(Eugubium) in Umbria, following the example of his countryman, Romuald, whose life he
described.^1528 He soon reached the height of ascetic holiness and became abbot and disciplinarian
of the hermits and monks of the whole surrounding 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 Dominicus, 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 exhaustion(1063).^1529 Even noble women ardently
practiced "hoc purgatorii genus," as Damiani calls it. He defended this self-imposed 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 example, had far-reaching
consequences; it became a part of the monastic discipline among Dominicans^1530 and Franciscans,
and assumed 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.^1531
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 Gomorrah; 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 by the Lateran Council of 1059.
He also condemned in the clergy the practice of bearing arms, although even Pope Leo IX., in 1053,
led an army against the pillaging Normans. He firmly maintained that a priest should not draw the
sword even in defense of the faith, but contend only with the Word of God and the weapon of the
Spirit.
A man of such talent, piety and energy could not remain hidden in the desert. He was drawn
to Rome, and against his will chosen bishop of Ostia and Cardinal of the Roman church by Stephen
X. in 1058. He narrowly escaped the triple crown in 1061. He was the spiritual counsellor and
censor of the Hildebrandian popes (Gregory VI., Clement II., Leo IX., Victor II., Stephen X.,
Nicolas II., Alexander II.), and of Hildebrand himself. He was employed on important missions at
(^1528) See above, p. 366 sqq.
(^1529) See Damiani’s account in Vita Dominici Loricati, c. 10, in Migne, I. 1017.
(^1530) St. Dominic, the founder of the order of the Dominicans (1170-1221), is said to have scourged himself every night
three times, first for himself, then for his contemporaries, and last for the souls in purgatory.
(^1531) Boileau,Historia Flagellantium, Paris, 1700; Förstemann,Die christl. Geisslergesellschaften, Halle, 1828; Cooper,
Flagellation and the Flagellants, London, 1870. 3d ed., 1877.