Gabriel Marcel - Definition and Overview

Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was the leading existentialist Christian. Marcel was a devoted Catholic, with an atheistic father. A gentle and flexible man, Marcel was opposed to anti-Semitism and supported closer connections to non-Catholics.

Gabriel Marcel coined the word existentialism after the First World War, while he was still an atheist. In 1929 he converted to Catholicism. His great books are Mystery of Being (1950) and Man Against Society (1955).

Marcel argued that scientific thought had squeezed the life our of human experience, by replacing the "mystery" of being with a false scenario of life composed of "problems" and "solutions." Marcel is often classified as being of the earliest existentialists, although dreaded being described as being in the same class as the atheistic Jean-Paul Sartre - he himself preferred the term "neo-Socratic". Sartre emphasized people's ability to create themselves with freedom and autonomy, which Marcel viewed as a mistake. Marcel taught that the goal of life is true communion with God, which meant opposing both modern materialism and a technologically driven society.