The Visitation of Crowds

The same holiness that drew disciples drew multitudes: the sick seeking healing, the possessed seeking deliverance, pilgrims, and the powerful, until Hilarion’s desert was no longer a desert but a thoroughfare, and the hermit who had fled Antony’s mountain to escape the crowds found the crowds again at his own door. This file establishes Jerome’s account of the fame that besieged Hilarion, his evident distress at it, and the deep tension the Life draws between the holy man as a public figure and the solitary’s vocation to be hidden.

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

The Desert Besieged

The arc of Hilarion’s Palestinian years, as Jerome tells it, is one of an increasing failure to remain unknown. The first reported wonders — a healing here, an exorcism there — spread his name, and once his name was known the people came. Jerome describes a steady swelling of the traffic to his cell: first individuals, then families, then “great crowds” from Palestine and beyond, bringing their sick and their demon-possessed, so that the hermit was surrounded by exactly the kind of multitude that had driven him from Antony’s mountain in the first place (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the gathering crowds; trans. White 1998; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 6). The desert behind Majuma, chosen for its emptiness, filled up; the silence Hilarion had sought was broken by the noise of the petitioners.

The crowds were not only the humble. Jerome’s narrative brings to Hilarion’s door figures of standing — provincial notables, a candidate in the public games, even, in the wandering years, the rulers and bishops of distant cities (treated in The Chariot Race and the Camel and Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia, Cyprus). This is a standard feature of the late-antique holy man as the sources portray him: the man of the desert becomes, precisely by his withdrawal from society, a figure to whom the whole of society resorts — a court of appeal, a healer, an oracle, a patron — so that the more perfectly he flees the world the more the world pursues him (Cox Miller 1983; on the type, see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion).

The Saint’s Distress

What gives Jerome’s treatment of the crowds its particular force is Hilarion’s reaction to them. He is not gratified by his fame but oppressed by it. Jerome repeatedly shows the saint groaning under the press of visitors, weeping that he could not be hidden, complaining that the renown of his miracles had robbed him of the solitude for which he had become a monk (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — Hilarion’s grief at his fame; trans. White 1998). The most concentrated expression of this distress comes when, at length, the burden becomes unbearable and Hilarion resolves to flee — to leave Palestine altogether and seek again the hiddenness he had lost — saying, in Jerome’s report, that he would not be a spectacle, that he had become a public show, and that he must depart (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the resolve to flee Palestine; trans. White 1998; the flights are detailed in The Flight from Fame).

This distress is not merely a personality trait Jerome happens to record; it is theologically weighted. In the desert tradition, the love of human praise — kenodoxia, vainglory — was reckoned among the most dangerous of the passions, the subtle pride that could undo a lifetime of asceticism and that grew most readily from the very holiness that drew admiration. Hilarion’s flight from fame is thus the flight from a temptation: the saint understands that to be venerated is to be endangered, and that the safety of his soul lies in obscurity (Chitty 1966; on the ascetic theology, see The Pattern of Solitude). Jerome means his reader to admire not the crowds’ devotion but the saint’s recoil from it.

The Tension at the Heart of the Holy Life

The visitation of the crowds exposes a tension that runs through the whole of early monasticism and is nowhere sharper than in Hilarion’s story: the hermit’s vocation is to be hidden, yet his holiness makes him sought; the more he succeeds in sanctity the more he fails in solitude. This is the engine of Hilarion’s biography. Where Antony, in Athanasius, eventually accepts a measure of public role — receiving visitors, answering the philosophers, intervening in the Arian crisis — Hilarion, in Jerome, never reconciles himself to it, and the unresolved tension propels him into the long wanderings that fill the second half of the Life (Weingarten 2005; Rebenich 2002).

It is worth observing that this tension also served Jerome’s own purposes. Jerome was, in the years he wrote, a controversial promoter of the ascetic life among the Roman aristocracy, and a saint who shunned all worldly notice was a useful rebuke to the worldliness Jerome attacked; the figure of the holy man hounded by his own fame carried a polemical charge in Jerome’s hands (Rebenich 2002; on this, see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion). The reader should therefore receive Hilarion’s distress at the crowds as at once a genuine note of the eremitic ethos — the real horror of vainglory that the desert fathers all shared — and a theme Jerome had every reason to develop. Both can be true: the historical Hilarion may well have fled his fame, as Sozomen’s independent tradition of his removal to Cyprus implies (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14, V.10), and Jerome may well have made the most of it.

The visitation of the crowds, then, is the turning point of the Life. It marks the moment when Hilarion’s founding work in Palestine was done — the monasteries established, the movement seeded — and the moment when the cost of that work, his lost solitude, became insupportable. Out of it comes the second and stranger half of his story: not the founder rooted in one desert, but the old man wandering the Mediterranean in search of a hiddenness he would not find until his death on Cyprus.

See Also

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 gathering crowds of sick and possessed; Hilarion’s grief at his fame; the resolve to flee Palestine.)
  • Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14; V.10. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (The independent tradition of Hilarion’s withdrawal and removal to Cyprus.)
  • Cox Miller, Patricia. Biography in Late Antiquity: A Quest for the Holy Man. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. (The late-antique holy man as a public figure sought by society.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Vainglory and the flight from praise in the desert tradition.)
  • Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002. (Jerome’s polemical use of the ascetic ideal.)
  • Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The flight from fame as the structuring theme of the Life.)