The use of "prudential" in John Wesley

Though not every last one of the following is, the idea was to find every occurrence relevant to the concept of "the prudential means of grace" in what is currently searchable (the 19th-century Jackson edition of the Works, the 1909-1916/1938 Curnock edition of the Journal (no relevant hits that are non-duplicative), the 1931 Telford edition of the Letters, etc. (this will all, of course, need to be re-done upon the completion of The Wesley Works Digitization Project)).

• 1731 Jun 11:  "prudential means" (Letter to his mother; Curnock 8, 270; Jackson 12, 11; Telford 1, 86)
• [1731] Jul 19:  "prudential means" (Letter to Mrs. Pendarves; Telford 1, 93)
• 1731 Nov 17:  "prudential means" (Letter to his brother Samuel; Jackson 12, 21; Telford 1, 114) 
• 1732 Feb 28;  "prudential means" (Letter to his mother; Jackson 12, 14)
• 1733 Aug 17:  "prudential means" (Letter to his mother; Jackson 12, 11; Telford 1, 138)
• 1733 Aug 17:  "prudential means" (Letter to his mother; Jackson 12, 14)
• 1734/1735 Feb 14:  "prudential rules" (Letter to his mother; Telford 8, 269) 
• 1735 Jan 13:  "prudential means" (Letter to his mother; Telford 1, 179)
• 1736 Nov 23:  "prudential rules" (Letter to his brother Samuel; Jackson 12, 27; Telford 1, 209)
• 1737 Mar 29:  "prudential rules" (Letter to Mrs. Chapman; Curnock 8, 308; Jackson 12, 45; Telford 1, 220)
• 1748:  "prudential regulation" (Letter to Vincent Perronet; Telford 2, 297)
• 1748:  "prudential helps" (Letter to Vincent Perronet; Telford 2, 298)
• 1748:  "merely prudential, not essential, not of divine institution" (Letter to Vincent Perronet; Telford 2, 298)
• 1748:  "prudential helps" (Letter to Vincent Perronet; Telford 2, 302) 
• 1749 [1744-1747]:  "either instituted or prudential" (Minutes of several conversations; Jackson 8, 310)
• 1749 [1744-1747]:  "prudential means"  (Minutes of several conversations; Jackson 8, 311)
• 1749:  "prudential regulation" (Plain account of the people called Methodists; Jackson 8, 244)
• 1749:  "prudential helps", "merely prudential, not essential, not of divine institution" (Plain account of the people called Methodists; Jackson 8, 245)
• 1749:  "prudential helps" (Plain account of the people called Methodists; Jackson 8, 250)
• 1749:  "prudential rules" (Short address to the inhabitants of Ireland; Jackson 9, 169)
• 1750 May 22:  "prudential helps" (Letter to Gilbert Boyce; Telford 3, 36) 
• 1758:  "prudential) rule" (Reasons against a separation from the Church of England; Jackson 13, 217)
• 1781 Mar 13:  "by a prudent mixture of reading, meditation, prayer, and conversation. . . . exercise. . . .  And . . . that truly Christian diversion, visiting the poor" (Letter to Elizabeth Morgan; Telford 7, 51)
• 1786:  "prudent means" (List of poetical works; Jackson 14, 326) 
• 1786:  "prudential regulations" (Thoughts upon Methodism; Jackson 13, 246)
• 1786 Jun 14:  "prudential helps" (Letter to Henry Brooke; Telford 7, 333) 

"Amid billows of mysteries have I fallen"

"This Jesus has made so many symbols | that I have fallen into the sea of them" (trans. Sebastian Brock, The harp of the Spirit:  eighteen poems of St. Ephrem, 2nd enlarged ed., Studies supplementary to Sobernost 4 (Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, 1983), 16).

"This Jesus has multiplied for us mysteries. Amid billows of mysteries have I fallen, which show me in parable the life of the dead, in all mysteries and in all types" (trans. Stopford, NPNF, 2nd ser., vol. 13 (1898), p. 202; CCEL).

"Hic Jesus multiplicavit nobis typos, incidi in mare typorum, qui mihi parabolizant resurrectionem mortuorum omnimodis figuris et imaginibus" (trans. Bickell, Carmina Nisibena (1866), 157; Syriac, 70 ff.).

ܗܢܐ ܝܫܘܥ ܐܣܓܝ ܠܢ ܪ̈ܙܐ
ܒܝܬ ܓ̈ܠܠܐ ܕܐܪ̈ܙܘܗܝ ܢܦܠܬ ܕܐܡܬܠ ܠܢ ܚܝܬ ܡ̈ܝܬܐ
ܒܟܠ ܪ̈ܙܝܢ ܘܒܟܠ ܛܘ̈ܦܗܝܢ

     St. Ephraem the Syrian, Carmina Nisibena 39.17.  Original Syriac (which I do not read, and, so, may well have mangled):  CSCO 240, Scriptores Syri 102.2, ed. Beck (1963), p. 27 l. 25-p. 28 l. 1.  Selectable.

"a fractious movement"

      "Others draw conclusions that set them apart from Lutherans and Zwinglians as well as at odds with Anabaptists[, not to mention, of course, the Catholic Church].  The lay nobleman Caspar Schenckfeld begins as a follower of Luther and helps to establish the Reformation in Liegnitz, Silesia, east of Saxony.  But the Eucharistic controversy leads him to his own sacramentarian understanding of the Lord’s Supper.  He believes Christians should refrain from receiving the Eucharist until a visible moral improvement in their lives makes them worthy of the sacrament.  Schwenckfeld stops receiving the Eucharistic bread in early 1526 and, as it turns out, never receives it again before his death in 1561.  Schenckfeld and others, collectively known as 'spiritualists,' simply take an either-or distinction between matter and spirit and the interior nature of faith to their logical extremes.  In various ways, they emerge from the evangelical movement of the 1520s as yet another expression that shows the diversity of the early Reformation."

     Brad Gregory, Rebel in the ranks:  Martin Luther, the Reformation, and the conflicts that continue to shape our world (New York:  HarperOne, 2017), chap. 3, A fractious movement.

'Orthodox' means orthodox in life as well as faith

"The Creed does not speak of the struggle of faithful living. It is for this reason that genetic orthodoxy, unlike creedal [(for many a merely aesthetic)] orthodoxy, has something to say about the contours of the Christian life, and what it says is traditional: male, female, nuptial union, sex, children, families, death, and generations—all under God’s dominion. Genetic orthodoxy learns from Genesis that faithful living is not stable and serene. It is filled with pitfalls, yearnings, failures, sterilities, confusions, unexpected joys, regrets, wandering loves, and the rest. There is a line, but it is one that wavers and wobbles, sometimes frays and dissolves, only to be wrenched back into its clarity of direction."

     Ephraim Radner, "Creedal orthodoxy won't save us," First things no. 366 (October 2026):  75 (76-75).  Image:  Wycliffe College.

Barba-Kay on "automation’s ineluctable need for [a] virtue ethics" that might call automation itself into question

"While the story of Stanislav Petrov – the Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who likely saved the world from nuclear holocaust in 1983 – is often trotted out to advocate for the view that human beings ought to be kept 'in the loop' of automated weapons’ responses, I argue that the episode in fact belies this reading. By attending more closely to the features of this event – to Petrov’s professional background, to his familiarity with the warning system, and to his decisions to defy his protocol – it becomes clear that Petrov was not seamlessly working 'in his loop,' but reassessing it entirely. I claim that this exhibits a paradox intrinsic to all automated loops: namely, that their optimum function in fact rests on unforeseen human interventions that cannot be reliably codified ex ante, that is, that good judgment cannot simply be 'programmed into' their protocols. This dependence, moreover, reveals automation’s ineluctable need for virtue ethics – not in the usual sense (whereby ethics deliberates about, say, possible damages and loss of life), but in the sense that ethical judgment, rightly understood, entails the reassessment of all of the conditions surrounding a decision, including whether a protocol should be followed at all."

     Antón Barba-Kay. "There Is No Ethical Automation: Stanislav Petrov’s Ordeal by Protocol." Journal of Military Ethics 23, no. 3/4 (2024):  Abstract (277–288).  I have yet to read the article itself.  Image.

Altars and relics

"Thus in the train of the impious heresy of the defamers of Christians, many other impieties appeared.  Just as those heretics removed the sight of venerable icons from the church, they also abandoned other customs, which should now be renewed and which should be in vigour in virtue of both written and unwritten legislation.  Therefore we decree that in venerable churches [(σεπτοὶ ναοὶ | venerabilis templa)] consecrated without relics of the holy martyrs, the installation of relics should take place along with the usual prayers.  And if in future any bishop is found out consecrating a church without relics, let him be deposed as someone who has flouted the ecclesiastical traditions."

     Second Council of Nicaea (787), Canon 7, as trans. Tanner (vol. 1, p. 144-145).

     1596:  "In 1596 Church law required a sepulcher for every altar" (NCE2 1, 315 < Bliley, Altars according to the Code of Canon Law (1927), 41 < Pontificale Romanum Clementis VIII (below)).    

     Corpus juris canonici 

     Code of canon law (Codex juris canonici (1982- )), Can. 1237 §2:  "The ancient tradition of placing relics of martyrs or other saints under a fixed altar is to be preserved, according to the norms given in the liturgical books [(Antiqua traditio Martyrum aliorumve Sanctorum reliquias sub altari fixo condendi servetur, iuxta normas in libris liturgicis traditas)]."

     Image:  Enclosure of the relics, "Consecration of the altar [(Consecratio altaris)]," Pontificale Romanum Clementis VIII (Rome:  [1596] 1595), p. 359 (pp. 322- ).

Simone Weil on (indirectly) pacifism (or, at least, the French pacifists of the 1930s)

     "Indirect mechanism of a crime.
     "My criminal error, before 1939, concerning pacifist circles and their activity, was due to incapacity caused by the devastation of physical pain for so many years.  Being in no state to observe their action at close quarters by meeting and talking with them, I failed to detect their propensity for treason.  But I could easily have reflected that the state I was in disqualified me from serious responsibilities and made it obligatory to refrain from them.  What prevented me from seeing this was the sin of laziness, the temptation of inertia.  I desired so intensely to refrain from that sort of responsibility that I dared not consider impartially the legitimate reasons for refraining; like a seminary pupil tortured by violent carnal desires who dare not so much as look at a woman.
     "I had so often succumbed to laziness and intertia in small things that when I was faced with something important I felt I must blindly resist the temptation of inertia—instead of coolly examining the possible advantages and disadvantages of action or inaction.
     "Thus the weakness of not writing a letter, or not making my bed one day when I felt tired, by accumulating in the course of many days, finally led me to the sin of criminal negligence towards my country."

          Simone Weil, "London notebook, 1943," in First and last notebooks, trans. Richard Rees, (London:  Oxford University Press, 1970), 345-346.

Simone Weil on (capital) punishment

      "Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.  There are two kinds of punishment, disciplinary and penal. . . . [T]he most indispensable punishment for the soul is [the latter,] that inflicted for crime.  By committing crime, a man places himself, of his own accord, outside the chain of eternal obligations that bind every human being to every other one.  Punishment alone can weld him back again; fully so, if accompanied by consent on his part; otherwise only partially so.  Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law but subjecting him to the punishment ordained by the law. . . .
     "So that this need may be satisfied, it is above all necessary that. . . . punishment . . . be an honor.  It must not only wipe out the stigma of the crime, but must be regarded as a supplementary form of education, compelling a devotion to the public good.  The severity of the punishment must also be in keeping with the kind of obligation which has been violated, and not with the interests of public security. . . .
     ". . . Punishment only takes place where the hardship is accompanied at some time or other, by a feeling of justice.  Just as the musician awakens the sense of beauty in us by sounds, so the penal system should know how to awaken the sense of justice in the criminal by the infliction of pain, or even, if need be, of death. . . .  [P]unishment is a method of getting justice into the soul of the criminal by bodily suffering."

     Simone Weil, The need for roots:  prelude to a declaration of duties toward mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (New York:  G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1952), 21-22 ("The needs of the soul. Punishment").

"God has power to deliver from evil only the eternal part of the soul of those who have made real and direct contact with him.  The rest of the soul, and the entire soul of whoever has not received the grace of real and direct contact with God, is at the mercy of men's caprice and the hazards of circumstance.
     "Therefore is is for men to see that men are preserved from harm.
     "When harm is done to a man, real evil enters into him; not merely pain and suffering, but the actual horror of evil. . . .
     "Nevertheless, eternal wisdom does not abandon the soul entirely to the mercy of chance and men's caprice.  The harm inflicted on a man by a wound from outside sharpens his thirst for the good and thus there automatically arises the possibility of a cure.  If the wound is deep, the thirst is for good in its purest form.  The part of the soul which cries 'Why am I being hurt?' is on the deepest level and even in the most corrupt of men it remains from earliest infancy perfectly intact and totally innocent.
     "To maintain justice and preserve men from all harm means first of all to prevent harm being done to them.  For those to whom harm has been done, it means to efface the material consequences by putting them in a place where the wound, if it is not too deep, may be cured naturally by a spell of well-being.  But for those in whom the wound is a laceration of the soul it means further, and above all, to offer them good in its purest form to assuage their thirst.
     "Sometimes it may be necessary to inflict harm in order to stimulate this thirst before assuaging it, and that is what punishment is for.  Men who are so estranged from the good that they seek to spread evil everywhere can only be reintegrated with the good by having harm inflicted upon them.  This must be done until the completely innocent part of their soul awakens with the surprised cry 'Why am I being hurt?'  The innocent part of the criminal's soul must then be fed to make it grow until it becomes able to judge and condemn his past crimes and at last, by the help of grace, to forgive them.  With this the punishment is completed; the criminal has been reintegrated with the good and should be publicly and solemnly reintegrated with society.
     "That is what punishment is.  Even capital punishment [(la peine capitale)], although it excludes reintegration with society in the literal sense, should be the same thing.  Punishment is solely a method of procuring pure good for men who do not desire it.  The art of punishing is the art of awakening in a criminal, by pain or even death, the desire for pure good."

     Simone Weil, "Human personality" (1942/1943), a translation of "Collectivité—personne—impersonnel droit—justice" ("Le personne et le sacré"), and sometimes entitled "Beyond personalism," in Écrits de Londres et dernières lettres (Paris:  Gallimard, 1957), 38-40.  From Simone Weil:  an anthology, ed. Siân Miles (London:  Virago, 1986), 93-94.


     "Apart from death, man’s punishment in Genesis consists solely of imposed submission.  Work and death; passivity of woman in love and child-birth.
     "Work is something resembling death.  It is submission to matter.
     "But beauty is a snare of God’s to obtain our consent to the obedience to which he constrains us.
     "Human punishment ought to imitate God’s method.
     "Reduce the criminal to obedience by constraint, while offering him enticements which will one day win his consent.
     "It is always a failure if a guilty man dies without ever having once felt that his condemnation was his greatest good fortune.
     "Physical and moral pain are things which overwhelm the soul; surely we ought not to refrain from making use of them?  Why let such precious gifts of God run to waste?  But to pervert their use is appalling.
     "If one judges a criminal to be incurable, one has no right to punish him; one ought only to prevent him from doing harm.  The infliction of punishment is a declaration of faith that in the depths of the guilty there is a grain of pure good.
     "To punish without that faith is to do evil for evil’s sake."

     Simone Weil, "London notebook, 1943," in First and last notebooks, trans. Richard Rees, (London:  Oxford University Press, 1970), 345.

"one day they will be our co-heirs[,] just as here below they are our guardians and trustees"

"O God, Who in thine unspeakable Providence hast been pleased to give thine holy Angels charge over us, to keep us, mercifully grant unto our prayers, that we be both ever fenced by their wardship here, and everlastingly blessed by their fellowship hereafter. Through".

"O God, who in your unfathomable providence are pleased to send your holy Angels to guard us, hear our supplication as we cry to you, that we may always be defended by their protection and rejoice eternally in their company. Through".

"God our Father, in your loving providence you send your holy angels to watch over us.  Hear our prayers, defend us always by their protection and let us share your life with them forever.  We ask this through".

"Deus, qui ineffabili providentia sanctos Angelos tuos ad nostram custodiam mittere dignaris: largire supplicibus tuis; et eorum semper protectione defendi, et aeterna societate gaudere. Per".

     Prayer for 2 October, Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels.  Headline from Sermon 12.3.6-8 on Ps 91 by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a reading for the day from, presumably, the foundation of the feast on 13 September 1670.  Image.

Pseudo C. S. Lewis

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."
"You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream."
Etc.

     The phrase "never too old" does not occur in any of the many books of his reproduced in searchable full-text (e.g.  html) at fadedpage.com, nor could I get it to occur in any of the three volumes of his Collected letters, as searchable via public library eVersions.  It isn’t referenced in The quotable Lewis (1989) or The C. S. Lewis index (1995) either, and some (e.g. here and here) have long claimed that it can’t be found in him.  More importantly, The Quote Investigator says the same.  Conversely, it does appear in The misquotable C. S. Lewis (2018).  Etc.

"every [(toute)] avoidable error"-in-"print" must be punished, with "prison or hard labor" if necessary

     "The need of truth is more sacred than any other need. . . .  One feels afraid to read when once one has realized the quantity and the monstrousness [(l’énormité)] of the material falsehoods shamelessly paraded, even in the books of the most reputable authors.  Thereafter one reads as though one were drinking from a contaminated well.
     "There are men who work eight hours a day and make the immense effort of reading in the evenings so as to acquire knowledge.  It is impossible for them to go and verify their sources in the big libraries.  They have to take the books on trust.  One has no right to give them spurious provender [(à manger du faux)].  What sense is there in pleading that authors act in good faith?  They don’t have to do physical labor for eight hours a day.  Society provides for their sustenance so that they may have the leisure and give themselves the trouble to avoid error. . . ."
     "A few straightforward measures of public salubrity would protect the population from offenses against the truth [(les atteintes à la vérité)].
     "The first would be to set up, with such protection in view, special courts enjoying the highest prestige, composed of judges specially selected and trained.  They would be responsible for publicly condemning any avoidable error [(toute erreur evitable)] , and would be able to sentence to prison or hard labor for repeated commission of the offense, aggravated by proven dishonesty of intention.
     ". . . .
     "Under this system, anybody, no matter who, discovering an avoidable error [(une erreur évitable)] in a printed text or radio broadcast, would be entitled to bring an action before these courts."

     Simone Weil, The need for roots:  prelude to a declaration of duties toward mankind, trans. Arthur Wills (New York:  G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), 37-39 (Part one, Truth).  French from L’enracinement:  prelude à une declaration des devoirs enverse l’être humain, Collection Espoir (Paris:  Gallimard, 1949), 38-40.
     Who, then, should be prosecuted for this eminently avoidable error?  The translator?  Or someone else further on down the chain?  "All the more reason why it is disgraceful to tolerate the existence of newspapers on which, as everybody knows, not one of the collaborators would be able to stop [(y demeurer, to remain!)], unless he were prepared from time to time to tamper knowingly with the truth" (38).
     Cf. Geoffrey Hill on the metaphysical significance of inaccuracy.

Nos. two and three of Baumstark's "celebrated" "laws of liturgical development" ("criteria . . . of relative [liturgical] age")

"a [liturgical] text is [1] the more ancient the less influenced by the Bible and [2] the more recent the more symmetrical.  What is more, . . . the tendency towards symmetry is felt before the influence of the Bible, for there are many cases in which the symmetry, itself clearly secondary, has been destroyed by the more and more invasive impact [(action . . . envahissante)] of biblical language."

     Anton Baumstark, Liturgie comparée:  principes et méthodes pour l'étude historique des liturgies chrétiennes (Chevetogne, Belgium: Editions de Chevetogne, 1953 [1939]), 67, citing (his student) Fritz Hamm and (subsequently) Hieronymus Engberding (translation mine).  "celebrated" from Haquin, André Haquin, "Un prière eucharistique valide, sans paroles de consécration?: L’anaphore Syrienne d’Addaï et Mari," Revue théologique de Louvain 37, no. 4 (2006): 536n8 (532-544).  This struck me at first as counter-intuitive, but makes sense in the light of the presence of liturgy in Scripture itself (67-68).

Oratio, Feast of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, 17 September

"Deus, fons vitae, qui sanctam Hildegardem, virginem, prophetico spiritu imbuisti, fac nos, quaesumus, eius exemplo et intercessione, vias tuas scire et in huius saeculi caligine lucis tuae claritatem cognoscere. Per Dominum."

O God, source of life, who steeped Saint Hildegard in the prophetic Spirit, cause us, we pray, by her example and intercession, to know your ways [(vias tuas scire > Scivias)] and in the darkness of our [(huius, of this)] time to know the brightness of your light.  Through [our] Lord [Jesus Christ your Son, who, etc.].

     Prayer for the Feast of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Doctor of the Church, 17 September, translation mine (as I wasn't seeing this offhand in any of my apps).  Image:  RomkeHoekstra, Wikimedia Commons.


Church of England:

"Most glorious and holy God, whose servant Hildegard, strong in the faith, was caught up in the vision of your heavenly courts:  by the breath of your Spirit open our eyes to glimpse your glory and our lips to sing your praises with all the angels; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who". Etc.

Episcopal Church:

"God of all times and seasons:  Give us grace that we, after the example of thy servant Hildegard, may both know and make known the joy and jubilation of being part of thy creation, and show forth thy glory not only with our lips but in our lives; through Jesus Christ our Savior, who".  Etc.

"Changes of habit"

     "In the summer of 1538 the order was put out for former regulars to remove habits or face the capital punishment of felons. Anecdotally, Cromwell met Alexander Barclay – formerly a monk, now a friar – at a bookstall by St Paul’s and told him that if he did not take off his habit he would be hanged, 'for example to all other'. Beyond London and the vicegerent’s gaze, it proved more difficult to prevent. Sir Piers Edgcumbe caught up with two Plymouth Franciscans still clothed as friars. 'Wolde [they] by them new hobyts or naye?', he challenged them. 'They bowthe sayed that they wolde not for a yere or tow and by that tyme perchance ther wylbe aouther change and then oure olde hobyts wyll serve agayne.' One Sir Robert Elys, resolutely uncooperative, was 'carried hym to the joyell [gaol]', declaring, 'he trustyd within tow yeris he mought weer his clothyng  agayne . . . [and] that he had red in a pronunsticacion that ther shulde be a kyng in yglond that shulde do gret wrong to his comynaltie to ther semyng and that within tow yeris after he shulde take gret repentance for the same.'"

      James G. Clark, The dissolution of the monasteries:  a new history (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2021), chap. 9 ("Changes of habit").  Image:  Wikimedia Commons.

"Were it not for the poetry and song that they recite before me daily, I would not have created the world"

"Were it not for the poetry and song that they [all [sons of] flesh and blood [(כל בני בשר ודם)]] recite before me daily, I would not have created the world [(שאלמלא שירה וזמרה שהם אומרים לפני בכל יום לא בראתי את עולמי)]; and whence do we know that the Holy One, blessed is he, only created the world on account of the poetry and song?  From the verse which says (Psalm 96:6), 'Honor and majesty are before him, strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.'  That is to say, honor and majesty are before him in heavens, but strength and beauty arise from his sanctuary on earth. . . .  And whence do we know that the Holy One, blessed is he, created the heavens for the matter of poetry?  From the verse which says (Psalm 19:1), 'The heavens declare the glory of God. . . .'  And whence do we know that Adam opened his mouth in a song of praise?  From the verse which says 'A psalm, a poem for the Sabbath day.  It is good to give thanks to the Lord, and to sing praise to thy name, O most high!' (Psalm 92:1)."

     Midrash Otiyyot Derabbi Akiba [(מדרש אותיות דרבי עקיבא)] (7th/9th (prob. 9th) cent.), chap. 1, as trans. Harold Fisch, Poetry with a purpose:  biblical poetics and interpretation, Indiana studies in biblical literature (Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN:  Indiana University Press, 1988), 119.  Hebrew from the edition ed. Solomon Aaron Wertheimer (Jerusalem:  1914), 1-2 (beginning from the penultimate line of the text (not apparatus) on p. 1), not vol. 2 of (the still-less-than-fully-critical edition usually given for the Midrash Otiyyot Derabbi Akiba,) Wertheimer's Bate midrashot:  ʻeśrim ṿe-ḥamishah midreshe Ḥazal ʻal pi kitve yad me-Genizat Yerushalayim u-Mitsrayim, ʻim mevoʼot, heʻarot ṿe-tsiyunim (Jerusalem:  Hotsaʼat Ketav-yad ṿe-sefer, 1988 [1950-1953]).  Hat tip:  Brian Lugioyo.  Image:  Rylands Sephardi Haggadah, fol. 28v (Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art and Material Culture).

"from any ashes whatever"

"[Christ's] rising from the grave was a sufficient argument to prove that men are to be raised up by Divine power, not only from their graves, but also from any dust whatever [(non solum de sepulcris, sed etiam de quibuscumque cineribus)]."

     I.e. he did not have "to return to dust [(incinerationem pati, suffer incineration)] so as to give to them who have returned to dust the hope of rising from the dust [(spem resurgendi incineratis post incinerationem, to the incinerated the hope of rising after incineration)]," incinerare being post-classical, and capable of meaning both 1a. "to reduce to ashes (by burning)" and 1b. "to reduce to dust (by decomposition)" (DMLBS), an ambiguity not present in the DMLBS (at least) for cinis:  cineribus < cinis, "1. The residue from a fire," "3. Ashes regarded as the result of destruction or consumption by fire," "4. Ashes as the condition of the body after death (whether cremated or not)" (OLD); "II.A. The ashes of a corpse that is burned," "the person after death," "after burning the corpse" (Lewis (& Short)); "1. residue of combustion" only (DMLBS).  The word in the Vulgate of Gen 3:19 ("dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return"), by contrast, is pulvis; and in the Vetus Latina, terra (L:  the "allgemeine Form der Vetus Latina"; H:  Jerome's Vulgate (28*)).
     St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III.51.3.ad 3.

A prayer referencing St. Hildegard of Bingen

München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
Res/V.ss. 982 m, XIIIIv

A prayer [with reference] to [(zü)] the holy saint Hildegard [of Bingen]:

Almighty, eternal God:  we beseech thee to bestow upon us [(wir bitten dich das du uns verleihen wöllest, we beseech thee that thou wouldst bestow upon us)] the Spirit of truth and, so, [to] be gracious [to us]  as you were to the holy [and] chaste saint Hildegard, that we may fulfill your will [both] here in time and with thee in everlasting happiness.  Amen.

      Die Legend des heyligen hertzogen sant Ruprechts bey Byngen uff sant Ruprechts berg leyplich rastende ([Oppenheim]:  [Köbel], 1524), XIIIIv, as digitized by MDZ, trans. mine.

Inscription on Mt. Ararat

For Nikolay Pavlovich [Romanov I], denominated Tsar of All-Russ’, Ivan Fyodorovich [Paskevich-Erevansky] liberated, by armed might, this most-holy sanctuary of the Christian faith from (Y)Erevan in the year of our Lord 1826.

Nicolao Pauli filio
totius Rutheniae autocratore
jubente
hoc asylum sacrosanctum
armata manu vindicavit
fidei Christianae
Johannes Friedrich filius
Paskewitsch ab Erivan
Anno domini MDCCCXXVI.

     Parrot, Friedrich. Reise zum Ararat (Berlin: Haude und Spener, 1834), 145 (p. 163 of the English translation of the book published in 1845).  Inscription on the "leaden plate" affixed to a cross erected on the summit of Mt. Ararat by the Parrot expedition in 1826, translation mine.  With thanks to my colleague Paula Skreslet for the diversion.

"'Africa's domestic economy encouraged large-scale trading and possession of slaves long before Europeans visited African shores'"

     "While it is not a straightforward matter whether the transatlantic slave trade was 'the gravest crime against humanity,' surely it was a crime. It was a crime and a monumental tragedy from the perspective of tens of millions of black human lives that were sacrificed on the twin altars of greed and human stupidity. That said—and this is a crucial point—there is scant historical support for the tacit assumption that it was an organized and systematic assault against hapless Africans who, but for lack of military wherewithal, would have risen up against and repelled their enslavers. The historical evidence is more sobering. As John Thornton wrote in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 ([2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, ]1998[, 125]): '[In conclusion, then, we must accept that] African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers. This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange but even at deeper levels. Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves.[ . . .  Africa's domestic economy encouraged large-scale trading and possession of slaves long before Europeans visited African shores.]' This conclusion is not controversial among serious historians of the transatlantic slave trade. It also helps explain the historical absurdity of those newfangled European abolitionists who, as it were, had suddenly started seeing the trade through a different moral lens and began struggling to convince African traffickers, until a minute ago their trading partners, of the wrongfulness of the enterprise.
     "If European abolitionists did not become saints overnight, African chiefs who insisted on business as usual were hardly Satanic. They were instead agents following a brutal social logic: So integral was enslavement to the internal workings and moral order of most African communities in that period that it is difficult to conceive of their functioning without it. Historically, a pre-colonial African kingdom that did not extract slaves from a vanquished vassal was as rare as one that did not regularly engage in slave raids. In the 1840s, Gezo, king of the West African state of Dahomey, told the importuning British, 'The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth.… The mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery.' In this, he echoed a sentiment that was not uncommon for the time.
     "Indeed, not only was trade in human beings par for the course, many believed that it was God’s will. After Britain declared all slave trading illegal in 1807, the King of Bonny (now part of Nigeria) doubled down in a tone not all that different from that of King Gezo: 'We think this trade must go on. That is the verdict of our oracle and the priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God himself.' Nigerian historian P.A. Igbafe observed about the pre-colonial Benin Kingdom that the institution of slavery was 'one of its main props.' This could well have been said about every single pre-colonial African kingdom. The Asante Empire, with its capital in Kumasi—located in present-day Ghana—was a slave-owning one.
     "Rather than a 'definitive break in world history,' therefore, the transatlantic slave trade was coextensive with it. That it was egregious in its brutality is without question, but it was a trade involving two sides and, crucially, seems to have unfolded within a moral and social calculus in which you were either traded or trader. It is one thing to recognize its sheer ugliness and another thing entirely to misrepresent it, which the campaigners for reparatory justice flagrantly do.
     "The transatlantic slave trade, moreover, is just one of three momentous episodes of human trafficking in African history, the other two being the trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades. Consider this: The transatlantic slave trade lasted roughly 400 years. The trans-Saharan lasted for 1,300 years, and it preceded, overlapped with, and continued long [(a century or so?)] after the transatlantic slave trade had ceased."

     Ebenezer Obadare, "A Dubious Quest for 'Reparatory Justice':  The case for compensating Africa for slavery rests on bad history, questionable morality, and false promises," Commentary, September 2026.  I have not yet verified these claims, only that Obadare holds a BA in history and an MSc in international relations from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, and a Ph.D. in social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.  On the other hand, and am currently reading J. C. Sharman, Ties that bound:  slavery and power in Africa (Princeton University Press, 2026), and there Sharman follows up his own quotation of Thornton ("Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves") with "This was the case ['for the first century and a half of [Portuguese] contact' and] during and after the era of the company states until the end of European involvement in the slave trade.  Such a perspective runs completely against popular stereotypes of European masters and African victims.  It also contradicts an earlier generation of scholarship holding that Europe dominated and exploited Africans right from the beginning of relations between them—a view epitomized in the book [(Rodney Walter's)] How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. . . . [T]he Europeans were consistently in an inferior position" (65, supplemented by 59).  Though Sharman is here making, in context, a point about the (nevertheless African-dominated) ramp-up effected by European demand from the later 17th century, this one still stands:  ". . . Africans had centuries of experience with slavery and long-distance slave trades before contact with Europeans . . ." (75).  Not only that, "'[B]y the middle of the nineteenth century there were more slaves in Muslim West Africa than in all parts of the Americas at any time in the history of the black Atlantic'" (104, quoting Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihad in West Africa during the age of revolutions (Princeton University Press, 2016), 160, under the sub-heading "Limitations on the involvement of Muslim West Africa in the Atlantic trade").
     For but one alternative perspective of which I happen to be aware, with equally recent citations, some of them in French, see Sègbégnon Mathieu Gnonhossou, "Soul-destroyers tore me from my mother's arms : West African resistance to the slave trade," in Awakening to justice:  faithful voices from the abolitionist past, ed. Dialogue on Race and Faith Project (Seattle, Wash.) (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2024).  What strikes me, though, is how little the footnotes to Gnonhossou overlap with entries in the twenty-page bibliography to Sharman.  Glancing through the former all-too quickly, I caught only two titles cited by Gnonhossou that appear in the bibliography to Sharman, though Gnohossou does cite titles by Sharman's authors that Sharman does not cite:  Law (notes 15, 18, 20, and 30), Manning (notes 16, 20, and 24), Monroe (notes 18, 20, 22, and 23), and Ross (note 14).