Hilarion

Hilarion, commonly called Hilarion the Great, was a fourth-century Christian hermit and a principal figure in the beginnings of monasticism in Palestine. The chief ancient account of his life is the Vita Hilarionis composed by Jerome of Stridon around 390, a work that mixes a historical outline with miracle stories in the manner of contemporary hagiography. According to Jerome, Hilarion was born in the village of Tabatha, about five miles south of Gaza, of pagan parents. He was sent as a boy to Alexandria to study rhetoric and grammar. In that city he became a Christian. Hearing of the fame of Anthony the Great, he traveled into the Egyptian desert, remained with Anthony for about two months, and then returned to his native region. Finding that his parents had died, he divided the family property, giving his share to his brothers and to the poor, and at about the age of fifteen withdrew to a desert area near Maiuma, the port of Gaza, to live as an anchorite.

There he adopted an extremely austere regimen. He wore a sackcloth shirt and a cloak of skins given him by Anthony, ate sparingly of figs, vegetables, and later a little bread and oil, and supported himself by basket-weaving and garden work. He first occupied a shelter of reeds and later a cell so confined that he could neither stand upright nor lie at full length. Jerome attributes to him numerous healings, exorcisms, and other wonders. Whether or not those episodes can be verified, it is clear that disciples gathered around him and that monastic cells and communities multiplied in the Gaza district. Later ecclesiastical tradition therefore regards Hilarion as the founder who carried the Antonian eremitical pattern from Egypt into Palestine and neighboring Syria.

As his reputation spread, crowds of visitors made solitude impossible. After Anthony’s death, traditionally placed in 356, Hilarion left Palestine, visited places associated with Anthony in Egypt, and then moved westward through the desert of Libya. Jerome describes further sojourns in Sicily, at Epidaurus in Dalmatia, and finally in Cyprus. In each region admirers and the sick sought him out. He spent his last years in a secluded spot on Cyprus and died there, according to the chronology derived from Jerome, in 371, in about his eightieth year.

His close disciple Hesychius is reported to have removed the body some ten months after the burial in Cyprus and to have conveyed it to the monastery at Maiuma near Gaza, which became the center of Hilarion’s cult. The Roman Martyrology and the Byzantine calendars keep his feast on 21 October. No formal papal canonization in the later medieval sense occurred; veneration is of the ancient, pre-congregational type. Hilarion left no writings that survive. Assessment of his life depends on Jerome’s biography, on brief notices in later historians such as Sozomen, and on the liturgical tradition. Scholars treat the miracle cycle with caution while accepting that a historical Palestinian hermit of that name organized early monastic settlements in the Gaza region during the first half of the fourth century and died in Cyprus in the early 370s.