Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

49. John Paul II, Theology of the Body, 429–32; Granados García, La carne; Scola, Nuptial Mystery.

50. See Balthasar, TD, 3:206–14, 220–29.

51. Giussani, RS, 7. Translation modified.

52. It is perhaps clear now that “desire” for Giussani does not mean an élan, a Schellingian force that drives the human being forward without having been initiated by anything, nor does it mean just any type of desire. It is inappropriate, for example, to identify desire here with cupidity.

53. Giussani, RS, 113.

54. Ibid., 97.

55. It is important to see that Giussani is proposing a renewed sense of mediation, which brings together truth’s particular evidence and man’s access to it without confusion. Through the encounter with the dual unity of the sign (gift and logos in a third) and through one’s own original needs, it becomes clear that “the proper characteristic of man’s being is that of being transparent to himself, aware of himself and, in him, of the horizon of the real” (Giussani, RS, 97).

56. Ibid., 99.

57. Ibid., 47. The four categories are not drawn from any anthropological or eschatological system that might tend to downplay the integrity of human nature for the sake of shoring up the primacy of God’s salvific will. Nor are they an expression of Rahner’s supernatural existential; they do not indicate an original bestowal of grace. The “needs” delineate human nature’s twofold being given and openness to the mystery. The human end of seeing and being in communion with God does not lead Giussani to reduce history to the categorical, or religious anthropology to an athematic orientation toward God.

58. See also Aquinas, ST, II–II, q. 68, a. 4.

59. The ground of Giussani’s treatment of Augustine and Aquinas on man’s constitutive desire to see God—a theme we cannot explore here—is creation in Christ.

60. Giussani, RS, 116. Translation modified.

61. Benedict XVI, Church Fathers, 86. The discontinuity between revelation and man’s affirmation of the mystery is also why the original needs by which man judges the truth of everything should not be understood as potentia oboedientialis. Indeed, they indicate man’s creaturely dependency. As Balthasar says, “obediential potency” does not give God the priority that is proper to him, and it would be better to dispense with this term. See Balthasar, ET, 3:40. It is better, then, not to think of the original needs in abstract terms (nature’s capacity to receive grace) but rather in personal ones, i.e., these needs are an expression of the relation between God and man that is always initiated by God and within which man’s existence (and nature) comes to be understood.

62. The expression “knowledge in love” is from Augustine, Trin. 9.10.15 (PL 42:969). This cum amore notitia is also expressed by Aquinas as sapida scientia. See Aquinas, ST, I, q. 43, a. 5, ad 2.

63. Giussani, ROE, 99.

64. Giussani, VNC, 20–22.

65. He writes that “without religiosity man is used by man and destroyed by man. The power that operates in this way is not only the power of multinational companies or well-known dictators: it is mainly the power of man over woman, of woman over man; it is the power of parents over children, and of friends over friends” (Giussani, “Esperienza cristiana e potere,” 18). If understanding means to grasp the link between something and reality, Giussani means “the whole of reality.” Since this wholeness is always beyond man’s grasp, to understand something means to begin “a very long search in order to reach that threshold from which—participating in the eye of Another, in the heart of Another—one can see and love everything” (Giussani, SPVVC, 59).

66. Giussani, SPVVC, 36–49. In this regard, Giussani’s understanding of judgment (and therefore reason) has its truth in faith.

67. Giussani, AC, 277; Giussani, SPVVC, 58–64.

68. Giussani, “Per lo sviluppo,” 39.

69. Giussani, JTE, 20.

70. James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Calvin, Institutes.

71. Much of feminist and liberal theology presupposes this understanding of time and history. See, for example, Firestone, Dialectic of Sex; Johnson, She Who Is.

72. Schmitz, “Human Nature,” 126. See also Oliver, Divine Motion; Oliver, “Motion,” 163–99.

73. Grant, “Time as History,” 21.

74. “We North Americans,” writes Grant, “whose ancestors crossed the ocean were, because of our religious traditions and because this continent was experienced as pure potentiality (a tabula rasa), the people most exclusively enfolded in the conception of time as progress and the exaltation of doing that went with it. We were to be the people who, after dominating two European wars, would become the chief leaders in establishing the reign of technique throughout all the planet and perhaps beyond it” (ibid., 24).

75. Heidegger, Concept of Time, 1–2.

76. Euthanasia is an affirmation of what it sets out to deny, i.e., the insurmountable difference between oneself and the giver of one’s own being. If I were the origin of myself, the principle of life would rest within me. Since I am not, the ultimate self-contradictory act of euthanasia is in reality a denial of the good of death (allowing oneself to be taken). This is also why euthanasia is a form of suicide. Suicide attempts to get rid of bodily existence because the body is the continual reminder of the difference (and similarity) between oneself and God—and since the denial of this difference is the denial of oneself, the act tragically affirms what it attempts to escape: that I am not the origin of myself.

77.