or EREMIT, Eremita, a devout person retired into solitude, to be more at leisure for prayer and contemplation, and to disencumber himself of the affairs of this world.—The word is formed from the Greek ἐρημός, desert or wilderness; and according to the etymology, should rather be wrote Eremit.

Paul surnamed the Hermit, is usually reckoned the first hermit; though St Jerome at the beginning of the life of that saint says, it is not known who was the first.—Some go back to John the Baptist, others to Elias; others make St Anthony the founder of the eremitical life; but others think that he only rekindled and heightened the fervour thereof, and hold that the disciples of that saint owned St Paul of Thebes for the first that practised it. The persecutions of Decius and Valerian are supposed to have been the occasion.—Several of the ancient hermits, as St Anthony, &c., though they lived in deserts, had yet numbers of religious accompanying them.

There are also various orders and congregations of religious distinguished by the title of hermits; as, hermits of St Augustine, of St John Baptist, of St Jerome, of St Paul, &c.

the Peter Gautier, a French officer of Amiens in Picardy, who quitted the military profession, and commenced hermit and pilgrim. He travelled to the Holy Land about the year 1093; and making a melancholy recital of the deplorable situation of a few Christians in that country to Pope Urban II, and at the same time enthusiastically lamenting that Infidels should be in possession of the famous city where the Author of Christianity first promulgated his sacred doctrines, Urban gave him a fatal commission to excite all Christian princes to a general war against the Turks and Saracens the possessors of the Holy Land. See CROISADE.