Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

In the middle of the night somebody began to cry outside of Chauntecleer's Coop. If it had been but a few sprinkled tears with nothing but a moan or two, Chauntecleer would probably not have minded. But this crying was more than a gentle moan. By each dark hour of the night it grew. It became a decided wail, and after that it became a definite howl. And howlying -- particularly at the door of his Coop, and in the middle of the night -- howling. Chauntecleer minded very much. (p. 13)

Summary: Long before the rise of men, Chauntecleer is lord of the Coop, and of all the land around. He's a bit silly and a bit vain, a foolish Rooster, but he makes an honest effort to keep peace and uphold order, and with a bit of muddling he mostly does well enough. The book opens with him meeting a creature new to his domain, Mundo Cani Dog, a perpetually over-humble, over-sensitive, weepy, mourny dog, who irritates him to no end, but he soon learns that it is handy for Rooster to have a Dog help with some things, even if the Dog is a mope who never stops talking about how much of a failure and a nothing he is. Unbeknownst to all the animals in the land, they were made by God to be the Keepers of the Wyrm, a terrible and ancient power imprisoned in the earth beneath him, who, if he should ever be freed, would devour the world.

Nor is the Wyrm quiescent. In another domain, ruled by an aging Rooster named Senex, he has begun to whisper. Senex has no heir, and as his abilities slip in his age, he is terrified of being a failure. With Wyrm's help, Senex lays an egg, and the unnatural abomination of the Rooster-laid egg is hatched beneath a Toad. This is Cockatrice, who is like a Rooster and yet not, a scaly, featherless thing of great malice who soon kills Senex, usurping his place, and initiates a regime of terror focused on only one thing: the breeding of snake-like and venomous Basilisks. A Hen, named Pertelote, eventually escapes this regime and finds shelter in the lands of Chauntecleer.

Some elements of the story here have been told elsewhere, but instead of Wyrm, Cockatrice, and Toad, the characters in that story were called the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet. For this is a story about the End of the World, or, at least, a first taste of it. As Chauntecleer keeps the peace in his little realm, unaware of the dangers beneath his feet or multiplyling in the rivers, all things move slowly toward the Armageddon of the animals. And against the pride of the Wyrm, the wickedness of Cockatrice, the malice of the Basilisks, against all of that evil, there is nothing to defend what is good and prevent the end of all except a decent but foolish Rooster, and a loyal Dog who never stops mourning, and some beasts, brave in their way, sometimes, but narrow in their views. God has not left them entirely without resource, since He sends to them the Dun Cow, who gives Chauntecleer what he needs to fight, but the fighting will have to be their own.

Do not let the talking animals give you the wrong idea; this is a book about war, the War, and there are books about war with human characters that are not as brutally honest as this one is about how bad even a necessary war can be. The brutality of Cockatrice's regime, or the terror and loss of the Final Battle in which beast after beast dies from the poison of the Basilisks, are laid out without any pulled punches. Obviously, the earth is still here, and thus Chauntecleer and his allies will narrowly win, but the sacrifices will be terrible by the end, and the Wyrm that wants to devour the world still waits to be freed.

Favorite Passage: Chapter Twenty-Four ends in the middle of a sentence with this passage:

Suddenly Chauntecleer took dizzy and began to sway. How many battles make a war? How muh, and how much more, can a rooster bear before the break? He let his slack wings touch the ground on either side of him so that he wouldn't fall altogether, and then dragged back to the camp. But again and again he turned his head to look behind, trying to believe what he saw.

He stumbled into the trench at the bottom of the wall. Slowly he raised his eyes. There was Pertelote, still standing on its top and looking at him. Chauntecleer  shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile. He spread his wings empty in front of her. The smile didn't work. It hung too crooked on his face. "Do you know? Do you know?" he said as if he were very young. "Pertelote. I don't know anymore," he said, and then he fainted. Many of his bones had been broken.

Chauntecleer had won. Chauntecleer was victorious, but

(p. 223)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow, Pocket Books (New York: 1978).

Dashed Off XXIV

 The Church participates the Mediatorship of Christ by being socially and sacramentally His Body.

In petitionary prayer, we socially participate in God's beneficence.

Prayers may seem ephemeral but they are ever before the Lord.

We learn in the Old Testament, in its history corrected by prophecy, what God means by a 'priestly nation'.

"For since the doctrine of Our Lord's Mediation is funded upon His taking our flesh: since its primary law is the re-creation in His person of our common nature, the entrance of divine graces into humanity ni its Head and Chief;--therefore some medium is required, by which those things, which were stored up in Him, may be distributed to His brethren. To speak of the Head as the fountain of grace, is to assume teh existence of streams, by which it may be transmitted to His members. Now this function is so plainly assigned to Sacraments, that nothing else can be alleged to supply their place." R. I. Wilberforce

evidences as channels of intelligibility

On Van Leeuwen's acount of belief, almost nothing we usually count as a belief turns out to be a belief -- only a few things directly connected to the evidence of empirical experience still get counted.

Anticipation is the soul of rhetoric.

'It war guid tym of wykkitnes to ces.'

expansion to Gentiles as Peter's use of the keys; Council of Jerusalem as apostles' use of the key

When a man is counting noses, the nose he is most likely to miss is the one he sees in the mirror. Sometimes we forget to include the most obvious truth precisely because it's so obvious we treat it as if it were already included, even when it hasn't been.

"The mind is under the power of the demons of evil intellect and duality. / But when the mind surrenders, through the Guru, it becomes one." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 222
"Through the Word of the Shabad, merits are gathered in and demerits are burned away."
"To practice forgiveness is the true fast, good conduct and contentment." 223
"Union with God is not obtained by arguments and egotism, / but by offering your mind, the comfort of the Naam is obtained." 226

Words get their meanings within the context of personal connections.

A jack of all trades gets to enjoy many things.

"The only phenomenological access that we have to the gift is in the 'thank you' of gratitude." Jean-Louis Chretien

Human beings do not merely adapt to their environment but mirror it, both behaviorally and symbolically.

felicitas as a divine gift of good fortune given to boldness (fortune favors the brave)

pignora imperii: Palladium, Sacred Fire of Vesta, the Ancilia of Mars, are the commonly recognized ones. Servius the Grammarian in the fourth century identifies seven:
(1) Acus Matris Deum (in the Temple of Cybele)
(2) Quadriga Fictilis Veientanorus (on the roof the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus)
(3) Cineres Orestes (in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus)
(4) Sceptrum Priami
(5) velum Ilionae
(6) Palladium (in the Temple of Vesta)
(7) Ancilia of Mars (in the Regia)
--- The Ashes, the Scepter, and the Veil are not attested anywhere else.

Role-playing games are constructed out of patterns of deciding factors, which may be choice, calculation, or chance process.

"The Rationalistic notion, that man's regeneration  may be effected through the progress of society, and the development of his natural powers, is the delusion of a cultivated age." R.I. Wilberforce
"Coincidence, resemblance, and proportion, the three keys to our knowledge of creation, require it exist within us, in order to be called forth."
"Ingratitude and oppression, justice and truth -- the feelings of which these are the natural objects -- testify clearly to some close alliance, which binds together all the far-severed sciions of the family of mankind."
"A system of worship upon earth is the necessary correlative to a work of intercession in heaven."
"The imported objective truth of the Word written, requires the engrafted subjective influence of the Living Word as its expositor."

Sex essentially has reference to other people.

Human society, like human life, is both natural and artificial.

marriage as a mutual consecration

Babel as the general template of societal corruption

In the calendar of saints, we celebrate the Church as prophetic.

Our choices, like us, eventually die.

civil functions of states
(1) mediation between citizens
(2) coordination of citizen projects
(3) protection of citizens as citizens
dominial functions of states
(1) giving laws to subjects
(2) enforcing laws on subjects
(3) adjudicating matters of law for subjects

All the sacraments express aspects of Christ's mediation.

People mistake their attraction to good for their own goodness.

"Only the individual who experiences himself as a person, as an integrated whole, is capable of understanding other persons." Edith Stein
"Whenever we come into contact with realms of value that we cannot enter, we become aware of our own deficient value and unworthiness."

'Religions' in general tend to be very good at articulating over time their phenomenological character as bounded idealities.

Phenomena are signs of both phenomena and noumena.

"Language is much more like a sort of being than a means, and that is why it can present something to us so well." Merleau-Ponty
"Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has to do only with language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by meaning."

"The whole course of nature that we are so familiar with has certain natural laws of its own, according to which both the spirit of life which is a creature has drives and urges that are somehow predetermined and which even a bad will cannot bypass, and also the elements of this material world have their distinct energies and qualities, which determine what each is or is not capable of, what can or cannot be made from each. It is from these baselines of things, so to say, that whatever comes to be takes in its own particular time span, its risings and continued progress, its ends and its settings, according to the kind of thing it is." Augustine (Lit Comm 9.17.3.2, cp. 6.13.23)

The divine inspiration of the Scriptural text implies the divine inspiration of its originary context, as originary, and of its appropriate interpretive context, as appropriate and interpretive.

Bo-me-rang

When we have seen a thousand stones fall to the ground, we may see one which does not fall under the same apparent circumstances. How then, it is asked, can experience teach us that all stones, rigorously speaking, will fall if unsupported? And to this we reply, that it is not true that we can conceive one stone to be suspended in the air, while a thousand others fall, without believing some peculiar cause to support it; and that, therefore, such a supposition forms no exception to the law, that gravity is a force by which all bodies are urged downwards. Undoubtedly we can conceive a body, when dropt or thrown, to move in a line quite different from other bodies: thus a certain missile used by the natives of Australia, and lately brought to this country, when thrown from the hand in a proper manner, describes a curve, and returns to the place from whence it was thrown. But did any one, therefore, even for an instant suppose that the laws of motion are different for this and for other bodies? On the contrary, was not every person of a speculative turn immediately led to inquire how it was that the known causes which modify motion, the resistance of the air and the other causes, produced in this instance so peculiar an effect?

[William Whewell, The History of Science, Volume I, p. 269. At "a certain missile", Whewell has a footnote, "Called a Bo-me-rang"; hence the title of the post. The argument here, minus the boomerang, is similar to one also found in Lady Mary Shepherd's criticisms of Hume.]

Particular Practicables

As said above, prudence is concerned with particular practicables. As such things are almost infinitely diverse, no one man can adequately consider them all, nor in a short time rather than over a long period of time. Thus in things relevant to prudence, man especially needs to be taught by others, and particularly by elders, who have achieved a sensible understanding of practicable ends [qui sanum intellectum adepti sunt circa fines operabilium]. Thus the Philosopher says, in VI Ethic., "It is fitting to attend no less to the indemonstrable claims and opinions of experienced people who are older and prudent, than to their demonstrations, for by experience they see principles." Thus also it is said in Prov. III, "Do not lean on your own prudence"; and it is said in Eccli. VI, "Stand in the multitude of presbyters," that is, elders, "that are prudent, and join yourself from the heart to their wisdom." And this pertains to teachableness [docilitas], to be very receptive to learning. And so teachableness is appropriately posited as a part of prudence.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2.49.3 co. (my translation). The Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

Johnson on Tragic Catharsis

 I introduced Aristotle's doctrine in his Art of Poetry, of 'the [Greek: katharsis ton pathaematon], the purging of the passions,' as the purpose of tragedy. 'But how are the passions to be purged by terrour and pity?' (said I, with an assumed air of ignorance, to incite him to talk, for which it was often necessary to employ some address).

JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, you are to consider what is the meaning of purging in the original sense. It is to expel impurities from the human body. The mind is subject to the same imperfection. The passions are the great movers of human actions; but they are mixed with such impurities, that it is necessary they should be purged or refined by means of terrour and pity. For instance, ambition is a noble passion; but by seeing upon the stage, that a man who is so excessively ambitious as to raise himself by injustice, is punished, we are terrified at the fatal consequences of such a passion. In the same manner a certain degree of resentment is necessary; but if we see that a man carries it too far, we pity the object of it, and are taught to moderate that passion.' 

My record upon this occasion does great injustice to Johnson's expression, which was so forcible and brilliant, that Mr. Cradock whispered me, 'O that his words were written in a book!'

[Boswell's Life of Johnson, Volume 3 (sections 117-119).]

Evening Note for Tuesday, September 23

 Thought for the Evening: Convertibility of Signs and Principles

One of the most important aspects of human life consists of probable reasoning, by which I mean not 'reasoning with those quantities called probabilities' but reasoning that deals with the truth-like, the apparent, and the only partially proven, with signs rather than proofs. A significant part of any intellectual inquiry consists of pulling these signs together, first in a way that starts to make sense, and then in such a way that they serve as a foundation for claims about truth, and then in the development of what is effectively a proof (although not always a strict demonstration). The key issue governing proof by signs is convertibility of evidential signs with actual principles and causes.

Following (somewhat loosely) St. Albert the Great in his discussion of signs of verisimilitude (Topicorum 1.1.2), we can organize these evidential signs in something like the following way.

(1) Evidential signs that are immediate phenomena, 'on the surface'. These are typically sensible qualities or immediately experienced features of the world which have a connection with deeper things. Thus, the whiteness of snow gives us a clue about its internal structure, but there is a significant gap of inquiry in the two, because the whiteness of snow is immediately recognizable but the internal structure to which it is a clue takes a considerable amount of investigation to reach.

(2) Evidential signs intermediate between the immediate phenomena and underlying principles. Albert takes the intermediate level of signs of truthlikeness to be the ones that are recognizable to many with only a little reasoning. His example is the pole star as a sign of the movement of the earth; the former shows the latter with a little reasoning that is of the sort that closely connects with things that most people don't have a difficulty understanding, if they put an effort into understanding the reasoning.

(3) Evidential signs convertible with the underlying principles. 'Convertibility' here means that they have an immediate connection such that they go together.  Albert's example is the eclipse and the relative motion of the moon. These signs can only be recognized by considerable reasoning and investigation, and so are only apparent 'to the wise', but when you recognize them, it is practically like recognizing that of which they are signs. These signs themselves have three grades:

(3a) Convertible so as to be recognizable by reflection on experience. These are are cases in which the actual convertibility is something we can sense.

(3b) Convertible so as to be recognizable given relevant competency. The actual convertibility requires at least a general kind of  skill to recognize.

(3c) Convertible so as to be recognizable with great experience and familiarity. The actual convertibility requires what we call relevant expertise to recognize.

However, we can take complexes and patterns of evidential signs together, and interlink them in various ways to get new signs, and because of this we can embed a superficial sign in a context of signs that gets us to (2) or (3). We can also strengthen signs by ruling out possibilities, and so we can transform a type (1) or type (2) sign into a type (3) sign by ruling out all connections but one between the sign and the underlying principles of which it is evidence.

Historically, people seem to have worked out at least four kinds of methods for transforming signs so that they are convertible with principles -- at least, methods that can be seen as such. The earliest, which we find forming in Plato's account of dialectic and developed in Aristotle's Topics and commentary on it, consists of maximal propositions and commonplaces (topoi or loci communes) and topical differentiae, which are principles for how to construct arguments given various starting points. An example of a maximal proposition would be, 'When a material is lacking, what is made from the material is lacking', whose differentia is 'from a material cause'. Suppose you were inquiring into whether a society had swords, but you don't have any direct information about it. To answer, "Does this society have swords?", you can apply the maximal proposition from material causes by recognizing that effective swords require certain kinds of materials -- bronze, iron, steel -- and then you can see if you have evidence that rules out each kind of material being commonly available. The more completely you can rule out the materials needed to make the swords, the tighter connection you create between your evidence and the actual causes and features of the situation. Another maximal proposition is, "It is not right to contradict what seems to be the case to everyone or the many or the wise." This differs from the previous one by being the maximal proposition for an 'extrinsic' topic, and the way you would approach convertibility would be by looking at the reasons why it seems true to everyone or the many or the wise, since, if something seems true to all or to many or to the intelligently informed, then even if it were strictly speaking wrong, there would have to be a reason why it seemed true to them.

A second method people have worked out to get convertibility of signs and principles is Nyaya, the systematic logical approach developed around the 2nd century by (it is thought) Aksapada Gautama in the Nyaya-sutra, and which, in the roiling turmoil of Indian intellectual thought, where massive numbers of different intellectual positions were put into argumentative competition, was raised to a high degree of sophistication, taking various forms in different Indian philosophical schools but perhaps reaching its most thorough form in the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school. The term that approximates what we are calling 'convertibility' here is in Nyaya called vyapti, or 'pervasion/concomitance'. The Nyaya approach identifies various pramanas, or ways of knowledge -- like perception, inference, and testimony -- which allow conclusions to have a connection to what is true, and an elaborate, and sometimes remarkably clever, apparatus was developed for analyzing ways in which such connections can go wrong and right. The result is encapsulated in what has popularly become known as the 'Nyaya syllogism', roughly: "There is fire on the hill? There is smoke on the hill. Wherever there is smoke, there is fire (i.e., pervasion between smoke and fire) as with a kitchen hearth (example of another actual case where the same pervasion is found) but unlike a steaming lake. This hill is smoky in that way. So there is fire on the hill." Or another example: "Atoms and karma have to be given direction by a conscious agent before they can function? They are insentient like an axe. Insentient things come to function only when directed by a conscious agent as a cause, as axes cut only when directed by an axeman. So atoms and karma also have to be given direction by a conscious agent as a cause."

A third method, which overlaps the first, is that of demonstrative regress. Some comments in passing in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics on demonstration in causal reasoning caused problems for commentators, because Aristotle seemed to attribute demonstrative status to a kind of argument that he elsewhere denies can be demonstrative. Early commentators interpreted him as using 'demonstration' (apodeixis) loosely, but in the Renaissance, commentators were not so sure and began to explore other possibilities, and this tradition, which perhaps can be said to begin with Agostino Nifo, reached its clearest form in the works of Giacomo Zabarella. Zabarella, pulling together ideas from prior commentators, argued that there is a kind of beneficial circular argument (regressus) in which you start by inferring the existence of a cause from the effect (Nifo calls this syllogismus conjecturalis, where 'conjecturalis' means not conjectural but non-necessary), and then by a business of understanding (negotiatio intellectus) or intelligent inspection (examen mentale) you make confused ideas more distinct; as you might expect, it consists of making distinctions and working out the implications of those distinctions until the whole field, so to speak, is well ordered, at which point you can prove the effect from the cause with a syllogism that has necessity ex condicione -- and thus you get a genuine demonstration for a conclusion, where certain conditions discovered in the negotiatio are respected. Cassirer noted that there were similarities between Galileo and Zabarella, and through the work of William Wallace and others it is by now established that Galileo knew the demonstrative regress and often makes use of its terminology, but he begins to rework the negotiatio to focus on geometry and experience rather than a priori distinctions, and as time goes on thinks less in terms of syllogisms than in terms of geometrical analysis. Wallace used this to show that many classical scientific discoveries could fairly easily be put into regressus demonstrativa form, even when the discoverers were not themselves thinking in those terms.

A fourth method we find developing with Francis Bacon's attempt to give an account of induction. Bacon suggested that we find the forma naturae of a given phenomenon by drawing up lists of what we found to happen with it in various circumstances and see what in these lists agrees and disagrees with what. This was put in a more rigorous form by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic. Mill, looking over common patterns of inductive reasoning, condensed them into four or five 'methods' (depending on how they are counted) along the lines of Bacon's lists, which are summarized in the Canons of Induction: the Method of Agreement, the Method of Difference, the Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, the Method of Residue, and the Method of Concomitant Variations.  For instance, in the Method of Agreement, you note that a phenomenon occurs in a number of different situations, which also share another phenomenon; from this you conclude that the two have a causal connection, and then you just keep applying the different methods until the causal connection becomes clear. Mill intended this to be a complete account of experimental reasoning; Whewell at the time pointed out that this is not how large portions of scientific inquiry works, but it had a great deal of influence in a number of scientific fields, for an extended period of time.

Various Links of Interest

* Ian J. Campbell & Gabriel Shapiro, Can You Deny the PNC? (Metaphysics Γ.3, 1005b11-34) (PDF)

* Nils Peterson, Goodbye Dorothy Parker, Apologies Edgar Guest, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Mauricio Suárez, The Pragmatics of Scientific Representation (PDF)

* Marie Leborne Lucas, Neither One Nor Two. Philosophy of Pregnancy, at "Blog of the APA"

* Jeffrey Maynes, The method(s) of cases (PDF)

* Katja Crone, Foundations of a we-perspective

* Katie Ebner-Landy, David Hume vs literature, at "Aeon". This is an interesting argument, but I think things are slightly more complicated if we taken into view Hume's historical works, which certainly do use the character-sketch method as one of several methods.

Currently Reading

In Book

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow
Andrew Willard Jones, The Two Cities
Oliver O'Donovan, The Disappearance of Ethics

In Audiobook

Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game
Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

In Tales Irrevocably Gone

 Lost
by G. K. Chesterton 

So you have gained the golden crowns, so you have piled together
The laurels and the jewels, the pearls out of the blue,
But I will beat the bounding drum and I will fly the feather
For all the glory I have lost, the good I never knew. 

 I saw the light of morning pale on princely human faces,
In tales irrevocably gone, in final night enfurled,
I saw the tail of flying fights, a glimpse of burning blisses,
And laughed to think what I had lost -- the wealth of all the world. 

 Yea, ruined in a royal game I was before my cradle;
Was ever gambler hurling gold who lost such things as I?
The purple moth that died an hour ere I was born of
That great green sunset God shall make three days after I die. 

 When all the lights are lost and done, when all the skies are broken,
Above the ruin of the stars my soul shall sit in state,
With a brain made rich, with the irrevocable sunsets,
And a closed heart happy in the fullness of a fate. 

 So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the golden weather,
The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy and sell,
But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring feather,
For the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like hell.

Augustine's Ascent of the Soul

 We are inquiring, of course, about the power of the soul, and the soul has the power to perform all these acts simultaneously, although it may think that it is really doing only that act which implies some effort or, at least, some fear. For it performs that act with greater attention than the rest. To teach these grades to anyone, let the acts of the soul, from the lowest to the highest, be called, first, Animation; the second, Sensation; the third, Art; the fourth, Virtue; the fifth, Tranquillity; the sixth, Approach; the seventh, Contemplation. They can be named also in this way: 'of the body'; 'through the body'; 'about the body'; 'toward itself'; 'in itself'; 'toward God'; 'in God'. Or again, in this way: 'beautifully of another, beautifully through another, beautifully about another, beautifully toward a beautiful, beautifully in a beautiful, beautifully toward Beauty, beautifully in Beauty.'

[St. Augustine, The Magnitude of the Soul, McMahon, tr.,  in Writings of Saint Augustine, Volume 2, Ludwig Schopp, ed., CIMA Publishing Co., Inc. (New York: 1947) pp. 146-147.]

What does the soul, or the human being qua alive, do? It holds together and maintains the body (Animation), interacts with its physical environment like other animals (Sensation), acts in a way distinctive to it as rational (Art, Virtue), purifies itself for higher good (Approach), and is united with supreme good (Contemplation). Thus is the fullness and beauty of human life according to Augustine.

Augustine's Ascent of the Soul
First Step	Animation (Being Alive)	Of the Body	beautifully of another
Second Step	Sensation	Through the Body	beautifully through another
Third Step	Art (Productive Skill)	About the Body	beautifully about another
Fourth Step	Virtue	Toward the Soul	beautifully toward the beautiful
Fifth Step	Tranquillity	In the Soul	beautifully in the beautiful
Sixth Step	Approach (Entry)	Toward God	beautifully toward Beauty
Seventh Step	Contemplation	In God	beautifully in Beauty