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

II A.

ON THE PARISIAN ARIAN COLLECTANEA (HISTORICAL FRAGMENTS).

1. On the title and arrangement. — 2. On the codices of the entire collection. — 3. On parallel texts. — 4. On the editions. — 5. On the sources of the collection and its editor. — 6. On the nature of this edition.

1. In the year 1598, Nicolaus Faber (Le Fèvre), a man most deserving for his promotion of humanistic studies, edited in Paris a collection of several documents of the 4th century, which were gathered to combat the Arians and connected in part by narrative texts; this collection, indeed, is not very large if the folios are counted, but it is of the greatest importance if the subject matter is considered¹. Peter Pithou had prepared this edition for the press and had brought it almost to completion according to a 15th-century codex, which is called the Pithou codex (= T, cf. below p. XXXVII), when he was snatched away by premature death. In that manuscript book, Pithou had found a collection divided into two parts, one part lacking a title, the other adorned with an inscription which attributes the book to Hilary of Poitiers with these words: Here begins the second book of Hilary of Poitiers of the province of Aquitania, in which are all things that show either how, or for what causes, or at whose urging under the emperor Constantius the Council of Rimini was held against the formula of the Nicene treatise, by which all heresies had been contained. The last document of the second part was concluded with this subscription: Explicit the book of Saint Hilary from the historical work. Faber, who undertook the care of Pithou's edition, thinking that the whole collection in the Pithou codex was badly divided into two parts and that the latter part had been wrongly placed before the former, changed the order of both series, so that the inscription mentioned above would apply to the entire collection as it were, and the letters of the Parisian synod, from which the beginning of the former part was taken in the codex, would follow like a rescript to the letter of the Orientals of the Seleucian synod, which formed the end of the latter part. Faber numbered the pages of his edition from the new second part in a new series of numbers. He prefixed to the work this title: Fragments of Hilary of Poitiers, bishop of the province of Aquitania, from a historical work, never before edited. At the end he added a document, which has always been reprinted in later editions, namely: Condemnation of the blasphemy of Arius and an exposition

¹ Cf. Faber, Pref. p. 2.