Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson
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Names: Smith Gilson, Caitlin, author. | Lee, Eric Austin, foreword.
Title: Subordinated ethics : natural law and moral miscellany in Aquinas and Dostoyevsky / Caitlin Smith Gilson ; foreword by Eric Austin Lee.
Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2020 | Series: Veritas 38 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-8639-9 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-5326-8640-5 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-8641-2 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Ethics. | Natural law. | Thomas—Aquinas Saint—1225?–1274. | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881. | Law and ethics.
Classification: BJ1012 .S57 2020 (print) | BJ1012 .S57 (ebook)
Manufactured in the U.S.A. August 25, 2020
For Our Daisi,
You were and are everything that’s right about this world: endlessly gentle, unknowingly beautiful, with a wit that could make one find that ethereally silly part in the soul which may well be the only needful thing in this world. Alternatively, that same wit, always and equally spirit, would return you to the ground with a wisdom older than any single age. So, my dear eternal child, I think you know better than most that your death is everything wrong with the world, and because of this, we are lost without you. We cannot of our own power make it right, just as we cannot make the rain fall and the grass grow, and yet we need these things to live and to love. Nor can we be the ocean waves at play and the mountains at dusk, as you were little one. You were these things! We will forever breathe the earth and breathe you, now the elegy of the birdsong at morning’s break. Please help me to love as best as I can, and thus to love as you loved; and to laugh as best as I can, and thus to laugh as you laughed. Perhaps then you may bring us up into that joy that incarnates every worthy moment in this life and the next, and return us to soft pastures underfoot.
—Love Always,
Your Aunt Caitlin
There’s a famous freak rock near us,
A black savage skull of a thing on the moor.
Monks built a chapel there and one wall stands
Facing the sea still, high on the schorl mass.
Gales from both coasts have struck the pinnacle
A thousand times, and shaken this church door
Which we approached under fragrant leafage
Up the lane from a July-scorched stile . . .
Something remains impregnable, holds evidence
Without a technique of defence.
—Jack Clemo, “In Roche Church”
Foreword
“Entering the Chase”:
The Effortless Drama of Natural Law’s longior via
It is all too easy to enshrine discussions of natural law within current political accounts of ultimately facile and pithy attempts at moralistic obedience. The political false dilemmas of any given decade in this sense are as reactionary as they are legion. If we agree with one Catholic saint invoking another that the natural law is nothing else but “the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided” to the extent that this light was even given to us as a law upon our hearts at our very creation,2 then surely we know what propositional, mental, and obediential boxes to check. It is an odd predicament we find ourselves in when we can in one sense be wholly “right” by one light yet in our prescriptive anger we can snuff out that same light of understanding in an unattractive false certitude which cuts to the quick in premature reduction. We do ourselves and others no favors if while we claim that we see in a glass darkly we further darken our vision with varieties of unnecessary moralistic fallibilism and thus offer a blind path for others.3
The path forward is not easy, to be sure, so we could offer instead that the drama of existence is an essentially difficult one. There is a deep truth to affirm along with Socrates (who affirms an ancient proverb) that all that is beautiful is difficult.4 Again, we must be careful, for while it is true to say that God is love, the obverse that all love is God is not a theological truth, lest we endanger ourselves toward pantheistic platitudes; likewise, all that is difficult may not be beautiful, and a struggle for its own sake may lend itself more toward a merely pagan virtue that is ultimately closer to classical or Enlightenment agon than may be truly beautiful, true, or good. Accordingly, we seem to harbor an implicit mistrust of that which is effortless because we do not want to accept that which is a gift.5 Natural law must be fought for, indeed, it could be argued that we must defend it for its own sake because tradition must of itself resist all change and maintain continuity to stem the tide of an over-eager progressivism.
In one sense this sounds like an upright and righteous charge, but in and of itself it is a fallibilist posture that demands that natural law has to always incur the hard work of the theologian, philosopher, or pastor that still finds itself within another modern dilemma of technocracy versus populism: virtue is found within the learnèd “virtuous,” and the rest of us simple folk have the option of blind deference or the ressentiment of rejection. The gospel is hidden from the learned and wise, and revealed to the simple, the child-like;6 this is true, but does this yet lead us to conclude that the head no longer requires feet or vice versa?7 If we keep with this Pauline metaphor for a moment, insisting that we can work out our part in the hard work alone of our position, the “true” is only won at the expense of the good, and what’s more, at the expense of the other. On the contrary, Josef Pieper highlights this problematic when he notes that for Aquinas, “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult.” That is, “Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more meritorious; it must be more difficult in such a way that it is at the same time good in yet a higher way.”8 Along with Aquinas, Pieper dares to suggest against our modern proclivity toward the self-meritorious difficulty of work that “the sublime achievements of moral goodness are characterized by effortlessness—because it is of their essence to spring from love.”9 Yet once more, “effortlessness” is not the goal either, in the same way that difficulty for its own sake is not the goal, for the end is that which is good for its own sake, a life lived in love of God and neighbor.
If neither difficulty nor effortlessness for their own sakes are the goal, but may both be very real descriptions of the experience of living out a life lived within an obedience to the natural law, Gilson recommends something different than prescription and something otherwise than reactionary steadfastness. Subordinated Ethics is not a detailed treatise on the specifics of natural law theory nor a set of recipes for how one “enacts” the natural law within a series of steps to follow, cultural attitudes to mimic, nor particular “stances” to take—although, of course, many ethical ways of life naturally follow within a path taken along this route, and that is precisely her point: the natural law is that which first and foremost is itself not first, but second, for it itself follows the eternal law.
Following along such a path begins here by way of an acknowledgement in the form of a response. Gilson, who often has St. Thomas as her guide, proposes here a longer way that “ends its journey in seeing what was there to begin with and what initiated its pilgrimage: the non-mediated presence of To Be. The journey itself is a response to the non-mediated mystery of being.”10 Here, as in her previous work, Gilson explores the nature of the longior via (“longer way”) by attending to a metaphysics of causality that finds its “resolution” in God. To understand the path of the longior via it is important to acknowledge that this road is not purely immediate grasping of cause and effect, but the truth of this way is discovered along a road that realizes our creaturely place in the order of things. Again, this path is not simply a pronouncement of affirming that God is the ultimate cause because we somehow have direct access to God as the first cause.11 As Gilson says elsewhere, “The longer way is a twofold process: we begin in effects and arrive at first causes only because we already understand the nature of effects to be effects of. We possess or partake in causal meaning