And Beauty Immortal Awakes from the Tomb

 The Hermit
by James Beattie 

At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still,
And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove,
When nought but the torrent is heard on the hill,
And nought but the nightingale’s song in the grove:
’Twas then, by the cave of the mountain afar,
A Hermit his song of the night thus began;
No more with himself, or with nature, at war,
He thought as a sage, while he felt as a man: 

“Ah! why thus abandoned to darkness and woe?
“Why thus, lonely Philomel, flows thy sad strain?
“For spring shall return, and a lover bestow,
“And thy bosom no trace of misfortune retain.
“Yet, if pity inspire thee, ah! cease not thy lay,
“Mourn, sweetest complainer! man calls thee to mourn:
“O sooth him, whose pleasures like thine pass away--
“Full quickly they pass—but they never return. 

“Now gliding remote on the verge of the sky,
“The moon, half-extinguished, her crescent displays:
“But lately I marked, when majestic on high,
“She shone, and the planets were lost in her blaze.
“Roll on, thou fair orb, and with gladness pursue
“The path that conducts thee to splendour again:
“But man’s faded glory no change shall renew--
“Ah fool! to exult in a glory so vain! 

“Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more:
“I mourn, but, ye woodlands, I mourn not for you;
“For morn is approaching, your charms to restore,
“Perfumed with fresh fragrance, and glittering with dew.
“Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn;
“Kind Nature the embryo blossom will save.--
“But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn?
“O, when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?” 

’Twas thus, by the glare of false science betrayed,
That leads, to bewilder, and dazzles, to blind;
My thoughts wont to roam, from shade onward to shade,
Destruction before me, and sorrow behind.
“O pity, great Father of light,” then I cried,
“Thy creature, who fain would not wander from Thee!
“Lo! humbled in dust, I relinquish my pride:
“From doubt and from darkness thou only canst free.” 

And darkness and doubt are now flying away:
No longer I roam in conjecture forlorn.
So breaks on the traveller, faint, and astray,
The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn.
See Truth, Love, and Mercy, in triumph descending,
And Nature all glowing in Eden’s first bloom!
On the cold cheek of Death smiles and roses are blending,
And Beauty immortal awakes from the tomb!

Carr on the Four Cardinal Virtues

 It would appear, then, that the four traditional virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and temperance may be defended as cardinal in terms of the four theses stated earlier in this paper. They are cardinal in so far as they do not appear to be mutually reducible, reference to each of them is indispensable for a full account of moral virtue and they represent the four main types of virtue of which all other particular non-cardinal virtues may be considered tokens (although any particular virtue may, as Plato might have said, partake of the forms of one or more of the four main types; chastity, for example, may be some sort of mixture with respect to sexual life of wisdom, justice and temperance). Finally, there are just four cardinal virtues, no more or less, because between them they would appear to safeguard human nature in all of the areas in which moral failure or error may occur in human affairs; harmful or excessive indulgence in sensual pleasure, misconduct under the influence of emotion or passion, unjust treatment of others through self-love or pride and careless or foolish conduct following from ignorance or a defect of wisdom.

David Carr, "The Cardinal Virtues and Plato's Moral Psychology", The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 151 (Apr., 1988), p. 200.

Links of Note

 * Kenny Easwaran, The Tripartite Role of Belief: Evidence, Truth, and Action (PDF)

* Justin Smith-Ruiu, My Kind of Conservatism, at "The Hinternet"

* Yale Weiss, The best of all possible Leibnizian completeness theorems (PDF)

* Dan Williams, On conspiracy theories of ignorance, at "Conspicuous Cognition"

* Kevin Jackson, Questioning the Theory of Firm: The Challenge of Hybrid, Social, and Faith-Based Businesses (PDF)

* Defense Against Dishonest Charts, at "FlowingData"

* Guus Duindam, On the Doctrine of Elements and the Demands of Kantian Virtue (PDF)

* Amod Sandhya Lele, We need to see emotions as bodily, at "Love of All Wisdom"

* Alexander Douglas, James Ferrier's Idealism, at "As Difficult as Rare"

* Sarah Catherine Byers, Augustine's "Illumination" Theory: Correcting Bonaventure and Gilson via Plotinus and Marius Victorinus (PDF)

* Andrey Ivanov, Thomas Aquinas in Reference to Beauty: Two Definitions

* Patrick Frierson, Maria Montessori, at the SEP

* Brian Kemple, The Doctrine of Signs in John Poinsot: The Context, Content, and Perennial Importance of Joannes a Sancto Thoma's 'Doctrina Signorum' (PDF)

Sell Not Thy Soul to Brittle Joy

 Man's Civil War
by St. Robert Southwell 

My hovering thoughts would fly to heaven
 And quiet nestle in the sky,
Fain would my ship in Virtue's shore
 Without remove at anchor lie. 

 But mounting thoughts are haled down
 With heavy poise of mortal load,
And blust'ring storms deny my ship
 In Virtue's haven secure abode. 

 When inward eye to heavenly sights
 Doth draw my longing heart's desire,
The world with jesses of delights
 Would to her perch my thoughts retire, 

 Fond Fancy trains to Pleasure's lure,
 Though Reason stiffly do repine;
Though Wisdom woo me to the saint,
 Yet Sense would win me to the shrine. 

 Where Reason loathes, there Fancy loves,
 And overrules the captive will;
Foes senses are to Virtue's lore,
 They draw the wit their wish to fill. 

 Need craves consent of soul to sense,
 Yet divers bents breed civil fray;
Hard hap where halves must disagree,
 Or truce of halves the whole betray! 

 O cruel fight! where fighting friend
 With love doth kill a favoring foe,
Where peace with sense is war with God,
 And self-delight the seed of woe! 

 Dame Pleasure's drugs are steeped in sin,
 Their sugared taste doth breed annoy;
O fickle sense! beware her gin,
 Sell not thy soul to brittle joy!

I missed the day, but St. Robert Southwell, after an extended period of torture and confinement, was martyred on February 21, 1595, hanged at Tyburn for the crime of high treason, due to his being a Jesuit priest and refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy. His poetry was immensely influential on the poetry and plays of the next generation, which was itself a titanic generation for both poetry and drama, so there are only a handful poets who have had as much of an influence on English literature as he.

Music on My Mind

 

Life in 3D, "Country Roads".

Dashed Off IV

 The scholar should enrich the experience of the reader rather than getting in the way of it.

"The whole world is the wealth of the faithful." Proverbs 17:6A (i.e., in the LXX and Vetus Latina)

mere fictions vs grounded fictions

In the way Schellenberg characterizes 'nonresistance' in the divine hiddenness argument, it is unclear if any *theists* are 'nonresistant', as opposed to merely having overcome resistance.

Terrain is half of tactics.

the tinker method (of engineering, of education, of charitable work...)

Mt 6:12 // Sir 28:2

"If a man receives the body of the Son of Man as the Bread of Life, he will have life in him." John 6:56 Vetus Latina

What we proclaim is both testimony and mystery.

By shedding error, we come to understanding; by revering truth, we come to wisdom.

The problem with the ignorance diagnosis of free will is that it requires exaggerating how ignorant we could possibly be, and (setting aside Spinoza and a few others) underestimates the kind of causes that would have to fill the gaps in order to be adequate.

People seem to forget that protesting only works if you don't come across as fringe loons.

contingent : final cause :: categorical : formal cause

unrestricted universe of discourse as logical analogue of ens ut primum cognitum

In the Church, things that are taught by infallible teaching are also taught by means that are themselves fallible.

public festivals as a mode of lay teaching

To be able to be taught by infallible means, a doctrine must be formally revealed, either in the plain letter of Scripture, or in Scritpure as understood by perpetual tradition of the Church, or it must be intimately connected with truth so revealed, either in being required for teaching it, or in being required for defending it, or in being required for living according to it.

human nature in integriity, in fall, in grace, and in glory (De Moor: instituted, destituted, restituted, constituted)

The lowest point of human degradation generally involves the attempt of the degraded to justify their degradation; this is usually more easily reached with self-imposed degradation than externally imposed degradation.

good as first willed and the limitless possibility in human action, action that can take into account the very universe itself

kinds of positive legislation
(1) customary
(2) constitutional (impositional)
(3) contractual
(4) petitionary
-- what we often think of as legislation today is a stylized version of (4) -- i.e., a bill is a stylized bill of petition, which is then deliberated over and approved or not.

Representation in government depends on the power to enforce obligations.

orders of fictional truths
(1) explicitly stated
(2) logically implied
(3) plausibly suggested
(4) scaffolding (used by author in writing; director in shooting; actor in determining motives; etc.)
(5) potentializing (what the author would /expects to assume if anything further is done)

Rage, even when understandable, is always a deterioration and often a degradation.

"All material practical principles are, without exception, of one and the same kidn and come under the general principle of self-love or one's own happiness." Kant
--> This is certainly false, for reasons noted by Butler.

Kant takes moral motivation to be self-love restricted to agreement with moral law.

correspondence with resemblance vs correspondence without resemblance

Every time Luke is mentioned in the New Testament, Mark is also mentioned.

1 Timothy 5:18 seems to call Luke 10:7 scripture
Pauls' description of the Last Supper is closest to Luke's

The Old Testament that Christians inherited was that of both Judean and Hellenistic Jews.

It takes work and cultivation of ability to seek knowledge for its own sake.

"All virtues are in our True Lord and Master; we are utterly without virtue. O Creator Lord, all are in Your Power." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 17
"The truthful are absorbed into the True Lord." 18
"The True Guru leads us to meet the Immaculate True God through the Word of His Shabad." 27
"He Himself dyes us in the Color of His Love; through the Word of His Shabad, He unites us with Himself. The True Color shall not fade away, for those who are attuned to His Love." 37
"The Word of the Gurmukh is God Himself. Throught he Shabad, we merge in Him." 39
"The True Guru, the Primal Being, is the Pool of Ambrosial Nectar. The blessed come to bathe in it." 40
"Even the ungrateful ones are cherished by God. O Nanak, He is forever the Forgiver." 47
"God Himself acts, and causes others to act; everything is in His Hands." 48
"The One Lord is the Doer, the Cause of causes, who has created the creation." 51

nadar: glance/favorable regard / favor; the glance of God's grace

"The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning." D. H. Lawrence

For statutes to function as law, first principles of reason must already be functioning as law.

Parts of pictures of something are not necessarily pictures of parts of it (e.g., they may be symbolic abbreviations).

Our congruous merit occurs within a covenant (pactum).

predilection -> election -> predestination

Most analytic work on grounding confuses categorical relations and transcendental relations.

"Mary is holy, Mary is blessed, but the Church is something much better than the Virgin Mary. Why? Because Mary is part of the Church, a holy member, a quite exceptional member, the supremely wonderful member, but novertheless a member of the whole body." Augustine (Sermon 72a.7

miracles as tracing out aspects of divine sovereignty

Evangelium vitae 62: "direct abortion, whether intended as end or as means is always a grave moral disorder, inasmuch as it is the deliberate elimination of an innocent human being"

The Old Covenant is not shed but is fulfilled in such a way that Gentiles may participate in it through Christ.

"Signum importat aliquod notum quoad nos, quo manducimur in alterius cognitionem." Aquinas Sent 4.1.1.1q2

Perceving the world around us, we get a feeling for its invariances; having a feeling for its invariances, we reflect on them, compare and contrast them, classify them, reason about them.

Human beings cannot act without taking our bodies to be meaningul and teleological, because in humana ction we recognize this (for example) as a hand, as a means of grasping, as mine for using, as me. We are soaked in meaning and vibrant with purpose, rich in orienting and full of signifying.

The devil woos with shallow benefits.

Three elements of probable inference: possibility, appropriateness, nonimpedance. Probable inference coverge on proof as positive reasons for possibility and independent grounds of appropriateness increase, and as impediments decrease, and as the reasons in each improve in quality.

positive laws as arising from the overlaps of senses of honor, the convergence of codes of honor twoard law

Another person may be experienced as a context, an opposition, a gift, or some mix of the three.

summons, surprise, address, and fact as mode sin which the world expresses itself in inquiry

"Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds." Raymond Chandler
"All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium, it only looks like speech."

"The ability to lie effectively, to appear different than one really is -- all the disguises essential in the world of power -- become, in the world of love, temptations, artful excuses to avoid the nakeness love requries, to avoid love." Josiah Thompson

'presentation' as translation of 'species' -- impressed presentation, expressed presentation, intelligible presentation, etc.

Being ut primum cognitum is being as involved in everything and thus not inquantum ens, as itself considered in itself.

A problem with social media platforms is that they train a particular kind of personality into habitual lying.

common sense as "a rough sketch of metaphysics, a vigorous and unreflective sketch" (Maritain)

Horror as a genre is about boundary violations of a certain kind; thus it must presuppose some boundaries. The usual boundaries are physical (body horror), mental (madness), and religious (transgression of sacred bound). Further, the violation must be culpable (moral horror) or piacular (tragic horror) or intrusive (alien horror). The violation may also be an incident or something that spreads (stain, contagion, or infestation). And, of course, one can combine all of these in various ways.

Being as first known jumbles together substantial being, accidental being, being in the guise of another (e.g., ficitonalized or idealized or under-an-aspect being), and being of reason.

Englert's version of Kant's Third Critique moral proof ("Kant as a Carpenter of Reason: The Highest Good and Systematic Coherence")
(1) Philosophy ought to provide a coherent account of experience as a whole. [Philosophical Demand]
(2) Judging experience as a whole leads to two necessary ideas, [a] morality and [b] nature, that ought to figure into a coherent account. [Fact of Experience & 1]
(3) A coherent account between [a] and [b] requires the highest good as a common point of reference. [Result of Ethico-Teleological Reflection & 2]
(4) The highest good can only be thought of as really possible if we postulate a further idea, namely [c] God, as "another causality." [Philosophical Postulate & 3]
(5) Therefore we must believe in God in order to do as we philosophically ought to do, namely, provide a coherent account of experience as a whole. [1 & 4]

Half of being a good author is understanding the story you are telling; this is far more difficult than it sounds, and many would-be writers fail at it, and even accomplished authors sometimes slip.

Certainties are of different kinds and are not all completely commensurable.

wrongous/wrongwise

Every theory contains realist and instrumentalist components.

"Poetry is unquestionably the language of nature; and, as such, ought to interest and impress, where it may not be able to inspire." Anna Seward

gut flora as categorically inernal vestment (habitus)

Vestment as a category concerns the fact that one substance can be as it were an accident for another substance. (It is specifically the relationality that is the vestment/cladding.)

integration of substance into substance
(1) organic part: incomplete substance into complete substance, substantially as complete part
(2) prosthetic part: incomplete substance into complete substance, substantially as incomplete part
(3) cladding/vestment: complete substance into complete substance, accidentally as actual quasi-part.
(4) separate tool: complete substance into complete substance, accidentally as a means for action and potential quasi-part

adornment : vestment as sign :: equipment : vestment as means
(manifestation and instrumentation)

Substance and relation as said transcendentally are ways of talking about one being -- being and unity both.

God as one being is imitated by creatures both substantially and relationally.

It is the civil society, not the state, that is the embodiment of all political right.

the juridical commonwealth as a symbol fo the ethical commonwealth

Kant's arguments that Judaism is a politics rather than a religion
(1) Its commands relate only to external acts. --> This is clearly not the law as interpreted by the prophets.
(2) It limits reward and punishment to this world. --> This requires to taking teh world to come as part of 'this world', and also ignores remembrance before the Lord.
(3) The concept of a chosen people shows enmity to other people. --> On the contrary, inherently the opposite: Jews as the universally mediating nation, the priestly people among all just peoples.

Albert on the eucharist
(1) body: communion
(2) blood: atonement
**
(3) soul: redemption
(4) spirit: vivification & virtue
**
(5) divinity: refreshment
**
--> as a whole: beatitude

The Eucharist has signs of both Body and Blood because the Body is the best as a symbol of fellowship and communion and the Blood as a symbol of sacrifice and atonement, both of which are essential aspects of this sacrament.

Everything becomes more stupid in committee, and Jesus never promises that committees of bishops are exceptions.

Augustine, Confessions Bk X.8.15 -- the sublimity of memory

"If we remember even the fact that we have forgotten, we have not entirely forgotten." Augustine
"The happy life, in fact, is joy in truth: and that means joy in You, who are Truth, O God my light, the health of my consequence, my God."

We form the image of the future and are formed in the image of the past.

Protestant treatment of the plain text of Scripture has an odd tendency to oscillate between reading Scripture as if one were brain-damaged (very literal, ignoring suggestive juxtapositions, bypassing the sorts of symbolisms readers generally find in even elementary human texts) and reading it as if it were a technical object of academic analysis, requiring elaborate apparatus and sophistication and expertise to read. In fact the plain text touches each of these poles and covers all in between.

Medium et Principium demonstationis est quod quid est.

We do not use 'what is' to demonstrate; instead use 'what the *what* is' (quiddity) to demonstrate.

"The object of the mind is what the what is, that is, the very being of something.... And thus a likeness of something in the mind is directly a likneess of its being, whereas a likeness of something in snesation or imagination is a likeness of its incidentals." Aquinas

The 'Evil God Challenge'

 The 'Evil God Challenge' (EGC) is an argument that every argument for a good God has an equally plausible counterpart argument for an evil God; the conclusion is typically that both are equally absurd, or that neither should be accepted. For some reason I cannot fathom, it seems to be enjoying a bit of a surge in popularity, which I find extremely irritating, because I think it is one of the most extraordinarily stupid arguments I've come across, to the extent that I regard taking it seriously as a sign of intellectual incompetence. There are many reasons why it is a ridiculous argument; here are just a few.

(1) The EGC does not establish what it is supposed to be establishing. It seems to pass by a great many of the people who propose the EGC, but if I have a claim (e.g., the world is good) that implies X, and the opposing claim (e.g., the world is not good) also implies X, these do not magically cancel out; what they establish is that, asssuming the propositions are meaningful, X is true no matter what, i.e., that it is a necessary truth. If I have a plausible valid argument, using terms like 'good', for "God exists and God is good", and I have an equally plausible valid argument, switching out the good-valenced terms for the bad-valenced terms, for "God exists and God is evil", what is very noticeable is that I can conclude "God exists" from both. If the premises are meaningful at all, and if good and evil are actually relevant to the question at all, then the most natural conclusion is that "God exists" is a serious candidate for a necessary truth. If the arguments are plausible and equally plausible they do not 'cancel out' in a way that touches the conclusion "God exists". This is part of how arguments from parity work; if something seems to follow equally from opposites, that makes it more probably true, not less.

Thus the only way the EGC could have any purchase against theism in general is if we knew that all the arguments for a good God were implausible and probably wrong. But nothing about the EGC could possibly establish this, and if you already had an argument that all the arguments for a good God were probably wrong, the EGC couldn't actually add anything to it except to rule out arguments for an evil God, which almost no one accepts anyway. 

(2) Proponents of the EGC consistently show that they don't understand the difference between 'parody argument' and 'parity argument'. The EGC is an argument from parity. That is to say, it claims that if you accept such-and-such argument, you should equally accept such-and-such argument, because the grounds or reasons for accepting them are not different in a way that matter. (Parity arguments are related to, but weaker than, a fortiori arguments, which claim that if you accept one argument, you have even more reason to accept another.) One way you can run an argument from parity is to create appropriate parody arguments. A parody argument is where you take an argument and substitute other things for its terms to get absurd results.  However, most parody arguments are completely useless for parity arguments, and even when you have a parody argument that might be suitable, you have to use it in the right way to create parity. The reason is very obvious -- you can make parody argument for any argument, just by substituting terms.

There is literally no person on the planet more painfully stupid than the person who thinks that you can object to an argument just by taking it, replacing its terms, and getting an absurd or silly result. If you do this, congratulations; you have just discovered that the argument has logical structure. Arguments have a logical structure that they share with lots of other arguments; they can share it with other arguments because the logical structure is detachable from the content of the argument. No argument can be refuted by merely showing that it has a logical structure. Just because you can take an argument that has 'good' in it, then substitute 'evil' for 'good', and get another argument doesn't tell us anything at all about how to evaluate either argument.

In order for your parody argument to be relevant to an argument from parity, you have to show that there would be more-or-less equal reason to accept the parody. This is a completely separate step. Over and over you find proponents of EGC spending an awful lot of time making parody arguments and, at best, vaguely handwaving the whole question of whether the parody is suitable for parity. This is a red flag; they are skipping or rushing through the hard step that actually does the real work. And it brings us to the third point.

(3) On no major ethical approach do good and evil have the symmetry required to get the equality. Unsurprisingly, once you use your brain to think about it, almost no form of ethics takes good and evil to be symmetrical so that you can simply interchange their terms in arguments without radically changing how you would asses the arguments. On most theories of good and evil, good and evil are not symmetrical with regard to power, intelligence, or results. This is why various forms of ethics don't have a problem with distingishing themselves from their equal and opposites. Utilitarians don't have to puzzle over why morality is based on maximizing happiness rather than maximizing suffering. Good is desirable, evil is undesirable. Kantians don't have to puzzle over why they should accept morality is a kind of conformity to reason rather than a kind of self-contradicting irrationality. Good is consistent, evil is inconsistent. Aristotelians don't have to puzzle over why our nature is completed by a totality of goods rather than a totality of evils. Good is fulfilling, evil is unfulfilling. In none of these cases are the two symmetrical and interchangeable; we can distinguish good and evil perfectly well, and know that if you switch the terms in any argument to which the meaning of the terms is genuinely relevant, it is extremely unlikely that you would get equally plausible arguments.

And in fact, if the EGC were any kind of argument worth taking seriously, it would do far more damage to ethics than to natural theology, because having the kind of symmetry that the EGC requires would mean that many ethical arguments would also have a problem, because their uses of 'good' and 'evil' are linkable to 'good' and 'evil' in the theological case, through positions like theological utilitarianism, Kantian philosophy of religion, etc. If you are a theistic Kantian, for instance, you postulate that God exists as willing the moral law, to solve a problem with respect to living a moral life. It is literally impossible to do this on Kantian principles and coherently postulate an evil God. If you try to insist to a theistic Kantian that there is an equally plausible argument for an evil God, you are saying that Kantian ethics is no more plausible than its direct opposite, which obviously a Kantian has no reason whatsoever to accept. (And indeed shouldn't, because even non-Kantians can see that Kantianism is more plausible than its polar opposite.) Things are a little more complicated for utilitarianism or Aristotelianism, because they have slightly more complicated accounts, but you get similar results for similar reasons. The EGC only works if ethical ways of using 'good' and 'evil' are no more plausible than their opposites. 

This is related to another problem for the EGC.

(4) On neither of the two most plausible accounts of the relation between good and evil (the account on which they are related as positive and privative and the account on which they are related as pleasing and displeasing) is the symmetry required by the EGC possible. These points have been discussed at length by others, and are obvious in themeselves, so I won't develop them here.

Honestly, I could go on. For instance, when proponents of the EGC actually get off their backsides and try to show that every argument for a good God has an equal and opposite counterpart argument for a bad God, they end up repeatedly mangling the former, or failing to address obvious problems with the latter that arise specifically from their appeal to badness. This is tedious work, but of course, even one argument for a good God having no equally plausible counterpart for an evil God breaks the EGC. Proponents of the EGC make bold claims, but they repeatedly show that they cannot deliver the goods when it comes to details. It's just a stupid argument all around.