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, no strings attached. 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 nonetheless 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, and transhumanism—all different strains of despair. We can trace the genealogy of this despair in its manifestation of cogito, ergo sum—a solipsistic reading that affirms the I as the most real mode of being as opposed to being-with-others-before-God.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 reject the authentic self before God.3 This authentic self is given a specific nature, a specific body, as a gift. Rejecting the body as a gift affects one’s mode of orientation and throws him or her into despair.4 It is a rejection of the gift in favor of a phenomenological orientation that refuses to accept or receive. Instead, 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 might turn me into and the gratitude it will impose on me.”
This is a delusion: a belief, shaped by the hermeneutic of suspicion, that the reception of the gift is an affront to one’s freedom. This suspicion sees the gift as a power play designed to co-opt freedom, subjugating the donee to the donor’s debt ands leads to the rationalization that, “My very act, in refusing your gift, is an exercise of agency that preserves my freedom.”
Now contrast this with Mary’s fiat. Her fiat, her radical openness to the gift, had cosmic consequences that restored the ontological privations of Eve’s “no,” crushing the serpent’s head as the dragon wails and gnashes his teeth. Whereas the ungrateful recipient recoils in suspicion, Mary’s “yes” displays freedom par excellence. Her fiat was an act of freedom that birthed freedom for all—the freedom that emptied himself in order to shatter the chains 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).
We become free when we are able to see, free from the blindness of darkness, the darkness of the sinful ego lost in despair. This fiat-ic act of receiving reveals that it is not passive but instead a cooperation with the Logos dwelling in pregnancy, an act of the will to deliberately and forcefully set aside the ego’s selfish wants 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 given so that the gift may work on us and transform our freedom.
Thus, man by nature is not merely a rational animal but a beloved animal, one who is made to participate in the divine economy of the gift he has received by loving. We become free when we take on the spiritual epoché of Mary: a receptive openness that, like her fiat, overwhelms the ego’s claims to the good in order to ponder being as it truly is: a gift.
The Marian way is extreme and unyielding. For us, her way calls for an ongoing, relentless suspension of the ego’s claims on truth, beauty, and goodness.5 It is a mode of being that explodes the ego’s idols and delusions through the forceful act of humility, battering the ego to its knees so that it admits its inadequate vision of self-without-God, and so that man may participate in grace’s violent disruption of despair’s resistance—and yet in the rubble of its destruction, grace rebuilds anew and restores us all in communion in the joy and glory of the resurrected Christ. Thus, Marian love is excruciating: to endure birth pangs (Rev. 12:1-2), the sword piercing the heart (Luke 2:35), and Christ’s crucifixion—to participate in what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Col. 1:24) so that we may be realigned and reborn in Christ as a transfigured self before God.
The reception of the gift is to will the unbearable burden of the cross, made bearable by the searing gift of grace. To will the cross is to be roused violently from our slumber so that we may agonize with Christ in the garden. In this life, 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 recognition of self-emptying kenosis, that humility requires humiliation, the painful unraveling of the habits of vice, and the disciplining of desire so that we may live authentically, realigned in truth. This is our cooperation with the gift, and it is made lighter in our practice of charity (caritas), prayer, and participation in the sacraments. Thus, in doing this, we condition ourselves to participate in the cross in a deeper way, participating in the divine life by transforming our suffering into joy, our despair into hope, our rejection into love, until we finally see the gift face to face in all his beatific glory.
The rejection doesn’t change the necessity of our dependence the actus essendi, but instead disorders our mode of participation within it.
This is not necessarily a knock on Descartes, but rather serves as an illustration of modernity’s obsession with the primacy of the I and the idol of the autonomous I. An I without God is incapable of seeing being as a gift because it is curved inward on itself, in curvatus in se, and trapped in its own solipsism. It cannot see gift because it doesn’t even see the giver as an other, seeing only itself in its solipsistic mirror.
The highest expressions of this despair is found in the Nietzschean will to power, in the fantasy of the Übermensch asserting a limitless self without God, and Sartre’s assertion that existence precedes essence.
To be precise, this rejection of the body as a gift is a species of despair, not despair in itself.
By the “Marian way,” I mean adopting her receptive fiatic disposition as our specific struggle to maintain it. I clarify this to avoid any suggestion that Mary struggled against egotistic temptations or had to suppress concupiscence, since by virtue of the Immaculate Conception, her nature was entirely free from disordered inclinations.