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.