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CHAPTER 6

MAN, EXPERIENCE OF GOD

In the previous chapter we have seen, from the point of view of God, what is the problem of God “and” man, of God giving Himself to man as experience. In this chapter we shall concern ourselves with the second point: What is man himself insofar as he, in his reality, is experiencing God?

The first thing we must point out when affirming that man is experience of God, considered a parte hominis, from the side of man, is that this does not primarily mean, much less formally mean, that man has experience of God. This is not the ultimate truth. We must add something else: it is not the case that man has experience of God; rather it is the case that man is experience of God, he is formally experience of God. And, of course, one asks, What does it mean that man is experience of God?


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What is experience of God?

The issue is, then, what this experience of God may be.

We are referring now to what experience of God is a parte hominis, on the part of man. Before anything else we must say that experience of God is not the experience of an object called “God”, not only because man is incapable of that, but because this is not even how one should conceive of what an intuition of the divine would be, were something like that possible. God is not a reality-object, as we explained in the previous chapters.

Also, experience of God is not to be understood as a state in which man is. At the beginning of the century, with the invading avalanche of books about religious experience, all started from the assumption that religious experience is something that affects a certain state of man. Nonetheless, God is neither an objectual terminus for man nor a state of man. What happens is that man is fundamented, and that God is the realitas fundamentalis, which is the reason why the experience of God on the part of man consists in the experience of being fundamentally fundamented in the reality of God. It is by making my being fundamentally that I attain the experience of God. What there is in the experience of God is the experience of the fontanal and fundamenting reality of God in religation as ultimateness, as ultimate possibility, and as supreme impellence. This, together with what was said in the previous chapter, is what opens the door for us to understand with greater precision what the experience of God is on the part of man.

{327} Actually, man is one finite way, among many other possible ones, of being God really and effectively. And what we call “human nature” is nothing but this moment of finitude, which can be multiple and various, but in the case of man is of a particular structure. The animal of realities is the moment of finitude, with which man is God. Man is a finite way of being God.

This finitude is formally experiential. Man is animal of realities, and in that condition of his own animality his experiential mode is incorporated. Consequently, man is an experiential mode of being God. God is an absolutely absolute reality and in this consists His metaphysical reality. On the other hand, I am, confronting God or with respect to God, a relatively absolute reality. Relatively absolute reality, because I have acquired this absolute characteristic in the face of reality by making myself a person, by making my own being, by making my own I, by making and fabricating my personality. Therefore, the experience of making myself a person is experience of the absolute. I am not absolute as a substance is; I am absolute by making myself a person and by constituting myself as an I. In constituting myself as an I, I have and formally am the experience of the absolute. This experience is precisely the experience of God; the experience of the absolute inasmuch as it is experience of my personal being. God not only is not a being, but with respect to our problem, He is not even a first efficient cause. He is quoad nos fundamental reality, realitas fundamentalis. And, therefore, one “is” by apprehending this formally transcendent characteristic of the fundamentality of God in the human person, in my own personal being.

{328} This is why God is neither object, nor a state, but that which is the absolute of my being. He is that which is founding and making possible the absolute of my being. The experience of God is but the experience of the absolute acquired in the constitution of my being, the experience of being founded upon a founding reality. Consequently, God, absolutely absolute reality, is inscribed in relativity, in what is absolute of a relatively absolute person, in my own personal reality. Whence it follows that this presence of God in persons, and correlatively, the mode in which man is partially experiencing God, may have different characteristics.


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Modes of the experience of God

We have seen that man is experience of God. And he is experience of God formally, inasmuch as he is a relatively absolute being, so that the experience of his own absolute relativity is precisely the experience of God because it is the experience of the absolute. But this can have different modes.

In the first place, there is a mode which is radical for every person. It is the case, in fact, that the turning towards fundamental reality, towards reality-fundament, is a moment of the will to truth. The will to truth, we said above, is precisely that moment by which man is author of his own personal being, which can only “be” by acquiring support or true fundament in the power of the real, {329} which he is experiencing as a relatively absolute reality. The radical mode of the experience of God is the will to truth, truth not in the sense of sincerity, not in the logical sense of the word, but in the sense of real truth. The radical mode of the experience of God is will to real truth.

This will is molded, as we indicated, in an intellective process, one which opens the ambit of ultimate fundamentality. This intellective process offers man several different possibilities for being a form of reality in the ambit of reality and real ultimateness. Therefore, each of the forms that man may adopt in his choice, each one of the forms of his own absolute being, is precisely the terminus of an appropriation, of a will which is constitutively choice-oriented.

Now, choice is the real and concrete way to be free, to be absolute. This is freedom. Hence, the experience of God in a radical and ultimate way is the experience of my own freedom, insofar as God is fundament of my own absolute being. Freedom, in fact, may have different aspects. Freedom is, in a first sense, “freedom from”. Man can be free, he feels free, he is free inasmuch as he is free from particular coercions, from particular impulses, from the weight of a tradition, which is not reflexive, but received routinely, etc. To liberate oneself from this, in one way or another, is what belongs to one aspect of freedom, this is the “freedom from”.

There is, however, another aspect of freedom. Man is free from all this, he has freedom in the sense of liberation. For what? Precisely, to be himself. This is the “freedom for being”. Man is not only liberated {330} from things, but is inexorably “free for being”, free to be precisely a form of reality confronting any other reality.

Nevertheless, there is still a third ultimate and radical aspect of freedom, because when all is said and done, freedom “from” and freedom “for” affect the modes of exercising freedom. There is something anterior, which consists in being free, prior to any exercise of freedom. This is precisely freedom “in”. Man is free “in” reality as such. Being precisely of a condition by virtue of which I am mine, I belong to myself and to no other reality. Freedom in this sense is or can be identical to the person. That is not so in the two first senses, but is radically and eminently so in this third aspect. This is what it is to be free. And it is in this third aspect of freedom where the root of my relatively absolute being is found, and therefore, where the radical experience of God is. The radical experience of God is the experience of being free “in” reality. To be free is the finite manner, concrete, of being God: to be free in an animal sense. The experience of this freedom experienced in the animal sense is precisely the experience of God.

In addition to this universal mode of experience thus described, there is another mode to which I had alluded previously. It is the experience of grace or of God as grace. In what measure can man have an experience of grace, unless it is an intellectual certainty metaphysically deducible from the possession of grace? That is a matter, which belongs to theologians and to the historians of dogma. Here it is a much simpler and elemental question. Man has an experience of grace, even though he may not know it, because there is no one exempt from this presence {331} of God. Rigorously speaking it is not a presence; it is in the very projection of the Trinitarian life ad extra that the formal explanation of the creation of man consists, as we pointed out above.

But there is a third mode of experience, and it is the supreme example: the human life of Christ. It is not a question of only seeing the mysteries we can observe in the life of Christ, but of seeing the very life of Christ as a mystery, not in the sense that Christ is the Son of God, but in a different sense. If one contemplates His life, Christ shows Himself as a person who is hungry, needs to sleep, has sorrows, sheds tears when a friend dies, etc. And one may ask, All these acts of the life of Christ, what were they to Him? One could think that they have a pedagogical function, that with them He wished to teach something. But the issue is how He taught it. He taught it by doing it Himself, but doing it truly. In other words, the concrete way He had of being the Son of God was precisely to feel hunger, to eat, to talk to friends, and to cry when He lost them, to pray, etc. This was the concrete way. He was not a man, in addition to being Son of God; rather, that was the concrete way how He humanly lived His own divine filiation. It was the experience of His own divine filiation.

The opposite would be what I have often called in my conferences a “gigantic biographic docetism”, as if Christ had an experience in the sense that He had to behave like other men, without this affecting Him as Son of God. In this is what “biographic docetism” would consist. In the same manner that God had in Christ a human body and psychism, He also had a strictly human biography, which affected His {332} own condition of being the Son of God. God desired to feel in His nature not only that He rendered a homage from finitude to divinity, to Which He was united hypostatically, but He desired something else: He desired to live biographically the vicissitudes of a man who feels needs in His own personal characteristics, to have to confront all kinds of vicissitudes, and even assume, at least in His human intelligence, some aspects of His mission on earth while in it. The idea of kénosis explains or points to this dimension in Christ, which consists in that concrete annulment to be finitely and humanly, as a Palestinian, at that time, a son of Joseph and Mary, a carpenter who walks on the streets of Nazareth, to experience in that way His own divine filiation. We are accustomed to think that “the other life” is no longer what this life is; but it is unnecessary to assume that there is fundamentally more than one life, divinely lived in two different ways: one having hunger, thirst, etc., and another contemplating God for all eternity. They are not two lives; it is the same life lived in a different way. To live is to possess oneself. Here, it is to possess oneself in grace; in heaven, it is to possess oneself in God. It is not one life after another; it is one self-same divine life.

This manner of experientially living His own divine filiation was in Christ the secret of His own personal intimacy. In reality, He did not reveal this to men. When the exegetes speak about the Messianic secret, they think this is an evident fact that can be taken from the text of St. Mark itself. But there is a subjacent fundamental theologic problem: In what does this Messianic secret consist? It consists precisely in that, in being the experiential manner of His own divine filiation. Christ {333} communicated to others in some measure, inasmuch as personal intimate biography can be communicated to others, what was essential about His life. And He did it precisely so that men, adding themselves to it, and uniting themselves to it, and surrendering themselves to Him, would be able some day to ascend to that constitutive secret of His own divine filiation, which was the secret of His personal life.

And this, despite being a theologic postulate from the perspective of the Christian faith, is not an exception to everything I have presented thus far. I indicated that man has an experience of God as a relatively absolute being, inscribed in a reality and in a power of the real. Christ not only had this religation to the power of the real, but was something else: the subsistent religation. And precisely by virtue of being, He founded a religion, one which in a certain way is the religion of religions. Christ is the subsistent experience of God. To be sure, the subsistent experience of God is not an experience outside the limits of daily existence: walking, eating, crying, having children. It is not an experience outside such limits, but is precisely the manner of experiencing in all of it the divine condition in which man consists.

It is not the case that in this world, man in fact has to deal with things and in addition with God, when he concerns himself with God. No. Man concerns himself with God purely and simply while concerning himself with things, with other persons. Man has to be concerned in this world with everything, even the most trivial. But has to be concerned with everything divinely. There is where the experience of God is, exactly.

As subsistent religation and experience of His own divine filiation, as experience of grace, and as {334} experience of freedom, three essentially united things, is how the forms of the experience of God are given. The intrinsic unity between freedom as absolute experience of the absolute of God, the experience of grace, and the unfolding of that presence in divine filiation conprises the theological unity upon which, in my estimation, this complex and rewarding theme must be erected.

But the presence of God in the experience of the absolute not only has these different forms, but also has different dimensions.