Saint Peter Damian (1007-1072)

We know Peter Damian first through himself. Few men of the Middle Ages left a work so abundant and so personal: the New Catholic Encyclopedia puts the surviving work at some 170 letters (the Epistolae), 53 sermons and 7 lives of saints, not counting the theological and polemical opuscula, the hymns and the liturgical poems^[7]. Pope Benedict XVI, who devoted his catechesis of 9 September 2009 to him, noted that, thanks to his knowledge of the great Latin classics, he became "one of the finest Latinists of his time, one of the greatest writers of the Latin Middle Ages"^[8]. Through these pages, a voice can be heard: ardent, ironic, by turns tender and fierce, always burning with the desire for God.

The first biography is owed to his disciple John of Lodi (Iohannes Laudensis), a monk of Fonte Avellana who lived beside him and later became Bishop of Gubbio. His Life of Blessed Peter Damian, written shortly after the saint's death, is our principal narrative source^[9][10].

Like every medieval Life, this account seeks to edify as much as to inform: several dates in Peter Damian's life — the exact year of his entry at Fonte Avellana, the day of his death, the dating of some opuscula — remain debated, and this article presents them honestly as ranges. But the essentials are solidly attested, both by his own writings and by the acts of the popes he served.

The last-born of a wretched family

Peter was born at Ravenna in 1007, into a large and poor family^[11][12]. He was the last of a long line of children, and his coming into the world, says the tradition reported by John of Lodi, was at first ill received: an exasperated sister-in-law is said to have reproached his mother for adding one more mouth to feed. Discouraged, she refused for a time to nurse the child, who nearly died; a servant is said to have saved him and brought him back to his mother^[13][14][15].

Orphaned early, little Peter passed into the hands of an elder brother who treated him harshly, barely feeding him and sending him, it is said, to herd swine^[16][17][18]. This childhood of deprivation left a lasting mark on him: all his life he kept the harshness of those who have known hunger, and an acute compassion for the poor and the lowly.

His brother Damian, Archpriest of Ravenna

Salvation came from another brother, Damian (Damianus), Archpriest of Ravenna, a cultivated and good man. Struck by the child's intelligence, he took him in, had him educated and loved him as a son^[19][20]. In gratitude, Peter later added his protector's name to his own: Petrus Damiani, Peter of Damian — that is how posterity knows him^[21][22].

"He added the name of Damian to that of Peter, in memory of the brother who had drawn him out of misery and opened the world of letters to him." — after the biographical tradition drawn from the Life by John of Lodi^[23]

Studies at Faenza and Parma

Under his brother's protection, Peter studied at the schools of Ravenna, then Faenza, and finally Parma, then one of the great intellectual centres of northern Italy^[24][25]. There he revealed himself as a first-rate mind: grammar, rhetoric, law — he excelled in everything. Around 1032, barely twenty-five years old, he was already a renowned master, surrounded by pupils, promised to the fortune and honours of the age^[26][27].

Conversion and contempt for the world

But at the summit of this success, a restlessness worked within him. The brilliant professor discovered the nothingness of the goods he was pursuing. Already, beneath his master's robes, he secretly wore a hairshirt and multiplied fasts and vigils^[28][29]. The De contemptu saeculi — "On Contempt for the World" — which he would write later, expresses what he lived through then: the conviction that nothing that passes deserves to be given one's soul.

"The fashion of this world passeth away." — Saint Paul, 1 Corinthians 7 — a word Peter Damian made his own when he left his chair for the desert^[30]

Entry at Fonte Avellana (c. 1035)

One day, two hermits passing through told him of the solitary life led at Fonte Avellana, a hermitage founded at the foot of Mount Catria, in the Apennines, by the disciples of Saint Romuald, the father of the Camaldolese^[31][32]. The account decided everything. Around 1035, Peter abandoned his career, gave away his goods and presented himself at the monastery gate to embrace the most austere life imaginable: isolated cells, silence, prolonged fasts, long night psalmody^[33][34].

There he proved so fervent that his health suffered: excessive vigils gave him atrocious insomnia. Far from discouraging him, the trial strengthened him in a new discretion — he would learn to moderate others while remaining, for himself, implacably rigorous^[35].

At the head of the hermitage (1043)

His virtues and learning soon marked him out. Even before the prior's death, he was made his collaborator; in 1043, he became prior of Fonte Avellana, a charge he would keep — at least in title — until his death^[36][37]. Under his government, the hermitage shone: he made it a centre of reform and a nursery of spiritual men. He founded or reformed several dependent hermitages — San Severino, Gamugno, Sitria, Ocri and others — built, enriched the library, and imposed a rule of uncommon exactingness^[38].

It is also to these years that his first great hagiographical work belongs: around 1042, he wrote the Life of Saint Romuald (Vita beati Romualdi), the founder of the Camaldolese, who had died some fifteen years earlier^[39][40]. This Life remains today our major source on Romuald: in composing it, Peter Damian placed himself explicitly in his spiritual filiation, that of a Christianity of the desert and of solitude.

The master of "holy discipline"

Peter Damian was one of the great promoters of voluntary discipline — the penitential flagellation monks inflicted on themselves in union with the sufferings of Christ^[41][42]. Against those who found the practice excessive, he defended it vigorously, seeing in it a concrete way to crucify the flesh and to make satisfaction for sins. This asceticism may be judged harsh; in him it proceeded from a coherent theology of penance, the direct prolongation of Saint Paul's word on the body that must be reduced to servitude.

The evil of the 11th century

To understand Peter Damian's struggle, one must measure the crisis of his time. In the 11th century, the Western Church was afflicted with two scourges. Simony — named after Simon Magus — is the trafficking of sacred goods: bishoprics, abbeys and ordinations were bought and sold like merchandise. Nicolaitism denotes the incontinence of clerics, who lived openly with concubines or married, in defiance of the law of ecclesiastical celibacy^[49][50].

These disorders were not mere individual weaknesses: they stemmed from the grip of laymen upon the Church, lords and princes disposing of sacred offices as their own property. It is this whole system that the reform of the 11th century — called Gregorian, after Gregory VII — would undertake to break. Peter Damian was one of its first and most intrepid heralds^[51][52].

📖 See the detailed article: The Gregorian Reform

The Liber Gomorrhianus (c. 1049)

Around 1049, Peter Damian addressed to the new pope Leo IX one of his most famous and most violent writings: the Liber Gomorrhianus, the "Book of Gomorrah"^[53][54]. In it he denounced without evasion the moral corruption of a part of the clergy, and particularly sins against nature, which he compared to the sin of Sodom punished by fire from heaven. The tone is that of a prophet: he spared neither the guilty, nor the bishops who closed their eyes, nor the false confessors who absolved their accomplices.

The work refuses all complacency, yet it never forgets that the goal of severity is salvation. After painting the picture of sin, Peter Damian turns to the sinner himself in a page of overwhelming hope:

"Arise, arise, awake, thou who art benumbed by the torpor of miserable pleasure! [...] Let thy mind presume with full confidence on the divine mercy: it is not for sinners to despair, but for the impious. For it is not the greatness of crimes that leads the soul to despair, but impiety." — Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah, ch. 23^[55]

Far from being a mere pamphlet, the book is also a defence of the sacrament of penance and a meditation on mercy: he who has fallen, he writes, can always "stretch out his hand with confidence to the pole of penance, which is everywhere at his disposal"^[56]. To those who accused him of denouncing his brethren, he answered that he preferred "to displease men rather than God", and invoked the great doctors — Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine — who had not feared to fight evil face to face^[57].

Leo IX received the work with favour. In a preface that has been preserved, the pope praises the author for having "lifted the arm of his mind against the obscenity of sexual pleasure", while tempering with wisdom the rigour of the proposed sanctions^[58][59].

"By a pious combat, dearest son, the design of thy mind has reached the high place of holy chastity. [...] Thou hast subdued the barbarism of the flesh by lifting the arm of thy mind against the obscenity of pleasure." — Pope Leo IX, preface to the Book of Gomorrah^[60]

The Liber Gratissimus (c. 1053)

Peter Damian's zeal was never blind. When some of the reformers, in the ardour of the struggle against simony, maintained that ordinations conferred by simoniacal bishops were purely and simply null, he took up his pen to correct them. In the Liber Gratissimus (c. 1053), he defended the thesis — which the Church would ultimately endorse — of the validity of these ordinations: the sacrament does not lose its force because of the minister's unworthiness, even though the trafficking remains a crime^[61][62].

This position, more nuanced than that of many zealots, shows the theological depth of the reformer: he wanted to purify the Church without tearing the fabric of the sacraments, nor casting doubt on the validity of thousands of Masses and baptisms. Here again, truth counted more for him than polemical effectiveness.

Among his opuscula, one has lastingly held the attention of philosophers: the De divina omnipotentia ("On Divine Omnipotence"), a letter written around 1065 to Abbot Desiderius of Monte Cassino — the future Pope Victor III — and to his monks^[63][64]. The debate had arisen from a table conversation at Monte Cassino Abbey, about a saying of Saint Jerome according to which God himself could not restore a woman's lost virginity. Two vertiginous questions followed: can God restore a lost virginity? And above all, can he make what has been not to have been, and change the past?

Peter Damian answers by defending God's omnipotence without compromise. Yes, God can restore virginity — not by effacing the past event, but by a miracle worked in the present, as he raises the dead^[65]. As for the accomplished past, to "undo" it would imply a contradiction; but this limit, Damian stresses, in no way touches divine power, for omnipotence is the capacity to do all that is good, and God never contradicts himself nor denies his wisdom^[66][67]. Far from despising reason, as has sometimes been claimed, he only wants dialectic to remain at the service of faith, "as the handmaid serves her mistress". The treatise, often cited in the history of medieval philosophy, shows how this austere monk knew, when occasion called, how to be a metaphysician.

Another famous opusculum, the Dominus vobiscum, answers a wholly monastic question: may the hermit praying alone in his cell say the liturgical formulas in the plural — "The Lord be with you" — when no one hears him? Peter Damian develops in it a magnificent theology of the Church as one body: the solitary is never alone, for he bears the whole Church within him, and the whole Church prays in him^[68][69].

"The Church of Christ is united by such a bond of charity that, in many, she is one, and in each one, mysteriously wholly present." — after Peter Damian, Dominus vobiscum^[70]

Compelled by Stephen IX

The man who aspired only to disappear into the desert was about to be torn from his solitude. In 1057, Pope Stephen IX — listed as "Stephen X" in the Catholic Encyclopedia, which counts in the series a short-lived Stephen II — (Frederick of Lorraine) decided to place at the service of the Roman Church this monk of whom all Italy spoke. On 30 November 1057, he created him Cardinal-Bishop of Ostia — one of the most eminent sees, whose holder has the privilege of consecrating the pope — and called him to the curia^[71][72].

Peter Damian resisted with all his might. He yielded, it is said, only under threat of excommunication and by formal obedience. Once a cardinal, he changed nothing in his life: beneath the purple, he kept the hairshirt, the fasting and the poverty of the monk^[73][74]. He never ceased to regard his charge as an exile far from the beloved cell, and repeatedly petitioned to be relieved of it.

In the service of five popes

Peter Damian served five reforming pontiffs — addressing his reform writings to Leo IX, sitting at the synod of Florence under Victor II in 1055, then acting as cardinal and legate under Stephen IX, Nicholas II and Alexander II — and formed a friendship as fruitful as it was stormy with Archdeacon Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, soul of the reform^[75][76]. He supported the great reform of the papal election of 1059, which reserved the choice of the pope to the cardinals and withdrew the papacy from the pressures of the Roman factions and the empire.

Milan and the Pataria (1059)

The most resounding mission was that of Milan. The great Lombard city was torn apart: the reforming people, the Pataria, denounced the simony and concubinage of a powerful clergy entrenched in its privileges. In 1059, Peter Damian was sent there as legate, with Anselm of Lucca (the future Alexander II)^[77][78]. The situation nearly turned into a riot: the Milanese clergy contested Rome's authority over the ancient see of Saint Ambrose.

With admirable courage and firmness, Peter Damian mounted the pulpit, secured recognition of Roman primacy, and obtained from the guilty clerics an oath of reform^[79]. It was a turning point: Rome imposed its law on the proudest of Italy's Churches, and the reform gained a decisive foothold there.

Cluny and France (1063)

In 1063, Alexander II sent him to France, to the abbey of Cluny. Bishop Drogo of Mâcon disputed with Abbot Hugh of Cluny the exemption that withdrew the great Burgundian abbey from episcopal jurisdiction to place it under the pope's sole authority. Peter Damian, assembling a council at Chalon-sur-Saône, decided in favour of Cluny and solemnly confirmed its privileges^[80][81]. It is to this stay in France that his Life of Saint Odilo, fifth Abbot of Cluny, belongs^[82].

Germany and the emperor's divorce (1069)

In 1069, already aged, he still accepted a delicate mission to Germany: the young Emperor Henry IV wanted to repudiate his wife Bertha of Savoy. Peter Damian, at the council of Frankfurt (Mainz according to the New Catholic Encyclopedia), opposed the divorce in the name of the indissolubility of marriage and made the sovereign back down^[83][84]. Once again, the old monk had bent a mighty man — not by force, but by the moral authority of a man who wanted nothing for himself.

Year after year, Peter Damian never ceased begging the popes to relieve him of his episcopal dignity. He wrote to Nicholas II, to Alexander II, pressing letters in which the longing for solitude shows through obedience. Around 1067, Alexander II at last granted his request: Peter Damian was relieved of the administration of Ostia and could return to Fonte Avellana, recovering the cell, the psalmody and the silence of his religious youth^[85][86].

He did not for all that renounce the service of the Church: to the end, he continued to be called upon for missions and mediations. But he accomplished them henceforth as a monk drawn for a moment out of his desert, not as a prelate settled in the world.

Hildebrand, his "holy Satan"

The friendship of Peter Damian and Hildebrand — the future Gregory VII — was one of the most fruitful in the history of the Church, and one of the liveliest. The hermit admired the energy of the great archdeacon, "unshakable pillar of the Apostolic See", but suffered to see him ceaselessly recall him to active service when he himself aspired only to the peace of the cloister^[87]. It is in this mingling of affection and exasperation that he forged the famous nickname: he called Hildebrand his holy Satan (sanctus Satanas)^[88][89].

The word, ironic and tender, was not meant as an insult: in its first biblical sense, satan means the "adversary", the one who stands across the path. Hildebrand was for Peter Damian that beloved adversary, wholly devoted to God, who tirelessly drew him out of his solitude to throw him into the affairs of the Church. Beneath the jest, a real tension shows through: in his last years, the hermit no longer fully shared the political views of the future pope, preferring the more hidden work of converting hearts to frontal struggle^[90].

The last mission

In 1072, despite his great age, Alexander II entrusted him with a last legation: to reconcile the Church of Ravenna, his native city, fallen into schism and excommunication after the death of a rebellious archbishop. Peter Damian succeeded in his mission and brought Ravenna back to obedience^[91][92]. It was as if God had granted him to close his life where it had begun.

On the way back, a fever seized him. He stopped at the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli (today Santa Maria Vecchia), at Faenza. There, watched over by the monks reciting the office around him, he gave his soul to God in the night before the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter — 22 February 1072 (the 23rd according to other accounts; 21 February, sometimes given, is his present feast, not the day of his death)^[93][94]. He was about sixty-five years old.

Relics, feast and cult

Venerated as a saint from his death — without formal canonization, a procedure which did not yet exist in this form in the 11th century: his cult, attested since his death at Faenza, Fonte Avellana, Monte Cassino and Cluny, was extended to the universal Church by Pope Leo XII in 1823^[119][120] —, Peter Damian was buried at Faenza, where his relics have rested since 1898 in a chapel dedicated to him in the cathedral^[121][122]. His feast, then fixed on 23 February, is celebrated today on 21 February, since the reform of the Roman calendar of 1969: the 23rd is the old date of his feast, not the day of his death^[123][124]. A memory of the insomnia of his youth at Fonte Avellana, popular piety invokes him for those who suffer from insomnia, and sees in him a model of the reformers of the Church^[125].

Doctor of the Church (1828)

On 27 September 1828, the same Pope Leo XII crowned this glory by proclaiming him Doctor of the Church^[126][127] — solemn recognition that his written work, his doctrine on penance, the religious life, divine omnipotence and the unity of the Church, belong to the treasury of Catholic teaching. He thus stands among the great doctors of the Middle Ages, beside Saint Anselm and Saint Bernard.

Three centuries after his death, Peter Damian received an unexpected homage: Dante Alighieri gave him a choice place in the Paradise of the Divine Comedy. In the heaven of Saturn, that of contemplative souls, the poet meets an ardent light that presents itself to him — it is Peter Damian, who describes his hermitage beneath Mount Catria and fulminates against the luxury of the prelates of his time, so covered with mantles that "they trail two beasts under a single skin"^[128][129].

"In that place, I was Peter Damian; and I was Peter the Sinner in the house of Our Lady, on the shore of the Adriatic." — Dante, Paradise, Canto XXI^[130]

That the greatest Christian poet should have chosen this reforming monk to bear, from on high in Heaven, the denunciation of ecclesiastical corruption, says enough about the place Peter Damian has kept in the Church's memory: that of an uncompromising watchman, but a watchman inhabited by the love of God.

The primacy of solitude

The heart of his spirituality is love of the hidden life. For Peter Damian, the eremitical life is "at the summit of the states of life", and the solitary's cell an anticipated paradise, the place where the soul, freed from the world, is united to God in continual prayer^[131]. All his active life — the legations, the purple, the struggles — was in his eyes only a parenthesis torn from this first vocation. That is why he never knew greater joy than to be able at last to return to the desert.

"The cell of the hermitage is the parlour where God converses with men." — Saint Peter Damian, quoted by Pope Benedict XVI^[132]

Penance and the Cross

He was also the great doctor of penance. Against the lukewarmness of his age, he recalled without respite the need for satisfaction, mortification, the tear of repentance. His promotion of "holy discipline" proceeded from this conviction: the Christian is called to complete in his flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ, not to punish himself, but to love. All his asceticism was contained in one sentence, in which he summed up the logic of the Cross:

"He who does not love the cross of Christ does not love Christ." — Saint Peter Damian, Sermo XVIII, 11, quoted by Pope Benedict XVI^[133]

He loved to sign himself with a title that spoke his whole soul: "Petrus crucis Christi servorum famulus — Peter servant of the servants of the cross of Christ" (Ep. 9, 1)^[134].

Marian tenderness

This harshness hid a great tenderness. Peter Damian nourished an ardent devotion to the Virgin Mary and powerfully helped to spread the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary — first prayed on Saturday, as a weekly tribute to Mary: he himself attested its already widespread use among the secular clergy of Italy and France, and had it recited in choir in several Italian houses^[135]. In him, the hardest asceticism and the most filial piety were not contradictory: they were the two faces of a single love.

"Let the soul fatten on the rich meats of continual prayer; and by the steps of fervent desire, it will tend each day more swiftly towards the heavenly Jerusalem." — Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah, ch. 23^[136]

A thousand years on, Saint Peter Damian remains burningly relevant. To a Church that once again knows the temptation of compromise and the wound of scandals, he recalls a simple and exacting truth: true reform comes not from structures first, but from the holiness of persons. The Church is healed only by letting oneself be healed.

He teaches freedom of heart. Poor become master, master become hermit, hermit become cardinal, cardinal become monk again: at each stage, he refused to cling to what he held. His greatness was never in office, but in detachment — which allowed him to tell the truth to popes as to emperors, because he expected nothing from them.

He teaches finally that contemplation and action are not opposed. This man of the desert was one of the most influential figures of his century; but he acted with such force only because he drew everything from silence and prayer. For him as for every Christian, it is from the secret of the cell that fruitfulness in the open is born.

"It is not the greatness of crimes that leads the soul to despair, but impiety." — This word of Saint Peter Damian still holds: to every discouraged sinner, the doctor of penance repeats that God's mercy is greater than any fault.

• Saint Romuald (951-1027) — the father of the Camaldolese, whose spiritual line gave birth to the Fonte Avellana hermitage where Peter Damian was converted; he also wrote his Life.
• Saint Odilo of Cluny (960-1049) — the fifth Abbot of Cluny, whose Life by Peter Damian belongs to his legation in France (1063).
• The Gregorian Reform — the great movement of purification of the Church in the 11th century, against simony and Nicolaitism, of which Peter Damian was a pioneer.
• Saint Gregory VII (c. 1015-1085) — Archdeacon Hildebrand, friend and beloved adversary of Peter Damian, his "holy Satan", who brought the reform to its summit.