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Stating the Problem of Ethical Enactment

Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified.

—Galatians 2:16

The moral life cannot be left un-advocated—without a technique of defence—and yet it lies about stifled by the professor and the politician, the pedagogue and the propagandist; rigid and contrived when it should have and give life.23 It is an odd predicament—and perhaps the predicament of our day, but I suspect otherwise—to find oneself understanding those who relish revolt as much as languishing in its consequences. And yet, can that desire to break free and put the tradition into tension be solely a negative aspect of ethical meaning, can it be solely the sensuous weapon of the progressive? How then is the reality of a chaste anarchism24 actually critical to the invocation of natural law? If the ethical life in its modern and post-modern context is beautiful at all, it increasingly appears discovered in nostalgia, but nostalgia can only function as a propaedeutic to a good will when one does not seek merely to remake what once was. The temptation to nostalgia is forgivable but not without consequences. The world is the moving image of the eternal and yet always novitas mundi. If we concoct an ethics nostalgic for what it cannot relive, we live and abide by a frustrated end. Within that which cannot complete itself, the beautiful will flee, replaced by the bitter, or ridiculous, or revolutionary. And yet a nostalgia, not in competition with the futural, but intersecting in Presence, has more to offer ethics than a merely frustrated incompletion. When we let it place us in our failing it can instill in us repentance in the face of the finite form and a rediscovery of what has been lost in a new and renewed form.

How is there to be an ethic rebuilt in a godless world, which has violated foundational meaning, and if it needs to be rebuilt, does this demonstrate a failure on the part of the originary ethic? Does it mean that the authentic moral life must constantly be in a phoenix state, born to die? Or is there some other more primal identification whereby the ethic is naturally a failing; not a failure as such but an in-failing, that it cannot hold its own because it is not built to withstand, but instead to be subordinated? One with no technique of defence but courageous surrender; an ethic, which takes heed from Wittgenstein: “ethics, if it is anything, must be supernatural and our words will only express facts as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water.”25 By subordinated, we mean an ethic that recognizes, when it places its natural law template upon experience, that an aspect of the natural law itself is obscured. The translation from immutable imbedded law to changeable and conditional law should not be managed with some worldly political facticity as the movement from that which is not in our power, the eternal law, to that which tempts us with the confluence of power, the human law. This odd straddling of the natural law between the two, as the revelation of the former and the foundation for the latter, reveals the natural law in the light of a certain playfulness—a quality of appearance and disappearance compatible with the alethiological emphasis of truth as un-veiling.26 The natural law does not have an in-itself objectival quality: it is either the face of the eternal law or the hidden bones beneath the flesh of the human law. It moves without capture. When it is caught it is more often than not the convention or nomos placed on the world, and yet it must be something more and other in order for those nomoi to be. This is the language game of tradition as enduring, and yet neither static nor uninformative. It also shows us that what is more apparent is actually the lesser, and yet, because the lesser, the human law is in our hands, and we press it into service as an imposition, as a leading position rather than as a struggling to catch-up to its source in-Being.27 If the immutable and always preceding eternal law is understood as the natural law through our rational participation in it, and if this participation then creates the human law as mutable, then without our ability to take hold of the situation—to pause in the eternal and see it for what it is—we have moved from that which precedes and cannot fail to that which follows and fails in the blink of an eye. And so the awkwardness and danger of human action: we act from eternity when we act in time, with all the dangers and temptations implicit in that action. And yet, what else is there to do, even in spite of the postmodernist interdict on eternity in favor of the progressivist ideological political correctness which has ridiculed and exiled the natural public orthodoxy which, whatever its limitations, maintains the relation between human action and non-temporal implication and foundation. We have created an artifice structure in danger of becoming artificial, susceptible to a protracted and often intentional infidelity to the eternal. The eternal reveals itself in the natural, the natural in the human, and in one sense nothing is lost because that which is eternal cannot be stripped of Being, but the revelation on our side points to a failing, that our grasping of this eternality must be done through a blindness, that we only see the immutable through the mutable, through a glass darkly, the always preceding order through the shambolic malleability of the effects. If we do not recognize this failing, then we live by a non-subordinated ethics where the natural law takes on the mode of prescriptive imposition identical with the human law, pressed to lead rather than to follow. Or it is lost altogether. But ethics must find its true subordination in the reality of our exteriorized existence,28 whereby the natural law occurs as connaturally “promulgated by the very fact that God instilled it into man’s mind so as to be known by him naturally.”29 Any other subordination is false and is actually a form of in-subordination. But still there are times when the true subordinated ethic takes on the character of the chaste anarchist, an ethics of insubordination precisely because it will not surrender to anything other than its naturally supernatural ordering. And this is martyrdom.

Perhaps in response to our fallen and falling world, or perhaps because our personal and collective fear finds it easier to abide by a rule than to be the lived invocation of its intelligibility, ethical rules were placed at the forefront of human ordination, dilemma, and action. Ethics is pressed into a service it cannot fulfill. It is laden with the terrifying responsibility to lead, even and especially if the ethical system claims to adhere to divine meaning. The more rabidly defended, the more this adherence appears in name only. Ethics becomes the frontispiece of divine meaning, the way into the divine so that all theological understanding is malformed in a way not entirely dissimilar to Kant:30 rendering God little more than a moral imperator, so much so that the whole theological drama can be read like one of Aesop’s fables.31 What is understood of ethics, and what is affectively impressed upon us, is an ethics disengaged from any otherness, and held only and openly within and by itself. Ethical action has taken on the language and imprimatur of the conscience symbol—a self-enclosed ideational dictum—and in doing so has evacuated the primitive and the mystical, the mysterious and the super-sensual which once gave rise to moral order, when the sacred knew its ground because it was in play. If ethics is to guide us along the way, it cannot lead, either as politburo or even as public orthodoxy.32 It cannot be smugly symbolic but must be by way of signage, of directionality, of the open realization that ethical meaning is en route, pointing the way because it is on the way, as only sign, not symbol, can point to the sacramental terminus. Description must precede prescription. The courtesies of dogma and tradition are the road signs and guideposts along the longior via, not themselves the termini.

An ethics that is in-failing (but not a failure) adheres to a different rhythm/metron; it resides as signage because it wholly depends upon the sacral for its enactment. The little things of the world are too beautiful to be “true” and yet they exist, so that their beauty is and must be the truth. The world is too fallen to possess such beauty, and yet the world is the place where that beauty is made known, so that beauty abides by a truth other than the world in order to be the bearer of the world. That truth is beyond but never leaves the world as the way in which true transcendence reconfigures a soul in longing, to be “more human than any human was ever likely to be.”33 A subordinated ethics lives by that riddle, by the beauty not of the world in order to be the bearer of the world, by the truth that condemns in order to save. It is the ethics of surrender and endurance, of paradox and seeming contradiction, of the anarchism born only of the ardent desire for true order and life-giving entelechy. It is the incommunicable uniqueness of each human soul in communion with its transcendental mystery, and in union with other incommunicable souls.34 What indeed is art but the attempt to capture the beauty of this temporal passing moment in relation to its mysterious transcendental a-temporality? What are tears for if not the recognition of its uncapturable but utterly human relation? Even—perhaps especially—the polis cannot escape this without escaping its essence, meaning, and beauty.

Ethical meaning can persist only by a loving suppression, as being shaped and filtered by the spiritual and the exotically primitive. It requires that it be born, not of or in isolation, but in the connatural non-mediated un-reflective love of play and ecstasy which knows no loss. It is this formation which prepares us for all other formations, all of which lead to our own anticipation of forgetfulness. This is the beyond-reason recognition of that-which-is-fated and that-which-is-free as the prime compatibility prefiguring all human action. This emphasis on the formation of the non-reflective love is crucial to any subsequent ethical reflection. The danger of a non-subordinated ethic, which mimics the truth but cannot carry it, is that it is consistently disseminated by an intelligence which has begun in reflection, in the awareness of ego and concept, which must merge and inhabit and then dictate to existence its meaning.35 It begins in the type of reflection whereby the mind must make a bridge to the world, a bridge it can never complete without remaking the world in the image and likeness of the ego.36 Thinking of itself as aware of itself and its responsibilities, it may reject those who dictate to existence its meaning, but then dictates to existence its alternative forms of meaning, placing itself in the same trap, the same ideological cul-de-sac. If ethics is resolutely a praxis, it cannot begin or end in a political theoria. This praxis summons existence to prepare the prerequisites for a consecrated sensibility, a mythic entrenchment of the soul in existence. When a genuine subordinated ethic takes on genuine reflection, it sees not from a conceptually abstractive or theoretical ground but from how the soul is the form of the body.37 It sees with the eye which knows itself as sight because it is in and of the world, and would be blind without it. Thus, to prepare for this praxis requires an enactment which is not preparation in the reflective theoretic sense, but abidance in the non-reflective love of Being, which those who anticipate their own forgetfulness can remember in the child at play. This exteriorizing praxis lives by a reclamation and inculcation of un-reflective living, of living so awash in the acts of mercy, ritual, familial bond, that it knows nothing but play and imagination. And here both Rousseau and Hobbes might agree. This is the resurrection of the affective intelligence from the materialisms and psychologisms which reduce the soul to the appetite, and/or mistake the ego for its own appetite as the meaning of the appetitive power.

If praxis is what it is only in act, and seeks the seamless act of the good without hesitation, then how it begins, how it is formed, takes on a different but not opposing path to the theoretical and contemplative life. In fact, if we understand that the intellect must guide the will, then the intellect has a place of primacy in that it situates the distance needed to distinguish the desire for the good from what is actually good. By that same token, the intellect leads only because it is first guided, first sparked by desire—so much so that the fulfillment of the intellect and will leads to something far closer to the true appetitive depth in the blinding clarity of love. For no knowledge of God, even speculative knowledge of the highest order, satisfies us,38 because it entails the distance or the estrangement from the full with-ness of lover and beloved. If the intellect is to guide the will, it must itself be guided by a primal appetitive praxis which has set the stage for genuine reflection. Why else does Aristotle open his Metaphysics with that shocking antithesis to common sense: all men by nature desire (stretch forth/yearn) to understand.39 What triggers this non-predatory erotic lust? This originary praxis has so immersed the body and soul in the communion with Being, that when the dark night does come, when the dryness and the anticipation of our forgetfulness replaces our non-reflective love with vicarious innocence, reflection returns to a source that is not reflection, that is not the ego enclosed on itself, attempting to build a bridge from idea to reality, but to the source which genuinely triggers the intellect to lead and which provides its hearth and home—in that mystery which sentiment craves but cannot name: the non-teleological end.40 Practice does indeed make perfect.

This journey into the gainful loss of the subordinated ethic will seek the voice of the other, both in its non-reflective love as foundational to any genuine ethic, and in its anticipation of forgetfulness, which is the recognition of what is lost and what is always in-failing. As such, we will find ourselves traversing the theological, philosophical, poetic, and literary registers in an effort to illuminate the voice of the other, not in the form of the ego but in the form of itself. This will be a dialogue between two seemingly contradictory voices: that of Dostoyevsky’s holy idiot Prince Myshkin41—who is neither Christ nor an alter Christus—and St. Thomas’s Five Ways. Myshkin’s voice is the language of presence, the attempt at reconciliation in a world of disintegrating images, and it is in recoil from the methodical awareness which demonstration and proof place upon the task of living justly. This voice will guide our conceptual unpacking of the Five Ways, no longer one of abstractive certainty but of a certitude which plays to and for the connatural ground of un-reflective love. We will approach “proof” in the strangest sense of the word: one unafraid of the fact that our conviction requires we be en route, that the certitude gained is never final, and could never situate us in the truth, even and especially when it provides the truth to secure the path. It is providing instead the admission into our gainful loss, into a subordinated ethics which enacts truth in us as movement, as doing, as seamless unity so in-tune that it forsakes us and even lets us doubt. The truth gained is the very movement of how praxis should manifest, giving us passageway into Being rather than replacing that viatoric entrenchment. It is the truer certitude born not of a strained attempt to read the world, but from the otherness which reads its nature within us. For all play, every game, has its rules as part of, and essential to, the game. They are not imposed upon the game but flow from the playful game itself.

From the dialogue between Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and St. Thomas’s Five Ways, we will seek to uncover how that-which-is-fated and that-which-is-free are one and the same in the subordinated ethics. What is understood as the theological apocalyptic42 will find its companion ethic in this essential subordination. The Holy Idiot and the Dumb Ox have much in common. It is one thing to be Anselm’s fool who can mouth the words but cannot think the thought, and quite another to be Dostoyevsky’s idiot, the dumb ox who can only speak the to be of what is. Speaking in the mythic language of creation, and the entanglement of virtue and vice, will also assist in setting the stage to view this non-reflective love, this incarnational animal, in its supernatural naturalness. The tension between those inhabited by the divine, and who thus live by a subordinated ethic, and those in whom the divine has faded, thereby causing ethics to lead and form abstractively the political and social orders, will then be brought to light. And here we will see how the traditional problem of ethics is the ethical problem of tradition, the lived-world in courteous transit through death to the non-reflective foundation of life.

Throughout, we will be tasked with setting out the image and action of the un-reflective or pre-reflective lover who lives by a subordinated ethic. This is the ethical soul who can bear the burden of reflection because such a soul is in contact with the foundation which precedes thought and is in harmony with Being as doing.43 We must be careful here, because the eidetic distance needed to illuminate such a figure awash in true self-presence, in the underlying co-naturalness of Being, has the danger of missing the point of such a figure. One can describe and easily admire, or admire and then dismiss, the effects of such a figure—as one sees, smiles and then bypasses the holy idiot. This bypassing becomes a ready-made option because the originary root of such a figure lays fallow, missing the stunning presence which reveals the un-reflective lover as the only truly reasonable being. To do so, we endeavor to recover a series of quiet, behind-our-backs transformations which set the stage for our political, social, ethical and thus interior lives. We will revisit non-reflexive love through how play becomes mythos, and imagination becomes consecration. Thus, affective intelligence transformed through mythos and consecration subordinates both the intellect and the will, and in doing so lives at the highest order of our animal nature in an enshrined unknowing immortality capable of grounding ethics not in reflection but in the ground of reflection, in Being as divine-bearing, a pre-thematic theotokos. The effort is to show how building up the animal—the affective intelligence—in us cultivates the true ratio because it is capable of situating within us a will that binds itself to the spiritual and to the living. By having a will that lives by a subordinated ethic, surrendered to the holy embodiment of love in ritual and familial accord, the intellect can then guide the will without beginning in the false sight of the ego, and only then will the fatal and free be in unison, where

Truth predicts the eclipse of truth, and in that eclipse it condemns man.44

This odd foundation which lives by being bypassed, which emphasizes the idiocy of Being,45 could be mistaken as the safe ground for an anti-ethics, or more precisely an ethics where all is “forgiven” only because there is nothing any longer to forgive. The saintly are meek but not vulgarly tolerant, and the fine line which allows one to go the distance in love of the other is only present because loss is present, because forgiveness is needed, because transcendence has been displaced by ignorance. We seek to articulate not a weak ethic, as companion to a so-called weak theology,46 but an ethical engagement which endures because it receives its strength from its incarnated subordination as viatoric and unfailingly guided by that originary affectivity. This is an ethics which can truly judge because it never relinquishes its status as secondary, as participant in Being-as-such; an ethics that can truly forgive because it lives within the beat of Being which alone can truly judge in its unity of fate and freedom. The beauty and terror of existence are not entitatively outside the participant, but sweep him up into the moving image of eternity, enabling him to judge authentically, living out the position which may rise above change but never above time. As such, this is an ethics of the Furies as much as it is of the Eumenides: the beauty beyond but not contrary to the world as the bearer of the world, even and especially in its failing, is experienced not by the judge but as the judge. The subordinated ethics must judge because, not only does it seek love, it is the enactment of love. It is an ethics experienced acutely in the repulsion from the lie, the unrelenting repulsion from the world which seeks to render the falsehood true, and it will not dismiss that experiential repulsion as if it is contrary to the go-the-distance love needed to judge and to save.47 If it were to dismiss what repels, having confused love and mercy with pandemic acceptance, it would disengage itself from the very subordination which gives all things life and reminds us that when we act in time we act from eternity. The experience of repulsion, not unlike the experience of joy, reveals our secondary status. Being repelled shows that we are not leading nor merely following but are reacting to a ground which precedes thought so as to inform it. We are neither leading in an ideologically enclosed manner nor following in a non-noetic indifference. Instead, we are in-formed so as to be formed through our always preceding contact with Being. In repulsion, we are being informed of a displacement of Being in our search for Being. Neither leading nor following represents the originary ethics, for both equate ethical meaning with prescriptive rule which overlooks the phenomenological harmony in which things are attuned to existence. Far too quickly our uneasy repulsion is put aside or quantified as a sociological apparatus reacting to social norms rather than as mystique incarnated in a politique. But this reduction occurs because, again, ethics loses union with that ab origine affectivity. If the natural law is to reveal its ever-deepening intelligibility as the shepherd of man, it is in how it reveals joy and repulsion, the former in its startlingly universal-into-particular communion of all things, placing the super-sensuous into the sensuous, and the latter, in the aching alienation of a world amiss, not at a distance but at such proximal nearness, so that the failings of one are the failings of all. If the natural law cannot somatically invoke the innocence and the fallenness of our natures, it becomes simply prescription and nothing more. And if it does invoke such experiential movements, it does so as movements, where each is informed of the ethical dimension of being-in-the-world because ethics is in failing, in trust to its secondary status.

If the secondary status is to be taken seriously, then the true political animal is far closer to the peasant than to the politician. The politician is not to be discarded nor his role lessened. But, for him to function properly, he must be aware of the dangerous territory, the polemos, of stepping out of the fertile ground of connatural communion where it would be better, thus truer-to-ethics, to remain. In one real sense, the politician must exile himself from the garden of daily affairs in order to defend the order of daily affairs. But, because the intelligibility of daily affairs is only genuinely revealed to us non-reflexively, if the politician stays too long in thought, he defends a perverted image. This is the paradox of political life. To think of the political life is, in a damning sense, to fall away from it. And yet, of course, we need to fall away as much as we need to return. Societies are built—but slowly rotting away48—on their successive powers to stray, to fall away. But how do we return?49 How do we defend what can only be enacted by familial into-the-earth entanglement? The much quoted and as often misunderstood “all men by nature desire to know” must be extrapolated in its relation to wonder. Aristotle is clearly seeking a somatic knowledge, one where phenomenologically the form is invested in matter, and thus where knowledge is never disengaged from Being as prime revealer.50 This knowledge is triggered by the naturalness of harmonious desire, not by the type of unsubordinated desire which exaggerates a defective human condition. It is knowledge as wonder. All men by nature overflow in participatory wonder, a wonder which naturally inoculates the participant against selfishness. Such political animals rarely, if ever, begin in the “I,” in the ego. They know themselves the proper way, non-reflexively, too busy to invoke the “I,” too full of love of the little things of the dappled earth. Wonder is the unifying principle aligning our being with the natural law as natural signage. The political animal is a being of wonder, his desire to know is never malformed by an ego which exists as a disservice to wonder, historically causing us to fall into knowledge.51 The difficulty: the politician more often than not exiles himself from wonder in order to defend the so-called ethical and social norms which are connaturally produced in wonder. How then can the natural law survive authentically if it pressed into a region alien to its very efficacy? If the natural law arises only in wonder, what happens to the natural law and its participants when wonder ceases and eidetic egoity takes hold?52 The true political animal is too busy being engaged by wonder.53 How then does the prescriptive recover what it has lost, how does the statesman defend without losing his ability to return?

Double Intentionality

To know is primarily and principally to seize within the self a non-self which in its turn is capable of seizing and embracing the self: it is to live with the life of another. To know means principally and first of all to accept and embrace within oneself the other who is just as capable of accepting and embracing; it means to live the life of the other living thing . . . [The Intellect] is essentially acquisitive of reality and not merely a process of forging propositions.54

Intentionality in its primal truth overcomes knowledge reduced to a copy theory or to a relativism of differing labels, while profiling human persons as the privileged beings who alone extract the meaning of Being as such, and that, in a way, the weight of Being resides in them alone. Otherness is as implicit in knowledge and ethics as it is explicit in love.

To say that the weight of Being resides in persons alone can only be understood when liberated from the deficient views of the soul as closed up in matter, as if body and soul are bifurcated into two accidentally related substances. Or, alternatively, one argues that the soul is the form of the body but, by neglecting the profound implications of such a statement, inchoately reflects a divided nature and an artificial union. The soul is already outside itself, it lives a radically exteriorized existence, so much so that what primarily constitutes our own nature is also the site of our own surpassing of self. What we own the least are our own selves, precisely because the soul in its innermost reality is existentially dependent on Being for its existence, and this is manifested most acutely in the act of knowledge.55 In knowledge, the human soul reveals itself to be the alterity of the divine, becoming, in a way, all things. Because we are not separately existent, we must arrive at ourselves by becoming identical with otherness.56

The self is thus permanence in transit. It is what distinguishes each in his own transcendent dignity, and this distinction is permanently unstripped. Yet, the what-it-is of what is unstripped is always in transition; the self is an actuating permanence, the moving image of eternity. Because the soul is united to the body, where each is the realization of the other’s perfection, a dual unity, we act in and out of time. As moving image, the intentional-self acts towards eternity while already being in union with the eternal which alone enables the self to act towards what-it-is in its nature.

We see our pre-cognitive acting from eternity when we act in time in our most originary access to the natural law. The Greek roots of synderesis call to mind vigil, watchfulness, preservation, and safeguarding. It is a non-mediated intuitive inclination towards the eternal good, which issues the effect of conscience and self-knowing. Even the most interior form of self-knowing, self-awareness, is a place where the self surpasses itself in order to be itself! Intentionality is inherent in all interior and exterior human acts. Synderesis is thus a pre-conscience, the immediate union with the eternal good which precedes and helps to issue conscience.57 Synderesis is not reduced to a capacity which can be geared towards good or evil—it is an unstripped and non-acquired habit or innate ability, a pre-cognitive union always unified with the eternal law. Yet its dignity straddles the meaning of habitus in a way that reflects our nature as on the confinium between time and eternity.58 If not capacity, it is described by Saint Thomas as a habitus, the un-erring ability to read the principles of moral action.59 But this must be distinguished from habit in the Augustinian sense, which can be overwhelmed by the appetite. This is instead what Saint Thomas calls the “habit of first principles.” Synderesis is the cause that helps to issue the effect of our acts of judgment or conscience. How does synderesis reflect that the human soul acts from the eternal while acting in time? Synderesis as non-mediated is an un-erring union with the eternal law, a union made possible because the human soul is itself aeviternal. And because our aeviternity is acted out through embodiment, time, and change, synderesis when cognized is thus the principle of the act of conscience, transformed into reflexive self-knowing. When conscience is actualized, this is the self-same participation and illumination of the natural law. Astonishingly, within the very structure of human nature itself, there is a pre-cognitive union with the eternal law, which issues the effect—conscience or self-knowing, which, as reflexive, is the knowing participation in the natural law. If the natural law is our participation in the eternal law, then synderesis is the pre-conscience or the pre-self-knowledge of our eternal union with the eternal law, while our reflexive self-knowing or conscience is the temporal participation in the natural law:

Although an act does not always remain in itself, yet it always remains in its cause, which is power and habit. Now all the habits by which conscience is formed, although many, nevertheless have their efficacy from one first habit, the habit of first principles, which is called synderesis. And for this special reason, this habit is sometimes called conscience, as we have said above.60

The human person stands on the horizon between time and eternity, the lowest of spiritual substances and the highest of corporeal creatures.61 It is this unique nature that begins to radicalize the meaning and power of the intentional act whereby the soul is, in a way, all things. If this is our nature, then we share the unique privilege of actions specific to incorporeal and corporeal designation. We act from eternity when we act in time.62 As Saint Thomas remarks in Question 2 of the Summa Theologica, incorporeal substances are not in space and thus, if not in space, they are not in time. To take up space—for there to be expansion and the appearance of presence—is to take up time. Space is the temporalization of presence, for in space we mark off the chronological happening of what is raised before us. In Question 76, we are reminded that the human intellect is not only incorporeal but a substance, which means that it is subsistent. This is why the objector asks how this soul, if not a body, can affect the body.63 How can the soul “touch” the body; between the mover and the moved there must be this touch or contact which requires embodiment. Saint Thomas responds by identifying two forms of contact: quantity and power. The former requires that contact be bodily, material, corporeal; the latter invokes the subsistent, indeed a-temporal nature of the soul. What then are we to understand about the unified nature of the human person as body and soul, if the body is in time, always exteriorizing its presence in and to the world, while its moving principle, the soul, is, in a way, in and yet not in time? The soul is in time if we accept that not only its power is to be the mover of the body, but its perfection is found in an exteriorized existence, perfected by its unity with the body. And yet, strangely enough, to be the moving principle of the specifically human person, who is free, who is an intellectual substance, requires that its movement is not reducible to time and to the causal determinisms of being that do not rise above change. The soul must act from eternity when it acts in time and if the soul and body are a dual unity, then man himself is connaturally in and not in time in every intentional action. That latter aspect is often overlooked and, in turn, its dramatic implications are bypassed.64 Our task is to recover that eternal action within an existential grounding, not divorced from it.

In a way we act from the same incorporeality, the same eternity or aeviternity,65 as the angels, but realize this activity in manifestly different ways. The angels act from eternity, identical to their incorporeal intellectual substance existentially dependent on God. That is why each angel is its own species. Human persons act from eternity as united to their incorporeal intellectual substance which, as the form of the body, protracts that eternity into the moving image of their own selves. This is why embodied existence, as existentially dependent on God, is our individuating principle and why human beings are of the same species. Eternity under the mode of an incorporeal aeviternity befits the angelic nature. This is why a total immediate eternal damnation befits the fallen angels and eternal totalizing elevation is fitting for the thrones and dominions. Eternity under the mode of an embodied aeviternity befits human nature. But for human beings, a longer way was assigned. This longer way is the moving image of eternity discovered in the experience of time. We are able to be the moving image of eternity because our aeviternal nature directs us to one aeviternity by which all—man and angels—are measured, thereby reaffirming that we act from eternity when we act in time.66

This longer way is what places us squarely in the midst of the miscellany of life, in the realm of the immediately existing otherness of life, society, love, and death. And it is this that subordinates our ethical enactment to the non-prescriptive, and, therefore, non-ideological natural law, as we shall see. Ideology seeks to overcome, indeed eliminate, the unsought particulars that actually constitute the meaning of time, life, and history. In the name of an absolute abstraction, all otherness is destroyed, rendering null and void the very context of ethical action—and all in the name of a contextual historical relativism.67

The phenomenological experience of time that permeates all experience is the experience of human nature as aeviternal, and communal human nature as historical. Time does not exist outside of human nature. Animals may affectively experience change, but they do not experience time or historicity. Time is the unity which occurs when a being resides on the horizon between eternity and time, where the soul acts from eternity in order to raise its own being into freedom above change and succession. Historical being demands the impossible: the human person is the totalizing unity of the embodied as the spiritual, while still pointing to the spiritual which the embodied craves; the temporal is realized as the eternal while pointing to the eternal which it lacks and needs in order to fulfill itself. If we do not merely take up some “space” between time and eternity but are the beings whose natures reside on the confinium itself, then our temporalizing actions must reveal our eternity as history, history which itself points to the eternal which it desires as other. We see this in the union of spouses and of parents to their children who are others-as-other, but yet seek to be that other contemporaneously. These unions exceed knowledge, while at the same time seeking out knowledge to express and complete themselves. As we act from eternity when we act in time, time itself alone reveals to us that we act from the eternal. And how we realize this temporalizing revelation of the eternal is through an incarnated intentionality whereby I know and love myself only by being the other who in turn is capable of being the other who I am. When Adrienne von Speyr remarked that the I who receives the sacrament is not the I who I think I am,68 we see the dramatic newness of souls that are in and yet not-in time. To another intentional agent I reveal the other that I have taken in and become. What I have become is the other—that agent’s self. Thus, what the agent takes in, when knowing his self, is the unity of the illumination of my own I who reveals the agent’s self. This illumination is twofold, each in and for the other. This dualizing unity reflects that knowledge is, in a way, all things. More still, when I first reveal to the intentional agent his or her own self, I do so only because the soul knows itself only in the face of Otherness, because the other has revealed my own self as illuminating his or her self in me. The only origin of this infinitizing mutual dependency would be that each acts from eternity when acting in time. With Levinas, who recognizes how our pre-cognitive union in the eternal places us, in a way, closer to the infinite than to the finite:

The sense of the human is not to be measured by presence, not even by self-presence. The meaning of proximity exceeds the limits of ontology, of the human essence, and of the world. It signifies by way of transcendence and the relationship-to-God-in-me (l’a-Dieu-en-moi) which is the putting of myself into question. The face signifies in the fact of summoning, of summoning me—in its nudity or its destitution, in everything that is precarious in questioning, in all the hazards of mortality—to the unresolved alternative between Being and Nothingness, a questioning which, ipso facto, summons me. The infinite in its absolute difference withholds itself from presence in me; the Infinite does not come to meet me in a contemporaneousness like that in which noesis and noema meet simultaneously together, nor in the way in which the interlocutors responding to one another may meet. The Infinite is not indifferent to me. It is in calling me to other men that transcendence concerns me. In this unique intrigue of transcendence, the non-absence of the Infinite is neither presence, nor re-presentation. Instead, the idea of the infinite is to be found in my responsibility for the Other.69

With Pegis:

Merely to juxtapose the spiritual and material within man, by simply relating soul and body to one another as form to matter, was not enough since it left the internal unity of man unexplained. Like the world of Aristotle, he still remained a two-part anomaly; he had no integrity and there was no meaning to the role of organic matter within his nature—unless that meaning were no more than the perpetuation of the anomaly itself. What was needed was nothing less than the total inclusion of the material within the spiritual in man’s nature, so that what the human body contributed as an organic and material instrument was already present within the soul in a spiritual form and as a spiritual exigency.70

Fallen time—that time inextricably aligned to the experience of death—often obscures the eternal at the heart of all temporal experience. In fallen time, we tend to see time as something existing outside the primordial experience of our existential comportment. In a word, we conflate time with change. There is order, structure, beauty to the world whether we see it or not. But when it is seen and experienced, this is the temporalizing action of existence.

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.71

In a way, time is relative as related to consciousness as consciousness of. If nothing is conscious of time, then there is no time to be had. To have time is to be making, wasting, fleeing, or recovering time. We have falsely bifurcated body and soul, and time and eternity: these are hallmarks of fallen time. The repercussion of such divisions is most pernicious in the knowing union of two beings capable of intentionality, and, as we shall see, in the moral ordering of political society.

The human soul has the capacity to become the other as other in knowledge and to know the real thing itself. What happens if the other that I seek to know in itself is not an object enclosed in matter, but another self who acts from eternity when acting in time, and who becomes the other as other in his or her own act of knowledge? Am I becoming the other of myself when I take on the other self who has become me in otherness? Does the other take on his own self which I have taken on when I became all things and became the other as other? And in this dualizing intentionality, are acts of knowledge without end, or rather, never completed, because to be a knower requires that the soul act from eternity when acting in time?

Time presents itself as the solitary instant, as the consciousness of solitude . . . If being is conscious of itself only in the present instant, how could we not realize that the present instant is the sole domain in which reality is experienced? If we were eventually to eliminate our being we should still have to start from ourselves to prove being . . . If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer, and that a young or tragic novelty—always sudden—never ceases to illustrate the essential discontinuity of time.72

What do we know when we know the other which is capable of knowing us? Must all knowing of the intentional other demand an infinitization, whereby all termini are revealed to be intermediaries? In this dualizing intentionality, we are required to re-visit, re-know what we have already grasped and yet already exceeded us each time it is grasped. Is this what is meant by Plato when he describes human beings as the moving image of eternity?73

Is there a double intentionality that we have lost when we exiled time from eternity through sin, vice and the other falls into knowledge? Is there the capacity for either a heightening or a diminution of the integral reality of selves each time we revisit knowing the other as other? Have we reduced intentionality to an act which cannot transform the human person because it reduces the human dimension to an entitative form of sensory intentionality? What happens when we bypass the radical truth that the human person is transformation-in-act:

The notion of intentionality cannot be reduced to a connection with an object. In other words, taste is always taste of something, and similarly thought and other intentional acts must have their corresponding objects. This way of presenting intentionality has a grain of truth but it is nonetheless reductive since it does not take stock of the most decisive point of the intimate union between knower and known.74

Since the other is eternal, no single temporal intentional act can know the other, it becomes a revisiting of that other as self, and turns into a heightening of the other. The reality of such dualizing intentionality is that I am truly myself only when I am always more in the other, and this alone unveils the earthy transcendence befitting our embodied spirituality.

But it is important to understand that because of the proper function of the will, and its un-materiality which is certainly not less pure in itself, but less ‘separated’ from things, and entirely turned towards their concrete state (cp. Sum. theol. i, 82, 3), intentionality here plays an entirely different part. The intentional being of love is not, like the intentional being of knowledge, an esse in virtue of which one (the knower) becomes another (the known), it is an esse in virtue of which—an immaterial but wholly different process—the other (the beloved), spiritually present in the one (the lover) by right of weight or impulsion, becomes for him another self.75

23. We are bombarded by the ravages of societal manufacturing; quite simply the Good can no longer compete with the spectral imprimatur of progressivism. Charles Péguy, over a century ago, knew too well the progressivist attitude. Cf. Péguy, Notre Patrie, 55: “Some people want to insult and abuse the army, because it is a good line these days. . . . In fact, at all political demonstrations it is a required theme. If you do not to take that line you do not look sufficiently progressive . . . and it will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.”

24. Cf. C. Gilson, Political Dialogue.

25. Wittgenstein, Lectures on Ethics, 9–10.

26. Cf. Heidegger, “Existential Structure of the Authentic Potentiality-for-Being which is Attested in the Conscience,” §295–301. See also Plato’s “Seventh Letter” in Complete Works, 344.

27. See ST I-II, 97, 1, ad. 1: “The natural law is a participation of the eternal law, as stated above (I-II:92:2), and therefore endures without change, owing to the unchangeableness and perfection of the Divine Reason, the Author of nature. But the reason of man is changeable and imperfect: wherefore his law is subject to change. Moreover, the natural law contains certain universal precepts, which are everlasting: whereas human law contains certain particular precepts, according to various emergencies.”

28. Cf. ST I, 75–76.

29. ST I-II, 90, 4, ad. 1.

30. For a prime example of the non-subordinated ethics see David Walsh’s landmark work The Modern Philosophical Revolution, most particularly his chapter “Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ as Existential,” 27–75. See also Péguy, Man and Saints, 57: “Kantianism has clean hands because it has no hands.”

31. The deleterious results of a non-subordinated ethic can be seen most acutely in the debates over life. What is lost is the fact that all ethical questions must be subordinated to the Presence as spiritual, both as creative and incommunicable. When abortion was sequestered as solely and primarily an ethical and legal problem, the arguments for life were immeasurably weakened. Such advocacy functioned on a misremembering of metaphysical foundation that, even if acknowledged, was acknowledged in an artificial and strained manner. Abortion utilizes metaphysical and natural theology vis-à-vis a pernicious gnostic strain of reference to God, but one aimed more so at deviation and bypass. The questions over life bogged down into biological, scientific, and legal statutes which, again, can only pay lip-service to Christ. By beginning the argument for life in the natural impossibly divorced from the supernatural, the ethical realm is improperly emancipated from its subordination to the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions which illuminate the universalizing particularity of the God-Man. This diminished form of ethics is then pressed to argue for a totality of meaning which it cannot possess. Pro-life advocacy seeks an eerily similar Hegelian program to absolutize its points precisely because it had deviated from the only absolute which can be concrete, particular, and creative: the only mystery to invoke clarity. Of course, the pro-abortion lobby had and has no use for the divine imperative, having supplanted it with its own Hegelian criterion of absolute self-right over the other. For a stunning and incisive anthropo-theological accounting of this “art” of misremembering, see O’Regan, Anatomy of Misremembering.

32. See Wilhelmsen and Kendall, “Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy,” 25–59; Kendall, Conservative Affirmation, 50–76.

33. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 126.

34. See Maritain, Range of Reason, 70: “The intellect may already have the idea of God and it may not yet have it. The non-conceptual knowledge which I am describing takes place independently of any use possibly made or not made of the idea of God, and independently of the actualization of any explicit and conscious knowledge of man’s true last End. In other words, the will, hiddenly, secretly, obscurely moving (when no extrinsic factor stops or deviates the process) down to the term of the immanent dialectic of the first act of freedom, goes beyond the immediate object of conscious and explicit knowledge (the moral good as such); and it carries with itself, down to that beyond, the intellect, which at this point no longer enjoys the use of its regular instruments, and, as a result, is only actualized below the threshold of reflective consciousness, in a night without concept and without utterable knowledge. The conformity of the intellect with this transcendent object: the Separate Good (attainable only by means of analogy) is then effected by the will, the rectitude of which is, in the practical order, the measure of the truth of the intellect. God is thus naturally known, without any conscious judgment, in and by the impulse of the will striving toward the Separate Good, whose existence is implicitly involved in the practical value acknowledged to the moral good. No speculative knowledge of God is achieved. This is a purely practical cognition of God, produced in and by the movement of the appetite toward the moral good precisely considered as good. The metaphysical content with which it is pregnant is not grasped as a metaphysical content, it is not released. It is a purely practical, nonconceptual and non-conscious knowledge of God, which can co-exist with a theoretical ignorance of God.”

35. Cf. C. Gilson, Immediacy and Meaning. See also Pope Francis, “Gaudete et Exsultate,” §49: “Those who yield to this pelagian or semi-pelagian mindset, even though they speak warmly of God’s grace, ‘ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style.’ When some of them tell the weak that all things can be accomplished with God’s grace, deep down they tend to give the idea that all things are possible by the human will, as if it were something pure, perfect, all-powerful, to which grace is then added. They fail to realize that ‘not everyone can do everything’, and that in this life human weaknesses are not healed completely and once for all by grace. In every case, as Saint Augustine taught, ‘God commands you to do what you can and to ask for what you cannot, and indeed to pray to him humbly: Grant what you command, and command what you will’.”

36. Cf. É. Gilson, Unity of Philosophical Experience, 193.

37. Cf. ST I, 76, 1, resp.

38. Cf. SCG III, 39.

39. Met. 980a.

40. Cf. Heidegger, Ponderings, §138: “Where does the human being stand?—In organized lived experience as the lived experience of organization—and this position is to be understood as a total state which determines contemporary humanity prior to and beyond any political attitude.”

41. Cf. Dostoyevsky, Idiot.

42. Cf. O’Regan, Theology and the Spaces Apocalyptic.

43. See Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 42–108. Aristostle, in his discussion of aesthetics, defends techne as necessarily preceding so as to ground aesthetic reflection so much so that while in NE 1139b we find a careful separation of episteme and techne this is deepened by their union in the following: Pr. An. 46a 22; Met. 981a1-b9, NE 1097a 4–8, Rhet. 1355b 32, 1362b 26, 1392a 25. The doing/making/originating is more primal than the artistic gaze, giving rise to the gaze. If we are all “gaze” and have no primal wellspring of non-reflexive union, then our ethical as well as our aesthetic ventures are forms of gnostic egoism. When the gaze repeatedly dissociates from its primal contact with presence, it first forgets its source, then demands the source be its own self-enclosed architectonic. Whether one “has” a faith-based ethical structure within this form of disintegrating image is of little improvement. For in doing so, the natural law being defended is prescriptively reduced to a perspective which as perspective is unable truly to compete for primacy except through force.

44. Jack Clemo, “On the Death of Karl Barth,” in Davie, New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, 291.

45. Cf. Desmond, Ethics and the Between, 170–76.

46. For a solid rationale for the interior intelligibility of this weakened theology, see Franco Crespi, “Absence of Foundation and Social Project,” in Vattimo and Rovatti, Weak Thought, 253–68.

47. Plato’s famous maieutic method is such a subordination. It refuses to place into the lead one who is not ready and only leads—as in the case of the Stranger—when subordinated to the Good which invests the soul with the embodiment of “teacher”. The genuine teacher is lover, synonymous with the natural forgetfulness of the ego which occurs when awed by the ordered newness of Being. Only in this form of forgetfulness does one gain what is lost—the self in its truer manifestation as beautifully in and reverently not of the world.

48. Cf. Voegelin, “Republic,” in Order and History, 3:126. Voegelin likens Plato’s understanding of democracy to a slow, comfortable, and often pleasurable rot, but one which must exhaust its own so-called aesthetic, revealing its abyss of depravation, red in tooth and claw.

49. Cf. C. Gilson, “Christian Polis: Noli Me Tangere,” 241–70.

50. Cf. DA 430a 20–25: “Actual knowledge is identical with its object: in the individual, potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge, but in the universe as a whole it is not prior even in time. Mind is not at one time knowing and at another not. When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructible), and without it nothing thinks.”

51. See Shestov, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, 1–28.

52. One here is reminded of the Hindu teaching on the Four Yugas or Four Age Cycle, i.e., Satya, Treta, Dvapara, Kali. See Gonzalez-Reimann, Mahabharata and the Yugas. In Satya one has that prelapsarian harmony, where breath, movement, and action are in perfect connatural karmic unity. What has/will become the cosmogonic in Kali Yuga was perfectly moving in seamless unreflexive innocence. Only the soul in reflection, estranged and tethered to the self which can only fear its own death, sees the fear, lives out the disharmony. In Treta, we begin to see the estrangement. No longer is the man aligned to the divine by a non-reflexive fully incarnational immediacy but by the spectatorial step-back so essential in knowledge. This is also paradoxically the age of heroes. The presence of the divine is most certainly still desired but can only be seen through the heroic, the larger than life. The desire thus for the hero reveals that the world is falling away from a perfected form. This is the same knowledge that often seeks wisdom but just as often tramples on it underfoot. This is where knowledge aligns itself with death; where it constructs the phantom self. The transition from our unknowing co-naturalness to our knowing courtship is a form of mediation which has already stripped the immediate of its immediacy, where ethical engagement has squandered its secondary status in favour of unsubordinated prescriptions. We then speak of that immediacy, but the speaking itself conveys reflection and our estrangement. Here the gods as less potent must entice our nearness, their presence has dwindled that now we must see, so to speak, to believe. In that third Yuga (Dvapara), this may be the golden age for man—a humanism of ideals, resources, intellectual insights—because, paradoxically, the divine has lessened considerably. In many ways, it’s a golden age built on shifting sands. It’s the ascent which prepares the most visceral of falls. We’ve constructed a pseudo-permanence which blinds us into seeing its impermanence. Only the “mad,” the one who has not made this ascent, understands how foolish it is for our natures to seek independence from the dust and clay; the earth itself is our brutal and gentle grace. We are in the final Yuga, where suffering is most intense, where the bull legs will be cut down to one as the moral karmic order is dramatically lessened. Kali Yuga is that prime antagonizing force undoing Vishnu at every turn. This is an apocalyptic age in the Christian sense. And yet, there is Salvation to be gained within all of these ages. Kali Yuga reveals itself in and through a heart-aching pandemic spiritual malaise—that out of all the ages, this one is the most entrenched in the necessity to suffer, to be pressed into relentless work, into the yoke of necessity. Transcending suffering in this period can only come about by entering the suffering so fully that the suffering can no longer claim you as its own. This suffering is of a visceral intensity and it seems as if this period, Kali Yuga, is where one is most apt to find the means to overcome suffering. But can one become so lost that they freely become unfree? Have we lost something along the way, in Sutya Yuga, that immemorial immediacy, which alone can lift us above the suffering? Does the Kali Yuga period, most apt to suffer, have the tools to overcome it? Or are they most apt to suffer because they have squandered or hidden or forgotten where to find those tools? This is why the battle between Kalki (Vishnu’s final avatar) is described in apocalyptic language.

53. See Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas, 19: “St. Thomas takes the view that the souls of all the ordinary hard-working and simple-minded people are quite as important as the souls of thinkers and truth-seekers; and he asks how all these people are possibly to find time for the amount of reasoning that is needed to find truth . . . [this] shows both a respect for scientific enquiry and a strong sympathy with the average man. His argument for Revelation is not an argument against Reason; but it is an argument for Revelation. The conclusion he draws from it is that men must receive the highest moral truths in a miraculous manner; or most men would not receive them at all. His arguments are rational and natural; but his own deduction is all for the supernatural; and, as is common in the case of his argument, it is not easy to find any deduction except his own deduction. And when we come to that, we find it is something as simple as St. Francis himself could desire; the message from heaven; the story that is told out of the sky; the fairytale that is really true.”

54. Rousselot, Intellectualism of St. Thomas, 8–13. See also Eckhart, “Sermon 34: When Our Work Becomes a Spiritual Work Working in the World,” in Breakthrough, 483: “Listen then to this wonder! How wonderful it is to be both outside and inside, to seize and to be seized, to see and at the same time to be what is seen, to hold and to be held—that is the goal where the spirit remains at rest, united with our dear eternity.”

55. Cf. DA 430b–431a: “The cognizing agent must be potentially one contrary, and contain the other. But if there is anything which has no contrary, it is self-cognizant, actual and separately existent . . . Knowledge when actively operative is identical with its object.”

56. Moral arguments which advocate “it’s my body, my right” in, for example, abortion, envision a fallacious sense of self-sufficiency that exists neither in practice nor in the act of knowledge itself. It is simply nowhere to be found, and the very heart of intentionality attests to this moral truth. Human beings realize themselves only in ontological dependency.

57. Cf. DV XVI, 1, ad. 9: “Synderesis does not denote higher or lower reason, but something that refers commonly to both. For in the very habit of the universal principles of law there are contained certain things which pertain to the eternal norms of conduct, such as, that God must be obeyed, and there are some that pertain to lower norms, such as, that we must live according to reason.”

58. SCG II, 80–81.

59. ST I, 79, 12, resp.: “Synderesis is not a power but a habit; though some held that it is a power higher than reason; while others [Cf. Alexander of Hales, Sum. Theol. II, 73] said that it is reason itself, not as reason, but as a nature. In order to make this clear we must observe that, as we have said above (Article 8), man’s act of reasoning, since it is a kind of movement, proceeds from the understanding of certain things—namely, those which are naturally known without any investigation on the part of reason, as from an immovable principle—and ends also at the understanding, inasmuch as by means of those principles naturally known, we judge of those things which we have discovered by reasoning. Now it is clear that, as the speculative reason argues about speculative things, so that practical reason argues about practical things. Therefore, we must have, bestowed on us by nature, not only speculative principles, but also practical principles. Now the first speculative principles bestowed on us by nature do not belong to a special power, but to a special habit, which is called ‘the understanding of principles,’ as the Philosopher explains (Ethic. vi, 6). Wherefore the first practical principles, bestowed on us by nature, do not belong to a special power, but to a special natural habit, which we call synderesis. Whence synderesis is said to incite to good, and to murmur at evil, inasmuch as through first principles we proceed to discover, and judge of what we have discovered. It is therefore clear that synderesis is not a power, but a natural habit.”

60. ST I, 79, 13, ad. 3.

61. Cf. SCG II, 68: “Dionysius says: Divine wisdom has joined the ends of the higher to the beginnings of the lower. Thus in the genus of bodies we find the human body, composed of elements equally tempered, attaining to the lowest member of the class above it, that is, to the human soul, which holds the lowest rank in the class of subsistent intelligences. Hence the human soul is said to be on the horizon and boundary line [Confinium/aeviternity] between things corporeal and incorporeal, inasmuch as it is an incorporeal substance and at the same time the form of a body.” SCG III, 61: The human person, by virtue of his intellectual soul stands on the borderline, the horizon or confinium between eternity and time. St. Thomas stresses this point throughout his works emphasizing that the soul is shown to hold the last place among intellectual things. See SCG II, 80–81; SCG II, 80; DV X, 8 resp. See also Pseudo-Aristotle, Book of Causes §22: “Indeed, the being that is after eternity and beyond time is Soul, because it is on the horizon of eternity from below and beyond time.”; §84: “And indeed, Intelligence encompasses the things it produces, both Nature and the horizon of Nature, namely, the Soul, for it is above Nature.” See also É. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy, 235–37.

62. Cf. Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, 192: “The philosopher knows that bodies have absolute dimensions, that there are in the world absolute motions, an absolute time, simultaneities which are absolute for events divided as far as may be in space: absolute signifies here entirely determined in itself, independently of any observer: the knowledge of what these are, the discernments of these absolute dimensions, movements, simultaneities (at a distance), time, by the aid of our means of observation and measurement, the philosopher renounces, voluntarily conceding that it is not possible. It is sufficient for him that they can be discerned by pure minds, which know without observing from a given point of space and time. The physicist makes a like renunciation, and with good reason. But for him, who does not philosophize and who is concerned with what he can measure and to the extent that he can measure it, the existence of these absolutes does not count and in their place he knows and handles only relative entities reconstructed by means of measurable determinations: entia rationis cum fundametito in re.”

63. See the objectors in ST I, 76, 5.

64. Cf. Pegis, Thomistic Notion of Man, 14: “Like other thinkers of their age, William of Saint-Thierry and Godfrey of Saint-Victor . . . had great difficulty in understanding how a simple and immaterial soul was present to the body and yet not in a spatial way. But this problem, which is at least as old as Plotinus and St. Augustine, not to mention Nemesius, is witness to the metaphysical innocence of the twelfth century.”

65. ST I, 10, 6, ad. 2.

66. Cf. ST I, 10, 6, resp: “A twofold opinion exists on this subject. Some say there is only one aeviternity; others that there are many aeviternities. Which of these is true, may be considered from the cause why time is one; for we can rise from corporeal things to the knowledge of spiritual things. Now some say that there is only one time for temporal things, forasmuch as one number exists for all things numbered; as time is a number, according to the Philosopher (Phys. iv). This, however, is not a sufficient reason; because time is not a number abstracted from the thing numbered, but existing in the thing numbered; otherwise it would not be continuous; for ten ells of cloth are continuous not by reason of the number, but by reason of the thing numbered. Now number as it exists in the thing numbered, is not the same for all; but it is different for different things. Hence, others assert that the unity of eternity as the principle of all duration is the cause of the unity of time. Thus, all durations are one in that view, in the light of their principle, but are many in the light of the diversity of things receiving duration from the influx of the first principle. On the other hand, others assign primary matter as the cause why time is one; as it is the first subject of movement, the measure of which is time. Neither of these reasons, however, is sufficient; forasmuch as things which are one in principle, or in subject, especially if distant, are not one absolutely, but accidentally. Therefore the true reason why time is one, is to be found in the oneness of the first movement by which, since it is most simple, all other movements are measured. Therefore time is referred to that movement, not only as a measure is to the thing measured, but also as accident is to subject; and thus receives unity from it. Whereas to other movements it is compared only as the measure is to the thing measured. Hence it is not multiplied by their multitude, because by one separate measure many things can be measured. This being established, we must observe that a twofold opinion existed concerning spiritual substances. Some said that all proceeded from God in a certain equality, as Origen said (Peri Archon. i); or at least many of them, as some others thought. Others said that all spiritual substances proceeded from God in a certain degree and order; and Dionysius (Coel. Hier. x) seems to have thought so, when he said that among spiritual substances there are the first, the middle and the last; even in one order of angels. Now according to the first opinion, it must be said that there are many aeviternities as there are many aeviternal things of first degree. But according to the second opinion, it would be necessary to say that there is one aeviternity only; because since each thing is measured by the most simple element of its genus, it must be that the existence of all aeviternal things should be measured by the existence of the first aeviternal thing, which is all the more simple the nearer it is to the first. Wherefore because the second opinion is truer, as will be shown later (I:47:2) we concede at present that there is only one aeviternity.”

67. Cf. Voegelin, Science, Politics, Gnosticism.

68. Cf. von Speyr, Cross.

69. Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality,” in Levinas Reader, 5. See Walsh on Levinas in Modern Philosophical Revolution, 311: “Love is love only when it loves an other as an other, not just as an other self. The Child is that unmerited event by which an other is ‘more exactly, me, but not myself.’ Transcendence has reached its goal when it has endangered, beyond its own finality, the finality of the transcendence of an other. I can love myself in the child but never as myself; it is always as other that the child is loved.” As such, the lines in Galatians are deeply suggestive of the intentional union we seek to elucidate. See Gal. 3:28 (KJV): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

70. Pegis, Thomistic Notion of Man, 51.

71. Borges, “New Refutation on Time,” in Labyrinths, 234.

72. Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant, 6–8.

73. Timaeus, 37d. Cf. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, §IV 358–59: “‘The moment’ is a figurative expression, and therefore it is not easy to deal with. However, it is a beautiful word to consider. Nothing is as swift as a blink of the eye, and yet it is commensurable with the content of the eternal . . . Whatever its etymological explanation, [‘the sudden’] is related to the category of the invisible, because time and eternity were conceived equally abstractly, because the concept of temporality was lacking, and this again was due to the lack of the concept of spirit. The Latin term is momentum (from movere), which by derivation expresses the merely vanishing. Thus understood, the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time . . . The moment is that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other, and with this the concept of temporality is posited, whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time. As a result, the above-mentioned division acquires its significance: the present time, the past time, the future time.”

74. Possenti, Nihilism and Metaphysics, 349.

75. Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, 453. The operation of the will within ourselves involves also another procession, that of love, whereby the object loved is in the lover, see ST I, 27, 3, resp., and Hegel, Natural Law, 104: “There is nothing else but the performance, on the ethical plane, of the tragedy which the Absolute eternally enacts with itself, by eternally giving birth to itself into objectivity, submitting in this objective form to suffering and death, and rising from its ashes into glory. The Divine in its form and objectivity is immediately double-natured, and its life is the absolute unity of these natures. But the movement of the absolute contradiction between these two natures presents itself in the Divine nature (which in this movement has comprehended itself) as courage, whereby the first nature frees itself from the death inherent in the other conflicting nature. Yet through this liberation it gives its own life, since that life is only in connection with this other life, any yet just as absolutely is resurrected out of it, since in this death (as the sacrifice of the second nature), death is mastered.”