Music on My Mind

 

Sissel Kyrkjebø, "Ave Maris Stella".

Aurelius Ambrosianus

 Today is the feast of St. Ambrose of Milan, Doctor of the Church. From his work On the Holy Spirit (Book II, Chapter 12):

Consider meanwhile whether you can say that the Spirit effects all things which the Father effects; for you cannot deny that the Father effects those things which the Holy Spirit effects; otherwise the Father does not effect all things, if He effects not those things which the Spirit also effects. But if the Father also effects those things which the Spirit effects, since the Spirit divides His operations, according to His own will, you must of necessity say, either that what the Spirit divides He divides according to His own will, against the will of God the Father; or if you say that the Father wills the same that the Holy Spirit wills, you must of necessity confess the oneness of the divine will and operation, even if you do it unwillingly, and, if not with the heart, at least with the mouth. 

But if the Holy Spirit is of one will and operation with God the Father, He is also of one substance, since the Creator is known by His works. So, then, it is the same Spirit, he says, the same Lord, the same God. And if you say Spirit, He is the same; and if you say Lord, He is the same; and if you say God, He is the same. Not the same, so that Himself is Father, Himself Son, Himself Spirit...; but because both the Father and the Son are the same Power. He is, then, the same in substance and in power, for there is not in the Godhead either the confusion of Sabellius nor the division of Arius, nor any earthly and bodily change.

The Roman governor of Aemilia-Liguria, whose capital was Mediolanum or Milan, he was only a catechumen when he was forcibly made bishop by the people. Ambrose tried to get out of it, but the Emperor thought he made a great choice for bishop, and he was baptized, confirmed, ordained, and elevated to bishop all in the same week. 

Inexhaustible Truth and Unlimited Goodness

 ...man's wish is to know inexhaustible truth and to enjoy unlimited goodness. But truth in this world is exhaustible, and goodness is limited; neither, then, can satisfy the desires of man's nature. Man's nature is bestowed on him by the Lord of Heaven, and he would hardly have bestowed it on him to no purpose. He is bound to cause it to be satisfied, and he is bound to satisfy it completely in the next life.

Matteo Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, Lancashire and Hu Kuo-chen, trs., Menard, ed., Institute of Jesuit Sources (Boston: 2016), Chapter 6, section 383, p. 265.

Abyss & Sea 20

 19

When Disan arrived home, Baia was out, so he used the time officially to transfer his status from Residence aboard the flagship to Residence again at Neyat Sor. He had hardly finished when Baia returned and he greeted her gladly.

"My queen," he said, and kissed her.

"My king," she said in response. "How was the Great Council?"

Disan sighed. "Troubling. We will have to discuss it later. How have things been here?"

"Well enough," said Baia. "There are still places that have not fully recovered from the earthquake, and I have been out and about to see them. And Asaia is still moody and I do not know why."

They had a supper together as Disan told of all that had happened while he was at the Porphyry Mountain. Baia listened somberly, and when he finished, she said, "It has reached the point that I feel that I no longer understand anything that is happening. We seem to be planning for a war with no identifiable enemy. King murders king. Strange powers from the Court of Night move events from the Porphyry Mountain. And who can understand what the Powers are doing?"

"Yes," said Disan, "but I think it is worse than that, because it is like coming to recognize that you never understood anything at all, that all that you thought was true is as false as counterfeit coin."

After a few days at Neyat Sor, there was report of significant delay at one of the major shipyards in mainland Sorea, so Disan went to inspect the situation personally. The problem was an ordinary logistical error, so it was not difficult to solve, but it was time-consuming and tedious, and it was all the more tiring by a late cold spell with a strong breeze. Because of this, on his way back to Neyat Sor, Disan and his guard stopped at an inn for an afternoon meal before continuing onward. The innkeeper seemed a jolly old fellow, and the inn common room was quite busy, with a bustle of conversation and laughter, with singing and even some dancing. Disan sat in a chair by the fire while his men ate nearby. It was a comfortable chair and he felt a little drowsy. Then he snapped completely awake, not at first knowing why.

The first thing he then noticed was that the fire was not leaping. It had not died down. It was not moving at all. The second thing he noticed, some dim some sense of which was probably what had actually brought him to attention in the first place, was that the entire room had gone silent. All his men were gone and the common room was completely empty, except for the innkeeper, who sat in a chair opposite him. But he was no innkeeper.

"Do you know who we are, O Disan, son of Rezan, son of Belan, King of Sorea?" asked the innkeeper who was not an innkeeper. 

"There are stories that one of the Powers, who is never given a name, shows forth in the appearance of an Old Man who meets travelers along the road. And I think we have met before in a cavern across the sea."

"Yes," said the Old Man. He rose and put his hand under Disan's chin and peered into his face with eyes that seemed to pierce through everything. Disan, who as king was not used to people touching him without permission, found it extremely uncomfortable.

Suddenly the Old Man dropped his hand and returned to his chair. "You have brushed the abyss, but you are not yet corrupted. Yet you dally. We gave you word by the Seven Sisters that you were to build a fleet."

"We have been building a fleet," said Disan.

"You were told to build a fleet but not for the abomination. We are also not blind. You have been temporizing, biding your time, hoping to stay in some middle path between the two demands that have been placed on you. And yourself have now met the abomination, and yet still you seek an irenic path. We tell you again, O King of Sorea. Judgment comes. Destruction is at the door. It cannot be avoided. Act accordingly."

Disan stared a moment into the unchanging fire. Then he said, "Is it really so impossible to avoid it? Surely you have other ways?"

"There are none."

"Do you not owe us anything at all? You called upon us in the War of Night and we came to your aid, and delivered to you the Court of Night."

The Old Man's grave face seemed to take on a faint cast of amusement. "Did you indeed? Were you the Golden Dragon who fought the Black Dragon for nine days and nine nights? Were you the unicorns who bore the brunt of the sorceries of the Court, immortals dying by the hundreds to save mortals, each one more precious and wise in lore than an entire human civilization? Were you the leocorns whose lion-like roars burst through the enchantments of the doors? Did you lay out the strategies and battle plans thousands of years before? Did you summon the great nations of the world to the right time and the right place? You could not even follow the instructions you were given. We do not deny that you contributed, as you were obligated to do by the Orikhalh Tablets, and for all that it was your duty, we have stayed our hand because of it in matters in which we were within our rights to be severe. But do you dare look at us in our face and proclaim that you do not deserve to be judged now, though you had aided us in a thousand wars before?"

Disan said nothing, and the two simply sat there for a brief moment in silence. Then the Old Man spoke again.

"We are not here to justify ourselves to you, for we are the Powers that govern the world and you have no authority to demand a justification from us. We are here to give you a message again, the gravest yet. But it seems to us that you will need more than just the message to motivate you, and we are not averse to giving it. Hear then the true story of what you call the War of Night, for the Court of Night was in no way the enemy that the Powers fought by means of it.

"In years past that are beyond all tally, the world was very different from the way it is now. In those days we raised up to assist us the most ancient races: dragon and unicorn, khalkythra and phoenix, griffin and leocorn, and many others for which you have no name. To you we gave the Gift of Fire, but they received Gifts without number. But in this time, creatures of the abyss entered in among us. They have no shape and no form. They cannot be seen or heard unless they wish to be so, and then they have merely the appearance that they wish to have. They are in this world only as a great emptiness and an all-devouring void. The greatest of these became known in the most ancient tongues as the Keeper of the Door, for it was through him that all the others came into the world. We called the most ancient races to war, and they were beaten back, although at great price. Many were lost, either corrupted or destroyed, no trace of their histories and their sciences and their arts remaining at all, except as reflected in the memories of those of the most ancient races that yet survive. Therefore we took thought for the day when the powers of the abyss would return, and we raised up the Court of Night and the Court of Day, and gave them Gifts of Dream and of Darkness, of Air and of Light, of Water and of Metal and of Wood. Co-equal and glorious they were in the beginning, mighty and splendid like a vision at the edge of your mind. There was no difference between dream and waking for them; what they dreamed, they made, and what they made had the powers of dream. Throughout the world they expanded, both great, both beautiful, and both filled with wonder. And then the Keeper returned.

"No less devastating was this war than the previous. But in the end the two Courts in alliance defeated him, they themselves, by their own wisdom and power. Their armies cornered the creatures of the abyss, dying by the thousands, and seven virgin priestesses, three from the Court of Night and four from the Court of Day, consecrated a stone with water and oil and light, sealing the Keeper behind it so that he could not enter the world. It was a terrible end; the creatures of the abyss tore them from within, and their blood poured out of their hearts. But they had foreseen this; they had begun the rite knowing that they would not survive it. With blood they made their final consecration and died, and the Keeper was locked out of the world. It was a great deed, but we warned them that their seal could not be flawless, and that the Keeper was not truly gone. Therefore both Courts vowed to guard the sevenfold seal. Both were devastated by the war, but as the Court of Night was the one that was least in ruins, the sevenfold seal came to them. And guard it they did.

"Over time both Courts grew proud, and they began to quarrel. And in those days, and not coincidentally, the Keeper found how to whisper through the flaws of the sevenfold seal, and he whispered in the ears and in the dreams of the Court of Night. Long were the years the refused to listen, but soon he whispered to them means by which they might have the advantage over the Court of Day, and in their pride they deemed that they could make just discrimination in the midst of temptation, and fell into the snare. Great were their victories over the Court of Day, and their corruption spread, and it was at its deepest when they seemed strongest. But the Court of Day was not weak, even in its disadvantage, and the two Courts ground each other into fragments.

"It was in those days that we came to the first of your kind, cold and wet and huddling in the mud and the caves, and we gave to you the Gift of Fire, which set all of your abilities to an inspired blaze. We selected some of you and gave you lesser gifts, this very land, the law of the Orikhalh Tablets, the pacts and the covenants, that you might grow great and wise. You are kin to fire, and fire has this quality, that kept in its hearth it is infinite boon, but when it breaks free it destroys all things, and the Orikhalh Tablets and the conditions of the pacts and the covenants we gave to you to be a hearth. In the meantime, the fragment of the Court of Night that continued the guard on the sevenfold seal grew more and more terrible, and it became clear that they were but puppets of another power. Therefore we summoned again the most ancient races that remained, with the remnants of the Court of Day and your grandfathers, and many others who would hear us. Thus the Court of Night, once glorious and beautiful beyond all dreaming, fell to judgment.

"But in that very hour, you too began to fall. We told your grandfathers to take nothing from the Court of Night without our permission, but they saw the wonders there and their hearts burned with covetousness. Foolishly thinking we did not see, they looted the Court, smuggling out what struck their fancy, including the sevenfold seal. Some of them laid their hands upon that holy stone, and through it the Keeper spoke to them, promising them all the dreams of their heart.

"Still we held our peace. There is one rule that governs all nations in this world, that those who rise will one day fall, and your weakness showed that you had already begun to decline behind the splendor of your appearance. Already you were beginning to overspill your hearth. Soon you would spread across the world in an uncontrolled blaze until you burned yourself out. The Orikhalh Tablets and the conditions of the pacts and the covenants were increasingly violated. We would have foiled your greatest ambitions, to preserve other good things in the world, and because of your oathbreaking and unfaithfulness, but other than that we might nonetheless have let you undergo your natural decline, but for one thing. Playing with powers you did not understand, acting with a hubris beyond even that of the Court of Night, you betrayed your allegiances and your vows before Illimitable Heaven, thinking to defy the Powers that govern the world, and you began to break the sevenfold seal. You said before that you delivered to us the Court of Night. No, but you joined forces with our enemy, and the enemy of everything else in this world.

"The sevenfold seal was finally sealed by seven voluntary sacrifices of blood in rites of consecration; it can be unsealed by seven voluntary sacrifices of blood in rites of desecration. Four of the seven sacrifices are already undone by the sacrifice of victims who were enticed by paying their families in gold and orikhalh or in other services. The rites of desecration required are difficult for your kind, and you are not a people much inclined to die, but you are getting more skilled at your wickedness, and  the rites will be finished at some point this year. The sevenfold seal will be broken entirely and the Keeper and his brothers will walk the earth again.

"In the meantime, we have not been idle, but we have played a game of care and precision. We have chosen the time for the seal to be broken, when a final set of traps have been set that will end the threat of the Keeper and his brethren. It is a time well into the future, and we do not give you permission to change it. Nothing in the world will stop us from preventing the seal from being broken before its time, and we will certainly not allow the Keeper to come forth with a faithless race of Fire as his puppets, turning our own gifts against us. Even now he uses you as shields, thinking that this provides him protection. It does not. The people of this realm will be destroyed, O King. But we would like, if we can, to save something of you. To that end, we have moved with great caution. The Keeper already has more influence than you know; already the substance of things is slowly being eaten away. We have had to restrict our actions carefully lest he discover too quickly what we intend. In the Porphyry Mountain we no longer directly act at all, and elsewhere only with the subtlest of touches. We spoke to you first in foreign lands, where his influence does not yet extend. Our second message we gave to the Seven Sisters long ago. We have reminded you of your duty in dreams. But now you have met the Keeper and he begins to suspect the nature of our actions, although he does not yet know the whole of it. So take the fact that we speak to you face to face on your own soil be a sign to you that all things soon will come to an end. This is our last message to you personally: Act the king, O king; summon your people and flee. The longer you delay, the less likely it is that any of you will survive."

The Old Man rose, but Disan spread his hands. "What can I possibly say to them? They will not understand. They will think I am mad."

The Old Man looked down at him with something like pity. "And if they do, what of it? Your people have brought judgment on themselves by the arrogance playing with what they do not understand. They cannot be saved except by taking the path of salvation, even if they do not understand it. Your task is to summon your people and flee, even if you do it alone. Wait too long and you will save no one at all."

The whole room became pitch black, and there was a considerable sound of stumbling and scuffling and swearing in the dark. Then one of Disan's guards happened upon the door and opened it. Light flooded in. Blinking against the sudden light, Disan and his men looked around, dazed, finding themselves not in an inn at all but in an old country barn.

When Disan returned to Neyat Sor, his first words to Baia were, "We have run out of time."

Fortnightly Book, December 5

Of Frances Burney's novels, I have already done her first and second novels, Evelina and Cecilia, both excellent, so let's do her third novel, Camilla: Or, A Picture of Youth, published in 1796. The novel apparently gave her some difficulties; when King George III asked her how much time it had taken to write it, she replied, "All my time, sir!" Camilla went through several revisions, and then she didn't like the criticism got when published, so she attempted to revise it again in a second edition (which took some work, because the publisher was reluctant to do it), and then, unsatisfied still, began reworking it for a third edition toward the end of her life. For significant periods, she had problems with respect to the copyright, having lost control of it. The version I have, the Oxford World's Classics, gives the 1796 first edition version, with grammatical and spelling revisions from the 1802 second edition (with more substantive revisions relegated to notes).

Given that it is a sizable tome and that my schedule is heavily unpredictable for the next several weeks, this 'fortnightly book' will likely take three and perhaps even four weeks. But when I am done with this, I will have completed the three explicitly mentioned novels by Burney and Edgeworth in the famous passage from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey:

Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

We later learn that John Thorpe doesn't have a high opinion of it; he calls it, " that other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant" and "it is the horridest nonsense you can imagine; there is nothing in the world in it but an old man’s playing at see-saw and learning Latin; upon my soul there is not". Condemnation by John Thorpe is, of course, a high literary recommendation in itself.

Nicolaus Stenonius

 Today is the memorial of Blessed Nicolas Steno. Niels Steensen was born into a Lutheran family in Copenhagen in 1638. (By the Julian calendar, which Denmark still used, he was born on January 1; by the Gregorian calendar we use today, he was born on January 11.) He had a hard childhood; he was a sickly boy, and thus often had to be isolated, and his father died when he was six. He went into medicine at the University of Copenhagen, and then set off on what can only be considered a lifetime journey, because he spent practically the rest of his life moving from place to place. He became an active researcher in the newly developing subfield of anatomy studying the lymphatic system; another name for the parotid duct is the Stensen duct. While broadly Cartesian himself, he did some of the early work in refuting common Cartesian ideas about the body -- e.g., he contributed to showing that the pineal gland did not have the function that Descartes attributed it and to showing that Harvey was more right than Descartes about the heart. In 1665, he made his way to Florence, where he became the physician to Grand Duke Ferdinando II de'Medici. While there, Steno, dissecting a shark, noted that the teeth were very much like certain kinds of rock formations, glossopetrae. This led him to an extensive investigation of the phenomenon in which we find one kind of rock embedded in another. He also was doing extensive anatomical research on muscles. While he was still engaged in these investigations, he saw a Corpus Christi procession. He had been thinking over his religious views in light of some of the discussions he had had while traveling; discussions with people like Bossuet had led him to conclude that the Lutheran account of the Eucharist was incorrect, and had been reading the Church Fathers, and, watching the eucharistic procession wondered if maybe Catholics were right after all. In 1667, on All Soul's Day, he was received into the Church.

In 1669, he published the Dissertationis prodromus de solido intra solidum naturaliter contento. It is one of the most remarkable and important scientific works of the seventeenth century, and all the more so when one considers that it is only the introduction to a more detailed work that was planned but never completed. It grew out of his thinking about the glossopetrae and the further investigations that this had led him to undertake. The problem Steno posed to himself was a very abstract one, and is that which is given in the title: how to explain the phenomenon of a solid body enclosed by a natural process within a different solid body, which is a specific version of an even more general problem, how, from a given substance produced by natural processes, to determine the place and manner of its production. Steno, of course, quickly saw that solids enclosed within solids would have to be explained by the solids previously being liquid, and then, by considering a wide variety of different examples, proposed his three principles:

(1) "If a solid body is enclosed on all sides by another solid body, of the two bodies that one first became hard which in the mutual contact, expresses on its own surface the properties of the other surface." (We would usually state this principle in the reverse direction, using impression rather than expression.)

(2) "If a solid substance is in every way like another solid substance, not only as regards the conditions of surface, but also as regards the inner arrangement of parts and particles, it will also be like it as regards the manner and place of production, if you except those conditions of place which are found time and again in some place to furnish neither any advantage nor disadvantage to the production of body."

(3) "If a solid body has been produced according to the laws of nature, it has been produced from a fluid."

On the basis of these three principles, you can solve a wide variety of problems. Given the abstract approach, these are of all kinds, but the one that is most significant is that on this basis you can build an accurate account of fossilization, thus setting paleontology on a sure footing. Nor is this all. In the course of the discussions of the Prodromus -- which remember is just Steno laying out the basic summaries of his research as an introduction -- he also establishes basic principles that made it possible to study geological strata and a principle of crystallography that is often seen as one of the foundations of the field, Steno's Law. Perhaps no one else in history has ever managed to advance the geological sciences so much in such a short space.

The full dissertation was perhaps never published because Steno's life underwent a series of disruptions. Ferdinando died in 1670, and, while the Medicis continued to welcome him, for a number of reasons Steno ended up back in Denmark. He had repeatedly tried for professorships, but it had often not worked out, and now he joined the University of Copenhagen as a professor of anatomy. It was not a particularly great time for him. He had previously made a lot of friends in the region, but as it happens, they liked Steno the relaxed secularish Lutheran much more than they liked Steno the earnest Catholic convert. And a Catholic in Copenhagen was a lightning rod for religious controversy; he soon regretted not staying in Florence, so much so that he resigned in 1674 and went back. He was made tutor to the son of Cosimo III, and decided (perhaps due to his recent unpleasant episode in the realm of religious controversy) to do an intensive study of theology. He was ordained in 1675 and the next year was made the titular bishop of Titopolis and appointed Apostolic Vicar of the Nordic Missions by Pope Innocent XI, thus becoming a missionary bishop. It's sometimes said that he did no scientific work after this. This is not strictly true (and is probably due to over-reading a comment by Leibniz, with whom he had had an argument over religious matters); we still see Steno off and on doing scientific work, but as bishop he was an extremely busy man, and none of this scientific research (mostly on the brain) ever quite reached published form. He did publish a number of theological works.

Most of his work, however, was practical; he was active in attempting reform abuses in the Church. He lived a life of voluntary poverty, dressed in a threadbare cloak, living on bread and beer and fasting several days a week. He eventually fell ill, and insisted that his body should be shipped back to Florence, which it was. 

From the opening of the Prodromus:

Travellers into unknown realms frequently find, as they hasten on over rough mountain paths toward a summit city, that it seems very near to them when first they descry it, whereas manifold turnings may wear even their hope to weariness. For they behold only the nearest peaks, while the things which are hidden from them by the interposition of those same peaks, whether heights of hills, or depths of valleys, or levels of plains, far and away surpass their guesses; since by flattering themselves they measure the intervening distances by their desire.

So, and not otherwise, is it with those who proceed to true knowledge by way of experiments; for as soon as certain tokens of the unknown truth have become clear to them, they are of a mind that the entire matter shall be straightway disclosed. And they will never be able to form in advance a due estimate of the time which is necessary for loosing that knotted chain of difficulties which, by coming forth one by one, and from concealment, as it were, delay, by the constant interposition of obstacles, them that are hastening toward the end. The beginning of the task merely reveals certain common, and commonly known, difficulties, whereas the matters which are comprised in these difficulties—now untruths which must be overthrown, now truths which must be established; sometimes dark places which must be illumined, and again, unknown facts which must be revealed shall rarely be disclosed by any one before the clew of his search shall lead him thither....

The plaque commemorating him in the Basilica of San Lorenzo:

The Brook Its Frozen Architecture Makes

 I had hoped to have a new installment of Abyss & Sea today, but I don't think that's happening; perhaps tomorrow, if I have time. Instead, here's a sonnet by Helen Hunt Jackson.

December
by Helen Hunt Jackson

The lakes of ice gleam bluer than the lakes
 Of water 'neath the summer sunshine gleamed:
Far fairer than when placidly it streamed,
The brook its frozen architecture makes,
And under bridges white its swift way takes.
Snow comes and goes as messenger who dreamed
Might linger on the road; or one who deemed
His message hostile gently for their sakes
Who listened might reveal it by degrees.
We gird against the cold of winter wind
Our loins now with mighty bands of sleep,
In longest, darkest nights take rest and ease,
And every shortening day, as shadows creep
O'er the brief noontide, fresh surprises find.