Holy Aemulatio: Vita Hilarionis and Jerome’s Efforts to Outdo the Life of Antony

Abstract

The three lives of saints penned by Jerome, Vita Pauli, Vita Malchi, and Vita Hilarionis, were frequently described in the past by one or another variant of Edward Gibbon’s acerbic verdict – that their only defect is »the want of truth and common sense.« Twentieth-century scholarship, less sweeping and perhaps more discerning, pointed out significant differences between the texts. While the Life of Malchus is not even biography and while the subject of Life of Paul seems to have been a figment of Jerome s imagination, the Life of Hilarion is anchored in reality, to the extent that traces of its protagonist can still be found in independent secondary sources such as Sozomenus. However, while its historicity poses intriguing questions of its own, recent decades have become particularly interested in its narrative strategies. Susan Weingarten convincingly showed how Jerome used and subverted a masterpiece of profane literature, namely, Apuleius’ Golden Ass. What inspired such a daring tactic? The approach was partly motivated by the text Jerome was emulating, namely, the Life of Antony itself.