The Divine Image and Human Destiny

Abstract

This chapter explores Hilary of Poitiers’s use of “divine image” language. Through this investigation, this chapter demonstrates how Hilary’s trinitarian anthropology takes on a particular Christological form. For Hilary, Christ is the locative expression of normative divine-human relations, and this is uniquely articulated by Hilary within the context of Christ’s suffering and human experience, the most controversial aspect of his thought. This chapter also discusses Hilary’s view of the relationship of the body and soul. In these interrelated concepts of the divine-human image, the body and soul, and Christ’s suffering, Hilary’s trinitarian anthropology carries its prime polemical weight and yields perhaps its most creative theological constructs. Here Hilary’s trinitarian anthropology is both expressed and lived out in the human condition, so that the “image of the invisible God” not only reveals divinity to humanity, but humanity to itself. This chapter also provides an extensive discussion of Hilary’s appropriation of Stoic philosophy.