Hilarion (c.291–371), abbot, monastic pioneer of Palestine. According to Jerome, whose Life of Hilarion is based on lost writings of Epiphanius, who knew Hilarion, he was the son of pagan parents from Gaza. He studied at Alexandria, where he became a Christian. He visited Antony, then at the height of his fame, but returned to Palestine, found his parents were dead, gave all his goods to his brothers and to the poor, and became a hermit at Majuma (c.306). His regime was based on Antony's: he lived on figs, bread, vegetables, and oil. First, he made a shelter of reeds, later a cell of about five feet by four, which survived until Jerome's time. Disciples of both sexes came to learn from him; so also did the crowds, attracted by his austerities and miracles. For the sake of his monks he had come to own household goods and a farm: to escape these responsibilities and the crowds, he left Palestine, first for Egypt, then for Sicily (where his disciple Hesychius found him), and eventually for Epidaurus in Dalmatia. Once more his miracles attracted publicity and he fled to Cyprus. He settled near Paphos, but later retired to a more remote site twelve miles away, where Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis (d. 403), visited him. Here he died at the age of eighty. He was buried near Paphos, but his relics were translated to Majuma.
Jerome's Life (some of whose details are unreliable) was the basis of the Greek, Armenian, and Coptic Acts. Hilarion is mentioned in Bede's Martyrology and appears frequently in Pre-Conquest English monastic calendars, but later his feast was ousted in England by those of Ursula and Dunstan's Ordination, which fell on the same day. His cult, however, remained strong elsewhere as that of a primitive monk like Antony, who was not martyred, but was venerated from early times in East and West as an example of monastic holiness. Feast: 21 October.
Bibliography
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- AA.SS. Oct. IX (1858), 16–59; Jerome's Life also in P.L., xxiii. 29–54; Sozomen, H.E., iii. 14; v. 10; vi. 32; E. Coleiro, ‘St. Jerome's Lives of the Hermits’, Vigiliae Christianae, xi (1957), 161–78; J. N. D. Kelly, Jerome (1975)
