788 FOUKTH PEKIOD. A. D. 490-1049.
397 and passim; GFRORER Oregor. VII., Bd. I.; HOFLER: Die deutschen Papste; WILL: Die Anf tinge der Restauration der Kirche im elf ten Jahrh. ; GIESEBRECHT : Gesch. der deutschen Kaizerzeit, vol. II. ; HEFELE : Conciliengesch., vol. IV.
I. LIFE. PETER DAMIANUS or DAMIANI (1007-1072),1 a friend of Hildebrand and zealous promoter of the moral reform of the clergy, was a native of Ravenna, had a very hard youth, but with the help of his brother Damianus (whose name he adopted),2 he was enabled to study at Ravenna, Faenza and Parma. He acquired honor and fortune as a teacher of the liberal arts in his native city. In his thirtieth year he suddenly left the world and became a hermit at Fonte Avellano near Gubbio (Eugubium) in Umbria, following the example of his countryman, Romuald, whose life he described.3 He soon reached the height of ascetic holiness and became abbot and disciplinarian of the hermits and monks of the whole surround ing region. Even miracles were attributed to him.
He systematized and popularized a method of meritorious self-flagellation in connection with the recital of the Psalms ; each Psalm was accompanied with a hundred strokes of a leathern thong on the bare back, the whole Psalter with fifteen thousand strokes. This penance became a rage, and many a monk flogged himself to death to the music of the Psalms for his own benefit, or for the release of souls in purgatory. The greatest expert was Dominions, who wore an iron cuirass around his bare body (hence called Loricatus), and so accelerated the strokes that he absolved without a break twelve Psalters ; at last he died of
1 There are several distinguished persons of that name, (a) Damianus, brother of Cosmas; they were physicians in Sicily who took no fees, and died as "silverless" martyrs of the Diocletian persecution (303), and became the patrons of physicians and druggists throughout the middle ages. The Greeks distinguish three pairs of these brothers. (6) Damianus, patriarch of Alexan dria, d. 601, who leaned to Sabellianism and Monophysitism. (c) D., bishop of Pavia, who drew up a confession of faith against the Monothelkes, A. D. 679.
2 As Eusebius called himself Pamphili after his friend and patron Pamphilus.
3 See above, p. 366 sqq.
I 182. ST. PETEK DAMIANI. 789
exhaustion (10G3).1 Even noble women ardently practiced "hoc puryatorii genus" as Daniiani calls it. He defended this selfimposed penance against the opponents as a voluntary imitation of the passion of Christ and the sufferings of martyrs, but he found it necessary also to check unnatural excesses among his disciples, and ordered that no one should be forced to scourge himself, and that forty Psalms with four thousand strokes at a time should be sufficient as a rule.
The ascetic practice which he encouraged by word and ex ample, had far-reaching consequences ; it became a part of the monastic discipline among Dominicans2 and Franciscans, and as sumed gigantic proportions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially during the reign of the Black Death (1349), when fraternities of Flagellants or Cross-bearers, moved by a spirit of repentance, preceded by crosses, stripped to the waist, with faces veiled, made pilgrimages through Italy, Germany and England and scourged themselves, while chanting the penitential psalms, twice a day for thirty-three days, in memory of the thirty-three years of our Lord's life.3
Damiani became the leader of the strict monastic party which centred at Cluny and labored, from the sacerdotal and theocratic point of view, for a reformation of the clergy and the church at a time of their deepest degradation and corruption. He compared the condition of his age to that of Sodom and Gomor rah ; he opposed simony and the concubinage of priests, as the two chief sources of evil. He advocated a law which punished simony with deposition, and which prohibited the laity from hearing mass said by married priests. Such a law was enacted
1 See Damiani's account in Vita Dominici Loricati, c. 10, in Migne, I. 1017.
2 St. Dominic, the founder of the order of the Dominicans (1170-1221), is paid to have scourged himself every night three times, first for himself, then for his contemporaries, and last for the souls in purgatory.
3 Boileau, Historia Flcifjellantium, Paris, 1700; Forstemann, Die christl. Gefsslergesettfchqften, Halle, 1828; Cooper, flagellation and the Flagellants, London, 1870, 3d ed., 1877.