Subordinated Ethics. Caitlin Smith Gilson

the amount of perfection received rather than by that of the capacity to receive.”

      83. Cf. SCG III, 26–40. Saint Thomas unveils a litany of options as to what human felicity does not consist in.

      84. Theaet. 176b1. NE, 1177b33; 1179a22–30; Met., 1072b14–26.

      85. God is not self-evident in our condition; but self-evident in our nature. This is the difference between natural law as imposition when reflecting our condition and as a connaturality in our nature. The difficulty of clarifying the meaning of traditio as a set of enduring truths wholly irreducible to a Humean irrational sentiment yet, at the same time, not easily open to verification, is realized in the language of natural law’s simultaneous self-evidence and refusal to unveil its mystery. Russell Kirk’s famous Ten Principles, perhaps, when read within this light, give them a whole new vantage by which to approach the relationship between tradition, conservatism, and the natural law. For the original six principles see Kirk, Conservative Mind. For their communion expansion see Kirk, Politics of Prudence.

      86. Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 268.

      87. Cf. Armand Maurer, “Gilson’s Use of History in Philosophy,” in Russman, Thomistic Papers V, 25–47. See also É. Gilson, Spirit of Thomism; Reason and Revelation; God and Philosophy.

      88. Cf. Pegis, “St. Anselm and the Argument in the Proslogion,” 228–67.

      89. Cf. Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery.

      90. DN I, 3, 77. See also O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas, 49.

      91. In Sent. VIII, 1, 1. See also O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas, 58.

      92. Moss, “Friendship: St. Anselm, Theoria and the Convolution of Sense,” in Milbank, Radical Orthodoxy, 127–42, esp. 132.

      93. Moss, “Friendship,” 132.

      94. Cf. Clarke, Explorations in Metaphysics, 48–49: “Not only does every being tend, by the inner dynamism of its act of existence, to overflow into action, but this action is both a self-manifestation and a self-communication, a self-sharing, of the being’s own inner ontological perfection with others. This natural tendency to self-giving is a revelation of the natural fecundity or “generosity” rooted in the very nature of being itself. We are immediately reminded of the ancient Platonic tradition—well known to St. Thomas—of the ‘self-diffusiveness of the Good’ (bonum est diffusivum sui, as the Latins put it). What St. Thomas has done is to incorporate this whole rich tradition of the fecundity of the Good into his own philosophy of being, turning this self-diffusiveness, which the Platonic tradition identified as proper to what they considered the ultimate ground of reality, the Good, into a property of being itself, of which the good now becomes one inseparable aspect (or transcendental property). Whereas in Platonism, and especially Neoplatonism, being itself is only a lesser dimension of the Good, for St. Thomas the good is a derivative property of existential being itself, expressing more explicitly the primal dynamism of self-expansiveness and self-giving inherent in the very nature of being as act of existence. The primacy always lies with existence for St. Thomas. Nothing can be good unless it first actually is; and from the very fact that it is, it naturally follows that it is good, since the act of existence is the root of all perfection in any domain, ‘the actuality of all acts, and the perfection of all perfections.’”

      95. Pseudo-Dionysius, “Celestial Hierarchy,” IV, 10, 159.

      96. DN IV, 5.

      97. ST I, 2, resp.; DN I, 3, 77; In Sent. VIII, 1, 1.

      98. Cf. Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being.