Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| Introduction.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Introduction to the Homilies
on Psalms I., LIII., CXXX.
————————————
Some account of St.
Hilary’s Homilies on the Psalms has already been given in
the Introduction to this volume, pp. xl.–xlv. A few words
remain to be said concerning his principle of exposition. This
may be gathered from his own statement in the fifth sections of the
Instructio Psalmorum, the discourse preliminary to the
Homilies:—‘There is no doubt that the language of the
Psalms must be interpreted by the light of the teaching of the
Gospel. Thus, whoever he be by whose mouth the Spirit of prophecy
has spoken, the whole purpose of his words is our instruction
concerning the glory and power of the coming, the Incarnation, the
Passion, the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of our
resurrection. Moreover, all the prophecies are shut and sealed to
worldly sense and pagan wisdom, as Isaiah says, And all these words
shall be unto you as the sayings of this book which is
sealed1358
.…
The whole is a texture woven of allegorical and typical meanings,
whereby are spread before our view all the mysteries of the
Only-begotten Son of God, Who was to be born in the body, to suffer, to
die, to rise again, to reign forever with, those who share His glory
because they believed on Him, to be the Judge of the rest of
mankind.’ It is true that Hilary from time to time
discriminates, and sometimes very shrewdly, between passages which
must, and others which must not, be thus interpreted, but for the most
part the commentary is theological and therefore mystical. The
Psalter is not used for the establishment of doctrine. No
position for which Hilary had not another and an independent defence is
maintained on the strength of an allegorical explanation, and no
deductions are drawn from such allegories. They are simply used
for the cumulative confirmation of truth otherwise revealed. The
result is a commentary much more illustrative of Hilary’s own
thought to of that of the writers of the Psalms; and great as are the
merits of the Homilies, they are counter-balanced by obvious and
serious defects. There is, of course, little interest taken in
the circumstances in which the Psalms were written. They are, in
Hilary’s eyes, essentially prophecies, and he is content as a
rule to describe the writer simply as ‘the Prophet.’
And as with the history, so with the spirit of the Psalter. There
is little evidence that he recognised in it the noblest and most
perfect expression of human devotion towards God, and still less that
he appreciated the elevation of its poetry. For the latter
failure there is ample excuse. The Septuagint and Old Latin
versions of the Psalms have for us venerable antiquity and sacred
associations, but they can hardly be said to appeal to the
imagination. Now while Hilary of course regarded the Greek
translation as authoritative on account both of our Lord’s use of
it and of general consent, he treats it not as literature but rather in
the spirit of a lawyer interpreting and applying the terms of an
ancient charter. Nor is it likely that the Latin version would
move Hilary as it sometimes moves us who read it to-day and find a
certain dignity and power in its unpolished sentences. Its
roughness could only shock, and its obscurity perplex, one who, as we
have said already (Intr. iii.), could think and express himself clearly
in what was to him a living and a cultivated language. But with
all his disadvantages he has produced a great and profoundly Christian
work, of permanent value and interest and of abiding influence upon
thought, theological and moral. For in these Homilies, and not
least in those which are here translated, the Roman genius for moral
reflection is manifest, and the pattern set which St. Ambrose was to
follow with success in such work as his De officiis
ministrorum.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
