Condemnation and Exile to Phrygia

In 356 Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, refused to join the Western bishops who, under imperial pressure, had subscribed to the condemnation of Athanasius of Alexandria, and he broke communion with Saturninus, the Arianizing bishop of Arles. At a synod convened by Saturninus at Béziers that year Hilary was condemned, and the emperor Constantius II banished him to Phrygia in Asia Minor. The exile, intended to silence a Gallic bishop, instead removed him into the very heart of the Eastern Trinitarian debates and — remarkably — left him in continuing communication with, and to a degree still exercising the office of bishop over, his churches in Gaul.

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

The Imperial Programme Against Athanasius

The events that drove Hilary into exile cannot be understood apart from the policy of the emperor Constantius II, sole Augustus after the defeat of the usurper Magnentius (353), who set himself to impose throughout the whole empire the deposition and condemnation of Athanasius of Alexandria. For Constantius the matter was at once ecclesiastical and political: Athanasius had been the great defender of the Nicene homoousios and the symbol of resistance to the eastern bishops Constantius favoured, and the emperor pressed Western synods to subscribe his condemnation as a test of obedience (Hanson 1988, 329–334; Ayres 2004, 133–135). At the councils of Arles (353) and Milan (355) the Western bishops were required to sign; those who refused — Paulinus of Trier, Eusebius of Vercelli, Lucifer of Cagliari, Dionysius of Milan, and the Roman deacon Hilary, with Liberius of Rome and Ossius of Cordova to follow — were themselves driven into exile (Hanson 1988, 334–337; Williams 1991, 36–40). It is the great theme of Hilary’s later polemic that the condemnation of Athanasius was made the instrument by which a creed not yet openly stated was being forced upon the West (Hilary, Contra Constantium 2; trans. NPNF II/9; cf. Liber I ad Constantium / fragmenta, in the Collectanea Antiariana Parisina).

Hilary, only recently raised to the see of Poitiers — by his own account he had been baptized as an adult and had not so much as heard the Nicene Creed until shortly before his exile (Hilary, De Synodis 91; trans. NPNF II/9) — entered this conflict as the issue reached Gaul.

The decisive figure on the other side in Gaul was Saturninus, bishop of Arles, the leading Western partisan of Constantius’ ecclesiastical policy and the agent through whom the imperial demand was pressed on the Gallic episcopate (Hilary, Contra Constantium 2, 11; trans. NPNF II/9; Hanson 1988, 337–339, 459–460). Hilary’s response was to gather the bishops of Gaul and to lead them in withdrawing communion from Saturninus and from the other principal supporters of the eastern party named in his own account, Ursacius of Singidunum and Valens of Mursa (Hilary, De Synodis 2; Contra Constantium 2; Williams 1991, 41–43; Beckwith 2008, 22–25). In the opening of De Synodis Hilary addresses the bishops of Gaul as those who together with him had “refused to communicate” with Saturninus, Ursacius, and Valens, treating the breach as the joint act of the orthodox Gallic Church and not merely his own (Hilary, De Synodis 2; trans. NPNF II/9; Weedman 2007, 25–30).

Two points in this break deserve weight. First, Hilary’s refusal was not in the first instance a refusal of a creed but a refusal to condemn a man — Athanasius — unheard and on imperial command, and Hilary consistently presented the demand to sign against Athanasius as the thin end of a doctrinal wedge (Hilary, Contra Constantium 2; Ayres 2004, 133–135; Hanson 1988, 459–461). Second, by severing communion with Saturninus, Hilary made himself the head of Nicene resistance in Gaul, the western counterpart to those whom Constantius had already exiled, and so a direct target of the same policy (Williams 1991, 41–46).

The Synod of Béziers (356) and Hilary’s Condemnation

In 356 Saturninus convened a synod at Béziers (Biterrae) in southern Gaul, at which Hilary was condemned (Hilary, Contra Constantium 2; Liber II ad Constantium 2, in the historical fragments; Hanson 1988, 459–461; Williams 1991, 41–46). Hilary himself refers to Béziers as a “synod of false apostles” and represents his condemnation there as the unjust verdict of a faction in the emperor’s service (Hilary, Contra Constantium 2; trans. NPNF II/9). From Béziers the matter went to Constantius, and the emperor — then resident in the West — issued the sentence of banishment that sent Hilary to Phrygia (Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 2.39, naming Hilary’s exile; Jerome, De viris illustribus 100; Hanson 1988, 460–461).

The precise ground of the condemnation is genuinely contested, and the disagreement is worth setting out plainly. [Disputed: the charge against Hilary at Béziers — On one reading the condemnation was doctrinal: Hilary was condemned for his Nicene confession and his refusal to subscribe against Athanasius, and the proceedings were a continuation of the imperial pressure exerted at Arles and Milan (so, in substance, Hanson 1988, 459–461, who stresses that Hilary presents it as a verdict of Saturninus' party). On a second reading, the formal pretext was not doctrine at all but a political charge connected with the affair of the Gallic usurper Silvanus (whose revolt at Cologne in 355 was crushed within weeks), so that Hilary was banished on a quasi-criminal or treasonable count and only later reconceived his case as a confessor's; this construction, argued by D. H. Williams (1991, 43–46; and "A Reassessment of the Early Career and Exile of Hilary of Poitiers," *Journal of Ecclesiastical History* 42 [1991]: 202–217), rests on the imperial habit of exiling bishops on civil rather than dogmatic grounds and on the silence of the earliest notices about a doctrinal sentence. Ayres (2004, 134 n.) and Beckwith (2008, 22–26) treat the question as open, noting that Hilary's own retrospective account naturally foregrounds the doctrinal stakes. The sources thus differ on whether Béziers condemned Hilary as a heretic-protector or banished him on a charge arising from the Silvanus episode.]

What is not in dispute is the outcome: by the close of 356 Hilary was an exile, sent not to a nearby retreat but across the empire to Phrygia in the Roman diocese of Asia (Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 2.39, 42; Jerome, De viris illustribus 100; Hanson 1988, 460–461; Beckwith 2008, 26–27).

Exile to Phrygia

Phrygia, in the interior of Asia Minor, lay deep within the Greek-speaking East and within the orbit of the eastern episcopate whose theology Constantius favoured — which is the irony at the centre of the whole episode. The emperor removed Hilary from Gaul to silence him; he thereby placed the West’s ablest Latin theologian where he could observe the Greek controversies at first hand and acquire the eastern conciliar documents that he would later transmit to the Latin Church (Ayres 2004, 178–179; Hanson 1988, 461–462; Weedman 2007, 30–35). Hilary’s exile lasted roughly four years, from 356 to about 360, when he was permitted (or simply chose) to return — the eastern bishops, by some accounts, being glad to be rid of so troublesome a Latin presence at the Council of Seleucia and after (Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 2.45, reporting that Hilary was sent back to Gaul as a “sower of discord”; Jerome, De viris illustribus 100; Hanson 1988, 461, 472).

It was in and from this exile that Hilary composed the works that made him “the Athanasius of the West”: the great De Trinitate in twelve books, the De Synodis reporting the eastern creeds to the Gallic bishops, and, after his return, the bitter Contra Constantium (Jerome, De viris illustribus 100; Beckwith 2008, 1–5; Weedman 2007, 1–10). The exile was therefore not an interruption of his theological work but its occasion (see The Twelve Books On the Trinity; Building Bridges, East and West).

A Bishop Still: Exile Without Deposition

The most striking feature of Hilary’s banishment is how little it severed him from his see. Unlike a canonical deposition, the imperial sentence of exilium removed the bishop’s person from his province but did not, in the Church’s eyes, vacate his office or absolve his flock of their bond to him; and Hilary appears to have remained, throughout his years in Phrygia, in active communication with the churches of Gaul, continuing to function as their bishop in absentia (Hanson 1988, 461–462; Williams 1991, 47–49; Beckwith 2008, 26–30). The decisive evidence is internal to his own writings. De Synodis is itself a letter written from exile to “the bishops of the provinces of Gaul and Britain” — to his own colleagues — surveying the eastern creeds for their instruction and asking their judgment, which presupposes a living, working relationship between an exiled bishop and the episcopate of his homeland (Hilary, De Synodis 1–8, 91; trans. NPNF II/9; Weedman 2007, 25–35; Ayres 2004, 178–179).

That he could write so, expecting to be heard and obeyed by the Gallic Church, shows that the exile had not deposed him in any sense his colleagues recognized; he addressed them as their fellow-bishop and they evidently still regarded Poitiers as his (Williams 1991, 47–49; Hanson 1988, 461–462). When he returned to Gaul about 360–361 he resumed his see at Poitiers without any record of re-installation, and at the Synod of Paris (c. 360–361) it was Hilary who led the Gallic bishops in formally condemning Saturninus and repudiating the creed of Rimini — completing, on his own ground, the breach that had sent him east (Hilary, Collectanea Antiariana Parisina / fragments; Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 2.45; Hanson 1988, 472–473, 521–522; Williams 1991, 49–52).

The exile to Phrygia thus has the paradoxical shape that defines this whole period of Hilary’s life: a punishment that did not punish, a silencing that produced his most influential books, and a removal from his see that left him, in fact and in his own self-understanding, the working bishop of Poitiers and the leader of the Nicene cause in the Latin West (see The Emperor and the Church).

References

Hilary of Poitiers. De Synodis (On the Councils, or the Faith of the Easterns). Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 9 (NPNF II/9), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (The letter to the bishops of Gaul and Britain from exile: §1–8 on the occasion and the break with Saturninus, Ursacius, and Valens; §91 on Hilary’s late acquaintance with the Nicene Creed.)
Hilary of Poitiers. Contra Constantium (Against Constantius). Trans. in NPNF II/9. (§2 on the demand to condemn Athanasius, the “synod of false apostles” at Béziers, and Saturninus; §11 on Saturninus.)
Hilary of Poitiers. Ad Constantium (Liber I and Liber II) and the historical fragments, ed. as the Collectanea Antiariana Parisina (Fragmenta historica), critical edition by A. Feder, CSEL 65 (Vienna, 1916). (The documents of the synods and Hilary’s appeals to the emperor; the Synod of Paris condemning Saturninus and Rimini.)
Sulpicius Severus. Chronica 2.39, 2.42, 2.45. (Notices of Hilary’s exile to Phrygia and his return to Gaul as a “sower of discord.”)
Jerome. De viris illustribus 100. (Hilary’s exile, his works composed in exile, and his return.)
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988. (The definitive narrative of the 350s: pp. 329–339 on Arles, Milan, and the campaign against Athanasius; pp. 459–462 on Saturninus, Béziers, and the exile; pp. 472–473, 521–522 on the return and the Synod of Paris.)
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (pp. 133–135 on the imperial campaign and the Western signatures; pp. 178–179 on Hilary in exile and his transmission of eastern theology.)
Beckwith, Carl L. Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity: From “De Fide” to “De Trinitate.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (pp. 1–5, 22–30 on the events of 356, the nature of the condemnation, and Hilary’s continuing episcopal activity in exile.)
Weedman, Mark. The Trinitarian Theology of Hilary of Poitiers. Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 89. Leiden: Brill, 2007. (pp. 1–10, 25–35 on Hilary’s career, the break with Saturninus, and De Synodis as a letter from exile.)
Williams, Daniel H. “A Reassessment of the Early Career and Exile of Hilary of Poitiers.” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 42 (1991): 202–217; and Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. (The argument that the Béziers charge may have been political — connected with the Silvanus affair — rather than strictly doctrinal; pp. cited in text as Williams 1991.)