Medieval anchorites were bricked into tiny cells built against churches
Once an anchorite moved into their little cell beside a church, the local bishop often held a ceremony to brick up the door. One small window let them hear Mass through the wall, and another faced the street, where neighbours passed in food and visitors came asking for advice.
The word hermit comes through Latin from the Greek eremos, meaning desert or uninhabited, so a hermit is literally a desert dweller. Anchorite has a separate root, a Greek verb for withdrawing into the countryside beyond a walled city. The two are often used interchangeably, but the anchorite was usually fixed to one spot, while a hermit might live in a cave or forest hut. Some medieval churches still keep the narrow squint window cut through the shared wall near the altar.
Christian tradition names Paul of Thebes, active in the third century, as the first known hermit in Egypt, though Antony the Great became far more famous thanks to a biography by Athanasius of Alexandria. Solitary life actually came before monasteries as such. The Desert Fathers wove baskets to trade for bread, and some attracted so many followers seeking counsel that their solitude disappeared. In medieval towns hermits might work as gatekeepers or ferrymen, and by the eleventh century living alone was accepted as a legitimate route to salvation in its own right.
The practice never died out. Carthusian and Camaldolese monasteries are really clusters of separate hermitages whose members meet only briefly for common prayer. Trappists who have matured in community may move to a hermitage on monastery grounds, as Thomas Merton did. Since the 1983 Code of Canon Law, canon 603 lets Catholics live as hermits under their own bishop without joining an order, and they must still earn a living in ways that preserve their silence.
Protestant churches have their own versions. Anglicans generally say solitaries rather than hermits, and the British congregation of the Society of St. John the Evangelist is now made up entirely of them. Early this century the Church of England saw a marked rise in applications to live this way. Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism and Taoism all have ascetic hermits too.
Source: Hermit
