Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

70 Others take an opposing view and identify experience with time, or more precisely, history. Experience, in this sense, would represent the Heraclitean river through which nature makes itself. Here the traveler would construct his own nature through his wandering in existence.71 The preceding reflections clarify why originary experience is not static in these various senses, but it remains to say a word on the concept of history that many common accounts of experience presuppose and build upon.

The development of modern sciences and the hermeneutical reflection that followed Husserl’s phenomenology inverted the premodern worldview that accounted for movement in terms of energeia and entelecheia. Consequently, experience is now understood as meaning more or less the same thing as time, while the combination of the two create an understanding of time as history. “For most contemporary thinkers,” writes K. L. Schmitz, “the timeless is a deficient and static mode found (if at all) in abstract human thought, and movement is unconditionally necessary.”72 Motion is nobler than rest—now identified with boredom and inactivity. The meaning of movement, however, is currently reduced to its topographical sense, or, more importantly, accounted for in terms of “possibility” and “will.” Depending on this latter idea of movement, time becomes the measure by which to observe man’s accomplishments. In this sense, for our contemporary culture, time is almost exclusively read in terms of a history that is no longer a context larger than the individual. History is not that “collective life of man,” as G. Grant says, that totality in light of which one’s own existence and works were seen as an indispensable but small contribution to a larger whole. History has become, as Grant writes, “the orientation to the future together with the will to mastery. Indeed the relation between mastery and concentration on the future is apparent in our language. The word ‘will’ is used as an auxiliary for the future tense, and also as the word that expresses our determination to do.”73 The “present” counts only inasmuch as it is history in the making; that is, as it is potentiality for a better future.74 The primacy of the will in a technocratic culture makes the human being believe that he can completely master himself, either by manipulating his very nature (as biotechnology claims to do in ever new and ever more effective ways) or by creating his own rights and values. This view of history is consistent with the idea of progress mentioned earlier because for both there is no longer an objective order of the good (no perception of the coextensiveness of being and gift) into which one enters. The perception of order and good is built by the few and embraced by the rest through democratic consensus—which generally reveals itself to be the submission of the majority to an anonymous oligarchy. It is this view of movement and time (as history) that considers any discussion of ontological principles such as gift or being as an archeological exercise, irrelevant for anyone familiar with the development of thought in the last centuries.

To perceive history as the collective life of man into which one enters and offers his great or small contribution requires a retrieval of rest as entelecheia. This, however, calls for recuperating the link between time and eternity that was severed by modernity. Modernity’s identification of experience with time transforms history into an immanent reality. History now refers only to two dialectically opposed dimensions of movement, becoming and stasis, where the former takes priority. To clarify the relation between the two requires no reference to a transcendent horizon in order to render history comprehensible. History, as “orientation to the future together with the will to mastery,” is self-sufficient; it is a self-enclosed reality whose measure can be made to fit man’s stature. As Heidegger puts it, “The philosopher does not believe. If the philosopher asks about time, then he has resolved to understand time in terms of time or in terms of the aei, which looks like eternity but proves to be a mere derivative of being temporal.”75 We now need to look back at the nature of gift as disclosed by originary experience in order to indicate its relation with time and eternity. In this way we will be able to assess why the sketched perception of time and history is based on a false or at least misconstrued anthropology.

There are three implications that arise from this discussion of the concrete singular being given to itself. First, as given to itself, the concrete singular does not coincide with itself. It is not its own origin. The fundamental evidence of being-made-now calls forth the awareness in the person as a singular being that his being and what he is, although inseparable, are not identical. He is a whole that is different from his being and his essence but is nonetheless constituted by the dual unity of essence and esse. The existence of the concrete singular, in its dual unity of esse and essence, is always already oriented towards its paternal origin. It thus exists only as a dramatic relation with the origin. The ontological difference, or real distinctio in Aquinas’s terms, is not a static description of the structure of a finite being whose activity can be cleanly detached from its ontology. The ontological difference reveals the singular’s specific temporality. As we saw, the human person comes to be at a moment not of his choosing, that is to say: he is given to himself. He has to receive his own being in order to be—and this reception, as we shall see shortly, has both an ontological and ethical connotation. The concrete singular’s historical existence includes the continuous movement (action, entelecheia) of receiving himself from and entrusting himself to others in the loving affirmation of their unknown, common origin. To exist as gift means that one enjoys a continual growth in the truth of what gift means. Finally, this growth reaches its resting point when the concrete singular’s destiny is fulfilled.76

The second implication relates to the gift as truly given: it remains other from and irreducible to the giver. The giver remains present in the gift but does not identify himself with it. It would be impossible to account for the meaning of the singular being’s existence if the difference from the original giver were not preserved, or if this difference were reduced to a simple separation. The singular being would be a “fragment” that never belonged to any totality. It would not even be possible to talk about its “whatness,” or, if attempted, it would simply come down to indulging in linguistic games. Time, reflecting the non-subsistence of finite beings, separates finite beings from God. Yet it does so not by denying God, but by imaging him. Because the giver remains present in the gift without losing his transcendence, time, as finite gift’s mode of being, images eternity, the eternal giver’s mode of being. Plato famously states in the Timaeus that since “it is not possible to bestow eternity fully upon anything that is begotten . . . [the Father] began to think of making a moving image of eternity, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity.”77 Time images eternity precisely in its continuous movement. Of course, for Plato the moving image meant above all circular movement. Yet, as Gregory of Nyssa explains, it is possible to think of the image’s movement (time) as a continuous becoming like the source as a result of the relation with that source. Time is coming into existence from and returning to the source while growing ever more like it, but without relinquishing the gift’s finite nature. The passage of time, because already sharing in the source, promises a unity with the source in which the finite gift is confirmed in the gift of being. From this point of view, the passage of time is a turning in desire towards the source, which, infinite itself, cannot but fulfill man’s desire without ever satiating it.78 Eternity does not simply lie before the beginning of time or wait at its end. It is, to speak with Bulgakov, “the noumenon (eternity) within the phenomenon (time).”79 Eternity is the truth of time that, in manifesting itself through time, distinguishes itself from time.

Third, the singular gift is totally given to itself in its own distinct unity; it is a “self.” Since it is irreducibly a “self,” even though its being and essence are not coextensive, the gift, from the point of view of the giver, cannot be taken back. It is crucial not