PETER, surnamed of Damian, was born about the year 988, in Ravenna, of a
good family, but reduced. He was the youngest of many children, and,
losing his father and mother very young, was left in the hands of a
brother who was married, in whose house he was treated more like a
slave, or rather like a beast, than one so nearly related; and when
grown up, he was sent to keep swine. He one day became master of a piece
of money, which, instead of laying it out in something for his own use,
he chose to bestow in alms on a priest, desiring him to offer up his
prayers for his father's soul. He had another brother called Damian, who
was archpriest of Ravenna, and afterwards a monk; who, taking pity on
him, had the charity to give him an education. Having found a father in
this brother, he seems from him to have taken the surname of Damian,
though he often styles himself the Sinner, out of humility. Those who
call him De Honestis, confound him with Peter of Ravenna, who was of the
family of Honesti. Damian sent Peter to school, first at Faenza,
afterwards at Parma, where he had Ivo for his master. By the means of
good natural parts and close application, it was not long before he
found himself in a capacity to teach others, which he did with great
applause, and no less advantage by the profits which accrued to him from
his professorship. To arm himself against the allurements of pleasure
and the artifices of the devil, he began to wear a rough hair shirt
under his clothes, and to inure himself to fasting, watching, and
prayer. In the night, if any temptation of concupiscence arose, he got
out of bed and plunged himself into the cold river. After this he
visited churches, reciting the psalter while he performed this devotion,
till the church office began. He not only gave much away in alms, but
was seldom without some poor person at his table, and took a pleasure in
serving such, or rather Jesus Christ in their persons, with his own
hands. But {449} thinking all this to be removing himself from the
deadly poison of sin but by halves, he resolved entirely to leave the
world and embrace a monastic life, and at a distance from his own
country, for the sake of meeting with the fewer obstacles to his design.
While his mind was full of these thoughts, two religious of the order of
St. Benedict, belonging to Font-Avellano, a desert at the foot of the
Apennine in Umbria, happened to call at the place of his abode; and
being much edified at their disinterestedness, he took a resolution to
embrace their institute, as he did soon after. This hermitage had been
founded by blessed Ludolf, about twenty years before St. Peter came
thither, and was then in the greatest repute. The hermits here remained
two and two together in separate cells, occupied chiefly in prayer and
reading. They lived on bread and water four days in the week: on
Tuesdays and Thursdays they ate pulse and herbs, which every one dressed
in his own cell: on their fast days all their bread was given them by
weight. They never used any wine, (the common drink of the country,)
except for mass, or in sickness: they went barefoot, used disciplines,
made many genuflections, struck their breasts, stood with their arms
stretched out in prayer, each according to his strength and devotion.
After the night office they said the whole psalter before day. Peter
watched long before the signal for matins, and after, with the rest.
These excessive watchings brought on him an insomnie, or wakefulness,
which was cured with very great difficulty. But he learned from this to
use more discretion. He gave a considerable time to sacred studies, and
became as well versed in the scriptures, and other sacred learning, as
he was before in profane literature.
His superior ordered him to make frequent exhortations to the religious,
and as he had acquired a very great character for virtue and learning,
Guy, abbot of Pomposia, begged his superior to send him to instruct his
monastery, which consisted of a hundred monks. Peter stayed there two
years, preaching with great fruit, and was then called back by his
abbot, and sent to perform the same function in the numerous abbey of
St. Vincent, near the mountain called Pietra Pertusa, or the Hollow
Rock. His love for poverty made him abhor and be ashamed to put on a new
habit, or any clothes which were not threadbare and most mean. His
obedience was so perfect, that the least word of any superior, or signal
given, according to the rule of the house, for the performance of any
duty, made him run that moment to discharge, with the utmost exactness,
whatever was enjoined. Being recalled home some time after, and
commanded by his abbot, with the unanimous consent of the hermitage, to
take upon him the government of the desert after his death, Peter's
extreme reluctance only obliged his superior to make greater use of his
authority till he acquiesced. Wherefore, at his decease, in 1041, Peter
took upon him the direction of that holy family, which he governed with
the greatest reputation for wisdom and sanctity. He also founded five
other numerous hermitages; in which he placed priors under his
inspection. His principal care was to cherish in his disciples the
spirit of solitude, charity, and humility. Among them many became great
lights of the church, as St. Ralph, bishop of Gubio, whose festival is
kept on the 26th of June, St. Dominick, surnamed Loricatus, the 14th of
October; St. John of Lodi, his successor in the priory of the Holy
Cross, who was also bishop of Gubio, and wrote St. Peter's life; and
many others. He was for twelve years much employed in the service of the
church by many zealous bishops, and by four popes successively, namely:
Gregory VI., Clement II., Leo IX., and Victor II. Their successor,
Stephen IX., in 1057, prevailed with him to quit his desert, and made
him cardinal bishop of Ostia. But such was his reluctance to the
dignity, that nothing less than the pope's {450} threatening him with
excommunication, and his commands, in virtue of obedience, could induce
Peter to submit.
Stephen IX. dying in 1058, Nicholas II. was chosen pope, a man of deep
penetration, of great virtue and learning, and very liberal in alms, as
our saint testifies, who assisted him in obliging John, bishop of
Veletri, an antipope, set up by the capitaneos or magistrates of Rome,
to quit his usurped dignity. Upon complaints of simony in the church of
Milan, Nicholas II. sent Peter thither as his legate, who chastised the
guilty. Nicholas II. dying, after having sat two years and six months,
Alexander was chosen pope, in 1062. Peter strenuously supported him
against the emperor, who set up an antipope, Cadolaus, bishop of Parma,
on whom the saint prevailed soon after to renounce his pretensions, in a
council held at Rome; and engaged Henry IV., king of Germany, who was
afterwards emperor, to acquiesce in what had been done, though that
prince, who in his infancy had succeeded his pious father, Henry III.,
had sucked in very early the corrupt maxims of tyranny and irreligion.
But virtue is amiable in the eyes of its very enemies, and often disarms
them of their fury. St. Peter had, with great importunity, solicited
Nicholas II. for leave to resign his bishopric, and return to his
solitude; but could not obtain it. His successor, Alexander II., out of
affection for the holy man, was prevailed upon to allow it, in 1062, but
not without great difficulty, and the reserve of a power to employ him
in church matters of importance, as he might have occasion hereafter for
his assistance. The saint from that time thought himself discharged, not
only from the burden of his flock, but also from the quality of
superior, with regard to the several monasteries, the general inspection
of which he had formerly charged himself with, reducing himself to the
condition of a simple monk.
In this retirement he edified the church by his penance and compunction,
and labored by his writings to enforce the observance of discipline and
morality. His style is copious and vehement, and the strictness of his
maxims appears in all his works, especially where he treats of the
duties of clergymen and monks. He severely rebuked the bishop of
Florence for playing a game at chess.[1] That prelate acknowledged his
amusement to be a faulty sloth in a man of his character, and received
the saint's remonstrance with great mildness, and submitted to his
injunction by way of penance, namely: to recite three times the psalter,
to wash the feet of twelve poor men, and to give to each a piece of
money. He shows those to be guilty of manifold simony, who serve princes
or flatter them for the sake of obtaining ecclesiastical preferments.[2]
He wrote a treatise to the bishop of Besanzon,[3] against the custom
which the canons of that church had of saying the divine office sitting;
though he allowed all to sit during the lessons. This saint recommended
the use of disciplines whereby to subdue and punish the flesh, which was
adopted as a compensation for long penitential fasts. Three thousand
lashes, with the recital of thirty psalms, were a redemption of a
canonical penance of one year's continuance. Sir Thomas More, St.
Francis of Sales, and others, testify that such means of mortification
are great helps to tame the flesh, and inure it to the labors of
penance; also to remove a hardness of heart and spiritual dryness, and
to soften the soul into compunction. But all danger of abuses, excess,
and singularity, is to be shunned, and other ordinary bodily
mortifications, as watching and fasting, are frequently more advisable.
This saint wrote most severely on the obligations of religious men,[4]
particularly against their strolling abroad; for one of the most
essential qualities of their state is solitude, or at least the spirit
{451} of retirement. He complained loudly of certain evasions, by which
many palliated real infractions of their vow of poverty. He justly
observed: "We can never restore what is decayed of primitive discipline;
and if we, by negligence, suffer any diminution in what remains
established, future ages will never be able to repair such breaches. Let
us not draw upon ourselves so base a reproach; but let us faithfully
transmit to posterity the examples of virtue which we have received from
our forefathers."[5] The holy man was obliged to interrupt his solitude
in obedience to the pope, who sent him in quality of his legate into
France, in 1063, commanding the archbishops and others to receive him as
himself. The holy man reconciled discords, settled the bounds of the
jurisdiction of certain dioceses, and condemned and deposed in councils
those who were convicted of simony. He, notwithstanding, tempered his
severity with mildness and indulgence towards penitents, where charity
and prudence required such a condescension. Henry IV., king of Germany,
at eighteen years of age, began to show the symptoms of a heart
abandoned to impiety, infamous debauchery, treachery, and cruelty. He
married, in 1066, Bertha, daughter to Otho, marquis of Italy, but
afterwards, in 1069, sought a divorce, by taking his oath that he had
never been able to consummate his marriage. The archbishop of Mentz had
the weakness to be gained over by his artifices to favor his desires, in
which view he assembled a council at Mentz. Pope Alexander II. forbade
him ever to consent to so enormous an injustice, and pitched upon Peter
Damian for his legate to preside in that synod, being sensible that a
person of the most inflexible virtue, prudence, and constancy, was
necessary for so important and difficult an affair, in which passion,
power, and craft, made use of every engine in opposition to the cause of
God. The venerable legate met the king and bishops at Frankfort, laid
before them the orders and instructions of his holiness, and in his name
conjured the king to pay a due respect to the law of God, the canons of
the church, and his own reputation, and seriously reflect on the public
scandal of so pernicious an example. The noblemen likewise all rose up
and entreated his majesty never to stain his honor by so foul an action.
The king, unable to resist so cogent an authority, dropped his project
of a divorce; but remaining the same man in his heart, continued to hate
the queen more than ever.
Saint Peter hastened back to his desert of Font-Avellano. Whatever
austerities he prescribed to others he was the first to practise
himself, remitting nothing of them even in his old age. He lived shut up
in his cell as in a prison, fasted every day, except festivals, and
allowed himself no other subsistence than coarse bread, bran, herbs, and
water, and this he never drank fresh, but what he had kept from the day
before. He tortured his body with iron girdles and frequent disciplines,
to render it more obedient to the spirit. He passed the three first days
of every Lent and Advent without taking any kind of nourishment
whatever; and often for forty days together lived only on raw herbs and
fruits, or on pulse steeped in cold water, without touching so much as
bread, or any thing which had passed the fire. A mat spread on the floor
was his bed. He used to make wooden spoons and such like useful mean
things, to exercise himself at certain hours in manual labor. Henry,
archbishop of Ravenna, having been excommunicated for grievous
enormities, St. Peter was sent by Pope Alexander II. in quality of
legate, to adjust the affairs of the church. When he arrived at Ravenna,
in 1072, he found the unfortunate prelate just dead; but brought {452}
the accomplices of his crimes to a sense of their guilt, and imposed on
them a suitable penance. This was his last undertaking for the church,
God being pleased soon after to call him to eternal rest, and to the
crown of his labors. Old age and the fatigues of his journey did not
make him lay aside his accustomed mortifications, by which he
consummated his holocaust. In his return towards Rome, he was stopped by
a fever in the monastery of our Lady without the gates of Faenza, and
died there on the eighth day of his sickness, while the monks were
reciting matins round about him. He passed from that employment which
had been the delight of his heart on earth, to sing the same praises of
God in eternal glory, on the 22d of February, 1072, being fourscore and
three years old. He is honored as patron at Faenza and Font-Avellano, on
the 23d of the same month.
Footnotes:
1. Opusc. 20, c. 7.
2. Ib. 22.
3. Ib. 29, Nat. Alex. Theo Dogm. l. 2, c. 8, reg. 8.
4. Opusc. 12.
5. The works of St. Peter Damien, printed in three volumes, at Lyons,
in 1623, consist of one hundred and fifty-eight letters, fifteen
sermons, five lives of saints, namely, of St. Odilo, abbot of Cluni;
St. Maurus, bishop of Cesene; St. Romuald; St. Ralph, bishop of
Gubio; and St. Dominick Luricatus, and SS. Lucillia and Flora. The
third volume contains sixty small tracts, with several prayers and
hymns.