Fragmenta ex aliis S. Hilarii operibus

711-712 FRAGMENTS FROM OTHER WORKS OF SAINT HILARY LEFT IN ANCIENT MONUMENTS. From the treatises on Job. I. So great and so admirable is the goodness of God’s mercy toward us, that through the one by whom we lost the nobility of that first and blessed creation in Adam’s offense, through that same one we again deserve to obtain what we lost. For then the devil, envious, did harm; but now, when he tries to harm, he is conquered. For he hurls all the weapons of his power through the weakness of our flesh, when he incites to lust, when he entices to drunkenness, when he goads to hatred, when he provokes to greed, when he instructs to murder, when he exacerbates to curses. But when, through the firmness of the mind, the creeping incentives of all these are repressed, we are cleansed from sin by the glory of this victory; for it is said thus: “Or how will one born of woman cleanse himself” (Job 25:4)? Because if the enemy is not present, there will be no war; with the war then ceasing, victory will be lacking. But without victory over the vices that clash against us, there will be no cleansing from vices: because, with this pirate of our body conquered, we are purified by the struggle of passions contending against us. Therefore, mindful and aware that our very bodies are the material of all vices, through which we are polluted and filthy, possessing nothing clean, nothing innocent in ourselves, let us rejoice that we have an enemy, in whose struggle we fight as if in a war of our own contest.

II. What letters had Job read, that he might abstain from every evil thing, because he venerated God with a mind alone, unmixed with vices? But to worship God is the proper office of justice. From the Prologue of the Exposition of the Gospel of Matthew. III. For it was first necessary for us, that the only-begotten God, for our sake, should be born a man, which he then was not. Likewise from the same. IV. Thirdly, that was fitting next, that because God was born a man in the world, etc. From the Exposition of the Epistle to Timothy. V. For when Scripture says, "Christ is a man" (1 Tim. 2:5), and when it says, "Christ died" (Rom. 8:34), and when it says, "The Word became flesh" (John 1:14), the speech is not to be stripped of its expositions by the fraud of the reader. For where "Christ is a man" occurs, "Mediator of God and men" precedes: so that from both, God and man, one subsists; and he is the mediator between man and God, by the confession in himself of each nature. But where "Christ died" occurs, it is subjoined, "Who rose again, who is at the right hand of God." In his passion is the infirmity of our flesh, in the resurrection his power, in the session with God his dignity.

From the Book to the Emperor Constantius. VI. The Son of God, having become man, is God...... The Son of God became the son of man (for man became God, not God became man), and the son of man became the Son of God. For the greatness of the Lord overcame the lowliness of the servile form; so that the servile form itself, which He assumed, ceased to be servile through the Lord who assumed it. For if those who are not by nature sons of God become sons of God through Him, how much more does He, who is by nature the Son of God, so exalt into God the one with whom, by His own will, He was conceived and born from the virgin’s womb, that in His name every knee bends—of the heavenly, earthly, and infernal beings—and every tongue confesses that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father. From an Uncertain Work. VII. Give us our daily bread today (Luke 11:3). For what does God so desire as that Christ, who is the bread of life and the bread from heaven, should dwell in us daily? And because the prayer is daily, it is also prayed daily that it be given.

Another passage. VIII. Therefore, when (Christ) was sent in the likeness of the flesh of sin, he did not have sin as he had flesh. But because all flesh is from sin—that is, derived from the parent Adam through sin—he was sent in the likeness of the flesh of sin, there being in him not sin, but the likeness of the flesh of sin. A doubtful fragment. IX. In whom all sinned. "In whom," that is, in Adam all sinned..... It is clear that they sinned in Adam, as in a mass. For he himself, corrupted through sin, caused all whom he begot to be born under sin. Testimony concerning Hilary's teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit. ": Hilary, in his explanations of the Apostle, speaking theologically of the Father and the Son, says that no duality is to be understood in the Holy Spirit, because the Father and the Son supply existence to him; hence both are the one principle of the Holy Spirit. O the wonderful and clear teaching of so great a Father against the schismatic Greeks concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit and the Father and Son as the sole principle! Now, that the holy Hilary wrote commentaries on the Epistles of Paul was affirmed by the Second Council of Seville, canon 13, in Aguirre, vol. III, p.: now behold, from that lost work a splendid fragment preserved by the Greeks. (From the Roman Spicilegium, vol. vi, p. 73.)