While almost all of the works in this vault use Victorian translations, due to the only English translation of this commentary being in copyright, it was machine-translated (by Claude, 2026) from the public-domain Latin. It has not been checked by a human translator.
Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, written about 353–356, before his exile to the East. Chapter 12: The disciples pluck the ears of corn. Jesus heals on the sabbath a man with a withered hand. He heals a blind and possessed man. On blasphemy against the Spirit, on the fruit of the good and the bad tree, on every idle word, on the Ninevites and the queen of the south, on the seven spirits and the eighth, and on the mother and brethren of Jesus.
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At that time Jesus went on the sabbath day through the corn; and his disciples were an hungred, and began to pluck the ears of corn, and to eat. His going out into the field of corn, and the sabbath day, and the hunger of the disciples, and the plucking of the ears, and the accusation of the Pharisees, and the Lord’s answer, have, like everything else, an understanding of an inward meaning lying beneath them. For all the truths of the deeds, as we have said, in the very working out of the events, take on an image of the truth to come which is like them and is to be understood from them.
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And first we must consider that this passage begins thus: At that time Jesus went through the corn: that is, at the time when He gave thanks to God the Father for the salvation given to the Gentiles; so that the same sense might hold together both what went before and what follows. Let us run through the rest, then. The field is the world, the sabbath is rest, the corn is the advance of those who are to believe towards the harvest. So His going out into the field on the sabbath is the Lord’s going forth into this world in the rest of the Law, to visit that crop, that is, the sowing of mankind. And because the hunger is a hunger for man’s salvation, the disciples hasten to pluck and pull the ears, that is, to satisfy themselves with the salvation of the saints. For ears of corn are not suitable food for a man, nor is the eating of plucked ears of grain profitable: but the likeness of the deed follows out the truth of the thing to come, and the force of the words set between completes the mystery both of the hunger and of the satisfying.
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The Pharisees, who thought that the key of heaven was in their hands, accuse the disciples of doing what was not lawful. The Lord reminds them of that deed, in which, under the matter of events, the meaning of a prophecy is contained: that David, when he was an hungred, together with those who were with him, was filled with the bread that was not lawful. For if it had not been lawful to do, David would not have been believed to have done it without crime. But without the guilt of crime he prophesies by deeds under the Law; in that he himself, with the others, was filled with the shewbread: so showing that Christ with the apostles was to be satisfied with the salvation of the Gentiles, which seemed unlawful to the Jews.
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He reminds them also of another prophecy, so that they might know that all things spoken before in the Law were fulfilled in Him: that the priests in the temple profane the sabbath without crime; showing, that is, that He Himself is the temple, in which, through the apostles’ teaching, while the people of the Law rest in unbelief, salvation is given to the Gentiles: because He Himself is greater than the sabbath, and the faith of the Gospel works in Christ without the guilt of breaking the Law.
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And to show that the whole working of these events contains this likeness of the work to come, He added: But if ye had known what this meaneth, I will have mercy, and not sacrifice, ye would not have condemned the guiltless. The work of our salvation is not in sacrifice but in mercy; and, the Law ceasing, we are saved in the goodness of God. Had they understood the gift of this, they would never have condemned the guiltless, that is, the apostles: whom they were going to accuse, out of spite, of transgressing the Law, when, the oldness of the sacrifices ceasing, the newness of mercy came to the help of all through them; nor would they have thought that the Lord of the sabbath was bound by the rule of the sabbath. These things were said and done in the field.
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And after this, when He had entered the synagogue, they bring Him a man with a withered hand, asking whether it was lawful to heal on the sabbath days, seeking an occasion of accusing Him from His answer. He shut them up with the example of a sheep falling into a pit, which they were careful to draw out on the sabbath without crime: and it was more right that a man, who is better than a sheep, should be healed; nor must it be thought that the sabbath can be profaned by the service of man’s salvation, when it is not profaned by care for drawing a sheep out of a pit.
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Such a healing by the Lord is rightly added here. For after His return from the field of corn, from which the apostles had already received the fruits of the sowing, He comes to the synagogue: intending to make ready from there also labourers for His harvest, many of whom afterwards came forth together with the apostles. These, then, are healed in the maimed man. For they had not the means of giving salvation; the office of the hand was idle, and the service of the body, by which anything is done and imparted, had withered. So the Lord bade him stretch out his hand, which was restored to him whole as the other. All the healing is in the word, and the hand is restored as the other, that is, it is made like the ministry of the apostles for the office of giving salvation: and He teaches the Pharisees that they ought not to take it ill that the work of man’s salvation is in the apostles, since their own hand too is to be refashioned for the ministry of the same office, if they believe.
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But the spite of the deed moves the Pharisees, and they take counsel against Him: because, seeing a man in the body, they did not understand God in His works. And knowing their counsels He withdrew Himself, so that He might be known to be far from the counsels of the malicious. And great multitudes followed Him: that is, as He withdraws from the unbelievers, the company of the faithful stays by Him.
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And He charged those whom He healed to keep silence. But was silence about the healing being commanded? Surely not; for the health restored to each was its own witness. But by commanding secrecy He both avoids the boasting of glorying about Himself, and nonetheless gives knowledge of Himself in that very thing, while He warns that silence be kept about Him: because the observance of silence proceeds from a thing which is worth keeping silent about.
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Moreover through this will to be silent about Himself the effect of what was spoken by Esaias is fulfilled. Of his prophecy we now only note this: that He is both beloved of God, and in Him the Father’s will is well pleased, and the Spirit of God is upon Him, and judgment is announced to the Gentiles by Him, and the bruised reed is not broken, and the smoking flax is not quenched: that is, that the frail and bruised bodies of the Gentiles have not been crushed, but rather kept for salvation; and that the smallness of the fire, now only smoking in the flax, has not been quenched: the small spirit left to Israel from the remnants of the old grace has not been taken away; because it is possible to take up again the whole light in the time of repentance. But this is prescribed within the limits of a fixed time, till he send forth judgment unto victory: that is, when the power of death has been taken away, He brings in judgment by the return of His glory, the Gentiles believing in His name through faith.
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Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb, and the rest. There follows the timely healing of the possessed, blind and dumb man. For it is not without reason that, after saying that all the multitudes were healed together, now a blind and dumb man possessed with a devil is brought from outside: so that without any ambiguity the same order of meaning might follow. The Pharisees were accusing the apostles of plucking the ears, that is, of gathering men out of the world; mercy was being preached above sacrifice; the man with the withered hand, brought to Him in the synagogue, was being healed: and these things not only do nothing to convert Israel, but the Pharisees even take counsel to kill Him. It was fitting, then, that after this the salvation of the Gentiles should come about in the figure of this one man: so that he who was the dwelling of a devil, and blind and dumb, might be made ready and fit to hold God, and might behold God in Christ, and might praise the works of Christ by confessing God. The multitudes were amazed at the work of this deed; but the spite of the Pharisees grows heavier. For because these great works of His went beyond human weakness, they avoid the shame of confessing Him by a greater crime of unbelief: so that, because they could not think these works to be a man’s, and would not confess them to be God’s, they said that all this power of His over the devils was from Beelzebub, the prince of the devils.
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And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation. The word of God is rich, and, set forth as a matter for understanding, offers a great abundance of examples from itself; and whether it is understood simply or looked into more deeply, it is needful for every advance. But leaving the things that lie open to common understanding, let us dwell on the inner meanings.
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Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation. About to answer what had been said about Beelzebub, He turned the force of His answer back upon the very men He was answering. For the Law is from God, and the promise of the kingdom of Israel is from the Law, and the birth and coming of Christ is from the Law. If the kingdom of the Law is divided against itself, it must needs be dissolved. And all power is drawn off by division, and the strength of a kingdom divided against itself is consumed: and so Israel lost the kingdom from the Law, since the people of the Law fights against the fulfilling of the Law in Christ.
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And every city or house divided against itself shall not stand. The meaning of the house and the city is the same as that of the kingdom. But the city here signified is Jerusalem, ever glorious in her rule over the nations. Now, after she has blazed out against her Lord in the fury of her people, and has driven away His apostles with the multitudes of believers, she will not stand, by the division of those who departed from her: and so, through this division, the destruction of that city is foretold, which soon followed.
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And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself. By the very kind of thing they said they condemn the malice of what they said before, when they said that He did these things by Beelzebub: not understanding that they had confessed that Beelzebub was divided; and that if he was forced into his own division, so that a devil drove out devils and the division itself stood against itself, it must be reckoned from this too that there is more power in him who divided than in those who were divided. So he is already divided, and forced against himself, and his kingdom is dissolved by such a division. And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children, that is, the apostles, cast them out? And therefore they are rightly appointed judges over them, since Christ will be found to have given them that power against devils which He Himself is denied to have had. So if the disciples work in Christ, and Christ works by the Spirit of God, the kingdom of God is come, now poured into the apostles through the office of the Mediator. But when Christ is charged with having His power through Beelzebub, God is blasphemed in Christ: and so the insult of an inexpiable reproach is laid upon God by the Pharisees under the name of Beelzebub.
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Or else how can one enter into a strong man’s house, and spoil his goods? and the rest. He shows that the whole power of the devil was crushed by Him in the first temptation: because no one enters a strong man’s house and spoils his goods unless he has bound the strong man, and then he will spoil his house; and whoever does this must needs be stronger than that strong man. He was bound, then, at the time when, named Satan by the Lord, he was bound fast by the very naming of his wickedness: and from him, so bound, He took the spoils, and carried off his house: that is, us, once his weapons, He brought back under His own rule as soldiers of his kingdom, and having conquered and bound him, made ready for Himself out of us a house empty and serviceable. And He shows that He is far from having borrowed any power from him: since he who is not with Him is against Him, and he who gathers not with Him scatters. From this is understood how great a peril it is to think ill of Him, not to be with whom is the very same as to be against Him, and not to gather is to scatter.
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All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven. He condemns the opinion of the Pharisees, and the perversity of those who think as they do, by a most severe sentence: promising pardon for all sins, and refusing forgiveness to blasphemy against the Spirit. For while the other words and deeds are let go with a liberal pardon, there is no mercy if God is denied in Christ. And in the matter in which sin is committed without pardon He spends the goodwill of a repeated warning: that sins of every kind are wholly to be forgiven, that blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is not to be forgiven. For what is so far beyond pardon as to deny in Christ that He is God, and to take away from Him the substance of the Father’s Spirit that abides in Him: since He accomplishes every work in the Spirit of God, and He Himself is the kingdom of heaven, and in Him God is reconciling the world to Himself? So whatever insult there may be against Christ, all of it will stand against God: because God is in Christ, and Christ in God.
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Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt, and his fruit corrupt, and the rest. The saying puts itself forth for the present and carries forward into the future. For in the present He refutes the Jews, who, though they understood that the works of Christ were beyond human power, yet would not confess that they were God’s. And for the future He rebukes all perversity of faith, that is, of those who, taking away from the Lord His Godhead and His fellowship in the Father’s substance, have boiled over into various heretical factions: doing neither the one nor the other, neither dwelling among the Gentiles under the pardon of ignorance, nor living in the knowledge of the truth. By the tree He signifies Himself set in the body: because through the inward fruitfulness of His power all richness goes forth into fruits. So either the tree is to be made good with good fruits, or set down as bad with bad fruits; because the tree itself will bear witness of itself by its fruits: not that, according to the nature of trees, a tree can be made bad which is good, or that the same tree with its branches can be good if it is bad; but that by this figure we might understand that Christ is either to be left as useless, or kept as good for the profit of His good fruits: because things said against the Son of man are under pardon, but blasphemy against the Spirit is without pardon. But to take a middle course, and to grant Christ some things while denying those which are greatest; to worship Him as God and to strip Him of fellowship with God — this is blasphemy against the Spirit: so that, while out of wonder at such great works you do not dare to take from Him the name of God, out of the malice of your mind and understanding you pluck away His nobility, which you are forced to confess in name, by denying His fellowship in the Father’s substance. And so the Lord extends the gift of His goodness even in this, saying that either the tree is to be made bad with bad fruits or good with good fruits: because for the opinion of the bad tree pardon is laid up in the secret of God’s indulgence (for every sin is to be forgiven); in the confession of the good tree there is eternal fruit: lest, walking in a middle opinion between the two, since we dare not declare Him bad and will not confess Him good, we be left to the indissoluble judgment of our corrupt opinion of Him.
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He taught that all such corruption of opinion proceeds from a fault of nature, saying that out of an evil treasure nothing but evil things can be brought forth, and that account must be given to God of every idle word, that is, every foolish and useless word: because by the words of our confession we shall be either condemned or justified, and shall receive such goodwill in the judgment to come as the opinion we have held about the Lord of heavenly glory.
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Then He is asked to give a sign, and He answered that He would give it from the sign of Jonas: and that as Jonas was held three days and as many nights in the belly of the whale, so He would remain within the heart of the earth for a like space of time. But He shows that the faith of the Gentiles will be greater. For the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonas, and won pardon from God by the confession of their repentance. And the queen of the south, now taken as an example of the Church, marvelling at the wisdom of Solomon, came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom she had marvelled at. The comparison, then, heaps up the reproach, and the faith of the Gentiles leaves the Jews without excuse: since those believed the prophets, that is, Jonas and Solomon, and these will not believe Christ, who is greater than Jonas and Solomon. And therefore they will judge them in the resurrection, because the fear of God was found in those to whom the Law had not been preached: and those who are unbelieving out of the Law are the more unworthy of pardon, the more faith was found in those who did not know the Law.
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When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none, and the rest. The passage is continuous, and from the very opening of the discourse it is shown to proceed from the sense of what went before: for it began with a connecting word. But the meaning of the whole comparison set out must be treated. The unclean spirit, going out of a man, goes about dry and waterless places, in which no fountain of life flowed. And when he finds no rest, then he will say within himself that it suits him to return to his house from which he came out; which he will find empty, swept and garnished; and he will take with him seven spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there, and the last state of that man will be worse than the first. And the Lord indeed completes it, saying, Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.
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We cannot doubt, then, that all this is to be referred to the person of this people: but we must consider how far each thing set forth is to be assigned to its own times and events. Above, under the names of the Ninevites and the queen of the south, the faith of the Gentiles was justified: but long before, after many grievous sins against God, the Law was given to the Jews. And their sins are recorded in the books of Moses. For after so many proofs of the divine power — Egypt struck with ten plagues, the pillar of cloud and of light serving them night and day, a road given through the Red Sea, springs flowing from split rocks, manna supplied to the hungry, and at last the people living for forty years with the life and garb of angels — afterwards beasts and stones were worshipped and prayed to, and they danced before them with choirs and songs, and metals were called gods. So the Law, which was given afterwards, by its coming cast out the unclean spirit that sat in the hearts of this people, and shut him out as by the guard of a power set round about them. He, going out from there, wandered about the deserted and dry nations, leaving his old house: so as to rest among them, in a dwelling undisturbed until the day of judgment.
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But again, when the grace of God had been imparted to the Gentiles, after the living fountain had flowed out in the water of the washing, there is no place for him to dwell among them: and since he no longer had rest in them, reckoning within himself, he thinks it best to go back to the house from which he set out. This, cleansed by the Law, adorned by the proclamations of the prophets, and made ready by the coming of Christ, is found empty: since the guard of the Law has departed from it (for the whole Law is until John), and Christ has not been received to dwell in it. And so it is both empty of an indweller and deserted by its guards: although for the coming of the indweller it had been both swept and garnished by the care of those who went before. Seven more wicked spirits, then, are taken with him; because so many were the gifts of grace appointed together with Christ, which that manifold wisdom of God placed in Him with a sevenfold glory: so that the possession of iniquity should be as great as that of graces was to have been. And so the last state of that man will be worse than the first: because the unclean spirit had gone out from the Jews for fear of the Law, but now will return upon them with the vengeance of the grace they rejected.
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And because He spoke all this in the power of His Father’s majesty, when it was told Him that His mother and brethren were waiting for Him outside, He stretched out His hand towards His disciples and answered that these were His brethren and mother; and that whoever had obeyed His Father’s will was His brother and sister and mother: making Himself the pattern of acting and thinking for all, that the right and name of all kinship was to be kept no longer by the condition of birth, but by the fellowship of the Church. But He must not be thought to have regarded His mother with disdain, to whom, when He was set in His Passion, He showed the feeling of the greatest care. And in this too a figurative meaning is kept, in that His mother and brethren stood outside, though they surely had power, as the others had, to come in to Him. But because He came unto His own, and His own received Him not, in His mother and brethren are prefigured the Synagogue and the Israelites, holding back from coming in and drawing near to Him.