The Principle of the Uniformity of Nature

 In philosophy, sometimes things seem to be the obvious thing, and then they just vanish. The Principle of the Uniformity of Nature (PUN, no pun intended) is a good example. There was a time when it was practically everywhere. It was the foundational principle of induction, and likewise the  fundamental warrant for reasoning beyond our immediate experience. It was the key element in widely accepted proofs of determinism, of the impossibility of miracles, of the eternity of the world. Scientists appealed to it in scientific investigations of all different kinds. It perhaps began soaring in importance somewhere around the 1850s, and then, with some up-and-down, seems to have begun a slow collapse in the 1880s, until in the 1950s Wesley Salmon (if I recall correctly) pronounced it dead, and certainly nobody takes it quite seriously on its own terms today. To rise suddenly into prominence as one of the most important of all rational principles and then just to end up as an artifact of purely historical interest, and to do so in about a century, is an interesting career. 

Of course, it's not quite so simple. The above rough resume is that of a principle specifically being called 'the principle of the uniformity of nature' or 'uniformity of nature', discussed specifically as such or casually referred to in the course of proving other things. The big question is what the principle actually was. Is the above resume the history of a label which made an already existing principle prominent? Is it the history of a particular use of a principle? Was there actually any such principle at all?

Ironically, given its once-sovereign importance, one could make an argument that there was never such a principle. Indeed, part of the downfall of the entire notion of a PUN is seen in the fact that people increasingly began to be confused about what it meant, and by preface or apposition would remark (for instance) about the difficulty of finding an exact formulation. And when we look at attempts to make it more specific, we find that people trying to formulate the PUN more exactly do not come up with the same formulation.

We have the Naive Formulation, which is perhaps most often used, because it is naturally connected with the name: The course of nature is uniform. But even in the 1850s it was clear that this was not adequate. W. G. Ward, in his debate with J. S. Mill about a priori propositions in the mid-century, noted, without putting a lot of emphasis on it, that there was a lot of evidence that the course of nature was not so very uniform. Later figures also note that it's unclear what 'nature' is supposed to mean here. If we try to take the Naive Formulation seriously, it's difficult to get more out of it than that there are some kinds of general principles describing the things into which we inquire, which is perhaps true, but not so obviously helpful.

Perhaps the most successful and widely accepted specification we can call the Causal Sameness Principle: The same causes have the same effects and the same effects have the same causes. This is an attractive candidate, because it has a very venerable history, long preceding the PUN label; it tends to be the formulation used by more philosophically minded scientists, like James Clerk Maxwell; and it would mean that PUN was not some fluke, because it's still often used today, even if it is no longer treated as having the importance or centrality that it once did. Unlike the Naive Formulation, whose status as a fundamental principle gave people considerable difficulty, it is fairly plausible to argue that it is a necessary principle, and therefore not in need of any further explanation. But even at the time it was occasionally noted that the Causal Sameness Principle can't do most of the things attributed to the PUN. It's useless for disproving miracles or free will, for instance, because miracles and free will deal with things that are neither 'same effects' nor 'same causes'; they are explicitly dealing with different kinds of causes. While you can perhaps see vaguely how a theory of induction might be based on it, the details of how were surprisingly tricky to work out -- in particular, it's not clear that the Causal Sameness Principle gets you closer to a full theory of induction than any other causal principle. Perhaps more serious is a point noted by Mill, that not all 'uniformities of nature' could be causal in the way the Causal Sameness Principle required. (Mill's example is fundamental properties, which as fundamental could not have any cause, unless you count God, but even if you do, that plays no role in how we usually reason inductively about them.)

Mill, in fact, provides in A System of Logic what I think is probably the best alternative to the Causal Sameness Principle, although he does it almost in passing: What is true in one case is true in all cases of a certain description. This has the advantage of being consistent with the Causal Sameness Principle while have flexibility more like that of the Naive Formulation. Call it the Description Formulation. What is, I think, most attractive about the Description Formulation is that it is the only version of PUN in which it is very obvious what it actually has to do with induction. In induction you are, more or less, going from 'Some A is B' to 'All A is B', and the puzzle is what you are doing that lets you do this. The Description Formulation gives an answer: you are not doing so simpliciter, but only under a description. And what we think of as induction is the work of finding and ruling out candidates for that description. (Mill thinks of this as happening, Bacon-like, with the various methods like the Methods of Agreement.) I start with this case, in which X is Y, and then I, by various kinds of trial and error, find a description D that lets me say 'All X is Y' in the context of D. At the extreme you can do this trivially -- if some A is B, then all A that is B is B -- which shows that the principle is not just an arbitrary claim, since we know it is a legitimate move for at least one description, but of course, in induction we are looking for non-trivial descriptions. That there are non-trivial descriptions to be found is not something we know beforehand, but Mill wouldn't be bothered by this, because he doesn't think the PUN is necessary, a priori, or indefeasible; he just thinks it is a principle that we've found to work in a lot of different kinds of situations, and so is suitable for practical purposes. But he also would have to concede, on the same grounds, that the Description Formulation can't do many things that people wanted it to do -- you can't use it to establish determinism, for instance. All that's really salvaged by the Description Formulation is a general format for inductive inquiry.

So it seems like the best summary here is that, while there are a few things that could be considered a principle of the uniformity of nature, they are quite limited and don't have the features that the PUN was generally taken to have; the PUN, as such, despite all the fanfare, never actually existed in any form at all. It was almost entirely carried by the rhetorical force of the phrase, 'uniformity of nature', in a context in which people would describe scientific inquiry as being concerned with 'uniformities of nature'.  People could point to particular 'uniformities of nature' -- in the period, astronomical phenomena and Newton's Laws would have been the obvious cases -- which is what made it plausible. But a general principle was never really formulated; the phrase was a placeholder, a stand-in serving as an IOU, whose place was never filled with anything that could deliver even a portion of what was promised.

The Fathomless Daylight Seems to Stand and Dream

 September
by Archibald Lampman 

 Now hath the summer reached her golden close,
And, lost amid her corn-fields, bright of soul,
Scarcely perceives from her divine repose
How near, how swift, the inevitable goal:
Still, still, she smiles, though from her careless feet
The bounty and the fruitful strength are gone,
And through the soft long wondering days goes on
The silent sere decadence sad and sweet. 

 The kingbird and the pensive thrush are fled,
Children of light, too fearful of the gloom;
The sun falls low, the secret word is said,
The mouldering woods grow silent as the tomb;
Even the fields have lost their sovereign grace,
The cone-flower and the marguerite; and no more,
Across the river's shadow-haunted floor,
The paths of skimming swallows interlace. 

 Already in the outland wilderness
The forests echo with unwonted dins;
In clamorous gangs the gathering woodmen press
Northward, and the stern winter's toil begins.
Around the long low shanties, whose rough lines
Break the sealed dreams of many an unnamed lake,
Already in the frost-clear morns awake
The crash and thunder of the falling pines. 

 Where the tilled earth, with all its fields set free,
Naked and yellow from the harvest lies,
By many a loft and busy granary,
The hum and tumult of the thrashers rise;
There the tanned farmers labor without slack,
Till twilight deepens round the spouting mill,
Feeding the loosened sheaves, or with fierce will,
Pitching waist-deep upon the dusty stack. 

 Still a brief while, ere the old year quite pass,
Our wandering steps and wistful eyes shall greet
The leaf, the water, the beloved grass;
Still from these haunts and this accustomed seat
I see the wood-wrapt city, swept with light,
The blue long-shadowed distance, and, between,
The dotted farm-lands with their parcelled green,
The dark pine forest and the watchful height. 

 I see the broad rough meadow stretched away
Into the crystal sunshine, wastes of sod,
Acres of withered vervain, purple-gray,
Branches of aster, groves of goldenrod;
And yonder, toward the sunlit summit, strewn
With shadowy boulders, crowned and swathed with weed,
Stand ranks of silken thistles, blown to seed,
Long silver fleeces shining like the noon. 

 In far-off russet corn-fields, where the dry
Gray shocks stand peaked and withering, half concealed
In the rough earth, the orange pumpkins lie,
Full-ribbed; and in the windless pasture-field
The sleek red horses o'er the sun-warmed ground
Stand pensively about in companies,
While all around them from the motionless trees
The long clean shadows sleep without a sound.

 Under cool elm-trees floats the distant stream,
Moveless as air; and o'er the vast warm earth
The fathomless daylight seems to stand and dream,
A liquid cool elixir -- all its girth
Bound with faint haze, a frail transparency,
Whose lucid purple barely veils and fills
The utmost valleys and the thin last hills,
Nor mars one whit their perfect clarity. 

 Thus without grief the golden days go by,
So soft we scarcely notice how they wend,
And like a smile half happy, or a sigh,
The summer passes to her quiet end;
And soon, too soon, around the cumbered eaves
Sly frosts shall take the creepers by surprise,
And through the wind-touched reddening woods shall rise
October with the rain of ruined leaves.

Dashed Off XXIII

 Morality is tiered and not flat. (We see this very obviously with treatment of children and with situations of heightened responsibility.)

One thing that can always be guaranteed with regard to family is that your plans will not turn out the way you think.

"I must in all cases recognize the free being outside me as free being, i.e., I must limit my freedom through the concept of the possibility of his freedom." Fichte
"The finite rational being cannot assume the existence of other finite rational beings outside it without positing itself as standing with those beings in a particular relation, called a relation of right."

Rights presuppose both moral law and freedom.

If there is no obligation to be rational, there is no obligation at all.

"To ask a religious man why he believes in God is like asking a happy man why he enjoys life." William Temple
"The great aim of all true religion is to transfer the centre of itnerest and concern from self to God."
"The appeal to authority is always a rational appeal in its own nature."
"The inner meaning of History is the conflict between the Lamb and the Wild Beast -- Love and Pride."
"The essential instrument of God is the community of persons, and the Book is the instrument of the community."

Iconoclasm tends to be associated historically with attempts to further state propaganda.

Christ fulfills both ceremonial law and moral law, making them symbols of a higher order, although they function differently as symbols.

representative vs vicarious functions of signs

Hooker on internal hierarchy (1.8.6)
on perpetual prayer (5.48.1)

Multitudes, when acting as multitudes, have difficulty distinguishing reality and appearance.

"When an individual's conduct consistently appears cruel, wicked, selfish, or ungenerous, the Akan would say of that individual that 'he is not a person' (onnye onipa)." Kwame Gyekye
"The judgment that a human being is 'not a person,' made on the basis of that individual's consistently morally repehensible conduct, implies that the pursuit or practice of moral virtue is intrinsic to the conception of a person held in African thought."

Berger's signals of transcendence: order, play, hope, damnation (outrage), humour

(1) All physical things have efficient powers.
(2) We understand efficient powers in terms of final causes.
(3) The efficient powers of physical things are intelligible.
(4) Therefore all physical things have final causes insofar as they have efficient powers.

Physics leads all physical sicences only because it serves all physical sciences. Physics is not a despot; it does not dictate terms. It provides tools that aid the development of other sciences on their own terms. When physicists have tried to dictated terms to other sciences, they have often tended to be wrong, like Lord Kelvin lecutring biologists on evolutionary timescales. Nor is surprising that they would; the physical phenomena that other sciences study in detail have to be accommodated by physicists as much as any of the paradigmatic ones with which physicists usually start. If other scientists do a good job of identifying and studying a phenomenon, physicists are in no position to dismiss it.

Complicated passions tend to resolve into simpler passions, and ulimtately into the principal passions, which have the simplest orientation to their objects.

"God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God." Berdyaev

Death affects us so deeply because we are in a sense immortal in all the wrong ways.

We are immortal enough to see something beyond any death, but not immortal enough to avoid death itself.

"The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content." Einstein

"One of the principal objects of theoretical research in any department of knowledge is to find the point of view from which the subject appears in its greatest simplicity." Gibbs

"A doubt which makes an impression on our mind cannot be removed by calling it metaphysical." Hertz

The unity of all science consists neither in its material nor in its method, but in its end.

"The sound experimental criticism of a hypothesis is subordinated to certain moral conditions; in order to estimate correctly the agreement of a physical theory with the facts, it is not enough tob e a good mathematician and skillful experimenter; one must also be an impartial and faithful judge." Claude Bernard

No k nowledge is complete until it is returned to divine principles, but one must also not try to short-circuit the route.

"Truth will sooner come out from error than from confusion." Bacon

The measure of a good explanans is not whether the explanans is clear but whether the explanandum is made more clear by it.

The soil in which the state grows is one of disposition, sentiment, and representation; power in a state is always veiled by signs and feelings, sometimes reaching the point of kitsch.

A political constitution cannot be wholly imposed because it is a shared way of thinking.

Only by interpreting aspects of a theory as causal can we relate the theory to experiment.

Even were there no heaven, one could not get a proper conception of human dignity without conceiving the possibility of heaven for human persons. The human person is that for which one can conceive the possibility of heaven.

adminicular/adminiculary
adminiculum: literally, 'at-hand tool'
-- English adminicle: something that aids/supports, an auxiliary, background ornament on a coin or medal, [in Scots law] corrobrative proof

"...the remarkable manner in which Divine Providence makes use of error itself as a preparation of truth; that is, employing the lighter forms of it in sweeping away those of a more offensive nature." Newman

jobs as social entities
-- offshoots of contracts, and while individual jobs can be created, 'job' as a category has grown organically under pragmatic and ethical pressures

co-communication (coordiation among communicators making them to act as a unified communicator, cf. co-authorship)

Progress must be grown.

One can go far in philosophy with many small and humble techniques.

Human cognition is not merely subject-object; our understanding of the subject-object relation is mediated and facilitated by co-subjects (who are also co-objects).

Every civil society must recognize natural, moral, legal, and spiritual titles and claims.

Every human being is more powerful, more wise, and more good with others than they are alone. Even the worse corruptions we can perform together are worse because they are corruptions of much greater goods, as our mass follies are misdirections of much greater wisdom.

The category of relation is the category of oriented transitives, i.e., the having of (directedness to) an other-term (object) that is properly other.

respicit ad aliquid (respectus) vs se habere ad aliquid (habitudo)

As the sex principia all presuppose relatio, they are capable of inheriting relativity to what only exists in reason.

It is not the same to wear a hat and to wear a crown, not the same to sit on a chair and to sit on a throne, not the same to hold a stick and to hold a scepter.

dominium: right whereby a things is ours
dom. plenum: ownership + usufruct
dom. minus plenum: ownership where usufruct is vested in another

It is immensely naive to think that clergy without temporal power will not be subject to temporal temptations.

A king is not a temporal vicar of God; he is a minister with a limited jurisdiction.

Legal positivism holds that legislation, however it is conceived, works ex opere operato, and not ex opere operantis (whether of legislator or minister or judge or society).

Mathematical systems have to be 'loosened up' by pragmatic and heuristic elements to be of genuine use in most physical and philosophical contexts; they need to be made fit to apply to things that are not purely formal aspects of pure quantities.

Logical systems related to Boolean Algebra tend to be appropriate to situations of combination and elimiantion, its logical operators being appropriate for describing various kinds of filtering of possibilities (as we see with truth tables).

Many of our responsibilities are only had by luck.

'lore' (e.g., 'magic systems') as narrative quasi-art (it's effetively a conceptual art, i.e., a formal quasi-art)

found fantasy (obviously dreams are a significant source, but there is also Chestertonian found fantasy)

le péché de l'angèlisme

Every empiricism, by its nature, has fringes it cannot handle well.

"The end, sought for by morality, is above it and is super-moral." F. H. Bradley

artificial teleology -> unconscious teleology -> natural teleology // artificial selection -> unconscious selection -> natural selection

"The inward reality in the Chrisitan religion is to be found by means of externals." Trethowan

All knowledge aspires to be a stepping stone to the Beatific Vision.

Eucharist & Exodus 24:4-11

Mascall on the Eucharist seems to confuse sacrifice with consecration.

Sacraments are essentially signs of grace, but as efficacious, their causality is of grace, not merely of sign.

Christ's death is not a sacrifice merely by death but by being offered by Christ, which he does both morally and sacerdotally in body and spirit on the Cross, in Session, and in the Eucharist, thereby offering in the most perfect way.

The people who best know how to play victims are always the people who make them.

An economy consists not merely in exchanges but also in a context that gives the exchanges meaning.

All beliefs are arrived at by reading out of an experience more than is contained in that experience alone.

Liberty of conscience is required by the common interest in public order and security; it is not limited by it, although there is a point beyond which that common interest itself, considered by itself, doe snot *require* further protection for liberty of conscience. This limitation of requirement for the liberty is not the same as limitation of the liberty itself.

PSR: 'If something exists, it is intelligible that it exists, either per se or per alium.'

Gerson's Ur-Platonism
(1) antimaterialism (Some things are neither bodies nor properties of bodies.)
(2) antimechanism (Some necessary explanations are not available to a materialist.)
(3) antinominalims (Some things are not situated individuals.)
(4) antirelativism (Some things are not purely relative to individual or collective cognition.)
(5) antiskepticism (Some knowledge is possible.)

yang : providential causation :: yin : providential permission

It is natural to human nature to be united to the divine nature, but in the Hypostatic Union it is so united beyond any human capacity.

Annales Cambriae puts Badon at 518 and Camlann at 549.

The normative does not in any meaningful way supervene on the natural, not because there are no domains where that supervenience occurs, but because the reverse supervenience and approximate correlation are also both sometimes possible. There is not and has never been any reason to think that every normative difference corresponds to some natural difference; almost everyone treats both as relating more loosely than that. It does not follow from this that there is no connection between the two; supervenience is a very specific and strict relation, and the point is that there is no obvious reason, and has never been an obvious reason, always to privilege it above other relations here, including above other broadly supervenience-like relations.

If I say, "That is cruel," everyone takes this as being a moral claim, but Mackie seems committed to saying that this moral claim describes a 'natural fact' (one he distinguishes from the 'moral fact' of 'That is wrong'.)

No matter how one divides 'natural fact' from 'normative fact', it seems that either the two must have some overlap or the account of one or the other has surprising and unexpected implications.

On chill and starlit winter night,
the tournaments of men afar
in sound and tumult making noise,
a churchyard still with snow is fair ---

History has always been more closely related to poetry than to philosophy.

One of the responsibilities of parents is to train their children for the dignity of dominion.

pratityasamutpada (dependent origination / dependent arising) as characterizing the realm of objects of cognition
-- all objects of cognition, considered only as such, exhibit duhkha (dukkha) (= unease / unsteadiness / standing instability) & anitya (impermanence) & anatman (lack of self-being)
-- dependent arising implies that things cannot be viewed properly if seen only in isolation; those who do not penetrate the principle are mired in overfocus on particular things

The begetting and raising of a child is the generating of an equal.

Peter takes Ps 69:25 to be prophetic of Judas Iscariot; but read as such, it goes on (vv. 27-28) to deny all salvation to Judas.

logical efficacy (Collingwood): the causing of a question to arise

Much of dialectic consists of removing hypotheses from the board.

What is usually called 'event causation' is really dependency between co-effects. The event of swinging the bat and the event of hitting a homerun are co-effects in which the latter is dependent on the former.

infant baptism a sign of the genuinely gratuitous nature of grace

In faith we all become like little children in the receiving of grace.

Music on My Mind

 

Heather Heywood, "My Bonnie Moorhen". This is a folksong that was first collected by James Hogg in his Jacobite Relics in 1819. It's almost universally thought to be an allegorical song with veiled reference to Bonnie Prince Charlie, from the days when support for him had to be concealed. Songs of that sort are not entirely unheard of, but I confess myself skeptical of such precision allegory in a folksong. Nonetheless, the song is very clearly Jacobite, making use of Jacobite imagery, and depicts the Jacobite cause as beautiful but hunted, and yet still hopeful of resurgence.

It is Something to Be Sure of a Desire

 The Great Minimum
by G.K. Chesterton 

 It is something to have wept as we have wept,
It is something to have done as we have done,
It is something to have watched when all men slept,
And seen the stars which never see the sun. 

 It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,
Although it break and leave the thorny rods,
It is something to have hungered once as those
Must hunger who have ate the bread of gods. 

 To have seen you and your unforgotten face,
Brave as a blast of trumpets for the fray,
Pure as white lilies in a watery space,
It were something, though you went from me today. 

 To have known the things that from the weak are furled,
Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;
It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky. 

 In a time of sceptic moths and cynic rusts,
And fattened lives that of their sweetness tire
In a world of flying loves and fading lusts,
It is something to be sure of a desire. 

 Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning. It is something to have been. 

Doctor of Controversies

 Today is the feast of St. Roberto Bellarmino, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From one of his sermons on the Eucharist:

...a man's last will and testament should surely be drawn up in the straightforward speech of everyday life. No one but a madman, or one who desired to make trouble after his death, would employ metonymy and metaphor in such a document. When a testator says, 'I leave my house to my son John,' does anybody or will anybody ever understand his words to mean 'I leave to my son John, not my house itself standing four-square, but a nice, painted picture of it.' In the next place, suppose a prince promised one of you a hundred gold pieces, and in fulfilment of his word sent a beautiful sketch of the coins, I wonder what you would think of his liberality. And suppose that when you complained, the donor said, 'Sir, your astonishment is out of place, as the painted crowns you received may very properly be considered true crowns by the figure of speech called metonymy,' would not everybody feel that he was making fun of you and your picture ? Now Our Lord promised to give us His flesh for our food. The bread which I shall give, He said, is my flesh for the life of the world.

[Quoted in James Brodrick, S.J., The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, S.J., 1542-1621, Volume I, Burns Oates and Washbourne, Ltd. (London: 1938), p. 84.]

Sibyl of the Rhine

 Today is the feast of St. Hildegard von Bingen, Virgin and Doctor of the Church. From The Book of Divine Works:

God's power is joined to the supreme strength that consists in the perfection of shining justice, for God's power and strength cleave to one another. God's power indeed is rounded by balanced equality, because it lacks beginning and end.... For no mutability, no vicissitude touches God with increase or loss, nor does any unit of time ever divide him; rather, he remains ever without beginning, inviolate and immutable, granting life to all that is and gathering to supreme blessedness those who purely worship him.

[St. Hildegard von Bingen, The Book of the Divine Works, Campbell, tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2018), p. 420.]

Verbal Disputes and Facts

 A purely verbal dispute is of course a dispute that arises solely from a misunderstanding about the meaning of words, where there is no difference of view as to facts between the disputants: the sort of dispute which the Scholastics sought to avoid by enforcing the maxim, Initium disputandi, definitio nominis. Logicians have held the most widely divergent views about the extent of such disputes, some maintaining, with Locke, "that the greatest part of the disputes in the world are merely verbal," others, with De Quincey, that "they have never in the whole course of their lives met with such a thing as a merely verbal dispute." The truth lies much nearer the latter extreme than the former, for when different people attach different meanings to the same term the cause of such difference of usage will almost invariably be found to be a difference of view about facts. In fixing the connotation of names, in attaching meanings to terms, people are guided by what they consider to be facts..., and by their interpretation of the latter: and it is just precisely because all do not agree in their admission of alleged facts, and in their interpretations of admitted facts, that differences in connotation and definition -- leading to ambiguity, equivocation, and so-called verbal disputes -- arise.

[ Peter Coffey, The Science of Logic: An Inquiry into the Principles of Accurate Thought and Scientific Method, Volume I: Conception, Judgment, and Inference, Peter Smith (New York: 1938) p. 103.]

Fortnightly Book, September 14

 I'm running behind on this, of course.

Walter Wangerin Jr. (1944-2021) was a Lutheran pastor and a professor of English at the University of Evansville, eventually ending up teaching at Valparaiso University. He was a prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction. Most of his works are religious, but perhaps his best-known work is a fantasy novel published in 1978 called The Book of the Dun Cow, which is the new fortnightly book.

Men have not yet come, and animals protect the world from the terrible Wyrm at the center of the earth. Chauntecleer is a rooster, and as such a lord of his domain. But to rule brings grave responsibilities, and there are terrible monsters, not least of which are the evil basilisks who seek to free the Wyrm who will destroy the world....

J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas)

Introduction

Opening Passage:

'Then you are so convinced by these new theories that you plan to jettison all the cliches of the modern novel -- adultery, love, ambition -- in order to write a biography of Gilles de Rais!'

After a pause, he contined:

'It is not the obscenity of Naturalism I detest -- the language of the lockup, the doss house and the latrines -- that would be foolish and absurd. Let's face it, some subjects can't be treated any other way -- Zola's L'Assommoir is living proof that works of tremendous vision and power can be constructed out of the linguistic equivalent of pitch and tar. That is not the issue, any more than the fact that I have serious reservations about Naturalism's heavy-handed, slapdash style. No, what I really object to is Naturalism's immorality on the intellectual plain -- the way it has turned literature into the living incarnation of materialism, the way it promotes the idea of art as something democratic!...' (p. 3)

Summary: Durtal is a writer who has been increasingly dissatisfied with the Naturalistic literary style that is in fashion; he was set on a different path by an experience with Matthias Grünewald's Tauberbischofsheim Altarpiece. His current project is working through a biography of Gilles de Rais. He often talks about it and related matters with his friend, Des Hermies, who is a doctor who (possibly) has considerable writing talent but has never published anything because he realized that, whatever his ability, he was never going to write anything genuinely original. Through Des Hermies, Durtal meets Carhaix, the last bellringer in Paris; Carhaix, unlike Durtal and Des Hermies, is both Catholic and married, but they forgive him such relatively minor faux pas because Mme Carhaix is delightful and Carhaix is an interesting conversationalist, if a bit obsessed by the dying art of change-ringing. (Carhaix is so obsessed with bells, in fact, that one suspects, despite his obvious commitment to the faith, that he's Catholic in part because it makes it easier to be a bellringer.)The three, I suppose, are misfit artists -- Durtal, the artist who has broken off the fashionable style and is struggling to find his own; Des Hermies, the over-curious and ever-restless failed artist; and Carhaix, devotee of an art that is almost extinct and generally no longer appreciated.

Durtal's work on Gilles de Rais is the unifying thread of the story; as we go, we find out more and more about this man who once was a fellow warrior beside St. Jeanne D'Arc and then became a Satanist executed for raping and murdering children. Des Hermies, who in his capacity as a physician has an extraordinary number of connections and acquaintances, recommends that he consider looking at how Satanists work in present-day France. The most notable Satanist of modern-day is Canon Docre, an unfrocked and excommunicated priest; Des Hermies has never met him, but he knows that the Chantelouves have connections with him. Durtal happens to know the Chantelouves, in a somewhat interesting way, since he and Mme. Chantelouve have been carrying on a correspondence affair. Durtal uses this connection to try to learn more about Satanism and, eventually, a Satanic Black Mass that Canon Docre will be holding when he visits Paris. As the progress of the Gilles de Rais research increases, and we follow Gilles de Rais in his descent into evil, Durtal seems to undergo an opposing transformation, as he increasingly comes to regard his affair as a sordid and repulsive matter and finds the Satanists, and everyone and everything associated with them, off-putting. He doesn't believe any of it, but even he is shocked and made uneasy by the intensely petty sacrilege at the Black Mass and the malice expressed toward the Eucharist; he doesn't really know why, but the sacrilege just seems repugnant. Durtal accepts none of the dogmas, and yet the sacrilege and blasphemy just seems wrong.

That's more or less where it's left. Human beings are myth-makers, and when we speak of the modern age we weave a myth -- a myth of progress, of the banishment of superstition, of clear-eyed regard for reality. And Durtal's brush with Satanism has shown him what he was already beginning to recognize in the very modern style of Literary Naturalism: it's entirely fiction. Many of the things that make the modern age bearable are just slightly new versions of things that have always been, like having a nice meal with friends. The progress of the modern age is sometimes fake -- not always, perhaps, but a lot of it is only surface deep, and some of it is covering losses and deteriorations, like the loss of the art of change-ringing. You're free, of course, to think it's in some way a good trade, and Durtal (although not Carhaix) might not criticize you for it -- but it is a deterioration being spun as progress. But even when genuine, some of the progress is really just the old enduring into the present day -- basic points of chemistry were discovered by Renaissance alchemists, and the beauty of modern Paris is partly built on the Gothic and the Baroque. Nor has the modern age banished superstition. There are astrologers, alchemists, magicians galore. There are Satanic Black Masses going on under the secular age's nose, and a few of its shining lights are closely linked to them, and modern Frenchmen are terrified of Satanic curses. Durtal and his two friends find that there is an entire movement of heretical Catholicism going around, headed by a messianic prophet named Dr. Joannes, that is opposing, with magic, the Satanic curses of people like Canon Docre. It doesn't matter whether any of this is true or not; it is there. It is very obviously not banished, and it all has exactly the same right to be called 'modern' as anything in the myth. Certainly the myth does not let the Middle Ages off for the fact that magic and Satanism were disapproved then, and indeed disapproved more harshly than they are in the modern age; the myth of modernity simply points out that it was all there. And here it is again. It exists in the same calendar year; it is fomented by the same social causes; it interacts with the same cultural context. And far from being clear-eyed about this, people tell themselves fictional stories of how it's all in the past.

An age so self-deceitful cannot be anything but sick. But the story is not pessimistic; there is a sort of hope about the world that comes out of this, although only of a limited sort. If the modern age could not eliminate superstition, maybe there is something to religion. Maybe. If sacrilege and blasphemy still exist, we have not entirely lost a conception of the sacred. Not entirely. If the modern age could not banish Satan, maybe there is something to be said for Catholics worshipping God. Maybe, and maybe something. Durtal doesn't really believe any of it. What he does know is that the myth of the modern age is a lie. Whatever good there might be in modernity, the positivists and the Satanists are cousins, the priests are often blasphemers and the politicians often corrupt, and the world is full of sordid futility and evil. To see that is a sort of progress. Evil is a clue to what really means something. Durtal, however, has not gone farther than the beginning of that. Even Huysmans did not know where it all would lead; it's not even clear that, having published this book, he ever thought he would return to Durtal at all. But even if it all stopped here, it is something to have discovered that something might lead somewhere.

Favorite Passage:

Des Hermies rose and paced the room for a moment.

'That is all very well,' he groaned, 'but this century does not give a fig for the coming glory of Christ; it adulterates the supernatural and vomits over the other-worldly. How can you have hope in the future under such circumstances? How can you possibly believe that they will be clean and decent, these offspring of our fetid bourgeoisie and the vile times in which we live? Brought up in conditions such as these, what will become of them, what will life make of them?'

'They will turn out,' replied Durtal, 'just the same as their parents. They will stuff their guts with food and evacuate their souls through their bowels.' (pp. 264-265)

Recommendation: Recommended; I would say, 'Highly Recommended', but there are parts of the book that are definitely not for everyone. (The book is in some ways like Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but with cleaner and more unified structure, and Satanic blasphemers rather than Templar enthusiasts.)

*****

J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas), Hale, tr. Penguin Books (New York: 2001).