Links of Note

 * Ernesto Priani, Ramon Llull, at the SEP

* Kevin J. Harrelson, Richard T. Greener and the Abolitionist Moment in American Philosophy, at "Blog of the APA"

* Carlos Cortissoz, Souls Within a Soul: The City-Soul Analogy Revisited (PDF)

* Edmund Stewart, The First Universities? Ancient Greek Philosophical Schools, at "Antigone"

* Doug Campbell, Why did the ancient Greeks avoid human dissection?, at "Plato's Fish-Trap: Ancient Natural Philosophy"

* Colin Chamberlain, How to Eat a Peach: Malebranche on the Function of the Passions (PDF)

* Brendan Hodge, Is Easter actually 'late' this year?, at "The Pillar"

* Francesca Mezzenza & Gabriel Scheidecker, Hegemony and Childcare, at "Aeon"

* Marshall Bierson, Understanding Anscombe's Absolutism (PDF)

* Andreas Wimmer, Seungwon Lee, and Jack LaViolette, The Spread of Romantic Nationalism across Europe: A Case of Ideational Diffusion, at "Broadstreet"

* Theresa Tallien, What Was Courtship?

* T. Parker Haratine, Augustine on memory, the mind, and human flourishing (PDF)

* Ryan Burge, The Truth Isn't Out There: Religion and Belief in Aliens, at "Graphs About Religion"

Hyper Christou Presbeuomen

Therefore from now on, we recall no one according to the flesh. Though too we knew Christ according to the flesh, yet now we no longer know. Therefore, if anyone in Christ -- a new creature. The original has perished; see, the new comes to be. And all from God, the one having restored us to himself through Christ, and having given us the service of restoration, how God was in Christ, the world restoring to Himself, not counting their lapses against them, and having placed in us the reason of restoration.

Therefore for Christ we negotiate, as though God is summoning through us. We beg on behalf of Christ: Be restored to God! The one unknowing of sin, he made sin for us, so that we might become God's justice in him. And also, cooperating, we urge you not to receive God's grace in an empty way.

For he says: At the approved time, I heard you, and in the day of safety, I rescued you. See, now is the well-approved time; see, now is the day of safety.

[2 Corinthians 5:16-6:2, my very rough translation. Like much of 2 Corinthians, this is a bit of a tangle. The word I've translated here as 'restoration' is often translated as 'reconciliation'; it can also mean 'change' and seems sometimes to be used to mean something like 'atonement'. The word I've translated as 'negotiate' literally means 'be elders' (it is related to the word presbyter, usually translated as 'elder', which gives us the word 'priest'), but age is not the key thing; to be an elder is to have a position of responsibility and honor. Thus the verb is often translated as 'be ambassadors'; we could also translate it as 'represent'.]

No Maps of His Soul Have I Penned

 Loyalty
by Berton Braley 

He may be six kinds of a liar,
He may be ten kinds of a fool,
He may be a wicked highflyer
Beyond any reason or rule;
There may be a shadow above him
Of ruin and woes to impend,
And I may not respect, but I love him,
Because -- well, because he's my friend. 

 I know he has faults by the billion,
But his faults are a portion of him;
I know that his record's vermilion,
And he's far from the sweet Seraphim;
But he's always been square with yours truly,
Ready to give or to lend,
And if he is wild and unruly,
I like him -- because he's my friend. 

 I criticize him but I do it
In just a frank, comradely key,
And back-biting gossips will rue it
If ever they knock him to me!
I never make diagrams of him,
No maps of his soul have I penned;
I don't analyze -- just love him,
Because -- well, because he's my friend.

Berton Braley was a popular American poet in the first half of the twentieth century; he was newspaper-syndicated and was the sort of poet whose poems, often humorous or motivational, newspaper readers would clip out and share, or have their children memorize.

Beattie on Vestment

 I find that James Beattie has a brief discussion of the Aristotelian category of echein/habitus, in his work, Theory of Language, Part II, Chapter II. In context, he's looking at adverbs, and he considers a possible way that had been proposed of categorizing adverbs in terms of Aristotle's categories. He goes through the categories briefly, assigning adverbs, and notes that there's no obvious English adverbs for the category of habitus, although he recognizes that this doesn't mean you couldn't have any, and he even gives a hypothetical example of how a particular etymology, if it had gone a different way than it actually did, might have delivered one. (Our contemporary English perhaps gives an actual example, in nattily.) Then he has a slight digression discussing the category itself:

By the by, I cannot see, for what purpose Aristotle made a separate category of the tenth; for to me it seems included in some of the preceding. A crown is as really a substance, as the head that wears it, and may last a thousand years longer . Or, if it is the having of the crown, or the being crowned, that distinguishes the category, as when we say, a crowned head, then crowned denotes a quality perceived by sense, and so belongs to the third predicament. Indeed this is not the only objection that might be made to the doctrine of the categories. Whoever treats of it in the way of detail, and without prejudice, will find, if I mistake not, that in some things it is redundant, and in others defective. 

This is unsurprising -- Beattie, like many early modern philosophers, has a dislike for 'the schoolmen'. The substance argument is very much the one later given Bentham, although Beattie has perhaps more justification for it -- when he defined the category originally, he said that it "denotes something additional and exterior to a substance, but not a part of it" (pp. 159-160), whereas Bentham is purportedly deriving his discussion from Sanderson but ignores Sanderson's explicit definition of the category in terms of adjacency. 

But Beattie is also in many ways a more educated man than Bentham, and unlike (apparently) Bentham was directly familiar with Aristotle himself, and so he considers a more adequate way of thinking of it, in terms of "the having" (the literal meaning of echein) of the other substance. His suggestion that in that case it should be reduced to quality (the third predicament, counting substance and quantity as the first two) is interesting. There is of course a form of quality that shares a cognate name with the tenth category -- hexis, or acquired disposition (translated into Latin with the same word for this category, habitus), is derived from one of the forms of echein -- so this is not implausible. (And makes clear that, despite the fact he's not making a show of it, Beattie's argument is informed by his familiarity with the actual Greek.)  There is in fact a very good modern article -- Abraham Edel's 1975 "Aristotle's Categories and the Nature of Categorial Theory" (I highly recommend it) -- that proposes something of the kind, leaning very heavily on the etymology. 

Nonetheless, I think this is fairly certainly a mistake. Being crowned is not really all that much like being skilled or virtuous (the most obvious forms of habitus in the quality sense), and Beattie's particular assumption that being crowned is a 'sensible quality' is probably related to the fact that as a Scottish common sense theorist he has a very broad interpretation of what counts as a 'sensible quality'. Obviously being crowned is not immediately sensible in the way that being red is; you have to have an intellectual understanding of what a crown is to see that someone is crowned.

What is true is that we sometimes treat being skilled, or virtuous, or red, or any kind of quality possession, on the model of being clothed. This is, again, a metaphorical use, and presumably happens because vestment is more sensible and imaginable than quality possession. (And there are sometimes direct connections. We can wear utility belts and other useful things, for instance, and these are things that can be instrumental to skill, and thus, in actual use, expressions of skill.) We can use vestment as a model for any kind of having, and we especially use it as a metaphor for contingent having (i.e., where what is had is something acquired, or something that depends on particular circumstances); even though the senses of 'having' are themselves very far from being univocal.

The Sheeted Mists Like Baffled Hosts Retire

 Sunrise
by George Heath 

Slow creeps the light athwart the concave still,
Steals a low whisper on the breathless calm,
Bringing the scent of opening flowers, a balm;
Breaks o'er the earth a grand, a rapturous thrill,
The chant of waters, and the song-bird's trill;
The clouds fold up their curtains, snowy white;
The sleeping stars fade noiselessly from sight.
Bright Phoebus mounts above the crimson hill;
The sheeted mists like baffled hosts retire,
Wan Zephyr comes to wanton with the flowers,
The stream meanders on, a string of fire,
And light and music fill earth's sylvan bowers!
Bright dewdrops shine and tremble everywhere:
O Sceptic, look and blush, for God is there!

Crown of Thanksgiving

 O Lord, behold your Church, saved by your Cross, and your flock bought with your precious Blood, offers a crown of thanksgiving in faith to you, O High Priest of justice who has exalted her by your abasement. And, like a glorious Bride, she rejoices and exults in you, O glorious Bridegroom. In the strength of the Truth, raise the walls of her salvation, and establish priests within her, to be ambassadors of peace on behalf of her children.

[From the Basilica Hymn for The Week Beginning the Great Fast (Sawma/Lent), in The Book of Before and After: The Liturgy of the Hours of the Church of the East, Fr. Andrew Younan, ed. and tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2024), p. 475. The Book of Before and After is the the liturgy of the hours (Divine Office) for the churches of the Church of East, i.e., the Church that grew up east of the Roman Empire (the Church that grew up inside the Roman Empire being the 'Church of the West'). Churches in the Church of the East tradition are the Assyrian Church of the East (sometimes just called the Church of the East, which includes the Chaldean Syrian Church of India), the Ancient Church of the East (a relatively recent split-off from the former), the Chaldean Catholic Church (which is in communion with Rome), and the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church (also in communion with Rome). This particular version of The Book of Before and After is specifically designed for the use of Chaldean Catholics. 

In the churches of the Church of the East -- as almost everywhere except the Latin Church -- Lent begins today; Ash Wednesday is a Latin Church tradition, and is not celebrated in the East at all, except in Maronite and (sometimes) Syro-Malabar parishes that serve a lot of Latin Catholics. The fasting custom for Chaldean Catholics is generally that the first, middle and last days of Lent are days of fast and abstinence, where abstinence covers not only meat but also dairy and eggs, and Fridays in Lent are days of abstinence from meat; there is no fasting on Sunday. Fasting consists of eating nothing between midnight and noon and only moderately the rest of the day.]

John of St. Thomas on Vestment

 Continuing on with the previous posts on the Aristotelian category of habitus/echein, I was curious about what John of St. Thomas (a.k.a., John Poinsot) -- also from the seventeenth century, although unlike Sanderson in the thick of the final scholastic flowering of the Baroque period -- says on the subject. John's interpretation of the category is heavily influenced by the Summa totius logicae Aristotelis (Opusculum 48); it is regarded as spurious today, and was often thought to be such in the seventeenth century, with, however, John of St. Thomas as one of its major defenders. From his Cursus Philosophicus:

About the category of habitus. Its definition is: "what is the adjacency of bodies and those things which are about the body." For just as a thing is rendered located by its adjacent and surrounding place, and by its subjection to time, so from the vestment around it, it is said to be clothed. Hence that is false that some say: habitus is a certain mode which is in the human body, by which it is rendered apt to be vested, which does not apply to other bodies. However, this does not render a man vested, but capable of being vested rather than merely nude. But it is clear that the category of habitus takes away nudity, since it renders him vested: therefore it does not consist in that mode, which is compatible with actual nudity. On account of which habitus is drawn out of the adjacency of clothing, just as where is from place. Nor does it prevent vestment from being a substance in itself. For since its application is accidental, it makes an accidental denomination and an accidental category, just as a vessel is said to be golden or wooden denominatively; but it is not a pure extrinsic denomination, but is drawn from an adjacency in man, as where is drawn from place.

 And so it is said by St. Thomas “habitus is a medium between clothing and having-clothing”, v Met., lect. xx, and 1-11, qest. XLIX, art. 1. Whence it comes that animals, even if they are covered with hair or are armed with claws, are not from them denominated as vested, because they are parts of the body. But if they are surrounded by some clothing, as a horse harnessed or armed, they are denominated by this category, as man by vestment. 

 The properties of these [last six] categories can easily be seen in St. Thomas’s Opusc. XLVIII, treating of each. Almost all of them are not susceptible of more and less, and do not have a contrary, save for action and passion, which have both. Habitus is also said to be susceptible of more and less not according to intensity or remission, but according to many or fewer clothings, as St. Thomas says, cited Opuscul., treatise on habit, chap. 3. However, it does not have a contrary, because it does not have intension and remission.

(My rough translation. John of St. Thomas uses two different words for clothed here, indutum and vestitum; they are used as synonyms, but I have used 'clothed' for indutum and its cognates and 'vested' for vestitum and its cognates, just to mark them in the translation.) While very briefly stated, I take it that John is here arguing for the idea that habitus is a real mode or aspect of a human being in such a way that becoming clothed changes the one who is clothed (they are no longer nude), which is due to the adjacency/adjoining.

And a little later, talking about the 'coordination' of the category (the coordination of a category, which is, I think, a term that comes from Suarez, is the system of genera under it), Poinsot says:

Habitus, which is a supreme genus, is divided by St. Thomas, Opusc. XLVIII, into arms and vestments, Arms, into offensive and defensive, each of which has various species. Vestments, into the vestment of men and of beasts, as horses are adorned with saddle, bridle, arms, etc. Vestments, into various modes of clothing according to diverse adjacencies, such as a tunic, shoe, hat, etc., which species are not taken from the material or art by which the vestments are made, but from the diverse way in which they are vested and covered. Also reduced to this category are wall ornaments, which are not properly vestments.

John of St. Thomas diverges slightly from St. Thomas's actual view as found in the Commentary on the Physics III, lect. 5, n. 14 (322); while St. Thomas does think that vestments for beasts are reduced to this category, he seems to be implying that it is not in a strict and proper sense but insofar as they 'are brought to human use' (in hominis usum veniunt). That is, in a much later vocabulary, the vestments of beasts are vestments not 'naturally' but 'morally', i.e., by human will (in something like the way, perhaps, that corporations are legal persons and so considered on the model of substances). The category is explicitly stated to be a special category for human beings. Op. 48, which is John's major influence here, says something similar, but perhaps more ambiguously:

Hence this category is only appropriate to humans. But it is true that we also vest and arm certain animals with external vestments and arms, for we vest apes and harness horses; and in this mode the category is able to pertain to them.

One way this could be read, however, is as saying that vestment applied to apes and horses is due to human beings but is nonetheless vestment in the proper sense. Given how Poinsot describes the coordination of the category, he has to be taking it to mean this when he cites it: vestments of beasts are a species of vestment and not, as seems to be the case with Aquinas in the Physics, an extended sense arising from how we use animals.

Mark K. Spencer has a very nice article on this, The Category of Habitus: Artifacts, Accidents, and Human Nature, which situates John's view in the context of the different scholastic views on how to understand the category. (I am personally inclined to think, however, that Spencer's own account of habitus, drawing from Poinsot and Joseph Owens, is both too narrow and too wide, although interestingly for the same reason: it ties the category too tightly to human use, and therefore also includes too many things that fall under human use. It's the old proper/extended problem, a serious problem in working out this category, because, again, we use this category as a model for all sorts of other things, thus leading to a huge number of metaphorical uses. Because of this, it's difficult to draw the line appropriately between proper and extended uses.)

Sanderson on Vestment

 I thought, given my last post, that I would translate Robert Sanderson's account of the category of Habitus from the Logicae Artis Compendium, so that it is more clear what Bentham would have had in front of him (not that he seems to have used it beyond the mnemonic verse, which is the only thing he references on this particular point); it's also interesting in giving us the 'Cliff's Notes' version of how it was understood in the seventeenth century. Seventeenth century textbooks like this are almost always extremely simplified versions of more sophisticated discussions in centuries prior. The universities were in bad shape by this point, and students, rather than doing any deep study or original work, mostly just crammed off compendia and summaries and vocabulary lists, which is one reason for the bad reputation of 'the schoolmen' in the early modern period. Nonetheless, sometimes the textbooks show that genuinely interesting things survived the slow but massive (and remarkably deliberate) brain-damaging of the entire scholastic super-edifice, which by the seventeenth century had been dumbed-down to almost nothing except in a few last redoubts like Coimbra and Louvain. Sanderson was a tutor at Oxford, which was not at all a shining example of university excellence in the seventeenth century, although he himself was fairly impressive (besides this textbook, which became one of the standard logic texts, he became an Anglican bishop famous for his preaching as well as a quite competent Regius Professor of Divinity). 

In any case, Sanderson on Habitus:

Habitus is the adjacency of the body and of those things which surround the body: by which the one having, these are said to be had. 'The body having' is the substance; 'The thing had' is an artificial form of the fourth species of quality: the application of this to that is this category of Habitus. Its property is to always be in many; in the having, namely, and in the had: but for different reasons. For it is in the having body, as in a subject; it is in the had thing, as in a cause. 

Everything pertaining to this: 

 1. Kinds of vestments: whether they are worn for the sake of Necessity, as being Shod, Tunicate; or for distinction, as being Ringed, Trousered; or simply for being Adorned, as being Armored, Saddled, Tasselled, etc. 

2. Possession, as being Wealthy, being Beneficed, being Described, being Named, etc., and those things that are similar to these.

(My rough translation.) 'Adjacency' could also be translated as 'adjoining'. The fourth species of quality is 'form and figure'. It's interesting that Sanderson assumes that the form must be artificial; covering oneself with leaves would perhaps not count, although maybe 'artificial form' is being used broadly here. Nonetheless, it's interesting that Sanderson holds that in being clothed that we are related to a qualitative trait of the clothes. I suppose that makes some sort of sense -- nobody wears a shirt unless it can be draped over their frame in a way that to some extent fits the frame, because the appropriate draping is what the shirt itself is and does in being worn as a shirt. Besides the explicitly mentioned quality, several other categories are clearly implied as presupposed here: substance and quantity (body), relation (adjacency), where (those things surrounding the body), action and passion (in the had as in a cause).

The examples gave me some trouble; what Latin I have simply doesn't extend very far into words for early modern words for clothes and the like. And, frankly, I don't understand Sanderson's division at all. Why are Shod and Tunicate classed under 'for the sake of necessity' but Trousered under 'for the sake of distinction', and Armored under 'merely for adornment'? I have no idea what principle of classification is going on here. But perhaps this is not intended to be a real classification; the relevant class is just 'kinds of vestments', all together, and Sanderson is simply telling us that all the reasons why one might wear something are relevant. (Notice, incidentally, that he puts 'Saddled' here, thus implicitly providing his answer to whether a horse being saddled counts in this category.)

The second class of Habitus, however, is even more perplexing, and I suspect that Sanderson is just going along with the name of the category ('what is had') rather than having any particular reason for thinking that your having a name is an 'adjacency of a body and what is around that body'. All of this class, I think, would really be metaphorical cases of vestment (in the case of Benefices, literally metaphorical, if you will pardon the expression, because the language of vestment and investiture is actually used as a metaphor to describe it). For purely logical reasons, that perhaps does not matter so much, since the logic would work much the same whether we are being literal or metaphorical, but 'possession' would make this category a massive hodge-podge of very different things whose relations to the actual description of the category are loose at best. Nonetheless, the metaphorical cases are quite important; we use the category as a sort of model or template for talking about a lot of other, very different, topics, namely, whenever one thing can be said to belong to a different thing.

The Category of Vestment

In his  Essay on Logic, Jeremy Bentham tackles (as one might expect from the title) the subject of logic, all done with his characteristic unearned confidence and obnoxious curmudgeonliness. No one could learn very much about logic from the essay, I think, but there are occasionally interesting things. When talking about the Aristotelian categories (of which he seems to have only secondhand and limited knowledge), he spends an extended amount of time on the tenth category, habitus (echein), which gets various translations as Possession, Having, Vestment, Clothing, and so forth, the category for things like 'shod', 'clothed', 'dressed', and so forth. Bentham's sarcastic comments on the subject are actually a good way to think through the category.

Habitus, vesture, human clothing, for such is the intimation given by the corresponding portion of the illustrative distich, nec tunicatus ero.  

The illustrative distich is from Robert Sanderson's mnemonic verse in his Logicae Artis Compendium, which is Bentham's primary source on the history of logic. The distich is:

Arbor Sex Servos Fervore Refrigerat Ustos,
Ruri Cras Stabo, nec Tunicatus ero.

In English, that would mean roughly, "The tree cools six servants burned from the heat; I will stand in the field tomorrow, but not clothed."  But, of course, it's a mnemonic; each capitalized word in the original gives an example of the category.  

But clothing, human clothing, is it not a substance? Here, then, we have given, in the character of the name of a predicament distinct from all the rest, an article included under one of them, viz. the first.

More insightful than it looks; that which is worn is indeed a substance, and this is the distinctive feature of habitus as a category. Some people suggest that Aristotle's original intention for the category was that it be a rest state reached by change, which seems more general than Aristotle had in view, although it would make some sense. The traditional list of ten categories was long known to divide: the first four categories (substance, quality, quantity, relation) and the last six categories (action, passion, when, where, posture, having). The latter, which came to be known as the sex principia, all seem clearly to presuppose the category of relation in some way (Bentham, jumping on this, previously claimed that they all just reduce to relation), and one way to understand the division is take the first four to be categories specifically concerned with being (complete actuality) and the final six to be specifically concerned with changing (incomplete actuality). However, in part because of the influence of Aristotle's examples, it was also natural to take being clothed as a central feature of this particular category. But this works as well, and ironically, it is precisely for what Bentham is criticizing. Clothing is when one substance becomes accident-like relative to another substance, without being incorporated as a substantial part. In wearing shoes, you take a different substance, the shoes, and you use them in such a way that you yourself change from being unshod to being shod; the shoes become as-if accidents to you. 

The accident strictly speaking is the state of wearing; but in the state of wearing another substance becomes predicable indirectly of you, as an adjunct of you. This is the distinctive feature of the category, and contrasts with the other five of the sex principia, all of which seem to be presupposed by this category. The Thomistic way of accounting for the sex principia is that they involve attribution to a subject of something beyond itself (which is why they presuppose relation). Action and passion are the categories for which the 'something beyond' is a cause or an effect; when, where, and posture are the categories for which the 'something beyond' is a measure (in particular, a change or a container, with the latter occurring in two different ways); and vestment is when the 'something beyond' is adjoined.

Late scholastics sometimes divided this category into ornament and equipment; it's clear that these are not mutually exclusive (shoes are both for use and for adornment), but these do seem to be the primary candidates for how one substance can become an adjunct for you. One substance can be adjoined to another as a sort of closely connected sign (adorned) or as a sort of closely connected tool (equipped).

 Clothing, a predicament distinct from substance? On equal ground might additional predicaments, in any number, be stated as having existence, as being entitled to a place upon the list, many of them, perhaps most, a better title. 

Bentham very notably provides no examples at all of anything that might be at least equally entitled to a place on the list. It is very difficult to come up with another category that definitely should be on the list, in part because (whether you think the original discussions in Aristotle had any principled scheme behind them or not) the list does seem to cover most of the things we predicate of things. And on the other side, it's hard to deny that we do, in fact, treat clothing in a special way as if it were almost part of what it clothes, and that this does affect what we say of things that are clothed. Even if you held, like Bentham, that the category is in some sense arbitrary and non-natural, that doesn't change the fact that we do in fact treat clothing in a different way from the way we treat everything else, and our language does in fact reflect this. There are things other than clothing in the strict sense that we do give special treatment -- you can say of someone that he is housed, for instance, in the sense of possessing a house, but one could argue that this falls under this category as an unusual case of non-clothing having something broadly like the relation to us that normally only clothing has. Clothing is a very good candidate for being the paradigmatic case, even if one held that, strictly speaking, the category also has to include things that are not strictly what we would call clothing. (One could also argue that any non-clothing cases are cases in which the category is predicated metaphorically, by a figure of speech, rather than properly.)

A curious predicament, a predicament, the exemplification of which is mere matter of contingency, a predicament which, at one time, had no existence, which in one place has, in another place has not, existence at this present time. 

 Before eating of the fatal apple, neither Adam, nor Eve his wife, had any clothing,—had possession, or so much as any idea of any such predicament. In fact, it had not any exemplification or any existence. At the very instant of its being placed, the first fig leaf that was ever placed, gave birth to this predicament, gave birth to the first individual from which the species, such as it is, pregnant with all the individuals that ever belonged to it, took its rise.

Some of the scholastics, like Thomas Aquinas, held that it is in fact true that this category is only properly predicated of human beings, so there would be no proper exemplification of it prior to the existence of human beings. Bentham has a tendency to dismiss things without giving any reason why, and this is a good case. He doesn't give us any actual reason to think it is absurd that human beings using human language might have a class of predications that completely presupposes something done by human beings. This is particularly the case, since Bentham thinks all accidents are "fictitious entities"; only substances are "real entities", so most of the categories don't have a real exemplification at all, being at best ways we linguistically compare and contrast substances. Fictitious entities, as Bentham understands the term, don't actually exist; they arise from the limitations of language. So it's hard to see why he's being so sarcastic about it. And likewise, it's not an absurdity that the first instance where we could predicate of something that it was clothed, required the invention of clothing.

There is something striking about the idea of human beings inventing an entirely new category. Nonetheless there are a few puzzles with Aquinas's position, which occasionally come up in scholastic discussions. Walls can be tapestried, which seems quite a bit like clothing, and in fact, statues can be dressed in clothes. Even more plausibly, horses can be shod and saddled, dogs and cats can be collared, and the like. On Aquinas's view, these are all extended senses based on the fact that by human intervention we can give an artificial relation to them on the model of our own clothing. Dogs themselves don't really wear collars; we put leather or cloth strips around dog's neck on the model of necklaces and collars in human beings, and then by a figure of speech treat the dog as wearing a collar.

I confess I'm not entirely convinced by this, in the sense that I can fully see that there would be a difference between the human cases and the cases of tapestried walls, saddled horses, and collared dogs, but I don't really see why that would affect either the predication or relation. Yes, these cases are derivative cases causally, but if you put sweater on a dog, it seems to be more than merely figuratively wearing a sweater. There are even purely natural cases, like the hermit crab with his adventitious shell, that seem difficult to distinguish from our wearing of clothes. To be sure, we often use this category metaphorically; we might say that the armadillo is armored, which is a figure of speech because what we are calling 'armor' is quite clearly just a part of the armadillo. But if we went around saying that the hermit crab was shelled, it's not at all clear why we would think that we were saying that the hermit crab was wearing the shell figuratively. If vestment is the category in which one substance is predicated of another substance specifically as adjoined to it, then the hermit crab's being shelled seems to count as vestment, despite no human intervention. And if that's the case, then it seems we should treat the cases of the horse's being saddled and the dog's being collared as vestment as well.

Perhaps St. Thomas is thinking of the category as being linked particularly to action. We, ourselves, wear clothes; being shod, despite the passive construction, is something we do as well as something done to us. Being shod is not something horses do; it is only something done to horses.  This distinction between active vestment and passive vestment does seem important for many purposes. But passion is a category just like action, so I'm not sure that this would make a difference. We can distinguish cases in which we clothe ourselves and in which we are clothed by another. If someone puts clothes on you while you are asleep, for instance, you still seem to be clothed in the proper sense.

The Origins of the Maronite Catholic Church (Re-Post)

This is a lightly revised re-post from 2023.

 

This week is interesting in the Maronite calendar of saints, because it includes a number of specifically Maronite saints: 

 February 27: St. Thalaleus, Disciple of St. Maron 

 February 28: Ss. Koura and Marana, Disciples of St. Maron 

 March 1: St. Domnina, Disciple of St. Maron & St. Eudokia of Baalbek 

 March 2: St. John Maron 

 So I thought I would say something about the origins of the Antiochene Syriac Maronite Church, a sui juris Eastern Catholic church in communion with Rome. 'Origins' because in a sense it has more than one. 

 Christianity, of course, has extensive roots in Syria and Lebanon; Antioch was where the Christians were first called 'Christian' and the bishops of Antioch in all of the apostolic churches have traditionally traced their see to St. Peter himself. The area is filled with the memory of ancient saints and martyrs. For instance, the Eudokia of Baalbek who is commemorated by the Maronites on March 1, and who is also known as Eudokia of Heliopolis, was a wealthy young woman who converted, gave away all of her wealth to the poor, and joined a convent; according to tradition, she was beheaded around 107. Many more could be added to the list. But one who particularly interests us is St. Maron, whose feast day is February 9. 

 St. Maron, or Maroun, or Maro, was born in Syria in the 4th century. According to some stories he had been a fellow student with St. John Chrysostom at one point, but what we definitely know is that he became an open-air hermit in Cyrrhus, near Antioch. Open-air eremitism is a particularly rigorous form of ascetic life; it means exactly what it sounds like it means: he lived in the open air, with only a small tent that he used only for the worst weather conditions, on a hill where a pagan temple had once stood. Syria is a region that has fairly significant temperature extremes over the year -- it gets fairly cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. It also occasionally has severe sandstorms in spring and autumn. It's not really camping country. People would occasionally visit hermits in those days to ask for prayers and the like, and over time, St. Maron developed a reputation as an effective healer, and people began to come in droves. According to Theodoret of Cyr, who wrote a book about ascetics living in the area around Antioch at this time, his reputation was not merely for physical healing, but for spiritual healing -- he could heal physical illness, but also things like anger and greed. A result was that people also began imitating him, and trying the open-air ascetic life themselves. The most important of these was a man we call St. James the Solitary, whose feast day is November 26, who also gained a widespread reputation. 

A spontaneous ascetic movement grew up around St. Maron and St. James, and this is the first origin of the Maronites, as a religious movement. St. Maron eventually came down with an illness and died, but the movement he unintentionally started continued to flourish. Many saints arose in the context of this movement. St. Abraham the Hermit, whose feast is February 14, took the Maronite life to Lebanon, where he preached in the area around Mount Lebanon and was later made bishop of Harran. St. Limnaeus was a student of another hermit (possibly also inspired by St. Maron), St. Thalassius, and afterward became a student of St. Maron himself; St. Thalassius and St. Limnaeus share a feast day on February 22. St. Thelalaeus the Weeper, whose feast is February 27, lived in a cage made out of a barrel. He had the gift of tears, so he wept for his sins very often. He happened to set up his barrel not far from a pagan temple, and so ended up preaching to pagans who came by, curious about the man living in a barrel, and converted many of them. St. Marana and St. Koura (or Cyra), whose feast is February 28, lived at Beroea in a crevice in the rocks with no roof, and St. Koura also kept a vow of silence. They did not leave the crevice at all; they built a house nearby where lived volunteers who passed them food through a narrow opening. St. Domnina the Younger, whose feast day is March 1, was a woman from a very wealthy family in Antioch; she started living in a hut in her mother's garden, veiling her face, and eating nothing but lentils. Like St. Thelalaeus, she also had the gift of tears. An entire religious community of women grew up around her, maintaining themselves by doing basic manual labor and carding wool. Many more could be added, and the kinds of asceticism they practiced were of all kinds. Monasteries and convents as well as hermitages began sprouting up.

So things went for a while, and the Maronite movement did not slow down, and it played a major role in the spiritual life of the patriarchate of Antioch. But crisis would hit in the early seventh century, when a civil war broke out, including a revolt in Antioch. The exact details are murky; the entire social situation seems to have deteriorated; but it is likely that Patriarch St. Anastasius II of Antioch (whose feast day is December 21) was assassinated by Monophysites in the course of a riot. The situation continued to be bad, so the Emperor and Patriarch of Constantinople got together and decided to appoint a titular patriarch of Antioch, who would reside in Constantinople. Exactly how this plan came into effect, we don't know; the entire period is a period of tumult, and so it may have been intended as a temporary measure until things quieted down, but in any case it ended up not being temporary, and lasted about a century. Needless to say, this was not popular among the monasteries around Antioch. What's more, things grew worse, as Muslim armies invaded Syria in a major campaign in the 630s. The monks seem to have seen that they were cut off and would likely not have a resident patriarch in any near future at this rate, so led by the major monastery in the area, the Monastery of St. Maroun on the Orontes, a major stronghold of Chalcedonian Christianity in the area, the bishops of Syria elected their own patriarch in 685 without any regard for either the Emperor or the Patriarch of Constantinople. We know remarkably little about this patriarch, St. John Maron, before his ascension, but he is said to have studied for a time in Constantinople and to have been the Monastery of St. Maroun's best teacher. Obviously they needed some recognition for the move, and Constantinople would obviously not have given it; so they went to Rome, where St. Sergius I was Pope. And while St. Sergius seems himself to have been born in Sicily, his family was Syrian from the area around Antioch. According to Maronite tradition, St. Sergius recognized St. John Maron as Patriarch of Antioch and All the East. Constantinople's line of titular patriarchs continued, and in the eighth century came back to Antioch; the Greek Orthodox and the Melkite Catholic patriarchal lineages for Antioch both descend from that return.

With St. John Maron, the Maronite movement, while continuing to be a movement, also became a Church, and this fusion of ascetic movement and hierarchy gives the Maronites many of their distinctive features even to this day. And at some point, St. John Maron made a further choice that would contribute to the identity of the Maronites: he moved the patriarchate from Syria to Lebanon, establishing himself in a place that became known as the Holy Valley, Ouadi Qadisha. He seems to have chosen the area because the Maronite religious movement had been well established there. It's unclear exactly why the move happened, but it would prove to be important, because it made the Maronites a major feature of the mountains of Lebanon, and that turned out strategically to be a very effective place to be as first the Byzantines and then the Muslims tried to uproot the Maronites but found themselves repeatedly foiled by the difficulty of the terrain. It was a hard life, and the Maronites often had to hunker down, hide, shift their location. But it meant that they survived. They came to know the hills and forests much better than their enemies, and the natural protections of the area were formidable.

This was not obvious at the time. As far as most of the Christian world was concerned, the Maronites almost completely vanished from history, as if they had been destroyed. But then the First Crusade happened, and Raymond of Toulouse, on his way to besiege Tripoli, discovered little communities of Christians in the Lebanese hills who greeted him enthusiastically when it became clear that he, too, was Christian. The Maronites actively assisted the Crusaders and, through them, re-established active communication with Rome, whose recognition of St. John Maron as patriarch they still remembered with gratitude. And ever since, they have been the Eastern Catholic church with the closest connection to Rome.

And Beauty Immortal Awakes from the Tomb

 The Hermit
by James Beattie 

At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still,
And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove,
When nought but the torrent is heard on the hill,
And nought but the nightingale’s song in the grove:
’Twas then, by the cave of the mountain afar,
A Hermit his song of the night thus began;
No more with himself, or with nature, at war,
He thought as a sage, while he felt as a man: 

“Ah! why thus abandoned to darkness and woe?
“Why thus, lonely Philomel, flows thy sad strain?
“For spring shall return, and a lover bestow,
“And thy bosom no trace of misfortune retain.
“Yet, if pity inspire thee, ah! cease not thy lay,
“Mourn, sweetest complainer! man calls thee to mourn:
“O sooth him, whose pleasures like thine pass away--
“Full quickly they pass—but they never return. 

“Now gliding remote on the verge of the sky,
“The moon, half-extinguished, her crescent displays:
“But lately I marked, when majestic on high,
“She shone, and the planets were lost in her blaze.
“Roll on, thou fair orb, and with gladness pursue
“The path that conducts thee to splendour again:
“But man’s faded glory no change shall renew--
“Ah fool! to exult in a glory so vain! 

“Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more:
“I mourn, but, ye woodlands, I mourn not for you;
“For morn is approaching, your charms to restore,
“Perfumed with fresh fragrance, and glittering with dew.
“Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn;
“Kind Nature the embryo blossom will save.--
“But when shall Spring visit the mouldering urn?
“O, when shall it dawn on the night of the grave?” 

’Twas thus, by the glare of false science betrayed,
That leads, to bewilder, and dazzles, to blind;
My thoughts wont to roam, from shade onward to shade,
Destruction before me, and sorrow behind.
“O pity, great Father of light,” then I cried,
“Thy creature, who fain would not wander from Thee!
“Lo! humbled in dust, I relinquish my pride:
“From doubt and from darkness thou only canst free.” 

And darkness and doubt are now flying away:
No longer I roam in conjecture forlorn.
So breaks on the traveller, faint, and astray,
The bright and the balmy effulgence of morn.
See Truth, Love, and Mercy, in triumph descending,
And Nature all glowing in Eden’s first bloom!
On the cold cheek of Death smiles and roses are blending,
And Beauty immortal awakes from the tomb!

Carr on the Four Cardinal Virtues

 It would appear, then, that the four traditional virtues of wisdom, justice, courage and temperance may be defended as cardinal in terms of the four theses stated earlier in this paper. They are cardinal in so far as they do not appear to be mutually reducible, reference to each of them is indispensable for a full account of moral virtue and they represent the four main types of virtue of which all other particular non-cardinal virtues may be considered tokens (although any particular virtue may, as Plato might have said, partake of the forms of one or more of the four main types; chastity, for example, may be some sort of mixture with respect to sexual life of wisdom, justice and temperance). Finally, there are just four cardinal virtues, no more or less, because between them they would appear to safeguard human nature in all of the areas in which moral failure or error may occur in human affairs; harmful or excessive indulgence in sensual pleasure, misconduct under the influence of emotion or passion, unjust treatment of others through self-love or pride and careless or foolish conduct following from ignorance or a defect of wisdom.

David Carr, "The Cardinal Virtues and Plato's Moral Psychology", The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 151 (Apr., 1988), p. 200.

Links of Note

 * Kenny Easwaran, The Tripartite Role of Belief: Evidence, Truth, and Action (PDF)

* Justin Smith-Ruiu, My Kind of Conservatism, at "The Hinternet"

* Yale Weiss, The best of all possible Leibnizian completeness theorems (PDF)

* Dan Williams, On conspiracy theories of ignorance, at "Conspicuous Cognition"

* Kevin Jackson, Questioning the Theory of Firm: The Challenge of Hybrid, Social, and Faith-Based Businesses (PDF)

* Defense Against Dishonest Charts, at "FlowingData"

* Guus Duindam, On the Doctrine of Elements and the Demands of Kantian Virtue (PDF)

* Amod Sandhya Lele, We need to see emotions as bodily, at "Love of All Wisdom"

* Alexander Douglas, James Ferrier's Idealism, at "As Difficult as Rare"

* Sarah Catherine Byers, Augustine's "Illumination" Theory: Correcting Bonaventure and Gilson via Plotinus and Marius Victorinus (PDF)

* Andrey Ivanov, Thomas Aquinas in Reference to Beauty: Two Definitions

* Patrick Frierson, Maria Montessori, at the SEP

* Brian Kemple, The Doctrine of Signs in John Poinsot: The Context, Content, and Perennial Importance of Joannes a Sancto Thoma's 'Doctrina Signorum' (PDF)

Sell Not Thy Soul to Brittle Joy

 Man's Civil War
by St. Robert Southwell 

My hovering thoughts would fly to heaven
 And quiet nestle in the sky,
Fain would my ship in Virtue's shore
 Without remove at anchor lie. 

 But mounting thoughts are haled down
 With heavy poise of mortal load,
And blust'ring storms deny my ship
 In Virtue's haven secure abode. 

 When inward eye to heavenly sights
 Doth draw my longing heart's desire,
The world with jesses of delights
 Would to her perch my thoughts retire, 

 Fond Fancy trains to Pleasure's lure,
 Though Reason stiffly do repine;
Though Wisdom woo me to the saint,
 Yet Sense would win me to the shrine. 

 Where Reason loathes, there Fancy loves,
 And overrules the captive will;
Foes senses are to Virtue's lore,
 They draw the wit their wish to fill. 

 Need craves consent of soul to sense,
 Yet divers bents breed civil fray;
Hard hap where halves must disagree,
 Or truce of halves the whole betray! 

 O cruel fight! where fighting friend
 With love doth kill a favoring foe,
Where peace with sense is war with God,
 And self-delight the seed of woe! 

 Dame Pleasure's drugs are steeped in sin,
 Their sugared taste doth breed annoy;
O fickle sense! beware her gin,
 Sell not thy soul to brittle joy!

I missed the day, but St. Robert Southwell, after an extended period of torture and confinement, was martyred on February 21, 1595, hanged at Tyburn for the crime of high treason, due to his being a Jesuit priest and refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy. His poetry was immensely influential on the poetry and plays of the next generation, which was itself a titanic generation for both poetry and drama, so there are only a handful poets who have had as much of an influence on English literature as he.

Music on My Mind

 

Life in 3D, "Country Roads".

Dashed Off IV

 The scholar should enrich the experience of the reader rather than getting in the way of it.

"The whole world is the wealth of the faithful." Proverbs 17:6A (i.e., in the LXX and Vetus Latina)

mere fictions vs grounded fictions

In the way Schellenberg characterizes 'nonresistance' in the divine hiddenness argument, it is unclear if any *theists* are 'nonresistant', as opposed to merely having overcome resistance.

Terrain is half of tactics.

the tinker method (of engineering, of education, of charitable work...)

Mt 6:12 // Sir 28:2

"If a man receives the body of the Son of Man as the Bread of Life, he will have life in him." John 6:56 Vetus Latina

What we proclaim is both testimony and mystery.

By shedding error, we come to understanding; by revering truth, we come to wisdom.

The problem with the ignorance diagnosis of free will is that it requires exaggerating how ignorant we could possibly be, and (setting aside Spinoza and a few others) underestimates the kind of causes that would have to fill the gaps in order to be adequate.

People seem to forget that protesting only works if you don't come across as fringe loons.

contingent : final cause :: categorical : formal cause

unrestricted universe of discourse as logical analogue of ens ut primum cognitum

In the Church, things that are taught by infallible teaching are also taught by means that are themselves fallible.

public festivals as a mode of lay teaching

To be able to be taught by infallible means, a doctrine must be formally revealed, either in the plain letter of Scripture, or in Scritpure as understood by perpetual tradition of the Church, or it must be intimately connected with truth so revealed, either in being required for teaching it, or in being required for defending it, or in being required for living according to it.

human nature in integriity, in fall, in grace, and in glory (De Moor: instituted, destituted, restituted, constituted)

The lowest point of human degradation generally involves the attempt of the degraded to justify their degradation; this is usually more easily reached with self-imposed degradation than externally imposed degradation.

good as first willed and the limitless possibility in human action, action that can take into account the very universe itself

kinds of positive legislation
(1) customary
(2) constitutional (impositional)
(3) contractual
(4) petitionary
-- what we often think of as legislation today is a stylized version of (4) -- i.e., a bill is a stylized bill of petition, which is then deliberated over and approved or not.

Representation in government depends on the power to enforce obligations.

orders of fictional truths
(1) explicitly stated
(2) logically implied
(3) plausibly suggested
(4) scaffolding (used by author in writing; director in shooting; actor in determining motives; etc.)
(5) potentializing (what the author would /expects to assume if anything further is done)

Rage, even when understandable, is always a deterioration and often a degradation.

"All material practical principles are, without exception, of one and the same kidn and come under the general principle of self-love or one's own happiness." Kant
--> This is certainly false, for reasons noted by Butler.

Kant takes moral motivation to be self-love restricted to agreement with moral law.

correspondence with resemblance vs correspondence without resemblance

Every time Luke is mentioned in the New Testament, Mark is also mentioned.

1 Timothy 5:18 seems to call Luke 10:7 scripture
Pauls' description of the Last Supper is closest to Luke's

The Old Testament that Christians inherited was that of both Judean and Hellenistic Jews.

It takes work and cultivation of ability to seek knowledge for its own sake.

"All virtues are in our True Lord and Master; we are utterly without virtue. O Creator Lord, all are in Your Power." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 17
"The truthful are absorbed into the True Lord." 18
"The True Guru leads us to meet the Immaculate True God through the Word of His Shabad." 27
"He Himself dyes us in the Color of His Love; through the Word of His Shabad, He unites us with Himself. The True Color shall not fade away, for those who are attuned to His Love." 37
"The Word of the Gurmukh is God Himself. Throught he Shabad, we merge in Him." 39
"The True Guru, the Primal Being, is the Pool of Ambrosial Nectar. The blessed come to bathe in it." 40
"Even the ungrateful ones are cherished by God. O Nanak, He is forever the Forgiver." 47
"God Himself acts, and causes others to act; everything is in His Hands." 48
"The One Lord is the Doer, the Cause of causes, who has created the creation." 51

nadar: glance/favorable regard / favor; the glance of God's grace

"The real joy of a book lies in reading it over and over again, and always finding it different, coming upon another meaning, another level of meaning." D. H. Lawrence

For statutes to function as law, first principles of reason must already be functioning as law.

Parts of pictures of something are not necessarily pictures of parts of it (e.g., they may be symbolic abbreviations).

Our congruous merit occurs within a covenant (pactum).

predilection -> election -> predestination

Most analytic work on grounding confuses categorical relations and transcendental relations.

"Mary is holy, Mary is blessed, but the Church is something much better than the Virgin Mary. Why? Because Mary is part of the Church, a holy member, a quite exceptional member, the supremely wonderful member, but novertheless a member of the whole body." Augustine (Sermon 72a.7

miracles as tracing out aspects of divine sovereignty

Evangelium vitae 62: "direct abortion, whether intended as end or as means is always a grave moral disorder, inasmuch as it is the deliberate elimination of an innocent human being"

The Old Covenant is not shed but is fulfilled in such a way that Gentiles may participate in it through Christ.

"Signum importat aliquod notum quoad nos, quo manducimur in alterius cognitionem." Aquinas Sent 4.1.1.1q2

Perceving the world around us, we get a feeling for its invariances; having a feeling for its invariances, we reflect on them, compare and contrast them, classify them, reason about them.

Human beings cannot act without taking our bodies to be meaningul and teleological, because in humana ction we recognize this (for example) as a hand, as a means of grasping, as mine for using, as me. We are soaked in meaning and vibrant with purpose, rich in orienting and full of signifying.

The devil woos with shallow benefits.

Three elements of probable inference: possibility, appropriateness, nonimpedance. Probable inference coverge on proof as positive reasons for possibility and independent grounds of appropriateness increase, and as impediments decrease, and as the reasons in each improve in quality.

positive laws as arising from the overlaps of senses of honor, the convergence of codes of honor twoard law

Another person may be experienced as a context, an opposition, a gift, or some mix of the three.

summons, surprise, address, and fact as mode sin which the world expresses itself in inquiry

"Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds." Raymond Chandler
"All language begins with speech, and the speech of common men at that, but when it develops to the point of becoming a literary medium, it only looks like speech."

"The ability to lie effectively, to appear different than one really is -- all the disguises essential in the world of power -- become, in the world of love, temptations, artful excuses to avoid the nakeness love requries, to avoid love." Josiah Thompson

'presentation' as translation of 'species' -- impressed presentation, expressed presentation, intelligible presentation, etc.

Being ut primum cognitum is being as involved in everything and thus not inquantum ens, as itself considered in itself.

A problem with social media platforms is that they train a particular kind of personality into habitual lying.

common sense as "a rough sketch of metaphysics, a vigorous and unreflective sketch" (Maritain)

Horror as a genre is about boundary violations of a certain kind; thus it must presuppose some boundaries. The usual boundaries are physical (body horror), mental (madness), and religious (transgression of sacred bound). Further, the violation must be culpable (moral horror) or piacular (tragic horror) or intrusive (alien horror). The violation may also be an incident or something that spreads (stain, contagion, or infestation). And, of course, one can combine all of these in various ways.

Being as first known jumbles together substantial being, accidental being, being in the guise of another (e.g., ficitonalized or idealized or under-an-aspect being), and being of reason.

Englert's version of Kant's Third Critique moral proof ("Kant as a Carpenter of Reason: The Highest Good and Systematic Coherence")
(1) Philosophy ought to provide a coherent account of experience as a whole. [Philosophical Demand]
(2) Judging experience as a whole leads to two necessary ideas, [a] morality and [b] nature, that ought to figure into a coherent account. [Fact of Experience & 1]
(3) A coherent account between [a] and [b] requires the highest good as a common point of reference. [Result of Ethico-Teleological Reflection & 2]
(4) The highest good can only be thought of as really possible if we postulate a further idea, namely [c] God, as "another causality." [Philosophical Postulate & 3]
(5) Therefore we must believe in God in order to do as we philosophically ought to do, namely, provide a coherent account of experience as a whole. [1 & 4]

Half of being a good author is understanding the story you are telling; this is far more difficult than it sounds, and many would-be writers fail at it, and even accomplished authors sometimes slip.

Certainties are of different kinds and are not all completely commensurable.

wrongous/wrongwise

Every theory contains realist and instrumentalist components.

"Poetry is unquestionably the language of nature; and, as such, ought to interest and impress, where it may not be able to inspire." Anna Seward

gut flora as categorically inernal vestment (habitus)

Vestment as a category concerns the fact that one substance can be as it were an accident for another substance. (It is specifically the relationality that is the vestment/cladding.)

integration of substance into substance
(1) organic part: incomplete substance into complete substance, substantially as complete part
(2) prosthetic part: incomplete substance into complete substance, substantially as incomplete part
(3) cladding/vestment: complete substance into complete substance, accidentally as actual quasi-part.
(4) separate tool: complete substance into complete substance, accidentally as a means for action and potential quasi-part

adornment : vestment as sign :: equipment : vestment as means
(manifestation and instrumentation)

Substance and relation as said transcendentally are ways of talking about one being -- being and unity both.

God as one being is imitated by creatures both substantially and relationally.

It is the civil society, not the state, that is the embodiment of all political right.

the juridical commonwealth as a symbol fo the ethical commonwealth

Kant's arguments that Judaism is a politics rather than a religion
(1) Its commands relate only to external acts. --> This is clearly not the law as interpreted by the prophets.
(2) It limits reward and punishment to this world. --> This requires to taking teh world to come as part of 'this world', and also ignores remembrance before the Lord.
(3) The concept of a chosen people shows enmity to other people. --> On the contrary, inherently the opposite: Jews as the universally mediating nation, the priestly people among all just peoples.

Albert on the eucharist
(1) body: communion
(2) blood: atonement
**
(3) soul: redemption
(4) spirit: vivification & virtue
**
(5) divinity: refreshment
**
--> as a whole: beatitude

The Eucharist has signs of both Body and Blood because the Body is the best as a symbol of fellowship and communion and the Blood as a symbol of sacrifice and atonement, both of which are essential aspects of this sacrament.

Everything becomes more stupid in committee, and Jesus never promises that committees of bishops are exceptions.

Augustine, Confessions Bk X.8.15 -- the sublimity of memory

"If we remember even the fact that we have forgotten, we have not entirely forgotten." Augustine
"The happy life, in fact, is joy in truth: and that means joy in You, who are Truth, O God my light, the health of my consequence, my God."

We form the image of the future and are formed in the image of the past.

Protestant treatment of the plain text of Scripture has an odd tendency to oscillate between reading Scripture as if one were brain-damaged (very literal, ignoring suggestive juxtapositions, bypassing the sorts of symbolisms readers generally find in even elementary human texts) and reading it as if it were a technical object of academic analysis, requiring elaborate apparatus and sophistication and expertise to read. In fact the plain text touches each of these poles and covers all in between.

Medium et Principium demonstationis est quod quid est.

We do not use 'what is' to demonstrate; instead use 'what the *what* is' (quiddity) to demonstrate.

"The object of the mind is what the what is, that is, the very being of something.... And thus a likeness of something in the mind is directly a likneess of its being, whereas a likeness of something in snesation or imagination is a likeness of its incidentals." Aquinas

The 'Evil God Challenge'

 The 'Evil God Challenge' (EGC) is an argument that every argument for a good God has an equally plausible counterpart argument for an evil God; the conclusion is typically that both are equally absurd, or that neither should be accepted. For some reason I cannot fathom, it seems to be enjoying a bit of a surge in popularity, which I find extremely irritating, because I think it is one of the most extraordinarily stupid arguments I've come across, to the extent that I regard taking it seriously as a sign of intellectual incompetence. There are many reasons why it is a ridiculous argument; here are just a few.

(1) The EGC does not establish what it is supposed to be establishing. It seems to pass by a great many of the people who propose the EGC, but if I have a claim (e.g., the world is good) that implies X, and the opposing claim (e.g., the world is not good) also implies X, these do not magically cancel out; what they establish is that, asssuming the propositions are meaningful, X is true no matter what, i.e., that it is a necessary truth. If I have a plausible valid argument, using terms like 'good', for "God exists and God is good", and I have an equally plausible valid argument, switching out the good-valenced terms for the bad-valenced terms, for "God exists and God is evil", what is very noticeable is that I can conclude "God exists" from both. If the premises are meaningful at all, and if good and evil are actually relevant to the question at all, then the most natural conclusion is that "God exists" is a serious candidate for a necessary truth. If the arguments are plausible and equally plausible they do not 'cancel out' in a way that touches the conclusion "God exists". This is part of how arguments from parity work; if something seems to follow equally from opposites, that makes it more probably true, not less.

Thus the only way the EGC could have any purchase against theism in general is if we knew that all the arguments for a good God were implausible and probably wrong. But nothing about the EGC could possibly establish this, and if you already had an argument that all the arguments for a good God were probably wrong, the EGC couldn't actually add anything to it except to rule out arguments for an evil God, which almost no one accepts anyway. 

(2) Proponents of the EGC consistently show that they don't understand the difference between 'parody argument' and 'parity argument'. The EGC is an argument from parity. That is to say, it claims that if you accept such-and-such argument, you should equally accept such-and-such argument, because the grounds or reasons for accepting them are not different in a way that matter. (Parity arguments are related to, but weaker than, a fortiori arguments, which claim that if you accept one argument, you have even more reason to accept another.) One way you can run an argument from parity is to create appropriate parody arguments. A parody argument is where you take an argument and substitute other things for its terms to get absurd results.  However, most parody arguments are completely useless for parity arguments, and even when you have a parody argument that might be suitable, you have to use it in the right way to create parity. The reason is very obvious -- you can make parody argument for any argument, just by substituting terms.

There is literally no person on the planet more painfully stupid than the person who thinks that you can object to an argument just by taking it, replacing its terms, and getting an absurd or silly result. If you do this, congratulations; you have just discovered that the argument has logical structure. Arguments have a logical structure that they share with lots of other arguments; they can share it with other arguments because the logical structure is detachable from the content of the argument. No argument can be refuted by merely showing that it has a logical structure. Just because you can take an argument that has 'good' in it, then substitute 'evil' for 'good', and get another argument doesn't tell us anything at all about how to evaluate either argument.

In order for your parody argument to be relevant to an argument from parity, you have to show that there would be more-or-less equal reason to accept the parody. This is a completely separate step. Over and over you find proponents of EGC spending an awful lot of time making parody arguments and, at best, vaguely handwaving the whole question of whether the parody is suitable for parity. This is a red flag; they are skipping or rushing through the hard step that actually does the real work. And it brings us to the third point.

(3) On no major ethical approach do good and evil have the symmetry required to get the equality. Unsurprisingly, once you use your brain to think about it, almost no form of ethics takes good and evil to be symmetrical so that you can simply interchange their terms in arguments without radically changing how you would asses the arguments. On most theories of good and evil, good and evil are not symmetrical with regard to power, intelligence, or results. This is why various forms of ethics don't have a problem with distingishing themselves from their equal and opposites. Utilitarians don't have to puzzle over why morality is based on maximizing happiness rather than maximizing suffering. Good is desirable, evil is undesirable. Kantians don't have to puzzle over why they should accept morality is a kind of conformity to reason rather than a kind of self-contradicting irrationality. Good is consistent, evil is inconsistent. Aristotelians don't have to puzzle over why our nature is completed by a totality of goods rather than a totality of evils. Good is fulfilling, evil is unfulfilling. In none of these cases are the two symmetrical and interchangeable; we can distinguish good and evil perfectly well, and know that if you switch the terms in any argument to which the meaning of the terms is genuinely relevant, it is extremely unlikely that you would get equally plausible arguments.

And in fact, if the EGC were any kind of argument worth taking seriously, it would do far more damage to ethics than to natural theology, because having the kind of symmetry that the EGC requires would mean that many ethical arguments would also have a problem, because their uses of 'good' and 'evil' are linkable to 'good' and 'evil' in the theological case, through positions like theological utilitarianism, Kantian philosophy of religion, etc. If you are a theistic Kantian, for instance, you postulate that God exists as willing the moral law, to solve a problem with respect to living a moral life. It is literally impossible to do this on Kantian principles and coherently postulate an evil God. If you try to insist to a theistic Kantian that there is an equally plausible argument for an evil God, you are saying that Kantian ethics is no more plausible than its direct opposite, which obviously a Kantian has no reason whatsoever to accept. (And indeed shouldn't, because even non-Kantians can see that Kantianism is more plausible than its polar opposite.) Things are a little more complicated for utilitarianism or Aristotelianism, because they have slightly more complicated accounts, but you get similar results for similar reasons. The EGC only works if ethical ways of using 'good' and 'evil' are no more plausible than their opposites. 

This is related to another problem for the EGC.

(4) On neither of the two most plausible accounts of the relation between good and evil (the account on which they are related as positive and privative and the account on which they are related as pleasing and displeasing) is the symmetry required by the EGC possible. These points have been discussed at length by others, and are obvious in themeselves, so I won't develop them here.

Honestly, I could go on. For instance, when proponents of the EGC actually get off their backsides and try to show that every argument for a good God has an equal and opposite counterpart argument for a bad God, they end up repeatedly mangling the former, or failing to address obvious problems with the latter that arise specifically from their appeal to badness. This is tedious work, but of course, even one argument for a good God having no equally plausible counterpart for an evil God breaks the EGC. Proponents of the EGC make bold claims, but they repeatedly show that they cannot deliver the goods when it comes to details. It's just a stupid argument all around.

The World's an Inn

 On the World
by Francis Quarles 

 The world's an Inn; and I her guest.
I eat; I drink; I take my rest.
My hostess, nature, does deny me
Nothing, wherewith she can supply me;
Where, having stayed a while,
I pay Her lavish bills, and go my way.

The Flower of Tuscany

Today was the memorial in the Roman Martyrology for Blessed Giovanni da Fiesole, more commonly known as Fra Angelico or Beato Angelico. He was born Guido di Pietro in the 1390s and became a Dominican friar at some point. We do not know when he started painting; he seems to have started with illuminating manuscripts, but in any case he became one of the foremost painters of the Renaissance. According to some stories, the pope offered to make him archbishop of Florence and he refused; if it at all happened, this was probably for the best, since it meant he could keep painting.

Fra Angelico, The Madonna of Humility

The Principle of Tinkering

 Last Positivist recently had a very good post, Learning from Four Analytic Philosophy Wins; except for the 'Statistical Method' examples, which I think are much less clearly wins than they would usually be regarded, I am pretty much in agreement with it. But I think there is another key aspect of analytic philosophy, which provides, overwhelmingly, most of the good in it: it is very good for tinkering with arguments. Everything in analytic philosophy facilitates argument-tinkering. Arguments are broken up, premises identified, logical connections identified, each part is often discussed at length, different variations are considered. 

The value of just tinkering with arguments should not be underestimated. You can learn a great deal about reasoning that way, you can refine and improve particular arguments to a high degree, you can sometimes turn probable inferences into proofs. It can help in classification and in seeing how arguments relate to other arguments, particularly since both can depend on fiddly bits of arguments that need to be identified, compared, and contrasted. And so forth. It all requires tinkering in the right way -- but if you look to that, analytic philosophy makes the rest easy.

Argument-tinkering is not the only way to approach philosophical questions; most approaches to philosophy do not put a great deal of emphasis on it. Indeed, there are only very few that do. But they put analytic philosophy in very good company; the primary other approaches that are built with the principle of tinkering are the family of approaches we call 'scholasticism' and the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school of Indian philosophy (with some overflow into other schools interacting with it), and these are very good company indeed. The comparison shows one of the strengths of the principle of tinkering: a lot of power with a lot of flexibility, if used well. And analytic philosophy arguably does tinkering better than either.

Of course, tinkering has its weaknesses, too. Arguments are not isolated machines. Your response to a syllogism in philosophy of science may commit you to a position in political philosophy; your views on metaphysics may imply things about aesthetics. The connections are not always obvious, but that just means that you have to actually put some work into uncovering them. Analytic philosophy has always struggled with this; in their objections and responses, analytic philosophers are always making claims that they never adequately think through, whose ramifications in other fields they never properly follow up on. Tinkering with individual arguments is not what you need for such thinking. But this is not an inevitable problem, and there are people who avoid it; you just have to recognize that tinkering, valuable as it is, only gets you so far.

Fortnightly Book, February 16

 The Faroe Islands are an archipelago between Scotland and Iceland, currently a self-governing member of the Kingdom of  Denmark with a population of about fifity-five thousand, with about a quarter of that living in its capital and largest city, Torshavn, on the island of Streymoy; its language, Faroese, is closely related to Icelandic. The national saga of the Faroese is the the thirteenth-century Faereyinga Saga, which tells of the intense conflicts that arose over the coming of Christianity to the islands, arising from previously existing faultlines in the population. And this work, the Faroe-Islander Saga, is the next fortnightly book. I am using the 2016 translation by Robert K. Painter.

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe

 Introduction

Opening Passage: There is a proem and a preface, but the real beginning is when we begin to get Margery's story:

When this creature was twenty years of age, or somewhat more, she was married to a worshipful burgess [of Lynn] and was with child within a short time, as nature would have it. And after she had conceived, she was troubled with severe attacks of sickness until the child was born. And then, what with the labour-pains she had in childbirth and the sickness that had gone  before, she despaired of her life, believing she might not live. Then she sent for her confessor, for she had a thing on her conscience which she had never revealed before that time in all her life. For she was continually hindered by her enemy -- the devil -- always saying to her while she was in good health that she didn't need to confess but to do penance by herself alone, and all should be forgiven, for God is merciful enough. And therefore this creature often did great penance in fasting on bread and water, and performed other acts of charity with devout prayers, but she would not reveal that one thing in confession. (p. 41)

Summary: The Book of Margery Kempe can be seen as a book of pilgrimages. Literal pilgrimage is one of the key components of the entire book, as Margery Kempe goes on quite a few, including to Rome and to Jerusalem. Much of the narrative interest of the book lies in this, since we get to see quite vividly what being a pilgrim in the early fifteenth century would be like. Margery is frank and clear about the difficulties. There are robbers and there are scammers. Sickness is common, and if you are sick you have very few options that do not leave you vulnerable to robbers and scammers. Pilgrimage in this period is not something one really does alone, especially if you are a woman, so when various plans fall through, she often ends up having to beg or negotiate to travel with someone else -- and it is often the case that the pilgrim parties are not well-matched, so that you may be traveling with someone with whom you cannot get along. (It becomes clear as we see many of these pilgrimages that Margery herself is very often the pilgrim with whom the other pilgrims find they cannot get along.) She is wealthy enough to have a few servants, but it's hard to find a servant who can endure a life of service under the difficult conditions of pilgrimage, particularly when the service is to a woman like Margery, who is continually putting her servants in embarrassing and perhaps unnecessarily difficult situations. Money is often tight, and almost impossible to replenish on the road, so despite being a moderately well-to-do woman, Margery at several points is reduced to begging door to door.

The work is also a book of moral pilgrimage. We start out with Margery recognizing her early self as devout but not devoted; that is, she goes to extensive lengths in her spiritual practices, but is doing it to avoid the one spiritual practice, sacramental confession, that she actually needs. (A very common problem that most people have to deal with at some point.) This leaves her vulnerable to the attacks of devils and many vices, but a sickness and religious vision of Christ starts her on the road to improvement. But it is a road, not an achievement. Even as she is setting out on it, she says, "she did not truly know our Lord's power to draw us to him" (p. 43), and this is, I think, what Margery's book is all about, a discovery of just how extensively one can be drawn to Christ, even often against one's will, even given one's flaws. Margery never stops being flawed. There is always a self-indulgent, self-justifying aspect to her; one suspects that even quite late in her life she is still indulging in some spiritual practices in order to avoid spiritual practices she needs more. She genuinely improves, but she never really stops being self-oriented, although she becomes capable of extraordinary sudden generosity; everything in The Book of Margery Kempe is about Margery Kempe. But she, often shortsighted and silly, generally incapable of sympathizing with or even understanding other people's points of view, occasionally outright selfish, stops being only that; she is drawn closer and closer to Christ despite that, the polar opposite of a marzipan saint.

The three key means by which Christ draws Margery are the gift of tears, persecution, and imaginative visions. The gift of tears is the root. Weeping as a religious practice has fallen out of fashion, in part through the victory of the sort of people who opposed Margery all her life, who insist that public weeping must be a sign of hypocrisy, but it was still practiced in Margery's day; to shed tears freely in prayer was often considered a grace. Margery, however, is given the gift in superabundance, to such an extent that it actively disturbs the people. She does not merely shed tears; she often wails, even to the point of disrupsting Mass (a reason why so many of her persecutors are understandably priests). She sheds so many tears so easily that people start assuming that it must be fake. And while this is certainly not true, Margery shows very little cognizance of what we find on the subject in, say, St. Catherine of Siena, who recognizes that there is a hierarchy of tears, and that one needs to progress in them to the 'tears of peace'. We do find that eventually her weeping changes character, but this happens not because of Margery but because of Christ; one sometimes gets the impression here, as one so often does with Margery, that Christ was trying to teach her lesson and that she kept not learning it because she is not self-aware enough to have an inkling that there is a lesson to be learned, until Christ eventually just arranges matters to force her to learn it. Nonetheless, St. Catherine also tells us that no tears are to be despised, whatever their motivation; coming from the heart and manifesting it (even false tears showing a false heart), they are a channel to the soul and thus a way in which we may learn and pray. The people around Margery are not so charitable, and while their irritations and annoyances are often entirely understandable, they do not stay at the level of irritations and annoyances, and at times become actively malicious.

In Book II, Margery happens in passing to give us some insight into how the people around her often saw her, which in other cases usually has to be inferred from their behavior, because Margery does not seem to have any idea why people around her treat her so badly. She tells us that a story started going around that she sat down to a table loaded with food, including herring and pike, saying, "Ah, false flesh, you would now eat red herring, but you shall not have your will," after which she ate the pike (a far higher quality and more expensive fish than herring). That is to say, she was accused of hypocritically pretending that she was being an ascetic while using that as a way to indulge herself; wanting pike, she pretended that she wanted herring so that she could 'deny' herself herring and eat pike instead. This story became so widespread that it became proverbial -- "False flesh, you shall eat no herring" (p. 288). Margery repeatedly denied that it ever happened, but denials are no match for a good story, so that it began to be the case that everywhere she went, the one thing people already knew about her was that she was the "False flesh, you shall eat no herring" lady. The point, of course, is not fish; this is how all of her actions were often seen. Margery, of course, not being a titan of insight into other people, does not seem fully to grasp that it's not just an isolated false rumor, although in this case she does find the right way to handle it -- admit that she is the woman in question, insist that she is not guilty and did not do it, but beyond that provide no criticism or recrimination and just let the ordinary decency of people do the rest. There's never any indication that she takes the general point or learns the general lesson, though; perhaps she wouldn't really be Margery if she did.

Margery is often accused of being a Lollard. 'Lollard' could sometimes just mean a common (as opposed to educated) heretic in general, but in her case it may sometimes still be used in the more technical sense. The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe, although Wycliffe was an educated theologian, and the Lollards were not especially educated people but picked up ideas from Wycliffe in bits and pieces, not always putting them together in ways that Wycliffe himself would have accepted. William Sawtry, the first priest burned at the stake for Lollardy, was a priest at St. Margaret's Church in Lynn, which is where Margery was from; he would have been Margery's own priest until his death in 1401. He rejected transubstantiation and prayer to the saints, arguing that preaching was more important than prayer, that church funds should be given to the poor instead, and that the True Cross should not be adored. Margery, who shows no particular interest in how churches use their funds, whose pilgrimages often take her to locations of purported Eucharistic miracles and relics of the life of Christ, and who never stops praying, often talking to the saints, is absolutely not a Lollard; it's hard to imagine anyone who would be more obviously the opposite of William Sawtry. But her origin combined with her odd prayer practices likely made it easy for people to accuse her of it.

The book is also an imaginative devotional pilgrimage; if Margery's behavior is the frustrating part of reading her story, her imagination is where Margery's charm shines through. Pilgrimage is prayer, but it is simultaneously a very earthy matter; you get dusty on the road, you have to concern yourselves with mundane matters of food and sleep and evacuation and sickness, and your patience and endurance are actually tried. Most of us prefer to be pilgrims in our imagination, where we can be clean and shining and just stop in when we feel like it, and where we can perhaps easily overestimate our progress. But Margery's imagination is a bit different, perhaps because she went on so many actual pilgrimages. It is very earthy, which makes some of her religious experiences seem simultaneously vividly concrete and embarrassingly silly. At one point she experiences the Holy Spirit as sounding like a puffing of a large bellows; at another, she imagines the persons of the Trinity as seated on fine cushions (the Father on a gold cushion, the Son on a red cushion, and the Holy Spirit on a white cushion). She is perfectly aware that this is only how she imagines it -- for instance, after talking about the cushions, she goes on to explain that nonetheless her belief in the Trinity is orthodox, giving an entirely correct summary of the doctrine. The Lord's assurances to her are sometimes suspiciously flattering and detailed, but some of this seems just to be that she's not as sophisticated as other mystics of the day at communicating the line between what the experience actually was and what she imagines and infers about it. 

Nonetheless, the fact that she sometimes comes across as a bit silly may be as much a sign of a flaw in ourselves as anything. We over-spiritualize these things, confining it to words and depictions in stained glass; we treat religious matters as abstract. Margery Kempe is temperamentally incapable of doing so. She doesn't just think about Christ's humanity; she imagines herself as the servant of the Holy Virgin, doing day to day chores for her so that the Virgin can look after the Christ child, and she does this over an extended period of time in great detail. She doesn't just talk about the Holy Spirit, she interacts with Him in ways that she imagines in the most concrete and realistic way possible. She doesn't grasp after fine phrases, letting everything glide on purely poetic association of words the way many false mystics do; she experienced something, and she tells you exactly what it was like, in the same way that she tells you exactly what she experienced in being sick or in conversing with an anchorite.

And it is because of this that everything begins to come into focus. We spend decades of journey with Margery as she pilgrimages through the world with her gift of tears. It is often as embarrassing and suspicious to us as it was to her contemporaries, and certainly more foreign. We follow along with her weird mix of self-justification and abject humility, and can get as impatient with it as everyone else did at the time. We learn of her highly imaginative and detailed visions through time, and we find it often silly and occasionally self-indulgent. But toward the end there are many vivid meditations on the Passion of Christ, drawing heavily from mystery plays and her own experiences as a pilgrim, imagined with the concrete and homely detail we have found before. They are often moving, and for the first time, when she recounts her weeping, it makes entire sense. We thought, and her contemporaries thought, that she was constantly weeping and wailing in disruptive ways that made little sense in context. But this was the context; this was where Margery Kempe always was, on the Via Dolorosa and at Golgotha. She was not there because she was especially good, or especially wise, or especially gifted, but she was there, and being there, how could she not weep, regardless of wherever else she might have been? Margery Kempe is silly, self-centered, and sometimes obnoxiously embarrassing -- we know it because she has shown it to us herself, sometimes with self-awareness and more often with an astonishing lack of it. Yes. But we had to go on a pilgrimage through the entire book before we reached the level of seeing the world in a less silly and self-centered way than embarrassingly silly and self-centered Margery Kempe. Perhaps we should be shedding some tears ourselves.

Favorite Passage:

Then she took ship, with the man who had provided for her, and God sent them calm wind, which pleased her very well, for there rose not a wave on the water. Her company thought they were making no progress, and were gloomy and grumbling. She prayed to our Lord, and he sent them enough wind that they sailed on a great way and the waves rose. Her companions were glad and cheerful, and she was miserable and sorrowful for fear of the waves. When she looked at them she was always frightened. Our Lord, speaking to her spirit, ordered to lay her head down so that she would not see the waves, and she did so. But she was always frightened, and she was often criticized for that.... (p. 276)

Recommendation: Recommended.

*****

Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, B. A. Windeatt, tr., Penguin Books (New York: 2004).

The Fellow Traveller of a Bird

 To attend to a living child is to be baffled in your humour, disappointed of your pathos, and set freshly free from all the preoccupations. You cannot anticipate him. Blackbirds, overheard year by year, do not compose the same phrases; never two leitmotifs alike. Not the tone, but the note alters. So with the uncovenanted ways of a child you keep no tryst. They meet you at another place, after failing you where you tarried; your former experiences, your documents are at fault. You are the fellow traveller of a bird. The bird alights and escapes out of time to your footing. 

 No man’s fancy could be beforehand, for instance, with a girl of four years old who dictated a letter to a distant cousin, with the sweet and unimaginable message: “I hope you enjoy yourself with your loving dolls.” A boy, still younger, persuading his mother to come down from the heights and play with him on the floor, but sensible, perhaps, that there was a dignity to be observed none the less, entreated her, “Mother, do be a lady frog.” None ever said their good things before these indeliberate authors. Even their own kind—children—have not preceded them. No child in the past ever found the same replies as the girl of five whose father made that appeal to feeling which is doomed to a different, perverse, and unforeseen success. He was rather tired with writing, and had a mind to snare some of the yet uncaptured flock of her sympathies. “Do you know, I have been working hard, darling? I work to buy things for you.” “Do you work,” she asked, “to buy the lovely puddin’s?” Yes, even for these. The subject must have seemed to her to be worth pursuing. “And do you work to buy the fat? I don’t like fat.” 

From Alice Meynell, "Fellow Travellers with a Bird", from Essays.