PETER DAMIANI, CARDINAL AND FLAGELLANT.
It is not every poet who begins by keeping the swine and ends by wearing
the red hat and purple robe of a cardinal-bishop. Nor is it every poet
who commences as a forlorn and deserted foundling, to whom it is a great
mercy to have even swine to keep by way of getting his daily bread. But
all this and more befell Damiani.
We are not informed about his parentage, except that he had a mother who
abandoned him, and a brother (or, more probably, an uncle) who took pity
on him. He was born in Ravenna. Some authorities say it was in 988;
others that it was in 1007. A modern hymnologist, anxious to be right
(though he is frequently wrong), sets it at 1002. But 1007 has the
greatest weight of evidence.
This brother, or uncle, had compassion on the lad, and poor little
outcast Peter was sent by him “into his fields to feed swine,” a much
more honorable employment of course in Italy than in Palestine, and one
which he shared with Nicholas Brakespeare, the English pope, Hadrian IV.
What was his previous history we cannot discover, though the _Acta
Sanctorum_ for February 23d is full of legendary accounts. We only know
that his natural abilities attracted the notice of another relative
(brother, some say), who was an archdeacon at Ravenna. He it was who
advanced Peter to the opportunities of education, and who proved so fast
a friend that the boy took his patron’s name for his own. As Eusebius
called himself Eusebius Pamphili (Pamphilus’s Eusebius), so Peter became
Peter Damiani, “Damian’s Peter,” and this designation has adhered to him
ever since. It is amusing to read now and then of _Peter Damianus_, as
if Damiani were an Italian nominative case instead of a Latin genitive.
His birth was too obscure to lead any person to interfere with him. He
therefore quietly studied and improved, to the edification of his
fellow-pupils and the admiration of his teachers. His school-training
was, first of all, in Faenza. Thence he was sent to Parma, and
eventually he returned to Ravenna, where he taught with distinction and
popular approval, until he was nearly or quite thirty years old.
The age was barbarous and good professors were scarce. It seems to have
been expected that brilliant minds would go on shining like those
exhaustless lamps which are fabled to have been found in the tombs of
the old magicians. If such was the case, with the intense intellect of
Damiani he must have tapped some source of real spiritual power early in
his course, for he burns brightly even now as we read his vivid
truthfulness and peruse some of his lovely verses, out from which leap,
nevertheless, tongues of flaming scorn for hypocrites and simonists.
Yes, the age was barbarous, and therefore Peter Damiani was soon a
professor, with many students and an abundance of fees. Knowledge in
those days not only meant power but wealth, and he was fast growing rich
in Ravenna. It was a delightful life, but it did not suit him. He was,
in fact, the “spiritual kinsman, and in many respects the pioneer” of
Gregory VII. Hildebrand came to be, after awhile, his personal friend,
his _sanctus Sathanas_, his Mephistopheles, his instigator and
stimulant. Of a sudden, then, he departed from Ravenna to take up his
abode with the hermits of Fonte Avellana, near Gubbio. Here he was known
by the name of Frater Honestus, and surely he deserved the title, for he
was a swift witness against every sort of sin. Guy, the abbot, persuaded
him to undertake the instruction of the brethren, and thus he found
himself back at his old work of teaching once more.
It was not long before the new monk became prior of the convent. Then,
in 1041, he rose to be abbot. And then, in 1047, he indited to Pope Leo
IX. his famous _Liber Gomorrhianus_. This _Gomorrah Book_ is just what
its name implies. It is one of the earliest protests uttered within the
Church against the awful wickedness which was everywhere prevalent.
The subject is far too unpleasant for me to deal with it at any length.
And yet this disagreeable topic forces itself upon the notice of the
student of that period wherever he may turn. Most ingenious and
sophistical distinctions were made in those days relative to sin. This
thing, for instance, was wrong; but that other was not half so wrong as
this was. Such an offence was to be condoned by a trifling penance, and
such another was to be only met by years of contrition. Against all this
hypocritical nastiness Damiani set his pen. No more scathing book was
ever written. And the only wonder is that it has evaded the vigilance of
the men who suffered by it, and has made its escape into type, never
again to be in peril of its existence. Bayle—who may be safely accounted
unapproachable in such abstruse inquiries—has given us the whole story
of this book. It was a terrible scourge to the vices of the clergy, and
even Baronius allows that it was not written one moment too soon.
The pope to whom this remarkable document was addressed was a man of
appropriate spirit. He was the third in the series of five able German
popes, who labored so hard in the cause of disciplinary reform. At
Hildebrand’s advice, he had laid aside the papal insignia, which he
donned at his election, and came to Rome as a barefooted pilgrim in
1048. He aimed to put down simony, to stop the barter and sale of
benefices, and to secure the celibacy of the clergy. To this end he used
the synods with vigor, and was ready for almost any proposed reform
which fell in with his line of operations. He was of the German, not the
ultramontane party, and therefore was quite liberal in his construction
of the great text, “Thou art Peter,” and went so far as to say that the
Church should first of all be built upon the true rock, which was
Christ. To him, then, the _Gomorrah Book_ went, and it made a stir.
The next four popes occupied among them no longer period of
ecclesiastical rule than from the year 1054 to the year 1061. Matters
were unsettled. No one continued in office. But the finger of Hildebrand
the cardinal was mightier than the hand of any pope. Nicholas II. was
guided by him, and Alexander II., who came forward in 1061, was
unquestionably under his control. And when Alexander appeared, it seemed
that the _Gomorrah Book_ was still an element of unrest and disturbance,
at a time when the claims of an Antipope (Honorius II.) had been set up
by the Imperialist party, and it was necessary for even Hildebrand’s
friends to give as little offence as possible to the clergy. For the
election of Alexander was clearly irregular, because it was in defiance
of the rules laid down by Nicholas II. at a Lateran Synod in 1059. With
a genial and suave manner the new pontiff now borrowed the work for the
ostensible purpose of having it copied by the help of the Abbot of St.
Saviour. That was the last that Damiani saw of it for some little while.
If Alexander thought that the hermit abbot of Fonte Avellana would
submit to this method of suppression he flattered his soul in vain.
Damiani, after a reasonable delay, appealed to his friend Hildebrand.
The book was like a part of himself, and he had no desire to have it
treated with neglect. One cannot here follow the windings of the story
further than to say that Damiani got his book again, and now we have it
too.
I am surprised at the blindness which prevents some writers from seeing
in this Peter de Honestis a most noble and consistent character. Morheim
only pays him a merited compliment when he says that his “genius,
candor, integrity, and writings of various kinds, entitle him to rank
among the first men of the age, although he was not free from the faults
of the times.” But how could one easily avoid the extreme of severity
who was confronted by the grossest sins that ever carried a hissing
sibilant in front of their names! Flagellation was a natural reaction
from those fleshly lusts that warred against the soul.
Somehow Hildebrand took a great fancy to this genuine reformer. His own
great schemes were ripening, and Damiani was just the man to be made of
value in the office of cardinal. In 1057, then, the abbot had been
created cardinal-bishop of Ostia by Pope Nicholas II., and in the year
following deacon of the holy college. At first he strenuously resisted
the honor, but was forced to assume it by the Pope’s command. In 1059 he
had acted as papal legate to the semi-independent Ambrosian Church of
Milan. Here he obtained pledges from them that they would conduct their
affairs with purity and agree to receive the authority of the Roman
pontiff.
He did not remain among the cardinals very long. His convent allured
him, and the display requisite to his proper duties was both irksome and
repugnant to him. Therefore he went home again, ardently devoted to
Hildebrand, but devoid of all ambition, and ready to denounce the Pope
or anybody else when it appeared that the rights of the Church were
infringed.
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.
From that date to the present time more or less of this old insanity
occasionally reappears. It affords a singular commentary on our boasted
advance beyond those dark ages, for us to know that the _Penitentes_ of
our own Californian coast do precisely every year what Dominic of the
Cuirass and Anthony of Padua and Conrad and Rainer all did centuries
ago.
And this frightful enginery of fanaticism was set in motion by the man
who wrote one of the loveliest hymns in the Latin language!
I make no attempt to analyze the feelings that have prompted this
strange austerity. Isaac Taylor has already done this in a most masterly
fashion in his _Fanaticism_. But the essence of it is that wild delusion
which leads men (and even women) to fancy that they can vicariously
atone for others’ sins and “make merit,” as the heathen do, for those
who are less bold than themselves. They have fastened themselves down
like the poor wretched geese doomed to furnish _pattes-de-fois-gras_.
They are before the hot fire of zeal and gorged upon indigestible
dogmas. Hence their charity becomes as abnormal as the livers of the
geese, and the moral epicure, alas, finds in them dainties suitable for
his depraved taste!
It would be a grievous injustice to a good man if Damiani should only
bear with us the character of an ardent zealot and not of a Christian
poet. In this last guise he is at his best. Doubtless he often offends
by his Mariolatry, but he will as often charm by the music of his verse.
He may serve also as a convenient example of this worship of Mary, for
in one of his prayers he has given us the pith and core of that peculiar
devotion. It runs thus:
“O queen of the world, stairs of heaven, throne of God, gate of
paradise, hear the prayers of the poor and despise not the groans of the
wretched. By thee our vows and sighs are borne to the presence of the
Redeemer, that whatsoever things are forbidden to our merits may obtain,
through thee, place in the ears of divine piety. Erase sins, relieve
crimes, raise the fallen, and release the entangled. Through thee the
thorns and shoots of vice are cut down, and the flowers and ornaments of
virtue appear. Appease with prayers the Judge, the Saviour, whom thou
didst produce in unique childbirth, that He who through thee has become
partaker of our humanity, through thee may also make us partakers of His
divinity. Who with God the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and
reigneth, world without end. Amen.”
I have given this as an example of his prose. Here is a petition
“against a stormy time,” composed in that “leonine and tailed rhyme” in
which Bernard of Cluny, a century later, wrote the _De Contemptu mundi_.
It commences,
“_O miseratrix, O dominatrix, praecipe dictu!_
O thou that pitiest, O thou the mightiest, hark to our crying;
Lest we be beaten down, lest we be smitten down when hail is flying.
Thine is a priestly breast, O thou that succorest, mother eternal
Therefore we pray to thee, lest we be stayed from thee, by storm
infernal.
Quiet the tempest-wrack! Give us the sunshine back for our fair
weather!
Lend us clear light again, make the stars bright again where the
clouds feather!
Virgin, oh cherish thy friends lest we perish by sickness or anger;
Drive all these ills away, thou whose love stills away thunder’s mad
clangor!”
By far the greater part of his hymns are addressed to the Virgin and to
the saints, but there are some others—the _Paule doctor Egregie_, the
_Paschalis festi gaudium_, the _Christe sanctorum gloria_, and the two
powerful judgment hymns, _Gravi me terrore_ and _O Quam dira, quam
horrenda_—which are worthy of note. This _Gravi me terrore_ of the
eleventh century ranks with the _Apparebit repentina_ of the seventh
century. These, together with the _Dies Irae_ of the fourteenth century,
form the great judgment triad of Latin psalmody.
Yet of all the hymns of that or any later time, nothing approaches the
beauty of the _Ad perennis vitae fontem_, of which this Peter Damiani
sings. It is born of Augustine’s thoughts and dreams of the heavenly
land, and some of its phrases are exquisite beyond the possibility of
translation. When Frater Honestus on February 23d, 1072, forever left
that convent of Fonte Avellana, whither Dante went upon his last
recorded journey, then that noble landscape might preserve these
sixty-one lines of Latin verse among the choicest treasures of its dell
and grove. This was no lark that sang against the sun with clarion notes
calling us to such praise as rings through the ancient morning hymn of
Hilary. It was the nightingale of Faenza, sending out those thrilling
tones from the midst of the walls which beheld the eager scholar and to
which the weary cardinal had returned to die. Upon his fame it is set
therefore not like the lark’s song, but the nightingale’s, not as the
flashing diamond, but (in Daniel’s very words) “as a precious pearl for
our treasury.” Mrs. Charles has rendered it into English with grace and
success. Mr. Morgan appends this autograph note to the version in the
copy of his book which is in my possession: “N. B.—This hymn was printed
without revision. If reprinted the metres will be made _equal_.” He has
not attempted to follow the versification of the original. I know of no
other translation except that of R. F. Littledale in _Lyra Mystica_.
Another beautiful hymn which was suggested by the prose of Augustine,
and is ascribed to Peter Damiani by Anselm of Canterbury, who was his
younger contemporary, is the _Quid tyranne, quid minaris_. It is
commonly called
THE ANTIDOTE OF ST. AUGUSTINE AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF SIN.
What are threats of thine, O tyrant,
How can any torture move,
When, for all of thy contriving,
Nothing yet can equal love.
Sweet it is to suffer sorrow,
Futile is the force of pain;
I had sooner die than borrow
Any spot that love to stain.
Heap the fagots as thou pleasest,
Do what evil hearts approve,
Add the sword and cross together,
Nothing yet can equal love.
Pain itself is quite too gentle,
One poor death too brief must be,
I would suffer thousand tortures—
Every woe is light to me!