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!

The Authorship of 2 Peter

Authorship attributions for any long-lasting text are inevitably layered and complicated. For instance, if you have read the Epic of Gilgamesh, you have read an edited translated reconstruction from several different variations that were themselves in different languages and from different times and cultures, and thus you have read a version that probably no one read before that version was published; editing, translating, and reconstructing all add complications to the question of who authored something, and they also complicate all inferences about authorship. 

For all the books of the New Testament, there are 'conservative' and 'liberal' positions about authorship; these are misleading labels for the position that the common and customary attributions are at least approximately right (conservative) and the position that the common and customary attributions are not correct enough to be counted as right (liberal). The reason it has to be put in this form is that common and customary attributions are often themselves approximate and incompletely certain, and authorship attributions even in other literary cases are made with an allowance that, for instance, there could also be intermediaries, editors, co-writers, different revisions, and so forth. For instance, the customary and common attribution for the Gospel of Matthew is that it was written by St. Matthew the Apostle, so the 'conservative' position is that it was written by St. Matthew or close enough; if it turned out (as some Church Fathers thought) that St. Matthew was the writer of the original draft, but that later writers translated it into Greek, perhaps with authorized expansions, this would still suffice for the conservative position. Likewise, traditionally St. Matthew and St. Levi are the same person (people in Judea and Galilee in the first century often had more than one name for various reasons), but if it turned out that they weren't and the Gospel was written by St. Levi, not St. Matthew, this would still be a conservative position, although one that no doubt conservatives would want clear evidence about -- the attribution to St. Matthew is right enough, and any confusion is actually elsewhere (in thinking that St. Matthew and St. Levi were the same, when in reality only the latter was the author). If one held that the authorship of the Gospel of Matthew had nothing to do with St. Matthew, and that the attribution was due not to St. Matthew having something somewhere to do with it but just an attribution that arose later for independent reasons, this would definitely be a liberal position on the authorship of the Gospel. Likewise, if it were a later forgery with no actual causal connection to St. Matthew, even indirectly or loosely, this would also be a liberal position.

Of all the books of the New Testament, the one that perhaps most easily lends itself to the liberal position, and causes the most difficulties for the conservative position, is 2 Peter.  (2 Timothy is probably its only rival on this particular point.) There are puzzles with it all the way across the board, however, that are not resolved.

The first and most basic elements to consider are what the work actually says. 2 Peter 1:1 gives as the 'from' of its greetings, Symeon Petros, slave and apostle of Jesus Christ. 'Symeon' is an unusual variant of 'Simon', but it is used of Simon Peter in Acts 15:14; Petros is a special title of Simon Peter in the same sense that Christos is a special title of Jesus Christ; and while the New Testament attributes apostleship to more than the Apostles proper, Symeon Petros...apostolos, is a very distinctive attribution. The epistle refers to a prior letter (without giving any indication as to its content) in 2 Peter 3:1; it refers to "our beloved brother Paul" (3:15) and his letters (3:16), and groups that first letter and some Pauline letters, whichever such letters might be in view (the usual educated guess based on echoes is that at least 1 Thessalonians is being considered), as "writings" (3:16, usually translated as 'Scriptures') that must not be distorted. It also says that "we" have made known Christ's power and appearing not by following stories, but having been "eyewitnesses" of his greatness (1:16), which it links with the Transfiguration, "we" having been brought with him and hearing the voice on the mountain (1:18). It anticipates the author's death as was made clear to the author by Jesus Christ himself (1:14). Thus the self-attribution of the text seems clearly to be Simon Peter; but is (as is often the case in this period) somewhat loose. What it strictly tells us is that it is written and sent under the authority of St. Simon Peter, the Simon Peter, and in the course of the letter it refers, as an eyewitness account, to an event of which Simon Peter was one of very few eyewitnesses. This is consistent with a very wide range of authorial possibilities. For instance, it has been suggested by some that several of St. Paul's letters were basically written by committee, with Paul simply supervising and giving final authorization; this would be equally consistent with what we find here. Many other things are possible.

It's difficult to pin down the earliest quotations and allusions, because any such assessment requires making a number of assumptions, but a plausible candidate is 1 Clement (9:2, 23:3), which would make 2 Peter quite early; if these are not genuine allusions, then the latest date for the work can be set well into the second century. The Church Fathers are fairly consisting in recognizing that the work was sometimes thought to be really St. Peter's, but that it was definitely not accepted as such universally; that is, some churches, but not all, read it as being genuinely Petrine. Origen, the first author to discuss its authorship directly, recognizes that some take it to be Petrine but does not himself regard it as such, and this is quite common among other Church Fathers who discuss these matters.

 Thus the 'conservative' here can hold that (1) there is a connection to St. Peter, such that he was in some way involved in the formation of the epistle under his authority, but (2) this connection could be fairly loose, given the uncertainties and ambivalences that we find. Beyond the actual statements of the text and consistency with some patristic evidence, there is not much that can be put forward directly to support it. Some people note, correctly, that for a work that involves a self-attribution to St. Peter, it is quite restrained, in both theology and attribution; pseudepigraphy often attempts to call on the authority of apostles for very extravagant claims, but the epistle here does not seem to be doing so. It gives us a very minimal account of the Transfiguration, draws conclusions that are quite modest, and attempts to impose by apostolic authority things that are mostly also found elsewhere in the New Testament. How much weight one gives this argument depends on a large number of background assumptions.

The 'liberal' position would be the opposite, that the process of the epistle's formation involves not even a loose derivation from St. Peter and his authorization. This is often combined with, although it is not strictly required by the 'liberal' position on authorship, the view that the early apparent allusions to 2 Peter are actually the reverse -- that is, 2 Peter is influenced by those texts rather than vice versa. This would make its origin well into the second century.

When we look at direct arguments for 'liberal' positions (i.e., those that don't just point out the uncertainties of the reasons for the 'conservative' positions), we find, however, that they don't get us very far. People will commonly point to the later patristic doubts about the authorship of the work. But this is in many ways the strongest argument on the liberal side. Other arguments are consistently doubtful. The Greek of the epistle is very weird, and definitely different from 1 Peter, but taking this to mean that it is not Petrine at all requires making a number of assumptions that are only that, assumptions. The 'conservative' positions for 1 Peter and 2 Peter do not strictly require (although they don't necessarily rule out) that St. Peter himself directly wrote anything at all, only that the epistles were written and sent under his authority and on his behalf; and if we take a 'liberal' position on 1 Peter, one can't use stylistic differences with 1 Peter as reasons for thinking 2 Peter non-Petrine.

2 Peter shares a lot of material with Jude, and effort sometimes is made to parse what this might mean for authorship. The answer is that we don't know. We don't know for sure how the two are related. Jude is usually thought to be first, because it is much, much tighter in argument than 2 Peter, and seems to have a much closer familiarity with the book of Enoch on whose material it draws. What is more, 2 Peter's use of the material is somewhat odder, in ways that would be explained if the author had heard either Jude or Jude's original source, but didn't have a written copy at hand. (If we assume that 2 Peter is drawing from Jude, the author of 2 Peter at several points substitutes for expressions in Jude other expressions that are similar-sounding, suggesting that it was not from a written copy but either from hearing it or remembering it. If we are assuming that they are both drawing from the same third source, Jude's use is much more like what you would expect from someone who had an actual written copy, and 2 Peter's use is much more like what you would expect from someone who had only heard it or had it second-hand.) The argument, which one occasionally finds, that St. Peter would not draw on ideas by St. Jude, on the ground that St. Peter was more important than St. Jude, is childish and stupid, and marks the person who uses it as an idiot who can be dismissed. What is important, though, is that, assuming 2 Peter draws on Jude or at least Jude's source, which is plausible, we know, even on the 'conservative' position,  that a significant amount of the material of the epistle is not actually from St. Peter himself -- at least, assuming (which we have no reason to believe but which we certainly do not know) that St. Peter himself is not Jude's source. (We can't fully rule that out because the ideas that someone cannot draw loosely on someone else's summary of what he himself previously said, or that someone cannot at times say things more precisely and at times more loosely, or that someone cannot remember what he previously said in a different way than actual record shows, are all obviously wrong.) The relationship with Jude, so far as we have it, doesn't really seem to say anything definite at all about the authorship of either.

Sometimes one finds arguments about St. Peter's literacy. He and the other apostles are referred to as agrammatoi in Acts 4:13, but that can mean anything from complete illiteracy to someone who can read or write at a basic level but has no literary skill. What is more, scribes were common in those days, and people could easily author letters despite not being able to write them. St. Peter is from Capernaum, which some think was not a Greek-speaking town; but a problem with this is that both Simon Peter and his brother Andrew have names that could be Helleno-Jewish -- that is, they have Jewish names that are very similar to Greek names, which seems to have been a common practice in Greek-speaking Jewish families in the day. And again, the 'conservative' position doesn't actually require that St. Peter directly wrote anything at all; he could have, like any number of other people, hired someone to write a letter on the lines that he determined. (The epistle doesn't show any signs of having been directly translated from another language, but, again, the 'conservative' position is consistent with St. Peter just asking for a letter that said such-and-such and the scribe writing the actual letter for him.) 1 Peter is generally thought to have fairly good Greek, but 2 Peter is very difficult to figure out in these terms, because it's usually thought to indicate wide reading in Greek (a lot of very artificial, literary flourishes) but is often baffling in ways consistent with the idea that the author does not speak Greek as a native language. On the basis of 1 Peter 5:12, the good Greek of 1 Peter is often attributed to Silvanus being the scribe. Recently there has been a push to interpret 1 Peter 5:12 as suggesting that Silvanus is the courier, not the scribe; the Greek, however, just says, 'I have written through Silvanus'. Literally, this would be a scribe of some sort; there are figurative uses of the phrase that could extend to other offices, including courier, but I have yet to come across any non-question-begging argument that it is ever used of someone who is only a courier. Thus a common position among 'conservatives' is that 1 Peter and 2 Peter are different just because Peter is using very different scribes at very different times and places, and this is possible, although we don't know.

If we assume that 2 Peter is pseudepigraphal, it is either deliberate pseudepigraphy (for instance, a rhetorical exercise) or a deliberate forgery. If the former, it would usually have indicators to indicate that it is intended to be taken as pseudepigraphical. Some people have argued that 3:2 is such (the author distinguishes himself from 'your apostles'); but again, 'apostle' in this period does not always indicate one of the Apostles proper. Forgery is always a possibility with any ancient text, but that is very different from our actually having evidence of it, which we don't here.

Thus, while the 'liberal' position is perhaps the easier position on the evidence, it is not by much. A great mistake people make in these kinds of disputes, whether about Biblical books or any ancient work, is assuming that the answer is in the evidence. In any case where there is extensive dispute at all, this is never true. Going on the evidence alone, some things are somewhat more probable than other things, but nothing can be established with certainty. No particular position is ruled out by the evidence. This sometimes happens. We do not always have complete evidence, and we certainly don't here. Our evidence is often consistent with many different opposing explanations, and this is certainly true here. The evidence can favor one position over another without getting anywhere near being definitive. Evidence can even be contradictory in a way that the evidence itself does not give us enough to resolve. And this, in the current state of things, seems very much the case here; it's background assumptions, not evidence, that get one to a definite conclusion.

Fortnightly Book, July 19

 Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar was a knight of Castile in the eleventh century; highly talented, he became the armiger regis to Sancho II, despite being only from the lesser nobility. During Sancho's rule, he led several successful campaigns against Alfonso VI and Garcia II (Sancho's brothers) as well as against the Almoravid Muslim kingdom of Andalusia. However, Sancho was murdered and Alfonso took the throne of Castile; thus he fell from favor and was eventually exiled. With nowhere else to go, he took work defending the Muslim kingdom of Zaragoza. Again, he was consistently successful, and Alfonso, facing a powerful and succesful Almoravid, had to give in and beg him to come back. He then went on to become ruler of Valencia, where he was very popular with both Christians and Muslims -- as was perhaps inevitable, because there was no ruler in Spain under whom they could possibly been safer. It is likely in Valencia that he began to be called as-Sayyid, the Lord, which gives him the name under which he has always been known since, El Cid. (In his lifetime, he was probably more often known as El Campeador.) And, indeed, despite Almoravid attempts to unseat him, he remained victorious until his death in 1099. After his death, however, the Almoravids were able to force his family into surrender.

El Cantar de mio Cid is the most famous telling of his legend, written in Old Castilian in the twelfth century. We actually don't know the title of the work -- as it has come down to us, the manuscript is missing its first part. It is, of course, the next fortnightly book. I'll be reading it in the Penguin Classics, translated by Burton Raffel, which has the Castilian and the English in parallel, which should be fun.

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim

Introduction

Opening Passage: There is a modern-day 'preface', as part of the frame narrative, but the opening passage should really be the first part of Chapter 1 (August, 1348, At Matins, The Commemoration of Sixtus II and His Companions):

Dietrich awoke with an uneasy feeling in his heart, like a bass voice chanting from a darkened choir loft. His eyes flew open and darted about the room. A night candle guttering in its sconce cast capers over trouble and basin, prie-dieu and psalter, and caused the figure upon the crucifix to writhe as if it were trying to tear itself down. In the corners and angles of the room, shadows swelled enormous with their secrets. Through the east winow, a dull red glow, thin as a knife across a throat, limned the crest of the Katerinaberg.

He took a long, stilling breath. The candle told Matins anyway; so, throwing the blanket aside, he exchanged nightshirt for cassock. Goose bumps puckered his skin and the short hairs rose on his neck. Dietrich shivered and hugged himself. Something will happen today. (p. 21)

Summary: In early August* of 1348, people in Oberhochwald wake to find the air charged with strange meaning -- quite literally, as their is a glow over the Great Woods and the charge in the air raises the hairs on people's necks and arms and the wool fibers on their clothes; as Pastor Dietrich puts it, it is as if God were rubbing the world with amber. A great wind knocks down the charcoal kiln in the woods and tears up trees. And what the people of Oberhochwald will discover will change everything, because all of the strange events have a natural cause, but one far beyond what they had ever imagined. A ship from the heavens has crashed into the forest. The people on it, whom the people of Oberhochwald call the Krenk (the closest that they can come to what the people call themselves), are strange men, looking something like large gray crickets or grasshoppers. The Krenk crew and passengers find themselves stranded, with an interdimensional engine whose circuits are burned out. Even worse, being from another world, their biology is not a perfect match for this new world, and they can find nothing that contains an essential amino acid without which, after their own stores are gone, their bodies will begin to break down. It seems hopeless. But Pastor Dietrich and some (not all) of the villagers befriend them, despite their somewhat demon-like appearance. (In the fourteenth century, of course, there were still legends of distant lands of men who look very different from those we know.) Among the Krenk passengers had been an expedition of scientists setting out to study new worlds, and they are able to develop a means of translating back and forth between the click-heavy Krenkish language and the German, Latin, and Greek of Pastor Dietrich and the villagers. 

The Krenk are surprised to discover that the locals are awaiting the return of a Lord from the sky, which would explain, as they think, why Pastor Dietrich (a former student at the University of Paris who has studied natural philosophy) sometimes speaks (at least as their machines translate it) in scientific terms that make sense to them and sometimes seems to have positions very primitive compared to their own. And in trying to better understand the customs of the villagers, they discover the sentence that holds the only hope they may have for living long enough to fix their ship and return home: Take and eat; this is my body, given for you. Of course, they don't quite understand these ideas the way the villagers of Oberhochwald do. (Which will result in  a grave disappointment when they go to a Christmas service expecting the return of the Lord from the sky, who they think might be able to help them return home.)

The Krenk, of course, are not theologians, but one thing I like about their discovery of Catholic Christianity is that it tracks very well with the kinds of confusion that often come about when Christianity first interacts with a culture. But, as in those cases, it is a confusion that is at the same time a creative ferment for many great and good things. The extremely hierarchical and caste-ish Krenk puzzling out what Pastor Dietrich means by charitas, in particular, is very well depicted, as is the revolutionary impact the idea has on the Krenkish mini-society of the ship, especially in the context of their near-certain doom as their essential food stores run out.

The Krenk are not the only ones who are doomed, though, because the Plague is spreading through Europe, wiping out entire villages as it goes, and between the humans facing the Black Death and the Krenk facing starvation on an alien world, they together discover the true universal language: hope.

There is also a frame narrative, about a historian and a physicist who live together and unravel the mystery of what happened to the place called Eifelheim, a name it got as a euphemised version of Teufelheim, Devil-home, which is what Oberhochwald came to be called after the Black Death. Tom and Sharon are (deliberately) much less interesting people than the villagers, but I found them somewhat more interesting this time around, and their story serves as a background against which the medieval peasants, scholars, and lords stand out in clearer relief. 

Favorite Passage:

Some long time afterward, he crossed the road to the hospital to tell Hans what had happened and found the Krenkl had died also in his absence. Dietrich knelt by the corpse and lifted the great, long, serrated arms and folded them across the mottled torso in an attitude of prayer. He could not close the eyes, of course, and they seemed still aglow, though that was only the rays of the declining sun out beyond the autumn fields reflecting through them like one of Theodoric's raindrops, and the shadow of a rainbow fell on Hans's cheeks. (p. 298)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

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* Sixtus II and His Companions in the fourteenth century would have been August 6th. This day would later become the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration on the universal calendar, which pushed Sixtus II and Companions to August 7th, which is still their feast-day.

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim, Tor Books (New York: 2006).

Dashed Off XX

 humility as respectful deference to God

Replicability gets us from experiment to experimental ensemble, which is the basis for theory.

The do-operator relates changes of probabilities to changes in structures of causal dependency.

Every experiment is a selection out of diverse possibilities.

The human mind does not obsolesce.

the ceremonializing aspect of due process (treating as serious waht is serious, showing respect to the person and the citizen)

"Society itself is an effect or work of justice which exercises its authority over mankind." Rosmini
"Truth, as something infinite, renders the person an object to be respected."

Reductionism is useful to science not because it has ever been successful -- every reductionist account of anything beyond very limited domains has had to be significantly revised -- but precisely because it fails in a controlled way.

Particles do not explain; their abstractible characteristics, giving the possibilities that are available to the particles, do.

Most physical equations describe wholes as wholes, not partwise.

equality as a holistic operator.

Explanation in terms of laws of nature is epxlanation in terms of the entire universe.

reductions as theoretical experiments

the sense of the power of an argument

Every scientific reduction is a skeletal idealization, and this is its value.

Law is an instrument, but it is not merely instrumentally valuable.

Systems of property rights, well designed, are not merely useful but also agreeable.

Money confers purchasing power by valuative causation, ie., objective causation as a desirable object, that is itself instrumentally usable.

Addiction is almost never the fundamental problem, although it is very often the worst solution to it.

The nature of law cannot be determined without regard for the nature of legislation.

concepts --> concepts' aptitude for being applied -->principles

Certainty is the structure of social unity.

Forgiveness requires symbolism adequate to it.

literary taste and factors of re-readability (aptitudes in the work for rewarding re-reading)

martyrs as the viaticum of the Church

Theology is such a huge field that it sometimes takes centuries to appreciate a point adequately.

Development of doctrine often occurs by oscillation.

The need of forgiveness for symbolism arises from its need for communication.

Violence always has costs that cannot be foreseen.

"The nature of right is to be sought in the nature of human beings." Cicero (Leg. 1:5)

In society, rickety structures continue to exist usually because they are protecting smoething important.

morally responsible as principle vs morally responsible as exemplar

Philosophy done well is always bubbling.

Gauss suggested direct, inverse, and lateral units, instead of positive, negative, and imaginary units.

The more advanced an animal is, the more it seems to act with something broadly like a sense of humor -- dolphins, elephants, dogs, cats, apes, ravens, and the like all have moments in which they seem almost joking.

abduction, intervention, prediction, confirmation

geometry as the study of possible distinguishable interactions

titles of appropriateness

Attitudes are evoked by perception of ends and functions.

God as omniprobable
necessity qua precondition of manifold of possibilities --> necessity qua omnipossibility --> necessity qua relevant (conditional) omnipossibility --> omniprobability

On many moral anti-realisms, moral realism is at least a useful fiction.

Every living thing is a hierarchy.

Religious movements survive only by being either passionate or profound.

The Scripture that we read is always the Scripture that passes through the community.

We learn how to use instruments by learning how to use our bodies.

We first learn how to learn by being parented.

hasty vs delbierate assault in refutation

Immoral judgments always have an incompleteness about them.

A problem with Kp&Kq -> K(p&q) is that it seems one could know p and know q without knowing the logical operation of conjunction.

Subjective Bayesianism often seems to have problems similar to those one gets when one assuems that implication and inference are the same.

imagining as vs imagining as like

epistemic K as converter between mind-dependent and mind-independent modalities

Francis of Meyonnes's 4 ways to divine ubiquity
(1) immensity
(2) causality
(3) immutability
(4) coexistence
(his assessment of these is somewhat complicated, so these should be considered a classification of ways in which people have tried to show that God is everywhere; the fourth seems mostly distinctive to him)

divine presence as a precondition of incipit and desinit (God as present to states of change)

prior and posterior presence

Common ways that mothers think and speak about the unborn, although quite diverse, usually have something to be said for them.

In matters of reason, a good effort is never wasted.

Much artistic crafting takes place in the realm of hypotheticals.

All trust has implicit and eplicit modes.

Norms are only as rooted as their known reasons.

In every field, the best generation to be a part of is the generation after the geniuses.

"Rituals are established to regulate the feelings of the world, either by curbing excesses or by exhorting them where they fall short, simply so that people understand the fitting mean in the world." Dai Zhen

The 'familiar instance' in the Nyaya syllogism is something commonsensical that also survives acute investigation.

All nonpresence is relative to a presence.

hauntological arguments

Mt 26:67 // Mic 5:1
-- note that Matthew has already attributed Micah 5:2 to Christ in Mt 2. Note also Jesus as Shepherd (Mt 9:36, Mt 26:31, in comparison to Micah 5:4.

Links of Note

 * Francis Scott Key's House in Georgetown, and How DC Lost It, at "Ghosts of DC"

* Seth Kreeger, Creation and Divine Being in the Christian Neoplatonism of William of Auvergne

* Rob Alspaugh, Homer and Prudentius, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* Shane Ryan and Sharon Ryan, Wisdom in Analytic Philosophy, at the SEP

* Derek Thompson, America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Government Report Says About Who We Are

* Marie-Benoît Schwalm, “The Two Theologies: Scholastic and Positive”

* Philip Ball, Is Life Just Different?, at "Quanta"

* The Collected Works of St. Augustine

* Gene Callahan, Just What Is a Just Price?, at "Front Porch Republic"

Seraphic Doctor

 Today is the feast of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Doctor of the Church. From his Breviloquium, Part V, Chapter 8:

The First Principle, being first, is supreme; being supreme, it is supremely good; being supremely good, it is supremely happy and supremely delighting; being supremely delightful, it is supremely to be enjoyed. Therefore, because it is to be supremely enjoyed, we must totally cling to it with love and rest in it as our final end. Now a right and ordered love, called charity, bears us principally to that good in whom it finds its enjoyment and repose. This good is itself our reason for loving. Thus it follows that charity loves that good above everything else as that which will make it happy, and as a consequence it loves all other things which through that good are also suited for happiness. Now, our neighbor was created to reach that happiness along with ourselves -- which includes our body as well, for it was made to share that happiness together with our spirit. That is the reason why charity has but four objects: God, our neighbor, our spirit, and our body.

[St. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, Monti, tr., The Franciscan Institute (St. Bonaventure, New York), p. 201.]