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Hilarion of Tvali

Our Venerable Father Hilarion of Tvali, Abbot of Khakhuli

Venerable · d. 1041

Commemorated 24 July — Repose at the monastery of Tvali on the Black Mountain near Antioch

Hilarion, called Tvaleli from the monastery of Tvali, was one of the learned Georgian monks of the first half of the eleventh century, in whom the two poles of Georgian monastic life — the great houses of Tao-Klarjeti in the Georgian south-west and the Georgian colony on the Black Mountain above Antioch — are joined in a single career. He was abbot of Khakhuli, the chief school of the Georgian church, and there taught the boy who became George the Hagiorite, the greatest of the Georgian translators; the eleventh-century biographer known as George the Lesser says of him that he was outstanding in virtue and famous for his preaching and his ascetic labours, and elsewhere he is called a celebrated translator, writer and theologian. In his later years he left Khakhuli for Tvali, one of the Georgian monasteries of the Black Mountain in the territory of the patriarchate of Antioch, and died there, according to the historian Mikhail Sabinin, in 1041. He is commemorated on July 24.

Khakhuli

Khakhuli, in the province of Tao, was the greatest of the monastic schools of Georgia in the tenth and eleventh centuries — the house from which the Georgian presence on Mount Athos was drawn, and the home of the celebrated triptych of the Theotokos that bears its name. Hilarion was its abbot in the early eleventh century, and his reputation in the Georgian sources rests as much on his learning as on his rule: the notices call him a famous translator and writer and an eminent theologian, and George the Lesser, the disciple who wrote the Life of George the Hagiorite, singles him out for the quality of his sermons and the severity of his asceticism.

His most consequential act was the education of a child. About the year 1019, the boy George, then ten years old, was brought from the convent of Tadzrisi to Khakhuli and placed in its school; the Life names his teachers there as his uncle George the Scribe and Hilarion Tvaleli. That boy, tonsured at Khakhuli about twenty years later, went on to the Black Mountain and then to the Iviron monastery on Athos, and became George the Hagiorite, who translated the greater part of the Byzantine liturgical and patristic corpus into Georgian and defended the apostolicity of the Georgian church before the patriarch of Antioch. The Georgian tradition has always seen in Hilarion the man who set that work in motion.

Tvali and the Black Mountain

In his later years Hilarion left Georgia for the Black Mountain — Mavron Oros, the massif north of Antioch on the Orontes — where a Georgian monastic colony had grown up alongside the Greek, Syrian and Armenian houses of that extraordinary ascetic landscape. The Georgians of the Black Mountain, whose houses included Kalipos, the Wonderful Mountain of Symeon the Stylite the Younger, and the monastery of Tvali from which Hilarion takes his name, formed for two centuries the principal bridge between the Georgian church and the patriarchate of Antioch, and the Antiochian sources of the eleventh century know them well. It was to this same mountain that his pupil George came a decade or two later to sit at the feet of the recluse George of the Black Mountain, and there that the Georgian question of jurisdiction was afterwards argued out.

At Tvali Hilarion spent his last years and died. Mikhail Sabinin, the nineteenth-century compiler of the Georgian lives, gives the year as 1041; the Georgian sources are not more precise, and the place of his burial is not recorded.

Feast and commemoration

July 24 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 6). His memory is Georgian, and is carried into English through the Orthodox Church in America's calendar, which prints a notice and appoints a proper troparion in Tone 8. The Greek and Slavonic books do not have him, and neither does the Antiochian calendar — an omission worth noting, since he died on Antiochian ground: the Georgian colony of the Black Mountain has left its saints in the Georgian calendar rather than in the calendar of the patriarchate whose territory it occupied. He shares the day with the great martyr Christina of Tyre, with Boris and Gleb and with Polycarp of the Kiev Caves.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)

By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and by thy sighing from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; and thou didst become a luminary, shining upon the world by thy miracles, O Hilarion our father. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.

Original translation from the Georgian

Iconography

No traditional iconographic type of Hilarion of Tvali is recorded, and no pre-modern image of him has been identified. Where Georgian iconographers paint him — the modern compositions of the Synaxis of All Saints of Georgia include him among the fathers of the eleventh century — he is given the ordinary type of the venerable monastic teacher: an elder in the dark mantle and koukoulion, with a full grey beard, blessing with the right hand and holding in the left an open scroll bearing a line of Georgian nuskhuri or mkhedruli script, in token of the preaching for which the Life praises him. The composition may set behind him either the mountain church of Khakhuli in Tao or the bare ridges of the Black Mountain above Antioch, the two places between which his life was divided.

No storable image has been located for this collection: the search returns no pre-1900 depiction, and the Wikidata search under both "Hilarion of Tvali" and "Hilarion Tvaleli" returns no item at all, so that even an identity anchor is lacking. He is listed among the wanted icons.

Disputed questions

  • His name and its forms. He appears as Tvaleli, Tualeli and, in the OCA notice, as Tulashvili — the first two being the toponymic "of Tvali" in different transliterations of the Georgian, the last a patronymic surname of a later type. The George the Hagiorite entry in this collection spells him Hilarion Tualeli after its own sources; both refer to this saint.
  • Which Tvali? The monastery from which he is named is generally identified with the Georgian house of that name on the Black Mountain near Antioch, which is where the OCA notice places his repose. A Georgian locality of the same name has occasionally been proposed instead, which would keep him in Georgia to the end. The Antiochian identification is the received one and is followed here.
  • The date 1041. It rests on Sabinin, a nineteenth-century compiler working from materials not all of which survive; it is not independently attested. If it is right, Hilarion died at about the time his pupil George was making his own way to the Black Mountain, and the two may have met there.
  • What he wrote. He is described as a translator and writer, but no work is securely attributed to him, and the Georgian manuscript tradition preserves nothing under his name that scholarship has been able to fix. The reputation is attested; the corpus is lost.

Sources

  1. The Life of George the Hagiorite by George the Lesser (George the Minor), eleventh century — the notice of Hilarion as one of the teachers at Khakhuli, and the praise of his virtue, sermons and ascetic labours.
  2. Mikhail Sabinin, Sakartvelos samotkhe (The Paradise of Georgia), 19th century — for the year of repose, 1041.
  3. Orthodox Church in America, Lives of the Saints, July 24 — Saint Hilarion of Tvali (consulted for the calendar data, the form Tulashvili, the abbacy of Khakhuli, the removal to Tvali near Antioch, and the tone of the troparion).
  4. The Georgian monasteries of the Black Mountain near Antioch — for the setting of his last years; see also the entries for George the Hagiorite and George of the Black Mountain in this collection.