Saint Dominic: The Grace of the Word

By Guy Bedouelle

Written by one of the foremost contemporary authorities on Saint Dominic, this book represents the latest, best, most concise and readable spiritual biography of Saint Dominic. The focus of the biography is the way in which Saint Dominic embodied the role of Christ as preacher and the results that came from this grace. From his earliest youth, Sacred Scripture was the very heart and foundation of Dominic's spiritual life. He never ceased to plunge into the Word of God, to study it, to pray it. Bedouelle thus documents how Saint Dominic's whole life and mission was one continuous proclamation of the power of the Gospel to transform individual lives and society.

""Written in both a popular and scholarly style, the combination of historical comprehensiveness and keen theological insight in this work brings Dominic alive as the contemplative and tireless preacher, fed from a deeply interior stream of life""
- Gabriel O'Donnell, O.P., from the Preface

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ignatius Press
• Release date: Apr 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781681494142

Book preview

PREFACE

In the late spring of 1983, thirty-five American Dominican sisters and friars embarked on a pilgrimage to the lands of Dominic: Spain, France and Italy. Sponsored by Parable for Dominican Life and Mission this was not only a journey to the places sacred to the memory of St. Dominic and the beginnings of the Order of Preachers, but a true pilgrimage combining prayer with serious study of the sources of our history already brought out in English and the intense experience of common life and its attendant asceticism well familiar to those who have travelled with such a group over a period of time. In addition to the more than thirty pilgrims there were other travelling companions, who through their research and writings became not only fellow travellers, but even leaders and tour guides: Pierre Mandonnet, O.P., Marie-Humbert Vicaire, O.P., William A. Hinnebusch, O.P., and Simon Tugwell, O.P.

It was during this journey that I first encountered Fr. Guy Bedouelle’s spiritual portrait of St. Dominic in its original French edition. With the present translation of his work, Fr. Bedouelle becomes a fellow pilgrim for English-speaking Dominicans and his portrait of St. Dominic will, for a long time to come, instruct and inspire all the members of the Dominican Family who in each generation strive to know the Vir Evangelicus as Father, Founder and friend.

The twentieth century has witnessed an intensification of interest in Dominican sources, and serious scholarship has produced critical editions, translations and commentaries. We have been provided with a clear notion of the geographical, cultural and religious influences which shaped the mind of Dominic de Guzman and his plan to begin an international order of preachers. Indeed, some contemporary writers portray the Founder within a context of ideas and relationships which converged in the early thirteenth century in such a way as to make the beginning of the Order an imperative which Dominic could have avoided only with difficulty! In the recent past we, the sons and daughters of such a Founder, have tended to tell his story in terms of originality and innovation; recent research has brought into sharp relief the need to add the realities of continuity and fidelity to the tradition.

In his biography of St. Dominic, Bedouelle has taken this into account and has begun the task of drawing out the spiritual implications of these relationships and historical factors with a delicacy and insistence yet unknown among those who write from the vantage point of both the historian and the theologian. The author has underscored Dominic’s continuity with the tradition of religious life while rejoicing in his innovative joining of that tradition with the all encompassing ministry of the word. In reading Bedouelle’s work one is struck again by the genius of St. Dominic, a genius not based on a brand new idea, for clearly it was his relationship with Diego, his travel through Albigensian territory and his life of contemplative preparation as a canon at Osma which in some way provided him with the germ of his later project. His real genius lay in his bold taking over of the ideas and plans suggested by others and by the needs of his time in such an audacious manner that he not only drew the best preachers and teachers his era could offer, but he captured the hearts and imaginations of scores of men and women who wished to become part of the preaching mission. Bedouelle himself describes the charism of Dominic as a synthesis, rather than an original invention.

In one sense Bedouelle’s present book is the launching of a new literary genre for Dominican literature in English. In a style at once scholarly and popular this work will appeal to the novice as well as to those who have known St. Dominic for many years. The combination of historical comprehensiveness and keen theological insight in this work brings Dominic alive as the contemplative and the tireless preacher fed from a deeply interior stream of life. One is reminded of the words of Fr, Vicaire in his commentary on the forces which motivated St. Dominic: Thus the deepest source of his inspiration was not his love of the Church or even his evangelism, but, as was the case for the apostles, his love of Christ Jesus. It is this Christological fire which is at the heart of Bedouelle’s book and makes his spiritual portrait of St. Dominic useful to all readers. It is a revelation of the author’s own relationship to the subject of his work and a clear restatement of the ultimate purpose of St. Dominic’s own life and mission: preaching and the salvation of souls.

Fittingly, the present translation is the work of a Dominican nun, Sister Mary Thomas, O.P., of Our Lady of the Rosary Monastery in Buffalo, N.Y. We are grateful to her and her community for this work which is a valuable gift to the Church in our time.

Gabriel O’Donnell, O.P.

Dominican House of Studies

Washington, D.C.

January 6, 1987

INTRODUCTION

This book is not a new life of St. Dominic. It was conceived, rather, as a spiritual portrait,¹ an attempt to fathom the serenity of a countenance, to gaze upon the features of a servant of God. It would have been unthinkable, though, to pluck the figure of the founder of a new religious family from his setting, for it was that which opened the way, within the Church, for a distinct inspiration, a spiritual temperament, or to put it better, a definitive grace.

Almost every century has had its own life of St. Dominic. Each has drawn its own portrait, ranging from the reverent and moving Libellus, written by Jordan of Saxony to reveal the holiness of his predecessor as Master of the Preachers, up to the last century which gave us, for example, the flamboyant Life of St. Dominic limned by Lacordaire, as he himself said, with bold strokes. In our own time, besides the portraits by Henri Petitot, Bede Jarrett and, recently, Pie-Raymond Régamey—to draw from three generations—we also have the miniature by Bernanos and the huge reredos by Father Vicaire, which with a vast, broad sweep shows Dominic in his particular era and in his position within the Church.²

Without a doubt these texts reflect their times clearly, as do the various pictorial representations of Dominic throughout the ages. How are we to choose between the tranquillity of the thirteenth-century icons—the panel ascribed to Guido of Siena or the plaque in the Museum of Capodimonte at Naples—between the serenity of feature lent him by Fra Angelico, the severity of the anachronistic inquisition suggested by Berruguete, or the tragic mask of El Greco? History follows the same pattern: like its predecessors, our Dominic will reflect to some extent the values of the author, his world-view, the aspirations and limitations of his era.

It is true that modern methods of investigation allow for a plurality of approaches. We shall try to draw our Dominic with decisive strokes, with all the power of the truth of authentic documents, and without the elaborations of legend. We shall not underestimate the importance of a global perspective: Dominic had not only a social, local setting among neighbors and disciples; he was also a man of his times, times rich in change and evolution.

The simple man of our day, deluged with documentation, will probably delight to see the figure of a saint like Dominic Guzman emerge or to rediscover him in a synthesis which takes into account the highly valuable studies made of him and notes them, I hope, faithfully but without undue elaboration. These studies enable us to see Dominic within the mainstream of the Church movements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We have to point out some landmarks in various regions where Dominic and his first companions heard the call to preach the Word of God with renewed fervor: in Spain, in Languedoc, and in that Italy that also belonged to Francis of Assisi. Too, we should envisage the Preachers involved in the new universities springing up with a contemporary thrust in the heart of certain cities, or confronted by new political and economic structures. Above all, however, it was the gospel that revealed to Dominic’s gaze the needs and yearnings of his time.

In Part One we are introduced to Dominic through documents from the first generation of Dominicans.³ These records are unpolished and sometimes crude. We will not use fioretii or the arabesques of legend. We shall try to show the unfolding of his life, the vigor of his holiness and the solidarity of his work, imbued as they were with the freshness of the impressions of those who knew him personally and were captivated by that charm which derived simply from the gospel lived in its entirety, the grace of the Word.

Part Two verifies the basic truth that for Dominic, the grace of preaching could be exercised only within the Church. Dominic, meeting the needs of missions far and near, preached in an apostolic Church like the Church of Christ’s apostles. He rediscovered the poverty of the first disciples of the Lord. He preached in the name of a Church which was catholic, for he defended the Faith in Languedoc and in Lombardy against the artful and seductive deviations of Manichaeanism, affirming his passion for truth and his confidence in the understanding of believers. He preached, finally, in a Church which was already mystically one and holy, and taught both men and women how to rediscover and revive the immemorial tradition of religious life. He offered the service of an Order of Preachers to the truly universal concept of the Church, which was being affirmed in his epoch.

His preaching would be rooted, therefore, in prayer—the very source of his activity; prayer, liturgical and private, communal and personal, prayer always and everywhere. Did Dominic not give his brethren, in the tradition of the spiritual masters, this one, single ideal: to follow Christ, speaking only of God or with God?⁴

PART ONE

SAINT DOMINIC

All these people, and many others from Fanjeaux, asserted to a man that they had never seen anyone so holy and so good.

—Process of Canonization

Toulouse, n. 19

CHAPTER ONE

HIS WORLD

From childhood, Dominic of Caleruega read the Bible. He sucked the milk of the Sacred Scriptures, as the Fathers of the Church put it, for well they knew that this was the nourishment of Christians. He never ceased to plunge into the Word of God, to study it, pray it, preach it. At Palencia, where he was reared, it was the foundation of education. At Osma, in keeping with the Rule of Canons, it was the object of his constant meditation. He took the Scriptures with him on his travels. One of his closest companions assures us that Dominic always carried the Gospel of St. Matthew and the Epistles of St. Paul on his person.¹ Sacred Scripture claimed his total attention while he was preparing for that preaching which he made the focus of his life and of his Order.

This man lived in intimacy with the Word of God. Occasionally raising his eyes from the book he was pondering with tears and sighs, he would argue, discuss and struggle, or pause and listen. This is how he is described for us in an early writing² remarkably illustrated by one of Fra Angelico’s most celebrated frescoes. In the gospel, he discovered the world. In discerning the needs of his world, he glanced around with a look enlightened by the sacred text. Without a doubt, the contemplative movement came first. Dominic discovered a creation that was good. He faced a world already redeemed and sorrowed to see it again lost, bewildered and wretched because it had not lived by the Word of God.

Obviously there was a push and pull here between the sacred page, as it was called in his day, and the woes or joys of his contemporaries. He would at once draw them into that prayer of his which fed on the Scriptures, for he had come to a fullness of understanding of it.³ The rhythm of this movement matched his very heartbeat.

When he left his student’s room at Palencia to walk through the streets of Osma, and when he later crossed Europe in his extended travels with his bishop and in his visits to his foundations, what kind of world did Dominic find to be harbored in the sanctuary of his compassion? To all the needs of his time or, we might say, to every yearning of his age, Dominic seemed to find answers. Always, he found them in the gospel and in tradition.

What was Europe like at the end of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth? Historians claim that it was building up to the richest period of the Middle Ages, the high noon, to borrow Léopold Génicot’s-expression. It was a densely populated world, defining itself as urban and ending up poor because it was over-crowded. Nations were emerging; feudal resistance clashed with democratic aspirations. The world was Christian, but it was torn by schisms, doctrinal deviations and heresies.

A CROWDED WORLD

The population Dominic observed in Europe was continuously on the increase. The western world was swept by a demographic tide that began at the end of the eleventh century and lasted until the thirteenth. The most eloquent symbols of this phenomenon were the village churches having become too small, their naves needing to be rebuilt and enlarged. The vastness of the cathedrals that wedded exigency to beauty was another symbol.

The figures we quote in regard to this period are taken from varying sources with much caution. We may safely estimate that from fifty million inhabitants in 1150, Europe’s population expanded to sixty-one million at the beginning of the thirteenth century, while in 1100 there had been only forty-eight million. We thus have a leap of almost twenty million between 1150 and 1250, while the population of the preceding hundred years had increased by only four million.⁴ This population explosion was due basically, it seems, to a slightly longer life expectancy. The average lifespan was now thirty-five years. It had been twenty-five at the time of the Roman Empire, and now is more than seventy. But what made the difference was that the world had, for a variety of reasons, begun a spiraling cycle of expansion. Western Europe enjoyed greater security because invasions had been checked. Further—and this was even more significant than new inventions—progress in agricultural techniques for utilizing the soil and improving products rescued the populace from the undernourishment that had left a trail of disease and death. Prosperity was far from being universal, however. There were still epidemics and famines, but these were now local rather than wide-spread. Dominic was to encounter them, beginning with that great famine that devastated most of Spain during his student days in Palencia.⁵

Even though the birthrate began to decrease, it remained significant. Families in easy circumstances had an average of five children. The twelfth century was gradually entering upon an era of accelerated population growth. Land was scarce, despite the removal of the last of the brushwood and brambles which have left their traces in European countrysides under the name of clearings, bogs or marshlands. This was true despite all efforts to check the onrush of the sea, rivers (as in the plain of the Po) or swamps. This labor, undertaken and carried on by monks and farmers, created a world which, from the middle of the thirteenth century, was indeed full.

At the end of that century the population in certain regions grew to almost alarming figures, considering the ratio of people to available resources. Still, we have to distinguish between regions, Italy, for example, was not very densely populated on the whole, and yet it had its areas of human overcrowding.

There is no doubt that this factor of population expansion has to be taken into account in order to appreciate the influx of vocations in the new mendicant Orders. At the end of the century that saw the foundation of the Preachers, the ideal of the Dominican Order was a priory with a hundred brothers, such as could be found in cities like Montpellier, Narbonne, Tours, Besançon or even the little town of Bergues near Dunkirk. And we can note that at the time of Dominic’s death in 1221, the convent of St. Jacques in Paris already housed a hundred brethren and would approach having three hundred at the beginning of the fourteenth century,⁶

We should not view these impressive figures merely as a consequence of population growth. They also betoken a response to the urgency of an apostolate among the urban masses. This populous era was precisely the period when cities were burgeoning into their full development.

AN URBAN WORLD

In the thirteenth century, according to a luminous expression of Georges Duby, Christianity’s center of gravity shifted from the monastery to the cathedral. The hub of development shifted from country to city through a revival of the urban network instigated by ancient Rome. In old fortresses and markets and other centers of exchange, and in market-towns at the crossroads, life began to stir, and once again administrative, economic and soon political centers developed.

It would be a mistake to assume that this phenomenon worked to the detriment of the countryside. In the atmosphere of the population expansion so characteristic of those times, a reciprocity normally evolved between those who had always been producers and the growing class of urban consumers. There arose a system of vital exchange, which would soon develop into a fiscal economy. A new class appeared, that of the middle-man, to provide society with the services needed for the transport of commodities, for business transactions and communication. To supply provisions, to furnish equipment, to disseminate information, indeed even to promote the cult of beauty through arts and crafts—all these became specialized activities quite naturally requiring cities for their centers of operation. A new generation grew up around the ancient ruins, those tangible reminders of imperial Rome, in suburbs that were the new quarters. It was here that the middle classes lived on their profits, large or small. It was here that they had to be spoken to if one would speak to them of God.

The feudal regime was not yet challenged, but it sensed a need to become flexible, to adapt to new social relationships. Indeed, the urban nobility often comprised the youngest offshoots of the nobility still living in the castles; it was made up of younger sons, shorn of glory by the rights of seniority. This nobility, with its ancient roots, preserved a tradition of munificence and spendthrift prodigality. It was quickly joined by the new social class, which rivaled it and lived on the same footing but with even more facility and ostentation, at times amounting to elegance. There comes to mind Francis Bernadone, son of the wealthy cloth merchant of Assisi, or before him, at Lyons, the merchant Vaudes.

In order to carry on trade, make alliances and hence bolster their new power, which began as a financial force and grew to include both political and military might, the bourgeois demanded liberty, prerogatives and privileges. The Italian communes, rapidly spawned by rivalries between partisans of pope and emperor, acquired autonomy through municipal institutions and an independence very difficult to federalize. At times there was no need for emancipation, as the princes had a penchant for creating suburbs wherever they found a sizeable tract of land. The most prestigious legal status of the new cities was immediate attachment to imperial sovereignty.

One key to the cultural, political and ecclesiastical miracle of the thirteenth century lay perhaps in the amalgamation of those powers that no longer were able or desired to be antagonists—although they would soon enough become so again. The city needed the country, and the country, at first, profited by this. The feudal system hung on, but the ancestral structures were gradually relaxed. It would be inaccurate, however, to think that the ideal of chivalry, a prime symbol of feudal society, was less keen at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It was precisely in this period in fact that chivalry took on a mystical or courtly aspect, exemplified at the time in the adventures of Arthur and his companions in search of the Grail. We must wait until the middle of the century for the appearance of derisive texts such as The Romance of the Rose, so typical of an urban civilization. Cities were developing, but they were under the control of the old regime, a feudal system still very much alive.

Neither Francis nor Dominic seemed to choose the city for its own sake. At least in the beginning, the Preachers deliberately established themselves near the city gates. It was less a matter of being in the middle of a suburban population than of being able to turn simultaneously and with greater freedom toward peasants and city people alike. They were the bishop’s Preachers and therefore at the service of the entire diocese.

These Preachers differed from the eremetical and even the monastic ideal. They entertained no fear of the city. For them, it was not a place to flee from, as it had been for the Cistercians, their recent predecessors in the revival of religious life. These latter found refuge in the desert, where they could undertake a more radical self-denial. Their renewal of asceticism was an instinctive reaction to safeguard the integrity of the monastic goal against the disquieting affairs of a changing society which seemed resolutely oriented toward pleasure and corruption.

For Dominic, cities became the setting for evangelization, and ten years after his death the Preachers were unable to resist this urban pull, for in the city a new stability had been permanently established through trade, and also, on occasion, through the universities. After 1230 cities sought after priories of mendicant religious. We can detect a correlative between the increasing importance of cities and the establishment of the brethren within their walls.⁷ Somewhat later than the Dominicans, and with equal energy, the Friars Minor responded to a similar appeal.

Thus the urban movement accounts for the consolidation of the mendicant Orders far more than does their foundation or initial growth. Dominic wanted his brethren to address themselves to all manner of men in every social environment, wherever they might be and to the exclusion of none.

With the same kind of concern, but with his own particular genius, Francis of Assisi—less marked by a clerical mentality but nonetheless a thoroughly ecclesiastical man—did not in any way feel distinct from the laity of the Order of Penance. This integration with a population whose religious needs had gone unheard would be institutionalized by the Preachers at a later date. However, at times this phenomenon remained only anticipated, as in Italy.

The mendicants faced a demand for new forms of fraternities that might be termed artificial in the sense that they arose in response to needs, and to a certain confusion. As feudal and family bonds slackened, there was a feeling that social solidarity was beginning to crumble. Yet in the cities themselves, among the most zealous and fervent inhabitants, within the sanctification of marriage and in the professions, new bonds were to be created under the aegis of the brethren. These bonds would not differ too greatly from those that the guilds and confraternities were concurrently attempting to forge.

Dominic was the precursor of reconciliation between merchants and clergy, town and the life of perfection, city and Church, factions that had been antagonistic to some degree even as far back as the patristic era. This is not to say that Dominic accepted all the elements of the new society without demur. He was a man in times that were poor, but he perceived misery with the eyes of one familiar with the gospel.

A POOR SOCIETY

The twelfth century marked a turning point in the evolution of poverty. Until then, the poor man had been a peasant struck by misfortune and tracked down by bad luck, but he had managed to survive with the help of parish or family solidarity, thanks to normal integration in a rural world. Everyone had more or less shared the good harvests as well as the famines, mutually profiting in the years that saw sleek cows, but suffering the penury of lean years. Actually, due to the coincidence of wars and plagues, poverty had been the common lot.

At the end of the Middle Ages the poor, driven into the city ghettos, became vagabonds. They banded together into groups of ruffians or, on the other hand, frequented the cours des miracles.⁸ In either case their status was marginal and their neighbors would view them with a mixture of fear and scorn.

It was not like this in Europe of the thirteenth century. Poverty was actual and wretched, but the burden of it became heavier in view of the social inequalities taking hold. There was a daily hardship for the man who wanted only to feed his family, struggling with the scourges of the time, famine, plague and war. In the thirteenth century he also had to contend with the rising price of grain and the rising interest on loans. He felt the pressure of just barely being able to make both ends meet with his thatched house, his small garden and perhaps a single cow.⁹

We know these