Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

to grasp the gift-character and wholeness of the singular being. Furthermore, if understood correctly, originary experience protects against an objectivization of God—as if he were an object that could be encompassed by human feelings or reason—and against the tendency to relegate God to the position of a subject alongside the human being. In the face of all our attempts to confine God, the original giver, within the narrow boundaries of our transient emotions or our limited capacity to know, originary experience continues to reveal a structural disproportion between God and us. Within our experience, God naturally reveals himself as other and as calling us to respond to him. Starting from an anthropological reflection, originary experience leads us to the ontology of the concrete singular as gift and invites us to await the unexpected fulfillment of being and the human person in the Incarnate Logos who unites, without confusion or separation, the concrete singular and the divine (1 Tim 2:5; Heb 9:15).

      While subsequent chapters will deal more specifically with the ontological structure of the concrete singular, its response to the original giver, and what the renewal of the gift reveals of the nature of the original giver, the present chapter attempts to illuminate the meaning of gift as revealed through our originary experience. Following the insights of Luigi Giussani, we begin with the meaning of originary experience and how it reveals the unity in difference between God, the human being, and the world; then follows an indication of the characteristics of gift that guide our reflection; and finally we will see how our originary experience invites us to perceive the historicity of the concrete singular.

      1. Approaching Originary Experience

      Because a word is not neutral to its historical and cultural development, it is therefore helpful to examine the main elements that constitute the full meaning of the term “experience” by looking at its etymology. The Latin root (experior), derived from the Greek (peiraw), indicates that experience has to do with the acquisition of knowledge by trying. We become experienced by testing something repeatedly (Greek peiraw), as, for example, after having treated many patients, a doctor can recognize and treat a specific illness based on very few symptoms. The German word for experience, Erfahrung, offers another interesting aspect. Here experience is the process of learning that consists in traveling (fahren) around and seeking to discover the unknown by trying out different things. During this process, the traveler exposes himself to the possibility that unexpected discoveries may radically change him. To experience requires an openness to being affected by something whose origin remains beyond the control of the person.

      Before making further attempts at the meaning of experience, a word about its content is in order. When we talk about “originary” experience we indicate that fundamental dimension of our human existence that becomes actual in every discrete experience. “Originary,” besides its chronological connotation of beginning in time, points to a sourcing and guiding by means of ordering. Originary experience does not, then, refer to the events of infancy. It points rather to the actual living out of existence considered as a whole and, as this experience brings to light what is specifically human, its relation with the underlying mystery that makes all of being intelligible. The “content” of the originary experience is the whole of life as engaged in every circumstance with the ultimate meaning.

Pondering all these elements together, we see that experience refers to the entire human person: historical bodiliness, freedom, affection, desires, reason, being with others. More radically, it means that what is at stake is the person as such and his destiny. Our common experience teaches us that we truly see only when we put ourselves at risk. This risking is not embraced out of a love of danger but in the desire to discover what one does not yet fully know, namely, who one is and what being is. In fact, since what is sought in whatever one seeks is the meaning of oneself and all that is, it is clearly all of the human person that is risked. Traveling to a foreign land (Erfahrung), one hopes to grow, to know oneself by “recognizing the divine that is within us,” as Plato said.6 That there is risk and the possibility of changing indicates also that the content of what one experiences remains larger than what one can comprehend. Experience is not coextensive with life. That there will always be more to discover is indeed an indication of life’s greatness; and this ever-more is a sign of the presence of the infinite mystery.

      To discover something new through experience suggests further that “originary experience”—man’s engagement of all of himself with all of reality and its center, God—has a twofold dimension. It implies a receiving and a capacity to create. In order to discover, one needs to be actively searching. Distracted, ideological, or bored spirits are not available to find anything. At the same time, the traveler discovers because what he seeks comes to him first. The priority of the receptive over the creative, rather than a diminishment of man’s greatness, indicates his true stature. The traveler begins to walk because, in a certain sense, he has already been given what he has yet to find. The initiative to look for the meaning of one’s own enigma is a response to the invitation of the land where one hopes to find the sense of existence. In fact, after having gained some experience, one realizes both that he has been put on the path and that existence itself is always this already-being-on-the-path. For this reason, although one is involved in the discovery, the logos of what is seen is not imposed externally by the traveler. The content of experience is greater than the experience itself; rather than being produced or predetermined, this content is also welcomed.

The unity of the receptive and creative dimensions of experience, on the one hand, and the engagement of one’s entire self with a reality that remains always greater than what one can experience, on the other, brings us to a deeper layer of experience. To experience means to encounter the truth in which one becomes aware of the totality of reality. More precisely, a person becomes aware of himself in his relation to the world and to the ultimate guarantor of reality’s and his own goodness. Yet, since the priority of receiving is to be retained with respect to the creative aspect of experience, this dawning awareness grows, not as the fruit of conquest or the intake of a given datum, but out of the lived acknowledgment of oneself and the world as given. Experience, then, is not the stockpiling of information but rather the relation of all of oneself with the divine; it is lived awareness of the whole as an inexhaustible given.7

      2. Terminological Clarifications

To understand better what “originary experience” means and how it grants access to the unity of being as gift, a brief presentation of the cultural development of the semantics of the term will be helpful. As we shall see, because what is at stake in every experience is our relationship with the whole, the history of the concept of experience tends to overemphasize one or another particular aspect. Yet the neglect of other aspects results in confusion and hinders the growth in truth that is the desire of wisdom. Early Greek philosophy does not seem to attribute much importance to what one acquires through experience. For example, Aristotle considers experience to be that degree of knowledge between the simple sensible perception of finite beings and the proper sciences. “Experience knows the particular, whereas science (art) knows the universals.”8 Experience is an acquired skill, the synthesis of memories that prepares theoretical and practical knowledge.9 This sense of experience, according to which nihil in intellectu nisi in sensu, was adopted by Aquinas, although he also speaks of a knowledge by connaturality in which, through experience, one is attuned to the whole of being as, for example, the chaste knows what chastity is by experience and not by what he may have studied of this evangelical counsel.10 It is true that experience also has, at its first level, the connotation of searching for the truth and the acquisition of forms through sense knowledge. Nevertheless, the meaning of this search is more fully elucidated within the context outlined above.

      Through the Middle Ages, “learning by trying” was still seen as part of a path that both presupposed and yielded recognition of an ultimate origin, a final cause. Physics, metaphysics, and theology formed a differentiated unity. The origin was seen as the ever-present, initiating, and guiding telos of one’s own inquiries. It was God who was sought in