I have a question that has plagued me for a couple of years now. A few years ago I had a history professor who told me about a group of monks called (and this may be spelled wrong, but it sure sounds funny) the flatulents. He told my class they were dedicated to relieving the pain of Jesus’s atonement through self-inflicted injuries. To prove to us he wasn’t lying, he showed us a picture of a large statue in Rome of a monk holding a wicked-looking whip. Did he just make this up? Was this statue dedicated to someone else? Was I duped by a man who has nothing better to do than make up a feeble story? PLEASE let me know!
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Boy, you can say that again. A lot of people might think you were talking about the flagellants, Christians who believed in mortification of the flesh through ritual floggings. (One assumes this is the significance of the monk “holding a wicked-looking whip,” although who knows, perhaps the artist was depicting some other form of self-abuse.) The flagellants were one of the more extreme expressions of medieval asceticism, arising first in northern Italy around 1260 and spreading within a short time to Germany, Bohemia, and Poland. You’ve heard the expression “whip yourself into a frenzy”? These guys weren’t kidding. They’d travel from one town to the next, whipping themselves and each other in public squares and urging the populace to repent. Grossed out by these macabre spectacles, authorities had the movement suppressed. (No small task–what are you going to do, have the offenders flogged?) But from time to time flagellants of various stripes, as it were, have resurfaced. Even today the Hermanos Penitentes (“Penitent Brothers”) are said to practice secret flagellant rites in the back country of New Mexico, and similar displays take place among certain Islamic fundamentalists.
It’s all pretty bizarre, and one can’t help but think your idea about the flatulents is a superior alternative. There you are in some stuffy chapel, praying with the bros, quietly digesting the evening’s beans. Suddenly your stomach begins to rumble. The eyes of the assembly turn to you. You struggle, but finally…well, let’s just say you break your vow of silence. I’m telling you, the flesh can’t get much more mortified than that.
–Fritz Reece, Chicago
