Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

origin. If giving were not ultimately an allowing to be taken, an offering, it would be determined by a limited, self-imposed measure that, as has often been lamented, undoes the gift from within. The wealth of the gift is to give itself completely—a donation that can be described as utter poverty. In order to be true the gift has to be complete; it cannot admit any measure. This is also why previous, discrete moments of giving were perceived as true only when one abandoned oneself in the giving. Those moments also taught that to hand oneself over to the other, as in marriage, has the unexpected though desired fruit of being given back along with the one to whom one has entrusted oneself. This is why in dying, too, one permits oneself to be taken and hopes that this ultimate gift may be finally confirmed. In this regard, death encompasses both moments that must be viewed in and through the other: giving oneself and allowing oneself to be taken. Understanding death in this way, we discover a new sense of limit. Limit, or finitude, which after Christian revelation is no longer a sign of perfection, emerges not as an end and total solitude, but as relation with the paternal origin. If originary experience allowed us to see the gift-ness of the person and of what is present, we now need to ask how recognition of the original giver, and hence the unity with and difference from him, takes place.

      6. The Exigent Character of Life

The previous sections attempted to show, with the help of Giussani, that originary experience touches on the encounter with the presence of the other, a sign that is the unity of logos and gift. The gift of the singular sets man on the path toward the affirmation of the transcendent giver of the gift, of whom the sign is a word. As the analysis of gift through the reality of the family indicated, the person comes to recognize through his own experience that the origin of his existence cannot be fully identified with his progenitors or the natural biological mechanisms. Originary experience leads man to discover from within life itself a “structural disproportion” between him, the sign, and the ultimate giver, which, in light of such disproportion, cannot but be acknowledged as the divine paternal mystery. Before examining this further, there is a methodological implication to note: the human person’s call to acknowledge the original giver means that the core of the doctrine of the analogy between God and finite being—which will be developed formally in the next chapter—consists in the dramatic relation between God and the human person. If the gift is freely given to itself so that it can be itself in responding to the giver, the analogy of being between God and the concrete singular takes place within the horizon of what can be called, with Balthasar, an analogia libertatis. This analogy of freedom, having its apex and condition of possibility in Christ, contains an analogia personarum according to which each person discovers his or her unique face in the response to the call of the paternal giver.50

The encounter with truth, which we call here originary experience, takes the concrete form of the encounter between the wonder-causing self-presentation of being in the sign’s dual unity (gift-logos) and the original needs that constitute the human heart. Giussani says that originary experience invites us to perceive the presence of being, but in addition, that experience also reveals what constitutes the gift of one’s being: the “heart,” that is, “a complex of needs and ‘evidences’ which throws man into comparison with all that is.”51 Giussani orders the original evidences, needs, and exigencies that constitute the human heart in four fundamental categories: truth, justice, happiness, and love.52 The first category of truth is man’s search for the meaning of everything; that is, for the idea or form that gives things their identity and relation with the whole, with the ultimate: “the need for truth always implies singling out the ultimate truth, because one can only define a partial truth in relation to the ultimate. Nothing can be known without a quick, implicit comparison, if you like, between the thing and totality. Without even a glimpse of the ultimate, things become monstrous.”53 Giussani places great importance on this first category, to the extent that it is the ground for his understanding of reason. Here again, it is experience that yields the adequate nature of reason: “reason is that singular event of nature in which it [reason] reveals itself as the operative need to explain reality in all its factors so that man may be introduced to the truth of things.”54 The totality indicated here is not quantitative. It regards the ultimate meaning of all that exists, a meaning that the concrete singular itself is not. Thus the need for meaning, awakened by the sign, always opens to the threshold of the infinite mystery.55

Without the affirmed perspective of the divine origin as “the unitary meaning which nature’s objective and organic structure calls the human conscience to recognize,” human justice is impossible; love becomes sentimental, barren possessiveness; and happiness (satis factus) is a momentary illusion.56 Positively stated, the original needs of truth, love, justice, and happiness always seek a totalizing response, a response that does not stop short of the ultimate. They therefore root man in the relation with the mystery of which the constitution of reality, and indeed of man himself, speaks. Originary experience reveals that the gift of our being has the task of affirming the ultimate mystery, the all-encompassing meaning that gives man and the cosmos to themselves.

Giussani does not speak of man’s needs and exigencies in the search for the ultimate in terms of “rights” or of a “claim” on God. Man is interiorly ordered to the vision of God in whom alone he finds fulfillment. Nevertheless, these needs, precisely as needs, do not present a claim on this vision. Man is not on an equal footing with God, who remains other. Giussani contends that the original needs express themselves as questions, not claims. These questions seek a “total answer, an answer which covers the entire horizon of reason, exhausting completely the whole ‘category of possibility.’”57 Man’s needs seek a totality that is other than the sign, the human person, or the unity of both. Furthermore, the fact that Giussani calls them “needs” and “exigencies” does not imply that God’s definitive self-revelation in Christ is demanded by man’s given structure. There is no forced arrival of grace. Giussani reminds the reader that the opening line of Augustine’s Confessions—fecisti nos ad te—means that God has created man already turned to him.58 This being turned toward God (“ad”) is part of the gift of human nature.59

The gift of human being, for Giussani, is thus a call to live in a vertiginous existential condition, that is, in a tension between poles due to the paradoxical human nature (to speak with de Lubac): man cannot give himself that which he needs and without which he cannot live. In concrete human experience, both worldly goals and eternal striving leave the original needs unsatisfied; what these needs seek is an inexhaustible response. Giussani indicates, then, that the human being always experiences a sense of “structural disproportion” at a finite response to the totalizing human needs. The sign always leads the human person beyond what reason can grasp. Reason, in faithfulness to experience, shows that the exhaustive response to the ultimate question lies beyond the horizon of one’s own existence. If man’s encounter with the world is this interplay of “sign” and original needs, which are awakened and set in motion by the sign, we can say, according to Giussani, “that the world ‘demonstrates’ something else, demonstrates God as a sign ‘demonstrates’ that of which it is a sign.” God’s existence is implied in the dynamic proper to human experience. With a remarkable trust in human nature’s capacity to perceive the evidence, Giussani continues that “the answer exists because it cries out through the constitutive questions of our being, but experience cannot measure it. It exists but we do not know what it is.”60 While revealing himself within our originary experience, God remains beyond human grasp. Since there is a structural disproportion between the need for total meaning and