of gift, which is open to the transcending Eternal that constitutes it. This can account for the union as well as the distinction between time and eternity and so lead to a deeper understanding of the mystery of donation. “That which is no longer present,” Heidegger says, “presences immediately in its absence—in the manner of what has been and still concerns us. . . . But absence also concerns us in the sense of what is not yet present in the manner of presencing in the sense of coming toward us.”88 Heidegger explains further that it is “nearhood (Nahheit) that brings past, present, and future near to one another by distancing them. For it keeps what has been open by denying its advent as presence.”89 Through Nahheit, Heidegger sees future as the withholding of presence, and past as the refusal of presence. Certainly the past and the future are not the present, though they remain within it. Contrasting Heidegger’s account, however, they do so not as a denial of the present but as part of its constitutive gift. The past remains in the present as past in the form of tradition and memory, a handing over of and to the gift. The content of this tradition is not a sterile mass of doctrine. It is rather, on the one hand, human nature with its exigent character and all of the cosmos, and on the other hand, the cultural and historical inheritance that enables the human being to understand the present and the task laid out for him. In light of the perception of gift elucidated here, rather than “withholding,” the future is a coming, as Heidegger also mentions, but more so it is a coming that ratifies the promise that constitutes the gift of the present. Hence the future is not present because it is withheld, but because it is promised. In this sense, it is God, rather than Ereignis, who accounts for time’s fourth dimension: the unified givenness of time.90
Without the promise contained in the present gift, time would lack its logos and history would collapse in competing worldviews or shrivel down to an open space at man’s disposal. Furthermore, if the positivity of the present did not include difference within itself and from God, the present would let go of the past and forestall the future possibilities. In other words, if the gift were a sheer, univocal repetition of the gift—as seems to be the case in Heidegger’s understanding of being—there would be neither past nor telos to tend towards. The originary experience of time, instead, requires an analogical concept of being as gift.91
The mystery of death could emerge here as an ultimate objection to time as the presence of the gift that, enriched by its past, awaits fulfillment. But to grant this objection would mean identifying the mystery of death with biological death—thus losing sight of what death reveals of the nature of gift as indicated above—and, more importantly, denying that the continual coming from another, as witnessed by originary experience, presupposes the creative call to be that is capable of begetting where before there was “nothing.” In our account, by contrast, the future is opened up by death in a far more radical way than if finite gift were its own origin or confined within a self-enclosed historical horizon. Since the present is a gift, the fulfillment of the promise is not a necessary, mechanical payment of something that is due. It is, instead, a gratuitous and overabundant gift that surpasses the exuberance even of the surprising origin of finite existence.
The unity and difference of the gift of being and time enables us to say that the distinction of past and future from the present also engages the freedom proper to the gift. The gift is asked to receive itself and the whole from the source—in this sense its past—and to welcome the fulfillment of the promise—its future. Originary experience calls for the recognition of a real, created, finite freedom that is itself (autonomous) because it is given to itself (indebted). The difference and unity of past, present, and future reveals man’s finitude as relation with the original giver, whose presence in the gift represents also the call to make the gift like itself but, pace Hegel, without denying the concrete singular gift.92 What follows attempts to ground the assertion that what constitutes the gift of the present as gift is the fact that it is in the present time that all of the gift is given, received, and awaited.
1. The first adjective is from Whitehead, Symbolism, 16. The second is from Gadamer, Truth and Method, 346ff.
2. See, for example, Wojtyła, Acting Person, 3–22. John Paul II’s reflections on the nature of human love are built upon this understanding of experience. To him, there are three original experiences: original solitude, original unity, and original nakedness. These are three inseparable dimensions of the person that have to do with the discovery of what is specifically human through one’s encounter with the world and the human other. For John Paul II, “original” is intended in the twofold sense of “in the beginning” and at the source of every human being’s daily experience (John Paul II, Theology of the Body, 146–78). See also the fine introduction of Anderson and Granados García, Called to Love.
3. Rather than approach the meaning of gift from a sociological (Mauss, Godelier, Weiner), phenomenological (Heidegger, Marion), ethical (Seneca), or deconstructionist (Derrida, Schrag) point of view, I would like to present the relation between being and gift through an examination of “human originary experience.” Incidentally, John Milbank’s reflection on gift begins with an examination of evil (see Milbank, Being Reconciled).
4. Jonas, “Toward a Philosophy,” 195. Jonas writes further: “In brief, a mutual feedback operates between science and technology; each requires and propels the other; and as matters now stand, they can only live together or must die together” (ibid., 195).
5. This approach is also proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar and described by him as meta-anthropology. See, among others, Balthasar, GL, 5:653; Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible. See also Bieler, “Meta-anthropology and Christology,” 129–46.
6. In this regard, the knowledge acquired through “experience” can be approximated to the classic understanding of wisdom (sapientia): the knowledge of oneself that requires acknowledging that one “does not know” and that one’s own self is comprehensible only with the relation to the divinity (Plato, Apology 23b; Plato, Alcibiades 132c–135b).
7. For further development of this, see the famous work of Jean Mouroux, L’expérience chrétienne: Introduction a une théologie (Paris: Editiones Montaignes, 1952). English translation: Christian Experience, 24. See also Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 346–50.
8. Aristotle, Metaph. 981a15–16. For Aristotle, experience does not offer knowledge of the reasons for things; it is only science that studies the universals that can grant this knowledge: “Men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why; while [those who possess scientific knowledge] know the why and the cause of the facts” (ibid., 981a28–30).
9. Ibid., 980b25–981b9.
10. ST, II–II, q. 45, a. 2, c; ST, I–II, q. 26, a. 2; ST, I–II, q. 29, a. 1. This connotation of experience as the acquisition of knowledge is also found in more recent authors such as Bernard Lonergan, for whom experience has four different senses that must be properly distinguished: biological, aesthetic, intellectual, dramatic. Besides these, he also speaks of religious experience (Lonergan, Insight, 182–91).
