Turning to Gabriel Marcel

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

You're listening to a podcast by the Center for Action and Contemplation. To learn more, visit cac.org.

James Finley (0:08)

Greetings, I'm Jim Finley.

Kirsten Oates (0:11)

And I'm Kirsten Oates.

James Finley (0:13)

Welcome to Turning to the Mystics.

Kirsten Oates (0:23)

Welcome, everyone, to season 11 of Turning to the Mystics. And I'm here with Jim to introduce our new mystic for season 11 Welcome, Jim.

James Finley (0:33)

Yes, glad to start up again, share these insights with the folks.

Kirsten Oates (0:39)

And so who is our new mystic, Jim, for season 11?

James Finley (0:43)

The new mystic is Gabriel Marcel. And as always, we'll start with who he was historically to help us better understand who he is spiritually. Gabriel Marcel was born in France in 1889 where he lived until his death in 1973

He was a bit of a prodigy both as a musician and as a composer and as a playwright, but he was mainly known for his philosophy. And that's what we're going to be looking at. You know, from the very beginning of the Turning to the Mystics series of mystics we've been exploring, I've been focusing on the classical texts of the Christian mystics that I was introduced to in the monastery and have guided and sustained me over the years. But in the previous session, we branched out and for the first time turned to a poet as mystic, TS. Eliot, Four Quartets. We'll be doing more poets in the future, to Emily Dickinson and others. And now we're branching out even more and we're turning to a philosopher as a mystic, like a mystically awakened philosopher, turning to Marcel's insights, guiding us in our spiritual paths.

Kirsten Oates (1:55)

Wonderful. Jim, can you, for those of us who perhaps aren't familiar with philosophy, could you give us just a high level overview of what a philosopher does, what their focus is?

James Finley (2:07)

So we're talking about philosophy in the big picture. So Plato, Aristotle, these different philosophers down through the ages into the current age, Marcel. A philosopher is someone who shares with us an understanding of what the meaning of life is, what the meaning of reality, what's it mean to exist, what's it mean to be real. So a philosopher doesn't say, for example, we know the truth is important. A philosopher explores what is truth, where it isn't just the goodness is important and the will we turn toward the good. But a philosopher would kind of tease out and bring out into the open ways of understanding what goodness is. That's philosophy. So Gabriel Marcel is a philosopher. And so he's going to share with us a meaning of what he sees to be really what it means to be a person and how that relates onto what's the meaning of being, what's it mean to be. Philosophia, like the love of wisdom.

Kirsten Oates (3:09)

And you wouldn't say every philosopher was a mystic. And so how does it pair together that someone might be a philosopher and a mystic?

James Finley (3:17)

No, yeah, there's different branches of philosophy. So some aren't mystical, like pragmatism, for example. Gabriel Marcel was often linked up with the existential thought of France, existentialism, exploring the meaning of existence. So although the father of existentialism is Soren Kierkegaard, who is a Christian, a devout Christian, there's a strong also contemporary French philosophy, a strong vein of atheism. So Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, was an atheist. And he thought the meaning of life is nausea, that there is no meaning. He wrote a book called No Exit, and it's the persons of the trinity realizing they're each other's hell and they're trapped with each other forever.

Kirsten Oates (4:00)

Oh dear.

James Finley (4:01)

That's hardly mystical. And so he kind of parted from this existential identity and he referred more to himself as a neo-socratic philosopher. And what Socrates is, when you look at the dialogues of Socrates, what he would do is he would engage in a dialogue with someone about say, what is goodness? And they would begin by assuming that they knew what goodness was. And by the end of the dialogue, they realized they didn't know what all goodness was. But in realizing that, they started to understand what goodness is. So that's what Marcel does. He kind of unravels assumptions to bring us to a clarity that when we hear it, it rings true. So that's the tone of Marcel's philosophy.

Kirsten Oates (4:44)

Wonderful. Well, Jim, tell us a little bit more about his life, Gabriel Marcel.

James Finley (4:50)

You study his graduate work in philosophy. But he wasn't a philosopher in the sense of the academy, in a typical sense. He was not a tenured professor on campus at a university. But he was more of a loner, like thinking alone, apart to himself. But often invited to universities around the world to lecture. A lot of philosophers were in very serious dialogue with him. They saw the relevance of his thought. He was married. They had one adopted son. His wife would travel with him to these different lecture places. He wrote a little essay on his spiritual autobiography. It noted that when he was very young, his mother died. His mother was very influential in his life. He was very close to his mother. Very typical, the kind of insights Marcel, the kind of things he says, thinking of his mother. He said, it's amazing how present a dead person can be.