14. Religious Belief

Throughout the course of his work, Marcel arrived at an essentially theistic, specifically Christian, worldview, leading many to describe him as a Christian or theistic existentialist (especially in opposition to Sartre). Indeed, some thinkers regard Marcel's philosophical writings on religious belief as his most profound contribution to philosophy: “From the beginning of his philosophical career, Marcel's main interest has been the interpretation of religious experience, that is, of the relation between man and ultimate reality” (Cain, 1979, p. 87). Marcel’s early reflections, especially in Being and Having, laid the seeds for his conversion to Catholicism at the age of 40, though he believed that his philosophical ideas, and central Christian themes, though complementary, were in fact independent of each other: “It is quite possible that the existence of the fundamental Christian data may be necessary in fact to enable the mind to conceive some of the notions which I have attempted to analyze; but these notions cannot be said to depend on the data of Christianity, and they do not presuppose it . . . I have experienced [the development of these ideas] more than twenty years before I had the remotest thought of becoming a Catholic” (Marcel, 1995, pp. 44-45). Marcel became a Catholic when the French novelist, François Mauriac (1885--1979), recognized various themes in his writing concerning commitment, forgiveness, moral character and the religious justification of the moral order. Mauriac wrote to Marcel and explicitly asked him whether he ought not to join the Catholic Church, a call to which, after a period of reflection, Marcel assented. It is noteworthy that his conversion did not significantly change his philosophy, although it did lead to an increased focus on how various experiences, especially moral experiences, may point to the presence of the transcendent in human life.
Marcel, as one would expect, does not engage in philosophy of religion in the traditional sense. He is often critical of various attempts to “prove” the existence of God in the history of philosophy, such as those to be found in Thomism. He regards such attempts as belonging to the realm of primary reflection, and as such, they leave out the personal experience of God, which is necessarily lost in the move to abstraction. Marcel notes that committed religious believers are not greatly interested in arguments for God’s existence, and may even look upon these arguments with suspicion; atheists are also usually not persuaded by such arguments (Marcel, 1951b, p. 196; Marcel, 1964, p. 179). Another reason for the lack of efficacy of formal arguments is that many in the contemporary world are not open to the religious worldview. Marcel introduces a distinction between “anti-theists” and “atheists” to make this point. Whereas an atheist is somebody who does not believe in God, an anti-theist is somebody who does not want to believe in God. It is possible, Marcel observes, to close oneself off from the experience of the religious in human life, not for rational reasons, but for reasons of self-interest, or from a desire to avoid religious morality, or to avoid submission to an outside authority. This view is prevalent, he believes, not just in modern life, but also in modern philosophy: “The history of modern philosophy seems to supply abundant illustration of the progressive replacement of atheism by…an anti-theism, whose mainspring is to will that God should not be” (Marcel 1951b, p. 176). The prevalence of this attitude makes it even more difficult to pursue a purely rational approach to God’s existence.
However, Marcel develops another approach to the question of God, and many themes in his work are concerned in one way or another with this topic. He belongs to the line of thinkers, which includes Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Buber in philosophy, and Karl Barth and Paul Tillich in theology, who draw attention to the non-theoretical dimension of religious belief, and moral experience. His approach is phenomenological in character, involving a description of various human experiences and the attempt to reveal their underlying meaning and justification. Marcel’s position is that there is a set of profound human experiences (some of which we have described earlier) that reveal the presence of God (the ‘Absolute Thou’) in human life. These experiences are present in the lives of most human beings, even though a particular individual might not necessarily connect them with a religious worldview, or come to an affirmation of God based on them. The experiences mentioned above of fidelity, hope, presence and intersubjectivity, which all involve profound commitments that cannot be captured and analyzed in objective terms, but that are nonetheless real and can at least be partly described conceptually (in philosophy, but especially in literature, drama and art [Marcel, 1963]), are best explained if they are understood as being pledged to an absolute, transcendent reality. As noted, the experience of fidelity is one of his favorite examples. Fidelity involves a certain way of being with another person. The other person is not seen as a person with a certain set of desirable characteristics, or as identified with a function, or even as a rational, autonomous subject; rather he or she is experienced as a “thou,” a person with whom I identify and am one with on the path of life (Anderson, 1982, p. 31). Fidelity is an experience that the other will not fail me, and that I will not fail them, and so, as we have seen, it is deeper than constancy (in many relationships, fidelity is reduced to constancy). Marcel suggests that such experiences have religious significance, because the individual often appeals to an ultimate strength which from within enables him to make the pledge which he knows he could not make from himself alone (Pax, 1972, p. 60).
Marcel holds that unconditional commitments such as these are best explained if understood as being pledged to an absolute transcendence. Indeed, given that life is full of temptations and challenges, the recognition of an absolute Thou also helps the individual to keep his or her commitments. Of hope he observes: “The only possible source from which this absolute hope springs must once more be stressed. It appears as a response of the creature to the infinite Being to whom it is conscious of owing everything that it has and upon whom it cannot impose any condition whatsoever” (Marcel, 1962a, p. 47). “Unconditionality,” as he has also noted, “is the true sign of God’s presence” (Marcel, 1950-51, p. 40). In general, his position is that the affirmation of God can only be attained by an individual at the level of a being-in-a-situation, or secondary reflection. At the level of primary reflection, the existence of God cannot be demonstrated, because the individual must be personally involved in the various experiences that can lead to an affirmation, but such genuine involvement is precluded at the level of abstraction. Yet, this does not mean that philosophy of religion in the traditional sense is not important; indeed Marcel’s reflections just mentioned must be regarded as part of an attempt to show, however indirectly, that belief in God is reasonable, but, as with all areas of primary reflection, we should recognize the limitations of a purely rational approach to religious belief.

15. Marcel in Dialogue

Four decades after his death, Marcel's philosophy continues to generate a steady stream of creative scholarship that, if modest in volume, nevertheless attests to his continued relevance for the contemporary philosophical landscape. Marcel's influence on contemporary philosophy is apparent, for example, in the work of Paul Ricoeur, his most famous student. Through Ricoeur, Marcel has influenced contemporary philosophy in and around the hermeneutic tradition. The pattern of “detour and return” that characterizes Ricoeur and some of his students closely resembles Marcel's dialectic of primary and secondary reflection.[13] Likewise, Marcel's understanding of otherness—illustrated by his image of “constellations,” conglomerations of meaningfully connected but non-totalizable beings—is an explicit challenge to philosophers of absolute otherness including Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and John D. Caputo, and a valuable resource for philosophers with a chiastic understanding of otherness, including Ricoeur and Richard Kearney. In addition, Marcel's philosophy offers rich possibilities for dialogue with contemporary ontologies struggling to address the problem of “being” without succumbing to ethical “violence” or “ontotheological” conceptions of God. As such, his philosophy should be of interest to scholars interested in the work of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, Merold Westphal and others philosophizing at the intersection of philosophy and theology. Finally, his insistence that philosophy should illuminate our lived experience and his insistence on concrete examples have much in common with thinkers who view philosophy as a “way of life,” including Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault. The resources of Marcel's philosophy have only begun to be tapped, and one may hope that the recent republication of what are arguably Marcel's two most important works, The Mystery of Being (by St. Augustine's Press) and Creative Fidelity (by Fordham University Press), will help to fuel a renaissance in scholarship concerning this remarkable thinker.

Marcel’s thought continues to endure and a steady stream of studies regularly appear in different disciplines that draw attention to the relevance of Marcel’s central ideas for our concerns in twentieth first century philosophy, theology and culture. These works include Sweetman (2008), an analysis of Marcel’s view of the person and its implications for issues in epistemology and philosophy of religion; and Hernandez (2011), a detailed study of Marcel’s religious philosophy from the point of view of his reflections on ethics. Traenor’s work (2007) places Marcel into dialogue (and debate) with Levinas on the question of the other, while at the same time arguing that their views on the other are incompatible; Tunstall (2013) discusses and develops Marcel’s ideas about dehumanization with regard to the topic of racism; Tattum (2013) places Marcel in dialogue with thinkers such as Bergson, Levinas, Ricoeur and Derrida on the concept of time, while Pierre Colin (2009) returns to Marcel’s views of the experience of hope.

Marcel remains one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, and his major themes continue to be relevant for the plight of humanity in the twentieth first century. Many find Marcel's thought attractive because he emphasizes a number of significant ideas that have been influential in twentieth century thinking in both philosophy and theology: the attempt to preserve the dignity and integrity of the human person by emphasizing the inadequacy of the materialistic life and the unavoidable human need for transcendence; the inability of philosophy to capture the profundity and depth of key human experiences, and so the need to find a deeper kind of reflection; the emphasis on the human experience of intersubjectivity, which Marcel believes is at the root of human fulfillment; and a seeking after the transcendent dimension of human experience, a dimension that he believes cannot be denied without loss, and that often gives meaning to many of our most profound experiences. Marcel is also regarded as important by a range of thinkers in different disciplines because he presents an alternative vision to challenge the moral relativism and spiritual nihilism of his French rival, Jean Paul Sartre, and other representative existentialist philosophers (Marcel, 1995, pp. 47-90). For this important reason, his work continues to speak to many of our concerns today in ethics, politics, and religion.

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14. Religious Belief

15. Marcel in Dialogue

14. Religious Belief :: تعاليق

14. Religious Belief

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