By Sean O’Seasnain
Published in December 2007
The Dominican Tradition of Democracy
Beginning in 1959, the fifteen years of scholastic training and sacerdotal work in the Dominicans (known in Latin as Dominicanes and mischievously translated as ‘Dogs of the Lord’ because of their fierce dedication to learning and preaching) have been salutary and indeed sustaining for me throughout my work-life. These were years of learning in the Scholastic tradition, living in a monastic and democratic community, and working with freedom and a great sense of fulfillment and satisfaction in Trinidad and Tobago and subsequently as an unofficial “worker priest” in Ireland until I resigned in 1974 – becoming a “stray” Dog of the Lord. It was only after many years of working in some very undemocratic settings after leaving the Dominicans that I rediscovered their sense of community, work satisfaction, and enthusiastic zeal. It was when I came to work at The Working Centre a few years ago. It was like coming home again!
Something that is little known, is that a religious congregation like the Dominicans can be profoundly democratic. From their beginnings in 1216 their founder Dominic de Guzman and his followers developed their own Constitutions – a model credited with influencing the structure of parliament in Britain. Timothy Radcliffe who was Master of the Order from 1992 to 2001 observes:
“Dominic did not leave us a spirituality embodied in a collection of sermons or theological texts. Instead we have inherited from him and those earliest friars, a form of government that frees us to respond with compassion … When I was asked during a television interview in France what was central to our spirituality, I was almost as surprised as the interviewer when I replied “democracy”. Yet it is central to our lives. To be a brother is to have a voice and a vote. Yet we do not have votes merely as groups of private individuals, seeking compromise decisions that will leave each person with as much private freedom as possible. Our democracy should express our brotherhood … The Constitutions say that our government ‘is noted for an organic and balanced participation of all its members’, and that the universal authority of its head is shared ‘proportionately and with corresponding autonomy by the provinces and convents’.
Democracy as Vice vs. Democracy as Virtue
The Dominican democratic process which I personally experienced for fifteen years and the ‘spiritual democracy’ which I now experience at The Working Centre are rare phenomena. The word ‘democracy’ is bandied about daily in media reports and political pontifications. The meaning of democracy is very much diminished and pauperized in today’s world, and in dire need of rehabilitation. This diminished form is sometimes a mockery (spelled with a ‘k’ as in ‘demockracy’) and a vice.
The late Edward W. Said characterized this aspect of democracy well when he wrote about a post 9/11 chilling conjecture “in which the Christian right, the Israeli lobby, and the Bush administration’s semireligious belligerency is theoretically rationalized by neoconservative hawks whose view of the Middle East is committed to the destruction of Israel’s enemies, which is sometimes given the euphemistic label of redrawing the map by bringing regime change and ‘democracy’ to the Arab countries that most threaten Israel”.
This scenario is no longer conjecture and Kevin Phillips has just documented its arrival in American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. But ‘democracy as vice’ is not only evident in the United States. It is also alive and well in southern Ontario.
I personally experienced ‘democracy as vice’ in government bureaucracy where I was subjected to several years of menacing workplace harassment and mobbing of me by some of my former employer’s management and staff, making my workplace experience from 1982 to 1996 a ‘hell on earth’. Regrettably, to this day I regularly hear similar accounts of menacing treatment experienced by workers who have been injured and/or abused on the job – right here Waterloo Region.
Canada – A ‘Living Laboratory’ of Democracy
But that is not to be alarmist or fatalistic. Canada is a marvelous country full of people who are wonderful, generous, and diverse. It is a living laboratory which has a way of thinking and living deliberately as a just society – thanks to Pierre Elliott Trudeau. I met him and his wife Margaret on their honeymoon in Tobago four years before I came to Canada in 1974. There was something special about him that pertains to local democracy and Dominican spirituality. Whenever people refer to Trudeau’s education and formation they inevitably mention his Jesuit schooling. It is not too well known that he was immensely influenced also by Dominican spirituality.
Perhaps Trudeau was influenced by Timothy Radcliffe’s definition of Dominican radical witness: “In the Dominican approach you try to come to a common truth you can both agree on. We don’t aim for victory. We aim for community”. Well if Canada is a ‘living laboratory’ of democracy, then The Working Centre, like the Dominicans, is a ‘radical witness’ to local democracy – democracy as virtue.
What Constitutes Democracy as Virtue
In Meaningful Work to Meaningful Living, David L. Norton posits the Greek term eudaimonia as the virtue most central to what constitutes democracy in society because it is “the condition of ‘living in harmony with oneself’” [Democracy as Moral Development 1991]. While there are valuable insights into democracy, virtue, and good work in Norton, it seems to me that it is the virtue of epieikeia that more fittingly and accurately is the virtue underlying democracy and which can truly be designated as the virtue of democracy.
Epieikeia as part of the virtue of justice, to quote Romanus Cessario (a Dominican of course!), “… regards the service of the common good and has as its act not an omission but a fulfillment of the justice that is the intention of all law, when this or that prescription of the law may be deficient to deal with a certain situation.”
Epieikeia is the virtue of interpreting the law in a given situation. In a book A Tallaght Book of Theology a confrere writes:
It is a disservice to the law to see it simply as a solution to be slapped on a particular situation – yet, surprising as it may seem, this is frequently the very way law is treated. It is, moreover, a disservice to the dignity and responsibility of the human person when unquestioning adherence to the law is demanded, ascribing an unwarranted absoluteness to the law’s formulation. No one was more conscious of the law’s inherent limitations than Aquinas (cf. Summa theologiae I-II 91, 3 ad 3), who stated that even the written text of the gospels by itself kills (I-II 106, 2) – a fortiori the written formula of the human lawmaker.
All of this may seem so obvious, yet the ancient juris prudentes saw fit to introduce checks and balances to the seemingly inherent human tendency to inflate the law beyond its basic helpful role. Among these we may single out the practice of equity [another word for epieikeia]. This concept came into medieval jurisprudence through the Code of Justinian, as a way of safeguarding the community from a rigid and unyielding administration of the law and ensuring that ‘the rigour of the law [be] tempered by the sweetness of mercy’ (Henry of Susa, 1271). [Watchmen Raise Their Voices 2006]
Today’s lawmakers have lost sight of the virtue of epieikeia with the proliferation of ‘zero tolerance’ laws and bureaucracy. So many organizations, large and small, have forgotten the very concept of epieikeia, but it is alive and well at The Working Centre.
Welcome Home to Good Work.
