Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

. . . [The Intellect] is essentially acquisitive of reality and not merely a process of forging propositions.54

      Intentionality in its primal truth overcomes knowledge reduced to a copy theory or to a relativism of differing labels, while profiling human persons as the privileged beings who alone extract the meaning of Being as such, and that, in a way, the weight of Being resides in them alone. Otherness is as implicit in knowledge and ethics as it is explicit in love.

To say that the weight of Being resides in persons alone can only be understood when liberated from the deficient views of the soul as closed up in matter, as if body and soul are bifurcated into two accidentally related substances. Or, alternatively, one argues that the soul is the form of the body but, by neglecting the profound implications of such a statement, inchoately reflects a divided nature and an artificial union. The soul is already outside itself, it lives a radically exteriorized existence, so much so that what primarily constitutes our own nature is also the site of our own surpassing of self. What we own the least are our own selves, precisely because the soul in its innermost reality is existentially dependent on Being for its existence, and this is manifested most acutely in the act of knowledge.55 In knowledge, the human soul reveals itself to be the alterity of the divine, becoming, in a way, all things. Because we are not separately existent, we must arrive at ourselves by becoming identical with otherness.56

      The self is thus permanence in transit. It is what distinguishes each in his own transcendent dignity, and this distinction is permanently unstripped. Yet, the what-it-is of what is unstripped is always in transition; the self is an actuating permanence, the moving image of eternity. Because the soul is united to the body, where each is the realization of the other’s perfection, a dual unity, we act in and out of time. As moving image, the intentional-self acts towards eternity while already being in union with the eternal which alone enables the self to act towards what-it-is in its nature.

We see our pre-cognitive acting from eternity when we act in time in our most originary access to the natural law. The Greek roots of synderesis call to mind vigil, watchfulness, preservation, and safeguarding. It is a non-mediated intuitive inclination towards the eternal good, which issues the effect of conscience and self-knowing. Even the most interior form of self-knowing, self-awareness, is a place where the self surpasses itself in order to be itself! Intentionality is inherent in all interior and exterior human acts. Synderesis is thus a pre-conscience, the immediate union with the eternal good which precedes and helps to issue conscience.57 Synderesis is not reduced to a capacity which can be geared towards good or evil—it is an unstripped and non-acquired habit or innate ability, a pre-cognitive union always unified with the eternal law. Yet its dignity straddles the meaning of habitus in a way that reflects our nature as on the confinium between time and eternity.58 If not capacity, it is described by Saint Thomas as a habitus, the un-erring ability to read the principles of moral action.59 But this must be distinguished from habit in the Augustinian sense, which can be overwhelmed by the appetite. This is instead what Saint Thomas calls the “habit of first principles.” Synderesis is the cause that helps to issue the effect of our acts of judgment or conscience. How does synderesis reflect that the human soul acts from the eternal while acting in time? Synderesis as non-mediated is an un-erring union with the eternal law, a union made possible because the human soul is itself aeviternal. And because our aeviternity is acted out through embodiment, time, and change, synderesis when cognized is thus the principle of the act of conscience, transformed into reflexive self-knowing. When conscience is actualized, this is the self-same participation and illumination of the natural law. Astonishingly, within the very structure of human nature itself, there is a pre-cognitive union with the eternal law, which issues the effect—conscience or self-knowing, which, as reflexive, is the knowing participation in the natural law. If the natural law is our participation in the eternal law, then synderesis is the pre-conscience or the pre-self-knowledge of our eternal union with the eternal law, while our reflexive self-knowing or conscience is the temporal participation in the natural law:

Although an act does not always remain in itself, yet it always remains in its cause, which is power and habit. Now all the habits by which conscience is formed, although many, nevertheless have their efficacy from one first habit, the habit of first principles, which is called synderesis. And for this special reason, this habit is sometimes called conscience, as we have said above.60

The human person stands on the horizon between time and eternity, the lowest of spiritual substances and the highest of corporeal creatures.61 It is this unique nature that begins to radicalize the meaning and power of the intentional act whereby the soul is, in a way, all things. If this is our nature, then we share the unique privilege of actions specific to incorporeal and corporeal designation. We act from eternity when we act in time.62 As Saint Thomas remarks in Question 2 of the Summa Theologica, incorporeal substances are not in space and thus, if not in space, they are not in time. To take up space—for there to be expansion and the appearance of presence—is to take up time. Space is the temporalization of presence, for in space we mark off the chronological happening of what is raised before us. In Question 76, we are reminded that the human intellect is not only incorporeal but a substance, which means that it is subsistent. This is why the objector asks how this soul, if not a body, can affect the body.63 How can the soul “touch” the body; between the mover and the moved there must be this touch or contact which requires embodiment. Saint Thomas responds by identifying two forms of contact: quantity and power. The former requires that contact be bodily, material, corporeal; the latter invokes the subsistent, indeed a-temporal nature of the soul. What then are we to understand about the unified nature of the human person as body and soul, if the body is in time, always exteriorizing its presence in and to the world, while its moving principle, the soul, is, in a way, in and yet not in time? The soul is in time if we accept that not only its power is to be the mover of the body, but its perfection is found in an exteriorized existence, perfected by its unity with the body. And yet, strangely enough, to be the moving principle of the specifically human person, who is free, who is an intellectual substance, requires that its movement is not reducible to time and to the causal determinisms of being that do not rise above change. The soul must act from eternity when it acts in time and if the soul and body are a dual unity, then man himself is connaturally in and not in time in every intentional action. That latter aspect is often overlooked and, in turn, its dramatic implications are bypassed.64 Our task is to recover that eternal action within an existential grounding, not divorced from it.

In a way we act from the same incorporeality, the same eternity or aeviternity,65 as the angels, but realize this activity in manifestly different ways. The angels act from eternity, identical to their incorporeal intellectual substance existentially dependent on God. That is why each angel is its own species. Human persons act from eternity as united to their incorporeal intellectual substance which, as the form of the body, protracts that eternity into the moving image of their own selves. This is why embodied existence, as existentially dependent on God, is our individuating principle and why human beings are of the same species. Eternity under the mode of an incorporeal aeviternity befits the angelic nature. This is why a total immediate eternal damnation befits the fallen angels and eternal totalizing elevation is fitting for the thrones and dominions. Eternity under the mode of an embodied aeviternity befits human nature. But for human beings, a longer way was assigned. This longer way is the moving image of eternity discovered in the experience of time. We are able to be the moving image of eternity because our aeviternal nature directs us to one aeviternity by which all—man and angels—are measured, thereby reaffirming that we act from eternity when we act in time.66

This longer way is what places us squarely in the midst of the miscellany of life, in the realm of the immediately existing otherness of life, society, love, and death. And it is this that subordinates our ethical enactment to the non-prescriptive, and, therefore, non-ideological natural law, as we shall see. Ideology seeks to overcome, indeed eliminate, the unsought particulars that actually constitute the meaning of time, life, and history. In the name of an absolute abstraction, all otherness is destroyed, rendering null and void the very context of ethical action—and all in the name of a contextual historical relativism.67

The phenomenological experience of time that permeates all experience is the experience of human nature as aeviternal, and communal human