Pier Damiani e il gruppo riformatore romano. Il dissenso come forza propulsiva

Dissent is at the root of the war of words during the Investiture Controversy. There was a constant search for consensus and this is testified to by the grandiose propaganda work of the different warring parties. Ecclesiology was at the centre of the debate and the Roman Church was in need of many changes: dissent was the indispensable means to break ties with the past. But dissent was also present within the factions themselves and allowed guidelines to be drawn during the decades at the turn of the century. Peter Damian's adherence to the ideas of the Roman reform party was characterised by a marked individualism and he used dissent to increase his own weight within the papal curia of Leo IX. Damiani took advantage of the contradictions, contrasts and uncertainties that characterised this historical contingency. His will be a personal victory through dissent. In fact, in the 1950s he had not bent and had defended his own thought, expounding and justifying it in detail in long treatises. In the following decade, during the pontificate of Alexander II, he would thus be one of the main players in the Roman party and would see his own ideas, opposed a few years earlier, triumph among the reformers.