A. V. Dicey on Rule of Law

Jeremy Waldron has an interesting article on The Rule of Law at the SEP. The section on Albert Venn Dicey seems to me to be very misleading, however: Waldron says, "For Dicey, the key to the Rule of Law was legal equality," but while legal equality is important, I think it is not the key to Dicey's understanding of the idea of the rule of law.

What Dicey tells us is that there are actually three 'kindred' notions that are involved when we talk about 'rule of law':

(1) Security from arbitrary governmental power: This is the 'first principle of the Rule of Law' that Waldron quotes, "no man is punishable or can be lawfully made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary legal manner before the ordinary Courts of the land".

(2) Equality before the law: This is what Waldron says is key to his account, namely, that "every man, whatever be his rank or condition, is subject to the ordinary law of the realm and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals." Waldron's objection is irrelevant here; officials are not 'above the law', and they are not exempted from the ordinary law of the realm. If we say, as Waldron does, that officials "need to be hemmed in by extra restrictions" then if the restrictions are extra, they obviously are not exemptions from being subject to the law of the realm; and where are these restrictions coming from? If they arise from the ordinary legal means of ordinary tribunals, then this is precisely the kind of thing Dicey means. If you think that you need special courts for officials, or a special law governing officials only, the problems that immediately arise are (a) conflicts of jurisdiction in dealing with problems arising from the relations between officials and non-officials; (b) how is this not to say that one of the two groups, officials or non-officials, is a second-class citizenry, if they do not have the same protections for their rights and freedoms as everyone else?

[Note that Dicey's understanding of the rule of law in this second sense does not automatically generate a presumption of liberty, because Dicey specifically formulates his account of 'rule of law' so that it is consistent with a very, very strong view of parliamentary sovereignty (Parliament, understood as Crown, House of Lords, and House of Commons in cooperation, without restriction or limitation may make or unmake any law whatsoever, and the laws of Parliament may not be set aside by anything other than Parliament itself). Liberty is not what Dicey primarily has in mind when he is talking about rule of law.]

(3) Organic constitution: The constitutional law is not the source of but the consequence of the rights of individuals, as defined by courts; that is to say, "the constitution is the result of the ordinary law of the land." As Dicey points out in an example later on, English freedom is not guaranteed by a proposition in a document; freedom of person is not a privilege to be guaranteed at all -- it is the outcome of the ordinary law of the land as applied by courts. The Englishman's rights are built into the system, and require no paper guarantee or special intervention.

Dicey occasionally treats these as three perspectives on one thing (when he is talking about English law, usually), but more commonly treats them as distinct but related elements. Note that in all three cases the key concept is not 'equal' but 'ordinary'. Rule of law is, at a crude, vague level, about the primacy of ordinary law arising out of ordinary tribunals in an ordinary legal system. All three are ways in which one might recognize the supremacy of the ordinary law of the realm. If we look at droit administrif, one of the things this conception opposes, we find two ideas alien to English 'rule of law':

(1) That officials of the state have special privileges beyond those of ordinary citizens simply by being officials.
(2) Government should be structured by a separation of powers, which guarantees that other powers in the government are independent of the ordinary course of law as applied by courts.

Dicey's big idea with regard to rule of law is that the fundamental structure of government arises out of a normal course of law concerned with standard and stable protections for citizens, simply as citizens. He regards this as being, essentially, the power of courts to penalize any illegal activity, regardless of who has done it. This he sees as almost exclusively found in England (of his day), although he thinks that in practice the United States was also at least in the vicinity, despite its written constitution, because of judicial review.

It is possible that Dicey's view of rule of law is somewhat extravagant, as Waldron notes critics have often suggested, but it has more structure to it than you would get from Waldron's summary.

Maronite Year LVI

The Maronite calendar usually does not allow weekday feasts to be transferred to Sunday. Part of the reason for this is that most of the major feasts are already on Sundays, of course, and most of the rest are either saint's days or have such a close connection with a given date that it makes little sense to transfer them. There are some exceptions, however; a church can transfer the feast of its patron saint to Sunday, and there are two feasts that have fairly consistently been transferred to the closest Sunday, Holy Cross in September and the feast of Peter and Paul. Peter and Paul is on June 29, but liturgically it is transferred today to replace what would usually be the Seventh Sunday of Pentecost.

Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul
2 Corinthians 11:21-30; Matthew 16:13-20

Two grapes were pressed by the unbeliever,
from their pure wine the world's thirst is quenched.
O Christ our God, hope of all the martyrs,
You chose simple men to be Your lights;
fisher and tentmaker did great wonders,
You made them wise with Your wise Spirit.
You sent them to announce life's renewal
and salvation.

Two temples rise! The Spirit dwells within,
the Spirit of Christ the Word of God.
From among His friends, the Lord chose Simon,
giving him keys for heaven and earth.
Stand firm, Simon; you are the foundation;
the Church built on you shall not be lost.
O holy Peter, the Lord said, "Follow,"
and you followed.

Two precious pearls shine with splendid light,
bright on the crown of the Bride of Christ.
From among His enemies, Christ chose Saul;
the terror of lambs became a lamb.
He preached, worked wonders, built communities,
endured all things, converted nations.
O holy Paul, the Lord said, "Follow,"
and you followed.

Two tall columns stand, straight and unbending,
upholding the cathedral of heaven:
do not fear, O Church, for they shall endure;
the gates of hell shall not survive them.
On Peter the rock, Jesus built His Church,
through Paul's labors He raised up the frame,
a temple not made of timber or stone,
but of the saints.

Locus Focus

The Scriptorium of the Abbey
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco

The abundance of windows meant that the great room was cheered by a constant diffused light, even on a winter afternoon. The panes were not colored like church windows, and the lead-framed squares of clear glass allowed the light to enter in the purest possible fashion.... I have seen at other times and in other places many scriptoria, but none where there shone so luminously, in the outpouring of physical light which made the room glow, the spiritual principle that light incarnates, radiance, source of all beauty and learning, inseparable attribute of that proportion the room embodied.
The obvious feature of the Abbey in Eco's The Name of the Rose is the library, but the scriptorium is its heart. The library, as we discover through the book, is really a sort of tomb of books, but it is in the scriptorium that books are alive. It is there that monks read the books of the library -- when they are allowed them -- and it is there that monks copy books that come into the Abbey, increasing the library and the Abbey's wealth. It is also in the scriptorium that the books themselves come alive, changing from mere words on the page to works of delightful art, full of color and picture and even, whatever some might wish, laughter.

Our first experience of this scriptorium is of light. Medieval scriptoria were quite diverse, as Adso implies, with the only constants being that they needed to be situated so as not to disturb prayer, the main purpose of the monastery, and that they be suitable for writing. The designers of this scriptorium have built theirs so that monks work above all in an abundance of clear sunlight, despite being indoors.

Thomas Aquinas says that light is what makes something manifest for a cognitive power, and Adso certainly agrees with this: the physical light is a symbol of intellectual light, each making it possible to see, and thus making it possible for us to experience the beautiful, which is what pleases on being seen. And the response of the mind to beauty, Adso notes, is peace.

But first impressions are sometimes misleading. The scriptorium, so filled with light, is, like everything else in the Abbey, a place of secrets, because it is linked to the library. And we see something of this in another visit to the scriptorium.


We reached the scriptorium, emerging from the south tower. Venantius's desk was directly opposite. The room was so vast that, as we moved, we illuminated only a few yards of the wall at a time. We hoped no one was in the court, to see the light through the windows. The desk appeared to be in order, but William bent at once to examine the pages on the shelf below, and he cried out in dismay.

It is in the scriptorium that the catalog of books in the library is kept, and the death of Venantius, on the trail of a book, gives the scriptorium a different, and more sinister, complexion. The scriptorium is not just a place of life and light; it is where the conspiratorial secrets of the library spill out into the world, and those secrets can bring darkness and death....

And that, of course, makes it fit with the Conspiratorial Corners theme Enbrethiliel is finishing up.

Music on My Mind

Ralph Stanley, "O Death". Stanley, one of the bluegrass greats, died yesterday at the age of 89.

Maronite Year LV

I have noted previously that where one finds a notable feast on a day other than Sunday in the Maronite calendar, this often means that it is received from elsewhere -- usually either because its date was established so early that it has never been changed, or because its existence in the calendar is due to the influence of another calendar at some point in Maronite history. This is part of the explanation for the fact that a number of Maronite feasts double, with a Sunday feast at some point and a fixed feast at another. The primary feast for the Nativity of John the Baptist is in the Season of Announcement, the Sunday of the Birth of John the Baptizer. But it is also often celebrated in summer, as well, when the Latin Church celebrates it.

Feast of the Birth of John the Baptist
Galatians 4:21-5:1; Luke 1:57-66

O Lord our God, today Judean hills ring out
with news of a mystical birth;
on this day, Zechariah and Elizabeth
despite age announce a new son.
His name shall be John, for God is truly gracious!
He is not the One awaited,
but he announces the One for whom prophets hoped.

O voice preaching in the wilderness,
fill our wilderness with your good news!

We gather at the banks of the river of grace,
waiting, O John, for precious news,
listening to your announcement of our Lord Christ.
From your birth you were a great sign.
A seed takes root in the desert; it bears sweet fruit,
for the word in the wilderness
prepares the way for the Word who is born of God.

O great forerunner of the Word of God,
bring a sign to those who wander lost!

Zechariah and Elizabeth exulted;
Judean hills rejoiced with them;
the Church sings hymns for the birth of God's own herald.
Prophets and angels saw this truth:
one will prepare the way for our great salvation,
who will point to the coming One,
the One who will shake the foundations of the earth.

O child of wonder, infant of grace,
bring us news of our Savior's coming!

O Lord our Light, you enlighten the universe;
You glorify Your holy saints.
When you come in glory, the righteous will rejoice.
They are the columns of Your Church;
like fresh springs they irrigate the world with new life;
they are waters that refresh all;
they rise in splendor like the towering cedars.

O Savior, through Your prophets' prayers
make us worthy of Your holy Church!

Reasonable Complaining

We live in a society in which it is very easy to find people complaining; and, what is more, people take themselves as being entitled to do so. But it's also fairly easy to recognize that not all complaints are reasonable complaints.

In certain kinds of legal systems there is a concept known as standing or locus standi: in order to bring a lawsuit, you need to have standing. The exact doctrine of standing varies somewhat from legal system to legal system, and can also vary according to the case, but there are often common themes. A fairly basic kind of standing has three elements, which can be roughly stated in the following way:

(1) Injury in fact: there is a genuine (legal) harm, one that is specific and actual.
(2) Causal relation: the harm is genuinely an effect of the specific behavior being challenged.
(3) Redressability: the legal action can reasonably be regarded as able to provide appropriate relief for the harm.

There have been attempts here and there in recent decades to argue that doctrines of standing are out of date, but I actually think that they are just specific forms of a more general set of principles concerning reasonable complaint and protest. That is to say, I think legal standing, and the above three elements especially, can be justified as preventing courts from wasting time on complaints that by their nature are unreasonable; precise details might need, and perhaps often do need, adjustment for this or that specifically legal reason, but the general structure is quite necessary. (There are other reasons for a doctrine of standing, including its value in limiting government overreach, but they are less relevant for my purposes here.)

Thus, I think one can generalize the notion of locus standi to cover all complaining of any kind; complaint without locus standi is unreasonable complaint. And, as with the above basic notion of legal standing, three principles seem to stand out as quite necessary for rational behavior. They can be formulated in a positive or a negative way.

(1) Reasonable complaint is about what is genuinely harmful. / Complaints about things that do not actually harm are unreasonable.
(2) Reasonable complaint depends on the fact that a harm is genuinely an effect of that about which one is complaining. / Complaints about things that do not actually cause the harm are unreasonable.
(3) Reasonable complaint is connected to solution of problems. / Complaints about things that cannot be remedied, or that are divorced from any remedy, are unreasonable.

There might be some pushback on the third, but it is in fact true that people often criticize complaints about the inevitable or the incorrigible, and it is difficult to give any account of the practical rationality of complaining about what one cannot change. As to complaints in cases where the problem could be solved but in which the complaint has nothing to do with actually solving the problem, people often criticize this, too, and allowing it creates a number of problems in practice (e.g., people interfering with actual solutions by their incessant complaining, or exasperating people who are actually looking for real solutions).

Thus one can assess the reasonableness of complaints by looking to see whether they have locus standi: Is the thing complained about a real harm, and why? Is the thing complained about really the cause of the harm, and why? Is the complaint contributing to a real practical solution to the problem? (It hardly needs to be said that complaining on the internet often fails these tests. Some of that which does could, perhaps, be taken as mere venting, which is the kind of action that is not reasonable in itself, but at least arguably could be reasonable in a particular context. And not all unreasonable action is morally culpable, of course; some of it is just itself a harmless waste of time. But we all know that it would be difficult to stretch considerations like these very far.)

Some points:

(1) This account is about complaint. Not all critique or criticism is complaint; there can be a considerable difference, in fact, between criticizing a position and complaining about it. However, I think there's reason to hold that the above principles of reasonable complaint are themselves specific forms of even more general principles of reasonable criticism. Even so, it is a matter for inquiry whether there are kinds of criticism sufficiently different from complaint to operate under very different kinds of principles.

(2) The above principles are almost certainly not exhaustive. There are many things to consider in reasonable action -- honesty, moderation, fortitude, appropriateness to context, justice -- and while some of the basic principles of these might reduce to the above three, I see no reason to think that they all do.

(3) As noted above, unreasonable complaint is not itself something that it is necessarily reasonable to complain about. Complaint may be unreasonable but harmless; or it may be unreasonable, but any harms associated with it are, for all we know, not associated with it at all; or it may be pointless to complain about. But this is going to be something that can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. And, of course, merely because a case of unreasonable complaining is not harmful doesn't make it any more reasonable.

The Rowdiest Council

Today in the Maronite calendar is the memorial for the Fathers of the Holy and Ecumenical Council of Ephesus. The third ecumenical council was as close to being a free-for-all as a council can be.

Nestorius was a monk of Antioch who became famous for the quality of his sermons; because of this, the Emperor Theodosius II named him Patriarch of Constantinople in 428. Almost immediately he found himself dealing with a local dispute between those who claimed that Mary was Theotokos and those who thought it absurd and suggestive of Arianism to say that God had a human mother, because it suggested that the Son began to be. Nestorius proposed and tried to enforce a compromise in which Mary would be called Christotokos and not Theotokos, Christ-bearer rather than God-bearer. The controversy grew, because Nestorius does not seem to have been well liked by the populace, and the news began to spread. The ultimate result was a war of letters between St. Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria, and Nestorius. Nestorius was absolutely not prepared for the fight; the strength and influence of Alexandria was immense, and Alexandrians were brawlers, not at all shy about fighting a matter out, and politically cunning, since life in Alexandria required the negotiation of perpetually shifting political alliances.

The great alliance between Rome and Alexandria which largely defines the early conciliar period of the Church had begun to crack in the reign of Cyril's predecessor and uncle, who had leveraged the alliance in a harassment campaign against St. John Chrysostom, but it was not yet broken. Cyril soon wrote to Pope Celestine I of Rome to ask for his decision on the question. Celestine held a synod and came down against Nestorius, authorizing Cyril to speak for Rome in the matter. It was all that Cyril needed to know that he was on sure ground. Constantinople had become increasingly important due to its connection to the Emperor, but against Alexandria and Rome together it was far outmatched.

So Nestorius took what was his only available option: he pushed the Emperor to summon the bishops of the Empire to a council. It is often forgotten that the initiative for the Council of Ephesus was Nestorian -- as far as Cyril was concerned, there could hardly have been any need for a council, since both Rome and Alexandria had spoken on the matter and agreed. It was Nestorius who pressed for a council to exonerate him and condemn Cyril. Nestorius, no doubt, thought that his hand was fairly strong, since he could count on the support of Antioch and the Emperor, and he seems always to have thought that his position was the only reasonable position, rejected by Cyril only because Cyril was obstinate. He was in many ways a thoroughgoing intellectual, fond of 'technically' and 'strictly speaking', and while he seems to have been quite charming personally (people who knew him directly often supported him quite loyally), his entire approach as patriarch was high-handed and condescending.

Theodosius called for a council to open on June 7, 431, in Ephesus. I'm not sure why this city in particular was chosen; perhaps it was intended as a minor concession to the other side, but Ephesus was actively hostile to anything suggestive of Nestorianism, and the bishop of Ephesus, Memnon, would refuse Nestorius entry into all the churches of Ephesus, citing the decisions of Rome and Alexandria. And when Cyril arrived, he took control of everything. The delegations from Rome and Antioch were late because of stormy weather, and Cyril wanted to open on time, but he was told by the imperial representative, Candidian, that it would be illegal to open the council without the reading of the Emperor's convocation letter, and that he should wait until the other delegations arrived. Cyril did wait, for two weeks, and then opened the council, anyway, on June 22, presiding over it as Patriarch of Alexandria and representative of Rome. When Candidian came in with the pro-Nestorian bishops protesting, Cyril had him read the Emperor's letter to the bishops to clarify a point, and then took that reading of the letter as the legal opening of the council.

The council summoned Nestorius, but Nestorius, complaining of harassment by the people of Ephesus, would not recognize any council that was led by Cyril. He refused the summons and was condemned and deposed by the council.

John, Patriarch of Antioch, arrived a few days afterward to find that the council had already started and, in fact, had already condemned Nestorius. Furious, he and Candidian opened a separate council and deposed Cyril and Memnon. Meanwhile, the Roman legation arrived, and, after giving the letters of Pope Celestine to Cyril's council and some brief investigation, they concluded that all that was required was that the documents of the first session be read aloud in their presence. That done, the legates then signed and made Rome's support of the condemnation of Nestorius official.

That in hand, Cyril now began to move against John of Antioch, summoning him to the council. When John refused, he was deposed. Other bishops attempted to take advantage of this -- the bishop of Jerusalem (unsuccessfully) and the bishop of Cyprus (successfully) tried to get the council to recognize its independence form Antioch. Canons were drawn up, and the council came to an end. Throughout the entire period, the Imperial representatives had difficulty keeping order, both sides complained of physical bullying, and the city stayed more or less in uproar mode the entire time.

But its decisions held. Rome confirmed the decisions of the council for the West. Cyril reconciled with John, although only after much negotiation. And the question for the East then became, how strictly should we interpret the decisions of Ephesus? It would take another council a century later to answer that question.

Music on My Mind

Steve Martin with Steep Canyon Rangers, "Daddy Played the Banjo".

Nicholas Cabasilas

Yesterday (June 20) was the feast of Nicholas Cabasilas for the Greek Orthodox. He is not, as far as I am aware, officially on any Catholic calendars, although it is not difficult to find Melkite Catholics who refer to him as St. Nicholas Cabasilas. Regardless, he is one of the truly great Byzantine theologians. He lived in the fourteenth century; we don't know exactly when he was born or died, but common dates given are 1321-1391. His uncle Nilus Cabasilas was the Archbishop of Thessalonica; he himself became an advisor to John Cantacuzenos. We do not know whether he was ever ordained as a priest, although it seems likely given his intimate familiarity with liturgical matters, but he did become a monk. Later hagiography often claims he succeeded his uncle as Archbishop of Thessalonica, but these claims are late, and it is often unclear how the dates would work out, so these claims may well be the result of an accidental confusion between Nicholas and his uncle.

From The Life in Christ, which is concerned with the sacraments (particularly baptism, chrismation, and eucharist):

Those who come over to Him He welcomes with the gifts which follow from His death and burial. He does not merely bestow a crown or give them some share in His glory, He gives them Himself, the Victor who is crowned with glory. When we come up from the water we bear the Saviour upon our souls, on our heads, on our eyes, in our very inward parts, on all our members--Him who is pure from sin, free from all corruption, just as He was when He rose again and appeared to His disciples, as He was taken up, as He will come again to demand the return of His treasure.

Thus we have been born; we have been stamped with Christ as though with some figure and shape.

[Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ, DeCatanzaro, tr. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press (Crestwood, NY: 1974) p. 62.]

From A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, which goes step by step through the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, one of the major liturgies of the Church:

The central act in the celebration of the holy mysteries is the transformation of the elements into the Divine Body and Blood; its aim is the sanctification of the faithful, who through these mysteries receive the remission of their sins and the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven. As a preparation for, and contribution to, this act and this purpose, we have prayer, psalms, and readings from Holy Scripture; in short, all the sacred acts and forms which are said and done before and after the consecration of the elements.

[Nicholas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, Hussey & McNulty, trs., St. Vladimir's Seminary Press (Crestword, NY: 1960) p. 25.]

Sacra di San Michele

Looking around, I find that the Sacra di San Michele has a very nice little set of virtual tours on its website. The Benedictines were removed in 1622 after a period of long decline, and as MrsD noted in previous comments, it has been maintained by the Rosminians since 1836. It has also been adopted as the monumental symbol of Piedmont, so the regional government has been actively working for the past two decades to renovate it.

Your Teeth Are Like Washed Sheep

The simile, of course, is a flattened version of one found in the Song of Songs (4:4,6:6). In his discussion of metaphor in Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language Umberto Eco notes that our first reaction to this is to think of sheep as shaggy, dripping, bleating, smelling. But, of course, the figure of speech is not arbitrary (he also considers 5:15):

Nevertheless, we can imagine how the biblical poet drops all those properties of sheep negatively identified above, so as to preserve only the characteristic of aequalitas numerosa, their splendid unity in variety -- as well as their whiteness. It is understood that the poet is able to do so because within his culture these most probably were the properties associated with sheep, at least within the poetic tradition. And it is also clear that the qualities chosen to define the beauty of a healthy and sturdy country girl, destined to tend to the flocks among the rocky Palestinian hills, single out her upright solidity (like that of columns), her unbroken state of perfection, in the same way that it is not so much the cylindrical shape of columns that is preeminently chosen as is their whiteness, instead, and their grace of line. [p. 101]

This is plausible and, I think, not correct. Moreover, it is not correct in a way that I think sheds light on Eco's approach to metaphor in general.

I have on my shelves somewhere a book that was a required text for a theology class I took in undergrad on Old Testament wisdom literature. It's one of those books that can't just let texts be texts, but must also add on top something for 'critical distance' or 'deconstruction' (as theologians have considered, it anyway), an identification of things you have to be suspicious of, like sexism and the like. And one of the critical comments the book makes on the Song of Songs is that its language is crypto-monarchist. The first time I ever read that, I found it hilariously funny, and I find it hilariously funny every time I think of it. (This is what theology texts are good for when they are not good for theology; they are almost as good as joke books.) The Song of Songs is obviously not 'crypto-monarchist' in its language because there is absolutely nothing 'crypto-' about it. It talks about kings. It talks about accoutrements of kings. It talks especially about wealth of kings. And it does it all out in light of day without even a smidgeon of an attempt to hide it.

None of the figures of speech in the entire book are arbitrary; they all concern the things that make royalty wealthy and impressive. There is nothing in the work to suggest that aequalitas numerosa and whiteness were chosen because "within his culture these most probably were the properties associated with sheep, at least within the poetic tradition." It is of course, a sign that Eco is neither stupid nor sloppy that he adds that final phrase. In a society in which pastoral activities play a major role, it would hardly be the case that anyone could talk about sheep without having a very extensive familiarity with them, far more extensive than ours usually is. Most people today know that sheep are shaggy, bleating, smelling, only by hearsay. A few more have had occasional experiences of actual sheep, like myself (I had a pet lamb when I was a little boy). Only a very few people today have a familiarity with sheep that would match the kind of familiarity with sheep that would have been quite common in the poet's milieu. He would have known that they were shaggy, bleating, smelling, and more, and to a greater extent than we do. What is more, in the poet's actual culture it is extremely unlikely that in fact "unity in variety" and "whiteness" would be the most obvious properties associated with sheep, which would be food and clothing and the difference between wealth and poverty and between being poor and having nothing. Whiteness and unity in variety could hardly be more than minor properties in comparison. But Eco, being more careful than another might be, saves the claim with the final phrase. It's indeed possible that the poetic tradition tended to emphasize these properties when talking about sheep, if whiteness and unity-in-variety independently came up in poetry a lot. But there is no reason to think that this is operative in this case.

The order of events suggested by Eco's description is: talking about a girl, talking about teeth, teeth are white and numerously equal, sheep in poetry are white and numerously equal, her teeth are like sheep. But given the consistent pattern of figurative language throughout the work, it is much more likely that the order is something like this: he wants to describe a girl in terms of how impressively beautiful and worth valuing she is; this leads him to think of her in comparison with royal splendor and wealth; given that, the problem is to describe the girl in figures drawn from actual royal splendor and wealth; so he describes her nose, her legs, her belly, and, of course, comes to her teeth; what, from the domain of royal splendor and/or great wealth, has something in common with teeth?; he thinks through various things from that domain and comes up with the best fit -- flocks of sheep, white and many!; and so we get our simile. And where this is all going is that the girl is more valuable and wonderful than all of these signs of royal splendor and wealth, because she matches them all in one attractive little package. Given a choice between the extraordinary wealth represented by a flock of sheep with bright wool (and, as he goes on to say, pregnant with twins, which means the rich are getting richer) and the girl, what do you choose? The girl, of course. ("You look like a million bucks," he said, "the Rolls Royce of women, and your eyes are a mansion enough for anyone; and your kisses are sweeter than wine.") In short, the whiteness and numerous equality being selected out is almost certainly an effect of looking for an appropriate metaphor, not something simply received and applied.

This is all, of course, speculative reconstruction. There are a number of ways in which this line of thought could be varied. But, remember, we get a lot of figures of speech in the Song of Songs, and they do display thematic patterns. The explanation here easily adapts to her belly like a heap of wheat, her hair like a flock of goats, her neck and nose like a tower, her thighs like jewels, her navel like a bowl of wine, and, yes, her legs like marble columns. All of the similes develop within a larger set of metaphors, and to this extent there is a workman-like quality to them: you can identify the concern that selects what to look for.

This is precisely where Eco's account of metaphors is consistently weak. He likes to jump quickly to infinities, and then, to handle them, run to purely cultural explanations. But this does not lead to a very good explanation of most use of figures of speech, and it misses the most important thing, which is that the poet is not making up similes at random, but for a reason. Composing poetry is an extremely teleological affair: you have your ends, and you find your means for those ends. In the process you actively discover things that you weren't really expecting, but which happened to come along with the means that were available. It's like a master sculptor: he wants to sculpt Judith with the head of Holofernes, so he looks around for a marble of the right kind, and in sculpting he discovers features in the grain of the marble that he adapts to his use, and the choice of marble and the choice of the manner of adaptation are all governed by the end in view. Why does the poet go out of his way to mention that the sheep are ewes pregnant with twins? Was that what he was looking for from the beginning? No. Is it somehow a special feature of sheep as portrayed in standard poetic diction? Maybe, but that's not what explains its role here. It's an intensifier naturally arising as a possibility given that sheep were already selected, when you consider the end he had in view.

Rarely do we consider all properties when doing metaphors. Eco realizes this, but regularly tries to offload everything into culture, as if all the properties were really on the table and it's the arbitrary choices and historical contingencies of culture that narrow the focus. But this is backwards entirely. Why bring sheep in at all? Because there is already a reason for doing so. And that reason constrains and governs the properties selected out. Culture merely gives an order to the search by making some of those properties more likely to be called to mind than others; it suggests, while the poet does the actual selecting. When we deliberately choose a metaphor or simile, we are not picking them from an endless sea of possibilities; we have an end in view, and we usually only look at the things that are appropriate to that end; and from those possibilities we select the best fit we come across for that end. Only when we take into account the end in view do we get a real understanding of similes and metaphors.

-----

Quotation from Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, Indiana University Press (Bloomberg: 1984).

Seasonless, Herbless, Treeless, Manless, Lifeless

Darkness
by George Gordon, Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went--and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:
And they did live by watchfires--and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings--the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other's face;
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:
A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;
Forests were set on fire--but hour by hour
They fell and faded--and the crackling trunks
Extinguish'd with a crash--and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless--they were slain for food.
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again;--a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought--and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails--men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress--he died.
The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage; they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other's aspects--saw, and shriek'd, and died--
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful--was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless--
A lump of death--a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd
They slept on the abyss without a surge--
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon their mistress had expir'd before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them--She was the Universe.

In 1815, Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies erupted, massively, and the result was that 1816 was a year cold and dark. The sun was sometimes so blocked by particulate in the atmosphere that it burned red and one could see sunspots with the naked eye. It was the Year Without Summer, for summer never came. In some places, snow fell in June and late frost after late frost killed off crops, leading to a worldwide crisis as the price of what few staple crops survived soared sky high. Famine swept across Europe. The Yangtze Valley in China was flooded much of the year and tropical Taiwan had winter snow. Cholera swept through India due to a late monsoon that seemed never to stop raining.

Trying to pass an unpleasant summer, the Shelleys, Polidori, Byron, and others amused themselves in Switzerland with horror stories, leading to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre. And at some point during the year, Byron seems to have written the above apocalyptic poem.

Fortnightly Book, June 19

Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus.

There was some interest in reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose a couple of weeks ago, so it makes sense to do it earlier rather than later. Ironically, the striking title has very little significance of itself -- it was deliberately chosen not to give away anything and to suggest possible meanings in such a way that it will never be possible to pin down the real meaning. And that is very much the theme of the book -- the medieval confidence in reason is breaking down and giving way to a modern perplexity that can never decide if the things we see in the world are really there or not. We follow the signs -- and at the end we find only more signs.

But, of course, that sounds quite bland, and The Name of the Rose is not a bland book, so it will be fun to re-read. And since it is Eco, the work is an epistemological thriller and turns on some finer points of semiotics and philosophy.

To set the mood, here is a lovely picture of the Sacra di San Michele, in the Susa Valley of Piedmont, Italy, which is widely thought to be Eco's inspiration for the Abbey:

Maronite Year LIV

Sixth Sunday of Pentecost
1 Corinthians 12:12-13, 27-30; Matthew 10:16-25

God made hosts of angels ranked in orders of fire,
and Seraphim crying, Holy, Holy, Holy!
For He said, Let there be light, and the light was good.
Thus He has blessed this day with the Spirit of joy,
for through His resurrection He formed His true Church,
His martyrs and virgins marching in ranks of fire,
nations beyond all count singing hymns before Him,
splendid in light and glory.

As a body is one despite its many parts,
as all the parts together form one whole body,
so by the Spirit we are united as one,
sharing without division one baptism and one hope.

This is the day of light; let us praise, let us thank,
let us magnify our Savior, Lord Jesus Christ,
who through His love for us saved us and set us free,
dying upon the Cross and rising from the Tomb.
At the end of days, He will come with hosts of fire,
overthrowing darkness and judging nations;
make us worthy to rejoice with Your holy saints,
one Church united with love.

Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound; Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound

Introduction

Opening Passages: From Prometheus Bound:

POWER
Now we have come to the plain at the end of the earth,
the Scythian tract, and an untrodden wilderness.
And you, Hephaistos, must turn your mind to the orders
the father gave you,--to discipline and pin down
this outlaw here upon the lofty ragged rocks
in unbreakable bonds of adamantine chains.
It was your flower, the gleam of civilising fire,
he stole and handed it over to mortals. Therefore
he must pay the price of such a sin to the gods,
that he may be taught to bend to the dictatorship
of Zeus, and give up his ideas of helping men.

And from Prometheus Unbound:

Monarch of Gods and Daemons, and all Spirits
But One, who throng those bright and rolling worlds
Which Thou and I alone of living things
Behold with sleepless eyes! regard this Earth
Made multitudinous with thy slaves, whom thou
Requitest for knee-worship, prayer, and praise,
And toil, and hecatombs of broken hearts,
With fear and self-contempt and barren hope.

Summary: Prometheus was a Titan, an elder god, but in the great Titanomachy between the Titans and Zeus, Prometheus supported Zeus, and in part by the aid of Prometheus's flawless foresight, Zeus conquered and became king of the gods. New regimes wipe away the works of the old. And one of the works of the old regime was an animal, cave-dwelling and lowly, peopling the earth. Zeus ordered their destruction, that a new race might be raised to walk the earth as a sign of the power of the gods, but Prometheus instead stole the heavenly fire from the workshop of Hephaistos and brought it down to them. With the divine gift of fire came all the arts that build cities and make them thrive. And with it he brought hope, which covered up one kind of knowledge that they had before, knowledge of the day they would die.

It is a great temptation in reading Prometheus Bound to sympathize with Prometheus. The introduction to the work in the Heritage Press edition I was reading, by Rex Warner, sums it up with the question, "What, if anything, has Prometheus done wrong?" Of course, we are inclined to think in those terms because Prometheus was our champion; we were the animals he saved from destruction, we were the animals to which he gave a shard of divinity. But right there we see the problem. There is actually never, at any point, any question of what Prometheus did wrong. The human race was slated by the gods to end and be replaced. And Prometheus defied the gods by stealing for us something that belonged to the gods themselves, and he gave it to us, a people who had no right to it and could never deserve it, and made us complicit in the defiance of the gods, so that the whole of human life, every flame and every craft, was a sign of rebellion against the authority of Zeus.

Because of this, Zeus orders Hephaistos to bind Prometheus. Hephaistos is reluctant to do so against a brother-god, but he is made to do so by the Kratos (Authority) and the Bia (Coercive Power) of Zeus. (In my translation, Kratos is translated as Power and Bia as Violence, in keeping with the translator's tendency to play up the notion of Zeus as arbitrary dictator, for he, too, has a natural human bias in favor of Prometheus.)

It is interesting that Prometheus frees mankind by hiding from us our death-days, because Prometheus even in punishment defies Zeus by hiding from Zeus the day of Zeus's overthrow. Prometheus is the son of Themis, the order of things, identified by Aeschylus with Gaia, the earth that endures, and his mother had told him a secret: One of the women with whom Zeus would mate would bear a son who was greater than his father, as Zeus was greater than his father, and by the hand of that son Zeus would fall as Chronos fell to Zeus, or Ouranos to Chronos. It is fated that if Zeus does not avoid that union, he will fall. It is perhaps not so surprising that Zeus is so harsh in his punishment: his new regime has been betrayed by one of its allies, and that treacherous ally knows of a secret flaw that will destroy it all. But Prometheus will not tell the secret as long as he is bound; and Zeus cannot unbind him as if the authority of Zeus could be blackmailed or as if the laws of the gods were subject to any kind of negotiation.

It is an apparently insuperable impasse. And that, of course, is the point. We know that some things will have to happen. Zeus will one day give clemency to the less belligerent Titans. Heracles will one day free Prometheus, as Prometheus sees. Zeus will give his blessing to the human use of fire. And it all must be occur by deadline, so that Zeus will not beget a son more powerful than himself. Aeschylus is not a modern writer; he is not so shortsighted that he does not realize the overthrow of Zeus would be the overthrow of everything. The regime of the gods is, after all, the regime of all Greek civilization. The problem must be solved. But it is an impressively knotted problem: the source of civilization and the power without which it cannot exist are in conflict, and as the clock ticks down the doom of the latter draws closer, unless some reconciliation can be found.

In Aeschylus' play, Kratos comments that "there is no one except Zeus who has freedom". Shelley's poem is devoted to the utter repudiation of such an idea. The story of Prometheus is always and ever a depiction of humanity. One of the things Aeschylus does very well is to interlink the gift of fire and the arts and crafts of civilized life. The fire of Aeschylus is outward-facing; it is the power to form cities, the thing by which we have achievements that are divine and yet somehow at the same time a thing we do not have full power to control. But Shelley's Promethean gift, while covering the same ground, is all inward-facing. It is the power of reason and will not to be enslaved. Aeschylus' Prometheus is our benefactor; but Shelley's Prometheus is our exemplar, the liberator of Heaven's slaves. And given that, it is inevitable that Shelley will let Zeus fall. The power of Zeus cannot coerce the mind, and because Prometheus knows the secret, all of that power cannot give him victory. Zeus will be defeated and Prometheus unvanquished:

Ay, do thy worst. Thou art omnipotent.
O'er all things but thyself I gave thee power,
And my own will.

This is not to say there is no nuance. Shelley is entirely in the Prometheus camp, and his Zeus is nothing but an oppressor and tyrant. But while Shelley's Prometheus might shout out defiances like that above in a moment of grief, it is not his considered thought. As he says, "I wish no living thing to suffer pain." He is "firm, not proud". It is Zeus's own tyrannical mind that will lead to his destruction, during which he will wish for the mercy of Prometheus. And after his fall there will be no tyrants to succeed him.

And that is our victory, as well: the mind of man is "unextinguished fire". Shelley explicitly and deliberately develops his imagery and narrative in terms of the internal operations of the mind; we are Prometheus, in a sense, and thus his victory is the template for our our own heroisms.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

The difficulty that all of this faces is that there is nothing in this that is really a story. Despite all the beautiful pomp of word and declamation, Prometheus literally conquers by not doing anything. Zeus just gets pushed off the stage at the appropriate moment without much ado, and, God no longer in heaven, all's well with the world. Aeschylus' play has very little actual plot, but the overall narrative suggested in it, both background and foreshadow, is a truly epic story. But Shelley's poem is not a play, and it suggests no grand story. It could hardly do so: it is about what happens in a mind that refuses to bend. And, of course, the story of what happens in a mind that refuses to bend is -- that it refuses to bend, and that's it.

I am not fond of assimilating poem and poet too easily, but it does remind me of the Romantics themselves, or at least Shelley's little group. They all talked like Titans, but they were mostly just a group that talked about their Titanic selves; the victories over convention to which they looked were things that they expected to fall out inevitably from their refusal to comply with convention. Zeus will just fall on his own, any day now. Although perhaps that is not entirely fair. After all, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, written a few years earlier, is subtitled "The Modern Prometheus" and it is perhaps with Mary's novel, rather than Aeschylus' play, that Percy's poem should really be compared. That would actually make a very interesting study in itself.

There is much that is excellent in Shelley's poem, though. I think the interaction between Prometheus and his wife Asia is excellently done. It is quite subtle -- they are often not together in the poem and they do not spend much time talking at each other -- but it suggests a very great depth, and the poem does much better giving us the suggestion of something epic through their relationship than it does with Prometheus' victory over Zeus.

Favorite Passages: From Prometheus Bound:

Now it is fact, and no longer in words
that the earth is convulsed.
Out of the deep the roaring of thunder
rolls past, and flickering fire of the lightning
flashes out, and the whirlwinds
roll up the dust, and the blasts of all storms
leap at each other,
declaring
a war of the winds,
and the air and the sea are confounded.
These, most clearly, are strokes from Zeus
coming upon me to cause me fear.
O my glorious mother, O Heaven
with circle of light that is common to everyone,
you see me and see this injustice.

From Prometheus Unbound:

From all the blasts of heaven thou hast descended:
Yes, like a spirit, like a thought, which makes
Unwonted tears throng to the horny eyes,
And beatings haunt the desolated heart,
Which should have learnt repose: thou hast descended
Cradled in tempests; thou dost wake, O Spring!
O child of many winds! As suddenly
Thou comest as the memory of a dream,
Which now is sad because it hath been sweet;
Like genius, or like joy which riseth up
As from the earth, clothing with golden clouds
The desert of our life.

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, both, although you will need to be in a patient mood to get the most out of Shelley.

Flaming Sword

Take the case of the flaming sword; just as in it the natures of the fire and the steel are preserved distinct, so also are their two energies and their effects. For the energy of the steel is its cutting power, and that of the fire is its burning power, and the cut is the effect of the energy of the steel, and the burn is the effect of the energy of the fire: and these are kept quite distinct in the burnt cut, and in the cut burn, although neither does the burning take place apart from the cut after the union of the two, nor the cut apart from the burning: and we do not maintain on account of the twofold natural energy that there are two flaming swords, nor do we confuse the essential difference of the energies on account of the unity of the flaming sword. In like manner also, in the case of Christ, His divinity possesses an energy that is divine and omnipotent while His humanity has an energy such as is our own. And the effect of His human energy was His taking the child by the hand and drawing her to Himself, while that of His divine energy was the restoring of her to life.

St. John Damascene, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book III, Chapter XV.

Dashed Off XIII

Donne's "The Apparition" and the quasi-horror of certain aspects of sexual life (of course, these aspects are widely drawn upon in actual horror, as well)

appropriateness, obligation, inner strength, balance

"The criterion of a successful theory is that it enables us to understand its predecessors in a newly intelligible way." MacIntyre

The correction of another requires completion in the correction of oneself.

Sartre's 'existence precedes essence' is a misleading way of saying 'will precedes second nature'.

Every pleasure presupposes some end other than itself.
Seeking pleasure for the sake of pleasure is not the same as seeking pleasant things because they are pleasant. Pleasure being a sign of good, pleasant things may be sought because they are prima facie goods; but to seek pleasure for its own sake is to treat a sign of good as itself the good to be sought.

Delight functions like confirmation.

From love of common good comes law that can be good.

Components of Infallible Teaching
- efficient
(1) Christ, who is God, as primary cause
(2a) bishop of Rome precisely as successor of Peter, as secondary cause
(2b) or bishops together acting as successors of apostles, as secondary cause
(2c) or Church as whole as being from the apostles, as secondary cause
- formal cause
(3) definition arising from bishops
- material cause
(4) living faith of Church as a whole
final cause
(5) to guard and expound the apostolic faith

Even when, among those affected by our actions, there are like interests, those interests may be more remote or proximate to us with respect to those who have them -- e.g., in the difference between family and strangers.

Self-interest is not a replacement for either duty or virtue

Almost all popular error consists in a failure to think thing through in order to the end. That is, they arise from patchwork approaches and incompleteness.

serenity of conscience as an integral part of hope

(1) needs of life that are higher than pleasure: to live, to be a part of the human race, to sustain the human race, to reason and seek truth, to love God
(2) the beauty of moderation
(3) avoidng that which poorly expresses human dignity

taste:temperance::law:justice

paradox of testing: To test something properly and adequately requires knowing already what one tests.

conceptual analysis as an ineliminable part of testing

Saints are venerated so that
(1) we might be spurred on by their example
(2) we might have their protection
(3) we might be crowned by their victories
-- all of which express aspects of the love uniting us to them in God

philosophical pedagogy as resource management, logistics

the importance in ethics of the conception of misusing one's own body

Experiment presupposes a form of classification.

bureaucratic government as supercorporation

the matter of chrismation as imposition of hands in sign of the Holy Spirit -- the Apostles were granted special signs, but their successors use the general prophetic sign of the holy oil for anointing

Arguments begin 'outside' us, so to speak, and are only then brought inside, moving from being entertained to being accepted.

language as telepathy
the science fiction trope of telepathy as an exploration of language

deceptiveness as a privation (cp Descartes)

Prudence is a kind of purification.

Truth is the primary principle of freedom.

(1) We have the idea of substance.
(2) The idea of substance cannot originate from sensation alone
the idea of substance as a significant part of our reasoning about existence

What makes modalism about the Trinity wrong is the lack of subsistence.

The idea of being in general is implicit in the intellectual itself. (final cause)

universality of the ideas the possibility of the thing (Rosmini)

Withing a stable society, power arises from stable procedural privileges.

Ideas not maintained degrade over generations.

analogy as a tool for identifying explananda

intelligibility as goodness for intellect

natural classification as a limit concept (certainly Duhem, arguably Whewell as well)

natural law : analytics :: casuistics : topics
then it would seem that the theory of temptation would be to sophistics and something hortatory to poetics & rhetoric

"If there be no moral Truth, there is no Truth." Whewell

temperance as the fence-building virtue

Some kinds of advice can only be given by someone in the right circumstances.

The tradition of human life itself is a grave responsibility.

New Natural Law basic goods and necessitas humanae vitae

temperance and the symbolism of deeds that go beyond mere gestures

nonmeasuring experiments
need for units of measurement for precision
development of means of measurement
measuring experiments
need for unifying formulae
development of unifying formulae
integration of formulae into theories

The distinction between what we need and what we want can only be made by reference to what we are.

measurement as always within a universe of discourse

Affinity structures search; difficulty structures search. (Can these two be taken as comprehensive?)

Critias read as an acount of the degeneration of tradition

Claims about teleology require taking things abstractly, e.g., 'the heart' in "The heart pumps blood".

The perfection of the universe is obviously not something that can be assessed according to only one standard.

All completion requires final cause.

Every moral standard will tend to apply to very different kinds of action very differently.

If there were a best possible world, the only way we could understand the idea of it would be as a best possible story. And just as there is no best possible story, there is no best possible world.

Prudence is judged by ends, and appetites by means determined by prudence.

the preciousness of fragile goods

Moral standards must regard the nature of the agent -- as capable of acting, as having ends, as able to grow, as capable of decision, etc.

All that is has a goodness worthy of being.

family-making as anti-collectivist (arising from the tendency of collectivism to be anti-familial)

(1) suppositum (2) predicable (3) principle (4) operation (5) cooperation

Everything is either inherently principle or has a principle.

Intelligible constraints structure sensible events.

We can fall in love with intelligible patterns.

temperance the virtue of critique

The story appropriate to moral law is an endless story.

Through the lens of the sacraments we see that everything is a sign of heaven.

the art of failing well

metaphors as microarguments
naming as microarguments

Vital identity, i.e., identity of a living thing through time, indicates that the form of the living thing is substantial, not accidental.

Because reason is capable of taking all things as instruments, it can be difficult to determine at times whether the reason exhibited is in the principal or instrumental agent, if the behavior of the instrument is sufficiently sophisticated. This is a flaw in the Turing Test -- it fails to distinguish evidence of the computer being intelligent from evidence of the designer being intelligent and having foresight with respect to the instrument.

Descartes' position on final causes directly implies that the only evil is moral evil; natural evil requires natural ends.

To take profit alone as the measure of success in a corporation is like taking calories alone as a measure of health in an organism.

parrhesia as required for tradition

Diversity of experiences is useless without coherent integration.

vestment as part of rhetoric, governed by similar principles (decorum, etc.)

Causal 'mechanisms' are just classifiable causal (inter)actions.

predestination as structure of merit

Grace works the penitential in us.

the base, the ignoble, the disgraceful, the shameful, the beastly, the foul, the turpid, the vile, the brutish

real numbers as representing tendencies of certain sequences

urgency, impact, and trend in analyzing philosophical problems (relative to an argument or position: closeness to argument [directness of implciation], effect on argument, parity [effect on other arguments])

Many atheistic arguments from evil boil down to indirect claims that it is immoral for the human species to exist; this is especially true of popular versions.

Shepherd & manipulability accounts of causation

production processes as messy computations

wholesomeness of family as a need of human life

All scientific progress exhibits the fact that human beings are rational animals.

compatibilism : pantheism :: libertarianism : theism :: hard determinism : atheism

practical means // middle terms

(1) What can be is, when it is made to be. This is change.
(2) What is changed is changed by what makes it be.
(3) If a thing is made to be, it is not itself the thing that makes it to be.
(4) If a thing is made to be, what makes it to be, must be.
(5) To make a thing be may be a change in what makes it to be.
(6) If there is a chain of things made to be by things that are made to be things that make things be, there is a first in that chain.

Error magna pars miseriae est.

the structure of inquiry and Malebranche on inclination

The four causes are required to have a full account of measurement.

The seal of confession pertains to the sacrament of confession itself, so that (for instance) anyone who accidentally overhears a confession is morally and legally bound by it.

simplicity of means and richness of effects in prudence judgment and decision

most reality in the least compass as a mark of great literature

Art/craft/skill is that which is concerned with coming-to-be insofar as it is within one's power.

the testing of philosophical arguments by examining their analogues in other fields

A Quick Trip to Italy, Miscellanea VII

Vatican City

Most of my best pictures were used in the main posts, so I have fewer extras for Vatican City that rise above at least tolerable.

More pictures of St. Peter's from a distance:

And another of the Pinecone:

A bust of Pericles near the Round Hall:

A floor mosaic:

A glance toward the Pian Museums, which we didn't have a chance to visit:

A ceiling detail just before the Map Room:

Various minor details within St. Peter's, mostly from a distance being jostled by crowds:

Another outside shot:

to be continued

Truth and Light

I've noted before the Sikhism is the fifth largest religion in the world, despite the fact that it always gets overlooked. Today is an important Sikh holiday, the Martyrdom of Guru Arjan Dev, which I've talked about before.

The most important verse in the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book, is the Mul Mantar: "God is One, His Name is True, the One who Does, Fearless, Hateless, Deathless, Birthless, Self-Enlightened, Guru's Gift; Pray!" The True (Sat = what is, what endures, what is sure) is a major part of Sikh religious belief, and, indeed, much of its doctrine can be construed as a meditation on Truth. The word occurs in Sikh greetings like Sat Naam (His Name is True) and Sat Siri Akal (Truth is Highest and Deathless). It is in great measure because it is so emphatic on Truth, as such, that Sikhism is monotheistic. The Sikh moral ideal is to be in accordance with Truth. The role of the Guru is to unite the student with Truth, as Guru Nanak says of the Guru (SGGS 17.14):

If it pleases Him, I bathe in the Pool of Truth, and become radiant and pure.

God is Truth and the Lover of Truth, and the fulfillment of human life is union with Truth.

This is often put in terms of light (jot). The Guru Granth presents each human being as existing by the gift of God, and at the fundamental heart of who they are is a light derived from divine Light. All of Sikh practice is concerned, directly or indirectly with reuniting the light within with the divine Light. The Sri Guru Granth Sahib is essentially a hymnbook; it is sung. It is also the perpetual Guru, carrying forward the light of Guru Nanak, and by this light manifesting the divine Light. So by singing its hymns, one unites oneself to the Guru, and thus uplifted one contemplates through the Guru the divine Light from which one comes; in doing this, one purifies oneself, and so makes oneself fit to unite again with the divine Light after death. This basic idea of our light uniting with divine light, joti jot samana, is found everywhere in Sikh thought, and is that which corresponds to moksha in Hinduism, liberation from the cycle of reincarnation.

An old poem of mine trying to capture various elements of Sikhism in a short form (Amritsar, of course, is the Sikh holy city):

Amritsar

Although the sea divides us, in Amritsar I stand;
my heart rests in the warmth of its nectar-golden sand.
In a vessel, clay and calm, made by the guru's hand,
I feel blessing pouring down: for in Amritsar I stand.

When time pools all around me like some silent sarovar,
I am in Ramdaspur; and, whether near or far,
my heart is by those waters as they shine beneath the stars
around the golden temple of blessed Amritsar.

When trouble overtakes me I flee to the fort of steel,
I shelter in the city with the sacred pools that heal,
I search for the jot of light where the psalms of gurus peal:
this world is all mirage, but Amritsar is real.

Practice Before Theory

I say, moreover, that Geometry,— speculative Geometry,—was extracted from practical Land Measuring. History informs us that this was so ;_that the Geometry of the Greeks arose out of the Land-Measuring of the Egyptians. And this is of itself most likely; for in every subject, Practice comes historically before Theory; Art before Science. Man acts first by the guidance of his practical Reason, and afterwards unfolds his convictions before the eye of his speculative Reason; thus striving to discern the Truths on which his action depends, and the Ideas which it involves. He constructs Squares and Pyramids and Ellipses, directed by his practical Geometrical Faculty; and then, by the aid of the same Faculty in a speculative form, he discovers the properties of Squares and Pyramids and Ellipses, and finds out demonstrations of these properties, and resolves these demonstrations into their simplest shapes, till he makes them depend upon Axioms, which all are ready to acknowledge after a little reflection, but which no one saw the true place of before. These Axioms are assented to by all thoughtful persons; and to say that they are assented to by all who have steadily considered them, is one of the simplest ways of saying that they are self-evident.

William Whewell, Lectures on Systematic Morality, Lesson V

Beauty on Beauty Called Us Back

The Hunting of the Dragon
by G. K. Chesterton

When we went hunting the Dragon
In the days when we were young,
We tossed the bright world over our shoulder
As bugle and baldrick slung;
Never was world so wild and fair
As what went by on the wind,
Never such fields of paradise
As the fields we left behind:

For this is the best of a rest for men
That men should rise and ride
Making a flying fairyland
Of market and country-side,
Wings on the cottage, wings on the wood,
Wings upon pot and pan,
For the hunting of the Dragon
That is the life of a man.

For men grow weary of fairyland
When the Dragon is a dream,
And tire of the talking bird in the tree,
The singing fish in the stream;
And the wandering stars grow stale, grow stale,
And the wonder is stiff with scorn;
For this is the honour of fairyland
And the following of the horn;

Beauty on beauty called us back
When we could rise and ride,
And a woman looked out of every window
As wonderful as a bride:
And the tavern-sign as a tabard blazed,
And the children cheered and ran,
For the love of the hate of the Dragon
That is the pride of a man.

The sages called him a shadow
And the light went out of the sun:
And the wise men told us that all was well
And all was weary and one:
And then, and then, in the quiet garden,
With never a weed to kill,

We knew that his shining tail had shone
In the white road over the hill:
We knew that the clouds were flakes of flame,
We knew that the sunset fire
Was red with the blood of the Dragon
Whose death is the world’s desire.

For the horn was blown in the heart of the night
That men should rise and ride,
Keeping the tryst of a terrible jest
Never for long untried;
Drinking a dreadful blood for wine,
Never in cup or can,
The death of a deathless Dragon,
That is the life of a man.

Fitness of Words

At school, (Christ's Hospital,) I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master, the Reverend James Bowyer....I learned from him, that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word; and I well remember that, availing himself of the synonymes to the Homer of Didymus, he made us attempt to show, with regard to each, why it would not have answered the same purpose; and wherein consisted the peculiar fitness of the word in the original text.

[Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chapter I]

And the meaning of fine words cannot be made 'obvious', for it is not obvious to any one: least of all to adults, who have stopped listening to the sound because they think they know the meaning. They think argent 'means' silver. But it does not. It and silver have a reference to x or chem. Ag, but in each x is clothed in a totally different phonetic incarnation: x+y or x+z; and these do not have the same meaning, not only because they sound different and so arouse different responses, but also because they are not in fact used when talking about Ag. in the same way. It is better, I think, at any rate to begin with, to hear 'argent' as a sound only (z without x) in a poetic context, than to think 'it only means silver'. There is some chance then that you may like it for itself, and later learn to appreciate the heraldic overtones it has, in addition to its own peculiar sound, which 'silver' has not.

[J. R. R. Tolkien, Letter 234 to Jane Neave in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Carpenter and Tolkien, eds., Harper Collins (London: 1990) p. 310]

There's a lot of poetry here at Siris. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is purely philosophical -- since graduate school I have been irritated by philosophers of language whose conception of language is poorly suited for accounting for the existence and facts of poetry, which is one of the most obvious and important of all linguistic phenomena. There are works in the philosophy of language that lead one to suspect that the authors have never had any more poetry than they had been forced to read by the end of high school. And this is a problem. It is in poetry that one really puts language to the test, as it were, probing its limits and drawing new functions and nuances out of it, turning it on itself and on its head, playing with aspects of it that are often ignored. It is, of course, not only poets who do this -- but it is one reason why there's a never-ending river of poetry here.

Poetry deals, among other things, with finer shades of meaning. As Tolkien notes in the above passage, 'argent' and 'silver' are synonyms, but they are not, in fact, used in the same way. Substituting 'silver' for 'argent' is unlikely to affect the truth value of a statement, but it is likely to affect the "fitness of the word" that Bowyer, as described by Coleridge, attempted to show. Thus, as Tolkien again notes, 'argent' has "heraldic overtones". We would also often recognize 'argent' as being in a higher formal register than the more common 'silver', and as having poetic associations that need not be borne by the more common word.

One way to put this might be to say that 'argent' and 'silver' label closely analogous classes in what have come to be different systems of classification, and part of the difference between the two lies in their suggestion of which approach to classification is in play. We have to say that it is only a suggestion, since we can perfectly well transfer across classifications, as when someone uses overly formal words for comic effect, but our ability to do this depends on there being a difference in the first place.

Philosophy of language for a considerable portion of the past century has tended to be influenced by the Fregean division of meaning into force, sense, and tone, with the lion's share being concerned with sense. The above differences of meaning would usually get classified as differences in tone (coloring or shading, in Frege's own preferred manner of speaking), and that would be the end of it, since in practice 'tone' usually works as nothing more than the wastebin -- you throw in the things that you aren't using and never consider them again. This is problematic, since, as I've noted before, there's no reason to think that the same kinds of things get put into the wastebin each time. Something that can be treated as a mere difference of tone on one interpretation or occasion can, on another interpretation or occasion, be interpreted as a significant difference of sense. Whether or not the difference between 'cur' and 'dog' matters for the truth value of a statement depends in part on context and how one chooses to take the words in that context. The same is true of common derogatory terms, racist epithets, euphemisms, and the like. Again, it's a matter of classification: if you are classifying someone as a Norwegian, that's a different way of classifying them than if you classify them as a Noggie, because the latter includes as part of the classification a negative evaluation that is missing from the more neutral term, one that we can either ignore or take to be important. And doing so affects whether what is being said counts as accurate or inaccurate.

But even when the difference does not affect the truth value of a statement, it's an error to think that the difference is really insignificant. It can still affect the "fitness of words", their appropriateness to their use and context. In communication, there are always many ends, and some words will just fit those ends better than others in a given case. Unlike discussions of sense and reference, however, in which meaning is artifically divided in order to keep all the easy parts of the meaning together and to make it possible to ignore all the subtle parts, taking seriously the fitness or unfitness of words requires careful comparative work and also poetic experimentation.

Doctor Evangelicus

Today is the feast of St. Anthony of Padua, Doctor of the Church. He was born Fernando Martins de Bulhões in Lisbon in about 1195, and died in Padua in 1231; he was canonized within a year of his death. He joined the Franciscan order, and soon became renowned as a homilist. His sermons, which are typically concerned with tracing concordantiae or parallels and analogies between different parts of Scripture, are the reason for his liturgical status as Doctor of the Church, but he is perhaps most famous for being the patron saint of lost articles, and the primary association of him with his preaching in the popular mind is the hagiographical legend of his preaching to the fish:

St Anthony being at one time at Rimini, where there were a great number of heretics, and wishing to lead them by the light of faith into the way of truth, preached to them for several days, and reasoned with them on the faith of Christ and on the Holy Scriptures. They not only resisted his words, but were hardened and obstinate, refusing to listen to him.

At last St Anthony, inspired by God, went down to the sea-shore, where the river runs into the sea, and having placed himself on a bank between the river and the sea, he began to speak to the fishes as if the Lord had sent him to preach to them, and said: "Listen to the word of God, O ye fishes of the sea and of the river, seeing that the faithless heretics refuse to do so."

No sooner had he spoken these words than suddenly so great a multitude of fishes, both small and great, approached the bank on which he stood, that never before had so many been seen in the sea or the river. All kept their heads out of the water, and seemed to be looking attentively on St Anthony's face; all were ranged in perfect order and most peacefully, the smaller ones in front near the bank, after them came those a little bigger, and last of all, were the water was deeper, the largest.

When they had placed themselves in this order, St Anthony began to preach to them most solemnly, saying: "My brothers the fishes, you are bound, as much as is in your power, to return thanks to your Creator, who has given you so noble an element for your dwelling; for you have at your choice both sweet water and salt; you have many places of refuge from the tempest; you have likewise a pure and transparent element for your nourishment. God, your bountiful and kind Creator, when he made you, ordered you to increase and multiply, and gave you his blessing. In the universal deluge, all other creatures perished; you alone did God preserve from all harm. He has given you fins to enable you to go where you will. To you was it granted, according to the commandment of God, to keep the prophet Jonas, and after three days to throw him safe and sound on dry land. You it was who gave the tribute-money to our Saviour Jesus Christ, when, through his poverty, he had not wherewith to pay. By a singular mystery you were the nourishment of the eternal King, Jesus Christ, before and after his resurrection. Because of all these things you are bound to praise and bless the Lord, who has given you blessings so many and so much greater than to other creatures."

At these words the fish began to open their mouths, and bow their heads, endeavouring as much as was in their power to express their reverence and show forth their praise. St Anthony, seeing the reverence of the fish towards their Creator, rejoiced greatly in spirit, and said with a loud voice: "Blessed be the eternal God; for the fishes of the sea honour him more than men without faith, and animals without reason listen to his word with greater attention than sinful heretics."

And whilst St Anthony was preaching, the number of fishes increased, and none of them left the place that he had chosen. And the people of the city hearing of the miracle, made haste to go and witness it. With them also came the heretics of whom we have spoken above, who, seeing so wonderful and manifest a miracle, were touched in their hearts; and threw themselves at the feet of St Anthony to hear his words. The saint then began to expound to them the Catholic faith. He preached so eloquently, that all those heretics were converted, and returned to the true faith of Christ; the faithful also were filled with joy, and greatly comforted, being strengthened in the faith. After this St Anthony sent away the fishes, with the blessing of God; and they all departed, rejoicing as they went, and the people returned to the city.

The Little Flowers of St. Francis, Part I, Chapter XL.

Because of the tale, Anthony is often pictured with fish: a reminder that the gospel must be proclaimed even if there is no one to hear but the fish.

Apostolorum Apostola

The feast of St. Mary Magdalene was recently raised from the status of Memorial to Feast proper, which usually belongs to Apostles and a few others. As some have noted, this actually is a restoration of sorts, since the Magdalene's feastday has historically been quite important, and has been surprisingly low-ranked for about half a century. Because it was mentioned in the letter accompanying the decree, the following passage from Aquinas's Commentary on the Gospel of John (c. 20, l. 3 [2519]) is noteworthy, and worth reading in full context:

Notice the three privileges given to Mary Magdalene. First, she had the privilege of being a prophet because she was worthy enough to see the angels, for a prophet is an intermediary between angels and the people. Secondly, she had the dignity or rank of an angel insofar as she looked upon Christ, on whom the angels desire to look. Thirdly, she has the office of an apostle; indeed she was an apostle to the apostles insofar as it was her task to announce our Lord's resurrection to the disciples. Thus, just as it was a woman who was the first to announce the words of death, so it was a woman who would be the first to announce the words of life.

[St Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Chapters 13-21, Larcher and Weisheipl, trs. CUA Press (Washington, DC: 2010) p. 266]

The Latin, for those who are interested:

Ubi notandum est triplex privilegium, quod Magdalenae est collatum. Primo quidem propheticum, per hoc quod meruit Angelos videre: propheta enim est medius inter Angelos et populum. Secundo Angelorum fastigium, per hoc quod vidit Christum, in quem desiderant Angeli prospicere. Tertio officium apostolicum, immo facta est apostolorum apostola, per hoc quod ei committitur ut resurrectionem dominicam discipulis annuntiet: ut sicut mulier viro primo nuntiavit verba mortis, ita et mulier primo nuntiaret verba vitae.

Maronite Year LIII

Fifth Sunday of Pentecost
Philippians 3:7-14; Matthew 10:1-7

Our praise falls short of Your mercy, O Lord;
You are above all praise.
With Your resurrection You did great deeds,
beyond what we can say.
Truly, this is the day the Lord has made;
with David we rejoice,
with voices glad and strong.
This is the unequaled day, crown of feasts.

Twelve disciples You did call to Yourself,
with great authority:
power against evil You gave to them.
Simon Peter was first, and Andrew, too,
James and his brother John,
Philip and Bartholomew and Thomas,
Matthew and James, the son of Alphaeus,
Thaddeus and Simon,
and the traitor (may we not be like him!).

Through every land the zealous apostles
made disciples for Christ,
enduring hardship to preach to far realms,
like bright lamps enlightening all the world.
Their love burned ardently,
lighting the candles in Your holy Church,
which passed the flame of truth that they received
until our souls were lit
and we received the apostolic fire.

We count as loss even our greatest gains
compared to love of Christ,
for You, O Lord, we wish to our credit,
and You, O Lord, are He in whom we are.
By Your resurrection,
by participation in Your Passion,
we are formed to the pattern of Your death,
burning with Your bright love,
pressing forward for the prize through Your grace.

We praise You who formed us to Your image;
You brought us salvation
and from Your mercy You came to bring hope.
We give thanks for Your gifts,
for You became man and fell into death
that we might live again,
that death itself might die,
and we will always proclaim that wonder.