This completes the notebook that itself was finished in March 2022.
Even if you rejected 'An unjust law is not a law', there are injustices so great that laws requiring them cease for most people to be tolerable as laws, even in the abstract.
There are forms of injustice that are inconsistent with any law at all.
-- Aristotle on brutality, adapted to commentary on the nature of law
To be a human being is to be a participant in a broader community in which other people at least in principle owe you things.
A causal account of truth in judgment must appeal to both objective causality and exemplar causality.
A problem with truth deflationism is that the truth schema really makes adequation to reach truth a practice essential to inquiry, as important to inquiry in general as equality in the form of the zeroable equation is to mathematics, and for much the same reason.
the sacraments as jural goods
Tradition suggests or anticipates an ideal that is captured by the minds involved in it, as best they may, and which they attempt to implement, as best they may.
Scripture as text is a mechanism or means for creating languages.
culture as a dynamic system of mnemonics
"The semiosphere is that same semiotic space outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist." Lotman
"It is not seemly to be famous." Boris Pasternak
Every sign has an eschatology.
learning, imagination, eloquence, wit, gaiety, sublimity as moods of morality
-- Gould takes NOMA to apply to art as well, and it is here where all the flaws of the position are most clearly seen.
The Good Samaritan did not do liberation theology; he saw a wounded man and helped him.
Since having a right is imputable, in the Trinity there are three subsistent rights sharing one unique natural title to all possible jural goods.
Both aristocracies and republics require semi-regular significant sacrifices -- heroisms -- to function.
Relative to the artisanal idea, the action is a work: idea -> working (work-action, operation) -> work-thing (opus).
intellectual property and juridical titles, publicity of idea as title to a *kind* of opus
-- the opus as juridical good vs the kind of opus as juridical good
juridical title
(1) on natural grounds
(2) on artificial grounds
(3) on sacral grounds
piacularity and the need to recognize title even where one's violation of the right is not culpable or even complicitous
The Incarnation is in part a gift of the Virgin, and therefore donatively hers in that respect; the Eucharist is therefore, more indirectly, donatively hers.
the intercessory authority of the Virgin and the filial piety of Christ as man
life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as the three grades of equality
As the danger in writing is to overtell, the danger in a visual medium is to overshow.
the destructive character of credentialed class cultural self-segregation: the acceleration and expansion of oligarchical elitism -- every society can tolerate some of this, but as the credentialed class gets larger, it can create impermeable credential-bubbles, so that credentialed persons can limit their interaction with the rest of the population
the value of religious institutions in forcing different classes together at least sporadically
Ps 45:17 & Lk 1:48
The first three days of creation parallel the second three days, with the latter bringing the regime of life to the contextual frame of the former.
It is natural to human beings to make things their own.
Jdg 13:18: And the angel of the Lord said to him, 'Why do you ask my name, seeing it is ineffable?'
iconoclasm as a reiteration or transposition of docetism
Each theological virtue anticipates an everlasting adornment of soul and body in heavenly life: faith will give way to vision and hope to possession or comprehension, while love will remain but reach its highest form of fruition.
romance and complimentary embarrassment
the Church as the sacramental cosmos
All art aspires to the condition of a sacrament, all literature to the condition of a scripture.
"The baptized man himself becomes a spring." Ratzinger
The liturgy itself is a higher actualization of those who participate in it.
The correct form of demythologizing is toward spirit, not flesh, toward heaven, not earth, toward glory, not dullness, toward something more than myth, not less.
The world of electric lights and radios and medicine is a world in which spirit and wonder and miracle are not so strange and remote from us as we had thought. (This is a common theme in our science fiction.)
Edwards's account of true virtue -- benevolence to being in general, the consent propensity and union of heart to being in general that is immediately exercised in a general good will -- is not a bad description of integral good character as such.
"Heaven and earth were created that the Son of God might be complete in a spouse." Jonathan Edwards
baptism : angelic creation :: confirmation : angelic confirmation in beatitude :: ordination : angelic exaltation under Christ as King of Angels and heavenly high priest
the intrinsic rituality of drama
First Christ must be present, then He must be offered for us.
the two ends of rites involving sacraments: to make the sacrament, to make the sacrament clear
Every sin is a distorted kind of love.
Academic jargon is liable to slip into states of sloppy convenience, using imprecise terms as if they were precise, using loose analogies as if they were explanatory accounts, not doing the work of analysis the situation actually requires
The particular form Hume's skepticism takes largely immunizes him from persuasion by argument, although not in the cases that lie near concerns and interests he already independently has.
-- 'unreasonable' in the Fourth Amendment as perhaps an indicator of common law (the reason of the common law) -- cf. Laura Donahue, who notes that Joseph Story holds something like this
-- cf. Coke's famous, "the common law itselfe is nothing else but reason".
the curtilage of doctrine
gift, sale, lease, bailment
privacy law as growing out trespass law
confidential and privileged communication & the curtilage of the person
In popular telling, the Goodyear blimp Resolute is the only US craft to have operated under Letters of Marque and Reprisal since the War of 1812. It served briefly in Dec 1941 and early 1942 as an anti-submarine privateer on the California coast. (This seems, however, to be a legend; no formal letter was issued by Congress, although the Resolute does seem to have provided some reconnaissance assistance to the Navy for a short time.)
We represent time as dynamical because we measure it by change.
convening powers in government
contrition in confession, confession the first part of satisfaction
-- contrition is virtual confession and confession is virtual satisfaction
"Satisfaction is part of penance as a sacrament, and a fruit of penance as a virtue." Aquinas ST 3.90.2ad3
The confession one must have in the confessional is confession that expresses contrition and begins satisfaction by accepting the authority of the tribunal of mercy.
Penitence is a medicine if its contrition, confession, and satisfaction are true and sure, but where necessity impedes confession and satisfaction, the penitence is true if there is contrition. (Cp. Scholarios, De differentia)
Confession and satisfaction are in the will as it expresses itself outwardly.
There can be no absolution in a void; it must be applied to the penitent qua penitent.
Sacramental penitence includes Christ's satisfaction as meritorious and exemplar cause of our own.
As the necessities in determinism are stronger than deontic necessities, determinism implies that everything actually done is permissible.
Too much of what we find in surrogacy is the renting of women as women.
Much as Clausewitz says of war, everything in reasoning is simple, but the simple things are hard in a number of ways.
Many church parishes are organized *like* parishes but not *as* parishes.
cohesion
(1) charismatic
(2) prior social unity
(3) common experience (including professional ethos)
(4) mutual debt
The success of an army lies in solving a very large number of very small engineering problems (and, occasionally, a big engineering problem or two).
The arrogance of the clever is often itself unpardonable stupidity.
(1) Persons have intrinsic dignity.
(2) Everything else has either extrinsic dignity created by persons or dignity arising from association with persons.
(3) There was a first human person.
(4) Human persons must be caused.
(5) Nothing with intrinsic dignity can be caused by what has only extrinsic dignity or associate dignity.
(6) The first human person is not caused by a human person.
(7) Therefore, the first human person is caused by a person who is not human.
(8) Infinite regress of class of persons of kind X being caused by persons not of kind X is impossible.
(9) Therefore, there is a first person absolutely speaking from whom the series of persons resulting in any given human person comes.
"The ordinance of God is what we call the law of our being. To fulfil the law of our being is what we call the moral law. The moral law when reduced to a system is what we call religion." Gu Hongming
"A law from which we may escape is not the moral law."
"The moral law is to be found everywhere, and yet it is a secret."
"Great as the Universe is, man with the infinite moral nature in him is never satisfied."
"The true meaning of liberty says, 'You must fulfill the law of your being.' But the modern American notion of equality, among other things means head or brain flattening."
Gu Hongming's 'religion of good citizenship' is in fact universalist liberalism
"Do not hate hard labor or farmwork, which was created by the Most High." Sirach 7:15
The point of the Pax Romana is less that a state *of* peace was established and more that Rome was able to establish and enforce conditions *for* peace.
Esther B:2
(1) to deal fairly and with clemency
(2) to provide for subjects a life of complete tranquillity
(3) by making government humane and effective to restore the peace desired by all
--note incidentally the irony of this given what Haman has convinced the king to do
the Church as "a flood of water from a little spring" (Esther A:9)
idolatry as the reason, beginning, and end of all evil (Wis 14:27)
-- note the implication in vv. 28 & 29 that this is because the idols are actually covers for wrongdoing (cp 15:11-12)
-- note 15:16-17 -- contrary to what one might expect, the idolater is not making the divine in his own image, because man cannot actually make even a god-idol in his own image.
