Gaul and the Arian Crisis

The world into which Hilary of Poitiers was born — a Latin-speaking, still half-pagan Gaul on the western edge of the fourth-century Church — and the slow westward spread of the Arian controversy that would consume his episcopate. This file sets the historical and intellectual scene: the condition of Nicene Christianity in the West before Hilary, his cultivated pagan upbringing, and the conversion he himself narrates in the opening of De Trinitate Book 1, where a rational search for the good life is brought to rest by the divine name of Exodus 3:14 and the Prologue of John.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; Church Father)

A Latin Bishop on the Western Edge

Hilary belongs to the generation of Western churchmen who inherited the Council of Nicaea (325) as a settled fact and then watched the Eastern Church spend forty years quarrelling over what it had meant. He was born at Poitiers (Roman Pictavium), in Aquitania, into a propertied and educated family [Disputed: his birth is variously dated c. 310 (Beckwith 2008, 13, with most modern scholarship favouring c. 310/315); c. 315 (Hanson 1988, 459, "born probably about 315"); and more broadly c. 300–315 — the year is genuinely uncertain because no source gives it and it is reconstructed from the late date of his episcopate and death in 367]. The earliest connected witness to his life is the brief notice in Jerome, De viris illustribus 100, which makes him a native of Poitiers, a bishop, and the author of the works Jerome lists; almost everything else about his early years must be drawn, cautiously, from his own writings (Jerome, De viris illustribus 100; trans. NPNF II/3; Beckwith 2008, 13–14).

The Gaul of Hilary’s youth was a Roman province in full Latin culture but uneven Christianization. Christianity had reached the Rhône valley by the second century — the martyrs of Lyons and Vienne (177) and the episcopate of Irenaeus are its monuments (on whom see Irenaeus of Lyons) — but in the early fourth century the faith was still thin on the ground in much of Aquitania and the countryside remained substantially pagan. Hilary writes as a man who came to Christianity from outside it, by deliberation rather than upbringing, and his Latin is the trained Latin of the rhetorical schools (Hanson 1988, 459–461; Weedman 2007, 19–22). He is, in the standard and accurate phrase, a convert from cultivated paganism, not a cradle Christian (Beckwith 2008, 14).

That biographical fact matters for the whole shape of his theology. Where the great Eastern Nicenes — Athanasius, the Cappadocians — were formed inside the controversy, Hilary entered it as a Latin who had first to find the faith and then, almost at once, to defend it against a crisis that had not yet, when he was converted, fully reached the West (Ayres 2004, 179–181; Weedman 2007, 1–4).

The State of Nicene Christianity in the West

To understand the crisis Hilary walked into, one must see how differently East and West stood toward Nicaea in the 340s and 350s. The Western Church had subscribed to the Nicene Creed and, broadly, regarded the matter as closed; the term homoousios (“of the same substance,” consubstantial) had not generated in the Latin world the long anxiety it produced in the Greek, where it carried unwelcome associations (the word had earlier been suspect in connection with Paul of Samosata) and where a whole spectrum of theologians feared it collapsed Father and Son into one undifferentiated thing (Hanson 1988, 170–172, 557–559; Ayres 2004, 431–434). The result was a deep mutual incomprehension. Many Eastern bishops who were not Arians in any strict sense nonetheless distrusted Nicaea’s language; many Western bishops held the creed firmly but without a developed grasp of the Greek debates behind it (Ayres 2004, 100–104; on the creed itself see The Nicene Creed).

Into this gap stepped the imperial power. After the death of Constans (350) and his own victory over the usurper Magnentius (353), the emperor Constantius II became sole ruler of the whole empire — and Constantius was committed not to Nicaea but to a broad anti-Nicene settlement, increasingly to the homoian formula that the Son is “like” (homoios) the Father, deliberately avoiding the language of substance altogether (Hanson 1988, 557–561; Ayres 2004, 133–138). For the first time the West, which had been a Nicene refuge — it was to Rome and the West that Athanasius and Marcellus fled in the 340s — found imperial pressure bearing directly on its own sees (Beckwith 2008, 15–17). The synods that broke the Western resistance, Arles (353) and Milan (355), where bishops were pressed to condemn Athanasius and those who refused were deposed and exiled, are treated in the companion file on Hilary’s episcopate (see Bishop of Poitiers). The point here is that the Arian crisis was, for the West, an importation: a controversy generated in the Greek East and then driven into Latin Gaul by an emperor’s policy, arriving just as Hilary was beginning his episcopal life.

“Arianism” itself is a label that must be handled with care. The teaching of Arius of Alexandria — that the Son is a creature, made out of nothing before time, so that “there was when he was not” — had been condemned at Nicaea, but by mid-century the parties ranged against the Nicene homoousios were many and not identical: the radical anomoians (the Son “unlike” the Father, associated with Aetius and Eunomius), the homoians favoured by Constantius (the Son simply “like” the Father), and the homoiousians who held the Son “of like substance” (homoiousios) and stood, as Hilary would come to see, close to the Nicene position despite the missing iota (Hanson 1988, 557–559, 348–357; Ayres 2004, 133–149). Modern scholarship therefore avoids treating “Arian” as a single coherent church; it is largely a Nicene polemical category covering a spectrum (Ayres 2004, 1–6, 13–15; Weedman 2007, 5–9). Hilary himself, writing in and after exile, came to distinguish these positions with a care unusual in a Latin and to recognize allies among the homoiousians — but that discernment lay ahead. At his conversion the crisis was, for him, still chiefly the great fact of Nicaea and the gospel it confessed.

The Search for God: De Trinitate Book 1

The one extended account of Hilary’s coming to the faith is the great autobiographical proem with which he opens De Trinitate — twelve books that are his masterwork and the most ambitious Latin Trinitarian treatise before Augustine (the whole work is treated in The Twelve Books on the Trinity). The opening chapters are cast as the record of a mind’s progress: not a dated biography but a stylized intellectual ascent, a man reasoning his way out of paganism toward the living God (Beckwith 2008, 39–46; Weedman 2007, 19–25). It must be read for what it is — a rhetorically shaped prooemium with a theological purpose, the establishing of the right disposition for what follows — and not as a diary; but its sequence is Hilary’s own confession of how he found God in Scripture (Hilary, De Trinitate 1.1–14; trans. NPNF II/9, Watson; trans. McKenna, FC 25).

Hilary begins from the question every educated man of antiquity asked: how should a human being live, and what is the good worth pursuing? He surveys and rejects the answers of the philosophers and of the crowd — leisure and wealth, which are precarious and beneath a rational creature; the mere absence of pain, which is the contentment of animals (De Trinitate 1.1–2; NPNF II/9). The soul, he reasons, was not made for so small an end; it was made for “the knowledge and practice of virtue” and finally for the knowledge of God, for “the consciousness that we owe our life not to the present only but to eternity” (De Trinitate 1.2–4; NPNF II/9, Watson; Beckwith 2008, 40–42). The popular religion of his world he finds unworthy: a crowd of gods, deities of the seasons and the dead, idols of wood and stone — a religion that, in Hilary’s reading, knows nothing of the true God (De Trinitate 1.3–4; NPNF II/9). His seeking is therefore a moral and rational discontent that drives him to the Scriptures of the Jews and the Christians in the hope of something better (Weedman 2007, 22–24).

Exodus 3:14 — “I AM THAT I AM”

The turning point of the narrative is a single text. Searching, Hilary says, for a worthy conception of God, he found it in the words spoken to Moses at the burning bush: Ego sum qui sum — “I AM THAT I AM” — and to Israel, “He that is hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14, in Hilary’s Old Latin form; De Trinitate 1.5; trans. NPNF II/9, Watson). The name overwhelmed him. “I was frankly amazed,” he writes, “at so clear a definition of God, which expressed the incomprehensible knowledge of the divine nature in words most suited to human understanding” — for nothing is more proper to God than to be, since being admits of no past that has ceased and no future not yet come, but is the eternal present of Him who simply is (De Trinitate 1.5; NPNF II/9; McKenna, FC 25). This identification of God with absolute, eternal Being is the metaphysical foundation of Hilary’s whole theology of the divine nature: God is He who is, infinite and self-existent, and whatever is said truly of God must be measured against that (Beckwith 2008, 42–45; Weedman 2007, 24–27; on the doctrine of God see The Holy Trinity).

Yet Exodus 3:14, Hilary continues, left him still reaching. He had learned that God is, and is beyond comprehension, infinite, eternal; and he confirmed this from the Psalms and the Prophets and the book of Wisdom, which speak of God’s immensity, “whither shall I go from thy Spirit?” and of the heavens and the heaven of heavens unable to contain Him (De Trinitate 1.6–9; NPNF II/9, citing Psalm 138/139:7–8; Isaiah; Wisdom). The infinite One had been found — but the mind, Hilary confesses, “was carried beyond itself” and still trembled before a God it could affirm but not encompass (De Trinitate 1.7–9; NPNF II/9; Beckwith 2008, 44–46).

The Prologue of John

What Exodus had opened, the Gospel of John completed. The resolution of Hilary’s search comes when he turns to the opening of the Fourth Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1–3; De Trinitate 1.10; trans. NPNF II/9, Watson). Here, Hilary says, his soul “grasped more than it had hoped for.” He had sought a worthy doctrine of the one God and was given, in the same breath, the eternal Word who is God, who is with God, and through whom all things are — and then the astonishing further word that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14; De Trinitate 1.11–12; NPNF II/9). The God who simply is is not solitary: there is the Father and there is the Word who is God of God, and the Word has entered His own creation. The Prologue thus answered the very question Exodus had raised, joining the doctrine of the one infinite Being to the confession of the Son and the economy of the Incarnation (De Trinitate 1.10–13; NPNF II/9; Beckwith 2008, 45–48; Weedman 2007, 25–29).

The literary movement is exact and theologically loaded: Hilary makes his own conversion trace the very path his treatise will argue — from the unity and infinity of the divine nature (Exodus) to the eternal generation and incarnation of the Son (John) — so that the reader is led to be converted by the same Scriptures that converted the author (Beckwith 2008, 39–48; Weedman 2007, 19–29). It is a deliberately Johannine and exegetical conversion: Hilary does not reason his way to the Trinity by philosophy but is taught it by the words of Scripture, and this primacy of the biblical text over speculation will mark all his anti-Arian work (see Exegesis Against Arianism).

The Convert and the Crisis

The De Trinitate proem closes by binding this private illumination to a public danger. Hilary writes that, having found this faith, he learned of those who would tear it apart — who deny that the Son is truly God, or make Him a creature, or so press the unity of God as to leave no room for the Word (De Trinitate 1.16–19; NPNF II/9). The very gospel that had saved him, the eternal Word made flesh, was being contradicted by the teaching that had crossed from the East into the West. The man who had been brought to God by John 1:1 now found himself called to defend the Godhead of the Word against those who would unsay it (Beckwith 2008, 48–51; Hanson 1988, 461–463).

This is why Hilary’s biography and his theology cannot be separated, and why the proem of De Trinitate opens not only the treatise but the whole story of his life. He came to the faith just as the imperial settlement under Constantius II was about to fall upon the Western sees; his conversion through Exodus 3:14 and John 1 gave him precisely the two convictions — the one infinite Being, and the Word who is God of God — that the Arian crisis was attacking. When the synods of Arles and Milan demanded the West’s submission, and when Hilary as bishop of Poitiers refused, the controversy that had been an Eastern importation became his own struggle, and would carry him into the exile in Phrygia where the De Trinitate itself was largely written (see Condemnation and Exile to Phrygia). The cultivated pagan who had reasoned his way to the burning bush became the “Athanasius of the West.”

References

Hilary of Poitiers. On the Trinity (De Trinitate), Book 1. Trans. E. W. Watson et al., in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 9. Ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (The autobiographical proem: the search for the good at 1.1–4; Exodus 3:14 “I AM THAT I AM” and the metaphysics of being at 1.5; the divine immensity from Psalms, Prophets, and Wisdom at 1.6–9; the Prologue of John at 1.10–13; the turn to the controversy at 1.16–19.)
Hilary of Poitiers. The Trinity. Trans. Stephen McKenna. Fathers of the Church, Vol. 25. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1954. (Modern English translation consulted alongside NPNF; Book 1 proem.)
Jerome. De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men) 100. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 3. (The earliest connected notice of Hilary’s life and works.)
Beckwith, Carl L. Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity: From De Fide to De Trinitate. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (Hilary’s date and background, 13–17; the conversion narrative and the proem of De Trinitate 1, 39–51.)
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988. (Hilary’s life and dates, 459–463; the Western situation and Constantius’s homoian policy, 170–172, 557–561; the spectrum of anti-Nicene parties, 348–357, 557–559.)
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The problem of “Arianism” as a category, 1–6, 13–15; East–West incomprehension over homoousios, 100–104, 431–434; Constantius and the homoian settlement, 133–149; Hilary, 179–181.)
Weedman, Mark. The Trinitarian Theology of Hilary of Poitiers. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 89. Leiden: Brill, 2007. (Hilary’s background and Latin formation, 19–22; the proem as theological self-presentation, 19–29; the parties of the controversy, 5–9.)
Scripture cited: Exodus 3:14; Psalm 138/139:7–8 (LXX/Vulgate numbering); Wisdom of Solomon; John 1:1–3, 1:14.