The Flight from Fame

The deepest motive of Hilarion’s life, in Jerome’s telling, was the horror of being known. When the crowds his holiness drew made his Palestinian solitude impossible, the old man fled — back to Egypt and the desert of his master Antony, and then on and on across the sea, settling and being discovered and fleeing again in a pattern that fills the whole second half of the Life. This file establishes the motive and the rhythm of the flights, sets them within the desert tradition’s fear of vainglory, and shows how Jerome reads Hilarion’s restless flight as the purest expression of the eremitic vocation.

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

The Motive: The Horror of Vainglory

Hilarion’s flights are not, in Jerome’s presentation, the wanderings of a restless temperament but the deliberate self-defense of a soul against a specific spiritual danger: the love of human praise. In the moral theology of the desert, vainglory (kenodoxia) and its sister pride were reckoned the subtlest and deadliest of the passions, the more dangerous because they fed precisely on virtue — the more a monk’s holiness was admired, the greater his peril (Chitty 1966; on the passions, see The Pattern of Solitude). A hermit surrounded by crowds calling him holy stood in exactly the position the fathers feared most. Hilarion’s flight from fame is therefore, in Jerome’s framing, an act of ascetic prudence: to save his soul he must lose his reputation, and to lose his reputation he must keep moving.

Jerome makes this explicit in the saint’s own laments and resolves — that he had become a spectacle, that he could not pray for the press of visitors, that he must go where he was not known (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — Hilarion’s resolve to flee; trans. White 1998; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 6; see The Visitation of Crowds). The flight is thus the negative image of the holiness: the same sanctity that drew the crowds drove the saint, and the deeper his holiness the more urgent his need to hide.

The Resolve to Leave Palestine

The turning point comes when the burden in Palestine becomes insupportable. Jerome describes the moment of decision with feeling: Hilarion, now an old man with decades of fame upon him, weeping at the loss of his solitude, resolves to abandon the desert of Gaza that he had made the cradle of Palestinian monasticism, and to go where no one would know his face (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the departure from Palestine; trans. White 1998). The brethren and the people, hearing of his intention, gathered to prevent it — a great crowd, Jerome says, that would not let him go and that he had to overcome by sheer determination, refusing food until they relented (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the people’s attempt to detain him; trans. White 1998). The scene captures the paradox precisely: the man flees the crowds, and the crowds gather to stop his fleeing.

That he did leave Palestine and end his life elsewhere is one of the securely attested facts of his story, confirmed by Sozomen independently of Jerome (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14, V.10; see The Historical Hilarion). The historical Hilarion really did remove himself from the scene of his founding work, and the flight from fame, whatever Jerome made of it, has a genuine root in the saint’s recorded removal to Cyprus.

The Return to Egypt and the Desert of Antony

The first stage of the flight took Hilarion back to Egypt — a homecoming, of a sort, to the land where his vocation had begun. Jerome has him go to the places associated with Antony, who by now had died (Antony died c. 356), and visit the site of the master’s solitude and death, paying homage to the father of the life he had carried to Palestine (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the return to Egypt and the desert of Antony; trans. White 1998; on the visit and death-site, see Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia, Cyprus). The return to Antony’s desert closes a circle the Life opened with the visit of the boy of fifteen: Hilarion ends as he began, at the feet of Antony, now in memory. It is a deliberate literary symmetry on Jerome’s part, binding the two ends of the Life together through the figure of the master (Weingarten 2005).

But Egypt, too, failed to hide him. The pattern that had driven him from Palestine reasserted itself: he was recognized, the sick and the seekers found him, and the solitude dissolved again (Jerome, Life of Hilarion; trans. White 1998). So the flight continued — westward now, out of the Egyptian and Palestinian world altogether and across the Mediterranean.

The Rhythm of the Flights

What follows in the Life is a repeating cycle, and the repetition is the point. In each new place — Sicily, then Dalmatia, then Cyprus — the same sequence unfolds: Hilarion arrives unknown and finds a hidden spot; he is discovered, often through a wonder he cannot help working; the crowds gather; and he flees once more to a remoter place (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the wanderings; trans. White 1998; the itinerary is detailed in Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia, Cyprus). The cycle dramatizes a spiritual truth the desert tradition held dear: that holiness cannot finally be hidden, that the light cannot be put under a bushel, and that the saint who flees fame only proves his sanctity by the very flight. Jerome turns Hilarion’s restlessness into a kind of sustained sermon on humility, in which the impossibility of escape is itself the measure of the man.

Jerome’s Reading of the Flight

For Jerome, then, the flight from fame is not a flaw or an eccentricity but the crown of Hilarion’s holiness — the proof that he sought God and not himself, that he valued solitude above honor, and that he kept to the end the hermit’s vocation to be hidden in God. Where his master Antony eventually accepted a public role, Hilarion never did, and Jerome presents this stricter, more uncompromising flight as a distinctive note of his sanctity (Weingarten 2005; cf. Athanasius, Life of Antony, on Antony’s public engagements). It is also, as the source-criticism notes, a theme Jerome had reason to develop for his own ascetic propaganda — a saint who fled all worldly notice was a sharp rebuke to a worldly Church (Rebenich 2002; see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion). Both can be held at once: the historical saint really did withdraw to Cyprus, as Sozomen attests, and Jerome made of that withdrawal a great meditation on the flight from glory.

The flight from fame is thus the thread that ties the whole of Hilarion’s wandering years together and gives them their meaning. It begins in the crowds that drove the boy from Antony’s mountain, runs through the crowds that drove the old man from Gaza, and ends only in the hills above Paphos on Cyprus, where at last — in death — the hermit found the solitude that life had never let him keep.

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. (Hilarion’s resolve to flee Palestine; the people’s attempt to detain him; the return to Egypt and the desert of Antony; the repeating cycle of discovery and flight.)
  • Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14; V.10. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (The independent witness to Hilarion’s withdrawal and removal to Cyprus.)
  • Athanasius. Life of Antony (Vita Antonii). (Antony’s contrasting acceptance of a public role.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Vainglory and the flight from praise in the desert tradition.)
  • 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; the symmetry of the return to Antony.)
  • Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002. (Jerome’s polemical use of the flight from worldly notice.)