Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

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