Subordinated Ethics

“Drawing on an astonishingly diverse array of sources, Caitlin Smith Gilson retrieves the life-giving reality of morality by recalling its mediating subordination to what remains first and ever greater: the mystery of being and the presence of God.”


—D. C. Schindler, author of Love and the Postmodern Predicament





“Caitlin Gilson is very much at the heart of the personalist revolution, one that not only philosophizes about persons but out of persons. The fixities that had long encumbered traditional formulations are made to live again and we see that their source had always derived from what Dostoevsky referred to as ‘living life.’ Subordinated Ethics is a tour de force that illumines the interiority of the ethical life while connecting it with an enlargement of the perspective of existential metaphysics in St. Thomas.”


—David J. Walsh, Catholic University of America





“Subordinated Ethics is yet another testament to the ever-surprising mind of its author, characterized equally by an alpine clarity of thought and a sublimely poetic sensibility. Smith Gilson interprets Aquinas’ Five Ways and Dostoevsky’s Idiot together with such deftness, urgency, and joyful effulgence that neither can be read the same way again. The book is an astonishing paean to polyphony, play, contingency, wonder, beauty, virtue, and love in the purity and mystery of its givenness.”


—Jennifer Newsome Martin, University of Notre Dame