Two New Poem Drafts, Two Poem Re-Drafts

My Love, I Dreamed I Knew You Yesterday

My love, I dreamed I knew you yesterday:
the sun was raising crops from seed to grain,
the wind was walking lightly down the way
as clouds drew nigh that rumbled, big with rain,
and, soft, our eyes were looking far away
to futures never born; and then the pain
broke softly on my heart, like clouds of gray,
and thus the dream began to fade and wane.

Eden

The Word gave word to man;
the Adam woke with joy
and named the world anew
to humanize it through,
across creation's span,
as if it were a toy;
each word reflected true.

Crowns

One early morn I walked a road
past ancient oak trees bent and bowed;
the grass was dewed, the sky was dark,
the breezes played with shadows stark.
Afar arose a mountain high
with vastness sheer that touched the sky;
behind, the sun shed glory bright:
a shadow-king with crown of light.

My mind afar went walking, too.
I thought of me, I thought of you,
the wishing hopes that never found
a way to grow in thorny ground.
Astute aurora slowly spawned;
melancholy burst the dawn
like tales I've heard since I was born
of peasant king with crown of thorn.

In life we walk a darkling night,
and peace is rare without a fight.
But faces through the years grown worn
still memories with hopes adorn,
like sunrise red. Our shadowed mind
will someday leave our fears behind,
when elders throw their bodies down
before the Throne, and cast their crowns.

Certainties

The heart still beats in Peter's hall.
The world still turns upon the cross.
In silent gardens shadows fall
on leaves that do not heed their loss.
In holy skies the stars still burst
and milky still the stream is seen;
for sweetest light the mind still thirsts
as moonlight lends the lake its sheen.
How fair, how pure, the evenings are
that bring a respite from the day!
And, sure and safe and lit by star,
the road of Christ lies where it lay.

Exemplary Ritual Activity

Confucius's belief that sociopolitical harmony could be achieved without force, without action, is one of the cornerstones of his philosophical vision. Law and coercive punishment, while perhaps necessary evils, simply do not promote human morality effectively, nor do they create a social order based on mutual respect. Rather, an exemplary person and exemplary ritual activity are much more helpful guides. According to Confucius, without coercion of any sort they have the power to inspire in others model social behavior, born not of fear but of voluntary respect for others. In short, a man of virtue--the North Star--using ritual expression helps promote among the people a sense of shared values, creating thereby a strong communal identity, or what one scholar called "a fiduciary community based on mutual trust."

Daniel K. Gardner, Zhu Xi's Reading of the Analects, Cambridge UP (New York: 2003), p. 123. The quotation is from Tu Wei-ming's Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Chung-yung.

Brightness

...[W]hen we see men devoted to worldly wisdom and far from belief in Jesus Christ brought out of the depth of their error and called to an acknowledgment of the true Light, it is undoubtedly the brightness of the Divine grace that is at work: and whatever of new light illumines the darkness of their hearts, comes from the rays of the same star: so that it should both move with wonder, and going before lead to the adoration of God the minds which it visited with its splendour. But if with careful thought we wish to see how their threefold kind of gift is also offered by all who come to Christ with the foot of faith, is not the same offering repeated in the hearts of true believers? For he that acknowledges Christ the King of the universe brings gold from the treasure of his heart: he that believes the Only-begotten of God to have united man's true nature to Himself, offers myrrh; and he that confesses Him in no wise inferior to the Father's majesty, worships Him in a manner with incense.

St. Leo the Great, Sermon 36 on the Epiphany

Whom Stars and Seraphs Sing

Epiphany
by Christina Rossetti

'Lord Babe, if Thou art He
We sought for patiently,
Where is Thy court?
Hither may prophecy and star resort;
Men heed not their report.' –
'Bow down and worship, righteous man:
This Infant of a span
Is He man sought for since the world began!' –
'Then, Lord, accept my gold, too base a thing
For Thee, of all kings King.' –

'Lord Babe, despite Thy youth
I hold Thee of a truth
Both Good and Great:
But wherefore dost Thou keep so mean a state,
Low-lying desolate?' –
'Bow down and worship, righteous seer:
The Lord our God is here
Approachable, Who bids us all draw near.' –
'Wherefore to Thee I offer frankincense,
Thou Sole Omnipotence.' –

'But I have only brought
Myrrh; no wise afterthought
Instructed me
To gather pearls or gems, or choice to see
Coral or ivory.' –
'Not least thine offering proves thee wise:
For myrrh means sacrifice,
And He that lives, this Same is He that dies.' –
'Then here is myrrh: alas, yea woe is me
That myrrh befitteth Thee.' –

Myrrh, frankincense, and gold:
And lo from wintry fold
Good-will doth bring
A Lamb, the innocent likeness of this King
Whom stars and seraphs sing:
And lo the bird of love, a Dove,
Flutters and coos above:
And Dove and Lamb and Babe agree in love: –
Come all mankind, come all creation hither,
Come, worship Christ together.

Three Gifts They Bear Away

The Epiphany
by St. Robert Southwell

To blaze the rising of this glorious sun,
A glittering star appeareth in the East,
Whose sight to pilgrim-toils three sages won
To seek the light they long had in request;
And by this star to nobler star they pass,
Whose arms did their desired sun embrace.

Stall was the sky wherein these planets shined,
And want the cloud that did eclipse their rays;
Yet through this cloud their light did passage find,
And pierced these sages' hearts by secret ways,
Which made them know the Ruler of the skies,
By infant tongue and looks of babish eyes.

Heaven at her light, Earth blusheth at her pride,
And of their pomp these peers ashamed be;
Their crowns, their robes, their train they set aside,
When God's poor cottage, clothes, and crew, they
All glorious things their glory now despise,
Sith God contempt, doth more then glory prize.

Three gifts they bring, three gifts they bear away;
For incense, myrrh and gold, faith, hope and love;
And with their gifts the givers' hearts do stay,
Their mind from Christ no parting can remove;
His humble state, his stall, his poor retinue,
They fancy more than all their rich revenue.

Brownson's Traditionary Argument for God's Existence

I've been intending for a while -- actually at least a year and a half -- to discuss Orestes Brownson's infinite intelligible arguments for the existence of God. Infinite intelligible arguments are an often overlooked and thus under-studied kind of argument for God's existence, based on the idea that the intellect is capable of handling infinites of various kinds, and concluding that the some infinite intelligible must actually exist; very few people have done all that much work on the varieties and structures of such arguments, which is a particular problem given that there are a number of rather different flavors in getting from first step to conclusion. They are found in scattered forms prior to the early modern period -- Aquinas gives one, for instance -- but they became much more important due to the Cartesians, especially Malebranche, and enjoyed a sort of popularity in some circles in the nineteenth century, before fading out of memory almost completely. Part of the hold-up in doing some posts on the subject is that Brownson's early arguments, in his Unitarian phase, are based on Transcendentalist principles, whereas the later arguments, in his Catholic phase, are not, and indeed are generally linked to important criticisms of Transcendentalist thought. I hope I can get to something on them at some point this year.

But Brownson has other arguments, and his favored alternative is another kind of argument that is often overlooked and under-studied, despite having had a brief period of extraordinary popularity in the nineteenth century: traditionary arguments. As with infinite intelligible arguments, there are a number of very different kinds of traditionary arguments for the existence of God, and for a similar reason -- churches were very suspicious of them, which led those who were favorable to such arguments to rework them in different ways in the attempt to avoid the theological objections. Brownson's is a fairly straightforward causal argument, and is nicely developed in his April 1852 review of a book by Francis William Newman. The following is a first rough attempt to lay out the essential argument.

1. The intelligible, simply in itself, is not known by the senses.
2. Nonetheless, we human beings do not have pure immediate intuition of the intelligible to form a belief, but require some sensible representation by signs in a language.
3. The existence of God, if true, is a purely intelligible truth.
4. There are people who believe that God exists.
5. To believe that God exists requires that this be sensibly represented to us by signs in a language. (from 1, 2, and 3)
6. This sensible representation cannot be from oneself, but must be from someone else (a teacher).
7. If someone else represents it to us, they must either have had immediate nonsensible intuition of it (and thus by (2) not be human) or have had it sensibly represented to them by a teacher.
8. Therefore there is either a first teacher from whom human beings receive the means for believing the existence of God, or there must be an infinite series of teachers.
9. It is absurd to conclude that language for articulating the idea of God's existence has come to us through an infinite series of teachers.
10. Therefore there is a first teacher of God's existence to human beings, who had an immediate and purely intelligible intuition of God's existence.
11. This we call God.

The argument in its basic form is thus an argument that because people believe that God exists, God exists. But this is not because of a general property of belief, but a question of how human beings could possibly form any notion of divine existence to believe or not in the first place. Any answer to such a question has to involve language, but language is something human beings receive from teachers. There are a number of different ways one could go to get from here to God, but Brownson sets his up very deliberately as a cosmological argument. (He is beginning with Lamennais, the usual nineteenth-century source for traditionary arguments for God's existence, and the reason the argument focuses on language, but he is explicitly modifying Lamennais's argument in order to make the argument much more robust. While it's not quite so obvious in the original as I've represented it above, it seems pretty clear that he is modifying his traditionary argument on Aquinas, probably the First Way in particular.) The obvious opposing position would be to hold that the language required simply grew up gradually among human beings -- but, of course, this is more radical than it appears, since it requires a rejection of (2) -- if we developed the relevant language, which is just (in this context) sensible signs expressing concepts, it must be possible for us to get the concept from a source other than someone teaching us the language that already expresses that concept. An account would be needed of how this happens, and thus why (2) should be regarded as wrong.

In any case, the argument obviously has the same structure with causal arguments involving infinite regress, like the First Way. It also has an interesting complementary relationship with infinite intelligible arguments, which no doubt explains why Brownson puts them together. If one thinks of actual belief as intellectual reflection involving sensible signs, the infinite intelligible argument focuses on the former (intellectual reflection), while the traditionary argument focuses on the latter (sensible signs), and in both cases the claim is that this particular belief, that God exists, could not arise in us if God did not, in fact, exist. Brownson's own brief discussion of the relation between the two is somewhat unclear, in part because he is trying to avoid assimilation to Lamennais's condemned argument, and thus needs further study. The simplest way to read him seems to be that he takes proofs to be of different kinds -- the traditionary argument proves its conclusion, but does not do so in the highest way, which the infinite intelligible argument does. But, again, this needs further study.

It's a much more complicated question, to which I do not currently have any answer, as to how the traditionary argument relates to other theistic arguments that depend on language, but in which language is understood somewhat differently -- such as Berkeley's visual language argument or Augustine's interior Teacher argument. A full discussion would certainly require looking at this.

Holy Name

...[N]ames given to men by God always signify some gratuitous gift bestowed on them by Him; thus it was said to Abraham (Genesis 17:5): "Thou shalt be called Abraham; because I have made thee a father of many nations": and it was said to Peter (Matthew 16:18): "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church." Since, therefore, this prerogative of grace was bestowed on the Man Christ that through Him all men might be saved, therefore He was becomingly named Jesus, i.e. Saviour: the angel having foretold this name not only to His Mother, but also to Joseph, who was to be his foster-father.

St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 3.37.2