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Originary experience opens up a seldom pursued but uniquely fruitful path for pondering the form of the unity of being. In part because of the troubled history of the concept, and partly because of the contemporary use of the term “experience,” originary experience may seem a doubtful starting point. “Experience,” in fact, has been described as the “most deceitful” and “most obscure” of terms.1 Nevertheless, if by originary experience we mean the engagement of the whole of our being with the whole of reality and with God, who is their innermost and transcendent center, originary experience, despite its difficulties, can help us perceive from within life itself the unity of the concrete singular and its dynamic unity with and difference from God. Originary experience represents an encounter with truth that takes place beyond the dualism between subject and object. It involves, as John Paul II illustrated, objectively informed subjectivity.2 The person knows himself in knowing finite beings and their respective link with God. Experience therefore opens up access to the truth of self, world, and God without abstracting the person from what gives itself to be known or the act itself of knowing, and without the knower absorbing or being fully measured by what is known.

Originary experience also allows us to see that the unity and difference within the concrete singular and its intrinsic relation with God is a gift. In this sense, originary experience grants access not only to the truth of the unity of being but also to the perception of its goodness as gift. The singular being is not only good in itself; it is a gift. Its goodness, in other words, bears the memory of its origin from another and also the intimations of its destiny, its being for someone other than itself. The term “gift” offers a synthesis of what we learn through our originary experience: first, that our origin lies permanently with another, and so in a certain sense we belong to that other; second, that we can enjoy our own being and give of ourselves because, within that prior having been given, we are truly our own; third, that the relation with the permanent origin of our being is constitutive of our nature. Finally, since it is primarily through our own originary experience that we learn what gift means, this knowledge is not an abstract reflection; it is rather a lived awareness of oneself, the world, and God that involves all of our history.3 As historical lived awareness, originary experience allows us to savor the beauty of being given since the truth and goodness of being are radiated through one’s own concrete existence.

This approach to the nature of what is by way of man’s originary experience rests on a crucial methodological decision: rather than an analysis of being that considers all singular beings equally (meta-physics), we begin here with an exploration of the human person. Anthropology will lead to ontology. A note on a difference introduced since the advent of modern science can serve to justify this anthropological starting point: for modern man, physics is no longer what the Greeks intended by the term but is rather the science of the material world. Contemporary science, with its technological understanding of reason, relates to the world, that is, considers and manipulates it, in a way that presupposes a thorough reconfiguration of the world’s own nature. If at first early modern thinkers reinterpreted “nature” to mean blank, finite matter, sheer data that was open to manipulation, it is now the case that the “restlessness” of science, as Hans Jonas shows, understands matter as “an always reopened challenge for further penetration,” a theoretical and practical pursuit that can only be accomplished if science generates “an increasingly sophisticated and physically formidable technology as its tool.”4 The concept of nature (physis) as having an intrinsic, non-manipulable goodness in itself must be dispensed with if humanity is to progress ever onward. Since this scientific worldview deeply informs our thinking inasmuch as it has transformed thinking itself into a way of making, we cannot retrieve an adequate concept of nature and being without reexamining the grounds for our mastery over nature. This is not an easy task. On the one hand, the justification of our mastery simply through an unreflective appeal to evolution is merely another expression of our contemporary view informed by science. On the other hand, the issues raised by the scientific mastery of the world cannot be dismissed by a facile rejection of the role played by speculation and the human spirit in the constitution of singular beings. Clearly we cannot attempt to examine the nature of being as though contemporary science had nothing to offer here; that way leads to anachronisms and simply false conclusions. While the claim of modern science and philosophy needs not to be embraced acritically, it still raises a legitimate issue. In our current cultural context, reflection on the nature and unity of what is seems doomed if it halts at considering the human being as just one being among others. The human being, unlike other concrete singulars, has a unique mastery over being.

To take up and understand this mastery over nature depends on the human being’s attention to his own enigmatic makeup and his centrality in the cosmos. His makeup is enigmatic because the human being is, and yet he does not come from himself; it is given to him to be. His “power” and mastery over nature emerge within this mystery of his existence having been given. His centrality in the cosmos is due to the fact that his person is a unity of body, soul, and spirit. Through his own body, which is more than a receptacle for the soul or a neutral tool for obtaining ends determined by the soul, the human being recapitulates the cosmos within himself. That the form of his body is given by the soul indicates that the human person, endowed with the capacity to desire, to reason, and to be free, unlike other creatures, is affectively aware of his own position in the cosmos. From this original place, the human being discovers himself to be limited, bodily, and yet capable of receiving the whole. This capacity for the infinite indicates that the human person not only recapitulates the world, he also transcends it. Because the human person is spiritual, his transcendence of the cosmos is a relation with the one who can ultimately account for his existence. Our encounter with nature and the world, therefore, takes place within this twofold mystery: our being given to ourselves to live the relation with the origin. Human making takes place within the human person’s constitutive and prior being given to himself and is informed by a way of thinking that recognizes the gift-character of the concrete singular in wonder and permits it to be. Proceeding from the human person through the existential analysis of originary experience holds out the possibility of an ontological discourse on the gift-form of the unity of being that can correct our contemporary perception of nature without the loss of any speculative rigor.5

A final twofold clarification about methodology will be helpful. To take the path of originary experience in order to approach the nature of what is, rather than anthropomorphizing ontology, enables us 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 whatever one was learning. This, of course, did not mean that theology trumped science. Although, as many have shown, the perception of God guided scientific inquiry, the latter had its own integrity and methodology. This does not intend to say that the sciences were conceived independently from God, but that they represented a further exploration into the mystery of the whole. Independently of how it was used and accounted for, experience had to do with one’s own organic encounter with truth. It took into account both the whole person and the way in which knowing took place.

Modernity’s progressive rejection of fourfold causality, however, gradually began to account for beings as if God did not exist.11 Detached from their ultimate ground, concrete singulars became tools at the disposal of our technological endeavors and hence mirrors to serve the solipsistic perception of human existence. This epistemological strategy, as is well known, was the fruit of modernity’s attempt to ground reasonableness (and hence truth) in reason alone, that is, in the identification of the act of thinking with its content.12 This identification, with its undergirding separation of reason from experience, so it was hoped, was to yield absolute certainty. Modernity gradually separated the different elements that constitute human experience.

The Cartesian claim to ground truth in thought, without the presumed necessary reference to something other than the human mind (ultimately God), not only inaugurated the so-called transcendental turn to the subject and the methodical experience of empirical reality; it also introduced a separation between reason and its object that still haunts much of today’s thought. The Cartesian claim, however, revealed itself as unable to reconcile the pursued immediacy of the subject to itself with the inescapably mediated character of human subjectivity. While idealism claimed to overcome this separation between reason and its object, and to retrieve via dialectics (Hegel) the role of mediation for a truth that attempts to account for difference within itself (thus eliminating both the Enlightenment’s claim of immediacy without presuppositions, and the positivistic reading of being), it did not succeed in preserving the integrity of difference throughout the theoretical or practical process of the constitution of the absolute. Knowledge gained through experience aimed ever more decisively at the acquisition of power and at the manipulation of nature for the sake of a perennial progress. Phenomenology’s pursuit of the originary experience that precedes the opposition of subject and object comes to a halt (at least in Heidegger) because its reading of metaphysics as onto-theology finishes by hypostasizing the appearing of being in an event of reciprocal belonging that represents the end of being and of Da-sein.13

The modern perception of experience also affected the understanding of religious experience, that is to say, of man’s relation with God. Christian dogmas, for example, rather than the expression of the truth revealed through the person of Jesus Christ, are perceived as historical, relative truths. Although at first one could claim the need in faith to obey these truths, once they lose their intrinsic, universal value, any remaining moral force quickly disappears under the dominance of relativism. Religious experience, as seen in the different forms of Protestantism, is relegated to emotions whose validity is determined by their intensity since historical mediation is no longer acceptable. Schleiermacher’s emblematic account of religion in terms of a feeling of absolute dependence falls back into the attempt to eliminate conceptual and historical mediation and seeks to ground the perception of truth in an ineffable, incommunicable, interior experience that yields no volitional or cognitive content.14 In this regard experience is revelatory of a knowledge that is unable to transcend the subjective sphere of the person and so be communicated.

The philosophical and theological understanding of experience is both prompted by and responsible for the contemporary scientific concept of experience. As Robert Spaemann argues, for modern science, the acquisition of knowledge through experience is equivalent to “planned, homogenized experience, i.e., experiment.”15 The aspect of receiving in experience is interpreted as sheer passivity or simply set aside. Nowadays, to experience something is tantamount to verifying a hypothesis through an experiment that remains under the control of the scientist. An experience is a controlled experiment. To learn by trying has come to mean to experiment with things or, more crucially, with oneself—as biotechnology enables us to do in unprecedented ways. The encounter with truth offered by the scientific understanding of experience no longer leaves room for discovery as the unexpected fruit of a patient search that demands putting oneself at the disposal of what is given to be known. To understand experience as undergoing an event, circumstance, etc., which is deprived of intrinsic meaning, is yet another expression of this reduction of experience to experiment. It is left up to the human person to construct meaning by imposing a relative sense on a given event.

That experience seems to be trapped either by sheer subjectivism or by a technocratic interpretation of knowing is a revealing witness to the fact that when one sets aside God as the ultimate giver and telos of all that is, one is left with the illusion of a mastery over reality that can only fragment the human person out of existence, as the tragic events of the twentieth century and the servitude of man at the hands of the technical manipulation of his own life illustrate. Experience requires the whole of the human person as always already engaged with all of reality and with the common center of both, God.

3. A Distinct Understanding

While an empirical conception of experience emphasizes only the receptive side of experience, and the idealist and scientistic views hold up experience as the manifestation of the constructive capacity of the spirit, experience in the sense we are unfolding here is beyond the Enlightened separation of the receptive from the creative aspects.16 When dealing with experience we need to realize first that we are talking about a living whole, that is, the concrete historical existence of someone who is engaged, with all of his being, with the antecedent and ever-greater mystery as the mystery freely gives himself to be discovered in the human path towards wisdom. Second, contemporary entanglements with the term “experience,” as outlined in the previous section, emerge from a misconstrued anthropology that grants man’s central role in the cosmos while ignoring the fact that this dignity has been given to him. In other words, it is an anthropology that claims to have transfigured itself into a theology. Whereas prior to Christianity man could understand himself either as part of the cosmos and doomed to disappear with it, or as possessor of a tragic nobility that was always aware of the temptation of hubris, with the Judeo-Christian tradition the dignity and centrality of man emerges through the covenant and creation in Christ. After this revelation occurs in history, it is not possible to return to earlier anthropologies and cosmologies. Man either conceives himself as given to himself and, bearing the image of the divine, as invited to live a dramatic relation with God, or he replaces God.17 In the latter case, desire, reason, freedom, will, bodiliness, history, the world, and God are seen as disconnected fragments that the human person is free to reassemble at will. The problem is that one cannot define the meaning of all these fragments beforehand. The meaning has to be discovered as they play themselves out in experience. Detached from experience, Giussani contends, one comes up with a concept of reason as the measure of being. Thinking, reduced to measuring, becomes a species of willing.

Originary experience regards man’s capacity to grasp the meaning of something, its “objective link to everything else,” and the awareness of this link.18 Giussani’s absolutely innovative concept of religious, elementary experience—or originary experience as we have translated it here—allows us to ponder the enigma of the human person as given to himself in order to acknowledge the totality of the gift of being.19 For Giussani, originary experience is neither one way of knowing among others, nor a practical implementation of a theoretical ideology, nor a neutral instrument with which to gather information whose value and meaning are then assessed through heuristic, extrinsic criteria. Rather, “experience is reality’s emerging into man’s awareness; it is the becoming transparent of reality to man’s gaze.”20 The fact that reality “emerges” into man’s awareness shows that what is at stake in originary experience is the unity of the numerous factors already indicated: the reality that precedes the traveler and gives itself to be known, the traveler who seeks to discover the meaning of things and of himself, the distinction without separation of the two as they are held together by their link, their union with the ultimate mystery. What becomes transparent to man’s gaze is the character of the concrete singular as a sign, that is, as a reality given to itself, which, carrying the memory of the giver, brings the beholder to their common origin.

Giussani offers this precious synthetic definition: “elementary [or originary] experience tends to indicate totally the original impetus with which the human being reaches out to reality, seeking to become one with it. He does this by fulfilling a project that dictates to reality itself the ideal image that stimulates it from within.”21 Originary experience speaks therefore of our dynamic encounter with reality in all its complexity: on the one hand reality emerges before man and dictates “an ideal image” that the concrete singular carries within itself, that is, its own logos and its unique relation with God and the world. The “ideal image,” in this regard, is an echo of “the Word of Another.”22 Man’s original encounter with truth is always already offered to him by the objective and historical self-presentation of being, whose full disclosure requires the entire person. This is why, on the other hand, and simultaneous with the self-presentation of the concrete singular, the human being “reaches out” with an “original impetus” and “seeks to become one with reality.”

The “impetus,” which is always a response to the emergence of reality, brings something new into existence. It does so by fulfilling a project that was first elicited by the ideal image hidden within the reality itself. This ideal image is given back to the reality itself now unfolded anew in a unity that includes both the reality and the person in their relation with their common giving origin. Fulfilling the project entails bringing about something new because the becoming transparent of the concrete singular in man’s consciousness is the fulfillment of the former in the latter and a more intense radiance of the latter with the light of the singular being. That the human person “seeks to become one” with what gives itself to be known reveals that the ontological unity with what gives itself to be discovered and embraced requires an ordering towards the origin of both the person and the concrete singular.

For Giussani, therefore, every original human experience is either a religious one or it is not an experience in the first place: ultimately, experience is the living affirmation of God as that “unitary meaning which nature’s objective and organic structure calls the human conscience to recognize.”23 Experience, therefore, has to do with the dynamic unity of the encounter between reality and all of man, whose telos (and fulfillment) is the affirmation of God. Let us first look at how originary experience allows us to perceive finite beings as gift and then at the involvement of the human person.

4. The Inexorable Presence of the Sign

One can never stress enough that experience implies “an encounter with an objective fact that is independent from the experience that the person has.”24 Finite beings send man into a state of ongoing wonder, presenting themselves attractively (beauty), carrying their own logos (truth), and introducing him to the perception of and response to the good. Finite beings therefore are not sheer data, material that is infinitely open to manipulation by the subject. “Being,” Giussani writes, is “not some abstract entity”; it is “a presence that I do not myself make, that I find. A presence that imposes itself on me.”25 Being is given to the person; it is a gift. Thus for Giussani, in some similarity with Balthasar, originary experience represents the perception of the concrete analogy of being through its transcendental determinations and not through an abstract reflection on being.

In an attempt to overcome the positivistic understanding of finite being (and reality as a whole) mentioned earlier, Giussani does not speak of the concrete singular in terms of an object lying before a knowing subject, but rather of “presence.” With this term, he wishes to illustrate the interiority of finite beings and their relation with the knowing person (primarily man, but ultimately God). Let us look at what this term, “presence,” entails.

“Presence” indicates, first of all, that something is present to someone. That is, as “present,” it is another, irreducible to the one before whom it presents itself. What is present comes from some other who is distinct from both what is present and the beholder. For being to be “present” means further that it addresses the one to whom it comes. The coming into being of concrete singulars aims at man’s welcoming of the irreducible, inexhaustible alterity of the singular gift. Taking traditional metaphysics as a starting point would have meant stopping at the acknowledgment of the creatureliness of a finite being. We would miss the fact that concrete singulars, in being themselves, are also present to someone, that is, they are themselves inasmuch as they address someone. This reference to another, which is proper to being-gift, grounds the subsequent ethical reflection.

Another aspect of “presence” has to do with belonging. To be present to someone is to be given to someone, and in a certain sense to belong to that person. Finite being, we could say, operates the claim of the beautiful on the one who is called. The otherness of the concrete singular represents a gift because the claim of its beauty is to let its own light illumine and shine in the beholder so that this one can come to see and desire the source. To belong to another does not have a univocal meaning and depends on a free giving to the beholder. Yet, even at its most basic level, to speak of belonging indicates that gift, being as presence, is not a self-enclosed reality; it is always already with other beings. It contains the memory of the origin, and it exists within a communion of beings.

Being as “presence” arrives at its full meaning in man when his awareness reaches its fullest form, when it offers, that is, recognizes, the divine mystery as the ultimate consistency of all that exists.26 This characterization of being as presence is a way of expressing a unity of that which is present and the one to whom it is present. This unity is not a static, topographical face-off. It is a free belonging to each other that preserves their difference because the one to whom singular being is given acknowledges the origin and telos common to both.

Giussani clarifies further that the condition for perceiving the gift-character of being and its irreducible alterity is the passionate, insistent, and complete observation of reality and of oneself in action. This observation has to be “complete” in order to make room for all the factors of reality, without censoring for any ideology or dividing what is separate only in thought. It has to be “passionate” because freedom and reason are co-originary. There is no such thing as a simple rationalistic observation of the nature of beings. The one who does not love does not discover.27 Finally it has to be “insistent” because the temptation to ideology is always lurking.

The other part of the condition is that one’s engagement be with the whole of reality and its center. Without engaging the whole, instead of knowledge one would end up, once again, in an ideological account of oneself and of being—an account that attempts to fit the whole to the particular of one’s choice. Grasping the unity of being as gift is an arduous exercise that requires paying attention to oneself in action. We could even say that experience and action are two sides of the same coin. Action, which is not simply “production” or “making,” is the concrete, dramatic dialogue in history between God and man, a dialogue in which circumstances are as much the stage on which the action takes place as the content of this drama.28 The perception of being as gift is never the necessary or automatic outcome of a logical process but requires the engagement of the human person. The gift must be received in order to be seen. When the human being is engaged thus, it is possible for him to discover the positivity of what he encounters and of himself in three aspects: the fact that beings are given (are present to him); that finite beings are not simply opaque objects but signs with which the human being is united; and that he, along with the concrete singular, is constantly generated by the source.

The perception of being as gift disclosed by man’s original relation with the other and revealed in experience opens a further dimension of intelligibility. That being is gift indicates that gift is also a logos, “a word, an invitation,” that speaks of another. In fact, “the gift whose meaning is not also given is not really a gift.”29 Gift, in other words, carries its own intelligibility. This means not only that reality’s own light enables man to see it as gift but also that this gift is the word of another, a mystery always present and ever greater that speaks to man. It is important to realize, first, that to say that the gift has its own logos not only means that truth and goodness are coexistent in the singular as it is given to itself and to another. It also means that originary experience, to discover the meaning of any given being or circumstance, must listen carefully to the logos that speaks within and through the gift. Man must not impose an aleatory meaning on his own experience. Just as life is larger than our experience of it, so the logos that speaks in the gift cannot be enclosed in a human concept. The fact that originary experience bears its own meaning does not imply that one will understand or grasp that meaning. The inseparability of gift from its own logos indicates that the mystery pronounces himself to man in infinitely different ways without repetition. Every finite being-gift is a whole, an integral singular being, a word infinitely other than the mystery and yet a word that communicates this mysterious other on which it constitutively depends.

Giussani speaks of sign as the dual unity of gift and logos discovered through originary experience: “The sign is a reality whose meaning is another reality, something I am able to experience, which acquires its meaning by leading to another reality.”30 Finite being is a sign, a word-gift that brings man to the transcendent ground of both reality and the human being. While some of his christological writings treat “sign” and “sacrament” as synonymous, Giussani does not use the term “symbol” to refer to the dual unity of gift and logos that characterizes finite beings.31 “Symbol” does not indicate the intrinsic link between gift and logos as clearly as “sign” seems to do. “Symbol” can be easily understood as a reality whose meaning is culturally determined and hence imposed on human experience. In this sense, “symbols” would be historically conditioned and so would have no claim to universality or ontological depth. This understanding of symbol easily leads to conclusions such as those of M. Lawler, for whom “experience and not ontology makes reality.”32 For Giussani, instead, the sign is “a word that shakes up because it is through the sign that the presence of the transcendent touches the flesh.”33 Whereas the culturally determined understanding of symbol leads to endless interpretations, for Giussani, experience is “bumping into a sign, an objective reality that moves the person towards his telos, towards his destiny.”34 The sign, therefore, indicates the concrete way in which the mystery gives himself to the human being, so that, through the flesh, once it is received, the sign moves the human being to recognize and assent to the source that generates everything.

It is in the experience of the encounter with the inexorable presence of finite beings that one discovers oneself as given to oneself. Giussani says that “there was a time when the person did not exist: hence what constitutes the person is a given (datum), the person is the product of another.”35 Our birth, more than a biological beginning whose only meaning is chronological, reveals something very important about finite human being: not originating with oneself is the sign that one has been given to oneself. The existence of freedom, limited though real, and of self-awareness prevents us from reducing the human being to his historical and biological antecedents. The human being is an incarnate spirit that transcends nature. “One cannot deny,” Giussani insists, “that the greatest and most profound evidence is that I do not make myself, I am not making myself. I do not give myself being, I do not give me the reality that I am; I am ‘given.’”36

To welcome the evidence of one’s own constitutive givenness reveals the unity binding the self together with its mysterious and permanent source: God, the ultimate source at the origin of both the sign and the human being. Since the origin revealed in the sign is the one from which one’s own self and every sign is ultimately continuously begotten, the mystery may be called “father.” Unlike a human father, however, the mystery is “Father at every moment. He is begetting me now.”37

Although paternal, the mystery remains mystery. Any attempt to define the face of the mystery inevitably becomes ideology.38 This will remain the case even when, in Christ, the mystery lets himself be seen. “God is father, but he is father like no other is father. The revealed term carries the mystery further within you, closer to your flesh and bones, and you really feel it in a familiar way, as a son or daughter.”39 Human experience does give us an intimation of what the Incarnation of the Logos reveals, apart from which we could never fathom this: the mystery is Father like no other father. Because of the dialogical aspect of the mystery’s self-manifestation (through the sign that is both gift and logos), Giussani also designates the mystery with the second personal pronoun. Both reality itself and, as we shall see, man’s own dynamism attest to the existence of the mystery, that “Thou” who speaks to man. Once again, although to speak in terms of dialogue presupposes ascribing personhood to the divine mystery, this “Thou” remains “inexhaustible, evident, and not ‘demonstrable’”—that is, beyond man’s comprehension.40

To sum up, we can say that originary experience allows us to discover both finite being and oneself as gift at whose respective centers is the divine mystery. Since the nature of being is gift and the divine mystery addresses himself to the human person, the truth of this claim about originary experience cannot be seen if it is detached from the engagement of freedom. When Giussani says that originary “experience” enables us to perceive the evident nature of the sign’s dual unity of being-gift and logos he does not have in mind a certainty that does not require freedom. “Evidence” does not mean logical (univocal) or empirical evidence. It is thus neither the result of physical observation nor a necessary deduction from certain premises. Rather, “evidence” indicates the peculiar ontological and epistemological nature of truth, according to which truth presents itself offering the meaning for which man is searching and calling for the decision of man’s freedom. The relation with truth is always a dramatic event. The self-presentation of truth offers meaning and invites man to receive it. While truth’s self-presentation is unequivocal, being’s meaning as gift cannot be seen until it is embraced. Reason and freedom are co-originary. “Evidence,” therefore, means “to become aware of an inexorable presence.” To perceive the evidence is to “open my eyes to this reality which imposes itself upon me, which does not depend upon me, but upon which I depend; it is the great conditioning of my existence—if you like, the given.”41

5. The Experience of Being Given

We have mentioned that originary experience indicates the engagement of all of oneself with all of reality and its center, God. Man’s engagement with the whole, or his lived awareness, acknowledges that both the human person and other concrete singulars have been made, are given to themselves and to each other. The encounter with the gifted irreducibility of the other can be accounted for in many different ways. Yet, rather than imagining what we have described so far as a solitary individual contemplating a beautiful starry night, or a sudden realization in the midst of life—but in a sense also apart from it—that one is not one’s own, it is more helpful to realize that the gift character of being involves first and foremost the personal encounter and the common life that takes place within the family. To be sure, acknowledging being’s utter positivity also happens in many other circumstances. Still, since both knowing and loving have the form of a personal encounter, a look at the nature of familial relations will enable us to give a more complete account of the main characteristics of gift.42 I will thus sketch out the existence of the human person from its beginning to its end with an eye toward indicating the main features of gift.

Giussani referred constantly to the event of one’s own birth to indicate the gift-character of finite being.43 For him, the crucial cultural problem today is the retrieval of the meaning of birth. “Every evil,” he said in an interview, “originates with the lie according to which man theoretically and practically attempts to define himself, forgetting, erasing from his memory his own birth.”44 Birth expresses primordially the gift of being. We have already alluded to the fourfold mystery of birth as that which more than anything else puts us in the way of seeing being’s nature as gift. We can now return to this mystery to see that it first indicates an exuberance of the gift. The child is the fruit of a loving union of a man and a woman. Birth, in this regard, is a radically non-democratic event: the child has no say in his own birth and the parents cannot force his personal existence into being. Certainly, scientific progress can facilitate the manipulation of the begetting of a child, but science can never overcome the fact that it always operates with preexistent material that it did not and cannot create.45

The existence of gift requires a giver, who gives without claiming a return; a receiver—which in our case also coincides with the gift itself; and a dynamic, loving relation between them. This relation constitutes in different degrees a dwelling place. The child is loved into existence and comes as a gift within a home. It is rather difficult today to understand what a home is. Technology has left us homeless and has forced us to think unilaterally of “place” in terms of time and hence as empty space. A dwelling place is now seen as a stopping point in the path of time, and time is no longer viewed as the confirmation of the gift that grants indwelling and unity. Pushing the human being to do more and better, to try different things, and to master nature, the technological mindset and the tools it creates project the human being ahead in the future, preventing him from living the present and from being some-where. Tragically, since the future is not yet and the past is no longer, by preventing his dwelling in the present, the technological mindset places the human being no-where. Because he is no-where, technology cannot but consider the human person as an individual, that is, a holder of rights who determines himself through his action—now understood as making. Yet, in this way, technological thinking quantifies the subject. It abandons man to laws and policies that accentuate his homelessness. Because of this quantification of the person, even at home, social life turns out to be a sequence of individual encounters that not only leave the person radically isolated but, more intensely, force the relationship with others into an exercise of power and instinct. The home into which a child is born is the place that love generates by allowing people to participate and dwell in it. In this sense, the home, with the shared life it entails, is not only where one is born but also the place that continuously helps the person rediscover his own constitutive childlikeness. The home is the continual, living reminder of one’s own having been begotten, of the gift-ness of life, and of the task of existing. The gift is never a monad: it exists only within a communion.

As a fruit, the child always arrives as a surprise. Although he cannot come into being without the parents, he is another spirit, who is irreducible both to his parents and to the biological laws. The child is a gift because he is given to himself. Yet the origin remains present in the child as other. The child belongs to this origin, yet is truly given to himself and can enjoy his very being (as the child’s joyful play reveals). The gift is not simply the correct array of gift, giver, and receiver. The giver remains present in the gift (the child), but as other than the gift. This is true both somatically and, more importantly, spiritually. Let us look at this more closely.

The parents’ embrace of the child—expressed both by the physical embrace and by the existence of the home and life together—represents the certainty that allows the child to grow, precisely because each parent images (differently) the ultimate paternal origin from which the child comes. The father is the sign of God’s absolute otherness, and as father, he is always oriented towards the begotten child and the child’s destiny. The human father therefore is rightly seen as the reminder of one’s own origin and as he who accompanies one on one’s own path and leads one to fulfillment. Fatherhood is as much about origin as it is about telos and accompanying the child in moving toward his telos. The mother is the sign of God’s gratuity. The gift does not count the cost of how much it gives. It gives all of itself without regard for what is left for itself because it knows that it is itself only when it gives itself completely and embraces what it receives in giving itself. Paternity and maternity, although different expressions of the same love, are not interchangeable roles. As Balthasar says, “In love and in fidelity the woman has an easier time of it. . . . The woman is not called to represent anything that she herself is not, while the man has to represent the very source of life, which he can never be.”46 Fatherhood and motherhood, however, image the totality of God’s love only together. The father can be father (and so represent the origin and its fecund, accompanying authority) only in responding to the wife’s incarnation of love’s gratuity. The mother can be mother (the icon of divine gratitude and creaturely reception of divine love) only as a response to the husband’s representing the origin. In this way, as the educative task illustrates, the mother helps the child to face life with the certainty of being loved (hence complementing the task of the father), and, as the father responds to the gratuitous love that the wife incarnates, he helps the child to face existence, to grow free in becoming personally responsible for his own destiny. This asymmetrical reciprocity that is fruitful in a third person expresses the nature of gift at the anthropological level.

Experiencing the fatherhood and motherhood of his parents is essential to the child’s discovery of the positive sense of dependence on God and of the positivity of existence, for it is through his parents that the child can discover the utter positivity of God’s fatherhood. Thus, without fatherhood and motherhood, dependence (and hence sonship) would be slavery, finitude an unbearable limit, and life’s positive destiny dissolution in the One. The home is the place in which one can discover the truth of the freedom of the gift: autonomy (autexousia) and indebtedness.

The education to the truth of the gift that the father and the mother are to give begins by accepting the child as other. The gift is not a gift until it is received. This is the case first of all for the parents: they are to accept the child as a gift to them from another. The reception of the child requires them to affirm joyfully their own finitude, that is, their not being the ultimate origin of the child. If the parents were to present themselves as the only origin, the child would perceive himself to be just a reiteration of that human origin, and the gift of his very self would lose its freedom and novelty. If the parents were to distance themselves completely from the ultimate origin and deny that they are a sign of the divine giver, the gift, as F. Ulrich writes, “would be absolutized; it would be consumed in the things that are and coincide with them.”47 To receive the child as a gift entails the constant acknowledgment that the child is given to them and that they are a true origin precisely because the gratuitous and ongoing gift of their substance is a real sign of the divine love. The child thus needs to be set free if he is to discover being’s gift-ness.48

When the parents avow their relativity to God and to the child, when they teach the dynamic of the gift that is to elicit the personal response of the child to God by witnessing their own, the home is revealed to be a sign of the difference in unity that, as we shall see, constitutes being as such. Precisely because originary experience allows man to perceive the constitutive dependence of any finite being-gift (sign) on its mysterious source, it also shows that the mystery’s presence not only guarantees finite beings their proper alterity, it also suggests that being is communion. The home is a sign of this ontological “evidence.” Undoubtedly, this perception of being as communion revealed in experience is only reached thanks to divine revelation. Nevertheless, the dogma of the Trinity clarifies and strengthens what man’s experience witnesses to: the positivity of being and the unity of the many, which is at the root of that surprising experience that the more one loves and affirms another, the more one affirms oneself.

Within the home, the child is called to receive the gift of himself in its entirety. This reception means acknowledging one’s own being given to oneself and calls one to respond to the human and the divine givers. The fatherhood and motherhood of his parents constantly call forth the child’s personal responsibility. This responsibility, before being a duty, takes the form of a gift, because the original gift of himself to the child seeks to be reciprocated gratuitously. Within the context of the family we can see that, rather than through an abstract dialectics of freedom and nature, the reception of the gift is better accounted for as a loving response that gratuitously recognizes the other as other and wishes to be one with it. When, at home, parents codify every response, the gratuity of the original gift dries up and with it the response itself. Instead, the obedience that a rule of life demands is an incarnation of love. The “rule” is the ordering of the life together in light of its origin and its telos. Thus, the “rule,” as an incarnation of love into which all the members of the family are called to enter, purifies the reciprocation of the gift from undue attachments to oneself precisely because in requiring obedience in what may contradict an instinct, it ensures the gratuity of the gift. The difficult years of adolescence are in fact the growth into the truth of the gift; that is, the belonging to the giving source must become truly one’s own, fully free and conscious. One is called to discover what it means that “youth” is a true belonging to the source.

The gift that childhood represents would not be gratuitous if, besides being given to himself, the child were not endowed with the capacity to give. Generosity includes the giver’s giving to the gift the capacity not only to respond but also to give further. This is why the sexually differentiated body is nuptial: it is the way that enables us to dwell in the memory of our coming from another and of our continuous dependence on something we are not in order to be ourselves. Rooted in the memory of having been given, one can thus discover one’s true self in the gratuitous gift of self.49 The gift (child) remains filial inasmuch as he gives himself to others and becomes fruitful through the nuptial union with another of the opposite sex, exercising his given capacity to give further. Therefore, fecundity is not only the begetting, but also the maturing of the child. To give oneself is also to entrust oneself to others in search of the mysterious origin, the permanent source of one’s own being—a dangerous process since the gift of self to another may be rejected. In addition to marriage, giving further also has the form of friendship and work. Giussani’s synthetic definition of originary experience is also a description of the meaning of work: man’s activity as the fulfillment of a project is, in fact, the mystery of becoming one with reality in the transfiguration of the latter according to the ideal image that is suggested to the human being by reality itself, and dictated to reality by man through his creative capacity. Fruitful giving and receiving—as, for example, in teaching, healing, and building—has to do with a spiritual communication without loss. The giver (teacher) communicates himself to the receiver (student) through the gift without imposing himself on the receiver and in so doing collaborates in bringing something new (understanding) into existence.

The relation between the parents, and that between them and the child, reveals another crucial aspect of the logic of the gift: donation is not unilateral. It is not simply the case that one gives and the other receives, and then the one who receives will give further at a second moment. Thinking of the exchange of gifts in terms of passivity and activity could preclude seeing that giving entails a receiving in the giving itself, while the receiving entails a giving in the receiving itself. It is important, however, not to lose sight of the priority of the giving and the receiving in either case. While there is a receiving in the giving, it remains a giving, and while there is a giving in the receiving, it remains a receiving. To read the relation between the giving and receiving as purely reciprocal or interchangeable is tantamount to reading the logic of gift through the lens of a power that forgets its own having been given to itself. Equality between the giver, the gift, and the receiver is preserved only when the order and the difference are respected. Otherwise, gift would be ontologically inferior to the giver, and hence, not really a gift but a “fall” from the giver. In spousal love, the husband gives himself and, in giving himself, receives his wife, who, in receiving the husband, gives herself. Through the parents, the child is given to himself, and in so doing they accept him as given to them. The child receives the gift of himself in giving himself to the parents and others. Since the original evidence of being given to oneself remains the permanent determination of the gift that the person is, one does not grow out of childhood. To be sure, infancy fades away in adolescence, which disappears in adulthood. Yet childhood, as indicating the identity of the gift that acknowledges the priority of its being given, grows ever deeper. Leaping out of childhood not only represents a denial of the gift but also calls forth its opposite: chaotic being. We shall return to this later.

Recapitulating what has been said so far, the singular is a gift because it is given to itself from another that remains present in the gift without absorbing it into itself. The gift is called to reciprocate the gift to the giver with the same gratuity that characterized its being given to exist. In this dialogue that opens the possibility to respond, although never completely, in thankfulness, one discovers that one is with others in a home, whose existence is the sign of the ultimate source that calls every finite singular to be. The fruitful response is as much giving further (work, begetting) as it is personally responding to the destiny that the original giver prepares for everyone and that unfolds gradually through the historical existence of the person. Throughout this itinerary the person has constant negative and positive intimations of death. The negative encounters are all those instances in which the risk of giving meets an ungrateful rejection of the gift or a denial of further giving. But the risk of giving does not derive simply from possible negative outcomes. Giving always requires the detachment of the giver from the gift and the receiver so that they can be themselves and respond to the giver gratuitously. The giver’s detachment is not a withdrawal, but, endowed with the form of giving, is a waiting for the response to come and to do so gratuitously. The “risking” indicates the totality of the giving that respects the irreducible otherness of the gift and thus waits for a gratuitous response that may not come.

The positive intimations of death can be perceived if we realize that death, beyond its meaning of biological extinction and interruption of the original giving, reminds the person of the gift of his own existence. Death reminds the receiver of the constant being allowed to be. In this regard, death reveals anew the truth of birth: finite gift’s ontogenic dependence on the source that begets the human being at every moment. One advantage of lived time is that it affords the possibility to see the unity of existence as a gift under the never-ending light of the mystery—even if most of the time this unity passes unnoticed. Perhaps more forcefully than birth itself, death discloses that life is a gift that calls for further giving, but a giving that in reality, since it is a response to the presence that calls, coincides with permitting oneself to be taken. Our contemporary culture holds up sudden death as the ideal way to die. Yet, while in some cases death may occur abruptly, normally speaking one is called to receive it, that is, to learn to give oneself over to the origin of one’s own existence. Through death, one is asked to give oneself over completely. This could seem an unacceptable expropriation if we lose sight of the fact that the logic of gift that sustains existence is one of love. In love, one wishes to give oneself over completely to the beloved. Death, of course, has the flavor of a punishment and threatens to be the last word on existence. Yet it also brings us to the truth of the gift: the complete entrusting of oneself to the paternal origin. If giving were not ultimately an allowing to be taken, an offering, it would be determined by a limited, self-imposed measure that, as has often been lamented, undoes the gift from within. The wealth of the gift is to give itself completely—a donation that can be described as utter poverty. In order to be true the gift has to be complete; it cannot admit any measure. This is also why previous, discrete moments of giving were perceived as true only when one abandoned oneself in the giving. Those moments also taught that to hand oneself over to the other, as in marriage, has the unexpected though desired fruit of being given back along with the one to whom one has entrusted oneself. This is why in dying, too, one permits oneself to be taken and hopes that this ultimate gift may be finally confirmed. In this regard, death encompasses both moments that must be viewed in and through the other: giving oneself and allowing oneself to be taken. Understanding death in this way, we discover a new sense of limit. Limit, or finitude, which after Christian revelation is no longer a sign of perfection, emerges not as an end and total solitude, but as relation with the paternal origin. If originary experience allowed us to see the gift-ness of the person and of what is present, we now need to ask how recognition of the original giver, and hence the unity with and difference from him, takes place.

6. The Exigent Character of Life

The previous sections attempted to show, with the help of Giussani, that originary experience touches on the encounter with the presence of the other, a sign that is the unity of logos and gift. The gift of the singular sets man on the path toward the affirmation of the transcendent giver of the gift, of whom the sign is a word. As the analysis of gift through the reality of the family indicated, the person comes to recognize through his own experience that the origin of his existence cannot be fully identified with his progenitors or the natural biological mechanisms. Originary experience leads man to discover from within life itself a “structural disproportion” between him, the sign, and the ultimate giver, which, in light of such disproportion, cannot but be acknowledged as the divine paternal mystery. Before examining this further, there is a methodological implication to note: the human person’s call to acknowledge the original giver means that the core of the doctrine of the analogy between God and finite being—which will be developed formally in the next chapter—consists in the dramatic relation between God and the human person. If the gift is freely given to itself so that it can be itself in responding to the giver, the analogy of being between God and the concrete singular takes place within the horizon of what can be called, with Balthasar, an analogia libertatis. This analogy of freedom, having its apex and condition of possibility in Christ, contains an analogia personarum according to which each person discovers his or her unique face in the response to the call of the paternal giver.50

The encounter with truth, which we call here originary experience, takes the concrete form of the encounter between the wonder-causing self-presentation of being in the sign’s dual unity (gift-logos) and the original needs that constitute the human heart. Giussani says that originary experience invites us to perceive the presence of being, but in addition, that experience also reveals what constitutes the gift of one’s being: the “heart,” that is, “a complex of needs and ‘evidences’ which throws man into comparison with all that is.”51 Giussani orders the original evidences, needs, and exigencies that constitute the human heart in four fundamental categories: truth, justice, happiness, and love.52 The first category of truth is man’s search for the meaning of everything; that is, for the idea or form that gives things their identity and relation with the whole, with the ultimate: “the need for truth always implies singling out the ultimate truth, because one can only define a partial truth in relation to the ultimate. Nothing can be known without a quick, implicit comparison, if you like, between the thing and totality. Without even a glimpse of the ultimate, things become monstrous.”53 Giussani places great importance on this first category, to the extent that it is the ground for his understanding of reason. Here again, it is experience that yields the adequate nature of reason: “reason is that singular event of nature in which it [reason] reveals itself as the operative need to explain reality in all its factors so that man may be introduced to the truth of things.”54 The totality indicated here is not quantitative. It regards the ultimate meaning of all that exists, a meaning that the concrete singular itself is not. Thus the need for meaning, awakened by the sign, always opens to the threshold of the infinite mystery.55

Without the affirmed perspective of the divine origin as “the unitary meaning which nature’s objective and organic structure calls the human conscience to recognize,” human justice is impossible; love becomes sentimental, barren possessiveness; and happiness (satis factus) is a momentary illusion.56 Positively stated, the original needs of truth, love, justice, and happiness always seek a totalizing response, a response that does not stop short of the ultimate. They therefore root man in the relation with the mystery of which the constitution of reality, and indeed of man himself, speaks. Originary experience reveals that the gift of our being has the task of affirming the ultimate mystery, the all-encompassing meaning that gives man and the cosmos to themselves.

Giussani does not speak of man’s needs and exigencies in the search for the ultimate in terms of “rights” or of a “claim” on God. Man is interiorly ordered to the vision of God in whom alone he finds fulfillment. Nevertheless, these needs, precisely as needs, do not present a claim on this vision. Man is not on an equal footing with God, who remains other. Giussani contends that the original needs express themselves as questions, not claims. These questions seek a “total answer, an answer which covers the entire horizon of reason, exhausting completely the whole ‘category of possibility.’”57 Man’s needs seek a totality that is other than the sign, the human person, or the unity of both. Furthermore, the fact that Giussani calls them “needs” and “exigencies” does not imply that God’s definitive self-revelation in Christ is demanded by man’s given structure. There is no forced arrival of grace. Giussani reminds the reader that the opening line of Augustine’s Confessions—fecisti nos ad te—means that God has created man already turned to him.58 This being turned toward God (“ad”) is part of the gift of human nature.59

The gift of human being, for Giussani, is thus a call to live in a vertiginous existential condition, that is, in a tension between poles due to the paradoxical human nature (to speak with de Lubac): man cannot give himself that which he needs and without which he cannot live. In concrete human experience, both worldly goals and eternal striving leave the original needs unsatisfied; what these needs seek is an inexhaustible response. Giussani indicates, then, that the human being always experiences a sense of “structural disproportion” at a finite response to the totalizing human needs. The sign always leads the human person beyond what reason can grasp. Reason, in faithfulness to experience, shows that the exhaustive response to the ultimate question lies beyond the horizon of one’s own existence. If man’s encounter with the world is this interplay of “sign” and original needs, which are awakened and set in motion by the sign, we can say, according to Giussani, “that the world ‘demonstrates’ something else, demonstrates God as a sign ‘demonstrates’ that of which it is a sign.” God’s existence is implied in the dynamic proper to human experience. With a remarkable trust in human nature’s capacity to perceive the evidence, Giussani continues that “the answer exists because it cries out through the constitutive questions of our being, but experience cannot measure it. It exists but we do not know what it is.”60 While revealing himself within our originary experience, God remains beyond human grasp. Since there is a structural disproportion between the need for total meaning and the sign whose logos speaks of the giver, the perception of God through experience cannot be reduced to a feeling of his presence. Since God gives himself to be known through the mediation of the sign’s gift-character, originary experience does not propose a direct intuition of God (ontologism). Consequently, what this means for man and his constitutive needs is that both remain beyond understanding until man is encountered by God. What man really needs is discovered only in Christ. It is then that he realizes that he is thirsty because, incomprehensibly to him, God is more profoundly thirsty for him.61

The encounter between the sign and the constitutive needs of the heart comes to expression in a judgment, that is, as a knowledge in love, which acknowledges God to be the ground of the sign and, at the same time, discovers the correspondence of both the sign and the ground to the human heart.62 Because the transcendentals are coextensive, all that exists co-responds to a certain extent to man’s original needs. That is, through this judgment man acknowledges that reality responds with and in man to the ultimate source. Originary experience therefore reveals a unity between man, reality, and the whole. For Giussani, elementary experience is true if it “throws us into the rhythm of the real, drawing us irresistibly toward unification with the ultimate aspect of things and their true, definitive meaning.”63 It also discloses that “to understand” does not mean to comprehend something in the sense of completely grasping its meaning. It is rather to acknowledge the integrity and the fullness of presence.64 To acknowledge this fullness, to know, involves all of the human person. The criterion for judging the truth of any thing has to be independent of the judger’s wishes and limited cognitive capacities and, at the same time, it has to be truly his. To emphasize the latter without the former leads to subjectivism; to affirm the former without the latter leads to alienation. For Giussani, the criterion for judging given to man is not outside of him. It is given to him and, as such, it is his; it coincides with him. Yet since it is given to him with his own nature (in a sense it is his own nature), the criterion is greater than he is, and so is never subjective. The infallible criterion is the array of inextricable needs that constitute the human heart. To say that the original needs are the infallible criteria man is given—“infallible as criteria not as judgment”—attempts to liberate man from alienation, that is, to keep man from jettisoning the responsibility of “seeing for himself.”65 Given the dimensions of the original needs, what responds adequately and totally to man’s exigencies and original needs would be a sign that coincides completely with the mystery. This is why, Giussani says, only “something exceptional corresponds,” that is, only Christ, the sacrament of the Father, the one in whom mystery and sign coincide, adequately responds, that is, addresses and fulfills without satiating the needs of man’s heart.66

It is important to note that the judging, as knowledge in love, that acknowledges the gift-character of the singular, and so God as the singular’s ultimate, takes place in collaboration with man’s affection and freedom. The way reason knows something is not by processing information as a computer does; it requires being touched by the sign (gift-logos) and being moved to know. Giussani, rejecting the Enlightenment claim of an isolated reason unimpaired by any form of mediation, stresses further the unity of affection and reason and states that “without evidence we would not be moved, and without being moved, there would not be evidence.”67 Bearing in mind the twofold connotation of affection—first the passive sense, to be touched, to be struck; then the active sense, to love something—we can say that reason desires to know: it is provoked and moved to know and it loves what gives itself to be known. There is another dimension, however, of the need to welcome in freedom, to re-cognize, what reason sees and what the affections love. “To know (conoscere) is to recognize (riconoscere) what exists in the comparison with one’s original needs.”68

Freedom, however, can and does come between reason and affection to separate them. In this separation, freedom negates the ultimate and evident meaning of things, that is, the source that gives them to themselves. The alternative between affirming the gift or rejecting it that is offered to human freedom is never, for Giussani, a choice between two equally relevant options. The positivity of being (one’s own being and that of reality) requires reason to acknowledge the priority of being over nothingness. The fact that one is indicates that there is a meaning and that one is made for and so exists always in a movement towards this meaning. Only the affirmation of the “evident” corresponds to being’s self-presentation and its specific anthropology. To separate reason from the affective adhesion to the mystery is the form of freedom’s reluctance to embrace the “evident.” Experience makes it clear that just as reason cannot resist identifying the mystery of the whole with a particular—a reduced sense of unity that ideology quickly conflates with totalitarianism—so freedom’s fear of affirming being simply because it is cannot be overcome by man’s energies alone. Although the milieu of the community is not a guarantee, Giussani says that without it freedom cannot say its yes to “the possession of the link that binds one thing to the other and all of the things together.”69

It is possible now to see that if, in contradiction to the unity between God, man, and the world as disclosed by originary experience, one separates them into three fragments, the result is an arsenal of false understandings of experience. If experience is understood as “sheer trying out, proliferation of initiatives, and undergoing,” it results from having lost the link between experience and judging. If experience is seen as “mere reaction to circumstances and events,” there has been a loss of the sense in which the impact with reality always invites freedom to recognize the ultimate ground. Experience understood as an “experiment” at man’s disposal loses sight of the fact that man and reality are always being held in existence and confuses conversion and novelty with power and repetition. To “insist on one’s own plans and ideas,” instead of embracing the true novelty that takes place in experience, is to abandon oneself to the fear of affirming being for what it is. It is a rejection of the risk of oneself that is constitutive of the dramatic existence of man. To reduce experience to a subjective, indisputable, or even “graced” event, is to overlook its integral relation with the objective, transcendent side of experience (sign, authority, tradition, God). To circumscribe experience to the limits of one’s own sexuality is to neglect the meaning and universality of the original needs and evidences. Finally, to separate meaning from experience and consider the former imposed on the latter through cultural mediation is to neglect the dual unity of gift and logos that characterizes all that is.

7. The Time of Gift

Treating of gift as the form of the unity of being, examined by way of man’s originary experience, also demands taking up the topic of time. To experience, we noted, is to travel around (Erfahrung) and to discover that gift characterizes the form of being’s unity and permanence. Both aspects presuppose an idea of time, which we must now make explicit.

The association of experience with time, of course, is nothing new. One opinion says that experience is fundamentally static, since it has to do with our awareness of the relation between God, man, and the world, an awareness that, as we just saw, is expressed through the person’s knowing in love (judgment). The lack of history and growth would indeed be the case if by “awareness” we meant “feelings” or “emotions” (as William James understood religious experience), or if awareness spoke of the possibility of direct knowledge of God (as if sign, mediation, and thus authority were secondary to originary experience), or, finally, if the content of this awareness were the “knowledge” of a limited object (that could also be called God). This “limited object” is incapable of changing the human person or setting him on a path toward the truth of himself, either because the relation between God and the human being is conceived in strict katalogical terms, or because, according to our technological culture, finite beings are only nominalistically related to God and so have no power to bring the human person upwards (analogia) to the original giver.70 Others take an opposing view and identify experience with time, or more precisely, history. Experience, in this sense, would represent the Heraclitean river through which nature makes itself. Here the traveler would construct his own nature through his wandering in existence.71 The preceding reflections clarify why originary experience is not static in these various senses, but it remains to say a word on the concept of history that many common accounts of experience presuppose and build upon.

The development of modern sciences and the hermeneutical reflection that followed Husserl’s phenomenology inverted the premodern worldview that accounted for movement in terms of energeia and entelecheia. Consequently, experience is now understood as meaning more or less the same thing as time, while the combination of the two create an understanding of time as history. “For most contemporary thinkers,” writes K. L. Schmitz, “the timeless is a deficient and static mode found (if at all) in abstract human thought, and movement is unconditionally necessary.”72 Motion is nobler than rest—now identified with boredom and inactivity. The meaning of movement, however, is currently reduced to its topographical sense, or, more importantly, accounted for in terms of “possibility” and “will.” Depending on this latter idea of movement, time becomes the measure by which to observe man’s accomplishments. In this sense, for our contemporary culture, time is almost exclusively read in terms of a history that is no longer a context larger than the individual. History is not that “collective life of man,” as G. Grant says, that totality in light of which one’s own existence and works were seen as an indispensable but small contribution to a larger whole. History has become, as Grant writes, “the orientation to the future together with the will to mastery. Indeed the relation between mastery and concentration on the future is apparent in our language. The word ‘will’ is used as an auxiliary for the future tense, and also as the word that expresses our determination to do.”73 The “present” counts only inasmuch as it is history in the making; that is, as it is potentiality for a better future.74 The primacy of the will in a technocratic culture makes the human being believe that he can completely master himself, either by manipulating his very nature (as biotechnology claims to do in ever new and ever more effective ways) or by creating his own rights and values. This view of history is consistent with the idea of progress mentioned earlier because for both there is no longer an objective order of the good (no perception of the coextensiveness of being and gift) into which one enters. The perception of order and good is built by the few and embraced by the rest through democratic consensus—which generally reveals itself to be the submission of the majority to an anonymous oligarchy. It is this view of movement and time (as history) that considers any discussion of ontological principles such as gift or being as an archeological exercise, irrelevant for anyone familiar with the development of thought in the last centuries.

To perceive history as the collective life of man into which one enters and offers his great or small contribution requires a retrieval of rest as entelecheia. This, however, calls for recuperating the link between time and eternity that was severed by modernity. Modernity’s identification of experience with time transforms history into an immanent reality. History now refers only to two dialectically opposed dimensions of movement, becoming and stasis, where the former takes priority. To clarify the relation between the two requires no reference to a transcendent horizon in order to render history comprehensible. History, as “orientation to the future together with the will to mastery,” is self-sufficient; it is a self-enclosed reality whose measure can be made to fit man’s stature. As Heidegger puts it, “The philosopher does not believe. If the philosopher asks about time, then he has resolved to understand time in terms of time or in terms of the aei, which looks like eternity but proves to be a mere derivative of being temporal.”75 We now need to look back at the nature of gift as disclosed by originary experience in order to indicate its relation with time and eternity. In this way we will be able to assess why the sketched perception of time and history is based on a false or at least misconstrued anthropology.

There are three implications that arise from this discussion of the concrete singular being given to itself. First, as given to itself, the concrete singular does not coincide with itself. It is not its own origin. The fundamental evidence of being-made-now calls forth the awareness in the person as a singular being that his being and what he is, although inseparable, are not identical. He is a whole that is different from his being and his essence but is nonetheless constituted by the dual unity of essence and esse. The existence of the concrete singular, in its dual unity of esse and essence, is always already oriented towards its paternal origin. It thus exists only as a dramatic relation with the origin. The ontological difference, or real distinctio in Aquinas’s terms, is not a static description of the structure of a finite being whose activity can be cleanly detached from its ontology. The ontological difference reveals the singular’s specific temporality. As we saw, the human person comes to be at a moment not of his choosing, that is to say: he is given to himself. He has to receive his own being in order to be—and this reception, as we shall see shortly, has both an ontological and ethical connotation. The concrete singular’s historical existence includes the continuous movement (action, entelecheia) of receiving himself from and entrusting himself to others in the loving affirmation of their unknown, common origin. To exist as gift means that one enjoys a continual growth in the truth of what gift means. Finally, this growth reaches its resting point when the concrete singular’s destiny is fulfilled.76

The second implication relates to the gift as truly given: it remains other from and irreducible to the giver. The giver remains present in the gift but does not identify himself with it. It would be impossible to account for the meaning of the singular being’s existence if the difference from the original giver were not preserved, or if this difference were reduced to a simple separation. The singular being would be a “fragment” that never belonged to any totality. It would not even be possible to talk about its “whatness,” or, if attempted, it would simply come down to indulging in linguistic games. Time, reflecting the non-subsistence of finite beings, separates finite beings from God. Yet it does so not by denying God, but by imaging him. Because the giver remains present in the gift without losing his transcendence, time, as finite gift’s mode of being, images eternity, the eternal giver’s mode of being. Plato famously states in the Timaeus that since “it is not possible to bestow eternity fully upon anything that is begotten . . . [the Father] began to think of making a moving image of eternity, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity.”77 Time images eternity precisely in its continuous movement. Of course, for Plato the moving image meant above all circular movement. Yet, as Gregory of Nyssa explains, it is possible to think of the image’s movement (time) as a continuous becoming like the source as a result of the relation with that source. Time is coming into existence from and returning to the source while growing ever more like it, but without relinquishing the gift’s finite nature. The passage of time, because already sharing in the source, promises a unity with the source in which the finite gift is confirmed in the gift of being. From this point of view, the passage of time is a turning in desire towards the source, which, infinite itself, cannot but fulfill man’s desire without ever satiating it.78 Eternity does not simply lie before the beginning of time or wait at its end. It is, to speak with Bulgakov, “the noumenon (eternity) within the phenomenon (time).”79 Eternity is the truth of time that, in manifesting itself through time, distinguishes itself from time.

Third, the singular gift is totally given to itself in its own distinct unity; it is a “self.” Since it is irreducibly a “self,” even though its being and essence are not coextensive, the gift, from the point of view of the giver, cannot be taken back. It is crucial not to lose sight of the totality of the gift; otherwise we would think that gift relies only upon the power to give. The potentiality to give, however—or “gift,” considered as a verb—is only one aspect. “Gift” is also a noun and, as such, describes the nature of the concrete singular. In addition to the inseparability of these two aspects of the word “gift,” there also exists a proper taxis between them. The singular’s capacity to give or to be given rests in its being given completely to itself. It is true that the gift is to grow in the truth of its being, yet this is a growth into what has already been given: participation in being. The totality proper to the singular being, therefore, also contains a promise of more, that is, of being confirmed in being and of participating in a being with others that knows no end. The promise is not made, however, because the beginning of the singular’s existence is an empty void waiting to be filled. The promise of more is, rather, an increase of what has already been given. This promise is not a movement from sheer potency to actuality, but an indwelling of the latter. An inquiry into the meaning of substance in what follows will explore in what sense the connotations of gift’s actuality and potentiality are not dialectically related, and why the need to grow in the gift does not threaten the concrete singular’s being. It suffices here to note that to think of time without relation to eternity is to give potentiality priority over actuality. Taking as primordial the verbal sense of gift as potency grounds the claim that history is all-encompassing.80 This claim, however, looks at the concrete singular from its historical end (death) rather than from its inception, and holds up the future rather than the present as time’s fundamental category. The human being is indeed oriented towards the future, but this is because the fullness of the present opens him to it. How is the “present” then to be understood?

Heidegger, who attempted to think of “being (Sein) without regard to metaphysics” and, in order to do so, had “to leave metaphysics to itself,” said in his famous lecture Time and Being that “from the dawn of Western-European thinking until today, Being (Sein) means the same as presencing (Anwesen). Presencing, presence (Anwesenheit) speaks of the present. . . . Being is determined as presence by time.”81 There is a sense in which this Heideggerian affirmation is correct. We mentioned earlier that originary experience invites us to account for being in terms of a presence (being as gift and logos) that imposes itself. Presence, we saw, presupposes a threefold movement of the concrete singular: its coming from another to call the human being through beauty to freely let himself and the sign (the concrete singular) be united with God, the sourcing giver and telos of both, in the historical return of both to him. This coming to, being with, and going towards is also time—although not identical with it.82 Time is therefore not the receptacle in which the being of gift is given or contained. The question will be whether what we described as presence is what Heidegger intended.

The methodology adopted here—the anthropological starting point that moves from the human being to being in general and the divine giver—enables us to see that there is a reciprocity between being’s presence (gift-logos; sign) and the human being. In a deceivingly similar way, Heidegger writes that the human being is “standing within the approach of presence, but in such a way that he receives as a gift the presencing that It gives by perceiving what appears in letting-presence.”83 Presence, according to him, means “the constant abiding that approaches man, reaches him, is extended to him.”84 As is well known, Heidegger calls Ereignis the belonging together of what gives itself and the one it claims in giving itself to it. Of course there can be no pretense of attempting to give here a full explanation of what Heidegger means by this complex term. It will be helpful for our purposes, though, to indicate first the main differences in the sense of “presence” and hence “time,” and second, how dialogue with Heidegger helps us understand time’s threefold dimension of past, present, and future.

Ereignis (event) is neither a historical occurrence nor a phenomenon presupposing a god to give a gift of a finite being to the human being and the latter to the former. Ereignis is a reciprocal belonging that “is a giving as destiny, giving as an opening up which reaches out. Both belong together, inasmuch as the former, destiny, lies in the latter, extending opening up.”85 This opening of the open takes place on the basis of a concealment, not because the giving (Es gibt) is the action of a god who remains hidden, but because the withdrawal proper to giving—which determines the modes of giving as sending and extending—belongs to what is proper to Ereignis.86 Contrary to Heidegger, the belonging together of presence and the human being, however, must also keep in view the fact that, as originary experience discloses, both finite beings and the human being come from another. To eliminate this third in the totality of being and time by hypostasizing the event, as Heidegger seems to do (the event events, Das Ereignis ereignet), is tantamount to making human finitude the prime analogate for the whole.87 This metaphysical decision, however, overlooks the constant discovery of experience that one is still being made and held in existence. The wonder that being’s presence elicits in the human being precludes any burning of the bridges between metaphysics and the experience of time. It is true that the present, as Heidegger says, cannot be a simple “now,” understood as the instant measurable by the clock. But beyond what he grants here, the present includes the presence that bears both the continual reminder of the passage from nothingness to being given, and the ongoing movement towards the ultimate source of being.

If the present is a gift in which the source gives itself in distinction from the gift while remaining its innermost, as the originary experience of being in the world and of childhood discloses, then perhaps we can adopt Heidegger’s understanding of past and future as true with a correction from the metaphysical reading of gift, which is open to the transcending Eternal that constitutes it. This can account for the union as well as the distinction between time and eternity and so lead to a deeper understanding of the mystery of donation. “That which is no longer present,” Heidegger says, “presences immediately in its absence—in the manner of what has been and still concerns us. . . . But absence also concerns us in the sense of what is not yet present in the manner of presencing in the sense of coming toward us.”88 Heidegger explains further that it is “nearhood (Nahheit) that brings past, present, and future near to one another by distancing them. For it keeps what has been open by denying its advent as presence.”89 Through Nahheit, Heidegger sees future as the withholding of presence, and past as the refusal of presence. Certainly the past and the future are not the present, though they remain within it. Contrasting Heidegger’s account, however, they do so not as a denial of the present but as part of its constitutive gift. The past remains in the present as past in the form of tradition and memory, a handing over of and to the gift. The content of this tradition is not a sterile mass of doctrine. It is rather, on the one hand, human nature with its exigent character and all of the cosmos, and on the other hand, the cultural and historical inheritance that enables the human being to understand the present and the task laid out for him. In light of the perception of gift elucidated here, rather than “withholding,” the future is a coming, as Heidegger also mentions, but more so it is a coming that ratifies the promise that constitutes the gift of the present. Hence the future is not present because it is withheld, but because it is promised. In this sense, it is God, rather than Ereignis, who accounts for time’s fourth dimension: the unified givenness of time.90

Without the promise contained in the present gift, time would lack its logos and history would collapse in competing worldviews or shrivel down to an open space at man’s disposal. Furthermore, if the positivity of the present did not include difference within itself and from God, the present would let go of the past and forestall the future possibilities. In other words, if the gift were a sheer, univocal repetition of the gift—as seems to be the case in Heidegger’s understanding of being—there would be neither past nor telos to tend towards. The originary experience of time, instead, requires an analogical concept of being as gift.91

The mystery of death could emerge here as an ultimate objection to time as the presence of the gift that, enriched by its past, awaits fulfillment. But to grant this objection would mean identifying the mystery of death with biological death—thus losing sight of what death reveals of the nature of gift as indicated above—and, more importantly, denying that the continual coming from another, as witnessed by originary experience, presupposes the creative call to be that is capable of begetting where before there was “nothing.” In our account, by contrast, the future is opened up by death in a far more radical way than if finite gift were its own origin or confined within a self-enclosed historical horizon. Since the present is a gift, the fulfillment of the promise is not a necessary, mechanical payment of something that is due. It is, instead, a gratuitous and overabundant gift that surpasses the exuberance even of the surprising origin of finite existence.

The unity and difference of the gift of being and time enables us to say that the distinction of past and future from the present also engages the freedom proper to the gift. The gift is asked to receive itself and the whole from the source—in this sense its past—and to welcome the fulfillment of the promise—its future. Originary experience calls for the recognition of a real, created, finite freedom that is itself (autonomous) because it is given to itself (indebted). The difference and unity of past, present, and future reveals man’s finitude as relation with the original giver, whose presence in the gift represents also the call to make the gift like itself but, pace Hegel, without denying the concrete singular gift.92 What follows attempts to ground the assertion that what constitutes the gift of the present as gift is the fact that it is in the present time that all of the gift is given, received, and awaited.

1. The first adjective is from Whitehead, Symbolism, 16. The second is from Gadamer, Truth and Method, 346ff.

2. See, for example, Wojtyła, Acting Person, 3–22. John Paul II’s reflections on the nature of human love are built upon this understanding of experience. To him, there are three original experiences: original solitude, original unity, and original nakedness. These are three inseparable dimensions of the person that have to do with the discovery of what is specifically human through one’s encounter with the world and the human other. For John Paul II, “original” is intended in the twofold sense of “in the beginning” and at the source of every human being’s daily experience (John Paul II, Theology of the Body, 146–78). See also the fine introduction of Anderson and Granados García, Called to Love.

3. Rather than approach the meaning of gift from a sociological (Mauss, Godelier, Weiner), phenomenological (Heidegger, Marion), ethical (Seneca), or deconstructionist (Derrida, Schrag) point of view, I would like to present the relation between being and gift through an examination of “human originary experience.” Incidentally, John Milbank’s reflection on gift begins with an examination of evil (see Milbank, Being Reconciled).

4. Jonas, “Toward a Philosophy,” 195. Jonas writes further: “In brief, a mutual feedback operates between science and technology; each requires and propels the other; and as matters now stand, they can only live together or must die together” (ibid., 195).

5. This approach is also proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar and described by him as meta-anthropology. See, among others, Balthasar, GL, 5:653; Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible. See also Bieler, “Meta-anthropology and Christology,” 129–46.

6. In this regard, the knowledge acquired through “experience” can be approximated to the classic understanding of wisdom (sapientia): the knowledge of oneself that requires acknowledging that one “does not know” and that one’s own self is comprehensible only with the relation to the divinity (Plato, Apology 23b; Plato, Alcibiades 132c–135b).

7. For further development of this, see the famous work of Jean Mouroux, L’expérience chrétienne: Introduction a une théologie (Paris: Editiones Montaignes, 1952). English translation: Christian Experience, 24. See also Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 346–50.

8. Aristotle, Metaph. 981a15–16. For Aristotle, experience does not offer knowledge of the reasons for things; it is only science that studies the universals that can grant this knowledge: “Men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why; while [those who possess scientific knowledge] know the why and the cause of the facts” (ibid., 981a28–30).

9. Ibid., 980b25–981b9.

10. ST, II–II, q. 45, a. 2, c; ST, I–II, q. 26, a. 2; ST, I–II, q. 29, a. 1. This connotation of experience as the acquisition of knowledge is also found in more recent authors such as Bernard Lonergan, for whom experience has four different senses that must be properly distinguished: biological, aesthetic, intellectual, dramatic. Besides these, he also speaks of religious experience (Lonergan, Insight, 182–91).

11. Grotius, De iure belli, prolegomena 11.

12. Of course, this concept of reason and truth is only one aspect characterizing “modernity.” Robert Spaemann, for example, indicates the following as the primary aspects: understanding freedom as emancipation; the myth of necessary and endless progress; progressive mastery of nature; objectivism; homogenization of experience; hypothesizing reality; naturalistic universalism (Spaemann, “Ende der Modernität?,” 232–60).

13. Gadamer’s attempt to continue the phenomenological reflection through hermeneutics still accentuates the separation between ontology and history. See Gadamer, Truth and Method.

14. Schleiermacher, On Religion; Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 3–128.

15. Spaemann, “Ende der Modernität?,” 240.

16. Mouroux, Christian Experience, 9–15.

17. “O man!” Gregory of Nyssa wrote, “realize what you are! Consider your royal dignity! The heavens have not been made in God’s image as you have, nor the moon, nor the sun, nor anything to be seen in creation. . . . Behold, of all that exists there is nothing that can contain your greatness” (cited in de Lubac, Drama, 20).

18. “Experience demands an I, an object, a relationship between the I and the object; but this is not enough: [these three elements are to be perceived] within an ideal horizon that colors in different ways the relation that God establishes between me and the thing. This is the mortal sin from Descartes onwards: to speak of reason forgetting that from which one extracts the concept of reason: experience. Doing this one fabricates, pre-fabricates the concept of reason and with it judges the concept of experience. In this way one confuses everything” (Giussani, “Tu,” 84; ROE, 98–102, at 99). This chapter of ROE was 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 because each one has a different task and unique relation with the same origin.

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. Plato, Timaeus 37c5–d9. This passage was used by Plotinus to explain time. See Plotinus, Enneads 3.7.

78. Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs 1.51, 6.127–29, 12.217–18 (PG 44:780, 885–89, 1021–24).

79. Bulgakov, Lamb of God, 135.

80. A well-known exponent of this claim, which enjoys a great ascendency in theology, is Alfred North Whitehead. See his Process and Reality.

81. Heidegger, OTB, 24 and 2. For his understanding of Sprung (leap), see his Contributions to Philosophy, §117. Heidegger dedicates §§115–67 to defining the meaning of Sprung. In a very different context, Hegel wrote: “Absolute timelessness is distinct from duration; the former is eternity, from which natural time is absent. But in its Concept, time itself is eternal; for time as such—not any particular time, nor Now—is its Concept, and this, like every Concept generally, is eternal, therefore also absolute Presence” (Hegel, Encyclopedia, §258, Zusätze, 36. English translation slightly modified).

82. Aristotle already explained that time is the complex whole that is both inseparable from movement but not identified with it. See Aristotle, Physics 217b29–224a20.

83. Heidegger, OTB, 12. Emphasis added.

84. Ibid.

85. Ibid., 19. For the concept of Ereignis in Heidegger, see Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, GA 65. See also Heidegger, Pathmarks.

86. Heidegger, OTB, 22.

87. Ibid., 24.

88. Ibid., 13.

89. Ibid., 15. Emphasis added.

90. “The unity of time’s three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak—not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter. True time is four-dimensional. But the dimension which we call the fourth in our count is, in the nature of the matter, the first, that is, the giving that determines all” (ibid., 15).

91. It is possible now to understand why Giussani wrote that “experience is time inasmuch as it identifies itself with a present event” (Giussani, AC, 50).

92. “If God is all sufficient and lacks nothing,” asks Hegel, “why does He disclose Himself in a sheer Other of himself? The divine Idea is just this: to disclose itself, to posit this Other outside itself and to take it back again into itself, in order to be subjectivity and Spirit. . . . God is subjectivity, activity, infinite actuosity in which otherness has only a transient being, remaining implicit within the unity of the Idea, because it is itself this totality of the Idea” (Hegel, Encyclopedia, §247, Zusätze, 14–15).