Essays in Anarchism and Religion, Volume 1/Chapter 2
The Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, and Exemplary Anarchism
Benjamin J. Pauli
Kettering University, USA
The Catholic Worker movement’s fusion of anarchism and Catholicism is one of the most unusual hybrids in the history of the anarchist tradition and is sometimes dismissed as paradoxical or contradictory. In arguing that the pairing of these influences is not as counter-intuitive as it appears at first glance, this chapter seeks to explain the elective affinity of anarchism and Catholicism through the concept of exemplarity. The vision for the Catholic Worker devised by its founders Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day was, I argue, informed by interpretations of central Christian figures like Christ, the saints, and the “holy fool” that placed special emphasis on their exemplary qualities. Maurin and Day saw in the Catholic tradition of exemplarity a means of exercising leadership and authority through the power of examples and voluntary emulation rather than coercion, and within the context of the Catholic Worker movement the exemplary influence of Day in particular helped to reconcile the movement’s need for coherence and direction with the autonomy and dignity of its members. In highlighting the Catholic Worker’s “exemplary anarchism,” this chapter not only reveals one of the ways in which the Worker’s Catholicism actually enhanced its anarchism, but also points to the broader relevance of the concept of exemplarity to anarchist theory.
“I’m like everyone else: I admire people who have become outstanding.”
—Dorothy Day
If one wanted to illustrate the proposition, recounted by Noam Chomsky in his introduction to Daniel Guerin’s Anarchism, that “anarchism has a broad back, like paper it endures anything,” one could hardly do better than to point to the existence of the Catholic Worker movement.[1] Launched by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin on May 1, 1933, when the first issue of the Catholic Worker was distributed to bemused radicals assembled in Union Square, Manhattan, the Catholic Worker movement has from its inception fused an anarchist sensibility with intense Catholic piety. Effecting that unlikely pairing required, to use the term employed by one of the movement’s most perceptive scholars, nothing less than “inventing” Catholic radicalism in the United States, where Social Gospel Protestants had a near monopoly on faith-based social activism in the early 20th century.[2] If the mystery of its very existence were not enough, the unusual longevity of the Catholic Worker raises questions as to what deeper lessons about social movements might be contained in the Worker’s seemingly idiosyncratic synthesis of disparate influences.
By no means can those lessons be illuminated comprehensively in the space of this chapter. Instead, in what follows I will attempt to draw attention to a feature of the movement that has garnered much comment but little systematic exposition, a feature that goes some way towards explaining how the Worker was able to find an affinity between anarchist ideas and a specifically Catholic version of the Christian faith. The concept that will underpin this discussion is the concept of “exemplarity,” a concept whose flagging philosophical reputation has begun to revive thanks to recent scholarly work on the subject in the areas of philosophy, literary criticism, rhetoric, pedagogy, and legal studies.[3] Exemplarity, I will argue, played an instrumental role in shaping the Catholic Worker movement’s self-conception and determining the manner of the movement’s operation. After offering a brief history of the idea of exemplarity from its roots in ancient philosophy, history, and rhetoric to its incorporation into Christianity, I will examine its place in the founding vision for the Catholic Worker as fleshed out by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in the early 1930s. The ideal of contemporary sainthood that informed the Worker’s activities was, I maintain, informed by interpretations of central Christian figures like Christ, the saints, and the figure of the “holy fool” that placed special emphasis on their exemplary qualities. I will then consider whether Day, the Worker’s de facto leader, consistently adhered to the logic of exemplarity in her exercise of authority within the movement, given her reputation for authoritarianism and her occasional assertions of direct control over the New York Catholic Worker community and newspaper. Finally, I will argue that in a number of important respects the idea of exemplarity provides a more satisfactory framework than the Weberian theory of “charismatic” leadership for assessing Day’s influence over the movement and the continued flourishing of the movement after her death.
In the course of this discussion I hope to deepen our understanding of the relationship of the Catholic Worker to the anarchist tradition by outlining one of the ways in which the Worker’s Catholic faith was not, from an anarchist perspective, a liability but rather a resource. Most importantly, the connection to the exemplary tradition provided by Catholicism suggested a means of exercising leadership and authority through the power of examples and voluntary emulation rather than coercion. In this way, exemplarity brought to the movement coherence and direction that it might not otherwise have possessed, without compromising the autonomy and dignity of the movement’s members. In highlighting the ability of exemplarity to reconcile these sometimes-competing priorities, I hope to use the example of the Catholic Worker movement to suggest some larger lessons for anarchist thought and practice.
The Christian exemplum
Although the concept of exemplarity found fertile soil in the Christian tradition, it did not originate there. In Greek thought it can be discerned in the notion of the paradeigma, a term first invested with philosophical significance by Plato. For Plato, paradeigma referred to a model derived from the transcendent Forms at the centre of his ontology. He used the term to connote a top-down, general-to-particular relationship involving the appearance of divine qualities in the world of phenomena, although sensible objects could partake of the Forms only imperfectly.[4] In Aristotle’s work on rhetoric, by contrast, the idea of paradeigma was treated inductively, as a particular from which general conclusions could be derived.[5] The latter sense of the term, which gave paradeigma a functional role independent of larger ontological claims, was not far removed from the way in which early Greek historians like Herodotus and Thucydides began to conceive of the import of historical examples. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides first made explicit an idea at best implicit in Herodotus’ Histories: the study of history had utility in the present because it allowed one to learn from the examples—both good and bad—of one’s historical predecessors, and to act with prudence in confronting situations similar to those they faced.[6] Later historians like Xenophon and Ephorus gave paradeigma an even more prominent role in their work by introducing an extradiegetic authorial voice meant to identify exemplary conduct unambiguously and ensure that it would be recognized as such by the reader. This innovation was increasingly put in the service of didactic and moralistic aims by the Greek historian Polybius, as well as historians of ancient Rome like Livy, for whom the Latin term corresponding to paradeigma was exemplum.[7] Aside from the prominent place accorded exempla in ancient histories, orators like Cicero helped to make exempla a standard feature of Roman rhetoric.[8]
In Roman thought and culture, the idea of the exemplum was closely linked to the figure that modern parlance knows as the exemplar, an individual whose body of accomplishments as a whole is considered exemplary and worthy of emulation. Romans memorialized great personages in a manner that linked their great deeds to an underlying greatness of character, as reflected in physical monuments like public statuary and imagines (images of ancestors displayed in the atria of noble residences}, which often touted the high points of the individual’s résumé in pictorial or even list form. Exemplarity became intertwined not just with specific acts, but with the overarching biographies of exceptional people, setting the stage for the exemplary personal narratives later associated with the venerated figures of Christendom. Unsurprisingly, given the dominant values of Roman society, exemplars tended to be revered politicians and military leaders, national heroes whose most admirable actions involved the subordination of self and personal relationships to patriotic duty. Despite the fact that these figures were, in some sense, prototypes for the Christian exemplar, the nationalistic morality they embodied was roundly excoriated by early Christians like Augustine, whose interpretation of the exempla virtutis emphasized allegiance to a transcendent order beyond the saeculum.[9]
Christians may have been critical of the particular ways in which exemplarity was manifested in pagan thought and culture, but the idea of exemplarity itself thrived within Christianity. For Christians, writes Peter Brown, “God Himself was proposed to man as the Exemplar behind all exemplars.”[10] The exemplary relationship of God to man was facilitated by the idea that God, for all of His omniscience and omnipotence, was not an absolute Other to humanity. The creation myths of the early Hebrew Bible bequeathed to Christians the idea that human beings had been made in God’s image and raised the prospect of a godly original condition or essential nature that could be discerned and promoted even within the context of a fallen world. “The result of this view,” Brown continues, “was to present human history as containing a sequence of exemplars, each of which made real, at varying times and in varying degrees, the awesome potentiality of the first model of humanity.” While precedents can be identified in the prophetic tradition of the Christian Old Testament, the gospel narratives brought this idea of exemplarity to its climax in the figure of Jesus Christ, in whom “the original beauty of Adam. . . blazed forth.”[11] The precise nature of Christ—the relationship of His divine qualities to His human qualities—was of course one of the prickliest controversies within the early Church, and the significance of Christ’s deeds was interpreted differently depending on where one placed emphasis. But as early as the Epistles of Paul there was suggestion that Christ’s example was meant to be imitated by ordinary Christians: “Follow my example,” Paul exhorted the Corinthians, “as I follow Christ’s.”[12] According to this conception of examples building upon examples, an apostolic disciple of Christ like Paul was, as John Howard Yoder writes, “merely an exemplary follower of the true example.”[13]
Paul’s words capture both the foundational quality of exemplarity within Christianity—Christ conceived, henceforth, as the ultimate exemplar, a point of reference for all who follow Him—and the self-replicating quality of exempla, in which present exempla spawn future exempla by referring back to past exempla (even Christ Himself referred back to the “perfection” of the “heavenly Father”).[14] The proliferation of stories of saints in the Middle Ages attested to the potency of the exemplary idea, particularly among laypeople, for whom the vividness of a saintly example offered a concrete means of engaging with the teachings of the Church. In these stories, Christian principles were not transmitted in a dry, legalistic manner but instead embodied and dramatized in order to produce a visceral impact. It is probable, however, that the concretization of exemplarity in the tangible of specific persons whose humanness was less in question than Christ’s owed its appeal not only to its ability to make Christian doctrine more accessible, but to its vaguely subversive, anti-clerical quality. The exempla presented instances of self-sacrificing religious authenticity—sometimes associated with figures outside of the Church hierarchy—that were often meant to contrast with the privileged and hypocritical lives led by many Church officials. The exempla celebrated individual integrity rather than institutional position, proposing that individual holiness be judged on the basis of the way of life one adopted rather than the external trappings of religious authority. Accordingly, medieval authors like Chaucer and Gower placed emphasis on exemplarity “as doing, as factum, rather than dictum,” a prioritization of praxis that the saints shared—or so it was claimed—with Christ. As Larry Scanlon explains, “If even Christ’s dicta depend on his facta, then the textual authority of the clergy must always be secondary to their actual piety as a group of historical individuals.” By this measure, most clergy did not merit the level of respect bestowed upon them."[15]
As has already been demonstrated, there were always grounds within the Christian tradition for putting stress on the similarities between God and His creation, between God’s son and the creatures He was sent to redeem. Undoubtedly, the existence of these similarities helped to make plausible the suggestion that the characteristics and actions of God and Son stood in an exemplary relation to humanity, providing targets for aspiration and guides for action rather than being prohibitively transcendent. Nevertheless, until the rise of the mendicant orders in the 13th century, there was a general tendency to treat the idea of exemplarity metaphorically, to see in exceptional behaviour a moral lesson perhaps, but also the presence of something which, for the average person, was unreachably divine. As Christ began to be conceptualized less as an impossibly exalted, quasi-supernatural figure and more as the most perfect human being who ever lived, the idea that other human beings could live in “imitation” of Him became more influential. Figures like Saint Francis of Assisi adopted a more literal interpretation of what it meant to “imitate” Christ, aspiring not only to live up to His moral vision, but to replicate His voluntary poverty and His translation of neighbourly love into an active principle manifested in an ongoing commitment to good works. The godliness of Francis and those he himself inspired was expressed in a consistent and all-consuming pattern of life.[16]
Aside from what has already been canvassed in this necessarily brief overview, there are three further things to note about the Christian exemplum before assessing the way it was taken up by the Catholic Worker. First of all, the moral quality of Christian exemplarity was central—Christian exempla united not just universal and particular (as a more technical definition of exemplum might connote) but “ought” and “is.” They fit that category of exemplarity identified by the critical theorist Alessandro Ferrara as overcoming the “dichotomic view of our world as split between facts and values, facts and norms, Sein and Sollen, is and ought.” Exemplars, from this perspective, are “entities, material or symbolic, that are as they should be, atoms of reconciliation where is and ought merge and, in so doing, liberate an energy that sparks our imagination.”[17] Secondly, it is important to note that within mainstream Christianity the notion of the “imitation” of Christ was invoked not as a binding moral commandment so much as an exemplary ideal. Understandings of just how relevant such an ideal was to everyday people evolved over the course of time. Isolated groups always existed in which individuals attempted to attain a state of Christ-like “perfection,” but only gradually did similarly ambitious movements arise (like the Franciscans) that were strong enough to carve out an officially recognized place within the Church. Were we to carry the story of Christian exemplarity beyond the Catholic tradition specifically and into the 19th century, we would find a multiplication of groups aspiring to a Christ-like ideal and the increasing feeling that “sainthood” of a kind was within the reach of any committed practitioner of the Christian faith. Finally, we should highlight the tendency to see in the exemplum a kind of authority distinct from the law-like authority of Christian doctrine—authority that inspires imitation rather than commanding obedience. In some sense, exempla “compel” emulation, but they owe their influence principally to the voluntary actions of those who find their spirits stirred by them, not to feelings of obligation or threats of sanction for noncompliance.
Exemplarity and the origins of the Catholic Worker
There is ample evidence that the tradition of Christian exemplarity described above directly informed Dorothy Day’s and Peter Maurin’s visions for the Catholic Worker. It is in the nature of examples, however, that they tend to give rise to a multiplicity of interpretations, and it will be necessary not only to show that Day and Maurin found inspiration in the Christian exempla but to describe more precisely the manner in which they selectively appropriated the tradition for the sake of the movement. Both Day and Maurin, for instance, saw Christ’s example as a model with great relevance to their own activities. But their understanding of His example placed heavy stress on His human qualities and lent credence to their own emphasis on anarchism, decentralism, and active ministry to the poor. Day argued that
Philosophical anarchism, decentralism, requires that we follow the Gospel precept to be obedient to every living thing: “Be subject therefore to every human creature for God’s sake.” It means washing the feet of others, as Jesus did at the Last Supper. “You call me Master and Lord,” He said, “and rightly so, for that is what I am. Then if I, your Lord have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example; you are to do as I have done for you.” To serve others, not to seek power over them. Not to dominate, not to judge others.[18]
Maurin, similarly, maintained that “Self-giving love. . .was the example Christ gave to his followers and was the consistent witness of Christians in the early Church.” The implication was that the works of mercy articulated by Christ in Matthew 25 “must again become the Christian way of life.”[19] Day’s account of the facta of Christ’s life in her autobiography The Long Loneliness highlighted His humble origins, His eschewal of political power, His closeness to the people and concern for their material welfare:
He was born in a stable. . .He did not come to be a temporal King. . . He worked with His hands, spent the first years of His life in exile, and the rest of His early manhood in a crude carpentry shop in Nazareth. He fulfilled His religious duties in the synagogue and the temple. He trod the roads in His public life and the first men He called were fishermen, small owners of boats and nets. He was familiar with the migrant worker and the proletariat, and some of His parables dealt with them. He spoke of the living wage, not equal pay for equal work, in the parable of those who came at the first and the eleventh hour.[20]
Beyond the paramount example of Christ, the subsidiary exemplarity of the saints was frequently referenced by both Day and Maurin. Implicitly gesturing to the broader exemplary tradition, Maurin counselled Day early on in their collaboration that it was “better to know the lives of the saints than the lives of kings and generals.”[21] The advice was, perhaps, superfluous: from an early age, Day had been impressed by saintly demonstrations of piety and driven to imitate them. Long before her conversion to Catholicism, Day’s response to first hearing the story of a saint was to experiment with sleeping on the floor in her own attempt at asceticism.[22] As Day began to drift towards the Church, she was especially drawn to the life of Teresa of Avila, “a saint with whom [she] readily identified,” as Day’s biographer puts it.[23] The magnetic effect that Teresa and other saints had on Day was at first largely a consequence of their exemplary devotion, as Day struggled to transition from liberated bohemian to faithful adherent of the Church’s teachings.[24] Maurin, however, encouraged Day to view the saints not just as exemplars of personal moral probity but as exemplars of radical social action who had pioneered strategies of translating Christian love into active care for the underprivileged.[25] Maurin helped Day to see that the answer to her well-known question—“Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?”—lay at least in part in forgotten and underemphasized aspects of the Christian tradition itself.[26]
As important as Maurin’s perspective was in encouraging Day to mine the Christian past for unexploded “dynamite,” the fuller answer to her question was that the saintly precedents of Christian lore had to inspire analogous saintliness in the present. The movement Day and Maurin hoped to create would require, both realized, modern-day “saints,” and although they were hesitant to claim the mantle of sainthood for themselves,[27] they were less reluctant to apply the designation to one another. As Jim Forest writes, Maurin believed that Day “had the potential of becoming a new Saint Catherine of Siena, the outspoken medieval reformer and peace negotiator who had counselled and reprimanded both popes and princes. What Saint Catherine had done in the fourteenth century, Peter believed Dorothy could do in the twentieth.”[28] Day, likewise, regarded Maurin, who “lived the poverty he admired in St. Francis,” as something of a saint.[29] Maurin’s chief importance to the movement, in fact, may have been as an exemplar, as a “religious archetype and symbol.”[30] As Mel Piehl explains:
ultimately, Maurin’s most important function for Day was that he provided her—and through her the Catholic Worker movement—with a personal symbol of traditional Catholic spirituality. . .Because he advocated and lived a life of absolute poverty and generosity based on Catholic ideals, Maurin expressed perfectly Day’s most deeply held beliefs about religion and society. His humble appearance and openhearted simplicity brought to mind the saints she knew so well from her studies and suggested that sainthood was a present as well as a past reality.[31]
Day may indeed have had “an intuitive sense of saintliness, even when it came in strange disguises, and an intense desire to see the heroic potential of every person whom she met,”[32] but undoubtedly her exposure to Maurin played a substantial role in leading her to the conclusion that, in her own words, “There are many saints here, there and everywhere and not only the canonized saints that Rome draws to our attention.” Referring back to Saint Paul’s original call for Christians to live in imitation of Christ, Day held that “saints should be common” because “we are all called to be saints.”[33]
As Day and Maurin interpreted them, then, the examples set by the saints were not to be regarded with passive awe but to be consulted as guides, not just by the “leaders” of the Catholic Worker movement, but by its rank-and-file, for whom it was not out of the question to aspire to saintliness in their own lives. The implication was that “the traditional ‘counsels of perfection’ applied to laypeople as well as to those in religious orders.”[34] One means the Worker adopted of inculcating this view was through the sponsorship of annual weeklong retreats, inspired by the retreat movement of the Canadian Jesuit Father Onesimus Lacouture. These retreats
offered a lofty vision of personal holiness, urging every Christian to aspire to the “counsels of perfection” that mainstream Catholicism enjoined only on members of religious orders. Participants were urged to take the Sermon on the Mount literally—to turn the other cheek and go the second mile—and to give up even minor indulgences if these stood in the way of loving Christ and the poor. In the retreat, Day explained, “We had to aim at perfection; we had to be guided by the folly of the Cross.”[35]
Although their aims were in a sense “lofty,” however, these retreats helped to convince Day of the wisdom of the “Little Way” advocated by one of her favourite saints, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who had modelled the possibility of sanctifying even the smallest and humblest acts. The greatness of Thérèse lay not in superhuman feats but in the plodding consistency with which she consecrated her life to God. While Day had initially been attracted to “spectacular saints who were impossible to imitate,” she found in Thérèse a message “obviously meant for each one of us, confronting us with daily duties, simple and small, but constant.”[36] The example of Thérèse illustrated the possibility of bridging the lowly and the transcendent within the context of everyday life, of planting modest “seeds” in one’s own patch of ground that would ultimately bear fruit far beyond it in myriad, often unexpected ways. This idea was best captured, perhaps, in one of Day’s favourite metaphors, the “loaves and fishes” of scripture: “we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time; we can be responsible only for the one action of the present moment. But we can beg for an increase of love in our hearts that will vitalize and transform all our individual actions, and know that God will take them and multiply them, as Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes.”[37]
The prospects of divine assistance aside, Day understood that in order for small actions to have this kind of multiplier effect they had to have propagandistic value, for actions cannot qualify as exemplary unless they command the attention of an audience.[38] This meant that some thought had to be given to the image that the Worker projected to those outside the movement. Rather than relying on the simplified, stereotypical imagery of traditional propaganda, however, the Worker consciously courted an image that looked, on the surface, counterintuitive and even contradictory. Workers challenged the idea that cleanliness was next to godliness through their “often ragtag appearance,”[39] they fought to eradicate poverty even as they embraced it themselves, and they preached the need for social action while adopting an approach that was strangely tolerant of failure. The upshot of the Worker’s incongruous appearance was that it encouraged spectators to re-evaluate entrenched assumptions about the nature of holiness and the vocation of the saint. Day often appealed to the idea of the “holy fool” to capture this relationship between the quizzical spectator and the spectated.[40] A recurring character type within the Christian tradition sometimes attributed even to Christ Himself,[41] the holy fool is an individual whose outward bearing is contemptuous of social conventions, but whose actions hint at his underlying saintliness and superiority of character. The holy fool has sometimes been interpreted as engaging in wilful deceit, or at the very least in a complex performance meant both to conceal and reveal his true nature.[42] Day clearly liked the implication that immediate appearances can be deceiving, and that it was necessary to look for the deeper meaning in seemingly eccentric and provocative behaviour before passing judgment. There was no component of deliberate concealment in the Worker’s actions, however: its departure from accepted notions of propriety was meant—in part, anyway—to expose the ways in which social and cultural conditions worked against genuine godliness, causing saints to appear peculiar, irrelevant, or even threatening. Within the context of the movement, therefore, the holy fool metaphor took on a significance aimed less at the exceptional qualities of the individuals in question, and more at the social structures that made such qualities appear exceptional. It also reinforced the “loaves and fishes” idea that the effects of one’s actions were not rationally calculable, that the path of saintliness was not, therefore, the path of the so-called “rational actor,” who is dependent upon conventional wisdom and focused on attaining immediate, tangible results within existing institutional structures.
Aside from the influence exerted on Day and Maurin by the figures of Christ, the saint, and the holy fool, the philosophy of personalism—a term which, for Maurin in particular, often served as a pithy encapsulation of the Worker’s outlook—strengthened their attraction to the idea of exemplarity. While the concept of personalism is too complicated and capacious to be examined in detail here, a few ideas falling under that heading can be singled out as especially relevant. Like the exemplars of the Christian tradition, the notion of the “person,” as formulated by early-20th century thinkers like Nikolai Berdyaev and Emmanuel Mounier, united the sacred with the secular. Personalism held that each person, in all of his or her uniqueness, was an absolute end, made in the image of God and therefore not to be sacrificed to any ostensibly “higher” cause. The same love and respect that one bestowed upon God was to be bestowed upon the least of His creatures as well. This helped to explain Day’s determination “to meet Christ in the persons who came to her.”[43] Personalism fostered a way of seeing that sensitized its exponents to the godly qualities of everyday people and held out the possibility that saintliness could be embodied not simply in abstract principles or Christian folklore but in living flesh and blood, in the here and now.
Aside from encouraging an exemplary way of seeing, personalism encouraged an exemplary way of acting. Rather than offloading social problems like poverty onto the impersonal, bureaucratic apparatus of the welfare state, Workers were expected to address them in a manner that not only established a direct relationship between benefactor and beneficiary (whose human dignity was violated by being termed a “client” or a “case”) but that demanded personal sacrifice and fostered personal development. The Worker saw social change as inseparable from personal change: thus, “While trying to transform society…a Catholic Worker was engaged in transforming himself as well.”[44] The development of the self in this sense was personalistic rather than individualistic: cultivating the personality was supposed to result, in the words of the French philosopher and Catholic Worker supporter Jacques Maritain, in “the generous self of the heroes and saints.”[45] The philosophy of personalism helped to enrich, therefore, the links the Worker posited between exemplary personal qualities, the striving for saintliness in everyday life, and the struggle for social change.
Exemplarity, leadership, and authority
If the influence of the exemplary tradition on Day and Maurin has been well documented, less well understood is the relationship between exemplarity and the operation of leadership and authority within the Catholic Worker movement. In the third section of this chapter, I will argue that the concept of exemplarity is in many ways more useful than the Weberian concept of “charisma” in capturing these aspects of the movement as well as explaining the movement’s ability to sustain itself in the absence of Day, who died in 1980. I hope to demonstrate that the Worker’s emphasis on exemplarity created a functional model of leadership and authority which, by eschewing domination and coercion in favour of voluntary emulation, helped to reconcile these components of the movement with anarchist principles.
Before exploring these claims, however, it must be admitted that leadership and authority in the Catholic Worker movement were not always exerted in a strictly exemplary fashion, particularly in the case of Day, whose influence was in a number of important instances both direct and, arguably, authoritarian. Day has, in fact, been described as something of a “benevolent dictator.”[46] As Catholic Worker John Cort remembered: “I don’t think I ever argued with her, so great was her authority among us. What it came down to was that the Catholic Worker was an extraordinary combination of anarchy and dictatorship.”[47] Michael Harrington, a member of the movement as a young man, had a similar impression: “we were living in a community where, whenever we made a decision, we all had a completely democratic, anarchist discussion, and then Dorothy made up her mind. The place was run on a führer concept, and Dorothy was the führer.”[48] Day ensured that “certain convictions (pacifism, personalism, the centrality of the works of mercy) prevailed in the Worker publications as non-negotiable and publicly expressed values.”[49] It was one of these convictions—pacifism—that inspired Day’s most ambitious attempt to exercise control, not only over the New York Catholic Worker community, but over the movement as a whole: unflinching in her commitment to nonviolence during World War II, Day insisted that Catholic Worker communities throughout the country adopt a pacifist position in their publications or disassociate themselves from the movement.
Furthermore, Day often used her influence to ensure that her conservative orientation to Church theology and hierarchy predominated, in form if not in spirit. This was most evident, perhaps, in Day’s approach to her role as overseer of the New York Catholic Worker paper. Day used this privileged position to supervise the hiring and activities of editors as well as the contributions of writers, closely monitoring the paper’s content: “Day allowed her writers and editors creative freedom,” Nancy Roberts writes, “but within what she perceived as Catholic Worker principles. She usually screened everything that went into the paper, with few exceptions.” Rather than risk a quarrel with the matriarch, many writers resorted to “self-censorship.”[50] This meant, for one thing, that no criticism of church officials was to be found in the paper. It also meant that the paper carried many articles espousing traditional roles for women and was prevented from becoming an active advocate for women’s liberation after the emergence of the women’s movement. Additionally, Day used the paper as a means of promulgating a very conservative view of abortion and birth control, labelling both “genocide.”[51]
Finally, Day’s de facto authority as watchful “mother and grandmother”[52] of the movement meant that “Certain behavioural assumptions pervaded life at the Catholic Worker.” She would often chastise people whose conduct she disapproved of, as in the case of Jim Forest, whose “divorce and remarriage in 1967 moved Dorothy to request that Forest remove himself as head of the Catholic Peace Fellowship or she would remove her name from the list of sponsors.”[53] On another occasion, she banned alcohol at Peter Maurin Farm. Her most forceful actions, however, consisted of the outright expulsion of individuals from the movement. The most notorious of these episodes took place in 1962, when “there were young people living in Worker house apartments whose standards were so at variance with traditional morality that Dorothy, in one of her moments of a towering righteous anger, threw them all out.”[54]
Within her own Worker community in New York, Day’s exercise of authority—as has often been remarked—was to a large extent modelled on the monastic role of the abbess, who exercised final sovereignty within an institution whose components functioned more or less autonomously on an everyday level. While many of the criticisms of Day’s heavy-handedness by other Workers are undoubtedly justified, any explanation of Day’s willingness to vest such authority in herself must take into consideration the fact that she felt a strong personal responsibility for the institutional survival of the New York Catholic Worker. Arguably, it was because Day voluntarily shouldered this burden and the complex and often painful problems of decision-making that came along with it that other figures within the movement—Maurin in particular—were able to lead lives of greater consistency, to adopt more literally “the values of smallness and openness to failure that Day espoused.” As Dan McKanan points out, Maurin’s “practice, during all the years he was associated with the movement, was simply to outline his ‘program’ and provide a personal example of a life of scholarship and manual labour, then leave it to others to follow suit or not.”[55] Determined to build a movement, Day clearly felt that she could not afford the luxury of perfect exemplarity, and it was in New York more than elsewhere that the instrumentalities of movement-making stood out in her actions and gave them a more controlling aspect. It is crucial to acknowledge with McKanan, however, that whatever truth there is to claims about Day’s authoritarian streak, “her authoritarianism had little influence on the movement beyond New York.” In fact, “The one time she seriously tried to assert her authority on a national level”—the aforementioned effort to force other Worker communities to adopt a position of absolute pacifism or leave the movement— “the attempt backfired,” resulting in a rash of defections by and dissolutions of Worker communities and even the burning of the New York Catholic Worker.[56]
However dictatorial some of Day’s actions during her “long tenure as charismatic leader” may seem, Piehl is correct to argue that ultimately “the strength of Day’s leadership was exercised as much through her role as spiritual writer and exemplar as through her position as head of the movement.”[57] What I would like to suggest in evaluating that claim, however, is the utility of making a further distinction, a distinction between the concepts—both of which are invoked by Piehl—of “charisma” and “exemplarity.” Piehl is far from alone in attaching the ideas of charisma and charismatic leadership to Day and to the Worker more generally. Aside from one full-length study of this connection,[58] it is frequently invoked in the secondary literature: Day’s “charismatic leadership” has been described, for example, as “the glue of the movement,” at least during her lifetime.[59] Max Weber’s pioneering theory of charismatic leadership and authority—although it has been subjected to much critique and revision—remains the standard point of reference in this literature, and for this reason it is most useful to distinguish the concept of exemplarity from the concept of charisma as understood by Weber.[60]
There are at least three important respects in which Weber’s theory of charisma and the concept of exemplarity would seem to be in tension. Firstly, Weber’s understanding of charisma puts emphasis on the perception of special qualities in an exceptional individual. He describes charisma as “the surrender to the extraordinary. . .i.e., actual revelation or grace resting in such a person as a savior, a prophet, or a hero.”[61] Charismatic leaders are seen as “the bearers of specific gifts of body and mind” that are so unusual they are “considered ‘supernatural’ (in the sense that not everybody could have access to them).”[62] Charisma is thus bound up with the specific person who bears it—it is “a highly individual quality” not easily reproduced because inaccessible to most.[63] The corollary of the idea that charisma is a scarce resource is that only a select few will possess the qualifications for leadership, sharply distinguishing them from those over whom they exercise their authority.
Secondly, although Weber gives charisma some strikingly anarchistic features, arguing that it “transforms all values and breaks all traditional and rational norms”64 and, famously, that it is “the specifically creative revolutionary force of history,”[65] he ultimately makes it a handmaiden to political domination. The portrait Weber paints of the charismatic leader is of a figure who aspires to march at the head of a column of obedient disciples, a figure who out of a special sense of personal mission “seizes the task for which he is destined and demands that others obey and follow him.”[66] While the charismatic leader’s followers technically sign on to his cause voluntarily, in some sense “it is their duty to recognize his charisma.”[67] In other words, his superior qualities generate a sense of obligation that takes on a compulsory aspect. The charismatic leader may begin by inspiring others, but he ultimately puts inspiration in the service of command. Weber envisioned this playing out quite literally in the realm of politics, where his personal preference was for strong but plebiscitarian leadership, combining wide executive prerogative with popular appeal. Charisma’s political utility, as Weber saw it, was in its ability to secure the consent of the public to the exercise of power by elites and thus obviate the need for the naked exercise of political domination.
Thirdly, Weber saw charisma as inherently unstable and transitory. This was precisely because it is premised on the recognition of unique qualities in individuals. Even when the original charismatic leader is alive, he can only perpetuate his authority by “proving his powers in practice” again and again, by continuously working “miracles”—a feat few are able to sustain indefinitely.[68] When the charismatic leader dies, the group or movement built up around him almost inevitably experiences a severe crisis of succession, a desperate search for a replica of what cannot be replicated. To forestall such crises and ensure their survival, charismatic movements must “transform charisma and charismatic blessing from a unique, transitory gift of grace of extraordinary times and persons into a permanent possession of everyday life.”[69] It is for this reason that charisma is subject to perennial decay: charismatic movements attempt to institutionalize the authority associated with the charismatic leader, adopting strategies of rationalization and bureaucratization that make authority stable and transmissible. While the organizations that evolve out of this process may continue to benefit from a lingering charismatic aura, on a dayto-day level their operations look much the same as those of any other rationalized enterprise and generally bear little resemblance to the charismatic leader’s original vision.
Each of these three characteristics of charisma can be usefully contrasted with the characteristics I have associated with the concept of exemplarity. While exemplarity proposes that some individuals are especially accomplished, for example, it is less conducive to a rigid distinction between leader and follower, since examples must, in some sense, be accessible to those expected to imitate them. Rather than treating the exemplar as a quasi-divine figure in possession of unique qualities, exemplarity envisions people operating on a more or less equal plane of ability. Exemplarity presumes, in other words, that exceptional people do not have a monopoly on the qualities they exemplify, and that the proper response to exemplary behaviour is not genuflection or obedience, but an effort to discover and develop similar qualities in oneself. Both Day and Maurin, as we have seen, demurred when characterized by others as saints, and, like most exemplars, downplayed their own exemplarity by claiming merely to be imitating even worthier predecessors. Furthermore, they articulated an egalitarianism of aspiration according to which all members of the movement were invited to adopt saintliness as their own ideal. Day went even further, in fact, by consistently highlighting saintly qualities in the actions of figures outside the movement altogether, including the many secular radicals she counted as personal friends.
Exemplarity also differs from Weber’s charisma in that it is, by its very nature, less likely to be employed as a means of legitimating domination. The actions of the exemplar, unlike the charismatic leader, have little to do with amassing and commanding followers.[70] The exemplar is generally content to exert an indirect influence, and imitation of the exemplar is voluntary rather than obligatory. The fact that the Catholic Worker used the idea of exemplarity to undermine rather than reinforce differences between leaders and led speaks to the fact that there was no general drive for domination within the movement. Although Day may have abused her authority at times, she also helped to ensure that the Worker remained “a voluntary organization eschewing credo and constitution.”71 Day actively promoted the idea that authority of all kinds—from exemplary authority to the authority of God[72]—must be willingly acceded to by the individuals subject to it, and she explicitly rejected—along with other Workers—the model of command and obedience epitomized by the state.
Finally, while charisma is distinguished by its incessant tendency to decay, exemplarity has a self-proliferating quality: exemplars, as already noted, tend to give rise to new exemplars, while charisma, bottled up in the exceptional few, is less communicable and thus shorter-lived. This fact may help to explain the Catholic Worker’s failure to follow the trajectory Weber prophesied for charismatic movements that seek to overcome the mortality of their leaders and the resultant loss of charisma through routinization and bureaucratization. Even before Day’s death the Catholic Worker’s particular brand of exemplarity, which urged Workers to keep things “small” and to found autonomous communities in response to new needs, made it unusually indisposed to the idea of a large, bureaucratic organization. When Day’s health began to decline in the 1970s, the movement did not suddenly abandon its principles in a frantic bid to institutionalize her authority. This is not to suggest that Day’s role in the movement had been insignificant in holding things together over the years: her exemplarity did exert a kind of centripetal influence that helped imbue the loosely-organized Worker communities with a sense of common identity and the feeling that they were orbiting, however autonomously, around a common core. But there was no suggestion that the only way for the movement to survive was to become radically more centralized and rule-bound after her death. Rather, the movement has continued to favour centralization of a symbolic rather than an institutional kind. As McKanan notes, what is even more remarkable than the Worker’s avoidance of bureaucratization, given its model of organization, is that “it has not simply disintegrated into hundreds of local houses and farms, without any sense of connection to a larger movement.”[73] McKanan concludes, in line with the thesis being proposed here, that what accounts for this is largely that Day “modeled a practice of friendship” that fostered ties between diverse communities and even “reached beyond the boundaries of her movement.”[74] With Day’s death, Catholic Worker communities themselves took up the role that Day had exemplified, providing support and encouragement to one another and sustaining the movement’s sense of identity.[75] It was the exemplary model of leadership and authority that Day brought to the Worker from its origins onward, in contradistinction to the charismatic leader’s drive for domination, that allowed the movement as a whole to be “a multifaceted anarchist affair, with a variety of other leaders and tendencies.”[76]
As the foregoing discussion makes clear, the Catholic Worker’s reliance upon an exemplary model of leadership and authority has had the (largely intended) effect of enhancing the anarchist aspects of the movement. The concept of exemplarity has allowed the Worker to draw sustenance from contemporary and historical examples of excellence while simultaneously emphasizing the equality and the empowerment of all individuals within the movement, who are urged to think of themselves as having the capacity for self-determination as well as the capacity for selfless commitment to those in need. The Worker’s emphasis on the noncoercive and indirect influence of examples rather than the coercive and direct influence of commands has meshed nicely with the traditional anarchist resistance to all forms of authority that are not voluntarily accepted. Finally, the concept of exemplarity has helped Workers to envision the possibility of a movement that opts for the centralization of common identity and purpose rather than the centralization of institutions, enabling Worker communities to develop autonomously while retaining ties of solidarity and support to the rest of the movement. It is not an exaggeration to say that for Day, Maurin, and the Catholic Worker, anarchism was not embraced as an abstract political ideology, but rather understood as the social arrangement that flowed logically out of exemplarity pushed to its limit. While this points to the counterintuitive conclusion that the Catholic Worker’s Catholicism has—at least in some respects—enriched rather than undermined its anarchism, it also suggests that scholars of anarchism would do well to look more carefully at the potential for exemplarity to influence organizational structure and to serve as a binding agent within anarchist movements and communities. Exemplarity may help to separate authority from domination and to explain how the phenomenon that Paul McLaughlin labels “moral authority” may indeed be reconcilable with anarchist principles.[77]
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have attempted to use the concept of exemplarity to account for the affinity the Catholic Worker movement found between Catholicism’s traditional celebration of saintly exempla and anarchism, the political philosophy that best describes the approach to organization the movement adopted internally, and promoted externally, through its social activism. More specifically, I have endeavoured to dissipate some of the “bewilderment” that many scholars have experienced in trying to make sense of Dorothy Day’s “successful use of authority,” by arguing that on the level of the movement as a whole she adopted an exemplary model of leadership that was ultimately more decisive than her occasionally authoritarian impulses.[78] This is not because I wish to exonerate Day of her shortcomings—indeed, I believe that she is open to criticism not only for overstepping her bounds with respect to the direct influence she exerted on the movement, but also for the example she set. In some ways, her exemplary authority, quite aside from whatever direct power she possessed, also served to close down possibilities within the movement that might otherwise have emerged.[79] Regardless of the manner in which Day wielded the exemplary leadership I have attributed to her, however, examining her relationship to the broader movement—in which, as Nancy Roberts writes, “Day’s authority was most reinforced by the power of her own pristine example”[80]—can help us to discern the concept of exemplarity in action and to weigh its merits. That Day should go down as the “inventor” of Catholic radicalism in the United States is instructive, for it teaches us one last, ironic, lesson about exemplarity. Exemplars are rarely the straightforward imitators of past greatness that they claim to be. Rather, in attempting to make the exemplary models of the past relevant to the present, they more often than not create something new. The chain of exemplary causation is as much about innovation as it is about the endless recycling of accomplishment. The greatest exemplars—those who liberate the sparks of the imagination rather than inspiring mere mimicry—are those whose deeds are familiar enough to bring to mind the best of the exemplary tradition, yet who steer the profound authority of that tradition into new channels.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, Alex Christoyannopoulos, Matt Adams, Christina Doonan, and Vivian Kao for helpful feedback, as well as Jeff Stout for his comments on an earlier version of this article.
Notes
1↑ The quote is from Octave Mirbeau. See the “Introduction” to Daniel Guerin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), vii.
2↑ Mel Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982), x.
3↑ Important examples of this strain of scholarship include Alexander Gelley, ed., Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), Irene E. Harvey, Labyrinths of Exemplarity: At the Limits of Deconstruction (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002), Bryan R. Warnick, Imitation and Education: A Philosophical Inquiry into Learning by Example (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008), Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/52 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/53 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/54 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/55 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/56 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/57 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/58 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/59 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/60 Page:Essays in Anarchism and Religion Volume 01.pdf/61