Commentary on Matthew, Chapter 4

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 4: On the beatitudes and the commandments, on being reconciled with one’s brethren, on adultery, on plucking out the eye and the hand, on oaths, and on almsgiving.

1. When great multitudes, then, had gathered, He goes up into a mountain and teaches: that is, set on the height of His Father’s majesty, He lays down the precepts of the heavenly life. For He would not have handed down the ordinances of eternity unless He had been set in eternity. And so it is written thus: He opened his mouth, and taught them. It would have been readier to say that He spoke. But because He had taken His stand in the glory of His Father’s majesty, and teaches eternity, the office of the human mouth is therefore shown to have obeyed the motion of the Spirit speaking.

2. Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. By His example the Lord had taught that the glory of human ambition must be left behind, when He said, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. And since He had foretold by the prophets that He would choose a people humble and trembling at His words, He set the beginning of perfect blessedness in humility of spirit. Those, then, who breathe humbly, that is, who remember that they are men, are set in possession of the heavenly kingdom: aware that they have been formed from mean and slender beginnings and brought forth into this shape of a finished body; that by God’s ministering they go on to this power of feeling, seeing, judging and acting; that nothing is any man’s own, nothing his property, but that by the gift of one Father the same beginnings of coming into life are given to all, and the same means of using it supplied; and that we ought, after the example of that most good One who has bestowed these things on us, to be imitators of His perfect goodness towards us: to be good to all, to count all things common to all; to let neither the insolence of worldly pride, nor the lust of wealth, nor the ambition of empty glory corrupt us; but to be subject to God, and, from our sharing in life, to be held fast to all men in the love of a common life; reckoning that in our very being born lies a great advance of the divine goodness yet to come, whose reward and honour must be earned by the works of the present life. And so, through this humility of spirit, by which we remember both that all things have been granted us by God and that better things are to be hoped for hereafter, the kingdom of heaven will be ours.

3. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. To the meek He promises the inheritance of the earth, that is, of that body which the Lord Himself took as His dwelling. Because, through the meekness of our mind, Christ will have dwelt in us, we too shall be clothed with the glory of His glorified body.

4. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. To those who mourn He promises the solace of eternal comfort. It is not for those who grieve over bereavements, or insults, or losses, but for those who weep over their old sins, and are troubled in conscience by the crimes with which we are defiled, that this constant comfort is prepared in heaven.

5. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. To those who thirst and hunger after righteousness He gives blessedness: signifying that the eagerness of the saints, stretched out towards the teaching of God, will be satisfied with the good things of a perfect fulness in heaven.

6. Blessed are the merciful: for God shall have mercy on them. For the merciful He prepares the gifts of mercy. For God so delights in the disposition of our goodwill towards all, that He will bestow His mercy on the merciful alone.

7. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. To the pure in heart He pledges the sight of God. For nothing polluted and foul can stand to meet the divine brightness, and the eye of a defiled mind is dulled before the sight of God: those, that is, lie open to the sight and the meeting of God who, through brightness of soul and purity of life, have the power of beholding. For only when we are made perfect in spirit, and changed by immortality, shall we behold — what is ordained for the pure in heart alone — that which in God is immortal.

8. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. The blessedness of peacemakers is the reward of adoption, that they may remain sons of God; for God is the one Father of all. Nor will it be permitted to pass into the name of His family in any other way, than that, taking up forgetfulness of the things by which we might be offended, we live together in the peace of brotherly love.

9. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and the rest. At the last He rewards with perfect blessedness those whose disposition is ready to suffer all things for Christ: for He Himself is righteousness. For them, then, the kingdom is reserved, and a great reward in heaven is promised, who, poor in spirit through contempt of the world, and put to shame by the losses and forfeits of present things, and confessors of the heavenly righteousness against the revilings of men, and thereafter glorious witnesses to the promises of God, have spent the whole use of life in bearing witness to His eternity.

10. Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, that which shall be salted with it is good for nothing. There is no salt of the earth, I think: how then did He call the apostles the salt of the earth? But we must seek the proper sense of the words, which both the office of the apostles and the nature of salt itself will show. Salt holds in itself alone the elements of water and of fire; and out of the two it is one thing. Made, then, for every use of mankind, it imparts incorruption to the bodies on which it is sprinkled, and is most fitted to give every sense of a seasoned taste. And the apostles are the preachers of heavenly things, and as it were the sowers of eternity: conferring immortality on all bodies on which their word is sprinkled, and made perfect, as John testified above, by the sacrament of water and of fire. Rightly, then, were they called the salt of the earth, keeping bodies for eternity by the power of their teaching, as salt does. But the nature of salt is always the same, and can never be changed. Yet because man is liable to change, and he alone is blessed who has continued to the end in all the works of God, He therefore warns them, having named them the salt of the earth, to persevere in the power of the authority entrusted to them; lest, having lost their savour, they salt nothing, and themselves, having lost the sense of the savour they received, be unable to give life to what is corrupt; and lest, cast out of the storehouses of the Church, they be trodden under the feet of passers-by together with those whom they have salted.

11. Ye are the light of the world. It is the nature of light to give forth light wherever it is carried, and, when it is brought into a house, to destroy the darkness, the light prevailing. The world, then, being set outside the knowledge of God, was darkened with the darkness of ignorance: to it the light of knowledge is brought by the apostles, and the knowledge of God shines out, and from their small and frail bodies, wherever they go, light is supplied to the darkness.

12. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, and the rest. He calls the flesh which He had taken a city: because as a city consists of a variety and multitude of inhabitants, so in Him, by the nature of the body He took, a kind of gathering together of the whole human race is contained. And so He becomes a city by our being gathered into Him, and we, by sharing in His flesh, are the inhabitants of the city. He can no longer, then, be hidden: because, set in the height of the loftiness of God, He is lifted up to be beheld and understood by all in wonder at His works.

13. But neither is a candle lit to be hidden under a bushel. For what fruit is there in keeping the cost of a light shut up? The Lord rightly compared the Synagogue to a bushel: for it took the fruits it received into itself alone, and held a fixed measure of measured-out observance; but now, at His coming, it is emptied of all fruit, yet is still not able to hide the light. And so now the candle of Christ is not to be hidden under a bushel, nor concealed by the covering of the Synagogue; but, hung up in His Passion on the wood, it will give eternal light to those who dwell in the Church. He warns the apostles also to shine with a like light, that God may be praised in wonder at their work: not that glory ought to be sought from men, for all things are to be done for the honour of God; but that our work, even though we say nothing of it, may shine out to those among whom we live.

14. Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. The force and power of the heavenly words embrace great matters. For the Law was set as a law of works, and it shut up all things to the faith of those things which were to be revealed in Christ, whose teaching and whose Passion are alike the great and deep decree of the Father’s will. And the Law spoke, under the veil of spiritual words, of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of His bodily nature, and of His Passion, and of His resurrection; and that this was thus ordained already before the ages for the time of our age, the authority both of the prophets and of the apostles often declares. That is why, after the fast of forty days, Satan, anxious with such great suspicions, broke out into the boldness of tempting Him: dreading in Jesus the vast secret of the heavenly design. For the name Jesus is our Lord’s from the body. And so His bodily nature and His Passion are the will of God and the salvation of the world; and it is beyond the eloquence of human speech that God from God, the Son from the Father’s substance and abiding within the Father’s substance, was first embodied in man, then subjected by the condition of man to death, and at the last, returning after three days from death to life, carried back to heaven the matter of the body He had taken, joined to the eternity of the Spirit and of His own substance.

15. So, lest we should think that there was anything in His works other than what was contained in the Law, He professed that He was not destroying the Law but fulfilling it: that heaven and earth, which we take to be the chief elements, were indeed to be dissolved; but that not even the least thing of the commandments of the Law could be left undone; for in Him the Law and all prophecy are fulfilled. In His Passion, when He was now about to give up the ghost, sure of this great secret in Himself, having drunk the vinegar, He declared that all things were finished: for all the sayings of the prophets then received the proof of their being done. And so He laid down that not even the least of the commandments of God may be broken without guilt; declaring that those who break the least will be least, that is, last and next to nothing. But nothing can be less than those things which are least. And the least of all things is the Lord’s Passion and death on the cross: and if anyone will not confess this, as a thing to be ashamed of, he will be least; but to him who confesses it He promises the great glory of being called in heaven.

16. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. With a most beautiful opening He began to go beyond the work of the Law, not dissolving it, but going before it by a greater advance: declaring that the apostles would have no entrance into heaven unless they surpassed the righteousness of the Pharisees in equity. So, setting before them the things prescribed in the Law, He goes beyond them by advancing them, not by abolishing them.

17. The Law forbade killing, and would atone for the guilt of murder by the severity of its judgment. But in the Gospels the feeling of a mind wrongly stirred against another carries the same penalty; and by the precept of faith anger taken up without reason is no less guilty than murder among the works of the Law. And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council. Raca is a reproach of emptiness; and he who with the taunt of emptiness charges one who is full of the Holy Spirit becomes guilty before the council of the saints, and is to pay for the insult to the Holy Spirit by the punishment of the saints’ judgment. But whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. It is the peril of great guilt to provoke, with the insult of a senseless mind, him whom God has named salt; and to exasperate with the reproach of foolish understanding the understanding that salts the foolish, that is, him who salts them. Such a one, then, will be the food of eternal fire. So what the Law did not condemn even in deeds, the faith of the Gospels condemns for a mere insulting looseness of words.

18. Binding all men together, then, in mutual love, He suffers no prayer to be made by one who is not at peace: but those who offer gifts at the altar, if they remember that they have some grudge with their brethren, He bids first be reconciled in the peace of men and then return to the peace of God, passing over from the love of men into the love of God.

19. And because He allows no time to be empty of a disposition to be appeased, He has bidden us agree with our adversary quickly, kindly, in all the way of our life: lest, slow to return to favour, we come to the time of death with peace not made, and the adversary deliver us to the judge, and the judge to the officer, and we be cast into prison, and not come out thence until we have paid the uttermost farthing. In the precepts of the Lord’s Prayer we pray that our sins may be forgiven us after an example, and, having granted to our adversaries the terms of pardon, we beg for that same pardon. It will be denied us, therefore, if it is denied to others by us; and we are guilty by our own judgment if we pass to the time of judgment with our grudges not put away; our adversary delivers us to the judge, because the anger of our grudge, remaining fixed upon him, convicts us. And because charity covers the multitude of sins, and is the eager advocate of our errors before God, we shall pay the uttermost farthing of the punishment unless the guilt of a good many crimes is redeemed at its price. What many have understood in this passage I did not think needed treating. For they referred this command, to be reconciled in goodwill with our adversary, to the concord of body and spirit, which are at odds with each other; but we, holding to the order of the teaching, and going beyond the work of the Law by the advances of the Gospel, did not think that the continuity of the meaning ought to be torn apart.

20. Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery, and so on. The order of the precepts is carried on its own course, and, leaving aside the works of the Law, now in the Gospels the mere movement of a falling glance is made equal to adultery, and the enticing desire of a passing look is punished with the deed of fornication.

21. And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee, and so on. The step of innocence is raised higher, and faith makes advance. For we are warned to be free not only of our own vices, but also of those that come upon us from without. For the injuries to the body are not commanded because of members that sin: the left eye would sin no less than the right. Certainly the foot, which has no sense of desire, is useless to injure, since the cause of punishment will not fall upon it. But because, though our members are different from one another, yet we are all one body, we are warned to cast away from us, or rather to pluck out, the nearness of those dearest to us, if we see any such thing in them, lest through familiarity we come into partnership in their crime: it being better to go without things useful and most necessary, as though without the members of eye and foot, than to be held, even into the fellowship of hell, by the affection of a vicious kinship. But the cutting off of members would be useful if the heart too could be cut out. For since desire is reckoned equal to the deed, the injury of the body is idle while the impulse of the will is left.

22. It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement, and so on. Bringing about equity towards all, He commanded it to abide above all in the peace of marriage: adding much to the Law, taking nothing from it. Nor surely can the advance be found fault with. For whereas the Law had granted freedom to give divorce on the authority of a bill, now the faith of the Gospel has not only enjoined on the husband a will to peace, but has also laid on him the guilt of his wife being driven into adultery, if, by the necessity of the separation, she must marry another: prescribing no other reason for leaving a marriage than one which would defile the husband by fellowship with a wife who has prostituted herself.

23. Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, and so on. The Law had set a penalty for perjury, so that the reverence of the oath might restrain the fraud of liars; and at the same time that a rude and unruly people might, by the habit of swearing, make frequent mention of their God. But faith removes the habit of the oath, establishing the business of our life in truth, casting away the desire to deceive, and prescribing simplicity in speaking and in hearing: that what was might be, and what was not might not be; because between is and not there would lie open matter for deceit, and whatever is more than these is all of evil. For what is, it is its own nature always to be; and what is not, it is its nature not to be. So for those who live in simplicity there is no need of the reverence of swearing, since with them what is, always is, and what is not, is not; and by these means all their work and all their speech is in the truth.

24. Swear not by heaven; for it is God’s throne, and the rest. He not only does not allow us to swear oaths to God, since all the truth of God is to be kept by the simplicity of our word and deed; but He condemns the superstition of their old stubbornness. For it was the religion of the Jews to swear by these names of the elements, by heaven and earth and Jerusalem, and even by their own head; and by the oath they paid these a veneration that was an insult to God. For what weight was there in swearing by heaven, God’s throne; in swearing by the earth, His footstool; in swearing by Jerusalem, a city soon to be destroyed for the insolence and sins of those who dwelt in it, especially since it had been set up as a foreshadowing of the Church, that is, of the body of Christ, which is the city of the great King? And why should they wish to swear by their head? Could the swearer have the power to change even one hair, when nature, proceeding from God, supplies the colour of them all? And so He shows that these pledges of oaths were full of guilt among them, since, ignoring or neglecting their Maker, they paid religious honour to His works.

25. Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, and the rest. The Lord wishes the hope of our faith, stretched out into eternity, to be proved by the facts themselves: so that the very endurance that passes over a wrong may be a witness to the judgment to come. The Law held unfaithful Israel within fear by fear, and restrained the will to do wrong by the requiting of wrong. But faith does not allow the pain of any wrong to be so heavy that one should seek revenge, and be the avenger of an insult offered to himself: because in the judgment of God there is both more comfort for those who have suffered wrong and a severer punishment for those who have done it. And so the Gospels not only bid us keep away from iniquities, but also require us to pass over the wrongs that we might avenge. For when struck on the cheek we are bidden to offer the other, and when carrying a burden a mile, to go on for the space of two miles: so that we may have the profit of a revenge from the very increase of the wrong; the Lord of the heavenly Powers Himself, for the increase of His glory, offering His cheeks to the palms of the hand and His shoulders to the scourges.

26. He bids us not only flee the decisions of human judgment, but avoid them even at the cost of loss: so that if anyone would strip us of our coat by judgment, we should let him have our cloak also; and, despising worldly goods through the hope of good things to come, we should reprove the empty greed of the Gentiles and the vanity of unfruitful avarice. He bids us also give to all what they ask, and not turn our face and our mind from the prayers of those who would borrow: so that those in want may be supplied through our generosity, and we may keep off their thirst with drink, their hunger with food, their nakedness with clothing given them; and so may be found worthy of those good things which we need from God, the merit of obtaining which the habit of giving may win for us. He shows also that we must be ready in the duty of dispensing the grace we have received: so that the dispensing of a free good may be free, and we may not refuse to those who would borrow what we ourselves borrow from God, always fulfilling the ministry of imparting without loss to our having.

27. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy, and the rest. He has gathered up all things in perfect goodness. For the Law required that one’s neighbour be loved, and gave leave for hatred against an enemy. But faith commands that enemies be loved, and breaks the wanton motions of men’s minds with the feeling of a love shared by all: not only driving anger away from revenge, but even softening it into love for the one who has done the wrong. For it is the way of the Gentiles to love those who love them, and it is common to all to love those who love them. He calls us, then, into the inheritance of God, and so also into the imitation of Him, who, by the coming of His Christ, in the sacraments of baptism and of the Spirit, gives both His sun and His rain to the good and to the unjust. So He has trained us for the perfect life through this harmony of goodness towards all, because we must imitate our Father who is perfect in heaven.

28. Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, and so on. He removes all care for present things, and bids us be intent only on the hope of what is to come; and not to seek either the favour of men by a display of goodness, or a boasting of religion by a show of public prayer; but to keep the fruit of a good work within the conscience of faith: because the pursuit of human praise will receive only that reward which it seeks from men; but the expectation of winning God’s favour will obtain the reward of long patience. He bids us also that the left hand should not know the work of the right. But does the nature of the body allow this? Or are the services of the hands given the power of understanding? But His meaning is that our works should rest in the knowledge of God: since, under the naming of the members, the knowledge of those who are ours and with us is to be kept away from what we do.