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nasius from the Oriental bishops, which iiad bceu sent
to his predecessor Julius, he had hesitated to condemn
that saint, since his predecessor had absolved him,
but he had sent legates to Alexandria to sunmion him
to Rome. Athaiuisius had refused to come, and
liberius on receiving new letters from the East had at
once excommunicated him, and was now anxious to
communicate with the Arian party. Duchesne thinks
this letter was written in exile at the beginning of 357,
and that Liberius had really sent an embassy (in 352-
3), sugeestin^ that Athanasius should come to Rome;
now inhis exue he remembers that Athanasius had ex-
cused himself, and alleges this as a pretext for con-
demning him. It seems inconceivable, however, that
after heroically supporting Athanasius for years, and,
having suffered exde for more than a year rather than
condemn him, Liberius should motive his present
weakness by a disobedience on the saint's part at
which he had testified no resentment during all this
stretch of time. On the contrary- , St. Hilar>s com-
ment seems plainly to imply that the letter was forged
b^ Fortunatian, Metropolitan of Aquilcia, one of the
bishops who condemned Athanasius and joined the
court party at the Council of Milan in 355. Fortuna-
tian must have tried to excuse his own fall, bv pre-
tending that the pope (who was then still in Rome)
had entrusted this letter to him to give to the emperor,
- ' but Potamius and Epictetus did not believe it to be
genuine when they condemned the pope with glee (as the Council of Rimini said of them) , else they would not have condemned him to exile, *'and Fortunatian sent it also to many bishops without getting any ^in by it". And St. Hilary goes on to declare that For- tunatian had further condemned himself by omitting to mention how Athanasius had been acquitted at Sardica after the letter of the Easterns against him to Pope JuUus, and how a letter harl come from a council at Alexandna and all ^ypt in his favour to Liberius, as earlier to Julius. Hilary appeals to documents ^iiiiich follow, evidently the letter "Obsecro" to the emperor (already mentioned), in which Liberius at- tests that he received the defence by the Egyptians at the same time with the accusation by the Arians. The letter "Obsecro" forms fragment V, and it seems to have been immediately followed in the original work by fragment VI, which opens with the letter of Liberius to the confessors, "Quamuis sub imagine" (l»roving how steadfast he was in his support of the uiitJi), Allowed by quotations from letters to a bishop of ^x>leto and to Hosius, in which the pope deplores the iflJl of Vincent at Aries. These letters are mcon- testably genuine.
There follows in the same fragment a paragraph which declares that Liberius, when in exile, reversed all these promises and actions, writing to the wicked, prevaricating Arians the three letters which complete the fragment. These correspond to the authentic letters which have preceded, each to each: the first, "Pro deifico timore is a parody of "Obsecro"; the second, "Quia scio uos", is a reversal of cverj' thing said in " QuamuLs" ; the thinl " Non doceo", is a palinode, painful to read, of the letter to Hosius. The three are clearly forgeries, composed for their present position. They defend the authenticity of "Studens paci*', which they represent as having been sent to the em- peror from Rome by the hands of Fortunatian; the genuine letters are not contested, but it is shown that Liberius changed his mind and wrote the Studens paci"j that in spite of this he was exiled, through the machinations of his enemies, so he wrote *' Pro deifico timore" to the Easterns, assuring them not only that he had condemned Athanasius in "Studens paci", but that Demophilus, the Bishop of Bercea (repro- bated as a heretic in "Obsecro"), had explained to him the Sirmian formula of 357, and he had willinglv accepted it. This formula disapproved of the words homoauHoi Bad kamoimuioa alike; it had been drawn
up by Germinius, Ursacius, and Valens. "Quia scio
nos" is addressed precisely to these three court bishops
and Liberius begs them "to pray the emperor for his
restoration, just as in "Quamuis" he had begged the
three confessors to pray to God that he too might be
exiled. " Non doceo' ' parodies the grief of Liberius at
the fall of Vincent; it is addressed U> Vincent himself
and be^ him to get the Campanian bishops to xneet
and wnte to the emperor for the restoration of Libe-
rius. Interspersed m the first and second letters are
anathemas *' to the prevaricator Liberius", attributed
by the former to St. Ililary. The forger is clearly one
of the Luciferians, whose heres\' consisted in denying
all validity to the acts of those bishops who had fallen
at the CJouncil of Rimini in 359; whereas Pope Libe-
rius had issued a decree admitting their restoration on
their sincere repentance, and also condemned the
Luciferian practice of rebaptizing those whom the
fallen bishops had baptized.
The aforesaid "Fragments" of St. Hilary have recently been scrutinize by Wilmart, and it appears that they belonged to two different books, the one written in 356 as an apology when the saint was sent into exile by the Synod of Edziers, and the other writ- ten soon after the Council of Rimini for the instruction (says Rufinus) of the fallen bishops; it was entitled " Liber ad versus Valentem et Ursacium". The letters of Liberius belonged to the latter work. Rufinus tells us that it was interpolated — he implies this of the whole edition — and that Hilary was accused at a coun- cil on the score of these corruptions; he denied them, but, on the book being fetched from his own lodging, they were found in it, and St. Hilary was expelled ex- communicate from the council. St. Jerome denied all knowledge of the incident, but Rufinus certainly spoke with good evidence, and his story fits in exactly with St. Hilary's own account of a council of ten bishops which sat at his urgent request at Milan about 364 to try Auxentius whom he accused of Arianism. The latter defended himself by equivocal expressions, and the bishops as well as the orthodox Emperor Valen- tinian were satisfied; St. Ililary, on the contrary, was accused by Auxentius of heresy, and of joining with St. Eusebius of Vercelli in disturbing the peace, and he was banished from the city. He does not mention of what heresy he was accused, nor on what grounds; but it must have been Luciferianism, and Rufinus has in- formed us of the proofs which were offered. It is in- teresting that the fragments of the book against Valens and Ursacius should still contain in the forged let^rs of IJl)erius (and perliaps, also in one attributed to St. Eusebius) a part of the false evidence on which a Doc- tor of the Church was turned out of Milan and appar- ently excommunicated.
It would seem that when St. Hilarj' wrote his l)ook
- ' Ad versus Constant ium" in 360, just before his return
from exile in the East, he l)elievcd that Liberius had fallen and had renounced St. AthanasiiLs; but his words are not quite clear. At all events, when he wrote his ** Ad versus Valentem et Ursacium" after his re- turn, he showed the letter " Studens paci" to be a for- gery, by appending to it some noble letters of the pope. Now this seems to prove that the Luciferians were making use of '* Studens paci" after Rimini, in order to show that the pope, who was now in their opinion too indulgent to the fallen bishops, had himself been guilty of an even worse betrayal of the Catholic cause before his exile. In their view, such a fall would un- pope liim and invalidate all his subsequent acts. That St. Hilary should have taken some trouble to prove that the ** Studens paci" was spurious makes it evident that he did not believe Liberius had fallen subse- ouently in his exile; else his trouble was useless. Consequently, St. Hilary becomes a strong witness to the innocence of Liberius. If St. Athanasius believed in his fall , this was when he was in hiding, and immedi- ately after the euppoeed event; he waa apparently de-
