Hilarion and the Monastic Mission

Hilarion’s lasting significance lies in his place within the spread of the monastic life: he was the man who carried the eremitic monasticism of Antony from Egypt to Palestine, the founder from whom the great Judaean lauras of Euthymius and Sabbas ultimately descended, and — through his Mediterranean wanderings and the diffusion of Jerome’s Life — an unwitting agent of the ideal’s spread to the West. This file sets Hilarion beside Antony and Pachomius among the fathers of monasticism and traces the line that runs from his desert of Gaza to the monastic world that came after.

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

The Two Founders and the Third

The monastic movement of the fourth century crystallized around two great founding figures in Egypt, and Hilarion’s importance is best understood by placing him in relation to them. Antony the Great (c. 251–356) was the father of the eremitic, or anchoritic, life — the life of the solitary hermit, dwelling alone in the desert, gathered loosely with others around a spiritual father; his Life by Athanasius made him the archetype of the monk for the whole Church (see St. Antony the Great). Pachomius the Great (c. 292–348) was the father of the cenobitic life — the fully common life of monks dwelling together under a single rule and abbot, organized in the great monasteries of the Thebaid (see St. Pachomius the Great; on the two forms, Monasticism). Between and after them stand the figures who carried the movement outward, and among these Hilarion is the foremost for Palestine (Chitty 1966).

Hilarion belonged decisively to the Antonian, eremitic stream. He had sat at Antony’s feet; he lived the solitary’s life of the measured diet and the hair shirt and the cell-tomb; and the monasticism he planted in Palestine was eremitic in character, a life of hermits gathered around a father rather than a Pachomian cenobium (see The Pattern of Solitude and Disciples and the Laura). If Antony was the father of monks and Pachomius the father of monasteries, Hilarion was the father of the monks of Palestine — the third great name in the founding generation, the one who made the Holy Land a second home of the desert ideal.

The Transplanting to Palestine

The central fact of Hilarion’s mission is the transplanting itself: he took the monastic life that had arisen in Egypt and rooted it in Palestinian soil, where it had not been before (Jerome, Life of Hilarion; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14; see The Desert of Gaza). This was not a trivial geographical extension but a decisive act in the history of the Church, for Palestine — the land of the Lord’s own life — would become, in the centuries after Hilarion, one of the great heartlands of monasticism, a “desert made a city” to rival Egypt itself (Chitty 1966). That this happened at all traces back, through the memory of the Palestinian monks and the witness of both Jerome and Sozomen, to Hilarion’s founding work near Gaza.

The importance of the transplanting is underlined by the independence of the witness to it. It is not only Jerome, with his interest in glorifying the Holy Land, who makes Hilarion the founder of Palestinian monasticism; it is also Sozomen, the local historian drawing on his own region’s memory, who says the same (Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14; see The Historical Hilarion). The mission of Hilarion — the carrying of the desert from Egypt to Palestine — is thus among the most securely attested facts of his life and the firmest basis of his greatness.

The Line to the Judaean Lauras

From Hilarion’s Palestinian beginning runs the line to the mature monasticism of the Holy Land. The eremitic life he planted in the Gaza region developed, over the following century and more, into the great monastic civilization of the Judaean desert — the wilderness between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea — where a succession of founders built the lauras and cenobia that made Palestine a monastic heartland. The chief names of that flowering are Chariton, Euthymius the Great (377–473), and above all Sabbas the Sanctified (439–532), whose Great Laura still stands and whose liturgical Typikon shaped the worship of the whole Byzantine and Slavic Church (Chitty 1966). These men and their houses are the mature fruit of the seed Hilarion planted; the Judaean monasticism looked back, through its own tradition and through the witnesses to Hilarion, to the hermit of Gaza as the originator of the monastic life in their land.

It would overstate the case to make Hilarion the direct organizational founder of the Judaean lauras, which arose more than a century after him and owed their specific institutions to Chariton, Euthymius, and Sabbas (Chitty 1966) [Disputed: Hilarion is the founder of Palestinian eremitic monasticism in the general sense and the figure to whom its origin was traced, but the developed laura-system of the Judaean desert was the work of the later founders (Chariton, Euthymius, Sabbas) and should not be attributed to Hilarion directly; his role is that of originator and forerunner, not institutional architect (Chitty 1966)]. But the line of descent is real and was felt as real: Hilarion stands at the head of the Palestinian monastic tradition as Antony stands at the head of the Egyptian.

The Wanderings as Diffusion

There is a further, unintended dimension to Hilarion’s monastic mission: his very flights helped spread the ideal. The wandering years carried the great hermit across the Mediterranean — to Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Cyprus — and everywhere he went, despite his efforts at concealment, his holiness drew people and his example commended the monastic life (see Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia, Cyprus). Cyprus in particular received the saint at the end of his life and kept him as one of its own. The man who fled fame became, against his will, a missionary of the ascetic ideal across the sea, his presence planting the memory and the example of the desert in lands far from Egypt (Weingarten 2005).

And beyond his physical wanderings, the diffusion of his memory through Jerome’s Life carried the monastic ideal to the Latin West (see The Cult and Jerome’s Life of Hilarion). Jerome wrote the Lives precisely to commend the monastic life to the West, and Hilarion, as the central figure of the triptych and the truest disciple of Antony among the three, became one of the exemplars by which Western Christians learned what a monk was (Rebenich 2002). In this literary sense too Hilarion served the monastic mission, his story a vehicle for the ideal across the whole Christian world.

Hilarion’s Place Among the Fathers

Set in this wider frame, Hilarion’s standing is clear. He is one of the founding fathers of the monastic movement — not its originator, as Antony was, nor the architect of its cenobitic form, as Pachomius was, but the man who carried the eremitic life to Palestine and made the Holy Land a home of the monks. Beside Antony of Egypt and Pachomius of the Thebaid, Hilarion is Palestine’s father in the desert, and the Judaean monasticism that became one of the glories of the Christian East counted him its origin (Chitty 1966). This is the durable core of his greatness, surer than any single wonder of the Life, and the ground on which the Church’s title for him — Hilarion the Great — most securely rests (see Legacy and Assessment).

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. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890. (Hilarion as founder of Palestinian monasticism.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The eremitic and cenobitic founders; the line from Hilarion to the Judaean lauras of Chariton, Euthymius, and Sabbas.)
Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The wanderings as diffusion of the ideal; the Cypriot reception.)
Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002. (The Lives as the means of commending monasticism to the West.)