Evening Sacrifice, Morning Offering

"Let my prayer be set forth in Your sight as incense, and the lifting up of my hands an evening sacrifice" (Psalm 140:2). That this is wont to be understood of the Head Himself, every Christian acknowledges. For when the day was now sinking towards evening, the Lord upon the Cross "laid down His life to take it again," (John 10:17) did not lose it against His will. Still we too are figured there. For what of Him hung upon the tree, save what He took of us? And how can it be that the Father should leave and abandon His only begotten Son, especially when He is one God with Him? Yet, fixing our weakness upon the Cross, where, as the Apostle says, "our old man is crucified with Him," (Romans 6:6) He cried out in the voice of that our "old man," "Why have You forsaken Me?" That then is the "evening sacrifice," the Passion of the Lord, the Cross of the Lord, the offering of a salutary Victim, the whole burnt offering acceptable to God. That "evening sacrifice" produced, in His Resurrection, a morning offering. Prayer then, purely directed from a faithful heart, rises like incense from a hallowed altar. Nought is more delightful than the odour of the Lord: such odour let all have who believe.

Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 141. There's some interesting rhetorical virtuosity here: the play on 'lifting up of my hands', where it represents simultaneously both Christ's hanging on the cross and lifting up hands in Christian prayer, which is paralleled by the play on incense, which can be taken as incense in the strict sense, a symbol of prayer, or incense in the broader sense that includes the scent of a sacrifice, which is a symbol of Christ; all deliberately used to indicate that the faithful Christian at prayer is united with Christ on the Cross, and to suggest that therefore both are in preparation for Resurrection.

Chaospet on "The End of Philosophy"

This was too good merely to attach to the end of the previous post as an update. David Brooks's The End of Philosophy thoroughly refuted in a webcomic. In the process, chaospet shows just how much philosophy you can do in a webcomic. More philosophical webcomics of this quality could start a revolution and make the comic a recognized philosophical medium.

In the meantime, PZ Myers, of all people, also has a good and thoughtful post criticizing the op-ed, thus showing that he is, in fact, still capable of good and thoughtful posts.

The End of Philosophy?

I don't think we should exaggerate the flaws, despite the absurd hed, but the problem with David Brooks's The End of Philosophy piece begins with the very opening paragraph:

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

But this is not very Socratic at all. For Socrates, morality is a craft or skill, analogous to shoe-making or medicine, and just as it would be odd to characterize the craft of a physician by saying "Think through medical problems, find a healthy principle, apply it," so it would be odd to characterize the Socratic approach to moral thinking in these terms. And Socrates pretty clearly denies that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation; rather, it is knowing how to live, which makes use of reason and deliberation but is not "mostly" reason and deliberation. And in fact, thinking through moral problems is itself not a major part of Socratic discussion of morality.

Nor, outside a handful of exceptions, like casuists and a few contemporary analytic philosophers, has it been a major part of philosophy. And even the casuists were writing confessor's manuals, which are primarily for evaluating matters after the fact and only secondarily and indirectly for deciding behavior before the fact; the real practical influence of casuistics was always intended to reside in the living practice of confession and spiritual direction. So I suppose the 'approaches of millions of people' is really 'approaches of a small handful of analytic philosophers in the past few decades', because that's about all it really covers.

The problem with sensationalism about the "evolutionary approach to morality" is that this is all business as usual. Nothing Brooks says was not already said more rigorously by Darwin in the nineteenth century, when he entered into the field of moral philosophy on the side of the moral sense theorists against the utilitarians; very little of that is much beyond what Hume had already said in the eighteenth century; and the basic point, of morality as being like aesthetics, we already find in Shaftesbury in the seventeenth. And one can probably trace it back further. There has been no sea change; only a gradual development of modern moral philosophy along a direction laid down centuries ago.

Clothed with the Wisdom and the Power

Further Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. Lo! the death of Christ, that is, the Cross, clothed us with the enhypostatic wisdom and power of God. And the power of God is the Word of the Cross, either because God’s might, that is, the victory over death, has been revealed to us by it, or because, just as the four extremities of the Cross are held fast and bound together by the bolt in the middle, so also by God’s power the height and the depth, the length and the breadth, that is, every creature visible and invisible, is maintained.

John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book IV, Chapter XI.

Open-Mindedness and Other Videos

A nice YouTube video on open-mindedness. There are a few (minor) missteps (e.g., the 'unexplained therefore explained' objection requires an oddly uncharitable interpretation of the argument to which it is an objection), but it's actually pretty decent.

The user, QualiaSoup, has a number of other good videos up -- again, here and there there are a few things I would consider missteps, but many of them are worth watching. I recommend Evolution and The problem with anecdotes.

There are bound to be other good YouTube videos along these lines. Have any of you come across any?

Treading Down Death

Athanasius de incarnatione. St. Athanasius on the Incarnation, tr. by A. Robertson By Athanasius

Links for Noting

* One of the world's most elusive, dangerous, and astoundingly successful serial criminals, the Phantom of Heilbronn, may not exist at all, but may instead be a defective series of cotton swabs that contaminated evidence in more than 40 different German crime scenes over 15 years. The Phantom seems to have been quite literally that: an evidential phantom.

* It's no secret that I like Finnish music. If this were a perfect world, we'd all use Latin for thinking, Greek for praying, English for trading, Spanish for loving, Gaelic for storytelling, and Finnish for singing. Here are some excellent Finnish music YouTube finds; the first group is women's voices and the second men's.

Johanna Kurkela, Häävalssi
Johanna Kurkela, Kauriinsilmät
Jippu, Metsäkukkia

Juha Tapio, Kaksi puuta
Ville Valo, Kun Minä Kotoani Läksin
Kari Tapio, Mun sydämeni tänne jää

* Diana Wynne Jones discusses her medieval influences and mocks, rightly, large portions of the fantasy market.

* Kenny Pearce discusses good and bad apologetics.

* Will Huysman pointed out to me that St. Francis de Sales's The Catholic Controversy is online. This is one of the classics of the Counter-Reformation, growing out of a tract campaign that addressed many of the pro-Reformation arguments that were common in France in the late 16th century. Neither those arguments nor Francis de Sales's responses to them always map very closely to the current Catholic-Protestant zones of controversy, as one might expect from the sheer number of important things that had not yet happened (the Synod of Dort, for instance); but there is still much of interest in the work.