N. A. BERDYAEV (BERDIAEV)
Nicholas Berdyaev, Prophet for the Catholic Worker
Movement:
The Bourgeois Mind
by Nicholas Berdyaev
Arranged by Peter Maurin
- The Catholic Worker, July-August, l935.
A Spiritual State
l. What does the word actually mean?
2. It has remained unexplained though it has been so much used and
so often misapplied.
3. Even when superficially used it is a word with a magic power of
its own and its depth has to be fathomed.
4. The word designates a spiritual state, a direction of the soul,
a peculiar consciousness of being.
5. It is neither a social nor an economic condition; yet it is something
more than a psychological and ethical one --it is spiritual, ontological.
6. The state of being bourgeois has always existed in the world.
7. Its immortal image is forever fixed in the gospels with its equally
immortal antithesis, but in the nineteenth century it attained its
climax and ruled supreme.
Enslaved Society
l. Though the middle-class society of the last century is so spoken
of in the superficial social-economic significance of the term, it
is bourgeois in a deeper and more spiritual sense.
2. This middle-class mentality ripened and enslaved human society
and culture at the summit of their civilization.
3. Its concupisence is no longer restrictecd by man's supernatural
beliefs as it was in past epochs.
4. It is no longer kept in bounds by the sacred symbolism of a nobler
traditional culture.
5. The bourgeois spirit emancipated itself, expanded and was at last
able to express its own type of life.
Denouncers
l. But even when the triumph of mediocrity was complete a few deep
thinkers denounced it with uncompromising power.
2. Carlyle, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Leon Bloy, Dostoievsky, Leontiv, all
foresaw the victory of the bourgeois spirit over a truly great culture
on the ruins of which it would establish its own hideous kingdom.
3. With prophetic force and fire these men denounced the spiritual
sources and moral foundations of middle-classdom and repelled by its
ugliness thirsting for a nobler culture, a different life looked back
upon Greece or the middle- ages the Renaissance or Byzantium.
A New Type
l. History has failed, there is no such thing as historical progress.
2. The present is in no wise an improvement upon the past.
3. A period of high cultural development is succeeded by another wherein
culture Deteriorates qualitatively.
4. The will to power, to well- being, to wealth triumphs over the
will to holiness, to genius.
5. The highest spiritual achievements belong to the past, spirituality
is on the wane and a time of spiritual decline is a time of bourgeois
ascendency.
6. The knight and the monk the philosopher and the poet have been
superseded by a new type --the greedy bourgeois conqueror, organizer
and trader.
7. The center of life is displaced and transferred to its periphery
the organic hierarchical order of life is being destroyed.
Leon Bloy
l. One of those whose rebellion against the bourgeois spirit was most
uncompromising and bitter was Leon Bloy the remarkable and little
known French Catholic writer.
2. Bloy, who lived all his life unrecognized and in dire misery, has
written an extraordinary book L'Exegese des Lieux Communs which is
a searching examination of the commonplaces of bourgeois wisdom.
3. He gives a wonderfully witty metaphysical interpretation of the
pronouncements which are the bourgeois rule of life.
4. Thus in "Dieu ne demande pas tant" --God does not ask all of that--
he endeavours to penetrate the secret movements of the heart mind
and will of a bourgeois to expose his specular metaphysics and mysticism.
Leon Bloy's Sayings
l. The bourgeois, even when he is a good Catholic believes only in
this world in the expedient and the useful he is incapable of living
by faith in another world and refuses to base his life on the mystery
of Golgotha.
2. The magnificent superiority of the bourgeois is based on unbelief
even after he has seen and touched.
3. Not upon the utter impossibility of seeing and touching due to
unbelief.
4. The bourgeois is an idolater enslaved by the visible.
5. Business is the bourgeois God his absolute.
6. It was the bourgeois who crucified Christ; on Golgotha he cut the
world off from Christ, money from the poor.
The Poor and Money
l. The Poor and Money are great symbols for Bloy
2. There is a mystery of money its mysterious separation from the
spirit, and the middle-class world is governed by this money benefit
of the spirit.
3. Middle-classdom is opposed to the absolute, it is destructive of
eternity.
4. A bourgeois may be religious and this middle-class religiosity
is more hateful in Bloy's eyes than atheism.
5. How many such bourgeois idolaters did he discover amongst "good
Catholics" --the Lord Christ is very decorative in shops.
6. Leon Bloy studies the average bourgeois but the problem can be
deepened.
7. In the higher degrees of a spiritual life the bourgeois spirit
paralizes all spiritual movement and extinguishes the fire which is
the very essence of the spirit.
The Bourgeois Spirit
l. The bourgeois is out for the conquest of the world and Jesus says
to him "Woe to you because you love the uppermost seats in the synagogues
and salutations in the market-place."
2. And his interests in this world are repudiated by Jesus in the
words "Seek not what you shall eat or what you shall drink... for
all these things do the nations of the world seek."
3. Christ said to those whom he chose: "If you had been of the world,
the world would love its own, but because you are not of the world,
therefore the world hateth you."
4. The world is the bourgeois spirit; it is not God's creation, the
cosmos which the Son of God could not deny but the enslavement and
the over burdening of God's creation by passions and concupiscence.
Reprinted from The Catholic Worker, July-August, l935.
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