Hilary of Poitiers

Hilary was born at Poitiers in western Gaul about 310, into a wealthy pagan family, and given a full classical education. He came to God the long way, by thinking. He describes working through the question of what a life is for, rejecting the answers he had been given, arriving at the conviction that there must be one eternal, self-existent God, and then meeting the prologue of John's Gospel. He was married and had a daughter before he was baptized, probably in his thirties.

Around 350 the people of Poitiers made him their bishop.

The Arian controversy reached Gaul, and Hilary would not go along. He refused communion with Saturninus of Arles and the bishops backing the imperial line, and he wrote to the emperor Constantius asking for freedom for the church. In 356 Constantius exiled him to Phrygia in Asia Minor.

The exile was the making of him. Cut off from his diocese but left free to read and write, Hilary learned Greek theology at its source and produced On the Trinity in twelve books, the first major Latin treatment of the doctrine, and the book that gave the West its vocabulary for it. He also wrote On the Councils, patiently explaining to Western bishops what the Eastern parties actually meant by their terms, and where the disagreement was real and where it was only language. It was an attempt to keep men from condemning each other over translation.

He kept fighting from exile. He asked for a public debate with Saturninus. He attended the eastern council at Seleucia in 359. Finally he wrote Against Constantius, an unsparing attack on the emperor himself. The Eastern bishops concluded he was more trouble in their territory than in his own, and in 360 they sent him home, Sulpicius Severus says they returned the sower of discord to Gaul.

In Gaul he did what no one expected: he led the churches back to the Nicene faith without a purge, receiving back bishops who had signed at Rimini rather than deposing them. Then he went to Milan with Eusebius of Vercelli to challenge the Arian bishop Auxentius.

He wrote the first Latin hymns for congregations to sing, and commentaries on Matthew and the Psalms. Martin of Tours was his disciple. He died about 367, and Rome named him a Doctor of the Church in 1851. Jerome and Augustine both call him a defense of the church.

Sources: Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity and historical fragments (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 9); Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 100; Sulpicius Severus, Chronicle, book II; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. III.