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
