The Visit to Antony

Hearing at Alexandria of the fame of St. Antony, the boy Hilarion — about fifteen years old — went out into the Egyptian desert to find him, and stayed about two months in his company, watching his life of prayer and labor. But the crowds that already thronged Antony’s mountain made the stricter solitude Hilarion sought impossible there, and so he returned toward his own country to begin, in the desert of Gaza, what Antony had begun in Egypt. This file establishes Jerome’s account of the formative visit, its place in linking Hilarion to the father of monasticism, and how the encounter is shaped by Jerome’s literary purpose.

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

The Journey into the Desert

The hinge of Hilarion’s early life, in Jerome’s telling, is the visit to Antony. Having been converted at Alexandria, the boy heard “the name of Antony, which was then famous among all the peoples of Egypt,” and “burning with desire to see him, he set out for the desert” (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 3; trans. White 1998; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 6). The journey is the classic pattern of the monastic vocation as the fourth century understood it: the seeker leaves the inhabited world and goes out to sit at the feet of an established father, to receive not a doctrine but a way of life learned by watching.

Jerome gives Hilarion’s age at this point as about fifteen (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 3; trans. White 1998), which on the usual chronology places the visit around 306 — a date that matters, because it bears directly on the contested claim that Hilarion was the first monk of Palestine [Disputed: the date of the visit and return depends on Jerome's loose chronology; the conventional reckoning (birth c. 291, visit at c. 15) yields a return to Palestine c. 306, but the figures are inferred from the *Life* and are not independently dated — see the discussion at [The Desert of Gaza](../02-father-of-palestinian-monasticism/the-desert-of-gaza.md)]. The young convert of the Alexandrian schools thus comes to Antony as a pupil at the very beginning of the great age of the desert, while Antony himself was still alive and his fame still growing.

Two Months with Antony

What Hilarion found, Jerome says, was not the solitude he had imagined but a mountain already crowded. He “remained with him about two months, observing the order of his life and the seriousness of his conduct: how constant he was in prayer, how humble in receiving the brethren, severe in rebuking, eager in exhorting, and how no weakness of the body ever broke the rigour of his abstinence” (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 3; trans. NPNF; trans. White 1998). The list is a portrait of the monastic virtues as Athanasius had set them out in the Life of Antony — prayer, humility, discernment, unbroken self-denial — and Jerome means his reader to see in the boy’s two months a complete apprenticeship in the desert ideal.

But “the multitude of those who came to Antony on account of various sicknesses and the assaults of demons” made the place, Jerome says, no longer a true desert: Hilarion “considered that it was unbecoming to seek in the desert the renown of the city,” and resolved that, having learned how Antony lived, he must go and live so himself, but in a hiddenness Antony’s fame no longer permitted him (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 3; trans. White 1998). This is a theme Jerome plants at the very root of the Life and returns to again and again: the flight from fame as the deepest impulse of Hilarion’s whole career (see The Flight from Fame). The crowds that drove the young man away from Antony’s mountain prefigure the crowds that would, decades later, drive the old man away from his own.

So Hilarion left. “Having received the saint’s blessing,” he returned toward his homeland with a few companions, learned on the way of the death of his parents, divided his inheritance — part to his brothers, part to the poor, keeping nothing for himself — and went down into the desert near Gaza to begin the life (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 3; trans. White 1998). The renunciation of property at the threshold of the desert is itself modeled on the gospel scene that, in Athanasius, had launched Antony: the word “if you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor” (Matthew 19:21), which Antony heard read in church and obeyed (Athanasius, Life of Antony 2–3). Jerome’s Hilarion enters his vocation by the same gate.

The visit to Antony does double work in the Life. Historically, it makes Hilarion the disciple and heir of the father of monasticism, the channel by which the Egyptian eremitic life was carried into Palestine — the role that is the basis of his importance (see Hilarion and the Monastic Mission). Literarily, it binds Jerome’s Life of Hilarion to Athanasius’s Life of Antony, the work Jerome openly took as his model: by sending his hero to Antony, Jerome makes his own Life a sequel and a complement to the Antony, and signals to his reader that what Athanasius did for Egypt he, Jerome, is doing for Palestine (on this, see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion).

This means the visit must be read with a double eye. There is no reason to doubt that the historical Hilarion stood in the tradition of Antony — Sozomen, independently, calls him the man who brought the monastic philosophy to Palestine and treats him as belonging to the Antonian movement (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14). But the particular scene — the two months, the catalogue of Antony’s virtues, the crowds, the boy’s resolve — is told in the idiom and with the purposes of Jerome’s hagiography, and the catalogue of virtues in particular is so close to Athanasius’s that it reads as homage rather than independent reportage (Weingarten 2005; Rebenich 2002). Patricia Cox Miller has shown how the late-antique Life of a holy man works by such patterning, presenting the saint less as a unique individual than as a fresh embodiment of a recognized type (Cox Miller 1983); the visit to Antony is precisely where Jerome establishes the type to which his Hilarion will conform.

The honest summary, then, is this: that Hilarion was formed in the Antonian tradition and carried it to Palestine is as secure as anything in his story, vouched for by an independent witness. The vivid particulars of the visit — the number of months, the words exchanged, the inner resolve — are Jerome’s, told to bind his saint to Antony and his book to Athanasius, and are to be received as the hagiographer’s portrait of a real discipleship rather than as a stenographic record of it.

See Also

References

  • Jerome. Life of Hilarion (Vita Hilarionis) 3. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 6. 1893; and trans. Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives. London: Penguin, 1998. (The journey to Antony; the two months; the catalogue of Antony’s virtues; the crowds; the resolve to seek a stricter solitude; the renunciation of the inheritance.)
  • Athanasius. Life of Antony (Vita Antonii) 2–3. (The gospel call to sell all and follow, the model for the monastic renunciation.)
  • Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (Hilarion as the bringer of the monastic life to Palestine, in the tradition of Antony.)
  • Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002. (Jerome’s use of Athanasius’s Antony as a model.)
  • Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The literary dependence of the Life of Hilarion on the Antony.)
  • Cox Miller, Patricia. Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. (The conventions of the late-antique holy-man Life.)