The World's an Inn

 On the World
by Francis Quarles 

 The world's an Inn; and I her guest.
I eat; I drink; I take my rest.
My hostess, nature, does deny me
Nothing, wherewith she can supply me;
Where, having stayed a while,
I pay Her lavish bills, and go my way.

The Flower of Tuscany

Today was the memorial in the Roman Martyrology for Blessed Giovanni da Fiesole, more commonly known as Fra Angelico or Beato Angelico. He was born Guido di Pietro in the 1390s and became a Dominican friar at some point. We do not know when he started painting; he seems to have started with illuminating manuscripts, but in any case he became one of the foremost painters of the Renaissance. According to some stories, the pope offered to make him archbishop of Florence and he refused; if it at all happened, this was probably for the best, since it meant he could keep painting.

Fra Angelico, The Madonna of Humility

The Principle of Tinkering

 Last Positivist recently had a very good post, Learning from Four Analytic Philosophy Wins; except for the 'Statistical Method' examples, which I think are much less clearly wins than they would usually be regarded, I am pretty much in agreement with it. But I think there is another key aspect of analytic philosophy, which provides, overwhelmingly, most of the good in it: it is very good for tinkering with arguments. Everything in analytic philosophy facilitates argument-tinkering. Arguments are broken up, premises identified, logical connections identified, each part is often discussed at length, different variations are considered. 

The value of just tinkering with arguments should not be underestimated. You can learn a great deal about reasoning that way, you can refine and improve particular arguments to a high degree, you can sometimes turn probable inferences into proofs. It can help in classification and in seeing how arguments relate to other arguments, particularly since both can depend on fiddly bits of arguments that need to be identified, compared, and contrasted. And so forth. It all requires tinkering in the right way -- but if you look to that, analytic philosophy makes the rest easy.

Argument-tinkering is not the only way to approach philosophical questions; most approaches to philosophy do not put a great deal of emphasis on it. Indeed, there are only very few that do. But they put analytic philosophy in very good company; the primary other approaches that are built with the principle of tinkering are the family of approaches we call 'scholasticism' and the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school of Indian philosophy (with some overflow into other schools interacting with it), and these are very good company indeed. The comparison shows one of the strengths of the principle of tinkering: a lot of power with a lot of flexibility, if used well. And analytic philosophy arguably does tinkering better than either.

Of course, tinkering has its weaknesses, too. Arguments are not isolated machines. Your response to a syllogism in philosophy of science may commit you to a position in political philosophy; your views on metaphysics may imply things about aesthetics. The connections are not always obvious, but that just means that you have to actually put some work into uncovering them. Analytic philosophy has always struggled with this; in their objections and responses, analytic philosophers are always making claims that they never adequately think through, whose ramifications in other fields they never properly follow up on. Tinkering with individual arguments is not what you need for such thinking. But this is not an inevitable problem, and there are people who avoid it; you just have to recognize that tinkering, valuable as it is, only gets you so far.

Fortnightly Book, February 16

 The Faroe Islands are an archipelago between Scotland and Iceland, currently a self-governing member of the Kingdom of  Denmark with a population of about fifity-five thousand, with about a quarter of that living in its capital and largest city, Torshavn, on the island of Streymoy; its language, Faroese, is closely related to Icelandic. The national saga of the Faroese is the the thirteenth-century Faereyinga Saga, which tells of the intense conflicts that arose over the coming of Christianity to the islands, arising from previously existing faultlines in the population. And this work, the Faroe-Islander Saga, is the next fortnightly book. I am using the 2016 translation by Robert K. Painter.

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe

 Introduction

Opening Passage: There is a proem and a preface, but the real beginning is when we begin to get Margery's story:

When this creature was twenty years of age, or somewhat more, she was married to a worshipful burgess [of Lynn] and was with child within a short time, as nature would have it. And after she had conceived, she was troubled with severe attacks of sickness until the child was born. And then, what with the labour-pains she had in childbirth and the sickness that had gone  before, she despaired of her life, believing she might not live. Then she sent for her confessor, for she had a thing on her conscience which she had never revealed before that time in all her life. For she was continually hindered by her enemy -- the devil -- always saying to her while she was in good health that she didn't need to confess but to do penance by herself alone, and all should be forgiven, for God is merciful enough. And therefore this creature often did great penance in fasting on bread and water, and performed other acts of charity with devout prayers, but she would not reveal that one thing in confession. (p. 41)

Summary: The Book of Margery Kempe can be seen as a book of pilgrimages. Literal pilgrimage is one of the key components of the entire book, as Margery Kempe goes on quite a few, including to Rome and to Jerusalem. Much of the narrative interest of the book lies in this, since we get to see quite vividly what being a pilgrim in the early fifteenth century would be like. Margery is frank and clear about the difficulties. There are robbers and there are scammers. Sickness is common, and if you are sick you have very few options that do not leave you vulnerable to robbers and scammers. Pilgrimage in this period is not something one really does alone, especially if you are a woman, so when various plans fall through, she often ends up having to beg or negotiate to travel with someone else -- and it is often the case that the pilgrim parties are not well-matched, so that you may be traveling with someone with whom you cannot get along. (It becomes clear as we see many of these pilgrimages that Margery herself is very often the pilgrim with whom the other pilgrims find they cannot get along.) She is wealthy enough to have a few servants, but it's hard to find a servant who can endure a life of service under the difficult conditions of pilgrimage, particularly when the service is to a woman like Margery, who is continually putting her servants in embarrassing and perhaps unnecessarily difficult situations. Money is often tight, and almost impossible to replenish on the road, so despite being a moderately well-to-do woman, Margery at several points is reduced to begging door to door.

The work is also a book of moral pilgrimage. We start out with Margery recognizing her early self as devout but not devoted; that is, she goes to extensive lengths in her spiritual practices, but is doing it to avoid the one spiritual practice, sacramental confession, that she actually needs. (A very common problem that most people have to deal with at some point.) This leaves her vulnerable to the attacks of devils and many vices, but a sickness and religious vision of Christ starts her on the road to improvement. But it is a road, not an achievement. Even as she is setting out on it, she says, "she did not truly know our Lord's power to draw us to him" (p. 43), and this is, I think, what Margery's book is all about, a discovery of just how extensively one can be drawn to Christ, even often against one's will, even given one's flaws. Margery never stops being flawed. There is always a self-indulgent, self-justifying aspect to her; one suspects that even quite late in her life she is still indulging in some spiritual practices in order to avoid spiritual practices she needs more. She genuinely improves, but she never really stops being self-oriented, although she becomes capable of extraordinary sudden generosity; everything in The Book of Margery Kempe is about Margery Kempe. But she, often shortsighted and silly, generally incapable of sympathizing with or even understanding other people's points of view, occasionally outright selfish, stops being only that; she is drawn closer and closer to Christ despite that, the polar opposite of a marzipan saint.

The three key means by which Christ draws Margery are the gift of tears, persecution, and imaginative visions. The gift of tears is the root. Weeping as a religious practice has fallen out of fashion, in part through the victory of the sort of people who opposed Margery all her life, who insist that public weeping must be a sign of hypocrisy, but it was still practiced in Margery's day; to shed tears freely in prayer was often considered a grace. Margery, however, is given the gift in superabundance, to such an extent that it actively disturbs the people. She does not merely shed tears; she often wails, even to the point of disrupsting Mass (a reason why so many of her persecutors are understandably priests). She sheds so many tears so easily that people start assuming that it must be fake. And while this is certainly not true, Margery shows very little cognizance of what we find on the subject in, say, St. Catherine of Siena, who recognizes that there is a hierarchy of tears, and that one needs to progress in them to the 'tears of peace'. We do find that eventually her weeping changes character, but this happens not because of Margery but because of Christ; one sometimes gets the impression here, as one so often does with Margery, that Christ was trying to teach her lesson and that she kept not learning it because she is not self-aware enough to have an inkling that there is a lesson to be learned, until Christ eventually just arranges matters to force her to learn it. Nonetheless, St. Catherine also tells us that no tears are to be despised, whatever their motivation; coming from the heart and manifesting it (even false tears showing a false heart), they are a channel to the soul and thus a way in which we may learn and pray. The people around Margery are not so charitable, and while their irritations and annoyances are often entirely understandable, they do not stay at the level of irritations and annoyances, and at times become actively malicious.

In Book II, Margery happens in passing to give us some insight into how the people around her often saw her, which in other cases usually has to be inferred from their behavior, because Margery does not seem to have any idea why people around her treat her so badly. She tells us that a story started going around that she sat down to a table loaded with food, including herring and pike, saying, "Ah, false flesh, you would now eat red herring, but you shall not have your will," after which she ate the pike (a far higher quality and more expensive fish than herring). That is to say, she was accused of hypocritically pretending that she was being an ascetic while using that as a way to indulge herself; wanting pike, she pretended that she wanted herring so that she could 'deny' herself herring and eat pike instead. This story became so widespread that it became proverbial -- "False flesh, you shall eat no herring" (p. 288). Margery repeatedly denied that it ever happened, but denials are no match for a good story, so that it began to be the case that everywhere she went, the one thing people already knew about her was that she was the "False flesh, you shall eat no herring" lady. The point, of course, is not fish; this is how all of her actions were often seen. Margery, of course, not being a titan of insight into other people, does not seem fully to grasp that it's not just an isolated false rumor, although in this case she does find the right way to handle it -- admit that she is the woman in question, insist that she is not guilty and did not do it, but beyond that provide no criticism or recrimination and just let the ordinary decency of people do the rest. There's never any indication that she takes the general point or learns the general lesson, though; perhaps she wouldn't really be Margery if she did.

Margery is often accused of being a Lollard. 'Lollard' could sometimes just mean a common (as opposed to educated) heretic in general, but in her case it may sometimes still be used in the more technical sense. The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe, although Wycliffe was an educated theologian, and the Lollards were not especially educated people but picked up ideas from Wycliffe in bits and pieces, not always putting them together in ways that Wycliffe himself would have accepted. William Sawtry, the first priest burned at the stake for Lollardy, was a priest at St. Margaret's Church in Lynn, which is where Margery was from; he would have been Margery's own priest until his death in 1401. He rejected transubstantiation and prayer to the saints, arguing that preaching was more important than prayer, that church funds should be given to the poor instead, and that the True Cross should not be adored. Margery, who shows no particular interest in how churches use their funds, whose pilgrimages often take her to locations of purported Eucharistic miracles and relics of the life of Christ, and who never stops praying, often talking to the saints, is absolutely not a Lollard; it's hard to imagine anyone who would be more obviously the opposite of William Sawtry. But her origin combined with her odd prayer practices likely made it easy for people to accuse her of it.

The book is also an imaginative devotional pilgrimage; if Margery's behavior is the frustrating part of reading her story, her imagination is where Margery's charm shines through. Pilgrimage is prayer, but it is simultaneously a very earthy matter; you get dusty on the road, you have to concern yourselves with mundane matters of food and sleep and evacuation and sickness, and your patience and endurance are actually tried. Most of us prefer to be pilgrims in our imagination, where we can be clean and shining and just stop in when we feel like it, and where we can perhaps easily overestimate our progress. But Margery's imagination is a bit different, perhaps because she went on so many actual pilgrimages. It is very earthy, which makes some of her religious experiences seem simultaneously vividly concrete and embarrassingly silly. At one point she experiences the Holy Spirit as sounding like a puffing of a large bellows; at another, she imagines the persons of the Trinity as seated on fine cushions (the Father on a gold cushion, the Son on a red cushion, and the Holy Spirit on a white cushion). She is perfectly aware that this is only how she imagines it -- for instance, after talking about the cushions, she goes on to explain that nonetheless her belief in the Trinity is orthodox, giving an entirely correct summary of the doctrine. The Lord's assurances to her are sometimes suspiciously flattering and detailed, but some of this seems just to be that she's not as sophisticated as other mystics of the day at communicating the line between what the experience actually was and what she imagines and infers about it. 

Nonetheless, the fact that she sometimes comes across as a bit silly may be as much a sign of a flaw in ourselves as anything. We over-spiritualize these things, confining it to words and depictions in stained glass; we treat religious matters as abstract. Margery Kempe is temperamentally incapable of doing so. She doesn't just think about Christ's humanity; she imagines herself as the servant of the Holy Virgin, doing day to day chores for her so that the Virgin can look after the Christ child, and she does this over an extended period of time in great detail. She doesn't just talk about the Holy Spirit, she interacts with Him in ways that she imagines in the most concrete and realistic way possible. She doesn't grasp after fine phrases, letting everything glide on purely poetic association of words the way many false mystics do; she experienced something, and she tells you exactly what it was like, in the same way that she tells you exactly what she experienced in being sick or in conversing with an anchorite.

And it is because of this that everything begins to come into focus. We spend decades of journey with Margery as she pilgrimages through the world with her gift of tears. It is often as embarrassing and suspicious to us as it was to her contemporaries, and certainly more foreign. We follow along with her weird mix of self-justification and abject humility, and can get as impatient with it as everyone else did at the time. We learn of her highly imaginative and detailed visions through time, and we find it often silly and occasionally self-indulgent. But toward the end there are many vivid meditations on the Passion of Christ, drawing heavily from mystery plays and her own experiences as a pilgrim, imagined with the concrete and homely detail we have found before. They are often moving, and for the first time, when she recounts her weeping, it makes entire sense. We thought, and her contemporaries thought, that she was constantly weeping and wailing in disruptive ways that made little sense in context. But this was the context; this was where Margery Kempe always was, on the Via Dolorosa and at Golgotha. She was not there because she was especially good, or especially wise, or especially gifted, but she was there, and being there, how could she not weep, regardless of wherever else she might have been? Margery Kempe is silly, self-centered, and sometimes obnoxiously embarrassing -- we know it because she has shown it to us herself, sometimes with self-awareness and more often with an astonishing lack of it. Yes. But we had to go on a pilgrimage through the entire book before we reached the level of seeing the world in a less silly and self-centered way than embarrassingly silly and self-centered Margery Kempe. Perhaps we should be shedding some tears ourselves.

Favorite Passage:

Then she took ship, with the man who had provided for her, and God sent them calm wind, which pleased her very well, for there rose not a wave on the water. Her company thought they were making no progress, and were gloomy and grumbling. She prayed to our Lord, and he sent them enough wind that they sailed on a great way and the waves rose. Her companions were glad and cheerful, and she was miserable and sorrowful for fear of the waves. When she looked at them she was always frightened. Our Lord, speaking to her spirit, ordered to lay her head down so that she would not see the waves, and she did so. But she was always frightened, and she was often criticized for that.... (p. 276)

Recommendation: Recommended.

*****

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, B. A. Windeatt, tr., Penguin Books (New York: 2004).

The Fellow Traveller of a Bird

 To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the preoccupations. You cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do not compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, but the note alters. So with the uncovenanted ways of a child you keep no tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where you tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault. You are the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of time to your footing. 

 No man’s fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and unimaginable message: “I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls.” A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heights and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there was a dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, “Mother, do be a lady frog.” None ever said their good things before these indeliberate authors. Even their own kind—children—have not preceded them. No child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whose father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies. “Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things for you.” “Do you work,” she asked, “to buy the lovely puddin’s?” Yes, even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth pursuing. “And do you work to buy the fat? I don’t like fat.” 

From Alice Meynell, "Fellow Travellers with a Bird", from Essays.

Lamb to the Slaughter

 When Philip meets the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8, the eunuch is reading Isaiah 53:7-8 (all quotations NRSV-UE): 

Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.

The word for 'slaughter' here is sphage; it can be translated as 'slaughter' or 'killing' in general, but it is often used in Greek for sacrificial killing, especially in certain kinds of special sacrifices. The standard word for high sacrifice, i.e., formal sacrifice to Olympian gods, or in the Bible to God, is thysia, and has overtones of communion with the divine, since the sacrifice would be shared with the offerer in a sacrificial feast. These sacrifices were for public festivals or important family occasions, like the birth of a child or a wedding. But there were lots of other sacrifices that had more specialized functions -- for instance, a fairly common sacrifice that would be called a sphage would be a sacrifice before battle. 

We have a similar use of sphage in Romans 8:36, this time quoting Psalm 44:22:

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”

Again, while it could just mean 'slaughter', it almost certainly is intended at least to suggest sacrifice.

The third passage in the New Testament that uses sphage is James 5:5, in James's condemnation of the rich:

You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have nourished your hearts in a day of slaughter.

(There is probably an allusion here to Jeremiah 12:1-3.) While 'slaughter' works here, the intended image again seems to be specifically of animals being fattened (a perhaps better translation than 'nourished') for sacrifice. The point is ironic, of course: with all of their ill-gotten wealth, they are in fact just fattening themselves up for imminent sacrifice.

The verb sphazo is also found in the New Testament; interestingly, it seems only to be in the Johannine literature. In one case, 1 John 3:12, it possibly just  means 'kill', but one wonders whether there might be a hint of allusion to the sacrificial meaning mixed in with the more general meaning. Other uses are in Revelation; for instance, Revelation 5:6, 5:9-10, and 5:12:

Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, with seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.

They sing a new song: “You are worthy to take the scroll and to break its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth.”

Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, singing with full voice, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!”

These are all clearly sacrificial, as is the similar usage in Revelation 13:8. Revelation 6:4 is probably just general slaughter (but perhaps the rider on the red horse in taking away the peace of the earth makes men sacrifice each other, in at least a figurative sense), but 6:9 likely implies not just slaughter but also that martyrdom is a kind of  sacrifice:

When he broke the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given; they cried out with a loud voice, “Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long will it be before you judge and avenge our blood on the inhabitants of the earth?”

The same use of the term for martyrdom is found in Revelation 18:24. 

Revelation 13:3 is a peculiar one. It's about the Beast, and says literally something like, "And one of its heads in the manner of having been killed (esphagmenen) to death, and its death blow was relieved, and all the land wondered at the back of the Beast." In immediate context it makes sense to read the verb as suggesting just killing or slaying in general. Yet the emphatic phrase, 'killed to death' weirdly combined with the weakening hos (like, as, in the manner of), the mentions of worship in the broader context, and the fact that in 13:8 we get the same word (esphagmenou) attached to the Lamb, where it clearly indicates sacrifice, makes me wonder if we should perhaps take the meaning to be that one of the heads seemed to have been sacrificed, which contrasts with the Lamb, who was really sacrificed. The worshipped-on-earth, ten-horned, seven-headed, blasphemously named Beast is to the Dragon as the worshipped-in-heaven, seven-horned, seven-eyed, many-named Lamb is to God; the Beast is therefore perhaps implied to be the pseudo-sacrifice through which the Dragon is worshipped.