Apostle to the English

Today is the feast for St. Augustine of Canterbury. Augustine, born in the sixth century, was the prior of the monastery of St. Andrew (St. Gregory himself was the abbot) in Rome when St. Gregory chose him to be the leader of a band of thirty missionaries to preach the faith in Kent. They were given a letter of introduction for the queen of Kent, St. Aldeberge, also known as St. Bertha, who was a Frankish princess and thus already Christian, as a way of getting their first foot in the door. They were welcomed, and it is because of St. Aldeberge that the primary see of England is Canterbury (Augustine was later instructed to make London his archiepiscopal see, probably because of its Roman roots, but this turned out to be infeasible until long after Canterbury's traditional place had been established). St. Aldeberge gave her private chapel to be a church dedicated to St. Martin of Tours -- and St. Martin's at Canterbury is still there, although, of course, only parts of the church go back to the original after all this time. The missionaries arrived in Kent in 597; King Æthelberht of Kent was converted shortly after. There began to be a significant pagan backlash in the 610s after Æthelberht's death, but by the death of the last missionary in 635, Kent was heavily Christian, and the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon territories had begun. St. Augustine only had time to start the whole thing off; he probably died around 604.

Dashed Off XI

apologetics as the origin of systematization (Santayana)

kinds of responses to paradoxes:
(1) impossibilist: The paradoxical situation is not in fact possible.
(2) illusionist: The paradoxical situation is not problematic, but only apparently so.
(3) logical revisionist: The paradoxical situation is not problematic in a more appropriate logical system or scheme.
(4) metaphysical postulationist: The paradoxical situation is not problematic if a substantive metaphysical position is true.

moving from argument to argument through the hyperargument

three stimuli to sobriety in philosophy: the Church, marriage, professorship

Peter feeds the sheep through his successors.

Apostle : intellectus :: bishop : ratio

"The man of genius who founds a science, an art, or a civilisation, imparts to his work an impetus that often carries it on for centuries. Christ did not do less for His Church." Journet

Reason especially concerns itself with the hidden, the absent, the not yet.

"In rational prayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its welfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it accommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it conceives." Santayana

The full life of charity requires a canonical organization of divine character.

The life of reason, committed to love of truth, is committed to half at least of the convertibility of the good and the true: all that is true is to that extent good.

accident -> substance --> hierarchy of substances -->first substance
principle -> hierarchy of principles --> first principle
generable --> ingenerable --> necessary --> first necessary
for the sake of another --> for its own sake --> hierarchy of ends -->ultimate end
potential --> actual --> hierarchy of actualities --> pure act
composite --> simple --> hierarchy of simplicity --> most simple
mutable --> immutable --> hierarchy of immutability --> first immutable

superinduction of the world as posterior, from another, relative, for the sake of another, participating, caused, conditioned, having sufficient reason, sign, ordered, dependent

civilization --> common good --> good itself
order of society to unity, truth, goodness, beauty, wisdom, nobility, sublimity, virtue

order of intellect to true, order of intellect to intelligible, order of intellect to sublime
order of will to good, order of will to perfect, order of will to pure
order of intellect and will to beautiful, order of intellect and will to wise, order of intellect and will to integral
*******
order of intellect/will qua power, in habit, in act

ordered properties of being --> ordering being

retracing arguments for God' existence, expressing arguments for God's existence, tending arguments for God's existence

civic order --> marriage --> divine providence
civic order --> funerals --> divine providence
civic order --> law --> eternal law

Sometimes the reordering of thought is the hardest work of reason

unity of Church // transcendental unity; apostolicity // truth; holiness // good; catholicity // ?infinite?beautiful?

inappropriateness-blocking arguments for God's existence (global skepticism, victory of evil, collapse of practice)

Bellarmine's Note of Extent & the transmarine argument against Donatism (and to a lesser extent Arianism)

If you do not have time to do it justly, you do not have time to do it.

The sublimities of the life of Christ arise from the humilities of the life of Christ.

yield, accuracy, and penetration of arguments:
suggestive - probable - demonstrative
loosely (associatively) relevant - generically relevant - specifically relevant
cosmetic - problematizing - fatal

take, bless, break, give
Feeding of the 5000: Mk 6:41; Mt 14:19; Lki 9:16; Jn 6:11
Feeding of the 4000: Mk 8:6; Mt 15:36
Last Supper: Mk 14:22-24; Mt 26:26-28; Lk 22:17-19-20; 1 Cor 11:23-26
Supper at Emmaus: Lk 24:30-35

Truth is that from which reason derives. Being from truth is part of the notion of reason.

the universal obligation to believe with right faith

What every society strives for in an arbitration/judiciary system is a means of achieving results that are consistently clear and generally reasonably appropriate; any ritual system capable of achieving this to some degree, to that extent can function as a court.

state of custody as a ritual state

particles as measurable dislocations

Mathematical description becomes physical explanation when it is used to describe coherence and resistance.

Ought not becomes cannot with a relevant comprehensive search.

Thinking that a multicosm in itself terminates the notion of finetuning is like thinking that the multiplicity of environments in a universe terminates the notion of fine-tuning: it is sleight of hand.

"fairness is only an appropriate way of dividing up something which is actually good" (Brendan Hodge)

flicker of freedom // flicker of insight

A man is the better for occasionally rambling.

energy as a physical capacity for having an end
energy as capacity to be a moved mover

intuition // visual inspection

the notes of the Church and the standard of doctrine and belief:
Our faith must not be individual but one in Christ, not according to our preferences but under the tutelage and in light of the example of the saints, not partial but universal for all, not by our will but through apostolic succession. In short, appropriate to Christ's Church as one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.

Box: by essence; Diamond: by participation

The sensualist consistently attempts to excuse his sensual actiosn by hyperintellectualizing them. One sees this especially, although not exclusively, with sex -- note how pedophiles consistently hide behind education, as if pedophilia were an intellectual endeavor of cooperation and mentorship. But this is just a more egregious example of something rather common.

preservatory scholarship
ends of scholarship: discovery, explanation, preservation, development


We use propositions to inquire, to assert, and to conclude.

doubt : suspicion :: disbelief : belief

love as converting notional to real assent

metaphors that are useful for coming to understand & metaphors that are useful for expressing an understanding already had

To love moral law is to love it as subsisting, real, and active.
moral law --> obligation to love moral law --> love of moral law --> moral law as person --> God
the moral obligation to treat moral law as not less than personal

rhetoric as requiring understanding of the professions of one's audience (in Newman's sense of 'professions')

An account of heresy and orthodoxy that does not allow for theological economies is flawed.

the Bible as icon of providence, as icon of Christ, as icon of Holy Spirit

real assent as a principle of social coherence

"Our image of Him never is one, but broken into numberless partial aspects, independent each of each." Newman

Implicit faith is genuine faith because the Church does not merely speak the faith but displays it sacramentally and lives it morally.

external world known:
evidently - Berkeley
instinctively - Newman
assumptively - Hume
inferentially - Shepherd

assessing the modal status of an objection relative to that to which it objects

Note Saadia's argument for reward in the world to come, from the reward of Moses.

Intercession is a natural expression of charity.

Circumcision : Jewish genealogy :: Baptism : Christian Tradition

martyrdom as its own extreme unction

personal succession as sign of doctrinal succession

The world is greater than a city, but the world is not greater than the Chair of Peter.

the subtle similarities between hope and temperance

"Errors in reasoning are lessons and warnings, not to give up reasoning, but to reason with greater caution." Newman

prudence as the structuring principle of reasonable inquiry

We must always strive to render our charity more consistent in practice, more pure in intensity, more universal in scope, and more apostolic in expression.

analysis of arguments in terms of the modal judgments required for them (assertive, judgment of possibility, counterfactual conditional, judgment of necessity)
cp. Williamson's account of the structure of Gettier cases

rituals symbolizing and assisting virtue (etiquette, courts, etc.)

the virtue of religion and classification of sacramentals
general ends (different sacramentals focus more on one or the other)
(1) for stimulating the interior act of devotion
(2) for assisting the interior act of prayer
specific kinds
(1) corporeal adorations
(2) offerings to God
(3) reverences of the Name
(4) impediments to irreligion
(5) imepdiments to superstition

the conditions under which antiquity, long duration, and widespreadness serve as extrinsic marks of truth

allusion as quasi-reference

The reference of names can be fixed not only by description but by pointing, inclining one's head, making marks on a map, attaching a label, or deferring to someone else's use, and can be carried by historical custom received from an original fixing whose nature is unknown, estimation of who or what someone else means, explicit description, and more.

possibility as pre-overlap

mereological interpretations of strict implication systems

All allegorical interpretations of the Resurrection at least strongly suggest that the literal interpretation of the Resurrection is true -- either (as in all orthodox allegorical interpretations) because their truth would be good reason to regard teh latter as true, or (as in more Modernist interpretations) because they suppose phenomena for which the latter would be the simpler interpretation. The strength of the suggestion will vary as evidence strength and simplicity vary, but some kind of case the suggestion can be made in each case.

Coffey's consensus gentium argument against occasionalism ("the universal belief of mankind, based on the testimony of consciousness as rationally interpreted by human intelligence, that we are the causes of thoguth, imagination, sensation, volition, etc.")

traditionalism (e.g. Bonald) // occasionalism // intelligent design theory // divine command theory
speculative reason (ontologism); speculative effect (traditionalism); practical reason (divine command); practical effect (intelligent design)
existence (pantheism?); what it is (Platonism); what it does (occasionalism)
practical effects: operative (situationism?); productive (intelligent design); social (logical positivism)

consensus gentium as evidence that there is evidence

authority as provisional mover of the mind

semi-traditionalism and the distinction between context of discovery and context of justification

the right of free communication among bishops

The standards for miracles for canonization should be such that they are both wonders and fitting symbols of Catholic truths (salvation, for instance).

"Our hoping is proof that hope, as such, is not an extravagance; and our possession of certitude is a proof that it is not a weakness or an absurdity to be certain." Newman

Note that Newman in effect rejects the unity of the virtues (in his comments on phronesis).

reference to fictional characters // reference to political boundaries

patience as the appropriate response to one's own doubt

By overcoming evil, we learn more about the good.

Beauty in the liturgy is like spiritual consolation; one should be encouraged by it, taking heart for the difficult task ahead. But it is not the point, for the liturgy does not exist for the sake of pleasing on being seen.

Rediscovery of liturgical heritage is like rediscovery of the relics of the saints.

Love of truth is not the same as love of evidence.

Christian teaching is an offering to God.
Let your questions be also prayers.

evidence as truthwardness
evidence as mind suggestion
evidence as splendor of truth

Diffusion of ideas is diffusion of signs.

beachhead arguments, prototype arguments, feeler arguments

the right of voluntary association as intrinsic to the sacramental economy of the Church

Legal fiction is the alteration of the application of law through variation in the classification of facts.

What counts as a resource shifts with human use.

The water of justice becomes the wine of charity.

To think about: Every argument from evil that is not merely conclusion-weakening requires an a priori component to justify the should-not-therefore-does-not move.
Thus every argument from evil requires an a priori understanding of pure good / infinite good.

Swearing at other people is a sign that the swearer feels powerless -- defeasible, but remarkably accurate.

Ramon Llull & fruitful juxtaposition

transcendental vs categorical modalities

Scripture is not separate from the proclamation of the Church.

extrinsic vs intrinsic accounts of the working of faith
extrinsic vs intrinsic accounts of hell and heaven
extrinsic vs intrinsic accounts of liturgy

Elements of Modal Logic, Part VIII

Part VII

We have been classifying modalities by which of the rules -- (1), (2), (3), (4), (D), (M) -- they are assigned. We also looked at squares of oppositions, although, since (3) and (4) make Box and Diamond interdefinable, we only looked at the Box versions. The 1234-Box, you recall had this square of opposition:

And the 1234D-Box looked like this:

So what happens with M? It's not an easy question. If we just add (M) to the 1234 square, we don't have any way yet of putting that on the diagram. Remember (M) just tells us that Box puts something on the Reference Table. We need something to represent 'being on the Reference Table'. This actually is a modal operator; it's often not explicitly noted, but one way to think of (M) is as introducing a new modality. We need to define it more explicitly to use it, though, because we need to be able to represent it. So we introduce a new rule whose purpose is simply to make explicit the modal operator implicitly introduced by (M), and I will call this Rule (T).

(T) T, applied to anything, places that to which it applies on the Reference Table.

We can use the definition in (T) to restate (M) in a different way:

(M) □ includes T.

And with this we have the means of making a square of opposition. This is the square of opposition for 1234M (or, we could equally call it, 1234TM):

T is obviously the contradictory of T-Not. (M) tells us that you can get from Box to T, and of course we have the corresponding arrow from Box-Not to T-Not. Those together give us three new contrariety oppositions.

What will happen if we also add Rule (D) to this? We get something like this:

Basically, as you might expect, this square is the 1234D square combined with the 1234M square; the one new thing is that when they are put together, the combined oppositions make it so that it also has to be true that T also works like ◊.

But here's an interesting question. Our square of opposition has T and T~. But what about ~T~ and ~T? When we think about the oppositions among these, we find something interesting:

If we are using a classical kind of negation (i.e., 'Not' is not being used in a weird way), then both of the left-hand modalities are contradictories of both the right-hand modalities, and our arrows between top and bottom go both ways -- from T you can get ~T~, and from ~T~ you can get T, and so forth. They are equivalent, so you can substitute them for each other whenever you want. Thus we could equally just represent this square of opposition as a line: on the left, T and ~T~; on the right, T~ and ~T; and the left and right are contradictory. This is why it shows up as a line on our squares of opposition above.

There are actually four different kinds of squares of opposition. In a degenerate square, all four corners are equivalent to the others -- they just all can be substituted for each other, and we could represent our square as if it were a single point. A semidegenerate square we can collapse to a line, and our T square of opposition is an example. A square of opposition that looks like our 1234 square above is often called a Boolean square. And a square of opposition that looks like our 1234D square is called a classical square.

What about our 1234M and 1234DM squares? They are actually a combination of squares. This is not surprising -- we've only been looking at the Box side, rules (3) and (4) tell us how to combine two different squares of opposition -- one with Box and one with Diamond. It's just that rules (3) and (4) go in both directions, from Box to Diamond and Diamond to Box, so the Boolean squares fit perfectly on top of each other. (D) and (M) only go in one direction, from Box to Diamond and from Box to T, so they complicate things slightly. Adding (D) to 1234 turns the Boolean squares into classical squares. And adding (M) gives us another square entirely. So 1234M is a Boolean square (Box) linked with a Boolean square (Diamond) and both of those linked with a semidegenerate square (T). And 1234DM is a classical square (Box) linked with a classical square (Diamond), and both of those linked with a semidegenerate square (T).

That we can fit various kinds of squares of opposition together in various ways is immensely important, and there is no limit to it. Every square of opposition is a kind of modality, and you can fit together all kinds of modalities together, if you just have the right rules for them. If you wanted to, you could have a tangle of modalities that would be represented by a thousand distinct Boolean squares combined with a thousand distinct classical squares combined with a thousand distinct semidegenerate squares combined with a thousand distinct degenerate squares. You'd need rules to link them up; but if you had the rules, there is no limit to how complicated you can get.

There is a jungle of different kinds of modal operators out there; and we've hardly begun exploring them. One thing we need to ask is what these squares of opposition have to do with our tables.

Part IX

Beda Venerabilis

Today is Ascension Thursday, of course, which takes liturgical precedence unless it is transferred to Sunday (a barbarous practice), but May 25 is the feast of St. Baeda of Northumbria, Doctor of the Church, crown jewel of Anglo-Saxon monasticism. The Venerable Bede (d. 735) lived almost all of his life in and around the monastery at Jarrow, but became one of the most learned men of his century.

One of the surviving Old English poems is a short work known as Bede's Death-Song. There are two extant versions, which just differ by dialect. Wikipedia gives both. Northumbria:

Fore thaem neidfaerae naenig uuiurthit
thoncsnotturra, than him tharf sie
to ymbhycggannae aer his hiniongae
huaet his gastae godaes aeththa yflaes
aefter deothdaege doemid uueorthae.

Wessex:

For þam nedfere næni wyrþeþ
þances snotera, þonne him þearf sy
to gehicgenne ær his heonengange
hwæt his gaste godes oþþe yfeles
æfter deaþe heonon demed weorþe.

We don't actually know for sure that this is Bede's own poem. We know from Cuthbert that Bede on his deathbed recited a poem in Old English, and Cuthbert, who is writing in Latin, gives us a Latin paraphrase of the meaning, which fits this poem very, very well. We do not know for sure if this is actually Bede's original poem or if it is a later attempt to reconstruct it. What we do know is that (1) the person who came up with it had considerable talent, since for all its brevity, this is a very neatly constructed poem, and (2) if it's a reconstruction it is impressive how the author was able both to fit Cuthbert's Latin paraphrase so well and make it work purely on its own terms as an Old English poem. (If it's by Bede himself, of course, there is no surprise on either point.) Michael Burch's (slightly loose, but nice) translation:

Bede's Death-Song
translated by Michael Burch

Facing Death, that inescapable journey,
who can be wiser than he
who reflects, while breath yet remains,
on whether his life brought others happiness, or pains,
since his soul may yet win delight's or night's way
after his death-day.

[ADDED LATER: A Clerk of Oxford notes that St. Bede died on Ascension Thursday, which I had completely forgotten, so a year in which Bede's Day and Ascension fall together is a year in which our commemoration of death links up to what Bede himself was commemorating on his last day of life. She also notes the third possibility for Bede's Death Song, which I did not consider, namely, that it predates Bede and Bede was quoting it.]

Venerable Helm

It occurred to me today that, since I am reading Craig Williamson's translation of the entire Old English poetic corpus, it would fit very nicely to make a special note of Anglo-Saxon saints whose feasts occur during the fortnight. (Particularly since the greatest Anglo-Saxon saint's feast is tomorrow.) So we start with St. Aldhelm (d. 709), whose feast is today or tomorrow. It makes sense to do him today since he gets doubly trumped tomorrow.

When Pope Vitalian sent St. Theodore of Tarsus to become Archbishop of Canterbury, St. Theodore brought with him St. Hadrian, often known today as St. Adrian of Canterbury, a scholar of rather considerable talents. St. Aldhelm was one of St. Hadrian's students until he became sick and had to return to his original home in Malmesbury. There he joined Malmesbury Abbey, where he seems eventually to have become abbot, and from which he would eventually found two more abbeys in Somerset and Wiltshire. He is the first Anglo-Saxon monk we know to have written in Latin verse, at which he became an expert. He also is said to have written many Anglo-Saxon poems, but unfortunately only some of his Latin works have survived. He ended his days as bishop of Sherborne, and was venerated as a saint from shortly after his death. Because of his extensive ingenuity in various riddles and riddle-games, he is sometimes considered the patron saint of cruciverbalists.

Gratitude and Reverence

The supreme Will has determined our existence through our ancestors, and, bowing down before Its action, we cannot be indifferent to its instruments. I know that if I were born among cannibals I should be a cannibal myself, and I cannot help feeling gratitude and reverence to men who by their labor and exploits have raised my people from the savage state and brought them to the level of culture upon which they are standing now. This has been done by Providence through men who have been specially called and who cannot be separated from their providential work....

The providential men who gave us a share in the higher religion and in human enlightenment did not themselves create these in the first instance. What they gave us they had themselves received from the geniuses, heroes, and saints of the former ages, and our grateful memory must include them too. We must reconstruct as completely as possible the whole line of our spiritual ancestors--men through whom Providence has led humanity on the path to perfection.

The pious memory of our ancestors compels us to do service to them actively....

[Vladimir Soloviev, The Justification of the Good, von Peters, ed. Catholic Resources (Chattanooga, TN: 2015), pp. 111-112.]

Wulf, Min Wulf

Michael Drout reads the Old English poem, Wulf & Eadwacer:



The poem is notoriously obscure, so I'm not sure how much of the translation is rigorous and how much of it is speculative.

Spheres of Personal Sovereignty

It seems to me that rights talk has the function of enabling people to claim a sphere of personal sovereignty, in which their choice is law. And spheres of personal sovereignty in turn have a function, namely, that they enable us to undertake obligations freely--in other words to create the realm of institutional facts that Searle emphasizes in his social philosophy. hence they give the advantage to consensual relations. They define the boundaries behind which people can retreat and which cannot be crossed without transgression.

The primary function of the idea of a right, therefore, is to identify something as within the boundary of me and mine.

[Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World, Princeton UP (Princeton: 2014) pp. 85-86.]

Music on My Mind

Nox Arcana, "Running with Wolves." A little instrumental for your morning.

Evening Note for Monday, May 22

Thought for the Evening: Moral Testimony and Problems with the Asymmetry Thesis

It is often thought that there is an asymmetry between relying on testimony in nonmoral matters and relying on testimony in moral matters, so that you can get knowledge, or be reasonable relying on, the former, while there is something problematic about trying to get knowledge or relying on the latter. Pinning down what this asymmetry is supposed to be turns out to be less than straightforward, in part because in order to make it both clear and plausible everything has to be fine-tuned.

It's easy to see why this would be. In order for the asymmetry thesis to work, we must be comparing comparable kinds of testimony, where the moral testimony is taken under conditions that would not be problematic for nonmoral testimony. For instance, you can't state the thesis in a way in which we assume that your nonmoral testimony is taken from generally honest people and your moral testimony is taken from generally dishonest people, because accepting nonmoral testimony from generally dishonest people is also problematic, and the point is to find a comparison on which only accepting the moral testimony would be problematic. Likewise, people can accept testimony in all sorts of different ways, and this needs to be equalized on both sides. Likewise (and people in the literature are not always careful about this), you need to be comparing expert testimony with expert testimony and non-expert testimony with non-expert testimony, on both sides of the balance. Likewise (and this is actually somewhat difficult), you need a comparison where the stakes are not greatly imbalanced -- when the stakes are high, our standards of testimony go up. Part of the problem is that morality itself can raise the stakes, which means that you have to be quite careful to avoid comparing moral testimony on something that radically affects how one should live one's life with say, testimony about the statistical makeup of the population of Iowa. Reasonable caution in the latter case simply is not the same sort of thing as reasonable caution in the former case, and it has solely to do with the fact that the former will demand a lot more than mere acceptance.

This is a fairly serious set of problems, and one that I do not think proponents of the asymmetry thesis have really done the work to solve. But one of the more precise and careful ideas, based on the work of Sarah McGrath and discussed by Guy Fletcher, takes the asymmetry to be about deference in matters involving thin moral concepts leading directly to moral judgment that is problematic because it is without appropriate understanding.

(1) Deference is an interesting element here; our acceptance of testimony is always quite complicated, and we certainly can accept testimony nondeferentially -- for instance, we can accept it only because it agrees with what we already know. Deference requires that we accept something on authority, and this raises the question of how we are evaluating the authority to which we are deferring.

(2) The distinction between 'thin' and 'thick' moral concepts is somewhat misleading; 'thick' moral concepts are concepts that have both an evaluative and a nonevaluative component, whereas 'thin' are purely evaluative. In practice, though, the distinction is more complicated because it's not clear that there are any purely evaluative concepts, with no nonevaluative component at all, so people usually make the distinction relative, with thin moral concepts being "more purely evaluative". This, of course, makes the distinction next door to useless for the kind of work needed here. Suffice it to say that for our purposes it's really an issue of abstraction and fundamentalness, with thin concepts being more abstract and covering a fundamental portion of the moral field. So what people have in mind when they are talking about thin moral concepts are things like good, bad, right, wrong. This contrasts with what they are thinking about when they talk about thick moral concepts, which are things like generous, gracious, cruel, obscene. Thus the idea is that there's something problematic about deference to moral testimony on fundamental things like right and wrong, good or bad.

This brings us back to the equalization problem, since if we are dealing only with very general and fundamental things on the moral side, we can only compare testimony about them to testimony about very general and fundamental things on the nonmoral side. And what are the corresponding fundamental things? Presumably things like true, false, consistent, inconsistent, and (to avoid getting into the analogues of the 'thick' concepts) these concepts have to be functioning as such -- that is, if we are in a context in which dogs are relevant, the question at hand is not testimony about dogs, but testimony about what counts as truth in matters concerning dogs. If we really are operating at such a level, we are in realm where believing something out of deference to testimony is surely extraordinarily rare on either side. On the other hand, if we try to bring it down, we are getting increasingly less 'thin', and we have to do that on the moral side as well, to make the comparison legitimate.

(3) We could use moral testimony in multiple ways; what the asymmetry proponents want to argue is that we cannot use it to form moral judgments about good or bad, right or wrong. For instance, if you don't know if something is right, but defer to someone else's judgment that it is right. This we can leave as straightforward enough, although, if we are going to be serious about the 'thin moral concepts' part, we have to be careful that we don't accidentally turn our thin moral concepts into indirect ways of talking about thick moral concepts.

(4) If we're going to say that accepting moral testimony is more problematic than accepting nonmoral testimony, we have to have some notion of what 'more problematic' means. There are two ways that one can go here. Either (i) the moral case does not give you the right kind of understanding and the nonmoral does; or (ii) neither the moral case nor the nonmoral case give you understanding, but morality by its nature requires understanding in a way that other things don't. The latter seems to be favored; but obviously it would depend on what your account of morality was.


In reality, I think the asymmetry thesis fails totally, if we understand it in something like this way. Think of how testimony works. I tell you something, witnessing to its truth; on authority of my testimony, you come to believe it to be true. One way to characterize this is to say that I am giving you evidence about what you ought to believe, or at least treat as true, that I am putting it forward as right to believe, or at least good to believe. So:

(A) You are very skeptical of modern biology -- biologists talk so much about everything that it's sometimes difficult to take them entirely seriously. But, I insist, "At least some theories put forward by biologists are very credible." "Well, I couldn't say for myself," you say, "but you know more about it, so I guess I should indeed defer to you on this point and accept that some biological theories are very credible."

(B) You are very skeptical of modern biology -- biologists talk so much about everything that it's sometimes difficult to take them entirely seriously. But, I insist, "At least some theories put forward by biologists are probably true." "Well, I couldn't say for myself," you say, "but you know more about it, so I guess I should indeed defer to you on this point and accept that some biological theories are probably true."

(C) You are very skeptical of modern biology -- biologists talk so much about everything that it's sometimes difficult to take them entirely seriously. But, I insist, "Believing in some of the theories biologists put forward is good ." "Well, I couldn't say for myself," you say, "but you know more about it, so I guess I should indeed defer to you on this point and accept that belief in some of the biological theories is good."

In (A) I explicitly mention a 'thick' moral concept, credibility; in (B) I just mention probable truth; in (C) I explicitly mention a 'thin' moral concept. It is difficult to find cases in which we can't treat (A) and (B) as interchangeable, at least with commonly true assumptions. But there also doesn't seem to be any way in which (C) could possibly be problematic if (A) and (B) aren't; (C) seems interchangeable with (A), at least on commonly true assumptions. But it seems like you can run similar translations in any particular case.

It's possible that one can resolve these problems, but not, I think, at this level of precision. Proponents of the asymmetry thesis need a great deal more clarity than has yet been put forward. (My own view is that testimony is testimony; the cases are symmetrical.)

Various Links of Interest

* Helen Andrews has a sharply critical article on John Stuart Mill and Hariet Taylor (in part talking about Hayek's research into the subject). It seems right enough, although it should be noted that the acid tongues of the Carlyles are not always to be trusted.

* Julie D. notes a podcast currently running on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy.

* Rebilius Crusoe, Francis William Newman's paraphrase of Robinson Crusoe into Latin. Francis William was the younger brother of John Henry; where J. H. went Catholic, F. W. went very liberal, eventually becoming a sort of religious agnostic. He was an enthusiast for languages, and was professor of Latin at University College, London. [I misstated his university earlier; I think I was muddling him up with someone else.]

* Manuel Vargas, If Free Will Doesn't Exist, Neither Does Water (PDF)

Currently Reading

Craig Williamson, The Complete Old English Poems
Vladimir Soloviev, The Justification of the Good
Satischandra Chatterjee, The Nyaya Theory of Knowledge
Roger Scruton, The Soul of the World
St. Romanos the Melodist, On the Life of Christ: Kontakia

Fortnightly Book, May 21

I have a stack of books about knee-high on my stairs of things that might become a fortnightly book, as well as Heritage Press editions that I haven't used yet; I still have the third volume of the Arabian Nights, and I intend to get around to some plays by Ibsen. But the fortnightly book is not really done to plan. This past week I splurged a bit and bought, among other things, The Complete Old English Poems, Craig Williamson's recent translation of the entire extant corpus of Old English verse. As one of the introductory notes puts it, the work "contains modern alliterative, strong-stress poetic translations of all the Old English (OE) poems in the six volumes of The Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records..., plus additional OE poems identified or discovered after the publication of ASPR" (p. liii). And that is going to be the fortnightly book.

The work follows the ASPR and so is partly organized by manuscript.

First, we have the Junius Manuscript, with Genesis (A and B), Exodus, Daniel, Christ and Satan.

Then we have the Vercelli Book, with Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, Soul and Body I, Homiletic Fragment I: On Human Deceit, The Dream of the Rood, Elene.

This is followed by the Exeter Book, which, being devoted to poetry in particular, has a fair number of different poems of different kinds, the most famous of which are probably The Wanderer and The Seafarer.

After this we have Beowulf and Judith, which are the poetic works found in the Nowell Codex.

Then comes the Paris Psalter, which, being a metrical translation from Latin, is paired with the poetry from translations of Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy.

Then there are a lot of minor poems, of which the most famous are probably The Battle of Maldon and Bede's Death Song.

And last there are the additional poems not included in the ASPR.

Tom Shippey in his introduction to the book makes an excellent comment on the whole corpus, which will do well enough to start us off:

The poems we have are also, in their way, almost all "last survivors": only three of them, apart from the Chronicle poems and the poems ascribed to Caedmon and Bede, and found in many manuscripts, duplicate each other. Some of the poems are, furthermore, fragments, including the Maldon and Finnsburg poems and Judith. As for the corpus itself, it is now a ruin. Certainly it exists. But its existence is at least a reminder of what no longer exists, a whole tradition of which we can hear only, here and there, murmurs and echoes....The poems exist, often in fragmentary form, and like the old ruins, they bear testimony to all that they remember, even if it has vanished. (p. l)

Teresa of Avila, The Life; and The Interior Castle

Introduction

Opening Passages: From the Life:

If I had not been so wicked, the possession of devout and God-fearing parents, together with the favour of God's grace, would have been enough to make me good. My father was fond of reading holy books, and had some in Spanish so that his children might read them too. These, and the pains my mother took in teaching us to pray and educating us in devotion to Our Lady and certain Saints, began to rouse me at the age, I think, of six or seven. It was a help to me that I never saw my parents inclined to anything but virtue, and many virtues they had. (p. 23)

From The Interior Castle:

Not many things that I have been ordered to under obedience have been as difficult for me as is this present task of writing about prayer. First, ti doesn't seem that the Lord is giving me either the spirit or the desire to undertake the work. Second, I have been experiencing now for three months such great noise and weakness in my head that I've found it a hardship even to write concerning necessary business matters. But, knowing that the strength given by obedience usually lessens the difficulty of things that seem impossible, I resolved to carry out the task very willingly, even though my human nature seems greatly distressed. Fro the Lord hasn't given me so much virtue that my nature in the midst of its struggle with continual sickness and duties of so many kinds doesn't feel strong aversion toward such a task. May He, in whose mercy I trust and who has helped me in other more difficult things so as to favor me, do this work for me. (p. 33)

Summary: St. Teresa's Life covers the period from her early years to her founding of the reformed convent, St. Joseph's in Àvila. Two themes intertwine throughout the actual narrative portion, based on two kinds of impediments people may have in the life of prayer.

The first kind of impediment is that which is put in place by oneself. Teresa is frank that she often impeded her own progress; part of the charm of the work is that it is a guidebook by which she warns others not to make the mistakes she made. Coleridge in his notes on St. Teresa was puzzled by her tendency to account herself the "most wicked of sinners", which seemed to him a kind of obvious lie; but, besides the oddity of the poet not grasping the naturalness of the superlative expression in order to express a more forceful condemnation, the more general point is that the things of which she speaks were impediments to union with God. In a like manner, this answers the puzzle people occasionally have about Teresa's forceful condemnations of things that do not seem so very bad, or even bad at all: they are impediments to union, and just as a thing may be minor in itself but serious in troubling a marriage, so a thing minor in itself may be far more grave when considered as an obstacle to a greater good.

The remedy for this kind of impediment is self-knowledge, which, however, is a difficult matter. One of the notable things about Teresa's discussions of self-knowledge is that it is clear that in her view self-knowledge is not something we can fully attain by ourselves; ultimately, of course, we will need the grace of God, but we also need the aid of others. Self-knowledge is social; it requires association with others, in love of God and love of neighbor.

The second kind of impediment is more interesting, storywise, and as interesting psychologically. One of the recurring themes of the Life is that of persecution by good people. Over and over again Teresa's progress is made more difficult by the opposition of good and decent people; and over and over again the most serious and terrible opponents are good and decent, and sometimes holy, people. There is no ironic attribution here; the whole point is that the persecutors are genuinely good and decent, and at times even genuinely holy. The problem arises because while the people in question may be good people acting on good motives, they do not fully understand what is happening. They do not have the experiences Teresa has, and she cannot fully explain them to them in words. Scholars often know about the things Teresa describes, and occasionally more than she does (although her spiritual reading was prodigious, it was not focused on technical and rigorous exposition), but for them it is an abstract conclusion depending on having the right premises, not something known by intimate familiarity. Teresa's experiences strike other people as dangerous -- which they are -- and as possible temptations by the devil -- which is a worry Teresa herself has to think through carefully -- and as forms of spiritual pride -- which is wrong, but understandable given that much of what she does is the sort of thing that could indeed be motivated by spiritual pride, although not always the way in which she does it.

The remedy for this kind of impediment is love of God. The good will persecute the good when they do not know the things they would need to know in order to avoid it; this is not actually abnormal. But this is also not as important, in the greater scheme of things, as it might sound; because goodness, being a work of God, is ultimately consistent, and all of these trials and troubles caused by good people, difficult though they might be, further the progress of Teresa's maturity and insight, and also contribute in the end to the increase of the goodness in what she is able to accomplish. Thus Teresa portrays reliance on the Lord as the primary mainstay throughout such difficulties.

Were we going through Teresa's life, we would have read the Foundations next, which talks of Teresa's trials and troubles and triumphs after the founding of St. Joseph's, and if we were looking at the growth in her spiritual understanding, we would probably look at The Way of Perfection, but there is indeed a special connection between the Life and the Interior Castle that makes it appropriate to fit them together. The entire middle of the Life, from about Chapter 11 to about Chapter 31, the greater portion of the book, is concerned not with telling a story so much as giving an account of the life of prayer. It is narratively a digression, but it is not a gratuitous one, since understanding the complexities of the life of prayer is essential for understanding Teresa's own life, and particularly what is behind her achievement in the founding of St. Joseph's. Interior Castle, written about fourteen years later, sees Teresa considering the same matters from a more mature perspective. The Four Waters, which is the scheme she uses for organizing her account of progress of prayer in the Life, only take us up to the sixth mansion in the Seven Mansions (moradas = apartments or dwelling-places) scheme she uses in the Interior Castle. She has progressed beyond the stage at which she wrote the Life and therefore has a better understanding of the things she talked about in that work, as she explicitly notes at several points. What is more, the work is an attempt to review the same material from that more advanced perspective. The reason why she was required to write the book, was that the Life was still being examined by the Inquisition, so she didn't have a copy of it; and once when in discussion about the spiritual life with her confessor, Father Gratian, she said that she had discussed the matter at greater length in her Life, of which she didn't have the copy. Father Gratian told her to write it down again, without the biographical reflection, and so she did. Thus Interior Castle revisits the self-knowledge theme of the earlier work and puts many of the claims made there in new light.

It is not my purpose here to look in any detail at the schematic of the spiritual life given in these works (a useful summary by Jordan Aumann, O.P, is given here), since I am here concerned more with the books as literary works. They are rich in metaphor, vigorous in language, abundant in insight; the Life, in particular, is a psychologically interesting narrative, and The Interior Castle is practically a prose poem. But they are both written with practical focus, since all of St. Teresa's focus was in some sense practical; they are about a life, one of moral and spiritual progress. Teresa herself is clear enough that the schemes she gives will only be approximated in the lives of other people -- as she says, although she looks at only seven moradas, "in each of these there are many others, below and above and to the sides, with lovely gardens and fountains and labyrinths, such delightful things that you would want to be dissolved in praises of the great God who created the soul in His own image and likeness" (p. 196). The works are not a rigid manual, a scholarly work for scholars. Rather, they are a sharing of experiences by one who has experienced them, a travelogue of the interior life.

Favorite Passages: From the Life, St. Teresa complaining about the difficulty of living a spiritual life and at the same time navigating a culture based on honor and avoiding offense:

...if we take care, as we rightly should, always to please God and hate the world, I do not see how at the same time we can be equally careful to please those who live in the world in matters that are continually changing. If this etiquette could be learnt once and for all, it might be tolerable. But even the correct addressing of letters demands the establishment of a University chair; there ought to be lectures in the art -- or whatever you call it. In one case one corner of the paper has to be left blank, and in another case another; and suddenly a man who was not even a 'Magnificence', has to be described as 'Illustrious'. (p. 282)

From The Interior Castle:

You must have already heard about His marvels manifested in the way silk originates, for only He could have invented something like that. The silkworms come from seeds about the size of little grains of pepper. (I have never seen this but have heard of it, and so if something in the explanation gets distorted it won't be my fault.) When the warm weather comes and the leaves begin to appear on the mulberry tree, the seeds start to live, for they are dead until then. The worms nourish themselves on the mulberry leaves until, having grown to full size, they settle on some twigs. There with their little mouths they themselves go about spinning the silk and making some very thick little cocoons in which they enclose themselves. The silkworm, which is fat and ugly, then dies, and a little white butterfly, which is very pretty, comes forth from the cocoon. (p. 91)

Recommendation: The Life is definitely a must-read; it is one of the great autobiographies of Western civilization, and deservedly considered so. The Interior Castle is Teresa's masterpiece, and a very beautiful work; but it's probably the case that you need to be in the right mindset to read it.

**********

Quotations from:

Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Àila by Herself, Cohen, tr. Penguin Books (New York: 1957).

Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle, Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, trs. Paulist Press (New York: 1979).