{355} (cont’d)

3

Experiential unity of God “and” man

Viewed from the tensiveness, In what does this unity consist, that experiential unity by which God gives Himself as experience of absolute reality to me, constituting me in my relatively absolute reality?

The tensiveness, I said, is formally the experience of man as experience of God. And the experience of God is ultimately and radically experience of this tensiveness. God, giving Himself as experience, is an eminently active moment on the part of God. It is, to be sure, God giving Himself in experience. But with respect to man, this which we have called “the experience of man”, is not experience in the same sense as it is in God, because in the case of God, it is God giving Himself as experience to a man. But, on the other hand, in the case of man, man is experiencing that which God {356} has given him. Man is experience of God in the sense of experientiality, an experientiality of the donating reality of God as absolute. It is an experientiality of the absolute. And, therefore, since the experientiality of the absolute in God, as formal constitutive of the I is a donation, a unity is given between donation and experience. And in this unity is in what the unity of theological tension concretely consists. My absolute has a tensive characteristic. Man is God finitely, tensively.

Naturally man can be God tensively in several different ways.

There is in first place, a tensive unity proper to every personal reality, in virtue of the fact of being an I. The I, let us repeat, is not the substantive reality of man. Man is a substantive reality, provided with an intelligence, by virtue of which he possesses a characteristic, which when activated will exercise the relatively absolute being. Prior and independently to its exercise, man is a person in the sense that he possesses that characteristic I called “personeity”. But what we call “I” is not this reality, but the act in which this reality affirms itself as such a reality, i.e., as person. Confronting what? Confronting everything real insofar as it is real. It then follows that the I is not the substantive reality of man at all, but the act in which the substantive reality actualizes itself as his-own, the act of being I. It is relatively absolute because it is an act in which my substantive reality is affirmed not confronting this or that person nor this or that thing, but confronting any reality whatsoever qua reality. This includes, in principle, as absurd as this emplacement may be, the case of the sinner, who confronts God Himself. The I is then not only a tensivity, but is {357} precisely the radical metaphysical characteristic of being a “tensal” act. It is an act in which my substantive reality affirms itself tensively, and constitutes itself as an I in which its-ownness, that in which its substantive reality consists, is reactualized, and therefore, is that in which the formal explanation of its personality consists.

But there may be other cases, other different ways of being God tensively. Once more I allude to things, which transcend a strictly philosophical framework, but serve as a concrete example of possible ways of being God tensively.

Thus, we have the Pauline references to grace. The word cháris, grace, is not limited in St. Paul to what theologians will later call “sanctifying grace”, but refers to everything that is “gracious” from the side of God, gratuitous from the side of God, which translates a term from the Old Testament, hesed, an ambivalent term. On the one hand it signifies something, which has been translated as “mercy”, a translation, which can be correct, but correct in the sense of a contraction of what the word hesed signifies. Actually, this term means the good disposition, the benevolence with which God inclines towards human persons. From the point of view of man the same word and the same concept do not mean benevolence, but rather the intimate attitude in which man places himself internally in the hands of God, and receives his hesed from God. It is not simply the case of a word, which may have two senses, but of something much more radical; rather, it represents a typical case of “tensive unity”. This is precisely the tensive unity of a hesed, which from the side of God is the donation under the form of benevolence; but from the side of man is what a Greek might call eusébeia, interior {358} religion. When Hosea placed on the lips of God that He wished mercy and not sacrifices, he was not referring to the mercy of God, of course, but to eusébeia, to the interior religion of man. The term, however, is hesed. This is the expression of a concept, which is really tensive of the unity between God and man, from the point of view of what we call “grace”.

Many other examples can be quoted. When the sacred texts make reference to “men of good will”, or “men loved by God”, we face a case similar to the above. The eudokía from the side of God is precisely the benevolence, love, and inclination with which He loves mankind. But with respect to man, the issue is not the good will one has for doing this or that, but the will to place oneself in the hands of God. Because of this, it is good. The tensive unity of these two aspects is precisely what the word eudokía (Lk 2:14) expresses. It is not a question, in my estimation, of words that have a polysemy, depending on whether they are referring to God or to man. It is not the case of two senses more or less analogical, more or less harmonized in a unity. No. We are concerned properly and rigorously with only one and unique concept, which has the tensive unity of a donation from the side of God, and from the side of man of an experience, of a surrender to God.

There can still be a superior mode, a superior manner in which man can be God tensively. That mode in which the I is a reactualization of its-ownness, but of an its-ownness that does not belong to him, i.e., the substantive reality belongs to someone else. This case is precisely the case of Christ, the I of Christ. The reality of Christ is not his-own, but is of the Word mysteriously, {359} so mysteriously that not even the human intelligence of Christ Himself could have had a comprehensive and exhaustive view of this fact, which in its ultimate depth is His divine filiation. Christ is a reality that, as substantive reality, is not his-own. He exercises the act of being an I, and in this act He expresses his-ownness in second act. But it is not a his-ownness determined formally by His own human substantivity. It will be useful to pursue this example further.

One could very well ask, when Christ says I, Who is this I?

The interpretation has been given that Christ has two I’s, one I, which is human, the son of Mary and Joseph, working as carpenter, suffering, etc.; and another I, which would properly be the Word. This appears to me as something absolutely untenable, because in this interpretation one starts from a false idea of the I. What is an I? Is it a mere psychological structure? As we have just said, I, born of my father and my mother, cry, suffer... this is not the I; these are the features with which my own experience advances as it configures the I. The I, formally speaking, is not a psychological or anthropological structure; it is a rigorously metaphysical structure. It is the act by virtue of which it reactualizes itself —if it does so, that presupposes a prior act— in the form of an act of which the its-ownness is proper to the reactualized reality in that act. This is precisely the I. If this is the case, it is impossible to say that in Christ there are two I’s.

And this is so for two reasons. First and most fundamental, the Word is not an I. We are accustomed to consider that the three Persons of the Trinity are I, You, He. This is the ultimate expression of a destitute anthropomorphism. {360} Anthropomorphisms are inevitable, as long as they are not indigent. Formally speaking, none of the three Persons is I, not in the sense we are discussing. But, in second place, the I, as act in which a nature reactualizes itself in its-ownness, is an act, which is performed. By whom? Precisely by the Incarnate Word. Then, the I, to which Christ refers, is neither the Word, nor His human nature: it is Jesus-Christ in His unity. It is a founded act, which is not the one constitutive of a theandric and hypostatic unity, but the act in which He reaffirms Himself precisely in His his-ownness; He reaffirms in second act, so to speak, what His reality is in its-ownness in the first act. This in the case of Christ, and in the case of any one of us. What occurs in the case of Christ is that his-ownness, which reactualizes as an I in His human nature, is not an his-ownness, which pertains to Him by reason of human nature, but precisely by reason of the Word. And in this case, what we call the I of Christ is the actualization in a second act of the unity with which the Word and the singular nature of Christ really and mysteriously constitute only one reality.

In Christ, therefore, there are no two I’s, first because human reality and the reality of the Word are not an I. And, in second place, because the I is not one of a human reality. There is only one I, the unique I of Christ, which is precisely the reactualization of His his-ownness, of His human substantivity in a his-ownness, which in this case is a subsistent tensiveness, Christ, Who is precisely the subsistent experience of God, as we saw earlier. The personal biography of Christ, not only the acts He performs, but His internal mode of being, {361} is not extraneous to His own reality considered as Incarnate Word. This would be what I have called an “enormous biographic docetism”. It could have been otherwise; but in fact it was this way. His biography affects Him and, therefore, Christ, as Incarnate Word in His unity, really and effectively wished to have experience of His filial condition, of His metaphysical filial characteristic with respect to God. That was precisely the “one”, the supreme tensive characteristic of that in which the proper experience of man consisted, on the part of man, in his unity with God. Jesus-Christ is in this sense the very subsistence of the tensive experience of man with God.

There are still other aspects of this tensive unity. We are accustomed to consider the situation of man on earth as someone looking for God here, or there, or nowhere, or rejecting Him. Saint Paul put it in one sentence: man is searching for God as if groping. From the point of view I am here describing, Christ is not only, in my estimation, a mere factual condition, which man possesses with respect to God, to an unknown God. With this “literary genre” some have wished to express something, which is not simply a historical vicissitude, but the very structure of history, considered from the point of view concerning us here. This is just the historic tensiveness with respect to God. The entire history of religions is a historic tensiveness with respect to God.

Therefore, the metaphysical unity of man and God is not a metaphysical transcurrence, but a metaphysical unity with a tensive characteristic, which may adopt diverse forms or different modes. But all these modes, of hesed, of dóxa, of eudokía, of Incarnation, {362} of searching like groping, of pselapháo, which St. Paul mentioned to the Athenians, all these modes are founded in something, which is anterior to all of this: the characteristic, by virtue of which a human person is constitutively tensoral and, therefore, able to experience that something, which God gives to it, namely, the donation of His absolute being, of the absolute reality of God, which is given to man for him to be absolute.


4

Unity of man “and” God as transcurrence
of religation

We began this book by referring to man as substantive reality, who makes his absolute being in religation. And now we find out that man is a tensive experience of God. Indeed, these two aspects are precisely the same thing. This is the essential point.

In his religation to the power of the real, man is formally sustained in God, founded in God, transcendent in things. By virtue of this, religation is in reality a constituting support of man as an I in God, since we have seen that the power of the real supports itself upon a God transcendent in things. This support is a tension —in the sense I have just explained. Thus, the theological essence of religation consists in that tension. In religation there is a dominance of the power of the real with respect to man who makes his I with that power of the real.

Hence, from the point of view of God, that dominance has a precise characteristic: the pre-tensor characteristic of God. {363} And from the point of view of man, who needs to support himself upon reality to make his I, that dominance is the tension with which man supports himself precisely upon that pre-tensor structure, which the absolutely absolute reality is, transcendent in things and in a special and personal way in every man. The essence of religation is precisely the theological tension between man and God. This is why when in the previous chapters I mentioned that man is restlessness of his absolute being, I was referring not to the restlessness for happiness —even though this may be one of the forms restlesness acquires —nor to the “irrequietum cor nostrum, Domine, donec requiescat in te” of St. Augustine, but to something much more radical. What St. Augustine says is true, but it is true because what makes man restless in his depth is precisely the figure of his own relatively absolute being, the “What is going to become of me?”, and “What am I going to do with myself?”. This is the true restlessness.

From the point of view of what we have just explained, the matter is quite clear: restlessness is the human and lived expression of the tensive unity between man and God. Man is restless, because his I formally consists in a tension, in a tensiveness with God. The tensive restlessness of the constitution of the I is the concrete form by which man finds himself in his being, which is the I, religated to the relatively absolute reality. This point is the culmination of the unity of the different issues studied in this book.

I said, in fact, that I was going to be concerned with the theological dimension of man, understanding by “theological” a concept, which expresses not something theologic, but something, which is prior to any theology and which is the fundamental presupposition to all of theology. Namely, a dimension {364} of the very being of man, which faces God. Man proceeds towards God and encounters Him while making himself a person. And in this making himself a person is where the theological dimension of man is found. I have accomplished the exposition and articulation of this idea in three successive parts.

In the first place man: What is it to be a man? How does a man make himself a person? To this problem an essential and fundamental concept is addressed: religation. Man makes himself a person by being religated in his very being to the power of the real as real, as ultimate, possibilitating, and impelling.

In the second place, in this religation man finds himself hurled towards the fundament of religation: this is the progress of man towards God. In his personal religation man possesses velis nolis a will to real truth, that is, to ground his own being in one form or another, perhaps even upon himself, as in the case of the atheist. Nevertheless, man necessarily possesses that will to truth. And this will to truth unfolds in an act, which has two aspects. On one hand, it is to know intellectively in some form the characteristic of this fundament, in such a way that this intellection is the intellection of the absolutely absolute reality of God; and on the other, it is to have access to it, in a precise from, appropriating to himself that personal reality. This appropriation constitutes a surrender to the personal reality of God, and insofar as true, is precisely faith. It is the concept of intellective surrender to God as the will to truth.

In the third place, posing the problem of what man is and what God is leads us to discuss the problem of God “and” man. In what does this “and” consist? This “and” does not have a copulative, but an implicative characteristic. In {365} his intellective surrender man discovers that his being is formally and constitutively experience of God. To be a human person is a way to be an experience of God, i.e., a tensive experience, one which unfolds itself individually, socially, and historically. To be man is a finite way of being God. And it is in this I with a tensive characteristic that the ultimate and radical transcurrence of religation consists, for anyone who admits the reality of God.

Religation to the power of the real, intellective surrender to God in the will to truth, and the tensive experience of God: these are the three concepts, which express three moments of only one phenomenon, of only one structure, whose intrinsic and formal unity constitutes the theological dimension of man, of man as constitution of the act in which he affirms himself as relatively absolute in the depths of reality insofar as I.