Feast and Cult

Hilarion the Great is commemorated on 21 October in both the Orthodox East and the Latin West, kept in the calendars and synaxaria as a venerable father and wonderworker, the founder of the monastic life in Palestine. This file establishes the feast and the developed liturgical cult that grew from the early veneration treated in the preceding sections — the saint’s place in the menaion and the synaxarion, and the character of his liturgical commemoration as one of the great fathers of monasticism.

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

The Feast of 21 October

The feast of St. Hilarion the Great is kept on 21 October in the Orthodox Church and, traditionally, on the same day in the Western calendar [Disputed: the principal feast of Hilarion is 21 October in both East and West; the date derives from the tradition of his commemoration and is well established, though, as with most saints of the period, it reflects the day assigned by the calendars rather than an independently dated event such as the day of death (which the sources do not precisely fix)]. The commemoration places him in the autumn cycle of the fixed calendar, among the saints whose memory the Church keeps day by day through the liturgical year. For the Orthodox faithful the day is the occasion to honor Hilarion as a venerable father — a hosios, one of the holy monastics — and to recall his life as a model of ascetic struggle and his standing as the founder of Palestinian monasticism (on the calendar and liturgical context generally, see Monasticism).

In the Synaxarion and the Menaion

Hilarion has his place in the liturgical books of the Orthodox Church. The Synaxarion — the collection of brief lives read at the daily services — carries a notice of him under 21 October, summarizing his life after the tradition of Jerome’s Life: his birth near Gaza, his discipleship under Antony, his founding of the monastic life in Palestine, his wonders, his wanderings, and his death on Cyprus (on the underlying tradition, see Jerome’s Life of Hilarion). The Menaion — the liturgical book of the fixed feasts — provides the hymnography for his commemoration: the troparion, kontakion, and canon by which the Church sings his memory at Vespers and Matins, praising him in the standard idiom of the monastic saints as a model of asceticism, a luminary of the desert, and an intercessor for the faithful.

The hymnographic portrait of Hilarion is, like all such liturgical commemoration, a distillation of the saint’s tradition into praise and petition: it honors his ascetic labors, his discipleship under Antony, his wonderworking gifts, and his founding role, and asks his intercession. The liturgical cult thus carries the memory of Hilarion forward not as history to be examined but as the Church’s living veneration of a glorified father, sung year by year on his feast (on the relation of veneration to the historical record, see The Historical Hilarion).

The Character of the Cult

The developed cult of Hilarion bears the marks of its origins. It is, first, a monastic cult: Hilarion is venerated above all as a father of monks, and his memory is cherished especially within the monastic tradition for which he is a founding figure, in Palestine and beyond (see Hilarion and the Monastic Mission). It is, second, a geographically broad cult, reflecting the saint’s own wandering life and the early roots of his veneration in Palestine, Cyprus, and the West (see The Cult and Veneration). And it is, third, a cult carried in large part by a text: the popularity of Jerome’s Life did as much to spread and sustain the veneration of Hilarion as any shrine, making him one of the saints whose cult is inseparable from the biography that records him (Rebenich 2002; Weingarten 2005).

The Hymnographic Portrait

The themes the Church’s hymnody draws from Hilarion’s life are those the whole collection has traced. He is sung as a disciple of Antony who became himself a teacher of monks; as the planter of the ascetic life in Palestine; as a wonderworker whose miracles flowed from his self-emptying; and as a model of the flight from glory, who sought to be hidden in God (on these themes, see The Flight from Fame and Hilarion and the Monastic Mission). The liturgical commemoration thus compresses the arc of the Life into praise: birth among thorns, formation in the desert, founding labor in Palestine, the wonders, the wandering, and the holy death on Cyprus. It is the saint’s tradition turned to prayer, and it carries his memory to the faithful not as a matter for the historian’s scrutiny but as the Church’s living veneration of one of her fathers (on the relation of veneration to the historical record, see The Historical Hilarion).

It is characteristic of the Orthodox commemoration of the monastic saints that the hymnody dwells less on biographical incident than on the pattern of holiness the saint embodies — the struggle against the passions, the gift of dispassion (apatheia), the illumination of the purified soul, the boldness (parrhesia) before God that makes the saint an intercessor. Hilarion is commemorated within this common idiom of the desert fathers, his particular story (Gaza, Antony, Cyprus) set within the universal portrait of the monk who has made himself a dwelling-place of the Spirit (on the ascetic theology, see The Pattern of Solitude).

Hilarion Among the Commemorated Fathers

On his feast Hilarion takes his place among the great monastic fathers whom the Orthodox calendar commemorates through the year — Antony (17 January), Euthymius the Great (20 January), Sabbas the Sanctified (5 December), Pachomius (15 May), and the rest of the company of the desert. His commemoration on 21 October is one thread in the Church’s year-long honoring of the monastic saints, and his place in it expresses the judgment the tradition has made of him: that he belongs in the first rank of the fathers of the monastic life, the founder of that life in the Holy Land, worthy to be remembered beside his master Antony and the other great names of the desert (see Legacy and Assessment). The feast keeps that judgment alive, returning each 21 October to the memory of the hermit of Gaza and asking the prayers of the father of Palestine’s monks.

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 tradition summarized in the synaxarion notice.)
  • Sozomen. The Ecclesiastical History III.14. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 2. 1890.
  • Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. London: Routledge, 2002. (The cult carried by the popularity of the Life.)
  • Weingarten, Susan. The Saint’s Saints: Hagiography and Geography in Jerome. Leiden: Brill, 2005. (The text-borne diffusion of the veneration.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Hilarion among the commemorated fathers of monasticism.)