Review of Postmodernity and Univocity

Here are my thoughts on a recent book.

Postmodernity and Univocity: A Critical Account of Radical Orthodoxy and John Duns Scotus

For sale here.

The author is Daniel Horan, OFM. His website is here. He is a graduate student in systematic theology at Boston College. The author is not a specialist in Scotus, but a member of the same order trying to exonerate Scotus' name.

Previously reviewed by Peter J. Leihart here.

The book is not a general discussion of Radical Orthdoxy, but, as is obvious from the title, focuses on RO's appropriation of Scotus, or what Horan calls the "Scotus story". The book is roughly divided in three parts. 1. Summarizing what RO claims about Scotus, 2. summarizing the critique of Radical orthodoxy by Richard Cross and Thomas Williams, 3. and a historical-critical discussion of univocity.

It was somewhat of a drag to read the first part, though not owing to the fault of the author, since I have read the originals, and the RO claims are so outrageous. But the author, whose own blood seemed to be up at times, did not fall into polemic. He noted RO's reliance on non-existence passages, strange methods of citation, and so on. Although the main storytellers for RO's Scotus are Milbank and Pickstock, Horan covered all the minor characters in the tapestry as well, even though they are largely derivative. The end of this section of Horan's book was quite valuable. For not only did he treat RO proper, but he also went through some of the more recent popularizers of the Scotus story, some of whom we have encountered on this blog: Brad Gregory and Robert Baron, and a bishop or two, for example. Horan shows that these derivative writers add nothing at all to the conversation, but simply cite RO as their source.

One defect of the first section is that Horan did not wish to delve into narrative. Now to some extent this is perfectly reasonable. It is a work on RO's appropriation of Scotus, not one on the use of narrative in theology. But by making this move, Horan misses, I think the ultimately twofold origin of the Scotus story. The first is that RO subscribes to the rise-fall thesis deriving from early 19th century Jesuits involved in the German kulturkampf, according to which all human thought prior to Thomas Aquinas is but a preparation for Aquinas, and everything that follows is a symptom of decline and departure from the truth. This thesis underlies RO, though even Thomists have criticized it as distorting Aquinas. I am thinking of John Inglis' work in particular. Horan thinks that the RO narrative goes back only as far as Gilson. But in fact it is part of a much older Thomist historiographical claim, which may explain why Thomists have been generally sympathetic to RO, save for reservations about their use of Aquinas. A second point about narrative that I think Horan misses is the importance of Deleuze. RO despises Deleuze, but their Scotus story is best explained as a response to Deleuze's scattered remarks on Scotus, who D. makes central to his own genealogy of modernity; univocity is great and leads straight to Spinoza. RO basically takes everything Deleuze says about Scotus at face value; their attack on Scotus is really an attack on Deleuze's Scotus with a few back-filled references to the Wolter translations to give the appearance of having read Scotus (though it should noted that, as an Australian Thomist did in his dissertation that was making the rounds a year so ago, RO views itself as prophetic and creative and so not bound by the canons of academic scholarship. To this I say, shouldn't they then be employed by think-tanks instead of a university?).

In the second section of the book, Horan discusses Cross and William's, the only two authors who have written against RO's interpretation of Scotus. William's piece is something of a rant, and so perhaps easily ignored, while Cross's main piece of criticism was published in Antonianum, which elsewhere Horan says no one in the states apparently reads. So their criticism has been generally ignored, and the "Scotus story" has been adopted all across the humanities. Indeed, one of the more depressing parts of the book is the few times Horan mentions how remarkable it is that even though academics generally pride themselves on being critical and distrustful of narrative and testing of truth claims, there has been no criticism of RO's appropriation of Scotus save for the two specialists mentioned above. Also in this section Horan tries to locate RO within 20th c. Thomism, and opts for a new label: "Cambridge Thomist".

In the third section the author gives a historical-critical analysis of univocity. Here we find that Thomas was not Scotus' target when developing univocity, but rather Henry of Ghent. We also find that univocity is not a metaphysical claim, but a semantic/conceptual one. Horan basically just reads the text of Scotus and explains what univocity is about, with reference to the relevant secondary literature (a feature lacking in the RO story). There are some strange errors, here, such as attributing Marrone's article on univocity in Scotus' early works to Dumont, a few latin typos, but nothing serious. Pini's work is strangely absent, which made sense of Scotus' commentary on met. IV, and also explained the notion of different sciences viewing being in different ways (analogical for metaphysics, univocal for logic), and which was not fully articulated by the older studies of Cyrcil and Wolter that Horan cites. But that is a minor criticism. The only substantial criticism I had of this section was a desire to make Scotus one harmonious whole in which everything is connected. The author segued rather unclearly from the application of the formal distinction in the treatment in univocity to its use in individuation (without much explanation of the formal distinction, which is probably as complicated as univocity), and he also seemed to think that haecceity was a direct consequence of univocity, which I found strange. I think univocity (that is, as applied to the problem of natural knowledge of God) and individuation are simply separate issues. But all in all, Horan gave an accurate presentation of what Scotus actually thought.

The question that remains is whether pointing out the historical-critical truth affect the dominant view of Scotus in the humanities today that is based on narrative? Perhaps publishing a book from an ecumenical press rather than an academic press will make more of a difference than the previous publications in specialist journals. It is also not written by a specialist, but by a concerned theologian, which may also make it more palatable.

Recommendation: specialists will not get much out of this book, I am afraid, especially if they have already read this material. But happily it is not directed at them. So I heartily recommend it to theologians, Thomists, philosophers with an interest in medieval thought, and also to the interested lay reader. The book manages to be both brief and to get the required work done, and it is written by and large quite clearly.

A Ramble on Ockham, Scholarship, and Other Matters

The other day I mentioned that I'd been reading Armand Maurer's The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of Its Principles. I picked it up last week and have read about a third of it so far.

Now, Maurer's book isn't a replacement for or a competitor to Marilyn Adams' William Ockham, which must be one of the most impressive books on mediaeval philosophy of the last fifty years. At almost 1,400 pages, Adams' book is more than twice the length of Maurer's; it's enormously detailed and enormously comprehensive; it treats a vast range of arguments in precise detail, not only Ockham's, but those of many of Ockham's interlocutors and influences, including Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Scotus, Chatton, Aureol, etc. Anyone who wants a good introduction to post-Thomistic philosophy and doesn't need it gentle would do well to study Adams' book carefully, together with John Wippel's The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy. (By the way, as long as I'm throwing out generalized recommendations, if you'd like to round out your education, gentle reader, you should pair these books with John F. Quinn's massive The Historical Constitution of Bonaventure's Philosophy, which is however unfortunately very difficult to obtain. I don't have a copy, but I worked my way through it while writing the old dissertation.)

There are, however, problems with Adams' book. For one thing, did I mention that it's freakin' huge? It takes some real stamina. I'll admit that I didn't finish it. When I was taking Timothy Noone's course on Ockham in grad school I started reading it, but about two-thirds in to the book and the semester, I stopped. It's not just the size, but the size combined with the presentation. Adams writes the kind of anglo-analytic scholastic stuff that I've never found very palatable, medieval arguments presented with a heavy 20th century veneer: lists of numbered propositions and labelled arguments, variables with subscripts and superscripts, occasional modern notation, etc. This is not necessarily bad in principle: Scotus himself used some of these techniques (he and Ockham have good claims to be the first real anglo-analytic philosophers, if the term implies an English-speaking origin, preoccupation with logic, linguistic analysis, a highly compressed (for Scotus) or lucid (for Ockham) style as opposed to a florid or elaborate one (like Henry's or Bonaventure's)), apparently for his own convenience, since it does not make him easier to read. But Adams uses them, presumably, for the convenience of and to appeal to a mid-20th-century mainstream analytic audience. This limits the book in some ways, since for a broader audience, continentals or people like me who are actually more familiar with the scholastic tradition than the 20th-century one, understanding Ockham through Adams sometimes means having to mentally re-translate her modernizations back into something like what Ockham might have really said. It's a little like a Latin trying to read Aristotle as translated and commented on by the Arabs - much better than nothing, for sure, but of course you'd rather have it straight from the Greek. And it's a real question whether the mainstream analytic tradition, not used to thinking in medieval patterns, will care enough about any scholastic thinker to master a book like Adams'. I'm afraid the whole Adams-Stump-Kretzmann-Kenny etc. project of dragging medieval philosophy into the mid-20th-century has been more or less a failure, given the fact that contemporary philosophy has moved on without really assimilating their work, making their books targeted at an audience that is fast ceasing to exist and so dated in a way that many books by the likes of Gilson or Maritain or Yves Simon aren't.

In any case, I was talking about Maurer. His book on Ockham may be no substitute for Adams', but in many ways I'm liking it better. It's extremely well written, very clear and even enjoyable. There's a huge amount of erudition behind it - Maurer has clearly mastered the corpus of Ockham's writings and the secondary literature - but I find the presentation clean, uncluttered, and very intelligible. Maurer's writing in English but he presents Ockham as a medieval, not as a modern anglo-philosopher in disguise. He's light on his feet, which is a pleasing contrast to some other scholars whose projects are similar. I'm thinking for instance of Wippel, whom respect and filial piety (he was one of my teachers and on my dissertation committee) forbid me to criticize too harshly. His (fairly few) books are magisterial and indispensable. But The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being is not exactly fun to read.

Maurer is not writing a really comprehensive survey, but as his title indicates, is seeking to understand the various facets of Ockham's thought as reflected in his few basic principles. The first part of the book treats these principles in themselves, with two long chapters on "Logic and Reality" and "Philosophy and Theology" which provide a very good summation of the central stances of Ockhamism. The second and third parts are about the application of these principles to God and Creatures respectively. Maurer presents Ockham without espousing Ockhamism, as he indicates in his introduction, but extremely fairly and straightforwardly, with only the very occasional criticism or caveat.

I'll post a longish excerpt soon, but right now I want to notice something Maurer says in the prefatory blurb right at the beginning of the book:

Martin Heidegger once declared, "Every thinker thinks but one single thought." The original and focal point of Ockham's thought is the singular or individual thing (res singularis), as common nature (natura communis) is the central conception of Scotism and the act of existing (esse) is of Thomism. With Ockham the traditional conjugations of being come to signify the thing itself in its ineluctable unity.

With all due respect to Heidegger, I'm not so sure about this. No doubt some thinkers can be reduced to one single central thought, but I have my doubts about both Aquinas and Scotus. Certainly some modern Thomists have acted as though all of Thomism depended on his doctrine of esse, but there's a lot more to Thomas himself than that. In fact when I think of Thomas what primarily strikes me is a certain kind of order which sets him apart from his competitors (recall his remarks about order in the first chapter of Summa contra gentiles). St Bonaventure is another extremely orderly thinker, but Bonaventure's sense of order is artistic and graceful, where Thomas' is schematic and pedagogical. Not for nothing is Thomas the patron of teachers. He excels at being able to talk intelligently about everything, and above all to produce the sense that everything fits. This is why Thomism gets compared to a Gothic cathedral. It's huge, it's varied, the variety is subordinated to a single great design. On the other hand the range of issues that Scotus or Bonaventure deal with is more restricted. Bonaventureanism is less like a cathedral and more like a fantastically illuminated manuscript.

It's more fair, however, to say that esse is an "original and focal point" for Thomas than it is to say that the common nature is for Scotus. That just strikes me as wrong. Scotus' mind does not evince either Bonaventurean or Thomistic order: opening his books frequently produces the sensation of falling into a profound but chaotic abyss of insight. His method is not systematic and his thought is not easily systematizable. Vos' book The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus tries to reduce it to some semblance of order by orienting his achievement around some central conceptual accomplishments, like synchronic contingency, but with in my opinion very limited success. The common nature is, of course, very important for Scotus, but the notion of the irreducible individual is no less so - in fact the Scotist insistence on the primacy of the individual is in my opinion one of its great strengths over Thomism. Haecceities, the formal distinction, intrinsic modes, essentially ordered causes, and many other distinctively Scotist ideas work together in a complex and delicate balance in which no one of them takes priority over the others and all are fitted into a more general Aristotelean substrate from which they only emerge as needed in the particular instance. There are certain basic Thomistic notions which Aquinas deploys over and over again in a hundred contexts with almost monotonous regularity - esse, the real distinction of being and essence, immateriality or separability from matter, etc. - in a way that Scotus doesn't. If Thomas' thought is like a cathedral, Scotus' is like a piece of enormously complex polyphony sung over a drone of Aristotelianism and a cantus firmus of revelation. You can't grasp it all at once because it's essentially developmental and progressive. You can't reduce it to a leitmotif because the various melodic themes arise when needed by the music as a whole in one or another voice, and the importance is less in any particular voice or theme than in their fugal interplay. What's happening now depends on what happened in the debate a moment ago more than on the demands of some architectonic conceptual structure.

All this rhapsodizing is, of course, taking us away from Ockham again. For Ockham I do think it's fair to say, as our own Ockham said the other day, "It seems Ockham took a handful [of] basic and already established principles then applied them relentlessly and consistently in places they had never been applied before." But if Ockham's strength is to show what happens when you join genius and fearless persistence to such a technique, damn the consequences, it would be a mistake to assume that other thinkers are trying less successfully to do the same thing.

As I noted, in a while I'll post a lengthy excerpt from Maurer's book. I may also say something soon about the other book I bought at the same time and am reading simultaneously with it, Sokolowski's Phenomenology of the Human Person, which I'm enjoying very much.

Errantry

I have the character defect (not too rare, perhaps) of, whatever I am or ought to be doing, wishing I were doing something else - even when what I am or ought to be doing is something I very much want to do. Throughout school I had this problem: whatever I was studying, I wanted to study something else. When I was supposed to be learning calculus I was reading Thomists. When I was supposed to be studying Greek and French I was teaching myself Latin on the side.

Now that I'm in school not as a student but as a teacher this fault hasn't gone away. Last week I was teaching Hume's Enquiry, but Hume got me thinking of other British Empiricists I'd loved and lost, and I ended up rereading Berkeley's Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous instead of focussing on class preparation. This week it's Kant's Prolegomena, and I find myself feeling the pull, which I haven't felt in a very long time, of the Critique of Pure Reason.

{Autobiographical Interlude}

Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant were the first serious philosophy books I ever read, back as a fifteen-year-old novice. I might have glanced at a little Plato first, but I don't recall. Until then the extent of my philosophy had been largely C.S. Lewis and various things along the lines of Francis Schaeffer. At fifteen I hoarded my pennies until I could afford to buy a set of the 1952 edition of the Britannica Great Books. I read here and there as inclination and ability led me, but I knew I wanted to get to the philosophy. As I say, I don't recall how much Plato I looked at, but it couldn't have been much. A short acquaintance showed that Aristotle and Aquinas were too hard to start with, and I thought I'd look at the English thinkers. The Locke-Berekely-Hume volume was just right.

On the whole these guys weren't a bad place to start philosophy. Their great advantage is that they are very good and clear writers, a fact I've come to appreciate more and more after spending so much of my subsequent years with either Germans or scholastics. I read the empiricists avidly but never felt taken in by them. I couldn't at the time put my finger on where they were going wrong but I felt sure they must be; nevertheless my appetite was whetted. They incited my curiosity without settling my opinions or even my inclinations. When in the Introduction to his Principles of Human Knowledge Berkeley said

It were an endless as well as an useless thing to trace the Schoolmen, those great masters of abstraction, through all the manifold inextricable labyrinths of error and dispute which their doctrine of abstract natures and notions seems to have led them into

he didn't dissuade me from doing so myself. It turns out that following the schoolmen through their labyrinths - of error sometimes, of dispute always, of wisdom, I hope, occasionally - is indeed an endless thing, but not, I have found, a useless one. When at the end of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding Hume said

When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion

I didn't take his advice. My volumes of divinity and school metaphysics have multiplied a hundredfold since then. But it was a start.

I have to confess that I didn't read Kant next because he was the logical step after Hume, but for a much stupider reason. Nickelodeon used to show a cartoon called "Rocko's Modern Life", and in one episode Rocko discovers that his friend, who he had always considered a dim bulb, is actually a prodigy. He visits his friend's house to find him reading the Critique of Pure Reason, decides that he can't be bested by his friend, and goes home to read it himself, resulting in an amusing montage of mental anguish and existential horror (this is how I remember the episode; it's been more than fifteen years). I took this as a challenge and started to read the Critique myself. Kant daunted me as it daunted Rocko - I had to take notes to follow the argument, the first time I had done that with a book, and I didn't finish it - but I took it as a challenge to come back to.

Of course, speaking of challenges to come back to, thinking of the possibility of picking up the Critique reminds me that I never did finish Hegel's Phenomenology. We spent many weeks reading sections of it my senior year in college, and at the time it didn't leave me wanting more. Some years after that it was the only book on my comprehensive reading lists in graduate school that I didn't finish. Last year I bought a commentary on it by my favorite undergraduate teacher, thinking that he if anyone would teach me to love Hegel as he deserves, but the commentary has so far gone as unfinished as its commentatum.

* * *

So, reading the opening sections of the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics is filling me with an irrational desire to read Hegel side by side with a 500-page commentary. I think I'll manage to hold out for now. But I do the same thing with literature. Earlier this summer I was rereading The Canterbury Tales. I took a break to read The Faerie Queene for the third time, and when I was done, instead of going back to Chaucer, I've instead gone back to a series of Icelandic sagas. Right now I'm in the middle of a translation of Njalssaga which is more literally faithful than the last one I read, so I'm enjoying it. But I confess that I'm taking a break from it in order to read The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a little book that I find improves with age. I've decided just now that the third poem, "Errantry", is an allegory of the philosophical life, and it includes an episode on the hero's attempt to win love and reward from that harsh mistress Academia:

He sat and sang a melody,
his errantry a tarrying,
he begged a pretty butterfly,
that fluttered by to marry him.
She scorned him and she scoffed at him,
she laughed at him unpitying,
so long he studied wizardry,
and sigaldry and smithying.

It turns out that the pursuit, like so many pursuits, is just a distraction. The butterfly squanders his gifts and falls to bitter quarreling; the hero abandons her and looks elsewhere, but in his journeying and tourneying forgets his message and his errand. I need to beware of distractions. The real thing is the study - the wizardry and sigaldry and smithying.

Modern Life

In these days in which we live, when existence has become a thing of infinite complexity and fate, if it slips us a bit of goose with one hand, if pretty sure to give us the sleeve across the windpipe with the other, it is rarely that we find a human being who is unmixedly happy. Always the bitter will be blended with the sweet, and in this mélange one can be reasonably certain that it is the former that will predominate.

A severe indictment of our modern civilization, but it can't say it didn't ask for it.

-Wodehouse, Uncle Dynamite

Review of a New Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy

Here are some brief thoughts on the following new title:

Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, ed. Lagerlund, 2 vols., Springer 2011. $679.00 (!)

First things first. There is no index or table of contents. This makes the two volumes rather unwieldy and irritating. But, to assuage academic pride, perhaps, they do contain a list of contributors and the departments where they teach. Also, they have modeled the bibliographic entries on the sciences, which is rather ludicrous for medieval authors. In every entry you get items like this: "Francis of Mayronnes (1965)..." or "Thomas Aquinas (1887)...." Enough said.

Regarding the contents, these expensive volumes appear to be an improvement of the Noone/Gracia Blackwell volume, because in addition to author-entries we get thematic entries as well (and cutting edge ones, such as "intentionality" and "philosophical psychology"). And unlike the recent Pasnau volumes, Scotism has been given some representation. We get an article on Scotus by Thomas Williams, as well as articles on William of Alnwick, John of Reading, Walter Chatton, and Francis of Meyronnes. So they got the main figures of English Scotism (but not the French; no Hugo de novo castro). They did not, however, treat such an obvious character as Antonius Andreas (despite the fact that Marek Gensler was a contributor, who has written numerous articles on Antonius). I suppose I shouldn't expect that Spanish Scotism would be represented (in addition to Antonius, this would include Petrus Thomae, Petrus de Navarra, probably Ioannes de Bassolis, Francesc Eixemenis, Aufredo Gonteri). Of course, every obscure nominalist and thomist author was represented, including several that I, lover of bibliography though I am, had never heard of before.

So as is usual with such volumes, contemporary interest and expertise shape the contents. Furthermore, such interest and expertise is in turn shaped by what has been rescued from the manuscripts.

Arabic and Jewish philosophy also receive a lot of attention, which will be the sections useful to me as I am not a specialist in those fields and these articles can serve as gateways to these other thinkers.

Mediaeval and Modern Logics II

Lest anyone should think that my last post implies that we Scotists can find nothing good in modern philosophy (rather than that we simply regard it as metaphysically inadequate), I offer a corrective text:

Unfortunately there are still neo-scholastic logicians - though happily their number is decreasing - who are convinced that their logic is genuinely scholastic and that it cannot be surpassed by anything that modern logic has to offer. They look askance at the latter's formalism. They are suspicious of its symbolic form. They are afraid of repeating the Cartesian experiment of mixing mathematical thinking with philosophical speculation. Their coldness and openly hostile attitude are not without reason, since modern logic has made its most striking development not only in the hands of mathematicians, but also in the shadow of Positivism. Curiously enough, they seem to share with Kant the firm belief that logic has not progressed since the time of Aristotle. Yet the history of their own tradition should dispel this illusion, for the history of scholastic logic alone gives ample proof of a decided advance beyond the Stagirite's logic . . .

For those who have more than a passing acquaintance with modern logic, it is an accepted fact that this logic has made tremendous strides forward. It is likewise a fact - and one which current research continues to confirm - that these new developments have deviated far less from the logic of the 13th and 14th centuries than from that of our neo-scholastic textbooks . . .

Among the elements shared in varying degrees by genuinely scholastic logic and modern logic, there is one in particular that brings them in close proximity and facilitates a comparison. It is the character of formality, conserved in a much purer form in scholastic logic than in its neo-scholastic counterpart.

- Philotheus Boehner, Medieval Logic: An Outline of Its Development from 1250 to c.1400, Introduction

Boehner proceeds in a useful manner, showing where modern developments are good, useful, and compatible with mediaeval philosophy properly understood, as well as recognizing where the modern systems are allied or bound up with bad elements. He also shows how a "manualist" attitude to philosophy, presenting Thomism as a closed system, an alternative to modern philosophy, doesn't do justice either to the scholastic or to the modern philosophical tradition. This can help us to see how to read both. Vos doesn't really do this, as I recall, his attitude instead being "Scotus is great! All he needs to read modern philosophy!" A more judicious and less breathless approach would recognize that much in modern logic is good but that not much in modern metaphysics is and that these two need to be carefully disentwined to make their respective strengths and weaknesses clear.

Pope's Slander

Something inspired me today to reread Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism," and I recalled that there are some pretty interesting bits in it besides the famous quotes that everyone knows. For instance:

Some praise at Morning what they blame at Night;
But always think the last Opinion right.
A Muse by these is like a Mistress us'd,
This hour she's idoliz'd, the next abus'd,
While their weak Heads, like Towns unfortify'd,
'Twixt Sense and Nonsense daily change their Side.
Ask them the Cause; They're wiser still, they say;
And still to Morrow's wiser than to Day.
We think our Fathers Fools, so wise we grow;
Our wiser Sons, no doubt, will think us so.

I definitely know people like this, and it's always a bit stupefying to see someone who changes his opinions constantly and yet never doubts the truth of his current one. In fact this seems like a pretty devastating critique of modernism in general. And the observation in the final couplet seems rigorously Chestertonian.

Right after this segment Pope continues:

Once School-Divines this zealous Isle o'erspread;
Who knew most Sentences was deepest read;
Faith, Gospel, All, seem'd made to be disputed,
And none had Sense enough to be Confuted.
Scotists and Thomists, now, in Peace remain,
Amidst their kindred Cobwebs in Duck-Lane.

Ha ha, Scotists and Thomists once fought in England, but now nobody cares in our glorious age of Protestant Enlightenment! Sadly enough this attitude was common enough even among the good Catholic humanists, e.g. St Thomas More.

But this, later on, is much worse:

Learning and Rome alike in Empire grew,
And Arts still follow'd where her Eagles flew;
From the same Foes, at last, both felt their Doom,
And the same Age saw Learning fall, and Rome.
With Tyranny, then Superstition join'd,
As that the Body, this enslav'd the Mind;
Much was Believ'd, but little understood,
And to be dull was constru'd to be good;
A second Deluge Learning thus o'er-run,
And the Monks finish'd what the Goths begun.

Here Pope repeats the old Renaissance slander which was reproduced ad infinitum by the so-called Enlightenment. The ironic thing is that the historical forgetfulness of their (Roman) past which the moderns falsely accused the mediaevals of was mirrored by their actual historical forgetfulness of their own (mediaeval) past. If the Monks had really finished what the Goths begun, the "Renaissance" (itself an almost totally false label) would never have been possible. Where did Pope and all those other Humanists think all the books of the glorious classical past came from? From copies made by monks, of course. And if the moderns had ever bothered learning how to actually read mediaeval books they might have seen how much mediaeval literature was indebted to classical form and content. The least "classical" books from the middle ages - Icelandic saga literature, for instance - also tend to be the most "modern".

If you're talking about sculpture, painting, and architecture, though, the moderns certainly had a point. Much was lost and renaissance artists did rediscover and improve on classical techniques. On the other hand, they also foolishly overlooked and despised mediaeval innovations. What kind of a philistine, no matter how professedly "classical", do you have to be to call the gothic cathedrals barbarous?

At length, Erasmus, that great, injur'd Name,
(The Glory of the Priesthood, and the Shame!)
Stemm'd the wild Torrent of a barb'rous Age.
And drove those Holy Vandals off the Stage.

Credit to Erasmus where credit is due, but this is just nonsense, the same sort of nonsense that we at the Smithy decry when St Thomas is exalted to the heavens high above every other Catholic thinker, only much, much worse. There's no passing this off as hyperbole. It's just lies, plain and simple. I wonder what Pope would make of the fact that the ideas of their precious Enlightenment came to full fruition in the 20th century, that most "barb'rous" of all ages.

Words to Live By: Thomas Aquinas

Item debemus audire non solum ab uno, sed a multis; quia dicit Apostolus I Cor. XII, quod divisiones gratiarum sunt. Unus non est profectus in omnibus. Beatus Gregorius optime scivit moralitates, beatus Augustinus quaestiones solvere, et beatus Ambrosius optime allegorizavit. Quod non addiscis ab uno, addiscis ab alio. Unde in Eccl. VI: in medio presbyterorum prudentium sta, et in sapientia cordium illorum conversare, ut possis audire narrationem Dei. Quod non narrat unus, narrat alius. Non dico quod credam utile esse quod qui incipiunt primo audire scientiam aliquam, quod diversos audiant; sed debent audire unum quousque sint fundati; et cum sint fundati, audiant diversos, ut possint carpere flores ex diversis, idest quae sunt utilia.

Further, we should not only listen to one person but to many people, because as the Apostle says: there are a variety of graces. One man is not accomplished in all things. Blessed Gregory knew morals the best, blessed Augustine solved questions [the best], and blessed Ambrose allegorized the best. What you do not learn from one, you learn from another; thus in Ecclesiasticus: Stand in the midst of the wise elders, and join yourself from your heart to their wisdom, that you may listen to the discourse of God. What one does not tell you, another does. I am not saying that I believe that it is useful for those who are beginning to first listen to any sort of knowledge for the sake of listening to different people, but they ought to listen to one person until they become well versed, and when they have become well versed, then they should listen to different people so that they might be able to pick flowers from different opinions, in other words, those things which are helpful.

--Sermon, "Puer Iesus", 3.6

Vol. XII

I got my box from Quaracchi yesterday with all the edited Ordinatio volumes I didn't have yet, including the just-released volume 12, which is 500 pages all about the Eucharist - the Scotistic Commission claims it's the longest and most comprehensive treatment of the subject in all the middle ages. Not even Faber has this one: ha ha, chew on that!

I'd love to get to it, but I have several volumes before that I need to get to first. Getting the box reminded me how hard it is to learn about Scotus without being a scholar with access to a top-notch library. These books are really really expensive, and there are no translations, and the scholarship on Scotus is still scanty at best, except on a few popular topics. So The Smithy will have to continue its mission of reading it for you and reporting on occasional bits.

Sorry about the collapse of Ockham month. No fancy excuses: I've been reading and doing other things, and I got bored with it.

Symposium

Instead of dutifully reading Ockham today I've been reading the Symposium and Allan Bloom's commentary. I confess that whenever I read Plato I feel that he is both the most beautiful and most profound of philosophers and become tempted to just keep reading him and ignore all his footnoters.

I remember vividly the first time I read the Symposium, at fifteen or sixteen, in the old Jowett translation in the Britannica Great Books set. It certainly made more of an impression on me than any of the other Plato I read around the same. I'll never forget my initial impression at the speech of Aristophanes, which I didn't understand was supposed to be funny and found simply absurd and ludicrous and a bit grotesque.

And too I remember vividly the second time I read it, a few years later as a college freshman. For many years at St John's College there had been a tradition of making the Symposium seminar an actual symposium, with everyone drinking and talking. Federal funding regulations had made this wise and beneficent custom impracticable for a program in which Plato comes in the first year when nearly all the participants were underage, and by the time I got there the practice had been "officially" discontinued. Unofficially, however, most people got plenty drunk beforehand and a few intrepid souls snuck their wine into class in things like Snapple bottles. I stayed totally sober - I was very careful not to drink for the first two years of college - and participated in the discussion and watched in amazement as various usually dour or carefree or vice-hardened classmates began to pour their hearts out, some even weeping, as we all wondered together about love and beauty and transcendence and being fundamentally incomplete.

Perhaps part of the reason that Plato has such attractions for me is (in addition to his astonishing excellence) merely personal, in that I read so much of him as a freshman, which was such a formative period and has so many intense associations. For instance, I can't read the Phaedrus without thinking of another seminar, after which I met up with my girlfriend who had just had her own (at St John's all the seminars in the College happen at the same time, from 8-10 PM on Monday and Thursday nights; it's almost like a community liturgy around which all other time is structured). We were talking and she mentioned how proud she was that we had kept the black horses of our souls in check so well, which was ironic, for I had partly spent my seminar worrying that my own black horse might be champing at the bit more than I could handle.

Anyway. I read a great deal besides my studies in scholastic philosophy and theology, but since the blog is explicitly centered around these, it's always hard to tell what place if any other matter have here. "What's this tripe?" I can hear my vast crowd of frothing readers protest. "We came here for the good stuff, and he's trying to pass off his nostalgia instead of thinking like a man!" Fair enough. Back to the trenches tomorrow.

Narn i Hin Scoti

Speaking of the constitution of the divine persons, the other day I read Scotus' Ordinatio I dist. 26. This is a classic Scotus monster-question of sixty pages, various competing positions summarized and argued for and against in dozens of arguments, with references to the Fathers, councils, popes, recent scholastics, and on and on, and at the end the reader is quite unsure what Scotus' own opinion is! The situation with this text is so complicated that the editors devote most of their large introduction to v. 6 explaining what happened, and reading it I was quite struck how similar the Ordinatio is to The Silmarillion.

What I mean is this: as is well known, when J.R.R. Tolkien died he left behind a vast quantity of manuscripts in various states of completion, many of which in theory were to eventually produce some final version of the masterpiece he'd been working on all his life. But he died without ever constituting the final work and the task of finding some way to present the disparate material to the public fell to his son Christopher and assistants. What Tolkien fils did at first was to combine, reduce, tinker, harmonize, and rewrite the various material until he could offer the "published" Silmarillion as a pretty complete and coherent work. The difficulty with this publication is that it left its readers with a rather unclear idea of what Tolkien pere had actually written. It was readable, and substantially great, but was it authentic?

Eventually Christopher ended up publishing a huge amount of the original materials anyway so that people could see for themselves where the original pastiche came from, complete with commentary and critical apparatus. Someone published a book not too long ago analyzing The Silmarillion passage-by-passage against the various volumes of The History of Middle-earth to show exactly what its relation is to the source materials.

The History of Middle-earth is both much greater and much less great than the published Silmarillion. There's a lot of stuff in the source-material that isn't great at all. There's a lot of repetition, or insignificant variation, false starts, questionable approaches, etc. It doesn't cohere, obviously. It's almost impossible to read all the way through. (I've read all but some of the middle volumes of drafts from The Lord of the Rings.) Chunks of it repay very long and careful study, especially many of the long-form drafts and narratives in the later volumes, such as the Finrod and Andreth dialogue; but many of the summaries and annals can be glanced at once and left alone.

Anyway for someone who really loves Tolkien's work Christopher's Silmarillion can't be the final word, even though it's so much more readable and approachable than the massive set. Nevertheless it was probably a necessary production, and without it no doubt the more definitive series would never have been published.

Now the funny thing is that Scotus' work has such a similar history. When he died he left behind all these drafts of works which never reached completion, and his disciples saw that they could not be copied and published just as they sat on the Doctor's desk. The drafts were in various states of chaos, with additions and cancellations from various periods of time, and big blank spaces left for more additions and sketches for continuation. Much of the materials were nigh unintelligible as they stood. They had to be finessed, supplemented, edited to produce a readable edition. This was done, with the result that a) Scotism became a great school, one of the main strains of scholastic thought, and b) confusion reigned about just what Scotus' writings and teachings were for centuries. People read the "editions" but didn't always know if they were getting Scotus or one of his disciples or some opinion that Scotus had considered but not endorsed, or whether they were reading something by another person entirely, like James of Viterbo.

This is finally getting better as critical editions have been (oh so slowly) coming out over the past decades. The aim of the Vatican edition's Ordinatio is explicitly to produce, as far as humanly possible, the contents of the "Liber Scoti", the actual book written in Scotus' own hand, as he left it when he died, extracted from the mess of later alterations and accretions. Now we know better than ever before what Scotus wrote. But, paradoxically, this makes him harder to read! The whole reason that the first "editions" were produced in such an inauthentic form is that the actual "Liber Scoti" was so hard to make sense of!

It's rough, because Scotus would be hard enough to understand without taking into account all the historical and textual issues. Sometimes I think we have to resign ourselves to not always being able to reach the "mind of Scotus", or even the true intention of the text at hand, because there just might not be one. There's only what Scotus was thinking about and what he was working on up to the end, and not always a definitive answer, just as in the end maybe there's no "true" family tree for the house of Finwë, only various versions and ideas.

For Tolkien enthusiasts, luckily, Christopher put out both the "edited" version and the "raw" version of his father's work in his own lifetime. One can think of the work of Scotus' first disciples as parallel to the work of the "early" C.T. and the work of the Vatican edition and its American counterpart as parallel to the work of the "late" C.T., only for Scotus it took 600-700 years instead of a couple of decades. No doubt a lot of this is just due to advances in publishing capabilities. If the fourteenth century had had the ability to produce facsimiles there might not have been nearly as big of a confusion.

To return to Ordinatio I dist. 26, Scotus argues for and against the "common" western view that the divine persons are constituted only by their relations of origin. He has some pretty compelling arguments against this and for the notion that there must be some additional absolute property to constitute a person, and that a person cannot be understood simply as a subsistent relation, but must be something absolute. As I said earlier, in this text it's not possible to tell his own opinion. The editors have a lot to say about it. In the end Scotus' position appears to be: it's more likely that the persons are constituted simply by their relations of origin; this is more consonant with the latin tradition. At the same time, the Church has never defined this matter, and it is possible, licit, and orthodox to hold that there must be an additional something absolute in their constitution.

Self Portrait?

A clerk ther was of Oxenford also,
That un-to logik hadde longe y-go.
As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he nas nat right fat, I undertake;
But loked holwe, and ther-to soberly.
Ful thredbar was his overest courtepy;
For he had geten him yet no benefyce,
Ne was so worldly for to have offyce.
For his was lever have at his beddes heed
Twenty bokes, clad in blak or reed,
Of Aristotle and his philosophye,
Than robes ryche, or fithele, or gay sautrye.
But al be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre;
But al that he mighte of his freendes hente,
On bokes and on lerninge he it spente,
And bisily gan for the soules preye
Of hem that yaf him wher-with to scoleye.
Of studie took he most cure and most hede.
Noght o word spak he more than was nede,
And that was seyd in forme and reverence,
And short and quik, and ful of hy sentence.
Souninge in moral vertu was his speche,
And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche.

--Chaucer

Chesterton and the Sanity of Christianity

As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind — the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness. In case any reader has not come across the thing I mean, I will give such instances as I remember at random of this self-contradiction in the sceptical attack. I give four or five of them; there are fifty more.

Thus, for instance, I was much moved by the eloquent attack on Christianity as a thing of inhuman gloom; for I thought (and still think) sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin. Insincere pessimism is a social accomplishment, rather agreeable than otherwise; and fortunately nearly all pessimism is insincere. But if Christianity was, as these people said, a thing purely pessimistic and opposed to life, then I was quite prepared to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral. But the extraordinary thing is this. They did prove to me in Chapter I. (to my complete satisfaction) that Christianity was too pessimistic; and then, in Chapter II., they began to prove to me that it was a great deal too optimistic. One accusation against Christianity was that it prevented men, by morbid tears and terrors, from seeking joy and liberty in the bosom of Nature. But another accusation was that it comforted men with a fictitious providence, and put them in a pink-and-white nursery. One great agnostic asked why Nature was not beautiful enough, and why it was hard to be free. Another great agnostic objected that Christian optimism, “the garment of make-believe woven by pious hands,” hid from us the fact that Nature was ugly, and that it was impossible to be free. One rationalist had hardly done calling Christianity a nightmare before another began to call it a fool’s paradise. This puzzled me; the charges seemed inconsistent. Christianity could not at once be the black mask on a white world, and also the white mask on a black world. The state of the Christian could not be at once so comfortable that he was a coward to cling to it, and so uncomfortable that he was a fool to stand it. If it falsified human vision it must falsify it one way or another; it could not wear both green and rose-coloured spectacles. I rolled on my tongue with a terrible joy, as did all young men of that time, the taunts which Swinburne hurled at the dreariness of the creed —

“Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean, the world has grown gray with Thy breath.”
But when I read the same poet’s accounts of paganism (as in “Atalanta”), I gathered that the world was, if possible, more gray before the Galilean breathed on it than afterwards. The poet maintained, indeed, in the abstract, that life itself was pitch dark. And yet, somehow, Christianity had darkened it. The very man who denounced Christianity for pessimism was himself a pessimist. I thought there must be something wrong. And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.

It must be understood that I did not conclude hastily that the accusations were false or the accusers fools. I simply deduced that Christianity must be something even weirder and wickeder than they made out. A thing might have these two opposite vices; but it must be a rather queer thing if it did. A man might be too fat in one place and too thin in another; but he would be an odd shape. At this point my thoughts were only of the odd shape of the Christian religion; I did not allege any odd shape in the rationalistic mind.

Here is another case of the same kind. I felt that a strong case against Christianity lay in the charge that there is something timid, monkish, and unmanly about all that is called “Christian,” especially in its attitude towards resistance and fighting. The great sceptics of the nineteenth century were largely virile. Bradlaugh in an expansive way, Huxley, in a reticent way, were decidedly men. In comparison, it did seem tenable that there was something weak and over patient about Christian counsels. The Gospel paradox about the other cheek, the fact that priests never fought, a hundred things made plausible the accusation that Christianity was an attempt to make a man too like a sheep. I read it and believed it, and if I had read nothing different, I should have gone on believing it. But I read something very different. I turned the next page in my agnostic manual, and my brain turned up-side down. Now I found that I was to hate Christianity not for fighting too little, but for fighting too much. Christianity, it seemed, was the mother of wars. Christianity had deluged the world with blood. I had got thoroughly angry with the Christian, because he never was angry. And now I was told to be angry with him because his anger had been the most huge and horrible thing in human history; because his anger had soaked the earth and smoked to the sun. The very people who reproached Christianity with the meekness and non-resistance of the monasteries were the very people who reproached it also with the violence and valour of the Crusades. It was the fault of poor old Christianity (somehow or other) both that Edward the Confessor did not fight and that Richard Coeur de Leon did. The Quakers (we were told) were the only characteristic Christians; and yet the massacres of Cromwell and Alva were characteristic Christian crimes. What could it all mean? What was this Christianity which always forbade war and always produced wars? What could be the nature of the thing which one could abuse first because it would not fight, and second because it was always fighting? In what world of riddles was born this monstrous murder and this monstrous meekness? The shape of Christianity grew a queerer shape every instant.

I take a third case; the strangest of all, because it involves the one real objection to the faith. The one real objection to the Christian religion is simply that it is one religion. The world is a big place, full of very different kinds of people. Christianity (it may reasonably be said) is one thing confined to one kind of people; it began in Palestine, it has practically stopped with Europe. I was duly impressed with this argument in my youth, and I was much drawn towards the doctrine often preached in Ethical Societies — I mean the doctrine that there is one great unconscious church of all humanity rounded on the omnipresence of the human conscience. Creeds, it was said, divided men; but at least morals united them. The soul might seek the strangest and most remote lands and ages and still find essential ethical common sense. It might find Confucius under Eastern trees, and he would be writing “Thou shalt not steal.” It might decipher the darkest hieroglyphic on the most primeval desert, and the meaning when deciphered would be “Little boys should tell the truth.” I believed this doctrine of the brotherhood of all men in the possession of a moral sense, and I believe it still — with other things. And I was thoroughly annoyed with Christianity for suggesting (as I supposed) that whole ages and empires of men had utterly escaped this light of justice and reason. But then I found an astonishing thing. I found that the very people who said that mankind was one church from Plato to Emerson were the very people who said that morality had changed altogether, and that what was right in one age was wrong in another. If I asked, say, for an altar, I was told that we needed none, for men our brothers gave us clear oracles and one creed in their universal customs and ideals. But if I mildly pointed out that one of men’s universal customs was to have an altar, then my agnostic teachers turned clean round and told me that men had always been in darkness and the superstitions of savages. I found it was their daily taunt against Christianity that it was the light of one people and had left all others to die in the dark. But I also found that it was their special boast for themselves that science and progress were the discovery of one people, and that all other peoples had died in the dark. Their chief insult to Christianity was actually their chief compliment to themselves, and there seemed to be a strange unfairness about all their relative insistence on the two things. When considering some pagan or agnostic, we were to remember that all men had one religion; when considering some mystic or spiritualist, we were only to consider what absurd religions some men had. We could trust the ethics of Epictetus, because ethics had never changed. We must not trust the ethics of Bossuet, because ethics had changed. They changed in two hundred years, but not in two thousand.

This began to be alarming. It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with. What again could this astonishing thing be like which people were so anxious to contradict, that in doing so they did not mind contradicting themselves? I saw the same thing on every side. I can give no further space to this discussion of it in detail; but lest any one supposes that I have unfairly selected three accidental cases I will run briefly through a few others. Thus, certain sceptics wrote that the great crime of Christianity had been its attack on the family; it had dragged women to the loneliness and contemplation of the cloister, away from their homes and their children. But, then, other sceptics (slightly more advanced) said that the great crime of Christianity was forcing the family and marriage upon us; that it doomed women to the drudgery of their homes and children, and forbade them loneliness and contemplation. The charge was actually reversed. Or, again, certain phrases in the Epistles or the marriage service, were said by the anti-Christians to show contempt for woman’s intellect. But I found that the anti-Christians themselves had a contempt for woman’s intellect; for it was their great sneer at the Church on the Continent that “only women” went to it. Or again, Christianity was reproached with its naked and hungry habits; with its sackcloth and dried peas. But the next minute Christianity was being reproached with its pomp and its ritualism; its shrines of porphyry and its robes of gold. It was abused for being too plain and for being too coloured. Again Christianity had always been accused of restraining sexuality too much, when Bradlaugh the Malthusian discovered that it restrained it too little. It is often accused in the same breath of prim respectability and of religious extravagance. Between the covers of the same atheistic pamphlet I have found the faith rebuked for its disunion, “One thinks one thing, and one another,” and rebuked also for its union, “It is difference of opinion that prevents the world from going to the dogs.” In the same conversation a free-thinker, a friend of mine, blamed Christianity for despising Jews, and then despised it himself for being Jewish.

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre. Perhaps, after all, it is Christianity that is sane and all its critics that are mad — in various ways. I tested this idea by asking myself whether there was about any of the accusers anything morbid that might explain the accusation. I was startled to find that this key fitted a lock. For instance, it was certainly odd that the modern world charged Christianity at once with bodily austerity and with artistic pomp. But then it was also odd, very odd, that the modern world itself combined extreme bodily luxury with an extreme absence of artistic pomp. The modern man thought Becket’s robes too rich and his meals too poor. But then the modern man was really exceptional in history; no man before ever ate such elaborate dinners in such ugly clothes. The modern man found the church too simple exactly where modern life is too complex; he found the church too gorgeous exactly where modern life is too dingy. The man who disliked the plain fasts and feasts was mad on entrées. The man who disliked vestments wore a pair of preposterous trousers. And surely if there was any insanity involved in the matter at all it was in the trousers, not in the simply falling robe. If there was any insanity at all, it was in the extravagant entrées, not in the bread and wine.

I went over all the cases, and I found the key fitted so far. The fact that Swinburne was irritated at the unhappiness of Christians and yet more irritated at their happiness was easily explained. It was no longer a complication of diseases in Christianity, but a complication of diseases in Swinburne. The restraints of Christians saddened him simply because he was more hedonist than a healthy man should be. The faith of Christians angered him because he was more pessimist than a healthy man should be. In the same way the Malthusians by instinct attacked Christianity; not because there is anything especially anti-Malthusian about Christianity, but because there is something a little anti-human about Malthusianism.

Nevertheless it could not, I felt, be quite true that Christianity was merely sensible and stood in the middle. There was really an element in it of emphasis and even frenzy which had justified the secularists in their superficial criticism. It might be wise, I began more and more to think that it was wise, but it was not merely worldly wise; it was not merely temperate and respectable. Its fierce crusaders and meek saints might balance each other; still, the crusaders were very fierce and the saints were very meek, meek beyond all decency. Now, it was just at this point of the speculation that I remembered my thoughts about the martyr and the suicide. In that matter there had been this combination between two almost insane positions which yet somehow amounted to sanity. This was just such another contradiction; and this I had already found to be true. This was exactly one of the paradoxes in which sceptics found the creed wrong; and in this I had found it right. Madly as Christians might love the martyr or hate the suicide, they never felt these passions more madly than I had felt them long before I dreamed of Christianity. Then the most difficult and interesting part of the mental process opened, and I began to trace this idea darkly through all the enormous thoughts of our theology. The idea was that which I had outlined touching the optimist and the pessimist; that we want not an amalgam or compromise, but both things at the top of their energy; love and wrath both burning. Here I shall only trace it in relation to ethics. But I need not remind the reader that the idea of this combination is indeed central in orthodox theology. For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God. Now let me trace this notion as I found it.

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little. Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy the u[[epsilon]][[sigma]][[omicron]][[nu]] or balance of Aristotle. They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever. But the great truism of the u[[epsilon]][[sigma]][[omicron]][[nu]] remains for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any balance except their own. But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way.

Philosophical Comics

People who get to know me in person occasionally express shock or surprise when they learn about my occasionally lowbrow taste in pop culture, since I like cartoons , bad movies ,and all sorts of comics. I'm not entirely sure why this should be so. In my less charitable moods I'm tempted to think it's because some people use movies etc. as their primary source of intellectual stimulation, and so are snobby about the trash, whereas for me they are for amusement and relaxation, and I get my thinking material, er, elsewhere. I'm much more careful when choosing novels, since they're generally much more of a time commitment, though even here I do enjoy occasional light reading. I will admit, however, to being very picky indeed about music and poetry.

Anyway, it's always a delight when my lowbrow tastes overlap with my highbrow ones, to the confusion of phrenologists everywhere, and I was very excited to find out about Logicomix: An Epic Search For Truth, a fascinating and skillful comic book about the life of Bertrand Russell, and the quest for the foundations of logic and mathematics by Frege, Cantor, Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Gödel, and the rest. The art is good, the storytelling is good, the philosophy is all silly modernism but well portrayed and fascinating. I rate it five out of five formalities.

Uncut Pages

The pleasures derived from the use of a paper knife are tactile, auditory, visual, and especially mental. Progress in reading is preceded by an act that traverses that material solidity of the book to allow you access to its incorporeal substance. Penetrating among the pages from below, the blade vehemently moves upward, opening a vertical cut in a flowing succession of slashes that one by one strike the fibers and mow them down - with a friendly and cheery crackling the good paper receives that first visitor, who announces countless turns of the pages stirred by the wind or by a gaze - then the horizontal fold, especially if it is double, opposes greater resistance, because it requires an awkward backhand motion - there the sound is one of muffled laceration, with deeper notes. The margin of the pages is jagged, revealing its fibrous texture; as fine shaving - also known as "curl" - is detached from it, as pretty to see as a wave's foam on the beach. Opening a path for yourself, with a sword's blade, in the barrier of pages becomes linked with the thought of how much the word contains and concealed: you cut your way through your reading as if through a dense forest.

-- Italo Calvino, If On A Winter's Night A Traveler

I love this passage, which captures so well the unique pleasure that comes from reading a book with uncut pages. Nowadays there's an additional quality to this pleasure that comes from the fact that books aren't sold this way anymore. Only quite old books still have uncut pages, which means that, once you cut one, that's one less book that can give you this pleasure. There's a feeling in cutting a set of pages of doing something irreversible.

The other thing is that, since the book you're cutting is quite old, there's always mixed with the cutting and reading the knowledge, simultaneously melancholy and delightful, that no one has read the book before, despite its age. A little over a year ago I bought, very cheaply, a near-complete set of Sir Walter Scott's novels. They're nearly one hundred and twenty years old, and yet the pages were all uncut until I began to read them. When I started Waverly I couldn't avoid thinking about how many homes or libraries or used bookstores this set must have wandered through in twelve decades, with no one to read them, waiting for me to find them. It's like a romantic comedy with no girl.

When the book is, for instance, a Quarrachi edition of some scholastic author, however, the melancholy overcomes the delight, since theirs are usually the only editions available of these works, and the uncut pages means that not enough people have been reading the scholastics to exhaust decades-old printings.

Nostalgia

Browsing through my library this morning I discovered, tucked into the index, the receipt for my copy of Bernard Lonergan's Insight, which it turns out I purchased nine years ago today. Does that ever make me feel old! And it took me back to when I first read the book in the previous year as a 19-year-old sophomore. Insight and Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge were probably the two modern books that had the greatest effect on me that year and set the stage for my thinking for a long time. After I finished my B.A. and went to grad school I turned in my "Thomist" license plate and began studying more scholastics and fewer neo-Thomists, but I still owe those guys a debt of gratitude. In fact going through my shelves made me (as so often happens) think that it might be time to read some of these books again (and there are still a few by Gilson I've never gotten around to). But when is that going to happen?

All that being said, check out this bit from the preface to Degrees of Knowledge:

In truth, Thomism is a common task. One is not a Thomist because, in the emporium of systems, one chooses it as if one were choosing one system among others just as you try one pair of shoes after another in a shoestore until you find a pattern that fits your foot better. If that were the way it was done, it would be more stimulating to cut a system to one's own measure. One is a Thomist because one has repudiated every attempt to find philosophical truth in any system fabricated by an individual (even though that individual be called ego) and because one wants to seek out what is true - for oneself, indeed, and by one's own reason - by allowing oneself to be taught by the whole range of human thought, in order not to neglect anything of that which is. Aristotle and St. Thomas occupy a privileged place for us only because, thank to their supreme docility to the lessons of the real, we find in them the principles and the scale of values through which the total effort of this universal thought can be preserved without running the risk of eclecticism and confusion.

This sort of thing really impressed me as a teenager; now that I'm pushing thirty it raises my hackles. At this point I'm suspicious of any philosophical "system" whatsoever, even one so venerable as Thomism. As soon as one turns one's insights, principles, arguments, and conclusions into a "system" it begins to take on a life of its own, to become a thought-artifact. This seems to be just what Maritain likes about Thomism, which he claims is "organic" and grows through the ages through cooperative work, like a medieval cathedral. But there is inevitably born in its inhabitants and curators the urge to defend the cathedral from outside attack, even if the attack comes only in the form of suggestions for remodeling. It's not clear to me that this defensive posture is the same thing as "supreme docility to the lessons of the real".

This criticism by no means falls on St Thomas himself just because it seems empirically to describe "Thomism". But it's also not clear to me that Thomas either intended to or did build a "system" - and indeed Maritain implies the opposite - or that his particular "thought-world" is a preeminently exemplary vessel of the philosophia perennis in some sort of self-contained and exclusionary way. This is in part why I didn't trade my "Thomist" plate in for a "Scotist" one ("Bonaventurean" wouldn't fit, even if it were accurate!): I'm not at all convinced that there is a "Scotism" or a "Scotistic synthesis", rather than simply a series of uniquely penetrating insights and arguments fitting into and conditioning a common scholasticism - common not in the sense of there being a shared common "system", but a shared terminology, outlook, method, and basic conceptual structure. I don't see any reason why it isn't possible to consider oneself a "Scomist", as one eminent academic I know likes to call himself, or a "Scotaventurean" or "Thomiventurscotist", for that matter. I think it's easier and more sensible just to call oneself a scholastic.

Now this very lack of "synthesis" has led people to criticize Scotus on just this point: his thought is not constructive, but critical, etc, and he's presented as part of a larger story in which the thirteenth century is the age of constructing the great cathedrals of thought and the fourteenth is the age of gnawing at the mortar to see how strong they are. But there's good reason to doubt this story, at least as a story of why the fourteenth century is not so worthy of study as the thirteenth. Everyone would admit that St Bonaventure and St Thomas have a greater power of "synthesis" than Bl Scotus does. But Bonaventure's thought is still closer to Scotus' than to Thomas'. And synthetic power is no guarantee of the truth of any given principle or conclusion. This seems to me the main point. Once we've told ourselves that St Thomas was "supremely docile to the lessons of the real" we're already likely to a) assume that his contemporaries weren't so supremely docile and that b) arguments which if accepted would impair the cathedral of Thomism must come from an inferior docility. As I've said many times before, I think this sort of attitude locates Thomas' merits in the wrong place, needlessly denigrates everyone else, and is bad for the philosophic spirit. If rejecting it means "running the risk of eclecticism and confusion", well, confusion is a constant and unavoidable risk in philosophy. And I have to admit that I don't quite grasp Maritain's horror of eclecticism. I'm not even entirely sure I know what he means.

A Rural Seat

A Rural Seat

Nahum Tate (1652-1715), The Choice:

Grant me, indulgent Heaven, a rural seat,
Rather contemptible than great;
Where, though I taste life's sweets, still I may be
Athirst for immortality.
I would have business, but exempt from strife;
A private, but an active, life;
A conscience bold, and punctual to his charge;
My stock of health, or patience, large.
Some books I'd have, and some acquaintance too,
But very good, and very few.
Then (if one mortal two such grants may crave)
From silent life I'd steal into my grave.

Thanks to Laudator Temporis Acti, a blog I've read a number of times before but am only now adding to the blogroll. So this post isn't wholly derivative, here's a complementary piece I came across all by my lonesome in a real live book, by Alexander Pope:

Ode On Solitude:

Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest, who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days, and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixt; sweet recreation;
And Innocence, which most does please
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

Awesome!

I've just come across something too awesome not to mention: Njal's Saga in Latin. You can get in from Google books here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=AIIAAAAAcAAJ

Sometimes the Internet rocks.

Maybe I'll print it off and stick it on my shelf next to my Latin edition of the Kalevala.

Benedictio nuptiarum

Our worthy and esteemed Faber was married two days ago and consequently may not post for some time as he adjusts to his new duties. I offer both Mr and the new Mrs Faber my heartiest congratulations. At the end of my Best Man speech I offered a toast in English which I here present in its original form:

Benedictio nuptiarum

Utinam uxoris scientia et sollertia arte Latine
id mariti praestet semper--

Utinam ea usque irrideat ei,
et semper poenitet--

Et ergo impensam librorum suorum
semper ignoscat.

Bibliomania

What wild desires, what restless torments seize
The hapless man, who feels the book-disease,
If niggard Fortune cramp his gen'rous mind,
And Prudence quench the Spark by heaven assign'd!
With wistful glance his aching eyes behold
The Princeps-copy, clad in blue and gold,
Where the tall Book-case, with partition thin,
Displays, yet guards the tempting charms within . . .
For you the Monk illum'd his pictur'd page,
For you the press defies the Spoils of age;
Faustus for you infernal tortures bore,
For you Erasmus starv'd on Adria's shore. . . .
Ev'n I, debarr'd of ease, and studious hours,
Confess, mid anxious toil, its lurking powers.
How pure the joy, when first my hands unfold
The small, rare volume, black with tarnish'd gold!
The Eyes skims restless, like the roving bee,
O'er flowers of wit, or song, or repartee,
While sweet as Springs, new-bubbling from the stone,
Glides through the breast some pleasing theme unknown.

--From Dr John Ferriar's Bibliomania