RECLUSES. - Reclusion is a form of eremitic life in which the religious imposes upon himself a solitary life, far from any community or enclosed in a cell, deprived as far as possible of communications with the outside. Ancient Egypt had known the reclusion of certain priests of Serapis, but this practice has no connection with the Christian custom.
It is in the East that reclusion appears more ancient and more widespread in the Church, principally in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor; and it spread, especially from the 4th century onward, more among men than among women. Some applied themselves to it with excessive refinements: living in a cave or in a tomb, like Peter the Galatian, or in a cell that permitted neither the sitting nor the lying position, deprived of any other light and any other ventilation than what filtered through a simple crack in the roof; in some cases the cell, without a roof, exposed the recluse to the rigors of frost and the heats of the sun. The longevity of some recluses, taking into account such an absence of hygiene, is prodigious. Others fasted to the extreme limits of weakness. Those who came out of their retreat to procure some nourishment or to draw water did so only at night. Others received some food through a narrow opening at ground level, which could serve on occasion for some laconic counsel of spiritual direction to their rare visitors; thus, for example, Salamanes on the banks of the Euphrates. Still others even had a companion; Peter the Galatian, for example, lived with a man possessed. There was also the case of recluses who directed a monastery from afar. But their life in general, lived in the most absolute silence, consisted almost solely in prayers and in the reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers.
The West adopted the reclusive life around the 5th century, under the influence of the East, through the diffusion of the lives of St. Anthony and St. Hilary and thanks to the Collationes and the writings of Cassian. Gregory of Tours frequently recalls the existence of recluses in Gaul in the 4th century: for example, Marcius, who lived in a grotto that he had dug himself in the rock near Royat, in Auvergne, and Hospitius, who lived near Nice, his naked body bound in iron chains and wearing a hair shirt.
Although the rigors of recluses were less severe than in the East, some councils nevertheless promulgated canons to regulate the practice. After the Councils of Vannes (463), of Agde (506), of Orléans (533), of Toledo (643), the Council in Trullo (692; can. 41 [Hefele-Leclercq, III, p. 568]) did not authorize reclusion except for monks who had spent three years in a monastery, provided they had obtained permission from the abbot and the bishop. Thus certain customs came to be established: from the time of St. Radegund, at Poitiers, the entry of a nun into reclusion was accompanied by a true ceremony; the majority of recluses depended more or less on a monastery; thus St. Benedict, when, at the beginning of his religious life, he shut himself in a grotto. It was not always perpetual; for some, it was sometimes limited to a period of life, or to determined periods of the liturgical year, or even interrupted by the necessity of apostolate or of charitable actions; in the 6th century Eparcus, a recluse for 43 years, at the same time directed a monastery near Angoulême; St. Senoch withdrew during Lent and from the day of St. Martin to Christmas.
Reclusion developed still further from the 9th to the 13th century; it is sometimes difficult to distinguish it from eremitism in general, very much in vogue at that time, but about which we are still poorly informed: rules were also imposed, which smacks of paradox, upon a type of religious life profoundly individualistic: Regula solitaria of Grimlaicus (9th century), Rule of Ethelred of York (12th century), Rule of Peter the Venerable for the recluses of Cluny.
Cistercian abbeys and Regular Chapters considered themselves honored to have at least one recluse in their vicinity and dependencies. Some, like Robert of Arbrissel, founder of Fontevrault, have remained very celebrated. The very multiplicity of recluses as of hermits moved Pope Innocent IV to discipline the multitude of them under the Rule of St. Augustine (1256). The flowering of the Mendicant Orders, in spite of the initiatives of the Spirituals, contributed to bringing reclusion into disuse during the last two centuries of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless in France the reclusory of the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris was inhabited until the end of the 15th century and the life of reclusion was then illustrated by the sanctity of Colette de Corbie (v.); there were, however, still recluses in Rome at the beginning of the 15th century.
From the 15th century onward the properly reclusive life was practiced only exceptionally, whereas eremitism continued to find adherents until the 20th century; for example, with Charles de Foucauld (v.) in the Sahara.