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The experience from the part of God

Experience is physical probing of reality. In the donation of God as real truth we have an authentic experience, because in it we are acquiring that absolute characteristic which God gives us relatively; of course, not as an absolute characteristic, which is mounted upon itself, but as a characteristic, which stems from one of the fundamental modes with which reality is present to man, i.e., directional reality, in the form of “towards”. Man receives this donation precisely in the form of a “towards”, and not purely and simply as something there in front of us. The experience of God is a real experience, a parte Dei, because it is real experiential donation; it is God really and effectively as experiential person. In the fact of man constituting himself as a “principially” absolute person, God gives Himself to us as experientiable, as fundament, which is experiential, experientiable, and experienced. It is God giving Himself as absolute so that man may be able to be a person, i.e., experientially.

God has given Himself as absolute in experience; it is God giving Himself or making Himself experienced as absolute. It is in this that the experience of God formally consists, insofar as it is experience, and insofar as He is giving Himself in experience.


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2

Different forms of donation

The donation of God to man can take on very different forms, which is necessary to note.

In the first place, God is giving Himself as experiential absolute in a universal form. All persons are constituted, in one form or another, by this characteristic of absolute, and therefore, inexorably, with or without the knowledge of man, God has a universal form of being experiential for all human persons, to wit being the experiential absolute.

But, in the second place, there are forms, which are more particular. For example, there is that form by virtue of which donation, and therefore man, is an absolute reality, something founded precisely upon the transcendence of God in things. This is something different than what I just indicated. It is, for example, that which entails the idea of the presence of God in persons, when one talks about grace. Grace is not a mere quality. It is a dynamic moment. This dynamic moment may be interpreted as the presence of God in persons (uncreated grace), and as the type of quality, which that presence impresses upon persons (created grace). But this dualism, independently of any other formal theological considerations, is not sufficient. It must be absorbed into something more radical and primary, such as the transcendence of God in persons in the form of constitutive donation of their relatively absolute being.

In the third place, there is a more intimate and absolute mode. That mode of presence of God in a person making {320} and formally constituting therein at least its relatively absolute dimension; it is that presence by virtue of which the relation is so intimate, that it is precisely the real truth of God in person. This is what happens in the Incarnation, just as it is accepted by the Christian faith, but which as a possibility can be thought of by human reason. Jesus-Christ is the truth of God in person. This is how the Verbum caro factum est must be interpreted. Caro, flesh, in this case means precisely the form of being experience, the experiential form in the person of the real truth of God. And the factum est means precisely to make itself experience: Christ Himself is making Himself in a certain way human, and more than humanly, although not as Word.

At least, therefore, we have these three forms of transcendence of God in things as donation: the universal transcendence in the form of giving Himself as experience of the absolute; in the second place, the presence in grace; and, in the third place, that presence in the form of being the very its-ownness of the human reality of Christ, which is, according to the Christian faith, the Incarnation.


3

Dimensions of the experience of God

In this experiential donation, donation concerns all the dimensions of the being and the reality of the human person.

In the first place, it concerns persons individually as we have just seen; but in the second place, {321} it concerns human persons inasmuch as they are making themselves socially and historically. God gives Himself to man as experience —we are not talking about men, but about God— in the form of socio-historical experience.

Hegel started from the idea that since God is absolute spirit and in the form of absolute reason, this which we call society and history are moments of that absolute giving of Himself in the dialectic of being, in the dialectic of the absolute spirit, which is the dialectic of reason. From my perspective this is absolutely untenable. In the first place, the function of God in history is not, as Hegel pretends, to be the presence of reason in history. No. It is to be the presence of real truth in history. Real truth is not to be identified with reason. Certainly, there is a presence of God as reason, but that is not the primary and formal way God is present in history. He is present as real truth. And, in the second place, it is untenable because we are not dealing with the becoming of God, but with His giving of Himself, with His real donation; and this donation is not a dialectical unfolding, but something different: it is an experiential unfolding. History is not dialectical, either in this case or in any other. History, in the problem we are studying, is the absolute as human possibility; it is absolute reality made possibility in human experience.

History is essentially experiential; it is God giving Himself as historical experience. And this is clear in the history of religions. We have, for example, in the Old Testament, that God founds or establishes the people of Israel, the chosen people, in a berith, in a covenant. In that covenant the initiative lies with Yahweh, with God. But that initiative consists, on God’s part, in giving Himself to the {322} people of Israel precisely as origin, as agent, and as the medium of an historical experience. Really and effectively, God gives Himself as real truth in the three dimensions of real truth, but above all in that one to which man is most sensitive, i.e., as fidelity. The covenant is an experiential initiative of the fidelity of God with the people to whom He offers it. This is the form in which real truth is in the people of Israel. In this manner one can interpret a good portion of the history of Israel, through the covenant, which itself is historical, from the accounts of paradise to the culmination of the prophets. This is the ratification of God giving Himself under the form of covenant, of berith, under the form of historical experience, to the people of Israel.

It is also the case with Christ. His historicity —God has an historicity, Christ has an historicity— founds and constitutes the religious movement called “Christianity”, whose history starts from Christ Himself. It is precisely God giving Himself as son of Mary, and giving Himself as absolute Truth of the Word, experientially, as son of Mary and Joseph.

If someone wishes to reflect upon the idea of providence, I consider it unnecessary to locate providence purely and exclusively in the arrangement of reasons and dispositions on God’s part, some for approval and others for permissibility, anthropomorphically speaking. There is something much more radical: that upon which divine providence rests is precisely the experienced transcurrence of God in the history and life of each man. It is an unfolding, an experiential disposition. These are the particular modes, the particular dimensions, according to which God gives Himself to us, on His part, as something experienced by man. He gives Himself to us in a universal form as {323} an absolute, which is going to be experienced or, at least, that may be experienced. He gives Himself also in that other distinct form, although not equally recognizable, which the experience of grace is, which is also common to each man. And in the third place, in the supreme case, in that greater degree of unity and of presence, which the Incarnation is. From this perspective, the Incarnation is the willful incardination of God in history as something, which is going to be experienced throughout its whole course. God founds Christianity in a more radical form than becoming “Christian”; He founds Christianity when entering history itself to be part of it. Humanity is thus constituted into an historical experience of the absolute.

Greek metaphysics here encounters significant limitations, which stem from the idea of the possible actuation of a potency by an act, or of a possible Platonic participation of some realities with respect to others. But above all it has a fundamental and serious limitation: the complete absence of the concept and the very term of person. It took the titanic effort of the Cappadocian Fathers¹ to divest the term hypóstasis from its characteristic of pure hypokeímenon, from its characteristic of subjectum, and of substance, to bring it near to what the juridical sense of the Romans had given to the term persona, as differentiated from the pure res, the thing. It is facile in the course of the history of philosophy to speak of what the person is, in contradistinction to the res naturalis, for example in Descartes and above all Kant. But what is forgotten is that the introduction of the concept of person in its own peculiarity has been the work of Christian thought, and of the Revelation to which this thought refers.

{324} Be that as it may, God, giving Himself as experience, is precisely what He is for man. God is experience of man in a precise sense. On the one hand, He gives Himself to man to constitute him as man, a man who is personal animal of realities. On the other hand, and as a consequence of this, He gives Himself to man to be experienced by man himself, who is personal animal of realities. It is here where the second question surfaces: In what does this experience of God consist from the side of man?

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¹ (Tr. note: the IV cent. Fathers of the Church, St. Basil, St. Gregory of Nazianzus, and St. Gregory of Nyssa.)