hermitArticle Free Pass hermit, also called Eremite, one who
retires from society, primarily for religious reasons, and lives
in solitude. In Christianity the word (from Greek erēmitēs,
“living in the desert”) is used interchangeably with anchorite,
although the two were originally distinguished on the basis of
location: an anchorite selected a cell attached to a church or
near a populous centre, while a hermit retired to the
wilderness. The first Christian hermits appeared by the end of
the 3rd century in Egypt, where one reaction to the persecution
of Christians by the Roman emperor Decius was flight into the
desert to preserve the faith and to lead a life of prayer and
penance. Paul of Thebes, who fled to the desert about 250, has
been considered the first hermit. The excessive austerity and
other extremes of the early hermits’ lives were tempered by the
establishment of cenobite (common life) communities. The
foundation was thus laid in the 4th century for the institution
of monasticism (i.e., monks livin