The Violent Reception of Gift
And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.
Matthew 11:12
If being is ontologically a gift, then it follows that creation is an act of love because (1) being is good and (2) it is given to another gratuitously as a pure gift without expectation of reciprocity. This seems fairly straightforward. However, what is sometimes overlooked is the role of the recipient. While the gift is given to the recipient for the recipient’s own sake, the gift might not be fully appreciated or even outright rejected (though necessarily received in the case of being).1 This rejection affects the recipient’s orientation and mode of being in the world, leading to what Kierkegaard calls despair.
Consider, for example, the rejection of the gift of our bodies and modernity’s obsession with bodily autonomy, abortion, and bodily alterations in the form of botox, plastic surgery, transgenderism, transhumanism, and more—all different expressions of despair. We can trace the source of these particular expressions in the conditions that culminated in the cogito, ergo sum. The cogito is a solipsism that shifts the emphasis of our sociality in favor of the “I,” making the “I” prior to even nature itself. Though the cogito was an exercise in methodological doubt, the methodology is often mistaken as an anthropology that construes the “I” as the primary site of reality to the neglect of the other’s existence. But more disastrously, the Cartesian shift loses sight of the self as being before God—that is, the shift reflects the utter failure of grasping the deeper reality that a self without God is metaphysically incoherent.2 One who suffers from the different aforementioned strains of despair by willing to be oneself on one’s own terms, as Kierkegaard puts it, suffers from despair because he or she fails to grasp that he or she is only ever authentic before God.3 A true recognition of authenticity acknowledges our own nature as a necessary given, with a specific body, as a gift. Rejecting the body as gift quickly reveals one as either lost in a despair that does not know he is in despair, or a despair that wills to be other than what one is on his own terms. Thus, such a rejection is characterized by a phenomenological orientation that refuses to accept or receive. Indeed, its refusal is shaped by how he or she believes the gift ought to look. It’s the attitude of, “No, I refuse your gift because of what it says about me and the gratitude it will impose on me.”
This is a delusional belief, born of a hermeneutic of suspicion, that leads one of the opinion that receiving a gift is to commit an affront to one’s freedom. The suspicious mind sees not gift, but power play designed to co-opt freedom and subjugate the donee to the donor’s debt. Thus, after all rationalization has taken place, the self-asserting man declares that, “In refusing the gift, I heroically exercise my agency and secure my freedom.”
The model of the Virgin Mary stands in sharp contrast to the self-asserting man. Mary’s fiat and her primordial openness to the gift etched itself in history with such repercussive effect that it brought in a new order to the cosmos, restoring the ontological privations of Eve’s “no,” causing even the dragon to tremble at the feet of she who gave birth to Jesus Christ. Where our ungrateful recipient, the self-asserting man, recoils in suspicion, Mary’s “yes” displayed freedom par excellence. Her fiat was an act of freedom that birthed freedom personified—the freedom that emptied himself in order to finally shatter the rusting chain of sin and despair, realigning us to seek the Good with a full understanding of its direction, first “in a mirror dimly, but then face to face” (1 Cor 13:12).
Authentic freedom can only come with a vision of the Good, and with Mary’s obedience, the Good entered history incarnate in the flesh. In our darkness the light of Christ shines so that we may see the mis-relation of the self and realign it according to the Good. The fiat-ic act of receiving is not a passive posture but a cooperation with the Logos dwelling in pregnancy, an act of the will to deliberately and forcefully burst through the ego’s enclosure in order to see and bear the fruits of the gift. Paradoxically, it is in the painful struggle of humility, in setting aside our impositions, that we exercise authentic freedom and discipline the self for the proper mode of being: a humble openness to the gift that dwells in us, transforms our freedom, and perfects our nature.
Thus, man by nature is not merely a rational animal but a beloved one made to participate in the divine economy of the gift by loving in turn. Freedom comes when we take on the spiritual epoché of Mary: a receptive openness that, like her fiat, overwhelms the ego’s claims on the Good in order to ponder being truly as a gift wholly outside the self.
The Marian way is extreme and unyielding because it does not compromise with the ego’s hubristic claims on reality. Indeed, the via Maria is an ongoing suspension of the ego’s claims on truth, beauty, and goodness. To continually suspend in the Marian way is to explode the ego’s idols with the violent grace of humility, battering the ego to its knees until it admits the incoherence of the self-without-God and the self-in-spite-of-God. Once the ego has been obliterated by the detonations of grace, out of the rubble emerges a new disposition that delights in the agapic communion of joy that glorifies the risen Christ. So Marian love first begins by way of birth pangs (Rev. 12:1-2) and the sword (Luke 2:35), uniting the cross of self-denial with the lack of Christ’s afflictions (Col. 1:24). Then, after this cruciform clearing, the newly transfigured self may pour its love outward as a libation of agape, loving finally according to the law of the gift.
So again, the reception of the gift is at first a purgatorial clearing of the soul. It moves by rousing the soul violently from its slumber so that it may agonize with Christ in the garden. To participate in the gift of the cross is to continually and viciously die to self, for to die is gain and to live is Christ (Phil. 1:21). This does not entail the self-inflicted wounds of flagellation or extreme physical forms of self-mortification—which itself reflects the ego’s own masochistic attempt to seize the gift according to its warped terms. Instead, it is a movement of kenosis that humiliates so as to humble and painfully unravel the habits of vice. Then out of this de-creation emerges our cooperation with the gift in disciplining our desire for the Good, aided by the supernatural virtues and made lighter in prayer and the sacraments. So long as we live in this world, our lifetime will consist of a constant oscillation between libation and love—that is, it is an ongoing effort to deny in order to receive, and in receiving to give and give joyfully. Thus, in this effort of giving and receiving, we may transform our suffering into joy, our despair into hope, our rejection into love, until finally we behold the fulfillment of the gift face to face in all his beatific glory.
The rejection, of course, doesn’t change our metaphysical participation in God’s being, but instead disorders our mode of participation within him.
This isn’t so much a critique on Descartes as it is an illustration of modernity’s obsession with autonomy and how the “I” has become an idol. An “I” without God is an abstraction that strips away an understanding of being as gift, because such an abstraction creates conditions for an inward curving identity, in curvatus in se, and thus traps itself in solipsism. The conditions of the Cartesian “I” cannot conceive of the self as a gift because it doesn’t even see the giver as an other. Moreover, it constitutes a failure because it assumes that the notion of a self can even be conceived coherently without reference to an other, not only with respect to the self as formed by other creatures but the self also grounding its ontological coherence in our participation in God’s otherness.
The highest form of this despair is found in certain expressions of the Nietzschean will to power, in an Übermensch asserting a self-possessing power without God, and more flimsily Sartre’s assertion that existence precedes essence.