Auxentius of Milan

In the mid-360s, under the new Western emperor Valentinian I, the aging Hilary of Poitiers carried his fight against Arianism into the imperial city of Milan itself, where the homoian bishop Auxentius held the see. Hilary sought to have Auxentius examined and deposed as a heretic, won a hearing, and seemed for a moment to have exposed him — but Auxentius secured the emperor’s protection by an evasive profession of faith, and it was Hilary, not Auxentius, who was ordered to leave the city. The episode, recorded in Hilary’s bitter Contra Auxentium, was a defeat; yet it left Milan a marked battleground and prepared the ground that Ambrose would recover for Nicaea a decade later.

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

Milan Under an Arian Bishop

When Hilary returned from his eastern exile to a West that was, on the surface, drifting back toward the Nicene faith, one great see remained firmly in homoian (Arianizing) hands: Milan, the chief imperial residence of the Western emperors and the most important Christian center of northern Italy. Its bishop was Auxentius, a Cappadocian by origin who had been installed at Milan in 355 after the Nicene bishop Dionysius was deposed and exiled under Constantius II for refusing to condemn Athanasius (Hanson, Search, 1988, 506–507; Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts, 1995, 38–46, 69–73). Auxentius was no theological lightweight: a careful, durable churchman who had subscribed the imperially favored homoian formulas and who held his great see, against repeated attempts to dislodge him, for some twenty years until his death in 374 — at which point the people of Milan would, famously, acclaim the catechumen-governor Ambrose to succeed him (Williams 1995, 69–73, 104–111).

For Hilary, Auxentius’s tenure was an open wound: in the very capital of the Western emperor, a bishop who in Hilary’s judgment denied the true divinity of the Son presided over the Church and enjoyed the emperor’s favor. The accession of Valentinian I in 364, a soldier-emperor of broadly Nicene sympathies but a determined policy of religious non-interference, seemed to open a door. If the emperor would not actively prop up the homoians as Constantius had, perhaps Auxentius could be exposed and lawfully deposed by the bishops. Hilary, joined by Eusebius of Vercelli — a fellow Western confessor who had shared the experience of exile under Constantius — went to Milan to press the case (Hanson 1988, 506–507; Williams 1995, 69–73).

The Confrontation and the Contra Auxentius

Our principal source for what followed is Hilary’s own account, the Liber contra Auxentium (Book against Auxentius), into which he incorporated the relevant documents — including a profession of faith submitted by Auxentius and the imperial rescript that closed the affair (Contra Auxentium, esp. 7–15; trans. NPNF 2nd ser. vol. 9, Watson). Hilary’s charge was that Auxentius was a concealed heretic who held the Arian denial of the Son’s full divinity while sheltering behind ambiguous, scripturally worded formulas that avoided the decisive Nicene term homoousios (Contra Auxentium 7–10; Watson, NPNF II.9). Hilary and Eusebius pressed for a formal examination: let Auxentius be questioned on his faith, and his evasions would be unmasked.

A hearing was indeed convened — by the emperor’s order, before imperial commissioners (Hilary names the officials Auxentius’s case was referred to) and a panel of bishops (Contra Auxentium 7; Watson, NPNF II.9). At first the proceedings seemed to go Hilary’s way: under pressure Auxentius let slip language that betrayed his real position, even (on Hilary’s report) confessing in a way that exposed his deviation from the catholic confession of the Son as true God (Contra Auxentium 13–14; Watson, NPNF II.9; Williams 1995, 69–73). But Auxentius was too adroit to be cornered. Faced with deposition, he submitted to the emperor a written profession of faith carefully phrased to sound orthodox — affirming that the Son is “true God,” of one substance and divinity with the Father, in terms a Nicene could read with approval — while quietly preserving the latitude that let a homoian sign it (Contra Auxentium 14–15; Watson, NPNF II.9; Hanson 1988, 506–507). It was, in Hilary’s eyes, exactly the kind of deceit the Contra Constantium had warned of: heresy wearing orthodox words (see The Emperor and the Church).

The Emperor Decides for Auxentius

Valentinian I, whose settled policy was to keep the peace and to avoid being drawn into the bishops’ doctrinal quarrels, took the path of least resistance. Auxentius had professed an apparently catholic faith and was in possession of his see; the emperor accepted the profession as sufficient, confirmed Auxentius in Milan, and treated the matter as closed. Hilary and Eusebius, the men who had reopened it, were now the disturbers of an imperial peace that had been restored — and Hilary was ordered to leave the city (Contra Auxentium 15; Watson, NPNF II.9; Hanson 1988, 506–507; Williams 1995, 69–73). The bishop who had come to Milan as accuser departed as the one expelled.

Hilary’s response was the Contra Auxentius itself, a document written in defeat and burning with it. Having lost the official battle, he appealed past the emperor and the commissioners to the Christian people directly, publishing Auxentius’s profession alongside his own exposure of it so that the faithful might see for themselves that their bishop’s orthodoxy was a verbal screen (Contra Auxentium 1–6, 15; Watson, NPNF II.9). The pamphlet warns the laity against a smooth heresy that hides under catholic-sounding phrases and against the false peace that lets such men keep their sees, and it returns, in a lower key, to the great theme of Hilary’s last years: that the true enemy is the heresy that flatters and dissembles, not the open foe (Contra Auxentium 4–6; cf. Contra Constantium 5; Watson, NPNF II.9; Williams 1995, 69–73). It is, in effect, Hilary’s farewell polemic — a refusal to ratify by silence a settlement he believed to be a fraud.

[Disputed: the date of the Milanese confrontation is given variously as 364 or 365 (some accounts place the episode loosely "363/364"). The uncertainty arises because Hilary's own narrative is undated and the chronology must be reconstructed from the reign of Valentinian I (emperor from February 364) and from the sequence of Hilary's late career; Hanson (*Search*, 1988, 506–507) and Williams (*Ambrose of Milan*, 1995, 69–73) treat it as an event of the mid-360s, c. 364–365, without claiming a fixed year.]

A Defeat That Prepared a Victory

By the ordinary measure the Milan affair was a failure, and Hilary’s last public campaign ended in expulsion rather than triumph. Auxentius kept his see and his emperor’s confidence and died in possession of both around 374 (Williams 1995, 69–73, 104–111). Hilary returned to Gaul and to the quieter labors of his final years — exegesis, hymnody, the consolidation of Nicene order in the Gallic Church — and died about 367 (see The Nicene Legacy in Gaul; on his later veneration, Relics, Feast and Cult).

Yet the episode has a significance larger than its outcome. Hilary had identified, and forced into the open, the central problem of the post-Constantian West: that a great see could be held for a generation by a bishop whose orthodoxy was a matter of words, because the emperor preferred a quiet, conforming episcopate to a contested one. He had also shown the new shape of the struggle. Where Constantius had imposed heresy by force, Auxentius and his protectors maintained it by evasion and by the emperor’s neutrality; the homoian cause now survived not by persecution but by ambiguity and incumbency. Recovering Milan for Nicaea would require not another trial but a change of the man in the chair — and that is precisely what happened. When Auxentius died in 374, the contested election that followed brought Ambrose to the see, and Ambrose would do for Milan, with the full weight of his episcopate and his later confrontations with the imperial power, what Hilary had been unable to do from outside: make the imperial city Nicene and articulate, against Valentinian II and Theodosius, the very principle of the Church’s independence that Hilary had first urged against Constantius (Williams 1995, 104–111, 152–153; Hanson 1988, 506–507). Hilary’s Milanese defeat thus stands as the prelude to Ambrose’s recovery — the failed first assault on a fortress that the next generation would take (see St. Ambrose of Milan; on the faith at stake throughout, The Nicene Creed).

In the longer memory of the Church, Hilary’s persistence — winning his point in argument even where he lost it in the imperial chancery — is part of why he is reckoned among the Fathers and Doctors of the West, “the Athanasius of the Latins,” who would not let a verbal orthodoxy pass for the real thing (see The Church Fathers; on the period, The Pre-Schism Church).

See Also

References

  • Hilary of Poitiers. Liber contra Auxentium (Contra Auxentium). English translation in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series, vol. 9, trans. E. W. Watson et al. (the charge against Auxentius, the hearing before the imperial commissioners, Auxentius’s evasive profession of faith, the imperial rescript confirming him, and Hilary’s appeal to the laity and expulsion from Milan).
  • Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988. (Auxentius of Milan and the confrontation with Hilary and Eusebius of Vercelli, pp. 506–507; the homoian episcopate in the West.)
  • Williams, Daniel H. Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. (The fullest treatment of the Auxentius affair: Auxentius’s installation in 355 and long tenure, the Hilary–Eusebius campaign of the mid-360s, Valentinian I’s policy of non-intervention, and the line from Auxentius to Ambrose’s election in 374 — pp. 38–46, 69–73, 104–111, 152–153.)
  • Beckwith, Carl L. Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity: From De Fide to De Trinitate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (Chronology of Hilary’s career after the eastern exile.)
  • Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The homoian theology Auxentius represented and the Western Nicene recovery.)