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
