The Return and the Council of Paris

Around 360 Hilary of Poitiers returned from his Eastern exile to Gaul — according to Sulpicius Severus because the Easterns found him a troublesome presence and contrived to be rid of “a sower of discord.” Back in the West he rallied the Gallic bishops against the Arianizing creed extorted at Ariminum (Rimini) in 359, and under his influence a council at Paris (c. 360–361) repudiated that formula and reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea, marking the turn of the tide for the Nicene cause in the Latin West. The exact date and canons of the Paris council, and the true reason for Hilary’s release, are both contested in the sources.

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

The Return from Exile

Hilary had been exiled to Phrygia by Constantius II after the synod of Béziers in 356, condemned for his refusal of the imperial-Arian policy (see Condemnation and Exile to Phrygia). The exile lasted roughly four years; by 360 he was back in Gaul, his banishment evidently terminated though never formally lifted in the sense of a vindication. The circumstances of that return are reported most fully by Sulpicius Severus, the Gallic chronicler of the next generation, and they are unexpected.

According to Sulpicius, Hilary was not so much pardoned as expelled. Even in exile Hilary had not fallen silent: he had pressed the Eastern bishops, written his treatises, and intervened in the Eastern councils with such persistence that the dominant party found him intolerable. When the homoiousian-leaning Easterns assembled (in connection with the Council of Seleucia of 359), Hilary’s presence and his agitation became an embarrassment; and so, Sulpicius reports, they petitioned the emperor to send Hilary back to Gaul, regarding him as “a sower of discord and a troubler of the East” — seminator discordiarum et turbator Orientis — preferring to be rid of him at home rather than endure him among themselves (Sulpicius Severus, Chronicle [Chronica / Historia Sacra] 2.45). The irony is sharp: Constantius had exiled Hilary to silence him in the West, and the exile returned him to the West with his reputation enhanced and his resolve intact, free now to do at home the very thing for which the East had wished him gone.

[Disputed: the reason for Hilary's release and return is given differently in the sources and reconstructed differently by historians. Sulpicius Severus, *Chronicle* 2.45 attributes it to the Eastern bishops, who found Hilary a "sower of discord" (*seminator discordiarum*) and asked Constantius to send him home; on this account the return was effectively a second expulsion engineered by Hilary's Eastern opponents rather than a release granted by the emperor as an act of clemency. Other reconstructions hold that Constantius, or the general drift of imperial policy after 359–360, allowed numbers of exiled Western bishops to return, so that Hilary's homecoming need not have required a special Eastern petition; and some note that no formal rescission of the sentence of Béziers is attested, so Hilary may have returned without imperial authorization at all. The sources do not allow a single certain account; Sulpicius's "sower of discord" notice is the earliest and fullest, but it is a hostile-to-the-East framing written decades later.]

Whatever its mechanism, the return was decisive. Jerome notes simply that Hilary, after his exile, was restored to Gaul (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 100), and the substance of the next two years is the use Hilary made of that restoration.

The State of the West: The Catastrophe of Ariminum

Hilary returned to a Western Church that had just suffered a humiliating reverse. In 359 Constantius had convened a great council of the Western bishops at Ariminum (modern Rimini), parallel to the Eastern council at Seleucia, intending to impose a single creed on the whole Church. The Western bishops at Ariminum — more than four hundred of them — at first stood firm for Nicaea and rejected the “dated creed” pressed upon them, which confessed the Son merely “like the Father” (homoios) and banned the word ousia. But the emperor refused to let the bishops disperse, wore them down by detaining a delegation at Nike in Thrace, and through pressure and exhaustion extracted their subscription to a formula that abandoned the homoousios and confessed the Son only “like the Father according to the Scriptures” (Hanson 1988, pp. 362–380; Ayres 2004, pp. 157–166). It was of this collapse that Jerome wrote his famous line: “the whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian” (Jerome, Dialogus adversus Luciferianos 19).

The creed of Ariminum was thus, in Hilary’s eyes and in those of the Nicene party, a creed extorted by fraud and force, to which the Western bishops had subscribed against their own conviction and conscience. Hilary returned precisely as this catastrophe was being digested in Gaul, and the whole of his subsequent campaign was directed at undoing it — at persuading the Gallic bishops that their subscription at Ariminum was null, the product of deception, and that the true faith of the West was and remained the faith of Nicaea (Williams 1995, pp. 38–46; on the imperial coercion of the Church, see The Emperor and the Church).

Rallying the Gallic Nicaeans

Restored to his see, Hilary became the organizing center of the Western resistance. His strategy, documented in the surviving historical fragments known as the Collectanea Antiariana Parisina (the “Parisian collection against the Arians,” a dossier of letters, creeds, and synodal documents preserved under Hilary’s name), was twofold: to release the Gallic bishops from the guilt of their Ariminian subscription by treating it as coerced and therefore void, and to reunite them on the basis of the Nicene confession, now expounded with the theological depth Hilary had brought back from the East (Collectanea Antiariana Parisina, fragments; Williams 1995, pp. 38–51; Beckwith 2008, pp. 200–205).

Hilary’s posture toward the bishops who had subscribed at Ariminum was, characteristically, irenic rather than punitive — and this distinguished him sharply from the rigorists. Where Lucifer of Cagliari and his followers demanded that bishops who had once subscribed an Arianizing formula be excluded from communion until they had done penance, Hilary sought to receive back into orthodox fellowship those who had been deceived at Ariminum and now repented of the subscription, asking repudiation of the error rather than degradation of the man (Hanson 1988, pp. 459–462, 506–508; Williams 1995, pp. 69–71). This was the same temper that had animated De Synodis — the conviction that the great body of the Western and Eastern conservatives were orthodox at heart and could be won, and that the real enemy was the small radical-Arian party and the imperial machinery that backed it (see Building Bridges, East and West: De Synodis).

The Council of Paris

The decisive expression of this campaign was a council of the Gallic bishops held at Paris, gathered under Hilary’s influence around the years 360–361. Its proceedings are known chiefly through a synodal letter preserved in the Collectanea Antiariana Parisina, in which the bishops of Gaul addressed their Eastern brethren — answering, in fact, a letter the Easterns (the homoiousian party) had sent westward (Collectanea Antiariana Parisina, the synodal letter of the Gallic bishops; Hanson 1988, pp. 460–462; Williams 1995, pp. 46–51).

The Council of Paris did three things of importance. First, it repudiated the creed of Ariminum, declaring that the Gallic Church would not be bound by a formula extracted under duress and incompatible with the faith. Second, it reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea, reasserting the homoousios against the Arianizing “likeness” formula and re-establishing the Nicene confession as the standard of the Western Church. Third, it condemned the leaders of the Arian party in the West — most notably Saturninus of Arles, Hilary’s old adversary who had presided at Béziers — while extending reconciliation to those bishops who repudiated their Ariminian subscription (Collectanea Antiariana Parisina; Hanson 1988, pp. 460–462; Williams 1995, pp. 46–51; on Saturninus and the western Arian bishops, cf. Auxentius of Milan). The letter notably continues the irenic line of De Synodis, expressing solidarity with the Eastern homoiousians against the common Anomoean enemy while gently commending the Nicene word to them.

[Disputed: the precise date of the Council of Paris and the exact content of its canons are not certainly fixed. The synodal letter preserved in the *Collectanea Antiariana Parisina* is the primary witness, but it is undated; modern reconstructions place the council variously c. 360 or c. 361 (Hanson 1988, pp. 460–462, inclines to 360/361; Williams 1995, pp. 46–51, treats it within the 360–361 Gallic rally). The council issued a synodal letter rather than a numbered series of canons in the later conciliar sense, so its "canons" are better described as the doctrinal affirmations and condemnations contained in that letter — repudiation of Ariminum, reaffirmation of *homoousios*/Nicaea, and condemnation of named Arianizing bishops (Saturninus of Arles in particular) — rather than as a fixed enumerated list. The historical reconstruction depends almost wholly on the Hilarian fragments, whose order and completeness are themselves debated.]

The Turn of the Tide in the West

The significance of Paris is best measured against what came before and after. Before Hilary’s return the Western Church had been driven, council by council and by direct imperial pressure, toward the Arianizing settlement; Ariminum in 359 had seemed to seal that defeat. After Hilary’s return, and above all after the Council of Paris, the Gallic Church was reconstituted on a Nicene basis, the Ariminian subscriptions were treated as void, and the West began the recovery that would, within a generation, make Gaul and Italy strongholds of the Nicene faith under bishops such as Martin of Tours and Ambrose of Milan (Hanson 1988, pp. 459–462, 871–875; Williams 1995, pp. 46–53, 232–238; on the lasting Nicene establishment in Gaul, see The Nicene Legacy in Gaul).

The death of Constantius in 361 removed the imperial sponsor of Western Arianism and accelerated this recovery; Hilary’s last campaigns — against Auxentius, the Arian bishop of Milan, and the polemical Contra Constantium — belong to the years that followed (see The Emperor and the Church and Auxentius of Milan). But it was the return of 360 and the rally that culminated at Paris that turned the Western tide. Modern historians of the controversy concur that Hilary’s homecoming was the hinge on which the Nicene recovery of the West swung: the man the East had wished gone as a “sower of discord” became, in Gaul, the gatherer of a scattered Nicene party and the architect of its restoration (Hanson 1988, pp. 459–462; Ayres 2004, pp. 179–181; Williams 1995, pp. 38–53). The title “the Athanasius of the West” is earned as much in this period as in any other: as Athanasius held the East to homoousios through exile and return, so Hilary held the West (on the Nicene faith itself, see The Nicene Creed; on the conciliar process, The Ecumenical Councils).

References

Sulpicius Severus. Chronicle (Chronica, also titled Historia Sacra) 2.45. (The notice that the Eastern bishops, finding Hilary a “sower of discord and a troubler of the East” — seminator discordiarum — asked Constantius to send him back to Gaul; the principal source for the manner of Hilary’s return.)
Hilary of Poitiers. Collectanea Antiariana Parisina (the “Parisian collection against the Arians”; also cited as Fragmenta historica). The dossier of letters, creeds, and synodal documents preserved under Hilary’s name, including the synodal letter of the Gallic bishops associated with the Council of Paris. (Edited in CSEL 65, ed. Feder.)
Jerome. De Viris Illustribus 100 (Hilary’s exile and restoration to Gaul); Dialogus adversus Luciferianos 19 (the world “groaning to find itself Arian” after Ariminum).
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Ariminum and Seleucia and the homoiousian context, pp. 157–166; Hilary’s significance, pp. 177–181.)
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988. (The councils of Ariminum and Seleucia, pp. 362–380; Hilary’s return, the Council of Paris, and the Gallic Nicene rally, pp. 459–462; the Luciferian rigorists, pp. 506–508; the Western recovery, pp. 871–875.)
Williams, Daniel H. Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. (Hilary’s return, the campaign against the Ariminian subscriptions, the Council of Paris, and the rigorist controversy, pp. 38–53, 69–71, 232–238.)
Beckwith, Carl L. Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity: From De Fide to De Trinitate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (Hilary’s Western campaign after the return and the use of the historical fragments, pp. 200–205.)