A Glittering Star Appeareth in the East

 The Epiphany 
by St. Robert Southwell

To blaze the rising of this glorious sun,
A glittering star appeareth in the East,
Whose sight to pilgrim-toils three sages won
To seek the light they long had in request;
And by this star to nobler star they pass,
Whose arms did their desired sun embrace.

Stall was the sky wherein these planets shined,
And want the cloud that did eclipse their rays;
Yet through this cloud their light did passage find,
And pierced these sages' hearts by secret ways,
Which made them know the Ruler of the skies,
By infant tongue and looks of babish eyes.

Heaven at her light, Earth blusheth at her pride,
And of their pomp these peers ashamed be;
Their crowns, their robes, their train they set aside,
When God's poor cottage, clothes, and crew, they
All glorious things their glory now despise,
Sith God contempt, doth more then glory prize.

Three gifts they bring, three gifts they bear away;
For incense, myrrh and gold, faith, hope and love;
And with their gifts the givers' hearts do stay,
Their mind from Christ no parting can remove;
His humble state, his stall, his poor retinue,
They fancy more than all their rich revenue.

Ginesthe Mimetai tou Theou

 All acridness and ambition and wrath and outcry and scurrility -- let it be taken away from you, along with every kind of badness. And become to one another useful, compassionate, forgiving each other as also God in Christ forgave you. Therefore become imitators of God, as doted-on children, and walk around in devotion, just as also Christ was devoted to us and submitted himself for us, an offering and sacrifice to God for a sweet-scented aroma. And debauchery and all impurity or craving, do not even let be named among you, as is fitting for the consecrated, and shamefulness and blathering or mockery, which are not appropriate; but rather, thanksgiving. For you are aware of this, that the debauched or impure or craving one, the one who is an idolator, has no patrimony in the realm of Christ and of God.

[Ephesians 4:31-5:5, my rough translation. 'Scurrility' is blasphemia; 'blathering' is morologia, fool-speaking or stupid-speaking. There are several plays on idea here, that emphasize the manner of our imitation. We are to forgive each other as God in Christ forgave us, which means that as beloved (agapeta) children we should walk in love (agape), as Christ loved (egapesen) in being a sacrifice for us; thus we should act as is fitting for the holy, i.e., those consecrated for sacrifice, which is to act in thanksgiving (eucharistia), which, of course is one of the major functions of sacrifice. If we do not act as appropriate to being consecrated, however, we do not have the inheritance (kleronomian) appropriate to beloved children.]

Evening Note for Saturday, January 4

 Thought for the Evening: Rough-and-Ready Ethical Tests for Practical Decision-making

In much of what we do, we use various tests and diagnostics and rules of thumb to give us first approximations for practical purposes. We certainly do this in ethics, but there is remarkably little discussion of these; discussions tend to be about underlying systems and not about useful first-approximation rules in decisions. If we are faced with a given scenario or situation, what are some rules that people use to get a first assessment of what choices are right and wrong, good and bad?

(1) Reciprocity: A very popular one is to use a crude form of reciprocity, either positive (you should do to others as you would generally like them to do to you) or negative (you should not do to others as you would generally not like them to do to you). There are sophisticated forms of reciprocity, but in practice the first-approximation rule is fairly simple and based on appearances.

(2) Generalizability of Principle: One common practical test is to consider whether the action is a candidate for being principled. (This is weaker than determining whether it is actually principled.) Is the principle of the choice or action something that could be generally used (even if some exceptions or qualifications are allowed)?

(3) Traditional Acceptability: Another common one is to consider what has long been considered acceptable by a diverse and widespread population of people.

(4) Beneficialness of Precedent: People often assess possible actions on whether the action would be beneficial or detrimental if taken as a precedent.

(5) Consistency with Paragons or Exemplars: There are also persons of exceptional reputation in moral matters, and people will regularly assess whether a given action is something that such persons would do, or at least whether they would approve or disapprove of it.

It's not difficult to find people using any and all of these. None of them are intended, of course, to be rigorously exact or always right; the whole point is just that we sometimes need a first assessment for practical purposes, something fairly easy that usually gets us in the right neighborhood. And in fact, you can easily build accounts in utilitarianism, Kantianism, or Aristotelianism, to name just three, that would explain why some of these rules would, across a large number of domains, give us something approximately right. For instance, if you accept the Kantian idea that maxims should be universalized, it's easy to show that our impression of how generalizable a principle is would often be a good first step to assessing whether the maxim can be universalized. It in effect gets us partially to where a Kantian wants us to be. Beneficialness of precedent can likewise easily be shown to be something that you will often have to consider in applying the greatest happiness principle. You can often build such justifications for most of the rules, although of course, which general approach to ethics you choose will change how directly a rule can be justified, as well as its relative importance compared to the other rules. In some cases, there is an inconsistency -- e.g., Kantianism strictly speaking rejects consistency with paragons as a way of assessing right and wrong -- but even then it may be that the particular approach implies that it has another use -- e.g., Kant holds that, once we've determined right and wrong, consistency with paragons like Jesus can be an assurance of sorts that doing what is right is possible.

Whenever we are faced with an ethicist (or, as often seems the case, bioethicist) making an apparently controversial or provocative claim, we should apply the rough-and-ready tests. They won't establish whether the ethicist is right or wrong, but they will give us the lay of the land, and lead us to raise the right questions about what they are claiming.

Various Links of Interest

* Mark Balaguer, Platonism in Metaphysics, at the SEP

* Michael Vazquez, Kant's Rejection of Stoic Eudaimonism (PDF)

* David Mikics, Christmas, the Greatest Jewish American Holiday, at "Tablet", discusses how much Christmas music is due to Jewish American composers.

* Michael B. Willenborg, The Persons of the Trinity are Themselves Triune: A Reply to Mooney (PDF)

* Abigail Tulenko, Folklore is philosophy, at "Aeon"

* Tuomas E. Tahko, Laws of Metaphysics for Essentialists (PDF)

* Luke Coppen, The book of before and after, interviews Fr. Andrew Younan on Chaldean Catholicism, at "The Pillar"

* Ignacio Silva, Thomas Aquinas and Some Neo-Thomists on the Possibility of Miracles and the Laws of Nature (PDF)

Currently Reading

Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Heinrich von dem Turlin, The Crown

in Audiobook

Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire
C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
Eve Titus, The Great Mouse Detective

Trust

 American Founders
by Peter Maurin 

The founders of America
came to America
to serve God
the way they thought
God wants to be served.
How God
wants to be served
is no longer taught
in American schools.
How to be successful
is still taught
in American schools.
Thinking of time
in terms of money
is at the base
of the thinking
of our business men.
We put on our coins:
“In God we trust,”
but persist in thinking
that everybody else
ought to pay cash.

It's increasingly unclear, I think, whether American schools still teach how to be successful; but trust still continues to take a beating. 

Dashed Off I

As always, dashed-off notes, to be taken with a grain of salt; this continues the notebook begun September 2024.

***** 

Knowing regularities is not enough; one needs to know regularities of regularities.

Shared truth has a different feel from truth received individually.

"I can remember a memory, expect an expectation, fantasize a fantasy." Edith Stein
"...the living body is consittuted in a two-fold manner as a sensed (bodily perceived) living body and as an outwardly perceived physical body of the outer world. And in this doubled givenness it is experienced as the same."
"To fantasize my body forsaken by my 'I' means to fantasize my living body no longer, but a completely parallel physical body, to fantasize my corpse."

the symbolizability of experience

Our subjectivity is intrinsically reflective of intersubjectivity. We experience our own aptness of accommodating and accounting for a perspective other than our own; we often reach for such a perspective.

We experience emotions as factors of intelligibility, as things that make sense of other things.

The Beatific Vision is how God by grace specifies our orientation toward the intelligible.

the sex principia as categories of interrelationality

Human imaginativeness and fantasy allow us to shift our environmental niche.

spiritual and corporeal works of mercy as symbolic imitations of Christ

The drum fill plays more of a role in the success of rock music than usually seems appreciated; it does a lot to maintain interest through variety and to add musical layers.

When we make a chair, we do not make it merely to be sat on but to be a chair such that it can be sat on; we do not empose bare function but form for function.

Artifact-making is organism-imitation. (This is a reason why many of Plato's & Aristotle's artifact analogies work.)

the human act of evention

"As we must not doubt our participation in his glory, so we must not doubt his participation in our nature." Leo
"Since you have discovered the grace of God in yourselves, respond by loving your own nature in him."

"The inexperienced are like those who observe from far away." Aristotle (SE 1.164b)
"A refutation (elenchos) is the contradictory of one and the same item, not merely of the name (onnomatos) but of the fact (pragmatos), using not a co-name but the same name, which results from premises by necessity (ex anankes) and doe snot include as premise what was to be proved, and by the same, in respect of the same, in teh same way, and at the same time. (SE 5.167a)

method as "procedure according to principles" (Kant)

-- Ramus uses the Homeric chain of gold to describe his method

rhetoric as the study of argument in light of the full person

inutition as like reading a word without having to spell it out (Miss Marple)

authority: the quality by which persons or institutions are the principles or sources of the actions of other persons or insitutions

Free will is the causal capability for acting that is not determined to only one possibility in such a way that prudential selection of possibilities is possible.

Prudent action is that to which free will has its natural orientation.

On some forms of compatibilism, like classical compatibilism or Strawsonian compatibilism, there is no ground to deny that institutions can have free will.

Democratic governance requires a peculiar sort of faith in people, one that is impossible to sustain without a faith in providence or at least an objective moral order in which being human lets us participate.

It seems in many cases that the point of trial by ordeal was to raise the cost of serious accusations and in others that the point was to give the authorities a safer (and face-saving) way to make rulings that could cause social or political problems.

agency, consultation, and assurance forms of mediation

the juridical presence of Christ in the sacrament of matrimony

'real' as a value term

Every measurement involves values (accuracy, precision, etc.) as an intrinsic part of the measurement.

"What was to be seen of our Redeemer has passed over into the sacraments." Leo

philosophy where faith is the interpretant (see Sadler's criticism of Deely)

each of the seven sacraments as representing one aspect of the Christian stance in prayer

Gradually one comes to sudden enlightenment.

three general forms of development of doctrine
(1) what is implicit is made more explicit
(2) what is obscure is made more clear
(3) what is vague is made more distinct
-- Garrigou-Lagrange takes (1) to be the case before Christ & (3) to be the case after; he has no (2) but would perhaps divide it between (1) and (3).

Mary as Zion (a common epithet for her in Ethiopian theology)

"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption." Raymond Chandler

It is part of how we understand preferences  that some may be nobler and others baser. Some may be more stable and others less, some may be more shareable and others less. What is more, it is also part of how we understand preferences that they can be first-hand or second-hand, for ourselves or for others.

"It started and took flight, circled, and afterward perched. He said: On mountain ridge, the hen pheasant. Time! Time! Zilu saluted. Three offerings and it flew." Analects 10.27
-- 'three offerings' is literally 'three smellings'; but in Xunzi the phrase is used for a sacrifice with three oficiants who do not eat during the sacrifice.
-- King Wu of Zhou in the Classic of Documents (Great Vow) uses an expression somewhat like Confucius's to mean 'seize the moment' with respect to rejuvenating the world.

timeliness and appropriate beahvior at appropriate time as the theme of Analects 10

-- Letter 72 of Cyril of Alexandria to Proclus, on why he does not directly condemn Theodore of Mopsuestia

Omnipotence is the power commensurate with all of contingent being as an effect.

the authority to swear in

Note & think about Vermigli's argument that baptism is a greater sacrament than eucharist.

gesture as way to bring the world within our circles of meaning

Whe there is a crisis, there is never only one crisis.

In a ready-made, what we sculpt is not the work but its social situation.

When Jane Austen first wrote 'Emma Woodhouse', she was not pretending to refer to Emma, but referring to Emma, a character in her story.

Languages obviously do not meet the conditions for being sets, whatever one might take them to be sets of; they are ever-shifting and their 'elements' flow into and overlap each other in complicated way.

Free verse is like apples: very good when good but often not good.

non-arbitrary fictions: center of gravity, equator, national borders, historical characters in historical fictions
-- this should be distinguished from fictions selected out of non-arbitrary elements, e.g., talking animals, where the fiction has to draw in part from the real behavior of animals but only freely and as useful for the story's characterization and plot.

Every virtue is a kind of love of being.

free will as originary alternate possibility

The success of the Church always comes thorugh many apparent failures.

"If indeed the Son is the Only-Begotten from teh Father, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Son, he is not like any created being which belongs to the Father and the Son, but is with each, living and powerful, and subsisting eternally from that which is the Father and the Son." Leo (Sermon 75)
"Whatever the divine governance does in managing all things, it comes from the providence of the whole Trinity."
"Eloquence  may be suitable for exhortation, reason may be effective in presuasion, but examples are more forceful than words, and it is better to teach by deeds than by words."
"The fullest remission of sins is obtained when there is one prayer and one confession of the whole Church."
"Devotion is then more efficacious and more holy when, in the works of mercy, the soul and the understanding of the whole Church is one. Public devotion must be put before one's own, and a special kind of value must be recognized where the common care watches over us."

the growth of Christianity as a punishment for the devil (Leo, Sermon 87)

If you never pronounce words incorrectly, it can only be because you have a small vocabulary.

Attribution is a selection from alternate possibilities.

"each of the gods is nothing else than the One in its participated aspect" Proclus

When we speak of the real presence, we could just as easily speak of our presence in the heavenly liturgy.

Languages are not strictly separate except pedagogically; there is a fractured thing, langugage, and languages are fragments, none wholly separate or separable, of the fractured surface.

-- religions could be organized according to mutual intelligibility in the way that is often done with languages

Truthmaker theory is not a general theory of truth but a theory of truthbearers.

We should likely not think in terms of 'truth-makers' but in terms of being as truly seen/judged/described: truths do not so much depend on being but are being in a particular mental light.

A truth-bearer is a sign, real or posited, of a truth. Truthbearers can be false, truths cannot.

What is true of a creature is a cooperative venture of Creator and creature.

Truthmaker theorists often err by starting with truthbearers and not with being.

A recurring problem in politicis is that even when relevant information changes on a dime, people's moral judgments cannot.

The eucharist is the only sacrament that in itself shows God's power as extending to created being as such.

In transubstantiation the bread and wine are changed both in their capacity for being and their way of being (this is the 'substance' part, which contrasts it with conversion = tranformation, where only the way of being is changed).

"Faith is not contrary to the senses, but concerns things to which sense does not reach." Aquinas

Fortnightly Books Index 2024

 Like last year (and indeed even more so than last year), this was a busy year with a highly irregular schedule that chopped my time up into little bits; this is the worst possible situation for the Fortnightly Book, and, indeed, for the first time the series essentially stalled out at the end of the year. Even before that time, the year had a fair number of three-week and even four-week 'fortnights'. I am hoping that next year is a bit more amenable, and that I won't be forced to convert this series into the Sesquifortnightly Book. Nonetheless, the series covered significant ground, with literature from Britain, Norway, Italy, America, Germany, and Greece. I think the Christiad was the one I most enjoyed, although partly because it was a much stronger work than I had been expecting from comments about it, followed by Wace's Roman de Brut; of the re-reads, I think I came to appreciate a great deal more about The Last Unicorn than I previously had.

January 7: Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Introduction, Review

January 28: Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Introduction, Review

February 11: Mortimer J. Adler, Philosopher at Large
Introduction, Review

February 25: Sigrid Undset, Saga of Saints
Introduction, Review

March 17: Marco Girolama Vida, Christiad
Introduction, Review

March 31: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjørnsen & Moe
Introduction, Review

April 14: Blind Harry, The Wallace
Introduction, Review

May 19: Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Introduction, Review

June 9: Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn
Introduction, Review

June 23: Eric Nguyen, Things We Lost the Water
Introduction, Review

July 7: Wace, Roman de Brut
Introduction, Review

July 28: Michael Flynn, In the Belly of the Whale
Introduction, Review

August 18: Hartmann von Aue, Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Poetry: The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue
Introduction, Review

September 8: The Saga of the Jomsvikings
Introduction, Review

September 22: Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz
Introduction, Review

October 27: Euripides, Three Great Plays by Euripides: Medea, Hippolytus, Helen
Introduction, Review

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

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