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.
