Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

originally published as Luigi Giussani, L’esperienza. For an approximation of Giussani’s concept of experience, cf. Scola, “Esperienza cristiana,” 199–213; Scola, “Esperienza, libertà e rischio,” 71–89; Sani, “L’educazione,” 5–27, at 21–23; Konrad, Tendere.

19. For Giussani, esperienza originale (here translated as originary experience), esperienza elementare (elementary experience), and esperienza religiosa or senso religioso (religious sense) are synonymous terms. Although familiar with the solitary work of Jean Mouroux on experience and well-versed in North American Protestant theology, Giussani contends that his understanding of experience is “totally original” (Giussani, “Seminario,” 134). For a comprehensive bibliography from 1951–1997, see Giussani, Porta la speranza, 205–60. For a historical development, see Montini and Giussani, Sul senso religioso.

20. Giussani, USD, 107.

21. Giussani, RS, 9.

22. Giussani, ROE, 99.

23. Ibid. Giussani therefore is not proposing either a naïve realism or a critical idealism as an understanding of man’s access to truth. His concept of experience has little to do with Rahner’s, for whom man’s experience of God and of himself is passive, transcendental, non-thematic, and non-reflexive. For Giussani experience does not have to do with “conditions of possibility” but with actual understanding in which history never comes at a second moment, nor is it seen as history of God. See Rahner, “Experience of Self,” 122–32.

24. Giussani, RE, 130.

25. Giussani, RS, 101.

26. For an account of the ontological movement of beings, see Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names, 3.8–9 (PG 3:704D–705B).

27. Giussani, RS, 3–33. The circularity between freedom and reason can also be found in, e.g., Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate: “Intelligence and love are not in separate compartments: love is rich in intelligence and intelligence is full of love” (no. 30; AAS 101 [2009], 665).

28. Maurice Blondel’s work is in fact one of the main sources of Catholic reflection on experience. See his L’action (1893).

29. Giussani, JTE, 71. Translation modified. The text continues: “And we would not be able to recognize that life and the cosmos are gift if we did not await the revelation of its meaning.”

30. Giusanni, RS, 111.

31. Giussani, “Ogni cosa.” See also Giussani, TT, 11–35; Giussani, “Mistero e segno coincidono.” For his understanding of sacrament, see Giusanni, WTC, 179–200.

32. Lawler, What Is, 48. Karl Rahner does have an interesting theology of symbol, which nonetheless remains problematic because it does not integrate his Trinitarian ontology with Christology. See Rahner, “Theology of the Symbol,” 221–52; Rahner, Church and the Sacraments.

33. Giussani, RVU, 114.

34. Giussani, AVS, 351.

35. Giussani, ROE, 98. That man depends, that he is “the product of another,” is “the original condition that is repeated at all levels of the person’s development. The cause of my growth does not coincide with me but is other than me” (ibid.).

36. Giussani, RS, 105; Giussani, GTSM, 77ff.

37. Giussani, RS, 106.

38. Ibid., 95–97, 132–40.

39. Ibid., 145.

40. Ibid., 161.

41. Ibid., 101. “Man depends, not only in an aspect of his life, but in everything: whoever observes his own experience can discover the evidence of a total dependence on Another who has made us, is making us, and continuously preserves us in being” (Giussani, “Paternità,” 1–4, at 1). See also Giussani, GTSM, 77.

42. For the personal nature of human knowing, see Nédoncelle, Personne humaine; Nédoncelle, La réciprocité; Nédoncelle, Vers une philosophie.

43. “Try to imagine a baby who has just come to life in the womb of its mother, just conceived. To make an unimaginable paradox, if that small fetus knew that all that he is, everything, each tiny drop of blood, each cell from its newly begun structure, everything in him, comes from the body of his mother . . . if this small fetus could be aware, he would feel everything flowing from the organism of his mother. . . . Think of the kind of total dependence—total in the absolute sense of the term—his self-awareness must be” (Giussani, PLW, 3:25). This example is also used to clarify the nature of morality.

44. Testori, Il senso, 38.

45. A rather lucid example of this opposing view was written by Gregory Stock: “IVF still accounts for fewer than 1 percent of live births in the United States. Improvements, however, may transform the procedure enough to integrate it into routine procreation. With a little marketing by IVF clinics, traditional reproduction may begin to seem antiquated, if not downright irresponsible. One day, people may view sex as essentially recreational, and conception as something best done in the laboratory” (Stock, Redesigning Humans, 55). See also Ratzinger, “Man between Reproduction and Creation.”

46. Balthasar, New Elucidations, 221.

47. Ulrich, Mensch als Anfang, 140.

48. We refer to the child in the singular, but we include within this reference the relation among siblings. The multiplicity of children is, in fact, an important sign of the fecundity proper to love (beyond its quantitative value), because every child is an expression of the novelty and similarity proper to otherness—both because every sibling is a new expression of the same love and