the cloister, that he may take up the warfare of the world."[1]
Albeit against his will, Damiani became a soldier of the Church in the fields of her secular militancy against the world. He was sent on more than one important mission—to Milan, to crush the married priests and establish the Pope's authority, or to Mainz, there to quell a rebellious archbishop and a youthful German king. Such missions and others he might accomplish with holy strenuousness; his more spontaneous zeal, however, was set upon the task of cleansing the immoralities of monks and clergy. In spite of his enforced relations with the powers of the world, he was a fiery reforming ascetic, a scourge of his time's wickedness, rather than a statesman of the Church. His writings were a vent for the outcries of his horror-stricken soul. The corruption of the clergy filled his nostrils: they were rotten, like the loin-cloth of Jeremiah, hidden by the Euphrates; their bellies were full of drunkenness and lust.[2] As for the apostolic see:
"Heu! sedes apostolica,
Orbis olim gloria,
Nunc, proh dolor! efficeris
Officina Simonis."[3]
These, with other verses written in tears, relate to schisms of pope and antipope which so often rent the papacy in Peter's lifetime.[4] He never ceased to cry out against monks
- ↑ Opusculum, xxxvi. (Migne 145, col. 595). It is also bad to be an abbot, as Damiani shows in plaintive and almost humorous verses:
"Nullus pene abbas modo
Valet esse monachus,
Dum diversum et nocivum
Sustinet negotium:
Et, quod velit sustinere,
Velut iniquus patitur****"Spiritaliter abbatem
Volunt fratres vivere,
Et per causas saeculares
Cogunt ilium pergere;
Per tam itaque diversa
Quis valet incedere?"De abbatum miseria rhythmus
(Migne, Pat. Lat. 145, col. 972). - ↑ Lib. v. Ep. iv.; cf. Jer. xiii.
- ↑ Ep. iv. ii (Migne, Pat. Lat. 144, col. 313).
- ↑ He died in 1072, a year before Hildebrand was made pope.
