Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

Since God gives himself to be known through the mediation of the sign’s gift-character, originary experience does not propose a direct intuition of God (ontologism). Consequently, what this means for man and his constitutive needs is that both remain beyond understanding until man is encountered by God. What man really needs is discovered only in Christ. It is then that he realizes that he is thirsty because, incomprehensibly to him, God is more profoundly thirsty for him.61

The encounter between the sign and the constitutive needs of the heart comes to expression in a judgment, that is, as a knowledge in love, which acknowledges God to be the ground of the sign and, at the same time, discovers the correspondence of both the sign and the ground to the human heart.62 Because the transcendentals are coextensive, all that exists co-responds to a certain extent to man’s original needs. That is, through this judgment man acknowledges that reality responds with and in man to the ultimate source. Originary experience therefore reveals a unity between man, reality, and the whole. For Giussani, elementary experience is true if it “throws us into the rhythm of the real, drawing us irresistibly toward unification with the ultimate aspect of things and their true, definitive meaning.”63 It also discloses that “to understand” does not mean to comprehend something in the sense of completely grasping its meaning. It is rather to acknowledge the integrity and the fullness of presence.64 To acknowledge this fullness, to know, involves all of the human person. The criterion for judging the truth of any thing has to be independent of the judger’s wishes and limited cognitive capacities and, at the same time, it has to be truly his. To emphasize the latter without the former leads to subjectivism; to affirm the former without the latter leads to alienation. For Giussani, the criterion for judging given to man is not outside of him. It is given to him and, as such, it is his; it coincides with him. Yet since it is given to him with his own nature (in a sense it is his own nature), the criterion is greater than he is, and so is never subjective. The infallible criterion is the array of inextricable needs that constitute the human heart. To say that the original needs are the infallible criteria man is given—“infallible as criteria not as judgment”—attempts to liberate man from alienation, that is, to keep man from jettisoning the responsibility of “seeing for himself.”65 Given the dimensions of the original needs, what responds adequately and totally to man’s exigencies and original needs would be a sign that coincides completely with the mystery. This is why, Giussani says, only “something exceptional corresponds,” that is, only Christ, the sacrament of the Father, the one in whom mystery and sign coincide, adequately responds, that is, addresses and fulfills without satiating the needs of man’s heart.66

It is important to note that the judging, as knowledge in love, that acknowledges the gift-character of the singular, and so God as the singular’s ultimate, takes place in collaboration with man’s affection and freedom. The way reason knows something is not by processing information as a computer does; it requires being touched by the sign (gift-logos) and being moved to know. Giussani, rejecting the Enlightenment claim of an isolated reason unimpaired by any form of mediation, stresses further the unity of affection and reason and states that “without evidence we would not be moved, and without being moved, there would not be evidence.”67 Bearing in mind the twofold connotation of affection—first the passive sense, to be touched, to be struck; then the active sense, to love something—we can say that reason desires to know: it is provoked and moved to know and it loves what gives itself to be known. There is another dimension, however, of the need to welcome in freedom, to re-cognize, what reason sees and what the affections love. “To know (conoscere) is to recognize (riconoscere) what exists in the comparison with one’s original needs.”68

Freedom, however, can and does come between reason and affection to separate them. In this separation, freedom negates the ultimate and evident meaning of things, that is, the source that gives them to themselves. The alternative between affirming the gift or rejecting it that is offered to human freedom is never, for Giussani, a choice between two equally relevant options. The positivity of being (one’s own being and that of reality) requires reason to acknowledge the priority of being over nothingness. The fact that one is indicates that there is a meaning and that one is made for and so exists always in a movement towards this meaning. Only the affirmation of the “evident” corresponds to being’s self-presentation and its specific anthropology. To separate reason from the affective adhesion to the mystery is the form of freedom’s reluctance to embrace the “evident.” Experience makes it clear that just as reason cannot resist identifying the mystery of the whole with a particular—a reduced sense of unity that ideology quickly conflates with totalitarianism—so freedom’s fear of affirming being simply because it is cannot be overcome by man’s energies alone. Although the milieu of the community is not a guarantee, Giussani says that without it freedom cannot say its yes to “the possession of the link that binds one thing to the other and all of the things together.”69

      It is possible now to see that if, in contradiction to the unity between God, man, and the world as disclosed by originary experience, one separates them into three fragments, the result is an arsenal of false understandings of experience. If experience is understood as “sheer trying out, proliferation of initiatives, and undergoing,” it results from having lost the link between experience and judging. If experience is seen as “mere reaction to circumstances and events,” there has been a loss of the sense in which the impact with reality always invites freedom to recognize the ultimate ground. Experience understood as an “experiment” at man’s disposal loses sight of the fact that man and reality are always being held in existence and confuses conversion and novelty with power and repetition. To “insist on one’s own plans and ideas,” instead of embracing the true novelty that takes place in experience, is to abandon oneself to the fear of affirming being for what it is. It is a rejection of the risk of oneself that is constitutive of the dramatic existence of man. To reduce experience to a subjective, indisputable, or even “graced” event, is to overlook its integral relation with the objective, transcendent side of experience (sign, authority, tradition, God). To circumscribe experience to the limits of one’s own sexuality is to neglect the meaning and universality of the original needs and evidences. Finally, to separate meaning from experience and consider the former imposed on the latter through cultural mediation is to neglect the dual unity of gift and logos that characterizes all that is.

      7. The Time of Gift

      Treating of gift as the form of the unity of being, examined by way of man’s originary experience, also demands taking up the topic of time. To experience, we noted, is to travel around (Erfahrung) and to discover that gift characterizes the form of being’s unity and permanence. Both aspects presuppose an idea of time, which we must now make explicit.

The association of experience with time, of course, is nothing new. One opinion says that experience is fundamentally static, since it has to do with our awareness of the relation between God, man, and the world, an awareness that, as we just saw, is expressed through the person’s knowing in love (judgment). The lack of history and growth would indeed be the case if by “awareness” we meant “feelings” or “emotions” (as William James understood religious experience), or if awareness spoke of the possibility of direct knowledge of God (as if sign, mediation, and thus authority were secondary to originary experience), or, finally, if the content of this awareness were the “knowledge” of a limited object (that could also be called God). This “limited object” is incapable of changing the human person or setting him on a path toward the truth of himself, either because the relation between God and the human being is conceived in strict katalogical terms, or because, according to our technological culture, finite beings are only nominalistically related to God and so have