Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

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Название Gift and the Unity of Being
Автор произведения Antonio López M.
Жанр Религия: прочее
Серия Veritas
Издательство Религия: прочее
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781630870416



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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

      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.