Anchorites

hermits; persons who withdraw from society. During the third century the Christian practice of staying away from heathen festivals grew into the idea that all sorts of bodily privations, such as going without food, dressing in painful clothing, and scourging one's self with whips, were acceptable in the sight of God and merited salvation. Monks believed in withdrawing from general society and denied themselves many of the pleasures of life, that they might have the more time for meditation and good works; the anchorites went a step farther, they withdrew themselves from society altogether. In the warm region around the eastern end of the Mediterranean they betook themselves to inaccessible deserts, caves, or other deep solitudes, and lived on the roughest sort of fare. Now and then an anchorite acquired a reputation for sanctity and was visited by sorrowing and sin-laden people, who made him a sort of father confessor, upon whom they might lay their burdens. The pillar saints were a set of anchorites who sought solitude by remaining on the top of pillars. One of the most remarkable, Simeon Stylites, remained in a cell in his monastery for nine years. He then withdrew to a pillar a yard in diameter about forty miles from Antioch, on the top of which he took up his position, removing every few years to a still higher pillar, until at last he remained day and night in all kinds of weather on the top of a pillar sixty feet high. His neck was loaded with iron chains; his lips moved in constant prayer; his body was bowed as though wrestling in agony for the forgiveness of sins. Frequently, it is said, he went without food for an entire week. His reputation for sanctity brought crowds of pilgrims who hoped to derive benefit from his prayers or even by touching the pillar on which so holy a man stood. After living this life for thirty-seven years, he died in 460, at the age of seventy-two. Many other pillar saints were scarcely less noted. See Monks

The fertile and peaceable lowlands of England ... offered few spots sufficiently wild and lonely for the habitation of a hermit; those, therefore, who wished to retire from the world into a more strict and solitary life than that which the monastery afforded were in the habit of immuring themselves, as anchorites, or in old English "Ankers," in little cells of stone, built usually against the wall of a church. There is nothing new under the sun; and similar anchorites might have been seen in Egypt, 500 years before the time of St. Anthony, immured in cells in the temples of Isis or Serapis. It is only recently that antiquarians have discovered how common this practice was in England, and how frequently the traces of these cells are to be found about our parish churches.--C. Kingsley, The Hermits.