Subordinated Ethics: Natural Law and Moral Miscellany in Aquinas and Dostoyevsky

With Dostoyevsky's Idiot and Aquinas' Dumb Ox as guides, this book seeks to recover the elemental mystery of the natural law, a law revealed only inwonder. If ethics is toguide us along the way, it must recover its subordination; description must precede prescription. If ethics is toinvite us along the way, it cannotlead, either aspolitburo,or even as public orthodoxy. It cannot be smugly symbolic but must be by way of signage, of directionality, of the open realization that ethical meaning isenroute, pointing the waybecauseit is within the way, as only sign, not symbol, can point to the sacramental terminus.The courtesies of dogma and tradition are the road signs and guideposts along thelongior via, not themselves the termini. We seek the dialogic heart of the natural law through two seemingly contradictory voices and approaches: St. Thomas Aquinas and his famousfive ways,and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's holy idiot, Prince Myshkin. It is precisely the apparent miscellany of these selected voices that provide us with a connatural invitation into the natural law as subordinated, as descriptive guide, not as prescriptive leader.