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).