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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.
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