Bourgeois (Consumerist) Refuses Golgotha by Nicholas Berdyaev
Léon Bloy studies the average bourgeois, but the problem can be deepened, for the bourgeois may manifest himself on a superior and more brilliant plane, even in the higher degrees of a spiritual life, where he paralyses all spiritual movement and extinguishes the fire which is the very essence of the spirit. The bourgeois may be pious, he may even be just, but it was said, "Unless your justice abound more than that of the Scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven." The bourgeois's justice never exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, he loves to give alms "in synagogues and in the streets" so as to be "honored by men," to "stand and pray in the synagogues and corners of the streets," to be "seen by men"; he loves to judge, and is the first to cast a stone at the sinner. When the disciples plucked ears of what on a Sabbath it was the bourgeois who taunted Jesus: "Behold, why do they on the Sabbath-day that which is not lawful?" And the answer he was given was one to upset all middle-class notions: "…I tell you that there is here a greater than the temple. And if you knew what this meaneth, I will have mercy and not sacrifice, you would never have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath… The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." It was again the bourgeois who said, "The Son of Man is come eating and drinking …behold a man that is a glutton and a drinker of wine, a friend of publicans and sinners"; for he has no love for publicans and sinners, his predilections lie with the righteous Pharisees. And, addressing the bourgeois, Christ said, "Amen, I say to you that the publicans and harlots shall go into the kingdom of God before you ... Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be humbled, and he that shall humble himself shall e exalted." But, "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut the kingdom of Heaven against men; for you yourselves do not enter in and those that are going in you suffer not to enter." And, "Whether is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifieth the gold?" When the bourgeois remarked that "He eats and drinks with publicans and sinners," Jesus replied, "They that are in health need not a physician, but they that re ill … I am not come to call the just but the sinners." These words of Christ, too, are aimed directly at the bourgeois: "He that will save his life shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul? The bourgeois is out for the conquest of the whole world, and Jesus says to him, "Woe to you … because you love the uppermost seats in the synagogues and salutations in the marketplace." And his interests in this world are repudiated by Jesus in the words: "Seek not what you shall eat, or what you shall drink … for all these things do the nations of the world seek. But your Father knoweth that you have need of these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things shall be added unto you." A bourgeois heart is condemned: "You … outwardly are full of hypocrisy and iniquity." Christ said to those whom he chose, "If you had been of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." "The world" is the bourgeois spirit: it is not God's creation, the cosmos which the Son of God could not deny, but the enslavement and the overburdening of God's creation by passions and concupiscence. A bourgeois is a man who loves "the world." The eternal repudiation of the very foundations of his spirit is expressed in the words, "Love not the world not the things which are in the world." To be bourgeois is a bondage, a tie with "the world"; it does not accept the mystery of Golgotha, it denies the Cross. Bourgeois consciousness of life is in opposition to the tragic consciousness of life: the man who lives through a tragedy is free from the taint, and in the truly dramatic moments of life a bourgeois ceases to be one. Wherein are to be found the spiritual roots of this malady? In too strong a faith in this visible world and unbelief in another, invisible world. The bourgeois is impressed with this world of material things stirred, tempted by it; he does not believe seriously in another existence, in a spiritual being, he feels no confidence in his neighbour's faith. The bourgeois has never acknowledged any saint during his lifetime, but only long after canonization and universal acceptance. Middle-classdom is enslavement of the spirit, its crushing by the external hard world, dependence upon the temporary and corruptible, incapacity for breaking through to eternity. When the bourgeois has stuck to his place too long, impeding the movement of everyone and everything until his power threatens life with inertia, there appears another type, with a greed for power and for the best in life, who says, "Clear out! I want your place." This parvenu bourgeois is no improvement upon his predecessor; he is even worse, but during the heyday of his conquest he seems a daredevil and quite unlike the pompous and steadfast bourgeois of old. The new bourgeois has a still greater greed for power and might, is still more ruthless towards the weak, is more intoxicated by his greatness, importance, and sudden predominance. A weakening of the consciousness of the tragedy of life invariably accompanies his worldly successes. The new bourgeois expels the old-it is the perennial comedy of history. The new man who has entered on to the scene begins by pretending that he repudiates all middle-classness, that his kingdom will not be a middle-class one: he is a socialist and revolutionary. But soon, very soon, the everlasting bourgeois features reappear. The rich man, spiritually enslaved by his wealth and enslaving others, is a prisoner of "the world," and it is more difficult for him to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. But the poor man, envying the rich and spiritually enslaved by the desire of usurping his place and his wealth, is in no wise easier. Herein is enacted the eternal tragi-comedy of history. The middle-class spirit takes possession of every social group, either in the shape of satisfaction with one's own "position" and desire to safeguard it at any cost or in the shape of envy of one's neighbour, desire of a good position and will to attain it at any cost. And the historical scene presents the tragi-comical picture of two bourgeois seizing each other by the throat, each imagining that he is defending some particular world opposed to the world of his enemy. In reality it is the same world, the same undying principle. Middle-classness is not determined by man's economic situation but by his spiritual attitude towards this position. Therefore in each class it may be spiritually conquered. The paradox of the life of the bourgeois consists in his repudiation
of tragedy; he is weighed down and darkened by his non-acceptance of the
internal tragedy of life, of Golgotha; there is a relief and freedom in
the acceptance of the Cross and the pain and suffering it entails. Spirit alone can defeat the bourgeois condition; no material means will avail. It is not a material or economic phenome-non, industrial development as such is not bourgeois. It is a wrong conception of life, the concupiscence of the temporal, which transforms life into an inferno. In its finite and vivid type the bourgeois is an apocalyptic image, a figure of the coming kingdom of which the sacred scripture has spoken. The middle-class spirit is contrasted with the pilgrim spirit: in this world Christians are but wayfarers, and the inner feeling of this pilgrimage is inherent to the Christian in every walk of life. A Christian has no city-he is in quest of the city of God, which can never be the city of "this world"; whenever an earthly city is mistaken for the New Jerusalem, Christians cease to be pilgrims and the bourgeois spirit reigns supreme. From The Bourgeois Mind, (Essay Reprint Series) Books for Libraries. Peter Maurin was so struck by this text that he wrote a lengthy Easy
Essay based on it. His Easy Essay was published in The Catholic Worker
in July-August 1935 and in the Houston Catholic Worker in June 1995.
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