Emmanuel Mounier on the Person and Vocation

One does not free man by detaching him from the bonds that paralyze him; one frees man by attaching him to his destiny.

emmanuel mounier

In 1932, with the encouragement of Jacques Maritain, Emmanuel Mounier (1905–50) along with his friends Georges Izard and André Déléage founded the monthly journal Esprit in order to provide a platform for speaking from a clearly Christian perspective to the social, political, and cultural issues facing France. Mounier served as editor, and the first issues featured articles by some of France’s most established Christian intellectuals, including Nikolai Berdyaev, Étienne Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, and Maritain, as well as contributions from Mounier and many of the young Catholic intellectuals in his circle. Their writings reflected what is sometimes identified as French or Christian personalism. In October 1936, Mounier wrote and published an edition of Esprit that sets out to do three things: 1) identify the basic principles of the personalist philosophy; 2) critique the positions he identified as contrary to personalism (i.e., liberal individualism, Marxism, fascism); and 3) consider the changes that would be required if his culture was to transform itself according to the principles of a personalist civilization. Mounier entitled this edition A Personalist Manifesto (Manifeste au Service du Personnalisme). At almost 300 pages this is no short manifesto but rather a prolonged and impassioned argument for a recovery of the Christian understanding of the person. And at the heart of this recovery is the call of vocation. This article will study Mounier’s Manifesto and explore why the concept of vocation cannot be separated from a complete understanding of the person.

I. Vocation in Mounier’s Personalism

In his Manifesto, Mounier defines the person thus: “A person is a spiritual being, constituted as such by its manner of existence and independence of being; it maintains this existence by its adhesion to a hierarchy of values that it has freely adopted, assimilated, and lived by its own responsible activity and by a constant interior development; thus it unifies all its activity in freedom and by means of creative acts develops the individuality of its vocation.”¹

The role of vocation in this definition is complicated. It serves both to individuate me as a person and to bind me to other persons. It serves my liberty by revealing my destiny. It unifies me by transcending me. How is this so? For Mounier, vocation has been confused with “the happy adaptation of my abilities” to some profession, and to counter this confusion, we need to recover the sense of call in vocation. In “Catholic Personalism Faces Our Time,” written in 1938, Mounier describes vocation as a “unique and transcendent message which Christ tries intimately to whisper to me in the midst of the body of the faithful, athwart the babel of words here below.”² Since this call is uniquely mine it does individuate me while at the same time calling me into communion with other persons. For Mounier, one of the failings of liberal individualism is that in its emphasis on individual rights and the social contract it sees persons as united merely by shared social structures. Liberalism wants to deny the “unity of vocation” which binds us in a natural community (PM, 24). From the Christian perspective the unity of vocation is the universal call to holiness. For Mounier, the paradox of vocation is that while it is universal it is also uniquely my own. In “Catholic Personalism Faces Our Time” he observes: “Every worthy vocation is inimitable. . . . Each Saint differs immeasurably from every other, and nevertheless all of them have sought but one goal—to imitate a single model: Jesus.”³ We are all called to holiness but each must imitate Christ in his or her own way.

Along with uniting persons in a community, a vocation also serves to unify the person. My vocation serves to unify my actions and choices. For Mounier, vocation “is not a systematic and abstract unification; it is rather the progressive discovery of a spiritual principle of life” (PM, 76). The discovery of this principle...