natural vs methodic asceticism
Philosophy can treat the symptoms of original sin, sometimes to excellent effect, but it cannot cure the disease, for it has no way to supply what is lacking.
Peter's shadow (Acts 5:12) // Paul's garment (Acts 19:12)
the links between the Transfiguration and the martyrdom of Stephen
baptism as "a fountain to purify from sin and uncleanness" (Zech 13:1)
Platonic myths as poetic descriptions of philosophical inquiry
Our character flaws are misfires of our greatnesses.
Who cannot personify a book cannot read well.
personal continuation after death as seen in
(1) prayers for the dead
(2) invocation of the saints
(3) veneration of icons
(4) sacramental unction
depiction as testimony
Rhetorical arguments are derived from analogues and symptoms.
Christ on the cross as aliquid stat pro aliquo
being a sign vs being a signifier
skill as natural secret (technical arcana)
Think of Feanor here: the uniqueness, unrepeatability, arises from (a) the unrepeatable nature of Feanor's skill; (b) the unrepeatable nature of his materials; (c) the unrepeatable je-ne-sais-quoi contributed by chance or fate (even Feanor cannot repeat his feat -- they are not just works of skill but of skill at a level even Feanor cannot himself guarantee, Feanor on an excellent day).
The amusing (geloios) is a kind of misfiring (hamartema) or shamefulness (aischos) that is painless (anodynon) and not destructive (ou phthartikon).
Laughter is an expression of relief. It is an error to conflate this with humor.
Privacy is merely an outgrowth of certain kinds of courteous practices.
teleological vs morphological metaphors
Augustine, Harmony 3.29, considers (1) manuscript variation, (2) the majority and antiquior readings, and (3) lectio difficilior.
defending the first precept of natural law by retorsion
All load-bearing criticisms should be retorsion-tested.
Formalizations of metaphorical usage requires a way to recognize norms and deviations from them.
Metaphors are not mere deviations from literal discourse (they are not mere inadvertent misuses of words, for instance).
Aristotle's formal analysis of metaphor by ratios is still the best formalization ever developed, notwithstanding the endless progression of fancier and fancier apparatuses.
Questions of the literal paraphrasability of metaphors are analogous to questions of commensurability of irrational numbers.
The teeth of the maiden are like washed sheep, or Julia's leg like an egg, whether we are culturally primed to recognize this or not. We see this truth in the fact that a little thought is all it takes to see the point of an alien metaphor, if it trades on a likeness of which we could be acquainted.
Word meanings are miniature traditions.
language as equipment for interrelating
To indicate something is to interrelate, or hypothetical interrelate, with respect to that thing.
"similes are metaphors needing an explanatory word" Aristotle Rhetoric 1406b
metalinguistic negation & fitness of words ('It wasn't hot, it was sweltering'; 'It wasn't bad, it was awful')
As vague metaphors, similes are strongest when contextualizing other, stronger metaphors: Mine eyes, like clouds, were drizzling rain.
usury of signs (trying to get the effect without doing the productive work -- e.g., trying to play on patriotic symbols to get an effect without using them as patriotic)
a book with the title, The Book You Are Reading
jurisdictio suppleta in errore communi cum titulo colorato
titulus coloratus (apparent right resulting from a real title revoked or voiced, where the latter is not known)
titulus existimatus (apparent right arising only from common belief)
While venial sins individually are not inconsistent with charity, a multiplicity of venial sins approaches such inconsistency, and a large multiplication of them is a grave negligence, and thus mortal sin.
excellences of good metaphor: to saphe (clarity), to heda (sweetness, elegance), to xenikon (foreignness) -- Aristotle Rhetoric 1405a
Riddles and figures of speech have the same root.
The clarity provided by the papal office is not the same as the clarity provided by one who occupies it.
Hume's empiricism can be seen as turning everything into metaphor (resemblance) and metonymy (contiguity) and our habituation to them.
the fourfold power of the state
(1) maiestas: supreme power in the hands of the people, making government possible
(2) imperium: power to coerce (jus gladii)
(3) iurisdictio: power to appoint judges, hear/judge cases, and execute judgments
(4) notio: power to hear and judge cases
order: perpetual, inalienable, one, unique, for the sanctification of individuals
jurisdiction: conditional on higher will, alienable, graded, delagatable, for the governing of the community
Pufendorf on moral entities:
states as moral entities framed on analogy with space
persons as moral entities framed on analogy with substance
- moral entities are "Modes superadded to natural things and motions by intelligent beings, chiefly to guide and restrain voluntary action and to procure regularity in methods of life"
- created or imposed
titles as moral formal qualities; powers, rights, and duties as moral active operative qualities; honor, authority, fame as moral passive qualities. prices as moral quantities for things, esteem as moral quantity for persons
"In the Law of Nations, as in all subjects, we have the Ideas and the Facts;--the Ideas are the Idea of the Good Faith, of the Justice, and we trust also of the Humanity of Nations; the Facts are the History of Nations." Whewell
The doctrine of separation of Church and state has tended to be collapsed into separation of private and public. But the Church cannot be shoved into a realm of the private, for it is certainly public.
philosophical myths
(1) to describe the eternal temporally
(2) to separate the imperfect from the perfect
"Just as light shines merely by acting as light, so too God orders the universe merely by acting as God." Olympiodorus
Skills by their very nature distinguish real good from apparent goods.
papal ratification : active magisterium :: reception by the Church : passive magisterium
"The whole Church wrote the Holy Scriptures and then gave life to them in Tradition. To put it more accurately, Scripture and Tradition, as two manifestations of one and the same Spirit, are a single manifestation. Scripture is nothing but written Tradition, and Tradition is nothing but living Scripture." Alexis Khomiakov
"The *whole* Church teaches -- the Church in all her fullness." Khomiakov
The passive magisterium is not a 'Church of Pupils'. It is a teaching authority (that is literally in the meaning); for in the Church to receive is to teach.
Infallibility resides in charitable catholicity.
Immutability of doctrine and holiness of rite are in the care of all the Body of Christ.
The importance of papal authority is seen in how ruthlessly and consistently the devil has attacked it.
remotive metaphor (sun without fire, wineless cup)
locus standi as intrinsic to rational complaint (that complained about must involve actual harm, according to reasonable causal account, in such a way that complaint is not merely futile and vain): complaining about something when there is no harm, or about something that does not in fact cause the harm there is, or about something that simply cannot be fixed, is unreasonable
The Son is begotten of the Father in such a manner that the Spirit dwells in Him, for otherwise He would not be perfectly begotten of God. Likewise, the Spirit proceeds from the Father so as to proceed through the Son who is with the Father, for otherwise He would not perfectly proceed as God from God. That the Spirit is from the Father is shared by Father and Son, for the Spirit of the Father and of the Son; for there is no separation in the Trinity, only distinction in unity, and all Three each have that they are with the other Two.
hedonism as an idealism of motivation (motivation as wholly in the mind, with proximate cause and object wholly in the mind)
Self-regarding and other-regarding impulses are often nested within each other.
pain as passively unpleasant vs pain as actively displeasing
pain as a feel of lack vs pain as a feel of excess
the threefold end of purgatorial endurance: refreshness, light, peace
purgatory as endurance, enlightenment, and pacification
In "This is My Beloved Son", the My points to the Father, the Son of course to the Son, and the Beloved to the Holy Spirit.
"the Psalmist calls the Spirit the Presence of the Son" Cyril of Alexandria on John Bk 9
"that the peace of Christ is His Spirit, it needs no long argument to demonstrate completely" Cyril A, on John Bk X
"The Son is the express Image of the Father, and His Spirit is the natural Likeness of the Son." Cyril A, on John Book XI
pre-formal matters in logic: equivocation, implicit meaning, relevance, regimentation, term formation
integral humanism, integral development, integral ecology
Heresiology is precedential in its rational structure, with heresiarchs and their heresies serving as precedent-types to avoid.
criticism : error :: complaint : harm
PSR as the abstract structure of evidence
three modes of reading Scriptural imprecations (Aquinas ST 2-2.25.6 ad 3)
(1) proclamation: as prediction rather than wish, with resignation to divine will
(2) prayer for justice: as wish directed to the justice of punishment rather than penalty as such
(3) prayer for purification: as wish not with respect to punishment but for removal of fault itself
rule of law: reason uncorrupted in its concern for common good
NB Dicey regards the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty as inconsistent with a natural law theory.
the concept of enmity in the jus gentium / law of nations
Hume takes our grasp of the external world to be in terms of extrapolative supposition and pragmatic conflation. This is perhaps as weak as it is possible to get and still have a substantive notion of the external world -- lose supposition, an dour grasp of any external world is crude and limited; lose conflation, and it is entirely speculative, hypothetical.
person as principle, as constant being, as noble being, as intentional being
the natural metaphor-seeking of the human mind in love
baptismal character is title to divine common good
Devotion avoids attenuation into vagueness and airy pseudo-abstraction by conversion to sensible practice -- the jingling of bells, the warm puff of incense, the song -- and finds its purity of heart in the prayer thereby incorporated.
the ordinary housekeeping of the household of faith
Hegal over-historicizes, history being his picture-thinking, and he describes as historical process things that in fact are one moment of it. All of the Phenomenology is one moment.
comedy and tragedy as the two aspects of faith
basic requirements of healthy institutions:
(1) avoiding avoidable negative side effects
(2) avoiding reward hacking
(3) scalable oversight
(4) safe innovation
(5) robustness in the face of distributional shifts
A problem-structure cannot be wholly circular or nonbeginning because the one attempt to consider and address a problem is starting somewhere. It could however be never-ending (no number of steps will solve it: insoluble) or could have paths that double back, and could be never-ending because of this.
Discipline is a pointer to doctrine.
apologetical utility: approximating or being in the direction of the truth, starting at the starting-point of the interlocutor
biological possibility as a deontic modality (what is required given developmental and evolutionary structures and processes)
Proverbs beget proverbs, and poems give birth to poems.
A proverb is:
Origen -- something said openly that points to something deep within; a cryptic saying with indirect meaning
Hippolytus -- word of explanation serviceable for the whole path of life
Evagrius -- as saying signifying the intelligible under the physical.
-- Note that Gregory of Nyssa, Adv Eun 3.2, uses both of Origen's descriptions
A good classification
(1) is stable in diverse circumstances
(2) balances diverse considerations
(3) is appropriate to the things
(4) is reasoned and principled
the correspondence authority of bishops
maze-generation : carving passages vs building walls
command of the sea // air supremacy
smuggling and privateering // asymmetric warfare
battlefields/battlespaces and perspectival mereologies (a battlespace is really overlapping battlespaces-from-different-perspectives, with their perspectival parts -- for instance, it matters if I can see you but you can't see me)
Apostolic profiles of the Church: Petrine, Johannine, Jamesian, Pauline
- cp. von Balthasar. It seems to me to be a mistake to think of a Marian profile on this level, in the way it would be a mistake to think of a 'Christian' profile on this level. Christ and Mary are indeed archetypes of the Church, but in a very different way from the Apostolic
- Note that the Apostolic profiles are found in the structure of the New Testament, as well.
- Note that Baltahasar himself over-officializes Peter and over-liberalizes Paul, and does not adequately capture the vision and prophecy that goes along with Johannine love -- his apostolic profiles are flat caricatures, compared to those we get in Scripture.
private revelation as condensation
"The implicit philosophy of any phenomenology of religion is the renewal of a theory of reminiscence." Ricoeur
'Detonation' and 'elaboration' of mystical experience are not separable.
