Michael D. Klein M.D. – I practiced pediatric surgery for 40 years (I finished my fellowship in 1979). I stepped down as Surgeon-in-Chief at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan and Professor and Arvin I. Philippart, III, Chair in Pediatric Surgical Research at Wayne State University in 2009. Prior to medical school, I studied medieval history.
My CV and further information is available on my personal website: ascholarsgarden.com.
In the summer of 1965 I was taking the last courses I needed to graduate from the University of Chicago. The one I needed was Humanities II with Herbert Lam (brilliant). I also took a graduate level course The Vita Apostolica with Lester Little. Professor Little had been my inspiration to study medieval history when I took his course in Western Civilization. I had been accepted to graduate school at Princeton and had also been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. All of this was serendipitous. I already had taken Western Civ at Western Reserve University during a high school summer (grade A). At U of C, however, every undergraduate had to take ten one year basic courses. It was assumed that you would take exams and ‘place out’ of at least two, thus spending only two full years in the basics. As a transfer student I took the exams and placed out of five, all the science and math and foreign language (French), but I had to take Social Science I and II and Humanities I and II and Western Civ!
For the Vita Apostolica Professor Little wished us to focus on the popular piety movements. There was a new book on the topic which he thought would be a good place to start, but it was in German, not one of my languages. He made several other suggestions and I chose Peter Damian. The class consisted of going off on our own to pursue our topic and then returning for a few classes in which to discuss each others’ papers. Conferences with Professor Little were always available.
As part of my investigation I trekked over to the Oriental Institue (now The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures), the source for Indiana Jones. That’s where the library had the Patrologia Latina (and the Patrologia Graeca). The Patrologia had 221 Volumes and Volumes 144 and 145 contained the work of St. Peter Damian. My Latin was quite poor. I had only one year the previous academic (my senior) year, so I had no hope of reading originals, I used mainly French sources, but I did notice a large amount of poetry, and I had never read anything about Peter Damian writing poetry. It seemed that this would be a good area to study.
Peter Damian was a strange man, different, difficult to understand then and now. There are two representations of him that a 20th or 21st century intellectual might come across.
The Italian playwright Pirandello’s[1] (?anti) hero, Enrico IV, complains about this stickler for good and church directed behavior. In fact it was Peter Damian’s friend, Pope Gregory VII who twice excommunicated the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV. Pirandello’s insight recognizes that much of Gregory’s reforming efforts were politically motivated in the ‘Investiture Controversy’ struggle between the church and secular rulers. He recognizes Peter Damian as the moral force of the church (Gregorian) reform movement.
More widely recognized (and more appropriately) Peter Damian appears in Dante’s Paradiso [2] as one of the very few churchmen of whom Dante approves. Dante meets him in the seventh heaven (Saturn) of contemplative souls.
He was born in Northeast Italy, orphaned early and raised by uncaring relatives. He was rescued from this situation by Damian, an older brother, whose name he took in gratitude. Thanks to this he was able to study in Ravenna and became a teacher of rhetoric (reminding us of St. Augustine). At 28 he experienced a religious conversion and became a priest and committed to, not just the life of a monk, but the life of a hermit. His monastery at Fonte Avellana was both cenobitic (monks living, working, and praying together) and eremitic (monks living alone in cells separate from the monastery). PD considered the eremitic life closer to God with the cenobitic being a stage on the way to that. For several years he lived such a life under loose monastic direction in the wilderness of the Apennine Mountains. Clearly he was (like Augustine again) tempted by concupiscence. He adopted the discipline (flagellation) to punish his flesh as a way to deal with this and to imitate the sufferings of Christ on the cross. The passion and the cross were central to his religious thinking.
Yet he had read the ancient pagan authors and had a mindset of scholarship. He continued reading closely, but now the church fathers. And reading he thought and he wrote his thoughts, sharing them with his monastic brothers until his fame had spread to nearby monasteries and finally to Rome. In the monastery, manual labor was considered a way to worship God. PD explains that his hands are no good at manual labor, and therefore he worships the Lord with his writing. He preached in his own and nearby monasteries.
He was good at this and seeing how devoted the monks were to him, and how willing they were to listen to him, he was made Prior of his monastery at Fonte Avellana at the age of 37. We are told that this was much against his will, but we wonder. He could have refused to leave his hermit’s hut and never created his growing reputation. He could not stop with just this office and preaching. He created a network of monasteries all of which were loosely or tightly under his control. This was not done by being a hermit, but by building personal relationships.[3]
People trusted him and admired him. They saw him as truly devoted to a Christian life of prayer. It was not only the monks who sought his guidance. The local nobility supported the foundation of his new and growing network of monasteries. His fame spread and he developed similar relationships with regional and imperial nobles as well as with popes, especially Leo IX and Gregory VII who were fighting for needed church reforms. The two reforms they most sought were clerical celibacy, for many priests and bishops still married, and appointment of bishops only by the church and not by secular rulers. While the latter reform may have had practical and theological bases to promote holiness, it also led to, or formed a rationale for, not just a separation of church and state, but the authority of the religious over the secular ruler since the secular ruler was considered to hold his dominion from God.
From being an intellectual source or assistant to reforming popes he became their instrument, a tool to deal with difficult issues. Thus (?again against his will) he was appointed Bishop of Ostia and made a Cardinal. He was also sent by popes as their representative to settle problems in many dioceses. Much of his political and reforming activity is recorded in a large correspondence which has been preserved.
Whenever he could, however, he returned to Fonte Avellana, not to a comfortable connubial monastic existence, but to the eremitic experience and the discipline.
All the time he continued to write: Letters of advice, sermons, prayers, and (my particular interest) poetry. In one epistle he details homosexuality in the monastery, how to deal with, and especially how to punish, its various forms. The poems are rich and varied. Some are political as he rails against the anti-Pope Cadalus, some preach fire and brimstone, some preach love and a loving God. The most well-known poems have been called hymns and are often used in that way. For his time Peter Damian had the problem of the exceptional person. He was good at many things and could not keep still. He was like our ‘triple threat’ academic, good at research, teaching, and administration. The example from my own life in pediatric surgery is the skillful surgeon with good hands and a warm heart, loved by the patients, parents, nurses, and students. Her curiosity and intelligence drive him to create a laboratory. His clinical and teaching success drive others to make her Surgeon-in-Chief or President of the hospital. Yet she always longs for the examining room with just one family, for the operating room. A few manage this (Bartlett, Grosfeld, Fonkalsrud, Holcomb), others drift to the lab and stay, some climb administration and desert the clinic. Peter Damian did it all.
Can his poetry speak to us today? Can they tell us about Peter Damian himself? Can they reflect religious thought and practice in the Holy Roman Empire of the 11th century and say something about the struggle between emperors and popes, the lives of local clergy, and the religious yearnings of regular folk and the rising movements of popular piety? The whole project, unlikely to be concluded in my lifetime seeks to illuminate, if not answer, these questions. I began, however, with five poems, one political and four religious. I self-published these in a slim volume available for $4.95 in print or as an Ebook on AMAZON.
In 1927 FJE Raby published one of the earliest studies of Medieval Latin Poetry.[4] While the classical Latin of the late Republic and early empire was slowly changing and then devolving into the Romance languages, poetry, even in Latin, was changing from strictly classical forms such as non-rhyming dactylic hexameter with strict rules (often violated) to rhyming and even singsongy forms. Peter Damian is an example of this change. Raby chose four of Peter Damian’s poems as either ‘best’ or ‘representative,’ and he chose one of these to call the ‘strangest and sweetest.’ This last one is now no longer attributed to Damian. These are the four religious poems which I presented in an English translation. I have added one poem from the Epigrams on the anti-Pope Cadalus. It is a scurrilous political polemic. It seems out of keeping with his religious poetry, although it uses scatological language similar to what he uses against immorality and immoral priests and monks. I have worked on the sense and meaning and have tried to use ‘poetic language.’ For now they are in free verse so I need not take further liberties with meter or rhyme. These translations are not the same as those on this website. The translations here are as literal as I could make them and still convey the meaning.
[1] Italian author, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 for his “bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage.” In Act 1. Henry mistakes the disguised Belcredi for the monk Peter Damian and reacts angrily, but is later calmed.
[2] onepeterfive.com/st-peter-damian
[3] Jasper, KL, Mapping a Monastic Network: Peter Damian and Fonte Avellana in the Eleventh Century, Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2012.
[4] Raby, FJE, A History of Christian-Latin Poetry from the Beginning to the Close of the Middle Ages, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1927.
For the Vita Apostolica Professor Little wished us to focus on the popular piety movements. There was a new book on the topic which he thought would be a good place to start, but it was in German, not one of my languages. He made several other suggestions and I chose Peter Damian. The class consisted of going off on our own to pursue our topic and then returning for a few classes in which to discuss each others’ papers. Conferences with Professor Little were always available.
As part of my investigation I trekked over to the Oriental Institue (now The Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures), the source for Indiana Jones. That’s where the library had the Patrologia Latina (and the Patrologia Graeca). The Patrologia had 221 Volumes and Volumes 144 and 145 contained the work of St. Peter Damian. My Latin was quite poor. I had only one year the previous academic (my senior) year, so I had no hope of reading originals, I used mainly French sources, but I did notice a large amount of poetry, and I had never read anything about Peter Damian writing poetry. It seemed that this would be a good area to study.
This is not an academic bibliography. It is a record of my search for the poetry of St. Peter Damian.
Constantini Cajetani in Patrologia Latina Vols 144 and 145, Patrologiae Cursus Completus. Series Latina., Ed. Jacques-Pau Migne, 221 Vols., Paris, 1844-1864
For a long time this was the only and the best source for the work of St. Peter Damian. The poems and prayers are found in the second volume. The series editor is a fascinating personality. More information can be found at libguides.lib.rochester.edu/c.php.
and fun further reading is
God’s Plagiarist: Being the Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbé Migne, by R. Howard Bloch is a wonderfully written, and documented biography of Jacques-Paul Migne.
Cajetani has really been replaced by Kurt Reindell’s Scholarly work in the 1980’s in the Monumenta Germani Historica. This work is limited to the ‘Letters’ which include most of Damian’s prose work.
Peter Damian, Epistolae, ed. Kurt Reindell, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Epistolae saeculi XI., vols. 1-4, (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, München, 1983). This is available at https://www.dmgh.de/mgh_briefe. Thanks to Google Translate I have been able to use this valuable resource.
Owen Blum worked closely with Kurt Reindell and has produced an English translation of the letters.
Peter Damian, The Letters of Peter Damian, 4 vols., trans. Owen J. Blum, O.F.M., Fathers of the Church, Medieval Continuations, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2014), 78-82. These are in print and not terribly expensive.
The best secondary source for St. Peter Damian remains the work of Dom Jean Leclercqu. It is detailed, objective, and compelling reading.
Jean Leclercq, Saint Pierre Damien: ermite et homme d’Église (Rome, 1960)
For English I really liked Patricia McNulty, St. Petr Damian: Selected Writings on the Spiritual Life, Faber and Faber, 1959.
John of Lodi, a contemporary and student of Damian, has written a life in Latin. It has not been translated that I can find. One more thing for me to do. It can be found in Vol. 144 of the Patrologia.
There is an Italian biography which I am in the process of reading. So far it seems a bit hagiographic, but I shall press on.
Ruggero Benericetti, L’Eremo E La Cattedra, Vita di san Pier Damiani, Ancora, Firenze, 2007
The year before I was in Lester Little’s course on the Vita Apostolica, and certainly unbeknownst to me, Margareta Lokrantz published her dissertation for the Ph.D. at the University of Stockholm. This is certainly the first appraisal of the Poetry of St. Peter Damian. Again thanks to Google Translate I have made significant use of it. This is very hard to find. I have acquired a photocopy of the entire work and will post it on this site along with an English translation of the Italian.
Margareta Lokrantz, L’Opere Poetica di San Pier Damiani, Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Studia Latina Stockholmiensis, Almquist & Wiksell, Stockholm 1964
Lokrantz is a fascinating figure. I am sure her life would be a wonderful biography. She went on to found the study of Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at the University of Milan.
She was also clearly involved with the publication of the current best and most available work on the poetry of St. Peter Damian, published in 2007 as part of the celebration of the millenium of his birth. I am not yet quite sure how she was involved as she died in 2004, but she is certainly given credit and I refer to this work as Lokrantz and Facchini 2007. It includes prose, prayers, and Italian translations. Once more thanks to Google Translate I have made significant use of it.
Opere di Pier Damiani: Poesie e Preghiere, Lokrantz, U. Facchini, eds., Città Nuova 2007