Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

expression of his love for the world, and it is given so that the concrete singular may experience from within, taste, and take delight in his love.47

      Human love has its roots in the creative affirmation of the singular, according to which God says to the creature: it is good for you to be (Gen 1:31). Willing man’s ultimate good, God wishes the creature to participate in his life, to dwell in him. Because of this divine love, every true lover wills the good of the beloved.48 In light of the circularity between gift and love we can suggest now that gift is the mystery of the communication of love whose unity is also one of ever-greater differentiation.

      To express the mystery of unity and difference in a third specific to love, and so to better understand the gratuity proper to the giving and the receiving of the gift, we need to look briefly at the two indissociable terms that come together in the name love, that is, eros and agape. Love has an oblative, agapic dimension and a desirous, erotic dimension. Eros, a god for the Greeks, has an ambiguous nature. The offspring of poros (wealth) and penia (poverty), eros, so Plato recounts, indicates need and precariousness and, at the same time, impetuousness, the desire for wisdom.49 Eros is not a self-motivated impulse. It is awakened by beauty. This beauty is first the corporeal beauty, which attracts and entices the lover out of himself because it is the overflowing of the eternal beauty in a concrete form. We thus find the first connotation of eros: the beginning of desire lies in a certain given participation in beauty. Eros is moved by something else, in which it seeks the fullness of what it has foretasted. Receiving the form of beauty, eros engages the whole of the person, including his body, and drives the person to transcend himself. Desire tears him away from his own limitations. This, then, is the second connotation: eros not only indicates the need to receive; it also draws the person to seek unity with what he still does not possess. Seeking unity with love itself, eros moves the lover upwards to the root of beings. Love “thirsts,” so to speak, for the beauty that comes to it first. This is why eros has been described as the ascending dimension of love.

      We can say further, and apart from the neoplatonic tradition, that, anthropologically speaking, eros, as the desire of unity with the other, includes physical, conjugal union. Yet the union that desire seeks is better perceived in its highest degree: spiritual indwelling. Eros, again, is the desiring dimension of love that seeks unity with the other. Undoubtedly, eros tends to be burdened by its own ambiguity, which, as Benedict XVI says, is that the erotic force can overpower reason. Eros, separated from logos (truth, reason), can become a sort of “divine madness,”50 which results in self-destructive excesses. If united to truth (logos), eros seeks a union that does not reduce the good of the other to the satisfaction of one’s own whims.51

      It is important, at this point, to correct a common misunderstanding. The fact that eros separate from logos becomes an irrational, maddening desire does not mean that the yearning for unity with the other, the need both for the other and to be received by the other, is in itself negative. One does not understand the nature of conjugal union, for example, by starting out from instances of sexual degradation and violence; in the same vein, eros goes equally misunderstood if greed or lust is taken as its complete form. If eros and agape are two inseparable dimensions of love, this desire is in itself a perfection. In fact, as Aquinas says, every creature yearns for God according to the degree proper to its own participation in being.52 Thus eros reveals that the perfection of oneself is not in oneself. The lover desires to be one with the beloved, who already somehow dwells in the lover. The lover desires, needs, and implores that the beloved let him be part of her as she is in him. Eros indicates that the lover cannot give to himself that of which he already has a foretaste; it must be given to him gratuitously. This is the radical poverty of eros: not that it does not know love, but that it puts itself at the disposal of the other’s gift, orienting itself towards a reception whose occurrence and measure does not lie at its disposal. Of course, human desires are always in need of purification. The desire for unity tends to become possessiveness. Yet to consider the poverty proper to eros as an imperfection presupposes a negative anthropology, according to which all desires are taken a priori as sinful.53 A love that does not desire is a love that cannot suffer and, as such, is a love that cannot find joy in being welcomed by the other. The giving of a gift is an expression of love (eros) inasmuch as it is both a response to a preceding gift and a yearning for a response, a gratuitous unity with the receiver.

      If the erotic dimension of love acknowledges the exigence to receive the other and the search for unity with the other, the agapic dimension highlights the oblative gift of self. To love another is to love its good. To love its good, however, always requires surrendering oneself to the other, living for the other’s sake, giving oneself to the other. Agape represents love’s katalogical movement. Just as it is proper to love to ask (eros), it is also a perfection of love to kneel (agape). The lover who is intent only on seeking the unity turns the beloved into a means for self-satisfaction. Instead, the true lover, that is, the person whose agape is true, spends himself for the sake of the beloved. He wishes to affirm the beloved with the radical gift of self. The love that keeps too close an eye on what it has done, acquired, or sacrificed for the sake of the beloved suffocates both parties. This is why agape purifies eros. It ensures that the desire to be one with the other is for the other’s sake and not for one’s own profit. Agape helps logos give form to eros. At the same time, eros is intrinsic to agape because the love that gives without receiving or being permanently open to receive from the other is, in reality, a denial of self. Eros without agape becomes egotism—in this case, the gift will crush the receiver. Agape without eros is a denial of self. A self-effacing offering of oneself without the simultaneous delight in and plead to be received by the other, that is, without an awareness of what one receives in giving and gives in receiving, is yet another form of egotism, this time under the form of piety.54 The gift without the giver is no longer a gift.

      Eros and agape are two dimensions of the same form of love. From the point of view of the unity between the giver, gift, and the receiver, we can now see that whereas eros emphasizes the unifying aspect of love, agape underscores the difference between them. Love posits another who is different from itself, in order that this other might be (agape). Love, in doing so, also seeks to be received within the other itself to dwell in it (eros). Love does not want to be received by the other in order to disappear in or use the other, but rather to enjoy a gratuitous and, in a term that will be explained later, virginal unity with the other (agape).

      The agapic dimension of love is perceived as a perfection of love thanks to Christian revelation. While the Aristotelian unmoved mover or the Plotinian One does not care for the world, the God of Jesus Christ does. Love is what is most proper to God. He alone, without losing himself, can give himself to what he is not because, in himself, he exists as a tripersonal communion of love. It is at the level of the three divine persons that the relation between eros, agape, and logos indicated earlier finally becomes clear. The perfection of love, where the beloved without regard for himself gives all of himself to the other, all the while desiring to be loved by this other, is protected from egotism through the third that both unites them and preserves their distinction. Love gives itself, a relation of personal indwelling in which everything is given and shared. As we saw with childhood, and as it will reappear with the mystery of gift’s gratuity when we ponder the role of the third hypostasis, this relation does not collapse into the giver or the receiver because of this third, who represents at the personal level the objective unity between the giver and the receiver. The complete form of love is marked by the giving and receiving known as koinonia. In this communion, as Christian revelation confirms, the third is both fruit and summit of the love that binds the lover to and distinguishes him from the beloved. This koinonia, when referred to God, describes both the unity of love and its preservation of the difference of giver, gift, and receiver.

      Before proceeding further, there is a mysterious, difficult implication to consider, even if only briefly. If agape and eros are two dimensions of love, and both are perfections, there is a sense in which, as Benedict XVI suggests, eros, and not only agape, is proper to divine love.55 Most of the Christian tradition, as, for example, in the seminal work of Origen, perceives the relation of eros and agape in terms of an analogical and katalogical movement.56 As we mentioned, eros represents the movement of the soul upwards, seeking union with the primordial giver. Agape represents the downward movement from God to man, which purifies and preserves man’s erotic search for beauty and transforms it into