My authority is absent. In my world I taste of mysticism but mystic I am not. I am a Dystopian thinker since 4th grade. And there you have it. My 4th grade intellect striving to restate the best thought and said in secularism since 1966 is still trapped in 1966. My moods and interests are more or less variants on 1966. I am 9: and now nearly 65 and my wife a few months shy of 80. If I could go back to 1966 I think nothing would be of difference significantly. Going forward I am not so sure. Not so sure because I am rare in the record. In choosing to choose compassion and also to speak on Dystopia I abjure ideology in favor of the actual I sense and see.
It would be impossible to say exactly what Business is. It is that mysterious divinity, something like an Isis of the swinish, by whom all other divinities are supplanted. It would not be rending the veil surrounding this mystery to mention, here or elsewhere . . . Business is Business, just as God is God, that is to say over and above everything. Business is the Inexplicable, Unprovable, the Uncircumscribed, the point where it is enough to utter this Stock phrase in order to solve all questions, in order to instantly muzzle reproof. When these seven syllables have been uttered, everything has been said, everything has been answered, and there is no hope for further Revelation.
“Business is Business,” “the umbilicus of all Stock Phrases, the age’s ultimate word,” speaks like Hermes on behalf of its god, surreptitiously stating that its god is beyond criticism. But in so doing, the bourgeois mind inadvertently admits that it has bestowed Business with a religious character. Ironically, this puts us in a position to employ Marx’s own argument to a different end. Marx asserts that “The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.” For our purposes, we must translate this fine line from the poeticized German, putting it in plain English: “The criticism of the bourgeois spirit is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that couch of comfort of which bourgeois spirit is the halo.” The couch, by the way, is crawling with bedbugs of Bloy’s own making. But if he sends you fleeing from your seat, terrified by the fact that what once comforted you is also consuming you, Bloy does not leave you no exit. He leaves you standing in disbelief over what just happened, but he sets your feet at the threshold of a cosmos yet populated with the Inexplicable, Unprovable, Uncircumscribed God.
Ironies shadow puppet the walls of history, dwarfing the earnest efforts of too many. As Dawson explains, the author of the Communist Manifesto was ghosted by the farcical specter that oppressed him: “Marx was himself a disgruntled bourgeois, and his doctrine of historic materialism is a hangover from a debauch of bourgeois economics and bourgeois philosophy.” Marx, Dawson continues, was in his concern for the proletariat moved not by love, but by hatred. He was “a man of narrow, jealous, unforgiving temperament, who hated and calumniated his own friends and allies. And consequently he sought the motive power for the transformation of society not in love but in hatred and failed to recognize that the social order cannot be renewed save by a new principle of spiritual order.” Bloy, too, was in a sense a “disgruntled bourgeois”; as the self-proclaimed Ungrateful Beggar explains in his autobiographical novel Le Désespéré, his father was “a shriveled little bourgeois employed in the Perigueux tax collector’s office.” In his capacity to alienate friends and benefactors, Bloy bears a striking resemblance to the portrait of Marx that Dawson sketches. And yet Bloy knew that only by a new—or, rather, ancient—principle of spiritual order, would the social order be renewed. Simone Weil’s question could have come from his mouth: “Our period has destroyed the interior hierarchy. How should it allow the social hierarchy, which is only a clumsy image of it, to go on existing?”
Absent an absolute reorientation, lacking what Dorothy Day called the revolution of the heart, “business is business.” The bourgeois spirit will continue to find the kingdom of heaven unbearable—an otherworldly reign that ought to be tempered, tamed, reinterpreted until Christians can find themselves full at home with the spirit of capitalism, and this in spite of the fact that, as the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano contended even in 1949, “Capitalism is intrinsically atheistic. Capitalism is godless, not by nature of a philosophy which it does not profess, but in practice (which is its only philosophy), by its insatiable greed and avarice, its mighty power, its dominion.” Dawson closes “Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind” with the following lines: “If the age of the martyrs has not yet come, the age of a limited, self-protective, bourgeois religion is over. For the kingdom of heaven suffers violence and the violent take it by force.” Regretfully, the Catholic historian was utterly wrong in his proclamation that the age of bourgeois religion is over. He was, after all, only human. A historian and not a prophet. But perhaps he was also wrong in his assessment that the age of martyrs has not yet come, and this not merely in the sense that the twentieth century saw a staggering number of Christian martyrs. Rather, as Raïssa Maritain observes with regard to Bloy’s death, “We saw this peace and this wonder on his face in the very last hours of his life. The martyrdom of blood would have been in his soul the illumined symbol of the constant martyrdom he had suffered during long hard years in which his life and labors had no other aim than to give witness to Truth and Faith and the exigencies of God.” By his constant martyrdom Bloy bled drops that can still serve as seeds that might grow in the soil of contemplative souls who have grown dissatisfied with the comforting confines of the bourgeois mind. A mind many in the Church have too long tried to baptize. A mind that can only be baptized by the blood of the poor. A mind that, baptized, all too soon assumes holy orders and presides over the funeral of our immortal souls. https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2020/06/reading-the-bourgeois-mind-with-leon-bloy/