Gift and the Unity of Being
Antonio López
foreword by
John Milbank
GIFT AND THE UNITY OF BEING
Veritas 11
Copyright © 2014 Antonio López. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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isbn 13: 978-1-62032-667-1
eisbn 13: 978-1-63087-041-6
Cataloging-in-Publication data:
López, Antonio, 1968–
Gift and the unity of being / Antonio López ; foreword by John Milbank.
xviii + 350 p. ; 23 cm. —Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
isbn 13: 978-1-62032-667-1
Veritas 11
1. Gifts—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Philosophical theology. I. Milbank, John. II. Title. III. Series.
bt751.3 .l67 2014
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
VERITAS
Series Introduction
“. . . the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)
In much contemporary discourse, Pilate’s question has been taken to mark the absolute boundary of human thought. Beyond this boundary, it is often suggested, is an intellectual hinterland into which we must not venture. This terrain is an agnosticism of thought: because truth cannot be possessed, it must not be spoken. Thus, it is argued that the defenders of “truth” in our day are often traffickers in ideology, merchants of counterfeits, or anti-liberal. They are, because it is somewhat taken for granted that Nietzsche’s word is final: truth is the domain of tyranny.
Is this indeed the case, or might another vision of truth offer itself? The ancient Greeks named the love of wisdom as philia, or friendship. The one who would become wise, they argued, would be a “friend of truth.” For both philosophy and theology might be conceived as schools in the friendship of truth, as a kind of relation. For like friendship, truth is as much discovered as it is made. If truth is then so elusive, if its domain is terra incognita, perhaps this is because it arrives to us—unannounced—as gift, as a person, and not some thing.
The aim of the Veritas book series is to publish incisive and original current scholarly work that inhabits “the between” and “the beyond” of theology and philosophy. These volumes will all share a common aspiration to transcend the institutional divorce in which these two disciplines often find themselves, and to engage questions of pressing concern to both philosophers and theologians in such a way as to reinvigorate both disciples with a kind of interdisciplinary desire, often so absent in contemporary academe. In a word, these volumes represent collective efforts in the befriending of truth, doing so beyond the simulacra of pretend tolerance, the violent, yet insipid reasoning of liberalism that asks with Pilate, “What is truth?”—expecting a consensus of non-commitment; one that encourages the commodification of the mind, now sedated by the civil service of career, ministered by the frightened patrons of position.
The series will therefore consist of two “wings”: (1) original monographs; and (2) essay collections on a range of topics in theology and philosophy. The latter will principally by the products of the annual conferences of the Centre of Theology and Philosophy (www.theologyphilosophycentre .co.uk).
Conor Cunningham and Peter Candler, Series editors
To David L. Schindler,
in friendship
Non per avere a sè di bene acquisto,
ch’esser non può, ma perchè suo splendore,
potesse, risplendendo, dir ‘Subsisto’,
in sua etternità di tempo fore,
fuor d’ogni altro comprender, come i piacque,
s’aperse in nuovi amor l’etterno amore.
Not (for it cannot be) that he should gain
good for himself, but that, shining, his resplendence
might utter “I exist” beyond
all time in his eternity, beyond
confining space, as pleased him,
the eternal love opened into new loves.
Dante, Paradiso, XXIX, 13–18
Foreword
John Milbank
Today it would be difficult for any one theologian to write a complete, new Summa. Yet in this wonderful book, Antonio López offers us no less than a short, indicative Summa theologiae for our times, which points the way to a new theological and philosophical synthesis.
This synthesis pivots round the concept of “gift.” This is no arbitrary, idiosyncratic choice on Fr. López’s part, because today, to a remarkable degree, much academic and practical thinking is converging round this theme. Ever since Marcel Mauss, anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have come more and more to realize that human society as such is composed by gift-exchange before it is further cemented by state authority and economic contract. Increasingly it is acknowledged that this remains at bottom true for advanced and modern societies as well as for primitive ones. In consequence, both secular and Catholic social teachings have started to pay renewed attention to gratuitous exchange or reciprocity. It is realized that this unavoidable reality has been undermined by the impersonalism of much modern thinking, and that its recognition and restoration are crucial to solving our contemporary social and economic problems.
At the same time, modern philosophy has been much concerned with the “givenness” of reality and has sometimes understood this givenness as “gift,” either in ontological or in phenomenological terms.
Yet here we can note a certain irony. Often the social discourse about the gift has been secular and has allowed that a gift, as a gift, may paradoxically require a return, rendering gift-giving something that always assumes a relational context. On the other hand, the philosophical and sometimes theological discussions of the gift have frequently insisted on a unilateral purism that denies that a true gift can, of itself, assume any return or even reception, nor exist genuinely within a context of preestablished relationship. In consequence, the gift as “time” or as the ethical imperative is deemed to be at once a transcendental condition for all of reality, all of knowing and ethical action, and yet as “impossible” in terms of actual realization. Either this circumstance is regarded as a ground for postmodern skepticism, or else for a neo-Plotinian mysticism of that which lies supposedly “beyond being.”
However, another group of theologians, less publicized in the Anglo-Saxon academy and including Benedict XVI, has developed an understanding of the gift in reciprocalist terms that can be much more related to the realism of the anthropological and sociological understandings of gift as gift-exchange.
Their efforts are brought to a new height of analytic sophistication in the current book, which is nevertheless commendably clear and