by Michael J. Baxter, Theology Department, University of Notre Dame [Page 1 of 2]  In the wake of their momentous encounter in December 1932, Peter Maurin subjected Dorothy Day to a pedagogical program that he dubbed "indoctrination," which, from Day's account, consisted of Maurin coming over to her apartment and expounding to her on God, the Church, the Church Fathers, the saints, the poor, hospitality, liberalism, capitalism, fascism, communism, personalism, distributism, anarchism, Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Chesterton, Belloc, Maritain, Berdyaev, Kropotkin, and so on, until she had heard enough for one day and sent him away.1 Maurin liked to compose and recite "easy essays"--clever, laconic commentaries on the Church and the world-and it is likely that one of the first easy essays he recited in Day's presence (her memory was not so clear on this2) was entitled "The Dynamite of the Church," which goes as follows: Writing about the Catholic Church, The notion of the Church as "dynamic" and having "dynamite" in its possession is worth lingering over for a moment. Both words are derived from the Greek dynamis, meaning power or might. It appears many times in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament) in reference to the mighty acts of God, and in the New Testament in reference to Jesus, who also is an agent of God's power and might, when he casts out demons and heals the sick, and commissions his disciples to do the same. After the resurrection, the apostles bear witness to Christ "with great power," especially Paul, who delivers the Gospel "not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power" (I Cor 2:4). This same power will prevail at the end of time, when Christ destroys all other sovereignties and powers and hands over the kingdom to God the Father (I Cor 15:24).4 Peter Maurin's point is this: God unleashed a power, a dynamis, in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, which was to be shared by his followers in their spreading of the Gospel message, but Catholic scholars have taken this dynamic message, cordoned it off, kept it under wraps, and rendered it socially impotent. They have done so in the way that scholars know best, by means of "nice phraseology." In its own quipping way, the essay points to the fact that in the world of Catholic scholarship in the thirties, theology and social theory functioned as separate, unrelated disciplines. I elaborate on this separation in the first part of this article. In the second part, I draw on writings of Maurin and Day to show that they did not separate theology from social theory, but espoused a social theory suffused with theological terms and categories. In the third part, I argue that many Catholic scholars today fail to appreciate this integration because they continue to work under an assumed separation between theology and social theory, a separation that privileges the ethical agenda of the nation-state and unfairly marginalizes the radicalist ethical vision of the Catholic Worker. In the fourth and final part, I briefly describe the difficulty in presenting the Catholic Worker from its own radicalist perspective given the disciplinary lines which currently separate theology from social theory, and the nature of the task that is immediately before us. 1. THEOLOGY, HERMETICALLY SEALED Maurin's description of theology "in an hermetic container" was not a critique of any particular Catholic scholar, but of all Catholic scholars--or almost all-collectively went about their work. It was a critique of discourse, that is, of the paradigms, institutions, disciplines, practices, rules, regulations, and unexamined assumptions making up the frame of reference out of which a group of scholars works.5 The questions and problems taken up by a given group of scholars emerge within this frame of reference, but the frame of reference itself often goes unquestioned, unproblematized. In his essay, Peter Maurin contends that the discourse or frame of reference of Catholic scholarship unwisely treats theology and social theory as if they constitute two separate fields of inquiry, and inaccurately views theology as asocial and social theory as having little to do with theology. Peter Maurin was right. If we look at the theoretical paradigm dominating the discourse of Catholic scholarship in these years, we see that it divided all fields of knowledge according to two fundamentally distinct realms: the natural and the supernatural. Derived from a misreading of Aquinas, this neo-Scholastic paradigm held that the natural desires of the human person-the desire to meet one's physical needs, to live in society, to marry and raise children, to produce and consume goods, to establish forms of governments which enable such natural activities to be performed in accord with justice and the common good-that these natural desires can be fulfilled without the aid of the supernatural life of Christ in the Church. In this view, there were two separate realms or tiers of human existence, the natural and the supernatural, and it was possible to confine the study of society, economics, and politics to one of those two realms, the natural.6 Hence the separation between theology and social theory. Any critique of discourse entails a critique of institutions; in this instance, a critique of the standard institutional arrangement in U.S. Catholic higher education in the pre-conciliar era. With few exceptions, Catholic colleges and universities placed philosophy at the center of the curriculum as the discipline that would organize and place into proper perspective knowledge gained from all other academic fields, the arts, the natural sciences, and the newly emergent social sciences. Theology, by contrast, had virtually no place in the standard curriculum. It was studied in the seminaries, which were organizationally separate from the colleges and usually free-standing institutions. Dogma, christology, moral theology, sacramental theology, mystical theology, and scripture, were reserved for the training of future priests. What religious instruction was available at the colleges was catechetical in nature, and did not relate directly to the knowledge pursued and produced at the colleges and universities. This institutional arrangement reinforced the idea that the study of politics, economics, and society deals with natural activities and should be governed by philosophy, not theology.7 Admittedly, the situation was not as clear cut as this account implies, but I believe the picture I have painted, big brush and all, is accurate as regards Catholic social theory in the early twentieth century. John Ryan, for example, the most prominent Catholic social theorist of this era, wrote almost nothing on sin and grace, the sacraments, christology, soteriology, or eschatology, or scripture.8 The same is true of Moorhouse F.X. Millar, a colleague of Ryan's, whose extensive writings in philosophy and political theory propose no more than a marginal role for theology.9 The same is true of the many lesser known social theorists whose journal articles about political, economic, and social matters are by and large devoid of substantive theological reasoning and argumentation. And the same is true, with qualifications, of the most influential U.S. Catholic social theorist of this century, John Courtney Murray. How to read Murray is a hotly contested and complex matter these days, too complex to give a full account here, so let me sum up my reading of him in a nutshell. Murray was more ready and able than his predecessors to import theological terms and categories into his social theory,10 but he did so in such a way that his theology effaced itself as it moved into the realm of the natural and the social. In We Hold These Truths, he invokes the incarnation, but only to say that it established a spiritual, not temporal, order.11 This spiritual/temporal distinction dictates (and mutes) the significance of other theological terms and categories. Thus he refers to redemption, but only to note in passing that the Western constitutional tradition may be seen as redemptive in a terrestrial sense.12 He mentions providence, but only to suggest that it was operative at the U.S. founding.13 He even brings up the Sermon on the Mount, but only to insist that its precepts, or any other precepts drawn directly from scripture, have no direct bearing on the morality of public policy.14 In each case, Murray's use of theological terms and categories only serves to reinforce the premise of the primacy of the spiritual order, a premise that serves to reinforce the existence of another order set aside solely for temporal affairs-the affairs of politics, the state, civil law, public discourse-wherein the language of faith and revelation yields to the language of reason and natural law. The overall effect is to lend support to the presiding contention of We Hold These Truths, that this spiritual/temporal distinction received full-fledged endorsement by the U.S. founders and was granted legal recognition in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. It is important to note the connection between the neo-Scholastic division of the natural from the supernatural and the exigencies of liberal democratic political order in the United States of America. Murray set out to provide a basis for a "public philosophy" that would appeal to all parties in a religiously pluralistic setting; this meant a philosophy not grounded in the beliefs and practices of any specific ecclesial body, a philosophy not referring to the ultimate ends of human existence;15 and the neo-Scholastic natural law, autonomous from the supernatural and accessible by means of reason alone, was perfectly suited to this task.16 The problem with natural law conceived apart from its supernatural end is that it perpetuates the myth of the modern liberal state as a religiously neutral institutional arrangement. In fact, this is a debased, unnatural law that should rather be understood as a rival to true religion (in the Augustinian sense), and its emergence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries dissipated the authority of the Church not only among the networks of social and political power but also within its own membership.17 Furthermore, when natural law is not ordered to its supernatural end, it lacks the linguistic and conceptual resources needed to challenge existing configurations of political power from a perspective other than the realm of "the political." In this sense, the neo-Scholastic enclosure of the natural within an autonomous sphere precluded a fundamental theological critique of the modern liberal state. Thus while Murray was an accomplished theologian, theology had little direct and substantive effect on his political theory. The same is true of Catholic social theory in general. It is remarkably bereft of references to Christ, the sacraments, scripture, the saints, and other tradition-specific theological terms and categories which do not easily conform to the discursive protocols of the modern liberal state. This is what Peter Maurin put his finger on in "Blowing the Dynamite of the Church." What we need to put our finger on is that much the same is true of Catholic social theory today. But before commenting on the contemporary scene, I want to take up the Catholic Worker from its own non-state-centered, theologically-informed, radicalist perspective. 2. THE DYNAMITE OF THE CHURCH The social theory to which Maurin referred in his essay was dynamic because it possessed an explosive ingredient: Jesus Christ. The image of dynamite jolts the listener/reader into imagining Christ and the Church in temporal rather than in purely spiritual terms. This is not to say that Maurin denied that the Church's mission is "spiritual"; no Catholic intellectual of that era would have denied that; but, for Maurin, "spiritual" signified specific practices and a specific form of social life. In contrast to standard Catholic social theory, his social theory was, in a word, ecclesial. Consider, for example, his three-pronged vision of a society based on cult, culture, and cultivation. Together with culture and cultivation he lists as an indispensable element "cult," the practice of the worship of God (and he had a specifically Catholic form of worship in mind).18 Consider his designation of parishes and dioceses as sites for the practice of hospitality; not the "muni," not state-run shelters, but the Church.19 Consider his view of St. Francis as one who lived the kind of life that could spark social reconstruction, not personal piety or ecclesiastical reform alone, but the reconstruction of society.20 For Peter Maurin, society is not built on a "pure nature"; rather, society flows out of a "nature" ordered to and fulfilled by Christ in the Church, a nature that is, to paraphrase both Father John J. Hugo and the English theologian John Milbank, "supernaturalized."21 This supernaturalism permeates the writings of Dorothy Day, particularly The Long Loneliness. Think of the scene at the outset: "Confession"-the practice of bringing one's sins into the light of day, also writing about "all the things which had brought [her] to God," about how she "found faith" and "became a member of the Mystical Body of Christ."22 Think of the scene in the postscript: people sitting, talking, dividing up loaves and fishes, welcoming the poor into houses with expanding walls, knowing God and each other in a Eucharistic banquet joining heaven and earth.23 Confession, then communion-here we have the story of a practicing Catholic who like Augustine (whom she cites in depicting her own task as a writer24) feels compelled to tell how God has taken possession of her life. This supernaturalist perspective is written into the structure of the overall narrative of The Long Loneliness, as it moves from the second to the third part. Dorothy Day's time on Staten Island with Forster Batterham, walking the beach, reading, cooking, eating together, sleeping together, bearing a child-this consoling time of "natural happiness" draws her into an overflowing supernatural love. With Forster she had a child she loved and he made the physical world come alive, awakening in her a flood of gratitude. But, she writes, "the final object of this love and gratitude was God. No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore."25 Natural happiness could not satisfy. It expands one's desire beyond what the natural itself can ever fulfill. Nature, in other words, produces a lack. It is like salt on the tongue, leaving us thirsting for something more; not for more salt, but for the water which alone quenches our thirst.26 So the story moves on, painfully, to the baptism of her daughter, to the break-up with Forster, to her own baptism, and at length, to her life at the Worker-the story of natural love transformed into the love of the cross. A theology of the supernatural comes in Day's account of the Retreat. She describes Fr. Pacifique Roy as talking "of nature and the supernatural, how God became man that man might become God, how we were under the obligation of putting off the old man and putting on Christ..." This, he said, is done by "acting always for the 'supernatural motive,'" by "supernaturalizing all our actions every day."27 Fr. John J. Hugo, director of the Catholic Worker retreats, stressed that as Christians "we have been given a share in the divine life; we have been raised to a supernatural level."28 "Grace is a share in the divine life . . . ," he said, "and the law of this supernatural life is love, a love which demands renunciation."29 Significantly, she wrote this chapter shortly after the promulgation of Humani generis (1950), the encyclical that defended the neo-Scholastic notion of "pure nature" as necessary to preserve the integrity of nature and the gratuity of grace. This pronouncement called into question the nouvelle theologie of Henri de Lubac and others for arguing that the notion of a purely natural end was a distortion of Aquinas' belief that the human person has a natural desire for God and thus a single, supernatural end. Given this context, it is significant that Day alludes to the controversy, mentions de Lubac favorably,30 and offers a brief formulation of her own supernaturalist theology: "Body and soul constitute human nature," she writes. "The body is no less good than the soul. In mortifying the natural we must not injure the body or the soul. We are not to destroy it but to transform it, as iron is transformed in the fire."31 This is clearly a defense of Hugo against his critics, and also perhaps her own homespun attempt to allay official suspicion. All of which goes to show that Day's integrated understanding of the natural/supernatural relation ran counter to the neo-Scholastic two-tier paradigm that dominated the discourse of Catholic scholarship during the pre-conciliar era. She envisioned society not as enclosed within an autonomous "natural" realm of human activity, but as radically open and dynamically oriented toward the supernatural. Two scholars associated with the Worker, Virgil Michel, O.S.B. and Paul Hanly Furfey, articulated this perspective in books, academic journals, and articles in popular periodicals including The Catholic Worker: Michel, by rooting all social regeneration in the liturgy;32 Furfey, by showing that all true society flows from participation in the inner life of the Trinity.33 But it was Day who was able to articulate it in terms of specific practices that make up a supernaturalized life. Her thick descriptions of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving hospitality to the stranger, instructing the ignorant (that is, picketing), growing food on the land (or trying to), and so on-all showed that Peter Maurin's "new society within the shell of the old" where "it is easier for people to be good"34 was thoroughly realizable in the here and now, through the power of the Holy Spirit and the intercession of the saints. But this "new society" never figured into the work of Catholic social theorists. It did not register as a "society" as they understood the term. It was "spiritual" rather than "temporal," "supernatural" rather than "natural," "ecclesial" rather than "social." It embodied "charity" rather than "justice." These are false oppositions, of course, produced by the separation of theology and social theory that dominated Catholic scholarly discourse in the pre-conciliar era, but the effect, as Peter Maurin saw so clearly, was to confine the power or dynamis of Christ to an asocial sphere where it lay dormant. The situation is not fundamentally different now. Even though the Catholic Worker has received plenty of scholarly attention lately-something that Catholic Workers should fear because, as Stanley Hauerwas had observed, academics study religious movements that are dead or that they are trying to kill-it remains marginalized in the discourse of Catholic social ethicists. Some social ethicists exclude it willingly; others, against their best intentions; but in any case, the problem is not so much with the ethicists themselves as with the discursive structure of their field, which still posits a division between theology and social theory.  |
