Corpus of Latin Ecclesiastical Writers, Vol. LXV: Hilary's Treatise on the Mysteries, Fragments, and Hymns

As for the fact that Hilary’s Tractatus mysteriorum Treatise on Mysteries are commemorated by the author of the Ratio generalis General Account under the title Liber officiorum Book of Offices, this cannot create any great difficulty. For Coustantius, the distinguished editor of the works of Hilary, fell into a similar error; he, being ignorant of the meaning of that Hilarian term mysteriorum of mysteries, wrote in his Preface (n. 23) regarding the book of mysteries—of which nothing remains to us except the title indicated by Jerome—that one might conjecture from that very title that the book was concerned with ecclesiastical offices. This opinion of Coustantius was adopted by not a few other learned men, who were deceived, moreover, by the fact that Ambrose also wrote a book De mysteriis On the Mysteries, which deals with sacred rites, and that Isidore of Seville published a work titled Officiorum libri duo Two Books of Offices or De ecclesiasticis officiis On Ecclesiastical Offices. Hence, it does not seem strange that the author who copied the fragment from Hilary to support his argument regarding the liturgical advent also called the Liber mysteriorum the Liber officiorum by mistake.

3. I. F. Gamurrini was the first to bring the text of the Tractatus to light, along with several hymns of Hilary and the work inscribed Peregrinatio ad loca sancta Pilgrimage to the Holy Places, all preserved in the same Codex A. This first edition was published in the collection titled Biblioteca dell' Academia storico-giuridica IV, Rome 1887, pp. 3—28. While the text was well and successfully corrected by the editor in many places, in not a few others it was left uncorrected or poorly handled. It was also frequently punctuated incorrectly, such that the meaning is either null or becomes false. Furthermore, the published text contains numerous errors arising from the reading of the codex, a list of which we provided in Studien I 36 sq. We have, however, gladly adopted many of the editor’s corrections and conjectures, always adding his name, except for those corrections by the learned man that suggest themselves to any reader. Cardinal I. P. Pitra provided an index of more than forty conjectures for correcting the text of the Tractatus (Analecta sacra V [1888] 144 sq.). Although Pitra did not inspect the Aretine codex himself, he nevertheless healed certain corrupt passages and attempted others with notable conjectures. We were provided with no small help by the notes that Hubert Lindemann published in his book Des hl. Hilarius von Poitiers Liber mysteriorum (1905), pp. 98—119, using the Aretine codex itself.

4. The only testimony from antiquity handed down to us concerning the Tractatus mysteriorum is from Jerome (de viris inl. 100), [stating] that Hilary wrote a book of hymns and another of mysteries.