Hilary of Poitiers
310 CE–367 CE · Poitiers
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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PoitiersFrance
What they did here
Born here to a pagan family, converted as an adult, and was elected bishop of Pictavium around 353 by popular acclamation; began writing De Trinitate here before his exile.
About Poitiers
Poitiers is a city on the Clain River in west-central France, capital of the Vienne department and historic centre of the Poitou region. Founded by the Celtic Pictones and called Pictavium under Rome, it became an early Christian see; Hilary of Poitiers, its bishop from about 350 to 367, was a leading Western opponent of Arianism, and the city's Baptistery of Saint John dates from the fourth century. Two battles bear its name, Charles Martel's victory over an Umayyad army in 732 and the English victory of 1356 in the Hundred Years' War. Its university, founded in 1431, counted René Descartes among its law students.
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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