Saint Thomas opens his Five Ways with a proposed rejection of the self-evident existence of God. We must ask ourselves why this clarity of vision, this type of certitude, must be dismissed from the outset? This is Aquinas’s opening salvo, and it carries the tone and approach for the unfolding of his arguments, a tone and approach which are to lead us to the door of the divine and claim a groundwork unlike any other type of proof precisely because it is not “proof.” Rather is it a way, a signpost pointing, beyond any reasonable doubt, to that difference as such at the heart of Being. And yet, Thomas’s difference as such, this beyond reasonable doubt mystery which serves as foundation for all empirical truths, even as it resides beyond them, carries its own presential self-evidence, a communion with un-reflexive love. Saint Thomas does not merely reject the self-evident existence of God, but points to a different order of self-evidence with first principles34 which retains the crucial importance of that strange clarity, that self-evident communion with Being so clear and real that it is unquestionably present. This presence is there for Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, not as a thing to be aspired to or studied or even religiously sustained as a promise35 but simply a presence to which the bodily soul is united:
Myshkin is different from others because, as an Idiot and an epileptic who is at the same time an exceptionally clever man, he has much closer and less obscure relationships with the Unconscious. He has had rare instants of intuitive perception, occasional seconds of transcendent exaltation. For a lightning moment he has felt the all-being, the all-feeling, the all-suffering, the all-understanding. He has known all that is in the world. There lies the kernel of his magical being. He has not studied, and is not endowed with, mystical wisdom, he has not even aspired to it. He has simply experienced the thing itself. He has not merely had occasional significant thoughts and ideas. He has literally, once and more than once, stood on the magic borderland where everything is affirmed, where not only the remotest thought is true, but also the contrary of such thought.36
Now what occurs in ST I, 2, 1 is not so much a rejection of the principles of self-evidence as it is a relocation of their placement, not in that second order where natural law is identical with its necessarily prescriptive role in the polis, but in that first order which is clear to those who, like Myshkin, live one in being with a bodily soul. It is therefore not a question of dismissing that certitude as without foundation or basis, but showing that something does indeed change when man acts only by reflection and places the natural law, as necessary imposition, upon his being. When he interrogatively uncovers his naturally supernatural status, he affirms and yet by that very act loses that very status! By being eidetically circumscribed as a “state” or “status,” that supernatural appellation betokens more alienation than union, a not-of-the-world recognition which has the tendency to veer into the unnatural or to bypass the natural as a merely uninformative starting point, losing the forest for the trees, losing the actual to be of the what is in the mediated flux of what is. The divine multiplication of intermediaries invites the soul to reflection but also tempts the soul to put the emphasis on the wrong syllables of existence, forfeiting immediacy to distance. And yet this is the longer way and must be efficacious. The self-evidence of God is too easy an answer, and existence, while a gift, is not easy. It is unease in essence. It is ill at ease without being dis-eased. And while God is not self-evident, He is ineluctable.
That first order clarity is obscured because we have turned reflexive, claiming our naturally supernatural state in the second order of prescription and imposition, thereby becoming identical with our own imposition. This movement is not unnatural; it is the essential movement which reveals the natural law to be our rational participation in the eternal law.37 But all movements receive their meaning from their efficient and final causation, from their arche and telos. The telos is gathered by way of the intellect which creates distance-as-separation and places us as spectator; but the arche, which had originarily ignited our desire for the telos, is gained not by conceptio or theoria but by an originary praxis. It is one with the bodily and simple soul which lives before aspiration so that aspiration may occur, which precedes contemplation so that that dwelling can be inhabited. It is the play before work which allows the work to be creative in the realm of sanctification.38 It is the first order of our being before existence is reordered39 in terms of a judiciary futurity in which essences are determined, decisions made, and responsibilities assumed, “for the sake of” realm in which every end is incremental and temporally futural, for the sake of the objective to be attained. Now in some sense this seems an inversion of the distinction between practical and theoretical, where praxis is the realm of the for-the-sake-of while theoria is the realm of the in-itself. Only when a soul has lived before futurity can it access within itself the natural law in a way which recognizes the law’s necessary imposition, but moves beyond it as only the child, saint, martyr, or idiot can.40 If our ethical life is to hold both the in and the not-of the world without surrendering the former in favor of the latter, this requires we become like children, or like the lilies.
Youth, in fact, is not just a time of growing, learning, ripening and incompleteness, but primarily a time of play, of doing for its own sake, and hence a true bearer of the meaning of life. Anyone denying this, and regarding youth as a mere introduction and prelude to real life, commits the same error that beclouded the mediaeval view of human existence: he shifts life’s center of gravity forwards, into the future. Just as the majority of religions, discontented with earthly life, are wont to transfer the meaning of existence out of this life and into a hereafter, so man in general is inclined always to regard every state, since none of them is wholly perfect, as a mere preparation for a more perfect one.41
“The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to children”42 not because the child at play is weak, pacified by all things to the point of impotence, as is the danger of Prince Myshkin, who reminds one of Christ but more of what Christ is not. Hesse speaks of the similarity between Christ and Myshkin as both sharing a morbid fear of entanglement with the erotic vicissitudes of incarnated being,43 but this is not what is meant by the child to whom Christ offers the kingdom of heaven. The child at play is Christ-like because she alone is able to sustain existence as it is, in itself, incarnated in the present where praxis truly originates. When the natural law moves from the first order of un-reflexive love to the second order, the recognition of our naturally supernatural state, it is in danger of losing the lesson of Presence, downgrading the mystery of the bodily soul and obfuscating the self-evidence of the child-like first order. This imposition often engulfs praxis in the futural, stripping it of its interior non-temporality which a genuine affectivity provides. It demands that practical actions have the same vision as the intellect, as if its outcomes, choices, and actions need to be guided by advantage gained or lost, as if happiness resides only by what is won or surrendered. It replaces origins with ends. It does seem that I am inverting a classic distinction in terms of the temporal framework customarily attached to praxis and theoria. Historically, praxis—as for the sake of something else—is naturally aligned with the futural and theoria is the in-itself non-futural play which distinguishes itself as the good-for-itself.” The justification could be made that while classically, praxis embodies the futural, it does so when aligned with the intellect as if it is a handmaiden to theoria. Praxis adjectivally attaches to the intellect and thus embodies a futurity, but often a vacant and perspectival one where the intellect seeks its next advantage or foothold in time. We seek the originary praxis which grounds the intellect in its own pre-cognitive union with Being. But this union can be seen in practical action, in the into-the-world cyclical repetition of the day’s events in which the pattern outwardly and by the dissection of the intellect reveals a futural movement but inwardly within our primal affectivity provides a harmony with the ebb and flow, the unveiling and veiling of Being. Only when praxis is allowed both its outward futurity recognized by the intellect and its inward immediacy enacted by affectivity can it be genuinely meaningful. The degeneration of praxis into homo faber is a prime example of praxis sequestered to its outward view managed by the intellect. God is found among the pots and pans but only when praxis carries this two-fold harmony.
It is difficult to distinguish how the will, guided by the intellect, cannot take on the intellect’s futurity, even in its recollection, and when it does this, the ethical life is commoditized, becoming a store