A Strong and Vigorous Flame

 The Conquest
by John Norris 

 I. In Power or Wisdom to contend with thee,
Great God, who but a Lucifer would dare?
Our Strength is but Infirmity,
And when we this perceive, our Sight's most clear:
But yet I will not be excell'd thought I,
In Love; in Love I'll with my Maker vy.

 II. I view'd the Glories of thy Seat above,
And thought of every Grace and Charm divine,
And farther to encrease my Love
I measured all the Heights and Depths of thine.
Thus there broke forth a Strong and Vigorous Flame,
And almost melted down my mortal Frame. 

 III. But when thy Bloody Sweat and Death I view,
I own (Dear Lord) the Conquest of thy Love;
Thou dost my highest Flights outdo;
I in a lower Orb, and slower, move.
Thus in this Strife's a double Weakness shewn,
Thy Love I cannot equal, nor yet bear my own.

In the Stubbles of Renown

 Gleaners of Fame: A September Sonnet
by Alfred Austin  

 Hearken not, friend, for the resounding din
 That did the Poet's verses once acclaim:
 We are but gleaners in the field of fame,
 Whence the main harvest hath been gathered in.
 The sheaves of glory you are fain to win,
 Long since were stored round many a household name,
 The reapers of the Past, who timely came,
 And brought to end what none can now begin.
 Yet, in the stubbles of renown, 'tis right
 To stoop and gather the remaining ears,
 And carry homeward in the waning light
 What hath been left us by our happier peers;
 So that, befall what may, we be not quite
 Famished of honor in the far-off years.

Somewhat ironic, perhaps. Austin was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, a number of years after publishing this sonnet, and spent the rest of his career being criticized for not deserving it and only having received it because of his friendship with Lord Salisbury. (The derogatory nickname that seems to be remembered even today is "The Banjo Byron".) He's quite a decent poet, but he followed Southey, Wordsworth, and Tennyson; almost no one was going to look impressive after that string of greats. It probably didn't help that earlier in his career he had foolishly written literary criticism bashing some of the great poetic names of the day, and, despite his poetic competence, his own poetry was not good enough to back up his big talk.  

Dashed Off XXI

 Love of the artwork makes it to be good in its kind; joy in the artwork ornaments it in a way appropriate to itself; peace in the artwork sets it in appropriate context.

Three parts of ancient Greek meal:
(1) sitos: staples, usually barley or wheat bread
(2) opson: salt, olives, cheese, boiled roots, vegetables, onions, fish
(3) potos: beverage
--> Note Xenophon (Mem 1.3.5): "[Socrates] ate just enough food to make eating a pleasure, and he was so ready for his food that his desire for sitos was his opson." Also note the criticism of the opsophage (Mem 3.14.4) and the comment about foods that persuade one to eat and drink when not hungry or thirsty (Mem 1.3.6). (Cf. Mobus on this.)

No one compares statements only with statements.

From the fact that a statement cannot be incorporated into a system of statements, we can only conclude that it is at least not part of this system, if it is viable or consistent; we cannot conclude that it is incorrect. That would requires us to know why it cannot be incorporated.

skill as a kind of security in difficult deed

'Her is no chos bot owder do or de." Wallace IV.593

Shy love as well bold love imitates God.

Joy is an adorning power.

Love deems it an honor to do good.

In the peace of charity, we dwell in the good of the loved as in something beautiful.

Our practical actions suppose contexts that give them meaning.

Akan proverbs (noted by Kwame Gyekye)
"If the occasion (situation) has not arisen, the proverb has not come."
"When the occasion arises, it calls for a proverb."
"Each destiny is unlike any other."
"The pursuit of beneficence brings no evil on the one who pursues it."
"Everything has its 'because of'."
"What is fated to prosper or succeed cannot be otherwise."
"God is the justification of all things."
"The earth is wide but God is the elder (chief)."
"All men are children, no one is a child of earth."
"Man is not a palm tree that he should be complete (self-sufficient)."
"The right arm washes the left arm, and the left arm also washes the right arm."
"If one eats the honey alone, it plagues one's stomach."
"The order God has settled, living man cannot subvert."
"Wisdom is not in the hand of one person."
"No one knows His beginning and His end."
"Everything is from God and ends up in God."
"Speech is one thing, wisdom another."
"The wise man is spoken to in proverbs, not in words (speeches)."
"Wisdom is not like money, to be tied up and hidden away."
"If a problem lasts for a long time, wisdom comes to it."
"All things depend on God."
"When a man dies he is not dead."
"God created everyone well."
"Trying hard breaks the back of misfortune."
"If a man is unhappy, his condut is the cause."
"Goodness is the prime characteristic of God."
"Character comes from your deeds."
"When a man descends from heaven, he descends into a human society."
"The prosperity of man depends on (fellow) man.
"No one teaches a child God."

NB that in Akan predicates can be used as commands, questions, and assertions.

four kinds of proprium
(1) exists for the whole of a species but not for it alone (e.g., natural and potential possession of two feet)
(2) exists only for one species but not for every member (e.g., knowledge of medicine)
(3) exists for every member of only one species, but not always (e.g. gray hair in old age)
(4) eixsts always for every member of only one species (e.g., risibility)
-- The true proprium (4) is that which does not cause variation of degree in subject and is not essential to it. It differs from accidents in being convertible with their subjects and from differentia in not eing substantial. It is identified with respect to matter, with respect to form, or with respect to an action from the form.

Using the material cause in explanation almost always requires some principle of conservation or uniformity.

Accidents subsist in individuals, propria in species, differentiae in genera.

Diodorean possibility (p is or at some point will be) and necessity (p is and at every point will be) as Diamond and Box with respect to a forward lightcone

"The true artist is obedient to a conception of perfection to which his work is constantly related and re-related in what seems an external manner." Iris Murdoch

"The beauty of the world is the order of the world that is loved." Simone Weil

Saints who are given the grace of extraordinary mortifications are given them not to show us what to do but to show us that our own ascetic labors are not so difficult, much less impossible or unbearable, as we might imagine from only comparing them to more comfortable lives.

The primary task of the beginner in the spiritual life is to develop the habit of prayer, i.e., ease of and swiftness to prayer in routine and out, through all the aspects of life; and the primary means to this are routines of prayer, detachment and small ascetic self-disciplines, and memorative practices like spiritual reading or icons, which refresh us and remind us to prayer.

** EW Trueman Dicken's summary of the Four Waters in the Life:
(1) Active states = natural prayer
Beginners (vocal/discursive prayer = 1st water)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Prayer of Quiet = Recollection = 2nd water (incipient contemplation)
--- --- --- --- (A1) First higher state -- quiet during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (A2) Second higher state -- will and understanding involved, but not memory
--- --- (B) Sleep of the faculties = 3rd water
--- --- (C) Union = 4th water
** Summary of the Mansions
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners I (includes fervor novitium) = Mansions I
--- --- (B) Beginners II (arid vocal or discursive prayer) = Mansions II
--- --- (C) Beginners III (vocal or discursive prayer with sensible devotion) = Mansions III
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection = Mansions IV.iii
--- --- (B) Prayer of Quiet (infused consolations) = Mansions IV
--- --- (C) Union = Mansions V
** Summary of The Way
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners (vocal or discursive prayer)
--- ---  (B) [Active] Recollection (affective prayer)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Prayer of Quiet (incipient contemplation)
--- --- --- --- (1) First higher state = quiet during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (2) ?
--- --- (B) Union -- All faculties cleaving to God.
** Summary of Relation V
(1) Active states = natural prayer
Beginners (general awareness of the presence of God)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection
--- --- (B) Sleep of the faculties -- during daily tasks(?)
--- --- (C) Union
** Final Tabulation up to Mansions
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners I (as in Mansions)
--- --- (B) Beginners II (as in Mansions)
--- --- (C) Beginners III (as in Mansions)
--- --- (D) Active Recollection (as in The Way [only])
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection (Mansions IV.iii)
--- --- (B) Prayer of Quiet, including
--- --- --- --- (1) Quiet maintained during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (2) (?) An indefinable, highly confused state
--- --- (C) (?) Sleep of the Faculties
--- --- (D) Union

God is not a pedagogical tutiorist; He often teaches in daring or even dangerous ways.

We should often most docilely consider the saints with whom we have the least natural sympathies.

Lived experience is not foundational but holistic. We do not so much build on it as within it; it is not the Ur-text but the context of our articulated experience.

A problem with Schutz's coneption of 'finite provinces of meaning' is his assumption of the 'world of working' as 'paramount reality', when in reality it is more like an incomplete hallway or exchange-station that nobody regards as adequate even on its own terms. We also recognize that this interchange connects to greater as well as lesser realities -- e.g., that of scientific theory, or artistic beauty, or religious communion, which are taken to be in some sense more paramount.

Irrationality requires an extensive context of rationality.

Part of moral maturity is being able to recognize both other sins and natural penalties as punishment for sin.

"With shame, the human being manifests almost instinctively the need of affirmation and acceptance of this 'self,' according to its rightful value. He experiences it at the same time both within himself and externally, before the 'other'." John Paul II
"Man appears in creation as the one who received the world as a gift, and it can also be said that the world received man as a gift."
"Man appears as created, that is, as the one who, in the midst of the 'world,' received the other man as a gift."
"Masculinity and femininity -- namely, sex -- is the original sign of a creative donation and an awareness on the part of man, male-female, of a gift lived in an original way."
"Happiness is being rooted in love."
"In the mystery of creation, man and woman were 'given' in a special way to each other by the Creator."
"Man appears in the visible world as the highest expression of the divine gift, because he bears within him the interior dimension of the gift."

One may have all the elements of a proof of p, and even recognize this, and yet not know p, because knowledge of p is not mere possession of something that proves, even when aware of this possession. One may have adequate evidence to know p and yet not know p, because knowledge of p is not the meeting of a threshold of evidence.

** Dicken on John of the Cross's Ascent
The Understanding -- to be mortified in respect of knowledge received
--- (1) Naturally
--- --- --- By the exterior senses (Ascent I)
--- --- --- By the interior senses (Ascent II.xii-xiv)
--- (2) Supernaturally
--- --- --- (a) Corporally
--- --- --- --- --- By the exterior senses (Ascent II.xi)
--- --- --- --- --- By the interior senses (Ascent II.xvi-xxii)
--- --- --- (b) Spiritually
--- --- --- --- --- (i) Distinctly (Ascent II.xxiiii-end)
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By visions
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By revelations
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By locutions
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By spiritual feelings
--- --- --- --- --- (ii) Confusedly (contemplation)

"Some people are so patient about not making spiritual progress that God would certainly wish them to be less so!" St. John of the Cross

spiritus vertiginis (Night I, xiv.3)

Note Dicken's insistence, on the Stages of Prayer table comparing Teresa and John, that these are 'a highly integrated pattern' but that the stages are not necessarily identical because (1) the sanits are presupposing somewhat different methods and backgrounds (Teresa's for those whose devotion is mostly affective and of the heart, John's for those with a more formal and discursive background) and (2) Teresa's terms are primarily focused on prayer time, John's on the whole attitude of life; they identify the same stages but not the same thigns, and the terms are not perfectly coextensive.

You can prepare for confession as much as possible, and it will still be the case that when you finally say something in the confessional, you realize that what you said is not quite right.

Juridical entities always require some natural anchor, although as the sophistication of the legal system increases, the indirectness can increase.

Grounding is not a relation but a status.

"No style can be good in the mouth of a man who has nothing, or nonsense, to say." C. S. Lewis
"'Look in thy heart and write' is good counsel for poets; but when a poet looks in his heart he finds many things there besides the actual. That is why, and how, he is a poet."

The artist imitates nature by the very act of imitation.

funerals as ways of showing respect to human dignity

A system in which pregnancy is treated as a secondary matter or inconvenience is an inherently misogynistic system.

The damned are constantly represented in Scripture as bound to or in fire, in such terms as to indicate that this binding induces both a moral qulity (awareness of restriction) and a 'physical' quality (actual constraint of behavior).

purgatory as a sharing of the Cross of Christ

The New Testament is even more concerned to represent God as judge than the Old Testament; this is inevitable, given that the NT has a greater concentration of apocalyptic.

Realms are governed by authoritative documents and appointed channels of communication.

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." Einstein

"A philosophy may indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself." William James

Against a Dark Blue Night-Sky

 In The Damned, which I am of course currently reading for the fortnightly book, the Crucifixion of Mathias Grünewald, from the sixteenth-century altarpiece sometimes known as the Karlsruher Altar and sometimes as the Tauberbischofsheimer Altar, plays a significant role. One of the most famous passages from the book is a detailed attempt to convey it in words; the character Durtal, who has been (like Huysmans) hobnobbing with the Naturalists has grown tired of what he sees as their tedious book-exercise approach and, seeking a richer kind of naturalism, discovers it perfectly expressed in Grünewald's painting. Part of the description (in a different and older translation than the one I am reading):

He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain. With extraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry of admiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of the Cassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body. 

 This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated. 

 Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulæ touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia. 

 Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring figure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched; all the drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under jaw racked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously. 

 The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mocking executioners into flight. 

Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost to touch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, kept watch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour of mucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and swollen with weeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like a gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs of bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent with weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erect but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which he contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry which threatened to rend his quivering throat.

The description is an implicit criticism in itself of Naturalism, I think; part of what Huysmans is suggesting is that Naturalism as a literary movement could not accurately describe even a painting like this in this way, because it is blind to the kind of experience that is required to do so. This is a fundamental reason why Naturalism as a literary movement began to give way to Decadence, as it began to dawn on artists, and writers and illustrators in particular, that, despite Naturalism introducing powerful means of description, Naturalists were getting their vivid realism not by describing reality as it actually was but by chopping off experiences that did not fit their preconceptions of reality. When I did Barbey d'Aurevilley's Les Diabolique, I noted that a lot of his work was motivated (explicitly) by a sort of contempt for the literary scene's handling of both moral and natural evil, and Huysmans has a similar view, possibly less contemptuous but certainly just as tired of it. As Huysmans once put it to a friend in a letter, he was disgusted by the Naturalists trying to convince people that devilry was an old wives' tale or a chemical imbalance, and tired equally of occultists with their tired treadmill of examples, and wanted to write a story that taught the lesson that the Devil was real and ruled the world. This was not a theological position but an artistic protest against what was increasingly seen as the dishonesty of the art of the Naturalists when it came to dealing with actual human experience. Decadence arises from applying techniques of Naturalist realism not to the humdrum and everyday but to the interesting extremes, especially interesting extremes of good and evil, that require stretching those techniques in new directions. 

[Crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald - 1. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202.2. Google Art Project, Public Domain, Link]

Gregorius Magnus

 Today is the feast of Pope St. Gregory I the Great, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From his Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Book II, Tenth Homily):

For Holy Church has two lives, the one which she leads temporally, the other which she receives for eternity, the one in which she labors on earth, the other in which she is rewarded in Heaven, the one in which she earns rewards, the other truly in which she rejoices in the receipt thereof, and in each life she offers sacrifices. Here of course the sacrifice of compunction, there the sacrifice of praise....Yet flesh is offered in each sacrifice because here the oblation of flesh is the maceration of the body, there the oblation of flesh is the glory of resurrection in praise of God. For truly the flesh is offered there as for an whole-burnt offering; when wholly changed in eternal incorruption it contains nothing of contradiction or mortality because, at once wholly kindled with the fires of His love, it will continue in praise for ever....

[Saint Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Tomkinson, tr., Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies (Etna, CA: 2008) p. 442.]

Implicit Intention

 ...Some considerable time ago, men of the world were in the habit of using much indecent language in mutual conversation; while, nevertheless, they thought it thoroughly ungentlemanly so to speak in the presence of ladies. We will suppose two gentlemen of the period to be talking with each other, while some lady is in the room, ocupied, we will say, in writing a letter. They are wholly engrossed, so far as they are themselves aware, with the subject they are upon -- politics, or the Stock Exchange, or sporting. They are not explicitly thinking of the lady at all; and yet, if they are really gentlemen, her presence exercises on them a most real and practical influence. It is not that they fall into bad language and then apologize; on the contrary they are so restrained by her presence that they do not dream of such expressions. Yet, on the other hand, no one will say that the freedom of their thought and speech is explicitly perceived by them to be interfered with. Their careful abstinence, then, from foul language is due indeed to an actual intention present in their mind: the intention, namely, of not distressing the lady who is present. Yet this intention is entirely implicit; and they will not even become aware of its existence, except by means of careful introspection. And this, we would submit, if we may here anticipate our coming argument, is that kind of practical remembrance and impression concerning God's intimate presence, which it is of such singular importance that I preserve through the day....

[William George Ward, "The Extent of Free Will", in Essays on the Philosophy of Theism, Volume II, Wilfrid Ward, ed., Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. (London: 1884) p. 286.]

Links of Note

 * Elisabeth Camp, Metaphor in the Mind: The Cognition of Metaphor (PDF)

* Michael Arsenault, Aristotle on Misperceiving

* Pauline Kleingeld, Kant's Analytic Method and the Argument of Groundwork I (PDF)

* Susan Pickard, Sex is Not a Spectrum, on Beauvoir's account of sex, at "Beauvoirian Feminism"

* Sarale Ben-Asher, Poetic Imitation: The Argument of Republic 10 (PDF)

* Connor Tabarrok, Floodplains, FEMA, and Financial Analysis, at "Of All Trades"

* Paniel Reyes Cardenas, Term Functor Logic Tableaux

* John Plaice, Leibniz's Teleology is the Basis for the Principle of Least Action, at "Fiat Lux"

* Ian J. Campbell, Rational Powers and Knowledge of Counterparts in Aristotle (PDF)

* Adam Louis-Klein, The Holiest Hatred, on our contemporary rise of anti-semitism, at "Tablet"

* Emily Herring, Laughter is vital, on Bergson's account of laughter, at "Aeon"

* David Weinberger, We Are More Than We Think, reviews Edward Feser's Immortal Souls, at "Religion & Liberty"

* Vanessa de Harven, The Principle of Sufficient Reason in the Hellenistic Period (PDF)

* Nicolas Sarzeaud, A New Document on the Appearance of the Shroud of Turin from Nicole Oresme: Fighting False Relics and False Rumours in the Fourteenth Century. As the title suggests, a discussion by Oresme in the previously unpublished Problemata considers in passing the question of the Shroud as an example of religious fraud, and is the earliest skeptical mention (although we have indirect evidence that it was not an uncommon view at the time, and the cautious Holy See a bit later strictly required that it be displayed not as the actual relic but as a 'figure and representation' of the shroud of Christ). The mention is mostly unremarkable, except for historical interest, but Sarzeaud does a good job of discussing how these matters were approached in the fourteenth century.

* Typepad is completely shutting down. As the first of the major blogging platforms to fall, it seems like the end of an era. Part of the reason is due to broader business issues, so Wordpress and Blogger, which do not have the same problems, are likely to stand a while yet. (Indeed, while it's always difficult to guess how Google will go, I suspect the rise of LLMs has accidentally expanded Blogger's life, in the sense that Google has an additional incentive to keep it around a while yet, as a still-slowly-expanding mass of human text which Google can use for training.) But at some point the end will come for us all.

* Edward Feser, Maimonides on negative theology

* Christopher Pincock, Reichenbach, Russell, and scientific realism (PDF)

* Lance H. Gray, A Philosophy of Scarecrows

ADDED LATER: Graham Greene, noted Oneida actor from Ontario, died today. His most significant role, I think, was in Dances with Wolves, but I've always most loved his role as the sly and hilarious Joseph in Maverick. He was always great on the screen; he mentioned more than once in interviews that he preferred to do Native American and First Nations roles that went beyond the ordinary stoic stereotype of the silver screen Indian, and he was exceptionally good at bringing charm and humor to almost any role.

Fortnightly Book, August 31

 Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was born in 1848 to a French schoolteacher and a Dutch artist. He spent most of his life as a civil servant doing a job he disliked, but he also began a long career as an author in 1874, writing under the Dutch-ified version of his name, Joris-Karl, or J.-K., Huysmans. Originally he was known as an up-and-coming author of the Naturalist school, associated with Zola, but in the 1880s, having become convinced that Naturalism was deteriorating into a tedious treadmill of the same and the ordinary, he began to drift in another, darker direction, and eventually became known as one of the major writers in the Decadent school. In this period, his works became gloomy and exaggerated versions of his own life experiences and attempts to deal with the dreadfulness of modern life. He had originally expected this entire trajectory of his writing career to do poorly in terms of publication, consoling himself with the fact that he was doing something genuinely new, but the works touched a chord and often sold well.

The next fortnightly book is Huysmans's darkest and most controversial Decadent novel, Là-bas; the translation is literally 'Down There' but it is often given in English as The Damned. It tells the story of a man named Durtal, bored and disgusted by life, who throws himself into writing a biography of Gilles de Rais. Gilles de Rais was once the Marshal of France, a distinction he earned by exceptional valor while serving with St. Jeanne D'Arc. There is very little historical information about their relationship, which seems to have been purely professional and even merely occasional, but writers ever since have not been able to resist treating it as more, because of one very significant fact: Gilles de Rais, afterward, would go down a dark road, starting with grave financial troubles and ending with a trial in which he was accused of trying to summon demons (to get rich) and convicted and hanged for heresy, sodomy, and the murder of children. Historians debate how much of this was strictly true and how much of it was exaggerated (some of the financial troubles and some of the killings are almost certainly true), and folklore and the inevitable story-fascination of a saint interacting with an eventual devil-worshipper have exaggerated them even more. Gilles de Rais became a symbol for nineteenth-century Satanists, and thus Durtal's study of him leads him to the Satanist community in Paris. One of the many things that made the novel notorious was its depiction of Black Mass, based loosely on Huysmans's own experience of such a ceremony.

Là-bas would not be the last of Durtal; after the 'black book' of Là-bas, he wrote the 'white book' of En Route, and then La cathèdrale (his best-selling work), and L'Oblat, through which Durtal (in a path that was mirroring his creator's) continues to find disappointment in trying out means to escape the drudgery and sordidness of modern life, but on the way converts to Catholicism and eventually becomes a Benedictine oblate. All of that, however, is in the future. Huysmans himself did not yet know that this was to be Durtal's fate; he had not lived it yet. Here we begin, with the 'black book', the book of despair, the book about the disgusting horror pleasure can become when you try to make it something it cannot be.

Maurice LeBlanc, The Confessions of Arsene Lupin

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From "Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!...", the first story in the collection:

"Lupin," I said, "tell me something about yourself."

"Why, what would you have me tell you? Everybody knows my life!" replied Lupin, who lay drowsing on the sofa in my study.

"Nobody knows it!" I protested. "People know from your letters in the newspapers that you were mixed up in this case, that you started that case. But the part which you played in it all, the plain facts of the story, the upshot of the mystery: these are things of which they know nothing." (p. 1)

Summary: The ten stories in this collection are a mixed group, very different from one to another. However, they focus on aspects of Lupin's character that tend to go beyond his mere master-thievery, although we do, of course, get some of that. A significant, and unsurprising one, is Lupin's major strength and weakness, namely, beautiful women. This comes up in "The Wedding-Ring", "The Infernal Trap", and "Edith Swan-Neck". In several, Lupin plays the detective, sometimes to further a theft (as in "The Red Silk Scarf" or "The Invisible Prisoner") and sometimes to prove a point (as in "A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues"). In all of them, things are not precisely what things seem.

A common, although not universal, thread through the stories is the use of this idea, that things are different from what they appear to be, as a sort of joke or topsy-turviness. In the case of "A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues", the central joke is actually a pun, since the story is an homage of sorts to Edgar Allan Poe's classic and genre-defining detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", which it combines with a deliberate subversion of a common expectation in detective fiction, that the solutions to detective fictions stories are not supposed to repeat, and the upside-down insistence by Lupin, inconsistent with the thinking of so many stories in detective fiction, that extraordinary effects require extraordinary causes. Perhaps Lupin is so insistent on the matter because so many of his own effects are out of the ordinary. We get the same sort of subversiveness in Lupin's insistence in "Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!...", found in less bald form in other stories in the book, that those staples of detective fiction, rigorous deduction and close observation, don't actually matter much for solving mysteries; what matters instead is intelligent intuition, the ability to see that a bunch of very different things nonethless fit together if you only make the right supposition. Crime, in reality, is a personal foible; you find the explanation not by method but by a good understanding of people.

I think "Edith Swan-Neck" is structurally the best story in the work; it contains a nice set of twists upon twists. The story is also strengthened by the fact that it does a very good job of showing that Ganimard, Lupin's longsuffering and ever-losing detective opponent, is actually quite brilliant. He may not at the level of Herlock Sholmes or Lupin himself, but he is very, very good at his job. The perpetual danger, of course, is that, fated always to fail in his pursuit of Lupin, he could come across looking like a buffoon or an incompetent, which is to the detriment of Lupin himself. Here, however, as Lupin himself notes, he shows himself to be formidable, and thus to highlight Lupin's own genius all the more. My favorite story in the work, however, is the very charming "The Invisible Prisoner", in which Lupin casually commits a theft by apparently solving the theft he commits.

Favorite Passage: From "Edith Swan-Neck":

"But then why all these complications? Why the theft of one tapestry, followed by its recovery, followed by the theft of the twelve? Why that house-warming? Why that disturbance? Why everything? Your story won't hold water, Ganimard."

"Only because, you, chief, like myself, have stopped halfway; because, strange as this story already sounds, we must go still farther, very much farther, in the direction of the improbable and the astounding. And why not, after all? Remember that we are dealing with Arsène Lupin. With him, is it not always just the improbable and the astounding that we must look for? Must we not always go straight for the maddest suppositions? And, when I say the maddest, I am using the wrong word. On the contrary, the whole thing is wonderfully logical and so simple that a child could understand it. Confederates only betray you. Why employ confederates, when it is so easy and so natural to act for yourself, by yourself, with your own hands and by the means within your own reach?" (p. 231)

Recommendation: Recommended.

******

Maurcie Leblanc, The Confessions of Arsène Lupin, Fox Eye (Leicester: 2022).

Her Many-Pictured Page

 Wanderings
by St. John Henry Newman

Ere yet I left home's youthful shrine,
 My heart and hope were stored
Where first I caught the rays divine,
 And drank the Eternal Word. 

I went afar; the world unroll'd
 Her many-pictured page;
I stored the marvels which she told,
 And trusted to her gage. 

Her pleasures quaff'd, I sought awhile
 The scenes I prized before;
But parent's praise and sister's smile
 Stirr'd my cold heart no more. 

So ever sear, so ever cloy
 Earth's favours as they fade;
Since Adam lost for one fierce joy
 His Eden's sacred shade. 

 Off the Lizard.
December 8, 1832.

Doctor Gratiae

 Today is the feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From Tractate 97 on the Gospel of John:

The Holy Spirit, whom the Lord promised to send to His disciples, to teach them all the truth which, at the time He was speaking to them, they were unable to bear: of the which Holy Spirit, as the apostle says, we have now received the earnest, an expression whereby we are to understand that His fullness is reserved for us till another life: that Holy Spirit, therefore, teaches believers also in the present life, as far as they can severally apprehend what is spiritual; and enkindles a growing desire in their breasts, according as each one makes progress in that love, which will lead him both to love what he knows already, and to long after what still remains to be known: so that those very things which he has some notion of at present, he may know that he is still ignorant of, as they are yet to be known in that life which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man has perceived. But were the inner Master wishing at present to say those things in such a way of knowing, that is, to unfold and make them patent to our mind, our human weakness would be unable to bear them. Whereof you remember, beloved, that I have already spoken, when we were occupied with the words of the holy Gospel, where the Lord says, I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now. Not that in these words of the Lord we should be suspecting an over-fastidious concealment of no one knows what secrets, which might be uttered by the Teacher, but could not be borne by the learner, but those very things which in connection with religious doctrine we read and write, hear and speak of, as within the knowledge of such and such persons, were Christ willing to utter to us in the self-same way as He speaks of them to the holy angels, in His own Person as the only-begotten Word of the Father, and co-eternal with Him, where are the human beings that could bear them, even were they already spiritual, as the apostles still were not when the Lord so spoke to them, and as they afterwards became when the Holy Spirit descended? For, of course, whatever may be known of the creature, is less than the Creator Himself, who is the supreme and true and unchangeable God.

Still the Billows from Numidia Seek the Lovely Roman Shore

 Monica and Augustine
by Lucy Larcom 

 In the martyr Cyprian's chapel there was moaning through the night;
Monica's low prayer stole upward till it met the early light.
Till the dawn came, walking softly o'er the troubled sea without,
Monica for her Augustine wept the dreary watches out. 

 "Lord of all the holy martyrs! Giver of the crown of flame,
Set on hoary-headed Cyprian, who to Thee child-hearted came;
Hear me for my child of promise! Thou his erring way canst see;
Long from Thee a restless wanderer, must he go away from me? 

 "'T is for Thee, O God, a mother this her wondrous child would keep;
Through the ripening of his manhood Thou hast seen me watch and weep.
Tangled in the mesh of Mani, groping through the maze of sense,
Other, deadlier snares await him, if from me he wander hence. 

 "Thine he shall be, Lord; Thy promise brightens up my night of fears:
Faith beholds him at Thy altar, yet baptized with only tears;
For the angel of my vision, came he not from Thy right hand,
Whispering unto me, his mother, "Where thou standest, he shall stand"? 

 "Saviour, Lord, whose name is Faithful, I am Thine, I rest on Thee;
And beside me in Thy kingdom I this wanderer shall see.
Check the tide! hold still the breezes! for his soul's beloved sake,
Do not let him leave me! Keep him -- keep him -- lest my heart should break!" 

 Man must ask, and God will answer, yet we may not understand,
Knowing but our own poor language all the writing of His hand.
In our meagre speech we ask him, and He answers in His own;
Vast beyond our thought the blessing that we blindly judge is none. 

 When the sun rose from the water, Monica was on the shore;
Out of sight had dropped the vessel that afar Augustine bore.
Home she turned, her sad heart singing underneath its load of care,
"Still I know Thy name is faithful, O Thou God that hearest prayer!" 

 By the garden-beds of Ostia now together stand the twain,
Monica and her Augustine, gazing far across the main,
Toward the home-land of Numidia, hiding in the distance dim,
Where God parted them in sorrow, both to bring the nearer Him. 

 And the mother's prayer is answered, for their souls are side by side,
Where His peace flows in upon them with a full eternal tide.
And Augustine's thought is blending with the murmur of the sea;
"Bless Thee, Lord, that we are restless, till we find our rest in Thee!" 

 And their talk, the son and mother, leaning out above the flowers,
Is like lapse of angel-music, linking heaven's enraptured hours.
Hushed is all the song of Nature; hushed is care, and passion's din,
In that hush they hear a welcome from the Highest: -- "Enter in!" 

 "What new mercy has befallen? every earthly wish is gone,"
Monica half speaks, half muses; " why should earthly life move on?
Ah, my son, what peace and gladness surging from this silence roll!
'T is the Eternal Deep that answers to the deep within my soul! 

 "Not a sigh of homesick longing moves the stillness of my heart;
In the light of this great glory, unto God would I depart.
Though more dear thou art than ever, standing at heaven's gate with me,
For the sweetness of His presence I could say farewell to thee." 

 There's a silent room in Ostia; tearless mourners by a bed:
Since the angels roused that sleeper, who shall weep, or call her dead?
Not beside the dust beloved shall her exiled ashes lie;
She awaits the Resurrection underneath a Roman sky. 

 Now Augustine in his bosom keeps the image of a saint,
Whose warm tears of consecration drop on thoughts of sinful taint.
In the home that knew him erring, a bewildered Manichee,
Minister at Truth's high altar, him that mother-saint shall see. 

 In the dreams of midnight, haunted by the ghosts of buried sins;
In the days of calm, the spirit, struggling through temptation, wins;
Monica looks down upon him, joy to bless, and gloom beguile;
And the world can see Augustine clearer for that saintly smile. 

 Still the billows from Numidia seek the lovely Roman shore,
Though Augustine to his mother sailed long since the death-wave o'er,
Still his word sweeps down the ages like the surging of the sea:
"Bless Thee, Lord, that we are restless, till we find our rest in Thee!"

The Greatest of All Lessons

 It is then, as appears, the greatest of all lessons to know one's self. For if one knows himself, he will know God; and knowing God, he will be made like God, not by wearing gold or long robes, but by well-doing, and by requiring as few things as possible. 

 Now, God alone is in need of nothing, and rejoices most when He sees us bright with the ornament of intelligence; and then, too, rejoices in him who is arrayed in chastity, the sacred stole of the body. Since then the soul consists of three divisions; the intellect, which is called the reasoning faculty, is the inner man, which is the ruler of this man that is seen. And that one, in another respect, God guides. But the irascible part, being brutal, dwells near to insanity. And appetite, which is the third department, is many-shaped above Proteus, the varying sea-god, who changed himself now into one shape, now into another; and it allures to adulteries, to licentiousness, to seductions.

[Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, Book III, Chapter I.]

Rescher and Gallagher on Plurative Syllogisms

Consider the two arguments: 

All A's are B's 
All parts of A's are parts of B's

Most C's are A's 
Most C's are B's
Some A's are B's 

Textbooks often charge that traditional logic is "inadequate" because it cannot accommodate patently valid arguments like the first. But this holds equally true of modern quantificational logic itself, which cannot accommodate the second. Powerful tool though it is, quantificational logic is unequal to certain childishly simple valid arguments, which have featured in the logical literature for over a century (i.e., since the days of De Morgan and Boole). Plurative syllogisms afford an interesting instance of an inferential task in which the powerful machinery of quantificational logic fails us, but to which the humble technique of Venn diagrams proves adequate.

[Nicholas Rescher and Neil Gallagher, "Venn Diagrams for Plurative Syllogisms", Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jun., 1965), p. 55.]

Rescher elsewhere notes (in "Plurality-Quantification", if I am recalling correctly) that plurative syllogisms are even more difficult for standard predicate calculus than they seem. You might think, for instance, that you could solve the problem (as you would with syllogistic) by adding a 'Most' quantifier, (Mx), which in the predicate calculus would have to mean something like 'For most of the individuals x of the universe of discourse'. But it turns out, given how standard predicate calculus structures propositions, that simply adding a Most quantifier to the predicate calculus doesn't make it possible to say that Most S are P. You get something that looks superficially like it, but doesn't have the right logical properties; in other words, the standard pred. calc. rules for quantifiers and how they are used are tailored specifically for universal quantifiers and existential quantifiers and how those quantifiers, specifically, relate to each other, so merely adding a plurative quantifier doesn't get you something that works right. You'd have to rebuild the system from the ground up to get things right.

As Rescher and Gallagher note, people have a long history of criticizing basic syllogistic and class logics for not having an immediately obvious way to handle relational arguments (like the first in Rescher's and Gallagher's comment above), while at the same time just ignoring the basic kinds of argument that the predicate calculus doesn't directly accommodate. In reality, of course, this is a childish way of arguing; your logical system always has a purpose, and it just doesn't have to deal with things that are not part of the purpose; that you might use a different logical system for a different thing has no bearing on the value of any logical system. But people often seem allergic to this sort of logical pluralism; they really want there to be a ONE TRUE LOGIC, in the sense of a logical system that covers absolutely everything logical that you might want to do, or to which everything logical could be cleanly reduced. But there isn't one, and even if there were, we don't have it.

This, of course, is different from holding that all logical systems are equally good. For one, given a particular logical purpose, not all logical systems are equally good means to that end. And, perhaps more importantly, not all logical purposes are equally important. It would be entirely possible to argue that one logical system, or one family of logical systems, is the primary logical system, in the sense of being the best logical system for the most basic or the most important thing logic can be used for. No doubt there would be some controversy about it, but you could very well argue it.  But saying that it is the best instrument for the most important things is not the same as saying that it can do everything important.

Monsignor Knox

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox died on this day in 1957. He was born in Kibworth, in Leicestershire, to an important Evangelical Anglican family; his grandfather on his mother's side had been Bishop of Lahore, and his father eventually became the Bishop of Manchester. He studied at Eton, where he began, much to the dissatisfaction of his family, to take an interest in Anglo-Catholic movements in the Church of England and eventually ended up in the University of Oxford at Balliol College, where he thrived, and afterward was elected fellow of Trinity College. Shortly thereafter he became an Anglican priest and became chaplain of the college. After serving in British intelligence during the Great War, he taught at Shrewsbury School. Then in 1917, he converted to Catholicism, resigning his chaplaincy, which provoked a family crisis, as his father then cut him out of his will. He was ordained a Catholic priest and began teaching at St. Edmund's College. 

Knox was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction alike, a significant member of the Detection Club, a major figure in early broadcasting, and the translator of the Knox Version of the Bible. From Heaven and Charing Cross, his book of Corpus Christi sermons:

...You see, we are so materialistic, our minds are so chained to the things of sense, that we imagine our Lord as instituting the Blessed Sacrament with bread and wine as the remote matter of it because bread and wine reminded him of that grace which he intended the Blessed Sacrament to bestow. But, if you come to think of it, it was just the other way about. When he created the worlds he gave common bread and wine for our use in order that we might understand what the Blessed Sacrament was when it came to be instituted. He did not design the Sacred Host to be something like bread. He designed bread to be something like the Sacred Host.

Always, it is the things which affect us outwardly and impress themselves on our senses that are the shams, the imaginaries; reality belongs to the things of the spirit. All the din and clatter of the streets, all the great factories which dominate our landscape, are only echoes and shadows if you think of them for a moment in the light of eternity; the Reality is in here, is there above the altar, is that part of it which our eyes cannot see and our senses cannot distinguish.... (pp. 13-14).

Evening Note for Saturday, August 23

 Thought for the Evening: Plurative Modalities

Modal operators, as we often study them, are divided into two major kinds: strong (or Box) and weak (or Diamond). Strong modalities are necessity-like: necessary, always, everywhere, obligatory, known. Weak modalities are possibility-like: possible, sometimes, somewhere, permissible. In practice, we often use a third, intermediate between them, which is sometimes just called the null modality, and means (more or less) what is true without any modification. And this is a giveaway, I suppose, since the null is effectively like a strong modality when compared with a weak modality and like a weak modality when compared with a strong modality. Strong modality and weak modality are not really two groups of different kinds; they are comparative. You see this further in  multimodal systems; 'believed' may be a strong modality in a doxastic system but a weak modality in an epistemic system.

In short, there are many intermediate modal operators between absolute necessity and absolute possibility. This is in fact what we would expect on other grounds. Even if we stay with a given kind of modality -- say, temporal modalities -- we can weaken the strong modal operator or strengthen the weak modal operator to get a new modal operator. In possible world semantics, we analogize all other modal operators to quantifiers -- strong modal operators all work like the universal quantifier, weak modal operators all work like the existential quantifier. But you can have different quantifiers as well. Quantity that is weaker than universal quantity but stronger than particular quantity goes by different names in different systems, but one of the names used is 'plurative'. Examples of markers of plurative quantity are things like 'most' or 'few'. Consider the following basic plurative syllogism:

Most of those who will study hard will pass.
Most students will study hard.
Therefore, some students will pass.

This is a valid argument. That's somewhat peculiar, since if we treat 'most' like 'some', we shouldn't get a conclusion (two particular premises), and if we treat 'most' like 'all', we can get a much stronger conclusion (since we could get a universal conclusion), but what we find is that we can get a conclusion, just not a universal one. There's a reason why syllogistic primarily focuses on universal and particular quantity, because these are special in several ways. If we look at distribution, for instance, they both have nice, clean distribution rules associated with quantity: universal propositions distribute the subject, particular propositions don't. If we try to pin down the distribution rule for 'most', we get something more like (this is only approximate, since it depends on some assumptions about how distribution works): the subject term is distributed when, and only when, the subject term is the minor term (or would be the minor term if the conclusion were converted). In short, you can't tell how the quantity works until you know the role of the proposition in the argument. That's a much messier rule. But it's also notable that we can, in fact, give a distribution rule, and, despite its greater messiness, it is one that is practically useful in real argumentative contexts. Similar issues come up when we look at other logical properties.

Plurative modal operators would be modal operators that correspond to plurative quantifiers -- they are about what happens in most (or few) possible worlds, if we use a possible world framework. We can take any kind of Box and 'plurativize' it. The most obvious cases are with temporal modalities, since in ordinary English we often use words that correspond to plurative temporal operators: most of the time, usually, often, almost always. But we can do it with other cases as well, without any real difficulty, even though we don't always have straightforward English terms for them all. Not only is there 'necessary', there is 'nearly necessary'; not only is there 'everywhere', there is 'most places' or 'almost everywhere'; not only is there 'obligatory', there is 'nearly obligatory' or 'usually to be done'. And the same sort of thing can be done from the other side, strengthening weak modalities that correspond to 'some' or 'at least one' so that they correspond to 'at least a few'.

Links of Interest

* John Lawless, Against Acceptance Theories of Social Norms (PDF)

* John Plaice, Pierre Louis Maupertuis and the Principle of Least Action, at "Fiat Lux"

* David M. Berry, Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of "Plate Glass Universities, at "Stunlaw"

* Takuya Niikawa, Consciousness Aesthetics (PDF)

* Estrada González Luis & Romero Rodríguez Christian, How we learned to stop worrying and love tonk (PDF)

* John Hawks, How archaeologists are missing Pleistocene cultures

* Nirmalya Kajuri, An Ode to the Spherical Cow, at "The Spacetime Beat"

Currently Reading

In Book

Maurice Leblanc, The Confessions of Arsene Lupin
Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England
Frank M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion
Brian Kemple, Linguistic Signification
Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest

In Audiobook

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire
Jim Butcher, Storm Front
Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness

Dashed Off XX

This starts the notebook that was begun in April 2024.

 ******

Morality is not a monolith, and has aspects both absolute and relative, the former making the latter possible.

Unfortunately we live in a time in which a man must be wrong often in order to be right enough.

'Day after day sharpens our thoughts, and night after night increases knowledge.'

Our faith is a testimony, a promise, and an inheritance.

Discussion of the sacrament of orders should begin with the apostles, who are the true fullness of order, then to the bishops as successors and vicars of the apostles, constituting particular churches, then priests and deacons who assist the bishops. This (1) clarifies the institution; (2) recognizes the primacy of bishops and their role in the Church qua apostolic; (3) clarifies the sense in which the three grades are distinct sacraments yet the same sacrament; (4) recognizes the permanent role of the Twelve and the relation of bishops to them.

temple-service order
-- proper & per se: apostles
-- -- derivatively
-- -- -- -- vicarious & participated: bishops
-- -- -- -- participatory
-- -- -- -- -- -- representative: priests
-- -- -- -- -- -- assistant: deacons
-- -- -- -- -- -- co-assistant: minor orders

kinds of poetic culture
(1) courtly makers
(2) popular songsters
(3) hymnodists
(4) bohemians
(5) academics/workshopists
(6) dabblers

Both Kelsen and Hart give accounts of law in which law mostly regulates and organizes officials' coercion of the people.

No one can be an official unless we already know what laws are 'legally valid'.

Reason is always one of the sources of law.

The law on a question is never settled on the basis of legally binding sources alone. Law jiggles; people are always fiddling with it in both interpretation and application, regardless of what the sources say.

Hart's criticism of Fuller shows that he doesn't understand what morality is, and has never properly considered what gives rise to legal ethics. (He also exaggerates the extent that Fuller's principles are directly required by efficacy or purposiveness in themselves, because he is in fact implicitly assuming that law requires more than bare efficiency for any kind of purpose. This is the strength of Fuller's position -- legal efficacy for legal purposes does in fact require going beyond bare purposiveness.)

In every form of ethics, tehre are kinds of efficacy conditions that are moral ideals.

Significant portions of law exist to facilitate and protect ethical practices of judges, lawyers, and officials.

"Ritual is poetry in the world of acts." Ross Nichols

Not everything knowable exists before it is known.

(1) Entia rationis are objects of thought whose being consist wholly in being objects of thought.
(2) Suppose no entia rationis exist. Either you know what is thereby said not to exist, or you do not.
(3) If you do not, then the supposition cannot stand.
(4) If you do, then the supposition is that objects of thought existing wholly as objects of thought do not exist when they are objects of thought.

We do not merely use concepts; we stretch them in using them.

There is great value in some of what is derided as 'picture book phenomenology'.

As soon as we can think, we are already in a world much larger than ourselves.

People sometimes say that two things are contradictory when in reality it is only that their minds are too small to relate them.

Human responsibility is a reflection of divine providence into the imperfect human person.

A key theme in many folktales is the small thing that is really large. This is flexibly used:
(a) the physically small that is physically large (ship in pocket)
(b) the physically small that is figuratively large (the help of the mouse)
(c) the figuratively small that is physically large (the troll, ogre, giant)
(d) the figuratively small that is figuratively large (the hero).

[1] Many things are clarified by striving to approximate a 'God's-eye view'.
[2] This is most naturally explained by there being something like a God's-eye view.

The lack of bottle in a bottle is part of what makes it a bottle.

We usually associate 'interests' with life or the capacity for spontaneous action, but even a knife has something analogous, in that there are things bad for a knife being a knife.

The teleology of an artifact is an extension of the teleology of a living thing.

Many fairy tales make use of the principles of a favor economy, because of its amplifying effect -- a small action of help on my part may solve a massive problem for another, which may result in later receiving a favor that is big for me. (Fairy tales also sometimes explore pathologies of this, e.g., putting oneself in a debt one shouldn't by accepting a favor ill-advisedly, or giving careless favors that put on in a vulnerable position. They also sometimes look at the scenarios on the other side, of failing to do favors for others, as well as negotiations over favors.)

existence qua esse vs existence qua ex alio sistere

In terms of what Biblical scholarship can actually study, the Bible is like a large family of musical performances, from which Biblical scholars derive s a score. These 'performances'  are the actual texts in the manuscript traditions, and they have individual 'artistic variation', and are even played on different 'instruments' -- Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and so forth. Of these 'performances', some are more central in terms of their intrinsic attributes and some are more prominent in their external influence. However, Biblical scholars have a tendency to posit a foundational text to which they do not have actual acess, and which, given how different texts were put together at different times and in different contexts, could nto have existed at all, and rather than treating this as merely a type in a typological classification, hypothesize about it as if it were history.

integral richness as a mark of understanding

Every human being naturally builds an 'imaginative realm', each depending on the imaginative capacities and habits of the person; and one of the  most difficult aspects of moral life is disciplining and organizing this imaginative realm so as not to make oneself unnecessarily vulnerable to temptation.

aphorisms as means of thenching

"An enlightened king concentrates on expressing virtue, thus the four barbarians submit to his rule. Thus by propagating virtue one can make those distant submit. What need is there to rely on expanding territory?" Shi Zimei

"The government of the noble causes men to submit with their bodies. The government of the sage causes men to submit with their minds." Huang Shigong

Kant's categories as modes of similitude

In holy orders, the ordained receives consecration to an angelic ministry, (cf. Chrysostom, On the Priesthood 1.3c4; also the letters in Rev), a juridical title in the divine court for graces of help in this ministry, and a holy seal in conformation to Christ as High Priest and King of Angels. They also receive a general mission which is to be specified by jurisdiction, as well as the special patronage of the Holy Virgin as Queen of Heaven.

The Queenship of Mary consists in that her ministry as Mother of Christ does not cease at death.

Augustine on order: "a disposition given his own place to each one of those being equal and unequal" (Civ Dei 1.19 c 13 n1).

The sacramental character seals an interior covenant.

the enceinte of a doctrine
doctrinal development by concentric fortification of principle

Acceptively, God exists as a social entity, and this is true even if (like an atheist) one regards Him as a social fiction. But we tend not to think much about God's existence as a social entity.

The matter of matrimony is the passive contract, which is what is given, and the form of matrimony is the active contract, and thus the mutual giving.

The mutual consent expressed in words in matrimony is the efficient cause; the nature of matrimony is the mutual consent formalized as contractual bond. Thus the sacrament is permanent, not transient.

The priest in matrimony is the minister not of the sacrament itself but of the Church's recognition and benediction.

All genuine marriages are 'sacraments of nature' and have a natural sacredness as instituted by God, being the locus of the humanly appropriate survival of humanity, and foreshadonwing union with the divine (albeit confusedly).

It seems likely that marriage between Christian and unbeliever, if done properly according to the Church, should be seen as a minor sacrament (saramental), even though not as a major sacrament, for the baptized believer.

'Civil marriage' is in some sense a misnomer; it is natural marriage, and the civil power has only authority insofar as is involved in its being part of the civil religion or piety or in its having publicity as a contract.

The primary difficulty with iterated deontic operators is maintaining consistent interpretation.

Identity is a way of thinking about entity.

Being has its first principle in God, and so does distinction; being and distinction alike imitate God.

"The dynamism of our mind proceeds necessarily beyond every finite object, beyond the sum of all possible finite objects, towards the infinite itself." Emerich Coreth
"Every finite being stands in a fundamental relation to the absolute being of God. When we render this relation explicit, we may derive from it a proof of God's existence. Thus demonstrations of God are possible from the finalistic order and harmony of the world, from the finite subject-object relation, hence also from the ontic truth and goodness of being, further from the absolute nature of moral obligation, from the transcendence of human society and history, from the religious experience both of the individual and of humanity as a whole, and so on."

Being is the instigator and object of wondering.

"In a generalized sense, a horizon is specified by two poles, one objective and the other subjective, with each pole conditioning the other. Hence, the objective pole is taken, not materially, but like the formal object *sub ratione sub qua attingitur* (under the aspect whih the activity specifically regards); similarly the subjective pole is considered, not materially, but in its relation to the objective pole." Lonergan

Our capability for the sublime is itself sublime.

A pope who teaches something explicitly as an innovation is by definition not teaching it as the successor of St. Peter.

Merit by its nature involves a note of incompleteness and probation.

There is almost always more than one possible strategy.

co-prayer as a central component of the communion of saints (prayer with and prayer for)

Nothing is as contagious as confusion.

James Chastek on baptism of vicarious desire (JT 4/17/24)
Given: At least some unborn humans are persons.
(1) People have rational souls and so are ordered to the beatific vision.
(2) Where there is order to beatitude, something is responsible for attaining this beatitude by its proper means, which in the ease of beatitude is baptism or some intentional act with the force of baptism.
(3) For the young, the parent is responsible.
(4) One cannot be responsible for doing something that cannot be done.
(5) Since baptism of the unborn is impossible, the parent must be capable of, and responsible for, some intentional act with the force of baptism.

The unborn in a Christian family are within the enclosure of the domestic church. Welcoming into the domestic church begins well before birth, being virtually present in the marital sacrament itself.

Lived experience is susceptible to critique for the same reasons lived action is.

topology as a sort of algebra of measurables

Metaphysics begins with being even before any affirmation or negation, being as the precondition for any affirmation and negation.

"...those objects are metaphysical which have the absolute properties of generality and necessity." Marechal
"We do not really overcome an error until we can point to a contradiction."
"Every error contains a part of the truth."
"The conditions of possibility which determine the essential structure of the object of thought a priori are precisely what we term 'faculties of knowledge'."
"In every object of thought, whatever it may be, we affirm absolute being implicitly and contingent being explicitly. Outside of this simultaneous dual affirmation there is no possibility of objective thought."

being as presupposed in inquiry, as constitutive of the object of inquiry, as regulative of the imquiry, as that to which the inquiry tends

the history of philosophy itself as intrinsically a dialectical, rhapsodic, eclectic interaction of minds

Every error relates to truth
(1) as including (presupposed by) truth
(2) as included in (corrected within) truth
(3) as resembling truth.
These interact and come apart in various interesting ways.

Being we discover both phenomenally and noumenally.

two moments of transcendental method (Muck)
(1) retorsive -- shows the necessary ground of object of thought and knowledge of it
(2) operative (act-analytical) -- shows the structure of the act whereby the object of thought is known

Potential being and counterfactual possibility are inherent in the very concept and nature of experimentation.

To Muck's two moments of transcendental method we should perhaps add a solutive or illuminative moment where one uses the retorsive and operative results to solve or reduce problems, or possible problems.

Method begins not with pure abstract consideration but with purported successes and diagnosis or analysis of them as successes.

experiment --> ensemble --> analytical formulas --> laws of nature --> cosmos

You can't form a method without already knowing how to succeed, at least in principle.

science as structured not by a method but by a system for creating methods

imaginative association as a symbol of intellectual reasoning

Somehow human beings never seem to learn that politics is not puppetry.

To fight requires anticipating the future.

rule in claim, rule in name, rule in domain

Particular injustices can be observed; systemic injustice must be inferred by reasoning.

catechetical similes

There's a Smile on the Fruit, and a Smile on the Flower

 The Gladness of Nature
by William Cullen Bryant 

 Is this a time to be cloudy and sad,
When our mother Nature laughs around;
When even the deep blue heavens look glad,
And gladness breathes from the blossoming ground? 

 There are notes of joy from the hang-bird and wren, 
And the gossip of swallows through all the sky;
The ground-squirrel gayly chirps by his den,
And the wilding bee hums merrily by. 

 The clouds are at play in the azure space,
And their shadows at play on the bright green vale,
And here they stretch to the frolic chase,
And there they roll on the easy gale. 

 There's a dance of leaves in that aspen bower,
There's a titter of winds in that beechen tree,
There's a smile on the fruit, and a smile on the flower,
And a laugh from the brook that runs to the sea. 

 And look at the broad-faced sun, how he smiles
On the dewy earth that smiles in his ray,
On the leaping waters and gay young isles;
Ay, look, and he'll smile thy gloom away.

Last of the Fathers

 Today was the feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Doctor of the Church. From a letter to the Cardinal Deacon Peter:

From this blindness, then, it follows that we frequently love and approve that which is not for that which is; since while we are in this body we are wandering from Him who is the Fulness of Existence. And what is man, O God, except that Thou hast taken knowledge of Him? If the knowledge of God is the cause that man is anything, the want of this makes him nothing. But He who calls those things which are not as though they were, pitying those reduced in a manner to nothing, and not yet able to contemplate in its reality, and to embrace by love that hidden manna, concerning which the Apostle says: Your life is hidden with Christ in God (Cor. iii. 3). But in the meantime He has given us to taste it by faith and to seek for by strong desire. By these two we are brought for the second time from not being, to begin to be that His (new) creature, which one day shall pass into a perfect man, into the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. That, without doubt, shall take place, when righteousness shall be turned into judgment, that is, faith into knowledge, the righteousness which is of faith into the righteousness of full knowledge, and also the hope of this state of exile shall be changed into the fulness of love. For if faith and love begin during the exile, knowledge and love render perfect those in the Presence of God. For as faith leads to full knowledge, so hope leads to perfect love, and, as it is said, If ye will not believe ye shall not understand (Is. vii. 9, acc. to lxx.), so it may equally be said with fitness, if you have not hoped, you will not perfectly love. Knowledge then is the fruit of faith, perfect charity of hope. In the meantime the just lives by faith (Hab. ii. 4), but he is not happy except by knowledge; and he aspires towards God as the hart desires the water-brooks; but the blessed drinks with joy from the fountain of the Saviour, that is, he delights in the fulness of love.

Method and Common Sense

 I've recently needed a new pair of eyeglasses. My glass lenses had been (very slightly) scratched a while ago, and what this ultimately began leading to was for the protective film on the lens to begin a slow process of infinitesimal flaking and cracking. Because the process was so slow, it wasn't generally noticeable. However, not long ago I was finding myself a bit bothered as to how my lenses were catching the light, and I remembered that I had an old pair of back-up glasses from a previous prescription and dug them out to see how they would work, and it was extraordinary. I had been seeing through what was effectively a cloud; now, everything was much clearer.

The interesting thing, of course, is that the prescription on the back-up glasses is an older, less adequate prescription. The lenses I had been using are a somewhat better fit for my eyes than these older glasses, and under very specific circumstances (the lighting just right) this can be seen. But in general, the cloudiness created by the deterioration of the lenses makes the better-prescription glasses worse than the glasses with a less adequate prescription.

This strikes me as an analogy for how methods of inquiry often work in practice. Just as the more defective lenses with more adequate prescription can be less effective than the less defective lenses with less adequate prescription, so too a more adequate method that is used in a way involving inadequate understanding can be worse than a less adequate method that is used with good understanding. In fact, I think that, when people talk about 'common sense' in arguing and reasoning, they are often talking about this phenomenon. A method might be very powerful, but used badly might be worse than a much simpler, more modest method used well. Many people obviously go wrong by applying methods they only poorly understand, and in many fields you get people who develop elaborate structures on sophisticated methods that are less adequate than simpler structures built on less sophisticated methods, even where the methods used in the elaborate case are, considered in themselves, better methods. 

There are obvious constraints about how this would work, some of which can be seen in the analogy. For instance, it's obvious that one reason you can have this result in the eyeglass case is that the eyeglasses are doing the same thing and have the same purpose, so they can be directly compared. In appealing to 'common sense', people sometimes err by directly comparing things that in fact have different ends in inquiry; this is not an error exclusive to common sense (people do it with massively more sophisticated and expertise-requiring methods, as well), but it's a possible error that has to be kept in mind.

Another condition is that we are dealing with a matter in which approximation, in a broad sense, can be practically useful. That is, in fact, what we are talking about, really; lacking a perfectly understood perfect method, we are comparing methods that have imperfections, or at least limitations, and that are therefore already might not be adequate for high-precision, high-accuracy work. Neither the defective better-prescription glasses nor the effective worse-prescription glasses get me out of having to get an eye exam and new glasses; it's just that in comparing these two glasses, neither of which is perfect, the unclouded weaker prescription is an improvement over the clouded better prescription. Likewise with methods of argument and reasoning.

A third condition is that the difference cannot be very extreme, as measured by its relation to the end in view. Obviously glasses that are so scratched up nothing can be seen are bad glasses whatever the prescription; obviously glasses whose prescription is so off that they are useless are bad glasses whatever the condition of the glasses themselves. As we approach either, we are getting worse; it's just that the approach to each is distinct, and therefore one is not always worse than the other. Of course, if you have a method used with complete incompetence, it does not matter how good the method itself is; and if you have a method too simplistic to get even in the neighborhood of the right kind of answer, it does not matter how competently you use it. Examples of failures on each score are easy to find in almost any intellectual field; you can go on internet forums and find examples of each with remarkably little difficulty. How things go down in between these is the more interesting and less straightforward matter.

Nonetheless, these conditions are not especially difficult to achieve. There are lots of intellectual situations in which you will get farther with a simpler approach than a more adequate approach, as long as the simpler approach is still adequate enough, simply because the simpler approach is less 'in the way' and fiddly than the more adequate approach. Sophisticated methods often come with the weakness of having hidden restrictions, hidden limitations, hidden assumptions that have to be satisfied, like cracks and flakes in the protective coating of a lens, which cannot really be seen but make the whole thing give a clouded result -- and, indeed, the clouded result might not even usually be noticeable despite always being there. How many analytic philosophers have gone wrong simply by mistranslating things into and out of the predicate calculus, making mistakes they would have avoided entirely just by using basic syllogisms or natural-language rules of thumb? More than a few. This is not an indictment of the best methods of analysis used well; but the best methods of analysis can in various ways be harder to use well than simpler methods that will get you close enough. What's more, even in using the stronger method, you might need to check your results using the weaker method; this is a common thing in fields like mathematics, and there have been times, like the early development of the calculus, when entire subfields operated entirely under this regime of always checking the more powerful and precise approach by looser or less rigorous or more approximate means.

The Heat Is Like Some Drowsy Drug

 Reverie in August
by Clark Ashton Smith

The heat is like some drowsy drug
Laden with honey-foundered dreams. . . .
Again the pagan forest seems
To couch and roof our pagan love, 

 Alone I wait . . . but not alone:
For something of you lingers yet,
Something returns, and subtly tells
Of all the beauty made our own. 

 Across the days that intervene
I breathe the fragrance of your hair,
One with the pine-embalsamed air:
Its warm oblivion covers me. 

 Again some gently murmured word
Lights the great fire in my blood . . .
Till rapture like a singing sun
Is in the riven spirit stirred. 

 And leaning thirstily and fain
On earth and air that burn with drouth,
I find again your pagan mouth --
Half-palpable, like dreams that fade.

Reasonable Self-Love and Just Benevolence

 As human nature is not one simple uniform thing, but a composition of various parts, body, spirit, appetites, particular passions, and affections; for each of which reasonable self-love would lead men to have due regard, and make suitable provision: so society consists of various parts, to which we stand in different respects and relations; and just benevolence would as surely lead us to have due regard to each of these, and behave as the respective relations require. Reasonable good will, and right behaviour towards our fellow creatures, are in a manner the same: only that the former expresseth the principle as it is in the mind; the latter, the principle as it were, become external, i. e. exerted in actions. 

 And so far as temperance, sobriety, and moderation in sensual pleasures, and the contrary vices, have any respect to our fellow creatures, any influences upon their quiet, welfare, and happiness; as they always have a real, and often a near, influence upon it; so far it is manifest those virtues may be produced by the love of our neighbor, and that the contrary vices would be prevented by it. Indeed, if men's regard to themselves will not restrain them from excess, it may be thought little probable, that their love to others will he sufficient: but the reason is, that their love to other's is not, any more than their regard to themselves, just, and in its due degree. There are, however, manifest instances of persons kept sober and temperate from regard to their affairs, and the welfare of those who depend upon them. And it is obvious to every one, that habitual excess, a dissolute course of life, implies a general neglect of the duties we owe towards our friends, our families, and our country.

Joseph Butler, Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, Sermon XIII, "Upon the Love of Our Neighbour".

Two Poem Drafts

The second one, of course, is a version of a passage from Song of Songs, chapter 6. It occurs to me that the Bannered is arguably the starry host, to go with the White (which we know from elsewhere is a synonym of the moon) and the Hot (which is a synonym of the sun), which gives a nice layer to the passage. The she-goats, ewes, queens, concubines, and virgins could also very well be figures of speech for the starry sky. It's remarkable how much sense you can make of the passage in this way; for instance, the bathing place or 'washing' could very well be the Milky Way, the three similes at the beginning could be a different way of expressing the three celestial similes at the end, etc. And, of course, that interacts interestingly with readings of the Fair One as Israel, the Church, and the soul. Truly the Song of Songs.

About a Poem

Word drew well,
lines sketched cheerfully;
hope painted deftly
hues suitable;--
life sought truly
as, sail slung neatly,
peace sailed dreamily
pure, restless seas.

Like the Many-Bannered

Bright are you, my nearest,
like the Delightful Place,
comely like the Peaceful Place,
sublime like the Many-Bannered!

Remove from me your presence,
for it overwhelms:--
your hair like a flock of she-goats
capering from the empty place;
your teeth like a flock of ewes,
springing up from the Bathing Place,
each one twin-bearing and none barren;
your temple like a pomegranate slice
behind your veil.
Sixty are the queens
and eighty the concubines,
with virgins numberless,
but one is my dove,
one my perfect one,
she of her mother,
she the pure one of the one who bore her.
The daughters saw her and blessed her;
the queens and concubines praised her.

Who is this leaning out like the dawn,
bright like the White,
pure like the Burning,
sublime like the Many-Bannered?

Nor Never Spell Their 'Taters with a P

 Sonnet Wrote on the Fly-Leaf of My Grammar Durin' School Hours
by Nixon Waterman

O Education! Maybe thou art all
 Our teachers tell us, but just let me say
 That if my folks wouldst let me have my way,
 From early Spring till frost comes in the Fall
 I 'dst be outdoors, you bet! a-playin' ball
 Or otherwise enjoyin' each fine day. 

 It seem'st a shame for boys to have to stay
Like culprits shut in by a prison wall!
 I guess if you get rich folks wilt not care
 If you don'tst know your grammar to a T,
For baby boys, you'llst find 'most everywhere,
Art named for uncles who hast money, see?
Though they hain'tst got no learnin' they canst spare
Nor never spell their 'taters with a p.

Dashed Off XIX

This completes the notebook that was finished in April 2024.

**** 

In myths the world is less personified than not depersonified.

Texts detached from communities are mere residues.

Reactive attitudes are
(a) formats of communication or address
(b) in the action of one moral person (A) to another (B)
(c) on the basis of how (A) classifies the actions of (B)
(d) in light of expectation or demand for good relations between (A) and (B) in community.
-- Sometimes the structure attributed to reactive attitudes is nto A to B but A to B on behalf of C
personal: A to B on behalf of A
vicarious: A to B on behalf of B or C
self-reaction: A to A on behalf of A
Perhaps we should actually distinguish direct and indirect reactive attitudes.
-- the issue of 'A to B in light of abstract commitment'. Perhaps 'personal investment', 'abstract commitment', and 'behalf of another'.
-- Hieronymi: "a reactive attitude is x's reaction to x's perception of or beliefs about the quality of y's will toward z. In the impersonal reactive attitudes, x, y, and z are different persons. In the case of the personal reactive attitudes, teh same person stands in for x and z. In the case of self-directed attitudes, the same person stands in for x and y."
-- Strawson: "Just as there are personal and vicarious reactive attitudes associated with demans on others for oneself and demands on others for others, so there are self-reactive attitudes associated with demans on oneself for others."

Olivi's seven affects proclaiming free choice (from his commentary on the Sentences)
(1) affectus zeli et misericordiae
(2) affectus gloriationis et erubescentiae
(3) affectus amicitiae et inimicitiae
(4) affects ingratitudinis et gratitudinis
(5) affectus subjectionis seu reverentiae et dominationis seu liberatis invictae et beatae
(6) affectus spei et diffidentiae
(7) affectus timoris et sollicitudinis
-- The essential idea is that reasonable people do not assume these affect against evils performed by what does not have 'the free use of reason'. If we had no free will, these affects would require assuming falsehoods. But it is inexplicable, even impossible, for all these affects to be based entirely on such falsehoods. Each of these is a recognition of reason qua free; the best explanation for such a recognition is that reason can be reason qua free; the only explanation for so many different such recognitions is that there is free use of reason.

Human commitment to participation in ordinary interpersonal relationships is too thoroughgoing and deeply rooted for us consistently to accept a general theoretical commitment that suggests that these ordinary interpersonal relationships are unreasonable or falsely grounded.

We are natural persons who must grow into being persons, and on the process of doing so give ourselves artificial personhoods. We are potential persons developing as person by way of making ourselves persons.

faith : reason :: reason : passion

the material as that which requires something else to be intelligible

"The humble man no longer presumes to determine where he stands; he leaves it to God." Dietrich von Hildebrand
"The most perfect state or nation cannot glorify God as much as a perfect marriage."

The quality of any afterfaith depends on the quality fo the faith.

Legal systems arise naturally even if we assume that all particular laws are artificial.

"Perhaps every new learning makes room for itself by creating a new ignorance." C. S. Lewis

communion : eucharist :: satisfaction : penance

Christ is present in the eucharist as agent, as object, and as res -- agentially, objectively, and really/substantially.

Kant's Analogies of Experience as ways of thinking about the unity fo the world through unities of experience

formats of sacramental confession
(1) public general: used only for emergencies (e.g., immanent death)
(2) public personal: most common in ancient church
(3) private
formats of sacramental satisfaction
(1) public: order of penitents
(2) public: personal
(3) private: penitential pilgrimage
(4) private: vow
(5) private: prayer

spacetime as a symbol of providence

A 'moral cause' is that which gives reason to the 'physical cause'.

Human beings form legal systems because human reason already has the features that we externalize into legal systems.

Cognitive tool use is even more natural to us than physical tool use.

The sacramental character is a title to further grace, related to the exercise of priestly office. Thi sis true also of the covenantal bond in the Old Testament sacrifices and in matrimony.

physical causality
--- dispositive
--- perfective
moral causality
--- dispositive
--- --- precative
--- --- meritorious
--- --- juridical
--- perfective ?
occasional causality

teaching as shared light

Commands and counsels are instrumental dispositive moral causes.

J. Hogan's laws of ornament (Am. Eccl. Rev. vol 24, pp. 474ff)
(1) unity: The same style of decoration should be used throughout.
(2) subordination: Ornament should be appropriate to utility, place, and structure
(3) measure and proportion: There must be proportion of size and pattern between what adorns and what is adorned.
(4) treatment: The imitative forms of adornment should be conventionalized.

representing heraldic tinctures:
Aurum puncta notant
Argentum absentia signi
Linea staris rubeum
Caeruleumque jacens
Descendit virida in loerani
qua purpura surgit
cumque jacens stanti linea mixta nigrum est.

the three primaries of knowledge:
(1) fact: existing thinking subject
(2) principle: noncontradiction
(3) condition: intellectual aptitude for truth

"The mind while we are in this present life, whether it contemplate, meditate, deliberate, or howsoever exercise itself, worketh nothing without continual recourse to imagination, the only storehouse of wit and peculiar chair of memory." Hooker

Human narratives consist of oppositions and resolutions of oppositions.

farce as an insulation from terror

opificium --> officium (work-doing)

A certain pragmatism is required for heroism.

To consider: Any general condition on means of verifying certain propositions can ground a modality. For example, we can verfiy at a place, or a time, or with respect to a fiction, et.
-- In other words: verification and modality are related.

Some things are justified and yet can still be bad habits to let yourself get into.

ius = quod iustum est = ipsam reme iustam = dikaion

ius vs ius specified genitively vs ius specified datively

ius: 'a kind of moral facultas which anyone has concerning his own rem or a rem due to him'

"What the law of nature obliges to an end, ius gives to the means." Wolff

what is due us so as to be our own

Every right presupposes a standard of reason.

Eternal Life, Christian Liberty, and the Pursuit of Beatitude

Pontifex Maximus
-- Foundation of Collegium Ponificium is attributed to Numa Pompilius (Kingdom of Rome) as advisors to the rex in matters of religion. It was headed by the Pont. Max.
-- In Roman Republic a rex sacrorum was appointed the college to perform functions previously performed by the rex; he was deliberately restricted from actual political office and subordinated to Pont. Max. The Pont. Max., on the other hand, was a political office.
-- Julius Caesar became a pontifex in 73 BC and was made Pont. Max. in 63 BC (hence the Julian calendar).
-- The purpose of the Collegium was to maintain pax deorum. Most authority was invested in Pont. Max., with other pontiffs forming his consilium; the Pont. Max. specifically administered the just divinum: regulation of calendar and ceremonies, consecration of places and objects, regulation of burials, marriages, adoptions, inheritances. The Collegium also kept the archives of the state.
-- Marcus Aemilius Lepidus becomes Pont. Max. in 44 BC with death of Julius Caesar, and holds the post until 13 BC, after which he is succeeded by Augustus Caesar.; the title began to be an imperial title. In the Third Century, with co-rulers, there could be more than one Pont. Max.
-- Gratian is the last emperor to use the title, relinquishing it between 376 and 383.
-- Theodosius in 380, making Christianity the official religion of the empire, designates Damasus as pontifex (Peter of Alexandria he designates as episcopus). Leo is sometimes said to be the first to use the title of himself.
-- The official title today is Summus Pontifex Ecclesiae Universalist; but Pontifex Maximus is often still used customarily and in inscriptions.
-- the first Pontifex Maximus is by tradition Numa Marcius, advisor to Numa Pompilius; our list has a gap for the rest of the Kingdom and is patchy for the Republi.

It is custom that makes constitutional law, law.

Good custom has the authority of reason as well as the people.

"The food of the mind is ever accumulating, while its digestive power remains as it was." T. H. Green
"A great part of the discipline of life rises simply from its slowness. The long years of patient waiting and silent labour, the struggle with listlessness and pain, the loss of time by illness, the hope deferred, the doubt that lays hold on delay -- these are the tests of that pertinacity in man which is but a step below heroism."
"Man reads back into himself, so to speak, the distinctions which have issued from him, and which he finds in language. In this retranslation, he changes the fluidity which belongs to them in language, where they represent ever-shifting attitudes of thought and perpetually cross each other, for the fixedness of separate things. He has suffered and said 'I feel'; has contrived means to escape his suffering, and said 'I think'; but it has been the 'I' that has felt as well as thought, and has thought in its feeling."
"It is the true nemesis of human life that any spiritual impulse, not accompanied by clear comprehensive thought, is enslaved by its own realisation."

false titles
--- (1) titulus fictus
--- --- --- (a) not granted
--- --- --- (b) not granted for relevant case, place, time, or person
--- (2) titulus coloratus
--- --- --- (a) defect in grantor (e.g.,, if authorization has unknowingly lapsed)
--- --- --- (b) defect in grantee (e.g., if there is an unknown impediment)
--- --- --- (c) defect in concession (e.g., if obtained incorrectly)
--- (3) titulus simpliciter nullus
--- --- --- (a) grantor had no right to grant
--- --- --- (b) grant is manifestly defective in itself
[Titulus coloratus may suffice for jurisdition or other relevant authority if (a) there is relevant common error on the point or (b) the defect is curable, at least in principle. If the common error is common enough, or necessity intervenes, titulus fictus may also suffice.]

We human beings are often our own punishment.

thought experiments in analytic philosophy
(1) hypothetical instantiations
(2) idealizations
(3) what-if narratives
(4) allegorical fables (philosophical myths)
-- All of these require different kinds of analysis.
-- Analytic philosophers often have eccentric or even idiosyncratic visions about how to draw the lines -- e.g., many thought experiments in metaphysics are really (4) but analytic philosophers rarely treat them as such.

capacity to be and the boundedness of being (as measured by restriction among possible worlds to which it pertains, interpretating possible worlds in all its alethic-metaphysial ways -- times, locations, possibilities)

"It must be remembered that no art lives by *nature*, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these ar enot made it ceases to exist." C. S. Lewis

"Affirmation and denial is very often the expression of testimony, which is a different act of the mind and ought to be distinguished from judgment." Reid

Every religion seems to involve a system of courtesies.

fictions in which we are invested vs those in which we are not invested

to 'rekindle hearts in a world that grows chill'

"There are attitudes in man which disclose quite clearly the cahracter of his earthly situation as being a *status viae*. Such are questioning, longing, and hope." Dietrich von Hildebrand
"Philosophy implies a *wondering* about its object. In philosophy one 'wakes up' in a special way. When a man embarks upon a philosophical analysis of the world, he begins to stare at the world in wonder, instead of taking it for granted."

'listening acts' corresponding to speech acts

When we contemplate, we are as it were infused with what we contemplate.

transconsiderational identity of objects

All fictions have roots in reality.

(1) For a given Box and Diamond, not everything can be nonBoxish.
(2) Every Boxish thing is either fundamental or relative to more encompassingly Boxish things.
(3) There is a most fundamental kind of Box.
(4) Therefore there is a fundamental kind of Boxish thing.

the Holy See as an inheritor of Roman civil and tribal religion
(1) by supereminence
(2) by reception as Pontifex Maximus and as Bishop of Old Rome
(3) by long practical possession

insights as droplets and drops

In the right context, everyone is a dramatic personality.

A 'state of affairs' is an arbitrary slice of 'affairs', i.e., of actions and passions.

Every social act can be (in principle) done on another's behalf.

"Hoc nomen persona significat substantiam particularem, prout subjicitur proprietate quae sonat dignitatem." Aquinas (Sent 1.23.1.1 co)

"Persona de sui ratione dicit suppositum distinctum proprietate and dignitatem pertinente." Bonaventure (Sent 1.23.1.1 co)

"Unus enim homo ex natura sua non ordinatur ad alterius sicut ad finem." Aquinas (Sent 2.44.1.3 ad 1)
"Natura omnes hoimes aequalis in liberate fecit." (Sent 2.44.1.3 ad 1)
"Dignitas significat bonitatem alicuius propter seipsam." (Sent 3.35.1.4A co)

All talk of possibility is a way of talking about the actual.

due process and legal courtesy as grounded in jural dignity

Gricean theory seems to work best for answers to questions, because answering a question is a case in which something like the cooperative principle ("Contribute what is required by the accepted purpose of the conversation") applies. Who does not cooperate, is not answering the question. And in this light the Maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relation, and Manner describe the conditions for answering well. But it fits so well because answers have a specific role within a larger conversational context, where that role is 'called forth' by that context, which sets an end requiring a specific kind of means.

Implicatures are often not completely required, but simply appropriate.

implicatures as often arising out of common patterns of cooperation as much as this particular cooperative context

When people give examples of implicatures, they often do not give sufficient information. The examples often really have uncertain or ambiguous implicatures.

An implicature is what is not said but ought to be understood.

The maxims relevant to implicature can vary depending on the context and kind of cooperation (hence stylishness, politeness, etc.).

What Gricean theory gets right is subordination of linguistic communication to ends; where it errs is in assuming one general and universal end. Sperber and Wilson do the same with less common sense.

One can work out an implicature by inference, and one can work out an implication by inference, but neither implicatur nor implication are inferences.

Figures of speech are not implicatures, but they may implicate; what expressions implicate may also be figurative.

"It is not love of liberty that makes men write Utopias." C. S. Lewis

Christ as archegos, making a multitude of others like himself in nobility and excellence, as an excellent family

The demos is hard to ennoble, but hard to corrupt. Both can be and have been done, however, by slow pressures.

pambasileia
-- The pambasileus has a phronesis so extraordinary that it exceeds that of the rest of the polity, thus making him a ruler that is not part of the city. In fact, he is to the polity as whole to part.
-- Aristotle raises the question of how, given the disparity, it would be possible to live in society with him (cf. Pol 3.19 1284a on the god among men, who can only be recognized by a wholly just society and inevitably is ostracized or executed by a less just polity). How does one shar ein rule with him? How can there be equality of justice between them?

Social facts are structured by reason, which is governed by natural law.

Bugbears should not be multiplied without necessity.

upward and downward transposition of ideas

Be prudent and charitable, and let God do the ecumenism.