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.

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim

Introduction

Opening Passage: There is a modern-day 'preface', as part of the frame narrative, but the opening passage should really be the first part of Chapter 1 (August, 1348, At Matins, The Commemoration of Sixtus II and His Companions):

Dietrich awoke with an uneasy feeling in his heart, like a bass voice chanting from a darkened choir loft. His eyes flew open and darted about the room. A night candle guttering in its sconce cast capers over trouble and basin, prie-dieu and psalter, and caused the figure upon the crucifix to writhe as if it were trying to tear itself down. In the corners and angles of the room, shadows swelled enormous with their secrets. Through the east winow, a dull red glow, thin as a knife across a throat, limned the crest of the Katerinaberg.

He took a long, stilling breath. The candle told Matins anyway; so, throwing the blanket aside, he exchanged nightshirt for cassock. Goose bumps puckered his skin and the short hairs rose on his neck. Dietrich shivered and hugged himself. Something will happen today. (p. 21)

Summary: In early August* of 1348, people in Oberhochwald wake to find the air charged with strange meaning -- quite literally, as their is a glow over the Great Woods and the charge in the air raises the hairs on people's necks and arms and the wool fibers on their clothes; as Pastor Dietrich puts it, it is as if God were rubbing the world with amber. A great wind knocks down the charcoal kiln in the woods and tears up trees. And what the people of Oberhochwald will discover will change everything, because all of the strange events have a natural cause, but one far beyond what they had ever imagined. A ship from the heavens has crashed into the forest. The people on it, whom the people of Oberhochwald call the Krenk (the closest that they can come to what the people call themselves), are strange men, looking something like large gray crickets or grasshoppers. The Krenk crew and passengers find themselves stranded, with an interdimensional engine whose circuits are burned out. Even worse, being from another world, their biology is not a perfect match for this new world, and they can find nothing that contains an essential amino acid without which, after their own stores are gone, their bodies will begin to break down. It seems hopeless. But Pastor Dietrich and some (not all) of the villagers befriend them, despite their somewhat demon-like appearance. (In the fourteenth century, of course, there were still legends of distant lands of men who look very different from those we know.) Among the Krenk passengers had been an expedition of scientists setting out to study new worlds, and they are able to develop a means of translating back and forth between the click-heavy Krenkish language and the German, Latin, and Greek of Pastor Dietrich and the villagers. 

The Krenk are surprised to discover that the locals are awaiting the return of a Lord from the sky, which would explain, as they think, why Pastor Dietrich (a former student at the University of Paris who has studied natural philosophy) sometimes speaks (at least as their machines translate it) in scientific terms that make sense to them and sometimes seems to have positions very primitive compared to their own. And in trying to better understand the customs of the villagers, they discover the sentence that holds the only hope they may have for living long enough to fix their ship and return home: Take and eat; this is my body, given for you. Of course, they don't quite understand these ideas the way the villagers of Oberhochwald do. (Which will result in  a grave disappointment when they go to a Christmas service expecting the return of the Lord from the sky, who they think might be able to help them return home.)

The Krenk, of course, are not theologians, but one thing I like about their discovery of Catholic Christianity is that it tracks very well with the kinds of confusion that often come about when Christianity first interacts with a culture. But, as in those cases, it is a confusion that is at the same time a creative ferment for many great and good things. The extremely hierarchical and caste-ish Krenk puzzling out what Pastor Dietrich means by charitas, in particular, is very well depicted, as is the revolutionary impact the idea has on the Krenkish mini-society of the ship, especially in the context of their near-certain doom as their essential food stores run out.

The Krenk are not the only ones who are doomed, though, because the Plague is spreading through Europe, wiping out entire villages as it goes, and between the humans facing the Black Death and the Krenk facing starvation on an alien world, they together discover the true universal language: hope.

There is also a frame narrative, about a historian and a physicist who live together and unravel the mystery of what happened to the place called Eifelheim, a name it got as a euphemised version of Teufelheim, Devil-home, which is what Oberhochwald came to be called after the Black Death. Tom and Sharon are (deliberately) much less interesting people than the villagers, but I found them somewhat more interesting this time around, and their story serves as a background against which the medieval peasants, scholars, and lords stand out in clearer relief. 

Favorite Passage:

Some long time afterward, he crossed the road to the hospital to tell Hans what had happened and found the Krenkl had died also in his absence. Dietrich knelt by the corpse and lifted the great, long, serrated arms and folded them across the mottled torso in an attitude of prayer. He could not close the eyes, of course, and they seemed still aglow, though that was only the rays of the declining sun out beyond the autumn fields reflecting through them like one of Theodoric's raindrops, and the shadow of a rainbow fell on Hans's cheeks. (p. 298)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

------------------

* Sixtus II and His Companions in the fourteenth century would have been August 6th. This day would later become the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration on the universal calendar, which pushed Sixtus II and Companions to August 7th, which is still their feast-day.

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim, Tor Books (New York: 2006).

Dashed Off XX

 humility as respectful deference to God

Replicability gets us from experiment to experimental ensemble, which is the basis for theory.

The do-operator relates changes of probabilities to changes in structures of causal dependency.

Every experiment is a selection out of diverse possibilities.

The human mind does not obsolesce.

the ceremonializing aspect of due process (treating as serious waht is serious, showing respect to the person and the citizen)

"Society itself is an effect or work of justice which exercises its authority over mankind." Rosmini
"Truth, as something infinite, renders the person an object to be respected."

Reductionism is useful to science not because it has ever been successful -- every reductionist account of anything beyond very limited domains has had to be significantly revised -- but precisely because it fails in a controlled way.

Particles do not explain; their abstractible characteristics, giving the possibilities that are available to the particles, do.

Most physical equations describe wholes as wholes, not partwise.

equality as a holistic operator.

Explanation in terms of laws of nature is epxlanation in terms of the entire universe.

reductions as theoretical experiments

the sense of the power of an argument

Every scientific reduction is a skeletal idealization, and this is its value.

Law is an instrument, but it is not merely instrumentally valuable.

Systems of property rights, well designed, are not merely useful but also agreeable.

Money confers purchasing power by valuative causation, ie., objective causation as a desirable object, that is itself instrumentally usable.

Addiction is almost never the fundamental problem, although it is very often the worst solution to it.

The nature of law cannot be determined without regard for the nature of legislation.

concepts --> concepts' aptitude for being applied -->principles

Certainty is the structure of social unity.

Forgiveness requires symbolism adequate to it.

literary taste and factors of re-readability (aptitudes in the work for rewarding re-reading)

martyrs as the viaticum of the Church

Theology is such a huge field that it sometimes takes centuries to appreciate a point adequately.

Development of doctrine often occurs by oscillation.

The need of forgiveness for symbolism arises from its need for communication.

Violence always has costs that cannot be foreseen.

"The nature of right is to be sought in the nature of human beings." Cicero (Leg. 1:5)

In society, rickety structures continue to exist usually because they are protecting smoething important.

morally responsible as principle vs morally responsible as exemplar

Philosophy done well is always bubbling.

Gauss suggested direct, inverse, and lateral units, instead of positive, negative, and imaginary units.

The more advanced an animal is, the more it seems to act with something broadly like a sense of humor -- dolphins, elephants, dogs, cats, apes, ravens, and the like all have moments in which they seem almost joking.

abduction, intervention, prediction, confirmation

geometry as the study of possible distinguishable interactions

titles of appropriateness

Attitudes are evoked by perception of ends and functions.

God as omniprobable
necessity qua precondition of manifold of possibilities --> necessity qua omnipossibility --> necessity qua relevant (conditional) omnipossibility --> omniprobability

On many moral anti-realisms, moral realism is at least a useful fiction.

Every living thing is a hierarchy.

Religious movements survive only by being either passionate or profound.

The Scripture that we read is always the Scripture that passes through the community.

We learn how to use instruments by learning how to use our bodies.

We first learn how to learn by being parented.

hasty vs delbierate assault in refutation

Immoral judgments always have an incompleteness about them.

A problem with Kp&Kq -> K(p&q) is that it seems one could know p and know q without knowing the logical operation of conjunction.

Subjective Bayesianism often seems to have problems similar to those one gets when one assuems that implication and inference are the same.

imagining as vs imagining as like

epistemic K as converter between mind-dependent and mind-independent modalities

Francis of Meyonnes's 4 ways to divine ubiquity
(1) immensity
(2) causality
(3) immutability
(4) coexistence
(his assessment of these is somewhat complicated, so these should be considered a classification of ways in which people have tried to show that God is everywhere; the fourth seems mostly distinctive to him)

divine presence as a precondition of incipit and desinit (God as present to states of change)

prior and posterior presence

Common ways that mothers think and speak about the unborn, although quite diverse, usually have something to be said for them.

In matters of reason, a good effort is never wasted.

Much artistic crafting takes place in the realm of hypotheticals.

All trust has implicit and eplicit modes.

Norms are only as rooted as their known reasons.

In every field, the best generation to be a part of is the generation after the geniuses.

"Rituals are established to regulate the feelings of the world, either by curbing excesses or by exhorting them where they fall short, simply so that people understand the fitting mean in the world." Dai Zhen

The 'familiar instance' in the Nyaya syllogism is something commonsensical that also survives acute investigation.

All nonpresence is relative to a presence.

hauntological arguments

Mt 26:67 // Mic 5:1
-- note that Matthew has already attributed Micah 5:2 to Christ in Mt 2. Note also Jesus as Shepherd (Mt 9:36, Mt 26:31, in comparison to Micah 5:4.

Links of Note

 * Francis Scott Key's House in Georgetown, and How DC Lost It, at "Ghosts of DC"

* Seth Kreeger, Creation and Divine Being in the Christian Neoplatonism of William of Auvergne

* Rob Alspaugh, Homer and Prudentius, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* Shane Ryan and Sharon Ryan, Wisdom in Analytic Philosophy, at the SEP

* Derek Thompson, America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Government Report Says About Who We Are

* Marie-Benoît Schwalm, “The Two Theologies: Scholastic and Positive”

* Philip Ball, Is Life Just Different?, at "Quanta"

* The Collected Works of St. Augustine

* Gene Callahan, Just What Is a Just Price?, at "Front Porch Republic"

Seraphic Doctor

 Today is the feast of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Doctor of the Church. From his Breviloquium, Part V, Chapter 8:

The First Principle, being first, is supreme; being supreme, it is supremely good; being supremely good, it is supremely happy and supremely delighting; being supremely delightful, it is supremely to be enjoyed. Therefore, because it is to be supremely enjoyed, we must totally cling to it with love and rest in it as our final end. Now a right and ordered love, called charity, bears us principally to that good in whom it finds its enjoyment and repose. This good is itself our reason for loving. Thus it follows that charity loves that good above everything else as that which will make it happy, and as a consequence it loves all other things which through that good are also suited for happiness. Now, our neighbor was created to reach that happiness along with ourselves -- which includes our body as well, for it was made to share that happiness together with our spirit. That is the reason why charity has but four objects: God, our neighbor, our spirit, and our body.

[St. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, Monti, tr., The Franciscan Institute (St. Bonaventure, New York), p. 201.]

Ah, Here's to the Vine

 The 'Boozer's' Health
by William Milton Byram 

Ah, here's to the vine
That bears the fair wine
That banishes trouble away!
Forever be thine
Good Bacchus thy wine 
That vanquishes sorrow today!
And a health to the corn
Which we need at morn
To drive the mean headache away! 

May thy glory shine
One friend of mine
With freedom's foes ever at bay!
Long life to the vine,
That bears the fair wine,
That vanquishes sorrow to-day!
And a health to the corn,
Which we need at morn,
To drive the mean headache away!

Reflective Knowledge

 A reflection on the knowledge we have, that is, knowing that we know, so increases our knowledge that the new knowledge relates to the former in the way that more relates to less, or even the infinite to the finite. With reflective knowledge we rule and control direct knowledge as we will; only reflective knowledge brings direct knowledge under our free will. We would never have discovered the art of writing if we had not reflected on language. Numbers are an invention arising from reflection on the ideas of numbers. Algebraic letters are the result of a reflection on numbers. Analytical functions arose from a third reflection on algebraic letters. This is the real meaning of the apparent play on words: 'we know that we know that we know'! It is the simplest formula expressing the order of ideas, to which the Analytical Functions of Lagrange belong.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), p. 111n131.]