Ignatius Theophorus

Today is the feast of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Martyr, one of the Apostolic Fathers in the generation after the Apostles. He was bishop of Antioch, and according to tradition the third after St. Peter, and (also according to tradition) he died around 116. From his letter to the Ephesians (18:1-19:3): 

My spirit is made an offscouring for the Cross, which is a stumbling-block to them that are unbelievers, but to us salvation and life eternal. Where is the wise? Where is the disputer? Where is the boasting of them that are called prudent? For our God, Jesus the Christ, was conceived in the womb by Mary according to a dispensation, of the seed of David but also of the Holy Ghost; and He was born and was baptized that by His passion He might cleanse water. And hidden from the prince of this world were the virginity of Mary and her child-bearing and likewise also the death of the Lord -- three mysteries to be cried aloud -- the which were wrought in the silence of God. How then were they made manifest to the ages? A star shone forth in the heaven above all the stars; and its light was unutterable, and its strangeness caused amazement; and all the rest of the constellations with the sun and moon formed themselves into a chorus about the star; but the star itself far outshone them all; and there was perplexity to know whence came this strange appearance which was so unlike them. From that time forward every sorcery and every spell was dissolved, the ignorance of wickedness vanished away, the ancient kingdom was pulled down, when God appeared in the likeness of man unto newness of everlasting life; and that which had been perfected in the counsels of God began to take effect. Thence all things were perturbed, because the abolishing of death was taken in hand.

The Cogitative Sense

 Thomas Aquinas, in great measure, although not slavishly, following Avicenna, organizes our sensory experience into particular sensory powers. The external powers are the senses in our usual sense; vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell. The internal powers or senses process these: the common sense is, so to speak our sense of sensing and thus is how we are aware that we are sensing in such-and-such way and also is our sense of our sensations relating to each other (our sense of co-sensing, e.g., that the sound we hear is co-sensed with the sight of something rushing by); the imagination retains and recombines what we have sensed; the estimative is concerned with 'intentions', i.e., principles organizing our senses in particular ways, and in brute animals, for instance, is their sense of safety and danger, or of things as attractive or repulsive; and the memorative retains these intentions, and is therefore among other things the sense that something has been retained by the imagination. In human beings, however, according to Aquinas, we have instead of an estimative sense a cogitative sense, which does still seems to have, as part of its lower act, some estimative role like that found in other animals, but whose higher and principal act in human beings is ministry to the intellect.

As Aquinas puts it, the excellence of the cogitative sense compared to the estimative sense in other animals lies in its "affinity and proximity to universal reason, which, in a sense, overflows" into it (ST 1.78.4 ad 5). The formality under which the cogitative sense handles our sensory experience is cognition of  individuals as under a common nature. Unlike the intellect, it has no conception of universals as such, but it does identify and create particular patterns and groupings and recognize individual, singular, particular things as members of those groupings and components of those patterns. Because it serves as an instrument for intellectual acts, the cogitative sense is also called the passive intellect and the particular reason. It is not strictly intellect, at all, but it organizes and disposes our sensory experience in ways that facilitate or are responsive to things like intellectual abstraction. It is likewise not strictly reason at all, but it re-organizes our internal sensory processing in light of reasoning, and most importantly is how we think about singular, particular things. The latter means that it has a central role in practical problem-solving and moral reasoning; prudence as a moral virtue primarily works by organizing the cogitative sense.

I have been thinking about the cogitative sense because I am re-reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and it suddenly struck me that almost everything Kant describes in the work is concerned with what Aquinas would call the cogitative power, and if you understand it in this way as Kant's 'reason', and even more his 'understanding', actually being the cogitative sense, suddenly so many things about Kant's argument start to make sense. 

This is not an accident, but arises from the structure of the problem that Kant has set himself. Kant concedes a lot to empiricism, and one of things he concedes is that we only have empirical objects of cognition. All objects of cognition must come from sensation, imagination, or empirical apperception (sense of self).  Thus all of our cognition of objects consists of acts that are what Aquinas would call acts of the internal senses. However, Kant is not an empiricist; he (correctly) recognizes that empiricism cannot possibly account for our actual thought and experience. Attempting to work out the possible conditions for our actual thought and experience, he sets himself the problem of how our sensations, imaginations, and empirical apperceptions can possibly have the unities they actually do; he calls this synthesis, and, using transcendental arguments, he establishes that these syntheses must conform to concepts and possible judgments, and that to make sense of any such synthesis and its conformity, you must take the concepts and the forms of judgments to be a priori, and to make sense of our actual experience of objects, you must be able to make the distinction between the phenomenal (the empirical) and the noumenal; however, given the empiricist restriction, we cannot take the noumenal as object, so it can only be a concept, held a priori, that serves as a limit-concept for the phenomenal, without which the latter cannot be interpreted as we inevitably interpret it. 

Now, the highest cognitive power that specifically concerns empirical objects in Aquinas's scholastic account is the cogitative sense. Thus Kant's empiricist restriction of objects to the empirical means that his analysis of human thought and experience cannot rise higher than the cogitative power. The cogitative power is what synthesizes everything done by all of our other senses, internal or external, and it is also apperceptive, in the sense that in at least a rudimentary way it is a sense of self -- it is how we cognize ourselves as individuals in relation to other individuals, and are able to compare and contrast ourselves with other things, because it is how we cognize anything as individual. However he (correctly) recognizes that cogitation works the way it does only because of what it presupposes, which makes its particular syntheses possible and which can be dimly recognized as the limits or boundaries in light of which everything else is organized. Everything that Kant calls 'transcendental' or 'a priori' or 'noumenal' is what in scholastic terms would be called (depending on the case) intellectual acts and concepts or intelligible objects. In St. Thomas's terms, Kant, starting with the cogitative sense, by transcendental argument establishes that its actions of synthesis require the intellect as a condition for their possibility. However, since he does not rise above what can be found in the cogitative power, he can only consider the intellect 'remotively' -- going simply on what the cogitative power provides, we cannot know what the intellect is or how it works, but only that it is, and that our experience is organized in light of it, and what it is not. This apophatic character is why Kant has so much difficulty in characterizing the noumenal.

As one might expect from how I have described this, I think Aquinas at the fundamental level has the stronger position. Kant concedes too much to the empiricists, and many of the weirder aspects of his epistemology and critique arise directly from those concessions. At the same time, he shows that the empiricists can't be right, even given those concessions, because human experience does not work they way they claim it should and their very limited principles can't explain what we actually experience. In doing this, he's not really doing anything that any other rationalist would, although he does it very well, particularly given how much he has conceded. But what he ends up establishing is that even with those concessions you keep running up against something that goes beyond what those concessions can directly allow, much less explain. We have concepts and principles (or rules, as he often calls them) that, with respect to the kinds of thinking he has been considering, are 'transcendental', and understanding the phenomenal content of experience requires positing the noumenal as a limit. Yet the noumenal has to be more than just a limit, although Kant due to the empiricist concessions is unable to say anything, or at least anything very consistent, about it. All of this can be cleared up simply by recognizing that we have, in however limited a form, a higher cognitive ability than Kant allows when he makes his empiricist concessions. That ability, all call 'intellect'.

Teresa of Avila

 Today was the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, Doctor of the Church. From The Way of Perfection (Chapter 17):

I do not mean that it is for us to say what we shall do, but that we must do our best in everything, for the choice is not ours but the Lord’s. If after many years He is pleased to give each of us her office, it will be a curious kind of humility for you to wish to choose; let the Lord of the house do that, for He is wise and powerful and knows what is fitting for you and for Himself as well. Be sure that, if you do what lies in your power and prepare yourself for high contemplation with the perfection aforementioned, then, if He does not grant it you (and I think He will not fail to do so if you have true detachment and humility), it will be because He has laid up this joy for you so as to give it you in Heaven, and because, as I have said elsewhere, He is pleased to treat you like people who are strong and give you a cross to bear on earth like that which His Majesty Himself always bore. 

 What better sign of friendship is there than for Him to give you what He gave Himself? It might well be that you would not have had so great a reward from contemplation. His judgments are His own; we must not meddle in them. It is indeed a good thing that the choice is not ours; for, if it were, we should think it the more restful life and all become great contemplatives. Oh, how much we gain if we have no desire to gain what seems to us best and so have no fear of losing, since God never permits a truly mortified person to lose anything except when such loss will bring him greater gain!

Patricia Routledge

 Somehow I had missed that Dame Patricia Routledge, one of the great comic actresses of our day, died earlier this month at age 96. She is best known for portraying Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced 'bouquet') in Keeping Up Appearances, but I also like her more wry and dry humor as Hetty Wainthrop in Hetty Wainthrop Investigates, a criminally underrated show. She earned a Tony Award in 1968, playing in Darling of the Day across from Vincent Price and an Olivier Award in 1988 for playing in Candide. Her acting range was extraodinary; while best known for comedy, she played in everything, and did well in everything.

Proposition, Question, and Conclusion

 A proposition (propositio) is an expression (oratio) signifying what is true or false; for instance, when someone says that the heaven is revolvable, this is called a statement (enuntiatio) and an assertion (proloquium). A question is a proposition brought into doubt and uncertainty, as when someone asks whether the heaven is revolvable. A conclusion is a proposition confirmed by arguments, as when someone shows by means of other facts (rebus) that the heaven is revolvable. A statement, whether it is said only for its own sake or brought forward to confirm something else, is a proposition; if one asks regarding it, it is a question; if it is confirmed [by other facts], it is a conclusion. So a proposition, question, and conclusion are one and the same, though they differ in the way mentioned above.

[Boethius, Boethius's De topicis differentiis, Stump, tr., Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY: 2004) p. 30. Part of the point here, I take it, is to establish what it is that remains the same through dialectical inquiry -- we can have a question, which receives confirmation to be a conclusion, and then is affirmed as a proposition, and these three have to be in some sense the same thing, or you've just changed the subject, although they also have to be distinguishable.]

Two New Poem Drafts

 Exclusion

I suppose we can say, if nothing else will do,
that all things have a measure, some accounted span,
that limits make the the thing and keep its focus true,
that all things spread their being in just the ways they can.
Yet still it seems absurd, improper, even rude,
that we, so like strange gods, with reason hold full sway,
yet like some sword-kept Eden, the world dares exclude
such as us from endless life, imposing a final day.
We stamp our feet, demand the Manager give His time,
insist that we are deserving, our merit known to all,
weep at the unfairness, in anger scream and rant,
and are firmly turned away, no matter how sublime.
We feel, deep inside, that immortal regions call,
but no matter -- when it comes to evading death, we can't.

The Tie

The sun through the blinds
on the houseplants streaks lines
which then tickle the eyes;
through glass and in part
ray pours from sun's heart,
between star and my soul forming tie.

Links of Note

 * Ian J. Campbell & Christof Rapp, The Definition of Fallacies: A Defence of Aristotle's Appearance Condition (PDF)

* Robert Keim, The Poet of Assisi, at "Via Mediaevalis"

* Jared Dembrun, Mariology Is Always Christological, at "Son of St. Catherine"

* Daniel D. De Haan, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being in Avicenna's Metaphysics of the Healing (PDF)

* Laura Caponetto, Undoing things with words (PDF)

* Ben Burgis, My Preferred Solution to the Liar Paradox, at "Philosophy for the People". There are serious problems with disquotationalism (e.g., it requires already and independently being able to assign truth values), but this is an interesting disquotationalist attempt to deal with the matter.

* Noam Hoffer, Kant's Teleology as the 'True Apology' to Leibniz's Pre-Established Harmony (PDF)

* Jessica Tizzard & Hugo Hogenbirk, The infinite divisibility and multiplicity of creatures: Conway's non-absolutist theory of space (PDF)

* Chad Engelland, Dare Students Go Amish on the Topic of AI?

Fortnightly Book, October 12

 In working through Maurice LeBlanc's Arsene Lupin stories, we find ourselves having to make a judgment call after The Confessions of Arsene Lupin. The next published work is The Teeth of the Tiger, but it is peculiar in that it was published in English translation, in 1914, before it was published in the original French, in 1920. In 1916, LeBlanc published The Shell Shard (or The Shrapnel), which was originally a standalone tale, but which was written to be a Lupin tale and re-published as such in 1923. Then comes The Golden Triangle, serializec in 1917 and published in book form in 1918. We can set aside The Shell Shard as not being Lupinesque until later (and it may well be that, in any case, LeBlanc got the idea that he could make The Shell Shard a Lupin story from how he handled Lupin in The Golden Triangle), but we have to make a choice as to the order of the other two. After some thought, I have decided to follow the French publication order here, which means that the next fortnightly book is The Golden Triangle, also known as The Return of Arsene Lupin. This also has the advantage, in this case, of following the internal chronology of the narrative.

At the end of the tragic events of 813, Arsene Lupin left for the Foreign Legion, assumed by most of the world to be dead, and The Golden Triangle gives us a glimpse of him afterward. By all the descriptions, it seems to be in the style that would later be associated with Marquand's Mr. Moto -- that is, he is not the main character of the story but the resolving character, the one who links the essential elements so that the whole can come to a resolution. As some of the prior Lupin works gave us a bit too much of Lupin himself, showing the gentleman thief in a more indirect light could very well be showing him in a better light. We shall see.

Captain Patrice Belval rescues a woman from an attempted kidnapping. The ensuing adventure brings him into contact with a conspiracy to steal the gold reserves of France, and in opposition to a dangerous adversary. To deal with this problem, he gets help from a friend of a friend, Don Luis Perenna, but saving three hundred million francs in gold during World War I is going to require solving some difficult problems....

A Most Excellent Creator

 Let us, then, now seek the Trinity which is God, in the things themselves that are eternal, incorporeal, and unchangeable; in the perfect contemplation of which a blessed life is promised us, which cannot be other than eternal. For not only does the authority of the divine books declare that God is; but the whole nature of the universe itself which surrounds us, and to which we also belong, proclaims that it has a most excellent Creator, who has given to us a mind and natural reason, whereby to see that things living are to be preferred to things that are not living; things that have sense to things that have not; things that have understanding to things that have not; things immortal to things mortal; things powerful to things impotent; things righteous to things unrighteous; things beautiful to things deformed; things good to things evil; things incorruptible to things corruptible; things unchangeable to things changeable; things invisible to things visible; things incorporeal to things corporeal; things blessed to things miserable. And hence, since without doubt we place the Creator above things created, we must needs confess that the Creator both lives in the highest sense, and perceives and understands all things, and that He cannot die, or suffer decay, or be changed; and that He is not a body, but a spirit, of all the most powerful, most righteous, most beautiful, most good, most blessed.

[Augustine, De Trinitate XV, iv, 6.]

John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

Charles Reding was the only son of a clergyman, who was in possession of a valuable benefice in a midland county. His father intended him for orders and sent him at a proper age to a public school. He had long revolved in his mind the respective advantages and disadvantages of public and private education, and had decided in favour of the former. "Seclusion", he said, "is no security for virtue...." (p. 11)

Summary: Charles Reding comes to Oxford, and while a bright, inquisitive mind in his way, is not much different from other students, beyond the fact that he has an unusual irenic temperament that wants, where possible, to give people the benefit of the doubt. He falls in with William Sheffield, entering Oxford at the same time, who is a bit more cynical and sarcastic. Oxford University at the time was a central hub, one might say, in the Church of England, since once of its major social functions was the training of clergy, and religion is a hot topic at the time. The late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century had involved a proliferation of different views of religion in the English Church, and political disputes over Dissenters and Catholics had intensified the importance of religion as a subject, and thus everyone discusses religious matters. At Oxford, Reding comes into contact with some of this chaos. Sheffield, of course, is the sort of person destined to respectability; he thinks making a lot of fuss about religion is usually the sign of a sham, and thus dabbles in the fads but never commits to anything much. Reding meets Bateman, a ritualist Anglo-Catholic whose conception of being Catholic is wearing cassocks and making sure his Anglican church has saint-niches, which remain empty because, of course, he couldn't get away with filling them with statues of saints. He meets White, a brash young man whose Anglo-Catholicism is all big talk that will obviously never come into action. There is Freeborn, the Evangelical who thinks all these catholicizing movements are slipping toward idolatry. There is Vincent, the affable Latitudinarian who never quite opposes anyone, but never quite supports them. There is Carlton, who seems in many ways to represent the most intellectually serious forms of Anglicanism. And so forth. What we see is that there is no obvious doctrinal Anglican cores -- everybody agrees to use the same words, but the primary unity beyond that seems just to be an agreement not to be Roman Catholic.

This situation -- Anglicans being Anglicans and yet not obviously having anything in common beyond being Anglicans -- causes severe problems for Reding, particularly as he comes closer to having to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles for his degree and yet finding few answers and no agreement about how he is supposed to understand them. Charles ill-advised remarks to the effect that at least the Roman Catholics have an official position leads people to suspect him of being in danger of swimming the Tiber. Such suspicions are self-feeding -- every discussion, every question, every puzzlement gives people further reason for it. They start actively trying to prevent his flight to Rome. In vain does Charles point out that he has no intention of becoming Roman Catholic, that he has never talked to a Catholic priest, that he has never studied Catholic doctrine and only knows about it second-hand, that he doesn't understand why anyone leaves the Church of England for the Church of Rome. Everyone is very concerned about his eventual defection, and, ironically, it will be this that will create situations in which he has to make the leap. He is punished for a tendency to Roman Catholicism that he doesn't see himself as having, but it is so consistent that he begins to doubt his own assessment. Perhaps other people are seeing something about himself that he does not?

From the time that Loss and Gain was published, it has been treated as autobiographical and satirical. It is not autobiographical -- if any character in the book is like Newman, it is not Charles but the priest he briefly meets on the train when he is intending to convert. It is an essential part of Charles's story that he is not, unlike Newman, a part of the Oxford Movement; he knows very little about them, beyond respecting the Movement's willingness to take doctrine seriously. Reding's journey has none of the intellectual shifts that Newman's had; Reding, while an intelligent young man, has a conversion that does not at all proceed on intellectual ground. All they have in common, really, is what every convert to Rome would have had at the time: massive loss, as opportunities dry up and relationships rupture, and massive gain.

Calling the book satiricial is better founded. It is not a comic work, but parts are quite funny. Anglo-Catholics come in for some heavy satirizing; Newman knew them well, and his own Romeward interests being devotional, even as an Anglican he didn't always have much patience for those whose Romeward tendencies were mostly ritualistic or scholastic. And the chapter of Charles fending off the many sectaries who, hearing that he is converting to Catholicism, come to try to divert him into their own weird religious varieties, is justly regarded as hilarious by almost everyone. There is also a humorously biting edge to the fact that Charles is pushed into conversion entirely by people who are trying to keep him from being converted. Yet the book is not, I think, primarily satirical in purpose. Rather, it is a character study, a look at what, psychologically, goes into making a radical transformation, and all the loss and gain involved. It is, as its subtitle suggests, 'The Story of a Convert'. That it sees clearly the many absurdities and humorous twists that can attend conversion is just a byproduct of the great art with which it looks at the question.

While a dialogical novel, the work is not a philosophical or theological dialogue; religion is, of course, heavily discussed, but the participants in the discussions are themselves wrestling with questions. Catholic doctrines are not explored at any profound level, and Reding's own conversion is not a conversion by doctrinal arguments. It's a dialogical novel because dialogue displays for us social relations. This is one of the reasons, I think, that the novel is much better as a novel than most novels about conversions; the discussions do not serve a primarily didactic purpose but as a depiction of society and what it means to be someone who, without resentment, malice, or even dislike, nonetheless doesn't fit in it and cannot, however he tries, make himself do so. It is extremely successful at this.

Favorite Passage:

"...I hope you approve of the cassock, Mrs. Reding?"

"It is a very cold dress, sir -- that's my opinion -- when made of silk or bombazeen; and very unbecoming too, when worn by itself."

"Particularly behind", said Charles; "it is quite unshapely."

"Oh. I have remedied that", said Bateman; "you have noticed, Miss Reding, I dare say, the Bishop's short cassock. It comes to the knees, and look smuch like a continuation of a waistcoat, the straight-cut coat being worn as usual. Well, Miss Reding, I have adopted the same plan with the long cassock; I put my coat over it."

Mary had difficulty to keep from smiling; Charles laughed out. "Impossible, Bateman", he said;  you don't mean you wear your tailed French coat over your long straight cassock reaching to your ankles?"

"Certainly", said Bateman gravely; "I thus consult for warmth and appearance too; and all my parishioners are sure to know me. I think this a great point, Miss Reding: I hear the little boys as I pass say, 'That's the parson'."

"I'll be bound they do", said Charles. (p. 225)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain, Lipscombe, ed., Ignatius Press (San Francisco: 2012).

But God Had Called Him Man

 The Clerk
by Charles Williams 

 The clerk sat on a stool
And added up a column,
Looking a very fool,
Staid he was and solemn.
He said: 'Nineteen and one.
Mark nought and carry two.'
And that was all that he had done
And all that he could do. 

 The clerk sat on his stool
And another line began:
The heroes called him fool
But God had called him man.
He said: 'Two fives are ten
And carry one along.'
The devil shuddered in his den
And Heaven broke forth in song.

Dashed Off XXV

Every society's institutions are inevitably broken down by perversion, oppression, betrayal, and malicious violence.

(a fragment of the physical map) position with respect to time -> velocity; velocity with respect to time ->acceleration; velocity with respect to mass -> momentum; acceleration with respect to mass -> force; momentum with respect to time -> force; force with respect to distance -> work; work in terms of capacity/capability -> energy

anfractuous: full of windings and intricate turnings

Propp's functions are invariances across stories; they are determined by comparison to many other stories. Thus what counts as functional vs nonfunctional will in fact depend on the comparison set.

The groove in a sword blade (fuller) is to reduce the weight of the blade (even a short fuller can reduce a considerable portion of the weight) while not significantly weakening it. Ricassos, when existing, are unsharpened parts of the blade base (the forte) allowing the blade itself to be gripped for particular actions.

the small thing that makes the world a little better in a way that brings people together (Frieren)

three major forms of ornament-making: coloring, carving, casting (there are other forms, but they tend to copy these three into different media, e.g., mosaic)

Part of the purpose of civil religion is to give civil value to what is prior to the civil society; it is, so to speak, the filial piety of civil society itself.

"...the general reason why Plato rejects nominalism, materialism, etc., is that these positions render impossible the explanation of the phenomena they are supposed to explain." Gerson

Sanctions must derive from persons.

Every human person is a work in progress.

At the end of life, reconciliation, eucharist, and unction each and together provide an opportunity for full repentance and disposition to eternity.

The self is hidden by its passions.

Between 235 and 284, there were 20 emperors recognized by the Senate, but in fact there were many more claimants than this. The period was effectively a free-for-all civil war.

The range of Christian response to ancient persecution -- hiding, lapsed, certificated, and confessing -- are implicit in all Christian interactions with the world.

the simplicities that explain complexities

The human being has many consciousnesses, such as visual, tactile, memorative, integrated by being consciousnesses of one living being.

Scientimagic has always been more at the center of science fiction than science. What science fiction does is explore the evocativeness of scientific, parascientific, and peri-scientific vocabularies.

Recognition is not solidarity.

(1) express words (2) general tendency (3) analogy of doctrine (4) common consent

"*Authority* in all instances belongs to those by whom judgment is finally pronounced on the last appeal." R. I. Wilberforce

Movement through space is a temporal power; transition through time is a spatial power.

God in assuming human nature assumens also human civilizationality.

The meaning of a term is in its being alive.

kinds of private prayer: (1) basic religious expression (2) preparation for liturgy (3) participative liturgy

artificial virtues (in Hume's sense) and group virtues

'Existential import' would be more accurately called 'objectual import'.

faith as involving an openness to discovering

Often when people criticize things that are generally regarded as hierarchical, they criticize them for a lack of hierarchical acts.

"Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods." Wittgenstein

We cannot help but expect analogies between beautiful things; beauty pushes us toward analogies.

grammar : angel :: rhetoric : archangel :: dialectic : principality

ordinary experience of extraordinary things

the release & detachment of the same sign to different domains

rituals as symbols vs rituals as frameworks of symbols

People will sometimes classify philosophical things as religion when they don't know what to do with them.

In the ordinary narrative art, world-building arises through connection of story to story, attempt to maintain a consistency through variation within a story, and drawing the reader/listener in through plausible patterns.

Living as we do in the infancy of the Church, we often struggle to see the larger providential picture, and have often misguidedly fixated on things that mattered little or ignored things that mattered much. We are not different from our ancestors in this.

A People without a Crown lack one of the historical ways of seeing and understanding themselves; they must compensate for this or collapse into confusion.

three modes of apostolic mission: reasoning, preaching, and virtue
Cf. Beda: "Theirs was the honour and authority of the apostles by their holy witness, the truth by their learning, the miracles by their merit."

Civilization is both natural and artificial, like human life.

When we look at the dreams of transhumanists, so much of what they imagine is just an externalization of what rational mind and virutous character already have more intimately, as if, failing to be geniuses, we dressed in clothes we stereotype as those of geniuses.

"The office of Pontifex Maximus, or chief priest, was to declare and interpret divine law, or, rather, to preside over sacred rites; he not only prescribed rules for public ceremony, but regulated the sarifices of private persons, not suffering them to vary from established custom, and giving information to everyone of what was requisite for purposes of worship or supplication." Plutarch (Life of Numa Pompilius)

"In apprehending the Creator through the creature, the philosopher has no cause to boast: he simply consents not to frustrate a principal purpose of his natural being, when the way has opened for him to fulfill it." Farrer
"To reject metaphysics is equivalent to saying that there are no serious questions for the human mind except those which fall under the special sciences."
"Our minds, in fact, are neither mirrors nor containers: their receptivity depends on what they can *do*, on their ability to busy themselves with their object, to express it in discoursing on it."
"To know God by revelation man needs both reason and wit; without reason he could not make sense of revelation, without wit he could not receive it."
"Poetry and divine inspiration have this in common, that both are projected in images which cannot be decoded, but must be allowed to signify what they signify of the reality beyond them."
"All parables are imperfect, or they would not be parables. Wisdom lies in seeing how far any comparison takes us, and at what point it must desert us."
"A good man helped by Grace may do human things divinely; Christ did divine things humanly."
"The two essential capacities of a reasonable creature, to love and to think, are in a manner both divine and infinite. Thought can aspire to think things as they are in themselves, not as they happen to affect the the thinker, and this is to model one's mind on the thought of God, the simple truth. So also we can care for things as God made them to be, not as they concern a personal interest, or a private passion."
"The sacraments are covenanted mercies; of uncovenanted mercies the number is infinite, and the scope unknown."
"The way to show God's mind in nature is to let them show us how they go."

Any argument from evil always presupposes an account of creation.

Medieval theology and philosophy were primarily concerned with explication of meanings.

Most theories of reason and rationality only consider them in their solid, crystalline form, but they have liquid and gaseous forms, less rigid and more diffuse and fluid, and other forms for which the physical analogy begins to fail.

Evolutionary theory shows us that it takes a considerable part of a universe to make a living thing.

A group mind would have to be held together by self-love, both love of the group mind for itself as group mind and love of the individual parts for themselves as part of the group.

If you had an oracle of the gods, to use it well you would have to know yourself.

the anarchic character of modern Catholicism (Brendan Hodge)

No one spirituality is adequate to the entire Body of Christ.

"Only the person who renounces self-importance, who no longer struggles to defend or assert himself, can be large enough for God's boundless action." Edith Stein
"God is truth, and whoever seeks truth is seeking God, whether he knows it or not."

Cor ad Cor Loquitur

 Today is the feast of St. John Henry Newman, who will be officially designated a Doctor of the Church in November. From An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, Chapter 10, Section 1:

Conscience is a personal guide, and I use it because I must use myself; I am as little able to think by any mind but my own as to breathe with another's lungs. Conscience is nearer to me than any other means of knowledge. And as it is given to me, so also is it given to others; and being carried about by every individual in his own breast, and requiring nothing besides itself, it is thus adapted for the communication to each separately of that knowledge which is most momentous to him individually, -- adapted for the use of all classes and conditions of men, for high and low, young and old, men and women, independently of books, of educated reasoning, of physical knowledge, or of philosophy. Conscience, too, teaches us, not only that God is, but what He is; it provides for the mind a real image of Him, as a medium of worship; it gives us a rule of right and wrong, as being His rule, and a code of moral duties. Moreover, it is so constituted that, if obeyed, it becomes clearer in its injunctions, and wider in their range, and corrects and completes the accidental feebleness of its initial teachings. Conscience, then, considered as our guide, is fully furnished for its office. I say all this without entering into the question how far external assistances are in all cases necessary to the action of the mind, because in fact man does not live in isolation, but is everywhere found as a member of society; I am not concerned here with abstract questions.

One of his most famous works, usually just known as "Lead, Kindly Light":

The Pillar of the Cloud
by St. John Henry Newman

Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom
 Lead Thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home --
Lead Thou me on!
Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene -- one step enough for me. 

 I was not ever thus, nor pray'd that Thou
 Shouldst lead me on.
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
 Lead Thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years. 

So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still
 Will lead me on,
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till
 The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile. 

 At Sea.
June 16, 1833.

A Poem Draft

A rough first sketch, based on the Japanese folktales of Momotarō; 'Momo' means 'peach' and Tarō is a very common Japanese name, common enough that it is sometimes used to mean an everyman. Hence 'Peachy Jack'.

 Peachy Jack

In days of old, young Peachy Jack,
from river born, explored the earth,
and sought the spirit-island ways
to fight the spirits of the earth;
he met a dog upon the road
and with him shared some sticky buns;
a monkey, and a pheasant, too,
were sharing in those tasty buns.
"And whither go you?" each would ask;
"I go to steal the spirit-gold,"
our Peachy Jack would then reply,
and so they went in search of gold,
and, coming to the spirit-house,
the pheasant flew above the gate,
the monkey climbed the ivy wall,
the dog broke through the iron gate,
and they and Peachy Jack did fight
the spirit-king and bound him well,
and took his gold and then went home;
the four together lived quite well.

It Never Was Lit Again on my Hearth

 The Witch
by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge 

I have walked a great while over the snow,
And I am not tall nor strong.
My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set,
And the way was hard and long.
I have wandered over the fruitful earth,
But I never came here before.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door! 

 The cutting wind is a cruel foe.
I dare not stand in the blast.
My hands are stone, and my voice a groan,
And the worst of death is past.
I am but a little maiden still,
My little white feet are sore.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door! 

 Her voice was the voice that women have,
Who plead for their heart's desire.
She came -- she came -- and the quivering flame
Sunk and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor,
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.

More Lonesome than the Desert Wild

 The Stranger
by Henry Longueville Mansel

 I stood amidst a joyful crowd, in festive pageantry:
Among the gay, the fair, the proud, was none to smile on me.
 No! cold was every glancing eye, and heartless every tone:
 And in the midst of gaiety I felt I was alone. 

 I turned me from the festal scene -- my heart was truly sad;
 I felt I must not linger there, where all save me were glad.
 I was a lonely being there -- unnoticed and unknown:
 I turned me from the sight and wept, because I was alone. 

I stood where every look was warm, and every accent kind;
I thought not of the giddy throng, the joys I left behind:
But, withering like the autumn leaves, those kindred souls are gone,
 And I am left in solitude, neglected and alone. 

 More lonesome than the desert wild, than ocean's trackless wave;
 More mournful than the pall of death, more cheerless than the grave;
 Is he who weeps for loved ones lost, for friendships overthrown;
 And gazes on the busy world, 'mong millions, -- yet alone. 

 O may I learn to rest my hopes on other worlds than this!
Here, pilgrims on life's weary way, we cannot hope for bliss.
 O may I, bowed to God's decrees, with resignation own,
Our destined mansion is not here -- 'tis good to be alone.

The Golden Age of the Philosopher

 There are proud enthusiasts who conclude that, by advancing in knowledge and the useful arts, man will soon be able to command nature, and become independent of it. It is singular to observe how every mind paints a golden age for the future destinies of our world, and each mind colours that age with its own hues. The golden age of the philosopher is an anticipated period in which man shall be able to control all, and yet be controlled of none. But the philosopher forgets one most important element in his calculation and that is, that in very proportion as society becomes more artificial, it becomes more reticulated, and the destinies of every one portion more connected with those of every other, and that the snapping of one link in this network may throw the whole into inextricable confusion. In short, both the regular and the contingent pervade nature, and we cannot free ourselves from the one or the other; and man, whether in his lesser or wider spheres, whether in the ruder or more civilized states of society, is made to fall in with very much the same proportion of both.

James McCosh, The Method of the Divine Government, Physical and Moral, Third Edition, Sutherland and Knox (Edinburgh: 1852) p. 173. McCosh was arguably the last major figure in what we call today, 'Scottish Common Sense Philosophy'. He spent some time in Belfast at Queen's College (now Queen's University), but in the 1860s was invited by the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) to become its president. He was one of Princeton's most effective presidents; the college had had a very rocky nineteenth century, beginning with student riots over Stanley Stanhope Smith's attempts to secularize it, continuing with student riots over Ashbel Green's attempt to re-theologize it, nearly shutting down due to low enrollment under James Carnahan, then, as it was slowly improving, hit by the Civil War (almost a third of its students had been from Southern states). McCosh turned most of it around, cultivated one of the premier faculties in the United States, established the doctorate program, massively expanded enrollment, and established features of collegiate life that were copied elsewhere for the next fifty years. In 1888, he resigned the presidency and became a philosophy professor until his death in 1894. McCosh's The Method of the Divine Government is one of the better nineteenth-century discussions of design arguments and their implications.

Or in What High Metropolis of Mars

 The Absence of the Muse
by Clark Ashton Smith 

 O Muse, where loiterest thou? In any land
Of Saturn, lit with moons and nenuphars?
Or in what high metropolis of Mars --
Hearing the gongs of dire, occult command,
And bugles blown from strand to unknown strand
Of continents embattled in old wars
That primal kings began? Or on the bars
Of ebbing seas in Venus, from the sand
Of shattered nacre with a thousand hues,
Dost pluck the blossoms of the purple wrack
And roses of blue coral for thy hair?
Or, flown beyond the roaring Zodiac,
Translatest thou the tale of earthly news
And earthly songs to singers of Altair?

Hieroglyphics and Rebusses

 Jeremy Bentham's Church of Englandism and Its Catechism Examined gets a passing mention in Newman's Loss and Gain, so I went back and re-read it, and, holy moly, I had blocked out how much of an unhinged, lunatic, nearly eight-hundred-page rant it is. Bentham has a besetting sin in which he will often not provide any arguments for his position, merely classifying things in tendentious ways, and yet clearly thinks he is providing an argument by doing so; he also often, when he does deign to give an argument, clearly thinks he is speaking in a plain, literal way, when in reality load-bearing parts of his arguments almost always depend on metaphors and analogies. Church of Englandism takes both of these Benthamite traits and exponentializes them. But I also looked into some of the critial responses to the work, and they are sometimes a delight. The very best is the review in The British Critic for November 1818, which begins:

We have been very credibly informed, that Mr. Jeremy Bentham is an original thinker; and we are not inclined to doubt the assertion. We feel certain that he is a most profound thinker; for in many a part of this work before us, we have run out every fathom of our critical line, without once being fortunate enough to sound the bottom of a meaning. Words, as we have been taught, or so many signs and symbols of mental conceptions; and as we have no other means by which we can determine the quantity of such conceptions, unless through the medium of these signs and symbols, it is no unfair deduction, if we assert that unintelligible speaking is a proof of equally unintelligible thinking; in other words, that a man who writes in hieroglyphics, conceives in rebusses. Or to put the proposition in terms which Mr. Jeremy Bentham himself will not deny, unless, (which is not probable,) he supposes there can be any other authority equal to his own, "uncognoscibility being the end; indistinctness, voluminousness, confusion, and uncertainty, are so many means," Pref. xxxvii. We know not how we can put our readers more completely in possession of the present work (except excip; for where mischief is to be done this writer can speak plainly enough) than by the above appropriate quotation.

Mr. Jeremy Bentham is known to his own coterie of petty sophists and political quacks, as the author of a variety of treatises, more or less closely printed, published or unpublished, out of print, or waste paper, of which a "list hastily and imperfectly collected," is subjoined in his new volume. He has employed himself, at divers times, on morals, legislation, hard-labour, usury, mad-houses, taxation, special juries, perjury, economy, and parliamentary reform; and his depth of knowledge on each subject is said by those who have read his works, to be co-extensive with its variety -- a fact which we will not take upon ourselves to dispute, as we have no means of denying it. Moreover, he lives in a cock-loft, looking into the bird-cage walk; and as he cannot always make his countrymen understand the English, in which he thinks, he has occasionally employed a most respectable foreigner, to do it into French, for the benefit of our neighbours across the water.

From this slight sketch of the nature of Mr. Jeremy Bentham's lucubrations, our readers of course will be prepared for the impossibility of our attempting to present them with any detailed analysis of the contents of the work before us. As a literary phaenomenon it must always be regarded with curiosity; for except the lobster-cracking Bedlamite, we recollect no professed lunatic whose hallucinations have been published under his own immediate inspection; and they related more to physical than to moral effects....

The British Critic also had an association with Newman, although that came later. It was founded in 1793 by a bunch of High Church Anglicans who wanted to counteract ideas from the French Revolution and a public forum for discussing conservative Anglican ecclesiology. In the early 1810s, it was bought by Joshua Watson, the philanthropist, and Henry Handley Norris, the theologian, who were both key figures in the so-called Hackney Phalanx, a loosely strutured High-Church Tory group that was more actively engaged in reform and activism. (The review above is from this period.) For financial reasons, it combined with another review in 1826 to become officially The British Critic, Quarterly Theological Review, and Ecclesiastical Record. In the 1830s, it was having significant financial difficulties, and in 1836, Newman made a deal with Joshua Watson and the then-editor, James Shergold Boone, to provide them with authors who would write a portion of the review entirely for free. This led to The British Critic being a major vehicle for the Oxford Movement, and was arguably a more important, and perhaps more successful, and certainly less self-destructive, part of the Movement than Tracts for the Times. Nonetheless, Boone and Newman couldn't really agree on editorial matters, with the result that he resigned in 1837, to be replaced by Samuel Roffey Maitland, who soon after resigned. For all his many admirable qualities, including being famously sweet-tempered, it is a consistent feature of Newman's career that he was difficult to work with, in the paradoxical way that you would expect someone affable, headstrong, and arguably oversensitive to be. After Maitland, first Newman and then, in 1841, Thomas Mozley became editors, and the dominant editorial view of the review became rather bellicose, used less often to give a general High Church voice and more often for polemic about internal disputes in the broader High Church movement, and eventually came to an end in 1843.

Links of Note

 * Tim Sommers, Two Sources of Objectivity in Ethics, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Cansu Hepçağlayan, Political friendship as joint commitment: Aristotle on homonoia (PDF)

* Kendric Tonn: Painting in an Age of Digital Art, at "Trunkville"

* Chloé de Canson, Bayesianism and the Inferential Solution to Hume’s Problem (PDF)

* Lucia Oliveri, Imagine Learning Through Play, at "The Junkyard"

* Phil Corkum, Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics (PDF)

* Brian Potter, How Common Is Accidental Invention?, at "Construction Physics"

* John Walsh, Wolff on Obligation (PDF)

* Francine F. Abeles, Lewis Carroll's ciphers: the literary connections

* Razib Khan, How the West was wrought, "Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning"

Little Flower

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

But how shall I show my love, since love proves itself by deeds? Well! The little child will strew flowers . . . she will embrace the Divine Throne with their fragrance, she will sing Love's Canticle in silvery tones. Yes, my Beloved, it is thus my short life shall be spent in Thy sight. The only way I have of proving my love is to strew flowers before Thee—that is to say, I will let no tiny sacrifice pass, no look, no word. I wish to profit by the smallest actions, and to do them for Love. I wish to suffer for Love's sake, and for Love's sake even to rejoice: thus shall I strew flowers. Not one shall I find without scattering its petals before Thee . . . and I will sing . . . I will sing always, even if my roses must be gathered from amidst thorns; and the longer and sharper the thorns, the sweeter shall be my song. 

 But of what avail to thee, my Jesus, are my flowers and my songs? I know it well: this fragrant shower, these delicate petals of little price, these songs of love from a poor little heart like mine, will nevertheless be pleasing unto Thee. Trifles they are, but Thou wilt smile on them. The Church Triumphant, stooping towards her child, will gather up these scattered rose leaves, and, placing them in Thy Divine Hands, there to acquire an infinite value, will shower them on the Church Suffering to extinguish its flames, and on the Church Militant to obtain its victory.

Renato Casaro (1935-2025)

 Renato Casaro -- arguably the greatest film-poster artist of all time -- died today. Perhaps more than anyone else he established what people expect film posters to be, handpainting the original of each one in a dashing style. You have certainly seen some of his posters; some of his more famous ones were for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, A Fistful of Dollars, Conan the Barbarian, Dune, Total Recall, Terminator 2, True Lies, La Femme Nikita, The Princess Bride, The NeverEnding Story, and Dances with Wolves. (You may notice that there are a fair number of Arnold Scharzenegger films; Casaro once said that he was the perfect actor to paint.) But, of course, he was a major influence on many other film poster artists. Film poster art is a bit of niche aristic genre, but Casaro put an immense amount of genius into it, and it always showed.

Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus

 Today is the feast of St. Jerome, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. Everybody always remembers St. Jerome's crotchetiness, but he had a softer side. From a letter to Gaudentius, who had asked how he should raise his infant daughter for the religious life:

It is hard to write to a little girl who cannot understand what you say, of whose mind you know nothing, and of whose inclinations it would be rash to prophesy. In the words of a famous orator she is to be praised more for what she will be than for what she is. For how can you speak of self-control to a child who is eager for cakes, who babbles on her mother's knee, and to whom honey is sweeter than any words? Will she hear the deep things of the apostle when all her delight is in nursery tales? Will she heed the dark sayings of the prophets when her nurse can frighten her by a frowning face? Or will she comprehend the majesty of the gospel, when its splendour dazzles the keenest intellect? Shall I urge her to obey her parents when with her chubby hand she beats her smiling mother? For such reasons as these my dear Pacatula must read some other time the letter that I send her now. Meanwhile let her learn the alphabet, spelling, grammar, and syntax. To induce her to repeat her lessons with her little shrill voice, hold out to her as rewards cakes and mead and sweetmeats. She will make haste to perform her task if she hopes afterwards to get some bright bunch of flowers, some glittering bauble, some enchanting doll. She must also learn to spin, shaping the yarn with her tender thumb; for, even if she constantly breaks the threads, a day will come when she will no longer break them. Then when she has finished her lessons she ought to have some recreation. At such times she may hang round her mother's neck, or snatch kisses from her relations. Reward her for singing psalms that she may love what she has to learn. Her task will then become a pleasure to her and no compulsion will be necessary.

The rest of the letter takes a somewhat darker turn, as Jerome turns to reflecting on the evils of the day, but flashes like this little comment on raising girls are found throughout his works; he was the sort of curmudgeon who is a bit of teddy-bear if you catch him at the right time and in the right way.

O Well for Him that Loves the Sun

 Ballad of the Sun
by G. K. Chesterton  

O well for him that loves the sun,
That sees the heaven-race ridden or run,
The splashing seas of sunset won,
And shouts for victory. 

 God made the sun to crown his head,
And when death's dart at last is sped,
At least it will not find him dead,
And pass the carrion by. 

 O ill for him that loves the sun;
Shall the sun stoop for anyone?
Shall the sun weep for hearts undone
Or heavy souls that pray? 

 Not less for us and everyone
Was that white web of splendour spun;
O well for him who loves the sun
Although the sun should slay.

Fortnightly Book, September 28

 The Oxford Movement began in the 1830s and developed afterward in response to shifts in the relationship between Parliament and the Church of England; a significant early stimulus was the passing of the 1833 Church Temporalities Act, in which Parliament peremptorily reorganized some dioceses of the Church of Ireland and shut down a source of ecclesiastical revenue in order to solve a broader political problem. The actual provisions were deliberately chosen to cause minimal disruption, and even greater efficiency and sustainability, but it unsettled a significant portion of the Church of England, to whom it brought home the point that Parliament could easily just disestablish the Church or overrule it or reorganize it for any purpose it pleased, despite this apparently being inconsistent with both the notion of a Church going back to Christ and the customs of England. John Keble's 1833 Assize sermon, "National Apostasy", touched a chord in a wide variety of people. Nor were they unjustified in this worry, and a series of other controversies, both small and large, expanded the movement. A number of figures, including Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey, began publishing polemical tracts to make their ecclesiology public; this Tractarian movement was the intellectual core of the movement, although there were many people involved with the Oxford Movement whose relationship with the Tractarians was rather loose and sometimes even critical. The Tractarian refusal to back down made the Oxford Movement one of the central intellectual disputes of the age, and their very 'High' notion of what was meant by the Creed in talking of the "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church" led to people accusing them of being Romanizers. Indeed, while it is not by any means true of all, a significant portion of the movement, including some of its leading lights, eventually did leave the Church of England to join communion with Rome. Newman's conversion was the most explosive, happening in 1845.

One of those who converted relatively early on was Elizabeth Furlong Shipton Harris, who found, once she became Catholic, that she did not like it. She wrote a book, originally anonymous, From Oxford to Rome: And How It Fared with Some Who Lately Made the Journey, published in 1846. It was a dialogical novel that attempted to warn people about the dangers that led to the horrifying increase in conversions to Rome. I've skimmed through the book; it's actually quite intelligently, if perhaps idiosyncratically, written, and I suspect that Harris captures a great deal of the way in which the flourishing of Romanticism made the Oxford Movement attractive to people. Someone sent it to Newman in 1847 (Newman never mentions mentions the book by name, but from his references to it, it was almost certainly Harris's), and he was very unimpressed. He thought that its depiction of Oxford life was wrong ("wantonly and preposterously fanciful" was his phrase), that its characterization of those involved was generally implausible even given the diversity of views in the Oxford Movement, and that in particular it treated the movement as mired in a pompousness and pretentiousness that failed to grasp the sincerity of many of the people involved. (It is certainly true that the major figures in Harris's work speak and thinking in an over-heated, flowery way that goes beyond common Victorian novelistic conventions, even for a dialogical novel.) It perhaps also did not help his opinion that the novel can be read as implying that Newman was heavily to blame for turning an idealistic reform movement into a Roman-Catholic-generating machinery. However, it was substantive enough that it needed response. But responding to a novel with a treatise or a vigorous polemic seemed a poor choice, so Newman decided to write a better novel on the same subject. That novel was Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert, which was published in 1848.

The novel was successful, being immediately a bestseller and (not unrelatedly) also a source of considerable controversy. Dialogical novels are not very popular today, but they were at the time, and it is generally considered one of the most brilliantly written examples. Newman seems to have suceeded in his attempt to capture what Oxford University life was actually like in his Oxford days, and his satire of English incoherence on religion have impressed more than a few people through the years. The novel was often read, and criticized, as an apologetic work, although Newman himself did not think that a novel was a good place for apologetics, and explicitly denied that it was ever intended to be such a work rather than what it was, an attempt to write a better novel. It's very likely that the fact that Newman was primarily focused on writing a novel with more truth, probability, and insight than an already existing novel, rather than making a specific argument, is one of the reasons it stands above so many other dialogical novels in the period.

In any case, for the next fortnightly book, I am re-reading Loss and Gain.

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

In the middle of the night somebody began to cry outside of Chauntecleer's Coop. If it had been but a few sprinkled tears with nothing but a moan or two, Chauntecleer would probably not have minded. But this crying was more than a gentle moan. By each dark hour of the night it grew. It became a decided wail, and after that it became a definite howl. And howlying -- particularly at the door of his Coop, and in the middle of the night -- howling. Chauntecleer minded very much. (p. 13)

Summary: Long before the rise of men, Chauntecleer is lord of the Coop, and of all the land around. He's a bit silly and a bit vain, a foolish Rooster, but he makes an honest effort to keep peace and uphold order, and with a bit of muddling he mostly does well enough. The book opens with him meeting a creature new to his domain, Mundo Cani Dog, a perpetually over-humble, over-sensitive, weepy, mourny dog, who irritates him to no end, but he soon learns that it is handy for Rooster to have a Dog help with some things, even if the Dog is a mope who never stops talking about how much of a failure and a nothing he is. Unbeknownst to all the animals in the land, they were made by God to be the Keepers of the Wyrm, a terrible and ancient power imprisoned in the earth beneath him, who, if he should ever be freed, would devour the world.

Nor is the Wyrm quiescent. In another domain, ruled by an aging Rooster named Senex, he has begun to whisper. Senex has no heir, and as his abilities slip in his age, he is terrified of being a failure. With Wyrm's help, Senex lays an egg, and the unnatural abomination of the Rooster-laid egg is hatched beneath a Toad. This is Cockatrice, who is like a Rooster and yet not, a scaly, featherless thing of great malice who soon kills Senex, usurping his place, and initiates a regime of terror focused on only one thing: the breeding of snake-like and venomous Basilisks. A Hen, named Pertelote, eventually escapes this regime and finds shelter in the lands of Chauntecleer.

Some elements of the story here have been told elsewhere, but instead of Wyrm, Cockatrice, and Toad, the characters in that story were called the Dragon, the Beast, and the False Prophet. For this is a story about the End of the World, or, at least, a first taste of it. As Chauntecleer keeps the peace in his little realm, unaware of the dangers beneath his feet or multiplyling in the rivers, all things move slowly toward the Armageddon of the animals. And against the pride of the Wyrm, the wickedness of Cockatrice, the malice of the Basilisks, against all of that evil, there is nothing to defend what is good and prevent the end of all except a decent but foolish Rooster, and a loyal Dog who never stops mourning, and some beasts, brave in their way, sometimes, but narrow in their views. God has not left them entirely without resource, since He sends to them the Dun Cow, who gives Chauntecleer what he needs to fight, but the fighting will have to be their own.

Do not let the talking animals give you the wrong idea; this is a book about war, the War, and there are books about war with human characters that are not as brutally honest as this one is about how bad even a necessary war can be. The brutality of Cockatrice's regime, or the terror and loss of the Final Battle in which beast after beast dies from the poison of the Basilisks, are laid out without any pulled punches. Obviously, the earth is still here, and thus Chauntecleer and his allies will narrowly win, but the sacrifices will be terrible by the end, and the Wyrm that wants to devour the world still waits to be freed.

Favorite Passage: Chapter Twenty-Four ends in the middle of a sentence with this passage:

Suddenly Chauntecleer took dizzy and began to sway. How many battles make a war? How muh, and how much more, can a rooster bear before the break? He let his slack wings touch the ground on either side of him so that he wouldn't fall altogether, and then dragged back to the camp. But again and again he turned his head to look behind, trying to believe what he saw.

He stumbled into the trench at the bottom of the wall. Slowly he raised his eyes. There was Pertelote, still standing on its top and looking at him. Chauntecleer  shrugged his shoulders and tried to smile. He spread his wings empty in front of her. The smile didn't work. It hung too crooked on his face. "Do you know? Do you know?" he said as if he were very young. "Pertelote. I don't know anymore," he said, and then he fainted. Many of his bones had been broken.

Chauntecleer had won. Chauntecleer was victorious, but

(p. 223)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow, Pocket Books (New York: 1978).

Dashed Off XXIV

 The Church participates the Mediatorship of Christ by being socially and sacramentally His Body.

In petitionary prayer, we socially participate in God's beneficence.

Prayers may seem ephemeral but they are ever before the Lord.

We learn in the Old Testament, in its history corrected by prophecy, what God means by a 'priestly nation'.

"For since the doctrine of Our Lord's Mediation is funded upon His taking our flesh: since its primary law is the re-creation in His person of our common nature, the entrance of divine graces into humanity ni its Head and Chief;--therefore some medium is required, by which those things, which were stored up in Him, may be distributed to His brethren. To speak of the Head as the fountain of grace, is to assume teh existence of streams, by which it may be transmitted to His members. Now this function is so plainly assigned to Sacraments, that nothing else can be alleged to supply their place." R. I. Wilberforce

evidences as channels of intelligibility

On Van Leeuwen's acount of belief, almost nothing we usually count as a belief turns out to be a belief -- only a few things directly connected to the evidence of empirical experience still get counted.

Anticipation is the soul of rhetoric.

'It war guid tym of wykkitnes to ces.'

expansion to Gentiles as Peter's use of the keys; Council of Jerusalem as apostles' use of the key

When a man is counting noses, the nose he is most likely to miss is the one he sees in the mirror. Sometimes we forget to include the most obvious truth precisely because it's so obvious we treat it as if it were already included, even when it hasn't been.

"The mind is under the power of the demons of evil intellect and duality. / But when the mind surrenders, through the Guru, it becomes one." Sri Guru Granth Sahib 222
"Through the Word of the Shabad, merits are gathered in and demerits are burned away."
"To practice forgiveness is the true fast, good conduct and contentment." 223
"Union with God is not obtained by arguments and egotism, / but by offering your mind, the comfort of the Naam is obtained." 226

Words get their meanings within the context of personal connections.

A jack of all trades gets to enjoy many things.

"The only phenomenological access that we have to the gift is in the 'thank you' of gratitude." Jean-Louis Chretien

Human beings do not merely adapt to their environment but mirror it, both behaviorally and symbolically.

felicitas as a divine gift of good fortune given to boldness (fortune favors the brave)

pignora imperii: Palladium, Sacred Fire of Vesta, the Ancilia of Mars, are the commonly recognized ones. Servius the Grammarian in the fourth century identifies seven:
(1) Acus Matris Deum (in the Temple of Cybele)
(2) Quadriga Fictilis Veientanorus (on the roof the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus)
(3) Cineres Orestes (in the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus)
(4) Sceptrum Priami
(5) velum Ilionae
(6) Palladium (in the Temple of Vesta)
(7) Ancilia of Mars (in the Regia)
--- The Ashes, the Scepter, and the Veil are not attested anywhere else.

Role-playing games are constructed out of patterns of deciding factors, which may be choice, calculation, or chance process.

"The Rationalistic notion, that man's regeneration  may be effected through the progress of society, and the development of his natural powers, is the delusion of a cultivated age." R.I. Wilberforce
"Coincidence, resemblance, and proportion, the three keys to our knowledge of creation, require it exist within us, in order to be called forth."
"Ingratitude and oppression, justice and truth -- the feelings of which these are the natural objects -- testify clearly to some close alliance, which binds together all the far-severed sciions of the family of mankind."
"A system of worship upon earth is the necessary correlative to a work of intercession in heaven."
"The imported objective truth of the Word written, requires the engrafted subjective influence of the Living Word as its expositor."

Sex essentially has reference to other people.

Human society, like human life, is both natural and artificial.

marriage as a mutual consecration

Babel as the general template of societal corruption

In the calendar of saints, we celebrate the Church as prophetic.

Our choices, like us, eventually die.

civil functions of states
(1) mediation between citizens
(2) coordination of citizen projects
(3) protection of citizens as citizens
dominial functions of states
(1) giving laws to subjects
(2) enforcing laws on subjects
(3) adjudicating matters of law for subjects

All the sacraments express aspects of Christ's mediation.

People mistake their attraction to good for their own goodness.

"Only the individual who experiences himself as a person, as an integrated whole, is capable of understanding other persons." Edith Stein
"Whenever we come into contact with realms of value that we cannot enter, we become aware of our own deficient value and unworthiness."

'Religions' in general tend to be very good at articulating over time their phenomenological character as bounded idealities.

Phenomena are signs of both phenomena and noumena.

"Language is much more like a sort of being than a means, and that is why it can present something to us so well." Merleau-Ponty
"Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has to do only with language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by meaning."

"The whole course of nature that we are so familiar with has certain natural laws of its own, according to which both the spirit of life which is a creature has drives and urges that are somehow predetermined and which even a bad will cannot bypass, and also the elements of this material world have their distinct energies and qualities, which determine what each is or is not capable of, what can or cannot be made from each. It is from these baselines of things, so to say, that whatever comes to be takes in its own particular time span, its risings and continued progress, its ends and its settings, according to the kind of thing it is." Augustine (Lit Comm 9.17.3.2, cp. 6.13.23)

The divine inspiration of the Scriptural text implies the divine inspiration of its originary context, as originary, and of its appropriate interpretive context, as appropriate and interpretive.

Bo-me-rang

When we have seen a thousand stones fall to the ground, we may see one which does not fall under the same apparent circumstances. How then, it is asked, can experience teach us that all stones, rigorously speaking, will fall if unsupported? And to this we reply, that it is not true that we can conceive one stone to be suspended in the air, while a thousand others fall, without believing some peculiar cause to support it; and that, therefore, such a supposition forms no exception to the law, that gravity is a force by which all bodies are urged downwards. Undoubtedly we can conceive a body, when dropt or thrown, to move in a line quite different from other bodies: thus a certain missile used by the natives of Australia, and lately brought to this country, when thrown from the hand in a proper manner, describes a curve, and returns to the place from whence it was thrown. But did any one, therefore, even for an instant suppose that the laws of motion are different for this and for other bodies? On the contrary, was not every person of a speculative turn immediately led to inquire how it was that the known causes which modify motion, the resistance of the air and the other causes, produced in this instance so peculiar an effect?

[William Whewell, The History of Science, Volume I, p. 269. At "a certain missile", Whewell has a footnote, "Called a Bo-me-rang"; hence the title of the post. The argument here, minus the boomerang, is similar to one also found in Lady Mary Shepherd's criticisms of Hume.]

Particular Practicables

As said above, prudence is concerned with particular practicables. As such things are almost infinitely diverse, no one man can adequately consider them all, nor in a short time rather than over a long period of time. Thus in things relevant to prudence, man especially needs to be taught by others, and particularly by elders, who have achieved a sensible understanding of practicable ends [qui sanum intellectum adepti sunt circa fines operabilium]. Thus the Philosopher says, in VI Ethic., "It is fitting to attend no less to the indemonstrable claims and opinions of experienced people who are older and prudent, than to their demonstrations, for by experience they see principles." Thus also it is said in Prov. III, "Do not lean on your own prudence"; and it is said in Eccli. VI, "Stand in the multitude of presbyters," that is, elders, "that are prudent, and join yourself from the heart to their wisdom." And this pertains to teachableness [docilitas], to be very receptive to learning. And so teachableness is appropriately posited as a part of prudence.

[Thomas Aquinas, ST 2-2.49.3 co. (my translation). The Dominican Fathers translation is here.]

Johnson on Tragic Catharsis

 I introduced Aristotle's doctrine in his Art of Poetry, of 'the [Greek: katharsis ton pathaematon], the purging of the passions,' as the purpose of tragedy. 'But how are the passions to be purged by terrour and pity?' (said I, with an assumed air of ignorance, to incite him to talk, for which it was often necessary to employ some address).

JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, you are to consider what is the meaning of purging in the original sense. It is to expel impurities from the human body. The mind is subject to the same imperfection. The passions are the great movers of human actions; but they are mixed with such impurities, that it is necessary they should be purged or refined by means of terrour and pity. For instance, ambition is a noble passion; but by seeing upon the stage, that a man who is so excessively ambitious as to raise himself by injustice, is punished, we are terrified at the fatal consequences of such a passion. In the same manner a certain degree of resentment is necessary; but if we see that a man carries it too far, we pity the object of it, and are taught to moderate that passion.' 

My record upon this occasion does great injustice to Johnson's expression, which was so forcible and brilliant, that Mr. Cradock whispered me, 'O that his words were written in a book!'

[Boswell's Life of Johnson, Volume 3 (sections 117-119).]

Evening Note for Tuesday, September 23

 Thought for the Evening: Convertibility of Signs and Principles

One of the most important aspects of human life consists of probable reasoning, by which I mean not 'reasoning with those quantities called probabilities' but reasoning that deals with the truth-like, the apparent, and the only partially proven, with signs rather than proofs. A significant part of any intellectual inquiry consists of pulling these signs together, first in a way that starts to make sense, and then in such a way that they serve as a foundation for claims about truth, and then in the development of what is effectively a proof (although not always a strict demonstration). The key issue governing proof by signs is convertibility of evidential signs with actual principles and causes.

Following (somewhat loosely) St. Albert the Great in his discussion of signs of verisimilitude (Topicorum 1.1.2), we can organize these evidential signs in something like the following way.

(1) Evidential signs that are immediate phenomena, 'on the surface'. These are typically sensible qualities or immediately experienced features of the world which have a connection with deeper things. Thus, the whiteness of snow gives us a clue about its internal structure, but there is a significant gap of inquiry in the two, because the whiteness of snow is immediately recognizable but the internal structure to which it is a clue takes a considerable amount of investigation to reach.

(2) Evidential signs intermediate between the immediate phenomena and underlying principles. Albert takes the intermediate level of signs of truthlikeness to be the ones that are recognizable to many with only a little reasoning. His example is the pole star as a sign of the movement of the earth; the former shows the latter with a little reasoning that is of the sort that closely connects with things that most people don't have a difficulty understanding, if they put an effort into understanding the reasoning.

(3) Evidential signs convertible with the underlying principles. 'Convertibility' here means that they have an immediate connection such that they go together.  Albert's example is the eclipse and the relative motion of the moon. These signs can only be recognized by considerable reasoning and investigation, and so are only apparent 'to the wise', but when you recognize them, it is practically like recognizing that of which they are signs. These signs themselves have three grades:

(3a) Convertible so as to be recognizable by reflection on experience. These are are cases in which the actual convertibility is something we can sense.

(3b) Convertible so as to be recognizable given relevant competency. The actual convertibility requires at least a general kind of  skill to recognize.

(3c) Convertible so as to be recognizable with great experience and familiarity. The actual convertibility requires what we call relevant expertise to recognize.

However, we can take complexes and patterns of evidential signs together, and interlink them in various ways to get new signs, and because of this we can embed a superficial sign in a context of signs that gets us to (2) or (3). We can also strengthen signs by ruling out possibilities, and so we can transform a type (1) or type (2) sign into a type (3) sign by ruling out all connections but one between the sign and the underlying principles of which it is evidence.

Historically, people seem to have worked out at least four kinds of methods for transforming signs so that they are convertible with principles -- at least, methods that can be seen as such. The earliest, which we find forming in Plato's account of dialectic and developed in Aristotle's Topics and commentary on it, consists of maximal propositions and commonplaces (topoi or loci communes) and topical differentiae, which are principles for how to construct arguments given various starting points. An example of a maximal proposition would be, 'When a material is lacking, what is made from the material is lacking', whose differentia is 'from a material cause'. Suppose you were inquiring into whether a society had swords, but you don't have any direct information about it. To answer, "Does this society have swords?", you can apply the maximal proposition from material causes by recognizing that effective swords require certain kinds of materials -- bronze, iron, steel -- and then you can see if you have evidence that rules out each kind of material being commonly available. The more completely you can rule out the materials needed to make the swords, the tighter connection you create between your evidence and the actual causes and features of the situation. Another maximal proposition is, "It is not right to contradict what seems to be the case to everyone or the many or the wise." This differs from the previous one by being the maximal proposition for an 'extrinsic' topic, and the way you would approach convertibility would be by looking at the reasons why it seems true to everyone or the many or the wise, since, if something seems true to all or to many or to the intelligently informed, then even if it were strictly speaking wrong, there would have to be a reason why it seemed true to them.

A second method people have worked out to get convertibility of signs and principles is Nyaya, the systematic logical approach developed around the 2nd century by (it is thought) Aksapada Gautama in the Nyaya-sutra, and which, in the roiling turmoil of Indian intellectual thought, where massive numbers of different intellectual positions were put into argumentative competition, was raised to a high degree of sophistication, taking various forms in different Indian philosophical schools but perhaps reaching its most thorough form in the Nyaya-Vaisheshika school. The term that approximates what we are calling 'convertibility' here is in Nyaya called vyapti, or 'pervasion/concomitance'. The Nyaya approach identifies various pramanas, or ways of knowledge -- like perception, inference, and testimony -- which allow conclusions to have a connection to what is true, and an elaborate, and sometimes remarkably clever, apparatus was developed for analyzing ways in which such connections can go wrong and right. The result is encapsulated in what has popularly become known as the 'Nyaya syllogism', roughly: "There is fire on the hill? There is smoke on the hill. Wherever there is smoke, there is fire (i.e., pervasion between smoke and fire) as with a kitchen hearth (example of another actual case where the same pervasion is found) but unlike a steaming lake. This hill is smoky in that way. So there is fire on the hill." Or another example: "Atoms and karma have to be given direction by a conscious agent before they can function? They are insentient like an axe. Insentient things come to function only when directed by a conscious agent as a cause, as axes cut only when directed by an axeman. So atoms and karma also have to be given direction by a conscious agent as a cause."

A third method, which overlaps the first, is that of demonstrative regress. Some comments in passing in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics on demonstration in causal reasoning caused problems for commentators, because Aristotle seemed to attribute demonstrative status to a kind of argument that he elsewhere denies can be demonstrative. Early commentators interpreted him as using 'demonstration' (apodeixis) loosely, but in the Renaissance, commentators were not so sure and began to explore other possibilities, and this tradition, which perhaps can be said to begin with Agostino Nifo, reached its clearest form in the works of Giacomo Zabarella. Zabarella, pulling together ideas from prior commentators, argued that there is a kind of beneficial circular argument (regressus) in which you start by inferring the existence of a cause from the effect (Nifo calls this syllogismus conjecturalis, where 'conjecturalis' means not conjectural but non-necessary), and then by a business of understanding (negotiatio intellectus) or intelligent inspection (examen mentale) you make confused ideas more distinct; as you might expect, it consists of making distinctions and working out the implications of those distinctions until the whole field, so to speak, is well ordered, at which point you can prove the effect from the cause with a syllogism that has necessity ex condicione -- and thus you get a genuine demonstration for a conclusion, where certain conditions discovered in the negotiatio are respected. Cassirer noted that there were similarities between Galileo and Zabarella, and through the work of William Wallace and others it is by now established that Galileo knew the demonstrative regress and often makes use of its terminology, but he begins to rework the negotiatio to focus on geometry and experience rather than a priori distinctions, and as time goes on thinks less in terms of syllogisms than in terms of geometrical analysis. Wallace used this to show that many classical scientific discoveries could fairly easily be put into regressus demonstrativa form, even when the discoverers were not themselves thinking in those terms.

A fourth method we find developing with Francis Bacon's attempt to give an account of induction. Bacon suggested that we find the forma naturae of a given phenomenon by drawing up lists of what we found to happen with it in various circumstances and see what in these lists agrees and disagrees with what. This was put in a more rigorous form by John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic. Mill, looking over common patterns of inductive reasoning, condensed them into four or five 'methods' (depending on how they are counted) along the lines of Bacon's lists, which are summarized in the Canons of Induction: the Method of Agreement, the Method of Difference, the Joint Method of Agreement and Difference, the Method of Residue, and the Method of Concomitant Variations.  For instance, in the Method of Agreement, you note that a phenomenon occurs in a number of different situations, which also share another phenomenon; from this you conclude that the two have a causal connection, and then you just keep applying the different methods until the causal connection becomes clear. Mill intended this to be a complete account of experimental reasoning; Whewell at the time pointed out that this is not how large portions of scientific inquiry works, but it had a great deal of influence in a number of scientific fields, for an extended period of time.

Various Links of Interest

* Ian J. Campbell & Gabriel Shapiro, Can You Deny the PNC? (Metaphysics Γ.3, 1005b11-34) (PDF)

* Nils Peterson, Goodbye Dorothy Parker, Apologies Edgar Guest, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Mauricio Suárez, The Pragmatics of Scientific Representation (PDF)

* Marie Leborne Lucas, Neither One Nor Two. Philosophy of Pregnancy, at "Blog of the APA"

* Jeffrey Maynes, The method(s) of cases (PDF)

* Katja Crone, Foundations of a we-perspective

* Katie Ebner-Landy, David Hume vs literature, at "Aeon". This is an interesting argument, but I think things are slightly more complicated if we taken into view Hume's historical works, which certainly do use the character-sketch method as one of several methods.

Currently Reading

In Book

Walter Wangerin, Jr., The Book of the Dun Cow
Andrew Willard Jones, The Two Cities
Oliver O'Donovan, The Disappearance of Ethics

In Audiobook

Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Vor Game
Lev Grossman, The Bright Sword

In Tales Irrevocably Gone

 Lost
by G. K. Chesterton 

So you have gained the golden crowns, so you have piled together
The laurels and the jewels, the pearls out of the blue,
But I will beat the bounding drum and I will fly the feather
For all the glory I have lost, the good I never knew. 

 I saw the light of morning pale on princely human faces,
In tales irrevocably gone, in final night enfurled,
I saw the tail of flying fights, a glimpse of burning blisses,
And laughed to think what I had lost -- the wealth of all the world. 

 Yea, ruined in a royal game I was before my cradle;
Was ever gambler hurling gold who lost such things as I?
The purple moth that died an hour ere I was born of
That great green sunset God shall make three days after I die. 

 When all the lights are lost and done, when all the skies are broken,
Above the ruin of the stars my soul shall sit in state,
With a brain made rich, with the irrevocable sunsets,
And a closed heart happy in the fullness of a fate. 

 So you have gained the golden crowns and grasped the golden weather,
The kingdoms and the hemispheres that all men buy and sell,
But I will lash the leaping drum and swing the flaring feather,
For the light of seven heavens that are lost to me like hell.

Augustine's Ascent of the Soul

 We are inquiring, of course, about the power of the soul, and the soul has the power to perform all these acts simultaneously, although it may think that it is really doing only that act which implies some effort or, at least, some fear. For it performs that act with greater attention than the rest. To teach these grades to anyone, let the acts of the soul, from the lowest to the highest, be called, first, Animation; the second, Sensation; the third, Art; the fourth, Virtue; the fifth, Tranquillity; the sixth, Approach; the seventh, Contemplation. They can be named also in this way: 'of the body'; 'through the body'; 'about the body'; 'toward itself'; 'in itself'; 'toward God'; 'in God'. Or again, in this way: 'beautifully of another, beautifully through another, beautifully about another, beautifully toward a beautiful, beautifully in a beautiful, beautifully toward Beauty, beautifully in Beauty.'

[St. Augustine, The Magnitude of the Soul, McMahon, tr.,  in Writings of Saint Augustine, Volume 2, Ludwig Schopp, ed., CIMA Publishing Co., Inc. (New York: 1947) pp. 146-147.]

What does the soul, or the human being qua alive, do? It holds together and maintains the body (Animation), interacts with its physical environment like other animals (Sensation), acts in a way distinctive to it as rational (Art, Virtue), purifies itself for higher good (Approach), and is united with supreme good (Contemplation). Thus is the fullness and beauty of human life according to Augustine.

Augustine's Ascent of the Soul
First Step	Animation (Being Alive)	Of the Body	beautifully of another
Second Step	Sensation	Through the Body	beautifully through another
Third Step	Art (Productive Skill)	About the Body	beautifully about another
Fourth Step	Virtue	Toward the Soul	beautifully toward the beautiful
Fifth Step	Tranquillity	In the Soul	beautifully in the beautiful
Sixth Step	Approach (Entry)	Toward God	beautifully toward Beauty
Seventh Step	Contemplation	In God	beautifully in Beauty