{347}

CHAPTER 7

UNITY OF GOD “AND” MAN

Man is religated to the power of the real in a manifestative experience of the reality of this power. The power of the real is, in each real thing, more than its particular reality. And because of this it is founded upon a founding reality. Since this reality determines my I as relatively absolute, this founding reality is an absolutely absolute reality, i.e., God. Therefore, since this power of the real is conveyed in and by real things, God is in reality constituting them as real. This is the transcendence of God not beyond things, but in things. With respect to this particular reality, which the human person is, i.e., an animal of realities, the transcendence in it is a constituting presence in religation. And since religation in this case occurs in an animal of realities, it follows that the presence of God in the constitution of the personal I is a matter of experience. Man is, in this sense, an experience of God.

We then asked ourselves, first, What is this experience of God a parte Dei? What is God as experience? And we saw that it is God as Self-giving, and {348} Self-giving-Himself not to reality, to produce it in some way, or to found it; but Self-giving-Himself formally to a person, in the case of man. Therefore this giving has quite an unique metaphysical and theological structure: it is not like any other sort of giving, it is a donation. It is a donation of God Himself to that which is at the root of the I, to that by virtue of which man is a person, i.e., to his intelligence. And this actuality of God in intelligence is precisely His real truth. Consequently, the donation of God is donation of God as absolutely absolute reality, giving Himself as experience of His absolute characteristic under the form of real truth.

In second place, on man’s side, man does not have this experience only. It is not the case that man may have an experience of God; he is formally, insofar as a person that makes its I, formally I repeat, experience of God as ultimateness, as possibilitation, and as impellence. Man is, in his religation, experience of the absolute. And this experience is precisely the experience of God.

But then a third problem arises, to which we are going to dedicate this chapter: What is the unity of these two experiential moments, of God giving Himself in experience, and of man experiencing God? That is the issue of the unity of God and man. What is this “and”? For the purposes concerning this presentation, the problem unfolds into four questions:

1. What is the characteristic of the unity between God “and” man?
2. What is the particular characteristic of this unity in the case of human persons? {349}
3. What is the experiential unity of God “and” man?
4. What is the unity of man “and” God as metaphysical transcurrence of religation?


1

Generic characteristic of the unity of God “and” man

From the side of God, His donation of Himself is a constituting donation to the human person, and is a donation inasmuch as this substantive reality of man makes his I. Therefore, it is a real donation of the reality of God to the reality of man in order that man should be an I. From the side of man, it is a manifestative experience of reality, qua moment, an act by which he affirms himself as relatively absolute reality in the depths of the real.

From this we obtain a first immediate consequence: the second aspect depends on the first, inasmuch as man can have experience of the absolute and be relatively absolute, and inasmuch as he is constituted in some form by the donation of God. But this donation is a donation, which concerns God as reality, and man as reality. So ultimately it is just the case of a functionality of the real as real, with respect to man insofar as he makes his I with God Who is present in him formally, making him be I. And since the functionality of the real as real is what constitutes, in my estimation, the very essence of causality, it must be said that in the unity between {350} man and God we are dealing with a strict causality. It is a unity of causality, but of a constituting causality, one which formally constitutes, not merely one which is efficient and productive. We are thus dealing with a formal constitution. It is the functionality of my reality in its formal constitution as I. And it is precisely there where the causal functionality to which I am referring lies.

But, even from the point of view of causality understood in such a way, the question is not exhausted, because the functionality of the real, as real, actually concerns all things. But here we are referring to human persons, and therefore, this functionality also has an absolutely peculiar characteristic: the functionality of the real as real, inasmuch as God is absolute person and inasmush as man is a relative person, whose relative and formal act is to be I.

For this reason the type of causality we are discussing here is what earlier we called “personal causality”. It is a type of causality different from the type of causality canonized in the history of philosophy after Aristotle. Aristotle, with his division of the four causes, classifies causality from the point of view of what causes are insofar as they produce some reality: the cause, which is efficient, material, formal, and final. In my estimation, we should make the decision to introduce into metaphysics a type of causality I would call personal, by virtue of which the functionality of the real as real concerns persons as persons. Persons are “who”, and any individual “who” is not a numerical determination of the “what”. The “who” is an irreducible and ultimate metaphysical mode of reality, proper to open essences in contradistinction to closed essences.

{351} From this perspective of personal causality we should be able to see that many things we tend to consider as the complement, the embellishment, or the consequence of causality understood in the Aristotelian sense, such as prayer, the love of God, and help from God, in reality are not just purely religious things without metaphysical importance. No. I believe this is an absolute error. All these moments belong to a personal metaphysical causality, with as much causality as the fall of a stone can have under Aristotelian causality. From our perspective we are not dealing with an efficient, material, formal or final causality, but of a personal causality befitting an open essence.

This makes us realize that the unity of God “and” man is definitely a causal unity, but a unity of personal causality. And naturally this leads us to the second question.


2

Type of unity between God “and” man

In what does the unity stemming from personal causality consist?

To be sure, in this personal causality the distinction between God and man is maintained. Regardless of how greatly personal this causality may be, I am not God, and neither is God, formally considered, an I which might not exist. Therefore, the strict distinction between God and man as personal realities is maintained.

Nonetheless, this distinction is not the same as separation. One might tend to think that since God is what He is as {352} person, and since each one of our meager realities is what it is with respect to God, there would be a possibility at least in principle of tracing a kind of perimeter for each man, delimiting on one side the territory of God, and on the other the territory of man. This is an absolute fantasy, not because of any general metaphysical reasons, but really and concretely because of personal causality. It would completely erase and annihilate the very idea of personal causality. Persons are not, not even at the human inter-personal level, facing each other, as stones do in an electro-magnetic or gravitational field. Persons in their human relations are implicated in one form or another among themselves. It is a structure of implication. This is even more true in the case of the Divine Person.

The distinction between God and man, as persons, is something completely different. In the first place, there is a given presence of God formal to be sure in my person, constituting me as His donation. And there is also the presence of myself as formally constituted in God by the donation of God. God is certainly God without the need to be constituting any personality in any reality founded on Him. But I would not be I if I were not formally founded in the formal reality of God, present in me and constituting me as such an I. This is an incontrovertible truth. It is one thing that God may not need men to be personal, quite another that the reverse be true. The I, insofar as I, is not formally what it is except in and by God. I am not I except for the formal and constitutive presence of God in me as personal reality.

{353} Still, I am surely not God. But then one may ask: What is this “not”? That is the question precisely.

One might tend to think that I am not God just as a dog is not a cat, or as the planet Jupiter or the Moon are not the Sun. It would be a distinction indeed somewhat numerical, founded upon numerical multiplicity. This is absolutely not the case concerning the human person.

It is not so because this “not”, according to which I am not God, is precisely one of the intrinsic and formal moments of my constitution, of my I, by God Himself. In other words, not to be God is a formal way of being here-and-now in God. It is an active moment. The “not” is precisely the donation of His reality in order for man to be an I that is not God, so that this “not”, as moment of the I, is absolutely positive and active. God makes that I be a person without being God. It is a question, therefore, of a unique type of implication. It only appears between persons, and in a special way between the Divine Person and human persons. It is a formally active “not”. Without God I would not be what I am, i.e., absolute. But if this not-being-God were not to have an active characteristic, then I would not be relatively absolute. If the formally active characteristic of the “not” is not affirmed, one would fall into one of the forms of pantheism, or into one of the forms of extrinsicism between God and man. But, if it is affirmed, we have the formal presence of God in things from the point of view of reality, and we have the fundament of the relativity of the absolute. The “not” has the characteristic of being essentially positive and a constituent of the I, insofar as it is not God. And this is why not-being-God is precisely, with regards to a human person, a real and {354} positive way of being here-and-now in God. Therefore, between God and man there is a real distinction, but one, which is not only no-separation, but a formal implication.

It is a formal implication not a delimitation. It is a way of my being implicated in God and of God being co-implicated or complicated —if we could put it this way— with me. When all is said and done, God has somewhat complicated —expressed anthropomorphically— His own divine reality “with” having given Himself ad extra to human persons. And this being-in-God, but not-being-God (with the “not” as a positive moment of being in God) is precisely a type of implication we shall call “tension”. The implication between man and God, as a type of personal causality, is precisely tension. The unity of God and man is, therefore, theological tension. The concrete type of formally personal causality in our problem is precisely this: the case of an inter-personal tensive unity.

Here the word “tension” does not have a psychological sense, as if man were pretending something. It has a metaphysical sense in the form of implication, as I have explained. How this tension is lived is a separate question. Here, we are affirming the metaphysical characteristic of tension, and it is not to be construed as a psychological or anthropologic structure.

In this tension the donating moment of God, as a constituent of my personal reality, in the relatively absolute act of my I, is preponderant and initiating with respect to whatever the I may be as constituted person. Consequently, from the point of view of tension, in this inter-personal unity between God and man, God has a strictly pre-tensive function. {355} This is precisely the pre-tensor of what is going to be the tensiveness of man with respect to Him. And, on the other hand, each one of our personal realities is not pretensor, but only tensive or tensoral. And this tensive unity is precisely the metaphysical essence of the theological unity between God and man.

This tension is precisely the formal constitution of the I. God, absolute reality, is formally in my reality making that this reality make itself I in the divine reality, without being the divine reality. And in this unity is in what the experiential characteristic of the “and” consists.