From Fruit to Root - A Genealogy of "Radical" Hospitality

Chapter Three.

[Continued from Chapter Two, Part 3.]

What Hath Postmodernism To Do With Romanism? A Lot.

Primarily undergirding the “radical hospitality” of Teresa, Maurin, and Day — and those who were influenced by them — were Roman Catholic Personalism and Communitarianism. These views stressed the primacy of the social body over and against the individual, teaching that the individual’s true humanity consists in his acting with and for the other. The prevalence of this kind of anti-individualist, anti-capitalist, and pro-communitarian thinking was in the air during this time (i.e. 1930s), and is evidenced in the publication of many philosophical journals addressing these matters.

The most historically significant of these publications was Esprit, created by philosopher Emmanuel Mounier. As B. Jaye Miller notes, the journal “included Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Jews, political radicals and political conservatives, anarchists, Marxists, and fascists”¹ voicing the kinds of personalist and communitarian ideas echoed by Maurin and propagated by Day in her writings. Esprit was intended “to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of modern life and to a rebuilding of communitarian sensibilities in modern society.”²

Intellectuals of this time “were deeply troubled by the economic and political crises of the Depression and the rise of Hitler.”³ And it is in light of this that Esprit’s founder, Emmanuel Mounier,

…spoke of bourgeois individualism and rejected the search for tranquility that he felt characterized bourgeois life….Mounier saw the bourgeois man as an artificial man, severed from the health of work and human communion. The bourgeois man was set on the cultivation of his own ego and dedicated to the quest for power over others.⁴

What was needed was a new social philosophy and system that had a high regard for the human person. The exchange of ideas would eventually become a conflict between two groups whose socio-political theories were quite similar, but differed with respect to theology and, consequently, anthropology — namely, the French Roman Catholic philosophers and the Communists.

These two groups “…taught…that goods at one time in early human history belonged to all, and that all ought to have the use of such goods today.”⁵ They also relativized individual rights in light of “the common good.” Pope John Paul II explains that

The principle of the common good, to which every aspect of social life must be related if it is to attain its fullest meaning, stems from the dignity, unity and equality of all people. According to its primary and broadly accepted sense, the common good indicates “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily”.⁶

As for Karl Marx, his philosophical position is not substantially different. For as Jonathan Daly explains —

The telos for humanity that [Marx] imagined and posited…was a perfect society. …The productive level would be astonishingly high, making “it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic,” as he wrote in the German Ideology…⁷

In both instances, “the common good” is “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” Whereas Roman Catholicism is religious and, therefore, entails a somewhat different anthropology than that espoused by the atheistic communists, the overlap between these two ways of thinking is evident.

Their similarities are not only theoretical; they are also practical. Day notes the similarities between the religious practice of “radical hospitality” and what she experienced during her time as a communist, writing —

Peter [Maurin]’s idea of hospices seemed a simple and logical one to me, hospices such as they had in the Middle Ages for the poor and the wayfarer and which we certainly very much needed today. 

…He quoted St. Jerome, that every house should have a “Christ’s room” for our brother who was in need. That “the coat which hangs in one’s closet belongs to the poor.”

…I was familiar enough with the hospitality of the Communist, with the voluntary poverty of the Communist. At a meeting that very week of the farmers’ delegation, coming back from Washington and going back to their homes in the Middle West and New England, the chairman had called upon the audience to provide hospitality for the delegates.

“Who has an empty bed in their homes?” he wanted to know. “Who will put up one of the comrades for the next few days?” And hundreds of hands were raised.

It was like the Christian gesture put forth by the Daily Worker during the seamen’s strike two years ago when the editors called upon the readers to provide Christmas dinners to the strikers, and so many responded that two thousand were fed. In the old days many of my friends had hitch-hiked around the country organizing for unions and for Communist affiliates, and they were always put up in homes of the workers and shared their poverty with them.⁸

Day’s sentiment here parallels Butterfield’s statement in TGH where she clearly sees the strong similarities between “radically ordinary hospitality” and the “social-gospel practices” of liberal churches. It also shows us that the difference between the “radical hospitality” of the communists and the Roman Catholics was not primarily ethical but theological, which, as we noted in the last chapter, is identified as the “big difference” between Butterfield’s “radical hospitality” and the actions of the liberal churches as well in TGH. Day’s words demonstrate that her “radical hospitality” and Butterfield’s “radically ordinary hospitality” share similar, if not identical, motivations as well.

Given the influence of the French Catholic Personalists on Maurin and, therefore, Day, it is even more striking that Butterfield’s “radically ordinary hospitality” differs from that of the liberal churches because it recognizes the dignity of every human person, just as the Day’s “radical hospitality” differs from that of the communists for the same reason. For both writers, the dignity of the human being made in God’s image is something for which secular versions of social justice fail to account. They both advance a “Christian” corrective that places a great emphasis on the human person as a member of the community. 

And this is where we see the intersection of Roman Catholic social teaching and postmodern philosophy. For among the French Roman Catholic Existentialists and Personalists, we find influential Catholic luminaries like Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) and Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973), men who worked with, and alongside, the French philosopher of ethics who would have a massive influence on Jacques Derrida and his notion of “radical hospitality.” This philosopher was Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), a French Jewish Personalist who published “many” articles critiquing “mass democracy”  [i.e. classical liberalism] in Mounier’s journal Esprit.⁹

Additionally, as Edward Baring notes, Jacques Derrida’s thought “can be understood within the context of French Christian philosophy”¹⁰ which marked “the milieu in which deconstruction first developed.”¹¹ It was during his time in the “Lycee Louis-le-Grand…one of the elite Parisian Ecoles Préparatoires,”¹² that Derrida studied under French Catholic philosopher Etienne Borne, “one of the founding members of the MRP [i.e. Catholic Socialist Democrats] and a constant defender of Christianity against atheism.”¹³ Afterward, Derrida entered the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where Catholicism and Communism were in conflict and “had a profound impact on the type of philosophy studied at the Ecole.”¹⁴

In that context, the Roman Catholic philosophers’ teaching on the dignity of man, over and against the teaching of communists, made a lasting impression on Derrida’s thinking. Baring writes — 

Unlike the communists, for whom the antagonism between humanists and antihumanists caused an insuperable rift in Marxist theory, Derrida cleaved closer to the Christians, for whom the humanist assertion of Man’s need for God and the antihumanist rejection of the autonomous self were never so dramatically opposed.¹⁵

[…]

In Derrida’s essays from the period 1949–52, he followed the Christian existentialists in their rejection of human reason’s absolute validity, in the necessary return to experience, and – through an analysis of this experience – the opening up of the possibility or even a moral necessity of faith in God.¹⁶

While Derridean postmodernism and Roman Catholicism are clearly not identical, there are some philosophical commonalities between them. Derrida, as I noted above, found value in the “Christian” Existentialists’ opposition to “human reason’s absolute validity,” a theme that dominates most postmodern philosophy, as it is an extended critique of Enlightenment rationalism, broadly conceived.¹⁷ While differing in many respects, Derrida nevertheless also held to the belief that the subject/person is one whose identity is formed and sustained by dialogical/dialectical interactions with others in society.¹⁸ He also shares in common with the Catholic Existentialists, Personalists, and Communitarians opposition to the development of individualism and capitalism.

It is here necessary to state explicitly what has been implied above. Butterfieldian “radically ordinary hospitality” and Derridean “radical hospitality” are genealogically linked, sharing the same philosophical foundation — Roman Catholic social teaching as articulated by French Catholic Existentialist and Personalist philosophers. This is of great importance to our study, given that the French personalists, following a long history of Roman Catholic interpreters, interpreted Matthew 25:31-46 in the same manner as Butterfield and her evangelical predecessors. [Continued in Chapter Four.]

[Continued in Chapter Four.]

1. “Anarchism and French Catholicism in Esprit”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan—Mar, 1976), 164.

2. ibid., 163.

3. ibid., 164.

4. ibid., 165-166. (emphasis added)

5. Robbins, Ecclesiastical Megalomania.

6. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpeace/documents/rc_pc_justpeace_doc_20060526_compendio-dott-soc_en.html#Meaning%20and%20primary%20implications. (emphasis added)

7. “Bolshevik Power and Ideas of the Common Good”, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, June 4, 2015, https://isi.org/modern-age/bolshevik-power-and-ideas-of-the-common-good/.

8. On Hospitality, 6. (emphasis added) [https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/themes/On%20Hospitality%20(Dorothy%20Day).pdf]

9. Alford, C. Fred. “Levinas and Political Theory” in Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April: 2004), 157.

10. The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5.

11. ibid.

12. ibid., 55.

13. ibid., 56.

14. ibid., 97.

15. ibid., 5. (emphasis added)

16. ibid., 64. (emphasis added)

17. I am using the word rationalism to denote the primacy of reason in all matters, not in the narrower philosophical sense.

18. While postmodernism announced “the death of the subject” it was not announcing the annihilation of subjectivity, but recasting it as the product of a confluence of material and ideological — broadly speaking, sociological — realities. Derrida’s concept of the “decentered self” corresponds to what is today known as the “dialogical self.” For more on this see Wiley, Norbert. “Pragmatism and the Dialogical Self”, in International Journal for Dialogical Science, (Spring: 2006), Vol. 1, No. 1, 5-21. This dialogical self theory is distinct from the theory articulated by Hubert J.M. Hermans, et al. and their successors. For more on Hermans’ theory see Hermans, Hubert J.M. “The Dialogical Self: Toward a Theory of Personal and Cultural Positioning”, in Culture & Psychology Vol. 7, No. 3, (2001), 243-281.