My favorite existentialist philosopher is Gabriel Marcel. His insights into the mystery of the human person are beautiful, even inspiring. But reading him is demanding. One of the best essays I have read explaining Marcel’s vision of the human person and God is in Father Francis M. Tyrrell’s wonderful book “Man: Believer and Unbeliever” (New York: Alba House, 1974, 415 pp.).
Frank Tyrrell was one of my philosophy professors when I was a seminarian. I can recall when he was writing the book. At that time I was a young priest and Frank allowed me to read some of the chapters before his book was published. Marcel makes a distinction between what he calls problems and what he terms mysteries. Problems do not involve the human person directly.
So a computer that does not work, an automobile that won’t start, a roof that is leaking are examples of problems. None of them directly include the person. Mystery always involves the person directly. So death, love, and God would be examples of mysteries.
It is impossible to think about the mystery of death without thinking about your own death. It is not possible to think about the mystery of love without thinking about your own love relationships or lack of love relationships. It is impossible to think about the mystery of God without thinking about your relationship with God or your lack of relationship with God.
There is a final answer to every problem. We may not know the answer but in principle there is an answer. There is no final answer to a mystery. Of course if we know there is no final answer to a mystery an obvious question is why bother. We deal with mysteries because there is nothing more important than mysteries.
There is no evidence that any animal can reflect on mysteries. The most complicated computer cannot reflect on mysteries. In reflecting on mysteries, human beings are doing what is crucially important if we are going to grow and develop as persons.
Though there is no final answer to a mystery, we can go deeper and deeper into the meaning of a mystery. I love Frank Sheed’s example in trying to defend the importance of reflecting on mysteries. He compared a mystery to a deep water well.
Sheed claimed that the deeper you reached into the well the better the water tasted and there was no end to the water. A person can go deeper and deeper in reflecting on a mystery. The mood when dealing with a problem is curiosity. The person dealing with the problem wants to know the answer. The mood when reflecting on a mystery is awe or wonder. Mysteries are awesome and wonderful.
In Marcel’s philosophical vision, being ultimately means God. Commenting on Marcel’s view of the human person, Tyrell writes the following:
“Man feels the urgent need to ask himself:
‘Who am I?’ Reflecting upon
his self-experience in search of the
answer, he is forced to look always
beyond himself, to the other and to
the fullness of being which he mediates
and reveals. Man must therefore
transcend himself to fulfill himself.
But, Marcel insists, the exigence for
transcendence is not the summons
to transcend experience, to leave experience
behind, ‘for beyond all experience
there is nothing,’ but rather
to refine and deepen our understanding
of our experience by the light of
a purer, more discerning reflection.
“Marcel designates as ‘presence’
the ontological dynamic of intersubjectivity,
the potency of the other and
the self to mediate for each other, to
disclose in the process by which they
mutually elicit and constitute each
other, the Being from which each issues
as its common source” (pp. 116-
117).
This is amazing to me. What Marcel is claiming is that we need each other in order to become aware of the presence of God. We are tied together and become channels for one another to discover the presence of God. Marcel claimed that the more deeply I am present to myself the more deeply I can be present to another person, and the more deeply I am present to another person the more deeply I can be present to myself.
Reaching the presence of God is not the result of a reasoning process which concludes with a proof for the existence of God. The presence of God is discovered through presence in love to another human being.
Tyrell succinctly states Marcel’s view of the discovery of God:
“The need or exigence for transcendence
that powers the subject’s
drive for self-realization in the inter-
subjective relation within which
he confers being on the other as well
as receiving being from the other
from him inevitably leads beyond
each ‘other’ to the ‘Other’ whose englobing
Presence intimates itself in
every finite presence” p. 117).
I suspect that I am just beginning to have some understanding about what Marcel has said about God’s presence. I find Marcel’s philosophical vision exciting, and I want more.
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. He presents two 15-minute talks from his lecture series on the Catholic Novel, 10:30 a.m. Monday through Friday on NET-TV.