The Emperor and the Church: Contra Constantium

Around 360, after years of exile in the East under sentence of an Arian-dominated episcopate, Hilary of Poitiers wrote the Liber in Constantium imperatorem — a short, white-hot pamphlet that abandons the deferential tone of his earlier petitions and brands the reigning emperor Constantius II an Antichrist, a persecutor more dangerous than Nero and Decius because he caresses rather than scourges. Set against his two earlier books Ad Constantium, the work marks Hilary’s passage from suppliant to accuser, and it stands among the foundational Western texts asserting the Church’s freedom from imperial coercion in matters of faith.

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

From Petition to Denunciation

Hilary’s writings addressed to the emperor fall into two sharply contrasting groups, and the contrast is the whole story. The first group is the pair conventionally titled Ad Constantium (To Constantius), Books I and II. Book I, an appeal on behalf of the persecuted Western confessors, belongs to the years before Hilary’s banishment (commonly dated 355, around the Council of Milan), while Book II is the petition he submitted, or attempted to submit, during his exile — a request to be allowed to debate his accusers in the emperor’s presence and to set the true faith before him (Ad Constantium II.1–3; trans. NPNF 2nd ser. vol. 9, Watson). These books are studiously respectful. Hilary addresses Constantius as a Christian prince who, rightly informed, will surely defend the truth; he writes as a bishop petitioning his sovereign, confident that the persecution proceeds from the emperor’s bad advisers and not from the emperor’s own malice (Ad Constantium II.2–5; Watson, NPNF II.9).

The Liber in Constantium imperatorem — the Book against the Emperor Constantius, usually called Contra Constantium or In Constantium — is the photographic negative of that posture. Here the bishop no longer petitions; he indicts. The emperor whom the earlier books had hoped to enlighten is now arraigned as the very enemy of God. The shift is not rhetorical decoration but a considered change of judgment: Hilary tells his readers, in effect, that he had once believed Constantius could be reached by reason and reverence, and that the experience of the eastern councils — above all the double council of Ariminum (Rimini) and Seleucia in 359 and the creed extorted there — had taught him otherwise (Contra Constantium 4–5, 11; Watson, NPNF II.9; cf. Hilary, De Synodis, on the Ariminum formula). The pamphlet is the cry of a man who has stopped expecting justice from the throne and has decided to speak the truth about it instead (see The Return and the Council of Paris).

“I Resist Nero and Decius”: The Argument of the Book

The Contra Constantium opens by claiming for the moment a freedom of speech that the times had made dangerous. Hilary declares that he writes what he could not safely have said while still in the East, and he sets the present persecution against the persecutions of the pagan past in order to argue that the present one is worse (Contra Constantium 1–2; Watson, NPNF II.9). The line of reasoning is the heart of the work. The pagan emperors, Hilary says, fought the Church openly: they proscribed, exiled, burned, and beheaded, and by their very ferocity they made martyrs and so multiplied believers. Constantius wages a subtler and more lethal war. He does not forbid the faith; he corrupts it. He does not drive men from Christ by terror but lures them from the truth by flattery, patronage, and the soft violence of imperial favor — he “does not strike the back but tickles the belly,” seducing rather than compelling, so that men fall away without even the dignity of suffering for it (Contra Constantium 5; Watson, NPNF II.9).

From this comparison Hilary draws his most famous formula. He would rather, he says, contend with the persecutors of old, who at least made plain that they were enemies: “I resist [or: would resist] Nero, Decius, and Maximian” — the open butchers — but against this emperor, who “calls himself Lord,” who “does not scourge the back but tickles the belly,” who “does not condemn to life but bestows honors unto death,” there is a worse danger to be confronted, for he kills the soul while sparing the body (Contra Constantium 7; cf. 5; Watson, NPNF II.9). The rhetorical inversion is deliberate and shocking: the persecutor who kills is preferable to the patron who deceives, because the first sends his victims to heaven and the second drags them to hell. On the strength of this argument Hilary does not hesitate to apply to Constantius the language of the last things. The emperor is named Antichrist — not in the strict eschatological sense of the final adversary, but as one who does Antichrist’s work, the precursor and instrument of the great apostasy, an enemy of Christ wearing the mask of a Christian and seated, as it were, within the temple (Contra Constantium 5–7; Watson, NPNF II.9; on the motif, Hanson, Search, 1988, 470–471).

Behind the invective lies a precise theological grievance. Hilary’s charge is not merely that Constantius is cruel but that he has usurped the Church’s own office: the emperor has made himself the arbiter of the faith, convoking councils, dictating creeds, and rewarding the bishops who would subscribe to his Arianizing formulas with sees and the imperial post-system, while exiling those who would not (Contra Constantium 11–12, 27; Watson, NPNF II.9). The councils of Ariminum and Seleucia, and the “dated creed” of 359 that issued from imperial pressure, are for Hilary the proof of the indictment: a secular ruler had bent the assembled bishops of the world to a confession that betrayed Nicaea, and had done it by management and intimidation dressed as peace (Contra Constantium 11, 26–27; Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy, 2004, 157–166; Hanson 1988, 371–380). The emperor who claims to keep the peace of the Church, Hilary answers, is the one who has made war on its faith.

The Church’s Freedom and the Limits of the Emperor

What gives the Contra Constantium its long afterlife is that beneath the personal attack runs a constitutional argument about where the emperor’s authority ends. Hilary insists that faith is not the gift of emperors and cannot be commanded by them. God, he says, taught the knowledge of Himself rather than extorted it; the true religion is professed by free assent, not enforced by edict, and a faith that needs the secular arm to compel it is already not the faith of Christ (Contra Constantium 4–6; Watson, NPNF II.9). The bishops who let the emperor preside over their doctrine, and who appeal to him to settle what only the apostolic faith can settle, have inverted the right order: they have made the Church a department of the palace (Contra Constantium 11–12, 27; Williams, Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts, 1995, 49–52). Hilary’s protest is that the rule of faith stands above the throne, and that an emperor who legislates doctrine — even an orthodox doctrine, and far more an heretical one — trespasses on ground that is not his.

This is one of the earliest sustained Western statements of the principle that would later be given classic form by Hilary’s spiritual heir at Milan, Ambrose, in the dictum that the emperor is within the Church, not above it (Williams 1995, 49–52, 152–153). Hilary writes a generation before Ambrose’s confrontations with Valentinian II and Theodosius, and under far harsher conditions — Constantius II commanded an empire and a compliant episcopate, where Ambrose would face emperors already committed in principle to Nicaea — but the seed of the later doctrine is already here. The Contra Constantium belongs, with Athanasius’s History of the Arians, to the small body of mid-fourth-century texts in which orthodox bishops, finding the imperial power thrown against the Nicene faith, articulated for the first time a theology of the Church’s independence (Hanson 1988, 334–337, 469–471; on the parallel Eastern case see St. Athanasius). It is for this reason that the little book is read less as a curiosity of invective than as a document in the history of church and state (see The Nicene Legacy in Gaul).

The Problem of Publication

A genuine and unresolved difficulty hangs over the Contra Constantium: when, and under what circumstances, did Hilary release it? The internal tone is that of a man writing while the persecution still raged and the emperor still reigned; the work claims to speak the truth that fear had hitherto suppressed, which most naturally suits a composition made around 360, after Hilary had broken with the eastern councils but before Constantius’s death (Contra Constantium 1–2; Watson, NPNF II.9). Yet to publish so ferocious an attack on a living and powerful emperor — to call the reigning Augustus Antichrist in writing — would have been an act of extraordinary recklessness, and this has led scholars to divide over whether the book was actually circulated in 360–361 or was composed then but held back and only published after Constantius died on 3 November 361.

[Disputed: the date and manner of the work's publication are contested. Many scholars place its composition c. 360, while the persecution was active, and read it as written for circulation then (so the tradition reflected in Watson's NPNF II.9 introduction, treating it as Hilary's open denunciation after his return); others (cf. Hanson, *Search*, 1988, 469–471) stress that a published attack on the living emperor would have been suicidal and judge that the book, though drafted under Constantius, was withheld and saw the light only after his death in November 361, the present text perhaps lightly revised; the question turns on how literally the work's claim to "speak out now" is to be taken, and the primary evidence does not settle it. The Sources Chrétiennes critical edition (SC 334, ed. A. Rocher, 1987) reviews the dossier.]

The stakes of the question are more than antiquarian. If the Contra Constantium was published while Constantius lived, it is one of the boldest acts of episcopal defiance in the patristic age, a bishop hurling the charge of Antichrist at an emperor who could have killed him for it. If it was held back, it remains a true record of Hilary’s mind in 360 but a more prudent one in execution, and its ferocity is the ferocity of a man writing for the record and for the future rather than risking immediate martyrdom. Either way the text is authentic to its moment; the dispute is over its courage’s exact form, not over its content (Beckwith, Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity, 2008, on the chronology of Hilary’s later career; Hanson 1988, 469–471).

The Place of the Work in Hilary’s Career

The Contra Constantium is the polemical capstone of Hilary’s eastern decade. Banished from Gaul to Phrygia for his refusal to join the condemnation of Athanasius and the drift away from Nicaea (see Condemnation and Exile to Phrygia), Hilary had used his exile to master the Greek theological debates and to write his great work On the Trinity and his eirenic De Synodis, in which he sought to win the conservative “Homoiousian” Easterners to the Nicene homoousios by showing how nearly their concerns coincided (see Building Bridges East and West). The Contra Constantium shows the other face of the same man: the bridge-builder toward fellow bishops of good faith is the implacable accuser of the power that had corrupted the councils. Returned to the West — sent home, the sources suggest, as a troublemaker the eastern authorities preferred to be rid of — Hilary set down in this pamphlet the verdict his years in exile had forced upon him: that the peace Constantius offered the Church was the peace of apostasy, and that fidelity to the faith of Nicaea required resistance to the throne itself (Hanson 1988, 459–471; Ayres 2004, 177–179; on the Nicene confession at stake, The Nicene Creed).

That conviction would outlive both Hilary and Constantius. The empire’s swing back toward Nicaea after Constantius — and the eventual Nicene settlement under Theodosius — would vindicate Hilary’s refusal, and the principle he had asserted, that the emperor may not dictate the faith, would become a permanent possession of the Western Church (see The Nicene Legacy in Gaul; on the conciliar resolution of the controversy, The Ecumenical Councils).

References

Hilary of Poitiers. Liber in Constantium imperatorem (Contra Constantium / In Constantium). 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 comparison with Nero, Decius, and Maximian; the “tickles the belly” / “honors unto death” passages; the charge of Antichrist; the indictment of imperial control of the councils).
Hilary of Poitiers. Ad Constantium (Books I–II). English translation in NPNF 2nd series, vol. 9 (the deferential petitions, esp. II.1–5, against which the Contra Constantium is to be read).
Hilary of Poitiers. Contre Constance. Ed. and trans. André Rocher. Sources Chrétiennes 334. Paris: Cerf, 1987. (Critical text, French translation, and discussion of the date-and-publication problem.)
Hanson, R. P. C. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988. (Hilary’s career and the Contra Constantium, pp. 459–471; Ariminum/Seleucia and the imperial creeds, pp. 371–380; the Antichrist motif and the publication question.)
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The councils of 359 and the imperial homoian policy, pp. 157–166, 177–179.)
Williams, Daniel H. Ambrose of Milan and the End of the Nicene-Arian Conflicts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. (Hilary as forerunner of the Ambrosian doctrine of the Church’s freedom from imperial doctrinal coercion, pp. 49–52.)
Beckwith, Carl L. Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity: From De Fide to De Trinitate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (Chronology of Hilary’s exile and later career.)