Portal:Catholicism/Patron Archive/January 13

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Hilarius or Hilary (ca. 300 – 367) was bishop of Poitiers and considered an eminent doctor of the Western Christian Church. He was sometimes referred to as the malleus Arianorum ("hammer against Arianism") and the “Athanasius of the West”.

He was born at Poitiers about the end of the 3rd century A.D. His parents were pagans of distinction. He studied the Old and New Testament writings, with the result that he abandoned his Neoplatonism for Christianity, and with his wife and his daughter (traditionally named as Saint Abra) received the sacrament of baptism.

About 353, although still a married man, he was unanimously elected bishop (clerical celibacy was not required by the church until the late Middle Ages). Arianism was threatening to overrun the Western Church; to repel the disruption was the great task which Hilary undertook. He wrote to the emperor Constantius II a remonstrance against the persecutions by which the Arians had sought to crush their opponents. His efforts were not at first successful, for at the synod of Biterrae (Béziers), Hilary was by an imperial rescript banished to Phrygia, in which exile he spent nearly four years.

Thence, however, he continued to govern his diocese; while he found leisure for the preparation of two of the most important of his contributions to dogmatic and polemical theology, the De synodis or De fide Orientalium, an epistle, expounding the true views of the Eastern bishops on the Nicene controversy, and the De trinitate libri XII, composed in 359 and 360, in which, for the first time, a successful attempt was made to express in Latin the theological subtleties elaborated in the original Greek.

He was occupied for two or three years in combating Arianism within his diocese; but in 364, extending his efforts once more beyond Gaul, he impeached Auxentius, bishop of Milan, as heterodox. Summoned to appear before the emperor Valentinian I at Milan and there maintain his charges, Hilary had the mortification of hearing the supposed heretic give satisfactory answers to all the questions proposed; nor did his denunciation of the metropolitan as a hypocrite save himself from an ignominious expulsion from Milan.

The later years of his life were spent in comparative quiet, devoted in part to the preparation of his expositions of the Psalms; of his Commentarius in Evangelium Matthaei; and of his no longer extant translation of Origen's commentary on Job. He died in 367.
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