The Theology of St. Hilary of Poitiers (part 2 of 3)

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 motherhood²³² ; 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 worlds²³³ . Yet, in some real sense, Christ emptied Himself of this form of God²³⁴ . 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 Person²³⁵ . This is stated as distinctly as is the correlative fact that He retained and exercised the powers and the majesty of His nature. Thus it is clear that, outside the sphere of His work for men, the form and the nature of God remained unchanged in the Son; while within that sphere the form, though not the nature, was so affected that it could truly be said to be laid aside. But when we come to Hilary's explanation of this process, we can only acquit him of inconsistency in thought by admitting the ambiguity of his language. In one group of passages he recognises the self-emptying, but minimises its importance; in another he denies that our Lord could or did empty Himself of the form of God. And again, his definitions of the word form' are so various as to be actually contradictory. Yet a consistent sense, and one exceedingly characteristic of Hilary, can be derived from a comparison of his statements²³⁶ ; 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 apparel²³⁷ ,' and his definition of the word form' as meaning no more than face' or appearance²³⁸ ,'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 Man²³⁹ . On the other hand Hilary expressly declares that the concurrence of the two forms²⁴⁰ ' is impossible, they being mutually exclusive. This represents the higher form, that of God, as something more than a dress or appearance which could be changed or masked; and stronger still is the language used in the Homily on Psalm xviii. There (§ 4) he speaks of Christ being exhausted of His heavenly nature, this being used as a synonym for the form of God, and even of His being emptied of His substance. But it is probable that the Homily has descended to us, without revision by its author, in the very words which the shorthand writer took down. This mention of substance' is unlike Hilary's usual language, and the antithesis between the substance which the Son had not, because He had emptied Himself of it, and the substance which He had, because He had assumed it, is somewhat infelicitously expressed. The term must certainly not be taken as the deliberate statement of Hilary's final opinion, still less as the decisive passage to which his other assertions must be accommodated; but it is at least clear evidence that Hilary, in the maturity of his thought, was not afraid to state in the strongest possible language the reality and completeness of the evacuation. The reconciliation of these apparently contradictory views concerning Christ's relation to the form of God can only be found in Hilary's idea of the Incarnation as a dispensation,' or series of dispensations. The word and the thought are borrowed through Tertullian²⁴¹ 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 dispensation²⁴² , 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 Himself²⁴³ .' Concealment has a great part to play in Hilary's theories, and is in this instance the only explanation consistent with his doctrinal position²⁴⁴ .

Thus the Son made possible the union of humanity with Himself. He shrank from God into man²⁴⁵ ' by an act not only of Divine power, but of personal Divine will. He Who did this thing could not cease to be what He had been before; hence His very deed in submitting Himself to the change is evidence of His unchanged continuity of existence²⁴⁶ . And furthermore, His assumption of the servant's form was not accomplished by a single act. His wearing of that form was one continuous act of voluntary self-repression²⁴⁷ , and the events of His life on earth bear frequent witness to His possession of the powers of God.

Thus in Him God is united with man; these two natures form the elements' or parts' of one Person²⁴⁸ . The Godhead is superposed upon the manhood; or, as Hilary prefers to say, the manhood is assumed by Christ²⁴⁹ . And these two natures are not confused²⁵⁰ , but simultaneously coexist in Him as the Son of Man²⁵¹ . There are not two Christs²⁵² , nor is the one Christ a composite Being in such a sense that He is intermediate in kind between God and Man. He can speak as God and can also speak as Man; in the Homilies on the Psalms Hilary constantly distinguishes between His utterances in the one and the other nature. Yet He is one Person with two natures, of which the one dominates, though it does not extinguish, the other in every relation of His existence as the Son of Man²⁵³ . Every act, bodily or mental, done by Him is done by both natures of the one Christ. Hence a certain indifference towards the human aspects of His life, and a tendency rather to explain away what seems humiliation than to draw out its lessons²⁵⁴ . And Hilary is so impressed with the unity of Christ that the humanity, a notion for which he has no name²⁵⁵ , would have been in his eyes nothing more than a collective term for certain attributes of One Who is more than man, just as the body of Christ is not for him a dwelling occupied, or an instrument used, by God, but an inseparable property of Christ, Who personally is God and Man.

Hence the body of Christ has a character peculiar to itself. It is a heavenly body²⁵⁶ , because of its origin and because of its Owner, the Son of Man Who came down from heaven, and though on earth was in heaven still²⁵⁷ . It performs the functions and experiences, the limitations of a human body, and this is evidence that it is in every sense a true, not an alien or fictitious body. Though it is free from the sins of humanity, it has our weaknesses. But here the distinction must be made, which will presently be discussed, between the two kinds of suffering, that which feels and that which only endures. Christ was not conscious of suffering from these weaknesses, which could inflict no sense of want of weariness or pain upon His body, a body not the less real because it was perfect. He took our infirmities as truly as He bore our sins. But He was no more under the dominion of the one than of the other²⁵⁸ . His body was in the likeness of ours, but its reality did not consist in the likeness²⁵⁹ , but in the fact that He had created it a true body. Christ, by virtue of His creative power, might have made for Himself a true body, by means of which to fulfil God's purposes, that should have been free from these infirmities. It was for our sake that He did not. There would have been a true body, but it would have been difficult for us to believe it. Hence He assumed one which had for habits what are necessities to us, in order to demonstrate to us its reality²⁶⁰ . It was foreordained that He should be incarnate; the mode of the Incarnation was determined by considerations of our advantage. The arguments by which this thesis is supported will be stated presently, in connection with Hilary's account of the Passion. It would be difficult to decide whether he has constructed his theory concerning the human activities of our Lord upon the basis of this preponderance of the Divine nature in His incarnate personality, or whether he has argued back from what he deems the true account of Christ's mode of life on earth, and invented the hypothesis in explanation of it. In any case he has had the courage exactly to reverse the general belief of Christendom regarding the powers normally used by Christ. We are accustomed to think that with rare exceptions, such as the Transfiguration, He lived a life limited by the ordinary conditions of humanity, to draw lessons for ourselves from His bearing in circumstances like our own, to estimate His condescension and suffering, in kind if not in degree, by our own consciousness. Hilary regards the normal state of the incarnate Christ as that of exaltation, from which He stooped on rare occasions, by a special act of will, to self-humiliation. Thus the Incarnation, though itself a declension from the pristine glory, does not account for the facts of Christ's life; they must be explained by further isolated and temporary declensions. And since the Incarnation is the one great event, knowledge and faith concerning which are essential, the events which accompany or result from it tend, in Hilary's thought, to shrink in importance. They can and must be minimised, explained away, regarded as dispensations,' if they seem to derogate from the Majesty of Him Who was incarnate.

When we examine the interpretation of Scripture by which Hilary reaches the desired conclusions we find it, in many instances, strange indeed. The letter of the Gospels tells us of bodily needs and of suffering; Christ, though more than man, is proved to be Man by His obvious submission to the conditions of human life. But according to Hilary all human suffering is due to the union of an imperfect soul with an imperfect body. The soul of Christ, though truly human, was perfect; His body was that of a Person Divine as well as human. Thus both elements were perfect of their kind, and therefore as free from infirmity²⁶¹ as from sin, for affliction is the lot of man not because he is man, but because he is a sinner. In contrast with the squalor of sinful humanity, glory surrounded Christ from the Annunciation onward throughout His course on earth²⁶² . Miracle is the attestation of His Godhead, and He who was thus superior to the powers of nature could not be subject to the sufferings which nature inflicts. But, being omnipotent, He could subject Himself to humiliations which no power less than His own could lay upon Him, and this self-subjection is the supreme evidence of His might as well of His goodwill towards men. God, and only God, could occupy at once the cradle and the throne on high²⁶³ . Thus in emphasizing the humiliation Hilary is extolling the majesty of Christ, and refuting the errors of Arianism. That school had made the most of Christ's sufferings, holding them as proof of His inferiority to the Father. In Hilary's eyes His power to condescend and His final victory are equally conclusive evidences of His co-equal Divinity. But if He stoops to our estate, and is at the same time God exercising His full prerogatives, here again there must be a dispensation.' He was truly subject to the limitations of our nature; that is a fact of revelation. But He was subject by a succession of detached acts of self-restraint, culminating in the act, voluntary like the others, of His death²⁶⁴ . Of His acceptance of the ordinary infirmities of humanity we have already spoken. Hilary gives the same explanation of the Passion as he does of the thirst or weariness of Christ. That He could suffer, and that to the utmost, is proved by the fact that He did suffer; yet was He, or could He be, conscious of suffering? For the fulfilment of the Divine purpose, for our assurance of the reality of His work, the acts had to be done; but it was sufficient that they should be done by a dispensation, in other words, that the events should be real and yet the feelings be absent of which, had the events happened to us, we should have been conscious. To understand this we must recur to Hilary's theory of the relation of the soul to the body. The former is the organ of sense, the latter a lifeless thing. But the soul may fall below, or rise above, its normal state. Mortification of the body may set in, or drugs be administered which shall render the soul incapable of feeling the keenest pain²⁶⁵ . On the other hand it is capable of a spiritual elevation which shall make it unconscious of bodily needs or sufferings, as when Moses and Elijah fasted, or the three Jewish youths walked amid the flames²⁶⁶ . On this high level Christ always dwelt. Others might rise for a moment above themselves; He, not although, but because He was true and perfect Man, never fell below it. He placed Himself in circumstances where shame and wounds and death were inflicted upon Him; He had lived a life of humiliation, not only real, in that it involved a certain separation from God, but also apparent. But as in this latter respect we may no more overlook His glory than we may suppose Him ignorant, as by a dispensation He professed to be²⁶⁷ , so in regard to the Passion we must not imagine that He was inferior to His saints in being conscious, as they were not, of suffering²⁶⁸ . So far, indeed, is He from the sense of suffering that Hilary even says that the Passion was a delight to Him²⁶⁹ , and this not merely in its prospective results, but in the consciousness of power which He enjoyed in passing through it. Nor could this be surprising to one who looked with Hilary's eyes upon the humanity of Christ. He enforces his view sometimes with rhetoric, as when he repudiates the notion that the Bread of Life could hunger, and He who gives the living water, thirst²⁷⁰ , that the hand which restored the servant's ear could itself feel pain²⁷¹ , that He Who said, Now is the Son of Man glorified,' when Judas left the chamber, could at that moment be feeling sorrow²⁷² , and He before Whom the soldiers fell be capable of fear²⁷³ , or shrink from the pain of a death which was itself an exertion of His own free will and power²⁷⁴ . Or else he dwells upon the general character of Christ's manhood. He recognises no change in the mode of being after the Resurrection; the passing through closed doors, the sudden disappearance at Emmaus are typical of the normal properties of His body, which could heal the sick by a touch, and could walk upon the waves²⁷⁵ . It is a body upon the sensibility of which the forces of nature can make no impression whatever; they can no more pain Him than the stroke of a weapon can affect air or water²⁷⁶ ; or, as Hilary puts it elsewhere, fear and death, which have so painful a meaning to us, were no more to Him than a shower falling upon a surface which it cannot penetrate²⁷⁷ . It is not the passages of the Gospel which tell of Christ's glory, but those which speak of weakness or suffering that need to be explained; and Hilary on occasion is not afraid to explain them away. For instance, we read that when our Lord had fasted forty days and forty nights He was afterward an hungred.' Hilary denies that there is a connection of cause and effect. Christ's perfect body was unaffected by abstinence; but after the fast by an exertion of His will He experienced hunger²⁷⁸ . So also the Agony in the Garden is ingeniously misinterpreted. He took with Him the three Apostles, and then began to be sorrowful. He was not sorrowful till He had taken them; they, not He, were the cause. When He said, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,' the last words must not be regarded as meaning that His was a mortal sorrow, but as giving a note of time. The sorrow of which He spoke was not for Himself but for His Apostles, whose flight He foresaw, and He was asserting that this sorrow would last till He died. And when He prayed that the cup might pass away from Him, this was no entreaty that He might be spared. It was His purpose to drink it. The prayer was for His disciples that the cup might pass on from Him to them; that they might suffer for Him as martyrs full of hope, without pain or fear²⁷⁹ . One passage, St. Luke xxii. 43, 44, which conflicts with his view is rejected by Hilary on textual grounds, and not without some reason²⁸⁰ . He had looked for it, and found it absent, in a large number of manuscripts, both Greek and Latin. But perhaps the strangest argument which he employs is that when the Gospel tells us that Christ thirsted and hungered and wept, it does not proceed to say that He ate and drank and felt grief²⁸¹ . Hunger and thirst, eating and drinking, were two sets of dispensations, unconnected by the relation of cause and effect; the tears were another dispensation, not the expression of personal grief. If, as a habit, He accepts the needs and functions of our body, this does not render His own body more real, for by the act of its creation it was made truly human; His purpose, as has been said, is to enable us to recognise its reality, which would otherwise be difficult²⁸² . If He wept, He had the same object; this use of one of the evidences of bodily emotion would help us to believe²⁸³ . And so it is throughout Christ's life on earth. He suffered but He did not feel. No one but a heretic, says Hilary, would suppose that He was pained by the nails which fixed Him to the Cross²⁸⁴ .

It is obvious that Hilary's theory offers a perfect defence against the two dangers of the day, Arianism and Apollinarianism. The tables are turned upon the former by emphatic insistence upon the power manifested in the humiliation and suffering of Christ. That He, being what He was, should be able to place Himself in such circumstances was the most impressive evidence of His Divinity. And if His humanity was endowed with Divine properties, much more must His Divinity rise above that inferiority to which the Arians consigned it. Apollinarianism is controverted by the demonstration of His true humanity. No language can be too strong to describe its glories; but the true wonder is not that Christ, as God, has such attributes, but that He Who has them is very Man. The theory was well adapted for service in the controversies of the day; for us, however we may admire the courage and ingenuity it displays, it can be no more than a curiosity of doctrinal history. Yet, whatever its defects as an explanation of the facts, the skill with which dangers on either hand are avoided, the manifest anxiety to be loyal to established doctrine, deserve recognition and respect. It has been said that Hilary constantly withdraws in the second clause what he has asserted in the first²⁸⁵ ,' and in a sense it is true. For many of his statements might make him seem the advocate of an extreme doctrine of Kenosis, which would represent our Lord's self-emptying as complete. But often expressed and always present in Hilary's thought, for the coherence of which it is necessary, is the correlative notion of the dispensation, whereby Christ seemed for our sake to be less than He truly was. Again, Hilary has been accused of sailing somewhat close to the cliffs of Docetism²⁸⁶ ,' but all admit that he has escaped shipwreck. Various accounts of his teaching, all of which agree in acquitting him of this error, have been given; and that which has been accepted in this paper, of Christ by the very perfection of His humanity habitually living in such an ecstasy as that of Polycarp or Perpetua at their martyrdom, is a noble conception in itself and consistent with the Creeds, though it cannot satisfy us. In part, at any rate, it belonged to the lessons which Hilary had learned from Alexandria. Clement had taught, though his successor Origen rejected, the impassability of Christ, Who had eaten and drunk only by a dispensation';—He ate not for the sake of His body, which was sustained by a holy power, but that that false notion might not creep into the minds of His companions which in later days some have, in fact, conceived, that He had been manifested only in appearance. He was altogether impassible; there entered from without into Him no movement of the feelings, whether pleasure , or pain²⁸⁷ .' Thus Hilary had what would be in his eyes high authority for his opinion. But he must have felt some doubts of its value if he compared the strange exegesis and forced logic by which it was supported with that frank acceptance of the obvious sense of Scripture in which he takes so reasonable a pride in His direct controversy with the Arians. And another criticism may be ventured. In that controversy he balances with scrupulous reverence mystery against mystery, never forgetting that he is dealing with infinities. In this case the one is made to overwhelm the other; the infinite glory excludes the infinite sorrow from his view. Here, if anywhere, Hilary needs, and may justly claim, the indulgence he has demanded. It had not been his wish to define or explain; he was content with the plain words of Scripture and the simplest of creeds. But he was compelled by the fault of others to commit a fault²⁸⁸ ; and speculation based on sound principles, however perilous to him who made the first attempt, had been rendered by the prevalence of heresy a necessary evil. Again, we must bear in mind that Hilary was essentially a Greek theologian, to whom the supremely interesting as well as the supremely important doctrine was that God became Man. He does not conceal or undervalue the fact of the Atonement and of the Passion as the means by which it was wrought. But, even though he had not held his peculiar theory of impassibility, he would still have thought the effort most worth making not that of realising the pains of Christ by our experience of suffering and sense of the enormity of sin, but that of apprehending the mystery of the Incarnation. For that act of condescension was greater, not only in scale but in kind, than any humiliation to which Christ, already Man, submitted Himself in His human state.

Christ, Whose properties as incarnate are thus described by Hilary, is one Person. This, of course, needs no proof, but something must be said of the use which he makes of the doctrine. It is by Christ's own work, by an act of power, even of violence²⁸⁹ , exercised by Him upon Himself, that the two natures are inseparably associated in Him; so inseparably that between His death and resurrection His Divinity was simultaneously present with each of the severed elements of His humanity²⁹⁰ . Hence, though Hilary frequently discriminates between Christ's utterances as God and as Man²⁹¹ , he never fails to keep his reader's attention fixed upon the unity of His Person. And this unity is the more obvious because, as has been said, the Manhood in Christ is dominated by the Godhead. Though we are not allowed to forget that He is truly Man, yet as a rule Hilary prefers to speak in such words as, the only-begotten Son of God was crucified²⁹² ,' or to say more briefly, God was crucified²⁹³ .' Judas is the betrayer of God²⁹⁴ ;' the life of mortals is renewed through the death of immortal God²⁹⁵ .' Such expressions are far more frequent than the balanced language, the Passion of Jesus Christ, our God and Lord²⁹⁶ ,' and these again than such an exaltation of the manhood as the Man Jesus Christ, the Lord of Majesty²⁹⁷ .' But once, in an unguarded moment, an element of His humanity seems to be deified. Hilary never says that Christ's body is God, but he speaks of the spectators of the Crucifixion contemplating the power of the soul which by signs and deeds had proved itself God²⁹⁸ .'

But though distinctions may be drawn, and though for the sake of emphasis and brevity Christ may be called by the name of one only of His two natures, the essential fact is never forgotten that He is God and man, one Person in two forms, God's and the servant's. And these two natures do not stand isolated and apart, merely contained within the limits of one personality. Just as we saw that Hilary recognises a complete mutual indwelling and interpenetration of Father and Son, so he teaches that in the narrower sphere of the Incarnation there is an equally exact and comprehensive union of the Godhead and Manhood in Christ. Jesus is Christ, and Christ is Jesus²⁹⁹ . Not merely is the one Christ perfect Man and perfect God, but the whole Son of Man is the whole Son of God³⁰⁰ . So far is His manhood from being merged and lost in His Divinity, that the extent of the one is the measure of the other. We must not imagine that, simultaneously with the incarnate, there existed a non-incarnate Christ, respectively submitting to humiliation and ruling the worlds; nor yet must we conceive of one Christ in two unconnected states of being, as though the assumption of humanity were merely a function analogous to the guiding of the stars. On the contrary, the one Person is co-extensive with all infinity, and all action lies within His scope. Whatever He does, whether it be, or be not, in relation to humanity, and in the former case whether it be the exaltation of man-hood or the self-emptying of Godhead, is done within the sphere of the Incarnation³⁰¹ ,' the sphere which embraces His whole being and His whole action. The self-emptying itself was not a self-determination, instant and complete, made before the Incarnation, but, as we saw, a process which continued throughout Christ's life on earth and was active to the end. For as He hung, deliberately self-emptied of His glory, on the Cross, He manifested His normal powers by the earthquake shock. His submission to death was the last of a consistent series of exertions of His will, which began with the Annunciation and culminated in the Crucifixion.

Hilary estimates the cost of the Incarnation not by any episodes of Christ's life on earth, but by the fact that it brought about a real, though partial, separation or breach³⁰² within the Godhead. Henceforward there was in Christ the nature of the creature as well as that of the Creator; and this second nature, though it had been assumed in its most perfect form, was sundered by an infinite distance from God the Father, though indissolubly united with the Divinity of his Son. A barrier therefore was raised between them, to be overcome in due time by the elevation of manhood in and through the Son. When this elevation was complete within the Person of Christ, then the separation between Him and His Father would be at an end. He would still have true humanity, but this humanity would be raised to the level of association with the Father. In Hilary's doctrine the submission of Christ to this isolation is the central fact of Christianity, the supreme evidence of His love for men. Not only did it thus isolate Him, truly though partially, from the Father, but it introduced a strain, a division'³⁰³ within His now incarnate Person. The union of natures was real, but in order that it might become perfect the two needed to be adjusted; and the humiliation involved in this adjustment is a great part of the sacrifice made by Christ. There was conflict, in a certain sense, within Himself, repression and concealment of His powers. But finally the barrier was to be removed, the loss regained, by the exaltation of the manhood into harmonious association with the Godhead of Father and of Son³⁰⁴ . Then He Who had become in one Person God and Man would become for ever fully God and fully Man. The humanity would gain, the Divinity regain, its appropriate dignity³⁰⁵ , while each retained the reality it had had on earth.

Thus Christ's life in the world was a period of transition. He had descended; this was the time of preparation for an equal, and even loftier, ascent. We must now consider in what the preparation consisted; and here, at first sight, Hilary has involved himself in a grave difficulty. For it is manifest that his theory of Christ's life as one lived without effort, spiritual or physical, or rather as a life whose exertion consisted in a steady self accommodation to the infirmities of men, varied by occasional and special acts of condescension to suffering, excludes the possibility of an advance, a growth in grace as well as in stature, such as Athanasius scripturally taught³⁰⁶ . We might say of Hilary, as has been said of another Father, under his treatment the Divine history seems to be dissolved into a docetic drama³⁰⁷ .' In such a life it might seem that there was not merely no possibility of progress, but even an absence of identity, in the sense of continuity. The phenomena of Christ's life, therefore, are not manifestations of the disturbance and strain on which Hilary insists, for they are, when, rightly considered, proofs of His union with God and of His Divine power, not of weakness or of partial separation. It would, indeed, be vain for us to seek for sensible evidence of the process of adjustment, for it went on within the inmost being of the one Person. It did not affect the Godhead or the Manhood, both visibly revealed as aspects of the Person, but the hidden relation between the two. Our knowledge assures us that the process took place, but it is a knowledge attained by inference from what He was before and after the state of transition, not by observation of His action in that state. Both natures of the one Person were affected; everything'—glory as well as humiliation—was common to the entire Person at every moment, though to each aspect in its own distinctive manner.' The entire Person entered into inequality with Himself; the actuality of each aspect, during the state of humiliation, fell short of its idea—of the idea of the Son, of the idea of the perfect man, of the idea of the God-man. It was not merely the human aspect that was at first inadequate to the Divine; for, through the medium of the voluntary evacuatio,' it dragged down the Divine nature also, so far as is permitted it, to its own inequality³⁰⁸ .' Such is the only explanation which will reconcile Hilary's various, and sometimes obscure, utterances on this great subject. It is open to the obvious and fatal objection that it cuts, instead of loosening, the knot. For it denies any connection between the dispensation of Christ's life on earth and the mystery of His assumption and exaltation of humanity; the one becomes somewhat purposeless, and the other remains unverified. But it is at least a bold and reverent speculation, not inconsistent with the Faith as a system of thought, though no place can be found for it in the Faith, regarded as a revelation of fact.

It was on behalf of mankind that this great sacrifice was made by the Son. While it separated Him from the Father, it united Him to men. We must now consider what was the spiritual constitution of the humanity which He assumed, as we have already considered the physical Man, as we saw (p. lxix.) is constituted of body and soul, an outward and an inward substance, the one earthly, the other heavenly³⁰⁹ . The exact process of his creation has been revealed. First, man—that is, his soul—was made in the image of God; next, long afterwards, his body was fashioned out of dust; finally by a distinct act, man was made a living soul by the breath of God, the heavenly and earthly natures being thus coupled together³¹⁰ . The world was already complete when God created the highest, the most beautiful of His works after His own image. His other works were made by an instantaneous command; even the firmament was established by his hand³¹¹ ; man alone was made by the hands of God;—Thy hands have made me and fashioned me.' This singular honour of being made by a process, not an act, and by the hands, not the hand or the voice, of God, was paid to man not simply as the highest of the creatures, but as the one for whose sake the rest of the universe was called into being³¹² . It is, of course, the soul, made after the image of God, which has this high honour; an honour which no length of sinful ancestry can forfeit, for each soul is still separately created. Hence no human soul is akin to any other human soul; the uniformity of type is secured by each being made in the same pattern, and the dignity of humanity by the fact that this pattern is that of the Son, the Image of God. But the soul pervades the whole body with which it is associated, even as God pervades the universe³¹³ . The soul of each man is individual, special to himself; his brotherhood with mankind belongs to him through his body, which has therefore something of universality. Hence the relation of mankind with Christ is not through his human soul; it was the nature of universal flesh' which He took³¹⁴ that has made Him one with us in the Incarnation and in the Eucharist³¹⁵ . The reality of His body, as we have seen, is amply secured by Hilary; its universality is assured by the absence of any individual human paternity, which would have isolated Him from others³¹⁶ . Thus He took all humanity into His one body; He is the Church³¹⁷ , for He contains her through the mystery of His body. In Him, by the same means, there is contained the congregation, so to speak, of the whole race of men.' Hence He spoke of Himself as the City set on a hill; the inhabitants are mankind³¹⁸ . But Christ not only embraces all humanity in Himself, but the archetype after Whom, and the final cause for Whom, man was made. Every soul, when it proceeds from the hands of God, is pure, free and immortal, with a natural affinity and capacity for good³¹⁹ , which can find its satisfaction only in Christ, the ideal Man. But if Christ is thus everything to man, humanity has also, in the foreordained purpose of God, something to confer upon Christ. The temporary humiliation of the Incarnation has for its result a higher glory than He possessed before³²⁰ , acquired through the harmony of the two natures.

The course of this elevation is represented by Hilary as a succession of births, in continuation of the majestic series. First there had been the eternal generation of the Son; then His creation for the ways and for the works of God, His appointment, which Hilary regards as equivalent in importance to another birth, to the office of Creator; next the Incarnation, the birth in time which makes Him what He was not before, namely Man³²¹ . This is followed by the birth of Baptism, of which Hilary speaks thrice³²² . He read in St. Matthew iii. 17, instead of the familiar words of the Voice from heaven, Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee.' This was in his judgment the institution of the sacrament of Baptism; because Christ was baptized, we must follow His example. It was a new birth to Him, and therefore to us. He had been the Son; He became through Baptism the perfect Son by this fresh birth³²³ . It is difficult to see what Hilary's thought was; perhaps he had not defined it to himself. But, with this reading in his copy of the Gospel, it was necessary that he should be ready with an explanation; and though there remained a higher perfection to be reached, this birth in Baptism might well be regarded as a stage in the return of Christ to His glory, an elevation of His humanity to a more perfect congruity with His Godhead. This birth is followed by another, the effect and importance of which is more obvious, that of the Resurrection, the birthday of His humanity to glory³²⁴ .' By the Incarnation He had lost unity with the Father; but the created nature, by the assumption of which He had disturbed the unity both within Himself and in relation to the Father, is now raised to the level on which that unity is again possible. In the Resurrection, therefore, it is restored; and this stage of Christ's achievement is regarded as a New birth³²⁵ , by which His glory becomes, as it had been before, the same as that of the Father. But now the glory is shared by His humanity; the servant's form is promoted to the glory of God³²⁶ and the discordance comes to an end. Christ, God and Man, stands where the Word before the Incarnation stood. In this Resurrection, the only step in this Divine work which is caused by sin, His full humanity partakes. In order to satisfy all the conditions of actual human life, He died and visited the lower world³²⁷ ; and also, as man shall do, He rose again with the same body in which He had died³²⁸ . Then comes that final state, of which something has already been said, when God shall be all in all. No further change will be possible within the Person of Christ, for his humanity, already in harmony with the Godhead, will now be transmuted. The whole Christ, Man as well as God, will become wholly God. Yet the humanity will still exist, for it is inseparable from the Divinity, and will consist, as before, of body and soul. But there will be nothing earthly or fleshly left in the body; its nature will be purely spiritual³²⁹ . The only form in which Hilary can express this result is the seeming paradox that Christ will, by virtue of the final subjection, be and continue what He is not³³⁰ .' By this return of the whole Christ into perfect union with God, humanity attains the purpose of its creation. He was the archetype after Whose likeness man was fashioned, and in His Person all the possibilities of mankind are attained. And this great consummation not only fulfils the destinies of humanity; it brings also an augmentation of the glory of Him Who is glorified in Christ³³¹ .

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 God³³² ; 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 eternal³³³ . But they can only rise by a process, 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 God³³⁴ . And the means to this is knowledge of Him, received into a pure mind³³⁵ . Such knowledge makes the soul of man a dwelling rational, pure and eternal, wherein the Divine nature, whose properties these are, may eternally abide³³⁶ . 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 God³³⁷ .

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 explanation, 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 Him³³⁸ . He saw that there must be such a development, and if he was wrong in tracing its course, there is a reverence and loyalty, a solidity of reasoning and steady grasp of the problems under discussion, which save him 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 regards with 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 thought. 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. The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is little developed in his writings. The cause was, in part, his sympathy with Eastern thought. 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 unreasoned³³⁹ . 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 process has been arrested. There is nothing in his words concerning the Holy Spirit inconsistent with the later definitions of faith³⁴⁰ , 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 in alliance 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 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. §§ 29-35, 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. The doctrine, as he here defines it, is that the Holy Spirit undoubtedly exists; the Father and the 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 personal³⁴¹ 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. §§ 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. 19 f., 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 told that the Spirit' may mean Father or Son as well as Holy Ghost³⁴² , 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 Other³⁴³ , yet Hilary refuses with some emphasis and in a conspicuous 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 Him³⁴⁴ . We find in Hilary the premises from which the Divinity of the Holy Ghost is the necessary conclusion³⁴⁵ ;' and there is reason to believe that he would have stated the doctrine of the Procession in the Western, not in the Eastern, form³⁴⁶ ; 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 Faith³⁴⁷ .