The Relics Translated to Palestine

Hilarion died on Cyprus and was buried there, but his disciple Hesychius could not bear that the saint’s body should rest away from the Palestinian desert he had hallowed — and so, by Jerome’s account, after some ten months he returned secretly to Cyprus and carried the relics off (a pious theft, in the frank telling of the Life) back to the monastery near Majuma. This file establishes the translation of the relics: the burial on Cyprus, the incorrupt body Jerome reports, Hesychius’s daring recovery, and the two rival centers — Cyprus and Majuma — that the divided body created.

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

The Burial on Cyprus

When Hilarion died, around 371, in his remote retreat in the hills of Cyprus, he was buried there by Hesychius and the Cypriot Christians among whom he had spent his last years (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the death and burial; trans. White 1998; trans. NPNF 2nd ser., vol. 6; see Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia, Cyprus). The Cypriots, who had received the great hermit at the end of his wanderings, naturally regarded the tomb as their treasure, and the saint’s grave on the island became at once a place of veneration. This is the first center of Hilarion’s cult: the original tomb on Cyprus, the place where his body actually lay first.

Jerome reports a wonder of the grave that belongs to the standard repertoire of the saints’ relics: that when, after some months, the body was taken up, it was found incorrupt — undecayed and giving off a sweet odor — as though the holiness of the man had preserved his flesh from corruption (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the incorrupt body; trans. White 1998). The incorruption of the relics is reported here as the Life‘s testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5); in the Orthodox tradition the incorruption of a saint’s body is received as a sign of sanctity, and Jerome offers it in exactly that spirit, as the seal of God upon His servant.

Hesychius and the Recovery of the Body

The dramatic heart of the relics narrative is Hesychius’s recovery of the body. Hesychius, who had served Hilarion to the end and buried him on Cyprus, was unwilling to leave the saint’s body on the island; he wished it brought back to Palestine, to the monastery near Majuma where Hilarion’s monastic life had begun and where the Palestinian monks venerated their founder’s memory. But the Cypriots guarded the tomb jealously and would not have given the relics up. So, Jerome reports, Hesychius resorted to stratagem: after about ten months he returned to Cyprus, made a pretense of wishing to live at the saint’s old retreat, and then secretly took up the body and carried it away by ship to Palestine, conveying it to the monastery at Majuma, where the monks and the whole population came out to receive it with great honor (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — Hesychius’s recovery and the translation to Majuma; trans. White 1998).

Jerome does not disguise the character of the act: it was, in plain terms, a theft of relics — a furtum sacrum, in the language later attached to such episodes — a pious robbery in which the disciple stole his master’s body for love and for his homeland (Weingarten 2005). The motif of the holy theft of relics, far from being scandalous in the early medieval mind, was a recognized and even admired form of devotion: the saint was understood to permit, even to will, the translation of his body to the place where he was most loved, so that the success of the theft was itself read as the saint’s consent (on relics in the early Church, see The Cult). Jerome’s frank telling of Hesychius’s stratagem thus carries no censure; it is told as an act of supreme attachment to the saint.

The Two Centers of the Cult

The result of Hesychius’s translation was that Hilarion came to have two rival centers of veneration, and Jerome records the rivalry. The body lay now at Majuma in Palestine, where the monks of the monastery Hilarion had founded venerated their father’s relics; but the Cypriots, deprived of the body, continued to venerate the original tomb in the hills, which had been hallowed by the saint’s death and burial and from which (Jerome notes) wonders continued to be reported even after the body was gone (Jerome, Life of Hilarion — the rival veneration at Cyprus and Majuma; trans. White 1998; Weingarten 2005). The phenomenon is a familiar one in the cult of the saints: a translated body leaves behind a hallowed grave, and both the new shrine of the relics and the old shrine of the tomb become places of pilgrimage, each with its own claim on the saint.

This double cult is itself a kind of confirmation of the historical core of Hilarion’s story. That two communities — Palestinian and Cypriot — both claimed the saint, and that Sozomen independently knew of Hilarion’s connection with both Palestine and Cyprus (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14, V.10), points to a real and widely venerated figure whose death and burial on Cyprus and whose Palestinian origin were both firmly remembered (see The Historical Hilarion).

Reading the Relics Narrative

As with the rest of the Life, the relics narrative must be read with the double eye this collection has used throughout. The broad facts — Hilarion’s death and burial on Cyprus, the existence of a Palestinian cult at his monastery, and a Cypriot cult at his tomb — sit on the secure side of the record, supported by Sozomen’s independent knowledge of both locations. The vivid particulars — the incorrupt and fragrant body, the precise ten months, the cloak-and-dagger of Hesychius’s theft — are Jerome’s, told in the idiom of the relic-translation narrative and pinned to the Life (METHODOLOGY §3.5; Weingarten 2005). Hesychius himself is very probably the channel through which the whole tradition, including this closing drama, reached Jerome, which gives the relics narrative a special place in the Life: it is the part of the story closest to its likely living source, the disciple who buried the saint, stole his body, and may well have told the tale that Jerome wrote down (Weingarten 2005; see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion).

The translation of Hilarion’s relics to Palestine completes the circle his life had traced. The boy left Gaza for Antony’s desert; the man founded the monastic life in the desert of Gaza; the old man fled across the sea to die on Cyprus; and the disciple, by a holy theft, brought him home — so that the father of Palestinian monasticism rests, in the end, in the Palestinian soil he had made holy.

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 burial on Cyprus; the incorrupt body; Hesychius’s secret recovery and the translation to Majuma; the rival veneration at Cyprus and Majuma.)
  • Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14; V.10. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (The independent knowledge of Hilarion’s connection with both Palestine and Cyprus.)
  • Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The relic-theft motif; the double cult; Hesychius as the channel of tradition.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The Palestinian monastic context of the cult.)