League Earth with Heaven

The Divine Law
by Sir Aubrey de Vere

The natural Law, howe'er remote, obscure
Of origin, lies patent to the eye
Of Reason; whence astute Philosophy
From shrewd induction points to issues sure:
The laws of men but for a time endure;
And vary, as their plastic frame we spy
Through shifting glasses of expediency—
The Laws of God, immaculately pure,
Unalterably firm, whose sanctions claim
Affinity with naught of Earth, these laws
Have their deep root in Faith, in Hope their aim,
In Mystery their birth, in Love their cause;
League Earth with Heaven; and, knowing how to bind
Angels with Power, have care for human kind.

Dashed Off II

x is possible to y // x is at least some of y // x is part of y

analogical inference as a background for search; search as a background for proof

problem, end, means objectives, means executions, consolidation

rhetoric as the study of reasoning under external constraint -- time, audience predisposition, media limitations, uncertainties, need for practical action

the Mencius as a study of the existence, extension, and cultivation of common good

heart of compassion -- resisting suffering in others
heart of shame -- resisting being inferior rather than equal to others
heart of courtesy & modesty -- resisting any receiving or taking without merit or desert
heart of right & wrong -- resisting any doing of what is disapprovable

the Mencian account of the heart as a moral sense theory

"The things which are the simplest so long as they are undisputed invariably become the subtlest when once they are disputed." Chesterton

The cleverest proofs are those that open up ways for unclever people to solve problems correctly.

the problem of the novel: finding the pure case without losing the concrete expression

evidence as vectorial

the victory of rational sensibility as essential to the good life

affine geometry & logical quantifiers

Southwell's "Look Home" and mythopoeia

Edwards & Wilberforce on religious affections

Torah establishes and protects itself as a family tradition.

the public sphere as a religious structure

sacramental character as grounding an office of guardianship of Tradition

deus ex machina as plot vs. deus ex machina as spectacle

of any field of human life, to ask, "What will set this in good order?"
-> requires prior question, "What order is found here?"

undesigned coincidences as an argument against dissimulation and mistake

debugging & defective causes

quasi-final & quasi-material causes in mathematics -- these are, properly, formal, but they are formalities in some way analogous to ends or material (mappings, elements, etc.)
-> it is also the case that while math as such is formal, our mathematical work has genuine final and material causes.

possibility of memory as integral to consent

Experiments are instrumental causes.

conflicts of interest & testimonial evidence

sacramental character as form of witness

testimony : sign :: witness : image

just wage as essential to limiting government interventions and manipulations
The just wage is the wage in a just market as established by prudent contracts.

aligning incentives with virtuous activity as the major work of political governance

Rightly ordered loves require properly founded hopes.

preparing the public mind by familiarizing imaginations

priests as caretakers of signs
Reverential attitudes are expressed in signs and symbols.

apostolic succession as an ongoing work of the Holy Spirit

Human liberty always exists within a system of signs.

indicative vs. optative moods of worship

The Church Fathers sometimes teach by definite articulation and sometimes by general atmosphere.

Hume's passions as practical presumptions
pride & humility : the self
love & hatred : other people
joy & sorrow : the probable or certain
fear & hope : the uncertain
desire & aversion : good and bad
will : possibility of achievement

"The mind by an original instinct tends to unite itself with the good, and to avoid the evil, tho' they be conceived merely in idea, and be consider'd as to exist in any future period of time." Hume T 2.3.9.2

human understanding as like recollection of Beatific Vision, but actually anticipatory

Hume's account of direct passions is a structure of human action; indirect passions are a context of human action.

Societies achieve unity through salient acts of harmony.

The sacrament of matrimony is not something that takes place only in secret chambers of the soul but in public, before each other and the Church.

Esther as a type of the Church when favored by the state; Judith as type of the Church when dealing solely with foes
Ruth as a type of the Gentile Church

?: The scope of action of a material object is constrained by the tendency of its optimal transmission.

sexual perversions: through deceit, through violence, through indignity, through excess

Not to have reason is to be such as to be able to belong to another.

Aesthetics is normative in a different way from the way ethics is normative. It is common good that makes the difference. This is a principle of practical reason derived from the first: The beautiful is to be sought, done, and made; the ugly to be avoided. This is not an obligation but merely a principle guiding practical reasonableness. The reason it is not obligatory is precisely that it does not bring in the idea of common good or care for a community.

In the creation of Man God makes man and woman in His image and gives them dominion; he also makes them fit mates for each other and sets them to care for the garden, set apart for them, in which there is the tree of life. Because they sin, he exiles them from the garden and guards it with the angel that they may never return, but clothes them in mercy. In the re-creation, God creates man and woman in His image (Baptism) and gives them dominion (Confirmation). He makes them fit mates caring for the garden (Matrimony) and seals the garden, set apart for them, by angels (Orders; cp. Revelation); in this garden is found the tree of life (Eucharist). Because they sin, he provides a means to return (Reconciliation) and out of his mercy clothes them with glory (Unction).

sacrament applied to reason -> liturgical commonwealth & temporal power
sacrament in itself -> spiritual power

"Why is not the principle of generation atheistic, if that of development is?" Newman to J Walker 22 May 1868, on evolutionary theory

the convergence of analogies as a key to classification

Even nonsacramental marriages are consecrations; marriage is eminently a practice of setting-apart.

The form of a sacrament is meaning expressed in sensible sign, and the matter is sensible sign with meaning appropriate to form.

the Church itself as divine ordinance

Penalties and benefits bestowed by the masses are necessarily haphazard.

humor as structured by ethos, logos, & pathos

Absolutely to separate human learning from Christian doctrine is to show contempt for God's providential work in human society.

"What is an Axiom at one stage of our knowledge is often anything but an Axiom at an earlier stage." Charles Dodgson

In every sacrament we find God as principle, sign as expression, and grace as gift given from God through sign.

creation : apostles :: providence : bishops

Those who repent nothing grow never.

Minor ideas when held widely, with whatever diverse or varying commitment, have major effects on the course of society.

Tradition connects us both to the dead and to the unborn.

the intimate connection of play and beauty

Human beings experience nothing without experiencing it as involving tendencies.

the tendencies implicit even in Hume: galley effect, determination of mind to pass between causes & effects, propensity to unite experiences into one, etc.
-> Hume has no way to guarantee that they are purely in the mind, because of his complicated issues with perception/object distinction

the power, of promises kept, to ennoble

All argument is at least fragmentary story.

chesed : light; gevurah : division of waters; tiferet : water, land, plants; netzach : signs in heaven; hod : birds, sea-creatures; yesod : man; malkhut : sabbath

Indulgences indicate that we do not merely engage in penitential practice in isolated ways but as a community and on prior foundations.
indulgences as addressing the problem of how to maintain the faith of martyrs and confessors under conditions in which martyrdom and confessorship are unlikely
indulgences as a system of forensic justification, although not solely such
the merits of the saints as the medium by which the merits of Christ are applied
reflection on purgatory as itself penitential practice

sacramentalia and the poetics of expressing the sacramental sign

All of the old pre-Socratic conceptions of matter have counterparts in political philosophy.

Platonic recollection "as the awakening or resuscitation of the consciousness of the divine image in our souls" (Schlegel)

two primary functions of useful scholarship: collection of dispersed evidence, interesting solutions to particular problems

Christian power in the world as the power of the still, small voice

system, deduction, model, procedure
analogy, invention, symbol, story
conceptual unity, articulation, intuition, form of coherence
action, prudential assessment, plan, character

Pragmatic approaches have an inherently conservative aspect.

PSalm 78 and tradition

The Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic in part as witnessing to what is unifying, universal, sent from God, and holy.

private revelations as suggestive indications capable of being raised to probabilities by appropriate confirmations

The obedience of love finds new ways to obey.

Festivity enters prudential practice through gratitude and hope.

the Symposium as the philosophical counterpart of a satyr play

Xenophon does more than Plato to emphasize the importance of the memory of Socrates.

"nothing forced can ever be beautiful" (Xenophon)

filial piety toward the Church Fathers and the Apostles

Transforming society requires a good grasp of its teleologies.

The modern impulse is to take every fruitful good and reduce it to subjective satisfaction by rendering it sterile.

A marriage has its own sort of entelecheia.

the heart of society: comradeships of understanding and love

deus ex machina as a natural form of anagnorisis

Means and Ends

Examinations, no less than Lectures, are to be considered as means of Education. Since the proximate aim of Lecturers often is to prepare students for undergoing an examination, it is sometimes imagined that Lectures are means to Examinations as ends. But, in fact, Lectures and Examinations are alike means to a common end. The knowledge which, in such examinations as we have to speak of, the student brings out of his acquisitions, he is required to produce, in order that he may be induced to acquire it. Whatever honour or profit may be the prize of examinations, in a course of Education, the honour and the profit are not the ultimate objects of the system. They are instruments which have it for their purpose to make men give their attentions to those studies of which the educational course consists. In the student's individual purposes, it may be the object of study to obtain prizes; but in the purpose of the educational legislator, it is the object of prizes to promote study; and the prizes which he proposes, and the conditions to which he subjects them, are regulated by his views as to what the best course of study is.

William Whewell, Of a Liberal Education in General, pp. 132-133.

Subordination to Fire

Since it's Aquinas day, let's look at Aquinas on a controversial issue, one on which he is often misread: Hell. Kelly James Clark summarizing Aquinas on hell (PDF):

Aquinas rejects the notion that the damned are tormented solely by fire, arguing that a variety of tortures will be employed. The term ‘fire’ is prevalent in scripture to describe the intensity of the pain, not the specificity of the torture. Eternal suffering, likened to the horror of being burned, is inflicted by torment ‘in many ways and from many sources’ and without respite. Indeed, hell will be so arranged ‘as to be adapted to the utmost unhappiness of the damned,’ and there will be, he argues, just enough light to perceive ‘those things which are capable of tormenting the soul.’ (Summa Theologica Suppl. Q. 97, Art. 5) One will, for example, see the corporeal fires and smell their stench as they burn one’s corporeal body. This never ending fire, Aquinas believes, is sustained not by fuel but by the very breath of God.

One of the difficulties of talking about the medieval notion of hell is that all the most obvious words for talking about hell in English are filtered through Calvinism, first, and, beyond this, associated with fire-and-brimstone preaching and comic depictions of hell. We have to be careful about the assumptions we bring into the discussion. For instance, we have to be careful when Aquinas says something like, 'That fire will be of the greatest heat'; 'heat', like 'fire', is a technical term in medieval thought, and the term 'heat' indicates the property of very intense activity, not necessarily heat of the sort that feels hot. Or, another example, when medieval theologians talk about the 'suffering', passio, of hell or purgatory, they mean the state of undergoing the action of an external agent, not intense pain; souls in hell or purgatory are dominated by outside forces in ways that souls in heaven are not; that was, incidentally, what 'suffering' in English originally meant, and still occasionally means in various older expressions. I have found that people have difficulty grasping these kinds of shifts. And all the talk of fire is not arbitrary. Aquinas notes that Jesus himself talks about the fire of hell (Matthew 25:41); he argues that there are insuperable difficulties with taking this fire to be purely metaphorical, however different it may have to be, or merely imagined. So the question becomes: What is actually going on in the penalty of fire?

(There is another issue we have to be careful with. Clark is basically flipping through the Supplementum in his summary above. The Supplementum, however, is not strictly by Aquinas, although it sort of is. The Summa was never finished. It stops in the middle of a topic in Part III. The Supplement was made to complete the course of topics in the Summa; it is a digest of questions and answers drawn primarily from Aquinas's Commentary on the Sentences by someone other than St. Thomas himself. This creates a number of issues. Obviously there are the problems arisign from the fact that the condensation of one work by someone other than the author might sometimes be potentially misleading as to the author's actual view. Also, the Sentences Commentary is Aquinas's earliest work; it was chosen as the source of the Supplement not because it contains the final views of Aquinas on any subject but because it is quite comprehensive in the topics it covers. For instance, the question on the sacrament of matrimony in the Supplement is certainly not in every respect what Aquinas would have written had he ever written it, because Aquinas's views on sacramental theology changed quite a bit between the beginning of his career and the end, and we are missing what would have been the most important element of Aquinas's discussion -- how, exactly, he would have applied the instrumental-cause account of the sacraments to matrimony. The discussion of hell in the Supplement, in short, is a condensed digest of the very earliest discussion of hell we have from Aquinas, made by someone other than Aquinas, and not necessarily with any regard for Aquinas's mature views, whatever they might have been. There are in fact points in the sections on hell, like the discussion of the demerits of hell, where we have good reason from other passages in the actual Summa to think that Aquinas would have answered the question differently than what we get in the Supplement. But this is not hugely important for this particular topic, as far as I can see. I will in what follows chiefly stick to what we find in the Supplement.)

The penalty of fire in hell in Aquinas's view is not a torment of destruction -- the damned are incorruptible. They don't burn in our usual sense, because burning is destruction by fire, and they are indestructible. Aquinas is very clear about this. He actually has some difficulty handling the weeping attributed to the damned because of it -- crying as we think of it requires destruction and generation, and there is no destruction or generation in the age to come. (He holds that when we say they weep, we mean that they have some of the physical turmoil we associate with weeping, not that they cry tears.) So the damned cannot be physically harmed by the fire. What is more, the fire Aquinas has in mind is not what we think of as fire. It is not fire in the sense that immediately pops into mind. I've noted before that we tend not to grasp what medieval thinkers are talking about when they talk about the elements, and it's too long to go into with proper precision here. But a brief, crude summary: pure elemental fire is that in the world which at the most fundamental level tends to act vehemently on other things and resist change by its environment. (What we think of as fire is a mix of elements that has some preponderance of elemental fire over the other elements.) It is the most active thing in the physical universe, and the thing that is hardest to turn aside.

Aquinas says he doesn't know exactly know what the fire will be, materially speaking, only that it will be genuinely classifiable as fire, in medieval terms, whatever strange properties it might have. If it's some particular form of pure elemental fire, then it's just a variety of our kind of fire; but he also allows the possibility that it could be some strange kind of fire capable of subsisting without transformation in something other than itself. In any case, it's misleading to say, "This never ending fire, Aquinas believes, is sustained not by fuel but by the very breath of God." What Aquinas actually says is that, given that it is never-ending fire, it cannot be sustained by fuel but must be such that it does not need to be sustained, just being inexhaustible by nature; the point is that it is misleading to compare it to fire in our sense. Fire in our sense (and again, 'our sense' here is the medieval sense) has to be introduced into a body by elemental transformations, and to keep it in a body requires continual elemental transformations. But the fire of hell, being never-ending fire in an incorruptible body, can't be sustained by continual elemental transformations; it just has to be never-ending by the nature God gave it. The "breath of the Lord" is, of course, from the prophet Isaiah (30:33); Aquinas interprets this to mean that the fire in question was originally made by God, not that God's breath is a continual blast furnace, as Clark's overly condensed summary makes it sound.

What the fire of hell does is not harm or destroy but constrain. Since it is hyperactive and cannot be turned aside, the damned just have to go along with what it does whether they want to do so or not. The torment of hell is in Aquinas's first and foremost a penalty for the will. To be punished for being damned is to be placed in a universe that refuses to let you do what you want. To be punished for being damned is to be subordinated to other things, things less noble than you are, like mere fire, that nonetheless at least behave as they should. This is actually one of the reasons why medieval thinkers tended to be more impressed by the image of fire as a punishment for the damned than other images: the damned fail to act as they should, so they are punished by means of something lower than them that consistently acts as it is supposed to, even when other things try to prevent it. (Actually, that's one reason why the fires of purgatory also struck the medieval imagination: the souls of purgatory, on their way to heaven, endure a penalty of fire, as well, and with similar symbolic appropriateness: they wavered due to their environment, and pure fire is unwavering. The patient souls of purgatory have to learn to be as pure and unwavering in the goodness of their nature as fire is pure and unwavering in the goodness of its own.) There is also, in Aquinas's view, a bodily penalty, but it is not burning-and-stinking, both which are inconsistent with the fact that the body of the damned is incorruptible, but 'commotion', that is some kind of physical activity deriving from the action of fire in constraining the will.

All of this obviously depends on medieval physics in various ways; Aquinas is very careful to make the assumptions that would have been most secure, and even then only follows them to the extent that is strictly required, and explicitly marks a number of things as simply unknown, but, of course, no amount of care in the use of the medieval theory of the elements could completely survive the (at the time) unforeseeable collapse of the medieval theory of the elements, just as it is impossible that an argument or position depending on the most secure claims about gravity we have could remain completely intact if it turned out five hundred years down the road that gravity is actually something radically different from anything we were taking it to be. What Aquinas is doing is taking Jesus seriously when he says 'fire' and asking what fire is that would make it suitable for Jesus to mention it in this context. (And it is worth keeping in mind that the same issues that come with interpreting Aquinas when he talks about fire come up when interpreting Jesus when he talks about it; just because Jesus says 'fire' does not mean that he is drawing on the same assumptions about what fire is that we are. In fact, we can pretty much guarantee that he is not. This is not a mere question of whether the term should be taken literally or metaphorically; what counts as taking fire-terms literally has itself changed over the past two millenia.)

Whether Aquinas's actual view would still, in Clark's view, be suitable to Clark's purpose -- which is to argue that the medieval conception of hell is inconsistent with the goodness of God -- I don't know. But it is an error to think of it as a "medieval torture chamber view of hell", as Clark does.

Pulchritudo Spiritualis

Today is the memorial of St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church. Since Lent is rapidly approaching, here is a bit from his discussion of how the virtue of temperance is concerned with the beautiful:

As may be gathered from the words of Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv), beauty or comeliness results from the concurrence of clarity and due proportion. For he states that God is said to be beautiful, as being "the cause of the harmony and clarity of the universe." Hence the beauty of the body consists in a man having his bodily limbs well proportioned, together with a certain clarity of color. On like manner spiritual beauty consists in a man's conduct or actions being well proportioned in respect of the spiritual clarity of reason. Now this is what is meant by honesty, which we have stated (1) to be the same as virtue; and it is virtue that moderates according to reason all that is connected with man. Wherefore "honesty is the same as spiritual beauty." Hence Augustine says (Q83, qu. 30): "By honesty I mean intelligible beauty, which we properly designate as spiritual," and further on he adds that "many things are beautiful to the eye, which it would be hardly proper to call honest."

The word translated here (very unsatisfactorily) as 'honesty', honestas, actually means the opposite of the shameful, the sort of thing one approves or honors when one sees it, and so would be better translated by words related to 'honor'. Honestas is being honorable. Thus Aquinas's argument is that honorableness is a spiritual beauty recognized by the mind. The term can just be a synonym for 'virtue', but it is especially associated with the virtue of temperance, and can be used to indicate one of the fundamental components of temperance: being the kind of person to treat spiritual and intelligible beauty as more important than physical pleasures.

A Poem Draft

Spider

Ah, Arachne!
Punishment was the fate
you chose in challenging the gods.
Not vengeful is Athena,
no, nor her penalty.

How endless are the pains
the gods may pour on men,
but you, O Arachne,
she gave an honor,
that inevitable punishment
should also be a prize of fame,
that through the endless ages
your work should be acclaimed.
Thus your penalty was softened,
your skill by goddess recognized.
Not vengeful is Athena,
no, nor her penalty.

[ADDED LATER: Corrected the typo 'Ariadne' for Arachne, which I should certainly have caught!]

La Grande Madre Suor

It is altogether difficult for us, in our time, to form an idea of how bold Angela's plan was....

Angela Merici was clear as to her own task: she was to work for the renewal of religious life at home, among the children, and in the first place she was to influence the girls who in due time would build up new homes and be the mothers of the next generation. And above all her Company was to try to come in contact with that section of the people who were unable or disinclined to attend to their children's schooling, especially that of their little daughters.

[Sigrid Undset, Stages on the Road, Ave Maria Press (Notre Dame, IN: 2012) pp. 88, 89.]

Today is the memorial of St. Angela of Merici, Virgin. Born in 1474 in Italy, she at some point had a vision of an association of women devoted to the religious training of young girls. This would lead to the eventual foundation of the Company of St. Ursula in 1535. The Company was quite a revolutionary idea. That St. Angela knew this is right there in the name. St. Ursula was a patron saint of education, particularly for young women, but she was also semi-legendary British princess who, according to the most popular legend, was sent by her father to be married, attended by 11000 virgins. As Ursula did not want to be married, she instead spent the time sailing around with a little fleet of eleven ships for three years, and then decided that she needed to go on pilgrimage from Rome to Cologne before actually settling down to marry. (The whole army of women was, according to the same legend, martyred by the Huns in Cologne when the chieftain tried to marry Ursula and she decided that she would pass on that marriage, too.) The basic idea of the Company of St. Ursula was remarkable for its day: instead of religious women entering a convent for contemplation, the Company would be consecrated women going out into the world, an army of women fighting the degeneration of family life by making sure that young girls were educated. It was new idea.

Too new for the day, perhaps. The looseness of medieval life could perhaps have room for such a thing, at least on a small scale, but the age was turning early modern, and thus more rigidly structured. While Angela was alive, the Company was largely protected by her administrative skill and good reputation among the authorities; but after her death, the Company became less tightly organized and the authorities began to rein in this project of independent women in active ministry in society at large. Part of this, it should be said, was also general policy; the Church was becoming more centralized, and more reforming in character, and in an attempt to do something about crazier religious movements had begun more and more to enforce enclosure. The Company of Ursula fell victim to this policy and eventual became more conventional conventuals, although they continued to run schools for girls. It wasn't until the twentieth century that the idea began to have a resurgence, under the label 'secular institute', although the Ursulines had kept the memory, at least alive. The Ursulines today now have two branches -- the Order of St. Ursula, which is the monastic order, and the Angelines or Company of St. Ursula, which is the federated system of secular institutes that began to be formed in the 1950s or so on the original model suggested by St. Angela.

In 1934, Sigrid Undset ended her essay on St. Angela Merici with a recognition that her story had not yet reached its end:

And there are still germs in the ideas of St. Angela Merici whcih have not reached development; it may yet be that la grande madre suor Angela will give life to new families within the great home of the Church, and new generations will arise and call her blessed. [p. 103]