Saturday, October 25, 2025
Neither hero nor villain
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, at the time Professor of Modern History, University of Oxford, and the author of an important Columbus biography published by Oxford University Press in 1991 ("arguably one of the best-written and most historically sensitive" available, according to Dr. Valerie I. J. Flint in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Britannica Library), but now William P. Reynolds Professor of History, University of Notre Dame. "Columbus - Hero or Villain?," History today 42, no. 5 (May 1992): 9 (4-9).
And yet it seems clear that there are, in Fernández-Armesto's mind, respects in which Columbus was and remains the former at least, not (of course) to mention respects in which he was clearly a man of his own time, indeed more Genoese than Spanish, given that he "never understood [already contemporary] Spanish[/Castilian] scruples about slavery" (6). And yet "Las Casas revered him, and pitied, rather than censured, the imperfections of his attitude to the natives." (Though I suppose the question might be, Right up until his death in 1566, 61 years after Columbus'?)
Sunday, October 19, 2025
"God be in my head and in my understanding"
[Jean ]Sonet-[Keith Val ]Sinclair 991.
But the incipit varied. See, for example, this JONAS entry (where there is a complete (?) list of manuscripts and early printings, with dates, the earliest (plural) being either 15th century or second half of 15th century):
Jesus soit en mon chef et mon entendement...
Sonet-Sinclair 993
Jhesus soit en mon ame et en mon entendement;
Jhesus soit en ma bouche et en mon parlement...
Sonet-Sinclair 992
And in this one, at least, possibly Sonet-Sinclair 993, other words (fin) did as well:
Jhesus soit en mon chef et mo[n] entendement.
Jhesus soit en ma bouche et mon parlement.
Jhesus soit en mon cueur et en mon pensement.
Jhesus soit en ma fin et a mon trespasseme[n]t.
Saturday, October 18, 2025
"Sleepwalking into the Abyss"
"if I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss."
Iain McGilchrist, The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the western world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 235, 237.
Friday, October 17, 2025
"the bishop of Syria shall be found at the setting of the sun, having [been] fetched . . . from the sun's rising"
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| Timothy A. Gonsalves |
St. Ignatius of Antioch, Romans II.2, as trans. Lake.
"I seek Him who died for our sake. I desire Him who rose for us."
St. Ignatius of Antioch, Romans VI.1-3, as trans. Lake.
Being vs. being called
"pray for me or strength, both inward and outward, that I may not merely speak, but also have the will, that I may not only be called a Christian, but may also be found to be one."
St. Ignatius of Antioch, Romans III.1, as trans. Lake.
Sunday, October 12, 2025
"In the beginning was. . . . Jesus Christ"
Barth has thus “close[d] the door firmly on any attempt to find in John 1:1 a wholly abstract conception of the Word and, with that, an equally abstract conception of the Father’s relation to a Son who is not, in himself and as such, Jesus. For John, there is no eternal Word as such, no eternal Word in himself that is not already defined by his relation to the Jesus who is still to come. And that means too that the only-begotten Son is already in himself, in pretemporal eternity, Jesus Christ by way of anticipation of the event of the incarnation in time.
"The Christological subject in [even] John’s Gospel has here been shown to be 'Jesus Christ.' Jesus is the Word both in eternity (by anticipation) and in time (in concrete realization). 'Preexistence' is a less doubtful concept when speaking of the Johannine Prologue than it was in relation to the Synoptics. A step [(or 'development' (238))] has been taken by John towards greater clarification. But it is a step that remains in contact with the solutions provided in the Synoptics and ensures their commensurability with him. For here, too, it is a human being of whom all these things are said, a human being who is proper to the identity of the eternal God. . . . As a relation already proper to the Son in pretemporal eternity, . . . Jesus Christ is something like 'the hypostatic realization in God of His electing purposes' [(McCormack himself)]. He is the second person of the Trinity. So even when Jesus prays 'So now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in our presence before the world existed,' this ['I'] is not to be understood in terms of a Logos who bears in himself no relation to Jesus but who is now speaking in the voice of the human Jesus as his instrument. . . . No, it is the human Jesus who prays this prayer. And he can do so meaningfully because he is present by way of anticipation in the electing purposes of God that define him as a 'person' of the Trinity."
Bruce Lindley McCormack, The humility of the eternal Son: Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 243-245, underscoring mine. Not sure yet what I think of this considered as a project of Chalcedonian "repair," I do nonetheless resonate with the specificity with which it rejects the diffusely "cosmic" character of certain Christologies.
Saturday, October 11, 2025
Artificial nethermost intelligence
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| Aleteia |
"the wealth of intelligence employed by the engineers [of such machines] does not in any way raise the machine towards intelligence. [Quite] the contrary: what the[ engineers] testify to is [rather] the [enormous] effort required to reduce rational tasks to the level of a natural [(which is to say, sub-intelligent and inanimate, corpse-like and inert)] operation among the most impoverished [of them all]."
"Dans la conception de telles machines, les trésors d’intelligence déversés par les ingénieurs n’élèvent donc aucunement la machine vers l’intelligence, ils témoignent au contraire de l’effort nécessaire à l’homme pour abaisser des tâches rationnelles au niveau d’une opération naturelle parmi les plus pauvres."
Fr. Emmanuel Perrier, O.P., "Que fait l’intelligence artificielle?," Revue thomiste website, October (?) 2025. "Artificial nethermost intelligence" is my attempt to reproduce the number of syllables in the phrase "Artificial general intelligence."
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
"'faith and love' . . . can be maintained only when docetism is rejected"
ὑμεις οὖν τὴν πραϋπάθειαν ἀναλαβόντες ἀνακτήσασθε ἑαυτοὺς ἐν πίστει ὅ ἐστιν σὰρξ τοῦ κυρίου, καὶ ἐν ἀγάπῃ, ὅ ἐστιν αἷμα Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ.
St. Ignatius, Trallians 8.1, as trans. Kirsopp Lake. Cf. J. B. Lightfoot, The apostolic fathers: Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp 2.2 (1889), 171; Walter Bauer, Die Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochia und der Polykarpbrief, Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, Ergänzungsband 2 (Tübingen: Mohr (Siebeck), 1920), 236; William R. Schoedel & Helmut Koester, Ignatius of Antioch: a commentary on the letters of Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 149-150; etc. (I have not looked for any scholarship on this beyond (but not exhaustively!) the genre of the handy "commentary"). Schoedel & Koester, on the basis of a "study of the linking formula ('which is')": "The basic concern seems to be the affirmation of the reality of the flesh (and hence of the suffering) of the historical Jesus. And this, in turn, is linked by Ignatius with the maintenance of true obedience and love (Sm. 6.2; cf. Tr. 2.1). For in Ignatius' mind 'faith and love' (cf. Sm. 6.1) can be maintained only when docetism is rejected."
Cf. Romans 7.2-3, as trans. Lake, modifications mine:
[living (ζῶν)] I write to you[,] desiring [(ἐρῶν)] death. My [desire (ἐρως)] has been crucified, and there is in me no fire of love [(πῦρ φιλόυλον)] for material things; but only water living and speaking in me [(ζῶν καὶ λαλοῦν, emended by Lightfoot (II.2 (1889), pp. 224-25) to ἁλλόμενον, from Jn 4:14 as interpolated into the long recension, welling up)] in me, and saying to me from within, 'Come to the Father.' I have no pleasure in the food of corruption or in the delights of this life. I desire [(θέλω)] the 'bread [(ἄρτον)] of God,' which is the flesh [(σὰρξ)] of Jesus Christ, who was 'of the seed of David,' and for drink I desire [(θέλω)] his blood [(αἷμα)], which is incorruptible love [(ἀγάπη ἄφθαρτος)].
Saturday, September 20, 2025
"All the baptized in the Church have citizenship, on their sharing [1] the Creed and [2] the morality that comes from it."
Robert Cardinal Sarah, as interviewed by Giacomo Gambassi on 12 September 2025. Avvenire; Rorate Caeli.
Thursday, September 18, 2025
A wilde faith
Oscar Wilde, as quoted by Richard A. Kaye in "The path to Rome: investigating the deathbed conversion of Oscar Wilde," Times literary supplement no. 6386 (August 22, 2025), 8 (7-8). Richard Ellmann adds "alone", citing an undated letter of Reginald Turner to T. H. Bell "in Bell's unpublished MS. on Wilde (Clark)" (Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988, 583 and 621). I have followed this trail no further.
Sunday, September 7, 2025
Ouch
| Source |
"Let us learn, therefore to be men of wisdom and to honor Christ as he desires. For a person being honored finds greatest pleasure in the honor he desires, not in the honor we think best. Peter thought he was honoring Christ when he refused to let him wash his feet; but what Peter wanted was not truly an honor, quite the opposite! Give him the honor prescribed in his law by giving your riches to the poor. For God does not want golden vessels but golden hearts.
"Now, in saying this I am not forbidding you to make such gifts; I am only demanding that along with such gifts and before them you give alms. He accepts the former, but he is much more pleased with the latter. In the former, only the giver profits; in the latter, the recipient does too. A gift to the Church may be taken as a form of ostentation, but an alms is pure kindness.
"Of what use is it to weigh down Christ’s table with golden cups, when he himself is dying of hunger? First, fill him when he is hungry; then use the means you have left to adorn his table. Will you have a golden cup made but not give a cup of water? What is the use of providing the table with cloths woven of gold thread, and not providing Christ himself with the clothes he needs? What profit is there in that? Tell me: If you were to see him lacking the necessary food but were to leave him in that state and merely surround his table with gold, would he be grateful to you or rather would he not be angry? What if you were to see him clad in worn-out rags and stiff from the cold, and were to forget about clothing him and instead were to set up golden columns for him, saying that you were doing it in his honor? Would he not think he was being mocked and greatly insulted?
"Apply this also to Christ when he comes along the roads as a pilgrim, looking for shelter. You do not take him in as your guest, but you decorate floor and walls and the capitals of the pillars. You provide silver chains for the lamps, but you cannot bear even to look at him as he lies chained in prison. Once again, I am not forbidding you to supply these adornments; I am urging you to provide these other things as well, and indeed to provide them first. No one has ever been accused for not providing ornaments, but for those who neglect their neighbor a hell awaits with an inextinguishable fire and torment in the company of the demons. Do not, therefore, adorn the church and ignore your afflicted brother, for he is the most precious temple of all."
St. John Chrysostom, Homily 50 on Matthew, as trans. Liturgy of the hours for Saturday of Week 21 in Ordinary time. Ed. Field (1839), vol. 2, p. 64 ll. 15 ff.(57-66) = PG 58, col. 508 ll. 46 ff. NPNF 10 (1844), trans. Prevost:
"Wouldest thou do honor to Christ’s body? Neglect Him not when naked; do not[,] while here thou honorest Him with silken garments, neglect Him perishing without of cold and nakedness. For He that said, 'This is my body,' and by His word confirmed the fact, 'This same said, “Ye saw me an hungered, and fed me not;' and, 'Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.' For This indeed needs not coverings, but a pure soul; but that requires much attention.
"Let us learn therefore to be strict in life, and to honor Christ as He Himself desires. For to Him who is honored that honor is most pleasing, which it is His own will to have, not that which we account best. Since Peter too thought to honor Him by forbidding Him to wash his feet, but his doing so was not an honor, but the contrary,
"Even so do thou honor Him with this honor, which He ordained, spending thy wealth on poor people. Since God hath no need at all of golden vessels, but of golden souls.
"And these things I say, not forbidding such offerings to be provided; but requiring you, together with them, and before them, to give alms. For He accepts indeed the former, but much more the latter. For in the one the offerer alone is profited, but in the other the receiver also. Here the act seems to be a ground even of ostentation; but there all is mercifulness, and love to man.
"For what is the profit, when His table indeed is full of golden cups, but He perishes with hunger? First fill Him, being an hungered, and then abundantly deck out His table also. Dost thou make Him a cup of gold, while thou givest Him not a cup of cold water? And what is the profit? Dost thou furnish His table with cloths bespangled with gold, while to Himself thou affordest not even the necessary covering? And what good comes of it? For tell me, should you see one at a loss for necessary food, and omit appeasing his hunger, while you first overlaid his table with silver; would he indeed thank thee, and not rather be indignant? What, again, if seeing one wrapped in rags, and stiff with cold, thou shouldest neglect giving him a garment, and build golden columns, saying, 'thou wert doing it to his honor,' would he not say that thou wert mocking, and account it an insult, and that the most extreme?
"Let this then be thy thought with regard to Christ also, when He is going about a wanderer, and a stranger, needing a roof to cover Him; and thou, neglecting to receive Him, deckest out a pavement, and walls, and capitals of columns, and hangest up silver chains by means of lamps, but Himself bound in prison thou wilt not even look upon.
"And these things I say, not forbidding munificence in these matters, but admonishing you to do those other works together with these, or rather even before these. Because for not having done these no one was ever blamed, but for those, hell is threatened, and unquenchable fire, and the punishment with evil spirits. Do not therefore while adorning His house overlook thy brother in distress, for he is more properly a temple than the other."
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
Ales diei nuntius lucem
Prudentius. Inge B. Milfull, The hymns of the Anglo-Saxon church: a study and edition of the 'Durham hymnal.' Cambridge studies in Anglo-Saxon England 17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) no. 18, pp. 149-150.
Sunday, August 24, 2025
Jesus associated with the established just as much as with the outcast
Eberhard Jüngel, "Gewinn im Himmel und auf Erden: theologische Bemerkungen zum Streben nach Gewinn," Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 94, no. 4 (Dezember 1997): 551 (532-552). Though this paragraph must be read in the light of those both before and after, the whole of section IV, and indeed the article at large, it is nonetheless a striking one.
Thursday, August 14, 2025
Saturday, August 9, 2025
God is still, and will be forever incarnate
E. B. Pusey, Address III, "God’s Love for each soul in the Incarnation," Eleven addresses during a retreat of the Companions of the Love of Jesus engaged in perpetual intercession for the conversion of sinners (Oxford: James Parker, 1868), 26. This, as I've said earlier, is an occurrence of the verb engod six years earlier than that (also from Pusey) in the OED at the moment (though I just submitted the correction).
Not mysteries (plural), but the mystery, one and whole
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"Our nature, in Jesus, was engodded, deified. It shines throughout all space with the ineffable Glory of the Indwelling Godhead; but it was our nature, not ourselves. And now, as the counterpart and complement of the Incarnation, as He took our manhood into God, He has sent His Spirit, The Holy Ghost, to dwell in us. Truly it has been said, that men do amiss speak of mysteries of revelation. For all is one mystery; all is one mysterious whole, of which you cannot detach part from part, without deforming the whole. As well detach, if it were possible, one of the prismatic colours, and think that the light would remain ever the same, as think to sever from the rest one truth of God, the Father of lights, and think that the other truths would remain harmonious."
E. B. Pusey, "[Grieve not the Spirit of God]," Sermon 14 in Sermons preached before the University of Oxford between A.D. 1859 and 1872 (Oxford: J. Parker, 1872), 338-339. Currently the OED gives Pusey 1874 as the first occurrence of the verb engod. But here it is in 1872, also in Pusey. Does it occur any earlier? Yes, Pusey uses enGodded here in 1868, an "antedating" that I've just submitted via the OED's online form. (But we need a far more sophisticated search than the rough-and-ready Hathi Trust searches I've just run.
Interestingly, this was the Pusey's friend Newman's contention as well.)
This by the way, is on the whole a good sermon, and would bear a re-reading.
Sunday, August 3, 2025
"It is from us what befalls us"
Friday, August 1, 2025
"the higher you rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it"
Iain McGilchrist, "Preface to the new expanded edition," The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the modern world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019 [2010]), xxiii.
The unicorn and his lion, the anima and his animus
". . . reductionism has become a disease, a viewpoint lacking both intellectual sophistication and emotional depth, which is blighting our ability to understand what is happening and what we need to do about it. My current thoughts are directed towards illuminating what I see as a truer picture, a more helpful and, I believe, a more hopeful way of seeing our situation here on this planet, while we still have time.
". . . There are, it seems to me, four main pathways to the truth: science, reason, intuition and imagination. I also believe strongly that any world view that tries to get by without paying due respect to all four of these is bound to fail. Each on its own has its virtues and its vices, its gifts and its inherent dangers: only by respecting each and all together can we learn to act wisely. And each is a blend of elements contributed by either hemisphere.
"However, the same proviso applies in each case, namely that for each to be successful, what the left hemisphere can offer must be used in service of what the right hemisphere knows and sees, not the other way round. This is as important in the case of science as in that of imagination, in the case of reason as in that of intuition. The left hemisphere is a wonderful servant, but a very poor master.
"We also need to be aware of the sheer extent to which the left hemisphere is, in the most down-to-earth, empirically verifiable way, less reliable than the right – in matters of attention, perception, judgment, emotional understanding, and indeed intelligence as it is conventionally understood. And that means that we should be appropriately sceptical of the left hemisphere’s vision of a mechanistic world, an atomistic society, a world in which competition is more important than collaboration; a world in which nature is a heap of resource there for our exploitation, in which only humans count, and yet humans are only machines – not even very good ones, at that; a world curiously stripped of depth, colour and value. This is not the intelligent, if hard-nosed, view that its espousers comfort themselves by making it out to be; just a sterile fantasy, the product of a lack of imagination, which makes it easier for us to manipulate what we no longer understand. But it is a fantasy that displaces and renders inaccessible the vibrant, living, profoundly creative world that it was our fortune to inherit – until we squandered our inheritance.
Time is running out, and the way we think, which got us into this mess, will not be enough to get us out of it. . . . We need, I believe, to see the world with new eyes. . . ."
Iain McGilchrist, "Preface to the new expanded edition," The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the modern world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019 [2010]), xxiv-xxvi. Headline: Fr. M. C. D'Arcy, The mind and heart of love: Lion and unicorn: a study of eros and agape (1947), not cited by McGilchrist.
Thursday, July 31, 2025
Up with the binarchy
Iain McGilchrist, "Preface to the new expanded edition," The master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the modern world, New expanded edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019 [2010]), xvi. Undoubtedly I'm misusing McGilchrist prematurely.
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
"The trees were passive to Orpheus; that's why they danced"
Bruce Lindley McCormack on Sergius Bulgakov, The humility of the eternal Son: Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 134. The headline is from Austin Farrer.
Doomed to mistake it
"Aussi bien cette solidarité des âges a-t-elle tant de force qu’entre eux les liens d’intelligibilité sont véritablement à double sens. L’incompréhension du présent naît fatalement de l’ignorance du passé. Mais il n’est peut-être pas moins vain de s’épuiser à comprendre le passé, si l’on ne sait rien du présent."
Marc Bloch, The historian's craft, trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024 [1954]), 36; Apologie pour l'histoire; ou, Métier d'historiene, Cahiers des Annales [3] (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1949), 13. I was put onto this by Richard Davenport-Hines, "A Stalinist chump at Oxford: the Civil War historian who misjudged his own times," Times literary supplement no. 6364 (March 21, 2025): 21.
Saturday, July 26, 2025
"I would rather account to God for too great gentleness than for too great severity"
Saint François de Sales (?), as translated, only possibly (!), by Henry Sebastian Bowden (1877). The original French that I reproduce below comes from p. 383 of tom. 2 of the Vie de Saint François de Sales, évêque et Prince de Genève (1854), by André Jean Marie Hamon (1795–1874), who cites pt. IV sec. xxxii of the 1639-1641 Esprit de saint François de Sales, evêque et prince de Genêve: recueilli de divers écrits de M. Jean-Pierre Camus, evêque de Belley, by Jean-Pierre Camus (1585-1652):
Ah ! leur répondait-il, il vaut mieux avoir à rendre compte de trop de douceur que de trop de sévérité. Dieu n’est-il pas tout amour ? Dieu le père est le père des miséricordes ; Dieu le fils se nomme un agneau, et Dieu le Saint-Esprit se montre sous la forme d’une colombe, qui est la douceur même. S’il y avait quelque chose de meilleur que la bénignité, Jésus Christ nous l’aurait dit; et cependant il ne nous donne que deux leçons à apprendre de lui : la mansuétude [(sometimes douceur)] et l’humilité de cœur. Me voulez-vous donc empêcher d’apprendre la leçon que Dieu m’a donnée, et êtes-vous plus savant que Dieu ?
I have yet to find this passage (considered as a exact quotation) in any version of the Esprit de saint François de Sales that I've managed to locate online so far. E.g. This printing of 1727 not only lacks a pt. XIV chap. xxxii, but is unsearchable. On the other hand, this one of 1865/66 offers, without returning the key phrases, both a pt. XIV sec. xxxii and, at precisely that point in particular, an appeal to St. Anselm to that very same effect. This 1865/66, not to mention other 19th-century printings, might therefore be used more successfully than I've been able to use it so far to find at least the appeal to St. Anselm in variously numbered chapters or sections in the other, much earlier digitized printings that I've tried so far.
I would note also in passing that, though I have not conducted any significant research into the personalities involved (Hamon, who was born about 173 years after de Sales' death; Camus, who knew him well; etc.), this 2001 article by Alexander T. Pocetto, O.S.F.S., first published in 2001, while concluding in favor of Camus (in whose Esprit I, however, have, again, yet to find the very passage in question), grapples with his reputation for unreliability.
Clearly there is more work to be done on this one!





















