The Commentaries

Before he became the Latin champion of Nicaea, Hilary of Poitiers was an exegete, and he never ceased to be one. His Commentary on Matthew is the earliest surviving Latin commentary on that Gospel and on any complete book of the New Testament; his Tractatus super Psalmos, written after his eastern exile, naturalized the Greek — and especially the Origenian — reading of the Psalter in the Latin West; and the fragmentary Tractatus mysteriorum, rediscovered only in 1887, shows him expounding the whole Old Testament as a single web of types fulfilled in Christ. This file describes these works, Hilary’s typological and allegorical method, and his deep but creative debt to Origen.

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

Hilary as Exegete

Hilary (c. 310–367) is remembered first as “the Athanasius of the West,” the bishop of Poitiers who carried the Nicene faith into Gaul and answered the Arians on their own scriptural ground (see The Twelve Books on the Trinity and Exegesis Against Arianism). But the dogmatic combatant grew out of the commentator. Before the controversy reached Gaul Hilary had already written a continuous commentary on Matthew, and after his return from exile he gave the last decade of his life largely to expounding the Psalms. Jerome, who knew his works and partly depended on them, lists among Hilary’s writings “one book On the Mysteries, and a commentary on the Psalms, that is, on the first and second and from the fifty-first to the sixty-second, and from the one hundred and eighteenth to the end,” together with “a treatise on the Gospel of Matthew” (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 100; trans. NPNF II/3). Hilary thus stands near the head of a Latin exegetical tradition that, before him, had scarcely a continuous commentary to its name; he is one of the founders of Latin biblical interpretation, the predecessor of Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the work of turning the riches of Greek exegesis into a Western inheritance.

The Commentary on Matthew (In Matthaeum)

The Commentary on Matthew (Commentarius in Matthaeum, or In Matthaeum) is Hilary’s earliest surviving work and a landmark of Latin Christianity. It is the first commentary on the Gospel of Matthew in Latin, and indeed the earliest extant Latin commentary on any whole book of the New Testament, antedating the Pauline commentaries of “Ambrosiaster” and of Marius Victorinus (D. H. Williams, introduction to Commentary on Matthew, FC 125, Washington 2012, 1–24). It was composed in Gaul, before Hilary’s exile to Phrygia in 356 and apparently before the Arian controversy had fully broken upon him — for the work shows no awareness of the eastern debates that would dominate his later writing and contains no developed anti-Arian polemic of the kind that fills De Trinitate [Disputed: the dating of *In Matthaeum* to c. 353 (so Doignon in SC 254, and Williams, FC 125, 9–13, who place it shortly before the exile and before Hilary's engagement with the Arian crisis) is the consensus; it rests on internal evidence — the absence of the technical Nicene vocabulary and of explicit anti-Arian argument — rather than on any external date, and so the figure is an inference within a generally agreed window (early-to-mid 350s) rather than a fixed point].

The commentary is not a verse-by-verse philological gloss but a running exposition that moves through Matthew chapter by chapter, pausing on the passages that yield doctrine or carry a deeper sense. Hilary reads the Gospel above all spiritually and typologically: the literal narrative is the surface beneath which a figural meaning is to be discerned, and the events of Christ’s ministry are read as signs of the mystery of salvation and of the Church. The healing of the paralytic, the calling of Matthew the publican, the storm on the lake, the feeding of the multitudes — each becomes, in Hilary’s hands, a figure of the calling of the Gentiles, the gathering of the Church, or the passage of the soul from sin to grace (In Matthaeum 8–9, 14; SC 254 [Doignon]; trans. Williams, FC 125). The method is unmistakably indebted to the Greek allegorical tradition, and it gives the work its characteristic density: Hilary is interested less in what happened than in what it means, and he assumes that the Evangelist wrote, under the Spirit, so that the history might disclose the mystery.

Doctrinally the commentary already shows the lines of thought Hilary would later develop against the Arians, though without their controversial sharpness. He reads the baptism of Christ and the Transfiguration as manifestations of the Son’s true divinity and of the unity of Father and Son; he insists on the reality of Christ’s body and human experience while guarding the integrity of His Godhead; and his treatment of the Lord’s fear and prayer in the Passion already gropes toward the distinction between what Christ undergoes in His assumed humanity and what He is in His divine nature (In Matthaeum 31–33; Williams, FC 125, introduction, 20–24). The seeds of the forma Dei / forma servi Christology that would organize De Trinitate are visible here in their first growth.

The critical text of In Matthaeum was edited by Jean Doignon in Sources Chrétiennes 254 and 258 (Paris, 1978–1979), and the work was translated into English in full for the first time by D. H. Williams as Commentary on Matthew in the Fathers of the Church series, volume 125 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012); the underlying Latin stands in Patrologia Latina 9.

The Tractatus super Psalmos

If In Matthaeum belongs to the years before the exile, the Tractatus super Psalmos (the Homilies or Tractates on the Psalms) is the great work of Hilary’s last years, written after his return to Gaul about 360 and informed throughout by what he had learned of Greek exegesis in the East (Beckwith, Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity, Oxford 2008, 1–30; Williams, FC 125, introduction). It is not a complete commentary on the whole Psalter as it has come down to us. Jerome reports that Hilary expounded the first and second Psalms, then Psalms 51–62, and Psalms 118 through the end (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 100; NPNF II/3) — the surviving manuscripts preserve treatises on a comparable, though not identical, selection, with the long meditation on the 118th Psalm (the great alphabetic Psalm, LXX/Vulgate numbering = Hebrew/Masoretic Psalm 119) as its centerpiece.

Two features define the work. The first is its Christological reading of the Psalter. For Hilary the Psalms are not chiefly the prayers of David or of Israel but the voice of Christ and of the Church — the speech of the Word, sometimes in His own person, sometimes in the person of the body He has assumed, sometimes as the prayer the Head offers in the members. He sets this out programmatically in his Instructio Psalmorum, the prologue to the collection, where he lays down the principle that the whole Psalter is to be understood “of the Lord Jesus Christ” and read for the mystery hidden within its words (Tractatus super Psalmos, Instructio / prologue; the prologue and selected tractates are translated in NPNF II/9 [Watson, Pullan], among the “select works”). The Psalter so read becomes a continuous prophecy of the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and reign of Christ, and a school of the Church’s own prayer.

The second feature is its debt to Origen, which Hilary’s contemporaries already noted and which he himself does not conceal. Jerome states the matter directly: Hilary’s work on the Psalms was composed “in imitation of Origen, but with some additions of his own” (in quo opere imitatus Origenem, nonnulla etiam de suo addidit) (Jerome, De Viris Illustribus 100; NPNF II/3). The Tractatus super Psalmos takes over from Origen not only particular interpretations but the very habit of reading — the layering of literal, moral, and spiritual senses, the search for the figural meaning, the assumption that every detail signifies (on the threefold sense in Origen and its transmission, see Beckwith 2008, and Williams, FC 125, introduction). Yet Hilary is no mere translator. He selects, abridges, corrects, and recasts; he prunes the more speculative reaches of Origen’s thought and adapts the material to a Latin and Nicene readership, and he writes a Latin theological vocabulary for the Psalms that did not exist before him. The result is one of the channels by which the Origenian inheritance entered the Latin West, alongside the later and larger labors of Jerome and Rufinus.

The extent and exact sources of this dependence are debated. Hilary may have drawn not only on Origen’s own commentaries and homilies on the Psalms but on the catena-like exegetical tradition that gathered around them, and possibly on Eusebius of Caesarea’s commentary on the Psalms as well [Disputed: that Hilary's *Tractatus super Psalmos* depends heavily on Origen is universally granted, on Jerome's explicit testimony (*De Viris Illustribus* 100) and on the internal evidence; what is contested is the precise channel and degree — whether Hilary worked from Origen's writings directly, from a Greek catena, and/or from Eusebius of Caesarea's Psalms commentary, and how much of the exposition is independently his own. Scholars accordingly range from treating the work as a close adaptation of Greek sources to crediting Hilary with substantial original synthesis (see Beckwith 2008 and Williams, FC 125, introduction, for the cautious middle position; the question turns in part on the fragmentary state of Origen's own Psalms exegesis)].

The Tractatus Mysteriorum

The third exegetical work, the Tractatus mysteriorum (Treatise on the Mysteries), is the most fragmentary and had the most dramatic afterlife. The De Mysteriis that Jerome names among Hilary’s books (De Viris Illustribus 100) was lost to view for centuries and known only by report, until in 1887 a manuscript containing a substantial portion of it was discovered at Pistoia, in Italy, by J.-F. Gamurrini — the same find that brought to light the pilgrim diary of Egeria (the Itinerarium Egeriae) bound in the same codex (on the discovery, Williams, FC 125, introduction; standard editions of the Tractatus mysteriorum in SC 19bis [Brisson] and PL Supplement; the Latin is in Patrologia Latina 9).

What survives shows Hilary systematically reading the Old Testament as a sustained typology of Christ and the Church. He works through the great figures and events of salvation history — Adam, Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the Passover and Exodus, the entry into the promised land — and reads each as a mysterium, a figure that contains and foreshadows the reality fulfilled in Christ and in the sacraments of the Church (Tractatus mysteriorum 1; SC 19bis [Brisson]). The work is the clearest single statement of Hilary’s conviction that the whole of the earlier covenant was written in figures, that “everything in the Old Testament that is read of as having been done is to be understood as the prophecy of things to come,” and that the unity of the two Testaments is the unity of figure and fulfillment. It belongs to the same Greek-influenced typological stream as the Psalms tractates and shares their Origenian temper, and it is an important Latin witness — earlier than Ambrose’s De mysteriis and De sacramentis — to the figural reading of the Old Testament that would shape Western catechesis and liturgy.

Hilary’s Method and Its Place in Latin Exegesis

Across all three works one method is at work. Hilary reads Scripture on more than one level: he grants the historical, literal sense its reality — he is no docetist of the text — but he is convinced that the letter exists to carry a mysterium, a spiritual meaning concerning Christ and the Church, and it is this deeper sense that he labors to bring out (Beckwith 2008; Williams, FC 125, introduction). His controlling assumptions are those of the Alexandrian tradition mediated chiefly through Origen: that Scripture is a single book whose every part speaks of Christ, that the Old Testament is a tissue of types fulfilled in the New, and that the Psalms are the voice of the whole Christ, Head and members. What he adds is a Latin idiom and a Nicene frame: the same exegesis that yields the spiritual sense yields also, against the Arians, the eternal divinity of the Son and the reality of His self-emptying.

The historical importance of this body of work is large and easy to underestimate. When Hilary began, the Latin Church possessed almost no continuous scholarly commentary; the great Greek exegetical achievement of Origen and his successors lay largely beyond the reach of Latin readers. Hilary was among the first to bridge that gap — to write, in Latin, a commentary on a Gospel, a Christological exposition of the Psalter dependent on the best Greek learning, and a typological treatise on the Old Testament mysteries (Williams, FC 125, introduction; Beckwith 2008, 1–30). In doing so he prepared the ground for Ambrose, who would draw on the same Greek sources for his own exegesis (see St. Ambrose of Milan), and for Jerome and Augustine after him. The exegete and the dogmatician are finally one man: it was as a reader of Scripture that Hilary learned the faith he would defend, and it is in his commentaries that the Latin West first hears, in its own tongue, the figural and Christological reading of the Bible that the Greek Fathers had perfected.

References

Hilary of Poitiers. Commentary on Matthew (In Matthaeum). Critical text: Sur Matthieu, ed. Jean Doignon, Sources Chrétiennes 254, 258. Paris: Cerf, 1978–1979. English translation: Commentary on Matthew, trans. D. H. Williams, Fathers of the Church 125. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012. (Latin in Patrologia Latina 9.)
Hilary of Poitiers. Tractatus super Psalmos (Homilies on the Psalms). Latin in Patrologia Latina 9; critical edition in CSEL 22 (Zingerle) and Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 61, 61A, 61B. The Instructio Psalmorum (prologue) and selected tractates trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 9 (“St. Hilary of Poitiers, Select Works,” trans. E. W. Watson, L. Pullan, et al.).
Hilary of Poitiers. Tractatus mysteriorum (Treatise on the Mysteries). Critical edition: Traité des mystères, ed. Jean-Paul Brisson, Sources Chrétiennes 19bis. Paris: Cerf, 1967. (Rediscovered at Pistoia by J.-F. Gamurrini in 1887; Latin in Patrologia Latina 9.)
Jerome. De Viris Illustribus (On Illustrious Men) 100. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, vol. 3. (Lists Hilary’s On the Mysteries, the commentary on the Psalms “in imitation of Origen, but with some additions of his own,” and the commentary on Matthew.)
Williams, D. H. Introduction to Commentary on Matthew (above), Fathers of the Church 125. Washington, D.C., 2012. (On In Matthaeum as the first Latin commentary on Matthew, its dating before the exile, and Hilary’s exegetical method and debt to Origen.)
Beckwith, Carl L. Hilary of Poitiers on the Trinity: From De Fide to De Trinitate. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (On the development of Hilary’s thought, his eastern exile, and his exegetical sources.)
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (On Hilary’s place among the pro-Nicene theologians of the Latin West.)