The Life
Hilarion was born about 291 in the small village of Tabatha, five miles south of Gaza in Palestine, to pagan parents. They saw that he was unusually intelligent and sent him to Alexandria, the great metropolis of the eastern Mediterranean, to be educated. There he encountered Christians, was baptized, and at the age of fifteen heard about Saint Anthony in the Egyptian desert. He went to find him. He stayed with Anthony for two months, watching him pray, fast, weave baskets, receive visitors. Then Hilarion returned to Palestine. His parents had died. He distributed his entire inheritance to his brothers and to the poor. He went into the desert near Maiuma, the port of Gaza, built himself a small reed hut, and began to live as a hermit. He was alone there for about twenty-two years, fighting temptations, weaving baskets to eat, praying without ceasing. The Lord then began to work miracles through him. A barren woman conceived. A child was healed. A demon was cast out. Word spread. Other young men came to live near him. Hilarion never founded a formal monastery, but the Palestinian desert filled with his disciples’ cells, and Palestinian monasticism was born. In old age he fled growing fame, traveling to Egypt, Sicily, Dalmatia, and finally Cyprus, where he reposed about 371 at age eighty.
Saint Anthony was already legendary throughout the Christian world by the time the fifteen-year-old Hilarion went to find him. Anthony had been in the Egyptian desert for over fifty years. He was the founder of Christian monasticism. Stories of his battles with demons, his miracles, his teaching had reached every Christian community in the Mediterranean. Hilarion, just baptized in Alexandria, decided that he had to see this man for himself before deciding what to do with his life. He left Alexandria and walked into the desert. When he found Anthony’s mountain hermitage, the old saint received him kindly. Hilarion stayed two months. He watched Anthony pray. He watched him receive the constant stream of visitors. He watched him weave baskets. He watched him answer questions. He absorbed everything. At the end of the two months he came to a decision. He could not stay with Anthony, because Anthony’s fame meant that the hermitage was constantly full of visitors and seekers; there was no real silence, no real solitude. If Hilarion wanted to do what Anthony had done, he would have to find his own desert. He took his leave of the old saint with proper reverence. He went back to Palestine. He carried with him in his head the entire pattern of Christian eremitic life, learned by direct observation from the man who had invented it.
When Hilarion returned to Palestine he found that his parents had died. He distributed his entire inheritance to his brothers and to the poor of Tabatha. He went out into the desert hinterland behind Maiuma, the port city of Gaza, and built himself a small hut of reeds at a spot about seven miles from town. The hut was tiny, just enough to keep off the sun and the rain. He had no other possessions: a single garment, a small basket-making setup, a clay water jar. He began the same life he had watched Anthony living. He prayed the psalms at the appointed hours. He held continuous inner prayer of the heart through the day and most of the night. He fasted: at first only half a pint of lentils softened in cold water each evening; later, dry bread with salt; later still, fifteen figs a day taken only at sunset. He wove baskets to barter for the little food he allowed himself. He fought constant temptations: of the body (Jerome describes the violent temptations of the flesh that the young saint endured), of the mind (boredom, loneliness, the desire to abandon the project), of the spirit (the demons that beset every serious Christian ascetic). For twenty-two years he lived this life essentially alone. He saw almost no one. He spoke to almost no one. The Lord was forming him in the silence. When the time came for him to begin his public ministry, he was completely ready.
The first miracle that Saint Jerome records came after Hilarion had been alone in his desert hut for over twenty years. A married woman from a town near Gaza, who had been mocked by her husband and family for fifteen years of barrenness, somehow learned of the hermit and came to his hut. She wept. She begged him to pray for her. He resisted at first; he wanted to be left alone. She would not leave. Eventually he relented. He prayed for her. She returned home. Within a year she gave birth to a son. The story spread. Other women came. Other people came. Healings happened. Demons were cast out. Within a few years Hilarion had become known throughout Palestine and Syria as a wonderworker. Young men began to come to him not for healing but to learn how to live as he lived. They built their own small huts near his. They asked him for instruction. He gave it reluctantly at first, more willingly as he saw that their seriousness was real. He never founded a formal monastery; he never wrote a Rule; he never organized the community. But the community formed around him organically, just as the community of Anthony had formed in Egypt. By the 330s the desert behind Maiuma was filled with the cells of Hilarion’s disciples, and Palestinian monasticism existed.
When Hilarion was about eighteen years old, just two or three years into his desert hermitage, a band of robbers heard about him. They imagined that since people were sending him gifts of food and money, he must have accumulated some treasure. They came at night to rob him. They searched in every direction across the desert from evening until dawn but could not find his hut, hidden as it was in a fold of the land. In broad daylight they came upon him directly, walking on a path. They decided to make a kind of game of confronting him. They asked him: what would you do if robbers attacked you? He answered them simply: a naked man does not fear robbers. They said: but you could be killed. He answered: I could. He showed no fear at all. The robbers, unsettled by his calm, did not in fact attack him. They turned around and left. Some of them, according to the hagiographical tradition, were eventually converted by the encounter and abandoned their criminal life. The story has been preserved as one of the great moments in the patristic teaching about Christian poverty: the man who has nothing has nothing to lose; the man who has nothing to lose has nothing to fear; the man who has nothing to fear is genuinely free.
By his sixties Hilarion was famous throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The crowds at his hermitage near Maiuma had become impossible. He could not pray, could not rest, could barely think. He decided to leave. In 356, the year of Anthony’s death, he traveled back to Egypt, hoping to bury himself in the obscurity of the larger Egyptian monastic community. He found that his fame had reached Egypt too. He fled west, by ship, to Sicily, hoping that the long sea voyage and the change of country would render him anonymous. He settled there for a time in a remote location. His disciple Hesychius traced him there. Other Christians began to find him. He fled again, north to Dalmatia (modern Croatia), and stayed there for a while. He healed people there. He raised a dead boy back to life. The fame followed him. He fled finally to Cyprus, the island of his old friend Saint Epiphanius of Salamis, and settled in the most inaccessible interior of the island. There at last he found something close to the solitude he had sought all his life. His old friend Epiphanius visited him from time to time and learned the details of his life that would eventually be transmitted to Saint Jerome. He died there about 371, eighty years old, in the same desert solitude he had begun in seventy years earlier near Gaza.
The icons of Saint Hilarion sometimes depict him holding an open scroll. The text on the scroll reads: the tools of a monk are steadfastness, humility, and love according to God. The phrase is short. It encapsulates everything Hilarion learned from Anthony and everything he taught his own disciples. Steadfastness is the persistence in the practice of the monastic life across the years and decades, the refusal to abandon the work when temptations come, the commitment to keep going through the long dryness of spirit that even the great saints endure. Humility is the foundation of all the virtues, the constant awareness of one’s own poverty before God, the refusal to take credit for the gifts that the Lord works through one. Love according to God is the unifying principle, the love that orders all the other practices toward their proper end, the love that prevents asceticism from becoming a self-centered pursuit of personal achievement. These three together constitute the form of the monastic life. Without all three, no genuine monasticism is possible. With all three, the monk has all the tools he needs.
Hilarion shows that the Christian eremitic life is not finally tied to any particular geographical location. He began in Egypt with Anthony. He moved to Palestine. He fled later to Egypt, then Sicily, then Dalmatia, then Cyprus. In each place he carried the same fundamental discipline: prayer, fasting, manual labor, silence, struggle. In each place the same divine grace was available to him. The desert was not finally a place but a way of life. Anywhere he went, if he could find sufficient solitude, he could be a desert father. This pattern has had immense importance for the entire subsequent history of Christian monasticism. The eremitic life moved from Egypt to Palestine through Hilarion. It moved to Sicily through Hilarion. It moved to Dalmatia through Hilarion. It moved to Cyprus through Hilarion. The geographical extension of monasticism across the Mediterranean basin and eventually across the entire Christian world traces back, in significant part, to Hilarion’s personal trajectory. He was the bridge figure who proved that the desert could be planted anywhere there were Christians willing to live the discipline. Every subsequent Christian monastic foundation, in every part of the world, stands in some continuity with the work that Hilarion began on the day he left Anthony to find his own desert near Gaza.
Hilarion died about 371 in his Cypriot hermitage, eighty years old. His old friend Saint Epiphanius of Salamis attended his death. He was buried near his hut on Cyprus. About ten months later his disciple Hesychius, who had followed him through all his geographical wanderings, returned secretly to Cyprus, exhumed the body (which was found incorrupt), and carried it back to Palestine to be buried at the site of the saint’s original hermitage near Maiuma. The Cypriots, when they discovered the theft, lamented the loss of their saint’s body. The Palestinians, receiving him back, rejoiced. The contention was eventually resolved with the formula that has been preserved in the tradition: the Palestinians said, we possess the body of Saint Hilarion; the Cypriots said, his spirit remains with us. Both were right. The relics in Palestine continued to manifest miracles. The saint’s presence on Cyprus continued to be felt through his disciples and through Saint Epiphanius. About twenty years after his death, Saint Jerome wrote his Latin Life in Bethlehem, on the basis of the materials that Saint Epiphanius had transmitted from his Cypriot encounters with the saint. The Life became the principal vehicle through which the witness of Saint Hilarion reached the entire Western Christian world. He was venerated in monastic calendars from Spain to Britain. Bede commemorated him in northern England. Charlemagne brought a portion of his relics to Moissac Abbey in the early ninth century. He was the first non-martyr to be officially honored as Confessor by the Eastern Orthodox tradition.