30 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
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, there-
fore, 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 tra-
dition, 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 per-
son, 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 ostensi-
bly “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 every-
day 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, per-
sonalism encouraged an exemplary way of acting. Rather than
offloading social problems like poverty onto the impersonal, bu-
reaucratic apparatus of the welfare state, Workers were expected
to address them in a manner that not only established a direct