Gabriel Marcel: Session 2

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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James Finley (0:10)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley. Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Greetings, everyone, and welcome to our time together, turning for trustworthy guidance to the teachings of Gabriel Marcel.

In the introductory session with Kirsten, and also in the previous session, we explored the way Marcel tries to help us cultivate a spiritual worldview, how to be established in experiential, spiritual understanding of ourselves, others, and all of life, really.

And we saw at the very heart of this vision is his distinction on the winding path between problems and mystery. Problems in life, those problems where we seek a solution or an answer to things that are dualistically other than ourselves. So the example we use is if our car won't start, or if there's a leak in the roof, or if we're trying to find the answer to a complex math problem. All these are problems. And in the facing of a problem, we look for a method to solve the problems, or we go to someone who's trained in that method to solve the problem. And then once it's solved, we're done. We move on to the next problem. But mystery is very different. Mystery, we realize that when we turn towards things that are mysterious or of mystery, we ourselves are included in what we're turning towards. So if I ask, what does it mean to be a human being? It's I as the human being that I am that's asking, what does it mean to be a human being? If I ask, what is consciousness? It's I in my consciousness is asking about consciousness. If I ask, what is love? It's me and my desire to love and be loved. Just asking, what is love? And so these things are not problems, they're mysteries that I'm included. But here's the key to Marcel. It's not in the reductionistic sense, where everything refers back to me, like my personal opinion about who I am, my personal opinion what consciousness is, my personal opinion or feelings or attitudes about who others are. It's the opposite. I realize that I'm included in that the very presence of myself extends out into and is woven into the mystery of humanity. The very consciousness of myself extends out and is woven into the mystery of consciousness. The very mystery of myself is woven into the mystery of love. What he's really saying to ultimately is that my very self is woven into being. That's the ontological mystery, ontological. Ontology means our being. And he understands being to be infinite. And Kenneth Gallagher points out that he's doing this in a way to seeking the presence of God outside of religions. Later, he's going to look at religion. So right now, we're looking at kind of an experiential exploration of the presence of God outside of belief systems in religious faith. But he says, practically speaking, the infinity of being is God. So really what mystery is, what he's really concerned about, is how do I realize I'm being carried along in a present, an infinite presence that transcends me, but it always includes me. That my very presence extends out into the infinite presence of God because the infinite presence of God is giving itself to me as the very presence of me. And that transubjective communion is what he's trying to help us find. He's trying to find this. And we said too then, we see this in certain moments, which are the moments of thou. He uses this as a prime example of this. So father, mother, sister, brother, friend, beloved teacher, student, community that you're serving. To be in the presence of thou is you're in the presence of someone that you love. And you see who the person is factually. That is, you know what they look like, you get to know them, you know their personality, and so on. But to know them as thou, here is Ezekiel and here is Martin Buber, fills the entire horizon of your being. You realize that the infinite presence of God is presenting itself in and as the presence of the beloved. So to be in the presence of the beloved is to be in the presence of God. And your ability to see the thou of the beloved reveals you to yourself as thou. This thou moment, what love empowers us to see, it kind of transcends. And to see means to interiorly realize what our finite eyes can't see, to recognize or to realize what our conceptual mind can't define or explain. It really evokes a sense of awe, the thou moment, like an awakening. We also saw this thou dimension is carried out throughout all of life. So there's the thou dimension of the darkness of the night, there's the thou dimension of the smell of flowers, there's the thou dimension of silence, the thou dimension of solitude, there's the thou dimension that echoes in the voices of poets, the artist's visual mystics, they help us to see the landscape and flowers, they help us see the thou dimensions of all of reality. So that's Marcel. That's what we're talking about. Now we're going to see, Marcel does what all the, notice when turning to the mystics, all the mystics do this too. The mystics talk about certain moments that were quickened with a sense of oneness, of God's oneness with us in life itself. And then we see how these moments of oneness, these moments of intimately realized oneness, evokes the desire to abide in the oneness. That is, the intuition is at the thou moment. We realize that it isn't that something more is given in the realization of thou, but rather a curtain parts in that moment that reveals the true nature of every moment. See that every moment is thou. And realizing that every moment is thou, then I become aware that I'm not aware of the thou nature of myself. Hence my suffering, hence my fear, hence my confusion, hence my wayward ways. So the real question then is how do I stabilize in a path, a way of life, to be ever deeper, more habitually stabilized in the thou dimension, which is really the dimension of my very presence, extending out into and woven into the infinite presence of God. This extending out and woven into the very presence of me and transubjective communion and of everyone and everything that I see. What is the way of life where I become habitually established in that unit of awareness? So this is Marcel's concern, as with all the mystics we've been looking at. We also saw that each mystic has his or her own way of voicing this. We looked at John of the Cross or Teresa or Julian of the Knowledge. So Marcel has his own way of voicing this path. And he voices it as fidelity, hope and love are his three. And he gives it what makes Marcel so accessible as always. He always starts with an actual example in real life. Turning then to Kenneth Gallagher, Chapter 5, where we find this material on fidelity. He gives an example of fidelity. What does it mean to be faithful? And on what conditions can there exist of being capable of fidelity? Let us take a simple instance. I have been to see my friend in a hospital. His life is drawing to an end. He knows it. He knows that I know it. In the presence of the terror which each day advances nearer, In the presence of his loniness and heart-wrenching attempt at courage, My whole being is flooded with pity, With the necessity to stand with him at all cost. I promised faithfully to come back and see him again very soon. And when I made that promise, my feelings were completely sincere. It's fidelity. And what he's really suggesting here, this way, is that in that moment I was so moved because the dying friend, I was seeing the dying friend of my love for my friend is thou. And then the thou in me responds in fidelity to the thou. I'll keep coming back, I will stay close. He's calling this a moment of fidelity as an event. Marcel continues, for several days have passed, and what I felt on that occasion is just a memory. I tell myself I ought to go, that he deserves my sympathy. That I ought to feel the same way. Through conscientious self-flagellation, I can even conjure up a kind of abstract assembly of sympathy, I felt, but its unworthy falseness inspires repugnance in me. The question is, am I bound by the promise I made, and if so, why? So I did it, I meant it, a couple of days have passed, I no longer feel it. And therefore, should I be bound to something I said in a feeling that I no longer feel? And if I should be bound, why should I be bound? And then Marcel says, and this is so good because it's like psychotherapy, he's inviting us to relate to how experiential this is. Like he's helping us to see this is how our minds work. He suggests two ways that we might continue to stay faithful to see the friend, but neither one of them is fidelity. One is, I want to see my friend because it would be so insensitive if I would say to the friend, I promise I'll stay close if I feel like it. This doesn't sound very good to tell your dying friend. So you're going to avoid that one. He also says I could continue to see the friend to be true to my image of myself as someone who's faithful to his word. But Marcel says, this is not fidelity, this is me being faithful to an image I have of myself in my own eye. And so that's not fidelity either. So if neither one of those is fidelity, we can understand this psychologically. How are we to understand then fidelity as an access to the death of our very presence woven into and one with the very presence of God woven into us, the transubjective communion of fidelity? This is where he's taking us. Such a view consists of a purity of heart, consists of an ingenuous response of the unsolid demand of the instant. Only thus will I refrain from the betrayal of my true self. Now there is quite evidently a dialectical refutation which suggests itself here. We can only set up the principle of fidelity in the instant as a summa bonum, as a supreme good, insofar as it transcends the instant. Remember when we were going through TSL's Four Quartets, and he did a lot about time and about eternity. And here's something that helps me to see this, what we're getting at here poetically.