Ascension

Eternal Monarch, King Most High
by John Mason Neale

Eternal Monarch, King most high,
Whose blood hath brought redemption nigh,
By whom the death of Death was wrought,
And conquering grace’s battle fought.

Ascending to the throne of might,
And seated at the Father’s right,
All power in Heav’n is Jesu’s own,
That here His manhood had not known.

That so, in nature’s triple frame,
Each heav’nly and each earthly name,
And things in hell’s abyss abhorred,
May bend the knee and own Him Lord.

Yea, angels tremble when they see
How changed is our humanity;
That flesh hath purged what flesh had stained,
And God, the Flesh of God, hath reigned.

Be Thou our joy and strong defense,
Who art our future recompense;
So shall the light that springs from Thee
Be ours through all eternity.

O risen Christ, ascended Lord,
All praise to Thee let earth accord,
Who art, while endless ages run,
With Father and with Spirit One.

A translation of a thirteenth-century Latin hymn.

The Presence of Christ on the Altar

Peter L. P. Simpson has an interesting article at Commonweal, Have You Tried Scotus? I'm by and large sympathetic with the idea of the article -- as I always say, the Church does not need Thomisms as much as it needs St. Thomases, nor Scotisms as much as Bl. John Duns Scotuses. But I think the article takes the wrong way about to do this. For one thing, it's frankly absurd to suggest that there's any vast number of people who are "exclusive Thomists"; actual Thomists are themselves relatively thin on the ground, and most of them are hardly purists. The reason people do not make any extensive use of Scotus is not exclusivity but accessibility; St. Thomas, difficult as many people find him, is infinitely easier to find and follow than Bl. John, so naturally they are much more likely to consult Aquinas than they are to consult Scotus. Scotus is slowly become more accessible, due in part to people like Simpson, in fact, but that has happened very, very slowly, and Scotus is probably never going to be as accessible as Aquinas, because he tends to be more technical. But that's an infrastructural problem, a difference in the cost and difficulty of studying one rather than the other, not because there are any great numbers of people deliberately being "exclusive Thomists".

I also wish he were a little less sloppy in his set-up, since his discussion of Aquinas on the real presence is not quite right, and I doubt many people without a fair amount of background would have an easy time figuring out what Kenny's problem actually was. On the first point, that he muddles Aquinas's account up a bit, he mixes up discussion of transubstantiation, real presence, and location, which while related points are distinct. Aquinas distinguishes the first two, although he thinks they are related; that's why he considers them in distinct questions -- transubstantiation is the account of the change when the elements become the sacrament, and real presence is something that has to be further argued. Aquinas completely separates the second and the third, because he doesn't think that all presence is local, and, as he points out, treating Christ's presence as local raises the puzzle of how Christ could be located here on this altar, wholly present, and also located at some other altar, wholly present. Thus Aquinas, pace Simpson, does in fact have a response to Kenny's problem: while the bread and wine has accidents that locate it, in the sense of containing it in a place, in transubstantiation the substance of these accidents is replaced by Christ Himself, but he does not take on the accidents of the bread and wine (so far we have Kenny's set-up) -- but obviously that includes the accidents that contain it in a place. There is no problem of how Christ can have the where of the bread and the wine if he doesn't take on the accidents that remain; he doesn't have the where of the bread and the wine. He is present there, but not localized there. (This is explicitly discussed in ST III.76.5.) Kenny is making the mistake of assuming that all presence is local presence. Consider the soul, what it is that makes you a living thing; it is present in your hand, but it would be an error to assume that your soul is localized in your hand, for the obvious reason that it's present elsewhere, too. Likewise, a cause that has localized effects can by way of those effects be present in their location without the cause itself being located there. So too Christ is wholly present under the accidents of both bread and wine, and on this altar and that altar, because Christ does not become bread and wine, and so doesn't take on, Himself, the location of bread and wine any more than he takes on the flavor and consistency of bread and wine. Christ's Body is present where the host is located; that location was in a sense a measurement of the bread, but it is not a measurement of the Body of Christ.

Now, while Scotus's discussion is not particularly easy to follow, he is quite aware of all these distinctions, despite his differences from Aquinas in discussing them; he denies that transubstantiation is the foundation of the doctrine of the real presence (the difference from Aquinas that Simpson notes, since Aquinas starts with transubstantiation and moves from there to discussing the real presence) and he treats the question of location as a further question beyond that of presence. I am not a scholar of Scotus by any means, but it seems to me that Scotus's insistence on separating the question of transubstantiation and that of real presence is that he wants to insist that Christ's ability to be present is not limited, so that you cannot say (for instance) that Christ can only be really present by transubstantiation or under some kind of sensible signs in a sacrament. Christ's doing this is for our sake, not because He is in any way limited to doing it this way; Christ could be present in the very same way even without transubstantiation. Thomists, I take it, are perfectly free to agree that Christ's ability to be present is not limited to transubstantiation, but would insist that that is necessarily a different kind of presence. Which is right is, I think, a more interesting question than Kenny's, which makes an assumption that both Aquinas and Scotus reject, that Christ could only be present on the altar by being Himself localized on it.

Voyages Extraordinaires #43: Clovis Dardentor

When they had both left the train at the Cette railway-station -- the train from Paris to the Mediterranean -- Marcel Lornans, addressing Jean Taconnat, said to him: "What are you going to do until the boat starts?"

A comic novel, Clovis Dardentor tells of Marcel and Jean, cousins who are heading off to Algeria to join the French army, because, while they have inherited enough not to be in immediately dire straits, they do not have the income for a sustainable lifestyle. On the ship, they meet the Desirandelles, who are heading to Algeria with their son, destined to marry a lovely young woman by the name of Louise Elissane, and their very wealthy, very jovial friend, Clovis Dardentor. On the way, Jean, who seems to have a head for trivia, hits upon a plan for a better life than army life, based on the complicated provisions of French adoption laws, which are usually very restrictive, but, as it happens, if certain other circumstances are met, also require wealthy older men to adopt those who have saved their lives from fire, flood, or fight. Since Algeria is not always especially safe, Jean convinces Marcel to delay their entrance into the army, instead touring Algeria with the good-natured Dardentor in the hopes of an opportunity arising in which they can save -- or even just 'save' -- Dardentor from fire, flood, or fight; then Dardentor would have to adopt them, and their financial problems would be solved. They and Dardentor get along very well, but there's one thing they are not properly taking into account: Dardentor is as wealthy as he is because he is, first, very lucky, and, second, very competent and coolheaded, and a man like that is more likely to be savior than saved when accidents arise.

It's a charming tale, not very long. I wish we had more of Louise Elissane; we get her only in bits and pieces, and although she has by far the best scene in the book, it would have been nice to get more of her character.

Twofold Charity

Holy Scripture commends a twofold charity to us, namely, of God and of neighbour; charity of God, that we may love Him so as to rejoice in Him; charity of neighbour, that we may love him not so as to rejoice in him but with him in God, that is, so as to love God on account of Him, Himself, but our neighbour on account of God. Now God must be loved on account of Himself for the reason that He himself is our good. Now our neighbour must be loved on account of God for the reason that with him our good is in God. We love the One that we may go to Him and rejoice in Him. We love the other that we may run with him and arrive with him. The One as joy, the other as an ally of joy; the one as rest, the other as a consort of rest.

[Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith (De Sacramentis), Deferrari, tr., Ex Fontibus (2016) pp. 378-379.]

On Katsafanas on Fanaticism

Paul Katsafanas has an interesting paper on fanaticism at Philosophers' Imprint. In it he argues against what he calls in the Enlightenment account of fanaticism (which in the Enlightenment would have often been called 'enthusiasm'), which he characterizes as involving the following three elements:

(1) unwavering commitment to an ideal
(2) unwillingness to subject this ideal to rational criticism
(3) presumption of non-rational sanction for the ideal

I think you could criticize this as an account of actual Enlightenment views of the matter in a number of ways -- 'non-rational' is too vague, and while there is no single account of enthusiasm in the early modern period (and I am not as inclined as Katsafanas to think that Locke, Hume, Shaftesbury, and Kant are as much in agreement as he suggests), people discussing the matter tended to think of it in terms of principles, not ideals, and it tends to be important for how the word 'enthusiasm' functions in discourse that it is not merely a rejection of rational criticism but also a rejection of authority. Enthusiasts got the bad name they did because they were seen to subvert the structures of authority maintaining society. Hume, for instance, often uses this aspect of the idea in his historical explanations in the History; it's also why people were often nasty to Quakers and Methodist revivalists. They were seen as disrupting the order of society, and it's not merely that their grounds were seen as non-rational but (which is a different thing) that they could not be reasoned with. To be sure, there was a common notion of a 'harmless enthusiast'; but not everyone would have accepted such a view, and the harmlessness would be because they were, as we would say, a bit crazy -- authority and reason don't work on them but not because they are deliberately trying to overturn them.

This is not a purely historical issue, not that there are ever any such in matters of philosophical analysis; Katsafanas's immediate criticism of the 'Enlightenment account' is that it does not capture the intolerance and dangerousness that these very thinkers thought was attributable to enthusiasts. But the obvious reason for that is that the 'Enlightenment account' he gives is incomplete. But one can imagine someone trying to generalize an account of enthusiasm/fanaticism based on various early modern comments and coming up with something like this as a first approximation, so it's not an immediate issue for analysis.

As Katsafanas notes, however, 'the Enlightenment account' will not work as an account of fanaticism itself, because it includes too much. It covers anyone who is a 'true believer', in the colloquial sense. Katsafanas still regards 'being a true believer' as a rational defect, but it's so common that I'm not sure you can even go this far. We usually think of sports fans and music fans as 'fans', i.e., fanatics, by a figurative and hyperbolic extension of the term, but most fans of anything would count arguably count as 'true believers' in this sense. People are just resistant to criticism of their likes and dislikes in matters they regard as closely intertwined with who they are, even if reason didn't itself have much to do with their liking/disliking it or regarding it as a part of who they are. And while this can no doubt lead in bad directions, in itself this nonreasoning resistance seems to have nothing unreasonable about it. It's not a rational defect merely to have strongly decided tastes.

In any case, Katsafanas goes on to argue that we need to add several additional elements to get an adequate account:

(4) adoption of one or more sacred values,

where 'sacred values' means 'values that are associated with characteristic emotions like love or dread and are regarded as uncompromisable and indubitable',

(5) treating these sacred values as necessary for preservation of self-unity,

where this is his somewhat odd and controvertible way of saying what would perhaps more colloquially say as conveying that these sacred values are 'essential to your identity'.

I take it that Katsafanas is using these as steppingstones to try to build up an account where one can see how the elements would combine to make fanaticism dangerous; it's certainly not the case that these on their own add much. I take it that most people would have already assumed that element (1) implied something more or less like these, with these at most clarifying it so that we can cut out some marginal cases. So far we still don't have anything to distinguish fanaticism from many cases of (say) wholehearted love of one person for another. Katsafanas continues, however:

(6) taking these sacred values to be threatened if not widely accepted
(7) identification with a group that has these sacred values as shared values.

These both are definite advances; they give us an account of fanaticism that is social in character.

Katsafanas often talks about his account as taking fanaticism to be characterized by (1)-(7), but I'm honestly not sure why he doesn't take (4)-(7) to replace rather than add to (1)-(3); that is, given his arguments for them, I don't see what is missing in (4)-(7) that would require (1)-(3) specifically. At the end he seems to suggest that (4)-(7) introduce something like a disposition to violence, but, as I will go on to say, I don't see how that is supposed to work. This should be kept in mind as a qualification for the rest of my criticism of his account -- it's conceivable I'm not grasping something about how this account is supposed to fit together.

It seems to me that all Katsafanas has done is taken the 'true believer' of the original and made him or her a 'socially participant true believer'. What he has not given is what he promised to give, an account in which it would be clear why intolerance and dangerousness tend to be associated with fanatics. Consider a person who is not a fanatic but a fatalist. They have some sacred value -- say, liberty under a certain conception -- and they see the upholding of this value as essential for making sense of who they are as a person, and they recognize (as you usually have to with conceptions of liberty) that this liberty is threatened and not widely accepted, and they participate with groups that take this liberty as a shared value, but they honestly don't think they or the group have any ability to change things. Perhaps they are a dwindling minority and the fatalist just thinks that, alas, society is by this point doomed and there is nothing that can be done about it -- they will certainly lose, and no action they can take will change that, but because the value is uncompromisable and true, they will stay the course to the end. Now, this person by Katsafanas's definition is a fanatic, but it's really odd to classify them as such, because we don't think of merely being resigned to failure as a fanatical attitude, and obviously we don't because it isn't. As we might put the point, intolerance and dangerousness are associated with fanaticism because fanatics do things, but the resigned fatalist isn't doing anything. Being resigned in the face of (as you see it) the whole of society going mad isn't fanaticism. That is, the only component of Katsafanas's account that is not purely a matter of mental belief and attitude is identification with a group, but mere self-identification, even combined with the mental components, doesn't give you any fanatical acts. It's compatible with almost anyone you know being a fanatic, which they express entirely by having a poker night with other fanatics. I mean, there are groups with a history of breeding fanatics that often do a lot of social events together, like the KKK or Antifa, but it's not having brunch at the local eatery together that makes them identifiable as fanatics, but rather the willingness to engage in terroristic acts and assaults.

Perhaps Katsafanas assumes that adoption of sacred values combined with a sense of their being threatened always issues in definite outward actions, but this I think is just false, psychologically; at the very least, it would depend on the "characteristic emotions" involved and the opportunities for expressing them. Given his emphasis that fanaticism is a propensity to violence, not necessarily actual violence, I suspect that Katsafanas thinks more specifically that (1)-(7) tend to issue in violence, but this is a fortiori not true, as we see in the case of the resigned fatalist. You don't even have to go so far as resignation; sometimes people are still just trying to sort out what, if anything, they should do; sometimes people respond by not interfering with others but trying to move away from them and start over; and so forth.

I should say that, although Katsafanas doesn't consider these cases in particular, he ends the paper by considering the possibility that the content of the value might interfere, for instance if someone's sacred value were freedom from coercion, in which case you would have reason from the sacred value itself not to act violently toward other people over it. But since such people could meet (1)-(7), and he says that such people would not be fanatics "or at least not wholeheartedly", this seems to make his account defeasible, so that you could fit all of the criteria and yet not be a fanatic. And at least one argument he used to reject the 'Enlightenment account' -- that it would make peaceful Buddhists and tolerant Christians fanatics -- would seem to apply to his own account. It's not as if the difference between nonfanatical Buddhists and Christians and fanatics is that the former don't have deeply held sacred values, or that they don't join groups that share those values, and nothing seems to prevent them from thinking those values under threat, so we seem to be stuck in the same place we were, except with a social component that doesn't affect the original problem.

Fortnightly Book, May 26

Perhaps, were it possible to effect the total extirpation of novels, our young ladies in general, and boarding-school damsels in particular, might profit from their annihilation; but since the distemper they have spread seems incurable, since their contagion bids defiance to the medicine of advice or reprehension, and since they are found to baffle all the mental art of physic, save what is prescribed by the slow regimen of Time, and bitter diet of Experience; surely all attempts to contribute to the number of those which may be read, if not with advantage, at least without injury, ought rather to be encouraged than contemned.

The next fortnightly book is Fanny Burney's Evelina, published in 1778; an epistolary novel, it's generally considered a forerunner of the works of Jane Austen, and follows the adventures of a young woman raised in seclusion as she begins to interact with the finer portions of society. She makes many mistakes, but also discovers the hollowness of some social conventions. And, of course, you can be sure there is a possibility of marriage somewhere. This will be my first time reading it; I've read excerpts from Fanny Burney in looking at various issues in Austen, but not read any of her works all the way through.

Epistolary novels are sometimes difficult to read -- although it's not so much that they are difficult in themselves as that we no longer have all the reading habits required for them -- but Burney has a reputation for being quite humorous, and, although all her novels did reasonably well, Evelina was far and away her most successful one. She also has a reputation for excellence -- among those whom we know enjoyed her work are Austen, Burke, and Johnson. Her friendship with the latter is actually how she originally became known. Evelina was published anonymously, and she took great lengths to keep her authorship secret, including disguising her handwriting, creating secret identities, and once getting her brother to pose as the author and disguise himself so that he wouldn't be recognized. But of course her circle of close friends knew it, and things leak out to their friends, and word got back to a man named George Huddesworth, who in writing a comic poem, "Warley, A Satire", included a line,

Or gain approbation from dear little Burney?

On its own perhaps not so bad, but then he put in a footnote: 'The Authoress of Evelina', and thereby let the whole secret out to the world. In any case, it doesn't seem to have caused her any hurt more significant than embarrassment, and she did fairly well for herself afterward.

Charles Williams, Shadows of Ecstasy; The Greater Trumps

Introduction

Opening Passages: From Shadows of Ecstasy:

Roger Ingram's peroration broke over the silent dining hall: "He and such as he are one with the great conquerors, the great scientists, the great poets; they have all of them cried of the unknown: 'I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms.'" (p. 465)

From The Greater Trumps:

"...perfect Babel," Mr. Coningsby said peevishly, threw himself into a chair, and too up the evening paper."

"But Babel never was perfect, was it?" Nancy said to her brother in a low voice, yet not so low that her father could not hear if he chose. (p. 605)

Summary: In Shadows, Nigel Considine has discovered the ability to concentrate his energy so thoroughly that he can impose his will on others and influence their minds. With this power, and as representative of the 'schools' of African witchcraft, he has united African tribes against the colonial powers of Europe, threatens to start a new world order, and perhaps has overcome the power of death. Standing against him are mostly just a completely unexceptional Anglican priest, a good-natured skeptic and free thinker, and a Zulu king who has been rendered powerless by Considine's manipulations -- a weak and makeshift and somewhat unconvincing alliance of priest, prophet, and king against Considine. And who is Considine, really?

The best character in the novel is the Zulu king, Inkamasi, who gets remarkably little time given his overall importance. A true king, he is a convincing depiction of the charisma of kingship, even though he does not have the self-possession required to resist Considine's juggernaut energy. He has several of the best lines, and the reaction of other characters to him tells us more about them than about anything else. Of particular note is Rosamond, who is overwhelmed by Inkamasi's charisma, and in some sense falls in love, but reacts very poorly to him due to her prejudices about his black skin, which are shown to be quite common among the English throughout the story.

The novel is essentially a Fu Manchu story, but with Africa -- indeed, I've heard a story, which may be apocryphal (in the association with this novel in particular; the story itself comes from Williams), that Williams read one of Rohmer's novels, said, "I could do better than that," and wrote Shadows. There is a notable difference between the two, though. Fu Manchu, while in part Western-educated, is Chinese; Considine, while African-educated, is English. In the novel the colonized nations of Africa rise up against the colonizers with an apparently unstoppable force; but this uprising is itself the result of Considine, with the help of the 'schools', overthrowing, subverting, or dominating the legitimate rulers of Africa. What the colonial powers of Europe see only as the Black Peril turns out to be -- an Englishman's conquest of Africa.

It is but one of many ambiguities in this strangely ambiguous novel, which has no hard lines, only opposing perspectives. And perhaps that is part of the point. The story is about the nature of power, which, as it is found among us, is inevitably ambiguous. If you only see power, you will never get more than ambiguity.

With The Greater Trumps, Williams seems to hit his stride as a novelist; in some ways it is the most cleanly structure of his books, and we start getting more realistic characters given more realistic characterization, without any sacrifice of the more Williams-ish aspects. Technically, it works very well and I think the description of the snowstorm is some of Williams's most impressive descriptive work. I think it ends up being somewhere in the middle of Williams's novels in terms of quality, however; novelistic techniques are employed better in the later novels, and The Place of the Lion's portmanteau Neoplatonism is a far richer source of theme and imagery of the Williams-ish side than the Tarot are or could be. I had noted that the latter's Neoplatonism also helps to give an appropriate context for Williams's tendency to describe things in terms of abstractions, one in which that abstracting makes perfect sense; that's missing here, and the lack is sometimes felt. Nonetheless, there is much that is engaging about the work.

Nancy Coningsby is likely to marry Henry Lee, not entirely to the approval of her father, Lothair Coningsby, because Henry is gypsy and Mr. Coningsby has a prejudice against gypsies. Mr. Coningsby has recently inherited a friend's collection of card decks (a very disappointing inheritance), but Henry discovers that one of these decks of cards is the deck of cards, the Tarot pack that tracks and manipulates the underlying order of the world. This Tarot pack does this because it is linked to a collection of moving images that were created by someone attempting to capture an image of that underlying order; this collection Henry's family has been protecting. The lesser suits of the Tarot pack track, and give power, over the material elements of the world; the higher suits give these elements forms, and the Greater Trumps are the ultimate principles of the whole world-order. Misusing them will inevitably lead to grave consequences, and setting things right requires uncovering something about the card that both is and is not a Greater Trump, the zero card, The Fool, which is linked to the central image that does not move and yet is everywhere in the dance of images.

The story takes place at Christmas, and this is quite important, although some parts of this thread are the weakest parts of the novel. There is a recurring phrase, "adore the mystery of love", from John Byrom's Christmas hymn, "Christians, Awake":

Christians, awake, salute the happy morn
Whereon the Savior of the world was born.
Rise to adore the mystery of love
Which hosts of angels chanted from above;
With them the joyful tidings first begun
Of God Incarnate and the Virgin's Son.

And Joanna, the crazy relative of the Lees who thinks that she is the goddess Isis, finds the 'child' she has been looking for in Nancy, who is sort of the 'Messias' for the events of the story. But the Christmas side of it is not as well developed as it could be, I think. I think we run into the problem that Williams, again, likes to talk about important things in abstractions, and Christmas is, of all holy days, the one that is least amenable to this sort of abstracting; it is not about abstractions but about Mother and Child (the Mother and the Child). The Egyptian mythology aspect to it, which links the Tarot, traditionally said to capture Egyptian wisdom, with the gypsies, who get their name according to folk etymology from Egypt, works much, much better; the myth of Isis even fits better with Christmas than anything the novel does with Christmas itself. This is the second time I've read the novel, and I'm still not entirely sure where Williams was going with the Christmas angle.

I confess I didn't like some of the characters so much in this novel, either, although Mr. Coningsby really grew on me; I suppose I also find it amusing that Mr. Coningsby, the representation of rational intellect in this work, is a peevish, obstinate, and unimaginative person who has difficulty understanding anything that is going on and who keeps wanting to deliver witty retorts but suffers from perpetual esprit d'escalier. I also like that nobody hates him for any of this; it's just who he is as a member of the family. Nancy and Henry aren't bad, but I didn't really get them as The Lovers, and Sybil is sometimes excellent and sometimes just dull. But the story itself is probably the most 'exciting' of Williams's stories -- it's a story where a lot of interesting things happen, and it has some of Williams's best descriptive work.

Favorite Passages: From Shadows of Ecstasy:

"If you can seize Considine," the king said, -- "I say, if you can -- it will not be easy. For the greatest energy is in him, he and he alone is the centre of all the schools; it is he who holds power, either by the initiation or by the sleep, over the royalties of Africa; he is the union of their armies; without him the energies of the adepts will be divided, the generals will quarrel, the armies will fight. I tell you this, because you have saved me twice, and because I do not think mankind can be saved without intellect and without God." (p. 532)

From The Greater Trumps:

The cry shook the golden light; it vanished. Amabel, gazing, saw Miss Coningsby in the hall and the old woman lying in a heap at the foot of the stairs, and before she had time to move she saw the other visitors coming flying down them. They cam very swiftly but as if they also came in order; the lovers first, still hand in hand, and after them Mr. Coningsby, still anxiously watching Nancy, and thinking as fast as he could that he must keep in touch with her, whatever happened. And after him again came Ralph and Stephen, distracted from their mutual hostility, but with all their strength ready and vigilant. The three great orders of grace and intellect and corporeal strength, in those immature servants of their separate degrees, gathered round the place where Sybil kneeled by Joanna, and the search within and the search without were joined. (p. 748)

Recommendation: Recommended, although neither is Williams at his strongest.

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Charles Williams, Charles Williams Omnibus, Oxford City Press (Oxford: 2012).