WHILE rarely the focus of critical attention, the angel has long since hovered beside the solitary in the history of anchoritic spirituality. According to the conceptualisation of the religious life known as the vita angelica, men and women who devoted themselves to contemplation of God and renounced the world lived in imitation of, and even association with, the angels of heaven. As Jean Leclercq states in his chapter on the angelic life in La Vie parfaite:

Does it follow, therefore, that the most physically isolated of all religious people – anchorites – had the closest relationship of all to the celestial beings they emulated? Leclercq certainly suggests that this was the case. Later in his discussion, he provides the following extract from Nicholas of Clairvaux's sermon, On the dedication of a church:

Here, we seem to have evidence for the idea that worshippers retreated to far-flung places with the intention of seeking out celestial beings. Yet the phrase ‘in order to associate with angelic spirits’ [‘pour s'associer aux esprits angéliques’] distorts the meaning of the Latin, which implies not that hermits deliberately sought out angels, but that their highly contemplative mode of existence united them with angels, whose very function is to contemplate God.