The Song of the Cid

 Introduction

Opening Passage:  We are actually missing the original beginning of the work. The beginning we have is as follows (providing both the Castilian and the English for comparison):

De los sos ojos tan fuertemientre llorando,
tornava la cabeça e estávolos catando;
vio puertas abiertas e uços sin cañados,
alcándaras vazías sin pielles e sin mantos
e sin falcones e sin adtores mudados.
Sospiró Mio Cid ca mucho avié grandes cuidados;
fabló Mio Cid bien e tan mesurado;
"¡Grado a ti, Señor, Padre que estás en alto!
Esto me an buelto mios enemigos malos."

***

Tears were flowing from his eyes, then flowing faster
As he turned and looked back, just standing,
He saw the doors, swung open, padlocks gone,
Wall pegs empty,  no furs, no gowns
or cloaks, no falcons or molting hawks.
My Cid sighed, his burdens weighing him down.
My Cid spoke, in measured, well-controlled tones:
"I thank you, my Father, my Lord on high!
This is the vulture trap my evil enemies sent me." (pp. 2-3)

Summary: El Cid Campeador has fallen out of favor with the king (accused of embezzlement and disloyalty) and has been exiled from Castile. He and his men have to leave in haste, and there is immediately a problem of what to do about funds, particularly since it is now illegal for anyone directly to aid him. With the help of one of his right-hand men, Martín Antolínez, he hatches a plan; lots of people think he has embezzled taxes, so he uses chests purportedly filled with these taxes as collateral on a loan from Jewish moneylenders, on the pretext that they have a need liquid cash rather than gold treasure. In reality the chests are filled with sand, and by some quick-talking El Cid and his men come away with six hundred golden marks. As he leaves the territory, El Cid has a dream in which the Archangel Gabriel tells him that all will be well.

Out of the kingdom, El Cid needs another means of leverage, and in this case it is his military prowess. They seize a town in the territory of Toledo, but since the area has ties to and is under the protection of King Alfonso, they sell back the town to the Moors who own it and move on.  Eventually, El Cid and his men seize the key strategic town of Alcocer; this alarms the realm of Valencia, which lays seige to the town, but by a surprise attack, El Cid wins a decisive victory. However, he realizes that the geopolitical situation is a more complicated than he had hoped, so he again sells back the town to the Moors. At this point he is incredibly wealthy from all of his victories and from selling towns back to the people from whom he took them, so he sends a gift to King Alfonso in hopes that it starts paving the path for his return. 

So things go, but the key turning point comes when El Cid begins conquering the territory of Valencia, a grueling process lasting several years and resulting finally in the conquest of Valenica itself. This gives El Cid a stable enough position that he is able to reunite with his wife and daughters. The Kingdom of Morocco assaults Valencia with an impressive army, but despite being outnumbered, El Cid again outmaneuvers his enemy.

King Alfonso decides to heal the breach, and does so by pressing El Cid to give his daughters, Elvira and Sol, to the sons of the dauphins of Carrión. El Cid is not particularly thrilled at the marriages, but practically he doesn't have many other options, so he agrees to them. Everything seems good for a while. Cracks begin to develop, however, when a lion escapes its cage. El Cid handles himself well, and in fact simply leads the lion back to its cage, but not before his sons-in-law show themselves to be made of less courageous material, a cowardice that increasingly becomes obvious. The dauphins leave Valencia, claiming they wish to show their wives their own lands, but along the way they mistreat them and abandon them to die. Elvira and Sol luck out when a cousin comes across them. As King Alfonso had pressed the marriages on El Cid, this forces his hand, and he has to hold a formal court in Toledoto determine what should be done. This inevitably ends badly for the dauphins, but as it happens princes from Navarre and Aragon had come to the court proposing marriage, which means that both Elvira and Sol end up with far superior husbands, in both character and influence. And with this we more or less end, with El Cid effective at the summit of what could possibly be achieved by a knight.

El cantar de mio Cid is interesting in that it is an epic that regards warfare as an entirely secondary matter. Obviously, since one of El Cid's advantages is his extraordinary military prowess, it comes up at regular intervals, but the author has no interest in battles and wars as such, and at several points simply ignores very famous military conflicts of which he seems, from other things, to be clearly aware. What really interests the author is not El Cid's military prowess but his sociopolitical prowess, and the successes at which he most marvels are not battles won against incredible odds (although there are several of those) but the fact that El Cid is basically thrown out of society, with no resources except the loyalty of his men, and not only survives but thrives. Indeed, if anything, his exile ultimately makes El Cid massively more powerful, and the poem ends with El Cid more or less at the top of the social world. Stripped of everything, El Cid almost immediately manages (if only by fraud) to get all that he needs for immediate expenses and then (if only by conquest) to achieve a massive quantity of wealth and rulership of a relatively powerful city. All of the military achievements are as nothing compared to the man having endured one of the worst punishments in his society and come out on top despite, and even because of it. That is the marvel that the author clearly finds remarkable.

Favorite Passage:

Muño Gustioz stood up:
"Shut up, traitor, evil and dangerous!
You eat before you've said a single prayer,
Your greeting kiss stinks like your breath.
You don't speak truth to friends or lords;
You lie to everyone, and mostly to God.
I have no interest in friendship with you:
I'll make you admit you are what I say you are!"
King Alfonso declared: "This matter is closed.
We must proceed to combat, in the name of God!" (p. 227)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, although I did not always like Burton Raffel's translations.

****

The Song of the Cid, Burton Raffel, tr., Penguin (New York: 2009).

Dashed Off XXIII

If you demand that the Church stay out of politics, the Devil will expand what people count as political until the Church suffocates. If you demand that politics be separate from anything religious, the Devil will expand what counts as religious until politics is separate from anything good.

Many problems in society arise from the corrupt pursuit of justice.

You learn to love everyone only by loving someone well.

Malebranche (LO 67-68) and the walking man argument

Appearances by their nature have causes of appearing.

Error theories generally require an easy-transition-of-mind account of the error. But this requires that the easy transition of mind not itself be an effect of a natural link. The latter is usually the weakness of error theories about large domains.

Half of thinking is making enough quiet space for it.

The distinguishing mark of the state is cooperation ordered by law for the good of civil society.

Pretending-to-be does not imply not being, but tends to be found with not being. The connection between pretending to be and not being is not contingent even though it is not logical implication. Nor is it purely probabilistic, but instead something more like necessary for the probable case.

"In general as desire burns higher, anger sinks, and as anger burns higher, desire sinks." Aquinas

Objects' being separable does not imply that they are separate.

Even if we assume that there is no free will, all the phenomena associated with free will show that human action incorporates information about counterfactuals.

If we build a moral robot, its morality would give it greater power to do evil, not less.

Beliefs, like persons, have authority based in power, wisdom, and goodness, either in themselves or in context.

Taste arises not from the singular experience but from the ensemble of experiences.

Never trust someone who always talks about rights but never about the responsibilities that make them rights.

Independence is always a causal notion.

The three essential questions for causal reasoning from statistical data:
(1) Can we ignore an observation safely?
(2) Can we make an intervention an observation?
(3) Can we set aside an intervention safely?

the do-calculus as a representation of 'suppose that'

The most important apologetics, besides honest personal discussion and public preaching, is large-scale defense-in-depth.

To be good at analogical reasoning requires a full treasurehouse of memory.

When something becomes the standard de jure, people develop simpler proxies for it, which become the standard de facto.

We are often pained by things that are not bad but only could go bad.

It is a natural and common thing to pray not only for the future but for the past.

We take God not to be limited in power and presence by location; by analogy, God is not limited in power and presence by time.
-- this can be strengthened by recognizing that limitation in time requires some limitation in location and vice versa.

There is no action at a distance only in that 'distance' is a causal notion.

Every incipit and desinit is incomplete actuality and therefore participates actuality itself.

(1) Every possibility must participate possibility itself.
(2) Possibility itself must be actuality itself.
(3) Therefore any possibility implies actuality itself.

As any literal statement may also be given figurative or expressive meaning, there is always the possibility of taking any literal statement to be only figurative or expressive; thus the pervasiveness of the realist/anti-realist divide, since figurative statements may be taken realistically (as corresponding to something real) or anti-realistically.

Pursuing rights by litigation always runs the risk of setting precedent by failure.

public opinion as part of checks and balances

In politics, there is oten great power in the mere real possibility of acting. The people get a significant power from the fact that they actually can begin to rumble and flood. This is one reason why making actions of the state open to public view, to the extent that this is possible, is an important means of free society, despite its inconvenience for government.

The prudent man's sense of disgust is worth more than the fool's considered judgment.

People often talk about 'vocation' when what they really mean is 'role in providence'.

interest-based, policy-based, and precedent-based forms of practical reasoning

staefcraeft = grammar

Human beings are policy-making animals.

James the Just as 'font of all episcopacy' -- i.e., there is an early tradition of James being the first non-Apostolic bishop, with the episcopacy in general as modeled after him, and the episcopal succession after the succession of Symeon to James

Philosophy is a kind of theomania, in that even those philosophers arguing the craziest position are sometimes a little inspired, often hitting something more closely than might be obvious. In this it is like artistic inspiration or erotic love.

'Revealed preferences' are sometimes real preferences and sometimes defective executions.

Modernity sometimes seems to be a culture of persuading young people to make bad bets in life.

Passive connection between persons is the infrastructure for active connections.

All economic systems tend toward treating people as mere means. Law and custom and virtue are what work against this, when they are able to do so at all.

The saints evangelize; even long after their deaths, they continue to convert others.

intramodal signs (e.g., actual signifies actual) and transmodal signs (e.g., present signifies past)

permissibilities in context of obligations, obligations in merely permissible contexts

Most of the good and evil we do in the world is quickly swamped out. Only prudential planning and the stability of virtue make it go farther.

All of our experiences are experienced simultaneously in the three registers of possibility, actuality, and necessity.

A society in which people cannot improve their neighborhood is a society with little prospect.

The benefits received from experts with whom one has a cooperative relationship are generally different from any received from experts in a field generally.

Every state attempts to use professional institutions as instruments to control people.

Human beings deal with evil by putting it into stories.

Every kind of grace tends toward some kind of union.

Socratic rhetoric: showing people that they already at least partly agree with you

There is no preferred probability measurement; we handle probabilities comparatively.

Entropy is concerned with that variation that is consistent with given nonvariations.

Newton's First Law allows for a physics of lines. Newton's Second Law allows precise relationships between lines.

Scientific progress is a story of footnotes becoming central ideas.

Both socialism and capitalism work only given a background morality they cannot guarantee.

Every virtue has a negotium appropriate to it, concernign the organization of self and the world to facilitate its acts: training, routines, institutions, problem-solving.

rites & the negotium prudentiae

crusade as symbol of reform (note that they share similar kinds of failure points)

three types of participation in Mass: celebrant, ministrant, circumstant
-- circumstant participation involves forming the congregation as a congregation, both physically and spiritually; circumstant participation forms the templum

Jn 5:39 -- Scripture's role is to bear witness to Christ, through whom alone is eternal life.

By faith we impetrate justification.

We culminate our feelings by how we act on them.

History is the human imitation of eternity.

"Otium sine litteris mors." Seneca

the unity of humanity as a principle of philosophy of history

kinds of sanctity: natural, occupant, referential

Bayesian epistemology continually stumbles due to equivocations between degree of belief and belief about degree/probability.

economics as the statistics of voluntary moral obligation

The primary importance of precise prediction for scientific inquiry is less to assess accuracy than to assess completeness.

We say an institutional change is organic when (1) it is consistent with institutional ends and (2) it incorporates the lessons of its history.

Reforms fail as often as not.

People who believe in degrees of belief often have naive views of how they relate to action, resulting from the clumsy original betting idea.

subjective vs objective surprise in literature and cinema

the People as universal jury

All interpretations of quantum mechanics proceeds by relating the wave function to other things (the universe, observers, measuring devices, etc.).

The limits of physics can be read in its fundamental units.

Pace many philosophers of biology, whole organisms quite clearly have functions in populations; e.g., queens and drones in colonies, males and females in sexual populations. Likewise, they can have functions in ecosystems.

Free will should be understood in terms of different possible objects chosen rather than in terms of different possible outcomes. Because objects complete us causally, they often lead to different outcomes, but this is not the freedom.

Unless we assume the existence of volition, we cannot assess the evidential value of experiment.

Ethics cannot be outvoted.

participative vs representative roles in society

History eventually covers even atrocities in oblivion; it is divine judgment, not history, that remembers.

In learning many small things one begins to learn great things.

Contingent happenings are in physics regularly explained by the necessary truths of mathematics.

Every right creates an at least minimal right to use force to defend it, where this is not explicitly excluded.

'the justice' as a jural good of society that is held by occupation, sometimes admits of inheritance (although usually abandoment and reoccupation), etc.

Human beings can communicate imperatives nonverbally, althoug this often lacks the precision of verbal imperative. Social animals like dogs also seem to do something similar, although even less precisely, and in ways that are difficult to distinguish sometimes from mere warning or encouragement.

Human beings are never 'mere animals' even as infants.

Our early dependencies intensify our social connections.

Our biology as immersed in our culture is our first material for moral character.

a curriculum as a curation of the subject

All human life is structured by the bounds of inability.

Human beings are animals who moralize our lives as animals.

The first step toward a philosophy worth having is recognizing that philosophizing is natural to us.

While rights depend on duties, we have rights before we have duties, because others have duties to us before we are mature enough to have duties to them.

Human beings do not merely exchange things; we exchange kinds of exchanges.

We lear exchange even at the breast.

Multicultural societies work by converting tribes into teams.

The human intellect sees something of the system in a bit of the system. Given some understanding of physical interactions, we get a glimmer of the physical cosmos. Given minds and intelligibles, we get a glimmer of an intelligible world. Given some morality, we begin to feel out a realm of morality. And so forth.

Play is 'secularized' into exercise.

Loeb's incoherentism arises from treating the pluralistic, analogical moral realm as if it were uniform and univocal.

There are always less and more clumsy ways of fulfilling our duties.

Morality beneits us, but does not exist to benefit us. For one thing, what counts as benefit is downstream from morality itself in at least many cases.

In any work of art, the line between natural and artificial is difficult to draw.

The interest of a story is related to intervention (disruptition of regularity) and counterfactual reasoning (different ways things could go).

The richness of a language is its set of capacities for four things: storytelling, characterization, thematization, and statement modification.

We perceive in order to have that which pleases. (Note that this is different from saying that we perceive in order to be pleased.)

Storytelling is a byproduct of our capacity for wisdom.

Transfiguration

 Today is the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration.

And after six days Jesus took with him
Peter and James and John,
and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves;
and he was transfigured before them,
and his garments became glistening,
intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.
And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses;
and they were talking to Jesus.
And Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is well that we are here;
let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
For he did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid.
And a cloud overshadowed them,
and a voice came out of the cloud,
“This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”
And suddenly looking around they no longer saw any one with them
but Jesus only.
And as they were coming down the mountain,
he charged them to tell no one what they had seen,
until the Son of man should have risen from the dead.
So they kept the matter to themselves,
questioning what the rising from the dead meant

[Mark 9:2-9 RSV]

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths
when we made known to you
the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
For when he received honor and glory from God the Father
and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,”
we heard this voice borne from heaven,
for we were with him on the holy mountain.

[2 Peter 1:16-18 RSV]

Links of Note

 * Ed Simon, Charles Brockdon Brown Declares Independence, at "The Paris Review"

* Liel Leibovitz, Christopher Nolan's 'Odyssey': Epic for Our Times or Epic Failure, at "The Tablet"

* Theodore Nash, Apocalypse Troy: Nolan's Odyssey and the End of Civilization, at "Antigone"

* Johann Go, Just Waiting: The Ethics of Queues and Waiting Lists, at "Political Philosophy"

* Curt Jaimungal, The Standard Model Lagrangian Explained

* David S. Oderberg, In defense of panmoralism

* Steven Johnson, Notebooks and the Extended Mind, at "Adjacent Possible"

* Ehud Krinis, Judah Halevi, at the SEP

* Flame & Light, Do Narratives Require Narrators? I: The Analytic Argument

* Julio Alonzo has started a great project: Schola Thomistica, which uses LLMs to transcribe and translate scholastic texts, with contributors providing corrections that are then used for further training data to refine the translations. Use with critical thinking, but scholastic Latin is a very good language for this kind of translation, and it makes a wide number of works more accessible. (Also, a number of the translations are respectable public-domain translations, where they exist.) And more is going up all the time.

* In a similar vein, people are putting up Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus, using similar methods: every Greek and Latin Church Father in the complete Migne, along with an LLM-derived English translation. 

* And the beginnings of the complete works of St. Bonaventure. We live in a magical world!

Three New Poem Drafts

 Seaspray

The sea ascends on stone,
the mist and spray upraised,
in driven change, in tide,
that ceaselessly with foam
will never still nor stay;
yet still the ocean wide
beneath eternal sky
is changeless in its way,
with waves that shall abide.

Red Mansions

Bright red silk-work,
like braided rope,
such is time,
which binds us.
In blessed red pavilions,
of finest wood,
the festivals continue;
like words on paper,
or painted on silk,
they are dream and fiction,
yet also true.
Do not undo
those quiet rites of joy!
They are braided
into the classics,
the patterns unbound by time,
the chrysanthemums undying,
for fictions never truly die,
so only by means of them
do we learn what is,
the unreal real in the real unreal.
We burn like grass,
or fade like dusk,
and we are but a dream.
Where then do we find truth,
save in such dreams?
Then treasure it,
like most precious jade.

Early Morning Waking

In some deep Polarian age, jellyfish all around me,
matter gushing forward, I lay dreaming,
drowsing in a tropical arctic, the warm circumpolar waters,
where sun and moon kiss in dreaming tidal pools.
I sensed, I felt, I did not understand;
lidless, I did not see, but the world's trumpets were sounding.
I walked on four soft limbs, and called,
and everywhere there were ripples. All was sea
until the sun fled. Then upward I launched in a flowering of air
as all the world went crashing; in sylphine splendor I flew,
playing with dragons. There was no winter there,
but in warm light I was swinging, vibration on the breeze,
a wisdom in the air, a bell sounding in the sea.
Then all became a misty fire and the moon fled;
no longer was I lunatic, and polar seas turned icy,
and mind turned to magic, and I was I, and I myself.
The whispers wandered in my head, and I seized myself,
and took myself from myself, dividing myself into two.
Then I knew both good and evil, and I wandered,
not longer bound by memory, seeing the world and myself.
The dreamworld fell away. The morning stars were singing,
and the alphabet was born, and the cycles numbered.
The whole world turned; the fire-lands sank beneath.
Then truths were written in stones, dancing stones,
that circled the points of power. Atlantis gleamed in the wave,
a city of towers gilded, a city of pontifexes,
where ships were flying like gulls. Spirit filled the wind
and rebelled; the island drowned in the ocean,
and I, a Neanderthal, escaped, looking up at the stars.

A Golden Glory Fills the Earth

 August's Here
by Charles Frederick Forshaw 

Ripeness abounds, for August's here,
To fill us with a joy sincere:
The field, the glen, the wood, the shade,
The barren moors, the blossomed glade,
All, all foretell that she is near.

A golden glory fills the earth,
And hails with joy blest August's birth;
Luxurious gladness fills the land,
For, touched by August's mellow hand,
It basks no more in careworn dearth.

Each leaf seems by her supreme will
Matured, and is more beauteous still;
The insect world awakes to find
That she to them is also kind, 
And now they Nature's ways fulfil.

The hills, too, seem no longer drear,
For lo! the purple lings appear;
They bloom on all sides fresh and free,
Full of an inborn modesty,
And telling plainly -- August's here.

Truth and Certainty and the Human Mind

 If truth and certainty had been committed to the care of human free will, they would have languished and in all probability soon been annihilated by human perversity. For this reason we saw that the first truths were entrusted by creating Providence to human nature, not to an individual human being. Human nature, essentially intelligent, sees the first truths essentially. Human beings cannot but see them, nor can they annihilate them; just as they have no power to create anything, they have no power to destroy anything that has received existence from God....

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham:1991), p. 138, sect. 1245.]