If with Aristotle we acknowledge that the “to be” of a singular being involves a limited participation in act (being-at-work-staying-itself) and, with Aquinas, that form receives esse while at the same time essence limits esse, then the “to be” of every being is this ongoing communication of esse that makes an essence be while, at the same time, esse is received by the essence that esse causes to be. The unity of essence and esse that constitutes every created being is a gift given to the concrete singular that remains in being inasmuch as it ontologically participates in its own being given—this is also why the “singular” gift is perceived in its wholeness only when its relation with God is affirmed. Here we can return to the understanding of act as a complete and open principle. Esse and essence, Schmitz clarifies, are “radically open to each other in the constitution of a single entity. They do not achieve this unity by themselves. If God’s creative act is left out of the picture, it is impossible to explain how a non-existent and merely possible essence can determine the creature’s act of existence.” Each principle is incomplete in itself. It needs the other to be in one concrete singular. Thus, Schmitz concludes, “Each principle is inherently implicated in the other through the causal activity of the First Cause, and by a subordination of the one (potency) to the other (act) rather than by a reciprocity of two complete principles.”107
Interpreting the singular’s unity in terms of gift as the relation between esse and essence requires acknowledging a certain dependency of act on potency. Is it not the case that this relative “dependency” of act on potency, or, in the earlier expression, the “received act,” eliminates the principle of act? Do the mutual dependence of esse and essentia and their asymmetrical reciprocity—that esse is limited by essence, and so receives it in itself, and that essence is actualized by esse while limiting it—jeopardize act altogether? Hegel, in fact, contended that what we here consider an asymmetrical reciprocity between esse and essence, rather than expressing the gift-ness of the concrete singular being, is merely an expression of the law of contradiction. Contradiction, according to Hegel, is abhorred by common thinking. It thus tends to disguise contradiction under “the process of relating and comparing.”108 Yet Hegel claims that everything is “inherently contradictory.” Not by chance, contradiction plays a pivotal role in Hegel’s system: if in the first part of his Science of Logic, the logic of being, contradiction is presented as infinity, in the second, the logic of essence, it is contradiction that illumines the livingness of anything, and hence of the spirit as such.109 The universal, “abstract self-identity is not as yet a livingness” because life is the “power to hold and endure the contradiction within it.”110 Without contradiction there is no movement, only dead identity. “Only when the manifold terms have been driven to the point of contradiction do they become active and lively towards one another, receiving in contradiction the negativity which is the indwelling pulsation of self-movement and spontaneous activity.”111 To the terms Hegel uses (e.g., infinite-finite, father-son) we could add act-potency, esse-essence. The gift-ness of the concrete singular and its sheer dynamic, in his view, would not be anything but the denial of one by the other. Contradiction, Hegel contends, does not indicate imperfection or a defect to be eliminated. On the contrary, it is that which permits absolute activity. While it is undoubtedly fundamental that, as Hegel indicates, in a certain sense a relation always goes both ways—and hence there has to be what we call asymmetrical reciprocity—what is contrary to our view is that the unity’s liveliness of the singular is owed not to the singular’s nature as gift but to the power of the negative. Hegel claims that every thing and notion “is essentially a unity of distinguished and distinguishable moments, which, by virtue of the determinate, essential difference, pass over into contradictory moments.”112 The resolution draws the negated moments into a new sphere in such a way that the spirit reaches its fullness. On this path to its own completeness, one discovers that “the truth is that the absolute is, because the finite is the inherently self-contradictory opposition, because it is not.”113
Hegel indeed ponders deeply the “noughting” that creation ex nihilo indicates. Nevertheless, by making negativity the pulsating center of the movement of the absolute spirit, as the theological a priori of his philosophy requires, he seems to fall into the unilateral thought he so strenuously criticizes. In Hegel, the movement of the absolute spirit is simply erotic and not agapic. That is to say, absolute spirit, beginning with the emptiness that contains the promise of a fulfillment, posits from itself the difference that is then absorbed by the unity of the absolute Idea. From the beginning, all the way to the Cross, and back to the absolute spirit by means of the spirit within the absolute spirit, absolute spirit does not know an agapic love, that is, the affirmation of the other’s irreducibility. Contrary to Hegel, we can say that the gift of the singular being, its very identity, is perceived in its wholeness when the difference that traverses every being—and which allows us to say that, before God, creatures are indeed nothing—is the expression of a fullness that does not need another to be itself. For Hegel, instead, difference is the progressive and necessary fulfillment of an empty beginning. The fullness of the creative origin, as we see it, since it is the union of eros and agape, can and does decide against existing for itself alone. Difference—in the singular beings and between them and God—should thus be thought of as the gift’s availability to receive and to give. This availability is a permanent dimension of act.114
If our understanding of gift is correct, we can note with F. Ulrich that the difference the gift of being establishes between God and the world does not reside so much in the difference between divine “esse” and esse commune, for the latter also remains simple and complete, but rather, as Aquinas says, in the “non-subsistent” character of esse commune. What this adjective reveals of the dual unity of the created singular (esse-essence) is precisely its constitutive relation with the primordial giver. Non-subsistency points to the mysterious, ineffable wonder of being given to be, of depending on and belonging to the source. The positive understanding of the difference between God and the cosmos, which does not eliminate the difference or read it as contradiction, depends on the underlying idea one has of God, man, and the relationship between them. If absolute act is conceived according to the ideal that is perfect, self-contained, self-thinking thought, potency will always remain a deficiency, and the human being will always be trapped in the attempt to imitate an imaginary, self-subsistent God. If, instead, the one God is, as we saw, the richer unity (koinonia) of eros and agape, capable of creating another who is different from itself, then potency, rather than “something” left behind once esse is given and potency actualized, becomes the singular’s ongoing availability to be confirmed in being.
6. The Singular’s Perseity
The previous sections attempted to show how the category of gift can explain the dual unity of esse and essence in the concrete singular, while it also reveals the asymmetrical reciprocity between the two poles, thereby offering an account of both the contingency and the necessity proper to each created being. We need now to ponder how the perseity (esse per se, ousia) of the concrete singular can be considered in terms of gift. This reflection on substance and its relationship to the other categories that intrinsically inhere in it (traditionally called quantity, quality, relation) intends to show that the singular is both completely given to itself (esse ab) and at