The following are excerpts from the works of Mounier:
Principles of a Personalist Civilization
A personalist civilization is one whose structure and spirit are directed towards the development as persons of all the individuals constituting it. They have as their ultimate end to enable every individual to live as a person, that is, to exercise a maximum of initiative, responsiblity, and spiritual life.
Personalism
Personalism requires an affirmation of value, viz., the affirmation of the absolute value of the human person. We are not asserting that the human person is an absolute, although for a Christian believer the Absolute is indeed a person, and in strict terminology the spiritual does not exist except as personal. But we do assert that the human person as defined by us is an absolute in comparison with any other material or social reality and with any other human person. It can never be considered merely as part of a whole, whether of family, class, state, nation or even humanity. God himself, in the doctrines of Christianity, respects the liberty of the person, even while vivifying it from within. The whole theological mystery of free will and original sin is based on the dignity of free choice conferred on man. The Christian accepts it because he believes that man was in his very nature made according to the image of God, that he is called to perfect that image by an ever increasing participation in the supreme liberty of the children of God.
Any discussion of personalism must thus begin at the basic roots of all human existence. If our efforts were confined merely to a defence of man’s public liberties or to any rights not further grounded, then our position would be weak indeed; for there would then be danger of defending only individual privileges.
The Spiritual at the Heart of Human Reality
It is common to all the doctrines that we have rejected to regard the spiritual in any of its ultimate forms as a private affair of individual morality. This conception is characteristic of bourgeois idealism, which abandons society to the iron age; it is characteristic of fascist realism, which denies that there is even in private life any spiritual authority except that of the state; it is characteristic of Marxist materialism, according to which spiritual and person pseudo-realities exercise no primary initiative at all in human affairs.
On the contrary the personalism that we have delineated places a spiritual value, i.e., the person, the receptacle and the root of all other values, at the very heart and centre of all human reality.
We cannot overemphasize the fact that Personalism is not fundamentally centered in political action, but that it is a total effort to comprehend and outgrow the whole crisis of the twentieth century man.
Embodied Spirit
Body and matter are not seen as a neutral background which is neither blessed nor accursed, a passive slave either to good or evil. They have been inwardly incorporated in the living growth of the Kingdom of God. If the Incarnation is complete and the Resurrection total, the new man is therefore called upon to make a new earth, and the world of the body is asked to put forth its strength, not merely to declare the glory of God, but also to create it.
Personal Fulfillment, Human Progress
Christianity gives man his full stature and more than his full stature. It summons him to be a god, and it summons him in freedom. This, for the Christian, is the final and supreme significance of progress in history. Why did not God create both man and nature in a state of instantaneous perfection? Why evolution? Why the hesitant march of history?
Christianity replies: God is the Father, but He is not paternalist. He wishes man’s liberation to be the fruit of the toil, the genius and the suffering of man, that he should savour one day the full fruit of this labour, these toils and this loving, and not receive it as an overpowering gift from Heaven. Humanity fara da se, slowly, progressively. How could humanity, beatified, share however imperfectly in the asceity of God, unless it had contributed to its triumph with the labour of its own hands? Progress is always thought of as a forward movement, but it is also a waiting, a delay. Everything comes in its own time.
This reverse side of duration has only a meaning if time is both the patience of God and the glory of freedom. One may agree that this perspective adds more to the glory of a benevolent God than the picture of a God mocking at our impotence and rejoicing in our bondage.
Some people, when there is talk of progress and the liberation of humanity, like to speak of the arrogance of man without God. Suppose we were to speak a little of man’s arrogance with God? It is just as important. It is true that those who remove all tragedy from history, remove all Christianity. But it is only another and equally arrogant way of liquidating Christianity to forget the promise of Easter in the despair of Good Friday. Yesterday optimism was the philosophy of the satisfied. Then Christianity needed its Kierkegaards, its Pascals and its Bloys.
But our countries, devastated by weariness, now need the builders of hopes and duties. I have developed the theme of a triumphant history, because it is the Christian view of history, not in order to make plethoric Christians feel more at ease than the cavaliers of anathema and scorn. Perhaps tomorrow we shall be invaded by worse than barbarians, by Babbitts, with crucifixes of gold, teeth of gold, and hearts of gold, coming to preach their new theologals in a big way: optimism, good temper and philanthropy which can be achieved much more easily, we know, through using the right toothpaste, well-adjusted foundations and a Parker pen, than through the Word of God. Then once more we shall need those great sombre voices.
Tragic Optimism
I have preferred to call this perspective that of tragic optimism, as a better expression of the antinomial paradox at its roots than the term active pessimism which is sometimes used. It implies that if history does in the last instance progress, it does not progress by obvious stages. One should add, in order to describe the whole Christian attitude, that the full series of summits is hidden from us in the unfathomable dark of history. We only know that the movement is forward and we can sometimes see it in the main. But we cannot foretell its ways, its halts and detours. There is thus an obvious relationship between Christian optimism and humanist optimism, which today has to defend itself against the concept of an insensate world. But there is an unbridgeable gulf between an optimism of history, which thinks in terms of linear progress…and the tragic optimism of the Christian, for whom the meaning of progress is never entirely definable, certainly not outside the paradox of the Crucifixion, and who can never, even up to the last, exclude the possibility of demoniac catastrophe.
Since no one can decipher the secrets of history to their very end, whatever hypotheses we may formulate of these vicissitudes may be more or less calm or sombre. We forget how much our own moods help to colour our unconsidered reflections on the world.
But it is important that we should not transform our moodiness and discouragement into prophetic visions, and appear to accept the God of Love as the purveyor of catastrophes. If we do, perhaps we shall no longer perceive His quiet triumphs on the daily journey from Jerusalem to Emmaus.
Personalism opposed to Individualism
The fundamental nature of the person is not originality nor self-knowledge nor individual affirmation. It lies not in separation but in communication.
For a spectator of the human drama who is not blind to his own reactions, this truth is far from self-evident. From the beginnings of history until now, there have been many more days spent in war than in peace. The life of societies is a perpetual guerrilla, and where hostility dies down, indifference supervenes.
All the efforts of comradeship, of friendship and love seem futile against the vast obstacles to human brotherhood. Heidegger and Sartre make much of this in their philosophy. For them, the need to possess and to overcome everlastingly obstructs communication. Associated man is necessarily either tyrant or slave. The very look of another steals somewhat of my universe, his presence restricts my liberty, his promotion is my demotion. As for love, it is a mutual disease, an inferno.
It is vain to protest against this view. It is also hard to deny the importance of the aspect of human relations that it presents. The world of other is no garden of delight: it is a perpetual provocation to self-diminishment or aggrandisement. It continually re-imposes risk and suffering just as we seem to be achieving peace. Even the refusal to recognize this springs from the instinct of self-defence. Some, trying to forget it, narrow all their social contacts. Others make themselves into the pliable and useful objects of those around them–they become the poor of the philanthropists, the juniors of this man or the servants of that, while the egoists take flight from all altruism as illusion. Yet another may restrict his circle to people who consent to act as his own mirror. A kind of instinct works continually within us to deny or diminish the humanity of those around us.
Individualism is a system of morals, feelings, ideas and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defence. This was the ideology and the prevailing structure of Western bourgeois society in the 18th and 19th centuries. Man in the abstract, unattached to any natural community, the sovereign lord of a liberty unlimited and undirected, turning towards others with a primary mistrust, calculation and self-vindication; institutions restricted to the assurance that these egoisms should not encroach upon one another, or to their betterment as a purely profitmaking association–such is the rule of civilization now breaking up before our eyes, one of the poorest history has known. It is the very antithesis of personalism, and its dearest enemy.
Bourgeois and Individualist Civilization
The bourgeois and invidualist civilization, which has been supreme in our world for many years, is still firmly in the saddle. It is linked up with the roots of a Christianity that it has contributed so much to dislodge.
The bourgeois conception is the outcome of a period of civilization which has been developing from the Renaissance to our own day. It arose out of revolt of the individual against a social system that had become top-heavy and a spiritual system that had become inflexible. This revolt was not altogether disorderly and anarchic. It vibrated with legitimate aspirations of the human person. But it turned soon enough to so narrow a conception of the individual that from the very start it engendered in itself the germ of its decadence.
By extending their fields of conquest over five continents, industrial capitalism opened up to the captains of industry and some adventurers in finance great possibilities of adventure. But in discovering the automatic fecundity of money, finance capitalism at the same time opened up to them an easy world to conquer, in which all vital tensions disappeared.
The natural rhythm of things, their resistance and endurance, were broken down under the influence of an unlimited power, which came, not from labour as applied in an orderly way to natural forces, but from speculation. This speculation, in which profit is gained without the rendering of service, was the ideal towards which all capitalist endeavour tended. Thus the motive passion of adventure gradually gave way to the soft enjoyment of comfort, the passion of conquest to the ideal of the impersonal mechanism, of the automatic distributor of pleasures devoid of risk or of excess, regular and constant, derived from the machine and from fixed income. Once a civilization has become used to the way of this unhuman ease, it no longer creates in order to give rise to new creations, but its very creations produce ever greater quiet and inertia.
Thus the substitution of speculative profit for industrial profit, and of the values of comfort for the values of creation, has gradually dethroned the individualistic ideal and opened the way to the spirit which we call bourgeois because of its origin and which seems to us to be the exact antithesis of all spirituality. It took hold first of the upper classes but gradually descended to all classes, even the humblest.
For money separates. Money separates man from struggle with natural forces, for it levels all resistance. It separates men from each other, for it has commercialized all exchange and has falsified both speech and conduct. It takes the modern man, who can endure nothing but the spectacle of his own security and shuts him up, far from the living reproaches of poverty, in his own residential sections, his own schools, his own habit, his cars, his relations, his religion–in all of which he sees himself and his ideas reflected a hundredfold.
We are indeed far from the hero. The rich man of the classical period is himself fast disappearing. On the altar of this sad world there is but one god, smiling and hideous: the Bourgeois. He has lost the true sense of being, he moves only among things, and things that are practical and that have been denuded of their mystery. He is a man without love, a Christian without conscience, an unbeliever without passion. He has deflected the universe of virtues from its supposedly senseless course towards the infinite and made it centre about a petty system of social and psychological tranquility. For him there is only prosperity, health, common sense, balance, sweetness of life, comfort. Comfort is to the bourgeois world what heroism was to the Renaissance and sanctity to mediaeval Christianity–the ultimate value, the ultimate motive for all action.
Principles of a Personalist Civilization
A personalist civilization is one whose structure and spirit are directed towards the development as persons of all the individuals constituting it. They have as their ultimate end to enable every individual to live as a person, that is, to exercise a maximum of initiative, responsibility, and spiritual life.
Personalism
Personalism requires an affirmation of value, viz., the affirmation of the absolute value of the human person. We are not asserting that the human person is an absolute, although for a Christian believer the Absolute is indeed a person, and in strict terminology the spiritual does not exist except as personal. But we do assert that the human person as defined by us is an absolute in comparison with any other materials or social reality and with any other human person. It can never be considered merely as part of a whole, whether of family, class, state, nation or even humanity. God himself, in the doctrines of Christianity, respects the liberty of the person, even while vivifying it from within. The whole theological mystery of free will and original sin is based on the dignity of free choice conferred on man. The Christian accepts it because he believes that man was in his very nature made according to the image of God, that he is called to perfect that image by an ever increasing participation in the supreme liberty of the children of God.
Any discussion of personalism must thus begin at the basic roots of all human existence. If our efforts were confined merely to a defence of man’s public liberties or to any rights not further grounded, then our position would be weak indeed; for there would then be danger of defending only individual privileges.
The Spiritual at the Heart of Human Reality
It is common to all the doctrines we have rejected to regard the spiritual in any of its ultimate forms as a private affair of individual morality. This conception is characterisitc of bourgeois idealism, which abandons society to the iron age; it is characteristic of fascist realism, which denies that there is even in private life any spiritual authority except that of the state; it is characteristic of Marxist materialsim, according to which spiritual and person pseudo-realities exercise no primary initiative at all in human affairs.
On the contrary the personalism that we have delineated places a spiritual value, i.e., the person, the receptacle and the root of all other values, at the very heart and centre of all human reality.
We cannot overemphasize the fact that Personalism is not fundamentally centered in political action, but that it is a total effort to comprehend and outgrow the whole crisis of the twentieth century man.”
Embodied Spirit
Body and matter are not seen as a neutral background which is neither blessed nor accursed, a passive slave either to good or evil. They have been inwardly incorporated in the living growth of the Kingdom of God. If the Incarnation is complete and the Resurrection total, the new man is therefore called upon to make a new earth, and the world of the body is asked to put forth its strength, not merely to declare the glory of God, but also to create it.
Technical Progress
Technical progress serves men collectively in the same way as habit serves the individual. It is for man a powerful means of liberation provided he dominates it.
What we therefore reproach our technical civilization with is not that it is inhuman in itself, but that it has not yet been humanized and that it has thus far served an inhuman system.
Ultimately, the parable of the tares and the wheat is the truest symbol of the Christian vision of History. An accursed harvest springs up throughout the years to make all human Utopias ineffectual and to shatter the dream of a world which shall become innocent from the moment it is so decreed: such is the role of “Christian pessimism.” But growing tirelessly amidst these unhallowed fields is the kingdom of God, named and unnamed, with slow irrestible force.
One does not free a man by detaching him from the bonds that paralyze him; one frees a man by attaching him to his destiny.
To desire life at all costs is, some day, to buy life at the price of all reason for living. We have no authentic existence until we have an interior stronghold of values or of devotion against which we do not believe that the fear of death itself could prevail.
Sources
Eileen Cantin, Mounier: a Personalist View of History. Paulist Press, l973.
Emmanuel Mounier, Be Not Afraid: Studies in Personalist Sociology. Harper, l954.
______Personalism. University of Notre Dame Press, l952.
_______A Personalist Manifesto. Longmans, Green and Co., l938.
Houston Catholic Worker, Vol. XV, No. 2, March 1995.
