Hilary the Wonderworker
Our Venerable Father Hilary the Wonderworker
Venerable · Wonderworker · Priest
Commemorated 4 May — Commemoration of the wonderworking elder
Hilary the Wonderworker is a venerable father of the Greek synaxarion commemorated on May 4, of whom the tradition preserves a character rather than a chronology: a man of transparent faith and pure life who was granted, unusually early, the gift of miracles — healing the paralysed and the lame, breaking droughts by his prayer, and casting out demons in the name of Christ — who withdrew for a season into a small cell to prayer and the study of the Scriptures, and who was afterwards drawn back by his people and, at their insistence, ordained priest, serving as their spiritual father and teacher until his repose. The synaxarion couplet remembers him for a joy that was native to him and for wonders that continued from his tomb. Neither his century, his country, nor the place of his labours is transmitted.
What the record contains
The notice of Hilary in the Greek synaxaria is short, and it is honest to say so at the outset. It gives no date of birth or repose, no city, no province, no emperor, and no monastery; it does not say whether he was a hermit, a cenobite, or a parish priest who lived as a monk. What it gives is a portrait, drawn in the conventional but not therefore insincere terms of the bios of a holy elder, and one striking couplet.
He is described as distinguished from his youth by faith and by purity of life, and as effective in bringing others to Christ while still young — the synaxarion connects the two, treating his manner of living as itself the argument that persuaded. To this, the notice says, God added the charism of wonders: the paralysed and the lame were raised at his prayer, rains were given in time of drought when he interceded, and many were freed from unclean spirits through the invocation of the name of Christ over them. The three classes named — bodily healing, power over the elements, and exorcism — are the standard triad by which the Byzantine synaxarist marks a thaumatourgos, and the epithet attached to Hilary's name is exactly that word.
Withdrawal and return
At some point in his life he withdrew from the crowds that his gifts had gathered, and shut himself in a small cell, where he gave himself to prayer and to the reading of the divine Scriptures. The synaxarion presents the retreat as temporary and as a matter of discipline rather than of vocation: a man in danger from the honour his miracles brought him, going into hiding from it.
He afterwards returned to the open ministry of teaching and healing. His community pressed him to accept ordination to the priesthood, and he consented — the notice makes a point of the reluctance, and of the conscientiousness with which he then fulfilled the office. In his last years he is remembered as a spiritual father, guiding others, teaching, and — the synaxarist's summary judgement — living what he taught, until he reposed in peace.
Wonders from the tomb
The couplet appointed for his commemoration turns on two things: that he was joyful by nature, and that he works wonders even from his tomb. The first is a rare note in this literature, which more often praises severity; the second places him among the saints whose relics were a working shrine, and implies a local cultus at the place of his burial vigorous enough for the compilers to know of it. That the place itself has not come down to us is one of the ordinary losses of the synaxarion tradition.
Feast and commemoration
May 4 (church date; New Calendar civil May 4, Old Calendar civil May 17). The commemoration is Greek in origin and is carried by the Greek synaxaria and by the English-language lists that follow them (OrthodoxWiki among others). It does not appear in the Slavic Menaion for the day, nor on the OCA and azbyka day-pages for May 4/17, whose venerable fathers of the day are Nicephorus of Medikion and Nikephoros of Mount Athos. The disparity is worth recording rather than resolving: Hilary is a saint of the Greek usage of this day, and the Antiochian tradition, which follows the Greek synaxarion, keeps him. No proper service is appointed; the common of a venerable father is sung.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (from the common of a venerable father)
By the streams of thy tears thou didst make the barren desert to bring forth, and by thy sighings from the depths thou didst bear fruit a hundredfold in labours; and thou wast made a luminary, shining upon the world with wonders, O our father Hilary. Intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Hilary is painted as a venerable elder of the ordinary monastic type: in the rason and koukoulion or bare-headed, with a long white beard, one hand raised in blessing or holding the scroll of the ascetic teacher. Because he was ordained, he may be given the priest's epitrachelion beneath the monastic mantle, in the manner of the hieromonk-saints. He has no distinguishing attribute — no instrument, no companion, no scene — and in practice he is identified only by the inscription Ο ΟΣΙΟΣ ΙΛΑΡΙΟΣ Ο ΘΑΥΜΑΤΟΥΡΓΟΣ, which the painter must supply, since without it the figure is indistinguishable from any other bearded ascetic of the calendar. This is the ordinary iconographic condition of the synaxarion's undated fathers.
No pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection, and the search is complicated by the near-certainty that any candidate labelled simply "Saint Hilary" or "Saint Hilarion" belongs to one of the better-attested saints of those names.
Disputed questions
- No date is transmitted. Neither the Greek synaxaria nor the calendars that depend on them assign Hilary a century. This entry accordingly carries no century field and is indexed under unknown. Any confident dating met with in secondary lists should be treated as a guess.
- Not Hilary of Poitiers. The great Latin doctor Hilary of Poitiers (†367), whom the Orthodox calendar keeps on January 14, is a different person entirely: a bishop, a dogmatic writer against Arianism, and a confessor, with a full and datable biography. He is never called ho Thaumatourgos, and nothing in the May 4 notice suggests an episcopate or a controversy.
- Not the Hilarions. The Greek Ἱλάριος and Ἱλαρίων are distinct names that Slavic and English lists have often merged, so that this saint is sometimes met as "Hilarion the Wonderworker." He is not Hilarion the Great of Gaza and Cyprus (†371, October 21), the father of Palestinian monasticism and himself a celebrated wonderworker — the likeliest confusion of all — nor Hilarion the New of Pelekete (†754, March 28), the iconophile abbot on the Marmara, nor Hilarion the New of Dalmatia (†845, June 6), the confessor-abbot of the Dalmatian monastery in Constantinople. All of those have dates, places, and substantial vitae; the May 4 Hilary has none, which is itself the surest sign that he is a separate figure rather than a stray commemoration of one of them.
- "Desert" or not. English lists sometimes style him "Hilary the Wonderworker of the desert." The Greek notice does not use the word; it speaks only of a cell and a withdrawal. The epithet appears to be an English editorial gloss on that withdrawal and should not be pressed into evidence for an Egyptian or Palestinian setting.