Divine Unity and the “Ladder of Our Nature”

Abstract

This chapter places Hilary of Poitiers’s polemical opponents into sharper focus and shows how Hilary brings his epistemological and anthropological insights, described in the previous two chapters, to bear on them. Hilary develops his understanding of divine unity through an intertextual reading of John 10:30 and 14:9 in polemical engagement with Homoian and “Sabellian” theologies and by expanding upon this intertextual reading in previous Latin tradition, and this understanding both depends and elaborates upon his epistemological foundation of divine infinity. Hilary’s arguments for divine unity are based on the condescension of God in the humanity of Christ. For Hilary, humanity’s finite epistemological restrictions require this sort of material, bodily revelation, and by it, humanity is nourished and educated to move beyond its limitations to the vision of the triune God, and led to its fullness in divine perfection. This chapter also discusses divine unity in third- and fourth-century polemical contexts.