Peter Damian 1007 – 1072

Peter Damian was an Italian Benedictine reformer, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, and one of the most vigorous voices of the eleventh-century reform of the Latin Church. After early studies that gave him a deep command of classical and patristic learning, he withdrew to the hermitage of Fonte Avellana, where he reorganized eremitical life along strict lines. His treatise On Divine Omnipotence raised the famous question whether God can change the past and gave a celebrated answer that has shaped debate in philosophy of religion ever since. His blunt polemics against simony and clerical incontinence made him one of the great moral voices of his age.

Peter Damian was born around 1007 at Ravenna, the youngest child of an impoverished noble family. Orphaned and badly used as a swineherd by an elder brother, he was rescued by another brother, the archpriest Damian of Ravenna, whose name he later took in gratitude, and educated at Faenza and Parma, where he briefly taught liberal arts. Around 1035 he entered the strict hermitage of Fonte Avellana in the Apennines, of which he became prior in 1043; he was made cardinal-bishop of Ostia in 1057.

His works include the polemic Liber Gomorrhianus on clerical vice, the treatise on simony Liber Gratissimus, the celebrated letter on divine omnipotence De divina omnipotentia, the monastic rule and 'Dominus Vobiscum' on the solitary's recital of the liturgy, and a vast correspondence and body of sermons later collected as the Opuscula. He was a tireless agent of the Gregorian reform, sent on legations to Milan, Cluny, Florence, and the imperial court to combat simony, concubinage, and lay investiture.

Damian's most discussed philosophical contribution is his argument in De divina omnipotentia that nothing in past, present, or future is impossible for God, advanced against the dialecticians of his day to defend the priority of revelation over the rules of grammar and logic. He died at Faenza in February 1072 and was declared a Doctor of the Church by Leo XII in 1828.