Two Poem Drafts

 Social Media

The chim-chim of conversation may lull to sleep the ear;
the termless perorations may eat through all the year;
the chatter on the branches may drown the highway-roar;
but one day it will falter.
One day it will end
and the mouth take bit and halter,
all blather to forfend.

The blatherskite may jabber with ishkabibble roar;
the monkeys sling their gibber, the jungle trees to bore;
the World our Foe may babble and repeat its mock and sneer;
but one day it will silence.
One day it will end,
and the tongue, despite its violence,
beneath the yoke will bend.

Strange Primates

I hear the music and your eyes
are lovely like the ocean-wave,
darkly blue and gray,
like wild and stormy skies,
like death, so deeply grave --
yet somehow they are bright with light
that overshadows day.
And in such times I know,
whatever the worldly-wisemen say,
whatever counsels fools may rave,
that we, strange primates,
are yet unbound,
yet timeless,
though even our timelessness dies;
that something eternal we somehow save
from rapacious time that flies --
and there, only there, are we found.

Sounds and Movements

 Music is a joy, an unavoidable human disposition. So, people cannot be without music; if they feel joy, they must express it in sound and give it shape in movement. The way of human beings is such that changes in the motions of their nature are completely contained in these sounds and movements. 

 Xunzi, "Discourse on Music", in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Eric L. Hutton, tr., Princeton University Press [Princeton, NJ: 2014] p. 218.

Gift of the Lord

 Today is the feast of St. Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist. Most of what we know about him directly comes from his call:

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (Mt 9:9-13 NRSV)

In 10:3, he is again called a tax collector; other than that, he is just mentioned as one of the Twelve. In the very similar corresponding passages in Mark 2 and Luke 5, the tax collector is called Levi; Mark specifies further that he is the "son of Alphaeus". On the basis of this, Matthew and Levi are almost universally identified; because another one of the Twelve is also usually identified as 'James, son of Alphaeus', there is a common tradition that they were brothers. There are technically other possibilities consistent with the texts we have -- e.g., that Matthew, Levi, and James were three brothers -- but all of them are more complicated and none of them show up in the tradition. In the first century people using different names for different purposes was not uncommon; Judeans in Judea and Galilee had a much more fluid sense of names than we do. (One idea I once heard, which is pure speculation, but which has always stuck in my mind, is that Jesus, whom we know sometimes to give his disciples names, called Levi and gave him the name 'Matthew', Gift of the Lord, as a way of putting his past behind him.)

Some people have suggested that Matthew may also be the 'Mattai' who is one of the five disciples of Yeshu the Nazarene in Sanhedrin 43a; but it's hard to say. The rabbis may be conflating Jesus with another, earlier person of the same name, and in any case they are not interested in the history but in the question of whether something in a preserved baraita (an oral tradition not found in the Mishnah) conflicted with a given interpretation of the law. They effectively conclude that it doesn't because the Yeshu case was a weird exception due to the practical conditions. Of the five disciple names given, the others (Nakai, Netzer, Buni, and Toda) seem to be chosen just to make the point that the case was a unique one, which suggests that we should not put much weight on it. Nonetheless, we can't rule out that the original story was partly inspired by Matthew's name to begin with, and the play-on-words it allowed, so we don't know.

According to tradition, Matthew mostly spent his life preaching in Judea, but eventually went to preach to the Jewish community elsewhere -- most traditions and legends say Ethiopia, although by a weird quirk of naming, this could mean either Africa or modern-day Georgia, we don't know. He is traditionally regarded as a martyr, although we don't know how he died; one later legend suggests that he was killed by sword during liturgy.

His status as an Evangelist is due in part to the influence of Papias, who says in a quotation preserved by Eusebius that Matthew collected the logoi or sayings of Jesus in the Hebrew dialect, and others interpreted it. It's unclear whether the Gospel was attached to the name of Matthew because it seemed like the one that best fit the claim of Papias or whether Papias says it because it was already seen as Matthew's. In either case, it is a very reasonable conclusion that the sayings Papias mentions and the Gospel of Matthew are connected; parts of the Gospel as we have it are clearly arranged around sets of prophetic texts connected to Jesus' life and around sets of parables, so it's entirely possible to think of the Gospel as we have it as being such an original set of sayings 'interpreted'. (If you accept Markan priority, the 'interpretation' could very well have been in part by integrating it with Mark.) 

What is interesting is that Matthew is consistently associated with writings specifically for Jewish Christians; this is true not only of Papias's tradition and the superscription for the Gospel, but also of the various heretical works attributed to Matthew. James son of Alphaeus is sometimes identified with James the Less, who was one of the Brothers of the Lord. The Brothers of the Lord were relatives of Jesus who played (as we see at the beginning of Acts and in 1 Corinthians 9) an important leadership role in the early Christian community, especially around Jerusalem, up to the destruction of the Temple. There are complications with identifying James son of Alphaeus and James the Brother of the Lord, but if they are identified, then it would mean that Matthew may have been one of the Brothers of the Lord too. (The brothers of the Lord are named in Mark 6 and Matthew 13 as James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas, but we don't know if the list is intended to be exhaustive or just representative.) I'm inclined not to make the identification between the two Jameses, but it's certainly one that has occasionally been made.

Links of Note

 * Spencer Jay Case, Good Riddance: On Speaking Ill of the Dead, at "Case in Point"

* David Schneeweiss, Job

* James T. Keane, Sigrid Undset: Scholar, storyteller--and future saint?, at "America"

* Tamar Kushnir & Shaun Nichols, Moral Learning, at the SEP

* F. W. J. Schelling: On so-called Weather-shooting, at James Crane's "Substudies"

* Rex Butler interviews Ian Hunter: Spiritual Exercises in Kantian Philosophy, at the "JHI Blog"

* Louis Larue, Against Guala and Hendriks' Functionalist Theory of Institutions (PDF)

There is apparently a Blogger-wide problem with handling of feeds, so the recent posts and 'Weblogs I Regularly View' feeds in the sidebar are likely to be unreliable for a while.

Dashed Off XXVIII

 Our time experiences push us toward thinking about things they do not show us.

We are not merely symbol-makers but symbol-finders.

To be able to ask for the name of something requires an already vast familiarity with classification.

As far back as we can trace consistent tool-making we can trace the history of the ability to classify. (The consistency is essential here.)

To give an example one must do more than can be found in only the giving of the example.

To learn the meaning of a word is to learn the seed-crystal of infinite possible uses of the word.

Learning a new language may change the way one gardens and thereby change one's garden.

"In speculation as well as in gossip, we have some natural inclination towards the more surprising version of a story." Mary Midgley

Those meats tend to be favored in barbecue that are rich in fats and also have a strong distinctive taste that can bear an overlay of smokiness. (Hence the prevalence of cow and pig.)

Boo and hooray derive from our evaluations and do not ground them; in saying them we express an evaluation already made.

A divorce of philosophy and poetry causes problems for moral motivation.

We always learn languages by playing games.

There once was a critic of Thomism
who said, This is nothing but Rome-ism!
Though I never know why
the thing will not die
and it eats up my own view, Coxcomb-ism.

Great poets can survive having manifestos, but it always ruins lesser poets.

What we value structures what we regard as dangerous.

Humean psychology as what it would be like to live in a dream: wandering in images of experience held loosely together by the lingering associations from how they were associated in experience, nothing of substance, nothing of causation except custom and anticipation of imagination, appearance of reality maintained by coherences and constancies and the momentum and mistake of the mind

To have and apply a concept of reality or the real world, we must contrast things with dream, fiction, hallucination, etc. To make this comparison, however, there must be something that it is to be, there must be something 'true in a dream', 'true in fiction', etc.; otherwise there would be nothing allowing the comparison and contrast.

qualia as a crude way of talking about 'way of being true in experience', a substet of 'way of being true'

signs as interfaces between ways of being true -- e.g., testimony of what is true in one's experience

dream as natural version of Rimbaud's derangement of senses

Physicists work with both 'truth in a model' and 'truth in the physical world', and the relations between these need more elucidation.

Wittgensteinianism is just a preculiar form of seeking clear and distinctinct ideas by using a method doubt.

that which cannot be merely true in a model

transcendental arguments as movements from one truth domain to a more fundamental truth domain

Reasoning on the basis of testimony requires that there be a fact of the matter about whether a person is honest or lying, and that this fact not be a matter of appearances or reputation only.

Many of the features of fiction are also found in other domains in which we have nonsystematic evidence about something to which we lack direct access.

Reading up on the Zimbabwean Hyperinflation Crisis is like seeing a tornado lift a mountain and drop it on an overflowing dam; it is an economic disaster that begins to approach something like sublimity.

Some kinds of etiquette are higher and more sacred than any artificial protocol.

Follow back any social construction and you hit something natural that makes the features of that social construction possible and salient.

Even very intelligent and social beasts don't place the weight on suffering in their actions and responses that human beings do. Humans often don't experience suffering (their own or others) as just bad but as wrong, what ought not to be, as a defect in the way things are. We are, as far as we can tell, the only animals that do this consistently and certainly the only ones that keep doing it when only remembering or imagining it.

Companonionable silence is itself a sort of conversation.

household as grex, as group, as society

There are many moral obligations to which we have to learn to be committed.

an allegorical reading of Deuteronomy 20:19-20: When engaged in religious or apologetic argument, do not attack the good things in your opponent's position, because your dispute is not against what they get right, but instead distinguish out the things that are not valuable in this way, and by demolishing them build your own position against theirs, until you have achieved the point.

We inquire by creating domains of truth to compare with other domains of truth.

sufficient reason as involving three things: adequacy, reason, and Box (the mode under which adequacy and reason are linked for sufficient reason)

We learn about ourselves by defeating ourselves.

Parliaments increased prosperity by aligning legislative interests with protection of property rights and expansion of tax capacity.

Every society requires, if it is to survive, small bits of shareable beauty.

Because of the unity of virtues, you can in principle start with any virtue and develop an account of all the virtues, and such developments from different starting points will converge (although not always in straightforward ways). But not all virtues are equally valuable as the starting seed for virtue ethics. The best are those that are themselves inherently architectonic (like prudence or justice) or pedagogical (like filial piety or respect).

We uplift ourselves with poetry, stabilize ourselves with ritual, and for the culmination express ourselves with art.

In virtue the heart goes upward.

Inferior authority cannot rid itself of trying to appear authoritative.

Authority is what maintains what emerges from the ways of things.

Many criticisms of capitalism are really identifying weaknesses in democracy, but as people don't want to attack democracy, they find a scapegoat, with the result that they do not fortify democracy against its weaknesses; they have convinced themselves that if the scapegoat is destroyed, the weaknesses will vanish.

(pure being -> pure act) -> pure spirit

As actuality is the precondition for possibility, and some possibilities are necessarily so, there must be necessary being.

Ps 118:16-17 Vulg: The right hand of the Lord (the Holy Spirit) has wrought virtue (infused virtue); I shall not die but I shall live.

Amends are sometimes of greater value than punishment.

For there to be a community of nations, there must be a community of reason, structured by common rational principles and obligations.

All human beings are thrust into a discipline of service and obedience, and therefore can only come to rest in a discipline of service and obedience prior to and more fundamental than all others.

Everybody seems reasonable on the occasions that they accidentally make a reasonable argument.

If God judged man even with an imperfect but just man's standard, not many would stand.

We treat people as projecting an intentional structure and this intentional structure is part of our assessment of their actions.

"People do not suspect what does not appear to be hidden." Maurice LeBlanc, The Crystal Stopper

Every idea dropped into the sea of humanity mutates.

Reading is a discipline in structuring one's thoughts.

The 'obligation to obey the law' is not a single obligation.

All beneficiaries have a moral obligation to requite their benefactors.

To be grateful only for things requiring special effort or sacrifice is to be an ingrate. To refuse to be grateful for a benefit until it has tbeen established to have been intentional or voluntary is also to be an ingrate.

Obeying the law is not an adequate return for benefits received from civil society, much less any kind of uniquely suitable return, but where it is interpreted in a way reasonably consistent with common good, it is usually a necessary condition for some of what is necessary for a suitable and adequate return.

People are often grateful to institutions, like schools or churches or militaries.

The heart of grateful response is not attitude but active relationship. Neither goodwill nor respect nor gratitude are reducible to attitudes.

A very general sort of indebtedness, in particular and very distinctive situations, often spawns very specific debts.

Obligations of gratitude range from minor to extremely strong; it is not possible to be a grateful person and assume that this will not ever require significant sacrifice.

The stringency of gratitude obligations do not only vary with the sacrifice or effort behind the benefit, but also the extent and importance of the benefit.

Actions performed from gratitude are no more necessarily caught up in feeling grateful than actions performed from love; indeed, in both cases, adequate action often requires the action to stretch or extend farther or longer than the feeling can.

People often treat obedience to the law as part of 'giving back' to their society and often justify disobedience on the basis of society not giving them anything that would give them reason to obey.

M-T pronoun pattern: Across Eurasia , many otherwise unrelated languages have first-person pronouns beginning with M (or close equivalent) and second-person pronouns beginning with T (or close equivalent).
N-M pronoun pattern: Across the Americas (especiall the western coast), otherwise unrelated languages have first-person pronouns beginning with N (or close equivalent) and second-person pronouns beginning with M (or close equivalent).
-- The most obvious explanation is that these are relics of a common ancestry so far back there is no other known specific trace of it.
-- Another possible explanation is that this is actually due to convergence due to 'pronominal resonance' (Johannes Nichols) -- i.e., pronoun sets tend toward alliteration and rhyme, so languages tend to shift toward being more like those with more consistent alliteration (e.g., Turkish shift in first-person pronouns from B to M).
-- M-T families tend to be consistent with the Altaic hypothesis.

St. Robert and St. Hildegard

 Today is the feast of St. Roberto Bellarmino, Doctor of the Church.

Now, the reason why there are seven [sacraments] is that God customarily proceeds, in the way in which spiritual life is given, in an incorporeal manner. In as much as He considers the corporeal life: 1) it is necessary to be born; 2) to grow; 3) to be nourished; 4) 4) if a man becomes sick he receives medicine; 5) whenever one must fight, he must be armed; 6) it is necessary that there be some head that rules all men after they are born and increased; 7) that there would be some to whom the duty to propagate the human race would fall, otherwise, if others were not born to succeed the dead the human race would forthwith go out of existence.In the same way, God also constituted this arrangement in the spiritual life. 1) It is necessary for us to be born in the grace of God through Baptism; 2) Confirmation makes it so that grace will grow and be fortified; 3) the Most Holy Eucharist is given so that grace might be nourished and sustained; 4) that whenever the medicine of Penance is received, the grace lost to the soul will be recovered; 5) that when a man is at the point of death he arms itself against the infernal enemy who attacks us more at that time than in any other time, which is done with Extreme Unction; 6) that there would be someone in the Church that rules and governs us in the spiritual life, which is done by one in Orders; 7) that there would be some in the Church who look to the spiritual propagation of the human race, whereby the number of faithful could be increased in this way, which duty is carried out in the Sacrament of Matrimony. 

[St. Robert Bellarmine, Doctrina Christiana: The Timeless Catechism of St. Robert Bellarmine, Grant, tr. Mediatrix Press (pp. 153-154).]

****

It is also the feast of St. Hildegard von Bingen, Doctor of the Church.

For as good works follow upon a good will, in the same way, because they exist within the knowledge of God, the virtues bend toward the knowledge of God and lead humankind equally to all justice and to the rightness of heaven. For all of the virtues run swiftly alongside the salvation of humankind, although they may not all appear equally in any individual human being. For God's judgment both terrifies humans and examines them, and no human deed remains unscrutinized by God's judgment, for the just judgment of God adjudicates all things justly. Prudence, moreover, unleashes its powers upon humans with providence, so that, as they prudently cast aside the lust of the world, they might embrace chastity. Patience, meanwhile, touches them with gentleness, patiently to endure too the temptations of the flesh; for in both the male and the female sex, the ardor of carnal desire must be stilled by these virtues without any neglectful delay. For this reason, none of the faithful should regard these virtues dismissively, lest the virtues leave them parched in aridity or choked by lustful desires. Rather, they should imitate them with good works, so that the virtues might preserve them in all holiness. 

[St. Hildegard of Bingen, The Book of Divine Works, Campbell, tr., The Catholic University of America Press (Washington, DC: 2018) pp. 76-77.]

Third Heaven

 II Enoch 8:1-9:1 

And those men took me thence, and led me up on to the third heaven, and placed me there; and I looked downwards, and saw the produce of these places, such as has never been known for goodness. And I saw all the sweet-flowering trees and beheld their fruits, which were sweet-smelling, and all the foods borne by them bubbling with fragrant exhalation. And in the midst of the trees that of life, in that place whereon the Lord rests, when he goes up into paradise; and this tree is of ineffable goodness and fragrance, and adorned more than every existing thing; and on all sides it is in form gold-looking and vermilion and fire-like and covers all, and it has produce from all fruits. Its root is in the garden at the earth’s end. And paradise is between corruptibility and incorruptibility. And two springs come out which send forth honey and milk, and their springs send forth oil and wine, and they separate into four parts, and go round with quiet course, and go down into the Paradise of Eden, between corruptibility and incorruptibility. And thence they go forth along the earth, and have a revolution to their circle even as other elements. And here there is no unfruitful tree, and every place is blessed. And there are three hundred angels very bright, who keep the garden, and with incessant sweet singing and never-silent voices serve the Lord throughout all days and hours. 

 And I said: How very sweet is this place, and those men said to me: This place, O Enoch, is prepared for the righteous, who endure all manner of offence from those that exasperate their souls, who avert their eyes from iniquity, and make righteous judgment, and give bread to the hungering, and cover the naked with clothing, and raise up the fallen, and help injured orphans, and who walk without fault before the face of the Lord, and serve him alone, and for them is prepared this place for eternal inheritance.

 Apocalypse of Moses 37 

And God saith to him: 'Adam, what hast thou done? If thou hadst kept my commandment, there would now be no rejoicing among those who are bringing thee down to this place. Yet, I tell thee that I will turn their joy to grief and thy grief will I turn to joy, and I will transform thee to thy former glory? and set thee on the throne of thy deceiver. But he shall be cast into this place to see thee sitting above him, then he shall be condemned and they that heard him, and he shall be grieved sore when he seeth thee sitting on his honourable throne.' 

And he stayed there three hours, lying down, and thereafter the Father of all, sitting on his holy throne stretched out his hand, and took Adam and handed him over to the archangel Michael saying: 'Lift him up into Paradise unto the third Heaven, and leave him there until that fearful day of my reckoning, which I will make in the world.'  Then Michael took Adam and left him where God told him. 

But after all this, the archangel asked concerning the laying out of the remains. And God commanded that all the angels should assemble in His presence, each in his order, and all the angels assembled, some having censers in their hands, and others trumpets. And lo ! the Lord of Hosts came on and four winds drew Him and cherubim mounted on the winds and the angels from heaven escorting Him and they came on the earth, where was the body of Adam. And they came to paradise and all the leaves of paradise were stirred so that all men begotten of Adam slept from the fragrance save Seth alone, because he was born according to the appointment of God. Then Adam's body lay there in paradise on the earth and Seth grieved exceedingly over him. 

Then God spake to the archangel(s) Michael, (Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael): 'Go away to Paradise in the third heaven, and strew linen clothes and cover the body of Adam and bring oil of the oil of fragrance and pour it over him.' And they acted thus, did the three great angels, and they prepared him for burial.

 And God said: 'Let the body of Abel also be brought.' And they brought other linen clothes and prepared his (body) also. For he was unburied since the day when Cain his brother slew him; for wicked Cain took great pains to conceal (him) but could not, for the earth would not receive him for the body sprang up from the earth and a voice went out of the earth saying: 'I will not receive a companion body, till the earth which was taken and fashioned in me cometh to me.' At that time, the angels took it and placed it on a rock, till Adam his father was buried. And both were buried, according to the commandment of God, in the spot where God found the dust, and He caused the place to be dug for two. 

And God sent seven angels to paradise and they brought many fragrant spices and placed them in the earth, and they took the two bodies and placed them in the spot which they had digged and builded. And God called and said, 'Adam, Adam.' And the body answered from the earth and said: 'Here am I, Lord.' And God saith to him: 'I told thee (that) earth thou art and to earth shalt thou return. Again I promise to thee the Resurrection; I will raise thee up in the Resurrection with every man who is of thy seed.' 

II Corinthians 12:2-4 

I know someone in Christ who, fourteen years ago (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows), was caught up to the third heaven. And I know that this person (whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows) was caught up into Paradise and heard ineffable things, which no one may utter.