Links of Note

 * Tim Sommers, Two Sources of Objectivity in Ethics, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Cansu Hepçağlayan, Political friendship as joint commitment: Aristotle on homonoia (PDF)

* Kendric Tonn: Painting in an Age of Digital Art, at "Trunkville"

* Chloé de Canson, Bayesianism and the Inferential Solution to Hume’s Problem (PDF)

* Lucia Oliveri, Imagine Learning Through Play, at "The Junkyard"

* Phil Corkum, Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics (PDF)

* Brian Potter, How Common Is Accidental Invention?, at "Construction Physics"

* John Walsh, Wolff on Obligation (PDF)

* Francine F. Abeles, Lewis Carroll's ciphers: the literary connections

* Razib Khan, How the West was wrought, "Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning"

Little Flower

 Today is the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Doctor of the Church. From The Story of a Soul, Chapter XI:

But how shall I show my love, since love proves itself by deeds? Well! The little child will strew flowers . . . she will embrace the Divine Throne with their fragrance, she will sing Love's Canticle in silvery tones. Yes, my Beloved, it is thus my short life shall be spent in Thy sight. The only way I have of proving my love is to strew flowers before Thee—that is to say, I will let no tiny sacrifice pass, no look, no word. I wish to profit by the smallest actions, and to do them for Love. I wish to suffer for Love's sake, and for Love's sake even to rejoice: thus shall I strew flowers. Not one shall I find without scattering its petals before Thee . . . and I will sing . . . I will sing always, even if my roses must be gathered from amidst thorns; and the longer and sharper the thorns, the sweeter shall be my song. 

 But of what avail to thee, my Jesus, are my flowers and my songs? I know it well: this fragrant shower, these delicate petals of little price, these songs of love from a poor little heart like mine, will nevertheless be pleasing unto Thee. Trifles they are, but Thou wilt smile on them. The Church Triumphant, stooping towards her child, will gather up these scattered rose leaves, and, placing them in Thy Divine Hands, there to acquire an infinite value, will shower them on the Church Suffering to extinguish its flames, and on the Church Militant to obtain its victory.

Renato Casaro (1935-2025)

 Renato Casaro -- arguably the greatest film-poster artist of all time -- died today. Perhaps more than anyone else he established what people expect film posters to be, handpainting the original of each one in a dashing style. You have certainly seen some of his posters; some of his more famous ones were for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, Conan the Barbarian, Dune, Total Recall, Terminator 2, True Lies, La Femme Nikita, The Princess Bride, The NeverEnding Story, and Dances with Wolves. (You may notice that there are a fair number of Arnold Scharzenegger films; Casaro once said that he was the perfect actor to paint.) But, of course, he was a major influence on many other film poster artists. Film poster art is a bit of niche aristic genre, but Casaro put an immense amount of genius into it, and it always showed.

Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus

 Today is the feast of St. Jerome, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. Everybody always remembers St. Jerome's crotchetiness, but he had a softer side. From a letter to Gaudentius, who had asked how he should raise his infant daughter for the religious life:

It is hard to write to a little girl who cannot understand what you say, of whose mind you know nothing, and of whose inclinations it would be rash to prophesy. In the words of a famous orator she is to be praised more for what she will be than for what she is. For how can you speak of self-control to a child who is eager for cakes, who babbles on her mother's knee, and to whom honey is sweeter than any words? Will she hear the deep things of the apostle when all her delight is in nursery tales? Will she heed the dark sayings of the prophets when her nurse can frighten her by a frowning face? Or will she comprehend the majesty of the gospel, when its splendour dazzles the keenest intellect? Shall I urge her to obey her parents when with her chubby hand she beats her smiling mother? For such reasons as these my dear Pacatula must read some other time the letter that I send her now. Meanwhile let her learn the alphabet, spelling, grammar, and syntax. To induce her to repeat her lessons with her little shrill voice, hold out to her as rewards cakes and mead and sweetmeats. She will make haste to perform her task if she hopes afterwards to get some bright bunch of flowers, some glittering bauble, some enchanting doll. She must also learn to spin, shaping the yarn with her tender thumb; for, even if she constantly breaks the threads, a day will come when she will no longer break them. Then when she has finished her lessons she ought to have some recreation. At such times she may hang round her mother's neck, or snatch kisses from her relations. Reward her for singing psalms that she may love what she has to learn. Her task will then become a pleasure to her and no compulsion will be necessary.

The rest of the letter takes a somewhat darker turn, as Jerome turns to reflecting on the evils of the day, but flashes like this little comment on raising girls are found throughout his works; he was the sort of curmudgeon who is a bit of teddy-bear if you catch him at the right time and in the right way.

O Well for Him that Loves the Sun

 Ballad of the Sun
by G. K. Chesterton  

O well for him that loves the sun,
That sees the heaven-race ridden or run,
The splashing seas of sunset won,
And shouts for victory. 

 God made the sun to crown his head,
And when death's dart at last is sped,
At least it will not find him dead,
And pass the carrion by. 

 O ill for him that loves the sun;
Shall the sun stoop for anyone?
Shall the sun weep for hearts undone
Or heavy souls that pray? 

 Not less for us and everyone
Was that white web of splendour spun;
O well for him who loves the sun
Although the sun should slay.

Fortnightly Book, September 28

 The Oxford Movement began in the 1830s and developed afterward in response to shifts in the relationship between Parliament and the Church of England; a significant early stimulus was the passing of the 1833 Church Temporalities Act, in which Parliament peremptorily reorganized some dioceses of the Church of Ireland and shut down a source of ecclesiastical revenue in order to solve a broader political problem. The actual provisions were deliberately chosen to cause minimal disruption, and even greater efficiency and sustainability, but it unsettled a significant portion of the Church of England, to whom it brought home the point that Parliament could easily just disestablish the Church or overrule it or reorganize it for any purpose it pleased, despite this apparently being inconsistent with both the notion of a Church going back to Christ and the customs of England. John Keble's 1833 Assize sermon, "National Apostasy", touched a chord in a wide variety of people. Nor were they unjustified in this worry, and a series of other controversies, both small and large, expanded the movement. A number of figures, including Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey, began publishing polemical tracts to make their ecclesiology public; this Tractarian movement was the intellectual core of the movement, although there were many people involved with the Oxford Movement whose relationship with the Tractarians was rather loose and sometimes even critical. The Tractarian refusal to back down made the Oxford Movement one of the central intellectual disputes of the age, and their very 'High' notion of what was meant by the Creed in talking of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" led to people accusing them of being Romanizers. Indeed, while it is not by any means true of all, a significant portion of the movement, including some of its leading lights, eventually did leave the Church of England to join communion with Rome. Newman's conversion was the most explosive, happening in 1845.

One of those who converted relatively early on was Elizabeth Furlong Shipton Harris, who found, once she became Catholic, that she did not like it. She wrote a book, originally anonymous, From Oxford to Rome: And How It Fared with Some Who Lately Made the Journey, published in 1846. It was a dialogical novel that attempted to warn people about the dangers that led to the horrifying increase in conversions to Rome. I've skimmed through the book; it's actually quite intelligently, if perhaps idiosyncratically, written, and I suspect that Harris captures a great deal of the way in which the flourishing of Romanticism made the Oxford Movement attractive to people. Someone sent it to Newman in 1847 (Newman never mentions mentions the book by name, but from his references to it, it was almost certainly Harris's), and he was very unimpressed. He thought that its depiction of Oxford life was wrong ("wantonly and preposterously fanciful" was his phrase), that its characterization of those involved was generally implausible even given the diversity of views in the Oxford Movement, and that in particular it treated the movement as mired in a pompousness and pretentiousness that failed to grasp the sincerity of many of the people involved. (It is certainly true that the major figures in Harris's work speak and thinking in an over-heated, flowery way that goes beyond common Victorian novelistic conventions, even for a dialogical novel.) It perhaps also did not help his opinion that the novel can be read as implying that Newman was heavily to blame for turning an idealistic reform movement into a Roman-Catholic-generating machinery. However, it was substantive enough that it needed response. But responding to a novel with a treatise or a vigorous polemic seemed a poor choice, so Newman decided to write a better novel on the same subject. That novel was Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, which was published in 1848.

The novel was successful, being immediately a bestseller and (not unrelatedly) also a source of considerable controversy. Dialogical novels are not very popular today, but they were at the time, and it is generally considered one of the most brilliantly written examples. Newman seems to have suceeded in his attempt to capture what Oxford University life was actually like in his Oxford days, and his satire of English incoherence on religion have impressed more than a few people through the years. The novel was often read, and criticized, as an apologetic work, although Newman himself did not think that a novel was a good place for apologetics, and explicitly denied that it was ever intended to be such a work rather than what it was, an attempt to write a better novel. It's very likely that the fact that Newman was primarily focused on writing a novel with more truth, probability, and insight than an already existing novel, rather than making a specific argument, is one of the reasons it stands above so many other dialogical novels in the period.

In any case, for the next fortnightly book, I am re-reading Loss and Gain.

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

In the middle of the night somebody began to cry outside of Chauntecleer's Coop. If it had been but a few sprinkled tears with nothing but a moan or two, Chauntecleer would probably not have minded. But this crying was more than a gentle moan. By each dark hour of the night it grew. It became a decided wail, and after that it became a definite howl. And howlying -- particularly at the door of his Coop, and in the middle of the night -- howling. Chauntecleer minded very much. (p. 13)

Summary: Long before the rise of men, Chauntecleer is lord of the Coop, and of all the land around. He's a bit silly and a bit vain, a foolish Rooster, but he makes an honest effort to keep peace and uphold order, and with a bit of muddling he mostly does well enough. The book opens with him meeting a creature new to his domain, Mundo Cani Dog, a perpetually over-humble, over-sensitive, weepy, mourny dog, who irritates him to no end, but he soon learns that it is handy for Rooster to have a Dog help with some things, even if the Dog is a mope who never stops talking about how much of a failure and a nothing he is. Unbeknownst to all the animals in the land, they were made by God to be the Keepers of the Wyrm, a terrible and ancient power imprisoned in the earth beneath him, who, if he should ever be freed, would devour the world.

Nor is the Wyrm quiescent. In another domain, ruled by an aging Rooster named Senex, he has begun to whisper. Senex has no heir, and as his abilities slip in his age, he is terrified of being a failure. With Wyrm's help, Senex lays an egg, and the unnatural abomination of the Rooster-laid egg is hatched beneath a Toad. This is Cockatrice, who is like a Rooster and yet not, a scaly, featherless thing of great malice who soon kills Senex, usurping his place, and initiates a regime of terror focused on only one thing: the breeding of snake-like and venomous Basilisks. A Hen, named Pertelote, eventually escapes this regime and finds shelter in the lands of Chauntecleer.

Some elements of the story here have been told elsewhere, but instead of Wyrm, Cockatrice, and Toad, the characters in that story were called the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet. For this is a story about the End of the World, or, at least, a first taste of it. As Chauntecleer keeps the peace in his little realm, unaware of the dangers beneath his feet or multiplyling in the rivers, all things move slowly toward the Armageddon of the animals. And against the pride of the Wyrm, the wickedness of Cockatrice, the malice of the Basilisks, against all of that evil, there is nothing to defend what is good and prevent the end of all except a decent but foolish Rooster, and a loyal Dog who never stops mourning, and some beasts, brave in their way, sometimes, but narrow in their views. God has not left them entirely without resource, since He sends to them the Dun Cow, who gives Chauntecleer what he needs to fight, but the fighting will have to be their own.

Do not let the talking animals give you the wrong idea; this is a book about war, the War, and there are books about war with human characters that are not as brutally honest as this one is about how bad even a necessary war can be. The brutality of Cockatrice's regime, or the terror and loss of the Final Battle in which beast after beast dies from the poison of the Basilisks, are laid out without any pulled punches. Obviously, the earth is still here, and thus Chauntecleer and his allies will narrowly win, but the sacrifices will be terrible by the end, and the Wyrm that wants to devour the world still waits to be freed.

Favorite Passage: Chapter Twenty-Four ends in the middle of a sentence with this passage:

Suddenly Chauntecleer took dizzy and began to sway. How many battles make a war? How muh, and how much more, can a rooster bear before the break? He let his slack wings touch the ground on either side of him so that he wouldn't fall altogether, and then dragged back to the camp. But again and again he turned his head to look behind, trying to believe what he saw.

He stumbled into the trench at the bottom of the wall. Slowly he raised his eyes. There was Pertelote, still standing on its top and looking at him. Chauntecleer  shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile. He spread his wings empty in front of her. The smile didn't work. It hung too crooked on his face. "Do you know? Do you know?" he said as if he were very young. "Pertelote. I don't know anymore," he said, and then he fainted. Many of his bones had been broken.

Chauntecleer had won. Chauntecleer was victorious, but

(p. 223)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow, Pocket Books (New York: 1978).