Dolly Parton (1946-2026)

 Dolly Parton passed away today at the age of 80; earlier this year she was having a number of health problems. A great country music singer and an even greater songwriter, she has been one of the most important and influential people in American music in the past half century. 

Probably the most successful song written by her (although she penned so many hits, both for herself and others, that it's surprisingly difficult to decide):

"I Will Always Love You"

A song that I would say is probably her most Dolly-Parton-ish:

"Jolene"

But in some ways, I think this hit from the 1970s is still her best song:

"Coat of Many Colors"

Links of Note

 * Lorris Chevalier, When Garlic Defeated the Magnet: The Long Life of a Medieval Natural Belief, at "Medievalists.net"

* Rob Alspaugh, Deriving Ought from Fitting?, on St. Anselm's use of conveniens arguments, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* The Oughtred Society is devoted to all things slide-rule.

* Brian A. Pavlac, Nicholas Cusanus as Prince-Bishop of Brixen (1450-64): Historians and a Conflict of Church and State, at "Medievalists.net"

* J. C. Scharl, A Giant on the Shoulders of Giants, on Petrarch, at "Public Discourse"

* Franklin Tucker Eccher, A Vital Education, on the microcollege movement, at "The Point"

* Edward Feser, Abortion and partisan politics, at "Catholic World Report"

* Encyclopedia of Catholic Theology

* Simon Fitzpatrick, Animal Normativity, at the SEP

* Jacob Mchangama, Was Frederick Douglass a Free Speech Absolutist? 

* John Peck, SJ, Aquinas on God's Free Will to Create: Replies to Kretzmann and Blankenhorn (PDF)

Fortnightly Book, August 23

 When J.-K. Huysmans set out to write the result of Durtal's conversion to Catholicism and stay in the Trappist monastery at La Trappe in En Route, the result was La Cathedral, but in writing the book, it quickly became clear that there was no way to fit everything into it. So in The Cathedral, Durtal mostly just works out his doubts and confusions in Chartres. That book ended with Durtal actually committing to something, namely, setting out to visit the Benedictine monastery at Solesme. The final book in the Durtal sequence, L'Oblat, begins with him going to Solesme, and then follows him as he becomes a Benedictine oblate elsewhere, at Val-des-Saints. As with all of the Durtal sequence, there is a heavily autobiographical character to the book, as Huysmans based the book on his own experience, of about two years, at Ligugé; but Durtal, of course, is not Huysmans, and his path, however much it may loosely follow Huysmans's own, is not the same path.

There's been a bit of a Commedia structure to the Durtal sequence, starting with hell in La-bas, and moving to the definitely purgatorial En Route and La Cathedral, so one would naturally expect L'Oblat to be the Paradiso of the sequence, as it has in some ways been set up to be. And perhaps in some broad sense it is (we will see), but there is no true heaven on earth, and the situation in France was complicated. Huysmans himself had finally found a manner of life that brought together his art and his faith, but in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair, this was absolutely crushed. In 1901, the Republic passed the Waldeck-Rousseau Law of Religious Associations; Waldeck-Rousseau was a vehement anti-clericalist who had repeatedly tried to pass laws restricting the rights of religious groups, and after Dreyfus he was able to pull together the support required for it. The law, explicitly passed in order to impose the supremacy of the state over the Catholic Church, imposed all regulations for all other associations on religious associations (despite the fact that none had been written for religious associations) and began a massive closure of religious institutions -- schools, hospitals, monasteries -- for not already being in compliance with the newly imposed regulations. 

In retrospect, of course, it was one of the early signs of the more general phenomenon of the rise of twentieth-century statism and totalitarianism, but for Huysmans it was more personal, as the abbey that had been part of his daily religious devotion was forced to relocate outside of France, leaving Huysmans little choice but return to Paris, a Paris in which religious institutions had received a maiming blow. What infuriated Huysmans further was what he saw as the widespread failure of French Catholics, and even the Pope, to respond properly to the aggression; their response was (deliberately) usually rather minimal. Huysmans saw this as effectively a betrayal, and as he wrote The Oblate began to conceive it not merely as a rebuke to secular Republicans but as one to French Catholics as well. Because of this, some scholars have suggested that the book sets up for a possible future de-conversion of Durtal. Given that Huysmans himself never de-converted, this is immensely unlikely -- and yet we can be sure, just from the circumstances in which it was written, that there can be no ordinary happy ending for Durtal. The closest our world gets to heaven is prayerfully suffering and enduring for the right reasons. Huysmans knew that from experience. 

In any case, no further Durtal works were written; after The Oblate was published in 1903, Huysmans only published some works of hagiography and art criticism before his death in 1907.

Continuing Huysmans's application of the techniques of the Naturalist literary school to unusual topics, the book is also famous for having an unusually accurate depiction of turn-of-the-century Benedictine liturgy. We saw as far back as La-bas the influence of the ongoing struggle in Catholicism between different visions of liturgy, a struggle we still see today and sometimes call 'the liturgy wars', and this has been ongoing, if not quite as emphasized through the following books. (One can, however, read The Cathedral in great measure as concerned with widespread French Catholic ignorance of the underlying 'language' of the traditional liturgy.) Durtal's path to the Church, after all, was art, and one of the obstacles to his original conversion was priests (and lay Catholics, but especially priests) substituting for the traditional Catholic arts pop versions that were really just bad, kitschy imitations of the popular arts of contemporary culture. What kept him on the path was a combination of the simplicity of monastic life and the liturgy itself. The liturgy cannot but be a part of his next step in religious commitment.

I will be reading Brendan King's recent translation (2023); I've liked King's translations of the other books in the sequence.

Georgette Heyer, An Infamous Army

 Introduction

Opening Passage:

The youthful gentleman in the scarlet coat with blue facings and gold lace, who was seated in the window of Lady Worth's drawing-room, idly looking down into the street, ceased for a moment to pay any attention to the conversation that was in progress. Among the passers-by, a Bruxelloise in a black mantilla had caught his eye. She was lovely enough to be watched the whole way down the street. Besides, the conversation in the salon was very dull: just the same stuff that was being said all over Brussels. (p. 1)

Summary: All the people in Brussels have one major topic on their minds: Napoleon, who has returned from Elba and is gathering his army, with what seems to be extraordinary success. The city, already filled with English visiting the continent, begins to fill up with English, Prussian, and Dutch soldiers. Everyone is waiting for the arrival of the Duke of Wellington, and Lord and Lady Worth are awaiting the arrival of Colonel Charles Audley, Lord Worth's brother. 

While Napoleon may be the major topic of discussion, there is one other figure who keeps coming up in the talk and gossip: Lady Barbara Childe, the daughter of the Duke of Avon, known to her family and friends as 'Bab'. Strikingly beautiful, daring in fashion, scandalously flirtatious, and apparently completely heartless, Bab seems untameable. When Colonel Audley arrives, however, she finds his cool head and social competence surprisingly intriguing, and when he proposes marriage, she accepts. Nobody thinks that it will work. And, indeed, Barbara seems temperamentally incapable of leaving off her scandalous and flirtatious ways; Charles's relatively unshakeable attitude, if anything, only provokes her. The whole relationship breaks down completely. But then news comes that Napoleon is advancing from Paris. In an instant, all of Brussels is turned upside-down as the men go off to war, and the world looks very different.

There is so much going on in this book, it's difficult to summarize it in a way that does not cut out a great deal. One of the more interesting characters is the Duke of Wellington himself, whom Heyer has famously depicted with extraordinary historical accuracy. The Duke, due to his work in the Peninsular War against Napoleon's invasion of Iberia, is the one on whom everyone's hopes rest, but there is a nagging worry, because he has never gone up directly against Napoleon himself. What is more, the Allied army against Napoleon is a chaotic, thrown-together mish-mash of very different forces with radically different styles of training and fighting. Why, then, is most of the story concerned with young men and women at balls and on holiday excursions? The big problem with fighting Napoleon is the necessity for good timing, which means that you have to have a very large number of young men in the same place, waiting but ready and in good spirits for the time to be unleashed. You need things to keep them out of trouble, especially the officers. The officers are generally from the upper gentry and the nobility, and the governments have a vested interest in keeping their families as supportive of the war as possible. So they must kept busy with the sort of entertainments appropriate to respectable gentry and nobility. But perhaps more fundamentally, every military is just the marching of the society from which it is drawn; a Regency-period military will be a microcosm of a Regency society.

As to the main storyline that binds the whole together, I found Bab very annoying at the beginning, but it eventually becomes clear that she has her almost-redeeming qualities, and that much of our scandalous disregard for propriety is a sort of rebellion against expectations arising from the fact that many others, especially women, will maliciously interpret her actions, anyway. Charles is perhaps the weakest point, in that his primary narrative function is to be imperturbable; but even so, he has enough to do to stay interesting. In both cases, in any case, we have an example of one of the main themes of the novel; in the Duchess of Avon's words, "Nothing in this world is quite perfect, nor quite unbearable"  (p. 468).

Favorite Passage:

'By all means let him be shaved,' said the Duchess, frowning at him. 'He will feel very much more the thing.'

When Barbara came in with her grandfather to be met by the news that Colonel Audley was in the valet's hands, beings shaved, she exclaimed, 'Shaved! Good God, how came you to let him disturb himself for such a foolish thing?'

'My love, when a man begins to think of shaving you may take it from me that he is on the road to recovery,' said the Duchess.... (p. 469)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

*****

Georgette Heyer, An Infamous Army: A Novel of Love, War, Wellington, and Waterloo, Sourcebooks Landmark (Naperville, IL: 2007).

Music on My Mind

 

Tim Foust, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".

Things have been slow around here, due to travel, a crowded schedule, and catching up on things, but they should start picking up a bit more next week.

St. Bernard

  Today is the feast of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Doctor of the Church. From his commentary on the Song of Songs, Sermon XXXIV (pp. 411-412): 

Observe, my brethren, how humility justifies us. Humility, I say, not humiliation. How many there are who suffer humiliation without being humble! Some endure humiliation with bitterness, others with patience, others again with gladness. The first class are culpable, the second are innocent, the last are just. Although innocence may be considered a part of justice, still the perfection of justice belongs to humility. Now, he is truly humble who can say from his heart, "It is good for me that Thou hast humbled me." But he who submits to humiliation against his will cannot sincerely say this.... For it is not to the humbled but to the humble that God gives His grace. The humble man is he who converts humiliation into humility, and it is only such as can say to God, "It is good that Thou hast humbled me."

A Philosophic Profligate

 The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honour about ideas; he will not see that one must pay for an idea as for anything else. He will not see that any worthy idea, like any honest woman, can only be won on its own terms, and with its logical chain of loyalty. One idea attracts him; another idea really inspires him; a third idea flatters him; a fourth idea pays him. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other. The Sentimentalist is a philosophic profligate, who tries to capture every mental beauty without reference to its rival beauties; who will not even be off with the old love before he is on with the new. Thus if a man were to say, “I love this woman, but I may some day find my affinity in some other woman,” he would be a Sentimentalist. He would be saying, “I will eat my wedding-cake and keep it.” Or if a man should say, “I am a Republican, believing in the equality of citizens; but when the Government has given me my peerage I can do infinite good as a kind landlord and a wise legislator”; then that man would be a Sentimentalist. He would be trying to keep at the same time the classic austerity of equality and also the vulgar excitement of an aristocrat. Or if a man should say, “I am in favour of religious equality; but I must preserve the Protestant Succession,” he would be a Sentimentalist of a grosser and more improbable kind. 

 This is the essence of the Sentimentalist: that he seeks to enjoy every idea without its sequence, and every pleasure without its consequence.

[G. K. Chesterton, "The Sentimentalist", in Alarms and Discursions.]

I think it's fair to say that we live in an era where Sentimentalists in this sense sometimes reach locust-levels of infestation.

People, Poets, and Professors

 Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in this world. The first kind of people are People; they are the largest and probably the most valuable class. We owe to this class the chairs we sit down on, the clothes we wear, the houses we live in; and, indeed (when we come to think of it), we probably belong to this class ourselves. The second class may be called for convenience the Poets; they are often a nuisance to their families, but, generally speaking, a blessing to mankind. The third class is that of the Professors or Intellectuals; sometimes described as the thoughtful people; and these are a blight and a desolation both to their families and also to mankind. Of course, the classification sometimes overlaps, like all classification. Some good people are almost poets and some bad poets are almost professors. But the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research. 

[G. K. Chesterton, "The Three Kinds of Men", in Alarms and Discursions.]

Above and Below

 What disturbs the peace of unity is ambition, the vice that steals away from itself the soul which abandons itself to it, tearing it, as it were, in pieces, and dispersing it. The resplendent light of truth, who will not lose it in the mud, in the darkness of lust? Avarice and cupidity steal from us goodness, for it is the peculiar property of goodness to communicate to others the goods which it possesses. Thus, when Plato asked himself why God had created the world, he answered: "because he was good." These are the three vices: pride of life, concupiscence of the flesh, concupiscence of the eyes, which, as St. John says, are of the world and not of the Father who is unity, goodness, and truth indeed.

Let us therefore fly from the world, which is confirmed in evil; let us soar to the Father in whom are the peace that unifies, the true light, and the greatest happiness. But what will give us wings to soar? The love of the things that are above. What will take them from us? The lust for the things below, to follow which is to lose unity, truth, and goodness.

[Pico della Mirandola, On Being and One, Chapter X ]

From Him, and through Him, and for Him

 All things that are beneath God have an efficient, an exemplary, and a final cause. For from Him, and through Him, and for Him, are all things. If then we consider things as constituted by the efficient causality of God, we call them beings (entia), since it is because of this efficiency that they participate in being (esse). If we consider them as conforming to and according with the Divine exemplars which we call Ideas, and according to which God has created them, namely, being, unity, truth, goodness, something, thing -- the two last due to the disciples of Avicenna --, we call them true. The true picture of Hercules is, for example, said to be that which conforms to the true Hercules himself. If, again, we consider things as tending to God as their last end, we call them good. And finally, if each thing is considered absolutely, according to itself, we call it one. Now, the order is such that each thing must first be conceived under the idea of being, since every thing, whatever it be, must be produced by an efficient agent before being anything particular in itself, lest that which it is do not depend in its totality from the efficient cause. Thus it happens that a thing which comes after God cannot be conceived without being immediately thought of as a dependent being: finite being is being by participation. To being succeeds unity. Third comes truth, since it is only when a thing exists as such that one can inquire if it corresponds to the exemplar according to which it has been formed. If it resembles that exemplar, it has only to turn towards it by its attribute of goodness, in virtue of a sort of affinity or relationship.

[Pico della Mirandola, On Being and One, Chapter VIII.]

Dashed Off XXIV

 There is nothing wrong, as such, with having an opinion because it is convenient; the vast majority of our opinions are had because they are convenient. We get problems when we treat such opinions as more than opinions.

the bodily kinship of animal to animal (including human to nonhuman animal and human to human) as allowing a communication; given the generic commonality, we do something to make a specific commonality

We apprehend things precisely as apt for classifying.

Attention is inherently reduplicative.

the as-structure of an experiment

Functions are ends (teloi) of things as parts of interactive systems.

We are more capable of fully incorporating other animals into our life-system than other animals are capable of fully incoprorating us into theirs. This is precisely what it is for us to be superior to, and more noble than, other animals.

Following the law arises from our occupying 'the justice' for that part of society that is our life.

use and possession within the peace

Bureaucracies are dilatant, hardening against sudden change.

For a wide range of technologies, optimal use of the technology requires skill to do the thing without the technology. People who are capable of mental mathematics are better calculator users than those who are not, etc.

Preferences have no consistent inertia.

Many forms of moral anti-realism would apply in dreaming life as in waking, in fiction as in reality.

What is rightfully yours is yours up to the heights of heaven and down to the depths of hell.

A poem is not just about something but of and for it, as well.

We never really stop being willful children; we just become much more selective about it.

The 'greatest happiness' is indefinitely expandable.

'Bodily autonomy' requires that one be a person and also that the personhood of others be recognized.

Unreasoned change of law is always immensely dangerous to common good.

It is reasonable to hope that there will always be a reasonable hope.

Our natality begins before we are born, and continues afterward.

The Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in origin, in structure, in doctrine, in sacrament, and in end.

the poem and architectural 'surprise'

Wisdom is not something human beings reach on their own, although there are many different ways others can contribute to the pursuit.

The Apostles who most appear by name in the Gospels are Simon Peter (about 40 passages), John (about 21 passages), James (about 18 passages), Judas Iscariot (about 13 passages), Andrew (about 7 passages), Matthew (about 4 passages). The others appear no more than 3 times (i.e., in the disciples lists).

Many things that are fine when said in limited contexts as figures of speech are heretical if taken literally or outside those contexts. This is true even of things that are known to be impeccably orthodox when understood correctly.

Martyrdom reconciles all saints.

All effects are indexical signs of their causes; some (e.g., impress in wax) are iconic signs of their causes; and others (e.g., design of machine) are symbolic signs of their causes.

A theory is always a way of considering something, and no theory as such rules out other ways of considering it.

People evaluate moral systems by personifying them, thinking of a pure practitioner.

the body as standing objective correlate

The many are often right for reasons of convenience rather than substance, which leads sophists to draw the false conclusion that there are no reasons of substance for it.

Every partisan political position, when not bound by prudence, leads to a counterfeit justice.

Every culture in every age is inured to unwise things.

Both progressivism and conservatism have a tendency to argue by proxies.

Realpolitik has always been a form of liberalism, the kind that chooses to emphasize that in liberalism which is most easily linked to effectual power.

Much of our practical moral reasoning has to be such as to be something that can be learned by children.

Most moral anti-realists are metaethical realists.

Defining probability spaces first requires being able to reason with undefined probability systems.

harmonies of higher-order attitudes (attitudes toward attitudes)

All human jurisdiction arises from a legitimate deputation by mission.

The light of rational sun is reflected in imaginative moon.

We learn what is by being guided by what ought to be.

Stress in English is the relatively greater working of the mouth.

Every profession has its mysteries, the things with which one must simply become familiar.

Events may be linked narratively or episodically. This is relevant to discussions of 'event causation'.

Lawyers and judges tend to make the mistake of thinking that the rule of law is rule by lawyers.

By the Incarnation and the founding of the Church, God maximizes His extrinsic glory by forming glorifiers who are divine and divinized, God giving extrinsic as well as intrinsic glory to God.

means-making causation

Every right creates an etiquette around itself.

potential, disposition, function, intention

The key question of philosophical cosmology: What is the actual necessity that makes the universe possible?

Every meaningful journey outside is also a journey inside.

the haiku-esque

the jural ubiquity of the crown

advice and assistance as latent functions of friendship

jural : occupation :: sacral : consecration

Sometimes by meaning we mean availability for use for communication as such, sometimes the actual use, sometimes the valuation of the use.

Laws of nature can only be a version of one of the following:
(1) immaterial agents or prior ideas of immaterial agents
(2) universals or relations between universals
(3) ends of action
(4) positive summaries of actual behavior.

Both individual right and social right are imitations of God.

"...a *single* subject lives at the same time in several acts of different content." Edith Stein

generic epistemic box : memory :: generic deontic box : anticipation

To apply the laws of nature to a scenario, we must also take into account the structure and organization of the scenario, which is entirely distinct from the laws of nature themselves. (It is false that we only need initial conditions unless we are including structure, which is often not the case.)

enjoying another's enjoying of a thing vs. enjoying a thing in another's enjoyment of it

As time goes on, differences in language inevitably create differences in spiritual practice.

the death of Moses as a type of the baptism of desire

How strange to have a Christianity only as wide as one's own mind working alone; how strange that people are so often tempted toward this.

scientific statements used purely expressively in social discourse

Friendships seed networks of advice and assistance.

priesthood
(1) as natural office
(2) as spiritiual fraternity
(3) as convenantal ordered ordering
(4) as sacramental participation

Love begins with not trying arbitrarily to select whom we love.

How loose and impressionistic a metaphor is depends on the metaphor.

Human beings experience being forced or manipulated to do good as a kind of humiliation.

"Every act of nilling presupposes some act of willing." Scotus

The more virtuous, the more free.

We train our empathy by stretching it and by precisifying it.

the final causality account of laws of nature

In making rules for a game, we make a right and wrong and in so doing also make something to count as cheating.

We could equally call Langauge 'Narrativity' or 'Story'.

contrition as baptism of tears

fine-tuning as sign of contingency vs fine-tuning as sign of teleology

counterfactuals of power vs counterfactuals of attribution

All of human knowledge is compatible with ignorance about many closely associated things.

No institution, however well designed or built, can survive perpetual vice.

If there is no human teleology, there is no human fulfillment.

You prove that there are proofs by proving things; likewise, you establish that things can be reliable by successful inductions.

The nation-state is a mish-mash of familial, feudal, civil, and ecclesial powers, which is why it is so congenial to dictatorship.

Virtues integrate with each other in such a way as to suggest even further unities of virtue, and the limit of this ever-increasing unity of virtue is divine, which is why ever-more integral character seems ever more divine.

While spiritual sense is not the source of demonstration, interpretation of the literal sense that is not confirmed by the spiritual sense is at least incomplete.

We recognize the actual by contrast to what is not but could be.

A running problem with how analytic philosophy is often taught is that it leads people massively to underestimate the amount of work required to build proper regimented-premise arguments, with the result of a lot of unnecessary sloppiness right at the beginning.

The truly vulnerable can only ultimately be protected by their neighbors, i.e., the people actually associated with them in an ongoing way.

The capacity to have moral stances is a stance-independent moral property.

An outcome is good insofar as it can be a good means to a good end.

Global moral anti-realism requires anti-realism about friendship.

"The will is free, so that freedom is both the substance of right and its goal, while the system of right is the realm of freedom made actual, the world of mind brought forth out of itself like a second nature." Hegel

Liberalism has tended to confuse inchoate initial freedom and consummate or perfected freedom.

producing signs by ostension: example, sample, replica, charade
producing signs by stylization
producing signs by stipulation

Everything Eco attributes to convention seems to presuppose signs and to be done by means of signs.

It is within friendship that we learn the attitudes that are moral.

We are in the image of God not just individually but also socially.

In storytelling, people often confuse the main character of the story and the object that the story is about, which can be a character. These functions can be united (but it is difficult); they are not the same.

The consistent actions of the good are inherently exemplary; regular solutions by virutous people create models that we copy; regular methods of prudence establish precedent; etc.

One of the signs of a bad political system is that it doesn't benefit its true believers, but uses them to benefit its cynical opportunists.

The power to hold multiple points of view with regard to the same thing -- this is a stick and a staff and a weapon -- is one of humanity's major survival powers.

The great things of human life never have only one value.

We should always use means consistent with necessary ends.

the natural fit of attitude and facts
-- Some situations easily give rise to some attitudes and make it difficult for other attitudes to be maintained.
-- Some attitudes are overreactions to events and some are underreactions.

It is easier to be sad when the skies are gray.

We are never reasoning without oughts.

The Sun-Burnt Hours

 Sonnet to the Month of August
by Charles Leftley 

August, I welcome thee and all thy hours,
The sun-burnt hours, that dance about thy car,
Thy genial breezes, and refreshing showers,
Thy morning pageantry, and evening star.
Bright are thy smiles, and blithe thy votaries are,
For thou dost bring them harvests, fruits, and flowers,
Enlivening gifts, and more enlivening far,
The laughing vine to glad their clustering bowers.
Yet, August, though these various gifts be dear,
'Tis not for these I time my thankful strain;
No; but for Phyllis! (fye, why drops this tear?)
Whom thou hast sent o'er my fond heart to reign;
Oh! may she live to pleasure many a year,
Although she live to give her minstrel pain.

In Him and Through Him

 Man is likewise, and this adds infinitely to his dignity, this sets him in his perfect light, man is the image of God. He is descended from him, is his offspring, and bears the visible traces of his derivation from heaven, and his communion with the Supreme Existence. His understanding is a ray of divine intelligence; his power an efflux from that of the deity; his activity something similar to that of God; his capacity of becoming constantly more perfect, is a capacity of approaching nearer to the divine nature; his immortality is a similitude of the interminable duration of the Sovereign Being, and the means of an everlasting communion with him. As often as he thinks of truth; as often as he is inclined to goodness, and brings it to effect; as often as he perceives, admires, and promotes order and harmony; as often as he spreads love, and joy, and happiness around him; so often does he think, and will, and perform, and feel, and act in a godlike manner; so often does he pursue the work of his creator and father; so often does he promote the designs of the Sovereign Being; so often does he obtain a taste of pure divine felicity; and the more he does so, the oftener he acts in this manner, the greater is his similitude with God, the brighter does the image of God shine in him, the less are we able to mistake his high descent, and to overlook the dignity of his nature. It is then that God visibly acts, as it were in him and through him ; by him he gives testimony of the truth; he instructs and reveals himself to mankind by him; by him he maintains the cause of virtue; by him he speaks comfort to the afflicted; by him he pours balm into the wounded heart; by him affords help and support to the wretched, distributes bread to the hungry, and gives strength to the weak; his world is improved by him; and through him he spreads life and joy more diffusively around. And to be such an instrument in the hand of God; to have such a similitude with him, the most perfect, the most glorious being; to approach so near to the divinity, and, in a manner, to stand in his place upon the earth; must not this confer a great, or rather the greatest dignity on man?

[Georg Joachim Zollikofer, Sermons on the Dignity of Man and the Value of the Objects Principally Relating to Human Happiness, William Tooke, tr., Thomas & Sturtevant (1807), Sermon I (p. 10). Zollikofer (1730-1788) was a Swiss-German Reformed theologian whose sermons were highly influential on Enlightenment theology and philosophy, and thus on the common moral notion of human dignity today.]

Noble Image

 Canova and anyone who delighted in scratching and drilling holes in his most accomplished statues would not both be called sculptors; Raphael and a desecrator of his painting would not both be called artists. It would never occur to anyone that such a contorted use of words could be justified by claiming that both Canova and the person who destroyed his statues, or Raphael and his assailant used the same implements. 

 What is the system of truth but a kind of majestic statue or noble image of God himself, of much greater worth than anything produced by human hands. It is, after all, impressed upon immortal souls by the living image of eternal wisdom.

[Antonio Rosmini, About the Author's Studies, Murphy, tr., Rosmini House (Durham: 2004) p. 94.]

Fortnightly Book, August 9

 I did a Georgette Heyer novel about a decade ago, A Civil Contract, usually considered her most Austen-ish work; I have since wanted at some point to do her novel, An Infamous Army, which was one of her own favorites and which is sometimes regarded as the most historically accurate historical romance of all time. This seems as good a time as any. The book was published in 1937. It depicts British aristocracy vacationing in Brussels in 1815, around the time of Napoleon's return to power, and famously has an extremely well-researched depiction of the Battle of Waterloo that year. Her working title for it was Forgive, Brave Dead, a line from a poem by Sir Walter Scott, but the title on which she eventually decided, An Infamous Army, comes from a comment by the Duke of Wellington about the British troops under his command. The novel did OK, but was considerably less popular than many of her other historical romances, but time has been kind to it, particularly as we live in an era that is much more favorable to works with closely researched world-building of all kinds than the first half of the twentieth century was.

The Song of the Cid

 Introduction

Opening Passage:  We are actually missing the original beginning of the work. The beginning we have is as follows (providing both the Castilian and the English for comparison):

De los sos ojos tan fuertemientre llorando,
tornava la cabeça e estávolos catando;
vio puertas abiertas e uços sin cañados,
alcándaras vazías sin pielles e sin mantos
e sin falcones e sin adtores mudados.
Sospiró Mio Cid ca mucho avié grandes cuidados;
fabló Mio Cid bien e tan mesurado;
"¡Grado a ti, Señor, Padre que estás en alto!
Esto me an buelto mios enemigos malos."

***

Tears were flowing from his eyes, then flowing faster
As he turned and looked back, just standing,
He saw the doors, swung open, padlocks gone,
Wall pegs empty,  no furs, no gowns
or cloaks, no falcons or molting hawks.
My Cid sighed, his burdens weighing him down.
My Cid spoke, in measured, well-controlled tones:
"I thank you, my Father, my Lord on high!
This is the vulture trap my evil enemies sent me." (pp. 2-3)

Summary: El Cid Campeador has fallen out of favor with the king (accused of embezzlement and disloyalty) and has been exiled from Castile. He and his men have to leave in haste, and there is immediately a problem of what to do about funds, particularly since it is now illegal for anyone directly to aid him. With the help of one of his right-hand men, Martín Antolínez, he hatches a plan; lots of people think he has embezzled taxes, so he uses chests purportedly filled with these taxes as collateral on a loan from Jewish moneylenders, on the pretext that they have a need liquid cash rather than gold treasure. In reality the chests are filled with sand, and by some quick-talking El Cid and his men come away with six hundred golden marks. As he leaves the territory, El Cid has a dream in which the Archangel Gabriel tells him that all will be well.

Out of the kingdom, El Cid needs another means of leverage, and in this case it is his military prowess. They seize a town in the territory of Toledo, but since the area has ties to and is under the protection of King Alfonso, they sell back the town to the Moors who own it and move on.  Eventually, El Cid and his men seize the key strategic town of Alcocer; this alarms the realm of Valencia, which lays seige to the town, but by a surprise attack, El Cid wins a decisive victory. However, he realizes that the geopolitical situation is a more complicated than he had hoped, so he again sells back the town to the Moors. At this point he is incredibly wealthy from all of his victories and from selling towns back to the people from whom he took them, so he sends a gift to King Alfonso in hopes that it starts paving the path for his return. 

So things go, but the key turning point comes when El Cid begins conquering the territory of Valencia, a grueling process lasting several years and resulting finally in the conquest of Valenica itself. This gives El Cid a stable enough position that he is able to reunite with his wife and daughters. The Kingdom of Morocco assaults Valencia with an impressive army, but despite being outnumbered, El Cid again outmaneuvers his enemy.

King Alfonso decides to heal the breach, and does so by pressing El Cid to give his daughters, Elvira and Sol, to the sons of the dauphins of Carrión. El Cid is not particularly thrilled at the marriages, but practically he doesn't have many other options, so he agrees to them. Everything seems good for a while. Cracks begin to develop, however, when a lion escapes its cage. El Cid handles himself well, and in fact simply leads the lion back to its cage, but not before his sons-in-law show themselves to be made of less courageous material, a cowardice that increasingly becomes obvious. The dauphins leave Valencia, claiming they wish to show their wives their own lands, but along the way they mistreat them and abandon them to die. Elvira and Sol luck out when a cousin comes across them. As King Alfonso had pressed the marriages on El Cid, this forces his hand, and he has to hold a formal court in Toledoto determine what should be done. This inevitably ends badly for the dauphins, but as it happens princes from Navarre and Aragon had come to the court proposing marriage, which means that both Elvira and Sol end up with far superior husbands, in both character and influence. And with this we more or less end, with El Cid effectively at the summit of what could possibly be achieved by a knight.

El cantar de mio Cid is interesting in that it is an epic that regards warfare as an entirely secondary matter. Obviously, since one of El Cid's advantages is his extraordinary military prowess, it comes up at regular intervals, but the author has no interest in battles and wars as such, and at several points simply ignores very famous military conflicts of which he seems, from other things, to be clearly aware. What really interests the author is not El Cid's military prowess but his sociopolitical prowess, and the successes at which he most marvels are not battles won against incredible odds (although there are several of those) but the fact that El Cid is basically thrown out of society, with no resources except the loyalty of his men, and not only survives but thrives. Indeed, if anything, his exile ultimately makes El Cid massively more powerful, and the poem ends with El Cid more or less at the top of the social world. Stripped of everything, El Cid almost immediately manages (if only by fraud) to get all that he needs for immediate expenses and then (if only by conquest) to achieve a massive quantity of wealth and rulership of a relatively powerful city. All of the military achievements are as nothing compared to the man having endured one of the worst punishments in his society and come out on top despite, and even because of it. That is the marvel that the author clearly finds remarkable.

Favorite Passage:

Muño Gustioz stood up:
"Shut up, traitor, evil and dangerous!
You eat before you've said a single prayer,
Your greeting kiss stinks like your breath.
You don't speak truth to friends or lords;
You lie to everyone, and mostly to God.
I have no interest in friendship with you:
I'll make you admit you are what I say you are!"
King Alfonso declared: "This matter is closed.
We must proceed to combat, in the name of God!" (p. 227)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended, although I did not always like Burton Raffel's translations.

****

The Song of the Cid, Burton Raffel, tr., Penguin (New York: 2009).

Dashed Off XXIII

If you demand that the Church stay out of politics, the Devil will expand what people count as political until the Church suffocates. If you demand that politics be separate from anything religious, the Devil will expand what counts as religious until politics is separate from anything good.

Many problems in society arise from the corrupt pursuit of justice.

You learn to love everyone only by loving someone well.

Malebranche (LO 67-68) and the walking man argument

Appearances by their nature have causes of appearing.

Error theories generally require an easy-transition-of-mind account of the error. But this requires that the easy transition of mind not itself be an effect of a natural link. The latter is usually the weakness of error theories about large domains.

Half of thinking is making enough quiet space for it.

The distinguishing mark of the state is cooperation ordered by law for the good of civil society.

Pretending-to-be does not imply not being, but tends to be found with not being. The connection between pretending to be and not being is not contingent even though it is not logical implication. Nor is it purely probabilistic, but instead something more like necessary for the probable case.

"In general as desire burns higher, anger sinks, and as anger burns higher, desire sinks." Aquinas

Objects' being separable does not imply that they are separate.

Even if we assume that there is no free will, all the phenomena associated with free will show that human action incorporates information about counterfactuals.

If we build a moral robot, its morality would give it greater power to do evil, not less.

Beliefs, like persons, have authority based in power, wisdom, and goodness, either in themselves or in context.

Taste arises not from the singular experience but from the ensemble of experiences.

Never trust someone who always talks about rights but never about the responsibilities that make them rights.

Independence is always a causal notion.

The three essential questions for causal reasoning from statistical data:
(1) Can we ignore an observation safely?
(2) Can we make an intervention an observation?
(3) Can we set aside an intervention safely?

the do-calculus as a representation of 'suppose that'

The most important apologetics, besides honest personal discussion and public preaching, is large-scale defense-in-depth.

To be good at analogical reasoning requires a full treasurehouse of memory.

When something becomes the standard de jure, people develop simpler proxies for it, which become the standard de facto.

We are often pained by things that are not bad but only could go bad.

It is a natural and common thing to pray not only for the future but for the past.

We take God not to be limited in power and presence by location; by analogy, God is not limited in power and presence by time.
-- this can be strengthened by recognizing that limitation in time requires some limitation in location and vice versa.

There is no action at a distance only in that 'distance' is a causal notion.

Every incipit and desinit is incomplete actuality and therefore participates actuality itself.

(1) Every possibility must participate possibility itself.
(2) Possibility itself must be actuality itself.
(3) Therefore any possibility implies actuality itself.

As any literal statement may also be given figurative or expressive meaning, there is always the possibility of taking any literal statement to be only figurative or expressive; thus the pervasiveness of the realist/anti-realist divide, since figurative statements may be taken realistically (as corresponding to something real) or anti-realistically.

Pursuing rights by litigation always runs the risk of setting precedent by failure.

public opinion as part of checks and balances

In politics, there is oten great power in the mere real possibility of acting. The people get a significant power from the fact that they actually can begin to rumble and flood. This is one reason why making actions of the state open to public view, to the extent that this is possible, is an important means of free society, despite its inconvenience for government.

The prudent man's sense of disgust is worth more than the fool's considered judgment.

People often talk about 'vocation' when what they really mean is 'role in providence'.

interest-based, policy-based, and precedent-based forms of practical reasoning

staefcraeft = grammar

Human beings are policy-making animals.

James the Just as 'font of all episcopacy' -- i.e., there is an early tradition of James being the first non-Apostolic bishop, with the episcopacy in general as modeled after him, and the episcopal succession after the succession of Symeon to James

Philosophy is a kind of theomania, in that even those philosophers arguing the craziest position are sometimes a little inspired, often hitting something more closely than might be obvious. In this it is like artistic inspiration or erotic love.

'Revealed preferences' are sometimes real preferences and sometimes defective executions.

Modernity sometimes seems to be a culture of persuading young people to make bad bets in life.

Passive connection between persons is the infrastructure for active connections.

All economic systems tend toward treating people as mere means. Law and custom and virtue are what work against this, when they are able to do so at all.

The saints evangelize; even long after their deaths, they continue to convert others.

intramodal signs (e.g., actual signifies actual) and transmodal signs (e.g., present signifies past)

permissibilities in context of obligations, obligations in merely permissible contexts

Most of the good and evil we do in the world is quickly swamped out. Only prudential planning and the stability of virtue make it go farther.

All of our experiences are experienced simultaneously in the three registers of possibility, actuality, and necessity.

A society in which people cannot improve their neighborhood is a society with little prospect.

The benefits received from experts with whom one has a cooperative relationship are generally different from any received from experts in a field generally.

Every state attempts to use professional institutions as instruments to control people.

Human beings deal with evil by putting it into stories.

Every kind of grace tends toward some kind of union.

Socratic rhetoric: showing people that they already at least partly agree with you

There is no preferred probability measurement; we handle probabilities comparatively.

Entropy is concerned with that variation that is consistent with given nonvariations.

Newton's First Law allows for a physics of lines. Newton's Second Law allows precise relationships between lines.

Scientific progress is a story of footnotes becoming central ideas.

Both socialism and capitalism work only given a background morality they cannot guarantee.

Every virtue has a negotium appropriate to it, concernign the organization of self and the world to facilitate its acts: training, routines, institutions, problem-solving.

rites & the negotium prudentiae

crusade as symbol of reform (note that they share similar kinds of failure points)

three types of participation in Mass: celebrant, ministrant, circumstant
-- circumstant participation involves forming the congregation as a congregation, both physically and spiritually; circumstant participation forms the templum

Jn 5:39 -- Scripture's role is to bear witness to Christ, through whom alone is eternal life.

By faith we impetrate justification.

We culminate our feelings by how we act on them.

History is the human imitation of eternity.

"Otium sine litteris mors." Seneca

the unity of humanity as a principle of philosophy of history

kinds of sanctity: natural, occupant, referential

Bayesian epistemology continually stumbles due to equivocations between degree of belief and belief about degree/probability.

economics as the statistics of voluntary moral obligation

The primary importance of precise prediction for scientific inquiry is less to assess accuracy than to assess completeness.

We say an institutional change is organic when (1) it is consistent with institutional ends and (2) it incorporates the lessons of its history.

Reforms fail as often as not.

People who believe in degrees of belief often have naive views of how they relate to action, resulting from the clumsy original betting idea.

subjective vs objective surprise in literature and cinema

the People as universal jury

All interpretations of quantum mechanics proceeds by relating the wave function to other things (the universe, observers, measuring devices, etc.).

The limits of physics can be read in its fundamental units.

Pace many philosophers of biology, whole organisms quite clearly have functions in populations; e.g., queens and drones in colonies, males and females in sexual populations. Likewise, they can have functions in ecosystems.

Free will should be understood in terms of different possible objects chosen rather than in terms of different possible outcomes. Because objects complete us causally, they often lead to different outcomes, but this is not the freedom.

Unless we assume the existence of volition, we cannot assess the evidential value of experiment.

Ethics cannot be outvoted.

participative vs representative roles in society

History eventually covers even atrocities in oblivion; it is divine judgment, not history, that remembers.

In learning many small things one begins to learn great things.

Contingent happenings are in physics regularly explained by the necessary truths of mathematics.

Every right creates an at least minimal right to use force to defend it, where this is not explicitly excluded.

'the justice' as a jural good of society that is held by occupation, sometimes admits of inheritance (although usually abandoment and reoccupation), etc.

Human beings can communicate imperatives nonverbally, althoug this often lacks the precision of verbal imperative. Social animals like dogs also seem to do something similar, although even less precisely, and in ways that are difficult to distinguish sometimes from mere warning or encouragement.

Human beings are never 'mere animals' even as infants.

Our early dependencies intensify our social connections.

Our biology as immersed in our culture is our first material for moral character.

a curriculum as a curation of the subject

All human life is structured by the bounds of inability.

Human beings are animals who moralize our lives as animals.

The first step toward a philosophy worth having is recognizing that philosophizing is natural to us.

While rights depend on duties, we have rights before we have duties, because others have duties to us before we are mature enough to have duties to them.

Human beings do not merely exchange things; we exchange kinds of exchanges.

We lear exchange even at the breast.

Multicultural societies work by converting tribes into teams.

The human intellect sees something of the system in a bit of the system. Given some understanding of physical interactions, we get a glimmer of the physical cosmos. Given minds and intelligibles, we get a glimmer of an intelligible world. Given some morality, we begin to feel out a realm of morality. And so forth.

Play is 'secularized' into exercise.

Loeb's incoherentism arises from treating the pluralistic, analogical moral realm as if it were uniform and univocal.

There are always less and more clumsy ways of fulfilling our duties.

Morality beneits us, but does not exist to benefit us. For one thing, what counts as benefit is downstream from morality itself in at least many cases.

In any work of art, the line between natural and artificial is difficult to draw.

The interest of a story is related to intervention (disruptition of regularity) and counterfactual reasoning (different ways things could go).

The richness of a language is its set of capacities for four things: storytelling, characterization, thematization, and statement modification.

We perceive in order to have that which pleases. (Note that this is different from saying that we perceive in order to be pleased.)

Storytelling is a byproduct of our capacity for wisdom.

Transfiguration

 Today is the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration.

And after six days Jesus took with him
Peter and James and John,
and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves;
and he was transfigured before them,
and his garments became glistening,
intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them.
And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses;
and they were talking to Jesus.
And Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is well that we are here;
let us make three booths, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
For he did not know what to say, for they were exceedingly afraid.
And a cloud overshadowed them,
and a voice came out of the cloud,
“This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”
And suddenly looking around they no longer saw any one with them
but Jesus only.
And as they were coming down the mountain,
he charged them to tell no one what they had seen,
until the Son of man should have risen from the dead.
So they kept the matter to themselves,
questioning what the rising from the dead meant

[Mark 9:2-9 RSV]

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths
when we made known to you
the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,
but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
For when he received honor and glory from God the Father
and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory,
“This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,”
we heard this voice borne from heaven,
for we were with him on the holy mountain.

[2 Peter 1:16-18 RSV]

Links of Note

 * Ed Simon, Charles Brockdon Brown Declares Independence, at "The Paris Review"

* Liel Leibovitz, Christopher Nolan's 'Odyssey': Epic for Our Times or Epic Failure, at "The Tablet"

* Theodore Nash, Apocalypse Troy: Nolan's Odyssey and the End of Civilization, at "Antigone"

* Johann Go, Just Waiting: The Ethics of Queues and Waiting Lists, at "Political Philosophy"

* Curt Jaimungal, The Standard Model Lagrangian Explained

* David S. Oderberg, In defense of panmoralism

* Steven Johnson, Notebooks and the Extended Mind, at "Adjacent Possible"

* Ehud Krinis, Judah Halevi, at the SEP

* Flame & Light, Do Narratives Require Narrators? I: The Analytic Argument

* Julio Alonzo has started a great project: Schola Thomistica, which uses LLMs to transcribe and translate scholastic texts, with contributors providing corrections that are then used for further training data to refine the translations. Use with critical thinking, but scholastic Latin is a very good language for this kind of translation, and it makes a wide number of works more accessible. (Also, a number of the translations are respectable public-domain translations, where they exist.) And more is going up all the time.

* In a similar vein, people are putting up Migne's Patrologiae Cursus Completus, using similar methods: every Greek and Latin Church Father in the complete Migne, along with an LLM-derived English translation. 

* And the beginnings of the complete works of St. Bonaventure. We live in a magical world!

Three New Poem Drafts

 Seaspray

The sea ascends on stone,
the mist and spray upraised,
in driven change, in tide,
that ceaselessly with foam
will never still nor stay;
yet still the ocean wide
beneath eternal sky
is changeless in its way,
with waves that shall abide.

Red Mansions

Bright red silk-work,
like braided rope,
such is time,
which binds us.
In blessed red pavilions,
of finest wood,
the festivals continue;
like words on paper,
or painted on silk,
they are dream and fiction,
yet also true.
Do not undo
those quiet rites of joy!
They are braided
into the classics,
the patterns unbound by time,
the chrysanthemums undying,
for fictions never truly die,
so only by means of them
do we learn what is,
the unreal real in the real unreal.
We burn like grass,
or fade like dusk,
and we are but a dream.
Where then do we find truth,
save in such dreams?
Then treasure it,
like most precious jade.

Early Morning Waking

In some deep Polarian age, jellyfish all around me,
matter gushing forward, I lay dreaming,
drowsing in a tropical arctic, the warm circumpolar waters,
where sun and moon kiss in dreaming tidal pools.
I sensed, I felt, I did not understand;
lidless, I did not see, but the world's trumpets were sounding.
I walked on four soft limbs, and called,
and everywhere there were ripples. All was sea
until the sun fled. Then upward I launched in a flowering of air
as all the world went crashing; in sylphine splendor I flew,
playing with dragons. There was no winter there,
but in warm light I was swinging, vibration on the breeze,
a wisdom in the air, a bell sounding in the sea.
Then all became a misty fire and the moon fled;
no longer was I lunatic, and polar seas turned icy,
and mind turned to magic, and I was I, and I myself.
The whispers wandered in my head, and I seized myself,
and took myself from myself, dividing myself into two.
Then I knew both good and evil, and I wandered,
not longer bound by memory, seeing the world and myself.
The dreamworld fell away. The morning stars were singing,
and the alphabet was born, and the cycles numbered.
The whole world turned; the fire-lands sank beneath.
Then truths were written in stones, dancing stones,
that circled the points of power. Atlantis gleamed in the wave,
a city of towers gilded, a city of pontifexes,
where ships were flying like gulls. Spirit filled the wind
and rebelled; the island drowned in the ocean,
and I, a Neanderthal, escaped, looking up at the stars.

A Golden Glory Fills the Earth

 August's Here
by Charles Frederick Forshaw 

Ripeness abounds, for August's here,
To fill us with a joy sincere:
The field, the glen, the wood, the shade,
The barren moors, the blossomed glade,
All, all foretell that she is near.

A golden glory fills the earth,
And hails with joy blest August's birth;
Luxurious gladness fills the land,
For, touched by August's mellow hand,
It basks no more in careworn dearth.

Each leaf seems by her supreme will
Matured, and is more beauteous still;
The insect world awakes to find
That she to them is also kind, 
And now they Nature's ways fulfil.

The hills, too, seem no longer drear,
For lo! the purple lings appear;
They bloom on all sides fresh and free,
Full of an inborn modesty,
And telling plainly -- August's here.

Truth and Certainty and the Human Mind

 If truth and certainty had been committed to the care of human free will, they would have languished and in all probability soon been annihilated by human perversity. For this reason we saw that the first truths were entrusted by creating Providence to human nature, not to an individual human being. Human nature, essentially intelligent, sees the first truths essentially. Human beings cannot but see them, nor can they annihilate them; just as they have no power to create anything, they have no power to destroy anything that has received existence from God....

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham:1991), p. 138, sect. 1245.]

Dashed Off XXII

 All accounts of sensation are in terms of action, passion, and object; they just differ on how these interrelate.

The pleasures we take in things are heavily modulated by both habit and context.

What God accounts as being, is.

All arguing has a measure of performance and self-presentation to it.

myths as mnemonics for rites

Experimentation has an internal morality that involves carefulness, circumspection, honesty, etc.

Statements in scientific articles express 'objective voice', careulness, reasonableness, and pro-attitudes to the results as not merely achieved but properly and honestly achieved.

The metonymic tendency of the Jewish theology of names proliferates the quasi-divine non-divine; this is especially clear in Second Temple Judaism, which does not yet have the carefully balanced constraints and checks of Rabbinical Judaism.

mind-dependent
(1) as effect: e.g., work of art or craft
(2) as expression: e.g., intellectual activity and habits
(3) as object: beings of reason

fictions may be classified
(a) as to subject to which they are applied: fictionalzing vs nonfictionalizing
(b) as to the beings on which they are modeled: persons, trees, events, etc.,
(c) as to the fiction as fiction?  (as to the act of fiction?)

'Now' is not a part of time but a construct upon it.

what is meant to be vs what has meaning in being

Many people, when they say 'plot hole', only mean 'implausibility'; these are not the same thing.

controlled improbabilties as a primary technique in writing fantasy

While chimpanzees drumming have rhythm, they notable do not metricize their rhythm.

Every argument is surrounded by a cloud of related and semi-related positions, hypotheses, arguments, experiential evidences, pragmatic considerations, rhetorical formulations, and poetic images.

physical size as poison resistance

hard fact / soft fact distinctions for locations, possibilities, and permissibilities as well as times

People often reason themselves into absurd positions by treating loose metaphors as if they were strict reductions.

"The information coming from more people to more people has greater built-in redundancy than if it were to flow in one channel of communication." Jan Vansina

Consumption is never the sole end of production.

Everyone has preferences with regard to particular kinds of interactions, particular models of the world, and particular sources of authority, and large scale miscommunications genreally arise when any of these are significantly diferent, as people push toward specific kinds of associations, of diagnoses, of solutions, because of them.

Rights of free speech exist to subserve the virtue of eleutheria.

People are rarely arguing the argument right in front of them.

An opinion is something not yet concluded.

It is difficult to follow the evidence rather than what one assumes the evidence to be.

The classical theory of meter for English is somewhat confused because it conflates length and stress of syllable without recognizing this properly.

Poetic meter is consistent relative placement of sustainable syllables; footing is an artificial device for identifying the consistency, both in kind and in degree.

In spoken poetry you can have 'headless iambs', etc., by breath-rest taking the place of spoken syllable.

Genesis 1:6-8 as a symbol of mercy (waters above the firmament) and justice (waters below the firmament)

Mill's use of the Brutus example may be influenced by Smith's use of the same in TMS.

morality transfigured to sacramentality
community -> baptism
responsibility -> confirmation
social order -> ordination
repentance -> reconciliation
marriage -> matrimony
hope -> unction
devotion -> eucharist
(notably, marriage changes the least and devotion the most)

The story of the modern Catholic Church has been one of actively refusing to draw on its actual resources and consequently failing to press any of its advantages.

statistics as the recovery of structure from uncertainty

"One's own body is in the world just as the heart is in the organism." Merleau-Ponty

(associated experiences + experiences of interventions -> ensembles of possible experiences) + ensembles of measurements -> theorization

Even when one disagrees with it, the conscience of others must be given some respect.

civic discretion (i.e., of citizens) // prosecutorial and executive discretion

computers and corporations as 'technical persons' (i.e., skillful interaction requires treating in some respects as if person) -- this would include the 'lectoral person' of books

corpses as residual moral persons

church-buildings as signs of the incarnate/embodied nature of the Church as deriving from and appropriate to the Incarnate Word

Human beings are the animals who do not belong. All of human greatness arises from what we do about our nonbelonging, whether making peace with it, or building temporary belonging, or guesting to find the belonging we are missing. We build societies because we do not belong, so every day we get up and make a kind of belonging. Art, science, religion are formed as we seek in varoius ways a belonging we know we do not yet have. And in the end all of us face death, the ultimate expression of our nonbelonging, and have to find our peace with it.

All arguments arise out of banal observations.

Scientific realism is a metaphysical position and therefore implies metaphysical realism.

Checks and balances in government require that there are operative rational principles and an authority higher than the checking and balancing departments.

People are more comfortable evaluating personal interactions than arguments as such, so naturally tend to fall back on such evaluations.

judgments of taste as dealing with quality as quasi-relation

Phenomenology follows Descartes in treating necessity as inevitable presumption.

When responding to an argument, the stage of response matters -- e.g., an immediate negative response based on plausibility might in a short while give way to a cautiously positive response based on 'trying things out' in mind, later to give way to outright rejection through methodical proof.

All authority is based on nature and will.

In evidential analysis we decompose things into signs.

Faced with a set of signs, or things recognized as interpretable as such, the scientist will usually focus on the relation to the object, and the artist usually on the representamen as such. But thi sis difference in emphasis, not difference through exclusion.

Christ as natural person
Christ as moral person (Head of Church, etc.)
Church as moral person (baptized community)
Church as juridical person (People of God)
Church as sacramental person (Body and Bride of Christ)

When we eat, we (so to speak) sacrifice to ourselves.

Most progress is not ours.

Plane engines do not fly; planes with engines do.

Genuine diversity is downstream of freedom.

The institution that primarily enforces the rights of children is the family; a tiny fraction of the rights of children are enforced by the state or church, due to the way children are related to each, but in such cases, it is still to be assumed that families enforce most of the rights of children, because neither state nor church can practically engage in that level of enforcement and still achieve their legitimate ends.

Varzi & Casati call holes "locationally gracious," i.e., they allow their location to be shared.

As a prophetic people, the whole Jewish community will tend to be more right in essential things than is immediately obvious; things common to Jews in general, things generally shared by the whole rabbinical tradition, will tend to be right, even if in unexpected ways.

It's somewhat misleading to talk of the 'second coming', because the first coming is still going on, as Christ, the Messiah, continues His advent through the Church until He completes it in the end days.

The Goldenword

 Today is the feast of St. Peter Chrysologus, Doctor of the Church.

We have heard, my brothers, how high God's graciousness have brought us, and how high the celestial paternity has exalted us. Let us believe that we are sons of God, let us prove equal to our lineage, let us live for heaven, let us represent our Father by our resemblance so that we do not destroy with our vices what we have attained through grace. 

 Bring to the Lord, you sons of God. Bring. You see that our heavenly Father declares his love by his generosity, he manifests his affection by what he has given and his charity by his gifts. And truly, brothers, who does not compliantly obey the Author of his life, whoever does not unite with him through worship, whoever does not honor him with gifts does not know that he is his son, is heartless, denies his nature, and is ungrateful to his Father. 

[Peter Chrysologus, Selected Sermons, Volume 2, William Palardy, tr. Catholic University of America (Washington, DC: 2004),  Sermon 10, section 2,]

Knowing Something Unknown

 Let us imagine something that we have never known either through perception, or by likeness, analogy of nature, or relationship with any other thing we have perceived. What we are imagining is altogether unknown to us. But its existence is then revealed to us. We begin to know something about it, without however knowing anything of its essence. In a word, we know that something unknown to us exists.

What else could we know about this thing without at the same time knowing its essence? We could know all the infinite relationships it can have with things known to us.

When we speak of God, we are talking of one who has relationships with real things, with feelings, and with ideas, the three activities we have previously distinguished. 

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), pp. 135-136, sect. 1239. 'Feelings' is Cleary & Watson's translation for what would usually be translated as 'sensations', presumably because it includes internal as well as external sensations.]

Society of Persons

 Not only did God create man in his image and likeness, but also he modeled human society after the society of the Persons in the most holy Trinity. For this reason, just as in that adorable society, the Father loves his Son as himself, and loves himself in his Son, and the same is true for the love of the Son toward the Father and toward the Holy Spirit, and for the love of the Holy Spirit toward the Father and the Son, he also wants man to love his neighbor as himself. 

This is why he gave this second commandment: You will love your neighbor as yourself, which Jesus Christ said was like the first (Mt 22:39), because it also conforms to the divine and eternal life of the Persons in the most holy Trinity. 

[Jean-Jacques Olier, Introduction to the Christian Life and Virtues, Chapter 14, in Bérulle and the French School, Thompson, ed., Glendon, tr. Paulist (New York: 1989) p. 267.]

The Witch of Endor

 I was thinking about the Witch of Endor today, which is an entire story with many layers, and many more, I think, than appear on the surface. You know the basic story: Samuel has died, and Saul still has to deal with the Philistines, but he is afraid of them, and no longer has Samuel to advise him. So, despite the fact that it is illegal, he sends his servants out to find an 'owb, which literally means a 'mumbler' but is usually translated as 'medium'. They find one in Endor, and Saul goes to her; he asks her to call up Samuel. Then, I think, the story gets particularly interesting.

(1) The woman sees the spirit of Samuel and suddenly realizes that Saul is Saul. It is probably not an accident that the medium only just now realizes that she was deceived by Saul (whom we know not to be the most cunning of men). 

(2) But when the woman describes what she sees, she does not say that she sees Samuel. What she says is, literally, "I have seen God rising from the earth." This is often translated as 'a god', but the word is just Elohim, the common name for God (or perhaps, given the fact the Hebrew sometimes uses the plural form for cases which in English would use abstract terms, for the Godhead). That's an interesting thing to say.

Saul, of course, asks here what He looks like ("What is his appearance?"), and she says, "An old man is rising and he is wrapped in a cloak." Most readers assume that she is answering his question, but note that her response could be seen as not answering it but saying what is happening now. That is, there are two ways to read it:

I have seen God rising from the earth

and

An old man is rising, wrapped in a cloak

can be read as describing either the same thing or different things, one following after the other, in the same vision. (More on this in a moment.)

(3) 'Old man wrapped in a cloak' is about as generic and unidentifying a description as one can give, but immediately Saul takes it to be Samuel. This could be a nod to the common psychic trickery of giving vague descriptions and letting the mark do the work of specifying. But it could also be a bit of a joke. That is, Saul is (if he takes the medium's remarks to apply to the same thing, as most readers do) told that God is rising from the earth as an old man wrapped in a cloak, and his first response is, "Oh my God, that's Samuel!" That perhaps conveys something about Saul's attitude toward Samuel, however rocky their relationship often was!

(4) Saul then bows down to Samuel. Did Saul see Samuel? Verse 14 says that Saul was aware that it was Samuel; many translations use 'perceived' (and this seems to be how most people read the story), but the word in Hebrew seems to be quite broad, and probably just means that he took it that she was describing Samuel. At no point are we told that he actually sees anything. The woman herself might still be speaking. In fact that would make sense. The Jewish laws forbid recourse to 'knowers and mumblers' who are associated with 'dead-seekers', so we usually translate them, plausibly, as 'spiritualists and mediums'. But to this point, we have the 'knowing' part; now we get the 'mumbling' part. 

(5) In any case, Samuel says, "Why have you shaken me by raising me?" Saul replies that he is distressed because the Philistines are fighting him and God (Elohim) has left him, and he can't get any answers from dreams or prophets.

Then Samuel says, "Why ask me, since the Lord turned away from you and became your foe because the Lord Himself spoke by me? Thus the Lord has torn your kingdom from your hand and given it to David your neighbor, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord and exact burning wrath against Amalek." Notably, Samuel, or the apparent Samuel, turns Saul's reasoning against him Saul is asking Samuel because the Lord spoke by him, but given that he already knows why the Lord is no longer favoring him.

The word for wrath, by the way, literally means 'nose', so the Hebrew literally says that Saul did not do a fiery nose against Amalek. But 'nose' is sometimes used for 'face', and the link with anger, which it sometimes has, is generally thought to be because extremely angry people breathe heavily. So with only a little liberty we could translate this as "You did not obey the voice of the Lord and breathe fire against Amalek."

(6) Then Samuel continues, "Thus the Lord will do this thing to you today, and tomorrow will deliver Israel, with you, into the hand of the Philistines, and your sons to be with me, and the Lord will deliver the army of Israel into the hands of the Philistines." 

Saul, Israel, and the army of Israel are into the hands of the Philistines, but Saul's sons will be 'with me'. This is naturally (and reasonably) taken to be a way of saying that they will die, and indeed, some of Saul's sons, namely, Jonathan, Abinadab, and Malkishua, die in battle. But could be there be contrast here? The account of their deaths in 1 Samuel 31:6 makes very, very explicit that these three sons and Saul died on the same die. But note that Samuel only says that Saul's sons will be 'with me'; he does not say that Saul will be.

Also, one of Saul's sons does not die with the others, Eshbaal lives and becomes king for two years until he is assassinated by his own generals. (Eshbaal is sometimes called 'Ishbosheth' because of the later Jewish practice of bowdlerizing names of foreign deities; thus 'Man of Baal' is transformed into 'Man of the Shameful'.) Is he just not being included here, or is he also 'with me' even if not in the same way.

I keep saying 'with me', which is what Samuel says. It's natural to read it as 'with Samuel', but Samuel's role as voice of the Lord has been very pronounced here; one could also read it as 'with the Lord'. If that's the case, the contrastive reading has another level of bite.

(7) At this point, Saul falls, "in his full height", to the earth, extremely afraid. Again, the words seem carefully chosen. The woman had begun with, "I see God rising from the earth," and then we end with Saul falling (one could even interpret it as being cast down) to the earth. This certainly is symbolic -- Saul, in the fullness of his greatness, will soon be thrown down to the earth -- but it might also be meshing with the contrastive reading: God and Samuel ascend, and Saul's sons will be with them, but Saul descends. He sought Samuel to alleviate his fear about the Philistines, but the result is that he is now terribly afraid.

(8) The symbolism of Saul's fall as king continues: "There was no power in him" because he had not eaten for a day and a night, just as there will soon be no power in him because he had not fed from the words of the Lord. The woman, worried about her situation (and perhaps, to be fair, Saul's), asks him to listen to the voice of his maidservant (a big fall in itself, from the voice of the Lord to the voice of your slave). She offers him some bread to regain his strength. He refuses, but his men (the word is a different word, but could also mean 'slaves') encourages him to follow her advice, and he listens to their voice. Then he stands up from the ground, and the woman feeds him and his men.

(9) Earlier, the spirit of Samuel had called David Saul's neighbor; it could mean comrade, friend, or neighbor, and is the same word used in Leviticus when it says that the people of Israel should love their neighbor. Saul, of course, then goes on very much not to love his neighbor, since David has to flee for his life.

(10) The story is rather brilliantly written in that everything in it can be read in three different ways:

(a) The woman is a sham and she is making this all up. Again, the story does not actually say that Saul saw anything. Everything the woman does is consistent with the sort of medium-trickery that is even still practiced today. No secrets come out; everything we are told about the relationship between Saul and Samuel is public knowledge. But symbolically what happens in Saul being taken in, does in fact capture the low to which Saul has fallen and is falling.

(b) A spirit comes, but it is not Samuel, but merely mimics him; but in fact the spirit happens to speak the truth about Saul. (The passage calls him Samuel, but that need not be taken to mean more than that is how Saul understands it.)

(c) Samuel is really Samuel and has one last prophecy for Saul.

Interpretations consistent with each of these three can be found in both the Jewish rabbis and the Christian Church Fathers.

As for my preference, this is highly speculative but one possibility, out of many, that catches my fancy is this: The woman is perhaps a quack, and cannot really summon up a spirit, much less Samuel, but by God's providence, she has a vision of God rising from the earth. That is to say, Samuel is not there; rather, the medium is seized by God in such a way that she genuinely foresees the Harrowing of Hell. And the Samuel seen is not a spirit summoned up then and there, but a vision of Samuel at the 'leading captivity captive'. The real Samuel tells Saul that he and Israel will given into the hand of the Philistines, but "your sons are with me" (i.e., either with Samuel or with the Lord, or both, in rising to Paradise).

A very interesting story, in any case.

Iakobos

 Today is the feast of St. James the Greater, Apostle of the Lord, who according to tradition was beheaded by King Herod Agrippa I on July 25, AD 44. He was the first of the Twelve Apostles to be martyred; he is also the only Apostle whose actual martyrdom is explicitly recorded in the New Testament. According to Acts 12, Herod Agrippa was trying to curry favor with the local rulers, so he arrested first James, then Peter; James he beheaded. He wanted to make a spectacle of Peter, since it was around the time of Passover, so he put him in prison under tight guard. Peter was rescued by an angel, and eventually made it to the house of Mary the mother of John Mark, where a number of Christians were praying. When Peter came knocking, the servant-girl, named Rhoda, was so excited to hear his voice that she just left him standing there on the porch while she went to tell everyone. Because of the fate of St. James, no one believed her. I'm always struck by how careful the author is to name the people involved.

His brother was St. John the Apostle (who traditionally is the last of the Apostles to die); his father was a fisherman named Zebedee, and his mother was possibly (given Mk 15:40 and Mt 27:56) Mary Salome, who may have been a relative of the Holy Virgin. (Medieval tradition took her to be, like the Virgin Mary, the daughter of St. Anne, but given how families worked, the relationship could have been looser than that.) James, John, and Peter are consistently treated as the leaders of the Apostles; they are the Apostles admitted into Jesus' confidence at the healing of the daughter of Jairus, the Transfiguration, and the Agony in the Garden.

Dashed Off XXI

 You can always find disagreement if you search for it.

We make-believe manyt hings, and some of them we confirm to be real, and some of them we make to be real.

To be baptized is to be covenantal; to be confirmed is to be prophetic; to be ordained is to be angelicized. But there are covenant breakers, false prophets, and fallen angels.

global moral anti-realisms
(1) morality is a model, useful for practical purposes, of nonmoral things
(2) morality is an expression of integrated attitudes toward nonmoral things
(3) morality is a false interpretation of nonmoral things
(4) morality is an imaginary system not grounded in nonmoral things

intellection as active truth

literacy as a fine art

To execute law faithfully requires the authority to assess, to incentivize, and to correct.

We do not merely experience things; we often experience what we have already experienced and/or anticipated experiencing.

To care is to build a discipline of care.

Justice is not scorched earth.

People get irritable at the sudden tearing down or sudden major revision of longstanding and widespread classifications, because we need such things as landmarks and common reference points.

'Information' is used to mean both distinguishability and the causes of distinguishability.

In political matters, it is necessary (1) to have at least a hazy idea of 'the way things should be' and (2) to connect this 'way things should be' to the way things are. This may be done by locating the 'way things should be' either in the past, in the future, or in an ideal realm. (Or any mix of the three. Also, it may vary across particular issues.)

Most oppression does not occur by way of property rights but by way of partisan networks.

In the Karaite understanding of revelation, God chose a book. In the Rabbinical understanding, God chose a nation.

Jude 12-13 is also quite clearly a reference to 1 Enoch, thus makign Jude 14 literally true. 1 Enoch 2:1 -- contrast with 'wandering stars'; 2:3 contrast with 'rainless clous'; 3:1, 5:1, contrast with 'autumn trees', 5:3 contrast with 'waves of sea'; compare Jude 15 with 5:4; compare Jude 6 with 1 Enoch 10:11-14; compare 'wandering stars with 18:12-13.

1 Enoch 61:10 as quasi-Trinitarian

Beliefs that are nourished endure; beliefs that are starved perish.

People who are especially tempted to doubt have a nasty habit of handling it by trying to impose doubt on everyone.

Luther's preface to Bibliander's translation of the Qur'an (1543) puts considerable emphasis on the eternality of the Church. (But note also that he argues that 'the Turks' have better customs than Rome.)

isopsephy = equicalculus

In common law jurisdictions, courts are laboratories for legal devices.

Poverty is often less a lack of money and more a cloud of chaos.

When raising children, people often make the mistake of pushing the means before they have determined the end.

In reconstructed proto-languages, even if we assume a perfect reconstruction, we could never guarantee that words were used in the same cnetury (we can only very roughly and comparatively make judgments about chronological length of etymological tree, and even then only sometimes) or in the same geographical area (due to extensive migration); linguistic models are built wolly on surviving linguistic data, which does not encode all aspects of the language. Nonetheless, a properly built reconstruction, albeit always with a bit of approximation and looseness, can still be quite good and, more to the point, a useful device, as we see with cases like Proto-Germannic, which is often roughly confirmed with new data and helps make plausible reconstructions of the meaning of newly discovered old inscriptions, some of which themselves occasionally get later confirmation.

Without attention to causal reasoning, theoretical physics always runs to wild speculation.

fictions inherent in the thing
fictions imposed by the mind on the thing
-- -- with a foundation in the thing
-- -- due to relation of the thing to other things
-- -- by arbitrary imposition
fictions constructed by the mind but not imposed on things

"Our desire to understand 'how nature works' (i.e., to find the M in X -> M -> Y) is perhaps even stronger than our desire to quantify it." Pearl

mediated divine presence
(1) by sign: (a) creation (b) theophany (c) vision
(2) by prophetic representation
(3) by sacrament

Authors never fully understand why their works appeal.

Changes in prices depend on the causal structures that underlie them.

the changing and changed world
the guessed-at world
the intersubjective medium
the world as witnessed and testified

All norms are associated with narratives that explain them.

soundness of question
--> NB a question can be unsound because it requires something to be true that is false, e.g,. "Why has there been no woman as prime minister of Canada?", showing a kind of inconsistency

The faith by which we are saved is a faith already in existence by the point at which we ourselves begin to be believe.

Mark 2:5 -- belief on behalf of another

scepter, throne, vestment, and matchless weapons

All enduring human greatness requires intensive habituations.

The world we experience is nto merely of moving things but of things with apparent possibilities of motion.

the Church as a foam of transformations

moral imago dei: humanity
jural imago dei: covenantal people
sacral imago dei: sacramental church

The tears of the Church have healing power.

The temptation with which Protestantism has struggled is to begin thinking that we are strong alone; but our strength is to be together in Christ. Where they have not forgotten, they have achieved greatly -- powerful preaching, glorious hymns -- but the siren always calls.

None of us are holy alone.

Romantic relationships build their internal narrative interest to those involved in them by building inequalities and equalizing them.

Toleration is always a policy, not a virtue, and everyone always in the end treats it as merely a policy.

Nothing is a 'deepity' in the correct sense unless it is an equivocation. (On this ground, we see that many claims that things are deepities are themselves deepities equivocating on the word 'deepity'.)

God creates non-God, and does not require any not-God to do it.

Baddorf & McKay's imitationist account of collective virtue ("A Theory of Collective Virtue"): "Collectives can possess virtues and vices; they can do so because they can possess reasonably broad and stable dispositions that functionally and intentionally imitate individual virtues and vices."

A just society is a society of just people acting justly.

good customs of decision-making // virtues (as good habits concerned with choosing)

Pearson & Mitroff's four stages of crisis management
(1) signal detection: identify warning signs and prepare for possible crisis
(2) probing and prevention: active search and reduction of risks
(3) damage containment
(4) recovery
(5) review & learning

survey, strategy, solution, study

People in argument are often not fully sincere, because they are improvising means to multiple ends. In argument people often commit to things in advance of their considered belief, and only to make their arguments work.

Augustine, Ep. 187 to Dardanus & the Church as Temple

X's right to Y vs. X's having Y being reasonable

pleasure and pain as motivation confirmations

business ethics as the ethics of juridical persons
-- as personated
-- as constituted
-- as socially participating

All methodology is based on stories of how results have been reached.

Investment, like proclamation, follows the parable of the sower.

the pope as custos urbis Dei

A recurring problem with trying to explain things in terms of make-believe (e.g., Walton) is that make-believe is an immensely sophisticated and complex cognitive activity, and thus poorly suited for explaining anything simpler.

representation, figuration, narrativization

Higher animals clearly experience the world in valenced terms; some such valenced experiences make more functional sense than others. We are able to assess and correct valence attributions accordingly.

Naturalizing projects have a fairly consistent track record of doing at best okay.

Church councils never get what they want but what they say.

Books are indirect meetings of persons.

Idolatry, murder, and adultery violate sacred bonds, and therefore when unrepented exceed what any finite punishment could 'fit'.

There seems reason to think that we make political alliances by deliberately stultifying ourselves to facilitate being on the same page with a large group of very different people.

States not kept on track always end up trying to govern what does not need to be governed and trying to avoid governing what very much needs it.

Malebranche is right that about all of our sensations have an ambiguity  whereby we treat them as both mental and external to the mind; but he jumps too quickly to taking this to be an error.

"There is no other reason for saying that a square is not a circle than that the idea of a square is different from that of a circle and that the one can be thought of without thinking of the other." Malebranche (LO59)