Aquinas for Lent XXV

The faithful must be strong through charity, for love is as strong as death (Song 8:6); hence, it is symbolized by a pillar of fire capable of consuming everything: therefore, they received a burning pillar of fire for a guide on the unknown journey (Wis 18:3). As fire makes the surroundings visible, puts metals to the test, and destroys what can burn, so charity enlightens human actions, examines one's motives, and exterminates all vices.

[Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Letters of Saint Paul to the Galatians and Ephesians, The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine (Lander, WY: 2012) p. 178. From the commentary on Ephesians.]

From the Moon to the Earth

Isaac Todhunter in his biography of Whewell notes that among Whewell's papers there was a story, in four parts, although each part seems unfinished. The story is what we would call a science fiction story, and describes a man who has come to Earth from the Moon on a meteoric rock. Todhunter, alas, does not give us the whole story, but he does give us an outline, as well as a brief passage from the second part and the whole of the third part. The story outline is, more or less:

I. The narrator recounts his longstanding desire to communicate with inhabitants from another world, and discusses the facts that have led some people to think that Venus, Mars, or the Moon might be inhabited. To get from the Earth to the Moon would require a projectile, and would immediately run into the problem of the immense acceleration required. But to get from the Moon to the Earth is not such a formidable problem. Thus the narrator has an interest in meteorites.

II. This brings him into contact with a mineralogist, Edward Daniel Clarke, whose lectures put him on the trail of a large mass of meteoric iron in Siberia. On the way there, he meets up with a strange man in Pekin (modern day Beijing), named Mono, who is also interested in meteorites. The proceed together to Siberia, and in the course of their journey have a discussion about what the sky would look like to someone viewing it from the Moon.

III. Mono reveals that he is in fact from the Moon; he came to Earth looking for his brother, who, being of the daring sort, had first made the attempt to travel from the Moon to the Earth. The narrator wonders if Mono is crazy.

IV. Further questioning by the narrator elicits more explanation from Mono. They agree to go together to Peru in the hope of finding there some evidence of what happened to Mono's brother.

That the story was never finished is one of the misfortunes of philosophy, I think; what Todhunter gives of it is interesting, if somewhat digressive. And you get really nice passages like this, when Mono describes the history of the Moon-men, who live on the side of the Moon facing away from the Earth, as they discover the Earth:

It was an ancestor of my own, named Tisiri, who had the privilege of making this discovery, the greatest event in our lunar history, and I think, the greatest and most striking scientific discovery ever made by any inhabitant of the solar system....You may try to conceive my ancestor's feelings when, climbing the last ridge of the boundary mountains, he saw resting, as it seemed, upon the mountains of the opposite horizon this vast luminous orb: for it so happened that at that time the earth was at full, as you say of the moon: that is, her whole disk was enlightened. Tisiri, in his travels which he wrote and which we possess in our family, gives vent to his feelings in the most rapturous language. 'I saw,' he says, 'that mysterious center which we had long felt, as an invisible power, shaping and controlling the movements of our planet, expanded before my eyes into a vast luminous orb, vying in splendour with the sun and far larger than he. Considering how vast an influence this orb exerts upon our world I was disposed to fall down and worship it, but better thoughts prevailed, and I knelt down and thanked him who made both it and our planet, for having permitted me to see it, first of moon-men, and to disclose its existence to my fellow creatures.'

The story clearly draws on the Plurality of Worlds debate, which was raging at the time throughout the learned world: Are there inhabitants on the other planets in the solar system? The Yes answer had become overwhelming popular, being explicitly advocated in a number of public works and having a certain plausibility due to analogy and certain religious considerations. Whewell had contributed to this debate in 1853 with his work, originally anonymous, The Plurality of Worlds (he added the dialogue in 1854); it became an instant hit, widely published and widely attacked. In that work he essentially rips apart the case made by proponents of the idea of inhabitants on other worlds, systematically showing that it was based on speculation, not evidence and that, indeed, most of the evidence pointed the other way and that the evidence that did not was not sufficient to establish even any probabilities. But he seems to have also been interested in human fascination with the idea of otherworldly inhabitants, which he notes is a recurring idea.

Aquinas for Lent XXIV

...there are many works in the world which are good to men but not good to God since they are not done aright. Prov. 14:12: There is a way which seemeth just to a man: but the ends therefore lead to death. Eccles. 8:10: I saw the wicked buried: who also when they were yet living were in the holy place, and were praised in the city as men of just works. But this is manifested by right faith when it attains its reward from God, Who does not remunerate except right things.

[Thomas Aquinas, Commentaries on St. Paul's Epistles to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, Baer, tr. St. Augustine's Press (South Bend, IN: 2007) p. 200. This is from the commentary on Philemon.]

A Liberal Education

It is not because any one is profoundly versed in the records of ancient learning, or because he is familiar with the discoveries of modern art or science, that we deem him liberally educated. It is because he knows, of ancient literature, that which enables him to understand and to sympathize with those noble efforts of thought and imagination, by which Greece and Rome became, and have continued up to the present day, the mistresses and models of the civilized word: and again, because he has accompanied the course of those more recent triumphs of a severer intellectual power, in virtue of which the last two centuries must for all future ages continue to be the leaders and teachers of all nations in the knowledge of material nature. A liberal education is that which, so far as the progress of taste and thought and real knowledge are concerned, connects the past with the present and the future. And those who enjoy the inestimable advantages of such an education are the instruments, graced and honoured by their office, of diffusing through the present race of men, and transmitting to the next generation, all the best consequences of the intellectual exertions of man, from the first dawn of letters up to the present time.

William Whewell, Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge, Sermon XXI. It's not immediately obvious from this passage (although it becomes more so later in the sermon), but Whewell is taking a position here in a larger debate about liberal education, although it wouldn't have been controversial in context because the position was the Cantabrigian one (in part due to Whewell himself): that a liberal education requires, in addition to the Classics, the Sciences.

Aquinas for Lent XXIII

...the ceremonial precepts of the Old Testament were certain determinations of the precepts of natural rights and moral precepts. And therefore, with regard to this, those things which they used to hold from natural right were kept before the Law only for the observance of a vow, and without some precept. For, that something be offered to God in recognition of creation and dominion, this is natural; but that bulls and goats be offered, this is ceremonial.

[Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews, Baer, tr. St. Augustine's Press (South Bend, IN: 2006) p. 142.]

Fortnightly Book, March 11

While Sigrid Undset is most famous for her large medieval novels, most of her books are more modern in focus. This is the case with Ida Elisabeth, the next fortnightly book, which takes place in the 1930s. As with most Undset novels, it concerns living with a disastrous choice, and the question of how one puts one's life together given that the past cannot be undone. The backcover of it says that Ida Elisabeth marries her "teenage sweetheart", which is certainly overstating the matter; Ida Elisabeth and Frithjof in a sense just fall in together as teenagers sometimes do, and then they later marry, not so much for love but for familiarity. But Frithjof is a well-meaning dream-and-do-nothing kind of man, not very brave and not very honest, although sincere in his own way, the kind who always starts and never finishes, big on dreams and low on accomplishments. It is a catastrophe inevitable from the beginning, and there are no do-overs with something like that.

Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy

Introduction

Opening Passage:

You have requested me, my dear friend, to bestow some of that leisure, with which Providence has blessed the decline of my life, in registering the hazards and difficulties which attended its commencement. The recollection of those adventures, as you are pleased to term them, has indeed left upon my mind a chequered and varied feeling of pleasure and of pain, mingled, I trust, with no slight gratitude and veneration to the Disposer of human events, who guided my early course through much risk and labour, that the ease with which he has blessed my prolonged life, might seem softer from remembrance and contrast. Neither is it possible for me to doubt, what you have often affirmed, that the incidents which befell me among a people singularly primitive in their government and manners, have something interesting and attractive for those who love to hear an old man's stories of a past age. (p. 5)

Summary: Francis Osbaldistone is a young man raised to a mercantile family who very much does not want to go into the family business. In response, his father sends him off to his cousins in a kind of exchange -- since Frank won't take up the accounting ledger, he will go to Osbaldistone Hall, and one of his cousins, Rashleigh, will come to work in the London offices. Frank finds his cousins an uncouth lot, but living with them is the beautiful Diana Vernon, with whom he immediately falls in love; but she seems to be destined for another, or (since she, unlike Frank, is Catholic) a convent. When Rashleigh betrays the family, Frank in his attempt to make things right will find himself in Scotland, in desperate need of the help of others -- the cowardly servant, Andrew Fairservice; the shrewd Bailie, Nicol Jarvie; and the outlaw, cattle rustler, con man, blackmailer, patriot, Robert MacGregor. It is a sticky situation; tensions are high as the opposition between Highland Scotland, which is Catholic and Jacobite, and England (as well as its Protestant collaborators in the Lowlands), steadily makes its way toward the Jacobite rising of 1715.

Mr. Jarvie at one point makes an interesting comment that I thought shed a great deal of light on the themes of the novel; in response to Frank's asking him for advice about the best way to act for his honor: "Honour is a homicide and a bloodspiller, that gangs about making frays in the street; but Credit is a decent honest man, that sits at hame and makes the pat play." From the comment you can gather that Mr. Jarvie is very much a partisan of Credit; so, indeed, is Frank's father. But the novel itself does not denigrate honor, because it is the combination of the two -- Credit and Honour -- that make Scotland what it is, and the line between them is not a line between factions but something that runs through all the characters. Mr. Jarvie himself is an honorable man, as we see in comparing him to the MacVitties; mercantile credit and industry may have the upper hand, but honor has a voice, and, indeed, the two aspects of Scottish life, represented by bustling Glasgow and the bonnie Highlands, are not as unrelated as they might seem, just as the credit-shrewd Mr. Jarvie turns out to be cousin to the honor-shrewd Rob Roy. Rashleigh's betrayal is an attack on both, Credit and Honour; victory over him will require both.

It's a sign of Scott's literary genius, incidentally, that he is able to take two very negative stereotypes of Scotland -- the profit-minded, pinchpenny, accounting-book miser Scotland, and the sulky, touchy, kilt-wearing backwoods clan Scotland -- and turn them around to create an attractive picture by putting them in rapprochement, united in a just cause.

Like most of Scott's work, the story is slow-building, but it never lags in pace; it is interesting all the way through. Rob Roy is only occasionally on the scene, in the same way that the troubles building up to the Fifteen are merely an occasional element of the background, but the tale actually benefits from this, since it allows room for a suggestiveness that a plainer telling would miss. It is also a very character-oriented tale; with the exception of Rashleigh, whose good qualities are merely cleverness and charisma, and a few scattered minor characters, all of the characters are presented as very flawed but often admirable nonetheless.

Favorite Passage:

The attack which he meditated was prevented by the unexpected apparition of a female upon the summit of the rock.

“Stand!” she said, with a commanding tone, “and tell me what ye seek in MacGregor's country?”

I have seldom seen a finer or more commanding form than this woman. She might be between the term of forty and fifty years, and had a countenance which must once have been of a masculine cast of beauty; though now, imprinted with deep lines by exposure to rough weather, and perhaps by the wasting influence of grief and passion, its features were only strong, harsh, and expressive. She wore her plaid, not drawn around her head and shoulders, as is the fashion of the women in Scotland, but disposed around her body as the Highland soldiers wear theirs. She had a man's bonnet, with a feather in it, an unsheathed sword in her hand, and a pair of pistols at her girdle.

“It's Helen Campbell, Rob's wife,” said the Bailie, in a whisper of considerable alarm; “and there will be broken heads amang us or it's lang.” (p. 369)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

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Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy, Penguin (London: 1995).