The hermits on Mount Carmel

The origins of the Carmelites, as with so many medieval religious movements, are now obscure. The first western hermits on Mount Carmel wrote nothing that has survived, and the earliest document to name them can be dated only to the early thirteenth century. This records the request for a rule of life from a group of hermits which marks an already advanced stage in the development of their community. How long they had been together on the mountain is impossible to say. Earlier sources do, however, allow us to gain some idea of the life of twelfth-century Frankish hermits in the East. One such is the De conversatione servorum Dei of Gerard of Nazareth, bishop of Laodicea (Goncali, near Denizli in Turkey), c. 1140, which gives thumbnail sketches of men of standing who abandoned wealth and status to take up penitential lives of extreme deprivation in the places associated with the birth of Christianity. Eating irregularly, avoiding meat, practising self-flagellation and other bodily torments, they sought a personal experience of God. A Hungarian priest named Cosmas, whose existence is confirmed by other sources, lived as a hermit in a narrow cell on the walls of Jerusalem. Others built themselves shelters as remote as possible from human contact. One man, named Henry, erected a hut on the Black Mountain near Antioch, went bare foot, or sometimes totally naked, and ate nothing that had been killed.