Carmelites (Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel)

The Carmelites began as hermits on a mountain in the Holy Land and were transformed into one of the great contemplative orders by a sixteenth-century Spanish reform that split the order in two.

From Mount Carmel to Europe

The order originated with a group of Latin hermits living on Mount Carmel in the early thirteenth century, for whom Albert of Jerusalem wrote a rule of eremitical life. Driven from the Holy Land by the collapse of the Crusader states, the hermits migrated to Europe and were reconstituted there as mendicant friars, a change of form from solitary contemplation to an active order in the towns that sat uneasily with the eremitical rule they had brought with them. The order kept a strong devotion to the Virgin under the title of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and the practice of the brown scapular.

The Teresian reform

The decisive event in Carmelite history was the reform led by Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross in sixteenth-century Spain, which sought to restore a stricter, more contemplative and enclosed life against the relaxed observance of the day. The reform produced a separate branch, the Discalced Carmelites, distinct from the older Calced observance, so the order divided in two, and it gave the church two of its greatest mystical writers, whose accounts of contemplative prayer became foundational texts of Catholic spirituality. The Carmelites thus combine an ancient eremitical origin with a reform that turned the order into a school of mystical theology.

The Carmelites began as strict hermits on Mount Carmel itself, living under Albert of Jerusalem's austere early rule, but the order's entire subsequent shape was set by a single external event: the collapse of the Crusader states in the Holy Land, culminating in the fall of Acre in 1291, forced the community to relocate to Europe, where a life designed for solitary hermitages on a single mountainside had to be adapted to towns and cities instead.

Pope Innocent IV had already moved the order in that direction decades earlier, in 1247, modifying the original rule to permit a more communal, mendicant style of life better suited to European conditions than to the isolation Mount Carmel had allowed, which is why Carmelites function today as friars rather than as hermits despite their origin. The order underwent its own major reform three centuries later, when Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, both sixteenth century Spanish mystics, led a movement to restore stricter contemplative poverty and simplicity against what they saw as a relaxation of the founding austerity, a reform that produced the Discalced Carmelites as a distinct branch alongside the original, unreformed Carmelite order, repeating the same reform and counter reform pattern found across the Cistercian and Franciscan families.