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).

"the end can contain the beginning only because the beginning contained the end."

      Bruce Lindley McCormack, The humility of the eternal Son:  Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2021), 245n32.

"So called 'social trinitarianism' was not an option in the early church. Nor should it be today."

     Bruce Lindley McCormack, The humility of the eternal Son:  Reformed kenoticism and the repair of Chalcedon (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2021), 245n32.

"command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high" (the Supplices te rogamus)

"with the pronouncement of the words of institution, the Sacrifice of the Mass is established [(acquis)], holy, approved; but this acceptation is only manifest for us at the moment in which the offering of our oblation appears transfigured in the fires of the Holy Spirit, transferred by the ministry of the angel onto the altar in heaven, fully conformed to the vivifying Body and Blood of Christ.  It is only then that, perfectly consecrated—Saint Gelasius and Saint Gregory said even simply consecrated—it can be divided [(rompue)] among all of those invited to the royal banquet of the Lamb."

     A. Sage, "Saint Augustin et la prière du Canon 'Supplices te rogamus…'," Revue des études byzantines 11 (1953):  265 (252-265).

"command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high" (the Supplices te rogamus)

"we do not call Paul's tongue or his paper and ink the body and blood of Christ, nor the significant sounds made by his tongue, nor the meaningful signs written on the pages of his letters, but only that which is taken from the fruits of the earth, and consecrated by mystic prayers, and taken by us for our spiritual salvation in memory of what the Lord suffered for us. The hands of men give this its visible appearance, but it can only be consecrated into being such a great sacrament by the invisible working of the spirit of God. For all the physical movements involved in the whole action are worked by God acting in the first place on what is invisible in the ministers, namely on the souls of men or on the services of the occult spirits who are subject to him."

     St. Augustin, De Trinitate III.4.10, trans. Edmund Hill, WSA I/5 (1991), 132-134.  Footnote at the end here:  "This strange little excursus into eucharistic theology throws an interesting light on Augustine's ideas on the subject, and must modify to some extent the impression we get of them, say from his commentary on John 6 (Homilies on the Gospel of John 26, 13-20). Augustine is customarily thought of, largely on the strength of that passage, as holding a 'symbolist' view of the sacrament as against the 'realist' view expressed for example by Ambrose in his De Mysteriis 9. On the whole this is true, as Augustine always lays great stress on the significance of the sacraments, which he classifies as signs, sacred signs, rather than as just things. In this he is firmly taken up by Thomas Aquinas, and again by the leading spirits in theology today, who are reacting, perhaps over-reacting, against a somewhat uncritical and mechanical 'realism' that has colored Catholic sacramental thought and piety for rather a long time.
     "But this passage of ours here shows that Augustine's 'symbolism' was not unqualified. He does indeed introduce the eucharist quite unequivocally in a 'signs' context here. But then he introduces this section, which is in reality a footnote, to explain that the eucharist is a quite unique sort of sign, in that it is to be identified with the thing signified (the body and blood of Christ) in a way that no other sign can be. Furthermore a real and unique spiritual, divine, causality needs to be brought into play to effect this unique sign. It is interesting to observe that he thinks angels might well be co-ministers of the eucharist. Are they thought of perhaps as playing the same kind of role as the mysterious angel in the Supplices te rogamus prayer of Eucharistic Prayer I (the Roman Canon)?"

     I was put onto this passage (though not this translation with this footnote) by A. Sage, "Saint Augustine et la prière du Canon 'Supplices te rogamus…'," Revue des études byzantines 11 (1953):  253 (252-265).  And Sage was very clearly thinking so back then.  The Supplices te rogamus, "so disconcerting for more than one theologian or liturgist" (Sage, 252), I was glad to read:

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God: command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty, so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son, may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.  Through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Supplices te rogamus, omnipotens Deus: iube haec perferri per manus sancti Angeli tui in sublime altare tuum, in conspectu divinae maiestatis tuae; ut, quotquot ex hac altaris participatione sacrosanctum Filii tui Corpus et Sanguinem sumpserimus, omni benedictione caelesti et gratia repleamur. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.

Four theses on St. Hildegard of Bingen

If I am right about the importance of reading the visions of St. Hildegard of Bingen in the light of the early Vita of Gottfried of Disibodenberg and (after his death) Theoderich of Echternach, who imply that they were bestowed in order to ensure the orthodox (if imagistically allegorical) interpretation of both [1] Scripture and [2] Tradition; [3] set down in the form of an imagistic early scholasticism or [comprehensive] systematic theology; and [4] endorsed at the highest levels of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, then "The prophetessa teutonica can be shoehorned [(fugt sich . . . ein)] only with difficulty into the history of [Christian] mysticism [in general], and so-called German [Christian] mysticism [in particular].  Hildegard is not to be placed at the head of a line [of descent] that would lead from her to a [St.] Gertrude of Helfta or [a] Mechthild of Magdegburg.  She turns out to be in hindsight a theologian of high rank who develops, via the power of image and symbol independently, [a] theology saturated by [the Christian] tradition."

     Jörg Ulrich, "Vision bei Hildegard von Bingen:  Beobachtungen zur Vita Gottfrieds und Theoderichs und zu den Visionsschriften Hildegards," Kerygma und Dogma 47 (2001):  27 (14-29).  Image:  Eibingen, Klosterbibliothek Abtei St. Hildegard, Cod. 1 (Pergamentfaksimile von Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 1 (now lost)), fol. 1. 

"once, maybe twice. But. . . . not forever"

     "The conclusions I’ve drawn from reflecting on the question are simple. First, we never know what the effect of telling the truth will be. It’s always worth telling it once, maybe twice. But there may come a time when you’ve done that, and there’s nothing more you can do. The penny may drop in their minds over time. It’s always worth saying what you believe to be true and maybe repeating it, but not forever.
     "A second conclusion is, however, that ideologues again are not interested in a conversation; they’re interested in either persuading you or making you submit. If someone approaches you in a provocative, insulting manner from the get-go, you know they don’t want a conversation. If you engage with them, you’re likely to be reduced to an undignified scrap in which you lose your dignity and your temper. So if someone approaches you in that fashion, refuse to engage on those terms. Some exchanges are simply not worth having. They’re dangerous, and silence is the best response. And there is good dominical precedent for Christians to use silence in response to what other people say.
     "The third thing I’d say is that even ideologues and zealots may speak the truth. And that’s why I felt I ought to respond to the ten most hostile critics to my book on colonialism. I paid them the respect of taking what they said seriously and assessing how much sense it made. I conceded three or four minor points to my most obsessive and recalcitrant critic.
     "Finally, zealots are not the only ones we are speaking to. In a conference I held in Oxford in 2019, Bret Weinstein gave us the gnomic advice, “Always remember the room is not the room,” which means, when you’re faced with an aggressive zealot, you need to think about how you behave to the people who are watching. They are the more important audience. So for their sake it may be important to speak the truth as best you can without being drawn into an undignified scrap."

     Nigel Biggar in Matthew Lee Anderson and Nigel Biggar, "Liberalism in the U.S. and the UK: A Q&A with Lord Nigel Biggar," Public Discourse:  The JKournal of the Witherspoon Institute, August 13, 2026.

"In your light we see Light"

      "And sometimes, though not often, I see another light in that [shadow of the living] light, and this I have called 'the Living Light.'  But I am even less able to explain how I see this light than I am the other one.  Suffice it to say that when I do see it, all my sorrow and pain vanish from my memory and I become more like a young girl than an old women [(atque interim dum illam intueor, omnis mihi tristitia ommsque dolor de memoria aufertur, ita ut tunc mores simplices puelle, et non uetule mulieris habeam)]."

     St. Hildegard of Bingen, Letter 103r to the monk [St.] Guilbert of Gembloux (1175), Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, trans. Joseph L. Baird &  Radd K. Ehrman, vol. 2 (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1998), 23 (21-25).  Latin as supplied by Jörg Ulrich, "Vision bei Hildegard von Bingen:  Beobachtungen zur Vita Gottfrieds und Theoderichs und zu den Visionsschriften Hildegards," Kerygma und Dogma 47 (2001):  15n3 (14-29).    Image:  Eibingen, Klosterbibliothek Abtei St. Hildegard, Cod. 1 (Pergamentfaksimile von Wiesbaden, Hessische Landesbibliothek, Hs. 1 (now lost)), fol. 1. 

Gastadelli on the letter of St. Bernard to St. Hildegard

The legend of "The [enthusiastic] oral intervention of Bernard [of Clairvaux on Hildegard’s behalf to the effect that a luminary of that caliber should not remain obscure, but should rather be, by the papal authority of Eugenius III, proclaimed to be the recipient of a great grace, as indeed she was (according to the medievalist [Philipp] Jaffé) in Trier between 13 and 15 February 1148 (Regesta II, no. 9188),] is to be blamed on the fanciful [(phantasievoller)] biographers of Hildegard [Gottfried and Theodoric], exactly as the interpolation [of 1180/90] into [the authentically quite cagy] Epistle 366" (sometimes numbered 390) of 1147 in 11 of the 12 manuscripts of that famous letter.

     [Ferruccio Gastadelli], "Zu Brief 366" ("Aus Opere di San Bernardo, Vol VI/1, Milano 1986"), in Bernhard von Clairvaux Sämtliche Werke lateinisch-deutsch, ed. Gerhard B. Winkler et al., vol. III, p. 1188 (1187-1188).  Image:  Die Legend des heyligen hertzogen sant Ruprechts bey Byngen uff sant Ruprechts berg leyplich rastende [(Oppenheim:  Köbel, 1524)], XXVI =MDZ scan 55, Munich DigitiZation Center (MDZ) of the Bavarian State Library (BSB).

It takes a village to raze a child

"It takes a village to raise a child," but it can take a smaller "village" (of meddlesome, know-it-all busybodies) to raze or (be)traise or craze him, too.

     Steve Perisho.

Faith AND life

      "These half-dozen questions effectively synthesized what the Tudor regime had been pursuing piecemeal, as the opportunity arose, since it was first established half a century before.  The interest in the personal morality of the religious has often been upheld as the signal of a new determination to do battle with the very basis of religious vows.  But the behaviour of individuals, their social and sexual liaisons, had always figured in the visitations, both those carried out under the external authority of the bishop and those investigations undertaken by their own congregations."

     James G. Clark, The dissolution of the monasteries:  a new history (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2022), 234 (Part Two, chap. V. The King's Commissions), italics mine.  The footnote at the end of this paragraph  appears to cite sources no earlier than 1492, however.  Would this hold also against claims about the rise of a supposedly new and unprecedented reformist
interest in surveillance and control at about this time?