the child, saint, martyr, or idiot can.40 If our ethical life is to hold both the in and the not-of the world without surrendering the former in favor of the latter, this requires we become like children, or like the lilies.
Youth, in fact, is not just a time of growing, learning, ripening and incompleteness, but primarily a time of play, of doing for its own sake, and hence a true bearer of the meaning of life. Anyone denying this, and regarding youth as a mere introduction and prelude to real life, commits the same error that beclouded the mediaeval view of human existence: he shifts life’s center of gravity forwards, into the future. Just as the majority of religions, discontented with earthly life, are wont to transfer the meaning of existence out of this life and into a hereafter, so man in general is inclined always to regard every state, since none of them is wholly perfect, as a mere preparation for a more perfect one.41
“The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to children”42 not because the child at play is weak, pacified by all things to the point of impotence, as is the danger of Prince Myshkin, who reminds one of Christ but more of what Christ is not. Hesse speaks of the similarity between Christ and Myshkin as both sharing a morbid fear of entanglement with the erotic vicissitudes of incarnated being,43 but this is not what is meant by the child to whom Christ offers the kingdom of heaven. The child at play is Christ-like because she alone is able to sustain existence as it is, in itself, incarnated in the present where praxis truly originates. When the natural law moves from the first order of un-reflexive love to the second order, the recognition of our naturally supernatural state, it is in danger of losing the lesson of Presence, downgrading the mystery of the bodily soul and obfuscating the self-evidence of the child-like first order. This imposition often engulfs praxis in the futural, stripping it of its interior non-temporality which a genuine affectivity provides. It demands that practical actions have the same vision as the intellect, as if its outcomes, choices, and actions need to be guided by advantage gained or lost, as if happiness resides only by what is won or surrendered. It replaces origins with ends. It does seem that I am inverting a classic distinction in terms of the temporal framework customarily attached to praxis and theoria. Historically, praxis—as for the sake of something else—is naturally aligned with the futural and theoria is the in-itself non-futural play which distinguishes itself as the good-for-itself.” The justification could be made that while classically, praxis embodies the futural, it does so when aligned with the intellect as if it is a handmaiden to theoria. Praxis adjectivally attaches to the intellect and thus embodies a futurity, but often a vacant and perspectival one where the intellect seeks its next advantage or foothold in time. We seek the originary praxis which grounds the intellect in its own pre-cognitive union with Being. But this union can be seen in practical action, in the into-the-world cyclical repetition of the day’s events in which the pattern outwardly and by the dissection of the intellect reveals a futural movement but inwardly within our primal affectivity provides a harmony with the ebb and flow, the unveiling and veiling of Being. Only when praxis is allowed both its outward futurity recognized by the intellect and its inward immediacy enacted by affectivity can it be genuinely meaningful. The degeneration of praxis into homo faber is a prime example of praxis sequestered to its outward view managed by the intellect. God is found among the pots and pans but only when praxis carries this two-fold harmony.
It is difficult to distinguish how the will, guided by the intellect, cannot take on the intellect’s futurity, even in its recollection, and when it does this, the ethical life is commoditized, becoming a store shelf of products to be achieved.44 The futurity proper to the planning intellect lengthens the will’s immediacy, stretches it as it does with hope, denoting “a movement or a stretching forth of the appetite towards an arduous good.”45 But this stretching requires connection and stability to its origin, for without it it would be carried along as anticipating some point of finality beyond itself, all the while losing its fortitude and endurance, terminating in ennui. It stretches in a deeper way because it retains the immediacy of all-being.46 It is the union of Martha and Mary.47
The Realism of Remembered Things48
If praxis becomes futural, both the practical and intellectual realms are undermined. The intellect loses its source of contemplation in the longing not to reside in longing itself but in the presence of to be. It loses the ability for recollection to be a re-collection of being one with the Other as embodied bodily soul. The practical, when carried along, having surrendered its stretching forth, then creates an ethics where the futural is identical with the progressive and where the exotic artifice of the city state becomes fully alien. The imposition of the natural law no longer has the in which makes the “not-of” a relation to the natural rather than its antithesis, rendering the exotic flower of political life an artificial flower where toujours la politesse is easily transformed into a “you will do this” political correctness that often even contradicts and overrules the healthy public orthodoxy of common things.49
Now different gods had their allotments in different places which they set in order. Hephaestus and Athene, who were brother and sister, and sprang from the same father, having a common nature, and being united also in the love of philosophy and art, both obtained as their common portion this land, which was naturally adapted for wisdom and virtue; and there they implanted brave children of the soil, and put into their minds the order of government; their names are preserved, but their actions have disappeared by reason of the destruction of those who received the tradition, and the lapse of ages. For when there were any survivors, as I have already said, they were men who dwelt in the mountains; and they were ignorant of the art of writing, and had heard only the names of the chiefs of the land, but very little about their actions. The names they were willing enough to give to their children; but the virtues and the laws of their predecessors, they knew only by obscure traditions; and as they themselves and their children lacked for many generations the necessaries of life, they directed their attention to the supply of their wants, and of them they conversed, to the neglect of events that had happened in times long past; for mythology and the enquiry into antiquity are first introduced into cities when they begin to have leisure, and when they see that the necessaries of life have already been provided, but not before. And this is reason why the names of the ancients have been preserved to us and not their actions.
And it is here that the fateful disjunction, recognized throughout all history and all religion, comes to its explanatory place on center stage: the distinction between the human nature and the human condition. Perhaps all human beings by nature desire to understand—but certainly not by condition as we shall see. Most would rather live on in the cave of illusion.50 Yes, by nature we all yearn to ascend. How can we live in a world wherein nature is divorced from condition, where only the idiot and the child see the self-evidence of the divine? The objector states:
It seems that the existence of God is self-evident. Now those things are said to be self-evident to us the knowledge of which is naturally implanted in us, as we can see in regard to first principles. But as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. i, 1,3), ‘the knowledge of God is naturally implanted in all.’ Therefore, the existence of God is self-evident.51
Saint Thomas knows like Plato that what was “implanted in the brave children of the soil” was obscured by the lapse of time, by tradition, and by the very enactment of our supernatural natures. The demonstrations are not for those who already have God by non-eidetic pre-possession. They are unnecessary for those standing “dreaming on the verge of strife, magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life,”52 who are unaware that it is idiotic to carry all of one’s possessions in a small satchel and to wear gaiters and a coat ill-suited for the damp Russian thaw:
The owner of the hooded cloak was a young man, also twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, somewhat above the average in height, with very fair thick hair, with sunken cheeks and a thin, pointed, almost white beard. His eyes were large, blue and intent; there was something calm, though somber, in their expression, something full of that strange look by which some can surmise epilepsy in a person at first glance. The young man’s face was otherwise pleasing, delicate and lean, though colorless, and at this moment even blue with cold. From his hands dangled a meager bundle tied up in an old, faded raw-silk kerchief, which, it seemed, contained the entirety of his traveling effects. He wore thick-soled boots and spats—it
