Justified True Belief

(●) The bishop an emperor banished to the far side of the empire, who spent the exile writing the first great Latin book on the Trinity. + He admitted something in print that a lesser man would have kept quiet. Writing in 359, three years into his exile and halfway through the fight of his life, Hilary told the bishops of Gaul that he had been baptized long before, had been a bishop for some time, and had never so much as heard the creed of Nicaea until the day he was packing to leave home. A council of bishops had agreed that creed in 325, and it is the ancestor of the Nicene Creed Christians still recite on Sundays. A working bishop in Gaul in the 350s had simply never had it read to him. The admission explains the man. Hilary is not a theologian who inherited a position and defended it. He is a Latin-speaking provincial who was handed a controversy he did not start, shipped off to Asia Minor to keep him quiet, and who used the enforced leisure to learn Greek theology from the inside and write it back into Latin. What came out of those four years was twelve books called On the Trinity, the largest and most demanding work of theology the Latin church had yet produced. Novatian had written a short Latin book with the same title a century earlier; Hilary’s is of another order altogether, and Augustine and Ambrose both mined it. One small trace of him survives in an odd place. His feast falls on 13 January, and the English courts and the University of Oxford still call their winter term Hilary term, after him. A word is owed about the two dates in his title, because they are not the same kind of date at all. The death rests on a single ancient sentence: Sulpicius Severus, writing within a lifetime of it, says Hilary died in the sixth year after his return from exile, which most handbooks resolve as 367 and a few as 368. The birth is a reckoning with nothing under it at all, because no ancient source records it, and the handbooks print anything from 300 to 315. The "c." on the front of the title is doing real work.

(●) c. 310 AD: Born at Poitiers in Roman Gaul, into a house with books in it and no Christianity. + Poitiers, called Pictavium then, sat in Aquitaine in the southwest of Roman Gaul, and Gaul in the fourth century was not a backwater. Its schools were as good as any in the West, Bordeaux down the road was famous for its professors, and a boy from a comfortable family learned Greek alongside his Latin. Everything Hilary later wrote shows that education: he reads Greek theology without help, and his Latin prose is the trained kind, long-limbed and formal, the sort a man acquires from teachers and never quite loses. His parents were not Christians, and neither was he until he was a grown man. That is worth holding on to, because it is unusual among the great bishops of his century and it shapes how he argues. He came to the faith from outside it, by reading, and he never forgot what the outside of it looks like. Nothing else about the household is recorded. A later tradition gives him a wife and a daughter named Abra, but it rests on a letter that comes down under his name and that scholars have long judged not to be his, so it is a story about Hilary rather than a fact about him.

(●) c. 345 AD: He went looking for the happy life, found a sentence in Exodus that stopped him, and asked to be baptized. + He tells the story himself, in the opening pages of On the Trinity, and it is one of the few autobiographical passages in fourth-century Latin worth setting beside Augustine’s. He had begun, he says, by asking what a human life is actually for. The obvious answer of his class and time was leisure combined with money, and he could not make it hold: cattle in a good field have both, and nobody calls their contentment a life worth living. Then he came across the Hebrew books. What arrested him was not a doctrine but a self-description. God, asked for his name, answers "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14), and Hilary says he was amazed, because "no property of God which the mind can grasp is more characteristic of Him than existence." Here was a God who does not depend on anything, who did not begin and will not stop, said in four words that a man with no philosophy could carry home. Reading on, he came to the opening of John’s Gospel, and the Word who was with God and was God and became flesh, and what had been metaphysics became a rescue. Two things should be said honestly about that account. The first is that he wrote it years later, as the opening of a book meant to win an argument, so what survives is a testimony arranged for a purpose rather than a diary kept at the time. The second is that the year of his baptism is an inference and not a record. In 359 he described himself as long since baptized and some while a bishop, which puts the baptism somewhere in the 340s and no closer than that.

(●) c. 350 AD: The adult convert was made bishop of Poitiers, and his first book was a commentary on Matthew. + Western dioceses in the fourth century were enormous and few. Where a Greek province might have a bishop in every town, a Gallic bishop had a territory several times the size of an English county and was, in the language of the time, the sacerdos, the priest of the whole flock, with presbyters, the clergy who served under him in the towns, distributing what he consecrated. It was a large and quiet job, and there is no sign that anyone expected trouble from it. His earliest surviving work belongs to these years, and it was written before the Arian controversy had reached him. That controversy takes its name from Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria who had taught that the Son of God is not God in the full sense but the first and greatest of the things God made, and by the time Hilary was consecrated it had been running for a generation, mostly in Greek and at the other end of the Mediterranean. It would take up the rest of his life. None of that has reached the commentary on Matthew he wrote in these quiet years, which is one of the two oldest Latin commentaries on any Gospel that have come down to us. It was called the oldest for a long time, and a discovery has unsettled that: the Gospel notes of Fortunatianus, bishop of Aquileia, are a little earlier, and nobody could read them until 2012, when a scholar recognized them in an unlabelled manuscript at Cologne. Hilary’s commentary shows a man already steeped in Origen, the great Alexandrian scholar of the previous century, and already inclined to read the Old Testament as a set of pictures of Christ. It also shows a bishop with a sense of proportion. Coming to the Lord’s Prayer, he declines to expound it on the ground that Tertullian and Cyprian had already done so, and better. He simply moves on.

(●) 355 AD: When the court demanded that the West condemn Athanasius, he broke off communion with three bishops and wrote to the emperor. + The pressure did not arrive as a demand to deny the faith. It arrived as a demand for a signature. At a council in Milan in 355 the emperor Constantius required the Western bishops to join in condemning Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria who had spent nearly thirty years refusing to soften the Nicene position that the Son is of one substance with the Father, which is to say that whatever it takes to be God, the Son is that and not some grand thing just short of it. The charges against Athanasius were about conduct, and a bishop could tell himself he was voting on a man’s behavior and not on a doctrine. That was the point of framing it that way. Hilary would not sign, and he did the one thing a bishop could do about colleagues he could not stop. He broke communion with three of them, Saturninus of Arles and the Danubian bishops Ursacius and Valens. Breaking communion means refusing to share the Lord’s Supper with a man or to recognize his church as one you belong with; it is the strongest statement short of a council’s sentence, and in a church newly protected by the state it was also a political act. Then he wrote to Constantius. The letter asks for toleration for orthodox bishops and takes Athanasius’ part, and, read from a palace, it can hardly have sounded harmless: bishops recognized by the state were being called heretics, and men were said to be ready to die rather than submit. Constantius had just installed his cousin Julian over Gaul that November as Caesar, the junior colleague who governed a region in the senior emperor’s name, and he did not trust him. A province full of discontented Nicene Christians, and a general the emperor suspected, were not a combination anyone at court wanted to watch develop.

(●) 356 AD: A synod at Béziers sent him to Phrygia, and the exile turned into the most productive four years of his life. + In the spring of 356 Saturninus presided over a council of bishops, a synod, at Béziers in southern Gaul, which Hilary says he was made to attend. The complaints against him concerned his conduct, not his faith, which was never in question; he tried to turn the meeting into an examination of his opponents’ doctrine and was refused a hearing. By summer he was in Phrygia, inland in Asia Minor, in what is now west-central Turkey, banished by imperial order. Jerome, writing forty years later, says flatly that it was done by the faction of Saturninus. It was the gentlest exile imaginable, and it ruined the policy behind it. He was still bishop of Poitiers, still recognized as such, merely forbidden to live in his own diocese. He wrote to his clergy, they wrote back, his people sent him money, and nobody restricted his travel within a very large region. What the court had done, in effect, was to move a first-rate Latin mind into the middle of the Greek argument and give him four years with nothing else to do. He used them. He read the Eastern creeds, met the bishops who had written them, and learned that the dispute he had been handed in Gaul as a straight fight between two parties was in fact a tangle of parties, some of them nearer to him than they sounded. Out of the exile came the twelve books of On the Trinity and, in 359, On the Councils, written to explain the Easterners to the Gallic bishops and the Gallic bishops to the East. That same year he was present at the council of Seleucia, where Constantius had summoned the Eastern bishops to agree on a creed, and afterwards he went to Constantinople and petitioned Constantius for a public debate with Saturninus in the emperor’s hearing. He did not get it. Early in 360 he was sent home, which was not mercy: a man nobody could silence was less trouble in Gaul than in the capital.

(●) 360 AD: Back in Gaul, he went from church to church until the bishops who had signed at Rimini took it back. + He came home to a defeat. At Rimini in 359, while he was away in the East, where that autumn he sat at Seleucia, the Western bishops had been kept from going home until they agreed, and in the end, worn down, they put their names to a formula that said the Son is like the Father and pointedly refused to say of one substance with him. The word like leaves the question open. A copy can be like the original, and so can a portrait hanging over the fireplace, and that openness was the whole attraction of the word for the men who drafted the formula. Most of the bishops of Gaul had signed. They were not Arians and had not meant to become any such thing, and they had been told their words meant less than they turned out to mean. So Hilary travelled, which is the whole of his method in these years: no council first, no decree, just a bishop going to his colleagues one at a time and asking them to say out loud that the signature had been a mistake. They did. Then, with the ground prepared, a council met at Paris, c. 361, condemned what had been signed at Rimini, and deposed Saturninus. Sulpicius Severus, a Gallic writer of the next generation, gives Hilary the whole credit: it was by his exertions alone, he says, that the provinces of Gaul were cleansed of heresy. It is the one unambiguous victory of Hilary’s life. He also wrote, in this same stretch, an invective against Constantius, a formal published attack of the kind Roman orators had always written against their enemies, and it is so scalding that he cannot have meant it for the emperor’s eyes while the emperor lived: Constantius is Antichrist, flattering where the old persecutors had scourged, buying the church with tax exemptions the way Judas bought his kiss. It is not his best work. It is the sound of a patient man who has run out of patience.

(●) 364 AD: His last campaign, against the Arian bishop of Milan, failed, and three years later he died at home. + Late in 364 Hilary went to Milan to unseat its bishop, Auxentius, who had held the see, which is the church and district a bishop has charge of, for years with imperial protection. The new emperor Valentinian was personally orthodox, and Hilary seems to have thought the moment had come. He had misread it. Valentinian’s settled policy was that no bishop would be removed over doctrine, and when Auxentius appealed to him and produced a statement of faith the court found acceptable, it was Hilary who was told to leave the city. He went home and wrote Against Auxentius, which is as much a warning to his own side about a church that had learned to love emperors as it is an attack on one man. Auxentius kept Milan until his death in 374, and the man who followed him there was Ambrose. The years after that are almost blank, which is its own kind of evidence about how his contemporaries rated him. He preached and he wrote: a long series of homilies on the Psalms, a short book on the Old Testament as a picture-book of Christ, and a collection of the documents of the whole Arian conflict, stitched together with narrative, which breaks off with news that reached Gaul early in 367. Not everything from those years was writing. A former soldier named Martin had attached himself to Hilary before the exile and had refused ordination as a deacon, accepting instead the minor office of exorcist, about as low as an ordained man could be placed. After Hilary returned, Martin came back to him, and Hilary gave him land near Poitiers where he founded a monastery. In 371, four years after Hilary’s death, Martin became bishop of Tours. Of Hilary’s own death nothing is recorded at all: no scene, no last words, no year in any document, only Sulpicius’ note that it came in the sixth year from his return. Most handbooks resolve that as 367.

What He Taught

(T1) God can be known only where he has spoken about himself. + You can learn a great deal about a stranger from his house: the books on the shelf, the wear on the stairs, what he keeps and what he throws away. What you cannot do is work out from the furniture what he thinks about his own son. For that you have to ask him, and then believe what he tells you. That is Hilary’s whole method, and he states it before he argues anything. The people he was answering were the Arians, the followers of Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria who had taught that the Son is the first and greatest of God’s creatures, made out of nothing before time began, so that, in the slogan of the party, "there was when he was not." Their case was built on what fatherhood and sonship must mean, reasoning from the only fathers and sons anyone has ever met: a son comes after his father, a father must exist first, what is begotten must have begun. Hilary’s answer is to deny them the starting point. God is not one more item inside the world, to be measured by what holds for the items. What we may say about him is what he has said about himself. This cuts both ways, and Hilary knew it. It rules out the clever reasoning of his opponents, and it also rules out reading our own preferences into the text. He puts it as a rule for readers: the good student draws the sense out of the book instead of bringing it in, and does not decide what a passage must mean before opening it.

(Q) "For He Whom we can only know through His own utterances is the fitting witness concerning Himself." + Source: Hilary, On the Trinity I.18 (Watson translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 9). He is addressing the reader directly, at the point where the first book turns from his own story to the argument. Before anyone reasons about God, he says, two things have to go: the assumption that our minds set the scale, and the habit of settling a text’s meaning in advance (T1).

(T2) The one God is not a solitary God: the Son is God from God, born and not made. + A carpenter’s table is not a carpenter. A carpenter’s son is. Making produces something of a different kind from the maker, and begetting produces something of the same kind, and the difference between those two verbs is the hinge of the whole fourth-century argument. The Arian case ran that God is one, and that whatever is not that one God is therefore a creature; the Son, being distinct from the Father, falls on the creature side of the line, however exalted his rank. Hilary’s reply is that the line has been drawn in the wrong place. Scripture names the Father Father, and a father who has not given his own nature to his son has not fathered anyone; the word would be a courtesy title. So the Son is from the Father and is what the Father is, and the church confesses him born rather than made. Yet this is not a second God added alongside the first. Hilary refuses both errors by name: the Arian, who makes the Son a creature, and Sabellius, who saved the oneness of God by making Father and Son two masks on one actor, so that the Son’s prayers in Gethsemane are God talking to himself. He is also candid about the cost of the whole exercise. Left to itself, he says, faith would worship in silence. It is the errors of others that force believers to hammer out technical language for things that would be better adored than dissected, and he plainly disliked having to do it.

(Q) "Thus, neither denying that God is One nor maintaining that He is alone, we hold the straight road of truth." + Source: Hilary, On the Trinity VII.2 (Watson translation). He is summarizing six books of argument in a sentence, and the balance is the point: a road with a ditch on either side. One ditch denies that God is one, the other insists that being one means being alone (T2).

(T3) "I and the Father are one" is a unity of nature, not an agreement of wills. + Two men who have run a shop together for thirty years will tell you they are of one mind, and they will mean it exactly. They want the same things, they decide the same way, and neither of them would think of acting without the other. They are still two men. If you want to see one of them, you have to look at him and not at his partner. Hold on to that, because the objection Hilary is answering turns on exactly that difference, and the objection is better than it looks. His opponents did not deny that Jesus said "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30). They said it meant what it usually means when people say it. Scripture itself, they pointed out, says that the first believers were of one heart and soul (Acts 4:32), and that he who plants and he who waters are one (1 Corinthians 3:8), and nobody supposes those people share a single nature. They are united in aim. Why not read the Son’s oneness with the Father the same way? Because, Hilary answers, of the company the saying keeps. Take the sentences around it in the same Gospel: whoever has seen the Son has seen the Father; the Son is in the Father and the Father in the Son; know the Son and you know the Father. Two men who agree about everything are still two men, and seeing one is not seeing the other. Unity of purpose is something two natures can have. Being seen when someone else is looked at is not. Notice what this preserves. Hilary is not saying Father and Son are one person; he has just spent a book denying it. He is saying they are one God, sharing one nature, and that the Gospel’s way of speaking will not survive being reduced to a partnership.

(Q) "He avows the unity of nature, when those who see Him see the Father. He bears witness that He is indivisible from the Father, when He dwells in the Father Who dwells in Him." + Source: Hilary, On the Trinity VIII.4 (Watson translation). He has just quoted four sayings of Jesus in a row from John’s Gospel and is drawing them together. Each clause here is tied to one of them, which is his usual way of arguing: not a chain of deductions, but a set of texts laid side by side until the pattern in them is hard to miss (T3).

(T4) A brother who is frightened of a word is not yet an enemy of the faith. + Two Greek words divided the church for most of a century, and they differ by a single letter. The distance between them is the distance between telling a jeweller that a ring is the same gold as the one in the window and telling him it is like the gold in the window. One of those sentences will get you an argument at the counter. Homoousios means of the same substance: whatever it is to be God, the Son is that, exactly as the Father is. Homoiousios, with one extra iota, means of like substance. Nicaea had chosen the first. It sounds like hair-splitting until you see who was using the second and why. Some were Arians hiding behind a soft word. Others were not Arians at all. They were bishops who feared that "same substance" erased the distinction between Father and Son and left the church with Sabellius, and who wanted a word that kept the Son genuinely other than the Father while granting him everything else. Hilary, out east and talking to these men daily, worked out something that the West had no way of knowing from a distance: a good many of them meant by their word what he meant by his. So in On the Councils he did an unglamorous thing. He translated the Eastern creeds for the Gallic bishops, explained what each phrase was guarding against, and then turned around and asked the Easterners not to anathematize the word homoousios, that is, not to pronounce the church’s formal curse on the word and on anyone who kept using it, since the men who had used it were their own fathers in the faith and the bishops who had ordained them. It did not work. The court party wanted no reconciliation, and some of the allies Hilary had defended later turned out to deny the full Godhead of the Holy Spirit, which is a fair reason to think he had judged them too generously. But the instinct behind it is worth more than the outcome. He insisted on asking what a man meant before deciding what he was, and he would not let a word that did no harm to the faith be used as a weapon against people who held the faith.

(Q) "Though long ago regenerate in baptism, and for some time a bishop, I never heard of the Nicene creed until I was going into exile." + Source: Hilary, On the Councils 91 (Watson translation). He offers it as evidence in an argument, not as a confession of ignorance. His point is that he had reached the substance of the Nicene faith from the Gospels and the Epistles before he had ever seen the word the council used, which is exactly why he will not treat the word as the test of a man (T4).

(T5) The man born of Mary is the same person as the God who made the world. + The Arians had a strong hand whenever they played the Gospels’ own scenes back at their opponents, and they played it often. A God does not grow tired, or ask for information, or sweat in a garden at night, or die. Jesus does all of these, and the Gospels report them without the least embarrassment. Whatever he is, the Arians argued, he is plainly not what the Father is. Hilary’s answer is the doctrine of the Incarnation, the teaching that the eternal Son took a complete human life to himself without ceasing to be God: not God appearing as a man, and not a man promoted, but one person in two conditions. Paul’s language for it is a change of form, God taking the form of a servant (Philippians 2:7), and Hilary presses on the word took. Taking is not losing. A king who puts on a workman’s coat and spends a winter on the site has added something to his life and surrendered nothing of who he is, and the analogy limps only because the king is playacting and the Son was not. So the weakness in the Gospels belongs to the humanity, and the person who owns it is God the Son. The one who was born is the one who died is the one who rose is the one who is in heaven, and Hilary hammers that chain of identity until it cannot be broken anywhere along its length. How far he pressed the other half of it, the reality of what that human life felt, is the one place where his own church has not followed him.

(Q) "We confess Him as one and the same Person, not by loss of the Godhead, but by assumption of the manhood: in the form of God through His divine nature, in the form of man from His conception by the Holy Ghost." + Source: Hilary, On the Trinity X.22 (Watson translation), which begins the sentence "And we confess Him" and runs on past the point where the quotation stops. He is expounding Paul’s hymn about the form of God and the form of a servant, and the sentence runs straight on into the list he cares most about: the one who died is the one who was born, and the one who rose is the one who died (T5).

(Q) "I know, O Lord God Almighty, that I owe Thee, as the chief duty of my life, the devotion of all my words and thoughts to Thyself." + Source: Hilary, On the Trinity I.37 (Watson translation). The first book ends in prayer rather than argument, and what he asks for is worth noticing in a controversialist: "precision of language, soundness of argument, grace of style, loyalty to truth." He is about to spend eleven more books contradicting people, and he begins by asking not to win but to be accurate.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Jerome and Augustine read him, and Latin theology kept his sentences after it had half forgotten his name. + Jerome, who was stingy with praise, calls him the Rhone of Latin eloquence, a Gaul himself and born at Poitiers, in the preface to the second book of his commentary on Galatians, and gives him a full entry in his catalog of Christian writers with a list of the books. He had read him young: in a letter written from the Syrian desert he asks a friend to get him copies of the commentary on the Psalms and On the Councils, books he had once copied out at Trier in his own hand. Augustine went further, and did the thing an author most wants: he took a sentence seriously enough to stop and argue with it. In his own On the Trinity he quotes Hilary by name, calls him a man of no mean authority in handling the Scriptures and in the assertion of the faith, and then sets about working out what one very compressed sentence of Hilary’s had actually meant. The sentence gives the three persons one phrase each: infinity in the Eternal, his likeness in his express Image, our enjoyment of him in the Gift. The Eternal is the Father, the Image is the Son, the Gift is the Holy Spirit, and the whole doctrine is folded into one line. Augustine quotes it in a shorter form still, eternity in the Father, form in the Image, use in the Gift, and then turns each of the three words over in his hand. Eternity is said of the Father, he decides, because the Father is the one who has no father. Then he builds part of his own account out of what he has found there. Later, gathering the witnesses of the catholic faith against the Pelagians in Against Julian, he put Hilary into the same short list as Cyprian and Ambrose. The Pelagians held that a man can take the first step toward God on his own strength, without grace, and the way Augustine answered them was to show that the church had never taught any such thing, one named father at a time. Being called as a witness like that is its own kind of compliment: it means a writer has become someone whose testimony counts. That is how most of Hilary’s influence travelled, second hand and unlabelled. Ambrose used him, Augustine used him, and the readers of Ambrose and Augustine inherited him without knowing whose thought they had. The Roman church made the recognition official very late: in 1851 Pius IX named him a Doctor of the Church, a title given to the small number of writers whose teaching that church commends to everyone, fifteen centuries after he died.

(†) He tried to put theology into song, and the Latin hymn began with him even though his own hymns did not last. + Exile taught him a trick from the other side. The Arians in the East had discovered that people remember what they sing, and they had put their doctrine into verse and taught it in the streets. Hilary came home and tried the same thing in Latin, which nobody in the West is known to have done before. Whether his congregations took to the hymns nobody says. The one glimpse is a line Jerome quotes in the preface to the second book of his commentary on Galatians: in a hymn of his own, Hilary called his countrymen unteachable, and Jerome offers it as evidence that Gauls are slow to learn anything. Whether Hilary had his singers in mind or his whole province, Jerome does not say. He was first all the same. Isidore of Seville, writing in the seventh century, names him as the first Latin hymn writer, and Jerome’s catalog lists a book of hymns among his works. The book was lost, and for fourteen hundred years not a line of it could be produced. Then in 1884 an Italian scholar named Gamurrini found, in a manuscript at Arezzo, three damaged hymns attributed to Hilary, and published them three years later. The same volume gave the world his little book on the Old Testament and the travel diary of Egeria, a western woman, probably from Spain, who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and written home about it. E. W. Watson, editing the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers volume in 1899, judged that none of the three hymns was Hilary’s; scholars since have largely gone the other way and accepted them. All three are alphabetical acrostics, poems whose stanzas begin with the letters of the alphabet in order, which is a singer’s device and a memoriser’s before it is a poet’s: you can feel where you are in the hymn and you can tell when a verse has gone missing. All three are broken off. What he began, Ambrose finished a generation later at Milan, with short singable hymns that a crowd could hold on to, and through Ambrose the Latin hymn became one of the permanent possessions of the Western church. Hilary supplied the idea and not the tunes.

(†) The soldier who joined his household became Martin of Tours, and between them they converted Gaul at both ends. + Martin was a former soldier from Pannonia, on the Danube, and everything about him was the opposite of his bishop: no schooling to speak of, no interest in Greek, no gift for a controversial treatise. He came to Hilary before the exile and would not be made a deacon, crying out that he was unworthy, so Hilary enrolled him as an exorcist, one of the minor offices of the church, which was about as low as an ordained man could be placed. The years apart tested him. Martin went home to Pannonia to convert his parents, argued publicly against the Arian bishops there, and was scourged and run out of the province; he tried Milan next and was expelled again; he waited out the rest on a small island off the Italian coast. When he heard that Hilary was coming back he made for Rome to meet him, missed him on the road, and followed him to Poitiers. Hilary gave him land, and Martin founded a monastery on it, the first in that part of Gaul. In 371 he became bishop of Tours, and he spent a quarter of a century walking through the countryside preaching to people no treatise would ever reach. Sulpicius Severus, who knew Martin and wrote his life, is the source for all of this, and he is a warm witness rather than a cold one. The pairing he describes is real enough to be worth stating plainly: Hilary persuaded the educated that the Nicene faith was reasonable, and Martin carried the faith to villages where nobody could read. Neither could have done the other’s work.

(†) Where his own record will not bear the weight: he taught that the body of Christ felt the blows without feeling the pain. + The claim is his, in plain words, in the tenth book of On the Trinity, section 23. When Christ was struck, bound and lifted on the cross, Hilary writes, "He felt the force of suffering, but without its pain." His image is a dart thrown through water or flame: it passes, it pierces, it does the whole of what a dart does, and the water closes behind it unharmed. So the blows landed and the body took them, but pain, he says, was not native to that body, because it was conceived by the Holy Spirit and never had the weakness ours have. Two things should be said for him before anything is said against him. He is not denying that Christ had a real body; he insists on it, born of a real mother, and he wrote the whole book to establish that the person on the cross was God the Son. And he had a live opponent: the Arians were using Christ’s fear and exhaustion as proof that he was a creature, and Hilary was hunting for a way to deny them the argument. The way he chose does not fit the Gospels. "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). In Gethsemane he says, "My soul is very sorrowful, even to death" (Matthew 26:38), and Luke describes an agony and sweat like drops of blood (Luke 22:44). Hebrews puts it as strongly as it can be put: "In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what he suffered" (Hebrews 5:7-8), and the comfort the letter draws from it is that we do not have a high priest "who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses" (Hebrews 4:15). A high priest who feels the force of the blow without the pain of it is not the one described there. The church did not follow Hilary here, and later Latin theology kept his doctrine of the person while quietly dropping this part of his account of the flesh. One smaller reserve belongs in the same ledger, though it is a different kind of thing. On the Holy Spirit he holds back, in the second book of the same work: "Concerning the Holy Spirit I ought not to be silent, and yet I have no need to speak." He confesses the Spirit, baptizes into the threefold name, and treats the Spirit as God’s gift to us, and he never says the Spirit is a creature. He simply will not say in so many words what the church would say at Constantinople in 381, that the Spirit is to be worshipped and glorified with the Father and the Son. He died fourteen years before that council met, and his caution was a refusal to go further than he thought Scripture had gone, which is a better fault than most.