Spirit's Gift: The Metaphysical Insight of Claude Bruaire

3. Absolute’s Freedom

C hapter 3 Absolute’s Freedom To enter into the question of man’s existence is to immerse oneself in the mystery of the absolute itself. Every step of Bruaire’s systematic anthropology reveals the impossibility of giving a satisfactory account of who man is if one’s understanding of the absolute is inadequate.1 Although from his very first works Bruaire contends that only a determinate absolute is able to make reason out of man’s existence, his explication of what it means for God to be both “absolute” and “determinate” undergoes a remarkable evolution. Up until the publication of For Metaphysics in 1980, Bruaire’s concept of God as determinate absolute advances following this pattern: first, that God is a self-determinate/self-determining freedom; then, that this self-determination is portrayed as self-donating freedom; lastly, that donation in God is best conceived as self-expressing freedom. Hence, the absolute determines itself, that is to say, it gives itself to itself; it expresses itself. During these years, the concept of gift, which at first is only an intuition prompted by Christian revelation and anthropology, acquires a grounded philosophical expression thanks to the coming together of three decisive concepts in an unconfused but nonetheless inseparable unity : freedom, spirit, and being. Bruaire’s endeavor to articulate these three concepts provides us with some explicit descriptions of God in terms of  1. Xavier Tilliette reminds us that Bruaire himself said, before writing EE, that his anthropology could be considered finished without the metaphysics (Tilliette,“In memoriam,” 240). Nevertheless, my contention is that there are crucial parts of the systematic anthropology and of his concept of the absolute that cannot be fully comprehended without his metaphysics of gift, and vice versa. gift. At first, it seems that this attempt consists of two irreconcilable tracks: the first, absolute as self-determination, seems to be strictly philosophical, whereas the second, the absolute as revealed in Jesus Christ, could give the impression merely of being random incursions into the realm of theology. Nevertheless, the discovery that the logic of spirit should be perceived in terms of a logic of mercy breaks down this dichotomy and makes it possible to grasp absolute spirit in the light of gift. Self-Disclosing Gift One of the first references to the category of donation can be found in Bruaire’s paper “To Know God” (1965).2 Its overall intention is to present the terms in which the idea of God must be thought, while avoiding at all times the Scylla of anthropomorphism and the Charybdis of negative theology. Whereas the former says too little about God, because what is affirmed of him is too close to human nature, the latter, in trying to respect God’s unfathomable mystery, reduces speculative reflection to silence because it posits too large a gulf between God and man.According to Bruaire, what takes place in Christian revelation is distorted in the terms of either of these two positions. In Christian revelation it is God who manifests himself in the person of Jesus Christ; it is a human announcement endowed with universal content. It should, then, be possible to say something meaningful about God without being deceived into thinking that one can completely probe the depths of God’s mystery. This interpretation is rejected by the atheistic claim of the impossibility of God’s intervention in history. This judgment, says Bruaire, arises from an understanding of the absolute that is limited to its etymological sense: ab-solvere, that is to say, “free from something,” understood here as free from any type of relationship, determination, or opposition. Thus, it is impossible to conceptualize the absolute because it is infinitely the complete other, tout Autre. “Accordingly, our words cannot find it”: they are unable to give even a minimally acceptable rendition of it. If this is so, then the opposite is also true: God “cannot encounter us, come to this world, love 2. Bruaire, “Connaître Dieu,” in Dieu aujourd’hui: Semaine des intellectuels catholiques (10–16 mars 1965) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1965), 157–65 (hereafter CD). See also Bruaire, “Démythisation et conscience malheureuse,” Archivio di filosofia 2–3 (1966): 383–93.  Self-Determining Freedom us, save us.”3 In the end, any type of relationship would shatter this concept of an absolute devoid of meaning. Instead, according to Bruaire, if God is perceived as the absolute, he should be...