ST. HILARY OF POITIERS

CHAPTER IX.

HILARY AND THE EMPEROR.

The title which is prefixed to this chapter is open to a technical objection. A critic might urge against it that Hilary came into contact with two actual emperors, and with another magnate who became an emperor during Hilary's lifetime, though at the epoch when they met he was only recognised as an heir to the throne; as a Caesar, not as an Augustus. The two actual emperors were Constantius II. and Valentinian; the Caesar was the youth who was afterwards to be known to all time by the title of Julian the Apostate.

But the relations of the Bishop of Poitiers with Julian and with Valentinian, more especially with the former, were comparatively brief. Waiving once again, for the sake of convenience, chronological considerations, we may just state the nature of these relations, and then put them entirely on one side.

It will be seen presently that Hilary was suspected by Constantius of some interference of a hostile character in matters political. It is rather startling to find in Hilary's second letter, addressed to that emperor (about AD 360, during his exile), the following language :—"I am an exile, not as the victim of crime, but as that of a faction. I have a weighty witness on behalf of the justice of my complaint, my lord, your religious Caesar, Julian."

It is a singular circumstance, that although part of the episcopate of Hilary coincided with the short reign of Julian (AD 361-363), so that the open apostasy of the dissimulating prince must have become known even in Gaul, we do not hear of any collision between these old acquaintances. It is possible that the intolerant edicts of Julian, which prohibited the Christians from teaching the arts of grammar and of rhetoric, may have hardly had time to operate in Gaul before the death of their author made them null and void; or that Julian may have been too busy with Hilary's great fellow-labourer, Athanasius, to turn his theological attention from the East. "Julian, who despised the Christians, honoured Athanasius with his sincere and peculiar hatred''. From his own point of view Julian's sentiments were perfectly natural. He was thoroughly convinced that, if he could crush the primate of Egypt, he would have comparatively little difficulty in overthrowing other rulers of the Church. Athanasius has received many marks of homage, from the days of St. Gregory of Nyssa to those of Hooker; but none, perhaps, more emphatic and complete than the bitter hostility of Julian. The emperor's conduct in this respect was a real illustratio of the well-known dictum of a writer of this century, that " nothing is more infallible than the instinct of impiety."

But we must return to Hilary. Besides the brief and apparently favorable intercourse with Julian in Gaul, at the commencement of his episcopate, the Bishop of Poitiers was brought into contact on one occasion with the Emperor Valentinian. This emperor being at Milan in the year AD 364, the year of his accession, found Hilary at Milan engaged in a controversy with the bishop of that see, Auxentius.

Hilary was convinced, and apparently with good reason, that Auxentius was in reality an Arian at heart. As, however, the Bishop of Milan made an open profession of the faith proclaimed in the Nicenc Creed, we can hardly wonder that Valentinian, viewing the matter as a politician, declined to listen to the evidence that could be adduced against the sincerity of this avowal. The emperor commanded Hilary to return to Gaul. Hilary displayed prompt obedience, but he published in the following year, AD 365, an epistle, in which he warned the faithful against Auxentius, against whom he certainly made out a strong case. We do not, after this, hear of any more intercourse between Hilary and the authorities of the State.

But, although the "Athanasius of Gaul" (as M. de Broglie justly calls Hilary) thus came momentarily across the path of a Julian at the commencement of his episcopate, and a Valentinian at its close, the real representative of the State with whom Hilary had dealings was Constantius the Second. The negotiations between the two lasted for five years (356-361), and were of a far more elaborately controversial character than Hilary's dealings with Julian or with Valentinian. Indeed, we have three long letters addressed by Hilary to this sovereign. This summary of the facts of the case will, it is hoped, be thought to justify the limitation employed in the heading of the present chapter.

Constantius was a man who may fairly claim, perhaps, to be credited with good intentions, but it cannot be said that his ways of carrying them out were either wise or charitable. He seems to have cherished really strong convictions on behalf of the Christian religion as against heathenism. But he thought fit to turn against paganism the weapons of persecution which it had employed against the faith of the Cross. It is true that such force as he did employ was, for the most part, gentle, as compared with the savage deeds of a Nero, a Decius, or a Galerius; nor did the heathens of that age furnish any martyrs for their creed. Nevertheless, in thus changing the situation, Constantius was robbing the Church of Christ of one of her chief glories. She could no longer say that violence had again and again been employed against her, but never on her behalf. Her annalists are almost all agreed in condemning the sort of protection granted by Con­stantius as both wrong in principle and in every point of view a grave mistake.

The emperor, however, not only believed that severe laws against pagan modes of divination, the overthrow of heathen temples, and excessive immunities granted to the clergy, formed a genuine service to the faith, but he claimed in return the right of meddling largely with doctrine and with the controversies then rife concerning it. For secular rule he had some real gifts. Like his father, Constantine, he was skilled in military exercises; like him he could endure fatigue, was temperate in his repasts, and of unblemished moral character. But he was fussy and self-important; apparently all the more so, because he was conscious of a want of dignity of presence, being small of stature and slightly deformed in his legs. It was observed, that in public he would refrain from any gesture that might seem to compromise the stateliness he tried to affect, and would not so much as cough. He liked to display his taste for literature and for theology, and would indulge his courtiers with long harangues.

As Constantius was only one-and-twenty at the decease of his father in AD 337, some allowance might well be made for the vanity of one who found himself at so early an age in a position so exalted. But the increase of years and of experience did not in his case bring with it real growth of mind. No true largeness of ideas nor firmness of resolution marked the sway of Constantius. He did, indeed, pass by, without retaliation or notice, some very vehement and insulting addresses to him, more especially those from the pen of Lucifer of Cagliari. But he was fond of acting upon secret informations, which the accused person could not answer; he was too often the prey of the last courtiers who had access to his ear. Among Christians the Arians were eminently successful in obtaining his favour, and, though that favour might prove fitful and inconstant, he persecuted at the same time the heathen on one side, and the defenders of the Catholic faith upon the other.

Consequently, it is not surprising that neither with historian, ancient or modern, believing or heathen, does the memory of Constantius the Second find grace. Ammianus and Gibbon are as severe as Socrates and Dollinger. Such was the imperial ruler with whom Hilary was specially confronted.

The three letters to which reference has been made were respectively addressed by Hilary to Constantius in the years 355, 360, 361.

The first of the three is a plea for the toleration of the orthodox against the persecutions being inflicted upon them by the Arians—persecutions of a character both coarse and cruel. It appeared just after the bishops, led by Hilary, had taken the bold step of separating themselves from the communion of Valens, Ursacius, and Saturninus. A critic of our day, who is no mean judge of such a matter, calls attention to the skill, the tact and knowledge of the world displayed in the commencement of this epistle. Hilary begins by assuring the emperor of the thorough political submission of the Gauls to his sceptre.

"All is calm", he writes, "amongst us; no perverse or factious proposals are heard; there is no suspicion of sedition; hardly a murmur is audible. We are living in peace and obedience. One thing only do we demand of your excellency—it is that those who have been sent into exile and into the depths of the deserts, those excellent priests, worthy of the name which they bear, may be permitted to return to their homes; and thus everywhere may reign liberty and joy."

This language may remind us that Hilary had begun public life as a magistrate and a statesman. Even on political grounds, Hilary urges, the emperor is making a mistake. Among his Catholic subjects will be found the best defenders of the realm against internal sedition within, or barbarian invasion from without. He then proceeds to employ rather the tone of the philosopher :—

"You toil, O emperor, you govern the state by wise laws; you watch day and night, in order that all under your rule shall enjoy the blessing of liberty .... God also has brought man to know Him by His teaching, but has not compelled him to do so by force. Inspiring respect for His commands through the admiration of His heavenly marvels, He disdains the homage of a will that was compelled to confess Him. If such constraint were employed, even in support of the true faith, the wisdom of the bishops would arrest it, and would say : 'God is Lord of all; He has no need of an unwilling allegiance; He will have no compulsory confession of faith; we are not to deceive, but to serve Him; it is for our own sakes, more than for His, that we are to worship Him'. I can only receive him who comes willingly; I can only listen to him who prays, and mark with the sign of the Cross him who believes in it. We must seek after God in simplicity of heart, reverence Him in fear, and worship Him in sincerity of will. Who has ever heard of priests compelled to serve God by chains and punishment?"

Moderate as this language may seem, it was not such as Constantius was in the habit of hearing. Probably, if he had at the moment been governing Gaul in person, Hilary would at once have been made sensible of the emperor's annoyance; but Julian, to whose charge the province had been intrusted, was busy in a camp at Vienne on the Rhone. He expected an attack of barbarians, and was wholly engaged in making preparation for the first of those successful campaigns which he subsequently waged against the Alemanni and the Franks. Saturninus of Arles gathered together at Beziers (then known as Biterra) a small number of his partisans, and at last, through the intervention of Constantius, obtained from the hands of Julian the formal document which rendered Hilary an exile in Phrygia.

This event, as we have observed, took place at the close of AD 356. The second letter of Hilary to Constantius was written fully four years later. It embodies a protest on Hilary's part of innocence of all the charges which, he hears, are brought against him. He is still, he tells Constantius, for all practical purposes a bishop in Gaul, for his clergy listen to his injunctions, and through these he still ministers to his flock. He would gladly meet, in presence of the emperor, the man whom he regards as the real author of his exile, Saturninus, the bishop of Arles, and would like to be allowed to plead for the faith at the council which is about to be summoned (this is the council which ultimately met at Seleucia in AD 359). Meanwhile he is deeply conscious of the injury wrought to Christianity by the clashing of rival councils and varying professions of faith.

The emperor appears to have been anxious to see a creed drawn up which should not contain any phrase which was not to be found in Holy Scripture. This was a marked feature of the Semi-Arian case, and it must be owned that it is at first sight a highly plausible one; but it will not bear examination, for the very point at issue was what meaning was to be attached to this or that expression of Scripture. No commentator would be willing to be limited to the precise phraseology of the author whose writings he is trying to explain. As a plain matter of fact, at the present time it would be impossible to name any Christian community which has found itself able to act upon this theory. To carry it out in its integrity would almost require the employment of the original languages in which the Scriptures were written; for a translation, as even a beginner in scholarship must be aware, very often almost of necessity partakes of the nature of a commentary.

The Arians themselves do not seem to have urged this plea. Indeed, on their part it would have been transparently absurd, for they had a whole class of watchwords, of which not one was to be found in Scripture—as, for instance, the phrases specially condemned in the earliest edition of the Nicene Creed. Even on the part of the Semi-Arians it was inconsistent, for they, too, clung to the non-Scriptural term, homoousion, quite as persistently as their opponents did to their watchword.

Such is substantially the comment of Hilary upon the emperor's demand. He praises Constantius for his anxiety that his faith should be Scriptural, but he maintains that this is precisely what he and his friends are trying to teach. Only Constantius ought to remember, that all those whom even he would denounce as heretics make precisely the same claim. The emperor's allies had denounced, for example, Photinus and Sabellius; but Photinus and Sabellius both averred that their tenets were Scriptural. Montanus, who had employed the ministry of women who were apparently mad, had made the same claim. "They all talk Scripture without the sense of Scripture, and without true faith set forth a faith."

Thus far the addresses of Hilary to Constantius had been, it is admitted on all sides, loyal, respectful, and thoroughly Christian in tone. "It would be unjust", says a writer, who is by no means unduly favourable to champions of orthodoxy, "not to acknowledge the beautiful and Christian sentiments scattered throughout his two former addresses to Constantius, which are firm but respectful and, if rigidly, yet sincerely dogmatic. His plea for toleration, if not consistently maintained, is expressed with great force and simplicity."

The words just cited, of course, imply a reference to the third letter. It must have been written a year after the date (AD 360) in which the second was presented to the emperor.

During this time Constantius appears to have changed his plans. Hitherto, though not inflicting death upon any of the orthodox, he had employed the punishment of exile with great recklessness. Bishops in all directions had been dismissed, as has been observed, from their sees—we have abundant evidence besides Hilary's on this point—without much care as to the district named. Thus Paulinus, bishop of Treves, a man of high and holy character, having been banished into an heretical district, had been driven to beg for bread. Moreover, some of their faithful presbyters had been compelled to work in the mines.

Nevertheless, it seems probable that, if Constantius had continued to pursue this policy, Hilary, though he issued protests and petitions (far more for others than for himself), might have continued to address Constantius in comparatively moderate language. He had apparently a strong conviction that such punishments wrought their own cure, were often over-ruled to good, and ultimately did injury to the cause of those Arians who sympathised with the emperor in his action and had in some cases (as in Hilary's own) apparently suggested the victims.

But the emperor in the last years of his life—he died in AD 361—adopted a much more conciliatory policy. It was an illustration, to some extent, of the fable about the wind and the sun contending for the traveller's cloak. Invitations to the palace, bribes, good dinners, imperial flatteries were freely lavished; and it seems to have been found that many who would have been proof against harsh measures were really influenced by these allurements.

On almost the only occasion in his life of which we have any evidence, Hilary now thoroughly abandoned the tone of moderation which he generally employed. Constantius, by this change of policy, became in his eyes the worst of enemies to the truth; a very Antichrist, who would fain make the world a present to Satan. He appeals to the evidences of his own former moderation; but the time for gentleness has gone by. For his part he would thankfully see back again the time when the little-horse and the stocks, the fire and the axe, were plied against the faith of the Cross.

"But now we are contending against a deceitful persecutor, against a flattering enemy, against an Antichrist Constantius, who does not scourge the back, but pampers the appetite; who does not issue proscriptions that lead us to immortal life, but rich gifts that betray to endless death; does not send us from prison to liberty, but loads us inside the palace with honors that bribe to slavery; does not torture the body, but makes himself master of the heart; does not strike off heads with the sword, but slays the soul with gold; does not in public threaten with fire, but in secret is kindling for us a hell; does not aim at true self-conquest, but flatters that he may lord it over us; confesses Christ for the purpose of denying Him; aims at unity for the destruction of true peace; represses heresies, but in such wise as would leave no Christians; honors priests, that he may do away with bishops; and builds the Church's walls, that he may destroy her faith."

Then presently, with fresh vehemence, but with perhaps some measure of inconsistency, Hilary proceeds to accuse Constantius of, at least, some partial and local persecution of a more direct character:—

"To thee, O Constantius, do I proclaim what I would have uttered before Nero, what Decius and Maximin would have heard from me. Thou art warring against God, raging against the Church, persecuting the Saints. Thou hatest those that preach Christ, thou art overthrowing religion, tyrant as thou art, no longer merely in things human, but in things divine ... A doctor art thou of lore profane, and, untaught in real piety, thou art giving bishoprics to thine allies, and changing good ones for bad; thou art committing priests to prison, thou arrayest thine armies to strike terror into the Church; thou closest synods and compellest the faith of the Orientals to become impiety. Those who are shut up in one city thou dost frighten with threats, weaken by famine, kill with cold, mislead by dissimulation. So, most wicked of mortal men, dost thou manipulate all the ills of persecution, as to shut out the chance of pardon in the event of sin, and of martyrdom where there is confessorship. This hath that father of thine, that murderer from the beginning, taught thee—how to prevail without insult, to stab without the sword, to persecute without infamy, to indulge hatred without being suspected, to lie without being discovered, to make professions of faith while in unbelief, to flatter without kindliness, to act, carry out your own will, while yet concealing that will."

This letter has not unnaturally been the one especial object of attack with those who are inclined to lower Hilary. Men, who have no strong convictions of their own, imply that they would have always kept their temper under similar circumstances. But it is far less easy to judge such cases fairly than might at first sight be supposed. Sarcasm and invective almost always seem lawful weapons when employed on our own side; then they are just reproof and holy indignation. But turned against us they look like irreverence, and seem to carry with them their own condemnation. "If", as Mohler remarks, concerning the case before us,—"if we drive men to despair, we ought to be prepared to hear them speak the language of despair."

Even those who, while sympathising in the main with Hilary, may think his language excessive, and that he would have been wiser to preserve his more usual tone, must allow that his excess was not on that side to which men are generally most tempted. From the pagan orators of the day Constantius heard nothing but the language of flattery—flattery which on their part could not possibly have been sincere. And when we remember to how many teachers of religion undue subservience to the great has at some time of their life proved a snare—a list including men so different as Martin Luther, Laud, Bourdaloue— when we think of the special temptations of our own Church and age, we ought to make some allowance even for the excesses of those who have, at least, been preserved from what Bishop Andrewes teaches us to pray, "from making gods of kings."

We have given the very fiercest passages of this celebrated epistle, because neither on this nor on any other topic in Hilary's career do we wish to conceal anything. How far it is censurable in point of temper and of wisdom will always probably remain a point on which men must be content to differ. But two or three features of the case to which we have already made partial reference deserve some further consideration before we pass a judgment on it.

In the first place, Hilary, as a student of classic literature, was probably (though Quintilian was his favorite author) more or less familiar with the speeches of the greatest of Roman orators. Now, the eloquence of Cicero is certainly not always free from gross personalities; he can be, says one of his latest editors—Mr. Long—"most foul-mouthed". There are passages in the oration which Juvenal selects as Cicero's grandest effort, the second Philippic against Mark Antony, which are far more insulting than any sentences of Hilary; and it would be easy to multiply examples of this fault. Many of the readers of the epistle to Constantius would, more or less consciously, judge the document as a piece of Roman literature, and from such a point of view it would not greatly startle or astonish them.

But this, it will be said, is to put out of sight that Hilary was not a Roman consul, but a Christian bishop. The answer to such a charge shall be stated in the language of a living English judge : "It must also be borne in mind that, though Christianity expresses the tender and charitable sentiments with such passionate ardor, it has also a terrible side''. Gentleness is not its only characteristic. There are times when not only the seers of old, but the Prophet of prophets, found stern objurgation a necessity. Remove all such elements from the Gospel records, and they become at once a different book. If, then, the possibility of need for such reproof is proved by the highest and holiest of all examples, we may indeed question the manner or the degree in which it has been followed by Christ's servants, but we must not say that it is in itself necessarily wrong or unneeded. There is one more consideration which specially applies to English Churchmen. All systems and communions, even those of divine origin, being human in their working, must needs possess their weak sides. Now, it is to be feared that the accusation made against the Anglican communion of an undue leaning towards the side of temporal authority is not without some real foundation. The charge, though since reiterated by foes, has been made by more than one of her own sons. Careful study of our own faults, and earnest desire to amend them, are amongst the best pledges, under divine favor, for amendment alike in individuals and in societies. We may not have anything to show in this direction so deplorable as the flattery of Louis XIV by the great French preachers of his age; but in this matter Anglicanism is not blameless. Let us, then, bethink ourselves whether, since the present so deeply influences our judgments on the past, we may not unconsciously be inclined to judge with injustice those who have found themselves in a position of resistance to constituted authority in the State.

What, in effect, would have been produced upon the mind of Constantius by the letter of Hilary, we cannot tell. Gibbon describes the character of the emperor as a compound "of pride and weakness, of superstition and cruelty". But Constantius had, nevertheless, shown considerable indifference to written attacks, and might possibly have judged silence to be in this case also the wisest course. At the moment, however, when the letter was published, Constantius was dying, perhaps actually dead. He expired, after a short illness, on the 3rd of November, AD 361, in Asia Minor, not many miles from Tarsus, and was succeeded by his nephew, the gifted and too celebrated Julian.