05 — Sources
The source-critical centerpiece of this guide. Nearly everything known of Hilarion descends from a single work — Jerome’s Life of Hilarion, written around 390 in deliberate imitation of Athanasius’s Life of Antony and as the central panel of Jerome’s triptych of monastic Lives. These files examine that source: its purpose and literary character, its debt to Athanasius, and its reliability; and they weigh what can be securely known of the historical Hilarion against Jerome’s literary shaping, with the independent notice of Sozomen as the one substantial external control.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of Palestinian monasticism)
A collection built on one source must be honest about that source. The Life of Hilarion is a masterpiece of late-antique hagiography, and like all such works it is a portrait painted to a purpose, in an inherited idiom, by a writer — Jerome — with strong views and polemical interests, who never met his subject and wrote a generation after his death. This does not make Hilarion a fiction: an independent witness, Sozomen, writing in the next century from Hilarion’s own region, confirms the essential fact of his role as the founder of Palestinian monasticism, and the topography Jerome anchors the Life in is real. This section holds devotion and source-criticism together, in keeping with the repository’s methodology, distinguishing what the evidence will bear from what is Jerome’s art.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Jerome’s Life of Hilarion | The Vita Hilarionis (c. 390): its date and occasion; its place as the central panel of Jerome’s triptych of monastic Lives (Paul, Hilarion, Malchus); its deliberate modeling on Athanasius’s Life of Antony; Jerome’s polemical and propagandist purposes; its literary character and the named scholarship (Rebenich, Weingarten, Cox Miller). |
| The Historical Hilarion | What can be securely known versus Jerome’s shaping; Sozomen’s independent notice (HE III.14, V.10) as the one substantial external control; the reliability debate as a structured [Disputed: ...]; how an Orthodox reader holds a saint known almost wholly through a single literary Life. |
See Also
- The Visit to Antony — the scene where Jerome binds his Life to Athanasius’s
- Healings and Exorcisms — the wonders whose literary character this section explains
- The Relics Translated to Palestine — the disciple Hesychius as Jerome’s likely informant
- The Church Fathers — Jerome among the Fathers
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; V.10. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890.
- Athanasius. Life of Antony (Vita Antonii).
- Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002.
- Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005.
- Cox Miller, Patricia. Biography in Late Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.