Solitude and Biography in Jerome’s Life of Hilarion

This chapter studies Jerome’s Life of Hilarion. Solitude poses particular problems to the biographer. How can one depict someone else’s solitary experience? The first half of the chapter offers a survey of representations of solitude in ancient biography and autobiography, and examines some of the reasons for their relative scarcity. The second half of the chapter addresses Jerome’s use of those traditions, arguing that the Life of Hilarion draws attention to the fact that solitude is hard to achieve; also, at the same time, to the fact that it is hard to represent. In some passages there is no particular reason to think that Jerome is being self-conscious about the second of those problems: he is restricted perhaps without even quite realizing it to long-standing assumptions about the importance above all of words and deeds for the biographer. However, when he shows Hilarion fleeing from his supplicants, desperately seeking a place to be alone, it is hard to avoid the impression that Jerome is drawing attention to the difficulty the biographer faces in trying to fit his subjects into a new model of ascetic, solitary heroism, which was in its pure form an idealized and unrealistic image, almost inevitably disrupted in practice by many different kinds of communal engagement.