Dashed Off XXI

 You can always find disagreement if you search for it.

We make-believe manyt hings, and some of them we confirm to be real, and some of them we make to be real.

To be baptized is to be covenantal; to be confirmed is to be prophetic; to be ordained is to be angelicized. But there are covenant breakers, false prophets, and fallen angels.

global moral anti-realisms
(1) morality is a model, useful for practical purposes, of nonmoral things
(2) morality is an expression of integrated attitudes toward nonmoral things
(3) morality is a false interpretation of nonmoral things
(4) morality is an imaginary system not grounded in nonmoral things

intellection as active truth

literacy as a fine art

To execute law faithfully requires the authority to assess, to incentivize, and to correct.

We do not merely experience things; we often experience what we have already experienced and/or anticipated experiencing.

To care is to build a discipline of care.

Justice is not scorched earth.

People get irritable at the sudden tearing down or sudden major revision of longstanding and widespread classifications, because we need such things as landmarks and common reference points.

'Information' is used to mean both distinguishability and the causes of distinguishability.

In political matters, it is necessary (1) to have at least a hazy idea of 'the way things should be' and (2) to connect this 'way things should be' to the way things are. This may be done by locating the 'way things should be' either in the past, in the future, or in an ideal realm. (Or any mix of the three. Also, it may vary across particular issues.)

Most oppression does not occur by way of property rights but by way of partisan networks.

In the Karaite understanding of revelation, God chose a book. In the Rabbinical understanding, God chose a nation.

Jude 12-13 is also quite clearly a reference to 1 Enoch, thus makign Jude 14 literally true. 1 Enoch 2:1 -- contrast with 'wandering stars'; 2:3 contrast with 'rainless clous'; 3:1, 5:1, contrast with 'autumn trees', 5:3 contrast with 'waves of sea'; compare Jude 15 with 5:4; compare Jude 6 with 1 Enoch 10:11-14; compare 'wandering stars with 18:12-13.

1 Enoch 61:10 as quasi-Trinitarian

Beliefs that are nourished endure; beliefs that are starved perish.

People who are especially tempted to doubt have a nasty habit of handling it by trying to impose doubt on everyone.

Luther's preface to Bibliander's translation of the Qur'an (1543) puts considerable emphasis on the eternality of the Church. (But note also that he argues that 'the Turks' have better customs than Rome.)

isopsephy = equicalculus

In common law jurisdictions, courts are laboratories for legal devices.

Poverty is often less a lack of money and more a cloud of chaos.

When raising children, people often make the mistake of pushing the means before they have determined the end.

In reconstructed proto-languages, even if we assume a perfect reconstruction, we could never guarantee that words were used in the same cnetury (we can only very roughly and comparatively make judgments about chronological length of etymological tree, and even then only sometimes) or in the same geographical area (due to extensive migration); linguistic models are built wolly on surviving linguistic data, which does not encode all aspects of the language. Nonetheless, a properly built reconstruction, albeit always with a bit of approximation and looseness, can still be quite good and, more to the point, a useful device, as we see with cases like Proto-Germannic, which is often roughly confirmed with new data and helps make plausible reconstructions of the meaning of newly discovered old inscriptions, some of which themselves occasionally get later confirmation.

Without attention to causal reasoning, theoretical physics always runs to wild speculation.

fictions inherent in the thing
fictions imposed by the mind on the thing
-- -- with a foundation in the thing
-- -- due to relation of the thing to other things
-- -- by arbitrary imposition
fictions constructed by the mind but not imposed on things

"Our desire to understand 'how nature works' (i.e., to find the M in X -> M -> Y) is perhaps even stronger than our desire to quantify it." Pearl

mediated divine presence
(1) by sign: (a) creation (b) theophany (c) vision
(2) by prophetic representation
(3) by sacrament

Authors never fully understand why their works appeal.

Changes in prices depend on the causal structures that underlie them.

the changing and changed world
the guessed-at world
the intersubjective medium
the world as witnessed and testified

All norms are associated with narratives that explain them.

soundness of question
--> NB a question can be unsound because it requires something to be true that is false, e.g,. "Why has there been no woman as prime minister of Canada?", showing a kind of inconsistency

The faith by which we are saved is a faith already in existence by the point at which we ourselves begin to be believe.

Mark 2:5 -- belief on behalf of another

scepter, throne, vestment, and matchless weapons

All enduring human greatness requires intensive habituations.

The world we experience is nto merely of moving things but of things with apparent possibilities of motion.

the Church as a foam of transformations

moral imago dei: humanity
jural imago dei: covenantal people
sacral imago dei: sacramental church

The tears of the Church have healing power.

The temptation with which Protestantism has struggled is to begin thinking that we are strong alone; but our strength is to be together in Christ. Where they have not forgotten, they have achieved greatly -- powerful preaching, glorious hymns -- but the siren always calls.

None of us are holy alone.

Romantic relationships build their internal narrative interest to those involved in them by building inequalities and equalizing them.

Toleration is always a policy, not a virtue, and everyone always in the end treats it as merely a policy.

Nothing is a 'deepity' in the correct sense unless it is an equivocation. (On this ground, we see that many claims that things are deepities are themselves deepities equivocating on the word 'deepity'.)

God creates non-God, and does not require any not-God to do it.

Baddorf & McKay's imitationist account of collective virtue ("A Theory of Collective Virtue"): "Collectives can possess virtues and vices; they can do so because they can possess reasonably broad and stable dispositions that functionally and intentionally imitate individual virtues and vices."

A just society is a society of just people acting justly.

good customs of decision-making // virtues (as good habits concerned with choosing)

Pearson & Mitroff's four stages of crisis management
(1) signal detection: identify warning signs and prepare for possible crisis
(2) probing and prevention: active search and reduction of risks
(3) damage containment
(4) recovery
(5) review & learning

survey, strategy, solution, study

People in argument are often not fully sincere, because they are improvising means to multiple ends. In argument people often commit to things in advance of their considered belief, and only to make their arguments work.

Augustine, Ep. 187 to Dardanus & the Church as Temple

X's right to Y vs. X's having Y being reasonable

pleasure and pain as motivation confirmations

business ethics as the ethics of juridical persons
-- as personated
-- as constituted
-- as socially participating

All methodology is based on stories of how results have been reached.

Investment, like proclamation, follows the parable of the sower.

the pope as custos urbis Dei

A recurring problem with trying to explain things in terms of make-believe (e.g., Walton) is that make-believe is an immensely sophisticated and complex cognitive activity, and thus poorly suited for explaining anything simpler.

representation, figuration, narrativization

Higher animals clearly experience the world in valenced terms; some such valenced experiences make more functional sense than others. We are able to assess and correct valence attributions accordingly.

Naturalizing projects have a fairly consistent track record of doing at best okay.

Church councils never get what they want but what they say.

Books are indirect meetings of persons.

Idolatry, murder, and adultery violate sacred bonds, and therefore when unrepented exceed what any finite punishment could 'fit'.

There seems reason to think that we make political alliances by deliberately stultifying ourselves to facilitate being on the same page with a large group of very different people.

States not kept on track always end up trying to govern what does not need to be governed and trying to avoid governing what very much needs it.

Malebranche is right that about all of our sensations have an ambiguity  whereby we treat them as both mental and external to the mind; but he jumps too quickly to taking this to be an error.

"There is no other reason for saying that a square is not a circle than that the idea of a square is different from that of a circle and that the one can be thought of without thinking of the other." Malebranche (LO59)

And Sung by Lonely Campfires to the Stars

Upon Leaving the Black Hills
by A. Jean Holmes 

Beautiful hills, beneath whose shadows
I have dreamed dreams, have loved, have gained, and failed,
Have watched the sunsets pale, and breathed the pine,
And sung by lonely campfires to the stars:
Yet going, as I am, beyond the reach
Of finger-tips of fragrance in the winds,
And sight of brave, black hills against the sky,
I need not say good-bye; for you will be
Forever with me, though without your shrine.
Nor need I ask your steadfastness, your strength,
The purpose of your pines; be mine the will
To use them in my need, for they are there.
Through thee I have known God-steadfast as hills,
Constant and sweet as thy sweet spirit is!
Our little souls must understand the great
By simple simile: hills we can see
Can touch, can walk, and so can prove them real;
God, greater far, we trembling strive to feel.

Nolan Movies

 I saw The Odyssey the other day, and am still mulling it over; I may or may not say something about it this weekend. But as part of mulling, I was thinking of all of Christopher Nolan's movies and how I might rate them. This, I think, is the order in which I would rate them, at least at the moment.

1. Inception (2010) -- This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and, despite the respect it gets, I think it is still seriously underappreciated. One thing that puts it very high is that it has balance, which is not always Nolan's strong suit.

2. Memento (2000) -- I think one of the strengths of this movie is that, while it has the features of some of Nolan's most ambitious movies, it has none of the self-indulgence that weakens some of the later works. The combination of an ambitious idea and an understated means of implementing it is something that works very vwell.

3. The Dark Knight (2008) -- Partly because of excellent casting and a good set-up by Batman Begins, this is in many ways the most fun Nolan movie.

4. Interstellar (2014) -- This seems to be at the top of many people's lists, but I have never liked it anywhere as much as Inception or Memento, and I think it is certainly less brilliant than they are. Nonetheless, there is a lot to be said for it.

5. The Prestige (2006)

6. Dunkirk (2017) -- Nolan's most serious movie, this is a somewhat unique case, and I probably could be convinced to rate it a bit higher.

7. Batman Begins (2005)

8. Oppenheimer (2023)

9. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

10. Tenet (2020) -- There's a lot I like about this brilliant movie, and I want to rate it higher, but, utterly self-indulgent, it struggles to rise above being a string of gimmicks. It makes a good contrast with Inception, which I think avoids most of the problems that weaken this movie.

11. The Odyssey (2026) -- A good movie that could have been great but does not quite manage to cohere as it should. People have noted that it has a lot in common with Oppenheimer, but Oppenheimer is consistently better on all the points that the two share in common. 

That leaves two other Nolan movies -- Following (1998), which I have not seen, and Insomnia (2002), which I think I may have seen, but about which I remember nothing.

Beings

 The perception of the natures which compose the universe has been justified in the preceding chapters.

These nature are not being, but have being. Thus they receive being, because all that is not being (but nevertheless has being) must receive it from whoever is being.

Therefore, whoever is being must give being to the natures which compose the universe and are perceived by us.

But that which is being and gives being to creatures is cause, that is, God.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), p. 119 (section 1212).]

Very similar, of course, to the argument in St. Thomas's De ente et essentia (and Rosmini goes on immediately to give an adapted version of this that clearly is related to the First Way).

Doctor Apostolicus

 Today is the feast of St. Lawrence of Brindisi, Doctor of the Church. From his Mariale, a work highly influential on modern Catholic views of the Holy Virgin (Sermon 1), discussing the vision of the Woman and the Sun in Revelation 12:

By this heavenly vision God wanted the orthodox Church to demonstrate the divine wonders of Mary and to reveal to the faithful those things hidden in the Virgin, that all might know of what kind and how great is the glory of the Virgin from those things which had been written of her.

To summarize, there are two things that have been divinely handed down to us about the Virgin: that she was the Bride of God and Mother of Christ, just as Eve was the wife of Adam and the mother of men. So too in this vision these two things have been presented to human minds: that she is the Bride of God, the Queen of Heaven, the Bride of the High King, and that she conceived and gave birth to Christ, the only-begotten Son of God and true God. But what kind of glory accompanies these two things! He shows her robe, throne, and crown: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. O wonderful vision!

The Authorship of 2 Peter

Authorship attributions for any long-lasting text are inevitably layered and complicated. For instance, if you have read the Epic of Gilgamesh, you have read an edited translated reconstruction from several different variations that were themselves in different languages and from different times and cultures, and thus you have read a version that probably no one read before that version was published; editing, translating, and reconstructing all add complications to the question of who authored something, and they also complicate all inferences about authorship. 

For all the books of the New Testament, there are 'conservative' and 'liberal' positions about authorship; these are misleading labels for the position that the common and customary attributions are at least approximately right (conservative) and the position that the common and customary attributions are not correct enough to be counted as right (liberal). The reason it has to be put in this form is that common and customary attributions are often themselves approximate and incompletely certain, and authorship attributions even in other literary cases are made with an allowance that, for instance, there could also be intermediaries, editors, co-writers, different revisions, and so forth. For instance, the customary and common attribution for the Gospel of Matthew is that it was written by St. Matthew the Apostle, so the 'conservative' position is that it was written by St. Matthew or close enough; if it turned out (as some Church Fathers thought) that St. Matthew was the writer of the original draft, but that later writers translated it into Greek, perhaps with authorized expansions, this would still suffice for the conservative position. Likewise, traditionally St. Matthew and St. Levi are the same person (people in Judea and Galilee in the first century often had more than one name for various reasons), but if it turned out that they weren't and the Gospel was written by St. Levi, not St. Matthew, this would still be a conservative position, although one that no doubt conservatives would want clear evidence about -- the attribution to St. Matthew is right enough, and any confusion is actually elsewhere (in thinking that St. Matthew and St. Levi were the same, when in reality only the latter was the author). If one held that the authorship of the Gospel of Matthew had nothing to do with St. Matthew, and that the attribution was due not to St. Matthew having something somewhere to do with it but just an attribution that arose later for independent reasons, this would definitely be a liberal position on the authorship of the Gospel. Likewise, if it were a later forgery with no actual causal connection to St. Matthew, even indirectly or loosely, this would also be a liberal position.

Of all the books of the New Testament, the one that perhaps most easily lends itself to the liberal position, and causes the most difficulties for the conservative position, is 2 Peter.  (2 Timothy is probably its only rival on this particular point.) There are puzzles with it all the way across the board, however, that are not resolved.

The first and most basic elements to consider are what the work actually says. 2 Peter 1:1 gives as the 'from' of its greetings, Symeon Petros, slave and apostle of Jesus Christ. 'Symeon' is an unusual variant of 'Simon', but it is used of Simon Peter in Acts 15:14; Petros is a special title of Simon Peter in the same sense that Christos is a special title of Jesus Christ; and while the New Testament attributes apostleship to more than the Apostles proper, Symeon Petros...apostolos, is a very distinctive attribution. The epistle refers to a prior letter (without giving any indication as to its content) in 2 Peter 3:1; it refers to "our beloved brother Paul" (3:15) and his letters (3:16), and groups that first letter and some Pauline letters, whichever such letters might be in view (the usual educated guess based on echoes is that at least 1 Thessalonians is being considered), as "writings" (3:16, usually translated as 'Scriptures') that must not be distorted. It also says that "we" have made known Christ's power and appearing not by following stories, but having been "eyewitnesses" of his greatness (1:16), which it links with the Transfiguration, "we" having been brought with him and hearing the voice on the mountain (1:18). It anticipates the author's death as was made clear to the author by Jesus Christ himself (1:14). Thus the self-attribution of the text seems clearly to be Simon Peter; but is (as is often the case in this period) somewhat loose. What it strictly tells us is that it is written and sent under the authority of St. Simon Peter, the Simon Peter, and in the course of the letter it refers, as an eyewitness account, to an event of which Simon Peter was one of very few eyewitnesses. This is consistent with a very wide range of authorial possibilities. For instance, it has been suggested by some that several of St. Paul's letters were basically written by committee, with Paul simply supervising and giving final authorization; this would be equally consistent with what we find here. Many other things are possible.

It's difficult to pin down the earliest quotations and allusions, because any such assessment requires making a number of assumptions, but a plausible candidate is 1 Clement (9:2, 23:3), which would make 2 Peter quite early; if these are not genuine allusions, then the latest date for the work can be set well into the second century. The Church Fathers are fairly consisting in recognizing that the work was sometimes thought to be really St. Peter's, but that it was definitely not accepted as such universally; that is, some churches, but not all, read it as being genuinely Petrine. Origen, the first author to discuss its authorship directly, recognizes that some take it to be Petrine but does not himself regard it as such, and this is quite common among other Church Fathers who discuss these matters.

 Thus the 'conservative' here can hold that (1) there is a connection to St. Peter, such that he was in some way involved in the formation of the epistle under his authority, but (2) this connection could be fairly loose, given the uncertainties and ambivalences that we find. Beyond the actual statements of the text and consistency with some patristic evidence, there is not much that can be put forward directly to support it. Some people note, correctly, that for a work that involves a self-attribution to St. Peter, it is quite restrained, in both theology and attribution; pseudepigraphy often attempts to call on the authority of apostles for very extravagant claims, but the epistle here does not seem to be doing so. It gives us a very minimal account of the Transfiguration, draws conclusions that are quite modest, and attempts to impose by apostolic authority things that are mostly also found elsewhere in the New Testament. How much weight one gives this argument depends on a large number of background assumptions.

The 'liberal' position would be the opposite, that the process of the epistle's formation involves not even a loose derivation from St. Peter and his authorization. This is often combined with, although it is not strictly required by the 'liberal' position on authorship, the view that the early apparent allusions to 2 Peter are actually the reverse -- that is, 2 Peter is influenced by those texts rather than vice versa. This would make its origin well into the second century.

When we look at direct arguments for 'liberal' positions (i.e., those that don't just point out the uncertainties of the reasons for the 'conservative' positions), we find, however, that they don't get us very far. People will commonly point to the later patristic doubts about the authorship of the work. But this is in many ways the strongest argument on the liberal side. Other arguments are consistently doubtful. The Greek of the epistle is very weird, and definitely different from 1 Peter, but taking this to mean that it is not Petrine at all requires making a number of assumptions that are only that, assumptions. The 'conservative' positions for 1 Peter and 2 Peter do not strictly require (although they don't necessarily rule out) that St. Peter himself directly wrote anything at all, only that the epistles were written and sent under his authority and on his behalf; and if we take a 'liberal' position on 1 Peter, one can't use stylistic differences with 1 Peter as reasons for thinking 2 Peter non-Petrine.

2 Peter shares a lot of material with Jude, and effort sometimes is made to parse what this might mean for authorship. The answer is that we don't know. We don't know for sure how the two are related. Jude is usually thought to be first, because it is much, much tighter in argument than 2 Peter, and seems to have a much closer familiarity with the book of Enoch on whose material it draws. What is more, 2 Peter's use of the material is somewhat odder, in ways that would be explained if the author had heard either Jude or Jude's original source, but didn't have a written copy at hand. (If we assume that 2 Peter is drawing from Jude, the author of 2 Peter at several points substitutes for expressions in Jude other expressions that are similar-sounding, suggesting that it was not from a written copy but either from hearing it or remembering it. If we are assuming that they are both drawing from the same third source, Jude's use is much more like what you would expect from someone who had an actual written copy, and 2 Peter's use is much more like what you would expect from someone who had only heard it or had it second-hand.) The argument, which one occasionally finds, that St. Peter would not draw on ideas by St. Jude, on the ground that St. Peter was more important than St. Jude, is childish and stupid, and marks the person who uses it as an idiot who can be dismissed. What is important, though, is that, assuming 2 Peter draws on Jude or at least Jude's source, which is plausible, we know, even on the 'conservative' position,  that a significant amount of the material of the epistle is not actually from St. Peter himself -- at least, assuming (which we have no reason to believe but which we certainly do not know) that St. Peter himself is not Jude's source. (We can't fully rule that out because the ideas that someone cannot draw loosely on someone else's summary of what he himself previously said, or that someone cannot at times say things more precisely and at times more loosely, or that someone cannot remember what he previously said in a different way than actual record shows, are all obviously wrong.) The relationship with Jude, so far as we have it, doesn't really seem to say anything definite at all about the authorship of either.

Sometimes one finds arguments about St. Peter's literacy. He and the other apostles are referred to as agrammatoi in Acts 4:13, but that can mean anything from complete illiteracy to someone who can read or write at a basic level but has no literary skill. What is more, scribes were common in those days, and people could easily author letters despite not being able to write them. St. Peter is from Capernaum, which some think was not a Greek-speaking town; but a problem with this is that both Simon Peter and his brother Andrew have names that could be Helleno-Jewish -- that is, they have Jewish names that are very similar to Greek names, which seems to have been a common practice in Greek-speaking Jewish families in the day. And again, the 'conservative' position doesn't actually require that St. Peter directly wrote anything at all; he could have, like any number of other people, hired someone to write a letter on the lines that he determined. (The epistle doesn't show any signs of having been directly translated from another language, but, again, the 'conservative' position is consistent with St. Peter just asking for a letter that said such-and-such and the scribe writing the actual letter for him.) 1 Peter is generally thought to have fairly good Greek, but 2 Peter is very difficult to figure out in these terms, because it's usually thought to indicate wide reading in Greek (a lot of very artificial, literary flourishes) but is often baffling in ways consistent with the idea that the author does not speak Greek as a native language. On the basis of 1 Peter 5:12, the good Greek of 1 Peter is often attributed to Silvanus being the scribe. Recently there has been a push to interpret 1 Peter 5:12 as suggesting that Silvanus is the courier, not the scribe; the Greek, however, just says, 'I have written through Silvanus'. Literally, this would be a scribe of some sort; there are figurative uses of the phrase that could extend to other offices, including courier, but I have yet to come across any non-question-begging argument that it is ever used of someone who is only a courier. Thus a common position among 'conservatives' is that 1 Peter and 2 Peter are different just because Peter is using very different scribes at very different times and places, and this is possible, although we don't know.

If we assume that 2 Peter is pseudepigraphal, it is either deliberate pseudepigraphy (for instance, a rhetorical exercise) or a deliberate forgery. If the former, it would usually have indicators to indicate that it is intended to be taken as pseudepigraphical. Some people have argued that 3:2 is such (the author distinguishes himself from 'your apostles'); but again, 'apostle' in this period does not always indicate one of the Apostles proper. Forgery is always a possibility with any ancient text, but that is very different from our actually having evidence of it, which we don't here.

Thus, while the 'liberal' position is perhaps the easier position on the evidence, it is not by much. A great mistake people make in these kinds of disputes, whether about Biblical books or any ancient work, is assuming that the answer is in the evidence. In any case where there is extensive dispute at all, this is never true. Going on the evidence alone, some things are somewhat more probable than other things, but nothing can be established with certainty. No particular position is ruled out by the evidence. This sometimes happens. We do not always have complete evidence, and we certainly don't here. Our evidence is often consistent with many different opposing explanations, and this is certainly true here. The evidence can favor one position over another without getting anywhere near being definitive. Evidence can even be contradictory in a way that the evidence itself does not give us enough to resolve. And this, in the current state of things, seems very much the case here; it's background assumptions, not evidence, that get one to a definite conclusion.

Fortnightly Book, July 19

 Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar was a knight of Castile in the eleventh century; highly talented, he became the armiger regis to Sancho II, despite being only from the lesser nobility. During Sancho's rule, he led several successful campaigns against Alfonso VI and Garcia II (Sancho's brothers) as well as against the Almoravid Muslim kingdom of Andalusia. However, Sancho was murdered and Alfonso took the throne of Castile; thus he fell from favor and was eventually exiled. With nowhere else to go, he took work defending the Muslim kingdom of Zaragoza. Again, he was consistently successful, and Alfonso, facing a powerful and succesful Almoravid, had to give in and beg him to come back. He then went on to become ruler of Valencia, where he was very popular with both Christians and Muslims -- as was perhaps inevitable, because there was no ruler in Spain under whom they could possibly been safer. It is likely in Valencia that he began to be called as-Sayyid, the Lord, which gives him the name under which he has always been known since, El Cid. (In his lifetime, he was probably more often known as El Campeador.) And, indeed, despite Almoravid attempts to unseat him, he remained victorious until his death in 1099. After his death, however, the Almoravids were able to force his family into surrender.

El Cantar de mio Cid is the most famous telling of his legend, written in Old Castilian in the twelfth century. We actually don't know the title of the work -- as it has come down to us, the manuscript is missing its first part. It is, of course, the next fortnightly book. I'll be reading it in the Penguin Classics, translated by Burton Raffel, which has the Castilian and the English in parallel, which should be fun.