HILARIUS, St, of Arles (c. 403-449), an eminent prelate and an able if unsuccessful defender of the liberties of the Gallican Church, was born about 403, and in early youth entered the abbey of Lerins, then presided over by his kinsman Honoratus (St Honoré). Having succeeded Honoratus in the bishopric of Arles in 429, he set about the discharge of his episcopal functions with unusual energy and zeal. Following the example of St Augustine, he is said to have organized his cathedral clergy into a “congregation,” devoting a great part of their time to social exercises of ascetic religion. As bishop of Arles he held the rank of metropolitan of Vienne and Narbonne, and in this capacity he came into collision in 444 with Leo the Great on the question of the deposition of one of his bishops (Chelidonius); this quarrel resulted in his being deprived of his lights as metropolitan to consecrate bishops, call synods, or exercise ecclesiastical oversight in the province, and in the edict of Valentinian HL, so important in the history of the Gallican Church, “ut episcopis Gallicanis omnibusque pro lege esset quidquid apostolicae sedis auctoritas sanxisset.” He died in 449, and his name was afterwards introduced into the Roman martyrology for commemoration on the 5th of May. Hilarius enjoyed during his lifetime a high reputation for learning and eloquence as well as for piety; his extant works (Vita S Honorati Arelateηsis Episcopi and Metrum in Genesin) compare favourably with any similar literary productions of that period. A poem, De Providentia, usually included among the writings of Prosper, is sometimes also attributed to Hilary of Arles.

HILARIUS, St, bishop of Pictavium (Poitiers), an eminent “doctor” of the Western Church, sometimes referred to as the “malleus Arianorum” and the “Athanasius of the West,” was born at Poitiers about the end of the 3d century a.u. His parents, who were pagans of distinction, afforded him every means of acquiring a good education; and to the ordinary accomplishments of an educated gentleman there was added in his case what had even then become somewhat rare in the West, some knowledge of Greek. After he had attained to manhood his attention was directed to the Old and New Testament writings, with the result that he became convinced of the truth of Christianity, and along with his wife and his daughter received the sacrament of baptism. We have no means of knowing the nature or duration of the services which he rendered the church during the period which immediately followed his admission within its pale; but he appears to have continued to reside in Poitiers, and so great was the respect in which he came to be held by the citizens there that about 353, although still a married man, he was by the unanimous voice elected bishop. At that time Arianism, which under imperial protection had overspread the Eastern, was now under similar auspices threatening also to overrun the Western Church; to resist and repel the irruption was the great task which Hilary now set himself to achieve. One of his first steps was to secure the excommunication, by those of the Gallican hierarchy who still remained orthodox, of Saturninus, the Arian bishop of Arles, along with Ursacius and Valens, two of the most prominent of the supporters of that prelate. About the same time he wrote to the emperor Constantius a remonstrance against the persecutions by which the Arians had sought to crush their opponents (Ad Constantium Augustum Liber Primus, of which the most probable date is 355). His labours for the triumph of orthodoxy were not in the first instance, however, crowned with success; for at the synod of Biterrae (Beziers), summoned in 356 by Constantius with the professed purpose of settling the long-standing disputes, Hilary was by an imperial rescript banished along with Rhodanus of Toulouse to Phrygia, in which exile he spent nearly four years. From this hostile region, however, he continued to govern his diocese without undue difficulty, no successor having been nominated to the see; while at the same time 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 addressed in 358 to the bishops in Gaul, Germany, and Britain, expounding the true views (sometimes veiled in ambiguous words) of the Oriental bishops on the Trinitarian controversy, and the De Trinitate Libri XII. , composed in 359 and 360, in which, for the first time, it was successfully attempted to express in the Latin tongue the theological subtleties and refinements which had been elaborated with the aid of the more flexible language of Greece. The former of these works was not entirely approved by some of the.members of his own party, who thought he had shown too great forbearance towards the Arians, and had expressed himself too hopefully as to the possibilities of an ultimate reconciliation of the contending views; to their criticisms he replied in the Apologetica ad Reprehensores Libri de Synodis Responsa. In 359 Hilary attended the convocation of bishops at Seleucia in Isauria, where, along with the Egyptian Athanasians, he joined tho Homoiousian majority against the Arianizing party headed by Acacius of Caesarea; thence he betook himself to Constantinople, and, in a petition (Ad Constantium Augustum Liber Secundus') personally presented to the emperor in 360, repudiated the personal calumnies of his enemies and sought to vindicate his Trinitarian principles. His urgent and repeated request to be permitted a public discussion with his opponents, especially with Ursacius and Valens, proved at last so inconvenient that he was sent back to his diocese, which, accordingly, he appears to have reached about 361, within a very short time of the accession of Julian. Though he was received in his diocese with every demonstration of joy, he yet found Arianism strong enough there to demand his best energy and skill for the next two or three years; but in 364, extending his efforts once more beyond Gaul, he impeached Auxentius, bishop of Milan, and a man high in the imperial favour, as heterodox. Summoned to appear before the emperor (Valentinian) at Milan and there maintain his charges in person, Hilary had the mortification of hearing the supposed heretic give answers entirely satisfactory to all the questions which were proposed; nor did his (doubtless sincere) denunciation of the metropolitan as a hypocrite save himself from an ignominious expulsion from Milan as a disturber of the peace of the church. In 365 he published the Contra Ariaηos vel Auxentium Mediolanensem Liber, in connexion with the controversy; and also (but perhaps at a somewhat earlier date) the Contra Constantium Augustum Liber, in which he pronounced that lately deceased emperor to have been Antichrist, a rebel against God, “a tyrant whose sole object had been to make a gift to the devil of that world for which Christ had suffered.” The later years of Hilary’s life were spent in comparative quiet and retirement, devoted in part to the preparation of his expositions of the Psalms (Tractatus super Psalmos) , for which he was largely indebted to Origen; of his Commentarius in Evangelium Matthai, a work of no exegetical value; and of his no longer extant treatise on the book of Job. He died 13th January 368. His great energy and zeal, courage and perseverance, rendered him a very influential ecclesiastic during his life; while, in virtue at once of the depth and acuteness of his intellect and of the wide extent of his knowledge, he holds the very highest rank among the Latin writers of his century. Designated already by Augustine as “the illustrious doctor of the churches,” he by his works exerted an increasing influence in later centuries; and by Pius IX. he was formally recognized as “universae ecclesiae doctor” at the synod of Bordeaux in 1851. Hilary’s day in the Roman calendar is January 14; the English “Hilary Term” begins on the 11th and ends on the 31st.

Of Hilary’s works, which include, besides those already mentioned, some minor treatises, there have been several editions, of which the most worthy of mention are that of Erasmus (Basel, 1523, 1526, 1528), the Benedictine by Coûtant (Paris, 1693; reprinted by Maffei, Verona, 1730), and that of Migne in the Patrologiae Cursus Completus. His biography by Fortunatus probably dates from about the middle of the 6th century; other sources for the facts of the life of Hilary are the numerous incidental notices to be met with in his own writingsand in those of Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, and Gregory of Tours. See Reinkens, Hilarius v. Poictiers (1864).