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“Entering the Chase”:

The Effortless Drama of Natural Law’s longior via

It is all too easy to enshrine discussions of natural law within current political accounts of ultimately facile and pithy attempts at moralistic obedience. The political false dilemmas of any given decade in this sense are as reactionary as they are legion. If we agree with one Catholic saint invoking another that the natural law is nothing else but “the light of understanding infused in us by God, whereby we understand what must be done and what must be avoided” to the extent that this light was even given to us as a law upon our hearts at our very creation,2 then surely we know what propositional, mental, and obediential boxes to check. It is an odd predicament we find ourselves in when we can in one sense be wholly “right” by one light yet in our prescriptive anger we can snuff out that same light of understanding in an unattractive false certitude which cuts to the quick in premature reduction. We do ourselves and others no favors if while we claim that we see in a glass darkly we further darken our vision with varieties of unnecessary moralistic fallibilism and thus offer a blind path for others.3

The path forward is not easy, to be sure, so we could offer instead that the drama of existence is an essentially difficult one. There is a deep truth to affirm along with Socrates (who affirms an ancient proverb) that all that is beautiful is difficult.4 Again, we must be careful, for while it is true to say that God is love, the obverse that all love is God is not a theological truth, lest we endanger ourselves toward pantheistic platitudes; likewise, all that is difficult may not be beautiful, and a struggle for its own sake may lend itself more toward a merely pagan virtue that is ultimately closer to classical or Enlightenment agon than may be truly beautiful, true, or good. Accordingly, we seem to harbor an implicit mistrust of that which is effortless because we do not want to accept that which is a gift.5 Natural law must be fought for, indeed, it could be argued that we must defend it for its own sake because tradition must of itself resist all change and maintain continuity to stem the tide of an over-eager progressivism.

In one sense this sounds like an upright and righteous charge, but in and of itself it is a fallibilist posture that demands that natural law has to always incur the hard work of the theologian, philosopher, or pastor that still finds itself within another modern dilemma of technocracy versus populism: virtue is found within the learnèd “virtuous,” and the rest of us simple folk have the option of blind deference or the ressentiment of rejection. The gospel is hidden from the learned and wise, and revealed to the simple, the child-like;6 this is true, but does this yet lead us to conclude that the head no longer requires feet or vice versa?7 If we keep with this Pauline metaphor for a moment, insisting that we can work out our part in the hard work alone of our position, the “true” is only won at the expense of the good, and what’s more, at the expense of the other. On the contrary, Josef Pieper highlights this problematic when he notes that for Aquinas, “The essence of virtue consists in the good rather than in the difficult.” That is, “Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more meritorious; it must be more difficult in such a way that it is at the same time good in yet a higher way.”8 Along with Aquinas, Pieper dares to suggest against our modern proclivity toward the self-meritorious difficulty of work that “the sublime achievements of moral goodness are characterized by effortlessness—because it is of their essence to spring from love.”9 Yet once more, “effortlessness” is not the goal either, in the same way that difficulty for its own sake is not the goal, for the end is that which is good for its own sake, a life lived in love of God and neighbor.

If neither difficulty nor effortlessness for their own sakes are the goal, but may both be very real descriptions of the experience of living out a life lived within an obedience to the natural law, Gilson recommends something different than prescription and something otherwise than reactionary steadfastness. Subordinated Ethics is not a detailed treatise on the specifics of natural law theory nor a set of recipes for how one “enacts” the natural law within a series of steps to follow, cultural attitudes to mimic, nor particular “stances” to take—although, of course, many ethical ways of life naturally follow within a path taken along this route, and that is precisely her point: the natural law is that which first and foremost is itself not first, but second, for it itself follows the eternal law.

Following along such a path begins here by way of an acknowledgement in the form of a response. Gilson, who often has St. Thomas as her guide, proposes here a longer way that “ends its journey in seeing what was there to begin with and what initiated its pilgrimage: the non-mediated presence of To Be. The journey itself is a response to the non-mediated mystery of being.”10 Here, as in her previous work, Gilson explores the nature of the longior via (“longer way”) by attending to a metaphysics of causality that finds its “resolution” in God. To understand the path of the longior via it is important to acknowledge that this road is not purely immediate grasping of cause and effect, but the truth of this way is discovered along a road that realizes our creaturely place in the order of things. Again, this path is not simply a pronouncement of affirming that God is the ultimate cause because we somehow have direct access to God as the first cause.11 As Gilson says elsewhere, “The longer way is a twofold process: we begin in effects and arrive at first causes only because we already understand the nature of effects to be effects of. We possess or partake in causal meaning as original to our being. Causative efficacy is identical with our own intentionality and our originary otherness. We possess not the knowledge but the ground of knowledge which is, in its way of the uncreated.”12 Along with Aquinas, Gilson affirms our creaturely, existential situation of always already being in via, on the way, where we find ourselves within a world of effects, and where we ourselves are an “effect” born out of our own otherness within creation. Making the next step to acknowledging the causality is what Aquinas calls a “resolution” within being from the sensible to the intellectual of the divine science.13 Hence, in this way, the first becomes that which for us is the last: for it is only natural to proceed “from the sensible to the intelligible, from the effects to the causes, and from that which is later to the first.”14 This “reversal” from that which is last in the order of things to the first uncaused cause requires a metaphysical judgment that Gilson calls a necessity to stop, or ananke stenai: “The ananke stenai is the originating stop in the order of explanation and in Being.”15 Without such a judgment the spectre of an infinite (or as she calls it, “indefinite”) regress would paradoxically limit our ability to see things as they truly are. In every exploration of the various five ways of Thomas, Gilson shows us that one must at some point recognize that all the things of the world, within the spectrum of their miscellany, point back to that which is first—this very recognition is itself the judgment which enacts the “resolution” where we find ourselves within the viatoric chase of our creaturely existence toward the infinite.

Gilson’s proposal to “enter the chase,” therefore, is discerned and lived as an achievement over a lifetime of living through the stuff of life, a life that has its place not among the angels in an immediate vision16 but experienced in a “catching up” within the distance between God and man as existence itself. “This distance is the longer way, the way that allows finitude to be a ‘vehicle’ of transcendence. Through it there is always something more and Other, something not yet said and done, and thinking must indeed ‘catch up’ to Being.”17 Natural law, then, is not something to prescriptively secure18 but is received within the analogical distance of living within the embrace of eternal law’s inscription in our hearts.

Woven throughout, Gilson also attends to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, a work which she puts in conversation with Thomas’s five ways that may at first appear tangential but draws us to the heart of things. Like her previous excursions,19 here she brings in the literary and poetic to enlighten this notion of being “on the way” but here with a focus (along with Thomas Aquinas) on originary praxis by way of counterpoint. That is, Dostoyevsky’s Myshkin exemplifies a longing to return to our origins, that longing to be reconnected with that “first” which we only discover “last.” What both Thomas and Prince Myshkin illuminate is that our attitude and even, one might say, our metaphysical comportment need be reconfigured by the act of playfulness in order to return to our originary praxis. Our original practice as children is something we forget: our awe before existence, our desire to have an experience “again” (like that of a child’s playful exuberance), our original ability to see the light of dawn where everything is again new. Whether we like it or not, we are entrenched within life’s miscellany, and while we can all too easily romanticize the “messiness of life,” Gilson, like these authors and literary characters with whom she is in conversation, takes us to an emphasis on that which is present, a present presence here in all its immediacy.

To rightly see the joy of these realities requires not merely philosophical and theological acumen but a simplicity of heart. That is not to say, however, that these two need be opposed. The effortlessness spoken of above can indeed be learned by way of habit, of the action of our intellect which engages in the child-like play that is the very essence of such a simplicity. One of the many joys of being a parent20 is that paradoxical endurance of learning again to have the heart of a child. Learning to return to our own originary praxis is done amidst an encounter with an other, a presence that calls us again and again to not only start over, but to become that which is itself good.21 Lest we further confuse ourselves, one cannot simply abide by a prescription to “be child-like” either, because it is itself a practice to inhabit, a suggestion to live within the risk of an embodied, soul-entrenched immediacy within a world that claims it is the most “grown up” thing to not have children for any number of excuses which purport to be “rational.”

In reading this book by Gilson, I commend the reader to understand that it is written with—and should be read with—a deep allergy to all that is reactionary. That which is reactionary leads to moralistic prescription for it is not the basis of a generative, originary presence. That which resounds most truly in our soul is never the self-imposition of the ego but an openness to the otherness which is our existence made resplendent by the otherness of an infinite, Triune God in Whom we find our very being. Gilson’s exhortation to this originary presence and to our originary practice can only be rediscovered as a following of the natural law that participates in the eternal law, eschewing imposition of both the conservative prescription as much as it so very much otherwise than the progressivist piety that is self-defined, in turn, by its reaction to this moralism. The path is as immediate as it is risked in the longer metaphysical and theological paths she recommends we travel by returning once again to Thomas’s five ways. One can simply read the five ways or be inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Idiot without inhabiting them; Kierkegaard’s Johannes Climacus can see and write endlessly about what is on the other side of the “leap” without in fact taking that leap. Just because we fail over and over again when we do enter the chase should not be a fly in the ointment, but a spur for our souls.

[T]he Church takes place and grows constantly in the hearts of people and in the living reality of environments and social situations. It does this in encounter with the living presence of Jesus Christ, in the existential self-enrichment of the certainty of this encounter, and in experiencing His real capacity to save the human being in all his drama and mundaneness.22

Eric Austin Lee

Eastertide 2019

2. Veritatis Splendor, §40, quoting Thomas Aquinas, “Prologus: Opuscula Theologica,” II, no. 1129, p. 245; Cf. Thomas Aquinas, ST II-II, 91, 2.

3. See Aquinas, ST I-II, 48, 3.

4. Plato, Hippias Major, 304e8.

5. See Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, 35–36.

6. Luke 10:21.

7. Cf. 1 Cor 12:21.

8. Pieper, Leisure, 33–34, citing Aquinas, ST II-II, 123, 12, ad. 2 and ST II-II, 27, 8, ad. 2.

9. Pieper, Leisure, 34.

10. C. Gilson, Immediacy and Meaning, xii, emphasis in original.

11. Aquinas calls this particular misstep an error of the Platonists. See Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, X, 3.1964.

12. C. Gilson, Immediacy and Meaning, 180, emphasis hers. Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, X, 3.1964. Thomas also notes that Plato errors in a similar way in conflating the order of knowledge with the separable forms (ST, I, 84, 1).

13. See Aquinas, In Boethii De trinitate, q. 6, a. 1, co. 22. For a helpful summary of the details in Aquinas, see Aertsen, “Method and Metaphysics.”

14. Aquinas, In I Sent., 17, 1, 4. Translation Aertsen’s.

15. C. Gilson, Metaphysical Presuppositions, 172. See especially chapter 4.

16. Aquinas, ST I, 65, 2, ad. 1: “Man was not intended to secure his ultimate perfection at once, like the angel. Hence a longer way was assigned to man than to the angel for securing beatitude.”

17. C. Gilson, Metaphysical Presuppositions, 125.

18. See chapter 3, especially the section “Ten Principles in Search of an Author: Tradition, Virtues, Limits.”

19. C. Gilson, Immediacy and Meaning.

20. I mean this in the broadest sense possible, whether biological, foster, adoptive, as well as the pastors, deacons, priests, nuns, and the consecrated laity who are our fathers and mothers in that their own simplicity is to watch over us in prayer.

21. Cf. the section “Socrates as a Stand-In for the Good,” in Schindler, Plato’s Critique, 179–88.

22. Savorana, Life of Luigi Giussani, 637, citing Giussani’s article “La certezza della fede e la cultura Cristiana” [“The Certainty of Christian Faith and Culture”], appearing in the October 29, 1982 issue of L’Osservatore Romano (translated by Sullivan and Bacich).