Читать книгу Gift and the Unity of Being - Antonio López M. - Страница 11

The engagement of the whole of ourselves with the whole of reality, and with the center of both, who is God, calls us to recognize the positivity of all that is. With all its dramatic tensions, originary experience reveals that being itself is good qua given, that it is good to exist with others, and that the task for life is given with our destiny. It also reveals how every concrete singular is thus bound together in a complex, manifold unity in which each is fully itself.1 The preceding chapter’s anthropological reflection now opens up into a path to see in what sense “gift” is able to account for the form of the concrete singular’s unity in its relation to and difference from others and with God, the primordial giver. We begin our ontological exploration by addressing the postmodern attempt to dethrone the category of unity and the primacy of philosophical principles in order to ward off the yoke of totalitarianism (section 1). We will see that this representative exponent of the contemporary, fragmented worldview, as thematized in the postmodern understanding of gift, seems to fall short by not thinking radically enough of the difference between God and the world (sections 2–3). Viewed in light of the radical gift of creation ex nihilo, it is possible to perceive the constitutive gift-ness of concrete singulars with respect to their existence (sections 4–5), their essence (section 6), and their finite perseity (section 7).

1. The Allurement of Anarchy

To characterize a historical epoch without losing its richness and variety is always a difficult enterprise. Moreover, it may be simply presumptuous even to make the attempt when one is still living within the epoch to be described. One aspect of our own culture, however, may be indicated without the risk of platitudes. The technological understanding of reason enshrined in the West (thinking understood in terms of willing) seems to have destined our age to a pervasive fragmentation. This radical disunity appears at every turn: sciences treat wholes as heaps of fragments in order better to use them for the advancement of progress and societal well-being; individual rights, understood increasingly in terms of freedom from coercion, transform persons into individuals who view each other as potential enemies; bureaucracy, intended to serve a well-ordered society, alienates citizens from government while it quantifies and treats them as numeric instances of problems to resolve; families appear as transient congregations of isolated individuals; not infrequently work, family life, and play—now reduced to entertainment—are loosely connected for economic but not organic reasons; sexuality is severed from fecundity and both from spousal union; gender is redefined as a cultural category that is not necessarily connected to somatic features; fleeting and competing feelings define, if only for the moment they last, the identity of the human person.

This panoramic description of disintegrated wholes has found in some postmodern thinkers a theoretical elaboration that expresses the opposite view from originary experience. Jean-François Lyotard, elucidating the meaning of postmodernity, wrote that “we have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. . . . The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable [which is not another obscure name for God or source]; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.”2 It is important to underscore that this account both interprets unity in terms of totalitarianism—which itself is a political reading of unity in terms of power—and proposes to overturn it by means of, once again, power. In their attempt to leap out of the metaphysical discourse, postmodern thinkers present the philosophical reflections that preceded them as the inevitable succession of great narratives. Nevertheless, “the grand narrative,” Lyotard writes, “has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses.”3 To underscore the radicality of the rejection of the grand narrative, it is worth recalling that Jacques Derrida, responding to David Tracy’s adoption of the metaphor of fragments to depict our postmodern spiritual situation, rejected his being labeled a postmodern. Even though Tracy acknowledged that “there are only postmodernities,” Derrida noted that postmodernity is yet another “attempt to periodize the totality of history within a teleological scheme.”4 Derrida clarified further that “what is going on today—in religion, in art, in philosophy, in thinking—is a way of inventing gestures which are not subject to totality or to a loss of totality, to the nostalgia and work of mourning for totality. Of course, this is impossible. We cannot simply stop mourning and nostalgia, but then something else is perhaps at work, but this ‘perhaps’ is not in tune with ‘postmodernity’ or with the ‘fragment.’”5 To bring this claim forward inevitably requires postmodern thinkers to reject the subjective humanism that begot the perception of “unity” they so sternly contest.6 The subject is to be let go without remainder and unity replaced by a never-ending multiplicity of origins whose reciprocal supplementarity undermines the very names of “origin” and “unity.”7 Western culture seems to have fallen prey to the allurement of anarchy, that is, to that radical lack of principles that does not even have to conceive of itself as opposed to God. Derrida signals this “something else that is perhaps at work” in many different ways, including the unthinkable, polysemic, and equivocal “unname”: gift. Let us now consider briefly what he means by “gift.”

Derrida’s reflection on gift is offered as a contribution to the destruction of what Heidegger considered one of the basic assumptions of Western thought: the identification of being with presence (parousia).8 Gift, so Derrida contends, rather than accounting for presence as we saw earlier, undercuts it without replacing it with another more basic ground. “Gift” creates difference between the gift, the giver, the receiver, space, and time. For Derrida, therefore, the term “gift” refers to the unpresentable, the unnamable.9 As such, it is not possible to move away from the undecidability with which, according to him, the coexistence of the existence and non-existence of gift leaves us. Gift plays a “fundamental” role. In fact, it is an “open infrastructure” that enables him to elucidate the meaning of time, space, and interpersonal relations. It is important to bear in mind, however, that his exploration of the meaning and relation between gift, giver, and receiver is built upon the presupposition that the logic of gift requires both the absolute purity of the giver’s and the receiver’s intentions and the utter neutrality of the gift with respect to both. More precisely, gratuity presupposes for Derrida the a priori elimination of the subject (both the giver and the receiver). For this reason, Derrida casts gift within what he describes as the logic of the economy, which both requires and precludes gift.

Taking Mauss’s famous work on gift as a starting point, Derrida’s Given Time contends that “gift” belongs to the logic of the economic circular exchange—a logic that could be expressed as do ut des, I give so that you may (have to) give, or do quia dedisti, I give because you have given first.10 For “gift” to be, there has to be a giver who hands on a gift (a “present,” we could say, taking advantage of this feature of English) to a receiver, who is thus put in the position of reciprocating the first donation with a greater (excessive) gift after some time. For the donation to be truly gratuitous, however, it has to break away from the necessity to reciprocate, or to give in the first place. Thus, the giver cannot be aware of himself as giver. A giver must radically let go of the memory of the intention that triggers his giving if he is to truly give and not seek something in exchange. Any intention to give a gift that is not immediately thrown out into the most absolute oblivion spoils the gift and reduces the donation of the gift to pure commerce.11 The human being, so it seems for Derrida, is irremediably egotistic, always turning the gift into a profit of sorts. The gift (a present), to be such, cannot disclose its gift-ness because it would impose its own measure upon the giver or receiver; that is, it would require reciprocation. Lastly, Derrida claims that if the receiver knows himself to be a receiver, he is put in a position of having to show his gratitude and reciprocate the gift, even if simply by receiving it. For the reception of the gift to be true, therefore, the receiver must neither see the gift nor respond to the giver.

Derrida’s other well-known essay on the nature of gift, The Gift of Death, gives the same account of gift from the point of view of ethics and offers, among many other things, an elucidation of the meaning of responsibility in light of gift. The protagonists in this case are God, Abraham, and Isaac. This book, a relentless critique of a distorted perception of Christian ethics, contends that responsibility to God—the mysterium tremens that sets Abraham before the utterly irresponsible content of the request to murder his own son—is possible only “on the condition that the good no longer be a transcendental objective . . . on the condition that goodness forgets itself, hence a movement of infinite love.”12 The giver has to respond and “at the same time efface the origin of what one gives.”13 God, in this regard, is the name for the possibility to keep this secret, that is, to forget the gift.14 For Derrida, donation requires absolute secrecy: the gift (in the threefold “unity” of giver, receiver, and gift) cannot be present. The gift therefore remains unthinkably polysemic and indescribable.15

That the gift is both necessary and impossible entails that, for Derrida, “gift” does not belong to practical reason, nor does it indicate the “essence” or the “presence” of a phenomenon.16 To give, rather, is to open up the difference of time and space. “The gift is such only inasmuch as it gives time. . . . Where there is gift there is time.”17 In Given Time, Derrida uses Baudelaire’s story “Counterfeit Money” to illuminate his understanding of this “trace” he calls “gift” and of the difference that gift introduces between giver, gift, and receiver on the one hand, and of time and space on the other hand. Exiting a tobacco shop, so the very short story goes, two friends encounter a beggar. One gives him what later turns out to be a false coin. The giving, Derrida indicates, establishes a difference between giver, gift, and receiver. This difference is first of all time: “the given thing requires or takes time.”18 In order for the gift to be true, the receiver cannot respond immediately. He must receive the gift and reciprocate it later with another gift. Derrida suggests that the gift of one’s own life for another is perhaps the clearest illustration of this assertion that giving gives, above all, time: to die for another, says Derrida, does not eliminate the other’s death. It simply delays it. The gift reveals in this way that time’s present—in both the subjective and objective connotations of the genitive—is always postponed and hence time cannot be understood as “presence.”

Derrida argues that gift clarifies the meaning of time because it forces us to think of it apart from the category of the present. Just as with the gift that requires a present (gift) with neither memory (of the intention that gave the present) nor promise (of a return), the present time cannot be considered in terms of a “now” coming from a past and open to the arrival of an imminent future. Derrida would concur with Heidegger when the latter writes that “to giving and sending there belongs keeping back—such that the denial of the present and the withholding of the present, play within the giving of what has been and what will be.”19 For Derrida, time is not the Aristotelian measure of movement or the Augustinian psychological extension, but rather the passing away without trace and expectation of reciprocation. As such, time, and hence being (parousia), eludes the framework of presence and absence. Time is a “play” without origin or telos.20 Play, reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s language games and de Saussure’s theory of language, is not the grateful, bold enjoyment of having been given existence. Rather, here it is the lively but joyless fight where there is no “other” to respond to or speak to.21 As gift, time plays and conceals “itself” like a forgotten secret. Time, rather than speaking of the unity of the gift, points us to its irretrievable dissemination.

For Derrida, it is this temporization that ties gift and time to a narration, to a text. With this he does not mean that the story has to be told. The text is not simply a conveyance of content. Rather, giving and temporization appear only in a discourse.22 It is important to realize that Derrida’s insistence on the relationship between the gift-giving and its written account does not come from the inseparability of gift and logos alluded to earlier. He is not seeking an origin of the gift that would have no grasping intention. He is rather signaling that there is no “origin” from which the gift is given. What happens (Ereignis), therefore, happens to both the narrator and the narration, “as if the narrative produced the event it is supposed to report.”23 It is the text that makes giving possible in the first place. “The narrative gives the possibility of the recounted thing . . . and by the same token the possibility of the impossibility of gift and forgiveness.”24 For Derrida, what is guiltlessly and inevitably false in Baudelaire’s text is not simply the counterfeit coin given to the beggar, but the text itself. In this sense, the text itself also shows that gift is not possible.

Besides time, according to Derrida, gift speaks of yet another difference: that of “spacing.” Space, for Derrida, is not the indwelling of the gift that our examination of originary experience yielded. In his view space does not have anything to do with indwelling. For Derrida, “gift” differentiates as “space” that simultaneously unites and, more importantly, separates. Here again, the emphasis rests on difference rather than on unity. In Baudelaire’s story, as explained by Derrida, when the “giver” tells his friend the real “value” of the coin, the narration-gift drives a wider distance between all the characters. The gift separates the two friends because the one does not give and the gift of the other turns out to be deceptive. The gift also separates itself from the giver, since it shows that he has not been true to his own gifts and position in society.25 His gift reveals him to be de-centered. Furthermore, the gift causes the beggar’s status to plummet further down the social scale, while the apparent magnanimity of the giver heightens his superiority.26 Lastly, since the text is what enables the story to be narrated, the distance also affects Baudelaire’s reader—at least in Derrida’s account. The donation of the false coin, as in the case of the betrayed friend, detaches every engaged reader from the story. This distance, opened by the gift of the counterfeit money, signals the “absolute heterogeneity” proper to space.27 The gift reveals further, as with time, that space is made both possible and impossible by the giving of the difference. Derrida calls this differing “spacing,” which, as R. Gasché clarifies, “is the discrete synthesis of (1) the movement by which the self-identity of an entity is interrupted and (2) the passive constitution by inscription as habitation.”28 Gift gives time and space, that is, it differentiates being by postponing the present and forestalling indwelling.

The circularity of time, space, and gift—aimed at the elimination of the metaphysical understanding of being as presence—could seem to define gift as the ruling principle that orders the Derridean “system.” Yet Derrida’s “gift” does not designate a giving origin. To understand what “it” is, it may be helpful to acknowledge that, for him, gift and différance are synonymous. Like différance, gift temporizes and spaces. Like différance, gift—in its simultaneous possibility and impossibility—is more originary than contradiction is; it is understood through the written text; and it sets itself forth as absent in what is present. In this regard one could define gift simply as différance: “the non-full, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus the name of ‘origin’ no longer suits it.”29 In other words, both différance and gift—without being an “it”—displace being as presence and eliminate any unified whole by proposing a perception of time as event in which event differs from itself. Derrida claims that the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of gift is not an oxymoron. Paradox and contradiction still presuppose unity. The simultaneity of the possibility and impossibility of the gift reflects the “unpresentable”: equivocal origins that ongoingly supplement and undo each other.30

The analysis of originary experience prompts the question of whether “gift” necessarily leads to the dissemination of origins or subjectivity indicated by Derrida’s empty, abstract différance. Is it not rather the case that Derrida’s conclusion results from his abstract account of the difference between gift, giver, receiver, time, and space, an account that systematically neglects the concrete singular’s integral mode of being and hence, a priori, excludes the role of the body and the community from consideration?31 If the previous examination of originary experience is valid, we may ask further: is it not the case that gratuity, which is required for both the donating and the reciprocating of the gift, is better thought of through the lens of agape, rather than through the purity of a subjectless, objectless intention? The experience of being given, as it appeared earlier, reveals “giving” as an event in which one desires union with the other without absorption. If, as originary experience suggests, this is how difference is to be conceived, does it not appear then that Derrida’s equivocal account of gift rejects unity and the tout autre (God) precisely because he does not accept that the concrete singular, in this case the human person, is not the absolute other? If this is the case, then perhaps postmodernity—in its numerous forms, Derrida’s included—is the epitome of the subjectivity that it attempts to deconstruct; that is, a subject that does not wish to deal with itself, the world, and God because it cannot account for its own finitude from and by itself.

2. A Radical Difference

Giving has indeed a paradoxical nature: the finite giver’s gratuitous donation must be total and free; yet the donation is also a response to a preceding sign. The gift is both a sign of and irreducible to the source, hence, it is simultaneously transparent to the giver and other than the giver—the child, as we saw, is not a mechanical repetition of the parents. The receiver’s response is gratuitous when it reciprocates without closing itself off to the giver, that is, when it affirms the giver and is open to further giving. This paradoxical structure of the gift requires taking up two related factors. First, in contrast to the view that the gift is both possible and impossible, as Derrida believes, the paradoxical structure of the gift can be explained through the primordial giving known as creation ex nihilo. In fact, to claim that the gift cannot presuppose anything, that it must give all of itself to another who remains other, that it gives time and space, and that it must generate a free, gratuitous response, is to describe creation. Only creation allows an understanding of difference and unity that does not conclude by hypostasizing the giving and receiving of being—as is the case with Heidegger’s Ereignis—or breaking the whole into fragments from whose relation their identities are carved out—as in Derrida’s work. The substitution of creation with reflections on “ground” or “differentiating origins” in order to avoid dealing with the gift ex nihilo that creation is, and hence to avoid grappling with both the nothingness and real being proper to finite beings, leaves Derrida’s philosophical reflection on gift at an unresolved, aporetic level. Creation ex nihilo reveals that the exchange of gifts is a free participation in the original, creative gratuity that brings singular beings into existence and whose gratuity constitutes their very nature. Second, to account for gratuitousness it does not suffice to invoke a purity of intention, particularly one that ends by evacuating the giver, the receiver, and the gift of any identity or content for fear of losing the gift. It is necessary to consider the dimensions of love expressed in the terms eros, agape, and koinonia. What follows will consider the difference that creation ex nihilo introduces and how the negative aspect is to be perceived, beginning with this threefold dimension of love.

To start with an obvious but important point, we must recall that creation ex nihilo, while a legitimately philosophical concept, presupposes a difference between God and the world that is not available to unaided human experience. Creation requires the possibility that the world could have not been and that God’s greatness would have been unaffected by the lack. As Sokolowski describes it, the Christian difference, that is, the difference between a world created ex nihilo and its transcendent God, was unknown to the Greeks.32 Greek tragedies taught that however the gods excelled human beings and historical affairs, their dwelling place was on Mount Olympus, and their eternal history was inescapably tied to human history. Although corrected on many crucial points, the worldview underpinning Greek mythology remains intact for the great philosophers. Sokolowski also notes that Aristotle’s unmoved mover or self-thinking thought, Plato’s Good, and even Plotinus’s One are part of the cosmos. Plotinus’s One, despite its extreme otherness, cannot be without the Spirit and the Soul; Plato’s Good, although separated by an abyss from finite beings (becomings), does not exist independently of them; Aristotle’s self-thinking thought, regardless of whether it is aware of it, shares a necessary existence with those finite beings that never fully reach the unmoved mover and that imitate it either through eternal circular movement or through continual reproduction.33 Once philosophy welcomes the intimation of divine revelation, it is possible to see that creation accounts for what human experience perceives as the truth of the gift: a complete, gratuitous donation that awaits, without demanding it, a free response. For there to be the gift of the concrete singular at all, this radical difference between the world and God is needed.

Without pondering the meaning of nihil, one could claim that what originary experience considers a gift is simple necessity, and that the cosmos does in fact enclose the divine within its own horizon. Since Hegel’s attempt to integrate within the absolute spirit the difference between God and the world established by the creative nihil and Heidegger’s claim regarding the equi-primordial nature of truth and nothingness, we are inclined to think that we enjoy a panoptic vision of nothingness. Nothingness tends to be perceived as a concept synonymous with biological death. As a verb, “nothingness” is an exercise in contradiction. Nothingness is thus pictured as an “absent being” or an “enabling void” waiting to be filled by being’s presence. Nihil, however, is not a crypto-being that human reason can handle. Just as being is not a mere concept that the human mind can encompass, so nihil is not the dialectical partner of being. Nothingness is not a primordial poverty (penia) longing to be enriched by fullness (poros). It is not Hegel’s power of the negative, or even the negation of the negation through which the syllogistic logic of absolute spirit moves from “Logic” to “Spirit” through “Nature.” Both structures presuppose being. As C. O’Regan describes it in his account of why Hegel’s system ultimately rejects a creation ex nihilo, the nihil of creation is an oukontic, absolute one.34 If it is no-thing, then the coming of beings from God cannot be a Plotinian emanation or a production that benefits from some pre-existent material. Creation is not another kind of movement or the prototype of becoming—although it makes both of them possible. In this regard, creation is not another exemplum of human efficient causality. If it were simply another human making, the radical difference required to account for the positive existence of concrete singulars would still be lacking. Creation ex nihilo is the one act in which God communicates his esse ad extra to what he is not and what was not there before the original donation. It is, in other terms, the positing of an authentic multiplicity of singular beings that remain other from the source while not weakening or transforming that source.35

Creation’s radical nihil alone accounts for the being of concrete singulars without their confusion with the divine source or their reduction to pieces broken away from it. That beings are “from nothingness” entails that they are given to themselves, hence, that they are irreducible to the origin. The difference that creation introduces between the original giver and the concrete singular, since it indicates that the concrete singular being does not have consistency in itself, also requires the presence of the source in the singular-gift. The giver is present in the gift without absorbing it into himself.36 How are we to think then of this presence of the divine giver in the gift? Besides the similarity between the giver and the gift, it indicates that the concrete singular is relation with the source. Aquinas clarified that if creation is neither a change nor a movement, because both change and movement presuppose the existence of something (even if this something is primal matter), then creation indicates relation with the source.37 The positing of this relation is coincident with the inception and endurance of the concrete singular’s existence. Yet since the giver is present in the gift, the “relation” the original giver intends toward the gift/receiver is one of indwelling. Obviously, this “indwelling” varies according to the specific nature of each concrete singular. Nevertheless, it is analogically the case for each that having been given to itself entails being itself in another. This indwelling preserves the radical difference between God and concrete singulars because it affirms the radical oukontic negation. To claim the contrary would concede the relation between the divine giver and the gift to be one of pantheism. Yet if pantheism were the correct view of the relationship between God and the world, what sense could we make of our own bodies? Indwelling perpetuates this negation—negation is also a verb, “noughting,” as W. Desmond indicates—because it makes the original giving as a return to the source as other possible.38

3. Giving Otherness

The foregoing reflection on the radical nature of the gift in terms of creation ex nihilo considers creation to be a unique type of giving that speaks of a primordial act of love on the part of the original giver. While creation ex nihilo will enter again into the discussion later, at this point a few words on the relation between gift and love are in order. As we saw with Derrida, the gratuitousness of the gift and the unity between the giver, the gift, and the receiver depend on what we mean by love and gift. Clearly it is beyond our purpose here to summarize the intricate debate on the nature of love. In light of the richness of the tradition we will limit ourselves to a suggestion of how to understand this term.39

To characterize creation as a giving could give rise to an understanding of the nature of God, the original giver, in terms of the transcendental bonum, the Good. Much of Greek thought, particularly in Plato and the neoplatonic tradition, already pondered the nature of the ultimate, the One, in terms of goodness. From this Good, they said, proceeds all that is. Every concrete singular receives from the eternal goodness form, being, light, and goodness, and some receive life. The ancient philosophers knew full well that the more perfect a being is, the more it communicates; bonum diffusivum est sui. This communication meant that the cosmos moved towards the One by means of love.40 Yet this communication is not seen as the One’s love for the singular; it happens without the free and conscious decision of the Good itself.41 Furthermore, what comes forth from the Good, though participating in its fullness, is always less than the Good. The love that moves the cosmos and the stars knows only an upward movement. It is the cosmos that loves the Good, not vice versa. This is why for Plotinus, for example, the name of “good,” rather than indicating what the One is, has to do with its relation with the other hypostases.42

Through Christian revelation, God presents himself as a mystery of love. God not only gives creation to itself; he loves it and does so to the utmost. This understanding of God as absolute love fulfills the revelation of God as being (Exod 14:4; John 8:28) and transforms the Greek understanding of the Good. There is of course a sense in which the Good and love are synonymous. Love too, as revealed by Jesus Christ (1 John 4:8 and 16), regards the very essence of God. However, they do not coincide fully. Let us note three aspects of what love unfolds of the nature of God.

First, the identification of love with the divine esse permits a vision of love as witnessing to the transcendentality of the transcendentals, rather than as a simple synonym for goodness. Love grants a dynamic unity and intensification to the coextensiveness of being, oneness, truth, and beauty. In his being absolute love, God is one, true, good, beautiful, and living. This transcendental absoluteness can be seen in the self-revelation of himself to himself as the eternal communication of the totality of oneness, unity, good, truth, beauty, and life to the other.43

The second aspect that love unfolds is the personality of the Godhead. God is not only the fullness of being and goodness in the objective sense. He is superabundant being, goodness, wisdom, and life because he is also a personal being—that is, a being who exists as an infinite relation of love in which one has always already given himself over to the other completely. Due to the inseparability of love and logos in God, divine revelation does not lead to an understanding of the concept of “person” as marked by a random, arbitrary will, but rather as a mystery of dialogue and constitutive relation with another. Personhood, in light of revelation, is recognized as the perfection of being, first in God and analogically in the human being. God’s self-communicating goodness always exists as a communion of persons. The eternal communication of his own goodness (Deus Trinitas) is, analogically speaking, a loving, ever-greater, eternal encounter of the divine persons.

Third, the relation between love and person also means that God’s communication of his own being is accompanied by fruition. God not only communicates his being; he takes delight in doing so and, moreover, desires that the other participate in both the giving and the delight of loving and being loved by the other. There is no love without the delight of being loved and sharing this delight with the other. The love that is at the origin of creation ex nihilo is not an ornamental cloak over an exercise of power. When we say that God loves the world into existence we mean that he communicates his own goodness and being to what he is not.

While love unveils these three dimensions of the nature of the Good and so gives rise to a reading of the summum bonum as summa caritas, love is also a gift given (in God and from God). There is a circularity between love and gift that prevents us from reading love simply as a faculty of the will, and gift as an object of that love. Love is gift, and gift, in its highest expression, is love. Love is not just one gift given among others. Love is what makes gifts be gifts and not mere exchanges of property. It is love that ensures the purity of the giver’s and the receiver’s intentions. Alexander of Hales, describing the properties of the Holy Spirit, writes that love is what is given in whatever is given.44 Love, says Aquinas, “has the nature of the first gift, and through it all gratuitous gifts are given.”45 What love gives is itself, that is, it gives being with all the incomprehensible ever-greater unity of its transcendentals. It gives it so that the other can be. Creation ex nihilo is God’s absolute affirmation that generates another, one that is identical to the origin (the Son), and another that is what he is not.46 This communication is an expression of his love for the world, and it is given so that the concrete singular may experience from within, taste, and take delight in his love.47

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Before proceeding further, there is a mysterious, difficult implication to consider, even if only briefly. If agape and eros are two dimensions of love, and both are perfections, there is a sense in which, as Benedict XVI suggests, eros, and not only agape, is proper to divine love.55 Most of the Christian tradition, as, for example, in the seminal work of Origen, perceives the relation of eros and agape in terms of an analogical and katalogical movement.56 As we mentioned, eros represents the movement of the soul upwards, seeking union with the primordial giver. Agape represents the downward movement from God to man, which purifies and preserves man’s erotic search for beauty and transforms it into agape. Dionysius the Aereopagite, however, offers a different account. Instead of the vertical axis, Dionysius speaks of God’s love (eros) in terms of ecstasy, yearning. Love can go outside itself and move, so to speak, in any direction: upwards, downwards, or towards another at the same level. God is enticed away to become one with his creatures.57 Dionysius, who, like Origen, was free of the contemporary dualistic reading of eros and agape, indicates that love is what moves one towards the other. The tripersonal God comes out of himself (ek-stasis), without abandoning himself, in order to dwell in the creature and so bring the communication of divine life to its perfection in that creature.

It is of course the case that, as Dionysius shows, eros has no ambiguity in God: in him there is no separation between love and logos, nor does the existence of a yearning dimension to God’s love mean that the world dictates his response. Yet, part of the unfathomable mystery of creation is that God creates (agape) because he wishes (eros) a relation with the world. Overemphasizing divine freedom as having the possibility of not creating (agape without eros), while it intends to preserve God’s transcendence, fails to do justice to his immanence and his original creative intention: incarnation and recapitulation in Christ. To emphasize the erotic dimension of love over and against the agapic is to transform God into an empty, monadic, undetermined absolute, unable to create another different from itself because it stands in need of the finite to fulfill itself. Only the complete form of the dual unity of eros and agape, koinonia, allows us to see ex nihilo as the expression of God’s loving freedom in the communication of esse.

The gift of creation, therefore, is the giving of the creature to itself without the possibility of claiming it back (agape).58 The creature has its own integrity and time, for time begins with the creature. Giving the creature to itself entails furthermore that both the creature’s openness to the transcendent source and search for unity with it echo the source’s erotic love that seeks to unite itself with the gift without annihilating it (agape).59 The radical contingency of singular beings disclosed by creation ex nihilo is not subject to irrational randomness (a-logos), because, as Aquinas says, the gift of creation reflects God’s being.60 The dual unity of eros and agape in the one God prevents us from interpreting exemplar causality and the reflection on gift in terms of onto-theology and from elucidating the nature of God, as Ockham did, in terms of absolute, illogical will.61 In the present context, therefore, the opposite of “randomness” is “gift” and not logical necessity or the ascription of a self-explanatory nature to singular beings. The “necessity” of the form of singular beings is, in this view, the expression of the ontology of gift, the formal inverse of the gratuity of the gift. The reflection on the radical difference (ex nihilo) leads us now to consider the gratuity of a singular being’s existence and its ontological structure.

4. The Gift of Existence

Created ex nihilo, concrete singular beings are gifts because they are brought into existence in one act of absolute divine liberality. Since they are created from nothingness, their gift-ness marks their ontological structure. Ontologically speaking, the affirmation that the concrete singular is gift would not be complete if the finite being were not given to itself, that is, if it did not participate in its own being given. Gift relates to the concrete singular’s actus primus qui est forma, as Aquinas would say. If gift did not reach the level of the first act, we would equate being’s gift-ness to accidental existence. This, however, fails to account for the positivity of finite beings, and, in our view, for the unity proper to each one. This does make a rather tantalizing option for the modern mind, interested as it is primarily in “essence.” Being’s actual existence, not forming part of the definition of any being, tends to be perceived as indifferent to both our knowledge of it and to the being of the singular. Accordingly, “existence” would be relevant for religious reflections on the relationship between God and the human person, for obsolete metaphysics of creation, or for ethical reflections that seek a social transformation of an economy of self-interest into one capable of integrating principles of solidarity or subsidiarity. Reacting to this rationalistic approach, though retaining the abstraction from originary experience that gave rise to it, philosophers like Kierkegaard and Sartre privileged existence over essence. In this view, freedom includes the capacity to generate its own nature, and, as we saw, time is reduced to history.

Separating essence from existence results in a poor understanding of both. When considered apart from its relation to existence, essence tends to be perceived as a concept closed in on itself—and so with no transcendent relation to the logos it images—whose meaning can be encompassed by human reason. This abstract essence views existence as an unnecessary though desirable supplement. Severed from essence, existence is wrongly ascribed the capacity to produce meaning. Yet since it is the concrete singular that is created, both existence and essence are given, and this givenness can be perceived in each as well as in their asymmetrical relation. Esse and essentia are the two distinct, inseparable principles of a concrete singular being and cannot be rightly construed in abstraction from it. Though we will revisit the category of substance at a later point, our current task is to ponder the meaning of esse as gift. To enter into the mysterious perfection of all perfections, esse, we will turn to Aquinas’s conception of esse and its deepening of the Aristotelian account of form. We will see first Aristotle’s dealing with esse and then Thomas’s rereading of it in light of creation ex nihilo.

For Aristotle, being (to on), simply speaking, is an equivocal pros hen whose primary instance is form (morphe, eidos, or idea).62 What it means for something to be itself can be expressed as accidental being, as truth, as the categories, and as being-potential and being-at-work (energeia).63 It is the same being that can be expressed in this fourfold manner. As is known, the sense that accounts for the others is ousia (Entity).64 Ousia, according to Aristotle, is either matter, form, or the composite of matter and form. Form is the most proper instance of Entity, and its most fundamental meaning is reducible to act (energeia, entelecheia), a principle that can be pointed at but not defined in terms of anything more comprehensive.65

To grasp the ontological depth of gift, it suffices for our purposes to indicate how the circularity of form and act clarifies the issue of the concrete singular’s existence. For Aristotle, form accounts for both the cause of a singular being (it is thus: to ti en einai—what-was-being) and for its intelligibility (logos).66 Form is that principle, internal to a thing, thanks to which a concrete singular is a whole and not merely a heap of characteristics. For Aristotle, unlike Plato, form is in a sense identical with the particular being and different from it, but only in thought.67 Form is separate in notion (not abstracted) and exists as separate from matter only in human thinking. This is why, although form is the principle of the definition, it is not a universal. For Aristotle, form is thus the principle that accounts both for this singular being and for its universal meaning. It is a this (tode ti) without being singular. Form is a this that causes a particular being to be itself. To know the form therefore is to know both, for example, “this horse” and “horse.” For Aristotle, as Owens clarifies, form is “prior to and act of both composite Entity and logical universal.”68

Form is an active principle and not an archetype that is received by finite beings. It is act, that is, being-at-work-staying-itself (entelecheia).69 The form of a horse does not simply account for its horse-ness; it is also what is responsible for its neighing, galloping, grazing, breeding, etc. This “being at work” (energeia) therefore has no end outside of itself. The purpose of act, in other words, is the enjoyment of being. Like seeing and contemplating, entelecheia rests in itself. This is primordially the case for the unmoved mover, which is self-thinking thought.70 Of course, the actuality (energeia) of concrete singular beings is always imperfect. A single instance (a horse) never embodies its entire pattern (horse-ness). This is why every sub-lunar being, for Aristotle, is constituted by these two principles: actuality and potency—which is the possibility for actuality to be present. The “material” can become a single being if it receives the form from an already actual being. Once it receives the form, potency, while limiting the act of one being, is also the ability, the capacity, to live up to the form. Inasmuch as a singular being continues being what it is, both act and potency, form and matter, remain present in the actual existing being. Potency thus indicates both the limiting of a form and the capacity to live up to it, without being able to identify itself fully with the form.71

The unmoved mover is ultimately what is responsible in Aristotle’s understanding of form, whose primary instance is act. Self-thinking thought is the guarantor that there has always been and will always be form and order in the cosmos. Thus, to adopt this concept of form entails conceding the eternity of the world. Every being is necessary: the unmoved mover and the singular beings that imitate the unmoved mover precisely by having form and by being ordered.72 This view of form and its relation with act prevents Aristotle from having to give an account of the existence of single beings. Aristotle’s reflection is not open to the consideration of the first level of givenness of the concrete singular, that is, its existence as gift. In Aristotle’s metaphysical view of the cosmos, there is no real distinction between esse and essence. Let us see why.

As his treatment of accidental beings shows, existence is not reducible to form and so it does not yield scientific knowledge, which is the goal of the collection of books grouped under the name Metaphysics.73 Existence has no place in contemplation, and therefore there is no need to account for it. It is true that some passages of the Metaphysics indicate the difference between what something is and its existence.74 Nevertheless, when looked at in the presupposed, broader context of the Posterior Analytics, the inquiry regarding the facticity of a being (“if-it-is”) does not demonstrate the “existence” of a particular essence.75 “To ask whether there is an eclipse or not,” Aristotle writes, “is . . . the same as asking whether there is an account (logos) for it, i.e., the moon is eclipsed; and if this condition actually exists, we assert that it also actually exists.”76 As Owens indicates, Aristotle deals with the universal and necessary connections between the elements that form part of the definition and not with the existence of a thing. If the connection is accidental, then we are to conclude that there is no fact (e.g., a centaur). In the case of an evident indemonstrable, one can ask what it is. If it is a fact but it is not evident or indemonstrable (as the case of the lunar eclipse observed from the earth rather than the moon), one can inquire further what it is. For this reason, Owens concludes that for Aristotle “the ‘if-it-is,’ is a quasi-generic knowledge of the thing sufficient to establish it as a Being. The ‘what-it-is’ is the specific knowledge obtained through the addition of the proper difference.”77 Thus, there is no need to account for existence, nor is this “lack” a deficiency. Perfection is contained within the limits of the singular, not the infinite. Aristotle does not seem to wonder before the miracle of being given; he rather admires the intrinsic, ever-lively necessity of the order of the world.

Aquinas, benefitting from the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, revisits the Aristotelian principles and argues that the fundamental difference traversing every singular being is not so much between form and matter, or act and potency, but between what they are and their esse.78 The difference between esse and the Entity of any singular being can help us to explore the first level of givenness: the meaning of the existing of beings as gift. Numerous authors have clarified that Aquinas does propose a real distinction between esse and essence in singular beings.79 Benefitting from their work, it suffices to recall two arguments that illustrate the gift-ness of the “to be” of every singular being. The first clarifies that everything that “is in the genus of the substance is composite with real composition.”80 Whatever is a substance has an existence of its own. Yet there are many different members that belong to the same genus. The difference, then, indicates that in each existing being, its being (esse) and the thing itself must differ. Whereas in Aristotle form is responsible for both the essence and the singularity of a being, in Aquinas the “to be” of a thing no longer depends on the form—when the being is considered as a single, self-standing creature. Leaving aside other arguments that do not necessarily presuppose the proof of the existence of God, ipsum esse subsistens, if we turn to those that do, it becomes clear why there is, according to Aquinas, a real distinction between esse and essence in concrete singular beings.81 Aquinas contends in one of the latter arguments that every being causes an effect that is proper to its essence and that the effect images the essence: fire, for example, communicates light and heat; the architect communicates the form of the house he has in himself to the heap of material that can receive this form. At the same time, they also communicate an effect that is not directly proper to their own essences since they all give this other effect: heat makes something to be hot, and the builder gives being to a house. The communication of esse can be explained only thanks to that being the immediate effect of whose essence is esse itself: God. It is only God who is the simple, self-subsisting being whose essence is his esse, whereas all the others are given to participate in esse and, thanks to this participation, can also communicate esse.82

The difference between esse and what a being is affects every created being, regardless of its being composed of matter and form or its being a spiritual being. Even in the latter, according to Aquinas, it is still possible to find the distinction between being (esse) and what is (quod est).83 Finite beings, from the lowest to the highest, participate in esse. With this distinction, Aquinas separates the two main characteristics of form proposed by Aristotle. For Aquinas, form accounts for the intelligibility of a singular being and esse for its actuality. Form is no longer the highest principle of actuality. Form has to receive esse (act) in order to be the principle of being for the substance. “Nothing has actuality (actualitatem) if not inasmuch as it is: hence existence (ipsum esse) is what actuates all things, even their forms. Therefore it is not compared to other things as the receiver is to the received; but rather as the received to the receiver.”84 For Aquinas, Aristotle’s account is accurate when form is regarded as belonging to intraworldly causes, but in itself it is not the ultimate source of esse; it rather receives esse. Form is responsible for esse at the level of substance, but it is able to give it because it has received it. Form, although it keeps the necessity of its logos, no longer entails the necessity of its own existing. Form, for Aquinas, is thus endowed with a certain potentiality that is not the potentiality of matter. To synthesize Gilson’s account, when thinking of the relationship between esse and essence in that which is (ens), form is a potency that, without being matter, receives esse, which is an act that is not a form.85

Aquinas’s profound and indispensable ontological account of the structure of the concrete singular arrives at the threshold of the perception of esse, the first act, in terms of gift. This does not mean to imply, of course, that he did not see or account for the positivity of being. Rather, the exploration of esse in terms of gift was not needed at a time such as his when being’s positivity was commonly assumed, though explained in many different ways. More deeply, perhaps, Aquinas’s dependence on Aristotelian metaphysics prevented further development of his own original metaphysical reflection. Even acknowledging the primacy of esse as gift, which creation ex nihilo discloses, Aquinas still interprets the priority of act in a too Aristotelian way. That is to say, although he does speak of a reception at the level of first act, he does not account this owing oneself to another, this being affected by another that the gift of esse reveals, as a perfection that also constitutes the nature of act.86 Let us examine this a little more closely.

5. Open Principles

Creation ex nihilo shows the creature’s absolute ontological dependence on the primordial giver. This dependence is reflected in the fact that even form receives esse. To speak of receiving esse, however, requires seeing how the priority of act, without denying its priority, includes within itself something like reception. In doing so, we do not lose sight of the miracle of being: not only does God posit a concrete singular being where before there was nothing; in this very act of communicating his esse to the singular, God enables the singular to participate in the gift of self. The creature’s participation in the gift of self does not eclipse the priority of God’s creative act. God does everything. He posits a whole, a concrete singular, and not a collection of random pieces that come together at a certain point. The wholeness of the creature is reflected in the fact that the giving of the gift coincides with the positing of the receiver, the concrete singular being. The very wholeness of the concrete singular being speaks of its coming to be from another all at once. The singular participates in its being given precisely within its prior coming from God (esse ab) and its depending completely on him. At the same time, because God truly gives, the communication of his esse is coincident with the singular’s participation in its being given and in giving, the first form of which is reception of the gift. Creation allows a sharing in the creator’s act of sharing, yet does so without this sharing making the created esse identical with the divine esse.

What does this participation in giving mean at the level of the first act? We know that giving requires the receiver’s reception of the gift in order for the gift to be complete. To participate in giving, before it is “doing” something for others or for oneself, is to receive the gift of oneself. We also know that the giver always runs a risk in giving: the receiver could reject the original gift. Whereas at the level of the second act this rejection could take the form of, for example, possessiveness, or hatred toward the giver, at the level of the first act, where the receiver is posited by the gift, the possibility of not receiving and hence of not reciprocating the gift still exists. What could it mean for a receiver (first act) to reject the gift? At this level, it is possible for not-being to penetrate the deepest structure of the concrete singular. What tradition calls ontological evil, the imperfection of the creature, can illuminate the mystery of the singular’s involvement in the reception of its own gift of being at the level of the first act. Since there is no concrete singular before the communication of being, no whole before it is totally given to itself, the acceptance of the gift takes place with the very reception of it. Creation ex nihilo does not allow us here to think of a before and an after. There is no such thing as a created esse that, so to speak, “has the time” to think of what to do with itself. At the same time we cannot project a human freedom at the level of the first act and imagine that this purported independent being decides to receive itself. K. L. Schmitz, a student of Gilson, concurs here with Ulrich, Balthasar, Schindler, and others, when he states that “we must understand the acceptance as expressed by its subsistent self-reference (per se) and within its primordial ordination towards the Source of the being communicated to it without which there would be no self (autos), so that its original reception is communicated to it in its very institution.”87 To speak spatially where there is no body, at the level of the first act, inasmuch as it is allowed to participate in its own gift-ness, we can acknowledge a fourfold dimensionality of esse: (1) its having been given to itself (esse ab); (2) its own self-affirmation, its being-itself (esse per se); (3) its orientation to the source (esse ad); and (4) its being received not just by one concrete singular but by a community of esse with which every concrete singular is in relation. Act is therefore a complete principle that, as Schmitz suggests, is also open, though not in the Derridean sense.88

Here an aspect of the foregoing anthropological analysis of gift serves to dissipate a recurring objection. Gift indicates both a reception and an action. In giving, we mentioned, one receives, and in receiving one gives. This non-unilateral understanding of gift forestalls identifying giving with action and receiving with passion. Receiving is not passivity; it is a form of giving. In this regard, Schmitz also says that “there is more than passivity in reception: there is also self-possession and orientation towards the good. Esse as the supposit of the secondary activity already possesses the integral mode of potency and act in the form of an integral ordination towards (esse-ad).”89 If the communication of being is an expression of love, as we saw in the previous section, and if this communication is desired, then this perfection also regards the reception of the gift. If, contrary to the Greeks, desired giving is a perfection of love (agape), then receiving is no less a perfection of love. Reception understood in terms of passivity and imperfection is contrary to the revealed data that the one who gives, who is pure act, is a Father begetting the Son and, with and through the Son, spirating the Holy Spirit. Act is received act, first and foremost, as we shall see later, in the triune God, and, analogically speaking, by participation also in the concrete singular.

It is important to realize further that the first act as a received act does not mean either that everything is already decided at the ontological level, reducing human freedom to the simple iteration of this original reception or, more starkly, that action is irrelevant. Rather, the newness that takes place in human action is genuine because the wholeness of the concrete singular being represents an inexhaustible newness in its very being. The ontological newness is its being created from nothingness; yet its irreducibility to the source (its being given to itself) is not fully explained by reference to a divine generous act. For the concrete singular to be itself irreducible (per se), it also needs to participate in the giving. Otherwise, how could we defend the assertion that the concrete singular is not a tool required by the divine for some inscrutable purpose? Furthermore, if the concrete singular were not “original,” that is to say, if it were not somehow at its proper level a giver in receiving the gift of its own esse, could there actually be a human action in which God is recognized as all in all?

To indicate more fully what we mean by “received act,” let us unfold further, with the help of Aquinas, what esse means and what kind of unity it maintains with the essence of the singular.90 Esse, Aquinas explains, is neither a genus nor a difference; it is not part of the essence but is really distinct from it. If esse is not an essence, one could claim that esse would have to be an accident of the essence. For Aquinas, however, esse is neither an ens, a subject of being, nor an accident, though it can be described as an accident.91 Esse is participated in by the singular being as something that is not included in the essence of the participant. For lack of a better word, Aquinas refers to esse with the term aliud, but it does not have a quidditative content and hence esse cannot be defined. It could seem that esse, not being a some-thing, is no-thing. Did not Kant’s critique of the ontological argument indicate that existence is indifferent to both the reality of a concept and our understanding of it? Although there is a sense in which it could be stated that esse is not (since it does not subsist in itself), for Aquinas esse is not a mere ens rationis. It has, in a certain respect, priority over essence. Essence, in fact, relates to esse as potency to act.92 “Esse,” Aquinas states in wonder, “is the most perfect, the actuality of every act and the perfection of all perfections.”93 Only if this depth of esse is acknowledged does it become possible to indicate in what sense it does not exist.

As the actuality of every act, esse is common to all finite beings, although it cannot be predicated univocally since “received acts are diverse.”94 This entails two crucial points: first, as “the first of created things” and being present in all existing beings, esse has a quasi-unity of its own.95 Whatever is created is and, as we saw earlier, in causing their proper effects, finite beings also give esse. If esse did not have a quasi-unity, it would lose its priority and become an accident of essence. Furthermore, it would be difficult to say why, contrary to what we learn from originary experience, essence is not the cause of its being if it were true that esse proceeded from it. Second, and here we see the priority of essence over esse, this quasi-unity does not exist independently, floating, so to speak, between God and beings, as the broken mast of a ship floats free on the surface of the ocean. If it were a unity in its own right, esse would be a subject of being and not being itself. And since, in itself, esse is not limited nor can limit itself, if it were a proper unity, esse commune would be nothing but ipsum esse subsistens.96 The gift of being is a real, albeit limited, participation in the divine esse.

Aquinas explains that finite beings participate in the divine ipsum esse subsistens but not by means of formal causality. God is not the esse whereby each singular being exists.97 Whereas God’s esse is being in such a way that nothing can be added, esse commune for Aquinas is something to which nothing is added but to which something could be added.98 The nihil of creation, as we saw, prevents us both from interpreting God’s creative donation in pantheistic terms and from adopting an epistemology that would grant direct contemplation of the divine essence. God is only known through the sign (presence-gift). Esse commune therefore cannot be confused with the divine esse. Rather, esse commune is the divine being as participated in by creatures—and so distinct from them—by means of exemplar causality.99 Within a maior dissimilitudo, finite beings resemble God’s being. For Aquinas, concrete singular being images God’s being in its being (esse, unum), essence (logos), and dynamic order (amor) towards God the source.100 With a unique insight, Aquinas clarifies the similarity and difference between God’s esse and created esse in these terms: whereas God is ipsum esse subsistens, esse commune signifies “something complete and simple but not subsistent.”101 Esse, therefore, can only be predicated analogically from God and singular beings.102

The foregoing reflection on the asymmetrical reciprocity of esse and essence in Aquinas helps us to think afresh the unity proper to the concrete singular in terms of gift and to deepen the meaning of the internality of receptivity in act.103 The union of esse and essence is a mystery of gift precisely because they are given to each other and subsist in the reciprocal gift to each other. In the creative act, God co-creates esse and essence in giving one to the other so that the singular being may be.104 While remaining distinct from and ordered to each other, they are equally responsible for the being of the singular. As Aquinas says, since it does not limit itself, esse commune exists only as limited by essences. To “limit,” however, does not mean that essence has the capacity to possess the perfection of esse in its fullness. As we mentioned, the fact that esse remains a quasi-unity does not mean that essence comes from it or that esse is the ultimate subject of being. At the same time, just as esse does not exist without essence, so essence cannot be itself without esse. Therefore, neither is separated from the other or comes from the other: esse is not a proper accident of essence, nor is essence produced by esse. Thus, they do not enjoy independent existences, and they come together to form a specific finite being.105 Since esse is given to essence as act to potency, the compositum is not a union per accidens (like a horse and its rider) but a substantial one. They are both principles of the one being. Wippel accurately puts it as follows: while esse “actualizes . . . essence . . . , simultaneously the essence principle receives and limits the act of being. . . . Each enjoys its appropriate priority in the order of nature . . . with respect to its particular ontological function within a given entity.”106 The reciprocity of esse and essence does not eliminate the proper priorities of each principle. The difference and the order remain and are what make an inexhaustible whole.

If with Aristotle we acknowledge that the “to be” of a singular being involves a limited participation in act (being-at-work-staying-itself) and, with Aquinas, that form receives esse while at the same time essence limits esse, then the “to be” of every being is this ongoing communication of esse that makes an essence be while, at the same time, esse is received by the essence that esse causes to be. The unity of essence and esse that constitutes every created being is a gift given to the concrete singular that remains in being inasmuch as it ontologically participates in its own being given—this is also why the “singular” gift is perceived in its wholeness only when its relation with God is affirmed. Here we can return to the understanding of act as a complete and open principle. Esse and essence, Schmitz clarifies, are “radically open to each other in the constitution of a single entity. They do not achieve this unity by themselves. If God’s creative act is left out of the picture, it is impossible to explain how a non-existent and merely possible essence can determine the creature’s act of existence.” Each principle is incomplete in itself. It needs the other to be in one concrete singular. Thus, Schmitz concludes, “Each principle is inherently implicated in the other through the causal activity of the First Cause, and by a subordination of the one (potency) to the other (act) rather than by a reciprocity of two complete principles.”107

Interpreting the singular’s unity in terms of gift as the relation between esse and essence requires acknowledging a certain dependency of act on potency. Is it not the case that this relative “dependency” of act on potency, or, in the earlier expression, the “received act,” eliminates the principle of act? Do the mutual dependence of esse and essentia and their asymmetrical reciprocity—that esse is limited by essence, and so receives it in itself, and that essence is actualized by esse while limiting it—jeopardize act altogether? Hegel, in fact, contended that what we here consider an asymmetrical reciprocity between esse and essence, rather than expressing the gift-ness of the concrete singular being, is merely an expression of the law of contradiction. Contradiction, according to Hegel, is abhorred by common thinking. It thus tends to disguise contradiction under “the process of relating and comparing.”108 Yet Hegel claims that everything is “inherently contradictory.” Not by chance, contradiction plays a pivotal role in Hegel’s system: if in the first part of his Science of Logic, the logic of being, contradiction is presented as infinity, in the second, the logic of essence, it is contradiction that illumines the livingness of anything, and hence of the spirit as such.109 The universal, “abstract self-identity is not as yet a livingness” because life is the “power to hold and endure the contradiction within it.”110 Without contradiction there is no movement, only dead identity. “Only when the manifold terms have been driven to the point of contradiction do they become active and lively towards one another, receiving in contradiction the negativity which is the indwelling pulsation of self-movement and spontaneous activity.”111 To the terms Hegel uses (e.g., infinite-finite, father-son) we could add act-potency, esse-essence. The gift-ness of the concrete singular and its sheer dynamic, in his view, would not be anything but the denial of one by the other. Contradiction, Hegel contends, does not indicate imperfection or a defect to be eliminated. On the contrary, it is that which permits absolute activity. While it is undoubtedly fundamental that, as Hegel indicates, in a certain sense a relation always goes both ways—and hence there has to be what we call asymmetrical reciprocity—what is contrary to our view is that the unity’s liveliness of the singular is owed not to the singular’s nature as gift but to the power of the negative. Hegel claims that every thing and notion “is essentially a unity of distinguished and distinguishable moments, which, by virtue of the determinate, essential difference, pass over into contradictory moments.”112 The resolution draws the negated moments into a new sphere in such a way that the spirit reaches its fullness. On this path to its own completeness, one discovers that “the truth is that the absolute is, because the finite is the inherently self-contradictory opposition, because it is not.”113

Hegel indeed ponders deeply the “noughting” that creation ex nihilo indicates. Nevertheless, by making negativity the pulsating center of the movement of the absolute spirit, as the theological a priori of his philosophy requires, he seems to fall into the unilateral thought he so strenuously criticizes. In Hegel, the movement of the absolute spirit is simply erotic and not agapic. That is to say, absolute spirit, beginning with the emptiness that contains the promise of a fulfillment, posits from itself the difference that is then absorbed by the unity of the absolute Idea. From the beginning, all the way to the Cross, and back to the absolute spirit by means of the spirit within the absolute spirit, absolute spirit does not know an agapic love, that is, the affirmation of the other’s irreducibility. Contrary to Hegel, we can say that the gift of the singular being, its very identity, is perceived in its wholeness when the difference that traverses every being—and which allows us to say that, before God, creatures are indeed nothing—is the expression of a fullness that does not need another to be itself. For Hegel, instead, difference is the progressive and necessary fulfillment of an empty beginning. The fullness of the creative origin, as we see it, since it is the union of eros and agape, can and does decide against existing for itself alone. Difference—in the singular beings and between them and God—should thus be thought of as the gift’s availability to receive and to give. This availability is a permanent dimension of act.114

If our understanding of gift is correct, we can note with F. Ulrich that the difference the gift of being establishes between God and the world does not reside so much in the difference between divine “esse” and esse commune, for the latter also remains simple and complete, but rather, as Aquinas says, in the “non-subsistent” character of esse commune. What this adjective reveals of the dual unity of the created singular (esse-essence) is precisely its constitutive relation with the primordial giver. Non-subsistency points to the mysterious, ineffable wonder of being given to be, of depending on and belonging to the source. The positive understanding of the difference between God and the cosmos, which does not eliminate the difference or read it as contradiction, depends on the underlying idea one has of God, man, and the relationship between them. If absolute act is conceived according to the ideal that is perfect, self-contained, self-thinking thought, potency will always remain a deficiency, and the human being will always be trapped in the attempt to imitate an imaginary, self-subsistent God. If, instead, the one God is, as we saw, the richer unity (koinonia) of eros and agape, capable of creating another who is different from itself, then potency, rather than “something” left behind once esse is given and potency actualized, becomes the singular’s ongoing availability to be confirmed in being.

6. The Singular’s Perseity

The previous sections attempted to show how the category of gift can explain the dual unity of esse and essence in the concrete singular, while it also reveals the asymmetrical reciprocity between the two poles, thereby offering an account of both the contingency and the necessity proper to each created being. We need now to ponder how the perseity (esse per se, ousia) of the concrete singular can be considered in terms of gift. This reflection on substance and its relationship to the other categories that intrinsically inhere in it (traditionally called quantity, quality, relation) intends to show that the singular is both completely given to itself (esse ab) and at the same time, receiving itself, is dynamically oriented to (esse ad) the paternal origin.

Bearing in mind the ontological distinction required by creation ex nihilo, Aquinas rereads Aristotle’s characterization of substance, “to be by nature self-subsistent (kath’auto pephukos),” as “that to whose quiddity it belongs not to exist in another.”115 With this distinction, Aquinas is not rejecting the conception of substance as “to be in itself.” He is rather indicating that a created singular stands in itself (per se, kath’auto) not so much because it is the source of its own existence—this would be the case if esse were an accident of essence—but because it is given to it to be. Thus, for Aquinas, the definition of substance must include the essence (quiddity) and not only esse as in Aristotle (to be by nature self-subsistent).