Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

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Название Subordinated Ethics
Автор произведения Caitlin Smith Gilson
Жанр Словари
Серия Veritas
Издательство Словари
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isbn 9781532686412



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the knowledge but the ground of knowledge which is, in its way of the uncreated.”12 Along with Aquinas, Gilson affirms our creaturely, existential situation of always already being in via, on the way, where we find ourselves within a world of effects, and where we ourselves are an “effect” born out of our own otherness within creation. Making the next step to acknowledging the causality is what Aquinas calls a “resolution” within being from the sensible to the intellectual of the divine science.13 Hence, in this way, the first becomes that which for us is the last: for it is only natural to proceed “from the sensible to the intelligible, from the effects to the causes, and from that which is later to the first.”14 This “reversal” from that which is last in the order of things to the first uncaused cause requires a metaphysical judgment that Gilson calls a necessity to stop, or ananke stenai: “The ananke stenai is the originating stop in the order of explanation and in Being.”15 Without such a judgment the spectre of an infinite (or as she calls it, “indefinite”) regress would paradoxically limit our ability to see things as they truly are. In every exploration of the various five ways of Thomas, Gilson shows us that one must at some point recognize that all the things of the world, within the spectrum of their miscellany, point back to that which is first—this very recognition is itself the judgment which enacts the “resolution” where we find ourselves within the viatoric chase of our creaturely existence toward the infinite.

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

      Eric Austin Lee

      Eastertide 2019

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

      3. See Aquinas, ST I-II, 48, 3.

      4. Plato, Hippias Major, 304e8.

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

      6. Luke 10:21.

      7. Cf. 1 Cor 12:21.

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

      9. Pieper, Leisure, 34.

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

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

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

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

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