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
