a century and a half.