CHAP. XV.
Another difficulty. Which is the best plight to be in, for receiving a discipline?
EMINENT persons, in the times we speak of, did not differ from one another only in their opinions concerning the advantages of religious flagellations; but they also dissented with respect to the manner of performing them, as we may likewise conclude from the Writings and Ordinances of those times. Cardinal Damian, the great Patron of Flagellators, prescribed to them to strip themselves naked, and when thus perfectly free from every obstruction and impediment, to flog themselves in company with one another: this we learn from his xliid Opusculum, which he wrote to the Fathers of Mount Cassin, who were not intirely reconciled to the thought of those flagellations. On the other hand, an Ordinance which had been framed in the Assembly which was held at Aix-la-Chapelle, so early as the year 817, under the reign of Lewis le Débonnaire, forbad the above manner of flagellating Monks, because it did more harm than good. ‘Let the Monks (it is said in the 16th Canon) never be lashed naked, in the presence of the other Monks; let them not be whipped naked, for every trifling fault, in sight of the Brothers.’
Several religious Orders submitted to the directions of the above Canon; St. Lanfranc, among others, ordered, in his Statutes, ‘That Monks, guilty of offences, should be beaten with a thick rod, or wand, over their gowns.’ The Monks of Affligen, in the Netherlands, adopted the same Canon; and it was settled in their Ritual, as Haeftenus informs us, that the Monks should have their gowns on, when they were to be cudgelled.
However, the wise precautions we mention were adopted only in a few particular places; and the regard which ought to be paid to decency, as well as to the prudent Ordinance of the Assembly held at Aix-la-Chapelle, was utterly forgotten in most Monasteries; the practice recommended by Cardinal Damian being adopted in them, upon the score of more complete mortification. Nay, so cheap did the Framers of regulations, in several Monasteries, make their own nakedness, as well as that of the Brothers, that in certain cases they ordered delinquents to be stript in order to be flagellated, in sight not only of the Congregation, but even of the whole Public. In an Article of the Constitutions of the Abbey of Cluny, which Udalric has collected together, it is expressly settled that the persons guilty of the different faults enumerated therein, are ‘to be stripped naked in the middle of the next street or public place, so that every person who chooses may see them, and there tied up and lashed[88].’
Among the Promoters and Recommenders of nakedness, we must not omit to mention Cardinal Pullus, a person of no less importance than Cardinal Damian, and who, in his life-time, was high Chancellor of the Roman Church: in the Collection of Sentences with which this Cardinal has obliged the World, he gives it as his opinion, that the very nakedness of the Penitent, is a considerable increase of his merit[89].
