Skillet, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel"

 

Skillet, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel".

Knowing Canisius

As today is not only the Fourth Sunday of Advent but the feast of St. Peter Canisius, here is a re-post from 2023. 

 Today is the feast of St. Pieter Kanis, better known in English as Peter Canisius, Doctor of the Church. A major figure in the Catholic response to the Reformation, he is a major reason why a number of German-speaking regions stayed Catholic, for which reason he is sometimes called the Second Apostle to Germany. One of his major principles in discussions with Protestants was that attacks on them, especially personal attacks, were ultimately self-defeating; as he is said to have put it, by such attacks you are not curing anyone, just making them incurable, and therefore the best path was generally just to give an honest explanation to address any honest perplexities. He is most famous for his catechisms; 'knowing Canisius' is an old expression for having a solid catechetical education. From his Parvus catechismus (1558): 

 What does the first article of the Creed mean, "I believe in God the Father"? It shows first in the Godhead a person, namely the heavenly and eternal Father, for whom nothing is impossible or difficult to do, who produced heaven and earth, visible things together with all invisible things from nothing and even conserves and governs everything he has produced, with supreme goodness and wisdom. What does the second article of the Creed mean, "And in Jesus Christ his Son"? It reveals the second person in the Godhead, Jesus Christ, obviously his only begotten from eternity and consubstantial with the Father, our Lord and redeemer, as the one who has freed us from perdition. What is the third article, "Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit"? The third article proposes the mystery of the Lord's Incarnation: because the same Son of God, descending from heaven, assumed a human nature, but in an absolutely unique way, as he was conceived without a father, from the power of the Holy Spirit, born from the Virgin Mary who remained a virgin afterwards.

 [Peter Canisius, A Small Catechism for Catholics, Grant, tr., Mediatrix Press (2014) pp. 12-13.]

True Sun

 Tomorrow at about 10 am (Eastern Standard Time) is the Winter Solstice, so I have been thinking of this:

The Egyptians adored the sun and inappropriately referred to it as the visible son of the invisible God. But Jesus is the true sun who looks upon us with the rays of his light, who blesses us with his countenance and who rules us by his movements. He is the sun we should always behold and adore. Jesus is truly the only begotten Son of God and neither the sun nor any other created thing, whether in heaven or on earth, is his equal. Jesus is the only begotten Son and the visible Son of the invisible Father....Let us say for now that he is not the sun of the Egyptians, who were deceived by their myths, but the Sun of the Christians, who have been instructed in the school of truth, in the light of this sun, who is the light of the supernatural world. He is a sun who chose to depict and represent himself by the natural sun, which is only his shadow and symbol.

[ Pierre de Bérulle, Discourse on the State and Grandeurs of Jesus in Bérulle and the French School, Thompson, ed. Glendon, tr. Paulist (New York: 1989), 115.]

Dashed Off XXII

 Every ugliness posits a beauty with respect to which it is ugly.

We should be very cautious with respect to our inclination to moralize our certainties.

The Magna Carta is sui generis, but has the rough form of a feudal title because it is a negotiated settlement concerning feudal allegiance, whose historical value consists in part in the legal fiction -- not falsehood, but artificial construction after the fact -- that it was a gift of the barons to the whole people, the barons claiming the rights, liberties, and concessions for everyone. This latter occurs by stretching the phrase "all freemen of my kingdom and their heirs forever" from its technical sense (feudal vassals officially recognized as having freehold) to a later colloquial sense (including villein and burgess classes), and incorporation of all the rest under this semantic change, with the result that even indirect benefit to the lower classes was treated as if it were intended benefit. But by this, the Magna Carta became, and genuinely became in customary law, much larger than it was in original settlement.

(1) Ethical knowledge and value requires an idea of self in which it participates something larger than itself.
(2) Choice presupposes vision.
(3) Our contingency and weakness must be faced squarely.

The author is a final cause
who gives the story stable laws
to which the things of story tend
utnil they find their proper end.

Liberties are particular forms of commonality among human beings, ways of being the same for the same reason.

"A person is a person because of other persons." Ifeanyi Menkiti
"I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am."

It is always easier to improve the aesthetics of a course than its pedagogy.

'the aim of a thoroughly interconnected experience' (Kant 5:184)

(1) Organisms are purposive systems,
(2) which suggests that the whole of nature is a purposive system
(3) which, because human persons have moral ends,
(4) can only be if the whole of nature in some way is able to incorporate moral ends.

We often treat as X what is a fitting sign of X.

the intellectual vocation of the human senses

causality proper
causality involving temporal succession
causality involving spatial containment
causality involving both

We have regular experience of moral choices not being wholly a matter of internal and external sanctions, in temptation, in weakness of will, and resistance to sanction.

We use acquired dispositions, rites, and institutions to fill out our moral, jural, and sacral personhood.

Reasoning and deliberation, know-how and counsel, and the like can be shared among persons, communicated, and thus, to the extent that the communication can be regimented into rule or pattern, can be implemented in external practice or product.

one being as standing for another vs one benig as the guise of another

The roots of all service are debt, penalty, or exchange.

The Christian owes God service by debt, as creature; by penalty, as fallen; by debt again, as saved; and by exchange, as in covenant with God.

delegation of authority as creation of an alienable right

anosiurgotropos: skilled in works of impiety

In poetry as in drawing, one must copy a lot to create a lot.

Ritual as we know it presupposes grammatically articulated language.

Language builds on the mimetic skills to which human beings naturally tend.

'to be able to see some of the qualitative consequences of the equations by some method other than solving them in detail' (Feynman's description of understanding physical equations)

"If *Adonai* had ever been a God-hypothesis there would be no Jews." Fackenheim
"Judaism, like Christianity, embraced the belief in a hereafter the moment it focused on the individual, as well as collective human destiny."
"The Torah manifests love in the very act of manifesting commandment, for in commanding humans rather than angels, it accepts these humans in their humanity. Hence in accepting the Torah, man can at the same time accept himself as accepted by God in his humanity."

The first word of the Decalogue is 'I'.

The balance of reasons is a whirling and changing thing.

Philosophia finds its proper home in the philia of the wise.

Friendships of virtue give greater use and pleasure and to virtue.

Cassian on charity as friendship (Conferences XVI)

three acts of friendship: concordia, benevolentia, beneficentia

Our loves are the flowerings of faiths and hopes that led to them, and show their origins.

formal benefit: beneficent will
instrumental benefit: good given

Friends will and nill alike because they take each other into account in the willing and nilling.

Pride destroys the conditions for concord of wills.

Charity posits that others have good hidden from us, and as this is always true, charity is needed for right estimate of persons.

In everyone is the image of God; no human mind has plumbed its depths.

We must not confuse lack fo zeal for justice with compassion or mercy.

gift of faith --> sincere, generous, and merciful action

'that what it celebrates in mystery it may accomplish in power'

OM as a symbol of the Divine Word
the Divine Word as Shabda Brahman

"Om is the agreement with a hymn. Likewise is tatha [so be it] with a gatha. But Om is something divine and tatha is something human." Aitareya Brahmana 7.18.13
"Om is the bow, the arrow is the Self, Brahman the mark; by the undistracted man is it to be penetrated, one should become one in it, as the arrow becomes one with the mark." Mundaka Upanishad 2.2.4

A: Father
U: Son
M: Spirit
Note Sikh divine epithet, Ik Onkar, i.e., 'One Om'

the analytical, dialectical, and narrative modes of each philosophical position and argument

The qualia debate seems to be based on a garbled attempt to capture the difference between presential knowledge and objective knowledge. This becomes clear when one looks at the kinds of position proposed in it, which themselves seem garbled versions of accounts of that distinction, or at least something similar.

Most forms of modern paganism are just more distal kinds of Christian heresy; but thi sis also true of most forms of modern atheism.

'understanding approximately up to a certain degree of culture'
-- narrating history, appealing to examples, explaining examples

to be amen to Christ the Amen

To have less than paradise often rankles even the virtuous.

moral authority, sovereignty, sanctity

It is not being defeated by one's own flaws and failings that is the source of human greatness.

The world is full of endless numbers of tiny, beautiful things.

NB Gorgias 475d in light of Gorgias's claim that the rhetor is better equipped to get the patient to submit to teh doctor than the doctor is.

Organs have functions but this can only be if there is an overall functionality or function of the whole with respect to which they have these functions.

immediate inferences based on
(1) reorganization
(2) weakening
(3) translation

Every function posits classifications relevant to it.
--- input classification
--- --- trigger/nontrigger
--- --- appropriate/inappropriate
--- output classifications
Every classification posits possible functions to which it might be relevant.

existing being --> informational being

three aspects of fate: spinning, measuring, unturningness

Philosophical systems are limited by the limits of their accessible and usable archive.

natural law precept to act according to virtue -->
(1) defeasible moral right to act in ways appropriate to that virtue
(2) strict moral right to act in the only way appropriate to that virtue, when there is only one;
(3) where the precept to justice also applies: jural right
(4) where the precept to religion also applies: sacral right

Human beings seek dwellings that are kind to them.

arguments as knots in the endless thread of reason

Habitude XVII

 To the first one proceeds thus. It seems that one habitude is constituted from several habitudes. For that whose generation is completed all at once, but successively, seems to be constituted from several parts. But generation of a habitude is not all at once, but successively from several acts, as was said above. Therefore one habitude is constituted from several habitudes.

Further, a whole is constituted from parts. But to one habitude is assigned many parts, as when Tully posits many parts of fortitude, temperance, and other virtues. Therefore one habitude is constituted from several.

Further, from one conclusion alone is able to be had a kind of knowledge both actually and habitually. But many conclusions pertain to one whole kind of knowledge, as with arithmetic or geometry. Therefore one habitude is constituted from many.

But contrariwise, habitude, because it is a sort of quality, is a simple form. But nothing simple is constituted from several. Therefore one habitude is not constituted from several habitudes.

I reply that it must be said that a habitude ordered to working, which we are now principally intending, is a sort of completion of power. Now every completion is proportionate to its completable. Thus just as power, because it is one, extends itself to many according as they converge on some one thing, that is, in a sort of generic notion of object, so also habitude extends itself to many according as they have ordering to some one thing, such as to one specific notion of object, or one nature, or one principle, as is obvious from what has been said above. If therefore we consider habitude inasmuch as it extends itself to such things, we shall then find in it a sort of multiplicity. But because that multiplicity is ordered to some one thing, to which the habitude is principally related, what follows is that habitude is a simple quality, not constituted from many habitudes, even if it extends itself to many things. For one habitude does not extend itself to many things, save in ordering to one thing, from which it has unity.

To the first it therefore must be said that succession in the generation of a habitude does not happen from the fact that part is generated after part, but from the fact that the subject does not directly acquire firm and hard-to-move disposition and from the fact that it first begins to be incompletely in the subject and is bit-by-bit completed -- as is also the case with other qualities.

To the second it must be said that parts that are assigned to each single cardinal virtue are not integral parts, from which the whole is constituted but subjective or potential parts, as will be obvious below.

To the third it must be said that he who in some kind of knowledge acquires by demonstration knowledge of one conclusion indeed has the habitude by incompletely. But when he acquires by some demonstration knowledge of some other conclusion, another habitude is not generated in him, but the habitude that was previously in him becomes more complete, since it extends itself to several things; because conclusions and demonstrations of one kind of knowledge are ordered, and one is derived from another.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.54.4, my translation. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

It's very tempting to think of habitudes as being the sort of thing that could 'congeal' together to form new habitudes; St. Thomas shuts this down here, on the basis that this is not how qualities in general work. Habitudes grow by intension, not aggregation; they decline by remission, not by subtraction.

This article, of course, establishes a key principle of St. Thomas's influential taxonomy of virtues in terms of 'parts'. A potential puzzle with regard to the reply to the second objection is that St. Thomas does in fact assign to cardinal virtues not just subjective parts (i.e., specific versions of a virtue) and potential virtues (i.e., associated subordinate virtues directed to secondary matters), but "quasi-integral parts", which he sometimes just calls integral parts. These are not literally integral parts (i.e., parts in our ordinary sense of components making up a whole), but things that are associated with a virtue in the sense that the principal virtue needs them in order to exercise its act fully.

The reply to the third objection is a useful reminder that extension of knowledge works primarily by intension or intensification, not by addition or aggregation, as one might think if one looked only at the accumulation of conclusions that one can list as known. To take a set of principles and recognize more conclusions as proven by them is to know the principles and their consequence more intensively. To know is an act of the intellect as a power to know; knowing more is the intellect literally knowing more powerfully. This has a number of incidental ramifications worth thinking about -- e.g., knowledge cannot be assumed to be adequately characterized by a list of propositions known, and one may know the same thing to different degrees at times, in the sense that how powerfully or 'securely' it falls within one's knowledge, how 'central' it is to the things one knows, can vary as one's power to know that general kind of thing is built up by proofs. In this sense, we should think of knowing as like a light that, when more intense, reveals more.

Music on My Mind

 

Clamavi De Profundis, "What Child Is This".

A Sorting or Discriminatory Power

 Aristotle's accounts of the so-called 'practical syllogism', similarly, ascribe to the desires a sorting or discriminatory power: our of the man things presented to the agent by thought and perception, desire will single out some and not others to be foundations of action. Sometimes this selecting role is played by rational desire or 'wish'; but the appetitive forms of desire, too, 'speak', informing the whole creature of its needs and responding directly to the presence of what will satisfy those needs.... None of the appetites, not even the appetite for food, which Plato seems to hold throughout his life in unmitigated contempt, lacks, properly trained, its cognitive function. A well-formed character is a unity of thought and desire, in which choice has so blended these two elements, desire being attentive to thought and thought responsive to desire, that either one can guide and their guidance will be one and the same.

[Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Updated Edition, Cambridge University Press (New York: 2009) p. 308.]