The Probert Encyclopaedia of People

ANCHORITES

Anchorites or Anchorets were, in the early church, a class of religious persons who generally passed their lives in cells, from which they never removed. Their habitations were, in many instances, entirely separated from the abodes of other men, sometimes in the depth of wildernesses, in pits or caverns; at other times several of these individuals fixed their habitations in the vicinity of each other, but they always lived personally separate. The continual prevalence of bloody wars, civil commotions, and persecutions at the beginning of the Christian era must have made retirement and religious meditation agreeable to men of quiet and contemplative minds. This spirit, however, as might have been expected, soon led to fanatical excesses; many anchorites went without proper clothing, wore heavy chains, and we find at the close of the fourth century Simeon Stylites passing thirty years on the top of a column without ever descending from it, and finally dying there. In Egypt and Syria, where Christianity became blended with the Grecian philosophy and strongly tinged with the peculiar notions of the East, the anchorets were most numerous; in Europe there were comparatively few, and on the development and establishment of the monastic system they disappeared completely.
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