The Mystical Body of Christ: The Heart of the World's Unity
The Center of Dorothy Day's Moral Project
A continuation of our series introducing the life and work of Dorothy Day. Ordinarily, these are for supporting subscribers, but I’m unlocking this one for everyone because, to be honest, this is my favorite part of Day’s work.
Christ’s Incarnation: The Heart of the World
The most common error that happens with understanding Dorothy Day comes from approaching the world we live in like a house with two floors: the top floor is the theological ideas that we have differing opinions about, and the bottom floor is the practical world where things get worked out for real. In this scenario, everyone shares the bottom floor, and we might disagree with what’s going on on the top floor, but ultimately, what happens in the top floor is a matter of speculation anyway. This two-tiered thinking is part of how Day is consistently misread as only a social radical: the downstairs social activism, in this reading, can be separated out from her opinions about God, which are neither here nor there for understanding her political commitments.
Such a view of the relationship between God and creation presumes that if God enters into social questions, it is in a few discrete places, perhaps as an inspiration for certain social positions, perhaps because of divine command regarding this topic or that topic. In this reading, God, Scripture, and the teachings of the Church motivate Day and the difference between Dorothy and other social activists is just at the level of motivation. Whoever God might be as God does not come to bear on social life beyond how we give an account for the motives of our actions.
But Day’s work trades on a very different, sacramental, conception in which all of the world is transparent to the action of God because of the incarnation: the second story is the what is the most real about the first story of the house. One of the most well-known themes within Day’s work is how she saw our natural desires culminating in a desire for God: the yearning we have for love, for example, is ultimately a yearning for God’s love. We’ll see in a moment how this cashes out with respect to Day’s social ethics, but for now, it’s important to name the mystical dimensions of this: there is a reality in the “second story” of the house which persists among all persons (the “first story” of the house), and which determines what political life consists of1.
This understanding of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural is certainly not original to Day, but builds on some well-trod ground within Catholic theology about how to conceive of the relation between God and the world2. How all this cashes out gets into a lot of technical language, but the main upshot for our purposes is this: in Day’s estimation, all persons are created in the image of God, and the truthfulness of what they are is seen in Christ’s taking on human flesh. The consequence is that all persons are either “actual or potential members of the mystical body of Christ3.”
The term “mystical body of Christ” is one which is subject to some debate, but by way of a shorthand definition, consider the question of how it is that Christ (the historical person of the 1st century) is present in the 21st century. Theologian Henri de Lubac puts it this way: when we say “body of Christ”, this has three reference points—the historical person, the bread and the wine, and the gathered community of Jesus. All three of these are caught up together in this one term: to name something “the body of Christ” means that it has reference to Jesus of Nazareth, whose presence is known in the eating and drinking of the Supper.
Day takes it further, connecting the incarnation to this matrix: Christ is the one whose very incarnation takes up human nature as such, healing it by uniting God to human flesh. So, when we say “body of Christ”, we mean not just the faithful, but all of those for whom Christ has become incarnate—all humanity, actually and (in hope) potentially. We know what it means to be most human by asking what kinds of virtue, actions, and presumptions is fitting for people whose humanity is made possible by God in the flesh.
As she puts it most directly in a 1948 column:
But our unity, if it is not unity of thought in regard to temporal matters, is a unity at the altar rail. We are all members of the Mystical Body of Christ, and so we are closer to each other, by the tie of grace, than any blood brothers are. All these books about discrimination are thinking in terms of human brotherhood, of our responsibility one for another. We are our brother’s keeper, and all men are our brothers whether they be Catholic or not. But of course the tie that binds Catholics is closer, the tie of grace. We partake of the same food, Christ. We put off the old man and put on Christ. The same blood flows through our veins, Christ’s. We are the same flesh, Christ’s. But all men are members or potential members, as St. Augustine says, and there is no time with God, so who are we to know the degree of separation between us and the Communist, the unbaptized, the God-hater, who may tomorrow, like St. Paul, love Christ.
As you can see, the relation between persons is much tighter than something created by simple agreement of purpose, or by aligned politics: in Christ, she says, all persons are drawn together by a theologically-grounded hope that, in the fullness of time, all creation may realize what the truth of their lives is: that they are meant for Christ.
But beyond this, it’s a statement about what makes human communities tick: that when ordered toward and in Christ, human community is healed, transfigured, and given its explicit rationale in ways which remain true for those outside the church, even if denied in practice. One cannot entirely undo what has been made true by God, though we might efface it in innumerable ways
Human Nature Prior to Politics
Where this gets really interesting is that this account of humanness precedes what it means for us to be political beings. It’s not unreasonable to say that humans are constituted in our relationships, such that what I am is dependent upon others. It’s also not unreasonable to point out that humans are limited in their capacity for relationships or connection, and that societies are built through acknowledging those limits, and rendering care and attention accordingly. This understanding of what a human is—constituted by our relationships—has great political ramifications, because it creates certain priorities of care and concern for those with whom I have proximate relationships. If I’m bound to some by blood or national polity, I owe more to them, in part because who I am is made possible by these nearby people.
Day’s thesis—that we are persons insofar as we are bound up in Christ’s humanity—undercuts this political vision entirely. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have particular relations with our children that are unlike other relationships, but to be honest, it also undercuts this as well4. To name someone as belonging to a mystical, transnational polity as a consequence of Christ’s work creates a kind of universal polity which then stands as a question mark over all other political visions. The difficulties this thesis of Day’s creates for bonds of blood and family are the same that it creates for political and social divisions as well: we can no longer, because of Christ’s humanity, say that we owe less to the political other in a different country than we do our own proximate neighbors, precisely because there is no constitution of our common life that politics creates. Politics might well be the way that this reality, this first language, is given an accent, but it does not constitute what we are as humans, nor does politics create the obligations that we have to others.
All of this gets very fuzzy and very expansive very quickly, and undercuts the borders of care (and curiosity) that we exhibit toward those who are not near us regularly. It means that Day is very sympathetic to Communists, not just because she thinks they get the way that economics undermines human life in ways that her fellow Catholic capitalists miss, but because she views them as already having been taken up in Christ’s own humanity, in the work of the incarnation. As she will write concerning the Spanish Civil War:
On all sides, the controversy rages. Poor blood-drenched Spain is the most talked about subject today. Communists loudly condemn the rebels as Fascists and traitors to their class. Catholics wax indignant over the excesses of the loyalists, and cry “anti-Christ.” Who is right and who is wrong? We are inclined to believe that the issue is not so clear cut as to enable either side to condemn the other justifiably. There is much right and much wrong on both sides.
Our main concern is that the “members of Christ tear one another.” The Spanish people, Catholics for the most part, have been caught in a whirlpool of political ambitions, and are forced to take sides. Following “ideals” set forth by their leaders, they kill and maim and torture their fellow Members. This is not a condemnation. It is a cry of anguish, and the sob of one who sees his brother in agony5.
Though writing about actual members of the mystical body of Christ—fellow Catholic Christians—it’s important to note that her concerns are much broader. Her concern for ending the war is not simply about fellow Catholics killing one another, but for fellow humans whom Christ’s incarnation has ennobled killing one another. She can walk and chew gum at the same time: Communists are part of what is meant by the mystical body of Christ, and Communists are also mistaken when it comes to viewing economic relations as foundational for who people are6.
The ramifications here for not just a Christian politic, but how Christians describe how we become persons, are pretty staggering. We encounter Christ all the time precisely because of the logic of “body of Christ”, such that God is always and ever is teaching us how to be the people of God through friends, strangers, and enemies. Any attempt to name who an enemy is, thus, that does not take the incarnation’s effect on human nature into account, will wind up carving the world according to a political vision which treats theology as an afterthought instead of a starting point.
Next week, we’ll get into the role that hospitality plays for her, and then see where things go. If you have questions, or dimensions of her thought that you want to see explicitly teased out, drop them in the comments!
I get into the weeds of this in my chapter on Dorothy Day in my first book, Bodies of Peace, which is ten years old now, and apparently still can’t be found for less than 30$ for a paperback. Email me and I’ll send you a PDF of this chapter.
In conceiving of the natural life as culminating in the love of God, theologians are trying to thread the needle between two positions, both of which create problem for how we understand human desire for God. On the one hand, they’re trying to avoid making the desire for the supernatural a necessary feature of what it is to be human (and thus, no longer grace), and on the other hand, they try to avoid making grace a “second story” of the human frame (and thus, not really necessary).
This gets tricky in practice, particularly given that Day was a single mother to Tamar. Tamar, in interviews, is fairly candid about the difficulty of being the daughter to Dorothy, who everyone wanted time with. You can read the mediated words of her daughter via her granddaughter Kate’s book.
Day gets more into her own views on where she sees the errors in her first biography, From Union Square to Rome.