The Good and Noble Agatha

 Today is the feast of St. Agatha of Sicily, Virgin and Martyr. She died in the third century in the Decian persecution of the 250s, probably in Catania, Sicily, where she apparently had been born. We have very little direct information about here; most of our early information about her is very indirect. According to later legend, she was a fifteen-year-old girl from a Christian family who made a vow of virginity. The local prefect, Quintianus, had taken a fancy to her and attempted to pressure into marriage. When she still refused, he reported her to the authorities as a Christian; she was tortured, with (among other things) her breasts being cut off, and was sentenced to burned to death. Thus far, the pattern of her story is fairly standard for an early Virgin Martyr, but the story has an interesting twist; Agatha was not burned to death. While she was in prison, there was an earthquake, and for obvious reasons the local magistrates had more immediately serious matters on her mind, and St. Agatha at some point died in prison, for reasons unknown. It would make sense if she did so because of complications from her torture, but in fact the legend itself says that her wounds were healed by St. Peter after the earthquake, and thus Agatha is an unusual case of an early martyr for whom we have a legend and tradition but no early story of how she died, at all.

In any case, St. Agatha, like many of the early Virgin Martyrs, is easy to recognize in paintings, in her case because she usually has her cut-off breasts on a platter. And her name is preserved in part because she is such an early martyr that she is already commemorated in the Roman Canon, so her name is explicitly said every Mass along with several other early martyrs venerated in Rome. 

(The other Virgin Martyrs mentioned in the Canon are Agnes, Lucy, and Cecilia. Incidentally, in making sure that I got that right -- as it turns out I was forgetting Cecilia -- I was struck by how diverse the saints listed in the Roman Canon are. Besides the holy Virgin, the Baptist, and the Apostles, we have the early Papal Martyrs [Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius], Bishop Martyrs [Cyprian, Ignatius], a martyred priest [Marcellinus; maybe also Alexander (there are several different Alexanders who could have originally been meant, including a pope, a priest, and a soldier-martyr)], deacon-martyrs [Stephen, Lawrence], a martyred exorcist [Peter], and various lay martyrs -- a lay catechist [Chrysogonus], soldier-martyrs [John and Paul], physician-martyrs known for their almsdeeds [Cosmas and Damian], catechumens [Perpetua, Felicity], Virgin Martyrs [Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia], and a married woman about whom we know nothing else [Anastasia, although some sources list her as a Virgin Martyr, probably incorrectly; but Perpetua and Felicity were also married women]. While most are for obvious reasons associated directly with Rome, Sicily, the East, and North Africa are all represented. This is so diverse that it is obviously deliberately so, picking saints of all sorts of background from those who were popularly venerated in Rome when the Roman Canon was formed in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries -- probably the saints that had churches in Rome at the time.)

And to the Sea as Happily Dost Haste

 To The Nile
by John Keats

Son of the old Moon-mountains African!
Chief of the Pyramid and Crocodile!
We call thee fruitful, and that very while
A desert fills our seeing's inward span:
Nurse of swart nations since the world began,
Art thou so fruitful? or dost thou beguile
Such men to honour thee, who, worn with toil,
Rest for a space 'twixt Cairo and Decan?
O may dark fancies err! They surely do;
'Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste
Of all beyond itself. Thou dost bedew
Green rushes like our rivers, and dost taste
The pleasant sunrise. Green isles hast thou too,
And to the sea as happily dost haste.

Links of Note

 * Ed Simon, Close Reading Bad Poetry, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Emanuel Rutten, A Modal-Epistemic Argument for the Existence of God (PDF)

* Brad Skow, The Grotesque in Flannery O'Connor, at "Mostly Aesthetics"

* Michael Yuen, Kant on Hope's Value and Misanthropy (PDF)

* Brendan Hodge, Is migration padding the USCCB 'bottom line'?, at "The Pillar"

* Patrik Engisch, Creativity, Imagination, and the Culinary Arts (PDF)

* Jesper Kallestrup, Knowledge-Qua in Groups

* Dan Williams, The world outside and the pictures in our heads, at "Conspicuous Cognition"

* Verena Wagner, Committing to Indecision: A Taxonomy of Suspension of Judgment (PDF)

* Philip D. Bunn, Reflecting on the AI Crisis in Higher Education, at "Fusion"

* Luis F. Bartolo Alegre, Was Aristotle a non-classical logician? (PDF)

* Don A. Howard and Marco Giovanelli, Einstein's Philosophy of Science, at the SEP

* Ashley Purdy, Shared Tastes: Similiarity in Aristotelian Character Friendship (PDF)

* Miriam, The Warehouse of Good Intentions: On Folly and Friendship, at "Between Monk and Myrmidon"

* John T. Maier, The Agentive Modalities (PDF)

* J. B. Manchak, The universe is unknowable from within it

How to Remember

ST 2-2.49.1 ad 2, my rough translation; the Dominican Fathers translation is here. Of course, these are relevant to more than just memorizing things; they are, to take just one example, part of how we become thoughtful (i.e., keep important things in mind), including being mindful of God and our fellow human beings. The references to Cicero are actually to the Rhetorica ad Herennium, perhaps the most influential rhetorical handbook of all time, which is no longer attributed to Cicero. Sollicitudo, here translated as 'care', is one of the major acts of the virtue of prudence; it could also be translated as 'vigilance', 'watchfulness', or, for that matter, 'solicitude'; it is associated with ingenuity and alertness.

 

******

To the second it must be said that just as we have an aptitude for prudence from our nature, but its completion comes through practice or grace, as Tully says in his Rhetoric, so too memory not only derives from nature, but is made greater by art or diligence (industriae).

And there are four ways by which a man progresses in remembering well. The first of which is that he who wishes to remember something should take some likeness appropriate to it, but not wholly appropriate, because that which is inappropriate is more wondered-at, and so engages the soul more, and more vehemently. And this is why we see that in childhood we remember more of what we saw. Now the need for discovering these likenesses or images is because simple and intellectual dispositions (intentiones simplices et spirituales) easily escape the soul unless they are bound to some corporeal likeness, because human cognition has greater power over sensibles. Therefore the memorative [power] is placed in the sensitive part.

Secondly, whatever a man wants to remember he ought to hold in his attention (consideratione) and organize (ordinate disponat) so that he may proceed easily from one memory to another. Thus the Philosopher says, in the book De Mem., From a commonplace (a locis) we seem to remember something, because we go swiftly from one to the other.

Thirdly, a man ought to have care (sollicitudinem) and concern (affectum) about the things he wants to remember, because the more something makes an impression on the soul, the less it escapes it. Thus Tully says in his Rhetoric that care (sollicitudo) conserves the features of representations (simulacrorum figuras) whole.

Fourthly, one ought to meditate frequently on what one wants to remember. Thus the Philosopher says in the book De Mem. that meditations save memory, because, as is said in the same book, custom is like nature. Thus what we often apprehend (intelligimus) we quickly remember, as it were proceeding by natural order from one to the other.

Beyond Death's Starry West

 Intercessional
by Geoffrey Bache Smith 

 There is a place where voices
Of great guns do not come,
Where rifle, mine, and mortar
For evermore are dumb:
Where there is only silence,
And peace eternal and rest,
Set somewhere in the quiet isles
Beyond Death’s starry West.
O God, the God of battles,
To us who intercede,
Give only strength to follow
Until there’s no more need,
And grant us at that ending
Of the unkindly quest
To come unto the quiet isles
Beyond Death’s starry West.

Soft as the Falling of Wind-Scattered Grain

A Rain Sonnet
by Nina Frances Layard 

And all the dank hair of the hurrying rain,
 Flung backward by the wind, did stream and fly
 Across the anxious forehead of the sky,
 And rattling lashed my shaken window-pane
 With sudden spotted sounds, that yet again
 Sink to a lighter fingering, or die
 Into a tinkling treble by-and-by,
 Soft as the falling of wind-scattered grain.

 
 So is my sorrow as the streaming drift,
 That from the mighty shoulders of a cloud
 Is shaken back and tangled in the blast;
 So is my dreadful sorrow, but I lift
 A trembling hand to God and cry aloud
 That He shall make it music at the last.

Hypagete kai Ekcheete

 And I heard a loud sound from the fane saying to the seven messengers: Depart, and pour forth the seven cups of God's spiritedness upon the land. 

And the first went off and poured forth his cup upon the land and there began to be a fester, bad and miserable, on the human beings having the stamp of the beast and those prostrating before its image.

And the second poured forth his cup upon the sea, and there began to  be blood like a corpse's, and every living spirit that was in the sea died.

And the third poured forth his cup upon the rivers and the fountains of water, and there began to be blood. 

And I heard the messenger of the waters saying, Just you are, Is-Being and Was-Being, Godly, for you have decided these things, for the blood of the consecrated and the prophets they have poured forth, and you have given them blood to drink; they are deserving. 

And I heard the altar saying, Certainly, Lord God All-Ruler, your judgments [are] truthful and just.

And the fourth poured forth his cup upon the sun, and there was given it the burning of human beings with fire. And the human beings were burned with a great glow, and they blasphemed the Name of God, the One having authority over these afflictions, and they did not repent to give him glory.

And the fifth poured forth his cup upon the seat of the beast, and its empire began to be blinded, and they were chewing their tongues from the toil, and they blasphemed the God of heaven from their toils and from their festers, and they did not repent from their deeds.

And the sixth poured forth his cup upon the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried, so that the way might be prepared for the emperors of the dawning sun.

And I saw from the wyrm's mouth, and from the beast's mouth, and from the pseudo-prophet's mouth, three unclean spirits, like frogs, for they are daimonic spirits making signs, which go forth to the emperors of the whole world, to gather them for the war of the great day of God All-Ruler.

[Revelation 16:1-14, my rough translation. Some old versions do not have the "from the fane/temple/shrine/sanctuary" in the first verse. In verse five, not all sources have the "Lord". In verse twelve, "of the dawning sun" is often translated as a poetic expression for "from the east".

The word I've translated 'cup' is phiale (hence the KJV transliteration, "vial"), which is often translated as "bowl". The latter is perhaps technically the stricter translation, but either works; a phiale would have been a broad, shallow bowl used for libation-prayers (which were common in the household piety of the Roman empire), but the term is also often used for any cup or bowl that is used in sacrifices, especially for catching blood. It's this sacrificial character that is behind the word here. The bowls/cups are called the cups/bowls of God's thymos. This is often translated as 'wrath', and it could mean something like that, but it's not the usual word for 'wrath'. It's a much broader word in fact: a spirited horse has a lot of thymos, not because it is wrathful but because it is hard to break; if you have high spirits, you have a lot of thymos; your thymos is the part of you that seeks not ease and pleasure but challenge and victory. My guess is that it is here standing for something like what in Medieval Hebrew is called hod, glory/splendor/majesty, or netzach, perpetuity/durability/victoriousness: that is, the bowls are the bowls of the unconquerability of God.

The address to God by the angel of the waters is interesting: Being (ho on) and Having-Been (ho en) have been previously used (Rv. 11:17) with Coming (ho erchomenos); here, however, they are joined with ho hosios, which means 'godly, pious, righteous, holy'.

I have translated with the word 'daimonic' rather than 'demonic', because I think the older meaning of daimonion may partly be in view -- a daemon is an intermediary between gods and men. The dragon, beast, and false prophet are setting themselves up against God, as if they were divine, and the unclean spirits are their 'daemons'. 

Each of the plagues seems to involve a form of poetic justice; those who receive the stamp (charagma, related to the word character) of the beast receive a wound; those who pour out the blood of the saints receive blood to drink, the lordship of the beast is afflicted with toil in darkness/blindness. The sea is afflicted because the beast comes from the sea.]

Except, Indeed, that He Was Lean and Skinny

Hobbes, but why, or on what principle, I never could understand, was not murdered. This was a capital oversight of the professional men in the seventeenth century; because in every light he was a fine subject for murder, except, indeed, that he was lean and skinny; for I can prove that he had money, and (what is very funny,) he had no right to make the least resistance; for, according to himself, irresistible power creates the very highest species of right, so that it is rebellion of the blackest die to refuse to be murdered, when a competent force appears to murder you. However, gentlemen, though he was not murdered, I am happy to assure you that (by his own account) he was three times very near being murdered. 

 Thomas de Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, in Miscellaneous Essays. Of course, it is not really what Thomas Hobbes says about "competent force" trying to murder you; Hobbes thinks you have a right to self-defense in the face of an immediate attempt to cause your death. But I, too, have wondered why, or on what principle, Hobbes was not murdered.

Artificial Stupidity

 Freddie deBoer says something that has also bothered me about much of the marketing for "AI", although with a bit more swearing than I would do (but the swearing is perhaps justified here):

Watch this Apple Intelligence advertisement. The explicit message of this ad - the explicit message - is that the product being sold is for the dumbest fucking people alive. Our main character, Warren, is so utterly dense that his boss is flabbergasted when Warren writes a formulaic 50-word email without tripping on his dick. Everything about the advertisement is designed for you to understand that the fundamental appeal of having “AI” on your iPhone - and you could do this just as easily in the web browser, but never mind - is so that you, a deeply unintelligent being, can operate as a minimally-competent human. They’re selling this thing to people who look at Warren and say, yeah, that’s me, to the absolute dullards. The mentally incompetent. The too stupid to live. I mean that’s exactly what that commercial is conveying, right? They create a protagonist who is intended to appear as helpless and intellectually vacant as possible. They then demonstrate the great value of the product they’re selling, Apple Intelligence, by having it take an email he spends 30 seconds writing and converting it into a more professional email that any human being who doesn’t have some sort of serious cognitive disability could also write in 30 seconds. And Apple is not the only company that’s selling AI by demonstrating its ability to shepherd the tragically stupid through life.

But it's even worse than that, I think; what I think grates me about much of the marketing for AI is that, even trying as hard as they can to make it seem must-have, they can't avoid presenting it as if it will make you more stupid. That is, I think, the really irritating thing. It's not really so much that they are marketing to people who are already stupid; it's that they are marketing to everyone the attractions of having something that lets you be stupid. The marketing is never, "This makes this complicated process easier for better results'", which is how other technological innovations are generally marketed, but "Why do anything that requires intelligent work when you can take the lazy route of being artificially stupid?"

Perhaps deBoer is right that the root cause is hype inflation; in particular, we have something that is very technologically impressive if we consider its development, but that currently, almost by definition, just does what we already do anyway. The closest we can get to making the effect sound impressive is putting some results of intermediate-level skills just in reach of people without those skills, like being able to produce an OK illustration without being an amateur illustrator or hiring a professional illustrator, which is not something most people need very often -- or trying to convince people that they need a means to do what requires very few skills at all, and that they can already do, like following a business email template.

I suppose the real irritation, though, is that this kind of scammery often seems to work on people.

Fortnightly Book, January 26

 The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a religious ferment and chaos. Multiple new devotions spread throughout Europe, institutional structures shifted, certain classes of laity suddenly found themselves confronted with religious and moral questions that had before only been dimly anticipated. Pilgrimage became a major form of both religious practice and recreation. Reading of devotional works -- whether by reading them oneself or having them read to one -- became more common. And as often happens in such times, there was an explosion of mystical and ascetical theology, one that pervaded large portions of society, as people of all sorts of backgrounds turned from merely following along with the religious experience formed for them by institutions and in some sense took charge of their religious experience, or at least large parts of it, for themselves.

Into this ferment plunged Margery Kempe. Born somewhere around 1373 as Margery Brunham (or Burnham), to a well-to-do and influential family in the busy and important port city of Lynn (now officially known as King's Lynn, of which her father was the mayor), she benefited from a surge in the good fortunes of the bourgeois and mercantile classes. We don't know what kind of education she had, although we do know that she never learned to read, but we also know that she seems to have had a good memory, and could retain a great deal of anything read to her. In 1394, at about the age of twenty she married John Kempe, a local official in Lynn, with whom she would eventually have fourteen children. We don't know exactly when her mystical experiences began, but she was definitely struggling with them shortly after the birth of her child, and they seem to have never let up. She eventually forced her husband to accept a chastity agreement and began actively engaging in pilgrimage; everywhere she went, her devotion was as public as it can get, with loud prayers and weeping sobs and sudden strange reactions that put everyone around her off (an effect that has never entirely vanished, because her practices of religious devotion were, shall we say, very far from common ideas about religious devotion today). She was tried for heresy several times (always acquitted, because it was never really her beliefs that were causing the problems others had with her).

Eventually she dictated the book, now known was The Book of Margery Kempe, that is sometimes considered the first autobiographical work in the English language, giving in detail her accounts of her devotions, her many trials, her pilgrimages, and giving us one of the clearest snapshots of the religious practices, people, and pilgrimage places of the day, many of which she knew personally. (One of the most famous scenes of the book is when she met Julian of Norwich, and it is very clear that, despite being a very different person from Julian, she is giving a very close and accurate account of their exchange.) She had difficulty getting people to help her to put the book together. Then after her death, at some point in the sixteenth century the book disappeared, except for a pamphlet with a few extracts, and was only re-discovered in 1934. And of course, The Book of Margery Kempe is the next fortnightly book.

Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions

 Introduction

Opening Passage: There are two passages that can be considered the 'beginning', in the Note (which gives us the frame narrative) and Chapter 1. From Chapter 1:

He woke slowly. For a while he lay unaware of more than the pain in his head. Vision came piecemeal, until he saw that the thing before him was the root of a tree. As he turned over, a thick carpet of old leaves crackled. Earth and moss and moisture made a pungency in his nose.

"Det var som fanden!" he muttered, which means, roughly, "What the hell!" He sat up. (p. 10)

Summary: Holger Carlsen was a Dane who studied mechanical engineering in America; he was completely normal and unexceptional, behind the fact that he was adopted orphan. While he was in America, Denmark fell under the heel of Nazi Germany, but when rumors begin to spread that the Danes might be on the verge of active revolt, Holger returned to Denmark, despite the grave danger, and eventually joined the underground resistance. While involved in an important mission for the underground, he got into a shooting incident with the Germans in which he was apparently knocked out, and...

...woke naked in a strange forest, near a horse (named Papillon, according to the headstall) and some clothes and armor that were his size. Putting on the armor, he soon meets a beautiful swan maiden, who (as the name suggests) has a vestment that allows her to become a swan. Her name is Alianora. Sh takes him to Mother Gerd, a witch, who sends him on the duke of the elves in Faerie. Alianora introduces him to the dwarf Hugi, who becomes a trusted companion. When they reach the elves, Holger narrowly avoids being lured by the elves and Queen Morgan le Fay into a trap and put to rest for centuries beneath Elf Hill.

Meanwhile, he slowly begins to unravel the nature of the world around him. There are two great forces, Law and Chaos, in continual struggle. The fairy realm and all the bogies of human fear are on the side of Chaos, trying to turn the world back into some ungoverned and ungovernable state; on the side of Law are the major empires of men in the Middle World, the Holy Empire and, farther away, the Saracen lands. The denizens of Faerie have powerful magic, especially of illusion and glamour, but they are helpless before the holy symbols and prayers of Christianity. This comes us something of a shock to Holger, an agnostic. Holger also finds that he has something like a memory of the world, but just out of reach; he cannot recall anything, but sometimes he gets flashes and glimpses, and sometimes things seem very familiar, and sometimes he knows things that he certainly did not learn in our world. Figuring out the mystery hidden by the veils of memory will become essential to finding a way to return home. But when he does return home, what does he now leave behind, as a man who has lived in both worlds?

The overall story is not, I think, greatly surprising to anyone who knows the basic story of the Carlovingian paladin, Holger Danske, also known as Ogier the Dane, and the essential insight that Holger had to discover in order to begin to fulfill his role in that world and return to our own is one that I had guessed within literally a few minutes of starting the book. But it is told with considerable skill, and in that way is a bit like Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court -- if you know the story of King Arthur, you can guess a lot about where the latter story might go, but that's not the point, because it's not really a mystery story but (as we would say today in our anime-influenced world) an isekai, and the point is to see someone from our world make their way through another world. 

The fantasy elements of the tale are great. The attempts to hold together our world and the Middle World are somewhat uneven, although they occasionally (as with the explanation of why those who steal a sun-turned giant's gold are cursed) are clever. Part of the point, of course, is that Sir Holger trying to reach the goal of his quest while Morgan le Fay and an army of Chaos try to stop him is doing something of essentially the same kind as Holger Carlsen in the Danish resistance racing to try to get someone important out of the country while being hunted by Nazis. The battles of Law and Chaos are not exactly the same in style in the two worlds, but they are the same in substance. And it makes sense that Anderson puts this in terms of Law and Chaos rather than Good and Evil; it is easier to convince ourselves that we should let Chaos rule than that we should submit to Evil, and, in any case, in World War II, we had plenty of reasons to recognize that Law could be flawed and Chaos attractive, independent of any moral question.

Where the book is weakest is in its humor. There's a lot of potential humor in a story like this, and I think Anderson doesn't manage to draw it out to more than an occasional chuckle. I think this is what primarily prevents Three Hearts and Three Lions from rising to the level of Connecticut Yankee; the latter's easy humor both makes it easier to immerse oneself in the story and gives the social commentary aspect of it a greater depth than it would otherwise have. Nonetheless, unlike Connecticut Yankee, which would be practically unbearable if it were not written by someone as funny as Mark Twain, this is not primarily a comic work, and therefore, while lessened by its missed opportunities in humor, is not hurt as badly as it might have been by this weakness.

It is difficult sometimes to return to the sources of things. This book has been so influential on pop fantasy that it's necessary to remind yourself that you aren't seeing a trite repetition of a common trope but the first original that everyone is imitating. Dwarves are often portrayed in pop fantasy as having Scottish accents, which might seem rather random; but the reason is found here, where Anderson gives, for the very first time, a memorable dwarf character who speaks in broadly Scots-like dialect. Parts of the story can easily read like a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing campaign -- but the reason is not that Anderson is indulging in the bad habit of LitRPG but that early Dungeons & Dragons often imitated Three Hearts, and parts of that were so popular that they continue today in many different versions of many different fantasy role-playing games, which have in turn influenced fantasy on screen and page. (The same problem arises for the Conan stories, and for exactly the same reason.) The original should not be blamed for being popular and influential, even if some later imitations have degenerated to a sort of cargo-cult repetition. If you can come to it with fresh eyes, however, this is an enjoyable and rewarding book, and it is easy to see why it captivated so many, and why people have been imitating bits and pieces of it ever since. 

Favorite Passage:

Everywhere around were stars, but unthinkably remote in a black heaven. The Swan flashed overhad, the Milky Way spilled suns off its dim arch. Carl's Wain wheled under the Pole; all the stars were cold. Northward he began to see the peaks of this range, sword sharp, sheathed in ice that gleamed under the moon. Behind him waxed lightlessness.

Gallop and gallop and gallop! Now Holger heard the wild horns closer, shrilling and wailing. Never had he heard such anguis as was blown on the horns of the damned. Through the clover air he heard hoofs in the sky and the baying of immortal hounds. He leaned forward. His body swayed with Papillon's haste, his rein hand loose on the arched neck, his other hand gripped about Alianora's. (p. 213)

Recommendation: Recommended.

****

Poul Anderson, Three Hearts and Three Lions, Open Road (New York: 2018).

Links of Note

 * Two interesting items from "Medievalists.net":
 Lorris Chevalier, The Myth of Mills: Bridging Antiquity and Medieval Innovation
Lorris Chevalier, The Myth of the Medieval Flail: Separating Fact from Fiction

* Manuel Fasko, Shepherd on Nonlinguistic and Prelinguistic Cognition: A Case of Nonconceptualism? (PDF) -- I'm not convinced by all parts of this argument, and think that when she means 'latent conception' she means precisely what she says -- a conception that is not recognized as such at the time -- but it's an interesting discussion

* Ina Goy, Immanuel Kant on the Moral Feeling of Respect (PDF)

* Jonathan Gilmore, The Paradox of Tragedy, at the SEP

* Juan Carlos Gonzalez, Believing in organisms: Kant's non-mechanistic philosophy of nature (PDF)

* Patrick Flynn, Physicalists Should Have a Problem with the Problem of Suffering, at "The Journal of Absolute Truth"

* Emanuel Rutten, On Herman Philipse's Attempt to Write Off Cosmological Arguments (PDF)

* Patrik Engisch, Recipes, Traditions, and Representation (PDF)

* Julian Kwasniewski, 'Back to the Land' Catholics Champion Faithful Agrarian Living, on the Catholic Land Movement, at "National Catholic Register"

* Chris Fraser, Paradoxes in the School of Names (PDF)

* Gabriel J. LeBeau, Abdul-Rahman Alkiswani, Daniel J. Mauro, Paul J. Camarata, A Plausible Historical and Forensic Account of the Death of Thomas Aquinas

* Mustafa Yavuz, Avicennian Reception of Aristotelian Botany (PDF)

* L. W. Blakely, Philosophy in the Ruins, at "Front Porch Republic"

ADDED LATER

* This report in the Los Angeles Times, by Connor Sheets, on some of the failures that have made the recent Palisades fire so devastating, is an astounding look at a case of poor political priorities.

Emerentiana Emerita (Re-Post)

 Today is the feast of St. Emerentiana, so here is a lightly revised post from 2020 to mark the day.

*****

 Agnes was a Roman girl from a wealthy Christian family; as was common among the wealthy, she was given to a wetnurse, who was Emerentiana's mother, and who was lactating because she was already nursing Emerentiana. The two girls grew up together, and Emerentiana, who was not from a Christian family, eventually became a catechumen. About this time, according to the story, some of Agnes' pagan suitors who were rejected precisely because they were not Christian reported her to the authorities as a Christian. She was eventually beheaded. A few days later, Emerentiana was found praying outside her tomb near the Via Nomentana by a number of pagans who criticized her for doing so; when she scolded them for the evil they had done to her friend and foster-sister, they stoned the young catechumen to death. She was canonized and is often depicted holding stones in her lap. Both Agnes and Emerentiana are said to be buried in the Roman church of Sant'Agnese fuori le mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls), which was built over the catacombs on the Via Nomentana where Agnes was buried and Emerentiana martyred; but it can't be completely ruled out that she is in fact buried somewhere else nearby.

The name 'Emerentiana' is a fairly unusual one (although in some traditions, the Virgin Mary's grandmother is named Emerentia); the name comes from Latin ēmerēre, which means to deserve or merit, especially because you have completed a term of service. It's the same word that gives us the English word 'emeritus' for professors who have completed their service; 'emeritus' was the word Romans used for a veteran who had been honorably discharged.

The building of the church above the catacombs was a common practice in the early Church; it's actually the source of the Catholic customs of dedicating churches to saints, of putting relics in or under altars, and of having patron saints. While the earliest Christian churches seem to have been house churches, the earliest Christians would have particular liturgies at the graves of martyrs in catacombs and the like. The martyrs themselves were, so to speak, the altars. (In the Emerentiana legend this may well be why the pagans reacted so vehemently to Emerentiana praying at Agnes' tomb.) When it later became feasible, they would build churches and basilicas over the catacombs, and of course, the church would be referred to by the relevant martyr, leading to the practice of churches having titular saints. Where it was possible, the churches would be built in such a way that the altar was right over the saint giving the church its title, as Sant'Agnese fuori le mura is built so that the remains of St. Agnes are thought to be directly beneath the altar. But sometimes this was not possible, so it would be done symbolically by putting a relic of the saint in the altar, if one could be had. This continued even as there was a need for churches far from any martyr's grave, and when saints who were not strictly martyrs were given honors analogous to martyrs (thus leading to canonization in our usual sense). Thus, for instance, not far from where I live is a church dedicated to Saint Albert the Great; there is a little bit of bone from St. Albert in the altar, so every time Mass is said, it is in a sense said on the tomb of St. Albert, which in reality is very far from here. These titular saints, especially the more famous ones, were often associated with particular places, which became the idea of patron saints of places, which then expanded, sometimes by accident of location, sometimes by historical association, and sometimes just by analogies based on their lives, to patron saints of guilds and other things. Agnes being the more famous Virgin Martyr, she has a long list of things of which she is taken to be patron saint, most of which are based directly on her life or on historical associations that built up around her titular church. Emerentiana, always the quiet girl in Agnes' shadow, has a much shorter list. Indeed, the only thing I've ever seen Emerentiana listed as patron of is stomach problems. Like most lesser-known saints, the patronage comes purely by an analogy; as I said above, she is usually depicted seated with a pile of stones in her lap, and it's usually thought that she became associated with stomach problems because having a lap full of stones looks like it would be hard on the abdomen. It's far from being the only saint-patronage based on a visual pun.

In any case, I think St. Emerentiana would make a good patron saint for friends.

The Pardon Power

 People have been talking a lot about presidential pardons recently, in part because of controversial pardons by both Biden (e.g., pardoning his son Hunter despite having explicitly and publicly promised his Democratic supporters that he would not) and Trump (e.g., pardoning almost all January 6 protesters). As always happens with this topic, people say things that are motivated more by partisanship than the facts of the matter, so it's worth reminding ourselves how pardon power works.

The presidential pardon power is found in the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 1:

...he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.

Note that there are only two explicit restrictions here -- it has to be for offenses against the United States, and does not extend to cases of impeachment. The question of implicit restrictions, deriving from the concept of a "Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons", is an interesting field of discussion. One topic that often comes up is whether the President can pardon himself; self-pardons have historically not been regarded as possible, although this has never been directly tested in the United States (where federal courts usually try to avoid directly convicting Presidents for things). Another one relates to Biden's last-minute pardons, several of which were non-specific as to crimes and for people who have not been charged for anything, and might never be. These preemptive pardons are almost certainly not legitimate -- you can only pardon for offenses, and offenses have to be specific. The pardon power is not a power to give someone an immunity from prosecution, particularly if the pardon doesn't identify a particular offense and any charges or even investigations necessarily post-date the pardon.

However, these are not the issues that usually come up in discussion; people complain about pardons themselves, not about whether something is really a pardon or not. In doing so, they often misunderstand the point of the pardon power. These are matters I've discussed before, so I'll quote some of a post from 2008 below. (The original links to the sources have since broken; I'll look when I have the chance for new ones, if I have a chance.) Suffice it to say that the whole point of the pardon power is that it is difficult to put a rule to, because it really exists to handle cases where the rules are not good enough. The ideal situation for the pardon power is for when people are guilty -- have broken the law -- but it is not good for society as a whole to treat them as guilty and punish them. There are lots of situations in which you might need this, and pretty much any restriction you try to make on it will result in cases being treated too harshly because the law doesn't consider the relevant circumstances, or in cases being applied where, whatever the law may say, a large number of people regard applying it to the given case as an abuse of power, or in cases where punishing someone who is well and truly guilty of something would in fact harm the public good more than the punishment would benefit it. Whatever you may think of the prudence of particular pardons, it's clear that at least many of the more controversial pardons of Biden and Trump are intended by them to be exactly of this sort, and therefore exactly what the pardon power is for.

And, frankly, while individual pardons may be unwise, extensive use of the pardon power is not in general a bad thing, and should be encouraged rather than (as is usually done) discouraged. This is true because mercy is a higher and greater expression of civilized life than justice, and because, important as positive laws can be, the people as a whole are more important than any particular law. The justice system serves the people, and the people involved with it are prone to forget that; the pardon power is one of a very few things that explicitly recognizes that there are sometimes things that are more important than law enforcement. The pardon power is also important because it is a reminder that even good laws applied by good courts are not expressions of omniscience, and can fail to foresee genuinely important circumstances. 

*****

Blackstone had argued that the power of pardon was one of the advantages of monarchy over other forms of government because it (1) reduced the temptation of courts to strain the interpretation of law in order to take into account all the circumstances; (2) endeared the Crown to the people through acts of compassion; and (3), although this is only suggested in passing and is perhaps not Blackstone's own view, allowed the prince to express in a subtle way its disapproval of a too-strict law. 

Blackstone argues that a democracy can't seriously allow the power of pardon because there is no authority higher than the legislature and it would be inappropriate to give judges this power; which is fine as an argument as long as you don't have the tertium quid of an 'energetic magistrate' who is neither legislator nor judge. The colonies had carried over the power of pardon, and when they formed the Office of the President, the one that we know, they had two models to choose from: in most state constitutions the power of pardon was invested in the governor, in a few in the legislature. The power of pardon was given to the President in order to provide a check and a balance against Congress. 

 It's important to note that the power of pardon was not given in order to facilitate law or judicial justice. Quite the opposite; it was designed, and defended, on the basis that there needs to be a protection even from law and even from judicial justice. It was not made in order to prevent the backfiring of justice; one of the types of cases for which it was explicitly considered was the one where legal justice succeeds: the law was in general a reasonable one, and the judgment in court was a reasonable application of the law. As I think Oliver Wendell Holmes somewhere put it, it was explicitly supposed to include cases where policy required "a remission of a punishment strictly due, for a crime certainly ascertained." The cases where pardon can correct faulty justice were merely considered an additional benefit. 

 Hamilton explicitly argues that the power of pardon should be open to a very liberal use: 

 Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel. 

 It is thus entirely different from an acquittal; it does not imply innocence or vindication. Thus when we consider how it might be improved (and it is always possible that any clause of the Constitution might be improved), it does not make much sense to consider it as if it were part of the justice system. It is entirely a different matter: it is a distinct system for protecting people from the legislature and the courts; it is based on the principle that these things may not have a good result even when working quite well. (That there is some wisdom to this is seen in the aftermath of the Civil War, since Lincoln spent an immense amount of time using his pardoning power to protect deserters, especially very young ones, from full punishment.) Pardon is part of our justice system in a kind of incidental way; as it is set up to work, one can argue, it is (so to speak) part of our benevolence system, and works on the principle that mercy can and should sometimes supercede the ordinary operation of justice. James Wilson puts this point nicely: 

 The most general opinion, as we have already observed, and, we may add, the best opinion, is, that, in every state, there ought to be a power to pardon offences. In the mildest systems, of which human societies are capable, there will still exist a necessity of this discretionary power, the proper exercise of which may arise from the possible circumstances of every conviction. Citizens, even condemned citizens, may be unfortunate in a higher degree, than that, in which they are criminal. When the cry of the nation rises in their favour; when the judges themselves, descending from their seats, and laying aside the formidable sword of justice, come to supplicate in behalf of the person, whom they have been obliged to condemn; in such a situation, clemency is a virtue; it becomes a duty. 

 It's pretty clear, I think, that this in itself unsettles people; and repeatedly one finds that many of the arguments for restricting the pardoning power boil down simply to the fact that justice was not served. That really implies that there should be no real pardoning power at all; pardon gets its strength precisely from the fact that it is able to do this. The more restricted motivation that provides grounds for restricting the pardoning power (rather than eliminating it) is to discourage corruption. Certainly restrictions of the power to pardon are not unheard of -- the President perhaps has a less restricted power of absolute pardon than the British monarch had in the time of Blackstone. The pardoning power was (as I understand) in a way smuggled through the Constitutional convention, being added at the last minute and not discussed at length, despite being controversial; and it has, moreover, a long history of being used for political expediency. There is room for both motivations, if reasonably unfolded (as well as for reasoned defenses of keeping things as is, if any are on offer).* But I think it is very important to keep the two arguments distinct; otherwise we'll just make a hash of things. 

_____ 

* I'm of the view that the pardoning power is very important, and should be used more systematically than it usually is. I am open to arguments, however, that it could be reworked in ways to reduce any encouragement to corruption that might possibly result from it.

Two Poem Drafts

 On a Passage in a Letter by Mary Shelley

From the window he looked down upon the terrace and the sea,
which rushed with endless foaming in a raging, rising flood;
he saw himself in shadow and from shadow he did flee:
his hand around the throat of fate, the pounding in the blood,
brought terror to his heart and from the sight he fled
in fear of things that ever were and children ghostly-dead.
Thus lonely on a poet's throne, with burdened poet's crown,
he fled, for sea was flooding in and all was coming down.

Psalm 148

Glorify the One Who Is, glorify the One Who Truly Is;
Glorify Him in the loftiness.
Glorify Him, all His envoys;
Glorify Him, all His armies;
Glorify Him, bright sun and yellow moon;
Glorify Him, you heaping, shining stars;
Glorify Him, you loftiest loftiness,
And you flowing flows above the loftiness.

They will glorify the Name of the One Who Truly Is,
For He commanded and they were founded,
And He made them stand onward and always,
And He inscribed that they not pass over.

Glorify out of the land the One Who Truly Is,
O monsters and all deep things,
Flame, hail, snow, and mist,
Tempest winds fulfilling His word,
Hills and hillocks,
Fruitful trees and all cedars,
Wildlife and all beasts,
Creeping reptiles and chirping, flying birds,
Kings of the lands and all nations,
Chieftains and all vindicators of the land.

They will glorify the Name of the One Who Truly Is,
For His Name alone is uplifted,
His splendor above the land and the loftiness.

At Dawn, Behold! The Pall of Night Was Gone

 Morning Joy
by Claude McKay 

At night the wide and level stretch of wold,
 Which at high noon had basked in quiet gold,
 Far as the eye could see was ghostly white;
 Dark was the night save for the snow's weird light.
 I drew the shades far down, crept into bed;
 Hearing the cold wind moaning overhead
 Through the sad pines, my soul, catching its pain,
 Went sorrowing with it across the plain.
 At dawn, behold! the pall of night was gone,
 Save where a few shrubs melancholy, lone,
 Detained a fragile shadow. Golden-lipped
 The laughing grasses heaven's sweet wine sipped.
 The sun rose smiling o'er the river's breast,
 And my soul, by his happy spirit blest,
 Soared like a bird to greet him in the sky,
 And drew out of his heart Eternity.

Twofold Reflection of First Truth

 As a certain gloss on the verse The true have vanished, etc., of the Psalms says, the one First Truth is reflected by many truths in our minds, just as one person's face is reflected by many faces in a broken mirror. Now, this manifold reflection of the one First Truth involves two things. One is the light of our intellect, of which the Psalms speak: The light of your face, O Lord is signed upon us. The other is the first principles (simple or compound) that we naturally know. For we are only able to know the truth because of these first principles and the light of our intellect, and they are only able to make the truth clear to us because they resemble the First Truth, which makes them to a certain extent unchangeable and incapable of misleading us.

[Thomas Aquinas, Quodlibetal Questions, QQ. 10, art. 1, Turner Nevitt and Brian Davies, trs., Oxford University Press (New York: 2020), p. 142.]

The verse mentioned in the first sentence is Psalm 12:1; due to numbering differences, the gloss is the gloss on Psalm 11:2. The verse mentioned in the third sentence is Psalm 4:6 (Psalm 4:7 in the Vulgate), one of St. Thomas's favorite verses. Simple first principles are objects of the intellect like being and good; compound first principles are things like the principle of noncontradiction or the first principle of practical reason. In a sense, just as we can call God 'Truth Itself', we can call God 'The Principle of Noncontradiction Itself', that actual First Truth of which our understanding of the principle of noncontradiction is the participation.

Wisdom Doth Live with Children Round Her Knees

 I Grieved for Buonaparte
by William Wordsworth

I Grieved for Buonaparte, with a vain
 And an unthinking grief! The tenderest mood
 Of that Man's mind -- what can it be? what food
 Fed his first hopes? what knowledge could he gain?-- 
 'Tis not in battles that from youth we train
 The Governor who must be wise and good,
 And temper with the sternness of the brain
 Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood.
 Wisdom doth live with children round her knees:
 Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk
 Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk
 Of the mind's business: these are the degrees
 By which true Sway doth mount; this is the stalk
 True Power doth grow on; and her rights are these.

Dashed Off II

 "In instantaneous changes, a thing is in becoming and in being simultaneously." Aquinas

By sin we lose a triple dignity: innocence, filial relation to God, and fitness for relevant office and order. The sacraemtn of penance restores the latter two and provides a new dignity to compensate for loss of the first, namely, what might be called dignity of return. By coming before the tribunal of mercy, the penitent respects their basic human dignity, which they do not lose in sin but fail to respect; the Church in turn renders respect to the same by welcome, by counsel, and by seal.

"Baptism has some efficacy toward remission of sin even before it is actually received, while one receives it in proposal.' Aquinas (SCG 4.72)

happenstantial vs unitive majorities

"The ideal of integral human fulfillment is that of a single system in which all the goods of human persons would contribute to the fulfillment of the whole community of persons." Grisez
-- note that Grisez takes it to be the case that we can only know that this is actually possible by faith, which locates its achievement in "the divine act of re-creating all things in Jesus."
"The guidance which the ideal of integral human fulfillment offers to choice is to avoid unnecessary limitation and so maintain an openness to further goods."

person (or person-being) as itself a basic good of human persons

Integral human fulfillment should be seen as the social expression of the Mystical Body in its fullness.

We identify the nondispositional or categorical in contrast to and in light of the dispositional.

What most people derive from schooling is a set of drilled recipes for doing particular things, combined with a vast, foggy mass of dim impressions about what is relevant to what.

being constructed as an artifact vs receiving an artifactual designation

Every debunking argument presupposes a domain-specific PSR, because otherwise it could just be answered by denying that there even needs to be a reason.

If there is a teleology for artifacts, there is something at least very like a teleology for organisms; if there is something at least very like a teleology for organisms, tehre is something at least broadly like a teleology for natural systems of process like crystallization, ecosystems, or the internal balance of stars. The simplest account of all this is that it is all at least basically teleological.

Public schooling is not education itself but a particular instrument of education within a much larger context of education.

euthanasia as a mark of creeping totalitarianism

illocutionary & perlocutionary aspects of artifacts

"We say that the whole holy Scripture is divided into flesh and spirit, as if it were some spiritual human." Maximos
-- he goes on to analogize further -- the Law is the flesh, the Prophets the senses, the Gospel the intellectual soul "operating through the flesh of the Law, through the sensory perception of the Prophets, and manifesting its own power by its activities." (EOO Chapters 1.92)

Conscience is imperfect, but it is very dangerous to let a schematism in one's head substitute for it.

Physicists explain the behavior of physical objects by tracing it back to what is always the same. But it does not logically follow from this that everything in the behavior of physical objects is wholly explained by what is always the same; and, indeed, we know that the bheavior of physical objects is not itself always the same.

The Church's moral teaching mostly works by long, slow pressure.

deliberate monopolization as a sin against charity

aspects of just price: raritas, virtuositas (capacity to supply what is wanted), complacibilitas (capacity to satisfy want itself)

Res tantum valet quantum vendi potest communiter.
-- just price recognizes the communiter as not merely statistical, i.e., the price has to be such as to be consistent with and appropriate to common buying and selling, wehere there is a common good in exchange that is consistent with teh common good of the exchanges. This is why fair contract plays a significant role in it.

Business ethics by its nature has to be casuistical.

Usury fails to subordinate the means of exchange to the moral ends of exchange; it treats the means as the point.

pecunia vs capitale
pecunia non paret
capitale is not pure money but money in use as a means to anend, in combination with labor (industria)

cambium non est mutuum
-- & therefore the relevant prohibition is that against unjust price rather that against usury

A viable business ethics necessarily must presuppose that profit is not a direct end of business, but a means of sustaining and achieving its ends.

the licit titles to profit:
(1) to sustain the household
(2) to aid the indigent
(3) to reward exertion in supplying needs

People often talk about medieval prohibitions on usury as if they were simply imposed on merchants by moral theologians, but in reality, and despite a fair amount of evasion, merchants took them seriously, and while many exploited ambiguities, all looked down on blatant cases and actively sought to impose the prohibitions on each other, as well as to parade, as part of their image, their own adherence to them. This is a common pattern in business ethics: businesses often give themselves all benefit of any doubt, will be very fallible in the face of direct temptation, but nonetheless put significant effort into incorporating the relevant norms into their practice.

Most words for banking trace back to words for 'table'; this is an etymology with several independent originations. And I don't think this is trivial: a space for negotiation and account, jointly open to all parties, is the central and essential component of all banking.

A common pattern in banking and finance: trade --> receipts --> trade of receipts.

It does not 'impede' business to hold it to moral standards.

The three public functions of legitimate business:
(1) to supply from elsewhere what is needed
(2) to preserve what will be needed for when it will be needed
(3) to change what is less needed into what is more needed.

All business ethics must be structured in such a way as to recognize that desire for gain itself is bottomless and as such is all-destroying.

Just as there is reason to take genera as being in the substantial order without being substances, so too there is reason to take unified systems as being in the substantial order without themselves being substances.

While we know more than forms, the activity of forms is the primary anchor of knowledge.

We should perhaps think of atomic orbitals as having measurable 'electronicity' with integer values rather than electron particles; and indeed probably should only think of 'sites of interaction' rather than particles at all.

particle : site of interaction :: wave : scope of interaction

What makes human 'normative attitudes' normative attitudes is that they already presuppose a normative framework.
Human beings can create norms because we build on norms we already have.

People are regularly responsive to norms that they do not regard as authoritative. Some of this is just a matter of default -- the norm is there with no obvious better alternative -- and some a matter of derivative deference -- they take the norm to be useful for complying with a norm they do regard as authoritative -- and some a matter of social pressure -- it's the norm other people are already using, so it's easier to go along with it.

Children are born apt for society, but also must grow into it.

It is a recurring pattern of human experience that people coming to be happy find that happiness is much more simple than they were making it.

The actual decisions of courts have less influence than generally assumed; the perceived reasons for those decisions, on the other hand, have immense influence.

All artworks are communal by nature.

The great goodnesses that matter in politics are systems creating conditions for many small goodnesses.

Utilitarianism only works to the extent that its account of happiness approximates common good.

the state as a corporate agent/representative of the people vs. teh state as a territorial management corporation

Everything has an intelligibility adequate for it.

'things like that do happen' as an explanation
-- it seems clear that this can only explain the possibilities for a particular case
-- relation to Humean accounts of explanation

To explain is to set intelligilibty within a larger intelligibility.

What corresponds must cohere.

Titus 1:5 and the essential nature of the sacrament of order

Religion is a theurgy for God and His will having an influence on us; that is to say, by formulas, spiritual exercises, purifications, and expiations we open ourselves to God.

(1) To think within oneself.
(2) To think with other people.
(3) To think with all.

The Enlightenment period was an age that had no equal in the history of human misunderstanding.

"According as one acts, according as one conducts oneself, so does one become. The doer of good becomes good." Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (IV.4.5)

Machiavelli criticizes Charlemagne for receiving the imperial crown from another, but here he is certainly wrong. As we see from Augustus, from the formation of kingships, from medieval popes, from the rise of colonial empires, from American hegemony, power consists in the accumulation of effective titles and offices, where the efficacy of title or office is the combination of authorization and means.

People who actually have a conscience don't usually experience moral rules and pragmatic rules as the same.

All human bodies, by being human, have their character in part as being for the service of others. The muscle of the man, for instance, is partly explained by, and continues to have function for, its value to others of the human species.

What can be treated as obvious is never itself a matter of reasoning.

A problem with many proposals for increased lay participation in the Church is that they require a very well catechized laity that the proposals do nothing to establish or guarantee.

In politics, violence is often a sign of weakening power.

One cannot separate powers until one develops them.

"The connatural mode of proceeding for our intellect proceeds from potency to act, and from the imperfect to the perfect." Poinsot

All inquiry is from being relatively indeterminate to being relatively understood.

Metaphysics intimates sacred doctrine.

Being *falls* into our apprehension.

In every inquiry we are concerned with the kind of being, the way it is being, and the orientation of being to being.

the intellect as principal sense of being; the internal and external senses as instrumental senses of being

The externality of the external world is received by the mind as a kind of directionality or oder of experience within the experience itself.

Hyperbole is dangerous in politics.

Christian evangelization involves broadening propagation combined with narrowing interaction.

Experimental replications are checks, and resampling accounts of replication do not cover the multiple ways in which they are checks.

1 Tim 5:8 and the domestic church

Eden as a probationary state of freedom for the human race

Spirit of Truth and Power

Invocation to Poetry
(January Sixteenth)
by John Holland

"But if (fie of such a But!) you be borne so near the dulmaking cataract of Nilus, that you cannot hear the planet-like music of Poetry: if you have so earth-creeping a mind that it cannot lift itself up to look to the skies of Poetry, or rather, by a certain rustical disdain, will become such a mome as to be a Momus of Poetry: then, although I will not wish unto you the asses ears of Midas, nor to be driven by a Poet's verses as Bubonax was to hang himself, nor to be rhymed to death, as is said to be done in Ireland; -yet this much curse I must send you in the behalf of all Poets, that while you live you live in love, and never get favour, for lacking skill of a Sonnet, and when you die, your memory die from the earth for want of an Epitaph."-Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesie. 

 Spirit of Truth and Power! or whether yoke'd
 With chain harmonious to resounding rhyme;
 Or urged, in "winged words," fire-plumed, to climb;
 Or by the spell of hallow'd thought invoked--
 Thou art the soul's bright messenger sublime;
 Or when quick Lyric themes sweet Music wed;
 Or the Elegiac bard bewails the dead;
 Or Tragic muse instruction wins from crime;
 Or Epic genius snatches from dull time,
 The glorious memory of heroic deeds--
 Blest Poesy! thy inspiration breeds
 Such virtuous hope in youth's ingenuous prime,
 That oft true fame, as man's ambition free,
 Crowns through each stage of life thy faithful devotee.

On Dante's Hell

 Scott Aikin and Jason Aleksander have an interesting, if very odd, paper from a number of years ago, All Philosophers Go to Hell: Dante and the Problem of Infernal Punishment (PDF). The purported topic of the paper is an apparent inconsistency in Dante's depiction of hell. Trying to run this sort of argument with a poetic text is inherently tricky, but certainly Dante as a philosophical poet concerns himself with consistency; all the trickiness in his case is with the mode of depiction. But the oddities of the paper arise precisely from the attempt to translate his depiction into an account of hell. Aikin and Aleksander characterize the account of hell in the following terms:

1. The sins of the damned are a product of free will (though the damned may have “lost the good of the intellect” [3.18]).
2. The sins of the damned are infinite.
3. The sufferings of the damned in Hell are infinite, in the sense that the damned suffer eternally (or, at least, perduringly) and unchangingly.
4. The sufferings of the damned in Hell are proportionate to their crimes.
5. The punishments of the damned are warranted under a retributive conception of justice.

This is explicitly attributed to Dante, although the justification for this is somewhat unclear. In fact, except for perhaps (3) and (4), it seems clear that Dante would accept none of these as stated. The actual sins of the damned are due to free will (although they can also be punishments for other sins); in Limbo the only relevant sin is original sin, which is not actual sin. (Things are a little more complicated in a full scholastic theology, but Dante's poetic method limits how much he can directly convey of such subtleties.) The immediate justification given for (2), that it is a requirement for a theodicy of hell based on retributive justice, has nothing to do with Dante at all, who is certainly not giving such a theodicy. (Dante doesn't strictly have a theodicy, but the closest he has is suggested on the gates of hell themselves, and is, besides, the connection to the overall theme of the Comedy: hell itself is not said to be founded on retributive justice, although that is relevant, but on power, wisdom, and *love*. Justice in punishment is just one of the forms love takes; and we learn as things go that by establishing hell in mercy, divine love limits how corrupt things can become.) In any case, Dante would almost certainly have made the distinction made by any scholastic, that whether sins are infinite depends on what exactly about them that we are considering. The relevant sense here would be that original sin is participating in human failure to adhere to infinite good and the actual sins of the damned are ways of choosing something that falls short of infinite good, which for Dante means that they are defective and counterfeit loves, love being our participation in the divine love. The reason this is relevant is that heaven is full unitive participation in infinite good, the Beatific Vision; people are in hell in Dante because they have not done what is required for heaven and thus are cut off from full union with the infinite good that is God.

While (4) is technically correct of Dante's portrayal, it is trivially so -- the Comedy, like almost all depictions of hell, whether Western or Eastern, operates on the principle that the sufferings of the damned are symbolic representations of the sins themselves. The fundamental rule of artistic depiction of hell, as true of Buddhist hells as it is of Christian and Muslim hells, is that vice is the beginning of its own punishment, so that vices are depicted by symbolic punishments. (5), however, seems to be operating on the assumption that the punishments in the Comedy are separate from the crimes punished so that they need justification; in reality they are just the crimes themselves symbolically expressed, and therefore require no such justification. The actual punishments of hell are not really (say) being turned into a bleeding plant or whirling around in a wind of fire; these are just depictions of why people are punished in hell, namely, the sinful actions themselves (in these examples, suicide and lustful actions), or in other words, in what way their life failed to be a life of love and therefore carries a punishment in itself. Beyond the sins themselves considered as punishments, the actual punishments of hell, which Dante gets from scholastic theologians, are (a) penalty of loss (damnation in the strict sense), which is loss of infinite good, i.e., not being in heaven with full union with God and (b) penalty of sense, which is the experienced foiling of the will, sometimes direct and sometimes by mediating agencies like fire or darkness, that punishes disordered attachment to finite good. That is to say, the punishments of hell are not being with God and not being able to do what one wants, or (perhaps more directly) having to endure positive restriction that one does not want. Penalty of loss is the punishment of all in hell; penalty of sense, a punishment of all except those in Limbo. The poetic depictions are attempting to capture both in relation to the reason why they are given. Aikin and Aleksander recognize that the punishments metaphorically correspond to the sins, but fail to realize the true significance of this, because they keep treating the sins and their punishments as adventitiously related rather than naturally related.

Aikin and Aleksander spend some time trying to make sense of (3); I don't think Dante regards it as requiring much justification. Of course the punishment is perpetual; lots of punishments (exile and life imprisonment without parole, for instance) are perpetual, and only end because we literally die or (in some cases) metaphorically die, i.e., completely repent and reform, neither of which Dante thinks is possible for those who are already dead. Thus the punishment is not merely perpetual, i.e., intrinsically tending to continue; the things that could override its perpetuity are no longer on the table, so it is everlasting. Now, it is true that people today often have difficulty with the idea that the dead can no longer repent, but Dante certainly would not; thus (3) requires no special justification. The treacherous have the punishment of being treacherous people, and what follows naturally from that, for as long as they are treacherous people; the treacherous in hell are punished forever because they are treacherous people forever.

Thus when Aikin and Aleksander characterize the retributive nature of hell by the syllogism, "Those in Hell are sinners, and sin demands punishment. Therefore, Hell is the place for that punishment," this is potentially ambiguous; as characterized by Dante, sin is already the punishment; hell is just the fruition of that.

Now, Dante famously puts the noble pagans in Limbo, which is by definition the state in hell where there is no penalty of sense, only penalty of loss. The noble pagans are in hell because heaven cannot be deserved by human acquired virtue; it requires (as we see in the cases of both Ripheus and Trajan) faith, hope, and love, which make us suitable for union with God. The lack of this is the full extent of their penalty, though; the noble pagans still receive the natural reward of their virtue -- they have the reward of having lived a virtuous life, and being honored for it even after their deaths. And this is quite important, because Aikin and Aleksander repeatedly attempt to suggest that there is some sort of injustice in the noble pagans not receiving heaven, despite the fact that they never met the preconditions for it. But I suspect Dante would be simply bewildered by this. Why would you think that pagan magnanimity has as its natural and deserved reward Christian union with God? Dante is in fact being quite generous: a solid Aristotelian himself, he gives Aristotle every reward of pagan virtue that Aristotle himself thinks pagan virtue deserves: the reward of having lived well in a fully human life, the reward of being honored for it by others of similar virtue. What other reward could human virtue have? Why would you think that natural, acquired virtue, demands supernatural reward of divine union? In reality, human magnanimity deserves the reward of the character it forms and the honor of friendship with magnanimous people, which the noble pagans in Limbo have.

Indeed, while some people have made that assumption, it's odd for Aikin and Aleksander to be assuming it in the construction of their argument. If virtue by its nature deserves heaven, which is union with God, this is only explicable if there is union with God to deserve; and thus this assumption has the result of committing the person who assumes it to saying that the existence of virtue implies the existence of God. I'm very certain that this is not what Aikin and Aleksander intend, but it seems to be what they have commited themselves to.

This is, I think, a recurring problem in discussions of the so-called Problem of Hell. The whole point of Dante's limbo of the noble pagans is that if you concede to the noble pagans the fullest, the deepest, happiness and reward for their nobility that most of them hoped for, that is still short of what Christians claim heaven is like. The most complete reception of what ordinary human virtue deserves is just the life of virtue itself in society with others of virtue. But while heaven includes that, heaven is not just that, nor is it even primarily that; it is an infinite glory of an infinite reward. It's sometimes almost amusing that people talk about the 'Problem of Hell'; in Dante's terms, hell is the easy part -- it's just the completion of what you have achieved when you die. The wicked have achieved wickedness, and have the reward of the wicked; the noble have achieved human nobility, and have the reward of human nobility. The real difficulty, if we take seriously how Dante has set things up, is the Problem of Heaven: How can it possibly be just that there are those who receive infinitely beyond what the maximum of virtue could deserve? And it's mediated by what might be called the Problem of Purgatory: How can human beings possibly reach the point of having met the preconditions for heaven? Notably, Aikin and Aleksander don't seem to consider either of these problems, although, in fairness, they are not alone.

The fact that we cannot by purely human virtue deserve heaven, however, means that much of Aikin and Aleksander's argument is misplaced. They put a great deal of emphasis on the claim that you can only deserve punishment if you fully knew what you were doing, and that in this case that means that only the philosophers could deserve hell. But (1) this principle, read this strongly, is not true of any other case of punishment; in human punishments, for instance, ignorance can sometimes partially excuse, but the ignorance itself has to be innocent and whether or not it excuses, and to what degree, depends very much on the wrong that was done. Yes, knowledge of some kind is a requirement for genuinely being guilty of wrongdoing, but the knowledge that is required is just sufficient knowledge to be able to know that it was wrong. If you deliberately refuse to learn what you need to learn, that is not the right kind of ignorance; if you could have recognized that it was wrong but just made no effort to do so, that is not the right kind of ignorance; if other people know it was wrong and you didn't bother to take their advice seriously, that is not the right kind of ignorance. Beyond that, nobody in any other case holds that you have to know everything about the action to be guilty of wrongdoing; voluntary wrongdoing does not presuppose logical omniscience about your actions. Even knowing a very little bit about the wrongness of your action removes the excuse of invincible ignorance. And pretty much all of the sins punished in Dante's hell are things that any thoughtful person could in principle have recognized as wrong. You don't have to be a philosopher to recognize that you shouldn't betray your family or act with excessive violence. Even schism and heresy are just specialized versions of more general sins of contentiousness and willful disregard for truth. 

And (2), Aikin and Aleksander seem to assume that all penalties in hell are penalty of sense. But the philosophers in limbo are not subject to the penalty of sense. All they have is penalty of loss, the lack of heaven -- and they don't have heaven because human beings, due to original sin, literally cannot qualify for it by their own virtue. (Again, in strict theological terms, this oversimplifies, but Dante's poetic symbolisms limit how he can represent subtleties of sins, as opposed to the dominating vices of an entire life.) The only reward for which human virtue qualifies is a life of virtue and the honor of virtue. And Dante depicts virtuous pagans as having that. Ironically, what Aikin and Aleksander call the Problem of Hell, is in Dante just the fact that Christianity attributes to sainthood an infinitely higher reward than pagan philosophers like Aristotle (and, indeed, most secular modern philosophers) ever attributed to the virtuous life. Maybe one could argue that Platonists attributed a reward that was somewhat closer but, first, Dante is firmly an Aristotelian, and second, even that was arguably a much more cautious and limited attribution than Christianity insists can be attributed to the Beatific Vision. In other words, the Problem of Hell, at least when we are considering Dante, is really that Christianity has a mind-blowingly audacious conception of heavenly reward.

The Idolatry of Artefacts

 What is learned by trial and error must begin by being crude, whatever the character of the beginner. The very same pot which would prove its maker a genius if it were the first pot ever made in the world, would prove its maker a dunce if it came after milleniums of pot-making. The whole modern estimate of primitive man is based upon the idolatry of artefacts which is a great corporate sin of our own civilisation.

 C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, Collier (New York: 1962) p. 74. In other words, the things we make are at least as much a product of history up to us as they are a product of our intelligence or moral character; that 'primitive man' had no reliable anesthetics is not a sign that they were less compassionate, and that they had no reliable medicine is not a sign that they lacked the cognitive skills required for having reliable medicine. Our brilliance is not measured by smartphones, our rationality is not measured by wifi, and our virtue is not measured by the internet; we may, for all we can tell, be massively overtopped in all three by someone who has nothing more than basic language and fire.

****

I happened to notice that I published the above ten years ago; if anything, I think the "great corporate sin of our own civilisation" has worsened even in the past decade.

The Soul's Unrest and Death's Dark Mysteries

 Solomon
by Frederick George Scott

A double line of columns, white as snow,
And vaulted with mosaics rich in flowers,
Makes square this cypress grove where fountain showers
From golden basins cool the grass below;
While from that archway strains of music flow,
And laughings of fair girls beguile the hours.
But brooding, like one held by evil powers,
The great King heeds not, pacing sad and slow. 

His heart hath drained earth’s pleasures to the lees,
Hath quivered with life’s finest ecstasies;
Yet now some power reveals as in a glass
The soul’s unrest and death’s dark mysteries,
And down the courts the scared slaves watch him pass,
Reiterating, “Omnia Vanitas!”

Fortnightly Book, January 12

 The next fortnightly book is Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. Published in 1961, as an expansion on a 1953 novella, Three Hearts and Three Lions is a pastiche fantasy, i.e., a fantasy novel that throws together a bit of everything -- parallel universes, knights, elves, dwarves, swan maidens, cannibal hillmen, the Wild Hunt, and so forth. It has, however, been immensely influential on the fantasy in general, being a significant influence on movie fantasy, popular fantasy works, and early role-playing fantasy games.

In connection with this, it is worth reading Anderson's famous essay on fantasy writing, "On Thud and Blunder".

Heinrich von dem Turlin, The Crown

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

A wise man once said that speech without wisdom is worthless and wisdom unrevealed is also of little value, that he who thinks of something and keeps it to himself accomplishes no more than a fool does. What good is his knowledge if he says nothing and wins no one's favor? Hidden treasure and hidden learning are useless, but speech with understanding is worthwhile. It often happens that discourse lacks meaning and therefore gains nothing. Still, the warrior who is accustomed to drawing his sword and then running away before striking a blow seldom wins a battle. The longer he runs, the farther he is from victory, and the jewel is trodden unwittingly into the mud; just as the man who washes unbaked bricks only gets them dirtier. Whoever is going to fight and flee must still know how to protect himself well, for that is the way of the world. These words apply to me, for sad to say, I cannot be called on eof the most gifted, even though I would swear I am not among the fools. Misfortune, leave me free of rustic crudeness! (p. 3)

Summary: The Crown beings with a discussion of the life of King Arthur; this King Arthur lost his father, Uterpandragon, at the age of six and received the crown directly from him. He grew up very quickly and became an exemplary knight. One year, Arthur held a huge Christmas celebration with a tournament at Tintaguel in Cornwall. To this feast came a knight with a beautiful voice, but his skin was coverd with scales. He brought with him a tankard that could never be stolen from its rightful owner, because it would simply appear whenever he wished, and that had the curious feature that it would reveal any falseness of heart. This is asking for trouble, but this is what the Arthurian court lives for; they pass the tankard around and it spills wine over everyone with any deceit in them, and to the degree that they have this falseness. Many ladies and lords are greatly embarrassed, and Sir Keii, with his vicious wit, skewers them all. After it is passed around, the knight leaves it to Arthur, where it can be a test of any stranger who comes to court.

It's not entirely clear why von dem Turlin begins with this incident, although it perhaps it is to help us better gauge Sir Gawein's virtue with respect to the rest of the court -- the tankard spills on him, although much less severely than it does over most of the lords and ladies there. As the narrator says, "A little shortcoming can conceal great merit" (p. 24). This is true, we will see, of more than just Gawein. In any case, after the feasting, most of the knights ride out to a great tournament at Jaschune. This leaves Arthur alone with a few companions; the queen makes fun of Arthur warming himself by the fire, comparing him unfavorably to a knight she has heard stories of who is impervious to cold, and this hurts Arthur's feelings more than she anticipated. He and his companions ride out to find the knight and see what the story really is. They find him and there is a bit of jousting, both physical and verbal, back and forth, and they discover that he is named Gasozein de Dragoz; the knight thinks that Queen Ginover and he are soulmates, and that Arthur is feloniously keeping her against her will, and nothing will persuade him otherwise. The queen's jest gives Arthur some pause -- perhaps it is true -- but he decides to put the matter to the queen. The queen, meanwhile, is worried about Arthur out in the terrible cold, and hoping he is safe.

Meanwhile, Sir Gawein is out on adventure, which largely entails him beating down miscreants and giants and saving various people. These adventures are very much like what you would expect, but they lead to Sir Gawein into a rather unusual adventure. Amurfina, the daughter of Lord Laniure of Serre and Lady Ansgien, has taken possession of a magic bridle, the family's major heirloom, which guarantees the power of ruling Serre. This has put her into a feud with Sgoidamur, her sister, who insists that she has stolen it. The dispute gets very bad, and obviously solving it will require an appeal to the court of King Arthur. Unfortunately, both sisters have the same idea: each realizes that she stands the best chance of winning the dispute if she gets Sir Gawein on her side. Amurfina lucks out by catching Sir Gawein out on his adventures (her sister is going to Arthur's court to find him). Von dem Turlin spends an immense amount of time on the interactions between Sir Gawein and Amurfina; suffice it to say that Amurfina has cheated and spiked his food with a love potion that makes him fall in love with her, pledges to marry her, and forget entirely who he is. The chink in Amurfina's plan is that Sir Gawein is highly renowned, and he ends up being very interested in these stories of this amazing knight named Gawein, whose stories seem so familiar. The power of the potion breaks, and Sir Gawein sets out again on adventure to finish some of the giant-slaying he had been doing, although he seems to bear Amurfina no ill will, in part because he still doesn't seem to be quite clear what has happened.

Meanwhile, back at court, Queen Ginover is in for a surprise when she discovers that her honor is under suspicion because a knight named Gasozein is claiming that they are sweethearts. Arthur puts the choice to her, Arthur or Gasozein, and the queen chooses Arthur, saying that Gasozein has no claim on her. Spurned by the woman he thinks of as his true love, Gasozein departs in a fury. As you might expect, this is not the end of the tale. The queen's brother, Count Gotegrin, is furious that she would shame herself, as he sees it, and he abducts her in order to kill her. She is saved by Gasozein, who then also abducts her, although in his case it is not by force but due to the fact that the queen doesn't resist, because she thinks he is crazy and capable of anything if she doesn't humor him. Inevitably, he starts crossing lines, and the queen ends up needing to be saved again, this time by Sir Gawein. Gawein and Gasozein fight and fight, and it turns out to be an epic battle -- no one is normally a match for Gawein, but Gasozein is a competent knight who is unusually motivated. Nonetheless, Gawein eventually forces Gasozein into surrender; Gosozein swears to do no more harm and go with Gawein and Ginover to Karidol, where King Arthur's court is now residing. There Gasozein is true to his word, even offering to do his penance in the dungeons; he is pardoned, and he and Gawein become friends.

In the meantime, at the great Pentecost feast at Karidol, a maiden comes to the Arthurian court. Her name is Sgoidamur, and she tells a story about how her wicked sister stole a magic bridle that guarantees the power to rule. Sir Gawein, always tenderhearted toward a lovely woman, is moved to compassion and agrees to be her champion and retrieve the bridle for her; if he does so he can marry her. He comes to the magic castle of Gansguoter, who is Amurfina's uncle (and also, as it happens, the second husband of Igerne, Arthur's mother). Gansguoter challenges Gawein to a beheading game. Gawein cuts off his head; Gansguoter picks up his head and walks away. In the morning, Gawein bares his neck to the now-healed Gansguoter, but Gansguoter deliberately misses.  Gawein then has to fight many monsters in the hope of retrieving the bridle, which in a sense he does, because he reunites with Amurfina and return to court.

Now things are a little sticky, since Gawein is champion on both sides. In fact, he is pledged to marry both sisters. With some help from the king, Gawein negotiates a deal in which Sgoidamur marries Gasozein, who has his own kingdom, and they have a double wedding.

Thus ends Book One. Book Two is Gawein's grail quest. Much of this is what you would expect, because von dem Turlin basically steals the earlier Parzival Grail legends and gives them to Gawein; Sir Gawein is just less naive and more intelligent than Sir Parzival. Sir Gawein also has the inevitable help of the ladies, which is a great boon in any adventure and perhaps more important to a knight than intelligence. In particular, Gansguoter's sister is a goddess of some kind and she passes Sir Gawein the answers in the back of the book, so to speak, so that he avoids all of Parzival's mistakes and comes to the Grail with remarkably little difficulty. It's not a perfectly straightforward path, though; Sir Gawein sees many strange things, all of which suggest that Sir Gawein's quest is a quest through Purgatory. This is never explicitly stated, but the forward notes that the quest seems to be structured as a sort of riddle for the audience to try to figure out. Our images of Purgatory are heavily influenced by Dante; the images people associated with Purgatory in the thirteenth century are often radically different, and I suspect most people today would not solve the riddle, since the images are all weird symbolic scenes like a burning red man being whipped by screaming beautiful maidens, or a beautiful boy with arrows in his eyes, and things like that. 

The Parzival-like part of Gawein's Grail story is interwoven with another story, in which Sir Gawein goes through a number of adventures to achieve a magical victory stone, fighting a dragon and doing similar things for Lady Fortune, who has promised him, if he is successful, a ring that will guarantee the permanence of Arthur's court. The victory stone ends up being relevant to the Grail quest, but the relationship between the two stories is perhaps the weakest element of the narrative. Nonetheless, I think it plays an important role -- by the end of the book, Sir Gawein has achieved the Grail, in a muted fashion, and (apparently) released souls from Purgatory by doing so, but he has also brought honor to the court of King Arthur, which will now endure forever, thus granting the realm blessings both divine and human.

Von dem Turlin has a reputation for being verbose, and he is; I was not prepared for the sheer extent of his commitment to the principle that you should never say something in a sentence if you can say it in a paragraph. To some extent this is just medieval writing -- many great medieval works are written on the plan of 'simple story, many digressions' -- but von dem Turlin takes it very far. This does result in some very beautiful passages, and no doubt in the original gives him the opportunity to show off his poetic prowess, but in English prose translation it can get a bit wearying. The stories themselves, however, are quite interesting.

Favorite Passage:

Just before he entered the country, Gawein encountered something remarkable and beautiful, which pleased him greatly. He saw a very broad sword of fire that guarded a road leading to a strong tower in front of a charming castle the walls of which were as bright and transparent as glass. Nothing could be concealed within, because it would be seen from the outside. I don't know when it happened, but it was completely deserted. Although all this seemed most unusual to Gawein, I don't believe it was an enchanted castle, only that its history was unknown. Here it was that he left the heath. (p. 323)

Recommendation: Recommended, although, again, you have to be prepared for its style, which is deliberately wordy.

****

Heinrich von dem Turlin, The Crown, Thomas, tr., University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE: 1989).

Links of Note

 * Robin T. Bianchi, Action and Active Powers (PDF)

* Martin Butler, Essential Nature or Social Construction?, at "3 Quarks Daily"

* Emanuel Rutten, An Argument for God's Existence from Non-Bruteness (PDF)

* Bridget Ritz and Brandon Vaidyanathan, Aha = wow, at "Aeon", on the role of beauty in scientific inquiry

* Phil Corkum, Is Aristotle's Syllogistic a Logic? (PDF)

* Paola Gavin, The Cool, Refreshing History of Mint, at "Tablet"

* Elizabeth Lopatto, Stop using generative AI as a search engine, at "The Verge"

* Manuel Fasko, Mary Shepherd's 'Threefold Varieties of Intellect' and its role in improving education (PDF)

* Sam Carter & John Hawthorne, Normality (PDF)

* I'm currently reading up on "The Great Impostor", Ferdinand Demara; a few years back, the Independent had a nice summary of his surprisingly successful life of pretending to be other people: Ferdinand Waldo Demara: One of the greatest impostors the world has ever seen. 

* Mercedes Rubio, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas on the Nature of Signs (PDF)

* Charles Bolyard, Medieval Skepticism, at the SEP

* Mahesh Ananth, Aristotle and Huygens on Color and Light (PDF)

* Rosalind Chaplin, Kant's Supreme Principle of Pure Reason and the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PDF)

* George Leef, Is Higher Education Inevitably Stuck in the Past?, reviews Brian Rosenberg's, What It Is, I'm Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education.

* Stephen Travers recently had a good video at YouTube, The Understanding that Transformed My Drawing Experience and Outcomes, whose essential point I think generalizes to a wide variety of arts and skills.