Act-of-gift in Dryer’s Gift-Ontology

The giver-side actuality of gift names what God is as gratuitous self-communication, without implying any new state, acquired role, or superadded determination in God. In the divine case, what earlier idiom called the “act-of-gift” should now be stated more classically as the one simple divine actuality, the divine plenitude itself, named under the aspect of self-communication. This is not devotional language added after metaphysics. It is a doctrinally governed way of saying that whatever is truly predicated of God in se must be said by non-composition. God is not first an essence and then, secondarily, a giver. Nor is giverhood constituted by creaturely reception or by effects outside God. Rather, God gives because the one simple divine reality is already plenitude, goodness, and living self-communication in itself.

This also means that gift-language must be expressly Trinitarian. The one divine actuality is not an under-personal substrate behind Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, nor a neutral essence to which relations are later attached. In God, relation is not an added link but the very subsisting mode of the one divine essence according to relations of origin. For that reason, the giver-side actuality of gift is not something behind the persons, but the one triune divine life itself: from the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit. Said in classical idiom, this is the one simple divine actuality, identical with the divine essence and subsisting personally in the relations of origin; said under the project’s gift-grammar, it is the same reality named under the aspect of gratuitous self-communication. actus essendi subsistens… See also the Primitive.