Читать книгу Subordinated Ethics - Caitlin Smith Gilson - Страница 13

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.1

Freedom is as much an accomplishment as a given,2 a non-temporal consequence of the intellectual-spiritual nature of human existence in its journey across time. The will follows upon human intentionality whether or not a choice of consequences is involved. We are in a situation at all because we are by nature free. We are in this situation as a consequence of our own, and others, freedom, though not at all necessarily as a result of choice. Being-in-a-situation is not the negation of freedom but the necessary prerequisite of freedom.3 The essence of freedom is identical to the paradoxical essence of human being,4 located in its natural intentionality: to be-come what I am, I must be-come what I am not: this is a necessity flowing from the radical non-necessity qua contingency of my being and action. My essence is not finished, a “done deal,” a made thing. It must be achieved. This “must” is the sign and guarantee of my freedom. Freedom is a primordial given, but more a lifelong struggle to accomplish. The long historical failure to distinguish these aspects, without absorbing or reducing the one into the other, leads to the muddle of opposing and equally fatuous theories of freedom, choice, and determinism. We may or may not be “responsible” for our situation. That is not the fundamental point. It is because, and only because, we are free that we have—must have—a situation. Cancel the situation and we cancel freedom. Both subjectivism and traditional objectivism fail miserably and utterly in understanding this. Thus, immanence and transcendence are not opposed.5 The transcendent act is not a merely transitive act.6 For the ultimate is attained not by corporeal steps but by the movement of the heart.7 And like a garden, freedom requires nurture, development, pruning, weeding. The given of human nature is a seed, not a fruit. Liberty is a tree: arbitrio/arbor: the free act is the rooted act, not, contra Gide,8 the gratuitous act. Freedom as accomplishment unites body and soul, and ethical, social, political freedom require the careful gardener. In this sense, politics and ethics are “a posteriori” while moral sensibility is “a priori.” Personal-social-political unity requires subordination to an underlying elan, towards a pure and purely Other, reversing in some sense and uniting in another sense, Bergson’s open and closed societies, for Being is the unitary root of the elan vital, of the gardens of society and the mystical soul where theoria reveals itself as praxis. The free ethical act is not “knowledge” in the sense of being in possession of the prescriptive rulebook; rather is it, to paraphrase Lonergan, freedom from the rulebook.9

The Predicament of the Natural Law

For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well-affectioned towards the god, whose seed they were; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them. . . . When the divine portion began to fade away, and became diluted too often and too much with the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they then, being unable to bear their fortune, behaved unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see grew visibly debased, for they were losing the fairest of their precious gifts; but to those who had no eye to see the true happiness, they appeared glorious and blessed at the very time when they were full of avarice and unrighteous power.10

The ethical life rooted in the natural law envisions a number of things, one of which is happiness, albeit a peculiar faith-demanding sort which must be distinguished from affectivity and pleasure and yet not isolated from them; fulfilled, in fact, by them in love.11 This love fulfills because it abolishes the speculative distance of the intellect.12 The intellect chastens the will so that the will achieves a martyrological violence, not to itself but to the intellect to which it had first and long-since surrendered. Such happiness invokes submission and rebellion, and the lines between the two are more blurred than one might even imagine. Our abidance by and adherence to the natural law requires us to become the delicate weight in the swinging pendulum between an affective dominance and an over-intellectualization of act-into-conceptio, somehow striking an unearthly middle ground—human flourishing.13 Happiness is triggered by the immediacy of the will but agonically lengthened into a distance by the intellect—into an end to be achieved, a teleological goal—which must turn away from and somehow retain this initial will-based trigger. It is precisely this “turning away” which initiates the ethical system, thus inevitably conceiving it as an imposition. In this jarring of orders, everything carries purpose unto glory; all persist with clean lines and harmony raised by the unseemly, uneven and forgotten. Ours is an order offering up its own iniquity, and yet it retains its beauty as neither figmentary nor spectral. 14 By its “imposition” ethics is, from the outset, a preparation for judgment. Because ethical meaning places us in the enactment of time as a participant, a moving finger that writes and then moves on15 in the order of things, all ethical action seeks the imprimatur of the Other. Even if an ethical system devolves into a progressivist materialist egoism where otherness is affirmed as nothing more than mere ontical validity—as token gratuity or obstacle—all imposition, by being artifice-intelligence, sustains itself because it invokes judiciary vision, requiring something other from the world than the world. Underneath all the falsehoods is the unstripped natural law; its placement lifts us from the world and strips us down; it is a supernatural ratification as much as it is a sacrificial disrobing of our being.

They must be stripped bare of all those things before they are tried; for they must stand their trial dead. Their judge also must be naked, dead, beholding with very soul the very soul of each immediately upon his death, bereft of all his kin and having left behind on earth all that fine array, to the end that the judgement may be just.16

The law is said to be “natural” and yet it opens the door to the meaning of our nature precisely because it must lift us out of our natural connaturality,17 reclaiming a new nature in order for it to be so enacted. We are seeking instead to step back, to reside in the ground before the imposition of the natural law becomes identical to the ethical-political structure it guides; before it takes on the character of habit from which, for Saint Thomas, it is distinct:

A thing may be called a habit in two ways. First, properly and essentially: and thus the natural law is not a habit. For it has been stated above (I-II:90:1 ad 2) that the natural law is something appointed by reason, just as a proposition is a work of reason. Now that which a man does is not the same as that whereby he does it: for he makes a becoming speech by the habit of grammar. Since then a habit is that by which we act, a law cannot be a habit properly and essentially. Secondly, the term habit may be applied to that which we hold by a habit: thus, faith may mean that which we hold by faith. And accordingly, since the precepts of the natural law are sometimes considered by reason actually, while sometimes they are in the reason only habitually, in this way the natural law may be called a habit. Thus, in speculative matters, the indemonstrable principles are not the habit itself whereby we hold those principles, but are the principles the habit of which we possess.18

If the natural law in its originary precept can never be “blotted out from the hearts of men”19 we do much justice to human nature when we speak of it as super-natural, trans-natural, naturally supernatural, in but not of the world. Perhaps, still, we are missing something crucial, namely the missing components of ethical meaning. The language of our super-natural nature occurs as a secondary action leaving a first order behind; it is the spiritual framing of ethical imposition, it occurs only after the first order of human action, once unified with the world, is hidden.

What occurs before brings us to the un-reflexive recognition of Being which grounds metaphysics and, through it, our desire for the good and our aversion to evil, thereby providing the source for all natural law precepts. Saint Thomas speaks of our first encounter in knowledge not as a conceptual undertaking but as the universal apprehension that grounds knowledge and which allows the metaphysical and practical orders to unfold. And while it is a simple, singular universal apprehension, it is by no means a simplistic one. It is this seamless unity of thinking and Being which opens to us our beatitude, and which grounds the very complexity of all theoretical and practical action where thinking and Being more often than not fail to align:

Now a certain order is to be found in those things that are apprehended universally. For that which, before aught else, falls under apprehension, is ‘being,’ the notion of which is included in all things whatsoever a man apprehends. Wherefore the first indemonstrable principle is that ‘the same thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time,’ which is based on the notion of ‘being’ and ‘not-being:’ and on this principle all others are based, as is stated in Metaph. iv, text. 9. Now as ‘being’ is the first thing that falls under the apprehension simply, so ‘good’ is the first thing that falls under the apprehension of the practical reason, which is directed to action: since every agent acts for an end under the aspect of good. Consequently, the first principle of practical reason is one founded on the notion of good, viz. that ‘good is that which all things seek after.’ Hence this is the first precept of law, that ‘good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.’ All other precepts of the natural law are based upon this: so that whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as man’s good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done or avoided.20

The language of our natural super-nature is used to justify—and not wholly inauthentically—the turn away from the immediacy of the will; it is the judicial placing of the dams which hold back affective immediacy until it can be rerouted and managed by distance, spectatorship, and virtue training.21 These are the courtesies of tradition, education, and prescription, the rules of the game of which we spoke, and of which we will have cause to speak again in greater detail. But what then was there before all was held back and suspended? If it be natural—and thus good—mustn’t that non-reflexive love be foundational for the ethic? Our supernatural ordination finds its meaning by being born from our ethical predicament, the oddness of a natural law which imposes order upon nature, while refusing to call that placement alien. The natural law is as much a frail and exotic artifice—for no state of nature is natural—while claiming to be the prime substance of our innermost being. We can see this odd stance in the way in which all acts of virtue are prescribed by the natural law, finding their indelible image in its precepts. Yet when many virtuous acts are considered in themselves, the lineage to the natural law appears hidden; nature does not first incline the virtuous act but instead requires the enactment of reason. Our supernatural ordination attests more to our glaring estrangement from nature than to our proximity. With Saint Thomas:

For it has been stated that to the natural law belongs everything to which a man is inclined according to his nature. Now each thing is inclined naturally to an operation that is suitable to it according to its form: thus fire is inclined to give heat. Wherefore, since the rational soul is the proper form of man, there is in every man a natural inclination to act according to reason: and this is to act according to virtue. Consequently, considered thus, all acts of virtue are prescribed by the natural law: since each one’s reason naturally dictates to him to act virtuously. But if we speak of virtuous acts, considered in themselves, i.e. in their proper species, thus not all virtuous acts are prescribed by the natural law: for many things are done virtuously, to which nature does not incline at first; but which, through the inquiry of reason, have been found by men to be conducive to well-living.22

Our ethical ordination is not able to fulfill our natural supernaturality without first reuniting and rediscovering its meaning before the natural law appeared identical with ethical prescription, as something other than seamless unity and action. While those essential descriptions (“naturally supernatural,” “trans-natural” that “manifesting in your life the image of God impressed on your rational nature”23) cast the necessary gravity within the realms of metaphysics, epistemology, and theological discourse, their relevance within their own origin in the ethical life appears strained and unproductive. The natural law carries with it more than a whiff of Nietzschean irony. The overemphasis on ethics as an imposition fails to address the nature we seek to save and illuminate, becoming one of abandoning an unclear first-order nature in favor of a finality which cannot be clarified. And how could it clarify our end if it cannot dwell on and in our origin?24 If this supernatural end is said to be the fulfillment of our nature rather than its antithesis, then the natural law must have a meaning before it becomes prescription.25 The natural law remains an obscure end-to-be-perceived, and cannot become an eschatological and living realm, without that placement illuminating our first-order nature, our non-reflexive love—our timeliness because imprinted by the eternal law26—rather than suppressing it by way of a systematic over-intellectualizing of action into theoria. The natural law should be the signpost for freedom, it should widen the scope of mystery rather than diminish it. The Vienna Circle’s Moritz Schlick surprisingly endorses such a view in a remarkable passage:

The concept of duty, which so many philosophers place at the center of their ethics, presupposes the concept of purpose; to obey the commands of duty means nothing else but to stand under the dominion of purposes . . . Let us recall Schiller’s remark, that the principle of play as the true vocation of man will attain its deepest significance if we apply it to the seriousness of duty and destiny. What does this mean? It was Schiller who rebelled against the doctrine of Kant, whereby, of course, the moral is primarily to be found where man acts by conquering himself. For in Kant’s view an action is moral only when it springs from reverence for the law of duty as its sole motive; and since in the actual man conflicting inclinations are always present, moral action means a struggle against one’s own inclination, it means laborious work. Schiller was utterly and entirely right, for this account of the good is infinitely remote from the meaning that everyone is otherwise naturally accustomed to associate with the word. We do not call him the best man, who is obliged unceasingly to resist his own impulses and is constantly at war with his own desires; we say this, rather, of the man whose inclinations are kindly and benevolent from the start, so that he simply does not fall into doubt and self-conflict. The man who struggles with and conquers himself is perhaps the type of the great man but not of the good one . . . There is the deepest wisdom in the biblical injunction: ‘unless ye become as little children.’27

The Predicament of the Five Ways

If a genuine and efficacious ethics requires an accessible and meaningful natural law, this very natural law itself requires the existence of a divine and eternal Being. And thus the demonstration of God’s existence takes center stage in order to understand eternal action. Because of his faith, and not in spite of it, Saint Thomas, like Anselm, believes it absolutely critical that he demonstrate the existence of God. God is not the cause of some aspect of man or of some ideas and not others. He has caused everything that is real and existing in the world. The notion of creatio ex nihilo means that God is the universal cause and that all things in the world are the effects of God; the only thing we own outright is our own nothingness.28 He knows that in the natural world effects necessarily demonstrate the existence of their cause.29 Herein lies the predicament of Saint Thomas in his demonstrations for the existence of God: the faith that God created out of nothing has asserted that God is the universal cause. There can be no other primal cause for existence than God. Man and world are all effects of God as Cause. The faith is telling him that reason should be able to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of God because the God of the faith is the only universal cause of all that is in nature, and that in the natural order of things, effects necessarily point toward the existence of their cause.

The demonstrations for God are not logical or scientific proofs. Precisely because God’s essence is unknown to us,30 we cannot demonstrate Him by intellectual empirical description alone but must work within the relationship between the connatural immediacy of the will and the speculative distance of the intellect. The demonstrations are thus properly called ways or viae, meaning they are pointing towards what is needed, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be our primal and ultimate cause. What they are pointing toward is the mystery of God, a Being unlike any other Being in the world, a Being that was not caused but always existed, that is eternal, perfect, unchanging, infinite, all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful. Thus, what exactly can we demonstrate of this being when such attributes so surpass our limited powers as temporal, limited in knowledge and power? How can we get from the finite to the infinite?31

The predicament of Saint Thomas is as such: The faith urges reason that it must be able to demonstrate something of God beyond a reasonable doubt because effects necessarily demonstrate the existence of their cause. To say that this does not apply to God and man would imply that the truths of reason are not compatible with the truths of faith, and this is a dangerous precedent that Saint Thomas would never advocate. But at the same time, Saint Thomas knows that whatever he demonstrates of God cannot violate the effulgent mystery and plenitude of God. Saint Thomas’s demonstrations must demonstrate God beyond a reasonable doubt in order to respect the relationship between cause and effect, and at the same time demonstrate God in such a way not only that the demonstrations do not violate the mystery of God which is accessed only by the faith or, in the end, in the beatific vision of God, but actually opens the invitation to the mystery. The language of the reflexive intellect and the non-reflexive originary praxis of the will must both be at play in the demonstrations. Without the balance of the two, the Five Ways will fall either into reducing God to a cheap empirical certitude, or not going far enough to show that there is no other way to understand our complex existential situation but to affirm this efficacious supernatural origin.

God as Self-Evident? The Pedagogy of Suggestion

Verily, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach: Over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven Innocence, the heaven Chance, the heaven Prankishness. ‘By Chance’—that is the most ancient nobility of the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered them from their bondage under Purpose. This freedom and heavenly cheer I have placed over all things like an azure bell when I taught that over them and through them no ‘eternal will’ wills. This prankish folly I have put in the place of that will when I taught: ‘In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.’ A little reason, to be sure, a seed of wisdom scattered from star to starthis heaven is mixed in with all things: for folly’s sake, wisdom is mixed in with all things. A little wisdom is possible indeed; this blessed certainty I found in all things: that they would rather dance on the feet of chance.32

The rules of the language game of the divine are neither self-evident nor a priori nor even synthetic a priori—but they are naturally indubitable. The problem is that reflection on the natural separates us from the natural, creating the distance that requires what it should not require—demonstration! And it is this that puts God into the dock, and reveals Myshkin to be the enigma of simplicity that he is or, what Santayana calls, in referring to Nietzsche, the geniality of imbecility.33

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 shelf of products to be achieved.44 The futurity proper to the planning intellect lengthens the will’s immediacy, stretches it as it does with hope, denoting “a movement or a stretching forth of the appetite towards an arduous good.”45 But this stretching requires connection and stability to its origin, for without it it would be carried along as anticipating some point of finality beyond itself, all the while losing its fortitude and endurance, terminating in ennui. It stretches in a deeper way because it retains the immediacy of all-being.46 It is the union of Martha and Mary.47

The Realism of Remembered Things48

If praxis becomes futural, both the practical and intellectual realms are undermined. The intellect loses its source of contemplation in the longing not to reside in longing itself but in the presence of to be. It loses the ability for recollection to be a re-collection of being one with the Other as embodied bodily soul. The practical, when carried along, having surrendered its stretching forth, then creates an ethics where the futural is identical with the progressive and where the exotic artifice of the city state becomes fully alien. The imposition of the natural law no longer has the in which makes the “not-of” a relation to the natural rather than its antithesis, rendering the exotic flower of political life an artificial flower where toujours la politesse is easily transformed into a “you will do this” political correctness that often even contradicts and overrules the healthy public orthodoxy of common things.49

Now different gods had their allotments in different places which they set in order. Hephaestus and Athene, who were brother and sister, and sprang from the same father, having a common nature, and being united also in the love of philosophy and art, both obtained as their common portion this land, which was naturally adapted for wisdom and virtue; and there they implanted brave children of the soil, and put into their minds the order of government; their names are preserved, but their actions have disappeared by reason of the destruction of those who received the tradition, and the lapse of ages. For when there were any survivors, as I have already said, they were men who dwelt in the mountains; and they were ignorant of the art of writing, and had heard only the names of the chiefs of the land, but very little about their actions. The names they were willing enough to give to their children; but the virtues and the laws of their predecessors, they knew only by obscure traditions; and as they themselves and their children lacked for many generations the necessaries of life, they directed their attention to the supply of their wants, and of them they conversed, to the neglect of events that had happened in times long past; for mythology and the enquiry into antiquity are first introduced into cities when they begin to have leisure, and when they see that the necessaries of life have already been provided, but not before. And this is reason why the names of the ancients have been preserved to us and not their actions.

And it is here that the fateful disjunction, recognized throughout all history and all religion, comes to its explanatory place on center stage: the distinction between the human nature and the human condition. Perhaps all human beings by nature desire to understand—but certainly not by condition as we shall see. Most would rather live on in the cave of illusion.50 Yes, by nature we all yearn to ascend. How can we live in a world wherein nature is divorced from condition, where only the idiot and the child see the self-evidence of the divine? The objector states:

It seems that the existence of God is self-evident. Now those things are said to be self-evident to us the knowledge of which is naturally implanted in us, as we can see in regard to first principles. But as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. i, 1,3), ‘the knowledge of God is naturally implanted in all.’ Therefore, the existence of God is self-evident.51

Saint Thomas knows like Plato that what was “implanted in the brave children of the soil” was obscured by the lapse of time, by tradition, and by the very enactment of our supernatural natures. The demonstrations are not for those who already have God by non-eidetic pre-possession. They are unnecessary for those standing “dreaming on the verge of strife, magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life,”52 who are unaware that it is idiotic to carry all of one’s possessions in a small satchel and to wear gaiters and a coat ill-suited for the damp Russian thaw:

The owner of the hooded cloak was a young man, also twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, somewhat above the average in height, with very fair thick hair, with sunken cheeks and a thin, pointed, almost white beard. His eyes were large, blue and intent; there was something calm, though somber, in their expression, something full of that strange look by which some can surmise epilepsy in a person at first glance. The young man’s face was otherwise pleasing, delicate and lean, though colorless, and at this moment even blue with cold. From his hands dangled a meager bundle tied up in an old, faded raw-silk kerchief, which, it seemed, contained the entirety of his traveling effects. He wore thick-soled boots and spats—it was all very un-Russian.53

Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin is introduced to us, having left Switzerland, a recovering epileptic patient surrounded by snow which is bright and pure, little children whom he loves, and nature dappled by green and quiet. His benefactor, Pavlishtchev, who once had a child like him, found Myshkin years ago and took compassion on the dumb creature. But after four years in Switzerland, Pavlishtchev had died and Myshkin is sent unprepared into the world of exodus on business which will bring him all the troubles of navigating the impositions of the natural law—money, social entanglements, pity, love, confusion, and death. Everything in The Idiot is exodus and each sub-story mirrors others throughout. Myshkin begins his journey on a third-class train face to face with Parfyon Rogozhin, the very man who, because of their shared agony—their all-consuming entanglement with Nastassya Filippovna, another alter Christus—will return him to Switzerland, to his epilepsy, but deliver him lost.

In one of the third-class carriages, right by the window, two passengers had, from early dawn, been sitting facing one another—both were young people, both traveled light, both were unfashionably dressed, both had rather remarkable faces, and both expressed, at last, a desire to start a conversation. If they had both known, one about the other, in what way they were especially remarkable in that moment, they would naturally have wondered that chance had so strangely placed them face to face in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw–Petersburg train. One of them was a short man about twenty-seven, with almost black curly hair and small but fiery gray eyes. His nose was broad and flat, his cheekbones high; his thin lips continually curved into a sort of insolent, mocking and even malicious smile; but the high and well-shaped forehead redeemed the ignoble lines of the lower part of the face. What was particularly striking about the young man’s face was its deathly pallor, which lent him an exhausted look in spite of his fairly sturdy build, and at the same time something passionate to the point of suffering, which did not harmonize with his insolent and coarse smile and his sharp and self-satisfied gaze. He was warmly dressed in a full, black, sheepskin-lined overcoat, and had not felt the cold at night, while his neighbor had been forced to endure all the pleasures of a damp Russian November night, for which he was evidently unprepared.54

If post-fall man were to return to Eden and look up into the skies with those before the fall, he would neither see nor hear nor breathe what was loved by the latter. No matter where post-fall man resides, inside or outside the gates, he is in exodus, always somewhere east of Eden. Myshkin will return to Switzerland unable to survive exodus. Roghozin throughout never denies this even when he completes his end, and the one each loves, Nastassya, understands the impossible balance between the two. These two faces on a train, one an unknowing holy innocent and the other always in exodus but in a knowing exodus—differentiating him from the rest—both communicate what is and is not Christ. The Idiot is a meditation on the return to the place preceding exodus, as exile in a world deconstructed from any enduring narrative. This meditation illuminates what comes before, mostly by mocking our originary praxis but never without longing for its return. Every movement of the story finds a companion movement or sub-story, but no companion is a bedfellow, none can bring the other meaning, all fall into futility. It is a story of competing fatalisms and of what a soul must be in order to survive and love its fate, thereby making fate the highest form of freedom.55

Saint Thomas’s demonstrations are for those racing towards their fate, cast into exodus and living only, if at all, by the prescriptive imposition of the natural law. It is not a demonstration for those who abide by what is but for those enmeshed in futurity by condition. It is a language game of seeing what is there to be seen, but which is rarely seen at all: the divine presence. Like the characters in The Idiot, these are The Ways, given to those who have forgotten by condition the un-reflexive love, so that futurity cannot be liberation but only the fatal flaw, the hamartia which casts a long shadow:

Things are now as they are;

they will be fulfilled in what is fated;

neither burnt sacrifice nor libation

of offerings without fire

will soothe intense anger away.56

With the exceptions of Roghozin and Nastassya who race towards it in knowledge, every other character attempts “to avoid the unavoidable fatalism—the inevitable inevitability of narrative.”57 Only Myshkin for a time is freed from the need for demonstration, from the need to accept that God is not self-evident. As a demonstration catering to the fatal soul, to those retired to the secondary act of the natural law and its futurity, the demonstrations provide a reminding certainty of God’s presence, and a certainty of their own dispossession within the mystery.

The Five Ways demonstrate God because they show that the stretching forth of the will requires union, and requires it to return to what has been forgotten when it first claimed its own im-positional supernaturality. When this imposition occurs, that imprint of the eternal law is then understood to us in a “general and confused way.”58 We are in but not of the world by way of alienation and the weight lies in that “not-of” without reference to the in union with the world. How we are “not-of” the world cannot be illuminated until we recover what places us in. Our placement in the world is not accidental and thus it too must offer something more than a mere starting block to our supernatural status, left behind as we ascend and aspire to our nature, where at best we become coaches but not players, little gods but no longer “divine playthings.”59 For all those aspirations and ascensions are the makings of missing the mark. Only the idiot does not commit Oedipus’s error in believing that because “nothing can make me other than I am,” that this amounts to knowing what and who you are, as if reflection constitutes the soul:

Let the storm burst, my fixed resolve still holds,

To learn my lineage, be it ne’er so low.

It may be she with all a woman’s pride

Thinks scorn of my base parentage. But I

Who rank myself as Fortune’s favorite child,

The giver of good gifts, shall not be shamed.

She is my mother and the changing moons

My brethren, and with them I wax and wane.

Thus sprung why should I fear to trace my birth?

Nothing can make me other than I am. 60

Saint Anselm’s Thicket of Perfection:

That Which Rises Up against Death

For how great is that light from which shines every truth that gives light to the rational mind? How great is that truth in which is everything that is true, and outside which is only nothingness and the false? How boundless is the truth which sees at one glance whatsoever has been made, and by whom, and through whom, and how it has been made from nothing? What purity, what certainty, what splendor where it is? Assuredly more than a creature can conceive.61

The Dumb Ox recognizes the delicate position of the Five Ways: he must demonstrate God beyond a reasonable doubt but must also demonstrate the mystery, the incommunicability, the dramatic difference-as-such, which can be viewed by the secondary ethic but can only be accessed by our originary praxis, the childhood of a bodily soul. And to do this, the Ways must primarily invoke the longer way of the natural law as imposition, and then leave open the door to the immediacy of the Anselmian logic of perfection. Saint Thomas must turn away from the self-evidence of God so as to return to it in its proper place.

For Anselm, the idea of the perfect Being is the perfect idea. Whatever else the argument may or may not demonstrate, it does demonstrate that I cannot think of God without thinking of him as existing, if I am thinking of him as quo maius. And once I think of him as that than which nothing greater can be thought, thus recognizing the commensurate/incommensurate relation, I am also thinking of him as greater than anything that can be thought. This is a paradox but not a contradiction. But how does he get here? By taking the idea from and within the faith, not by discovering it in the warehouse of his mind nor by demonstrating it step-by-step. We do not mean a mere natural faith, or a rational assent to a cloaked and hidden God. This is a faith of the dramatis personae—of God and man. It is faith thoroughly supernatural and dependent on God because his pure To Be is not ideational, but lives in the cosmic naturalness of the actions of the noble soul. Here we have natural law as religious promise, as divine covenant:62

Ah, blessed they, who pass through life’s journey unstained, who follow the law of the Lord! Ah, blessed they, who cherish his decrees, make him the whole quest of their hearts! Afar from wrong-doing, thy sure paths they tread. Above all else it binds us, the charge thou hast given us to keep. Ah, how shall my steps be surely guided to keep faith with thy covenant? Attentive to all thy commandments, I go my way undismayed. A true heart’s worship thou shalt have, thy just awards prompting me. All shall be done thy laws demand, so thou wilt not forsake me utterly.63

The bifurcated view of nature and grace wreaks its havoc on the language of the natural and supernatural, and this can be seen in how faith is witnessed and enacted in the soul’s relationship of will and intellect.64 If faith is not achieved by the intellect’s powers alone, if there is no amount of rational climbing that can help us arrive at the non-sequitur of the Incarnation, then the view of the intellectual ascent to God is only partially competent to reveal to us the vision of the faithful. If faith—even and especially in its absence and dryness—must carry a witness-like65 quality to it, it is because the originary praxis which works itself into the soul of the saint or the martyr transmits what is incommunicable.

Is God self-evident? The question is framed in terms of intellectual assent, and the answer, within that vein, must be a resounding No. But because God’s essence and existence are identical, Saint Thomas presents the genuine non-mediated connectivity between God’s creative To Be and man’s active responsiveness to that immediacy:

God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately and touch it by its power; hence it is proved in Phys. vii that the thing moved and the mover must be joined together. Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect; as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated. Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing, as was shown above (Question 7, Article 1). Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.66

For the intellect, God is not self-evident, for to be so would undermine the freedom and integrity of the creature and of God. But in order to ground that freedom and the longer way of the intellect’s assent, God must be present according to our mode of being—to our desire to know. God must be present—immediately and connaturally self-evident—in the bodily immediacy of the soul as exteriorized existence. If man is already outside himself in order to know himself and the world, he is already, by that dual intentionality, in the self-evidence of God by presence of the will. This is a non-demonstrable—because pre- and non-intellectual—starting point for the intellect to guide the will towards what it desires. And how could the will desire God if it does not “know” God? Moreover, the will does not act by “knowing” but by acting, and thus it must have an acting immediacy or self-evidence of God for it to desire God. Again, how can the intellect guide the will to its desire, if neither the intellect nor the will is in possession of what it desires?67 God is in no way self-evident to the intellect, for this would be the sort of proto-occasionalism of select medieval thinkers,68 which diminishes the ontological dimension of God and of our personal freedom. It would render the will a vacuole having no role or reference point in its relationship with the intellect.

Saint Thomas’s rejection of the argument for self-evidence resides solely on the question of the intellect, but it leaves open the door for a different order of self-evidence, one absolutely necessary for the grounding of his metaphysics of To Be. If there is no form for connatural self-evidence, then the possibility of God as innermost in all things would be impossible. God would be idea but not Being. Let us change the question. If the question was “Is Being self-evident?” what would Saint Thomas’s answer be? It would certainly be “yes.” The existence of God is not self-evident to us though it is, in itself, self-evident. If we knew God’s essence as existence, as identical, then God’s existence would be self-evident:

[The] proposition, ‘God exists,’ of itself is self-evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject, because God is His own existence as will be hereafter shown (I:3:4). Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature—namely, by effects.69

Once you have identified God’s essence with His To Be, then Anselm is right and God cannot not exist, the richest idea cannot be the poorest, the most meaningful cannot be the emptiest.70 If I already knew that God is Being, his existence would be self-evident. But God as Being is not self-evident to the intellect.71 While on the horizon between time and eternity, and sharing an immediacy of vision with the angel, we understand, for the most part, by composition and division, especially when the essence is not common to all72 and knowledge of first causes must proceed by effects:

As in the intellect, when reasoning, the conclusion is compared with the principle, so in the intellect composing and dividing, the predicate is compared with the subject. For if our intellect were to see at once the truth of the conclusion in the principle, it would never understand by discursion and reasoning. In like manner, if the intellect in apprehending the quiddity of the subject were at once to have knowledge of all that can be attributed to, or removed from, the subject, it would never understand by composing and dividing, but only by understanding the essence. Thus, it is evident that for the self-same reason our intellect understands by discursion, and by composing and dividing, namely, that in the first apprehension of anything newly apprehended it does not at once grasp all that is virtually contained in it. And this comes from the weakness of the intellectual light within us, as has been said (Article 3). Hence, since the intellectual light is perfect in the angel, for he is a pure and most clear mirror, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv), it follows that as the angel does not understand by reasoning, so neither does he by composing and dividing.73

The intellect achieves this unifying and distinguishing because it works from and within the basis of Being, from an avenue of connatural self-evidence not immediately granted to the speculative intellect. By their nature as speculative, the intellectual powers work counter to that bodily immediacy, but never in contradiction to it; it is, again, the basis for those powers. How can one seek God if God is not in a way present; how can we know we are lost without knowing where we should be; how can composition and division be achieved without a ground already present from which unity and distinction proceed? This non-mediated, un-reflexive self-evidence resides identical to the proper good of the will while at the same time remaining at an essential distance from the intellect, reflective of our stance within the confinium of time and eternity. The will’s non-futural being-towards, saturated presence which desires the good, desires it because it is present. When reflected upon by the domain of the intellect, reflection necessarily obscures that self-evidence because it cannot be reduced to an eidetic vision. The will’s non-futurity is the un-observed essence of the intellectual life, as follows:

1 It is the time when we are in the unmeasured—as God is the unmeasured measurer.74 We do not anticipate beyond the present, we are in and of the beauty and play of life.In this sense, childhood should not be mere preparation for adulthood, as if the meaning of the child is bound up as a point of progress in the unfolding of maturation. If preparation, it is only because it should give the adult something other than the long littleness of life; it should provide a glimpse into that non-futurity where one is not reducible to the age or the time. This is Tolstoy’s green stick75 and Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited:I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I was old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.76

2 The non-futural basis of the will in its non-reflexive union with Being is the true transcendence, closer to God, the true foundation for our athanatizein, our immortality.Transcendence is over-intellectualized, so that the desire triggering transcendence is seen but passed over as the intellect seeks to manage that desire in an organized cognitive longing. This management is not wrong, but it will frustrate itself, not only because no earthly action can complete our happiness77 but also because one has not exhaustively joined with the clay and substance of the earth which truly brings us to the threshold of all our needs and desires, all our memories of joy and tragedy.The Franciscan Nun tells young JoanWhat those that are carnal lack, as we know, is being pure.But what we ought to know is that those that are pure lack being carnal.The angels are certainly pure, but they aren’t the least bit carnal.They have no idea what it is to have a body, to be a body.They have no idea what it is to be a poor creature.A carnal creature.A body kneaded from the clay of the earth.The carnal earth.They don’t understand this mysterious bond, this created bond,Infinitely mysterious,Between the soul and the body.This my child is what the angels do not understand.I mean to say, that this is what they haven’t experienced.What it is to have this body; to have this bond with this body; to be this body,To have this bond with the earth, with this earth, to be this earth, clay and dust, ash and the mud of the earth,The very body of Jesus.78

3 This primary form of saturated transcendence prepares us for the secondary transcendence, the transcendence of the intellect guiding the will, which is patterned after death, which speaks of desire, need, and loss in an often poignantly inarticulable vision of the unchanging meaning of change, a being-towards-death that is not merely a matter of tick-tock time elapse, but of a mode of temporality as inarticulable vision of the past as present, and the present as more than the “now,” a present as presence.If God is the saturated presence, the will in its non-futurity abides by God as Presence. We are the Other which is also presence to God’s Presence. The heart-aching immortality of the intellect is that its actions are always reducible to the mumbo jumbo of one’s age, because every desire, every futural need is confined and delimited by time.79 Without the will’s non-futural basis, the intellect’s anticipatory futurity will actualize itself on a nihilatory basis, it will build its house on sand rather than rock.80

4 A transcendence which does not pass over the non-futural resides in the ground which can survive the freedom that is a fatalism—in and through it, the remembrance of things past remains as past and present, as the fatal and the freeing.

The will achieves its futurity only in union with the intellect, and the intellect achieves its placement or presence only in union with the will. The intellect and will are distinct but never separated, as if one could ever act in isolation from the other. Nevertheless, their distinction calls to mind a need to distinguish further their powers so that identification of the one does not disintegrate into the other.

The will’s desire is seen precisely because the intellect’s speculative powers elongate that desire, making it visible. But the intellect’s ability to see itself as a spectator, to see itself distinct from the sweeping tide of time, requires the non-futural immediacy of desire that places us in Presence. Only with the will can the spectator be in but not of the world, where that “in-ness” is of such immersive power that it calls forth the fact that we are not of the world. We are not of the world, but not because we reside in stoic indifference. To the contrary, we are not of the world because we are granted access into it in such a way that we are closer to its Being than anything else. And because of this, we cannot doubt that there is truth, that there is meaning, that there is goodness, but what exactly they are in their fulfillment, in a way in which our eyes can take-in, is unclear, and even open to foolish denial, thus vindicating both Anselm and Aquinas. We cannot take-in, in vision, the source of the vision as source of the sight of the vision. The will lays in union with the existential ground of existence which is not knowledge but the ground of the possibility of knowledge. What exactly unveils that ground, in its meaning, is by that same token unknown to us. God is both “known” or enacted by the will and unknown by the intellect, or known by the intellect only by dispossession. The intellect must turn to a ground greater than itself and, as it does, it cannot put into vision a source of which it is already pre-possessed in order to turn. There are no shortcuts or innate ideas, for this pre-possession cannot be reduced to an innate idea; it is instead the ingrained non-ideational activity of the divine which allows the freedom of ideas to persist.81 But nevertheless, the capacity to turn towards what the intellect cannot place within its speculative grasp points to a natural power or capacity of the soul that is aligned with that non-ideational self-evidence.82 This whatness requires reflexive action which prompts the longer way, which achieves much knowledge, but cannot achieve completed happiness—for no act of the speculative reason can fulfill our desire for God.83 But reflexive action knows its kinship with the non-reflexive as foundation for its turn. Reflexive action seeks a homecoming which requires the distinctive powers of the intellect and will to become something other—an athanatizein—in the way which Plato envisioned but which placed him in his own aporia: it is not enough to know the good, one must be the good, for true knowing is being.84 The confused and general way in which we grasp the certitude of first principles is a kind of self-evidence that cannot be clarified until the completion of the demonstrations, and until it is understood that God’s essence and existence are identical.85

Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. And behold, instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest for ever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; Thou didst choose what was utterly beyond the strength of men.86

One can take the Anselmian “fides quaerens intellectum” as a metaphysical injunction. As long as a thing “has” being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being. Thus, in one sense, man reflects on the otherness of Being in the way in which a face sees itself in the otherness of a mirror, and realizes its own nature as an I only in communion with the Other. The Other is the mirror by which we reflexively know ourselves as knowers and then know ourselves as other. But because the I and the Other “have” Being and therefore “have” God innermost in us, and because man is a reflexive being, something odd is present in him as the preparatory condition to his reflexivity or peculiar mode of being. We recognize we are reflecting or mediating what cannot be mediated, because to see ourselves we must have the Other in total view as distinct and objectively quantifiable. But Being refuses this level of entitative disengagement both on the part of the I and on the part of the Other. And thus we remain mysteries even to ourselves.

The faith proclaims God to be Being itself (the “I am Who Am” of Exodus87). Anselm has already identified God with his own Being and as Being itself, and since one cannot deny Being, one cannot deny God. Put another way: if God exists; and if God is his own essence; and if his own essence is To Be—then God is Being itself, and one would indeed be a fool to deny it. The issue, therefore, is less one of inferring existence from the concept as if the proposition “God exists” is a necessary proposition, but more the unpacking of what is proposed to thought about God as a necessary Being. The problem for Anselm is that he both uses and does not use the full Platonic sense of Idea. His characterization of God in some way parallels Plato’s Agathon: it is both everything and beyond everything. It is both a starting point and a notion, more the former than the latter.88 The idea of God is not an innate idea for Anselm: it is found in and by faith and is “demonstrated” by the epistemological concept of fittingness within the larger metaphysical structure of participation and the analogia entis. So that the idea of God is not “self-evident,” and Anselm is not inferring existence from essence, and least of all is the idea of God as that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought a “clear and distinct idea” in any modern sense. It is closer to Saint Thomas’s fourth way than might at first be noticed.89 Saint Thomas’s rejection of the existence of God as self-evident must be taken as a cautionary tale and not a rejection of our underlying immediacy as such. The demonstrations for the existence of God are directed towards those who must recover what lay hidden as foundational for the first principles. This is why his Five Ways get us, beyond a reasonable doubt, to God but also place us squarely within the mystery and incommunicability of the divine. Saint Thomas paradoxically rejects self-evidence on grounds not incompatible with Anselm’s own defense of self evidence—namely, the unavoidability of supernatural meaning particularly when beings naturally lead to Being-as-such. Any self-evidence reducible to the intellect would, for Saint Thomas, destroy the truth that God is not merely the highest in the ladder of beings but of a different order altogether, a Being whose demonstration must also demonstrate his mystery, refusing reflection in order to be its grundsatz:

God is greater than all we can say, greater than all that we can know; and not merely does he transcend our language and our knowledge, but he is beyond the comprehension of every mind whatsoever, even of angelic minds, and beyond the being of every substance.90

Thomas’s rejection of self-evidence seeks to protect the truer recovery of our connatural self-evidence, that the arche is the telos not only in the metaphysical but also in the epistemological registers: we seek what we already possess, we are dispossessed of what we never possessed. This is why Saint Thomas argues that we can demonstrate God’s existence—that this difference-as-such exists, but what exactly that Being is cannot be reducible to the mind. This “that” which is being demonstrated is first triggered by the undeniability of first principles which place us interrogatively within the Five Ways.

The name qui est [‘He who is’] expresses ‘Being’ [esse] as absolute and not determined through any addition; and Damascene says, therefore, that it does not signify what God is but as it were an infinite ocean of substance which is without determination. When therefore we proceed towards God by the way of remotion, we first deny of him anything corporeal; and then we even deny of him anything intellectual, according as these are found in creatures, such as ‘goodness’ and ‘wisdom’; and then there remains in our minds only the notion that he is, and nothing more: wherefore he exists in a certain confusion for us. Lastly, however, we remove from him even ‘being’ itself as it is found in creatures; and then he remains in a kind of show of ignorance, by which ignorance, in so far as it pertains to this life, we are best united to God, as Dionysius says, and this is the cloud in which God is said to dwell.91

Saint Anselm may take a shortcut in the ontological argument but his footing is not wrong; he never weighted the argument in a conceptio alien to the world of Being. This can be seen in all aspects of Anselm’s life, particularly in how friendship was understood as a mutual intensity and interiorization of the other in order to be the self. In his letters to Gandulf, his greatest friend and fellow monk at Bec Abbey, Anselm unveils a bodily affectus as true transcendent, one that overwhelmingly opposes the disembodied, anti-affective Cartesian rationality of res cogitans. This affectivity invokes dulcedo, the sweetness of being, as its guiding principle:92

You have my consciousness always with you. If you are silent, I know that you love me; when I am silent, you know that I love you. You are conscious that I do not doubt you and I give witness to you that you are sure of me. We are then conscious of each other’s consciousness.93

This type of affectivity 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 the active life. See Saint Thomas’s response as to whether a religious order devoted to the contemplative life is superior to one devoted instead to the active life. While the former is superior it is only so when it embodies the non-mediated into-the-world nearness of the latter. The sweetness of contemplative perfection occurs when one returns from contemplation so as to be its irradiating presence. ST II-II, 188, 6, resp: “Better to illuminate than merely to shine to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate.”

22. ST I-II 94, 3, resp.

23. Catholic Encyclopedia, 9:77.

24. For Saint Augustine, the eternal law is imprinted on all men and when we act on the eternal law this is the enactment or realization of the natural law. Cf. ST I-II, 93, 2, resp: “A thing may be known in two ways: first, in itself; secondly, in its effect, wherein some likeness of that thing is found: thus, someone not seeing the sun in its substance, may know it by its rays. So then no one can know the eternal law, as it is in itself, except the blessed who see God in His Essence. But every rational creature knows it in its reflection, greater or less. For every knowledge of truth is a kind of reflection and participation of the eternal law, which is the unchangeable truth, as Augustine says (De Vera Relig. xxxi). Now all men know the truth to a certain extent, at least as to the common principles of the natural law: and as to the others, they partake of the knowledge of truth, some more, some less; and in this respect are more or less cognizant of the eternal law.”

25. Dr. Herbert Hartmann speaks to this on the question of Saint Thomas on Prudence and the Natural Law. “St. Thomas and Prudence,” 87: “Saint Thomas’ entire ethical teaching can, in a sense, be seen as an extended meditation upon the scriptural text: ‘God made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel.’ The fact that Aquinas was a Christian theologian did not lead him to denigrate the human virtue of prudence. For Aquinas, to err or misunderstand the creature and his proper excellence is to error or misunderstand the Creator. In short, a denigration of the powers of the rational creature, man, eventually would lead to a denigration of God’s power in nature. Therefore, Saint Thomas has no interest in degrading the human wisdom of prudence for the sake of elevating his praise of God’s power. Instead, his self-appointed task is to understand the nature of things as they are (and consequently man’s own place in the order of the universe) so that man, ‘who by faith is led to God as his last end,’ does not through ignorance of the truth lead himself astray.”

26. Cf. ST I-II, 93, 5, resp: “Now just as man, by such pronouncement, impresses a kind of inward principle of action on the man that is subject to him, so God imprints on the whole of nature the principles of its proper actions. And so, in this way, God is said to command the whole of nature, according to Psalm 148:6: ‘He hath made a decree, and it shall not pass away.’ And thus, all actions and movements of the whole of nature are subject to the eternal law. Consequently, irrational creatures are subject to the eternal law, through being moved by Divine providence; but not, as rational creatures are, through understanding the Divine commandment.”

27. Schlick, Philosophical Papers, 125.

28. Cf. Maritain, God and the Permission of Evil, 10: “In the order of Being and reality, God is the primal causation and thus the interior intelligibility of the known thing. This means that, for example, “in the line of the good, God is the first and transcendent cause of our liberty and our free decisions, so that the free act is wholly from God as first cause and wholly from us as second cause; because there is not a fibril of Being which escapes the causality of God. Our liberty has the initiative of our acts, but this is a second initiative; it is God who has the first initiative . . . in the line of good: all that which God knows in created existence, He knows because He causes it.”

29. ST I, 2, 1, resp.

30. Cf. ST I, 2, resp; DN I, 3, 77; In Sent. VIII, 1,1.

31. See McDermott’s prefatory comments in Summa Theologiae: A Concise Edition, xxxi–xxxii: “Negations are, so to speak, the shadows cast in our language by the affirmations we would like to make: God’s simpleness, for example, his lack of parts, is a shadow thrown onto our expectation of what perfection is—richness of complexity—by God’s all-embracing concentration of perfection in one entity, a perfection that sums every variety of created perfection that imitates it. In similar ways, Thomas will show that God is-and-isn’t in space: not existing in space as himself located, but present as the active doing of all spatial location and locatedness; and even more mysteriously, that God is-and-isn’t in time: not himself measured by time but present in all temporal measuring and measuredness. The principle appealed to throughout is the same principle that led to God’s existence in the first place: God exists as the doing of all being, the existence that acts in all existence, an existence in the world’s existing but not of it, no thing, but not therefore nothing.”

32. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 166.

33. Santayana, Egotism, 135.

34. Cf. ST I, 2, 1.

35. Cf. Pegis, “Aquinas and the Natural Law,” 5: “The Christian man, who knows by faith that God has made that hope of human nature into a promise and a reality, can understand the mystery of human destiny with greater depth, but as the end for philosophy as for reason the vision of the perfect good remains a hope—not indeed a hope without substance, since it is discovered and expressed within a world of divine providence. What could—and even would—come to man, if he but opened himself to it, for a God who was pure love? Let us say, then, that a philosophical ethics ends in human hope sustained by a mystery, whereas religious ethics begins with a covenant and is sustained by a promise.” This lecture was referred to by Leo Strauss in his University of Chicago, 1965 winter quarter class “Introduction to Political Philosophy: Aristotle,” sessions 10–16. He purportedly noted that he had never understood Thomism in such a manner, and found the talk profound.

36. Hesse, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” 203–4.

37. Cf. ST I-II, 91, 2, resp.

38. Cf. Moritz Schlick, “On the Meaning of Life,” in Hanfling, Life and Meaning: A Philosophical Reader, 60–73, esp. 64: “There is, however, no irreconcilable opposition between play in the philosophical sense and work in the economic meaning of the term. Play, as we see it, is any activity which takes place entirely for its own sake, independently of its effects and consequences. There is nothing to stop these effects from being of a useful or valuable kind. If they are, so much the better; the action still remains play, since it already bears its own value within itself . . . Play too, in other words, can be creative; its outcome can coincide with that of work . . . And that is also true in the end of those actions which engender neither science or art, but the day’s necessities, and which are seemingly altogether devoid of spirit. The tilling of the fields, the weaving of fabrics, the cobbling of shoes, can all become play, and may take on the character of artistic acts. Nor is it even so uncommon for a man to take so much pleasure in such activities, that he forgets the purpose of them. Every true craftsman can experience in his own case this transformation of the means into an end-in-itself, which can take place with almost any activity, and which makes the product into a work of art . . . The individual would lead an existence, as in the profound and beautiful saying of the Bible, like the life of the lilies of the field.”

39. See Saint Thomas on whether there was faith in angels and in man in their original states. ST II-II, 5, 1, ad. 1: “Their contemplation was higher than ours, and by means of it, they drew nearer to God than we do and so could in a clear way know more things about divine actions and mysteries than we can. For this reason, there was not in them a faith by which God is sought as being absent, in the way that He is sought by us. For He was more present to them by the light of wisdom than He is to us, even though He was not present to them as He is to the blessed through the light of glory.”

40. Cf. Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote.

41. Schlick, “On the Meaning of Life,” 68.

42. Matt 19:14 (VOICE).

43. Cf. Hesse, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” 199: “Only one trait in Myshkin’s character, but that an important one, appears to me as Christlike. I allude to his timid, morbid purity. The secret fear of sex and of procreation is a trait which must be reckoned with in the message of Christ for it plays a distinct part in his world mission. Even the superficial portrait of Jesus by Renan does not entirely overlook this feature.”

44. We seek here the distinct non-mediated temporal presence, particular to the will, the region in beings where grace transforms desire into self-giving, evoking a co-naissance intimacy with Being, one which paradoxically prepares the intellect to guide the will. Cf. Nichols, Word Has Been Abroad, xv.

45. ST II-II, 17, 3, resp.

46. Cf. Critias, 109b–c: “In the days of old the gods had the whole earth distributed among them by allotment. There was no quarrelling; for you cannot rightly suppose that the gods did not know what was proper for each of them to have, or, knowing this, that they would seek to procure for themselves by contention that which more properly belonged to others. They all of them by just apportionment obtained what they wanted, and peopled their own districts; and when they had peopled them they tended us, their nurselings and possessions, as shepherds tend their flocks, excepting only that they did not use blows or bodily force, as shepherds do, but governed us like pilots from the stern of the vessel, which is an easy way of guiding animals, holding our souls by the rudder of persuasion according to their own pleasure;—thus did they guide all mortal creatures.”

47. Cf. Eckhart, “Sermon 34,” in Breakthrough, 478: “Three things caused Mary to sit at our Lord’s feet. The first was that God’s goodness had embraced her soul. The second was a great, unspeakable longing: she yearned without knowing what it was she yearned after, and she desired without knowing what she desired! The third was the sweet consolation and bliss she derived from the eternal words that came from Christ’s mouth. Three things also caused Martha to run about and serve her dear Christ. The first was a maturity of age and a depth of her being, which was thoroughly trained to the most external matters. For this reason, she believed that no one was so well suited for activity as herself. The second was a wise prudence that knew how to achieve external acts to the highest degree that love demands. The third was the high dignity of her dear guest. The masters of the spiritual life say that God is ready for every person’s spiritual and physical satisfaction to the utmost degree that the person desires. We can clearly distinguish with respect to God’s dear friends how God satisfies our spiritual nature while, on the other hand, he also provides satisfaction for our physical nature.”

48. Cf. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, 85.

49. Cf. Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study of Sorcery,” in Published Essays, 1966–1985.

50. Strauss, On Tyranny, 22–132.

51. ST I, 2, 1, obj. 1.

52. Cf. Cornford, “Youth,” in Poems, 15.

53. Dostoyevsky, Idiot, 4.

54. Dostoyevsky, Idiot, 4.

55. Cf. See Jocasta’s foreshadowing remarks. Sophocles, “Oedipus the King,” in Three Theban Plays, §1070–72: “What should a man fear? It’s all chance, chance rules our lives. Not a man on earth can see a day ahead, groping through the dark. Better to live at random, best we can.” See also Milton, Paradise Lost, 658–61: “The reason’d high of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate, fixt fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, and found no end, in wand’ring mazes lost.” Cf. Hegel, Natural Law, 105: “Tragedy consists in this, that ethical nature segregates its inorganic nature (in order not to become entangled in it), as a fate, and places it outside itself: and by acknowledging this fate in the struggle against it, ethical nature is reconciled with the Divine being as the unity of both. To continue this metaphor, Comedy, on the other hand, will generally come down on the side of absence of fate. Either it falls within absolute vitality, and thus presents only shadows of clashes (or mock battles with a fabricated fate and fictitious enemies) or else it falls within non-life and therefore presents only shadows of self-determination and absoluteness; the former is the old, or Divine, comedy, the latter the modern comedy.”

56. Aeschylus, “Agamemnon,” Oresteia, §67–71.

57. Young, Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, 149.

58. ST I, 2, 1, ad. 1.

59. Cf. Laws 644d; 803b–c: “I assert that what is serious should be treated seriously, and what is not serious should not, and that by nature god is worthy of a complete blessed seriousness, but that what is human, as we said earlier, has been devised as a certain plaything of god, and that this is really the best thing about it. Every man and woman should spend life in this way, playing the most beautiful games.” Cf. Rahner, Man at Play, 40: “Surely only a man whose foundation is in the reality of God can thus call life on earth a game and a shadow-play? For only such a man as this, only to a man who truly believes that this world has proceeded out of the fullness of God’s creative being, is it given to say ‘Nay’ along with his ‘Yea’, and to say it without demur or hesitation. In other words, only such a man can accept and lovingly embrace the world—which includes himself—as God’s handiwork, and, at the same time, toss it aside as a child would toss a toy of which it had wearied, in order then to soar upward into the ‘blessed seriousness’ which is God alone. Only thus does gay melancholy become possible and justified, the mood which must always govern the Christian, the true Homo Ludens, as he follows his middle road. Love for the world and rejection of the world—both of these must draw him and he must at one and the same moment be ready to fold that world in his embrace and to turn his back upon it.”

60. Sophocles, “Oedipus the King,” in Three Theban Plays, §1077-86.

61. See “Monologium,” XIV, in Anselm, Proslogium, Monologium, Cur Deus Homo.

62. Pegis, “Aquinas and the Natural Law,” 5.

63. Ps 119.

64. Cf. ST I-II, 94, 6, ad. 2. On whether the natural law can be abolished from the heart of man. “Although grace is more efficacious than nature, yet nature is more essential to man, and therefore more enduring.”

65. Cf. Balthasar, Christian Witness, 18; see also Berry, “Tested in Fire,” 145–70.

66. ST I, 8, 1, resp.

67. This is why Plato places such a unique and privileged status on the nature of wonder. See Theaet. 155d: “I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder. He was not a bad genealogist who said that Iris (the messenger of heaven) is the child of Thaumas (wonder).”

68. Cf. É. Gilson, “Medieval Experiment,” Part 1 of The Unity of Philosophical Experience.

69. ST I, 2, 1, resp.

70. Cf. ST I, 3, 4, resp: “If the existence of a thing differs from its essence, this existence must be caused either by some exterior agent or by its essential principles. Now it is impossible for a thing’s existence to be caused by its essential constituent principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence, if its existence is caused. Therefore that thing, whose existence differs from its essence, must have its existence caused by another. But this cannot be true of God; because we call God the first efficient cause. Therefore, it is impossible that in God His existence should differ from His essence.”

71. Cf. ST I, 3, pr.: “Having recognized that something exists, we still have to investigate the way in which it exists, so that we may come to understand what it is that exists. But we cannot know what God is, only what he is not. We must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist rather than the ways in which he does.”

72. ST I, 2, 1, resp.

73. ST I, 58, 4, resp.

74. ST I, 2, 2, resp.

75. Tolstoy dictated to N. N. Gusev, his personal secretary, that he wanted to be buried at Yasnaya Polyana and his reasoning is ever timely. See “Tolstoy’s Grave”: “‘There should be no ceremonies while burying my body; a wooden coffin and let anybody who will be willing to take it to the Old Zakaz forest, to the place of the little green stick, by the ravine.’ Tolstoy heard the legend about the little green stick from his most beloved eldest brother Nikolai when a child. When Nikolai was 12 years old, he once told his family about a great secret. If it could be revealed, nobody would die any more, there would be no wars or illnesses, and all the people would become ant brothers. To make it happen, one just needed to find a little green stick, buried on the edge of the ravine in Old Zakaz, as the secret was written on it. Playing the game of ‘ant brothers,’ the Tolstoy children settled under arm-chairs covered with shawls; sitting there and snuggling up together (like ants in their little home), they felt how good it was to be together ‘under the same roof,’ because they loved each other. And they dreamed of the ant brotherhood for all the people. As an old man, Tolstoy wrote: ‘It was so very good, and I am grateful to God that I could play like that. We called it a game, though anything in the world is a game except that.’”

76. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 25.

77. Cf. Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 20–32.

78. Péguy, Portal of the Mystery of Hope, 45–46; cf. Péguy, Basic Verities, 275–77:

Blessed are those who died for carnal earth.

Provided it was in a just war.

Blessed are those who died for a plot of ground.

Blessed are those who died a solemn death.

Blessed are those who died in great battles.

Stretched out on the ground in the face of God.

…

Blessed are those who died for their carnal cities.

For they are the body of the City of God.

Blessed are those who died for their hearth and their fire,

And the lowly honors of their father’s house.

For such is the image and such the beginning

…

Blessed are those who died in this crushing down,

In the accomplishment of this earthly vow.

…

Blessed are those who died, for they have returned

Into primeval clay and primeval earth.

Blessed are those who died in a just war.

Blessed is the wheat that is ripe and the wheat that is gathered in sheaves.

79. Cf. Chesterton, Catholic Church and Conversion, 113: “The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”

80. Cf. Matt 7:24.

81. Cf. ST I, 2, 1, ad. 1. See also Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas, 46–47: “The best way I know to put this is to remind ourselves that simpleness is not an attribute of God, properly speaking, so much as a ‘formal feature’ of divinity. That is, we do not include ‘simpleness’ in that list of terms we wish to attribute to God—classically, ‘living’, ‘wise’, ‘willing’. It is rather that simpleness defines the manner in which such properties might be attributed to God. When we say God is simple, we are speaking not about God directly but about God’s ontological constitution; just as when we say that Eloise is composite, we are not predicating anything about her in any of the nine recognizable ways of Aristotle. So it would be putting the cart well before the horse to think of simpleness as a constituent property of God whose very “existence is a necessary condition of [God’s] existence” [Alvin Plantinga]. ‘Formal properties’ are not so much said of a subject, as they are reflected in a subject’s very mode of existing, and govern the way in which anything whatsoever might be said of that subject.”

82. Saint Thomas’s remarks on obediental potency as the divine inflictive benefaction raising us beyond our own powers requires that within us there is a natural openness to be raised. This natural openness is housed not in the intellect but in the intellect’s trigger mechanism, desire, in its most profound sense, as potency. What is described in obediential potency can be understood as reflecting the meaning of the will in its non-reflexive originary praxis. Cf. DV, XXIX, 3, answers to three difficulties: “The capacity of a creature is predicated on the potency of reception which it has. Now the potency of a creature to receive is of two kinds. One is natural; and this can be entirely fulfilled, because it extends only to natural perfections. The other is obediential potency, inasmuch as it can receive something from God; and such a capacity cannot be filled, because whatever God does with a creature, it still remains in potency to receive from God. Now a measure which increases when goodness increases is determined by the amount of perfection received rather than by that of the capacity to receive.”

83. Cf. SCG III, 26–40. Saint Thomas unveils a litany of options as to what human felicity does not consist in.

84. Theaet. 176b1. NE, 1177b33; 1179a22–30; Met., 1072b14–26.

85. God is not self-evident in our condition; but self-evident in our nature. This is the difference between natural law as imposition when reflecting our condition and as a connaturality in our nature. The difficulty of clarifying the meaning of traditio as a set of enduring truths wholly irreducible to a Humean irrational sentiment yet, at the same time, not easily open to verification, is realized in the language of natural law’s simultaneous self-evidence and refusal to unveil its mystery. Russell Kirk’s famous Ten Principles, perhaps, when read within this light, give them a whole new vantage by which to approach the relationship between tradition, conservatism, and the natural law. For the original six principles see Kirk, Conservative Mind. For their communion expansion see Kirk, Politics of Prudence.

86. Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 268.

87. Cf. Armand Maurer, “Gilson’s Use of History in Philosophy,” in Russman, Thomistic Papers V, 25–47. See also É. Gilson, Spirit of Thomism; Reason and Revelation; God and Philosophy.

88. Cf. Pegis, “St. Anselm and the Argument in the Proslogion,” 228–67.

89. Cf. Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery.

90. DN I, 3, 77. See also O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas, 49.

91. In Sent. VIII, 1, 1. See also O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas, 58.

92. Moss, “Friendship: St. Anselm, Theoria and the Convolution of Sense,” in Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy, 127–42, esp. 132.

93. Moss, “Friendship,” 132.

94. Cf. Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 48–49: “Not only does every being tend, by the inner dynamism of its act of existence, to overflow into action, but this action is both a self-manifestation and a self-communication, a self-sharing, of the being’s own inner ontological perfection with others. This natural tendency to self-giving is a revelation of the natural fecundity or “generosity” rooted in the very nature of being itself. We are immediately reminded of the ancient Platonic tradition—well known to St. Thomas—of the ‘self-diffusiveness of the Good’ (bonum est diffusivum sui, as the Latins put it). What St. Thomas has done is to incorporate this whole rich tradition of the fecundity of the Good into his own philosophy of being, turning this self-diffusiveness, which the Platonic tradition identified as proper to what they considered the ultimate ground of reality, the Good, into a property of being itself, of which the good now becomes one inseparable aspect (or transcendental property). Whereas in Platonism, and especially Neoplatonism, being itself is only a lesser dimension of the Good, for St. Thomas the good is a derivative property of existential being itself, expressing more explicitly the primal dynamism of self-expansiveness and self-giving inherent in the very nature of being as act of existence. The primacy always lies with existence for St. Thomas. Nothing can be good unless it first actually is; and from the very fact that it is, it naturally follows that it is good, since the act of existence is the root of all perfection in any domain, ‘the actuality of all acts, and the perfection of all perfections.’”

95. Pseudo-Dionysius, “Celestial Hierarchy,” IV, 10, 159.

96. DN IV, 5.

97. ST I, 2, resp.; DN I, 3, 77; In Sent. VIII, 1, 1.

98. Cf. Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being.