Hilary - the Councils 110
110 We may be sure that Auxentius, a man of the world, would derive all possible advantage from this excessive vehemence of his adversary. In the debate itself, where Hilary would have the advantage not only of a sound cause, but of greater earnestness, we cannot be surprised that he Won the victory. Auxentius was probably indifferent at heart; Hilary had devoted his life and all his talents to the cause. but such a victory could have no results, beyond lowering Auxentius in public esteem and self-respect. It does not appear from his words or from those of Hilary, that the actual creed of Rimini was imported into the dispute. It was on it that Auxentius relied; if he did not expressly contradict its teens, the debate became a mere discussion concerning abstract truth. The legal standard of doctrine was no more affected by his unwilling concession than it had been a few years before by the numerous repudiations, prompted by Hilary and Eusebius, of the vote given at Rimini. The confession which Hilary annexed in triumph to his narrative was the mere incidental expression of a private opinion, which Auxentius, in his further plea, could afford to leave unnoticed.The commissioners no doubt made their report privately to the Emperor. We do not know its tenour, but from the sequel we may be sure that they gave it as their opinion that Auxentius was the lawful bishop of Milan. Some time passed before Valentinian spoke. Whether Hilary took any further steps to influence his decision is unknown; but we possess a memorial addressed ’to the most blessed and glorious Emperors Valentinian and Valens’ by Auxentius. The two brothers were, by mutual arrangement, each sovereign within his own dominion, but they ruled as colleagues, not as rivals; and Auxeiltius must have taken courage from the thought that it would seem unnatural and impolitic for the elder to seize this first opportunity of proclaiming his dissent from the cherished convictions of the younger, by degrading one of the very school which his brother delighted to honour. For what had been proposed was not the silent filling of a vacant place, but the public ejection of a bishop whose station was not much less prominent than that of Athanasius himself, and his ejection on purely theological grounds. Constantius himself had rarely been so bold; his acts of oppression, as in Hilary’s case, were usually cloaked by some allegation of misconduct or: the victim’s part. But Auxentius had more than the character of Valens and political considerations on which to rely. In the forefront of his defence he put the Council of Rimini. This attack by Hilary and his friends was, according to him, the attempt of a handful of men to break up the unity attained by the labours of that great assembly of six hundred bishops141 . He declared his firm assent to all its decisions; every heresy that it had condemned he condemned. He sent with his address a copy of the Ac of the Council, and begged the Emptier to have them read to him. Its language would convince him that Hilary and Eusebius, bishops long deposed, were merely plotting universal schism. This, with his own account of the proceedings before the commission and a short statement of his belief, forms his appeal to the Emperor. It was composed with great skill, and was quite unanswerable. His actual possession of the see, the circumstances of the time, the very doctrine of the Church-for only a Council could undo what a Council had done-rendered his position unassailable. And if he was in the right, Hilary and his colleague were in the wrong. Nothing but success could have saved them from the humiliation. to which they were now subjected, of being expelled from Milan and bidden to return to their homes, while the Emperor publicly recognised Auxentius by receiving the Communion at his hands. Yet morally they had been in the right throughout. The strong legal position of Auxentius and the canons of that imposing Council of six hundred bishops behind which he screened himself had been obtained by delibrate fraudand oppression. He and his creed could not have, and did not deserve to have, any stability. Yet Valentinian was probably in the right, even in the interests of truth, in refusing to make a martyr of Auxentius. There would have been reprisals in the East, where the Catholic cause had far more to lose than had Arianism in the West; and general considerations of equity and policy must have inclined him to allow the Arian to pass the remainder of his days in peace. But we cannot wonder that Hilary failed to appreciate such reasons. He had thrown himself with all his heart into the attack, and risked in it his public credit as bishop and confessor and first of Western theologians. Hence his published account of the transaction is tinged with a pardonable shade of personal resentment. It was, indeed, necessary that he should issue a statement. The assault and the repulse were rendered conspicuous by time and place, and by the eminence of the persons engaged; and it was Hilary’s duty to see that the defeat which he had incurred brought no injury upon his cause. He therefore addressed a public letter ’to the beloved brethen who abide in the Faith of the fathers and repudiate the Arian heresy, the bishops and all their flocks.’ He begins by speaking of the blessings of peace, which the Christians of that day could neither enjoy nor promote, beset as they were by the forerunners of Antichrist, who boasted of the peace, in other words of the harmonious concurrence in blasphemy, which they had brought about. They bear themselves not as bishops of Christ but as priests of Antichrist. This is not random abuse (§ 2), but sober recognition of the fact, stated by St. John, that there are many Antichrists. For these men assume the cloak of piety, and pretend to preach the Gospel, with the one object of inducing others to deny Christ. It was ( 3) the misery and folly of the day that men endeavoured to promote the cause of God by human means and the favour of the world. Hilary asks bishops, who believe in their office, whether the Apostles had secular support when by their preaching they converted the greater part of mankind. They were not adorned with palace dignities; scourged and fettered, they sang their hymns. It was in obedience to no royal edict that Paul gathered a Church for Christ; he was exposed to public view in the theatre. Nero and Vespasian and Decius were no patrons of the Church; it was through their hatred that the truth had thriven. The Apostles laboured with their hands and worshipped in garrets and secret places, and in defiance of senate or monarch visited, it might be said, every village and every tribe. Yet it was these rebels who had. the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven; the more they were forbidden, the more they preached, and the power of God was made manifest. But now (§ 4) the Faith finds favour with men.
The Church seeks for secular support, and in so doing insults Christ by the implication that his support is insufficient. She in her turn holds out the threat of exile and prison. It was her endurance of these that drew men to her; now she imposes her faith by violence. She craves for favours at the hands of her communicants; once it was her consecration that she braved the threatenings of persecutors. Bishops in exile spread the Faith; now it is she that exiles bishops. She boasts that the world loves her; the world’s hatred was the evidence that she was Christ’s. The ruin is obvious which has fallen upon the Church. l he time of Antichrist, disguised as an angel of light, has come. 7–9) comes Hilary’s account of his proceedings at Milan, strongly colourecl by the intensity of his feelings. The Emperor’s first refusal to interfere with Auxentius is a ’command that the Church of the Milanese, which confesses that Christ is true God, of one divinity and substance with the Father, should be thrown into confusion under the pretext, and with the desire, of unity.’ The canons of Rimini are described as those of the Thracian fan Nicaea; Auxentius’ protest that he had never known Arius is met by the assertion that he had been ordained to the presbyterate in an Arian Church under George of Alexandria. Hilary refuses to discuss the Council of Rimini; it had been universally and righteously repudiated. His ejection from Milan, in spite of his protests that Auxentius was a liar and a renegade, is a revelation of the mystery of ungodliness. For Auxentius (eflrefls desire peace except with them who, following the doctrine of our fathers at Nicaea, shall make the Arians anathema and proclaim the true divinity of Christ.’These are the concluding words of Hilary’s last public utterance. We see him again giving an unreserved adhesion, in word as well as in heart, to the Nicene confession. It was the course dictated by policy as well as by conviction. His cautious language in earlier days had done good service to the Church in the East, and had made it easier for those who had compromised themselves at Rimini to reconcile themselves with him and with the truth for which he "stood. But by this time all whom he could wish to win ad given in their adhesion; Auxentius and the few who held with him, if suchthere were, were irreconcileable. They took their stand upon the Council of Rimini, and their opponents found in the doctrine of Nicaea the clear and uncompromising challenge which was necessary for effective warfare. But if Hilary’s doctrinal position is definite, his theory of the relations of church and State, if indeed his indignation allowed him to think of them, is obscure. An orthodox Emperor was upholding an Arian, and Hilary, while giving Valentinian credit for personal good faith, is as eager as in the worst days of Constantius for a severance. We must, however, remember that this manifesto, though it is the expression of a settled policy in the matter of doctrine, is in other respects the unguarded outpouring of an injured feeling. And here again we find the old perplexity of the ’inward evil.’ Auxentius is represented as in the church and outside it at the same time. He is an Antichrist, a devil, all that is evil; but Hilary is threatened and it is the Church that threatens, submission to an Arian is enforced and it is the church which enforces it142 . And if Auxentius had adhered to the confession which Hilary had induced him to sign, all objection to his episcopate would apparently have ceased. The time had not come, if it ever can come, for the solution of such problems. Meantime Hilary did his best, so far as words could do it, to brush aside the sophistries behind which Auxentius was defending himself The doctrine of Rimini is named that of Nicaea, in Thrace, where the discreditable and insignificant assembly met in which its terms were settled; the Church of Alexandria under the intruder George is frankly called Arian. It was an appeal to the future as well as an apology for himself. But certainly it could not move Valentinian, nor can Hilary have expected that it should. And, after all, Valentinian’s action was harmless, at least. By Hilary’s own confession, Auxentius had no influence for evil over his flock, and these proceedings must have warned him, if he needed the warning, that abstinence from aggressive Arianism was necessary if he would end his days in peace. The Emperor’s policy remained unchanged. At the Roman Council of the year 369 the Western bishops formally annulled the proceedings of Rimini, and so deprived Auxentius of his legal position. At the same time, as the logical consequence, they condemned him to deposition, but Valentinian refused to give effect to their sentence, and Auxentius remained bishop of Milan till his death in the year 374. He had outlived Hilary and Eusebius, and also Athanasius, the promoter of the last attack upon him; he had also outlived whatever Arianism there had been in Milan. His successor, St. Ambrose, had the enthusiastic support of his people in his conflicts with Arian princes. The Church could have gained little by Hilary’s success, and yet we cannot be sure that, in a broad sense, he failed.
(So resolute a bearing must have effectually strengthened the convictions of Valentinian and the fears of Auxentius.There remains one work of Hilary to be considered. This was a history of the Arian controversy in such of its aspects as had fallen under his own observation. We know from Jerome’s biography of Hilary that he wrote a book against Valens and Ursacius, containing an account of the Councils of Rimini and Seleucia. They had been his adversaries throughout his career, and had held their own against him. To them, at least as much as to Constantius, the overthrow of his Asiatic friends was due, and to them he owed the favour, which must have galled him, of permission to return to his diocese. Auxentius was one of their allies, and the failure of Hilary’s attack upon him made it clear that these men too, as subjects of Valentinian, were safe from merited deposition. Their worldly success was manifest; it was a natural and righteous task which Hilary undertook when he exposed their true character. It was clear that while Valens and Valentinian lived-and they were in early middle life-there would be an armed peace within the Western Church; that the overthrow of bishop by bishop in theological strife would be forbidden. The pen was the only weapon left to Hilary, and he used it to give an account of events from the time of that Council of Arles, in the year 353, which was the beginning for Gaul of the Arian conflict. He followed its course, with especial reference to Ursacius and Valens, until the year 367, or at least the end of 366; the latest incident recorded in the fragments which we possess must have happened within a few months of his death. The work was less a history than a collection of documents strung together by an explanatory narrative. It is evident that it was not undertaken as a literary effort; its aim is not the information of future gent rations, but the solemn indictment at the bar of public opinion of living offenders. It must have been, when complete, a singularly businesslike production, with no graces of style to render it attractive and no generalisations to illuminate its page,. Ha 1 the whole b en preserved, we should have had a complete record of Hilary’s life; as it is, we have thirteen valuable fragments143 , to which we owe a considerable part of our general knowledge of the time, though they tell us comparatively little of his own career. ’The commencement of the work has happily survived, and from it we learn the spirit in which he wrote. He begins (Fragment 1,§§ I, 2) with an exposition of St. Paul’s doctrine of faith, hope, and love. He testifies, with the Apostle, that the last is the greatest. The inseparable bond, of which he is conscious, of God’s love for him and his for God, has detached him from worldly interests. He, like others (§ 3), might have enjoyed ease and prosperity and imperial friendship, and have been, as they were, a bishop only in name and a burden upon the Church. But the condition imposed was that of tampering with Gospel truths, wilful blindness to oppression and the condonation of tyranny. Public opinion, ill-informed and unused to theological subtleties, would not have observed the change. But it would have been a cowardly declension from the love of Christ to which he could not stoop. He ft feels (§ 4) the difficulty of the task he undertakes. The devil and the heretics had done their worst, multitudes had been terrified into denial of their convictions. The story was complicated by the ingenuity in evil of the plotters, and evidence was difficult to obtain. The scene of intrigue could not be clearly delineated, crowded as it was with the busy figures of bishops and officers, putting every engine into motion against men of apostolic mind. The energy with which they propagated slander was the measure of its falsehood. They had implanted in the public mind the belief that the exiled bishops had suffered merely for refusing to condemn Athanasius; that they were inspired by obstinacy, not by principle. Out of reverence for theEmperor, whose throne is from God (§ 5), Hilary will not comment upon his usurped jurisdiction over a bishop, nor on the manner in which it was exercised; nor yet on the injustice whereby bishops were forced to pass sentence upon the accused in his absence. In this volume he will give the true causes of trouble, in comparison of which such tyranny, grievous though it be, is of small account. Once before-this, no doubt, was at Beziers-he had spoken his mind upon the matter. But that was a hasty and unprepared utterance, delivered to an audience as eager to silence him as he was to speak. He will, therefore (§ 6), give a full and consecutive narrative of events from the council of Arles onwards, with such an account of the question there debated as will shew the true merits of Paulinus, and make it clear that nothing less shall the Faith was at stake. He ends his introduction (§ 7) by warning the reader that this is a work which needs to be seriously studied. The multitude of letters and of synods which he must adduce will merely confuse and disgust him, if he do not bear in mind the dates and the persons, and the exact sense in which terms are used. Finally, he reminds him of the greatness of the subject. This is the knowledge of God, the hope of eternity; it is the duty of a Christian to acquire such knowledge as shall enable him to form and to maintain his own conclusions. The excerpts from the work have evidently been made by some one who was interested in Italy and Illyricum rather than in Gaul, and thought that the documents were more important than the narrative. Hence Hilary’s character is as little illustrated as the events of his life. Nor can the date of the work be precisely fixed. It is clear that he had already taken up his final attitude of uncompromising adherence to the Nicene Symbol; that is to say, he began to write after all the waverers had been reclaimed from contact with Arianism. He must, therefore, have written the book in his latest years; and it is manifest that after he had brought the narrative down to the time of his return from exile, he continued to add to it from time to time even till the end of his life. For the last incident recorded in the Fragments, the secession from the party of Valens and Ursacius of an old and important any, Germinius of Simlium, must have come to lids knowledge very shortly before his death. He had had little success in his warfare with error; if he and his friends had held their own, they had not succeeded either in synod or at court in overthrowing their enemies; and it is pleasant to think that this gleam of comfort came to brighten the last days of Hilary144 .
The news must have reached Gaul early in the year 367, and no subsequent event of importance can have come to his knowledge.But though we have reached the term of Hilary’s life, there remains one topic on which something must be said, his relation to St. Martin of Tours. Martin, born in Pannonia, the country of Valens and Ursacius, but converted from paganism under Catholic influences, was attracted by Hilary, already a bishop, and spent some years in his society before the outbreak of the Arian strife in Gaul. Hilary, we are told, wished to ordain him a priest, but at his urgent wish refrained, and admitted him instead to the humble rank of an exorcist. At an uncertain date, which cannot have long preceded Hilary’s exile, he felt himself moved to return to his native province in order to convert his parents, who were still pagans. He succeeded in the case of his mother and of many of his countrymen. But he was soon compelled to abandon his labours, for he had, as a true disciple of Hilary, regarded it as his duty to oppose the Arianism dominant in the province. Opposition to the bishops on the part of a man holding so low a station in the Church was a civil as well as an ecclesiastical offence, and Martin can have expected no other treatment than that which he received, of scourging and expulsion from the province. Hilary was by this time in exile, and Martin turned to Milan, where the heresy of the intruder Auxentius called forth his protests, which were silenced by another expulsion. He next retired to a small island off the Italian coast, where he lived in seclusion till he heard of Hilary’s return. He hastened to Rome, so Fortunatus tells us, to meet his friend, hut missed him on the way; and followed him at once to Poitiers. There Hilary gave him a site near the city, on which he founded the first monastery in that region, over which he presided for the rest of Hilary’s life and for four years after his death. In the year 371 he was consecrated bishop of Tours, and so continued till his death twenty-five years later. It is clear that Martin was never able to exert any influence over the mind or action of Hilary, whose interests were in an intellectual sphere above his reach. But the courage and tenacity with which Martin held and preached the Faith was certainly inspired to some considerable extent by admiration of Hilary and confidence in his teaching. And the joy which Hilary expresses, as we have seen, in his later Homilies on the Psalms over the rapid spread of Christianity in Gaul, was no doubt occasioned by the earlier triumphs of Martin among the peasantry. The two men were formed each to be the complement of the other. It was the work of Hilary to prove with cogent clearness to educated Christians, that reason as well as piety dictated an acceptance of the Catholic Faith; the mission of Martin was to those who were neither educated nor Christian, and his success in bringing the Faith home to the lives and consciences of the pagan masses marks him out as one of the greatest among the preachers of the Gospel. Both of them actively opposed Arianism, and both suffered in the conflict. But the confessorship of neither had any perceptible share in promoting the final victory of truth. Their true glory is that they were fellow-labourers equally successful in widely separate parts of the same field; and Hilary is entitled, beyond the honour due to his own achievements, to a share in that of St. Martin, whose merits he discovered and fostered.
We have now reached the end of Hilary’s life. Sulpicius Severus145 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).
Chapter II.—The Theology of St. Hilary of Pottiers.
This Chapter offers no more Than a tentative and imperfect outline of the theology of St. Hilary; it is an essay, not a monograph. Little attempt will be made to estimate the value of his opinions from the point of view of modern thought; little will be said about his relation to earlier and contemporary thought, a subject on which he is habitually silent, and nothing about the after fate of his speculations. Yet the task, thus narrowed, is not without its difficulties. Much more attention, it is true, has been paid to Hilary’s theology than to the history of his life, and the student cannot presume to dispense with the assistance of the books already written146 . But they cannot release him from the necessity of collecting evidence for himself from n the pages of Hilary, and of forming his own judgment upon it, for none of them can claim completeness and they differ widely as to the views which Hilary held. There is the further difficulty that a brief statement of a theologian’s opinions must be systematic. But Hilary has abstained perhaps deliberately, from constructing a system ; the scattered points of his teaching must be gathered from writings composed at various times and with various purposes. The part of his work which was, no doubt, most useful in his own day, his summary in the De Trinitate of the defence against Arianism, is clear and well arranged, but it bears less of the stamp of Hilary’s genius than any other of his writings. His characteristic thoughts are scattered over the pages of this great controversial treatise, where the exigencies of his immediate argument often deny him full scope for their development; or else they must be sought in his Commentary on St. Matthew, where they find incidental expression in the midst of allegorical exegesis; or again, amid the mysticism and exhortation of the Homilies on the Psalms. It is in some of these last that the Christology of Hilary is most completely stated; but the Homilies were intended for a general audience, and are unsystematic in construction and almost conversational in tone. Hilary has never worked out his thoughts in consistent theological form, and many of the most original among them have failed to attract the attention which they would have received had they been presented in such a shape as that of the later books of the De Trinate.
This desultory mode of composition had its advantages in life and warmth of present interest, and gives to Hilary’s writings a value as historical documents which a formal and comprehensive treatise would have lacked. But it seriously increases the difficulty of the present undertaking. It was inevitable that Hilary’s method, though he is a singularly consistent thinker, should sometimes lead him into self-contradiction and sometimes leave his meaning in obscurity. In such cases probabilities must be balanced, with due regard to the opinion of former theologians who have studied his writings, and a definite conclusion must be given, though space cannot be found for the considerations upon which it is based. But though the writer may be satisfied that he has, on the whole, fairly represented Hilary’s belief, it is impossible that a summary of doctrine can be an adequate reflection of a great teacher’s mind. Proportions are altogether changed; a doctrine once stated and then dismissed must be set down on the same scale as another to which the author recurs again and again with obvious interest. The inevitable result is an apparent coldness and stiffness and excess of Method which does Hilary an injustice both as a thinker and as a writer. In the interests of orderly sequence not only must he be represented as sometimes more consistent than he really is, but the play of thought, the undeveloped suggestions, often brilliant in their originality, the striking expression given to familiar truths, must all be sacrificed, and with the great part of the pleasure and profit to be derived from his writings. For their are two conclusions which the careful student will certainly reach; the one that every statement and argument will be in hearty and scrupulous consonance with the Creeds, the other that, within this limit, he must not be surprised at any ingenuity or audacity of logic or exegesis in explanation and illustration of recognised truths, and especially in the speculative connection of one truth with another. But the evidence that Hilary’s heart, as well as his reason, was engaged in the search and defence of truth must be sought, where it will be abundantly found, in the translations given in this volume. ’line present chapter only purposes to set out, in a very prosaic manner, the conclusions at which his speculative genius arrived, working as it did by the methods of strict logic in the spirit of eager loyalty to the Faith.
In his effort to render a reason for his belief Hilary’s constant appeal is to Scripture; and he avails himself freely of the thoughts of earlier theologians. But he never makes himself their slave; he is not the avowed adherent of any school, and never cites the names of those whose arguments he adopts. These he adjusts to his own system of thought, and presents for acceptance, not on authority, hut on their own merits. For Scripture, however, he has an unbounded reverence. Everything that he believes, save the fundamental truth of Theism, of which man has an innate consciousness, being unable to gaze upon the heavens without the conviction that God exists and has His home there147 , is directly derived from Holy Scripture. Scripture for Hilary means the Septuagint for the Old Testament, the Latin for the New. He was, as we saw, no Hebrew Scholar, and had small respect either for the versions which competed with the Septuagint or for the Latin rendering of the old Testament, but there is little evidence148 that he was dissatisfied with the Latin of the New; in fact, in one instance, whether through habitual contentment with his Latin or through momentary carelessness in verifying the sense, he bases an argument on a thoroughly false interpretation149 . Of his relation to Origen and the literary aspects of his exegetical work, something has been said in the former chapter. Here we must speak of his use of Scripture as the source of truth’, and of the methods he employs to draw out its meaning.
In Hilary’s eyes the two Testaments form one homogeneous revelation, of equal value throughout150 , and any part of the whole may be used in explanation of any other part. The same title of beatissimus is given to Daniel and to St. Paul when both are cited in Comm. in Mt 25,3; indeed, he and others of his day seem to have felt that the Saints of the Old Covenant were as near to themselves as those of the New. Not many years bad passed since Christians were accustom d to encourage themselves to martyrdom, in default of well-known heroes of their own faith , by the example of Daniel and his companions, or of the Seven Maccabees and their Mother. But Scripture is not only harmonious throughout, as Origen had taught; it is also never otiose. It never repeats itself, and a significance must be sought not only in the smallest differences of language, but also in the order in which apparent synonyms occur151 ; in fact, every detail, and every sense in which every detail may be interpreted, is a matter for profitable enquiry152 . Hence, the text of Scripture not only bears, but demands, the most strict and literal interpretation. Hilary’s explanation of the words, ’My soul is sorrowful even unto death,’ in Tract. in Ps 141,efmqefmrefmsefmtefmuefmvefmwefmxefmy . His confidence in their work, which is not exceeded by that of St. Augustine, encourages him to draw lessons from the differences between the Hebrew and theSeptuagint titles of the Pslams. For instance, Psalm cxlii. has been furnished in the Septuagint with a title which attributes it to David when pursued by Absalom. The contents of the Psalm are appropriate neither to the circumstances nor to the date. But this does not justify us in ignoring the title. We must regard the fact that a wrong connection is given to the Pslam as a warning to ourselves not to attempt to discover its historical position, but confine ourselves to its spiritual sense. And this is not all. Another Psalm, the third, is assigned in the Hebrew to the same king in the same distress. But, though this attribution is certainly correct, here also we must follow the leading of the Septuagint, which was fell to give a wrong title to one Psalm lest we should attach importance to the correct title of another. In both cases we must fix our attention not On the afflictions of David, but on the sorrows of Christ. Thus, negatively if not positively , the Septuagint must it guide our judgement162 . But Hilary often goes even further, and ventures upon a purely subjective interpretation, which sometimes gives useful insight into the modes of thought of Gaul h1 the fourth century. For instance, he is thoroughly classical in taking it for granted that the Psalmist’s words, ’I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills,’ cannot refer to the natural feature; that he can never mean the actual mountains bristling with woods, the naked rocks and pathless precipices and frozen snows163 . And even Gregory the Great could not surpass the prosaic grotesqueness with which Hilary declares it impious to suppose that God would feed the young ravens’ foul carrion birds164 ; and that the lilies of the Sermon on the Mount must be explained away, because they wear no clothing, and because, as a matter of fact, it is quite possible for men to be more brightly attired than they165 . Examples of such reasoning, more or less extravagant, might be multiplied from Hilary’s exegetical writings; passages in which no allowance is made for Oriental imagery, for poetry or for rhetoric166 .
But though Hilary throughout his whole period of authorship uses the mystical method of interpretation, never doubting that everywhere in Scripture there is a spiritual meaning which can he elicited, and that whatever sense, consistent with truth otherwise ascertained, can be extracted from it, may be extracted, yet there is a manifest increase in sobriety in his later as compared with his earlier writings. From the riotous profusion of mysticisms in the commentary on St. Matthew, where, for instance, ever) character and detail in the incident of St. Jn Baptist’s death becomes a symbol, it is a great advance to the almost Athanasian cautiousness in exegesis of the De Trinitate; though even here, especially in the early books which deal with the Old Testament, there is some extravagance and a very liberal employment of the method167 . His reasons, when he gives them, are those adduced in his other writings; the inappropriateness of the words to the time when they were written, or the plea that reverence or reason bids us penetrate behind the letter. His increasing caution is due to no distrust of the principle of mysticism.
Hilary - the Councils 110