But the incarnate Christ is as truly man as He is truly God. We have seen that He is ‘created in the body’; and Hilary constantly insists that His humanity is neither fictitious nor different in kind from ours E.g. Tr. in Ps. cxxxviii. 3.. We must therefore consider what is the constitution of man. He is, so Hilary teaches, a physically composite being; the elements of which his body is composed are themselves lifeless, and man himself is never fully alive This, in contrast with God, Who is Life, is proved by the fact that certain bodily growths can be removed without our being conscious of the operation; Trin. vii. 28.. According to this physiology, the father is the author of the child’s body, the maternal function being altogether subsidiary. It would seem that the mother does nothing more than protect the embryo, so giving it the opportunity of growth, and finally bring the child to birth Cf. Trin. vii. 28, x. 15, 16. Similarly in the Eumenides 637, Æschylus makes Apollo excuse Orestes’ murder of Clytænnestra on the ground that the mother is not the parent, but only the nurse of the germ. This is contrary to Aristotle’s teaching; Æschylus and Hilary evidently represent a rival current of ancient opinion.. And each human soul is separately created, like the universe, out of nothing. Only the body is engendered; the soul, wherein the likeness of man to God consists, has a nobler origin, being the immediate creation of God Trin. x. 20. In Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Iod, 6, 7, this thought is developed. Man has a double origin. First, he is made after the likeness of God. This is the soul, which is immaterial and has no resemblance and owes no debt, as of effect to cause, to any other nature (i.e. substance) than God. It is not His likeness, but is after His likeness. Secondly, there is the body, composed of earthly matter.. Hilary does not hold, or at least does not attach importance to, the tripartite division of man; for the purposes of his philosophy we consist of soul and body. We may now proceed to consider his theory of the Incarnation. This is based upon the Pauline conception of the first and second Adam. Each of these was created, and the two acts of creation exactly correspond. Christ, the Creator, made clay into the first Adam, who therefore had an earthly body. He made Himself into the second Adam, and therefore has a heavenly Body. To this end He descended from heaven and entered into the Virgin’s womb. For, in accordance with Hilary’s principle of interpretation Trin. ii. 30 f., viii. 23 f., the word ‘Spirit’ must not be regarded as necessarily signifying the Holy Ghost, but one or other of the Persons of the Trinity as the context may require; and in this case it means the Son, since the question is of an act of creation, and He, and none other, is the Creator. Also, correspondence between the two Adams would be as effectually broken were the Holy Ghost the Agent in the conception, as it would be were Christ’s body engendered and not created. Thus He is Himself not only the Author but (if the word may be used) the material of His own body Trin. x. 16, caro non aliunde originem sumpserat quam ex Verbo, and ib. 15, 18, 25. Dorner, I. ii., p. 403, n. 1, points out that this is exactly the teaching of Gregory of Nyssa.; the language of St. John, that the Word became flesh, must be taken literally. It would be insufficient to say that the Word took, or united Himself to, the flesh This view that the conception by the Holy Ghost means conception by the Son is consistently held by Hilary throughout his writings. It appears in the earliest of them; in Comm. in Matt. ii. 5, Christ is ‘born of a woman;…Made flesh through the Word.’ So in Trin. ii. 24, He is ‘born of the Virgin and of the Holy Ghost, Himself ministering to Himself in this operation.…By His own, that is God’s, overshadowing power He sowed for Himself the beginnings of His body and ordained that His flesh should commence to exist; and Trin. x 16.. But this creation of the Second Adam to be true man is not our only evidence of His humanity. We have seen that in Hilary’s judgment the mother has but a secondary share in her offspring. That share, whatever it be, belongs to the Virgin; she contributed to His growth and to His coming to birth ‘everything which it is the nature of her sex to impart Trin. x. 16; cf. ib. 17. In the Instructio Psalmorum, § 6, he speaks in more usual language;—adventus Domini ex virgine in hominem procreandi, and also in some other passages. Dorner’s view (I. ii. 403 f. and note 74, p. 533) differs from that here taken. But he is influenced (see especially p. 404) by the desire to save Hilary’s consistency rather than to state his actual opinion. And Hilary was too early in the field, too anxiously employed in feeling his way past the pitfalls of heresy, to escape the danger of occasional inconsistency..’ But though Christ is constantly said to have been born of the Virgin, He is habitually called the ‘Son of Man,’ not the Son of the Virgin, nor she the Mother of God. Such language would attribute to her an activity and an importance inconsistent with Hilary’s theory. For no portion of her substance, he distinctly says, was taken into the substance of her Son’s human body Trin. iii. 19, perfectum ipsa de suis non imminuta generavit. So ib. ii. 25, unigenitus Deus.…Virginis utero insertus accrescit. He grew there, but nothing more. In Virginem exactly corresponds to ex Virgine.; and elsewhere he argues that St. Paul’s words ‘made of a woman’ are deliberately chosen to describe Christ’s birth as a creation free from any commingling with existing humanity Trin. xii. 50; it would be a watering of the sense to regard commixtio in this passage as simply equivalent to coitio.. But the Virgin has an essential share in the fulfilment of prophecy. For though Christ without her co-operation could have created Himself as Man, yet He would not have been, as He was fore-ordained to be, the Son of Man Trin. x. 16.. And since He holds that the Virgin performs every function of a mother, Hilary avoids that Valentinian heresy according to which Christ passed through the Virgin ‘like water through a pipe Irenæus, i. 1, 13.,’ for He was Himself the Author of a true act of creation within her, and, when she had fulfilled her office, was born as true flesh. Again, Hilary’s clear sense of the eternal personal pre-existence of the Word saves him from any contact with the Monarchianism combated by Hippolytus and Tertullian, which held that the Son was the Father under another aspect. Indeed, so secure does he feel himself that he can venture to employ Monarchian theories, now rendered harmless, in explanation of the mysteries of the Incarnation. For we cannot fail to see a connection between his opinions and theirs; and it might seem that, confident in his wider knowledge, he has borrowed not only from the arguments used by Tertullian against the Monarchian Praxeas, but also from those which Tertullian assigns to the latter. Such reasonings, we know, had been very prevalent in the West; and Hilary’s use of certain of them, in order to turn their edge by showing that they were not inconsistent with the fundamental doctrines of the Faith He often and emphatically repudiates the use which the Monarchians made of them, e.g. Trin. iv. 4., may indicate that Monarchianism was still a real danger.