Of God as Father Hilary has little that is new to
say. He is called Father in Scripture; therefore He is Father and
necessarily has a Son. And conversely the fact that Scripture
speaks of God the Son is proof of the fatherhood. In fact, the
name ‘Son’ contains a revelation so necessary for the times
that it has practically banished that of ‘the Word,’ which
we should have expected Hilary, as a disciple of Origen, to employ by
preference Deus
Verbumoften; Verbum alone rarely, if ever.
Dorner with his iteration of ‘Logos,’ gives an altogether
false impression of Hilary’s vocabulary.. But since
faith in the Father alone is insufficient for salvation Trin. i. 17
and often., and is, indeed, not only insufficient
but actually false, because it denies His fatherhood in ignoring the
consubstantial Son, Hilary’s attention is concentrated upon the
relation between these two Persons. This relation is one of
eternal mutual indwelling, or ‘perichoresis,’ as it has
been called, rendered possible by Their oneness of nature and by the
infinity of Both. The thought is worked out from such passages
as Isaiah xlv.
14, St. John xiv. 11, with great cogency and
completeness, yet always with due stress laid on the incapacity of man
to comprehend its immensity. Hilary advances from this scriptural
position to the profound conception of the divine self-consciousness as
consisting in Their mutual recognition. Each sees Himself in His
perfect image, which must be coeternal with Himself. In Hilary
this is only a hint, one of the many thoughts which the urgency of the
conflict with Arianism forbade him to expand. But Dorner justly
sees in it ‘a kind of speculative construction of the doctrine of
the Trinity, out of the idea of the divine self-consciousness Doctrine of the
Person of Christ, I. ii. p. 302, English translation.
The passages to which he refers are Comm. in Matt. xi. 12;
Tr. in Ps. xci. 6; Trin. ii. 3, ix. 69. There is a
good, though brief, statement of this view in Mason’s Faith of
the Gospel, p. 56..’