The Coptic, not originally Celtic, ring or wheel cross

Minneapolis Institute of Art

"The Irish wheel cross, the symbol of Celtic Christianity, has recently been shown to have been a Coptic invention, depicted on a Coptic burial pall of the fifth [to sixth] century, [two or] three centuries before the design first appears in Scotland and Ireland."

     William Dalrymple, "The Egyptian connection," The New York review of books 55, no. 16 (October 23, 2008):  79 (77-80), citing Walter Horn, "On the origin of the Celtic cross, in The forgotten hermitage of Skellig Michael, ed. Walter Horn, Jenny White Marshall, and Grellan D. Rourke (University of California Press, 1990), 91-92, 95.  Horn:

     Students of Celtic iconography have believed that the transformation of the ring cross with equal arms into the developed ring cross was an autochthonous Irish development.  I had no reason to question this belief until the summer of 1984 when during an incidental visit to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, I was startled to find a Coptic burial shroud of wool and linen that the museum's catalogue assigned to the fifth to seventh century.  The cross shown in this textile is so strikingly similar in design to Irish ring crosses of the eighth and ninth centuries that it is difficult to preclude a developmental interconnection.

     The design on the Coptic textile in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts compels us to conclude that the shape of the developed ring cross as well as the custom of carrying crosses fashioned in this manner in religious processions was influenced by new stimuli from Egypt that reached the Celtic territories of Ireland and England in the eighth century.

"It isn't so, and never was"

"The most remarkable fact about American soldiers and civilians in the New Jersey campaign is that they did all of these things at the same time.  In a desperate struggle they found a way to defeat a formidable enemy, not merely once at Trenton but many times in twelve weeks of continued combat.  They reversed the momentum of the war.  They improvised a new way of war that grew into an American tradition.  And they chose a policy of humanity that aligned the conduct of the war with the values of the Revolution.
     "They set a high example, and we have much to learn from them.  Much recent historical writing has served us ill ill in that respect.  In the late twentieth century, too many scholars tried to make the American past into a record of crime and folly.  Too many writers have told us that we are captives of our darker selves and helpless victims of our history.  It isn't so, and never was.  The story of Washington's Crossing tells us that Americans in an earlier generation were capable of acting in a higher spirit—and so are we."

     David Hackett Fischer, Washington's crossing, Pivotal moments in American history (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004), 379.

Resentment (ressentiment) "is Other, it's never you and I", or "the overwhelmingly thoughtless Othering on the left"

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin

    "Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, you and I:  when it comes to resentment, we are all Nietzscheans.  Nietzsche gave the complex emotion for which he consistently used the French ressentiment a bad name, especially in On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). . . .
     "But is this negative intellectual tradition all there is to resentment?  No, says Robert A. Schneider. . . .  There is a different, more positive strand that was only sidelined in the early nineteenth century, and Nietzsche didn't even originate the negative line. . . .
     "Why does all this matter, and why is this an important book for the historical moment we inhabit?  Re-enter Obama and Clinton:  'they get bitter, they cling to their guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.' (Obama explaining the 'left behind' to San Francisco donors while on the presidential campaign trail, April 6, 2008); 'you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.  Right?  They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic - you name it'.  (Clinton at a New York LGBTQ fundraising event during her own presidential campaign, September 9, 2016).  For centrists and those on the left, resentment is terrible because it is driven by envy, yearns for golden pasts that never existed, targets minorities, constructs an Us (West Virginians in the US, northerners in the UK) versus a Them (Washington, Brussels, Westminster, all ciphers for 'elites'), stems from psychological maladjustment to changed circumstances (deindustrialization) and is ultimately pathological:  resentment is Other, it's never you and I."

     Jan Plamper, "Get even:  a history of political resentment," a review of The return of resentment:  the rise and decline and rise again of a political emotion (University of Chicago Press, 2023), by Robert A. Schneider, Times literary supplement no. 6268 (May 19, 2023):  11.  "The strength of Robert A. Schneider's succinct, accessible book is to have given resentment an intellectual genealogy.  It is less successful when trying to show a way out.  The 'measure of understanding and, dare I say, empathy' for Trump voters it suggests at the end remains murky.  Nonetheless, The Return of Resentment gives us the necessary tools to follow the injunction to take seriously the grievances of right-wing populist voters - at last."

J. K. Rowling, Monster?

It is not the likes of Roman Polanski, Richard Wagner, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, Pablo Picasso, Raymond Carver, Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway, and V. S. Naipaul, but "the female monsters [that] she shies away from, most of whom traded their children for their art.  While Doris Lessing (who 'scares the bejeezuz out of me, even from the grave') left two of her offspring in Africa when she came to England, and Joni Mitchell gave up her baby for adoption, J. K. Rowling, having fallen out with many of her younger readers over gender, has apparently created a generation of orphans.  Dederer is a mettlesome writer, but when she turns to the backlash against Rowling she sounds gagged, as though afraid of the wrath of a pitchfork-wielding herd.  Rowling may be on the wrong side of history, but does that make her a monster?  Recalling her children's love of Harry Potter, Dederer's sharpness turns to whimsey:  'Hard to imagine a more delightful sight than the bland corporate halls of the Oregon Convention Center filled with shrieking eleven-year-olds swooping around in cloaks.'
     "Instead of interrogating the battle between Rowling and her readers, Dederer notes the 'deep sadness' of her fans, 'the sadness of the staining of something beloved'.  But what is striking in this case is that the art itself has not been stained.  Rowling's readers feel no ambivalence towards the world she invented; they have simply killed off its author.  I've yet to meet a fan who is struggling with the ethics of owning a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, who fears that the author's perceived transphobia might have retroactively stained everything that Rowling has to say about Hogwarts."

     Frances Wilson, reviewing Monsters:  a fan's dilemma (Sceptre, 2023), by Claire Dederer, Times literary supplement no. 6266 (May 5, 2023):  8.  Publisher's blurb:  "In this unflinching, deeply personal book that expands on her instantly viral Paris Review essay, 'What Do We Do With the Art of Monstrous Men?' Claire Dederer asks: Can we love the work of Hemingway, Polanski, Naipaul, Miles Davis, or Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss? She explores the audience's relationship with artists from Woody Allen to Michael Jackson, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art."

It's "disagreement all the way down"

Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford

      "Of course, intellectual progress requires specialization and its patois.  We start with big questions:  'How does a multicellular organism develop from a zygote?'.  These questions are too big for us to answer.  So we break them down into smaller questions and keep going until we get to something small enough to be tractable.  But philosophy is not like science.  Scientists answer their small questions.  They arrive at reliable results that are accepted by their peers.  For philosophers there is disagreement all the way down.  Smaller questions only make for smaller squabbles."

     Rachel Fraser, "The biggest questions:  how philosophical inquiry should be made to serve human needs," a review of What's the use of philosophy?, by Philip Kitcher (Oxford University Press, 2023), Times literary supplement no. 6272 (June 16, 2023), 7 (7-8).  "Philosophy, then should not model itself on science.  What is the alternative?"

A boy and his dog, c. 24,000 BC

"One day around 26,000 years ago, an eight-to-ten-year-old child and a canine walked together into the rear of Chauvet Cave, in what is now France. Judging from their tracks, which can be traced for around 150 feet across the cave floor, their route took them past the magnificent art for which the cave is famous and into the Room of Skulls—a grotto where many cave-bear skulls can still be seen. They walked together companionably and deliberately, the child slipping once or twice, as well as stopping to clean a torch, in the process leaving a smear of charcoal.
     "It’s nice to imagine that the pair’s Huckleberry Finn–like exploration became the stuff of legend in their clan, for at the time Chauvet Cave’s recesses were abandoned, its art and cave-bear bones were already thousands of years old, and soon thereafter a landslide would seal the cave entrance. Whatever happened, the pair’s adventure certainly became famous in 2016, when a large radiocarbon dating program that included the smear of charcoal discarded by the child confirmed that the tracks constitute the oldest unequivocal evidence of a relationship between humans and canines."

     Tim Flannery, "Raised by wolves," The New York review of books 65, no. 6 (April 5, 2018):  16 (16-20).  Though there could well be corroborative detail in one of the books under review, Flannery's only footnote is to this article, in which, however, I have yet to locat an obvious reference to the child-and-canine specifically.

"A man who knows how to fix his car"

     "The city is man-made; the forest is nature’s place. ­Going to the forest means reconnecting with reality, trusting that God’s creation endures, even as man’s vanity erodes and destroys. In a different way, Matthew ­Crawford sounds a similar note. His books and essays detail the ways in which competent navigation through material reality builds our confidence. A man who knows how to fix his car is far less likely to be pushed around by an officious bureaucrat or intimidated by someone who tells him that his views are 'out of date.' In the forest—in the repair shop—we are disciplined and anchored by ­reality. Thus disciplined and anchored, we can endure the onslaughts of propaganda and resist groupthink."

     R. R. Reno, "Restoring freedom," First things no. 333 (May 2023):  68 (67-68).

Not even in Augustine is there any "'symbolism' in the strict sense of a sign independent of the . . . reality for which it stands"

"The bread and wine are not a figure of the body and blood of Christ—God forbid!—but the actual deified body of the Lord, because the Lord himself said:  'This is my body'; not 'a figure of my body' but 'my body,' and not 'a figure of my blood' but 'my blood.'  Even before this He had said to the Jews:  'except you eat of the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you.  For my flesh is meat indeed:  and my blood is drink indeed.'  And again:  'He that eateth me shall live.' . . .

"Wherefore, in all fear and with a pure conscience and undoubting faith let us approach, and it will be to us altogether as we believe and do not doubt.  And let us honor it [sc. the body and blood of Christ] with all purity of body and soul, for it is twofold.  Let us approach it with burning desire, and with our hands folded in the form of a cross let us receive the body of the Crucified.  With eyes, lips, and faces turned toward it let us receive the divine burning coal, so that the fire of the coal may be added to the desire within us to consume our sins and enlighten our hearts, and so that by this communion of the divine fire we may be set afire and deified. . . .

"It is Christ’s body and blood entering into the composition of our soul and body [(εἰς σύστασιν τῆς ἡμετέρας ψυχῆς τε καὶ σώματος χωροῦν)] without being consumed, without being corrupted, without passing into the privy—God forbid!—but into our substance for our sustenance [(εἰς τὴν ἡμῶν οὐσίαν τε καὶ συντήρησιν)], a bulwark against every sort of harm and a purifier from all uncleanliness—as if He were to take our adulterated gold and purify it by the discerning [purifying] fire, 'so that in the life to come we shall not be condemned with the world.'"

     St. John of Damascus, Expositio fidei 86 (PTS 12 (1973, ed. Kotter), 195.114-120; 196.121-129, 143-148), trans. Christoph Markschies in "Current research on the Eucharist in ancient Christianity:  how the Eucharist developed from the end of the fourth century in East and West," Early Christianity 7 (2016):  434 (417-446).  There is so much more to be pulled from this, e.g., from pp. 443-444:

To assess Augustine's theses through the prism of medieval and Reformation controversies between proponents of 'realistic' and more 'symbolic' eucharistic doctrines would be to completely misunderstand him.  For our Church Father, all reality is only comprehensible to man on earth through signs. . . .  In Augustine there is no 'symbolism' in the strict sense of a sign independent of the corollary reality for which it stands.

"a perfect and unremitting enmity"

Renovatio

"the values that will determine which lives are worth living, and which not, will always be the province of persons of vicious temperment.  If I were asked to decide what qualities to suppress or encourage in the human species, I might first attempt to discover it there is such a thing as a genetic predisposition to moral idiocy and then, if there is, to eliminate it; then there would be no more Joseph Fletchers (or Peter Singers, or Linus Paulings, of James Rachels), and I might think all is well.  But, of course, the very idea is a contradiction in terms.  Decisions regarding who should or should not live can, by definition, be made only by those who believe such decisions should be made; and therein lies the horror that nothing can ever exorcise from the ideology behind human bioengineering."

     David B. Hart, "The anti-theology of the body," Symposium:  John Paul II and the ethics of the body, The new Atlantis no. 9 (Summer 2005):  69 (65-73).  73:

John Paul's theology of the body will never, as I have said, be 'relevant' to the understanding of the human that lies 'beyond' Christian faith.  Between these two orders of vision there can be no fruitful 'conversation.'  All that can ever span the divide between them is the occasional miraculous movement of conversion or the occasional tragic movement of apostacy.  Thus the legacy of that theology will be to remain, for Christians, a monument to the grandeur and fullness of their faith's 'total humanism,' so to speak, to remind them how vast the Christian understanding of humanity's nature and destiny is, and to inspire them—whenever they are confronted by any philosophy, ethics, or science that would reduce any human life to an instrumental moment within some larger design—to  a perfect and unremitting enmity.