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.

Dashed Off XVII

 There is a goodness that moral goodness presupposes and on which it depends.

In all habitual faith, including that in human testimony, we trust something to be so in light of the goodness of that something, the goodness of the authority saying that it is so, and the goodness of the end in light of which we trust. In divine faith, these are all divine goodness: We trust God about God in light of God as our end.

truth : knowledge :: goodness : faith

esque concepts in figurate being
the common hydrological way of thinking about electrisity as figurate being
-- when something is seen specifically as a model, we are considering separately what in figurate being are considered together.
-- the figurate being is the thing itself considered as modeled by something else
-- cf. Dennett's intentional stance and design stance, as he sometimes uses them
-- how is figurate being related to real and rational being? This will require close analysis in terms of the strict definitions

People who come to a conclusion directly, and people who come to it through resistance, often have different kinds of insights into the conclusion, and both kinds of insight are valuable for inquiry.

Knowledge prepares for understanding and understanding prepares for wisdom.

the experience of nostalgia for paradise -- i.e., a sense of nostalgia for a goodness never in our lives had

To recognize ourselves as temporal, we clock ourselves by external changes.

Elections are divisions of a population in order to turn a chaos of voices into an order.

Given a political position, an unintelligent mind will try to generalize it indiscriminately.

Both progressive and conservative forms of liberalism require kinds of responsibility that liberalism itself cannot sustain and that must be borrowed at credit from other institutions, which liberalism itself also cannot sustain.

ligeantia naturalis (->subditus natus)
ligeantia acquisita (->subditus datus = denizen)
ligeantia localis
ligeantia legalis

allegiance to person vs to office

Note that Hume uses a consensus gentium argument against social contract theory (T 3.2.8), and indeed defends such an argument as legitimate for the entire field of mroality as respects virtue or obligation.

Teleportation would be a temporal power.

"...the arts are the best Time Machine we have." CS Lewis

In the Gospels we see Jesus through the Church; we never see Jesus except through the Church.

transdoxastic identity (sometimes called 'intentional identity', although this is a more general category)

Dasein is not something one has; having occurs within Dasein.

Any easily identifiable minority who are willing to argue their positions will tend to be labeled as obnoxious or insufferable, regardless of how they actually argue -- people like minority approaches they disagree with to be quiet and timid, not to insist that other approaches are definitely wrong, and (even worse) to keep arguing the point rather than being intimidated by stock responses. Everyone tends to be like this (people with minority approaches do the same to other minority approaches), and people are often very hypocritical about it, attacking people on this basis for not backing down in the face of their own obnoxiousness or insufferability. It likewise doesn't depend on the kind of conclusion or quality of argumentation. This seems to be due to a combiantion of (1) most people lacking endurance when it comes to arguing, and therefore being put off by people having endurance in it, and (2) most people being poorly prepared for argument on matters they normally take for granted, and therefore being stressed by having to scramble to argue for what they take to be at least relatively obvious; and (3) some people wanting to be deferred to rather than argued with at length; and (4) some people beginning with disdain or contempt for the minority approach to begin with, for reasons connected to its being a minority approach. Perhaps there's also a tendency to disparage things that are seen as wasting one's time or that might become a threat if allowed to grow.

Psalm 93 is traditionally associated with Friday.
(1) Headings in LXX and Vulgate assign it to "the day before the sabbath when the earth was inhabited".
(2) Mishnah says it was sung in Temple on Friday (m. Tamid 7:4; cf. b. Rosh Hashanah 31a).

Philosophers 'engineer concepts' in much the same way that painters 'work with light'.

Ascension // coronation

The artist must often work with hypothetical aesthetic judgments.

The border between the phenomenal and the merely noumenal is necessarily fuzzy.

Insights are completed in communication, and communication sparks insights.

Human wisdom does not protect one from misunderstanding, but it often does protect one from fruitless misunderstanding.

Sophomoric imitation radiates off of great literature like heat off a powerful engine.

Epics often use similes to prevent metaphors from obscuring the flow of narrative too much.

'Major deus intus agit rem, / maius numen inest.'

aesthetic self-preservation as part of the sociality of the body

Aesthetic testimony often clarifies our own experience or gives us a reason to take a second look.

In visual arts, as in philosophy and science, one simplifies in order to complexify.

"To call out woe upon an evil generation is well enough if you count yourself as one of the generation denounced. If, however, you think of it as an older generation or your own generations minus yourself then the exercise is not so healthy. The basic Christian doctrine of original sin is the necessary corrective to an overdose of ethics, as all good theologians know." R. B. McCallum

"To train our taste is to increase our capacity for pleasure; for it enables us to enter into such a variety of experience. This indeed is the special precious power of literature." David Cecil
"A true work of art is more than just shapely. It must stir our interest and stimulate our imagination, it must be individual and significant and delightful."

marriage as love united with order

In marriage spouses are symbols of each other.

"no van todos por un camino" Teresa of Avila

instrumental goods intrinsic qua good to human life

As Christ is the Image of God, it makes sense for us to use images in prayer as symbols of Christ; as Christ is Icon, we pray using icons of the saints, who are icons of Christ.

Augustinian sign: "Signum est quod se ipsum sensui et praeter se aliquid animo ostendit." (De dial.)
"Signum...est praeter speciem quam ingerit sensibus, aliud aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire." (De doctr. chr.)

martyrdom // victory titles

To the overtender, virtuous compassion seems cold, or even cruel, and on that basis overtenderness can do grave damage, soemtimes even worse than cruelty. But even so, as a vice it is less bad, because more corrigible, than cruelty.

Some of what Aquinas identifies as integral parts of prudence seemt o be rather potential parts with a ministerial or suburbican role to prudence precisely as form of virtues.

significant-or-significate as nonexclusive transcendental disjunction

high utility: capacity to contribute to and to be incorporated into love of God

Almost all of the external problems of the Church are the result of an ongoing crisis of morale. This crisis has no signle root; it arises from a large number of separate assaults simultaneously, all of which converge toward morale-breaking. This is because the assaults, while separate, are ultimately coordianted. But the thing of note is how durable and resilient the Church has been in the face of this campaign.

The greater our virtues, the more ceaselessly they are expressed.

Virtues never expressed are imperfect virtues.

Fictionalisms almost universally underestimate the extent to which our fictions use real models.

The US Constitution very clearly does not present itself as a social compact but as an ordinance of the People of the United States.

the cosmos as a corporation under its Lord

Truth is not a genus, and is predicated of many things in many ways.

As everything resembles everything in some way, the future necessarily resembles the past.

To use change to measure change, we must think of it as completable and complete.

Rituals look back toward an initiating reason and forward toward a completion,a nd are partly structured by the lreation between the reason that initiates and the result that completes.

It makes no sense to ask whether induction is reliable because 'reliability' is an intrinsically inductive term; we define it using induction, we apply it using induction.

A correct theory of evidence will give you some notion of when you need to gather more evidence. This requires a classification of evidence into different kinds, because this is the primary way we determine whether more evidence is needed.

Given the power of the human intellect combined with the human imagination, stories of epic, cosmic, or mythic scope are unavoidable, as the kinds of tale commensurate with the human mind at its most full and expansive.

Loyalty makes all things epic.

A people as a (a) civil body (b) militia (c) market

a see as (a) a habitation (epaulis) (b) a superintendance (episkopen) (c) a place of service (topon tes diakonias) (d) a deputation, by succession, from the apostles

Catholic theology as contrapuntal, with transpositions, inversions, and harmonies on the essential Christological theme.

All human imagination has a mythology.

The People of God are both subjects and citizens.

We can read anything as a living thing, a mind, or an artifact, and these kinds of figurate being play a considerable role in our thought.

'Ora et labora' seems to be a summary of monasticism due to Dom Maur Walter from the 1880s.

The Will to Go on Learning

 ...[E]very policy which boasts too much of its "specific, clearly stated objectives, achievable by specific, clearly defined means" and which is "the essence of previous (political) experiences" can be assumed in advance to be wrong, or at least suspicious, without us having to examine its objectives and means too closely. It is mere arbitrariness, a mere effort to reshape the community according to one's own ideas and one's own image.... The proper politics however means exclusively service to the community, service to a society of free citizens; the service does not consist of the imposition and enforcement of one's own ideas about what is good for another (one can perhaps raise small children by such a method; or better, keep watch on prisoners), but rather of attentive listening and deep respect towards that which the others consider good for them.... Politics is not distillation of previous experiences, but rather the will to go on learning; it is not a prepared program but rather the search for a path in complicated and rapidly changing conditions. In my opinion politics cannot, either today or tomorrow, do without humility (for the politician to be good and also successful, more of course will be needed--acumen, good fortune, the ability to catch the right moment), without humility with regard to reality, to the dignity of our neighbors (even the worst of them), and to their opinions (even the craziest). 

 [Václav Benda, The Long Night of the Watchman, St. Augustine's Press (South Bend, IN: 2017) p. 202.]

Two Poem Drafts

 When the Dams All Break

Cool raindrops,
spring-like, calm summer:
joyful tears.
But tears too flowing
create raging floods,
sweeping walls,
the pouring darkness,
and more grief.
Tears of loss bring loss
when the dams all break.

The Souls in Hell

The souls in hell, they know not God;
they think God but an It,
a being thing unmanifest,
negated and unsplit.

Around the ring their thinking runs,
and evil they define
as that which makes the cosmos be
from stillness and the Mine.

Around the ring their thinking moves,
with rushing color-noise,
vorticial in their history,
unbalanced in their poise.

Epigraph from Page 100

 One idea-game I haven't played here for some years is 'Epigraph from Page 100', which aas it sounds involves gathering a possible epigraph from page 100 of any book that happens to be at hand. A possible epigraph suggests possible works to which it might be an epigraph, which is sometimes interesting. I have been thinking about this because last month I had some air conditioning work done, and ended up having to clear out a lot of books from the stairs and hallway to prevent the workmen, much less used to them than I, from always tripping on them. I haven't finished moving them back because I have been busy with other things. So I have a huge number of books hanging around my living room at the moment. The rules are: it has to be a page actually numbered 100, it has to be the first sentence on the page, and it should be more or less sensical on its own.

Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of Louis IX, Emmaus Academic (Steubenville, OH: 2017).

In the pursuit of the fulfillment of the "debt of royal power," Louis brought together the long-running discourse on right rulership with that on the moral life itself, and in doing so he provided a convergence between the lay and the clerical.

Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Louis Infield, tr., Hackett Publishing Company (Indianapolis, IN: 1963).

Admitted that it is illogical to enunciate one's wishes to God, to whom all things are known, that the need to clothe one's dispositions in the sound of words is a human weakness, yet this is the means best suited to man's limitations.

Madeleine L'Engle, Many Waters, Dell Publishing (New York: 1987).

It was a relief to know that he was still on his own planet; even so, he felt lost, and far from anything familiar.

Anthony R. Lusvardi, SJ, Baptism of Desire and Christian Salvation, The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2024).

Theodore emphasizes the intention of the recipient of baptism because, as the Good Thief shows, when this intention is present, God can bring to completion the gifts the sacrament conveys.

Edith Stein, Letters to Roman Ingarden, Hugh Candler Hunt, tr., Maria Amata Neyer, OCD, ed., ICS Publications (Washington, DC: 2014).

It is so very beautiful here where everything is in bloom, and I see the beauty everywhere.

George Eliot, Romola, Penguin Books (New York: 2005).

Would any one have said that Tito had not made a rich return to his benefactor, or that his gratitude and affection would fail on any greater demand?

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Simon Armitage, tr., W. W. Norton and Company (New York: 2007). (Page 100 is the facing-page Middle English rather than the translation itself.)

And as in slomeryng he slode, sleyly he herde
A littel dyn at his dor, and derfly upon;
And he heves up his hed out of the clothes,
A corner of the cortyn he caught up a lyttel,
And waytes warly thiderwarde quat hit be myghte.

Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, Simon & Schuster (New York: 2008).

To become a member of a London guild (or livery company) you might need to pay as much as £3.

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel's The Philosophy of Right, Alan White, tr., Focus Philosophical Library (Newburyport, MA: 2002).

One should not think badly of human beings who make their well-being their intention.

Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Michael Chase, tr., Harvard University Press (Cambridge,  MA: 1998).

Thus, the totality of human existence is situated in relation to the whole of reality.

The Book of Taliesin: Poems of Warfare and Praise in an Enchanted Britain, Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams, trs., Penguin Books (New York: 2020).

There were six thousand men lined up on its ramparts
(Hard were the words exchanged with their watchman).

G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, Wordsworth Editions Limited (Ware, Hartfordshire: 1995).

The level of the sunlit landscape, though flat as a whole, fell away on the farther side of the wood in billows of heavy slope towards the sea, in a way not unlike the lower slope of the Sussex downs.