The Grace St. Dominic Brings to the World: A Fresh Look at Dominican Spirituality

The phrase "Dominican spirituality" has entered only lately into common usage within the Dominican Order. Neither St. Dominic (c.1172-1221) nor the early Dominican saints, including Thomas Aquinas (1224/25-74) and Catherine of Siena (?1347-80), would have recognized the expression. These holy ones of course would have known and observed the practices that, today, one includes under the heading of "Dominican spirituality." They, however, would have understood these basic pieces of Dominican life as indispensable constituents of that regular form of life, which, since the first decades of the thirteenth century, Dominicans have fostered and sustained. They would have accepted these practices, in other words, as composing the rhythm of Dominican life, though not as expressing the unique features of a classifiable Dominican spirituality.

Although the distinction initially may strike one as trifling, it is one thing to animate a form of life that embodies a divine grace and another to observe the axioms of a spirituality, even of a school whose authenticity the Church recognizes. The Dominican scholar Thomas Gilby says that form refers to "the inner shaping principle of a thing."¹ Like the natural forms that exist in creation, or even like the aesthetic forms that artists impose on their materials, form implies that something possesses an identifiable stability. We easily distinguish pineapples from panda bears and the music of George Friederic Handel from that of Harry Connick, Jr. In a word, form indicates what makes someone or something to be what he, she, or it is. Dominican form gives shape to a distinctive way of life within the Church. An official document of the Order of Preachers, in fact, employs the phrase, forma vitae, the form of the Order's life.² Were Dominicans to speak about their "spirituality," they would necessarily mean by the expression, "Dominican Spirituality," the distinctive form of life that distinguishes them from members of other religious institutes. They would at the same time describe the inner shaping principle that those who are drawn to espouse Dominican life desire to embrace, to make their own, and to give themselves to, all under the impulse of a freely given grace that we call a "vocation."

The Dominican form of life flows from the grace St. Dominic introduces into the world. It is a marvelous thing to ponder that one specific grace, originally embodied in the Castilian priest Dominic of Caleruega, today unites Dominican priests and cooperator brothers all over the world. This same grace also places today's Dominicans in a direct lineage with those men who for almost 800 years have worn the black and white habit of Dominic's Order. The Dominican form received its official recognition from the Roman Pontiff Honorius III (d. 1227) on December 22, 1216. Although his predecessor, the illustrious Pope Innocent III (d. July 1216), had confirmed Dominic in his project, Pope Honorius's bull, a document that miraculously survived the fury of the French Revolution and today is housed in the French provincial archives of the Haute-Garonne, accounts for the much anticipated eighth centenary jubilee of the Order to be celebrated in 2016.³ The inspiration for speaking of a grace that stands at the heart of a Dominican vocation comes from words that Honorius III addressed to Dominic in January 1221, some six months before the saint's death. These words have found their way into what is called the "Constitutio Fundamentalis," a text of recent composition that serves as a kind of preface to the constitutions and ordinations that today govern Dominican life: "'He who never ceases to make his Church fruitful through new offspring,'" began the Pope, "wishes to make these modern times [the thirteenth century] the equal of former days [the first Christian centuries] and to spread the Catholic faith. So he inspired you [Dominicans] with a holy desire to embrace poverty, profess the regular life and commit yourselves to the proclamation of the word of God, preaching everywhere the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."⁴ No doubt about it. Pope Honorius...