Feast day: January 13
St. Hilary of Poitiers
A pagan philosopher who reasoned his way into Christianity, became a bishop, and was exiled for refusing to condemn the Trinity.
Hilary was born into a wealthy pagan family of Poitiers, in Roman Gaul, around the year 310, and received an excellent classical education. He came to Christianity not by upbringing but by conviction, reasoning his way from the philosophers to the Scriptures and being baptized as an adult together with his wife and daughter. So respected was he that, though a married layman, the Christians of Poitiers chose him as their bishop around 350.
His episcopate fell in the thick of the Arian crisis, which denied the full divinity of Christ and then enjoyed the favour of the emperor. Hilary became the foremost defender of Nicene orthodoxy in the West, and his refusal to condemn St. Athanasius led the Arian emperor Constantius to banish him to Phrygia in the East.
Exile proved his most fruitful season. There he mastered Greek theology and composed his great work 'On the Trinity,' the first major Latin treatise on the doctrine, earning him the later title 'the Athanasius of the West.' His writing so embarrassed the Arians that they eventually persuaded the emperor to send the troublesome bishop home, where his return was a triumph.
He spent his last years restoring orthodoxy across Gaul and is credited with introducing the singing of hymns to the Western Church. He died about 367, and in 1851 Pope Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the Church.
Exile backfired: sent east to silence him, he learned his opponents' arguments firsthand and returned to dismantle them.
“They didn't know who they were dealing with when they exiled a man whose Church is everywhere.”
— St. Hilary of Poitiers
Image: Richard de Montbaston et collaborateurs. (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: newadvent.org/cathen/07349b.htm
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