Maurice Leblanc, The Golden Triangle: The Return of Arsene Lupin

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

It was close upon half-past six and the evening shadows were growing denser when two soldiers reached the little space, planted with trees, opposite the Musee Galliera, where the Rue de Chaillot and the Rue Pierre-Charron meet. One wore an infantryman's sky-blue great-coat; the other, a Senegalese, those clothes of undyed wool, with baggy breeches and a belted jacket, in which the Zouaves and the native African troops have been dressed since the war. One of them had lost his right leg, the other his left arm. (p. 1)

Summary: Patrice Belval and his Senegalese friend, known as Ya-Bon, help out a local nurse whom they have known for a short while, Coralie Bey, interfering with a plot to kidnap her. Patrice and Ya-Bon are both war heroes, Patrice having lost his right leg and Ya-Bon both his left arm and much of his power of speech (he is called Ya-Bon, because "ya, bon" is mostly all he can manage clearly to say with his injured throat). Coralie is the wife of Essares Bey, a banker of supposedly Egyptian extraction. Patrice and Ya-Bon, in their attempts to protect Coralie, find themselves in a series of events that lead to Essares Bey's murder, and a deepening series of mysteries resulting from it. The mysteries mount until Ya-Bon, who knows Arsene Lupin, having once saved the latter's life when the latter was in the Foreign Legion, connects Captain Belval and Lupin, and the mysteries finally begin to unravel.

This is a very unevenly developed book, I think; parts are very well done and parts seem to fall short of their promise. Ya-Bon is an engaging character who is underutilized in the story. There is an international mystery -- Essares Bey is part of a plot to drain gold out of France, and it is unclear who is behind it -- but it is greatly shortchanged. There is a domestic mystery -- despite having only met relatively recently, Patrice and Coralie find their names written down and linked together going back decades, and there ends up being a shared mystery involving their parents -- and this is mostly handled quite well. There is a mystery concerned with hidden gold, three hundred million francs worth (in 1915!), arising from the international plot, and this is also handled well, although perhaps too quickly and in a way that could possibly feel anticlimactic. I think part of the issue is that Patrice and Coralie, while charming, are not really strong enough characters to carry as much of the plot as they have to carry. Nonetheless, the twists and turns are mostly enjoyable.

In the Introduction, I suggested that Lupin being less visible here might benefit him as a character, and this was definitely the case. This is a much more likable Lupin than several of the more recent Lupin books have shown us, and his handling of the mysteries is quite masterful.

Favorite Passage:

They went nearer. There were bead wreaths laid down in rows on the tombstone. They counted nineteen, each bearing the date of one of the last nineteen years. Pushing them aside, they read the following inscription in gilt letters worn and soiled by the rain:

HERE LIE
PATRICE AND CORALIE,
BOTH OF WHOM WERE MURDERED
ON THE 14TH OF APRIL, 1895
REVENGE TO ME: I WILL REPAY.

Recommendation: Recommended; although it's somewhat uneven in execution, the twists are engaging and interesting.

*****

Maurice Leblanc, The Golden Triangle: The Return of Arsene Lupin, Fox Eye Publishing Ltd. (Leicester, UK: 2022).

A Being that Is A

 A exists, for if it did not exist, no good would exist without evil, no greatness without littleness, no eternity without beginning; and the same thing would be true of perfection, which would not exist without imperfection, nor would justice exist without injustice, nor nobility without baseness, and so on for the others. But since goodness, greatness, etc. are concordant with being, and their opposites with privation, therefore one should not doubt that A exists, nor should one deny the existence in it of goodness, greatness, etc.; because if there were no goodness, greatness etc. in A, then it would be impossible for A to exist, since this existence is in accord with no being in which there is not immense goodness, greatness, etc., and in which, through bonification, there is no goodness in greatness, nor, through magnification, any greatness in goodness, and so on for the rest, which bonification is so great, etc., and which magnification is so good, etc., that it could only accord with a being that is A.

[Ramon Llull, Ars Demonstrativa, Distinction II, Part II, in Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232-1316), Volume I, Bonner, ed. and tr., Princeton University Press (Princeton: 1985), p. 356.]

A is God. This is generally seen as an ontological argument, and allowing for the classificational mess that is the category 'ontological argument', this is probably right as intended; that is, it is an a priori argument for God's existence, of some kind. However, I think there is a more fruitful way to think of it (and indeed, of most of Llull's arguments), which consists in seeing it as a sort of limit-converging transcendental argument concerned with the conditions of coherence for our thought about the world. That is to say, Llull's idea is that in remembering, understanding, and willing the world, we have these various unified intelligible domains -- for instance, insofar as remembering, understanding, and willing go, we find ourselves concerned with things that are able to be good (bonus), that are actually being good (bonificans, bonificating), and so forth. This only makes coherent sense if there is something that unifies these in some way; this is the dignitas (the axiom or principle), in this case goodness or bonitas. And so it goes, he holds, for a bunch of other things: greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will (or love), virtue, truth, glory, perfection, justice, generosity, simplicity, nobility, mercy, and dominion. These are the dignitates that unify entire domains of thinking (remembering, understanding, willing) about and in the world. But how do these domains of thinking relate to each other? They can't be regarded as wholly separate, nor can they be regarded as inconsistent, as if entire domains of our thought were establishing that other domains of thought were wrong. The dignitates of these domains, at least, have to 'concord with being', to be the principles of domains of thinking about what is, and as such, have to have some kind of coherence with each other; since they concord with being, their opposites are privations of some kind. If you can never have being that is good without its opposite, then goodness (and thus the entire domain of thought of which it is the principle) has defective concordance with being. If goodness is inherently defective, however, that means that it is going to be defective in its coherence with others; for instance, if the greatest good is also defective in good, that means that its goodness has to be defective in greatness, or eternity (i.e., duration), or power, etc. The dignitates would then not have a complete coherence with each other, and the domains of thought that they unify would be inconsistent with each other.

Thus A is not God as such, but God specifically as principle of coherence among the dignitates, the principle that must exist if, for instance, the goodness-domain of our interaction with the world is to cohere completely with the power-domain, the truth-domain, etc. In the wheel of the dignitates, and of all our interaction with things, A is the central point that makes the wheel a wheel rather than a mess. If there is no A, Llull wants to say, then our thought about the world is ineliminably inconsistent and incoherent. It's not just a matter of goodness fitting imperfectly with wisdom, but of everything we think and do with regard to things having conflicting aspects. But in order to be the principle of coherence for the dignitates, A must be the limit case of each, in which all of the dignitates have perfect concordance: A is where goodness is great, eternal, powerful, wise, etc., and greatness is good, eternal, powerful, wise, etc., and power is good, great, eternal, wise, etc., and so on and so forth. All the domains of thought cohere, and are only able to cohere, because they all converge on A, the point where all their unifying dignitates are in complete concordance. Since incoherence of the domains of thought gives us endless contradictions and inconsistencies, A must exist.

In this sense, Llull's argument is somewhat like Kantian and Neokantian moral arguments: in those arguments we have a possible conflict, and practical reason authorizes postulating God to prevent the conflict, in those cases of some aspect of the moral domain and some aspect of the natural domain, from being insuperable in practice. Llull has a very different metaphysics and epistemology; there are many more domains than the moral and the natural;  he takes the argument to be demonstrative for reality rather than a postulate for practice because the conflict and inconsistency he is trying to avoid is not merely practical; but the general structure is analogous. The dignitates posit A as a condition of their coherence, both in themselves and of their domains with each other; the fundamental conditions of remembering, understanding, and willing cannot contradict each other. In another way, it is like Aquinas's Fourth Way; indeed, while Aquinas wouldn't himself put it quite the same way, the Fourth Way has an explicit step that corresponds to Llull's 'concordance with being' point. In fact, I think the best way locate Llull's argument in 'argument space' is as an intermediate form between something like the Fourth Way and something like the Kantian moral argument.

Down the Gray Border of the Night

An October Sunset
by Archibald Lampman

One moment the slim cloudflakes seem to lean
With their sad sunward faces aureoled,
And longing lips set downward brightening
To take the last sweet hand kiss of the king,
Gone down beyond the closing west acold;
Paying no reverence to the slender queen,
That like a curvèd olive leaf of gold
Hangs low in heaven, rounded toward sun,
Or the small stars that one by one unfold
Down the gray border of the night begun.

Boethius on Logic

 ...The careful system of discourse has two parts, one of discovery and the other of judgment -- sometimes judgment of the discovery itself, sometimes judgment of the deduction of the discovery, which is the form of an argumentation. The part that teaches about discovery supplies in abundance certain tools for discoveries and is called 'Topics'....The part that has to do with judgment proffers certain rules making determinations and is called 'Analytics'. If it makes observations about the junctures of propositions, it is named 'Prior Analytics'. But if it deals with the discoveries themselves, then the part that discusses the determining of necessary arguments is named 'Posterior Analytics', and the part that discusses false and tricky (that is, sophistical) arguments is named 'Refutations'. The judgment of verismilar argumentations is apparently not dealt with because the nature of judgment concerning the middle is clear and uncomplicated when one is acquainted with the extremes. For if one knows how to judge discerningly what is necessary and is also able to judge false arguments, it is no trouble for him to determine verisimilar arguments, which are in the middle.

[Boethius, Boethius's In Ciceronis Topica, Stump, tr. Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY: 1988) pp. 27-28.]

This is a very interesting passage. Later medieval scholastics will often take Topics to cover verisimilar (i.e., probable) arguments. Thomas Aquinas agrees with this, but also agrees with Boethius in assigning Topics to the logic of discovery (logica inventiva); then, partly following the Islamic commentators, he also assigns Rhetoric and Poetics to it, taking Topics to be the logica inventiva that concerns belief (which is appropriate to probable argument), Rhetoric to be the logical inventiva that concerns suspicion (as in 'suspecting to be true'), and Poetics to be the logica inventiva that concerns 'estimation according to some representation'.

So Secret that the Very Sky Seems Small

 A Ballade of Suicide
by G. K. Chesterton 

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours -- on the wall --
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day. 

To-morrow is the time I get my pay --
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall --
I see a little cloud all pink and grey --
Perhaps the rector's mother will not call --
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way --
I never read the works of Juvenal --
I think I will not hang myself to-day. 

The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational --
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small --
I think I will not hang myself to-day. 

 ENVOI
 Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

Orcs

 People have been talking about this news story from The Telegraph about a 2024 course at the University of Nottingham on the topic of "Decolonising Tolkien" (a summary by a Fox News reporter here, if you can't access the article itself). It is the sort of thing that one would expect. But I was caught short by this (using the Fox News summary):

According to The Telegraph, the course includes texts that accuse Tolkien’s work of "ethnic chauvinism" against orcs and other dark-skinned characters. 

 "It adds that Tolkien’s treatment of the fictional races shares in a tradition of ‘anti-African antipathy,’ in which people from Africa are painted as ‘the natural enemy of the white man,’" 

The Telegraph reported. Nubia has reportedly argued "that eastern races in the fictional realm of Middle Earth are depicted as evil while fairer-skinned peoples of the West are shown as virtuous."

So here's the thing. Tolkien's orcs, with a few exceptions of uncertain status, are not dark-skinned. In the LOTR movies and in the Rings of Power television show, orcs are often depicted as having some form of a dark muddy greenish-bluish-black color of skin. But Tolkien's orcs are generally sallow-skinned. They are usually a sort of sickly yellowish-brown color. (The representation of the goblins in the Hobbit movies are probably closer to what Tolkien actually had in mind for most orcs. Occasional references to 'black Uruks' are referring not to skin-color but to their being the branch of Orcs most closely associated with the Dark Lord in Mordor, the Black Land, black meaning enshadowed.) There is a reason for that related to the comment by the professor in the last paragraph above -- Tolkien's descriptions of orcs are heavily influenced by fantastical literary descriptions of Huns and Mongols, who, of course, invaded with fire and flame from the East. When asked to describe the orcs by a reader once, he explicitly says that they look somewhat like short, unusually ugly Mongols.

So, no, nothing whatsoever to do with Africa. The "eastern races" comment is less wrong, although, again, the dynamics here are based on the Huns and the Mongols, and the East invading the West, so that the harshness of the description is because the ultimate root of it is literary legends about (you guessed it) the terrifying invading armies of the Huns and the Mongols. The only connection to "colonialism" is that the European writers who wrote these legends absolutely did not want to be colonized by Attila's armies or, later, the Golden Horde. (Of course, in Middle Earth, the eastern human races are also not depicted as 'evil', but oppressed and enslaved, and forced under duress to fight as a result of their enslavement. They are demanded tribute from conquered countries, and Sauron and the Witch-King use them as auxiliaries and, to use the later term, cannon fodder.The eastern societies may well be often evil, because in the story they are under the direct influence and part of the loose, widespread empire of Sauron, but we only know of them very indirectly. It's also the case that the Western people are not particularly virtuous, and, in fact, when Tolkien tried to write a sequel story about what happened to Gondor after the death of Aragorn, he eventually gave it up because the only story he could write was a depressing one about how corrupt and evil and orc-like they became.)

So not only is part of the line of thought based on a poorly thought-out account of the subject matter, it is not about any kind of real "decolonising" at all -- the whole point of 'decolonizing' is people recovering their heritage after having been subjugated by colonial empires; anything else is a cheapening of the concept, and a mere rhetorical abuse. And, of course, it's philistine in its core. The story is as it is; it is a work of art that needs to be assessed on its own terms. The relation of Orcs to any human race is entirely missing in the story -- famously, Tolkien never could decide how they fit in with Elves and Men, and at one point or other rejected all the possible options -- and if you imagine them to be non-white human races, this is, as they say, a 'you problem', rather than a Tolkien problem, because that's just not there in the story. If you think the tale is corrupting or detrimental to society, you are not talking literature anymore, you are talking ethics, and you need to give actual philosophical arguments appropriate to ethics, not vague insinuation or analogy.

Links of Note

 * Daniel D. De Haan, Perception and the Vis Cogitativa: A Thomistic Analysis of Aspectual, Actional, and Affectual Percepts (PDF)

* Anthony Skelton, Sidgwick's Philosophical Intuitions (PDF)

* Lawrence Pasternack & Courtney Fugate, Kant's Philosophy of Religion, at the SEP; this is a very good summary of an extremely complicated topic.

* Edward Feser, How Not to Limit Free Speech, at "The Catholic World Report"

* Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg discuss the question, Can the Humanities Be Saved?, at "The Point"

* Elaine Scarry, Plato and the Poets, at "Boston Review"

* Taylor W. Cyr & Parker Gilley, No Easy Compatibilism (PDF)

* Xiao Qi, Re-evaluating the Principle of Virtuous Motives: Abilities, Justice, and Natural Virtues (PDF), on Hume's approach to virtue ethics.

For Lands Not Yet Laid Down in Any Chart

Possibilities
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Where are the Poets, unto whom belong
 The Olympian heights; whose singing shafts were sent
 Straight to the mark, and not from bows half bent,
 But with the utmost tension of the thong?
Where are the stately argosies of song,
 Whose rushing keels made music as they went
 Sailing in search of some new continent,
 With all sail set, and steady winds and strong?
Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
 In schools, some graduate of the field or street,
 Who shall become a master of the art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought,
 Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
 For lands not yet laid down in any chart.

Three Poem Drafts

 I Laud the Holy Spirit

I laud the Holy Spirit, the minister of sacrifice,
God who brings God hither,
the anointing and consecration,
God breathing out our prayer,
God breathing in our prayer,
He to whom our prayers are instruments,
He of whom our prayers are imitations,
the Life-giver worthy to be praised by the living.
Enliven us, O living God!

Every sacrifice He encompasses like fire
is that upon which God descends;
every sacrifice He encompasses like fire
is enflamed, and to God ascends.
Encompass us, O Holy One, like fire!

The Sapience of the priest
beyond the priest's own sapience,
the Holiness of the sacrifice
beyond the sacrifice's holiness,
the Meaning of the prayer
beyond the prayer's meaning,
dispeller of night,
destroyer of the impure,
Fire beyond all fire,
from which all fire comes,
bringer of all reverence, sublime,
abundance beyond all wealth,
in Your radiance make us radiant
and glowing with God!

Newly Waking Moments

Faith is born in hallow,
the last rite of the time,
the promise-field fallow,
shining in morn sublime;

when all hopes are blooming
sunny fields are alight --
cast out your dark dooming
and rise to morning bright.

My Love Is the Sun

My love is the sun,
a great blazing ball,
massive in size
and burning withal;

in the East she will rise,
fall down in the West,
and when she has set,
I finally rest.