Dashed Off II

 "In instantaneous changes, a thing is in becoming and in being simultaneously." Aquinas

By sin we lose a triple dignity: innocence, filial relation to God, and fitness for relevant office and order. The sacraemtn of penance restores the latter two and provides a new dignity to compensate for loss of the first, namely, what might be called dignity of return. By coming before the tribunal of mercy, the penitent respects their basic human dignity, which they do not lose in sin but fail to respect; the Church in turn renders respect to the same by welcome, by counsel, and by seal.

"Baptism has some efficacy toward remission of sin even before it is actually received, while one receives it in proposal.' Aquinas (SCG 4.72)

happenstantial vs unitive majorities

"The ideal of integral human fulfillment is that of a single system in which all the goods of human persons would contribute to the fulfillment of the whole community of persons." Grisez
-- note that Grisez takes it to be the case that we can only know that this is actually possible by faith, which locates its achievement in "the divine act of re-creating all things in Jesus."
"The guidance which the ideal of integral human fulfillment offers to choice is to avoid unnecessary limitation and so maintain an openness to further goods."

person (or person-being) as itself a basic good of human persons

Integral human fulfillment should be seen as the social expression of the Mystical Body in its fullness.

We identify the nondispositional or categorical in contracts to and in light of the dispositional.

What most people derive from schooling is a set of drilled recipes for doing particular things, combined with a vast, foggy mass of dim impressions about what is relevant to what.

being constructed as an artifact vs receiving an artifactual designation

Every debunking argument presupposes a domain-specific PSR, because otherwise it could just be answered by denying that there even needs to be a reason.

If there is a teleology for artifacts, there is something at least very like a teleology for organisms; if there is something at least very like a teleology for organisms, tehre is something at least broadly like a teleology for natural systems of process like crystallization, ecosystems, or the internal balance of stars. The simplest account of all this is that it is all at least basically teleological.

Public schooling is not education itself but a particular instrument of education within a much larger context of education.

euthanasia as a mark of creeping totalitarianism

illocutionary & perlocutionary aspects of artifacts

"We say that the whole holy Scripture is divided into flesh and spirit, as if it were some spiritual human." Maximos
-- he goes on to analogize further -- the Law is the flesh, the Prophets the senses, the Gospel the intellectual soul "operating through the flesh of the Law, through the sensory perception of the Prophets, and manifesting its own power by its activities." (EOO Chapters 1.92)

Conscience is imperfect, but it is very dangerous to let a schematism in one's head substitute for it.

Physicists explain the behavior of physical objects by tracing it back to what is always the same. But it does not logically follow from this that everything in the behavior of physical objects is wholly explained by what is always the same; and, indeed, we know that the bheavior of physical objects is not itself always the same.

The Church's moral teaching mostly works by long, slow pressure.

deliberate monopolization as a sin against charity

aspects of just price: raritas, virtuositas (capacity to supply what is wanted), complacibilitas (capacity to satisfy want itself)

Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest communiter.
-- just price recognizes the communiter as not merely statistical, i.e., the price has to be such as to be consistent with and appropriate to common buying and selling, wehere there is a common good in exchange that is consistent with teh common good of the exchanges. This is why fair contract plays a significant role in it.

Business ethics by its nature has to be casuistical.

Usury fails to subordinate the means of exchange to the moral ends of exchange; it treats the means as the point.

pecunia vs capitale
pecunia non paret
capitale is not pure money but money in use as a means to anend, in combination with labor (industria)

cambium non est mutuum
-- & therefore the relevant prohibition is that against unjust price rather that against usury

A viable business ethics necessarily must presuppose that profit is not a direct end of business, but a means of sustaining and achieving its ends.

the licit titles to profit:
(1) to sustain the household
(2) to aid the indigent
(3) to reward exertion in supplying needs

People often talk about medieval prohibitions on usury as if they were simply imposed on merchants by moral theologians, but in reality, and despite a fair amount of evasion, merchants took them seriously, and while many exploited ambiguities, all looked down on blatant cases and actively sought to impose the prohibitions on each other, as well as to parade, as part of their image, their own adherence to them. This is a common pattern in business ethics: businesses often give themselves all benefit of any doubt, will be very fallible in the face of direct temptation, but nonetheless put significant effort into incorporating the relevant norms into their practice.

Most words for banking trace back to words for 'table'; this is an etymology with several independent originations. And I don't think this is trivial: a space for negotiation and account, jointly open to all parties, is the central and essential component of all banking.

A common pattern in banking and finance: trade --> receipts --> trade of receipts.

It does not 'impede' business to hold it to moral standards.

The three public functions of legitimate business:
(1) to supply from elsewhere what is needed
(2) to preserve what will be needed for when it will be needed
(3) to change what is less needed into what is more needed.

All business ethics must be structured in such a way as to recognize that desire for gain itself is bottomless and as such is all-destroying.

Just as there is reason to take genera as being in the substantial order without being substances, so too there is reason to take unified systems as being in the substantial order without themselves being substances.

While we know more than forms, the activity of forms is the primary anchor of knowledge.

We should perhaps think of atomic orbitals as having measurable 'electronicity' with integer values rather than electron particles; and indeed probably should only think of 'sites of interaction' rather than particles at all.

particle : site of interaction :: wave : scope of interaction

What makes human 'normative attitudes' normative attitudes is that they already presuppose a normative framework.
Human beings can create norms because we build on norms we already have.

People are regularly responsive to norms that they do not regard as authoritative. Some of this is just a matter of default -- the norm is there with no obvious better alternative -- and some a matter of derivative deference -- they take the norm to be useful for complying with a norm they do regard as authoritative -- and some a matter of social pressure -- it's the norm other people are already using, so it's easier to go along with it.

Children are born apt for society, but also must grow into it.

It is a recurring pattern of human experience that people coming to be happy find that happiness is much more simple than they were making it.

The actual decisions of courts have less influence than generally assumed; the perceived reasons for those decisions, on the other hand, have immense influence.

All artworks are communal by nature.

The great goodnesses that matter in politics are systems creating conditions for many small goodnesses.

Utilitarianism only works to the extent that its account of happiness approximates common good.

the state as a corporate agent/representative of the people vs. teh state as a territorial management corporation

Everything has an intelligibility adequate for it.

'things like that do happen' as an explanation
-- it seems clear that this can only explain the possibilities for a particular case
-- relation to Humean accounts of explanation

To explain is to set intelligilibty within a larger intelligibility.

What corresponds must cohere.

Titus 1:5 and the essential nature of the sacrament of order

Religion is a theurgy for God and His will having an influence on us; that is to say, by formulas, spiritual exercises, purifications, and expiations we open ourselves to God.

(1) To think within oneself.
(2) To think with other people.
(3) To think with all.

The Enlightenment period was an age that had no equal in the history of human misunderstanding.

"According as one acts, according as one conducts oneself, so does one become. The doer of good becomes good." Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (IV.4.5)

Machiavelli criticizes Charlemagne for receiving the imperial crown from another, but here he is certainly wrong. As we see from Augustus, from the formation of kingships, from medieval popes, from the rise of colonial empires, from American hegemony, power consists in the accumulation of effective titles and offices, where the efficacy of title or office is the combination of authorization and means.

People who actually have a conscience don't usually experience moral rules and pragmatic rules as the same.

All human bodies, by being human, have their character in part as being for the service of others. The muscle of the man, for instance, is partly explained by, and continues to have function for, its value to others of the human species.

What can be treated as obvious is never itself a matter of reasoning.

A problem with many proposals for increased lay participation in the Church is that they require a very well catechized laity that the proposals do nothing to establish or guarantee.

In politics, violence is often a sign of weakening power.

One cannot separate powers until one develops them.

"The connatural mode of proceeding for our intellect proceeds from potency to act, and from the imperfect to the perfect." Poinsot

All inquiry is from being relatively indeterminate to being relatively understood.

Metaphysics intimates sacred doctrine.

Being *falls* into our apprehension.

In every inquiry we are concerned with the kind of being, the way it is being, and the orientation of being to being.

the intellect as principal sense of being; the internal and external senses as instrumental senses of being

The externality of the external world is received by the mind as a kind of directionality or oder of experience within the experience itself.

Hyperbole is dangerous in politics.

Christian evangelization involves broadening propagation combined with narrowing interaction.

Experimental replications are checks, and resampling accounts of replication do not cover the multiple ways in which they are checks.

1 Tim 5:8 and the domestic church

Eden as a probationary state of freedom for the human race

Spirit of Truth and Power

Invocation to Poetry
(January Sixteenth)
by John Holland

"But if (fie of such a But!) you be borne so near the dulmaking cataract of Nilus, that you cannot hear the planet-like music of Poetry: if you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the skies of Poetry, or rather, by a certain rustical disdain, will become such a mome as to be a Momus of Poetry: then, although I will not wish unto you the asses ears of Midas, nor to be driven by a Poet's verses as Bubonax was to hang himself, nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; -yet this much curse I must send you in the behalf of all Poets, that while you live you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a Sonnet, and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an Epitaph."-Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie. 

 Spirit of Truth and Power! or whether yoke'd
 With chain harmonious to resounding rhyme;
 Or urged, in "winged words," fire-plumed, to climb;
 Or by the spell of hallow'd thought invoked--
 Thou art the soul's bright messenger sublime;
 Or when quick Lyric themes sweet Music wed;
 Or the Elegiac bard bewails the dead;
 Or Tragic muse instruction wins from crime;
 Or Epic genius snatches from dull time,
 The glorious memory of heroic deeds--
 Blest Poesy! thy inspiration breeds
 Such virtuous hope in youth's ingenuous prime,
 That oft true fame, as man's ambition free,
 Crowns through each stage of life thy faithful devotee.

On Dante's Hell

 Scott Aikin and Jason Aleksander have an interesting, if very odd, paper from a number of years ago, All Philosophers Go to Hell: Dante and the Problem of Infernal Punishment (PDF). The purported topic of the paper is an apparent inconsistency in Dante's depiction of hell. Trying to run this sort of argument with a poetic text is inherently tricky, but certainly Dante as a philosophical poet concerns himself with consistency; all the trickiness in his case is with the mode of depiction. But the oddities of the paper arise precisely from the attempt to translate his depiction into an account of hell. Aikin and Aleksander characterize the account of hell in the following terms:

1. The sins of the damned are a product of free will (though the damned may have “lost the good of the intellect” [3.18]).
2. The sins of the damned are infinite.
3. The sufferings of the damned in Hell are infinite, in the sense that the damned suffer eternally (or, at least, perduringly) and unchangingly.
4. The sufferings of the damned in Hell are proportionate to their crimes.
5. The punishments of the damned are warranted under a retributive conception of justice.

This is explicitly attributed to Dante, although the justification for this is somewhat unclear. In fact, except for perhaps (3) and (4), it seems clear that Dante would accept none of these as stated. The actual sins of the damned are due to free will (although they can also be punishments for other sins); in Limbo the only relevant sin is original sin, which is not actual sin. (Things are a little more complicated in a full scholastic theology, but Dante's poetic method limits how much he can directly convey of such subtleties.) The immediate justification given for (2), that it is a requirement for a theodicy of hell based on retributive justice, has nothing to do with Dante at all, who is certainly not giving such a theodicy. (Dante doesn't strictly have a theodicy, but the closest he has is suggested on the gates of hell themselves, and is, besides, the connection to the overall theme of the Comedy: hell itself is not said to be founded on retributive justice, although that is relevant, but on power, wisdom, and *love*. Justice in punishment is just one of the forms love takes; and we learn as things go that by establishing hell in mercy, divine love limits how corrupt things can become.) In any case, Dante would almost certainly have made the distinction made by any scholastic, that whether sins are infinite depends on what exactly about them that we are considering. The relevant sense here would be that original sin is participating in human failure to adhere to infinite good and the actual sins of the damned are ways of choosing something that falls short of infinite good, which for Dante means that they are defective and counterfeit loves, love being our participation in the divine love. The reason this is relevant is that heaven is full unitive participation in infinite good, the Beatific Vision; people are in hell in Dante because they have not done what is required for heaven and thus are cut off from full union with the infinite good that is God.

While (4) is technically correct of Dante's portrayal, it is trivially so -- the Comedy, like almost all depictions of hell, whether Western or Eastern, operates on the principle that the sufferings of the damned are symbolic representations of the sins themselves. The fundamental rule of artistic depiction of hell, as true of Buddhist hells as it is of Christian and Muslim hells, is that vice is the beginning of its own punishment, so that vices are depicted by symbolic punishments. (5), however, seems to be operating on the assumption that the punishments in the Comedy are separate from the crimes punished so that they need justification; in reality they are just the crimes themselves symbolically expressed, and therefore require no such justification. The actual punishments of hell are not really (say) being turned into a bleeding plant or whirling around in a wind of fire; these are just depictions of why people are punished in hell, namely, the sinful actions themselves (in these examples, suicide and lustful actions), or in other words, in what way their life failed to be a life of love and therefore carries a punishment in itself. Beyond the sins themselves considered as punishments, the actual punishments of hell, which Dante gets from scholastic theologians, are (a) penalty of loss (damnation in the strict sense), which is loss of infinite good, i.e., not being in heaven with full union with God and (b) penalty of sense, which is the experienced foiling of the will, sometimes direct and sometimes by mediating agencies like fire or darkness, that punishes disordered attachment to finite good. That is to say, the punishments of hell are not being with God and not being able to do what one wants, or (perhaps more directly) having to endure positive restriction that one does not want. Penalty of loss is the punishment of all in hell; penalty of sense, a punishment of all except those in Limbo. The poetic depictions are attempting to capture both in relation to the reason why they are given. Aikin and Aleksander recognize that the punishments metaphorically correspond to the sins, but fail to realize the true significance of this, because they keep treating the sins and their punishments as adventitiously related rather than naturally related.

Aikin and Aleksander spend some time trying to make sense of (3); I don't think Dante regards it as requiring much justification. Of course the punishment is perpetual; lots of punishments (exile and life imprisonment without parole, for instance) are perpetual, and only end because we literally die or (in some cases) metaphorically die, i.e., completely repent and reform, neither of which Dante thinks is possible for those who are already dead. Thus the punishment is not merely perpetual, i.e., intrinsically tending to continue; the things that could override its perpetuity are no longer on the table, so it is everlasting. Now, it is true that people today often have difficulty with the idea that the dead can no longer repent, but Dante certainly would not; thus (3) requires no special justification. The treacherous have the punishment of being treacherous people, and what follows naturally from that, for as long as they are treacherous people; the treacherous in hell are punished forever because they are treacherous people forever.

Thus when Aikin and Aleksander characterize the retributive nature of hell by the syllogism, "Those in Hell are sinners, and sin demands punishment. Therefore, Hell is the place for that punishment," this is potentially ambiguous; as characterized by Dante, sin is already the punishment; hell is just the fruition of that.

Now, Dante famously puts the noble pagans in Limbo, which is by definition the state in hell where there is no penalty of sense, only penalty of loss. The noble pagans are in hell because heaven cannot be deserved by human acquired virtue; it requires (as we see in the cases of both Ripheus and Trajan) faith, hope, and love, which make us suitable for union with God. The lack of this is the full extent of their penalty, though; the noble pagans still receive the natural reward of their virtue -- they have the reward of having lived a virtuous life, and being honored for it even after their deaths. And this is quite important, because Aikin and Aleksander repeatedly attempt to suggest that there is some sort of injustice in the noble pagans not receiving heaven, despite the fact that they never met the preconditions for it. But I suspect Dante would be simply bewildered by this. Why would you think that pagan magnanimity has as its natural and deserved reward Christian union with God? Dante is in fact being quite generous: a solid Aristotelian himself, he gives Aristotle every reward of pagan virtue that Aristotle himself thinks pagan virtue deserves: the reward of having lived well in a fully human life, the reward of being honored for it by others of similar virtue. What other reward could human virtue have? Why would you think that natural, acquired virtue, demands supernatural reward of divine union? In reality, human magnanimity deserves the reward of the character it forms and the honor of friendship with magnanimous people, which the noble pagans in Limbo have.

Indeed, while some people have made that assumption, it's odd for Aikin and Aleksander to be assuming it in the construction of their argument. If virtue by its nature deserves heaven, which is union with God, this is only explicable if there is union with God to deserve; and thus this assumption has the result of committing the person who assumes it to saying that the existence of virtue implies the existence of God. I'm very certain that this is not what Aikin and Aleksander intend, but it seems to be what they have commited themselves to.

This is, I think, a recurring problem in discussions of the so-called Problem of Hell. The whole point of Dante's limbo of the noble pagans is that if you concede to the noble pagans the fullest, the deepest, happiness and reward for their nobility that most of them hoped for, that is still short of what Christians claim heaven is like. The most complete reception of what ordinary human virtue deserves is just the life of virtue itself in society with others of virtue. But while heaven includes that, heaven is not just that, nor is it even primarily that; it is an infinite glory of an infinite reward. It's sometimes almost amusing that people talk about the 'Problem of Hell'; in Dante's terms, hell is the easy part -- it's just the completion of what you have achieved when you die. The wicked have achieved wickedness, and have the reward of the wicked; the noble have achieved human nobility, and have the reward of human nobility. The real difficulty, if we take seriously how Dante has set things up, is the Problem of Heaven: How can it possibly be just that there are those who receive infinitely beyond what the maximum of virtue could deserve? And it's mediated by what might be called the Problem of Purgatory: How can human beings possibly reach the point of having met the preconditions for heaven? Notably, Aikin and Aleksander don't seem to consider either of these problems, although, in fairness, they are not alone.

The fact that we cannot by purely human virtue deserve heaven, however, means that much of Aikin and Aleksander's argument is misplaced. They put a great deal of emphasis on the claim that you can only deserve punishment if you fully knew what you were doing, and that in this case that means that only the philosophers could deserve hell. But (1) this principle, read this strongly, is not true of any other case of punishment; in human punishments, for instance, ignorance can sometimes partially excuse, but the ignorance itself has to be innocent and whether or not it excuses, and to what degree, depends very much on the wrong that was done. Yes, knowledge of some kind is a requirement for genuinely being guilty of wrongdoing, but the knowledge that is required is just sufficient knowledge to be able to know that it was wrong. If you deliberately refuse to learn what you need to learn, that is not the right kind of ignorance; if you could have recognized that it was wrong but just made no effort to do so, that is not the right kind of ignorance; if other people know it was wrong and you didn't bother to take their advice seriously, that is not the right kind of ignorance. Beyond that, nobody in any other case holds that you have to know everything about the action to be guilty of wrongdoing; voluntary wrongdoing does not presuppose logical omniscience about your actions. Even knowing a very little bit about the wrongness of your action removes the excuse of invincible ignorance. And pretty much all of the sins punished in Dante's hell are things that any thoughtful person could in principle have recognized as wrong. You don't have to be a philosopher to recognize that you shouldn't betray your family or act with excessive violence. Even schism and heresy are just specialized versions of more general sins of contentiousness and willful disregard for truth. 

And (2), Aikin and Aleksander seem to assume that all penalties in hell are penalty of sense. But the philosophers in limbo are not subject to the penalty of sense. All they have is penalty of loss, the lack of heaven -- and they don't have heaven because human beings, due to original sin, literally cannot qualify for it by their own virtue. (Again, in strict theological terms, this oversimplifies, but Dante's poetic symbolisms limit how he can represent subtleties of sins, as opposed to the dominating vices of an entire life.) The only reward for which human virtue qualifies is a life of virtue and the honor of virtue. And Dante depicts virtuous pagans as having that. Ironically, what Aikin and Aleksander call the Problem of Hell, is in Dante just the fact that Christianity attributes to sainthood an infinitely higher reward than pagan philosophers like Aristotle (and, indeed, most secular modern philosophers) ever attributed to the virtuous life. Maybe one could argue that Platonists attributed a reward that was somewhat closer but, first, Dante is firmly an Aristotelian, and second, even that was arguably a much more cautious and limited attribution than Christianity insists can be attributed to the Beatific Vision. In other words, the Problem of Hell, at least when we are considering Dante, is really that Christianity has a mind-blowingly audacious conception of heavenly reward.

The Idolatry of Artefacts

 What is learned by trial and error must begin by being crude, whatever the character of the beginner. The very same pot which would prove its maker a genius if it were the first pot ever made in the world, would prove its maker a dunce if it came after milleniums of pot-making. The whole modern estimate of primitive man is based upon the idolatry of artefacts which is a great corporate sin of our own civilisation.

 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Collier (New York: 1962) p. 74. In other words, the things we make are at least as much a product of history up to us as they are a product of our intelligence or moral character; that 'primitive man' had no reliable anesthetics is not a sign that they were less compassionate, and that they had no reliable medicine is not a sign that they lacked the cognitive skills required for having reliable medicine. Our brilliance is not measured by smartphones, our rationality is not measured by wifi, and our virtue is not measured by the internet; we may, for all we can tell, be massively overtopped in all three by someone who has nothing more than basic language and fire.

****

I happened to notice that I published the above ten years ago; if anything, I think the "great corporate sin of our own civilisation" has worsened even in the past decade.

The Soul's Unrest and Death's Dark Mysteries

 Solomon
by Frederick George Scott

A double line of columns, white as snow,
And vaulted with mosaics rich in flowers,
Makes square this cypress grove where fountain showers
From golden basins cool the grass below;
While from that archway strains of music flow,
And laughings of fair girls beguile the hours.
But brooding, like one held by evil powers,
The great King heeds not, pacing sad and slow. 

His heart hath drained earth’s pleasures to the lees,
Hath quivered with life’s finest ecstasies;
Yet now some power reveals as in a glass
The soul’s unrest and death’s dark mysteries,
And down the courts the scared slaves watch him pass,
Reiterating, “Omnia Vanitas!”

Fortnightly Book, January 12

 The next fortnightly book is Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. Published in 1961, as an expansion on a 1953 novella, Three Hearts and Three Lions is a pastiche fantasy, i.e., a fantasy novel that throws together a bit of everything -- parallel universes, knights, elves, dwarves, swan maidens, cannibal hillmen, the Wild Hunt, and so forth. It has, however, been immensely influential on the fantasy in general, being a significant influence on movie fantasy, popular fantasy works, and early role-playing fantasy games.

In connection with this, it is worth reading Anderson's famous essay on fantasy writing, "On Thud and Blunder".

Heinrich von dem Turlin, The Crown

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

A wise man once said that speech without wisdom is worthless and wisdom unrevealed is also of little value, that he who thinks of something and keeps it to himself accomplishes no more than a fool does. What good is his knowledge if he says nothing and wins no one's favor? Hidden treasure and hidden learning are useless, but speech with understanding is worthwhile. It often happens that discourse lacks meaning and therefore gains nothing. Still, the warrior who is accustomed to drawing his sword and then running away before striking a blow seldom wins a battle. The longer he runs, the farther he is from victory, and the jewel is trodden unwittingly into the mud; just as the man who washes unbaked bricks only gets them dirtier. Whoever is going to fight and flee must still know how to protect himself well, for that is the way of the world. These words apply to me, for sad to say, I cannot be called on eof the most gifted, even though I would swear I am not among the fools. Misfortune, leave me free of rustic crudeness! (p. 3)

Summary: The Crown beings with a discussion of the life of King Arthur; this King Arthur lost his father, Uterpandragon, at the age of six and received the crown directly from him. He grew up very quickly and became an exemplary knight. One year, Arthur held a huge Christmas celebration with a tournament at Tintaguel in Cornwall. To this feast came a knight with a beautiful voice, but his skin was coverd with scales. He brought with him a tankard that could never be stolen from its rightful owner, because it would simply appear whenever he wished, and that had the curious feature that it would reveal any falseness of heart. This is asking for trouble, but this is what the Arthurian court lives for; they pass the tankard around and it spills wine over everyone with any deceit in them, and to the degree that they have this falseness. Many ladies and lords are greatly embarrassed, and Sir Keii, with his vicious wit, skewers them all. After it is passed around, the knight leaves it to Arthur, where it can be a test of any stranger who comes to court.

It's not entirely clear why von dem Turlin begins with this incident, although it perhaps it is to help us better gauge Sir Gawein's virtue with respect to the rest of the court -- the tankard spills on him, although much less severely than it does over most of the lords and ladies there. As the narrator says, "A little shortcoming can conceal great merit" (p. 24). This is true, we will see, of more than just Gawein. In any case, after the feasting, most of the knights ride out to a great tournament at Jaschune. This leaves Arthur alone with a few companions; the queen makes fun of Arthur warming himself by the fire, comparing him unfavorably to a knight she has heard stories of who is impervious to cold, and this hurts Arthur's feelings more than she anticipated. He and his companions ride out to find the knight and see what the story really is. They find him and there is a bit of jousting, both physical and verbal, back and forth, and they discover that he is named Gasozein de Dragoz; the knight thinks that Queen Ginover and he are soulmates, and that Arthur is feloniously keeping her against her will, and nothing will persuade him otherwise. The queen's jest gives Arthur some pause -- perhaps it is true -- but he decides to put the matter to the queen. The queen, meanwhile, is worried about Arthur out in the terrible cold, and hoping he is safe.

Meanwhile, Sir Gawein is out on adventure, which largely entails him beating down miscreants and giants and saving various people. These adventures are very much like what you would expect, but they lead to Sir Gawein into a rather unusual adventure. Amurfina, the daughter of Lord Laniure of Serre and Lady Ansgien, has taken possession of a magic bridle, the family's major heirloom, which guarantees the power of ruling Serre. This has put her into a feud with Sgoidamur, her sister, who insists that she has stolen it. The dispute gets very bad, and obviously solving it will require an appeal to the court of King Arthur. Unfortunately, both sisters have the same idea: each realizes that she stands the best chance of winning the dispute if she gets Sir Gawein on her side. Amurfina lucks out by catching Sir Gawein out on his adventures (her sister is going to Arthur's court to find him). Von dem Turlin spends an immense amount of time on the interactions between Sir Gawein and Amurfina; suffice it to say that Amurfina has cheated and spiked his food with a love potion that makes him fall in love with her, pledges to marry her, and forget entirely who he is. The chink in Amurfina's plan is that Sir Gawein is highly renowned, and he ends up being very interested in these stories of this amazing knight named Gawein, whose stories seem so familiar. The power of the potion breaks, and Sir Gawein sets out again on adventure to finish some of the giant-slaying he had been doing, although he seems to bear Amurfina no ill will, in part because he still doesn't seem to be quite clear what has happened.

Meanwhile, back at court, Queen Ginover is in for a surprise when she discovers that her honor is under suspicion because a knight named Gasozein is claiming that they are sweethearts. Arthur puts the choice to her, Arthur or Gasozein, and the queen chooses Arthur, saying that Gasozein has no claim on her. Spurned by the woman he thinks of as his true love, Gasozein departs in a fury. As you might expect, this is not the end of the tale. The queen's brother, Count Gotegrin, is furious that she would shame herself, as he sees it, and he abducts her in order to kill her. She is saved by Gasozein, who then also abducts her, although in his case it is not by force but due to the fact that the queen doesn't resist, because she thinks he is crazy and capable of anything if she doesn't humor him. Inevitably, he starts crossing lines, and the queen ends up needing to be saved again, this time by Sir Gawein. Gawein and Gasozein fight and fight, and it turns out to be an epic battle -- no one is normally a match for Gawein, but Gasozein is a competent knight who is unusually motivated. Nonetheless, Gawein eventually forces Gasozein into surrender; Gosozein swears to do no more harm and go with Gawein and Ginover to Karidol, where King Arthur's court is now residing. There Gasozein is true to his word, even offering to do his penance in the dungeons; he is pardoned, and he and Gawein become friends.

In the meantime, at the great Pentecost feast at Karidol, a maiden comes to the Arthurian court. Her name is Sgoidamur, and she tells a story about how her wicked sister stole a magic bridle that guarantees the power to rule. Sir Gawein, always tenderhearted toward a lovely woman, is moved to compassion and agrees to be her champion and retrieve the bridle for her; if he does so he can marry her. He comes to the magic castle of Gansguoter, who is Amurfina's uncle (and also, as it happens, the second husband of Igerne, Arthur's mother). Gansguoter challenges Gawein to a beheading game. Gawein cuts off his head; Gansguoter picks up his head and walks away. In the morning, Gawein bares his neck to the now-healed Gansguoter, but Gansguoter deliberately misses.  Gawein then has to fight many monsters in the hope of retrieving the bridle, which in a sense he does, because he reunites with Amurfina and return to court.

Now things are a little sticky, since Gawein is champion on both sides. In fact, he is pledged to marry both sisters. With some help from the king, Gawein negotiates a deal in which Sgoidamur marries Gasozein, who has his own kingdom, and they have a double wedding.

Thus ends Book One. Book Two is Gawein's grail quest. Much of this is what you would expect, because von dem Turlin basically steals the earlier Parzival Grail legends and gives them to Gawein; Sir Gawein is just less naive and more intelligent than Sir Parzival. Sir Gawein also has the inevitable help of the ladies, which is a great boon in any adventure and perhaps more important to a knight than intelligence. In particular, Gansguoter's sister is a goddess of some kind and she passes Sir Gawein the answers in the back of the book, so to speak, so that he avoids all of Parzival's mistakes and comes to the Grail with remarkably little difficulty. It's not a perfectly straightforward path, though; Sir Gawein sees many strange things, all of which suggest that Sir Gawein's quest is a quest through Purgatory. This is never explicitly stated, but the forward notes that the quest seems to be structured as a sort of riddle for the audience to try to figure out. Our images of Purgatory are heavily influenced by Dante; the images people associated with Purgatory in the thirteenth century are often radically different, and I suspect most people today would not solve the riddle, since the images are all weird symbolic scenes like a burning red man being whipped by screaming beautiful maidens, or a beautiful boy with arrows in his eyes, and things like that. 

The Parzival-like part of Gawein's Grail story is interwoven with another story, in which Sir Gawein goes through a number of adventures to achieve a magical victory stone, fighting a dragon and doing similar things for Lady Fortune, who has promised him, if he is successful, a ring that will guarantee the permanence of Arthur's court. The victory stone ends up being relevant to the Grail quest, but the relationship between the two stories is perhaps the weakest element of the narrative. Nonetheless, I think it plays an important role -- by the end of the book, Sir Gawein has achieved the Grail, in a muted fashion, and (apparently) released souls from Purgatory by doing so, but he has also brought honor to the court of King Arthur, which will now endure forever, thus granting the realm blessings both divine and human.

Von dem Turlin has a reputation for being verbose, and he is; I was not prepared for the sheer extent of his commitment to the principle that you should never say something in a sentence if you can say it in a paragraph. To some extent this is just medieval writing -- many great medieval works are written on the plan of 'simple story, many digressions' -- but von dem Turlin takes it very far. This does result in some very beautiful passages, and no doubt in the original gives him the opportunity to show off his poetic prowess, but in English prose translation it can get a bit wearying. The stories themselves, however, are quite interesting.

Favorite Passage:

Just before he entered the country, Gawein encountered something remarkable and beautiful, which pleased him greatly. He saw a very broad sword of fire that guarded a road leading to a strong tower in front of a charming castle the walls of which were as bright and transparent as glass. Nothing could be concealed within, because it would be seen from the outside. I don't know when it happened, but it was completely deserted. Although all this seemed most unusual to Gawein, I don't believe it was an enchanted castle, only that its history was unknown. Here it was that he left the heath. (p. 323)

Recommendation: Recommended, although, again, you have to be prepared for its style, which is deliberately wordy.

****

Heinrich von dem Turlin, The Crown, Thomas, tr., University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE: 1989).