Hilary of Poitiers
310 CE–367 CE · Phrygia
Hilary of Poitiers (c. 310–367) was bishop of Pictavium (modern Poitiers) in Gaul and the foremost Latin defender of Nicene orthodoxy in the fourth-century Arian controversy, earning him the epithet "Athanasius of the West." Born to a pagan family, he converted to Christianity as an adult and was elected bishop by popular acclaim around 353, reportedly while still married with a daughter named Abra. His magnum opus, De Trinitate, a twelve-book systematic defense of the consubstantiality of the Son, was begun before his exile and completed during it; it became the definitive Latin Trinitarian synthesis and shaped all subsequent Western theology on the subject. Exiled to Phrygia by the Arian emperor Constantius II from about 356 to 360, he used those years in the East to study Greek theology, write De Synodis, and attend the Council of Seleucia (359), before Constantius himself dismissed him back to Gaul around 360 as a nuisance. He was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Pius IX in 1851.
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What they did here
Condemned at the Synod of Béziers and exiled to Phrygia by Emperor Constantius II; completed De Trinitate, wrote De Synodis, and attended the Council of Seleucia in 359.
About Phrygia
Phrygia, an inland region of west-central Anatolia, modern Turkey. It was the cradle of Montanism in the 2nd century; Hilary of Poitiers was exiled to the broader Asia Minor region under Constantius II.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Hilary of Poitiers’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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