Anyone else notice the similarities between Benedictines/Carmelites and Byzantine/Orthodox spirituality? I have and that has been one of many aspects that draws me to learn more about them.
This takes us back to the subject of Catholic Tradition. The Carmelite school dates back to before Christ, to the hermits at Mt. Carmel. The Benedictine school is born from the early hermits and cenobites. One can say that Benedict pulls from the best of both schools.
The Carmelites will eventually be Christianized and evolve and merge (for many reasons that are not important now) with the mendicant movement set in motion by the Servites, Trinitarians, Dominicans and Franciscans, in that order. The Carmelites will pick up many Dominican customs, including the habit of the Dominican order.
There’s a lot of spiritualties that have similarities. I was debating on making a Visio flow chart at one point showcasing that.
The Dominicans and Franciscans have a lot in common, and have great mutual respect with one another. This goes all the way back to the founding of both Orders, and continues today. Even in things like the Litany of the Saints, we have Dominic and Francis mentioned together.
The Benedictines are like the Franciscans in that they have an emphasis on community and obedience (with a side of obedience), and heavy on the contemplative. Carmalites are even more into the contemplative.
Falling some place in there are the Jesuits and Ignatian spirituality, which has it’s own thing.
Dominicans and Franciscans have much in common, because we are both mendicants and both are preachers. We also have the strong emphasis on poverty, though for the Franciscan, poverty is collective and individual. For the Dominican, poverty is individual, not collective. Dominicans live in large priories with great libraries, chapter halls, choirs, refectories and other comforts that only the Conventual Franciscans have, because they adopted these from the monks. Other Franciscans do not have these houses and do not have corporate property.
The difference is due to the focus. The Dominican focus is on knowing in order to preach. Franciscans focus on being in order to preach. While the Dominicans place a great deal of emphasis on knowledge and study and less on brotherhood, the Franciscans do it the other way around. One is first a brother, than a student.
They’re coming from different roots. The Dominicans are Augustinians at heart. They follow the Rule of St. Augustine. They don’t have a Dominican Rule. The Rule of St. Augustine says that they can even dispense with the constitutions (statutes) in order to study and preach. This means that they can dispense with the life and obligations of community, in order to study and preach. Like Augustine, Dominic focuses on Christ the teacher and Christ the priest.
The Franciscan does not accept any other inspiration except that of Francis, because Francis said,
**No one showed me what I ought to do, but the Most High Himself revealed to me that I should live according to the form of the holy Gospel. And I caused it to be written in few words and simply, and the Lord Pope confirmed it for me. **
The entire Franciscan family, all 1.7 million of us, ground our entire spiritual life on the private revelations given to St. Francis, which we accept as Truth, because the Lord Pope confirmed the Rule. The other orders do not make a claim to being inspired through revelation. Only Franciscans and Missionaries of Charity do. It was only to Francis and Mother Teresa that Christ actually spoke and told them what to do and how to fashion their communities.
The other communities are no less inspired though. They are equally inspired by the Holy Spirit, but through different means, not through visions and locutions, more through experience. These experiences are often commonly shared. The experience of an Augustine and a Dominic is common to both. The experience of Benedict, Bernard and Robert is common to all three, hence the overlaps between the Benedictines, Cistercians and Trappists. They come from a common well of spiritual graces.
These are theological facts and dimensions of Catholic Tradition that the average person in the pew does not know.
The Jesuits are not out there doing something different either, as many people think. Ingnatius took from the Dominicans of his time. As the Spirit guided him, he realized that what he had taken from the Dominicans was not meant for him or his order, because God had other plans.
The first Jesuits were mendicants. They made solemn vows, just like Dominicans, prayed in common, served he poor and lived a very intense life of study and prayer in community, as do Dominicans. They had coadjutor brothers who were not priests, but served the needs of the priests, liberating them to preach and study, just like Dominicans do.
However, given the needs of the missions and the needs of the Church for scholars, preaches and missionaries, Ignatius gradually abandoned the apostolates to the poor and sick, leaving those to the mendicants, gradually liberated his Jesuit brothers from community life in order to send them away to teach and preach. They kept certain Dominican elements: study, contemplation, LOTH, preaching and teaching. The dropped community life, obedience to a local superior, submission to bishops and corporate poverty, because it was not practical. Ignatius also borrowed something from the Franciscans. While the Franciscans profess unquestioning obedience to popes and bishops, Ignatius modified it a little. They would go where the pope sent them.
If we put all of these great movements together, we can see the entire Gospel as if in a tapestry.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
