Rather than spending her adult
years in a convent, Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Workers Movement in
the twentieth century, could distill religious experience through her activity
in the world—the sacred essentially coming up through the profane. This is not
to confound these two spheres, just as Christology has held since the Council
of Nicaea (325 CE) that the two natures, human and divine, of Christ do not mix
within his one essence. In fact, even within the religious sphere, Day could
distinguish qualitative differences between God as personified and as
impersonal in nature.
Day wrote of her pre-Catholic religious
“idea of God as a tremendous Force, a frightening impersonal God, a Voice, a
Hand stretched out to seize me, His child, and not in love. Christ was the
Saviour, meek and humble of heart, Jesus, the Good shepherd. But I did not
think of Jesus as God.”[1]
That she was reading Imitation of Christ at the time says a lot about
how she situated Jesus as an exemplar. Whether viewed as a holy man or as the
Son of God beyond nominally so in the Gospel story, Jesus is distinguished from
the idea of God as impersonal. This resonates with the relation between loving
devotion to Jesus as evinced by spiritual nuns, and viewing God as impersonal
resonates with both Shankara, the ninth-century Hindu theologian who claimed
that deities are merely manifestations of the all-pervading, impersonal Brahman,
and Pseudo-Dionysius, the sixth-century Christian theologian who emphasized
that God goes beyond the limits of human thought, perception, and emotion
(i.e., sensibility). The latter applies especially to Day’s statement, “I made
up my mind to accept what I did not understand, trusting light to come, as it
sometimes did, in a blinding flash of exultation and realization.”[2]
This can be interpreted as meaning that divine revelation lies beyond human
understanding, and yet it is sad just how many people claim to know God’s
will.
It was said of Day that she was
too religious to be a Communist. This is ironic because her need for God was in
the midst of her activities, political and even biological. The risk here was
in committing the category mistake of conflating the religious sphere with
others even though her religious experiences came when she was in the midst of
activity in other domains. We can keep the religious domain as distinct and unique
in some ways by interpreting her as being able to perceive her activities as analogies
to dynamics in the spiritual domain that are qualitatively different from
activities within Creation.
Relating herself birthing a child
to God as Creator, Day wrote, “God is the Creator, and the very fact that we [i.e.,
she and the baby’s father] were begetting a child made me have a sense that we
were made in the image and likeness of God, co-creators with him.”[3]
Although the episode evinces that she could see something in nature (i.e.,
giving birth) as in some way being similar, and thus analogical, to a
theological point, referring to herself as a co-creator ignores the qualitative
difference between propagation in the world and God creating existence and all
that is within it.
She was on firmer ground in thinking
about how vegetable seeds grow “into flowers and radishes and beans,” she
wrote, “It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it.”[4]
The word miracle is distinctly religious, so its application sans God
to a biological process itself should be resisted. So too, by the way, the word
evil is distinctly religious, and thus ethicists who define it as grave
injustice miss the mark. Day’s use of the word, miracle, should thus be
taken as analogical only, even if the meant something more by it. The distinctly
religious meaning to be grasped is that the divine transcends the limits of
human cognition and thus is at least in part inherently mysterious to us. Unlike
not understanding how a seed eventually grows so, producing even flowers and vegetables
that hardly resemble the original seeds and yet are their final causes
(Aristotle), not understanding God is inherent to God being uniquely
transcendent as it extends beyond Creation; vegetables do not. Religion is
distinct from the biological (scientific) domain. This holds in relation to
other domains too, including that of ethics.
Ironically because she founded
the Catholic workers’ movement, Day, like Kierkegaard, situated religious
experience above the sphere of morality. Of morality, Day said, “I saw them wrestling
with moral problems, with the principles by which they lived, and this made
them noble in my eyes.”[5]
Lest this be presumed to be the highest form of nobility to Day, while she watching
a woman kneel at her bed to pray, Day was convinced “that worship, adoration,
thanksgiving, supplication” are “the noblest acts of which [a person is]
capable in this life.”[6]
Nobility in a religious sense is more noble than is ethical nobility In Fear
and Trembling, Kierkegaard situates the divine decree made only to Abraham
that he sacrifice his only son, Isaac, above the universally-accessible ethical
stance that the sacrifice would actually be murder, for which Abraham would be
culpable.
Although Dorothy Day illustrates
that it is possible to have religious experience in the midst of our daily
activities in the world rather than spending years in a monastery being
necessary—and in this way she would side with Mahayana over Theravada Buddhism—her
way of viewing the profane in a religious way risks conflating the two, as if
the sacred and profane were co-creators rather than the profane being created
by God. In general, this category mistake ignores the qualitative difference
between the religious domain and other domains, such as science and even
morality. Ultimately, conflating the heavenly and earthly cities risks putting
humanity, and thus oneself, rather than a transcendent reference point, at the
center.
2. Ibid., p. 163.
3. Ibid., p. 153.
4. Ibid., p. 152.
5. Ibid., p. 123.
6. Ibid., p. 123.
