St Hilary was born at Poitiers at the end of the 3rd or the very beginning of the 4th century AD. His parents were well to do pagans and he received a good education. Later he studied both the Old and New Testaments, and abandoned his pagan neo-platonism for Christianity.

It was a time when the heresy, Arianism – that Jesus was just a very good man but not the Son of God, in denial of the Trinity – was on the ascendency and supported by the recently converted Emperor, Constantine the Great. Among increasingly violent battles between Trinitarians and Arians, the Trinitarian Christians of Arles elected Hilary as their bishop in 353AD, as their existing bishop, Saturninus, was an Arian, who was then excommunicated.

About the same time, Hilary wrote to the new Emperor Constantius II, to complain about the persecutions by which the Arians had sought to crush their Trinitarian opponents. But his approach backfired and he was sent into exile in Phrygia, a stronghold of Arianism in what is now Turkey. Here he spent 4 years, and yet continued to govern his diocese, as well as writing two of his most important theological works. He returned to his diocese in 361, and worked closely with St Martin, Bishop of Tours, to establish a monastery in his diocese, today known as Ligugé Abbey.

St Hilary died at Poitiers in 367. He is regarded as one of the pre-eminent Latin writers of the 4th century, particularly on the subject of the Trinity. His feast day, 13th January, gives its name to the spring terms of the English and Irish law courts, as well as the universities of Oxford and Dublin. St Hilary is the patron saint of lawyers, scholars, students, and theologians.

The picture of St Hilary above shows a man with a grey beard. Until the 1950s, the name was reserved almost entirely for the male gender. And yet today it is more usually associated with the female.