Sisters of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament

 I've talked previously about Jean-Marie Odin in the context of talking about the French Legation in Austin, Texas, and the aftermath of the 'Pig War' of 1841:

The French Legation building had been sold to Fr. Jean-Marie Odin, a member of the Congregation of the Mission, a Vincentian religious society. The Holy See had established the Apostolic Prefecture for Texas -- essentially a pre-pre-diocese -- in 1839, and Odin had been assigned to that as Vice-Prefect. When in 1841 the Apostolic Prefecture became an Apostolic Vicariate -- essentially a pre-diocese -- he was named Apostolic Vicar. Apostolic Vicars are generally titular bishops, so he was consecrated titular Bishop of Claudiopolis in Isauria. He was not in the building very long, because the Holy See formed the Diocese of Galveston in 1847 and chose Odin to be its first bishop. The area under his jurisdiction didn't actually change much -- the Diocese of Galveston covered the whole of Texas -- but he moved to Galveston and did quite extraordinary well in that position. He would later be named Archbishop of New Orleans as the nation began to be overtaken by the Civil War.

He happens to come up -- obliquely, and without being named -- in Huysmans's The Cathedral. Durtal is considering possible topics for writing about, and one of the topics that has been suggested to him is the life of Jeanne Chezard de Matel. She was born in 1596 near Lyon, and when she got older she decided that she wanted to go into the religious life. She had considerable difficulty finding anything suitable; over a period of about six years, she considered multiple possibilities, all of which ended up not panning out. So she eventually decided to start a religious order with a couple of other women who were also trying to figure out how to get into religious life. Thus was the seed of the Order of the Incarnate Word and Blessed Sacrament. The Archbishop of Lyon seemed cautiously supportive, but he died soon after the order was started, and the new archbishop did not like any of Jeanne de Matel's ideas for the order at all. Since the community's boarding school for girls was doing reasonably well and quite a few women were joining the community -- Jeanne's problem of not finding any of the extant religious orders suitable for her spiritual needs or practical abilities, despite an intense interest in the religious life, seems to have become a common one -- this set up an escalating series of confrontations. The order was eventually approved by Rome, but quite late; Jeanne de Matel, who had deferred the order's planned habit and religious profession until approval, was only able to take the habit and make her profession a few hours before her death in 1670. Durtal notes that she was not canonized, which is still true, although in 1992 she was given the title of Venerable by John Paul II, in part due to the Order beginning actively to take up her Cause for Canonization.

The order was by then doing quite well. They were, like all French-based orders, hit hard by the French Revolution and the dissolution of religious orders in the Decree of 1790, but they were able to reform again in 1817. The intersection with Texas, which is mentioned in passing as Durtal is running through the difficulties of Jeanne de Matel's life, came in 1852, when Bishop Odin, finding the Texas-sized Diocese of Galveston a bit unmanageable, started trying to get some help from his native France. The Order of the Incarnate Word answered his call, and St. Claire Valentine (the 'St.' is part of her religious name, not a title, so she's often known as 'Mother St. Claire' to avoid confusion) organized a group of sisters to take the three-month trip to Galveston. There they studied English and Spanish, and then caught a ride to Brownsville. More sisters arrived from elsewhere, they established a school for the poor, and then began to found other communities and engage in other projects throughout Texas. The communities still exist -- they run a number of schools and retreat centers throughout Texas, and a few (due to later requests by other bishops) in Mexico and Ohio, as well.

Dashed Off VII

 a recurring pattern in analytic philosophy -- defining a technical concept, someone gives it a name of convenience, then a double action occurs: people discuss the technical both in terms of the original technical point *and* as if its name were effectively a definition -- e.g., possible worlds, divine hiddenness, skeptical theism, justification

the phenomenon of talking at someone by talking to someone else in their presence

Human cognition requires marvels on which to work.

Man is the animal who sees himself as weird and funny.

Every divine revelation is through sensible or imaginative appearances, either directly, or by further mediation of angels.

Good conscience posits a higher judgment according to which conscientious judgments are vindicated. The tribunal of conscience is authoritative because it is under authority.

Bentham gets his version of utilitarianism in part by treating communities as nothing but an aggregate (cf. IPML c1, sections 4-5).

Pleasure and pain are intrinsically instrumental.

Metaphor and declamation, while not the foundation of moral science, have much to contribute to its development and improvement.

The botanist does not study merely this leaf but this leaf as representative of a whole class of possible leaves.

Time travel stories are fundamentally stories about choices.

Ideas are precious, but they are a difficult currency to convert.

Every serious personal relationship creates its own personal mythology, the imaginative iconography of commitment and devotion.

calibration problem (e.g., in arguing on another's premises) --> possibility of calibration --> participation in First Truth (cp. Aquinas, QQ X, 4, art1)

Trust is built by letting yourself be proven.

The first work in building and maintaining a free society is preserving age-old liberties; it is remarkable how often this is forgotten.

Nothing intensifies sorrow so much as beauty, and some beauty is seen more clearly through sorrowful eyes.

specific versions of the Third Way with the cosmos, with the rational soul, with angelic spirits

There is no opposite to divine goodness; evil is opposite only to the effects of divine goodness.

emotional responses to fictional characters and emotional responses to imaginative fictionalization of the real world (e.g., when people imagine those they have not met yet, or what it would be like to meet a certain kind of person)

The Second Way more easily blocks pantheism than the Third Way; the First Way more easily establishes providence than the Fourth Way.

kinds of argument people use to rationalize unjust actions
(1) normality
(2) advantage
(3) superior value
(4) necessity

Whewell's consilience could well be influenced by Johann Bernoulli's work on the problem of fastest descent -- Bernoulli explicitly notes that he is simultaneously solving an optics problem and a mechanics problem.

'Righteous Peace, Godly Glory' as a name of the Church (Bar 5:4)

experiment: a relatively bounded system involving change intended to allow representative causal inferences for the ends of inquiry

No experiment can possibly rule out the possibility that things exist for the end of being understood, by the very structure of experimentation.

Much of mathematics is concerned with virtual containment -- e.g., divisors in numbers, or triangles in polygons.

Analogizing between very different fields is often misleading, but not always, and few things are more fruitful for inquiry when it even approximately succeeds.

plot integrity in historical explanation

Poets construct their themes, but historians have to draw them out, in effect working out the plot, i.e., story, of events, classifying such plots, and in the best classification is discovery.

poet : historian :: mathematician : physicist

Quite a few personality disorders seem to involve defective capacity for introspection. Think about this.

The more we understand, the more beauty we find.

As our understanding is most often discursive, our loves are most often mobile and composite. Even those things and people we love most, we often love in a piecemeal and successsive manner.

Some kinds of imperfection are defects of competent execution, but some kinds of imperfection are badges of personal endeavor.

"That which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master." Aristotle
"The power of speech is disposed to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and tehrefore likewise the just and unjust."
"Things are defined by their working and their power."
"A possession is spoken of as part of something else."

The household is concerned with the natural supply of human everyday wants and needs. The village goes beyond everyday wants and needs, and the city to the point of self-sufficiency appropriate to good life.

Human beings become godlike insofar as they contain in themselves the incipience of all civil society.

The principle of order in civil society is administration of what is right.

parts of oikia (Aristotle): husband-wife, parent-children, master-slave, art of acquisition
-- the Confucians seem right that fraternal older-younger and friendship are also essential part; and king-minister is part of royal oikia

As we are instruments capable of our own work, God does not want us as slaves.

Aristotle explicitly takes the natural master-slave relationship to be a form of friendship for common good; the master cares for the slave, he says, as part of his own body, and vice versa.

That we may merit what God promises, we must come to love what He commands.

The Church Militant works for Truth, the Church Patient waits for Truth, the Church Triumphant dwells in Truth.

All election systems are structured by the arguments for them.

cascades and material transport explanations (Ross) as generalizable historical explanations (both the generalizable and the historical seem to play a role)

The plurality of forms thesis makes the mistake of thinking that because a substance has many explanations in the order of formal causes, it has many substantial forms, i.e., forms that properly make it this substance.

Reflective equilibrium is janitorial work, not construction. That is to say, given a framework, it cleans it up; but the framework is never established by reflective equilibrium. The framework establishes what judgments can be made with confidence, what judgments are considered, how cases are understood; parts of the framework are then adjusted, but only by holding other parts fixed, with the aim of making the building more convenient for janitors by making it more or less self-cleaning, or as close to it as possible.

Wide reflective equilibrium is not a method but an aim such that people use very different methods in the attempt to reach it.

If you understand cases as systems of possible rules, reflective equilibrium will lead you one way; if as systems of sources for consequences, another; if as the materials of human life, another.

diagrams as philosophical technology

"There is an urge in the human being toward beauty, truth, and goodness, which entails and demands freedom, joy, and peace." Raimon Panikkar
"Rhythm combines in a unique way at least four fundamental elements of human awareness: time, space, objectivity, and subjectivity."

sorrows are breaking
like waves on the shoreline
as I am a-whirl in the foam

design defective as design vs deteriorated good design

As creatures have providential meaning, Scripture has spiritual senses.

Limit interpretations of the derivative are related to infinitesimal interpretations in terms of the derivative characteristically representing (as the slope) the tangent line recognized as the best linear approximation of the function for a value, that exists; the limit interpretation emphasizes the linear part, the infinitesimal interpretation (using the standard part function) emphasizes the approximation part.

It is not the acceleration of progress that matters so much as its jerk and jounce.

When written in a senary number system, all primes except 2 and 3 end in either 1 or 5. (Sequence A004680)

the actual as the maximally distant from the impossible

We see the intellect as free power in dialectical syllogisms, rhetorical persuasions, and poetic designs.

modal supernaturality
(1) in manner of efficient cause: the natural directly used as instrument by what is prior to itself (supernatural intervention)
(2) in manner of final cause: the natural used as instrument for what is beyond its power (supernatural vocation)
(3) in manner of formal cause: the natural as receiving an accident that is beyond its natural accidents (supernatural capacitation)
(4) in manner of objective cause: contemplation

The Trinity is a mystery so rich that all of the gifts of grace in a sense have it as formal object quod, but in inexhaustibly many different ways.

We must imitate Christ not merely morally but also sacrally and spiritually. He must be not merely our precedent but the light reflected in us.

What pleases us is in some way in harmony with us.

Our soul and body have a native unity but also a practiced unity.

Many explanations appealing to natural selection presuppose a fundamental asymmetry between benefit and harm.

An intellectual discipline cannot survive ignoring its past.

Voting is not a political action that is able to be very sensitive to counterfactuals.

Reason is relentless, and human minds can only follow her until they tire.

People have an odd tendency to say that something has no meaning when what they really mean is that its meaning is inconvenient.

Every form of society has a dystopic possibility; sometimes many.

Unearned moralism often poisons what it touches.

Neurath's boat requires that doctriens be, partially or wholly, self-sustaining (the boat must keep floating); this is never established.

syllogisms as relation-multiplications (DeMorgan, cf. Lorenzen)

Every angel has, so to speak, a map of the entire angelic world, carrying intentional species of all other angels as to their natural being. Through this map they also have natural knowledge of the physical world, insofar as it pertains to some angels naturally to order it. Beyond this map, they also receive knowledge from their epistemic presence to themselves, from divine revelation, and from angelic communication.

"The usual character of human testimony is substantial truth under circumstantial variety." Paley

Serious historical work is a kind of semi-tesselation. It is as if one were completing a jigsaw puzzle, but rather than doing it with the pieces themselves, one were doing it with projections of the pieces from different angles and distances, so that the pieces have to be re-sized, speculatively rotated in three dimensions, shifted to account for distortion, etc.

"The philosophers themselves cannot divest themselves of their nature." Balmes
"Consciousness is an anchor, not a beacon."

In the Beatific Vision, truth, goodness, and beauty are seen in perfect unity in their principle.

To be a rational being is to be a being continually completed by being.

The sensory systems are not formal means but instrumental means, which is why modifying the sensory organs can change their suitability.

the wager for realism

Knowing is a species of co-being.

We tend to take the sensible for the real because the sensible is the relatively easy.

The concept is both formal sign and formal similitude; it is of its object and it has a kind of sameness with respect to it, so that the object is in the sign, formally.

Understanding the Gospels starts with enjoying the stories.

Mark's colloquialism often seems deliberate -- i.e., the author often seems to be deliberately not trying for the more formal.

Dance often has a spiritual quality in it because it is the fine art whose artifact is sensible activity as object.

One cannot be intimate with what has no nature.

"Sense does not cognize actual being save under here and now, but intellect apprehends actual being absolutely and with respect to every time." Aquinas

All our loves are lovelikenesses.

our experience of beauty as charm -> innner integrity -> gracefulness

enkapsis of sign in sign

The myth that all scientific explanation is mechanistic has obscured many things.

Actuality relates fuzzily and dynamically to the manifolds of possible worlds.

quantum entanglement and the information implicit in the context itself -- possible analogies between quantum entanglement & how we learn certain things in conversation?

the 'being drawn in' aspect of aesthetic experience

harmonious, stable, systematic intelligibilities

All sacraments require something of the minister and something of the recipient. The former, however, is essential to the sacrament as such, and the latter to its application.

All grace we receive sacramentally flickers within us, at least in effect, not because of its weakness but because of our own.

If sin could receive nothing but human medicament and repair, then (as in bodily medicine) the inevitable result is deterioration, at most deferred.

A Deep on Which the Darkness Lies

 We discover what mysteries of our nature are elucidated for us in God's word. Without it, the whole person appears to be nothing but earth, without form, empty, and darkness on the face of the deep. Here is a deep that finite understanding cannot fathom, a deep on which the darkness lies, whose surface our eye is not even allowed to distinguish. If we wish to know anything, then let us ask the Spirit who hovers over this deep, who can transpose this unformed, empty, dark, mysterious world into beauty, fullness, clarity, and glory which, by contrast, makes the rest of creation appear to lose its radiance.

[Johann Georg Hamann, The Complete London Writings, Kleinig, tr., Lexham Academic (Bellingham: 2025) p. 98. This is from "Biblical Meditations of a Christian" on Deuteronomy 30:11.]

Cosmic Cosiness

  I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

G. K. Chesterton, "The Ethics of Elfland", Orthodoxy, Chapter IV.

A Kind of Majestic Statue or Noble Image of God

 What is the system of truth but a kind of majestic statue or noble image of God himself, of much greater worth than anything produced by human hands. It is, after all, impressed upon immortal souls by the living image of eternal wisdom. The person who devotes himself to such a great work is called a philosopher and the subject he pursues is called philosophy. How, then, can such a name be profaned and abused by appying it to those who, although they too use their intellects, do so in such a shoddy way that their sole achievement is the demolition and disfigurement of the philosopher's work? Their sophistry obscures the light of truth revealed by true philosophy and daubs with falsehood the respectable limbs of the body of wisdom which the philosopher depicts in his writings. 

 [Antonio Rosmini, Introduction to Philosophy, Volume I: About the Author's Studies. Rosmini House (Durham: 2004) pp. 94-95.]

Four Poem Drafts

 In Mice

The treatment works;
it works in mice
and I suppose
that that is nice.

The little mice,
an ingrate lot,
will never give it
any thought.

But we must wait
ere we begin
to start the tests
for treating men

and may it work!
Yet it might not,
and fail to be
the hope we sought.

Crow Terrace Poetry Trial

My poems are in disarray,
like ashes from fire,
sifted by prosaic minds
stumbling over words.
And what do they find?
Who can find anything
who cannot travel the way?
I, a painter with thought,
am now judged by the blind
for denouncing the Imperial car.
Can one disrespect the artisan
by noting defects in the tool?
That is support, not blame.
Cicadas buzz angrily at the gate;
how strange that they herald winter.

Maria Domina

Lady Mary, bright as stars,
the world around like fury's storm
beats against my heart and head.
Queen of heaven, give me heed
and pray for me and all of mine
that we be safe in heart and mind.

O Lady great, high wisdom's Seat,
most holy Ark among the saints,
I beg you pray that all be well,
that we be ardent in our will,
and that, O Mother of many ends,
our path be clear to sunrise-east.

A Chalice Raised High

a chalice raised high
like the early plum blossoms --
ah! lucid stillness

Like a Sly Minister of State

 Evil allows for no system. It asserts itself, and its connection with others is often little better than the haze from a fog. Thus the author of evil cannot act coherently. Like a sly minister of state, he employs every means, every strategy, to help himself escape embarrassment, even if he too had to contradict all that he just had said and done just one minute earlier.

[Johann Georg Hamann, The Complete London Writings, Kleinig, tr., Lexham Academic (Bellingham: 2025) p. 70. This is from the Biblical Meditations of a Christian on Leviticus 19:33.]

Music on My Mind

 

Blackmore's Night, "Darkness".

Fortnightly Book, February 22

Huysmans had published En Route in 1895, but the complicated history of his writing of that work had meant that many of the things he had intended to write did not make it into the final draft, and many of the things he had originally intended that book to be had not been achieved. Thus it is perhaps unsurprising that in 1897 he serialized a portion of a new book in the conservative periodical L'Écho de Paris and published the book itself in 1898 as La Cathédrale. It would become Huysmans most successful work, facilitating his retirement from the civil service, with which his increasingly public religious proclivities had left him increasingly estranged. The threads that combined to make it so successful were many and varied. The book focuses heavily on Chartres Cathedral, and discusses it in detail enough that tourists started using it as a sort of guidebook -- a function it still has today. The critics generally recognized that in style and beauty of writing, Huysmans had outdone himself, but they split on whether Huysmans had become a religious loon enslaved to Church dogma or whether he was a religious hypocrite faking a faith he did not have. On the other side, some priests tried to get the book put on the Index for at least material heresy. All of these kinds of controversies, under the general marketing rule of "No publicity is bad publicity", increased the sales of the book. But perhaps the greatest contributor to the success of the book was the Dreyfus Affair.

In 1894, a French artillery officer, Alfred Dreyfus, was convicted of treason for divulging French military secrets to the Germans; he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in a French Guiana penal colony. The espionage was blown up by the press into a national object of attention, fears were raised because of the ongoing possibility of war between France and Germany, and the whole thing was exacerbated by the fact that its connection to national security meant that significant parts of the entire process occurred out of the public view. In 1896, however, information came to light that suggested that Dreyfus was innocent and that the actual culprit was a major named Esterhazy. The French brass, however, refused to accept the evidence; it was suppressed and Esterhazy was acquitted before a military tribunal. In addition, some of those involved in the original Dreyfus investigation forged evidence of Dreyfus's guilt. Despite the attempts of the French military to keep it quiet, the dispute over Dreyfus's guilt or innocent became increasingly public and noisy. 

One of those who became convinced of Dreyfus's innocence was Émile Zola, the leader of the Naturalist movement, and in January of 1898, Zola published an open letter in a newspaper, L'Aurore, under the title of "J'Accuse...!" Zola accused the President and government of France of illegal activities motivated by antisemitism, as Dreyfus was Jewish. Zola was prosecuted for libel and convicted in February. He fled to England to avoid imprisonment, staying there until the next change of government, and the whole event began to split the entire French cultural establishment. It did not do so cleanly -- every class and rank of French society split over the matter in some way, and the break cut across the right/left divide of French politics in weird ways. What is more, at no point was any faction primarily arguing about Dreyfus; the pro-Dreyfus factions saw the event as symbolic of a broader corruption in the system, the anti-Dreyfus factions saw the ongoing attempts to defend him as mostly a byproduct of a broader attempt to overturn French customs and ways. The antisemitic character of much of the anti-Dreyfus side is widely recognized; the highly classist character of much of the pro-Dreyfus movement is much less widely recognized but was certainly not hiding (and is one reason why the socialists and communists were often reluctant to be pro-Dreyfus). The fractures were already there, and the Dreyfus Affair just opened them.

Huysmans's book had nothing to do with any of this -- except it was published two weeks after Zola's letter, and became popular among anti-Dreyfus conservatives as an argument for French traditions and French Catholicism. Purely by an accident of timing, Huysmans became a sort of anti-Zola.

In any case, The Cathedral will be the next fortnightly book; the translation will be Brendan King's revised and amended version of Clara Bell's translation, and the edition that I am using has a number of black-and-white photographs of statues at Chartres discussed in the book.