These events happened before Julian left the country, in the middle of the summer of 361, on his march against Constantius; or at least, if the actual proceedings were subsequent to his departure, they must have quickly followed it, for his sanction was necessary, and when that was obtained there was no motive for delay. And now, for some years, Hilary disappears from sight. He tells us nothing in his writings of the ordinary course of his life and work; even his informal and discursive Homilies cast no light upon his methods of administration, his successes or failures, and very little on the character of his flock. There was no further conflict within the Church of Gaul during Hilary's lifetime. The death of Constantius, which happened before Julian could meet him in battle, removed all political anxiety. Julian himself was too busy with the revival of paganism in the East to concern himself seriously with its promotion in the Latin-speaking provinces, from which he was absent, and for which he cared less. The orthodox cause in Gaul did not suffer by his apostasy. His short reign was followed by the still briefer rule of the Catholic Jovian. Next came Valentinian, personally orthodox, but steadily refusing to allow depositions on account of doctrine. Under him Arianism dwindled away; Catholic successors were elected to Arian prelates, and the process would have been hastened but by a few years had Hilary been permitted to expel Auxentius from Milan, as we shall presently see him attempting to do.
This was his last interference in the politics of the Church, and does not concern us as yet. His chief interest henceforth was to be in literary work; in popularising and, as he thought, improving upon the teaching of Origen. He commented upon the book of Job, as we know from Jerome and Augustine. The former says that this, and his work on the Psalms, were translations from Origen. But that is far from an accurate account of the latter work, and may be equally inaccurate concerning the former. The two fragments which St. Augustine has preserved from the Commentary on Job are so short that we cannot draw from them any conclusion as to the character of the book. If we may trust Jerome, its length was somewhat more than a quarter of that of the Homilies on the Psalms [104] , in their present form. It is unfortunate, but not surprising, that the work should have fallen into oblivion. It was, no doubt, allegorical in its method, and nothing of that kind could survive in competition with Gregory the Great's inimitable Moralia on Job.
Hilary's other adaptation from Origen, the Homilies on the Psalms, happily remains to us. It is at least as great a work as the De Trinitate, and one from which we can learn even more what manner of man its writer was. For the De Trinitate is an appeal to all thoughtful Christians of the time, and written for future generations as well as for them; characteristic, as it is, in many ways of the author, the compass of the work and the stateliness of its rhetoric tend to conceal his personality. But the Homilies [105] on the Psalms, which would seem to have reached us in the notes of a shorthand writer, so artless and conversational is the style, shew us Hilary in another aspect. He is imparting instruction to his own familiar congregation; and he knows his people so well that he pours out whatever is passing through his mind. In fact, he seems often to be thinking aloud on subjects which interest him rather than addressing himself to the needs of his audience. Practical exhortation has, indeed, a much smaller space than mystical exegesis and speculative Christology. Yet abstruse questions are never made more obscure by involution of style. The language is free and flowing, always that of an educated man who has learnt facility by practice. And here, strange as it seems to a reader of the De Trinitate, he betrays a preference for poetical words [106] , which shews that his renunciation of such ornament elsewhere is deliberate. Yet, even here, he indulges in no definite reminiscences of the poets.
There remains only one trace, though it is sufficient, of the original circumstances of delivery. The Homily on Psalm xiv. begins with the words, The Psalm which has been read.' The Psalms were sung as an act of worship, not read as a lesson, in the normal course of divine service; and therefore we must assume that the Psalm to be expounded was recited, by the rector or another, as an introduction to the Homily. We need not be surprised that such notices, which must have seemed to possess no permanent interest, have been edited away. Many of the Homilies are too long to have been delivered on one or even two occasions, yet the ascription of praise with which Hilary, like Origen, always concludes, [107] has been omitted in every case except at the end of the whole discourse. This shews that Hilary himself, or more probably some editor, has put the work into its final shape. But this editing of the Homilies has not extended to the excision of the numerous repetitions, which were natural enough when Hilary was delivering each as a commentary complete in itself, and do not offend us when we read the discourse on a single Psalm, though they certainly disfigure the work when regarded as a treatise on the whole Psalter.
It is probably due to the accidents of time that our present copies of the Homilies are imperfect. We are, indeed, better off than was Jerome. His manuscript contained Homilies on Psalms 1, 2, 51-62, 118-150, according to the Latin notation. We have, in addition to these, Homilies which are certainly genuine on Psalms 13, 14, 63-69; and others on the titles of Psalms 9 and 91, which are probably spurious [108] . Some more Homilies of uncertain origin which have been fathered upon Hilary, and may be found in the editions, may be left out of account. In the Homily on Psalm 59, § 2, he mentions one, unknown to Jerome as to ourselves, on Psalm 44; and this allusion, isolated though it is, suggests that the Homilies contained, or were meant to contain, a commentary on the whole Book of Psalms, composed in the order in which they stand. There is, of course, nothing strange in the circulation in ancient times of imperfect copies; a well-known instance is that of St. Augustine's copy of Cyprian which did not contain an epistle which has come down to us. This series of Homilies was probably continuous as well as complete. The incidental allusions to the events of the times contain nothing inconsistent with the supposition that he began at the beginning of the Psalter and went on to the end. We might, indeed, construe the language of that on Psalm 52, § 13, concerning prosperous clergy, who heap up wealth for themselves and live in luxury, as an allusion to men like Saturninus, but the passage is vague, and a vivid recollection, not a present evil, may have suggested it. More definite, and indeed a clear note of time, is the Homily on Psalm 63, where heathenism is aggressive and is become a real danger, of which Hilary speaks in the same terms as he does of heresy. This contrasts strongly with such language as that of the Homily on Psalm 67, § 20, where the heathen are daily flocking into the Church, or of that on Psalm 137, § 10, where paganism has collapsed, its temples are ruined and its oracles silent; such words as the former could only have been written in the short reign of Julian. Other indications, such as the frequent warnings against heresy and denunciations of heretics, are too general to help in fixing the date. On the whole, it would seem a reasonable hypothesis that Hilary began his connected series of Homilies on the Psalms soon after his return to Gaul, that he had made good progress with them when Julian publicly apostatised, and that they were not completed till the better times of Valentinian.
He was conversing in pastoral intimacy with his people, and hence we cannot be surprised that he draws, perhaps unconsciously, on the results of his own previous labours. For instance, on Psalm 61, § 2, he gives what is evidently a reminiscence, yet with features of its own and not as a professed autobiography, of his mental history as described in the opening of the De Trinitate. And while the direct controversy against Arianism is not avoided, there is a manifest preference for the development of Hilary's characteristic Christology, which had already occupied him in the later books of the De Trinitate. We must, indeed, reconstruct his doctrine in this respect even more from the Homilies than from the De Trinitate; and in the later work he not only expands what he had previously suggested, but throws out still further suggestions which he had not the length of life to present in a more perfect form. But the Homilies contain much that is of far less permanent interest. Wherever he can [109] , he brings in the mystical interpretation of numbers, that strange vagary of the Eastern mind which had, at least from the time of Irenæus and the Epistle of Barnabas, found a congenial home in Christian thought. This and other distortions of the sense of Scripture, which are the result in Hilary, as in Origen, of a prosaic rather than a poetical turn of mind, will find a more appropriate place for discussion at the beginning of the next chapter. Allusions to the mode of worship of his time are very rare [110] , as are details of contemporary life. Of general encouragement to virtue and denunciation of vice there is abundance, and it repeats with striking fidelity the teaching of Cyprian. Hilary displays the same Puritanism in regard to jewelry as does Cyprian [111] , and the same abhorrence of public games and spectacles. Of these three elements, the Christology, the mysticism, the moral teaching, the Homilies are mainly compact. They carry on no sustained argument and contain, as has been said, a good deal of repetition. In fact, a continuous reader will probably form a worse impression of their quality than he who is satisfied with a few pages at a time. They are eminently adapted for selection, and the three Homilies, those on Psalms 1, 53 and 130, which have been translated for this volume, may be inadequate, yet are fairly representative, as specimens of the instruction which Hilary conveys in this work.
It has been said that the practical teaching of Hilary is that of Cyprian. But this is not a literary debt [112] ; the writer to whom almost all the exegesis is due, by borrowing of substance or of method, is Origen, except where the spirit of the fourth century has been at work. Yet other authors have been consulted, and this not only for general information, as in the case, already cited, of the elder Pliny, but for interpretation of the Psalms. For instance, a strange legend concerning Mount Hermon is cited on Psalm 132, § 6, from a writer whose name Hilary does not know; and on Psalm 133, § 4, he has consulted several writers and rejects the opinion of them all. But these authorities, whoever they may have been, were of little importance for his purpose in comparison with Origen. Still we can only accept Jerome's assertion that the Homilies are translated from Origen in a qualified sense. Hilary was writing for the edification of his own flock, and was obliged to modify much that Origen had said if he would serve their needs, for religious thought had changed rapidly in the century which lay between the two, and a mere translation would have been as coldly received as would a reprint of some commentary of the age of George II. to-day. And Hilary's was a mind too active and independent to be the slave of a traditional interpretation. We must, therefore, expect to find a considerable divergence; and we cannot be surprised that Hilary, as he settled down to his task, grew more and more free in his treatment of Origen's exegesis.
Unhappily the remains of Origen's work upon the Psalms, though considerable, are fragmentary, and of the fragments scattered through Catenæ no complete or critical edition has yet been made. Still, insufficient as the material would be for a detailed study and comparison, enough survives to enable us to form a general idea of the relation between the two writers. Origen [113] composed Homilies upon the Psalter, a Commentary upon it, and a summary treatise, called the Enchiridion. The first of these works was Hilary's model; Origen's Homilies were diffuse extemporary expositions, ending, like Hilary's, with an ascription of praise. It is unfortunate that, of the few which survive, all treat of Psalms on which Hilary's Homilies are lost. But it is doubtful whether Hilary knew the other writings of Origen upon the Psalter. We have ourselves a very small knowledge of them, for the Catenæ are not in the habit of giving more than the name of the author whom they cite. Yet it may well be that some of the apparent discrepancies between the explanations given by Hilary and by Origen are due to the loss of the passage from Origen's Homily which would have agreed with Hilary, and to the survival of the different rendering given in the Commentary or the Enchiridion; some, no doubt, are also due to the carelessness and even dishonesty of the compilers of Catenæ in stating the authorship of their selections. But though it is possible that Hilary had access to all Origen's writings on the Psalms, there is no reason to suppose that he possessed a copy of his Hexapla. The only translation of the Old Testament which he names beside the Septuagint is that of Aquila; he is aware that there are others, but none save the Septuagint has authority or deserves respect, and his rare allusions to them are only such as we find in Origen's Homilies, and imply no such exhaustive knowledge of the variants as a possessor of the Hexapla would have.