CARMELITES, an order of religious persons, making one of the four tribes of mendicants or begging friars, and taking its name from Mount Carmel, formerly inhabited by Elias, Elisha, and the children of the prophets, from whom this order pretends to be derived in an uninterrupted succession. The manner in which they make out their antiquity has something in it too ridiculous to be rehearsed. Some among them allege they are descendants of Jesus Christ; others go farther, and make Pythagoras a Carmelite, and the ancient druids regular branches of their order. But Phocos, a Greek monk, speaks the most rationally on the subject. He says, that in his time, 1185, Elias’s cave was still extant on the mountain, near which were the remains of a building which intimated that there had anciently been a monastery; and that some years before, an old monk, a priest of Calabria, by revelation, as he pretended, from the prophet Elias, had fixed there, and assembled ten brothers. In 1209 Albert, patriarch of Jerusalem, gave the solitaries a rigid rule, which Papebroch afterwards printed. In 1217, or, according to others, in 1226, Pope Honorius III. approved and confirmed it. This rule contained sixteen articles, one of which confined them to their cells, and enjoined them to continue day and night in prayer; another prohibited the brethren from having any property; another enjoined fasting from the feast of the holy cross till Easter, except on Sundays; abstinence at all times from flesh was enjoined by another article; one obliged them to manual labour, another imposed on them a strict silence from vespers till the tierce the next da y∙

The peace concluded by the Emperor Frederic II. with the Saracens in the year 1229, a peace so disadvantageous to Christendom and so beneficial to the infidels, occasioned the Carmelites to quit the Holy Land under Alan the fifth general of the order. He first sent some of the religious to Cyprus, who landed there in the year 1328, and founded a monastery in the forest of Fortania. Some Sicilians leaving Mount Carmel at the same time, returned to their own country, where they founded a monastery in the suburbs of Messina. Several English departed from Syria in the year 1240, in order to found others in England. Others of Provence, in the year 1244, founded a monastery in the desert of Aigualates, about a league from Marseilles[7:6:147]; and thus the number of their monasteries increasing, they held their European general chapter in the year 1245, at their monastery at Aylesford in England. This order afterwards increased so much, that it had thirty-eight provinces, besides the congregation of Mantua, in which were fifty-four monasteries, under a vicar-general; and the congregations of Barefooted Carmelites in Italy and Spain, which had their peculiar general.

After theestablishmentof the Carmelites in Europe, their rule was in some respects altered. Pope InnocentIV. added to the first article a precept of chastity, and relaxed the 11 th, which enjoins abstinence at all times from flesh, permitting them, when they travelled, to eat boiled flesh. This pope likewise gave them leave to eat in a common refectory, and to keep asses or mules for their use. Their rule was again mitigated by the popes Eugenius IV. and Pius II. Hence the order is divided into two branches, viz. the Carmelites of the ancient observance, called the moderate or mitigated ; and those of the strict observance, who are the barefooted Carmelites; — a reform set on foot in 1548 by S. Theresa, a nun of the convent of Avila, in Castile. These last are divided into two congregations, that of Spain and that of Italy.

The habit of the Carmelites was at first white, and the cloak was laced at the bottom with several lists. But Pope Honorius IV. commanded them to change it for that of Minims. Their scapulary is a small woollen habit, of a brown colour, thrown over their shoulders. They wear no linen shirts, but instead of them linsey-woolsey, which they change twice a week in the summer, and once a week in the winter.

If a monk of this order lies with a woman, he is prohibited saying mass for three or four years, is declared infamous, and obliged to discipline himself publicly once a week. If he is again guilty of the same fault, his penance is doubled; and if a third time, he is expelled the order.