Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop & Doctor of the Church
January 13 · d. 367
also known as Hilary of Poitiers, The Athanasius of the West
Hilary was bishop of Poitiers in Gaul in the fourth century, a married layman elected to the see and afterwards exiled to Phrygia by imperial order for refusing to yield to the Arian party. He wrote the twelve books of De Trinitate in exile and pleaded with the Eastern bishops not to divide the church over a word. He is a Doctor of the Church, and his feast is January 13.
Hilary of Poitiers was not raised a Christian. He was born at Poitiers in Gaul, into a family of high standing and probably pagan, and he was given the education such a family gave: the Latin classics, a fondness for Quintilian, and enough Greek to read the Eastern theologians, which mattered more later than anyone could have guessed. He came to the faith as a grown man, by reading. He read Moses and the prophets and found God saying of Himself, in the old translation, "I Am that I Am," and he wrote afterward that he was amazed to find in those words an insight into the divine nature so exact that no words could have improved it. He was baptized as an adult, a married man with a daughter.
Then the church at Poitiers did something startling. It elected him bishop, a layman lifted straight to the office with no steps in between, and still married. He had been a Christian only a few years.
And here is the thing about Hilary that is easy to miss. Years into his episcopate he had still never read the Nicene Creed. He said so himself, later, in writing: "Though long ago regenerate in baptism, and for some time a bishop, I never heard of the Nicene creed until I was going into exile, but the Gospels and Epistles suggested to me the meaning of ὁμοούσιον and ὁμοιούσιον." He had worked out the faith of Nicaea from Scripture alone, without knowing there was a council that had said it first.
That faith was, at the time, the losing side. The emperor Constantius favoured the Arian party, and in 356 a synod was convened at Béziers under Saturninus, the Arian bishop of Arles. Hilary came to it to make his case. He was not given a hearing. He was denounced to the emperor instead, and an imperial order sent him into exile in Phrygia, at the far end of the empire, with Rhodanus of Toulouse. There was no torture and no dungeon. There was simply a decree, and a bishop removed from his people for nearly four years.
He used the years. Still governing Poitiers from a distance, he read the Greek theologians in their own language and wrote the twelve books of De Trinitate, and he wrote De Synodis to the bishops of Gaul, explaining the Eastern bishops to them and pleading with both sides not to anathematize each other over the difference between two Greek words that meant, as he judged it, the same true thing. "We hold one and the same sacred truth," he wrote to them. "You are not Arians: why should you be thought to be Arians by denying the ὁμοούσιον?" And elsewhere: "Let us not condemn the fathers, let us not encourage heretics, lest while we drive one heresy away, we nurture another." Not everyone on his own side liked this. Lucifer of Cagliari attacked him publicly for being too ready to take repentant bishops back.
Before the exile a young soldier named Martin had come to him at Poitiers, and Hilary had tried to make him a deacon; Martin refused the honour and would accept only the humble office of exorcist. When the exile fell, Martin left Gaul too. When Hilary came home in 361, Martin came back to him, and on land Hilary gave him he founded the monastery at Ligugé, remembered as the first monastic community in Gaul. That is Martin of Tours, and the church in Gaul owes his monasteries to a friendship formed in a bishop's house before the trouble started.
Hilary did not come home broken. He went on with the fight, and at a Gallic council he secured the deposition of Saturninus, the very man who had refused him a hearing. Later, at Milan, he argued in public against the Arian bishop Auxentius before the emperor Valentinian, who ended the affair by ordering Hilary out of the city. He did not live to see the argument won.
He died at Poitiers, most likely in 367. He closed the last of the twelve books with a petition rather than a boast, asking God to keep this faith of his undefiled, "and even till my spirit departs, grant that this may be the utterance of my convictions."
You may know the words of the faith long before you know why they matter, or you may find, as Hilary did, that you have believed the thing itself for years without ever meeting the word for it. He said so plainly: he believed it before he knew the word, and the word then helped his believing. That is worth holding onto when you are tempted to measure someone's faith by their vocabulary, or your own by how well you can defend it. Hilary spent his exile arguing that men who used a different word meant the same truth, and he was criticized by his own side for the generosity. Where in your own life have you mistaken an unfamiliar word for an unfamiliar faith?
The evidence for Hilary comes in three unequal layers, and it helps to keep them apart. First, and best, are his own writings: De Trinitate, De Synodis, the homilies on the Psalms, and the pamphlets against Constantius and Auxentius. These are first-person and contemporary, though they are polemic against living opponents, advocacy rather than report. Second is a small body of near-contemporary notice. Jerome devoted chapter 100 of De Viris Illustribus to him around 392, roughly twenty-five years after his death, and independently confirms the banishment to Phrygia after Béziers, the twelve books against the Arians, De Synodis addressed to the Gallican bishops, the book handed to Constantius in person at Constantinople, and the commentary on the Psalms. Sulpicius Severus, who knew Martin of Tours personally, wrote the Life of Martin around 396 and supplies the whole Hilary and Martin sequence, though Hilary appears there only as a figure in another man's story. Third and latest is the hagiography: Venantius Fortunatus wrote a Life of Hilary at Poitiers in the 560s, about two centuries after the events, and Gregory of Tours followed him a generation later.
Several dates are genuinely contested. Hilary's birth year is nowhere attested and is only back-calculated from his career. Sources differ on whether he was elected bishop about 350 or about 353. The exile's end is given variously as 359, 360 or 361, possibly because recall and formal return to the see were not the same day. The death year is the liveliest question: the modern consensus is 367, though the eleventh-edition Britannica, which states it, adds that no more exact date is trustworthy; the Roman Breviary tradition gives 13 January 368, and the Catholic Encyclopedia records 1 November as what it calls the most accredited opinion without naming an ancient authority for it. Jerome gives no year at all, only that Hilary died during the reign of Valentinian and Valens. The two feast dates, 13 and 14 January, are not a dispute but a calendar reform: the older Roman calendar kept 14 January, which is why the January term at Oxford and in the English courts is still called Hilary term, and the current calendar keeps 13 January.
Two persistent confusions are worth naming. Hilary of Poitiers is not Hilary of Arles, who was born about 401 and died in 449, and the two have actually been confused in the manuscripts: Benedictine editors had to strip the poem Carmen in Genesim out of the Poitiers corpus. Nor is he Pope Hilarius, bishop of Rome from 461 to 468. He was never bishop of Arles at all; Saturninus of Arles was his opponent.
One correction bears on his corpus. His commentary on the Psalms is often described as almost entirely lost, and this is false: commentary on fifty-eight psalms survives, edited by A. Zingerle in 1891, of which the nineteenth-century English series translated only three as specimens. What has not survived in accessible English is the more personal and political material, the books addressed to Constantius, the treatise on the mysteries, and the hymn book Jerome says he wrote.
Hilary is remembered as the first hymn-writer of the Latin West; Jerome lists a book of hymns among his works, though only fragmentary incipits survive. Later tradition attached miracles to him. Fortunatus tells of the island of Gallinaria, infested with enormous coiling serpents, which fled at Hilary's arrival, and of the staff he planted as a boundary they would not cross, preferring to cross the sea rather than violate it; from this comes his patronage against snakebite. The Golden Legend tells of a child who died unbaptized at Poitiers, over whom Hilary lay praying in the dust until both rose, the old man from prayer and the child from death.
The devotion that grew up around his tomb at Poitiers is far better attested than these stories. By the 560s Fortunatus could catalogue nine healings there and Gregory of Tours added more, and pilgrims bound for Martin's shrine at Tours stopped at Hilary's on the way. The Basilica of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand still stands on the site, consecrated in 1049 and inscribed by UNESCO in 1998 among the monuments of the pilgrim routes to Compostela. Where his relics now are, no one can say: one tradition sends them to Le Puy, another to Saint-Denis, a third has them burned by Huguenots at Poitiers in 1572. Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1851.
Hilary's own words are quoted here from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 9 (1898), the first complete English rendering of his major works, edited by W. Sanday and translated by five hands working from the pre-critical Latin. The passages from De Trinitate (Book I, sections 5 and 11) are E. W. Watson's; the closing petition from Book XII, section 57 is E. N. Bennett's; the two passages from De Synodis, sections 88 and 91, are L. Pullan's. The standard modern English of De Trinitate is Stephen McKenna, Saint Hilary of Poitiers: The Trinity, Fathers of the Church volume 25 (Catholic University of America Press, 1954), still in print. The critical Latin text is Pieter Smulders, ed., CCSL 62 and 62A (Brepols, 1979 and 1980); the surviving Psalms commentary is A. Zingerle, ed., CSEL 22 (Vienna, 1891). For the near-contemporary testimony see Jerome, De Viris Illustribus, chapter 100, and Sulpicius Severus, Life of St Martin, chapter 5. The Gallinaria episode is Venantius Fortunatus, Vita S. Hilarii, chapters 35 to 38; the raising of the child is in the Hilary entry of Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend.
The interpretation of his name. Hilary is said of joyousness, for he was joyous in the service of God. Or Hilary is said virtuous and high, for he was high and strong in science, and virtuous in his life. Or Hilary is said of hilum, which is to say dark matter, for he had in his dictes great obscurity and profoundness.
Of the Life of S. Hilary.
S. Hilary, which was Bishop of Poictiers, was born in the country of Guienne. He had a wife wedded, and a daughter, and whereas he was in habit secular he lived after the life of a monk. He profited so much in holy life and sciences that he was chosen Archbishop of Poictiers. A manner of an heresy reigned in his country and through all France, which was the sect of the Arians, the which he destroyed to his power. Nevertheless by the commandment of the emperor, which was of the party of the heretics, by the suggestion of two bishops of that sect he was exiled, with which two bishops he disputed, and overcame them. Afterward, for they might not gainsay the truth of the matter, ne could not bear ne answer to his eloquence, so that he was constrained to come again to Poictiers. And as he passed by an isle of the sea, which was full of serpents, he chased them away by the virtue of his commandment, and by his sight only, and pight a staff in the middle of the isle and gave to the serpents liberty to come to that staff and not to pass farther, and the serpents obeyed him, which part is no land now but sea.
When S. Hilary came to Poictiers he met a child dead, borne for to be buried, and the child was not baptized; which child by virtue of his prayer he raised to life, for he lay long in the dust in prayer, and when he arose out of his prayer the child arose from death to life.
S. Hilary had a daughter named Apia and she would have been married, but S. Hilary preached to her so much of the estate of virginity that she changed her purpose. And when she was confirmed in this will and purpose S. Hilary doubted that she should change, and prayed our Lord for to take her while she was in good purpose, and anon she died, and S. Hilary buried her. And when her mother the wife of S. Hilary saw that her daughter was dead, she prayed to her husband, that he should impetre and get for her like as he had done for his daughter. And anon as S. Hilary had made his orison, she died, and by this manner he sent tofore him his wife and his daughter.
In this time the pope Leo, which favoured heresy, called a counsel of bishops, but he sent not for S. Hilary that he should come thereto, notwithstanding S. Hilary came thither. When the pope saw him come, he commanded that no man should arise against him, ne give him no place. Then said the pope to him: You are Hilary the cock, and not the son of an hen. And Hilary answered: I am Hilary and no cock, but a bishop in Gallia that is in France. Then said the pope, You are Hilary Gallus, and I am Leo of the Papal See, Judge. To whom Hilary said: If you be Leo yet are you not of the Tribe of Judah. Then the pope had great indignation and said to him: Abide you a little, and I shall pay to you your hire; and S. Hilary answered: And if you come not again who shall pay me for you? And the pope answered: I shall come again and shall beat down your pride. Then the pope went down into the low chamber for to ease him, and by the conduit of his nether part voided out all the entrails of his body, and so died suddenly. Thus then as he abode the pope S. Hilary found no place to sit on, ne none would remove to make him place, and when he saw that, he said: Domini est terra, the earth longs to our Lord, and sat down upon the earth, and the earth arose up by miracle by the will of our Lord, in such wise that he sat as high as the other, and anon after, word came that the pope was dead. Then S. Hilary confirmed all the other bishops that were there in the faith, and so confirmed, each went in to his country.
In the end, when S. Hilary had impetred of God many miracles to be showed by his prayer, he became sick, and saw his death approach. Then he called to him one of his chaplains whom he much loved and said to him: Go you out and bring to me word what you hear. When he had been long without, he came in and told to S. Hilary that he had heard a great noise in the city; and when it was midnight he sent his chaplain again to hearken as he had done tofore; and when he came again in to the chamber for to tell that he had heard nothing, a great clear light entered in, that the priest might not behold it. And when the light departed S. Hilary died, that was the year of grace three hundred and forty, let us pray to him that he pray for us. Amen
And next follows the Invention of S.
British (Received Pronunciation): Auxentius /ɔːkˈsɛnʃəs/; Augustine /ɔːˈɡʌstɪn/
Almighty God, you gave your servant Hilary of Poitiers special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52