From: St. Dominic and His Work, by Pierre Mandonnet, O.P.,
Translated by Sister Mary Benedicta Larkin, O.P., B. Herder Book Co., St. Louis/London, 1948.
SECTION TWO The Augustinian Rule of St. Dominic
IntroductionFOR a long time scholars took for granted that the Rule of St. Augustine was a late work. After the eleventh century they thought that they could find in Epistle 211 a legal text, from which the Rule was derived. Soon this notion became widely accepted. A better knowledge of the history of the manuscript would have refuted this hypothesis, but it did not lack some historical warrant. The second half of the eleventh, the twelfth, and the thirteenth centuries marked the flourishing period of the Augustinian institution.
When the Rule of St. Benedict, after a decisive and glorious influence on Christendom through several centuries, began to slacken in its fecundity in spite of its later reforms, the Rule of St. Augustine saw its influence suddenly increase with the canonical institutions of which we have spoken. The radical transformation which was reshaping the whole social order of Europe in that epoch had its repercussion also in the domain of religious life. The center of civilization was shifting. It was formerly bound up with the feudal order, in which, after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, the Benedictine foundation, by means of a rule and customs remarkably adapted to the rudimentary state of civilization, had succeeded in preserving all the essential values of life, from the economic to the spiritual. Now that center was passing to towns and communes which were rising here, there, everywhere. The flow of economic life was easier; men became less crude, more cultured. The bourgeois and the traders grew rich. A class, a mentality, a law, and institutions unknown to earlier centuries came into being. Crises occurred which the Church had not yet learned to handle.
This new world had new religious needs: greater spirituality, guidance, a stronger sacramental life, the practice of prayer and asceticism in lay fraternities. Already a reaction had set in against the newly acquired wealth, and ardent desires for a return to the simplicity of the Gospel awakened in the hearts of many. In every domain the emergencies which the Church had to meet took an original turn. At the same time the changing civilization embraced elements unknown to the earlier ages of Christendom. Soon the Church had to engage in more and more frequent struggles against a host of forces: Jews, Mussulman invaders, pagan doctrines, new or revived heresies, political revolutions, social upheavals, and the unenlightened pietism of a laity provoked to anticlericalism by the economic compromises and vices of some of the clergy. All these conditions had to be met by the Church through her clergy. The old monastic order, chiefly concerned with the spiritual perfection of its own members and hindered by institutions formerly so precious, seemed unequal to the pace of the new social order and no longer able to meet the demands made on it, particularly in the cities. The Church needed a reformed and learned priesthood, a militia of regular clergy free to undertake multiple labors. For this clerical reform it was imperative to employ a legislation adaptable to contemporary conditions and contemporary law.
As life in the towns developed a new culture and departed from feudal customs, it developed the urbanity which gave birth to the Rule of St. Augustine. This venerable text, therefore, with its genuine spiritual value and its authority, was endowed with a unique potency for adaptation in the new social order. It was but necessary to substitute for the detailed prescriptions of the Disciplina, laws more appropriate to particular situations. Thus revised, the Rule of St. Augustine renewed the work of clerical reform, for which it had formerly been used by the Bishop of Hippo. The Church, and especially the popes, soon regarded it as an instrument for molding clerical lives to serve the new and daily more urgent needs of Christendom. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Church, by means of this Rule, sought to create an army of priest whose life would be decidedly more active, while yet retaining the spiritual and contemplative bases of the regular life, the reform of which was being simultaneously pursued.
The flexibility of the Rule of St. Augustine made possible its use for purposes other than the clerical reform. Other needs of the age, other attempts at radically different forms of religious life, discovered in the Rule an invaluable standard whereby the new aspirations of the lay world might be actuated.
By the program which it represented, by the significance given to it at the time, the Rule, or rather the institution, of St. Augustine was still more fundamentally the bond of a holy ideal, of a powerful religious "movement" which rose and swept on to development in the late eleventh century. This movement for the "apostolic life" is perhaps the principal key, not only to the canonical changes, and the heretical, schismatic, or orthodox trends of the laity in the twelfth century, but even to the tendencies which led to the foundation of the mendicant orders in the thirteenth century. Because of its basic connection with the movement and its adoption by this same movement, the institution of St. Augustine subsequently enjoyed a rapid and magnificent expansion.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE RULE That expansion gives great importance to this study about the later destiny of the institution in the twelfth century: it is a grand page in Church history. The development and expansion that we are about to sketch is not a mere extension; it is specially a vital progress. The Augustinian Rule more and more consciously became suited for the task imposed upon it by the needs of the Church and the demands of the apostolic movement. We will follow the trend of this progress.
To give a true understanding of the renaissance of the Rule, this study of the Augustinian legislation has to give conspicuous attention to the statutes, customs, or constitutions, which replaced the Disciplina and formed what became the living Rule of St. Augustine. It is not surprising that this consideration develops, by a necessary transition, into an almost exclusive study of the destiny of one of these rules, that of the Friars Preachers, the capital importance of which will soon become evident. The fact that the following pages are devoted mostly to this rule should not be interpreted as the author's complacence in the institutions of the Order to which he belongs. The exposition itself will doubtless prove that the intrinsic nature of the subject called for the extensive treatment given it.
The outline for this section was determined by the character of the subject under consideration. A short historical review of the part played by the Augustinian institution in the movement for the restoration of the apostolic life in the twelfth century quite naturally led to investigation of the origin of St. Dominic's legislation. This research opened the way for a sketch to describe the extension and influence of the law of the Preachers, the true heir in the thirteenth century of the apostolic institution, which the decapitated text of St. Augustine was no longer able to direct except in name.
CHAPTER XXIII
The Rule of St. Augustine, Teacher of the Apostolic Life
REFORM OF THE CHURCH From the time of his conversion, about 1035, Peter Damian concentrated all his thought on the reform of the Church. During the pontificate of Leo IX his influence grew. Other apostles imitated him. Then came the persistent efforts of Hildebrand, subdeacon and later archdeacon of the Roman Church. However diverse their ways, all pursued a single end: the purification of the Church by liberating the clergy from the trammels of the world and the flesh, which, little by little, had enslaved them. From the beginning of the century, the Church waged a vigorous war against clerical marriage and the vice of concubinage as well as against simony, of which almost the whole Church, from pope to lowliest priest, had at some time felt the contamination. Peter Damian and his disciples made their appeals to the Churches of Italy, sounding the call to reform in ardent exhortation. Elevated to the pontifical throne, Hildebrand vigorously launched the investiture struggle for the release of the sacred hierarchy from domination by the lay power. The clergy here and there saw a gradual breaking in the network of temporal chains which had nearly everywhere proved a hindrance to their spiritual mission.
But along with the negative work of liberation, and indeed in order to render it possible, another work, and that positive, was indispensable. To win over the clergy to the reform, and to induce them to break the bonds which they themselves had forged, a new spirit, a new mode of life, a vital ideal had to be invoked. It did not have to be fashioned, nor was delay required to search it out; the reformers carried it in their souls. The campaign against simony and Nicolaitanism was begun in the name of the restoration of the ancient discipline.(1) The zeal of the reformers and the challenge of their fiery words became an appeal which no society, particularly no Christian society, could resist: it was a call to return to the primary sources, to the spirit of the early councils, and beyond that to the life of the primitive Church. The program proposed to the clergy was clearly conceived: it was the imitation of the life of the apostles.
RETURN TO THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH In the synod of 1059, the mighty Hildebrand had recalled this ideal and defended it with all the authority of his official power.(2) A few years later Peter Damian, in a letter. to the newly elected Alexander II earnestly recommending a point of capital importance for the reform of the clergy, gave full expression to his views.(3)The life for which be appealed was that which St. Augustine had exacted of his clerics. Jerome described it in his celebrated letters to Nepotianus and to Heliodorus. It was the life of the apostles and of the primitive Church, the life which had been taught to them, proposed to them, and bequeathed to them by Jesus Christ.
Evidently the rule of the canons followed from the norm of the apostolic life; and while any member of a spiritual society follows the discipline of his own order, he in a certain way imitates the child of the infant Church. Let us, therefore, regard the form which the Church, newly clothed in the faith under the apostles, maintained as the way of life. "The multitudes of the believers," as St. Luke says (Acts 4:32), "had but one heart and one soul; neither did any one say that aught of the things which be possessed was his own; but all things were common unto them." . . . Or will clerics ask for what Christ did not permit to His apostles? For when He sent them to preach, as Mark says, "He commanded that they should take nothing for the way but a staff only; no scrip, no bread, nor money in their purse." . . . Any cleric, therefore, who attempts to enjoy the revenues of property, will not be able to keep to the course of the apostles.(4)A cleric should possess nothing as his own. "The possession of goods has the effect of making clerics independent of the rule of their bishop, and they bend their necks to secular power in the shameful dishonor of degrading surrender. . . . And it is certain that such a one, having violated his order for love of money, is unworthy of any ecclesiastical dignity."(5) The possession of property thus peoples the clerical order with incompetents. But especially, by suppressing imitation of the apostolic life, it removes the very foundations of the spiritual office inherited by the clergy from the apostles, the office of preaching.(6) Immediately after the verse in the Acts of the Apostles describing the common life, we are told that the apostles with great power gave testimony to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that a great grace was in each of them."What does the writer of the sacred history aim at. . . . unless he wishes to show clearly that only those are fit for the office of preaching who possess none of the wealth of the world; and because they have nothing for themselves, possess all things in common?"(7) Freed from the encumbrance of terrestrial goods and like light-armed soldiers (expediti), these clerics will serve in the army of the Lord on the field of battle, strong in the armament of their virtues.(8)
POVERTY AND PREACHING For Peter Damian, poverty in common and preaching were the very essence of the life of the apostles and of the primitive Church, which he exhorted the clergy to imitate. Poverty and preaching have an inseparable affinity. If poverty is practiced, there will be results from preaching. In one of his letters to some clerics, urging them to adopt the community life, we read:
Whereas the bishops hold their primacy from the apostles, priests constitute in the Church the order of the seventy disciples. . . . Now, when the Lord sent the seventy disciples two by two before Him,(9) he admonished them that He who would teach others must himself live without reproach. From the outset He proposed as a principle of prime importance that they scorn pecuniary reward, despise the inclinations of avarice, and possess nothing as their own. "Carry neither purse nor scrip nor shoes." According to St. Mark, He also forbade them to have bread or money in their purse, or to wear two coats, requiring them to walk shod with sandals, carrying only a staff. Why was this done? . . . Why do we read this text in church, if not to put into practice what we read? Those who exercise the office of apostles throughout the ages must of course follow the example of the apostles. God forbid, then, that His preachers possess the goods of this world in order that the men whom He has raised up to extinguish the fire of concupiscence in the hearts of their hearers may protect themselves from the plague of ambition and avarice which infests others.(10)For Peter Damian the ordo clericorum (clergy) was identified in ideal with the ordo canonicorum (clergy living in community), and this body with the ordo praedicantium. The bond of identity, the soul which inspired, made lawful, and gave unity to these diverse offices, could be none other than the vita apostolica, the conversatio primitivae ecclesiae. Every cleric who lived this life, even though he was only a monk, was a minister as well as one ordained for preaching. Here Peter makes the first assault in a clash of arms between monks and canons, which lasted more than a century. Laymen and heretics in the following century had their own ideas about the matter: Did not imitation of the apostles in itself confer the right to preach and exercise the pastoral ministry?(11)This apostolic life, however, was no arbitrary fabrication of variable character. On the contrary, it was a most thoroughly determined reality, described in definite detail by the passages in the New Testament cited by Peter Damian: the texts in which Jesus defines the apostolic spirit which the apostles and disciples should have;(12) the text of the Acts which depicts the common life of the primitive Church.(13) These half-dozen verses set forth in concrete and striking details the ideal of the common life and of preaching in poverty.
TWO EPISODES Every Christian might know that ideal and meditate upon it. In simple faith the medieval soul could feel increasing in himself the desire to realize it in himself and to see it truly realized in the clergy. Did he not hear the priest read the Epistle and Gospel in the church on Sundays? Peter Damian rightly recalled this fact. In an age when the liturgical life was the one and true nourishment of faith, this public reading was not without efficacy. We may recall two striking scenes previous to the eleventh century which show the power of these two texts when heard in church, two scenes that are likewise two dates in the history that,we intend to describe.
The scene is in Africa. St. Augustine desired to justify to his people the common life which he exacted of his clerics. He assembled the congregation in the church. There they stood. He sat in their midst. Then the Deacon Lazarus came forward and read the text from the Acts of the Apostles. When he finished, Augustine took the book. "Now I wish to read; it gives me greater joy to read these words to you than to speak any of my own." And be read the text again; then he added: "That is the way we should like to live; pray for us that we may do so."(14)
Eight centuries later, in a little village of Umbria, the son of a rich merchant, who had received the grace of conversion three years earlier, was living as a hermit near a little church. One day at Mass he beard the account of the mission of the disciples read from the Gospel. He pondered the text; the thought of it overwhelmed him. He was St. Francis, who then began to preach penance.(15)
Two centuries had already passed since the preaching of Peter Darnian and his followers had called to the attention of the clergy and of the laity the meaning of these two texts, vibrant with energy for a renaissance and even a revolution, Indeed it was a revolution that began. From the barbarous ages the inspiration of St. Augustine was revived and amplified. Its spirit of zeal for the conquest of souls was accentuated in imitation of the apostles, thus completely renewing the vita apostolica.(16)
For several centuries after Peter Damian's time the ideal of the apostolic life was realized with prodigious success. In widely different circles this concept became an effective force. It gave birth to unforeseen institutions, and it stimulated a revival of ecclesiastical law. Out of it developed orthodox as well as heretical movements. It provoked reform, unrest, shocks, and revolutions. The correction of the clergy, the canonical movement, the itinerant preaching of the twelfth century, the rise of double monasteries, and the founding of the mendicant orders; the violent anticlerical heresies, the Albigensian war, and the Inquisition, were but the principal entries on the balance sheet. In short, the ideal of the apostolic life was one of the most powerful stimulating forces of Christian civilization in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and opened the way to important developments.
The concept was adaptable to varied designs. Yet the vita apostolica remained the motivating spring of all these currents and, in spite of all their divergent tendencies, was the source of their profound affinity.
UNITY OF THE MOVEMENT This unity of spirit is explicable only in view of the source just traced. These currents and revolutions did not find accord on a political or social level, nor even on an administrative or intellectual plane. Religion formed their basis of harmony, and that not on a visible range of orthodoxy, schism, or heresy, but in the invisible depths of Christian evangelical inspiration.(17) There alone they attained oneness: oneness of origin in the New Testament counsels noted above; oneness of motivation, by earnest and ceaseless meditation, for a fuller execution of the sacred program; finally, oneness of orientation for the reform of the Church.(18)
In this history, which touches on so many points, only certain aspects need be treated here, namely, those fundamental ones in which the Rule of St. Augustine appears, for it had a part in these changes. The restoration of the apostolic life was to be made in the name of St. Augustine and according to the example he had set. His sermons were on the lips of all the reformers in the eleventh century. The Disciplina monasterii of Augustine gave the password for bringing the Rule again upon the scene: Apostolicam enim vitam optamus vivere. The Commentary opened with the description of the common life as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, fundamental charter of life in the primitive Church. "The first purpose for which you have been brought together is that you dwell in unity in the house, and that you have but one soul and one heart in God. And call not anything your own, but let all things be common. . . . For thus you read in the Acts of the Apostles."
In the first movement which rose out of this current for the renewal of the apostolic life, namely, the canonical reform, the Rule of St. Augustine was revived. This Rule became so firmly rooted in the reform that for several centuries thereafter the canonical institution and the Augustinian institution were thought of as one.
THE CANONICAL REFORM To effect a reform of the clergy, it was necessary to begin with the canons. That division of the sacred ministry which lived a mitigated common life in fidelity to the "canons" at a mother church, or with the bishop in his episcopal house, was easier to reach than others.
In substance, the program of the Gregorian reformers purposed to correct the ecclesiastical order as regarded marriage, incontinency and simony; to urge renouncement of the peculium and the apportioning of alms as permitted by the canonical rule for two centuries past;(19) to foster zeal among the canons for the perfect common life; and finally, little by little, to influence the whole clerical order. The abuses under attack were so deeply rooted among the clergy that this program would never have even partially succeeded had it not been for the powerful psychological reform effected through the inspiring appeal of the vita apostolica.
After ten years of work at isolated reforms(20) Hildebrand in 1059, at the Synod of Rome, uttered a virulent denunciation of the old canonical rule and the distribution of money;(21) he reviewed the new, yet ancient design of the reform program. A canon, then and there drawn up and reiterated four years later by another synod,(22) proposed a new life to all chaste clerics, that very life which Peter Damian was then propagating through his preaching and his writing, the common life, the apostolic life itself.
We command the clerics who, in obedience to our predecessor, have cherished chastity to dwell close to the church for which they were ordained, as it becomes those zealous for religion,(23) and to eat and sleep under one roof and possess in common all that comes to them from this church; we exhort them to do all in their power to develop the apostolic life, that is, the common life, that having become perfect they may merit to dwell in heaven with those who now receive the hundredfold reward.(24)The ideal of reform which this official text proposed to all clerics was that to be upheld by all the great pontiffs at the close of the eleventh century; Alexander II, Gregory VII, and Urban II, strove to promote it by every possible means.It is not within our scope to describe how, toward the close of the century, this program was carried out with exclusive application to the canons, and, later on, to one division of the canons. It need only be remarked that in the early part of the twelfth century the canonical reform swept on to a grand expansion while yet sustaining the fullness of the initial ideal. Forty years after the Synod of Rome, Urban II again sketched the lines of the program in a formula, the force of which is now comprehensible: "to revive the practices taught by the apostles and carried out in the early days of the Church ."(25) It is noteworthy that the popes of this period in their official decrees recognized the apostolic life, or the conversatio primitivae Ecclesiae, as the ideal explicitly proper to the canons.(26)
The reformed canons embraced with their whole soul the fullness of this heritage as proclaimed in the words of Peter Damian. The movement stimulated the writing of numerous polemic and apologetic works which vigorously and insistently treated this elemental duality in their clerical life: common poverty and pastoral preaching. The canons sought to reserve this privilege to themselves.(27)
What is of still greater importance is that the canons were intent on stabilizing their apostolic life through the adoption of a rule. Having attempted to correct the old Institutionis fornw canonicorum of Aachen,(28) and having made trial of a Rule given by Gregory VII,(29) the canons finally chose the apostolic Rule of St. Augustine, adaptable as it was to the role awaiting it in the last quarter of the eleventh century.(30) From then on it was regarded as the basic law of the canonical institution.
CANONICAL CUSTOMS According to the degree in which it was practiced in the first decades, the Disciplina conferred upon canonical life a note of remarkable austerity. Though the original articles of the Rule were abandoned in the early twelfth century, the Commentary continued in use and exerted a deeper influence than that possible by a mere symbol or standard. Whereas the Rule of 816 permitted money, the Commentary, even in its decapitated state, exacted of the reformed canons an absolute repudiation of property. On this score, it is significant that from the early part of the twelfth century the universal rule for canons consisted of the Commentary of St. Augustine and particular customs, which together comprised a true law for apostolic life. These Augustinian customs, which deserve to be called the living Rule of St. Augustine, included details of apostolic significance. For example, the customs of Marbach which imposed upon the canons the use of stockings without feet, "as being the kind worn by the apostles."(31) Warrant for this practice was based on an ingenious interpretation of New Testament texts. With the same regard for the scrupulous imitation of the apostolic life, the Waldenses were later compelled to wear only sandals in their following of the same text.
These practices carried this spirit of imitation even farther, for it was carefully established, often in the very words of the prologue, that the canonical life was "an abasement even to the need and poverty of Christ."(32) It should be observed that this call to complete personal poverty was not accompanied by any authorization of common wealth. Fired by the zeal of the reformers, the canons in their community life sought to be poor, as poor as possible, like Christ and the apostles.(33) The revenues which they were to retain assured only their food and clothing, and that in the proportion de termined by the Rule.(34) Everything over and above was to be distributed to the poor.(35)
DEVIATION FROM THE REFORM Finally there was provision in their customs for the life of pastoral preaching. Study and the scholastic training requisite to preaching were therein treated to a degree unknown in monastic legislation.(36) The exercise of the apostolic ministry necessitated frequent missions outside the community, an exigence that was regulated by certain original statutes.(37) The pastoral work gave birth to new classes of religious: forenses, stationarii, in obedientiis commorantes.(38) The customs supposed in the canonical life some elements utterly foreign to monastic practice before the eleventh century. These elements fostered the apostolic life. These laws which were classed as Augustinian customs were indeed worthy of St. Augustine.
As time went on, the canonical reform developed in new ways. The clerical ideas of Peter Damian immediately inspired the great wave of the first fifty years. Later in a number of cities and towns apostolic houses arose in which common poverty and pastoral preaching were practiced according to the mode of the apostolic life. Often these groups were composed of diocesan clerics, or members of the episcopal chapters, who thus became associated in community life in the places where they had the care of souls. No other purpose actuated their adoption of the reform than the desire to motivate their clerical life and fulfill the duties of their office more perfectly. Well did they merit the eulogy of the historian, who saw in them "the classic pastors of souls in the Middle Ages ."(39) Had they been more numerous they might really have solved the clerical crisis of the age.
In the course of the twelfth century, however, and perhaps even as early as the foundation of St. Victor (1110), the canonical order was greatly modified by a very strong Benedictine influence, particularly from Cîteaux. The monastic ideal of personal sanctification was again embraced as a principal end. The new religious houses, in powerful congregations, were established in the country or on the outskirts of the communes. In these houses not only diocesan clerics gathered in the interests of self-reform, but also newly "converted" men entering religious life.
We can easily see how under such circumstances this new type of canon would have little concern for the imperatively important work of spreading the Gospel among people in the cities. His vision was no longer clearly focused on the ideal of the apostolic life preached by Peter Damian. The great canonical congregation, which grew more and more prominent with the passing of the twelfth century, differed from the episcopal or parish chapters first reformed, since in the following of the two sacred texts which served as the charter of the apostolic life the new groups concentrated on what was proposed the Acts of the Apostles, neglecting to some degree the exhortation of St. Luke. Their observance stressed the common life rather than the apostolate with poverty.
The trend was the very reverse in another movement, to which the Rule of St. Augustine also gave direction, a movement infinitely more intricate to trace than the canonical reform, but not less important. Its varied nature finds characterization only in a rather vague expression "the apostolic movement." This movement has been the subject of a scholarly study.(40)
THE APOSTOLIC MOVEMENT The ideas and aspirations for clerical reform were not proposed simply and quietly by discreet workmen, nor were they confined merely to ecclesiastical circles; rather were they deliberately publicized from the roofs and housetops. Italian reformers, like Peter Damian, made incessant appeals in the churches, sounding vigorous calls for correction and renewal. Men stirred to this appeal; in their hearts they compared the ideal proposed to the clergy with the practice of it habitual among them. It was to be expected that their sense of Christian fitness, though simple and even brutal , would know how to react.(41) That is what happened. And the movement had a force that did not fear to fan the flame.
The reason was that in the face of the weakness of princes and prelates, often among the most contaminated by the pest of simony, this popular censure at times became the sole support of the reforming popes and their collaborators.(42) By obliging the laity through positive commands to refuse to hear Mass and receive the sacraments from priests guilty of concubinage and simony,(43) by appealing directly to the people and by requiring their own representatives to depose from office and even by force to evict from the churches the sacred ministers who did not submit to the apostolic decrees,(44) the Gregorian popes, during the second half of the eleventh century, at times made bold use of this popular arm. This was notable in Germany, Flanders, the Papal States,(45) and particularly in Lombardy, and also in northern Italy.(46) In the movement there in the middle of the eleventh century common people, soldiers, minor clerics of the Patarines, brave because supported by the Church, entered the struggle with such great zeal that it became urgent at times to moderate it.(47) The popular revolt against unworthy clerics burst forth on this occasion also without being incited.(48) Political passions, aroused by the communal insurrections, often needed only a slight pretext to plunge into the struggle.
This tide of popular indignation, whipped to greater vigor by the tenacious resistance encountered in the clergy, could not sweep on without causing a profound psychological change in the medieval man of rough and elemental spirit. It was the forerunner of other revolutions. Further, the idea of a renewal of the primitive Christian life in the name of which the reform was carried on, and especially the incisive power of the program for the apostolic life seemed calculated to stir their very heralds out of their settled equilibrium.
In fact, the canonical reform itself (when accepted by the clergy) was far from exhausting the import of this ideal and of satisfying its demands.
The description of the disciples "sent two by two to preach from city to city" entailed a program that could hardly be realized in the sedentary life of the canon. Moreover, this ideal was not held out to the clergy only. They constituted but one of the elements of the apostolic life. Indeed, according to the testimony of the very ones who had propagated it, this apostolic life was the program of a Church, the plan of the primitive Church: "the multitude of believers," said the Acts of the Apostles. It was not the concern of clerics alone. The laity also had a share in that program. Why should it not be tried again?
THE PROGRAM OF A CHURCH If, bound as they seemed to be to their customs and to their wealth, ordinary ministers were unwilling to embrace this ideal, why should not pious men, wandering clerics, soldiers, rich merchants, or converted nobles, laymen and women, form a more apostolic community without them, apart from the traditional ranks. To realize anew the life of the primitive Church, to abandon money, learning, honors, all that a new and rising civilization was ready to put into the hands of Christians still untainted by all these temporal appeals: what a glorious religious program!
When precisely did they begin, these Christians who were stirred by the desire to imitate the apostles and revive the primitive Church, and how did they proceed to realize their design? It is difficult to say. But the last years of the eleventh century saw an apostolic movement take shape and crystallize about a few individuals. Had it not already been realized in the numberless groups of the "poor of Christ" who, toward the close of the eleventh century, flocked over the countryside to hear the preaching of Robert of Arbrissel?(49) This type of interest increased on a large scale in the following years, and the apostolic preacher described by St. Luke as traveling on foot, without money, and announcing the gospel, found successively wining imitators in Bernard of Thiron, Vitalis of Savigny, and Norbert of Xanten.
THE MULTITUDE OF BELIEVERS The "multitude of believers" of the Acts of the Apostles drew around the company of these new apostles to complete the living picture of the primitive Church. An itinerant preacher was not always needed to precipitate a reproduction of this primitive communism. Some years before Robert's appearance, groups of laymen initiated a type of life in common, not at all in the traditional mold of monasticism. In 1191, upon examination, Urban II approved of the formation of communities of this kind, "the more worthy of being perpetuated as the form of the primitive Church is impressed upon them."(50) Bernold of Constance has preserved the context of this bull; a vast concourse of men, women, peasant girls, married folks, throughout the Church and especially in Germany, offered themselves to the monks, the canons, and their parish priests, to lead in poverty and labor a common life imitative of the early Church.(51) Several years earlier, with the authorization of Gregory VIL St. Stephen of Muret had established a community of poor, even of mendicant poor, to whom he proposed the fundamental law of "the Gospel ... .. the poverty of Christ," "the institutions of the apostles and the canons."(52) That proved, actually, to be the rule of the new life embraced by the poor of Muret, the future "good men" of Grandmont.(53) Finally, deeper than any of these visible signs of the movement, there ran the undercurrent of the apostolic and evangelical idea in the lives of numberless souls, resulting in the formation of other "multitudes of believers," of "good men," "perfect," and "masters," who sought to emancipate themselves from the customs of the contemporary Church to lead a life conformed in the most literal details, rites, garb, symbols and names, to that pictured in the primitive Church and the life of the apostles.(54) The "apostolic movement" arose, an inorganic social reality, revolutionary and even anarchical, but somehow profoundly one in the motivating idea that animated it: the vita apostolica, imitation of the primitive Church. Its passion for reform, its opposition to the clergy of the age, its scorn for the sacraments of unworthy priests,(55) its proselytizing activities, its contention for imitation of the apostles as the sole basis of the right to preach, its desire of absolute poverty for clergy and laity alike, finally, its very geographical position in Lombardy and southern France, everything about this movement proclaimed its affinity to the popular and canonical currents of the Gregorian reform. Personalities as representative as those of Arnold of Brescia and his successors constituted the living transition.(56)
In these companies the ideal of the apostolic life had a significance quite different from that proposed in the canonical reform, which concerned clerics who voluntarily became members of a regular community in the very scene of their apostolic duties in order to embrace a holier state, to develop their sacerdotal powers, and, as imitators of the apostles through their common life, to exercise their ministry more fully. The apostolic life seemed an idea inseparable from the clerical life.
LAY DOMINANCE In the bands of the "apostolic movement," on the contrary, there was lay dominance; priests who happened to be in such companies, by that very fact stepped out of the ordinary circles of clerical life. The itinerant preacher alone, the instigator of the band or its spontaneous spokesman, enjoyed a plenitude in a ministry that was even much wider in scope than that open to the canons regular. But this preacher was not always a cleric and was himself but one of the typical elements of the enterprise, one of the personages of the renewed primitive Church. The apostolic life, according to the proponents of the apostolic movement, was an ideal of the whole Church, of the Christian life, whereby each one, independent of any distinction of clergy and laity, might claim a place in his own degree among the apostles or believers.
Our purpose does not require us to trace more fully the destinies of this movement which has recently been the subject of a remarkable study.(57) It need only be said that it did not raise up the leaders indispensable to its success, and, under the suspicion of nearly all the clergy to whom its anticlericalism gave alarm, it ended by falling into schism or drifting in the wake of heresies, like Catharism, which seemed to promise stability in a counter-Church, as containing features apparently much closer to the primitive Church.(58)
One division of the movement, however, which early in the twelfth century came under the direction of certain itinerant preachers commissioned by the popes, oriented itself, probably also with the support of the same popes,(59) toward a more stable institution. Along its own line of evolution the Catholic apostolic movement soon witnessed the appearance of new societies or religious companies: the houses of Fontevrault and of Prémontré, the Abbeys of Savigny and of Chaussey with their daughter communities, very remarkable orders specifically different from the old monastic type. The foundations of Robert of Arbrissel and his companions, of St. Norbert and his spiritual sons, produced double convents with curious organization: in two distinct groups, men and women of the apostolic community were simultaneously established(60) near a particular church where they had common assembly while their leader and founder continued his official itinerant apostolate.(61)
Then it was that, for the second time in the complex history of the apostolic life, the Rule of St. Augustine returned to play its part. It was used in Robert of Arbrissel's community and in that of St. Norbert. There it directed the life of the imitators of the primitive Church, marking the birth of a second canonical movement, a second Augustinian apostolic institution. This new branch differed from the first as much in its origin as in its way of understanding the apostolic ideal.
Although for the reformed clerics entrance into the Augustinian order and the life of poverty which it implied was embraced as the special means to the end of imitating the life of the apostles, it did not have this significance for the groups organized in "apostolic movements." For them the practice of the common life and poverty was antecedent to their affiliation to any regular Augustinian foundation. The constitution of a juridical organization seemed to add nothing to their imitation of the primitive Church. For them regular life was intended, not as a help to religious progress, but as a means toward social stabilization, and for the Church a kind of recuperative remedy to the degree in which this stabilization saved these vagabond companies from becoming anarchical or even heretical. The great success of the apostolic movement, its strong Christian vigor maintained in spite of its restless evolution, gave great value to its recuperative force.
The achievement might have become incomparable if it had furnished a solid institutional support for the itinerant preachers and provided for their perpetuation. But its weakness lay in its undefined, and difficult, almost contradictory, aspects. Certain elements, like that of an itinerant apostolate for the preacher and absolute poverty for the community, were hardly compatible with regular stability or life in solitary places. An equilibrium could be struck only by the sacrifice of some one of these elements. The event proved this. These new Augustinians, particularly the Premonstratensians, retreated in their spirit toward a conformity with other monastic orders, Cîteaux especially.(62) With their capitulation, the apostolic movement with its ideal of the life of the primitive Church lost the assurance of an established and permanent place in the Catholic social structure. In losing the refuge of the Augustinian institution, the movement at the same time lost safety in the bosom of the Church.
GRAVE DIFFICULTIES This evolution was not without immense consequences. The apostolic movement, the force of which did not abate among the laity, receded farther and farther from the direction of the Church, and soon went violently against it. The aspirations of the spiritual masses toward the common life and poverty found a means of realization in the rapid development of hospitaller and military institutes,(63) where the Rule of St. Augustine once more exercised a leading part.(64) But this desire for proselytism and the pastoral ministry no longer found a satisfying outlet. For various reasons, the itinerant preachers now caused disquiet or aroused anxiety in the Church, and no longer received from the popes the support that had been given to their predecessors. The history of the Waldenses is well known: pious evangelical Christians and eager proselytes who, almost in spite of themselves, lapsed into schism.
Thus, at the close of the twelfth century, the evolution of the vita apostolica had not at all fulfilled the promise of its opening years either for the canons or for the numerous bands created by the apostolic movement. The Church found herself facing terrible problems.
With Innocent III all would change.
THE ORDER OF PREACHERS With his finger on the pulse of a whole century, Innocent III from the beginning of his pontificate took his stand in the line of the Gregorian popes and renewed their efforts to authorize and stabilize in the Catholic social order a life of imitation of the apostles.(65) His undertakings in favor of the Humiliati of Lombardy, the Poor Catholics and the first followers of Francis, showed the extent to which the revival force was at work. Faithful to the ideal of a Christian life founded on the way of the Gospel, the apostolic movement again stirred in the Church, realized a new birth, and grew in her bosom with increasing zeal for conversions. Repeating at the same time the history of the preceding century, it established a series of original religious foundations, on the order of the ancient double monasteries where the "predicant" groups(66) of men or women, generally with the encouragement of the Pope, were established in homogeneous communities of more definite organization. Such were the three branches of the Order of the Humiliati,(67) the fraternities of Penance, the companies of the Poor Catholics,(68) and the Poor Clares who, with the Order of Penance and the Order of Friars Minor formed the three Orders of St. Francis. The apostolic movement fertilized anew the Catholic world and made it fruitful.
Would those in holy orders remain quiescent before the challenge? Would not the canonical reform revive with new vigor, in virtue of this ideal of imitation of the apostles, the ideal which had created it of old with all its promise for good? Would the ordo clericorum allow itself to be dispossessed of its prerogative as the ordo praedicantium by these movements of lay origin?
CHALLENGE TO THE CLERICS Just as the bishops convoked by Innocent in the Lateran Council were preparing for a discussion of the reform acknowledged as indispensable for the clergy and the apostolate, Dominic arrived in Rome from Narbonne. He came to propose to the head of the Church the institution of an order that would be the Order of Preachers.
Dominic was a priest. He was of the regular clergy, and an episcopal cleric. From his youth he had been nurtured on the best canonical apostolic spirituality, because he found the fullness of the reform in vigor at the chapter of Osma, which he entered upon completion of his clerical studies. He himself participated in the effort to renew the common life (1199),(69) and there is proof that the ideal of imitating the apostles was presented to him from the first under the most dynamic form, because the prior of the reform, Diego de Acebes, was himself animated with such an extraordinary spirit of zeal that, when he became the head of a diocese, he offered his resignation to the Pope in order to consecrate himself to the conversion of the pagans.(70) Dominic was then his subprior and joined with him in his endeavor.
From that time on, Dominic cultivated the spirit of the apostolic life with new intensity. With other priests he shared in the papal mission against the heretics in Narbonne. He taught according to the evangelical program of St. Luke: "Going and preaching according to the example of the Master, on foot, without gold or silver, in all things imitating the way of the apostles." Expressly designated by Innocent, this was the method of conquest which all the missioners of Languedoc had to practice.
Thereafter Dominic had the title and carried on the clerical duties of a preacher delegated to the Province of Narbonne.(71) Moreover, early in the year 1213, during the absence of the Bishop of Carcassonne, Dominic was named vicar-general in spiritualibus.(72) During these few years the episcopal office itself seemed about to claim him; he was threatened several times, and probably even canonically elected, at dates somewhat uncertain.(73) But he did not desire ecclesiastical dignities. In 1214 he became pastor of Fanjeaux, thus entering into the administration of the Diocese of Toulouse.(74) In 1215 he was appointed head of a small band of diocesan preachers by his Bishop, Foulques, who organized in his diocese the papal preaching(75) formerly inaugurated in Narbonne.
IN THE TRADITION OF HISTORY Installed in a house at Toulouse, the apostolic society then desired to strengthen its unity by a religious profession, to increase its spiritual treasury by the austerity of a common life, and especially to perpetuate its work in an institution. Thus the way was prepared for the foundation of the Preachers, a project which Dominic laid before the Pope.
Apparently these preliminary steps in the foundation of the Order of St. Dominic followed a traditional line. Does not the story read exactly like that for the foundations of regular episcopal clerics at the close of the eleventh century? Opposed in character to the apostolic movement which followed its inspiration independent of any consideration for law, the new clerical association possessed, even from the first, a juridical cast that was almost classic. These preachers were priests,(76) owing obedience to the bishop of the diocese, who legally conferred on them the office of preaching. For their maintenance, the bishop provided a third part of the tithes of the diocese, the other two parts being destined for the episcopal canons and for himself. In a very different position from that of itinerants, these preachers were installed in the city in a house which served as their headquarters.
Their number, doubtless, was very unusual: only individual delegated preachers were heard of previous to the thirteenth century. But after 1204 the great preaching missions organized by Innocent III created a precedent; not a precedent only, but a kind of magnet, since the little society of Toulouse was the direct outcome of one of these mission bands.
Furthermore, was not this new group of priests who aided the bishop in his office as pastor a replica in spiritualibus of the college of canons who at this period assisted him in his work as administrator of the diocese in temporalibus? The little association at the house of Peter Seila grew into a convent of canons regular, and in its membership, its juridical status, its position in the diocese, and even in the source of its revenue, it became a counterpart of the episcopal chapter of St. Stephen.(77)
It is not surprising, therefore, in 1216, to see Dominic and his first brethren, with the advice of Innocent III, choose as the Rule of their Order the Commentary of St. Augustine. Had they not adopted this decapitated text in their legislation -- and they might indeed have failed to consider it but for canon 13 of the Lateran Council(78) -- this order of priests would, nevertheless, have appeared as an authentic and pure resurgence of the great Augustinian current.
In the clerical order as well as among the lay groups of the "Predicant" movement, the apostolic life swept on in a mighty flow in the pontificate of Innocent III, renewing the ideal of the reformers of the eleventh century and continuing the history of the influence of St. Augustine.
A NEW INSTITUTION But in the same period, while holding to the line of this visible continuity and taking its classic shape, the apostolic ideal as expressed in the institution of the Friars Preachers far outdistanced its first goals in every direction. The nature of the order conceived and realized by St. Dominic, its freedom from parochial administration, its stamp of universality,(79) and particularly its apostolic spirit of boundless zeal and evangelical poverty, made this last offshoot of the Augustinian institution a force that profoundly affected the apostolic order and the Catholic hierarchy. A final goal had been reached.
A contemporary writer described this achievement in a remarkable picture which sketches this evolution. A great preacher, Jacques de Vitry, in a sermon to the canons regular, thus traced the history of the apostolic order:
This stream,(80) that is, regular life, which watered all of Egypt, or the whole universe, rising in the place of delight, namely, the primitive Church, among the faithful who had but one heart and one soul and called nothing they possessed their own,(81) flowed thence from this place of pleasure, and reached even to the blessed Augustine. He himself began to live according to the Rule instituted by the holy apostles.This stream produced of itself seven tributaries, or seven congregations of canons which possess the same Rule and the same basis but have different statutes. The Canons of Prémontré form one of these; the Convent of Grandmont, another; the Order of St. Victor, the third; the Order of Ardlaise, the fourth; the Order of Val-des-Écoliers, the fifth; the Order of Val-des-Choux, the sixth; the Order of Friars Preachers, the seventh. . . .
The stream from which these tributaries flowed is the Order of White Canons who wear linen and furs, use wine and meat, as they say that Blessed Augustine and his clerics did. Augustine made of his followers men white and pure within; without, black, and dead to the world; this was the symbolism of the habits with their black capes and their white linen garments. . . .
Therefore, in this blessed and holy way of life, the White Canons, who were the first among the canons, dwelt a long time. . . .
Many, in proposing to follow a yet more salutary counsel, imposed upon themselves more severe statutes while keeping to the foundation of the Rule. That is why they took it upon themselves to abstain from meat and preferred to use garments of wool or horsehair, scorning and rejecting linen shirts, linen and feather mattresses; this was done by the seven congregations already mentioned. . . .
Moreover, these canons regular were not content with being distinguished from the White Canons in their food and clothing; for, in these last times, the Congregation of the Friars Preachers, holy and pleasing to God, have ceaselessly waged war everywhere against the devil by freeing themselves from the burden of temporal possessions. Necessary, indeed, it is for combatants to be rid of all encumbrance; that is why Abraham selected three hundred servants free from all care to fight against the five kings.(82) Our combat is against the five senses.
In fact, Noemi,(83) that is, the splendor of the religious life, having dwelt long in the land of Moab, namely, among the black monks and white canons, returned to Bethlehem, or the house of bread, to the house of the Friars Preachers which sustains the whole world on the bread of the word. Thus Isaias announced: I will take away all thy tin. And I will restore thy judges as they were before, and make thy counselors as of old; that is, as in the days of the primitive Church and of the apostles. For in them the first state of the primitive Church traced its image, when all temporal goods were considered as dung. They rejected the tin of hypocrisy, which counterfeits silver, with those who wear a relicious habit and an appearance of piety, but do not possess it in truth.
To walk more freely to battle, these athletes of Christ, considering the cares, worries, and other troubles that proceed from riches and earthly possessions, naked have followed Christ naked, embracing joyous poverty and working for a treasure which does not fail.
DESCRIPTION BY A CONTEMPORARY There would be no purpose in lingering over the details (84) of this text. Its notes resound through the history of apostolic life, recalling the echo of St. Peter Damian's words, and from afar, those of the Bishop of Hippo. The four characteristics of the Order of Preachers which the sermon brings to light, are those signalized in the course of the first years of its history in the most reliable documents, the bulls of Pope Honorius III. This Order is canonical.(85) It is universal and nourishes the entire world on the bread of the word.(86). It is absolutely poor, having rejected possessions in order to be freer.(87) Finally it constitutes an army of soldiers of the faith who combat evil in all its domains.(88) Another statement, also from Jacques de Vitry, tells the whole story: "They unite the ordo praedicatorum to the ordo canonicorum."
This is a revealing declaration. Peter Damian had thought that the ordo praedicatorum and the ordo canonicorum ought by right to become ideDtified. A century and a half later, according to Jacques de Vitry, the one was united to the other. The fact is that the canons of the thirteenth century were far from having realized the hopes which the reformers had once placed in them. What is more significant, the Order of Preachers had conceived a preaching mission of such vast proportions that the canonical life of the period could no longer embrace it without bursting its bounds. And Jacques de Vitry truly appreciated that the leaven of this expansion was the total poverty of the Gospel along with ardent and universal preaching of the word of God, that is, the plenitude of the apostolic life.
In working this leaven into the temper of the canonical order, Dominic completely renewed it. He infused into it the spirited and fiery zeal which until then had burned only in the free but anarchical forms of the apostolic movement. He stabilized apostolic life in a solidly constituted order; he restored it as an exclusively clerical ideal and with it rejuvenated the Catholic hierarchy.
SUMMIT OF THE APOSTOLIC INSTITUTION In that hour the clerical institution inaugurated by St. Augustine reached the full development of its own nature. In his own words Augustine had epitomized its character in the Disciplina: Apostolicam vitam optamus vivere.(89) It was but natural, by a curious recovery, that in commenting on the Rule of the Preachers, Humbert of Romans should ferret out this text, so long suppressed from the Rule of St. Augustine.(90) Speaking of St. Dominic, Gregory IX declared: "He was a man fashioned on the apostolic rule."(91) Jordan of Saxony called him "an evangelical man."(92)
The Order founded by St. Dominic not only retained and amplified observances essential to the imitation of the apostles, with life in common, radical suppression of property, austerity and piety, but even more fully than Augustine, it recovered the historical orientation of this apostolic life, by equipping itself with a conquering activity. It raised this life to its maximum power of conquest by assuming, independent of any parochial work, the office of preaching. To this end all else was subordinated, the whole Rule with all its observances, and study in particular. Through the teaching of sacred doctrine and the giving of Christian instruction to all ranks of society, it strove to realize the evangelization of the whole world.
On the legislative plane, Jacques de Vitry likewise testifies that the Order of Preachers attained the summit of the Augustinian institution. Beginning with the eleventh century, all the orders that proved the new fecundity of the Augustinian concept supplemented the Commentary, substituting for the lost Disciplina more and more rigorous customs which constituted their true rule. Dominic followed the same lead, and his Customs are the crowning of this evolution.
This legislative work may seem slight when compared with all that is owing to the Founder of the Order of Preachers: the conception of the idea of the Order, the concentration of all the energies of the apostolic life in a regular community, the practical execution of the idea, the gathering of the first friars, their education and the conquering zeal he communicated to them, the psychological upheaval created in clerical circles resulting in an extraordinary flow of scholars into his own monasteries, the power of his personal sanctity. These seem infinitely more captivating and more worthy of attention than a legislative work.
Yet, if a person has clear vision, he will see that nothing reveals better the genius and the supernatural inspiration of this great saint. ne remark should suffice: for a hundred and fifty years all far-seeing souls were crying out for an Order of Preachers; the institution was tragically urgent; all energies were strained toward it; all companies of apostles seemed bent upon it; still, the idea with all its contradictory claims was not incarnated in an institution. Dominic constructed his Order and embraced the ideal in a Rule perfectly modeled; immediately and everywhere similar projects found a stabilizing force and reformed their life on this pattern. The great movement of the mendicant orders began to take its definite and fruitful form.
This final development of the institution of St. Augustine represented its complete expansion and its ultimate goal. Once the Order of Preachers was established, all foundations of apostolic orders, that is, of all new religious orders, depended in reality on the legislative type of the Preachers, even when they adopted as their Rule the Commentary of St. Augustine.
The reform of the clergy accomplished by the Rule of St. Augustine was thenceforth rendered inseparable from the influence of the law of St. Dominic. It was realized by that very law, the heir of the lost Disciplina. Hence a study of the evolution and the universal success of the apostolic institution in the thirteenth century would be futile if confined to the destinies of the decapitated Augustinian Commentary. It would be necessary and it would be sufficient to know the history and the spread of the Constitutions of the Preachers, or, as contemporaries styled it, the Rule of St. Dominic, in which the Commentary itself very nearly disappeared.
The first thing to do is to discover the law as it came from the hands of its institutor, St. Dominic, and to study its primitive history. Thus by internal evidence can be verified the testimony borne from without by Jacques de Vitry. Then it will be easier to understand the consequences of the evolution under consideration.
NOTES 1 A. Felice, La réforme grégorienne, I, 36.
2 "In the year of our Lord, 1059 . . . the illustrious Hildebrand, with the authority of the archdeacon of the Apostolic See, said: 'Some in clerical orders, inflamed with the fire of perfect charity through the Holy Spirit, in this Roman city and in the provinces and in parishes close or adjacent, have now for some length of time been living the common life, according to the practice of the primitive Church; they distributed their goods to the poor or left them to relatives, or donated them to the Church of Christ, and professed that they would receive nothing in their own light.'" Here there is reference to what was practiced prior to 1059; Hildebrand wished to prevent any relaxation on the part of clerics who had embraced the common life. Therefore he required the revision of the canonical Rule of Aachen, the prescriptions of which on the peculium were scandalous, as likewise on the maintenance provided in portions suitable for cyclopes and sailors rather than for canons and monks. Therefore he required that their way be reformed and "that they make profession according to the custom adopted by clerics everywhere in the city of Rome: to live the common life of the primitive Church." Hildebrand was named archdeacon only a few months after the synod, between August and October (Cf. Hefele-Leclercq, IV, 1191).
3 This opusculum (XXIV) is entitled Contra clericos regulares proprietarios. Peter Damian expressed the idea exactly on one occasion: "We do not say this in regard to all clerics but particularly in reference to those who belong to the canonical order and live in congregation" (PL, CXLV, 482). He was concerned, it seems, only with the canonical order, that is, as far as it was possible to define the term or the institution which was still in process of evolution; it included that principal division of the clergy who lived under the presidency of the bishop at a mother church and on its revenues. The conciliar canons (notably those of Aachen in 816) had promulgated rules of life for them.
4 Peter Damian, op. cit.,; PL, CXLV, 485 ff.
6 Cf. ibid., 489. Sacerdotal ordination is here designated by the significant expression, "to confer the office of preaching."
9 This comparison was traditional, no doubt, but it does not appear in the voluminous patristic florilegium. compiled on the life of clerics as a prologue to the Canonical Rule of Aachen any more than it appears in the Gospel texts on the apostolic life. Beginning with the eleventh century, the great use made of these texts And of this comparison to exalt the preaching character of apostolic life enhances its value.
Note this text of Peter Damian: "For what is meant by the seventy men (Judg. 9:5) but the great number of preachers of the Church? About these the Evangelist Luke speaks: The Lord appointed seventy (sic) and sent them two and two before 'His face into every city and place whither He Himself was to come' (Luke 10:1). This praedicantium ordo is prefigured in those about whom the Lord said to Moses: Gather unto me seventy men. . . .'" (Num. 11: 16 ff.). Cf. PL, CXLV, 389. Likewise the twelve fountains and the seventy palm trees (ibid.). Here, then, the ordo sacerdotum is the ordo praedicantium.10 Opusculum 27, De communi vita canonicorum ad clericos fanensis ecclesiae, PL, CXLVI 508 f. The tract is stirring because of the reflection it gives of the spiritual unrest agitating some of those to whom it was addressed, men attracted by the reform yet stIll hesitant. It opens with the text of the Acts of the Apostles which recalls the form of the primitive Church and the apostolic institution; a call "to gather with the apostles in the cenacle," then: "Indeed a little salt seasons many things, and the whole multitude of the Christian people is taught and instructed by a small number of clerics."
11 Opusculum 28, Apologeticus monachorum adversus clericos, PL, CXLV, 511-18. "We wonder, dearest brethren, if you are worthy to hear how and why you attempted to separate us from the society and unity of the universal Church, since it is evident that it was founded, governed, and freed from varying species of error by monks and not by canons. Truly the apostles, founders and rulers of the Church, lived in our way, not in yours, as Luke the Evangelist shows in the Acts of the Apostles" (Acts 4:32).
Peter Damian here claims only the right of administering the sacraments. But this claim was promptly enlarged upon. It was the pastoral ministry and preaching which the monks sought, on the same basis as canons. On this head polemical treatises were abundant in the early twelfth century. Rupert of Deutz, Altercatio monachi et clerici quod liceat monacho praedicare, PL, 170, 537 ff.; Rudbertus, Questio utrum monachis liceat praedicare (ed. Endres, p. 145); Honorius of Autun, Quod monachis liceat praedicare (ed. Endres, pp. 147 ff.); by an anonymous canon of St. Victor (after 1121), De vita vere apostolica, PL, CLXX, 611 ff.; Hugh of Rouen, Dialogorum lib. VI, PL, CXCII, 1219.
The monastic world of the time was agitated by a vigorous call to the apostolate, which the great success of Cîteaux, reactionary on this point, might obscure. Cf. Hauck, IV, 335 f. These aspirations were still strong in 1256 and even penetrated Cîteaux, as may be judged from the Dialogue d'un moine clunysien et d'un moine cistercien, written at that time. In general, however, the monks recognized that preaching called for the clerical status. It was characteristic of the heretics or schismatics, Cathari and Waldenses, to associate the preaching office exclusively with the imitation of the apostles; -- the preacher might even be a woman.12 Cf. Luke 9:3 f.; 10: 1-7; Matt. 10:9-11; Mark 6:8-10. This program is not entirely unified; one permits the staff, the other forbids it; one permits shoes, the other would not have them. In general, here is the substance of it: they are to go two by two (the rule of a companion); without silver or gold; on foot; gaining their bread from those to whom they preach (mendicancy); content with what is provided (therefore, no kinds of food are forbidden during apostolic journeys). Many added, go barefoot; some wished only a single tunic; some required that no bread, not even a sack, be carried.
14 Sermon, De vita et moribus clericorum suorum, PL, XXXVIII, 1574 f.
15 Cf. Celano, Vita (1), pp. 24 f. After hearing this text, which he had some priests translate into the vernacular for him, Peter Waldo of Lyons, a wealthy convert, conceived his idea of a movement for preaching by mendicants (cf. Bourbon, Anecdotes historiques, no. 342). With this text as a basis for his program, St. Dominic's bishop proposed to the Praedicatio in Narbonne the spirit of mendicant preaching, which was transmitted to the Order of Preachers (cf. Cernai, no. 21).
16 The idea of the apostolic life and the influence of the text of the Acts of the Apostles were not new. They can be traced to the very origin of Christian monasticism. It seems, however, that St. Augustine was the first to impose on clerics an absolute common life. From his time the idea was cherished continually. The Council of Aachen prepared, as an introduction to the Rule of the canons, a collection of texts including most of the scriptural and patristic passages used by the reformers of the eleventh century. Found there in extenso were the two sermons of St. Augustine on the life of his clerics. The canonical Rule of 816 (Institutionis forma canonicorum) had full assurance that it stood for the Apostolica instituta (Mansi, XIV, 226, 242).
It was characteristic of the Gregorian reformers that they carried out this idea with unprecedented vigor, especially in regard to poverty and in a revival of the proselytizing power inherent in the life of the apostles. On this last point stood their great originality. Up to that time the common life had been the sole aim. It was Peter Damian who put the emphasis on preaching. The texts from Luke, chapter 10 (and parallels), were not included in the Aachen collection.17 On the origin, nature, and motives of the workers in these various apostolic movements, cf. Grundmann, pp. 8, 34ff., 157-68. It is noteworthy that the lay apostles, even though they attacked the traditional forms of Christian society, were not poor vagabonds aligned against those in power, but often they were nobles, wealthy men, clerics converted or awakened to new fervor; they were even educated men disgusted with learning, who opposed the contemporary condition of society.
18 The influence of the reformers was exercised not merely by their sermons: Peter Damian wrote much, and his many short works had a large circulation. Cf. Manitius, Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, III, 75.
19 Synod of Aachen (816). This council (can. 120) assigned to each canon: food, clothing, and a share of the alms (Mansi, XIV, 231). This third provision opened the door to the peculium, the cause of all the evil (cf. can. 122; ibid., p. 232).
20 On March 12, 1051, Leo IX proposed to the canons of St. Martin of Lucca, "renewed in chastity," the whole ideal of the perfect common life: "Those who desire chastity and the regular discharge of holy offices at the altar . . . ought to receive the food and vesture of canons lest, while engaged in seeking the necessaries of life, they incur the fault of vagrancy. . . . If the Lord God . . . has delivered your church from priests with wives . . . the chaste from the unchaste, the ecclesiastical goods may be restored, which were dissipated by those living in luxury; and these resources may be applied for the common use of those living canonically." Jaffé, no. 4254; PL, CXLIII, 671; Mansi, XIX, 691 f. It is to be noted that the Pope speaks only of victus et vestitus; there is no question of peculium.
21 Hildebrand rose up against the possession of what this regulation permits. Peter Damian considered the question in more detail in his op. 24. PL, CXLV, 484. The text of the Aachen canon (120), as given by Mansi (XIV, 231), is evidently faulty.
22 Synod of Rome (April 20, 1063); Mansi, XIX, 1023 ff.
23 For the expression religiosi clerici, see Hertling in Zeitschrift für kathol. Theol., LIV ( 1930), 350.
25 "We have given thanks because you have proposed to renew the probable life of the holy Fathers, and you have, by the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, vowed to revive the institutes of apostolic doctrine customary in the first ages of the Holy Church but almost extinct with the passing of time." Privilege to the Friars of St. Paul of Narbonne on March 19, 1093 (PL, CLI, 360; Jaffé, no. 5482); cf. the bull of March 14, 1095, to the Canons of Magalon (Jaffé, no. 5550); of September 19, 1095, to the Friars of St. Ruf (Jaffé, no. 5579).
The conclusion of the bull (Jaffé, no. 5482) contains a summary of the history of canonical life. There are two lives in the Church, the high life and the low. The first lies in the monastic and canonical way. "Urban, pope and martyr, instituted the canonical life; Augustine regulated it by his laws; Jerome instructed it by his letters. Therefore it should not be thought any less meritorious, under the inspiration and direction of the Spirit of the Lord, to reinaugurate this primitive life of the Church than with persevering aid of the same Holy Spirit to guard the flourishing religious life of the monks" (PL, CLI, 360).
It is remarkable that this historical survey, in which the views of Peter Damian are apparent, recognizes the life of the primitive Church only in the canonical, and not in the monastic life. This little historical account had great success. It may be found separate from the original Privilege (PL, CLI, 535). It constituted an official decree in the mind of the canons and appeared as such in the Bull of Foundation of Prémontré (cf, Hugo, Sacri et canonici ordinis Praemonstratensis annales, Vol. I (documents), p. 8. It occurred frequently in polemics or apologies of the canons (cf. Hauck. IV, 360).26 The monks could not be deterred from recognizing in their common life an imitation of the primitive communism, a circumstance not without historical truth. To the different texts cited, we add William of St. Thierry, Liber de natura et dignitate amoris (chap. 9; PL, CLXXXIV, 395). William was then abbot of Cluny. In certain cases Urban II recognized even in the monastic life not only the apostolic common life, but the apostolic ministry. That indeed was the desire of certain monks, but not the customary view of the popes.
The official position here referred to had a great significance; it showed what importance the canonical reformers attached to the apostolate. It was the apostolate that made the canon as it had made the apostle. But it was not proper to the monk.27 As might be expected, imitation of the apostles was the main theme in their writings, at times being incorporated even in the title of the work; e.g., De vita vere apostolica.
28 L. Herding ("Augustinusregel und Augustinerorden," Zeitsch. für kath. Theol., LIV [1930], 350) thinks that the revision of the canons of Aachen, as found in Mansi (XIV, 283 ff.), was called forth by the canon of 1059 (1063).
29 Dom G. Morin, "Règlements inédits du pape Grégoire VII pour les chanoines réguliers," Rev. Bénéd., XVIII (1901), 177-83, where this Rule is published.
30 Urban II became pope in 1088, three years after the death of Gregory VII. On January 11, 1089, the Rule of St. Augustine reappeared for the first time unmistakably with the Canons of St. Jean des Vignes (cf. Herding, Reg., p. 356; P. Schroeder, p. 299; PL, CLI, 295; Jaffé, no. 5391).
31 "In regard to shoes (caligae), we follow the custom of the other canons, because in this matter we are directed by no new custom but by the ancient practice of the apostles themselves. For we know that the apostles went about barefoot (Matt. 10:10). We read also what the angel said to Peter in prison: 'Gird thyself and put on thy sandals' (Acts 12:8). If, therefore, Peter wore sandals and yet went about barefoot (Luke 10:4), it follows that they might have a modified form of shoe" (chap. 99; Martène, Rit., III, 317). The passage is not in the edition of Amort. According to Du Cange, the caligae were a form of leggings. This text seems rather to indicate socks.
32 Let anyone embracing the canonical profession lay aside his own garments and be vested in those of the monastery so that despoiled of his secular garb, he may understand that he has descended to the poverty and want of Christ." "Therefore, with all meekness the poverty of the dwelling, the austerity of the place, etc., be set before him (Martène Rit., III, 306). These are the first words of the Rule. The regula Portuensis opens with a long discussion of evangelical and apostolic poverty which seems drawn from the tracts of Peter Damian (Amort., pp. 341-45) This discourse may be found developed still further in the Rule of Aachen CIV, 289-91).
33 Peter Damian urged clerics to a complete detachment from material goods. If Gregorian reformers, in their quest of apostolic poverty, did not go so far as the mendicant apostles of the following century, it is not that they had any other ideal: but they did not think it possible to realize the ideal fully. If it was desirable that clerics should have food and clothing assured them, this was in order that the need of procuring them should not constitute a reason for vagabondage, a vice that was precisely one most keenly deplored in proprietary clerics. Cf. Peter Damian, op. 27, PL, V, 507.
34 Peter Damian, op. 24; PL, CXLV, 484 f.
35 In guaranteeing the possessions of the canons of Beuron (December 25, 1097), Urban II says: "Let everything be preserved entire, that it may be for your service and that of your successors and for the use of the poor" (PL, CLI, 499; Jaffé, no. 5692). The formula occurs frequently in the twelfth century. Tithes were assigned to the bishop, the canons, the poor, and for the maintenance of churches. What was over and above had to be given to the poor: "Since whatever clerics have belongs to the poor . . . there must be special care that from the tithes and offerings they lay aside means of support as much as they will and can for convents and hospitals" (c. 68, C. XVI, q. 1). See examples in Jaffé, nos. 5288, 5427. One of the most celebrated of these was the gift of half of a third part of the tithes by the Bishop and canons of Toulouse to the first companions of St. Dominic in 1215.
Peter Damian also made use of a text contained in the Regula canonicorum: "Let them receive food and drink and clothing, and with these let them be content lest, taking more, they seem to oppress the poor, not without sin, and let them not take that upon which the poor depend for sustenance" (PL, CXLV, 484).36 See in Denifle (Archiv, 1, 185 ff.) the learned notes in his prologue to the edition of the first Constitutions of the Order of Preachers. He cites texts from the Customs of Marbach, St. Victor, St. Denys of Reims, Porto. See also, in the modified Rule of Aachen, the enumeration of objects which the friars were tempted to appropriate: codices, tabulas, graphicum, the only ones mentioned (Mansi, XIV, 229).
37 See chaps. 23, 25, 27, of the Regula Portuensis (Amort, pp. 352 f.); chaps. 102, 103, of the Customs of Marbach (Martène, Rit., III, 317); chap. 4 of the Customs of St. Denys of Reims (ibid., p. 298); chaps. 59, 60 of St. Victor (ibid., p. 279).
38 Customs of St. Denys of Reims, chap. De foraneis (canonici forenses). Martène, Rit., III, 301; St. Victor, chap. 61, De his qui ad obedientias conversantur (ibid., 280). On this institution of the forenses, see Schreiber, II, 46; I, 124 ff.).
39 Schreiber Kurie und Kloster im XII Jahrh., II, 45.
40 Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegung im Mittelalter. . . , Historische Studien (1935), p. 267.
41 Everything is repeated in the history of the apostolic life. When, after a grave scandal, St. Augustine wished to consolidate in his clergy the ideal of the apostolic life which he had imposed upon them, he did not turn to the clergy but to the people. This attempt to bring pressure through popular indignation occasioned the two celebrated sermons (355 and 356), De vita et moribus clericorum suorum (PL, XXXVIII, 1568-80) which, like a mighty echo, have transmitted to posterity the clerical ideal of the holy Bishop.
42 Fliche, La réforme grégorienne, I, 157, gives contradictory opinions of historians about Gregory VII's part in the popular outbursts against simoniacal and incontinent clerics. Did the Pope permit them or provoke them? Fliche thinks Gregory was satisfied simply to enjoin upon the laity disobedience to disobedient pastors, and upon princes an opposition, even by force, to the services of unworthy clerics.
But the fact remains that, when the civil or ecclesiastical powers placed an obstacle in the way of reform, Gregory did not hesitate to proceed further and rely on the party in revolt, as in the case of the Patarines. This was the attitude of his predecessors, and notably that of Alexander II, who was pope in the time of Peter Damian.43 A synod of Rome in 1059 forbade concubinary clerics to exercise their office and decreed "that no one may hear the Mass of such a priest" (Mansi, XX, 907). The Roman synods of 1074 and 1075 renewed the same prescription in order that fear of the people and their censure might oblige the cleric to correct his life (Hefele-Leclercq, V, 90). The prohibition was repeated by Urban II, Paschal II, and even Innocent II (Second Lateran Council, can. 7; Hefele-Leclercq, V, 726).
44 See in Mansi (XX, 422) the commentary by Bernold of Constance on canon 4 the Synods of 1074-75, "that the people may not accept the ministrations of clerics whom they perceive to be living in opposition to the sacred canons, and to the evangelical and apostolic institutions."
45 In 1057 at Rome, popular meetings against concubinary and simoniacal clerics (Jaffé, after no. 4375; Peter Damian, PL, CXLV, 409). The first episodes of the Patarines belong to this time. In 1067, Alexander II aroused the people and clerics of Cremona ( Jaffé, no. 4637). In 1074, Gregory VII ordered the laity of Germany not to obey bishops who permitted their clerics to marry (Jaffé, no. 4902). At the time the Pope threatened Philip I of France with a revocation of the obedience his subjects if he continued to promote simony and other crimes (Jaffé, nos. 4807, 4855, 4878). He had recourse to this measure also against Henry IV in 1076. In 1075, he directed Rudolph of Swabia and Berthold of Carinthia to prevent "even by force" unworthy clerics from celebrating ( Jaffé, no. 4922); the same recommendation to the Count and Countess of Flanders J (Jaffé, nos. 5011, 5012). In 1079, he commanded all the faithful of Teutonia and Italy to refuse the ministrations of incontinent clerics (Jaffé, no. 5109).
46 On the Patarines, see Hefele-Leclercq, IV, 1127ff., 1191-98, 1249ff. The movement arose in Milan, but subsequently spread to Cremona, Brescia, Asti, Lodi, Ravenna. All Lombardy was agitated by it. Alexander II and Gregory VII relied on it while trying to prevent its excesses.
47 In 1057, Stephen IX tried to calm the Patarines (Jaffé, no. 4378), whence the successive missions of Hildebrand; then, under Nicholas II, the missions of Peter (Hefele-Leclercq, IV, 1131 ff., 1191 ff.). In 1059, the Synod of Rome added canons: "Let not any of the lay order judge clerics" (Mansi, XIX, 898, 909). a sketch of anticlericalism in Florence, see Peter Damian, De sacramentis per administrandis (PL, CXLV, 529).
48 Note, for example, in Felice (11, 253), the part played by the crowd in the deposition of Archbishop Manasses of Reims; cf. ibid., pp. 255-58, for the bishops of Thérouanne. Moreover, as always, the popular outbreaks worked quite as much in the opposite direction.
49 Baudry, Vita Roberti; PL, CLXII, 105,3, Walter, Die ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs, I, 125.
50 "We have learned about those who are agitating against the custom of the cenobitical groups, in which you receive under obedience laymen who renounce the world and devote themselves and their possessions to the common life. However, we approve of this way of life and this custom, as we have seen them to be laudable. Considering them the more worthy of being perpetuated as the form of the primitive Church is impressed upon them, we call them holy and Catholic, and by this letter confirm them by apostolic authority" (Urban II; PL, CLI, 336; Jaffé, no. 5456).
51 We quote extensively from this text. "In those times [about 1091] in the Teutonic kingdom, the common life flourished in many places, not only among clerics and monks living religiously together, but even among laymen who devoutly offered themselves and their goods to the same common life. Although in their garb they appeared to be neither clerics nor monks, they were considered not at all unequal to them in merit. Renouncing the world, these men gave themselves and their os sessions to con regations of clerics as well as to monks living regularly, that they might be privileged to serve them and to live in common under their obedience. Wherefore, incited by the envy of the devil, certain other men, jealous of the honorable life of these same brethren, gnawed with wicked teeth at their life, although seeing that they were living in common in the way of the primitive Church."
"Not only an innumerable multitude of men but also of women devoted themselves in those times to a life of this kind that they might live in common in obedience to clerics or monks, and most faithfully discharge for them the weight of the daily service of auxiliaries. On these farms also, many girls from country places renounced marriage and the world to live in obedience to a priest, But married people were not less zealous in living religiously, cultivating obedience to religious men. Moreover, zeal of this kind flourished with most vigor in Germany" (Chronicon, Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores, V, 453; PL, CXLVIII, 1407).
Among these lay associations, that of the Lay Brothers of Hirsau was in the first rank; there were also, no doubt, cloistered women in the double convents of Prémontré and many others. The place of the institution of lay brothers as related to the apostolic life would form a highly interesting study in itself.52 "To those inquiring what is your profession or rule or order, you may say: the first and principal Christian rule, the Gospel, in truth, because it is the source of all rules and principles; ... nor dare you say you are not subject to apostolic and canonical institutions and desirous of following in some way the footsteps of the holy Fathers" (St. Stephen of Muret, Sermo de unitate diversarum regularum; Martène, Rit., IV, 308). "For if the Son of God coming into the world knew of a better way to ascend to heaven than through poverty, He would have chosen it and walked therein" (St. Stephen, Sentences: ibid., 318). The rule holds these promises. It is the first of the mendicant rules. The friars possess only the lands attached to their convent.
54 It would be interesting to set the details of customs and of vocabulary peculiar to the apostolic movement (Catholic, schismatic, or heretical) in the evangelical context from which they sprang. Perhaps the term "believers" (credentes) is too readily applied to the faithful Cathari from the fact that they preached a new faith, distinct from the Catholic, and on this point there is a rejection of the statement of the chroniclers, almost all of whom give the name credentes to the Waldenses who were not heretics. Does not the text of the Acts account for this title? Likewise, is not the title perfectus for evangelical vocations derived from "If you wish to be perfect . . ." (Matt. 19:20)? According to St. Augustine, the names borne by the two classes of Manichaeans were not those mentioned, but auditores and electi (De moribus manichaeorum; PL, XXXII, 1357, 1368-78).
55 The Patarines were accused of insulting the sacraments of married or simoniacal priests. Arnulf (Gesta archiepiscoporum mediolanensium; Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores, VIII, 18) puts into their mouth the words canina stercora to designate the sacrifice of such priests. Sigebert of Gembloux, in his Chronicon (Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores, VI, 362), even asserts, among other things, that the laity, aroused by the prohibition against being present at the Mass of a married priest, went so far as to trample Hosts under foot and to spill the precious blood consecrated by these priests. The attitude of the clergy could only aggravate things. In 1077 the Bishop of Cambrai had a layman burned who had committed no other crime than that of refusing to receive Communion from the hands of a bishop or priest guilty of simony or immorality (Chron. S. Andreae; Monumenta Germaniae historica, Scriptores, VII, 540; Jaffé, no. 5030).
56 On the relations of Arnold with the Patarines and the canonical movement, see Hausrath, Arnold von Brescia (1891), pp. 8, 18. For the relations of the Lombard heretics with Arnold at the close of the twelfth century, see Breyer in Zeitschr. für Kirchengesch., XII (1891), p. 392. Cf. Greenaway, Arnold of Brescia, 1931.
57 Grundmann, pp. 13-38. He very correctly remarks that in that age a spiritual "movement" could not endure long as an abstraction, but tended to become an institution: a regular order or a sect.
58 Ibid., pp. 24, 26. Guiraud (L'Inquisition, I, 173-96) has very skillfully noted the analogies in the Cathari's worship and primitive Christian rites. Further, it is certain that the metaphysics of Catharist dualism had all that was necessary to satisfy minds at once inquisitive and simple.
61 Ibid., p. 46. This apostolate was limited to the person of the founder and disappeared with him.
62 Heijman (Untersuchungen . . . Anal. Praem. IV [1928], 367-69) has listed the slight differences which had arisen between Cîteaux and Prémontré at the end of the twelfth century on the question of the pastoral ministry. They may be significant, but they are very slight, It is surprising that the central branch had to wait until 1188 for the right to delegate residents to subordinate churches. The oldest extant statutes of Prémontré even forbade the possession of this type of church, "to which the care of souls belongs, unless it is an abbey" (R. van Waefelghem, Les premiers status de l'O. de Prem.; Analect. de l'O. de Pr., IX [1913], 45). Consequently it is not surprising to find in the important work, De ordine, habitu et professione canonicorum praemonstratensium (PL, CXCVIII, 439-610), addressed by Adam Scotus to the Premonstratensians at the close of the twelfth century, no mention of the ministry of souls. Moreover, this religious was on the point of becoming a Carthusian (Anal. Praem., IX [1933], 209-31).
But, in the Order of Prémontré, two branches did not submit to the centralizing tendency and monastic impulse of Prémontré from the time of Blessed Hugh Fosse: the branch of Magdeburg and the Norbertines of southern Germany.63 All the characteristics of the apostolic movement are traceable in the foundation of the military Order of St. James of the Sword. The Canons of St. Eligius had converted a certain number of noble knights. The converters and the converted decided to put all their goods in common. The canons were to become chaplains for the knights who remained in the married state. Peter Ferdinand, their leader, went to Alexander III and obtained a Rule, a supplement of the Rule of St. Augustine. A privilege of July 5, 1175, confirmed their foundation. Therein occurs this description:
"Among those things which in the order of your profession it has been decreed you should observe, the first is that you ought to live in all humility and concord without property under obedience to one master. Consider the example of those faithful who, converted to the Christian faith by the preaching of the apostles, sold all and laid the price of it at their feet. To each was given what was needful, and not any of those who possessed anything called it his own, but all things were common to them" (Jaffé, no. 12504; PL, CC, 1026).
This order of married men was certainly one of the most curious known in the Church; it can be understood only from within the apostolic movement.
The hospitaller movement also frequently made provision for those in the married state. It was one of the great efforts of the popes and their representatives in the thirteenth century to oblige all hospitaller houses of any importance to take the vow of chastity and embrace the regular life (Le Grand, Statuts d'Hôtels-Dieu et de léproseries, 1901).64 The Rule universal among hospitallers was that of St. Augustine (cf. Le Grand, op. cit.).
66 We say "predicant" rather than "clerical." Clerics did not constitute the essential active element of the apostolic movements, though they may have been numbered therein: as with the Poor Catholics and the companions of St. Francis. These communities evolved or were destined eventually to evolve toward the clerical order. The first Order of the Humiliati was instituted as a canonical order. Tiraboschi, II, 141.
67 Ibid., pp. 128-48: privileges of an institution of the three branches. Cf. especially . 144.
68 The principal division of the Poor Catholics did not, strictly speaking, form a religious order. The only thing they had in common was their way of life, the conversatio. More on the order of itinerant preachers or schoolmasters, they formed, a company rather than a community. Nevertheless, their propositum conversationis, granted by Innocent III, made provision for a religious life for the men and women whom their preaching influenced: "If any men of the world wish to abide in our counsel, we advise that some who are suitable should be selected to exhort and dispute against the heretics, while others dwell together in houses, living religiously and according to rule, dispensing their goods in justice and mercy, laboring with their hands, and paying the tithes, first fruits and offerings due to the Church." PL 215, 1513 C. Vide PL., 216, 601-2, the very curious project of the religious house which they propose to construct in 1212 in the Diocese of Elne for their converts; there they would have clerics, laymen, and women, It illustrates the type of the multiple monasteries in which the apostolic communities became stabilized.
72 "Indeed the man of God tarried during one Lent in the house of the Bishop at Carcassonne, devoting himself to preaching while he was also vicar of the Bishop in spiritualibus, having been appointed by the latter for the time of his absence in France, (Constantine, no. 55). The information comes from Stephen of Metz who met Dominic on this occasion. There is no reason to question it. Dominic was associated with Guy of Cernai, bishop of Carcassonne, who had participated in the Praedicatio in Narbonne. Guy, in fact, at the close of 1212 took his leave to go to France; he returned to his diocese after the octave of Easter, 1213 (Cernai, no. 299), which fell on March 30.
The office of vices gerens in spiritualibus, conferred by a bishop for the period of his absence (remote agens), was common in that age (cf. E. Fournier, Les origines de vicaire général, 1922, pp. 37 f., 91 f., 98).73 According to the witnesses at the process of canonization, he had been canonically elected to the bishopric of Carcassonne (Processus [Bologna], no. 28; Processus [Toulouse], nos. 3, 5, 18; Constantine, no. 62). This might have occurred either in 1208 or after 1215-16 (Eubel, I, 203). The fact that Dominic declined on account of "the new foundation of preachers and nuns at Prouille" (Processus [Toulouse], no. 3; Altaner, p. 30) would point to the year 1208, because in 1215 Prouille was capable of thriving alone. On the other hand, in 1208 there could be no consideration of the Preachers.
We have observed that the veteran members of the Praedicatio in Narbonne began to be promoted to bishoprics only after 1211. It seems that the election of Dominic could not have been prior to that date, which was itself connected with the crusade. Therefore we favor 1215 or 1216.74 Dominic was called Capellanus Fanjeaux in a charter of May 25, 1214 (Laurent, nos. 54 f.) and in a charter of the same year without designated month or date, but of later origin than the first (ibid., no. 58). The term capellanus in Languedoc at that time meant the pastor. See Du Cange, s.v. Capellanus; Processus (Toulouse), no. 19; Laurent, no. 134.
76 The only document which refers to the little Toulouse community of 1215 is charter no. 60. It does not specify that the preachers instituted by Foulques were priests. Therein precisely is evidence that they were. The law was most stringent on that point. Foulques would not have permitted an infringement of this law without mention of the fact, especially in the country of the Albigenses. From the first, moreover, the Order of Preachers was strictly clerical. The only seculars included were lay brothers.
77 Early in the thirteenth century the canons of St. Stephen lived a mitigated common life in the same house (Gal. Christ., XIII, instr. XLI, c. 27 and 28). In 1216, there are evidences of an attempt to embrace the full regular life (ibid., 77).
78 It is remarkable that in the first years of the thirteenth century, interest in the decapitated Commentary of St. Augustine began to wane. In the twelfth century it possessed the influence necessary to impose upon the canons the complete renunciation of the peculium. In the thirteenth century, this problem no longer existed: thenceforth the decision to be a canon regular meant the giving up of private property.
St. Dominic had no call for the Rule of St. Augustine; for that reason, perhaps, he had not decided beforehand with his brethren to adopt it (Jordan, no. 42). On the other hand, perhaps he would not have excluded it from his consideration, in his fidelity to canonical traditions.
After 1215, however, the case was different, and the Rule of St. Augustine was welcome in compliance with canon 13 of the Lateran Council.82 Gen. 14:14. Compare with the seventy men of Moses, Num. 11:16, referred to by Peter Damian.
84 Our preacher was not a critical historian for the early periods of religious orders. Perhaps the need of a sevenfold enumeration influenced him to include in his list some orders not Augustinian. The Order of Val-des-Choux followed the Rule of St. Benedict. Cf. W. do Gray Birch, Ordinale conventus valliscaulium 1900; Anecd., Martène, IV, 1651 to 1670; especially Jacques de Vitry, Historia occidentalis, chap. 18 (pp. 307-9).
Now it is known why Jacques introduced the Order of Grandmont into this history. This Order, however, followed neither the Rule of St. Augustine nor, as Jacques records (op. cit., pp. 313-15), that of Cîteaux; it had its own Rule, but so imperfect a Rule that it needed continual revisions.85 Privilege of foundation on December 22, 1216; Laurent, no. 74.
86 "Incessantly they sow their grain, that is, the word of preaching which is the bread of souls, over many waters, meaning many peoples." Bull of December 8, 1219; ibid., no. 103.
87 "The load of worldly goods having been cast off, they traverse the road of this world more speedily . . . and they go in the abjection of voluntary poverty." Bull of December 8, 1219; ibid., no. 103.
88 "Knowing that the brethren of your Order will be the champions of the faith and the true ights of the world." Bull of December 22, 1216; Laurent, no. 75. "As invincible athletes of Christ, armed with the shield of faith and the helmet of salvation, not fearing those who can kill the body, you will magnanimously use the word of God, which is more penetrating than any two-edged sword, against the enemies of the faith." Bull of January 21, 1217; ibid., no. 77. Cf. this short statement of St. Dominic in giving the habit: "I wish to give you arms, with which throughout your life you ought to fight against the devil." Processus (Bologna), no. 36.
89 Disciplina monasterii, no. 4.
90 "Truly the Blessed Augustine formulated his [Rule] on a model of the apostolic life, as is clear from what is said and read about him, because he began to live according to the rule constituted by the holy apostles, and in one of his sermons be himself said: 'We wish to live the apostolic life."' Prol. in exp. regulae B. Aug. Cf. Humbert, De vita regulari, I, 45.
92 Ibid., no. 104. In his Constitutions, Dominic requires his friars to conduct themselves on their apostolic journeys "as evangelical men" (Denifle, Archiv, I, 223).
CONTENTS