Justified True Belief

(●) The Spanish canon who decided that error is answered by preachers poor enough to be believed, and built an order to supply them. + Most men who turn the church in a new direction leave a shelf of books behind them. Dominic left four short documents, and one of them is a note letting a Toulouse furrier keep a converted heretic living in his house. What he made instead was an institution: the Order of Preachers, the friars the world would soon call Dominicans. A friar is a brother under religious vows, much like a monk, with one difference that turned out to matter: he is sent out to the towns to work rather than settled behind a single wall for life. Through that order Dominic changed both who was allowed to preach and what a preacher was expected to know. He was an unlikely man for it, and he came to it late. A canon is a priest who lives under a rule with the other clergy of a cathedral and sings its daily services, and Dominic was one of those for years before anything else happened to him. Then, in the hill country of southern France, he met a movement that had persuaded thousands of ordinary Catholics that the visible church was a fraud, and he watched the church’s official answer fail in front of him. His diagnosis was not that the arguments were weak. It was that the arguments were arriving in expensive carriages, from men who did not look like anything they were saying. Argument matters, he concluded, and so does the life of the one making it, and neither can carry the load alone. That is a question apologetics has never stopped asking, which is why a man who published almost nothing is worth a Christian reader’s time. One fact about him is worth keeping. In 1217, with sixteen brothers and no money, he sent almost all of them out of the country at once, seven to Paris and four to Spain, over the objections of nearly everyone. By the summer he died, four years later, the order had been divided into eight provinces reaching from England to Hungary, and within a generation it had produced Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas.

(●) c. 1170 AD: He was born at Caleruega in Old Castile, and the family gave three sons to the church. + The year is a convention rather than a record. No early source gives a date for his birth, and c. 1170 is a reckoning backward from the age he is said to have reached, so every date in his first thirty years carries a "c." with it and should. Caleruega was a village in the diocese of Osma, on the high dry plateau of Old Castile, in country still close enough to the frontier with Muslim Spain that the reconquest was ordinary news. Of the household itself we know very little. Jordan of Saxony joined the order while Dominic was alive, succeeded him at its head, and wrote the earliest account we have, and all he says of the parents is that they were devout and reputable. The names later Spanish writers supply, Felix de Guzmán and Joan of Aza, come from tradition rather than from the first witnesses, and so does the story his godmother told of a star on the infant’s forehead. Two brothers went the same way. Mannes entered Dominic’s own order and is venerated in Spain; the other, a priest who spent himself on the poor, comes to us from the Spanish lives rather than from Jordan. Jordan also passes on a detail from the nursery that sounds like family memory rather than legend: the child kept leaving his bed to sleep on the floor, and the habit stayed with him for life.

(●) c. 1184 AD: At the schools of Palencia a famine came, and he sold the books he had been sent to study. + He was sent to Palencia, then the best school in Castile, first for the liberal arts, the standard preliminary course of grammar, logic and rhetoric, and then for four years of theology. Jordan says he studied at night, slept almost not at all, and had a memory that held what it heard. He carried Matthew’s Gospel and Paul’s letters with him ever after, and one witness at the inquiry into his life testified that he had read them so often he all but knew them by heart. Then Spain went hungry. A famine struck while he was a student, the poor began dying in the streets of the town, and Dominic sold everything he owned to feed them, including the books. That was not the small gesture it can sound like from here. A theology student’s books in the twelfth century were hand-copied on parchment, worth more than a horse, and they were the whole of his working equipment, so selling them was closer to a modern student selling the degree than to selling the textbooks. Jordan adds the part that matters for what came later: the masters of theology in that town, seeing how little they had given beside this young man, began to give more. A famous line is attached to this episode, that he would not study on dead skins while men were dying of hunger. It is a good line and it may well be his, but it comes from the later lives rather than from Jordan or the sworn witnesses, and it is safer to call it a tradition than a quotation.

(●) c. 1196 AD: He became a cathedral canon at Osma and then subprior, and for years together hardly left the cloister. + The bishop of Osma heard about the student and made him a canon regular of his cathedral: a priest living under a monastic rule in common with the other cathedral clergy, in this case the Rule of St. Augustine, which Dominic would eventually give to his own order. His brethren made him subprior, second in the house. These are the invisible years, and they are long. No source counts them, and the dates at either end are reckoned rather than recorded, but they run from his twenties to the edge of his thirties, and there is almost nothing in them to report: the choir, his books, and the night office, the prayers a community gets out of bed to sing in the dark. Jordan says he scarcely ever left the monastery grounds. Whatever else the Order of Preachers turned out to be, it did not come from a restless young man looking for something to do. It came out of a cloister. In 1201 the prior of his own chapter, Diego de Acebes, was made bishop, and the two men took to each other. It was Diego who would pull Dominic out of Spain, and Diego who would say the sentence that started everything.

(●) c. 1203 AD: A royal marriage errand took him through Toulouse, where he argued a heretic innkeeper back into the church by morning. + Alfonso VIII of Castile wanted a bride from the north for his son Ferdinand and asked Bishop Diego to negotiate it. Diego took his subprior along. The two men rode out of Spain in 1203 or 1204, the sources differ, and on a second journey a year or two later they arrived to collect the girl and learned that she had died. The errand failed and the detour did the work. Their road ran through Toulouse, and in Toulouse Dominic discovered that the man whose house he was sleeping in had left the Catholic faith. The region was full of such people. Historians now call the movement Catharism; contemporaries called its followers Albigensians, after the town of Albi. What it taught was that the physical world is the work of an evil power and that the true God has nothing to do with matter, which cost it everything that depends on matter: no real incarnation, no sacraments worth the name, no resurrection of the body. Its full members, the ones called the "perfect," lived with a severity that made the local clergy look like what they often were. Jordan reports simply that Dominic spent the whole night at it and that by morning the innkeeper had come back to the faith. It is the first thing anyone records him doing outside Spain, and it is the shape of the rest of his life: one man, one conversation, all night.

(●) 1206 AD: At Montpellier his bishop told the pope’s legates to send the horses home, and the preaching began on foot. + Innocent III had put twelve Cistercian abbots into Languedoc as his legates, which is to say as men carrying the pope’s own authority in person, and their commission was to preach the Albigensians back into the church. The Cistercians were the reforming monks of the age, men who had left comfortable houses for a stricter life, so they were not an obvious failure on paper. By 1206 they were at Montpellier admitting that it was not working. Diego was passing through, and before he offered any advice he asked them a blunt question: what do the heretics actually do? Then he told them what he thought of the answer. The heretics were walking everywhere, poor and hard on themselves, and winning simple people by the look of the thing, while the pope’s men arrived with baggage trains. Match steel with steel, he said: meet them on the ground they had chosen. Then he sent his own carriages and servants back to Osma, kept a few clerics with him, and went out on foot. One sentence sits at this point in the record. Stephen of Bourbon, a Dominican who gathered stories for preachers a generation later, said he had it from the first brethren who were in that country with Dominic: "And this was the cause for instituting our Order." A handful of men sent their baggage home, and the first Dominicans dated the whole order from that day. What followed was two years of preaching on foot with Dominic at his side, and public debates that lasted days. Out of it came the first house, and what prompted it was an ordinary family difficulty. Noble families in the region were handing daughters over to the Cathars to be fed and taught because they could not afford to keep them, and so in 1206 Diego and Dominic founded a monastery at Prouille, between Fanjeaux and Montréal, for women converted out of the movement. It is the oldest foundation of the order, and it was a house of women before it was a house of men. Then everything went dark. Diego went home to Spain for money and died there on 30 December 1207. Two weeks later the papal legate Peter of Castelnau was murdered on the Rhône, and Innocent III called a crusade against the south of France. For the next seven years Dominic went on preaching in a country under armies, with no bishop behind him and no order yet. Elected bishop of Couserans in those years, he refused flatly, and Jordan says he declared he would sooner die than ever consent to an election that concerned him.

(●) 1215 AD: Toulouse gave him a house, and Rome gave his brothers a name: Preachers. + In April 1215 Bishop Fulk of Toulouse appointed Dominic and his companions preachers in his diocese and assigned them a share of the tithes, the tenth of a harvest that households owed the church, out of the portion the diocese kept for the poor. That same year two men of Toulouse joined him, and one of them, Peter Seila, handed over the stone houses he owned near the Narbonne gate. For the first time the preachers had an address. That November Dominic went with Fulk to Rome for the Fourth Lateran Council and asked Innocent III to confirm an order that would be called, and would be, an Order of Preachers. The pope sent him home to pick an existing rule first, since the council was in the act of forbidding the invention of new ones. So they chose one they already knew: the Rule of St. Augustine, the rule Dominic had lived under at Osma, to which they added their own harder customs about food, fasting, beds and clothing. In the summer of 1216 they took possession of the church of St. Romain in Toulouse and built cells above it for study and sleep. There were about sixteen of them. Confirmation came from the next pope. On 22 December 1216 Honorius III took the house under papal protection, and a month later, on 21 January 1217, he issued the letter that mattered: it addressed Dominic and his brothers as Friars Preachers and handed them the preaching mission itself. A further letter of 11 February 1218 commended the Order of Preachers to the bishops of the whole church. The wording of those letters is dry and what they did was not. Preaching had been a bishop’s prerogative, delegated downward with caution. It had now been given as an office to an order of men who would mostly never be bishops.

(●) 15 August 1217 AD: He scattered the whole community across Europe, and would not be argued out of it. + On the feast of the Assumption, at Prouille, Dominic called his brothers together and told them he intended to send them through the world and that they would not be living together any longer. Jordan, who heard this from men who were in the room, says they were all astonished, and agreed because his holiness carried them. Seven went to Paris, four to Spain, and the rest stayed to hold Toulouse and Prouille. He was breaking up a community of about sixteen men, most of them new, in a war zone, with no money. Every instinct of the age said to consolidate. A new religious house survived by getting endowed, walled and settled. Dominic did the reverse, and Peter Ferrand, writing some twenty years later, gives the reasoning in a farmer’s sentence: he knew that grain bears fruit if sown, but, if stored, it rots. He was right, and quickly. The Paris house at Saint-Jacques filled with university men. Bologna, the law school of Europe, filled faster. When the first general chapter met at Bologna in 1220, a general chapter being the assembly of elected brothers that made the order’s law for the whole of it, they voted to hold no possessions or revenues at all, not even the ones they already had in Toulouse, and they put that law in writing. By the second chapter in 1221 the order had been cut into eight provinces, eight self-governing regions each with its own houses and its own head: Spain, Provence, France, Lombardy, Rome, Hungary, Germany and England.

(●) 6 August 1221 AD: He died at Bologna at about fifty-one, worn out, and left his brothers three things. + He had spent the summer travelling and came back to Bologna ill with fever and dysentery. He was about fifty-one. From his bed he called in twelve of the more level-headed brothers and made them a short speech that was equal parts exhortation and confession, which is a rare thing to find in a deathbed scene written by admirers: Jordan has him warning them off easy company with women, especially young ones, and then admitting in the same breath, "up to this hour the grace of God has kept my flesh unsullied; yet I confess to not escaping the fault that talks with young women affected my heart more than conversations with those who were older." Then he told them what he was leaving them, since there was nothing else: charity, humility, and voluntary poverty. He also told them he would be more use to them dead than alive. He had no tomb of his own and was buried in the ground under the floor at Bologna. Within a dozen years the traffic to that floor had become a problem, and in May 1233 the brothers moved the body to a proper shrine, Jordan presiding. Gregory IX opened the formal inquiry into his life in July 1233. Witnesses were examined at Bologna that August and at Toulouse afterward, more than three hundred of them in the south, and their sworn depositions are the reason a man who published almost nothing can still be quoted. He was canonized on 3 July 1234, not quite thirteen years after his death.

What He Taught

(T1) Error is not answered from a carriage: the preacher must be poorer than the men he is answering. + Picture two men arriving in the same village on the same morning. One comes on foot, dusty, with no bag and nowhere to sleep, and says the world was made good by a good God. The other arrives with servants and a change of clothes and says the same words. In the Languedoc of 1206 the first man was a Cathar and the second was a Catholic, and the villagers were drawing the obvious conclusion. Diego’s counsel at Montpellier was that this could be reversed only by taking the advantage away: go on foot, carry nothing, and let the contrast fall the other way. Dominic spent the next fifteen years doing it, and the law of his order made it permanent. Brothers on the road were to carry no gold, silver, money or gifts, only food, clothing and books, which is close to what the Twelve were told when they were first sent out (Matthew 10:9–10; Luke 10:3–4). The point is easy to sentimentalize and worth stating precisely. Poverty here is not a spiritual achievement to be admired. It is a condition of being heard, the removal of the one objection that no argument can answer, and Dominic treated it as equipment rather than as merit. He also never confused it with the argument itself. The same men were required to study, which is where he and the movement he was answering part company: the Cathar perfect lived hard and taught error, and austerity alone had proved it could carry either.

(Q) "This is not the way, my brethren, this is not the way for you to proceed. I do not think it possible, by words alone, to lead back to the faith such men as are better attracted by example." + Source: Jordan of Saxony, Libellus 20 (Lehner, Saint Dominic: Biographical Documents, 1964). These are the words of Diego de Acebes, not of Dominic, spoken to the papal legates at Montpellier in 1206 with Dominic standing there. They belong with the teaching because Jordan, the order’s earliest historian, puts them at exactly this moment, and because the verdict on them was passed down by Stephen of Bourbon, who had it from the first brethren in that country: "And this was the cause for instituting our Order." Asked what he advised, Diego answered, "Do what I am about to do," and sent his baggage home.

(T2) The preacher’s first work is study, and every other observance gives way to it. + Think of a man in a library at nine in the evening, halfway into a question he has been working at all day, when the bell goes for prayer. In a monastery there is no question about what he does: he shuts the book. Monastic life is built around the daily round of chanted prayer, and in a traditional house that round is the point, so nothing is allowed to interrupt it. The law drawn up under Dominic opens instead with a clause giving each superior the standing power to excuse a brother from the common observances whenever they get in the way of study, preaching, or the good of souls. A dispensation, in this vocabulary, simply means official permission to skip something the rule requires. Dominic made dispensing routine and named its purpose, so that a brother in the middle of a hard question was not choosing between obedience and his books. The rest of the law leans the same way. Every province had to give a brother sent away to study at least three books of theology, which was a serious outlay in a century when every copy was written out by hand. A place had to be set aside where students could gather after Vespers, the evening prayer, and argue their questions out with each other. Students were not to be easily pulled off study for some duty or other task. And no man preached at all until he had sat under theology lectures for a year, with three years required before he could be a preacher general. Two things follow from this that are worth naming. The first is that Dominic did not think a holy life was a substitute for knowing what you were talking about, which is precisely the mistake he thought the other side was making. The second is that the order’s whole academic history, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican chairs at Paris, is not a later drift away from the founder’s intention. It is the founder’s intention, written into the law in his lifetime.

(Q) "The prelate shall have power to dispense the brethren in his priory when it shall seem expedient to him, especially in those things which are seen to impede study, preaching, or the good of souls, since it is known that our Order was founded, from the beginning, especially for preaching and the salvation of souls." + Source: The Primitive Constitutions of the Friars Preachers, Prologue (Lehner, Saint Dominic: Biographical Documents, 1964). The prelate here is simply the superior of the house, the man in charge of it. The constitutions were written by the order in Dominic’s lifetime and finished just after it, and the wording may be Jordan’s rather than his, but the provisions are the ones Dominic presided over at the chapters of 1220 and 1221. The next sentence of the Prologue states the aim of the study the dispensation protects: "Our study ought to tend principally, ardently, and with the highest endeavor to the end that we might be useful to the souls of our neighbors."

(T3) An order that owns nothing can be sent anywhere, so the brothers were to hold no possessions and no income at all. + In 1216 the brothers still held revenues: a share of the Toulouse tithes, some rents, the land at Prouille. At the first general chapter in 1220, with Dominic presiding, they gave them up. The rule they wrote is one line long and admits no exceptions, and it is what the word mendicant means: a mendicant order is one whose members beg their food rather than drawing it from an endowment. The reasoning behind it is not romantic in the least. Land does not travel. Endowments have to be managed, defended and litigated, and a house with rents to collect quietly acquires a reason to stay where the rents are. Dominic had just spent three years watching how fast his men could move when they had nothing to move, and what he wanted was an order that could be sent. The same instinct runs through the rest of the law. Men assigned to preaching or study are freed from administering property, and the order was given a form of government unusual for its century: priors elected rather than appointed from above, superiors answerable to chapters of elected brothers, and a provincial, the friar set over a whole province, who could be suspended by the four men his own province had chosen to define its business. Christian readers will want the distinction Dominic himself worked with. Poverty is not treated here as holier than owning things, and he left Prouille and the friars’ own churches in the order’s hands. What he refused was the settled income, on the ground that a man with a living to protect preaches with one eye on it (1 Timothy 6:8).

(Q) "Possessions or revenues shall not be accepted at all. Let none of our brethren dare to do the contrary, or ask their relatives for donations." + Source: The Primitive Constitutions of the Friars Preachers, Part II, chapter 26 (Lehner, Saint Dominic: Biographical Documents, 1964). The decision of the general chapter at Bologna in 1220, which Dominic presided over, written into the order’s law (T3). Jordan records the same vote: the brothers resolved to retain no possessions or revenues, "not even what they now held in the Toulouse area."

(T4) A preacher should be a man whose talk is with God or about God, and he asked nothing of his brothers he did not do. + The witnesses at Bologna in 1233 were under oath and were asked, repeatedly, how they knew what they were saying. Several of them independently described the same habit: whatever the company, on the road or at table or in front of a bishop, his talk went to God or about God, and he pressed the brothers to do the same. One friar testified that he had followed him into the church at night and found him praying there and weeping, standing on tiptoe with his hands raised; that he slept in the clothes he had worn all day, with his shoes off, sometimes on a board and very often sitting up. Another, asked how he could be sure, answered that in all their time together he had never once managed to find him asleep in a bed. That is the whole teaching in miniature. The prayer was long and severe, and the man who prayed it came to table cheerful, with his one cup of wine cut with three parts water. Two women who had housed him in the south told the inquiry there that they made a bed up for him and he got straight out of it again. Witnesses in both inquiries said he was always joyful with people and frequently weeping when he prayed, and that he had told them he wished to be tortured and cut to pieces for the faith of Christ. His order eventually wrote the habit into its law: brothers going out to preach were to be men "speaking with or about God to themselves and their neighbor." The word for this in Dominican language later became contemplata aliis tradere, to hand on to others the things you have contemplated. It is worth saying plainly what it protects against. A preaching order is an order of men who talk for a living, and the standing danger of such men is that the talk becomes a performance detached from anything they have actually met in prayer. Dominic’s answer was not to talk less but to keep the two joined.

(Q) "[Dominic] rarely spoke, except with God, that is, in prayer, or of God; further, he urged the brethren to act similarly." + Source: The Process of Canonization at Bologna, deposition 29 (Lehner, Saint Dominic: Biographical Documents, 1964). Sworn testimony taken in August 1233 from Brother John of Spain, one of the men Dominic had sent to Paris in 1217. The same witness added that Dominic was always joyful in company and frequently wept while praying, and that he had heard him say he wished to be tortured and cut to pieces for the faith of Christ.

(Q) "My very dear brothers, this is what I leave to you as a possession to be held by right of inheritance by you, my children. Have charity, preserve humility, and possess voluntary poverty." + Source: Jordan of Saxony, Libellus 92, incorporating Peter Ferrand 50 (Lehner, Saint Dominic: Biographical Documents, 1964). His last instruction at Bologna in August 1221, given to twelve of the more prudent brothers called to his bedside. It is a will in the strict sense: a man with nothing to leave naming what he is leaving. He told them in the same conversation that he would be of more use to them after his death than during his life.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) He made preaching an office of trained men rather than a bishop’s prerogative, and the church has never gone back. + Before 1217, preaching in the Western church belonged to bishops. They could and did delegate it, but it was theirs, and the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 had just complained that many of them were neither doing it nor providing for it. What Honorius III granted Dominic in January 1217 was that mission itself, given to an order whose members were mostly ordinary priests, subject to their own elected superiors, licensed to preach anywhere a bishop would receive them. That is a structural change, and it stuck. The friars put preaching, and the training that preaching requires, at the center of a church that had been organizing itself around sacrament and cloister. The habit of sending educated preachers to where people actually were, rather than waiting for people to come to a cathedral, passed into Christendom so completely that Christians on every side of the later divisions inherited it without knowing whose idea it had been. Scripture had said as much, and Dominic’s generation heard it: "And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent?" (Romans 10:14–15). Faith, Paul says a few lines on, "comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ" (Romans 10:17).

(†) The order he built to argue with heretics became the order that produced Aquinas. + Eight years after Dominic’s death, in 1229, Roland of Cremona became the first friar of any order to hold a chair of theology at Paris, and by the middle of the century the two great Dominican masters were in place: Albert the Great, who read the newly recovered Aristotle when much of the church wanted him banned, and his student Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologiae is still the most systematic attempt anyone has made to put the whole Christian faith in order. Both men were doing what the constitutions told them to do. The apologetic instinct came with the constitutions too. Aquinas built the Summa contra Gentiles as a case made without appeal to shared premises, which is the Montpellier problem transplanted into a study: how do you argue with a man who does not grant your books? A Dominican tradition first written down some forty years after his death says he wrote it at the request of Raymond of Peñafort, for friars arguing with Muslims and Jews in Spain, and scholars now treat that story with caution. What is not in doubt is Raymond himself, who set up schools of Arabic and Hebrew so that the men sent to make the case could read what the other side read. Three centuries later a Dominican bishop in the New World, Bartolomé de las Casas, spent the last forty years of his life arguing that the Indians of the Americas were free men with souls and rights, against his own countrymen and often against his own church, and he did it in the schoolroom vocabulary his order had given him. Francisco de Vitoria, a Dominican at Salamanca, turned the same argument into the beginnings of international law. Whatever else the order became, it kept the founder’s conviction that a case has to be made, out loud, to the people who disagree.

(†) Where his own record runs hard: he reconciled converted heretics under the lash, and accepted that the sword would follow the sermon. + Two things have to be separated before this can be weighed, because they are usually run together. The first is not his. Dominic was not an inquisitor. Gregory IX set up the office of inquisitor in Lombardy in 1231 and in Languedoc in 1234, ten years and more after Dominic’s death, and the tribunals were handed largely to his friars in the decades that followed. Nothing from his own century makes him one: not Jordan, not the sworn depositions, not the bull of canonization. The picture the world remembers was made in the 1490s, when the Spanish Inquisition commissioned Pedro Berruguete to paint Dominic presiding over a burning, and sixteenth and seventeenth century polemicists took the painting at its word. What his sons did with his order two and three centuries on is on their account, not his. The second is his, in his own hand, and should not be softened. One of the four surviving compositions is a letter reconciling a converted Cathar named Pons Roger. It sentences him to be marched by a priest from the city gate to the church on three Sundays or feast days, stripped to the waist and flogged the whole way; to lifelong abstinence from meat, eggs and cheese outside the greatest feasts; to three Lents a year, when one Lent, the forty-day fast before Easter, was already thought hard enough for most men; to a small cross sewn on each side of his breast; and, should he refuse any of it, to be "deemed a perjurer and a heretic excommunicated from association with the faithful." That is a man rejoining the church through a public beating, and Dominic wrote the terms. A saying points the same direction, though it stands on thinner ground. It surfaces only in Stephen of Salanhac, writing at Toulouse in 1278 out of conversations with men who had known Dominic, more than half a century after the words were supposed to have been said: that Dominic told the people of that country he had sung to them gently for years by preaching, imploring and weeping, and that where blessing is of no avail, the stick should prevail. Princes and prelates would come, he said, and towers and walls would come down. Whether or not he put it that way, he did go on preaching, without visible protest, through a crusade that sacked the towns he was preaching in. He was a man of the year 1210 and it does no good to pretend otherwise. But the standard by which this reads hard is not a modern one, and that is the point. The Lord’s servant is not to be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, "correcting his opponents with gentleness" (2 Timothy 2:24–25). "For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds" (2 Corinthians 10:4). When James and John asked leave to call fire down on a village that would not receive him, he turned and rebuked them (Luke 9:54–55). Dominic’s own instinct pulled that way more often than not: he refused the bishopric he was elected to, offered to sell himself into slavery to ransom a captive, and on the one occasion a later source puts him beside a fire lit for heretics he is pulling a man out of it. The ledger holds both entries, and the gentler one is the one his order forgot first.