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§ 3

THE ACCESS OF MAN TO GOD

The accessibility of God, we said, is not the same as the access of man to God. However, this does not mean that the access is an extrinsic relation between man and God, as if God were an object, which man may or may not propose to reach. Just the opposite. The access is an intrinsic moment to man, precisely and formally because the inter-personal presence of God in man is the presence of a God in and by Himself accessible. Consequently, the accessibility of God is already an inchoate access of man. God is found “in" things and only in them. From this it follows that the transcendence of God in things is already an access to God. But, let us add, an access only inchoate. Then we ask ourselves, in the first place, what is this access insofar as inchoate, and in the second place, what is the fullness of its nature.

I. The presence of God in man is inter-personal and occurs, as we have seen, in a dynamic tension. This tension, like every tension and especially the inter-personal, is a unity, which encompasses its two termini with the tension. We have seen in the preceeding pages what this tension is from the point of view of God: it is a manifestative tension in the form of notification and naked presence as “towards”. But in this tension man himself is included. Man reaches towards things determined by the power of the real; it is this power, which carries us religatingly to the constitution of our {195} I. This power is founded in the reality of God in things. And that involves three essential consequences.

1. In religation we are carried by the power of the real. Now, the fundament in things of this, their power of the real, is the formal, and constitutive presence of God in them. Whence it follows that, in the final analysis, to be carried by the power of the real is to be carried by God. It is God who has, so to speak, the first word in this going along carried by Him. This tension, which is founded in God encompases man tensely: God is the “pre-tension”, which carries us towards Him.

2. In this “pre-tension” we proceed towards things dragged by the power of the real in them, that is, by God himself. With respect to us, the inter-personal tension acquires the character of a “dragging”. Dragging is the specifically human moment of the tension in which we are formally constituted. Because of this the accessibility of God is at one and the same time the dragging with which we proceed to God in the “pre-tension”.

3. This power of the real, which religatingly makes us be, is the power of “the” reality in all real things. And this power is founded on the fact that God is present formally in them without being identical to them, i.e., is founded on a God transcendent “in” things. It follows that since we are religated to the power of the real in things, in them God drags us toward Himself precisely when going to things and being actually in them. By being transcendent in things, God makes me transcend; He is, if I may be permitted the expression, “transcendentifying”. We previously saw that to transcend is to have each thing take us to its own transcending depth. Now, this transcending is a movement, which determines each thing in us precisely and formally {196} by the constituting presence of God in it. The movement of transcending is, therefore, a movement determined by the transcendence of God itself in each thing. God is in this dimension, not only transcendent but transcendentifying.

By virtue of these three concepts taken together, i.e., by being pre-tension, dragging, and transcendentifying, the accessibility of God is eo ipso an inchoate access. Essentially, the three concepts constitute the theological essence of religation. In fact, religation is the incontrovertible fact that we are tied to the power of the real as fundamentality of our I. But having known intellectively that this power is an intrinsic and formal seat and vehicle of God, it becomes clear that the essence of religation is this inchoate access, which constitutes the accessibility of God in things, and above all in ourselves. Every man inchoatively has access to God through God. Saint Augustine wrote that God could say to man: “You would not have searched for me if I had not found you”. It is true. But it is a partial truth, because it is not primarily the case of a search, but of a true access, however inchoate, but still a true access. Whether they know it or not, all men are inchoatively accessing God.

II. This access is, as I mentioned, only an inchoate access. But the fundamentality of God is, as we saw, personal donation. By virtue of this, man has access to God religatingly in a tension, which has a very precise characteristic: a tension, which is the human correlate of the donating tension, i.e., the tension in surrender. Surrender corresponds to donation. The fullness in the form of access of man to God is “surrender”. God gives Himself to us in {197} things as a “towards” in the form of notification and naked presence. That is the reason why the fullness of the form of access to God is to give ourselves to Him in a “towards”: this is the surrender we are discussing.

All men, as I said, are in an inchoate access to God. But this inchoate access does not unfold into a full access in each man. For this to occur, it is necessary to have formal knowledge that God exists as an absolutely absolute reality in His whole absolute concretion. This knowledge is precisely what was justified in the previous chapter. Founded in this knowledge, i.e., in the situation of a man, which has intellectively known the reality of God, is how we bring about the surrender to Him. As I have just pointed out, this surrender is not identical to the inchoate access; but nor could it exist unless inscribed within that access and facilitated by it. The surrender, the fullness of the access, is nothing but the unfolding of the inchoate access. The surrender is not the primary access of man to God, but is its full unfolding. Paraphrasing St. Augustine, we might think that God could say to man: “You would not surrender to me, if I had not brought you to me”. We then ask ourselves, What is the unfolding of the inchoate access into its fullness of access?

In order to enter into this we must pay attention to three points: What is surrender?, What are its moments?, and What is the character of the union with God through tension in the surrender?

1. What is the surrender? Negatively put: we must erase the idea, nefarious for many reasons, that to surrender is to abandon oneself. To abandon oneself would be to escape from oneself; at best, it would be to trust that God accomplish things by Himself, without my intervention. This would constitute a gigantic act of laziness or desperation. Surrender is just the opposite. Above all, it is an {198} attitude, and a positive action, active. To the action of God donating reality, man responds with a positive action in which the person is not taken to God; rather, the person by himself accepts his being taken in an active and positive way, i.e., he “goes to God”. While going to real things he surrenders to God who is in them, constituting them formally, i.e., giving reality from Himself. In things, man surrenders to what is transcendent in them. As I have just said, man “would not go” to things unless he were “brought”. Because of this, the going is nothing but positive acceptance of being brought, i.e., its unfolding. Being brought by God, man does not drift with the current, but by rowing in reality goes towards God. Man makes his I, his relatively absolute being, surrendering himself to the absolutely absolute reality, to God.

But let us not forget: God and His donation are personal. Therefore, the surrender is not just a positive action, but a strictly inter-personal action, which is formally directed from the human person, who is an I, towards the person of God. To the personal donation, which is the founding presence of God in things and in man, the human person responds with that special form of donation, which is the surrender of the self. I said that going towards God is the unfolding of the being brought to Him. Now we can see why: the going towards God is donation; and since donation is founded upon the inchoate donation, the surrender is the unfolding of the latter. How?

2. The surrender of the human person to God has different moments. Here we encounter again, for the thousandth time, the three dimensions: the power of the real, religation, and God himself, i.e., ultimateness, possibilitation, {199} and impellence. But each time they acquire a clearer and more precise profile.

We already saw that, as absolutely absolute reality, God is the fundament of reality as radical ultimateness, as possibility of possibilities, and as destination of my absolute being. These are three characteristics, which pertain to God qua God. Hence, by virtue of this, the surrender of man to God has three rigorously determined moments.

A) To surrender to God is, above all, a going towards God as absolutely ultimate reality. In this respect, the surrender acquires a concrete characteristic: the veneration. To venerate does not primarily mean to obey, that is something derivative. What is primary in veneration is that kind of recognition of how relative I am, when facing the absolutely absolute person, which God is. It is like a disappearance before God. This is what the verb latreúo expresses, “to adore”. To adore is to venerate the unfathomable plenitude of this ultimate reality. Naturally, in this veneration all the moral moments are involved, which we need not recall now. But what is radical in each of them is the veneration in the sense just explained. While going towards real things, man bows before the reality of things and in them venerates God as personally transcendent. To the donation of reality man responds with veneration for the donor: this is the essence of personal adoration.

B) Man surrenders to God not only as ultimateness, but also as supreme possibilitator. In this respect surrender has a specific moment: to supplicate. Man not only venerates God in adoration, but person-to-person, supplicates God for the possibilities of his life. As I mentioned before, God is the donor of possibilities. This is {200} the essence of prayer. Prayer is not, in the formal sense, a formulary; it is a supplicating surrender of the mind to God. Adoration can also be called “prayer”; but I prefer to reserve the term for the acts of supplication. Man supplicates God in things and with things. He does not leave things aside to proceed towards God; it is in things themselves, with all their richness and with all their difficulties, where man surrenders to God in supplication so that God founds in them possibilities favorable to him. Prayer is only possible by this transcendence of God in things.

C) Man surrenders to God as supreme impellence. Perhaps this is what most clearly reveals the positive character of the surrender. Man rests on God as the strength of his life. That is not the strength that I may ask of God in order to do what I must do, but the very strength, the firm and strong support in which God consists. Indeed, man delivers himself to God in this aspect as refuge, not to act but to be. To surrender is to accept refuge. Of course, from this refuge we inexorably derive the assistance to act. But this is something derivative: what is primary is the surrender to God as refuge of my being.

To the three characteristics of God religating, viz. as ultimate, possibilitating, and impelling reality, there correspond three moments of the surrender of man to God: veneration, supplication, and refuge. It is through this triple aspect that the unitary and simple act of surrender by the human person to the divine person proceeds. They are three moments in some way different, but essentially inseparable. Any veneration, for example, is a supplication and a going to God as refuge, etc. What happens is that in each case one characteristic can predominate over the others. And {201} precisely because these moments of surrender are founded in the acceptance of the reality of God as ultimate, possibilitating, and impelling, this surrender constitutes the unfolding of the inchoate access. Essentially, the inchoate access is religation itself; the surrender is nothing but the unfolding of religation.

3. What is the nature of the unity between man and God in the dynamic tension of surrender? One might think that this unity is the result of the action of God and the reaction of man; in such case the unity would be a “correlation”. But this is absurd. Because not only is the unity not correlation, but on the contrary (if one still wishes to talk about correlation) it is the correlation, which is the result of the unity. And this is so because it is not the case of a unity between just any two realities, but between two very precise realities, between two persons. It is a unity from person to person. And since we are dealing with a donation of God and of a surrender of man, in which God himself has the initiative (God is pre-tension), it follows that in one form or another, this unity of donation and surrender is the unity of personal causality.

The unity of divine donation and human surrender belongs to this type of personal causality. More than union, it is communion between the human person and God. Man surrenders to God, accepting his own personal being from a donating God, who is also personal, and who donates my reality and my being. The unity between donating God and surrender is, therefore, a functionality of the real qua real, and for this reason, is strict causality. Furthermore, this causality is a functionality between God “by being who He is” and each man “by being who he is”. Because of this, the dynamic tension is not only causality, but inter-personal causality. And this is essential {202} for the correct understanding of the whole theme of the theological in man. Henceforth let this point be clearly noted.

A) The inter-personal causality of the theological tension is not a causality of two persons who are, in principle, strangers to each other. God and man are certainly different, but they are not strangers. God, as we indicated, is intrinsically and formally present in each real thing, transcendent “in” it. Therefore, His presence in the reality of each human person is also intrinsic and formal to it. It follows that in the inter-personal dynamic tension, God and each human person are not extrinsic to each other, but just the opposite: God qua person is intrinsic to each human personal reality. The causality of the “donation-surrender”, consequently, is not extrinsic, but intrinsic; it is a functionality from within human reality, not from outside of it. Furthermore, it is functionality from what is most radically internal to the person, since it stems from what the person is qua reality. God, as I pointed out, is transcendent “in” things and therefore is a person transcendent “in” the human person. His action in man concerns the very root of the vital act of the person, the act of the constitution of his I. The person of God is, if I may be permitted the expression, a formal moment of man making his I himself. Precisely because of this, it might appear that man not only makes his whole being, but that he does it completely. And this is not true. Yes, man makes his whole being, but does not make it totally qua person in contradistinction to the divine person. Each real thing includes in its reality the reality of God. Now, reality is dynamic by itself. And it follows that by including the reality of God, any real thing and specially the human person, formally includes {203} in its own dynamism the dynamicity of the divine person. Because of this, while it is indeed true that man makes his whole being (since each man by being his-own is his own reality), he nonetheless does not make it totally on his own because it is reality, and therefore it is dynamicity “in” the reality, and “in” the dynamicity of God. The motion of God is not a second motion added to the one that starts from myself; rather the motion that starts from myself is already formally and in itself, a motion of God. Correlatively, from the point of view of man, to ask help from God, for example, is not to ask help from someone who is outside and is asked to bring help, but rather to ask for something like an intensification of one who is already present in ourselves, and in which we are radically dynamic already; it is to ask help from a God who is transcendent in me. To resort to God is to resort to my own transcendent depth. When surrendering to God, man surrenders to what is most radically his-own. To avoid false interpretations I direct attention to what I explained above concerning the reality of God as the transcendental depth proper to each real thing.

B) As with any personal causality, such inter-personal causality is rigorously metaphysical. And this acquires its greatest reality when referring to the inter-personal causality of God and each man. The dynamic tension between God and man is formally constituted by those phenomena we might tend to consider as puerile sentimentalities. But no. They are the very forms of God’s causality in the life of the human person. Conversely, any form of human functionality with respect to the divine person inexorably occurs in accordance with these forms. And since this causality is, as we have just shown, radically intrinsic to {204} the human person, it follows that these functions are moments of the intrinsic and formal dynamism in which the life of the human person unfolds from itself. This is due to the fact that one of the two persons, the divine, is formally interior to the human, and therefore, the help God provides stems from the very depths of the human person. To help, to console, to listen, etc., are not mere psychic phenomena, but are the metaphysical forms through which God is constituting me in my being. Because of this, each man, whether he knows it or not, has the experience of God. This is not the empirical experience of an object, but a metaphysical experience of the fundamentality of his personal being. This experience is in itself the experience of God. God is something experienced. Correlatively, man, as we saw, surrenders to God-donor in veneration, supplication and refuge. These are the forms of inter-personal causality between God and man, from the point of view of man.

Summing up, donation-surrender is the metaphysical structure of the inter-personal causality between God and man, in the theological tension of his life. In this causality, therefore, the access of man to God qua God takes place. It is an access that, as we have seen, has three moments. Furthermore, this access, with all its moments, can and does have several forms: one can access to God through several directions and aspects. Then we ask, What is the radical dimension of surrender, which underlies all these forms and directions, i.e., What is the formal root of the surrender, of the access of man to God?


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APPENDIX 2

PERSONAL CAUSALITY AND MORALITY

Classical Metaphysics and positive Science instantly react against the idea of personal causality. Science, because it understands cause as an antecedent, linked to the presumed consecutive effect by a law. Does it make any sense then to apply causality to the personal unity of donation and surrender? Laplace said that in his science he had never felt any need to appeal to the God-hypothesis. But the fact is that Laplace’s arena is physics and astronomy, sciences with which, apparently, it is obvious that God has nothing to do, in the sense that He does not intervene in the equations of the phenomena. But, is it equally obvious, at least with respect to appearences, to say that we never feel the necessity to appeal to God when it is a question concerning man and his life? The matter does not appear as obvious precisely because the inter-personal texture, and that one proper to each person, do not have the form of law of the type, which physics calls “causal”. But then one thing is clear: “cause” is not synonymous with “law”. On the other hand, classical Metaphysics is based on the four causes of Aristotle. That metaphysics will not deny (how could it) that the action of God in pre-tension may be causal; but it will strain to interpret this action as an efficient and final causality. And this appears inadequate to me, not because there is no causality, but because what is unclear is the idea of causality itself. By repeated subdivision of causality into four causes, causality as such has not been conceptualized {206} adequately. Now, to my way of thinking, as I have repeatedly stated, causality is functionality of the real qua real. And this opens the field to many other types of strict causation, which can be fitted into Aristotle’s four causes only with great difficulty, and in a deficient manner.

The fact is that the causality of science and that of classical Metaphysics is a causality among things, among “what” things are. But from person to person there is a functionality, and therefore a strict causality, among persons, among “who” the persons are. It is not a mere application of classical causality to persons, but a type of causation irreducible to those of classical Metaphysics, and still less reducible to the concept of scientific law. This is what I call personal causality. However repugnant it may be to natural science, to my way of thinking there is a causality among persons, which is not given in nature.

In life there are numerous inter-personal “relations” irreducible to classical causality. When I am with a friend or with a person I love, the influence of the friendship or love is not reduced to mere psycho-physical causation. It is not only an influence by what the friend is, but by the friend for being who he is. Likewise, the communion of persons is something toto cælo different from a social union or unity, etc. To this order of personal causality belongs, above all, everything moral. That man may have a moral dimension, is something that belongs to his “physical” reality. Virtue is certainly not something that man has by nature, but it is something more than just a value; it is a real and physical appropriation of certain possibilities {207} for living. That is to say, it is a moment of my personal being, of my personality. And it is precisely this which, to my way of thinking, constitutes the moral dimension in man, i.e., “the” moral in man. It is unnecessary for man to have a particular moral virtue, but it is physically inexorable that he have one. Which means that “the” moral is a “physical” dimension of man. The moral is physical in its own way. Whatever is “the” morality, in the sense of values, rights, and duties, is only possible upon the foundation of “the” moral in man. There is moral good only because man is moral. Furthermore, each different morality is but an articulation of that inexorable human dimension: the moralities are inscribed in the moral. Now, this means that the moral is not found in the naked substantive reality of man, i.e., in what man is individually and specifically, but rather in his personized nature. Man is moral reality because he is nature, personal substantivity. Because of this, the so-called “moral causality” is strictly and formally personal causality. And the same must be said, to the greatest degree, of religation.

Science and classical Metaphysics had a tendency to see a psychological phenomenon in friendship, for example; the metaphysical structure of human realities would be anterior to such phenomena. However, to my way of thinking, this is not so. Continuing with the example mentioned, friendship is a metaphysical modality of inter-personal causality. Conversely, any person, in whatever measure he turns towards another person, is exercising a personal causality whose metaphysical modes are precisely and formally friendship, companionship, counseling, etc. In classical causality, collision, pressure, attraction, etc., are the modes of exercising physical causality. In personal causality {208} these modes are friendship, companionship, support, etc. To my way of thinking, there can never be enough emphasis on this theme of personal causality, and its metaphysical modes. It is a central theme in any metaphysics.