Unlike a lot of people I was not really shocked when I first heard that Gladstone sometimes scourged himself, especially after his late night encounters with prostitutes; nor do I take that revelation as strong evidence that those encounters involved something more physical than mere attempts to persuade the women into a better way of life. That he felt any kind of attraction or titillation, or even ‘committed adultery in his heart’ would have been reason enough for a deeply religious man of the nineteenth century to punish himself in this way; even in the middle of the twentieth century I knew an elderly priest, a man of deep compassion & goodness, who, by repute at least, indulged in regular self-flagellation.
The OED carries a quotation from 1983, from The Literary Review: It is easy to forget how common self-flagellation used to be among the devout.
That does not mean I do not feel horrified by such practice; on reflection it might be better to say I was neither startled nor surprised by the revelations about Gladstone.
I was however startled, shocked, surprised & horrified to read that, as late as 1949, in England, men as young as eighteen, recruits to the Jesuits, were expected to ‘beat ourselves with disciplines once a week’.
The OED confirms that discipline, as a noun, came to be applied to the instrument of chastisement - a whip or scourge; especially one used for religious penance.
The past, even one I was living in at the time, is truly another country.
Links
Fifty Years A Jesuit
Original Catholic Encyclopaedia
