The Anti-Arian Campaigns of Hilary of Poitiers and the “Liber Contra Auxentium”

Abstract

Few historians of early Christianity would dissent from the view that Hilary of Poitiers was the west's most able and articulate anti-Arian apologist of the 360s. In the course of this bishop's exile in Asia Minor (356–360) and return to the west, there is evidence of a substantial literary activity, most of which was circulated soon after his death and survives to the present day. Works such as his letters to the emperor Constantius II, expecially the so-called In Constantium, his collected dossier against Valens and Ursacius, and his theological treatises De synodis and De trinitate, attained for this once obscure bishop from Gaul a position of preeminence in the minds of the next generation of anti-Arians.