Truth and Light

I've noted before the Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world, despite the fact that it always gets overlooked. Today is an important Sikh holiday, the Martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev, which I've talked about before.

The most important verse in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, is the Mul Mantar: "God is One, His Name is True, the One who Does, Fearless, Hateless, Deathless, Birthless, Self-Enlightened, Guru's Gift; Pray!" The True (Sat = what is, what endures, what is sure) is a major part of Sikh religious belief, and, indeed, much of its doctrine can be construed as a meditation on Truth. The word occurs in Sikh greetings like Sat Naam (His Name is True) and Sat Siri Akal (Truth is Highest and Deathless). It is in great measure because it is so emphatic on Truth, as such, that Sikhism is monotheistic. The Sikh moral ideal is to be in accordance with Truth. The role of the Guru is to unite the student with Truth, as Guru Nanak says of the Guru (SGGS 17.14):

If it pleases Him, I bathe in the Pool of Truth, and become radiant and pure.

God is Truth and the Lover of Truth, and the fulfillment of human life is union with Truth.

This is often put in terms of light (jot). The Guru Granth presents each human being as existing by the gift of God, and at the fundamental heart of who they are is a light derived from divine Light. All of Sikh practice is concerned, directly or indirectly with reuniting the light within with the divine Light. The Sri Guru Granth Sahib is essentially a hymnbook; it is sung. It is also the perpetual Guru, carrying forward the light of Guru Nanak, and by this light manifesting the divine Light. So by singing its hymns, one unites oneself to the Guru, and thus uplifted one contemplates through the Guru the divine Light from which one comes; in doing this, one purifies oneself, and so makes oneself fit to unite again with the divine Light after death. This basic idea of our light uniting with divine light, joti jot samana, is found everywhere in Sikh thought, and is that which corresponds to moksha in Hinduism, liberation from the cycle of reincarnation.

An old poem of mine trying to capture various elements of Sikhism in a short form (Amritsar, of course, is the Sikh holy city):

Amritsar

Although the sea divides us, in Amritsar I stand;
my heart rests in the warmth of its nectar-golden sand.
In a vessel, clay and calm, made by the guru's hand,
I feel blessing pouring down: for in Amritsar I stand.

When time pools all around me like some silent sarovar,
I am in Ramdaspur; and, whether near or far,
my heart is by those waters as they shine beneath the stars
around the golden temple of blessed Amritsar.

When trouble overtakes me I flee to the fort of steel,
I shelter in the city with the sacred pools that heal,
I search for the jot of light where the psalms of gurus peal:
this world is all mirage, but Amritsar is real.

Practice Before Theory

I say, moreover, that Geometry,— speculative Geometry,—was extracted from practical Land Measuring. History informs us that this was so ;_that the Geometry of the Greeks arose out of the Land-Measuring of the Egyptians. And this is of itself most likely; for in every subject, Practice comes historically before Theory; Art before Science. Man acts first by the guidance of his practical Reason, and afterwards unfolds his convictions before the eye of his speculative Reason; thus striving to discern the Truths on which his action depends, and the Ideas which it involves. He constructs Squares and Pyramids and Ellipses, directed by his practical Geometrical Faculty; and then, by the aid of the same Faculty in a speculative form, he discovers the properties of Squares and Pyramids and Ellipses, and finds out demonstrations of these properties, and resolves these demonstrations into their simplest shapes, till he makes them depend upon Axioms, which all are ready to acknowledge after a little reflection, but which no one saw the true place of before. These Axioms are assented to by all thoughtful persons; and to say that they are assented to by all who have steadily considered them, is one of the simplest ways of saying that they are self-evident.

William Whewell, Lectures on Systematic Morality, Lesson V

Beauty on Beauty Called Us Back

The Hunting of the Dragon
by G. K. Chesterton

When we went hunting the Dragon
In the days when we were young,
We tossed the bright world over our shoulder
As bugle and baldrick slung;
Never was world so wild and fair
As what went by on the wind,
Never such fields of paradise
As the fields we left behind:

For this is the best of a rest for men
That men should rise and ride
Making a flying fairyland
Of market and country-side,
Wings on the cottage, wings on the wood,
Wings upon pot and pan,
For the hunting of the Dragon
That is the life of a man.

For men grow weary of fairyland
When the Dragon is a dream,
And tire of the talking bird in the tree,
The singing fish in the stream;
And the wandering stars grow stale, grow stale,
And the wonder is stiff with scorn;
For this is the honour of fairyland
And the following of the horn;

Beauty on beauty called us back
When we could rise and ride,
And a woman looked out of every window
As wonderful as a bride:
And the tavern-sign as a tabard blazed,
And the children cheered and ran,
For the love of the hate of the Dragon
That is the pride of a man.

The sages called him a shadow
And the light went out of the sun:
And the wise men told us that all was well
And all was weary and one:
And then, and then, in the quiet garden,
With never a weed to kill,

We knew that his shining tail had shone
In the white road over the hill:
We knew that the clouds were flakes of flame,
We knew that the sunset fire
Was red with the blood of the Dragon
Whose death is the world’s desire.

For the horn was blown in the heart of the night
That men should rise and ride,
Keeping the tryst of a terrible jest
Never for long untried;
Drinking a dreadful blood for wine,
Never in cup or can,
The death of a deathless Dragon,
That is the life of a man.

Fitness of Words

At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer....I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text.

[Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter I]

And the meaning of fine words cannot be made 'obvious', for it is not obvious to any one: least of all to adults, who have stopped listening to the sound because they think they know the meaning. They think argent 'means' silver. But it does not. It and silver have a reference to x or chem. Ag, but in each x is clothed in a totally different phonetic incarnation: x+y or x+z; and these do not have the same meaning, not only because they sound different and so arouse different responses, but also because they are not in fact used when talking about Ag. in the same way. It is better, I think, at any rate to begin with, to hear 'argent' as a sound only (z without x) in a poetic context, than to think 'it only means silver'. There is some chance then that you may like it for itself, and later learn to appreciate the heraldic overtones it has, in addition to its own peculiar sound, which 'silver' has not.

[J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 234 to Jane Neave in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Carpenter and Tolkien, eds., Harper Collins (London: 1990) p. 310]

There's a lot of poetry here at Siris. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is purely philosophical -- since graduate school I have been irritated by philosophers of language whose conception of language is poorly suited for accounting for the existence and facts of poetry, which is one of the most obvious and important of all linguistic phenomena. There are works in the philosophy of language that lead one to suspect that the authors have never had any more poetry than they had been forced to read by the end of high school. And this is a problem. It is in poetry that one really puts language to the test, as it were, probing its limits and drawing new functions and nuances out of it, turning it on itself and on its head, playing with aspects of it that are often ignored. It is, of course, not only poets who do this -- but it is one reason why there's a never-ending river of poetry here.

Poetry deals, among other things, with finer shades of meaning. As Tolkien notes in the above passage, 'argent' and 'silver' are synonyms, but they are not, in fact, used in the same way. Substituting 'silver' for 'argent' is unlikely to affect the truth value of a statement, but it is likely to affect the "fitness of the word" that Bowyer, as described by Coleridge, attempted to show. Thus, as Tolkien again notes, 'argent' has "heraldic overtones". We would also often recognize 'argent' as being in a higher formal register than the more common 'silver', and as having poetic associations that need not be borne by the more common word.

One way to put this might be to say that 'argent' and 'silver' label closely analogous classes in what have come to be different systems of classification, and part of the difference between the two lies in their suggestion of which approach to classification is in play. We have to say that it is only a suggestion, since we can perfectly well transfer across classifications, as when someone uses overly formal words for comic effect, but our ability to do this depends on there being a difference in the first place.

Philosophy of language for a considerable portion of the past century has tended to be influenced by the Fregean division of meaning into force, sense, and tone, with the lion's share being concerned with sense. The above differences of meaning would usually get classified as differences in tone (coloring or shading, in Frege's own preferred manner of speaking), and that would be the end of it, since in practice 'tone' usually works as nothing more than the wastebin -- you throw in the things that you aren't using and never consider them again. This is problematic, since, as I've noted before, there's no reason to think that the same kinds of things get put into the wastebin each time. Something that can be treated as a mere difference of tone on one interpretation or occasion can, on another interpretation or occasion, be interpreted as a significant difference of sense. Whether or not the difference between 'cur' and 'dog' matters for the truth value of a statement depends in part on context and how one chooses to take the words in that context. The same is true of common derogatory terms, racist epithets, euphemisms, and the like. Again, it's a matter of classification: if you are classifying someone as a Norwegian, that's a different way of classifying them than if you classify them as a Noggie, because the latter includes as part of the classification a negative evaluation that is missing from the more neutral term, one that we can either ignore or take to be important. And doing so affects whether what is being said counts as accurate or inaccurate.

But even when the difference does not affect the truth value of a statement, it's an error to think that the difference is really insignificant. It can still affect the "fitness of words", their appropriateness to their use and context. In communication, there are always many ends, and some words will just fit those ends better than others in a given case. Unlike discussions of sense and reference, however, in which meaning is artifically divided in order to keep all the easy parts of the meaning together and to make it possible to ignore all the subtle parts, taking seriously the fitness or unfitness of words requires careful comparative work and also poetic experimentation.

Doctor Evangelicus

Today is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church. He was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon in about 1195, and died in Padua in 1231; he was canonized within a year of his death. He joined the Franciscan order, and soon became renowned as a homilist. His sermons, which are typically concerned with tracing concordantiae or parallels and analogies between different parts of Scripture, are the reason for his liturgical status as Doctor of the Church, but he is perhaps most famous for being the patron saint of lost articles, and the primary association of him with his preaching in the popular mind is the hagiographical legend of his preaching to the fish:

St Anthony being at one time at Rimini, where there were a great number of heretics, and wishing to lead them by the light of faith into the way of truth, preached to them for several days, and reasoned with them on the faith of Christ and on the Holy Scriptures. They not only resisted his words, but were hardened and obstinate, refusing to listen to him.

At last St Anthony, inspired by God, went down to the sea-shore, where the river runs into the sea, and having placed himself on a bank between the river and the sea, he began to speak to the fishes as if the Lord had sent him to preach to them, and said: "Listen to the word of God, O ye fishes of the sea and of the river, seeing that the faithless heretics refuse to do so."

No sooner had he spoken these words than suddenly so great a multitude of fishes, both small and great, approached the bank on which he stood, that never before had so many been seen in the sea or the river. All kept their heads out of the water, and seemed to be looking attentively on St Anthony's face; all were ranged in perfect order and most peacefully, the smaller ones in front near the bank, after them came those a little bigger, and last of all, were the water was deeper, the largest.

When they had placed themselves in this order, St Anthony began to preach to them most solemnly, saying: "My brothers the fishes, you are bound, as much as is in your power, to return thanks to your Creator, who has given you so noble an element for your dwelling; for you have at your choice both sweet water and salt; you have many places of refuge from the tempest; you have likewise a pure and transparent element for your nourishment. God, your bountiful and kind Creator, when he made you, ordered you to increase and multiply, and gave you his blessing. In the universal deluge, all other creatures perished; you alone did God preserve from all harm. He has given you fins to enable you to go where you will. To you was it granted, according to the commandment of God, to keep the prophet Jonas, and after three days to throw him safe and sound on dry land. You it was who gave the tribute-money to our Saviour Jesus Christ, when, through his poverty, he had not wherewith to pay. By a singular mystery you were the nourishment of the eternal King, Jesus Christ, before and after his resurrection. Because of all these things you are bound to praise and bless the Lord, who has given you blessings so many and so much greater than to other creatures."

At these words the fish began to open their mouths, and bow their heads, endeavouring as much as was in their power to express their reverence and show forth their praise. St Anthony, seeing the reverence of the fish towards their Creator, rejoiced greatly in spirit, and said with a loud voice: "Blessed be the eternal God; for the fishes of the sea honour him more than men without faith, and animals without reason listen to his word with greater attention than sinful heretics."

And whilst St Anthony was preaching, the number of fishes increased, and none of them left the place that he had chosen. And the people of the city hearing of the miracle, made haste to go and witness it. With them also came the heretics of whom we have spoken above, who, seeing so wonderful and manifest a miracle, were touched in their hearts; and threw themselves at the feet of St Anthony to hear his words. The saint then began to expound to them the Catholic faith. He preached so eloquently, that all those heretics were converted, and returned to the true faith of Christ; the faithful also were filled with joy, and greatly comforted, being strengthened in the faith. After this St Anthony sent away the fishes, with the blessing of God; and they all departed, rejoicing as they went, and the people returned to the city.

The Little Flowers of St. Francis, Part I, Chapter XL.

Because of the tale, Anthony is often pictured with fish: a reminder that the gospel must be proclaimed even if there is no one to hear but the fish.

Apostolorum Apostola

The feast of St. Mary Magdalene was recently raised from the status of Memorial to Feast proper, which usually belongs to Apostles and a few others. As some have noted, this actually is a restoration of sorts, since the Magdalene's feastday has historically been quite important, and has been surprisingly low-ranked for about half a century. Because it was mentioned in the letter accompanying the decree, the following passage from Aquinas's Commentary on the Gospel of John (c. 20, l. 3 [2519]) is noteworthy, and worth reading in full context:

Notice the three privileges given to Mary Magdalene. First, she had the privilege of being a prophet because she was worthy enough to see the angels, for a prophet is an intermediary between angels and the people. Secondly, she had the dignity or rank of an angel insofar as she looked upon Christ, on whom the angels desire to look. Thirdly, she has the office of an apostle; indeed she was an apostle to the apostles insofar as it was her task to announce our Lord's resurrection to the disciples. Thus, just as it was a woman who was the first to announce the words of death, so it was a woman who would be the first to announce the words of life.

[St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 13-21, Larcher and Weisheipl, trs. CUA Press (Washington, DC: 2010) p. 266]

The Latin, for those who are interested:

Ubi notandum est triplex privilegium, quod Magdalenae est collatum. Primo quidem propheticum, per hoc quod meruit Angelos videre: propheta enim est medius inter Angelos et populum. Secundo Angelorum fastigium, per hoc quod vidit Christum, in quem desiderant Angeli prospicere. Tertio officium apostolicum, immo facta est apostolorum apostola, per hoc quod ei committitur ut resurrectionem dominicam discipulis annuntiet: ut sicut mulier viro primo nuntiavit verba mortis, ita et mulier primo nuntiaret verba vitae.

Maronite Year LIII

Fifth Sunday of Pentecost
Philippians 3:7-14; Matthew 10:1-7

Our praise falls short of Your mercy, O Lord;
You are above all praise.
With Your resurrection You did great deeds,
beyond what we can say.
Truly, this is the day the Lord has made;
with David we rejoice,
with voices glad and strong.
This is the unequaled day, crown of feasts.

Twelve disciples You did call to Yourself,
with great authority:
power against evil You gave to them.
Simon Peter was first, and Andrew, too,
James and his brother John,
Philip and Bartholomew and Thomas,
Matthew and James, the son of Alphaeus,
Thaddeus and Simon,
and the traitor (may we not be like him!).

Through every land the zealous apostles
made disciples for Christ,
enduring hardship to preach to far realms,
like bright lamps enlightening all the world.
Their love burned ardently,
lighting the candles in Your holy Church,
which passed the flame of truth that they received
until our souls were lit
and we received the apostolic fire.

We count as loss even our greatest gains
compared to love of Christ,
for You, O Lord, we wish to our credit,
and You, O Lord, are He in whom we are.
By Your resurrection,
by participation in Your Passion,
we are formed to the pattern of Your death,
burning with Your bright love,
pressing forward for the prize through Your grace.

We praise You who formed us to Your image;
You brought us salvation
and from Your mercy You came to bring hope.
We give thanks for Your gifts,
for You became man and fell into death
that we might live again,
that death itself might die,
and we will always proclaim that wonder.