We have now reached the end of Hilary's life. Sulpicius Severus [145] tells us that he died in the sixth year from his return. He had probably reached Poitiers early in the year 361; we have seen that the latest event recorded in the fragments of his history must have come to his knowledge early in 367. There is no reason to doubt that this was the conclusion of the history, and no consideration suggests that Sulpicius was wrong in his date. We may therefore assign the death of Hilary, with considerable confidence, to the year 367, and probably to its middle portion. Of the circumstances of his death nothing is recorded. This is one of the many signs that his contemporaries did not value him at his true worth. To them he must have been the busy and somewhat unsuccessful man of affairs; their successors in the next generation turned away from him and his works to the more attractive writings and more commanding characters of Ambrose and Augustine. Yet certainly no firmer purpose or more convinced faith, perhaps no keener intellect has devoted itself to the defence and elucidation of truth than that of Hilary: and it may be that Christian thinkers in the future will find an inspiration of new and fruitful thoughts in his writings.
[1] An actual dependence on Gregory of Nyssa has sometimes been ascribed to Hilary. But Gregory was surely too young for this. He may himself have borrowed from Hilary; but more probably both derived their common element from Eastern writers like Basil of Ancyra.
[2] This is certainly the best translation of Tractatus; the word is discussed on a later page.
[3] The latest date which I have seen assigned for his birth is 320, by Fechtrup, in Wetzer-Welte's Encyclopædia. But this is surely inconsistent with his styling Ursacius and Valens, in his first Epistle to Constantine, ignorant and unprincipled youths.' This was written about the year 355 before Hilary knew much of the Arian controversy or the combatants, and was ludicrously inappropriate, for Ursacius and Valens were elderly men. He had found the words either in some of Athanasius' writings or in the records of the Council of Sardica, and borrowed them without enquiry. He could not have done so had he been only some thirty-five years of age; at fifty-five they are natural enough.
[4] It is impossible to agree with Zingerle (Comment. Wölfflin. p. 218) that Hilary was under the necessity of using a Greek and Latin Glossary. Such a passage as Tract. in Ps. cxxxviii. 43, to which he appeals, shows rather the extent than the smallness of Hilary's knowledge of Greek. What he frankly confesses, there as elsewhere, is ignorance of Hebrew. The words of Jerome (Ep. 34, 3 f.) about Hilary's friend, the presbyter Heliodorus, to whom he used to refer for explanations of Origen on the Psalms, are equally incapable of being employed to prove Hilary's defective Greek. Heliodorus knew Hebrew, and Hilary for want of Hebrew found Origen's notes on the Hebrew text difficult to understand, and for this reason, according to Jerome, used to consult his friend; not because he was unfamiliar with Greek.
[5] His vocabulary is very poorly treated in the dictionaries; one of the many signs of the neglect into which he has fallen. There are at least twenty-four words in the Tractatus super Psalmos which are omitted in the last edition of Georges' lexicon, and these good Latin words, not technical terms invented for purposes of argument. Among the most interesting is quotiensque for quotienscumque; an unnoticed use is the frequent cum quando for quandoquidem. Of Hilary's other writings there is as yet no trustworthy text; from them the list of new words could at least be doubled.
[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.
[10] Yet he strangely reproaches his Old Latin Bible with the use of nimis for ualde, 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.
[11] E.g. Trin. v. 11, vii. 14, ix. 4.
[12] Trin. ii. 22.
[13] Trin. x. 14. This is a very remarkable allusion. Celsus, vii. præf., confidently assumes that all surgical operation must be painful.
[14] Comm. in Matt. xxi. 8.
[15] Trin. xi. 15.
[16] Tract. in Ps. cxviii. Ain. 16; it is from Plin. N.H. 37, 32.
[17] Tract. in Ps. lvii. 3. It suggests Virgil, Ovid, Silius, and others.
[18] Trin. vii. 3.
[19] Ep. 70, 5, Vir. Ill. 100.
[20] Tract. in Ps. i. 7, lxi. 2, lxiii. 5, &c. As usual, Hilary does not name his opponents.
[21] Hilary's legendary daughter Abra, to whom he is said to have written a letter printed in the editions of his works, is now generally abandoned by the best authorities, e.g. by Fechtrup, the writer, in Wetzer-Welte's Encyclopædia, of the best short life of Hilary.
[22] De Doctr. Chr. ii. 40.
[23] Trin. viii. 13-17.
[24] This is on the assumption, which seems probable, that Irenæus was not yet translated from the Greek. He certainly influenced Tertullian, and through him Hilary; and his doctrine of the recapitulation of mankind in Christ, reappearing as it does in Hilary, though not in Tertullian, suggests that our writer had made an independent study of Irenæus. Even if the present wretched translation existed, he would certainly read the Greek.
[25] Dr. Bigg's Bampton Lectures upon them are full of hints for the student of Hilary.
[26] Vir. Ill. 100.
[27] E.g. Tract. in Ps. cxxix. 4 f.
[28] E.g. Trin. ix. 6.
[29] Comm. in Matt. v. 1. It may be mentioned that the chapters of the Commentary do not coincide with those of the Gospel.
[30] Comm. in Matt. xvi. 4, theotetam quam deitatem Latini nuncupant, xxvi. 5, theotetam quam deitatem nuncupamus. The strange accusative theotetam makes it the more probable that we have here a specimen of the primitive Greek vocabulary of Latin Christendom of which so few examples, e.g. Baptism and Eucharist, have survived. Cyprian had probably the chief share in destroying it; but the subject has never been examined as it deserves.
[31] So especially xii. 18. There is similarly a possible allusion to Marcellus' teaching in xi. 9, which, however, may equally well be a reminiscence of some cognate earlier heresy.
[32] Maffei's Introduction, §15.
[33] xxxi. 3, penes quem erat antequam nasceretur
[34] See Ebert, Litteratur des Mittelalters, i. 139.
[35] Syn. 91; regeneratus pridem et in episcopatu aliquantisper manens. The renderings long ago' and for some time' in this translation seem rather too strong.
[36] E.g. Trin. viii. 1. The bishop is a prince of the Church.
[37] Sacerdos in Hilary, as in all writers till near the end of the fourth century, means bishop' always.
[38] By Dr. Robertson of King's College, London. This, and Professor Gwatkin's Studies of Arianism, are the best English accounts.
[39] Syn. 91.
[40] The Apologia contra Arianos, p. 100 ff. in Dr. Robertson's translation.
[41] Origines du culte chrétien, p. 88.
[42] Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 134.
[43] Ib., p. 28.
[44] Trin. vii. 3.
[45] There is much more evidence to this effect in Reuter, Augustinische Studien, p. 182 f. It was probably due to jealousy between West and East; cf. the way in which John of Jerusalem ignored the African decision in Pelagius' case. But the West was ignorant, as well as jealous, of the East. Even in his last years, after his sojourn in Asia Minor, Hilary believed that Jerusalem was, as had been prophesied, an uninhabited ruin; Tr. in Ps. cxxiv. § 2, cxxxi. §§ 18, 23, cxlvi. § 1.
[46] Chron. ii. 39.
[47] Syn. 91.
[48] This sparing of Marcellus, in the case of a Western like Hilary, may have been a concession to the incapacity of the West, e.g. Julius of Rome and the Council of Sardica, to see his error. But this is not so likely as that it was a falling in with the general policy of Athanasius, as was the rare mention of the homoousion; cf. Gwatkin, op. cit. 42 n. Hilary was singularly independent of Western opinion, and his whole aim was to win the East.
[49] No such examination seems to have been made as that to which Reuter in his admirable Augustinische Studien has subjected some of the thoughts of St. Augustine.
[50] Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, ii. p. 243 n. (ed. 3). Hilary is, making all allowance for dependence on Athanasius, an independent thinker, who has, indeed, excelled the bishop of Alexandria as a theologian.'
[51] Hort, Two Dissertations, p. 27.
[52] Trin. viii. 40.
[53] Cf. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 130.
[54] Ib., p. 159. It would not be fair to judge Hilary by the de Synodis alone. The would-be diplomatist, in his eagerness to bring about a reconciliation, is not quite just either to the facts or to his own feelings.
[55] Chron. ii. 39.
[56] Syn. 32.
[57] Ib. 78.
[58] Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 163.
[59] Sulp. Sev. Chron. ii. 42.
[60] Sulp. Sev. ii. 42, iuxta ea, quæ Nicææ erant a patribus conscripta.
[61] Sulpicius Severus, Chron. ii. 45, says that he addressed at this time three petitions to the Emperor. This is, of course, not impossible; but it is more likely that he had in his mind the two appeals, that before the exile and the present one, and the Invective.
[62] Cf. Trin. ii. 13 ff.
[63] Reading habet for habeo, but the text is obscure.
[64] It is true that the Nicene Council is not named here, but the allusion is obvious. The Conservatives had actually objected to the novelty of the Creed; and the Arians had, as Hilary goes on to say, used the pretext of novelty to destroy the Gospel. The Council of Nicæa was thirty-five years before, and is very accurately described as a Synod of our fathers.'
[65] Cf. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 182.
[66] Bodies lifted up without support, women hanging by the feet without their garments falling about their face.' The other references which the Benedictine editor gives for this curious statement are evidently borrowed from this of Hilary. From the time of the first Apologists exorcism is, of course, constantly appealed to as an evidence of the truth of Christianity, but usually, in somewhat perfunctory language, and without the assertion that the writer has himself seen what he records. Hilary himself does not profess to be an eye-witness.
[67] This is a telling point. Constantius had been notoriously unsuccessful in his Persian Wars.
[68] The text is corrupt, but it is not probable that Hilary means that Paulinus was first relegated to Phrygia and then to some pagan frontier district, if such there was. It is quite in Hilary's present vein to assume that because the Montanists were usually called after the province of their origin, in which they were still numerous, therefore all Phrygians were heretics and outside the pale of Christendom. If hordeo be read for horreo the passage is improved. Paulinus had either to be satisfied with rations of barley bread, the food of slaves, or else to beg from the heretics. Such treatment is very improbable, when we remember Hilary's own comfort in exile. But passions were excited, and men believed the worst of their opponents. We may compare the falsehoods in Walker's Sufferings of the Clergy, and in Neal's Puritans, which were eagerly believed in and after our own Civil War.
[69] Hilary had previously (§ 27) asserted that the Apostle has taught us to communicate with the tombs of the saints.' This is an allusion to Rom. xii. 13, with the strange reading tombs' for necessities' (mneiais for chreiais), which has, in fact, considerable authority in the mss. of the New Testament and in the Latin Christian writers. How far this reading may have been the cause, how far the effect, of the custom of celebrating the Eucharist at the tombs of Martyrs, it is impossible to say. The custom was by this time more than a century old, and one of its purposes was to maintain the sense of unity with the saints of the past. Constantius, by denying their doctrine, had made himself their enemy.
[70] Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 244.
[71] Rufinus, Hist. Eccl. i. 30, 31, and, dependent on him, Socrates iii. 10 and Sozomen v. 13.
[72] Cf. Dr. Bright, Waymarks, p. 217. n.
[73] Hist. Eccl. i. 30, 31.
[74] Op. cit. i. 31. The recantation of Liberius and of the Italian bishops may be read in Hilary's 12th Fragment.
[75] E.g. Trin. i. 17.
[76] Similarly in iv. 2 he alludes to the first book, meaning that which we call first, though, as we saw, in v. 3 he speaks of our fifth as his second.
[77] i.e. in the passage introduced as a connecting link with the books which now precede it, when the whole work was put into its present shape.
[78] E.g. ix. 31 to iii. 12, ix. 43 to vii. 17.