And I Have Many Miles on Foot to Fare

 Sonnet
by John Keats

Keen, fitful gusts are whisp'ring here and there
 Among the bushes half leafless, and dry;
 The stars look very cold about the sky,
 And I have many miles on foot to fare.
 Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air,
 Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily,
 Or of those silver lamps that burn on high,
 Or of the distance from home's pleasant lair:
 For I am brimfull of the friendliness
 That in a little cottage I have found;
 Of fair-hair'd Milton's eloquent distress,
 And all his love for gentle Lycid drown'd;
 Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,
 And faithful Petrarch gloriously crown'd.

Two Poem Drafts

 A Nightmare

Mammon and License,
the gods of America,
walk like ifrits
on the sands by the shore.
A fire is in them,
a darkness of fire,
a burning of fire
that burns where it strays.
Their shadows devour,
their flames unenlighten,
and by the far end
every good will be ash,
all bonds will be broken,
desires made sterile,
and all we have made
will be nothing at last.

A Shield Against Darkness

Arise, God!
Be broken,
His foes,
and flee,
His enemies,
before Him;
as smoke is routed,
be routed,
as wax is melted
by fire's face,
be lost,
O wicked,
before God's face.

But be glad,
O just!
Rejoice
before God's face;
rejoice gladly!
He rides
from all ages
the heavenly heavens;
He grants
His voice,
a mighty voice.

Arise, Lord God,
for Sabbath-rest;
You and the Ark,
the Ark of Your might!

Personal Identity and Transworld Identity

 The philosophical question of personal identity over time is, roughly, the topic of what is required for a person at one time to be the same person at another time; due to some complications with questions of personhood, this is sometimes generalized a bit to the question of what is required for something (perhaps a person) at one time to be the same something at another time. (Olson's characterization in his SEP article, I think, gets this backwards, taking the latter as the fundamental problem; this is not tenable as an account of the actual topic of personal identity in the actual history of philosophy.) However, topics of this form are not exclusive to personal identity (even if we stay with speaking about persons). Here are just a few others of similar kind:

what is required for a person at one place to be the same person at another place
what is required for a person in one possibility to be the same person in another possibility
what is required for a person in one society to be the same person in another society|
what is required for a person in one doxastic state to be the same person in another doxastic state
what is required for a person in one legal system to be the same person in another legal system
what is required for a person with respect to one set of duties to be the same person with respect to another set of duties

More could be added. All of these, including times, can be modeled as possible worlds in one way or another, so all of these are in fact just different variations of what is known as transworld identity. Transworld identity is usually discussed in talking about some version of the second topic in the above list: what is required for a person in one possibility to be a person in another possibility. It has tended to be dominated by discussions of David Lewis's particular view of possible worlds, interpreted only as complete possibilities and literally as worlds, but as I've noted before neither of these interpretations are strongly motivated. You can perfectly well interpret 'possible worlds' as times or places or any number of other things, and occasionally we do.

Most attempts to give an account of personal identity over time focus on things particularly relevant to time -- persistence of a psychologically continuous stream over time, persistence of a material body over time -- but in reality, given that personal identity over time is really just a much more general problem applied specifically to the domain of times, any account of this should be something that is also generalizable, in one of two senses:

(1) the account for personal identity over times, or at least a generalized form of it, can be directly applied as an account in these other transworld identity topics;

(2) the account for personal identity over times is analogous to the accounts for these other transworld identity topics, in such a way that, while they have to be adapted to the different domains, the account for one can be used as a model for how to develop an account for another.

(In fact, the kinds of domains are diverse enough that I suspect that you will have (1) for some and (2) for others.)

When we try this out, most accounts of personal identity over time simply don't do very well. First, as noted before, they tend to be very time-focused, but it's not always clear what the analogue for the time-focused element would be in another domain. What is the analogue of psychological or physical continuity over time when we are talking about different possibilities or places or doxastic states? And what's more, even when you can find something that might be an analogue, it's often not clear that the analogue could even do the work it would need to do in the analogue domain to solve analogous problems. 

Further, the answers often just push back any puzzles. If personal identity is a matter of a persisting material body, then we just have turned any questions of personal identity over time into questions of the identity of material bodies over time. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself (presumably some of these transworld identity topics are in fact reducible to more basic transworld identity topics, in the sense that the interpretations of possible worlds may be more and less fundamental), but it's noticeable that the actual point in question -- identity over time -- is still on the board as a point in question. In fact, I think it becomes clear that most modern accounts of personal identity over time simply don't go deeply enough actually to give an adequate account of the topic. (In this way they are somewhat analogous to attempts to attempts to give an account of transworld identity that reduce it to some form of transtemporal identity. OK, but transtemporal identity is just transworld identity where the possible worlds are interpreted as times.)

All Saints

Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in his holy place? The one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false god. They will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from God their Savior. [Psalm 24:3-5 NIV]

Edith of Wilton

St. Edith was the daughter of King Edgar the Peaceable and Queen Wilfrida. At the age of two, she began her course of education at Wilton Abbey, and effectively remained a part of that community her entire life. It is unclear whether she ever actually became a nun but it is much more likely that she participated as a secular member and royal patron, retaining her royal privileges and luxuries, but freely putting them at the service of the abbey. When her half-brother, King Edward the Martyr died, she was one of the possible candidates for the throne of England, but refused to have anything to do with it, and instead continued her life at Wilton, where she ministered to the sick and poor and helped to maintain and expand the abbey. Not long after she had paid for and completed a new chapel, which was consecrated by St. Dunstan, she suddenly died, in about 984, at the age of twenty-three. She might well have just been remembered as a wealthy but pious woman, but there were a few scattered stories of miracles, and both King Aethelred II, who was her brother, and King Cnut at various times had political reasons for keeping her memory public and supporting any tendency to her veneration. St. Dunstan seems also to have supported her cultus. Her feast day is September 16.

Pier Giorgio Frassati

Born in Turin, Italy, in 1901, Pier Giorgio Frassati's father was Alfredo Frassati, a newspaper owner active in liberal politics, and his mother was Adélaïde Ametis, an internationally recognized painter. As a young man, he began actively to engage in charitable activities, mostly, although not exclusively, through Catholic organizations, and when he began attending college for engineering he became active in social protest, as well. In 1922 he became a Third Order Dominican. When he completed his studies, his father offered him a car or an equivalent amount of money in a fund; he chose the fund and began using it for his charitable work. He was very physically active, enthusiastic particularly about mountaineering but enjoying a wide variety of activities. In 1925, while boating with friends, he began to experience severe pain and fever; he was eventually diagnosed as having polio. On July 4, he received last rites and died. A short life, but an unusually large number of people, most of whom had been personally helped by Frassati at one point or another, attended his funeral, and many of them went on to petition the Archbishop of Turin to open a cause for canonization for him. His younger sister, Luciana Frassati Gawronska, would eventually become famous for using her status as an Italian citizen to assist the Polish Resistance in World War II, and she would actively support the canonization cause, writing a biography of her brother. He was beatified by St. John Paul II in 1990, and canonized by Leo XIV in 2025. His feast day is July 4.

Ingrid of Skänninge

Born in the early thirteenth century to a noble family from  Östergötland in Sweden, Ingrid lived most of her life quite normally as a Swedish noblewoman, but after the death of her husband sometime around 1270, she became actively involved with a group of women who were attempting to further their devotion through prayer and ascetic practice under the guidance of a Dominican named Petrus of Dacia, a friend and correspondent of Bl. Christina von Stommeln. The women founded a Dominican convent with Ingrid as prioress, Skänninge Abbey, with Ingrid donating the land and buildings. It was formally recognized in 1281, and she died the following year. He feast day is September 2.

Xi Guizi

Born in the early 1880s in Hebei, China, in Dechao, Xi Guizi (also known in English as Chi Zhuze) became a Catholic catechumen. However, it was a hard time to be Catholic, as the Boxer Rebellion led to intense animosity against Catholics, Catholicism being seen as a foreign intrusion. During an anti-Western riot on June 1, 1900, he was recognized as a Catholic catechumen and dragged into the town square and killed.  He was beatified by Pius XII in 1955 and canonized by St. John Paul II in 2000. His feast day is July 20.

Pedro Claver y Corberó

Peter Claver was born in Verdú, Spain in 1580. After studying at the University of Barcelona, he joined the Society of Jesus and continued his studies in Mallorca, where he met St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, who told him that he should go into service in the Spanish colonies in the Americas. He followed this advice, and ended up in the New Kingdom of Granada, mostly in modern-day Colombia. While studying and working there, he found himself extremely disturbed by the practices of the Spanish slave trade; Cartagena was a major hub for it, and thus the nature, consequences, and sheer extent of it were far more visible than they had been in Spain. One of Claver's predecessors in Cartagena was Alonso de Sandoval, who had begun what he called el ministerio de los morenos, devoted to alleviating the condition of African slaves and providing religious instruction for those who were baptized; he began to train Claver for the work, and when Claver finished his studies, he signed his final profession with the words, aethiopum semper servus, forever servant (or slave) of the Africans. Feeling that there was a need for more active service than anyone had previously done, Claver began meeting slave ships, bringing food and medicine and learning supplies to teach the slaves the language. In the off season for the slave trade, he traveled the countryside, seeking out slaves on plantations, treating them as equals and sleeping in the slave quarters. He baptized and catechized vast numbers of people and preached against slavery in church, where he welcomed them as brothers. All of this was done under sometimes severe criticism; Church officials often held that he was being tactless and creating more problems than he was solving, local government officials were often reluctant to work with him, and wealthy families often avoided his churches. But he never stopped for almost four decades of ministry. As he grew older, he grew quite infirm, and suffered greatly, because he was largely neglected and perhaps occasionally abused by the servant the Society hired to tend to him.He died on September 8, 1564. He was canonized in 1888 by Leo XIII, and his feast is September 9.

Matilda of Ringelheim

Born to a count and countess in the Ducy of Saxony in the 890s, she studied at Herford Abbey more or less until she was married to the Duke of Saxony, Henry the Fowler, in 909. Henry was in a dispute with King Conrad I of Francia over various lands, and headed a rebellion against him for a number of years, which ended in a settlement; but when Conrad was nearing his death in 918, he recommended that Henry as his successor, having become convinced that Henry was the only one competent enough to be likely to hold off the increasing encroachments of the Magyar. When Henry became King of Francia in 919, Matilda as queen was put in a position to do extensive good for others, but the major opportunity came in 929, when Henry gave her her dower. The dower (not the same as a dowry) was a provision in marriage contracts in which the bride is guaranteed a support in case of widowhood; anything set aside as a dower (unlike a dowry) could not be spent by the husband. Henry's position had changed so considerably, however, that it made sense to rework the original provision, and the arrangement that was decided was for Henry to hand over completely to Matilda a very large amount of land. She would use this this to build monasteries and convents, the most important of which was perhaps that of Quedlinburg Abbey, which she had built in 939, the year of Henry's death, and where she became the first abbess. Matilda's son, Otto the Great, who became Holy Roman Emperor, eventually became displeased with some of his mother's decisions with regard to her property, and attempted to seize it; Matilda had to flee, and was only allowed to return when she swore off all her wealth. She grew sick and died in 968. Her feast day is March 14.

Germaine Cousin of Pibrac

St. Germaine, or Germana, was born in 1579 in Pibrac, near Toulouse, France. She was born with a deformed hand, and suffered from scrofula from an early age; because of this, she is said to have been mistreated by her stepmother. In order to keep her away from other children (due to the scrofula), she spent much of her childhood as a shepherdess, tending flocks in the countryside each day, punctuated mostly just by attending Mass each day. The local villagers over time shifted from avoiding her or mocking her to respecting her piety and her willingness to help others. She died in her sleep in 1601. In 1644, when the family grave was opened for another internment, her body was found incorrupt, which began a local movement toward her veneration, and over time she became associated with a large number of cures and healings. She was beatified by Bl. Pius IX in 1854 and canonized by him in 1867. She is a patron saint of the disabled and abandoned, and her feast day is June 15.

Ignatius Shoukrallah Maloyan

Shoukrallah Maloyan was born in 1869 to an Eastern Catholic family in Mardin (in modern-day Turkey) in the Ottoman Empire. An Armenian Catholic, he went to study at the Armenian Catholic Cathedral in Bzoummar, Lebanon, where he became a priest and took the religious name, Ignatius. He worked for some time in the Armenian Catholic Eparchy of Alexandria, based in Cairo, and then in 1904 moved to Constantinople (modern Istanbul) to serve with the Armenian Catholic Catholicos, Paul Petros XII Sabbaghian, as a member of the ICPB (Patriarchal Congregation of Bzoummar), a religious order specifically devoted to assisting the Catholicos in his patriarchal duties. In 1908, the Young Turks began to create a large number of problems for Armenian Catholics, with increasing talk of the extermination of all Christians, all Armenians, all Assyrians, and the like, and Paul Petros XII stepped down to avoid controversy over what was seen as his non-handling of it; he was replaced by Paul Petros XIII Terzian. To help stabilize the Armenian Catholic Church during the increasingly troubled time, Rome agreed to appoint a number of additional bishops to Armenian Catholic eparchies, and Ignatius Maloyan was made the Archbishop of Mardin in 1911 at the Armenian Catholic Synod of Rome. The Ottoman Empire, taking this as a sign that Armenian Catholics were attempting to build a space for independence from Ottoman oversight, retaliated by forcibly deposing Paul Petros XII and appointing their own preferred candidate for Catholicos instead, which Rome inevitably declared illicit. Nonetheless, papal reach into the Ottoman Empire was quite limited, so when Maloyan finally arrived in his see, he found plenty of trouble, as the Armenian Catholic Church found itself in a superposition of public puppet-church ruled by the Ottomans and underground-church in communion with Rome. It became worse when the 1913 coup put the Three Pashas government into power, and worse still with the beginning of World War I. Armenian Catholics were regularly harassed and occasionally murdered; things seemed likely to improve with the arrival in Mardin of Mustarrif Hilmi Bey, but rumors circulated in March 1915 that the Three Pashas government issued the order to exterminate all Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and on Palm Sunday, Turkish soldiers went throughout the churches of Maloyan to arrest Christians, ostensibly on charges of desertion; 'ostensibly' because they consistently just arrested the most important members of the Christian community. This continued throughout the Holy Week celebrations. Archbishop Maloyan publicly affirmed the loyalty of Armenian Catholics to the Ottoman Empire, and he was awarded a medal by the Sultan Mehmed V, which was no doubt the Sultan's attempt to provide the Catholics what protection he could against the anti-Christian and anti-Armenian factions that dominated his government, but the Sultan was by this point effectively a figurehead -- he claimed that some of his public orders were literally done at gunpoint -- and on May 25, 1915, Hilmi Bey was ordered to arrest all the Christian leaders in Mardin. To his great credit, he refused, on the grounds that he had no actual reason to do so, but in June a scheme was implemented to make it necessary for him to be away and allow the arrest of Christians while he was gone. Maloyan was arrested on June 3 or 4, accused of being a rebel supplying Armenian nationalists with guns, and given the option of being Muslim or being executed. He was tortured over a period of time. Hilmi Bey had meanwhile returned and made efforts to free the Christians who had been arrested, but this just gave the government material to remove him and replace him with someone more amenable to genocide. The Christians, including Archbishop Maloyan, were force-marched into the desert on the night of June 10 and shot. Ignatius Maloyan was beatified by St. John Paul II in 2001 and canonized by Pope Leo XIV in 2025. His feast day is June 11.

Galdino della Sala

Born in Milan near the end of the eleventh century, Galdino della Sala, or Galdinus, seems to have led a relatively quiet life, mostly known for his charitable work for those who were sick or in debt, until the death of Pope Adrian IV in 1159. The College of Cardinals split into pro-Imperial and anti-Imperial factions. The anti-Imperial faction, which had a slight majority at the time, elected Rolando Bandinelli, who took the name, Alexander III. The pro-Imperial faction regarded him as unacceptable and elected Octaviano Monticelli, who took the name, Victor IV. It is unclear whether this was done under the instigation of the Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa; he would certainly not have been happy at Bandinelli's election, but he can't actually have been much happier about a papal schism, and instead of trying to push the matter himself at the beginning, he called a synod at Pavia to determine which candidate should be considered the pope. However, when Pope Alexander III refused to attend, Barbarrossa backed Victor IV. Alexander excommunicated the Emperor; the Emperor attempted to install Victor IV, and found that it was much harder than he had expected. In 1164, Victor died, and the pro-Imperial cardinals around Victor elected Guido di Crema, who became Paschal III. Paschal III was succeeded by Callixtus III in 1168. Frederick Barbaross suffered a major defeat at Legagno in 1176, which made it politically necessary for him to support Alexander III, and Callixtus III himself formally submitted to Alexander III in 1178. Officially the schism was ended, although the stubborn holdouts tried electing a fourth antipope, Innocent III, whom Pope Alexander was able to capture and imprison, ending the schism de facto as well as de jure. All this time, there was a huge back-and-forth over whether Alexander or his rivals had the upper hand. Milan, however, favored Alexander, and Galdino, who was an archdeacon when the schism began, was vehemently in support of him. The Emperor was not amused; he besieged Milan, and supporters of Alexander had to flee. Alexander, barred from Rome at the time, was in Genoa, and Galdino went to support him there, following Alexander through the various locations Alexander visited in an attempt to stay out of the clutches of the Emperor: southern France, Sicily, and finally Rome again in 1165. Desperately in need of support, Alexander on his return to Rome made Galdino a cardinal and named him Archbishop of Milan and apostolic legate for Lombardy. He was eventually able to return to Milan, and continued actively supporting Pope Alexander, but he never saw the end of the schism. Having just finished a homily on April 18, 1176, he collapsed and died. He was canonized by Pope Alexander III at some time before the latter's death in 1181. His feast day is April 18.

Charles-Joseph-Eugène de Mazenod

Eugène de Mazenod was born in 1782 to an extremely wealthy family associated with the royal court. When the French Revolution began, his family was forced to flee. They wandered for some time in Italy, growing increasingly poor. Eugène's mother and sister eventually returned to France, his mother getting a formal divorce so that she could get part of their property back. Eugène eventually ended up in Palermo, where he was given protection by the Duke of Cannizaro, and as companion of their two sons began to live again the life of a wealthy noble; in his early twenties he returned to France to live with his mother, who was doing reasonably well, and he indulged himself as a rich young man. But it all seemed hollow, and only more so over time, and eventually he began to be restless in his lifestyle, and started doing more charitable work. On Good Friday, 1807, he saw a crucifix and had a religious experience in which it seemed to him that all of his life was one of sin, and he began to study for the priesthood, being ordained in 1811. In 1816, he felt compelled to live a life of total oblation to God and service to the poor and needy of Provence, and invited several other priests to join with him in this endeavor in a group that eventually became known as the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who would send missionaries all over the world. In 1837, Eugène was made Bishop of Marseilles, where he died in 1861. He was beatified by Paul VI and canonized by St. John Paul II; his feast day is May 21.

Caesarius of Arles and Caesaria the Elder

Caesarius was born near modern-day Chalon-sur-Saône; officially it was in the Holy Roman Empire, although in practice the Burgundians were mostly self-governing. Caesarius did not get along with his family, except for Caesaria, his sister, and at the age of seventeen he left home to become a monk at Lérins. He was a bright young man, and impressed by him as a student, the abbot made him cellarer of the monastery. Caesarius immediately started making enemies in this position when he refused to give monks food if he thought their discipline was not ascetic enough. The abbot removed him from the position, but then Caesarius, feeling that he needed to lead the way by example, started starving himself to death with fasting. The abbot then sent him to Arles for medical care, but probably also just to make him someone else's responsibility. The bishop of Arles turned out, to his surprise, to be a distant kinsman, who encouraged the young man to seek holiness along more normal lines and ordained him a priest. Caesarius was consecrated bishop of Arles in 502. He fulfilled the office with all the zeal that had been typical of him so far; his sheer energetic activity made him one of the most important bishops in the empire, although he also kept finding himself in controversies. For instance, when he ransomed captives, he ransomed everyone regardless of their backgrounds. His tendency to do things without much regard for how other people would see them, also led him several times to be denounced to the authorities for political reasons, but in the end he was judged innocent in each case. In 512, he helped his sister, Caesaria, found a religious community for women, writing the Rule for their community; the Rule would be a significant influence on the concept of cloistered communities. Caesaria seemed to organize the community very well; not much is known about her, but her community flourished greatly during her tenure as abbess. Under the influence of a priest from North Africa named Julianus Pomerius, Caesarius became an enthusiastic reader of St. Augustine, and became a major conduit for St. Augustine's influence on European churches in the sixth century. The culmination of this was his calling of the Council of Orange in 529 which became one of the most theologically important councils of the early Middle Ages. St. Caesarius died in 542; his feast day is August 27. It's unclear when St. Caesaria died, but her feast day is January 12.

************

2024 All Saints Post
Meinrad of Einsiedeln, Joaquima de Vedruna Vidal de Mas, Vibiana, Anne-Marie Rivier, Helier, Peter Ou, Gontrand, Theobald of Marly, Siméon-François Berneux, Marie-Nicolas-Antoine Daveluy, Lucas Hwang Sŏk-tu, Lorcán Ua Tuathail

2023 All Saints Post
Gaius Sollius Modestius Sidonius Apollinaris, Hesychius I, Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus, Apollinaris, Juvenal of Jerusalem, Wilfrid of Northumbria, Peter of Athos, Mildburh, Mildrith, Mildgytha, Jean-Gabriel Perboyre, Margaret of Città di Castello, Germanus I of Constantinople, Hemma von Gurk

2022 All Saints Post
Gildas the Wise, Clelia Barbieri, Marguerite Bourgeoys, Charles Eugene de Foucauld de Pontbriand, Lazaros the Iconographer, Arialdo and Erembaldo, Devashayam Pillai, Gerard Majella, David Uribe-Velasco, Inácio de Azevedo and the Martyrs of Tazacorte, Angelus of Jerusalem, Laura of St. Catherine of Siena, Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, Damien of Molokai

2021 All Saints Post
Niklaus von Flue, Contardo of Este, Peter of Verona, Virginia Centurione Bracelli, Fulrad, Ivan of Rila, Austregisilus, Sulpitius the Pious, Desiderius, Amandus, Remaclus, Theodard, Lambert, The Martyrs of Shanxi, Tôma Khuông, Maria Teresa Goretti, Lidwina of Schiedam, Oliver Plunkett, Mariam Baouardy, Marinus, Nunzio Sulprizio

2020 All Saints Post
André de Soveral, Domingos Carvalho, and the Martyrs of Cunhau, Henry of Uppsala and Eric IX the Holy, Adelaide of Burgundy, Junípero Serra y Ferrer, Maria Restituta Kafka, Venantius Fortunatus, Radegund, Junian of Maire, and Gregory of Tours, Magdalene of Nagasaki, Jeanne-Antide Thouret, Louis IX, Peter Nolasco, Tarasios of Constantinople, Albert Chmielowski

2019 All Saints Post, Part III
Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan, Gregory II and Gregory III, Katarina Ulfsdotter, Marko Stjepan Krizin, István Pongrácz, Melchior Grodziecki, Amandus and Bavo of Ghent, Zhang Huailu, Colette of Corbie, Alphonsus Rodriguez, Marie-Margeuerite d'Youville, Anthony of the Caves, Teresa of Calcutta

2019 All Saints Post, Part II
Bartolomeu dos Mártires, Manuel Moralez, Apollonius the Apologist, Henry II the Exuberant and Cunigunde of Luxembourg, Ramon Nonat, Francis Xavier Cabrini, Juliana of Liège, Aelia Pulcheria, John Henry Newman, Anna Schäffer, Ivo of Chartres, Paul I of Constantinople

2019 All Saints Post, Part I
Matteo Correa Magallanes, Nicholas Owen, Knud IV and Knud Lavard, Mariana de Jesús de Paredes, Joseph Vaz, Zdislava Berka, Caterina Fieschi Adorno, Pietro I Orseolo, Ðaminh Hà Trọng Mậu, Jeanne-Françoise Frémiot de Chantal, Stephen Min Kŭk-ka, Rabanus Maurus Magnentius

2018 All Saints Post
Gianna Beretta Molla, Margaret of Scotland, Yu Tae-chol Peter, Justa and Rufina of Seville, Giuseppe Moscati, Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghaţţas, Salomone Leclerq, Arnulf of Metz, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, Frumentius of Tyre, Jeanne Jugan, Joseph Zhang Dapeng, Maroun and Abraham of Harran, Magnus Erlendsson, Callixtus I, Hippolytus, Urban I, Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Jean de Brébeuf

2017 All Saints Post
John Ogilvie, Leo IV, Andrew Stratelates and the 2593 Martyrs, Theodore the Studite, The Martyrs of Gorkum, Margaret Ward and John Roche, Mesrop Mashtots, José María Robles Hurtado, Genevieve of Paris, Pedro Calungsod, Isaac of Nineveh, George Preca, Denis Ssebuggwawo Wasswa, Anthony of Padua

2016 All Saints Post
Theodore of Tarsus, Nilus the Younger, Anne Line, Mark Ji Tianxiang, Maria Elisabetta Hesselbad, Sergius of Radonezh, Anna Pak Agi, Jeanne de Valois, Vigilius of Trent, Claudian, Magorian, Sisinnius, Martyrius, Alexander, Euphrasia Eluvathingal, José Sanchez del Rio, Andrew Kaggwa, Roberto Bellarmino

2015 All Saints Post
Margaret Clitherow, Kaleb Elasbaan of Axum, Louis Martin and Marie-Azélie Guérin Martin, Gertrude of Nivelles, Pius V, Clare and Agnes of Assisi, Kuriakose Elias Chavara, Scholastica, Vinh Sơn Phạm Hiếu Liêm, Thorlak Thorhallson, John Damascene

2014 All Saints Post
Marie Guyart, Alphonsa Muttathupadathu, John Neumann, Hildegard von Bingen, Pedro de San José Betancurt, Benedict the Moor

2013 All Saints Post
María Guadalupe García Zavala, Antonio Primaldi, Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini, Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse and Augustine Zhao Rong, Josephine Margaret Bakhita, John Chrysostom

2012 All Saints Post
Jadwiga of Poland, Kateri Tekakwitha, André Bessette, Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès, Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga

2011 All Saints Post
Bonifacia Rodríguez de Castro, Celestine V, Olga of Kiev, Cyril of Jerusalem, Joseph Mukasa and Charles Lwanga

2010 All Saints Post
Moses the Black of Ethiopia, Micae Hồ Đình Hy, Katherine Mary Drexel, Robert Southwell, Lojze Grozde, Andrew Kim Tae Gon

Dashed Off XXVI

 Phenomena have to be made into objects of inquiry by language, classification, argument, method, and the like.

"Is the Christian inspired? Yes, he is indeed. Just as inspired as he is Christian, and just as Christian as he is inspired." Farrer
"Prayer and dogma are inseparable. They alone can explain each other. Either without the other is meaningless and dead."
"Every true prayer is a prayer of the Churh, every true prayer has repercussions in the Church, and every true prayer is, ultimately, prayed by the Church, since it is the Church's indwelling Holy Spirit that prays within each individual 'with sighs too deep for words' (Rm 8:26)."
"Holiness is a form of the soul  that has to emerge from the inmost core, from a level inaccessible both to external influences and to the efforts of the will."
"The evidence of light is that it illuminates; and if by the light of faith we do not see more colours in the world, more exactly in their proper being and truth, than eyes can perceive which lack supernatural illumination, then surely we stand self-condemned."

Hardware does not implement software simpliciter; it implements it approximately and under conditions determined by physical constraints.

"Justice is strenuous, except for those who love." Bede

Farming is a matter of continually improvising adjustments to plans.

Translation requires a commonality, or at least an analogy, o fexperience between author and translator, to coordinate meanings.

The author creates a text by final causes, and as a final cause.

John Wild, "An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Signs"
"A sign is not something *physically* present, exercising efficient causation. It is something *noetically* present, leading the interpreter *noetically* to take account of something other than itself."
"The natural sign, which leads the mind to an *individual* designation is *not* the linguistic sign of a *universal* signification."
-- Behavioralism for signs confuses 'similarity of response' and 'sameness of signification'.
"A sign is something to be understood, not merely responded to."
"No sign as such exercises any kind of *efficient* causation. But a sign is that which leads the knowing faculty to apprehend something other than itself, in virute of a real relation between the two."
"The reminder functions only by acting on us to make us think of something else. It either reminds us in functioning this way, or it does not. But a sign really signifies its signatum irrespective of its effect on us. Hence we can *misconstrue* or *misinterpret* signs. But ther eis no such thing as being *misreminded* by a reminder. It either reminds us or it does not."
"A sign is anything capable of noetically specifying (not causing, except in the sense of an *extrinsic formal cause*) the noetic faculty to apprehend something other than itself, in virtue of some real relation to this signatum."
"Anything that leads the knowing faculty to something other than itself is a sign. The more inconspicuously and vicariously a thing is, the more it is a sign. The most perfect sign is a concept which is literally *nothing but* a sign and which almost entirely vanishes in exercising its signifying function."

An inertial reference frame is a system of zeros for measuring locomotion, such that the locomotions measured are described by Newton's First Law.

The 'world' in 'world-building' is a system of classifications with a system of accounting.

A church history is an implicit ecclesiology.

What Scripture suggests in prayer is essential to its overall interpretation.

Fear is underestimated as a poetical passion, but joy is more poetical and sorrow more poetical still.

In ordinary times, men fear most the powers they themselves make.

Much of poetry consists in using images to do concept-work.

Anamnesis is not what the Eucharist is but how it is to be done. Christ tells us what it is: the Body, given for us, and the new covenant in Blood, poured out for us.

It is insufficiently considered what meaning 'do this in remembrance of me' would have for the disciples then while they were with him physically; it is always assumed tha tit is a command for the future, but nothing in the text strictly requires this -- in fact, teh association of anamnesis and diatheke, memorial and convenant, which go together theologically and in the history of Israel, suggests that the primary point is present, not future (although, of course, this doens't rule out the imperative also covering future actions when they become present).

the importance of practices that are not directly concerned with human persons but structured to express the value of teh human person

Many of the fundamental problems of physics are related to the question of how to reconcile the impartiality of the mathematics used in physical theory with the partiality found in the experiments that anchor the theory.

Quantum mechanical 'interpretations' are in fact predictions of the ultimate fate, the ultimate classification, of the wave equation.

moral sentiments as bailiffs of the tribunal of conscience

Many actions in which we engage are actions we do in a role, and disregard for the requirements of the role introduces rational incoherence into the action.

"For this reason has God established the rich and mighty over the poorer folk, that they should provide not for their own private ends, but rather for the common good." Antonino

"The gravitational equations could only be found by a purely formal principle (general covariance), that is, by trusting in the largest imaginable logical simplicity of the natural laws." Einstein (to de Broglie)

The outer ministers to the inner, the lower to the higher, and is thereby transfigured.

The saints on the calendar exhibit what might be called moral powers, and it is these moral powers mroe than their particular actions that we are to imitate. For instance, saints like Rose of Lima who did extraordinary mortifications exhibit in doing these things a spiritual nonattachment to worldly things and capacity for self-discipline, which we also should have, although in our case we should generally exercise these moral powers in ways other than extraordinary mortifications.

All humans slowly become more like what they revere.

Love creates the world, and Love will end it.

Greco-Roman culture as Peter's mother-in-law

On Farrer's account of Mark, the miracles of Jesus fall primarily into three groups:
(1) exorcism
(2) catharsis (e.g., lepers)
(3) apocatastasis (e.g., raising from dead)
-- (2) can be seen as 'miracles of water' and (3) as 'miracles of spirit'.
-- It is perhaps worth noting that the Church's interpretation of baptism reflects all three of these, baptism being a repudiation of evil in being cleased of sin and raised to new life. (Farrer takes it to be more immediately the Corss and Easter; the Resurrection is the fourteenth and culminating healing.)

the country neighborliness of Tom Bombadil (he treats even corrupt trees and barrow-wights more as bad neighbors than enemies)

Castles and fortresses work offensively primarily as logistics-disrupters.

feeding of the five thousand : Jews :: feeding of the four thousand : Gentiles -- (Farrer)

charters and contracts as social entities for constructing social entities

the tradition of the external world

If I am eaten by lions, the lions impose upon me the function of feeding and nourishing lions.

elemental properties (Llull)
(1) ignis: dispersivus et dispersibilis
(2) aqua: restrictiva et restringibilis
(3) aer: impetivus ideo repletivus
(4) terra: evacuabilis

"Nearly everything well done looks easy to do, especially if you have never tried it yourself." CS Lewis

formal wave as local travel of disposition to change things in a specific measurable way

sacramentals of first degree: directly represent Christ in liturgical contexts, e.g., the Gospels, the Cross, the Church Edifice, icons, relics, altar
sacramentals of second degree: means of reverential prayer in liturgical contexts, e.g., paten and chalice, candles, etc.
sacramentals of third degree: means of reverential prayer in contexts outside public liturgy

the Ark of the Covenant as a type of the sacraments

condign vs congruous value of gift

The faith of the one who receives the sacraments is a seal, title-deed, and pledge of grace.

Irenaeus's association of the gospels and the living creatures make them into a sort of symbolic throne for Christ.

Wit, like gemstones, gets tis value from not being common.

The true theology is a divine science of divine things.

What belongs to one is imputed to another based on something they share.

the transradication of humanity

Hell is no doubt filled with people who think God is guilty.

Study is more than attention, even attention aimed at learning.

"Languages do not have terms which are specific enough to distinguish neighbouring notions." Leibniz
"We often reason in words, with the object itself virtually absent from our mind. But this sort of knowledge cannot influence us -- something livelier is needed if we are to be moved."

each sacrament as a sign of an aspect of heaven -- e.g., baptism of immersion in Spirit, confirmation of strengthening in holiness, ordination of participation in heavenly liturgy, penance of divine imputation and acclamation of righteousness, unction of overflow of grace, matrimony of the Bride of the Lamb and holy union; eucharist of the Body of Christ (covenant and incorporation)

"If someone acquired a taste for poisons which would kill him or make him wrteched, it would be absurd to say that we ought not to argue with him about his tastes." Leibniz

Skepticism is often an excuse for selective dogmatism.

Memory preservation plays a large role in the building of personal relationships.

The world is more like magic than the magicless imagination conceives, and less like magic than the magicful imagination assumes.

The moral life is one of managing risks, but it is not one of eliminating risks; those who try to live without any moral risk act against both prudence and charity.

There is always a simplicity that cuts through every cleverness.

the Church as salvific engine

'Speed of thought' is often speed of stupidity.

In every society, politics and religion are the primary vehicle for diffusion of philosophy.

Every self-evident, evident, and proven principle is normative for at least a certain domain of thought, and every genuinely normative principle is true in at least a certain respect.

descriptive : normative :: form : end

A unified people over time creates an aesthetic world suitable to its cultural life.

the 'synaesthesia' of cultural development: making intelligible sensible form, matching and mixing arts of different modalities, expressing emotions in different artistic ways

Links of Note

 * Yili Zhou and Rhys Borchert, The Perils of Rejecting the Parity Argument, on moral realism

* Ian Campbell, Power, Getting What You Want, and Happiness: Gorgias 566A4-472D7 (PDF)

* Jeremy Wyatt, Primitivist Theories of Truth, at the SEP

* Roberto Granieri, Plotinus on the Firmest Principle (PDF)

* The Dark Herald reviews Miyazaki's Spirited Away.

* Awais Aftab, You aren't in the DSM, at "Asterisk"

* Daniel D. De Haan, Moral perception and the function of the Vis Cogitativa in Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of antecedent and consequent passions (PDF)

* Daniel D. De Haan, Beauty and Aesthetic Perception in Thomas Aquinas (PDF)

* Matthew Minerd, Thomistic Research Project: Toward a Fuller Appreciation of the Role of the Agent Intellect in Cognition, at "To Be a Thomist"

* Thomas D. Howes, The New Hero of Tribalists, at "Law & Liberty"

* Jani Hakkarainen, The Adventures of "Ontology" (PDF)

* Michael Baxter, What MacIntyre Meant, at "Notre Dame Magazine"

* Alex Watson, The Self as a Dynamic Constant. Rāmakaṇṭha's Middle Ground Between a Naiyāyika Eternal Ātman and a Buddhist Stream of Consciousness-Moments

* Eli Benjamin Israel, On Moral Perfection: An Atemporal Reading of Kant's Postulate of Immortality (PDF)

* Richard G. DeClue, Jr., Eucharistic Ecclesiology, at "Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology"

* Edward Feser, The Catholic Fight over Immigration, at "Unherd"

October Night

  October Night

I stood at dusk and looked around the garden small and dim;
the fountain dry was cracked, with dust and vines around the rim.
The roses dead were long and spare, the weeds were rising high;
then ghosts from ancient worlds arose and said that I would die.
In long and spectral robes they swept along the garden ways
and sang the songs no longer sung, the songs of distant days.
A Templar march I thought I heard, a troubadour's sad plea,
a hymn of love to loves long gone, a shanty rasped at sea.
Like breezes drifting, softly sped those tunes, like secret sigh.
And 'midst it all a whisper sang; it sang that I would die.
The darkness fell, it drifted down, a-float like falling shawl;
it settled over roses dead and draped across the wall.
I strained my ears to hear again that gently whispered word,
but silence through the darkness fell, so nothing then was heard,
and nothing felt by rising hairs, and nothing met my eye,
until at midnight down the way I heard that I would die.
A maiden walked like water's wave along the crumbling wall
and here and there an elegy from out her lips would fall.
A hint, a clue, a fragile thread, the song would drift my way
with meaning barely out of reach and sense just out of play,
but here and there it rose to reach the keen of sobbing cry,
and then no doubt remained at all: it said that I would die.

The moon was silver on the road, but stars were hid by clouds
that, dark and thunder-mutter-thick, were gathered up in crowds
like ghosts in endless number in some graveyard in the sky,
and somehow in the thunder's tones I heard that I would die.
On far and distant hills the wolves began to raise a howl
and down the moonlit road I saw a figure in a cowl
as black as night in color so that scarce could seeing see
where ended figure and the night; it clearly came for me,
and in its hand a scythe was held, that swept through air with ease,
and at its heels a hound did walk, as pale as death's disease.
The crows in murder raised their wings, all croaking out a cry,
and clear I heard it in their noise: they said that I would die.
The wind was blowing in the leaves and rustled roses dead
and mingled with the panic that was buzzing in my head,
till time itself with nausea was turned upon its ear
and death itself was manifest to brain enmeshed in fear.
I sought to turn, like trembling bird in pit I sought to fly,
but dizzy chills sped up my spine that said that I would die.
A hand was clamped upon my mouth; I could not scream or cry;
a voice was snarling in my ear and told me I would die.

And Brood with the Shades Unblest

 Hallowe’en in a Suburb
by H. P. Lovecraft 

 The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
 And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
 And the harpies of upper air,
 That flutter and laugh and stare. 

 For the village dead to the moon outspread
 Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
 Where the rivers of madness stream
 Down the gulfs to a pit of dream. 

 A chill wind weaves thro’ the rows of sheaves
 In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
 And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
 For harvests that fly and fail. 

 Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
 That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow’r
 Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne
 And looses the vast unknown. 

 So here again stretch the vale and plain
 That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
 Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw
 To shake all the world with awe. 

 And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
 The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
 Shall some day be with the rest,
 And brood with the shades unblest. 

 Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
 And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
 Of horror and death are penn’d,
 For the hounds of Time to rend.

Music on My Mind

 

milet, "Anytime Anywhere".

Fortnightly Book, October 26

Joris-Karl Huysmans's Là-bas had been rather scandalous, in a literary way, and it associated Huysmans in a sensationalistic way with occultism and Satanism, an association that Huysmans did nothing to suppress. But a bigger scandal than being associated with the occult was on the way.

In writing Là-bas, Huysmans doesn't seem to have had any particular thought of extending Durtal's story beyond the encounter with Satanism, but he seems to have felt, in publishing it, that there was more that needed to be written. Some of this is perhaps structural.  Là-bas leaves Durtal with a negative recognition -- that the rationalistic mythology of the self-image of the age is a lie, as seen in the occultists who are not, as the mythology suggests, relics of an older age (the way Carhaix's obsession with ringing church bells actually is) but created by the modern age itself -- but such a negative recognition raises a lot of questions about what better way of seeing things there might be. There are also reasons connected with Huysmans's increasing Decadent distaste for the timidity of Naturalism as an artistic  movement; he had already done something to show that Naturalists failed even seriously to explore evil and suffering, and now he could show that it also failed seriously to explore penitence and mysticism and sanctity, a white book to follow his black book. And, of course, some of it may well have been psychological -- Là-bas had drawn heavily from Huysmans's own psychological state and reflection at the time, and he himself had already been moving beyond where Durtal had been left at the end of that work.

In any case, he set out to write Là-haut (Up There) to complement Là-bas (Down There). This turned out to be quite difficult. He wanted a book that captured the aspects of human experience that we associate with mysticism, but when he attempted to work through this, he find himself dealing with a very different aspect of human experience that he found personally difficult to disentangle from mysticism: sex. One of the early working titles is The Carnal Battle, as it seems to have become heavily dominated by his struggle with sexual temptations at the time. Further, Huysmans found that he was much less well equipped to explore perennial mysticism than he had been to explore modern occultism; the whole thing mired him in a massively greater amount of research. For someone with a Naturalist background, the research was not necessarily a problem, but it required learning a very different vocabulary and set of assumptions than necessary for, say, reading sociological studies.

What is more, he had difficulty pinning down key elements of his story. His original idea seems to have been to weave in the story of the Marian apparition at La Salette in 1843 (which was controversial even among Catholics, in something like the way Medjugorje is today), but as the novel approached completion, he scrapped the entire thing, rewriting it again without anything to do with La Salette and trying to distance it even further from Là-bas. He also seems to have felt at times that it tended toward the artistically dull, and when he finally published it in 1895 under the title En Route, he expected it to be disliked by everyone, Catholics as well as freethinkers.

It was indeed scandalous; the sexual temptation theme from the Carnal Battle stage of writing was still on display, and shocked even some freethinking types with how explicit it was. But that was nothing compared to the scandal of conversion. The literary world could tolerate occultism as a sort of artistic eccentricity; it had no idea how to tolerate religious conversion as an artistic eccentricity. Indeed, pretty much everybody, freethinker or Catholic, had difficulty accepting that Huysmans really believed any of the religious material that made it into his novel. Everybody agreed it was very vividly written and everyone was also skeptical of the idea that it was in any way really Christian, rather than just mining Christian symbolism for literary effect. They also, despite liking the writing, found the book itself puzzling -- a novel that was not really a novel, brilliantly describing a short period of events in which nothing much actually seems to happen, as if someone were to write a 'novel' about an uneventful vacation. Perhaps the best way to summarize the novel is Huysmans's own summary:

The plot of the novel is as simple as it could be. I've taken the principal character of Là-bas, Durtal, had him converted, and sent him to a Trappist monastery. In studying his conversion, I've tried to trace the progress of a soul surprised by the gift of grace, and developing in an ecclesiastical atmosphere, to the accompaniment of mystical literature, liturgy, and plainchant, against a background of all that admirable art which the Church has created.

[Interview in Le Figaro, 5 January 1895, as quoted in the Introduction to J.-K. Huysmans, En Route, Brendan King, ed. and tr., Dedalus (Sawtry, UK: 2024), p. 15.]

Maurice Leblanc, The Golden Triangle: The Return of Arsene Lupin

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

It was close upon half-past six and the evening shadows were growing denser when two soldiers reached the little space, planted with trees, opposite the Musee Galliera, where the Rue de Chaillot and the Rue Pierre-Charron meet. One wore an infantryman's sky-blue great-coat; the other, a Senegalese, those clothes of undyed wool, with baggy breeches and a belted jacket, in which the Zouaves and the native African troops have been dressed since the war. One of them had lost his right leg, the other his left arm. (p. 1)

Summary: Patrice Belval and his Senegalese friend, known as Ya-Bon, help out a local nurse whom they have known for a short while, Coralie Bey, interfering with a plot to kidnap her. Patrice and Ya-Bon are both war heroes, Patrice having lost his right leg and Ya-Bon both his left arm and much of his power of speech (he is called Ya-Bon, because "ya, bon" is mostly all he can manage clearly to say with his injured throat). Coralie is the wife of Essares Bey, a banker of supposedly Egyptian extraction. Patrice and Ya-Bon, in their attempts to protect Coralie, find themselves in a series of events that lead to Essares Bey's murder, and a deepening series of mysteries resulting from it. The mysteries mount until Ya-Bon, who knows Arsene Lupin, having once saved the latter's life when the latter was in the Foreign Legion, connects Captain Belval and Lupin, and the mysteries finally begin to unravel.

This is a very unevenly developed book, I think; parts are very well done and parts seem to fall short of their promise. Ya-Bon is an engaging character who is underutilized in the story. There is an international mystery -- Essares Bey is part of a plot to drain gold out of France, and it is unclear who is behind it -- but it is greatly shortchanged. There is a domestic mystery -- despite having only met relatively recently, Patrice and Coralie find their names written down and linked together going back decades, and there ends up being a shared mystery involving their parents -- and this is mostly handled quite well. There is a mystery concerned with hidden gold, three hundred million francs worth (in 1915!), arising from the international plot, and this is also handled well, although perhaps too quickly and in a way that could possibly feel anticlimactic. I think part of the issue is that Patrice and Coralie, while charming, are not really strong enough characters to carry as much of the plot as they have to carry. Nonetheless, the twists and turns are mostly enjoyable.

In the Introduction, I suggested that Lupin being less visible here might benefit him as a character, and this was definitely the case. This is a much more likable Lupin than several of the more recent Lupin books have shown us, and his handling of the mysteries is quite masterful.

Favorite Passage:

They went nearer. There were bead wreaths laid down in rows on the tombstone. They counted nineteen, each bearing the date of one of the last nineteen years. Pushing them aside, they read the following inscription in gilt letters worn and soiled by the rain:

HERE LIE
PATRICE AND CORALIE,
BOTH OF WHOM WERE MURDERED
ON THE 14TH OF APRIL, 1895
REVENGE TO ME: I WILL REPAY.

Recommendation: Recommended; although it's somewhat uneven in execution, the twists are engaging and interesting.

*****

Maurice Leblanc, The Golden Triangle: The Return of Arsene Lupin, Fox Eye Publishing Ltd. (Leicester, UK: 2022).

A Being that Is A

 A exists, for if it did not exist, no good would exist without evil, no greatness without littleness, no eternity without beginning; and the same thing would be true of perfection, which would not exist without imperfection, nor would justice exist without injustice, nor nobility without baseness, and so on for the others. But since goodness, greatness, etc. are concordant with being, and their opposites with privation, therefore one should not doubt that A exists, nor should one deny the existence in it of goodness, greatness, etc.; because if there were no goodness, greatness etc. in A, then it would be impossible for A to exist, since this existence is in accord with no being in which there is not immense goodness, greatness, etc., and in which, through bonification, there is no goodness in greatness, nor, through magnification, any greatness in goodness, and so on for the rest, which bonification is so great, etc., and which magnification is so good, etc., that it could only accord with a being that is A.

[Ramon Llull, Ars Demonstrativa, Distinction II, Part II, in Selected Works of Ramon Llull (1232-1316), Volume I, Bonner, ed. and tr., Princeton University Press (Princeton: 1985), p. 356.]

A is God. This is generally seen as an ontological argument, and allowing for the classificational mess that is the category 'ontological argument', this is probably right as intended; that is, it is an a priori argument for God's existence, of some kind. However, I think there is a more fruitful way to think of it (and indeed, of most of Llull's arguments), which consists in seeing it as a sort of limit-converging transcendental argument concerned with the conditions of coherence for our thought about the world. That is to say, Llull's idea is that in remembering, understanding, and willing the world, we have these various unified intelligible domains -- for instance, insofar as remembering, understanding, and willing go, we find ourselves concerned with things that are able to be good (bonus), that are actually being good (bonificans, bonificating), and so forth. This only makes coherent sense if there is something that unifies these in some way; this is the dignitas (the axiom or principle), in this case goodness or bonitas. And so it goes, he holds, for a bunch of other things: greatness, eternity, power, wisdom, will (or love), virtue, truth, glory, perfection, justice, generosity, simplicity, nobility, mercy, and dominion. These are the dignitates that unify entire domains of thinking (remembering, understanding, willing) about and in the world. But how do these domains of thinking relate to each other? They can't be regarded as wholly separate, nor can they be regarded as inconsistent, as if entire domains of our thought were establishing that other domains of thought were wrong. The dignitates of these domains, at least, have to 'concord with being', to be the principles of domains of thinking about what is, and as such, have to have some kind of coherence with each other; since they concord with being, their opposites are privations of some kind. If you can never have being that is good without its opposite, then goodness (and thus the entire domain of thought of which it is the principle) has defective concordance with being. If goodness is inherently defective, however, that means that it is going to be defective in its coherence with others; for instance, if the greatest good is also defective in good, that means that its goodness has to be defective in greatness, or eternity (i.e., duration), or power, etc. The dignitates would then not have a complete coherence with each other, and the domains of thought that they unify would be inconsistent with each other.

Thus A is not God as such, but God specifically as principle of coherence among the dignitates, the principle that must exist if, for instance, the goodness-domain of our interaction with the world is to cohere completely with the power-domain, the truth-domain, etc. In the wheel of the dignitates, and of all our interaction with things, A is the central point that makes the wheel a wheel rather than a mess. If there is no A, Llull wants to say, then our thought about the world is ineliminably inconsistent and incoherent. It's not just a matter of goodness fitting imperfectly with wisdom, but of everything we think and do with regard to things having conflicting aspects. But in order to be the principle of coherence for the dignitates, A must be the limit case of each, in which all of the dignitates have perfect concordance: A is where goodness is great, eternal, powerful, wise, etc., and greatness is good, eternal, powerful, wise, etc., and power is good, great, eternal, wise, etc., and so on and so forth. All the domains of thought cohere, and are only able to cohere, because they all converge on A, the point where all their unifying dignitates are in complete concordance. Since incoherence of the domains of thought gives us endless contradictions and inconsistencies, A must exist.

In this sense, Llull's argument is somewhat like Kantian and Neokantian moral arguments: in those arguments we have a possible conflict, and practical reason authorizes postulating God to prevent the conflict, in those cases of some aspect of the moral domain and some aspect of the natural domain, from being insuperable in practice. Llull has a very different metaphysics and epistemology; there are many more domains than the moral and the natural;  he takes the argument to be demonstrative for reality rather than a postulate for practice because the conflict and inconsistency he is trying to avoid is not merely practical; but the general structure is analogous. The dignitates posit A as a condition of their coherence, both in themselves and of their domains with each other; the fundamental conditions of remembering, understanding, and willing cannot contradict each other. In another way, it is like Aquinas's Fourth Way; indeed, while Aquinas wouldn't himself put it quite the same way, the Fourth Way has an explicit step that corresponds to Llull's 'concordance with being' point. In fact, I think the best way locate Llull's argument in 'argument space' is as an intermediate form between something like the Fourth Way and something like the Kantian moral argument.

Down the Gray Border of the Night

An October Sunset
by Archibald Lampman

One moment the slim cloudflakes seem to lean
With their sad sunward faces aureoled,
And longing lips set downward brightening
To take the last sweet hand kiss of the king,
Gone down beyond the closing west acold;
Paying no reverence to the slender queen,
That like a curvèd olive leaf of gold
Hangs low in heaven, rounded toward sun,
Or the small stars that one by one unfold
Down the gray border of the night begun.

Boethius on Logic

 ...The careful system of discourse has two parts, one of discovery and the other of judgment -- sometimes judgment of the discovery itself, sometimes judgment of the deduction of the discovery, which is the form of an argumentation. The part that teaches about discovery supplies in abundance certain tools for discoveries and is called 'Topics'....The part that has to do with judgment proffers certain rules making determinations and is called 'Analytics'. If it makes observations about the junctures of propositions, it is named 'Prior Analytics'. But if it deals with the discoveries themselves, then the part that discusses the determining of necessary arguments is named 'Posterior Analytics', and the part that discusses false and tricky (that is, sophistical) arguments is named 'Refutations'. The judgment of verismilar argumentations is apparently not dealt with because the nature of judgment concerning the middle is clear and uncomplicated when one is acquainted with the extremes. For if one knows how to judge discerningly what is necessary and is also able to judge false arguments, it is no trouble for him to determine verisimilar arguments, which are in the middle.

[Boethius, Boethius's In Ciceronis Topica, Stump, tr. Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY: 1988) pp. 27-28.]

This is a very interesting passage. Later medieval scholastics will often take Topics to cover verisimilar (i.e., probable) arguments. Thomas Aquinas agrees with this, but also agrees with Boethius in assigning Topics to the logic of discovery (logica inventiva); then, partly following the Islamic commentators, he also assigns Rhetoric and Poetics to it, taking Topics to be the logica inventiva that concerns belief (which is appropriate to probable argument), Rhetoric to be the logical inventiva that concerns suspicion (as in 'suspecting to be true'), and Poetics to be the logica inventiva that concerns 'estimation according to some representation'.

So Secret that the Very Sky Seems Small

 A Ballade of Suicide
by G. K. Chesterton 

The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall;
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours -- on the wall --
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day. 

To-morrow is the time I get my pay --
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall --
I see a little cloud all pink and grey --
Perhaps the rector's mother will not call --
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way --
I never read the works of Juvenal --
I think I will not hang myself to-day. 

The world will have another washing-day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H.G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall,
Rationalists are growing rational --
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small --
I think I will not hang myself to-day. 

 ENVOI
 Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall,
I think I will not hang myself to-day.

Orcs

 People have been talking about this news story from The Telegraph about a 2024 course at the University of Nottingham on the topic of "Decolonising Tolkien" (a summary by a Fox News reporter here, if you can't access the article itself). It is the sort of thing that one would expect. But I was caught short by this (using the Fox News summary):

According to The Telegraph, the course includes texts that accuse Tolkien’s work of "ethnic chauvinism" against orcs and other dark-skinned characters. 

 "It adds that Tolkien’s treatment of the fictional races shares in a tradition of ‘anti-African antipathy,’ in which people from Africa are painted as ‘the natural enemy of the white man,’" 

The Telegraph reported. Nubia has reportedly argued "that eastern races in the fictional realm of Middle Earth are depicted as evil while fairer-skinned peoples of the West are shown as virtuous."

So here's the thing. Tolkien's orcs, with a few exceptions of uncertain status, are not dark-skinned. In the LOTR movies and in the Rings of Power television show, orcs are often depicted as having some form of a dark muddy greenish-bluish-black color of skin. But Tolkien's orcs are generally sallow-skinned. They are usually a sort of sickly yellowish-brown color. (The representation of the goblins in the Hobbit movies are probably closer to what Tolkien actually had in mind for most orcs. Occasional references to 'black Uruks' are referring not to skin-color but to their being the branch of Orcs most closely associated with the Dark Lord in Mordor, the Black Land, black meaning enshadowed.) There is a reason for that related to the comment by the professor in the last paragraph above -- Tolkien's descriptions of orcs are heavily influenced by fantastical literary descriptions of Huns and Mongols, who, of course, invaded with fire and flame from the East. When asked to describe the orcs by a reader once, he explicitly says that they look somewhat like short, unusually ugly Mongols.

So, no, nothing whatsoever to do with Africa. The "eastern races" comment is less wrong, although, again, the dynamics here are based on the Huns and the Mongols, and the East invading the West, so that the harshness of the description is because the ultimate root of it is literary legends about (you guessed it) the terrifying invading armies of the Huns and the Mongols. The only connection to "colonialism" is that the European writers who wrote these legends absolutely did not want to be colonized by Attila's armies or, later, the Golden Horde. (Of course, in Middle Earth, the eastern human races are also not depicted as 'evil', but oppressed and enslaved, and forced under duress to fight as a result of their enslavement. They are demanded tribute from conquered countries, and Sauron and the Witch-King use them as auxiliaries and, to use the later term, cannon fodder.The eastern societies may well be often evil, because in the story they are under the direct influence and part of the loose, widespread empire of Sauron, but we only know of them very indirectly. It's also the case that the Western people are not particularly virtuous, and, in fact, when Tolkien tried to write a sequel story about what happened to Gondor after the death of Aragorn, he eventually gave it up because the only story he could write was a depressing one about how corrupt and evil and orc-like they became.)

So not only is part of the line of thought based on a poorly thought-out account of the subject matter, it is not about any kind of real "decolonising" at all -- the whole point of 'decolonizing' is people recovering their heritage after having been subjugated by colonial empires; anything else is a cheapening of the concept, and a mere rhetorical abuse. And, of course, it's philistine in its core. The story is as it is; it is a work of art that needs to be assessed on its own terms. The relation of Orcs to any human race is entirely missing in the story -- famously, Tolkien never could decide how they fit in with Elves and Men, and at one point or other rejected all the possible options -- and if you imagine them to be non-white human races, this is, as they say, a 'you problem', rather than a Tolkien problem, because that's just not there in the story. If you think the tale is corrupting or detrimental to society, you are not talking literature anymore, you are talking ethics, and you need to give actual philosophical arguments appropriate to ethics, not vague insinuation or analogy.

Links of Note

 * Daniel D. De Haan, Perception and the Vis Cogitativa: A Thomistic Analysis of Aspectual, Actional, and Affectual Percepts (PDF)

* Anthony Skelton, Sidgwick's Philosophical Intuitions (PDF)

* Lawrence Pasternack & Courtney Fugate, Kant's Philosophy of Religion, at the SEP; this is a very good summary of an extremely complicated topic.

* Edward Feser, How Not to Limit Free Speech, at "The Catholic World Report"

* Jennifer Frey and Anastasia Berg discuss the question, Can the Humanities Be Saved?, at "The Point"

* Elaine Scarry, Plato and the Poets, at "Boston Review"

* Taylor W. Cyr & Parker Gilley, No Easy Compatibilism (PDF)

* Xiao Qi, Re-evaluating the Principle of Virtuous Motives: Abilities, Justice, and Natural Virtues (PDF), on Hume's approach to virtue ethics.

For Lands Not Yet Laid Down in Any Chart

Possibilities
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Where are the Poets, unto whom belong
 The Olympian heights; whose singing shafts were sent
 Straight to the mark, and not from bows half bent,
 But with the utmost tension of the thong?
Where are the stately argosies of song,
 Whose rushing keels made music as they went
 Sailing in search of some new continent,
 With all sail set, and steady winds and strong?
Perhaps there lives some dreamy boy, untaught
 In schools, some graduate of the field or street,
 Who shall become a master of the art,
An admiral sailing the high seas of thought,
 Fearless and first, and steering with his fleet
 For lands not yet laid down in any chart.

Three Poem Drafts

 I Laud the Holy Spirit

I laud the Holy Spirit, the minister of sacrifice,
God who brings God hither,
the anointing and consecration,
God breathing out our prayer,
God breathing in our prayer,
He to whom our prayers are instruments,
He of whom our prayers are imitations,
the Life-giver worthy to be praised by the living.
Enliven us, O living God!

Every sacrifice He encompasses like fire
is that upon which God descends;
every sacrifice He encompasses like fire
is enflamed, and to God ascends.
Encompass us, O Holy One, like fire!

The Sapience of the priest
beyond the priest's own sapience,
the Holiness of the sacrifice
beyond the sacrifice's holiness,
the Meaning of the prayer
beyond the prayer's meaning,
dispeller of night,
destroyer of the impure,
Fire beyond all fire,
from which all fire comes,
bringer of all reverence, sublime,
abundance beyond all wealth,
in Your radiance make us radiant
and glowing with God!

Newly Waking Moments

Faith is born in hallow,
the last rite of the time,
the promise-field fallow,
shining in morn sublime;

when all hopes are blooming
sunny fields are alight --
cast out your dark dooming
and rise to morning bright.

My Love Is the Sun

My love is the sun,
a great blazing ball,
massive in size
and burning withal;

in the East she will rise,
fall down in the West,
and when she has set,
I finally rest.

Dear Physician

 Whereas many have set their hand to organize a narration about the deeds accomplished among us, as handed down to us from the beginning by those who had been eyewitnesses and underoarsmen of the word, it occurred also to me, having closely followed it all from the beginning, to write it exactly in order to you, honorable Theophilos, that you may recognize the sureness of the accounts concerning which you were taught.

*****

So the first account I composed about everything, O Theophilos, that Jesus began to do and to teach, up to that day when, having commanded through Holy Spirit the apostles he had selected, he was raised up; and to them he exhibited himself alive after his suffering, with many signs, being seen by them for forty days, and speaking about the realm of God.

[Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1-3; both my rough translations.]

Today is the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist. 'Lucas' was not a common name, but it seems to have been a nickname, a shortened form of 'Lucanus'; several people associated with St. Paul have shortened-form versions of Greek names, so it may well have been a Pauline quirk to give people nicknames. In Colossians 4:14, he is called ho iatros ho agapetos, the dear/beloved healer; this could mean any number of things, but traditionally it has been interpreted literally, as meaning that Luke was a physician, and very possibly the official or semi-official physician attached to St. Paul's missionary group. He is also mentioned in Philemon 1:24, as a fellow-worker of St. Paul, and in 2 Timothy 4:11 as the only one of the group still with Paul while Paul was in prison. He has sometimes been identified with the "brother famous among all the churches for proclaiming the gospel" in 2 Corinthians 8:18, although this also sometimes thought to have been Barnabas.

According to a longstanding tradition, he was one of the seventy-two disciples sent by Jesus on missionary journeys, as mentioned in Luke 10, which is why he could say, as he does at the beginning of the Gospel, that he had closely followed everything from the beginning. He is traditionally considered to have been a Gentile from Antioch; one reason for the thinking that the Gentile tradition is right is that the mention in Colossians explicitly names Aristarchus, Mark, and Justus as the only Jewish co-workers with Paul at the time. It is still possible, however, that Paul specifically means Judeans, and that Luke was ethnically a Jew, of Hellenistic, rather than Judean, family. (This would make his being a member of the Seventy more probable.) And of course he is the traditional author of both the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, which constitute a little over one-quarter of the entire New Testament.. Famously, the Greek of both works is quite good -- not fancy, but clearly the work of someone who was very familiar with the language not just as spoken but as written. It's easy in our relatively literate age to forget that in most ages for most languages the spoken language and the written language can diverge quite a bit; several of the New Testament authors seem to have had a mostly spoken grasp of Greek, the author of the Gospel and Acts was clearly familiar with both. He effortlessly, and quite smoothly, alludes to a wide selection of the more widely accessible Greek literature. Insofar as we get a sense of him from his writings, he tends to be quite accurate, even meticulous, about things like cities and official titles; urbane and urbanite, I suppose.

The tradition suggests that he died of old age near Thebes, somewhere after about AD 84. It's unclear whether he was martyred; stories that say he was, say he was hanged, but other stories seem to depict him as dying of old age. He is a patron saint of historians, of course, but also patron saint of painters; there is an old legend that he painted a picture of the Virgin Mary. In any case, it is true that the Gospel of Luke has been perhaps the most favored source for paintings of the Life of Christ, so there is more than one reason to associate him with painting.

Ignatius Theophorus

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

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

The Cogitative Sense

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teresa of Avila

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

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

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

Patricia Routledge

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

Proposition, Question, and Conclusion

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

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