Chapter 6
As long as the Dominican Order can nurture at its bosom scholars in any field of knowledge—for all knowledge can lead to God—as long as it can generate a race of preachers who, by solid dispensation of the Word, can fortify men for the road that leads to God, it will not hesitate or apologize for the frankly intellectual bias given it by given it by Albert and his four associates on the Commission of Valenciennes.
—Thomas Schwertner, O.P.1
The Dominican path—the Dominican way—is only one path among many. But it is a path which is truly “broad and joyous.”
—Paul Murray, O.P.2
We find ourselves now embarking on the second part of our examination of the life and lessons of our great-souled man. Our emphasis shifts from St. Albert the thinker to St. Albert the doer, from he who contemplates to he who produces fruits. As we shall see, however, this is not a complete change of direction but merely a shift of emphasis—since thinking and doing often go hand in hand. Indeed, Albert believed that we are best able to do the good only when we come to know with certainty what is good. In this section, then, we will focus on the fruits that sprang from Albert’s passionate love for truth, wherever he found it.
I’ll let you know right from the get-go that there’s no way I can write this chapter from an objective and unbiased standpoint. You see, I was educated by (it pains me a little to say it) “penguins”—the term my childhood buddies and I used in the 1960s and ’70s to refer to those devout, dedicated, and disciplined Dominican Sisters of Springfield, Illinois, beclad in their immaculate black-and-white habits. For nine years of my childhood and adolescence I was guided along by many good sisters who tread the path of St. Dominic. It would take me several decades, however, to begin to grasp just how “broad and joyous” is the path they follow!
Just last summer, 34 years since I was last in their charge, my family and I had the great joy to share Mass and brunch with a group of those sisters. (With some trepidation I presented copies of my books to my eighth-grade English teacher, fearful she would detect grammatical infelicities that had slipped past the watchful eyes of my editor.) In their chapel, among the beautiful artistic renderings of saints that adorn its back wall, is one of St. Albert the Great. So indulge me a little, as we look at the works of St. Albert the doer, if I draw here and there from the lessons I learned from some of his very special spiritual descendants.
Imbibing the Dominican Spirit
In this section we’ll examine how and why St. Albert came to be a Dominican priest, and we’ll witness some of the greatest deeds he performed for that order. In the next chapter, for instance, we’ll focus on the foundational task and goal of the Order of Preachers—that of preaching to draw souls to Christ. For now, though, I’d like to provide just a taste of the Dominican spiritual charism that so attracted St. Albert and so guided his thoughts and works. Here I stand in great debt to the insights provided in Father Paul Murray’s book: The New Wine of Dominican Spirituality: A Drink Called Happiness.
I almost labeled this section “Eat, Drink, and be Hilarious (Again)” because it touches on a theme from my book Unearthing Your Ten Talents, which mentions St. Thomas Aquinas’s recommendation to drink alcohol in moderation “to the point of hilarity.” Among his many inspiring insights on Dominican spirituality, drawn from the writings of great Dominican saints and theologians, Father Murray compares the Dominicans’ joy in God to joyous inebriation from fine wine. This is a common scriptural metaphor—see, for example, Jeremiah 23:9—and many Dominican writings magnify the joy of wine and its connection to the love of God:3
A nature-lover like Albert would be right at home in company of the wine-loving Dominicans! They knew as he did that God’s creation is good and that he intends for us to be happy in enjoying (within reasonable limits) its bounty. Indeed, one of their early tasks was to combat the Albigensian heresy, which proclaimed that the material world of creation was evil (and that Jesus, therefore, could not have been incarnated in real human flesh). Drinking wine also expresses the expansiveness and joy of the Dominican soul. Their job was to preach the good news to man. So who is likely to believe the news is good if its bearer is rigid, and narrow, and joyless?
At a much deeper level, of course, “wine” and “intoxication” refer in a mystical sense to the “new wine” of the Spirit. When the Blessed Mother remarks, in John 2:3, “They have no wine,” she is referring not only to a wedding party that had run dry but to a human race bereft of the interior joy and life that only God could give them.
The religious order that spoke to Albert’s heart (at the prompting of Mother Mary herself, in some recountings) was full of men and women so grateful for the beneficence of God’s creation that they could see it as good, seek to study it to the core, and become intoxicated by its beauty and goodness yet never forget the deeper levels of meaning and mystery that always lead us away from created things and back to the Creator.
Blessed Jordan Anoints Europe with the Finest of Cologne
And now for the story of how Albert became a Dominican. Blessed Jordan of Saxony (1190-1237), the Dominican patron of vocations, succeeded St. Dominic himself as the Master General of the Order of Preachers in 1222. Because of the power of his preaching, the magnetism of his charity, and the humor in his heart,4 he was able to rake them in to the religious life like few before him or since. Some say he drew in more than a thousand vocations to the order during his 15 years as general. Among those enticed by this “wonderful charmer of souls”5 were Hugh of St. Cher, later a cardinal and producer of the world’s first biblical concordance, and Humbert of Romans, himself later general of the order and collaborator on its distinctive liturgy. But the biggest catch for this fisher of men was the future Albert the Great.
Soon after a visit to Padua in 1223, Blessed Jordan wrote to Blessed Diana d’Andalo about his latest recruits, specifically mentioning “two sons of German noblemen; the one a high official; the second truly noble in mind and body, enjoying great revenues. We hope that many similarly endowed will follow their examples.”6 One of these noble young men was likely our Albert. His choice was not an easy one: his uncle, dreaming of worldly success for his young charge, was strongly opposed to Albert’s interactions with the new mendicant order and made him wait before making his decision. Albert too had reason to hesitate. Though he cared nothing for following his ancestors’ footsteps in service to the emperor, he was aware of his own passion for knowledge and experience of things of the world, for animals and architecture, for medicine and science, for the philosophy of the Greeks, and he feared, like many others, that this thirst for the knowledge of the things of this world might draw him away from devotion to Christ.
And here enters another Albertine legend! Albert had a dream that he had entered the order but left it soon after. Upon awakening he rejoiced that his dream had foretold for him that which he had been fearing. But later that same day he attended a sermon in which Master Jordan declared that the devil sometimes subtly deceives men by telling them in their dreams that they will enter the order but not persevere! Albert approached the master and asked how he had read his heart. Jordan comforted him; Albert cast aside his fears and soon after became a Dominican for life.
Once in the order, Albert kept far too busy to even have a moment to consider leaving his priestly office (though, as we shall see, at the pope’s request he did for a time leave the convent for episcopal office). Let’s consider further exactly why the Dominican order provided such perfect soil for growing greatness of soul.
Acts of the Medieval Apostles
Albert could have become a secular priest and indeed later was made a bishop for a time, though not on his own initiative. He could have sought out a comfortable and well-established monastic order or could even have joined the devout and merry band of “fools for Christ” in the new order of St. Francis. As providence would have it, though, young Albert would choose an order whose primary mission was, and remains, “preaching, and the salvation of souls,”7 to be achieved by means of the vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty; by communal life with monastic observances; by the recitation of the Divine Office; and by the study of sacred truth.
The religious vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty freed the friars to follow Christ with all their heart, mind, strength, and soul. Sts. Albert and Thomas would write of obedience as a component of “observance,” a virtue related to justice, whereby we give to each his rightful due; in this case, by paying honor and respect to those who excel us in some way. Albert, like all Dominicans, paid such due by vowing obedience to his prior at the local level, to his provincial at the regional level, and to the master general of the entire order. This vow fostered a spirit of selflessness and made available all of one’s talents for the good of the order, which is to say, for the good of the Good News.
Chastity relates to the virtue of temperance that reins in our desires for earthly goods. In taking a vow of chastity, Albert embraced celibacy and rejected married family life in order to give himself fully to his order, thereby freeing himself from worldly cares and allowing him to share the fruits of his contemplation with full and undivided attention. Indeed, the leader of the first apostles told them that purity of heart would enable them to see God.8 How much greater the preaching of preachers with eyes only for God and how much greater trust from those who saw and heard them preach?
Poverty, too, replaces desires for the earthly with desires for the heavenly. In vowing to forsake ownership of worldly goods, Albert, though born to earthly wealth and nobility, would attain the riches of a far greater kingdom.9
Albert chose to live in a community that embraced many monastic observances that St. Dominic acquired from the traditional practices of the Benedictines, from simple religious habits and communal life to practices like periods of fasting, silence, penance, night vigils, and more. These would serve to honor God and to focus St. Albert in all his being on doing God’s work, and later, in training others to do the same. This communal life also trained Albert to see Christ within his religious brothers.10
Recitation of the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours was and is another cornerstone of Dominican spirituality. The Dominicans sought to imitate the Apostles in their zeal for prayer as well as preaching. The Twelve had continued ancient Jewish practices of praying at matins (midnight); terce, or third hour (9 a.m.); sext, or sixth hour (noon); and nones, or ninth hour (3 p.m.).11 By Albert’s time, this schedule of prayers had become more elaborate, including as well four additional prayer times: lauds at dawn, prime at 6 a.m., vespers in the evening, and compline before retiring but still had its basis in the Psalms. These prayers were called the Divine Office from the Latin officiis for “duties.” These regular prayers, then, were duties owed to God, following St. Paul’s exhortation to “pray always.” These periods of communal prayer, along with daily Mass, helped Albert to follow in the footsteps of St. Paul himself, as a learned man of many travels and powerful writings and preachings of the gospel of Christ.
Sacred study was the last pillar upon which the spiritual house of the sons of St. Dominic was built. In a time of rampant heresy, of threats from rediscovered pagan philosophies, and of Islam’s fierce and fervent expansion, an effective preacher needed great knowledge as well as holiness and courage. In Albert’s day the Dominicans played a major role in the development of the European university, with St. Albert himself and his young charge St. Thomas eventually becoming the most universal of all the universities’ doctors.12
All of these fundamental practices of the Dominican order—their vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, their communal life, monastic practices, recitation of the Divine Office and participation in daily Eucharist in the holy Mass, and their dedicated study of sacred truth—were means to preach the good news and win souls to God, to share the fruits of their contemplation that would lead their neighbors to eternal salvation. Surely then, when St. Dominic responded to God’s call to send forth his friar-preachers among the nations to use their minds to reach men’s hearts, he could not have imagined a more perfect Dominican fisher of men than that young broad-shouldered German whom Blessed Jordan had first caught in his net.
Great Idea #6: Joy!
Joy is not a virtue distinct from charity, but an act or effect of charity: for which reason it is number among the Fruits.
—St. Thomas Aquinas13
Albert was what we might call today a “nature lover,” and the legends of this love go back to his childhood days and his great enthusiasm for falconry. There is also the story, told by some German locals and early biographers, of a certain magnificent and high-spirited “White Horse of Lauingen” that could be tamed by no man but would peacefully follow wherever the boy Albert would lead him.
Now, both Albert and Thomas knew joy, both as a concept and as an actual experience. Joy is an effect or an end-state resulting from love. When we love something good we desire it until we possess it, and when we possess the object of our love, then we experience joy. (And on the contrary, when we hate something evil we fear it if it has not come upon us, and we feel sorrow when it has.) Joy then is a delightful result of love. St. Thomas said that joy is to desire as rest is to movement. Could perhaps that legendary white horse of Lauingen have sensed the calm and restful state of joy in the presence of young Albert?
God made us for joy. St. Paul tells us that “the kingdom of God does not mean food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.”14 The highest joy, of course, is the result of the highest love, the love of God in charity, and through this love, we can be certain that St. Albert’s joy was indeed very great.