In the Beginning was the Gift… A Marginal Note on God Without Being

Abstract

IA gift implies a giving and a giver distinct from the gift. But what if the giver is all giving? What if the gift and the giver is one? What if the giving alone names the giver? But surely the giver must first in some sense exist before it can be understood to act as giver (actio sequitur esse, said the old manuals that now languish in the deepest stackrooms of our libraries). But what if the esse is essentially agere, actio?This line of inquiry has surfaced for me once again in reading Jean-Luc Marion’s book (as presented in the University of Chicago translation), resuming a meditation that had its first airing in a paper prepared for the 1990 conference of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain. The paper was entitled ‘Celtic Creation Spirituality,’ and it tried to identify the understanding of God and creation as shown in the Carmina Gadelica of Alexander Carmichael and the people of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the 19th century, and as it remained in my memory from my own boyhood in the South-West of Ireland. I felt that the common faith of all these people could be summed up in the Johannine variant: ‘In the beginning was the gift and the gift was with God and the gift was God’. My reading of Jean-Luc Marion’s brilliant and challenging book has pushed me towards recalling that icon of the creator that was/is at the centre of Celtic Christianity and also at the centre of Jean-Luc Marion’s thinking.