Both the informed Christian and the secular educated seem to have forgotten everything about Gabriel Marcel (1887 – 1973). Throughout the twentieth century, Marcel has served as a symbol of France’s greatness as a dramatist, musician, and philosopher. He seminally contributed to the emergence and growth of twentieth century existentialism, giving it a Catholic ‘twist,’ dealing with anxiety, with faith as the highest form of fidelity, and with experience as the immersed engagement of involved persons, inspired by hope and given to joy.
Given the history of the twentieth century and the pervasiveness of “man’s inhumanity to man,” we could ask ourselves whether hope still survives. Few figures in the twentieth century, especially those who have lived through the slaughter of the First World War and the concentrations of the Second, have maintained that the hope and joy can be found in the life of Man and life in the Spirit.
BELIEF AND TRUST
In his major work The Mystery of Being (1950), Marcel showed that faith not only requires belief as a movement towards something, but that it requires trust to accompany it along its journey. Belief, movement, and trust are necessary accompaniments on the journey towards faith. During our turbulent times, many people, including both Christians and non-Christians, feel that there is something seriously wrong with America, and that the views of this relatively unknown Frenchman may have something to teach us about faith suffused with hope, thereby making faith ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’
ENCOUNTER AS RESPONSE
Not only did Marcel criticize the nihilism of atheistic philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, who saw life as an endless battle between isolated individuals, but he also saw that the preoccupation with the self can cause a crippling inability to engage in social life. In this respect he was very different from Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophers who saw contemplation as the highest goal of human life. Marcel, for example, understood faith not only as worship, but as the highest form of fidelity. He supported faith not simply as a buttress against atheism, but as the fullness of experience that arises out of a confidence that ‘someone’ will respond, that movement in the Spirit involves a movement from encounter to response, from response to commitment, and from commitment to true freedom. As one takes the journey, one encounters trust along the way. It is a trust that is immanent, and like a flower unfolding its buds, faith opens one to the sweetness of experience that constitutes communion.
FREEDOM, WILL TO POWER, AND THE CORRUPTION OF LANGUAGE
It is his use of religious terminology in discussing his philosophy that brings the censure of secular philosophers. If philosophy is perceived by the public as irrelevant, the blame cannot be laid on Marcel. For he undoubtedly believed that philosophy needs to speak to his contemporaries in nonterminological language. And he forewarned us against the corruption of language, as he recognized in his own day that the ‘freedom’ espoused by philosophers like Sartre and Nietzsche would lead to conflict as individuals pursued their will to power. Early in his life, he saw that the growth of the Hegelian state, smothering the ontological distinctions among its citizen subparts, eventually smothers human freedom. Unlike many political philosophers, he sees a citizen as more than an individual with rights. A citizen is a subject – one subject to loyalty, obligations, and involvement with persons, as well as subject to the state and its laws. More than that, to subject oneself to others opens oneself to encounter communion.
ADMIRATION BEGETS ASSIMILATION
His remedy to bring back life to philosophy involves more than redefining existing philosophical terms in usage, like subject and citizen and subject mentioned above. While he had no aversion toward modern philosophy’s emphasis on the individual, he never ceased expressing his attraction to Christian humanism and its communal nature. When he spoke in reference to “others,” they were not merely collections of individual isolates of which Marcel speaks; but of belonging in communion with, and in the presence of, hope and joy. Although Marcel believed that a movement towards freedom will sometimes ‘carry a sword’ – necessarily entailing ‘setting oneself against father or mother,’ he always believed that the central feature of such movement is a willingness to assimilate the best in others – to admire heroes and worthy role models.
The human Marcel was essentially a man caught up in the fast-moving events of the twentieth century, complicated by war and changing circumstances. Despite all his achievements as a playwright and philosopher, he never was able to reach those empyrean heights as a musician, his first love. Indeed, he never mastered music the way he mastered writing, a lifelong disappointment to him. It is the ultimate irony of Marcel’s life that he should not have been satisfied with his skill and reputation as a philosopher and writer of plays than as a musician.
It is true that much of Marcel’s thinking was conventionally Christian, although he did not formally become a Catholic until he was forty-two years old. He had to write to please a secular establishment, or he could not have had the impact he had on his contemporaries. His writings on hope were well under way prior to his conversion. It was, he later recalled, the gift of grace that moved him to his conversion, and not any independent stand he felt compelled to take in choosing to become a Christian.
CONTRA “APOSTLES” OF PESSIMISM
Marcel’s solution to the perceived absence of hope he found in his contemporaries and its apostles of pessimism was to hunker down in his study and build a philosophy that would perpetuate true Christian principles. He advised to make ourselves more “available,” to open ourselves up to encounters that would free us from sin and lead to abundance. Yet availability, without a growth in alertness, awareness, and consciousness can only lead to an abundance of the most superficial goods. His notion of ‘real goods’ becomes more of a possibility for us to achieve when we respond to encounters that appeal to our hopes and joy than respond, knee-jerk like, with mere activism, without the joyful infusion of grace.
Although our culture is as secular as ever, increasing numbers of people today seem more religious and less secular than at any other time in recent decades. They do not seem interested in political causes. Is this the new generation on which we rest our hopes? No wonder we sometimes feel that we may be alone, and hope dies with us in the grave.
REASON FOR HOPE
My assessment of the present situation is not as pessimistic as it may seem, for, like Marcel, I believe that a person engaged in assimilating the abundance of joy, as Marcel did, will find reason for hope. Marcel went further than Nietzsche did in saying that the will to power is not enough. Power for what? Marcel had higher expectations of people. He had always infused his writings and his personal relations with love. He was inspired by a love that went beyond mere assent to intellectual understanding. He tended to accept joy where he found it. His philosophical contemporary, Jean-Paul Sartre, had no one but himself and his isolated freedom to fall back on, for all he ever believed in was himself. But Marcel had the abundance (Fruits of the Holy Spirit) that arises out of fidelity and communion. That is why we should remember Marcel, and not Sartre.
One Response
Excellent article!