Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

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

      22. ST I-II 94, 3, resp.

      23. Catholic Encyclopedia, 9:77.

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

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

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

      27. Schlick, Philosophical Papers, 125.

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

      29. ST I, 2, 1, resp.

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

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

      32. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 166.

      33. Santayana, Egotism, 135.

      34. Cf. ST I, 2, 1.

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

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

      37. Cf. ST I-II, 91, 2, resp.

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