Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun

Introduction

Opening Passage:

Four individuals, in whose fortunes we should be glad to interest the reader, happened to be standing in one of the saloons of the sculpture-gallery in the Capitol at Rome. It was that room (the first, after ascending the staircase) in the centre of which reclines the noble and most pathetic figure of the Dying Gladiator, just sinking into his death-swoon. Around the walls stand the Antinous, the Amazon, the Lycian Apollo, the Juno; all famous productions of antique sculpture, and still shining in the undiminished majesty and beauty of their ideal life, although the marble that embodies them is yellow with time, and perhaps corroded by the damp earth in which they lay buried for centuries. Here, likewise, is seen a symbol (as apt at this moment as it was two thousand years ago) of the Human Soul, with its choice of Innocence or Evil close at hand, in the pretty figure of a child, clasping a dove to her bosom, but assaulted by a snake.

Summary: Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, and Donatello are four young friends enjoying the artistic life of Rome. Miriam and Hilda are painters; Miriam does original pieces while Hilda paints copies of the great works of Rome. Kenyon is a sculptor in charge of a workshop. And Donatello is an Italian, the Count of Monte Beni; the book opens with the other three noting the remarkable resemblance of Donatello to the Faun of Praxiteles, and teasing him about whether he has a faun's ears under his curls:



Of the four, Kenyon is attracted to Hilda and Donatello to Miriam. In both cases, however, there is some distance -- Hilda is wholly devoted to her virginal life of art, studying the Great Masters, and Miriam, with her carefully hidden past, is reserved and fends off attentions with biting wit and sarcasm. But Miriam has some unknown connection with a stranger who shadows her and whose image haunts her painting, and the lives of the four friends will change fatefully when Donatello, jealous and protective, throws the man off a cliff to his death. The guilt of Donatello, and of Miriam who may have incited the deed with a glance, will hang heavily over them from this point.

Besides the Marble Faun itself, a work that repeatedly shows up in the story is this one, which Hilda has recently copied:



In Hawthorne's time it would have been known as The Portrait of Beatrice Cenci, by Guido Reni, and it was one of the most famous paintings in the world, a continual fascination to artists of the Romantic movement. Beatrice Cenci was raped by her father, and with her mother and brothers plotted to assassinate him. They tried to poison him, but when this failed, they bludgeoned him to death and threw him off the balcony in the hope that it would look like an accident. The plot was uncovered, however, and Beatrice Cenci was executed at the age of 22. According to the legend, the portrait was painted the day before her execution. The tale became (and still to some extent is) famous, and the calm, ambiguous, possibly innocent expression of a figure who was both victim of awful crime and perpetrator of violent murder played a significant role in the painting's fame, and Hawthorne in his Italian notebooks reflected on the hard-to-define fascination of the work, wondering if it would exert the same fascination on someone who did not know the story behind it. (A worthwhile question, given that now it is widely thought that the painting is neither by Guido Reni nor of Beatrice Cenci.) The entire story of The Marble Faun is a layering of ambiguities in the same way. Miriam is an ambiguous figure much as Beatrice was -- in some sense murderess yet in some sense innocent. And yet it is Hilda who was fascinated by the painting and was able to copy it with faithfulness.

The symbolic complexity of this work is extraordinary. The tale is told as a reenactment of the Fall of Man, with the four friends in the garden of innocent youth are cast out by complicity in a terrible crime. Each of the four friends expresses most fully one of the elements of human personality. Donatello is continually associated with passion, the natural participation in the world. Miriam, on the other hand, expresses imagination, continually haunted by other possibilities. Miriam and Donatello, of course, have the most serious involvement in the actual crime, but there is an odd innocence to them both even in the commission -- Donatello is too natural and primal and passionate a creature fully to understand what he has done, and Miriam's role was inciting the murder with a transient pleading glance to Donatello, a very detached way of causing a human death. And although Donatello and Miriam are both directly involved, Hilda, too, is caught up by it, for she witnesses the act. Nor is this a mere witnessing. Hilda expresses sympathetic aspiration; it is her intense sympathy with what she sees that makes it possible for her to accomplish her ingenious copies. And she sees the murder as if it were a painting, through the frame of a doorway; it is not something merely seen, it is something that enters her, disrupting her entirely. The imagination, by a glance, incites the passions to do wrong, and moral sentiment, witnessing, is tangled up in the deed: it could almost be an allegory for how sin is really committed. Kenyon might seem to escape the doom, since he only becomes aware of the cause of the darkness cast over the friendship relatively late, and is the least disrupted by it, but I think even this is not quite so. Kenyon as a sculptor deals with the embodiment of ideas in unchanging marble; he spends almost the entire work turning works of art into allegories. Dealing with eternal verities, it is not surprising that Kenyon in his intellectuality shows the least obvious signs of disruption, but there are signs that even he is not free of it. When he suggests to Hilda that perhaps the sin was allowed by Providence for good, she reacts with horror at the thought. I'm not convinced that we should take this as solely telling us about Hilda herself, with her high moral sympathies. Rather, this is exactly how intellect is shadowed by wrongdoing: it writes it down as felix culpa in some abstract scheme of things. This makes sense in its own terms, but Hilda is right that there is in it a lack of any sense of the awfulness of evil. Donatello and Hilda, passion and moral sympathy, directly participate in the world (and notably have symbolic links in several ways, with, for instance Donatello living in a Tower with owls and Hilda in a Tower with doves; Miriam and Kenyon, imagination and intellect, are distanced from it, with Miriam haunted by a past that shows up perpetually in her imaginings and by dark possibilities of what could be, and Kenyon constantly placing things in a framework of ideas. In innocence, they work together; but in wrongdoing they are split apart, trying to navigate the shadows in their own, very limited terms. And their responses to it are different, as well; Donatello and Miriam are haunted by guilt of involvement, each in their own way, while Kenyon and Hilda struggle to deal with the very fact of the wrongdoing itself.

Or one could see the four as each expressing some aspect of art, and this is not necessarily exclusive of the first interpretation. In Donatello, we see the primal impulse of art, participation in the world around us; in Miriam with her reserve and distance from the world around her, the imagination of other possibilities; in Hilda, moral sympathy; in Kenyon with his allegories, intellectual ideation. All art expresses all four, albeit in different mixes. But artistic endeavor also exists in a fallen world; the complicity of art in sin, and the sorrow with which one must struggle as a result, throws everything off balance. But, of course, our response to art works much the same way, and this allegorization, while certainly drawing out things in the work that are there, is also an over-Kenyonized reading on its own. One may also participate in the Romance of the tale, which is about four friends rather than abstract concepts, or be intrigued in imagination with the ambiguities of it, or sympathize with its moral ideals and guilts, and in some Eden of reading we would do all four, and all four well; but we, alas, poor fallen readers, have tilting structures that almost guarantee that some of the richness of the work will elude our reading.

When the work was first published, readers protested the ambiguities of the ending, and so, reluctantly, Hawthorne put in an epilogue giving further information about what happened. I think his first instinct was in fact correct: the additional information, about what happened to Hilda when she disappeared, or what happened to Donatello, weakens the tale considerably. It makes an object of description what should be an object of allusion, and reduces the complexity of the work. Hawthorne's early readers had difficulty with the ambivalent character of the work itself -- it is finely balanced so that it can be read either as a realistic tale in romantic, fantastic Italy, or a fantastic tale set in real-world Italy, and rather than maintain a consistent style, it gives us now a painted scene, now a sculptured composition, now an allusion to other works, now a travelogue, now a psychological tale, now an allegory, thus increasing both the realism and the romanticism of the tale. The balance throughout the work is beautifully done; only the epilogue unbalances it, despite Hawthorne's attempt to preserve some ambiguity still.

But even with the epilogue, we never learn the answer to the key question: Is Donatello faun or man?

Favorite Passage:

A picture, however admirable the painter's art, and wonderful his power, requires of the spectator a surrender of himself, in due proportion with the miracle which has been wrought. Let the canvas glow as it may, you must look with the eye of faith, or its highest excellence escapes you. There is always the necessity of helping out the painter's art with your own resources of sensibility and imagination. Not that these qualities shall really add anything to what the master has effected; but they must be put so entirely under his control, and work along with him to such an extent, that, in a different mood, when you are cold and critical, instead of sympathetic, you will be apt to fancy that the loftier merits of the picture were of your own dreaming, not of his creating.

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

Maronite Year LXVI

(Because it's the end of term, I'm a bit delayed in getting the Fortnightly Book post done, and it turned out to be easier just to switch it with this one, which would usually be scheduled for tomorrow morning.)

Fourteenth Sunday of Pentecost
1 Thessalonians 2:1-13; Luke 10:38-42

On Crucifixion-day, the sword pierced Your side;
You were crowned with thorns and darkness crowned the earth;
Your disciples were scattered and fled in fear.
Today baptism pours forth in grace from Your side;
You crown the Church with Your immortality;
You gather Your disciples and give them hope;
You make the world radiant by resurrection.

Today is a day of victory and joy;
our Savior has sealed us with His endless light;
reward comes to the honest lovers of God.
O Craftsman of life, You have made our lives whole,
renewing our minds, long marred by corruption,
inviting us into Your kingdom's glory:
You make the world radiant by resurrection.

The Sun-Burnt Hours

Sonnet to the Month of August
by Charles Leftley

August, I welcome thee and all thy hours,
The sun-burnt hours, that dance about thy car,
Thy genial breezes, and refreshing showers,
Thy morning pageantry, and evening star.
Bright are thy smiles, and blithe thy votaries are,
For thou dost bring them harvests, fruits, and flowers,
Enlivening gifts, and more enlivening far,
The laughing vine to glad their clustering bowers.
Yet, August, though these various gifts be dear,
'Tis not for these I time my thankful strain;
No; but for Phyllis! (fye, why drops this tear?)
Whom thou hast sent o'er my fond heart to reign;
Oh! may she live to pleasure many a year,
Although she live to give her minstrel pain.

Rough Jottings on Absence of Evidence

The phrase 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' is a fairly widespread one, but its history is very difficult to trace. You can find the principle being used here and there in reasoning, of course, but the actual phrase doesn't seem to pop up before the 1990s -- and its popularity is almost certainly due to Carl Sagan (although he got it from Martin Rees). From him it spread quickly, and it tends to come up quite often in certain fields. It's fairly easy to find in geology, medicine, and criminology, in particular. Discussion for and against also shows up a lot in apologetical circles, whether the apologetics is of Christians or of skeptics out to convince the masses -- I'm fairly sure that this is just because both of these groups have read a lot of Carl Sagan.

Both groups are mixed, but the Christians tend generally to be for it and the skeptics against it, if you're interested. Reading some of the skeptical discussions makes for hilarity, at times, because they are so often vehemently committed to the phrase encapsulating a fallacy, often calling it the fallacy of appeal to ignorance, or the argument from ignorance, because they associate it with UFOers, that they cannot believe that he endorses it, even though anyone with basic reading skills can see that he does.

A distinction is sometimes made between 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' and 'Absence of proof is not proof of absence'. This is a post-Sagan distinction (Sagan uses 'evidence' and 'proof' interchangeably when the phrase comes up), and has come about very certainly because of the spread of accounts of evidence based on interpretations of probability theory (rather than on practices of inquiry), which as generally proposed require that absence of evidence be evidence of absence. And in fact the distinction doesn't salvage anything unless one has a very specific kind of account of proof in mind; in a lot of areas what is called 'proof' just is clear preponderance of evidence, and (on the other side) it's not actually difficult to find or rig situations in which an absence of proof would indeed be a proof of absence.

There's little serious philosophical examination of the maxim, although one can find some. Elliott Sober has argued (in "Absence of evidence and evidence of absence: evidential transitivity in connection with fossils, fishing, fine-tuning and firing squads") that while the Absence Maxim can be true if it just means that not looking for evidence is not evidence of evidence, it is not strictly true in general, although it is often close to true: in such cases the maxim should in strictness be 'Absence of evidence often only very weakly provides evidence of absence', but we often treat very weak evidence as if it were nonevidence. (Contrary to Michael Strevens's response (PDF), I don't think it is quite accurate to treat this as conveying "an underlying meaning that contradicts its apparent meaning". Sober is certainly right that we often treat making a very small difference as making no difference; and it is undeniable, I think, that most of the time when people say, "There is no evidence for p," what they mean is, "Any evidence for p is so weak as to be negligible." On Sober's account, we could add 'for practical purposes' to the Absence Maxim and get something at least in the neighborhood of right; and this seems very different from an actual contradiction.)

Let's call 'Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' the Absence Maxim to simplify things. There are a number of distinct but related issues tangled up with the Absence Maxim that have never really been untangled; I don't hope to do so here, but it might be worthwhile to point out a few things that do seem constantly to arise.

(1) The first and most obvious thing is that the Absence Maxim gets its plausibility from the way it is structured. To be absent is simply to be not present, presence has to be presence of something, and evidence is always evidence for soemthing, so we could rephrase it as 'Evidence-for-X is not present' is not 'There is evidence for X-is-not-present'. If one were to deny this, there would be obvious questions, since the kind of shifting around of operators and scope that this involves usually suggests an equivocation. One would at least need a principled reason for denying the Maxim that shows that you aren't just trading on ambiguity. One obvious worry is how you get the existence of something (evidence for X-is-not-present) entirely from the nonexistence of something else (evidence for X). Where does the existential operator pop out from?

This, I take it is related to the issue raised in the following video by Ian Goddard, which argues that it is important to make a distinction between absence of evidence and negative evidence:



There is little doubt that you can have logical systems in which denial of the Absence Maxim is required under some interpretation (Bayesian interpretations of probability theory are common examples); but, as one can make all sorts of formal systems with all sorts of arbitrary assumptions, and interpret them all sorts of different ways, this does not get us very far on its own. The point is that any formal representation of a denial of the Absence Maxim raises questions that would require principled answers, and that these answers are not necessarily immediately obvious. And they will not fall out of the formalism itself at all.

(2) We do clearly recognize cases where absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence -- call these negation-as-failure cases. If I thoroughly search my room for a dog and discover no evidence at all that there is a dog, then that is indeed evidence that there is no dog in my room.

One of the things that characterizes obvious negation-as-failure cases is that they are cases in which either (A) we can reasonably guarantee that our search has been exhaustive (the closed world assumption), or (B) we can reasonably conclude that further search is increasingly unlikely to turn up anything fundamentally different from what we have already discovered, so that we can discount as unpromising whatever we have not yet searched (which is a practical closed world assumption). There are many cases, however, in which we cannot guarantee any kind of closed world assumption -- for instance, if I have been searching for a dog in the city for two minutes and have not yet found it, this search was neither exhaustive nor reasonably extensive, and most people, I imagine, would regard someone as an idiot if they concluded from such a cursory search that there was no dog in the city. And as with cursory searches, so with searches that are incomplete for other reasons than merely trying.

We are sometimes in situations in which we already know that our bank of available evidence is missing a lot. Indeed, we are often in these situations -- they are the norm in most historical contexts. We already know that our fossil record does not record everything; it also does not provide a representative sample, because it only gives us things that were in fact in situations in which they, in particular, could be fossilized. Happily, there is more than one way a thing can be fossilized, but each way has its own specific conditions, and if they are not met, we don't get the fossil. Let's suppose that our fossil record is indeed very, very patchy. One way to interpret this kind of situation is to say that the fossil record, considered on its own, only provides us any evidence at all about organisms actually showing up in it, because we already know that the field of organisms and organism-types that won't show up can be massive in comparison to the field of those that do. Unless you were independently trying to fit evidence to a principle like Bayes' Theorem, there doesn't seem to be any specific reason to take an organism's not showing up in the record as evidence that it didn't exist -- most organisms that existed don't, so there's nothing about the fossil record itself that requires that you take things it doesn't show not to exist. In general this will be the case with patchy evidence; by the very fact of its being patchy, there's nothing about the collection of evidence itself that licenses taking absence of evidence as evidence of absence. The license would have to come from elsewhere.

This perhaps is connected with Sagan's own diagnosis of the problem to which the Absence Maxim is proposed as a solution -- what Sagan calls 'impatience with ambiguity'. 'Ambiguity' is a term Sagan elsewhere uses to describe the situation of not having an answer to a question. Sagan does not, as far as I am aware, explain his use of the word 'impatience' in this precise context, and Sagan is usually quite sloppy when it comes to supporting his claims about critical thinking, but I think one can argue that the term is genuinely appropriate in this context: in cases of cursory search, it is absurd to hold that not having a clear preponderance of evidence for one side is a reason to conclude it false, because you should exercise the patience required to make your investigation reasonably thorough before drawing such a conclusion rather than hurrying to draw a conclusion. There will be times in many kinds of investigation in which it will be unclear or debatable what the evidence actually shows; this is not on its own a good reason to cut short the investigation. Thus the Absence Maxim could perhaps be regarded, and sometimes seems to be used, as a non-stopping rule for inquiry -- we should not stop inquiry (even temporarily) on nothing more than the ground that we have found no evidence yet. This raises the question of how to assess the thoroughness of an inquiry. It also raises the question of the exact relation between evidence and warrant to draw a conclusion.

(3) In general, if one models inquiry as a search, it would seem to make very little sense to deny the Absence Maxim for search in general; one has to justify a negation-as-failure rule, by establishing that one's search would have picked up the evidence for something if it were there. Thus, someone who claimed that there was no extraterrestrial life because they didn't see any evidence of it when they glanced at the sky has not done the kind of search appropriate to the conclusion they are drawing. And this seems to hold even if we say that glancing at the sky would be at least a minor part of a genuinely appropriate search.

Searches are organized for different ends and can be very different in character; you cannot assume that every search is a negation-as-failure kind of search. Thus if one models inquiry as a search, there seems some reason to take the Absence Maxim to be true as a default -- one has to set up a search of the right sort to get a case in which one can conclude No X from No Evidence of X. (And note that if you relativize Bayesianism to a given kind of inquiry -- so your probability measures are always only relative to a given inquiry -- then this at least qualifies any rejection of the Absence Maxim on Bayesian grounds.) In general, if one treats the nature of the inquiry in which the evidence is being used as important to the evaluation of evidence, this seems to favor something like the Absence Maxim.

I think there does seem to be a divide in approaches to evidence, one that has not been adequately examined -- namely, between inquiry-focused and general-measure-focused accounts of evidence. There is a lot of variation within the two approaches, but the former tends to see evidence as something constructed or formed in light of an inquiry that is limited by particular ends, tends to be favorable to the idea that what counts as evidence in one field of inquiry may not always do so in another, and tends to be pluralist about how evidence supports claims (i.e., it tends not to assume that all evidential support is of the same kind), whereas the the latter tends to reject all of these things. These differences can obviously lead to some significant oppositions in how evidence is evaluated.

The Immediate Book Meme

From the Darwins.

1. What book are you reading now?

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
Roger Scruton, The Face of God
Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God
Stephen Blackwood, The Consolation of Boethius as Poetic Liturgy
Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics

2. What book did you just finish?

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Dumitru Staniloae, The Experience of God, Volume I

I have also been reading over the past three weeks The History of Middle-Earth, which is Christopher Tolkien's study of the drafting stages of his father's works; I have finished up to Volume 10, and so have just two more volumes to go.

3. What do you plan to read next?

I don't know about next, but I'll be doing some plays by Ibsen and re-reading George Eliot's Romola at some point in the next few months. I'll be finishing Bulgakov's and Staniloae's series at some point, but that's probably a longer-term project.

I also keep meaning to get to Half Price Books, so that will doubtless turn up a few.

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night; I am done with two out of three volumes, 2650 pages, and just need find a time to power through the last 1300 or so pages.

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

Tanith Lee's The Secret Books of Paradys

6. What is your current reading trend?

I read too many books to be keeping track of reading trends.

Dashed Off XVII

Feasting and fasting alike are for the sake of the beautiful and the good.

rationality, order, stability, integrity

Pleasure and pain are such as to be signs by nature; distinction between intrinsic and instrumental good does not work here as elsewhere.

A "brute fact" is only brute relative to a model; otherwise there is no way to identify bruteness.

The effectiveness of an argument depends in part on the habitus of the one who receives it.

charity as what makes satispassion possible

Grand Rounds as humanitarian ritual

The virtue of charity is required in order to assess divine love's actions properly.

to consider: the extent to which conservation laws imply simultaneity of causation (momentum has historically explicitly been taken to do so)

Accuracy conditions are causal conditions.

wu wei and honesty

People will generally tend to press their rhetorical advantages rather than their dialectical advantages.

the 'splendid models of the Holy Family' -- (1) domestic virtues (2) bonds of charity (3) joy of household

Moral law cannot be harmed, and yet one can offend against it.

National churches necessarily presuppose that the government bodies and agencies concerned with the church are legitimate representatives within the liturgical commonwealth.

homiletics as concerned with living and not merely hearing doctrine

the confusion of intellectual or volitional numbness with the doubt of genuine inquiry

Leading questions and rhetorical questions make obvious that questions can have assumptions, but that all questions have assumptions is made clear (1) by the fact that they make sense in some contexts and not others; and (2) by the fact that they distinguish relevant and irrelevant answer-candidates. (Assumptions are determined by analysis of possibilities.)

The first minimal level of making amends is simply accepting, and thus bearing and enduring, one's being responsible.

the desire to impart something genuinely precious to the world

general culture of mind as a requirement for professional life

nonmaleficence and gentlemanliness (Newman)

notional and real as poles of assent

spontaneously grown arguments vs deliberately synthesized arguments

the role of Catholic Marian piety in supporting the doctrine of papal infallibility (e.g., Lourdes)

the royal prerogatives of the Church

the problem of corruption of supplementary institutions as the primary problem of the liturgical commonwealth

Mere reason cannot overcome apathy.

assessment of conceptual analysis
(1) explains an array of paradigmatic cases
(2) makes sense of history of concept
(3) clarifies marginal cases without violence
(4) exhibits consilience
(5) survives aporetic/dialectic inquiry

Human rituals are rational communications, just as much as language is.

physical equations as summations of relevance among measurements

Style is not a uniform thing but a pattern of effects requiring causal analysis.

Humean causal theory as stylistic analysis of the world

humanity as a system of loyalties

It is quite clear that we often think of the necessity of the principle of noncontradiction in practical terms.

While law works itself out systematically, one should not overestimate the systematicity of law.

Every Is is an Ought to Be Regarded as True.

Positive law is relative to the formation of a community standpoint.

The assessment of evidence cannot occur independently of all practical reasons (cost of inquiry, promising character of evidence, etc.).

Classification requires abstraction from corruptions and contaminations.

In law one must start not with concepts used by the ends for which they are used.

the obsessive patience of genius

motherhood as paradigmatic friendship in Aristotle (it is his typical case of asymmetric friendship, and plays a key role in several arguments about the nature of friendship in general)

Fear of ridicule often distorts assessment of evidence, since it interferes with commitment to recognizing probabilities.

causation by diffusion (Shepherd is perhaps a very good start here, given her concept of causal mixing)

a common fallacy: the conditions for X came together gradually; therefore X emerged gradually (quite obviously it in fact depends on the relation between X and its conditions)

Most of what is called politics is an excuse for not attending to politics.

true romance as involving honestas and verecundia

the wish for truth as remedy against some biases (cp. Ward)

People in assessing their own characteristics tend to try to focus not on what they do but on what they do not do.

fruitful virginity of Mary expressed in being (1) Mother of God; (2) intercessor; (3) Mother of Church

mortification and eliminating mismatch between fantasy and reality

books that are pleasure-friends, utility-friends, or virtue-friends

ordered structures anticipatory of rational inference

relation between self-evidence and goodness

Modern generations describe computing in ways similar to the way former generations described literacy; computers are the gramarye of our day.

Arguments like characters in stories must be seen from many angles.

Much of what we call misfortune is just leaving a womb, or growing out of a childhood, in which prior props and supports are taken away.

orders as the sacrament of the unity of the sacramental economy

Darwin's argument for sexual selection is partly teleological: without sexual selection, display would be purposeless, which is incredible.

the role of integrity of body in cognition

baptized : foundations :: confirmed : major means :: ordained : ends

Isaiah 60, temporal prosperity, and liturgical commonwealth

human dignity & capacity for communion with God: the infinity implicit in our
(1) openness to Truth Itself
(2) openness to Good Itself
(3) openness to Beauty Itself
(4) capacity for attending to the Infinite Sublime

rejections of God arise from
(1) bad example of believers
(2) hostile philosophies
(3) trauma of evil
(4) preference for vice
(5) poor handling of perplexity
(6) excessive attachment to the sensible world

The capacity for theistic reasoning is a precondition for receiving revelation.

good as 'fit for purpose' vs good as 'precondition for fitness and purpose'

All measurement requires memory of at least an elementary kind.

Common sense can be recognized as rigorously certain when it is also recognized as (1) experiential (2) practical (3) perspectival and (4) approximate.

He Works Sorrow to Himself

Ane His Awin Ennemy
by William Dunbar

He that hes gold and grit richess,
And may be into mirryness,
And dois glaidness fra him expell,
And levis in to wretchitnefs,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

He that may be but sturt or stryfe,
And leif ane lusty plesand lyfe,
And syne with mariege dois him mell,
And bindis him with ane wicket wyfe,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

He that hes for his awin genyie
Ane plesand prop, bot mank or menyie,
And schuttis syne at ane uncow schell,
And is forsairn with the fleis of Spenyie,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

And he that with gud lyfe and trewth,
But varians or uder slewth,
Dois evir mair with ane maister dwell,
That nevir of him will haif no rewth,
He wirkis sorrow to him sell.

Now all this tyme lat us be mirry,
And set nocht by this warld a chirry:
Now quhill thair is gude wyne to sell,
He that dois on dry breid wirry,
I gif him to the Devill of Hell.

William Dunbar (c. 1459- c. 1530) was perhaps the greatest Scottish poet of the sixteenth century.

Music on My Mind

Peter Hollens, "Homeward Bound".

Inclusive Disjunction

STUDENT: Is the philosophy community in general like you, or are you weird?

ME: Both!

Philosophical Thought Experiments

Thought experiments in science are generally illuminating or, at the least, benign. It is not so with thought experiments in philosophy. They are a locus of misdirection and deception. We are supposed to derive important conclusions about fundamental matters from bizarre imaginings of zombies, who behave exactly like conscious humans, but are not conscious; or of substances that share exactly all the physical properties of water, but are not water. The narrative conventions of a thought experiment authorizes us to contemplate hokum that would otherwise never survive scrutiny.

John D. Norton, "The Worst Thought Experiment" (p. 11n). (Despite this footnote, the article is actually a criticism of Szilard's thought experiment in thermodynamics adapting Maxwell's Demon -- the worst thought experiment in science, according to Norton. As with all of Norton's philosophy of science work, the article is well worth reading.)

I think the 'important conclusions' is important here. Thought experiments in philosophy are benign, and sometimes illuminating, if they are of modest aim -- to illustrate a purely logical point, or to identify a conceptual distinction, or to exhibit a similarity between two fields of thought, or to summarize a more complicated response to a very specific point. More than this they cannot really bear. But, of course, they are made to bear more than this all the time -- when people use zombie experiments, they aren't merely sharpening the conceputal distinction between conscious experience and behavior indicative of it but treating the stories they are telling as establishing truths about consciousness itself. When you come across a philosophical thought experiment with major conclusions, always ask: What is the rational account that authorizes the inferences required by this story or description? And I think this is where they so often go wrong -- they are taken as establishing things when, at best, they can usually be doing no more than gesturing at a more sophisticated account. And, of course, very often there is no sophisticated account at all, in which case they can at best suggest a line or two of further inquiry in the same way that any metaphor or analogy might.

This is remarkably difficult to get across to some people. Just as even ordinary counterexamples must be analyzed to determine (1) that they are not merely apparent; and (2) that they are not more limited in scope than they might seem, the interior logic of a thought experiment also requires analysis, and each assumption made in building it requires examination -- it is a scaffold for further inquiry, not a primary result in its own right. But people have a weird tendency to throw out alleged counterexamples and move on, or to take thought experiments to establish things on their own. When people do this, I often just start asking the ordinary questions any sort of reader or writer of stories might reasonably ask about the logic of a tale; over and over again, one finds that the proposers of these thought experiments haven't even thought through the basic story-logic of their example, much less started working out any rigorous argument. It's a case of scaffoldings being confused with cathedrals, and means being confused with ends.

Lion and Mouse

I was thinking today, for no particular reason, of one of my favorite illustrations, from Alfred Swinbourne's Picture Logic (1875):



We often need mice to free the lion, even if it is not the mouse of illustration in particular who is in a position to do so.

Maronite Year LXV

Thirteenth Sunday of Pentecost
1 Corinthians 3:1-11; Luke 8:1-15

Parode

O Christ, You cast Your truth and grace abroad;
the apostles' preaching flies through the world,
their message to the far ends of the earth.
One plants, another waters, but they serve:
God does the work and God gives the increase.
The Church is the field of God's own tilling,
and all others are but His ministers.
Let us remember the sower of seed,
for seeds of truth fall on good and bad soil.

Strophe

    A sower went out to sow his seed.
    Some of his seed fell by the wayside,
    to be trod and eaten by the birds.
    Others fell on the rocks, dry and hot;
    they were withered in the noonday sun.
    Some fell among the thorny briars,
    to be smothered by those violent weeds.
    But others fell on soil of rich loam,
    yielding a harvest one hundredfold.

Antistrophe

    The seed is God's holy word, broadcast.
    Some by the path have the seed stolen,
    the devil snatching away their faith.
    Some receive with joy but have no roots,
    and in tribulation they wither.
    Others hear but never grow to fruit,
    stifled by worldly care and pleasure.
    But some with bright, noble heart endure:
    receiving some truth, they yield much truth.

Exode

O Lord, show your boundless mercy to us;
with Your Spirit, open our hearts to truth.
May we be pure, enlightened, forgiving,
receiving your truth with joy and honor,
nourished by the grace of living waters,
growing in love, in truth, and in mercy,
never distracted by this world's darkness,
but noble and generous in our hearts,
to yield by Your hand a harvest of grace.

The Electoral College and the Sense of the People

Every election cycle, there are junk arguments about the Electoral College that get thrown around. This cycle, like the the last, has been more quiet than the more contentious cycles before, but 'quiet' and 'silent' are not the same. Here is Jim Galloway at AJC:

The men who wrote the U.S. Constitution feared (small “d”) democracy, which they often associated with mob rule. The Electoral College was the awkward device imposed between voters and the power of the presidency — just in case the hoi polloi got carried away.

We have developed a friendlier attitude toward the popular vote in the centuries since, though it isn’t complete. Legislation to encourage a push toward the direct election of the president, introduced by Republicans, died a quiet death this year — at the hands of the most conservative elements in the state Capitol.

As to the point in the last sentence, I've talked about the sheer spam-scam nonsense of the (falsely named) 'National Popular Vote' movement before, about which I will only say here: good riddance and may its rotting corpse no longer lurch like a zombie out of its grave in search of idiot minds to devour. But over and over again, one hears this falsehood about the Founding Fathers creating the Electoral College to limit the power of the people. Indeed, this makes no sense historically. The system that the Electoral College replaced only allowed the people power over offices through their legislatures; the Electoral College gave them a new power that they didn't have before. The Electoral College was deliberately introduced for the purpose of guaranteeing that the people themselves would be brought into the election process for the Presidency, which was, in the form given in the proposed Constitution, a new and extraordinarily powerful office.

If you look at Hamilton, for instance, this is quite explicit, since Hamilton's defense of the Electoral College repeatedly connects it to guaranteeing a popular safeguard in the election of the President:

It was desirable that the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided. This end will be answered by committing the right of making it, not to any preestablished body, but to men chosen by the people for the special purpose, and at the particular conjuncture....

...Another and no less important desideratum was, that the Executive should be independent for his continuance in office on all but the people themselves. He might otherwise be tempted to sacrifice his duty to his complaisance for those whose favor was necessary to the duration of his official consequence. This advantage will also be secured, by making his re-election to depend on a special body of representatives, deputed by the society for the single purpose of making the important choice.

To be sure, this sense of the people was not the only concern that had to be addressed by the constitutional system for electing the President; this is because the Presidency as it existed in the U.S. Constitution was the single most controversial part of the entire proposal -- a great many people thought that there was too much power concentrated by the Constitution into one office, so those defending the Constitution, like Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had to allay worries about the possible tending of this "energetic magistrate" toward tyranny. So, for instance, Hamilton thinks that the Electoral College will provide a space for deliberative investigation of "all the reasons and inducements" for making a choice for the office. (The absurdity of electing the Electors so that they can rubber-stamp an already decided result is completely foreign to how Hamilton expected the Electoral College to work.) The means of election needed to be orderly and to allow for diversity in the election -- the Electoral College was intended to avoid a free-for-all every four years. (And here, at least, it works more or less as it was intended -- it makes it easier for people to keep track of the election given the huge population, and by breaking the election into chunks it makes more clear that everyone has to take into account more than just the view that happens at the moment to have the majority.) It needs relative immunity from corruption, as well -- which, people forget, is difficult to guarantee in a straight popular vote.

Thus there were other things that were thought important to consider. But the Electoral College was not put forward to reduce the power of hoi polloi but to increase it by guaranteeing them a say in the single most powerful federal office, which they did not have before, and as a way of guaranteeing that they would be one of the checks on the massively increased power that would be wielded by the President under the proposed Constitution. To be sure, one can find complaints about the Electoral College as an intermediary even in the anti-Federalist movement (Antifederalist no. 72, for instance); but the real target then was the sheer power of the Presidency in the new system. The Electoral College itself was designed to link the President to the people in a system already organized according to states, not to serve as a limit on the power of the people.

Of course, there is a legitimate question as to whether the Electoral College in practice lives up to the promise of the Electoral College in its original intent. But there's no question that the Electoral College as it was originally conceived involved a considerable expansion of the power of the people over the government.

Lit from Behind

Thanks to our upright posture, our liberated forearms, and our all-seizing hands we are able to face things not merely with our eyes but with our whole being. This posture penetrates our intentional understanding in subtle ways that have been in part clarified by Merleau-Ponty. The human face announces the human body and precedes it like an ensign. And our reading of the face reflects this. The face occurs in the world of objects as though lit from behind.

Roger Scruton, The Face of God, Bloomsbury (New York: 2015), pp. 80-81.

Maronite Year LXIV

Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord
2 Corinthians 3:7-17; Mark 9:1-7

You, O Christ, assumed our human nature,
undiminished in Yourself and Your glory,
and yet like us in all things except sin.
You shone brightly before Peter, James, and John,
a foretaste of the happiness You bring.
Shine on our minds that we may be enlightened;
allow us to taste the sweetness of light.
How good it is that we may dwell in Your grace,
for You are resplendent on the mountain!

One in nature with Father and Spirit,
to exalt servants You became a servant,
and yet in serving You were not severed:
there is one Power, one Kingship, and one Light.
Because of You, we heard the Father's voice,
and You have shown us the way of salvation.
Before the glory upon Golgotha,
You revealed Your majesty on Mount Tabor,
in beauty resplendent on the mountain.

On Tabor You showed us You are God's Son,
for the Father confirmed it with splendid love.
You gave us a taste of heavenly life
and showed us the beauty of Your Father's light,
the bright blazing in which You will return,
in the body but glorious in Godhead.
May our bishops, Lord, remember their task,
to show the brilliance of Your divinity,
bright, unending, resplendent on the mountain.

Today we hear the voice of the Father,
saying, "This is my beloved Son; hear him."
Today the Church cries out with rejoicing,
for this is the Son who has come to save us.
May all be touched by Your light and transformed;
may we carry Your name to all the nations,
revealing the light You revealed to us,
that we may contemplate Your face forever,
radiant, resplendent on the mountain.

El Inconcebible Dolor

Descartes
por Jorge Luis Borges

Soy el único hombre en la tierra y acaso no haya tierra ni hombre
Acaso un dios me engaña.
Acaso un dios me ha condenado al tiempo, esa larga ilusión.
Sueño la luna y sueño mis ojos que perciben la luna.
He soñado la tarde y la mañana del primer día.
He soñado a Cartago y a las legiones que desolaron Cartago.
He soñado a Lucano.
He soñado la colina del Gólgota y las cruces de Roma.
He soñado la geometría.
He soñado el punto, la línea, el plano y el volumen.
He soñado el amarillo, el azul y el rojo.
He soñado mi enfermiza niñez.
He soñado los mapas y los reinos y aquel duelo al alba.
He soñado el inconcebible dolor.
He soñado mi espada.
He soñado a Elisabeth de Bohemia.
He soñado la duda y la certidumbre.
He soñado el día de ayer.
Quizá no tuve ayer, quizá no he nacido.
Acaso sueño haber soñado.
Siento un poco de frío, un poco de miedo.
Sobre el Danubio está la noche.
Seguiré soñando a Descartes y a la fe de sus padres.

Descartes
by Jorge Luis Borges

I am the only man on earth and maybe there is neither earth nor man.
Maybe a god deceives me.
Maybe a god condemned me to time, that long illusion.
I dream the moon and I dream my eyes that perceive the moon.
I have dreamed the evening and morning of the first day.
I have dreamed Carthage and the legions that ravaged Carthage.
I have dreamed Lucan.
I have dreamed the hill of Golgotha and the crosses of Rome.
I have dreamed geometry.
I have dreamed point, line, plane, and volume.
I have dreamed yellow, blue, and red.
I have dreamed my sickly childhood.
I have dreamed maps and kingdoms and the duel at dawn.
I have dreamed inconceivable sorrow.
I have dreamed my sword.
I have dreamed Elisabeth of Bohemia.
I have dreamed doubt and certitude.
I have dreamed all of yesterday.
Perhaps I had no yesterday, perhaps I was not born.
Maybe I dream having dreamed.
I feel a little cold, a little fear.
Above the Danube, it is night.
I will continue dreaming Descartes and the faith of his fathers.

My translation.

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.