26 Essays in Anarchism and Religion: Volume 1
of Christians in the early Church.” The implication was that the
works of mercy articulated by Christ in Matthew 25 “must again
become the Christian way of life.”^19 Day’s account of the facta of
Christ’s life in her autobiography The Long Loneliness highlight-
ed His humble origins, His eschewal of political power, His close-
ness to the people and concern for their material welfare:
He was born in a stable...He did not come to be a temporal King...
He worked with His hands, spent the first years of His life in exile,
and the rest of His early manhood in a crude carpentry shop in
Nazareth. He fulfilled His religious duties in the synagogue and
the temple. He trod the roads in His public life and the first men
He called were fishermen, small owners of boats and nets. He was
familiar with the migrant worker and the proletariat, and some
of His parables dealt with them. He spoke of the living wage, not
equal pay for equal work, in the parable of those who came at the
first and the eleventh hour.^20Beyond the paramount example of Christ, the subsidiary exem-
plarity of the saints was frequently referenced by both Day and
Maurin. Implicitly gesturing to the broader exemplary tradition,
Maurin counselled Day early on in their collaboration that it was
“better to know the lives of the saints than the lives of kings and
generals.”^21 The advice was, perhaps, superfluous: from an ear-
ly age, Day had been impressed by saintly demonstrations of pi-
ety and driven to imitate them. Long before her conversion to
Catholicism, Day’s response to first hearing the story of a saint
was to experiment with sleeping on the floor in her own attempt
at asceticism.^22 As Day began to drift towards the Church, she
was especially drawn to the life of Teresa of Avila, “a saint with
whom [she] readily identified,” as Day’s biographer puts it.^23 The
magnetic effect that Teresa and other saints had on Day was at
first largely a consequence of their exemplary devotion, as Day
struggled to transition from liberated bohemian to faithful ad-
herent of the Church’s teachings.^24 Maurin, however, encouraged
Day to view the saints not just as exemplars of personal moral
probity but as exemplars of radical social action who had pio-
neered strategies of translating Christian love into active care for
the underprivileged.^25 Maurin helped Day to see that the answer