Walter Hilton


Walter Hilton was an English Augustinian mystic. His works became influential in the 15th century in England and Wales. He has been honoured as a saint by the Church of England and by the Episcopal Church in the United States.

Life

Walter Hilton was born about 1340–1345. Writing centuries later, an early 16th-century Carthusian, James Grenehalgh from Lancashire, referred to Hilton as a mystic coming "from the same region".
There is some presumptive evidence that Hilton received some education at the University of Cambridge, at some time between about 1360 and 1382. Walter de Hilton, Bachelor of Civil Law, clerk of Lincoln Diocese, was granted the reservation of a canonry and prebend of Abergwili, Carmarthen, in January 1371. In January 1371 Hilton was a bachelor of law attached to the diocesan court of Ely. Some manuscripts describe Hilton as a commensor or inceptor decretorum, i. e. one who had completed the studies and examinations for a mastership of canon law, but he did not undertake the regency that would have given him the title.
In the early 1380s, Hilton turned away from the world and became a solitary, as he describes in his earliest extant work, the Latin letter De Imagine Peccati. Not long after, Hilton states in a Latin epistle of spiritual counsel, De Utilitate et Prerogativis Religionis, addressed to his friend Adam Horsley, a former officer of the Exchequer, who was about to enter the Carthusian Order, that he is himself open to the idea of joining a religious community but is still uncertain of his vocation. Given that Horsley entered the Community of Beauvale in 1386, it seems likely that he joined a community around this date – 1386 is often suggested as his date of entry into Thurgarton Priory in Nottinghamshire, as an Augustinian Canon Regular.
Between 1386 and 1390, Hilton was probably the author of Epistola de Leccione, Intencione, Oracione, Meditacione et Allis, of a brief treatise in English Of Angels' Song, which criticizes one aspect of Richard Rolle's spirituality, and of The Epistle on the Mixed Life, which instructs a devout layman about wealth and household responsibility, advising him not to give up his active life to become a contemplative, but to mix the two. Because of strong echoes between the Mixed Life and the first of the two books of Hilton's major work, The Scale of Perfection, both were probably written about the same time, in the late 1380s. Hilton may also have translated The Prickynge of Love, though this remains a matter of dispute.
In his final years, Hilton probably wrote his Latin letter Epistola ad Quemdam Seculo Renunciare Volentem, and a brief piece on scruples entitled Firmissime crede. He also produced the English version of Eight Chapters on Perfection, a translation of a now lost Latin work by the Franciscan Lluis de Font, an Aragonese Franciscan who had a regency in theology at Cambridge in either 1391–1393 or 1393–1334. Also in this period, Hilton produced the second book of The Scale of Perfection. According to manuscript tradition, Hilton died on 24 March 1396 as an Augustinian Canon Regular at Thurgarton Priory. However, this manuscript was written much later than the history it reports, and it contains a number of historical mistakes.

Works

The first book of The Scale of Perfection is addressed to a woman recently enclosed as an anchoress, providing her with appropriate spiritual exercises; the bulk of its 93 chapters deal with extirpation of the "foul image of sin" in the soul – perversion of the image of the Trinity in the three spiritual powers of Mind, Reason and Will – through a series of meditations on the seven deadly sins. The second book, which opens by addressing itself to Hilton's former reader, who he says has further questions, seems from its style and content rather to be addressed to a larger, perhaps more sophisticated audience. Its main themes are reformation of the soul in faith alone and in both faith and feeling. The latter is described in an extended metaphor as a spiritual journey to Jerusalem, or "peace" in meditation, a gift which is also its own giver, Christ. The first book of the Scale was apparently written some time before the second and was circulated independently.
The Mixed Life occasionally appears with the Scale in 15th-century manuscripts and was printed by De Worde in 1494 as a third book of the Scale, possibly at the desire of Lady Margaret, although the Mixed Life occurs in only half the surviving copies of that printing. All later printings of the Scale also included the Mixed Life.
Hilton wrote three other Latin letters of spiritual guidance – the Epistola de Leccione, Intencione, Oracione, Meditacione et Allis, the Epistola ad Quemdam Seculo Renunciare Volentem and Firmissime crede – and a scholastic quodlibet on the appropriateness of reverence to images in churches, a practice criticised by Lollards. He also wrote commentaries on the Psalm texts Qui Habitat and Bonum Est, and perhaps on the Canticle Benedictus.

Later influence

Hilton's spiritual writings were influential in 15th-century England. They were used extensively shortly after his death in the Speculum spiritualium. The most famous was the Scale of Perfection, which survives in some 62 manuscripts, including 14 of a Latin translation made about 1400 by Hilton's contemporary at Cambridge and Ely, the Carmelite friar Thomas Fishlake. This translation became the first work written originally in English to circulate on the European continent. The Scale and Mixed Life were printed by Wynkyn de Worde in Westminster in 1494, at the request of Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of King Henry VII, and five more times before the English Reformation of the 1530s.
With the revival of the Roman Catholic Church in England in the 19th century, a modernised version of a 1659 edition was issued by Fr J. B. Dalgairns in 1870. Evelyn Underhill published an edition of the Scale in 1923.

Veneration

Hilton is honoured in the Church of England on 24 March and in the American Episcopal Church on 28 September, along with Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe.

Modern editions