As the Western philosophical tradition uses the term—as one can see exemplified in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas—“ecstasy,” the standing outside of oneself in or toward another, is a thing of extremes, and one of its subversive functions is to blur distinctions. It occupies the borderlands, its movements are nomadic. It is a phenomenon of transcendence, condescension, and circulation: the lower being lifted up into the higher, the higher caring for the lower, equals turning towards equals, united without confusion. (This is the way Dionysius, in On the Divine Names, describes the ekstasis of the members of the cosmos for each other, and of all for God and of God for all.) To study ecstasy is to study the connection of diverse things, the communion of indissoluble identities. The more heightened the identities, the more ecstatic the motion otherwards, yet the more interior the union accomplished.
What difference, if any, does extasis make for philosophy—for its axioms, queries, methods, and results? Put differently, is it possible that ecstasy poses a challenge to a certain conception of philosophy’s autonomy and integrity? However faint an image the philosophic life may be of the Christian life of grace, the philosopher’s aspiration to the sovereign Good by the path of moral virtue and contemplation is already an ecstatic existence in the Good. It is impossible to understand the dialogues of Plato, the treatises of Aristotle, the Enneads of Plotinus, apart from the fundamentally religious perspective they share in common with all true philosophers. They have no law of burnt offerings or written scriptures given by God, but they have a vivid awareness of Him and the desire to know Him. “In Him we live, and move, and have our being … for we are indeed His offspring”: this insight is, according to St. Paul, that of pagan poets (Acts 17:28).
The phrase “philosophical account” can refer to two quite different, though not unrelated, things. In a narrower sense, it signifies an account given solely from the vantage of unaided reason, on the basis of common, natural experience. According to this sense, “philosophical” refers to anything that can be discovered, deduced, or discussed by the power of, or from the perspective of, reason alone. Thus, while the philosopher who is a practicing Christian could well be aided in his thinking by the gifts of the Holy Spirit and receive insights by way of special interior experiences not had by others, it would remain the case that, insofar as he makes philosophical arguments, he does not presume in the interlocutor the influence of the Holy Spirit, nor does he appeal to the content of special experiences; rather, he would strive to articulate his position in terms that the interlocutor could understand apart from revelation and its aids. This is the strategy of argumentation St. Thomas recommends at the start of the Summa contra gentiles for dealing with those who accept no guide but reason.
There is, however, a broader and more classical sense of “philosophy” shared by ancient authors and Church Fathers who took the meaning of the compound word at face value. Philosophy is the pursuit of the whole, a love of wisdom about the whole, its causes, principles, and elements. An account of some reality, to be truly philosophical in this sense, must be open, systematic, and all-inclusive, addressing its object from all relevant angles—psychological, moral, metaphysical, religious; that is to say, in however many ways reality can manifest itself to our powers, with the corresponding interplay of definitions. Nothing less than the attempt to look at and make sense out of all of these dimensions would merit the title “philosophical” in the fullest sense.
As is well known, many of the ancient Schools regarded philosophy as the path of divine illumination and salvation. The most familiar example of such a school among pagans in the Western world is that of the later Neoplatonists, such as Iamblichus, Plotinus, Proclus, Porphyry, and Nicomachus, who integrated mythology and mystical experiences into their scientific accounts of cosmology, psychology, and ethics, and for whom the ultimate aim of the “search for causes” was not a conceptual system but the attainment of purification and re-union with God, which often involved ritual prayer and magic. They claimed as their models the earlier Pythagoreans, whose strict diet, simple adornment, and monastic way of life were greatly admired by the ancients. Philosophy as practiced by the Pythagoreans, the Neoplatonists, and the earliest Christian converts from pagan sects—the most famous being St. Justin Martyr, who defined Christianity simply as “true philosophy”—was evidently not defined in contrast to religion or revelation, except in the sense that the philosophers often attacked or scorned popular religion, considering its beliefs and practices foolish or immoral.
Taking philosophy in this more ancient sense—that is, the love of wisdom, the understanding of reality in light of its highest Cause and for the sake of union with It—we can appreciate the following remarks on the thought of Thomas à Kempis—but which apply equally well to Thomas d’Aquino—by a modern author named Brother Azarias:
The philosophy of the Imitation may be summed up in two words. It is a philosophy of Light, and a philosophy of Life: the Light of Truth, and the Life of Grace. Both the one and the other à Kempis seeks at their source and fountain-head. He does not separate them. It is only in the union of both that man attains his philosophic ideal … So the devout author, with Clement of Alexandria and Aquinas, ascends to the Incarnate Word—the divine Logos—as the Source whence proceeds all truth, both natural and revealed, for the criterion and ideal of human knowledge. Here he finds unity and harmony.
In order to be complete, any philosophical investigation must walk to and along the edge of mysteries of faith, religious practices, and spiritual insights, no less than it studies the arguments of ethics, physics, and metaphysics.
Does such an approach carelessly mingle truths of faith and truths of reason, data of revelation and data of nature? This objection has force only if one blurs or neglects the distinction between the two orders. For all the masters of the Catholic tradition (including St. Thomas), these two orders are not to be separated or alienated from each other, even as their distinctness should be safeguarded. To see and consider them together, respecting their distinction, presupposes an existential judgment about what reality is, and rests on a conviction that philosophy has an obligation on preterphilosophical grounds to pursue wisdom about the whole in view of the concrete situation in which we are philosophizing, not in view of pre-settled abstractions or predetermined possibilities that do not correspond to the actual or even the potential state of things. As Frederick Wilhelmsen puts it with customary vigor in his book The Metaphysics of Love:
The philosopher who would probe the being of the human person must never forget his history. The destiny of the human person is divinization, union with the Father through Christ. From this point of view, we are constituted persons by our beatitude. I am aware that the above opens me to the charge of “theologizing,” of confusing the philosophical and theological orders, of deducing a metaphysical conclusion from a theological premise. The charge would hold were I philosophizing within a rationalist framework in which philosophical progress is conceived to be the manipulation of premises for the sake of the conclusions that can be drawn from them. The charge does not hold if leveled against a man who conceives philosophical progress to be the rendering explicit of what is already given him in being. The being of the human person involves time and is therefore structurally historical. Any attempt to escape this history is bound to issue into a philosophy which will be irrelevant (although not necessarily false) because it will fail to illuminate the being of man as we find him in existence. In the being man has within history, he is destined for union with a Transcendent End. It is this human person, the only one who exists, that I am interested in probing.
In his work entitled The Four Cardinal Virtues, Josef Pieper makes much the same point when articulating what he regards as Thomas’s healthy, robust, filled-out notion of “reason” (ratio, recta ratio, secundum rationem, ordo rationis, etc.), as opposed to the impoverished changeling of rationalism that goes by the same name:
Reason includes a reference to reality; indeed, it is itself this reference. “In accord with reason” is, in this sense, that which is right “in itself,” that which corresponds to reality itself … Ratio is not that reason which arbitrarily restricts itself to the province of purely natural cognition. Ratio here signifies—in its widest sense—man’s power to grasp reality. Now, man grasps reality not only in natural cognition but also—and this reality is a higher object of knowledge and the process of grasping it a higher process—by faith in the revelation of God. If therefore the Summa Theologica states that Christ is the chief Lord (principalis Dominus), the first owner of our bodies, and that one who uses his body in a manner contrary to order, injures Christ the Lord Himself, Thomas is not of the opinion that this proposition exceeds the pattern of “mere” rational order, but rather that for Christian thought to be guided by divine revelation is the very highest form of “accord with reason”—this in spite of the fact that elsewhere Thomas knows how to distinguish sharply between natural and supernatural cognition. “The order of reason,” accordingly, is the order which corresponds to the reality made evident to man through faith and knowledge.
Taking into account what Wilhelmsen says about man as he is and Pieper about reason as it is, we see that while distinctions are possible and necessary (for one can speak of a hypothetical state of natural innocence without supernatural sonship, although it never existed; and one can imagine a man who is not part of a universe enveloped in grace, although such a world does not exist), they cease to serve their proper function if they obscure or negate the deeper harmony that binds the most diverse things—natures, beings, powers, activities, events—together into one actual order of reality governed by one God for the sake of one ultimate end. In other words, and without having to deny in any way the non-derivability of revealed truths from natural principles, one has good reason to assert that a truly philosophical investigation must remain open not only to things that pertain to the domain of nature, but also to things that pertain to the domain of grace, the life engendered by faith and charity. Such “things of grace,” while obscure, do not cease to be part of the single whole of reality that is accessible, whether in fact or in principle, to man’s self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. To take a modern example, the writings of Gabriel Marcel bear witness to the extent to which a philosopher meditating on the data of ordinary experience can already begin to catch sight of the dim outlines of certain revealed mysteries, detecting, as it were, a faint scent of incense that has drifted from the temple doors into the surrounding world.
What the foregoing suggests is that reason itself is inherently ecstatic: it stands outside itself, straining for a comprehension of sources beyond it, yearning toward the Good. When and to the extent that reason tries to close itself against this permanent transcendence, it withers into mere calculation and self-interest; it is an eagle with damaged wings and impaired vision, picking around on the ground for whatever scraps it can find to survive on. One sees this pathetic reduction of reason’s grandeur especially in the phenomenon of scientism, as when Carl Sagan remarked: “I am a collection of water, calcium, and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label.” With such words, which cannot even make sense of the self-consciousness of the speaker, his language-act, and the comprehension of his meaning between subjects, a rational animal effectively cancels itself out to the extent compatible with ongoing existence.
In short: the choice that faces man is always and only a choice for fertile ecstasy in the Good, where being expands endlessly and infinitely, or collapses into a sterile self-imprisonment, where the little one has is in danger of being lost. Shifting to an organic metaphor: what the Western tradition says about extasis, while brimming with philosophical interest in the narrow sense, has its root and fruition in the spiritual or theological domain. We would betray the philosophical insights if we did not take pains to dig around their roots in the soil of faith and follow their growth into the summertime fruits of divine charity, or at least, into the first tiny shoots that betoken the advent of spring. Cut off from its nourishing roots of religion and bereft of promised fruit, the trunk of reason will have no life. One might make furniture out of it, but it will be dead.
