Faroe-Islander Saga

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

There was a man named Grimur Kamban who was the first to settle in the Faroe Islands. In those days, a great number of men were seeking refuge from the tyranny of King Haraldur Fine-Hair; some men settled themselves in the Faroe Islands and farmed there, while other men sougth land on other islands.

When Aud the Deep-Minded was traveling to Iceland, she came first to the Faroe Islands. There she married off Alofa, daughter of Thorstein the Red, from whom descends the entire family line of Faroe-Islanders called the Götuskeggjar who live on Austurey. (p. 31)

Summary: The Faereyinga saga hints at its theme in the very beginning of the work: this is the saga of the independence of the Faroe Islands, settled by men seeking to escape tyranny, who will maintain a sort of independence despite being in some ways the least significant and least powerful of the Scandinavian lands. It primarily takes place over the course of the conversion of the Faroe Islands to Christianity; as with Njal's Saga, the islands are pagan at the beginning and Christian by the end. But the role of the conversion is somewhat different; in Njal's Saga, Christianity provides the means for the resolution of the problem of Iceland spiralling out of control, whereas the primary issue in Faroe-Islander Saga is how the Faroe Islands will genuinely convert to Christianity on its own terms rather than being forced into a pseudo-conversion by the rising power of Christian Norway.

But that is the saga considered at a very abstract level. The saga is actually the story of a wily and ruthless pagan family, the family of Thrandur, one of the Götuskeggjar from the island of Eysteroy, or Austurey, as it is known today. Despite being a younger brother, Thrandur, who we are told is exceptionally lucky, manages to inherit the family farm, which he rents out as he sails away to make a fortune -- which he makes in spades, as an unlikely series of events results in his coming into a massive amount of money. Meanwhile, an accidental death leads to a feud between two other families, those of Hafgrimur of Sudoroy and the brothers Brestir and Breinir Sigmundursson of Skuvoy.  Hafgrimur gets the help of Thrandur in a course of events that leads to the death of the two brothers; Thrandur wants to kill their sons, but is prevented by his allies, so instead sells them into slavery. They end up in Norway, where, after they are freed, they are raised by an extraordinarily talented outlaw family who takes them in during a snowstorm and then teaches them to fight and track; Brestir's son, Sigmundur, marries the daughter of the family, Thurid. Sigmundur and his cousin Thorir make their way to the court of Earl Hakon, where they do very well; as a result Sigmundur receives a ring from Earl Hakon that belonged to the goddess Thorgerd and renders its bearer lucky. The boys return to the Faroe Islands, where Sigmundur has to retake his family farm by force, and the two press Thrandur for legal compensation for the death of their father. They eventually agree to travel to the court of Earl Hakon in Trondheim to have him mediate; when only Sigmundur arrives at Trondheim, Earl Hakon decides very generously for Sigmundur and Thorir, and the two then have quite the task of trying to force Thrandur to comply, because Thrandur is not the kind of person to give anything freely.

The invasion of the Jomsvikings furthers the fortunes of Sigmundur and Thorir as they join Earl Hakon to fight them off, and this leads to Sigmundur being in good favor as King Olaf Tryggvason takes the throne and Christianizes Norway. Sigmundur becomes Christian and is tasked by King Olaf with Christianizing the Faroe Islands. Thrandur becomes his major opponent in this, but his luck outmatches Thrandur's for the moment, and he effectively forces Thrandur to convert, although it is clear that the conversion is less than even skin-deep. It also massively aggravates the feud between the two families. Thrandur's foster sons (Sigurthur, Thorthur, Gautur, and Leifur) attempt to assassinate the two cousins twice, but fail both times; the escalation brings things to a head, and finally Thrandur leads a violent raid against Sigmundur's farm, thinking to catch both Sigmundur and Thorir there, but he misses them, and they are repelled by Sigmundur's household led by the very impressive Thorid. Tracked by Thrandur, Sigmundur and Thorir and a servant named Einar manage to get away, although Einar dies in the process, and reach another island. But Sigmundur's luck runs out when they are discovered by a man named Thorgrimur, who murders them both and buries the body so that no one will know that he did it.

Leifur, one of Thrandur's foster sons (and the biological son of the man whom Sigmundur had killed in order to take back his family farm), wants to marry Thora, the daughter of Sigmundur and Thorid, and Thora demands that if Leifur is even to have a chance, he must discover who killed her father and bring them to justice. Thrandur tracks it down to Thorgrimur, and by pagan death-magic is able to find the evidence that convicts Thorgrimur, who is executed for it. (Killing a man is not so great a misdeed in medieval Scandinavian society, and would under most circumstances just legally require a fine, but killing a man and then covering up the killing is a capital crime.) Leifur marries Thora, although there's some indication that Thorid, now known as Thorid Strong-Widow, only allows this because she thinks it may eventually provide a way to get back at Thrandur.

A new King of Norway, Olafur Haraldursson (more commonly known today as St. Olaf), attempts to put the Faroe Islands under the Norwegian tax regimen, but the family of Thrandur repeatedly manages to foil this. In the course of doing this, Sigurthur, Thorthur, and Gautur end up murdering the tax envoy, which estranges them from Leifur, who had befriended him. They are exiled. With there being no one cunning enough or lucky enough to oppose him, however, Thrandur is able to engineer their return, and, even more than that, is able to arrange for Leifur's and Thora's son, Sigmundur Leifursson, to be fostered by him -- despite the fact that everyone in the family knows that the young Sigmundur is effectively a hostage. Sigurthur and Gautur manage to do well for themselves and in particular marry well, but in extraordinarily suspicious ways that lead to a sharp deterioration in their reputation. Thorthur, meanwhile, decides he wants to marry Thorid Strong-Widow, which gives Thorid the beginning of the thread she needs to unravel the family of Thrandur. The sons of Thrandur are caught in a carefully laid trap and killed, although at considerable cost, and Thrandur dies of grief. The family of Leifur and Thora become the dominant family in the Faroe Islands, which become Christian because the family of Thrandur had been the last obstacle to its doing so. Nonetheless, it's because of Thrandur's resistance that the Faroe Islands becomes Christian on Faroe-Islander terms rather than by being forced into it by the much more powerful Kingdom of Norway.

Of all the sagas I have read, this was in some ways the most difficult to read because it is subtle on a level that is far beyond even the ordinary subtle irony of most sagas. From the beginning, it is clear that there is something 'off' about Thrandur. The author never tells us anything about what it is. In fact, he has a habit of going very vague at crucial points in the story. We are told that Thrandur is very lucky, but he often seems too lucky. Some of this is no doubt ties to his entanglements with pagan magic -- for instance, every time anyone tries to work directly against him, they are opposed by bad weather -- but it's more than that. If it were only one or two instances in which Thrandur somehow came out on top agains the odds, okay, that's luck. But it happens again and again, and there is too much pattern to it. Thrandur seems to be cheating at every turn. We are never told that. Everything is told at a surface level in such a way that every individual case could be interpreted as just Thrandur lucking out. But over the course of the saga, we get repetitions, each slightly different, which start to raise questions about the cases we have already read about. And the author's not telling us about how things happened, his going vague at key moments, starts to look very deliberate.

For instance, at one point an associate of Thrandur, Eldjarn, is accidentally killed; this leads to the feud between Thrandur and the sons of Brestir and Beinir. Later, however, he shows up again helping Thrandur. Perhaps the author just forgot that Eldjarn had already died, or made a mistake in confusing him with someone else? Perhaps. But then there is also the episode in which the sons of Thrandur are killed, and then their ghosts start haunting the coast, stealing things and killing people, and then they show up alive again at the most auspicious time. Are both 'deaths' in fact just deceptions perpetrated by Thrandur and his family? The text doesn't tell us -- in fact, it goes very vague at every point where it could tell us something that would tell us yay or nay. If it just happened once -- fine. If something so strange happens twice -- odd. If something so strange happens twice and the narrator keeps denying us the relevant information about what is happening -- there is something going on. There are several other examples of this, like the fact that Sigurthur and Gautur both end up marrying wealthy widows, with whom there had already been rumors that they had been having affairs, shortly after their husbands die and they avenge -- or perhaps "avenge" -- their husbands deaths. We are never told that Sigurthur and Gautur killed the husbands. In fact, we are explicitly given the death scene that leads to Gautur's good fortune, and it very definitely does not say that Gautur killed the husband. In fact, the whole scene can be read as implying someone else's doing it. But when you stop and consider the scene carefully, it doesn't actually say that, either, and everything it says is, strictly speaking, consistent with the possibility that Gautur killed the husband and then blamed someone else, killing them before they could defend themselves. When it also happens to Sigurthur, with only slight variations in the details, it becomes practically certain that the latter interpretation is right. We don't know the details -- we are denied the details -- but Thrandur's family is a frighteningly cunning lot.

That perhaps make the eventual success of Sigmundur's and Thorid's family, and the triumph of Christianity, all the more remarkable.

Favorite Passage:

Next Thrandur instructed a blazing fire be made in the fire-house, and he had four metal grates placed in a square, and Thrandur himself scored nine furrows in the earthen floor, making nine concentric circles around the square, and he sat down on a stool between the fire and the grated pen. He asked his men not to speak to him, and they stood silently by.

For a long while Thrandur sat there.

After some time had passed, a man entered the fire-house. He was all wet. Everyone recognized the man as Einar South-Islander. Einar went up to the fire and warmed his hands; he stood there a long while; then he turned and let. More time went by, and another man came into the fire-house. He went to the fire, warmed his hands, and then departed. Soon after Thorir had left, a third man came into the fire-house, a great man covered in blood, who carried his head in his hands. They all recognized him as Sigmundur Brestirsson. Sigmundure halted at a certain spot on the floor for a time, then he made his departure. (pp. 96-97)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended

***

Faroe-Islander Saga, Robert K. Painter, tr., McFarland & Company, Inc. (Jefferson, NC: 2016).

Dashed Off V

 Accidents are likenesses of substances with respect to being.

Whatever we know of a thing, we know through knowing its substance.

"Any proposition whatever concerning the order of Nature must touch more or less upon religion." C. S. Peirce

"It is impossible to define velocity without some reference to the past and to the future." Whitehead

When young, we tend to act in light of what we think might work; when old, in light of what we know will not.

Political sovereignty has the same root as human rights.

the infant as a natural icon of the promise of humanity

Freedom of speech plays an important role in making it possible to assess and diagnose the moral rot of society.

Ritual is important for medicine in providing a clear framework, putting patients at ease, simplifying the work of doctors in dealing with patients, providing people with insulation from difficult events, etc.

The formal cause of justification is divine justice as given, and it is given morally (renewal of mind), jurally (imputation of justice before the divine tribunal), and sacrally (integration into heavenly liturgy).

It is remarkable how easily socialized healthcare slides into euthanizing infants and the elderly.

"God, grant human beings the power to see in small things the common principle of things both small and great." Augustine

We only have knowledge of the future in the sense that we have knowledge of dispositions.

Interpretation of Scripture is done before God the Teacher and Judge.

The 'state of nature' was a philosophical fiction constructed to evade and overwrite the actual state from which modern states arose: that which is broadly called 'feudal'.

We find no object adequate to the depths of the potential andpromise of human loyalty and fidelity except in God.

We generally think of successions as having a first; to get an infinite succession, we start with the first and move forward. Given this, we can turn it around and think of infinite succession backward; given this, we can splice the first of the backward succession to the first of the forward succession and get infinity both ways with respect to our reference point, the dual-sided first. Then we recognize that any point could be treated as first in this way, and abstract from the first by, so to speak, spreading it everywhere.

"For by Moses the one God attuned the Holy Scriptures to the minds of many people, who would see different things in those words, all of them true." Augustine
"For God in his Christ has made in us too a heaven and earth, the spiritual and the carnal members of his Church."

The young have difficulty disentangling ethics from their insecurities, and the old have difficulty disentangling their ethics from their comforts.

Animals, plants, and landmarks get something like rights from having roles in human traditions and communities.

A continual problem in talk of representation in political philosophy is equivocation between the sense in which representative represent everyone (i.e., exercise powers on their behalf) and the sense in which they definitely don't (i.e., picking which values and principles on which to act).

"A gift is the thing given by the person who bestows what we need, such as money, food, drink, clothing, shelter, assistance, whereas the fruit is the good and upright will of the giver." Augustine

To understand the demonstrative proof, you must understand the dialectical matrix.

Augustine's Confessions move from restlessness to rest.

In creating, God makes the capacity to imitate God.

"What is the principle of movement in the soul? Clearly just as in the whole it is God, so too in this. For the divine in us somehow moves all things." Aristotle (EE 1248a)

"Christ, according to his humanity, is the altar on high of God's majesty, on which we are offered when we are incorporated into him in glory." Albert

Too much discussion of evangelism focuses on the persona of the Christian and not on the person of Christ.

agent intellect : terminative object :: possible intellect : specificative object

Both bread and wine presuppose water.

In the sacraments, words represent the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit has, indeed is, absolutely infallible Magisterium; Scripture and the Church participate in this under certain conditions as the Spirit's instruments; Ecumenical Councils and the Pope under certain conditions participate in this instrumentality as representatives of the Church.

rememorative allegory as a principle of the liturgy

the scent of distance (related to concentrations detectable to the sense of smell)
--> arguably this requires a kinaesthetic element; it is change in intensity of scent that provides distance information

Nietzsche makes amor fati to be learning how to see the necessary as beautiful.

the internal morality of trade

"Usura solum in mutuo cadit." Bernardino

It is important to grasp that much of the traditional opposition to usury was driven by bankers and merchants. (It was seen as unfair trade practice, and also as endangering the reputation of the entire profession.)

the notes of development as modes of tradition

For Sikhs, the Sri Guru Granth Sahib is in a sense doubly Guru; it embodies the spirit of the Guru verbally (Guru Arjan Dev) but also receives commission as the Guru of the Panth (Guru Gobind Singh). In this twofold aspect it carries forward the double action of a guru: to teach the truth and to form a community for the truth.

Delicacy without good sense is a dangerous combination in both aesthetics and ethics.

"A poem is a stone thrown into the pool of the mind." David West

Caesarius of Arles on the ecclesiological interpretation of Pr 31 -- Sermon 139

Suffering does not bring wisdom; reflection, even on one's suffering, sometimes does.

(1) Recognizing the normative value of our own natural good, we must recognize the normative value of natural good in other cases.
(2) The child in the womb has a natural good.

A society that respects human dignity must prepare for those who will be born into it, as well as for those who will leave it by dying.

Faith is not a preoccupation; it is title to what is not immediate, like testimony, like inheritance, like promise, a having broadly what is not had strictly, and what is more, a shared having, a one faith and not many faiths, and what is more, it is received (as indeed testimony, inheritance, and promise are).

The Bible has its authority not as read by people but as addressing them, especially in a literal manner as read aloud in synagogue or church.

the cadence of being

intelligibility as being illuminated by the intellect

The invariances of the universe are together that whereby the universe imitates the immutable divine.

A book is a social entity, and Scripture is not an exception.

"When we ask how good a man is, we do not ask what he believes or hopes, but what he loves." Augustine
"Friendship begins with one's spouse and children, and from there moves on to strangers."

We do not force concepts onto objects; they are objects because we conceive them.

"God is the cause that acts and is not acted upon." Augustine Civ. Dei 5.9

Genuine conversation presupposes the free contribution of all parties involved. If we converse, we are free.

When people try to strip metaphysics out of something, they generally make it less human.

"...love is proportionate to apprehension." Maimonides Guide 3.51
"When you walk in the way of the moral virtues, you do justice to your rational soul, giving her the due that is her right." Guide 3.53

Our first conception of the cosmos is as a confused unity.

By prayer, even considered only as a human activity, we given things a relational status.

NB that Maimonides holds that prayer is a duty in the Law, whereas Nahmanides holds that it is not but rather a natural & spontaneous response to God's lovingkindness.
-- Maimonides' foundation for his position: Ex 23:25, Dt 13:5, Dt 11:13, Dt 6:13, Nm 10:9

"Know that all the practices of wroship, such as the reading of Torah, prayer, and the performance of the other commandments, have only teh end of training you to occupy yourself with His commandments, may He be exalted, rather than with matters pertaining to this world; you should act as if you were occupied with Him, may He be exalted, and not with that which is other than He." Maimonides Guide 3.51
"We, the community of those who adhere to Law, say that He knows with one single knowledge teh many and numerous things. For as far as He, may He be exalted, is concerned, insigths do not differ because of the difference of the things known, as is the case with respect to us." Guide 3.20

R. Joshua b. Levi: Hallelujah is the most perfect kind of praise, because it includes both praise and the Name (BT Perakhim 117A).

Paraphrases of literal expressions are often only indirect or approximate, so we should expect the same of paraphrases of figurative expressions.

broadcastmindedness (Knox): "the habit of taking over, from self-constituted mentors, a ready-made, standardized philosophy of life, instead of constructing, with however imperfect materials, a philosophy of life for oneself"

Professional ethics is inherently casuistical.

History absolves no one.

Every 'bounded ideality' has within it an abstract form or general structure, a historical representation, a functional timeline, geography, demographic, etiology, etc., that conforms to its general principles.

Interpreting the Good Samaritan as a figure of Christ, "Go and do likewise" is a command to be Christlike. Cf. Knox: "The mercy of God shown to us in the Incarnation is to be the model for all our acts of human mercy."

The Church is as if God, finding the treasure of Christ buried in the field of humanity, bought the whole field for the sake of the treasure.

The work of the vineyard is not to make the plants grow but to provide what they need.

Civil rights are always deteriorating and so always needing to be renewed.

The rosary is a conceptual prayer-garden.

"If you start by treating the uniformity of nature as a hypothesis and no more, you will find your hypothesis is upset by every recorded case of witches flying, tables turning, Saints being levitated, oracles coming true, horoscopes being verified, broken limbs being cured by faith-healing, and the like." Knox
"Everybody knows that all hypotheses are in the last resort partial and insecure as a representation of truth; at the best, they cannot be postiively proved, they can only escape refutation."
"The witness of power needs to be supplemented: that does not mean that it can be dispensed with."

It is easy to prepare oneself intellectually for matters of faith; the difficulty is preparing oneself morally.

All sacraments, major and minor, are transsignified and transfinalized.

Someone's being blameworthy implies that it is permissible to blame them.

Moving from confused and obscure cognition to distinct and clear cognition is generally a slow process requiring custom-tailored adjustment.

Our knowledge of our concepts is reflective, not direct, and is expanded by causal reasoning from communicating, whether by word or deed, as well as classificatory extrapolation from perception and practice. In a prephilosophical posture, things are known conceptually but the concepts are 'in use' rather than 'under study'. Puzzles about things lead to reflection on the concepts that we use; this is often done briefly, loosely, and in a limited way. The Socratic innovation is to take this reflection to a full study.

In practical classification, classes often do not correspond to unified concepts.

Our first articulated believing presupposes the guidance of authority.

"No explanation of the universe can be regarded as adequate which does not take account of all the phenomena of the universe, and among these human intelligence is surely not the least important." E. W. Trueman Dicken
"Morality is no less of an art than is the making of violins."

The point of the Sermon on the Mount is not the replacement of the Law but the transfiguration of the Law.

categories -> transcendentals -> immaterial being

Gratitude to God expands the circle of human beings to whom and for whom we must be thankful.

the motivational state of rule-regulation (Darwall) -- the commitment to abiding by rules of conventions of justice

self-love, private benevolence, public benevolence
(these can be regarded as three categories of wanting to do good, classified according to whose good)

Classification by smell is arguably the classification that best fits nominalist and empiricist accounts of classification.

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.)