The Metaphysician of Love: An Introduction to Louis Lavelle

For A.-D. Sertillanges, the Catholic philosopher Louis Lavelle (1883-1951) was truly “the Plato of our days.”[1] Jean-Louis Vieillard-Barron too affirmed that his was “the only great metaphysical synthesis in twentieth-century France.”[2] Yet it is easy to see what a sui generis position Lavelle assumed within the intellectual culture of his time. His was a metaphysics of the Absolute in a time when Heidegger’s thought had just entered France with power. He was a Catholic, but not a Thomist. He showed great appreciation for Bergson, and yet nothing sounds less Bergsonian than the title of his major work, “The Dialectics of the Eternal Present” (clearly not the intuition of duration!). Yet he achieved great prominence in his day.

He was born in a tiny rural village in Southwestern France, and eventually held the prestigious Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, which had been held by Bergson and which Merleau-Ponty assumed right afterwards. He was also the founder, along with René le Senne, of the book series Philosophie de l’Esprit, which introduced new currents of personalist, existentialist, and Christian metaphysical reflection into France and then expanded into Italy. By all counts, then, we can say that Lavelle was the most original French Catholic metaphysician of the twentieth century.

To understand more of his project, however, we need first to say a word about the philosophical tradition in which he finds himself, French Spiritualism. This movement began (unintentionally, as it were) by Maine de Biran, with his discovery of a subjectivity that feels itself as a causal power, that experiences its own voluntary effort, coupled with internal resistance, as taking precedence over any exterior correlative object of sensation. In this way, Biran argues (against Hume) that necessary causality is not something we induce from repetition, but something we immediately experience within ourselves in willed effort.

In this way he also argues (against the hyper-empiricists in France) that there is a more primitive fact than sensation: the immediate experience of myself in hyper-organic effort, which is never divorced from the inner resistance of the body. Drawing on Maine de Biran, then, French Spiritualism attempts to be, as Dominique Janicaud puts it, a “renewal of metaphysics, a direct gaze towards the absolute within a methodical deepening of the inner life.”[3] It is a metaphysics renewed on the basis of experience, a kind of proto-phenomenology and a positive metaphysics.

There is noticeably something Augustinian about this spiritualist line of philosophical reflection, which purports to rediscover metaphysics by means of interiority. But this Augustinianism shines all the more brightly in Lavelle’s voice. For Lavelle’s own fait primitif unveils that at the root of all our waking life is not only the primitive experience of my own, solitary effort, but the even more primitive experience of participation. From the start, to experience myself as act is already to experience myself as the recipient of a gift or of an invitation, as nourished by the infinite fountain of a pure Act, which alone knows no passivity and is coupled with no exterior object. Here is the Augustinian encounter with the interior intimo meo. For Lavelle, there is no possible deduction of such an experience of participation; he can only alert his readers that this experience is ever available to them, that we can always taste it, full of wonder and joy, even in the smallest gestures of freedom, such as moving my little finger, in the possibility of enacting a power which I alone can perform, though this power exceeds me on all sides.

We will see that Lavelle’s Dialectics of the Eternal Present thus follows what he calls the analytic method: departing from the fact of the experience of participation, this dialectics seeks only to analyze the relations of its different aspects, and to offer an itinerary which may deepen this primordial experience by means of a number of progressive démarches. We will see that, in this major work, three relationships of presence must be coordinated: first, the presence of God to myself and of myself to God; secondly, the presence of others to me and my presence to them; and finally, the presence of the sensible, phenomenal world, a presence which appears both as instrument and as obstacle to the expression of finite acts.

What we have here, therefore, is a philosophy which remains in its proper ambit as philosophical discourse, but which is ever animated by a theological vision of who God is, as pure Act, and ultimately, as pure generosity. Before we begin our exposition of Lavelle’s major work, then, the Dialectics of the Eternal Present, we would do well to say a word about the theological fruitfulness that might come from a fuller reception of his philosophy. In Lavelle’s philosophy of spirit and of participation, in which each human person discovers herself in the pure presence of God’s Act, we also discover the interrelation between my act and that of others—the possibility of a mutual constitution which is nothing other than a “community of spirits,” or better yet, a “communion of the saints.”

In this communion, each person finds herself only in the reciprocity between her act and that of another, when they are both transfigured into pure openness and availability. We can, therefore, agree with Gabriel Marcel’s statement that Lavelle’s philosophy is, above all, a “metaphysics of love.”[4] For Lavelle, the love between two finite beings is a kind of reciprocal creation, an allowing oneself to introduce and to be introduced into life by another; and so Lavelle affirms that instead of supposing its object, love discovers it and even gives it being by loving it, which reveals love’s full ontological value. In order to arrive at this culminating point of love and communion, however, we need to go volume by volume in his Dialectics of the Eternal Present, in order to trace the main arc of this intellectual and spiritual trajectory of participation.

On Being

The first volume of Lavelle’s dialectics prepares the groundwork for the philosophy of spirit and of participation that will unfold in the subsequent volumes. This first volume is dedicated to recovering the notion of being. In his time in France, any discourse on being was actively curtailed by the intellectual asceticism of different kinds of phenomenism, of either the neo-Kantian or more positivist kind. Lavelle wishes to intervene on the scene by insisting upon the universality and univocity of being. Universality speaks of the extension of the notion of being, whereas univocity speaks of its intension. In terms of the first, we can say simply that nothing escapes the domain of being, because, in a Parmenidean fashion, nothingness is not. Phenomena, then, along with dreams, the smallest particles of dust, illusory mirages, and even unrealized possibilities, are all imbued with being; they all exist in their proper way and with their irrevocable dignity. Lavelle wishes to affirm that even the most vanishing impression exists de plainpied avec l’être total, on the same plane as total being. He also worries about a notion of the hierarchy of being which would place being and nothingness as two extremes, thereby again hypostasizing and empowering nothingness.

With regards to univocity, Lavelle makes clear that his intention is by no means to re-awaken the old scholastic disputes about univocity and analogy. In fact, it is his contention that these mutually necessitate each other. Univocity points to the concrete unity of being, while analogy points to its diversity of modes. Univocity pertains not to a monism or a shared manner of being, but to the foundational unity that embraces everything that is and that allows nothing to stand apart. Analogy, then, being a doctrine of diversity, is for Lavelle conditioned by univocity, because unity is more foundational than difference. In this way, Lavelle wishes to reinscribe a discourse on being within France’s intellectual scene by means of an appeal to the ubiquity of being, to its primacy over every other category, under the key terms of universality and univocity. In his own words: “being cannot measure its gifts; it can only give itself fully in each of its members. Its presence can only be a total presence.”[5]

On Act

By means of the previous exposition, however, it is clear that the first volume of the Dialectics would not be enough all by itself. One could still, in a Hegelian manner, attack the universality of the notion of being as a sign that being turns out to be, in the end, the emptiest of all notions. If it applies to everything, does it mean anything? The second volume of the dialectics, which is perhaps the most important of the four, will have to engage in the arduous task of enriching our notion of being—it seeks to accomplish this by identifying being with act, which is also to identify being with spirit, subjectivity, or ipseity.

That God’s act does not simply give being and then depart, allowing for each being a self-subsistent existence, is clear from the fact that, in Aristotelian fashion, we say of each thing that it is in act insofar as it is. The act which gives (and which finds its archetype in the self-giving act of subjectivity) is prior to and the ground of the given object. For Lavelle, it is an impossibility for thought to conceive of an absolute object. The act, therefore, is the ground and very secret inwardness of all things.

The question now, then, is to explain how the perfect act of God, who alone perfectly coincides with itself, is able to share its own act with us. Here we need to speak of the very dynamics of participation, as a literal “co-acting,” cooperating or acting alongside God by the gift of his own creative act. It will become apparent that, for Lavelle, creation is utterly spiritual in that it represents not something external to God, but the very sharing of his own freedom with spirits who are truly free because of him. And the perfection and spirituality of God’s creative act is thus shown in the fact that God’s gift is so fertile that it is able to fructify a free response of love towards him.

For Lavelle, participation means that God virtualizes himself into an infinity of possibilities, so that we can choose, in freedom, which possibilities to actualize in the spatio-temporal world. There is, therefore, a gap or an interval between ourselves and God, which is expressed in the interval between ourselves and the sensible world. We are thus exceeded on two fronts: both in terms of the infinity of possibilities and powers, which we can never fully realize, and in terms of the resistance of the world, which will never yield perfectly to our freedom. The last intended volume of the Dialectics of the Eternal Present, which Lavelle did not live to write, would be called De la Sagesse. It is clear, however, from scattered indications throughout his writings, that wisdom, for Lavelle, is the very discipline of participation. It consists neither in denying the world and fleeing towards the solitude of a quiet, inexpressible act, nor does it consist in abandoning our freedom to the pressures of events. Instead, wisdom is the search for a certain proportionality between our inner act and the exterior conditions of our embodiment; it is the almost miraculous search for a spontaneity that is able to embrace the world as if we ourselves had chosen the life that was given to us.

On Time and Eternity

From the preceding, we may already have glimpsed how space and time, far from being merely formal conditions of experience, appear as the very means of participation, as the measure of the interval between my act and God’s act. How else, after all, do we understand time and space if not by the image of the interval between two points in space and between two points in time? But here we see, as the title of the work indicates, that time takes a more privileged role, which can be seen from the fact that, with time, all spatial distances can be crossed.

Yet it could appear that time is precisely the counter-argument to all of Lavelle’s unsurmountable positivity when it comes to the universality and univocity of being. Is not time, after all, the classic place of non-being, with the “not yet” of the future, and the “no longer” of the past? And is not the present simply an evanescent point of the passage? How, then, can God’s eternal present ever be shared with our own present, which is but a vanishing point of coincidence between our act and the sensible givenness of the world? Lavelle will thus have to speak of time in a new, positive way, to retrieve its intrinsic meaningfulness and to imbue it with spirituality.

For Lavelle, the future is the very positivity of the infinity of possibilities which remains ever open before me, a positivity which endures necessarily as a constitutive part of my being as act. The past too is not a faded perception, the vestige of an existence we have lost, but is able to endure under the sign of a spiritual memory. Lavelle, like Bergson, is attentive to those (Proustian) experiences, in which the past appears not as a faded perception, but actually as being even more beautiful than the event when it had taken place. “Memory presents our life to us in a spiritual picture in which events appear with a kind of light they did not have at the moment when they happened; they appeared then darkened by the preoccupations of interest and the fumes of passion.”[6] This experience, for Lavelle, means that the event has been transfigured in spirit, that it belongs to us all the more deeply insofar as we renounce the possession of its sensible availability. Though Lavelle is influenced by Bergson’s insights on the connection between memory and spirit in Matter and Memory, it becomes clear that, for Lavelle, memory is not simply an automatic process, the unavoidable preservation of the past in the form of a spiritual unconscious. Rather, memory depends on our freedom; it can be performed with different degrees of purity. The discovery of the spiritual presence of the past in the form of memory depends upon the exercise of our renunciation, of our self-divestment of a sensible availability.

All spirits are completed in participation mnemonically, once they no longer recall what they have, but only what they are, which is precisely what they have had, but have no longer; such that enrichment and simplification constitute the very rhythm of our spiritual life. In this sense, Lavelle will even come to the point of speaking of the “identity between spirit and sacrifice.”[7] In this sense too, memory performs a truly ontological function, not unlike that of death. For Lavelle, it is significant that one can only become a saint after one has died. This is not only because, during the course of life, one can always fall again into sin. It is more fundamentally because, after death, memory can finally gather up the entire intelligibility of one’s act with a new, spiritual unity, such as in the words of Mallarmé, which are often quoted in Lavelle studies: “tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change” (“such as into himself at last eternity changes him”). The dead are actually much closer to us than the living, much more interior to us, despite the shock that common sense feels towards such an idea.

On the Human Soul

We can say that this last published volume of Lavelle’s Dialectics of the Eternal Present manifests the way in which this dialectics distinguishes itself from the Hegelian kind. Hegel’s is a dialectics of contradiction, in which negativities are truly productive of their contraries, and in which the initially empty category of being can only come to itself by means of this process of the alternation of contraries. Lavelle’s dialectics, however, is a dialectics in the simpler dialogical sense, a dialectics in which the multiplicity of objects in the sensible world calls forth a multiplicity of powers that can respond to it. It is a dialectics of the fullness of Being, which does not come to itself, but rather generously shares itself with a multitude of finite acts, via a diversification of powers and objects and by means of intervals which must be crossed.

In this sense, Lavelle will speak systematically of three distinct kinds of power: the powers that discover the not-I (which are the noetic and representative powers of thought), the powers that constitute the I (which are the mnemonic and volitive powers of the will), and the powers that encounter another I (which are the expressive and affective powers of love). It is not our intention here to elucidate the inner structure of each of these powers. It appears, however, that Lavelle had in mind a certain progression or ascension through them. The work thus ends with a discussion of love, which is the perfection of thought and of will, as a power which both discovers the other and constitutes the self at once.

Love is the very perfection of the human act, insofar as, in the love between two human beings, we find something akin to God’s creation. God’s is the only act which is fully immanent and never departs from itself; even his creation is simply a summons of participation, a sharing of his own act with us. Human love too is like that: to love, for Lavelle, is to introduce another and to be introduced by another to life. Love is the only act which directs itself not towards an object, but towards another act; and, in this way, all resistance and limitation can be finally transformed into reciprocity.

Drawing upon this philosophy of spirit and of participation, how should we speak of the communion of the saints? How do we think or remember them, and how do they act upon us? Is it merely the case that we read the stories of their lives and are externally moved by them to imitate their example? And is it merely the case that they, in turn, access the store-house of graces, selecting which ones of these graces they will shower upon us, again externally, as it were? Instead, the communion of the saints unveils before us a new kind of existence as spirit, where the words “mine” and “yours” lose all meaning.

We have said before that there exists an “identity between spirit and sacrifice,” and also that “being cannot measure its gifts; it gives itself fully in each of its members. Its presence can only be a total presence.” And now, as we conclude this exploration of the great arc of Lavelle’s Dialectics, we are allowed to revisit these words in a more thoroughly theological light. For, in this spiritual communion, in which all the saints are united by the self-same gift of participation in God’s life, they cannot but overflow into each other, consumed by pure availability and pure openness to the point of constituting each other by their mutual love. It is true that only God can create out of nothing, but the marvel of participation is that we too can give ourselves “out of nothing” to our neighbor and receive ourselves in return.

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