Saint Hilarion of Gaza (c. 291-371)

A child of Thabatha, near Gaza

Hilarion is born about 291 at Thabatha (Tabatha), a village a few miles south of Gaza, in the Roman province of Syria Palaestina. His parents are pagans; he grows up in a bilingual environment, Greek and Aramaic.^[6][7]

Very young, he is sent to pursue studies in Alexandria, then the great intellectual capital of Roman Egypt. There he discovers Christianity and gives himself to Christ. Tradition reports that he was touched by the renown of Saint Anthony, the great hermit of the Egyptian desert.^[8][9]

The meeting with Saint Anthony

According to Jerome’s Vita, Hilarion goes to be formed with Anthony. He stays only a short time with him, but this meeting decides his whole life: he draws from it the ideal of evangelical solitude, of continual prayer and of victory over the passions.^[10][11]

Back in Palestine, he learns of the death of his parents. He distributes his goods to his brothers and to the poor, and keeps for himself only the prospect of the desert.^[12][13]

Twenty-two years in a hut

About 308, Hilarion builds himself a small hut near Maiuma, the port of Gaza, and lives in solitude for twenty-two years. He weaves osier baskets to earn his living, fasts, prays, and reads only the Holy Scriptures. Unlike other hermits, he chooses not to plunge into the Judean desert, but to remain on the land of Palestine.^[14][15]

His reputation as an ascetic spreads. Jerome’s Vita attributes healings and exorcisms to him, obtained by prayer. Disciples gather little by little around him, despite his wish to remain alone.^[16]

The hermit become father of monks

Under the emperor Constantius (337-361), a monastery forms near his hermitage. Hilarion becomes, against his will, the father of a monastic family. Among his disciples the sources name Hesychius, who will remain faithful to him to the end, and Saint Epiphanius of Salamis, future bishop of Cyprus and great defender of the Nicene faith.^[17][18]

The anecdote reported by the ancient sources between Epiphanius and Hilarion is famous: at table, Epiphanius offers a fowl to Hilarion, who excuses himself for having eaten no flesh since taking the habit; Epiphanius answers that, since his own, he has never let anyone go to sleep with a grievance against him. Hilarion humbly replies: “Forgive me: your way of life is better than mine.”^[19]

The flight under Julian the Apostate

At the accession of Julian the Apostate (361), the now famous hermit leaves Palestine so as not to be mixed up with the honours and pressures of power. A long wandering begins, which takes him first to Egypt, then to Sicily.^[20][21]

According to tradition, while he is in Dalmatia (at Epidaurus), he would by his prayer have calmed the sea during an earthquake and a tidal wave (the earthquake of 21 July 365 is contemporary with these travels). The episode, reported by Jerome, illustrates the reputation for spiritual power that accompanied the old ascetic.^[22]

The last years in Cyprus

Hilarion finally reaches Cyprus, where he can spend the last five years of his life in solitude and peace, far from the crowd that had pursued him. He dies about 371, at a very advanced age. According to the Vita, at the moment of death, he stirs himself against himself: “For nearly seventy years you have served Jesus Christ. And you still fear death?”^[23][24]

His disciple Hesychius comes to seek his body and buries it in the monastery of Maiuma. The memory of Hilarion is fixed especially in the East, but Jerome’s Vita, translated into Greek by Sophronius, assures a universal diffusion.^[25]

A first-hand source

The Vita Hilarionis is written in Latin by Saint Jerome about 390, at Bethlehem, in the wake of the Life of Anthony by Athanasius. Jerome there draws a living portrait of the Palestinian hermit: his beginnings, his rule of life, his spiritual combats, the miracles tradition attributes to him, his flights before the crowd, his peaceful death.^[26][27]

This work is not a theological treatise: it is a life of a saint, written to edify. But it remains the main source for knowing Hilarion. The historian distinguishes in it the plausible facts (the geography of Gaza and Maiuma, the chronology, the links with Anthony and Epiphanius) from the marvellous elements that Jerome reports with the admiration proper to the hagiographers of his time.^[28]

Place in monastic literature

The Life of Hilarion stands in a trio of lives of ascetics composed by Jerome: Paul of Thebes, Hilarion and Malchus. With the Life of Anthony by Athanasius and the accounts of Palladius and Cassian, it helps to fix the image of the desert monk in Latin Europe.^[29][30]

“For nearly seventy years you have served Jesus Christ. And you still fear death?” : Word of Saint Hilarion reported by Saint Jerome, Vita Hilarionis^[31][32]

Solitude ordered to prayer

For Hilarion, solitude is not an end in itself: it is the place of continual prayer and of interior combat. His hut at Maiuma, his osier baskets, his reading of the Scriptures sketch a simple spirituality, made of manual work, fasting and listening to the Word.^[33][34]

A humble ascetic

The anecdotes transmitted by Jerome and by the sources linked to Epiphanius show a man who refuses honours, flees the crowd, and knows how to recognise that another way of life may be superior to his own. This humility in the face of the admiration of others is one of the most striking traits of Hilarion’s spiritual profile.^[35][36]

Father of Palestinian monasticism

Hilarion is, with the monks of Gaza and later Saint Sabas, one of the founding figures of Palestinian monasticism. His influence is exercised by example more than by a written rule: Jerome’s Vita fixed his type of hermit for the West as for the East.^[37][38]

Veneration

He is venerated in the Catholic Church and in the Orthodox Churches (where he is honoured as “the Great”). Several places bear his name, including the castle of Saint Hilarion in Cyprus, in memory of his hermitage in the island. He is the patron of Caulonia, in Calabria, under the name of Sant’Ilario.^[39]

The iconography of Hilarion is dominated by the figure of the desert hermit and by the story of his temptations.

The miniature of the Menologion of Basil II (about 985) shows him as a monastic saint of the Byzantine Church, in the sobriety of monastic iconography.^[40] The painting by Dominique Papety, The Temptation of Saint Hilarion (about 1843), stands in the great pictorial tradition of the temptations of the desert.^[41] The print kept at the Rijksmuseum, De heilige Hilarion van Gaza, witnesses to the diffusion of his devotion in modern Europe.^[42]

The Church celebrates Saint Hilarion of Gaza on 21 October. Nominis notes this date as a local feast; the Roman Martyrology recalls him on the same date, under the name of “Saint Hilarion, abbot”, who died in Cyprus about 371.^[43]

• Saint Anthony the Great: Hilarion’s master, father of monks.
• The Desert Fathers: the spiritual family to which Hilarion belongs.
• Saint Epiphanius of Salamis: his disciple and friend, bishop of Cyprus.
• Saint Jerome: the author of the Vita Hilarionis.
• Saint Ursula and her companions: the other memorial of 21 October.