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PART III

MAN, EXPERIENCE OF GOD


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CHAPTER 5

GOD, EXPERIENCE OF MAN

Of the three parts I intended to develop, the first comprises the reality and being of man. The second, develops the subject of what divine reality is as the fundament of human reality, and the access of the human person to the divine reality. And so we have man “and” God, God “and” man. What now remains is to observe and analyze the singular and sui generis unity between God and man. Since God is found at the terminus of personal religation, In what does this “and” consist when we say God “and” man? What do we mean by God “and” man?

In order to pose the problem in a satisfactory manner, and not as some mere abstraction with a more or less ontological characteristic, let us review some of the points already covered.

In the first place, man in his religation is precisely and formally religated in his being to the power of the real, supported by which he makes his own I. In the second place, the power of the real is a power which is in real things. Religation is then a manifestative experience of the power of the real, and of the real in itself. It is an experience which is a physical test of reality, but also a manifestative and ostensive experience in some form of {308} that power of the real, and of the reality which has that power. In my religation, therefore, there is going to be a manifestation through experience of what reality is and what the power of the real is. We continually apprehend in and by reality itself what the reality is about. In the third place, the power of the real is not real unless founded upon a reality-fundament, the absolutely absolute reality with respect to which my personal reality, made with the power of the real and religated to it, is only a relatively absolute reality. The human person, by virtue of the structure of the power of the real itself to which it is religated, actually finds itself remitted to a founding reality, to a reality-fundament, i.e., to an absolutely absolute reality. In the fourth place, this power is a transcendence of God in things. God is not a thing which is beyond things themselves, or only a type of efficient cause, as natura naturans, underlying all of them. He is, from my perspective, something more elemental and prior to any theory: He is God transcendent in things; He is not transcendent to things, but transcendent in things. And among them, transcendent in the human person. And here is where our problem begins.

Since religation is a moment of personal reality, insofar as it makes its own being, and insofar as it makes its own I, it follows that the actuality of God (in one form or another which we will have to determine precisely), is in some way included in my personal and human reality, insofar as that person is religated, and therefore, inasmuch as it makes its own I. And this despite the fact that the actuality of God is the actuality of an absolutely absolute reality, and consequently, other than all personal realities.

{309} Of course, one may ask in which way. Certainly, not in a merely copulative manner. God “and” man do not exist in the same way that sun “and” the moon, “and” the earth, “and” the animals, “and” the men upon earth exist. Clearly, it is not a merely copulative “and” because it is God transcendent in things, and therefore, is not a mere copulative addition. But neither is it purely and simply a kind of efficient causality and more or less naturans, naturing; rather it is a presence of God in things, constituting them formally, constituting them as realities. And in the case of human persons, it is something which constitutes my remission to the divine fundament of my own personal reality in the configuration of my own I. He is a reality which is precisely founding. It is as founding that God is in the ultimate depth of things and especially in the depths of the person.

We may then ask about the characteristics of this founding presence.

Said in genere, God is present to me, is fundamenting me in my religation, which is a moment of my own I; He is religating me precisely at that moment in which the power of the real is at its greatest, so to speak precisely when, and to the degree in which the power of the real is something we are going to experience in religation. Therefore, God and the human person find themselves bonded; they are bonded in this experience of the real. Since religation is a formally constitutive moment of my person, it follows that God and the person are determined in and by this experience of God, at least insofar as fundamenting is concerned. Man, to put it in terms of a thesis, is experience of God. Here lies the radical unity of God and {310} the human person. It is the moment of the “and”. So far this “and” means that man is experience of God. It is not a merely copulative “and”, but is an experiential “and”. This affirmation starts by being somewhat obscure, because the expression “God, experience of man” has two vertices. It incorporates one that opens onto God Himself qua reality. On the one hand, from the side of God, God is a reality which, regardless of what He may be, occurs in one form or another in an experience, and is bonded to being an experience. But, on the other hand, to say that man is experience of God means that man, in his own personal reality, is experiencing the reality of God. Thus, there are two different aspects of the experience: one, which concerns God qua God, and another which concerns man qua man. Man is experience of God, or God is experience of man. From the side of God, God is experience of man; from the side of man, man is experience of God.

But this convergence of two experiences is not a sufficient explanation, because then the problem surfaces, In what does this unity ultimately consist, which apparently is not a convergence of God as experience of man, and of man as experience of God? Our question is thus divided into three parts:

1. From the part of God, in what does God being the experience of man consist?
2. From the part of man, in what does man being the experience of God consist?
3. In what does the radical, ultimate, unity of God and man consist in this fundamental experience?

In this chapter we shall give an answer to the first of the questions.

{311} As we have previously said, God is quoad nos et quoad omnes res a realitas fundamentalis. He is not a supreme being, but a fundamental reality, absolutely absolute. He certainly does not consist in being an Aristotelian formal cause of creation. That would be an enormous pantheistic monism. God does not consist in being a fundamental reality. God would be absolutely absolute reality even if He were not to fundament. And, conversely, if He had to be fundamenting in order to be God, He would not be absolutely absolute reality. He would then depend upon whatever He would have to fundament. And this is not the case. God is an absolutely absolute reality, and therefore, God does not consist in being fundamental reality. But, given the fact that God is founding and fundamenting things and particularly persons, then the primary and radical way God is God with respect to things, is to be realitas fundamentalis. He is fundament inasmuch as He is transcendent to things, but in things. And He is transcendent in things, and is fundamenting them, inasmuch as He is absolutely absolute reality. It is not the case that God fundaments things formally qua volitional intelligence. God is absolutely absolute reality, and is fundamenting things insofar as He is absolutely absolute, even though in this fundamentation the characteristics of intelligence and will are not formally included. God is absolutely absolute reality transcendent in the real.

But then, What is the concrete figure of this constitutional transcendence of things?

In the first place, God is in things, in the manner I have just indicated, in every reality, in each thing. God is a founding reality. To found is a mode of dynamism, {312} and the dynamism in each being is formally identical to that in which its naked reality consists. Reality is not only —stated humanly and anthropologically— the set of qualities and properties which reality possesses, which later is put into act; but rather to be dynamic belongs to reality intrinsically and formally, i.e., to be self-giving. Reality is essentially a self-giving. God self-gives and cannot not give. God is a self-giving, and a self-giving of the self-same reality in which He consists; furthermore, precisely because He is something which self-gives reality, insofar as that reality is not God, and precisely due to that, He is founding of all reality.

This giving, therefore, concerns reality qua reality; it concerns everything real. And the important point here is that it concerns the real qua real. This is the radical point. Everything else is inscribed within this. But, in addition, this self-giving and constituting of reality is not as if a cause and causal process produced things, and afterwards in some form may continue producing or maintaining them in being. This is true, but I consider it founded upon something more radical, i.e., that this self-giving of the real, qua real, consists precisely in the transcendence of God in that which He self-gives, i.e., the real. Consequently, God consists —from the point of view of fundamentation— in being the ultimate and radical depth from which the reality of man emerges and where his reality is qua real. Actually, the ultimate depth of things is not a phýsis or a natura neither naturata nor naturans. It is rather just their reality, the characteristic of reality. And inasmuch as God is constituting in actu exercito and at every instant this characteristic of reality by His transcendence in things, {313} God is something present in the ultimate depth of all of them in a continuous, constant, and constitutive manner.

What qualifies the presence of God in things, in all of them without exception, is to be constitutive. And it is in this that the fontanality of God consists. God is fundamental and fundamenting reality qua fontanal reality. Fontanal reality, I repeat, not in the sense of a natura naturans, but in the sense that it is something by virtue of whose presence reality is constituted, because that presence constitutes the reality of the real qua real. Of course fontanality, and not only fontanality, but as I see it, creation itself, depends essentially on the terminus to which it leads.

We are accustomed, on the topic of creation, to consider creation as univocal act. God has made things out of nothing and they are there in terminal fashion, and are terminally transcendent to God. This is inadequate. In my estimation, a precise idea of what creation is and the different modes of creation should have been posed in metaphysics and theology. If we rest content only with creation as production ex nihilo sui et subjecti, the conclusion would seem to be that all creative acts are equal. But it is a somewhat negative equality. Elephants are similar to stones in the fact that they do not climb trees. This is true, but it does not tell us what the elephant and the stone are.

Creation must be conceived as the very life of God projected freely ad extra, consequently in a finite form. Therefore, this coefficient of finitude of divine life projected ad extra is precisely finite nature, i.e., things. The pure divine life ad extra in its finitude is the characteristic of reality as such. From {314} this perspective is how the different modes of creation have to be understood. And we cannot apprehend the different modes in any other way, but showing that they depend upon the different types of metaphysical reality as such.

Now, in my estimation, the types of metaphysical reality are fundamentally two: on the one hand, there is the reality of those things, which have certain properties by virtue of which they are de suyo that which they are in themselves: these are the so-called “closed essences”, i.e., the case of the realities, which are not persons; they are things, which have their properties, which are the properties of their reality qua reality, and act according to them. In that case the mode of fontanality consists in the fact that God is fount of being de suyo what these things are. We may illustrate this with a simple example: it is not the case that God burns in fire, but rather that He makes fire burn; He makes that fire burn by making fire be fire. We are not, therefore, dealing with premotions and concurrences, which are something quite different from what we are trying to express here.

But there is another type of metaphysical reality, the metaphysical reality, which is constituted not by things, which are simply de suyo, but are de suyo in such a form that in addition they are their-own. They behave with their own characteristic of reality, something that does not occur with the rest of cosmic realities. These are the “open essences”, open to their own characteristic of reality. This is the case of man. Man not only acts by virtue of the properties he has, or by virtue of the properties possessed by the things with which he makes his life; above all he acts in an absolutely real manner, however problematic and difficult. Man {315} acts by being, and in order to be, a form of reality, i.e., from the perspective of his own characteristic of reality. This is appropriate for open essences. However, it makes fontanality acquire a special characteristic. Fontanality is certainly a constitutive presence of God, a transcendence of God in things, by virtue of God giving Himself to them. When this terminus to whom He gives Himself is a person, then fontanality acquires a special characteristic. It is no longer a mere fontanal giving, it is a more intimate and more profound giving. It is donation. Only when that to which He gives is a person, do we have a donation. For this reason, a parte Dei, His transcendence in persons consists in being donation. And by being thus, by God being that which is constituted in donation, it follows that the person himself is his own insofar as its own.

But then, donation of what?

Clearly we are concerned with an inter-personal relation, in which God’s own reality in one form or another constitutes human reality. But this human reality is qualified as open reality. Then the mode of God giving Himself is precisely a personal donation, which makes this donation have a special characteristic. It is not simply the brute funneling, in some cosmic and mechanical manner, of a reality into something, which did not previously have it; rather, it is something much more concrete: the fact is that what God actually gives to the human person in donation is precisely his real truth.

By “real truth” I understand —and I repeat it again— not something, which simply consists in being true in the sense of an affirmation, of a true judgement, nor does it consist in being a truth, which is in some way ontological; rather it consists in something more elemental, and for our problem {316} more decisive: the very actuality of the real in an intelligence, but qua reality. By virtue of its actualization in intelligence, we say that the real is true. Truth is not a kind of extrinsic relation to the real. It is extrinsic in a certain sense, because it might not be actualized in an intelligence. But supposing that it is, it is not an extrinsic relation, but the mere actualization of the real in that intelligence. This is real truth. Let us remember that this real truth has at least three dimensions. One, truth in the sense that it is an ostension, a manifestation; in the second place, truth in the sense that it is a kind of security or firmness with which the real is actualized in human intelligence; and in third place, the fact that it be in actu exercito, here and now.

And indeed, God gives Himself to man, to the human person, as real truth in that triple aspect, because in His transcendence and in His personal donation God is, in one form or another, an actualization of that donation, which consists of the reality in which the being of man is constituted; in the second place, it is a kind of presence —I shall develop this theme a little further down— of security and fidelity with respect to himself; and in the third place, it is something really and effectively in being, and without such being the human person would have no reality.

Therefore, it is with this true reality and in this true reality, that man, with the donation of God, is making his own relatively absolute person. The reality of God is absolutely absolute; the being of human personal reality is relatively absolute. From this it follows that the theme of donation to a person coincides {317} precisely and formally, upon that common point, with absoluteness. God is absolutely absolute; in His donation man constitutes himself as relatively absolute. The moment of the absolute is what constitutes the point —let us state it simply without qualifiers for the present— of convergence between God and man.

But man is a personal reality with a special characteristic, because man is an animal of realities. And animality constitutes the particular version of this person, which man is, or putting it in a better way, this particular version is constituted by what we call “experience”. From this it necessarily follows that the donation of God as real truth is precisely experiential donation. God gives Himself to man, not in an abstract manner as a cause may give itself to its effect in order to produce it; but in virtue of that which He produces, i.e., a person who is an animal of realities, the giving is intrinsically, formally, and constitutively a giving in experience. To say, then, that God is experience of man consists purely and simply in saying that He is giving Himself to man in a giving, which is experience, an experience which is not consequent upon the being of man, but one in which at one and the same time man is constituted as such. Man is, in this sense, God giving Himself as intrinsic and formal fundament of religation, in the animal of realities. This is the concrete form in which God gives Himself to us.

This formulation poses, however, three questions we must answer:

1. In what does this experience consist on the part of God?
2. Which are its possible modes?
3. What are its dimensions?