Opening the Gates of Our Being: Charting a Way Out of Fear with Jean Vanier and Emmanuel Mounier

Abstract

This essay draws the work of Jean Vanier and Emmanuel Mounier into dialogue, primarily on the topic of moving from a society built on fear to one built on love and communion. To accomplish this, the essay articulates aspects of Mounier’s personalist philosophy and the influence thereupon of Nikolai Berdyaev. Texts similarly titled Be Not Afraid by Vanier and Mounier provide a jumping off point for the dialogue between their works. Finally, the essay casts Vanier’s “way of the heart” as an expression of practical personalism.

Keywords:

• disability
• ethics
• L’Arche

Notes

1 According to Catholic moral theologian Charles E. Curran, commenting on the development of Catholic Social Teaching, its “integral and transcendent humanism depends heavily on the thought of French neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain” (Dorr, 2012, p. 413). Maritain’s integral humanism was articulated most explicitly in his book of that title, Integral Humanism (1936), as well as other “ground-breaking socio-political thought” in another major title, Man and the State (1951) (de Torre, 2001, p. 202). This and other work by Maritain had a powerful impact on his friend Cardinal Giovanni Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. When Pope Paul VI began to preside over the Second Vatican Council after the death of Pope John XXIII’s in June of 1963, he “invoked Maritain’s work … this was especially true with regard to Gaudium et spes” (McCauliff, 2011, p. 601).