On Work and War: the Words and Deeds of Dorothy Day and Simone Weil
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
ON WORK AND WAR: THE WORDS AND DEEDS OF DOROTHY DAY AND SIMONE WElL by Nancy Pollak PROJECT SUBMlllED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN LIBERAL STUDIES in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program O Nancy J. Pollak 2005 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2005 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL NAME: Nancy Pollak DEGREE: Master of Arts, Liberal Studies TITLE of PROJECT: ON WORK AND WAR: THE WORDS AND DEEDS OF DOROTHY DAY AND SIMONE WEIL Examining Committee: Chair: Anne-Marie Feenberg-Dibon Dr. Michael Fellman Senior Supervisor Professor of History Dr. June Sturrock Supervisor Professor Emeritus, English Dr. Eleanor Stebner External Examiner Associate Professor, Humanities Date Approved: November 17.2005 SIMON FRASER UNWERS~TY~ibra ry DECLARATION OF PARTIAL COPY RIGHT LICENCE The author, whose copyright is declared on the title page of this work, has granted to Simon Fraser University the right to lend this thesis, project or extended essay to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. The author has further granted permission to Simon Fraser University to keep or make a digital copy for use in its circulating collection, and, without changing the content, to translate the thesislproject or extended essays, if technically possible, to any medium or format for the purpose of preservation of the digital work. The author has further agreed that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by either the author or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without the author's written permission. Permission for public performance, or limited permission for private scholarly use, of any multimedia materials forming part of this work, may have been granted by the author. This information may be found on the separately catalogued multimedia material and in the signed Partial Copyright Licence. The original Partial Copyright Licence attesting to these terms, and signed by this author, may be found in the original bound copy of this work, retained in the Simon Fraser University Archive. Simon Fraser University Library Burnaby, BC, Canada ABSTRACT Dorothy Day (1 897-1980), American organizer of the Catholic Worker movement, is a heroic figure among peace and social justice activists. Simone Weil(1909 -1943), French mystic and philosopher, is celebrated in intellectual circles. Both women trained their attention on a liberating vision of work and were unsparing in their critique of war. Both adopted Catholicism as the home that best reflected their spiritual aspirations. The interplay of radicalism and religion was the compelling feature of their lives. As political activists and spiritual innovators, Day and Weil framed the challenges of their generation in unorthodox ways. Their encounters with suffering and injustice led them to stretch the fabric of political thought to include human experience on an intimate level. This paper is a case study of how two extraordinary twentieth-century women, politically rebellious yet religiously obedient, responded to their times. iii Approval ........................................................... ii Abstract ........................................................... iii Tableofcontents .................................................... iv Introduction ......................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Dorothy Day: Early Years. and the Spirituality of Work ........... 3 Becoming Catholic .............................................. 5 Peter Maurin and the birth of the Catholic Worker movement .................. 6 Mining the Catholic sources ...................................... 9 The Spirituality of Work ........................................... 10 Work and the machine .......................................... 11 Chapter 2: Simone Weil: Her Origins. and the Puzzle of Work .............. 15 ThePuzzleofWork ............................................. 19 Necessity. obedience. and the mysticism of work ........................ 22 Chapter 3: Dorothy Day: The Active Pacifist ............................... 26 Unjustwar ..................................................... 29 The Qualities of Her Mercy ......................................... 31 Putting Theory into Action ......................................... 36 Unwavering: The Second World War .................................. 37 Uncivil. indefensible .......................................... 42 Disarming the Heart ............................................. 43 Chapter 4: Simone Weil: Metaphysician of War ............................49 TheBodyinMeansandEnds .......................................50 FacingtheBeast ................................................. 53 "Paris was the rear" ............................................ 55 Abandoning pacifism .......................................... 58 Humiliation: Colonization of the mind .................................. 61 The Terrible Gift of War ........................................... 63 Measuring the dominion of force .................................... 64 Loving in extreme emptiness ...................................... 67 Chapter 5: With Hands and Minds Unbound ............................... 71 Endnotes ............................................................ 80 Sources ............................................................. 92 Dorothy Day and Simone Weil. Work and war. These few words, with their peculiar prosody, are the subject of this paper: An exploration of the ideas and actions of two extraordinary twentieth-century women in the realms of work and war. Dorothy Day (1897-1980), American journalist and organizer of the Catholic Worker movement, is a heroic figure among peace and social justice activists. Sirnone Weil(1909 -1943), French mystic, philosopher, genius andlor fool, is celebrated in intellectual circles. Both women trained their attention on a liberating vision of work and were unsparing in their critique of war. Both adopted Catholicism as the spiritual home that best reflected their personal and communal aspirations. The interplay of radicalism and religion is the compelling feature of their lives. This paper is a case study of how two women, thus committed, responded to their times. I examine them as activists, by looking into the circumstances and environments within which they manoeuvred. I examine them as innovators, by delving into the political and spiritual insights that animated their practices. My project is to understand Day and Weil as assemblages: to record the convergence of personality and events in their lives, alongside the broad strokes of history and economics. I consider their affinities and pointed differences. Day, for example, converted to Catholicism and lived into her eighties as a high-profile pacifist; Weil declined to be baptized and died a broken, young writer. Yet both women articulated a similar understanding of the knot that bound work and war. In life story and legacy, they could be said to person@ the Pythagorean unity of opposites, an idea that was central to Weil's intellectual method. Day and Weil are worthy of scrutiny not simply because their lives bear the scars of the last century but because each chose an untested path. They were privileged by their background and class - educated and secure - and could have lived in conditions less precarious, less exposed, than they did. Instead Day and Weil entered the fray, drawn to politics by curiosity and outrage, and to religion by intuition. They stepped outside their generation to hethe challenges of the mid-twentieth century in unorthodox and demanding ways. Their encounters with suffering and injustice led them to stretch the fabric of political thought to include human experience on an intimate level. In their view, uprooted industrial societies had created conditions that demanded little more than servility and offered little more than pain to most people. Coercion and aflliction in the workplace were replicated on a national scale in the drive for war. Surveying this destruction from their separate locations, both Day and Weil conceived of work, especially daily, manual tasks, as possessing a sacramental potential: a diflicult but powehl opportunity to make visible the spiritual core of human life. Work could be a profound service to others, in Day's view, and a profound encounter with stillness, in Weil's. In either case, work offered an engagement with persons and things that could shatter narrow senses of entitlement and unlock channels to God's grace. Neither Day nor Weil sought refbge in an established ideology. They rejected tenets of the left that did not match their essentially humanistic instincts. Their inner journeys, though very different, were intense efforts to uncover the light of God's love as they saw it. They were politically rebellious yet spiritually obedient. This unlikely combination was a galvanizing element in their characters: their capacity to challenge worldly power was nurtured by their willingness to shake free of an old self. Political radicalism went hand in hand with disciplined spirituality. With the world still at war, and with