Between 1930 and 1950, Emmanuel Mounier stood at the center of Catholic philosophical thought under the banner of "Personalism." He counted Maritain and Daniélou among his friends and moved in circles of the era's greatest thinkers. His life was brief—he died at forty-five—yet packed with activity and intellectual labor.
Personalism rejected both abstract individualism and absolute collectivism. It placed "the person" at the heart of two relationships: vertical (with God) and horizontal (with others), in harmony. For Mounier, "the living Christ at the center of one's life" was the foundation, and he lived by it each day.
This book gathers his reflections on suffering from his letters and diaries. Faced with a life so varied, so tested by work, by surroundings that often betrayed his ideals, by war, and above all by the illness and death of a daughter profoundly afflicted, we offer these pages to our readers—that they may receive their message with tenderness and gratitude.
For Mounier, suffering lived as a Christian does not lose its drama or its mystery. Instead, it opens onto a vision of life that is somehow positive, one that gives strength to bear its weight.
On the day his daughter Francesca received a diagnosis of acute encephalitis, he stood under the weight of a mystery that reason could not grasp. He wrote: "...we have been visited by someone very great...." A year later: "...when I approached her small bed, voiceless, I felt I was approaching an altar, some sacred place where God spoke through a sign. I felt a sadness that touched me deeply, yet it was light, transfigured. And around it I placed myself—I have no other word—in adoration. Without doubt, I have never known so intensely what prayer is as when my hand spoke things to that forehead which answered nothing; as when my eyes ventured toward that distant gaze, turned far away, beyond me, a kind of gaze that saw better than sight itself...."
It is rare to find an author who, alongside the gift of living and working with feet firmly planted on earth ("...often I turn with gratitude toward my four peasant grandparents, truly peasants all four..."), could approach a suffering child with an attitude that looks, through her, beyond and above the pain. Mounier speaks of this attitude as an act of adoration: suffering and joy dwell together there, and silence. He writes to his wife: "...I feel, as you do, a great weariness and a great calm mixed together; I feel that what is real, what is true comes from this calm, from our love for our little girl, which transforms gently into an offering, into a tenderness that surpasses her, that flows from her, returns to her, transforms us with her, and the weariness belongs only to a body so fragile for this light and for all that was habitual in us, possessive in our love for our child, who is gently consumed by a more beautiful love. We must be strong through prayer, through love, through surrender, through the will to keep joy deep in our hearts...."
Little Francesca, in her stillness, without speech, seems to speak, to explain, to soothe the pain. Through the pages of this book, her voice reaches us as well.
- Natalia Livi, 1996