Xanthulules

I had a strange dream last night, a small part of which involved a heated argument about xanthulules. Xanthulules, if you didn't know (it was new to me, as well) are objects with all properties not had by chrysanthemums, and only those properties. I don't recall the precise point of contention about them, but Venn diagrams on the relations between the properties of xanthulules and the properties of chrysanthemums were involved.

W. Norris Clarke

W. Norris Clarke, S.J., died June 10, at age 93. Norris Clarke was a leading exponent of what goes by the name 'Personalist Thomism' or 'Thomistic Personalism'. You can read his own account of his life on his Fordham webpage. Some of his works that are currently online:

A Taste of Existence (transcript from an interview)
A Creative Retrieval of Thomism (transcript from an interview)
Person, Being, and St. Thomas (a sort of symposium at Communio)
Freedom, Equality, Dignity of the Human Person (PDF)

The Holy Spirit in the Trinity

In an insanely long comments thread on this post, Michael Liccione and Photios Jones (of Energetic Procession) have been discussing, among other things, the Filioque, and Photios had an excellent comment that so neatly summarizes what one needs to convey in teaching the Trinity that I just had to record it here. This is the part of the comment that caught my eye:

One must be able to fit together these unique things from the Fathers:

(1) The Father as sole cause and originator of Son and Spirit *as* relation of origin (one by genesis, the other by ekpoureusis). - St. Photios

(2) The taxical order of the Persons coming forth: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, expressing their consubstantiality - Sts. Gregory of Nyssa, Athanasius, Maximus the Confessor

(3) The Spirit rests in the Son as his object, the Son's existence from the Father is the Sprits aim for Spiration. - St. Gregory of Cyprus II

(4) The Spirit as bond of love between Father and Son, because it is this bond of love as the energy of the Spirit that is common to all. - St. Gregory Palamas, St. Augustine, St. Gregory of Cyprus II. This is how the Gregory's interpret Augustine anyway.

What doesn't fit well here is the Carolingian and Scholastic view of 'relations of opposition' since there is no step of two-ness in the Trinity, and dialectic can only consider two and not three.

The one caveat I would have is with regard to that last sentence. 'Relations of opposition' in Scholastic theology are not such that they "can only consider two and not three"; this is because relatio means not 'relation' in our sense (which is closer to a correlation) but 'relatedness'. So a standard form of relatio in this sense is 'being a father'. The reason for the emphasis on opposition is not dialectic but that, whatever one says of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one must not hold, or hold something that commits you to holding, that being the Son is indistinguishable from being the Spirit,, or that either is indistinguishable from being the Father. So you distinguish being-the-Father from being-the-Son (the Father by being the Principle, which is called paternity, the Son by that form of coming-from-the-Principle that is called filiation), and being-the-Father from being-the-Spirit (the Father by paternity again, and the Spirit by that coming-from-the-Principle that is called procession), and being-the-Son from being-the-Spirit (the Son by filiation again, and the Spirit by spiration). If there is a worry about the Scholastic view, it should be not with the relations of opposition but with what are called the 'notional acts' in light of which they are interpreted.

Blackstone on Pursuit of Happiness

I find that in discussing the Declaration of Independence's "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" people often link it with Locke's trio of life, liberty, and property. But that doesn't really explain the "Pursuit of Happiness" part. If you read Blackstone, however, you find a likely influence:

As therefore the creator is a being, not only of infinite power, and wisdom, but also of infinite goodness, he has been pleased so to contrive the constitution and frame of humanity, that we should want no other prompter to inquire after and pursue the rule of right, but only our own self-love, that universal principle of action. For he has so intimately connected, so inseparably interwoven the laws of eternal justice with the happiness of each individual, that the latter cannot be attained but by observing the former; and, if the former be punctually obeyed, it cannot but induce the latter. In consequence of which mutual connection of justice and human felicity, he has not perplexed the law of nature with a multitude of abstracted rules and precepts, referring merely to the fitness or unfitness of things, as some have vainly surmised; but has graciously reduced the rule of obedience to this one paternal precept, "that man should pursue his own true and substantial happiness." This is the foundation of what we call ethics, or natural law. For the several articles into which it is branched in our systems, amount to no more than demonstrating, that this or that action tends to man's real happiness, and therefore very justly concluding that the performance of it is a part of the law of nature; or, on the other hand, that this or that action is destructive of man's real happiness, and therefore that the law of nature forbids it.

This law of nature, being coeval with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other-It is binding over all the globe in all countries, and at all times; no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this: and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original.

Lead the Way

Generate a Barack Obama Quote!

"These people haven't had Virtue Ethics for fifty years. So you can't be surprised if they get bitter and cling to their academic philosophy and their papers on Vagueness and their Utilitarianism. That's what my campaign is about. Teaching all the little people in this country that they can have Care Bear principles."
Generate your own Obama quote at Buttafly.com

Which reminds me -- I've been intending for some time to do a post on Care Bear ethics. The Care Bears, of course, are virtue ethicists; like all good virtue ethicists, they are cute, cuddly, and preachy. Unlike most virtue ethicists, however, they drive cloud cars and shoot rainbows out of their tummy symbols.

The Last Professors

Inside Higher Ed has an interview with Frank Donoghue on his new book The Last Professors. It's a must-read for academics; it makes a number of points worth a bit of rumination. (I think that the problems identified are especially acute in philosophy.) And he makes a point that I've tried to make before to my colleagues and have not been able to get through to them: academia as we know it -- namely, academia focused on departments of tenured faculty -- is for all practical purposes dead. Tenured professors themselves could have prevented this, but they failed to do so; indeed, were heavily complicitous in it. And the system has been collapsing for too long to make reversal likely:

The tenure-track professoriate will never be restored. Two factors seal its fate. First, the hiring of adjuncts continues to outpace the hiring of tenure-track professors by a rate of three to one. It’s silly to think we can reverse the trend toward casualization when, despite a great deal of attention and effort, we can’t even slow it down. Second, the demographics of American higher education don’t help us either. For 40 years, students have been moving away from the humanities toward vocationalism. This trend has been accompanied by an equally pronounced shift in enrollments from four-year schools (with English and History majors) to community colleges, where the humanities have never had a strong presence. Tenure-track professors don’t have a place in this new higher education universe. Much as it pains me to say it, I never considered putting a question mark at the end of my title, The Last Professors.

Nostalgia aside, I think it needs to be pointed out that this need not be a bad thing, or, at least, a wholly bad thing. The form of academia we know is not sacrosanct and writ in stone; it itself is the result of a long series of reforms of, and revolutions in, previous academic systems. It is in principle possible to build an excellent academic system that is grounded in adjunct faculty, one where such faculty have adequate support and resources, adequate pay, adequate benefits, adequate protection, and adequate flexibility to compensate for the lack of tenured faculty. It could be an excellent system. We are, of course, not building it. Instead we are grafting, ad hoc, an adjunct-dependent system on academia as we have known it, leaving us with a hybrid system that manages, with remarkable ingenuity, to combine most of the disadvantages of both. Nonetheless, it could turn out OK in the end. It's what happens between now and then that gives reason to worry.

The following passage touches on an even more essential issue:

For a hundred years, humanists claimed to follow Matthew Arnold’s exhortation to promulgate the best that has been thought and said. As universities have more and more come to function as occupational training centers, places where students come for vocational credentials, this charge has been emptied of any real meaning. It’s no longer relevant to the mission of most universities. And at those institutions where the liberal arts still flourish, prestige has taken the place of the Arnoldian mottoes. That is, the best universities now steer prospective students away from the content of the curriculum (literature, philosophy, history) and toward the signaling power of the institution itself.

Saint-Themed Poem Drafts

Combing through some old poem drafts. These are saint-themed; I noted some myth-themed ones previously.

Annaya

The cedars grow tall on the Liban hills
with life beyond grasp of human will;
light grows bright around muddy grave
of a hermit-saint who hid his face;
the heart is kissed by burning light
of cedar rising to sun and sky
and, flaming with fire that sears the night,
it burns but is not burned.

Loyola at Llobregar

On the river-bank I sit,
water running past,
mind running past,
a path ever-moving.
It courses over stones,
overflowing matter,
dividing as a unity,
drawn to a natural place,
rushing like a music
to divine consummation.
The mind now prepared
by ten thousand disciplines
flows with the river
to the ocean of God.

Lull upon the Mountain

Like lightning in the storm
where bolts of God rain down
was the conversion of the wheels,
the wheels within the wheels,
the Principles of All
in never-ceasing orbit!

The lights were strangely shining
in the fallen mountain-darkness
when Raymond saw the wheels,
the wheels within the wheels,
the glory of the signs
in ever-turning circles!

Peace pours out like oceans,
tumbling in the darkness;
Ophanim move in glory,
the wheels within the wheels,
the holy presence racing
in a chariot of fire!

The Triumph of St. Catherine

Behold the worldy-wise bent down,
the brilliance of the earthly minds,
the best of all the men who know,
all brought to shame, refuted all,
all answered with the purest truth
and conquered by a woman's word!

The vestige of the Spirit's power,
its print upon the sands of time,
is here, the maid, the queen who knows,
who overcomes the present age,
the darkness in high places!

They seek to break, the rack they bring,
to torture truth to fit their whims;
the rack she breaks. She overcomes!
God bless Queen Catherine, Spirit-wise!

They seek to burn, to turn to ash,
to make as nothing Gospel truth;
they set the virgin on the wood
and light the flame - she does not burn.
The flames can only purify,
but in God's love she is most pure.
God bless Maid Catherine, Spirit-wise!

Behold the godless Caesar's host
of answer-men and scholars wise,
all wordly men who serve the gods
of lucre, politics, and death,
bent down and puzzled by this truth:
The maiden, Church-like in her faith,
cannot be broken, cannot burn!

They bring the sword to pierce her soul,
it enters in her tender side
and blood flows out as with Christ -
she is a witness in her death,
she mimics Him in sacrifice,
a martyr true attesting truth.
The blood by which she lives flows out,
and she is born amid the pangs
of Christ who births us on the Cross
into His everlasting life!

All are silent, overcome,
uncertain what they saw that day:
the truth could not be made to break,
the truth could not be made to burn,
and blood itself, from stigma pierced,
seemed to witness to God's truth.

The vestige of the Spirit's power,
its print upon these changing sands,
is here, the maid, the queen who knows,
who overcomes the present age,
the darkness in the highest places!
She has the martyr's palm in hand -
God bless Saint Catherine, Spirit-wise!

And here is a myth-themed poem that I seem to have missed:

As Zeus upon Danae

as Zeus upon Danae
the light in my eyes
breaks down upon me
fire on fire

gold floods of glory
envisioning truth
mind overflowing
I walk in a daze
breathed out by a God