Saint Hilary of Poitiers

Hilary was born in Poitiers around 310, into an aristocratic Gallo-Roman family, and the first thing that captured him was philosophy. He was married and had a daughter, Abra, when in 353 the community acclaimed him bishop — and it should be said that back then this is how it worked: the people made the bishop, often picking someone who hadn’t asked for it. He came to theology almost out of necessity. He discovered the Nicene Creed only in 354, a year after becoming bishop, and from there he threw himself into it. He wrote a commentary on the Gospel of Matthew that is the oldest in Latin to have come down to us. In 356, at the Synod of Béziers, he found himself up against the Arians, who got the emperor to sentence him to exile. He spent five years in Phrygia, far from everything, and it was right there that he wrote his most important book, *De Trinitate*. The finest thing he did, though, came in 359, at the Council of Seleucia, and it looks more like mediation than victory. Two parties were clashing: those who said the Son was of the same substance as the Father, and those who said he was only similar. Hilary crushed neither. To the second group he showed how much ambiguity was hiding in that “similar”; to the first, who were his own side, he pointed out that by insisting too much they risked making the Father and the Son a single person. He won unity by explaining to each side the limit of its own formula: a rare skill, then as now. He protected a young man who would become Martin, the bishop of Tours. In 1851 he was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church. If your name is Hilary, today is your name day — a rare name, and a sunny-sounding one, because it holds the same root as “hilarity.”