The Ebb and Flow of the Tide

Related to the previous post, here is Butler:

We cannot indeed say a thing is probably true upon one very slight presumption for it; because, as there may be probabilities on both sides of a question, there may be some against it; and though there be not, yet a slight presumption does not beget that degree of conviction, which is implied in saying a thing is probably true. But that the slightest possible presumption is of the nature of a probability, appears from hence; that such low presumption often repeated, will amount even to moral certainty. Thus a man’s having observed the ebb and flow of the tide to-day, affords some sort of presumption, though the lowest imaginable, that it may happen again to-morrow: but the observation of this event for so many days, and months, and ages together, as it has been observed by mankind, gives us a full assurance that it will.

This is fairly interesting, since Butler is arguing that "the slightest possible presumption" must be a kind of probability for what is presumed because by accumulation it can reach even full assurance. Butler takes moral certainty to come in degrees, and "full assurance", I take it, is what he calls "the highest moral certainty".

Beattie very clearly draws on Butler's argument in his account of probable reasoning in the Essay on Truth, even using the same example of the ebb and flow of tides. However, Beattie's probability only concerns the future, e.g., our expectation that the tide will keep ebbing and flowing, whereas it is quite clear that Butler is only using it as just one kind of example for a much larger phenomenon.

Not Intuitive, Not Demonstrative, Yet Sovereign

Assent on reasonings not demonstrative is too widely recognized an act to be irrational, unless man's nature is irrational, too familiar to the prudent and clear-minded to be an infirmity or an extravagance. None of us can think or act without the acceptance of truths, not intuitive, not demonstrated, yet sovereign. If our nature has any constitution, any laws, one of them is this absolute reception of propositions as true, which lie outside the narrow range of conclusions to which logic, formal or virtual, is tethered; nor has any philosophical theory the power to force on us a rule which will not work for a day.

John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Chapter 6. In the sense Newman means, 'assent' is unconditional and does not admit of degrees; if you assent to something, you simply take it to be true, period. (You can still have a reason for assenting, of course; but the assent itself is not provisional or tentative or partial or something that comes in any kind of degree at all.) Examples of things that Newman thinks all reasonable people, however much they love truth, take to be simply true, despite not having perfect proof of it, are: that we exist, that there are things we do not know, that there are other minds, that there is an external world, that the earth is round, that there are lots of cities on it and that they do not disappear when we leave them, that we have parents, that we will die. The idea is that whether or not one can have a rigorous proof of these conclusions, in fact every reasonable person accepts some things like these as simply true despite having nothing more than a probable -- and sometimes even only a weakly probable -- argument in hand for them; therefore it can be reasonable to believe something certainly on reasoning that itself is only probable.

Paradise in Nature

Beauty in nature is the breath of the Holy Spirit over the world. Beauty is immanent to creation and clothes it. Beauty is paradise in nature, whose traces are preserved in nature's memory as a reflection of heaven, although in the fallen world beauty finds itself torn away from holiness. This natural beauty is revealed to man, who is called to receive its revelation not only naturally but also spiritually, in teh entirety and fullness of his spiritual being, directed at God. For man, therefore, beauty is inseparable from holiness; it is not only natural but also "spiritual" beauty.

Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God, Jakim, tr., Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, MI: 2008) p. 155.

Intolerances

Gary Gutting has a post on religious intolerance at "The Stone"; Gutting is usually vague to the point of being almost vapid, but this is even worse than usual. When people try to make these kinds of arguments without being clear about what is supposed to be meant by 'tolerance' and 'intolerance', the result is inevitably going to be dubious at best. Without knowing precisely what one means, it's not clear what it means to say that there was achieved "a widespread attitude of religious toleration in Europe and the United States"; prejudices against religious groups are certainly common both places, as (to take one example) the history of Mormonism shows in spades, and continue up to the present day. If one means legal regimes of toleration (as Gutting occasionally seems to mean), they have a checkered history and are sometimes tolerant only by technicalities, and it's not really clear what this would have to do with a young man slitting a priest's throat in a European country, anyway. No doubt there's some meaning of 'tolerance' in which one can say that Gutting's claim is true -- the word can mean almost anything outside of active attempts to destroy -- but then the question would be, is this really the sense relevant to his comments about Islam? And it's impossible to say without knowing the sense.

Part of the reason this is worth noting is that there is not, contrary to popular conflations, an obvious relation between violence and most things called intolerance. A lot of things that get called by the name are intrinsically conflict-avoiding -- strong prejudices against external foreigners are one possible ground for isolationism, prejudices by a minority within a nation not uncommonly lead to enclave formation, and prejudices by a majority in power most commonly lead to 'slow strangling' of the outgroup by laws because the people holding the power don't usually need to resort to direct violence unless they are facing a rebellion. By plenty of standards, the Amish are highly intolerant of other religious groups, and nobody is worried about Amish violence. Stable Islamic governments that have actively attempted to limit non-Islamic religious movements have not historically been very violent, in the sense of initiating active physical force; it's much more efficient to tax the opposition out of existence or make it very difficult for them to earn a living. (That's one of the major reasons why modern England is Protestant rather than Catholic, and it took hardly more than a generation.) The violence in such cases is usually started by the people being taxed or restricted out of jobs, and has nothing to do with whether they are religiously intolerant or not. (Unstable governments, of course, tend to be violent toward any perceived threat, whatever it might be.)

Where we are confining ourselves to talking about violence, it is arguably, in any case, a mistake to think of these matters in terms of tolerance and intolerance at all; it ultimately does not clarify anything to discuss how tolerant or intolerant Islam is considered to be, because 'intolerance', like 'hate' or 'fear', tends not to do any explanatory work. It is usually used as a pseudo-explanation, a label for a result that happens to be put in causal terms, rather than something that is genuinely capable of being a cause of anything. It's like saying that war is caused by aggressiveness -- setting aside all the kinds of aggressiveness that don't result in war, usually what you're doing is simply classifying someone as aggressive because they are engaging in an act we classify as aggressive, without a hint of a real cause of the act itself anywhere in sight. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it's not a real explanation of anything -- just at best a description of what needs to be explained. More and more I am inclined to regard dragging in 'intolerance' as a concession of not understanding the situation, because it often doesn't contribute anything at all.

None of this, of course, is to say that one can't have an argument of the sort that Gutting's argument purports to be -- only that Gutting, like most people, is not doing any of the work, or critical thinking, required for it.

And, incidentally, on this:

As President Obama recently said, “Some currents of Islam have not gone through a reformation that would help people adapt their religious doctrines to modernity.”

If there's anything that's certainly true about ISIS, it's that it is reforming religion to adapt to modernity. Within its means, it is using all the methods and tools of modernity it can, and it was built to reform the entire religion in light of them. Of course, what President Obama means (and what Gutting means by quoting him) is that some currents of Islam have not grown so wise (as he sees it) as to agree with his main preferences for how to live; that's what people in the First World always mean by 'modernity': adaptation to their own convenience and liking. This, of course, is merely conceptual gerrymandering. Totalitarianism is as modern as religious toleration and has as good an Enlightenment and secular pedigree; bombing people is as modern and secular a way of getting results as letting people run for office. Terrorist groups and aggressively oppressive regimes are adaptations to modernity. It's time for people to stop lying to themselves about this: this is modernity.

Estel and Amdir

'Have ye then no hope?' said Finrod.

'What is hope?' she said. 'An expectation of good, which though uncertain has some foundation in what is known? Then we have none.'

'That is one thing that Men call "hope",' said Finrod. 'Amdir we call it, "looking up". But there is another which is founded deeper. Estel we call it, that is "trust". It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves. This is the last foundation of Estel, which we keep even when we contemplate the End: of all His designs the issue must be for His Children's joy. Amdir you have not, you say. Does no Estel at all abide?'

[J. R. R. Tolkien, "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth" in Morgoth's Ring, Christopher Tolkien, ed., HarperCollins (London: 2015) p. 320.]

You might remember that Estel was the name Aragorn had when growing up in Rivendell, before he was told about his heritage.

Fortnightly Book, July 31

MrsD a while back mentioned Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, and that's the next fortnightly book. In high school I loved Nathaniel Hawthorne, and read almost everything I could get my hands on (I particularly liked The House of the Seven Gables and "The Celestial Railroad"). But I don't think I ever got round to reading this one, or, if I did, I don't recall anything about it.

1852 was an election year, and Hawthorne was friends with Franklin Pierce. Pierce was a dark horse candidate, having squeaked by in the nominations due to a tactical mistake by the supporters of Buchanan. Hawthorne contributed to his campaign by writing a political biography of his rather unexciting career that made the case that this was actually an advantage. When Pierce won the election, he named Hawthorne consul to Liverpool, England. That's a sign of how appreciative Pierce was, because it was not just a plum position, but one of the very most important foreign service positions, very well paid and very prestigious. As the Pierce administration drew to a close and Hawthorne resigned from his position, he and his family went on an extended holiday to Italy for over a year and a half. While there, Hawthorne kept detailed notes, and they became the basis for The Marble Faun: or The Romance of Monte Beni, which was published in 1860. (The British edition was published with the title, Transformation, against Hawthorne's wishes.) It had a very curious reception -- critics were ambivalent about it, since it was a mixture of genres that were usually kept distinct, and a lot of people seem not to have liked the ending. However, as it happened it came out at the right time -- Americans were increasingly going to Italy, and they started using Hawthorne's tale as a sort of guidebook. The places Hawthorne talked about in The Marble Faun became the must-see sites in Rome. There was even an edition made at one point with blank pages where tourists could paste their own photographs as illustrations in the book. In the book, Italy is a kind of fantasy locale, built not just out of monuments and natural scenes but out of layers of history and legend and myth; The Marble Faun gave Americans an atmosphere for their tours.

And to get us started, here is the statue that inspired the name and story of the book, known variously as the Capitoline Faun, the Faun of Praxiteles, and the Resting Satyr, which is a Roman copy of a Greek statue supposedly by the great Greek sculptor Praxiteles:

Maronite Year LXIII

The Maronite Catholic Church began, of course, as a religious movement, heavily focused on ascetic life, inspired by St. Maron (or Maroun), who was an open-air hermit in the mountains. One of the major centers for this movement was the monastery of Bet Maroun, which grew to have several hundred monks. Given the nature of the region in which the movement thrived, it is difficult to get any precise historical information about it. However, apparently in the early sixth century, the monks of the region had a brief correspondence with Pope St. Hormisdas. The primary struggle of Hormisdas's papacy was over the Acacian schism, which had been caused by the Emperor Zeno's issuing of a document, the Henoticon, attempting to force a compromise between the Monophysites and the Chalcedonians. Decades later, when Hormisdas came to the papal throne, the schism was still a problem, and Hormisdas himself strongly advocated a noncompromising position, and he asked for public declarations in the East in favor of the Council of Chalcedon and the letters of Pope St. Leo I. This seems to have been the occasion for the correspondence; the monks wrote a letter affirming their support of Chalcedonian orthodoxy, in which they told of monasteries having been burned and three hundred and fifty monks martyred by Monophysites, requesting his assistance and protection.


The Feast of the 350 Martyrs, Disciples of St. Maron
Romans 16:17-20; Luke 11:49-54

For the sake of Your holy name, the martyrs fought,
Lord, not with sword but with grace and holy patience,
and in all places You exalt their victory.

Beneath their feet You will crush the Adversary;
faith, hope, and love guided them to the paths of life,
for they were loyal to truth and did not waver.

As their death was pleasing sacrifice in Your sight,
may their memory be protection to Your flock,
and their prayers a shield for Your chosen people.

Through them, the unfathomable riches of Christ,
the treasuries of divine wisdom, rain on us,
according to the eternal purpose of God.

O Three Hundred Fifty martyrs! Great is your faith!
When our Lord Christ called you to follow, you followed,
and God's grace, like a mother, sustained you in death.

Pray for us, O martyrs, that we may be worthy
to celebrate your feast and join your holy choir,
giving great honor with you to Christ the martyr.

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Introduction

Opening Passage:

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.

Summary: Tristram Shandy's life is filled with mishaps, and four, in particular, rule his fate. Tristram's father, being of philosophical temperament, had (like many an early modern philosopher) turned his attention to the best way to educate children, and concluded that there were certain basic things that were essential to a successful life. First, the animal spirits and humors must be properly balanced at conception; second, a successful man must have a large and attractive nose; and third, he must have an auspicious name, like Trismegistus, and not a name that will be a burden on him, like Tristram. Alas, at the time his parents were conceiving him, his mother suddenly asked his father whether he had wound the clock; and when he was born, his nose was crushed by forceps; and the maid and his mother got the name mixed up, and so he was christened Tristram. The fourth mishap occurred when he was accidentally circumcised due to the forgetfulness of the chambermaid.

The work is, as one might expect, both bawdy and satirical all the way through; one can see everywhere Sterne's taking of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought to an extreme and he never passes up a sexual innuendo if he can repeat it into the ground. Fully appreciating the satire requires, I think, having shared the same background reading as Sterne. There is no need for this with the bawdy jokes, although they get to be a bit wearing after a while. Where the book excels is in characterization. Every character is vividly unique -- Walter Shandy, Tristram's mother, Uncle Toby, Corporal Trim, Yorick (Sterne's own stand-in), and many of the secondary characters. MrsD noted that there was a Theatre Royal radio drama from the 1950s based on the book. Without the bawdy and with only a limited timeframe, it is not at all like the book. But it makes an excellent tribute to the charm of Sterne's Uncle Toby, a former soldier so gentle that he literally would not hurt a fly:



The work can be seen as satirizing any pretension of realism on the part of a novel. If we actually wrote up your life as a novel, what would it really include? A lot of bickering over extraordinary silly topics, a lot of obsessing over trivial hobby-horses, a lot of distractions, a lot of digressions, a lot of time doing nothing worth narrating; ridiculous embarrassments, ridiculous plans, failures to attend to matters of importance for ridiculous reasons. And, most of all, ridiculous opinions, in endless supply, the human brain being a sort of opinion-factory, producing ten opinions a minute on every subject under the sun. One of the mottos Sterne puts on the title page of some of the volumes is from Epictetus's Enchiridion: "We are bothered with opinions about things, not by things themselves." In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, we get very little of the actual life of Tristram; but we have endless opinions from everyone, and it is the endless variety of opinions that give interest to the snippets of action.

To the limited extent one can say that Tristram Shandy is 'about' anything, it can be said to be about the physical experience of writing and reading books. Sterne revels in the physical aspects of a book, giving us a black page as an elegy, a blank page as a portrait, a marbled page as a description of the book itself, various illustrative lines, shifts of font. He plays with the seriality of a book by displacing and misplacing parts of it, and its episodic character by using chapter divisions as punctuation. He plays at length with the fact that books are in part made up out of other books. And writing a book is not neglected, either. As Walter Shandy thinks of the conception of a child, so a writer tends to treat the conception of a book, planning and trying to get the start of the 'child' just right (Sterne repeatedly mocks the idea of writing according to a plan); just as Walter Shandy thinks a magnificent name essential to success, so people put a great emphasis on the titles of books. No one who has ever had a book seem to become more complicated faster than he or she could write it will fail to recognize the Tristra-paedia -- or Tristram Shandy itself.

Favorite Passage: From Volume I, Chapter XXXVI:

Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation. As no one, who knows what he is about in good company, would venture to talk all;—so no author, who understands the just boundaries of decorum and good-breeding, would presume to think all: The truest respect which you can pay to the reader's understanding, is to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his turn, as well as yourself.

For my own part, I am eternally paying him compliments of this kind, and do all that lies in my power to keep his imagination as busy as my own.

Recommendation: Highly recommended, but you have to be in the mood for most of it.

The Vindication of the Byzantine West

Today (July 28) in the Maronite calendar is the memorial for the Fathers of the Holy and Ecumenical Third Council of Constantinople. While it occurred, of course, in Constantinople, and was attended mostly by Eastern bishops, and dealt with theological disputes that were almost entirely Byzantine, it is in many ways the most Western of the Seven Ecumenical councils of the first millenium, for it was the triumph of the Byzantine West.

To understand the council, one must get out of one's head any nonsense about the Greek East as some kind of opposition to the Latin West. In the seventh century, there were no such sharp lines. In Italy, Greek and Latin rites were all jumbled together -- Italy in a north-ish and west-ish was largely Latin due to the influence of Rome and Milan, but the church in southern Italy was very decentralized, and churches were generally founded by local patronage, and while each church would generally be either Byzantine or Latin rite, it was just a matter of whichever the local patrons happened to decide that they wanted. There was a slow latinization under the southern Lombards, but it was very slow and barely noticeable at this early a date. And Italy was not entirely under Lombard rule; the other major power was the Exarchate of Ravenna, which was firmly Byzantine. Nor were the boundaries between the two powers neat and clean, as you can see from this map of the Lombard/Byzantine division of Italy at the end of the sixth century, shortly after the Lombard invasions:



Nor, for that matter, did the boundaries necessarily mean much; being in Lombard territory still could mean considerable direct Byzantine influence, depending on the particular political situation. Moreover, from 642 to 752 (from John IV to Zachary) there were eleven Popes whose native language was Greek -- either from Sicily, or from Syria, or from Greek-speaking parts of Italy, or (in one case) from Ephesus. The only exceptions, I believe, were the Popes who had been born in Rome itself. What is more, Muslim invasions both east of Italy (Syria) and west of Italy (Sicily) had led to a very significant influx of Greek-speaking refugees. There was a broader Latin world, to the north and to the west, over which Rome had extraordinary influence; but Rome itself in the seventh century lived in a world that was in a great many ways more Greek than Latin, more Eastern than Western.

The Emperor, Heraclius, was faced with a serious set of problems; he was very concerned with recovering territory that had been lost to the Persian Empire and preventing yet more territory from being lost, and the disunity between Christians who followed Chalcedon and those who rejected it was interfering with the formation of a unified front against the Persians. With the support of Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople, he attempted to push a compromise position: if the Monophysites would accept the formula that Christ had two natures, divine and human, the Chalcedonians would accept the formula that Christ had one operation or will (Monothelitism). It seemed to many to be a viable solution to a serious problem, a way to bring peace to a fight of which everyone was tired. Alexandria and Antioch signed on. The East was coming together -- or so it seemed. Nobody had reckoned on St. Sophronius. Sophronius was a widely respected monk; in 633 he traveled to Alexandria and to Constantinople in an attempt to convince their respective patriarchs that the compromise was unacceptable. He failed. But the next year he was elected Patriarch of Jerusalem, and from that position he began actively opposing the Monothelite compromise.

So now began the maneuvering. Patriarch Sergius wrote to the Pope at the time, Honorius I, insisting that the relevant phrase, one operation (energy) of Christ, had been used in a letter by Patriarch Mennas to Pope Vigilius (the letter was actually a forgery, but Sergius was not in a position to know this), and that the compromise was making it so that people who had before repudiated the words of Pope St. Leo I to Chalcedon were now singing his praises: unity was being achieved. However, he was willing to drop the precise formula he had been using, if Sophronius would also drop his. In the face of this argument (it is explicitly the unification of the East that the Pope found impressive), Honorius replied that this was probably for the best, and affirmed Sergius's position, or at least something like it; later, people will suggest that Honorius took Sergius to be denying that Christ had two contrary wills, and possibly that's what he was thinking, although it's hard to say. But it still made the dispute one of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome against Jerusalem. Or so it seemed. A synod met in Cyprus with representatives from all sides; and it came down in Sophronius's favor. And with that the whole compromise began to fall apart.

But Sergius was not deterred. The formula could be tweaked; and he tweaked it. This modified version is what would become known as the Ecthesis, and Sergius got Heraclius to sign off on it -- Heraclius would later say reluctantly, but how much this is actually true is difficult to say. All this happened in 638. Why 638? Because St. Sophronius died in March of that year. Patriarch Sergius would die in December of the same year -- but by the time he had done so, all four eastern sees had signed on to the new compromise, in part because Sergius was now able to use Honorius's letter. Eastern unity was now within reach. Or so it seemed.

Honorius had died in October 638, after what had seemed at the time to be a quite competent and relatively uneventful thirteen years of papal rule. Three days after his death, Severinus was elected Pope. But at the time, it was expected that no pope would take office until he received confirmation documents from the Emperor. Heraclius made it a requirement that Severinus could not receive the documentation until he signed on to the Ecthesis. Severinus had already refused to do so, but after some negotiation they were able to get Heraclius to agree to confirm the election on condition that they would show the Ecthesis to Severinus and ask him to sign it if he agreed with it. So the Exarch of Ravenna was to make sure that Severinus did sign it and then issue the confirmation in the Emperor's name. Severinus, however, refused. More negotiations followed and finally in 640, Heraclius, who was very ill, gave in, and confirmed the election. Severinus immediately called a synod and condemned the Ecthesis. Because of the long negotiation to get Imperial confirmation, which had led to his practically being a prisoner in the Lateran Palace for a year, it was about all he was able to do, as he died two months after the confirmation. But the momentum was now set: John IV (from Greek-speaking Dalmatia), Severinus's successor, also refused to accept the Ecthesis. And after John IV came St. Theodore I, a Greek-speaking Syrian from Jerusalem, and with him the foundations of the Third Council of Constantinople began to be laid. Theodore was very much against Monothelitism, and attempted to depose Patriarch Paul II of Constantinople for his support for it.

Of St. Maximos the Confessor in his early life we know relatively little for certain, although there is excellent reason to think that he was from Constantinople, served for a while as a civil servant there, and, after he became a monk, studied under Sophronius. He became involved in the Monothelite controversy while in Carthage, and he began a correspondence with Pope Theodore in 646, shortly before journeying to Rome to meet the Pope in person. He and Theodore planned a council to handle the matter. But it was not just any ordinary synod. Maximos's plan was for the Pope to call an ecumenical council. This was a bold move, because all ecumenical councils up to that point had been called by Emperors. Maximos was the one who did much of the practical work of planning for the council. Two things, however, would complicate matters.

The first was that in 648, the Emperor Constans I issued a decree called the Typos, which prohibited any discussion of Monothelitism at all -- quite literally, it commanded by law that everyone should go back to the way things were before the dispute arose. The second was that Theodore died suddenly in 649, before the council could actually be convened. He was succeeded by St. Martin I, who had spent much of his career in Constantinople. This put the council temporarily under a bit of doubt, but, as it happened, Pope Martin was of the same mind as Pope Theodore had been, and he did not wait for any imperial confirmation of the election; he called the council into session almost immediately, and the council began almost immediately because almost all of the planning had been done for it. Thus came about the Lateran Council of 649, the almost-ecumenical council. While there was a judicious selection of Latin bishops from Italy and North Africa, almost all of the major movers of the council were Greek-speaking, and perhaps as many as a quarter of all the bishops, as well. The council claimed that the bishop of Rome had full authority to eliminate heresy, and it condemned both the Ecthesis and the Typos. Martin promulgated the acts of the council by an encyclical claiming that the council had ecumenical authority.

Needless to say, Emperor Constans empowered the Exarch of Ravenna to arrest both Pope Martin and Maximos. Both were eventually caught in 653. Martin was exiled without trial and died in 655. Maximos was tried for heresy, found guilty, and as punishment had his tongue and right hand cut off; he was then exiled, and died in 662. The quieter St. Eugene I did not push the matter of the council with Constantinople, nor did St. Vitalian afterward, although both were opposed to Monothelitism. Adeodatus II did not involve himself with the question at all, and we have very little information about what Domnus, the next pope, did on this matter. But in 678, St. Agatho, from Sicily, became pope, and he was of a more energetic mettle.

And the timing was right, as well. The Emperor Constantine IV had a number of successes against the Muslim armies that had arisen and distracted imperial attention from the question of schism, and thus having a space to breathe, he wrote a letter to Pope Domnus proposing an ecumenical council to resolve the matter. Domnus was already dead, but Agatho wasted no time at all; he had synods throughout the West called to discuss the matter and arranged to send a large delegation -- the largest delegation of Western bishops that had to that point ever been sent to an ecumenical council -- and the Third Council of Constantinople officially opened in 680. A letter from Agatho was read at the council that came down strongly against the Monothelite heresy; it was accepted by the council and helped to consolidate the opinion of the council against Monothelitism. The council condemned Monothelitism and the major Monothelites, including Pope Honorius. Sophronius is explicitly upheld as orthodox in the Acts of the Council. The council held under Pope Martin is explicitly referred to in the letter of Agatho, which was accepted as orthodox by the council.

Pope Agatho did not live to see the triumph; by the time the decrees of the council had been sent back to Rome, he had died, after less than three years as Pope. He was succeeded by St. Leo II, who was Pope for less than a year, but who confirmed the decrees of the Third Council of Constantinople and arranged to have them promulgated throughout the West. Leo was very careful to explain in his letters to bishops that he took Honorius to be condemned not for heresy as such but for negligence in opposing it. Leo's successor, St. Benedict II, would do further work in making sure that the West was all on the same page with regard to the council. In the East, the council had fewer problems than ecumenical councils had usually had before, and became widely accepted very quickly.

The Third Council of Constantinople had as its primary and immediate effect the consolidation of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. But the council often shows up in other contexts too -- most notably in discussions of papal authority. There are two reasons for this. The first is the condemnation of Pope Honorius, by a council that Catholics accept as orthodox. The condemnation is quite harsh, as well:

And in addition to these we decide that Honorius also, who was Pope of Elder Rome, be with them cast out of the Holy Church of God, and be anathematized with them, because we have found by his letter to Sergius that he followed his opinion in all things and confirmed his wicked dogmas.

The reason for the condemnation seems to have been that Macarius of Antioch, one of the Monothelite holdouts, repeatedly appealed to Honorius in his defense.

On the other hand, the council accepted as orthodox the letter of Agatho, which makes very strong claims about the Roman see, e.g.:

Therefore the Holy Church of God, the mother of your most Christian power, should be delivered and liberated with all your might (through the help of God) from the errors of such teachers, and the evangelical and apostolic uprightness of the orthodox faith, which has been established upon the firm rock of this Church of blessed Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, which by his grace and guardianship remains free from all error, [that faith I say] the whole number of rulers and priests, of the clergy and of the people, unanimously should confess and preach with us as the true declaration of the Apostolic tradition, in order to please God and to save their own souls.

It's doubtful that the Greeks paid much attention to such claims, but Rome has always taken things like this seriously, as more than mere rhetoric. Prior to Agatho, the popes had already considered the case of Honorius; John IV, for instance, had argued, when opposing Monothelitism, that Honorius was simply confused, and thought that Sergius was condemning the notion that Christ had two opposed wills. When Leo II affirmed and promulgated the decrees of the III Constantinople, he also made very clear that he took it to be condemning him not for teaching heresy but for failing to oppose it and thus giving it encouragement. One should not get the wrong idea about this -- Leo's condemnation of Honorius for failing to do his duty in preserving the faith is quite as sharp as anything put forward by the council, and the papal oath that it was common for new popes to take included at some point a condemnation of Honorius for assisting heretics. But it's also clear that they at no point saw this as inconsistent with continuing to affirm, as Agatho puts it, that the Roman see remained "free from all error". The case became an issue, however, in the Reformation, since Protestants regularly appealed to Honorius as an example of papal heresy; the Counter-Reformation was not able to come up with a unified response to this argument, but the conclusion that has since come to dominate is that Honorius was not in fact teaching ex cathedra, but simply stating a private opinion, albeit in official correspondence.

Regardless, the Third Council of Constantinople stands as the great achievement of the Byzantine West, and one that could arguably have never come about except by the impetus of people who in culture were both Western and Greek. The Latin West knew almost nothing about it. The Greek East could do almost nothing about it. But the Greek West both understood the problem and laid the foundations for solving it.

Arda Unmarred

'For Arda Unmarred hath two aspects or senses. The first is the Unmarred that they discern in the Marred, if their eyes are not dimmed, and yearn for, as we yearn for the Will of Eru: this is the ground upon which Hope is built. The second is the Unmarred that shall be: that is, to speak according to Time in which they have their being, the Arda Healed, which shall be greater and more fair than the first, because of the Marring: this is the Hope that sustaineth. It cometh not only from the yearning for the Will of Ilúvatar the Begetter (which by itself may lead those within Time to no more than regret), but also from trust in Eru the Lord everlasting, that he is good, and that his works shall all end in good. This the Marrer hath denied, and in this denial is the root of evil, and its end is in despair....'

Manwë in "Laws and Customs Among the Eldar (A)" in J.R.R. Tolkien, Morgoth's Ring, Christopher Tolkien, ed., HarperCollins (London: 2015) p. 245. This is from one of the drafts of the Quenta Silmarillion, the material of which was being reworked after the publication of The Lord of the Rings.

UGCC Catechism

I've mentioned it was coming several times before, so since it has come (after considerable delay), I thought I'd put something up -- the Ukrainian Catholic Catechism, Christ Our Pascha, is now out and available. You can buy a copy here and no doubt elsewhere as time goes on.

Ray of Sunshine

Another priest in the same deanery, Father Aime Remi Mputu Amba, pastor dean of Sotteville-lès-Rouen, recalled that whenever Father Hamel came into the room for meetings, “it was always a ray of sunshine.”

“Despite his advanced age, he was still invested in the life of the parish. I often told him, jokingly, ‘Jacques, it’s time to take your pension.’ What he always answered, laughing: ‘Have you ever seen a retired pastor? I will work until my last breath.'”

(ht)

A Poem Draft

Intellectual Discovery

The altivolant splendor of the sunlight of the mind,
and all the shining glory of the radiance of its dawn,
illuminate with wonder a world endowed with grace,
the land of human reason in its variegated charm.

There rivers wash on banks with albinal lilies laid
and trees soar up to heaven with fair trunks of living gold.
The roses drip their dew like a sky of argent stars,
the breeze is clean, the grass is thick, beside a diamond road.

And underneath the tracing of bright branches formed of light,
beneath a tree of glory like an angel in its gleam,
a fountain leaps with waters, full of laughter and of life,
of truth, of hope, of poetry, of logic, and of dreams.

Retributivism

From Bedau and Kelly's SEP article on punishment:

The best justification of punishment is also not purely retributivist. The retributive justification of punishment is founded on two a priori norms (the guilty deserve to be punished, and no moral consideration relevant to punishment outweighs the offender’s criminal desert) and an epistemological claim (we know with reasonable certainty what punishment the guilty deserve) (Primoratz 1989, M. Moore 1987).

This is not, in fact, true of retributivists in general, though. The commitment generally shared by most people called retributivists is that punishment may only be imposed on the guilty. It is logically possible to have a retributivism committed to the claim that all the guilty should be punished, but no one seems actually ever to have held such a view. Even very hardcore retributivists usually concede something to other moral considerations -- and, indeed, not just moral considerations but practical considerations, as well, like how much trouble it would take to do the punishing, or the dangers of giving certain people the authority to punish in certain ways, or whether doing so would consistently require you to punish huge numbers of people. Retributivism in general doesn't normally tell you why you should punish this particular person but only why you can be punishing people at all; this does set up a default, but there might be any number of things that qualify this default, ranging from difficulty, to the feasibility of consistency, to the common customs of society, to general welfare.

Nor do any of these qualifications make the position less retributivist; if you consider utility, for instance, this doesn't mean that you have a utilitarian theory of punishment, since you may have a retributivist theory of punishment which recognizes that utility is a concern for the specifics of how society operates.

It is also a mistake to think of the matter in terms of "what punishment the guilty deserve". Punishments are not related to deserts in a one-to-one manner. Being deserving of punishment is something that we all recognize can be determined even when we don't know yet what punishment, specifically, should be given; while some penalties may be more appropriate than others, the question of what, precisely, the punishment should be is a different question from that of what justifies some kind of punishment in the first place. It is entirely possible to be a retributivist who thinks that there are many different ways you could legitimately go in punishing a particular kind of crime.

Wabbling Back to the Fire

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Geometer and Jurist

A mind well disciplined in elementary geometry and in general jurisprudence, would be as well prepared as mere discipline can make a mind, for most trains of human speculation and reasoning. The mathematical portion of such an education would give clear habits of logical deduction, and a perception of the delight of demonstration; while the moral portion of the education, as we may call jurisprudence, would guard the mind from the defect, sometimes ascribed to mere mathematicians, of seeing none but mathematical proofs, and applying to all cases mathematical processes. A young man well imbued with these, the leading elements of Athenian and Roman culture, would, we need not fear to say, be superior in intellectual discipline to three-fourths of the young men of our own day, on whom all the ordinary appliances of what is called a good education have been bestowed. Geometer and jurist, the pupil formed by this culture of the old world, might make no bad figure among the men of letters or of science, the lawyers and the politicians, of our own times.

[William Whewell, Influence of the History of Science Upon Intellectual Education: A Lecture, pp. 24-25.]

(Whewell goes on to note, however, that this would give a purely deductive education, and thus that there would be a need to add inductive approaches to these. Whewell notes that you could do this by picking some natural science, but his recommendation is a focus on the study of the history of natural sciences. One cannot help noticing that geometry, jurisprudence, and history of science would describe a very large portion of Whewell's oeuvre.)

Maronite Year LXII

Eleventh Sunday of Pentecost
Ephesians 2:17-22; Luke 19:1-10

O Christ, You came to find and save us who were lost;
You do not desire the sinner's destruction,
but seek for repentance from evil conduct,
uniting all in one Spirit to the Father.
Strengthened by Your kindness, O Hope beyond hope,
we who falter under sin's weight cry for You.
Do not turn Your face; receive us despite our sin;
Savior of the fallen, have mercy on us,
purify our souls, join us to Your Father,
that we exiles may be made children of Your house.

By Your resurrection, You build a great temple;
apostles and prophets are its foundation,
saints are its stones, and You are its cornerstone.
By the Spirit's anointing You consecrate it.
Only Son of God, You brought us salvation,
favoring us with a compassion divine.
Thieves upon the world's cross, You gave us paradise,
covering us with Your grace of compassion,
justifying the poor and the penitent,
and opening the gates to the garden of light.

O Source of life, we acknowledge Your divine gifts;
In forgiving mercy, You chose to be man,
even descending to the realm of the dead,
to bring rejoicing to the nations of the earth.
Your Father poured forth His renewing Spirit,
dividing His grace among the apostles,
that they might go forth and recall nations from sin.
By destroying death, You awakened our joy,
assembling nations that they might adore You,
that all might joyfully proclaim Your salvation.

Beyond the Wandering Moon

Somewhere or Other
by Christina Rossetti

Somewhere or other there must surely be
The face not seen, the voice not heard,
The heart that not yet—never yet—ah me!
Made answer to my word.

Somewhere or other, may be near or far;
Past land and sea, clean out of sight;
Beyond the wandering moon, beyond the star
That tracks her night by night.

Somewhere or other, may be far or near;
With just a wall, a hedge, between;
With just the last leaves of the dying year
Fallen on a turf grown green.

Maronite Year LXI

Youssef Antoun Makhluf was born in 1828 in Bekaa Kafra in the mountains of Lebanon. He eventually entered the Lebanese Maronite Order; he then took the name Sharbel, or Charbel, and studied briefly under St. Nemetulla Kassab. In 1874, he became a monastic hermit, and he died on December 24, 1898. Pope Paul VI beatified him in 1965 and raised him to the general calendar in 1977.

Feast of St. Sharbel
Romans 8:28-29; Matthew 13:36-43

O Christ our Light, You fill the earth with light;
You choose worthy teachers to teach Your Church,
securing the good of those who love God,
molding Your people into Your image.
You give Your saints the word of life and truth;
as flame to flame they kindle ardent faith,
each a star to show us the path of life.

From Sharbel's hermitage a great light shines:
through his prayers we receive salvation,
through his intercessions, health of spirit.
O Sharbel, you found the pearl of great price,
giving everything that you might have it.
Our Lord Jesus Christ called you to follow,
and without hesitation you followed.

Dashed Off XVI

This takes me up to December 25, 2014 in my notebooks.

Every method is a means with a degree of appropriateness to a context and to an end.

The method of doubt establishes that mind has a teleology.

An event requires location (space), duration (time), and actuality (cause).

respect for individuals as protection against mobbing

A theory drawn from or supported by experiments must be interpreted in ways consistent with the possibility and existence of those experiments and the viability of the supporting inferences.

The chief problem with most theories of punishment is detachment of punishment from questions of justice.

(1) Scriptural memorial of the work of Christ
(2) liturgical enactment of the work of Christ

Scripture as implicate Tradition; Tradition as explicate Scripture. Scripture as Tradition in rule; Tradition as Scripture in life.
Tradition as that which is required fully to unfold Scripture
1 Cor 11:23 & the nature of Tradition

Private revelations as probable confirmations and suggestive clarifications.

Form is that which is capable of having likeness to other forms. (Less trivial than it sounds, particularly with respect to cognition.) Matter is that which limits this capability in form (although form may, e.g., insofar as it has reference to matter, have intrinsic limitations as well).

the capital vices as disorders of humanity itself

Truths about bad deeds are easily poisoned by lies, for people will believe anything about those whom they regard as clearly having done wrong.

"How could that which does not make a man worse, make his life worse?" (Marcus Aurelius)

"We are all working together to complete one work; some of us knowingly and consciously and the others consciously." (Marcus Aurelius)

mereotopology as a theory of distinction and relations among the distinguished

faith expressed in works, in authority, in memory, in tradition, in institution, in reasoning, in ascetic life, in mystical life

It is curious that naturalists have a tendency to reject purely formal accounts of mathematics (platonistic) in favor of purely teleological ones (constructivistic).

the intrinsic structure of observation as the most fundamental issue in philosophy of science (note that this includes but is not reducible to the structure of perception)

mereotopological structures implicit in experimentation
the importance of boundary-to-experiment for experimentation -- with some kinds of experiment, this is very clear; boundaries need to be in place for reasons of avoiding contamination, isolating effects, and simplifying reasoning about the experiment

act, potency, and the principle of causality as the intrinsic structure of sensations

the martyr's prize, the tyrant's eternal torment by fire: 4 Macc 9:9, 9:31-32, 10:10-11, 10:15, 11:3, 12:12, 12:18, 13;15, 18:3-5, 18:18, 18:22-23

4 Macc 13:16 -- 'the full armor of self-control, which is divine reason'
4 Macc 14:7 -- 'the seven days of creation move in choral dance around religion'
4 Macc 16:25 -- 'those who die for the sake of God live to God, as do Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the patriarchs'
4 Macc 17:6 -- 'for your childbearing was from Abraham the father'
4 Macc 17:21 -- 'they having become as it were a ransom for the sin of our nation'
4 Macc 17:22 -- 'through the blood' & 'through their death as a hilasterion' (cp Rm 3:25, Hb 9:11-15, 1 Pt 1:19, 1 Jn 1:7)

Purity is primarily purity of reason.

inquiry into angelic knowledge as inquiry into contemplative life

the preparticles of a particle (preparticular properties) -- even the old atomoi had geometrical preparticles

Two problems w/ common Calvinist approaches to Scripture (which otherwise are often excellent): (1) ambiguity about what Scripture is; (2) treatment of all Scripture as positive law even when it is clearly not being an arbitrary authority but teaching reasons.

pleasure as fineza

Aristotelian logic takes known-making as important.

experimental reasoning as proof by sign/example

continuum : composition :: discrete number : division

aesthetic criticism and the involution of art

All technical skills are refined by an aesthetic criticism appropriate to them.

style as a relation to a medium

the aesthetics of philosophical system (we already see this in much of the comparison of scholasticism and cathedral architecture)

Kardinsky's three internal necessities of art: (1) personal expression; (2) Zeitgeist; (3) helping the cause of art

creativity in experimentation, experiments as works of art

experiment as an extrinsic teleological organization of intrinsic final causes

the depreciation of final and formal causes in modern thought as related to the tendency to ignore the character and conditions of experiment

To predict the future course of scientific inquiry would be to produce it before it was produced. (cp Hulme on creativity in art)

experiment // architecture
in being constructed of design solutions

angelic knowledge : contemplation :: angelic speech : magisterial teaching

Act and potency is how we explain two becoming one.

Our intellect is not of singulars directly not because they are singular but because our minds are acquainted with singulars that are material.

angelic knowledge & angelic speech as limit concepts

recreational use of sophisms

Philosophical or political response to evil is only the vigilance of a siege or leaguer, not an uprooting.

Magic tricks are less often unwound by analysis than by history.

principle of causality as integral to identity: if appearances A remain the same while reality R changes, some cause must maintain A as R changes; if reality R changes, some cause must change it

Tools are a kind of sign, so all animals capable of sign use above a certain sophistication are capable of tool use.

'Full of grace' is used by the angel not merely as a description but as a title under which she may be hailed.

Jesus (1) will be great; (2) will be called Son of the Most High; (3) will be given by God the throne of David his father; (4) will rule over the house of Jacob forever; (5) will have no end to his kingdom; (6) will be called holy, the Son of God.

What is manifested through the prophetic writings is manifested in the fulfillment of them.

To endure in the face of evil and difficulty is in and of itself a good.

sense of Scripture as type of the Spirit's work of Tradition

Benefits and harms obviously must be evaluated not merely quantitatively but also qualitatively.

Christ offers Himself (1) on the altar of the world; (2) on the altar of the Cross; (3) on the altars of His people through His priests; (4) at the Throne of God.

The sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is offered on the altar under the sign of the separation of Body and Blood.

enacted vs unenacted memorial

hierarchies of art structured by the two poles of ingenuity-based rendering in visible way of the universal essence, and technical copying of the particular appearance

rhyparography

models as analogical experiments

Intellect 'is a part of ourselves, and we ascend toward it.' (Plotinus)

reproduction as economic system

a dusk of images

the link between the sublime and the purifying

Medieval commentaries often called Lamentations 'Lamentation of Lamentations' to highlight parallel with Song of Songs; seems to be due to Paschasius Radbertus.
Lamentations and salutiferus dolor
Lamentations read morally as an account of human fallenness & repentance; allegorically as an account of persecution
giving one's cheek to the smiter: Lam 3:30 // Mt 5:39
Lam 4:20-22 & atonement

"There are only three ways of judging the prophets: they told the truth, deliberately invented a tale, or were victims of an illusion." Herschel, God in Search of Man

transmission of original sin as negative image of transmission of original justice; the transmission of original justice as parallel/analogous to sacred Tradition
Adam / Christ
Head of humanity / Head of Mystical Body
human solidarity / charitable union of members in Mystical Body
original justice / impress of Christ through faith and sacrament
generation (genealogy) / tradition

fake-awesome as misdirected sublimity (C. Hodge)

Balaam's Ass as a type of the Church (Irenaeus)

obligations arising from summation of possible actions with respect to (1) happiness of oneself; (2) happiness of others; (3) self-harm; (4) harming of others

omniscience Ps 139:1-6
omnipresence Ps 139:7-12
omnipotence Ps 139:13-16
holiness Ps 139:17-24

"each of us has been the Adam of his own soul" (2 Baruch 54:19)

Sir 3:3 & Jesus' honoring of his Father as atonement for sins
Tob 12:9 & Jesus' works of mercy as atonement for sins

'Generations' in Genesis seems to suggest an inheritance or reception-from (note particular 2:4, but also 6:9, where it seems it must include more than mere descent).

The Church teaches not only by laying down definitive limits but also by giving nondefinitive central lines. (Church approval & encouragement of popular devotions is a good example.)

bread of God Lv 3:11,16; 21:6,8,17,22f.

washed with water Lv 8:6-9
anointed with oil Lv8:12
consecrated by sacrifice Lv 8:14ff

David made king (1) privately in Bethlehem (1 Sam 16:13); (2) over Judah in Hebron (2 Sam 2:4); (3) over all Israel in Hebron (2 Sam 5:3)

The canon of the more difficult reading is simply that simple elimination of difficulty may always be done to eliminate difficulty, but introduction of difficulty requires special causal explanation. (i.e., it is based on the asymmetry of removal and addition)

As the sacraments are the presence of Christ and His Spirit, priests serve them and are not lords of them.

impartial spectator and the virtue of prudence (when Smith uses 'prudence', of course, he means something very narrow)
Note esp. his discussion of systems based on propriety, in which he holds that the propriety must be determined by "the sympathetic feelings of the impartial and well-informed spectator"

honor & tradition as integral to large-scale and extensive forms of caring
Without honor, caring becomes betrayal.

the general structure of the Pentateuch as the general structure of reception of revelation

original justice as intrinsic covenant, as radical solidarity, as that which unites priesthood, prophecy, and royalty in a unified (unfragmented) seminal form

To think of Christian life as encounter is not bold enough.

Interpretation of a text is limited by one's ability to discover its final causes.

The starting point of philosophical theology is -- everything available.

knowledge of good and evil as being situated so as to pronounce on what is to be done (see W. Malcolm Clark's 1969 article on this, which is quite a good start)

Merismus is always toned or valenced.

"Life is not made for delicate souls." (Seneca)

"An ugly man, if alive, is more beautiful than a man portrayed in a statue, however beautiful it may be." (Plotinus)

progress of calendar calculation, music, architecture in the liturgical commonwealth

the role of analogies of analogies in theory formation

Jer 1:10 & the papacy (Innocent III)
Melchizedek as a type of the papacy (Innocent III)

what is useful in common as approximation of the just

"every friendship is found in community" (Aristotle)

style as the presence of the author

People most fear death as powerlessness or else as ending of delight.

Titus 2:11-14 & the cardinal virtues

The first step in being a true friend to another is being a true friend to oneself.

Writing on its own presupposes an immense number of things about sensation and cognition.

The good of friendship cannot be reduced to pleasure or preference-satisfaction, although some friendships are constituted by mutual pursuit of pleasure or preference-satisfaction.

plurality of societies and plurality of hopes
A totalitarian regime attempts to eliminate sources of hope.

galley effect and perspective

Doctor debet habere fundamentum doctrinae, et perfectionem.

certain forms of higher criticism as giving heed to fables (purely speculative scenarios) and endless genealogies (of texts)

sophrosyne in Titus

cinema as a visual medium for exhibiting aspiration (sometimes by negative): aspiration made visible and audible in a followable narrative

Without honor and tradition, there is no romance; not because every romantic must directly draw on them but because every action is recognized as romantic only in light of them.

the baptism of John & Jesus as participating in Jewish prophetic tradition (// circumcision and Jesus as participating in Jewish covenant)

symbolism as the natural cognitive environment of human beings

(1) The means to an end can only be agreeable where the end is agreeable. (T 3.3.1.9 (SBN 577))
(2) Means to an end are only valued so far as the end is valued. (T 3.3.6.2 (SBN 619))
(3) Whoever chooses the means chooses the end. (T 3.2.7.4 (SBN 536)
(4) It is a contradiction in terms that anything pleases as a means to an end where the end itself in no wise affects us. (EPM 5.17 (SBN 219))

Liberalizing an institution without breaking it is not a straightforward matter; the danger is that one will achieve the goal at the cost of making people think it not worth their time and energy in the first place.

the danger of not appreciating Scripture in its own right, of using it solely as a means for addressing this question or that

Rome, Naples et Florence: October 1816, Part I

We are currently on page 13.

[1er octobre]

Stendhal reflects that the art of Italy, like that of much of Europe, is in shambles: music is «le seul art qui vive encore en Italie». The claim that there are two routes to pleasure in music, «la sublime harmonie» and «la mélodie délicieuse» is an interesting one, although I can't speak to the quality of Stendhal's music history in his discussion of it.

Most of the rest of the day's entry is the Story of Gina, which seems a fairly commonplace story of lovers. I suppose it connects to Stendhal's prior comment connecting the living music of Italy with love. It's possibly notable that Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma has a character named Gina, although, since I have never read it, I also cannot speak to whether there is any influence on the book to be found here.

[2 octobre]

I confess it took me more than a bit to figure out what chétive was supposed to tell us. So we now learn that Soliva is puny like a man of genius, which is a description I intend to use of someone at some point in the future. And we get more description of the opera, Testa di bronzo, this time focusing on the cast.

[3 octobre]

The orchestra of Milan lacks brio; it is good for sweetness rather than forcefulness, in contrast to the Parisian orchestra of Favart. Thus Stendhal's recipe for a perfect orchestra:

Dans un orchestre parfait, les violons seraient français, les instruments à vent allemands, et le reste italien, y compris le chef d'orchestre.

Alessandro Rolla was a musical innovator and the music teacher of Paganini, and was the orchestra director at La Scala from 1802 to 1833. His music was often quite intense -- hence the gossip, which Stendhal also gives, that his music gave women "attacks of nerves".

Alas, I have no idea what Stendhal is trying to convey by his final analogy between French authors and Italian composers.

[4 octobre]

Finally something other than music! Bernardino Luini was a sixteenth century painter whose works are found throughout Northern Italy. Here is Luini's Adoration of the Magi, which I believe was once at Soronno, but now is at the Louvre:



Daniele Crespi is seventeenth century; since Correggio is Stendhal's favorite painter, his saying that he has the sense of Correggio is a high compliment.

According to Daniel Muller's notes, Antonio Litta (1745-1820) was made duke by Napoleon, and was a particularly high muck-a-muck of Napoleonic Italy. Antonio Canova was the greatest sculptor of the day; it was on his advice that the British Museum bought the Elgin marbles. I don't know what statues by Canova Stendhal would have seen, but Canova's most famous work is Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, which gives a sense of his neoclassical style:



And then more opera. I suppose you really need to appreciate opera to appreciate Stendhal.

The Edinburgh Review gets rather biting with Stendhal's comments on Milan, for perhaps not entirely objective reasons:

About this period of his progress, breaks out that hatred of the English which never quite quits him during his whole journey. In the only remark upon Milan not connected with the theatre, he says the Milanese is remarkable for two things, 'la sagacité et la bonté;' and he adds, 'quand il discute, ile est contraire des Anglais, il est serré comme Tacite.' It is some comfort, however, to find that we are blamed in good company; for it seems, 'dés qu'il ecrit, il veut faire des belles phrase toscanes; et il plus bavard que Ciceron.'

David Muller describes this as «un ton un peu pincé». One can hardly blame the reviewer, though. That aside, it's another example of Stendhal's somewhat odd choices in comparisons. And, in any case, you can add 'more chatty than Cicero' to your list of ready insults.

We get a mention of Italian ice cream, and Stendhal is indeed right that it is divine.

[6 octobre]

More of the singing of Angelica Catalani.

If I understand the publication timeline correctly, the Milan entries ended here in the original 1817 edition, and then the work went briefly through Parma and Bologna to get to Florence. In later editions we get a good deal more of Milan.

[7 octobre]

Lady Fanny Harley apparently had a very beautiful face.

[8 octobre]

So beautiful that we're going to talk about it some more.

In seriousness, though, it's interesting that everything we get about Lady Fanny Harley's face is stated entirely in terms of how it reminds Stendhal of paintings. It reminds me of Eco's monks, who always describe things through books.


And there's a break of nearly two weeks in the entries, so we'll pick up again in two weeks on page 34 with bonhomie italienne.

The Opposite of 'Hypocritical' Is...

...'penitent'.

This is actually quite clear if one reads Jesus's denunciations of hypocrisy in context. What makes hypocrisy actually wrong? That it is a way of refusing to repent of one's sins.

People who remark on brazen wrongdoers (whether they are speaking of themselves or others) that 'at least they are not hypocrites' have missed the point entirely.

Reading the Harm Principle Upside-Down

I happened to be reading through various posts and tweets on Mill's harm principle the other day, and found it interesting how confused they often are; some very notable mistakes. As far as I can tell, nobody has anywhere pointed out the errors, so I thought I'd do it just so that there is someone somewhere noting them.

The harm principle comes from Mill's On Liberty, Chapter I:

The object of this Essay is to assert on every simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. The principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.

A common misinterpretation of this, no doubt due to the label that has come to be attached to it, seems to be that this is an authorization of harm -- that is, that it says that you can interfere with liberty of action when it harms another. This is upside-down -- despite the label 'harm principle', the principle is not about harm or response to it, but about protecting liberty. And Mill explicitly rules out any interpretation of the principle as telling you when you can intervene in Chapter V:

...it must by no means be supposed, because damage, or probability of damage, to the interests of others, can alone justify the interference of society, that therefore it always does justify such interference.

In other words, the harm principle does not tell us at all when the government intervene; it just claims that it is not even a legitimate option except when there is harm to others.

It's quite obvious, and no doubt was obvious to Mill (who was a close reader of Plato, who makes the point), that much depends on exactly what counts as harm. Mill, however, deliberately avoids going into any detail, arguably because for his purpose he wants to argue that this is one of the things that needs to be openly and freely discussed in a free society. One obvious question is whether verbal harms can count, and it seems to be a common view that the harm principle allows for this. However, even setting aside the fact that this is arguably against the very spirit of On Liberty, Mill seems to me to rule this out quite definitely as well.

The harm principle draws a distinction between public and personal interests -- society cannot interfere with what pertains merely to a person himself, but only where the person's actions become a real public concern in its own right. Mill guards against a simplistic understanding of this (although how well he does so is open to dispute); almost any private action has some kind of public consequence somewhere. However, if these public consequences are such as arise only through the "free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation" of the others involved, this is not what is meant. However one takes this, Mill is clear that the point is to protect liberty of thought and conscience from outside interference. And this, he insists, requires also the protection of the liberty of expressing and publishing opinions:

The liberty of expressing and publishing opinions may seem to fall under a different principle, since it belongs to that part of the conduct of an individual which concerns other people; but, being almost of as much importance as the liberty of thought itself, and resting in great part on the same reasons, is practically inseparable from it.

He will go later to say that liberty of thought and liberty of speaking and writing are inseparable, and he regards treating them as such to be part of what is required to have a free society in the first place.

Thus Mill's harm principle does not allow for the possibility of verbal harm, as such. There is still some wiggle-room -- Mill thinks you can in principle have public decency laws against pornography, for instance, because he allows for the possibility that one might have good arguments that it is harmful to society at large if not kept purely private, and arguably there are some kinds of verbal harassment that he would allow to be regulated because the way they are done makes it impossible for people to opt out (and thus their exposure to it is not free and voluntary). But in neither of these cases is there actually any notion that expressing and publishing an opinion, however atrocious or offensive, could possibly be regarded as harm on its own.

A third common misinterpretation, that the harm principle only applies to government, I have dealt with before; Mill is quite clear, as you can read in the passage above, that it also applies to interventions of public opinion (shaming and boycotting would be examples).

There are a lot of people who seem to like to talk the Millian talk, but make qualifications that are actually fatal to Mill's entire argument. You cannot be a classical liberal, in the sense in which Mill's On Liberty is definitive of the position, and also hold that speech, however atrocious, can be regulated on its own, even if only by nothing more than public shaming tactics. Trying to hold both requires reading the harm principle upside-down, as a restriction of liberty rather than (as intended by Mill) a basic protection of it.

Notable Links, Notably Noted and Linked

* Robert J. Lang on the use of origami to improve optical systems.

* Mike Aquilina on philosophical ancestors of the Music of the Ainur

* There was a recent kerfuffle about celebrating Mass ad orientem rather than versus populum; Corpus Christi Watershed notes the current state of liturgical law on the subject.

* Geoffrey Pullum lets loose all guns against Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

* Matthew Normand argues that psychologists would be better served by more careful causal studies of single cases than they are when trying to pull their conclusions out of statistics of populations.

* Gregory Stackpole on the contribution of monastic governance to some of our common expectations for good political systems: Part I (only the first part is currently up).

* Ian Ground on the philosophical analysis of ugliness.

* How Voltaire became rich by gaming the lottery.

* Ancient and Medieval Anesthesia at "Aliens in This World"

* Therese Ann Druart, Al-Farabi, at the SEP
Nadja Germann, Al Farabi's Philosophy of Society and Religion, at the SEP
Karen Gorodeisky, 19th Century Romantic Aesthetics, at the SEP

* The reasons for the success of the AR-15, at "DarwinCatholic"

* Eve Keneinan on Plato's tripartite account of the soul and on Intellect vs Imagination.

* Clothing in the Viking Age

* Sukaini Hirji on Aristotle on virtue and eudaimonia at Meena Krishnamurthy's blog, "Philosopher".

* The Vatican Library is digitizing its entire manuscript collection.

* How easy is it to move in late medieval and early modern armor? Contrary to the popular view, it is remarkably easy to do so.

* Ages ago, one of the things I argued here is that while a sense of disgust is not in any way sufficient for moral life, it is in fact (contrary to the views of a number of current moral philosophers) a necessary moral sentiment, and cultivating it in proper directions is an important part of moral life. I was reminded of this because of Anthony Esolen's recent article on the uses of disgust.

* Die Fuggerei was founded in Augsburg, Bavaria in 1516 by the Fugger banking family to be a community for the needy, and is still doing today what it was founded to do. To rent the apartments there was originally one Reinischer Gulden a year, so to keep the rent about the same as it has always been, the current rent is 0.88 euros a year. Obviously there are preconditions; one must be Catholic (and willing to say basic Catholic prayers each day as part of the religious life of the community), have lived in Augsburg for at least two years, and not, despite one's unfortunate circumstances, actually be in debt.

Music on My Mind

Liam Clancy, "The Patriot Game".

Sidgwick, Merit, and Excellence

In The Methods of Ethics, Chapter V, Henry Sidgwick argues that the philosophical dispute over free will has no major effect on discussion of ethics, despite the common view. His argument, however, I find a little odd.

Sidgwick holds that ethics tends to divide into two different types, one focused on Happiness, and another focused on Perfection or Excellence, and he argues that being a determinist wouldn't seem to affect questions of Happiness. He then goes on to argue that the same is true of Excellence:

...if Excellence is in itself admirable and desirable, it surely remains equally so whether any individual's approximation to it is entirely determined by inherited nature and external influences or not:--except so far as the notion of Excellence includes that of Free Will. Now Free Will is obviously not included in our common ideal of physical and intellectual perfection: and it seems to me also not to be included in the common notions of the excellences of character which we call virtues: the manifestations of courage, temperance, and justice do not become less admirable because we can trace their antecedents in a happy balance of inherited dispositions developed by a careful education.

It is not at all obvious, however, that merit (or desert) is not part of our ordinary conceptions of intellectual perfection and moral excellence. Sidgwick accepts that determinism is inconsistent with "the ordinary notion of merit", although he holds that determinists can have other notions of merit (or similar notions) that can do similar work. So the question is whether our common notions of intellectual perfection and moral excellence are completely detachable from our common notions of merit. Sidgwick argues in a footnote:

But I do not see that Perfection becomes less an End to be aimed at, because we cease to regard its attainment as meritorious. The inapplicability of the notion of 'merit' to Divine action has never been felt to detract from the Perfection of the Divine Nature.

But the reason that the perfection of the Divine Nature doesn't involve merit is that God is not the kind of thing that merits any kind of goodness; God has it all by nature already. Human beings are not in any way like this, however; we are the kind of thing that do not have intellectual and moral goodness by nature and so we must achieve excellence in these things. That we can have a conception of excellence that does not require achievement does not establish that our conception of human excellence does not require it, and it is obviously the latter alone that is relevant to ethics. We often clearly recognize a distinction between having intellectual excellence by nature (native intelligence) and intellectual excellence by achievement (hard work, careful self-cultivation, etc. related to intellectual life). So the only question is whether the excellence of intellectual achievement itself involves the notion of merit. And that is certainly the most natural way to read the distinction. Thus our common notions of intellectual excellence appear to involve the common notion of merit, and thus are not detachable from the question of free will (assuming Sidgwick is right about everything else).

This becomes even more obvious with moral excellence than with intellectual excellence. The claim that the manifestations of the virtues do not become less admirable because of determinism is again a shifting to a different topic. The questions are whether the virtues themselves require some kind of free choice, and, more specifically, whether merit belongs to the notions of these virtues. We already know that 'manifestations' of virtues, i.e., actions, can be done by people who do not have the virtues, and that this is quite common. For instance, people who are trying to get the virtues, get them by doing the actions associated with the virtue. We can see that such action is admirable; but the question is not about the action without the virtue but about the having of the virtue itself. Another case, and an interesting contrast, is hypocrisy, since hypocrites are careful to have the same same 'manifestations' of virtues in order to cover up the fact that they don't have the virtue; and we can see that this is not admirable, whereas the same actions would certainly be admirable if done by someone who actually had the virtue or weren't using it as a way to deceive people into thinking that they had it. What makes the difference? One reading, a very natural one, is that virtues themselves are not merely admirable, but are admirable because they have been merited; and the actions of virtues are admirable, even without the virtues, when they are part of the work of meriting that goes into beginning to have the virtues.

And the admiration is an interesting aspect, too. When we say that something is admirable, we may mean either that it is admired, or that it is such as to merit admiration. These are not the same thing, and the latter is what is most commonly meant when talking about the admirableness of virtues and virtuous actions. If determinism, as Sidgwick thinks, messes with our notion of merit, then it messes with our notion of virtue.

****

Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, Seventh Edition, Hackett (Indianapolis, IN: 1981), p 68 & 68n-69n.

Two Poem Drafts

Sleep-Melancholy

Dreams in my head in the dark:
deep are the seas that now flood.
Strange, dark shapes, black forms,
press into thoughts like a wind.
Misery wells in my heart,
surging like waves in a storm;
doomed ships drown in the night,
waiting for hope where is none.
Upward the waves in the wind
carry the ship to its doom;
sails are to long shreds torn,
rudders are broken to sticks.
Cast to the seabed below,
sailors are meeting their death.
Waves break over my head.
Sorrow my heart will soon drown.

Night Walk

In silent starlight rivers flow,
their waves of moonshine rippling light,
and I am where I do not know
on empty lane in quiet night,
and I am walking, robed with glow,
on pebbled way of gray and white.

The stars like song refract a fire.
Their iridescent showers fall
on rivers silver like a wire
and snow the caps of mountains tall;
and as I walk, I never tire,
but stride refreshed by heaven's call.

On night-lit paths my feet have passed;
in shadows I have voyaged far,
on farther lands my fortune cast
with no companion but a star,
and all has led to this at last:
to walk wherever visions are.

Re-Post: Three Peculiar Pages

This is a slight revision of a post originally published in 2005.

Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published in multiple volumes in the 1760s, is perhaps the world's greatest experimental novel. That's a fairly bold statement, but if any experimental novel has a claim on that title, Tristram Shandy does. One can see something of what Sterne does with three pages in particular, each of which captures something of the mystery or perhaps oddness of human life.

The Black Page

In Volume I Chapter XII we find a page that looks something like this, assuming I get the HTML right:






It is an elegiac page; Sterne inserts it after the death of the parson Yorick (Alas, poor Yorick! -- According to Shandy, this Yorick is a relative of Hamlet's Yorick). It symbolizes the mystery of death. Death is a black page, something put in the novel which we are almost expected to read (and which we all try to read, as we always try to 'read' death and the mysteries involved therein).

The Marbled Page

This page, which is inserted at the end of Volume III Chapter XXXVI, I can't really reproduce here; for an example, see Tristram Shandy Online.

I say 'an example' because an example is all that it is. It is one marbled page. But the marbling process creates a different page each time. Thus, every single book with a true marbled page has a different marbled page! And that's the point. As the narrator says:

Read, read, read, read, my unlearned reader ! read, -- or by the knowledge of the great saint Paraleipomenon -- I tell you before-hand, you had better throw down the book at once; for without much reading, by which your reverence knows, I mean much knowledge, you will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work !) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unraval the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one.

A "motley emblem of my work": in other words, the book itself. But the book is itself a sort of presentation of life -- Sterne is constantly mocking the pretensions of the novel to being 'true to life' by giving it, in Tristram Shandy, a task that takes such a pretension seriously: the actual recording of a full life, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. With the exception of a few digressions and what one generally learns about a narrator (who is Tristram himself), we learn virtually nothing about Tristram's actual life: virtually all the long, sprawling, unfinished nine-volume work is devoted to the background that would be needed to understand Shandy's early years. A large chunk is taken to develop the background necessary for understanding his conception, and another to understanding his birth; we already get something of the Tristra-paedia, and would no doubt get more if Sterne had managed (as he intended) to write yet more volumes. The novel's 'trueness to life' is simply inadequate for a serious demand that it be true to life. Tristram Shandy is motley and endless because human life is motley and so individualized -- each person being, as it were, a unique marbled page, whose individuality is so precise it admits of no adequate description.

The Blank Page

The third peculiar page is found in Volume VI Chapter XXXVIII. Shandy has just begun to talk about the widow Wadman, of whom he says at the end of Chapter XXXVII, "never did they eyes behold, or they concupiscence covet any thing in this world, more concupiscible than widow Wadman". He then goes on to say:

TO conceive this right, -- call for pen and ink -- here's paper ready to your hand. ---- Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind ---- as like your mistress
as you can ---- as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you -- 'tis all
one to me ---- please but your own fancy in it.

The Picture of the Widow Wadman, the most desirable of all women, is a blank page. And after the blank page, the narrator continues:

------ Was ever any thing in Nature so sweet ! -- so exquisite !

---- Then, dear Sir, how could my uncle Toby resist it ?

Thrice happy book ! thou wilt have one page, at least, within thy covers,
which MALICE will not blacken, and which IGNORANCE cannot misrepresent.

It might be a bit too pedantic, or too pompous, or both, to say that this blank symbolizes the mystery of love, although I think a lot could be said in such a vein. What we call 'beautiful' or 'attractive' is actually just that which is blank enough that we can 'please our fancy in it'; we conceive it aright when we just let our imagination make it up. And it's surprising how obvious this sometimes seems if you think about the fashion industry, or Hollywood. There are always exceptions, of course; but attractive people are often blank -- not quite as blank as the picture of Widow Wadman, but blank enough -- and all their attractiveness is just what we have chosen to write on them with our imaginations (often guided by designers and directors). In other words, they are attractive to so many people because they are so easy for everyone to adapt for their own imaginations.

But it's possible to look at the blank page a bit differently (one of the problems with the interpretation of a blank page, I suppose). This is suggested by the "Thrice Happy Book" paragraph. The blank page is not merely about the interpretation of beauty or 'concupiscibility'. [Incidentally, the ambiguity of what Sterne actually says about the widow is interesting. He says that our eyes have not seen or our concupiscences coveted anything so concupiscible as the widow Wadman. One reading of that, encouraged by the lines immediately following the blank page, is to take 'concupiscible' as synonymous with desirable; but it could be a play on words, as well, since 'concupiscible' can also mean 'filled with strong desire, lustful', which describes the widow to a T, as she lays siege to poor uncle Toby in order to get him as a husband.] The problem with interpreting concupiscibility can be generalized to all interpretation. By providing a blank page, Shandy purports to give us the one page in his book safe from distortion by malice or ignorance; since there is no right or wrong way to interpret a blank page, it is immune from misinterpretation.

Those are just three pages in the novel. Sterne does a many other experimental things that are fascinating in themselves. But the three peculiar pages are my favorites.

Maronite Year LX

Tenth Sunday of Pentecost
1 Corinthians 12:1-11; Matthew 12:22-32

O Lord our God, on Sunday You rose in glorious splendor!
By the power of the Holy Spirit You have wrought our salvation.
Only through the Spirit can any say that Jesus is Lord;
though gifts are many, there is one Holy Spirit who gives them all.
By the Spirit's power we have been baptized as one body;
we have been given drink from the same fountain of living water.
Christ overcame all suffering and destroyed death's victories;
He brought back sinners from death and clothed them with the robe of glory.
On Sunday we are marked with the seal of our Lord's endless light;
thus, O Lord, we sing Your praises with all the choirs of seraphim.