Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson
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of seeing what is there to be seen, but which is rarely seen at all: the divine presence. Like the characters in The Idiot, these are The Ways, given to those who have forgotten by condition the un-reflexive love, so that futurity cannot be liberation but only the fatal flaw, the hamartia which casts a long shadow:
Things are now as they are;
they will be fulfilled in what is fated;
neither burnt sacrifice nor libation
of offerings without fire
will soothe intense anger away.56
With the exceptions of Roghozin and Nastassya who race towards it in knowledge, every other character attempts “to avoid the unavoidable fatalism—the inevitable inevitability of narrative.”57 Only Myshkin for a time is freed from the need for demonstration, from the need to accept that God is not self-evident. As a demonstration catering to the fatal soul, to those retired to the secondary act of the natural law and its futurity, the demonstrations provide a reminding certainty of God’s presence, and a certainty of their own dispossession within the mystery.
The Five Ways demonstrate God because they show that the stretching forth of the will requires union, and requires it to return to what has been forgotten when it first claimed its own im-positional supernaturality. When this imposition occurs, that imprint of the eternal law is then understood to us in a “general and confused way.”58 We are in but not of the world by way of alienation and the weight lies in that “not-of” without reference to the in union with the world. How we are “not-of” the world cannot be illuminated until we recover what places us in. Our placement in the world is not accidental and thus it too must offer something more than a mere starting block to our supernatural status, left behind as we ascend and aspire to our nature, where at best we become coaches but not players, little gods but no longer “divine playthings.”59 For all those aspirations and ascensions are the makings of missing the mark. Only the idiot does not commit Oedipus’s error in believing that because “nothing can make me other than I am,” that this amounts to knowing what and who you are, as if reflection constitutes the soul:
Let the storm burst, my fixed resolve still holds,
To learn my lineage, be it ne’er so low.
It may be she with all a woman’s pride
Thinks scorn of my base parentage. But I
Who rank myself as Fortune’s favorite child,
The giver of good gifts, shall not be shamed.
She is my mother and the changing moons
My brethren, and with them I wax and wane.
Thus sprung why should I fear to trace my birth?
Nothing can make me other than I am. 60
Saint Anselm’s Thicket of Perfection:
That Which Rises Up against Death
For how great is that light from which shines every truth that gives light to the rational mind? How great is that truth in which is everything that is true, and outside which is only nothingness and the false? How boundless is the truth which sees at one glance whatsoever has been made, and by whom, and through whom, and how it has been made from nothing? What purity, what certainty, what splendor where it is? Assuredly more than a creature can conceive.61
The Dumb Ox recognizes the delicate position of the Five Ways: he must demonstrate God beyond a reasonable doubt but must also demonstrate the mystery, the incommunicability, the dramatic difference-as-such, which can be viewed by the secondary ethic but can only be accessed by our originary praxis, the childhood of a bodily soul. And to do this, the Ways must primarily invoke the longer way of the natural law as imposition, and then leave open the door to the immediacy of the Anselmian logic of perfection. Saint Thomas must turn away from the self-evidence of God so as to return to it in its proper place.
For Anselm, the idea of the perfect Being is the perfect idea. Whatever else the argument may or may not demonstrate, it does demonstrate that I cannot think of God without thinking of him as existing, if I am thinking of him as quo maius. And once I think of him as that than which nothing greater can be thought, thus recognizing the commensurate/incommensurate relation, I am also thinking of him as greater than anything that can be thought. This is a paradox but not a contradiction. But how does he get here? By taking the idea from and within the faith, not by discovering it in the warehouse of his mind nor by demonstrating it step-by-step. We do not mean a mere natural faith, or a rational assent to a cloaked and hidden God. This is a faith of the dramatis personae—of God and man. It is faith thoroughly supernatural and dependent on God because his pure To Be is not ideational, but lives in the cosmic naturalness of the actions of the noble soul. Here we have natural law as religious promise, as divine covenant:62
Ah, blessed they, who pass through life’s journey unstained, who follow the law of the Lord! Ah, blessed they, who cherish his decrees, make him the whole quest of their hearts! Afar from wrong-doing, thy sure paths they tread. Above all else it binds us, the charge thou hast given us to keep. Ah, how shall my steps be surely guided to keep faith with thy covenant? Attentive to all thy commandments, I go my way undismayed. A true heart’s worship thou shalt have, thy just awards prompting me. All shall be done thy laws demand, so thou wilt not forsake me utterly.63
The bifurcated view of nature and grace wreaks its havoc on the language of the natural and supernatural, and this can be seen in how faith is witnessed and enacted in the soul’s relationship of will and intellect.64 If faith is not achieved by the intellect’s powers alone, if there is no amount of rational climbing that can help us arrive at the non-sequitur of the Incarnation, then the view of the intellectual ascent to God is only partially competent to reveal to us the vision of the faithful. If faith—even and especially in its absence and dryness—must carry a witness-like65 quality to it, it is because the originary praxis which works itself into the soul of the saint or the martyr transmits what is incommunicable.
Is God self-evident? The question is framed in terms of intellectual assent, and the answer, within that vein, must be a resounding No. But because God’s essence and existence are identical, Saint Thomas presents the genuine non-mediated connectivity between God’s creative To Be and man’s active responsiveness to that immediacy:
God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately and touch it by its power; hence it is proved in Phys. vii that the thing moved and the mover must be joined together. Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect; as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated. Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing, as was shown above (Question 7, Article 1). Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.66
For the intellect, God is not self-evident, for to be so would undermine the freedom and integrity of the creature and of God. But in