spiritual meaning of birth opens up the fourth layer, the theological meaning. This aspect, which is perhaps the most difficult to perceive, is illuminated if we recall the surprise that greets the news of a new child coming into existence. This surprise is, at its core, a signal of the relationship with the ultimate source from which it is given to the child to be. The justice of pointing to this theological meaning (as opposed to forcing an interpretation on a neutral event) is underscored when we reflect that the child is a new person, a new spirit, who is irreducible either to his own parents or to the biological process through which he came into being. Births that do not come from a genuine act of love between a man and a woman do not call into question this experience of wonder; they presuppose it. Moreover, the light of a new existence has within it the capacity to correct from within the meager measure behind its conception. Irreducible to parents or biological laws, the child is born into a solitude that no human companionship, not even that of his own parents, can eliminate. The solitude of this twofold irreducibility is not one of loneliness, however; it is rather a sign of a deeper communion. The child is placed in a dialogue with the ultimate origin of existence, which theology has always expressed through the term “God.” This irreducibility, forming a constitutive element of the person, also indicates that the relationship with God is at the chronological beginning of our existence and also at every moment thereafter. We are not our own. The theological meaning of birth grounds not only the ontological and spiritual meanings, but also, to return to the beginning, the somatic meaning. The body, while expressing the difference from God who is pure spirit, also reveals the divine, original generosity. From within its own finitude, the body reflects divine life through the interpersonal relationships of man and wife, parents and children. Furthermore, our historical existence, precisely as existence in time, images the unmoving movement of the eternal being. Rather than an arc stretching from nothingness to the unknown void, corporeal and historical existence is a movement towards the original giver that contains the hope that our finite “be-ing” may be confirmed in the relation with that giver. Birth, both as the inception of life and a permanent dimension of existence, provides a stance for thinking about the whole: a mystery that illuminates the positivity of finite existing and of being as such.
When we look at the fourfold dimension of the mystery of birth—biological, ontological, spiritual, theological—the complexity and paradoxical nature of the unity of our being emerges. It is complex because we come to be ourselves as the fruit of a nuptial union and, while remaining distinct from our relations with God, parents, and others, we do not exist apart from them. This complexity is present in all four dimensions of the mystery, but we may particularly consider our ontological structure, a dual unity of being and essence. The unity of being is paradoxical because, as we are born into a communion that precedes us, we are born in and to the promise of being, which is fulfilled through a relation with what we are not. The mystery of our being, which is truly given to ourselves and yet incomprehensible without the constitutive relation with the giver, instills in us the desire for the unity we have been given, that is, for the unity of our own being what we are in time, and for the union with those to whom we are entrusted and to whom we are called to entrust ourselves. Thus our ontological structure grounds our desires to know and be known, to love and be loved, to build and to endure. These desires are prompted by and are an expression of our nature: of being born in and to a unity of being that both precedes us and deepens anew through us. Human existing seeks a form that gathers all its various elements into a unity, which, however, it cannot give to itself.
The mystery of birth holds out the possibility of understanding the unity of our being, and of being as such, in terms of gift. Our positivistic culture’s widespread idea that birth, and so finite existence, is merely the fruit of chance or necessity cannot account for the surprise that is proper to the sheer existence of life; the existence of the spirit and its irreducible wholeness. Yet, the meaning of gift is not obvious. To suggest that the unity of our being has the form of gift means that we are not our own, that our “to-be” owes itself most deeply to another. Today there is a great need to retrieve the meaning of creation. Nevertheless, gift as the form of the unity of being means more than the fact that concrete singular beings are created, although this is both important and true. The positivity of being concrete singulars requires examining in what sense being, man, and God (the ultimate source of our birth) are gift; that is, in what sense God is gift in himself and in what sense being and man participate in the divine gift-ness.
Our inquiry cannot stop at considering only the singular being and God in terms of gift. The concept of gift also extends to the spiritual, transitive relation between the original giver, the gift, and the receiver. To examine in what sense being, man, and God are gift requires seeing in what sense the bond that ties them together—while simultaneously preserving their difference—can also be accounted for in terms of gift. If gift indicates the form of unity, unity indicates the permanence of the gift. This permanence is the source and significance of the negation within the term “indissolubility.” In this light, the relation between original giver, gift, and receiver can be viewed in terms of being if it is also viewed in terms of time. Here the modern temptation to juxtapose time and eternity arises, in response to which we can say that if the unity of the concrete singular reveals the permanence of the gift, it is because eternity is the very center of time. The permanence of the gift proper to God, which we call eternity, is the ground of the permanence that is proper to the concrete singular. Rather than the “conditions of possibility” for something to happen, the spatial term “ground” points to the occasioning, sustaining, and ordering in being of the concrete singular. The hoped-for, final confirmation of the singular gift does not appear then as a leap out of time into eternity, but rather as the gratuitous, unexpected, victorious re-giving of the gift of being. Hence, to think of the unity of being as the permanence of the gift permits the relationship between the original giver, the gift, and the receiver, between time and eternity, to emerge in the light of asymmetrical indwelling. The giver makes it possible for the gift and the receiver to be, and it is also up to the giver, not without the participation of the gift/receiver, to confirm the original donation. To remain in being, in the unity of being, is to dwell in the unceasing donation of the gift that God is. Time and eternity are bound up with being because each is the enduring of the gift of being: while eternity is its own beginning, time is the permanent letting the concrete singular be and become itself.
We can now try to formulate what we would like to ponder in this book: gift is the form of the unity of being and unity is the permanence of the gift of being. One point that helps to avoid reducing the horizon of this investigation is that any reflection on the gift from the aspect of action, important as it is, rests on the human being’s capacity to give himself. An account of the act of giving something, whether from God to man, man to God, or among men, calls for some explanation of how the concrete singular, permanently given to itself, participates in the original gift of self not only by further giving but through its very ontological constitution. Given our cultural context, marked as it is by the atheistic claim that fragmentation is more primordial than unity, to fail to give an account of the relationship between esse and essence, between God and the world, and between men in terms of gift would collapse the act of giving into either a technological interpretation of causality and human making or a philosophical hypostatization of human giving. Gift, instead, brings all its richness to bear on the question when it is first thought of as a principle, rather than a “present” that is offered to someone. In other words, to root ethics in ontology allows us to perceive the real newness that an act of giving represents with regard to the ontological gift-structure of the concrete singular.
In these pages, therefore, gift is considered primal. The term “primal” has a twofold meaning: arche, the “permanent principle of origination and ordering,” and the temporal aspect of being “first” in time. Gift, on the one hand, is a permanent source of originating, ordering, and restless rest. Reading the second connotation in light of the first we can say that gift is, on the other hand, an ever-new beginning—and not simply the commencement of being. Although this perception of gift and of the nature of the unity of being in terms of gift is radical and comprehensive, it does not propose a system built on a concept (gift). As the Hegelian project demonstrates, the attempt to elevate a concept as adequate to the whole is liable to end up on the shores of nihilism despite the best of intentions. The following reflections wish to offer, then, rather than a system, a synthesis of the type of unity