Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

C. Gilson, Metaphysical Presuppositions, 172. See especially chapter 4.

      16. Aquinas, ST I, 65, 2, ad. 1: “Man was not intended to secure his ultimate perfection at once, like the angel. Hence a longer way was assigned to man than to the angel for securing beatitude.”

      17. C. Gilson, Metaphysical Presuppositions, 125.

      18. See chapter 3, especially the section “Ten Principles in Search of an Author: Tradition, Virtues, Limits.”

      19. C. Gilson, Immediacy and Meaning.

      20. I mean this in the broadest sense possible, whether biological, foster, adoptive, as well as the pastors, deacons, priests, nuns, and the consecrated laity who are our fathers and mothers in that their own simplicity is to watch over us in prayer.

      21. Cf. the section “Socrates as a Stand-In for the Good,” in Schindler, Plato’s Critique, 179–88.

      22. Savorana, Life of Luigi Giussani, 637, citing Giussani’s article “La certezza della fede e la cultura Cristiana” [“The Certainty of Christian Faith and Culture”], appearing in the October 29, 1982 issue of L’Osservatore Romano (translated by Sullivan and Bacich).

      Preface

      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