Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

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

The Realism of Remembered Things48

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      Saint Thomas’s demonstrations are for those racing towards their fate, cast into exodus and living only, if at all, by the prescriptive imposition of the natural law. It is not a demonstration for those who abide by what is but for those