Artikkeleita

On one painting by Vasano, Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena are represented together. They witness the crucifixion, standing each on one side of the Cross. To the best of my knowledge, this theme is quite unique. Of course, on many paintings, Thomas and Catherine are represented together in the throng of Dominican saints, but they are very seldom associated for their own sake, as a meaningful pair. The hint at St Dominic who, as reported and pictured in various ways, used to spend hours in the contemplation of the crucified Christ, is obvious. What is different is that Dominic is always represented alone in this setting, which is hardly surprising. The Order of Preachers s is a fruit of Dominic´s solitude in Fanjeaux and it developed at the pace of Dominic´s lonesome prayer at night. The originality and unity of the Order rests on a single intuition, the condition of which was solitude. It belongs to the very nature of the Order that none of its member can claim to be heir to the fullness of Dominic´s intuition. Still, the mission of embodying essential aspects of this intuition was given to a few, and this is probably what lies behind the painting by Vasano. I see Thomas and Catherine standing for two fundamental and complementary aspects of Dominic´s unique intuition. In my view, the contrast between the two characters emphasizes this idea of complementarity. There is a man and there is a woman. One could add: there is a tree. The picture, however, is opposite to that of the Fall. The tree of the knowledge of right and wrong has become the tree of life. By eating from its fruits, one does not fall away from God´s friendship, but, on the contrary, recovers it. There stand a man and a woman who embraced the same religious vocation, under the guidance of Dominic, as a direct witness to Christ´s salvation. Each one was assigned a specific path within this spiritual family, Aquinas as a member of the second Order, the brethren, Catherine as a member or rather a founding figure of what would later become the regular third Order, better known as the Dominican sisters (the first Order being Dominican cloistered nuns). The paths were and still are are different, but the goal was and still is identical. Indeed, the contemplation of the Cross led both to holiness. A man and a woman, two Dominicans, two saints. Even more: two Doctors of the Church. At this point, however, the contrast starts to be more striking than the similarity. On the left-hand side stands one of the brightest intellectual minds that ever lived, someone who, not satisfied with having swallowed and digested about all that the science of his time had to offer, managed to reorganize this body of knowledge into a revolutionary - and enduringly revolutionary- theological synthesis. On the right hand- side stands a woman who never went to school, someone who was not even taught how to read and write. As much as the former astonished the world through his command of discursive reason, the latter took it aback with the total immediacy of her spiritual teaching. On one side, the summit of 13^th century scholasticism; on the other, the most powerful voice of 14^th century mysticism. This tells about the contrast- but what about the complementarity?

The fact that I could not find any book or even any article attempting to compare Thomas and Catherine is probably a sign that this theme is less than self evident. However, I would argue that people often tend to confuse the notion of complementarity with that of similarity or identity. Thomas and Catherine do not speak about the same things, or rather they speak about the same things from two points of view which are radically different. The goal of Aquinas is theoretical. He is interested in ideas and their relationship to the truth. The goal of Catherine is practical. She is interested in people, as the living stones of the Body of Christ which is the Church. She wants to lead people, her people, back to Christ, to the condition of friendship with God. One does not deal with ideas as with living individuals. You do not scold ideas. Liksewise, you do not treat people as if they were theories about reality. However, complementarity is precisely something other than immediate identity or similarity- it is the art of subordinating the impossibility of identity, the unavoidability of developing different capacities and skills, to the manifestation of one and the same reality or one and the same goal. Think of the art of raising children: it is the most obvious manifestation of the complementarity between a man and a woman. Likewise, I believe that one can show how the complementarity between Thomas and Catherine reveals something which is of the essence of Dominic´s spiritual intuition - that very intuition, which Dominic did not express in a written form, but that lies at the very core and heart of his religious Order. Comparing Catherine and Thomas, emphasizing their common points without hiding their possible divergences, is like sketching out the configuration of the Dominican approach to reality, the Dominican worldview. Let me therefore try to indicate here a few elements that could become part of a very interesting work – a book which, for all its material immensity and methodological complexity, might, unfortunately, never see the light of day.

One should probably start such book with clarifying the issue about the possible influence of Thomas´ teaching on Catherine. I foresee a frustrating first chapter, since it would most likely lead to the conclusion that the issue will never be solved. It is not that Catherine did not come into contact with Aquinas´intellectual legacy. True, the writings of Catherine do not witness any trace of a personal reading of Aquinas´ works, which is not very surprising for a woman deprived of basic instruction. However, there is little doubt that the Dominican brethren who became part of her inner circle, such a Raymond of Capua, Tommaso Caffarini, etc. were more than familiar with this legacy. As members of the Order, they had been schooled in order to become the representatives of the Order´s official doctrine. What they told Catherine certainly played a part in the feelings of admiration that Catherine nourished for the figure and doctrine of Aquinas. However, it is impossible to assess the extent of this influence, especially since, according to these Dominicans, Catherine was to them more of a teacher than a pupil. But there is more to this. One should add a decisive element, embarrassing though it sounds in our academe´s secular setting. The fact, you see, is that Thomas Aquinas was a very good friend of Catherine, at least according to the latter! In his Legenda Major (II, 21), the life of Catherine he wrote, Raymondo of Capua, who long exerted the uneasy office of being her confessor and spiritual director, reports that, besides conversing with Christ and his Mother on a regular basis, Catherine was granted the company of St.Paul and John the Evangelist, whose names she could not mention without manifesting a great joy. Further, Raymondo writes that she “sometimes” saw the blessed Dominic and “quite frequently” Thomas Aquinas, though slightly less frequently than St.Agnes of Montepulciano. Actually, according to what Catherine hereself writes to Raymondo of Capua in a long letter (n.136), she owed no little debt of gratitude to her friend Aquinas. In this letter, she recalls how she was miraculously given the ability to write during a vision that she had of the Lord. Still, she had, as she actually writes with her own hand, to “learn” how to write or come into possession of this supernatural gift. In this manner, after the Lord had left her, she tells that she started this apprenticeship as if “during her sleep”, and this under the special guidance of John the Evangelist and Thomas Aquinas. You will, I hope, admit that, if it is difficult to assess the extent of the thomistic influence on Catherine of her Dominican companions of the time, it is even more difficult to assess the influence that Thomas himself could, a century after his death, have exercized on Catherine in one of their conversations from the divine outer space!

The fact remains that, in the Dialogue, Catherine speaks as if she had the clear perception of the immediate connection between the doctrine of Thomas and the wisdom of God himself. Actually, she claims to be the mere messenger of what God himself declares

This passage which opens the chapter is interesting in many respects. One of the most striking elements is that Thomas Aquinas comes out as the first to be mentioned, before Augustine, the rest of the Doctors and the saints. In the letter to Raymondo which we quoted above, Aquinas was, as we heard, mentioned on an equal footing with John the Evangelist. I take it not only an additional manifestation of Catherine´s boundless respect for Aquinas´doctrine, but as the the sign of an extraordinary spiritual proximity, some sort of supernatural intimacy. Catherine does not need to read Aquinas or be taught his doctrine, which would require the command of a heavy philosophical apparatus. She knows what his doctrine is about, since its origin is identical to the living source of her own science. In the c.149 of the Dialogue, also known as Catherine´s treatise on prayer, she writes or rather God tells her:

Catherine does not deny that Aquinas was a great scholar. She claims that scholarship cannot become the instrument of its own transfiguration into a mirror of the Truth without grace, that is, without the infuse science that springs out from prayer and love of God. But the emphasis on truth does more than tell about a common origin that would eventually explain the convergence of her teaching with that of Aquinas. After all, the same point could be made about any other inspired teaching. Rather, the emphasis on Truth reveals, in my estimation, a common understanding in terms of personal mission. The whole quest of Aquinas stems from the conviction that the manifestation of truth itself to the intellect is the decisive step that can orientate mankind on the path towards salvation. Indeed, truth is revealed in the Scriptures, as Catherine writes after Aquinas. However, since there are many false ideas that adumbrate the perception of this truth, what is revealed needs to be manifested. This is not done by dismissing false ideas ex auctoritate, as if we immediately knew better, but on the contrary by letting these false ideas question what we hold to be obvious. We need to give these conceptions a chance to display the elements of truth that they contain, no matter how false the conclusions that are currently drawn from them are. Thus, by reconnecting these elements to the absolute truth which illuminates all the intellects that have received the Revelation of God in faith, we will be able to grasp and indicate even to those who uphold them the missing part or the missing link that render them false and misleading. In this sense, the method of Aquinas is just the opposite of what the term scholasticism evokes to the contemporary mindset: it is not a display of dogmas, but a conversation. It is a dialogue, which owes to its confidence in the power of Truth its capacity of listening to whatever hostile ways of thinking have to say. Although she does not discuss ideas on a theoretical level, Catherine understands her mission likewise. Her mystical teaching is not concerned with witnessing some supernatural experience of an exclusive nature. It is not a pre-Carmelite attempt at guiding souls into ways that will remain forever hidden to the common. The benchmark of Catherine´s uncommon, always extraordinary and frequently outlandish witness is that it is meant to go public, that it is destined to the common, far from being reserved to a spiritual elite. There would be no dialogue of Catherine with God if it was not for the sake of the dialogue of Catherine with the people of her time. As much as Thomas wanted to confront the intellects of his time with the truth that his intellect could grasp, Catherine wants to confront the spiritual attitudes of her time with the truth that the ears of her spirit heard. No wonder this is Thomas´ and Catherine´s common way of being preachers. This is indeed the way that Dominic sometime discovered somewhere in the south of France, on a night when, after identifying as a confirmed heretic the inn-keeper who hosted him, he chose to discuss with him until the dawn rather than having him arrested. Nothing but truth will convince. One should never force the lost sheep to go back home; one can merely point into a direction that they will themselves recognize. Hence the motto of Dominic´s Order: Veritas.

Of course, Thomas and Catherine do not access the ultimate truth in the same manner. It is a reflection on the first principles known by the intellect that leads Aquinas to develop a theory of human morals. One has to understand something about God and the structure of the universe in order to penetrate the intricate machinery of human actions´ psychological and moral foundations. Catherine goes the other way: she is asked by God and consequently asks her reader to go down into themselves, what she calls the inner cell, in order to find God. Take this famous passage from the chap.86 of the Dialogue:

However, as we see, discovering the presence of God within the self leads back, according to Catherine, to a truer understanding of the self. Contemplated with the eye of the intellect, the light of God is piercing; it reveals our truth to ourselves, and this truth is most of the time far from pleasant. One observes as similar reversal in Aquinas: if it is true that the knowledge of God and the universe leads to a correct analysis of the self, what ultimately comes out of the analysis of the self, of human conscience at its utmost depth, where it is an immediate perception of the principles of good and evil, is the voice of the eternal Truth which is God. As Aquinas writes in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: “The bond of our conscience, even when it is erring, is the law of God himself. Indeed, if our conscience commands us to do this or to avoid that, it is due to the fact that it believes this action to correspond or not to correspond to to the law of God. It is only by means of our inner conscience that this Law applies to our actions” (Super ad Rom.14, 14, lect.2,n.1120).

Seeing itself in the light of God, the soul, teaches Catherine in her treatise on obedience (Dialogo, c.149) is able to identify the passions that pervert its actions – pride, impatience, injustice, etc.- as well as the root of them all: self-love, which produces pride which produces in turn the other vices. In this amore proprio di se, one easily recognizes what Aquinas describes as the inordinate search of one´s own good, inordinatus amor sui: vanity is the inordinate love of one´s spiritual good, greed and lust the inordinate love of one´s physical good while the inordinate love of external things is cupidity (IaIIae q.84, a.4). Catherine uses the notion of pride, orgoglio, in a way which is identical to Aquinas´ use of superbia: it is the neglect of the obedience due to God, which is generated by this inordinate research of our own good, peccatum ex parte aversionis a Deo, cuius praecepto homo subdi recusat (IaIIaq q.84,a.2). The agreement of both authors strikesa vital chord, as it were, of what I previously called the Dominican worldview. When it comes to sin, the emphasis is not on our free-willing rejection of the obedience due to God. In human beings, pride is not a cause, but a consequence, and this is precisely the difference with fallen angels, what makes human beings redeemable, at the difference of demons. Typically, the Dominican worldview emphasizes the cause of pride, the origin of the decision made by the will; namely, the erroneous judgment of the intellect, which sincerely believes that its good is where, in fact, it is not. This means that human beings are guilty only for one part; for the other, they are the victims of their own finitude: willing evil, they will against their better understanding, that is, against their innermost will – a will that cannot do other than continuously tend towards true happiness, whatever may happen. As Catherine writes in a “treatise on Discretion” (Dialogo, c.42) :

As you probably know, the idea that true happiness, as the natural and unmovable object of the will, is identical to a fellowship with God which includes the contemplation of God by human intellects, is the pivot of Aquinas´ theological conception. It is the main articulation of the Summa Theologica, which to be found in the Prologue and the first question of the Ia IIae: “the object of the will , i.e. of man´s appetite, is the universal good; just as the object of the intellect is the universal true Hence it is evident that naught can lull man´s will,save the universal good . This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation “ (a.8).

However, it takes more than a penetrating intellectual insight to correct man´s primeval error of judgment, since this error has widely damaged his free will, his capacity to act according to the most authentic inclination of his will. God not only sees in the human sinful condition, in their defiant course of actions, the persistent desire of their hearts to reach Him as well as their incapacity to reach Him. He comes to help, and this help is what we call divine mercy. As Thomas writes in the question of the IIaIIae dedicated to the virtue of mercy: “It is essential to fault that it be voluntary; and in this respect it deserves punishment rather than mercy. Since, however, fault may be, in a way, a punishment, through having something connected with it that is against the sinner's will, it may, in this respect, call for mercy. It is in this sense that we pity and commiserate sinners. Thus Gregory says in a homily (Hom. 34 in Evangelia) that "true godliness is not disdainful but compassionate," and again it is written (Matthew 9:36) that Jesus "seeing the multitudes, had compassion on them: because they were distressed, and lying like sheep that have no shepherd." (a1., obj.1).

As Aquinas teaches in the same question, for a human being, the greatest of all virtues is charity, because charity elevates him to the maximum of his capacity, to the utmost ressemblance with God. But for God, charity is not a virtue, because He is naturally charity or pure love. And still, God is supremely virtuous, since, if He cannot become more perfect than He naturally is, He is still able, according to an absolutely free decision, to manifest His perfection by communicating something of his goodness to those who are most in need of it: « misereri ponitur proprium Deo, et in hoc maxime dicitur eius omnipotentia manifestari. mercy is accounted as being proper to God: and therein His omnipotence is declared to be chiefly manifested” (a.4, co.).

The innocence hidden in the first evil of the human race, that which made human beings so easy prey to the error of their own judgment, warrants the manifestation of God´s goodness without rendering it necessary. Accordingly, nothing could have made better known the goodness of God to the human kind than the Creator´s absolutely free decision of manifesting his divine mercy to his wretched creatures. This decision came to be fully displayed in the Incarnation of the Word. This is the ground that provides the Order of preachers with its raison d´etre. “My mercy”- thus Dominic called God during his prayers at night. “My mercy, what will become of sinners?”. The foundation of Preachers is the direct consequence of Dominic´s contemplation of God´s mercy for sinners. From this point of view again, Catherine is a worthy sister of brother Thomas because she is a pure daughter of our father Dominic. As she writes or rather exclaims, in a passage where her lyricism reaches one of its highest pitches:

For Aquinas, divine mercy, manifested in the grace that flows from Christ, is what gives to the human kind the possibility of achieving their redditus, their return to the Creator from whom they are originally sprung into being. For Catherine, divine mercy is what gives to her contemporaries a chance to come back to the Church that once generated them anew through Christ´s baptism. The way stands open – this is the basic message of Dominic´s preaching. God justifies the repentent sinner, and this justification is an actual infusion of grace, the fruits of which are the theological virtues: faith, hope and charity. From faith to charity by means of hope: the path back to God, is identical for everyone, but it is covered differently by each of the followers of Christ, depending on the condition of each one´s natural abilities and supernatural gifts. There would be an interesting, but quite complicated comparative study to make on how both authors, Thomas and Catherine, conceive the interplay between natural and theological virtues (faith, hope and charity). I am especially thinking about the virtue of prudence, as a principle of spiritual growth in Catherine´s conception and as the habitus which determines adequate moral actions in Aquinas´ anthropology. Here, out of sympathy for my listeners, I will rather insist on what is, as Paul taught us, the most essential; that is, charity.

One cannot contemplate the mercy of God without loving God. Charity is already at work in faith, as the initial response of man to God´s salvation in Christ But the more one contemplate the mercy of God, the more one is filled with charity. As Jordan of Saxony, the one who succeeded Dominic at the head of the Order, famously characterizes his predecessor in the following terms: “Everybody was enfolded in the wide embrace of his charity, and since he loved everyone, everyone loved him “. At the same time, the contemplation of God´s mercy is already a gift of God´s supernatural grace. No wonder Dominic is also called the doctor gratiae, doctor of grace. Accordingly, one may say that charity, as a supernatural virtue possessed by human beings is the response of human beings to the supernatural love that God manifests to them. To express the same idea with other words, the supernatural restoration of the communication of men to God, as they love Him, is the result of a first supernatural communication of God to men, since He loved them first. Aquinas calls this mutual communication of love between human beings and God friendship, and this is, according to him, the very essence of charity. Let me quote the respondeo of the article where he defines it: “It is written (John 15:15): "I will not now call you servants. . . but My friends. Now this was said to them by reason of nothing else than charity. Therefore charity is friendship. (…) well-wishing does not suffice for friendship, for a certain mutual love is requisite, since friendship is between friend and friend: and this well-wishing is founded on some kind of communication. Accordingly, since there is a communication between man and God, inasmuch as He communicates His happiness to us, some kind of friendship must needs be based on this same communication, of which it is written (1 Corinthians 1:9): "God is faithful: by Whom you are called unto the fellowship (ἐκλήθητε εἰς κοινωνίαν) of His Son." The love which is based on this communication, is charity: wherefore it is evident that charity is the friendship of man for God”(IIaIIae q.23 a.1).

Aquinas is not afraid of building his definition of charity on a vertiginous paradox: in some way, charity sets us on an equal footing with God, since there can be no friendship without two distinct entities entering in a relationship of reciprocity, but at the same time, it is the unilateral gift of God to us which creates this reciprocity, since, on our side, we have nothing to offer to God except our sinfulness. Those who are familiar with Catherine will recognize here the core of her peculiar relationship to God: the Father speaks to Catherine and Catherine speaks to the Father.The spiritual freedom of Catherine, her supernatural boldness, comes from this mutual acknowledgment. At the same time, though, Catherine keeps the most vivid consciousness that the privilege of this friendship is rooted into an absolutely non-reciprocal and non-reciprocable gift of God: “You are the one who is not. I am the One who is”. According to Raymond of Capoue (Vita I, c.10), this revelation of God to Catherine, made in her early years, signed the beginning of her extraordinary adventure with God.

Charity, as I said, is at the beginning and at the principle of our life with God; but it is its end, telos, as well. From the beginning to the end, it needs to grow, something which can also be expressed in terms of purification. As long as our love for God is mixed with concerns about ourselves, we do not love God for himself. This is precisely what Aquinas writes at the beginning of the text we just quoted: “According to the Philosopher (Ethica Nicomachea viii,2,3) not every love has the character of friendship, but that love which is together with benevolence, when, to wit, we love someone so as to wish good to him. If, however, we do not wish good to what we love, but wish its good for ourselves, (thus we are said to love wine, or a horse, or the like), it is love not of friendship, but of a kind of concupiscence. For it would be absurd to speak of having friendship for wine or for a horse”.

It is the same reasoning that lies behind Catherine´s way of scolding those who become indifferent to God due to some tribulation (Dial.67):

That love for our fellow human beings cannot be separated from our love for God can easily be accounted for from this “friendship perspective” on charity. As Aquinas writes in the same article:” Friendship extends to a person in two ways: first in respect of himself, and in this way friendship never extends but to one's friends: secondly, it extends to someone in respect of another, as, when a man has friendship for a certain person, for his sake he loves all belonging to him, be they children, servants, or connected with him in any way. Indeed so much do we love our friends, that for their sake we love all who belong to them, even if they hurt or hate us; so that, in this way, the friendship of charity extends even to our enemies, whom we love out of charity in relation to God, to Whom the friendship of charity is chiefly directed”. Likewise, it is the loving contemplation of the Father which inspires to Catherine an inextinguishable love of her fellow humanbeings.

Be that as it may, loving God for the sake of Himself, as the goal of our spiritual life, conceals another paradox. If charity,friendship with God, is the fulfillment of each human being´s innermost longing, it implies that, in order to reach their happiness, human beings need to be ready to prefer God to themselves. But what kind of self-fulfillment could one self- sacrifice be? The concrete illustration to this paradox is Christ, who, out of charity, his love of mankind being a consequence a consequence of his love of the Father, gives up his life. Can his sacrifice be called happiness, however? For Thomas as for Catherine, one cannot understand what happiness is as long as one remains enclosed in the framework of this life and the logic of this world. True happiness in this life does not only come from the prospect, but the actual, though embryonnic, experience of eternal blessedness beyond this life. This experience which is the essence of charity, is precisely, what gives us, believers, the power to challenge the powers of this world. One could say that what makes the sacrifice of one´s life for God´s sake possible is the fact that, no matter how tragic and painful it is, it is intimately related to this condition of eternal blessedness where the communication of God´s life to us calls out in response the giving of our entire self to God. At its highest, the experience of charity incorporates us into the inner movement of the Trinity, where each Person is one with the Others through the integral and eternal giving or communication of Herself:

Truth, mercy and charity – or else, seen from a human point of view : knowledge, compassion and grace. The heart of Dominic´s prayer and, henceforth, of his Order´s spirituality, lies in the articulation of these three poles. Thomas Aquinas and Catherine of Siena could not have been Dominicans without placing this tripodal articulation at the center of their respective worldviews. One could may claim that the way both authors have unfolded the intuition of Dominic is as genial, as decisive a grace for Dominic´s Order, as the intuition of Dominic itself. We owe to Aquinas the transformation of Dominic´s intuition into the most brilliant conceptual understanding of the Revelation that has seen the light of day. We owe to Catherine of Siena the consciousness that Dominic´s intuition was not only a conceptual understanding, but also the channel of God´s most personal and direct communication to the world.

If I had to write an ultimate chapter in this book on Thomas and Catherine which, hopefullly, someone else will write in the future, I would probably dedicate it to the Eucharist. It is here that both authors see the knot where the tree lines, Truth, Mercy and Charity converge and meet in a manner of utterly miraculous concreteness. Only the religious mind, the sight of faith can perceive, in what appears to be almost nothing to those who lack faith, the very reality through which shines the absolute power of God´s kindness towards the human kind. This, in itself, a subject of abyssal wonder for both authors. Let me then, by way of final conclusion, provide a last example of the spiritual harmony between Thomas and Catherine. As I quote Aquinas´ Adoro te devote and the c. 111 of the Dialogue, you will hear their voices respond to each other and mingle in a choir of eternal gratitude for the marvel of God´s grace:

It is a common and especially a biblical truth that all that exists needs times of re-creation for survival – including us human beings. In the experience and history of mankind regular times of revitalisation are provided during a week, a month, a year, a century; opportunities for physical, agricultural, social and spiritual refreshment. ‘Holy times’ regain the integrity of creation, the fullness of our religious life in all its dimensions with regard to ourselves but also our society and as a source of all this: our relationship to God.

The branches of our Order also need times of revitalisation, to release the fullness of our preaching, catching fire from St. Dominic’s original vision. The “jubilee novena of years”, celebrated by our Dominican Family, is an opportunity for the renewal of our Order in all its branches according to its origin. The Jubilee started already two years ago with the memory of the 800^th anniversary of the foundation of the monastery at Prouilhe and will continue until the year 2016, 800 years after the official confirmation of our Order by Pope Honorius III.

These nine years could become a real opportunity for renewal of the most numerous part of our Order, the Lay Dominicans. There are not four different torches burning separately, but rather only one; one flame spread into several tongues of fire. The symbol of the burning torch is familiar to us as Dominican Family members, taken from the well-known dream of St. Dominic’s mother when she was pregnant with him. However, what does that mean in reality, in our present day, ‘pregnant’ with our visions of preaching the Grace of God?

Being from its canonical nature half-wild, half-domestic, a lay Dominican comes up as a peculiar animal. According to its conditio or status, a lay Dominican has little in common with the other Dominican species, the Dominican nuns of the first Order, the brothers of the second, the sisters of the third. Although they own a specific place within the structure of the Church, lay Dominicans do not belong to the class of "consecrated people", as the Church calls them, and consequently the former are not tied to the same canonical obligations as the latter. However, this strange animal called a Lay Dominican prays, as well as the other members of the the same clerical species. It is a fact almost as obvious as its existence, and it is even a duty bound with his or her Dominican vows. The question is whether this prayer is different from the one practiced by the other species of the same family.