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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
12/01/2011
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.
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