DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, 2014 Tyler Viale Boston College Gabriel Marcel: Hope and Love in Time of Death To point out that love and hope are two of the major themes of Gabriel Marcel's work is no new discovery. Throughout his corpus, rarely more than a few pages pass between mentions of either one or the other. However, what does appear to be missed in the literature regarding Marcel's work, in my estimation at least, is the elaboration of this link. Too often the subject is taken up of either hope or love, rather than both. This approach has risked falling into a fatal error of viewing either as able to exist without the other. Perhaps this task is simply too great, given the source material (Albert Randall provides a series of appendices noting some 600 passages related to hope in Marcel's works ). Certainly it is a task too great for today's short 1 discussion. Nevertheless, I think it is one that must be started. After briefly formulating some of the basic tenets of Marcel's philosophy, I will examine several moments of death which Marcel deals with extensively in order to try and draw out the true nature of both hope and love, as well as the relation between the two. I. Dual Metaphysics Gabriel Marcel's experience of two world wars plays a decisive part in the path of his philosophy. "On a scale without historical precedent, men in this century have experienced destruction and have also experienced the apparent uselessness of superhuman sacrifices: given these conditions...where is he going to rest his hope?" Marcel asks following the close of the 2 Second World War. The destruction witnessed had erased hope, had therefore also erased the Albert Randall, The Mystery of Hope in the Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel 1883-1973 (Lewiston, New York: Edwin 1 Mellen Press: 1992), Appendices. Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, trans. G.S. Fraser (Lanham: University Press of America, 1985), 184.2 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !2 future, turning 'carpe diem' into a "universal imperative." But this was no distant observation, 3 as he notes elsewhere, "I do not hesitate to say that my whole life–and even that of my spirit–has developed under the mark of the death of other persons." From the death of his mother as a 4 child to his experience in World War I, searching for and delivering news of lost or killed soldiers to their families, death was something with which Marcel was closely acquainted. This new life which Marcel perceived as rising in the time following the end of the wars was one where "life [was] no longer loved...as if a kind of marriage between man and wife had been broken." Thus, any attempt at re-possessing hope must be founded in a recovery of love for life. 5 Marcel warns however that this "love for life" is not that which simply seeks diversion or amusement, but rather a love that is "substantial," "rooted in being," and "not commensurate with anything on which a value can be set or with anything 'marketable.'" To recover the love of life then, is precisely to re-grasp the nature of love itself: "it is only a sufficiently deep reflection on the nature of love," which he later calls "a metaphysic of love," that we can recover a true love for life, rather than a banal 'taste for life.' But this, he continues, "cannot fail to culminate in a doctrine of the Mystical Body." In restoring the love of this life, we are naturally led to re-6 establish hope for the transcendent. It is in this vein that he leaves a journal fragment in 1943, "Agape lies at the root of hope," a thought continued nearly a decade later when he explains that "the problem, the only 7 MMS, 184.3 Gabriel Marcel, Presence and Immortality trans. Michael Machado (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1967), 230.4 MMS, 188.5 all quotes MMS, 189.6 PI, 183.7 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !3 essential problem is posed by the conflict between love and death....It is essentially in this perspective that the reflections on hope which I made sometime ago, and which are in reality at the heart of my entire work, must be seen." Those reflections were published under the title 8 Homo Viator, and subtitled Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope. There, in a chapter titled "Sketch of a Phenomenology and a Metaphysic of Hope," delivered as a talk in Lyon in February 1942, he writes "it is not possible to sit in judgment on the case of hope without at the same time trying the case of love." 9 We can now come full circle to the first question posed, the line which, to some extent, is the judgment passed down by Marcel, having now tried the two cases in the wake of devastation: "where is [man] going to rest his hope?" Love has been abandoned, and hope forgotten alongside it. And the only way in which it may be recovered is to reformulate the two metaphysics to which he has alluded, that of love and that of hope. II. Value as Mystery This reformulation must be founded on two key Marcelian concepts: mystery and value. Mystery is the broad category of concepts to which he opposes mere problems. Unlike a problem which presents itself as an obstacle in our way, a mystery is something which we encounter, not as something to be understood or solved, but to be experienced, something which we take part in. This presents us with the first great problem, for as Randall points out, "to write about mystery is to distort it, for a mystery is not an abstraction but an experience that involves the whole human PI, 231.8 Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator, trans. Emma Craufurd and Paul Seaton (South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2010), 52.9 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !4 being." This does not make this project hopeless, but it should serve as a warning: what is said 10 is only for the sake of what is experienced. Our relation with this realm of mystery is one which he calls "exigence ontologique," which he himself admitted is poorly rendered in English as "ontological need," and is closely related to "the faculty of wonder." For man life must go beyond the technical if we are to 11 encounter its mystery. Marcel laments that this has been abandoned in modern society, symbolized, he says, by "the rather horrible expression 'time table'." Life has become a factory 12 line, predictable and utilitarian. Marcel hopes to recover the element of mystery, or depth, of being, which he defines as "the love which it is able to bestow" What the modern factory life 13 does not communicate is human depth, the depth which can only be seen through a communion of love. Which, as we will see, can come only when the other becomes a 'thou' for me. Hope and love are two of the ways which this mystery is encountered. Love is "what one might call the essential ontological datum." He continues even more strongly by asserting "the science of ontology will not get out of the scholastic rut until it takes full cognisance of the fact that love comes first." That hope follows along side of it may be reasonably inferred by the relation 14 pointed to in section I. Randall, The Mystery of Hope, 124.10 Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existence, trans. Manya Harai (Freeport, New York: Books for Library Press, 11 1969), 13. PE, 2.12 Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 13 1963), 79. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katherine Farrer (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 167.14 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !5 Elsewhere, Marcel uses the language of value to discuss these phenomena, though he notes in his 1951 work, "it is a vocabulary which is beginning to satisfy my less and less....the kind of philosophy for which 'value is a key term seems an abortive attempt to recover through our words what we have really lost from our thoughts." 'Value' has made the shift from an 15 ontological mystery, such as my worth (that is, my dignity) as a person, to a simple transaction, such as my worth (cost) as a speaker. Nevertheless, it is a terminology which he employed in his earlier works prior to and during World War II, and is one which, as long as we keep his later warnings in mind, can provide us with a valuable insight. Thus in a talk given in 1943, he refers to values as setting a seal on or consecrating human life. Where value truly makes itself 16 evident, where the life of value takes its meaning, is at the moment of death, and especially at the moment of sacrifice. Says Marcel, "value is probably always related to a sacrifice which is at least possible; value is, however, only authentic when something incommensurable is not only granted but established." This, however, is no Heideggerian being-towards-death. Man, Marcel 17 believes, is not something which is temporal, finite. In fact, this would be the very negation of value. Rather man truly is homo viator, man 'on his way.' A traveler who does not belong, and who is always returning. Thus he writes that "if death is the ultimate reality, value is annihilated in mere scandal." Value is a scandal because in that world hope becomes foolishness. To say 18 "you shall never die," would be to command the tide to stop. MMS, 127-8.15 HV, 134.16 HV, 136.17 HV, 145.18 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !6 The other aspect of value is that they "can only be incarnate." Values are always 19 encountered in life, in the person. Encounter here is a key term, because value is mystery, something which cannot simply be read off of the person, which cannot be quantified or put on an application form. No, value is the person. Value is that which is experienced in the co-esse formed in love. Love itself functions as a kind of ur-value, of which Marcel says "love is not yet a value and yet, on the other hand, there is not and cannot be any value without love." It is 20 because of this incarnate nature of love, of value, that death becomes an issue. If death is, at very least, the total decay of my physical body (which for Marcel, is something essential, something I am, not merely that I have), death takes away love, takes away the very condition for the possibility of love. This is the full significance of Marcel's statement "the only essential problem is posed by the conflict between love and death." III. The Moments of Death Death, as the seeming annihilation of the mystery of life, looms as that which has the power to destroy all that is loved. And yet for Marcel, this is not, as it is for so many others, reason to despair, but rather reason to hope. In fact despair constitutes the very submission to death, the abandonment of love. It is in the moments of death that we see most clearly the link between love and hope. Here I wish to discuss four moments of death, which I think show the various ways in which love and hope shine forth in death. They are four moments to which Marcel returns to time and again in his writings, suicide, my own death, sacrifice, and the death of the other. HV, 135.19 MMS, 189.20 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !7 We can examine these four moments to show how hope and love are built out of our situation here and now. To begin with then, is that moment which is so familiar to all existentialist thinkers, suicide. Suicide relates to the antithesis of hope, variously referred to as simply despair, or sometimes strengthened into the term 'unhope'. While Marcel follows the more or less standard interpretation of suicide, it must be pointed out that for Marcel suicide is always preceded by a kind of lived suicide, as Marcel says, it "can be prefigured in my very way of life." Suicide is the expression of absolute despair, unhope and un-love; "the absolute 21 negation of oneself." Suicide amounts to a rejection of the mystery of life. Somewhere between suicide and sacrifice lies my own foreseen death. The death which is foretold to me, as so often happens, by medical diagnosis. This is a theme to which Marcel returns time and again. Marcel points out the event of my illness can take two forms. Either I myself can announce my fate as final, or it can be delivered to me by my doctors. In the first, I act through a kind of despair, announcing my rejection by "pronouncing my own sentence." My actions don't yet constitute suicide, and yet contain all its marks, an abandonment of the desire to live, a denial of the transcendent, a refusal of all resistance. As Marcel concludes "is there not every chance that, discouraged by this sentence, it will feel obliged to confirm it. So it comes about that, far from merely foreseeing my own destiny, I shall really have precipitated it." The announcement of my impending death becomes the setting in motion of its arrival. Yet as Marcel notes, this scenario plays out very differently if I am informed by another that I will certainly die. In this case, rather than resigning to my fate, I can instead gain "not merely the strength to deny CF, 142.21 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !8 it, but to prove it to be wrong in fact." The announcement of my death appears as a challenge 22 which I cannot accept, and which further I must overcome. I make the avowal, through hope, that "I will beat this disease, I will live." But this kind of hope does not bring me out of myself. It is only a hope that I will remain as myself. Nor does it truly come up against death, by rejecting death I do not come up against death until I truly meet it. So far as this is the case, it fails to ever reach the truest sense of the word hope. Lastly, since this encounter fails to bring me out of myself, it fails to bring in love. It is not, as suicide was, a rejection of love, but is nevertheless its absence. Further up in this movement of hope is sacrifice and martyrdom. Whereas in suicide the person ends his life out of negation, in sacrifice, the martyr "does it for something else that he asserts means more, that is worth more; he puts his life at the disposal of that higher reality." We see in sacrifice then, the beginnings of hope, that there is something beyond myself. As Marcel says, "there is not and cannot be any sacrifice without hope," but it is still insufficient, or at 23 least it seems so to me (here I suspect Marcel might raise objection). The death of the martyr is death for a cause, for an ideal, in which Marcel says he "identifies himself with that for which he gives his life." Even in its highest form, death for the Absolute Thou, God, he "fancies that he will be associated with the victory." In every case, the martyr acts "as if he believed." In 24 25 other words, it seems to me as if the martyr is always acting at a kind of remove. There is hope, in its more pure sense where I do not objectify my end, but although there is identification, and all quotes HV, 31.22 CF, 77.23 BH, 88, footnote 1.24 CF, 77.25 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !9 although there is hope that my death will bring some sort of triumph, there is never (or at least there is not necessarily) the moment of love. There is not the movement from ideas to persons. For this reason it seems like we must distinguish a further sacrifice of love, where I do not give my life up for a cause, for something in which I believe, but rather for a person whom I love. When this movement is made, we finally see a moment in which both hope and love are shown forth in their full natures, but this can only be seen at a remove, in the moment of my own death, I cannot also play witness to the love and the hope which is involved. In an anecdote he relates in several works, Marcel tells another participant at a conference, "What matters is neither my death, nor yours; it is the death of the one we love." Certainly it is these moments on which 26 Marcel devotes the most time. The moment of the death of another. When we look at the death of the other, it is easiest to see the meaning of hope and love, because the other's death is the death which I live through, which I must deal with not only prior, but also after its happening. Here Marcel makes his most profound statements, one coming from the mouth of a character in one of his plays, "to love a being is to say you, you in particular, will never die." 27 This is a phrase to which Marcel returns again and again, and truly begins to show the nature of the relation between hope and love. As Marcel elaborates on his characters words, what it really says is "because I love you, because I affirm you as being, there is something in you which can bridge the abyss that I vaguely call 'death'." Love does not deny death as the sick patient did, 28 rather love says that death is not the end. That death, whatever it may be when it comes, will not be the close of the other, and will not be the close of my love for them. Already belied in these PI, 231.26 HV, 140.27 Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being vol. II (South Bend: Gateway Editions, 1951), 62. 28 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !10 words is the close relation between hope and love, the hinting that one cannot exist without the other. For this movement must surely be one of hope, hope of transcendence, hope that there is life after death. And yet Marcel repeats over and over again this quote "to love a being...." This is because as I have quoted already, "Agape lies at the root of hope," without love there is no hope, because hope is in its fullest sense hope that the beloved might live. Making use once more of one of his characters, Marcel tells us "the only dead are those whom we no longer love." So 29 long as we love, there is hope which says "you, you in particular shall not die." It is important to note here that it never goes beyond "you in particular," because immortality never goes beyond hope. What Marcel offers is not a proof for immortality, of which he says "we cannot even be concerned with anything of the kind," but rather remains on the 30 level of the unique individual, as he says "I can only utter and propose that what my reflection comes up with in being brought to bear on my experience." Love, it seems evident to me, can 31 only truly be on the level of the individual, thus hope, which springs from that love, can also exist only between individuals. However, Marcel relates the story of one of his real life friends who was killed to make the point that although this immortality is personal, that does not mean it is subjective in the sense of non-real. Unable to fully articulate this mystery, he can only ask the question "what do I mean when I say, 'It is not merely the image of Emile M. that I carry within me, it is he himself'?" Again, this does not serve as an objective proof of immortality, but it 32 does hint at the individual nature of immortality, while simultaneously affirming it to be a real PI, 277.29 PI, 194.30 PI, 193.31 PI, 145.32 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !11 immortality and not merely a lasting memory. "This affirmation is by no means a statement of fact; it is quite the opposite, like hope." 33 At this point we come to Marcel's second great statement, "I hope in thee for us." This one is far less forthcoming in its meaning than the previous. The beginning and the end seem clear enough, "I hope for us." At this level we have a perfect example of the statement "I hope," hope of community, availability. I hope that I will be present to you, and you will remain present to me. But the middle term, "in thee," presents more difficulties in interpretation. Here Marcel has created an ambiguity, one which I think was intentional. To examine exactly what is meant, we have to look at the quote in its larger context, "In thee – for us": between this "thou" and this "us" which only the most persistent reflection can finally discover in the act of hope, what is the vital link? Must we not reply that "Thou" is in some way the guarantee of the union that holds us together, myself to myself, or one to the other, or these beings to those other beings? More than a guarantee which secures or confirms from outside a union which already exists, it is the very cement which binds the whole into one. 34 Both the original French as well as the English translation leaves thee in lower case except for once, when referencing the "Thou" which holds the union together. According to Godfrey, we ought to read this as claiming that "any full hope...involves not only an empirical thou...but also absolute Thou." However, I am not sure this is necessarily the case. For the present, we will 35 have to ignore the possibility of a direct communion with God to focus on the relation with the other (whether or not the Thou is involved in "we"). PI, 145.33 HV, 54.34 Joseph Godfrey, "Appraising Marcel on Hope," Philosophy Today 31, (1987): 238.35 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !12 Here, another person becomes for me a thou, becoming present to me as a second person. This is not simply nearness of body to body, for as Marcel points out, I may sit next to a man on the train, and yet feel no connection with him at all. Though he is near to me, he is not present to me, he is not presented to me as a thou to love. Only when I acknowledge the mysterious element of another's being do they become a thou, something more than just an object of perception. This is the movement of hope, Marcel says, and "consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being...a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me, which cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being." I first recognize that there is another like me,who lives with me, and for whom the 36 same question of existence arises. From here, the thou becomes the we in love, in intersubjectivity. Marcel speaks at times of the other living in me, being part of my very being. This is no exaggeration for him. Intersubjectivity is something more primal than solitude; my own being cannot be worked out except in its relation to others, to a we. Here we might bring in what Jean-Luc Marion calls the fundamental ontological question. Not the question of certainty, "does anything exist?" but rather of assurance of my own being, which can only be asked as "does anyone love me?" A question so haunting in its uncertainty, and one which is prefigured 37 in much of Marcel's work in the grounding of the Ontological Mystery in love. As Marcel himself notes, "it is indeed necessary to observe that the "I" can designate only an absence, more precisely only a lack." In this mood, it is easy to see where the rise of despair and suicide come 38 PE, 16.36 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 37 2008), 20. PI, 144.38 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !13 from. When a person feels unloved, they become destabilized, they have nothing, as Marcel sought to find, on which to rest their hope. Without love there is no intersubjectivity, and therefore, no subjectivity of any kind. On the other hand, when intersubjectivity is recognized as the proper mode of existence, when others become thous, and I moves into the realm of we, we can reach the heights of Marcel's great statement: "I hope in thee for us." the hope in the other, in their existence with me, willing what I am willing, brings us into the realm of intersubjectivity, which for Marcel is synonymous with love. There is a slight problem in this formulation, which does not seem to occur to Marcel, but which will later trouble Marion extensively: when seeking to answer the question "does anybody love me?" another human's love can never be first. Nor can it ever be guaranteed. There is always a chance that the love turns out to be a sham, that the other is not who I thought they were, and the love ends. Nor (it seems) can anybody's love for me ever precede my existence, so there is always a point at which I am unloved, in which, therefore, my very being is destabilized. As I said, this does not seem to be a concern of Marcel's, however I think it is one that must be added in. One which seems so clear a fundamental problem. This, then, is why we must go back and question the involvement of an Absolute Thou, guaranteeing our love, so that "I hope in thee for us" becomes "I hope in Thee for us." It is God who loves us before we existed, whose love for us is totally unconditional. Whether the "us" in that formulation can refer exclusively to myself and God is still uncertain, but when God is added in to my relations to others as an insurer the possibility of love, of intersubjectivity, becomes even more assured. DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !14 Having discussed the personal terms in the saying, we can return to the action, "I hope." Not just any hope, but a hope "for us." The fact that the hope is "for us" brings us into the truest and best forms of hope, those which reach beyond the individual and bring him into the communal. It is a hope which does not give any conditions or restrictions. I hope for us no matter who or what or where intervenes between us. The connection bonded in this hope is one which is truly transcendent. I hope for us that we remain, no matter if you are to depart on a trip and be no longer near to me. Nor even, will I allow that we to cease, even if death comes between us. As this becomes elucidated, it will be noticed that the line is becoming blurred between Marcel's two great aphorisms, "to love a being is to say that you shall not die" and "I hope in thee for us" both become the same, "I affirm that you will not depart from me, nor I from you." Finally, in this experience, we see the true fullness of love and hope. IV. The relation of Love and Hope Now that we have looked at the ways in which love and hope interact at death, we can begin to piece together what exactly the relation is between these two values. Let us recall some of the most penetrating quotes from Marcel's work: "agape lies at the root of hope," "the only essential problem is posed by the conflict between love and death," and finally "it is not possible to sit in judgment on the case of hope without at the same time trying the case of love." It is clear then, that there is an unbreakable link between these three phenomena. Nor can any of them be seen apart from the wider phenomena of transcendence. As Kenneth Gallagher states "of all the 'concrete approaches' to the ontological mystery, hope is the one which most unambiguously announces its references to transcendence." Death, the very negation of transcendence, is 39 Kenneth T. Gallagher, The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 73.39 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !15 sought to be overcome in hope. Hope, in its purest form, is always a hope for life. Whether it was the hope which overcomes suicide, the hope which says "a cure will be found," or that which says to the loved one, hope's proper element always seems to revolve around the rejection of death and the affirmation of transcendence. The relation of love to transcendence is not as clear. Unlike hope, it does not confront death head on. Hope points at death and seeks to overcome. Love points at the other and seeks to be overcome by them, a surrender into intersubjectivity. However this movement hides within it several different movements towards transcendence. The first is one that Marcel himself hesitates to give the name: the transcendence of self to other. This horizontal transcendence brings the self out of himself and into communion with the other. As God, Absolute Thou, is brought into the relation of love, and love becomes grounded in and reassured by the third person, this horizontal transcendence begins to reference a vertical dimension. But it does not yet, in its own movement, go beyond in the purest sense. The reassurance of the Thou is only a downward movement towards us, and does not involve a return. The love of another is, and must always remain, a love of other for other. As Marcel says, "there is, at the root of love, the belief in the inexhaustible richness and the unpredictable spontaneity of the being who is loved." It should never be seen 40 as merely the Love of God through others, nor the love of others mediated through a love of God, as the scholastics so often relegated it. Love, Eros, must remain an acknowledgement of the other for themselves, an "act of a free mind affirming another free self," even when it takes 41 place in the light of, under the watch of, God as third party. Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. B. Wall (Chicago: Gateway Edition, 1960), 64.40 MJ, 64.41 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !16 Randall writes that for Marcel love does involve vertical transcendence, "communion between a human thou and the Absolute Thou." While I do not wish to follow him in this claim 42 (I think Randall problematically conflates transcendence to God and transcending death), his follow-up conclusions nonetheless provide insight to what I think is the true relation of love to transcendence; "[vertical] transcendence not only makes love possible for Marcel but is also the foundation for hope. The transcendent ground of hope leads to the ontological mystery." I have 43 ceded that, while I do not agree with Randall that love transcends, it is certainly true that the element of the transcendent hangs over love. However, I think that it is not love which responds, but rather hope. This is the way which hope grows from the root of love, as Marcel says. Hope is what truly opens up love to the vertically transcendent. These two phenomena can never be separated, because they work together to bring the self out of itself and into communion, into the ontological mystery. This is the movement of hope, as Marcel has said over and over, but we must also remember his warning, "in the long run all that is not done through Love and for Love must invariably end by being doe against Love." Hope without love is hubris, says Marcel. 44 45 Love without hope is lust. Love brings us out of ourselves into a communion of persons, of other thous. Hope brings us, as communion, beyond ourselves, beyond mortality, and into the realm of the Infinite Thou, the fullness of the ontological mystery. Two mysteries, two concrete approaches to the Ontological Mystery, which must not, indeed, cannot, ever be separated from each other. Randall, The Mystery of Hope, 292.42 Randall, The Mystery of Hope, 291-2.43 MMS, 75.44 PE, 19.45 DRAFT PAPER: DO NOT CITE FINAL VERSION PUBLISHED IN HOPE: CLAREMONT STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 2014 Viale !