Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

becomes for him another self.75

      23. We are bombarded by the ravages of societal manufacturing; quite simply the Good can no longer compete with the spectral imprimatur of progressivism. Charles Péguy, over a century ago, knew too well the progressivist attitude. Cf. Péguy, Notre Patrie, 55: “Some people want to insult and abuse the army, because it is a good line these days. . . . In fact, at all political demonstrations it is a required theme. If you do not to take that line you do not look sufficiently progressive . . . and it will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.”

      24. Cf. C. Gilson, Political Dialogue.

      25. Wittgenstein, Lectures on Ethics, 9–10.

      26. Cf. Heidegger, “Existential Structure of the Authentic Potentiality-for-Being which is Attested in the Conscience,” §295–301. See also Plato’s “Seventh Letter” in Complete Works, 344.

      27. See ST I-II, 97, 1, ad. 1: “The natural law is a participation of the eternal law, as stated above (I-II:92:2), and therefore endures without change, owing to the unchangeableness and perfection of the Divine Reason, the Author of nature. But the reason of man is changeable and imperfect: wherefore his law is subject to change. Moreover, the natural law contains certain universal precepts, which are everlasting: whereas human law contains certain particular precepts, according to various emergencies.”

      28. Cf. ST I, 75–76.

      29. ST I-II, 90, 4, ad. 1.

      30. For a prime example of the non-subordinated ethics see David Walsh’s landmark work The Modern Philosophical Revolution, most particularly his chapter “Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ as Existential,” 27–75. See also Péguy, Man and Saints, 57: “Kantianism has clean hands because it has no hands.”

      31. The deleterious results of a non-subordinated ethic can be seen most acutely in the debates over life. What is lost is the fact that all ethical questions must be subordinated to the Presence as spiritual, both as creative and incommunicable. When abortion was sequestered as solely and primarily an ethical and legal problem, the arguments for life were immeasurably weakened. Such advocacy functioned on a misremembering of metaphysical foundation that, even if acknowledged, was acknowledged in an artificial and strained manner. Abortion utilizes metaphysical and natural theology vis-à-vis a pernicious gnostic strain of reference to God, but one aimed more so at deviation and bypass. The questions over life bogged down into biological, scientific, and legal statutes which, again, can only pay lip-service to Christ. By beginning the argument for life in the natural impossibly divorced from the supernatural, the ethical realm is improperly emancipated from its subordination to the spiritual and metaphysical dimensions which illuminate the universalizing particularity of the God-Man. This diminished form of ethics is then pressed to argue for a totality of meaning which it cannot possess. Pro-life advocacy seeks an eerily similar Hegelian program to absolutize its points precisely because it had deviated from the only absolute which can be concrete, particular, and creative: the only mystery to invoke clarity. Of course, the pro-abortion lobby had and has no use for the divine imperative, having supplanted it with its own Hegelian criterion of absolute self-right over the other. For a stunning and incisive anthropo-theological accounting of this “art” of misremembering, see O’Regan, Anatomy of Misremembering.

      32. See Wilhelmsen and Kendall, “Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy,” 25–59; Kendall, Conservative Affirmation, 50–76.

      33. Chesterton, Everlasting Man, 126.

      34. See Maritain, Range of Reason, 70: “The intellect may already have the idea of God and it may not yet have it. The non-conceptual knowledge which I am describing takes place independently of any use possibly made or not made of the idea of God, and independently of the actualization of any explicit and conscious knowledge of man’s true last End. In other words, the will, hiddenly, secretly, obscurely moving (when no extrinsic factor stops or deviates the process) down to the term of the immanent dialectic of the first act of freedom, goes beyond the immediate object of conscious and explicit knowledge (the moral good as such); and it carries with itself, down to that beyond, the intellect, which at this point no longer enjoys the use of its regular instruments, and, as a result, is only actualized below the threshold of reflective consciousness, in a night without concept and without utterable knowledge. The conformity of the intellect with this transcendent object: the Separate Good (attainable only by means of analogy) is then effected by the will, the rectitude of which is, in the practical order, the measure of the truth of the intellect. God is thus naturally known, without any conscious judgment, in and by the impulse of the will striving toward the Separate Good, whose existence is implicitly involved in the practical value acknowledged to the moral good. No speculative knowledge of God is achieved. This is a purely practical cognition of God, produced in and by the movement of the appetite toward the moral good precisely considered as good. The metaphysical content with which it is pregnant is not grasped as a metaphysical content, it is not released. It is a purely practical, nonconceptual and non-conscious knowledge of God, which can co-exist with a theoretical ignorance of God.”

      35. Cf. C. Gilson, Immediacy and Meaning. See also Pope Francis, “Gaudete et Exsultate,” §49: “Those who yield to this pelagian or semi-pelagian mindset, even though they speak warmly of God’s grace, ‘ultimately trust only in their own powers and feel superior to others because they observe certain rules or remain intransigently faithful to a particular Catholic style.’ When some of them tell the weak that all things can be accomplished with God’s grace, deep down they tend to give the idea that all things are possible by the human will, as if it were something pure, perfect, all-powerful, to which grace is then added. They fail to realize that ‘not everyone can do everything’, and that in this life human weaknesses are not healed completely and once for all by grace. In every case, as Saint Augustine taught, ‘God commands you to do what you can and to ask for what you cannot, and indeed to pray to him humbly: Grant what you command, and command what you will’.”

      36. Cf. É. Gilson, Unity of Philosophical Experience, 193.

      37. Cf. ST I, 76, 1, resp.

      38. Cf. SCG III, 39.

      39. Met. 980a.

      40. Cf. Heidegger, Ponderings, §138: “Where does the human being stand?—In organized lived experience as the lived experience of organization—and this position is to be understood as a total state which determines contemporary humanity prior to and beyond any political attitude.”

      41. Cf. Dostoyevsky, Idiot.

      42. Cf. O’Regan, Theology and the Spaces Apocalyptic.

      43.