In 1062 Alexander II. found use for him as legate to France, and he influenced Cluny in favor of Alexander II. In 1068-69 we find him again a legate in Germany, impressing on young Henry IV. the importance of submission to Rome. This, too, he effected; and in 1072—the last year of his life—he appears in the same capacity at the age of sixty six, busy with the reform of the Church in his native Ravenna.
This is the outline of his story, and it bears no great marks of difference from others which have been commemorated in ecclesiastical history. Upon these services, and upon his relations to Hildebrand, a claim to considerable repute might be established for him. These facts, however, would not keep him in mind to-day so well as his doctrine of flagellation and the melody of his two grand hymns.
This matter of flagellation was older than Damiani’s time. It was permitted in the convents to give five “disciplinary strokes.” Starting at this point Peter the Honest asks, “Why may we not give the sixth, for the same reason?” If these five have been inflicted on the unwilling victim, why should he not secure some credit to himself by taking a sixth, a seventh, an eighth? The ice once broken, it is easy to see how the new custom would be seized upon by the ascetic hermits of Fonte Avellana. The argument is curious, as a specimen of that specious reasoning to which the ecclesiastic mind was tending, and which, later on, comes into full bloom among the Jesuit fathers.
Damiani inquires “if our Saviour was not beaten; if Paul did not receive, on several occasions, forty stripes save one; if all the apostles were not scourged; and whether the martyrs had not received the same punishment. Did not St. Jerome say that these were scourged by order of God? And who dares deny that they were scourged for others and not for themselves? Hence, if one undertakes this discipline, willingly, for himself, he must be doing a good thing.” (See Fleury: Hist. Ecclesiastique, XII., p. 107, Anno 1062.) He then adds the example of Guy, his predecessor, who died 1046, and of Poppo, a contemporary, who had died in 1048. The date of his own advocacy of this doctrine is about 1056.
Monte Cassino took up the practice with vigor; but in Peter’s own convent the most consummate example of flagellation was speedily developed, and his disciple, Dominic of the Cuirass (Dominicus Loricatus), carries off the palm from all posterity. The method proposed by Damiani was that the psalter should be recited to the accompaniment of the blows of the scourge. Every psalm called for one hundred strokes; the whole psalter for fifteen thousand. By this spiritual arithmetic three thousand equalled one year of purgatory, and therefore the complete psalter answered for five years of purgation removed from either one’s self or one’s neighbor. But Dominic was an inebriate in his flogging and set himself tasks of stupendous size. He also improved the art in several respects. He used both hands with dreadful facility, and frequently lashed his face until it was covered with blood, singing his psalms the while in a harsh, cracked, and terrible voice. In the forty days of one Lent he recited the psalter two hundred times, and inflicted what one reckless calculator calls “sixty million stripes” upon himself. The true number is three million, which is clearly sufficient.
At another occasion he literally flogged himself “against time,” apparently just to see what could be done by a determined man in twenty-four hours. At the end of that period he had gone through the psalter twelve times and a fraction over, and had given himself one hundred and eighty-three thousand stripes, working away with both hands (as a caustic writer suggests) “in the interest of the great sinking fund of the Catholic Church.”
Flagellation, like the dancing mania and the strange parades of the Turlepins and Anabaptists in the Middle Ages, has its root in nervous excitement and morbid devotion. Under Anthony of Padua, about 1210, all Perugia lashed themselves through the streets. Justin of Padua relates that great disorders and indecency attended the processions. The madness spread like wildfire through Rome and Italy. In 1260 and in 1261 the custom was again revived after some decadence, in the same town of Perugia and under one Rainer. And at this date thousands went out into Germany led by priests with banners and crosses. Again fading from public notice, the flagellants reappeared during the progress of the plague in 1349. Hecker and Cooper supplement the account given by Boileau. The affair was itself an epidemic. The company marched and sang hymns—among which was the Stabat Mater—and bore tapers and magnificent banners. They finally became a regular nomadic tribe, separating into two portions, one of which went to the south and the other to the north. The Church was powerless, and those pro and anti flagellationists, who happened to be in ecclesiastical authority, solemnly excommunicated each other!
The wild license of these scenes was far from aiding either morality or religion. Clement VI. (1332-52) issued his bull against them. And, inasmuch as these fanatics had failed to restore a dead child to life in Strasburg, the malediction of Rome had some effect, and once more the harsh custom died out.
Then there was another upheaval under Venturinus, a Dominican of Bergamo, and ten thousand persons joined the order. Like a perennial plant it again perished and again sprang up in 1414, when these awful orgies were renewed under the leadership of a person named Conrad. But now the Inquisition interfered, and among the testimony taken to show the lengths to which the fanaticism went is the sworn evidence of a citizen of Nordhausen who, in 1446, asserted that his wife wanted to have the children scourged just as soon as they had been baptized!
Once more, in the sixteenth century the Black and Gray Penitents appeared in France. In 1574 the Queen-mother put herself at the head of the black band in Avignon, and the disorders, indecency, and general depravity of manners which followed would scarcely be believed even if it was proper to mention them.