Disciples and the Laura

Hilarion had sought to be hidden, but his sanctity gathered a movement. Drawn by his reputation, men came to live near him in the desert of Gaza, monasteries arose across Palestine, and the eremitic life he had carried from Egypt became, by the witness of Jerome and the independent Sozomen, the seedbed of the whole Palestinian monastic tradition. This file establishes the multiplication of hermits around Hilarion, his visitation of the monasteries that grew up, and the place of his eremitic pattern in the line that would lead to the great lauras of the Judaean desert.

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

The Gathering of Hermits

The dynamic Hilarion had witnessed on Antony’s mountain repeated itself in his own desert. As his manner of life and the reports of his holiness spread, others came to imitate him; they settled near him, took up the same discipline, and so the solitary became, against his intention, the father of a community of solitaries. Jerome states that through Hilarion’s example “innumerable monasteries” arose throughout Palestine, and that all the monks of the country looked to him as their founder and master (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the spread of monasteries in Palestine; trans. White 1998; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 6). The independent Sozomen confirms the substance: Hilarion was the originator of the monastic life in Palestine, and the monks of the region traced their discipline to him (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14).

This makes Hilarion’s importance structural and not merely personal. He was not only a great ascetic but the head of a spring — the point from which the monastic life flowed into a whole province. Jerome’s claim of “innumerable monasteries” is hagiographic in its scale [Disputed: Jerome's report of "innumerable" monasteries arising through Hilarion is a rhetorical magnification typical of the genre; Sozomen independently confirms that Hilarion founded Palestinian monasticism and that monks gathered around him, but does not quantify them, and modern historians read the founding as real while discounting Jerome's hyperbole (Chitty 1966; Weingarten 2005)]. What the evidence supports is that a genuine monastic movement grew up around Hilarion in the Gaza region and that he was remembered, on independent testimony, as its father.

Hilarion’s Visitation of the Monasteries

As the monasteries multiplied, Hilarion took on, in Jerome’s narrative, a role beyond that of a hidden hermit: he became a visitor and overseer of the communities that had grown from him. Jerome describes how, late in his Palestinian years, Hilarion went about visiting the brethren and their monasteries, accompanied by a great company of monks, traveling from house to house through the desert — a kind of progress through the movement he had founded (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the visitation of the monasteries of the Gaza desert; trans. White 1998). On these journeys Jerome sets several of his characteristic episodes: the saint coming to a brother’s cell, blessing a vineyard or a field, giving counsel, and showing in passing the discernment and the wonderworking power that the Life attributes to him (treated in Healings and Exorcisms).

The visitation motif performs an important function in the Life: it shows Hilarion as not merely a solitary but a father — one whose holiness builds up a body, who cares for the communities his example called into being. It also, in Jerome’s telling, deepens the tension that drives the later narrative, for the more he is sought as a father and a wonderworker, the less he can have the solitude for which he became a monk in the first place (see The Visitation of Crowds and The Flight from Fame).

The Eremitic Pattern and the Laura

Hilarion’s monasticism was eremitic, not cenobitic — that is, a life of solitaries dwelling apart and gathered loosely around a father, rather than the regimented common life of a Pachomian monastery in Egypt. This distinction matters for his place in monastic history. The two great forms of the early monastic life were the eremitic, descended from Antony, in which monks lived alone in scattered cells; and the cenobitic, organized by Pachomius, in which they lived a fully common life under a single rule and roof (Chitty 1966; on Pachomius, see St. Pachomius the Great). Hilarion belonged to the Antonian, eremitic stream and carried it to Palestine.

The characteristic institution that would later embody this eremitic pattern in Palestine was the laura — a settlement in which monks lived as hermits in separate cells through the week and came together only for the weekend liturgy and common meal, a structure midway between the pure solitary and the full cenobium. The great Palestinian lauras of the fifth and sixth centuries — those of Chariton, Euthymius, and above all Sabbas in the Judaean desert — were the mature flowering of the eremitic life Hilarion had planted (Chitty 1966; on the later flowering and his place in it, see Hilarion and the Monastic Mission). It would be an anachronism to call Hilarion’s own gathering a laura in the developed institutional sense [Disputed: Hilarion's settlement is not described by Jerome in the technical vocabulary of the later *laura*, and scholars caution against reading the developed Sabaite institution back into the fourth century; what can be said is that Hilarion established the eremitic monasticism in Palestine from which the laura-system later grew, not that he founded a laura in the strict sense (Chitty 1966)]. But the line of descent is real: the Judaean monasticism that would make Palestine a second Egypt looked back, through its own memory and through Jerome’s and Sozomen’s witness, to Hilarion of Gaza as its origin.

The Founder Remembered

The surest measure of Hilarion’s role is that two independent traditions — Jerome’s elaborate Life and Sozomen’s brief, locally informed notice — agree on the essential fact: that he was the father of the monastic movement in Palestine, the man around whom and from whom it grew (Jerome, Life of Hilarion; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14). The particulars of the Life — the numbers, the visitation processions, the individual scenes — are Jerome’s, to be held as the hagiographer’s filling-in of that fact. But the fact itself, the founding of Palestinian monasticism in Hilarion, stands on the firmest ground the sources for his life can offer, and it is on this, more than on any single wonder, that his standing among the fathers rests (see Legacy and Assessment).

See Also

• The Visitation of Crowds — the fame that came with the gathering of disciples
• The Desert of Gaza — the solitude from which the movement grew
• Hilarion and the Monastic Mission — the later Palestinian monasticism that descended from him
• St. Pachomius the Great — the cenobitic founder beside whom Hilarion’s eremitism stands
• Monasticism — the eremitic and cenobitic forms of the monastic life

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. (The spread of monasteries in Palestine; the visitation of the brethren; Hilarion as founder and master of the Palestinian monks.)
• Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (The independent witness that Hilarion originated the monastic life in Palestine.)
• Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The eremitic and cenobitic forms; the laura; the descent of Judaean monasticism from Hilarion’s beginning.)
• Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (Jerome’s hagiographic magnification of the movement’s scale.)