Church Fathers: Post-Nicene Fathers Vol 09: 29.01.08 Introduction Part 8

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Church Fathers: Post-Nicene Fathers Vol 09: 29.01.08 Introduction Part 8



TOPIC: Post-Nicene Fathers Vol 09 (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 29.01.08 Introduction Part 8

Other Subjects in this Topic:

In the fact that humanity is thus elevated in Christ consists the hope of individual men. Man in Him has, in a true sense, become Godhyperlink ; and though Hilary as a rule avoids the phrase, familiar to him in the writings of his Alexandrian teachers and freely used by Athanasius and other of his contemporaries, that men become gods because God became Man, still the thought which it coveys is constantly present to his mind. As we have seen, men are created with such elevation as their final cause; they have the innate certainty that their soul is of Divine origin and a natural longing for the knowledge and hope of things eternalhyperlink . But they can only rise by a ptocess, corresponding to that by which the humanity in Christ was raised to the level of the Divinity. This process begins with the new birth in the one Baptism, and attains its completion when we fully receive the nature and the knowledge of God. We are to be members of Christ's body and partakers in Him, saved into the name and the nature of Godhyperlink . And the means to this is knowledge of Him, received into a pure mindhyperlink . Such knowledge makes the soul of man a dwelling rational, pure and eternal, wherein the Divine nature, whoseproperties these are, may eternally abidehyperlink . Only that which has reason can be in union with Him Who is reason. Faith must be accurately informed as well as sincere. Christ became Man in order that we might believe Him; that He might be a witness to us from among ourselves touching the things of Godhyperlink .

We have now followed Hilary through his great theory, in which we may safely say that no other theologian entirely agrees, and which, where it is most original, diverges most widely from the usual lines of Christian thought. Yet it nowhere contradicts the accepted standards of belief; and if it errs it does so in exp1anation, not in the statement of the truths which it undertakes to explain. Hilary has the distinction of being the only one of his contemporaries with the speculative genius to imagine this development ending in the abolition of incongruity and in the restoration of the full majesty of the Son and of man with Himhyperlink . He saw that there must be such a development, and if he was wtong in tracing its course, there is a reverence and loyalty, a solidity of reasoning and steady grasp of the ptoblems under discussion, which save hi~n from falling into mere ingenuity or ostentation. Sometimes he may seem to be on the verge of heresy; but in each case it will be found that, whether his system be right or no, the place in it which he has found for an argument used elsewhere in the interests of error is one where the argument is powerless for evil. Sometimes-and this is the most serious reproach that can be brought against him-it must seem that his theology is abstract, moving in a region apart from the facts of human life. It must be admitted that this is the case; that though, as we shall presently see, Hilary had a clear sense of the realities of temptation and sin and of the need of redemption, and has expressed himself in these regarcls wLth the fervour and practical wisdom of an earnest and experienced pastor, still these subjects lie within the sphere of his feelings rather than of his tllought. It was not his fault that he lived in the days before St. Augustine, and in the heat of an earlier controversy; and it is his conspicuous merit that in his zeal for the Divinity of Christ he traced the Incarnation back beyond the beginning of sin and found its motive in God's eternal purpose of uniting man to Himself. He does not estimate the condescension of Christ by the distance which separates the Sinless from the sinful. To his wider thought sin is not the cause of that great sequence of Divine acts of grace, but a disturbing factor which has modified its course. The measure of the love of God in Christ is the infinity He overpassed in uniting the Creator with the creature.

But before we approach the practical theology of Hilary something must be said of his teaching concerning the Third Person of the Trinity. 'line doctrine of the Holy Spirit is little developed in his writings. The cause was, in part, his sympathy with Easternthought. The West, in this as in some other respects, was in advance of the contemporary Greeks; but Hilary was too independent to accept conclusions which were as yet unreasonedhyperlink . But a stronger reason was that the doctrine was not directly involved in the Arian controversy. On the main question, as we have seen, he kept an open mind, and was prepared to modify from time to time the terms in which he stated the Divinity of our Lord; but in other respects he was often strangely archaic. Such is the case here; Hilary's is a logical position, but the logical ptocess has been arrested. There is nothing in his words concerning the Holy Spirit inconsistent with the later definitions of faithhyperlink , and it would be unfair to blame him because, in the course of a strenuous life devoted to the elucidation and defence of other doctrines, he found no time to develope this; unfair also to blame him for not recognising its full importance. In his earlier days, and while he was inalliance with the Semiarians, there was nothing to bring this doctrine prominently before his mind; in his later life it still lay outside the range of controversy, so far as he was concerned. Hilary, in fact, preferred like Athanasius to rest in the indefinite terms of the original Nicene Creed, the confession of which ended with the simple 'And in the Holy Ghost.' But there was a further and practical reason for his reserve. It was a constant taunt of the Arians that the Catholics worshipped a plurality of Gods. The frequency and emphasis with which Hilary denies that Christians have either two Gods or one God in solitude proves that he regarded this plausible assertion as one of the most dangerous weapons wielded by heresy. It was his object, as a skilful disputant, to bring his whole forces to bear upon them, and this in a precisely limited field of battle. To import the question of the Holy Spirit into the controversy might distract his reader's attention from the main issue, and afford the enemy an opening for that evasion which he constantly accuses them of attempting. Hence, in part, the small space allowed to so important a theme; and hence the avoidance, which we noticed, of the very word 'Trinity.' The Arians made the most of their argument about two Gods; Hilary would not allow them the opportunity of imputing to the faithful a belief in three. This might not have been a sufficient inducement, had it stood alone, but the encouragement which he received from Origen's vagueness, representative as it was of the average theology of the the third century, must have predisposed him to give weight to the practical consideration Yet Hilary has not avoided a formal statement of his belief. In Trin. ii. §§ z9-35, which is, as we saw, part of a summary statement of the Christian Faith, he sets it forth with Scripture proofs. But he shows clearly, by the short space he allows to it, that it is not in his eyes of co-ordinate importance with the other truths of which he treats. And the curious language in which he introduces the subject, in § 29, seems to imply that he throws it in to satisfy others rather than from his own sense of its necessary place in such a statement. 'line doctrine, as he here defines it, is that the Holy Spirit undoubtedly exists; the Father andthe Son are the Authors of His being, and, since He is joined with Them in our confession, He cannot, without mutilation of the Faith, be separated from Them The fact that He is given to us is a further proof of His existence Yet the title 'Spirit' is often used both for Father and for Son; in proof of this St. John iv. 24 and 2 Cor. iii. 17 are cited. Yet the Holy Spirit has a personalhyperlink existence and a special office in relation to us. It is through Him that we know God. Our nature is capable of knowing Him, as the eye is capable of sight; and the gift of the Spirit is to the soul what the gift of light is to the eye. Again, in xii. ss**~ 55, 56, the subject is introduced, as if by an after thought, and even more briefly than in the second book. As he has refused to style the Son a creature, so he refuses to give that name to the Spirit, Who has gone forth from God, and been sent by Christ. The Son is the Only-begotten, and therefore he will not say that the Spirit was begotten; yet he cannot call Him a creature, for the Spirit's knowledge of the mysteries of God, of which He is the Interpreter to men, is the proof of His oneness in nature with God. The Spirit speaks unutterable things and is ineffable in His operation. Hilary cannot define, yet he believes. It must suffice to say, with the Apostle, simply that He is the Spirit of God. The tone of § 56 seems that of silent rebuke to some excess of definition, as he would deem it, of which he had heard. To these passages must be added another in Trin. viii. 19f., where the possession by Father and Son of one Spirit is used in proof of their own unity. But in this passage there occur several instances of Hilary's characteristic vagueness. As in ii. 30, so here we are toldthat 'the Spirit' may mean Father or Son as well as Holy Ghosthyperlink , and instances are given where the word has one or other of the two first significations. Thus we must set a certain number of passages where a reference in Scripture to the Holy Spirit is explained away against a number, certainly no greater, in which He is recognised. and in the latter we notice a strong tendency to understate the truth. For though we are expressly told that the Spirit is not a creature, that He is from the Father through the Son, is of one substance with Them and bears the same relation to the One that He bears to the Otherhyperlink , yet Hilary refuses with some emphasis and in a concpicuous place, at the very end of the treatise, to call Him God. But both groups of passages, those in which the Holy Ghost is recognised and those in which reason is given for non-recognition, are more than counterbalanced by a multitude in which, no doubt for the controversial reason already mentioned, the Holy Spirit is left unnamed, though it would have been most natural that allusion should be made to Himhyperlink We find in Hilary 'the premisses from which the Divinity of the Holy Ghost is the necessary conclusionhyperlink ;' and there is reason to believe that he would have stated the doctrine of the Procession in the Western, not in the Eastern, formhyperlink ; but we find a certain willingness to keep the doctrine in the background, which sufficiently indicates a failure to grasp its cardinal importance, and is, however natural in his circumstances and however interesting as evidence of his mode of thought, a blemish to the De Trinitate, if we seek in it a balanced exposition of the Faithhyperlink .

We may now turn to the practical teaching of Hilary. Henceforth he will be no longer the compiler of the best Latin handbook of the Arian controversy, or the somewhat unsystematic investigator of unexplored regions of theology. We shall find him often accepting the common stock of Christian ideas of his age, without criticism or attempt at improvement upon them; often paraphrasing in even more emphatic language emphatic and apparently contradictory passages of Scripture, without any effort after harmony or balance. Yet sometimes we shall find him anticipating on one page the thoughts of later theologians, while on another he is content to repeat the views upon the same subject which had satisfied an earlier generation. His doctrine, where it is not traditional, is never more than tentative, and we must not be surprised, we must even expect, to find him inconsistent with himself.

No subject illustrates this inconsistency better than that of sin, of which Hilary gives two accounts, the one Eastern and traditional, the other an anticipation of Augustinianism. These are never compared and weighed the one against the other. In the passages where each appears, it is adduced confidently, without any reservation or hint that he is aware of another explanation of the facts of experience. The more usual account is that which is required by Hilary's doctrine of the separate creation of every human soul, which is good, because it is God's immediate work, and has a natural tendency to, and fitness for, perfection. Because God, after Whose image man is made, is free, therefore man also is free; he has absolute liberty, and is under no compulsion to good or to evilhyperlink . The sin which God foresees, as in the case of Esau, He does not forordainhyperlink . Punishment never follows except upon sin actually committed; the elect are they who show themselves worthy of electionhyperlink , But the human body has defiled the soul; in fact, Hilary sometimes speaks as though sin were not an act of will but an irresistible pressure exerted by the body on the soul. If we had no body, he says once, we should have no sin; it is a 'body of death' and cannot be pure. This is the spiritual meaning of the ancient law against touching a corpsehyperlink . When the Psalmist laments that his soul cleaveth to the ground, his sorrow is that it is inseparably attached to a body of earthhyperlink ; when Job and Jeremiah cursed the day of their birth, their anger was directed against the necessity of living surrounded by the weaknesses and vices of the flesh, not against the creation of their souls after the image of Godhyperlink . Such language, if it stood alone, would convict its author of Manicheanism, but Hilary elsewhere asserts that the desire of the soul goes half-way to meet the invitation of sinhyperlink ., and this latter in his normal teaching. Man has a natural proclivity to evil, an inherited weaknesshyperlink which has, as a matter of experience, betrayed all men into actual sin, with the exception of Christhyperlink . Elsewhere, however, Hilary recognises the possibility, under existing conditions, of a sinless life. For David could make the prayer, 'Take from me the way of iniquity ;' of iniquity itself he was guiltless, and only needed to pray against the tendency inherent in his bodily naturehyperlink . But such a case is altogether exceptional; ordinary men must confide in the thought that God is indulgent, for He knows our infirmity. He is propitiated by the wish to be righteous, and in His judgment the merits of good men outweigh their sinshyperlink . Hence a prevalent tone of hopefulness about the future state of the baptized; even Sodom and Gomorrah, their punishment in history having satisfied the righteousness of God, shall ultimately be savedhyperlink . Yet God has a perfect, immutable goodness of which human goodness, though real, falls infinitely short, because He is steadfast and we are driven by varying impulseshyperlink . This Divine goodness is the standard and the hope set before us. It can only be attained by gracehyperlink , and grace is freely offered. But just as the soul, being free advances to meet sin, so it must advance to meet grace. Man must take the first step; he must wish and pray for grace, and then perseverance in faith will be granted himhyperlink , together with such a measure of the Spirit as he shall desire and deservehyperlink . He will, indeed, be able to do more than he need, as David did when he spared and afterwards lamented Saul, his worst enemy, and St. Paul, who voluntarily abstained from the lawful privilege of marriagehyperlink . Such is Hilary's first account, 'a naive, undeveloped mode of thought concerning the origin of sin and the state of manhyperlink .' Its inconsistencies are as obvious as their cause, the unguarded homiletical expansion of isolated passages. There is no attempt to reconcile man's freedom to be good with the fact of universal sin. The theory, so far as it is consistent, is derived from Alexandria, from Clement and Origen. It may seem not merely inadequate as theology, but philosophical rather than Christian; and its aim is, indeed, that of strengthening man's sense of moral responsibility and of heightening his courage to withstand temptation. But we must remember that Hilary everywhere assumes the union between the Christian and Christ. While this union exists there is always the power of bringing conduct into conformity with His will. Conduct, then, is, comparatively speaking, a matter of detail. Sins of action and emotion do not necessarily sever the union; a whole system of casuistry might be built upon Hilary's foundation. But false thoughts of God violate the very principle of union between Him and man. However abstract they may seem and remote from practical life, they are an insuperable barrier. For intellectual harmony, as well as moral, is necessary; and error of belief, like a key moving in a lock with whose wards it does not correspond, forbids all access to the nature and the grace of God. Agood example of his relative estimate of intellectual and moral offences occurs in the Homily on Psalm I. **ss 6-8, where it is noteworthy that he does not trace back the former to moral causeshyperlink .

Against these, the expressions of Hilary's usual opinion, must be set others in which he anticipates the language of St. Augustine in the Pelagian controversy. But certain deductions must be made, before we can rightly judge the weight of his testimony on the side of original sin. Passages where he is merely amplifying the words of Scripture must be excluded, as also those which are obviously exhibitions of unguarded rhetoric. For instance such words as these, 'Ever since the sin and unbelief of our first parent, we of later generations have had sin for the father of our body and unbelief for the mother of our soulhyperlink ,' contradicting as they do Hilary's well-known theory of the origin of the soul, cannot be regarded as giving his deliberate belief concerning sin. Again, we must be careful not to interpret strong language concerning the body (e.g. Tr. in Ps. cxviii, Caph, 5 fin. ), as though it referred to our whole complex manhood. But after all deductions a good deal of strong Augustinianism remains. In the person of Adam God created all mankind, and all are implicated in his downfall, which was not only the beginning of evil but is a continuous powerhyperlink . Not only as a matter of experience, is no man sinless, but no man can, by any possibility, be free from sinhyperlink . Because of the sin of one sentence is passed upon allhyperlink ; the sentence of slavery which is so deep a degradation that the victim of sin forfeits even the name of manhyperlink . But Hilary not only states the doctrine; be approaches very nearly, on rare occasions, to the term 'original sinhyperlink .' It follows that nothing less than a regeneration, the free gift of God, will availhyperlink ; and the grace by which the Christian must be maintained is also His spontaneous and unconditional gift. Faith, knowledge, Christian life, all have their origin and their maintenance from Himhyperlink . Such is a brief statement of Hilary's position as a forerunner of St. Augustine. The passages cited are scattered over his writings, from the earliest to the latest, and there is no sign that the more modern view was gaining ground in his mind as his judgment ripened. He had no occasion to face the question, and was content to say whatever seemed obviously to arise from the words under discussion, or to be most profitable to his audience. His Augustinianism, if it may be called so, is but one of many instances of originality, a thought thrown out but not developed. It is a symptom of revolt against the inadequate views of older theologians; but it had more influence upon the mind of his great successor than upon his own. Dealing, as he did, with the subject in hortatory writings, hardly at all, and only incidentally, in his formal treatise on the Trinity, he preferred to regard it as a matter of morals rather than of doctrine. And the dignity of man, impressed upon him by the great Alexandrians, seemed to demand for humanity the fullest liberty.



Footnotes



332 E.g. Trin. ix. 4, x. 7.



333 Trin. in Ps. lxii. 3; of Comm in Matt.xvi.5.



334 Tr. in. Ps. lvi. 7, liii. 5. we muat remember the importance of names in Hilary's eyes. They are not arbitrary symbols, but belong essentially to the objects which they signify. Had there been no sin, from which man needed to be saved, he would still required raising to his name and nature.



335 Ib. cxviii. , Aleph, 1, cxxx. 6.



336 Ib. cxxxi. 23.



337 Trin. iii. 9.



338 Forster, op. cit.



339 Cf Harnack, Dogmengesch. ii. 281. But Harnack is unjust in saying that Had not quite made up his own mind.



340 Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 206 n. `Hilary's belief in the deity of the Holy Spirit is hardly more doubtful than St. John's: yet he nowhere states it in so many words.


0'



341 If the word may be admitted for the sake of clearness. Hilary never calls the Spirit a Person.



342 §§23, 25, 30; so also ix. 69 and notably in x. 16. Similarly in Comm in Matt. iii. I, the Spirit means Christ.



343 Trin. Viii. 20, ix. 73 fin., and especially ii. 4. This last is not a reference to the Macedonian heresy, but to the logical result of Arianism.



344 T'rin. i. l7, v. I, 35, vii. 8, 31, viii. 31, 36, x. 6.&c.



345 Balzer, Theologie des hl. Hilarius, p. 51.



346 Trin. viii. 21, xii. 55.



347 The work by Tertullian in which the doctrine of the Spirit is most fully brought out; in which, in fact, He is first expressly named God, is the Adversus Praxean. It was written after his secession from the Church, and Hilary, upon whom it had more influence than any other of Tertullian's writings, may have suspected that this teaching was the expression of his Montanism rather than a legitimate deduction from Scripture, and so have been misled by over caution. He may also have been infuenced by such Biblical passages as Rev. xiv. I, where the Spirit is unnamed.



348 E.g. Tr. in Ps. ii. l6, 1I. 23.



349 Ib. Ivii 3.



350 lb. cxviii., Teth, 4, Ixiv. 5.



351 Ib. cxviii., Gimel, 3, 4.



352 Ib., Daleth, 1.



353 Ib. cxix. 19 (12).



354 Ib. cxix. lxviii. 9



355 E.g. ib cxviii., Aleph, 8, lii. 12. Natura infirmitalis is a favourite phrase.



356 E.g. ib. Iii. 9 cxviii., Gimel, 12,Vau, 6.



357 Ib. cxviii. Daleth, 8: cf. He, 16.



358 Ib. Iii. 12.



359 Ib. Ixviii. 22, based on St. Matt. x. 15.



360 Ib. 1ii. 1l. I2.



361 E.g. ib. cxviii., Prolog. 2, Alph, 12, Phe, 8.



362 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., He 12, Nun 20. But in the former passage the perseverance also depends upon the Christian.



363 Trin. ii. 35.



364 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Nun II f.



365 Forster, loc cit.



366 So also the Sin against the Holy Ghost is primarily intellectual, not ethical; Comm. Matt. v. 15, xii. 17.



367 Ib. x. 23.



368 Trin. iv. 21; Tr. in Ps. Ixvi. 2; Comm. in Matt. xviii. 6.



369 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., He, 16.



370 Tr in Ps. Iix. 4 in.



371 Ib. cxlii. 6, cxviii., Ioa, 2. In regard to the latter passage we must remember once more what importance Hilary attaches to names.



372 Comm. in Matt. sx. 24, originis nostra pecata ; Tr. in ps. cxviii, Tau, 6, scit sub peccati lege se esse natum. Other passages must be cited from quotations in St. Augustine, but Forster, p. 676, has given reason for doubting Hilary's authorship.



373 E.g. Comm, in Matt. x. 24.



374 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Vau, 4, Lamed, I; cf. Nun, 20.