Memorials of Human Superstition / being a paraphrase and commentary on the Historia Flagellantium of the Abbé Boileau, Doctor of the Sorbonne

by Jean Louis de Lolme

The flagellating practices and ceremonies alluded to in this Chapter, are certainly most astonishing facts in the History of Man: and if any thing renders our surprise less than it otherwise would be, it is the consideration that such practices have not been imagined on a sudden, and at once, but have been the result of a long series of slow innovations, introduced by different persons, at different times, and in places remote from one another.

Besides, it really seems that there is a secret propensity in Mankind, for arduous modes of worship of all kinds. The observation has been made, that in the Science of Moral, speculatively considered, Men, whatever may be their private conduct, are most pleased with such maxims as are most rigid; and so, with respect to religious rites, do they seem to be most taken with, and most strongly to adhere to, such as are most laborious, and even painful.

We see, in fact, that bodily austerities of a cruel kind, performed with religious intentions, have obtained among almost all the Nations in the World; and self-scourgings, in particular, were practised with views of this kind among almost all the Nations of antiquity of whom accounts have been left us: on which the Reader is referred to the sixth Chapter of this Book.

The same practice we mention, besides the advantage of its obviousness to recommend it, had in its favour, with Christians, the farther circumstance of its being in a manner sanctified by the History itself of the facts on which their religion is grounded. As a punishment of that kind made express part of the ill treatment which our Saviour underwent, the thoughts of pious persons were naturally directed to a mode of mortification of which so frequent mention was made in books, hymns, sermons, and religious conversations: hence has it happened, that the practices here alluded to, have been much more constantly and universally adopted by Christians, than by the professors of any other Religion.

A difference, however, took place in the above respect, between the Eastern and the Western Christians. As the Christians who were settled in the East, lived almost always in the midst of hostile Nations, and besides, never formed among themselves any very numerous sect, they never went such lengths in their opinions, nor gave into such extravagant practices, as the Christians in the West. They had not, for instance, adopted the fond notions since entertained by the latter, on the efficaciousness of self-flagellations to atone for past sins. Their religious notions had taken a different turn. They generally considered a certain deep sense of past offences, a state of unbounded contrition for the same, as the competent means of atonement. They considered tears as the last stage of such contrition, and in a manner a necessary token of it. Shedding tears was, therefore, the thing they aimed at, in all their devotional acts: self-scourging was thought by them to be an excellent expedient for obtaining so happy an effect; and they hence resorted to it, not (as hath been done in the West) as to a direct and immediate method of compensating past sins, but only as to a subsidiary operation, and a means which, they sagaciously thought, would soon bring them to the requisite state of tears and salutary compunction.

Of this turn of the devotion of the Eastern Christians, as well as of the ends they proposed to themselves in their acts of self-flagellation, we find proofs in the few instances that have been left us in Books, of their having performed acts of that sort: I shall relate the following one, which is to be found in the work of Gabriel, Archbishop of Philadelphia, intitled Πατερικὸν, or Collection of actions of Fathers, or Saints.

A certain Saint had come to a resolution of renouncing the World, and had fixed his habitation on the celebrated Mountain of Nitria, in Thebaid; and next to the cell to which he had retired, was that of another Saint, whom he heard every day bitterly weep for his sins. Finding himself unable to weep in the same manner, and heartily envying the happiness of the other Saint, he one day spoke to himself in the following terms: ‘You do not cry, you wretch; you do not weep for your sins. I will make you cry; I will make you weep by force, since you will not do it of your own accord; I will make you grieve for your sins, as you ought:’ saying which, he took up in a passion a large scourge that lay by him, and laid lashes upon himself so thick and in so effectual a manner, that he soon brought himself to that happy state which was the object of his ambition.

Another instance of the manner of the devotion of the Eastern Christians, is supplied by the passage in St. John Climax, that has been recited at pag. 121. Both the Opposers, and the Promoters, of the practice of self-flagellation, have gone too far in their interpretations of that passage. The latter have asserted that it expressly alluded to religious disciplines, performed in the same manner, and with the same views, as they now are in modern Monasteries; while the former have been as positive that it meant no such thing as beating or scourging, and is only to be understood of the lamentations of the Monks in the Monastery in question, that is, in a bare figurative manner. The passage in St. John Climax is this: ‘Some among the Monks watered the pavement with their tears, while others, who could not shed any, beat themselves.’ The expression used in this passage, to say that some among the Monks beat themselves, is certainly as precise as any the Greek language can supply; yet neither does it supply a sufficient proof that they performed, in the above Monastery, regular and periodical flagellations of the same kind with those that have been since used in the Western Monasteries, in the times of Cardinal Damian, and the Widow Cechald: the self-flagellations alluded to, in the passage we speak of, appear to have been of the same kind with those performed by the Saint of the Mountain of Nitria who has been abovementioned, and were calculated to enable those who could not weep, to weep plentifully.

But among the Western Christians, as the extensive Country over which they became in time to be spread, without any intervening opponents, afforded a vast field for innovations of every kind, they, as hath been above said, went the greatest lengths in their opinions concerning the usefulness of the practices we mention, to which the History of their Religion had at first given rise.

In the first place, mortifications of the kind here alluded to, were used among them from notions of much the same sort with those entertained by the Eastern Christians, that is, with a view of sanctifying themselves by their repentance, and assisting their compunction.