Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

as non-reflexive basis for all subsequent intellectual reflections is essential to understanding the Anselmian logic of perfection in its proper place; not as a polar opposite to Saint Thomas, but as a different facet of the same unified meaning. Saints Anselm and Thomas Aquinas recognize the purposiveness of the will’s own union with the self-evidence of Being. If there is goodness, if meaning, truth and thus beings are self-evident—what then fulfills and orders them? Is it a natural or super-natural cause? If the existence or thatness of goodness, truth and beauty cannot be denied, what kind of causation is its source principle?: this is the inevitable question. Saint Thomas’s distinction therefore relies on the strange self-evidence to the will and the emphatic non-self-evidence to the intellect. The Ways unite certitude and mystery so that each reflects the other, both embodying the self-evidence of the unified will-in-Being and the intellect which must take the longer way. These demonstrations stand for those who have no faith, but their subtlety invites one into the faith. When Saint Thomas gets us to the door of the divine, he does not arrive at an impersonal entity with little or no potential for relationality, but at a being whose fecundity of Goodness is identical with His Being.94 This powerful union returns us again to the fact that Saint Thomas demonstrates God beyond a reasonable doubt, and yet what it is that is beyond any doubt is mystery itself. This is the very mystery which, when the intellect engages it as Other, realizes that its reflection requires it be prepossessed in a non-reflexive way, in the affective basis of the Good. Saint Thomas never departs from his Pseudo-Dionysian heritage:

The cause of all things, through an excess of goodness, loves all things, produces all things, perfects all things, contains and turns all things towards himself; divine love is good through the goodness of the Good. Indeed, love itself which produces the goodness of beings, pre-subsisting super-abundantly in the Good, did not allow itself to remain unproductive but moved itself to produce in the super-abundant generation of all.95

Ex divina pulchritudine esse omnium derivatur.96

Through a glass darkly we recognize the first principles through our connatural pre-possession, but our intellect cannot grasp that unmeasured essence in its startling effulgence.97 We can only recognize that our pre-possession cannot be rooted in a natural power, where essence is distinct from existence. Moreover, whatever steps ground our trajectory to the divine cannot be passed over as if rungs of a ladder on the great chain of Being.98 This non-reflexive pre-possession speaks more to our ethical life than anything else because it is a union of the will with Being. What we lay out in the demonstrations for the existence of God will also provide a renewed accounting of the meaning of the natural law, not merely as imposition but as the fundamental unity with Being as Personal, because it is our originary and connatural relation of Being as the Good.

      1. Maistre, St Petersburg Dialogues, 44.

      2. ST I, 83, 2, ad. 2. And this accomplishment, for Saint Bernard, is only so because of a grace-filled union which enables one to desire the good, fulfilling the will in its activity. See Bernard, On Grace and Free Choice, 28: “It is creative grace which gave existence to the will; it is saving grace which giveth it moral success; it is the will itself which bringeth about its own moral failure. Accordingly, free choice maketh us possessed of will; grace maketh us possessed of good will. It is in virtue of free choice that we will, it is in virtue of grace that we will what is good.”

      3. Cf. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1–8.

      4. Cf. C. Gilson, “Rebellion of the Gladiators,” 13–72.

      5. This reflects the unitive relationship between immanent acts and transitive acts in Aristotle. See Met. IX, 1050a; NE VI, 1140a.

      6. Cf. ST I, 85; DV, X, 8, ad. 1; X, 11, ad. 10.

      7. Cf. Prov 3:5–6 (DRC1752): “Have confidence in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not upon thy own prudence. In all thy ways think on him, and he will direct thy steps.”

      8. Cf. Sender, “Freedom and Constraint in Andre Gide,” 405–19.

      9. Cf. Lonergan, Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan.

      10. Critias, 120d–121b.

      11. See Saint Thomas on whether the contemplative life has nothing to do with the affections, and pertains wholly to the intellect. ST II-II, 180, 1.

      12. Cf. SCG III, 25–40.

      13. Cf. ST I-II, 94, 3.

      14. Cf. Doctorow, Reporting the Universe, 122: “Whitman when he walked the streets of New York loved everything he saw—the multitudes that thrilled him, the industries at work, the ships in the harbor, the clatter of horses and carriages, the crowds in the streets, the flags of celebration. Yet he knew, of course, that the newspaper business from which he made his living relied finally for its success on the skinny shoulders of itinerant newsboys, street urchins who lived on the few cents they made hawking the papers in every corner of the city. Thousands of vagrant children lived in the streets of the city that Whitman loved. Yet his exultant optimism and awe of human achievement was not demeaned; he could carry it all, the whole city, and attend like a nurse to its illnesses but like a lover to its fair face.”

      15. Khayyam, Rubaiyat, §51, 71, 76.

      16. Gorgias, 523e.

      17. Maritain, Approaches to God, 111–12: “Nothing is more human than for man to desire naturally things impossible to his nature. It is, indeed, the property of a nature which is not closed up in matter like the nature of physical things, but which is intellectual or infinitized by the spirit. It is the property of a metaphysical nature. Such desires reach for the infinite, because the intellect thirsts for Being and Being is infinite. They are natural, but one may also call them transnatural. [And this desire] . . . Is not a simple velleity, a superadded desire, a desire of super-erogation. It is born in the very depths of the thirst of our intellect for Being; it is a nostalgia so pro-foundly human that all the wisdom and all the folly of man’s behavior has in it its most secret reason. And because this desire which asks for what is impossible to nature is a desire of nature in its pro-foundest depths, St. Thomas Aquinas asserts that it cannot issue in an absolute impossibility. It is in no way necessary that it be satisfied, since it asks for what is impossible for nature. But it is necessary that by some means (which is not nature) it be able to be satisfied, since it necessarily emanates from nature.”

      18. ST I, 94, 1, resp.

      19. ST I, 94, 6, resp.

      20. ST I-II, 94, 2, resp.

      21. But this “holding back” is done only so that it can deliver the sweetness of contemplation wholly mingled with