Self and Self-sacrifice

In the first part of his article “Soul of Reciprocity,” Milbank contrasts Cartesian generosity with Christian: “if the cogito is the donum , it is an impoverished donum . Generosity, in Descartes, begins as generosity towards oneself, or rather, as an expansive willing, that already is, auto-effectively, generosity. It is just this Cartesian generosity, which, we have seen, Marion re-works as a pure self-instigating will that must affirm the reality of the gift, and itself as cogiven. If such generosity is, in a second instance, sacrificial, then it is important to realise that a pure self-sacrifice unto utter loss must always dialectically presuppose a prior self-possession altogether outside gift, which may then be subsequently offered.”

Christian sacrifice recognizes no such pre-donated self: Descartes’ idea is “unlike evangelical ecstasy where one originally loses one’s life to gain it, and therefore, there is no self before gift and sacrifice, and yet, just for that reason, there is an original supplemented self that is a return of self to self in the very outgoing.”