(b Poitiers, c315; d Poitiers, c367). Latin theologian, scriptural exegete and hymn writer. Hilary, thought to be of distinguished family and education, was converted to Christianity in his early manhood and was made bishop of Poitiers around 350. Between 356 and 361 he was in exile in Asia Minor at the order of Emperor Constantius II as a result of his opposition to Arianism. Some scholars suggest that the Syriac hymnody of the time (most notably that of Ephrem Syrus) may have inspired him to write his own hymns, thus turning one of the heretics’ own propaganda weapons against them. Although there is early testimony (by St Jerome and Isidore of Seville) to the existence of an entire Liber hymnorum of indeterminate size, only three hymns, none of them wholly complete, now survive. These poems, Ante saecula qui manes, Fefellit saevam and Adae carnis gloriosa (?or cernis gloriam), are preserved in an 11th-century manuscript discovered by G.F. Gamurrini in 1884; neither melodies nor liturgical functions exist for them. Another hymn, Hymnum dicat turba fratrum, much more widely distributed (in ten manuscripts dating from between the 7th and 13th centuries), though ascribed to Hilary in some early manuscripts, has been rejected by recent scholarship; it is nonetheless of considerable age and poetic merit.
It is generally agreed that the excessive sophistication of the language, thought and poetic technique of Hilary’s hymns accounts for their disappearance from or their failure to be accepted into liturgical use – in contrast to the hymns of the only slightly younger Ambrose. Nothing is really known, however, about how, when and where Hilary’s hymns were used in the early centuries. Hilary was the author of the first Latin psalm commentary, the Tractatus super psalmos, whose overall approach represents the typical allegorical manner of Origen. Its introductory ‘Instructio psalmorum’ provides a particularly thorough and scholarly summary of patristic Psalter exegesis.
W. Bulst: Hymni latini antiquissimi LXXV (Heidelberg, 1956)
J. Szövérffy: Die Annalen der lateinischen Hymnendichtung, i (Berlin, 1964)
J. McKinnon: Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge, 1987)
LAWRENCE GUSHEE/JAMES W. McKINNON