03 — The Spreading Life
The unintended consequence of Hilarion’s solitude: as his sanctity became known, hermits multiplied around him, and the monastic life he had brought from Egypt took root and spread through Palestine; and crowds came — the sick, the possessed, the curious, the great — drawn by reports of his wonders, until the fame he had fled to Antony’s desert to escape found him again in his own. These files establish the beginnings of Palestinian monasticism around Hilarion and the burden of the crowds that his holiness drew.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)
What Hilarion had not sought came to him. The monk who chose a tomb-like cell to be hidden became, in Jerome’s narrative, the seed of a whole movement: others came to live near him, monasteries arose in the Gaza region and beyond, and Palestine, which had had no organized monasticism, now had its first. With the disciples came the crowds — for healing, for deliverance, for a word, or merely to see — and the Life makes Hilarion’s discomfort with this fame one of its great themes, the engine that would eventually drive him into his years of wandering. This section treats the multiplication of the monastic life and the visitation of the crowds; the wonders that drew them are detailed in Section 04, and the flights they provoked in Section 06.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Disciples and the Laura | The multiplication of hermits around Hilarion and the beginnings of organized Palestinian monasticism (Jerome, Life of Hilarion; Sozomen, HE III.14); his visitation of the monasteries; the founding generation that traced its descent to him; the relation of his eremitic pattern to the later Palestinian laura. |
| The Visitation of Crowds | The fame that drew multitudes — the sick, the possessed, pilgrims, and the powerful — to his cell; his evident discomfort with it and his longing to be hidden; the tension between the holy man as a public figure and the hermit’s vocation to solitude, and how Jerome frames it. |
See Also
- The Desert of Gaza — the solitude out of which the movement grew
- The Wonderworker — the miracles that drew the crowds
- The Flight from Fame — where the burden of the crowds finally drove him
- Monasticism — the movement Hilarion seeded in Palestine
References
- Jerome. Life of Hilarion (Vita Hilarionis). Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 6. 1893; and trans. Carolinne White, Early Christian Lives. London: Penguin, 1998.
- Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890.
- Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.