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TOPIC: Post-Nicene Fathers Vol 09 (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 29.01.06 Introduction Part 6
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Though Hilary was not its inventor, and was forced by the large part played by Old Testamellt exegesis in the Arian controversy to employ it, whether he would or nothyperlink , yet it is certain that his hearty, though not indiscriminatehyperlink , acceptance of the methocl led to its general adoption in the West. Tertullian and Cyprian had madle no great use of such speculations; Irenaeus probably had little influence. It was the in troduction of Origen's thought to Latin Christendom by Hilary and his contemporaries which set the fashion, and none of them can have had such influence as Hilary himself. It is a strange irony of fate that so deep and original a thinker should have exerted his most permanent influence not through his own thoughts, but through this dubious legacy which hc handed on from Alexandria to Europe yet wiithin certain limits, it was a sound and, for that age, even a scientific method; and Hilary might at least plead that he never allowed the system to be his master, and that it was a means which enabled him to derive from Scriptures which otherwise, to him, would be unprofitable, some treasure of true and valuable instruction. It never moulds his thoughts; at the rnost, he regards it as a useful auxiliary. No praise can be too highl for his wise and sober marshalling not so much of texts as of the collective evidence of Scripture concerning the relation of the Father andl the Son in the De Trinate; and if his Christology be not equally convincing, it is not the fault of his method, but of its applicationhyperlink . We cannot wonder that Hilary, who owed his clear dogmatic convictions to a carefiil and independent study of Scripture, should have wished to lead others to the same source of knowledge. He couples it with the Eucharist as a second Table of the Lord, a public means of grace, which needs, if it is to profit the hearer, the same preparation of a pure heart and lifehyperlink . Attention to the lessons read in church is a primary duty, but private study of Scripture is enforced with equal earnestnesshyperlink . It must be for all, as Hilary had found it for himself, a privilege as well as a duty.
His sense of the value of Scripture is heightened by his belief in the sacredness of language. Names belong inseparably to the things which they signify; words are themselves a revelation. This is a lesson learnt from Origen; and the false antithesis between the nature and the name of God, of which, according to the Arians, Christ had the latter only, made it of special use to Hilaryhyperlink . But if this high dignity belongs to every statement of truth, there is the less need for technical terms of theology. The rarity of their occurrence in the pages of Hilary has already been mentioned. 'Trinity'hyperlink is almost absent, and ' Person 'hyperlink hardly more common, he prefers, by a turn of language which would scarcely be seemly in English, to speak of the 'embodied' Christ and of His 'Embodiment,' though Latin theology was already familiar with the 'Incarnationhyperlink .' In fact, it would seem that he had resolved to make himself independent of technical terms and of such lines of thought as would require them. But he is never guilty of confusion caused by an inadequate vocabulary. He has the literary skill to express in ordinary words ideas which are very remote from ordinary thought, and this at no inordinate length. No one, for instance, has developed the idea of the mutual indwelling of Father and Son more fully and clearly than he; yet he has not found it necessary to employ or devise the monstrous 'circuminsession' or 'perichoresis' of later theology. And where he does use terms of current theology, or rather metaphysic, he shews that he is their master, not their slave. The most important idea of this kind which he had to express was that of the Divine substance. The word 'essence' is entirely rejectedhyperlink ; 'substance' and 'nature' are freely used as synonyms, but in such alternation that both of them still obviously belong to the sphere of literature, and not of science. They are twice used as exact alternatives, for the avoidance of monotony, in parallel clauses of Trin. Vi. I8' 19. So also the nature of fire in vii. 29 is not an abstraction; and in ix. 36 ('z. the Divine substance and nature are equivalents. These are only a few of many instanceshyperlink Here, as always, there is an abstention from abstract thoughts and terms, which indicates, on the part of a student of philosophy and of philosophical theology, a deliberate narrowing of his range of speculation. We may illustrate the purpose of Hilary by comparing his method with that of the author of a treatise on Astronomy without .Mathematics But some part of his caution is probably due to his sense of the inadequacy of the terms with which Latin theology was as yet equipped, and of the danger, not only to his readers' faith, but to his Own reputation for orthodoxy, which might result from ingenuity in the employment or invention of technical language.
Though, as we have seen, the contemplative state is not the ultimate happiness of man, yet the knowledge of God is essential to salvationhyperlink ; man, created in God's image, is by nature capable of, and intended for, such knowledge, and Christ came to impart it, the necessary condition on the side of humanity being purity of mindhyperlink , and the result the elevation of man to the life of God. Hilary does not shrink from the emphatic language of the Alexandrian school, which spoke of the efnxefnyefnzefoaefob~ believe in the Holy Ghost.'
In a great measure he has succeeded in retaining this simplicity in regard to the doctrine of God. He had the full Greek sense of the divine unity; there is no suggestion of the possession by the Persons of the Trinity of contrasted or complementary qualities. The revelation he would defend is that of God, One, perfect, infinite, immutable. This absolute God has manifested Himself under the name 'HE That IS,' to which Hilary constantly recurs. It is only through His own revelation of Himself that God can be known. But here we are faced by a difficulty; our reason is inadequate and tends to be fallacious. The argument from analogy, which we should naturally use, cannot be a sufficient guide, since it must proceed from the finite to the infinite. Hilary has set this forth with great force and frequency, and with a picturesque variety of illustration. Again, our partial glimpses of the truth are often in apparent contradiction; when this is the case, we need to be on our guard against the temptation to reject one as incompatible with the other. We must devote an equal attention to each, and believe without hesitation that both are true. The interest of the De Trinitate is greatly heightened by the skill and courage with which Hilary will handle some seeming paradox, and make the antithesis of opposed infinities conduce to reverence for Him of Whom they, are aspects. And he never allows his reader to forget the immensity of his theme ; and here again the skill is manifest with which he casts upon the reader the same awe with which he is himself impressed.
Of God as Father Hilary has little that is new to say. He is called Father in Scripture; therefore He is Father and necessarily has a Son. And conversely the fact that Scripture speaks of God the Son is proof of the fatherhood. In fact, the name 'Son' contains a revelation so necessary for the times that it has practically banished that of 'the Word,' which we should have expected Hilary, as a disciple of Origen, to employ by preferencehyperlink . But since faith in the Father alone is insufficient for salvationhyperlink , and is, indeed, not only insufficient but actually false, because it denies His fatherhood in ignoring,, the consubstantial Son, Hilary's attention is concentrated upon the relation between these two Persons. This relation is one of eternal mutual indwelling, or 'perichoresis,'as it has been called, rendered possible by Their oneness of nature and by the infinity of Both. The thought is worked out from such passages as Isaiah xlv. 14, St. John xiv. I I, with great cogency and completeness, yet always with due stress laid on the incapacity of man to comprehend its immensity. Hilary advances from this scriptural position to the profound conception of the divine self-consciousness as consisting in Their mutual recognition. Each sees Himself in His perfect image, which must be coeternal with Himself. In Hilary this is only a hint, one of the many thoughts which the urgency of the conflict with Arianism forbade him to expand. But Dorner justly sees in it 'a kind of speculative construction of the doctrine of the Trinity, out of the idea of the divine self-consciousnesshyperlink .'
The Arian controversy was chiefly waged over the question of the eternal generation of the Son. By the time that Hilary began to write, every text of Scripture which could be made applicable to the point in dispute had been used to the utmost. There was little or nothing that remained to be done in the discovery or combination of passages. Of that controversy Athanasius was the hero; the arguments which he used and those which he refuted are admirably set forth in the introduction to the translation of his writings in this series. In writing the De Trinitate, so far as it dealt directly with the original controversy, it was neither possible nor desirable that Hilary should leave the beaten path. His object was to provide his readers with a compendious statement of ascertained truth for their own guidance, and with an armoury of weapons which had been tried and found Effective in the conflicts of the day. It would, therefore, be superfluous to give in this place a detailed account of his reasonings concerning the generation of the Son, nor would such an account be of any assistance to those who have his writings in their hands. Hilary's treatment of the Scriptural evidence is very complete, as was, indeed, necessary in a work which was intended as a handbook for practical use. The Father alone is unbegotten; the Son is truly the Son, neither created nor adopted. The Son is the Creator of the worlds, the Wisdom of God, Who alone knows the Father, Who manifested God to man in the various Theophanies of the Old Testament. His birth is without parallel, inasmuch as other births imply a previous non-existence, while that of the Son is from eternity. For the generation on the part of the Father and the birth on the part of the Son are not connected as by a temporal sequence of cause and effect, but exactly coincide in a timeless eternityhyperlink . Hilary repudiates the possibility of illustrating this divine birth by sensible analogies; it is beyond our understanding as it is beyond time. Nor can we wonder at this, seeing that our own birth is to us an insoluble mystery. The eternal birth of the Son is the expression of the eternal nature of God. It is the nature of the One that He should be Father, of the Other that He should be Son; this nature is co-eternal with Themselves, and therefore the One is co-eternal with the Other. Hence Athanasius had drawn the conclusion that the Son is 'by nature and not by willhyperlink ; not that the will of God is contrary to His nature, but that (if the words may be used) there was no scope for its exercise in the generation of the Son, which came to pass as a direct consequence of the Divine nature. Such language was a natural protest against an Arian abuse; but it was a departure from earlier precedent and was not accepted by that Cappadocian school, more true to Alexandrian tradition than Athanasius himself, with which Hilary was in closest sympathy. In their eyes the generation of the Son must be an act of God's will, if the freedom of Omnipotence, for which they were jealous, was to be respected; and Hilary shared their scruples. Not only in the De Sydonis but in the De Trinitatehyperlink he assigns the birth of the Son to the omnipotence, the counsel and will of God acting in co-operation with His nature. This two-fold cause of birth is peculiar to the Son; all other beings owe their existence simply to the power and will, not to the nature of Godhyperlink . Such being the relation between Father and Son, it is obvious that They cannot differ in nature. The word 'birth,' by which the relation is described, indicates the transmission of nature from parent to offspring; and this word is, like ' Father' and 'Son,' an essential part of the revelation. The same divine nature or substance exists eternally and in equal perfection in Both, un-begotten in the Father, begotten in the Son. In fact, the expression, 'Only-begotten God' may be called Hilary's watchword, with such 'peculiar abundancehyperlink ' does it occur in his writings, as in those of his Cappadocian friends. But, though the Son is the Image of the Father, Hilary in his maturer thought, when free from the influence of his Asiatic allies, is careful to avoid using the inadequate and perilous term 'likeness' to describe the relationhyperlink . Such being the birth, and such the unity of nature, the Son must very God. This is proved by all the usual passages of the Old Testament, from the Creation, onwards. These are used, as by the other Fathers, to prove that the Son has not the name only, but the reality, of Godhead; the reality corresponding to the nature. All things were made through Him out of nothing; therefore He is Almighty as the Father is Almighty. If man is made in the image of Both, if one Spirit belongs to Both, there can be no difference of nature between the Two. But They are not Two as possessing one nature, like human father and son, while living separate lives. God is One, with a Divinity undivided and indivisiblehyperlink ; and Hilary is never weary of denying the Arian charge that his creed involved the worship of two Gods. No analogies from created things can explain this unity. Tree and branch, fire and heat, source and stream can only illustrate Their inseparable co-existence; such comparisons, if pressed? Lead inevitably to error. The true unity of Father and Son is deeper than this; deeper also than any unity, however perfect, of will with will. For it is an eternal mutual indwelling, Each perfectly corresponding with and comprehending and containing the Other, and Himself in the Other; and this not after the manner of earthly commingling of substances or exchange of properties. The only true comparison that can be made is with the union between Christ, in virtue of His humanity, and the believerhyperlink ; such is the union, in virtue of the Godhead, between Father and Son. And this unity extends inevitably to will and action. since the Father is acting in all that the Son does, the Son is acting in all that the Father does; 'he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.' This doctrine reconciles all our Lord's statements in the Gospel of St. John concerning His own and His Father's work.
But, notwithstanding this unity, there is a true numerical duality of Person. Sabellius, we must remember, had held for two generations the pre-eminence among heretics. To the Greek-speaking world outside Egypt the error which he and Paul of Samosata had taught, that God is one Person, was still the most dangerous of falsehoods; the supreme victory of truth had not been won in their eyes when Arius was condemned at Nicaea, but when Paul was deposed at Antioch. The Nicene leaders had certainly counted the cost when they adopted as the test of orthodoxy the same word which Paul had used for the inculcation of error. But the homoousion, however great its value as a permanent safeguard of truth, was the immediate cause of alienation and Suspicion. And not only did it make the East misunderstand the West, but it furnished the Arians with the most effective of instruments for widening the breach between the two forces opposed to them. They had an excuse for calling their opponents in Egypt and the West by the name of Sabellians, the very name most likely to engender distrust in Asiahyperlink . Hilary, who could enter with sympathy into the Eastern mind and had learnt from his own treatment at Seleucia how strong the feeling was, labours with untiring patience to dissipate the prejudice. There is no Arian plea against which he argues at greater length. The names 'Father and 'Son,' being parts of the revelation, are convincing proofs of distinction of Person as well as of unity of nature. They prove that the nature is the same, but possessed after a different manner by Each of the Two; by the One as ingrenerate, by the Other as begotten. The word ' Image,' also a part of the revelation, is another proof of the distinction; an object and its reflection in a mirror are obviously not one thing. Again, the distinct existence of the Son is proved by the fact that He has free volition of His own; and by a multitude of passages of Scripture, many of them absolutely convincing, as for instance, those from the Gospel of St John. But these two Persons, though one in nature, are not equal in dignity. The Father is greater than the Son; greater not merely as compared to the incarnate Christ, but as compared to the Son, begotten from eternity. This is not simply by the prerogative inherent in all paternity; it is because the Father is self-existent, Himself the Source of all beinghyperlink . With one of His happy phrases Hilary describes it as an inferiority generatione, non generehyperlink ; the Son is one in kind or nature with the Father, though inferior, as the Begotten, to the Unbegotten. But this inferiority is not to be so construed as to lessen our belief in His divine attributes. For instance, when He addresses the Father in prayer, this is not because He is subordinate, but because He wishes to honour the Fatherhoodhyperlink ; and, as Hilary argues at great lengthhyperlink , the end, when God shall be all in all, is not to be regarded as a surrender of the Son's power, in the sense of loss. It is a mysterious final state of permanent, willing submission to the Father's will, into which He enters by the supreme expression of an obedience which has never failed. Again, our Lord's language in St. Mark xiii. 32, must not be taken as signifying ignorance on the part of the Son of His Father's purpose. For, according to St. Paul (Col. ii. 3), in Him are hid all the treasures of wisclom and knowledge, and therefore He must know the day and hour of judgment. He is ignorant relatively to us, in the sense that He will not betray His Father's secrethyperlink . Whether or no it be possible in calmer times to maintain that the knowledge and the ignorance are complementary truths which finite minds cannot reconcile, we cannot wonder that Hilary, ever on the watch against apparent concessions to Arianism, should in this instance have abandoned his usual method of halancing against each other theapparent contraries. His reasoning is, in any case, a striking proof of his intense conviction of the co-equal Godhead of the Son.
Such is Hilary's argument, very briefly stated. We may read almost all of it, where Hilary himself had certainly read it, in the Discourses against the Arians and elsewhere in the writings of Athanasins. How far, however, he was borrowing from the latter must remain doubtful, as must the question as to the originality of Athanasius. For the controversy was universal, and both of these great writers had the practical purpose of collecting the best arguments out of the multitude which were suggested in ephemeral literature or verbal debate. Their victory, intellectual as well as moral, over their adversaries was decisive, and the more striking because it was the Arians who had made the attack on ground chosen by themselves. The authority of Scripture as the final court of appeal was their premise as well as that of their opponents; and they had selected the texts on which the verdict of Scripture was to be based. Out of their own mouth they were condemned, and the work done in the fourth century can never need to be repeated. It was, of course, an unfinished work. As we have seen, Hilary concerns himself with two Persons, not with three; and since he states the contrasted truths of plurality and unity without such explanation of the mystery as the speculative genius of Augustine was to supply, he leaves, in spite of all his efforts, a certain impression of excessive dualism. But these defects do not lessen the permanent value of his work.. Indeed, we may even assert that they, together with some strange speculations and many instances of which interpretation, which are, however, no part of the structure of his argument and could not affcct its solidity, actually enhance its human and historical interest. The De Trinitate remains `the most perfect literary achievement called forth by the Arian controversyhyperlink .'
Hitherto we have been considering the relations within the Godhead of Father and Son, together with certain characters which belong to the Son in virtue of His eternal birth. We now come to the more original part of Hilary's teaching, which must be treated in greater detail. Till now he has spoken only of the Son; he now comes to speak of Christ, the name which the Son bears in relation to the world. We have seen that Hilary regards the Son as the Creatorhyperlink . This was proved for him, as for Athanasius, by the passage, Proverbs viii. 22, which they read according to the Septuagint, 'The Lord hath' created Me for the begining of His ways for His Workshyperlink .' These worcls, round which the controversy raged, were interpreted by the orthodox as implying that at the time, and for the purpose, of creation the Father assigned new functions to the Son as His representative. The gift of these functions, the exercise of wbich called into existence orders of being inferior to God, marked in Hilary's eyes a change so definite and important in the activity of the Son that it deservecl to be called a second birth, not ineffable like the eternal birth, but strictly analogous to the Incarnation. This last was a creation, which brought Him within the sphere of created humanity; the creation of Wisdom for the beginning of God's ways had brought Him, though less closely, into the same relationhyperlink , and. the Incarnation is the completion of what was begun in preparation for the creation of the world. Creation is the mode by which finite being begins, and the beginning of each stage in the connection between the infinite Son and His creatures is called, from the one point of view, a creation, from the other, a birth. We cannot fail to see here an anticipation of the opinion that 'the true Protevangelium is the revelation of Creation, or in other words that the Incarnation was independent of the Fallhyperlink ,' for the Incarnation is a step in the one continuous divine progress from the Creation to the final consummation of all things, and has not sin for its cause, but is part of the original counsel of Godhyperlink . Together with this new office the Son receives a new name. Henceforth Hilary calls Him, Christ; He is Christ in relation to the world, as He is Son in relation to the Father. From the beginning of time, then, the Son becomes Christ and stands in immediate relation to the world; it is in and through Christ that God is the Author of all thingshyperlink , and the title of Creator strictly belongs to the Son. This beginning of time, we must remember, is hidden in no remote antiquity. The world had no mysterious past; it came into existence suddenly at a date which could be fixed with much precision, some 5,600 years before Hilary's dayhyperlink , and had undergone no change since then. Before that date there had been nothing outside the Godhead; from that time forth the Son has stood in constant relation to the created world.
Christ, for so we must henceforth call Him, has not only sustained in being the universe which He created, but has also imparted to men a steadily increasing knowledge of God. For such knowledge, we remember, man was made, and his salvation depends upon its possession. All the Theophanies of the `'Old Testament are such revelations by Him of Himself; and it was He that spoke by the mouth of Moses and the Prophets. But however significant and valuable this Divine teaching and manifestation might be, it was not complete in itself, but was designed to prepare men's minds to expect its fulfilment in the Incarnation. Just as the Law was preliminary to the Gospel, so the appearances of Christ in human form to Abraham and to others were a foreshadowing of the true humanity which He was to assume. They were true revelations, as far as they went; but their purpose was not simply to impart so much knowledge as they explicitly conveyed, but also to lead men on to expect more, and to expect it in the very form in which it ultimately camehyperlink . For His self-revelation in the Incarnation was but the treading again of a familiar path. He had often appeared, and had often spoken, by His own mouth or by that of men whom He had inspired; and in all this contact with the world His one object had been to bestow upon mankind the knowledge of God. With the same object He became incarnate j the full revelation was to impart the perfect knowledge. He became man, Hilary says, in order that we might believe Him;-'to be a Witness from among US to the things of God, and by means of weak flesh to proclaim God the Father to our weak and carnal selveshyperlink .' Here again we see the continuity of the Divine purpose, the fulfilment of the counsel which dates back to the beginning of time. If man had not sinned, he would still have needed the progressive revelation; sin has certainly modified Christ's course upon earth, but was not the determining cause of the Incarnation.The doctrine of the Incarnation, or Embodiment as Hilary prefers to call it, is presented very fully in the De Trinitate, and with mucll originality. The Godhead of Christ is secured by His identity with the eternal Son and by the fact that at the very time of His humilia tion upon earth He was continuing without interruption His divine work of maintaining the existence of the worldshyperlink . Indeed, by a natural protest against the degradation which the Arians would put upon Him, it is the glory of Christ upon which Hilary lays chief stress. And this is not the moral glory of submission and self-sacrifice, but the visible glory of miracles attesting the Divine presence. In the third book of the De Trinitate the miracles of Cana and of the feeding of the five thousand, the entrance into the closed room where the disciples were assembled, the darkness and the earthquake at the Crucifixion, are the proofs urged for His Godhead; and the wonderful circumstances surrounding the birth at Bethlehem are similarly employed in book ii.hyperlink Sound as the reasoning is, it is typical of a certain unwillingness on Hilary's part to dwell upon the self-surrender of Christ; he prefers to think of Him rather as the Revealer of God than as the Redeemer of men. But, apart from this preference, he constantly insists that the Incarnation has caused neither loss nor change of the Divine nature in Christhyperlink , and proves the point by the same words of our Lord which had been used to demonstrate the eternal Sonship. And the assumption of flesh lessens His power as little as it degrades His nature. For though it is, in one aspect, an act of submission to the will of the Father, it is, in another, an exertion of His own omnipotence. No inferior power could apptopriate to itself an alien nature; only God could strip Himself of the attributes of Godheadhyperlink .
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 ourshyperlink . 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 alivehyperlink . 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 birthhyperlink . 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 Godhyperlink . Hilary does not hold, or at least does not attach importance to, thetripartite 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 interpretationhyperlink , 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 bodyhyperlink ; 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 fleshhyperlink . 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 imparthyperlink .' 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 bodyhyperlink ; 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 humanityhyperlink , 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 Manhyperlink . 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 pipehyperlink ,' 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 tlie 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 Faithhyperlink , 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 bad 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 contradictedhyperlink , but repudiated on every page by the contrary assumption on which all Hilary's arguments are based. Christ, shell, is 'perfect manhyperlink , 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 ancestryhyperlink , 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 motherhoodhyperlink ; 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 worldshyperlink . Yet, in some real sense, Christ emptied Himself of this form of Godhyperlink . 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 Personhyperlink . 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 ptocess, 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 statementshyperlink ; 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 apparelhyperlink ,' and his definition of the word 'form' as meaning no more than 'face' or 'appearancehyperlink ,'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 Manhyperlink . On the other hand Hilary expressly declares that the 'concurrence of the two formshyperlink ' 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 age 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 Tertullianhyperlink 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 dispensationhyperlink , 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 Himselfhyperlink .' Concealment has a great part to play in Hilary's theories, and is in this instance the only explanation consistent with his doctrinal positionhyperlink .
Footnotes
173 E g. Trin. vii' 13; and cf. the argument which is also Athanasian of vii. 31.
174 Beside the passages menentioned on p. xxx., it only occurs in Instructio Psalmorum §13
175 The translation of the De Trinitate in this volume may give a somewhat false impressionin this respect. For the sake of concicseness the word Person has been often in the English where it is absent, and absent designedly in the Latin. The word occurs Trin. iii . 23 in.,iv .42,v. 10,26,vii. 39,40 and in a few other places.
176 Concorporatio, Comm. in Matt, vi. I ; corporatio, Tr. in Ps, i, 14, ii. 3, and often; corporalitas Deus, Comm, in Matt. iv, 14, Tr. in Ps. li. 16; corporalitas, Comm. in Matt. iv. 14 (twice), Instr. Ps. vi. In the De Trinitate he usually prefers a periphrasis ; - assumpta caro, assumpsit carnem. Corporatio is used of man's dwelling in a body in Trin. xi, 15 and De Mysteriis, ed. Gamurrini, p. 5.
177 It occurrs. in the De Synodis. 69, but in that work Hilary is writing as an advocate in defence of Ianguage used by others, not as the exponent of his own thoughts. It also occurs once or twice in translations from the Greek, probably by another hand than Hilary's; but from his own authorship it is completely absent.
178 Trin. v. to, Syn. 69, `God is One not in Person, but in nature,
0'Trin. iv. 42, `Not by oneness of Person but by unity of substance;
0' vi. 35, `the birth of a living Nature from a living Nature
0' of God or Christ. is simply a periphrasis. The two natures in the Incarnate Christ are also mentioned, though, as we shall see, Hilary here aIso avoids a precise nomenclature..
179 Tr. in Ps. cxxxi. 6, `The supreme achievement of Christ was to render man, instructed in the knowledge of God, worthy to be God's dwelling-place ;
0' cf. ib §23
180 Tr. in Ps. cxviii, Aleph., §I
185 Deus Verbum often; Verbum alone rarely, if ever. Dorner with his iteration of `Logos,
0' gives an altogether false impression of Hilary's vocabulary.
186 Trin. I. 17 and often.
187 Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1. ii. p. 302, English translation. The passages to which he refers are Comm. in Matt. xi. 12; Tr. in Ps. xci. 6 ; Trin. ii. 3. ix. 69. There is a good, though brief, statement of this view in Mason's Faith of the Gospel, p. 56.
188 Trin, xii. 21, `the birth is in the generation and the generation in the birth,
0'
189 Discourses against the Arians, iii. 58ff ; see Robertson's notes in the Athanasius volume of this series. p.426
190 E.g. Syn. 35, 37, 59, Trin. iii. 4, vi. 21, viii . 54
191 Cf. Baltzer, Theologie d. hl. Hil. p, 19 f.
192 Hort, Two Dissertations, p. 21, and cf. p. xvi., above.
193 It constantly appears, though with all due safeguards, in the De Synodis, where sympathy as well as policy impelled him to approximate the language used by his friends. Similarly in Trin. iii. 23, he argues, from the admitted likeness, that there can be no difference. But, as we saw, this part of the De Trinitate is probably an early work, and does not represent Hilary's later thought
194 Trin, v . 38.
195 Trin. viii. 13 ff,
196 Cf. Sulp Sev., Chron. ii. 42 for the Eastern suspicion that the West held a trionyma unio ;-one Person under three names, the citations in Westcott's Gospel of St. John, additional note to xiv. 28
197 This was the doctrine of all the earlier theologians, soon to be displaced in the stress of controversy by the opinion that theinferiority concerns the Son only as united with man. See the citations in Wescot's Gospel of St. John, additional note to xiv, 28.
198 Tr. in Ps. cxxxviii. 17.
199 lb. cxli. 6.
200 Trin. xi. 21 ff., on I Cor. xv, 21 ff.
201 Trin. ix. 58 ff .
202 Bardenhewer, Patrologie, p. 377.
203 This is one of Hilary's many reminiscences of Origen. Athanasius brought the father into direct connection with the world ; cf. Harnack, Dogmengesch. ii. 206 (ed.3)
204 Trin. xii. 35 ff. The passage is treated at much greater length in Athanasius' Discourses against the Arians, ii. 18fi where see Robertson's notes.
205 Trin. xii. 45; at the Incarnation Christ is `created in the body,
0' and this is connected with His creation for the begining of the ways of God.
206 Westcott, essay on `The Gospel of creation,
0' in his edition of St John's Epistles, Where, however Hilary is not mentioned.
207 Cf. Trin. xi. 49.
208 Trin.ii. 6, xii.4, &c. He is also often named Jesus Christ in this connection, e.g. Trin. iv. 6
209 According to Eusebius' computation, which Hilary would probably accept without dispute, there were 5,228 years from the creation to our Lord's commencement of his mission in the 15th year of Tiberius, a.d. 29.
210 E.g. Trin. iv . 27; Tr. in Ps, lxviii, 19
211 Trin. iii.9 ; cf. St. John xvii. 3.
212 Trin. ii. 25 and often.
213 Trin. ii. 27. The sarne conclusion is constantly drawn in the Comm. in Matt.
214 E g. Trin. ix. 4, 14, 51; Tr. in Ps. ii. 11, 25.
215 Trin. ii. 25, xii. 6, &c
216 E.g. Tr. in Ps. cxxxviii. 3.
217 This, in contrast with God, Who is Life, is proved by the fact that certain bodily growths can be removed without our being conscious of the operation ; Trin. vii. 28.
218 Cf. Trin. vii. 23, x 15, 16. Similarly in the Eumenides 637, Aechylus Makes Apollo excuse Orestes' murder of Clytae nnestra on the go and that the mother is not the parent, but only the nurse of the germ. This is contrary to Aristotle's teaching; Aeschylus and Hilary evidently represent a rival current of ancient opinion..
219 Trin. x. 20. In Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Iod, 6, 7, this thought is developed. Man has a double origin. First, he is made after the likeness of God. This is the soul, which is immaterial and has no resemblance and owes no debt, as of effect to cause, to any other nature (i.e. substance) than God. It is not His likeness, but is after His likeness. Secondly, there is the body, cornposed of earthly matter.
220 Trin. ii. 3of., viii. 23f .
221 Trin. x. 16, caro non aliunde originem sumpserat quam Verbo, and ib. 15,18,25. Dorner, I. ii., p.403, n.i points out that this is exactly the teaching of Gregory of Nyssa.
222 This view that the conception by the Holy Ghost means conception by the Son is consistently held by Hilary throughout his writings. It appears in the earliest of them; in Comm. in Matt. ii. 5, Christ is `born of a woman; . . . Made flesh through the Word.
0' So in Trin. ii. 24 He is `born of the Virgin and of the Holy Ghost, Himself ministering Himself in this operation.... By His own, that is God's., overshadowing power He sowed for Himself the beginings of His body ordained that His flesh should commence to exist ;
0'and Trin. x 16
223 Trin. x. 16; cf. ib. 17. 1n the Instructio. Pslamorum,§6, he speaks in more usual language;-adventus Domini ex virgine in hominem. procreandi, and also in some other passage. Dorners view (1. ii 403 f. and note 74, p. 533) differs from that here taken. But he is influenced (see especially p. 404) by the desire to save Hilary's consistency rather than to state his Actutal opinion on. And Hilary was too early in the field, too anxiously employed in feeling his way past the pitfalls of heresy, to escape the danger of occasional inconsistency.
224 Trin. iii. I9, perfectum ipsa de suis non imminuta generavit. So ib, ii. 25, uigenitus Deus.... Virginis utero insertus acc rescit. He grew there, but nothing more. In Virginem exactly corresponds to ex Virgine.
225 Trin. xii. 50; it would be a watering of the sense to regard commixtio in this passage as simply equivalent to coitio.
226 Trin, x. 16.
227 Irenxus, i. I, 13.
228 He often and emphatically repudiates the use which the Monarchians made of them, e.g. Trin.iv, 4.
229 E.g. Trin. x. 22 in The human soul is clearly intended. Schwane, ii, 268, justly praises Hilary for greater accuracy than his contemporaries in laying stress upon each of the constituent elements of Christ's humanity, and especially upon the soul ; in this respect following Tertullian and Origen
230 In Trin. x. 21 f. is an argument analogous to that of the De Synodis concerning the Godhead. Christ is Man because He is perfectly like man, just as in the Homoeusian argument He is God because He is perfectly like God.
231 E.g. Comm. in Matt. I. ; Tr. in Ps. lxviii. 19.
232 Trin. ii, 26.
233 Ib, viii, 45, 47, ix. 14, &c.
234 This `evacuation
0' or `exinauition
0' is represented in Tr. in Ps. lxvii. 4 by the more precise metaphor of a vessel drained of its liquid contents.
235 Hilary has devoted his Homily on Psalm lxviii. to this subject. In §25 he asks, `How could He exist in the form of God?
0' There are many equally emphatic statements throughout his writings.
236 Baltzer and Schwane have been followed in this matter, in opposition to Dorner.
237 Trin. ix. 38 habitus demutatio, and similarly Ib. 14.
238 Tr. in Ps. Ixviii. 25.
239 E.g. Trin. viii. 45.
240 Trin ix. 14, concursus utriusque formae.
241 It is very characteristic that it lies outside Cyprian's vocabulary and range of ideas.
242 Trin,. ix. 38 in., and especially Ib. 39. The unity of glory departed through His obedience in the Dispensation.
243 Trin. xi. 48; cf. the end of this section and xii. 6.
244 Cf Baltzer, Christologie, p. 10f., Schwane, p. 272 f. Other explanations which have been suggested are quite inadmissible Dorner p. 407, takes the passage cited above about `substance
0' too seriously, and wavers bettween the equally impossible interpretations of `countenance
0' and `personality.
0' Forster (l.c. p. 659) understands the word to mean `mode of existence.
0' Wirthmuller, cited by Schwane, p. 273, has the courage to regard `form of God
0' and `form of a servant
0' as equivalent to Divinity and humanity.