Wisdom Doth Live with Children Round Her Knees

 I Grieved for Buonaparte
by William Wordsworth

I Grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain
 And an unthinking grief! The tenderest mood
 Of that Man's mind -- what can it be? what food
 Fed his first hopes? what knowledge could he gain?-- 
 'Tis not in battles that from youth we train
 The Governor who must be wise and good,
 And temper with the sternness of the brain
 Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood.
 Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:
 Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk
 Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
 Of the mind's business: these are the degrees
 By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk
 True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.

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".