Ecstasy and the Love of Wisdom
By Peter Kwasniewski, European Conservative.
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).
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