flagellation

flagellation During the Middle Ages, various ascetic sects within the Mediterranean and Hibernian world adopted the practice of flagellation; ritual scourging of the flesh with a whip for the purpose of cleansing the soul of sin. Among Christian religious communities, where flagellation was most systematically integrated into devotional life, flagellation was performed as a memorial to an act of sacrifice that occurred centuries in the past, the suffering and martyrdom of Jesus Christ. Personal acts of self-immolation by monks, nuns, and other holy people imitated biblical descriptions of Christ's journey to Calvary for crucifixion, the primordial moment of Christian sacrifice, when life beyond the grave was supposed to have been achieved. Mimetic flagellation was done in the belief that bodily suffering atoned for offenses against God and satisfied divine justice.

Penitential obligations imposed by the church hierarchy over the lay population extended the practice of remunerative suffering in the high Middle Ages. Flagellation of a voluntary nature was appropriated soon thereafter by lay members of society in Italy, Greece, Germany, and Poland. During the fourteenth century, public processions of ritual scourging were formed with the intention of appeasing God's wrath in order to secure communal health against the bubonic plague. At a slightly later date, towards the end of the fifteenth century, voluntary scourging became public in Spain, where it took on its most elaborate and ceremonial forms. Young men who called themselves disciplinantes, the flagellators, organized into religious brotherhoods for the specific purpose of scourging the flesh ‘in payment for all the sins of the Christian people’. These collective orders of storytellers reproduced during Holy Week the mournful scriptural saga of redemption by inscribing on their backs the blood that was thought once to have been shed by Christ. The men who chose to participate in the annual performances of penitence initially met together in private in parish churches and local monasteries, to contemplate Christ's suffering and share in evening meals. They extended to one another signs of affection and goodwill and offered apologies for past offences. Wedded in a state of grace and freed of animosity, they silently journeyed out on to dirt and cobblestone streets, walking barefoot through narrow corridors of urban and rural thoroughfares for distances of some two to five leagues. On the way they scourged themselves, flailing long, knotted and wax-tipped ropes across their backs until blood drenched their linen tunics and spilled over on to darkened pavements. As much as a pound of coagulated blood was noted to have been shed by individual flagellants during these paschal ceremonies. It was because of the physical strength and endurance required to perform in front of the public with unwavering resolve that corporate legislation required that flagellation only be performed by men under the age of fifty in good health.

The flagellants' re-enactment of Christ's sacrifice, in processions that riddled the surface of public streets with the blood of inhabitants, exposes for us a dual meaning to bodily ritual in the religious observances of traditional communities. Ritual is a means first and foremost, as Mircea Eliade has demonstrated forcefully in The Sacred and the Profane, of spanning the chronological distance between present and past and perpetuating memories of a people's supernatural origins. The theological message of ritual scourging was made clear to spectators in formal pronouncements. As young men solemnly raised lashes over their heads, public oracles announced that

‘this is done in honor and reverence of the shedding of His precious blood, and in honor of the five thousand lashes that they gave Him in order to redeem and save us’.
Along with this commemorative function, a second, more immediate and personal meaning was expressed in these ceremonial acts. Suffering and affliction experienced by all who followed Christ, it was collectively articulated, had the continued power to cleanse, to heal, and to restore moral order. This was why Holy Week exercises did not merely recall, in an abstract manner, an act of sanctifying pain that had occurred once already in the past, but actively emulated this sanctification process in the present.

Through the experience of genuine pain, penitents were laying claim to their immediate sense of control over morality and collective justice. Flagellants were rehearsing a past that continued to live on in their emotional appreciation of the world, causing their own blood to mingle with that of Christ's memory to bring down upon the community divine grace.

M. Flynn

See also body mutilation and markings; Christianity and the body; stigmata.