St. Cyril of Alexandria

Shame on me; yesterday was the feast of St. Cyril of Alexandria, and I completely forgot about it. From his Commentary on Luke:

Our Lord Jesus Christ requires those who love Him to be accurate investigators of whatsoever is written concerning Him: for He has said, "that the kingdom of heaven is like to a treasure hid in a field." For the mystery of Christ is deposited, so to speak, at a great depth, nor is it plain to the many: but he who uncovers it by means of an accurate knowledge, finds the riches which are therein, and resembles that wise woman, even Mary, of whom Christ said, that "she had chosen the good part, that should not be taken away from her." For these earthly and temporal things fade away with the flesh: but those which are divine and intellectual, and that benefit the life of the soul, are firmly established, and their possession cannot be shaken.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons

June 28 is the feast of St. Irenaeus of Lyons. From a preserved fragment of a lost work:

Know that every man is either empty or full. For if he has not the Holy Spirit, he has no knowledge of the Creator; he has not received Jesus Christ the Life; he knows not the Father who is in heaven; if he does not live after the dictates of reason, after the heavenly law, he is not a sober-minded person, nor does he act uprightly: such an one is empty. If, on the other hand, he receives God, who says, I will dwell with them, and walk in them, and I will be their God[Leviticus 26:12], such an one is not empty, but full.

Quotable Quote

Jeff Miller in fine form at "The Curt Jester":

The section on loving our enemies is fairly good and is certainly a part of the dialogue about torture. I am reminded of St. Paul writing in the Book of Romans.

'No, "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.'

Those who justify torture get it backwards and want to eliminate the middle man of doing good and go straight to pouring burning coals on their heads.

Model for Writing

At "Leiter Reports" there's a post about whom one should recommend (to students) as models for writing. I've always liked the recommendation one of the UToronto professors -- Doug Hutchinson, if I remember correctly -- once made to his students: see if you can imagine Rex Murphy putting it that way.

Consent of the Governed

A law, properly speaking, regards first and foremost the order to the common good. Now to order anything to the common good, belongs either to the whole people, or to someone who is the viceregent of the whole people. And therefore the making of a law belongs either to the whole people or to a public personage who has care of the whole people: since in all other matters the directing of anything to the end concerns him to whom the end belongs.

Thomas Aquinas, ST 1-2.90.3

Accordingly, the best form of government is in a state or kingdom, where one is given the power to preside over all; while under him are others having governing powers: and yet a government of this kind is shared by all [ad omnes pertinet], both because all are eligible to govern [ex omnibus eligi possunt], and because the rulers are chosen by all [ab omnibus eliguntur]. For this is the best form of polity, being partly kingdom, since there is one at the head of all; partly aristocracy, in so far as a number of persons are set in authority; partly democracy, i.e. government by the people [potestate populi], in so far as the rulers can be chosen from the people [ex popularibus possunt eligi principes], and the people have the right to choose their rulers [ad populum pertinet electio principum].

ST 1-2ae.105.1

ID Wrestlings

Steve Matheson has an interesting response to a claim on the "Uncommon Descent" blog that theistic evolutionists are 'spineless appeasers'. From the post:

I embrace evolutionary explanations because they have explanatory power. For the same reason, I embrace naturalistic explanations for the development of the human brain, and for the causation of cancer, and for the formation of the Grand Canyon. All of these explanations involve mechanisms that are referred to as "random." In fact, randomness and chance are interesting topics for Christians of all kinds and in nearly every aspect of scientific inquiry (if not all of life). In my view, to focus on these issues exclusively in the context of biological evolution is a huge mistake. If I thought the ID movement were really about wrestling with the notions of chance, providence and design in the analysis of God's world, I'd be happy to join the conversation. It's not, and I'm not.

That's certainly part of my attitude, as well. It does seem that by and large the ID movement is only interested in wrestling with the people they've marked out as opponents, and not in wrestling with the actual phenomena in the world given to us.

Proving Negatives

John Wilkins has a post at "Evolving Thoughts" on proving a negative. I've discussed the oddity of the slogan that you can't prove a negative myself. My argument was that cases that are supposedly examples of unprovable negatives are really cases of claims whose relevance to any available evidence is unknown, due to vagueness or some such; and thus that the problem is not that they are negative at all. Wilkins has an interesting suggestion that the notion comes from ignoring universes of discourse. I don't think this can be the whole matter, because even if you ignore universes of discourse you can have a theory of proof that allows you to prove negatives, e.g., by allowing you to prove affirmatives that themselves rule out other affirmatives. But it's an interesting suggestion, and probably at least partly true; given how big I am on universes of discourse, I'm surprised it didn't occur to me as a possibility.

UPDATE: I looked for the phrase on Google Book and discovered that (1) philosophers have been pointing out that the slogan is not really true for at least two hundred years; and (2) it's at least possible that the expression grew up in the context of British law courts, and just wandered out into the wide world from there, because the expression appears to have been quite common in discussion of burdens of proof in court.