Gaza and Alexandria

Hilarion was born about 291 at the village of Thabatha, some five miles south of Gaza in Palestine, of parents who worshipped idols — “a rose,” in Jerome’s phrase, “among thorns.” Sent while still a boy to study under a grammarian at Alexandria, he was baptized there and gave himself to Christ, so that the two poles of his beginnings were a pagan village on the edge of the Palestinian desert and the great Christian metropolis of Egypt. This file establishes what Jerome’s Life reports of his origins, his schooling, and his conversion, and sets that account against the geography and the religious world of the fourth-century coast.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)

The Village near Gaza

Jerome opens the Life of Hilarion with the saint’s origins, and the opening is precise about place. “Hilarion was born in the village of Thabatha, which lies about five miles to the south of Gaza, a city of Palestine,” and he was born, Jerome adds, “of parents devoted to idols” — so that, in the famous figure, “he blossomed like a rose among thorns” (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 2; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 6; trans. White 1998). The dating of his birth is not given directly by Jerome but is reckoned back from the length of life and the date of death the Life implies: the usual modern reckoning places his birth around 291 and his death around 371, in his eightieth year [Disputed: Jerome's chronology in the *Life* is internally loose; modern scholars derive birth c. 291 / death c. 371 (so the *Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church* and most handbooks), but the figures are inferences from a literary text rather than dated records, and Weingarten (2005) cautions that Jerome's numbers serve his narrative more than a calendar].

Thabatha — the modern identification is with a site in the territory south of Gaza, in the coastal strip of Palestine — lay in a region that was still substantially pagan in the late third century. Gaza itself was a stronghold of the old cults well into the Christian centuries; its great temple of Marnas, the Marneion, would not fall until the very end of the fourth century, in the time of Bishop Porphyry of Gaza (c. 402), more than a generation after Hilarion’s death (Chitty 1966; on the apostolic and patriarchal geography, see Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem). That a future founder of Christian monasticism should arise from idol-worshipping parents in such a region is, for Jerome, not incidental but the point: the Life is a story of grace springing up where one would least expect it, and the “rose among thorns” is its governing image.

Susan Weingarten, in the principal modern study of Jerome’s hagiography, notes how carefully Jerome anchors the Life of Hilarion in real Palestinian and Egyptian geography — the distances, the place-names, the routes — even as he shapes the narrative for his own purposes; the topographical precision is one of the marks that argue for a genuine figure behind the literary portrait (Weingarten 2005). The reader meets at the outset the double character of the source: a story told with the conventions of holy-man biography, but pinned to a map that can be checked.

The Schools of Alexandria

Because there was no advanced schooling to be had in his own corner of Palestine, the boy was sent abroad. “He was handed over to a grammarian at Alexandria,” Jerome reports, “and there, so far as his age allowed, he gave proof of great ability and character” (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 2; trans. White 1998). Alexandria in the early fourth century was the second city of the Roman world, the seat of an ancient catechetical tradition and, in Hilarion’s youth, the see soon to be held by Athanasius — the city that was the intellectual capital of Greek Christianity and the hub from which the news of the desert monks radiated.

It was there, Jerome continues, that the young Hilarion became a Christian: “he was loved by all and was skilled in speech; but what was more, he believed in the Lord Jesus, and took no delight in the madness of the circus, the blood of the arena, or the luxury of the theatre” (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 2; trans. NPNF; trans. White 1998). The triad of circus, arena, and theatre is a standard rhetorical set-piece — the three great spectacles of the Greco-Roman city that Christian moralists routinely renounced — and Jerome deploys it to mark Hilarion’s conversion as a turning from the whole apparatus of pagan civic life. The detail is conventional, but its function is to show a youth already ascetic in temper before he ever reached the desert.

That Alexandria should be the place of his baptism and conversion ties Hilarion from the start to the Egyptian Church and to its monastic ferment. The same city was the funnel through which travelers, pilgrims, and seekers passed on their way to the desert of Antony; and it was at Alexandria, by Jerome’s account, that Hilarion first heard of “the fame of Antony, which was on the lips of all the races of Egypt” (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 3; trans. White 1998). The conversion in the Christian metropolis and the call to the desert are, in the Life, two moments of a single movement: the boy who would not delight in the spectacles of the city was already being drawn toward the man of the wilderness.

The Religious World of the Coast

To understand Hilarion’s beginnings is to understand the seam he lived on. The southern Palestinian coast around Gaza was a frontier between a still-vigorous paganism and an advancing Christianity; the Egyptian desert beyond the Nile delta was, in these very decades, becoming “a city” of monks under the influence of Antony and, in the cenobitic mode, of Pachomius (Chitty 1966; on the wider monastic movement, see Monasticism). Hilarion’s life would consist precisely in carrying what was being forged in the Egyptian desert back across that seam into his Palestinian homeland.

The fourth century into which he was born was the age of the Church’s emergence from persecution into imperial favor — the era of the Peace of the Church under Constantine, of the Council of Nicaea (325), and of the Arian crisis that would consume the energies of Athanasius, the man who would write the Life of Antony that became the template for Hilarion’s own (on the period, see The Pre-Schism Church). It was an age in which, as worldly Christianity grew comfortable, the most fervent sought a new martyrdom in the ascetic life of the desert — and Hilarion, the convert of Alexandria from a pagan village, was among the first to bring that desert home to the Holy Land.

The honest limit of all this must be stated plainly: every detail of Hilarion’s birth, parentage, schooling, and conversion comes from Jerome alone, written about a century after the events and by a man who never knew him. Sozomen, the one independent witness, confirms the broad fact that Hilarion was the founder of the monastic life in Palestine and a man of the region of Gaza, but does not corroborate the particulars of his youth (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14; on the source problem, see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion and The Historical Hilarion). The “rose among thorns” of Thabatha is the beginning of a story we possess in a single, deliberately crafted telling.

See Also

References

  • Jerome. Life of Hilarion (Vita Hilarionis) 2–3. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 6. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1893; and trans. Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives. London: Penguin, 1998. (Birth at Thabatha near Gaza; the “rose among thorns”; the schooling at Alexandria; the conversion and the renunciation of the spectacles.)
  • Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (The independent notice that Hilarion founded the monastic life in Palestine.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Gaza and its cults; the Egyptian desert in Hilarion’s youth.)
  • Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (Jerome’s geographical precision in the Life of Hilarion; the cautions about his chronology.)