But the incarnate Christ is as truly man as He is truly God. We have seen that He is created in the body'; and Hilary constantly insists that His humanity is neither fictitious nor different in kind from ours [216] . We must therefore consider what is the constitution of man. He is, so Hilary teaches, a physically composite being; the elements of which his body is composed are themselves lifeless, and man himself is never fully alive [217] . According to this physiology, the father is the author of the child's body, the maternal function being altogether subsidiary. It would seem that the mother does nothing more than protect the embryo, so giving it the opportunity of growth, and finally bring the child to birth [218] . And each human soul is separately created, like the universe, out of nothing. Only the body is engendered; the soul, wherein the likeness of man to God consists, has a nobler origin, being the immediate creation of God [219] . Hilary does not hold, or at least does not attach importance to, the tripartite division of man; for the purposes of his philosophy we consist of soul and body. We may now proceed to consider his theory of the Incarnation. This is based upon the Pauline conception of the first and second Adam. Each of these was created, and the two acts of creation exactly correspond. Christ, the Creator, made clay into the first Adam, who therefore had an earthly body. He made Himself into the second Adam, and therefore has a heavenly Body. To this end He descended from heaven and entered into the Virgin's womb. For, in accordance with Hilary's principle of interpretation [220] , the word Spirit' must not be regarded as necessarily signifying the Holy Ghost, but one or other of the Persons of the Trinity as the context may require; and in this case it means the Son, since the question is of an act of creation, and He, and none other, is the Creator. Also, correspondence between the two Adams would be as effectually broken were the Holy Ghost the Agent in the conception, as it would be were Christ's body engendered and not created. Thus He is Himself not only the Author but (if the word may be used) the material of His own body [221] ; the language of St. John, that the Word became flesh, must be taken literally. It would be insufficient to say that the Word took, or united Himself to, the flesh [222] . But this creation of the Second Adam to be true man is not our only evidence of His humanity. We have seen that in Hilary's judgment the mother has but a secondary share in her offspring. That share, whatever it be, belongs to the Virgin; she contributed to His growth and to His coming to birth everything which it is the nature of her sex to impart [223] .' But though Christ is constantly said to have been born of the Virgin, He is habitually called the Son of Man,' not the Son of the Virgin, nor she the Mother of God. Such language would attribute to her an activity and an importance inconsistent with Hilary's theory. For no portion of her substance, he distinctly says, was taken into the substance of her Son's human body [224] ; and elsewhere he argues that St. Paul's words made of a woman' are deliberately chosen to describe Christ's birth as a creation free from any commingling with existing humanity [225] . But the Virgin has an essential share in the fulfilment of prophecy. For though Christ without her co-operation could have created Himself as Man, yet He would not have been, as He was fore-ordained to be, the Son of Man [226] . And since He holds that the Virgin performs every function of a mother, Hilary avoids that Valentinian heresy according to which Christ passed through the Virgin like water through a pipe [227] ,' for He was Himself the Author of a true act of creation within her, and, when she had fulfilled her office, was born as true flesh. Again, Hilary's clear sense of the eternal personal pre-existence of the Word saves him from any contact with the Monarchianism combated by Hippolytus and Tertullian, which held that the Son was the Father under another aspect. Indeed, so secure does he feel himself that he can venture to employ Monarchian theories, now rendered harmless, in explanation of the mysteries of the Incarnation. For we cannot fail to see a connection between his opinions and theirs; and it might seem that, confident in his wider knowledge, he has borrowed not only from the arguments used by Tertullian against the Monarchian Praxeas, but also from those which Tertullian assigns to the latter. Such reasonings, we know, had been very prevalent in the West; and Hilary's use of certain of them, in order to turn their edge by showing that they were not inconsistent with the fundamental doctrines of the Faith [228] , may indicate that Monarchianism was still a real danger.
Thus the Son becomes flesh, and that by true maternity on the Virgin's part. But man is more than flesh; he is soul as well, and it is the soul which makes him man instead of matter. The soul, as we saw, is created by a special act of God at the beginning of the separate existence of each human being; and Christ, to be true man and not merely true flesh, created for Himself the human soul which was necessary for true humanity. He had borrowed from the Apollinarians, consciously no doubt, their interpretation of one of their favourite passages, The Word became flesh'; here again we find an argument of heretics rendered harmless and adopted by orthodoxy. For the strange Apollinarian denial to Christ of a human soul, and therefore of perfect manhood, is not only expressly contradicted [229] , but repudiated on every page by the contrary assumption on which all Hilary's arguments are based. Christ, then, is perfect man [230] , of a reasonable soul and Human flesh subsisting,' for Whom the Virgin has performed the normal functions of maternity. But there is one wide and obvious difference between Hilary's mode of handling the matter and that with which we are familiar. His view concerning the mother's office forbids his laying stress upon our Lord's inheritance from her. Occasionally, and without emphasis, he mentions our Lord as the Son of David, or otherwise introduces His human ancestry [231] , but he never dwells upon the subject. He neither bases upon this ancestry the truth, nor deduces from it the character, of Christ's humanity. Such is Hilary's account of the facts of the Incarnation. In his teaching there is no doubt error as well as defect, but only in the mode of explanation, not in the doctrine explained. It will help us to do him justice if we may compare the theories that have been framed concerning another great doctrine, that of the Atonement, and remember that the strangely diverse speculations of Gregory the Great and of St. Anselm profess to account for the same facts, and that, so far as definitions of the Church are concerned, we are free to accept one or other, or neither, of the rival explanations.
Christ, then, Who had been perfect God from eternity, became perfect Man by His self-wrought act of creation. Thus there was an approximation between God and man; man was raised by God, Who humbled Himself to meet Him. On the one hand the Virgin was sanctified in preparation for her sacred motherhood [232] ; on the other hand there was a condescension of the Son to our low estate. The key to this is found by Hilary in the language of St. Paul. Christ emptied Himself of the form of God and took the form of a servant; this is a revelation as decisive as the same Apostle's words concerning the first and the second Adam. The form of God, wherein the Son is to the Father as the exact image reflected in a mirror, the exact impression taken from a seal, belongs to Christ's very being. He could not detach it from Himself, if He would, for it is the property of God to be eternally what He is; and, as Hilary constantly reminds us, the continuous existence of creation is evidence that there had been no break in the Son's divine activity in maintaining the universe which He had made. While He was in the cradle He upheld the worlds [233] . Yet, in some real sense, Christ emptied Himself of this form of God [234] . It was necessary that He should do so if manhood, even the sinless manhood created by Himself for His own Incarnation, was to co-exist with Godhead in His one Person [235] . This is stated as distinctly as is the correlative fact that He retained and exercised the powers and the majesty of His nature. Thus it is clear that, outside the sphere of His work for men, the form and the nature of God remained unchanged in the Son; while within that sphere the form, though not the nature, was so affected that it could truly be said to be laid aside. But when we come to Hilary's explanation of this process, we can only acquit him of inconsistency in thought by admitting the ambiguity of his language. In one group of passages he recognises the self-emptying, but minimises its importance; in another he denies that our Lord could or did empty Himself of the form of God. And again, his definitions of the word form' are so various as to be actually contradictory. Yet a consistent sense, and one exceedingly characteristic of Hilary, can be derived from a comparison of his statements [236] ; and in judging him we must remember that we have no systematic exposition of his views, but must gather them not only from his deliberate reasonings, but sometimes from homiletical amplifications of Scripture language, composed for edification and without the thought of theological balance, and sometimes from incidental sayings, thrown out in the course of other lines of argument. To the minimising statements belongs his description of the evacuation as a change of apparel [237] ,' and his definition of the word form' as meaning no more than face' or appearance [238] ,'as also his insistence from time to time upon the permanence of this form in Christ, not merely in His supramundane relations, but as the Son of Man [239] . On the other hand Hilary expressly declares that the concurrence of the two forms [240] ' is impossible, they being mutually exclusive. This represents the higher form, that of God, as something more than a dress or appearance which could be changed or masked; and stronger still is the language used in the Homily on Psalm xviii. There (§ 4) he speaks of Christ being exhausted of His heavenly nature, this being used as a synonym for the form of God, and even of His being emptied of His substance. But it is probable that the Homily has descended to us, without revision by its author, in the very words which the shorthand writer took down. This mention of substance' is unlike Hilary's usual language, and the antithesis between the substance which the Son had not, because He had emptied Himself of it, and the substance which He had, because He had assumed it, is somewhat infelicitously expressed. The term must certainly not be taken as the deliberate statement of Hilary's final opinion, still less as the decisive passage to which his other assertions must be accommodated; but it is at least clear evidence that Hilary, in the maturity of his thought, was not afraid to state in the strongest possible language the reality and completeness of the evacuation. The reconciliation of these apparently contradictory views concerning Christ's relation to the form of God can only be found in Hilary's idea of the Incarnation as a dispensation,' or series of dispensations. The word and the thought are borrowed through Tertullian [241] from the Greek economy'; but in Hilary's mind the notion of Divine reserve has grown till it has become, we might almost say, the dominant element of the conception. This self-emptying is a dispensation [242] , whereby the incarnate Son of God appears to be, what He is not, destitute of the form of God. For this form is the glory of God, concealed by our Lord for the purposes of His human life, yet held by Hilary, to a greater extent, perhaps, than by any other theologian, to have been present with Him on earth. In words which have a wider application, and must be considered hereafter, Hilary speaks of Christ as emptying Himself and hiding Himself within Himself [243] .' Concealment has a great part to play in Hilary's theories, and is in this instance the only explanation consistent with his doctrinal position [244] .
Thus the Son made possible the union of humanity with Himself. He shrank from God into man [245] ' by an act not only of Divine power, but of personal Divine will. He Who did this thing could not cease to be what He had been before; hence His very deed in submitting Himself to the change is evidence of His unchanged continuity of existence [246] . And furthermore, His assumption of the servant's form was not accomplished by a single act. His wearing of that form was one continuous act of voluntary self-repression [247] , and the events of His life on earth bear frequent witness to His possession of the powers of God.