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)

And Sung by Lonely Campfires to the Stars

Upon Leaving the Black Hills
by A. Jean Holmes 

Beautiful hills, beneath whose shadows
I have dreamed dreams, have loved, have gained, and failed,
Have watched the sunsets pale, and breathed the pine,
And sung by lonely campfires to the stars:
Yet going, as I am, beyond the reach
Of finger-tips of fragrance in the winds,
And sight of brave, black hills against the sky,
I need not say good-bye; for you will be
Forever with me, though without your shrine.
Nor need I ask your steadfastness, your strength,
The purpose of your pines; be mine the will
To use them in my need, for they are there.
Through thee I have known God-steadfast as hills,
Constant and sweet as thy sweet spirit is!
Our little souls must understand the great
By simple simile: hills we can see
Can touch, can walk, and so can prove them real;
God, greater far, we trembling strive to feel.

Nolan Movies

 I saw The Odyssey the other day, and am still mulling it over; I may or may not say something about it this weekend. But as part of mulling, I was thinking of all of Christopher Nolan's movies and how I might rate them. This, I think, is the order in which I would rate them, at least at the moment.

1. Inception (2010) -- This is one of my favorite movies of all time, and, despite the respect it gets, I think it is still seriously underappreciated. One thing that puts it very high is that it has balance, which is not always Nolan's strong suit.

2. Memento (2000) -- I think one of the strengths of this movie is that, while it has the features of some of Nolan's most ambitious movies, it has none of the self-indulgence that weakens some of the later works. The combination of an ambitious idea and an understated means of implementing it is something that works very vwell.

3. The Dark Knight (2008) -- Partly because of excellent casting and a good set-up by Batman Begins, this is in many ways the most fun Nolan movie.

4. Interstellar (2014) -- This seems to be at the top of many people's lists, but I have never liked it anywhere as much as Inception or Memento, and I think it is certainly less brilliant than they are. Nonetheless, there is a lot to be said for it.

5. The Prestige (2006)

6. Dunkirk (2017) -- Nolan's most serious movie, this is a somewhat unique case, and I probably could be convinced to rate it a bit higher.

7. Batman Begins (2005)

8. Oppenheimer (2023)

9. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

10. Tenet (2020) -- There's a lot I like about this brilliant movie, and I want to rate it higher, but, utterly self-indulgent, it struggles to rise above being a string of gimmicks. It makes a good contrast with Inception, which I think avoids most of the problems that weaken this movie.

11. The Odyssey (2026) -- A good movie that could have been great but does not quite manage to cohere as it should. People have noted that it has a lot in common with Oppenheimer, but Oppenheimer is consistently better on all the points that the two share in common. 

That leaves two other Nolan movies -- Following (1998), which I have not seen, and Insomnia (2002), which I think I may have seen, but about which I remember nothing.

Beings

 The perception of the natures which compose the universe has been justified in the preceding chapters.

These nature are not being, but have being. Thus they receive being, because all that is not being (but nevertheless has being) must receive it from whoever is being.

Therefore, whoever is being must give being to the natures which compose the universe and are perceived by us.

But that which is being and gives being to creatures is cause, that is, God.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), p. 119 (section 1212).]

Very similar, of course, to the argument in St. Thomas's De ente et essentia (and Rosmini goes on immediately to give an adapted version of this that clearly is related to the First Way).

Doctor Apostolicus

 Today is the feast of St. Lawrence of Brindisi, Doctor of the Church. From his Mariale, a work highly influential on modern Catholic views of the Holy Virgin (Sermon 1), discussing the vision of the Woman and the Sun in Revelation 12:

By this heavenly vision God wanted the orthodox Church to demonstrate the divine wonders of Mary and to reveal to the faithful those things hidden in the Virgin, that all might know of what kind and how great is the glory of the Virgin from those things which had been written of her.

To summarize, there are two things that have been divinely handed down to us about the Virgin: that she was the Bride of God and Mother of Christ, just as Eve was the wife of Adam and the mother of men. So too in this vision these two things have been presented to human minds: that she is the Bride of God, the Queen of Heaven, the Bride of the High King, and that she conceived and gave birth to Christ, the only-begotten Son of God and true God. But what kind of glory accompanies these two things! He shows her robe, throne, and crown: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. O wonderful vision!

The Authorship of 2 Peter

Authorship attributions for any long-lasting text are inevitably layered and complicated. For instance, if you have read the Epic of Gilgamesh, you have read an edited translated reconstruction from several different variations that were themselves in different languages and from different times and cultures, and thus you have read a version that probably no one read before that version was published; editing, translating, and reconstructing all add complications to the question of who authored something, and they also complicate all inferences about authorship. 

For all the books of the New Testament, there are 'conservative' and 'liberal' positions about authorship; these are misleading labels for the position that the common and customary attributions are at least approximately right (conservative) and the position that the common and customary attributions are not correct enough to be counted as right (liberal). The reason it has to be put in this form is that common and customary attributions are often themselves approximate and incompletely certain, and authorship attributions even in other literary cases are made with an allowance that, for instance, there could also be intermediaries, editors, co-writers, different revisions, and so forth. For instance, the customary and common attribution for the Gospel of Matthew is that it was written by St. Matthew the Apostle, so the 'conservative' position is that it was written by St. Matthew or close enough; if it turned out (as some Church Fathers thought) that St. Matthew was the writer of the original draft, but that later writers translated it into Greek, perhaps with authorized expansions, this would still suffice for the conservative position. Likewise, traditionally St. Matthew and St. Levi are the same person (people in Judea and Galilee in the first century often had more than one name for various reasons), but if it turned out that they weren't and the Gospel was written by St. Levi, not St. Matthew, this would still be a conservative position, although one that no doubt conservatives would want clear evidence about -- the attribution to St. Matthew is right enough, and any confusion is actually elsewhere (in thinking that St. Matthew and St. Levi were the same, when in reality only the latter was the author). If one held that the authorship of the Gospel of Matthew had nothing to do with St. Matthew, and that the attribution was due not to St. Matthew having something somewhere to do with it but just an attribution that arose later for independent reasons, this would definitely be a liberal position on the authorship of the Gospel. Likewise, if it were a later forgery with no actual causal connection to St. Matthew, even indirectly or loosely, this would also be a liberal position.

Of all the books of the New Testament, the one that perhaps most easily lends itself to the liberal position, and causes the most difficulties for the conservative position, is 2 Peter.  (2 Timothy is probably its only rival on this particular point.) There are puzzles with it all the way across the board, however, that are not resolved.

The first and most basic elements to consider are what the work actually says. 2 Peter 1:1 gives as the 'from' of its greetings, Symeon Petros, slave and apostle of Jesus Christ. 'Symeon' is an unusual variant of 'Simon', but it is used of Simon Peter in Acts 15:14; Petros is a special title of Simon Peter in the same sense that Christos is a special title of Jesus Christ; and while the New Testament attributes apostleship to more than the Apostles proper, Symeon Petros...apostolos, is a very distinctive attribution. The epistle refers to a prior letter (without giving any indication as to its content) in 2 Peter 3:1; it refers to "our beloved brother Paul" (3:15) and his letters (3:16), and groups that first letter and some Pauline letters, whichever such letters might be in view (the usual educated guess based on echoes is that at least 1 Thessalonians is being considered), as "writings" (3:16, usually translated as 'Scriptures') that must not be distorted. It also says that "we" have made known Christ's power and appearing not by following stories, but having been "eyewitnesses" of his greatness (1:16), which it links with the Transfiguration, "we" having been brought with him and hearing the voice on the mountain (1:18). It anticipates the author's death as was made clear to the author by Jesus Christ himself (1:14). Thus the self-attribution of the text seems clearly to be Simon Peter; but is (as is often the case in this period) somewhat loose. What it strictly tells us is that it is written and sent under the authority of St. Simon Peter, the Simon Peter, and in the course of the letter it refers, as an eyewitness account, to an event of which Simon Peter was one of very few eyewitnesses. This is consistent with a very wide range of authorial possibilities. For instance, it has been suggested by some that several of St. Paul's letters were basically written by committee, with Paul simply supervising and giving final authorization; this would be equally consistent with what we find here. Many other things are possible.

It's difficult to pin down the earliest quotations and allusions, because any such assessment requires making a number of assumptions, but a plausible candidate is 1 Clement (9:2, 23:3), which would make 2 Peter quite early; if these are not genuine allusions, then the latest date for the work can be set well into the second century. The Church Fathers are fairly consisting in recognizing that the work was sometimes thought to be really St. Peter's, but that it was definitely not accepted as such universally; that is, some churches, but not all, read it as being genuinely Petrine. Origen, the first author to discuss its authorship directly, recognizes that some take it to be Petrine but does not himself regard it as such, and this is quite common among other Church Fathers who discuss these matters.

 Thus the 'conservative' here can hold that (1) there is a connection to St. Peter, such that he was in some way involved in the formation of the epistle under his authority, but (2) this connection could be fairly loose, given the uncertainties and ambivalences that we find. Beyond the actual statements of the text and consistency with some patristic evidence, there is not much that can be put forward directly to support it. Some people note, correctly, that for a work that involves a self-attribution to St. Peter, it is quite restrained, in both theology and attribution; pseudepigraphy often attempts to call on the authority of apostles for very extravagant claims, but the epistle here does not seem to be doing so. It gives us a very minimal account of the Transfiguration, draws conclusions that are quite modest, and attempts to impose by apostolic authority things that are mostly also found elsewhere in the New Testament. How much weight one gives this argument depends on a large number of background assumptions.

The 'liberal' position would be the opposite, that the process of the epistle's formation involves not even a loose derivation from St. Peter and his authorization. This is often combined with, although it is not strictly required by the 'liberal' position on authorship, the view that the early apparent allusions to 2 Peter are actually the reverse -- that is, 2 Peter is influenced by those texts rather than vice versa. This would make its origin well into the second century.

When we look at direct arguments for 'liberal' positions (i.e., those that don't just point out the uncertainties of the reasons for the 'conservative' positions), we find, however, that they don't get us very far. People will commonly point to the later patristic doubts about the authorship of the work. But this is in many ways the strongest argument on the liberal side. Other arguments are consistently doubtful. The Greek of the epistle is very weird, and definitely different from 1 Peter, but taking this to mean that it is not Petrine at all requires making a number of assumptions that are only that, assumptions. The 'conservative' positions for 1 Peter and 2 Peter do not strictly require (although they don't necessarily rule out) that St. Peter himself directly wrote anything at all, only that the epistles were written and sent under his authority and on his behalf; and if we take a 'liberal' position on 1 Peter, one can't use stylistic differences with 1 Peter as reasons for thinking 2 Peter non-Petrine.

2 Peter shares a lot of material with Jude, and effort sometimes is made to parse what this might mean for authorship. The answer is that we don't know. We don't know for sure how the two are related. Jude is usually thought to be first, because it is much, much tighter in argument than 2 Peter, and seems to have a much closer familiarity with the book of Enoch on whose material it draws. What is more, 2 Peter's use of the material is somewhat odder, in ways that would be explained if the author had heard either Jude or Jude's original source, but didn't have a written copy at hand. (If we assume that 2 Peter is drawing from Jude, the author of 2 Peter at several points substitutes for expressions in Jude other expressions that are similar-sounding, suggesting that it was not from a written copy but either from hearing it or remembering it. If we are assuming that they are both drawing from the same third source, Jude's use is much more like what you would expect from someone who had an actual written copy, and 2 Peter's use is much more like what you would expect from someone who had only heard it or had it second-hand.) The argument, which one occasionally finds, that St. Peter would not draw on ideas by St. Jude, on the ground that St. Peter was more important than St. Jude, is childish and stupid, and marks the person who uses it as an idiot who can be dismissed. What is important, though, is that, assuming 2 Peter draws on Jude or at least Jude's source, which is plausible, we know, even on the 'conservative' position,  that a significant amount of the material of the epistle is not actually from St. Peter himself -- at least, assuming (which we have no reason to believe but which we certainly do not know) that St. Peter himself is not Jude's source. (We can't fully rule that out because the ideas that someone cannot draw loosely on someone else's summary of what he himself previously said, or that someone cannot at times say things more precisely and at times more loosely, or that someone cannot remember what he previously said in a different way than actual record shows, are all obviously wrong.) The relationship with Jude, so far as we have it, doesn't really seem to say anything definite at all about the authorship of either.

Sometimes one finds arguments about St. Peter's literacy. He and the other apostles are referred to as agrammatoi in Acts 4:13, but that can mean anything from complete illiteracy to someone who can read or write at a basic level but has no literary skill. What is more, scribes were common in those days, and people could easily author letters despite not being able to write them. St. Peter is from Capernaum, which some think was not a Greek-speaking town; but a problem with this is that both Simon Peter and his brother Andrew have names that could be Helleno-Jewish -- that is, they have Jewish names that are very similar to Greek names, which seems to have been a common practice in Greek-speaking Jewish families in the day. And again, the 'conservative' position doesn't actually require that St. Peter directly wrote anything at all; he could have, like any number of other people, hired someone to write a letter on the lines that he determined. (The epistle doesn't show any signs of having been directly translated from another language, but, again, the 'conservative' position is consistent with St. Peter just asking for a letter that said such-and-such and the scribe writing the actual letter for him.) 1 Peter is generally thought to have fairly good Greek, but 2 Peter is very difficult to figure out in these terms, because it's usually thought to indicate wide reading in Greek (a lot of very artificial, literary flourishes) but is often baffling in ways consistent with the idea that the author does not speak Greek as a native language. On the basis of 1 Peter 5:12, the good Greek of 1 Peter is often attributed to Silvanus being the scribe. Recently there has been a push to interpret 1 Peter 5:12 as suggesting that Silvanus is the courier, not the scribe; the Greek, however, just says, 'I have written through Silvanus'. Literally, this would be a scribe of some sort; there are figurative uses of the phrase that could extend to other offices, including courier, but I have yet to come across any non-question-begging argument that it is ever used of someone who is only a courier. Thus a common position among 'conservatives' is that 1 Peter and 2 Peter are different just because Peter is using very different scribes at very different times and places, and this is possible, although we don't know.

If we assume that 2 Peter is pseudepigraphal, it is either deliberate pseudepigraphy (for instance, a rhetorical exercise) or a deliberate forgery. If the former, it would usually have indicators to indicate that it is intended to be taken as pseudepigraphical. Some people have argued that 3:2 is such (the author distinguishes himself from 'your apostles'); but again, 'apostle' in this period does not always indicate one of the Apostles proper. Forgery is always a possibility with any ancient text, but that is very different from our actually having evidence of it, which we don't here.

Thus, while the 'liberal' position is perhaps the easier position on the evidence, it is not by much. A great mistake people make in these kinds of disputes, whether about Biblical books or any ancient work, is assuming that the answer is in the evidence. In any case where there is extensive dispute at all, this is never true. Going on the evidence alone, some things are somewhat more probable than other things, but nothing can be established with certainty. No particular position is ruled out by the evidence. This sometimes happens. We do not always have complete evidence, and we certainly don't here. Our evidence is often consistent with many different opposing explanations, and this is certainly true here. The evidence can favor one position over another without getting anywhere near being definitive. Evidence can even be contradictory in a way that the evidence itself does not give us enough to resolve. And this, in the current state of things, seems very much the case here; it's background assumptions, not evidence, that get one to a definite conclusion.

Fortnightly Book, July 19

 Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar was a knight of Castile in the eleventh century; highly talented, he became the armiger regis to Sancho II, despite being only from the lesser nobility. During Sancho's rule, he led several successful campaigns against Alfonso VI and Garcia II (Sancho's brothers) as well as against the Almoravid Muslim kingdom of Andalusia. However, Sancho was murdered and Alfonso took the throne of Castile; thus he fell from favor and was eventually exiled. With nowhere else to go, he took work defending the Muslim kingdom of Zaragoza. Again, he was consistently successful, and Alfonso, facing a powerful and succesful Almoravid, had to give in and beg him to come back. He then went on to become ruler of Valencia, where he was very popular with both Christians and Muslims -- as was perhaps inevitable, because there was no ruler in Spain under whom they could possibly been safer. It is likely in Valencia that he began to be called as-Sayyid, the Lord, which gives him the name under which he has always been known since, El Cid. (In his lifetime, he was probably more often known as El Campeador.) And, indeed, despite Almoravid attempts to unseat him, he remained victorious until his death in 1099. After his death, however, the Almoravids were able to force his family into surrender.

El Cantar de mio Cid is the most famous telling of his legend, written in Old Castilian in the twelfth century. We actually don't know the title of the work -- as it has come down to us, the manuscript is missing its first part. It is, of course, the next fortnightly book. I'll be reading it in the Penguin Classics, translated by Burton Raffel, which has the Castilian and the English in parallel, which should be fun.

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim

Introduction

Opening Passage: There is a modern-day 'preface', as part of the frame narrative, but the opening passage should really be the first part of Chapter 1 (August, 1348, At Matins, The Commemoration of Sixtus II and His Companions):

Dietrich awoke with an uneasy feeling in his heart, like a bass voice chanting from a darkened choir loft. His eyes flew open and darted about the room. A night candle guttering in its sconce cast capers over trouble and basin, prie-dieu and psalter, and caused the figure upon the crucifix to writhe as if it were trying to tear itself down. In the corners and angles of the room, shadows swelled enormous with their secrets. Through the east winow, a dull red glow, thin as a knife across a throat, limned the crest of the Katerinaberg.

He took a long, stilling breath. The candle told Matins anyway; so, throwing the blanket aside, he exchanged nightshirt for cassock. Goose bumps puckered his skin and the short hairs rose on his neck. Dietrich shivered and hugged himself. Something will happen today. (p. 21)

Summary: In early August* of 1348, people in Oberhochwald wake to find the air charged with strange meaning -- quite literally, as their is a glow over the Great Woods and the charge in the air raises the hairs on people's necks and arms and the wool fibers on their clothes; as Pastor Dietrich puts it, it is as if God were rubbing the world with amber. A great wind knocks down the charcoal kiln in the woods and tears up trees. And what the people of Oberhochwald will discover will change everything, because all of the strange events have a natural cause, but one far beyond what they had ever imagined. A ship from the heavens has crashed into the forest. The people on it, whom the people of Oberhochwald call the Krenken (the closest that they can come to what the people call themselves), are strange men, looking something like large gray crickets or grasshoppers. The Krenk crew and passengers find themselves stranded, with an interdimensional engine whose circuits are burned out. Even worse, being from another world, their biology is not a perfect match for this new world, and they can find nothing that contains an essential amino acid without which, after their own stores are gone, their bodies will begin to break down. It seems hopeless. But Pastor Dietrich and some (not all) of the villagers befriend them, despite their somewhat demon-like appearance. (In the fourteenth century, of course, there were still legends of distant lands of men who look very different from those we know.) Among the Krenk passengers had been an expedition of scientists setting out to study new worlds, and they are able to develop a means of translating back and forth between the click-heavy Krenkish language and the German, Latin, and Greek of Pastor Dietrich and the villagers. 

The Krenken are surprised to discover that the locals are awaiting the return of a Lord from the sky, which would explain, as they think, why Pastor Dietrich (a former student at the University of Paris who has studied natural philosophy) sometimes speaks (at least as their machines translate it) in scientific terms that make sense to them and sometimes seems to have positions very primitive compared to their own. And in trying to better understand the customs of the villagers, they discover the sentence that holds the only hope they may have for living long enough to fix their ship and return home: Take and eat; this is my body, given for you. Of course, they don't quite understand these ideas the way the villagers of Oberhochwald do. (Which will result in  a grave disappointment when they go to a Christmas service expecting the return of the Lord from the sky, who they think might be able to help them return home.)

The Krenken, of course, are not theologians, but one thing I like about their discovery of Catholic Christianity is that it tracks very well with the kinds of confusion that often come about when Christianity first interacts with a culture. But, as in those cases, it is a confusion that is at the same time a creative ferment for many great and good things. The extremely hierarchical and caste-ish Krenken puzzling out what Pastor Dietrich means by charitas, in particular, is very well depicted, as is the revolutionary impact the idea has on the Krenkish mini-society of the ship, especially in the context of their near-certain doom as their essential food stores run out.

The Krenken are not the only ones who are doomed, though, because the Plague is spreading through Europe, wiping out entire villages as it goes, and between the humans facing the Black Death and the Krenk facing starvation on an alien world, they together discover the true universal language: hope.

There is also a frame narrative, about a historian and a physicist who live together and unravel the mystery of what happened to the place called Eifelheim, a name it got as a euphemised version of Teufelheim, Devil-home, which is what Oberhochwald came to be called after the Black Death. Tom and Sharon are (deliberately) much less interesting people than the villagers, but I found them somewhat more interesting this time around, and their story serves as a background against which the medieval peasants, scholars, and lords stand out in clearer relief. 

Favorite Passage:

Some long time afterward, he crossed the road to the hospital to tell Hans what had happened and found the Krenkl had died also in his absence. Dietrich knelt by the corpse and lifted the great, long, serrated arms and folded them across the mottled torso in an attitude of prayer. He could not close the eyes, of course, and they seemed still aglow, though that was only the rays of the declining sun out beyond the autumn fields reflecting through them like one of Theodoric's raindrops, and the shadow of a rainbow fell on Hans's cheeks. (p. 298)

Recommendation: Highly Recommended.

------------------

* Sixtus II and His Companions in the fourteenth century would have been August 6th. This day would later become the Feast of the Holy Transfiguration on the universal calendar, which pushed Sixtus II and Companions to August 7th, which is still their feast-day.

Michael Flynn, Eifelheim, Tor Books (New York: 2006).

Dashed Off XX

 humility as respectful deference to God

Replicability gets us from experiment to experimental ensemble, which is the basis for theory.

The do-operator relates changes of probabilities to changes in structures of causal dependency.

Every experiment is a selection out of diverse possibilities.

The human mind does not obsolesce.

the ceremonializing aspect of due process (treating as serious waht is serious, showing respect to the person and the citizen)

"Society itself is an effect or work of justice which exercises its authority over mankind." Rosmini
"Truth, as something infinite, renders the person an object to be respected."

Reductionism is useful to science not because it has ever been successful -- every reductionist account of anything beyond very limited domains has had to be significantly revised -- but precisely because it fails in a controlled way.

Particles do not explain; their abstractible characteristics, giving the possibilities that are available to the particles, do.

Most physical equations describe wholes as wholes, not partwise.

equality as a holistic operator.

Explanation in terms of laws of nature is epxlanation in terms of the entire universe.

reductions as theoretical experiments

the sense of the power of an argument

Every scientific reduction is a skeletal idealization, and this is its value.

Law is an instrument, but it is not merely instrumentally valuable.

Systems of property rights, well designed, are not merely useful but also agreeable.

Money confers purchasing power by valuative causation, ie., objective causation as a desirable object, that is itself instrumentally usable.

Addiction is almost never the fundamental problem, although it is very often the worst solution to it.

The nature of law cannot be determined without regard for the nature of legislation.

concepts --> concepts' aptitude for being applied -->principles

Certainty is the structure of social unity.

Forgiveness requires symbolism adequate to it.

literary taste and factors of re-readability (aptitudes in the work for rewarding re-reading)

martyrs as the viaticum of the Church

Theology is such a huge field that it sometimes takes centuries to appreciate a point adequately.

Development of doctrine often occurs by oscillation.

The need of forgiveness for symbolism arises from its need for communication.

Violence always has costs that cannot be foreseen.

"The nature of right is to be sought in the nature of human beings." Cicero (Leg. 1:5)

In society, rickety structures continue to exist usually because they are protecting smoething important.

morally responsible as principle vs morally responsible as exemplar

Philosophy done well is always bubbling.

Gauss suggested direct, inverse, and lateral units, instead of positive, negative, and imaginary units.

The more advanced an animal is, the more it seems to act with something broadly like a sense of humor -- dolphins, elephants, dogs, cats, apes, ravens, and the like all have moments in which they seem almost joking.

abduction, intervention, prediction, confirmation

geometry as the study of possible distinguishable interactions

titles of appropriateness

Attitudes are evoked by perception of ends and functions.

God as omniprobable
necessity qua precondition of manifold of possibilities --> necessity qua omnipossibility --> necessity qua relevant (conditional) omnipossibility --> omniprobability

On many moral anti-realisms, moral realism is at least a useful fiction.

Every living thing is a hierarchy.

Religious movements survive only by being either passionate or profound.

The Scripture that we read is always the Scripture that passes through the community.

We learn how to use instruments by learning how to use our bodies.

We first learn how to learn by being parented.

hasty vs delbierate assault in refutation

Immoral judgments always have an incompleteness about them.

A problem with Kp&Kq -> K(p&q) is that it seems one could know p and know q without knowing the logical operation of conjunction.

Subjective Bayesianism often seems to have problems similar to those one gets when one assuems that implication and inference are the same.

imagining as vs imagining as like

epistemic K as converter between mind-dependent and mind-independent modalities

Francis of Meyonnes's 4 ways to divine ubiquity
(1) immensity
(2) causality
(3) immutability
(4) coexistence
(his assessment of these is somewhat complicated, so these should be considered a classification of ways in which people have tried to show that God is everywhere; the fourth seems mostly distinctive to him)

divine presence as a precondition of incipit and desinit (God as present to states of change)

prior and posterior presence

Common ways that mothers think and speak about the unborn, although quite diverse, usually have something to be said for them.

In matters of reason, a good effort is never wasted.

Much artistic crafting takes place in the realm of hypotheticals.

All trust has implicit and eplicit modes.

Norms are only as rooted as their known reasons.

In every field, the best generation to be a part of is the generation after the geniuses.

"Rituals are established to regulate the feelings of the world, either by curbing excesses or by exhorting them where they fall short, simply so that people understand the fitting mean in the world." Dai Zhen

The 'familiar instance' in the Nyaya syllogism is something commonsensical that also survives acute investigation.

All nonpresence is relative to a presence.

hauntological arguments

Mt 26:67 // Mic 5:1
-- note that Matthew has already attributed Micah 5:2 to Christ in Mt 2. Note also Jesus as Shepherd (Mt 9:36, Mt 26:31, in comparison to Micah 5:4.

Links of Note

 * Francis Scott Key's House in Georgetown, and How DC Lost It, at "Ghosts of DC"

* Seth Kreeger, Creation and Divine Being in the Christian Neoplatonism of William of Auvergne

* Rob Alspaugh, Homer and Prudentius, at "Teaching Boys Badly"

* Shane Ryan and Sharon Ryan, Wisdom in Analytic Philosophy, at the SEP

* Derek Thompson, America, 1926: What a Forgotten 100-Year-Old Government Report Says About Who We Are

* Marie-Benoît Schwalm, “The Two Theologies: Scholastic and Positive”

* Philip Ball, Is Life Just Different?, at "Quanta"

* The Collected Works of St. Augustine

* Gene Callahan, Just What Is a Just Price?, at "Front Porch Republic"

Seraphic Doctor

 Today is the feast of St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio, Doctor of the Church. From his Breviloquium, Part V, Chapter 8:

The First Principle, being first, is supreme; being supreme, it is supremely good; being supremely good, it is supremely happy and supremely delighting; being supremely delightful, it is supremely to be enjoyed. Therefore, because it is to be supremely enjoyed, we must totally cling to it with love and rest in it as our final end. Now a right and ordered love, called charity, bears us principally to that good in whom it finds its enjoyment and repose. This good is itself our reason for loving. Thus it follows that charity loves that good above everything else as that which will make it happy, and as a consequence it loves all other things which through that good are also suited for happiness. Now, our neighbor was created to reach that happiness along with ourselves -- which includes our body as well, for it was made to share that happiness together with our spirit. That is the reason why charity has but four objects: God, our neighbor, our spirit, and our body.

[St. Bonaventure, Breviloquium, Monti, tr., The Franciscan Institute (St. Bonaventure, New York), p. 201.]

Ah, Here's to the Vine

 The 'Boozer's' Health
by William Milton Byram 

Ah, here's to the vine
That bears the fair wine
That banishes trouble away!
Forever be thine
Good Bacchus thy wine 
That vanquishes sorrow today!
And a health to the corn
Which we need at morn
To drive the mean headache away! 

May thy glory shine
One friend of mine
With freedom's foes ever at bay!
Long life to the vine,
That bears the fair wine,
That vanquishes sorrow to-day!
And a health to the corn,
Which we need at morn,
To drive the mean headache away!

Reflective Knowledge

 A reflection on the knowledge we have, that is, knowing that we know, so increases our knowledge that the new knowledge relates to the former in the way that more relates to less, or even the infinite to the finite. With reflective knowledge we rule and control direct knowledge as we will; only reflective knowledge brings direct knowledge under our free will. We would never have discovered the art of writing if we had not reflected on language. Numbers are an invention arising from reflection on the ideas of numbers. Algebraic letters are the result of a reflection on numbers. Analytical functions arose from a third reflection on algebraic letters. This is the real meaning of the apparent play on words: 'we know that we know that we know'! It is the simplest formula expressing the order of ideas, to which the Analytical Functions of Lagrange belong.

[Antonio Rosmini, Certainty, Cleary & Watson, trs., Rosmini House (Durham: 1991), p. 111n131.]

Dashed Off XIX

 To write poetry, you have to be willing to go down rabbit holes.

When we consent to things, we are often not only consenting on our own behalf, but on behalf of everyone else for certain aspects of that to which we consent.

The brain is a theater of rituals.

All sciences, as such, are beautiful.

Gn 3:12 as Marian prophecy

Christianity is the life of Christ made shareable.

Archeological attestation of Kings of Judea and Israel:
(1) Kurkh Monolith: Ahab (I)
(2) Mesha Steele: Omri (I)
(3) Tel Dan Steele: Ahaziah 'of the House of David' (I)
(4) Summary Inscription 7: Johahaz [Ahaz] (J)
(5) Black Obelisk: Jehus 'son of Omri' (I)
(6) Tell al-Rimah Steele: Johoash [Joash] (I)
(7) Shema Seal: Jeroboam II (I)
(8) Iran Steele: Menahem (I)
(9) Summary Inscription 4: Pekah & Hoshea (I)
(10) Jeconiah Rations Tablet: Jeconiah (J)
(11) Hezekiah Birka: Hezekiah 'son of Ahaz' (J)
(12) Esarhaddon Prism: Manasseh (J)

The power structure of David's Israel, as given in Scripture, seems to be:
(1) a general power base in Hebron and the tribe of Judah
(2) some support from the religion network centered at Shiloh
(3) possession of Jerusalem from defeat of Jebusites
(4) slow and incomplete religious centralization at Jerusalem
(5) (mostly) broadly friendly relations and support from Philistines and Gath
(6) some authority over Saul's power base, arising from defeat of Eshbaal (Ishbosheth)
(7) success at playing off surrounding powers in military squabbles.

Philosophers of science have repeatedly tried to make experimentalists second-class citizens in the republic of science.

mechanism as that which may be imitated in experimental design

construction in mathematics // experimentation in physics

Different kinds of probability (epistemic, etc.) depend on the teleologies being considered.

the transfer of polytheistic divine epithets to God by triplex via

The tribunal of conscience has authority to:
(1) authorize
(2) order in accordance with obligation
(3) prohibit from exceeding authority
(4) impose conditions
(5) review
(6) act in aid of its own jurisdiction.

Conscience is supreme in its own jurisdiction, but its jurisdiction is not a supreme jurisdiction. Conscience is a tribunal itself subject to judgment.

Measurement requires a causal system capable of reducing possibilities.

Large-scale charitable endeavor requires coordination with the local.

Magic and mystery are parts of everyone's history.

The recording ability of the state is not a machinery but a cooperation. Trying to treat it too much like a machinery always creates failures.

deontic presence (association with what is not-obligatory-not)

"Just as our Redeemer is one person with the congregation of the good, and so is head of the body and we the body of His head, so also the Ancient Enemy is one person with the whole collection of the reprobate since he as head excels them in iniquity while they are servants to his persuasions and cling to him as a body joined to a head." Gregory, Moralia 4.18

"Causal analysis is emphatically not just about data; in causal analysis we must incorporate some understanding of the process that produces the data, and then we get something that was not in the data to begin with." Judea Pearl

given that I know that X --> given that it is true that X --> given that X

Every solution is optimal according to some standard; what is important is the relevant and appropriate standard.

no'am: pleasantness, delightfulness, beauty, favor, grace
-- from na'am, to be pleasant/delightful/lovely
-- translated in LXX as charis
Ps 27:4 the beauty of the Lord
Ps 90:17 beauty/favor of the Lord
Pr 3:17 pleasant way
Pr 15:26 pleasant words
Pr 16:24 pleasant words
Zech 11:7,10 Favor/Beauty

Differences in understanding are handled by wisdom.

Law is part of the human panoply of survival; other animals have fang and claw and swift muscle, but we have law.

the intelligibility of the concept of reliability --> the truth-aptness of induction
(If anything is recognizable as possibly reliable, it can only be because of induction.)

murmurations of kindnesses

Obligation as such becomes available to prudence, and in prudence becomes more than obligation. It suggests preferabilities for what is permissible; it provides inspiration for new options; it connects to other obligations by symbol and by analogy.

Prudence transforms the acts and works of other habits, both interpretatively and by incorporating them into a greater plan.

'Democracy' is not the sort of thing that can be defended; what can be defended is the Demos, the People.

It is a common error in many modern societies to think that saying concrete things in abstract words makes it more important.

It is difficult to be moderate and consistent in political contexts.

Modern societies are often intentionally only instrumentally literate.

Despite popular presentations that put the emphasis on belief, the subjectivity of subjective Bayesianism should really be thought of as 'the probabilities can vary from case to case', with belief a figure of speech (and *sometimes* perhaps an example).

principiation, mediation, convergence

Arrogant complacency is death in politics.

Every manifold of modal states derives from a difference-maker.

History consistently indicates that Torah gives the Jewish people an advantage or, perhaps more strictly accurately, Jews following Torah create a community that is highly durable, highly flexible, and, within the constraints of broader causal context, tends toward what makes a community prosper.

Lk 23:43 // Dt 30:18

The Calvinist TULIP should be seen not merely as a list but as a progression: We begin in sin (Total Depravity), but God in grace has chosen us (Unconditional Election) and provided a remedy for those chosen (Limited Atonement), which is granted us not in a way dependent on our weak grasp but on God's mighty strength (Irresistible Grace), so that we have perfect security in Him (Perseverance of the Saints).

"There is no such thing as just being good or bad, there is only being a good or bad so-and-so." Geach

We are more interested in richness or harmonious diversity of pleasures than pleasure as such.

One of the evils of 'utility monsters' is that they are monotonous and boring.

Taxonomies of philosophical theories are inherently interesting.

Effective altruism consistently has difficulties with scale -- it is hard to scale up to both complex things and to many different things, and hard to scale down to fine-grained detail work.

Most people regard general welfare as an important goal but (correctly) recognize that it depends on getting a lot of other things right -- namely particular things in the vicinage that can then be a platform for more.

Very few things contribute more to general welfare than raising children well.

People generally have fewer problems with effective altruism than with the combinations of EA with utilitarianism.

Beneficence requires other virtues to set the stage for it.

Christans as "philosomaton genos" (Celsus)
as "spermologoi" (Acts 17:18)
(note that Luke's comment at v 21 could perhaps be ironic because of this)

Creeds are landmarks.

monuments as standing testimony

Science textbooks are the dissection of the remains of scientific inquiry.

In the Church, the martyrs continue to be witnesses.

The human body is intrinsically liturgical.

The obsolete is often simply what we have forgotten how to use.

To do great things and to do them only well is not something that happens in politics.

To reform successfully, you need to have clear lines of authority.

Two things are more successful than anything else at getting 'engagement': kitsch and provocation.

Tradition at a very small scale we call "studying"; tradition at a very large scale we call "civilization".

A civilized society studies its ways.

The sensible is always explained in terms of the merely intelligible.

The philosophy of nature of any given age is always a system of analogies.

'Spend less than you make' and 'make more than you spend' are different goals,e ven though the means are usually the same; the priorities will at times be different. Likewise with 'be wrong less than you are right' and 'be right more than you are wrong'. Even the means are not always the same, though, because we do not always have equal freedom to affect both sides of the comparison.

that we have an idea of free will --> that we have free will
(the ignorance-of-causes position, depsite its problems accounting for phenomena, keeps recurring in part to block this natural inference)

human rights --> civil rights --> courtesy rights (i.e., aspects of civil rights extended to non-citizens)

price as a causal structure including anticipatory links
proposing a price // causal inquiry

omnipotence as a notwithstanding power

Love celebrates in both bright times and dark times.

What gives life meaning is what death cannot nullify.

Even where local anti-realism makes sense for part of a domain, global anti-realism does not, because the local anti-realism, to be intelligible, requires a framework of facts about the viability, usefulness, and effectiveness of possible constructions. Every anti-realism presupposes some kind of realist framework, and one would have to have a principled reason for classifying the framework itself as being in an entirely different domain from that which it frames.

The Massabki Brothers

 Today is the feast of the Blessed Massabki Brothers in the Maronite calendar. The following is my brief note on them from 2016, very slightly revised.

*****

July 10 is the Feast of the Blessed Massabki Brothers, Abdel Mooti Massabki, Francis Massabki, and Raphael Massabki. They lived in Damascus during a time when tensions were very high in the Ottoman Empire. A great civil war broke out in the region of Mount Lebanon and Syria in 1860 between Maronites and their Druze governors. The fighting was fierce, and the Maronites at an inevitable disadvantage against Druze forces backed by Ottoman troops. In July 1860, the fighting came to Damascus, and the results were brutal as much of the relatively peaceful Christian population was slaughtered by Druze and Muslim paramilitary groups while the government looked the other way -- thousands of Christians died in the Damascus Massacre, perhaps as many as ten thousand, and the Christian quarter of the city was almost entirely destroyed. The massacre might well have been total had it not been for cases of Christians being saved by their Muslim neighbors, especially in poor areas around the city. Of note as well was the work of Abdelkader El Djezairi, an Algerian Sufi freedom fighter who was living in exile in Damascus at the time; having forewarning of the trouble, he and his fellow Algerians sheltered hundreds of Christians in his house as he sent his sons out into danger in order to bring Christians to safety. 

But there were many who had no such protection, and no recourse but to pray. The Massabki brothers, prominent Maronites in the city, were praying in a Franciscan church on July 9, 1860 and given the choice to die or convert to Islam. They were beatified in 1926 by Pius XI.

The Feast of the Three Blessed Massabki Maronite Martyrs

Let us praise Christ the Martyr;
He shed His blood for our sins
and crowns those who persevere.
Behold the Massabki saints!
Their crown is of purest gold.
Holy martyrs, pray for us! 

O brothers, You prayed in faith
and died in Christ, in His Church,
forgiving persecutors,
like the Lord upon His Cross.
Thus you are honored with Him!
Holy martyrs, pray for us! 

Jesus said, "Follow." You did.
You heard the call of heaven
and for love of Christ endured.
Trusting in Christ's great mercy,
You won crowns of victory.
Holy martyrs, pray for us!

The Principal Thing

 To be a person of taste, it seems necessary, that one have, first, a lively and correct imagination; secondly, the power of distinct apprehension; thirdly, the capacity of being easily, strongly, and agreeably affected, with sublimity, beauty, harmony, exact imitation, &c.; fourthly, Sympathy, or Sensibility of heart; and, fifthly, Judgment, or Good Sense, which is the principal thing, and may not very improperly be said to comprehend all the rest. 

 James Beattie, Of Imagination, Chapter IV.

The Mysterious Depths of Water

Among my most widely read posts here at "Siris" is the 2011 post, Water Is Not H2O, which is about how water is more complicated than it seems. The title, of course, is a provocative way of stating one of the key arguments: While H2O is the water-forming molecule, the behavior of that molecule guarantees that any amount of water that exists for a while will also be composed of H, O, H2, O2, H2O2, and similar combinations, and many of the properties of what we call 'water' depend on this fact that any significant amount of water existing for more than a moment is not just H2O. This is actually standard point made in philosophy of chemistry, one that has usually not diffused out to philosophers in other fields. But I also noted a few other things relevant to the nature, with the ultimate conclusion:

Water is an interacting society, not a molecule, and it is a society of related molecules, not just H2O; among those molecules H2O is just the most prominent family, not a single kind of molecule; and light water (what we usually think of as H2O) is just the most prominent branch of that family.

So I was interested to see a recent science news item come up about studies of the molecular structure of water:

A study published in Nature Physics provides new molecular-level evidence from simulations that liquid water is not a single uniform substance, but a constantly shifting mixture of two distinct microscopic structures.

As the article notes, this is not a new idea. It's not surprising, because it confirms what chemists and physicists had already suspected. For reasons tied to the behavior of water, it has long been hypothesized that water molecules shift around between two kinds of structures. This is known as the two-state model, and the reason why it was already taken to be probably true is that water seems schizophrenic, sometimes acting as if it were highly structured and sometimes as if it were very loose and disordered, but rarely in between. Naturally the easiest explanation of this is that it actually sometimes is highly structured and sometimes quite disordered, and rarely in between; and what we know of water molecules doesn't rule this out. The big puzzle was that it was very difficult to find any evidence of this, beyond the behavior that led to the model in the first place. One might think that you could confirm it by just checking how the molecules are related to each other, but it's actually quite difficult to get good direct evidence of the overall structures of vast numbers of molecules in constantly changing relationships. And in particular there was no clear idea of how the two states would even be related to each other in the actual behavior of water.

So, as I understand it, having looked at a number of these pop science articles and having briefly skimmed through what I could find of the relevant papers without forking any money over to get behind paywalls (and without pirating anything!), the state of things is something like the following.

The new discovery is repeatedly called 'direct molecular evidence for the two-state model', in this and other articles, and it is, but in a more complicated way than I think that makes it sound. Nobody has seen these two structures themselves, and there's a lot that is still unknown. The two-state model, to work at all, requires that there be a state of water known as liquid-to-liquid transition, in which water splits into a high-density state and a low-density state. It wasn't obvious that water had such a transition because you can only get it under certain conditions, in a very, very, very cold state in which liquid water is still liquid but is almost right at the edge of becoming solid. This is very difficult to set up, because water freezes so easily, and usually does so long before this point, so you have to supercool the water in such a way that it stays liquid. Computer simulations suggested that something like this state probably existed, but even the best computer simulations were quite messy; physical chemists could guess where it would have to exist if it did exist, but they had to make assumptions that were not yet proven; and nobody had yet been able to produce it in a way that got useful measurements. Improvements in computer simulation, however, made it possible to give a more precise statement of the relevant numbers for measurements related to energy and density under certain conditions, and the answer was coherent, and also consistent both with the two-state model and what else we know of water. And, without trying to make the model fit some more recent evidence based on new technology and measurement processes using X-ray lasers (which we began to get earlier this year; see here also  ), the model happens to fit new measurements that we were only just recently able to obtain.

Thus the 'direct molecular evidence' is that the two-state model now has clear and definite computer simulation of water that shows us how, given everything else we know about water, the two states would have to be related to each other, and new measurements under roughly the conditions expected by the model are consistent with what the precisified model says we should get. That is, the two-state model went from being a rather hazy idea with a lot of guesswork to being a fairly precise idea with definite features, and, importantly, when the hazy idea was made precise and definite, it fit both the old evidence and some new measurements we were just now able to start getting. William Whewell would really like this example, because he was always a champion of the idea that one of the routes of progress in the sciences was just making ideas more clear and precise; here, the computer simulation is evidence of the two-state model because it makes the two-state model much more clear and precise without breaking it in any way, despite measurements that have been improving at the same time. Nobody has seen or traced out the actual structures (because it is still very difficult to do); the evidence is not direct in that way. We just have new direct measurements that confirm their existence, in exactly the way the theory indicates that they should.

What is perhaps almost as important is that a new line of inquiry was opened up by this. The computer simulation indicates that the two structures change their behavior depending on the temperature and pressure, in ways that we might be able to confirm or disconfirm in the future.

Thus the two-state model, our best idea of how water might work, is almost certainly right, although there is still room for unexpected discovery. Thus water is not only an interactive society of many different molecules, of which H2O is only the most important, but an interactive society whose molecules are related in at least two different ways, each of which contributes to different aspects of water's behavior. Water is a surprisingly deep subject.