Circumstantiae

 In Chapter XXXIIII ("The Spinster Loses Some Sleep") of Owen Wister's The Virginia, we find the narrator turns the narrative into a brief discussion of ethics. The Virginian has been involved in a lynching of cattle rustlers; Molly Wood is struggling with this as a matter of conscience. Judge Henry is attempting to think through what he should say to her about it; a former federal judge, he doesn't approve of vigilantism in general, but he's also a Wyoming man who knows that the standard mechanisms of law cannot keep up with cattle rustlers enough to prevent them from degrading the entire social order into what is effectively a system of organized crime -- he has seen it happen. At this point, the narrator himself voices an opinion:

I cannot say that I believe in doing evil that good may come. I do not. I think that any man who honestly justifies such course deceives himself. But this I can say: to call any act evil, instantly begs the question. Many an act that man does is right or wrong according to the time and place which form, so to speak, its context; strip it of its surrounding circumstances, and you tear away its meaning. Gentlemen reformers, beware of this common practice of yours! beware of calling an act evil on Tuesday because that same act was evil on Monday!

As a narrative device, this works quite well in context -- Wister is not just telling a tale of Wyoming cowboys but trying to portray their culture sympathetically to people who do not share it. Aware of his audience, he recognizes that he needs to give the reader, just like Molly Wood, an actual way to see The Virginian's integrity and honor despite the foreignness of his ways. From this point he therefore goes on to provide an actual philosophical argument for his exhortation:

 On Monday I walk over my neighbor's field; there is no wrong in such walking. By Tuesday he has put up a sign that trespassers will be prosecuted according to law. I walk again on Tuesday, and am a law-breaker. Do you begin to see my point? or are you inclined to object to the illustration because the walking on Tuesday was not WRONG, but merely ILLEGAL? Then here is another illustration which you will find it a trifle more embarrassing to answer. Consider carefully, let me beg you, the case of a young man and a young woman who walk out of a door on Tuesday, pronounced man and wife by a third party inside the door. It matters not that on Monday they were, in their own hearts, sacredly vowed to each other. If they had omitted stepping inside that door, if they had dispensed with that third party, and gone away on Monday sacredly vowed to each other in their own hearts, you would have scarcely found their conduct moral. Consider these things carefully,—the sign-post and the third party,—and the difference they make. And now, for a finish, we will return to the sign-post. 

 Suppose that I went over my neighbor's field on Tuesday, after the sign-post was put up, because I saw a murder about to be committed in the field, and therefore ran in and stopped it. Was I doing evil that good might come? Do you not think that to stay out and let the murder be done would have been the evil act in this case? To disobey the sign-post was RIGHT; and I trust that you now perceive the same act may wear as many different hues of right or wrong as the rainbow, according to the atmosphere in which it is done. It is not safe to say of any man, “He did evil that good might come.” Was the thing that he did, in the first place, evil? That is the question.

Thus the narrator's argument is that change of circumstances can change the nature of the act in such a way that our judgment of its morality reasonably changes. If I cross a field on Monday, when I have no reason to think there is legal reason for me not to do so, and if I cross a field on Tuesday when there is a posted No Trespassing sign, I am in some sense doing the same thing, but the character of the action has changed. The legal difference makes a difference to the moral assessment. Very often, whether an act is moral or immoral depends on whether certain conditions are met, but circumstances can change whether the conditions are met. They can also shift what conditions are met. Thus if I ignore a No Trespassing sign because I am preventing a murder, the narrator says, the action is right. And very importantly, it's not a wrong action done for good reason (evil that good may come), but simply a good action. 

In ST 2-1.18.10, St. Thomas Aquinas considers what is essentially this same question: Can circumstance place moral action in the class of good or evil? The superficial reason why not is that circumstances are accidental to the nature or substance of the act itself, but in natural things the accidents do not change the nature of that in which they inhere. But, says Aquinas, this is because natural things are determinate to one and always come down to an ultimate form, so there's no way for a circumstance to contribute to what the thing is. It is not so in human actions, because reason is not determinate to one and for any particular reason why you might do something the way you do, you could have an even more basic reason. In natural things, the starting point for everything is fixed; in rational matters, we can choose our starting point. The nature or substance of an action is what Aquinas calls the object; it is what you are actually choosing to do; if we add a circumstance to it, this can sometimes be added in such a way that it specifies a precondition of the object, without changing the object itself but in such a way that it changes whether the action should be classified as good or bad:

Thus to appropriate another's property is specified by reason of the property being "another's," and in this respect it is placed in the species of theft; and if we consider that action also in its bearing on place or time, then this will be an additional circumstance. But since the reason can direct as to place, time, and the like, it may happen that the condition as to place, in relation to the object, is considered as being in disaccord with reason: for instance, reason forbids damage to be done to a holy place. Consequently to steal from a holy place has an additional repugnance to the order of reason. And thus place, which was first of all considered as a circumstance, is considered here as the principal condition of the object, and as itself repugnant to reason.

In general, this circumstantial sensitivity occurs when the circumstance shifts whether the object is concordant or discordant with reason, since the morality of an action is fundamentally about how it relates to reason. This means, first, that shift in classification is not necessarily done by only one circumstance; it could happen by a combination of circumstances. It further means that, depending on how they relate to reason's direction of the act, circumstances may have no effect at all on whether an action is moral or immoral, or may make it better or worse without changing whether it is moral or immoral (obvious examples being when the circumstances provide some excuse for a wrong action without making it cease to be wrong, or when there are better or worse ways to do something like being honest with someone), or they could shift entirely whether it is right or wrong.

In Wister's sign-post example, the new legal circumstance created by the posted regulation affects how the action will be reasoned through in the reasoning of a sensible person. The example makes it sound like it's a difference of time, but in fact it's being Monday or Tuesday is not relevant to the rightness or wrongness of the action. Aquinas follows Aristotle and Cicero in identifying eight circumstances of an action: who, what, about what, where, by what aids, why, in what way (or how), when. When is not the relevant morality-shifting circumstance, although it could in a situation where a deadline of some sort were set. The circumstance here seems to be what; on Monday you were not doing something that could be itself classified as trespassing, but on Tuesday you are. In the wedding case, the circumstances that make the shift seem to be how and by what, although that might depend on the exact intention of the parties. Early in the book, we see a change of circumstances that matters; Steve, The Virginian's friend, calls him a 'son of a bitch', and Trampas, soon to be The Virginian's enemy, also calls him a 'son of a bitch'; this is certainly affected by the circumstance who (Steve is a longtime friend, and therefore has more leeway than Trampas), but in context the most important circumstance is how, which we see as the scene with Trampas results in one of the most famous lines in Western fiction: "When you call me that, smile." In Steve's case it was obviously done in a good-natured, affectionate way; Trampas was being mean. 

In the case of the lynching of the cattle rustlers, this is a much more complicated situation. The what is killing human beings, which makes it (everyone in the story rightly agrees) a very grave action. The who, the about what, and the why are all important here: this is an honest attempt to serve genuine justice by punishing thieves with respect to a serious crime for which justice is difficult to obtain. In all of these circumstances the action fares better than (to use the contrast that is explicitly used in The Virginian) the lynching of Southern blacks, whose who, why, what, and about what make the latter an unmitigated evil. 

However there are further complications in the cattle rustling case, which is why the narrator is sympathetic to Molly Wood's crisis of conscience and Judge Henry's reservations. The how is mixed. It is defective, since it is done extralegally, which is why Judge Henry would prefer another way if there were one, although in this particular case it was done very carefully and with due regard for certain crude basics -- for instance, they have made very sure that the people they will be hanging are indeed the cattle rustlers who have been causing problems throughout the area. But The Virginian himself struggles with the action because of other who circumstances -- his position means that he, himself, has a special obligation to protect his men from the problems caused by cattle rustlers, but one of the cattle rustlers he is going to have to hang is his friend Steve. The narrator effectively argues that the lynching is right; but we see that the circumstances complicate the matter by making it defective in various ways, even if the circumstances don't change the fact that it is right. Other circumstances, like when and by what aids play no significant role in the moral decisionmaking itself, although under the circumstances, where perhaps does play an indirect role in how we assess whether the reasoning is appropriate (the same actions done for the same reasons would be more of a problem in the East than they are in the West).

On Aquinas's account, why and what are always the most important circumstances, so while they are not always determinative for morality in themselves (they could just shift how well or badly the action is done), they are the circumstances most likely to shift an action between being good and being bad. What should be distinguished from the object, i.e., what you are choosing to do, which is not a circumstance but the substance of the action; rather, it's more like the classification of the object in light of its context. Why is so important because it is the way the object of the action relates to things more important than itself. What is more, how important the other circumstances are almost always depends on their relation to why and what, and how they interact with those. This is also seen in the cattle rustler case, in which it matters very much why The Virginian and his fellow cowboys are hanging the cattle rustlers, and what the action means in the context of the budding and as-yet unstable civilization of Wyoming; it is these that give us the reason to recognize that, however short of the ideal the action itself might be, the action is nonetheless an expression of integrity and honor and justice. The justice is circumstantially defective, but genuinely just.

All of this is quite interesting, both Wister's basic argument and the fact that it fits so well with St. Thomas's account, in part because people do not always do well in taking circumstances into account. We tend to see this kind of reasoning as making the world 'shades of gray' and contrast it with 'black and white', which people often prefer. This is highly misleading. The fact that circumstances can shift an action back and forth over the border between good and bad does not make the distinction between good and bad any less sharp. The fact that our actions are complicated increases what we have to consider to assess their goodness or badness, but good and evil are not affected by our complicated relationship to each. There's a danger that one might read Wister's argument, or St. Thomas's, as a sort of relativism; but neither is claiming that good and bad are relative but that our actions are to be assessed by what is relevant to our reasons for them. If you take bread that is not yours, it matters whether you are doing so maliciously or to feed your family. If you tell the truth to someone, it matters whether you are doing so to hurt them or because you believe they have a right to know. If you try to help someone, it matters how you go about doing it. Whether or not you are breaking the law depends on where and when in the world you are. You have different obligations to different people, so to whom you do things can matter. The categories of good and bad are not complicated by this; what is complicated is how our actions are classified in those terms.

Actions are good and bad in terms of how they fit with reason, and circumstances are how even actions the same in themselves can be differently related to reason. The circumstances are not the only thing that affect the morality of the action (obviously the object of the action is the starting point), but they do affect it.

Dashed Off I

 As always, dashed off thoughts; these continue from the notebook begun at the end of July 2024.

***

Nehemiah & the role of the laity

The first principle of all scholarship is extensive acquaintance.

We want not the satisfaction of our preferences, but *no worse* than the satisfaction of our preferences, for we all recognize that there are cognitive and appetitive limits to our ability to prefer.

We have inclinations more foundational than preference.

literature as a study of basic forms of goods (and challenges and temptations related to them): life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability/friendship, practical reasonableness, religion

objectivity as usefulness across perspectives

The role of the external world as intersubjective medium rquires that it have both purposiveness and expressiveness.

How a society organizes sport tells you a great deal about the society. Sports teams as big business do not exist in little village games; leagues in highly organized societies do not have the flexibility of those that have often improvised local organization.

Repentance is a cousin of humor.

Much of the attraction people have toward sex has less to do with physical desire or pleasure than with the fleshly sublimity of the experience of overwhelming and being overwhelmed, our own animal natures experienced as sublime.

"There are, in the final analysis, only two ways of making a choice between alternative ways of co-ordinating action to the common purpose or common good of any group. There must be either unanimity, or authority. There are no other possibilities.' Finnis

Every legal system creates a band or region of the semi-legal, in which things fall under the law in uncertain or confused ways that heavily depend on things that are not laws, or eve clearly recognized by laws, and in which things that are not laws are inconsistently and confusedly treated as if they were.

cGh cube
Special relativity reduces to Newtonian mechanics as c approaches infinity; quantum mechanics reduces to classical mechanics as h-bar approaches 0; general relativity reduces to special relativity as G approaches 0. Classical mechanics: (0,0,0); relativistic quantum gravity: (c, G, h) = (with relevant choice of units) (1,1,1).

In changing things, the actual cannot exceed the potential actualized. The 'exceeds' needs clarification.

Flashback, in medias res, and flashforward are relations between plot and narrative.

We are forgivable because we are mortal.

high philosophy, low philosophy, wild philosophy

the periodic table as a system of confirmed analogical inferences

analogical inferences using plausible, probable, or proven connections (ordered similarities)

Not bare similarity but ordered similarity is usually the foundation of analogical inferences.

All human beings are at the same time both human and also inhuman expressions of the natural world.

"Intermediate causes extend the reach of the ultimate cause by their nature, and so also contribute their natures to its causal action." Chastek

The diversity of artificial classifications is sometimes based on diversity of natural classifications; that is to say, a set of related artificial classifications does not always converge on one natural classification but on a set of related natural classifications.

the multiplication of perspectives in the Church as the material of Christian culture

Reason according to those principles that could be true without qualification.
-- Reason according to those principles that could be applied to the entire system of things.
-- Reason according to those principles consistent with the existence and nature of reason.
-- Reason according to those principles that could consistently be used by the entire community of rational inquirers.

In matters of skill, act in such a way as allows skill and virtue to be consistent with each other.
-- In matters of skill, act in such a way as allows practices of skill to be consistent with friendships of excellence.

If we are not morally responsible for our actions, we are not intellectually responsible for our conclusions, and for similar reasons.

fas : religio :: ius : iustitia

You cannot have good statistics with sloppy classifications.

Sorrow is beautiful when it enriches.

endearments as negotiating conditions of vulnerability

Most of the benefits of intelligence arise from social cooperation.

"When the fear of the Lord breathes upon a person, that person begins to fear God and wisely advances towards the perfection of good and upright works." Hildegard von Bingen

viriditas as the opposite of ariditas (Hildegar)

People have a bad habit of treating evidence of complexity as if it were evidential ambiguity.

A single glance may give good evidence of existence; the conditions must be very tightly constrained for a single glance to give good evidence of nonexistence.

civil friendship as an end of civil disobedience

Every sacrament involves an implicit theology of salvation, as captured in symbol, in Scriptural association, and in functional role within the sacramental economy.

Hos 6:1-3 and the Resurrection

The act of explaining something posits sufficient reason for it.

punishment and correction as jural good

rule of law as based on the principle of legal order as neither optional, nor arbitrary, nor infeasible, and on opposition to attempts to treat it as one of these

reason, authority, and tradition as the sources of legal order

Signs are often nested in signs.

-esque aesthetic concepts and found art

Thomas Wilson's description of accident (The Rule of Reason (1551)): ' the thing chauncing or cleving to the substance'

Wolff's universal rule for free actions (see Walschots): do that which makes you and your state or that of another more perfect, omit that which makes it more imperfect. 
--perfection is "consensum in varietate" (thus he thinks of it as integration or unification of one's life)
Crusius's "highest foundation of natural law": do that which is in accordance with the perfection of God and your relation to him, and furthermore what is in accordance with the essential perfection of human nature, and omit the opposite.
Crusius's "complete concept of divine natural law": do everything that is in accordance with the perfection of God, the essential perfection of your own nature and that all other creatures, and finally also the relations of things to each other that he has established, and omit the opposite, out of obedience to the command of your creator, as your natural and necessary sovereign.
Mendelssohn's "first law of nature": make your intrinsic and extrinsic condition and that of your fellow human being, in the proper proportion, as perfect as you can.
Tittel's "principle of happiness": act in such a way that through your action and disposition the common world, the well-being of sensing and thinking natures -- thus also your own happiness -- is best preserved and promoted.
(Kant's categorical imperative is an attempt to improve on these kinds of principles.)

ostension as the root of pronominality; pronouns are signs of particular ostensions
-- note that we can and do supplement and even at times substitute actual ostension for pronouns (co-speech and pro-speech ostensions)

Pantomime tends to have an SOV order even when the pantomimers speak a language with a different order (See Goldin-Meadow et al, "The Natural Order of Events: How Speakers of Different Languages Represent Events Nonverbally".)

Discussions of social ontology often confuse
(1) treating X as Y
(2) intending to treat X as Y
(3) intending that X be treated as Y
(4) acting as if X were Y
(5) making X Y
(6) X being Y in a classification in use.
These can overlap, but are not the same, and make reference to different kinds of act.

The Son is that of which it may be said that it is always false that there was when He was not.

Jesus Christ is the Son of God in the most perfect sense of sonship, being of the Father, both naturally and by adoption, both as proceeding and as received and acclaimed; Son both literally and figuratively, both ontically and morally, both by inheritance and by merit. He is thus Son truly and preeminently, unique and firstborn with respect to all creation.

Box formation
(1) Rule of Necessitation
(2) exceptionlessness with respect to simple enumeration
(3) derivation from Box at least as strong
(4) Rule of General / Conditional Necessitation
(5) self-evidence
-- Even in the same domain, these cannot always be assumed to deliver the same kind of Box; this requires further assumptions to coordinate them.

Necessitation is a problem for doxastic logics because we assume one belief-track per believer and the same axioms across belief-tracks. That is, we assume that believing is neither chunky nor fragmentary.

provability logics as strong, idealized doxastic logics

Our beliefs seem to cluster around pramanas and to require construction.

It is a common experience to discover that we were already committed to something before anyone, including ourselves, took us to be, because commitment is just part of rational living, i.e., living as a rational animal. It is also a common experience to find that people are trying to commit us to things to which we are not in fact committed.

nBP (n Believes p) -> p if True is taken not as real but as projected. If T is projected it seems plausible that nBp -> nB(nBp), unless one has an account of 'projected as true' that makes it independent of belief.

rigor as express layout and examination of possible points of error

"Such is the nature of novelty, that, where any thing pleases, it becomes doubly agreeable, if new; but if it displeases, it is doubly displeasing upon that very account." Hume

fluvial vs pluvial inspiration

adhesive vs inhesive personal relationships

The history of Arianism shows the Church trying out many alternatives but repeatedly finding only the homoousios adequate.
anhomoian -- homoian -- homoiousian -- homoosuian; three of the four were systematically eliminated in a multi-century disjunctive syllogism.

Job 38:17 -- 'doorkeepers of the underworld trembled' and the descent of hell

We come to believe by practicing believing, across all the fields with respect to which we form beliefs.

Everyone interprets the physical world allegorically; we see this even in atheists who take the vastness or regularity or materiality of the universe as implying a moral view of one kind or another.

Many deteriorations are clearly caused by chance events, and thus arise insofar as the deteriorating thing's actions and passions do not have a final cause. We preserve things by preventing such chance events (or reducing their likeliness).

Habitude XVIII

 After this must be considered specific habitudes. And because habitudes, as was said, are distinguished through good and bad, first one must speak of good habitudes, which are virtues and other things adjoined to them, namely, gifts, beatitudes, and fruits; second, of bad habitudes, namely vices and sins. Now, about virtues, five things must be considered: first, the essence of virtue, second, its subject; third, the division of virtue; fourth, the cause of virtue; five, certain properties of virtue. About the first, four things must be asked. First, whether human virtue is habitude. Second, whether it is working habitude [habitus operativa]. Third, whether it is good habitude. Fourth, the definition of virtue.

To the first one proceeds thus. It seems that human virtue is not habitude. For virtue is the limit of power [ultimus potentiae], as is said in De Caelo I. But the limit of each thing is traced back to the genus of which it is the limit, as the point to the genus of the line. Therefore virtue is traced back to the genus of power, and not to the genus of habitude.

Further, Augustine says, in De Libero Arbit. II, that virtue is good use of free choice. But use of free choice is act. Therefore virtue is not habitude but act.

Further, we do not merit by habitudes but by acts; otherwise a human being would continuously merit, even sleeping. But we merit by virtues. Therefore virtues are not habitudes but acts.

Further, Augustine says, in the book De moribus Eccles., that virtue is order of love. And in the book of eighty-three quest. he says that ordering that is called virtue is enjoying what is to be enjoyed and using what is to be used. But order, or ordering, names either act or relatedness. Therefore virtue is not habitude, but act or relatedness.

Further, just as there are human virtues, there are natural virtues. But natural virtues are not habitudes, but sorts of powers. Therefore neither are human virtues. 

But contrariwise is that the Philosopher, in the book Predicament., posits kind of knowledge and virtue to be habitude.

I reply that it must be said that virtue names a kind of completion of power. But the completion of anything is considered chiefly in ordering to its end. But the end of power is act. Wherefore power is said to be complete according as it is determined to its act. But there are sorts of powers that are according to themselves determined to their acts, like active natural powers, and therefore such natural powers according to themselves are called virtues. But rational powers, which are proper to human beings, are not determined to one but have themselves indeterminate to many, are determined to act through habitude, as is obvious from what was said above. And therefore human virtues are habitudes.

Therefore to the first it must be said that sometimes virtue is said of that to which virtue is, to wit, either the object of virtue or its act, just as faith is sometimes called that which is believed, sometimes the believing itself, and sometimes the habitude itself by which one believes. Thus when it is said that virtue is the limit of power, 'virtue' is taken for the object of virtue. For that limit in which the power is able to be is that which is named the virtue of the thing, just as, if someone can carry a hundred pounds and no more, his power is considered according to a hundred pounds and not sixty. But the objection proceeded as if virtue were the limit of power essentially.

To the second it must be said that good use of free choice is said to be virtue according to the same reason, to wit, because it is that to which virtue is directed as its proper act. For the act of virtue is nothing other than good use of free choice.

To the third it must be said that we are said to merit something in two ways: (1) in one way, as by merit itself, in the way we are said to run by running, and in this way we merit by acts; (2) in another way, we are said to merit something as the principle of merit, and in this way we are said to run by moving power, and thus we are said to merit by virtues and habitudes.

To the fourth it must be said that virtue is called order or ordering of love as that to which it is virtue, for love in us is ordered through virtue.

To the fifth it must be said that natural powers are determined of themselves to one, but not rational powers. And therefore it is not similar, as was said.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.55.prol & 2-1.55.1, my translation. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

Virtue, of course, while not by any means the only kind of habitude, is the summit of them all, so it is essential for any serious study of habitude, and foundational for any study of human society and civilization. A key concept that is clearly in play here is that habitude is a principle of ordering and determination for actions that can in some way be otherwise (and thus for what is in some way fitting or appropriate rather than necessary), and in the case of virtue, for free actions.

Good

 You certainly do not love anything except what is good, since good is the earth, with the loftiness of its mountains, and the due measure of its hills, and the level surface of its plains; and good is an estate that is pleasant and fertile; and good is a house that is arranged in due proportions, and is spacious and bright; and good are animal and animate bodies; and good is air that is temperate, and salubrious; and good is food that is agreeable and fit for health; and good is health, without pains or lassitude; and good is the countenance of man that is disposed in fit proportions, and is cheerful in look, and bright in color; and good is the mind of a friend, with the sweetness of agreement, and with the confidence of love; and good is a righteous man; and good are riches, since they are readily useful; and good is the heaven, with its sun, and moon, and stars; and good are the angels, by their holy obedience; and good is discourse that sweetly teaches and suitably admonishes the hearer; and good is a poem that is harmonious in its numbers and weighty in its sense. And why add yet more and more? This thing is good and that good, but take away this and that, and regard good itself if you can, so will you see God, not good by a good that is other than Himself, but the good of all good.

Augustine, De Trinitate, Book VIII, Chapter 3.

Links of Note

 * David Sherwood, A Suggestive Note on the Esse of the Eucharist (PDF)

* Gregory Sadler, Von Hildebrand and Christian Philosophy: A Comparative Approach

* Lynne Kiesling, Jane Austen as Applied Moral Philosopher, at "Knowledge Problem"

* Bridger Ehli, Body, Coherence, and Hume's Galley (PDF). There are two major ways to read Hume's comment about the inadequacy of the galley effect, the extensive (it doesn't cover enough well enough) and the intensive (it doesn't get you a strong enough belief). I incline to the extensive reading, but this is an interesting argument for the intensive reading.

* Joel Miller, The Weird and Wild Mind of Charles Williams, at "Miller's Book Review"

* Terry Eagleton, Pregnant with Monsters, reviewing David Bather Woods's Arthur Schopenhaeuer, at "The London Review of Books"

* Miroslav Novák, The good citizen, the good man, and alternation in Aristotle's best constitutions (PDF)

* Amod Lele, Do you need anger for respect and accountability? at "Love of All Wisdom"

Fortnightly Book, January 4

 I was wondering what to do for the next fortnightly book, but some friends sent me Daniel Mendelsohn's translation of The Odyssey for Christmas, so that seems a good candidate. 

Of Homer we know very little beyond the two masterpieces bequeathed to civilization in his name; modern scholars tend toward thinking that The Iliad and The Odyssey have different authors, but modern scholars have been very wrong in their assessments about these works before, so we should perhaps take that as a possibility not yet proven. The Greeks did not have a stable theology or mythology, so the occasional theological and mythological differences between the two tell us nothing (imagine trying to get a completely coherent account of the gods from Aeschylus or Plato); differences in style and vocabulary can be explained by the differences in story and theme combined with the likely differences in redaction history. If we take the two to go back, in some way, to a single poet, which we follow tradition in calling 'Homer', there is no consistent tradition about him. Some ancient stories held that he was an eyewitness of the Trojan War, others that he lived centuries afterward. The best guess, taking into account both tradition and scholarly hypothesis, is that he would have lived somewhere in the eighth century BC.

The content of the two works, on the other hand, discusses events in the Late Bronze Age, about five hundred years earlier, and allowing for distortions of time and editing, apparently well. The Iliad, in particular, has tended to trounce its scholarly skeptics; over and over again, aspects of its story that were considered purely invented have turned out to be probably about right, with some approximation. The same is true of The Odyssey, which probably does capture, filtered through some later Greek ideas and perhaps revision for narrative unity, actual Mediterranean cultures and stories from the Late Bronze Age. These cultures are often called 'palace-cultures' because they tended to be built around the palace of a war-chief who extended his protection to the community around it. Palace-culture collapsed almost completely in the early twelfth century BC; that it seems to be reflected in the interactions between kings and between kings and commoners in The Odyssey seems a sign of the latter's broad accuracy in cultural depiction.

But, of course, it is the story, not the sociology, of The Odyssey that fundamentally matters. And with that there is perhaps no better place to start off than Aristotle's famous comment, which makes it a story fundamentally about absence from and return to home:

A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight -- suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tost, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them. This is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode.

Owen Wister, The Virginian

 Introduction

Opening Passage: A bit long, but worth noting in full, both as a description of The Virginian and as capturing the overall style of the work:

Some notable sight was drawing the passengers, both men and women, to the window; and therefore I rose and crossed the car to see what it was. I saw near the track an enclosure, and round it some laughing men, and inside it some whirling dust, and amid the dust some horses, plunging, huddling, and dodging. They were cow ponies in a corral, and one of them would not be caught, no matter who threw the rope. We had plenty of time to watch this sport, for our train had stopped that the engine might take water at the tank before it pulled us up beside the station platform of Medicine Bow. We were also six hours late, and starving for entertainment. The pony in the corral was wise, and rapid of limb. Have you seen a skilful boxer watch his antagonist with a quiet, incessant eye? Such an eye as this did the pony keep upon whatever man took the rope. The man might pretend to look at the weather, which was fine; or he might affect earnest conversation with a bystander: it was bootless. The pony saw through it. No feint hoodwinked him. This animal was thoroughly a man of the world. His undistracted eye stayed fixed upon the dissembling foe, and the gravity of his horse-expression made the matter one of high comedy. Then the rope would sail out at him, but he was already elsewhere; and if horses laugh, gayety must have abounded in that corral. Sometimes the pony took a turn alone; next he had slid in a flash among his brothers, and the whole of them like a school of playful fish whipped round the corral, kicking up the fine dust, and (I take it) roaring with laughter. Through the window-glass of our Pullman the thud of their mischievous hoofs reached us, and the strong, humorous curses of the cow-boys. Then for the first time I noticed a man who sat on the high gate of the corral, looking on. For he now climbed down with the undulations of a tiger, smooth and easy, as if his muscles flowed beneath his skin. The others had all visibly whirled the rope, some of them even shoulder high. I did not see his arm lift or move. He appeared to hold the rope down low, by his leg. But like a sudden snake I saw the noose go out its length and fall true; and the thing was done. As the captured pony walked in with a sweet, church-door expression, our train moved slowly on to the station, and a passenger remarked, "That man knows his business."

Summary: The narrator, who is never named, comes into Medicine Bow, Wyoming, in order to visit the Sunk Creek Ranch; he finds a few unexpected surprises. The first is that his luggage was lost; it's probably coming, but it got separated from him at some point. The second is that the Sunk Creek Ranch is not at Medicine Bow, which is just the closest train station -- the ranch is 263 miles away. Judge Henry, who owns the Sunk Creek Ranch, has sent one of his employees to escort him, a tall, handsome man with a Southern accent who is only known throughout the story as "The Virginian" (a friend once calls him "Jeff", and this is treated as his actual name in some adaptations, but in fact this is just a slightly derogatory general nickname for people from Virginia). The narrator also meets, briefly, The Virginian's old friend, Steve, who seems a very likable man. 

While they are waiting for the narrator's luggage to arrive, The Virginian gets involved in a card game with a man named Trampas, also an employee of Judge Henry; it goes badly, and The Virginian ends up humiliating Trampas, earning his eternal enmity. This opposition between The Virginian and Trampas is the primary storyline of the book, and it will culminate in a series of events that will lead to The Virginian being put into an impossible position that will lead to him having to participate in a lynching against (among others) Steve, who has fallen into horse-thieving.

Much of the rest of the story involves the tenderfoot narrator getting used to the rough Wyoming life through various episodes, but one line that ends up being particularly important is The Virginian's meeting with Molly Wood, an Eastern girl who, restless at home, has come West to be the local schoolteacher. They are both obviously attracted to each other, and fall easily into banter and teasing, and The Virginian even begins reading Molly's favorite books in order to discuss them with her. But they came from very different cultural worlds -- one of the strengths of the social description in the book is that Wister does an excellent job at showing just how different their cultures are, sometimes almost foreign-country different, despite both being part of the United States. The romance is done quite well -- the back-and-forth between Molly and The Virginian is lively and clever. This storyline will culminate in Molly having to come to The Virginian's rescue when the latter is on the verge of death, which makes this an interesting case of a romance whose key event is the woman saving the man in distress. This is done quite deliberately; when you look over the romance story, it flips the standard expectations. While The Virginian is very much a stereotypical man, and Molly Wood a very feminine character, in the romance they often take the role opposite of what you might expect from typical romance conventions. The result is that both are quite well-rounded characters, and we get a much deeper insight into The Virginian's character than we would if we had only the very masculine adventures that arise from Trampas's attempts to revenge himself.

I listened to several radio adaptations of the story -- those of Frontier Theater (1947), Hallmark Playhouse (1949), and The General Electric Theater (1953). The narrator is often dropped, which significantly changes the tenor of the story. Unsurprisingly, both for this reason of narrative change and probably to fit their anticipated audiences, the adaptations flip the structure of the novel, making the romance the central story. The exception in the three radio adaptations is that of The General Electric Theater, which keeps a narrator, but minimizes his role in the story, and keeps the romance secondary, but lets it occupy a larger proportion of the overall time. This seems to be a different approach to creating the same general solution of telling the story in a very limited timeframe while leveraging the more immediate impact of the romance in giving events in the story weight; it is more successful for the purposes of adaptation but complicates abridgement of the story. The Trampas story is also usually shifted to focus much more on the tragic friendship between The Virginian and Steve, which is also (probably not incidentally) where it intersects with the Molly Wood storyline. The General Electric Theater version, in other respects the best as an adaptation, botches this portion by focusing on Trampas instead and rushing Molly Wood's crisis of conscience. It's just very difficult, I think, to fit a complicated story like this into an abridged format in a different medium.

One of the biggest effects of these kinds of changes, one which I think will go on to have a major influence on the Cowboy Westerns that The Virginian inspired, is that The Virginian becomes much more of a 'simple man'. This lets the adaptations give Molly the possibility of teaching The Virginian something or other about 'civilization'; this is absolutely not part of the book, in which the cultures of The Virginian and of Molly Wood are treated as being on par. In the book, The Virginian's letting Molly Wood teach him is an act of generosity and magnanimity on his part, something that he is doing deliberately in order to have more things to talk with her about and more excuses to see her, and Molly Wood in turn deliberately sets out to understand his own culture in its own right (a point that is emphasized by Molly's difficulties with getting her family back East to see the value of the match). The simplicity of the cowboy-hero would become a trope of the genre. In the book, however, The Virginian is not a 'simple man' at all; not only is he fairly solidly educated (even if in not as literary a way as Molly), he is an extremely, even deviously, cunning fellow, who is constantly approaching problems from an indirect and unexpected direction, and repeatedly outmaneuvers everyone else in the book, including, in very different ways, Trampas and Molly Wood.

The story also has a very deliberately constructed theme that does not come out in any of the adaptations: what is right in one context is not right in another, and what is wrong in one context is not wrong in another. This is explicitly discussed in a brief excursus on moral philosophy later in the book (which I intend at some point to discuss in a post), but it is put very vividly in one of the most memorable scenes of the book. The narrator had previously witnessed the back-and-forth ragging of Steve and The Virginian as friends, and Steve had called The Virginian at one point, "son of a ---"; the force of this is perhaps easily missed by readers of our day, since not only have we been subjected to the tiresome Millenial fashion of never-ending casual swearing, sapping all force from all cussing whatsoever, but 'son of a bitch' in particular does not usually come across as an especially terrible insult. In the day, however, it was one of worst possible insults you could apply to anyone. But Steve and The Virginian are friends, and then as now male friends might sometimes use insults as terms of affection. In the poker game with Trampas, however, Trampas gets angry with The Virginian and uses the same insult, which leads to The Virginian pulling a gun on him, because the insult is just that serious. Context matters to right and wrong. Almost everything The Virginian does can be interpreted as morally wrong, if you do not exercise the goodwill that is required to see why he does it in the circumstances in which he does it. To recognize how admirable he is, you have to be able to see how his actions are the right actions in his case, no matter how much they would be wrong in a different case. This thematic development gives The Virginian a moral complexity far greater than you usually find in later Cowboy Westerns.

Favorite Passage: There are many possible candidates -- the book is sometimes hilariously funny -- but the card scene with Trampas is hard to beat:

There had been silence over in the corner; but now the man Trampas spoke again. 

 "And ten," said he, sliding out some chips from before him. Very strange it was to hear him, how he contrived to make those words a personal taunt. The Virginian was looking at his cards. He might have been deaf.

 "And twenty," said the next player, easily. 

 The next threw his cards down. 

 It was now the Virginian's turn to bet, or leave the game, and he did not speak at once. Therefore Trampas spoke. "Your bet, you son-of-a——" 

The Virginian's pistol came out, and his hand lay on the table, holding it unaimed. And with a voice as gentle as ever, the voice that sounded almost like a caress, but drawling a very little more than usual, so that there was almost a space between each word, he issued his orders to the man Trampas:— 

 "When you call me that, smile." And he looked at Trampas across the table. 

 Yes, the voice was gentle. But in my ears it seemed as if somewhere the bell of death was ringing; and silence, like a stroke, fell on the large room. All men present, as if by some magnetic current, had become aware of this crisis. In my ignorance, and the total stoppage of my thoughts, I stood stock-still, and noticed various people crouching, or shifting their positions. 

 "Sit quiet," said the dealer, scornfully to the man near me. "Can't you see he don't want to push trouble? He has handed Trampas the choice to back down or draw his steel."

[By Arthur I. Keller - https://archive.org/details/virginianhorsema00wistuoft, Public Domain, Link]

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.