Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Caitlin Smith Gilson
Издательство: Ingram
Серия: Veritas
Жанр произведения: Словари
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781532686412
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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

      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.