Habitude XXXV

 It seems that original sin is not habitude. For original sin is lack of original justice, as Anselm says in the book on the virginal conception, and so original sin is a sort of privation. But privation is opposed to habitude. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

Further, actual sin has more of the notion of fault than original, inasmuch as it has more of the notion of the voluntary. But actual habitude of sin does not have the notion of fault; otherwise it would follow that a man sleeping, culpably sins. Thefore no original habitude has the notion of fault.

Further, in badness, act always precedes habitude, for bad habitude is never infused, but acquired. But original sin is not preceded by any act. Therefore original sin is not habitude.

But contrariwise is what Augustine says in the book on the baptism of infants, that due to original sin little children are capable of craving [concupiscibili], though they are not actually craving [concupiscentes]. But capability [habilitas] is called according to some habitude. Therefore original sin is habitude.

I reply that it must be said that, as was said above, habitude is twofold. One is that by which power is inclined to act, as kinds of knowledge [scientiae] and virtues are called habitudes. And in this way, original sin is not habitude. In another way, habitude is said to be a disposition of a nature composed of many things, according to which it has itself [se habet] either well or badly toward something, and especially according as the disposition has been turned as it were into nature, as is obvious from illness and health. And in this way original sin is habitude. For it is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition coming from the dissolution of that harmony in which the notion of original justice consisted, just as bodily illness is a sort of disordered [inordinata] disposition of body, according to which the equality in which the notion of health consists is dissolved. Whence original sin is called languor of nature.

To the first it must be said that, as illness of body has something of privation, inasmuch as equality of health is removed, and has something positive, to wit the humors themselves being disposed disorderedly [inordinata dispositos], so too original sin has privation of original justice, and with it disordered disposition [inordinatam dispositionem] of the parts of the soul. Whence it is not pure privation but a sort of corrupt habitude.

To the second it must be said that actual sin is a sort of disordering [inordinatio] of act, whereas original sin, since it is sin of nature, is a sort of disordered disposition [inordinata dispositio] of nature itself, which has the notion of fault inasmuch as it is derived from the first parent, as was said. Now this kind of disordered disposition of nature [inordinata dispositio naturae] has the notion of habitude, but disordered disposition of act [inordinata dipositio actus] does not have the notion of habitude. And because of this original sin is able to be habitude, but not actual sin.

To the third it must be said that that objection proceeds from the habitude by which power is inclined to act, but original sin is not such a habitude. Although even from original sin some inclination to disordered act [actum inordinatum] follows, not directly, but indirectly, to wit, through removal of the impediment [remotionem prohibentis], that is, original justice, which impeded disordered change [inordinatos motus], just as also from bodily illness there follows inclination to disordered bodily changes [motus corporales inordinatos]. Nor ought it to be said that original sin is infused habitude, nor acquired, save by the act of the first parent rather than the act of this person, but it is innate through defective origin.

[St. Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-1.82.1, my translation. The Latin is here, the Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

It's important to grasp that original sin is not sin in a strictly proper sense, i.e., in the sense that the person who has it has thereby sinned; rather, it is the sin of the whole human race, in the first parent as the head of the human race. In that parental sin, original justice, which protected from actual disorder, was lost, with the result that all descended human beings are disordered in their desires.

Besides the importance of original sin itself, one of the important points emphasized here is that the infused vs. acquired distinction is not exhaustive for habitudes; original sin is neither infused nor acquired by the person who has it, but is a result of a defective origination of the person, namely, being generated when original justice has been lost. This makes original sin a natural habitude like congenital illness rather than a rational habitude like science or virtue, although since it is a disordered state of our rational ability to organize our inclinations, disordered acts follow from it, which makes vice possible and, indeed, in the long run inevitable where there is nothing to counteract it.

And Stand a Barrier to Eternity

To a Daisy
by Alice Meynell 

Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide
Like all created things, secrets from me,
And stand a barrier to eternity.
And I, how can I praise thee well and wide 

From where I dwell---upon the hither side?
Thou little veil for so great mystery,
When shall I penetrate all things and thee,
And then look back? For this I must abide, 

Till thou shalt grow and fold and be unfurled
Literally between me and the world.
Then I shall drink from in beneath a spring,

And from a poet’s side shall read his book.
O daisy mine, what will it be to look
From God’s side even of such a simple thing?

The Guardian 100 Best Novels

The Guardian recently published their list of 100 Best Novels As people have been commenting all over, the list is very weird. They took 172 authors, critics, academics, had each give a top ten list, and then compiled them into a single list, taking into account the weightings of the individual lists. I suppose it's inevitable that a list made this way will have some strangeness to it. It's absurd, for instance, for The Handmaid's Tale to be on a list of 100 best novels ever published in English, and even if it were, it is certainly not a better book than The Left Hand of Darkness. Charles Dickens doesn't even make the top 10, which is already a sign that the list can't be taken seriously. There are also some novelistic powerhouses that seem very underrepresented: if I haven't missed anything, Japan and Norway don't show up, France is represented entirely by Flaubert and Proust, and Germany seems to be represented entirely by Thomas Mann.  The author that I'm most disappointed not to see on a list like this is Alessandro Manzoni.

Still, it's been a while since I've done booklist around here. Bolded I have definitely read. I have linked to the ones that I've done as Fortnightly Books.

Looking at the ones I haven't read, I don't have a particular interest in reading most of them (which is not say that I wouldn't do so if the opportunity happened to arise).

I find to my complete and utter astonishment that while I've discussed them occasionally, I've never done Emma, Middlemarch, or Jane Eyre for the Fortnightly Book, which I could have sworn that I had. That will have to be rectified at some point. Vanity Fair, too, perhaps. The Great Gatsby is already on my list to do as Fortnightly Book sometime this year, and I have had Sentimental Education for years, intending to do it but always forgetting, so maybe I should actually get on that sometime.

100 My Ántonia
99 The Go-Between
98 The Road
97 Catch-22
96 Pedro Páramo
95 The Return of the Native
94 The Known World
93 Invisible Cities
92 Sentimental Education
91 Life and Fate
90 Jacob's Room
89 The Left Hand of Darkness
88 Ragtime
87 The Line of Beauty
86 The Turn of the Screw
85 The Vegetarian
84 The Talented Mr Ripley
83 A Farewell to Arms
82 The End of the Affair
81 Buddenbrooks
80 Rebecca
79 Go Tell It on the Mountain
78 A House for Mr Biswas
77 The Rainbow
76 Dracula
75 The Bluest Eye
74 Nervous Conditions
73 Austerlitz
72 Our Mutual Friend
71 Kindred
70 Jude the Obscure
69 Crime and Punishment
68 Blood Meridian
67 The Man Without Qualities
66 The Master and Margarita
65 The Color Purple
64 The Good Soldier
63 White Teeth
62 Half of a Yellow Sun
61 The Rings of Saturn
60 Howards End
59 Never Let Me Go
58 Disgrace
57 The Sound and the Fury
56 Mansfield Park
55 The Waves
54 Orlando
53 The Transit of Venus
52 The Golden Bowl
51 My Brilliant Friend
50 Wide Sargasso Sea
49 A Fine Balance
48 The Metamorphosis
47 Vanity Fair
46 The Leopard
45 The Golden Notebook
44 Giovanni's Room
43 Housekeeping
42 The Magic Mountain
41 Heart of Darkness
40 Song of Solomon
39 Their Eyes Were Watching God
38 The Age of Innocence
37 Invisible Man
36 The Handmaid's Tale
35 Great Expectations
34 Wolf Hall
33 David Copperfield
32 The God of Small Things
31 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
30 Frankenstein
29 Pale Fire
28 The Brothers Karamazov
27 The Trial
26 Don Quixote
25 Lolita
24 The Remains of the Day
23 Midnight's Children
22 Things Fall Apart
21 The Portrait of a Lady
20 Wuthering Heights
19 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
18 Persuasion
17 One Hundred Years of Solitude
16 Nineteen Eighty-Four
15 Moby-Dick
14 Mrs Dalloway
13 Emma
12 Bleak House
11 The Great Gatsby
10 Madame Bovary
9 Pride and Prejudice
8 Jane Eyre
7 War and Peace
6 Anna Karenina
5 In Search of Lost Time
4 To the Lighthouse
3 Ulysses
2 Beloved
1 Middlemarch

Links of Note

 * Jacob Allee, Dorothy L. Sayers on Facts, Feelings, and Natural Law, at "Study the Great Books"

* Exploring the Richness and Roots of Fantasy, at "The Library of Lewis and Tolkien"

* Boaz Faraday Schuman, To Contradict Is to Cooperate: Prior, Abelard, Buridan, Grice (PDF)

* Harry D'Agostino, A MacIntyrean Auto-Biography (Part I -- After Virtue)

* Chris Bobonich & Katherine Meadows, Plato's Laws, at the SEP

* Ravi Thakral & Guillaine Arthur, Normativity and the Indefinite Singular in Morality (PDF)

* Brad Skow, The Plague Crucifix, on Danto's The Abuse of Beauty, at "Mostly Aesthetics"

* Benjamin Robert Koons, The Justice of Punitive Wars, at "The Journal of Controversial Ideas"

* Joseph E. Blado, Dölpopa, Shentong Buddhism, and the Three Jewels: An Analytic Friendly Analysis (PDF)

* Ambrose Gardeil, Evolution and the Principles of St. Thomas, translated by Matthew Minerd, with an interesting discussion of habitus, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Rob Spence, The Leopard, on Lampedusa's classic, at "First Folios"

* Toby Ord, Interpolation, Extrapolation, Hyperpolation: Generalising into new dimensions (PDF)

* Ben Burgis, It's Hard to Make Sense of Marxism Without a Conception of Objective Human Flourishing, at "Philosophy for the People"

* Chris Fraser, Tang Junyi on Mencian and Mohist Conceptions of Mind (PDF)

Music on My Mind

 

Meret, "Breath of the Dying Sun".

Fortnightly Book, May 17

 Hermann Karl Hesse (1877-1962) began writing while working at a bookshop in the 1890s, but it was only in 1904 that he published his first successful work, Peter Camenzind, which became a bestseller in Germany. It did well enough that Hesse realized that devoting himself fulltime to writing could be a viable career. It was not as straightforward as he perhaps had hoped -- he had to work around a very complicated personal life and the Great War -- but he did well enough, and in 1931 he began writing a book that was originally intended to be the story of a man reincarnated across several lives. Of course, at this time things were rather complicated in Germany; Hesse had lived in Switzerland for a while at this point, but the rise of the Nazi regime would seriously impede his work. Because the Nazis looked at him with suspicion, German journals and publishing houses stopped working with him, so he couldn't get things published. Finally, having worked on the book for eleven years, resulting it in its having a very different character than he had originally intended, he published Der Glasperlenspiel, The Glass Bead Game in 1943 in Switzerland. It is largely this work that resulted in his reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature a few years later, in 1946. It would be his last major work, although for the next decades he did write many shorter works while keeping up an extensive correspondence.

The Glass Bead Game is the next fortnightly book. It is set in the future -- exactly when is unspecified, but Hesse elsewhere suggests that the narrator is looking back from around the beginning of the 25th century. The world's intellectual life has become dominated by the Glass Bead Game, a logical and mathematical system allowing players to improvise elaborate compositions of cultural values and ideas like music. The narrator is trying to figure out the life of Joseph Knecht, a young man with an interest in music, who rose to prominence as Magister Ludi, a key figure in the Order that primarily organizes the public games for the Glass Bead Game, who eventually becomes disillusioned by the intellectual life of his time.

Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From The Mystery of the Holy Innocents:

I am, God says, Master of the Three Virtues.

Faith is a loyal wife.
Charity is a fervent mother.
But hope is a very little girl.

I am, God says, the Master of the Virtues.

It is Faith who holds fast through century upon century.

It is Charity who gives herself through centuries of centuries,
But it is my little hope
who gets up every morning.

I am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues.

It is Faith who resists through century upon century.
It is Charity who yields through century upon century.
But it is my little hope
Who every morning
Says good-day to us.

I am, God says, the Lord of the Virtues. (p. 69)

Summary: Since this is a collection of poems, there is no plot or direct throughline, but there is a recurring theme of France as an expression of Catholic hope despite its mounting difficulties. We get this in "Presentation of the Beauce to Our Lady of Chartres" (of which you can hear Paul Mankin's interpretation of the French original here), in which the Beauce, the rich farmland region between the Seine and the Loire, is pictured as being engaged in a sort of quasi-liturgical procession, its harvests and beauty being offered as a gift to the Virgin:

We were born for you on the margin of this plain,
Where the golden River Loire serenely curves,
And this sandy glorious stream forever serves
To kiss the sacred hem of your immortal train. (p. 23)

Just as here you look down on an ocean of wheat,
Over there it's an ocean of heads you control,
And the harvests of joy and the harvests of dole
Are collected each night in the courts round your feet. (p. 25)

Different expressions of French hope even in difficulty are also found in "Prayer to Our Lady of Chartres For a Credit to be Carried Forward", "For Those who Die in Battle", and The Mystery of the Holy Innocents.

The Mystery of the Holy Innocents is the primary, and longest, poem in this collection, and it is on the Christian virtue of hope itself, rooted, of course, in the Passion of Christ and the martyrdom of the saints. One of the most striking passages in the poem pictures the prayers of Christians as ships in great fleets of ships sent to conquer God:

Those three or four words which conquer me, me the conquerable,
And which they send in front of their misery like two invincible hands joined together.
Those three or four words which advance like a strong prow in front a weak ship,
And which cleave the wave of my anger.
And when the prow has passed, the ship passes and all the fleet behind it. (p. 87)

There are four great fleets. The first is the fleet of the Paternosters, the Our Fathers,

And it is a fleet of the line
A battle fleet,
Like a beautiful classical fleet, like a fleet of triremes,
Advancing to attack the King (p. 90)

After it follows the second fleet, "the fleet with white sails, the innumerable fleet of the Ave Marias, / And it is a fleet of biremes" (p. 95). The third fleet is all the prayers of the Christian clock -- the Divine Office or Liturgy of Hours, the prayers of the Mass and Vespers, the graces before meals. These are the three fleets of prayers, containing all of the prayers of the Church. But there is, the poem goes on to say, a fourth fleet, "the invisible fleet" (p. p. 95), consisting of the prayers never said, the half-felt, half-understood impulses of the heart, completely imperceptible, but each one treated by God as if it were fully a prayer like any other.

The Mystery of the Holy Innocents also explores the ways in which France is the France of St. Louis, a saint of hope, in which the liberty of the Frenchman is an image of the liberty, the gratuitousness and grace, of God. In the same way, an extensive section of it reflects on the Old Testament as an anticipation of the New Testament, an anticipation that itself anticipates the martyrdom of the Holy Innocents, who themselves symbolize the virtue of hope. All of history up to them is but the childhood of a salvation history that ends in the hopeful innocence of a new childhood:

Nothing is less elaborate than my Paradise.
Aram sub ipsam, on the steps of the altar itself
These simple children play with their palms and their martyrs' crowns.
I believe they play at hoops, God says, and perhaps at quoits
(at least I believe so, for do not think
that they ever ask my permission)
And the palm forever green they use apparently as a hoop-stick. (p. 165)

Favorite Passage: From "For Those who Die in Battle" (from Eve):

Happy are they who die for a temporal land,
When a just war calls, and they obey and go forth,
Happy are they who die for a handful of earth,
Happy are they who die in so noble a band.

Happy are they who die in their country's defence,
Lying outstretched before God with upturned faces.
Happy are they who die in those last high places,
Such funeral rites have  a great magnificence.

Happy are they who die for their cities of earth,
They are the outward forms of the City above.
Happy are they who die for their fire and their hearth,
Their father's house and its humble honour and love. (p. 58)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Charles Péguy, The Mystery of the Holy Innocents and Other Poems, Pansy Pakenham, tr., Wipf and Stock Publishers (Eugene, OR: 2017).