Saint Dominic

Spanish monk and religious leader

• Born: c. 1170
• Birthplace: Calaruega, Castile (now in Spain)
• Died: August 6, 1221
• Place of death: Bologna, Romagna (now in Italy)

Through faith, courage, and practicality, Dominic established the Dominican order in 1215, which revolutionized the monastic movement of the Middle Ages and filled a vital need for apostolic preaching in the Church.

Early Life

Dominic was born the third son of Jane of Aza and Felix de Guzmán, both of noble blood. Little is known about his father, and it appears that he died when Dominic was young. Dominic inherited his exceptional sensitivity to the suffering of others from his mother. When he was six or seven years old, old enough to learn how to read, Dominic was handed over to an uncle, an archpriest, to begin his education. At fourteen, Dominic went to Palencia, where he received a thorough grounding in theology and the Scriptures. As a student, Dominic was something of a loner with a reputation for being mature beyond his years. He did not, however, isolate himself from current events.

In the mid-1190’, Spain was in great misery. War had broken out against the Muslims, and with war came famine. In the course of a terrible famine that occurred while Dominic was at Palencia, few of the rich or the authorities did anything to help the starving masses. Repulsed by their indifference and inspired by Scripture (Luke 18: 18-26), Dominic sold all that he had, including his books with his personal glosses, saying that he would not study on dead skins while people were dying of hunger.

Life’s Work

In 1196, Dominic became a canon and then a priest of the cathedral chapter of Osma. There he met Diego of Acebo, bishop of Osma, a man of intense zeal who would change the course of Dominic’s life. Diego returned the chapter to the apostolic life as described in the Acts of the Apostles 4:32-33. He also had a gift for evangelism, and Diego quickly recognized Dominic as a gifted, deeply spiritual priest. The two became inseparable.

In 1203, Diego was sent to Rome with Dominic by King Alfonso VIII to secure a marriage contract for the king’s son. Their route took them through Languedoc in southern France, and they discovered that what had been rumored in Spain was true: Languedoc was infested by the rapidly growing Waldensian and Catharist (Albigensian) heresies. The primary reason for the success of these heresies was the state of the clergy. Most of the parish priests were illiterate and lived lives hardly different from the poor people of their flock. Ignorant and worldly, they were unable to command respect and, more significant, they were unable to teach and defend the faith. The ostentation and worldly lifestyle of many, though certainly not all, of the higher clergy stood in stark contrast to the moral and humble lives of the majority of the heretics.

The contrast with the Church’s position in Spain must have shocked both men. In Spain, the Church, under constant pressure from its enemy, Islam, was united and strong. In southern France, with its rich, productive land, numerous towns, and more sophisticated economy, the Church had become complacent, corrupt, and unable to inspire and win souls. This was the decisive moment in Dominic’s life. The recognition of the Church’s need burdened his soul and charted his life’s work. Unknowingly, Diego and Dominic spent their first night in Languedoc in the home of a Catharist. They would not have known their host was a heretic by outward statement or appearance. Possibly he made some spiritual comment about the Church or expressed anticlerical feelings. In any event, Dominic passed the night in conversation with his host. After a night of honest debate, in which Dominic first tried to understand his host’s position and then countered with his own beliefs, the heretic was converted back to the faith.

Their experience in southern France convinced Diego and Dominic to become missionaries. When they reached Rome, Diego asked Pope Innocent III to permit him to resign as bishop of Osma so that he, with Dominic, could be a full-time missionary. It is a measure of Diego’s reputation as a bishop that Innocent III refused Diego’s request, and both men returned to Languedoc.

Dominic began to perfect his approach to the heretics. Since the night he converted his host, Dominic had been convinced that genuine discussion was the only effective way to confront heresy. He went to great lengths to comprehend fully the heretics’ arguments before contradicting them. He debated them without scorn or condescension, and he was not afraid to appoint a heretic to officiate at a debate and to determine the victor. Dominic saw the heretics in a humane light. He knew that they were in error, but he also realized that they had some justifiable positions and that many of them lived virtuous lives. For example, on close examination, the Waldensians were seen as Christians who took the Bible seriously and who had been pushed into heresy by not being allowed to preach. In fact, Dominic adopted some of the Waldensians’ orthodox views into his own movement. It is an indication of his greatness that, in trying to understand the Waldensians, Dominic was able to take what was good and incorporate it into the Church. If priests and churchmen lived simple and virtuous lives, the great anticlerical impetus for heresy would be stopped. This approach was something new; the accepted response to heresy then in vogue was force and oppression. It is interesting to speculate how Church history would have changed had Dominic been able to elaborate his plan. Two events, however, prevented this from happening: the death of Diego and the Albigensian crusade (1209-1229).

On December 30, 1207, Diego, bishop of Osma, died. Dominic’s sense of loss must have been enormous. For ten years, they had shared everything together, complementing each other perfectly. Diego had played an important part in developing Dominic’s innovative approach to heresy. Dominic now faced the daunting apostolic task of evangelizing southern France alone. In the coming months, the situation would only continue to deteriorate. In January, 1208, Peter of Castelnau, Cistercian legate to Languedoc, was assassinated by a member of the household of Raymond, count of Toulouse, who if not a Catharist himself, resisted any firm actions against that sect. This set in motion a chain of events that culminated in the savage Albigensian crusade (1209-1229), which soon deteriorated into a war of conquest by the northern French nobility. Any plan to combat heresy via religious debate was quickly halted; the ravages of warfare made calm discussion impossible.

With the situation in southern France so poisoned by the Albigensian war, Dominic retreated into his religious house at Prouille. The bloodshed and savagery of the war repelled him. Dominic understood that force never truly converted anyone, and he wanted nothing to do with the violence. Dominic had attracted a small band of preachers around him and now realized that a new religious order was necessary to carry out effectively the missionary work. The members of this order would be priests who would not withdraw from the world. Rather, their designated duty would be to preach the word of God to regain for the Church those who had lost their way. They were to persuade others to Christ, and this would require that they be educated men themselves. Therefore, study was to be as important as prayer. Dominic, however, would also demand that these men live a life worthy of the Gospels, and so poverty was mandatory. Dominic’s insistence on poverty, unlike that of Saint Francis of Assisi, was totally practical. It would allow the members of the order to concentrate on preaching without being distracted by material goods and would also add moral force to their mission.

An important element of Dominic’s vision was the inclusion of women. His followers at Prouille included a number of female converts, apparently of noble birth. From the outset of his development of the new order, he established what was called a double monastery, with a convent for the nuns and a priory for the friars. The nuns were trained to teach the local children and to instruct converts to the faith. Dominic considered their example an essential part of the work of the order.

Placed in the context of the thirteenth century, this was a revolutionary monastic movement. In October of 1215, after having been granted a religious house by Bishop Fulk of Toulouse in that city, Dominic requested that Innocent III formally confirm his new order. Innocent III refused. The Church was deeply concerned about the development and control of new religious orders and movements and had forbidden the creation of new orders. Innocent III understood the worsening condition of the Church and the clear need for effective preaching, but Dominic’s proposed order broke too much with the past and seemed to have unreachable goals. Innocent III did concede that if Dominic would incorporate his order into an established monastic rule, it would be approved. Dominic agreed and chose the Augustinian rule, with which he had been familiar as a canon of Osma.

Dominic viewed the pope’s approval of the order in 1216 only as a beginning, and he moved rapidly to expand. By 1217, he had friars in Toulouse, Paris, Bologna, Madrid, and Rome. By the time the order had its first general chapter (essentially a congress of the whole order), at Bologna on May 17, 1220, six houses had been established in Lombardy, four in Provence, four in France, three in Tuscany and Rome, and two in Spain, and groups of preachers had traveled to England, Germany, Hungary, and Scandinavia.

Dominic not only organized the order and traveled extensively but also devoted himself personally to the grueling ministry of preaching. In 1220-1221, Dominic started on an enormous mission of evangelizing in northern Italy, but the effort proved to be too much. All the deprivation and exertions of the past caught up with him, and he fell ill at Bologna.

Dominic called together his closest brothers in the order to give them his final instructions. Throughout his career, Dominic the man was hard to discern. He was a person of true humility who chose to remain in the background of events and avoided self-promotion. In his last words, some of the man is seen. Dominic told his brethren never to accept any kind of property and then confessed that, while he had remained a virgin all of his life, he had taken more pleasure in conversation with young women than with old. As his friars prayed, Dominic died, on August 6, 1221.

Significance

Dominic’s emphasis on education and intellectual excellence quickly placed the order into the heart of the medieval universities. By 1245, general houses of the order had been opened at Paris, Oxford, Cologne, Montpellier, and Bologna all centers of important universities. The order produced some of the greatest scholars of the period, such as Saint Albertus Magnus and his pupil, Saint Thomas Aquinas. Thomas would lead a successful defense of Christian doctrine against the skeptical philosophy of Averroës, and Thomas’s Summa theologiae (c. 1265-1273;Summa Theologica, 1911-1921), which, in essence, reconciled faith and reason, would be the apex of medieval scholarship. Thomistic philosophy would become a foundation of Church doctrine.

The Dominicans were also leaders in the expansion and defense of the faith. Bartolomé de las Casas, author of Historia de las Indias (wr. 1520-1561; History of the Indies, partial translation, 1971), protested the horrible exploitation of the Indians by the Spaniards. By 1600, Dominicans had gone into the Philippines, China, Taiwan, and Japan.

Dominicans were in the forefront in the struggle against Protestantism; 130 Dominican bishops and theologians were present at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), and their Thomistic positions had a major influence on the council’s decrees. Indeed, before the inception of the Jesuit order, the Dominicans were the chief champions of the Church. They were also the order most involved with the Inquisition. Dominic deserves no blame for this identification. The Inquisition operated in complete opposition to his beliefs, and there is no doubt that Dominic would have condemned the Inquisition in the strongest possible terms.

Possibly the Dominicans’ greatest impact was on the everyday operations of the Church. In the period from 1221 to the twentieth century, there were two Dominican popes, Saint Pius V (1566-1572) and Benedict XIII (1724-1730), forty-one cardinals, and more than one thousand archbishops and bishops.

Bibliography

Emond, James R., ed. Dominican Bibliography and Book of Reference, 1216-1992: A List of Works in English By and About Members of the Order of Friars Preachers, Founded by St. Domini. New York: P. Lang, 2000. A revised edition of the bibliography compiled beginning in 1216 and through 1992. This collection is made up of more than twelve hundred pages, and it includes an index.

Finley, Mitch. The Seeker’s Guide to the Christian Story. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1998. A book oriented toward seekers of the Christian faith, with a chapter on Dominic in relation to the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Saint Francis of Assisi.

Hinnebusch, William A. The Intellectual and Cultural Life to 1500. Vol. 2 in The History of the Dominican Order. Staten Island, N.Y.: Alba House, 1973. Discusses such topics as the importance of study to the order, the order’s impact on doctrine, the development of libraries, and the writings of various Dominican authors in biblical, pastoral, and spiritual theology and history. An excellent, scholarly work best appreciated if one has a basic understanding of the order’s history.

Jarrett, Bede. Life of Saint Dominic (1170-1221). 2d ed. London: Burns, Oates, and Washburn, 1934. This is a standard biography of Dominic that, while not as detailed as Vicaire’, is still considered one of the better works on the life of the saint. Includes an index.

Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy. Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: G. Braziller, 1978. Based on a Dominican inquisition, this exceptional book re-creates time in the small village of Montaillou and most of its inhabitants from 1294 to 1324. While it does not discuss Dominic, this book covers the history, social life and customs, and religious life of a town that was deeply affected by the Catharist heresy. This account reveals what Dominic probably confronted on a daily basis. Includes maps, index, and bibliography.

Lehner, Francis C., ed. Saint Dominic: Biographical Documents. Washington, D.C.: Thomist Press, 1964. An excellent source for English translations of the principal primary sources on the life of Dominic.

Nigg, Walter. Warriors of God: The Great Religious Orders and Their Founders. Edited and translated by Mary Ilford. New York: Knopf, 1959. Includes a succinct account of Dominic’s life and work. There is little material on his early life, but the description of his work in Languedoc, the evolution of the order, and its impact on the development of the Church is excellent.

Vicaire, M.-H. Saint Dominic and His Times. Translated by Kathleen Pond. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964. Considered by many historians to be a definitive study of Dominic. The first section covers his early childhood, education, spiritual growth, encounters with heretics, and events surrounding the establishment of the order in 1215. Part 2 details Dominic’s life in Rome and his successful efforts to organize and expand the order.