Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

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Originary experience regards man’s capacity to grasp the meaning of something, its “objective link to everything else,” and the awareness of this link.18 Giussani’s absolutely innovative concept of religious, elementary experience—or originary experience as we have translated it here—allows us to ponder the enigma of the human person as given to himself in order to acknowledge the totality of the gift of being.19 For Giussani, originary experience is neither one way of knowing among others, nor a practical implementation of a theoretical ideology, nor a neutral instrument with which to gather information whose value and meaning are then assessed through heuristic, extrinsic criteria. Rather, “experience is reality’s emerging into man’s awareness; it is the becoming transparent of reality to man’s gaze.”20 The fact that reality “emerges” into man’s awareness shows that what is at stake in originary experience is the unity of the numerous factors already indicated: the reality that precedes the traveler and gives itself to be known, the traveler who seeks to discover the meaning of things and of himself, the distinction without separation of the two as they are held together by their link, their union with the ultimate mystery. What becomes transparent to man’s gaze is the character of the concrete singular as a sign, that is, as a reality given to itself, which, carrying the memory of the giver, brings the beholder to their common origin.

Giussani offers this precious synthetic definition: “elementary [or originary] experience tends to indicate totally the original impetus with which the human being reaches out to reality, seeking to become one with it. He does this by fulfilling a project that dictates to reality itself the ideal image that stimulates it from within.”21 Originary experience speaks therefore of our dynamic encounter with reality in all its complexity: on the one hand reality emerges before man and dictates “an ideal image” that the concrete singular carries within itself, that is, its own logos and its unique relation with God and the world. The “ideal image,” in this regard, is an echo of “the Word of Another.”22 Man’s original encounter with truth is always already offered to him by the objective and historical self-presentation of being, whose full disclosure requires the entire person. This is why, on the other hand, and simultaneous with the self-presentation of the concrete singular, the human being “reaches out” with an “original impetus” and “seeks to become one with reality.”

      The “impetus,” which is always a response to the emergence of reality, brings something new into existence. It does so by fulfilling a project that was first elicited by the ideal image hidden within the reality itself. This ideal image is given back to the reality itself now unfolded anew in a unity that includes both the reality and the person in their relation with their common giving origin. Fulfilling the project entails bringing about something new because the becoming transparent of the concrete singular in man’s consciousness is the fulfillment of the former in the latter and a more intense radiance of the latter with the light of the singular being. That the human person “seeks to become one” with what gives itself to be known reveals that the ontological unity with what gives itself to be discovered and embraced requires an ordering towards the origin of both the person and the concrete singular.

For Giussani, therefore, every original human experience is either a religious one or it is not an experience in the first place: ultimately, experience is the living affirmation of God as that “unitary meaning which nature’s objective and organic structure calls the human conscience to recognize.”23 Experience, therefore, has to do with the dynamic unity of the encounter between reality and all of man, whose telos (and fulfillment) is the affirmation of God. Let us first look at how originary experience allows us to perceive finite beings as gift and then at the involvement of the human person.

      4. The Inexorable Presence of the Sign

One can never stress enough that experience implies “an encounter with an objective fact that is independent from the experience that the person has.”24 Finite beings send man into a state of ongoing wonder, presenting themselves attractively (beauty), carrying their own logos (truth), and introducing him to the perception of and response to the good. Finite beings therefore are not sheer data, material that is infinitely open to manipulation by the subject. “Being,” Giussani writes, is “not some abstract entity”; it is “a presence that I do not myself make, that I find. A presence that imposes itself on me.”25 Being is given to the person; it is a gift. Thus for Giussani, in some similarity with Balthasar, originary experience represents the perception of the concrete analogy of being through its transcendental determinations and not through an abstract reflection on being.

      In an attempt to overcome the positivistic understanding of finite being (and reality as a whole) mentioned earlier, Giussani does not speak of the concrete singular in terms of an object lying before a knowing subject, but rather of “presence.” With this term, he wishes to illustrate the interiority of finite beings and their relation with the knowing person (primarily man, but ultimately God). Let us look at what this term, “presence,” entails.

      “Presence” indicates, first of all, that something is present to someone. That is, as “present,” it is another, irreducible to the one before whom it presents itself. What is present comes from some other who is distinct from both what is present and the beholder. For being to be “present” means further that it addresses the one to whom it comes. The coming into being of concrete singulars aims at man’s welcoming of the irreducible, inexhaustible alterity of the singular gift. Taking traditional metaphysics as a starting point would have meant stopping at the acknowledgment of the creatureliness of a finite being. We would miss the fact that concrete singulars, in being themselves, are also present to someone, that is, they are themselves inasmuch as they address someone. This reference to another, which is proper to being-gift, grounds the subsequent ethical reflection.

      Another aspect of “presence” has to do with belonging. To be present to someone is to be given to someone, and in a certain sense to belong to that person. Finite being, we could say, operates the claim of the beautiful on the one who is called. The otherness of the concrete singular represents a gift because the claim of its beauty is to let its own light illumine and shine in the beholder so that this one can come to see and desire the source. To belong to another does not have a univocal meaning and depends on a free giving to the beholder. Yet, even at its most basic level, to speak of belonging indicates that gift, being as presence, is not a self-enclosed reality; it is always already with other beings. It contains the memory of the origin, and it exists within a communion of beings.

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