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.