Fordyce's Sermons

By tea-time, however, the dose had been enough, and Mr. Bennet was glad to take his guest into the drawing-room again, and when tea was over, glad to invite him to read aloud to the ladies. Mr. Collins readily assented, and a book was produced; but on beholding it (for every thing announced it to be from a circulating library), he started back, and begging pardon, protested that he never read novels. -- Kitty stared at him, and Lydia exclaimed. -- Other books were produced, and after some deliberation he chose Fordyce's Sermons. Lydia gaped as he opened the volume, and before he had, with very monotonous solemnity, read three pages, she interrupted him with,

``Do you know, mama, that my uncle Philips talks of turning away Richard, and if he does, Colonel Forster will hire him. My aunt told me so herself on Saturday. I shall walk to Meryton to-morrow to hear more about it, and to ask when Mr. Denny comes back from town.''

[Austen, Pride and Prejudice, chapter 14]

The full title of the book would be Sermons to Young Women. And this is the table of contents for that scintillating book (by 1809, the two volumes were presented in a handy one-volume work):

Volume I
1. On the Importance of the Female Sex, Especially the Younger Part
2. On Modesty of Apparel
3. On Female Reserve
4. On Female Virtue
5. On Female Virtue, Friendship, and Conversation
6. On Female Virtue, with Domestic and Elegant Accomplishments
7. On Female Virtue, with Intellectual Accomplishments

Volume II
8. On Female Virtue, with Intellectual Accomplishments
9. On Female Piety
10. On the Same Subject
11. On the Same Subject
12. On Good Works
13. On Female Meekness
14. On the Same Subject

I actually wonder if there is more going on in the scene than is usually given credit. Obviously we have Mr. Collins "with very monotonous solemnity" reading a book of sermons because he refuses to read novels, which tells us a very great deal about Mr. Collins. And it's almost certain that she's mocking Fordyce, whose method of educating young women is perhaps less than well calculated to keep their attention. And one has only to dip into the sermons to find that they do not exactly sparkle, being exactly the sorts of sermons one might read with very monotonous solemnity. Nonetheless, there are often layers and layers of irony in Austen, and it is noticeable that Lydia, who gapes at the very idea of reading sermons and who rudely interrupts, arguably needs the sort of lessons Fordyce is trying to get across, even if not in a sermon monotonously read. Here is a selection from Sermon III, On Female Reserve, after he has broached the virtue of shamefacedness and noted that it should not be confused with pretences.

Has Virtue then forsaken the sex? God forbid. But I am bold to say, her favourite walks are not in those places of public entertainment, now so fondly frequented by so many women. She loves the shade. There she finds herself most secure from the blights of calumny, and the heats of temptation. Ah! ye mothers of this land, how can you expose so rashly those tender blossoms committed to your care? Have ye forgotten that every unkindly breath is ready to blast them? Are ye ignorant, how soon the whitest innocence may be sullied; that it is possible, even for the strictest principles to be corrupted? Is there nothing in your own minds that whispers of the frailty of your sex?...

[He imagines here what the parents might say to him about the necessity of making sure their daughters are not naive, but have some carefully supervised introduction to the world.]

We admit your arguments, so far as they go. Keep within these bounds, and be blameless. But do the parents of the present generation commonly keep within them? Are not many of those parents as fond of gaiety and show as the merest girl can possibly be? Is it surprising to see the daughters of such become very early the votaries of Folly, when every other day or night they are conducted in triumph to her temples, without any precaution, any previous pains taken to instruct them in the emptiness and worthlessness of the object worshipped there; worshipped with every circumstance that can serve to propagate the idolatry, while the poor innocents are inflamed by 'the concurrence of company, dress, flattery, example; the example of those whom, hv nature and education, they are disposed to respect most highly, and to imitate most implicitly? It were strange indeed, if in this situation their too susceptible hearts should escape the fashionable contagion. But what can be said for those, who thus directly, and with their eyes open, lead their children into a snare ?—Cease, thou restless and raging spirit of hell, who art "going about "seeking whom thou maycst devour," cease thy cruel toil. The parents of Britain render it needless....

If you think about Lydia's situation, it seems to hit a spot, doesn't it? And Austen herself read sermons quite often; although she expresses a preference in one of her letters for Thomas Sherlock's sermons over any of the competitors.

This does not change the fact that there is something very, very Mr.-Collins-ish about Fordyce:

...there seem to me to be very few, in the style of Novel, that you can read with safety, and yet fewer that you can read with advantage.— What shall we say of certain books, which we are assured (for we have not read them) are in their nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestife rous, and contain such rank treason against the royalty of Virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will. But can it be true—say, ye chaste stars, that with innumerable eyes inspect the midnight behaviour of mortals—can it be true, that any young woman, pretending to decency, should endure for a moment to look on this infernal brood of futility and lewdness?

Nor do we condemn those writings only, that, with an effrontery which defies the laws of God and man, carry on their very forehead the mark of the beast. We consider the general run of Novels as utterly unfit for you. Instruction they convey none. They paint scenes of pleasure and passion altogether improper for you to behold, even with the mind's eye. Their descriptions are often loose and luscious in a high degree ; their representations of love between the sexes are almost universally overstrained.

But fairness requires noting that he does recommend very highly the novels of Samuel Richardson, especially Clarissa. This is a taste of which Austen herself might well approve, at least to the very limited extent that it goes: Richardson was one of her favorite authors and Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison was one of her favorite novels from an early age. (Which does not mean she will not mock him ironically when the occasion suits.)

Minor bit of trivia, incidentally: Charlotte Lucas seems to be the only female character in Austen's novels to marry a man younger than herself; because, of course, part of the point of the character is that pompous, sententious Mr. Collins, who refuses to read novels and reads sermons monotonously, is only twenty-five years old.

Poem a Day 5

Aeris Aviditas

A useful thing, to seek, to have, to hold;
it makes the corn to rise, the wine to flow,
and builds security to make us bold
and keeps us safe, and sets the world aglow
with luxuries beyond what beasts can know,
allowing more and more, and without cease,
and costs but more and more of love and peace.

Deuterocanon Friday: Fasting

When one builds and another tears down,
what do they gain but hard work?
When one prays and another curses,
to whose voice will the Lord listen?
If one washes after touching a corpse, and touches it again,
what has been gained by washing?
So if one fasts for his sins,
and goes again and does the same things,
who will listen to his prayer?
And what has he gained by humbling himself?

Sirach 34:28-31 (NRSV-C)

Links of Note and Notes that Note

* This cartoon by Jason Bach captures almost everything there is to say about recent media discussion of the Pope's interview.

* An article at Science discusses peer review in open-access journals. It concludes that sometimes there is and sometimes there really, really isn't.

* Dubious shenanigans in community college accreditation.

It's worth remembering that accreditation is a relatively recent thing, and that there is no reason to think that it does much. Canada, whose higher education system is as good as anything in the U.S., has no national or regional accreditation system; colleges are simply regulated by provincial governments, and that somewhat indirectly, and instead of jumping through hoops for accreditation, colleges simply maintain their status as members in good standing in professional associations; some particular departments and degrees have their own form of accreditation through appropriate agencies that can determine the right kind of accreditation for those programs. It's a system that works and makes sense -- it's programs and degrees, not colleges, that need accreditation, when it is needed at all. As noted at the link, we here have a case in which the accrediting organization's policies are actually interfering directly with the educational policies of the state of California, and on grounds that cannot be linked to superior educational quality.

* Ross Wolfe has a review of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism at "The Charnel-House".

* Rebecca Stark looks at the basic meaning of mortification of sin, with links to Reformed resources on the subject.

* John Wilkins has a post on the idea that the brain could be downloaded, saying many salutary things.

Of course, even if it were possible, it might not be like we think; I remember a short story somewhere in which aliens learn how to hack a human being's brain, and they land on earth expecting to conquer us easily -- after all they can just break straight into our minds. And they discover that every single human brain is so different that they would have to start virtually from scratch for every single one.

* Rabbi Yaakov Ariel on Maimonides's 13 principles.

* Jana at "Wondering Aloud with Young People" discusses Rachel Carson's The Sense of Wonder, which I think is her best book.

* Hic Rhodus, hic saltus: Aesop, Erasmus, Hegel, and Marx

* T. E. Hulme Reconsidered at "The Imaginative Conservative". Hulme was born 130 years ago this past September.

I suspect history will treat Hulme reasonably well. He'll never be one of the greats, but I think people will keep coming back to him at least indirectly. His manuscripts on the philosophy of language, literature, and style are brilliant, and much better than almost any other twentieth century philosophy of language, since Hulme actually knew his subject in greater depth than being able to string words together into sentences. He is one of those philosophers who is brilliant in fragments; Leibniz is the most famous, and, ironically, given Hulme's arguments against romanticism, the Romantic philosophers. He is not as brilliant as Leibniz, and he lacks the movement the Romantics had, but he is of the same general kind. I think he will be a minor philosopher who is read far longer than many more famous for philosophy in their day.

An aphorism from his manuscripts on language: "Thought is the joining together of new analogies, and so inspiration is a matter of an accidentally seen analogy or unlooked-for resemblance."

* Another anniversary this year: Albert Camus turns 100.

* James Chastek on the trial of Socrates as the trial of all philosophy.

* John Michael Greer on the flight to the ephemeral at "The Archdruid Report".

Individual(ized) Human Nature

Bill Vallicella has an interesting post summarizing an inconsistent tetrad whose implications he has been studying:

a. A person is a (primary) substance of a rational nature. (Boethian definition)
b. There is only one person in Christ, the Word, the Second Person of the Trinity. (Rejection of the heresy of Nestorius, according to which in Christ there are two persons in two natures rather than one person in two natures, as orthodoxy maintains.)
c. The individual(ized) human nature of Christ is a primary substance of a rational nature.
d. Every (primary) substance is its own supposit, which implies that every substance of a rational nature has its own personhood.

I think (c), in particular, requires more work. I am a primary substance of a rational nature, namely, human; but we would not say that my human nature (considered as individualized or not) is a primary substance of rational nature, since it is just what I share with other human beings precisely as human. My human nature is by definition not a primary substance; we aren't talking about primary substances when talking about natures in this way.

If, on the other hand, we take it as a roundabout way of saying 'I am a primary substance of rational nature', and thus take the phrase to mean something like 'the individual of human nature is a primary substance of a rational nature', this becomes true but problematic for treating the tetrad as a inconsistent. Statement (c) is then equivalent to "Christ is a primary substance of human nature, which is a rational nature"; this creates no obvious inconsistency, since we already know from (b) that Christ is a primary substance of rational nature, and combined with the others it merely implies that there is one supposit of Christ, who is the Word and has human nature. (It's not essential here to say anything about supposits; for the purpose in this post, in which it plays no role, we can just treat 'supposit' as a synonym for 'subject', which, despite some differences, is the closest ordinary English word.)

The reason why one would try to put it in terms of individual(ized) human nature is clear enough: what would make the inconsistency would be to establish that the having of a human nature requires having its own supposit. But it is impossible to establish this from human nature considered on its own, so the idea is to try to get out of human nature as individual(ized). However, human nature even as individual(ized) is no more a primary substance than unindividual(ized) human nature; rather, the individual of human nature, that individual thing which has human nature, is a primary substance. The latter breaks the attempt to get a supposit or person specifically for the human nature of Christ, however.

Poem a Day 4

Vehementia Delectationis

More close than clothes or vestment sewn to please,
a film so near that pain is left outside,
a garment wrapped around of scented breeze,
we wear this cloak that self and soul may hide
from all their cares, and, safely sealed inside,
we, happy, wait, as infant held in womb,
as corpse, protected, rotting, laid in tomb.

Ambassador, Part II

This is the second part of a short story draft. Part I.

Had I had any sense whatsoever, I would have 'come down' with a terrible illness the moment I was invited to the Second Consul's office. Nothing good could come of such an invitation. But I suppose I took it as a sign the ice was thawing, so I walked into the office as innocent as a lamb gamboling by the slaughterhouse. I do not know how long I could have held it off in any case; a consul can only be put off so long before soldiers come by to haul you in.

"How is your father?" he asked, with a big smile. Both the question and the smile should also have set alarms ringing.

"He is doing quite well," I replied. "As active as ever. He is away with my brother looking into buying a seaside villa. The rents have been excellent the past few years."

"That is good," he said. "Would you like a drink?"

In general, you should never take a drink from someone who almost certainly favors your family's enemies, but you should also never refuse an offer of a drink from a consul. Caught between two political truths, I took the drink with thanks.

"I hope you will allow me to be frank," he said, after we had shared empty comments about the quality of the oak-aged brandy. "Your family's political fortunes have not exactly been at their highest in past years. I have always felt the situation to be regrettable, but the shifting political winds have never blown quite right for me to do anything about it. And I am not sure that they do so now. But necessity may accomplish what diplomacy cannot. An ambassadorial position has recently come open, one that can only be filled by someone of highest senatorial pedigree. It may be the route to restoring your family's political position. It is a politically sensitive position, and I do not claim that it would be easy in every way, but things are in motion that if properly kept in motion would ensure the finest political laurels."

It was this that in fact set off my alarms. I started running through all the ambassadorial positions that I knew were open, wondering what edge-of-everything hole in the wall they were going to try to stuff me, and thinking through the excuses that might get me out of them. The trouble is that there are very few excuses that you can give a consul to his face. I confess that part of my mind also began trying to figure out what my father could have possibly done that I wouldn't know about and yet could lead the Second Consul to think that he could move directly rather than through a senatorial committee; consuls normally went through great lengths to preserve the public appearance of neutrality.

I sipped my brandy, trying to sort this all out in my head. "What is the position?" I finally asked, unable to come to any likely possibilities on my own.

"The Matriarchate of Syan."

I choked on my brandy. It was worse than I had thought. Syan is where you send enemies whose careers you no longer need to destroy. It took me a while to quit coughing.

After I had recovered, I sighed. "I take it that the position was artificially rather than naturally opened."

"Officially it was a natural opening. Unofficially, he was certainly poisoned; we think he got sloppy and the Matriarch got wind of what he was doing."

"And we are just letting the Matriarchate get away with it."

"We would have to be in a position to do otherwise. You know how touchy they are; and we are in no shape to go to war over an assassination they can just deny. We could never get our allies to give money or troops for that."

He put down his snifter. "Look," he said. "I know you exactly what you are thinking. And normally you would be right. Your predecessor was stuffed into the position to keep him safely out of the way until precisely something like this would happen, or until he was too old to be useful. And in Syan it's a rare ambassador who grows old. But he was more cunning than his enemies expected, and he was somehow able to use the position to leverage some important concession from the Five Cities. Concessions we need. The Republic is planning to move against Syan. The deal is that we get the concessions by not intervening, at least until matters are in hand, beyond providing some minor cover. But we need someone there to reduce the chance that they will try to renege on the deal. The Matriarch knows us nearly as well as we do; she knows that it is a position given to members of disgraced high-level families; sending someone from a minor family would be taken as an insult, and to send someone from a family on the upswing would make her suspicious. We need a trustworthy black sheep. Even people who hate your family concede that you are, one and all, good citizens of the Empire, and you were deemed the least risky of your family." He spread his hands. "Such is politics; we are all puppets held by the strings of the very webs we weave."

"I take it, then, that there is no room for me to turn down this offer."

"Let us simply say that it is your duty as an Imperial citizen, and, as I said, whatever others may think of your family, nobody impugns your sense of duty." Which in senatorial circles is a polite way of telling you to shut up and just accept that you have no alternative.

And so I was packed off on the next transport to Syan.

to be continued