Part F: The Harm

23. The excess: flagellation and anorexia mirabilis

This is the hard chapter, and it is the point where chapter 5 comes due.

A note before: I describe historically. I do not give method details, and I will not present as admirable something that killed people.

The stylite and the early extremity

The early ascetic literature records competitive extremes: sleep deprivation, immobility, hermitism in extreme conditions, and — in its most famous form — life on a pillar.

And it records also, notably, internal criticism: the collections of sayings contain repeatedly stories in which the elder rebukes the excessive, and diakrisis — measure — is the supreme virtue. The Benedictine Rule (chapter 11) is, to a large extent, the institutionalisation of this criticism.

Organised flagellation

Self-flagellation as a private practice appears from the 11th century. But the significant development is the mass:

1260, in Italy: the first great movement, connected with apocalyptic expectations
1348–1349: the second, during the plague — groups moving from city to city flagellating publicly

Both were condemned. Clement VI, in 1349, issued a bull against the movement.

And both, especially the second, are connected with violent attacks on Jewish communities — the pogroms of 1348–49 are historical fact, and the flagellation movements were part of the mechanism. This must be recorded together: self-punishment and other-punishment moved together.

Anorexia mirabilis

From the 13th century onward, a specific phenomenon is recorded repeatedly in Western Europe: women, mostly young, who acquire a reputation for sanctity through prolonged refusal of food, often with declared exclusive nutrition from the eucharist.

The name is later. The cases are not.

And some of these women died from the consequences, young. Catherine of Siena, one of the most influential women of the 14th century — she mediated in the return of the papacy from Avignon, later declared a Doctor of the Church — died in 1380, at the age of 33, after prolonged refusal of food.

The dispute over interpretation, which must be presented fairly

There are two main readings and they disagree seriously:

The clinical reading (Rudolph Bell is the best-known advocate) sees in the historical cases the features of eating disorder, expressed in the available cultural idiom.

The historical reading (Caroline Walker Bynum is the strongest voice) counters that retrospective diagnosis imposes a modern category on people with an entirely different meaning-world, and that it misses the essential: food was the one resource that women of the period controlled, and its refusal was, in context, a form of power in a world that denied them every other.

My position: Bynum’s objection is methodologically strong and changes how one reads the texts. It does not change the fact that people died, and it does not change the fact that the system rewarded with sanctity the behaviour that killed them. These two stand independently of how the state is named.

And the point that is the worst

The tradition had the tools to stop this and did not use them enough.

There was diakrisis. There was the Rule with its express moderation and the priority of the sick. There were confessors who ordered women to eat — and there are records of both obedience and resistance. There was, from the 16th century, the Ignatian manual itself that orders the director to lighten the burden.

And the canonisation process continued to count extremity as evidence.

The shape is the same one I recorded in twelve documents: the tradition provides the exception, and social pressure blocks the exception.

The one system in the series that resolved it structurally is Judaism, with pikuach nefesh: the saving of life is not permission to break the law, it is obligation that overrides. One who fasts when one should not is not pious — one errs.

This tradition had all the ingredients for the same solution — chapter 36 of the Rule is precisely this idea — and did not make it a principle.

24. The body of others: torture as institution

Chapter 23 is about what people did to themselves. This is about what was done to others, and it is heavier.

The facts

The reintroduction of torture into legal procedure. The Ad extirpanda of Innocent IV (1252) explicitly permits torture in proceedings against heretics. This fits within the broader revival of Roman evidentiary law, where confession is the queen of proofs — and torture is the mechanism for producing it.

The Holy Inquisitions, in their various forms, with the Spanish (from 1478) as the best known. The numbers of executions have been significantly revised downward by modern historiography, which now works from archival data — but the institution existed, torture was a procedural tool, and executions were public by design.

The witch prosecutions, which were a phenomenon of both Catholic and Protestant regions, with a peak in the 16th–17th century, that is, after the Reformation and at the dawn of the scientific revolution. Current estimates for executions in Europe range in the tens of thousands, with the overwhelming majority of the victims women.

And corporal punishment as a norm — in justice, in schools, in institutions — for centuries, with theological justification.

The contradiction, stated by the criterion of the document

This is not a generic “religions did bad things”. It is specifically heavy for this tradition, and the reason is chapter 4:

A system that taught that the human body is so important that the god took it and that it is resurrected, set up mechanisms for its methodical dissolution.

Every tradition in the series has its hard chapter. Bloodletting killed from ignorance. Nahua human sacrifice was consistent with a cosmology of debt. Tibetan abuse was protected by samaya.

Here the harm contradicts the central teaching of the system itself. It is not ignorance and it is not consequence — it is transgression of its own premises, by the institution that formulated them.

This is, if one keeps the criterion steady, the worst form of the indictment, not the lightest.

25. And the other side: the hospital

And here is the strongest claim of the tradition, and it must be presented with the same precision.

The facts

Previous civilisations had medicine. Rome had valetudinaria — for soldiers and slaves, that is, for productive assets. Islam developed the bīmāristān to an exceptional level, and the Islamic document of this series covers it.

What is distinctive in the Christian West is the institution of open care as religious obligation, extended to people from whom no return is expected:

Hospices and hôtels-Dieu attached to bishoprics and monasteries, from the 4th century onwards
The Benedictine Rule, chapter 36: the care of the sick before every other obligation
The hospital orders — Hospitallers, Antonines and others — as specialised institutions
Leprosaria, at scale; medieval Europe had hundreds
And the canonical obligation of bishoprics to maintain structures of care and hospitality

The honest assessment, with both sides

In favour: this is, in my view, the cleanest case in the entire series where a tradition acted on its premise about the body. If the material body is the object of salvation, then the sick body requires care independently of the worth of its bearer — and the tradition built institutions of exactly this logic, which survived centuries and evolved into the modern hospital.

And the objection, which is real: for most of this history medical effectiveness was minimal. These institutions provided shelter, food, cleanliness, company, and a dignified death — not treatment. Part of the Western medicine practised within them was Galenic, with bloodletting, which is described in the Greek document as the deadliest medical error in history.

So the exact formulation is restrictive and, I think, sufficient:

The contribution is institutional, not therapeutic. The tradition did not discover how to heal bodies. It discovered that there must be a place where bodies are received without paying — and this it kept.

And by the criteria of this series it is the most important success I recorded: not technical, but institutional, and therefore transferable.