Fortnightly Book, September 14

 I'm running behind on this, of course.

Walter Wangerin Jr. (1944-2021) was a Lutheran pastor and a professor of English at the University of Evansville, eventually ending up teaching at Valparaiso University. He was a prolific author of both fiction and nonfiction. Most of his works are religious, but perhaps his best-known work is a fantasy novel published in 1978 called The Book of the Dun Cow, which is the new fortnightly book.

Men have not yet come, and animals protect the world from the terrible Wyrm at the center of the earth. Chauntecleer is a rooster, and as such a lord of his domain. But to rule brings grave responsibilities, and there are terrible monsters, not least of which are the evil basilisks who seek to free the Wyrm who will destory the world....

J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas)

Introduction

Opening Passage:

'Then you are so convinced by these new theories that you plan to jettison all the cliches of the modern novel -- adultery, love, ambition -- in order to write a biography of Gilles de Rais!'

After a pause, he contined:

'It is not the obscenity of Naturalism I detest -- the language of the lockup, the doss house and the latrines -- that would be foolish and absurd. Let's face it, some subjects can't be treated any other way -- Zola's L'Assommoir is living proof that works of tremendous vision and power can be constructed out of the linguistic equivalent of pitch and tar. That is not the issue, any more than the fact that I have serious reservations about Naturalism's heavy-handed, slapdash style. No, what I really object to is Naturalism's immorality on the intellectual plain -- the way it has turned literature into the living incarnation of materialism, the way it promotes the idea of art as something democratic!...' (p. 3)

Summary: Durtal is a writer who has been increasingly dissatisfied with the Naturalistic literary style that is in fashion; he was set on a different path by an experience with Matthias Grünewald's Tauberbischofsheim Altarpiece. His current project is working through a biography of Gilles de Rais. He often talks about it and related matters with his friend, Des Hermies, who is a doctor who (possibly) has considerable writing talent but has never published anything because he realized that, whatever his ability, he was never going to write anything genuinely original. Through Des Hermies, Durtal meets Carhaix, the last bellringer in Paris; Carhaix, unlike Durtal and Des Hermies, is both Catholic and married, but they forgive him such relatively minor faux pas because Mme Carhaix is delightful and Carhaix is an interesting conversationalist, if a bit obsessed by the dying art of change-ringing. (Carhaix is so obsessed with bells, in fact, that one suspects, despite his obvious commitment to the faith, that he's Catholic in part because it makes it easier to be a bellringer.)The three, I suppose, are misfit artists -- Durtal, the artist who has broken off the fashionable style and is struggling to find his own; Des Hermies, the over-curious and ever-restless failed artist; and Carhaix, devotee of an art that is almost extinct and generally no longer appreciated.

Durtal's work on Gilles de Rais is the unifying thread of the story; as we go, we find out more and more about this man who once was a fellow warrior beside St. Jeanne D'Arc and then became a Satanist executed for raping and murdering children. Des Hermies, who in his capacity as a physician has an extraordinary number of connections and acquaintances, recommends that he consider looking at how Satanists work in present-day France. The most notable Satanist of modern-day is Canon Docre, an unfrocked and excommunicated priest; Des Hermies has never met him, but he knows that the Chantelouves have connections with him. Durtal happens to know the Chantelouves, in a somewhat interesting way, since he and Mme. Chantelouve have been carrying on a correspondence affair. Durtal uses this connection to try to learn more about Satanism and, eventually, a Satanic Black Mass that Canon Docre will be holding when he visits Paris. As the progress of the Gilles de Rais research increases, and we follow Gilles de Rais in his descent into evil, Durtal seems to undergo an opposing transformation, as he increasingly comes to regard his affair as a sordid and repulsive matter and finds the Satanists, and everyone and everything associated with them, off-putting. He doesn't believe any of it, but even he is shocked and made uneasy by the intensely petty sacrilege at the Black Mass and the malice expressed toward the Eucharist; he doesn't really know why, but the sacrilege just seems repugnant. Durtal accepts none of the dogmas, and yet the sacrilege and blasphemy just seems wrong.

That's more or less where it's left. Human beings are myth-makers, and when we speak of the modern age we weave a myth -- a myth of progress, of the banishment of superstition, of clear-eyed regard for reality. And Durtal's brush with Satanism has shown him what he was already beginning to recognize in the very modern style of Literary Naturalism: it's entirely fiction. Many of the things that make the modern age bearable are just slightly new versions of things that have always been, like having a nice meal with friends. The progress of the modern age is sometimes fake -- not always, perhaps, but a lot of it is only surface deep, and some of it is covering losses and deteriorations, like the loss of the art of change-ringing. You're free, of course, to think it's in some way a good trade, and Durtal (although not Carhaix) might not criticize you for it -- but it is a deterioration being spun as progress. But even when genuine, some of the progress is really just the old enduring into the present day -- basic points of chemistry were discovered by Renaissance alchemists, and the beauty of modern Paris is partly built on the Gothic and the Baroque. Nor has the modern age banished superstition. There are astrologers, alchemists, magicians galore. There are Satanic Black Masses going on under the secular age's nose, and a few of its shining lights are closely linked to them, and modern Frenchmen are terrified of Satanic curses. Durtal and his two friends find that there is an entire movement of heretical Catholicism going around, headed by a messianic prophet named Dr. Joannes, that is opposing, with magic, the Satanic curses of people like Canon Docre. It doesn't matter whether any of this is true or not; it is there. It is very obviously not banished, and it all has exactly the same right to be called 'modern' as anything in the myth. Certainly the myth does not let the Middle Ages off for the fact that magic and Satanism were disapproved then, and indeed disapproved more harshly than they are in the modern age; the myth of modernity simply points out that it was all there. And here it is again. It exists in the same calendar year; it is fomented by the same social causes; it interacts with the same cultural context. And far from being clear-eyed about this, people tell themselves fictional stories of how it's all in the past.

An age so self-deceitful cannot be anything but sick. But the story is not pessimistic; there is a sort of hope about the world that comes out of this, although only of a limited sort. If the modern age could not eliminate superstition, maybe there is something to religion. Maybe. If sacrilege and blasphemy still exist, we have not entirely lost a conception of the sacred. Not entirely. If the modern age could not banish Satan, maybe there is something to be said for Catholics worshipping God. Maybe, and maybe something. Durtal doesn't really believe any of it. What he does know is that the myth of the modern age is a lie. Whatever good there might be in modernity, the positivists and the Satanists are cousins, the priests are often blasphemers and the politicians often corrupt, and the world is full of sordid futility and evil. To see that is a sort of progress. Evil is a clue to what really means something. Durtal, however, has not gone farther than the beginning of that. Even Huysmans did not know where it all would lead; it's not even clear that, having published this book, he ever thought he would return to Durtal at all. But even if it all stopped here, it is something to have discovered that something might lead somewhere.

Favorite Passage:

Des Hermies rose and paced the room for a moment.

'That is all very well,' he groaned, 'but this century does not give a fig for the coming glory of Christ; it adulterates the supernatural and vomits over the other-worldly. How can you have hope in the future under such circumstances? How can you possibly believe that they will be clean and decent, these offspring of our fetid bourgeoisie and the vile times in which we live? Brought up in conditions such as these, what will become of them, what will life make of them?'

'They will turn out,' replied Durtal, 'just the same as their parents. They will stuff their guts with food and evacuate their souls through their bowels.' (pp. 264-265)

Recommendation: Recommended; I would say, 'Highly Recommended', but there are parts of the book that are definitely not for everyone. (The book is in some ways like Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but with cleaner and more unified structure, and Satanic blasphemers rather than Templar enthusiasts.)

*****

J.-K. Huysmans, The Damned (Là-Bas), Hale, tr. Penguin Books (New York: 2001).

Golden Mouth

 Today was the feast of St. John Chrysostom, Doctor of the Church. From Discourse 3 on Lazarus:

Do you not notice that workmen in brass, or goldsmiths, or silversmiths, or those who engage in any art whatsoever, preserve carefully all the instruments of their art; and if hunger come, or poverty afflict them, they prefer to endure anything rather than sell for their maintenance any of the tools which they use. It is frequently the case that many thus choose rather to borrow money to maintain their house and family, than part with the least of the instruments of their art. This they do for the best reasons; for they know that when those are sold, all their skill is rendered of no avail, and the entire groundwork of their gain is gone. If those are left, they may be able, by persevering in the exercise of their skill, in time to pay off their debts; but if they, in the meantime, allow the tools to go to others, there is, for the future, no means by which they can contrive any alleviation of their poverty and hunger. We also ought to judge in the same way. As the instruments of their art are the hammer and anvil and pincers, so the instruments of our work are the apostolic and prophetic books, and all the inspired and profitable Scriptures. And as they, by their instruments, shape all the articles they take in hand, so also do we, by our instruments, arm our mind, and strengthen it when relaxed, and renew it when out of condition. 

The Provincials and the Metropole

The conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on September 10 on the campus of Utah Valley University while speaking to students at a large public debate event. I know very little about him, beyond recognizing his picture and knowing he was closely connected with TPUSA, but every coldblooded murder under any circumstances is a loss to all of us. The event has led to a massive degradation of relations across all the political parts of social media, with endless accusations and recriminations, and some people, including teachers, who are, as they say, 'too online', have made fools of themselves and put their jobs in jeopardy by speaking positively of the murder. One would think it would just be common sense, regardless of one's political views, not publicly to celebrate a murder on a school campus at a student event if you are a teacher, but I suppose it's not actually difficult to find people without common sense in the teaching profession.

In any case, I was looking through a number of social media accounts this morning in a (futile) attempt to find more scholarly article and website recommendations for my occaional 'links of note' posts, and stumbled upon a debate about a particular case that pulled me up short a bit. It was about some positive comments made by a teacher in a high classroom about the murder of Kirk. That wasn't what made me pause. What caught my attention was that the high school was in Australia.

It's an old story. The provincials chat about affairs in the metropole in order to pretend to be cosmopolitans. What is peculiar about our moment of time is that the provincials deliberately make themselves provincials and treat the United States as the metropole even when there is no reason why they should. It goes far beyond what most people note on this subject, namely, that people pay attention to American politics because of America's global influence. This isn't like the Cuban Missile Crisis or trade wars. Rather, the domestic political issues of the United States are just copied. We saw this with George Floyd, in which you had people in foreign countries protesting a single policing incident in Minnesota, and here we have a teacher in Australia treating a political murder in Utah as if it were local politics. And it's become a joke on X.com and some other social media sites that the accounts most vociferously engaged with American politics always turn out not to be Americans. Half the world have volunteered to be an American colony, and treat themselves like the provinces of a metropole; there is a global tacit agreement for treating the US as the one place that really matters. All other political issues have to be shoehorned into American political disputes, otherwise they are treated as fringe.

It should go without saying, but perhaps doesn't, that this is bad for everyone. Most American domestic politics simply cannot bear that weight; most of it has no global significance at all. What is more, American domestic politics is weird. It does not work like politics in the rest of the world. Part of this is that we are an unusually successful republic, and republican politics always tends to be more paranoid and rough-and-tumble and tolerant of extremes than, say, the politics of parliamentary monarchies. The price of a republic is crazy people being the primary defense against crazy people, checks and balances carried to the point of a universal law, and we've been a prospering republic longer than most. We are also immense. There isn't really a single domestic politics in a population that's about a third of a billion people spread out from sea to shining sea in a federated system. There are lots of different domestic politics with fuzzy borders in a lot of similar-but-different political systems that work like capacitors, building up charge on particular issues that suddenly leap into national prominence; these suddenly-national topics then immediately start mutating on contact with new and different regional politics, in unpredictable ways. Local politics often makes a certain amount of practical sense, but in a system like this, at the national level there's not much rhyme or reason as to why at any given time we all happen to be talking about this topic rather than that. These topics get filtered through international journalistic institutions and arrive, in often highly simplified and distorted form, in other countries, where people naively take them up as a the topic du jour. 

And the discussions are often quite ignorant. One of the things that I discovered very early as an academic is that academics located outside of the United States often have really strange interpretations of American politics; this is not so much their fault as the nature of the thing. It's what happens when your conceptions of an exotic country are built mostly out of secondhand rumors about it. And make no mistake, whatever country you may live in, whatever politics might be like there, in politics the United States is an exotic land of strange customs. It's hard enough to follow and understand US politics when you are an American in America; outside of that, you have little chance at all. What actually happens, of course, is that the American topics get mapped, badly and inconsistently, on the domestic politics of other countries, so that people in other countries think that the disputes are about X when that has never been the point of the dispute at all. Sometimes these confusions bleed back into the United States, to the muddling of everything.

But the whole thing is bad on the other side, as well. There is just no reason why Australians should be treating themselves as a cultural appendage of the United States, with the political events of such a globally significant powerhouse as Orem, Utah having a centrality and importance on a level with things that happen in Melbourne or Sydney. There is no value for Australia, or any other country, in turning themselves into peasants troubled by rumors about intrigues in the royal palace. It doesn't matter how influential American politics is; it's not your own, and it's usually not that valuable or important. This doesn't mean that you can't have an interest in it, of course, nor does it mean that there are never cases of genuine global importance (but they can come from anywhere, not just the United States), but there's no reason why these issues of domestic America should be taking up valuable real estate in another country's political consciousness.

I sometimes wonder, though, if it's deliberate; perhaps people around the world talk American politics so that they don't (directly) have to talk about their own. In any case, it's an impoverishment all around.

Dashed Off XXII

 "Admit the existence of a God, of a personal God, and the possibility of miracles follows at once." G. G. Stokes

At any given stage of scientific explanation, one cannot rule out all alternative assumptions by scientific theory alone.

Even self-evident principles are known only by abstracting from the sensible.

Translation inevitably diversifies interpretations, involving as it does interpretive choices.

We use qualities to determine quantities.

Understanding is an imitation of heaven.

The Church is the extension of Christ as both historical and heavenly.

"...the use of paradox is to awaken the mind." Chesterton

As it is easier to be an official than a scientist, official scientists slide toward being more officious and less scientific.

It is science as hard, tedious work that makes discoveries, but science as flashy rhetoric that collects the grants.

the romance of conscience

"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head." Chesterton

Marriage is the institution which most requires a sense of reality.

Jeremiah 4:29 & Job 30:6 use 'keph' rather than the usual 'sur' for rocks; note that in both cases the context is about last-resort shelter.

there is one thing that you must know,
though you know it as you cry:
for the things that make life good to live
sometimes good men must die
gird up your loins, inflame your heart,
exhort your weary feet;
sometimes an evil worse than death
is the evil of defeat

"A sentence is too long either when length makes it obscure or unpronounceable, or else when the matter is too little to fill it." C. S. Lewis

The problem with Lyotard's account of the postmodern is that postmodernism is responsible for an explosion of metanarratives, metanarratives everywhere and multiplying like rabbits.

Jaki's argument for the universe (from Limits)
"...any totality, as a form of perfection, is really and consistently understood only insofar as it is set aganist a larger, more inclusive totality. But this again is subject to the same restriction.... As a result one may conclude that the sensory understanding or grasp of any totality depends ultimately on the reality of its supreme kind, which is the universe. Only this way can regress to infinity be avoided."

"Even as there is no branch of knowledge from which exact science is wholly excluded, so it would seem there is no branch which exact science wholly covers." Eddington

The brain has different functions depending on the system within which one considers it.

The scientific outlook is (deliberately) a never-ending tangle of riddles.

To say that Christ is King is to say that He is font of law, font of justice, font of mercy, font of honors.

"Great subjects do not make great poems; usually, indeed, the reverse." C. S. Lewis

While Bunyan gives us strict allegory, Spenser gives us loose allegory, something often ambiguous between allegory and allusion. Bunyan is describing an experience in personated terms; Spenser is narrating representative characters with a thematic meaning.

The difference between classical and neoclassical is the difference between genius and method.

passion, mood, season, climate

Sometimes a hug is next door to a prayer.

"The world-edifice puts one into quiet astonishment by its immeasurable greatness and by the infinite manifoldness and beauty which shine forth from it on all sides. If now...the presentation of all this perfection excites the imagination, on the other side another kind of enthralment seizes the understanding when it considers how so much splendor, so much greatness flows from a single universal rule with an eternal and right order." Immanuel Kant
"In the universal quiet of nature and in the tranquillity of mind there speaks the hidden capacity for knowledge of the immortal soul in unspecifiable language and offers undeveloped concepts that can be grasped but not described."

As the son of a Jewish woman, circumcised and presented in the Temple, Jesus is by blood, by nationality, by covenant, and by sacred sign a Jew.

Demythologizers are almost always transmythologizers; they strip away one to replace it with another.

States tend to fiscalize due services  over time, converting service obligations to the state into sources of revenue.

"Belief in an external world independent of the perceiving subject is the basis of all natural science." Einstein

"All philosophies survive by the metaphysical truth which they contain." Gilson

Places and times are only equivalent as the possible means of measuring them allow them to be.

Experimentation is socially structured by rituals that facilitate communication and cooperation.

Scientific inquiry is limited by the bounds of integrity of the inquirer.

transcendental arguments as arguments from final causes

authorial persona -> narrative voice -> lectoral impression

In the long run, activism can only bargain with either noncooperation or violence.

People treat their invention of new sins as proof of their moral progress.

"Assent is the acceptance of truth and truth is the proper object of the intellect." Newman

"Personality is always transcendent in relation to process." William Temple

Which social facts are relevant to laws depends on laws and other obligations.

Because we wonder, God exists.

"History is philosophy drawn from examples." Dionysius of Halicarnassus (De arte rhetorica 11.2)

A Sort of Symbol of Assent

 But reasoning by rule and in words is too natural to us, to admit of being regarded merely in the light of utility. Our inquiries spontaneously fall into scientific sequence, and we think in logic, as we talk in prose, without aiming at doing so. However sure we are of the accuracy of our instinctive conclusions, we as instinctively put them into words, as far as we can; as preferring, if possible, to have them in an objective shape which we can fall back upon, -- first for our own satisfaction, then for our justification with others. Such a tangible defence of what we hold, inadequate as it necessarily is, considered as an analysis of our ratiocination in its length and breadth, nevertheless is in such sense associated with our holdings, and so fortifies and illustrates them, that it acts as a vivid apprehension acts, giving them luminousness and force. Thus inference becomes a sort of symbol of assent, and even bears upon action.

[John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent, Chapter 8, Part 1.]

A Poem Draft

 Scribbledehobble

1. The Mystery of Creation

The word is wide around us;
it is a round us,
a roundel in a round,
written without a sound,
sundered from all note
yet written in a note.
I have ridden round the round,
written down the rood,
the road to heaven high,
down the way to sky.
The angles sing,
fair and square,
triangular up there,
where sigh the zephyrs fair
in the zithers of their hair.
Holly lute, hallowed lute,
with tambrel and with drum,
holly lute, yeah, hallowed lute,
with the damsel thrum.

2. The Mystery of The Adam

Man is woman working outward,
man is Highest working downward,
life from breathing on the water,
life from life through life all-bearing,
man and woman baring
in an Eden never boring.
Adam is of Adam half the Adam
(for man is Adam, not an atom);
Adam in Eden's evening
lightly leafing, breezes heaving,
having living haven,
dreams of loving Eve.
Truly she is heaven,
in woman man is even,
and here sleeps Adam dreaming
upon the eve of Eve;
crowned with sun-corona,
through sagehood and comprehension,
with no apprehension,
through grace and justice poured
la fille de la grâce
(for she just is the fill of grace)
and through splendor twice respendent,
she descends through victory,
eternity,
to the utter founding,
and there she is, the dwelling
of the light poured on the world.
Ave Eva, plenty gracious!
Ave, Eva, full of grace!
The anointed and his bride
are announced with holy banns.
But sorry, like a sword
is a sorrow slinking inward,
with sinuous insinuation
and seductive peroration.
The summer turns now autumn
and the leaves are brown in fall.
Ave, Eve, full of grace!
But salve, Eva, may God have mercy,
salve Eva, fallen grace.
The crown is dimmed on Adam
with the shadow of the damned.

3. The Mystery of the Chariot

Metatron  may measure
but there is higher and unmeasured;
none may mete it, it is not metric,
it rules all, a judicial ruler,
the root of righteous reason,
on a throne of light and fire.
We are thrown before the throne,
we bow down,
we cast our crowns,
as the leaping zap of lightning,
all-enlightening,
zigs and zags above our heads.
Blessed be the Glory from its Place!
(He is the Glory, He is the Place),
we sing with hallowed lute,
yeah, holy lute,
already by the river,
roving beneath the temple,
exiled by rolling time.
From the north, the wind and cloud,
resplendent above the river,
with a white-hot fire,
a living fire, a leavened fire,
a hale and high and hallowed fire,
flaming forth the fourfold four
facing four directions:
man and lion, ox and eagle,
with upward wings upwinging,
and wings around their bodies,
they straigthway move, unswinging,
unturning undeterred.
The lightening leaped between them.
Skydomed above the creatures
a throne with voices thundered,
and on the throne of Glory
was one like the son of man,
a man of molten fire
with a rainbow 'round his head.
Like a Son of Man,
like the Glory of the Lord,
he sits and rules:
under throne we cast our crowns,
for we are overthrown.
Ave Maria, plenty gracious!
Eva Maria, full of grace!

4. The Mystery of the Bride

A river not already but eternal from the throne
waters trees of plenty,
plenty gracious, unalone.
On the throne the Lamb,
seven eyes like seven suns,
the spring of living water
in the city jewel-encrusted
where the Jewish tribes all gather
to bring their sheaves to Zion
and the apostolic thrones.
The world is altered,
is an altar,
evermore will be unaltered,
evermore will be unaltared.
The word is wide around us,
all around us the world is worded,
as descending from the heavens
comes the Bride unto her Lamb.
All the lame are here unlamed,
by the blood they all are lambed,
waving sheaves of harvest
as the city comes in glory,
and they sing a psalm in honor:
Ave Zion, plenty gracious,
haily holy Bride well-graced!

Evening Note for Tuesday, September 9

 Thought for the Evening: Titles in Tradition

We classify things sometimes as 'traditional', and it is perhaps interesting to think of the ways in which something could be so classified. Perhaps we can draw a division of grounds for classifying something as traditional on an analogy with title for a right. Then we might perhaps get something like this:

(1) titulus per se
--- --- (a) recurring presentation in monuments and documents
--- --- (b) widespread at least semi-independent aceptance

(2) titulus per accidens
--- --- (a) occasional notice indicating continual handing down
--- --- (b) probability in light of established doctrines and principles

(3) titulus coloratus
--- --- (a) handed down in defective/distorted/damaged form
--- --- (b) handed down gappily

(4) titulus fictus
--- --- (a) accepted as traditional only because thought traditional
--- --- (b) handed down but in a manner displaced/discontinuous from its necessary & proper conditions

(5) titulus simpliciter nullius
--- --- (a) not handed down at all (invented)
--- --- (b) handed down but garbled into incoherence

If the analogy were to hold, one could say that things are properly traditional if they have per se title or per accidens title; the others are not traditional in the most proper sense. However, things under the color of tradition (colorate title) are sort-of traditional, and can be regarded as such when the title in question is widely accepted, or associated with honest attempts to be traditional, or if it is sufficientally similar to per se title or per accidens title for practical purposes, or if it is 'healed' by reasonable correction or by association with something else that has superior title.  

Fictive title and null title give us something that is not really traditional at all, but they might suffice for treating something as traditional in a looser sense if they are the result of what is unavoidable or if they are associated with something that has superior title. An example of null title that allows for classification as traditional in a looser sense would perhaps be the Kirishitan prayers; the Kirishitan community were Catholic Christians who were cut off, without priests, for nearly two centuries. They preserved a number of Christian prayers, but the prayers were all in Latin, which fewer and fewer of them knew anything about as time went on. Therefore the prayers, Latin spoken with Japanese pronunciation by people who for the most part did not understand Latin, became garbled, and were just memorized by people who didn't know what they meant, which allowed for further garbling. The prayers themselves, then, have null title as the traditional prayers, but many Kirishitan practices were in much better shape, and had at least colorate title, so the Kirishitan prayers can be regarded as the traditional Paternoster, etc., in a looser sense of the term.

I'm not sure how well this holds up across the board, but I think it's an interesting first approximation.

Links of Note

* Aron Wall, The Argument from Confusion is Weak, at "Undivided Looking"

* Ian J. Campbell, Zeno of Elea's Arguments Against the One (PDF)

* Susan Pickard, Beauvior on Trans, at "Beauvoirian Feminism"

* Martin Lin, Spinoza on Powers and Abilities (PDF)

* The Julia Wedgwood Site has information about and articles by Julia Wedgwood (1833-1913).

* Matthew Chrisman & Berislav Marušić, Transparency, Self-Knowledge, and the Sociality of Belief (PDF)

* Kailani B., I Tried Reading Brandon Sanderson's Books, at "Damsel in the Library". This is pretty close to my experience with Sanderson's works. If find some of the ideas interesting, and occasionally executed, but I find it very difficult to enjoy them. I occasionally try again, but have difficulty pushing through -- I recently tried The Final Empire in audiobook, but couldn't really get through, and I think a lot of it is that while his stories are sometimes interesting, his language is boring. It manages to be neither gravely dignified nor vigorously colloquial nor quietly self-effacing; it's always in the way and uninteresting.

Currently Reading

In Book

J. K. Huysmans, The Damned
Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest
Oliver O'Donovan, The Disappearance of Ethics

In Audiobook

Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice

A Strong and Vigorous Flame

 The Conquest
by John Norris 

 I. In Power or Wisdom to contend with thee,
Great God, who but a Lucifer would dare?
Our Strength is but Infirmity,
And when we this perceive, our Sight's most clear:
But yet I will not be excell'd thought I,
In Love; in Love I'll with my Maker vy.

 II. I view'd the Glories of thy Seat above,
And thought of every Grace and Charm divine,
And farther to encrease my Love
I measured all the Heights and Depths of thine.
Thus there broke forth a Strong and Vigorous Flame,
And almost melted down my mortal Frame. 

 III. But when thy Bloody Sweat and Death I view,
I own (Dear Lord) the Conquest of thy Love;
Thou dost my highest Flights outdo;
I in a lower Orb, and slower, move.
Thus in this Strife's a double Weakness shewn,
Thy Love I cannot equal, nor yet bear my own.

In the Stubbles of Renown

 Gleaners of Fame: A September Sonnet
by Alfred Austin  

 Hearken not, friend, for the resounding din
 That did the Poet's verses once acclaim:
 We are but gleaners in the field of fame,
 Whence the main harvest hath been gathered in.
 The sheaves of glory you are fain to win,
 Long since were stored round many a household name,
 The reapers of the Past, who timely came,
 And brought to end what none can now begin.
 Yet, in the stubbles of renown, 'tis right
 To stoop and gather the remaining ears,
 And carry homeward in the waning light
 What hath been left us by our happier peers;
 So that, befall what may, we be not quite
 Famished of honor in the far-off years.

Somewhat ironic, perhaps. Austin was appointed Poet Laureate in 1896, a number of years after publishing this sonnet, and spent the rest of his career being criticized for not deserving it and only having received it because of his friendship with Lord Salisbury. (The derogatory nickname that seems to be remembered even today is "The Banjo Byron".) He's quite a decent poet, but he followed Southey, Wordsworth, and Tennyson; almost no one was going to look impressive after that string of greats. It probably didn't help that earlier in his career he had foolishly written literary criticism bashing some of the great poetic names of the day, and, despite his poetic competence, his own poetry was not good enough to back up his big talk.  

Dashed Off XXI

 Love of the artwork makes it to be good in its kind; joy in the artwork ornaments it in a way appropriate to itself; peace in the artwork sets it in appropriate context.

Three parts of ancient Greek meal:
(1) sitos: staples, usually barley or wheat bread
(2) opson: salt, olives, cheese, boiled roots, vegetables, onions, fish
(3) potos: beverage
--> Note Xenophon (Mem 1.3.5): "[Socrates] ate just enough food to make eating a pleasure, and he was so ready for his food that his desire for sitos was his opson." Also note the criticism of the opsophage (Mem 3.14.4) and the comment about foods that persuade one to eat and drink when not hungry or thirsty (Mem 1.3.6). (Cf. Mobus on this.)

No one compares statements only with statements.

From the fact that a statement cannot be incorporated into a system of statements, we can only conclude that it is at least not part of this system, if it is viable or consistent; we cannot conclude that it is incorrect. That would requires us to know why it cannot be incorporated.

skill as a kind of security in difficult deed

'Her is no chos bot owder do or de." Wallace IV.593

Shy love as well bold love imitates God.

Joy is an adorning power.

Love deems it an honor to do good.

In the peace of charity, we dwell in the good of the loved as in something beautiful.

Our practical actions suppose contexts that give them meaning.

Akan proverbs (noted by Kwame Gyekye)
"If the occasion (situation) has not arisen, the proverb has not come."
"When the occasion arises, it calls for a proverb."
"Each destiny is unlike any other."
"The pursuit of beneficence brings no evil on the one who pursues it."
"Everything has its 'because of'."
"What is fated to prosper or succeed cannot be otherwise."
"God is the justification of all things."
"The earth is wide but God is the elder (chief)."
"All men are children, no one is a child of earth."
"Man is not a palm tree that he should be complete (self-sufficient)."
"The right arm washes the left arm, and the left arm also washes the right arm."
"If one eats the honey alone, it plagues one's stomach."
"The order God has settled, living man cannot subvert."
"Wisdom is not in the hand of one person."
"No one knows His beginning and His end."
"Everything is from God and ends up in God."
"Speech is one thing, wisdom another."
"The wise man is spoken to in proverbs, not in words (speeches)."
"Wisdom is not like money, to be tied up and hidden away."
"If a problem lasts for a long time, wisdom comes to it."
"All things depend on God."
"When a man dies he is not dead."
"God created everyone well."
"Trying hard breaks the back of misfortune."
"If a man is unhappy, his condut is the cause."
"Goodness is the prime characteristic of God."
"Character comes from your deeds."
"When a man descends from heaven, he descends into a human society."
"The prosperity of man depends on (fellow) man.
"No one teaches a child God."

NB that in Akan predicates can be used as commands, questions, and assertions.

four kinds of proprium
(1) exists for the whole of a species but not for it alone (e.g., natural and potential possession of two feet)
(2) exists only for one species but not for every member (e.g., knowledge of medicine)
(3) exists for every member of only one species, but not always (e.g. gray hair in old age)
(4) eixsts always for every member of only one species (e.g., risibility)
-- The true proprium (4) is that which does not cause variation of degree in subject and is not essential to it. It differs from accidents in being convertible with their subjects and from differentia in not eing substantial. It is identified with respect to matter, with respect to form, or with respect to an action from the form.

Using the material cause in explanation almost always requires some principle of conservation or uniformity.

Accidents subsist in individuals, propria in species, differentiae in genera.

Diodorean possibility (p is or at some point will be) and necessity (p is and at every point will be) as Diamond and Box with respect to a forward lightcone

"The true artist is obedient to a conception of perfection to which his work is constantly related and re-related in what seems an external manner." Iris Murdoch

"The beauty of the world is the order of the world that is loved." Simone Weil

Saints who are given the grace of extraordinary mortifications are given them not to show us what to do but to show us that our own ascetic labors are not so difficult, much less impossible or unbearable, as we might imagine from only comparing them to more comfortable lives.

The primary task of the beginner in the spiritual life is to develop the habit of prayer, i.e., ease of and swiftness to prayer in routine and out, through all the aspects of life; and the primary means to this are routines of prayer, detachment and small ascetic self-disciplines, and memorative practices like spiritual reading or icons, which refresh us and remind us to prayer.

** EW Trueman Dicken's summary of the Four Waters in the Life:
(1) Active states = natural prayer
Beginners (vocal/discursive prayer = 1st water)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Prayer of Quiet = Recollection = 2nd water (incipient contemplation)
--- --- --- --- (A1) First higher state -- quiet during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (A2) Second higher state -- will and understanding involved, but not memory
--- --- (B) Sleep of the faculties = 3rd water
--- --- (C) Union = 4th water
** Summary of the Mansions
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners I (includes fervor novitium) = Mansions I
--- --- (B) Beginners II (arid vocal or discursive prayer) = Mansions II
--- --- (C) Beginners III (vocal or discursive prayer with sensible devotion) = Mansions III
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection = Mansions IV.iii
--- --- (B) Prayer of Quiet (infused consolations) = Mansions IV
--- --- (C) Union = Mansions V
** Summary of The Way
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners (vocal or discursive prayer)
--- ---  (B) [Active] Recollection (affective prayer)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Prayer of Quiet (incipient contemplation)
--- --- --- --- (1) First higher state = quiet during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (2) ?
--- --- (B) Union -- All faculties cleaving to God.
** Summary of Relation V
(1) Active states = natural prayer
Beginners (general awareness of the presence of God)
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection
--- --- (B) Sleep of the faculties -- during daily tasks(?)
--- --- (C) Union
** Final Tabulation up to Mansions
(1) Active states = natural prayer
--- --- (A) Beginners I (as in Mansions)
--- --- (B) Beginners II (as in Mansions)
--- --- (C) Beginners III (as in Mansions)
--- --- (D) Active Recollection (as in The Way [only])
(2) Passive states = supernatural prayer
--- --- (A) Passive Recollection (Mansions IV.iii)
--- --- (B) Prayer of Quiet, including
--- --- --- --- (1) Quiet maintained during daily tasks
--- --- --- --- (2) (?) An indefinable, highly confused state
--- --- (C) (?) Sleep of the Faculties
--- --- (D) Union

God is not a pedagogical tutiorist; He often teaches in daring or even dangerous ways.

We should often most docilely consider the saints with whom we have the least natural sympathies.

Lived experience is not foundational but holistic. We do not so much build on it as within it; it is not the Ur-text but the context of our articulated experience.

A problem with Schutz's coneption of 'finite provinces of meaning' is his assumption of the 'world of working' as 'paramount reality', when in reality it is more like an incomplete hallway or exchange-station that nobody regards as adequate even on its own terms. We also recognize that this interchange connects to greater as well as lesser realities -- e.g., that of scientific theory, or artistic beauty, or religious communion, which are taken to be in some sense more paramount.

Irrationality requires an extensive context of rationality.

Part of moral maturity is being able to recognize both other sins and natural penalties as punishment for sin.

"With shame, the human being manifests almost instinctively the need of affirmation and acceptance of this 'self,' according to its rightful value. He experiences it at the same time both within himself and externally, before the 'other'." John Paul II
"Man appears in creation as the one who received the world as a gift, and it can also be said that the world received man as a gift."
"Man appears as created, that is, as the one who, in the midst of the 'world,' received the other man as a gift."
"Masculinity and femininity -- namely, sex -- is the original sign of a creative donation and an awareness on the part of man, male-female, of a gift lived in an original way."
"Happiness is being rooted in love."
"In the mystery of creation, man and woman were 'given' in a special way to each other by the Creator."
"Man appears in the visible world as the highest expression of the divine gift, because he bears within him the interior dimension of the gift."

One may have all the elements of a proof of p, and even recognize this, and yet not know p, because knowledge of p is not mere possession of something that proves, even when aware of this possession. One may have adequate evidence to know p and yet not know p, because knowledge of p is not the meeting of a threshold of evidence.

** Dicken on John of the Cross's Ascent
The Understanding -- to be mortified in respect of knowledge received
--- (1) Naturally
--- --- --- By the exterior senses (Ascent I)
--- --- --- By the interior senses (Ascent II.xii-xiv)
--- (2) Supernaturally
--- --- --- (a) Corporally
--- --- --- --- --- By the exterior senses (Ascent II.xi)
--- --- --- --- --- By the interior senses (Ascent II.xvi-xxii)
--- --- --- (b) Spiritually
--- --- --- --- --- (i) Distinctly (Ascent II.xxiiii-end)
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By visions
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By revelations
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By locutions
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- By spiritual feelings
--- --- --- --- --- (ii) Confusedly (contemplation)

"Some people are so patient about not making spiritual progress that God would certainly wish them to be less so!" St. John of the Cross

spiritus vertiginis (Night I, xiv.3)

Note Dicken's insistence, on the Stages of Prayer table comparing Teresa and John, that these are 'a highly integrated pattern' but that the stages are not necessarily identical because (1) the sanits are presupposing somewhat different methods and backgrounds (Teresa's for those whose devotion is mostly affective and of the heart, John's for those with a more formal and discursive background) and (2) Teresa's terms are primarily focused on prayer time, John's on the whole attitude of life; they identify the same stages but not the same thigns, and the terms are not perfectly coextensive.

You can prepare for confession as much as possible, and it will still be the case that when you finally say something in the confessional, you realize that what you said is not quite right.

Juridical entities always require some natural anchor, although as the sophistication of the legal system increases, the indirectness can increase.

Grounding is not a relation but a status.

"No style can be good in the mouth of a man who has nothing, or nonsense, to say." C. S. Lewis
"'Look in thy heart and write' is good counsel for poets; but when a poet looks in his heart he finds many things there besides the actual. That is why, and how, he is a poet."

The artist imitates nature by the very act of imitation.

funerals as ways of showing respect to human dignity

A system in which pregnancy is treated as a secondary matter or inconvenience is an inherently misogynistic system.

The damned are constantly represented in Scripture as bound to or in fire, in such terms as to indicate that this binding induces both a moral qulity (awareness of restriction) and a 'physical' quality (actual constraint of behavior).

purgatory as a sharing of the Cross of Christ

The New Testament is even more concerned to represent God as judge than the Old Testament; this is inevitable, given that the NT has a greater concentration of apocalyptic.

Realms are governed by authoritative documents and appointed channels of communication.

"The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." Einstein

"A philosophy may indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself." William James

Against a Dark Blue Night-Sky

 In The Damned, which I am of course currently reading for the fortnightly book, the Crucifixion of Mathias Grünewald, from the sixteenth-century altarpiece sometimes known as the Karlsruher Altar and sometimes as the Tauberbischofsheimer Altar, plays a significant role. One of the most famous passages from the book is a detailed attempt to convey it in words; the character Durtal, who has been (like Huysmans) hobnobbing with the Naturalists has grown tired of what he sees as their tedious book-exercise approach and, seeking a richer kind of naturalism, discovers it perfectly expressed in Grünewald's painting. Part of the description (in a different and older translation than the one I am reading):

He shuddered in his armchair and closed his eyes as if in pain. With extraordinary lucidity he revisualized the picture, and the cry of admiration wrung from him when he had entered the little room of the Cassel museum was reechoing in his mind as here, in his study, the Christ rose before him, formidable, on a rude cross of barky wood, the arm an untrimmed branch bending like a bow under the weight of the body. 

 This branch seemed about to spring back and mercifully hurl afar from our cruel, sinful world the suffering flesh held to earth by the enormous spike piercing the feet. Dislocated, almost ripped out of their sockets, the arms of the Christ seemed trammelled by the knotty cords of the straining muscles. The laboured tendons of the armpits seemed ready to snap. The fingers, wide apart, were contorted in an arrested gesture in which were supplication and reproach but also benediction. The trembling thighs were greasy with sweat. The ribs were like staves, or like the bars of a cage, the flesh swollen, blue, mottled with flea-bites, specked as with pin-pricks by spines broken off from the rods of the scourging and now festering beneath the skin where they had penetrated. 

 Purulence was at hand. The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the colour of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulæ touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia. 

 Above this eruptive cadaver, the head, tumultuous, enormous, encircled by a disordered crown of thorns, hung down lifeless. One lacklustre eye half opened as a shudder of terror or of sorrow traversed the expiring figure. The face was furrowed, the brow seamed, the cheeks blanched; all the drooping features wept, while the mouth, unnerved, its under jaw racked by tetanic contractions, laughed atrociously. 

 The torture had been terrific, and the agony had frightened the mocking executioners into flight. 

Against a dark blue night-sky the cross seemed to bow down, almost to touch the ground with its tip, while two figures, one on each side, kept watch over the Christ. One was the Virgin, wearing a hood the colour of mucous blood over a robe of wan blue. Her face was pale and swollen with weeping, and she stood rigid, as one who buries his fingernails deep into his palms and sobs. The other figure was that of Saint John, like a gipsy or sunburnt Swabian peasant, very tall, his beard matted and tangled, his robe of a scarlet stuff cut in wide strips like slabs of bark. His mantle was a chamois yellow; the lining, caught up at the sleeves, showed a feverish yellow as of unripe lemons. Spent with weeping, but possessed of more endurance than Mary, who was yet erect but broken and exhausted, he had joined his hands and in an access of outraged loyalty had drawn himself up before the corpse, which he contemplated with his red and smoky eyes while he choked back the cry which threatened to rend his quivering throat.

The description is an implicit criticism in itself of Naturalism, I think; part of what Huysmans is suggesting is that Naturalism as a literary movement could not accurately describe even a painting like this in this way, because it is blind to the kind of experience that is required to do so. This is a fundamental reason why Naturalism as a literary movement began to give way to Decadence, as it began to dawn on artists, and writers and illustrators in particular, that, despite Naturalism introducing powerful means of description, Naturalists were getting their vivid realism not by describing reality as it actually was but by chopping off experiences that did not fit their preconceptions of reality. When I did Barbey d'Aurevilley's Les Diabolique, I noted that a lot of his work was motivated (explicitly) by a sort of contempt for the literary scene's handling of both moral and natural evil, and Huysmans has a similar view, possibly less contemptuous but certainly just as tired of it. As Huysmans once put it to a friend in a letter, he was disgusted by the Naturalists trying to convince people that devilry was an old wives' tale or a chemical imbalance, and tired equally of occultists with their tired treadmill of examples, and wanted to write a story that taught the lesson that the Devil was real and ruled the world. This was not a theological position but an artistic protest against what was increasingly seen as the dishonesty of the art of the Naturalists when it came to dealing with actual human experience. Decadence arises from applying techniques of Naturalist realism not to the humdrum and everyday but to the interesting extremes, especially interesting extremes of good and evil, that require stretching those techniques in new directions. 

[Crucifixion by Matthias Grünewald - 1. The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202.2. Google Art Project, Public Domain, Link]

Gregorius Magnus

 Today is the feast of Pope St. Gregory I the Great, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From his Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Book II, Tenth Homily):

For Holy Church has two lives, the one which she leads temporally, the other which she receives for eternity, the one in which she labors on earth, the other in which she is rewarded in Heaven, the one in which she earns rewards, the other truly in which she rejoices in the receipt thereof, and in each life she offers sacrifices. Here of course the sacrifice of compunction, there the sacrifice of praise....Yet flesh is offered in each sacrifice because here the oblation of flesh is the maceration of the body, there the oblation of flesh is the glory of resurrection in praise of God. For truly the flesh is offered there as for an whole-burnt offering; when wholly changed in eternal incorruption it contains nothing of contradiction or mortality because, at once wholly kindled with the fires of His love, it will continue in praise for ever....

[Saint Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Tomkinson, tr., Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies (Etna, CA: 2008) p. 442.]

Implicit Intention

 ...Some considerable time ago, men of the world were in the habit of using much indecent language in mutual conversation; while, nevertheless, they thought it thoroughly ungentlemanly so to speak in the presence of ladies. We will suppose two gentlemen of the period to be talking with each other, while some lady is in the room, ocupied, we will say, in writing a letter. They are wholly engrossed, so far as they are themselves aware, with the subject they are upon -- politics, or the Stock Exchange, or sporting. They are not explicitly thinking of the lady at all; and yet, if they are really gentlemen, her presence exercises on them a most real and practical influence. It is not that they fall into bad language and then apologize; on the contrary they are so restrained by her presence that they do not dream of such expressions. Yet, on the other hand, no one will say that the freedom of their thought and speech is explicitly perceived by them to be interfered with. Their careful abstinence, then, from foul language is due indeed to an actual intention present in their mind: the intention, namely, of not distressing the lady who is present. Yet this intention is entirely implicit; and they will not even become aware of its existence, except by means of careful introspection. And this, we would submit, if we may here anticipate our coming argument, is that kind of practical remembrance and impression concerning God's intimate presence, which it is of such singular importance that I preserve through the day....

[William George Ward, "The Extent of Free Will", in Essays on the Philosophy of Theism, Volume II, Wilfrid Ward, ed., Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. (London: 1884) p. 286.]

Links of Note

 * Elisabeth Camp, Metaphor in the Mind: The Cognition of Metaphor (PDF)

* Michael Arsenault, Aristotle on Misperceiving

* Pauline Kleingeld, Kant's Analytic Method and the Argument of Groundwork I (PDF)

* Susan Pickard, Sex is Not a Spectrum, on Beauvoir's account of sex, at "Beauvoirian Feminism"

* Sarale Ben-Asher, Poetic Imitation: The Argument of Republic 10 (PDF)

* Connor Tabarrok, Floodplains, FEMA, and Financial Analysis, at "Of All Trades"

* Paniel Reyes Cardenas, Term Functor Logic Tableaux

* John Plaice, Leibniz's Teleology is the Basis for the Principle of Least Action, at "Fiat Lux"

* Ian J. Campbell, Rational Powers and Knowledge of Counterparts in Aristotle (PDF)

* Adam Louis-Klein, The Holiest Hatred, on our contemporary rise of anti-semitism, at "Tablet"

* Emily Herring, Laughter is vital, on Bergson's account of laughter, at "Aeon"

* David Weinberger, We Are More Than We Think, reviews Edward Feser's Immortal Souls, at "Religion & Liberty"

* Vanessa de Harven, The Principle of Sufficient Reason in the Hellenistic Period (PDF)

* Nicolas Sarzeaud, A New Document on the Appearance of the Shroud of Turin from Nicole Oresme: Fighting False Relics and False Rumours in the Fourteenth Century. As the title suggests, a discussion by Oresme in the previously unpublished Problemata considers in passing the question of the Shroud as an example of religious fraud, and is the earliest skeptical mention (although we have indirect evidence that it was not an uncommon view at the time, and the cautious Holy See a bit later strictly required that it be displayed not as the actual relic but as a 'figure and representation' of the shroud of Christ). The mention is mostly unremarkable, except for historical interest, but Sarzeaud does a good job of discussing how these matters were approached in the fourteenth century.

* Typepad is completely shutting down. As the first of the major blogging platforms to fall, it seems like the end of an era. Part of the reason is due to broader business issues, so Wordpress and Blogger, which do not have the same problems, are likely to stand a while yet. (Indeed, while it's always difficult to guess how Google will go, I suspect the rise of LLMs has accidentally expanded Blogger's life, in the sense that Google has an additional incentive to keep it around a while yet, as a still-slowly-expanding mass of human text which Google can use for training.) But at some point the end will come for us all.

* Edward Feser, Maimonides on negative theology

* Christopher Pincock, Reichenbach, Russell, and scientific realism (PDF)

* Lance H. Gray, A Philosophy of Scarecrows

ADDED LATER: Graham Greene, noted Oneida actor from Ontario, died today. His most significant role, I think, was in Dances with Wolves, but I've always most loved his role as the sly and hilarious Joseph in Maverick. He was always great on the screen; he mentioned more than once in interviews that he preferred to do Native American and First Nations roles that went beyond the ordinary stoic stereotype of the silver screen Indian, and he was exceptionally good at bringing charm and humor to almost any role.

Fortnightly Book, August 31

 Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was born in 1848 to a French schoolteacher and a Dutch artist. He spent most of his life as a civil servant doing a job he disliked, but he also began a long career as an author in 1874, writing under the Dutch-ified version of his name, Joris-Karl, or J.-K., Huysmans. Originally he was known as an up-and-coming author of the Naturalist school, associated with Zola, but in the 1880s, having become convinced that Naturalism was deteriorating into a tedious treadmill of the same and the ordinary, he began to drift in another, darker direction, and eventually became known as one of the major writers in the Decadent school. In this period, his works became gloomy and exaggerated versions of his own life experiences and attempts to deal with the dreadfulness of modern life. He had originally expected this entire trajectory of his writing career to do poorly in terms of publication, consoling himself with the fact that he was doing something genuinely new, but the works touched a chord and often sold well.

The next fortnightly book is Huysmans's darkest and most controversial Decadent novel, Là-bas; the translation is literally 'Down There' but it is often given in English as The Damned. It tells the story of a man named Durtal, bored and disgusted by life, who throws himself into writing a biography of Gilles de Rais. Gilles de Rais was once the Marshal of France, a distinction he earned by exceptional valor while serving with St. Jeanne D'Arc. There is very little historical information about their relationship, which seems to have been purely professional and even merely occasional, but writers ever since have not been able to resist treating it as more, because of one very significant fact: Gilles de Rais, afterward, would go down a dark road, starting with grave financial troubles and ending with a trial in which he was accused of trying to summon demons (to get rich) and convicted and hanged for heresy, sodomy, and the murder of children. Historians debate how much of this was strictly true and how much of it was exaggerated (some of the financial troubles and some of the killings are almost certainly true), and folklore and the inevitable story-fascination of a saint interacting with an eventual devil-worshipper have exaggerated them even more. Gilles de Rais became a symbol for nineteenth-century Satanists, and thus Durtal's study of him leads him to the Satanist community in Paris. One of the many things that made the novel notorious was its depiction of Black Mass, based loosely on Huysmans's own experience of such a ceremony.

Là-bas would not be the last of Durtal; after the 'black book' of Là-bas, he wrote the 'white book' of En Route, and then La cathèdrale (his best-selling work), and L'Oblat, through which Durtal (in a path that was mirroring his creator's) continues to find disappointment in trying out means to escape the drudgery and sordidness of modern life, but on the way converts to Catholicism and eventually becomes a Benedictine oblate. All of that, however, is in the future. Huysmans himself did not yet know that this was to be Durtal's fate; he had not lived it yet. Here we begin, with the 'black book', the book of despair, the book about the disgusting horror pleasure can become when you try to make it something it cannot be.

Maurice LeBlanc, The Confessions of Arsene Lupin

 Introduction

Opening Passage: From "Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!...", the first story in the collection:

"Lupin," I said, "tell me something about yourself."

"Why, what would you have me tell you? Everybody knows my life!" replied Lupin, who lay drowsing on the sofa in my study.

"Nobody knows it!" I protested. "People know from your letters in the newspapers that you were mixed up in this case, that you started that case. But the part which you played in it all, the plain facts of the story, the upshot of the mystery: these are things of which they know nothing." (p. 1)

Summary: The ten stories in this collection are a mixed group, very different from one to another. However, they focus on aspects of Lupin's character that tend to go beyond his mere master-thievery, although we do, of course, get some of that. A significant, and unsurprising one, is Lupin's major strength and weakness, namely, beautiful women. This comes up in "The Wedding-Ring", "The Infernal Trap", and "Edith Swan-Neck". In several, Lupin plays the detective, sometimes to further a theft (as in "The Red Silk Scarf" or "The Invisible Prisoner") and sometimes to prove a point (as in "A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues"). In all of them, things are not precisely what things seem.

A common, although not universal, thread through the stories is the use of this idea, that things are different from what they appear to be, as a sort of joke or topsy-turviness. In the case of "A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues", the central joke is actually a pun, since the story is an homage of sorts to Edgar Allan Poe's classic and genre-defining detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", which it combines with a deliberate subversion of a common expectation in detective fiction, that the solutions to detective fictions stories are not supposed to repeat, and the upside-down insistence by Lupin, inconsistent with the thinking of so many stories in detective fiction, that extraordinary effects require extraordinary causes. Perhaps Lupin is so insistent on the matter because so many of his own effects are out of the ordinary. We get the same sort of subversiveness in Lupin's insistence in "Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!...", found in less bald form in other stories in the book, that those staples of detective fiction, rigorous deduction and close observation, don't actually matter much for solving mysteries; what matters instead is intelligent intuition, the ability to see that a bunch of very different things nonethless fit together if you only make the right supposition. Crime, in reality, is a personal foible; you find the explanation not by method but by a good understanding of people.

I think "Edith Swan-Neck" is structurally the best story in the work; it contains a nice set of twists upon twists. The story is also strengthened by the fact that it does a very good job of showing that Ganimard, Lupin's longsuffering and ever-losing detective opponent, is actually quite brilliant. He may not at the level of Herlock Sholmes or Lupin himself, but he is very, very good at his job. The perpetual danger, of course, is that, fated always to fail in his pursuit of Lupin, he could come across looking like a buffoon or an incompetent, which is to the detriment of Lupin himself. Here, however, as Lupin himself notes, he shows himself to be formidable, and thus to highlight Lupin's own genius all the more. My favorite story in the work, however, is the very charming "The Invisible Prisoner", in which Lupin casually commits a theft by apparently solving the theft he commits.

Favorite Passage: From "Edith Swan-Neck":

"But then why all these complications? Why the theft of one tapestry, followed by its recovery, followed by the theft of the twelve? Why that house-warming? Why that disturbance? Why everything? Your story won't hold water, Ganimard."

"Only because, you, chief, like myself, have stopped halfway; because, strange as this story already sounds, we must go still farther, very much farther, in the direction of the improbable and the astounding. And why not, after all? Remember that we are dealing with Arsène Lupin. With him, is it not always just the improbable and the astounding that we must look for? Must we not always go straight for the maddest suppositions? And, when I say the maddest, I am using the wrong word. On the contrary, the whole thing is wonderfully logical and so simple that a child could understand it. Confederates only betray you. Why employ confederates, when it is so easy and so natural to act for yourself, by yourself, with your own hands and by the means within your own reach?" (p. 231)

Recommendation: Recommended.

******

Maurcie Leblanc, The Confessions of Arsène Lupin, Fox Eye (Leicester: 2022).

Her Many-Pictured Page

 Wanderings
by St. John Henry Newman

Ere yet I left home's youthful shrine,
 My heart and hope were stored
Where first I caught the rays divine,
 And drank the Eternal Word. 

I went afar; the world unroll'd
 Her many-pictured page;
I stored the marvels which she told,
 And trusted to her gage. 

Her pleasures quaff'd, I sought awhile
 The scenes I prized before;
But parent's praise and sister's smile
 Stirr'd my cold heart no more. 

So ever sear, so ever cloy
 Earth's favours as they fade;
Since Adam lost for one fierce joy
 His Eden's sacred shade. 

 Off the Lizard.
December 8, 1832.

Doctor Gratiae

 Today is the feast of St. Augustine of Hippo, Bishop and Doctor of the Church. From Tractate 97 on the Gospel of John:

The Holy Spirit, whom the Lord promised to send to His disciples, to teach them all the truth which, at the time He was speaking to them, they were unable to bear: of the which Holy Spirit, as the apostle says, we have now received the earnest, an expression whereby we are to understand that His fullness is reserved for us till another life: that Holy Spirit, therefore, teaches believers also in the present life, as far as they can severally apprehend what is spiritual; and enkindles a growing desire in their breasts, according as each one makes progress in that love, which will lead him both to love what he knows already, and to long after what still remains to be known: so that those very things which he has some notion of at present, he may know that he is still ignorant of, as they are yet to be known in that life which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man has perceived. But were the inner Master wishing at present to say those things in such a way of knowing, that is, to unfold and make them patent to our mind, our human weakness would be unable to bear them. Whereof you remember, beloved, that I have already spoken, when we were occupied with the words of the holy Gospel, where the Lord says, I have yet many things to say unto you, but you cannot bear them now. Not that in these words of the Lord we should be suspecting an over-fastidious concealment of no one knows what secrets, which might be uttered by the Teacher, but could not be borne by the learner, but those very things which in connection with religious doctrine we read and write, hear and speak of, as within the knowledge of such and such persons, were Christ willing to utter to us in the self-same way as He speaks of them to the holy angels, in His own Person as the only-begotten Word of the Father, and co-eternal with Him, where are the human beings that could bear them, even were they already spiritual, as the apostles still were not when the Lord so spoke to them, and as they afterwards became when the Holy Spirit descended? For, of course, whatever may be known of the creature, is less than the Creator Himself, who is the supreme and true and unchangeable God.

Still the Billows from Numidia Seek the Lovely Roman Shore

 Monica and Augustine
by Lucy Larcom 

 In the martyr Cyprian's chapel there was moaning through the night;
Monica's low prayer stole upward till it met the early light.
Till the dawn came, walking softly o'er the troubled sea without,
Monica for her Augustine wept the dreary watches out. 

 "Lord of all the holy martyrs! Giver of the crown of flame,
Set on hoary-headed Cyprian, who to Thee child-hearted came;
Hear me for my child of promise! Thou his erring way canst see;
Long from Thee a restless wanderer, must he go away from me? 

 "'T is for Thee, O God, a mother this her wondrous child would keep;
Through the ripening of his manhood Thou hast seen me watch and weep.
Tangled in the mesh of Mani, groping through the maze of sense,
Other, deadlier snares await him, if from me he wander hence. 

 "Thine he shall be, Lord; Thy promise brightens up my night of fears:
Faith beholds him at Thy altar, yet baptized with only tears;
For the angel of my vision, came he not from Thy right hand,
Whispering unto me, his mother, "Where thou standest, he shall stand"? 

 "Saviour, Lord, whose name is Faithful, I am Thine, I rest on Thee;
And beside me in Thy kingdom I this wanderer shall see.
Check the tide! hold still the breezes! for his soul's beloved sake,
Do not let him leave me! Keep him -- keep him -- lest my heart should break!" 

 Man must ask, and God will answer, yet we may not understand,
Knowing but our own poor language all the writing of His hand.
In our meagre speech we ask him, and He answers in His own;
Vast beyond our thought the blessing that we blindly judge is none. 

 When the sun rose from the water, Monica was on the shore;
Out of sight had dropped the vessel that afar Augustine bore.
Home she turned, her sad heart singing underneath its load of care,
"Still I know Thy name is faithful, O Thou God that hearest prayer!" 

 By the garden-beds of Ostia now together stand the twain,
Monica and her Augustine, gazing far across the main,
Toward the home-land of Numidia, hiding in the distance dim,
Where God parted them in sorrow, both to bring the nearer Him. 

 And the mother's prayer is answered, for their souls are side by side,
Where His peace flows in upon them with a full eternal tide.
And Augustine's thought is blending with the murmur of the sea;
"Bless Thee, Lord, that we are restless, till we find our rest in Thee!" 

 And their talk, the son and mother, leaning out above the flowers,
Is like lapse of angel-music, linking heaven's enraptured hours.
Hushed is all the song of Nature; hushed is care, and passion's din,
In that hush they hear a welcome from the Highest: -- "Enter in!" 

 "What new mercy has befallen? every earthly wish is gone,"
Monica half speaks, half muses; " why should earthly life move on?
Ah, my son, what peace and gladness surging from this silence roll!
'T is the Eternal Deep that answers to the deep within my soul! 

 "Not a sigh of homesick longing moves the stillness of my heart;
In the light of this great glory, unto God would I depart.
Though more dear thou art than ever, standing at heaven's gate with me,
For the sweetness of His presence I could say farewell to thee." 

 There's a silent room in Ostia; tearless mourners by a bed:
Since the angels roused that sleeper, who shall weep, or call her dead?
Not beside the dust beloved shall her exiled ashes lie;
She awaits the Resurrection underneath a Roman sky. 

 Now Augustine in his bosom keeps the image of a saint,
Whose warm tears of consecration drop on thoughts of sinful taint.
In the home that knew him erring, a bewildered Manichee,
Minister at Truth's high altar, him that mother-saint shall see. 

 In the dreams of midnight, haunted by the ghosts of buried sins;
In the days of calm, the spirit, struggling through temptation, wins;
Monica looks down upon him, joy to bless, and gloom beguile;
And the world can see Augustine clearer for that saintly smile. 

 Still the billows from Numidia seek the lovely Roman shore,
Though Augustine to his mother sailed long since the death-wave o'er,
Still his word sweeps down the ages like the surging of the sea:
"Bless Thee, Lord, that we are restless, till we find our rest in Thee!"

The Greatest of All Lessons

 It is then, as appears, the greatest of all lessons to know one's self. For if one knows himself, he will know God; and knowing God, he will be made like God, not by wearing gold or long robes, but by well-doing, and by requiring as few things as possible. 

 Now, God alone is in need of nothing, and rejoices most when He sees us bright with the ornament of intelligence; and then, too, rejoices in him who is arrayed in chastity, the sacred stole of the body. Since then the soul consists of three divisions; the intellect, which is called the reasoning faculty, is the inner man, which is the ruler of this man that is seen. And that one, in another respect, God guides. But the irascible part, being brutal, dwells near to insanity. And appetite, which is the third department, is many-shaped above Proteus, the varying sea-god, who changed himself now into one shape, now into another; and it allures to adulteries, to licentiousness, to seductions.

[Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus, Book III, Chapter I.]

Rescher and Gallagher on Plurative Syllogisms

Consider the two arguments: 

All A's are B's 
All parts of A's are parts of B's

Most C's are A's 
Most C's are B's
Some A's are B's 

Textbooks often charge that traditional logic is "inadequate" because it cannot accommodate patently valid arguments like the first. But this holds equally true of modern quantificational logic itself, which cannot accommodate the second. Powerful tool though it is, quantificational logic is unequal to certain childishly simple valid arguments, which have featured in the logical literature for over a century (i.e., since the days of De Morgan and Boole). Plurative syllogisms afford an interesting instance of an inferential task in which the powerful machinery of quantificational logic fails us, but to which the humble technique of Venn diagrams proves adequate.

[Nicholas Rescher and Neil Gallagher, "Venn Diagrams for Plurative Syllogisms", Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jun., 1965), p. 55.]

Rescher elsewhere notes (in "Plurality-Quantification", if I am recalling correctly) that plurative syllogisms are even more difficult for standard predicate calculus than they seem. You might think, for instance, that you could solve the problem (as you would with syllogistic) by adding a 'Most' quantifier, (Mx), which in the predicate calculus would have to mean something like 'For most of the individuals x of the universe of discourse'. But it turns out, given how standard predicate calculus structures propositions, that simply adding a Most quantifier to the predicate calculus doesn't make it possible to say that Most S are P. You get something that looks superficially like it, but doesn't have the right logical properties; in other words, the standard pred. calc. rules for quantifiers and how they are used are tailored specifically for universal quantifiers and existential quantifiers and how those quantifiers, specifically, relate to each other, so merely adding a plurative quantifier doesn't get you something that works right. You'd have to rebuild the system from the ground up to get things right.

As Rescher and Gallagher note, people have a long history of criticizing basic syllogistic and class logics for not having an immediately obvious way to handle relational arguments (like the first in Rescher's and Gallagher's comment above), while at the same time just ignoring the basic kinds of argument that the predicate calculus doesn't directly accommodate. In reality, of course, this is a childish way of arguing; your logical system always has a purpose, and it just doesn't have to deal with things that are not part of the purpose; that you might use a different logical system for a different thing has no bearing on the value of any logical system. But people often seem allergic to this sort of logical pluralism; they really want there to be a ONE TRUE LOGIC, in the sense of a logical system that covers absolutely everything logical that you might want to do, or to which everything logical could be cleanly reduced. But there isn't one, and even if there were, we don't have it.

This, of course, is different from holding that all logical systems are equally good. For one, given a particular logical purpose, not all logical systems are equally good means to that end. And, perhaps more importantly, not all logical purposes are equally important. It would be entirely possible to argue that one logical system, or one family of logical systems, is the primary logical system, in the sense of being the best logical system for the most basic or the most important thing logic can be used for. No doubt there would be some controversy about it, but you could very well argue it.  But saying that it is the best instrument for the most important things is not the same as saying that it can do everything important.

Monsignor Knox

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox died on this day in 1957. He was born in Kibworth, in Leicestershire, to an important Evangelical Anglican family; his grandfather on his mother's side had been Bishop of Lahore, and his father eventually became the Bishop of Manchester. He studied at Eton, where he began, much to the dissatisfaction of his family, to take an interest in Anglo-Catholic movements in the Church of England and eventually ended up in the University of Oxford at Balliol College, where he thrived, and afterward was elected fellow of Trinity College. Shortly thereafter he became an Anglican priest and became chaplain of the college. After serving in British intelligence during the Great War, he taught at Shrewsbury School. Then in 1917, he converted to Catholicism, resigning his chaplaincy, which provoked a family crisis, as his father then cut him out of his will. He was ordained a Catholic priest and began teaching at St. Edmund's College. 

Knox was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction alike, a significant member of the Detection Club, a major figure in early broadcasting, and the translator of the Knox Version of the Bible. From Heaven and Charing Cross, his book of Corpus Christi sermons:

...You see, we are so materialistic, our minds are so chained to the things of sense, that we imagine our Lord as instituting the Blessed Sacrament with bread and wine as the remote matter of it because bread and wine reminded him of that grace which he intended the Blessed Sacrament to bestow. But, if you come to think of it, it was just the other way about. When he created the worlds he gave common bread and wine for our use in order that we might understand what the Blessed Sacrament was when it came to be instituted. He did not design the Sacred Host to be something like bread. He designed bread to be something like the Sacred Host.

Always, it is the things which affect us outwardly and impress themselves on our senses that are the shams, the imaginaries; reality belongs to the things of the spirit. All the din and clatter of the streets, all the great factories which dominate our landscape, are only echoes and shadows if you think of them for a moment in the light of eternity; the Reality is in here, is there above the altar, is that part of it which our eyes cannot see and our senses cannot distinguish.... (pp. 13-14).

Evening Note for Saturday, August 23

 Thought for the Evening: Plurative Modalities

Modal operators, as we often study them, are divided into two major kinds: strong (or Box) and weak (or Diamond). Strong modalities are necessity-like: necessary, always, everywhere, obligatory, known. Weak modalities are possibility-like: possible, sometimes, somewhere, permissible. In practice, we often use a third, intermediate between them, which is sometimes just called the null modality, and means (more or less) what is true without any modification. And this is a giveaway, I suppose, since the null is effectively like a strong modality when compared with a weak modality and like a weak modality when compared with a strong modality. Strong modality and weak modality are not really two groups of different kinds; they are comparative. You see this further in  multimodal systems; 'believed' may be a strong modality in a doxastic system but a weak modality in an epistemic system.

In short, there are many intermediate modal operators between absolute necessity and absolute possibility. This is in fact what we would expect on other grounds. Even if we stay with a given kind of modality -- say, temporal modalities -- we can weaken the strong modal operator or strengthen the weak modal operator to get a new modal operator. In possible world semantics, we analogize all other modal operators to quantifiers -- strong modal operators all work like the universal quantifier, weak modal operators all work like the existential quantifier. But you can have different quantifiers as well. Quantity that is weaker than universal quantity but stronger than particular quantity goes by different names in different systems, but one of the names used is 'plurative'. Examples of markers of plurative quantity are things like 'most' or 'few'. Consider the following basic plurative syllogism:

Most of those who will study hard will pass.
Most students will study hard.
Therefore, some students will pass.

This is a valid argument. That's somewhat peculiar, since if we treat 'most' like 'some', we shouldn't get a conclusion (two particular premises), and if we treat 'most' like 'all', we can get a much stronger conclusion (since we could get a universal conclusion), but what we find is that we can get a conclusion, just not a universal one. There's a reason why syllogistic primarily focuses on universal and particular quantity, because these are special in several ways. If we look at distribution, for instance, they both have nice, clean distribution rules associated with quantity: universal propositions distribute the subject, particular propositions don't. If we try to pin down the distribution rule for 'most', we get something more like (this is only approximate, since it depends on some assumptions about how distribution works): the subject term is distributed when, and only when, the subject term is the minor term (or would be the minor term if the conclusion were converted). In short, you can't tell how the quantity works until you know the role of the proposition in the argument. That's a much messier rule. But it's also notable that we can, in fact, give a distribution rule, and, despite its greater messiness, it is one that is practically useful in real argumentative contexts. Similar issues come up when we look at other logical properties.

Plurative modal operators would be modal operators that correspond to plurative quantifiers -- they are about what happens in most (or few) possible worlds, if we use a possible world framework. We can take any kind of Box and 'plurativize' it. The most obvious cases are with temporal modalities, since in ordinary English we often use words that correspond to plurative temporal operators: most of the time, usually, often, almost always. But we can do it with other cases as well, without any real difficulty, even though we don't always have straightforward English terms for them all. Not only is there 'necessary', there is 'nearly necessary'; not only is there 'everywhere', there is 'most places' or 'almost everywhere'; not only is there 'obligatory', there is 'nearly obligatory' or 'usually to be done'. And the same sort of thing can be done from the other side, strengthening weak modalities that correspond to 'some' or 'at least one' so that they correspond to 'at least a few'.

Links of Interest

* John Lawless, Against Acceptance Theories of Social Norms (PDF)

* John Plaice, Pierre Louis Maupertuis and the Principle of Least Action, at "Fiat Lux"

* David M. Berry, Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of "Plate Glass Universities, at "Stunlaw"

* Takuya Niikawa, Consciousness Aesthetics (PDF)

* Estrada González Luis & Romero Rodríguez Christian, How we learned to stop worrying and love tonk (PDF)

* John Hawks, How archaeologists are missing Pleistocene cultures

* Nirmalya Kajuri, An Ode to the Spherical Cow, at "The Spacetime Beat"

Currently Reading

In Book

Maurice Leblanc, The Confessions of Arsene Lupin
Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England
Frank M. Turner, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion
Brian Kemple, Linguistic Signification
Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest

In Audiobook

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
Brandon Sanderson, The Final Empire
Jim Butcher, Storm Front
Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World
Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness

Dashed Off XX

This starts the notebook that was begun in April 2024.

 ******

Morality is not a monolith, and has aspects both absolute and relative, the former making the latter possible.

Unfortunately we live in a time in which a man must be wrong often in order to be right enough.

'Day after day sharpens our thoughts, and night after night increases knowledge.'

Our faith is a testimony, a promise, and an inheritance.

Discussion of the sacrament of orders should begin with the apostles, who are the true fullness of order, then to the bishops as successors and vicars of the apostles, constituting particular churches, then priests and deacons who assist the bishops. This (1) clarifies the institution; (2) recognizes the primacy of bishops and their role in the Church qua apostolic; (3) clarifies the sense in which the three grades are distinct sacraments yet the same sacrament; (4) recognizes the permanent role of the Twelve and the relation of bishops to them.

temple-service order
-- proper & per se: apostles
-- -- derivatively
-- -- -- -- vicarious & participated: bishops
-- -- -- -- participatory
-- -- -- -- -- -- representative: priests
-- -- -- -- -- -- assistant: deacons
-- -- -- -- -- -- co-assistant: minor orders

kinds of poetic culture
(1) courtly makers
(2) popular songsters
(3) hymnodists
(4) bohemians
(5) academics/workshopists
(6) dabblers

Both Kelsen and Hart give accounts of law in which law mostly regulates and organizes officials' coercion of the people.

No one can be an official unless we already know what laws are 'legally valid'.

Reason is always one of the sources of law.

The law on a question is never settled on the basis of legally binding sources alone. Law jiggles; people are always fiddling with it in both interpretation and application, regardless of what the sources say.

Hart's criticism of Fuller shows that he doesn't understand what morality is, and has never properly considered what gives rise to legal ethics. (He also exaggerates the extent that Fuller's principles are directly required by efficacy or purposiveness in themselves, because he is in fact implicitly assuming that law requires more than bare efficiency for any kind of purpose. This is the strength of Fuller's position -- legal efficacy for legal purposes does in fact require going beyond bare purposiveness.)

In every form of ethics, tehre are kinds of efficacy conditions that are moral ideals.

Significant portions of law exist to facilitate and protect ethical practices of judges, lawyers, and officials.

"Ritual is poetry in the world of acts." Ross Nichols

Not everything knowable exists before it is known.

(1) Entia rationis are objects of thought whose being consist wholly in being objects of thought.
(2) Suppose no entia rationis exist. Either you know what is thereby said not to exist, or you do not.
(3) If you do not, then the supposition cannot stand.
(4) If you do, then the supposition is that objects of thought existing wholly as objects of thought do not exist when they are objects of thought.

We do not merely use concepts; we stretch them in using them.

There is great value in some of what is derided as 'picture book phenomenology'.

As soon as we can think, we are already in a world much larger than ourselves.

People sometimes say that two things are contradictory when in reality it is only that their minds are too small to relate them.

Human responsibility is a reflection of divine providence into the imperfect human person.

A key theme in many folktales is the small thing that is really large. This is flexibly used:
(a) the physically small that is physically large (ship in pocket)
(b) the physically small that is figuratively large (the help of the mouse)
(c) the figuratively small that is physically large (the troll, ogre, giant)
(d) the figuratively small that is figuratively large (the hero).

[1] Many things are clarified by striving to approximate a 'God's-eye view'.
[2] This is most naturally explained by there being something like a God's-eye view.

The lack of bottle in a bottle is part of what makes it a bottle.

We usually associate 'interests' with life or the capacity for spontaneous action, but even a knife has something analogous, in that there are things bad for a knife being a knife.

The teleology of an artifact is an extension of the teleology of a living thing.

Many fairy tales make use of the principles of a favor economy, because of its amplifying effect -- a small action of help on my part may solve a massive problem for another, which may result in later receiving a favor that is big for me. (Fairy tales also sometimes explore pathologies of this, e.g., putting oneself in a debt one shouldn't by accepting a favor ill-advisedly, or giving careless favors that put on in a vulnerable position. They also sometimes look at the scenarios on the other side, of failing to do favors for others, as well as negotiations over favors.)

existence qua esse vs existence qua ex alio sistere

In terms of what Biblical scholarship can actually study, the Bible is like a large family of musical performances, from which Biblical scholars derive s a score. These 'performances'  are the actual texts in the manuscript traditions, and they have individual 'artistic variation', and are even played on different 'instruments' -- Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and so forth. Of these 'performances', some are more central in terms of their intrinsic attributes and some are more prominent in their external influence. However, Biblical scholars have a tendency to posit a foundational text to which they do not have actual acess, and which, given how different texts were put together at different times and in different contexts, could nto have existed at all, and rather than treating this as merely a type in a typological classification, hypothesize about it as if it were history.

integral richness as a mark of understanding

Every human being naturally builds an 'imaginative realm', each depending on the imaginative capacities and habits of the person; and one of the  most difficult aspects of moral life is disciplining and organizing this imaginative realm so as not to make oneself unnecessarily vulnerable to temptation.

aphorisms as means of thenching

"An enlightened king concentrates on expressing virtue, thus the four barbarians submit to his rule. Thus by propagating virtue one can make those distant submit. What need is there to rely on expanding territory?" Shi Zimei

"The government of the noble causes men to submit with their bodies. The government of the sage causes men to submit with their minds." Huang Shigong

Kant's categories as modes of similitude

In holy orders, the ordained receives consecration to an angelic ministry, (cf. Chrysostom, On the Priesthood 1.3c4; also the letters in Rev), a juridical title in the divine court for graces of help in this ministry, and a holy seal in conformation to Christ as High Priest and King of Angels. They also receive a general mission which is to be specified by jurisdiction, as well as the special patronage of the Holy Virgin as Queen of Heaven.

The Queenship of Mary consists in that her ministry as Mother of Christ does not cease at death.

Augustine on order: "a disposition given his own place to each one of those being equal and unequal" (Civ Dei 1.19 c 13 n1).

The sacramental character seals an interior covenant.

the enceinte of a doctrine
doctrinal development by concentric fortification of principle

Acceptively, God exists as a social entity, and this is true even if (like an atheist) one regards Him as a social fiction. But we tend not to think much about God's existence as a social entity.

The matter of matrimony is the passive contract, which is what is given, and the form of matrimony is the active contract, and thus the mutual giving.

The mutual consent expressed in words in matrimony is the efficient cause; the nature of matrimony is the mutual consent formalized as contractual bond. Thus the sacrament is permanent, not transient.

The priest in matrimony is the minister not of the sacrament itself but of the Church's recognition and benediction.

All genuine marriages are 'sacraments of nature' and have a natural sacredness as instituted by God, being the locus of the humanly appropriate survival of humanity, and foreshadonwing union with the divine (albeit confusedly).

It seems likely that marriage between Christian and unbeliever, if done properly according to the Church, should be seen as a minor sacrament (saramental), even though not as a major sacrament, for the baptized believer.

'Civil marriage' is in some sense a misnomer; it is natural marriage, and the civil power has only authority insofar as is involved in its being part of the civil religion or piety or in its having publicity as a contract.

The primary difficulty with iterated deontic operators is maintaining consistent interpretation.

Identity is a way of thinking about entity.

Being has its first principle in God, and so does distinction; being and distinction alike imitate God.

"The dynamism of our mind proceeds necessarily beyond every finite object, beyond the sum of all possible finite objects, towards the infinite itself." Emerich Coreth
"Every finite being stands in a fundamental relation to the absolute being of God. When we render this relation explicit, we may derive from it a proof of God's existence. Thus demonstrations of God are possible from the finalistic order and harmony of the world, from the finite subject-object relation, hence also from the ontic truth and goodness of being, further from the absolute nature of moral obligation, from the transcendence of human society and history, from the religious experience both of the individual and of humanity as a whole, and so on."

Being is the instigator and object of wondering.

"In a generalized sense, a horizon is specified by two poles, one objective and the other subjective, with each pole conditioning the other. Hence, the objective pole is taken, not materially, but like the formal object *sub ratione sub qua attingitur* (under the aspect whih the activity specifically regards); similarly the subjective pole is considered, not materially, but in its relation to the objective pole." Lonergan

Our capability for the sublime is itself sublime.

A pope who teaches something explicitly as an innovation is by definition not teaching it as the successor of St. Peter.

Merit by its nature involves a note of incompleteness and probation.

There is almost always more than one possible strategy.

co-prayer as a central component of the communion of saints (prayer with and prayer for)

Nothing is as contagious as confusion.

James Chastek on baptism of vicarious desire (JT 4/17/24)
Given: At least some unborn humans are persons.
(1) People have rational souls and so are ordered to the beatific vision.
(2) Where there is order to beatitude, something is responsible for attaining this beatitude by its proper means, which in the ease of beatitude is baptism or some intentional act with the force of baptism.
(3) For the young, the parent is responsible.
(4) One cannot be responsible for doing something that cannot be done.
(5) Since baptism of the unborn is impossible, the parent must be capable of, and responsible for, some intentional act with the force of baptism.

The unborn in a Christian family are within the enclosure of the domestic church. Welcoming into the domestic church begins well before birth, being virtually present in the marital sacrament itself.

Lived experience is susceptible to critique for the same reasons lived action is.

topology as a sort of algebra of measurables

Metaphysics begins with being even before any affirmation or negation, being as the precondition for any affirmation and negation.

"...those objects are metaphysical which have the absolute properties of generality and necessity." Marechal
"We do not really overcome an error until we can point to a contradiction."
"Every error contains a part of the truth."
"The conditions of possibility which determine the essential structure of the object of thought a priori are precisely what we term 'faculties of knowledge'."
"In every object of thought, whatever it may be, we affirm absolute being implicitly and contingent being explicitly. Outside of this simultaneous dual affirmation there is no possibility of objective thought."

being as presupposed in inquiry, as constitutive of the object of inquiry, as regulative of the imquiry, as that to which the inquiry tends

the history of philosophy itself as intrinsically a dialectical, rhapsodic, eclectic interaction of minds

Every error relates to truth
(1) as including (presupposed by) truth
(2) as included in (corrected within) truth
(3) as resembling truth.
These interact and come apart in various interesting ways.

Being we discover both phenomenally and noumenally.

two moments of transcendental method (Muck)
(1) retorsive -- shows the necessary ground of object of thought and knowledge of it
(2) operative (act-analytical) -- shows the structure of the act whereby the object of thought is known

Potential being and counterfactual possibility are inherent in the very concept and nature of experimentation.

To Muck's two moments of transcendental method we should perhaps add a solutive or illuminative moment where one uses the retorsive and operative results to solve or reduce problems, or possible problems.

Method begins not with pure abstract consideration but with purported successes and diagnosis or analysis of them as successes.

experiment --> ensemble --> analytical formulas --> laws of nature --> cosmos

You can't form a method without already knowing how to succeed, at least in principle.

science as structured not by a method but by a system for creating methods

imaginative association as a symbol of intellectual reasoning

Somehow human beings never seem to learn that politics is not puppetry.

To fight requires anticipating the future.

rule in claim, rule in name, rule in domain

Particular injustices can be observed; systemic injustice must be inferred by reasoning.

catechetical similes