Golden Mouth

 Today was the feast of St. John Chrysostom, Doctor of the Church. From Discourse 3 on Lazarus:

Do you not notice that workmen in brass, or goldsmiths, or silversmiths, or those who engage in any art whatsoever, preserve carefully all the instruments of their art; and if hunger come, or poverty afflict them, they prefer to endure anything rather than sell for their maintenance any of the tools which they use. It is frequently the case that many thus choose rather to borrow money to maintain their house and family, than part with the least of the instruments of their art. This they do for the best reasons; for they know that when those are sold, all their skill is rendered of no avail, and the entire groundwork of their gain is gone. If those are left, they may be able, by persevering in the exercise of their skill, in time to pay off their debts; but if they, in the meantime, allow the tools to go to others, there is, for the future, no means by which they can contrive any alleviation of their poverty and hunger. We also ought to judge in the same way. As the instruments of their art are the hammer and anvil and pincers, so the instruments of our work are the apostolic and prophetic books, and all the inspired and profitable Scriptures. And as they, by their instruments, shape all the articles they take in hand, so also do we, by our instruments, arm our mind, and strengthen it when relaxed, and renew it when out of condition. 

The Provincials and the Metropole

The conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10 on the campus of Utah Valley University while speaking to students at a large public debate event. I know very little about him, beyond recognizing his picture and knowing he was closely connected with TPUSA, but every coldblooded murder under any circumstances is a loss to all of us. The event has led to a massive degradation of relations across all the political parts of social media, with endless accusations and recriminations, and some people, including teachers, who are, as they say, 'too online', have made fools of themselves and put their jobs in jeopardy by speaking positively of the murder. One would think it would just be common sense, regardless of one's political views, not publicly to celebrate a murder on a school campus at a student event if you are a teacher, but I suppose it's not actually difficult to find people without common sense in the teaching profession.

In any case, I was looking through a number of social media accounts this morning in a (futile) attempt to find more scholarly article and website recommendations for my occaional 'links of note' posts, and stumbled upon a debate about a particular case that pulled me up short a bit. It was about some positive comments made by a teacher in a high classroom about the murder of Kirk. That wasn't what made me pause. What caught my attention was that the high school was in Australia.

It's an old story. The provincials chat about affairs in the metropole in order to pretend to be cosmopolitans. What is peculiar about our moment of time is that the provincials deliberately make themselves provincials and treat the United States as the metropole even when there is no reason why they should. It goes far beyond what most people note on this subject, namely, that people pay attention to American politics because of America's global influence. This isn't like the Cuban Missile Crisis or trade wars. Rather, the domestic political issues of the United States are just copied. We saw this with George Floyd, in which you had people in foreign countries protesting a single policing incident in Minnesota, and here we have a teacher in Australia treating a political murder in Utah as if it were local politics. And it's become a joke on X.com and some other social media sites that the accounts most vociferously engaged with American politics always turn out not to be Americans. Half the world have volunteered to be an American colony, and treat themselves like the provinces of a metropole; there is a global tacit agreement for treating the US as the one place that really matters. All other political issues have to be shoehorned into American political disputes, otherwise they are treated as fringe.

It should go without saying, but perhaps doesn't, that this is bad for everyone. Most American domestic politics simply cannot bear that weight; most of it has no global significance at all. What is more, American domestic politics is weird. It does not work like politics in the rest of the world. Part of this is that we are an unusually successful republic, and republican politics always tends to be more paranoid and rough-and-tumble and tolerant of extremes than, say, the politics of parliamentary monarchies. The price of a republic is crazy people being the primary defense against crazy people, checks and balances carried to the point of a universal law, and we've been a prospering republic longer than most. We are also immense. There isn't really a single domestic politics in a population that's about a third of a billion people spread out from sea to shining sea in a federated system. There are lots of different domestic politics with fuzzy borders in a lot of similar-but-different political systems that work like capacitors, building up charge on particular issues that suddenly leap into national prominence; these suddenly-national topics then immediately start mutating on contact with new and different regional politics, in unpredictable ways. Local politics often makes a certain amount of practical sense, but in a system like this, at the national level there's not much rhyme or reason as to why at any given time we all happen to be talking about this topic rather than that. These topics get filtered through international journalistic institutions and arrive, in often highly simplified and distorted form, in other countries, where people naively take them up as a the topic du jour. 

And the discussions are often quite ignorant. One of the things that I discovered very early as an academic is that academics located outside of the United States often have really strange interpretations of American politics; this is not so much their fault as the nature of the thing. It's what happens when your conceptions of an exotic country are built mostly out of secondhand rumors about it. And make no mistake, whatever country you may live in, whatever politics might be like there, in politics the United States is an exotic land of strange customs. It's hard enough to follow and understand US politics when you are an American in America; outside of that, you have little chance at all. What actually happens, of course, is that the American topics get mapped, badly and inconsistently, on the domestic politics of other countries, so that people in other countries think that the disputes are about X when that has never been the point of the dispute at all. Sometimes these confusions bleed back into the United States, to the muddling of everything.

But the whole thing is bad on the other side, as well. There is just no reason why Australians should be treating themselves as a cultural appendage of the United States, with the political events of such a globally significant powerhouse as Orem, Utah having a centrality and importance on a level with things that happen in Melbourne or Sydney. There is no value for Australia, or any other country, in turning themselves into peasants troubled by rumors about intrigues in the royal palace. It doesn't matter how influential American politics is; it's not your own, and it's usually not that valuable or important. This doesn't mean that you can't have an interest in it, of course, nor does it mean that there are never cases of genuine global importance (but they can come from anywhere, not just the United States), but there's no reason why these issues of domestic America should be taking up valuable real estate in another country's political consciousness.

I sometimes wonder, though, if it's deliberate; perhaps people around the world talk American politics so that they don't (directly) have to talk about their own. In any case, it's an impoverishment all around.

Dashed Off XXII

 "Admit the existence of a God, of a personal God, and the possibility of miracles follows at once." G. G. Stokes

At any given stage of scientific explanation, one cannot rule out all alternative assumptions by scientific theory alone.

Even self-evident principles are known only by abstracting from the sensible.

Translation inevitably diversifies interpretations, involving as it does interpretive choices.

We use qualities to determine quantities.

Understanding is an imitation of heaven.

The Church is the extension of Christ as both historical and heavenly.

"...the use of paradox is to awaken the mind." Chesterton

As it is easier to be an official than a scientist, official scientists slide toward being more officious and less scientific.

It is science as hard, tedious work that makes discoveries, but science as flashy rhetoric that collects the grants.

the romance of conscience

"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head." Chesterton

Marriage is the institution which most requires a sense of reality.

Jeremiah 4:29 & Job 30:6 use 'keph' rather than the usual 'sur' for rocks; note that in both cases the context is about last-resort shelter.

there is one thing that you must know,
though you know it as you cry:
for the things that make life good to live
sometimes good men must die
gird up your loins, inflame your heart,
exhort your weary feet;
sometimes an evil worse than death
is the evil of defeat

"A sentence is too long either when length makes it obscure or unpronounceable, or else when the matter is too little to fill it." C. S. Lewis

The problem with Lyotard's account of the postmodern is that postmodernism is responsible for an explosion of metanarratives, metanarratives everywhere and multiplying like rabbits.

Jaki's argument for the universe (from Limits)
"...any totality, as a form of perfection, is really and consistently understood only insofar as it is set aganist a larger, more inclusive totality. But this again is subject to the same restriction.... As a result one may conclude that the sensory understanding or grasp of any totality depends ultimately on the reality of its supreme kind, which is the universe. Only this way can regress to infinity be avoided."

"Even as there is no branch of knowledge from which exact science is wholly excluded, so it would seem there is no branch which exact science wholly covers." Eddington

The brain has different functions depending on the system within which one considers it.

The scientific outlook is (deliberately) a never-ending tangle of riddles.

To say that Christ is King is to say that He is font of law, font of justice, font of mercy, font of honors.

"Great subjects do not make great poems; usually, indeed, the reverse." C. S. Lewis

While Bunyan gives us strict allegory, Spenser gives us loose allegory, something often ambiguous between allegory and allusion. Bunyan is describing an experience in personated terms; Spenser is narrating representative characters with a thematic meaning.

The difference between classical and neoclassical is the difference between genius and method.

passion, mood, season, climate

Sometimes a hug is next door to a prayer.

"The world-edifice puts one into quiet astonishment by its immeasurable greatness and by the infinite manifoldness and beauty which shine forth from it on all sides. If now...the presentation of all this perfection excites the imagination, on the other side another kind of enthralment seizes the understanding when it considers how so much splendor, so much greatness flows from a single universal rule with an eternal and right order." Immanuel Kant
"In the universal quiet of nature and in the tranquillity of mind there speaks the hidden capacity for knowledge of the immortal soul in unspecifiable language and offers undeveloped concepts that can be grasped but not described."

As the son of a Jewish woman, circumcised and presented in the Temple, Jesus is by blood, by nationality, by covenant, and by sacred sign a Jew.

Demythologizers are almost always transmythologizers; they strip away one to replace it with another.

States tend to fiscalize due services  over time, converting service obligations to the state into sources of revenue.

"Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science." Einstein

"All philosophies survive by the metaphysical truth which they contain." Gilson

Places and times are only equivalent as the possible means of measuring them allow them to be.

Experimentation is socially structured by rituals that facilitate communication and cooperation.

Scientific inquiry is limited by the bounds of integrity of the inquirer.

transcendental arguments as arguments from final causes

authorial persona -> narrative voice -> lectoral impression

In the long run, activism can only bargain with either noncooperation or violence.

People treat their invention of new sins as proof of their moral progress.

"Assent is the acceptance of truth and truth is the proper object of the intellect." Newman

"Personality is always transcendent in relation to process." William Temple

Which social facts are relevant to laws depends on laws and other obligations.

Because we wonder, God exists.

"History is philosophy drawn from examples." Dionysius of Halicarnassus (De arte rhetorica 11.2)

A Sort of Symbol of Assent

 But reasoning by rule and in words is too natural to us, to admit of being regarded merely in the light of utility. Our inquiries spontaneously fall into scientific sequence, and we think in logic, as we talk in prose, without aiming at doing so. However sure we are of the accuracy of our instinctive conclusions, we as instinctively put them into words, as far as we can; as preferring, if possible, to have them in an objective shape which we can fall back upon, -- first for our own satisfaction, then for our justification with others. Such a tangible defence of what we hold, inadequate as it necessarily is, considered as an analysis of our ratiocination in its length and breadth, nevertheless is in such sense associated with our holdings, and so fortifies and illustrates them, that it acts as a vivid apprehension acts, giving them luminousness and force. Thus inference becomes a sort of symbol of assent, and even bears upon action.

[John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent, Chapter 8, Part 1.]

A Poem Draft

 Scribbledehobble

1. The Mystery of Creation

The word is wide around us;
it is a round us,
a roundel in a round,
written without a sound,
sundered from all note
yet written in a note.
I have ridden round the round,
written down the rood,
the road to heaven high,
down the way to sky.
The angles sing,
fair and square,
triangular up there,
where sigh the zephyrs fair
in the zithers of their hair.
Holly lute, hallowed lute,
with tambrel and with drum,
holly lute, yeah, hallowed lute,
with the damsel thrum.

2. The Mystery of The Adam

Man is woman working outward,
man is Highest working downward,
life from breathing on the water,
life from life through life all-bearing,
man and woman baring
in an Eden never boring.
Adam is of Adam half the Adam
(for man is Adam, not an atom);
Adam in Eden's evening
lightly leafing, breezes heaving,
having living haven,
dreams of loving Eve.
Truly she is heaven,
in woman man is even,
and here sleeps Adam dreaming
upon the eve of Eve;
crowned with sun-corona,
through sagehood and comprehension,
with no apprehension,
through grace and justice poured
la fille de la grâce
(for she just is the fill of grace)
and through splendor twice respendent,
she descends through victory,
eternity,
to the utter founding,
and there she is, the dwelling
of the light poured on the world.
Ave Eva, plenty gracious!
Ave, Eva, full of grace!
The anointed and his bride
are announced with holy banns.
But sorry, like a sword
is a sorrow slinking inward,
with sinuous insinuation
and seductive peroration.
The summer turns now autumn
and the leaves are brown in fall.
Ave, Eve, full of grace!
But salve, Eva, may God have mercy,
salve Eva, fallen grace.
The crown is dimmed on Adam
with the shadow of the damned.

3. The Mystery of the Chariot

Metatron  may measure
but there is higher and unmeasured;
none may mete it, it is not metric,
it rules all, a judicial ruler,
the root of righteous reason,
on a throne of light and fire.
We are thrown before the throne,
we bow down,
we cast our crowns,
as the leaping zap of lightning,
all-enlightening,
zigs and zags above our heads.
Blessed be the Glory from its Place!
(He is the Glory, He is the Place),
we sing with hallowed lute,
yeah, holy lute,
already by the river,
roving beneath the temple,
exiled by rolling time.
From the north, the wind and cloud,
resplendent above the river,
with a white-hot fire,
a living fire, a leavened fire,
a hale and high and hallowed fire,
flaming forth the fourfold four
facing four directions:
man and lion, ox and eagle,
with upward wings upwinging,
and wings around their bodies,
they straigthway move, unswinging,
unturning undeterred.
The lightening leaped between them.
Skydomed above the creatures
a throne with voices thundered,
and on the throne of Glory
was one like the son of man,
a man of molten fire
with a rainbow 'round his head.
Like a Son of Man,
like the Glory of the Lord,
he sits and rules:
under throne we cast our crowns,
for we are overthrown.
Ave Maria, plenty gracious!
Eva Maria, full of grace!

4. The Mystery of the Bride

A river not already but eternal from the throne
waters trees of plenty,
plenty gracious, unalone.
On the throne the Lamb,
seven eyes like seven suns,
the spring of living water
in the city jewel-encrusted
where the Jewish tribes all gather
to bring their sheaves to Zion
and the apostolic thrones.
The world is altered,
is an altar,
evermore will be unaltered,
evermore will be unaltared.
The word is wide around us,
all around us the world is worded,
as descending from the heavens
comes the Bride unto her Lamb.
All the lame are here unlamed,
by the blood they all are lambed,
waving sheaves of harvest
as the city comes in glory,
and they sing a psalm in honor:
Ave Zion, plenty gracious,
haily holy Bride well-graced!

Evening Note for Tuesday, September 9

 Thought for the Evening: Titles in Tradition

We classify things sometimes as 'traditional', and it is perhaps interesting to think of the ways in which something could be so classified. Perhaps we can draw a division of grounds for classifying something as traditional on an analogy with title for a right. Then we might perhaps get something like this:

(1) titulus per se
--- --- (a) recurring presentation in monuments and documents
--- --- (b) widespread at least semi-independent aceptance

(2) titulus per accidens
--- --- (a) occasional notice indicating continual handing down
--- --- (b) probability in light of established doctrines and principles

(3) titulus coloratus
--- --- (a) handed down in defective/distorted/damaged form
--- --- (b) handed down gappily

(4) titulus fictus
--- --- (a) accepted as traditional only because thought traditional
--- --- (b) handed down but in a manner displaced/discontinuous from its necessary & proper conditions

(5) titulus simpliciter nullius
--- --- (a) not handed down at all (invented)
--- --- (b) handed down but garbled into incoherence

If the analogy were to hold, one could say that things are properly traditional if they have per se title or per accidens title; the others are not traditional in the most proper sense. However, things under the color of tradition (colorate title) are sort-of traditional, and can be regarded as such when the title in question is widely accepted, or associated with honest attempts to be traditional, or if it is sufficientally similar to per se title or per accidens title for practical purposes, or if it is 'healed' by reasonable correction or by association with something else that has superior title.  

Fictive title and null title give us something that is not really traditional at all, but they might suffice for treating something as traditional in a looser sense if they are the result of what is unavoidable or if they are associated with something that has superior title. An example of null title that allows for classification as traditional in a looser sense would perhaps be the Kirishitan prayers; the Kirishitan community were Catholic Christians who were cut off, without priests, for nearly two centuries. They preserved a number of Christian prayers, but the prayers were all in Latin, which fewer and fewer of them knew anything about as time went on. Therefore the prayers, Latin spoken with Japanese pronunciation by people who for the most part did not understand Latin, became garbled, and were just memorized by people who didn't know what they meant, which allowed for further garbling. The prayers themselves, then, have null title as the traditional prayers, but many Kirishitan practices were in much better shape, and had at least colorate title, so the Kirishitan prayers can be regarded as the traditional Paternoster, etc., in a looser sense of the term.

I'm not sure how well this holds up across the board, but I think it's an interesting first approximation.

Links of Note

* Aron Wall, The Argument from Confusion is Weak, at "Undivided Looking"

* Ian J. Campbell, Zeno of Elea's Arguments Against the One (PDF)

* Susan Pickard, Beauvior on Trans, at "Beauvoirian Feminism"

* Martin Lin, Spinoza on Powers and Abilities (PDF)

* The Julia Wedgwood Site has information about and articles by Julia Wedgwood (1833-1913).

* Matthew Chrisman & Berislav Marušić, Transparency, Self-Knowledge, and the Sociality of Belief (PDF)

* Kailani B., I Tried Reading Brandon Sanderson's Books, at "Damsel in the Library". This is pretty close to my experience with Sanderson's works. If find some of the ideas interesting, and occasionally executed, but I find it very difficult to enjoy them. I occasionally try again, but have difficulty pushing through -- I recently tried The Final Empire in audiobook, but couldn't really get through, and I think a lot of it is that while his stories are sometimes interesting, his language is boring. It manages to be neither gravely dignified nor vigorously colloquial nor quietly self-effacing; it's always in the way and uninteresting.

Currently Reading

In Book

J. K. Huysmans, The Damned
Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest
Oliver O'Donovan, The Disappearance of Ethics

In Audiobook

Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice

A Strong and Vigorous Flame

 The Conquest
by John Norris 

 I. In Power or Wisdom to contend with thee,
Great God, who but a Lucifer would dare?
Our Strength is but Infirmity,
And when we this perceive, our Sight's most clear:
But yet I will not be excell'd thought I,
In Love; in Love I'll with my Maker vy.

 II. I view'd the Glories of thy Seat above,
And thought of every Grace and Charm divine,
And farther to encrease my Love
I measured all the Heights and Depths of thine.
Thus there broke forth a Strong and Vigorous Flame,
And almost melted down my mortal Frame. 

 III. But when thy Bloody Sweat and Death I view,
I own (Dear Lord) the Conquest of thy Love;
Thou dost my highest Flights outdo;
I in a lower Orb, and slower, move.
Thus in this Strife's a double Weakness shewn,
Thy Love I cannot equal, nor yet bear my own.