Varieties of Religious Experience; Calvin, Institutes.
71. Much of feminist and liberal theology presupposes this understanding of time and history. See, for example, Firestone, Dialectic of Sex; Johnson, She Who Is.
72. Schmitz, “Human Nature,” 126. See also Oliver, Divine Motion; Oliver, “Motion,” 163–99.
73. Grant, “Time as History,” 21.
74. “We North Americans,” writes Grant, “whose ancestors crossed the ocean were, because of our religious traditions and because this continent was experienced as pure potentiality (a tabula rasa), the people most exclusively enfolded in the conception of time as progress and the exaltation of doing that went with it. We were to be the people who, after dominating two European wars, would become the chief leaders in establishing the reign of technique throughout all the planet and perhaps beyond it” (ibid., 24).
75. Heidegger, Concept of Time, 1–2.
76. Euthanasia is an affirmation of what it sets out to deny, i.e., the insurmountable difference between oneself and the giver of one’s own being. If I were the origin of myself, the principle of life would rest within me. Since I am not, the ultimate self-contradictory act of euthanasia is in reality a denial of the good of death (allowing oneself to be taken). This is also why euthanasia is a form of suicide. Suicide attempts to get rid of bodily existence because the body is the continual reminder of the difference (and similarity) between oneself and God—and since the denial of this difference is the denial of oneself, the act tragically affirms what it attempts to escape: that I am not the origin of myself.
77. Plato, Timaeus 37c5–d9. This passage was used by Plotinus to explain time. See Plotinus, Enneads 3.7.
78. Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs 1.51, 6.127–29, 12.217–18 (PG 44:780, 885–89, 1021–24).
79. Bulgakov, Lamb of God, 135.
80. A well-known exponent of this claim, which enjoys a great ascendency in theology, is Alfred North Whitehead. See his Process and Reality.
81. Heidegger, OTB, 24 and 2. For his understanding of Sprung (leap), see his Contributions to Philosophy, §117. Heidegger dedicates §§115–67 to defining the meaning of Sprung. In a very different context, Hegel wrote: “Absolute timelessness is distinct from duration; the former is eternity, from which natural time is absent. But in its Concept, time itself is eternal; for time as such—not any particular time, nor Now—is its Concept, and this, like every Concept generally, is eternal, therefore also absolute Presence” (Hegel, Encyclopedia, §258, Zusätze, 36. English translation slightly modified).
82. Aristotle already explained that time is the complex whole that is both inseparable from movement but not identified with it. See Aristotle, Physics 217b29–224a20.
83. Heidegger, OTB, 12. Emphasis added.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., 19. For the concept of Ereignis in Heidegger, see Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, GA 65. See also Heidegger, Pathmarks.
86. Heidegger, OTB, 22.
87. Ibid., 24.
88. Ibid., 13.
89. Ibid., 15. Emphasis added.
90. “The unity of time’s three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak—not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter. True time is four-dimensional. But the dimension which we call the fourth in our count is, in the nature of the matter, the first, that is, the giving that determines all” (ibid., 15).
91. It is possible now to understand why Giussani wrote that “experience is time inasmuch as it identifies itself with a present event” (Giussani, AC, 50).
92. “If God is all sufficient and lacks nothing,” asks Hegel, “why does He disclose Himself in a sheer Other of himself? The divine Idea is just this: to disclose itself, to posit this Other outside itself and to take it back again into itself, in order to be subjectivity and Spirit. . . . God is subjectivity, activity, infinite actuosity in which otherness has only a transient being, remaining implicit within the unity of the Idea, because it is itself this totality of the Idea” (Hegel, Encyclopedia, §247, Zusätze, 14–15).
II. Concrete Singularity
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
