Envoy and servant sooth he seemed of Christ,
For the first love made manifest in him
Was the first counsel that was given by Christ.

Dante, Paradiso, Canto 12

August 8 was the Feast Day of Saint Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers. I thought it would be entertaining to look up Dominican scientists and write about a few of them. Um… My plan was to write about people who weren’t Saint Albert the Great, because I figured everyone already knew about him. Um… There aren’t a lot of famous dead Dominican scientists. There are definitely some living scientists, especially professors, but I was expecting something along the lines of the Jesuits, who swarmed the natural sciences almost as soon as they got going. 

I’m guessing that, because Saint Albert was right on the scene at the beginning of the Dominicans, I thought there would be Dominican scientists all over. When there weren’t, I started digging into the Dominicans a bit, realizing that I knew very little about them, aside from Saint Dominic.

The New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia says, “The first order instituted by the Church with an academic mission was the Preachers. The decree of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) requiring the appointment of a master of theology for each cathedral school had not been effectual. The Roman Church and St. Dominic met the needs of the situation by creating a religious order vowed to the teaching of the sacred sciences.”   

Meaning they taught theology and philosophy, not the natural sciences… 

I then found a helpful little treatise online which, I think, was written about 1975. The url is below**.  I’ve only read about fifteen pages but it is a lot longer. THE DOMINICANS A Short History by William A. Hinnebusch, O.P., D.Ph. (Oxon.)

He wrote —”Our order was instituted principally for preaching and for the salvation of souls.”   This seems to be a direct quote from something because a LOT of places use these words but I’m still not sure where it originated. Maybe Saint Dominic. And he goes on to explain that the Dominicans were explicitly tasked with helping the bishop to preach in parishes on Sundays.

And there you have it. Priests are not explaining science from the pulpit every Sunday. Even so … I found various lists of specifically Catholic, scientist, priests. There are six Dominicans on those lists.  

Theodoric Borgognoni (1205 -1298) studied surgery and made advances in the actual practice of surgery. His father had been a surgeon in Bologna and Theodoric inherited some of his ideas. Pope Innocent IV took Theodoric as his personal doctor. Surgery was considered separately from “medicine” at the time.

Theodoric of Freiberg was an early Dominican. There are no birth or death dates for him but there is a record that at a Chapter General* in Germany he was made Superior General of the Dominicans in this place from 1293 to 1297. Theodoric is also known as Thierry and is a personal favorite of mine. He wrote about rainbows in 1304, explaining how raindrops bounce light and produce the whole spectrum of color. Pierre Duhem showed that Descartes (1596-1650) who is normally given credit for the first understanding of rainbows, had access to Thierry’s manuscript. 

* “The chapter is the supreme executive, legislative, and judiciary authority in the Order.”

Ignazio Danti (1536 -1586) joined in the Dominicans in 1555. He liked mathematics, astronomy, and geography, and taught them. Practically speaking, in that age, liking geography meant that he drew a lot of maps. He lived in Florence, prior to Galileo, and helped to construct a church. Cosmo I, Duke of Florence, wanted him to build a canal but I think Cosmo died first.  Ignazio’s brother Vincenzo was an important sculptor in Perugia. 

Joseph Galien was born in 1699 but his death date is argued. Both 1762 or 1782 are given. This seems incredibly odd to me but I don’t really understand the Dominican structure. At any rate Galien was a Dominican who studied aeronautics as well as meteorology and physics. He wrote a book called 

“The Art of Navigating through the Air, Physical and Geometric Fun, Preceded by a Memoir on the Formation of Hail.”

FUN. 

Depending upon how you take that word in the title, Galien was doing a thought experiment, or showing that he was an idiot who understood nothing about the air. He did write about how the atmospheric pressure drops drastically as you rise through it, which is true. And it seems clear to me that he did not expect any one to build a cube for flotation purposes. It was supposed to be more than a mile along an edge. More than 640 acres per side. The Montgolfier brothers read his little treatise and mentioned it, or he would, perhaps, be totally forgotten. 

Jacques Barelier (1606 – 1673) was a Dominican botanist who was read by the de Jussieu brothers in the late 1700’s. I didn’t find anything else about him. 

Vincent of Beauvais wrote an Encyclopedia. He was an early Dominican, joining perhaps in 1218. He tried to compile the general knowledge of the time with help from King Saint Louis IX, who bought him books. He covered many branches of the natural sciences, meaning not theology or philosophy, but Nature. However …

Bartolomaeus Anglicus, a Franciscan, wrote an encyclopedia in 1231, at about the same time as Vincent. He also tried to compile all the knowledge of the times, and the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia is a bit odd on the subject. First, it says that this guy gets/should get the credit usually offered to Vincent of Beauvais for the first important encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. It also points out that although Vincent wrote ten times as much as Bartholomew, it is Bartholomew’s encyclopedia that was constantly translated, and manuscripts of it are found everywhere. Not sure what to make of that!

I also do realize that if I were doing Dominican saints instead of scientists, I could probably write for year and never repeat myself.

**  https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&doi=20fd06c3cc4664df48214ff92664d9424703d402  (Short history of the Order of Preachers).