| #### 2. ST. DOMINIC AND THE FRIARS PREACHERS |

| #### #### The advent of the crusade in Languedoc did not put an end to the campaign of preaching and discussion. Diego retired to his diocese; the legates had now the conduct of the war to occupy them; it was Dominic who was now the principal figure in the purely religious movement. A pious layman gave over to the use of the preachers whom he led, a house in Toulouse, where the Cistercian bishop, Fulk, gave Dominic and his small band recognition as official preachers. Then the bishop made over to them the church of St. Romanus in that city. By the time the General Council met in 1215, the new society numbered sixteen members, and Dominic, who had shown his sense of where his calling lay by refusing successively the sees of Beziers, of Comminges and of Navarre, set out for the council with Fulk, to secure the approbation of Innocent III for what promised to be a new religious order. #### The pope had, at the very beginning of Dominic's venture, called on the legates in Languedoc to seek out and foster men of this type. but now, since the general council had decided that new religious orders were not to be encouraged, he bade Dominic consult with his companions and choose some one of the already existing monastic rules under which to arrange their common life. #### In August, 1216, Dominic was once more in Rome. At Toulouse it had been decided that the most suitable rule was the so- called Rule of St. Augustine -- the rule under which, since 1194, Dominic had himself lived, and under which he had organised the house at Prouille. The general exhortations and principles of this rule called for some practical supplement, and in the constitutions drawn up to provide this Dominic was greatly influenced by the constitutions of the Order of Premontre. Innocent III had died [ ] before Dominic returned to Rome; and it was his successor, Honorius III, who in December, 1216, gave the new venture the papal approbation, as an order of canons dedicated to the work of preaching. #### For all the traditional framework of the Augustinian rule and the status of an order of canons in which the preachers were now officially set, it was a new kind of thing which the pope had sanctioned, and the novelty of its nature -- an order of priests whose one purpose was intellectual work for the salvation of others -- showed itself in an amazingly novel adaptation of the monastic code. #### To begin with, the only stability the new order had was stability to the order. The monk vowed himself to a particular house: the Preacher to go wherever preaching took him. The aim of the new institute was preaching, and to the study which is a first necessity of the preacher's office all else in the life must be strictly subordinated. The claim of study was, in every case of a conflict of monastic duties, to have precedence. Thus it was directed that the church services were not to be unduly protracted and the office to be chanted briskly, so that the time for study was not shortened. The idea was to train apostles to combat, by their intelligence no less than by their ascetic life, a heresy seductive philosophically no less than morally. From the new monasticism there disappeared the one-time universal element of manual labour. In austerity of life the Preachers yielded nothing to the Cistercians themselves, but for the necessary manual work of the house -- since the need of preachers was desperate -- lay brothers were instituted from the beginning. Even, at one moment, the founder would have handed over to the brothers the entire control of the temporal concerns of the order. #### The unit of the society was the convent of at least twelve preachers, ruled by a prior and taught by a doctor, for every house of the Preachers was a house of study; and from study, as long as he lived, the Preacher was never exempt. To the lectures, which all must attend -- even the prior -- the secular clergy were to be admitted should they so desire. The doctor lectured on the text of Holy Scripture, treating theological questions as they arose. A second lecture commented the Liber Sententiarum of Peter Lombard. In the larger convents there was a second lecturer for the Sentences. Once a fortnight there was to be a public disputation. #### The convents were grouped into provinces, and in each province it was the aim to provide a school of higher studies. At the summit of the intellectual organisation were the Studia Generalia, presided over by a regent, who lectured on Holy Scripture, and whom two bachelors assisted, one to lecture on the Glossa, the other on the Sentences. By 1248 there were five such studia, in the five great University cities of Paris, Oxford, Cologne, Montpellier and Bologna. #### Lectureships were later created for the liberal arts, for logic, for natural science, for foreign languages (in view of the missions), and, in the Spanish houses, for oriental studies, for Hebrew, Greek and Arabic especially. The Friar Preacher was then a student for life. Whoever entered the order entered a university. #### The Preacher was none the less a monk, in the austerity of his life and the public prayer to which he was bound. The abstinence from meat was perpetual. On all Fridays, on a score of vigils, and every day from September 14 to Easter, the Preacher had but one meal. He wore nothing but wool, he slept with his brethren in a common dormitory, he kept a silence almost as perpetual as his abstinence, and every day, publicly, at the chapter he confessed his offences against the rule. #### Between this severe monastic observance and the new ideal of a learned apostolate in the world outside, there would seem to be an inevitable conflict, and the later history of the order shows, more than once, strong differences of opinion between the Preachers whom one ideal attracted as superior to the other. The difficulty arising from this dualism was present to the mind of the founder, who provided for it by a system of dispensations that is one of the features that makes his order, even to-day after seven hundred years, unique in the Church. This principle, that the superior not only may but must, when the good of the apostolate calls for it, dispense from any detail of the monastic observance, is set at the very head of the Constitutions, jointly with the definition of the order's purpose. The difficulty of course must persist, the equilibrium be sometimes hard to maintain, but there derives from the direction and from the spirit that inspires it a suppleness which perhaps no other order, as an order, possesses. #### The convent buildings were to be as plain as possible, the territory worked from it carefully divided from that of its neighbours in the province. The Preachers were to go about in twos, to possess nothing, but to live on alms. Before Dominic died the poverty of the order received a new emphasis, for he adopted the Franciscan ideal that not only should the individual religious not be an owner, but that the very institute should be utterly dependent on what the providence of God sent to it. #### At the head of the province was the provincial prior, and at the head of the whole order the Master-General, to whom every Preacher at his profession promised his obedience. Here was centralisation indeed, as developed as that of Cluny. It was, however, tempered by a bold innovation, the principle, namely, that all superiors are elected by those whom they will govern and that they are elected for a time only. The prior is the choice of the brethren of the convent, the provincial prior of a special provincial chapter, a body composed of all the priors and two delegates elected by each convent of the province. The Master-General is elected for life by a body consisting of all the provincials and one delegate from each province. The provincial chapter -- all the priors and one elected delegate from each convent -- meets annually and so, too, does the general chapter. Carefully planned regulations protect the freedom of election from any usurpation on the part of officials in days to come, surer of themselves than of their brethren, and preserve the institute against the premature fossilization that is the end of bureaucracy in all things human. In the order the superiors are nothing, the order is all. No external signs of respect are shown to the priors; they are not to be given the ritual honours that fall to the abbots in the different older orders. When the term of office expires the superior resumes in the order the place he last filled as a simple friar. #### Supervision lies with the order; the community of each convent is bound to present a periodical report on the government of its prior, the provincial chapter on the provincial prior, the general chapter on the Master-General. #### While the new institution has features in common with all the preceding attempts to found a centralised order -- notably with Cluny, Citeaux, and with Premontre above all -- its essence was Dominic's own creation and in this it is revolutionary, in the idea, that is to say, of religious scattered in convents throughout the world, not tied by vow to any one house but to the general service of the order throughout the world, and all owing obedience to the one general superior. Hitherto no more had been achieved than a federation of more or less autonomous monastic houses: in the Order of Preachers the Church welcomed the first religious order. Its curiously flexible rule has secured that, to a much greater degree than is usual, the ideal that gave rise to the order is still its very life. And the peculiar system of centralisation through "democratic" institutions continues to be, substantially, what St. Dominic planned and wrote into its first constitutions. #### The original rule met its first revisers in the first general chapter held at Bologna in 1220. It was then that the decision was taken to adopt corporate poverty. The linen rochet which, as with the other canons-regular, formed part of the Preacher's habit, was given up, and in its place over their white tunic they adopted the monastic scapular. The title of abbot for the superior and of abbey for the convent were also abandoned. The Preachers were already, in reality, what they have since remained -- friars. Twenty years later it was the order's good fortune to have for its Master-General the greatest canon lawyer of the day, St. Raymond of Penaforte. He took the rule as St. Dominic had left it, and the decisions of the score of general chapters since his death, and arranging the whole scientifically, he produced what was henceforth the official text of the rule. #### Once the order was papally confirmed, Dominic broke up the community of Toulouse and sent its members far and wide, three of them to the new university of Paris. Recruits began to come in, very many of them masters of arts, and in 1218 the Preachers were established at Lyons and Rome and Bologna. In 1219 the first Spanish houses were founded, at Madrid and Barcelona, houses also at Metz, at Rheims, Poitiers and Limoges, and six more in Italy. By the time of the general chapter of 1221 -- a matter of weeks only before St. Dominic's death -- there were sixty convents, organised in eight provinces: Provence, Spain, France, Lombardy, Rome, England, Germany and Hungary. Fifty years later, in those same eight provinces the number of houses had increased to three hundred and twenty, and there were the four new provinces of Poland, Scandinavia, Greece and the Holy Land. It is interesting to notice that, of the three hundred and ninety-four convents of 1277, no less than a hundred and forty were in the land where the neo-Manichees had once threatened to be supreme. #### From the very beginning, the popes made continual and varied use of the new arm they had themselves done so much to create. The Preachers were the Roman Church's agents for the visitation of monasteries and sees, they preached the Crusade, they acted as its fiscal officials -- the order's protests against such distractions passing unheeded -- and of course to them first of all, once it was established, was committed the Inquisition. The Preachers were the natural reserve whence popes, bishops, other religious orders and universities, too, drew their professors of theology. From the new order came the first biblical concordances and correctories, the first complete commentaries, and many translations of the Bible into the new national tongues, French, Catalan, Valencian, Castilian and Italian. They compiled manuals for preachers and for confessors -- the Summa Penitentiarum of St. Raymond of Penaforte their model and type -- and books of reference innumerable: collections of matter for sermons, for example, collections of stories about the lives of the saints, manuals to guide the catechist, and handbooks for those engaged in casuistry, such, for example, the Summa contra Catharos of Moneta of Cremona. #### Christendom began to be instructed as the Preachers spread rapidly through its cities and towns. ####  |