by Father Robert Lauder

In my role as a professor of philosophy at St. John’s University, Jamaica, I am often reminded of a line from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s great musical “The King and I.” The line, which is in the song “Getting to Know You,” is: “It’s an old and ancient saying but a true and honest thought that if you become a teacher by your students you’ll be taught.”

It certainly is a “true and honest thought.” Several times during this spring semester, I had the experience of being taught by my students. This seemed to happen most often in a course titled “Personalism.” That I was receiving insights from my students made the course especially enjoyable.

I created this “Personalism” course approximately 20 years ago. My guess is that St. John’s may be the only university in the country that has such a philosophy course. Personalism is a philosophy centered on the love relationship between God and us.

People think that if a course is about God, then it is a theology course. Actually large numbers of philosophers have written about God. The list includes Augustine, Aquinas, Buber, Kierkegaard, Marcel, Macmurray and many others. I believe that if the God-talk is based on a supernatural revelation from God, then the talk is theological. If it is based only on human experience, then it is philosophical.

As the students and I worked our way through the course this past spring, I occasionally thought back to the first time I taught the course and what a struggle I had explaining the insights of the personalist thinkers. This spring, there was no such problem. Rather the course was a wonderful experience for me of seeing more deeply into truths that I had already embraced but which came to life for me in new ways.

Team Effort

On the first day of class in any course I teach, I say to the students that I hope to learn from them, that each time I teach a course I look at the course as a team effort and that the contribution of the students is important to me. When I say that, I genuinely mean it. This past spring was one of the best experiences I ever had in learning from the students.

One of the texts that the students and I read together was Emmanuel Mounier’s wonderful book “Personalism” (Notre Dame; University of Notre Dame Press, 1952, pp. 132, $2.25). In my view, personalism is a 20th- and 21st-century philosophy. I don’t believe there were any personalist philosophers prior to the 20th century, which gave birth to thinkers such as Buber, Mounier, Marcel and Macmurray. Of course, prior to the 20th century, there were thinkers who had profound insight into the mystery of the human person, but there was no thinker whose entire philosophical outlook deserved the tag “personalism.”

View of God and Person

Early in his book, Mounier points out six Christian beliefs that may have paved the way for personalism to become a philosophy. These beliefs emphasize a view of God and of the human person drawn from Christian revelation and which in some manner may have paved the way for personalism to develop.

The six beliefs are:

1. God has created every single person from nothing;

2. The human person is an indissoluble whole;

3. God offers each person a relation of unique intimacy;

4. The profound purpose of human existence is to freely cooperate in building the Kingdom of God;

5. Liberty is an essential trait of the human person; and

6. The doctrine of the Trinity reveals that God is an intimate dialogue between persons and, of its very essence, the negation of solitude.

Believing in these doctrines should give someone an almost overwhelming sense of God’s love permeating the lives of human persons. I think of Pope Francis’ insistence that God is a part of every person’s life. Believing in these six Christian doctrines should also give someone a strong sense of the dignity and importance of every human being. There are no unimportant people, no insignificant people.

Every person is precious to God and should be precious to each of us.[hr] Father Robert Lauder, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn and philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, writes a weekly column for the Catholic Press.