HERMIT (Gr. ee'imiites, Lat. erimita, an inhabitant of the desert), one of the names given in the early ages, and still more in the later church, to a class of solitary ascetics, who, with a view to more complete freedom front the cares. ternplatious. and bu5i ness of the world, withdrew from the ordinary intercourse of life, acid took up the-u' abode in natural caverns or rudely formed huts in deserts, forests, mountains, and other places. In the first centuries, the names of eremite and anchorite (q.v.) were indiscriminately applied to these solitaries; but the word eremite having been adopted into Latin, it is more commonly used in the modern languages which are derived from the Latin; and the Germans use the name einsiedler, which is of the same signification. The hermits of the middle ages, like the primitive anchorites, often lived in complete solitude; but a much more common, and, in its influence on the church, more important form of the institute, was that of a community of hermits, each possessing his separate hermitage, but all meeting at stated times for mass, prayer, religious instruction, and other common and public exercises. The various herniits of this class are regarded as constituting religious orders, and although never attaining to the popularity which dis tinguished the Franciscans, the Capuchins, the Dominicans, and other active orders, they form, nevertheless, a numerous and not uninfluential element in the spiritual life of the Roman Catholic church. It is beyond the scope of this work to enumerate all
the eremitical orders. The most remarkable are—the hermits of St. Augustine, who trace their origin to the holy father of that name, but are subdivided into several varie ties, which had their rise in the 11th, 12th, and 13th-centuries; the Camaldolese, founded by St. Romuald in 1012; the Celestines, a branch of the Franciscans, established by Peter Murrone, afterwards pope Celestine V.; the Hieronymites (q.v.), established first in Castile in the 14th c., and thence introduced into other parts of Spain and into Italy by Lope d'Olmeda in 1424; and the Paulites, so called from St. Paul, the first hermit, but an institute of the 13th c., which had its origin in Hungary, and attained to a wider extension and a greater popularity than perhaps any other among the eremitical orders. —Sec Helyot, Histoire des Ordres Religieur; also Wetser, Kirchen Lexicon art. Einskdler.