How It Is Produced

 A competent teacher must go to school with God and himself if he wishes to exercise his office with wisdom. He must imitate him as he reveals himself in nature and in sacred Scripture, and be able to teach both equally in our souls. Almighty God, for whom it costs nothing, for whom nothing is too expensive for human beings, is the thriftiest, slowest God. His rule for agriculture, and the time that he waits patiently for its fruits, should be our guide. It is not a matter of what fruit, or how much fruit, but it is all about how it is produced. Both children and we too know that! He tells his disciples that, in that hour when you need to speak, it will be given to you first and foremost how to speak and then what to say. This order seems to be back to front for us human beings; yet it is to some extent proper to God and sanctified through his own ways.

[Johann Georg Hamann, The Complete London Writings, Kleinig, tr., Lexham Academic (Bellingham: 2025), pp. 330-331, from "Thoughts on the Course of My Life".]

Habitude XXXII

And to the first one proceeds thus. It seems that gifts are not distinguished from virtues. For Gregory, in Moral. I, expositing Job, there were born to him seven sons, says, Seven sons were born to us when through conception of good thinking, seven virtues of the Holy Spirit arose in us. And he confirms this with Isaiah XI, And the spirit of intellection rests upon him, etc., where are enumerated the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Therefore the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are virtues.

Further, Augustine, in the book De Quaestionib. Evang., expositing what is found in Matth. XII, Therefore he goes and takes with him seven other spirits, etc., says, Seven vices are contrary to seven virtues of the Holy Spirit, that is the seven gifts. But the seven vices are contrary to virtues, commonly named. Therefore gifts are not distinguished from virtues, commonly named.

Further, those things whose definitions are the same, are the same. But the definition of virtue is appropriate to the gifts, for each gift is a good quality of mind, by which one lives rightly, etc. Likewise, the definition of gift is appropriate to the infused virtues, for gift is unreturnable giving, according to the Philosopher. Therefore virtues and gifts are not distinguished.

Further, several of the things enumerated among gifts are virtues. For as was said above, wisdom and intellection and knowledge are intellectual virtues; counsel pertains to prudence; and piety is a kind of justice; and fortitude is a moral virtue. Therefore it seems that virtues are not distinguished from gifts.

But contrarwise is that Gregory, Moral I, distinguishes seven gifts, which are signified by seven sons of Job, from the three theological virtues, which he says are signified by the three daughters of Job. And in Moral. II he distinguishes the same seven gifts from the four cardinal virtues, which he says are signified by the four corners of the house.

I reply that it must be said that if we speak of gifts and virtues according to the notion of the name, they have no opposition to each other. For the notion of virtue is drawn from what completes the human being for acting well, as was said above, but the notion of gift is drawn from comparison to the cause from which it is. But nothing forbids that which is from another as gift from being such as to complete [completiva] someone for acting well, especially since we said above that some virtues are infused into us from God. Thus according to this, gift and virtue are not able to be distinguished. 

And therefore some have proposed that gifts should not be distinguished from virtues. But no lesser difficulty remains for them, to wit, to assign a reason for why some virtues are called gifts, and not all, and why some things are counted among gifts that are not counted among virtues, as is obvious from fear.

Hence others said that gifts should be distinguished from virtues, but they did not assign an appropriate cause of distinction, which, to wit, would be common to the virtues but in no way the gifts, or the converse. For some, considering that among the seven gifts, four pertain to reason, to wit, wisdom, knowledge, intellection, and counsel, and three to the striving impulse [vim appetitivam], to wit, fortitude, piety, and fear, held that gifts completed free judgment [liberum arbitrium] according as it is a faculty of reason, but virtues according as it is a faculty of will, because they discovered only two virtues in reason or intellect, to wit, faith and prudence, but others in the striving or receiving impulse [vi appetitiva vel affectiva]. But it ought to be, if this distinction were appropriate, for all virtues to be in the striving impulse, and all gifts in reason. 

Some, however, considering  what Gregory says in Moral. II, that the gift of the Holy Spirit, which in the mind subject to it forms temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude, secures the same mind against any particular temptation through seven gifts, said that virtues are directed to working well, but gifts to resisting temptation. But even this distinction does not suffice. For virtues also resist temptations that lead to sins contrary to virtues, for everything whatsoever naturally resists its contrary. This is especially obvious with regard to charity, of which it is said in Cantic. VIII, Many waters were not able to extinguish charity. 

But others, considering that these gifts are handed down in Scripture as they were in Christ, as is obvious in Isaiah XI, have said that virtues are simply ordered to working well, but gifts are ordered so that through them we are conformed to Christ, especially as to what He endured [passus est], because in His passion suchlike gifts blazed [resplenduerunt]. But this also does not seem to be sufficient, because the Lord Himself especially leads us to conformity to Him according to humility and meekness (Matth. XI, Learn from me because I am lowly and humble of heart) and according to charity (as in John XV, Love each other as I have loved you). And these virtues also especially blazed in Christ's passion. 

And therefore, to distinguish gifts from virtues, we must follow the Scriptural way of speaking, in which they are handed down to us not indeed under the name of gifts, but rather under the name of spirits, for thus it is said in Isaiah XI, There shall rest upon him the spirit of wisdom and intellection, etc. From which words it is clearly given to be understood that these seven are enumerated there according as they are in us by divine inspiration. But inspiration signifies a sort of being changed from outside [motionem ab exteriori]. For it must be considered that there is in the human being a twofold source of changing, one indeed inside, which is reason, and the other outside, which is God, as was said above, and also the Philosopher says this, in the chapter on good fortune. Now it is clear that everything that is changed must be proportioned to the changer, and this is the completion of the changeable inasmuch as it is changeable, the disposition by which it is disposed to be changed well by its changer.  Therefore by as much as the changer is higher, by so much it is necessary for the changeable to be proportioned to it by way of a more complete disposition, just as we see that a student needs to be more completely disposed in order to be capable of higher teaching from a teacher. 

Now it is clear that human beings complete a human being according as the human being is born to be changed according through reason in those things he does inwardly and outwardly. Therefore there needs to be in the human being higher completions according to which it is disposed to be changed by divinity. And these completions are called gifts, not only because they are infused by God, but because according to them the human being is disposed so as to be made readily changeable by divine inspiration, as is said in Isaiah I, The Lord opened my ear, but I do not contradict, I did not turn back. And the Philosopher also says, in the chapter on good fortune, that for those who are changed through divine instigation [instinctum], it does not benefit to be counseled according to human reason, but rather that they follow their inner instigation, because they are changed by a better source than human reason. And this is what some say, that gifts complete human beings for higher acts than acts of virtue.

To the first therefore it must be said that suchlike gifts are sometimes named virtues, according to the common notion of virtue. However, they have something supereminent over the common notion of virtue, inasmuch as they are sorts of divine virtues, completing the human being inasmuch as he is changed by God. Thus also the Philosopher, in Ethic. VII, places above common virtue a sort of heroic or divine virtue, according to which some are called divine men.

To the second it must be said that vices, inasmuch as they are against the good of reason, are contrary to virtues, but inasmuch as they are against divine instigation, they are contrary to gifts. For the same thing is contrary to God and reason, whose light is derived from God.

To the third it must be said that that definition is given to virtue according to the common way of virtue. Thus if we wish to restrict the definition to virtues as opposed to gifts, we will say that what is said, by which one lives rightly, is to be understood of rightness of life which is taken according to the rule of reason. Likewise, gift, as distinguished from infused virtue, is able to be said to be that which is given by God, in order to change one, to wit, that which makes a man follow well His instigation.

To the fourth it must be said that wisdom is called intellectual virtue inasmuch as it proceeds from the judgment of reason, but it is called gift inasmuch as it is worked from divine instigation. And likewise it must be said of the others.

[Thomas Aquinas, 2-1.68.1, my translation; the Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

We could spend more time on the virtues, which again are the habitudes everyone discusses the most, but what we have so far has been enough to touch on all of the essential principles. So we'll move on to the next kind of habitude: the gifts of the Holy Spirit. How we are to understand them as habitudes will come later, but we already get the essential principles here in distinguishing them from the infused virtues.

Links of Note

 * Austin Suggs, Should We All Be Skeptics?, on Augustine's early philosophical works

* Mark K. Spencer, Defending the Filioque and the Essence-Energy Distinction, at "Living With Lady Philosophy"

* Brian Embry, Suarez's Partial Pluralism About Substantial Form (PDF)

* Yascha Mounk interviews Kathleen Stock on the case against assisted death.

* Andrew T. Forceheims, A Function-Based Account of Fittingness (PDF)

* Matthew Minerd, There Is No Esoteric Doctrine in Christianity, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Brad Skow, You Too Could Found a Nation and Become Its President, at "Mostly Aesthetics"

* Amy Kind, Imagination, Creativity, and Skill (PDF)

* Flame & Light, A Brief Overview of Waltonian Theory of Make-Believe

* Allison Aitken, Dharmakirti on Relations and Persons (PDF)

* At the SEP, Voula Tsouna, The Cyrenaics

Fortnightly Book, April 12

 Michael Psellos (or Psellus) was originally named Constantine, Michael being the name he took in later life when he became a monk; 'Psellos' is probably a nickname, and means 'one who stammers'. He spent some time in the Imperial civil service, and eventually became a hypogrammateus, or secretary, and advisor to Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos. He also became involved in the Imperial University of the Palace Hall of Magnaura, which Monomachos was restructuring. He received the formal title of Hypatos ton Philosophon, the Chief of the Philosophers. With a few pauses, he would become a significant figure in the courts of laters Empresses and Emperors, as well. We know very little about his later life, and, in fact, he may not have long survived leaving imperial service at some point in the reign of Michael VII Doukas.

His best known work, which will be the next fortnighly book, is the Chronographia, a historical discussion of the reign of the fourteen emperors and empresses of the Empire from 976, the accession of Basil II Porphyrogenitos (Bulgaroctonos), to around 1076 or so, just before the end of the reign of Michael VII Doukas (Parapinaces). It is famous for its focus on biographical and psychological portraiture, which it uses historical events to illuminate, rather than the more common approach of doing the reverse. I will be reading it in the Penguin Classics edition, which has the title, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, and is translated by E. R. A. Sewter.

Maurice Leblanc, The Secret of Sarek

 Introduction

Opening Passage: Narratively, either the Foreword or Chapter 1 can be treated as the beginning of the book. From the Foreword:

The year was 1902. While strolling in the Bois with his daughter Véronique, the well-known scholar of the megalithic monuments of Brittany, M. Antoine d'Hergemont, was assaulted, and Véronique abducted, by four men. This came to be called the Hergemont scandal.

From Chapter 1:

Into the picturesque village of Le Faouet, situated in the very heart of Brittany, there drove one morning in the month of May a lady whose spreading grey cloak and the thick veil that covered her face failed to hider her remarkable beauty and perfect grace of figure.

The lady took a hurried lunch at the principal inn. Then, at about half-past eleven, she begged the proprietor to look after her bag for her, asked for a few particulars about the neighbourhood and walked through the village into the open country. (p. 1)

Summary: Véronique d'Hergemont was once kidnapped and forced into marriage by a man named Count Alexis Vorski; the marriage led to a son, François. Véronique's father fled with François but they were lost at sea and presumed dead, leading Véronique to withdraw in grief into a Carmelite convent, in 1905. But in 1919, when watching a film about Brittany, 'A Breton Legend', she happened to see a door with the initials V. d'H. in what looked like her own handwriting, despite her not remembering ever having written. She investigates, and begins to find herself in a complicated tangle of mysteries. These mysteries lead her to the island of Sarek, a strange island off the coast of the most superstitious part of Brittany. Sarek is also known as the Island of the Thirty Coffins, the 'thirty coffins' being a complicated series of reefs that surround the island and make it difficult to approach. There are many strange legends associated with it, and Sarek is in fact chock full of Gothic Romance tropes. The island is associated with Druids, and has a lithic structure, the Fairies' Dolmen; it has a ruined Priory from a medieval monastery. There is a cave system on the island. There is a garden on the island, known as the Calvary of Flowers, in which the flowers grow strangely large and vibrant.

Most importantly, the locals are terrified of the island, and it is associated with fragments of prophecy about the thirty coffins having thirty victims and a four women being crucified and a miraculous stone, known as the God-Stone, that can kill and heal. In the course of her investigation, Véronique discovers a drawing by her own father of the illustration in an old manuscript concerned with the prophecy; one of the four crucified women has her own face, and is identified by the initials, V. d'H. And it will only get stranger from here, until Don Luis de Perenna -- better known as Lupin -- arrives to solve the mysteries.

When we look at reviews of this book, it tends to get a love-or-hate response. The first third of the book at least is quite slow-moving; the story is structured so that there are many pieces that have to be put into place. This clearly loses it a lot of readers. Once things begin moving, however, they move quite quickly. Lupin's role in the book is really as a deus ex machina rather than anything else; Lupin ends the book, in fact, reflecting that a novelist could have written a version of the story that did not involve him. (My suspicion, albeit based on very little, is that this is Leblanc commenting sarcastically on the fact that readers keep wanting more Lupin, despite there being so many other stories to tell and hinting at the novel he actually had wanted to write.) Personally, I found the book quite fun, especially once the pieces were all in place. I had no problem with Lupin's being the external resolver. The book is in the genre of apparently supernatural mysteries that turn out to be not so supernatural; these are often not very convincing, but I think this was handled quite well.

There are many mysteries to the Isle of Sarek, but I think it does not give away too much of the story to remark that the book is the book it is because it was written in 1919.  In 1898, the Curies discovered radium, and were able to isolate the pure form in 1910. A few things were known about it, but radioactivity was (for obvious reasons) difficult to study, and radium in particular is difficult to gather together in large amounts. And the early bits and pieces that anyone could put together made radium, although already known to be potentially dangerous, seem to have immense potential for a large number of things, if you just used it correctly or in the right doses. In 1918, for instance, you have the development of the patent medicine, Radithor, which claimed to cure a number of illnesses with a solution that included traces of radium. This was the one of the early entries into what later became known as the Radium Fad, in which radium showed up in all sorts of medicines and cosmetics, extraordinary effects being attributed to its radioactive powers, which, after all, were not any kind of superstitious miracles, but were scientific facts. It wasn't until the 1930s that the Radium Fad began to crash. This happens to be historically important in the United States, because Radithor's demise in a scandal in which one of its major advocates died of radiation poisoning led to a massive expansion of powers in the Food and Drug Administration and a great deal more regulatory caution about medicines and cosmetics. 

All of this is to say that the story was written in that exciting time when radium was seen as having limitless potential, near the very beginning of the Radium Fad. Scientific magic, scientific miracle, sweeping away superstition. It's not magic, it's vita-rays! Of course, we know now that it was all a sort of superstition itself (although we have certainly not in general learned the lesson that what we replace superstition with is often just a new kind of superstition). But that was in the future. The romantic possibilities of it had not yet crashed into disillusionment, and I think it works well as a science fiction thriller for its day. And frankly, I like how it meshes with the Gothic atmosphere and folkloric elements.

Favorite Passage:

"They are very complicated legends," said Stéphane, "very obscure traditions in which we must abandon any attempt to distinguish between what is superstition and what might be truth. Out of this jumble of old wives' tales, the most that we can disentangle is two sets of ideas, those referring to the prophecy of the thirty coffins and those relating to the existence of a treasure, or rather of a miraculous stone."

"Then they take as a prophecy," said Véronique, "the words which I read on Maguennoc's drawing and again on the Fairies' Dolmen."

"Yes, a prophecy which dates back to an indeterminate period and which for centuries has governed the whole history and the whole life of Sarek. The belief has always prevailed that a day would come when, within a space of twelve months, the thirty principal reefs which surround the island and which are called the thirty coffins would recieve their thirty victims, who were to die a violent death, and that those thirty victims would include four women who were to die crucified. It is an established and undisputed tradition, handed down from father to son: and everybody believes in it. It is expressed in the line and part of a line inscribed on the Fairies' Dolmen: 'Four women crucified,' and 'For thirty coffins victims thirty times!'" (pp. 122-123)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, although, as noted above, mileage may vary. The book is explicitly a sequel to The Golden Triangle, and I think parts of the story work better if you have already read that book.

Two Poem Re-Drafts

  Exclusion 

I suppose we can say, if nothing else will do,
that all things have a measure, some accounted span,
that limits make the thing and keep its focus true,
that all things spread their being in just the ways they can.
Yet still it seems absurd, improper, even rude,
that we, like some strange gods, with reason hold full sway,
yet with a sword-kept Eden, the world dares exclude
such as us from endless life, imposing a final day.
We stamp our feet, demand the Manager give His time,
insist that we are deserving, our merit known to all,
weep at the unfairness, in anger scream and rant,
and are firmly turned away, no matter how sublime.
We feel, deep inside, that immortal regions call,
but no matter -- we try to evade death, and we can't.

Stranger in This World

God is found in a thousand clues,
lure and ruse,
through mists and in tides,
hints preparing for good news. 

The sea upon the rocks may crash and foam
but I am unencumbered by their rage,
and though I stood alone,
as the world may think alone,
with God's help I will conquer this and every age. 

Every thought that does not follow
the world's staff like foolish sheep,
every prayer that I make that it will never hear,
is a wall against the sea,
is a battle's victory;
though the wind may blow,
the waters fall in sheets,
yet nothing shall I fear,
for nothing need I fear,
and I need never fall to dark defeat. 

As moonlight falls around us
like a darker shade of pale,
a white found in the night
when the stars the heavens sail,
as breezes softly murmur beneath the vestments white
of a moon that ever wanders,
but never falters with its light,
I think a little hope is merited;
in all that we have inherited,
the little things that matter are the things that conquer most. 

The sea upon the rocks may crash and foam,
but always am I safe at home,
for if I hold my homeland in my heart, 
no one can my inside-myself from my possession part. 

A pilgrim in the world,
a seashell on my staff,
at frowning faces of the world
I am free to laugh;
and if the storms that stir the world
rise against me in a gale,
yet, though I may be weak,
I know I will prevail;
there is a promise given
that withstands the gates of hell. 

And you, yes, you, can have all the worldly things you sought,
for I will cast them all aside to see the face of God.

Welcome Home, Artemis II

 The splashdown of the Integrity module of the Artemis mission occurred in the Pacific, not too far from San Diego, I believe, at about 5:07pm today, after a picture-perfect re-entry and descent. As I write this, the US Navy is doing the work of retrieving the astronauts, who report that their condition is Green, i.e., very good. The descent was great to watch. Some things should be done just because they're wonderful.