The Cult

Out of the saint’s death and the translation of his relics grew an early and geographically spread veneration: a Palestinian cult at the monastery of Majuma where Hesychius brought the body, a continuing Cypriot cult at the original tomb in the hills, and — through the rapid diffusion of Jerome’s Life — the spread of Hilarion’s name into the Latin West. This file establishes the early cult of Hilarion in Palestine, Cyprus, and the West, and sets it within the early Church’s veneration of the saints and their relics.

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

The Cult at Majuma and in Palestine

The primary home of Hilarion’s cult was the monastery near Majuma, the port of Gaza, where Hesychius had carried the relics and where the saint had begun his monastic life decades before (see The Relics Translated to Palestine). There the monks venerated their founder, and the shrine became a center of devotion for the Palestinian monastic movement that traced its origin to him. The cult had a strong local foundation: Hilarion was the father of the very monasticism that filled the Gaza desert, and his monks had every reason to keep his memory and venerate his relics with particular fervor (Chitty 1966).

That the Palestinian cult was real and locally anchored is confirmed independently of Jerome by Sozomen, who, as a native of the Gaza region, knew the monastery and the memory of Hilarion among the Christians of his district (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14). Sozomen also preserves a striking notice bearing on the cult’s history: that under the emperor Julian the Apostate (r. 361–363), in the brief pagan reaction, the pagans of the region attacked the saint’s shrine — for the cult of Hilarion stood, as his life had stood, in direct opposition to the paganism of Gaza (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History V.10) [Disputed: the precise events of the pagan reaction against Hilarion's shrine under Julian come from Sozomen and concern the period around or just after the saint's removal; the chronology relative to Hilarion's own death (c. 371) is not perfectly clear in the sources, and the notice is best read as evidence of the cult's early establishment and its conflict with surviving paganism rather than as a fixed dated event]. The episode shows the cult of Hilarion already a force in the religious struggle of the region within a generation of his life.

The Continuing Cult on Cyprus

The translation of the body to Palestine did not end the veneration of Hilarion on Cyprus. As noted in the previous file, the original tomb in the Cypriot hills remained a hallowed place, and Jerome reports that wonders continued to be associated with it even after the relics were removed — the Cypriots, deprived of the body, kept the cult of the grave (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the continuing Cypriot veneration; trans. White 1998; see The Relics Translated to Palestine). Cyprus thus retained Hilarion as one of its own holy ones, the great hermit who had ended his life and first been buried on the island, and the saint’s association with Cyprus remained strong in the island’s tradition (Weingarten 2005). The double cult — Majuma and Cyprus — gave Hilarion an unusually wide early veneration, spanning the Palestinian coast and the great island of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Diffusion in the West

The third channel of Hilarion’s cult was literary, and it was Jerome’s doing. By writing the Life of Hilarion in Latin and circulating it as part of his triptych of monastic Lives, Jerome carried the saint’s name and story into the Latin-speaking West, where Hilarion would otherwise have remained unknown (see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion). The Life was widely read and copied, one of the most popular of the monastic biographies, and through it Hilarion entered the devotional and liturgical memory of the Western Church alongside Antony and Paul the Hermit (Rebenich 2002; Weingarten 2005). The diffusion of the cult in the West is therefore inseparable from the diffusion of Jerome’s text: where the Life went, the veneration of Hilarion followed, and the saint of the Gaza desert became a familiar figure in the monastic imagination of Latin Christendom (on the East–West spread, see Veneration).

Relics and the Veneration of the Saints

The cult of Hilarion belongs to a development that the fourth century saw flower across the whole Church: the veneration of the saints and especially of their relics. The early Christians had honored the martyrs at their tombs and kept their relics as precious — a practice already visible in the second century — and in the fourth century, as the age of the great persecutions passed and the ascetic confessors took the martyrs’ place as the Church’s heroes, the veneration of holy bodies and the keeping of their feasts grew into a central feature of Christian devotion (Chitty 1966; on the patristic context, see The Church Fathers). The translation of relics — the moving of a holy body to a new shrine, as Hesychius moved Hilarion’s — became a recognized and powerful act of devotion, multiplying the centers of a saint’s presence and binding communities to their holy patrons.

The Orthodox theology of relics rests on the conviction that the bodies of the saints, having been temples of the Holy Spirit and instruments of holiness in life, remain bearers of grace in death, channels through which God continues to work and points of communion between the Church on earth and the saint in glory. The veneration paid to relics is not worship, which belongs to God alone, but honor, of the kind the Martyrdom of Polycarp had already distinguished in the second century when it said the Christians worship Christ but love the martyrs as His disciples (cf. Martyrdom of Polycarp 17). Hilarion’s cult — the incorrupt body, the translated relics, the rival shrines, the wonders at the tomb — is a fourth-century instance of this theology in action, the Church honoring in death the man God had made holy in life.

The Foundation of the Later Veneration

The early cult described here — Palestinian, Cypriot, and Western — is the foundation on which the developed liturgical veneration of Hilarion was built: the feast of 21 October, the saint’s place in the calendars and synaxaria of the Orthodox and Western Churches, and his standing among the great fathers of monasticism (treated in Feast and Cult and Legacy and Assessment). What began at a stolen grave on Cyprus and a monastery shrine at Majuma grew, through Jerome’s pen and the Church’s memory, into a veneration that has lasted from the fourth century to the present, keeping alive the memory of the boy from Thabatha who became the father of the monks of the Holy Land.

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 continuing Cypriot veneration of the tomb; the relics at Majuma.)
Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14; V.10. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (The Palestinian cult known to Sozomen’s region; the pagan reaction against the shrine under Julian.)
The Martyrdom of Polycarp 17. (The early distinction between the worship due to Christ and the honor paid to the saints.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The Palestinian monastic cult; the fourth-century veneration of ascetic saints.)
Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The Cypriot and Palestinian cults; the diffusion through Jerome’s text.)
Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002. (The popularity and circulation of the Life in the West.)