Education and Friendship

 Education is like friendship: it brings help, comfort, strength, privilege and success. Friendship is unquentionably profitable. However, you must never value friendship for the profit that it brings. To treat friendship as a means is to lose the capacity for friendship. Your companion is no longer your friend when you begin to weigh him in the balance of advantage. So it is with education: the profit of education persists only so long as you don't pursue it.

[Roger Scruton, Untimely Tracts, Macmillan (Basingstoke, UK: 1987) p. 228.]

Fortnightly Book, August 10

 Due to an overloaded long weekend, I am a bit behind on this, of course.

Up to 813, one notices a progression in LeBlanc's depiction of Arsene Lupin. Lupin gets inreasingly dark, ruthless, and disturbing. He is not merely a brilliant thief; he is a dangerous man. This contrasts with the earliest views we get of him, which is of someone who is more of a trickster, the kind of person who (temporarily) outsmarts a version of Sherlock Holmes by finding a way to lock him in a house overnight at a key point, but thoughtfully supplies a picnic dinner out of both a respect and a desire to tweak his opponent's nose. He begins charming and stylish, in very careful control of his own public relations; he stays stylish, but in The Hollow Needle and 813, he loses control of his public relations, and he becomes much less charming. Some of this is just that the stories become a bit darker and Lupin's difficulties become deeper -- in Arsene Lupin vs Herlock Sholmes, he is playing a game with a clever opponent, but in The Hollow Needle, Lupin has too many clever opponents and cannot outmaneuver them all simultaneously, resulting in tragedy, and in 813, Lupin is in a life-and-death struggle, with all of Europe on the line. He's still very competent, but he doesn't really seem quite the miraculously hypercompetent character of the earlier stories; we find him often anxious or afraid or angry. This varies a lot, but it is certain that he becomes, overall, a darker figure. 

813 was originally intended to bring an end to Lupin, but in returning to him, LeBlanc faced a question of how to return to him. His solution to the problem was not to continue the story onward but to go back in time, and this provided the opportunity to return to the charming and humorously mischievous Lupin of the earlier stories.  We saw this to a limited extent with The Crystal Stopper, but we find it even more in the short stories and novellas written around the same time. These were collected in Les Confidences d'Arsène Lupin, which is usually translated into English as The Confessions of Arsene Lupin. All are set before The Hollow Needle. Most of them were originally published in journals in 1911, before The Crystal Stopper came out, but three were published in 1912 or 1913. When the English translation came out, it also included a short story from 1927. This makes for ten stories:

1. "Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!..."
2. "The Wedding-Ring"
3. "The Sign of the Shadow"
4. "The Infernal Trap"
5. "The Red Silk Scarf"
6. "Shadowed by Death"
7. "A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues"
8. "Lupin's Marriage"
9. "The Invisible Prisoner"
10. "Edith Swan-Neck"

So this will be the next fortnightly book.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo

Introduction

Opening Passage: From the Middle English, as given in Armitage:

Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes,
The tulk that the trammes of tresoun ther wroght
Was tried for his tricherie, the trewest on erthe.
Hit was Ennias the athel and his highe kynde
That sithen depreced provinces, and patrounes bicome
Welneghe of al the wele in the West Iles:
Fro riche Romulus to Rome ricchis hym swythe,
With gret bobbaunce that burghe he biges upon fyrst,
And nevenes hit his aunes nome, as hit now hat;
Tiius to Tuskan, and teldes bigynnes;
Langaberde in Lumbardie lyftes up homes;
And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On mony bonkkes ful brode Bretayn he settes
wyth wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysse and blunder
Ful skete has skyfred synne. (p. 20)

Armitage's translation:

Once the siege and assault of Troy had ceased,
with the city a smoke-heap of cinders and ash,
the traitor who contrived such betrayal there
was tried for his treachery, the truest on earth;
Aeneas, it was, with his noble warriors
who went conquering  abroad, laying claim to the crowns
of the wealthiest kingdoms in the western world.
Mighty Romulus quickly careered towards Rome
and conceived a city in magnifient style
which from then until now has been known by his name.
Ticius constructed townships in Tuscany
and Langobard did likewise building homes in Lombardy.
And further afield, over the Sea of France,
Felix Brutus founds Britain on broad banks
most grand.
And wonder, dread and war
have lingered in that land
where loss and love in turn
have held the upper hand. (p. 21)

Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain (in my edition, the lines are broken oddly, I suspect through not having properly taken into account the initial capital, so I have here corrected them):

When the siege and the assault had ceased at Troy
and the fortress fell in flame to firebrands and ashes
the traitor who the contrivance of treason there fashioned
was tried for his treachery, the most true upon earth --
it was Aeneas the noble and his renowned kindred
who then laid under them lands, and lords became
of well-nigh all the wealth in the Western Isles.
When royal Romulus to Rome his road had taken,
in great pomp and pride he peopled it first,
and named it with his own name that yet now it bears;
Tirius went to Tuscany and towns founded,
Langeberde in Lombardy uplifted halls,
and far over the French flood Felix Brutus
on many a broad bank and brae Britain established
full fair,
when strange things, strife and sadness,
at whiles in the land did fare,
and each other grief and gladness
oft fast have followed there. (p. 17)

From Tolkien's translation of Pearl:

 Pearl of delight that a prince doth please
To grace in gold enclosed so clear,
I vow that from over orient seas
Never proved I any in price her peer.
So round, so radiant ranged by these,
So fine, so smooth did her sides appear
That ever in judging gems that please
Her only alone I deemed as dear.
Alas! I lost her in garden near:
Through grass to the ground from me it shot;
I pine now opporessed by love-wound dear
For that pearl, mine own, without a spot. (p. 94)

From Tolkien's translation of Sir Orfeo:

We often read and written find,
as learned men do us remind,
that lays that now the harpers sing
are wrought of many a marvellous thing.
Some are of weal, and some of woe,
and some do joy and gladness know;
in some are guile and treachery told,
in some the deeds that chanced of old;
some are of jests and ribaldry,
and some are tales of Faerie.
Of all the things that men may heed
'tis most of love they sing indeed. (p. 128)

Summary: It is the custom in King Arthur's court for great feasts to be recognized by adventure: the king will not eat until some wonderful adventure arises. And when the court is at Camelot on Christmas, the Lord's own feast, a great wonder comes to the court. A Green Knight comes to the court with a challenge. It is common for knights to be designated by colors (Red Knight, Black Knight, and so forth), but in this case the color is not merely heraldic. The knight is green of face, and of hair, and of armor, and of steed. The challenge he brings is a stroke-for-stroke. He has a magnificent axe, which one of the court will use to give him a single stroke, from which the Green Knight will not defend himself, and will receive the axe as a prize. And then one year later, at New Year's, the same person will meet the Green Knight at his Green Chapel, and receive a stroke in return, on the same terms. Everyone is a bit taken aback at this game, but when the Green Knight mocks them, for their hesitation, King Arthur rises to meet the challenge. However, Sir Gawain, the king's nephew, asks to do it in his place, and this is accepted. The Green Knight bares his neck, Sir Gawain cuts off his head in a single stroke. But then the Green Knight grabs his head by the hair, remounts his steed, and reminds them all that Sir Gawain is due to receive a similar blow in turn, come New Year's.

After All Hallows', Sir Gawain sets out to find the Green Chapel, and wanders over a great portion of the kingdom searching for it. By Christmas he comes to an excellent and hospitable castle, whose lord and lady welcome him heartily. After celebrating Christmas, Sir Gawain intends to set off again, with three days to go, but the lord tells him that the Green Chapel is less than half a day away, so he can stay until the day appointed. The lord proposes a game in the meantime. At the end of the day, each will give the other whatever they win during the day. Each morning, the lord goes out hunting, and each day he gives Sir Gawain what he gained from the hunt. The lady seems a bit of a hunter, too, since each day she tries to seduce Sir Gawain. Sir Gawain, of course, is the model of knightly courtesy, and in all the legends is known for his extraordinary politeness and gentleness toward women, so despite not being seduced, he goes along with the lady's games without crossing any actual lines. The lady, however, uses his courtesy against him, and uses this to maneuver Sir Gawain each day into a kiss, although he refuses to go further than that. And, every evening he gives the lord of the castle a kiss, thus giving to the lord what he gained during the day. However, as the day approaches, the lady offers him, along with three kisses, a girdle of green and gold which, she claims, will make him immune to the axe stroke. Sir Gawain takes it, and does not give it to the lord as part of the game, returning only the kisses.

On New Year's, Sir Gawain goes to the Green Chapel, where he meets the Green Knight, ready with his axe. Sir Gawain flinches from the first attempt, which is aborted, for which he is mocked by the Green Knight, but insists on going through with the game. The Green Knight tests his nerve with a fake attempt, and when Sir Gawain angrily tells him to do it, the Green Knight delivers his strike, cutting Sir Gawain slightly on the neck. He then tells Sir Gawain that he is the lord of the castle, acting on behalf of Morgan, the sister of King Arthur, and he has been impressed with Sir Gawain. Only one small fault had marred Sir Gawain's extraordinary chivalry: he had kept back the green girdle. Each blow had been a symbol of one of the days of the winnings game, and Sir Gawain only received any wound at all because of the girdle. The Green Knight, whose name is Sir Bertilak, doesn't blame him much for that -- he was, after all, facing likely death -- but Sir Gawain is devastated by his failure. When he returns to court, he manfully tells the truth about his failiure. The court is also not inclined to blame (and as Tolkien points out, there is no greater authority on chivalry than King Arthur's court), but it does not make Sir Gawain feel any better; he will always wear a green girdle as a sash, as a reminder of his failure. In response, the ladies and knights begin wearing green sashes in honor of Sir Gawain.

In some ways, this is a story of penitence. It is because Sir Gawain constantly examines himself and reminds himself of the ideal that he is the greatest exemplar of knighthood. His external temptations aim at what seem to be his strengths -- his courteousness, in particular -- turning them against him, but he manages to navigate the difficult situation. The temptation that actually wounds him is his fear of death, and even then it is an apparently slight failure -- indeed, as everyone else points out, it is nothing but a slight failure. But for Sir Gawain it is cowardice and discourtesy, and he is not wrong, either. He confesses his fault before the chivalrous court, and does satisfaction for it, by the green sash; but his fault repented is itself a badge of honor. 

Tolkien also translates Pearl, which is one of the poems in the same manuscript that preserved Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The narrator has a vision or dream of a queenly and heavenly maiden across a river, who is repeatedly called a pearl. (Some have suggested that the infant's name was the very popular girl's name of Margaret, which means 'Pearl'.) As the poem goes on, we learn that the narrator knows the maiden, but that she had actually died before she was around two years old, and that she is related to him. While it's never strictly said, it is strongly implied that she is his dead infant daughter. The narrator struggles with understanding how an infant who knew neither Creed nor prayer could be made a queen in heaven. In this sense, the poem is about infant baptism, and is perhaps one of the greatest literary discussions of the subject. The dreamer eventually tries to cross the river to join the Pearl in the heavenly city, which he had been forbidden to do, and he awakes.

Sir Orfeo is a completely unconnected work by a completely different author, but it shares with Sir Gawain and Pearl the themes of death and of crossing a boundary into a strange realm; it is, of course, a medieval retelling of the Orpheus story, with Orpheus as a knight rescuing his kidnapped wife from the fairy king. Sir Orfeo, however, has a happier ending than the original Orpheus.

I read Sir Gawain in three versions -- the Armitage translation had both the Middle English and Simon Armitage's translation, and then I also read Tolkien's, of course. They were all quite good. I liked many of Tolkien's translation choices better as a narrative matter, but Armitage's translation mostly does very well at taking a story that uses a difficult set of poetic tools and providing a very readable translation that manages to use a lot of similar poetic tools. I also listened to Armitage's translation in audiobook, which was very nice, at least when I listened at 1.5x (as is sometimes common in audiobooks, the 1x speed is very, very slow; my brain cannot quite slow down that much).

Favorite Passage: My favorite passage has always been the passage in which Sir Gawain's symbol -- the Pentangle on his shield -- is explained. Here is part of it, in the original:

The fyft fyve that I finde that the frek used
Was fraunchyse and felwschyp forbe al thyng;
His clannes and his cortaysye croked were never,
and pite, that passes alle poyntes -- thyse pure fyve
Were harder happed on that hathel then on any other. (p. 64)

In Armitage's translation:

The fifth set of five which I heard the knight followed
included friendship and fraternity with fellow men,
purity and politeness that impressed at all times,
and pity, which surpassed all pointedness. Five things
which meant more to Gawain than to most other men. (p. 65)

In Tolkien's translation:

The fifth five that was used, as I find, by this knight
was free-giving and friendliness first before all,
and chastity and chivalry ever changeless and straight,
and piety surpassing all points: these perfect five
were hasped upon him harder than on any man else. (p. 36)

Recommendation: The original and both translations are Highly Recommended.

****

Simon Armitage (tr.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, W. W. Norton & Company  (New York: 2007).

J. R. R. Tolkien (tr.), Sir Gawan and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo,  Christopher Tolkien, ed., HarperCollins (London: 1975).

Friendship and Trouble

 It is not reasonable to refuse to undertake any honourable task or activity, or to lay it aside once undertaken, in order to avoid trouble. If we are to run away from anxiety, we must run away from virtue, which naturally feels a certain sense of anxiety when it meets things contrary to itself, and finds them hateful and repulsive; as good nature is repelled by ill nature, self-control by excess, courage by cowardixe; similarly one may see that just men are most distressed by instances of injustice, brave men by cowardly behaviour, decently-behaved men by indecency. It is the property of a well-constituted mind to be glad at good things, and to be distressed by the opposite. Therefore, if distress of mind is permissible in a wise man at all (which it surely is, unless we think that human qualities have been altogether uprooted from his mind), what reason is there why we should totally remove friendship from life merely to avoid having to go to some trouble because of it? 

[ Cicero, Laelius: On Friendship, section 47; from Cicero, On Friendship and The Dream of Scipio, Powell, tr. (Oxbow: 2005) p. 51.]

And So I Went to Fairyland

Modern Elfland
by G. K. Chesterton 

 I cut a staff in a churchyard copse,
I clad myself in ragged things,
I set a feather in my cap
That fell out of an angel’s wings. 

 I filled my wallet with white stones,
I took three foxgloves in my hand,
I slung my shoes across my back,
And so I went to fairyland. 

 But lo, within that ancient place
Science had reared her iron crown,
And the great cloud of steam went up
That telleth where she takes a town. 

 But cowled with smoke and starred with lamps,
That strange land’s light was still its own;
The word that witched the woods and hills
Spoke in the iron and the stone. 

 Not Nature’s hand had ever curved
That mute unearthly porter’s spine.
Like sleeping dragon’s sudden eyes
The signals leered along the line. 

 The chimneys thronging crooked or straight
Were fingers signalling the sky;
The dog that strayed across the street
Seemed four-legged by monstrosity. 

 ‘In vain,’ I cried, ‘though you too touch
The new time’s desecrating hand,
Through all the noises of a town
I hear the heart of fairyland.’ 

 I read the name above a door,
Then through my spirit pealed and passed:
‘This is the town of thine own home,
And thou hast looked on it at last.’

Et j'entens de leurs voix le concert admirable

On the Transfiguration of Our Lord
by Laurent Drelincourt

Great God! Am I on Earth, or am I in the Skies?
My heart is transported by a pleasure ineffable.
The Saints, old and new, are present to my eyes
and I hear their voices in concert admirable.

I see, by the millions, the Angels glorious,
and of their Divine King the Person adorable,
whose brilliant robe and radiant brow
efface the Sun's brilliance incomparable.

The Holy Spirit on Jesus seems to me to rest:
The Father in the Son shows his majesty,
and the Son is marked out by the Father's oracle.

But if I contemplate you -- O Monarch of Kings! --
Bloody, disfigured, dying on Calvary,
I admire you much less on Tabor than on the Cross!

My rough translation. Laurent Drelincourt was a seventeenth century Calvinist. He seems to be most famous today for his Marian poems; some early Calvinists had a 'High Christology of Mary' (it was an argument going back to John Calvin that the Catholic view of Mary was too low, although Calvin himself doesn't put a lot of emphasis on this argument). This fell out of favor over time, but Drelincourt is one of the resources modern Reformed theologians go back to when they are trying to reclaim that particular early strand of the Reformed tradition. In any case, many of his other devotional sonnets are quite good.

Our Intellectual Estate and Property

 With all these arts and pursuits of practical life, the intellectual business of thinking -- of such thinking at least as is common to most men -- and of communicating thought, has a sort of affinity and resemblance. For, unquestionably, it is one among the many problems of philosophy to establish a wise economy and prudent stewardship of that ever-shifting mass of incoming and outgoing thoughts which make up our intellectual estate and property. And this is the more necessary, the greater are the treasures of thought possessed by our age. For, in the highly rapid interchange of, and traffic in ideas, which is carrying on, the receipts and disbursements are not always duly balanced, There is much cause, therefore, to fear lest a thoughtless and lavish dissipation of the noblest mental endowments should become prevalent, or a false and baseless credit-system in thought spring up amidst an absolute deficiency of a solid and permanent capital safely invested in fundamental ideas and lasting truths. 

 Friedrich Schlegel, The Philosophy of Life, Lecture I.

Links of Note

 * Francesco Pierini, Inner speech and the phenomenology of poetry (PDF)

* Duncan Richter, Some Remarks of Anscombe's on Faith and Justice: A Note

* Richard Y. Chappell, The Gift of Life, at "Good Thoughts"

* Paul Faulkner, On the Nature of Faith and Its Relation to Trust and Belief (PDF)

* David, Initiating Unscientific Prelude, at "Words Without Knowledge"

* Joseph Heath, Illness is a social construct, at "In Due Course"

* Roberto di Ceglie, Thomas Aquinas and the certainty of hope in relation to faith and charity (PDF)

* Sam Kriss, Against Truth, at "Numb at the Lodge". One of the more amusing things about this article is that it lays a trap for certain kinds of rationalists and utilitarians by deliberately provocative and hyperbolic language aimed at attacking their insularity and brittle sense of superior intelligence and, judging from some of the responses, does so very effectively, as so very many of the responses showed a failure to understand even common figures of speech, like variant uses of the terms 'true' and 'false'. An interesting example of mocking people above their heads.

* Gene Callahan, Gorgias: Plato's Guide to Online Discussions, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Mark Windsor, The Uncanny as Anti-Sublime (PDF)

* Matt Whiteley, What a Squabble Within Academic Poetry Can Tell Us About Our Culture, at "The Isle Is Full of Noises"

* William F. Vallicella, Butchvarov's Paradox of Antirealism and Husserl's Paradox of Human Subjectivity, at "Philosophy in Progress"

Doctors of the Church

 My last Doctors of the Church post was in 2022, shortly after the addition of St. Irenaeus of Lyons, but is now obsolete, since onJuly 31 of this year, Pope Leo XIV approved the decision to declare St. John Henry Newman as a Doctor of the Church. The formal proclamation has not strictly been made yet, but will presumably be made this year; should it be delayed at some point, I will update this post with any corrections, but we might as well add him already.

'Doctor of the Church' is a special, officially given, liturgical title in Rome's Universal Calendar: it indicates (1) saints in the universal calendar who (2) were and are doctors (i.e., theological teachers) and who (3) have left theological writings that (4) are of extraordinary quality and considerable value for the whole community of the faithful. It originally grew up on its own as applied to a small group of especially important theologians (Athanasius, Basil, Nazianzen, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great). It was later conferred on Thomas Aquinas, and shortly afterward, Bonaventure, in order to recognize that these theologians were, in their own ways and according to the formats of their time, teachers of the Church of the same caliber as the prior Doctors of the Church. It has since been extended outward by official recognition of a theologian as being in the same class. Because of (2), it is traditional not to consider martyrs for the title, despite a number of notable theologians in that category who fit all of the other criteria, because 'martyr' is a higher liturgical title than 'doctor' -- martyrs would never be liturgically given a Mass for doctors, only for martyrs, and thus the title would be otiose. (Irenaeus is still a somewhat peculiar quasi-exception; he is sometimes but not always commemorated as a martyr, for reasons that are not very well known.) (3) is likewise rather restrictive; there have been some excellent theologians who don't qualify because we know of their work only indirectly and not from any writings they left (St. Macrina comes immediately to mind). And, of course, there are extraordinarily important theologians who aren't saints on the calendar (Tertullian, Origen, Theodore Abu-Qurra, Leo XIII). 

While the title is, strictly speaking, a liturgical title and an acknowledgement of contribution, it also plays a role as a sort of directory of especially recommended authors for Catholic theology. What follows are various lists in which different kinds of theological periods and overlaps can be observed.

I. By Death Year
(sometimes approximate; year in parentheses is the year they were officially recognized as Doctor of the Church; to show gaps, asterisks indicate approximate length of intervening interval between death years, each asterisk indicating approximately a decade)

202 Irenaeus of Lyons (2022)

****************
368 Hilary of Poitiers (1851)
373 Athanasius
373 Ephrem the Syrian (1920)
379 Basil of Caesarea
387 Cyril of Jerusalem (1883)
390 Gregory Nazianzen
397 Ambrose of Milan
407 John Chrysostom
*
420 Jerome
*
430 Augustine
*
444 Cyril of Alexandria (1883)
450 Peter Chrysologus (1729)
*
461 Leo the Great (1754)
**************
604 Gregory the Great
***
636 Isidore of Seville (1722)
*********
735 Bede (1899)
*
749 John Damascene (1883)
**************************
1003 Gregory of Narek (2015)
******
1072 Peter Damian (1828)
***
1109 Anselm (1720)
****
1153 Bernard of Clairvaux (1830)
*
1179 Hildegard von Bingen (2012)
*****
1231 Anthony of Padua (1946)
****
1274 Thomas Aquinas (1568)
1274 Bonaventure (1588)
1280 Albert the Great (1931)
*********
1379 Catherine of Siena (1970)
*******************
1569 John of Avila (2012)
*
1582 Teresa of Avila (1970)
1591 John of the Cross (1926)
1597 Peter Canisius (1925)
**
1619 Lawrence of Brindisi (1959)
1621 Robert Bellarmine (1931)
1622 Francis de Sales (1877)
****************
1787 Alphonsus Liguori (1871)
**********

1890 John Henry Newman (2025)
1897 Therese of Lisieux (1997)

II. By Birth Year
(often approximate, especially for earlier figures)

130 Irenaeus

****************
293 Athanasius
300 Hilary of Poitiers
306 Ephrem the Syrian
313 Cyril of Jerusalem
*
329 Gregory Nazianzen
330 Basil of Caesarea
337 Ambrose of Milan
*
347 Jerome
349 John Chrysostom
354 Augustine
**
376 Cyril of Alexandria
380 Peter Chrysologus
**
400 Leo I
**************
540 Gregory I
**
560 Isidore of Seville
***********
672 Bede
676 John Damascene
***************************
951 Gregory of Narek
*****
1007 Peter Damian
**
1033 Anselm of Canterbury
*****
1090 Bernard of Clairvaux
1098 Hildegard von Bingen
**********
1195 Anthony of Padua
1206 Albert the Great (although perhaps as early as 1193)
**
1221 Bonaventure
1225 Thomas Aquinas
************
1347 Catherine of Siena
***************
1500 John of Avila
*
1515 Teresa of Avila
1521 Peter Canisius
**
1542 John of the Cross
1542 Robert Bellarmine
*
1559 Lawrence of Brindisi
1567 Francis de Sales
************
1696 Alphonsus Liguori
**********

1801 John Henry Newman

*******
1873 Therese of Lisieux

III. By Year of Recognition

[Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great all received it by organically developed custom]

1568 Thomas Aquinas
**
1588 Bonaventure
*************
1720 Anselm of Canterbury
1722 Isidore of Seville
1729 Peter Chrysologus
**
1754 Leo the Great
*******
1828 Peter Damian
1830 Bernard of Clairvaux
**
1851 Hilary of Poitiers
**
1871 Alphonsus Liguori
1877 Francis de Sales
1883 Cyril of Alexandria, Cyril of Jerusalem, John Damascene
*
1899 Bede
**
1920 Ephrem the Syrian
1925 Peter Canisius
1926 John of the Cross
1931 Albert the Great, Robert Bellarmine
*
1946 Anthony of Padua
*
1959 Lawrence of Brindisi
*
1970 Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila
**
1997 Therese of Lisieux
*
2012 John of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen
2015 Gregory of Narek

2022 Irenaeus of Lyons

2025 John Henry Newman

IV. By Number of Years from Death to Recognition
(Color Code, very rough: Patristic Era, Scholastic Era, Counter-Reformation)

[Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great all received it by organically developed custom]

1820 Irenaeus of Lyons

1547 Ephrem of Syria

1496 Cyril of Jerusalem
1483 Hilary of Poitiers
1439 Cyril of Alexandria

1293 Leo I
1279 Peter Chrysologus

1164 Bede
1134 John Damascene

1086 Isidore of Seville
1012 Gregory of Narek

833 Hildegard of Bingen

756 Peter Damian
715 Anthony of Padua

677 Bernard of Clairvaux
651 Albert the Great
611 Anselm of Canterbury

591 Catherine of Siena

443 John of Avila

388 Teresa of Avila
340 Lawrence of Brindisi
335 John of the Cross
328 Peter Canisius
314 Bonaventure
310 Robert Bellarmine

294 Thomas Aquinas
255 Francis de Sales

135 John Henry Newman

100 Therese of Lisieux

84 Alphonsus Liguori

V. By Papal Reign of Recognition

225. Pius V
Thomas Aquinas

227. Sixtus V
Bonaventure

243. Clement XI
Anselm of Canterbury

244. Innocent XIII
Isidore of Seville

245. Benedict XIII
Peter Chrysologus

247. Benedict XIV
Leo the Great

252. Leo XII
Peter Damian

253. Pius VIII
Bernard of Clairvaux

255. Pius IX
Hilary of Poitiers
Alphonsus Liguori
Francis de Sales

256. Leo XIII
Cyril of Alexandria
Cyril of Jerusalem
John Damascene
Bede

258. Benedict XV
Ephrem the Syrian

259. Pius XI
Peter Canisius
John of the Cross
Albert the Great
Robert Bellarmine

260. Pius XII
Anthony of Padua

261. John XXIII
Lawrence of Brindisi

262. Paul VI
Catherine of Siena
Teresa of Avila

264. John Paul II
Therese of Lisieux

265. Benedict XVI
John of Avila
Hildegard of Bingen

266. Francis I
Gregory of Narek

Irenaeus of Lyons

267. Leo XIV

John Henry Newman

VI. By Date of Feast

[Feast days without asterisks are the feast days on the current Latin calendar, ignoring local variations; feast days with asterisks are the feast days on some Eastern Catholic, usually Byzantine, calendars, where they differ from the Latin feast days. Many of the saints have feast days that are not here listed, due to local calendars or the calendars of religious orders. The number in square brackets is the number of Doctors celebrated in that month on the Roman Calendar.]

January [5]

1 Basil the Great *

2 Gregory Nazianzen

2 Basil the Great

13 Hilary of Poitiers

14 Hilary of Poitiers *

18 Athanasius of Alexandria *

24 Frances de Sales

25 Gregory Nazianzen *

28 Ephrem the Syrian *

28 Thomas Aquinas

February [2]

18 Leo the Great *

21 Peter Damian

27 Gregory of Narek

March [1]

12 Gregory the Great *

18 Cyril of Jerusalem

April [3]

4 Isidore of Seville

21 Anselm of Canterbury

29 Catherine of Siena

May [3]

2 Athanasius of Alexandria

10 John of Avila

25 Bede

27 Bede *

June [4]

9 Ephrem the Syrian

13 Anthony of Padua

15 Augustine *

27 Cyril of Alexandria

28 Irenaeus of Lyons

July [3]

15 Bonaventure

21 Lawrence of Brindisi

30 Peter Chrysologus

August [3]

1 Alphonsus Liguori

20 Bernard of Clairvaux

28 Augustine

23 Irenaeus of Lyons *

September [5]

3 Gregory the Great

13 John Chrysostom

14 John Chrysostom *

17 Hildegard of Bingen

17 Robert Bellarmine

30 Jerome

October [3]

1 Therese of Lisieux

3 Therese of Lisieux *

9 John Henry Newman

15 Teresa of Avila

November [2]

10 Leo the Great

15 Albert the Great

December [4]

4 John Damascene

7 Ambrose of Milan

14 John of the Cross

21 Peter of Canisius

VII. Various Comments

There are thirty-eight Doctors of the Church. Ten are Eastern in origin (Irenaeus, Hilary, Athanasius, Ephrem, Basil, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Alexandria, John Damascene, Gregory of Narek); the rest are Western.

There are three Carmelites (Teresa, John of the Cross, and Therese), two Jesuits (Canisius and Bellarmine), three Dominicans (Thomas, Albert, Catherine (Tertiary)), four Franciscans (Anthony, Bonaventure, Lawrence, Francis de Sales (Tertiary)), one Redemptorist (Liguori), one Oratorian (Newman), and five or six Benedictines (Isidore [maybe], Bede, Anselm, Bernard, Hildegard, Peter Damian).

There are twenty bishops, of whom two were Patriarchs of Rome (Leo, Gregory), two Patriarchs of Alexandria (Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria), two Patriarchs of Constantinople (Nazianzen, Chrysostom), and one Patriarch of Jerusalem (Cyril of Jerusalem). There is no Patriarch of Antioch with the title. There is one deacon (Ephrem). There are four laypersons, all of them women (Hildegard, Catherine, Teresa, Therese), three of whom were nuns (Hildegard, Teresa, Therese). 

The period in which the most Doctors of the Church were added most quickly was the period from 1920 to 1931; in those eleven years, five saints were given the title. The Popes who proclaimed the most saints 'Doctor of the Church' were Leo XIII and Pius XI, with four each.

Wild Lilies Blaze, and Bees Hum Soon and Late

 August
by Lizette Woodworth Reese 

 No wind, no bird. The river flames like brass.
On either side, smitten as with a spell
Of silence, brood the fields. In the deep grass,
Edging the dusty roads, lie as they fell
Handfuls of shriveled leaves from tree and bush.
But 'long the orchard fence and at the gate,
Thrusting their saffron torches through the hush,
Wild lilies blaze, and bees hum soon and late.
Rust-colored the tall straggling brier, not one
Rose left. The spider sets its loom up there
Close to the roots, and spins out in the sun
A silken web from twig to twig. The air
Is full of hot rank scents. Upon the hill
Drifts the noon's single cloud, white, glaring, still.

Dashed Off XVIII

 Supposition is a property of a term relative to another term in a proposition, based on the signification of the term. (Signification is what makes term able to have a role in a proposition.)
In "Running is a participle, Socrates is running, therefore Socrates is a participle", we have a fallacy of four terms, in which the major has 'running' with material supposition and the minor with personal supposition. In "Running is an activity, Socrates is running, therefore Socrates is an activity", we get the same with the major using 'running' with simple supposition.
Medieval logicians generally thought that supposition was always determined by the predicate, because at least some predicates clearly do ('is a genus', 'is a word', etc.).
"'Dog' is used to talk about some kinds of pets" shows that material supposition can clearly presuppose signification.

Hegemons dominate through alliance systems.

Because we often reduce chance by intention and plan, people mistakenly come to think that intentions or plans exclude chance. But a chance event may be intended; it, lacking complete immediate purpose that restricts its possibilities to one, may have an incomplete immediate purpose and a complete mediate purpose, like a dice roll in a game, and one may plan for all the possibilities allowed by a chance event, even bringing them in plan to an inevitable end. Intention and design by nature incorporate necessities and chances.

The same locution may have any mix of illocutionary points -- assertive, commissive, directive, declarative, expressive as illocutionary points do not exclude each other.

We owe persons not merely respect but also truth and love.

To be reasons-responsive is to be responsive to counterfactual and hypothetical possibilities.

"Precepts lead to right actions only if they meet a pliant ingenium." Seneca

elegance as the balance of the useful and agreeable

'the pleasures of friendship, of unreserved conversation, of similarity of taste and opinion'

"Herself a realist, Jane Austen recognized -- as many professed Christians do not -- that Christianity is a realistic religion, with no illusions about the fallen nature of man." David Cecil

The embryo is in the process of being made to make itself alive.

Forms are a kind of sharing of being.

"Freemen (liberales) are the sort of people who ransom prisoners of war." Cicero (Offic. 2.16)

ecclesial right to go // cosmopolitan right

NB that Kant understands 'liberty, equality, fraternity' as a TRS triad on the model of 'substance, cause, community'.

Kant's TRS triads as deliberate analogies of Newton's three laws of motion?

ius civitatis, ius gentium, ius cosmopoliticum as TRS triad

Searle takes acceptives to be commissives, which is certainly wrong (see Searle and Vanderveken)

Even those who touch the hem of the garments of the Mystical Body receive blessing.

The 'sense' in sense of humor, sense of beauty, etc., is capacity for firsthand experience.

One of our most basic experiences of truth is of things as good to know.

syneidesis: Wis 18:11, 1 Tim 1:5, 19; Rm 13:5; 2 Cor 4:2

When the Christian suffers, he can do so as a part of a sort of conspiracy with God.

The notion that feeling guilty is in itself unhealthy has been the source of many a mental illness.

physical contact as causal equivalence of forces

The phenomenological world is our life seen objectively.

Language is the psychopomp.

"Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions." CS Lewis
"What expresses or stimulates emotion directly, without the intervention of an image or concept, expresses or stimulates it feebly."

illuminative way = way of infused contemplation
illuminative way // purgatory

Growing up is a matter of learning how to love more wholly.

"The whole foundation of prayer is grounded in humility, and the more a soul abases itself in prayer, the more God exalts it." Teresa of Avila

"Truth is always precious; but all truths are not equally relevant to all persons." E. W. Dicken Trueman

Conscience transcends individual/communal divides.

sophia : Tao : phronesis : Five Constant Virtues

the Lullian method as a method for making philosophical inquiry and argument a spiritual practice

"In the order of ends, objective affirmation is inevitable." Marechal
"Since the formal object of a tendency is the measure of the amplitude of the end whither this tendency keeps striving, we know that the ultimate satiating end of the intellect must be a reality possessing no limiting determinations, that is, a transcendent object, a subsisting infinite."
"To affirm of God that he is possible is the same as to affirm that he exists, since his existence is the condition of every possibility."

When Vaihinger talks about fictions, he means merely 'expedient inventions' that 'deviate' in some way from the real as such. Thus the whole acocunt is really about deliberately constructed beings of reason. But his conception of this is so absurdly broad that anything involving any actino of mind gets counted as a 'fiction'. One falls into the fiction of a hole because of the fiction of gravity, just as what is fictionally classified as an apple falls from what is fictionally classified as a tree, a fictional event we study by the fictional system of fictions we call physics.

"By knowing of the finite as finite, I always co-know the Infinite." Donceel
"Whatever reality we know, we know as limited. But to know a limit as limit means to be, in fact or in striving, beyond this limit. Hence our mind keeps striving beyond any limited reality toward the unlimited reality, the infinitely perfect reality. This implies at least that the infinite by perfect reality is possible."

Mass, force, etc., are functions within a physical theory tied to certain general kinds of measurement.

Change
(1) divides according to complete and incomplete
(2) so as to be virtually multiple (having parts of some kind due to its capabilities)
(3) with indefinitely many parts as measurable by other changes.

before & after with respect to change of containing boundary

'Utter' is just a word for 'outer'; who utters something externalizes it, specifically in speech.

PSR as a precondition for hypothesizing (cp. Mercier) -- recognizing the need for a sufficient reason, a reason is proposed and assessed in that light.

Statistics always depends on classifications.

"For occupancy to be a title to property the following things are necessary: (1) a 'res nullius'; (2) a thing capable of being appropriated; (3) an external act performed in regard to this object and in some way bringing it under the agent's power; (4) a clear manifestation of his intention to possess it permanently and exclusively." Mercier
"Christianity opposes the pretensions of absolutism by its insistence on the rights of the individual, of the family, and of religious society."

Circumcision conferred a jural status under divine positive law, ex opere operato; baptism confers both a jural status and grace ex opere operato.

Baptism, confirmation, ordination, and matrimony confer a jural status ex opere operato; reconciliation has a jural effect (in absolution).

major effects of baptism
(1) sacred
-- (1a) regenerative grace
-- (1b) indelible character
(2) juridical: membership in the Church
-- (2a) under divine law
-- (2b) with rights and privileges under ecclesial law
(3) moral: public allegiance in the community of the Church

Moral causality is either
(1) advisory, or
(2) juridical
-- (a) either conventional, or
-- (b) authoritatively imposed; or
(3) meritorious; or
(4) objective/significant.

A mystery in Casel's sense is an objective cause in sacral order.

The Church is intended to be a holy people, so it is necessary for there to be holy orders constituting it as such. But societies have many orders and it is not required for them all to be holy orders, only those that are genuinely constitutive.

The primary line between 'organized' religion and its opposite seems to be the need for a system to certify and/or credential.

Over the course of salvation history as depicted in Scripture we see a concentration and intensification of symbols.

It's notable that when we try to imagine abstract concepts, we often imagine them as if they were fluids.
-- This could be due to the easy participability of fluids, being capable of portions without fundamental change.

The whole Christ is present in the Church as both Body and New Covenant.

A commemoration of a covenant is always a renewal of some kind, like wedding vows, but not so as to be different, also like wedding vows.

Into the Mysteries of How and Why

To Schelling -- I
by August Graf von Platen
translated by Reginald Bancroft Cooke

 Doth not he ever king in Truth's domain
 Reign too o'er Beauty's realm by kingly right?
Thou dost behold them perfectly unite
And closely fuse in one harmonious strain.
This little present thou wilt not disdain;
 These oriental throngs with true delight
Thou wilt survey, so picturesque, so bright,
And grow accustomed to their strange refrain.
 On blooms of a far land admittedly
 I poise but lightly like the butterfly,
Joying perchance in some mere vanity.
But from the brims of flowers 'neath every sky
Thou dipp'st the wing of the inviolate bee
Into the mysteries of How and Why.

August Graf von Platen's full name was Graf Karl August Georg Maximilian von Platen-Hallermunde (the 'Graf', which after the abolition of titles in 1919 is treated as the first part of the surname, was in Graf Platen's own day still usually treated as a prenominal title), but outside of titlepages he is usually referred to by some shorter form. Platen, often considered one of the greatest writers of sonnets in German history, did not get along with the literary establishment of his day, and famously got into a rather vicious public spat with Heine, which began with heated remarks about the interest in Oriental poetry and ended with Platen attacking Heine for being a Jew and Heine attacking Platen for being a homosexual. Heine got the worse of the dispute, since the comments about homosexuality (saying, for instance, that Graf Platen was more a man of rump than a man of brain) were widely regarded as a low blow (and homosexuality was, frankly, less stigmatized in some circles in Germany than being Jewish), and the spat made life difficult for both men. (Heine would later call it a 'war of annihilation'.) Graf Platen died in 1835 in Syracuse in the Two Sicilies, a lonely and isolated 'wandering rhapsodist' to the very end.

Music on My Mind

 

Tracey Hewat, "Firelands".

On LaFolette on Parenting Licenses

 Jack Maden, Should Parenting Require a License?, at "Philosophy Break" discusses Hugh LaFolette's 1980 argument that the answer is Yes. I've LaFolette's argument, or arguments that are clearly descended from it, popping up more often recently, so perhaps it's worth looking at why it is, and has always been, a worthless argument.

LaFolette doesn't make things easy for himself in "Licensing Parents", in that he intends his argument to be for the most extreme claim -- not that it would be reasonable sometimes to license parents but that everyone should in fact be required to get a license to be a parent. To get this conlusion he attempts to characterize the kinds of situations in which society requires licenses, e.g., "We require drivers to be licensed because driving an auto is an activity which is potentially harmful to others, safe performance of the activity requires a certain competence, and we have a moderately reliable procedure for determining that competence" (p. 183). Similar things, LaFolette suggests, can be said of doctors, lawyers, and the like. It is in fact a dubious claim that we license lawyers because of their potentially harmful activities rather than (e.g.) because governments wanted order on the matter of who could argue before the bar. Likewise, we know that states didn't start requiring licenses to determine competence, because the first driver's licenses didn't have a driving test. The driving exam is actually an artifact of a completely different thing -- the first driving exams were not for driving but for being a professional chauffeur, and states eventually (in some cases swiftly and in some slowly) started extending the same requirement to drivers in general. It is likewise very unclear that medical licenses were developed, or have primarily been used, in order to assess competence for the preventing of potential harm; doctors started advocating medical licensing to reduce competition and push newcomers with easily obtained medical degrees out of the market. Perhaps you could argue that, whatever the origins of these licensing systems, they are maintained to prevent potential harms, but it is more difficult, I think, when you look at some of the things that are licensed; in many states, for instance, hairstylists have remarkably strict licensing requirements. The point of saying this is that the primary justification for licensing seems never to be merely avoiding harm but the bare fact of extending regulatory powers, which might be done for any number of reasons.

LaFolette argues that it is desirable to regulate any field which meets these three conditions: potential harm, need for a certain level of competence, and moderately reliable procedure for determining that competence. He doesn't consider the many, many activities that meet these criteria for which we don't require licenses -- I teach at a college; that has requirements, but college professorship isn't a licensed profession despite meeting all three conditions. Instead, the handling of the competence issue is done by the ordinary functioning of the job market, and the potential for harm is mostly just swept aside on the general principle that everyone deserves an education. Whether or not college professors have any training to teach at all varies across the board, and most don't, or not much. Nobody, however, takes Ted Kaczynski as an argument that the academic profession should be restricted by licensing -- or, at least, nobody has yet. 

In any case, LaFolette argues that parenting meets all three requriements. Parenting allows for child abuse, which is quite harmful both to the child and society. (He ignores the fact, known even in 1980, that parents are the people least likely to abuse their children, but I assume that he would say that the tiny percentage of parents who abuse their children cause disproportionate harm. But I also suspect that he would argue that most parenting methods -- spanking but also many of the psychological methods that were beginning to be used and have become very common today -- are either physically or emotionally abusive, or both.)  He takes it to be obvious that there is a minimal competence required for raising children. (He never, however, actually says what it is, despite the fact that this seems relevant to the argument. Walking across the street is a potentially harmful activity, one that often causes wrecks, and it does require a minimal comptence, like being able to read signs and lights, and it would be pretty easy to test for this competence, but we don't have pedestrian licenses. Arguably one reason is that people think that the minimal comptence is so minimal that it's not worth the trouble of testing. It matters, if you are arguing for licensing parenting, whether you think 'minimal competence' for parenting is ordinary human decency or advanced psychological training, or something else.)

LaFolette then goes on to consider two kinds of objections against his argument to this point. Objection 1: Licensing is not theoretically desirable because, regardless of the potential for harm or the need for minimal competence, people have rights that take precedence. LaFolette's response to this seems to me to be mere handwaving; he argues that these rights are "not without limitations" (p. 186). He also gives a completely inadequate list of possible interpretations of "right to have children", and doesn't consider the possibility that people might have a right not to have longstanding customs and usages be interfered with without necessity, or that they might have a right not to be subject to regulation in matters that have traditionally not been regulated when they have not themselves shown any incapacity or turpitude. That is to say, he doesn't consider any of the arguments that individuals doing as they think best, not intervention by the state, is the reasonable default for a free society. The statist tendency of LaFolette's argument is never addressed; he simply treats it as obvious that (1) the state should at least usually get involved in anything that can potentially cause harm and requires a minimal level of competence, and likewise that (2) there are no limitations to the state's authority to require licensing except assessment of potential harm and feasibility, and (3) that state intervention in such matters does not have to be independently justified. When he does address worries about intervention, he shifts the subject. Instead of considering the intrusiveness of imposing a licensing system, he argues that there would be few further intrusions for those who have received licenses. Given how onerous the requirements of some licensing systems can get when it comes to keeping your license, this is, like most of LaFolette's naive claims about licensing, dubious, but even so, it's not the right question. The worry that matters is the intrusiveness of building an entire bureaucracy regulating whether people will be even allowed to do something, and the perpetual danger that such systems will be captured to further vested interests. This is not trivial. Even when people support licensing they usually hate having to deal with the inevitable bureaucracy and paperwork. Bureauracies like licensing systems tend to be inflexible, unintuitive, time-consuming, expensive, and, in short, burdensome, even when justified.

Obection 2: Licensing, even if theoretically desirable, is not practically implementable. This could be because (1) we do not have an adequate criterion of what counts as good parenting; or (2) there is no reliable way to know beforehand what features a person will have who will abuse their children; or (3) administration would unintentioanlly misuse any test that could be developed; or (4) administration would intentionally abuse the test; or (5) we could never "adequately, reasonably, and fairly" (p. 193) enforce such a regime. LaFolette's answer to (1) is that we only need a criterion of what counts as very bad parenting; his answer to (2) is what looks to me like a very expensive and complicated research program (one that would have to be ongoing) whose results can't actually be anticipated. LaFolette's answer to (3) I find particularly worrisome; he argues that we shouldn't worry about unintentional misuses unless we have reason to think they would be more common than in other licensing systems. This is, first of all, not the way to design a properly functioning administrative system; you need not dismissal but specific countermeasures to prevent unintentional misuse. Second, unintentional misuses are one of the things that can give you a reason to think that a licensing system should be scrapped, and every functional licensing system continually worries about this. Again, LaFolette assumes that bureaucracy does not require close vigilance but is somehow the natural default, its failures just foibles until proven more serious. Third, a perpetual worry with licensing systems is that they create moral hazard -- that is, people over-rely on the licensing for assessing the competence, with the result that they are less careful and less protected. That LaFolette doesn't even have an actual answer to this sort of problem is itself a worry. His answer to (4) is even worse, since he says that we shouldn't reject licensing parents unless it can be shown that it is more likely to be abused than other licensing systems. Since licensing systems are -- notoriously -- abused all the time, and repeatedly have to be reformed, we have LaFolette yet again arguing that the failures of the state should be ignored as just the natural and normal course of things, and treating its many and well known abuses as barely even worthy of serious consideration, despite the fact that he extends parents -- a much more respectable and highly regarded population of agents -- no such generosity.

Nor does his answer to (5) give us any hope of anything better. He admits that there could be difficulties, but thinks these can be surmounted. His example of how you might do so: "We might not punish parents at all--we might just remove the children and put them up for adoption" (p. 193). This, I think, summarizes in a sentence all that Hugh LaFolette, at least in 1980, did not understand about parenting, even bad parenting. 

The most interesting (and least objectionable) part of LaFolette's argument is an analogy he tries to draw with adoption, in which we do in fact impose prior standards on who can become a parent. But while LaFolette does a good job of addressing some objections to this analogy that are not quite adequate, he misses the fact that we do this because adoption, however important it may be, is an artificial legal construct that exists for legal convenience, and thus legislators can make the requirements for it whatever they please. The high standards, which LaFolette rightly notes are much higher than you would expect for a licensing system, are in part because making adoption too easy would cause all sorts of legal problems and in part to address known failure points specific to legal adoption (e.g., people adopting children to make them sex slaves, a rare but recurring problem even under our current system). 

One interesting thing that LaFolette says, which I have increasingly seen, is that in his view the reason people resist licensing parents because they see parents as having a "natural sovereignty over their children" (p. 196). (The way this is often put today is accusations that parents see themselves as "owning" their children.) He regards this as an "abhorrent view", but his reasons for this is are quite vague -- parents who hold this view "may well" mistreat their children and even if they treat their children well, wouldn't be treating their children as deserving good treatment but only treating them well "because they want to" and the view in any case is inconsistent with raising children to be adults. None of this is given any backing, and one suspects, given what LaFolette keeps implying about state power, that most of this is projection -- he doesn't think parents should be regarded as having "natural sovereignty" over their children because he doesn't really regard "sovereignty" as involving any responsibility. Just as the sovereign state should in his view license parenting because the state finds it "theoretically desirable" and can, he assumes that parents will do whatever they find desirable and can do. In reality, parents are the adults who are least likely to treat their children in these ways, by all the evidence we have; they are the adults who consistently show themselves to be most active in protecting the rights of their children; and by the millions they raise children to be excellent adults. LaFolette takes the "natural sovereignty" view to be common, but there is remarkably little evidence of any of the consequences he says that it brings with it.

None of this argument is any good. But there is an irony here, as for a while there used to be a general parenting license -- it was called a marriage license. The licensing system was never perfectly implemented in the way LaFolette seems to imagine his proposal would -- from practical necessity, alternative routes like common law marriage kept having to be recognized, and there were all sorts of complications about how to deal with the inevitable unlicensed children -- bastards, as they were called. The requirements were also clearly more 'minimal' and easier to implement than those LaFolette seems to have in mind. Interestingly, that system, despite an excellent reputation and results, had long started breaking down before LaFolette had penned a word, and its collapse was beginning to accelerate. The relative success of state-licensed marriage at its height might give one reason to think it possible that you could have a successful parent-licensing system of the kind LaFolette wants. But if we couldn't maintain a looser, more flexible, minimal system that people mostly liked, its unclear why we would be able to maintain a stricter, more bureaucratic, higher-requirement system that people don't even want.

Now, of course, this was all in 1980. But in 2010, LaFolette revisited the argument and mostly reaffirmed it. Unfortunately, its prospects as an argument had not improved at all in thirty years; if anything, the difficulties of preventing abuse of licensing systems, for instance, are even more widely recognized than they were. Even worse, it's quite clearly this article revisiting the argument that has led to the immensely dimwitted claims, the modernized version of his "natural sovereignty" view, that parents are generally going around thinking of children as their "property", an accusation that is inconsistent with the evidence we have and which is never backed up by anything that could possibly justify it. The harm that can be caused by an academic article is not always great; but in some cases, like LaFolette's active statism with respect to parenting, it is potentially immense. This sort of quasi-fascist and totalitarian notion that the state has right and authority to intervene everywhere where the ends justify the means is unfortunately surprisingly common among academics; and you don't have to invent a nonexistent multitude of parents treating their children like chattel to explain why ordinary people would push back against it.

*****

Hugh LaFolette, "Licensing Parents", Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1980), pp. 182-197.

Links of Note

 * Emma Fieser, Descartes on Miracles (PDF)

* Joseph Rahi, Virtue ethics has entered the chat, at "Think Strange Thoughts"

* Daniel Nolan, Crosscultural Social Ontology: The Case of Navies (PDF)

* Gene Botkin, Effective Altruism and the Ministry of Love, at "The Swan Throne"

* Martin Lin, The Contingency of the Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles in Liebniz (PDF)

* Rob Alspaugh, Dreaming vs Reasoning, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* Kenny Easwaran, Hank Green on "Fish"

*  Alois Pichler & Sebastian Sunday Grève, Cognitivism about religious belief in later Wittgenstein (PDF)

* Mike Schramm reviews Von Hildebrand's "What Is Philosophy?", at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Stefano Caputo, One but not the Same (PDF), on truth

* Edward Feser, Heeding Anscombe on just war doctrine

* Robert Keim, The Language of Holy Communion in Medieval England, at "Via Medievalis"

And Dreams of Sullen Rain and Mist

 A Dark Day of Summer
by Madison Julius Cawein   

 Though Summer walks the world to-day
 With corn-crowned hours for her guard,
 Her thoughts have clad themselves in gray,
 And wait in Autumn's weedy yard. 

 And where the larkspur and the phlox
 Spread carpets for her feet to pass,
 She stands with sombre, dripping locks
 Bound bleak with fog-washed zinnias. 

 Sad terra-cotta-colored flowers,
 Whose disks the trickling wet has tinged
 With dingy lustre, like the bowers,
 Flame-flecked with leaves, the frost has singed. 

 She, with slow feet, -- 'mid gaunt gold blooms
 Of marigolds her fingers twist, --
 Passes, dim-swathed in Fall's perfumes
 And dreams of sullen rain and mist.

The Gratitude Theory of Political Obligation

 Political philosophers have considered a number of different theories attempting to ground 'political obligation', that is, the obligation to comply with the state or government. One that, since the 1970s, has usually been quickly dismissed is the gratitude theory of politial obligation. This theory says that people have an obligation to support the state due to having received benefits from the state. It seems to be a quite general consensus that it is untenable. However, when one looks at the arguments that have been used against it, they consistnetly use implausible and, indeed, sometimes obviously incorrect accounts of gratitude. It is true that gratitude cannot be a complete theory of political obligation, but that is something that it shares with any single-factor theory; 'political obligation' is not a single thing, and therefore has no single account. But the gratitude theory, despite being incomplete, is correct insofar as it identifies a kind of political obligation that is genuinely important, and all of the arguments that are typically used against gratitude being a ground of political obligation are astoundingly bad.

It is worth making one especially important precisifying point. The gratitude theory says that the obligation to support the state arises form having received benefits from the state. It follows from this that, despite the name, the gratitude theory does not only involve gratitude. There are other moral qualities that are concerned with reception of benefits. Some of these deal with very specific kinds of benefactors -- e.g., filial piety with parents and religious virtue with God -- and others with specific kinds of benefits -- e.g., there are kinds of respect specifically concerned with eminence or excellence. These may sometimes be relevant, but are not going to be universal. However, besides gratitude there are two other kinds of virtue associated with response to benefits, and, what is more, gratitude in some sense presupposes them both -- that is, they have a sort of priority over gratitude in that gratitude specifically deals with benefits insofar as they are not covered by them. These are observance, which is respect for governance itself specifically insofar as its eminence contributes beneficially to one's life (e.g., by providing a dignity with which we can be associated or by setting things in a useful order), and justice, which gives a return so that things are even/level/fair. Fairness is often contrasted with gratitude, and it is true that they cover different ground, but a gratitude theory, to make sense of gratitude's role specifically, has to make room for other benefit-responses, because it often presupposes them. For instance, if I receive benefits from a contract, I must in justice fulfill the contract fairly, not taking advantage, but beyond that, I may also have to give something in gratitude -- e.g., if the other party to the contract fulfilled their part excellently, or in an especially helpful way,  or by going above and beyond what would normally be expected. This sort of gratitude is distinct from, but certainly not separate from, justice or fairness, and the gratitude is specifically concerned with the obligations of the latter. 

Therefore, contrary to the way it is sometimes discussed, the gratitude theory has to be understood as saying that the our political obligation arises at least from gratitude, not that it arises only from gratitude; or, perhaps more narrowly but accurately, that it arises in complete form with gratitude, but not that gratitude is the only thing that contributes to it. This is in fact clear from discussions; when people attempt to explain the content and implications of the gratitude theory, they clearly say things that apply to observance or justice, not just gratitude. However, when people criticize the gratitude theory, they regularly criticize it as if it only involved gratitude, and base their criticism entirely on purported features of gratitude without even looking at whether observance or justice might contribute something.

When A. J. Simmons argued against the gratitude theory in the late 1970s, he did so by arguing that obligations associated with gratitude had certain features that were problematic with respect to establishing an adequate ground for political obligation, which we might briefly summarize as:

(1) Obligations of gratitude are only for special benefits, i.e., benefits that required special effort or some kind of sacrifice.

(2) Obligations of gratitude only arise when the giving of the benefit is not unintentional, involuntary, or for a disqualifying agenda.

(3) Obligations of gratitude only arise when the beneficiary wants and accepts the benefit as being from the benefactor, or at least would want and accept it as being from the benefactor if certain conditions were met. 

Most arguments against the gratitude theory since Simmons have been based on some version of these. Unfortunately, each of these three is simply incorrect. We can (and very often do) have obligations of gratitude for ordinary benefits that involve no special effort or sacrifice, obligations of gratitude for benefits given defectively, and obligations of gratitude toward people or for things we did not particularly want. What does change in these cases is how one fulfills the obligation. But anyone who acted according to the three principles above would often be an ingrate.

A simple way to recognize that (1) is false is to look at cross-cultural practices of gratitude, which regularly involve various kinds of thanks and/or return for entirely ordinary things like passing the salt. Yes, these are often perfunctory, but they are responses to things that are themselves usually perfunctory, and at least the consistent failure to say "Thank you" for small favors (if saying "Thank you" is the cultural custom for grateful actions) is a sign of someone lacking in gratitude. Any particular small favor, of course, might not be much in the way of a benefit, but it is often at least a little beneficial, and many of these tiny benefits can make a significant difference to one's life. Gratitude has to enter in somewhere, and perhaps we could sometimes make it a package deal -- instead of expressing gratitude for each and every bit, we might express gratitude all at once for the whole lot. But given the wide variety of situations under which these benefits are given, we are often not going to be in a position to know that we could later give thanks, and therefore people will often show gratitude bit by bit, in case they can't later. We are in fact obligated to be grateful for all benefits whatsoever, and to express this when it is appropriate, and there is a way to do so, and we are able to do so, in a way that is appropriate for that kind of benefit.

(2) is on much stronger ground, because there quite clearly are disqualifying grounds for gratitude. For instance, if someone gives an apparently good gift but, as it turns out, with the intention of actually harming you or someone else, this is obviously not something that calls for gratitude, because this is only apparently a benefit. Likewise, if someone seems to benefit you but, it turns out, is taking credit for something that is really due to them, they are not (at least thus far) due any gratitude because they are only apparently a benefactor. Both of these, however, are cases where there is only an appearance of what gratitude requires. It's less clear whether lack of intention and lack of voluntariness disqualify. It's clear that the response of gratitude may still be required in unintentional or involuntary cases -- we know this because we can be grateful toward nonrational things that happen to benefit us, and this is in fact a common human response -- but many of thems will not call for an obligation of gratitude. The key issue, however, would be whether there is a real moral debt to a person for a real benefit really given. If these three features are in place (moral debt, benefit, act of giving), then it seems that we have a genuine obligation of gratitude. Lack of intention or lack of voluntariness would seem to have to actually eliminate one of these three in order to prevent an obligation of gratitude. But in practice, we will not always be in a position to assess whether a benefit is given wholly involuntarily or unintentionally, and therefore we can have an 'overflow obligation' of gratitude -- that is, we can be obligated because as far as we know there may have been at least some aspect of the beneficent action that was intentional or voluntary enough. One of the marks of an ingrate is someone who refuses to act with gratitude toward something unless it can first be proven that it was done in the right spirit and way. Such an attitude would inevitably result in genuine benefits being received without gratitude simply on the basis that they can't meet the arbitrarily high standard we have imposed for being grateful.

(3) is obviously not going to work, because it would mean that, across a vast range of cases, whether or not you should be grateful would depend entirely on whether you feel like being so. Most benefits for which we are grateful are given without anyone first getting our clear consent to be benefited. There are of course times when we are 'benefited' exasperatingly with benefits we don't want because they are actually useless or harmful, and this circumstance would clearly affect the manner in which we need to respond. But we have obligations of gratitude not merely for the gift but also for the giving, and while it is difficult to be grateful to someone who is 'helping' in unhelpful ways, if they are genuinely sincere, we will at least often have the obligation to be grateful for the generosity of their heart, God bless 'em.

Given all of this, we can actually have obligations of gratitude under an extremely wide range of conditions, and there is no reason to think that we cannot thereby have obligations of gratitude to the state or government, given that we almost certainly receive particular benefits from them -- roads and schools and national defense and so forth. Socrates in the Crito was right, at least thus far: acting ungratefully to the city whose laws raised and nurtured and protected you is a genuine form of ingratitude, and you can be obligated to the city for the benefit of its laws.

Beyond trying to argue against the gratitude theory of politial obligation on the basis of a flawed notion of gratitude, there are two other more promising arguments that often are made against it. First, obligations of gratitude do not give sufficiently forceful obligations. Second, obligations of gratitude do not give sufficiently specific obligations. While better, these are also flawed.

The essential idea of the first argument is that the state has the right to demand compliance and punish refusal to comply, whereas it seems that obligations of gratitude do not allow for this kind of demand and punishment. The point about demand can, I think, be questioned -- if someone is ungrateful, it does sometimes seem appropriate to demand that they show a little gratitude. But it does seem that the circumstances under which you could punish someone for being ungrateful to you, beyond simply cutting them off and refusing to keep benefiting them, are pretty limited. Nonethless, I think there are two things to be said to this. First, we should push back hard, I think, on any claim that the state has a general right to demand and punish. This seems widely to be assumed, but this is because much modern political philosophy is effectively totalitarian, taking the state to have universal power and authority rather than, as is the more correct and certainly the politically and morally safer position, taking it to be quite limited in power and authority. When you stop making that assumption, it does seem that the state needs to earn its right to demand and punish by something like clear and manifest benefits. The state does not exist for itself; it exists to serve. If it is doing so badly, it is unclear why we should think that that has no effect on its right to demand and punish. Second, as noted above, gratitude sometimes presupposes justice, and most of the obvious cases of the state have a definite right to demand and punish seem clearly to be cases in which justice is the key factor, rather than gratitude as such (which may, however, affect how we should comply). What the argument gets right is that some political obligation is what used to be called a 'legal debt' or 'strict debt', whereas gratitude gets us only what used to be called 'moral debt' or 'customary debt'. Justice, however, gets us to legal debt, so some gratitude can incorporate the legal debt of justice as part of what one considers in satisfying the moral debt of gratitude.

The second argument seems to be the one that political philosophers have found most conclusive, and is the one most often found. The basic idea is that whereas political obligation seems often to require very specific things -- paying taxes, obeying this or that law, complying with the draft -- obligations of gratitude don't seem to be specific in this way. This is true, but this is because the bare fact of being grateful is itself not a specific thing. The grateful response, however, has to be responsive to particular facts about the benefit received and how it is given, and this means that the response of the grateful person is always quite specific and adapted to the situation. One of the things that is always considered is what means are available for grateful response, and in fact the ways in which you can genuinely express gratitude to the state for benefits received is quite limited -- states may seem complex, but they effectively need funding, compliance with just law, and noninterference with their legitimate functions, as well as sometimes some symbolic support, which can facilitate their work. Perhaps there are other things, but there's not much else that most people most of the time could do in order to show their gratitude for the benefits of the state. States are quite simple, really; they require remarkably little, so there are usually only a limited number of ways you can respond gratefully.

Again, none of this is to say that the gratitude theory can be a complete theory of political obligation -- political obligation is so complicated that it pretty much guarantees that only a pluralist theory would be adequate. But the point, I think, is clear enough: gratitude can (and, I think, clearly does) play a role in grounding political obligations, and almost all of the arguments against its doing so are defective.

The Dome of Florence, Pensive and Alone

At Florence
by William Wordsworth

Under the shadow of a stately Pile,
The dome of Florence, pensive and alone,
Nor giving heed to aught that passed the while,
I stood, and gazed upon a marble stone,
The laurelled Dante's favourite seat. A throne,
In just esteem, it rivals; though no style
Be there of decoration to beguile
The mind, depressed by thought of greatness flown.
As a true man, who long had served the lyre,
I gazed with earnestness, and dared no more.
But in his breast the mighty Poet bore
A Patriot's heart, warm with undying fire.
Bold with the thought, in reverence I sate down,
And, for a moment, filled that empty Throne.

By Time and Toil Truth Will Gleam Forth

 Our book will not shrink from making use of what is best in philosophy and other preparatory instruction. For not only for the Hebrews and those that are under the law, according to the apostle, is it right to become a Jew, but also a Greek for the sake of the Greeks, that we may gain all. (1 Corinthians 9:20-21) Also in the Epistle to the Colossians he writes, Admonishing every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ. (Colossians 1:28) The nicety of speculation, too, suits the sketch presented in my commentaries. In this respect the resources of learning are like a relish mixed with the food of an athlete, who is not indulging in luxury, but entertains a noble desire for distinction. 

 By music we harmoniously relax the excessive tension of gravity. And as those who wish to address the people, do so often by the herald, that what is said may be better heard; so also in this case. For we have the word, that was spoken to many, before the common tradition. Wherefore we must set forth the opinions and utterances which cried individually to them, by which those who hear shall more readily turn. 

 And, in truth, to speak briefly: Among many small pearls there is the one; and in a great lake of fish there is the beauty-fish; and by time and toil truth will gleam forth, if a good helper is at hand. For most benefits are supplied, from God, through men. All of us who make use of our eyes see what is presented before them. But some look at objects for one reason, others for another. For instance, the cook and the shepherd do not survey the sheep similarly: for the one examines it if it be fat; the other watches to see if it be of good breed. Let a man milk the sheep's milk if he need sustenance: let him shear the wool if he need clothing. And in this way let me produce the fruit of the Greek erudition.

St. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 1.1

No Such Thing

 NEPHEW: Remember, there's no such thing as too much cheese.

ME: If there were an ocean of cheese, that would surely be too much cheese.

NEPHEW: But there's no such thing, so there's still no such thing as too much cheese.

Links of Note

 * Bradley Hillier-Smith, Rights, Duties, and Inviolability (PDF)

* Matthew Advent, Usury and Interest: Forgotten Contributions to the Thomistic Tradition 

* Justin A. Capes, On Repentance (PDF)

* T. C. Schmidt, Josephus and Jesus, gives an interesting argument that the Testimonium Flavium is genuine; for instance, he argues that, contrary to the assumptions usually made by those arguing that it is interpolated by Christians, early Christians did not read the Testimonium as a positive testimony -- they, of course, were not looking for historical evidence of Jesus the way modern scholars do, being more interested in chronology and the like, and when they regarded the Testimonium as significant at all, they often read it as a poor fit with Christian claims or treat it as relatively uninteresting. Thus, Schmidt argues, there is reason to think that the author is non-Christian, and he goes on to argue for internal evidence that it is indeed Josephus who wrote it.

* Ben Platts-Mills, Injury and Inhibition, at "Aeon", on what actually happened in the famous case of Phineas Gage

* Chloe Hadjimatheou, The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit, and desperation, at "The Observer"

* B. A. Clarke, When Early Rifles are Written Badly, at "Clarke's Corner"

* Logan Paul Gage & Frederick D. Aquino, Newman's Illative Sense Re-Examined (PDF)

* Drunk Wisconsin, Non-Parents Think Having Kids Is Harder Than It Is

* Dennis McCarthy, How Darwin Really, Truly Solved the Mystery of Life, at "All the Mysteries that Remain"

* Fanatic Thomist, Is God Infinite? Insights from Francisco Suarez

* Olga Litvak, Untranslated, at "The Hedgehog Review"

* Andrea Araf & Lorenzo Zemolin, Paradoxical Opinions on Mixture in Alexander of Aphrodisias, De Mixtione (PDF)

* Hana Videen, What is Hwaet? The Debate Behind Beowulf's Opening Line, at "Medievalists.net"

* Sandrine Parageau, The French liar, at "Aeon", on Rene Descartes and how his contemporaries perceived him

* Ellen Wexler, Jane Austen Never Loved Bath -- But Bath Loves Jane Austen, at "Smithsonian Magazine"

* James Maliszewski, From the Brontes to Braunstein, at "Grognardia", on the pre-history of the modern role-playing game

Fortnightly Book, July 20

I recently came into possession of a copy of Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I had thought that I had done J. R. R. Tolkien's translation as part of the fortnightly book; but apparently not, so I added that as well. Since Armitage's translation has the Middle English as well as his own translation, I'll be looking at three versions this fortnight: the original, Armitage's translation, and Tolkien's translation. Tolkien's translation also includes Pearl and Sir Orfeo.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the best known stand-alone Arthurian romances. Written in alliterative stanzas with some rhyme, it survived in a single 14th-century manuscript; the manuscript was published in 1839. Because the manuscript includes Pearl, Patience, and Cleanness, all of which are, like Sir Gawain, of high quality, and have a number of features in common (like the same dialect, North West Midlands), it is often thought that one poet wrote them all, which would put him, despite his anonymity, easily in the same league as his contemporary, Chaucer.

Maurice LeBlanc, The Crystal Stopper

 Introduction

Opening Passage: 

 The two boats fastened to the little pier that jutted out from the garden lay rocking in its shadow. Here and there lighted windows showed through the thick mist on the margins of the lake. The Enghien Casino opposite blazed with light, though it was late in the season, the end of September. A few stars appeared through the clouds. A light breeze ruffled the surface of the water. 

 Arsène Lupin left the summer-house where he was smoking a cigar and, bending forward at the end of the pier: 

 “Growler?” he asked. “Masher?... Are you there?” 

 A man rose from each of the boats, and one of them answered: “Yes, governor.” 

 “Get ready. I hear the car coming with Gilbert and Vaucheray.” 

 He crossed the garden, walked round a house in process of construction, the scaffolding of which loomed overhead, and cautiously opened the door on the Avenue de Ceinture. He was not mistaken: a bright light flashed round the bend and a large, open motor-car drew up, whence sprang two men in great-coats, with the collars turned up, and caps. 

 It was Gilbert and Vaucheray: Gilbert, a young fellow of twenty or twenty-two, with an attractive cast of features and a supple and sinewy frame; Vaucheray, older, shorter, with grizzled hair and a pale, sickly face.

Summary: Taking place in narrative time sometime before 813, The Crystal Stopper introduces us to an aspect of Lupin's extraordinary abilities that has been seen here and there in previous works, but never brought into focus: his gang. Lupin has his own extraordinary talents, of course, but it is clear that he has some sort of organization that allows him to leverage these talents in the most effective way. As the narrator at one point notes, in practical terms this cannot be large organization; it has to have a small core that is able to make use of various occasional supplementary groups that are not part of the organization itself. What we find in The Crystal Stopper is an instance in which an important part of the core organization breaks down. A robbery goes very wrong, with the result that two of Lupin's associates are arrested; in the hands of the police, they turn on each other, with the result that they will be executed for murder. Lupin has reason to think that one of the two is innocent of the murder, and, besides that, will eventually have reasons of his to try to protect the innocent man from execution (since Lupin is French, 'reasons of his own' inevitably means a beautiful woman).

Things will get stranger from here, however, as in the course of investigating Lupin finds that there is more going on than there ever seemed to be on the surface. The robbery and murder occurred at the house of Deputy Daubrecq, and Lupin finds that there is an obscure blackmailing scheme going on around Daubrecq. The blackmail for some reason is connected to a crystal stopper, which seems to be an entirely ordinary stopper for a bottle, and on obtaining Lupin finds, to his embarrassment that he, the greatest thief in France is the victim of theft -- and ends up being the victim of theft more than once. Eventually the blackmail scheme is shown to center on a blackmail list of politicians who have taken bribes related to the financial disaster of the Canal Company. But what does it have to do with the crystal stopper? Why is the crystal stopper even of any importance at all? Can Lupin uncover the truth before the execution? And even if he can, will he be able to leverage the matter so as to be able to do anything to save a man from being executed for a crime he did not commit?

It's interesting to see Lupin in the role of a detective. We've had bits and pieces, especially in 813, but this is thoroughly a mystery story, as we follow Lupin sorting clues and solving puzzles, winding through an obstacle course of lies, threats, misdirections, and misleading evidence. Several times, he finds he has to backtrack and find his trail again. The mystery itself is quite well done; the essential idea ("People do not suspect what does not appear to be hidden") is literally one of the oldest ideas in detective fiction, but is given a rather original twist here. The detective role suits Lupin very well, and a detective who works not occasionally but entirely outside the law, and is perfectly fine with committing all sorts of crimes in order to solve the case, is an interesting novelty.

Favorite Passage:  My actual favorite passage I can't give here because it gives away an essential plot twist to the mystery, of the crystal stopper. Here is a distant second:

“Dear me, yes, an attractive bandit, a romantic and chivalrous cracksman, anything you please. For all that, in the eyes of a really honest woman, with an upright nature and a well-balanced mind, I am only the merest riff-raff.” 

 I saw that the wound was sharper than he was willing to admit, and I said: “So you really loved her?” 

 “I even believe,” he said, in a jesting tone, “that I asked her to marry me. After all, I had saved her son, had I not?... So . . . I thought. What a rebuff!... It produced a coolness between us.... Since then....” 

 “You have forgotten her?” 

 “Oh, certainly! But it required the consolations of one Italian, two Americans, three Russians, a German grand-duchess and a Chinawoman to do it!”

Recommendation: Highly Recommended; it's a decent mystery story, and it's fascinating to see Lupin solving a mystery.