The Beautiful and the Picturesque

 More concisely, the Beautiful is nature or art obeying the universal laws of perfect existence (i. e. Beauty), easily, freely, harmoniously, and without the display of power. The Picturesque is nature or art obeying the same laws rudely, violently, irregularly, and often displaying power only. 

 Hence we find all Beautiful forms characterized by curved and flowing lines-lines expressive of infinity, of grace, and willing obedience: and all Picturesque forms character ized by irregular and broken lines-lines expressive of violence, abrupt action, and partial disobedience, a struggling of the idea with the substance or the condition of its being. The Beautiful is an idea of beauty calmly and harmoniously expressed; the Picturesque an idea of beauty or power strongly and irregularly expressed. As an example of the Beautiful in other arts we refer to the Apollo of the Vatican; as an example of the Picturesque, to the Laocoon or the Dying Gladiator. In nature we would place before the reader a finely formed elm or chestnut, whose well balanced head is supported on a trunk full of symmetry and dignity, and whose branches almost sweep the turf in their rich luxuriance; as a picturesque contrast, some pine or larch, whose gnarled roots grasp the rocky crag on which it grows, and whose wild and irregular branches tell of the storm and tempest that it has so often struggled against.

Andrew Jackson Downing, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1859), pp. 53-54. The metaphysical component, the "universal laws of perfect existence", which Downing takes to be imitative of divine attributes, is an interesting twist on the standard Gilpin-style theory of the picturesque, and seems to be at least partly derived from Ruskin.

The Territory of Thought

 Even between man and man, then, constituted, as men are, alike, various distinct instruments, keys, or calculi of thought obtain, on which their ideas and arguments shape themselves respectively, and which we must use, if we would reach them. The cogitative method, as it may be called, of one man is notoriously very different from that of another; of the lawyer from that of the soldier, of the rich from that of the poor. The territory of thought is portioned out in a hundred different ways. Abstractions, generalizations, definitions, propositions, all are framed on distinct standards; and if this is found in matters of this world between man and man, surely much more must it exist between the ideas of men, and the thoughts, ways, and works of God.

[John Henry Newman, The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine (Sermon 15), Oxford University Sermons.]

Links of Note

 * Paul R. DeHart, Social Contract Theory in the Ruins?, at "Public Discourse"

* Thomas Byrne, Husserl's Phenomenology of Wishing (PDF)

* Elisa Gabbert, The Essay as Realm, at "Georgia Review"

* Hein van den Berg and Boris Demarest, Induction and certainty in the physics of Wolff and Crusius (PDF)

* Alisa Ruddell, Gendered Worlds: Our Need for Belonging and Usefulness, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Dennis Whitcomb & Jared Millson, Inquiring Attitudes and Erotetic Logic: Norms of Restriction and Expansion (PDF)

* John Hartley, Forget Turing, It's the Tolkien Test for AI that Matters, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Beatriz de Almedia Rodrigues, The Ofences of the Imagination: The Grotesque in Kant's Aesthetics (PDF)

* Stuart Halpen, The Fantastic Four, on the rich symbolism of the 'four species' used in the Jewish feast of Sukkot, at "Tablet"

* Daryl Close, Why Student Ratings of Faculty are Unethical (PDF) -- despite the title, the paper is making an argument specifically about how college administrators typically use student evaluations, not an argument for the claim that there is no role for student input into faculty teaching quality.

* Bikash K. Bhattacharyah, The script creator, on the religion of Laipianism, at "Aeon"

Two New Poem Drafts

 Monument

My glory will not change, but years endure,
though life in earthen grave come to find its cure;
I stand alone in splendor, uncaring of the crowd,
and blossom like the flower even in a burial shroud.
My tombstone stands in marble to defy the awful storm;
the day has met its twilight, but the evening is still warm.
I am alone, but like a granite fortress stand,
or like a mountain soaring, formed by mighty angel's hand.

Unobtainable

Diamond glowing on planet no man mars
circling the glory of a blue-white star:
you'll never reach it, though you travel far
through endless trouble --
it's unobtainable.

An angel's melody pure and calmly sweet
echoing down a bright and golden street:
the gates won't open to you, though you fiercely beat
like a host of devils;
it's unobtainable.

A palace made of gold in the deepest of the deep,
gleaming in the water where the kraken sleep;
you'll never know the secrets that its treasure-houses keep
in a priceless bubble;
it's unobtainable.

My heart's in a cave in a bright iceberg-hill
surrounded by a glacier cold and stark and still;
you may wish to come to have it, but you never will --
no one is able;
it's unobtainable.

A Fine Taste

 A fine taste is neither wholly the gift of nature, nor wholly the effect of art. It derives its origin from certain powers natural to the mind; but these powers cannot attain their full perfection, unless they be assisted by proper culture. Taste consists chiefly in the improvement of those principles which are commonly called the powers of imagination, and are considered by modern philosophers as internal or reflex senses supplying us with finer and more delicate perceptions, than any which can be properly referred to our external organs. These are reducible to the following principles; the senses of novelty, of sublimity, of beauty, of imitation, of harmony, of ridicule, and of virtue.

[Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste, pp. 1-2.]

Pistos ho Logos

The saying is trustworthy: if anyone is eager for supervisory authority, he longs for a good work. Thus the supervisor must be unconvictable, husband of one wife, sober, temperate, orderly, hospitable, instructive, not drunken, not brawling, but equitable, uncontentious, unavaricious, presiding well over his own household, keeping children well-ordered with every kind of honor -- for if one does not preside over his own household, how will he take care of the church of God? -- not inexperienced, so that he has not been clouded so as to fall into the judgment of the devil. And also he must have a good witness from those outside, so that he might not fall into disgrace and the trickery of the devil.

[1 Timothy 3:1-7, my rough translation. 'Supervisor', like 'overseer', is the literal translation of episkopos, or 'bishop'. As always, I translate this hyperliterally so that we not forget that 'bishop' is not mere jargon but says what the point of the office is. Philoxenon, hospitable, literally means 'fond of guests', but is a fairly broad term (and a very revered character trait) in the ancient world; it's very difficult to convey the strength of the word in English, because we do not generally treat hospitality as a literally sacred value associated with divine things, which it was in the ancient world. It's tempting to see nephalion (sober) and sophrona (temperate) as concerned with the internal qualifications and philoxenon and didaktikon (instructive) as the external outflow of these, with kosmion (orderly) being the mediating term between the internal and the external. If this is the case, then the series is not just a list but gives a profile or template of the properly lived episcopal life. 

Paroinen (drunken) means 'given to (literally: staying near) wine' but can also be used more broadly for the kinds of behaviors that are associated with people given to drinking -- quarrelsomeness, erratic behavior, etc. Plekton (brawling) literally means hitting, striking, punching, and that sort of thing. 

Aquinas in his commentary takes the clauses between 'instructive' and 'presiding well' to rule out three major areas of temptation, concupiscence of flesh, anger, and cupidity, which is, I think, at least in the ballpark of what St. Paul has in mind here. His discussion is somewhat complicated by the fac that the Latin translator seems to have had some difficulty conveying the Greek meaning into Latin, given that the closest Latin terms overlap the Greek terms in meaning but not always well. The Latin is: Oportet ergo episcopum irreprehensibilem esse, unius uxoris virum, sobrium, prudentem, ornatum, pudicum, hospitalem, doctorem, non vinolentum, non percussorem, sed modestum: non litigiosum, non cupidum (Therefore it befits the bishop to be irreproachable, man of one wife, sober, prudent, decorous, chaste, hospitable, a teacher, not winebibbing, not a hitter, but modest; not contentious, not covetous). That's thirteen terms in Latin to cover twelve terms in Greek. The Latin translation seems to translate sophrona as 'prudent' rather than 'temperate' to distinguish it from 'sober' (they indeed can overlap, creating a question of how they are supposed to be distinct), and to translate kosmion by two words, 'decorous' and 'chaste', which is a (reasonably plausible) interpretation of the kinds of orderliness meant by the Greek word. Modestum as a translation of epieike (equitable/fair/flexibly rather than rigidly just) is not bad -- the Latin modestum, unlike its more parochial English cognate, has a very large range of meaning -- but precisely because of the large range obscures the connection with epieikia (equitableness), which actually seems quite important. Seeing it sandwiched between 'not a hitter' and 'not contentious', Aquinas takes modestum to mean 'patient' -- which, again, is arguably in the ballpark of what is meant, because he is probably right that it is carrying through rather than disrupting the line of thought. 'Evenhandedness' or 'fairmindedness' might capture the point, someone refusing to jump easily into fights because he is always trying to be fair to people. I mention all this because it is a good example of the kinds of things that have to be considered in trying to translate a list that is not given much of an explanation.

The 'take care of' (epimelesetai), which parenthetically seems to sum up the entire episcopal task, is elsewhere in the New Testament only found in the parable of the Good Samaritan, where it is found twice; the Good Samaritan, having tended the beaten traveler with oil and wine, loads him onto his own beast, and then takes him to an inn to take care of him; when he leaves, he gives money to the innkeeper and tells him to take care of the traveler. Of the two dangers to the bishop mentioned in verses 6 and 7 (the first internal and the second external), being 'clouded' (typhotheis), is more often translated as 'puffed up', which is in some ways an excellent compromise as a translation. The word literally means 'smoke-filled' or 'cloudy', but very often has the figurative sense of 'arrogant, proud, vain'. Oneidismon (disgrace) literally means 'insult' or 'blame' and is often translated as 'reproach' or 'reviling'; it does not, however, necessarily imply that the insult or blame is justified, and I am inclined to think that here it is unjustified blame that is in view. The inexperienced (neophyte) bishop can fall into the power of the devil through pride, but even unjustified accusation can be used by the devil to neutralize the effectiveness of a bishop, so the kind of person who should be bishop should be someone who has real experience in matters of spirit (avoiding the temptations of pride) and in matters of public interaction (avoiding the trap of situations that bring unnecessary disrepute on himself and his flock).]

God-Bearer

 Today is the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Martyr; one of the Apostolic Fathers who link the Apostles to later churches, he had been according to tradition one of the children blessed by Jesus, became a student of St. John the Apostle, and was appointed bishop of Antioch as successor to St. Evodius at the recommendation of St. Peter. He was martyred in the reign of Trajan, his death usually thought to be somewhere around AD 115. From his Epistle to the Smyrnaeans (Chapters 0-3):

 Ignatius, who is also Theophorus, to the church of God the Father and of Jesus Christ the Beloved, which hath been mercifully endowed with every grace, being filled with faith and love and lacking in no grace, most reverend and bearing holy treasures; to the church which is in Smyrna of Asia, in a blameless spirit and in the word of God abundant greeting. I give glory to Jesus Christ the God who bestowed such wisdom upon you; for I have perceived that ye are established in faith immovable, being as it were nailed on the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, in flesh and in spirit, and firmly grounded in love in the blood of Christ, fully persuaded as touching our Lord that He is truly of the race of David according to the flesh, but Son of God by the Divine will and power, truly born of a virgin and baptized by John that all righteousness might be fulfilled by Him,  truly nailed up in the flesh for our sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the tetrarch (of which fruit are we -- that is, of His most blessed passion); that He might set up an ensign unto all the ages through His resurrection, for His saints and faithful people, whether among Jews or among Gentiles, in one body of His Church. For He suffered all these things for our sakes [that we might be saved]; and He suffered truly, as also He raised Himself truly; not as certain unbelievers say, that He suffered in semblance, being themselves mere semblance. And according as their opinions are, so shall it happen to them, for they are without body and demon-like. For I know and believe that He was in the flesh even after the resurrection;  and when He came to Peter and his company, He said to them, Lay hold and handle me, and see that I am not a demon without body. And straightway they touched Him, and they believed, being joined unto His flesh and His blood. Wherefore also they despised death, nay they were found superior to death. And after His resurrection He [both] ate with them and drank with them as one in the flesh, though spiritually He was united with the Father.

The Ghosts of All the Dreams are There

 Dawn
by Isaac Rosenberg 

O tender first cold flush of rose,
O budded dawn, wake dreamily;
Your dim lips as your lids unclose
Murmur your own sad threnody.
O as the soft and frail lights break
Upon your eyelids, and your eyes
Wider and wider grow and wake,
The old pale glory dies. 

And then, as sleep lies down to sleep
And all her dreams lie somewhere dead,
The iron shepherd leads his sheep
To pastures parched whose green is shed.
Still, O frail dawn, still in your hair
And your cold eyes and sad sweet lips,
The ghosts of all the dreams are there,
To fade like passing ships.

The Intrinsic Form of the Poem

 From whatever source the poet derives the initial word through which he works, it is a compelling word, seeking to express itself, as it were, in a more defined and concrete word. And as this word exists in both intellect and sense, it is a sensible and spiritual matter which is produced -- images and ideas, and words as signs of these. The binding together of all this matter is the intrinsic form of the poem: a communication of the exemplary word to the poem through this form.

[John Alphonsus Duffy, A Philosophy of Poetry Based on Thomistic Principles, p. 183.]

Teresa

 Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church. From The Way of Perfection (Chapter 5):

You already know that the first stone of this foundation must be a good conscience and that you must make every effort to free yourselves from even venial sins and follow the greatest possible perfection. You might suppose that any confessor would know this, but you would be wrong: it happened that I had to go about matters of consciences to a man who had taken a complete course in theology; and he did me a great deal of mischief by telling me that certain things were of no importance. I know that he had no intention of deceiving me, or any reason for doing so: it was simply that he knew no better. And in addition to this instance I have met with two or three similar ones. 

 Everything depends on our having true light to keep the law of God perfectly. This is a firm basis for prayer; but without this strong foundation the whole building will go awry....

The Blush of Morn Is on the Brine

 Song of the Fairies to the Sea-Nymphs
by Anna Seward 

 Hasten, from your coral caves,
 Every nymph that sportive laves
 In the green sea's oozy wells,
 And gilds the fins, and spots the shells!
 Hasten, and our morrice join,
 Ere the gaudy morning shine! 

 Rising from the foamy wave,
 Instant now your aid we crave;
 Come, and trip like our gay band,
 Traceless on the amber sand.
 Haste! or we must hence away,
 Yet an hour, and all is day! 

 At your bidding, from our feet
 Shall the ocean monsters fleet,
Sea-nettle and sting-fish glide
 Back upon the refluent tide.
 Haste! the dawn has streak'd the cloud,
 Haste! the village cock has crow'd. 

 See! the clouds of night retire,
 Hesper gleams with languid fire!
 Quickly then our revel join,
 The blush of morn is on the brine!
 Loiterers, we must hence away,
 Yonder breaks the orb of day.

International Law in Times of War

 Jessica Wolfendale has an op-ed article in Forward on the Israel's war in Gaza and what might be done to persuade Israel to back off; it makes a few good points but also unfortunately makes some common errors and dubious assumptions when it comes to the international law of war. For instance, she discusses the ICC arrest warrant applications earlier this year, as well as the sharp criticisms that they received for treating Hamas and Israel as equivalent, and says:

The false equivalency claim rests on the assumption that the ICC was implying that Israel and Hamas are equivalent organizations, when in fact the arrest warrants describe specific actions, committed by Hamas and Israel, that are violations of international law. In international law, a war crime does not cease to be a crime just because it is committed by the military forces of a democratic state, or in a defensive war. Many liberal democracies have committed war crimes: The United States conducted carpet bombing in Cambodia during the Vietnam War, and implemented a torture program after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. So, Israel’s status as a liberal democracy provides no reason to assume that it has not committed, or would not commit, war crimes.

I don't think this is quite the assumption of the false equivalency claim, but there's a broader problem here that comes from Wolfendale's sloppiness (not confined only to her) on the matter of war crimes. The problem is that sovereign states cannot commit war crimes. There are no war crimes without war criminals, and potential war criminals are natural persons capable of responsible decisions connected to the supposed crimes, not juridical persons in the care of natural persons, which is what a state is. You cannot arrest or imprison a state. And this is fully recognized in international law; the arrest warrant applications, for instance, were not for 'Israel' but for the prime minister and defense minister of Israel. While we do recognize states as juridical persons, and therefore acting as a whole, we don't (for quite good reasons) generally treat them as responsible parties for criminal purposes.

This is connected, I think, with a common failing in academic discussions of international law of war, which is not recognizing how very limited it is and how very (deliberately) skewed it is. There was a recent example of this, although I cannot currently find the particular example, with regard to Israel's use of pagers to do significant damage to Hezbollah. The academic in question was stating, as if it were obvious, that Israel had violated the Geneva Conventions on booby traps. Now, obviously, Israel's pager gambit would fit what we colloquially call a 'booby trap'. But international law is like many fields of law, but worse than most, in often not using words in their common senses. As it happens, the explosive pagers do not seem to fit the Protocol definiton of 'booby trap', which requires that something explode because it is approached or disturbed in a way that would ordinarily be a safe action; the explosive pagers were exploded by remote-control detonation, not by the users disturbing them with an apparently safe action. That makes them closer to what the Protocol calls 'other devices'. But are the pagers violations of the 'other device' clauses? Well, one of the things that people often overlook is that international law forbids very little in war as long as it is proportional to what is known as a "military objective", which means, more or less, the reduction of the fighting capability of hostile combatants. Whether that's the case here depends on whether Israel's plan for the pagers was specifically geared to such an objective, whether it took any steps to minimize collateral damage to the extent possible, and whether it could have had roughly the same result in a way that was less risky for collateral damage. None of these things could possibly be determined without actual investigation. International law is not intuitive and you should always be suspicious of someone treating technical legal matters as obvious.

International law is also a construct negotiated among sovereign states, and is particularly at present a project of states of broadly liberal tenor, and thus unsurprisingly is designed to favor sovereign states, particularly of a broadly liberal tenor. This, of course, is one of the reasons for the international anger caused by the arrest warrant applications; the prime minister and defense minister of Israel, unlike any Hamas leaders, are elected officers of a sovereign state. The only two ways you could enforce anything against them are (1) if Israel itself hands them over for war crimes or (2) if you declare war on Israel and impose it as a condition of surrender. I can assure you that neither of these are going to happen, so what was the point of doing it? 

It seems to have been symbolic. Either the prosecutor wanted to issue a warrant against Hamas leaders and thought that he could not for political reasons get away with doing so unless he showed that he was not taking Israel's side (in which case the claim that he was treating them as equivalent seems to be right), or he was showboating and thus misusing his position, or he was sincerely acting in the belief that the ICC is empowered to issue arrest warrants against sitting elected officers of sovereign states. The last is the most interesting one; it is known that the ICC holds that sitting elected officers of sovereign states do not have immunity before international courts, and also known that this position is not accepted by most of the states that are party to the authorizing statute of the court. Some of them are quite serious about this; the United States, for instance, famously has a law authorizing the President to do any and all acts, including invasion, necessary to free U.S. officials detained under these kinds of conditions. The interpretation seems to commit the parties to the treaty to committing hostile actions that could cause wars; the ICC has issued an arrest warrant against Putin, for instance, but arresting the head of state of the Russian government seems to require a willingness to go to war with Russia over it. Israel is a much weaker state than Russia, of course, but it also is considered an ally by the United States, which is most definitely not a weak state, and it is known that the America does not look kindly on states that make its foreign policy in the Middle East more difficult. One of the other ways international law is skewed is that it is designed to be used as an instrument by powerful states to prevent weaker states from becoming a threat and and to make this look fair by also being a means for weaker states to issue ineffecutal protests against more powerful states. But in any case, interpretations of international law that could require that states engage in bloody and costly wars are a hard sell, regardless of the intentions behind them.

Wolfendale seems to see the international law apparatus as a means of forcing states to do things; but in reality, the international law apparatus depends heavily on the willingness of states to conform to it. The primary enforcer of any international laws concerning actions committed by offcers in the Israeli state is the Israeli state; and by and large any states not already hostile to Israel will defer whenever possible to Israel's own judgment about how they should be enforced. That is perhaps not fair, but it is the way things are. International law does not work by good intentions and ideals but by ordinary politics and pragmatic negotiation. And, outside of cases where Israel itself puts its soldiers and officers on trial for war crimes -- which like most militarily active nations it has occasoinally done -- critics of Israel are unlikely to find any gambit under international law that would have any serious effect. Part of this is the practical realities already mentioned. But part of it is that Israel is very, very good at playing the system. The legal review apparatus that Israel uses to review its strategy and tactics is magnitudes more sophisticated than that of any other military in the world; even big players like the United States do not review their military actions for legality as extensively and rigorously as Israel does. It does, of course, give Israel its air of often sacrificing the spirit of the law to the letter -- and frankly that is often quite deliberate. Most states do this, and it sometimes seems that international anger against Israel is due less to its practice here than to its unusual competence at it. But you can only enforce the spirit of the law by enforcing the letter, and Israel, even if sometimes only by the thinnest of technicalities, is very careful always to have grounds to argue that it complied with the letter. The idea Wolfendale has, that you could seriously affect Israeli foreign and military policy by this sort of clumsy lawfare, does not seem to be well founded.

Does this mean that nothing can be done externally to influence Israel? No. Israel's position in the international scheme depends in several ways on not being opposed by certain major players -- the United States and the United Kingdom, in particular -- so the one factor that is almost as important to Israel's policy as Israel's own domestic politics is what keeps the U.S. and the U.K. tolerant, or at least reluctant to intervene. But the threat of such intervention also does not work by good intentions; it works by a willingness to use force. Outside of that, nothing will work except negotiating with Israel by offering it something that it wants more.

In short, international law is not intuitive but very legalistic, it is not self-operating but dependent on the cooperation of the state parties involved, and it always gives the preference to powerful sovereign states of a broadly liberal bent, regardless of what they are doing. It does not descend from heaven, or well up from pure reason; it is a very limited instrument, and while it has been known to be used as a cover for a powerful state's bullying of a less powerful state, it has never itself been a significant lever for shifting military behavior. That contrasts with, say, the United States being willing to invade over a matter, which has occasionally worked miracles. The truth of the matter is, no clever armchair solutions to a problem like the war in Gaza are genuinely feasible, and whenever you look at them closely their tinny tinsel can be seen for the mere facade that it is. The only thing that will change the behavior of a state engaged in military action is war-weariness at home or powers abroad actively raising the cost of the status quo to such a height that the state cannot practically continue. Or to put the matter more crudely: If you don't like what Israel is doing, your options are to wait until it gets tired of doing it, perhaps at most hoping that minor harassments of law and economics will make that time come sooner, or to step in with fists ready to bloody its nose. That's how you persuade a state.

Music on My Mind

 

Allison Russell, "Hy-Brasil".

Generous Spirit

 "Philosophers do not carry into effect all that they teach." No; but they effect much good by their teaching, by the noble thoughts which they conceive in their minds: would, indeed, that they could act up to their talk: what could be happier than they would be? but in the meanwhile you have no right to despise good sayings and hearts full of good thoughts. Men deserve praise for engaging in profitable studies, even though they stop short of producing any results. Why need we wonder if those who begin to climb a steep path do not succeed in ascending it very high? yet, if you be a man, look with respect on those who attempt great things, even though they fall. It is the act of a generous spirit to proportion its efforts not to its own strength but to that of human nature, to entertain lofty aims, and to conceive plans which are too vast to be carried into execution even by those who are endowed with gigantic intellects....

[Seneca, De Beata Vita, ch. XX.]

Links of Note

 * Laura Nuño de la Rosa & James G. Lennox, From the Method of Division to the Theory of Transformations: Thompson After Aristotle, and Aristotle After Thompson (PDF)

* George Karamanolis, Numenius, at the SEP

* Mark Boespflug & Elizabeth Jackson, Doxastic Voluntarism, at the SEP

* Andreas Blank, Simple Esteem and the Method of Commonplaces in Pufendorf (PDF)

* Christopher Smeenk, Philosophical geometers and geometrical philosophers (PDF)

* Delaney O'Connell, Pretendians from the Perspective of a Cherokee, at the "Blog of the APA"

* Saha Paravizian, al-Ghazali, at the IEP

* Christopher Earley, Co-Producing Art's Cognitive Value (PDF)

* Alexander Stern, 'A Sense Sublime', interviews Charles Taylor at "Commonweal"

* Freddie deBoer, Basics: School Reform

* Apaar Kumar, Kant on the Ground of Human Dignity (PDF)

* An actual field hospital: The Order of Malta's ambitious Gaza mission, at "The Pillar"

Two Poem Drafts

 Mater et Magistra

Flowing through you,
illuminating, sublime,
flowing from one to many,
subtle yet intelligible,
is a swiftly moving stream:

benevolent, comforting, gentle,
direct, expansive, irresistible,
friendly, benevolent, kind,
strong and all-enduring. 

Think of such subtle essence:
nothing intrudes save pure light,
the breath of divine activity,
the pure stream of effulgence,
from Almighty God, who knows no stain.

You are the radiant glow of eternal light,
the shining mirror of His glory,
the flawless image of His goodness.

Your glory is thus brighter than the sun,
more splendid than all stars. 

I compare you to the light,
but the light is dim beside you,
for light must contend with darkness,
but what turmoil can overthrow you,
whose Head is the Lamb upon the Throne? 

Nothing is beyond such sovereignty;
nothing is hidden from such vision;
no living mind can be unpierced by your truth. 

How wonderful is your sweep from end to end;
great your proclamation unto all the world;
everywhere your order of grace is manifested.

Alone and in yourself, you do all things;
renewing all things, you are unchanged;
ancient and imposing, you converse with saints,
as friend to friend,
loving with friendship no one else. 

Enchantment

I look out on a golden sunlight
bathing with bliss the grass and trees,
and through the bough a wind is flowing;
there is a god among the leaves.

We live by clock and stable season;
it flows, or so we think, in lines,
but, turn and twist, we envision freely
and think in imaginary time.

The darkest backward and abysm
I rotate outward into light
and at this time I travel sideways
and in a moment live a life.

Naiads in winding brooks are singing,
complex numbers their beat in time,
with quaternions on their noted scales
and turnings in their signs.

Enchanted isle is all around you,
but you on factious byways strode
and jawed, and voted, paid sacrifices,
a Caliban with a drunkard-god.

A tempest brought you to this shoreline,
cast you up on mercy's womb,
but you tied your soul to resentful vengeance,
trading humanity for a tome,

writing your plaints in the oaken blood
to cast a spell on your own mind;
but lo! your thought, an airy spirit,
may yet undo the chains that bind.

I look out on a golden sunlight;
piano music fills the breeze
and journeys in my spirit's power
to stranger lands and richer seas.

Shake off slumber, now awaken,
the cloud-capped towers are soaring high;
below, the green sea rumbles softly,
above, the azure vaults now sigh.

The incantations, the calculations,
I make as though they were a gift,
octonions of soul enchanting
as I turn quest to noble risk.

Purple-clad stars may rise in evening
and, amber-vested, retire at day,
but stars within are ever shining:
they blossom, bloom, and never fade.

A Mind Alive

 Today is the feast of St. John Henry Newman. From his sermon, Christ upon the Waters -- Part 2, from Sermons Preached on Various Occasions: 

And if Satan can so well avail himself even of the gifts and glories of the Church, it is not wonderful that he can be skilful also in his exhibition and use of those offences and scandals which are his own work in her now or in former times. My Brethren, she has scandals, she has a reproach, she has a shame: no Catholic will deny it. She has ever had the reproach and shame of being the mother of children unworthy of her. She has good children; -- she has many more bad. Such is the will of God, as declared from the beginning. He might have formed a pure Church; but He has expressly predicted that the cockle, sown by the enemy, shall remain with the wheat, even to the harvest at the end of the world. He pronounced that His Church should be like a fisher's net, gathering of every kind, and not examined till the evening. Nay, more than this, He declared that the bad and imperfect should far surpass the good. "Many are called," He said, "but few are chosen"; and His Apostle speaks of "a remnant saved according to the election of grace." There is ever, then, an abundance of materials in the lives and the histories of Catholics; ready to the use of those opponents who, starting with the notion that the Holy Church is the work of the devil, wish to have some corroboration of their leading idea. Her very prerogative gives special opportunity for it; I mean, that she is the Church of all lands and of all times. If there was a Judas among the Apostles, and a Nicholas among the deacons, why should we be surprised that in the course of eighteen hundred years, there should be flagrant instances of cruelty, of unfaithfulness, of hypocrisy, or of profligacy, and that not only in the Catholic people, but in high places, in royal palaces, in bishops' households, nay, in the seat of St. Peter itself?...

The Grandeurs of His Babylonian Heart

 Correlated Greatness
by Francis Thompson 

O nothing, in this corporal earth of man,
That to the imminent heaven of his high soul
Responds with colour and with shadow, can
Lack correlated greatness. If the scroll
Where thoughts lie fast in spell of hieroglyph
Be mighty through its mighty habitants;
If God be in His Name; grave potence if
The sounds unbind of hieratic chants;
All's vast that vastness means. Nay, I affirm
Nature is whole in her least things exprest,
Nor know we with what scope God builds the worm.
Our towns are copied fragments from our breast;
And all man's Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.

Like to a Good Old Age Released from Care

October
by William Cullen Bryant 

 Ay, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath!
 When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,
 And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,
 And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
 Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay
 In the gay woods and in the golden air,
 Like to a good old age released from care,
 Journeying, in long serenity, away.
 In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
 Might wear out life like thee, 'mid bowers and brooks,
 And, dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
 And music of kind voices ever nigh;
 And when my last sand twinkled in the glass,
 Pass silently from men, as thou dost pass.

Dashed Off XXIII

 love, joy, and peace as three aspects of solidarity

The only justice that is complete is the justice that is ordered to beatitude.

Human beings are organized hierarchically because they are hierarchical internally.

Pride is a greater corruption than other vices, but by the same token shows more of the spiritual glory that it corrupts, as in a caricature or parody.

Permissions are context-sensitive; A permitting X and B permitting X will often be very different kinds of action. This becomes very obvious if A and B have very different levels of knowledge about X, or if A and B have very different duties with respect to X, but it happens elsewhere and in other ways as well.

narrative vs schematic classification
detection-based classification vs rule-based classification

space and time (history) as themselves systems of alternate possibilities

The Gospel of Mark emphasizes the failures of all of Jesus' followers.

Citizens of the Kingdom of God are armigerous, bearing spiritual arms in their spiritual citizenship.

Living organisms are complex material systems that can be considered immaterially, in varying degrees depending on the kind of life.

clothing as passive tool use

true - intellect - wisdom
good - will - love
beautiful - ? - happiness

being
1. actuality
-- -- 1a. immutability
-- -- 1b. simplicity
-- -- 1c. eternity
2. modality (perseity)
-- -- 2a. necessity
-- -- 2b. immensity
-- -- -- -- 2b1. with respect to place
-- -- -- -- 2b2. with respect to time (atemporality)

Historical explanations involve explaining in terms of causes-in-readiness, showing that there are such causes in readiness and showing that effects emerge out of this ready reserve of causes.

classification, imputation, ordination

The root of human dignity is so because it is our capacity for sacramental and social union with God.

Scientific inquiry is an intrinsically social endeavor.

rites as means of customary law

the Transfiguration as the model of all iconography

Nothing is more inclusive than hell.

Acts 9:32-35 Aeneas as a type of Rome

Acts 9:36-42 on the order of the widows

1 Cor 11:12 & Mary as New Eve

substituting signs vs guising signs
uniforms as vestments serving as guising signs

language as index, as icon, and as symbol of reason

signs that are instruments of what they signify

autonomy as a work of grace

Myths work themselves out into rituals.

Ritual is a means of thinking outwardly and experiencing inwardly.

The adjective 'real' often designates a priority or superiority in likeness to the paradigmatic.

'Man' and 'woman' have generic functionality in the life of the human species; this generic functionality is given customary specification in a society.

Love only justifies to the extent it converges on divine love.

spiritual power directly serving spiritual ends
spiritual power cooperating with the temporal power's indirectly serving spiritual ends
temporal power cooperating with the spiritual power's directly serving spiritual ends
temporal power directly serving temporal ends and indirectly serving spiritual ends through them

Every experience of actual regularity suggests a greater possible regularity.

Spiritual ends require indirect as well as direct means.

the Church's right to non-interference in sacramental and doctrinal matters

All fallen human loves are interwoven with betrayals, although some much more, and much more seriously, than others.

deacon : baptism :: priest : confirmation :: bishop : ordination
--> There seems something to the analogy, but it is difficult to identify any unified principle of relation.

Both the spiritual and the temporal powers may delegate power to each other, for mutual benefit.

philosophy qua field as the field where all fields meet, the field between all fields

the importance of avoiding political agnosticism

Descartes's infinite perfect being as a way of talking about God as the infinite intelligible

mosaic as a symbol of providence

The existence of a contingent thing implies the existence of a broader system, however loose, of which it is a part or a consequence or both.

God is not a deceiver = What is purely intelligible involves no falsehood.

obstinacy as penalty

Doing things out of love is not inconsistent with doing them out of a motive of duty; love takes duties and transfigures them.

No one has acceptance without exception.

Every political scheme eventually reaches the stage of pathology.

the legal organization of the natural capabilities of the human race

traditionally recognized excuses for criminal responsibility: automatism, infancy, insanity, involuntary intoxication, duress, entrapment, mistake of fact, mistake of law

"The notion of a role has built into it a notion of some conduct as appropriate." Dorothy Emmet
"...casuistry is a necessary excercise in trying to determine the limits of principles in regard to new and varied circumstances, and in trying to resolve conflicts of principles."

Literature, art, & experimentation presuppose people operating in relevant social roles.

habitus as role carried around with us

mystical experiences as limit cases of ordinary cognitive experience

memory as anticipation of present

elections as creating 'interference patterns' in results

"Do not think, he says that you are destined for easy struggles or unimportant tasks. You are the salt of the earth." Chrysostom

Human beings have no intrinsic title to the life of another human being; the extrinsic titles are:
(1) personal self-defense
(2) defense of another's life
(3) defense of public good (just punishment).

God has intrinsic title to anything to which any created being has extrinsic title; this title is creation.
--> This explains many dispensations.

covenant -> free will

-- the relevant titles for each of the Ten Commandments

Political power is exercised by patterns of exclusion.

Oppression is not a system in the proper sense; it is incoherent.

Conservatism always eventually dissipates; progressivism always eventually eats itself.

Knowledge is something we do not discover by considering our experience alone but by considering what is shareable among many.

"Errasse humanum est, et confiteri errorem, prudentis." Jerome (Ep 57.12)
"Humanum fuit errare, diabolicum est per animositatem in errore manere." Augustine (Serm. 164.14)

The law is a sign and symbol of grace.
-- Torah and grace are both expressions of divine wisdom.

Actions do not float free from the powers or capabilities of which they are exercises, and apparently similar descriptions of actions that are expressions of different capabilities  does not make the actions the same.

Human beings grow into their hierarchies, shaping them in various ways as they go.

promise -- verity -- memorial

In the sacrament as convenantal act, there is simultaneously promise, fulfillment, and memorial.

Links of Note

 * Jill North, The Complex Structure of Quantum Mechanics, at "Blog of the APA"

* Agnes Bolinska & Joseph D. Martin, The tragedy of the canon; or, path dependence in the history and philosophy of science (PDF)

* Srikanth Reddy, Hannah Arendt, Poet, at "The Paris Review"

* Owen Ware, The Unity of Reason and the Highest Good (PDF)

* Michael Lucchese, Christian Institutions in a New World, at "Public Discourse"

* Marius Stan, Laws and natural philosophy (PDF)

*  Paul Kalligas, Plotinus, at the SEP

* Dolores G. Morris, Closure as a Stance (PDF)

* Helen DeCruz, Her lively and sweet countenance, on the notion of 'countenance' in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, as well as some of the philosophical ideas behind it, at "Wondering Freely"

* Christopher P. Martin, Spinoza's Formal Mechanism (PDF)

* Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, God Is Not a Thing: A Response to Dale Tuggy, a guest post at Fr. Aidan Kimel's "Eclectic Orthodoxy"

* Philip Cary, The Inner Word Prior to Language: Augustine as Platonist Alternative to Gadamerian Hermeneutics (PDF)

* Albania is considering the possibility of ceding a token territory and recognition of sovereignty to the Bektashi Order, which, if done, would create a new European microstate. The Urdhri Bektashi was originally founded as a Sufi brotherhood in the Ottoman Empire, which moved from Turkey to Albania when its lodges were forcibly closed during the founding of the Turkish Republic.  The Dedebaba (spiritual leader of the Bektashis) has apparently indicated that he envisions the state as being organized on the analogy of Vatican City. Without knowing much about the particular local details, this general sort of move seems reasonable to me, at least when it is actually feasible; and, as the history of the Bektashi Order itself shows, there is a potential value to major religious organizations not being subject to the whims of nationalist politics.

* Christopher Smeerk, Philosophical geometers and geometrical philosophers (PDF)

* Evan Thompson, Clock time contra lived time, on the debate between Einstein and Bergson, at "Aeon"

Securing Human Rights

From James Nickel & Adam Etinson, Human Rights, at the SEP:

Attributing human rights to god’s commands may give them a secure status at the metaphysical level, but in a very diverse world it does not make them practically secure. Billions of people today do not believe in the god of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. If people do not believe in god, or in the sort of god that prescribes rights, then if you want to base human rights on theological beliefs you must persuade these people to accept a rights-supporting theological view. This is likely to be even harder than persuading them of human rights. Legal enactment at the national and international levels provides a far more secure status for practical purposes.

The claim that legal enactment is a more secure foundation for the position that human rights exist "in a very diverse world" than divine commands seems a common view in some circles, but it also seems straightforwardly false, and it's difficult to see what conceivable argument for it could even be plausible. Legal enactment requires recognized legal authority; there is no legal authority at the national and international levels -- at all -- that has universal or even practically universal recognition as an authority capable of being a source of human rights nor is this surprising, since human rights are (as the authors recognize) generally taken to be at least mostly universal, and therefore seem to require an authority with at least mostly universal scope for the human race, which gives us a very limited set of candidates. Many, many more people believe in the existence of a God who can endow human beings with rights than accept the authority of any international or national agency in existence. Christians and Muslims alone make up more than half the population of the earth, and it's not clear you could get even half the population of the earth to accept that the United Nations actually has the authority to provide a "secure status for practical purposes" for human rights existing.

What's more, the proverb, "What's good for the gander is good for the goose", comes to mind here: If there are many people who believe that human rights exist because of God's commands and not any human agency -- and there undoubtedly are, and they are many -- the argument given here against the divine command option applies a fortiori to the legal enactment opposition; if people do not believe that international agencies, or the sort of international agencies that exist, can prescribe human rights, "then if you want to base human rights on" legal enactment, "you must persuade these people to accept a rights-supporting" view of international law that can actually ground human rights. Nickel & Etinson seem to assume that it's obvious that because legal agencies can recognize the existence of human rights that legal agencies can account for their existence; but there are many views on which the latter is not possible. The concern for a "diverse world" here seems to be fake, or at least based on a failure to think through the argument. Yes, it's true that many people have views that make a divine-command-based view impossible; it is at least as obviously true that many people have views that make a nation-and-international-law view a non-starter. The actual tendency of the argument, if we accepted it, is to the position that there is no way to explain the existence of human rights, because if theism doesn't unite a sufficiently large and diverse portion of the planet to count, nothing available does. No legal authority is as widely respected and deferred-to by as large and diverse a population as divine authority is, and it's not even close. 

Part of what is happening, of course, is that the diversity of theistic views about God is being treated as a strike against theistic grounding, while the diversity of juridical views about legal and political agencies is being ignored. But the two cases are in fact parallel. Theism in this context merely has to be adequate to establish that human rights exist -- that is compatible with widely different views of God's nature and acts, and also with considerable disagreement about which things in particular we should consider to be divinely endowed human rights. The details can be worked out by argument --  just exactly as they have to be on the legal-enactment view, which assumes that people who do not at all agree on the nature and scope of authority of national and international legal powers are nonetheless able to come to adequate agreement "for practical purposes" on human rights.

Of course, we should not accept the argument at all. If you are really concerned with "a diverse world", all views have to be taken seriously; if you are really interested in truth, it does not matter that there are people who are not persuaded, but only what is the right view; if you are really interested in persuasion, you have to go with the view that actually persuades more people; if you are really interested in practical security of human rights, you should work with the views on which people actually base their practical reasoning. On all of these grounds, one should reject an argument like this, even if we assume (which we should not) that what explains the existence of human rights must be some sort of positive enactment like a divine command or legal enactment at the national or international level.

The Dabbler

 42. The dabbler does not know in any art what it is all about -- he imitates like a monkey -- and has no sense of the essential course of art. The true painter etc. certainly can distinguish the picturesque from the unpicturesque everywhere. So it is with the poet, the novelist, the travel writer. The writer of chronicles is the dabbler in history -- he wants to give everything and gives nothing. So it is throughout. Every art has its individual sphere -- he who does not know this exactly or have some sense of it -- will never be an artist.

[Novalis, Logological Fragments II, in Novalis: Philosophical Writings, Margaret Mahony Stoljar, ed. and tr., SUNY Press (Albany, NY: 1997), p. 42.]

The Little Flower

 Today is the feast of St. Therese of Lisieux, Doctor of the Church. From The Story of a Soul, Chapter IX:

Among the numberless graces that I have received this year, not the least is an understanding of how far-reaching is the precept of charity. I had never before fathomed these words of Our Lord: "The second commandment is like to the first: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." I had set myself above all to love God, and it was in loving Him that I discovered the hidden meaning of these other words: "It is not those who say, Lord, Lord! who enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the Will of My Father." 

 Jesus revealed me this Will when at the Last Supper He gave His New Commandment in telling His Apostles to love one another as He had loved them. I set myself to find out how He had loved His Apostles; and I saw that it was not for their natural qualities, for they were ignorant men, full of earthly ideas. And yet He calls them His Friends, His Brethren; He desires to see them near Him in the Kingdom of His Father, and in order to admit them to this Kingdom He wills to die on the Cross, saying: "Greater love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life for his friends." 

 As I meditated on these Divine words, I saw how imperfect was the love I bore my Sisters in religion. I understood that I did not love them as Our Lord loves them. I know now that true charity consists in bearing all our neighbours' defects—not being surprised at their weakness, but edified at their smallest virtues. Above all I know that charity must not remain shut up in the heart, for "No man lighteth a candle, and putteth it in a hidden place, nor under a bushel; but upon a candlestick, that they who come in may see the light." 

 It seems to me, dear Mother, this candle represents that charity which enlightens and gladdens, not only those who are dear to us, but all those who are of the household.

The Thunderer

 Today is the feast of St. Jerome, Doctor of the Church. In his De viris illustribus (Of Famous Men), he gives a list of 135 Christians important for their work in Christian letters. (He actually includes three Jews -- Philo Judaeus, Josephus, and Justus -- and one pagan -- Seneca -- on what might be called 'the grounds of close enough', each contributing something important to Christian letters, and in the cases of Philo, Josephus, and Seneca, there being some reason in their texts or in popular traditions to think that they were at least broadly friendly to Christians.) The final Famous Man of Christian Letters that Jerome mentions is himself:

I, Jerome, son of Eusebius, of the city of Strido, which is on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia and was overthrown by the Goths, up to the present year, that is, the fourteenth of the Emperor Theodosius, have written the following: Life of Paul the monk, one book of Letters to different persons, an Exhortation to Heliodorus, Controversy of Luciferianus and Orthodoxus, Chronicle of universal history, 28 homilies of Origen on Jeremiah and Ezekiel, which I translated from Greek into Latin, On the Seraphim, On Osanna, On the prudent and the prodigal sons, On three questions of the ancient law, Homilies on the Song of Songs two, Against Helvidius, On the perpetual virginity of Mary, To Eustochius, On maintaining virginity, one book of Epistles to Marcella, a consolatory letter to Paula On the death of a daughter, three books of Commentaries on the epistle of Paul to the Galatians, likewise three books of Commentaries on the epistle to the Ephesians, On the epistle to Titus one book, On the epistle to Philemon one, Commentaries on Ecclesiastes, one book of Hebrew questions on Genesis, one book On places in Judea, one book of Hebrew names, Didymus on the Holy Spirit, which I translated into Latin one book, 39 homilies on Luke, On Psalms 10 to 16, seven books, On the captive Monk, The Life of the blessed Hilarion. I translated the New Testament from the Greek, and the Old Testament from the Hebrew, and how many Letters I have written To Paula and Eustochius I do not know, for I write daily. I wrote moreover, two books of Explanations on Micah, one book On Nahum, two books On Habakkuk, one On Zephaniah, one On Haggai, and many others On the prophets, which are not yet finished, and which I am still at work upon.

As the Garments of the Saints

 26. The poet ends the move as he begins it. If the philosopher only orders everything, places everything, the poet would loosen all bonds. His words are not common signs -- they are sounds -- magic words which move beautiful groups around themselves. As the garments of the saints still retain wondrous powers, so is many a word sanctified through some splendid memory, and has become a poem almost on its own. For the poet language is never too poor but always too general. He needs words that often recur and are played out through use. His world is simple, like his instrument -- but it is just as inexhaustible a source of melodies.

[Novalis, Logological Fragments I, in Novalis: Philosophical Writings, Margaret Mahony Stoljar, ed. and tr., SUNY Press (Albany, NY: 1997), p. 54.]

A good example of what Novalis has in mind, I think, is the word 'mother', which is in bare sense something like 'the designation of a woman relative to her children'; but how far this falls short of the word's meaning! The word 'mother' is indeed "a poem almost on its own", and Novalis surely has something of the right idea about what makes it so -- it has not only a bare common meaning but is a word that is associated for many with "some splendid memory", and therefore its actual meaning is many-layered from being used in such a richly varied portion of overall human experience. It is this many-layered character that makes it suitable for many of the figurative expressions in which it shows up; to speak of Mother Church or Mother Russia or Mother Earth is not merely to carry over some kind of analogy with a 'woman relative to her children' but to carry over analogies with these layers -- the phases of motherhood, the actual relations of children to their mothers, the all-encompassing providence of which motherhood makes such an excellent symbol precisely because it is an eminent example of something that involves a sort of all-encompassing providence. The layers are what make the word an instrument capable of being "inexhaustible" as "a source of melodies." And so on with many other words that are in common use across a richly varied part of human experience, the second-class relics of the human person.

On Milgram Experiments

 Laura Niemi, Edouard Machery, and John M. Doris have an op-ed in Scientific American, Milgram’s Infamous Shock Studies Still Hold Lessons for Confronting Authoritarianism, in which they defend a certain interpretation of Milgram's shock studies from criticism:

By reexamining the data from Milgram’s experiments and considering the outcomes of several conceptual replications (more recent studies that used different approaches to probe people’s susceptibility to authority figures), we determined that, in fact, Milgram’s work and conclusions still stand. That finding has several important implications, particularly for confronting the knotty question of how people might overcome the tendency to submit to malevolent authority.

I am unconvinced of the broader conclusion. For one thing, it's unclear how generalizable Milgram's actual results would be. People often, as the authors do, take it to provide some sort of insight into authoritarian regimes. But none of Milgram's own experiments concerned obedience in authoritarian regimes; they (and almost all of the replications that the authors talk about) are all about direct or indirect obedience to a scientific expert in a scenario constructed within what they recognize as a formal experiment. These are not the same kind of obedience, nor the same kind of authority. If we take them at face value, one can very well argue, what they would seem to show is the very grave danger posed by purported experts like scientists, arising from the tendency of people not to obey, simpliciter, but to assume that such purported experts know what they are doing. (That the authors take the Milgram experiments to have implications like being careful in selecting political leadership and not, as would be much more justified, being careful with letting people like themselves determine practical policies, is, I think, an example of a very common kind of wishful thinking among academics in which they jump to assuming that their work has broad, grand relevance on a basis that simply shows that it has some local relevance.)

Further, it's not at all clear that the experiment is correctly described as concerned with "the tendency to submit to malevolent authority"; certainly the participants did not regard themselves as submitting to malevolent authority, nor were the experimenters actually malevolent authorities. There are also other complications. For instance, it has been argued that it is often the case that as experimenters move from encouraging an action in ways that are obviously requests to giving what are clearly orders that people become less likely to comply. That is to say, people are less likely to obey if it is clearly made a matter of obedience. Related to this, it's unclear that the experiments are actually tracking obedience or submission to authority as opposed to (to take just one example) interpretation of the distribution of responsibility. 

The authors of the op-ed essentially jump from answering one particular objection -- that perhaps the participants didn't think it was real* -- to trying to reinstate it in promiscuous applicability. This is not a legitimate inference, and the defects are not filled by their more formal work-up.

It's also unclear how far their claim can work on the authoritarian regime side. We have plenty of evidence (e.g., testimony of people who have lived under authoritarian regimes) that compliance under authoritarian regimes is heavily motivated by the belief that compliance is necessary to survival, either literally or figuratively in terms of 'getting by'. For understanding most of the obedience problems in an authoritarian regime, the supposed tendency to obey authority that people infer from the Milgram experiments does not seem to be particularly useful.

----

* It's unclear to me that they have quite established that the objection fails. What they have established is that when people are specifically asked whether they believed it was real, they often say that they did. But when you look at the examples, I'm not sure you couldn't interpret some of this as people affirming that they did indeed believe that this was what was proposed as part of the experiment in which they were participating. If you have people participate in a murder mystery game, you can get them afterward to say that they did indeed believe that so-and-so was the murderer; what they mean is not that they believed that so-and-so was the murderer in real life, since they don't even believe that there was a real murder, but that they believed that the murder mystery game did in fact work in such a way that so-and-so had the murderer role.  I'm not saying that this is how the participants' comments should be taken; my point is that the authors of the op-ed (like, it seems, many of the psychologists doing these kinds of experiments) seem to be assuming that belief is single, unitary, straightforward thing. But there are lots of situations in which people's explicit beliefs as participants are not necessarily what their beliefs are simpliciter -- and while some of these are very different situations from an experiment, nonetheless people are involved in these experiments as participants. And unless I'm missing something, none of the evidence to which the authors point is sufficiently precise and careful to close this gap.

The Old Thorns Shall Grow Out of the Old Stem

 One Certainty
by Christina Rossetti 

 Vanity of vanities, the Preacher saith,
All things are vanity. The eye and ear
Cannot be filled with what they see and hear:
Like early dew, or like the sudden breath
Of wind, or like the grass that withereth,
Is man, tossed to and for by hope and fear:
So little joy hath he, so little cheer,
Till all things end in the long dust of death.
Today is the sill the same as yesterday,
Tomorrow also even as one of them;
And there is nothing new under the sun:
Until the ancient race of Time be run,
The old thorns shall grow out of the old stem,
And morning shall be cold and twilight grey.

Dashed Off XXII

 the 'sense of existence' as a mode of the sensus communis
-- the sense of integral salience, of salience to the whole of our sensory experiences

Monarchies in practice (and sometimes despite intention) tend to be complex power-sharing systems.

having both the Body and the Blood in the Eucharist as a symbol of the superabundance of grace

taking the Five Classics "not only as written texts but also as broadly conceived humanistic visions" (Tu Wei-Ming)
"Confucius never claimed any positive knowledge of spiritual matters and yet he implied that he had acquired a tacit understanding with heaven."

Building and maintaining a family is participation in the governance of society.

We are social by affection and civilizational by reason.

It is an error to think of habituation as circumscribing free will rather than modulating it.

"If God is love, charity should have no end, for divinity can be closed off by no boundary." Leo the Great

two key ostensions of the Christian faith: "This is my beloved Son" and "This is my body"

Our assessment of evidence always depends on how we classify it.

We do not naturally think only of natural things.

The problem with the credit theory of money is that to cover everything adequately, it needs to presuppose something to be credited.

Money is made by exchanges; it is the exchanges that are socially constructed, and money is a role in them. One of the key features of money is that it easily crosses the real (as in 'real estate') vs. ledger boundary; real assets are represented in ledgers but do not exist in them, financial assets are both represented and wholly existent in ledgers, but money is both real and ledgerly.

presential knowledge of intention
knowledge of intention by extrapolation of deliberation
knowledge of intention by causal inference from action

"Normative concepts exist because human beings have normative problems. And we have normative problems because we are self-conscious rational animals, capable of reflection about what we ought to believe and to do." Korsgaard

"Every theory of 'projection', either empiricist or intellectualist, assumes what it wants to explain, since we could not project our feelings into the visible behaviour of an animal if soemthing in its behaviour did not itself suggest the inference to us." Merleau-Ponty

the causes of the Church (Lawrence of Brindisi)
(1) principal efficient: God
(2) instrumental efficient: apostles and ministers
(3) material cause: human multitude
(4) formal cause: true faith
(5) final cause: glory of God and salvation of souls
-- Thus the causal definition of the Church is the human confidelity formed by God through the apostles and other ministers for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.
-- possibly --> one : principal efficient :: holy : final :: catholic :: material :: apostolic : instrumental efficient :: Church (ecclesia) : formal

Isaiah 2:2-3 & Mic 4:1-2 on the visible Church; cf. Mt 5:14

Both the true preaching of the gospel and the right administration of the sacraments are those that exhibit the Notes of the Church.

To have faith is not bare belief but to believe in a way that is perfected by belonging.

ways of clarifying the true Church
(1) via notarum
(2) via empirica
(3) via historica
(4) via primatus

the integrated multiplicity of the Church's testimony to Christ as a sign of its credibility

sacramental character as having moral causality (cp. Bellarmine)

Errors diversify inquiry and sins diversify goods.

oneiric entities, ludic entities

theatre as an externalization of dream (cp. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night's Dream, which uses this as a conceit)

Bottles and jars and tubes are fascinating in being portable holes; they are an example of the almost magical character of human ingenuity.

Privacy is an inherently hierarchical notion.

Some innocence is default, but some innocence is acquired.

answers that are not solutions and solutions that are not answers

Evidence has at least three major functions in inquiry: it points to something, it interacts with other evidence, and it suggests.

(1) the apostolic churches
(2) the Christian tribal obediences (national churches)
(3) the Christian subtribal communities
(4) the Chrisitan-associated religious movements

Money's ability to measure the value of other things depends on its not being itself a primary target of acquisition.

the privity conception of a trust: confidence reposed in another, annexed in privity to the estate or land and to the person touching the land
--> this led to the notion that corporate entities could not be trustees, not being natural persons in whom confidence could be reposed
--> this slowly shifted from focus on the conscience of the person to focus on the equitable rights attached to the estate; this ultimately allows for the possibility of corporate trustees
--> privity shifted from being taken very strictly to being taken loosely

idea as agentive object, faculty as objectual agent

Many things must be tried for some things to be discovered.

Christians as a spiritually armigerous people

"Man is tricked only by the simplest ideas." Barbey D'Auberville

Sure hope is always founded upon victory.

What people call their identity is often the investment of their person in what is beneath them.

revivescence of skill after disruption

the overflow of reason into the world
(1) skill
(2) design
(3) prudential organization
(4) social deeming

Prudence and skill, as being practical, have animal analogues.

use of sign vs. instrumentalization of sign

instrumentalizations of sign-systems as like vestment

'X counts as Y in C' and satisficing

American hegemony is resilient because it is many different systems, allowing other states to be tightly or loosely enmeshed as they find appropriate for themselves.

particles as interaction-points characterized by probabilities

In inquiry, every problem is a hint.

"The junzi dwells in ren by means of yi, and only then is it ren. He carries out yi by means of li, and only then is it yi." Xunzi

rites as providing a source of moral vocabulary

Xunzi on rites // Plotinus on prayers

perlocutionary force
(1) persuasions
(2) provocations / response incitements
(3) norm enforcements
(4) instructions
(5) obfuscations

Money is not primarily an objective-cause kind but an instrumental-cause kind.

Jesus relates individually to His disciples, but He also, and more often (as far as we see in the Gospels), relates to them as groups.

Money is a 'store of value' specifically for exchange.

extrinsic dispositions

Money is not reducible to physical properties because it is an abstract feature of mediated exchanges insofar as they are commensurable.

To every virtue corresponds values of the world as seen in light of that virtue.

The line between individual and collective intentionality is not always clear.

faculties as usable layers of self

the seven capital vices as each a corruption of an importants aspect of the human person, and therefore as a sort of negative sketch of what it is to be a human person
(0) pride: likeness to God
(1) vainglory: appearance to others
(2) envy: participation in others
(3) wrath: self-dominion
(4) sloth: internality
(5) greed: expression into physical world
(6) gluttony: physical organism
(7) lust: species-being

fictions as fragments of impossible worlds

Institutions can facilitate coordination and cooperation, but they can also limit overcoordination and disvalued cooperations.

"A prudent man would not criticize every ignorance, nor would he consider every knowledge worthy of praise." Palamas

light as manifesting manifested & manifested manifester

"In the absence of any purposes, goals, and forms in nature, there is no principle for dividing the organism into working parts." Craver

The foremost thing we do with words is being present by means of them.

Gregory the Great, Moralia 8.54 & divine sublimity

It takes a lot of ordinary to build a little magical.

One of the major differences between favors & money is that the value of favors is always negotiable, and is re-negotiated in ways concerned with particular exchanges, getting its actual value within a given particular exchange.

commitment, covenant, consecration

The value of money is specifically a value for mediating exchanges.

Catholic Social Teaching is not a political philosophy or program but a framework adaptable to many different social situations and structures.

Rites are cooperative means by which we greatly expand our flexibility for handling different situations.

'the grand traditions of good talk'

The Lord's hard sayings establish that it is not enough to be decent.

In designing and reforming social arrangements, one must recognize that most features of social arrangement, are undesigned.

When people land belief, they often are attributing to belief what pertains to truth, which we sometimes belief. 

All sex that is not rape is a ritual.

Observation and experiment can only tell us of what does happen if they also tell us, at least indirectly and in a limited way, what might happen, because what does happen happens as something that might happen in various ways.

Entropy is an inherently modal feature of systems, and requires a modal analysis (like Gibbs's ensembles).

Every physical change involves the generation and corruption of physical states.

providential societies vs artistic societies
--> prudential societies can include both as subsocieties

Why is there something rather than nothing?
1. regress
2. state
-- -- 2a. immediate
-- -- -- -- 2a1. brute-factism
-- -- -- -- 2a2. necessitarianism
-- -- 2b. ultimate
-- -- -- -- 2b1. necessary being(s)
-- -- -- -- 2b2. necessary principle/law

Simplicity and elegance are really explanatory only in contexts involving mental causes.

pure allegory vs. mythic re-representation / re-contextualization

Almost all of human life is lived in an abnormal normality, like citizens of an occupied country going about their business as their occupiers buy their wares, collect taxes, and occasionally make them disappear.

'X counts as Y in Z' and estimatio/cogitatio

commens, universe of discourse, definition

Most countercultures are imaginary self-representations.

Social media shows that there is not merely a 'hustle culture' but a kind of culture one might call 'hustled culture', people whose hobby is finding people to hustle them. We are insulated in everyday life from the phenomenon of people enjoying being the sold-to and even the swindled, the people who find it exciting to be conned and scammed.

engineering as concerned with internal functions of artifacts that are open systems (Maxim Raginsky)

Melanchthon takes the Second Table to be concerned with civil justice.

"...'to participate' is in some way the same as 'to take part', so that it imports a double relation -- both of part to whole and of taker to taken." Scotus Ord 1.8.2
--> he notes that the first is a real relation and the second a relation of reason (although in genus-species, the second is real)

States do not engage in 'remedy and reparation' unless forced. When a state or government offers up what it claims to be reparation or remedy freely, it is actually engaging in bargaining, using its past wrongs as leverage. Past wrongs are cases in which people can often be convinced to exchange a substantive good for a purely symbolic one, in order to feel vindicated.

Public schooling is an instrument for bureaucratizing a population.

stock: any entity that accumulates or depletes over time (level variable)
flow: rate of change in stock
If quantity of stock at time t is Q(t), then derivative dQ(t)/d(t) is flow; stock at t is the integral of flow from 0 to t.

All life is a mosaic of hope and glory.

One Main Office of a Liberal Education

 All exact knowledge supposes the mind to be able to apply, steadily and clearly, not only the processes of reasoning, but also certain fundamental ideas; and it is one main office of a liberal education to fix and develope these ideas. The ideas of Space and of Number are the subject matter of Geometry, of Arithmetic, and of Algebra in its character of Universal Arithmetic: and since all our knowledge, relative to the external world, must be subject to the conditions of space and number, the elementary portions of mathematics just mentioned are, rightly and necessarily, made the basis of all intellectual education. If we advance further in mathematical study, with the view of its thus serving as an intellectual discipline, what other ideas do we thus bring to activity and use? I reply, that the main general ideas which we have next to introduce, and which consequently should be the governing principles of the second stage of a liberal education, are the following:--the mechanical ideas of Force and Body, with their various modifications; the idea of the Symmetry of symbolical expressions;--the idea of the Universal Interpretation of symbols, including as an important branch of this, the Application of Algebra to Geometry;--and the idea of a Limit.

William Whewell, The Doctrine of Limits, page viii. Whewell was a major advocate for a conception of liberal arts that was significantly informed by the basic elements of the sciences of his day, as well as one of the major figures in the development of calculus education in Britain, so there is perhaps an implicit argument here that has more extensive aims than are immediately stated.

Links of Note

 * Colin Marshall, Do All Roads Lead to Philosophy on Wikipedia? They Do About 97.3% of the Time, at "Open Culture". As noted in the article, Wikipedia is a constantly varying thing, so paths change, but here is the Wikipedia road from 'atmosphere of earth' to 'philosophy of language':

atmosphere of Earth -- gas -- states of matter -- physics -- natural science -- branches of science -- science -- scientific method -- empirical -- evidence -- proposition -- philosophy of language

* Jane Psmith reviews Dennis Rasmussen's Fears of a Setting Sun at "Mr. and Mrs. Psmith's Bookshelf"

* Fabio Lampert, Freedom, Omniscience, and the Contingent A Priori (PDF)

* ArchaeoEd, a podcast about ancient civilizations of the Americas

* Matthew David Segall, 'No Thinker Thinks Twice': On the Attempt to Catch Whitehead in the Act of Philosophizing, at "Footnotes2Plato"

* Andrej Čaja, John Henry Newman's Idea of a University as Critique of Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarian Conception of Education (PDF)

* Carlo DaVia, The Role of Aristotle in Gadamer's Work (PDF)

* Freddie deBoer, The Basics: Deference Politics

* Matthew Minerd, From Unity to Distinction to Unity: A Recovery of the Vocabulary of Various Mental Distinctions, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Monte Ransom Johnson, The Medical Background and Inductive Basis of Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean (PDF)

* Frederick Bauerschmidt, The Body of Christ Is Made from Bread: Transubstantiation and the Grammar of Creation, at "Church Life Journal"

* Jeff McMahan, Just War Theory and The Russia-Ukraine War, at "Blog of the APA". A much better discussion than most discussions of just war theory I have seen. I particularly like the recognition, essential to any accurate account of just war theory, that war, the situation, is not the same thing as war, the action, and it is the latter, not the former, that just war theory directly considers; it is astounding how many people equivocate between the two, including people who should know better. I also think that, while it needs some work, his account of the proportionality requirement is much better than you usually find. It's also good to see someone using the distinction between responsibility and culpability, which is quite important in this kind of context. The particular 'revisionist' version of just war theory that McMahan advocates, though, is not strictly tenable on human rights grounds, I think; soldiers have a basic right to self-defense because everyone does -- the basic form of the right does not depend on one's character. Granted, I think you can argue that respect for rights morally has to take a somewhat different form depending on whether things are being done justly or unjustly, and that there are particular rights, some of which may be related to more basic rights, that come from just action specifically and cannot be appealed to by people acting unjustly, but these are different matters and not relevant to things like basic self-defense. McMahan is also hampered on this particular point, I think, by not considering the full spectrum of reasons why a soldier might be fighting, and forgetting, on this point, at least, that part of just war theory is the recognition that warring is only just as a means to just peace, and that how one understands the moral obligations in war is affected by what leaves open the possibility for bringing about just peace. This is historically one of the secondary reasons why people have accepted the 'moral equality of combatants', for instance; if you don't, then you can get into some nastily vicious cycles of war. But, that said, it is again one of the better discussions I have seen.

Life and Illness

 Matti Hayry at the JME Blog:

Illness, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “an unhealthy condition of body or mind”. Health, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.” Life, according to any realistic account, is not characterised by complete physical, mental and social well-being. It is, in other words, an unhealthy condition of body and mind. It is an illness.

This is as fallacious an inference as it sounds, although in some subtle ways. It involves a formal fallacy; 'healthy' and 'health' are not synonymous because one is said with reference to the other. -- as we might put it in lexicography-speak, 'healthy' is not 'health' but 'pertaining to health'. 'Unhealthy' is even more indirectly related to 'health', because the negation ('un-') can interact in odd ways with the 'pertaining' part. But the inference is also problematic materially. From the fact that life is not characterized by complete physical, mental, and social well-being, one cannot infer that it is the condition that itself involves the privation of complete, physical, mental, and social well-being, which is what you would have to assume in order to get the conclusion that life is an unhealthy condition of body and mind. We can see this another way by asking of the WHO definition, "Well-being of what"? And the plausible answer is that it is of living organisms insofar as they are alive. Likewise, you can ask of the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition, "Of body and mind in what respect?" And again the plausible answer is that it is something like "insofar as they are alive". An inanimate or dead body cannot be ill. But illness is cumulative or quasi-cumulative. The more ill you get, the closer to dead you get; if you get too ill, you die. Thus life may not be characterized by 'complete physical, mental, and social well-being', but illness is in the privation, not in the life. Illness is, so to speak, the empty gap between 'being alive' and 'being alive in complete physical, mental, and social well-being'; it makes no  sense to say that life is the empty gap between being alive and being alive in complete well-being. 

We can see all of this in yet another way, by asking if 'healthy life' is a contradiction in terms, which it would have to be if life itself were an illness. It is very clearly not. If we intended to claim that, although life in itself is not illness, life happens to be illness in the cases we know, then we would have to ask if 'healthy life of the sort we know' is a contradiction in terms; it very clearly is not. What this suggests is that when we are talking about 'life' and 'illness' we are talking about distinguishable things, even in cases where we find them both.

He continues:

Since being born means entering an existence of illness, the rationality and morality of creating new lives should perhaps be reconsidered. If illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated when possible, prevention would be the most effective way of achieving this. No new lives, no new future illness.

'Illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated when possible' is ambiguous between two senses: 'In all possible circumstances, illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated' and 'Illness ought to be eliminated and mitigated to the extent it is possible to do so'; these are modally distinct, one involving a propositional modality and the other involving a predicate modality. The inference made here requires, I think, that we take it in the (much stronger) propositional modality sense; but medical ethics only requires the predicate modality sense, as is clear from when Hayry talks about the WHO definition. Eliminating and mitigating illness is not an absolute value, for all possible circumstances, but an instrumental one. Instrumental to what? Well, the plausible answers are 'living' or 'living better' or 'living as well as possible', depending on context. Why else would people want less illness?

In any case, another example for the 'irrational anti-natalist arguments' file. This is an interesting one, though, because of all of the parallel arguments you could create. Vice is an unvirtuous condition, virtue is a state of complete mental excellence, human life is not a state of complete mental excellence, therefore human life is a vice. Ugliness is an unbeautiful condition, beauty is a state of fullness of excellence for pleasing on contemplation, human life is not such a state, therefore human life is a species of ugliness; of course your mama is ugly, because she is alive. The possibilities are endless.

Fortnightly Book, September 22

 Charles Dickens began publishing fiction in late 1833 with short sketches of characters and scenes; originally they were published without byline, but in 1834, he started using the pen-name, Boz. (The 'o' is long; it derives from 'Moses' pronounced through the nose as 'Boses'.) The sketches were published in a number of different magazines until 1836, when Dickens a published, in two 'series',  Sketches by Boz, Illustrative of Every-Day Life and Every-Day People. It did fairly well, although it was very quickly overshadowed by The Pickwick Papers, Dickens's first novel. Ever since that first novel, Sketches by Boz has tended to be overlooked; but no longer here, as it is the next fortnightly book. It's a long work, so it might be a three- or even four-week 'fortnight', depending on my schedule.

Most versions of Sketches use the 1868 edition, but I am reading the Penguin Classics edition edited by Dennis Walder, which deliberately uses the 1839 edition, the first edition to have all of the sketches, on the grounds that (a) this is the edition for which Dickens's own direct involvement was most extensive and is best understood; and (b) many of the revisions to later editions are obviously concessions, perhaps not all directly authorized by Dickens, to a Victorian audience, toning down some of the vividness of the original sketches, and were, besides, occasionally sloppy. Whether this is the case or not, it is the version I have. It also has the original illustrations by George Cruikshank.

The Saga of the Jomsvikings

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

Gorm was the name of a king who ruled over Denmark and was called the Childless. He was a mighty king, and popular with his subjects. He had long governed his kingdom when the events to be told happened. At that time there was in Saxland an earl called Arnfinn, who held his land in fief from King Charlemagne. Arnfinn and King Gorm were good friends and had been on viking expeditions together. The earl had a beautiful sister, and he was fonder of her than he should have been and begot a child with her; the child was kept hidden, and then the earl sent men away with it but bade them not to desert it before they knew what would befall it.

They came to Denmark and to a forest. They were aware that King Gorm was in the forest hunting with his followers. They laid the child under a tree and hid themselves. (pp. 27-28)

Summary: King Gorm discovers a child, whom he names Knut, in the forest, and arranges to have him fostered and eventually makes him heir to the kingdom; when Knut becomes king, he has a son, also named Gorm, who becomes king. In the second Gorm's day there was an earl, known as Klak-Harold, who had a daughter, Thyra, who was able to interpret dreams. Gorm had several dreams, and Thyra was able to interpret them (as foretelling the decline of Denmark, but not yet); in return, Gorm married Thyra, and they had two sons, Knut and Harold; by the happenstance of events, Knut dies and Harold becomes the new king. King Harold Gormsson and one of his earls, Earl Hakon, plot against the king of Norway (also called Harold), and it is within the context of this conflict that the rest of the tale takes place. This stage-setting is not mere stage-setting; part of the anonymous author's point, I think, is that the broader context is playing a significant role in the story. This is specifically a tale of Norway versus Denmark, and we are learning how Denmark sets itself up to fail at the same time that it appears to be succeeding.

King Harold Gormsson gets involved in a feud between two brothers named Fiolnir Tokason and Aki Tokason, leading to the death of the latter; the youngest brother, Palnir, is perplexed as to how to get vengeance for Aki's death given that the perpetrator is king of Denmark, and thus one of the most powerful people in the known world; but the woman he marries, Ingeborg, has a dream that suggests that King Harold will, along with many others die. They have a son, Palnatoki, who grows up and makes important connections. He also is clever to take up any opportunity that might come about; he discovers an illegitimate child of the king's, named Svein, and sees to his fostering. Svein grows up to be a thorn in King Harold's side, and in the disputes between them Palnatoki is able to seize a chance to kill King Harold in secret. Svein becomes king, but when he discovers that Palnatoki killed his father, he attemps to arrest him. (King Svein definitely does not want people to think that he was behind the regicide, and he even more definitely does not want people to think that regicide can be rewarded.) Palnatoki leaves, and because of his connections is able to mass a significant fleet. They harry some islands in the Baltic and the local king, Burisleif, recognizes that this cannot go on; King Burisleif offers Palnatoki a deal: he will give Palnatoki the island and fortress of Jomsborg, on the condition that Palnatoki will defend the king's lands. Thus is the beginning of the Jomsvikings, a military fraternity devoted to battle and deeds of extraordinary martial courage.

We then get the tale of some of the famous last members of the Jomsvikings -- the violent prodigy Vagn, who at the age of twelve is so competent in battle that he convinces the Jomsvikings to make an exception to their rule that no one can join before the age of eighteen; Sigvaldi and Thorkel, devious and cunning brothers who have come to test their mettle; bold Bui, famous for his resoluteness and brazenness. After Palnatoki's death, Sigvaldi becomes administrator of the laws of the Jomsvikings, but he is too devious by half and his scheming in an attempt to get a marriage to Burisleif's daughter leads him to kidnapping King Svein. It ends well, but of course it is a red flag that things are not too stable. When the father of Sigvalid and Thorkel dies, King Svein uses the occasion to pressure Sigvaldi and others into making terrible vows while drunk. However, vows are vows, and Sigvaldi intends to follow threw on his vow, which is to seize Earl Hakon's lands, or kill Earl Hakon, or die himself; the other Jomsvikings intend also to follow through on their related vows, and King Svein pledges twenty ships to help them. They intend to set upon Earl Hakon before he knows what's happening, but Hakon is alerted to the impending invasion, so it becomes a straightforward sea battle. 

The Jomsvikings might well have won under most circumstances, but Earl Hakon makes a pact with the pagan goddesses, Thorgerd and Irpa. We don't really know anything about Thorgerd and Irpa, although they show up occasionally throughout Scandinavian literature; they seem to have been goddesses who were particularly open to making a deal, or at least giving a bit of luck to those who make the right sacrifice for it. Earl Hakon sacrifices his seven-year-old son to them, which seems to have been the right sacrifice for what he wanted, because a storm comes up whose winds, rain, and hail put the Jomsvikings at a disadvantage, and the goddesses show up themselves sending forth arrows from their fingers that kill man after man after man. Sigvaldi and his followers and allies withdraw. The rest of the Jomsvikings are defeated, and the leaders are seized and begin to face execution. But each one dies fearlessly with a joke on his lips, and Vagn even manages to impress them so much that he wins life for himself and those who haven't died yet. We then get the 'what happened after' to the survivors: Vagn becomes wildly successful, Sigvaldi becomes successful, Bui becomes a dragon. Earl Hakon rules Norway, but not for long, for things are changing: Olaf Trygvasson comes along, Earl Hakon is murdered, and eventually King St. Olaf converts Norway to Christianity, and a new and different age begins.

The whole story, particularly where concerned with the battle, is well done. No one in this tale is what you could call a good person; every one of them is a nasty piece of work. Some of them, like Vagn, seem sociopathic. But they are not without their admirable features, and the sacrifice of Earl Hakon gives a twist that makes them almost heroic despite their obvious vices. Before, the Jomsvikings were basically ruthless pirates, admirable only for their competence and brotherhood, but they fight gods fearlessly, they face death fearlessly, and they laugh in the face of anyone who attempts to intimidate them. They are folk heroes, not because they are good but because they are, even in hopeless defeat, humanity at its most indomitable. It's a very Scandinavian-saga attitude; most of our sagas were written by Christians who pretty clearly admired the pagan indomitability of their ancestors despite recognizing that Christianity had improved life overall. The author of this saga seems particularly taken with the idea of the Fearless Viking. He is also a skillful enough to convey what is attractive about it to the reader, which is an impressive feat.

Favorite Passage:

Then Palnatoki established laws for Jomsborg, with the assistance of wise men, to the end that the renown fo the men of Jomsborg should spread most widely and their power should wax greatly. The first of their laws was that no one might join the company who was over fifty or under eighteen. All members were to be between these ages. Kinship must not weight when considering for membership a man who wished to join. No member was to flee from any man who was his equal in bravery and as well armed as himself. Each member must avenge any other member as though he were his brother. No one was to utter words of fear or be afraid of anything, however hopeless matters looked. All the booty brought in from their expeditions was to be carried to the standard -- of whatever value, big or small -- and anyone not abiding by this rule was to start a quarrel. And if news of importance came to any man's knowledge he was not to have the temerity to make it known to all, because Palnatoki was to announce all news. No one was to have a woman within the fort, and no one was to be away for more than three days. And if it became known after a man had been admitted into the company that he had earlier slain the father or brother or some other near kinsman of a member, Palnatoki was to be the judge, as he was to be also of whatever other differences arose among them. (pp. 63-64)

Recommendation: Recommended.

****

The Saga of the Jomsvikings, Hollander, tr., University of Texas Press (Austin: 2022).