EPIPHANY · 13 JANUARY · TRINITY · 30 SEPTEMBER · TRINITY/ADVENT · 10 NOVEMBER Bishops, Priest & Doctors
Hilary of Poitiers, Jerome & Leo the Great
Bishops, Priest & Doctors of the Church · The Latin Doctors · d. 368, 420 & 461
Hilary — HIL-ah-ree · Poitiers — pwah-TYAY · Jerome — jeh-ROME · Vulgate — VUL-gate · Eustochium — yoo-STOH-kee-um · Leo — LEE-oh · Chalcedon — KAL-seh-don · Attila — AT-ih-la · Tome — TOHM · Phrygia — FRIJ-ee-a
O God, who by thy servants Hilary, Jerome, and Leo didst arm thy Church with the sword of thy Word, the shield of right doctrine, and the sceptre of holy governance; Grant that we, receiving from their labours the faith in its fullness, may hold it, read it, and defend it with all our mind and heart and strength; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
The Latin West produced, in the two centuries between the Council of Nicaea and the fall of Rome, a succession of Doctors whose combined output forms the intellectual and spiritual foundation of Western Christianity in a way that no other tradition quite matches. Three of them — Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great — already have their meditations. Three more await: Hilary of Poitiers (pwah-TYAY), Jerome, and Leo the Great. They make an unlikely triad. Hilary is the statesman-bishop who endured four years of exile in Phrygia (FRIJ-ee-a) for the Nicene faith and came back to Gaul a better theologian for it, having learned Greek and encountered the full range of Eastern controversy at first hand. Jerome is the magnificently irascible scholar-hermit who spent the last thirty-four years of his life in a cave in Bethlehem (BETH-leh-hem), writing letters of devastating wit and commentary of inexhaustible learning to a network of aristocratic Roman women who funded his work and endured his temper. Leo is the supreme ecclesiastical statesman, the first pope to be given the title Magnus — the Great — by the unanimous consent of history, whose papacy redefined the authority of the Roman see and whose personal intervention twice saved the city of Rome from destruction. Three very different men; one vocation; one tradition; one faith delivered in three entirely distinct registers of genius.
Hilary of Poitiers (HIL-ah-ree of pwah-TYAY) is called the Athanasius of the West, and the parallel is exact: as Athanasius held the Nicene faith alone in the East against the Arian emperors, so Hilary held it in the West when the Emperor Constantius exiled him to Phrygia for refusing to condemn Athanasius. The exile, intended as a punishment, became a gift: Hilary encountered Greek theology in its full depth, read the Eastern Fathers, and returned to Gaul with a command of Trinitarian theology that the Latin Church had not yet possessed. His great work On the Trinity — twelve books written partly in exile — is the first sustained Latin treatment of the doctrine that Nicaea had defined, and it gave the Western Church a philosophical vocabulary for the mystery that complemented rather than simply reproduced the Eastern formulations. He also wrote hymns — among the earliest Latin Christian hymnody — and his pupil Martin of Tours carried the ascetic and episcopal vision of his master into the next generation of Gaulish Christianity. Hilary’s feast falls in Epiphany, the season of the Trinity’s manifestation, on 13 January: the Latin completion of what the Cappadocians were completing in the East, the two halves of the Nicene tradition finding their fullest expression within a few weeks of each other on the calendar.
Jerome requires a different approach entirely, because he resists hagiographical smoothing. He was quarrelsome, vain, sometimes cruel in controversy, and capable of a savagery toward opponents — and occasionally toward friends who became opponents — that makes uncomfortable reading. He was also the greatest biblical scholar of the ancient world and the translator of the Bible into Latin — the Vulgate (VUL-gate), commissioned by Pope Damasus and completed over twenty years in Bethlehem — which became the Bible of Western civilisation for a thousand years and more, and which the Anglican tradition received directly through the King James Bible’s constant dependence on its rhythms and phrasings. He knew Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. He had read everything. He could destroy an argument in a sentence and a reputation in a paragraph. He surrounded himself in Bethlehem with a community of Roman noblewomen — Paula (PAW-la) and her daughter Eustochium (yoo-STOH-kee-um) chief among them — who supported his work, learned Hebrew alongside him, and founded a convent beside his monastery. They are the silent scholars behind the Vulgate, and Jerome was honest enough to acknowledge it. His feast falls on 30 September in Trinity, in the long green weeks of ordinary scholarly labour: the season in which the Church simply reads and studies and works, which is what Jerome did every day of his life in the cave at Bethlehem, with a lamp and a codex and the whole of the biblical world spread before him.
Leo the Great (LEE-oh) governed the Roman see from 440 to 461, through the most dangerous decades the Western Empire had yet endured. In 451 his Tome (TOHM) — a letter to the Council of Chalcedon (KAL-seh-don) setting out with lapidary precision the doctrine of Christ’s two natures in one person — was read aloud to the assembled bishops, who responded with the acclamation: Peter has spoken through Leo. The Chalcedonian definition, which settled the Christological controversies of the fifth century and remains the orthodox standard of both East and West, rests substantially on Leo’s formulation. Two years later, when Attila the Hun (AT-ih-la) stood before the gates of Rome with his army, it was Leo who rode out to meet him on the banks of the River Mincio — unarmed, in episcopal vestments, with no military force behind him — and turned him back. The secular historians are uncertain why Attila withdrew; the Christian tradition has no doubt. And three years after that, when the Vandal king Gaiseric (GY-zer-ik) sacked Rome, it was Leo again who negotiated with him and secured the lives of the population. He could not save the buildings; he saved the people. The feast of Leo falls at the very threshold of Advent, in the dying of the Trinity season’s long light: the statesman who held the Church together when everything else was falling apart, the last strong hand before the darkness of the early medieval centuries, the man who passed the faith on when there was almost nothing left to pass it on with. Ambrose had prepared Augustine; Augustine had prepared Gregory; Leo had prepared, by his sheer tenacity, the world in which Gregory could work. The Latin tradition is one long act of transmission, each Doctor receiving and passing forward, and Leo is the last link before the chain becomes medieval.
O Almighty God, who by the labours of thy servants Hilary, Jerome, and Leo didst preserve and transmit the faith of the universal Church through times of exile, controversy, and catastrophe; Grant that we, who have received from their hands the scriptures in our tongue and the creeds upon our lips, may be faithful stewards of so great a treasure, and may pass it on, as they did, without loss and without fear; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.