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Catholic Saints
St. Hilary
00:16:29
Join Dr. Jean-Paul Juge and Dr. Elizabeth Klein as they discuss the enduring contributions of this fourth-century saint — Hilary of Poitiers. See how he combined theological insight and poetic prowess to serve God and His people.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Foreign.
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Podcast Host/Producer
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live and share their faith.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Hello and welcome to Catholic Saints, the podcast about the lives of the saints and their legacy for the church and for us. I'm Dr. Elizabeth Klein and I'm joined today by Dr. Jean Paul Juge to talk about Hillary of Poetry Poitier.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Thanks for having me.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah, thanks for joining me. So before we jump right into things, this is your first year at the Augusta Institute, brand new, first time on the show. So why don't you say what are you teaching this fall?
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah, I'll be teaching Catholic Faith and Church of the Fathers, which is our patristic seminar with the MA and Biblical Studies students. And then I'll be co teaching Light to the nations with Dr. Carl Bennerstrom.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Awesome. So both of these courses deal heavily with early Christian history. Dr. Jus is an expert in the Fathers, which is relevant to today because we are going to be talking about Hillary of Poitiers, who is a 4th century theologian and bishop whose feast day is the 13th of January. So why don't you take it away, tell us a little bit about Hillary, who he is, where he's from, what's his story.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Right, yeah. Most of the fame and glory of the 4th century Latin or 4th and 5th century Latin theologians goes to Augustine and to Ambrose. But Hillary, even though he gets passed over, is really important to the development of Christian doctrine. He gets known as the Athanasius of the West. For some of you who may know, Athanasius is a great Greek bishop in the fourth century who drives home the teaching at the Council of Nicaea that the Son of God is equal to God the Father.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Awesome. Okay, could you back up a little bit? Do we know anything about Hillary's life or sort of where he was born or anything about that or. Not so much.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah. So our knowledge of Hillary, Hillary's life basically starts when he was ordained as a bishop in about 353.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Okay.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
And we know that you had to be about 30 years old to be a bishop at that time. So we can guess he was born around 310, 320. But yeah, things really kick off with our knowledge of his life around then because maybe only three years into being a bishop, he's exiled and his life gets very dramatic after that.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Okay. Do we know why he was exiled or.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah, we're not totally sure. It seems like it came through some sort of imperial order, and it may have been because he was in real staunch opposition to Arian theology is kind of the general name we give for that. And he refused to comply possibly with the movement of Arian theology.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
So Hillary, Athanasius of the West, Athanasius of the west only gets exiled one time.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
No, he gets exiled five times. Okay, so really earns the name Athanasius. It's really hard to keep up with Athanasius. That's right, yeah. So no, Hillary is exiled once, but his exile is really interesting. It's a real pivotal moment in his life and his career. He goes to Phrygia, which is in modern day Turkey, and there he seems to really deepen his knowledge of the Greek language. Of course, Hillary is a Latin writer and a Latin author and through may be some kind of, you know, isolation from him working and thinking within a Latin speaking world, but here he, he gets into contact with the, the east, with Greek writings, Greek thought. He becomes aware of the theological controversies that have been going on in that, that side of the Christian world. He especially seems to study, you know, the great commentator on Scripture, Origin of Alexandria. So his, his theology greatly develops in this very short time, it seems. And then when he is finally allowed to return to his bishop, excuse me, to his diocese in Gaul, in Poitiers, he's, you know, locked and loaded with all kinds of new ammo.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Okay, so for the listeners, Gaul, where Hillary is from, is in modern day France. So he's in the West, Latin speaking, gets exiled to the east potentially due to the Aryan controversy, which seems to have been sort of counterproductive since he got extra loaded up with anti Aryan theology out there in the East.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
It didn't kill him, it only made him stronger.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
That's right, yeah, that's really interesting. You know, the listeners may not know a lot of really well known theologians in the west, didn't necessarily read a lot of Greek except in translation or necessarily know a lot of the important Greek fathers. St. Augustine, for example, did not read a ton of the Cappadocian Fathers or, you know, he may have only had access in translation. So it really is a really cool thing when you have some of these Western fathers who know a lot of Greek. Tertullian Ambrose are two examples. But that's, that's really interesting about Hillary. So, so when he comes back, is it at that point where he sort of becomes a theological powerhouse or is there anything we know about that after that point or.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah, I think so. And he seems to indicate that he really didn't even know much about the Nicene Creed or about, you know, what really was going on at the Council of Nicaea until, you know, maybe into his exile or just several years into being a bishop. So news traveled really slow.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
So he's anti Arian before. It's cool.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Exactly. Yeah, it sure seems that way. And maybe we could kind of explain to the listeners, one of the big changes that comes about with the Council of Nicaea is using language about the Father and Son being one nature or same in being, same in substance. So it's kind of this introduction of a more vague kind of philosophical terminology that to a lot of people. Right. It made them nervous to say anything that wasn't explicitly in Scripture. Right. Language that wasn't explicitly in Scripture. But Hillary and others noticed how ambiguities in the language of Scripture was being taken advantage of. And so he's a real champion of talking about father and Son as having an identical nature. Right. And a shared nature.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. So many of the listeners may know that the Council of Nicaea, the sort of famous debate is over the divinity of the Sun. And maybe in, like, popular versions of this, people think this meant, oh, the Arians thought Jesus was just a cool guy, but the Nicenes thought he was really God. It's, however, much more complicated and subtle than this. The Aryans definitely thought Jesus was more than just a regular guy. They thought he was divine in some sense, but maybe an angel or similar to God. And the Nicene party really emphasized, no, he has to really be God. God, exactly. God in every way. That God the Father is God. And as John Paul has explained, this was expressed in the Creed by the word homoosios or of one substance, consubstantial, as we say in the Creed in the translation today. So you're saying Hillary really sort of drilled down on that particular word as well in his sort of defense of the creed.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah. So maybe a couple things to say. You're absolutely right that Arius and those who get associated with Arius. Right. They definitely understood that the Son in his divinity was some kind of super excellent creature. Arius runs afoul by saying he was created out of nothing. Now, these people call the Arians that Hillary is opposing, um, they're. They're not quite like Arius. What they're really stressing is even though they, they do follow Arius and, and speaking of the Son as inferior to God the Father as some kind of creature, but they prefer this language of saying, well, the Son is like the Father, so they become known as Homoians because homoios is a Greek word for like.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right. So homoousyas same substance. Homoio usias, like similar to similar substance.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
This is where things get even more confusing, Right. Because the Hamoiusians, the Lycan substance, they are actually going to be, at the end of the day, cool with Hillary and Athanasius because they still want to use this language of substance or being. But the Hamoans are people who say, no, we're just going to get rid of all that language of being or nature. We're just going to say that he's like God the Father. And so Hillary is ultimately going to insist upon. We have to keep in this language of a shared being.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
A shared nature, because otherwise we lose this really important connection of the very identity of the father and son are tied together as God. Right. But both, you know, Hillary. Hillary's going to be kind of diplomatic and those who want to say, oh, he's like in substance, but if they, if they mean the same thing, he's going to be pretty diplomatic about it. Ultimately, of course, Nicaea's language of being same in substance, Homoos is going to win out.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. So, I mean, anyone who's maybe listened to other podcasts about Nicene era theologians or have read a bit about the Nicene Creed, are going to kind of get the message that Dr. Shush is pointing out here, which is that a lot of theological controversies of the past are quite subtle and complex, and theologies, as I would say, as a theologian, actually really hard work. And so sometimes people like Hillary, you know, you do need to make really fine distinctions. You need to sort of be diplomatic and think about what the meaning behind other formulations of the same theological ideas are. And this can be quite difficult, especially at times when we're dealing with Latin and Greek, different languages, or dealing with people who maybe have different valid theological concerns. And so for these great theologians, Athanasius and Hillary, the Athanasius of the west, they really deserve a lot of sort of respect and credit for sorting some of these things out. So maybe if you could kind of get up out of the weeds here a little bit and maybe tell us sort of one thing you think Hillary really contributed to this debate or, or one sort of unique aspect of his interaction with the Arian controversy might be.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah, and it is hard to pick one thing. You know, he wrote this 12 volume work on the Trinity, and it's very long and it's pretty. It really stands out among early Christian writings for devoting this kind of comprehensive take on, you know, looking at all these relevant passages of Scripture in the debate. And more specifically, even though it's on the Trinity, looking at the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. And I'd say one contribution is that Hillary wants us to make use of material metaphors and images very carefully when we're talking about the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. He's very cautious about that. And he says, look, you know, insofar as they're useful, great. But we should realize that these metaphors you see a lot in the early Christian writings about a ray of light from the sun, these metaphors for how the Son of God comes forth from the Father, they're not totally appropriate to God. And we have to be very careful about interjecting, you know, material ways of thinking. And finally, that the shared nature between God the Father and God the Son is really safeguarded in this birth from the Son, From God the Father. Right. So that's in birth that we have a unity of nature. And he uses this example of, you know, parents giving birth of the same nature to their offspring. Of course, there's an identity of nature in a totally different way. So he's. He's very careful. Right. With using these images from the natural world, and yet he always kind of pulls out the value of it for these very complicated theological questions.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
That's really interesting. It seems to me that that becomes a common theme in Western theology, maybe from Hillary taking some of these earlier Greek fathers who. Who very sensibly lay down a lot of metaphors against the Aryans, the Westerners, in a lot of ways, especially in the earlier period. Arianism isn't quite as heated in the West. And so to take a second look at that and say, okay, yeah, that's useful in this respect, but maybe in another respect, we need to examine those metaphors. You know, Augustine famously, and on the Trinity kind of is going through sets of metaphors and trying to make them more and more interior in order to be more precise about what those relationships mean and ultimately what it means for our life as those who become participators in the Blessed Trinity. All right, well, all this stuff is fascinating. I wish we had, you know, maybe we should start a Nicaea podcast, because this is a lot to say about the Council of Christ.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah, we would not run out of content.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
But why don't we turn to maybe what some of Hillary's theology or his life might say to us today or what we might take away to prayer from Hillary.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah. So Hillary, of course, is very famous for all these theological controversies. But he was also a very prolific commentator on the Scriptures, as many of these great bishops and theologians were. So, you know, he wrote the. Probably the first Latin commentary in the Gospel of Matthew. He had really extensive commentaries, really more like homilies on the Psalms. And he was an incredibly prayerful person, right. Not just an intellect, you know, in the weeds of doctrinal controversy and wrote some hymns. He had some pretty extensive, it seems, classical rhetorical kind of training. And it's beautiful to see him bringing that not only to theological controversies, but even to composing some really wonderful Christian hymns, a few of which have survived.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Oh, that's amazing. You know, Ambrose and Gregory of Naziensis also wrote hymns and poetry. Sort of puts a high bar for us theologians today because we're often not renowned for being creative and poetic types. So it's kind of amazing that that doesn't always seem to go together in the modern world. So it's kind of amazing that it did go together and was understood to go together. Deep theological reflection and sort of singing God's praises or writing beautiful things in honor of God. Do you have any. Maybe a little quip or example of something Hillary wrote.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
I'd actually like to share an excerpt, if it's not too long, wonderful. Of one of his hymns. So playing off of. I think it's First Corinthians 15:50 or 55 around there. 55, where Paul, right, famously says, you know, death wears your sting. Right. Hillary has a kind of hymn to death, the personified death, kind of rubbing it in death's face that crisis conquered death.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Right.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
So please.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Regal.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Yeah, here's. Yeah, here we go.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
In Persona Hillary.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Of course. Here we go. The incarnate word deceived you, Death in your cruelty, and you rush with all your might upon the body of the living God. Your death, O Death, destroyed God when in triumph, knowing no defeat in the infernal realm, the glowing pool of the pale Styx grows cold, and the Phlegethon, frozen over, knows not that it is boiling underneath. The light appearing shines bright, and the vast darkness of Hades and the fierce keeper of deep Tartarus trembles. O death, then do you realize you have been destroyed by your own law, when you perceive that God has subjected you to yourself? This body of mine which you hold cannot perish, and corruption has no dominion over it all. The infirmity of flesh is stronger than you are the nature of flesh, born together with God and rising again. I, through this nature shall ascend in joy to the heights of heaven with my glorified body with what strong hopes. I faithfully believed in Christ, who by his birth takes me to himself through his flesh.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Take that death.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Take that death.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
What made me think about, you know, for burgeoning theologians who may be listening, so beautiful. And you can see how closely understanding the nature of God in the Trinity is tied to the concept of what we say, deification or participation in divine life. That, you know, God became man, that man might become God, that we are really taken up into the divine life. And that is heightened when you understand the person of Christ correctly. Well, thank you so much. This was a lot of fun.
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Dr. Jean Paul Juge
Absolutely. Thank you for having me and giving me an excuse to talk about Nicaea.
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Dr. Elizabeth Klein
Yeah. Saint Hilary, pray for us.
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Podcast Host/Producer
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