Arnobius on 'Natural Evil'

 Would you venture to say that, in this universe, this thing or the other thing is an evil, whose origin and cause you are unable to explain and to analyze? And because it interferes with your lawful, perhaps even your unlawful pleasures, would you say that it is pernicious and adverse? What, then, because cold is disagreeable to your members, and is wont to chill the warmth of your blood, ought not winter on that account to exist in the world? And because you are unable to endure the hottest rays of the sun, is summer to be removed from the year, and a different course of nature to be instituted under different laws? Hellebore is poison to men; should it therefore not grow? The wolf lies in wait by the sheepfolds; is nature at all in fault, because she has produced a beast most dangerous to sheep? The serpent by his bite takes away life; a reproach, forsooth, to creation, because it has added to animals monsters so cruel.

It is rather presumptuous, when you are not your own master, even when you are the property of another, to dictate terms to those more powerful; to wish that that should happen which you desire, not that which you have found fixed in things by their original constitution. Wherefore, if you wish that your complaints should have a basis, you must first inform us whence you are, or who you are; whether the world was created and fashioned for you, or whether you came into it as sojourners from other regions. And since it is not in your power to say or to explain for what purpose you live beneath this vault of heaven, cease to believe that anything belongs to you; since those things which take place are not brought about in favour of a part, but have regard to the interest of the whole.

[Arnobius of Sicca, Seven Books Against the Heathen, Book 1, chapters 11-12.]

Dashed Off XXVI

This completes the notebook finished in September 2023. 

***************

"The unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification is 'lived.'" Merleau-Ponty

One of the modes of human sexuality is consecration to something higher, whether in honor, or in moral integrity, or in sanctity.

Quality of evidence is relevant to reasoning with the evidence but is neither reducible to probability nor any strict quantity at all; how good the evidence is for being evidence is distinct from both its own probability and the probability of that for which it is evidence.

time: measured by change (=clock) according to before and after of number
place: measured by boundary (=containing limit) according to inside & outside of direction
probability: measured by kinds of possibility (=classification) according to ratio of membership in whole

simultaneity, co-location, equiprobability (relations allowing us to extend one set of measurements to another)

prettiness as small & contained beauty

the theology of Scripture in Sirach 24

the aesthetic dignity of the human person

The Zohar associates Gn 1:1 with the fear of the Lord & Gn 1:2 with the punishments of those who reject it; Gn 1:3 it associates with love of God.

Making assumptions for practical reasons is essential to investigating.

All serious exegesis derives from & is based on a mix of reason and tradition.

People are at their most beautiful in doing; 'passive beauty' is active beauty, so to speak.

What the material conditional interpretation of indicative conditionals fails to capture is inferential dependence.

The theology of divine names is itself a way of covering everything in theology, the method of names touching on every theological field in precisely the way in which it is theological.

As in chess, power serves to protect not power but the only thing that matters.

the method of winning by forcing the accumulation of mistakes (the OODA loop would be an example)

Historically very powerful legislatures have tended to be slow to act.

Modern synods are often less synods than contiones.

militia as exercitus, militia as comitia centuriata

The electromagnetic field at a given location is the time-delayed effect/representation of the position, velocity, and acceleration of a charge in the past.
--> Related to this, electric fields and magnetic fields neither interact nor cause each other, but are mathematical patterns of charge-charge interaction.

shared text as integral to the structure of the Church as Church
-- Scripture, preaching, correspondence, etc.

The basic political strategy of the Church is to outlast.

The corruption of rights discourse arises from attempts to use it to shirk moral responsibility, when in reality a right is in itself a region of responsibility.

A remarkable amount of 'gender identity' involves taking jokes made by previous generations to deal with embarrassment and treating them as serious, literal statements of truth.

A truth that cannot be shared among inquirers cannot be known.

Locked inside every virtue is a way to God.

Morality itself has a divine quality, regardless of how you choose to explain the fact.

It is part of the human lot that what we want or what makes us happy regularly involves or presupposes things we have not considered.

One of the essential requirements of moral maturity is recognizing that you yourself are capable of great evil.

Reason is expressed in the possibility of friendship. All acts of reason that are appropriate to reason are possible grounds of friendship or friendly acts, or else express friendly acts or friendship themselves.

problem space (David Scott): a historically contingent ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes hangs

The Souls of Black Folks as in part a study of virtue-signaling as a sociological phenomenon

Catherine of Siena, Dialogues, ch. 47: no one can observe the commandments fully and properly without observing the counsels 'at least in thought'

modes of passions
(1) simple anger (sorrow, joy, etc.)
(2) anger (etc.) with another
(3) anger (etc.) on behalf of another
(4) abstract anger (etc.)

the long percolation of thought

elements of experience
--- direct perception
--- --- sensation
--- --- sentiment
--- --- immediate apprehension
--- indirect perception
--- --- memory
--- --- anticipation
--- --- sympathy
--- classification
--- inference
--- testimony

Many people enjoy works of art less on aesthetic grounds and more on social or empathetic grounds. Most enthusiasms or fandoms are built on the latter.

love : good :: joy : true :: peace : beautiful

"We exist in a social reality which has been made by others and which we make for others....Speech is the way that we reorganize the universe." Rosenstock-Huessy

Any action norms are valid that are rationally appropriate to the general form of the rational discourse involved; we always have a wide selection of possible discursive norms.

People who ask how God can permit evil have a tendency never to ask how God can permit them.

To imagine a just society is to imagine a society whose actions are oriented to a common good to which one may subordinate one's private good.

custom --> honor & shame --> law

In many areas of thought, human guesses, while not consistently right, are also not consistently wrong, and that we sometimes get what is true by guess plays an important role in human inquiry.

It is precisely the task of human reason to go beyond what merely appears.

"that long experiment called common sense" (Duhem)

what the signifier suggests vs. what the object suggests

Charity humbles its possessors, and often those receiving it.

Signs suggest co-signs.

Occasional (as opposed to systematic) writing has a tendency both sometimes to concede too much and sometimes to claim too much.

The strength of experiment is in matters of mediating causes; it presupposes final effects and first causes, and mostly tells us of the network in between.

"The physicist does not choose the hypotheses he will base his theory on: they germinate in him, without his assistance." Duhem

Duhem's historical work is in part to show that great scientific ideas are not created ex nihilo but grow over long periods from seeds that sometimes look very different from themselves.

Prophet, priest, and king all involve a relation to God; in Christ this relation occurs within Christ Himself, in His very person.

The teachings of Jesus touch on the fundamental preconditions of ethics.

Talk of a 'conserved quantity' presupposes (1) changes with measurable features (2) the negative thesis that proper causes of those changes do not also change the given measurable feature. We cannot identify anything as genuinely conserved unless we have identified it as not subject to modification by a relevant moving cause; a conserved quantity is the same even given that things are caused to change. The notion therefore presupposes causation.

Scripture and Tradition are two modes of being Apostolic.

The standard for quality in  education is how well it contributes to our roles in fundamental moral communities: humanity, family, civil society, Church, etc.

Porphyry and Simplicius both attest that Aristotle's Categories was sometimes called Pro ton Topikon (Before-the-Topics).

The New Testament makes reasonably clear that divine revelations in the Old Testament involved angels even when angels are not explicitly mentioned as such.

"All things are full of angels." Origen

signs with respect to sensory interpretants, with respect to discursive interpretants, with respect to intellectual interpretants

"Nothing comes to be from nothing within the order of nature." Albert

An organic body is constantly flowing in and out in various ways.

conserved quantities as consistent signates

Humans seem to have evolved under pressure to philosophize; dialectical skill was, from all that we can tell, necessary to navigate some kinds of constant problems, both social and natural.

protection, respect, and audience for the common people

"Magic is the the art of using the world of sense arbitrarily." Novalis

The Church as pillar of truth has both load-bearing and space-organizing functions.

A sitcom is a set of stable characters united by a stable location that carries the potential for recurring but varying trouble whose disruptions can consistently be overcome, anchored in a humorous lead character or a humorous relationship between lead characters.

All taxes restrict the freedom of action of those who are taxed.

eshet chayil  -- Ruth 3:11b, Pr 12:4, Pr 31:10; cp. also Pr 31:29
LXX: gyne andreia Pr 31:10, 12:4), gyne dynameos (Rt 3:11); cp also Sir 26:2 (gyne andreia)

Every particular truth is a sign of a larger intelligibility to which it is subordinate.

A sacred text demands of our interpretations that they become more tightly interwoven.

defensive, regulative, and unitive functions of sovereignty

Compatibilists are often really argue that determinism is consistent with teleology.

Human ethics cannot reach to impairments of will except very indirectly; but Christ can.

"The whole order of events that the Gospel narrative fully describes must be received by the faithful hearing it, so that, by a saving faith in the actions then completed during the time of our Lord's Passion, we should understand not only the forgiveness of sins to have been accomplished in Christ, but also the pattern of justice to have been set forth." Leo the Great
"One faith justifies the holy people of all times."
"Although the rigor of that figurative law has been revoked, the benefit of voluntary observance has increased nonetheless."

Human beings discover truth by filtering the world in many different ways; it is important not to confuse the filter and the truth, although people often do.

Scientific investigations cannot be fully methodized because nature itself, despite its regularities, is not methodical.

The need to eat and drink is a biological form of obligation; there are other kinds, like pregnancy or stress.

Repetition is not a mechanism of cultural reproduction but an effect; this is a fundamental flaw in the work of Judith Butler, and why so many attempts to implement Butler's ideas have a cargo-cult quality.

Every baptism -- sacramental, blood, desire, vicarious desire -- is a death.

picturesque : painting :: romantique : literature

"The episcopate is one order with the presbyterate, but in genus, not in species. For orders are derived from the relation they have to the Eucharist, and because the highest power concerning the Eucharist is the power of consecrating it." Bellarmine

What is not distributed through a money-based market will tend to be distributed through a favor-based market.

Being actual implies not just being possible but also being possible with respect to other things in various ways, possibilities of acting and receiving, possibilities of being related.

affinity, focus, channel

Through the image of God we are in principle capable of being His representatives, personating Him to the universe.

Necessity does not merely imply actuality; it implies the possibility of being actual to and with and for other things in some way, and it implies being necessary for other things.

Understanding is a way of living.

The citizenry as a body and moral person is under an obligation to promote just institituions in the manner available to it as a body, because this is true of all moral persons. This obligation induces a derivative set of obligations on citizens as participants in the citzenry, first, to act in ways that do not directly impede the fulfillment of that obligation, and second, to act in reasonable ways that contribute to the possible success of fulfilling that obligation.

Consciousness is a species of interlinking between memory and anticipation.

normativity-in-an-inquiry (or in-a-model) -- plays an important role in scientific inference

Whose Speech Fed Rome Even as the Tiber's Flow

 Tiber, Nile, and Thames
by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The head and hands of murdered Cicero,
 Above his seat high in the Forum hung,
 Drew jeers and burning tears. When on the rung
Of a swift-mounted ladder, all aglow,
 Fulvia, Mark Antony's shameless wife, with show
 Of foot firm-poised and gleaming arm upflung,
 Bade her sharp needle pierce that god-like tongue
Whose speech fed Rome even as the Tiber's flow.
 And thou, Cleopatra's Needle, that hadst thrid
Great skirts of Time ere she and Antony hid
 Dead hope! -- hast thou too reached, surviving death,
 A city of sweet speech scorned, -- on whose chill stone
Keats withered, Coleridge pined, and Chatterton,
 Breadless, with poison froze the God-fired breath?

Conviction and Illustration

  But the point, to which I chiefly advert, is the necessity of thoroughly understanding the distinction between analogous, and metaphorical language. Analogies are used in aid of Conviction: Metaphors, as means of Illustration. The language is analogous, wherever a thing, power, or principle in a higher dignity is expressed by the same thing, power, or principle in a lower but more known form. Such, for instance, is the language of John iii. 6. That which is born of the flesh, is flesh; that which is born of the Spirit, is Spirit. The latter half of the verse contains the fact asserted; the former half the analogous fact, by which it is rendered intelligible. If any man choose to call this metaphorical or figurative, I ask him whether with Hobbes and Bolingbroke he applies the same rule to the moral attributes of the Deity? Whether he regards the divine Justice, for instance, as a metaphorical term, a mere figure of speech? If he disclaims this, then I answer, neither do I regard the words, born again, or spiritual life, as figures or metaphors. I have only to add, that these analogies are the material, or (to speak chemically) the base, of Symbols and symbolical expressions; the nature of which is always tautegorical, that is, expressing the same subject but with a difference, in contra-distinction from metaphors and similitudes, that are always allegorical, that is, expressing a different subject but with a resemblance.

[Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aphorisms on Spiritual Religion, Aphorism VII, p. 136.]

I have been juggling quite a few things the past week and a half, and it looks like I will still be doing so for the next week at least, so things are likely to be light around here.

Deducing Claims from Claims

 ...whereas it has become a commonplace that one cannot legimitately deduce an 'ought' from an 'is', cannot prove a moral conclusion purely on the basis of some factual claim, it has been forgotten that this is only an instance of a wider principle. That wider principle is that one cannot legimtately deduce any claim simply from another: that Zebedee is married to Rahab does not, of itself, imply that Rahab is married to Zebedee nor that Zebedee is not married to Tamar. To reach such conclusions we need additional premisses, about the institution of marriage. If one claim were enough to establish what had seemed to be a different claim, that would be reason to consider that the second claim really was no other than the first, under some disguise.

[Stepen R. L. Clark, From Athens to Jerusalem, Clarendon Press (Oxford: 1984) p. 11.]

Fortnightly Book, November 10

 Diu Crône is a curious work. We know exactly who wrote it -- Heinrich von dem Türlin. We know nothing else about him, beyond his name; all attempts to trace down anything further have failed or led to doubtful results. We know it was written between about 1220 and 1240, but nothing about the circumstances. It is an Arthurian work that draws on a wide range of other Arthurian works; but its Grail story is unique in that it is Gawein (as it is spelled here) who achieves the Grail. (In the main traditions, as represented by, for instance, The Quest of the Holy Grail, Gawain fails because despite his promise he continually does not follow through.) The title, which means The Crown, refers to the poem itself, which compares itself to a crown full of gems. Like many works of its day, but perhaps more than most Arthurian works, the book has a reputation for trying to stuff everything and the kitchen sink into the story.

The Crown is, of course, the next fortnightly book. I will be reading J. W. Thomas's 1989 translation. It was somewhat difficult to find. Mine is a used library discard from Pine Manor College, which no longer exists, as such -- after some rocky years it was assimilated into Boston College in 2020, and then repurposed within Boston College under the name 'Messina College' earlier this year. I mention this, because I find it sometimes interesting to know the routes a book took to me, particularly when it's very much not the kind of book you can just grab off of Amazon at any time.