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 affectively impressed upon us, is an ethics disengaged from any otherness, and held only and openly within and by itself. Ethical action has taken on the language and imprimatur of the conscience symbol—a self-enclosed ideational dictum—and in doing so has evacuated the primitive and the mystical, the mysterious and the super-sensual which once gave rise to moral order, when the sacred knew its ground because it was in play. If ethics is to guide us along the way, it cannot lead, either as politburo or even as public orthodoxy.32 It cannot be smugly symbolic but must be by way of signage, of directionality, of the open realization that ethical meaning is en route, pointing the way because it is on the way, as only sign, not symbol, can point to the sacramental terminus. Description must precede prescription. The courtesies of dogma and tradition are the road signs and guideposts along the longior via, not themselves the termini.
An ethics that is in-failing (but not a failure) adheres to a different rhythm/metron; it resides as signage because it wholly depends upon the sacral for its enactment. The little things of the world are too beautiful to be “true” and yet they exist, so that their beauty is and must be the truth. The world is too fallen to possess such beauty, and yet the world is the place where that beauty is made known, so that beauty abides by a truth other than the world in order to be the bearer of the world. That truth is beyond but never leaves the world as the way in which true transcendence reconfigures a soul in longing, to be “more human than any human was ever likely to be.”33 A subordinated ethics lives by that riddle, by the beauty not of the world in order to be the bearer of the world, by the truth that condemns in order to save. It is the ethics of surrender and endurance, of paradox and seeming contradiction, of the anarchism born only of the ardent desire for true order and life-giving entelechy. It is the incommunicable uniqueness of each human soul in communion with its transcendental mystery, and in union with other incommunicable souls.34 What indeed is art but the attempt to capture the beauty of this temporal passing moment in relation to its mysterious transcendental a-temporality? What are tears for if not the recognition of its uncapturable but utterly human relation? Even—perhaps especially—the polis cannot escape this without escaping its essence, meaning, and beauty.
Ethical meaning can persist only by a loving suppression, as being shaped and filtered by the spiritual and the exotically primitive. It requires that it be born, not of or in isolation, but in the connatural non-mediated un-reflective love of play and ecstasy which knows no loss. It is this formation which prepares us for all other formations, all of which lead to our own anticipation of forgetfulness. This is the beyond-reason recognition of that-which-is-fated and that-which-is-free as the prime compatibility prefiguring all human action. This emphasis on the formation of the non-reflective love is crucial to any subsequent ethical reflection. The danger of a non-subordinated ethic, which mimics the truth but cannot carry it, is that it is consistently disseminated by an intelligence which has begun in reflection, in the awareness of ego and concept, which must merge and inhabit and then dictate to existence its meaning.35 It begins in the type of reflection whereby the mind must make a bridge to the world, a bridge it can never complete without remaking the world in the image and likeness of the ego.36 Thinking of itself as aware of itself and its responsibilities, it may reject those who dictate to existence its meaning, but then dictates to existence its alternative forms of meaning, placing itself in the same trap, the same ideological cul-de-sac. If ethics is resolutely a praxis, it cannot begin or end in a political theoria. This praxis summons existence to prepare the prerequisites for a consecrated sensibility, a mythic entrenchment of the soul in existence. When a genuine subordinated ethic takes on genuine reflection, it sees not from a conceptually abstractive or theoretical ground but from how the soul is the form of the body.37 It sees with the eye which knows itself as sight because it is in and of the world, and would be blind without it. Thus, to prepare for this praxis requires an enactment which is not preparation in the reflective theoretic sense, but abidance in the non-reflective love of Being, which those who anticipate their own forgetfulness can remember in the child at play. This exteriorizing praxis lives by a reclamation and inculcation of un-reflective living, of living so awash in the acts of mercy, ritual, familial bond, that it knows nothing but play and imagination. And here both Rousseau and Hobbes might agree. This is the resurrection of the affective intelligence from the materialisms and psychologisms which reduce the soul to the appetite, and/or mistake the ego for its own appetite as the meaning of the appetitive power.
If praxis is what it is only in act, and seeks the seamless act of the good without hesitation, then how it begins, how it is formed, takes on a different but not opposing path to the theoretical and contemplative life. In fact, if we understand that the intellect must guide the will, then the intellect has a place of primacy in that it situates the distance needed to distinguish the desire for the good from what is actually good. By that same token, the intellect leads only because it is first guided, first sparked by desire—so much so that the fulfillment of the intellect and will leads to something far closer to the true appetitive depth in the blinding clarity of love. For no knowledge of God, even speculative knowledge of the highest order, satisfies us,38 because it entails the distance or the estrangement from the full with-ness of lover and beloved. If the intellect is to guide the will, it must itself be guided by a primal appetitive praxis which has set the stage for genuine reflection. Why else does Aristotle open his Metaphysics with that shocking antithesis to common sense: all men by nature desire (stretch forth/yearn) to understand.39 What triggers this non-predatory erotic lust? This originary praxis has so immersed the body and soul in the communion with Being, that when the dark night does come, when the dryness and the anticipation of our forgetfulness replaces our non-reflective love with vicarious innocence, reflection returns to a source that is not reflection, that is not the ego enclosed on itself, attempting to build a bridge from idea to reality, but to the source which genuinely triggers the intellect to lead and which provides its hearth and home—in that mystery which sentiment craves but cannot name: the non-teleological end.40 Practice does indeed make perfect.
This journey into the gainful loss of the subordinated ethic will seek the voice of the other, both in its non-reflective love as foundational to any genuine ethic, and in its anticipation of forgetfulness, which is the recognition of what is lost and what is always in-failing. As such, we will find ourselves traversing the theological, philosophical, poetic, and literary registers in an effort to illuminate the voice of the other, not in the form of the ego but in the form of itself. This will be a dialogue between two seemingly contradictory voices: that of Dostoyevsky’s holy idiot Prince Myshkin41—who is neither Christ nor an alter Christus—and St. Thomas’s Five Ways. Myshkin’s voice is the language of presence, the attempt at reconciliation in a world of disintegrating images, and it is in recoil from the methodical awareness
