Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson
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the knowledge but the ground of knowledge which is, in its way of the uncreated.”12 Along with Aquinas, Gilson affirms our creaturely, existential situation of always already being in via, on the way, where we find ourselves within a world of effects, and where we ourselves are an “effect” born out of our own otherness within creation. Making the next step to acknowledging the causality is what Aquinas calls a “resolution” within being from the sensible to the intellectual of the divine science.13 Hence, in this way, the first becomes that which for us is the last: for it is only natural to proceed “from the sensible to the intelligible, from the effects to the causes, and from that which is later to the first.”14 This “reversal” from that which is last in the order of things to the first uncaused cause requires a metaphysical judgment that Gilson calls a necessity to stop, or ananke stenai: “The ananke stenai is the originating stop in the order of explanation and in Being.”15 Without such a judgment the spectre of an infinite (or as she calls it, “indefinite”) regress would paradoxically limit our ability to see things as they truly are. In every exploration of the various five ways of Thomas, Gilson shows us that one must at some point recognize that all the things of the world, within the spectrum of their miscellany, point back to that which is first—this very recognition is itself the judgment which enacts the “resolution” where we find ourselves within the viatoric chase of our creaturely existence toward the infinite.
Gilson’s proposal to “enter the chase,” therefore, is discerned and lived as an achievement over a lifetime of living through the stuff of life, a life that has its place not among the angels in an immediate vision16 but experienced in a “catching up” within the distance between God and man as existence itself. “This distance is the longer way, the way that allows finitude to be a ‘vehicle’ of transcendence. Through it there is always something more and Other, something not yet said and done, and thinking must indeed ‘catch up’ to Being.”17 Natural law, then, is not something to prescriptively secure18 but is received within the analogical distance of living within the embrace of eternal law’s inscription in our hearts.
Woven throughout, Gilson also attends to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, a work which she puts in conversation with Thomas’s five ways that may at first appear tangential but draws us to the heart of things. Like her previous excursions,19 here she brings in the literary and poetic to enlighten this notion of being “on the way” but here with a focus (along with Thomas Aquinas) on originary praxis by way of counterpoint. That is, Dostoyevsky’s Myshkin exemplifies a longing to return to our origins, that longing to be reconnected with that “first” which we only discover “last.” What both Thomas and Prince Myshkin illuminate is that our attitude and even, one might say, our metaphysical comportment need be reconfigured by the act of playfulness in order to return to our originary praxis. Our original practice as children is something we forget: our awe before existence, our desire to have an experience “again” (like that of a child’s playful exuberance), our original ability to see the light of dawn where everything is again new. Whether we like it or not, we are entrenched within life’s miscellany, and while we can all too easily romanticize the “messiness of life,” Gilson, like these authors and literary characters with whom she is in conversation, takes us to an emphasis on that which is present, a present presence here in all its immediacy.
To rightly see the joy of these realities requires not merely philosophical and theological acumen but a simplicity of heart. That is not to say, however, that these two need be opposed. The effortlessness spoken of above can indeed be learned by way of habit, of the action of our intellect which engages in the child-like play that is the very essence of such a simplicity. One of the many joys of being a parent20 is that paradoxical endurance of learning again to have the heart of a child. Learning to return to our own originary praxis is done amidst an encounter with an other, a presence that calls us again and again to not only start over, but to become that which is itself good.21 Lest we further confuse ourselves, one cannot simply abide by a prescription to “be child-like” either, because it is itself a practice to inhabit, a suggestion to live within the risk of an embodied, soul-entrenched immediacy within a world that claims it is the most “grown up” thing to not have children for any number of excuses which purport to be “rational.”
In reading this book by Gilson, I commend the reader to understand that it is written with—and should be read with—a deep allergy to all that is reactionary. That which is reactionary leads to moralistic prescription for it is not the basis of a generative, originary presence. That which resounds most truly in our soul is never the self-imposition of the ego but an openness to the otherness which is our existence made resplendent by the otherness of an infinite, Triune God in Whom we find our very being. Gilson’s exhortation to this originary presence and to our originary practice can only be rediscovered as a following of the natural law that participates in the eternal law, eschewing imposition of both the conservative prescription as much as it so very much otherwise than the progressivist piety that is self-defined, in turn, by its reaction to this moralism. The path is as immediate as it is risked in the longer metaphysical and theological paths she recommends we travel by returning once again to Thomas’s five ways. One can simply read the five ways or be inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Idiot without inhabiting them; Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus can see and write endlessly about what is on the other side of the “leap” without in fact taking that leap. Just because we fail over and over again when we do enter the chase should not be a fly in the ointment, but a spur for our souls.
[T]he Church takes place and grows constantly in the hearts of people and in the living reality of environments and social situations. It does this in encounter with the living presence of Jesus Christ, in the existential self-enrichment of the certainty of this encounter, and in experiencing His real capacity to save the human being in all his drama and mundaneness.22
Eric Austin Lee
Eastertide 2019
2. Veritatis Splendor, §40, quoting Thomas Aquinas, “Prologus: Opuscula Theologica,” II, no. 1129, p. 245; Cf. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II, 91, 2.
3. See Aquinas, ST I-II, 48, 3.
4. Plato, Hippias Major, 304e8.
5. See Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 35–36.
6. Luke 10:21.
7. Cf. 1 Cor 12:21.
8. Pieper, Leisure, 33–34, citing Aquinas, ST II-II, 123, 12, ad. 2 and ST II-II, 27, 8, ad. 2.
9. Pieper, Leisure, 34.
10. C. Gilson, Immediacy and Meaning, xii, emphasis in original.
11. Aquinas calls this particular misstep an error of the Platonists. See Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, X, 3.1964.
12. C. Gilson, Immediacy and Meaning, 180, emphasis hers. Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, X, 3.1964. Thomas also notes that Plato errors in a similar way in conflating the order of knowledge with the separable forms (ST, I, 84, 1).
13. See Aquinas, In Boethii De trinitate, q. 6, a. 1, co. 22. For a helpful summary of the details in Aquinas, see Aertsen, “Method and Metaphysics.”
14. Aquinas, In I Sent., 17, 1, 4. Translation Aertsen’s.