Sui Juris Churches XXIV: The Latin Church

(on sui juris churches in general)

Liturgical Family: Latin

Primary Liturgical Language: Latin

Juridical Status: Patriarchal

Approximate Population (to Nearest 100 Million): 1.2 billion

Brief History: The Latin Church is one of the largest religious institutions, if not the largest, in the history of the world. It is often noted that it is many times larger than all of the Eastern Catholic churches put together, but this is still somewhat misleading. If all Eastern churches of Apostolic provenance were put together -- if, in addition to the Eastern Catholic churches, all of the Eastern Orthodox, and all of the Oriental Orthodox, and all of the Assyrian Church of the East were to enter the Catholic Communion -- the Latin Church would still be more than three times larger than all of the Eastern churches put together. It is immense, truly and unquestionably global, and it has all the advantages, and all the disadvantages, of immensity.

The proper name for the church is the Latin Church. Colloquially it is often called the Roman Catholic Church or (much more rarely) the Western Catholic Church. But 'Western Catholic' has never caught on, and 'Roman Catholic' in all official documents of the Holy See itself always refers to the entire Catholic communion, never to the Latin Church alone. And 'Latin Church' fits: it is the Latin Church, no further clarification required.

The Christian community in Rome arose very, very early; the earliest mentions of it that we know of, in the New Testament itself, already indicate that it was reasonably well established. The Roman Empire was a realm in which movement was relatively easy, and obviously there was a lot of constant circulation into and out of Rome, the foremost city in the Empire. Thus Roman Christianity was beginning to be established even before the arrival of the Apostolic evangelists. The two that became most closely associated with Rome, of course, were St. Paul and St. Peter. The book of Acts, in fact, ends with Paul in Rome, and the book of I Peter 5:13 represents Peter as being in 'Babylon', which was often a codeword for Rome in the early Christian community.

Having such an early-rooted Christian community and being the heart of the beast, it was inevitable that it would be especially hard-hit in the occasional Imperial persecutions of Christianity arose. Early and widespread legends represents both St. Paul and St. Peter as having been martyred in Rome. This is quite significant for the role of Rome in the later history of the Church, because the association with so many holy martyrs, and especially with St. Peter and St. Paul, meant that Rome had an immense amount of pull that has never abated; other Christian communities have always naturally tended to be drawn into its influence, to the extent that there was active communication between Rome and these other communities. In the early days this was especially true of Western Europe and North Africa. That Rome is the last resting place of both Peter and Paul has also always been the overarching principle governing how the bishop of Rome has been seen in the Latin Church: as the Successor of St. Peter, keeper of the keys and foundational rock of the Church, and as carrying on the task of St. Paul in carrying the message of the gospel to the nations.

Rome was not the only great see to exert a significant 'gravitational attraction' on other sees. Alexandria and Antioch, and a little later Constantinople, also did so. But the Eastern Roman Empire was more crowded in the West, and thus the East saw an intense tug-of-war of influence between the major Eastern sees, with other sees in a constant shift from being dominated by one to being dominated by another. And Rome was not directly involved in most of it; it was out of the way, and active routes of communication between West and East, while still existent, were becoming less reliable. The always important trade routes between Rome and Egypt, however, remained relatively good. Thus began to coalesce the Rome-Alexandria alliance, which was part of the reason for Alexandria's immense importance in the early patristic period. Most of Rome's knowledge of events in the East came through Alexandria, and Alexandria to at least a limited extent operated not only in its own right but also as Rome's agent in the East, giving it more than enough influence to counterbalance the other Sees. This alliance would reach its high point with St. Cyril of Alexandria's victory at the Council of Ephesus, but it had already started breaking apart by that point, as Rome had become increasingly wary of what it saw as Alexandria's over-reach. The alliance would be broken entirely in and after the Council of Chalcedon.

The result of the slow collapse of the Empire in the West and of the fading of regular communications between East and West would inevitably isolate the Latin Church from the Eastern sees, which were engaged in a constant struggle with each other, and also to expand the extent to which the See of Rome had to step in to serve the civilizational function that had once belonged to the once Imperial city. The See of Rome thus became entangled with the complicated politics that developed in the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms in the West, whether that of Charlemagne or Otto of Saxony. Contact with the East also was not always easy, because the West and the East had diverged in a number of customs, which led each to look with some suspicion on the orthodoxy of the other. In addition, the Eastern and Western sees were fighting very different theological battles; one of the things that would later become a major contention between East and West, the addition of the Filioque to the Creed, initially arose out of the struggle of Iberian sees with a mutant variety of Arianism that was not found in the East.

The occasion for the actual cracking of relations between Rome and the Eastern Orthodox sees, and thus the Latin Church and its Eastern counterparts, was when Rome stepped in to adjudicate a canonical dispute in the See of Constantinople in the late ninth century. The Patriarch, Ignatios, was deposed by the Emperor because of his extensive criticisms of Imperial politics, and the Emperor, Michael III, had a layman, Photios, ordained and put in his stead. The supporters of Ignatios appealed to Rome, and Pope Nicholas I agreed that Ignatios had been deposed uncanonically and recognized him as the rightful Patriarch. Photios would later respond by excommunicating the Pope. Michael III, however, was assassinated by Basil the Macedonian, who took the throne and wanted to strengthen ties with the West, so he banished Photios and reinstated Ignatios, and what Catholics call the Fourth Council of Constantinople in 869 condemned Photios. Basil had nothing personally against Photios, however, and eventually recalled him; Photios and Ignatios reconciled, and at the death of the latter, Photios became Patriarch. Photios then called another council, what many Eastern Orthodox call the Fourth Council of Constantinople, and a somewhat half-hearted attempt was made by both sides to heal a number of the disputes that had arisen over the previous decades and years. It did not succeed very well. Photios was recognized as the Patriarch, but we can see the cracks very clearly. It's notable that while both Catholic and Orthodox calendars recognize Ignatios as a saint, only Orthodox calendars recognize Photios and only Catholic calendars recognize Nicholas as saints.

But cracks are not breaks, and the tearing of the Orthodox Catholic Church was slow. Everybody knows the mutual excommunication of Cerularius and Humbert in 1054, but this seems more of a symptom of worsening conditions than a significant cause of anything. It seems to me that if you want to locate a definite break, it makes more sense to put it at some point between 1182, when Latin Christians in Constantinople were massacred, touching off a series of mutual retaliations, and the Sack of Constantinople in 1204, when the Fourth Crusade was basically highjacked by the Venetians (who had suffered the worst in the Latin Massacre) and used to conquer Constantinople itself. Pope Innocent III strongly condemned the action, but as it was a fait accompli, the question was what to do in its wake. One of the things that the clergy accompanying the Crusade did was appoint a Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. Such Latin Patriarchates were recognized by the Fourth Lateran Council. (Latin Patriarchates were eventually set up for all of the Eastern sees; the only one that currently still exists is the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem.)

But the Crusades did not only see the tearing of relations between the Greeks and the Latins, with much bad blood; they also led to the establishing of permanent relations with the Maronites and temporary relations with the Armenians of Lesser Cilicia, and the interaction of Latin Christians with some of the other Christian groups around the Holy Land both enriched the doctrine and devotion of the Latin Church and would later set up possibilities of reunion that might not otherwise have existed.

The Latin Empire of Constantinople lasted only until 1261, at which point Michael VIII Palaiologos managed to recapture Constantinople. Now things were in a very bad state between the sees of Rome and Constantinople. But the Byzantine Empire was also collapsing. It had been slowly declining, off and on, for centuries by this time, but the Sack of Constantinople had thrown things completely off-kilter. The Byzantine Empire needed Western help more than ever before; and the religious divide between East and West was now worse than ever before. Thus began the Imperial policy of courting reunion with the West while not pressing for it too hard at home. The Second Council of Lyons was convoked in 1272, which served as a sort of council of nations: while it was an ecclesiastical council, there were representatives of the major political groups of the day, including ambassadors from the Byzantine Empire, the Ilkhanate, England, France, and parts of Spain, Germany, and Italy. Much of its business was concerned with secular Christendom: conquest of the Holy Land, protection of pilgrimage routes, the recognition of the Holy Roman Emperor, an official declaration of peace among Christian nations. In addition, the Latins and Greeks at the council came to an agreement about the major doctrinal issues separating them. It was ambitious. It failed. Emperor Michael did officially promulgate the reunion, but this purely official recognition only lasted for the few years he had left to live, and was in fact strongly resisted in the East.

The fourteenth century was a period of crisis for the Latin Church. In 1304, following the death of Pope Benedict XI, the College of Cardinals deadlocked between the Italians and the French. After nearly a year of negotiations, the College chose someone who was not one of the cardinals: Raymond Bertrand de Got, the Archbishop of Bourdeaux. He was French, but he had solid Italian ties, and not being a member of either of the two parties of cardinals, he was almost certainly seen as a compromise candidate. As compromise candidates sometimes are, he was a massive disaster. Ascending to the papal throne as Clement V, he refused to go to Rome -- even for his coronation -- and immediately showed himself to be an active partisan in favor of French power. In 1309, he moved the Papal Curia to Avignon, France, nominally for reasons of security. The Avignon Papacy, often referred to as the Babylonian Captivity, would last until it was ended by Gregory XI's return to Rome in 1377. The move to Avignon put the papacy squarely under French control; it also led to a massive expansion of power on the part of the papal curia, as the papacy itself began to imitate the intensive centralization and revenue-focused organization that had come to be associated with France, the first of the major nations to begin forging the modern nation-state. Most of the corruptions and abuses associated with the Renaissance papacy and that were specifically targeted by later Protestant reformers can be argued to have their root in the Avignon Papacy.

The return of Gregory XI to Rome was not, alas, a return to normality. When Gregory XI died shortly after the return, Urban VI was elected. He was an Italian, and probably only elected due to a failure of the French cardinals to unite behind a common candidate. Urban VI was a gung-ho reformer, a vehement critic of all of the faults of the papal curia, and like most such reformers turned out to be a domineering leader who demanded that everyone fall in line and that there be no dissent. Since cardinals always have the solidarity of a herd of cats, and like cats tend to resist going in any direction that they can't be fooled into thinking it was already their idea to go, this inevitably created an immense amount of resentment and dissent. The French Cardinals revolted, forming a list of grievances and declaring in council that his election was invalid and the see of Rome unoccupied; the sedevacantist cardinals elected another to be pope, Clement VII, who returned to Avignon. And thus the Western Schism began, splitting the Latin Church and sowing confusion everywhere. It would last until 1417, and by the end of it there would be three claimants for the papacy, at Avignon, Rome, and Pisa.

Faced with such a situation, an idea caught fire: if the papacy itself is in doubt, who could be higher than the Pope, if not a general council? Thus the battle between conciliarists and papalists began, and the conciliarists from the beginning had the upper hand. After all, what else could solve the problem except a general council? When they attempted to do so at Pisa, the result was just the Pisan line of popes; but, again, what else was there? And a big boost came to conciliarism when a general council did indeed solve the problem. One of the Pisan popes, John XXIII, called a council at Constance, and the Roman pope, Gregory XII, decided to recognize it as an authoritative council. The Council of Constance's (1414-1418) solution was to have all three claimants to the papacy resign -- they did not have to concede that their claim was illegitimate, they just had to agree to give it up for the good of the church -- and elect one pope from scratch, while confirming as cardinals all the cardinals that had been created by each of the claimants. Both the Pisan and the Roman popes accepted the agreement, and the Council (eventually -- it deliberately delayed to prevent a new pope from interfering with its work) elected Martin V as pope. The Avignon pope refused to resign -- but immediately began to lose influence even among previously strong supporters because of it. Constance did not just deal with the problem, however; it furthered a number of pet projects of conciliarists, designed to establish clearly the superiority of general councils over the pope.

One of the requirements imposed by Constance was that ecumenical councils should be held at regular intervals. The Council of Siena (originally Pavia) was initially called to be such, but faced a significant number of problems getting up and running properly. It did, however, establish that the next council should be at Basel; and Martin V did indeed summon a council to Basel in 1431, although he died before it actually opened. His successor, Eugenius IV, had his legate open the council, but as the council immediately began making demands on the papacy, he quickly issued a bull dissolving it, with another council to open at Bologna a year and a half later. The bishops at Basel refused, reiterating the claims of Constance, and demanded that the Pope appear in person to answer for his impudence. Eugene was facing a number of problems at the time, including an invasion of the Papal States, and so could not easily afford to be involved in a power struggle with the bishops. A compromise was worked out by pressure from the Holy Roman Emperor; Eugene withdrew his bull and, reserving the rights of the Holy See, recognized the council as ecumenical, but refused to include within that the anti-papal provisions that had previously been resolved. Shortly afterward, Eugene had to flee Rome and was exiled for some years in Florence. In 1438, Eugene, now in a slightly stronger position, attempted to dissolve the council at Basel again, moving it to Ferrara. Due to European politics (the council at Basel was widely thought to be very pro-French), the bishops of the council split, with some staying at Basel and claiming to be the real ecumenical council, and some accepting the change. Those who stayed at Basel issued a decree deposing Eugene as a heretic and electing an antipope.

And it's at this point that the Eastern sees enter the picture. None of the Eastern sees had any interest in furthering the doctrine of papal supremacy; but, ironically, they were one of the factors that tipped the power away from the conciliarists to the papalists. For the Eastern sees, reunion of East and West meant one thing: the reunion of the See of Rome with its Eastern counterparts. They had no particular interest in this whole issue with the Council of Basel; the leader of the Church in the West was, in their eyes, very obviously the bishop of Rome, and, not having had any part at all in the affairs of Basel, they had no reason to regard it as having any kind of ecumenical authority. Thus when negotiations between the East and the West at Ferrara, and continued at Florence, the entire weight of the Eastern churches was placed on the papalist side of the scale. Thus it was that the Florence was a victory for Rome. Yes, the unions with the major Eastern sees began to fall apart as soon as the delegates returned home. Yes, the unions with the Armenians and the Copts were entirely on paper and with delegates who had no authority to speak for their churches. But the pope had broken the seemingly unstoppable momentum of conciliarism.

Conciliarism did not die; and even after it was officially condemned at the Fifth Lateran Council, and struggles for variant forms of it, like Gallicanism, continued to plague the West for the next several hundred years. It was in the course of these struggles that a significant number of the unions with Eastern churches would come about, and a great deal of the Latin Church's interaction with the East, and many papal impositions on the Eastern churches who united with Rome, can be explained by this ongoing struggle of authority. The next several centuries would begin to see a massive expansion of the Latin Church, due to Portuguese discoveries of trade routes to east Asia and Spanish discoveries in the New World. It would also see the rise of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation -- another authority-struggle contributing to Latin interaction with the East. This is all quite visible in the work of one of the popes who did the most work with establishing and consolidating the reunions of various Eastern churches with Rome, Benedict XIV; much of the time when he actively affirms specific rites distinctive to the East, one can see that these rites express principles that were inconsistent with common Protestant claims, and thus served as independent witnesses in that particular struggle.

(This would also be part of the latinizing of rites pressed on Eastern churches by Latin bishops. But this was not the only cause working, by any means. Not all latinization was imposed by Rome. Some of it was voluntary, as can be seen in the fact that Eastern churches not in communion with Rome also went through a process of latinization, in part because of the near-ubiquity of the Latin Church by this time, and in part because Latin customs were sometimes easier and often simpler.)

The slowly increasing significance of the Eastern churches in the life of the Latin Church, and the complications caused by its struggles over authority, can be seen in the case of the First Vatican Council. The Melkite Patriarch, Gregory II Youssef, was one of the major voices opposing the definition of papal infallibility, arguing that actual definition would interfere with relations with the Eastern Orthodox, and that the terms in which some of the Council fathers wanted to define it failed to take into account the good example of Florence in explicitly recognizing that traditional rights and privileges of all the patriarchal sees. After the Council, it was very important for Pius IX to get the explicit affirmation of all of the Eastern patriarchs; the Armenians, Melkites, and Chaldeans were particularly reluctant. When Patriarch Gregory signed, he did so explicitly with the qualification from Florence; and Patriarch Joseph IV Audo of the Chaldeans was the last Eastern patriarch to sign it, and did so only with great reluctance. But they all did, and it had become important for Rome that they do so. And the importance of the Eastern churches to the Latin Church have continued to expand; they were particularly cultivated by Leo XIII, with whom Rome's relations with Eastern churches began to loosen considerably, and this tendency was amplified by the Second Vatican Council.

Notable Monuments: The preeminent church of the Latin Church is the Papal Archbasilica of St. John in the Lateran, which is the cathedral of the diocese of Rome and thus the immediate church of the pope; there are, in addition, several other well known papal major archbasilicas in Rome: the most famous is St. Peter's in the Vatican, but there are also St. Paul's Outside the Walls and St. Mary Major.

Notable Saints: Agnes (January 21); Thomas Aquinas (January 28); Peter and Paul (June 29); Protomartyrs of Rome (June 30); Lawrence (August 10); Augustine (August 28); Gregory I (September 3); Leo I (November 10); Lucy (December 13).

Notable Religious Institutes: Benedictines; the Order of Friars Minor (Franciscans); the Order of Preachers (Dominicans); the Society of Jesus (Jesuits); among many others.

Extent of Official Jurisdiction: Barring a few small areas of the world, like Eritrea, that are entirely under the authority of Eastern Catholic bishops, global.

Online Sources and Resources:

http://w2.vatican.va/content/vatican/en.html

http://newadvent.org/cathen/

Five Greatest Women Philosophers

Aeon Ideas asks, who are the five greatest women philosophers?

Nigel Warburton lists (deliberately restricting himself to the twentieth century):

(1) Simone de Beauvoir
(2) Hannah Arendt
(3) Judith Jarvis Thomson
(4) Patricia Churchland
(5) Martha Nussbaum

Amusingly, he refuses Anscombe a position entirely on the basis of her views of sex, and includes Thomson entirely on the basis of an argument for abortion.

Gene Glotzer lists:

(1) Simone de Beauvoir
(2) Elizabeth Anscombe
(3) Philippa Foot
(4) Martha Nussbaum
(5) Hannah Arendt

Avinash Jha lists (explicitly warning that the list is not so much a list of greatest as simply candidates for it based on personal experience):

(1) Simone Weil
(2) Hannah Arendt
(3) Luce Irigaray
(4) Susanne Langer
(5) Adriana Cavarero

As they all note, it's not a trivial question; there are lots of women philosophers, and it's difficult in their case to use direct influence as a proxy measure for estimating whether you are doing more than just indicating personal preferences, simply because the extent and nature of their influence has often depended on the culture of the day.

These questions are less interesting for who gets on the list than for who gets considered as a candidate and why. Assuming a standard of philosophical greatness in which we must have direct reasoning from the philosopher at first hand (thus eliminating very famous women philosophers like Hypatia, whose reasoning we can only guess at given a few anecdotes and the philosophical movements of the day, and a few fairly influential women philosophers like St. Macrina the Younger, whose reasoning we have but only second-hand), confining myself to those who are dead (since it is at least prima facie reasonable to hold that we need some distance in order to appreciate philosophers properly, and thus eliminating reasonable candidates like Onora O'Neill and Martha Nussbaum) and just using a purely subjective assessment of how seriously the philosopher should be taken today, this would be my first rough attempt (in no particular order):

(1) Lady Mary Shepherd
(2) Edith Stein
(3) Elizabeth Anscombe
(4) Simone de Beauvoir
(5) Simone Weil

But Arendt and Foot are both very reasonable candidates from the original lists, even under the conditions I've suggested. There are women philosophers I would recommend highly, of course, who aren't on the list. I think both Mary Astell and Catherine Trotter Cockburn are seriously worth anyone's time, for instance, but I don't know if I could point to anything giving me reason to rank them comparatively that much better than many other excellent women philosophers.

False Zeal

There is a maxim upon which as a foundation stone the little society of Calvario rests.... It is the following: "we must so earnestly take heed to ourselves, as to value nothing except in reference to the salvation and perfection of our own souls," and regard all that concerns our neighbour merely as a means of pleasing God or sanctifying ourselves.

This maxim excludes that false zeal which renders people more anxious about their neighbour's salvation than their own, the offspring of secret pride, through which a man shrinks from considering his own shortcomings and presumes to think himself necessary to his neighbour, as though his own affairs were all settled and in good order. This mode of acting is also a sign of little faith in the Goodness and Providence of God, as though He did not watch over mankind with a Father's care, without need of our assistance.

Antonio Rosmini, Letters, Chiefly on Religious Subjects, pp. 605-606.

Summer Days for Me

Summer
by Christina Rossetti

Winter is cold-hearted
Spring is yea and nay,
Autumn is a weather-cock
Blown every way:
Summer days for me
When every leaf is on its tree;

When Robin's not a beggar,
And Jenny Wren's a bride,
And larks hang singing, singing, singing,
Over the wheat-fields wide,
And anchored lilies ride,
And the pendulum spider
Swings from side to side,

And blue-black beetles transact business,
And gnats fly in a host,
And furry caterpillars hasten
That no time be lost,
And moths grow fat and thrive,
And ladybirds arrive.

Before green apples blush,
Before green nuts embrown,
Why, one day in the country
Is worth a month in town;
Is worth a day and a year
Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion
That days drone elsewhere.

Thursday Vice: Irony

The Greek word eironeia originally meant something like a fake or fictional ignorance. Aristotle (NE IV.7 1127a-1127b) uses it to describe a vice of defect opposing both the virtue of truthfulness about oneself and the excessive vice of boastfulness (alazoneia). It is not as blameworthy a vice as boastfulness, since the self-deprecating will tend to come across as more civilized than the boastful, but deliberately telling falsehoods is in itself an ignoble thing. He also speaks briefly of it in the Rhetoric (II.2 1379b, 1382b), noting that we tend to get angry at the ironical when we are being serious, because we interpret it as a sign of contempt for us, and also that the ironical can be something to fear because you can never be sure how close they are to doing something harmful to you -- they hide their real attitudes. On the other side, though, he also emphasizes the apparently civilized character of eironeia, because the ironical man tends to jest at his own expense rather than the expense of others.

Theophrastus in his Characters describes eironeia as "affectation of the worse in word or deed". The picture he paints is of a very dishonest man, the sort who treats his enemies as if they were friends -- to their faces, at least -- and who will never commit to saying what he is actually doing, hiding under the excuse that he is only thinking about things.

Aquinas's account of the virtue of truthfulness is much more expansive than Aristotle's, which was primarily about oneself, but he stays closer to Aristotle in describing the vice of ironia (ST 2-2.113), as it comes out in Latin. It is in some way saying something lesser about oneself. The act of saying lesser things about oneself than are strictly true could be done salva veritate, as a way of appropriately concealing one's greater qualities in a context in which they would distract from what is important; but the vice of ironia concerns cases in which one falls away from the truth, as when you attribute to yourself a failing you don't actually think you have, or when you deny something great about yourself that you are confident you do have. Such falling away from the truth is a kind of mendacity and is intrinsically wrong. Aquinas argues that Aristotle's ranking of irony as less bad than boastfulness is a matter of the usual motives behind them: the boastful are more likely to have a base motive of grasping after money or honors than the ironical are. Nonetheless, it can, he insists, be the case that irony is worse than boastfulness if its motives are worse.

Since ironia opposes truthfulness, which is a potential part of justice and thus a kind of justice-in-a-broad-sense, its wrongness constitutes a form of injustice -- against oneself, one assumes, although perhaps also indirectly against any kind of good, since it involves depreciating and obscuring good for one's own ends.

A Class of Men Loathed for Their Vices

Yesterday was the Feast of the Protomartyrs of Rome, so here's a description of them from a non-Christian source, Tacitus (Annals 15.44):

But neither human help, nor imperial munificence, nor all the modes of placating Heaven, could stifle scandal or dispel the belief that the fire had taken place by order. Therefore, to scotch the rumour, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians.

Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. First, then, the confessed members of the sect were arrested; next, on their disclosures, vast numbers were convicted, not so much on the count of arson as for hatred of the human race.

And derision accompanied their end: they were covered with wild beasts' skins and torn to death by dogs; or they were fastened on crosses, and, when daylight failed were burned to serve as lamps by night. Nero had offered his Gardens for the spectacle, and gave an exhibition in his Circus, mixing with the crowd in the habit of a charioteer, or mounted on his car. Hence, in spite of a guilt which had earned the most exemplary punishment, there arose a sentiment of pity, due to the impression that they were being sacrificed not for the welfare of the state but to the ferocity of a single man.

A major fire, lasting for six days, had devastated the city of Rome; toward the end of the conflagration, a second fire broke out suddenly and unexpectedly. (This is the same fire that led to the story that 'Nero fiddled while Rome burned'.) And the rumor went around, and would not be squelched, that the Emperor Nero had actually started the second fire himself to make sure that the parts of the city he wanted to rebuild would have to be rebuilt. And even the Romans, who had no reason to be sympathetic with the Christians in general, had difficulty seeing the large-scale executions as anything other than an attempted scapegoating and distraction.

The Analects, Books XVI-XVIII

Book XVI

Book XVI gives us longer, more complicated analects; it has also occasionally been noticed by commentators that some of it explicitly, and perhaps much of it implicitly, concerns the corruption of the family of Ji, as represented by the unreasonable and unjustified attack of Chi on the independent state of Zhuanyu. Confucius refuses to accept the excuse of Ran You that it is being done against his advice and insists that the action is a sign of internal weakness and bad advice (16.1). The next two analects seem to carry this theme forward.

We also get the lists of three, which seem to exist as a pedagogical tool for organizing important points. There are three kinds of beneficial friendship and three kinds of harmful friendship (16.4), three kinds of beneficial pleasure and three kinds of harmful pleasure (16.5), three mistakes made in attending on the noble (16.6), three things the noble guard against (16.7), three things the noble hold in awe (16.8), nine things to which the noble attend (16.10). We also get a ranking of knowers (16.9) and an interesting anecdote about Confucius's relationship with his son Boyu (16.13).

Book XVII

Book XVII, which seems to have a special concern with oppositions between appearance and reality, seems also to have clear links to the prior one. We begin again with the politics of the Ji family, since Yang Huo (17.1) was someone who usurped power from them and Gongshan Furao (17.4) was involved in a rebellion against them. We also get lists: the five practices relevant to ren (17.5), six hidden consequences (17.7), three weaknesses of antiquity and modernity (17.14), and hatreds (17.22). We also get a saying concerned with Confucius's relationship with is son (17.8).

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this book is the picture it gives of Master Kong, since we find him involved in some startling things. He is willing to work with a usurper (17.1), and to help rebels despite his shocked students arguing that it is against his principles (17.4; 17.6). He also gives a student advice to do as he deems best but then criticizes him when he leaves (17.19) and seems to be actively rude to another (17.20).

Book XVIII

This book, unlike most of the others, has a very definite and very obvious theme: that of leaving. At 18.1, Master Kong praises those who fled the bad reign of Zhou. Liu Xia Hui, on the other hand, refuses to leave even when dismissed (18.2). When Duke Jing of Qi refuses to employ Master Kong, he leaves (18.3) and likewise leaves at the bad behavior of one of the family of Ji (18.4). Confucius hears the Madman of Chu singing a song about virtue and rushes out to find him, only to discover that the Madman has already left (18.5). Master Kong is criticized for not becoming a recluse (18.6) and a recluse is criticized for not participating in society (18.7). The end of the book is somewhat cryptic, but they carry forward the theme: 18.8 seems to look at motivations for retiring from the world, 18.9 seems to list examples of people who left for other places, 18.10 is about why the noble might not leave, and 18.11 seems to be a list of people who did not leave but stayed and participated.

Thus the book has to do with a standing problem: if your advice is not heeded, what is the proper course of action? Should you stay and keep trying, or should you leave? And the book's response seems to be that finding a solution to that is very complicated, and requires carefully considering a number of different issues.

to be continued

A Poem Re-Draft

This one is an adaptation of an old ballad.

Judas

Christ was looking to the heavens,
looking with a sigh and frown,
looking for the time of day;
'Judas, make my way,' he said,
'buy a room in Zion-town.'
Judas said, 'A stately dwelling
I will buy us for the feast,
Money rings within the wallet,
bells of silver, thirty piece.'
Judas searched then high and low,
Judas searched then broad and deep.
Nowhere did he find a dwelling,
nowhere was a room for having,
nowhere would his money buy it,
coins of silver, thirty piece.
Tired from his ceaseless searching,
ceased he then to nap a while,
deeply on the lawn he slumbered.
When he woke soon past the noon-hour,
nowhere could he find the purse,
nowhere could he find the money,
treasured silver, thirty piece.
Judas wept and beat his breast,
Crying, 'What can now be done?'
Judas wept for thought of failure,
wept (for what would others say?),
fearing to return to Jesus
without dwelling, without wallet,
without silver, thirty piece.

But a young man near was shouting,
'Have you heard? The priests have posted
prize for word to help them capture
Joshua the Nazorean,
trouble-making, rabble-raising:
prize of silver, thirty piece!
Straightway Satan spoke to Judas,
'Never has the Lord been caught,
Grasping hands he has eluded.
Can they capture one who conquers
blindness, sickness, lameness, death
walks on water, loaves and fishes
multiplies like subtle thoughts,
water turns to wedding wine?
Crowds he passes through unharmed!
If he from the temple height
were to fall, the Lord's own angels,
soaring down, would surely save him!
If he were in starving hunger,
stones he'd surely change to bread!
If he wanted all the kingdoms,
bright and splendid, of the world,
kings would fall before his power!'
So, like Christ had faced before him,
Judas faced the cunning tempter,
tempting with the touch of truth.
Judas to the scribes and priests
made a promise to betray,
promised to deliver Jesus.

Judas came again to Jesus,
saying he had found no place,
nowhere taking merely silver.
Christ then looked up to the heavens,
looking with a sigh and frown.
John he called, and also Peter,
gave to them a mission new:
'Silver cannot buy a dwelling,
time is short, too soon too late.
Go now quickly to the city.
When you enter in the gate
you will find a water-bearer;
let him guide you to his home.
Ask the master of the house
"Where is found the special room?
He who asks has pressing need."'

Judas followed, worries lightened
thinking how he was so clever,
how the priests he had outsmarted,
how he trusted in his Master,
thinking he would get the money,
shining silver, thirty piece.

A Person and A Story

The only two things that can satisfy the soul are a person and a story; and even a story must be about a person. There are indeed very voluptuous appetites and enjoyments in mere abstractions like mathematics, logic, or chess. But these mere pleasures of the mind are like mere pleasures of the body. That is, they are mere pleasures, though they may be gigantic pleasures; they can never by a mere increase of themselves amount to happiness. A man just about to be hanged may enjoy his breakfast; especially if it be his favourite breakfast; and in the same way he may enjoy an argument with the chaplain about heresy, especially if it is his favourite heresy. But whether he can enjoy either of them does not depend on either of them; it depends upon his spiritual attitude towards a subsequent event. And that event is really interesting to the soul; because it is the end of a story and (as some hold) the end of a person.

G. K. Chesterton, "The Priest of Spring", A Miscellany of Men.

Some Notable Links

Have been traveling today, so I thought that I'd take the opportunity just to clear out some of the links I've been collecting.

Several items of interest with regard to Eastern Catholicism:

* The Armenian Catholic Patriarch, Nerses Bedros XIX (né Pierre Taza), died on Thursday, June 25, at the age of 75. Egyptian by birth, he had an active ecclesiastical career and was elected Armenian Catholic Patriarch in 1999.

* In its recent synod, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church decided to expand its calendar of saints:

They decided to add Saints Sharbel Makhluf, Francis of Assisi, Rafqa, Rita, Nimatullah al-Hardini, Don Bosco, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, John Paul II, John XXIII, Vincent de Paul, Mary of Jesus Crucified and Alphonsine to the Ordo of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. Those saints will be commemorated on their feast-day according to the Ordo of their original Church so that they can be examples for everyone on the path to holiness.

Sharbel, Rafqa, and Nimatullah are Maronite saints; Mary of Jesus Crucified is Melkite; the others are Latin (although St. Marie Alphonsine was an 'Eastern' saint, she was associated with the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem). All of them are already on the Roman calendar.

* The Chaldean Patriarch, Louis Raphael Sako, who is very active, has apparently written a book arguing that military action against ISIS is consistent with just war principles. The Chaldean Catholics, of course, have been seriously harmed by the advance of ISIS.

* The Maronite Monks of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph have begun fundraising for building a monastery in Washington state, about 1 hour north of Portland.

-----

And some other notable links, of various kinds:

* Sara L. Uckelman, A very brief, incomplete, and stopgap account of women in medieval logic

* Derek Baker, Deliberators Must Be Imperfect

* John Brungardt on Pope Francis's recent encyclical, Laudato Si'

David Mills on the same

* Thomas F. Bertonneau, Sketch of the Ecology of Knowledge

* The Institute of Catholic Culture

* The Newman-Scotus Reader looks like it would be interesting (ht)

Such Love Has Laboured Its Best and Worst

Mary Wollstonecraft and Fuselli
by Robert Browning

O but is it not hard, Dear?
Mine are the nerves to quake at a mouse:
If a spider drops I shrink with fear:
I should die outright in a haunted house;
While for you—did the danger dared bring help—
From a lion's den I could steal his whelp,
With a serpent round me, stand stock-still,
Go sleep in a churchyard,—so would will
Give me the power to dare and do
Valiantly—just for you!

Much amiss in the head, Dear,
I toil at a language, tax my brain
Attempting to draw—the scratches here!
I play, play, practise and all in vain:
But for you—if my triumph brought you pride,
I would grapple with Greek Plays till I died,
Paint a portrait of you—who can tell?
Work my fingers off for your "Pretty well:"
Language and painting and music too,
Easily done—for you!

Strong and fierce in the heart, Dear,
With—more than a will—what seems a power
To pounce on my prey, love outbroke here
In flame devouring and to devour.
Such love has laboured its best and worst
To win me a lover; yet, last as first,
I have not quickened his pulse one beat,
Fixed a moment's fancy, bitter or sweet:
Yet the strong fierce heart's love's labour's due,
Utterly lost, was—you!

As with much of Browning's poetry, there is a detectable quantity of not-entirely-innocent irony. Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter and writer with whom Wollstonecraft, one of whose weaknesses was falling in love with men who were hardly worth her love, fell in love. He was a misogynist, constantly making disparaging remarks about the intelligence of women, and had, as she herself recognized, a "reptile vanity". She was perfectly willing not to turn it into a sexual relationship, and he strung her along for some time, but when she actually talked to Fuseli's wife about it, Fuseli's wife was not willing to sign on to her being a third, even if Platonic, participant in her relationship with Fuseli, and Fuseli was infuriated that she had done so. Heartbroken, she fled to France, where she fell in love with someone even worse. The interesting thing in reading Wollstonecraft's comments and correspondence with respect to these love affairs is that she knew that they were problematic -- but knowing full well that the man was awful could never quite overcome the feeling that she needed to be with him.

Precept vs. Picture

We should avoid, I think, using the indicative mood for what is really a commandment like the Scout Law ("A Boy Scout is kind to animals" - it means a Boy Scout ought to be kind to animals). For if we hear: "a Christian couple grow in grace and love together" doesn't the question arise "supposing they don't?" It clears the air to substitute the bite of what is clearly a precept for the sweetness of a rosy picture.

Elizabeth Anscombe, Contraception and Chastity (1972).

Sui Juris Churches XXIII: The Macedonian Greek Catholic Church

(on sui juris churches in general)

Liturgical Family: Byzantine

Primary Liturgical Language: Macedonian

Juridical Status: Apostolic Exarchate

Approximate Population (to Nearest 1000): 15,000

Brief History: The Macedonian Greek Catholic Church is a former part of two different sui juris churches. Its roots lie in the formation of an Apostolic Exarchate for Macedonia in 1883; that was part of the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church, because a considerable portion of the Byzantine rite Catholics in Macedonia were of Bulgarian background. After World War I, however, and the formation of Yugoslavia, it made more administrative sense for Macedonia to be folded into the Eparchy of Križevci along with the rest of Yugoslavia. As part of the eparchy it endured the same problems and occasional persecutions that Greek Catholics faced throughout Yugoslavia.

In 2001 the Apostolic Exarchate of Macedonia was re-formed, and since 2008 it has been officially regarded as independent of the Byzantine Church of Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. The Exarch is also the Latin Rite bishop of Skopje. Its population has grown steadily over the past decade.

Notable Monuments: Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Strumica.

Extent of Official Jurisdiction: The Apostolic Exarchate of Macedonia of the Macedonians

Online Sources and Resources: There is very little online information about this sui juris church.

http://www.gcatholic.org/

http://www.cnewa.org/

http://www.zenit.org/

A Poem Draft

Travel

How stagnant standing waters grow, a venom-brew,
how sweet are waters poured through river's wend!
The lion's cave alone is cage in zoo--
on travel does the lion's life depend.
Old friends, though left behind, are yet old friends,
but one who travels far makes friends anew.
At home no honor grows, but slowly ends;
abroad adventures grow for hardy hearts and true.
The golden ore is rock within the mine,
but travel makes it treasured for its shine.

Thursday Virtue: Studiousness

Studiousness, or studiositas, is, according to Aquinas (ST 2-2.166), a potential part (or adjunct virtue) of temperance. As the name of the virtue suggests, its act is study, which Aquinas glosses as "an intense application of the mind to something". It is therefore a virtue concerned with the direction of cognition (cognitio), or knowledge in a very broad sense of the term. The reason the virtue is needed is that we do not merely happen to be acquainted with (cognoscere) things; we have a drive to it. This needs to be moderated, and it is this moderation that associates studiousness with temperance as a potential part.

Studiousness is, further, a subjective part or particular version of the virtue of modestia, the understanding of which Aquinas gets from Cicero. Modestia concerns itself with the way (modus) things are done; different subjective parts of it concern different kinds of inclinations that are expressed in ordinary, everyday life, whether it be our drive toward excellence (humility) or our tendency to play (eutrapelia) or, as in this case, our thirst for things that contribute to knowledge.

Despite the fact that it might not sound like it, studiousness is very much concerned with our use of our bodies. We are not pure minds, so even though we have a natural desire to know things, there is a 'drag' on this desire arising from the bodily desire to avoid the difficult and unpleasant. In order to develop the virtue of studiousness, we must restrain the former so as to study the right things in the right way in the right order, and we must overcome the latter so as to follow through. This is the reason why Aquinas insists on study as the intense or vehement application of mind: it must have the force to overcome the trouble of learning. Thus the two vices opposed to the mean of studiousness are curiositas, which tends to pursue knowledge with a disordered object, and desultoriness or languor in learning.

Studiousness is thus heavily concerned with eliminating attempts to cut corners in the application of mind, attempts to get magical solutions and easy answers that don't involve the intellectual work appropriate to what we are trying to know.

Talent and Virtue

Talent is a gift, the use we put it to depends on ourselves. Now talent of itself affords no guarantee of being well employed, rather it may tempt us to abuse the gift. The heart, on the contrary, inclines us to make a proper use of such talent as we may possess. More valuable therefore are the qualities of the heart, which give a right direction to our actions; virtue, in fact, is the only thing in man deserving of praise, inasmuch as it is his own.

Antonio Rosmini, Letters, Chiefly on Religious Subjects, pp. 599-600 (To Don Paolo Orsi, 27 Jan 1827).

Sui Juris Churches XXII: The Byzantine Church of Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro

(on sui juris churches in general)

Liturgical Family: Byzantine

Primary Liturgical Language: Croatian, although there are others

Juridical Status: Eparchial

Approximate Population: About 60,000

Brief History: The Byzantine Church of Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro, also known as the Croatian Greek Catholic Church and (occasionally) as the Križevci Catholic Church arose in the shadowlands between Christian East and Christian West in the wars between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire; as the latter managed to gain victories over the former, certain areas that had long been Eastern Orthodox came into the jurisdiction of the Catholic Habsburgs. In 1611 the Byzantine Rite was officially recognized in the area, with its primary headquarters at the monastery of Marča, as part of the Latin Catholic diocese of Zagreb. This was an unstable arrangement, as were similar arrangements that grew up all along the Habsburg borders. In the wake of the Ruthenian Unions, Empress Maria Theresa advocated that the Croatian Byzantine Catholics be given an independence along the Ruthenian model. This was granted by Pius VI in 1771 and the Eparchy of Križevci was born.

The eparchy from the beginning suffered complications and problems arising from Yugoslavian politics, ranging from the rises of the Ustaše, with which many Catholics were complicit, and the invasion of the Nazi Germany, to the formation of a Communist dictatorship under Josep Tito. The end of World War I saw the development of Yugoslavia, and in light of practical administrative concerns, the Eparchy of Križevci was expanded to include all Byzantine Catholics in Yugoslavia, making it an extremely ethnically diverse Church. Yugolavia became Communist in 1946, and the Catholic Church, both the populous Latin Rite and the smaller Byzantine Rite, underwent a persecution lasting for decades, although the persecution lessened considerably beginning in 1963. In the 1990s Yugoslavia began to break apart in a series of bloody wars; Croatia and Slovenia, both highly Catholic regions, broke away in 1991. To deal with the complications, things were reorganized. The Eparchy of Križevci continued to cover Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovinia. A new Apostolic Exarchate was created in 2003 for Serbia and Montenegro and another for Macedonia. The Macedonian exarchate was separated on its own, but the other exarchate remains linked to Križevci.

Notable Monuments: The Greek Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Križevci

Extent of Official Jurisdiction: The Eparchy of Križevci and the Apostolic Exarchate of Serbia. (Sphere of influence always extends beyond the official jurisdiction due to members of the church living outside of any official jurisdiction of the church. In 2013, the Byzantine Catholics of Montenegro were, due to further political complications, put under the jurisdiction of a Latin bishop; thus they fall outside the official jurisdiction of the church.)

Online Sources and Resources: Relatively little can be found about this particular church online.

http://www.cnewa.org/

http://krizevci.hbk.hr/

The Analects, Books XIII-XV

Book XIII

Book XIII is largely on the subject of government, and, as usual, Master Kong's approach to it is in terms of moral authority; the rulers and ministers acting properly leads to the people acting properly (13.6, 13.10, 13.11, 13.12, 13.13). At 13.3 we get the famous passage about rectification of names, which Master Kong gives as his answer to the question of what the most important thing in administering a government is. Zilu is baffled by this, but Master Kong dismisses his bafflement. Names must be right for what is said to be intelligible; the intelligibility of what is said is required for accomplishing things effectively. One needs to accomplish things effectively in order for rites and music to work as they should (cp. 13.5). Rites and music, of course, are the primary instruments of moral authority in government, since they set examples and teach the skills involved in imitating those examples (cp. 13.4; 13.6). The coercive power of the state to punish is peripheral to the cultivation of rites and music, being used to correct only those whom rites and music have not helped. If rites and music are not working as they should, then, punishments are not being applied as they should be, and the people will suffer for it. This correction of names, however, is not a mere matter of words. (13.15 seems to imply well enough that words alone do not suffice.) It is a matter of viewing and describing things correctly, so that things can be communicated correctly. Government is a matter of communication. Without correct communication, there can be no correct government.

The reason Confucius puts such emphasis on moral authority in government is the same reason Plato does: because the primary activity of government is not force but education and its prerequisites (13.9). Even military power is primarily a matter of education (13.29-30). The great enemy of all good government is people thinking that they can simply decide as a matter of will what things are and whether they count as good or bad; this will mean, among other things that people poorly suited for government will be given the powers of government, that people will not have a clear path to follow, and that rulers and ministers will not take proper advice. All of these are issues that regularly come up in Master Kong's discussion of government. If people treat moral matters as matters of mere will, they cannot have reasonable priorities. We see this in Master Kong's biting remarks about a system of government in which sons are expected to inform on their fathers (13.18) and his contemptuous dismissal of those currently in government (13.20).

Book XIV

In addition to the more abstract method of profiles, a significant feature of Confucian pedagogy is reflection on ancient deeds. Much of Book XIV is concerned with this. At 14.5 we get a discussion of the superiority of moral influence over strength or military skill, in the form of a comparison of great heroes. There is some discussion of matters related to the powerful Duke Huan (e.g., 14.15), particularly of his advisor Guan Zhong (14.9; 14.16; 14.17). Duke Huan was the ruler of Qi at one of its major military high points. Guan Zhong was one of his prime ministers, and is often credited with a considerable portion of the greatness of Qi in his day; one of the things Master Kong is doing is analyzing his success as a statesman.

A particularly interesting analect is 14.19, in which Master Kong argues that even if a ruler does not follow the Tao, his work may be maintained by sufficiently competent ministers. We also get a variety of analects that give us a different picture of Master Kong, including his occasional mistreatment by others (14.25; 14.32, in which he is not addressed respectfully; 14.39) and some rather sharp criticisms of others (14.43; 14.44).

Book XV

Book XV is notable for having a number of especially striking aphoristic sayings by Master Kong. I will just note a few of them.

The Master said: 'Not to talk with people although they can be talked with is to waste people. To talk with people although they can't be talked with is to waste words. A man of understanding does not waste people, but he also does not waste words. (15.8)

The Master said: 'If a man avoids thinking about distant matters he will certainly have worries close at hand.' (15.12)

The Master said: 'I can do nothing at all for someone who does not say "what shall I do about this, what shall I do about this?"' (15.16)

Zigong asked: 'Is there a single word such that one could practice it throughout one's life?' The Master said: 'Reciprocity, perhaps? Do not inflict on others what you yourself would not wish done to you. (15.24)

The Master said: 'If one commits an error and does not reform, this is what is meant by an error.' (15.30)

The Master said: 'In words the purpose is simply to get one's point across.' (15.41)

One of the other analects in this book has had an especially important history; in 15.3, Confucius denies that is the sort of thing that remembers many things that he has studied, saying that instead he strings everything together with "one thing". He does not specify, but there appears to be a long tradition, mentioned by several commentators, of linking this analect with 4.15, which makes the "one thing" the thread of loyalty and reciprocity (and notably both loyalty and reciprocity are clarified in this book).

A number of analects here also have to deal with words and their proper role (15.6; 15.8; 15.11; 15.17; 15.22; 15.23; 15.24; 15.25; 15.27; 15.40; 15.41). This issue of language comes up too often to be plausibly ascribed to coincidence.

to be continued

Saint Noble-Strength

Today is the Feast of St. Etheldreda, whose name was in the original Anglo-Saxon, Aethelthryth, and whose name is also the original for the common name Audrey. She was born into the Wuffing dynasty of East Anglia as one of four daughters of King Onna of East Anglia who became saints. Early on she made a vow of perpetual virginity, but, as princesses often are, she was married off for political reasons to Tondberct of South Gyrwe. He seems to have been a decent man, though, because she convinced him to respect her vow. He died a few years later, and she retired to the Isle of Ely, which her husband had given her as a wedding gift, to build an abbey. (Ely at the time was basically a patch of dry ground in the middle of very marshy fenland.) However, she was married off again, this time to Ecgfrith of Northumbria. She was less than pleased with this state of affairs, and after considerable argument managed to convince Ecgfrith to let her become a nun. According to some stories, Ecgfrith attempted to get St. Wilfrith, the bishop of York, to persuade her to give up her vow, and St. Wilfrith's refusal became a factor in the intense feud that developed between the bishop and the king. Regardless, she retired to the Abbey of Ely again. Aethelthryth's abbey would last for almost two hundred years before it was destroyed in 870 by Danish Vikings.

The Venerable Bede wrote a hymn in her honor.

The English word 'tawdry' comes from St. Etheldreda's name; there was a fair in Ely that sold cloth goods, among which was an inexpensive neck ornament, St. Audrey's lace, shortened eventually to tawdry lace. 'Tawdry', of course, preserves the cheapness of the ornament rather than its saintly origin.

The Defective Concept of the 'Introduction to Philosophy' Course

There is an interesting exercise that I think is valuable for every philosophy professor at some point in his or her career to try: try to pin down exactly what an 'Introduction to Philosophy' course is, using the different standards to which we actually hold such courses. What can easily be found when one does this is that Intro courses are in reality jumbles. If you were to take typical Department-mandated objectives for Intro courses and design a course specifically to meet those objectives, then another standard, like the typical prerequisite structure of a philosophy major, and design a course specifically to contribute in an optimal way to preparing for the courses for which it is a prerequisite, then another standard, like actually introducing people to philosophy, and design a course specifically with that in view -- if, I say, you were to do this through all the different standards to which Introduction to Philosophy courses are held, I think you would quickly find that none of the courses would obviously be the same course.

There are a number of different functions an 'Introduction to Philosophy' course could have. It could be the kind of course that used to be called Philosophical Encyclopedia, which was basically what the title says: it was a tour of philosophy, involving a very brief historical survey, a look at some of the major positions of some of the major philosophical disciplines, and, often, a guide to students as to what might be worth reading on their own. Nothing about the course particularly required that students do philosophy, beyond what was required to follow the basic ideas in very broad outline, but it wasn't intended to do so: it was intended, like a logic course, to give students basic tools (distinctions, classifications, general concepts required for historical comparison), and perhaps also to give them a sense of where they might head next. This is a perfectly reasonable thing to have a course for. There's a perfectly straightforward sense in which, done properly, it would be a solid and useful 'Introduction to Philosophy' course. Intro courses tend not to fulfill this function particularly well, but if you look at a lot of course objectives for them, it's pretty clear that they are, at least in principle, supposed to fulfill it.

Another possible approach might be to treat it as a course in philosophical writing. That there is often a need for something like such a course is usually quite obvious to those who have to grade student papers. Philosophical writing takes certain skills of analysis and organization, and it is really not fair to students to expect that they will already have them or will just pick them up on the fly or will somehow gain them through 'feedback' from the professor, particularly since assignments and feedback are often not particularly well designed for doing this. (I could write another post entirely about peculiarities and defects in how people seem to think of and handle feedback to students, and the difficult problems of doing 'feedback' in a way that could seriously be considered useful for students themselves.) But most Intro courses are not set up with a focus on writing.

A different kind of approach might be to focus on philosophy majors, making the Intro course a gateway to the major. It is quite clear that Intro courses are often treated as fulfilling this function. To fulfill this function properly, however, the course should set students up to succeed in future philosophy courses. This is arguably the function that Intro courses usually fulfill best, but I would argue that they often don't fulfill it very well, either, not so much from lack of trying as from the limits on our ability to anticipate what students would actually find useful in future courses. Philosophy is an immense field; in one way or another it covers everything. And if you start asking specific questions about how these courses set students up for success, you often find that there is no obvious answer to the question. If, for instance, the Intro course is supposed to set up for courses like Ancient Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy, and so forth, why don't more Intro courses have extensive discussion of actual Stoic and Neoplatonist figures and ideas? If it is supposed to prepare for courses more focused on analytic-style problems, Philosophy of Mind, for instance, why don't more Intro courses have a significant logic component? There are lots that don't.

Many philosophy professors really want their Intro courses to be introductions to doing philosophy. Ich habe nicht die Absicht die Philosophie zu lehren sondern philosophiren zu lehren. But if you look at course descriptions, course objectives, prerequisite structures, and the like, it's often less than clear how these fit with how teachers often go about trying to get their students to think through philosophical issues in philosophical ways.

The list, of course, could be extended indefinitely, using things like actual methods of evaluating teaching, or departmental policies, or even the practical fact that Intro courses tend to function as 'advertising' by which departments recruit philosophy majors in the first place. The real point here, of course, is that it's difficult for Intro to be a good introduction because there are so many conflicting ways to be an introduction, all of which are on the table and none of which are easy to exclude given all the standard pressures that go into designing and teaching an Intro course in the first place. If you go through all the course objectives, department policies, things that come up in the evaluation process that professors need to show that they do in order to have a proper evaluation portfolio, there is too much expectation put on the table. No matter what anyone does, something is going to be shortchanged. You can get some amusing confirmations of this if you get a bunch of philosophy professors together to talk about Intro courses; they rarely have the same idea of what an Introduction to Philosophy course should be and are often aghast at how other philosophy professors run their Intro courses, despite the fact that those others can virtually always justify their approaches by one of the jillion different standards on the table.

Ideally, I think, there would be an Intro course qua Philosophical Encyclopedia, and an Intro course qua Philosophical Writing, and an Intro course qua teacher and students trying to think through philosophical questions together, and so forth. There's no obvious reason why all of this should be stuffed into the same course; when you try to do it, it's easy for one to crowd out the others. The problem, of course, is how to make something like this practicable given common administrative expectations and the sheer inertia in how faculty tend to handle basic courses in the first place.

Vinculae Variae

* "The History Blog" has an interesting post on the church scribes and networks that were used to give the Magna Carta a wide distribution.

* MrD on climate change.

* Elmar Kremer in a podcast on classical theism at "Wireless Philosophy"

* The history of hushpuppies.

* A hairdresser has recently begun to overturn certain assumptions of archeologists and historians about how the Egyptians did their hair.

* Flannery O'Connor is currently on a US postage stamp.

* Rebecca Stark on Susanna Wesley and Aristotle.

* Catherine Nielsen on Augustine on the elusiveness of complete self-knowledge.

* The priest who invented the bulletproof vest.

* John Farrell on Christopher Lee

* Michael Zheltov, The Moment of Eucharistic Consecration in Byzantine Thought

* Early Indo-European Online has an interesting series of language lessons.

* Online Syriac-Aramaic language lessons.

* An interesting essay on sedevacantism, by Michael Davies, at "Radical Catholic"

* Eran Tal, Measurement in Science, at the SEP

* The Deconstructor in the Darkness at "speculum criticum traditionis"

Fortnightly Book, June 21

As some of you may know, a portion of the Fortnightly Book series consists of reading through the books I inherited from my grandparents; I do read others, as occasion suggests them, but the series was started so that I could read through the inherited books, and about half of them have tended to come from that group. There are a few multi-volume works in the batch, however, that I've not really known how to do in this kind of series. I did do Les Miserables, which was pretty intensive reading. But the most obviously problematic example is Richard Burton's edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, three thick volumes totaling somewhere around 4000 pages. I do read a lot, and I read quickly, but I also do many other things, including some rather time-consuming research, and I am also always reading more than one book at a time. I do not think I can manage that much in two weeks, or even in one of the stretched three-week 'fortnights' I take when I am especially busy.

So what I've decided to do is simply break it up. After all it's an endless series of tales, and seems quite suited to being taken partwise. (I also don't think I will go straight through; I will intersperse other books, and I just intend to get all three done by the end of the year.) Thus the next fortnightly book is the first of the three volumes in the Heritage Press edition, which is in its turn the equivalent of a Volumes I and II of the Limited Editions edition of which the Heritage Press edition is essentially the cheaper version. (The full Richard Burton edition was originally published in ten volumes; I don't know how far this Heritage Press volume takes us in the original ten volume series, nor in the later but more widely read sixteen volume edition.) This volume is 1334 pages long and takes us up to the 271st night of Shahrázád's ingenious use of cliffhangers and stories withing stories to prevent her husband from actually going through with his plan of killing her the next morning.

There is no one version of the One Thousand and One Nights; we have the frame story about Shahrázád (more often spelled 'Scheherazade') in quite a few manuscripts, but the actual stories told are not all the same. And, somewhat ironically, the single most famous tale, that of Aladdin and his lamp, is not one of Shahrézéd's tales in any manuscript at all: it first becomes associated with the Nights in the first European edition, because Antoine Galland published his version of the Nights together with several other tales he had discovered. Likewise, the ending is not exactly the same in all of them, although in all of them it is a happy ending. Thus there are lots of different versions of the Nights. Burton's, if I understand correctly, draws from one of the relatively late Egyptian versions (the one sometimes known as the Macnaghten version), which bulked up the tales to guarantee that there would actually be at least 1001 nights; the original title seems to have been a figure of speech, and a lot of the manuscripts have less than three hundred distinct stories.

The Heritage Press volume I will be reading is one of the handsomer books in my possession, with an ivory-colored linen spine stamped in gold leaf and a tangerine cover-papers printed in gold and black. It has a thousand and one drawings by Valenti Angelo.

Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera

Introduction

Opening Passage:

The Opera ghost really existed. He was not, as was long believed, a creature of the imagination of the artists, the superstition of the managers, or a product of the absurd and impressionable brains of the young ladies of the ballet, their mothers, th box-keepers, the cloak-room attendants or the concierge. Yes, he existed in flesh and blood, although he assumed the complete appearance of a real phantom; that is to say, of a spectral shade.

Summary: The Phantom of the Opera sits squarely in the Mystery genre of stories, but it has a number of twists that together combine to make it unique.

(1) It is set up as a historical mystery. By this I mean more than a mystery taking place in a past time. The narrator is laying out his solution to a mystery that occurred some thirty years before. Thus it requires piecing together in the way a historian pieces together a historical narrative. While there are other historical mystery works -- Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time is probably the most famous, although it's one I haven't read -- this is not a common route to take in mystery writing, I imagine because it is difficult to maintain immediacy.

(2) While there are several murders in the course of the story, none of them is the primary crime to be unraveled. That is the disappearance of Christine Daaé. And even that is a secondary issue; none of the crimes is the central mystery of the work.

(3) The story continually plays up the fantastic and supernatural in its descriptions -- and then undoes them by uncovering entirely natural and often mechanistic explanations of them. While this in itself is not at all uncommon, I don't think there's any other major mystery tale that does it on anything like the scale on which this book does it. There are layers and layers and layers of it. The great danger of this kind of approach is Scooby-Doo-ism, in which the story builds up a heavily fantastic appearance whose discovered explanation is a banal and wholly inadequate non-fantastic explanation, a just-so story that is little more than glib handwaving. Phantom avoids this, I think, by heavily drawing on aspects of the world that we take to be natural but nonetheless still highly suggestive: trapdoors, strange torture machines, underground lakes, secret passages behind mirrors, Orientalism, and the like. And, more important than this, it links them up in such a way that the natural solution often gets you immediately into something even more fantastic-seeming, so you don't really have time to question the adequacy of the explanation, and even if you did, the fact that the natural solutions so often bring more fantastic elements with them underlines the fact that they aren't the complete explanation.

There are occasionally stories that do approach this level of complexity in the interplay between fantastic and natural: the novels of Tim Powers. But Powers's movement is in entirely the other direction, because rather than giving us the apparently fantastic and showing us an elaborate natural explanation, he shows us the apparently natural and gives us an elaborately fantastic explanation. But the level of complexity being similar, I think one could very well say that Phantom's closest cousin is something like Declare.

(4) The story works very hard to paint the Opera Ghost both as a monster and as someone to be pitied, and merges the two surprisingly well.

Leroux's The Mystery of the Yellow Room spawned an entire subgenre of imitators, the locked-room mysteries. But The Phantom of the Opera, while far more famous, has no such imitators, and part of this, I think, is that it is inimitable -- there are so many unique features that are so essential to the story that if you pick them apart you get an entirely different kind of story. The combination of this with lush description and careful characterization certainly puts The Phantom of the Opera in the top tier of the greatest mystery stories ever written.

Favorite Passage:

And turning to his audience M. Mifroid delivered a little lecture on police methods.

"I don't know for a moment whether M. le Comte de Chagny has really carried Christine Daaé off or not... but I want to know and I believe that, at this moment, no one is more anxious to inform us than his brother....And now he is flying in pursuit of him. He is my chief auxiliary! This, gentlemen, is the art of the police, which is believed to be so complicated and which, nevertheless, appears so simple as soon as you see that it consists in getting your work done by people who have nothing to do with the police."

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

Locus Focus

The Lake Beneath the Paris Opera House
The Phantom of the Opera
by Gaston Leroux

At last, César raised his nostrils, sniffed the air and quickened his pace a little. I felt a moistness in the air and César stopped. The darkness had lifted. A sort of bluey light surrounded us. We were on the edge of a lake, whose leaden waters stretched into the distance, into the darkenss; but the blue light lit up the bank and I saw a little boat fastened to an iron ring on the wharf!


The Palais Garnier or Paris Opera House is almost the most striking character of The Phantom of the Opera, and I almost picked this city-unto-itself as the place to focus on. But, if you really think about it, the place that really dominates the story is the lake five stories below.

Apparently the idea of a lake or river beneath it was a common rumor the day; they had had considerable difficulty drying the foundations, so the architect built big cisterns and a small waterway to help reduce the amount of groundwater linking into the cellars. But the notion of a lake beneath the extraordinarily elaborate and expensive building is just too striking an idea to miss. I mean, seriously, what would your reaction be if you learned that there was a passageway somewhere in the building you're now in that leads to an underground lake? That can take an already interesting building and make it amazing.

And the Opera House in the story has to be the Opera House with the lake, even if it is more legend than history, because this story is about secrets, and nothing so perfectly captures this as the lake itself.

But perhaps 'secret' is not quite the right word. Given the size of the Opera House, it would not be surprising if even an entire lake were secret, in much the same way that even the managers did not know that the Opera House had its own stables, despite knowing that their productions regularly used horses. But Christine already knew that the lake and its boat existed, although she had never seen them before. In this way it is like the Opera Ghost: it's perhaps not correct to call him a secret, because everyone talks about him. But that's different from really coming across him, just as knowing that a lake is under the building is different from actually finding it. Things may be known about without being known. So what would be a word for something that's not really secret and yet is somehow elusive? I don't know if there is a word in English for it, but perhaps 'mystery' is close.

And that fits in another way, because Gaston Leroux is very much a mystery writer, and his narrator is piecing together a historical mystery out of newspaper evidence and written and oral anecdotes.

The events do not date more than thirty years back; and it would not be difficult to find at the present day, in the foyer of the ballet, old men of the highest respectability, men upon whose word one could absolutely rely, who would remember as though they happened yesterday the mysterious and dramatic conditions that attended the kidnapping of Christine Daaé, the disappearance of the Vicomte de Chagny and the death of his elder brother, Count Philippe, whose body was found on the bank of the lake that exists in the lower cellars of the Opera on the Rue-Scribe side.
The mysterious character of the lake lies not in its being unknown but in its being known and yet suggestive of much more than one knows. Perhaps we could say that while the lake is not a secret, it is a lake that seems to hold secrets, and in this case certainly does. In a real sense, the story of The Phantom of the Opera is not that of the Opera Ghost but of the Opera House, which holds many mysteries: the Opera Ghost is just the mystery whose secrets hold the key to uncovering so many other secrets. And all of those secrets come together on the lake far below the surface.

There's Much Afoot in Heaven and Earth This Year

The Rainy Summer
by Alice Meynell

There’s much afoot in heaven and earth this year;
The winds hunt up the sun, hunt up the moon,
Trouble the dubious dawn, hasten the drear
Height of a threatening noon.

No breath of boughs, no breath of leaves, of fronds,
May linger or grow warm; the trees are loud;
The forest, rooted, tosses in her bonds,
And strains against the cloud.

No scents may pause within the garden-fold;
The rifled flowers are cold as ocean-shells;
Bees, humming in the storm, carry their cold
Wild honey to cold cells.

Word & Question (Poem Draft)

So this is an entry for Enbrethiliel's Word & Question Game, in which people send in a word and a question, and then they get mixed up and sent out to different people as poem prompts. I confess I hadn't the faintest idea what to do with the word. Had I been fancy-fancy I would have done something with the original bundok, but mixing in Tagalog and answering the question and using the word 'boondocks' all at once is a bit beyond my minor poetic powers. I also had the difficulty that 'boondocks' is a word that almost demands a poem with sharp edges, but the words for answering the question kept settling down in less spiky ways, giving the whole, I think something of a discordant tone. But I might eventually do something with the last bit of it.

Word: Boondocks
Question: Have we been here before?

The streams through hollow hills,
cold and softly shushing in the night,
like roads through giant's halls
not yet touched by dawning of the light;
yes, some have known these things,
though never televised.

I saw upon the screen
a thousand stars at night;
and heard the screech-owl's scream
and recorded catbird's note.

Dust and bur beneath bare soles,
a fish fresh-caught from by the quay,
sunset setting down its seal
upon the letter of the day:
you cannot learn these things
from what is televised.

The illusion that one knows:
that is the city life;
knowing about, as from the news,
but not here with hate and love.

In the boondocks one learns one's will,
for better or for worse,
and, too, one's limits like a wall,
and how to stay the course,
and the presence of the thing
that stays untelevised.

In a box of walls with pride
we account us worldly-wise
who've never in dust prayed
or felt the world's own ways.

We walked, both you and I,
down a road as yet unpaved;
it was known, I know not why,
and yet unknown, like life unproved;

we walked where only deer
knew the paths that came and went,
felt what wonder we could dare,
and the pull of aching want,

we walked upon the leaves
falling on the forest floor,
knew them like old loves,
though we were never here before,

and felt the shock, the sheer surprise,
of what goes untelevised.

Thursday Virtue: Observantia

Tucked away and easy to miss in Aquinas's many discussions of virtue is the virtue of observantia (2-2.102), closely related to pietas and, like pietas, a potential part or auxiliary virtue of justice. We might indeed, given things that Aquinas says about it, regard observantia as a potential part of pietas.

Pietas is giving direct and indirect honor to our parents, to whom we owe a moral debt; that is, we honor our parents directly for bringing us into the world, and we honor them indirectly by giving honor to their family and to their patria or homeland. But there are ways in which we may be related to others who are not our parents that are in some way or other analogous to the way we are related to our parents. In one case, that of God, the relation is more fundamental and complete than that of our relation to our parents, and this concerns the virtue of religio; in other cases, the relation is looser, and it is these that are the concern of observantia, which is the virtue of giving proper honor to those in positions of dignity or excellence. Like many of Aquinas's basic definitions of potential parts of justice, the definition is derived from Cicero.

In order to develop this idea, Aquinas uses the notion of pater; since observantia is analogy-based, nothing much turns on whether we read it in its specific meaning of 'father' or its generic meaning of 'parent', but the same word in relation to piety has to be understood as including, not excluding, our mothers, so it is certainly more appropriate here to think of it in terms of 'parent'. A parent is a principle of generation, upbringing, and learning, and of whatever is relevant to the completion of a human life (pater est principium et generationis et educationis et disciplinae, et omnium quae ad perfectionem humanae vitae pertinent). Just as a parent shares in a particular way the nature of a principle, which God has in a complete way, so too certain other people share in a particular way the nature that a parent has in a complete way. We see this in our tendency to extend respect given to parents to other people under limited conditions, because they have a similar sort of charge, but over a narrow field. Aquinas specifically mentions the prince of a city (for civil matters), the dux or general (for military matters), and the teacher (for learning). But there are many, very many, more ways in which one may involve something like this notion of a parent.

Aquinas identifies two major acts associated with observantia: honor and worship (cultus). Honor is recognition of an excellence; worship is deference in which one obeys someone worthy of honor or repays benefits received from them in some appropriate way. Worship in this sense thus adds to honor the notion of decent action between human beings. But there are a lots of different kinds of things we call 'honor' and 'worship', not all of which are relevant to observantia itself. Thus, for instance, if you are a soldier giving obedience and showing respect to your general, you have a well-defined obligation of obedience. This makes that kind of honor a matter of justice in the strict sense, not of a virtue like observantia that deals with less-defined matters and can only be regarded as justice in a broad sense. Thus the kinds of honor and worship that are relevant to observantia arise when there is not any precise action that we have to do given our position in society. Thus one might show respect to a teacher even though one is not that teacher's student, because the role of 'teacher' is itself something that has an excellence with respect to the common good of society. Likewise, one might show respect to a mother even though you are not related to her in any determinable way at all, because motherhood is itself an excellence, given its importance to the healthy functioning of society. And, of course, since there is no precise obligation, one would tend to render such respect on a sliding scale, with those who fulfill these roles with the greatest and clearest virtue being given the greatest honor. If anyone were to ask why we do this given that we don't strictly have to do so, we would say that we do it because, despite not being strictly required by our position, it is nonetheless a good thing to do.

One of the things that makes observantia interesting as a virtue is that it is a particularly promising locus for comparison between Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy, since it has many analogies to the Confucian conception of good social relations. Like the Confucian idea, observantia in society at large is derivative from pietas toward our parents, which serves as a kind of foundation for it.

Sui Juris Churches XXI: The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church

(on sui juris churches in general)

Liturgical Family: Byzantine

Primary Liturgical Language: Bulgarian

Juridical Status: Apostolic Exarchate

Approximate Population: Roughly 10,000 to 11,000

Brief History: Bulgarians had long had a dream of autocephaly; relations between Christians in Bulgaria and Constantinople were always more than slightly complicated. In the nineteenth century, a politician named Dragan Tsankov began to suggest that this might be practically accomplished by communion with Rome along the lines of the Ruthenian Unions. This seems to have met pockets of the population that were already interested in the idea. In 1859, a group of people in Kukush (modern Kilkis) sent a letter to the Pope desiring union under the condition that they would be able to keep their rites and elect their own bishops; and in the next year Tsankov and a number of other intellectuals gave a similar letter to the Apostolic Vicar in Constantinople. Pius IX did not hesitate; he accepted the offers and in 1861 named Joseph Sokolsky, one of Tsankov's delegation, their archbishop. Unfortunately, Sokolsky's appointment had relatively little effect, because the Russians, worried about what a Bulgarian Uniate Church might do to their influence in Bulgaria, kidnapped him a few months later and threw him in prison. The Bulgarians uniting with Rome had no real religious leader until 1863, when Raphael Popov, who had been a deacon while in Tsankov's delegation, was elected bishop.

The movement for union spread, slowly, but the wind was taken out of its sails when the Ottoman Empire itself pressed for an Orthodox Bulgarian Exarchate. That process took a while, but as the Patriarchate in Constantinople made more and more concessions in that direction, the Bulgarians received a measure of ecclesial independence that removed one of the obvious reasons for becoming Catholic.

In 1874, another group in Kukush added its stream to the mix when the Orthodox Bishop of Kukush himself, Nil Izorov, joined communion with Rome. Izorov had been involved in the development of the Bulgarian Exarchate, but in the process of contributing he came to the conclusion that Bulgarian communities in Macedonia were deliberately being left out. His attempts to force a more explicit confrontation on this issue were not appreciated, and the Patriarchate pressured the Exarchate to recall him, which it eventually did. The recall was taken by Bulgarians in Macedonia as a clear sign that Izorov had been right, and several of these Bulgarian communities began actively insisting that the Exarchate give them their own eparchy under Izorov. The Exarchate refused, so they tried to become Anglican. But the British at the British Consulate were wary about getting involved in this kind of politics, so that went nowhere as well. Well, third time's the charm; they approached Rome, and Rome had none of the political qualms of the others. Izorov would become the head of the small Bulgarian Uniate community after the death of Popov, but in 1895 would return to the Orthodox Church. This would actually be a constant problem in the early history of the Bulgarian Catholic Church, as a number of priests and bishops would waver back and forth between being Catholic and being Orthodox.

The Bulgarian Catholic communities in Macedonia would be in for difficult days during the Balkan Wars and the First World War, as they were caught in the middle of several different, and very intense, political struggles. Kukush would be burned by the Greeks; the Turks began a genocide of Bulgarians in Thrace. Bulgarians fled in massive numbers to Bulgaria, which, unfortunately, did not have the resources to handle them. The situation would devastate the Bulgarian Catholic Church in its original homelands, but enough survivors congregated in Bulgaria that in 1925 the Apostolic Visitor to Bulgaria, Angelo Rancalli, began to press for a reorganization, and in the next year Rome established the Apostolic Exarchate of Sofia to take care of them.

Unfortunately, Bulgaria had been invaded by the Soviets toward the end of World War II (thus switching Bulgaria from an Axis nation to an Allied nation), and that meant that the Communists were in control of Bulgaria. Fortunately the persecution of the Catholic Church in Bulgaria was much less severe than it was in many other places; the Church was never officially suppressed, although there were executions early on and it was subject to the usual long list of restrictions. Even these were said to have been more lightly enforced after Angelo Rancalli became Pope John XXIII.

In 1989 the Communist regime lost power, and since that time the Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church has slowly managed to regain its confiscated property and expand.

Notable Saints: As a Byzantine Rite church, the Bulgarian Greek Catholics have a number of Byzantine Calendar saints on their calendar. In addition, there are a number of Greek Catholic martyrs under the Communist regime who might someday be beatified or canonized; I believe that Bl. Kamen Vitchev is the only one who has been beatified so far. Given his close association with both Latin and Greek Rite churches in Bulgaria, having devoted nearly a decade of his career to Bulgarian Catholics, John XXIII (October 11) could probably be added to the list.

Notable Religious Institutes: One of the longstanding religious orders is the Holy Eucharist Sisters, whose active involvement in the Bulgarian Greek Church goes back almost to the beginning. The Byzantine Discalced Carmelites, while small, are also relatively active.

Extent of Official Jurisdiction: One Apostolic Exarchate in Bulgaria.

Online Sources and Resources:

http://www.cnewa.org/

http://www.katolsk.no/

http://www.kae-bg.org/

The Analects, Books XI-XII

Book XI

Book XI can be seen as giving more information about Confucius's school, in the sense of his teaching and how he interacted with his students. We get some indication of the major subjects discussed and considered important (11.3), for instance: virtuous conduct, speech, administration, culture and learning.

We also get a better sense of Yan Hui, Master Kong's greatest student, who unfortunately died relatively young. He was one of the students who excelled at virtuous conduct (11.3), and was the one student Master Kong considered genuinely fond of learning (11.7). (You will remember that 'fond of learning' was a key summary phrase 1.14.) Master Kong lamented his death deeply (11.9; 11.10), but honored him not with showy externals but with proper regard for the rites (11.8; 11.11). The famous comment at 11.12 about ghosts and death is often treated alone, but I wonder if it should be included with the loosely group comments concerned with Yan Hui's death: here too, Master Kong takes our proper concern in the face of death to be simply good and appropriate behavior. We also get a poignantly ironic anecdote about him from an important time in Master Kong's life (11.21).

We also see a number of other interactions between Confucius and his more extreme students. We have a rare, if limited, defense of Zilu (=Zhong You) (11.15), who is often presented as the primary instance of the what-not-to-do student: no matter how small it may be, his genuine progress is not to be despised. We have a sharp criticism of Ziyou (=Ran You, = Ran Qiu) (11.17), one of the most important students, and some remarkably strong criticisms (11.18) of various students, although not attributed Master Kong himself. A very interesting anecdote shows Master Kong giving opposite advice to Ran You and to Zhong You alike, in which he gives them opposing advice, thus tailoring his teaching to the personality of each (11.20), and another in which he assesses their weaknesses and merits (11.22).

Most interesting of all, perhaps, is the long anecdote in which Confucius asks four of his students, Zilu, Ran You, Gongxi Hua, and Zeng Xi, what their ambition is. Zilu and Ran You we have by this point met in spades. Zeng Xi was the father of Master Zeng, whose reflections we got in Book I. Gongxi Hua was praised by Master Kong in Book V for his familiarity with ritual. Each of the students gives their description of the life they would like to live if someone were to shower reward on their merits. After Zeng Xi gives his own scenario, which involved a very simple life, Confucius affirms the excellence of that ambition. Afterward, Zeng Xi asks him what the difference is, and the difference is that the other three's ambitions were equivalent to wanting extraordinary power in a state.

Book XII

Book XII opens and closes with ren, humanity to oneself and others. The first three analects consist of students asking about ren and getting different answers from Master Kong. The first answer (12.1), given to Yan Hui, is to subdue oneself and return to li (ritual or appropriate behavior); as Yan Hui is Master Kong's best and most virtuous student, this answer seems to give us something like the most complete or adequate understanding of how to cultivate humanity. The second answer (12.2), to Zhonggong (=Ran Yong), focuses on practical tasks rather than general practical principles, giving several maxims the following of which would in some way require subduing oneself and conforming to ritual, including a maxim of reciprocity ("Do not impose on others what you would not like yourself"). The third answer (12.3), to Sima Niu, is simply to hesitate in talking; Sima Niu is baffled by the answer, but Master Kong says that achieving ren is difficult and, recognizing that, one could hardly avoid hesitating to talk about. Part of what seems to be going on here is Confucius's standard practice of tailoring his teaching to the student. Yan Hui, as the most virtuous of the students, does not require particular tasks to follow; even when he asks for clarification, Master Kong stays at a general level. Zhonggong gets more pragmatic advice, presumably because he needs it. And with Sima Niu the advice ultimately boils down to insisting on treating ren with the seriousness it deserves, using an external behavior as a sign of this internal disposition. (Sima Niu also seems to have had a reputation among Confucius's students for talking, so it could very well that there is an implicit criticism here.)

With its consideration of humaneness, the chapter interweaves discussions of government (12.4, 12.7, 12.9, 12.10, 12.11, 12.14, 12.17, 12.19, 12.20, 12.21) and the noble person or gentleman (12.4, 12.5, 12.8, 12.16, 12.19, 12.24). The interweaving is so thorough it does not seem to be wholly accidental. While it may be dangerous to impose too rigorous a pattern on the book, there does seem to be a sort of unified thematic tapestry here. All of these matters -- humanity, government, nobility -- are interlinked in Confucian thought. One of their key elements is captured in the last three analects of the book, which bring us back to the ren discussed in the first three analects. Asked what ren is, Master Kong says it is to love others, and to understand is to understand others (12.22). The primary actions of all the major ideas discussed in this book are other-directed. This leads to a comment by Master Kong about friends (12.23) and another comment by Master Zeng linking culture, friendship, and the noble person (12.24).

to be continued

Brushing Up on Languages

One of the things I am doing this summer is brushing up on languages. Something I came across that has turned out to be quite useful is Duolingo, which is free and actually quite effective. Each Duolingo course aims to cover roughly the same ground as about a year at the college-level, and does so mostly by drilling dressed up as a game. It's especially good for a refresher. I started the French course on June 1, and am about two-thirds of the way done, and have found it reasonably good at stitching up patches in my memory. I liked it enough that I've also been taking the Bokmal (Norwegian) course, to see how useful it would be for learning a language almost from scratch (I knew a few words and phrases of Norwegian, but that's about it), and while this is obviously a much slower process than simply using it to review, it seems to be reasonably effective. I started the Bokmal at the same time as the French and I am about ten percent of the way through; but already can handle basic and generic sentences, at least, like Mange lærere leser bøker, "Many teachers read books". I'll be starting the Spanish tree a little later this month, also for a review, and the German tree (my German proficiency would be somewhere between my Norwegian and my French proficiency, since it's more advanced than nothing, but very patchy) a little later.

The languages they currently have are: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Irish, Danish, Swedish, Esperanto, Turkish, Norwegian, Ukrainian. There are several others that are in the process of being developed. There will eventually be a Vietnamese course available, so probably this fall I'll start using it for my on-again-off-again Vietnamese study. The courses are all crowdsourced, which means you occasionally run into odd translations, but this hasn't been a serious issue.

To brush up on Latin, I've been using some of Evan der Millner's YouTube videos, particularly his Latin in Latin course (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV). He summarizes his approach here.

There are other online resources, of course, like this Norwegian mini-course that I'll be starting next week, as well as standard offline book approaches (e.g., I'm currently reading through Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata), but I've found these to be both reasonably accessible and useful. So what online language resources have you found useful?

First Principle of Wise Government

The first principle of every wise government is to tend towards the substantial good and not to waste its power in collecting the accidents and thus diminishing it. Thus for example, a commander who should prefer collecting the spoils left upon the battle-field, to pursuing the enemy and completing his rout, would manifestly lose precious time; his tactics would be quite opposed to the principle of the greatest celerity.

[Rosmini, Theodicy, volume 2, 363-364.]

With this established, we can immediately determine the first of all rules of good government, that is, the first criterion for evaluating the means for governing any society whatever. This first rule and criterion is indubitably the following: That which constitutes the existence or substance of a society is to be preserved and strengthened, even at the cost of having to neglect that which forms its accidental refinement.

When this self-evident rule is applied to civil society, it becomes the first norm of sound politics.

In the same way we can also deduce the greatest errors in government. They are those by which the government of a society loses sight of all that constitutes the subsistence of the society because of its excessive concern for the society’s progress towards accidental perfection.

[Rosmini, Philosophy of Politics, Volume 1, Chapter 1]

Poem a Day XIV

Gold and Green

A tree is rooted in the earth,
an earthy thing, a mattered thing,
but spreads its branches to the sky,
and drinks the sun, and grows in light.
How strange the one who with a smirk
insists the sun is but a fruit,
or that it cannot be at all
because it is not formed by tree.

So look, O man! For in the dawn
that shines through branches richly green,
a gold that lightens with a fire
is seen, beyond the earthy tree.