The Witch of Endor

 I was thinking about the Witch of Endor today, which is an entire story with many layers, and many more, I think, than appear on the surface. You know the basic story: Samuel has died, and Saul still has to deal with the Philistines, but he is afraid of them, and no longer has Samuel to advise him. So, despite the fact that it is illegal, he sends his servants out to find an 'owb, which literally means a 'mumbler' but is usually translated as 'medium'. They find one in Endor, and Saul goes to her; he asks her to call up Samuel. Then, I think, the story gets particularly interesting.

(1) The woman sees the spirit of Samuel and suddenly realizes that Saul is Saul. It is probably not an accident that the medium only just now realizes that she was deceived by Saul (whom we know not to be the most cunning of men). 

(2) But when the woman describes what she sees, she does not say that she sees Samuel. What she says is, literally, "I have seen God rising from the earth." This is often translated as 'a god', but the word is just Elohim, the common name for God (or perhaps, given the fact the Hebrew sometimes uses the plural form for cases which in English would use abstract terms, for the Godhead). That's an interesting thing to say.

Saul, of course, asks here what He looks like ("What is his appearance?"), and she says, "An old man is rising and he is wrapped in a cloak." Most readers assume that she is answering his question, but note that her response could be seen as not answering it but saying what is happening now. That is, there are two ways to read it:

I have seen God rising from the earth

and

An old man is rising, wrapped in a cloak

can be read as either describing the same thing or different things, one following after the other, in the same vision. (More on this in a moment.)

(3) 'Old man wrapped in a cloak' is about as generic and unidentifying a description as one can give, but immediately Saul takes it to be Samuel. This could be a nod to the common psychic trickery of giving vague descriptions and letting the mark do the work of specifying. But it could also be a bit of a joke. That is, Saul is (if he takes the medium's remarks to apply to the same thing, as most readers do) told that God is rising from the earth as an old man wrapped in a cloak, and his first response is, "Oh my God, that's Samuel!" That perhaps conveys something about Saul's attitude toward Samuel, however rocky their relationship often was!

(4) Saul then bows down to Samuel. Did Saul see Samuel? Verse 14 says that Saul was aware that it was Samuel; many translations use 'perceived' (and this seems to be how most people read the story), but the word in Hebrew seems to be quite broad, and probably just means that he took it that she was describing Samuel. At no point are we told that he actually sees anything. The woman herself might still be speaking. In fact that would make sense. The Jewish laws forbid recourse to 'knowers and mumblers' who are associated with 'dead-seekers', so we usually translate them, plausibly, as 'spiritualists and mediums'. But to this point, we have the 'knowing' part; now we get the 'mumbling' part. 

(5) In any case, Samuel says, "Why have you shaken me by raising me?" Saul replies that he is distressed because the Philistines are fighting him and God (Elohim) has left him, and he can't get any answers from dreams or prophets.

Then Samuel says, "Why ask me, since the Lord turned away from you and became your foe because the Lord Himself spoke by me? Thus the Lord has torn your kingdom from your hand and given it to David your neighbor, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord and exact burning wrath against Amalek." Notably, Samuel, or the apparent Samuel, turns Saul's reasoning against him Saul is asking Samuel because the Lord spoke by him, but given that he already knows why the Lord is no longer favoring him.

The word for wrath, by the way, literally means 'nose', so the Hebrew literally says that Saul did not do a fiery nose against Amalek. But 'nose' is sometimes used for 'face', and the link with anger, which it sometimes has, is generally thought to be because extremely angry people breathe heavily. So with only a little liberty we could translate this as "You did not obey the voice of the Lord and breath fire against Amalek."

(6) Then Samuel continues, "Thus the Lord will do this thing to you today, and tomorrow will deliver Israel, with you, into the hand of the Philistines, and your sons to be with me, and the Lord will deliver the army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines." 

Saul, Israel, and the army of Israel are into the hands of the Philistines, but Saul's sons will be 'with me'. This is naturally (and reasonably) taken to be a way of saying that they will die, and indeed, some of Saul's sons, namely, Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malkishua, die in battle. But could be there be contrast here? The account of their deaths in 1 Samuel 31:6 makes very, very explicit that these three sons and Saul died on the same die. But note that Samuel only says that Saul's sons will be 'with me'; he does not say that Saul will be.

Also, one of Saul's sons does not die with the others, Eshbaal lives and becomes king for two years until he is assassinated by his own generals. (Eshbaal is sometimes called 'Ishbosheth' because of the later Jewish practice of bowdlerizing names of foreign deities; thus 'Man of Baal' is transformed into 'Man of the Shameful'.) Is he just not being included here, or is he also 'with me' even if not in the same way.

I keep saying 'with me', which is what Samuel says. It's natural to read it as 'with Samuel', but Samuel's role as voice of the Lord has been very pronounced here; one could also read it as 'with the Lord'. If that's the case, the contrastive reading has another level of bite.

(7) At this point, Saul falls, "in his full height", to the earth, extremely afraid. Again, the words seem carefully chosen. The woman had begun with, "I see God rising from the earth," and then we end with Saul falling (one could even interpret it as being cast down) to the earth. This certainly is symbolic -- Saul, in the fullness of his greatness, will soon be thrown down to the earth -- but it might also be meshing with the contrastive reading: God and Samuel ascend, and Saul's sons will be with them, but Saul descends. He sought Samuel to alleviate his fear about the Philistines, but the result is that he is now terribly afraid.

(8) The symbolism of Saul's fall as king continues: "There was no power in him" because he had not eaten for a day and a night, just as there will soon be no power in him because he had not fed from the words of the Lord. The woman, worried about her situation (and perhaps, to be fair, Saul's), asks him to listen to the voice of his maidservant (a big all in itself, from the voice of the Lord to the voice of your slave). She offers him some bread to regain his strength. He refuses, but his men (the word is a different word, but could also mean 'slaves') encourages him to follow her advice, and he listens to their voice. Then he stands up from the ground, and the woman feeds him and his men.

(9) Earlier, the spirit of Samuel had called David Saul's neighbor; it could mean comrade, friend, or neighbor, and is the same word used in Leviticus when it says that the people of Israel should love their neighbor. Saul, of course, then goes on very much not to love his neighbor, since David has to flee for his life.

(10) The story is rather brilliantly written in that everything in it can be read in three different ways:

(a) The woman is a sham and she is making this all up. Again, the story does not actually say that Saul saw anything. Everything the woman does is consistent with the sort of medium-trickery that is even still practiced today. No secrets come out; everything we are told about the relationship between Saul and Samuel is public knowledge. But symbolically what happens in Saul being taken in, does in fact capture the low to which Saul has fallen and is falling.

(b) A spirit comes, but it is not Samuel, but merely mimics him; but in fact the spirit happens to speak the truth about Saul. (The passage calls him Samuel, but that need not be taken to mean more than that is how Saul understands it.)

(c) Samuel is really Samuel and has one last prophecy for Saul.

Interpretations consistent with each of these three can be found in both the Jewish rabbis and the Christian Church Fathers.

As for my preference, this is highly speculative but one possibility, out of many, that catches my fancy is this: The woman is perhaps a quack, and cannot really summon up a spirit, much less Samuel, but by God's providence, she has a vision of God rising from the earth. That is to say, Samuel is not there; rather, the medium is seized by God in such a way that she genuinely foresees the Harrowing of Hell. And the Samuel seen is not a spirit summoned up then and there, but a vision of Samuel at the 'leading captivity captive'. The real Samuel tells Saul that he and Israel will given into the hand of the Philistines, but "your sons are with me" (i.e., either with Samuel or with the Lord, or both, in rising to Paradise).

A very interesting story, in any case.

Iakobos

 Today is the feast of St. James the Greater, Apostle of the Lord, who according to tradition was beheaded by King Herod Agrippa I on July 25, AD 44. He was the first of the Twelve Apostles to be martyred; he is also the only Apostle whose actual martyrdom is explicitly recorded in the New Testament. According to Acts 12, Herod Agrippa was trying to curry favor with the local rulers, so he arrested first James, then Peter; James he beheaded. He wanted to make a spectacle of Peter, since it was around the time of Passover, so he put him in prison under tight guard. Peter was rescued by an angel, and eventually made it to the house of Mary the mother of John Mark, where a number of Christians were praying. When Peter came knocking, the servant-girl, named Rhoda, was so excited to hear his voice that she just left him standing there on the porch while she went to tell everyone. Because of the fate of St. James, no one believed her. I'm always struck by how careful the author is to name the people involved.

His brother was St. John the Apostle (who traditionally is the last of the Apostles to die); his father was a fisherman named Zebedee, and his mother was possibly (given Mk 15:40 and Mt 27:56) Mary Salome, who may have been a relative of the Holy Virgin. (Medieval tradition took her to be, like the Virgin Mary, the daughter of St. Anne, but given how families worked, the relationship could have been looser than that.) James, John, and Peter are consistently treated as the leaders of the Apostles; they are the Apostles admitted into Jesus' confidence at the healing of the daughter of Jairus, the Transfiguration, and the Agony in the Garden.

Dashed Off XXI

 You can always find disagreement if you search for it.

We make-believe manyt hings, and some of them we confirm to be real, and some of them we make to be real.

To be baptized is to be covenantal; to be confirmed is to be prophetic; to be ordained is to be angelicized. But there are covenant breakers, false prophets, and fallen angels.

global moral anti-realisms
(1) morality is a model, useful for practical purposes, of nonmoral things
(2) morality is an expression of integrated attitudes toward nonmoral things
(3) morality is a false interpretation of nonmoral things
(4) morality is an imaginary system not grounded in nonmoral things

intellection as active truth

literacy as a fine art

To execute law faithfully requires the authority to assess, to incentivize, and to correct.

We do not merely experience things; we often experience what we have already experienced and/or anticipated experiencing.

To care is to build a discipline of care.

Justice is not scorched earth.

People get irritable at the sudden tearing down or sudden major revision of longstanding and widespread classifications, because we need such things as landmarks and common reference points.

'Information' is used to mean both distinguishability and the causes of distinguishability.

In political matters, it is necessary (1) to have at least a hazy idea of 'the way things should be' and (2) to connect this 'way things should be' to the way things are. This may be done by locating the 'way things should be' either in the past, in the future, or in an ideal realm. (Or any mix of the three. Also, it may vary across particular issues.)

Most oppression does not occur by way of property rights but by way of partisan networks.

In the Karaite understanding of revelation, God chose a book. In the Rabbinical understanding, God chose a nation.

Jude 12-13 is also quite clearly a reference to 1 Enoch, thus makign Jude 14 literally true. 1 Enoch 2:1 -- contrast with 'wandering stars'; 2:3 contrast with 'rainless clous'; 3:1, 5:1, contrast with 'autumn trees', 5:3 contrast with 'waves of sea'; compare Jude 15 with 5:4; compare Jude 6 with 1 Enoch 10:11-14; compare 'wandering stars with 18:12-13.

1 Enoch 61:10 as quasi-Trinitarian

Beliefs that are nourished endure; beliefs that are starved perish.

People who are especially tempted to doubt have a nasty habit of handling it by trying to impose doubt on everyone.

Luther's preface to Bibliander's translation of the Qur'an (1543) puts considerable emphasis on the eternality of the Church. (But note also that he argues that 'the Turks' have better customs than Rome.)

isopsephy = equicalculus

In common law jurisdictions, courts are laboratories for legal devices.

Poverty is often less a lack of money and more a cloud of chaos.

When raising children, people often make the mistake of pushing the means before they have determined the end.

In reconstructed proto-languages, even if we assume a perfect reconstruction, we could never guarantee that words were used in the same cnetury (we can only very roughly and comparatively make judgments about chronological length of etymological tree, and even then only sometimes) or in the same geographical area (due to extensive migration); linguistic models are built wolly on surviving linguistic data, which does not encode all aspects of the language. Nonetheless, a properly built reconstruction, albeit always with a bit of approximation and looseness, can still be quite good and, more to the point, a useful device, as we see with cases like Proto-Germannic, which is often roughly confirmed with new data and helps make plausible reconstructions of the meaning of newly discovered old inscriptions, some of which themselves occasionally get later confirmation.

Without attention to causal reasoning, theoretical physics always runs to wild speculation.

fictions inherent in the thing
fictions imposed by the mind on the thing
-- -- with a foundation in the thing
-- -- due to relation of the thing to other things
-- -- by arbitrary imposition
fictions constructed by the mind but not imposed on things

"Our desire to understand 'how nature works' (i.e., to find the M in X -> M -> Y) is perhaps even stronger than our desire to quantify it." Pearl

mediated divine presence
(1) by sign: (a) creation (b) theophany (c) vision
(2) by prophetic representation
(3) by sacrament

Authors never fully understand why their works appeal.

Changes in prices depend on the causal structures that underlie them.

the changing and changed world
the guessed-at world
the intersubjective medium
the world as witnessed and testified

All norms are associated with narratives that explain them.

soundness of question
--> NB a question can be unsound because it requires something to be true that is false, e.g,. "Why has there been no woman as prime minister of Canada?", showing a kind of inconsistency

The faith by which we are saved is a faith already in existence by the point at which we ourselves begin to be believe.

Mark 2:5 -- belief on behalf of another

scepter, throne, vestment, and matchless weapons

All enduring human greatness requires intensive habituations.

The world we experience is nto merely of moving things but of things with apparent possibilities of motion.

the Church as a foam of transformations

moral imago dei: humanity
jural imago dei: covenantal people
sacral imago dei: sacramental church

The tears of the Church have healing power.

The temptation with which Protestantism has struggled is to begin thinking that we are strong alone; but our strength is to be together in Christ. Where they have not forgotten, they have achieved greatly -- powerful preaching, glorious hymns -- but the siren always calls.

None of us are holy alone.

Romantic relationships build their internal narrative interest to those involved in them by building inequalities and equalizing them.

Toleration is always a policy, not a virtue, and everyone always in the end treats it as merely a policy.

Nothing is a 'deepity' in the correct sense unless it is an equivocation. (On this ground, we see that many claims that things are deepities are themselves deepities equivocating on the word 'deepity'.)

God creates non-God, and does not require any not-God to do it.

Baddorf & McKay's imitationist account of collective virtue ("A Theory of Collective Virtue"): "Collectives can possess virtues and vices; they can do so because they can possess reasonably broad and stable dispositions that functionally and intentionally imitate individual virtues and vices."

A just society is a society of just people acting justly.

good customs of decision-making // virtues (as good habits concerned with choosing)

Pearson & Mitroff's four stages of crisis management
(1) signal detection: identify warning signs and prepare for possible crisis
(2) probing and prevention: active search and reduction of risks
(3) damage containment
(4) recovery
(5) review & learning

survey, strategy, solution, study

People in argument are often not fully sincere, because they are improvising means to multiple ends. In argument people often commit to things in advance of their considered belief, and only to make their arguments work.

Augustine, Ep. 187 to Dardanus & the Church as Temple

X's right to Y vs. X's having Y being reasonable

pleasure and pain as motivation confirmations

business ethics as the ethics of juridical persons
-- as personated
-- as constituted
-- as socially participating

All methodology is based on stories of how results have been reached.

Investment, like proclamation, follows the parable of the sower.

the pope as custos urbis Dei

A recurring problem with trying to explain things in terms of make-believe (e.g., Walton) is that make-believe is an immensely sophisticated and complex cognitive activity, and thus poorly suited for explaining anything simpler.

representation, figuration, narrativization

Higher animals clearly experience the world in valenced terms; some such valenced experiences make more functional sense than others. We are able to assess and correct valence attributions accordingly.

Naturalizing projects have a fairly consistent track record of doing at best okay.

Church councils never get what they want but what they say.

Books are indirect meetings of persons.

Idolatry, murder, and adultery violate sacred bonds, and therefore when unrepented exceed what any finite punishment could 'fit'.

There seems reason to think that we make political alliances by deliberately stultifying ourselves to facilitate being on the same page with a large group of very different people.

States not kept on track always end up trying to govern what does not need to be governed and trying to avoid governing what very much needs it.

Malebranche is right that about all of our sensations have an ambiguity  whereby we treat them as both mental and external to the mind; but he jumps too quickly to taking this to be an error.

"There is no other reason for saying that a square is not a circle than that the idea of a square is different from that of a circle and that the one can be thought of without thinking of the other." Malebranche (LO59)

And Sung by Lonely Campfires to the Stars

Upon Leaving the Black Hills
by A. Jean Holmes 

Beautiful hills, beneath whose shadows
I have dreamed dreams, have loved, have gained, and failed,
Have watched the sunsets pale, and breathed the pine,
And sung by lonely campfires to the stars:
Yet going, as I am, beyond the reach
Of finger-tips of fragrance in the winds,
And sight of brave, black hills against the sky,
I need not say good-bye; for you will be
Forever with me, though without your shrine.
Nor need I ask your steadfastness, your strength,
The purpose of your pines; be mine the will
To use them in my need, for they are there.
Through thee I have known God-steadfast as hills,
Constant and sweet as thy sweet spirit is!
Our little souls must understand the great
By simple simile: hills we can see
Can touch, can walk, and so can prove them real;
God, greater far, we trembling strive to feel.

Nolan Movies

 I saw The Odyssey the other day, and am still mulling it over; I may or may not say something about it this weekend. But as part of mulling, I was thinking of all of Christopher Nolan's movies and how I might rate them. This, I think, is the order in which I would rate them, at least at the moment.

1. Inception (2010) -- This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and, despite the respect it gets, I think it is still seriously underappreciated. One thing that puts it very high is that it has balance, which is not always Nolan's strong suit.

2. Memento (2000) -- I think one of the strengths of this movie is that, while it has the features of some of Nolan's most ambitious movies, it has none of the self-indulgence that weakens some of the later works. The combination of an ambitious idea and an understated means of implementing it is something that works very vwell.

3. The Dark Knight (2008) -- Partly because of excellent casting and a good set-up by Batman Begins, this is in many ways the most fun Nolan movie.

4. Interstellar (2014) -- This seems to be at the top of many people's lists, but I have never liked it anywhere as much as Inception or Memento, and I think it is certainly less brilliant than they are. Nonetheless, there is a lot to be said for it.

5. The Prestige (2006)

6. Dunkirk (2017) -- Nolan's most serious movie, this is a somewhat unique case, and I probably could be convinced to rate it a bit higher.

7. Batman Begins (2005)

8. Oppenheimer (2023)

9. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

10. Tenet (2020) -- There's a lot I like about this brilliant movie, and I want to rate it higher, but, utterly self-indulgent, it struggles to rise above being a string of gimmicks. It makes a good contrast with Inception, which I think avoids most of the problems that weaken this movie.

11. The Odyssey (2026) -- A good movie that could have been great but does not quite manage to cohere as it should. People have noted that it has a lot in common with Oppenheimer, but Oppenheimer is consistently better on all the points that the two share in common. 

That leaves two other Nolan movies -- Following (1998), which I have not seen, and Insomnia (2002), which I think I may have seen, but about which I remember nothing.

Beings

 The perception of the natures which compose the universe has been justified in the preceding chapters.

These nature are not being, but have being. Thus they receive being, because all that is not being (but nevertheless has being) must receive it from whoever is being.

Therefore, whoever is being must give being to the natures which compose the universe and are perceived by us.

But that which is being and gives being to creatures is cause, that is, God.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), p. 119 (section 1212).]

Very similar, of course, to the argument in St. Thomas's De ente et essentia (and Rosmini goes on immediately to give an adapted version of this that clearly is related to the First Way).

Doctor Apostolicus

 Today is the feast of St. Lawrence of Brindisi, Doctor of the Church. From his Mariale, a work highly influential on modern Catholic views of the Holy Virgin (Sermon 1), discussing the vision of the Woman and the Sun in Revelation 12:

By this heavenly vision God wanted the orthodox Church to demonstrate the divine wonders of Mary and to reveal to the faithful those things hidden in the Virgin, that all might know of what kind and how great is the glory of the Virgin from those things which had been written of her.

To summarize, there are two things that have been divinely handed down to us about the Virgin: that she was the Bride of God and Mother of Christ, just as Eve was the wife of Adam and the mother of men. So too in this vision these two things have been presented to human minds: that she is the Bride of God, the Queen of Heaven, the Bride of the High King, and that she conceived and gave birth to Christ, the only-begotten Son of God and true God. But what kind of glory accompanies these two things! He shows her robe, throne, and crown: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. O wonderful vision!