The Dominicans

The Dominican view of nature is based on the fact that they were founded to combat a heresy advocating that the natural world was evil. On January 17, 1217, just eight years after Pope Innocent III approved the rule of Saint Francis, Pope Honorius III ratified the constitutions for the Dominican Order. Like the Franciscans, the first Dominican priests were friars. They worked outside the monastery and were founded to combat the Albigensian heresy. Today, the Dominican family includes sisters and lay people.

The Albigenses espoused a form of Manichaeism, a cosmic dualism, holding that the devil was actually a rival god who created matter. The soul is imprisoned in matter and the objective is to liberate the soul. Therefore, they discouraged marriage and saw death as the final release. For them, Christ was not the Son of God but an angel with a corporate appearance. The first objective of the Dominicans was to restore a Christian view of creation.

The Dominicans call themselves “The Order of Preachers.” But “preaching” here is not restricted to a discourse on Sunday morning. They see their charism as closely following the Old Testament definition of a prophet as one called by God to speak for God. They say of themselves that their objective is to contemplate and to share the fruits of their contemplation. Like the Franciscans, they embrace an incarnational spirituality: They believe that all life is sacred because God became human in Jesus Christ. Through the centuries, the Dominicans have been heavily involved in education, scholarship, and missions.

Fra Angelico (1400?-1455) was a Dominican and a painter who continued the work of Giotto in giving more natural shape and color to works of art.

Dominican Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) is considered the greatest of the medieval philosophers and theologians. His Summa Theologica is built on Aristotle and provided a synthesis of theology up to that point in time. Saint Thomas presents the knowledge we get from revelation, our experience and our capacity to reason as compatible and complementary ways of knowing. He set the stage for the later development of the scientific method.

A recent movement within the religious orders of women in the United States is to convert the lands that once served as novitiates, mother houses and schools into organic farms and ecological learning centers. The Dominican sisters have been at the forefront of this movement and Genesis Farm is their flagship.

Founded by Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis and the Dominican Sisters of Caldwell, New Jersey, the farm focuses on learning and teaching a new cosmology. They also sponsor a large, community-supported biodynamic garden. Their teaching is build around the works of Thomas Berry, Brian Swimme and a section of Saint Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. In Part I, Question 47 of his Summa, Aquinas says that God is most fully revealed, not through one species only, but through the whole universe because one creature alone could not adequately represent His goodness.

Genesis Farm uses the structure of a story. The universe is a series of unfolding stories. Humanity needs to listen to the stories and individuals need to see the story of their lives in the context of the universe of which they are a part. MacGillis also uses the image of a punchbowl on a table surrounded by glasses. Each glass is a religious or ethnic tradition that holds some wisdom. When the glasses are emptied into the punchbowl, the wisdom is not lost but enlarged. The families who sponsor the organic garden at Genesis Farm are presently founding a grammar school where their children can progressively learn the stories of the universe.

The Dominican sisters also operate Sophia Garden in Amityville, New York and Siena Spiritual Center in Water Mill, Long Island. They have similar farms and learning centers in Springfield, Illinois; Ponchatoula, Louisiana; Blacklick, and Bath, Ohio; Houston and Boerne, Texas; Plainville, Massachusetts; St. Catherine, Kentucky; and Pawnee Rock, Kansas. The Dominicans EarthLinks in Denver, Colorado endeavors to link people, especially the economically poor, to each other and nature through hikes, garden projects and school programs. Sister Mary Ellen Leciejewski, based at the Dominican hospital in Santa Cruz, California, works full time on issues related to the impact of health services on the environment. She says, “Our ecological commitment is integral to our healing mission. There is a profound connection that exists between healing the individual and healing the planet.” The Dominicans also run an ecological farm in Benin City, Nigeria.

			The Jesuits
			The Francisans
			Religious Orders and Ecology
			Franciscan Reverence of Creation Resources
			OFM JPIC Home Page

 

Copyright, Bron Taylor and Jeffrey Kaplan, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (London: Continuum, forthcoming 2004).