Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson
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elongate that desire, making it visible. But the intellect’s ability to see itself as a spectator, to see itself distinct from the sweeping tide of time, requires the non-futural immediacy of desire that places us in Presence. Only with the will can the spectator be in but not of the world, where that “in-ness” is of such immersive power that it calls forth the fact that we are not of the world. We are not of the world, but not because we reside in stoic indifference. To the contrary, we are not of the world because we are granted access into it in such a way that we are closer to its Being than anything else. And because of this, we cannot doubt that there is truth, that there is meaning, that there is goodness, but what exactly they are in their fulfillment, in a way in which our eyes can take-in, is unclear, and even open to foolish denial, thus vindicating both Anselm and Aquinas. We cannot take-in, in vision, the source of the vision as source of the sight of the vision. The will lays in union with the existential ground of existence which is not knowledge but the ground of the possibility of knowledge. What exactly unveils that ground, in its meaning, is by that same token unknown to us. God is both “known” or enacted by the will and unknown by the intellect, or known by the intellect only by dispossession. The intellect must turn to a ground greater than itself and, as it does, it cannot put into vision a source of which it is already pre-possessed in order to turn. There are no shortcuts or innate ideas, for this pre-possession cannot be reduced to an innate idea; it is instead the ingrained non-ideational activity of the divine which allows the freedom of ideas to persist.81 But nevertheless, the capacity to turn towards what the intellect cannot place within its speculative grasp points to a natural power or capacity of the soul that is aligned with that non-ideational self-evidence.82 This whatness requires reflexive action which prompts the longer way, which achieves much knowledge, but cannot achieve completed happiness—for no act of the speculative reason can fulfill our desire for God.83 But reflexive action knows its kinship with the non-reflexive as foundation for its turn. Reflexive action seeks a homecoming which requires the distinctive powers of the intellect and will to become something other—an athanatizein—in the way which Plato envisioned but which placed him in his own aporia: it is not enough to know the good, one must be the good, for true knowing is being.84 The confused and general way in which we grasp the certitude of first principles is a kind of self-evidence that cannot be clarified until the completion of the demonstrations, and until it is understood that God’s essence and existence are identical.85
Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men.86
One can take the Anselmian “fides quaerens intellectum” as a metaphysical injunction. As long as a thing “has” being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being. Thus, in one sense, man reflects on the otherness of Being in the way in which a face sees itself in the otherness of a mirror, and realizes its own nature as an I only in communion with the Other. The Other is the mirror by which we reflexively know ourselves as knowers and then know ourselves as other. But because the I and the Other “have” Being and therefore “have” God innermost in us, and because man is a reflexive being, something odd is present in him as the preparatory condition to his reflexivity or peculiar mode of being. We recognize we are reflecting or mediating what cannot be mediated, because to see ourselves we must have the Other in total view as distinct and objectively quantifiable. But Being refuses this level of entitative disengagement both on the part of the I and on the part of the Other. And thus we remain mysteries even to ourselves.
The faith proclaims God to be Being itself (the “I am Who Am” of Exodus87). Anselm has already identified God with his own Being and as Being itself, and since one cannot deny Being, one cannot deny God. Put another way: if God exists; and if God is his own essence; and if his own essence is To Be—then God is Being itself, and one would indeed be a fool to deny it. The issue, therefore, is less one of inferring existence from the concept as if the proposition “God exists” is a necessary proposition, but more the unpacking of what is proposed to thought about God as a necessary Being. The problem for Anselm is that he both uses and does not use the full Platonic sense of Idea. His characterization of God in some way parallels Plato’s Agathon: it is both everything and beyond everything. It is both a starting point and a notion, more the former than the latter.88 The idea of God is not an innate idea for Anselm: it is found in and by faith and is “demonstrated” by the epistemological concept of fittingness within the larger metaphysical structure of participation and the analogia entis. So that the idea of God is not “self-evident,” and Anselm is not inferring existence from essence, and least of all is the idea of God as that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought a “clear and distinct idea” in any modern sense. It is closer to Saint Thomas’s fourth way than might at first be noticed.89 Saint Thomas’s rejection of the existence of God as self-evident must be taken as a cautionary tale and not a rejection of our underlying immediacy as such. The demonstrations for the existence of God are directed towards those who must recover what lay hidden as foundational for the first principles. This is why his Five Ways get us, beyond a reasonable doubt, to God but also place us squarely within the mystery and incommunicability of the divine. Saint Thomas paradoxically rejects self-evidence on grounds not incompatible with Anselm’s own defense of self evidence—namely, the unavoidability of supernatural meaning particularly when beings naturally lead to Being-as-such. Any self-evidence reducible to the intellect would, for Saint Thomas, destroy the truth that God is not merely the highest in the ladder of beings but of a different order altogether, a Being whose demonstration must also demonstrate his mystery, refusing reflection in order to be its grundsatz:
God is greater than all we can say, greater than all that we can know; and not merely does he transcend our language and our knowledge, but he is beyond the comprehension of every mind whatsoever, even of angelic minds, and beyond the being of every substance.90
Thomas’s rejection of self-evidence seeks to protect the truer recovery of our connatural self-evidence, that the arche is the telos not only in the metaphysical but also in the epistemological registers: we seek what we already possess, we are dispossessed of what we never possessed. This is why Saint Thomas argues that we can demonstrate God’s existence—that this difference-as-such exists, but what exactly that Being is cannot be reducible to the mind. This “that” which is being demonstrated is first triggered by the undeniability of first principles which place us interrogatively within the Five Ways.
The name qui est [‘He who is’] expresses ‘Being’ [esse] as absolute and not determined through any addition; and Damascene says, therefore, that it does not signify what God is but as it were an infinite ocean of substance which is without determination. When therefore we proceed towards God by the way of remotion, we first deny of him anything corporeal; and then we even deny of him anything intellectual, according as these are found in creatures, such as ‘goodness’ and ‘wisdom’; and then there remains in our minds only the notion that he is, and nothing more: wherefore he exists in a certain confusion for us. Lastly, however, we remove from him even ‘being’ itself as it is found in creatures; and then he remains in a kind of show of ignorance, by which ignorance, in so far as it pertains to this life, we are best united to God, as Dionysius says, and this is the cloud in which God is said to dwell.91
Saint Anselm may take a shortcut in the ontological argument but his footing is not wrong; he never weighted the argument in a conceptio alien to the world of Being. This can be seen in all aspects of Anselm’s life, particularly in how friendship was understood as a mutual intensity and interiorization of the other in order to be the self. In his letters to Gandulf, his greatest friend and fellow monk at Bec Abbey, Anselm unveils a bodily affectus as true transcendent, one that overwhelmingly opposes the disembodied, anti-affective Cartesian rationality of res cogitans. This affectivity invokes dulcedo, the sweetness of being, as its guiding principle:92
You have my consciousness always with you. If you are silent, I know that you love me; when I am silent, you know that I love you. You are conscious that I do not doubt you and I give witness to you that you are sure of me. We are then conscious of each other’s consciousness.93
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