Scottish Poetry II

Address to the Unco Guid, Or the Rigidly Righteous
by Robert Burns

        My Son, these maxims make a rule,
        An' lump them aye thegither;
        The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
        The Rigid Wise anither:
        The cleanest corn that ere was dight
        May hae some pyles o' caff in;
        So ne'er a fellow-creature slight
        For random fits o' daffin.
        Solomon.-Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16.

O ye wha are sae guid yoursel',
Sae pious and sae holy,
Ye've nought to do but mark and tell
Your neibours' fauts and folly!
Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill,
Supplied wi' store o' water;
The heaped happer's ebbing still,
An' still the clap plays clatter.

Hear me, ye venerable core,
As counsel for poor mortals
That frequent pass douce Wisdom's door
For glaikit Folly's portals:
I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,
Would here propone defences-
Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,
Their failings and mischances.

Ye see your state wi' theirs compared,
And shudder at the niffer;
But cast a moment's fair regard,
What maks the mighty differ;
Discount what scant occasion gave,
That purity ye pride in;
And (what's aft mair than a' the lave),
Your better art o' hidin.

Think, when your castigated pulse
Gies now and then a wallop!
What ragings must his veins convulse,
That still eternal gallop!
Wi' wind and tide fair i' your tail,
Right on ye scud your sea-way;
But in the teeth o' baith to sail,
It maks an unco lee-way.

See Social Life and Glee sit down,
All joyous and unthinking,
Till, quite transmugrified, they're grown
Debauchery and Drinking:
O would they stay to calculate
Th' eternal consequences;
Or your more dreaded hell to state,
Damnation of expenses!

Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,
Tied up in godly laces,
Before ye gie poor Frailty names,
Suppose a change o' cases;
A dear-lov'd lad, convenience snug,
A treach'rous inclination-
But let me whisper i' your lug,
Ye're aiblins nae temptation.

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark, -
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, 'tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let's be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What's done we partly may compute,
But know not what's resisted.

Whatever Things Were Rightly Said

Today is the feast of St. Justin Martyr, patron saint of philosophers and also in a sense of this blog. From his Second Apology:

For I myself, when I discovered the wicked disguise which the evil spirits had thrown around the divine doctrines of the Christians, to turn aside others from joining them, laughed both at those who framed these falsehoods, and at the disguise itself, and at popular opinion; and I confess that I both boast and with all my strength strive to be found a Christian; not because the teachings of Plato are different from those of Christ, but because they are not in all respects similar, as neither are those of the others, Stoics, and poets, and historians. For each man spoke well in proportion to the share he had of the spermatic word, seeing what was related to it. But they who contradict themselves on the more important points appear not to have possessed the heavenly wisdom, and the knowledge which cannot be spoken against. Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. For next to God, we worship and love the Word who is from the unbegotten and ineffable God, since also He became man for our sakes, that, becoming a partaker of our sufferings, He might also bring us healing. For all the writers were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation imparted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the thing itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.

Fully to understand this, you have to recognize that 'word' here is Logos, which can of course also be translated as 'reason'. Spermatikos logos here is related to the Stoic idea (more or less) that there is in everything a participation in Divine Reason that makes it unfold rationally in the way appropriate to it; it could also be translated as 'germinal reason' or 'seminal reason'.

Scottish Poetry I

Nature
by James Beattie

O how canst thou renounce the boundless store
Of charms which Nature to her votary yields!
The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
All that the genial ray of morning gilds,
And all that echoes to the song of even,
All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields,
And all the dread magnificence of heaven,
O how canst thou renounce and hope to be forgiven!

Visitation

The Maid of Orleans

Today is the feast of St. Joan of Arc, or St. Jehanne D'Arc, the Maid of Orleans. I have a summary of the battles in which St. Joan was involved here.

Jehanne D'Arc

A quiet garden path
        (St. Michael be our guide)
a scent of spring and day,
a field both green and wide,
and a girl--

and beauty bright and bold
        (St. Catherine, for us pray)
and fierce but calm resolve
(with militance like May)
of a girl--

the hope that step by step
        (St. Margaret, lend your aid)
will charge the raging host
and face the swinging blade
as a girl--

by one bright thread are bound
        (Lord Jesus, give us grace)
with frame of twining flame
and eyes set in the face
of a girl....

Dont suis de bien et de joye separée

On May 29, 1453, Sultan Mehmed II defeated Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos to capture Constantinople, by ingenious strategy, and overwhelming army, and an innovative use of gunpowder to nullify Constantinople's extraordinary fortifications. Emperor Constantine's dwindling army was aided by a few hundred men from the Papal States and Genoa, as well as a handful of ships from Venice that were already in Constantinople, which, except for a further fleet sent from Venice that failed to arrive in time, was the most that the West would volunteer at that period of increasing hostility between East and West. It was, for all that, a closer thing than is sometimes admitted; attempts to treat the fall of Constantinople as inevitable tend to overlook both how extraordinary Constantinople's fortifications were, and also how much in the way of military talent and resources the Sultan had to bring to bear in order to accomplish it. The Ottoman army had heavy losses; their victory was hard-won. In the confusion, nobody knows for sure what happened to the Emperor.

And so fell, once and for all, the Roman Empire. Thousands of Christians were killed in the aftermath, and thousands sold into slavery. The Ottomans looted the city for three days -- Mehmed II could not deny them the right because it was part of their pay. But it is said at the end of it that he wept, saying, "And see what a city we have submitted to plunder and destruction."

Cappella Romana and Alexander Lingas perform Guillaume Du Fay's Lamentatio Sanctae Matris Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae:



Du Fay (or Dufay) was a Flemish composer who made his way to Italy in the fifteenth century; his most famous work is probably the motet, Nuper rosarum flores, which was written for the consecration of the Cathedral in Florence, but this one, reflecting on the loss of Hagia Sophia, is in some ways more haunting. It is in content a lament of the Holy Virgin seeing her Son crucified, which also represents the lament of the Church.

St. Melangell's Lambs

There's a rabbit that keeps hanging around my yard in the late afternoons to cool off; he makes the world more interesting, so it seems fitting to mark today, the feast day of the patron saint of rabbits, hares, and those who raise them, St. Monacella, also known as St. Melangell.

The tale of the saint is this. St. Melangell was an Irish princess who fled Ireland as a teenager so that she would not have to marry; she ended up in Wales, where she lived for about fifteen years as a hermit. One day the Prince of Powys was out hunting hares, and while in pursuit he came suddenly into a thicket and saw an unexpected sight that stopped him short: a beautiful young woman in prayer, holding the hare, while his hunting dogs were whining and barking a few feet away. The prince heard her story, and gave her the land where he had discovered her, so that she might found an abbey there. She lived to a pious old age, and was buried in the small church in the village that had sprung up near the abbey; the village, Pennant, became known as Pennant Melangell, and the church became known as St. Melangell's. The hares in the parish were sometimes called 'St. Melangell's lambs', and for a very long time it was considered wrong to harm any hare within the borders of the parish, because in it they had the right of sanctuary.