The Desert of Gaza

Returning from Egypt around the age of fifteen, Hilarion gave away the inheritance left by his dead parents and went down into the wilderness behind Majuma, the port of Gaza, to live as a hermit — and there, by the witness of Jerome and the independent testimony of Sozomen, he became the founder of the monastic life in Palestine, by Jerome’s tradition the first monk of the Holy Land. This file establishes the founding of the Palestinian desert: the renunciation, the hut at Majuma, the long years of solitude, and the contested but well-attested claim of priority that makes Hilarion the father of monasticism east of the Jordan.

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

The Return and the Renunciation

Hilarion came back from Antony’s desert to find his parents dead. Jerome reports that he divided the property they left: “he gave a part to his brothers and a part to the poor, keeping nothing at all for himself,” remembering the fate of Ananias and Sapphira and the Lord’s word that whoever does not renounce all he has cannot be His disciple (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 3; trans. White 1998; cf. Luke 14:33, Acts 5:1–11). The total divestment is the formal beginning of his monastic life and, again, a deliberate echo of Antony’s renunciation in Athanasius (Athanasius, Life of Antony 2–3): the new monk strips himself of the world before entering the desert.

Then, “when he was about fifteen years old, he went into the desert” — the wilderness that lay between Gaza and the sea, behind the port settlement of Majuma (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 3–4; trans. White 1998). On the usual chronology this places the founding of his solitude around the year 306 [Disputed: the date rests on Jerome's statement of Hilarion's age (about fifteen) combined with the inferred birth-date c. 291, giving a return c. 306; the figures are drawn from the *Life* and are not independently dated, so "c. 306" should be read as a scholarly inference rather than a fixed point (Weingarten 2005)]. It was a bold place to settle. The coast around Gaza was infested, Jerome says, with robbers, and his friends warned the boy of the danger; he answered that one who fears death does not fear robbers, and that he who had nothing to lose feared nothing (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 4; trans. White 1998) — the fearlessness of total poverty, offered as the first sign of his sanctity.

The Hut at Majuma

Hilarion’s dwelling, as Jerome describes it, was of a deliberate poverty. At first he slept in the open or under reeds; later he built himself “a little cell, so small and low that it might rather be called a tomb than a house” — Jerome gives its dimensions, just wide and long enough to lie down in, more like a sepulchre than a home (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 5, and the later notice of the cell’s measurements; trans. NPNF; trans. White 1998). The cell-as-tomb is a recurring image of the ascetic life: the monk is one already dead to the world, and his cell rehearses the grave. Hilarion would live in this region behind Majuma, by Jerome’s reckoning, for some twenty-two years before the multitude of disciples and visitors finally drove him to abandon it (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the long Palestinian sojourn; on the departure, see The Flight from Fame).

The geography here is one of the marks of the Life‘s rootedness. Majuma — the harbor town of Gaza, distinct enough to have its own episcopal organization in the fourth century — is a real and identifiable place, and Jerome’s placing of Hilarion’s cell in its hinterland is consistent with the topography of the southern Palestinian coast (Weingarten 2005). Sozomen, who was himself from this very district, knew the site of Hilarion’s monastery near Gaza and the memory of it among the local Christians (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14, V.10), which gives the location an independent anchor that much of the rest of the Life lacks.

The First Monk of Palestine

The largest claim made for Hilarion is one of priority: that he was the first to bring the monastic life to Palestine — the father of Holy Land monasticism as Antony was of the Egyptian. Jerome states it directly, presenting Hilarion as the founder of the eremitic life in his homeland, and the claim is the spine of the whole Life (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the framing of Hilarion as Palestine’s Antony; trans. White 1998). Crucially, it is not Jerome’s alone. Sozomen, writing independently in the next century and drawing on the memory of his own region, says plainly that Hilarion was the originator of monasticism in Palestine, the one who introduced the discipline there and around whom the monks of the country gathered (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14).

Still, the priority claim must be held with care: [Disputed: Jerome and Sozomen present Hilarion as the first monk and founder of monasticism in Palestine; modern scholars accept that he was the great pioneer and organizer of Palestinian eremitism but note that scattered ascetics and "sons of the covenant" existed in Syria-Palestine before and around him, so "first monk of the Holy Land" is best read as "the founder of the Palestinian monastic movement" rather than a claim that no ascetic preceded him (Chitty 1966; Weingarten 2005). Jerome also had a polemical interest in exalting Hilarion as Palestine's Antony, which colors the absoluteness of the claim (Rebenich 2002).]. The careful form of the claim, then, is the one the evidence will bear: Hilarion was the man through whom the organized eremitic life took root in Palestine and from whom the later Palestinian monasticism of the Judaean desert — of Euthymius, Sabbas, and their lauras — traced its ultimate descent (Chitty 1966; on that later flowering, see Hilarion and the Monastic Mission).

The Desert as a Spiritual Geography

For Jerome, the desert of Gaza is not merely a place but a spiritual condition. Into its silence Hilarion carried the warfare he had seen waged on Antony’s mountain — the assaults of the demons, the temptations of the flesh, the long discipline of the body — and the Life fills the early Palestinian years with these struggles (Jerome, Life of Hilarion 4–8; treated in The Pattern of Solitude). The choice of the wilderness behind Majuma, within sight of the pagan stronghold of Gaza and its temple of Marnas, also frames Hilarion’s solitude as a standing rebuke to the old cults: the monk in the desert and the idol in the city face each other across a few miles of sand (Chitty 1966; on the apostolic geography, see Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem).

What can be securely held is this. A real ascetic named Hilarion, formed in the Antonian tradition, settled in the desert near Gaza in the early fourth century and became the recognized founder of the monastic life in Palestine; this much is vouched for by the independent and locally informed Sozomen as well as by Jerome. The vivid particulars — the tomb-like cell, the exact years, the fearless answer to the robbers — are Jerome’s hagiographic furnishing of that securely attested fact (on the source question, see The Historical Hilarion).

References

Jerome. Life of Hilarion (Vita Hilarionis) 3–5. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 6. 1893; and trans. Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives. London: Penguin, 1998. (The renunciation of the inheritance; the entry into the desert at about fifteen; the cell “more like a tomb than a house”; the answer to the robbers.)
Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14; V.10. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (Hilarion as founder of Palestinian monasticism; the monastery near Gaza known to Sozomen’s own region.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Hilarion as pioneer of Palestinian eremitism; the descent of the Judaean monasticism; Gaza and its cults.)
Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The topography of Majuma and the desert of Gaza; the chronology cautions.)
Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002. (Jerome’s polemical interest in presenting Hilarion as Palestine’s Antony.)