Edith Stein

Today is the feast of Edith Stein. While the exact circumstances of her death are unclear, our evidence is that Stein was gassed at Auschwitz on this day in 1942.

"What Does the Prayer Really Say?" has a dialogue between Ambrose and Augustine written by Stein.

ICS has the whole of Edith Stein's book, The Hidden Life, online.

Marianne Sawicki's translation of Stein's An Investigation into the State is also online.

Excerpts from her masterpiece of phenomenology, Finite and Eternal Being. I looked briefly at some of the early arguments in that work my first year blogging, and also quoted a passage on thinking with the heart and another on the Interior Castle later on.

Stein's Sprituality of the Christian Woman at EWTN.

John Sullivan's essay, Edith Stein's Humor and Compassion, gives many quotations from her.

Edith Stein's letter to Pope Pius XI about the anti-semitism of the Nazis.

Marianne Sawicki also has a good discussion of the four treatises Stein wrote while she was Husserl's assistant. It's also worth noting that she was one of the most important editorial hands contributing to Husserl's Ideen II (and is the one responsible for the current structure of the work and for some passages, although she was not the last one to work on it with Husserl). I've posted a short passage from "Sentient Causality" in which she criticizes Hume.

The Western Confucian on Nagasaki

The Western Confucian has a number of posts relevant to today's remembrance of Nagasaki:

The Saint of Urakami

Karl Keating on Nagasaki and Hiroshima

"My God, What Have We Done?" (the reflections of the chaplain who blessed the crews who dropped the bombs)

Two A-Bomb Museums

Ora pro nobis peccatoribus

Not Always on the Mount May We

Not always on the mount may we
rapt in the heavenly vision be:
The shores of thought and feeling know
the Spirit's tidal ebb and flow.

'O it is good abiding here,'
We cry, the heavenly presence near:
The vision vanishes, our eyes
are lifted into vacant skies.

Yet has one such exalted hour
upon the soul redeeming power,
and in its strength, through after days,
we travel our appointed ways,

Till all the lowly vale grows bright,
transfigured in remembered light,
and in untiring souls we bear
the freshness of the upper air.

The mount for vision: but below
the paths of daily duty go,
and nobler life therein shall own
the pattern on the mountain shown.

Frederick Lucian Hosmer (1885)

Proper Names

In a discussion of Chalcedonian Christology at Dale Tuggy's "Trinities", the question of how to interpret proper names came up. In the comments I argue (in retrospect somewhat unclearly and inadequately in parts) that, contrary to a common practice, proper names should not be treated as individual constants. As I said, my argument is uneven in quality, since a comment box is not the most useful venue for making a point like this. But a good portion of the argument has already been given in an accessible form by Tyler Burge, in his important paper, Reference and Proper Names. I don't quite agree with the Burge's own view -- I'm not convinced that the best non-individual-constant position is to say that proper names are abbreviated descriptions, although clearly they are related to descriptions in some way. But his attack on the constants view of proper names is, I think, exactly right. Proper names can be pluralized, quantified, predicated, and all sorts of other things one wouldn't expect if they were really captured by translating them as individual constants. Which suggests the following dialogue:

-How many Brandons are here?

There is only one Brandon here.

-Which of you is that Brandon?

I'm that Brandon.

-I've heard that every Brandon has the right account of proper names. Is that true?

Well, perhaps not; I am Brandon, and I do believe that proper names don't normally function like individual constants, and there are good arguments for it. But some Brandons might not agree.

-But those other Brandons would be different Brandons.

Very true. But that someone is a different Brandon than I am doesn't mean that he is not really Brandon. It just means that he's not me. Our sharing a name doesn't mean much.

-But surely talking about 'Brandons' requires us to say that there is some way in which all these Brandons are identical.

No; it just means that they've all been called, independently, 'Brandon'. This implies no more than the fact that both jadeite and nephrite are called 'jade'.

-But if 'Brandon' is a proper name, it should pick out only one person.

And so it does, if you use it to talk about one person in particular. But proper names have what Sommers calls 'wild quantity', and sometimes we don't use them to talk about one person in particular. And sometimes we get confused. Roxane, for instance, thought that 'Christian' picked out only one person, but through no fault of her own she was picking out both Christian and Cyrano; she couldn't distinguish between the two, even though they weren't the same person, and even though only Christian was Christian.

-In any case, if I were Brandon, I'd be happy to be a Brandon.

Yes, I find that being Brandon is nice. And think how bad the world would be if no Brandon existed.

Urakami

The explosion of the atomic bomb came altogether unexpectedly. I saw the flash of light in the radium laboratory. Not only my present but also my past and future were blown away in the blast. My beloved students burned together in a ball of fire right before my eyes. Then I collected my wife, whom I had asked to take care of the children after my death but who now had become a bucket-full of soft ashes, from the burnt-out ruins of our house. She had died in the kitchen. For me, the injury to the right side of my body and acute atomic disease caused by the atomic bomb were added to my chronic radiation illness, disabling me far sooner than expected.

--Takashi Nagai, in Leaving These Children Behind.

On August 9, 1945, the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Due to drifting winds, the bomb dropped in the Urakami area of Nagasaki, obliterating the Urakami Catholic Cathedral and killing the greater part of Nagasaki's Catholic community, as well as many others. Nagai was in his office at Nagasaki Medical Center at the time, less than a thousand meters from the epicenter. He survived, but as he notes in the above passage, struggled with radiation-induced cancer the rest of his life. He devoted himself to helping others, and while bed-ridden for leukemia, wrote a number of books on dealing with the atomic-bomb experience that have been very popular among Japanese Catholics. His works are very difficult to find in English, although The Bells of Nagasaki was translated by William Johnston. In his works, the desolation of Nagasaki is seen as a sacrifice of atonement, by innocents, for the horrors of war, and a perpetual memorial saying to mankind, "Seek peace."

The Peacock

The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. "Christ will come like that!" he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.

Mrs. McIntyre's face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. "It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go," she said. "I don't find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world."

The old man didn't seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. "The Transfiguration," he murmured.

[Flannery O'Connor, "The Displaced Person," The Complete Short Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York: 1977) 226.]

The peacock in this story is quite a remarkable symbol, handled well by a brilliant writer. Through much of the story the peacock -- the hope of Transfiguration -- is notably present; he opens and closes the story, in fact. The first sentence is:

The peacock was following Mrs. Shortley up the road to the hill where she meant to stand.

The last sentence is:

He came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs and, after he had fed these to the peacock, he would come in and sit by the side of her bed and explain the doctrines of the Church.

(The 'He' is the priest in the passage above.) However, with the exception of the explicit notice in the above passage, the peacock is largely ignored. Mrs. Shortley and Mrs. McIntyre are so caught up with the problem of the Displaced Persons -- World War II refugees -- that they have no real patience for it. The Transfiguration theme is linked with another theme, namely, Christ as a Displaced Person; while the peacock may seem to Mrs. McIntyre merely another mouth to feed, it carries with it an implicit transfiguration, a secret splendor. For Mrs. McIntyre, the D.P.'s, like Mr. Guizac, are a problem, but in truth they are an opportunity, bringing with them a sort of liberation.

Feast and Afterfeast

I sometimes think that Christians should choose a solemnity, in much the way many people take a patron saint, one that especially sums up to them their perspective on Christian life. Of course, there's a sense in which Easter and Christmas are universal feasts in this sense; but not everyone, I think, is equally called to speak the truth of Easter or the truth of Christmas to the Church and to the world. Some might be called to be Christians of the Annunciation, or of the Baptism, or of the Triumphal Entry, or of Pentecost; not, of course, in the sense that they are different kinds of Christian but in the sense that they are Christians called to affirm more clearly different aspects of life in Christ. There is no question what my special solemnity would be; it occurred yesterday. It is the Feast of the Transfiguration.

Like many great feasts, Transfiguration has an octave and an apodosis; it had a forefeast on Saturday and its afterfeast today. So as a sort of celebration there will be Transfiguration-related posts here and there throughout the week.

Some reading on the Transfiguration.


Not To Be Missed

Transfigure this out (Way of the Fathers): a sermon by Augustine on the day

Angelus Message on the Feast of the Transfiguration (St. Peter's Helpers)

Three from St Ephrem (Summa Minutiae)

The Manifestation of Divine Glory (Deacon Dan Wright)

Feast of the Transfiguration (Spero Forum Weblog)

A Chinese Hymn on the Transfiguration (Word from the Desert)

The Transfiguration Shows Us Who Jesus Is (Bonfire of the Vanities)

St Ephrem's Teaching on the Transfiguration (From the Anchor Hold)


Reflections

Transfiguration (Italian (American) Catholic)

Transfiguration (fatherwoolley.com)

Feast of the Transfiguration: of Christ, Mankind, and Creation (Historical Christian)

The Transfiguration (Southwark Vocations)

Practicing Prayer (meditatio)

Feast of the Transfiguration (ByzFaith)

Unclerical Sermons to Myself (The Curt Jester)


Hiroshima and Tabor
Transfiguration (Sacramentum Vitae)

Sunday Thought: The Kingdom Coming Business (Apologia)

Coming Down the Mountain (Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good)

Christ and the Bomb (Liberamedeus)

The Joy of the Transfiguration (Flos Carmeli)

Transfigurations (From the Anchor Hold)