"No such item as a virtuous people."

"When that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland he said he would leave nothing alive.  Said the Irish were vermin and devils.  Clean out the country for good people to step into.  Make a paradise.  Now we make this American paradise I guess.  Guess it be strange so many Irish boys doing this work.  Ain’t that the way of the world.  No such item as a virtuous people.  Winona the only soul not thrown on the bonfire."

     Thomas McNulty in Sebastian Barry's Days without end:  a novel (New York:  Viking, 2016), 226.

"the long muscle of the river"

     Thomas McNulty in Sebastian Barry's Days without end:  a novel (New York:  Viking, 2016), 181.

Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato

      "The commemorative practices that have accumulated about the figure of Columbus can doubtless be criticized for reproducing [(reproduzieren)] over and over again the dubious dichotomies of Middle Ages and Modernity, dogmatism and enlightenment, knowledge rooted in authority and knowledge rooted in empirical investigation, flat world and round earth; and so not just [for] reproducing [(nachformen)] the flat earth error, but [for] positively contributing to its establishment.  But that with the exception of [professional historians committed to] the historical sciences understood in the broadest sense, no one thinks to question critically the comprehensive darkening and flattening of the Middle Ages; indeed, that even the mass-medial corrections issued at regular intervals in books, films, and magazines [produced] for popular consumption appear to achieve at best a short-term Aha! effect before once more giving way to the picture of a disk-shaped Middle Ages—[all of this] shows that this type of discourse [(Diskursfigur)] is granted in the public consciousness afterwards just as before the status of an historical fact, and that the fiction [(Erzälung)] of a period of cosmo-, geo-, and ethnographical ignorance ended by Columbus meets obviously a need for [the] construction of historical meaning [(historischer Sinnstiftung)] that the 'true history [(Realhistorie)]' cannot—or can only with difficulty—satisfy.
     "One is almost tempted to speak of the scene [(Auftritt)] of the discoverer of America before the Talavera Commission [reproduced, for example, on the Columbus doors of the U.S. Capitol] as a mythologue [(Mythologem)].  Like most myths [(Mythen)], the [one] compressed into this scene [(Szene)] of the demonstration of the spherical shape of the earth does [but] one [thing]:  it explains the present—and as it became, so it is.  Enabled thereby is a positioning of modern man in time (important at none other than a time of global spatial expansion [(Entgrenzung)]), and the dissociation [of him] from [(Abgrenzung gegenüber)] an Other experienced as foreign, primitive, threatening, etc.  In 'reality' the world of the Middle Ages may [?!] have been less flat than many moderns believe.  But [summoning up] the will to correct the error [(Den Irrtum korrigieren zu wollen)] has turned out to be [a] rather hopeless undertaking:  Se non è vero, è ben trovato.  If not true, it is nevertheless well invented.  As one puts it with felicity today, it makes simply too much sense."

     Thomas Reinhardt, "Die Erfindung der flachen Erde:  der Mythos Kolumbus und die Konstruktion der Epochenschwelle zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit," Paideuma:  Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 53 (2007):  175-176 (161-180).

Flammarion engraving

Flammarion, L'atmosphère (1888), 163

      "Just one example by way of illustration:  In 1888 there appeared in Paris the popular scientific astronomy [(Himmelskunde:  L'atmosphère)] of Nicolas Camille Flammarion.  In this [book] a [now-]famous woodcut executed in the style of early modernity shows a kneeling man who, grasping a walking stick loosely with his left hand, with his right hand and head pushes through the vault of heaven and gets a glimpse of the world beyond the firmament.  The caption announces [that] a missionary of the Middle Ages reports [(habe behauptet)] that he has discovered the point at which heaven and earth come together.  The earth is according to this conception [(dabei)] necessarily flat and overvaulted by the heavens as by a dome-shaped cheese cover.
     "Experts [however now] agree that the engraving was original to the book by Flammarion.  Although some [of its] stylistic features appear to echo [those of] the late 15^th or early 16^th century, a more precise iconographical examination quickly reveals that the motif [(Motiv)] cannot have been engraved before the late 19^th century, and therefore depicts not the medieval worldview, but rather the idea [(Bild)] of th[e medieval] worldview constructed for itself by modernity.  And yet it was again and again described as [a] woodcut 'from approximately 1530' and enlisted in illustration of the European conception of the world before Columbus.  This makes it obvious on the one hand how much the idea of a 'disc-shaped Middle Ages' satisfied popular demand for simple explanations of the world, but shows above all the power with which such faulty conceptions, once anchored in the public consciousness, are carried forward."

     Thomas Reinhardt, "Die Erfindung der flachen Erde:  Der Mythos Kolumbus und die Konstruktion der Epochenschwelle zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit," Paideuma:  Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde 53 (2007):  163-165 (161-180).

     Note well that Reinhardt, writing in 2007, does not cite

• Stefano Gattei, writing in 2014:  "An original fake:  closing the debate on Flammarion's engraving," in Fakes!?  hoaxes, counterfeits and deception in early modern science, ed. Marco Baretta and Maria Conforti (Sagamore Beach:  Science History Publications/USA, a division of Watson Publishing International LLC, 2014), 226-265, which I was put onto by Segner himself via private correspondence, who wasn't thereby endorsing its conclusions prematurely.
  
• Hans Gerhard Senger, writing in 2011:  "Der »Wanderer am Weltenrand«:  eine alter oder altertumelnder Weltaufriss?," in Atlas der Weltbilder, ed. Christoph Markschies, Ingeborg Reichle, Jochen Brüning, and Peter Deuflhard for the Berlin-Brandenbergische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin:  Akademie Verlag GmbH, 2011), 342-352, which I was put onto by Segner himself via private correspondence.
  
• Hans Gerhard Senger, writing in 2001:  "Denken in neuen Horizonten:  Der Holzschnitt des Flammarion - Wanderer am Weltenrand," in Horzonte:  Nikolaus on Kues in seiner Welt:  eine Ausstellung zur 600. Wiederkehr seines Geburtstages (Trier:  2001), 16-19, which I was put onto by 2011, above.
• Hans Gerhard Senger, writing in 1998:  "'Wanderer am Weltenrand' — ein Raumforscher um 1530?  Überlegungen zu einer peregrinatio inventiva," in Raum und Raumvorstellungen im Mittelalter, ed. Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia:  Veröffentlichungen des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln 25 (Berlin and New York:  Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 793-827, whom I am reading right now, and who argues, against Weber (1973, below) and the consensus, that "there are, after [1973 just] as [there were] before, good grounds for a dating in the 16th century" (794) after all.  (Note, too, that Senger includes an "Ergänzung und Fortzetzung des Literaturnachweis von Bruno Weber (1973)" of 28 items dating from 1946 to 1997 (pp. 819-820).)
  

     Although Reindhart is right that what the image depicts is a flat, disc-shaped earth, this does not seem to have been either what Flammarion, in 1888, invented it to stress ("je me suis élevé en ballon plus haut que l’olympe grec, sans être jamais parvenu à toucher cette tente"), or what most of those who were duped by him used it for either.
     And yet, though Flammarion himself did not, there were several in the long line of those deceived who drew special attention to its flat-earth implications, if only in passing:  Georges Urbain and Marcel Boll in 1933 (Weber Anhang no. 14 (Bruno Weber, "Ubi caelum terrae se coniungit:  ein altertümlicher Aufriß des Weltgebäudes von Camille Flammarion," Gutenberg Jahrbuch 48 (1973):  398-407 (381-408)):  "la Terre flotterait, comme un bouchon, sur les eaux planes et horizontales"), Lucien Rudaux and Gérard de Vaucouleurs in 1948 (Weber Anhang no. 16:  "Le ciel forme au-dessus de la Terre plane une voûte hémisphérique"), Herbert Meschkowski in 1961 (Weber Anhang no. 30, Das Christentum im Jahrhundert der Naturwissenchaften:  "der Erdscheibe"), Aniela Jaffé in 1967 (Weber Anhang no. 50-52:  "am Rand einer altertümlichkosmischen Landschaft"), Friedrich Becker in 1968 (Weber Anhang no. 56:  "die scheibenförmige Erde"), John Desmond Bernal in 1969 (Weber Anhang no. 59:  "In medieval times there was a return to the concept of [a] flat Earth"), and Oto Bihalij-Merin in 1971 (Weber Anhang no. 70:  "Der Mensch an den Grenzen der Welt").
     Whether Flammarion intended to deceive (intended it to be taken for an authentic early modern woodcut) is another question.

Diversi(on-ici)-ty, diversi-ionism

      "Scapegoating gains support from those who hope to escape its fury.  Stroll down the hallway of any academic department and you'll see door after door festooned with 'safe space' stickers, rainbow decals, Black Lives Matter signs, the latest flier from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office.  Each one is an attempt at what Shelby Steele calls 'dissociation.'  I may be white, even male, even married to a white woman, with white kids, but I am not the one you are looking for.  He is over there."

     James F. Keating, "Woke religion," a review of American awakening:  identity politics and other afflictions of our time, by Joshua Mitchell, First things no. 312 (April 2021):  51 (50-52).  Cf. Havel.

Zenas, "a person 'skilled in the Law par excellence, the Torah, even the whole OT'"

     Reidar Hvalvik, "Named Jewish believers connected with the Pauline mission," in Jewish believers in Jesus:  the early centuries, ed. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (Peabody, MA:  Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2007), 176-177 (154-178).  Most strikingly, "Admittedly Zenas is a contraction of Zenodorus, 'gift of Zeus,' and it is argued that it is 'unlikely' that a Jewish lawyer would have such a pagan name [('So I. Howard Marshall')].  This argument is, however, not valid.  There are several examples of Jews with typical pagan names, e.g., the female equivalent Zenodora ['Used of a Jewish woman in Rome (CIJ 43; cf. Noy, Jewish inscriptions, 100)'], further Dionysius, Apollonius, and Serapion."
     "The second name to be examined more closely is Lois, the grandmother of Timothy (2 Tim 1:5). . . .  Her name, Lois, is probably Cilician, but this does not help us very much in light of what we know of Jewish names.  There is, however, a 50 percent chance that Lois was a Jew.  The fact that she is juxtaposed with Timothy's Jewish mother increases the probability" (177).

• Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Oxford).  Down when I last tried.

"the one-cell human embryo has, right then and there, radical capacities, to think, talk, and laugh, which a frog embryo simply lacks. And these radical capacities are the rational foundation of human equality."

law.nd.edu

"human beings always have radical ­capacities that animals of other kinds never have. It is a sober truth—more and more intelligible as our knowledge of genetic complexity and the nanophysics of DNA expands—that the one-cell human embryo has, right then and there, radical capacities, to think, talk, and laugh, which a frog embryo simply lacks. And these radical capacities are the rational foundation of human equality. Their possession by every member of our species, from conception until death, justifies communities in undertaking the burdens of envisaging and securing equal protection of law, and in setting out on the course of acknowledging rights of persons. . . .
". . . the fact of the matter is as stated frankly by Robert G. Edwards, the first person to bring a human person from conception in a Petri dish to birth from her mother’s womb. Work on in vitro fertilization, into which ethical considerations 'hardly entered,' enabled him, he wrote, to 'examine a microscopic human being—one in its very earliest stages of development.' At its one-, two- and four-cell stages, 'the embryo is passing through a critical period in its life of great exploration: it becomes magnificently organized, switching on its own biochemistry,' increasing 'in size, and preparing itself quickly for implantation in the womb.'
     "Acknowledging that a human being is sexed radically—that is, from its very beginning—Edwards said about his first 'test-tube baby,' Louise Brown, 'She was beautiful then [as one or two cells], and she is beautiful now.' That appreciation of beauty went beyond the facts of the matter, but knowingly presupposed a totally informed grasp of the facts of the matter: about the dynamic, self-directing unity and integrity of Louise’s being, at every stage from her beginning, and about her personal membership of humankind from that earliest time of her life.
     "The words of the profoundly secular Dr. Edwards, like the more highly articulated syntheses of developmental-biological information with philosophical precision such as one finds in Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen’s Embryo (2008), all reinforce the already inevitable conclusion: Justice Stevens was simply mistaken in claiming—as he repeatedly did, most elaborately in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services—that the question of when human life (or personhood) begins is theological and/or religious, a question that there can be no secular purpose in resolving.
"Difficult or easy, that question, like its answer, is in truth strictly factual. Not in the same sense as history is factual, but in the equally secular sense in which natural science and philosophical assessments of natural-scientific findings are factual. It is like the judgment that we are animals that can make free choices, in which nothing determines which of two or more options will be chosen other than the choosing itself; or the judgment that reasons for judgment are not reducible to very complex physical interactions and causalities; or the judgment that an original singularity ('Big Bang'), billions of years ago, better explains the data than alternative histories of the universe. One is making a strictly secular judgment when one concludes that not only the one-cell, but equally the two-cell and four-cell human embryo—and equally the embryo at all later stages (including in a special, complex way, the relatively rare cases of monozygotic twinning, and excluding the also relatively rare cases of hydatidiform moles and other products of human conception that lack the epigenetic primordia for development of human capacities)—exists, functions, and develops as a unified, self-directed whole of a particular (human!) kind and never as a mere collection of contiguous but unintegrated individual cells. Equally secular and equally available is the rational conclusion that each adult, child, infant, and unborn child had his or her personal beginning precisely as a one- and then two- and then four-celled embryo with just those radical capacities which, by their species-specific diversities, both distinguish him or her from every other human person and unite all these human persons, all of us, in basic equality of humanity.
     "Our understanding (and accurate critical assessment) of the amazing way in which species-specific information ('form') dominates the astounding storm of partially random nano-level molecular and sub-molecular events is knowledge that is, if anything, more a cause (or potential cause) of moving toward 'theological' or 'religious' hypotheses and judgments than it is a result or manifestation of theology or religion. Justice Stevens had things backward, and his Webster claim is no rational or constitutional barrier to revisiting and rejecting the Roe denial of personhood before birth."

     John Finnis, "Abortion is unconstitutional," First things no. 312 (April 2021):  37-38 (29-38).