Veneration

Hilarion is venerated across the whole of the pre-schism Church’s heirs — in the Orthodox East, where he is a venerable father and wonderworker commemorated on 21 October, and in the Latin West, where Jerome’s Life secured him a place in the martyrologies and the monastic memory. This file surveys his veneration across East and West: his standing in the Orthodox calendars and synaxaria, his Western commemoration, the shared honor paid to a saint of the undivided Church, and the iconography and title by which he is known.

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

A Saint of the Undivided Church

Hilarion died around 371, more than six centuries before the schism that divided the Latin West from the Orthodox East, and like all the saints of the pre-schism Church he is venerated in common by both traditions (on the period, see The Pre-Schism Church). His cult, as the previous section showed, had three early roots — the Palestinian shrine at Majuma, the Cypriot tomb, and the Western diffusion through Jerome’s Life (see The Cult) — and from these it spread into the calendars and devotion of the whole Christian world. He is thus a genuinely ecumenical saint in the proper sense: a holy one of the undivided Church, honored by Greek and Latin, Eastern and Western Christians alike.

In the Orthodox East

In the Orthodox Church Hilarion is commemorated as a venerable father (hosios) and wonderworker, and his feast is kept on 21 October (see Feast and Cult). He has his place in the Greek Synaxarion and the Slavic calendars, among the great fathers of monasticism whose memory the Church keeps through the liturgical year, and is honored especially within the monastic tradition for which he is a founding father (on the calendar context, see Feast and Cult). The Orthodox veneration draws on the whole of the Life as the Church’s loving memory of the saint — his discipleship under Antony, his founding of Palestinian monasticism, his wonders, his flight from fame, his holy death — received as the tradition of a real and glorified father of the Church (see The Historical Hilarion for the source-critical reading that accompanies this veneration).

Hilarion’s standing in the East is bound up with his role as the father of Palestinian monasticism, for the Orthodox monastic tradition — and especially the great Palestinian houses descended from the Judaean desert fathers — counts him among its originators (see Hilarion and the Monastic Mission). His memory is therefore cherished not only as that of an individual saint but as that of a founder, one of the fathers through whom the monastic life that shapes Orthodox spirituality came to the Holy Land.

In the Latin West

In the West, Hilarion’s veneration is the direct fruit of Jerome’s Life. Because Jerome wrote the Vita Hilarionis in Latin and circulated it widely, Hilarion became a familiar saint in the Western Church, entered the Western martyrologies, and was commemorated in the Latin calendar — traditionally also on 21 October — among the holy hermits and confessors (Rebenich 2002; Weingarten 2005). The Western cult never had the local relic-shrine that anchored the Eastern veneration, but it had something equally durable: the popularity of the text. Jerome’s Life of Hilarion was one of the most read of the early monastic biographies, and through it Hilarion’s example helped form the Western monastic ideal alongside Antony and Paul the Hermit, his name kept alive in the West by the very book that is our chief source for his life (see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion).

Iconography and the Title “the Great”

In Orthodox iconography Hilarion is depicted as an aged monk and ascetic, in the monastic habit, often bearded and white-haired, frequently holding a scroll or making a gesture of blessing — the standard iconographic type of the venerable desert father, in which he appears alongside Antony, Euthymius, Sabbas, and the other monastic saints (on the type, the iconography of the desert fathers is treated within the broader Monasticism tradition). The icon presents him not as an individual portrait but as a member of the company of the holy fathers, a witness to the monastic life he helped found.

The title by which he is most often known — Hilarion the Great — places him among the small number of saints honored with that epithet, beside Antony the Great, Macarius the Great, Pachomius the Great, and the other towering figures of the monastic age [Disputed: the epithet "the Great" is a traditional honorific marking Hilarion's stature among the founding fathers of monasticism; it is not a formally conferred title and its application varies by tradition, but it is well established in the Orthodox commemoration of him as one of the great desert fathers]. The title is most securely justified, as the assessment of his legacy argues, not by any single wonder but by his historical role as the father of the monastic life in Palestine (see Legacy and Assessment).

The Shared Veneration

That Hilarion is honored by both East and West is fitting, for his own life crossed the boundaries that later divided them: born in Palestine, formed in Egypt, dying on Cyprus, commemorated in Greek and Latin, his cult spanned the Mediterranean from the start. The common veneration of such a saint is a reminder of the undivided Church from which both traditions descend, and of the monastic movement that was, in the fourth century, the shared inheritance of the whole Christian world (see The Pre-Schism Church). Hilarion the Great belongs to all the heirs of that Church — the wandering hermit of Gaza who could not escape the world’s love in life and has not escaped it in the eighteen centuries since.

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.
  • Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890.
  • Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002. (The Western diffusion of Hilarion’s cult through Jerome’s Life.)
  • Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The spread of the veneration East and West.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Hilarion among the great fathers of monasticism.)