Siris

On Bossuet and Divine Right

2009-11-24T00:03:00.004-06:00

Many point to Christianity as the historical force that challenged the ancient world’s inegalitarianism. There is quite a bit of truth to this, but it’s possible to push the case too far. Many ideas that are crucial to the modern political synthesis are nowhere to be found until the seventeenth century at the earliest, and even during that era, the far more typical Christian politics was not John Locke’s, but that of the lesser-known Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux and court preacher to Louis XIV. Bossuet’s Politics Drawn from Holy Scripture made the case that the most natural Christian polity — indeed, the only properly Christian polity — was an absolute monarchy, because the king was an image of God on earth. Christianity certainly taught that there was an inherent dignity to all people, regardless of social station, but it was quite reluctant to challenge the idea of social station itself.

(hat-tip)

Bossuet is an extraordinarily bad example to hold up as the typical view, because Bossuet's view was anything but typical: he was a Gallicanist, and precisely one of the things that made Gallicanism controversial even among Catholics was that it was widely held to involve an excessive estimate of the sacral importance of the temporal authority (and in particular, French authority). You have to understand that there was no divine right of kings in the Middle Ages; it was held that authority generally had its wellspring in God, but kings in (for instance) the early Middle Ages were not in a position to assert themselves possessors of any sort of divine right: the favor of Heaven was not certain and the Church was for obvious reasons suspicious of any attempt by kings to regard themselves as having any special consideration from heaven simply because they were kings. To begin to get something that can reasonably be called divine right you have to have a strong sovereign with centralized authority capable of asserting such a right and getting away with it; this requires ideas that originally begin to develop in the medieval disputes between the Emperor and the Pope, and in the rise of Philip the Fair (whose reign has the dubious distinction of being perhaps the single worst thing ever to happen to the Catholic Church). In the early modern period these ideas coalesce around the monarchs who have by that point developed strongly centralized nation-states, of which France is the most obvious. And the French were able to get away with this sort of assertion only because France had by that time developed a considerable degree of independence within the Church (once again, going back to Philip the Fair). Thus we get to the rise of Gallicanism, and the view that God had established Louis XIV with a right to rule that not even the Pope could contradict. Obviously this was not going to be universally accepted even among Catholics, and thus the seventeenth century has no views of Christian politics that can be called typical: Protestants and Catholics do not share views on the subject, Protestants tend to support their local governments as legitimate regardless of the kind, and the Catholics are by this time regularly split between parties like the Gallicans (monarchists or nationalists, we might call them) and the Ultra-montanists (papalists, we might call them). Bossuet, far from presenting a typical view of Christian politics in the seventeenth century, cannot even be said to represent the majority of Catholics at that time.

Memorist (Part Four)

2009-11-23T14:24:00.004-06:00

This is the fourth part of a short story draft. Part I, Part II, Part III.

Sixty years allows for great changes. Every Matriarch was once an Infanta, and this one was no exception. She had once been young, and famously beautiful, with golden hair and a dazzling smile, and a widely admired vivacity of mind. She had married the son of the Matriarch at the time, and the match had been good. She had been adopted as Infanta, and people had rejoiced. People who smarted under the rule of the Matriarch then in power looked at the couple and said to themselves: Good days are ahead.

Thus when I say to you that the Matriarch, through the machine of the Memorist, found herself sitting on a grassy green hillock, with a blue sky and shining sun ahead, laughing and laughing at some joke told by the man she loved, you will know that such a thing is possible. Sixty years allows for great changes. Have you not known changes in your own span of life? The Matriarch never smiled; but the Infanta she had been had laughed.

"It really wasn't that funny," said the handsome man at her side, the son I just mentioned, throwing a dandelion in her direction.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but it was the way you said it." She picked up the dandelion he had thrown and held it up to the light, studying it closely. Then she threw it aside.

"I am worried," she said. "All this unrest in the cities. And your mother will not listen to reason."

"The Matriarch is not known for listening to anything," said the Matriarch's son. "But she usually knows what she is doing."

"Yes!" she cried. "She knows what she is doing when it comes to keeping the power in her own hands, or squeezing peasants for taxes, or marching her soldiers here and there."

"That is what Matriarchs do," the young man said. "You will have to do these things yourself."

She sighed. "Yes, but there is exercise of power and there is exercise of brutality, and they are not the same thing." She looked at him wistfully. "Don't you think so?"

He had perhaps not been taking the conversation fully seriously up to this point, but at this question he looked her in the face thoughtfully and with a slow nod of the head said, "I think you are right. But maybe it is not always easy to divide the two."

The Matriarch-to-be plucked another dandelion and twirled it. "If she continues in the way she has proceeded, there will be bloodshed in every city from here to the farthest borders. She will succeed in what she is doing, but the people will drown in blood. Traitors will be purged, but at the cost of many innocents. And she will not listen to reason. She must be stopped."

The Matriarch's son looked sharply at her. "If she will not listen, how can she be stopped?"

She turned to say something to him, but the whole world was rippling around her and the ripples carried the words away. She found herself again in the Small Drawing Room, facing the young man, the Memorist.

"Matriarch!" said a voice at her side, and she turned to see the young man who had told her of the Memorist's arrival.

"Well?" she said, more sharply than she intended.

The young man glanced at the Memorist, but continued. "They have begun to move. You asked me to tell you when they had begun."

"And how have they begun to move?"

"The sublieutenant I previously told you about has tried to convince the Infanta to poison you. He then met with the general, and now he is back with the Infanta. She has agreed."

"I see," the Matriarch said. Then she looked intently at him. "And your sources for this information are good?"

The young man smiled. "They are very good."

The Matriarch's eyes narrowed. "I see. Your source is a woman. The Infanta's handmaiden, perhaps." Her hand began absently tracing the design of her ring. "You overestimate your influence over her, I assure you. What do you know of a woman's mind? Nothing!"

The last word came out savagely, and the young man stepped back in surprise. "Apologies, Matriarch, but I assure you that my source is good."

"Hmm. Well, it tallies with my own sources. I have sent portions of the legion on fool's errands. No doubt the general is trying to undo the mess now. Now, then, is the time to strike, before he can bring back all of his handpicked traitors."

"I have already begun, as you had requested before. The general will soon be in our custody. I will arrange for him to have an audience with you tomorrow in the torture chambers."

"No," said the Matriarch. "I will not have time for such things. We must set an example of him, swiftly. His head is to be on a pike in front of the palace as soon as possible. And the head of this sublieutenant, too."

"And the Infanta?"

The Matriarch looked down at the ring she had been stroking. "Bring her here. I will myself give her the punishment she deserves. But heads on pikes first; then you can bring her. You may go."

As the young man bowed and backed out the door, the Matriarch turned again to the Memorist. "Let us continue."

Caplan on Casuistry

2009-11-23T13:47:00.003-06:00

An interesting post by Bryan Caplan on what he calls 'ethical intuitionism'. I don't think he's using the word in quite the way philosophers would, although what he does give us could count as one kind of ethical intuitionism, depending on the underlying moral epistemology. What Caplan is actually arguing is that we should do casuistry -- because that's what he actually describes:

Sensible moral reasoning begins with concrete, specific cases. For example: It would be wrong for me to walk over to Robin right now and punch him. From there, we can start to generalize. It would probably be wrong for me to walk over and punch any of the people in this room. At the same time, we can note exceptions. If Robin had consented to box me, then punching him would be OK. In fact, it would probably be wrong not to try to punch him, because I'd be cheating you, the audience.

That's argument by cases of consciences, and such argument is casuistry. I agree we need a genuine casuistry; it's lack has left a void that has been filled by ridiculous trolley problems. (Trolleyology, I once joked to someone, is the devil's version of casuistry.) But it's clear enough, as well, that casuistry on its own doesn't get you far at all. Pascal in his Provincial Letters bent or broke more than one truth, but his attack on casuistry was surely right in one respect, namely, that casuistry alone leads to moral absurdities; and big moral absurdities are moral abominations.

Tyler Cowen also has an interesting comment on Caplan's piece:

My overall view is that ethical intuitionism settles many fewer issues than most of its proponents like to think. That said, there is often nowhere else to go. We somehow need to come to terms with two propositions at the same time:

1. We need to think more rather than less ethically.

2. The content of ethical philosophy tells us less, in reliable terms, than most people would like to believe.

Which are both right. But contrary to Cowen's suggestion, I think it's clear enough that this is because we have no developed casuistry -- it's casuistry that gets into the real details of the ethical life and the ethical society. But what we have is a very degenerate form of it, consisting of very few tools for analyzing cases and of almost no forms of inference beyond analogical reasoning. That's not going to get you much. One might as well try to build a ship and go to the moon with nothing but free-body diagrams of inclined planes.

Memorist (Part Three)

2009-11-23T08:06:00.003-06:00

This is the third part of a short-story draft. Part I, Part II.

In a run-down, deserted part of the palace, fit only for mice and conspirators, a general and a sub-lieutenant met to have a quiet chat.

"You are late," the general growled, obviously in a bad mood.

"I am sorry, sir," replied the sublieutenant; "the Infanta kept me too long."

"Are things in place yet?

"Almost."

The general growled again, this time without words. Then he said, "'Almost' is not enough."

"To be honest, sir, I'm not sure how far the Infanta can be pushed. She is a weak woman."

"Of course, she's a weak woman! Do you think The Dragon Lady would stand another strong-willed woman as Infanta? A rival for control? But it is to our advantage; it makes her pliable to our will as well as the Matriarch's. And even a weak woman can poison."

"Yes, sir. I mean that she may not have the courage to go through with it."

There was another growl. "For sixty years The Dragon Lady has kept power in her iron grasp. My father was a sublieutenant like yourself when she first seized it. It's time she toppled, and toppled in a way that put the power into our hands. I expect you to find a way to get her to do it."

Then they broke apart and went on their ways.

***

The Memorist did not seem put out at having had to wait so long for the Matriarch; but if he was, such feelings were not the sort of thing you expressed in her presence. She was surprised at how young he looked, and how foolish. But, she reflected, everyone had begun to look young once she had turned eighty. And foolish.

"I understand, Matriarch, that you already know something of my art," he said.

"By report only."

"That is enough; until you have experienced itself, that is enough. It will save us time for explanations. There are only certain things that you must keep in mind.

"First, there is no method of precise control. I cannot guarantee what you will experience, and I cannot guarantee that it will be pleasant. The experience follows not my guidance but the guidance of associations in your own mind.

"Second, it is important that you remain seated. You can harm yourself by walking around if you are not first brought out.

"Third, nothing can be changed. You are not sent back; you merely experience again. Trying to change anything will distort the experience and possibly break it.

"Fourth, I will carefully you observe you the entire time. If something seems to be wrong, I will bring you out. If I do, it is important that you not struggle against it; that, too, can harm.

"Do you understand?"

"Yes," said the Matriarch, sitting down in a chair beside a table on which sat a pitcher and a glass of water. "Let us proceed."

And she relaxed back into the chair as the Memorist turned on his machine and the world began to ripple away like a pond-surface.

Instrument of Wondrous Hypotyposis

2009-11-22T07:19:00.003-06:00

Umberto Eco discusses our interest in lists:

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

I'm not really convinced, though, with Eco's moral psychology of the list, in which we like lists because we like things without limits. I think, if you must speculate in such terms, that the reverse is more plausible; we like lists because we love limits. And even death: what frightens people about death is not that it is a limit but that it itself is not limited. The list of things that death destroys can never be completed. But I don't think our taste for lists really has much to do with death rather than, say, order.

Memorist (Part Two)

2009-11-21T23:12:00.003-06:00

This is the second part of a short story draft. For the first part, click here.

After her dinner with the Infanta, the Matriarch passed through a series of rooms toward the Small Drawing Room, where the Memorist awaited her. But before she had reached the room, a voice arrested her.

"Matriarch!"

The Matriarch stopped and turned slowly toward the voice, which belonged to one of the generals of the army. She noted with some pleasure that he flinched under the coldness of the look she gave him. No doubt he would later tell loud jokes, perhaps even insulting stories, about The Dragon Lady to salve his pride at having quailed before the glance of an old woman, as they all did. They were all alike. She had dealt with them for sixty years, and they were all alike. But they were also all firmly in her iron grasp, however much they might squirm. She continued to look at him coldly, waiting and looking. He squirmed.

"Matriarch," he said again. "I understand that you have reassigned a portion of my legion to the sentinel-stations. Why was I not consulted on this matter?"

She continued to look but said nothing for so long that he opened his mouth to speak again. But before he could, she said, icily, "And I should consult with you?"

His mouth closed again. The Matriarch simply turned and walked away, but there was something in the turn and the walk that expressed contempt more than any words could. As she moved out of sight, the general's fists curled and teeth gritted in rage and he stormed off to his next meeting.

***

The Infanta of Syan and her handmaiden did everything in their power to make the Infanta beautiful. They careful did her hair and perfumed her in every place that would admit of perfuming; they painted her thin lips and tried to shape her shapeless eyebrows; they powdered her face to cover her sallow complexion and used every secret known to cosmetics in an attempt to thicken her thin lashes. They did, as I said, everything in their power to make the poor girl beautiful; but such an effect, I fear, is beyond the ability of mortal woman, however ingenious she may be and however resourceful her supplier of cosmetics, and the result was more like a painted ugliness than like the vision of loveliness the Infanta had hoped to attain. But they managed, in the process, to distract from some of the Infanta's most unpleasant features, and so had reached a point where the Infanta, used to disappointment on this topic, was willing to settle.

The handmaiden had just gone out to retrieve somethign when she rushed back in again. "He's here!" she said breathlessly.

Excitement rushed over the Infanta's features. "Bring him in, bring him in!" she said, trying, not entirely successfully, not to squeal it out.

As the handmaiden went out the Infanta composed her features and her body into a pose and demeanor that she hoped conveyed an impression of Regal Splendor. It conveyed nothing of the sort, but the Infanta fortunately was looking eagerly at the door, not at the mirror, when she did it, and thus she somehow, despite the absurdity of her looks, had a charming air of innocent enthusiasm. That is a cosmetic ladies of the court rarely wear; but it was the only thing that prevented her from looking merely like a fugitive from colony of exceptionally ugly clowns.

The air of innocent enthusiasm intensified when a young man walked through the door. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and bright blue eyes, and he was dressed in a flawless dress uniform. The uniform, while handsome, only declared him to be a lowly sublieutenant; but his smile, also handsome, declared a great many things more.

He went down on one knee. "My Infanta!" he said. "You are truly loveliness itself tonight! I thank you for allowing me into your gracious presence!"

The Infanta simpered at this opening -- how could she not? But she had more self-control than many young women have when a handsome young soldier is on his knees before them, and she only offered him her hand to kiss, which he did with melodramatic enthusiasm. She then bade him sit by her, which he also did with enthusiasm. Only then did she soften out of her attitude of, as she still thought it (not having looked in the mirror), Regal Splendor.

"How are you tonight, my love?" she said.

"Now that I see you, I am very well," he replied. "And you, my darling Infanta?"

She sighed. "Not well at all. I think the Matriarch intends to poison me."

The soldier looked sharply at her. "What makes you say that?"

"I told you before, she hates me and does nothing but torment me. I think she has only kept me alive this long to torment me. And everyone says that she poisoned the previous Matriarch, and that Matriarch's son, and hundreds and hundreds of others, too. She's a horrid woman. I hate her!"

"You know," said the young man slowly, "if you survive her it is you who will be Matriarch."

"Yes," said the Infanta dismissively, "but haven't you been listening? She will kill me. She kills everyone." But something in his voice made her look at him. He took her hands in his and looked deeply into her eyes with that passionate, poetic look at which no one can succeed except handsome young men trying to be persuasive.

"My darling Infanta," he said in the manner of one beginning a practiced speech, "as long as she lives, you will live in fear, and it rends my heart to see you in such fear. As long as she lives, you and I can never truly be together. How would you ever convince her to allow it? But if she were to die before you, you would become Matriarch, and all our problems would be solved. You would live free of her, and there is nobody who could stand in the way of our being together. I know that you, being of such good heart, would never think of it yourself, but there are poisons that are swift and painless and that could never be discovered. As a soldier I can get you such poisons. It is within your power to solve all our problems and bring us together completely."

The Infanta was somewhat confused at the mingling of the pleasant blue eyes with the unpleasant suggestion. "But I don't think I could...," she began.

He quickly interrupted her. "I know it is something you would never do under ordinary circumstances. How could you? You have a good and decent heart. That is what I love most about you." The Infanta blushed here, but the young man took no notice. "But these are not ordinary circumstances. You have lived under the most terrible oppression a woman can expect to bear, under constant anxiety because of the odious mindgames of the Matriarch. No one could blame you. As you say, she may mean to kill you; it would only be self-defense." He squeezed her hands harder. "All I ask is that you consider it. I know that your good judgment will decide best what to do." And at that he kissed her many times, and she was confused yet again, although much more pleasantly and for different reasons.

The rest of their interview consisted of the stilted, trite banalities at which lovers excel. But they all eventually came to an end, and the young man emerged from the Infanta's room, straightened his uniform, and hurried off to his next meeting.

Memorist (Part One)

2009-11-21T21:35:00.003-06:00

This is the first part of a short story draft.

The Matriarch of Syan was watching a criminal die. He was being executed as Syan always executed those who committed capital crimes, with brands of glowing iron and every effort made to keep him conscious for as long as possible. It was a gruesome thing to watch, but she had seen every criminal execution in her sixty years as Matriarch, more than could be counted, and so the screams of agony made not the slightest change in her impassive countenance, and did not in the slightest affect the air she had about her of being elsewhere, thinking of other things.

In a pause between the screams there was the sound of a door being opened to her right and she turned to look at the dark-haired young man who entered. He carefully kept his gaze on the Matriarch. She seemed to draw suddenly from deep inside herself and look at him with razor intensity.

"Matriarch," he said, "I beg pardon for the disturbance, but you asked to be notified immediately when the Memorist arrived."

There was a scream from the room below that startled the young man into glancing at the glass. He quickly looked away again, a sudden nervousness springing to life in his hands. He cleared his throat. "Shall I arrange an audience immediately?"

She looked at the ground a moment, suddenly far away again. A twinge of pain suddenly crossed her face; then it passed, and she looked up again. "No," she said. "We will make him wait. I will take supper with the Infanta first. Tell the cook that the dish with the mushrooms is to be served, but remind him that last time it was unacceptably tepid." She turned again to gaze dispassionately at the dying man below as the young man bowed low and backed out of the room. But when the door had closed again she allowed herself to look down at the large and ornate ring of gold and diamonds on her right hand. She touched the setting that could be slid aside to reveal the compartment with the poison.

***

The Infanta of Syan was a sullen girl with a sullen face. She was ugly and untalented and had always been so. When she had been chosen as the consort of the Matriarch's son it had caused widespread surprise and the rumors about the reason for it had been wild. The son had been sickly and soon after had died. The rumors, too, soon died, for they were smothered by the overwhelmingly boring personality of the Infanta herself, who had no vice but sullenness and no virtue but mediocrity. In the court it was joked -- quietly, of course, and with every futile attempt to guarantee that the Matriarch did not hear -- that the Matriarch had chosen her as security against assassination, for no one would look at the Infanta and see the future of Syan. The Matriarch thought of this as she gazed across the table at the Infanta and set her lips in a thin, firm line. This line may have been a repressed frown, or a repressed smile, or something else entirely; no one ever saw the Matriarch frown or smile.

"And how are your lessons, my dear," she said dispassionately. In form it was a question; but there was no hint of a question in her tone, no verbal suggestion of a question mark. The Matriarch did not question; she commanded and was answered.

The Infanta merely toyed with her food and said nothing. The Matriarch's voice became colder. "And how are your lessons, my dear," she repeated.

The Infanta looked up furtively. "Fine," she said sullenly, as she said everything sullenly. And she returned to toying with her food.

"Excellent, my dear. One who will be Matriarch must cultivate a wide range of skills." The Matriarch had not touched her plate at all, but she pushed it firmly away from her and looked across at the Infanta. "I have heard, however, that you have often shirked them, instead preferring to flirt -- if the foolish mooning you do can be called flirting -- with certain palace guards."

The Infanta's eyes flickered up suddenly, then fell back down.

"One who is to be Matriarch must forego such private foolishness," the Matriarch continued quietly. "For those in our position such matters always end badly for the other person. And sometimes for both." She looked down at the ring on her right hand and distractedly traced the patterns on it.

"Sometimes for both," she repeated. "I expect more sense in the future."

The Infanta suddenly pushed her plate away. "As you please," she said. "May I leave?" Her sullen voice suddenly took on a slight edge of malice. "I have lessons to attend to, you see."

The Matriarch's lips set into that thin line that may have been her version of a smile, or a frown, or something else entirely. "Certainly, my dear," she said.

King of Grief

2009-11-21T18:20:00.000-06:00

The Thanksgiving
by George Herbert

Oh King of grief! (a title strange, yet true,
To thee of all kings onely due)
Oh King of wounds! how shall I grieve for thee,
Who in all grief preventest me?
Shall I weep bloud? why, thou hast wept such store
That all thy body was one doore.
Shall I be scourged, floutted, boxed, sold?
’Tis but to tell the tale is told.
My God, my God, why dost thou part from me?
Was such a grief as cannot be.
Shall I then sing, skipping thy doleful storie,
And side with thy triumphant glorie?
Shall thy stokes be my stroking? thorns, my flower?
Thy rod, my posie? crosse, my bower?
But how then shall I imitate thee, and
Copie thy fair, though bloudie hand?
Surely I will revenge me on thy love,
And trie who shall victorious prove.
If thou dost give me wealth, I will restore
All back unto thee by the poore.
If thou dost give me honour, men shall see,
The honour doth belong to thee.
I will not marry; or, if she be mine,
She and her children shall be thine.
My bosome friend, if he blaspheme thy Name,
I will tear thence his love and fame.
One half of me being gone, the rest I give
Unto some Chappell, die or live.
As for thy passion--But of that anon,
When with the other I have done.
For thy predestination I’le contrive,
That three yeares hence, if I survive,
I’le build a spittle, or mend common wayes,
And mend mine own without delayes.
Then I will use the works of thy creation,
As if I us’d them but for fashion.
The world and I will quarrell; and the yeare
Shall not perceive, that I am here.
My musick shall finde thee, and ev’ry string
Shall have his attribute to sing;
That all together may accord in thee,
And prove one God, one harmonie.
If thou shalt give me wit, it shall appeare,
If thou hast give’n it me, ’tis here.
Nay, I will reade thy book, and never move
Till I have found therein thy love,
Thy art of love, which I’le turn back on thee:
O my deare Saviour, Victorie!
Then for thy passion---I will do for that---
Alas, my God, I know not what.

Like the Heavy Scent of Flowers

2009-11-20T13:46:00.000-06:00

Rain Before Dawn
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The dull, faint patter in the drooping hours
Drifts in upon my sleep and fills my hair
With damp; the burden of the heavy air
Is strewn upon me where my tired soul cowers,
Shrinking like some lone queen in empty towers
Dying. Blind with unrest I grow aware:
The pounding of broad wings drifts down the stair
And sates me like the heavy scent of flowers.

I lie upon my heart. My eyes like hands
Grip at the soggy pillow. Now the dawn
Tears from her wetted breast the splattered blouse
Of night; lead-eyed and moist she straggles o'er the lawn,
Between the curtains brooding stares and stands
Like some drenched swimmer -- Death's within the house!

On a Noncounterexample to Aquinas's Third Way

2009-11-20T11:43:00.006-06:00

Aquinas's Third Way is a very tricky argument; not only do we have two different versions of it in the manuscripts, it uses terms in a way with which we are not very familiar, and because it is merely a concise summary, looking at the Third Way itself often will not answer any questions one may have about it. But just one can clarify things in the First Way by looking at the Commentary on the Physics, so one can clarify things in the Third Way by looking at the Commentary on the De Caelo, where Aquinas discusses generation and corruption and the sort of possibility and necessity an Aristotelian would associate with those two. Thus, if we turn to the De Caelo commentary we see immediately that we have to put aside the meanings we usually give to the terms:

And it should be noted that, as the Philosopher says in Metaphysics V, possible and impossible are said in one way absolutely, namely, because in themselves they can be true or cannot be true by reason of the relationship existing between the terms; in another way a thing is said to be possible or impossible to something, namely, what it is able for with respect to its active or passive power. And it is in this sense that "possible" and "impossible" are taken here, namely, as what is, or is not, within the power of an agent or patient - for this is the meaning that is most appropriate to natural things.

Likewise I think we would see that, whatever problems there may be with the argument, one of the counterexamples very commonly put forward against it is not a counterexample at all. I quote Wippel's summary of it:

Why not rather suggest that one possible being has come into being after another, and that after another, extending backwards into a beginningless past? Under this supposition, some possible being or beings will have existed at any given point in time, although no single possible being will have existed from eternity.

[John Wippel, "The Five Ways," Thomas Aquinas, Brian Davies, ed. Oxford UP [Oxford: 2002] p. 176.]

This is supposed to be a counterexample to the claim that "It is impossible for all things that are, to be such [i.e., possibly not being in the sense relevant to generation and corruption], because what possibly is not being, is at some time or other not." But this is singularly what it fails to be. The underlying idea involved in Aquinas's discussions of possibility and necessity in generation is the actual ability to exist for a duration, given the nature of things. Something that possibly exists and possibly doesn't exist means that it has the actual ability, given its generating causes and its nature, of existing for a specific period of time and the actual ability, given its nature and generating causes, of not existing outside that specific period of time; and this is an ability that must be exercised, because if you say that something began to exist at a specific point in time because of its generating causes and its generable nature, you are saying that it had the ability to begin to exist from that point on, and not prior. And likewise, if you destroy something, it no longer has the actual ability to exist, but only the actual ability not to exist. If it has the ability to exist for a specific period of time, it exists; and if it doesn't, it doesn't. Thus in this very technical sense of the term it's a contradiction to say that something possibly is and possibly is not at the same time: this would be to say that its causes and nature are set up so that it both exists and does not exist in that period of time, which is a contradiction. Now something counts as necessary in the same way if its causes and nature are such that it exists at every time. Some of these things exist always because of their nature, some because they are made to exist. But if it exists always, it is necessary and not possible, since in the sense being used here necessity is an actual ability to exist at every time and possibility is a actual ability to exist some, and only some, times. And since 'generable' and 'destructible' are coextensive, an existing thing that by the nature of things is ingenerable is indestructible; so, if one accepts the arguments in the De Caelo commentary (which are really the trickiest and hardest part of the whole account), if something by nature has never been generated it will by nature never be destroyed, and this is to be necessary in the sense relevant to generation.

But given this we see why the supposed counterexample is not a counterexample: the world insofar as it consists of the series will have always existed, and therefore will be ingenerable, and therefore will be classified as necessary, and therefore not as possible. Therefore the scenario doesn't present a case in which everything would be possible, and is not a counterexample to the claim that not everything can be possible (in the relevant sense). Faced with such a series, we would have to ask, in Aristotelian terms, whether the series itself had some feature that made it necessary to exist or if it were made necessary to exist by some cause (which itself would have to be necessary to exist in order to have that sort of effect); that is, the argument would proceed exactly as it would if there were no such series.

And this, if you think about it, makes entire sense: while Aquinas holds that the world was created, he accepts the Aristotelian claim that it is ingenerable and indestructible, and he can do this because creation and generation are two entirely different things: Aristotle has no concept of creation in the Christian sense, and trying to treat creation and generation as the same thing will get you immediately into contradictions. This is why Aquinas holds that it is possible for the world always to have existed: there is no impediment to it either from the nature of the world (which is such that if it exists it can neither be generated nor destroyed in the Aristotelian sense) nor from its cause (which is God omnipotent, cause of existence for everything that can be made to exist). The argument is built out of Aristotle's account of generation, but the supposed counterexample depicts a situation that is on Aristotle's own account the way the world actually is, and on Aquinas's account a way in which God could have created it. If the world were possible in the sense relevant to the Aristotelian account of generation, it could not exist without being generated at some point in time after it had not existed. So it is necessary, being such that it cannot be generated or destroyed; but it can still be created. Explaining this, in fact, is how Aquinas ends the first book of the De Caelo commentary:

But according to the Catholic faith, we hold that [the world] began to be, not through a process of generation as from nature, but by flowing from a first principle whose power was not bound to give it existence in infinite time but as it willed, after previous non-existence, in order to manifest the excellence of its power over the totality of being, namely, that the totality of being depends entirely on it and its power is not confined or determined to the production of some given being. Now the things produced by it so as to exist forever have the potency and power to exist forever, and in no way at some time not to exist. For as long as they did not exist, they had no such power; but when they now exist, they have no power with respect to non-existence in the past but to the existence which now prevails or will be - for potency does not look to the past, but to the present or future, as the Philosopher says. Thus it is clear that the preceding arguments in no way impugn the judgment of the Catholic faith.

I think, incidentally, that the same points show that there is no quantifier shift fallacy in the argument. Like I said, I think the hard part is figuring out the arguments for why 'ingenerable' and 'indestructible' are coextensive and why 'generable' and 'destructible' are coextensive, which, although not explicitly mentioned in the argument, is essential to the notion of necessity being used; once that is assumed, the argument follows in strict succession.

Days of Darkness

2009-11-19T15:01:00.005-06:00

The passage from Hume I previously mentioned in passing, one of the ones that always forms a stumblingblock to simplistic interpretations of Hume's essay on miracles:

I beg the limitations here made may be remarked, when I say, that a miracle can never be proved, so as to be the foundation of a system of religion. For I own, that otherwise, there may possibly be miracles, or violations of the usual course of nature, of such a kind as to admit of proof from human testimony; though, perhaps, it will be impossible to find any such in all the records of history. Thus, suppose, all authors, in all languages, agree, that, from the first of January, 1600, there was a total darkness over the whole earth for eight days: suppose that the tradition of this extraordinary event is still strong and lively among the people: that all travellers, who return from foreign countries, bring us accounts of the same tradition, without the least variation or contradiction: it is evident, that our present philosophers, instead of doubting the fact, ought to receive it as certain, and ought to search for the causes whence it might be derived. The decay, corruption, and dissolution of nature, is an event rendered probable by so many analogies, that any phenomenon, which seems to have a tendency towards that catastrophe, comes within the reach of human testimony, if that testimony be very extensive and uniform.

ECHU, Section X, Part II. As has been noted plenty of times in the scholarly literature, this causes serious problems for those who think that Hume ever offers an in-principle or a priori (as opposed to merely empirical or a posteriori) argument against miracles; an in-principle argument should eliminate the days of darkness as well as (to use the very transparent example Hume uses) the resurrection of Elizabeth I. And Hume himself is quite explicit: the reason we should "form a general resolution" not to attend to any reports of religious miracles is the claim, which Hume thinks is discoverable from experience, that "the violations of truth are more common in the testimony concerning religious miracles, than in that concerning any other matter of fact". And thus Part I of the essay only serves to establish the standard that has to be met by any testimony of a 'violation of the usual course of nature'; the argument of the essay actually stands or falls not with that but with how accurate the observations in the beginning of Part II, about religious unreliability, are.

What is generally overlooked, but is quite clearly signaled by Hume at the very beginning of the essay, with the mention of Tillotson, and at the end of the essay, with the transparent talk about faith, is that Hume is turning popular anti-Catholic tropes and arguments, as used by Protestants, against Protestants as well. Protestant arguments about the gullibility of Catholics with regard to the miracles of the saints become Humean arguments about the gullibility of religious people generally with regard to miracles generally; Protestant arguments that we cannot rationally believe that transubstantiation occurs against the evidence of our senses find parallels in Hume's arguments against believing in religious miracles; and so forth. What is more, this seems not to have been lost on Hume's early critics; George Campbell, for instance, sees quite clearly what Hume is doing in (for instance) his long note on the Jansenist miracles, and, obviously, refuses to play the game, insisting that the parallels are artifical and based on false assumptions. In any case, these tropes were not typically in-principle arguments; they were based on claims about the mendacity of priests, the gullibility of poorly educated Catholics, and so forth.

Links for Thinking

2009-11-19T11:16:00.002-06:00

* The Alexandrian, an online Catholic cultural magazine for young Canadians, has published its Fall 2009 edition.

* Turning novel openings into chess games

* Ed Feser has an interesting post on Plato's affinity argument in the Phaedo.

* Humphrey notes some serious lapses in the article on Hypatia of Alexandria in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

*Cédric Eyssette gives links to the original sources of the Jack, Anne, and George problem that I posted a while back, as well as a useful little summary (in French) of what's supposed to be involved in it.

* A suggestion about how to understand the breastplate and belt in Paul's 'whole armor of God'. Commenters also note links to Exodus 28, Isaiah 59, and Wisdom 5.

* Rebecca recently had a post on the theological term 'covenant'.

* Mike Flynn discusses various possibilities for alien intelligence.

The Berry and the Bath (Repost)

2009-11-18T09:30:00.002-06:00

An earlier version of this post was posted in 2005.

The Kalevala is one of the world's most remarkable works of literature. Compiled by Elias Lönnrot in the early nineteenth century from Karelian folk songs, it is the national epic of Finland. What Lönnrot was attempting to do had been attempted before with much less scholarly skill, in particular by James MacPherson in his 1760 Ossian, an attempt to pull together Highland folksongs into a national epic.* But Lönnrot's masterpiece is in another league entirely.

One of the interesting aspects of the Kalevala is Lönnrot's adaptation of the first three poems in a religious cycle of Christian legends; in a trope common in folklore, he presents it as the ending of the Kalevala -- the old gods and heroes sail away as they are replaced by Christianity. As the story goes, there was a young girl named Marjatta who was sweet and pure and innocent; so pure and innocent, in fact, that she refuses to sit in a sledge drawn by a stallion. One day she's out tending sheep on the hillside, when she comes across a cowberry, which she eats ('Marjatta' suggests the Finnish word marja, 'berry'). She becomes pregnant. After nine months, she begins to realize that she needs a sauna (to ease childbirth, of course); so she goes to her mother, who gives this supportive response:

'Fie upon you, demon's bitch!
Who were you laid by?
Was it an unmarried man
or else a married fellow?'

So she goes to her father, who is equally supportive:

'Go, you whore, further than that
scarlet woman, further off
to the bruin's rocky dens
ino the bear's craggy cells--
there, you whore, to breeed
there, scarlet woman, to teem!'

Marjatta responds:

'I am not a whore at all
no kind of scarlet woman:
I am to have a great man
to bear one of noble birth
who will put down the mighty
vanquish Väinämöinen too.'

Väinämöinen is the sky-god/hero who is the protagonist of most of the Kalevala. According to Bosley's notes the line 'who will put down the mighty' might be more literally translated as 'who will have power over power itself'. But back to Marjatta: she needs that sauna, and it doesn't seem to be forthcoming; so she sends her servant-girl Piltti find a sauna at Sedgeditch; when Piltti asks who she will ask for one, Marjatta replies that she should ask for Herod's bath at Saraja's gates.

Piltti comes to Herod's cabin and there finds Herod at a feast. The picture is unforgettably good:

Ugly Herod in shirtsleeves
eats, drinks in the grand manner
at the head of the table
with only his lawn shirt on;
Herod declared from his meal
snapped, leaning over his cup:
'What do you say, mean one? Why
wretch, are you rushing about?'

Piltti replies that she's looking for a bath at Sedgeditch. When Herod's mistress asks her for whom she's asking, Piltti replies that it's for Marjatta. To which Herod's mistress replies:

'The baths are not free for all
not the saunas at Saraja's gate.
There's a bath on the burnt hill
a stable among the pines
for a scarlet woman to have sons
a whore to bring forth her brats:
when the horse breathes out
bathe yourself in that!'

Piltti returns to Marjatta with this bit of counsel. Poor Marjatta bursts into tears and goes to the stall on Tapio hill, praying as she goes:

'Come, Creator, my refuge
and my help, merciful one
in this hard labour
in these most hard times:
free a wench from a tight spot
a woman from the belly-throes
lest she sink in woes
perish in her pains!'

So Marjatta gives birth with the horse's breath as a sauna, and beside a manger brings forth a baby boy, whom she wraps in swaddling clothes.

The story goes on from there, with a confrontation between the little boy and Väinämöinen. It's an interesting set of legends, forming a sort of mythological symbol of the life of Christ that plays on the association of Marjatta and marja; one thinks of the common medieval play on the association of Maria and Latin maris, as in Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, a popular title for Mary.

[All quotations from the Kalevala are from Keith Bosley's translation, Oxford University Press, 1989.]

[*] The Ossianic question, namely, whether MacPherson had forged the poem, was one of the major literary disputes and scandals of the eighteenth century, with most of the period's literary intellectuals in Britain lining up on one side of the question or another, e.g., Hugh Blair argued that it was genuine, David Hume and Samuel Johnson that it was not. My understanding is that current folklore scholarship holds it to be based in actual Highland folksongs, but massively re-worked.

Motives and Grounds

2009-11-16T20:10:00.002-06:00

And [Aristotle] says that the very desire to attentively lay out difficult and obscure things and give their cause, and to inquire into everything and leave aside nothing, will perhaps be seen as a sign either of great stupidity that causes one to be unable to distinguish between the easy and the difficult, or else as a sign of "great hastiness," i.e., of great presumption, that causes a man not to know the measure of his capability for investigating the truth. But although some deserve rebuke on this point, it is not a just thing to condemn all alike; rather we ought first to look at two things.

(1) We must look at the cause that moves a man to speak of such things, whether he is doing it out of love for the truth (ex amore veritatis) or in order to show off his cleverness (ad ostentationem sapientiae)? (2) One ought to consider how he governs himself in believing what he asserts, whether he has a weak certainty about them according to the common human way (secundum communem hominum modum), or does he know them firmly, i.e., beyond the common human way? When, therefore, a person can attain to a knowledge of necessary causes more certainly than the common human way, he who finds such necessities ought to receive our thanks rather than our rebuke.

Thomas Aquinas. In De caelo, lib. 2 l. 7 n. 4. The translation is mine and is quick and loose, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Crazy Parmer Lane

2009-11-16T16:25:00.003-06:00

I don't like driving much, and Parmer Lane here in Austin is almost the perfect summation of why: people don't think when they drive. I had to go to Wal-Mart to buy some jeans, and I came back just as rush hour was beginning to start. The number of crazy drivers out was just insane. Yes, I mean you, little old lady in the red Nissan with the Obama Hope bumper sticker, who continued to go fifty miles per hour through the flashing lights of a school zone. The school zone on Parmer is thirty-five, which is already absurdly fast. As, indeed, most of Parmer is absurdly fast, since the speed limit in my area varies from fifty to sixty-five despite the fact that it has traffic lights exactly like any other street -- people speed up to fifty, slam on the brakes, speed up to fifty, slam on the brakes, speed up to fifty.... Naturally, since the speed limit says fifty, everybody gets angry at the people who have only managed to get up to forty-five before the next light begins to loom up ahead. And then, of course, there was the person at the Mopac intersection weaving in and out of traffic and tailgating the cars up ahead -- who obviously couldn't go any faster than the cars in front of them. No doubt it was so important that he reach his destination as quickly as possible that he couldn't even be bothered with the patience to drive at the same speed as everyone else for five to ten minutes until the traffic thinned out. I would have walked, and I've walked to Wal-Mart once before, but it's quite a hike, and, as I've mentioned before, Parmer is extremely pedestrian-unfriendly -- witness the nice red Nissan in the school zone. I think I've read somewhere that Parmer is one of the worst streets for accidents in Austin, and that's not in the least surprising: the whole street is ridiculous.

Hume on Historical Evidence

2009-11-16T11:38:00.002-06:00

Now moral evidence is nothing but a conclusion concerning the actions of men, deriv’d from the consideration of their motives, temper and situation. Thus when we see certain characters or figures describ’d upon paper, we infer that the person, who produc’d them, would affirm such facts, the death of Caesar, the success of Augustus, the cruelty of Nero; and remembring many other concurrent testimonies we conclude, that those facts were once really existent, and that so many men, without any interest, wou’d never conspire to deceive us; especially since they must, in the attempt, expose themselves to the derision of all their contemporaries, when these facts were asserted to be recent and universally known. The same kind of reasoning runs thro’ politics, war, commerce, oeconomy, and indeed mixes itself so entirely in human life, that ’tis impossible to act or subsist a moment without having recourse to it.

[Hume, Treatise 2.3.1.15.] This is similar in part to the hypothetical days of darkness in Section X of the Enquiry, when Hume explicitly argues that it is possible for even a violation of the laws of nature to receive, in his words, "proof from human testimony" if the testimony is sufficiently extensive and uniform, if the phenomenon admits of sufficient analogy as to be not too singular, and if interfering biases -- Hume has religious biases particularly in mind here, since he has just been arguing that they have a pernicious effect on the quality of testimony -- are not involved. Hume doesn't think any historical testimony has reached that point, of course; but as an empiricist he won't rule it out a priori. Any reason for ruling it out would have to come, as in the case with religion, a posteriori. But in general there's no need for historical testimony to reach that level anyway, since most historical testimony does not describe violations of the laws of nature, and therefore has less to do to reach the point of leaving no room for doubt or opposition on the basis of experience, which is all Hume ever means by 'proof'. People who only read Hume superficially and casually often forget that Hume was a historian; he would go on to write a History of England, and he himself doesn't shirk from treating historical evidence as at least on occasion reaching the level of proof.

The Friendly and the Unfriendly

2009-11-15T20:19:00.006-06:00

It should be said that friendship and enmity are found in brute animals. The reason for this is that friendship consists in the perception of what is agreeable and enmity in the perception of what is harmful. But these are found in brute animals, and therefore, etc. For birds perceive that a seed is agreeable to them, and a sheep or lamb perceives that a wolf is harmful to it but that a human or a shepherd is a friend.

St. Albert the Great, Questions Concerning Aristotle's On Animals, Book VIII, q. 1 (Resnick & Kitchell, trs.). He later argues that this is universal to all animals, because even immobile animals will flow over something they find agreeable and recede from something they find harmful. The actually interesting thing here, I think, is the conception of friendship as an agreement between two things, at least one of which is capable of perceiving the agreement, insofar as it is perceived. Not all of these agreements are of the same sort, of course, and so there are many kinds and levels of friendship. Each kind of animal (including ourselves, of course) is capable of some kind of friendship, and what we would call higher animals (including ourselves, of course) are capable of many kinds of friendship, depending on their powers of perception. But for St. Albert, animal life is by its very nature a life that involves interacting with the world in terms of the friendly and the unfriendly (or amiable and hostile), where this is not an anthropomorphism but a more general account of interaction with the world in which 'friendly' and 'unfriendly' in the sense we humans usually recognize is merely one particular kind of friendliness and unfriendliness.

Cold Oblivion's Wave

2009-11-15T16:40:00.002-06:00

Elegy
Written at the Sea-side, and Addressed to Miss Honora Sneyd
by Anna Seward

I write, Honora, on the sparkling sand!-
The envious waves forbid the trace to stay:
Honora's name again adorns the strand!
Again the waters bear their prize away!

So Nature wrote her charms upon thy face,
The cheek's light bloom, the lip's envermeil'd dye,
And every gay, and every witching grace,
That Youth's warm hours, and Beauty's stores supply.

But Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave,
Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm;
E'en Nature's self, so powerful, cannot save
Her own rich gifts from this o'erwhelming harm.

Love and the Muse can boast superior power,
Indelible the letters they shall frame;
They yield to no inevitable hour,
But will on lasting tablets write thy name.

Seward, the 'Swan of Lichfield', was in the circle of Erasmus Darwin, who encouraged her to write her poetry from an early age. She was something of a controversial poet in her lifetime; the critical opinion of her occupies the entire range.

Descartes on Eternal Truths

2009-11-14T10:29:00.004-06:00

One of the most contentious areas of Descartes scholarship is the interpretation of his position on eternal truths, and it's an interesting area of controversy, because the controversy is less over what Descartes's position than over what it involves. Descartes is quite clear about his position; it's the position itself that's difficult to wrap one's mind around.

Descartes discussed his position on the eternal truths in April of 1630 with Mersenne; the topic comes up because of Descartes's insistence that mathematical truths depend on God just like everything else:

It will be said that if God had established these truths he could change them as a king changes his laws. To this the answer is: Yes he can, if his will cna change. 'But I understand them to be eternal and unchangeable.'--I make the same jdugment about God. 'But his will is free.' Yes, but his power is beyond our grasp. In general we can assert that God can do everything that is within our grasp but not that he cannot do what is beyond our grasp. It would be rash to think that our imagination reaches as far as his power. (AT I, 146; CSMK 23)

Mersenne pressed for clarification so in a letter of early May, Descartes explains, linking the position to the strongly voluntarist Cartesian account of simplicity, in which divine knowing is a form of willing:

As for the eternal truths, I say once more that they are true or possible only because God knows them as true or possible. They are not known as true by God in any way which would imply that they are true independently of him. If men really understood the sense oftheir words they could never say without blasphemy that the truth of anything is prior to the knowledge which God has of it. In God willing and knowing are a single thing in such a way that by the very fact of willing something he knows it and it is only for this reason that such a thing is true. So we must not say that if God did not exist nevertheless these truths would be true; for the existence of God is the first and the most eternal of all possible truths and the one from which alone all others proceed. (AT I, 149-150; CSMK 24)

Mersenne was not satisfied and pressed the point again, so in late May we find Descartes explaining himself again:

You ask me by what kind of causality God established the eternal truths. I reply: by the same kind of causality as he created all things, that is to say, as their efficient and total cause....You ask also what necessitated God to create these truths; and I reply that he was free to make it not true that all the radii of the circle are equal--just as free as he was not to create the world. And it is certain that these truths are no more necessarily attached to his essence than are other created things. You ask what God did in order to produce them. I reply created things. You ask what God did in order to produce them. I reply that from all eternity he willed and understood them to be, and by that very fact he created them. Or, if you reserve the word created for the existence of things, then he established them and made them. In God, willing, understanding and creating are all the same thing without one being prior to the other even conceptually. (AT I, 151-153; CSMK 25-26)

Other things intervene, and thus this is all of the discussion at that time, but Descartes does briefly mention his thesis again in correspondence with Mersenne from 1638:

You ask whether there would be real space, as there is now, if God had created nothing. At first this question seems to be beyond the capacity of the human mind, like infinity, so that it would be unreasonable to discuss it; but in fact I think that it is merely beyond the capacity of our imagination, like the questions of the existence of God and of the human soul, I believe that our intellect can reach the truth of the matter, which is, in my opinion, that not only would there not be any space, but even those truths which are called eternal -- as that 'the whole is greater than its part' -- would not be truths if God had not so established, as I think I wrote you once before.... (AT II, 138; CSMK 102-103)

There is another passage in the correspondence, this time in a letter to Mesland from 1644, in which Descartes summarizes his position on eternal truths:

I turn to the difficulty of conceiving how God would have been acting freely and indifferently if he had made it false that the three angles of a trianglewere equal to two right angles, or in general that contradictories could not be true together. It is easy to dispel this difficulty by considering that the power of God cannot have any limits, and that our mind is finite and so created as to be able to conceive as possible the things which God has wished to be in fact possible, but not be able to conceive as possible things which God could have made possible, but which he has nevertheless wished to make impossible. The first consideration shows us that God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore that he could have done the opposite. The second consideration assures us that even if this be true, we should not try to comprehend it, since our nature is incapable of doing so. And even if God has willed that some truths should be necessary, this does not mean that he willed them necessarily; for it is one thing to will that they be necessary, and quite another to will this necessarily, or to be necessitated to will it. (AT IV, 118, CSMK 235)

And he goes on to base this again on his conception of divine simplicity. There are a few other places that have a bearing, but these suffice for the basic picture.

Thus Descartes's position is easy enough to lay out:

(1) All truths whatsoever depend on the divine will, even mathematical and logical principles.
(2) Truths are necessary, possible, or impossible because God wills that they be.
(3) God's freedom and power is so extensive that he could even make contradictions true.
(4) God has eternally willed some things to be true (perhaps even necessarily true) so that they may be called eternal truths.

The controversies are over how to put this together. Some have argued that Descartes holds that no truths are strictly necessary (as opposed to always true); others have held (more plausibly, I think) that he holds that God makes some truths necessary, but that their necessity itself is contingent on the divine existence. One can interpret Descartes's claim as simply a stricture on us: we know that God is infinitely powerful, we know that God's infinite attributes exceed our finite abilities to comprehend them, so while we know some of the things God can do, we should never say that we know something He cannot do, because it could be that our reason for thinking so is just an effect of the finitude of our human minds rather than an actual limitation on divine power. But Descartes sometimes seems to suggest a stronger position, in which we actually know that God could have made necessary truths false or non-necessary.

(I started thinking about Descartes on eternal truths due to this post at "The Prosblogion".)

Formation

2009-11-13T21:40:00.001-06:00

Simple contact with other people and with one’s surroundings is often sufficient to stimulate certain responses. Ordinary daily existence conditions the formation of the spirit. However, instruction and guidance are needed for other responses, especially those involving the higher faculties. Allowance should be made for spontaneity as well as planned work and instruction. Formation requires the creation of educational subject matters which will place duties before intellect and will, stir the emotions, and fulfill the soul. But here we enter into the realm of values—the good, the beautiful, the noble, the sacred—the specific values which are unique to each soul and to its individual quality.

Edith Stein

Only Four Things Certain

2009-11-13T09:14:00.000-06:00

The Gods of the Copybook Headings
by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "Stick to the Devil you know."

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four-
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man--
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:--
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wobbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

On Sobel on the Second Way

2009-11-12T09:27:00.010-06:00

I recently recommended Sobel's Logic and Theism to someone as a good discussion, from an atheistic perspective, of philosophical issues relevant to atheism. And by and large it's a book worth reading. But there are curious bits. One of those occurs in the discussion of Aquinas's Second Way. Sobel reconstructs the argument using seven premises, which are (I paraphrase some of them):

(1) There are sensible things with efficient causes.
(2) If a thing has an efficient cause, it has exactly one efficient cause.
(3) Efficient causes are prior to their effects.
(4) Priority of efficient causes is irreflexive.
(5) Priority of efficient causes is transitive.
(6) Every sensible efficient cause has an efficient cause.
(7) Infinite regress of efficient causes is impossible.

What would surprise someone who has a fair degree of acquaintance with Aristotelian views of efficient causes woud be (2), which is a very un-Aristotelian thing to say, at least if we are talking about medieval Aristotelians. (Aristotle himself has no notion of efficient causes at all; the concept requires a higher level of abstraction and generalization than we find in Aristotle's discussions of causes.) And it's not generally in the spirit of Aristotelian accounts of causation, either; it makes efficient causation intransitive, which eliminates the possibility of (genuine) remote and proximate causes in the order of efficient causes. (Sobel actually recognizes this, but treats phrases like 'proximate efficient cause' as redundant phrases used for convenience. This might well be a modern thing to do; it's not the sort of thing you would expect of medieval scholastics, who tend to want a specific and substantive rationale for every term they use.)

When we look at Sobel's account of this premise, we see that he has been misled by translation. Sobel says (PDF),

Aquinas writes that it is not possible for "a thing...to be the efficient cause of itself" (loc. cit., emphasis added), from which I gather that things that have efficient causes are to have unique ones. He envisions for a sensible thing x, a sequence of efficient causes that lead to it. If, for example, there are three causes in such a sequence to x, then I read him as saying that exactly "the ultimate cause" is a cause of x, while "the first is the cause [only] of the intermediate cause, and the intermediate is the cause [only] of the ultimate cause" (ST q2,a3 p. 22).

Aquinas's Latin, however, has no definite article: the only options available are the (potentially more ambiguous) default case, where there is no article or article-like expression, and the use of an article-like circumlocution (e.g., of the sort that would be translated by phrases like 'a certain thing'). St. Thomas's Latin here is Invenimus enim in istis sensibilibus esse ordinem causarum efficientium, nec tamen invenitur, nec est possibile, quod aliquid sit causa efficiens sui ipsius, with no article-like expression, so there is nothing to bear the weight Sobel places on the definite article in the translation (quod aliquid sit causa efficiens sui ipsius, what Aquinas is saying is impossible, simply means, "that something should be an efficient cause of its very self" or, as we might also put it a bit more colloquially, "for something to be a cause effecting itself"). Likewise, the interpolation of 'only' into the sentence about ultimate causes pretty clearly makes it say something different from what Aquinas means, and something Aquinas would pretty clearly not accept, for a number of reasons.

But Sobel is aboveboard from the beginning that he is only considering an argument along the lines of the Second Way, and not necessarily Aquinas's own version of the argument.

Malebranche on the Scope of the Passions

2009-11-11T09:41:00.002-06:00

A legal contest takes place between two men to decide who owns a piece of land; they ought to produce only their titles and say only what is related to their case or what might improve it. Yet they never fail to slander one another, contradict each other's statements, contest trivial points, and complicate their case with an infinity of pointless details that obscure the main issue. In short, the influence of each of the passions is as great as the mental scope of those moved by them--i.e., if we think that something is in any way related to the object of our passions, the passions move us with regard to that object.

Malebranche, Search after Truth 5.7 (LO 372)

Leo and Attila

2009-11-10T21:52:00.005-06:00

Today is the feast of St. Leo the Great; the 'Great' was well-earned. One of Leo's famous feats:

Now Attila, having once more collected his forces which had been scattered in Gaul [at the battle of Chalons], took his way through Pannonia into Italy. . . To the emperor and the senate and Roman people none of all the proposed plans to oppose the enemy seemed so practicable as to send legates to the most savage king and beg for peace. Our most blessed Pope Leo -trusting in the help of God, who never fails the righteous in their trials - undertook the task, accompanied by Avienus, a man of consular rank, and the prefect Trygetius. And the outcome was what his faith had foreseen; for when the king had received the embassy, he was so impressed by the presence of the high priest that he ordered his army to give up warfare and, after he had promised peace, he departed beyond the Danube.

Raphael has a famous painting depicting the meeting between Leo and Attila. At this point in his campaign Attila's resources were probably already stretched quite thinly, so Attila was likely open to persuasion already; but that's often the trick of diplomacy, and the point at which it requires the greatest courage. After all, Valentinian III, the Western Emperor at the time, seems to have decided to hole himself up in Ravenna during the crisis; someone had to stand up to bat. Leo tried to repeat the success when the Vandals came a few years later, under Genseric; they were not dissuaded -- but he still seems to have drawn out of them a promise not to burn the city. And when they left after ten days of pillaging, he helped Rome rebuild and recover.

Even more importantly, but not related to invading Barbarian Hordes, Leo is notable for the Tome of Leo, one of the greatest expressions of Chalcedonian Christology ever written.

Aquinas on the Light of Tabor

2009-11-10T12:47:00.001-06:00

It was fitting that the disciples should be afraid and fall down on hearing the voice of the Father, to show that the glory which was then being revealed surpasses in excellence the sense and faculty of all mortal beings; according to Exodus 33:20: "Man shall not see Me and live." This is what Jerome says on Matthew 17:6: "Such is human frailty that it cannot bear to gaze on such great glory." But men are healed of this frailty by Christ when He brings them into glory. And this is signified by what He says to them: "Arise, and fear not."

Aquinas ST 3.45.4 ad 4. Note that Exodus 33:20 cannot support what precedes it unless seeing the glory is looking on the divinity. Cf. 3.45.2 ("the clarity of Christ's body in His transfiguration was derived from His Godhead, as Damascene says, and from the glory of His soul" and "in Christ's transfiguration clarity overflowed from His Godhead and from His soul into His body"), 1.12.5 ("The disposition to the form of fire can be natural only to the subject of that form. Hence the light of glory cannot be natural to a creature unless the creature has a divine nature; which is impossible. But by this light the rational creature is made deiform"), and 2-1.5.6 ad 2 ("the light of glory, whereby God is seen, is in God perfectly and naturally; whereas in any creature, it is imperfectly and by similitude or participation").