Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

compounded of soul, body, and spirit and both physically and socially dependent, Fr. López refuses to endorse the idealism and abstraction of the theorists of purified donation. With a simple exactitude that might shame many would-be adepts of vaunted rigor, he rightly insists that a giver cannot give unless he is first already himself a recipient.

      Equally he shows that the “impure” gift that is bound up with a reception and return more corresponds to the teaching of Christian theology. Created beings only exist as gift because in being “given to themselves” they are through and through a return of praise to God, even though this return is inadequate and not “needed” by God. The “nuptial” perspective upon Christology is precisely the recognition that the gift of the Incarnation would have been impossible without its reception by Mary and the Church. The traditional doctrine of substantive relations in the Trinity shows that the Father is in a crucial sense passive and receptive in his giving of the Son (as Hegel distortedly realized), while the necessary place of the Holy Spirit shows the essence of gift as reciprocity, while insisting on the asymmetry and non-foreclosure of further gratuity in the reality of relational union. In this sense there is always a “unilateral moment” in gift-exchange, which Fr. López fully incorporates.

      Finally, were theology to deny the exchangist perspective on gift, then unilateral “mercy” would be divorced from justice, defined by Aristotle as all the proportional reciprocities that are shared by friends in the city. Then we would be left with a mercy without justice and worse, a justice without mercy. It could be added here that we would also be left with a generosity without economy and worse (just what neoliberalism has left us with today), an economy without charity. Those many recent thinkers who require a giving “outside the economic” need to reflect on how this abandons us to economic amorality and to an impotently formalistic ethics of “rights” (criticized at one point in this book) that proclaims the dignity of the isolated human being as such, but leaves people as situated in concrete biological, social, and vocational relations outside the sway of dignity altogether.

      Christian thinking, instead of dreaming of a non-existent “aneconomic” realm, requires a re-rooting of the falsely disembedded amoral economy of today back in the divine economia. Then precisely defined contract would become subordinate to and guided by asymmetrical reciprocity and non-identical repetition of real personal relationships, always seeking the mutual good, even in monetary transactions.

      Effectively, Fr. López sees the need to think gift in terms of the genuinely economic, so understood.

      But his work has more fundamentally a much wider, metaphysical import. In developing his account of theological gift as reciprocity, he in effect treats gift as a “transcendental” in the medieval sense. This proves a natural intellectual move, since all the main categories and themes of Christian doctrine indeed concern gift at their heart: creation, incarnation, redemption, grace, the Church, the sacraments, virginity, and marriage. But more specifically one could say that this adoption of a new transcendental category achieves three things.

      First, it allows one to transit readily from a philosophical concern with the givenness of being to a theological one with creation and grace. The gift character of reality that philosophy is able to ponder only receives an adequate clarification in terms of supernatural revelation.

      Second, it allows Fr. López to reinstate a premodern realist and cosmological focus in metaphysics while incorporating what is valid in the modern “turn to the subject.” Following the work of Mouroux, Giussani, and others, he realizes that modern subjectivism can only be undone by a kind of counter-subjectivism, not by any simple demand that we return to an objectivist ontology. This is because, for modern people, the meaning of “the objective” has already been determined by the turn to the subject as something meaninglessly given and manipulable. It no longer spontaneously suggests a meaningful donation. To recover this suggestion, we need to return to “an originary experience” that the older, objectivist metaphysics took for granted and so did not discuss. It is even the case, it is implied, that we must renew this experience in an unprecedentedly acute way, because the question must arise as to how it could ever have been lost sight of in the first place. In an ultimately “romantic” lineage perpetuated in our own times by German, French, and Italian Catholics like Guardini, Balthasar, Ulrich, Bruaire, and Giussani (all much cited), Fr. López insists that this experience has aesthetic, affective, and imaginative as well as rational dimensions.

      In this respect he follows Giussani, who by no means peremptorily dismissed “liberal Protestant” concerns with religious experience, but instead transformed them so as to free them from any connotations of “foundational feelings.” In the same spirit, Fr. López listens carefully to the insights of Husserl, Heidegger, and Marion, yet resists any notion of a pure phenomenological reduction to the sheerly given. Indeed, he sees that such an indubitably manifest reality cannot be the gift, because a gift involves always a personal, interpretative response to the relatively uncertain and even ambivalent. In consequence, any surd “given”—however ineffably “saturated” and not merely factual—cannot be a gift, but will remain thoroughly impersonal in character. It is near sophistry to try to associate this very impersonalism with the purity of the one-way gift. For such a gift, without recognizable giver, recipient, or content, can be of no social effect, including, therefore, no ecclesial or redemptive effect. To be sure, for Christianity gifts are given and received by the pure in heart, but any notion that this can be separated from the benefit of the materially poor is refused from the mouth of Jesus himself at the very outset.

      Nevertheless, with a necessary generosity, Fr. López incorporates some of the insights of modern phenomenology and of modern linguistic philosophy and hermeneutics. In doing so he contrives to balance their respective emphases on the extra-linguistically “given” and on arbitrary linguistic construction or interpretation. For he insists throughout his book that verbum and donum go together—a point that has ultimately Trinitarian implications. Thus the world is given to us, but as signs that we must read and respond to if we want to receive it at all—including ourselves as gifts to ourselves. Conversely, we will misread these signs if we do not understand them as gifts, because then there would lurk no intention behind them. Merely apparent signs would reduce to the events of our reception of givens that are not gifts, and these events could only conceal an abyss. With an unfailing eye for the way in which Heidegger perversely ruined his own real and astonishing profundity by a kind of philosophical charlatanry, Fr. López shows that he after all closed the question of being by reducing it to the event of our ontic reception of existence. Elsewhere he is equally remorseless in exposing the continued subjectivism of Heidegger’s postmodern heirs.

      In the third place, and most crucially, the transcendentality of the gift permits a rethinking of the Thomistic metaphysics of act and being that renders it a fully Trinitarian metaphysics. The divine actus is already, as in the case of the Paternal origin, in a certain sense receptive in order that it may act at all; equivalently we cannot see any finite reality as an act unless we also see it as a received gift. Here Fr. López, drawing as he did in his first book on Claude Bruaire’s “ontodology,” makes use of modern idealism while purging it of what is invalid. Since a gift, in order to be given, must be received, if every being is a gift of itself to itself, then it can only exist as reflectively giving itself to itself. This means that consciously spiritual beings are the first and primordial created beings. There cannot be a cosmos without spirit, as indeed Aquinas like the Fathers taught, and equally every non-spiritual creature must exhibit this spirituality in some lesser, analogical degree. I find here a fascinating implication both that some kind of vitalism might be embraced by Christian metaphysics and that a genuine vitalism must derive from transcendence and not immanence, as Bergson and others have supposed.

      If even God is receptive, then, conversely, even pure created recipients must be active: gratuitously generous on their own account to others and seeking the end of reciprocal union with others and with God.

      It then follows not just that every being qua being is a gift and that God is eminent generosity, but also that every being is internally and externally involved in a gift-exchange of initiation, reception, and counter-giving that in God is Trinitarian relation—though Fr. López strenuously avoids any simplistic identification of the three divine persons with these three exchangist moments. Deploying