Friday, September 05, 2025

Dashed Off XXI

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

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

No one compares statements only with statements.

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

skill as a kind of security in difficult deed

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

Shy love as well bold love imitates God.

Joy is an adorning power.

Love deems it an honor to do good.

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

Our practical actions suppose contexts that give them meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irrationality requires an extensive context of rationality.

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

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

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

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

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

spiritus vertiginis (Night I, xiv.3)

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

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

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

Grounding is not a relation but a status.

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

The artist imitates nature by the very act of imitation.

funerals as ways of showing respect to human dignity

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

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

purgatory as a sharing of the Cross of Christ

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

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

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

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