"the higher you rise in your craft, skill or profession, the more you will be removed from its performance in order to manage it"

"since the Industrial Revolution, but particularly in the last fifty years, we have created a world around us which, in contrast to the natural world, reflects the left hemisphere’s priorities and its vision. Today all the available sources of intuitive life – the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyse them, that their power to help us see intuitively beyond the hermetic world that the left hemisphere has set up has been largely drained from them. . . . The cerebral and the abstract – for example, management and its systems – have become more highly valued than the hands-on task that management exists to serve, with the odd effect that 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

". . . [the left hemisphere] works its necessary effects at an intermediate stage. Problems arise when this is treated as the end stage. . . [T]he Master realises the need for an emissary to do certain work on his behalf (which he, the Master, must not involve himself with) and report back to him. That is why he appoints the emissary in the first place. The emissary, however, knowing less than the Master, thinks he knows everything and considers himself the real Master, thus failing to carry out his duty to report back. The right hemisphere’s view is inclusive, 'both/and', synthetic, integrative; it realises the need for both. The left hemisphere’s view is exclusive, 'either/or', analytic and fragmentary – but, crucially, unaware of what it is missing. It therefore thinks it can go it alone. . . .
". . . 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.

Up with the binarchy

"Recognizing valid differences between two elements of a system is not to 'dichotomise.'  Some people fear dichotomies are simplistic.  But it is also simplistic to reject a perfectly valid dichotomy just because you happen to have a thing against dichotomies when they occur."

     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.

"The trees were passive to Orpheus; that's why they danced"

"the crucial point to observe here is that Mary is judged to have been purely receptive in relation to God and to God's reconciling purposes.  And yet, her receptivity is to be understood as active, not passive.  She 'goes forth to receive the Lord.'  And that is a point of considerable significance.  Emphasis is laid here on the active obedience of Mary, on her (human) power to receive the Holy Spirit rooted in her holiness.  To be sure, the 'person-forming' power (if I can again borrow a Christological caegory) remains God's.  Mary is given the power of 'Divine Maternity.'  She 'becomes heaven, and Her womb becomes the place of the overshadowing.'  Indeed, what she receives in her virginal conception is not a gift of grace so much as it is 'the Holy Spirit Himself in all the fullness of His divine nature.'  And so she was made the fit instrument of the incarnation of the Logos.  But she must voluntarily receive for any of this to happen.  A hierarchy of wills is envisioned; the lesser 'follows' the greater.  The same holds true in the hypostatic union itself - which brings us, in the second place, to Jesus."

     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

"This solidarity of the ages is so effective that the lines of connection work both ways.  Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past.  But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present."

     "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.

"I would rather account to God for too great gentleness than for too great severity"

"I would rather account to God for too great gentleness than for too great severity. Is not God all love? God the Father is the Father of mercy; God the Son is a Lamb; God the Holy Ghost is a Dove, that is, gentleness itself. [. . .] And are you wiser than God?"

     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!

Grammatical gender

"Gender has the same root as genre and genus, so, in a grammatical context, refers to the category [or class] of a noun. . . .  English speakers, accustomed to a mother tongue without such noun classifications, may find it difficult to divorce the idea of [grammatical] gender from concepts of male/female, let alone avoid the temptation to find significance in a word's gender.  But many nouns belong to a gender category at complete variance with their meaning:  the Spanish word for masculinity (la masculinidad) is feminine because -idad is a feminine ending.  In contrast, el feminismo (feminism) is masculine because -ismo is a masculine ending.  Nor is it only in Romance languages where such discrepancies occur; like its Spanish and French counterparts, the German word for 'manliness' (die Mannlichkeit) is feminine."

     While the German word for feminism (Feminismus), I would add, is masculine, and the Latin word for manhood or masculinity (virilitas), feminine.  Etc.  Rory McDowall Clark, "Masculine and feminine," letter to the editor, Times literary supplement no. 6371 (May 9, 2025), 6.  More profoundly, though, perhaps, why is -idad "feminine," and -ismo "masculine"?  Etc.