The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (Volume I)

Introduction

Opening Passage:

In the name of Allah, the Compassionating, the Compassionate! Praise be to Allah, The Beneficent King, The Creator of the Universe, Lord of the Three Worlds, Who set up The Firmament without Pillars in its Stead and Who stretched out the Earth even as a Bed; and Grace, and Prayer-Blessing be upon Our Lord Mohammed, Lord of Apostolic Men, and upon His Family and Companion-Train; Prayer and Blessings Enduring and Grace Which unto The Day of Doom shall Remain. Amen! O Thou of The Three Worlds Sovereign!

And afterwards. Verily the works and words of those gone before us have become instances and examples to men of our modern day, that folk may view what admonishing chances befel other folk and may therefrom take warning; and that they may peruse the annals of antique peoples and all that hath betided them, and be thereby ruled and restrained:--Praise, therefore be to Him who hath made the histories of the Past an admonition unto the Present! Now of such instances are the tales called "A Thousand Nights and a Night," together with their far-famed legends and wonders.

Summary: The Arabian Nights is a very, very complicated story about sex. The frame narrative is precisely about this. King Shahryar and his brother Shah Zaman, though extraordinarily powerful men, both discover that their wives are cheating on them, and in the most shameful sort of way. Devastated, they set out to discover if anyone else has been so cuckolded. They soon discover a woman married to a Jinni (genie), who uses the threat of her dangerous husband to force men to have sex with her. Astounded at the discovery that you can have all the power of a Jinni and still be betrayed by a woman, King Shahryar returns to his seraglio to kill all the concubines and their slaves, and makes a very fateful decision: Since there are no chaste and faithful women anywhere, he will marry a virgin each night and have her head cut off in the morning, thus eliminating forever any danger that he will ever be cheated on. This goes on for three years, and, needless to say, makes the king considerably less than popular with the people, and the Wazir is no longer able to find any maidens because anyone with a virgin daughter has fled the country. Well, almost everybody. The Wazir has two daughters, Shahrazad and Dunyazad, and while the King out of affection for the Wazir has exempted them from the search, Shahrazad has had about enough of this endless slaughter of virgins, and insists that she will stop it or die.

The psychological insight in Shahrazad's plan is quite impressive. It's not just the stories, although they are quite important. The basic format for each night is that the King and Shahrazad have sex, and then they will sleep; when they awake (it is very nearly universal in societies not ruled by electric lights to wake in the middle of the night), Dunyazad asks Sahrazad to tell a story, which she will do until she has to leave off. The king decides he wants to hear the rest of the story, or sometimes the story she briefly mentions as being even more interesting than the story she just told, and they start the cycle again. A thousand and one nights of sex and entertainment is enough to make any man merciful, no matter how paranoid he might be about women.

This first volume takes us to the 272nd night, so it's almost a year's worth of storytelling; the sections are not all equal because, for obvious reasons, Shahrazad cannot control how much time she has to tell the tale. The stories themselves are of varying length. Some of them are scarcely more than anecdotes. This volume has the longest of all the tales of the Arabian Nights, The Tale of King Omar bin al-Nu'uman and His Sons Sharrkan and Zau al-Makan, which is practically a book in itself, extending from the 45th night to the 145th night, and making up more than four hundred pages in my edition. It's an interesting experience reading it, since it is a chivalrous romance that is Muslim, not Christian.

Everyone bogs down sometimes in the Nights. Judging from the comments in his notes, Burton seems to have found the tale of the brother and sister in the Tale of King Omar very tedious. I didn't have a problem with it, although I thought it less interesting than the tale of Princess Abrizah that makes up a considerable portion of the beginning of the Tale of King Omar. But I bogged down myself in the Tale of Aziz and Azizah, which is also a sub-story in the Tale of King Omar. My favorite stories in this volume were the beast-fables (from the 146th night to the 152nd night), an assessment with which King Shahryar apparently agrees, since they are his first request, and the first tales to which he responds not just with curiosity but with enthusiasm. I also liked the Aladdin tale, The Tale of Ala al-Din Abu al-Shamat. That tale and the Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinni were the most familiar of the tales; I remember very simplified and cleaned-up versions of Aladdin and the talisman from when I was child, and the Fisherman and the Jinni will ring familiarly to anyone who has read Tim Powers's Declare.

The stories are very cynical. Men and women alike will betray you. Whatever Allah has written on your forehead will come to pass, no matter how much you attempt to evade it. No one can avoid their Lot, no matter their forethought. People die, are enslaved, are tortured, are imprisoned, are forced to flee. If you come across anyone showing visible religious devotion, you can be sure that they are out to destroy you. (This played to very interesting effect in the Tale of King Omar, in which the Christian witch Zat al-Dawahi is able over and over and over again to destroy even entire Muslim armies simply by turning their own religion against them, and gulling them all by an elaborate pretense of devotion.) This cynicism is perhaps one reason why Burton's edition has become the gold standard of all editions; the Nights need an editor and commentator as cynical as they are.

But we are not through it all yet, by any means, and we know that the frame narrative will end happily enough.

Favorite Passage:

Now when the Fisherman saw the Ifrit his side muscles quivered, his teeth chattered, his spittle dried up and he became blind about what to do. Upon this the Ifrit looked at him and cried, "There is no god but the God, and Sulayman is the prophet of God"; presently adding, "O Apostle of Allah, slay me not; never again will I gainsay thee in word nor sin against thee in deed." Quoth the Fisherman, "O Mérid, diddest thou say, Sulayman the Apostle of Allah; and Sulauman is dead some thousand and eight hundred years ago, and we are now in the last days of the world!..."

There is something just perfect about this detail in the story of the Fisherman and the Jinni, in which a Fisherman pulls a jar with a genie out of the sea and the genie, having been stuck at the bottom of the sea for hundreds of years, is so out of date that his affirmation of Islam is, "There is no God but God, and Solomon is His Prophet!" It tickles me. And it's made even better by the fisherman's "Wait, what?" reaction.

Because this is just the first volume of a three-volume edition that I will (eventually!) be completing, I will only do the usual 'Recommendation' section at the end for all three volumes.

Robert Hugh Benson's Fiction

Catholic World Report has a good article on the fiction of Robert Hugh Benson. I haven't read all of it, by any means, but I have read Lord of the World, The Dawn of All, The Necromancers, By What Authority?, and Come Rack! Come Rope! In overall terms, Lord of the World and Come Rack! Come Rope! are the best of those, although I think I liked the characterization in By What Authority? better than in Come Rack! Come Rope! (Mary Corbet, the flippant and gaudy lady-in-waiting who turns out to have more sense in her head, and more goodness in her heart, than almost everyone else around her, was especially good).

The description given in the article of The Dawn of All is somewhat misleading, since it doesn't at all convey the essential point of the story, which is that victory in the world does not really change anything about the task of the Christian. Be the victory ever so great -- and in The Dawn of All it is taken to the very farthest limit -- the Christian faith is still the faith of martyrs, and if your faith does not involve a willingness to die for Christ, it is not the faith. That the Christian faith is the faith of martyrs seems actually to be a common theme throughout Benson's work.

Half Loving-Kindliness and Half Disdain

To My Cat
by Rosamund Marriott Watson

Half loving-kindliness and half disdain,
Thou contest to my call serenely suave,
With humming speech and gracious gestures grave,
In salutation courtly and urbane;
Yet must I humble me thy grace to gain,
For wiles may win thee though no arts enslave,
And nowhere gladly thou abidest save
Where naught disturbs the concord of thy reign.

Sphinx of my quiet hearth! who deign’st to dwell
Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease,
Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses;
That men forget dost thou remember well,
Beholden still in blinking reveries
With sombre, sea-green gaze inscrutable.

Thursday Virtue: Patience

Cicero in passing in the De Inventione Book II tells us that there are four "parts" of fortitude: magnificence, magnanimity, patience, and perseverance. Patience, he tells us, is "voluntary and sustained endurance, for the sake of what is honourable or advantageous, of difficult and painful labors".

Beyond that passing reference, which will end up being extraordinarily influential, there are few serious discussions of patience over the centuries. One of the important exceptions is De Patientia a treatise attributed to Augustine on the subject. Augustine, if it really is him (scholars have wavered back and forth on the subject), notes that 'patience' is related to the word for suffering, and defines it as "that by which we tolerate evil things with an even mind, that we may not with a mind uneven desert good things, through which we may arrive at better." The patient sufferer finds his suffering lighter than the impatient one, while patience itself contributes to additional goods that would never arise for the impatient. It is undertaken for the sake of good, and thus is not merely suffering in order to suffer. Because patience by its nature is concerned with the mental life, the suffering it deals with need not be physical, but could be anything unpleasant that would goad to wrongdoing. He then goes on to say that it depends on charity and thus cannot be attained by human will alone.

When Thomas Aquinas discusses the virtue of fortitude, he draws on Cicero, as he often does for the others, in order to determine its potential parts -- a potential part being a secondary virtue associated with it, a sort of satellite virtue. Thus the potential parts of fortitude are directly from Cicero's list: magnanimity, magnificence, patience, and perseverance. He develops this idea with respect to patience by combining Cicero's basic idea with much of the argument from the Augustinian De Patientia (2-2.136). Accepting the Augustinian definition of patience, he argues that it is necessarily a lesser virtue than a number of other virtues, including fortitude and temperance, because these virtues deal with greater obstacles to virtue than even hardship and suffering -- death and danger of death in the case of fortitude and pleasures of touch in the case of temperance.

Because the Augustinian treatise discussed whether it is possible to have patience in the proper sense without divine help, Aquinas also considers the question. And he concludes unequivocally that Augustine is right: patience does what it does out of love for good, and the love for good that is sufficient for the kinds of suffering patience must bear must be for a good so great any such suffering is worth it. But suffering is itself a deprivation of good, so the good loved in patience must be a good so great that any ordinary good is inferior to it. Patience, then, does indeed seem to derive from charity, and thus is impossible without grace. It is true that the inclination of reason to good could in principle be great enough, but Aquinas argues that as we actually find it it is always intermixed with the false craving of concupiscence. True patience requires a purity of love that reason alone cannot guarantee. This is not to deny, of course, that someone might endure great suffering for a defective good that he craves; but this kind of endurance of hardship necessarily inherits the defectiveness of the good craved, and thus in any such case would fall short of patience itself.

While Aquinas, following Cicero, places patience as a potential part of fortitude, he does explicitly argue that it has some similarity with temperance. Patience is very much concerned with desires in a way that fortitude is not, for instance, which links it to temperance. In addition, if we understood 'patience' in a very specific sense as concerned with the dangers of death, we could consider it an integral part of fortitude, i.e., an essential condition required for fortitude, rather than a potential part -- the potential part is the kind of patience is more generic, in that it is just concerned with hardship in general rather than with ultimate hardship in particular. He also distinguishes it from the virtue of longanimity; like patience, longanimity is a virtue of endurance, but it is an endurance directed to reaching a good that takes work to reach, and thus it is not particularly concerned with evils or hardships themselves, although the two can be linked insofar as the difficulty of attaining the good could cause grief, and thus suffering. In this sense, one could say that patience involves a sort of constancy combined with longanimity.

Aquinas's synthesis would be quite influential; it is found summarized without attribution, for instance, in Henry More's An Account of Virtue (1701), although parts of More's account of patience, which he regards as a more basic virtue than fortitude, are his own. While the details are not always preserved, 'patience' taken in such a way as at least to suggest a very high standard seems to last until quite late, being easily found even in the early twentieth century. It does not seem to be extant at all anymore -- when we talk about 'patience' it is often more a matter of a particular kind of social etiquette than the sort of everything-for-good devotion that the word once meant. I'm not sure why there is this gap, but my rough sense is that discussion of patience as a virtue in its own right fades a bit through the twentieth century, leaving the moral understanding of the term entirely in the hands of everyday, colloquial conversation.

Sui Juris Churches Index

The full index for all the posts on sui juris churches follows. The primary ordering principles were just time and ignorance, so nothing much should be made of the order. I knew some of them -- Armenian, Chaldean, Bulgarian, and Latin -- would have to be put off to a point when I had a bit more time than I had in Spring term, due to the complexity of their history and the subsequent difficulty of condensing it to a brief summary. Some of them I already knew quite a bit about, like the Maronite, some I knew a little, but only a little about, and others, like the Slovak, Albanian, and Croatian, I knew nothing whatsoever about before starting the project, thus requiring more research. I suppose I also tried to spread out the Byzantine Rite churches a bit; since they are more than half of the particular churches, I broke them up.

Going through them all was an interesting experience, and I learned quite a bit from it. It made very clear just how awful a thing twentieth-century Communism was; when you look at the history of the Eastern churches, you run into just terrible things, over and over again, that came about due to the Soviets or their satellite governments. Prior to the Soviet Union, the worst persecutors of Eastern Catholics were the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire, especially the latter, but they had nothing on the Communists. And the Communists were not only terrible; they were very effective. It was particularly difficult to read up on what Communists did to Eastern Catholics in Belarus and Albania.

It was also interesting seeing the variation in how visible the churches are online; some of them are very active and visible on the internet, while others are not. Interestingly, the most popular post in the entire series, by far, was that for the Russian Catholic Church; small though the church is, it seems to have a very active social media and internet presence!

Introduction: Sui Juris Churches

I. The Italo-Albanian Catholic Church
II. The Syriac Maronite Church of Antioch
III. The Melkite Catholic Church
IV. The Romanian Church United with Rome, Greek-Catholic
V. The Russian Greek Catholic Church
VI. The Coptic Catholic Church
VII. The Ruthenian Catholic Church
VIII. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church
IX. The Belarusian Greek Catholic Church
X. The Church of Malabar Syrians
XI. The Syro-Malankara Catholic Church
XII. The Greek Catholic Church in Slovakia
XIII. The Albanian Byzantine Catholic Church
XIV. The Ethiopian Catholic Church
XV. The Eritrean Catholic Church
XVI. The Hungarian Greek Catholic Church
XVII. The Armenian Catholic Church
XVIII. The Greek Byzantine Catholic Church
XIX. The Syriac Catholic Church
XX. The Chaldean Catholic Church
XXI. The Bulgarian Greek Catholic Church
XXII. The Byzantine Church of Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro
XXIII. The Macedonian Greek Catholic Church
XXIV. The Latin Church

Appendices

I. Ordinariates for the Faithful of the Eastern Rite
II. Patriarchal and Major Archiepiscopal Cathedrals of the Catholic Church

Sui Juris Churches, Appendix II: Patriarchal and Major Archiepiscopal Cathedrals of the Catholic Church

Armenian Catholic: The Cathedral of St. Elie and St. Gregory the Illuminator in Beirut, Lebanon. The order of the saints' names is not fixed, so one will occasionally find it referred to as the Cathedral of St. Gregory the Illuminator and St. Elie. Pope Pius XI paid for it to be built in 1928.

Chaldean Catholic: The Church of Mary, Mother of Sorrows in Baghdad, Iraq. It was constructed in 1898.

Coptic Catholic: The Cathedral of Our Lady of Egypt in Cairo, Egypt.

Latin Catholic: The Papal Archbasilica of the Most Holy Savior and Saints John the Baptist and the Evangelist in the Lateran, in Rome, Italy. A palace that came into possession of the popes in the fourth century, it had to be rebuilt in the ninth century and again in the fourteenth century, and it underwent a major reconstruction in the sixteenth century. The Feast of the Dedication of St. John Lateran is celebrated on November 9 in the Roman Calendar.

Maronite Catholic: The Cathedral of the Maronite Patriarchate, in Bkerké, Lebanon.

Melkite Greek Catholic: The Patriarchal Cathedral of Our Lady of the Dormition in Damascus, Syria.

Romanian Greek Catholic: The Greek-Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Blaj, Romania. It was constructed around 1756.

Syriac Catholic: The Cathedral of Our Lady of Annunciation in Beirut, Lebanon.

Syro-Malabar Catholic: St. Mary's Cathedral Basilica, in Kochi, Kerala, India.

Syro-Malankara Catholic: St. Mary's Syro-Malankara Cathedral in Trevandra, Kerala, India. It was constructed in 1965.

Ukrainian Greek Catholic: The Patriarchal Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Kiev, Ukraine. Construction on it was finished in 2011; before that time, the cathedral was in Lviv.

Online Sources and Resources:

http://www.gcatholic.org/

Music on My Mind

Il Volo, "Grande Amore". You can blame Enbrethiliel for it.