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Article Excerpt
THE CATHOLIC WORKER'S manner of living justly in contemporary American society was specified by Dorothy Day as a "little way." The expression was not original to Day. She first found it in the autobiographical writings of Therese of Lisieux, the late-19th-century mystic known as the "Little Flower." In its original setting, that is, within the life of an enclosed Carmelite nun, the "little way" embraced mostly the nonspectacular, routine living of 20 isolated religious sisters. Therese sought a way to God within daily human interactions--"interactions" that she accurately described as "ordinary." The application of Therese's term to Day's own world and activities required considerable effort and inventiveness. For Day and the Workers, the "little way" came to characterize a contemporary method for transcending in act the social sinfulness of, and brutal divisions within, national and international societies. In this study I trace Day's transposition of the term from its original cloistered setting to that of New York City at the height of the Great Depression and the Second World War. (1) I suggest that the tools and attitudes by which Day effected the transposition betrays something distinctly "Catholic" at the core of her approach to social living. (2)
Before Day was capable even of distinguishing between Therese of Lisieux and Teresa of Avila, (3) the Little Flower's life and her "way" had been endorsed by Roman Catholics as a fitting path to God from within daily (bourgeois) living. (4) The "way" also had been roundly criticized for encouraging purely passive images of female and lay sanctity, images that supported general magisterial opposition to working-class and feminist attempts to gain public voice, whether through independent labor organizing or grassroots movements for voting rights. That this "little way" appeared to leave unchallenged the killing structures of overly bureaucratic, "iron jacketed" capitalistic societies had also been noted. Speaking from within rather than from outside these concerns, the first reactions of Day the socialist to Lisieux and her "little way" were not kind. She complained:
What kind of saint was this who felt she had to practice heroic charity in eating what was put in front of her, in taking medicine, enduring cold and heat, restraint, enduring the society of mediocre souls ..., for whom a splash of dirty water from the careless washing of a nun next to her in the laundry was mentioned as "mortification" when the very root of the word meant death.... (5)
In the face of the Great Depression and the rise of European fascism, Therese's "little way" did appear trivial. Even more, her way seemed to encourage passivity in response to death by starvation and violence, to discourage any action--much less heroic action--that was needed to reverse the decline unto death of the West. Day confessed to having found Joan of Arc and, of course, Teresa of Avila "much more to [her] taste." She looked for "ways" that fit more closely with the social hope that first guided her to the labor movement, then to writing for Communist publications, and eventually to co-founding the Catholic Worker movement. Even Day's mildly feminist sense of personal dignity bridled at the "sweet," socially passive saint. She took her confessor's recommendation that she read Therese's Story of a Soul (6) as another example of "men, and priests too, [being] very insulting to women, handing out what they felt suited their intelligence; in other words, pious pap." (7)
Day and Therese were eventually reconciled. Day wrote a book on Therese (her most sustained, single non-biographical work) and claimed her as a "workers' saint." To move from her initial rejection of Therese, Day reconstructed the saint's own interior (Therese's own self-understanding) and expanded Therese's outward movements toward social transformation. Here I examine first Day's reconstruction (or creation) of Therese's sense of self, a reconstruction that Day needed if Therese was to be of any help to Catholic Workers. Then I trace Day's transposition of Therese's fragile attempts at social loving from the convent scullery into Worker soup kitchens and anti-war protests.
A SENSE OF THE REDEEMED SELF
Day's first adjustment, then, concerned Therese's sense of herself--a sense foundationally characterized by a strong contrast between the creature and the Creator--the thoroughly dependent creature before an omnipotent God. Stated in these terms, the contrast is theological, to which Day would not, and could not, object. Often conjoined to this theological contrast, however, are moral contrasts, two of which she found troublesome. The first moral contrast was constructed on strong condemnations of human depravity, the challenge of which led Day to a positive grounding for the redeemed self. The second moral contrast was based on parent/child metaphors, and challenged Day's notions of human moral agency. Both concern human dignity as understood within a theological anthropology.
The Depraved vs. the Loving Self
While Day's first objections to Therese's way rose from Therese's alleged indifference to social evil, (8) several other Catholic critiques of Therese found dangerous, if not fatal, flaws within Therese's sense of self. At issue was Therese's awareness of personal sinfulness, particularly as highlighted and critiqued by Hans Urs von Balthasar. According to Day, Balthasar "writes that [Therese's] family had done extremely well in not blunting her fine and delicate sense of sin," (9) a sense that is necessary for the maintenance of a proper relationship to one's redeemer. While at first, Day seems to applaud the steps that Therese's parents took to nourish a "delicate sense of sin," she immediately qualifies the utility of this "delicate sense" in her treatment of another judgment by Balthasar. The situation under consideration was Therese's confessor's claim, addressed to Therese, that, in his judgment, she had never committed grievous, mortal sin. According to Day, " ... Father yon Balthasar complains that, due to this indiscreet remark of her confessor's, Therese lost that sense of sin which is so necessary if the Christian is to feel pity and responsibility." (10)
A strong sense of sinfulness, understood as personal worthlessness or even absolute depravity, is not, for Day, a sufficient, nor even a necessary, entry into Therese's "little way." (I explore later Day's positive foundation for "the way.") In fact, in the classic style of those who recently, explicitly encountered with Freud the ambiguous aspects of the censoring self, Day could write that Therese "also suffered intensely from scruples and for so long that it was a neurosis, like the need to be forever washing one's hands. She was tempted to vanity and wept, and then wept because she had wept." (11) In a chapter dedicated to Therese's "Mental Illness," Day returns to Therese's neurotic scrupulosity, examines further "Therese's account of the nervous, neurotic state she was in for almost two years ... at the departure of Pauline" [the first of her sisters to enter Carmel], and concludes that "[b]oth of these illnesses, scruples as well as the former mysterious ailment, would be considered today to be some form of mental or nervous breakdown." (12) In a very modern, yet quaintly Catholic move, she recommends Therese as a patron saint for those who so suffer. "I am sure we should pray to St. Therese about those around us who are going through this suffering, these `nervous breakdowns,' these delusions. If her `way' is for all, surely we should recognize her experience, and her desire to help in this field, too." (13) Day, then, has associated any sense of moral "transcendence" that achieves its "higher" viewpoint through a starkly negative evaluation of the self with the category of "illness," even "delusion," not immediately with "sin." Clearly a proper sense of self, even in relation to God, need not rely on Balthasar's "sense of sin."
Why did Day so emphatically step away from Balthasar's endorsed sense of sinfulness--even to the point of partially reducing her model saint to a Freudian neurotic? It would appear that Day was trying to avoid within Therese any sharp dichotomy between the natural and the supernatural. Here we approach Day's more positive theological grounding for a sense of self. Through her own "way" into the Church, Day encountered and clung to a deep link between her own interior drives and her experience of her God. At various points throughout her life, beginning with her 1938 apologia for her own conversion (addressed to her brother), Day insisted that the "natural" loves of her life, far from hindering her, in fact brought her to God. Neither social evil nor personal sinfulness (both of which she experienced intimately) suggested to her a path to God that she could follow. She insisted that "lilt was human love that helped me to understand divine love. Human love at its best, unselfish, glowing, illuminating our days, gives us a glimpse...
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