Roots of the Catholic Worker Movement: Saints and Philosophers who Influenced Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin

Nicholas Berdyaev, Prophet for the Catholic Worker Movement:

The Bourgeois Mind

by Nicholas Berdyaev

Arranged by Peter Maurin

A Spiritual State
l. What does the word
actually mean?
2. It has remained unexplained

though it has been so much used
and so often misapplied.
3. Even when superficially used
it is a word
with a magic power of its
own
and its depth has to be
fathomed.
4. The word designates a
spiritual state,
a direction of the soul,
a peculiar consciousness of
being.
5. It is neither a social
nor an economic condition;
yet it is something more
than a psychological
and ethical one
--it is spiritual, ontological.
6. The state of being bourgeois
has always existed
in the world.
7. Its immortal image
is forever fixed in the
gospels
with its equally
immortal antithesis,
but in the nineteenth century
it attained its climax
and ruled supreme.
Enslaved Society
l. Though the middle-class
society of the last century
is so spoken of
in the superficial
social-economic significance
of the term,
it is bourgeois
in a deeper and more
spiritual sense.
2. This middle-class mentality
ripened and enslaved
human society and culture
at the summit of their
civilization.
3. Its concupisence
is no longer restrictecd
by man's supernatural beliefs
as it was in past epochs.
4. It is no longer kept in bounds
by the sacred symbolism
of a nobler traditional
culture.
5. The bourgeois spirit
emancipated itself,
expanded
and was at last
able to express
its own type of life.
Denouncers
l. But even when the triumph of mediocrity
was complete
a few deep thinkers
denounced it
with uncompromising power.
2. Carlyle, Nietzsche, Ibsen,
Leon Bloy, Dostoievsky, Leontiv,
all foresaw
the victory of the bourgeois
spirit
over a truly great culture
on the ruins of which
it would establish
its own hideous kingdom.
3. With prophetic force and fire
these men
denounced the spiritual
sources
and moral foundations
of middle-classdom
and repelled by its ugliness
thirsting for a nobler culture,
a different life
looked back
upon Greece or the middle-
ages
the Renaissance or Byzantium.
A New Type
l. History has failed,
there is no such thing
as historical progress.
2. The present is in no wise
an improvement upon the
past.
3. A period of high cultural
development
is succeeded by another
wherein culture
Deteriorates qualitatively.
4. The will to power, to well-
being, to wealth
triumphs over the will
to holiness, to genius.
5. The highest spiritual achievements
belong to the past,
spirituality is on the wane
and a time of spiritual decline
is a time of bourgeois
ascendency.
6. The knight and the monk
the philosopher and the poet
have been superseded
by a new type
--the greedy bourgeois
conqueror,
organizer and trader.
7. The center of life is
displaced
and transferred
to its periphery
the organic hierarchical
order of life
is being destroyed.
Leon Bloy
l. One of those whose rebellion
against the bourgeois spirit
was most uncompromising
and bitter
was Leon Bloy
the remarkable and little
known
French Catholic writer.
2. Bloy, who lived all his life
unrecognized and in dire
misery,
has written an extraordinary
book
L'Exegese des Lieux
Communs
which is a searching
examination
of the commonplaces
of bourgeois wisdom.
3. He gives a wonderfully witty
metaphysical interpretation
of the pronouncements
which are the bourgeois rule
of life.
4. Thus in "Dieu ne demande
pas tant"
--God does not ask all of
that--
he endeavours to penetrate
the secret movements of the
heart
mind and will
of a bourgeois
to expose his specular
metaphysics and mysticism.
Leon Bloy's Sayings
l. The bourgeois,
even when he is a good
Catholic
believes only in this world
in the expedient and the
useful
he is incapable
of living by faith
in another world
and refuses to base his life
on the mystery of Golgotha.
2. The magnificent superiority
of the bourgeois
is based on unbelief
even after he has seen and
touched.
3. Not upon the utter
impossibility
of seeing and touching
due to unbelief.
4. The bourgeois is an idolater
enslaved by the visible.
5. Business is the bourgeois
God
his absolute.
6. It was the bourgeois
who crucified Christ;
on Golgotha
he cut the world off from
Christ,
money from the poor.
The Poor and Money
l. The Poor and Money
are great symbols for Bloy
2. There is a mystery of money
its mysterious separation
from the spirit,
and the middle-class world
is governed by this money
benefit of the spirit.
3. Middle-classdom is opposed
to the absolute,
it is destructive of eternity.
4. A bourgeois may be religious and this middle-class
religiosity
is more hateful
in Bloy's eyes
than atheism.
5. How many such bourgeois
idolaters
did he discover
amongst "good Catholics"
--the Lord Christ
is very decorative
in shops.
6. Leon Bloy studies the
average bourgeois
but the problem can be
deepened.
7. In the higher degrees of a
spiritual life
the bourgeois spirit
paralizes all spiritual
movement
and extinguishes the fire
which is the very essence
of the spirit.
The Bourgeois Spirit
l. The bourgeois is out
for the conquest of the world
and Jesus says to him
"Woe to you
because you love the
uppermost seats
in the synagogues
and salutations
in the market-place."
2. 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."
3. 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,
therefore the world hateth
you."
4. 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 over burdening
of God's creation
by passions and
concupiscence.

Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XV, No. 4, May-June 1995. Reprinted from The Catholic Worker, July-August, l935.