To tell the story of the Order famed for the pursuit of truth, we must begin with a touch of heresy. Founding a religious order had probably never occurred to the young Dominic de Guzman in 1203, when he set out to accompany his bishop on a mission on behalf of the king of Castille. The mission was to arrange a marriage for the young son of the king with a noble girl from Denmark. The route from Spain to Denmark took them through the southern French region of Languedoc, where a heresy was thriving. The shock of seeing how well-entrenched this heresy was led Dominic – who up to that point had been living a peaceful life as a cathedral canon – to want to devote his life to preaching the truth and, in time, to found an order dedicated to the same task.

The good, the bad and the ugly

What was this heresy that so shocked Dominic? It was known by two names. The first, ‘Catharism’, was derived from a Greek work meaning ‘purified’. The second, ‘Albigensianism’, was a reference to the diocese of Albi, where the heresy was at its strongest. These were new names in the Church’s lexicon, but the heresy was simply a medieval variant of another very old heresy called ‘dualism’, which had first emerged as an organised Christian heresy in the second century, and was possibly brought to France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by French crusaders who had encountered it in the East. Dualism was an attempt to explain how evil could exist in a world created by a God that the Christian Church taught was all-good. The dualist solution was that God did not create the material world, only the spiritual world. The material world had been created by an evil spirit. The inconsistencies with orthodox Catholic theology were substantial. In varying ways dualism led to the rejection of some or all of the sacraments, since each sacrament makes use of essential material elements. Even the central fact of Christianity, the Incarnation, needed a dualist revision, as God could not genuinely have taken on human flesh if human flesh was evil.

It was not fun to be a Cathar. The Cathar’s notion of ‘purification’ involved separating oneself as far as possible from the material world. This was done through the common Christian ascetical practices of fasting and abstinence from meat, but also through a profoundly non-Christian rejection of marriage and procreation. A particularly ugly feature of Catharism was that suicide was held to be a praiseworthy action, since this amounted to the ultimate rejection of matter.

Up to this point in the Church’s history the only preaching was done by bishops. Even if parish priests had been permitted to preach, they did not have the doctrinal training to match the relatively sophisticated arguments of the lay Cathar preachers. The bishops in their turn may have been better educated, but their lifestyles did not give the same witness of austerity and reliance on God’s providence as those offered by the Cathars. To the simple folk of Languedoc who wanted to hear the message of salvation, it was the Cathars who seemed to be the true successors of the apostles.

Holy preachers

Dominic returned to the region as soon as he could, and for about ten years he laboured, often alone, in the task of preaching truth to those who had been deceived by error. All the while, an idea was germinating in his mind that would find its concrete form in 1216 with the establishment of the Order of Preachers by Pope Honorius III, and over the following five years while the Constitutions of the Order took their form. Dominic’s idea was to meet head-on the problems he was encountering. He saw that there was too little preaching being done to counter the spread of the heresy; he would organise a group of priests who would be totally dedicated to preaching. The majority of the clergy was poorly educated and had little wisdom to hand on; Dominic’s preachers would be committed to study, because a preacher cannot impart doctrinal knowledge that he does not possess. The Cathar preachers, because of their manifest austerity, were considered attractive and credible; Dominic’s preachers, then, would be visibly committed to living lives of holiness, of which the practice of poverty would be central. With his studious and poor preachers, Dominic intended to fight the twin problems of ignorance and laxity among the clergy that had done so much to allow Catharism to spread.

Dominic never wanted his preachers to be egg-heads in rags; he specifically had in mind a religious order. From its beginnings in the early Church, the purpose of religious life had always been to save one’s soul through the living of that vocation. Like the hermits, monks, nuns and canons regular that had gone before them, Dominic’s friars would be committed to the pursuit of holiness. It was through the means of regular life, study and contemplation that friar would be sanctified, and then through the witness of his own life and his preaching he would sanctify others. It is no coincidence, then, that the most legendary preachers of the Order have also been officially recognised by the Church for their holiness; friars like Blessed Reginald of Orleans, Blessed Jordan of Saxony and St Vincent Ferrer are famous examples. The Order has also offered much to the Church’s treasury of spiritual literature, with great writers such as Thomas Aquinas, Henry Suso and Meister Eckhart still read and valued today.

A holy order

It is encouraging for a Dominican to become familiar with the lives of the hundreds of saints and blesseds who have taken the path to holiness offered by our Order. Every novice who receives the habit of the Order is clothed with something that has been worn by generations of holy preachers, who have lived out their vocations in the many ways offered in the Order. Our Order can claim as its own some of the greatest saints in the history of the Church – St Dominic himself, St Albert the Great, St Thomas Aquinas, St Catherine of Siena. Together with the hundreds of martyrs from our Order, they are a great source of pride and inspiration for those preaching and aiming for holiness in the Order today.