Gabriel Marcel & The Promise of Fidelity to Persons

The Christian "existentialist" philosopher Gabriel Marcel also had an important role in Christian Personalism. In particular, he brought together ethical, emotional, and existential commitments to show their dependence upon each other. (I should say in passing that reading Marcel's existential diary, Being and Having, was an important help to me at a time in which my faith was foundering and I was cut off from trust of God or others.) Here's some of his key ideas:

1. Ours is a broken world characterized by the impersonal relations of technology. The world system is functionalist in its treatment of situations and people. This treatment creates a condition of despair since technology and functionalism can not solve or engage the personal.
2. As persons created in the image of God we are created for ontological wholeness. It is a condition of who we are and of the trajectory of our lives in time and space. To be human is to pursue wholeness.
3. One way we learn to achieve wholeness is to distinguish between what we "have" and what we "are." Both are important ways to relating to reality, but to confuse the two is to distort essential aspects of our selves as things that are disposable.
4. Not all of life is a problem to be solved; much of it is a mystery to be received and lived. Again, to confuse the two is to invite frustration and despair. To treat people as problems is to attempt and reduce them to things that can be manipulated rather than other images of God that we encounter in all their value and difference.
5. Intersubjective experience involves the risk of making oneself disponibilite, that is available, disposable, at hand for another. It involves making oneself a gift to another, offering one's self to another because we are "with" the other; we are part of them.
6. The fullest relationships are ones of mutual reciprocity. They are acts of charity and presence. They require of us fidelity--commitments to be at the disposal of another--and this needs our constant willingness to remain open and accountable to other persons.
7. The power to do this is found in the Christian virtue of hope, which is given actively by God to the human person.

"The possibility of despair is bound up with liberty. It is the essence of liberty that it is able to be exerted in self-betrayal. Nothing which is outside [us] can shut the door to despair. . . . Fidelity [should be] considered as the recognition of something permanent . . . [and] witness considered as the beginning of things--the Church a perpetutated witness, an act of fidelity. It is an essential characteristic of the being to whom I give fidelity to be not only liable to be betrayed, but also in some manner affected by my betrayal.

"Fidelity [then is] regarded as witness perpetuated, but it is the essence of witness that it can be obliterated and wiped out. . . . Fidelity can only be shown towards a person, never at all to a notion or an ideal. An absolute fidelity involves an absolute person. Question: does not an absolute fidelity to a creature presuppose Him in whose sight I bind myself?"