Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson
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God must be present according to our mode of being—to our desire to know. God must be present—immediately and connaturally self-evident—in the bodily immediacy of the soul as exteriorized existence. If man is already outside himself in order to know himself and the world, he is already, by that dual intentionality, in the self-evidence of God by presence of the will. This is a non-demonstrable—because pre- and non-intellectual—starting point for the intellect to guide the will towards what it desires. And how could the will desire God if it does not “know” God? Moreover, the will does not act by “knowing” but by acting, and thus it must have an acting immediacy or self-evidence of God for it to desire God. Again, how can the intellect guide the will to its desire, if neither the intellect nor the will is in possession of what it desires?67 God is in no way self-evident to the intellect, for this would be the sort of proto-occasionalism of select medieval thinkers,68 which diminishes the ontological dimension of God and of our personal freedom. It would render the will a vacuole having no role or reference point in its relationship with the intellect.
Saint Thomas’s rejection of the argument for self-evidence resides solely on the question of the intellect, but it leaves open the door for a different order of self-evidence, one absolutely necessary for the grounding of his metaphysics of To Be. If there is no form for connatural self-evidence, then the possibility of God as innermost in all things would be impossible. God would be idea but not Being. Let us change the question. If the question was “Is Being self-evident?” what would Saint Thomas’s answer be? It would certainly be “yes.” The existence of God is not self-evident to us though it is, in itself, self-evident. If we knew God’s essence as existence, as identical, then God’s existence would be self-evident:
[The] proposition, ‘God exists,’ of itself is self-evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject, because God is His own existence as will be hereafter shown (I:3:4). Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature—namely, by effects.69
Once you have identified God’s essence with His To Be, then Anselm is right and God cannot not exist, the richest idea cannot be the poorest, the most meaningful cannot be the emptiest.70 If I already knew that God is Being, his existence would be self-evident. But God as Being is not self-evident to the intellect.71 While on the horizon between time and eternity, and sharing an immediacy of vision with the angel, we understand, for the most part, by composition and division, especially when the essence is not common to all72 and knowledge of first causes must proceed by effects:
As in the intellect, when reasoning, the conclusion is compared with the principle, so in the intellect composing and dividing, the predicate is compared with the subject. For if our intellect were to see at once the truth of the conclusion in the principle, it would never understand by discursion and reasoning. In like manner, if the intellect in apprehending the quiddity of the subject were at once to have knowledge of all that can be attributed to, or removed from, the subject, it would never understand by composing and dividing, but only by understanding the essence. Thus, it is evident that for the self-same reason our intellect understands by discursion, and by composing and dividing, namely, that in the first apprehension of anything newly apprehended it does not at once grasp all that is virtually contained in it. And this comes from the weakness of the intellectual light within us, as has been said (Article 3). Hence, since the intellectual light is perfect in the angel, for he is a pure and most clear mirror, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv), it follows that as the angel does not understand by reasoning, so neither does he by composing and dividing.73
The intellect achieves this unifying and distinguishing because it works from and within the basis of Being, from an avenue of connatural self-evidence not immediately granted to the speculative intellect. By their nature as speculative, the intellectual powers work counter to that bodily immediacy, but never in contradiction to it; it is, again, the basis for those powers. How can one seek God if God is not in a way present; how can we know we are lost without knowing where we should be; how can composition and division be achieved without a ground already present from which unity and distinction proceed? This non-mediated, un-reflexive self-evidence resides identical to the proper good of the will while at the same time remaining at an essential distance from the intellect, reflective of our stance within the confinium of time and eternity. The will’s non-futural being-towards, saturated presence which desires the good, desires it because it is present. When reflected upon by the domain of the intellect, reflection necessarily obscures that self-evidence because it cannot be reduced to an eidetic vision. The will’s non-futurity is the un-observed essence of the intellectual life, as follows:
1 It is the time when we are in the unmeasured—as God is the unmeasured measurer.74 We do not anticipate beyond the present, we are in and of the beauty and play of life.In this sense, childhood should not be mere preparation for adulthood, as if the meaning of the child is bound up as a point of progress in the unfolding of maturation. If preparation, it is only because it should give the adult something other than the long littleness of life; it should provide a glimpse into that non-futurity where one is not reducible to the age or the time. This is Tolstoy’s green stick75 and Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited:I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.76
2 The non-futural basis of the will in its non-reflexive union with Being is the true transcendence, closer to God, the true foundation for our athanatizein, our immortality.Transcendence is over-intellectualized, so that the desire triggering transcendence is seen but passed over as the intellect seeks to manage that desire in an organized cognitive longing. This management is not wrong, but it will frustrate itself, not only because no earthly action can complete our happiness77 but also because one has not exhaustively joined with the clay and substance of the earth which truly brings us to the threshold of all our needs and desires, all our memories of joy and tragedy.The Franciscan Nun tells young JoanWhat those that are carnal lack, as we know, is being pure.But what we ought to know is that those that are pure lack being carnal.The angels are certainly pure, but they aren’t the least bit carnal.They have no idea what it is to have a body, to be a body.They have no idea what it is to be a poor creature.A carnal creature.A body kneaded from the clay of the earth.The carnal earth.They don’t understand this mysterious bond, this created bond,Infinitely mysterious,Between the soul and the body.This my child is what the angels do not understand.I mean to say, that this is what they haven’t experienced.What it is to have this body; to have this bond with this body; to be this body,To have this bond with the earth, with this earth, to be this earth, clay and dust, ash and the mud of the earth,The very body of Jesus.78
3 This primary form of saturated transcendence prepares us for the secondary transcendence, the transcendence of the intellect guiding the will, which is patterned after death, which speaks of desire, need, and loss in an often poignantly inarticulable vision of the unchanging meaning of change, a being-towards-death that is not merely a matter of tick-tock time elapse, but of a mode of temporality as inarticulable vision of the past as present, and the present as more than the “now,” a present as presence.If God is the saturated presence, the will in its non-futurity abides by God as Presence. We are the Other which is also presence to God’s Presence. The heart-aching immortality of the intellect is that its actions are always reducible to the mumbo jumbo of one’s age, because every desire, every futural need is confined and delimited by time.79 Without the will’s non-futural basis, the intellect’s anticipatory futurity will actualize itself on a nihilatory basis, it will build its house on sand rather than rock.80
4 A transcendence which does not pass over the non-futural resides in the ground which can survive the freedom that is a fatalism—in and through it, the remembrance of things past remains as past and present, as the fatal and the freeing.
The will achieves its futurity only in union with the intellect, and the intellect achieves its placement or presence only in union with the will. The intellect and will are distinct but never separated, as if one could ever act in isolation from the other. Nevertheless, their distinction calls to mind a need to distinguish further their powers so that identification of the one does not disintegrate into the other.
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