The Blog of the American Chesterton Society

Good Bye

2010-12-10T11:46:00.000-06:00

This is, indeed, and finally, our last post. But all is not lost. You may find us here, blogging, posting, and keeping you up to day about all things Chesterton, so come on over.

Why We Still Need Chesterton

2010-11-30T13:18:00.001-06:00

Complete article here.

Paradoxically, Christopher Hitchens must be due for canonisation as a secular saint. In the broadcast snatches of his Toronto debate against Tony Blair on whether religion is a force for good, Hitchens assumed a kind of divine grandeur.

I am no theological expert but this seems to overlook the religious virtue of humility. When G K Chesterton was asked by The Times to write on the theme, “What's wrong with the world?” he submitted the following: “Dear Sirs, I am. Sincerely yours, G K Chesterton.”

Why didn't Blair produce Handel's Messiah as his witness? Perhaps followed by the Liberian war- lord, General Butt Naked, interviewed at the weekend, who apparently turned from inhuman slaughterer to meek and repentant sinner after a blinding vision of Christ.

G K Chesterton advised the use of “fairytale” language properly to evoke the nature of the world. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. Hitchens and his fellow atheists talk of the superiority of reason over faith.

Chesterton countered that “reason itself is an act of faith”. Demonstrating this should be Blair's Bewitched project.

Chestertonian Homework Help

2010-11-18T15:41:00.000-06:00

I recently had an email from a young University student who thankfully is studying Chesterton. Since there aren't Spark or Cliff notes for Chesterton's work, students can feel at a loss for help with Chesterton assignments.

I'll post her question first:

We are to write about the moral discoveries that Father Brown made in “The Mistake of the Machine.” However, I am having a very difficult time since, as I stated above, I can not fully grasp what the writing means.

So here's my answer:

I guess I want to suggest reading it again, with some thoughts in mind. There are two very major themes in this story. One is that Man is NOT a machine, although Father Brown calls Man a machine several times, just to confuse you. But the contrast of Man and Machine is a theme. Can a machine tell one the truth? Can a MAN tell one the truth? Can a machine lie? Can a man lie? Can a machine read a man's heart (motives, for example)? Can a person act in a way contrary to his human nature?

The second theme is the assumption of who a person is based on appearance.

Both of these themes take place within the conversation between Father Brown and the Governor/Detective Greywood Usher, Greywood taking the "scientific" view point, Father Brown taking the more reasonable, faithful view point, the view point that allows for man to act as a man, and not as a machine (scientifically, in other words, science cannot explain a man's motives, his "heart") which was brought out in the beginning by talking about blood and circulation, etc. The word blood is repeatedly used, in both scientific terms and in terms of class "blue-blooded" etc. to emphasize the assumption that blood makes a man what he is, which science or even aristocrats may believe. But a rational person like Father Brown knows that blood is just blood, and tells one nothing about man's soul.

So, I hope I've pointed you in the right direction and given you some clues and hints to work from.

Chesterton is difficult. I totally understand that. When I had to read Chesterton in college, I really, truthfully, hated it, because I couldn't understand it. But hang in there, he does get better with time.

And the young student said it helped her write her paper. So there you go, we'll call them ChesterNotes.

Make a Small Donation, Get to Hear it First!

2010-10-30T14:11:00.003-05:00

Your donation will help us with the production costs, which include audio equipment, room rental, music and sound effects. In return, we have some gifts for you!

$10 will get you the free MP3 files two weeks before the public!
$40 will get you the above plus a free 3-Disc CD set when the project is complete!

In the absence of the money to make a feature film, “The Man Who Was Thursday” will come alive as a high quality, fully produced radio play. Actors breath life in the characters, sound effects and foley keep you in the scene, and a musical score ties it all together.

Ink and Fairydust Magazine

2010-10-29T09:12:00.001-05:00

A fairly new e-zine, created by talented young people interested in literature and Chesterton and a whole lot more, who provide Something Good To Read. Check out Ink and Fairydust Magazine now!

The Start of the Transition to Something New

2010-10-15T18:06:00.000-05:00

I'm pleased to announce that we are beginning the transition to a new American Chesterton Society web site, one that will combine the best of the old site with the best of the Gilbert Magazine site, with an interactive component like a blog. So it will be the best of three worlds combined into one.

You'll be able to get more content, interact with Gilbert columnists and readers, and much, much more.

As soon as the new site is ready, you'll be the first to know. And thanks for 5 great years of blogging here.

Coming to a Conclusion

2010-10-07T08:45:00.002-05:00

The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot come to conclusions it is rusty.
[GKC Heretics CW1:196]

Yes - we have come to a conclusion. This the last column I am writing for Nancy, since this blogg is being closed. There must be some mystical significance to this, since today is the feast of the Holy Rosary: the anniversary of Lepanto and the victory over our dark enemy; but then this blogg began on a Marian feast nearly five years ago, and it seems fitting that my role end on one.

God willing, I shall continue to write on my own blogg, "GKC's Favourite". I also contribute to The Duhem Society, which studies the work of Pierre Duhem and S. L. Jaki, great historians of science.

Apologia: Lest there be any doubt, I am not so much interested in Chesterton except for the way in which he proclaims the truth of Jesus Christ, and the cosmos made through Him. I hereby submit all my work to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church; if any of my writing is at odds with her teachings, I humbly ask for her correction.

And so... well... what really has to be said in such a conclusion? Only this: Let us take GKC's warnings about pride seriously, and let us keep things in their proper order: let us strive to be Christians who also read Chesterton, not Chestertonians who also read the gospels. Let us heed the warning given in GKC's own discussion of St. Francis, who did not want people to follow him, but to follow Christ. And good things may come from bloggs, as we Chestertonians happen to know, far better than others... (hee hee!)

A Chestertonian blogger once asked me: "You don't expect me to revolutionize society on my blogg?"
And I looked straight into his eyes and smiled sweetly. "No, I don't, but I suppose that if you were serious about your Chesterton that is exactly what you would do."
[cf. GKC TMWWT CW6:481]

Let us be serious about our Chesterton, and thereby turn society back - to our Lord.

May God bless you always, and your families!

Let us conclude with Chesterton's own last words:

"The issue is now quite clear. It is between light and darkness and every one must choose his side."

Conjugating your sonnets and integrating your relations

2010-09-30T09:26:00.008-05:00

Caution: HUMOR WARNING. This posting contains Funny Material. Laughing may result. Prolonged laughing has not been observed in lab rats so all those government-acronym places don't know what will happen and don't really care. (Recent studies indicate they have no sense of humor.) But you have been warned. Hee hee.

You get a bonus today: this posting contains a lesson in elementary heraldry. You see, I was thinking again about heraldry, since I am trying to work up a coat-of-arms for one of the organizations in my Saga... Actually I probably need at least two more. Neither are critical to the story, at least as far as I can tell at present, but one never knows. The others I have made are already in play: I built one merely from a certain artistic sense - it actually derives from Chesterton's last words about the battle between light and darkness (See Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 650). This is Joseph Chandler's arms, from my Saga:

Sable, a chevron Or; in chief an antique lamp fired proper, radiated of the second.

But as my writing progressed, this interesting design has proven to fit into the plot in a way which almost shocked me - one rarely expects such minor details as a fictional coat-of-arms for a fictional character to have any significance. Though, as we Chestertonians know, it ought to. We might try an epigram, sort of like this: "There is no such thing as a minor detail". And this is borne out in other authors, if one pays attention. I just finished re-reading Tolkien's The Hobbit, which I had to reference in my own work (it's a GREAT quote, really cool in the context, and connected with the above arms) and if you've been to Middle Earth you know that Tolkien's names are - ah - what verb - perhaps sculpted. He is very careful to provide an entire history and etymology for his roots. No wonder it took him so long to write. I have a similar difficulty, not because I am a philologist but because I am a computer scientist, and have to be sure to arrange every last BIT of things... hee hee. The challenge, whether one writes software or stories, is to be sure that one writes with an END in mind - that is, one must have a purpose, and every word ought to be justified - it should be chosen and placed, as a mosaic artist selects tesserae. Chesterton was aware of this. I would not attempt to argue about Chesterton's choice of words in general, and (since I am not a lit'ry scholar) I would prefer to avoid such criticism of his work. Rather, let's consider how GKC applies this consideration to another great English writer:

There was never a better criticism of Chaucer than that written within a hundred years of his death by old Caxton the printer; nor has this particular aptitude with words been expressed in words so apt. The medieval master printer's estimate is worth libraries of the patronizing pedantry, that has been written in the four hundred years that followed. 'For he writeth no void words; but all his matter is full of high and quick sentence'; that is, sense; sententia. The melodious but monotonous etiquette of much medieval poetry was a perpetual temptation to write void words; like the void words of modern journalese; except that the medieval words at least were graceful and the modern words base.
[GKC Chaucer CW18:319]

Now, any programmers who are reading this (especially those who are familiar with the language called "C") will have to laugh, since in "C" there is a keyword "void" which has a particular meaning and usefulness; hence excellent and efficient programs will often have "void words", hee hee. If you aren't laughing, don't worry, it's not that funny. But then don't expect me to laugh at your horrible 17-line sonnets. Hee hee. (I hope you noticed my title; that's one of the points I'm getting at.)

One of the interesting challenges in building a story, as in building a computer program, is the selection of names. I have used several different mechanisms, depending on my mood, or the particulars of the person (or data item) at hand... but this isn't a "meet the author" (or programmer) column, and I am NOT telling my very cool secrets here! But I bring up the issue since Chesterton talks about it in at least two places I can recall even without consulting the texts. The one is the exceedingly famous encomium in Heretics of the great and awesome name "SMITH" and if you EVER want to write fiction or anything where you will need names - including software, I must add - you ought to know this excerpt, and keep it near you as you work:

I remember a long time ago a sensible sub-editor coming up to me with a book in his hand, called "Mr. Smith," or "The Smith Family," or some such thing. He said, "Well, you won't get any of your damned mysticism out of this," or words to that effect. I am happy to say that I undeceived him; but the victory was too obvious and easy. In most cases the name is unpoetical, although the fact is poetical. In the case of Smith, the name is so poetical that it must be an arduous and heroic matter for the man to live up to it. The name of Smith is the name of the one trade that even kings respected, it could claim half the glory of that arma virumque which all epics acclaimed. The spirit of the smithy is so close to the spirit of song that it has mixed in a million poems, and every blacksmith is a harmonious blacksmith.
Even the village children feel that in some dim way the smith is poetic, as the grocer and the cobbler are not poetic, when they feast on the dancing sparks and deafening blows in the cavern of that creative violence. The brute repose of Nature, the passionate cunning of man, the strongest of earthly metals, the wierdest of earthly elements, the unconquerable iron subdued by its only conqueror, the wheel and the ploughshare, the sword and the steam-hammer, the arraying of armies and the whole legend of arms, all these things are written, briefly indeed, but quite legibly, on the visiting-card of Mr. Smith. Yet our novelists call their hero "Aylmer Valence," which means nothing, or "Vernon Raymond," which means nothing, when it is in their power to give him this sacred name of Smith - this name made of iron and flame. It would be very natural if a certain hauteur, a certain carriage of the head, a certain curl of the lip, distinguished every one whose name is Smith. Perhaps it does; I trust so. Whoever else are parvenus, the Smiths are not parvenus. From the darkest dawn of history this clan has gone forth to battle; its trophies are on every hand; its name is everywhere; it is older than the nations, and its sign is the Hammer of Thor.
[GKC Heretics CW1:54-5]

(By the way, if you don't know what arma virumque means, check back next Tuesday and you'll find out.) Gosh it's almost enough to make me want to change my name!

The second instance where GKC discusses the selection of names for fiction is quite funny, and comes up in a notable setting. His brother's wife Ada, was also a writer and (gasp!) undercover reporter. She got sued because she had used a name in one of her fictional stories - and there happened to be a real person with that name. You really need to read two essays, but I don't have room to quote them all. But... be forewarned! This one is REALLY funny. It has some of GKC's best creative stunts, where he approaches (asymtotically, perhaps) to the mathematical stuntmanship of that famous mathematician, Professor Dodgson.. but you don't care. I just want you to realize I laughed VERY loud when I first read this, and I expect you may also. So finish your food and drink before you read this next excerpt:

Legal decisions lately made bring this tomfoolery to the point of the intolerable. It is the judges' business to explain the law; and the law may be as the judges said: in those cases the law is what Mr. Bumble said it was. But it is not only an ass, but a wild ass; one capable of kicking down whole cities and civilisations. The cases to which I refer are those in which gentlemen obtained damages from newspapers because articles in them contained characters with their names. It was not alleged that the characters specially recalled or suggested the plaintiffs; it was not alleged that the characters were specially unpleasant. But it was laid down by the judges that damages for libel were due. Well, if that is the law, let us alter it. But, indeed, it is not properly a law, but one of the accidents of an anarchy.

I need not point out the insanely perilous position in which it places that already harassed and emaciated person, the author. He must take names for his tales; and if he takes natural or possible names, he must know that there are probably many real people who bear them. In fact, some of the most famous and isolated figures in fiction bear names that are common and general in reality. On this principle many a mild Welsh dissenting minister may consider himself saddled with the private life of Tom Jones. On this principle, every person bearing two other ordinary names may be found nervously consulting his own character in "Tom Brown at Oxford." For the matter of that Iago is a very common name in Spanish; and if we only pushed this legal logic a little further, the translation of such names might be included, and we might have a man forbidding the performance of "Othello" on the ground that his name was James. These cases seem to me no crazier than the actual cases as settled.

The question, of course, is simple enough: what is a novelist supposed to do? Is he to leave blanks for the names, or number them? Should he advertise first for all the claimants to a title and square them moderately beforehand? The only other way I can think of would be to give the characters names that no one of ordinary strength could possess, pronounce, or endure - say, "Quinchbootlepump" or "Pottlehartipips." One might cherish a hope that few prosecutors could establish a claim to these. How far they would enrich or weaken the style of the author it would, of course, be more difficult to say. One must think mainly of the average romantic novel; one must imagine some paragraph like this: "As Bunchoosa Blutterspangle lingered in the lovely garden a voice said 'Bunchi' behind her, in tones that recalled the old glad days at the Quoodlesnakes'. It was, it was indeed the deep, melodious voice of Splitcat Chintzibobs." It seems to me that this method would ruffle, as it were, the smooth surface of the softer and more simply pathetic passages.
[GKC ILN Feb 11 1911 CW29:36-7; the law case is discussed in ILN Dec 9 1911, CW 29:201]

Several times at Chesterton Conferences I have considered altering my name tag to read "Hello my name is Doctor Splitcat Chintzibobs" - except that Dale would probably expect me to change it to something else. I would, too - except those name tags are too small to fit "Hello my name is Doctor Plakkopytrixophylisperambulantiobatrix". Ah, well. So I don't. And besides, people would wonder if I had a twin brother. (I do, but I am the evil twin. Hee hee. Gosh I wish you could hear what "hee hee" actually sounds like when I do it; I had a whole course in grad school on how to do that sinister doctoral laugh. It's very effective.)

You can also find a very good commentary by GKC on Dodgson's use of fantasy words - no, I don't mean those like Tolkien's. I mean "brillig" and the Bandersnatch and the Jubjub bird and that sort of thing, as well as "uglification". You may think this is crazy - but then you weren't in the assembly language class (which I taught while I was doing my doctorate) when I read to them from Dodgson's text. People still think I am crazy, but what do they know. If you want to understand the first and most important technical aspect of flow-of-control in computer programming, you can find no better text than Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. (I was going to quote it, but I think this time I will let you do some research.)

I was going to talk some more about this, and relate it to my title, but I decided to do it another time. Instead I want to talk about heraldry a little more, since heraldry really is both art and science at once, and ought to be more widely known. I've seen some exceedingly HORRID web sites which would be greatly and easily improved if their designers knew that very first rule of heraldry. I've seen commercial trucks and advertising banners and even license plates which break the rule as well, so perhaps it will be worth our consideration. Besides, it's fun, and really very easy, and you can do it with kids if you have any around. Be sure to get some crayons and nice white paper if you don't have any. You can probably find kids at the store too, if you don't already have some at home. If not, you will have to act like a kid for a little while; it doesn't hurt. Even if you are at work, or perhaps at some unfortunate "institute of higher learning" you ought to keep a box of crayons and some clean paper with you. It is very helpful, and also people will wonder what that smell is (ah the good smell of a crayon!) and then they will want to work on heraldry too, and they will improve their web sites... who knows how much good may result!

All right, so let us begin. I won't give the usual introduction today - another day perhaps - but leap right to the chapter about colors.

In heraldry we use just SIX different pigments - generally. There are two or three others but they are rarely used, and there a few other oddities, one of which is extremely high-tech, but we're just starting out today, and we'll come back to those special things later. Since heraldry is an ancient art, we use some very interesting terms for the hues we already know, and we group them into two main classes. (This is not hard, it just takes getting used to; it's a technical language like any science or art.) Here are the six:

There are TWO "metals":

1. "Or" which is gold or yellow. Note: we always capitalize this word; it comes from the Latin aurum = gold. You can use a yellow crayon or paint when you make yours; if you have money and work out your own arms, perhaps someday you might buy gold leaf and use that... but see what GKC says about gold first, as you may be disappointed.)
2. "Argent" which is silver or white. Note: that's like the Latin for silver. When you make yours, you can just leave the paper blank, unless you are painting and have some of that fantastic Titanium White, or can buy some silver leaf.

Then there are four "colors":

1. "Gules" which is red. You can use any bright red, though perhaps sometimes you'll make it deeper. Remember, it is an ART; you must do it RIGHT.

2. "Vert" which is green. You can use any bright green - again paying attention to what it is that you are making.

3. "Azure" which is blue. The same, but this time any bright blue.
4. "Sable" which is black. This is black. You may think the term "bright black" is sheer lunacy - but the Romans didn't think so! Oh yes: Latin has two words for black: niger which is bright or "shining black", and ater which is dull or "dead black"; the dictionary also just translates it "dark". Very interesting, but let's get back to heraldry.

All right. There are the six heraldic pigments: the metals Or and argent, the colors gules vert, azure and sable. Now, you need to know the RULE. It is very simple:

Never place metal upon metal, or color upon color.

Do you understand? For example, don't use anything white against a yellow blackground, or red against green, or blue against black (and so forth).

Why? you ask.

Well... remember that business - I must have quoted it a hundred times - about reverting to the doctrinal principles of the 13th century in order to get things done? Heraldry was NOT just fun art. It was something of extreme importance... but I will give you that explanation in my introduction some other time. (Have you caught on? I'm breaking the flow of control rule, just to demonstrate how one conjugates a sonnet. Hee hee.)

The quick reason is this: the purpose of a coat-of-arms - or of any real piece of art - is to get a message across. For example:

If you write yellow letters on a white background, it will be hard to read.

Could you read that? That is (in heraldic terms) placing metal on metal, "Or upon argent". It's difficult to read. Here's what I wrote, but obeying the rule, and placing "sable upon argent" (color on metal):

If you write yellow letters on a white background, it will be hard to read.

It's true. It's not impossible - but it's not as clear. However, metal on color, or color on metal is quite easily seen and grasped. But let us see some example coats-of-arms - just simple ones which will demonstrate the rule. You can try drawing these for practice. All three are from Chesterton:

Argent, a cross gules.
The national flag of England is the Cross of St. George, and that, oddly enough, was splashed from one end of Dublin to the other; it was mostly displayed on shield-shaped banners, and may have been regarded by many as merely religious; but it was the authentic St. George's Cross; gules on a field argent, with the four arms of the cross meeting the edges of the flag.
[GKC Christendom in Dublin 9]

"Our bearings," continued Syme calmly, "are 'argent a chevron gules charged with three cross crosslets of the field'."
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:565]

The arms borne by the great Border family of Scrope, in popular language a blue shield with a gold band across it (I can say 'azure a bend or' quite as prettily as anybody else) was found to have been also adopted by a certain Sir Thomas Grosvenor, then presumably the newer name of the two.
[GKC Chaucer CW18:214]

Now that you have learned the first rule of heraldry, you are in a position to understand a curious little line in one of GKC's essays. I will just give it to you - see what you make of it:

The alphabet is one set of arbitrary symbols. The figures of heraldry are another set of arbitrary symbols. In the fourteenth century every gentleman knew one: in the twentieth century every gentleman knows the other. The first gentleman was just precisely as ignorant for not knowing that c-a-t spells "cat," as the second gentleman is for not knowing that a St. Andrew's Cross is called a cross saltire, or that vert on gules is bad heraldry.
[GKC ILN Dec 2 1905 CW27:70-71]

I would like to say more about that powerful bit about how the alphabet is a set of arbitrary symbols - recently I tried (with both hands I tried) to tell you a little of that mystery. But of course this is one of those odd little Traditions "liberals" require - just as "Free Speech" is one of those little Liberties "conservatives" demand. The challenge to us is to recall what Chesterton said in his book on Browning: "Free speech is a paradox". So, in many ways, is heraldry.

The Secret of the Sword

2010-09-29T08:32:00.002-05:00

"To St. Michael, In Time Of Peace"

Michael, Michael: Michael of the Morning,
Michael of the Army of the Lord.
Stiffen thou the hand upon the still sword, Michael,
Folded and shut upon the sheathed sword, Michael,
Under the fullness of the white robes falling,
Gird us with the secret of the sword.

When the world cracked because of a sneer in heaven,
Leaving out of all time a scar upon the sky,
Thou didst rise up against the Horror in the highest,
Dragging down the highest that looked down on the Most High:
Rending from the seventh heaven the hell of exaltation
Down the seven heavens till the dark seas burn:
Thou that in thunder threwest down the Dragon
Knowest in what silence the Serpent can return.

Down through the universe the vast night falling,
(Michael, Michael: Michael of the Morning!)
Far down the universe the deep calms calling,
(Michael, Michael: Michael of the Sword!)
Bid us not forget in the baths of all forgetfulness,
In the sigh long drawn from the frenzy and the fretfulness,
In the huge holy sempiternal silence,
In the beginning was the Word.

When from the deeps a dying God astounded
Angels and devils who do all but die,
Seeing Him fallen where thou couldst not follow,
Seeing Him mounted where thou couldst not fly,
Hand on the hilt, thou hast halted all thy legions,
Waiting the Tetelestai and the acclaim,
Swords that salute Him dead and everlasting
God beyond God and greater than His Name.

Round us and over us the cold thoughts creeping,
(Michael, Michael: Michael of the battle-cry!)
Round us and under us the thronged worlds sleeping,
(Michael, Michael: Michael of the Charge!)
Guard us the Word; the trysting and the trusting
Edge upon honour and the blade unrusting.
Fine as the hair and tauter than the harpstring,
Ready as when it rang upon the target

He that giveth peace unto us; not as the world giveth:
He that giveth law unto us; not as the scribes:
Shall He be softened for the softening of the cities
Patient in usury; delicate in bribes?
They that come to quiet us, saying the sword is broken,
Break men with famine, fetter them with gold,
Sell them as sheep; and He shall know the selling,
For He was more than murdered. He was sold.

Michael, Michael: Michael of the Mastering,
Michael of the marching on the mountains of the Lord,
Marshal the world and purge of rot and riot,
Rule through the world till all the world be quiet:
Only establish when the World is broken,
What is unbroken is the Word.

[GKC CW10:174 et seq]

Please don't forget: today begins our annual Rosary novena, inspired by our memory of Mary's gift of victory to the naval forces of the West at Lepanto. There is so much evil in our world, and our foe is deadly - but we have a far more powerful ally. Let us unite in prayer, contemplating the mysteries of our Lord's life, death, and resurrection, and together ask for aid in our battle.

PS: if you need something to aid in your appreciation of this truth, please read Janney's The Miracle of the Bells.

Tuesday's Bit of Latin: Franciscan Humour

2010-09-28T12:05:00.003-05:00

Since next Monday is the feast of St. Francis, I thought I would post this in advance so you can tell your Franciscan (and Benedictine) friends about it.
--Dr. Thursday.

There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace of Benedictus benedicat, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan triumphantly retorted Franciscus Franciscat. It is something of a parable of mediaeval history; for if there were a verb Franciscare it would be an approximate description of what St. Francis afterwards did. But that more individual mysticism was only approaching its birth, and Benedictus benedicat is very precisely the motto of the earliest mediaevalism. I mean that everything is blessed from beyond, by something which has in its turn been blessed from beyond again; only the blessed bless.
[GKC A Short History of England]

In case you don't get it, the Latin Benedictus benedicat means "May Benedict bless..." As GKC points out in his introduction, there isn't any Latin verb Franciscare or rather Franciscere - but that really is the whole point of the joke. You know, it's when the door isn't a door that it's a jar. Or about getting down from the duck. It's how you get UP on the duck in the first place which is the mystery.... hee hee. Perhaps when you are a Franciscan, you know how.

4294967295, or, the Last Number

2010-09-23T09:44:00.002-05:00

Today is the Equinox, the beginning of Autumn. As I am sure you know by now (as Chesterton points out) since the God of Christianity is the real God of the universe, Christianity has something say about everything from pork to pyrotechnics, from pigs to the binomial theorem - so too, Christianity has something to say about Autumn. I apologise for the pun, but I cannot resist...

Christianity spoke again and said: "I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is - the Fall."
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:321]

Yes, the Fall. (Which means that business with the snake and the fruit in the Garden happened in late summer, hee hee.) With the arrival of the autumnal equinox, Autumn (or the Fall, if you call it what it is) comes to our Northern Hemisphere, and our thoughts are naturally urged to contemplate the mystery of time.

Now, everyone will expect some sort of stiff physics or perhaps speculative cosmology - but that is not suitable for our column, even though GKC certainly mentioned Einstein nearly a hundred times in his various writings. I especially like the bit about how people ought to be fined if they mention his name without knowing what they are talking about. (That's in ILN May 23 1931 CW35:526) But we are not going into that sort of thing here - at least not today. If you're moving near the speed of light, however, perhaps we'll go into it yesterday, hee hee.

No; actually I was thinking more about numbers - which sometimes happens for me, since I play with numbers a lot - but also because of my recent writing about the chirality of letters. Now, the common Man (as GKC loved to say) does not normally think there is any difference between a NUMBER and a DIGIT. In fact, the use of that word "difference" is a hilarious pun, and gets into one of those things that - uh. As usual, Chesterton has gone into this, and he says it far better than I can:

They differed from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were. A picture may look like a landscape; it may look in every detail exactly like a landscape. The only detail in which it differs is that it is not a landscape. The difference is only that which divides a portrait of Queen Elizabeth from Queen Elizabeth.
[GKC TEM CW2:245]

"They differ from the reality not in what they looked like but in what they were." There is a huge difference between a number and a representation of that number - and there is no pun at all in that context, since the "difference" isn't the mathematical kind of subtraction. One does not subtract paintings from English sovereigns; it is that old line about mixing apples with oranges... the possibility of fruit salads notwithstanding. Indeed, it is this grand conundrum which has misled several otherwise wise writers into distortions which ought not be dignified by the term "paradox", even though that is the word which is usually applied. But I am wandering and you are lost too. (Whew!) Let us return to numbers, or rather words about numbers, and about digits.

You see, I was thinking about time, and starts and ends - about measuring (as God states was His design in fashioning the various lamps in the sky, Gen 1:14) and about giving order to things. As soon as we examine this truth, we find a paradox, and we don't have to be a Chesterton to appreciate it. The paradox is that the sun and the moon do just one thing: the sun appears to travel, from east to west, over and over again. The moon does the same, while it slowly gets bigger and then smaller, and moves slowly from west to east against the background of the stars. (Yes there are some other wobbles but we'll let those details aside for today.) The sun and moon appear to make the same motions - but they make them in seeming endlessness. We have that grand insight into science given by GKC in his "Ethics of Elfland" chapter of Orthodoxy about how God says "Do it again!" to these heavenly bodies - and even if you have already read that chapter I urge you to Do It Again.

Ah, the intoxicating grandness of astronomy, where everyone on earth "has access at all times to the original objects of his study ... the masterworks of the heavens belong to him as much as to the great observatories of the world." [Robert Burnham Jr., Burnham's Celestial Handbook 5] Did you know that of the seven so-called "Liberal" Arts, there are four (or five) which are properly in the technical or scientific realm, and not in the non-science side? Oh yes. All four of the Quadrivium are about numbers in one sense or another: this is nothing new, but has been understood in this sense as far back as the twelfth century - for example, see the Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor:

Now, multitude which stands in itself is the concern of arithmetic, while that which stands in relation to another multitude is the concern of music. Geometry holds forth knowledge of immobile magnitude, while astronomy claims knowledge of the mobile.
[The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor translated and annotated by Jerome Taylor; Book 2 chapter 6]

Or, to put it as computer scientists do, in the form of a tree (which is sometimes called an "outline"):

a. The discrete
1) the absolute = Arithmetic
2) the relative = Music
b. The continued
1) the stable = Geometry
2) the moving = Astronomy

[Above from The World of Mathematics 85]

We know a bit more about mathematics now, and might adjust this tree and add to it significantly, but it is a good start, and does indeed suggest that there is a lot more to the intellectual life than a stream of dull plot-schemes, or the dates kings died on, or philosophical dreams (or nightmares) aimed at dethroning God... hee hee! The fact that the typical philosopher is not set on understanding Reality but on dethroning God is stated in Chesterton's grand epigram about modern thought: "With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it." [GKC Orthodoxy CW1:237] However! I have digressed, since it is quite tiresome to continue to read the whine of the liberal arts crowd here on the INTERNET. I wonder where they think computers come from! Plants, maybe. Ahem. The point here is not to make a digression on liberal arts - or even on liberal sciences - but to suggest an important truth about numbers - and about time.

In order to help reveal more of this, I have to go back to something I mentioned previously, and about which I recounted an interesting story almost a year ago: the fact that computers cannot add. Perhaps I here need to stress an even more surprising truth, and one which will distress the public educrats who read this blogg: the fact that computers do not use numbers. Yes, computer do not deal with numbers at all. What they deal with is something else - and the closest I can come to describing it without formalisms is to say, like I did previously, that they deal with things which have properties like railroad cars, that can be manipulated. (The Latin here is rather exaggerated; we do not use our hands (Latin manus) to manipulate railroad cars unless they are toy railroad cars!) But yes, those things which we call BYTES are arranged, and linked together and "manipulated" - they are physical in a way that no number is physical.

Remember how (long ago) we learned about counting? We had three sheep or three cherries or three toy engines... we found out the mystery that this "three" thing was like "red" or "soft": it did not depend on the things, but on the three-ness of those things. There has been much written about this mystery of number - but it is not a mystery. It is caused by some refusing to learn the first Learning, which is why the Greeks called it "Mathematics" = "That Which is Learned". Again, Chesterton says it far better than I can:

It is as easy to be logical about things that do not exist as about things that do exist. If twice three is six, it is certain that three men with two legs each will have six legs between them. And if twice three is six, it is equally certain that three men with two heads each will have six heads between them. That there never were three men with two heads each does not invalidate the logic in the least. It makes the deduction impossible, but it does not make it illogical. Twice three is still six, whether you reckon it in pigs or in flaming dragons, whether you reckon it in cottages or in castles-in-the-air.
[GKC ILN Nov 11 1905 CW27:59]

However, we are not concerned today with these things that do not exist, with flaming dragons or with castles-in-the-air, but with something far more mysterious: the LAST NUMBER.

Yes. (Oh boy, exciting!) Now, you will laugh about this, since you probably think it is a joke. It's not a joke. You may have followed Milo through The Phantom Tollbooth and asked the Mathemagician about the Biggest number, or the Longest number - and he has sent you up the infinite staircase, or out along the infinite line - both of which take you to the same place. But that is another sort of thing. (People worry about infinity, and get confused; they must have been absent that day, or haven't gotten that far in their coursework. Oh well; another time for that.) But I do not mean THAT sort of Last Number.

If you have owned a car long enough - or have bought a used one which someone else has owned long enough - you will know what I am talking about. There comes a point when the odometer "goes back to all zeros" - suddenly you have a New Car again. (hee hee) It sounds very Christian, let's see: "unless your car turn and be built again, it shall by no means..." Ahem. But we know that the car is not new. It is still the same old car. But the odometer says something astoundingly small!

Yes. But there is a better example, and one which we are even more familiar with, and will tell my point far better. It is called the Clock.

Now we all know how to add - or we think we do until we go to balance our checkbooks, though that usually means subtraction - and usually we are pretty good at adding. And I am sure that if I gave you a number, you feel fairly certain that you would be able to add two to that number and give me the correct answer. Let's try a little quiz:

I ask and... you answer:

Five plus two is... Seven.
Seven plus two is... Nine.
Nine plus two is... Eleven.
Eleven plus two is... Thirteen.

Good. Now, let's just try it with some other words put alongside, shall we? And we'll see what happens.

It's eleven o'clock in the morning now - let's meet in two hours - will you be free?

And you respond: At one this afternoon? Yes, I'm free.

Ah ha! But you just added two to eleven and got one!

Is that oops or sure? Well, well. What is going on?

It's the same as the car odometer - and the same as the computer. The clock provides us with just one "wheel" and when it runs out, we start over. We do as Chesterton says God tells the sun: "Do It Again." The repetition after noon is our homage, not (oddly enough) to the non-Copernican terms of Sunrise and Sunset, which is the way the Romans named the hours, but to the far more mysterious zenith and nadir of the globe, to midnight and noon.

In the computer, there is something rather like an odometer - there is a fixed number of places, sort of like those little dials of digits, and when they fill up, it starts over again at zero. However, because the computer's "numbers" (which are NOT numbers) represent values using a base-two scheme, the Last Number of a computer isn't all nines. That was the Great Media Fear some ten years ago, remember? They called it Eetook, or Y2K - the comet which was supposed to hit on New Year's of 2000 (or maybe 2001 depending on when you believe the millennium began, hee hee) No; in a thirty-two bit computer, which is what most personal and business machines are these days, the Last Number looks like this in our common tongue:

4,294,967,295

or if you prefer it in words:

four billion, two hundred ninety-four million, nine hundred sixty-seven thousand, two hundred ninety-five.

It's the last number, because after it comes zero again. (Remember, as I said, the things in the computer are NOT numbers, but that is another topic for another day. Huh? Are you looking at a computer? Do you see numbers here? I didn't think so. Hee hee!)

It's not all that hard. Look at the clock. After 12 comes 1. Yeah, our "12" on the clock ought to be "zero" - and on computers, midnight is called "00:00". If your clock or watch is digital, you may (as I do) have it set to use the 24-hour clock, sometimes called military time, in which case the Last Number looks like "23:59" or "23:59:59".

I had to hunt a good bit to find whether GKC ever played with this puzzle, and I am not sure he didn't. But he has a lovely joke about time:

Mr. Birrell ... remarked that all the children appeared to be consumed with a desire to ask him the time. He appeared mystified as to why they asked him the time. I am unable to answer with accuracy (although I have studied the phenomenon many hundred times) beyond being quite certain that it was not because they wanted to know. A careful examination of the conduct of Battersea Park children shows quite clearly that the mention of no hour of the day (however sensational) makes any difference at all to their dignified and dilatory behaviour. Children live in an almost entirely timeless world (in which they resemble the Deity of Thomas Aquinas), and most of us who can remember our childhood can remember a certain sense of spaciousness in the hours, a sense that might be called a kind of happy emptiness. ... And I think very few children (certainly not the countless hordes that lie in wait for Mr. Birrell and me in Battersea Park) take any particular interest at all in the time of day. If you followed the disgraceful example of Policeman Peter Forth, and answered them "A quarter past thirteen," I think the information would be received with a refined indifference.
[GKC ILN May 5 1906 CW:178-9]

Perhaps all my lengthy discussion of the Last Number will also be received with a "refined indifference" - but it has some relevance. There is a last number assigned to each of us also... As a true priest and teacher, Father Jaki often reminded people of the Four Last Things: death, judgement, heaven and hell. In thinking of the waning of the year, we may do well to ponder the coming Harvest - our Lord actually mentioned such a thing - and consider how our odometer is counting off the seconds and minutes and hours. How are we using our time and our lives? Is it fruitful? But it is also important to remember that while the northern hemisphere begins autumn, the southern hemisphere begins spring. This is NOT a matter of dualism. This is not a suggestion that we believe, as the pagans, in the Cycle or "Great Year" - this topic is examined in all its bitter barrenness in Jaki's Science and Creation. We are Christian: we believe in the Strict Linearity of Time. This absolute linearity of Christian history is also found in Chesterton's The Everlasting Man: "It declares that really and even recently, or right in the middle of historic times, there did walk into the world this original invisible being; about whom the thinkers make theories and the mythologists hand down myths; the Man Who Made the World. [CW2:398-9, emphasis added] You cannot have a middle of a circle... or to put it another way, no circle can have its center on its edge.

There is A LAST NUMBER to the Cosmos, and it WILL end. (The mystery of "end" is also something we shall consider another day, since it also makes people itch, like "infinity".) But the fact that we humans CAN add (unlike machines) suggests something infinite at work. In fact, we do have something infinite, and it is the very fact (among others) that we CAN imagine adding correctly, regardless of how huge a number, that we are distinguished from machines. And if you think about this a little more, you will begin to see into both "infinity" and "end"... but let it go for today.

A good friend of mine, a brilliant engineer, once put it into a satirical "poem" (I think that is what he called it). I don't have his precise phrase to quote but it was something like "intelligent rivers perform addition." That is the whole point. A computer cannot add, or rather it adds only in the way in which a river adds its water to the ocean.

But there is a greater point to be made, and I bring in the term "poem" intentionally, so that I can conclude with a Chesterton quote:

In one of his poems, he says that abyss between the known and the unknown is bridged by "Pontifical death." There are about ten historical and theological puns in that one word. That a priest means a pontiff, that a pontiff means a bridge-maker, that death is certainly a bridge, that death may turn out after all to be a reconciling priest, that at least priests and bridges both attest to the fact that one thing can get separated from another thing - these ideas, and twenty more, are all actually concentrated in the word "pontifical." In Francis Thompson's poetry, as in the poetry of the universe, you can work infinitely out and out, but yet infinitely in and in. These two infinities are the mark of greatness; and he was a great poet.
[GKC ILN Dec 14 1907 CW27:603-4]

Tuesday's bit of Latin: omniBUS

2010-09-21T08:36:00.004-05:00

Not that I have loads of spare time, but since things seem to be a little too quiet these days on the INTERNET I thought I ought to start something. Ahem. I mean start another posting series. Also, since the word has actually made it down to even our diocesan paper that the CORRECTED form of the words for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is scheduled to begin use in Advent of 2011 - you know, sort of like a software upgrade: (Hee hee: "The Vatican today announced the release of "Mass 2.1" Ahem!) Even though this version is English and not Latin, I thought we ought to consider a little about Chesterton and Latin.

To start with, let's see one of my favourite bits of Latin in GKC - one of those lovely places where an ending for the ablative plural has become a common word in English. Oh yes, very funny, but true.... But read it for yourself:

The word "omnibus" is a very noble word with a very noble meaning and even tradition. It is derived from an ancient and adamantine tongue which has rolled it with very authoritative thunders: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus. It is a word really more human and universal than republic or democracy. A man might very consistently build a temple for all the tribes of men, a temple of the largest pattern and the loveliest design, and then call it an omnibus. It is true that the dignity of this description has really been somewhat diminished by the illogical habit of clipping the word down to the last and least important part of it. But that is only one of many modern examples in which real vulgarity is not in democracy,
but rather in the loss of democracy. It is about as democratic to call an omnibus a 'bus as it would be to call a democrat a rat.
[GKC ILN Jan 13 1917 CW31:22-3]

GKC is quoting what is known as the "Vincentian Canon" (or rule) phrased by St. Vincent of Lérins (+ ca 440) "That must be regarded as true which is believed EVERYWHERE (ubique), ALWAYS (semper), BY ALL (omnibus)". [See e.g. Attwater, A Catholic Dictionary]

One curious note relating to this is something I picked up in my explorations of molecular biology - there is an important enzyme called "ubiquitin" which might be roughly nicknamed "the everywhere stuff"... There are some other "ubi" compounds too, but you can hunt for them yourselves.

Perhaps someday, someone somewhere will take up the question of whether the tech term "SCSI-bus" is a dative or ablative plural, and then discuss the root of this very odd noun and give the rest of its paradigm. (Hee hee.)

Palin again: rRNA beyond the pale, or the suppressed pun?

2010-09-16T11:29:00.002-05:00

In this, my final posting of the summer, I will get political. Hee hee. Yes, in a rare foray into the maelstrom of the popular news, I reach in for a piece of verbal excitement, much as our Uncle Gilbert did - and behold I am rescued by a name and a word from the newspaper!

Yes, I was pondering what I would write about for some time, in fact. There's lots of computing to talk about, and lots of science, and lots and lots of Chesterton to apply - he is, after all, a great bridge-builder, if not quite as the ancient Romans used the word pontifex, or the ancient Hebrews spoke of the order of Melchizedek... and I am not the engineer he was, but I try. I thought about starting a series of "Chesterton-related" books - but could hardly get past The Phantom Tollbooth and The Miracle of the Bells and The Haunted Bookshop... Or, if I had more guts-and-gumption, something on the INTERNET or even on the hilarious 14th century "Tweetbook" phrase gaudent moderni brevitate. The character limit is so silly, it feels Aztec (or is it Mayan) with their 260-day horoscope calendar - but I am far too busy to write such studies just now. Thinking of the INTERNET and the nearly complete collection of GKC's writings now available "for free" (as people say) made me apply a standard method of inversion, one of those rare "problem-solving" techniques which escape the moderns who delight in brevity like those who are employed in education: that is, I could consider some questions which the usual "search tools" cannot solve, even if there really was such a collection available - like, what Latin did GKC use. I explored that some time ago, and had a list somewhere... and something made me wonder what... Ah but I must not anticipate my pun. I wondered about GKC's use of a certain form of word, and was about to ask that question of AMBER (since I am the one who does the work, not my computer) But it seemed too dull as a topic - a verbal firework, indeed, but a fizzle. I had almost decided on starting a little "education" series on heraldry, since I have those five coats-of-arms from my Saga hanging on my laser printer for inspiration, and I had recalled from memory my little cheat-sheet I handed out at the seminar I gave some years ago at the Chesterton Conference. It would be fun, talking about the colors, such curious words: Or, argent, gules, azure, vert, sable - and the Law, and the Ordinaries, the fess, the pale...

(For example, this arms is blazoned: Vert, a pale Or.)

Then I stopped. Pale. Verbal fireworks. Oh my. GKC's use of... Well, what is a "pale"? In heraldry, this is a vertical band or stripe. It comes from the Latin palus = a stake, related to pango = I drive in, fasten. It comes up in the odd, almost antique sounding phrase "beyond the pale" which really means nothing more than "outside the fence". Chesterton uses "paling" (fence) over 30 times; we heard it used recently in his The Ball and the Cross where a staurophobe saw the cross repeated. And then, I noted the prefix in this word "paling" was the same five letters (though not of the same derivation) as the prefix in another famous word - the word which had been on my mind as one worth researching in AMBER: the word palindrome.

We know that drome comes from the Greek "run" - a hippodrome is a place for horse-races. But what is this prefix PALIN?

Ah, you say, and laugh, with smug running down your face. Doc, Doc! This is some political column! BORING.

No it is not. I know who Sarah Palin is, and have my own opinions; they are irrelevant for my purpose today. You will find neither encomium nor obloquy here. (If you don't understand me, you had better go buy a dictionary. You'll need it when you go to read Chesterton; he uses them too.)

But let us consider words. The Greek palin means "again" or "once more". It comes up in several very curious English words:
palimpsest = "scraped again"
palingenesis = "born again"
palindrome = "run again"
palinode = "sung again"
But since you have your dictionary out already you can consider the others as you wish. (To my knowledge GKC only uses one, and that only once; guess which.) For now let's just look at "palindrome" - or rather at palindromes.

You know them. Words like "noon" and "radar". Sentences like "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama." That one is perhaps the best known and most famous. They come up in other languages, too: one need not study very much Latin before one trips over that famous irregular verb esse - or illi or ibi or non or ecce. In a book called Mother Tongue [page 227] I found mention of two from the classical tongues:

Nispon anomimata mi monan opsin

Which the Greeks wrote on fountains: "Wash the sin as well as the face". And the Romans had this witty saying:

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

If Bilbo and Gollum had been trading Latin riddles, the challenge "We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire" would be answered by "moths" (or tinea).

Now, of what earthly good are palindromes? Or are they just a silliness, a toy of the tongue, or prehaps more correctly, of the printed word?

Well... besides being a kind of rarity, and hence interesting, they happen to arise in a very curious place, where they have what I would suggest is a rather startling purpose. When I was doing my doctorate, I got to become familiar with something called prokaryotic rRNA - the ribosomal RNA of bacteria, which was being studied by some of the biologists at that School-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named. Among other things, I learned a little about the "shape" of rRNA. Remember what I said in previous columns, how letters have two "hands" - a left hand and a right hand - by which they chain together to form a word. In the same way the nucleotide "bases" of rRNA have two hands, a 5-prime hand and a 3-prime hand, by which they chain together to form the molecule of rRNA. These are around 1500 bases long, and have various amazing details which would take far too long to describe... maybe some other time. But one of the additional things about these "bases" are that they have a characteristic like letters - in fact, we use letters to name them: A, C, G, U. These letters, however, are unlike the written letters of language in that they have an additional property. We cannot pile a letter on top of another (Note, in Scrabble, we merely agree to let "up" mean left and "down" mean right.) These "bases" are able to BIND or link in a kind of vertical sense - yes, even while they stay in their places within the word! But they must obey a certain rule. The base called "A" may link with the base called "U". The base called "C" may link with the base called "G". And it is permitted that the base A "sit next to" a "G" base.... Anyway, this binding is called the "Watson-Crick" pairing, and one may even form palindromes according to this pairing, such as ...AAAGGGU.....ACCCUUU...

Doc you are crazy. Why bother with all this?

Yeah, well, that's what some biologists seemed to think too. They fuss about evolution and linked mutations and stuff like that. But you see there's something else going on. As Chesterton liked to say, it's too big to be seen. [See "The Three Tools of Death" in The Innocence of Father Brown] And perhaps you won't see it. It's not easy to guess unless you've been reading along with us.

Normally, there are lots and lots of things we SEE but we do not OBSERVE. There are many of these, in our spoken language, and even more in our printed language. I have said several times how ancient Latin and Greek did not use something so simple and common - something we use constantly, something which if I left it out you would GO INSANE, even if you weren't reading my writing. Take a look:

It's the very simple character called the SPACE - ASCII 20 hex, if you want the technical term. They strung their letters and words together without spaces - ah, how much more advanced we are. (And now, since "the moderns rejoice in brevity" perhaps our twitbooks will ban that character, hee hee.) But without trying to get technical, the space plays an important part, even if it is no more than making something readable.

So too, perhaps, the Watson-Crick palindrome plays a part. It may be suggested that these things play a role akin to the spaces - or, perhaps to make the argument a bit stronger, akin to the indentations in poetry. Now, I happen to know (since I read Chesterton) that not all indentation implies a rhyme scheme - for example I propose his poem that doesn't rhyme. You may wonder if I have completely lost my marbles, maybe got infected by those prokaryotes in the lab? Chesterton wrote a poem that doesn't rhyme?

Oh yes... It's one of my favorites, too. I wonder if it's been reprinted. Ah well, I'll leave that to you for homework. Hee hee.

But, as odd as it sounds, due to this matter of what the biologists call "linked mutations" - that is, when one base on one side of the palindrome changes, it is almost guaranteed that the corresponding one on the other side will also change, and to the exactly proper matching base. It appears that these palindromes form "helices" which hold the rRNA molecule in its proper shape... so in some sense, it is irrelevant what the bases "spell" as long as there are just enough to keep the two parts aligned and stuck together - and the rest of the thing at its proper shape. In the same way, we don't mind TOO much if there is a little MORE spacing between words, or a little less - this is the trick typographers use to make that elegant right-justified margin which is the trademark of tradition, and so repelling in this age of the "all-powerful" modern computer. Ahem. Yeah, that was being sarcastic: remember they cannot even add correctly! Oh my.

I have just one more little item to add - maybe I should say one word. Hee hee. Perhaps it was lurking in my mind, as it was over a week ago when I saw the article, and I laughed, since no one wanted to mention Dodgson in the context. Maybe it was too striking - or maybe I just happen to read the right books - like Chesterton, who (thank God) read Dodgson, even if he was a math professor. (How many of you lit'ry folk read books by math professors? Or even blogg-postings by computer scientists? Oh, very good. Welcome to our family, sit down and make yourself comfortable, but be sure to fasten your safety harness it gets bumpy.)

What word? you ask.

Apparently there was some discussion centering on something which the newspaper spelled "REFUDIATE" - which it seems was used by someone named Palin. Palin again? Yes, indeed.

And this word - which is not really a word at all, but a sort of verbal glitch - made people laugh. I don't know if it was a slip of the tongue or a typographical error, and it hardly matters. One of Chesterton's most profound scientific statements is based on a typographical error which I expect he encountered many times:

...the printer's tendency to turn the word "cosmic" into the word "comic." It annoyed me at the time. But since then I have come to the conclusion that the printers were right. The democracy is always right. Whatever is cosmic is comic.
[GKC ILN June 9 1906 CW27:206]

It's too bad more astronomers and physicists have not encoutnered this typograpical error - maybe like me they do their own typesetting and proofreading, hee hee. Now this laughter is a good thing, as we know, even if, as GKC speculates in the last sentence of Orthodoxy, that Christ hid His own laughter from us. I could spend a whole column on this - and no doubt will, though I prefer to handle it in my fiction, as you may already know. Ahem.

In that important reference work called The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo defeated the demon called the "Senses Taker" with laughter. Harry Potter tells Frank and George to work on their joke-shop, since: "I could do with a few laughs. We could all deal with a few laughs. I've got a feeling we're going to need them more than usual before long." [JKR Goblet of Fire HP 4:733; see note below] In other words, laughter may be important in the impending battle. And of course we can all recite Chesterton's most famous quote about angels being able to take themselves lightly - which is about the importance of laughter. (No wonder he would think it correct to say "I'm what's wrong with the world"!)

But more than being simply a joke, this word "refudiate" happens to be an example of an important method of word-formation: a method which was practiced by one of the Great Authors of Literature, the mathematician named C. L. Dodgson. Perhaps you do not know Dodgson, or only know him under his logon screen ID or whatever the twitbook thing is called, hee hee. But since Chesterton happened to write about it, I will give you the references. It's grand:

In my pure and ardent youth I had a proposal that the names of husband and wife should be not hyphened but telescoped. They could be made into portmanteau words, as Lewis Carroll made "Slithy" out of "Writhing" and "Slimy." In that case my imaginary married couple would not be called Ponderbury-Ballymulligan; they would be called simply Ponderbulligan or Banderpulgury. This would be more convenient for telegrams, if not for shipwrecks. One can see how swiftly and smoothly it would fit itself to most marriages of society.
[GKC ILN Apr 29 1911 CW29:78]

Now, Lewis Carroll was a very Victorian Victorian. But he did identically the same thing; only he happened to know that it was funny, and therefore he did it for fun. He invented what he called "portmanteau words," with the sense of two words telescoped into one. Thus he explained that "brillig" is a combination of "brilliant" and "grilling"; or that "slithy" is a portmanteau of "lithe" and "slimy." This particular instance happens to illustrate what I mean when I say that I am not a mere partisan. The author of "Alice in Wonderland" is not an ideal being whom I revere, or hold up to be revered. In some respects he was much too Victorian a Victorian. On some matters he really was much too solemn. But he was not solemn about portmanteau words...
[GKC ILN Sept 12 1931 CW35:589-90]

I am almost certain that many moderns suffer from what may be called the disease of the suppressed pun. I mean that, in men who ould disdain to make anything so vulgar as a joke out of a verbal coincidence, there is a subconscious movement of the mind to meet the sound of the word. Thus those who would denounce creeds (a Latin word for anything that anybody believes) are seldom or never, you will notice, moved to describe them by any milder name; they must have a word that sounds like a portmanteau of "crank" and "crabbed" and "greed." They cannot really let themselves go in reviling doctrine. It must be in reviling dogma. They would never sink so low as to make a positive pun about it...
[GKC The Well and the Shallows CW3:347]

Ah, wonderful! Let us all strive to refudiate the grave and the glum by taking ourselves lightly. For homework, try to make up your own portmanteau word. Get it into the media somehow - at least post a comment with its derivation, meaning, and use in a sentence. Special bonus points to anyone who contrives one in Latin or Greek.

P.S. If you dislike my quoting Harry Potter, recall that Aquinas quotes pagans - even St. Paul quotes pagans, Benedict XVI quotes Nietzche, and Chesterton quotes Shaw. We need to continually recall the friendship of GBS and GKC, always recalling that Chesterton could write about his foes in this way:

I am not concerned with Mr. Rudyard Kipling as a vivid artist or a vigorous personality; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose view of things has the hardihood to differ from mine. I am not concerned with Mr. Bernard Shaw as one of the most brilliant and one of the most honest men alive; I am concerned with him as a Heretic - that is to say, a man whose philosophy is quite solid, quite coherent, and quite wrong.
[GKC Heretics CW1:46]

I may be quite wrong too - but I hope to be honest, and I trust we shall remain friends. We need only look to Uncle Gilbert as a reminder.

Violence on the Planes

2010-09-11T08:35:00.002-05:00

Yeah, I almost choked at Holy Mass today when I heard that in the readings - and something about the destruction of the buildings in the north. The gospel (about the cure of the centurion's servant) was most reassuring, however - just as He did at Cana, our Lord can perform miracles-at-a-distance, and we surely need His power to heal and to restore us. We must recall that profound insight of Newman: "[Jesus] has, if I may so speak, the incomprehensible power of even making Himself weak" - an idea sketched for us in GKC's gorgeous Christmas card: "...the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle." [GKC TEM CW2:301] This is something neither His enemies nor ours can tolerate - and something which is their defeat: "The cross cannot be defeated - for it is Defeat." [GKC The Ball and the Cross]

This day, a day when we failed to be vigilant, recalls John Philpot Curran's famous epigram on vigilance:

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

and GKC's comment upon it:

...which is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin...
[GKC The Thing CW3:312]

The term "vigilance" reminds me of WATCHER, the monitoring tool which watched all our other machines and programs. It reminds me of how nearly every one of the 48 television monitors, each showing a different cable TV channel, were all showing the same thing. I also think of how I quoted Chesterton as we watched the big screens in our Control Room - the screens which showed not WATCHER, but something more terrifying, but NOT surprising - and how, soon after, I changed WATCHER to display the American flag:

And if you'd like more detail, click here for an account of how it happened. It's phrased in a fictional style, but it's a good approximation. And yes, I really did quote GKC...

Art and Technology, or, the Magic of Chiral Letters and Trains

2010-09-09T10:33:00.002-05:00

One of the odd lines I overheard at the Chesterton Conference was something regarding a tension or division between "art" and "technology". I laughed, since it is so a-Chestertonian. Note: I did not say anti-Chestertonian. It is not so much against GKC as much as "lacking" or "avoiding"; perhaps I should say without GKC. Do I mean this as some sort of unkind retaliation against whoever said it? Of course not. We don't go into such personal things here. Besides, it would not be quite right, as I don't have any actual statement about the matter to examine. Besides, I might as well go into a debate with Father Jaki about what he called the "Impassable Divide", which was his way of trying to examine the variety of fields of study. (He was too much of a student of Cardinal Newman to jump to the wrong conclusion about this, but more on that another time.) Rather, I just take the chance adjacency of these words - "art" and "technology"... No. I really need to say "chance conflict" there, though I will grab onto that "adjacency" for examination in just a little.

But first I want to show you how Chesterton dealt with this sort of conflict. It's quite elegant, especially since his words provide a precise paradigm for us in this case. It comes up in a remarkably relevant way, where he is (as Father Jaki puts it) writing as a Seer of Science:

The general notion that science establishes agnosticism is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Science is the Latin for knowledge. Agnosticism is the Greek for ignorance. It is not self evident that ignorance is the goal of knowledge. It is the ignorance and not the knowledge that produces the current notion that free thought weakens theism. It is the real world, that we see with our own eyes, that obviously unfolds a plan of things that fit into each other.
[GKC, The Thing CW3:170-1]

We could do this as musicians when given violin parts in C and simply transpose for our E-flat and B-flat saxes. But it's funnier to me because we don't even have to do that much work!

The general notion that art establishes a-technology is a sort of mystification produced by talking Latin and Greek instead of plain English. Art is the Latin for skill. A-technology is the Greek for lack of skill. It is not self evident that lack of skill is the goal of skill.

Yes. You see, the Latin word ars, artis and the Greek tecnh (pronounced "techE", with a long e at the end) mean the same thing - skill, human cleverness, "art" in the widest sense. The opposite to these terms is rather surprising: it is natura or ingenium in Latin, or fusiV in Greek (pronounced "physis") - that is things which are natural in their work, and emphatically not human. (Incidentally, all this is from dictionaries and other references, and is not "my" opinion; if you don't like it, you'll have to take it up with them, and not me. Or perhaps you'd prefer to join me in my new university, which will deal with all these things in a just manner.)

Now what is particularly funny about this is the real opposition (at least from the words themselves) is not between "art" and "technology" but between "technology" and "engineering"! Oh yes - engineering descends to us from ingenium, and really means "something you're born with". Amazing.

But for Chestertonians - and indeed for all those who appreciate words like "catholic" (not upper-case) - we do not have a conflict; we do not face an impassable divide. We are following a well-trodden path; Newman and Chesterton and others have pointed the way to an excellent bridge. We know that God is just another Name for "truth" - even that atheist attests to this when (finding himself without God) he immediately created one as the device which detects truth! (Hee hee hee!) Just this past week I found another stunning link from Newman to Chesterton - and indeed to Duhem and Jaki. I can't give the whole essay, but I will just give the trigger sentence for you:

Though sacred truth was delivered once for all, and scientific discoveries are progressive, yet there is a great resemblance in the respective histories of Christianity and of Science.
[Newman, University Sketches 14: "Supply and Demand: the Schoolmen"]

Ah... does that sound familiar? Here's how Chesterton put it, in that classic debate between the Catholic MacIan and the Atheist Turnbull:

[MacIan said:]"...there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill or down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but they have steadily increased in certain definable matters; they have steadily advanced in a certain definable direction; they are the only two things, it seems, that ever can progress. The first is strictly physical science. The second is the Catholic Church."

"Physical science and the Catholic Church!" said Turnbull sarcastically; "and no doubt the first owes a great deal to the second."

"If you pressed that point I might reply that it was very probable," answered MacIan calmly. "I often fancy that your historical generalizations rest frequently on random instances; I should not be surprised if your vague notions of the Church as the persecutor of science was a generalization from Galileo. I should not be at all surprised if, when you counted the scientific investigations and discoveries since the fall of Rome, you found that a great mass of them had been made by monks."
[GKC The Ball and the Cross chapter 8]

I would suggest this excerpt when faced with the question, "Did Chesterton know of Pierre Duhem?" Duhem, of course, is the great French thermodynamicist and historian of science; next Tuesday marks the 94th anniversary of his death. He wrote the ten-volume Le système du monde: histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic which examines in huge and meticulous detail the actual development of science during the Middle Ages. (See Jaki's Science and Creation chapter 10 "The Sighting of New Horizons" for details, or his biography, Uneasy Genius: : The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem.)

It would be fun to go into this further - I know some people like such debates - but I want to go into something even more difficult today. Last week we talked briefly about "chirality" - the idea that the basic chemicals of life come in two forms, mirror images of each other, possessing the paradoxical sameness/differentness as the left hand and the right hand. (Though as Sheila points out, all living things use only the L-form.) Today I wish to tell you a little more about the mystery of right-and-left, or rather about that "adjacency" I mentioned a little earlier, and show you how it enters into another field of study. No, not chemistry, but literature.

Oh yes. You see, I know where the bridge is - or perhaps I should say the Gate... and so I can "go in and out" (see John 10:9) It is remarkable (no, not my insight, but the truth of the thing) perhaps because it arises in such a strange and hard-to-see place that few ever spot it. It really takes a Chestertonian perspective, as we say over and over here: "the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing." [GKC Tremendous Trifles ch 1]

That mystery arises for me in particular because I am a computer scientist, and have to deal with extremely detailed matters which very VERY few people ever touch, and most never even suspect even exist! Last November I posted the story of how I shocked an intelligent young man by showing him how a computer cannot add. (Well, speaking as a computer scientist, I know computers cannot add; after all, computers do not even deal with "numbers" - but people persist in thinking such silly things. Computers, however, will do what I tell them, as long as I tell them correctly, and then they do it very fast. Ahem.) Well, today I must tell you (who I am sure are also intelligent, though you may be older or younger, male or female) a little more about what computers can and cannot do...

No. I won't. This is NOT a blogg about computers. I will use another analogy, one which I delight in, and which for me long antedates my awareness of computers.

I live in a famous town, a town whose name appears on a very popular board game - for a number of reasons I do not care to mention it here. The name of this town happens to look like the English gerund for what one does with books - which may explain a little about me - but it is not pronounced like that gerund. I live just three blocks from the railroad (that's how the name appears on that board game) and I have known that railroad from a very early age. Perhaps you also like trains; children do tend to admire them - and we know how Chesterton admired them:

For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of trains. I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter.
[GKC ILN July 21 1906 CW27:239]

Here is yet another project for a wise student to pursue: GKC on trains. Ah. I must quote one other, to set up my argument correctly:

The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:479]

(Of course you must remember that "Bradshaw" means the book of train schedules.) Oh my, you look pale. Did I just say something evil? I told you this would be much more a cause of debate than my struggle over "art" and "technology". Let me say it again, in isolation, in case you missed the fighting words:

Man is a magician.

Oh my oh my.

Yes. Let us proceed with our lesson, shall we? Wands out, then, class.

You don't have a wand? Oh yes you do... I have a bunch here on my desk. I use them a lot, even though I also use a computer. My favourite is made of a very special sort of wood, and contains a core which has a remarkable power... contained in that core are countless spells. Oh yes, let's say that NASTY word again...

Spells.

(hee hee!) Have I made it clear yet what that wand is?

Oh, perhaps not. (sigh) But then let's talk about what comes out of those wands. You see, as hard as it may be for you to realize, what comes out is just like those trains. While the wand is in your hand - ah - above the paper, it is like the empty track. It is nothing at all... it is a mystical expectation, it is that strange line from "Little Town of Bethlehem" about the "silent streets" filled with "hopes and fears of all the years"... or, as Chesterton told us about a writer with "writer's block":

"He did no work lately; sometimes sat and stared at a blank sheet of paper as if he had no ideas."
"Or as if he had too many," said Gabriel Gale.
[GKC "The Purple Jewel" in The Poet and the Lunatics]

But then - ah, then, with a rush of noise like the Holy Spirit on the first Pentecost, with a blaze of fire and smoke (in the old days when they were steam-driven) comes the Engine... that first and most mystic of the mystical components of the train! Behind it, in that grand order, which is the First Rule of Heaven, comes a chain of cars, linked at their ends - and on they roll.

But each must follow, according to that order. Not one can ever depart from the forward motion of the Engine... Once the handedness has been chosen, all the train cars, all the monomers (to use the chemistry term) must abide by the chosen direction.

There is a mystery here. Yes, you can yap at me for pretending that there is some occult thing lurking in a common pencil - but I shall defend (as Chesterton's Gabriel Syme) that Man is a magician, and never more so as when he wields that mighty wand full of spells... er, spelling.

The secret, of course, is that every single letter comes with two hidden and marvellous hands, and they are as distinct as our left hand from our right hand. Oh yes. Our letters are chiral. They are like the railroad cars, and they must follow the engine in proper order.

Now you will not see them, if you pick up a Q or even an X, and examine it under a powerful magnifying lens. These hands aren't seen in that manner.

However, if you have ever managed to see the OLD kind of printing press, where there are actual cases of type - that is, separate little chunks of metal, one for EACH letter - you will have a hint of those hands. You see, I am not talking about the SHAPE of the letters - some of which do possess some interesting symmetries. I am talking about the letters-in-themselves, in the sense that they are powerless unless they are combined into words. But when they are combined, they must abide by the rules of order. They must all stand on their "feet" and all with the "nick" facing in the same direction. (These are the technical terms applied to a single type block.) Yes, there really is a left hand of S and a right hand of H, and they join as mightily as two train cars (though usually not with quite the same crash; I've watched the making up of trains at the local train yard.) They also are like the amino acids - they only combine with the expenditure of energy, and the combination is signified by an advance along an ever-growing chain. That word "chain" is important; in computing, or rather in the branch of finite math where we study the theory of this sort of thing, we speak of "concatenation" - this comes from the Latin catena = chain, and refers to the act of joining two strings (two ordered collections) into one. Concatenation is reminiscent of the idea of "adding", and there are certain similarities, but there are also important differences - specifically there is NO difference, I mean there is no "subtraction"... but I must not go into this fascinating matter further today.

The mystery I am trying to display for you is that these letters - which you are perceiving and yet paradoxically ignoring as you read my writing - these letters are just like a man with his hands spread out on either side. They are like the train cars, linking together at their ends. (You do NOT stack train cars one on top of the other, or side against side; those are not trains but wrecks.) Even when you play Scrabble or work a cross-word puzzle, you MUST abide by this rule: you will always truly link "left hand to right hand" even though you arrange the physical letters in a vertical sense.

Yes, you can say that palindromes (words like "noon" or "radar") work both ways - they are ambidextrous, if you insist. But such are rare. You can also put your switch engine at the rear of the train and push it along - I've seen that done, but it is also rare.

What is the point of all this? The point is my poor attempt at shining light on something you may have not ever noticed: that there exists in each letter two little "connectors" - a right hand and a left hand, just like the amino and the carboxyl groups in an amino acid (which build proteins), or like the 5-prime and the 3-prime hydroxyls in nucleotides (which build DNA or RNA), or like the two couplers at the ends of a freight car (which build a train). Those "hands" are bound, not to the letter in its graphical form, but to the letter-as-it-is. "S" has a certain shape, and as a Scrabble tile it may fit above or below, left or right; but as an idea it can be enigne, car, or caboose: it may Start a word or come in the midSt, or at the end of other letterS - and in each case it always keeps its right hand distinguished from its left. It is in this binding that the mystery and the power of WORD occurs: the distinction which keeps "GOD" from running into "DOG" or into "GDO" (short for "grid dip oscillator" a tool used by radio engineers) or keeps "LIVE" and "EVIL" apart.

It is not for nothing that the wizards of fantasy speak of the power of a spell. We know what power there is in a spell. Remember that next time you pick up your pencil or pen - or when you see a train go by.

2b or not 2b

2010-09-02T12:59:00.007-05:00

Wow. I just spotted an amazing comment made on one of my earlier postings, to wit, the one on positive and negative triangles. Here it is:

Sheila writes: Ooh, I actually knew about the "handed" isomers of amino acids -- Dr. Marshner brought them up in our apologetics class! Only one isomer (I forget if it is the left- or right-handed version) works in the human body -- making the chances of proteins forming randomly in the primordial sludge even LESS statistically likely.
posted August 31 2010

What a triumph - there is a theology professor SOMEWHERE who KNOWS about isomers of amino acids!

Here, for example, is a rendition of the amino acid called alanine. Again, remember, there are two versions - here is one and here is its mirror...

This is excellent... and quite exciting. It may mean there are some philosophers who will have a clue about life and the real world. It is all very well to make odd and unattributed claims (as curiously humorous as they are) about papal encyclicals - but the truth of amino acids will stand no matter how many "philosophers" write journal articles against them or against their study. Perhaps, in this decadent time, there are some who do not believe in such things, as there are some who do not believe in the motions of the earth, or in the multiplicity of the chemical elements. I have no time for such silliness; I have real work to do. And real poetry to write. Indeed! I was able to hear Dr. Marshner at the recent conference, and I can readily imagine how he brought this important chemical fact to bear upon the moral and philosophical topics at hand. Such grand work gives us an excellent and most hopeful vision of greater things to come. And the mystery is far deeper, as we shall consider today.

Since carbon has four bonds, oriented along the vertices of a tetrahedron, there peers out from this common chemical the Sign of the Cross - yes, to the despair of iconoclasts and - er - a certain tribe of staurophobes.

Since this geometric truth is a bit difficult to describe, I will give you some pictures. But - er - since they are two dimensional, you will still have to exert your intellects, though not quite so much as if I only used words.

In the first, we see a tetrahedron - that is, a four-sided thing, sort of like a pyramid, except in pyramids the bottoms are square, and here the bottom is triangular.

All four sides are triangles. You can make one yourself, it's fun. Just cut out four equilateral triangles - that is, where all the edges are the same length - and then tape their edges together. Even easier, just print this picture and then cut it out - DON'T cut into the diagram, just around the outside - then FOLD on the lines, and tape it up, and you will have yourself a nice little tetrahedron.

Now for the intellectual part. Imagine a little ball floating in its middle - you got it?

Good. Let's make it blue, just because I like blue. (Actually, in the usual color scheme it ought to be black, but you already saw that in the diagram of alanine.)

Next, imagine four lines reaching out from the ball to the four CORNERS of the tetrahedron. (Or look at the picture.)

All right. Now for the tricky part. Instead of looking at it from the SIDE of the tetrahedron, try looking at it from the EDGE:

Ah.... THERE IS THE CROSS.

Those four lines represent the four single bonds of carbon. If you make several and then label them with letters, and try rotating them, you will see that there are TWO kinds, which work just like the left hand and the right hand - that is what is called "chiral" or "handed".

Organic chemistry, then, contains its own very special hint - a kind of subtle reminder - of the Passion. It is eminently fitting; all the sciences and all the technical disciplines carry the burden, just as history and civics and literature and music... it's suggested in that very curious and disturbing comment about Christ's lament over Jerusalem:

Therefore the story of Christ is the story of a journey, almost in the manner of a military march; certainly in the manner of the quest of a hero moving to his achievement or his doom. It is a story that begins in the paradise of Galilee, a pastoral and peaceful land having really some hint of Eden, and gradually climbs the rising country into the mountains that are nearer to the storm-clouds and the stars, as to a Mountain of Purgatory. He may be met as if straying in strange places, or stopped on the way for discussion or dispute; but his face is set towards the mountain city. That is the meaning of that great culmination when he crested the ridge and stood at the turning of the road and suddenly cried aloud, lamenting over Jerusalem. Some light touch of that lament is in every patriotic poem; or if it is absent, the patriotism stinks with vulgarity.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:339-340]

If Chesterton can tie patriotism and poetry into the Great Story of the Crucifixion, I shall by no means refrain from tying in chemistry and three-dimensional graphics and all sorts of other matters. It may seem to be an inversion of St. Paul's restriction, "while I was among you I was determined to know nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" [see 1Cor2:2] It is rather a more extensive application of that clause from the Nicene Creed, "per quem omnia facta sunt" = "Through Him all things were made". If there were no rocks there could be no Calvary; if no plants, there could be no cross; if no iron, there could be no nails; if no moon, there could be no Passover to signal the proper date; if no sun, there would be nothing to announce the dire extremity of the death of God... if no humans, there would be no reason for Him to have suffered.

Is it annoying to think of the cross always?

Is it annoying to think of your mother and father, your spouse, your children?

Is it annoying to think of One who loves you? Or the token of His love?

However - we know the cross is annoying to some. You may recall that very interesting introductory chapter to The Ball and the Cross, the great debate between Father Michael and Professor Lucifer...

"I once knew a man like you, Lucifer," he said, with a maddening monotony and slowness of articulation. "He took this..."
"There is no man like me," cried Lucifer, with a violence that shook the ship.
"As I was observing," continued Michael, "this man also took the view that the symbol of Christianity was a symbol of savagery and all unreason. His history is rather amusing. It is also a perfect allegory of what happens to rationalists like yourself. He began, of course, by refusing to allow a crucifix in his house, or round his wife's neck, or even in a picture. He said, as you say, that it was an arbitrary and fantastic shape, that it was a monstrosity, loved because it was paradoxical. Then he began to grow fiercer and more eccentric; he would batter the crosses by the roadside; for he lived in a Roman Catholic country. Finally in a height of frenzy he climbed the steeple of the Parish Church and tore down the cross, waving it in the air, and uttering wild soliloquies up there under the stars. Then one still summer evening as he was wending his way homewards, along a lane, the devil of his madness came upon him with a violence and transfiguration which changes the world. He was standing smoking, for a moment, in the front of an interminable line of palings, [vertical stakes; a picket fence] when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this, too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He burnt his house because it was made of crosses. He was found in the river."
Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.
"Is that story really true?" he asked.
"Oh, no," said Michael, airily. "It is a parable. It is a parable of you and all your rationalists. You begin by breaking up the Cross; but you end by breaking up the habitable world."
[GKC The Ball and the Cross]

And so, we now see that this hated symbol stares out from the very essence of life... I once heard how a "certain country" banned a certain kind of army boot because it left tread-marks with a plus-sign... I don't know if they have also banned computer keyboards, along with ASCII code 2b, which produces that "+" character yet; I wonder if they will forbid coal, charcoal, oil, and diamonds - and end up forbidding all organic compounds - compounds containing carbon - including their own bodies. They too follow that man Father Michael describes; they too may be found in the river. It is a pity.

Enough. Let us think more positive thoughts, then.

You didn't catch the Hamlet pun, did you? Or did you?

You should recall this famous line:

If the morbid Renaissance intellectual is supposed to say, "To be or not to be - that is the question," then the massive medieval doctor [Aquinas] does most certainly reply in a voice of thunder, "To be - that is the answer."
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:489]

It has fallen to computer science and the ASCII character set to link this great truth of ontology with the very Sign of the Cross. It is the sign that is opposed - but it is also the sign of reality. (The squares of imaginary numbers are negative; the squares of reals are marked with the cross, I mean a plus sign.) This universe, the only real universe, is the one which has sun and moon, rocks and trees, iron and all the rest - it has Man, and thus it has the Cross.

P.S. I am aware that the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross comes later this month, on the 14th to be exact; but somehow this seemed to be a most fitting derivative of Sheila's comment, and I hope you will consult it again, either on the 14th, or during a future Holy Week. All things, after all, science and engineering as much as literature and history, must glorify God. And they do.

P.S.#2: I forgot I had posted (quite some time ago) this poem about this curious character.

Drinkers live longer

2010-08-31T08:03:00.000-05:00

Drinkers live longer than teetotalers, says this news article. I wonder why it didn't work with the Chesterton and Shaw?

Looking at "Abbr." - or, the Mirror of Life

2010-08-26T09:23:00.002-05:00

One of the very best things one learns as one explores the vast cosmos - a trick hidden from most students, alas, and ignored by most of the modern industries - is that one can use knowledge from one field to make advances in another field. The little corner called "higher education" has tried to market this idea under the label of "interdisciplinary studies": they have "Physics for Poets", and (I presume) "Poetry for Physicists". Of course this only goes so far; there are what some call "Impassable Divides". I've seen them. I could tell you stories, but then today's column would be even more huge than it is going to be. So instead of telling you of the failures, I will tell you of the successes. As you might expect, they have to do with our Uncle Gilbert.

Speaking as a scientist, one of the startling things I have found in Chesterton's writing is an honest admiration for true Science - Science "writ large" as Father Jaki always writes. If you wish a detailed study of this matter, consult Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science. One of the more delightful epigrams, and the one which perhaps exemplifies my point today, is this:

The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical.
[GKC Heretics CW1:113]

If we really admire something...

Ah well. Let me interrupt for a non-science interlude. I do NOT say nonsense there; please! That word "admire" comes from the Latin mirari = "to wonder at". In other words, we ought to have a sense of wonder at the engine.

Earlier this week on the Duhem Society blogg I posted a fascinating excerpt from a little book I am reading. (I'm still not done, it's a terrible shame to think it takes me this long to finish a book with less than 100 pages!) It was in connection with my comments about "a university" and Newman's famous book, and it was really an amazing statement:

If there were no Catholic universities, the academic world would be the poorer for it. The reason Academe would be poorer is that it would lack an advocate of mystery.
[Francis J. Wade, S. J.: The Aquinas Lecture 1978: The Catholic University and the Faith, 4]

It would take another book (much larger than Father Wade's) to properly handle that amazing idea. But the important thing is not that "Catholic" part, but the "mystery" part - though they are connected, and my purpose is not to argue that connection. My point is to underscore the MYSTERY.

When we talk about "mystery" we usually understand something like one of GKC's Father Brown stories: an intellectual puzzle, phrased in a traditional form of literature, and brought to a clever and (hopefully) unexpected resolution - indeed, to a surprising resolution. The theological underpinnings of Christianity have long spoken of Mystery in a somehow related sense, though here there is not usually the sense of an "intellectual puzzle". In religion, "Mystery" is tied up with the term "Mystic" - meaning a person who touches or perhaps perceives a Mystery. Let us hear Chesterton who has done truly great work on elucidating this difficult matter:

A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. ... no true mystic ever loved darkness rather than light. No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible - by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. ... Every great mystic goes about with a magnifying glass; He sees every flea as a giant - perhaps rather as an ogre.
[GKC William Blake 4, 131-2, 155]

Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. ... The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. ... Symbols alone are of even a cloudy value in speaking of this deep matter; and another symbol from physical nature will express sufficiently well the real place of mysticism before mankind. The one created thing which we cannot look at is the one thing in the light of which we look at everything. Like the sun at noonday, mysticism explains everything else by the blaze of its own victorious invisibility.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:230, 231]

Well, I could go on, but clearly this is another wonderful research topic. The point you see, is that one begins to realize that there is always something more... it is grasping that reason itself requires an initial commitment to something unreasoned (though NOT unreasonABLE) - the acceptance of some truth exterior to that proven, or provable. Again, I am NOT going into this here as much as it needs to be gone into - but I do have something to say, and I want to get to it.

In the course of my work (Ah!) I have relied heavily upon all this, as well as upon that most practical line from Heretics about reverting to the doctrinal principles of the thirteenth century. One of the links provided by this mysticism was the one which gave me an elegant way of handling the daily transport of some 17,000 files to-and-from a location in the Rockies to our location somewhere in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was not my idea; it was God's; it was how He manages transport of messenger RNA within eukaryotic cells. (I got it from reading a book on biochemistry.) Another came from the famous Gray's Anatomy; I've written about that one in my book on Subsidiarity, which is still awaiting a publisher. But there is more to the mystery of mystery - and aptly enough, it touches on the mystery of life itself.

But I will get there by a kind of pun - the pun in my title, represented by the symbols "abbr." As you may know, this is nothing more than the abbreviation for the word "abbreviation".

Here, I shall delete a whole extraneous diatribe about the so-called "problem-solving skills" one continually hears about from "educators" and simply teach you another of them, one of the more powerful known to computing. It is simply "abbr." - the idea of self-reference, though we have a more formal name and call it "recursion". No, I am not going to lecture on that formalism, or teach you factorial (surprise!) or make comments about the Peano axioms and mathematical induction. Rather, I want to tell you about how it happens in life.

Life - when we learn about it at the molecular level - consists in two very unusual things, which are really one thing. Life is a complex system of a variety of molecules - most of which are complex collections of carbon and three or four or five other elements (some call this CHONPS) - but they are busy molecules, reacting with each other, or more importantly NOT reacting with each other. That is because they are all collected within some water, and are at what we call "physiological temperature" - they are warm, and so are bumping around within that water. One would not be wrong to claim "Life's one big pool party" - if you look through that microscope GKC mentioned in connection with Blake.

But as you have heard before, there is a mystery to life. It is most simply phrased, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Nowadays, since we know a little more about it, we could say it a little differently, but I don't want to go into a lot of that detail now. I do hope you've heard the term "DNA" by now, since we need to talk about it next.

The mystery isn't so much that there's a pool party. The mystery is that one pool party can give rise to another and now there are two. How this is done involves things like DNA and RNA and two marvellous engines called "polymerase" and "ribosome" (yes I am skipping all sorts of tech details here).

But I won't skip all of the details.

Just as I told you about "abbr." and the computer-science problem solver called "recursion" I do have to tell you this much about life. The DNA, you see, contains the exact instructions to build those two engines. Oh it seems very readily understandable that one could "copy" DNA into another DNA. Somehow. We have photocopiers, don't we? We can make a copy of a piece of paper.

Ah, now here comes the mystery.

Obviously if that paper is a blueprint for the photocopier, we could make another copy of the blueprint. Yeah, that's nice, but the thing is we need a copy of the photocopier itself.

There - you see it? We have a self-reference. We have "abbr." We have recursion.

Yes, the DNA code (they call it the "genome") contains instructions to build the polymerase and the ribosome, and all the other tools those machines require. (It also contains instructions for other things - building the heart, or the skin, or the eye - all that.) But the "common denominator" to life is this self-reference, the idea that somewhere in the 3,000,000,000 bases of DNA the instructions say "and don't forget to make a copy of these instructions".

Now for the mystery in the other sense.

In that other technical work I do, which some call "prayer" I often say the rosary, or what we could call the "hand-held gospel". One day I was saying the "Second Glorious Mystery" during which we consider the Ascension of Jesus into heaven. As you no doubt know, this is mentioned just at the conclusion of the Gospel of St. Luke and also in its sequel "Acts of the Apostles". Also associated with this event is the "Great Commission" given at the conclusion of St. Matthew's gospel, which I will quote:

Going therefore, teach ye all nations: baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you. And behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.
[Mt 28:19-20]

And somehow I started thinking about DNA and life and then.... OH. Well... how very curious. In the very last command of our Lord, what do we find?

"Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you"

BUT THIS IS ONE OF THOSE THINGS HE COMMANDED.

Hence it is recursive. It is self-referential. It is like the ribosome code appearing in DNA, or like "abbr." Wow! (hee hee) In fact, this one phrase constitutes the Life of the Church, the mystical Body of Christ on earth, since it constitutes the replication process in itself. The "increase and multiply" of Genesis is here renewed, and life takes on a whole new meaning - even though it is still mysterious.

(What does all this mean? Did "Doc" explain life (in DNA)? Did he explain the Church? Did he even explain this "recursion"? )

Not really. I tried to show you something - put it out into view for you to look at.

(And why did you bother mentioning the mirror? You didn't say anything about mirrors.)

Well, that's part of the mystery - a mirror is a kind of simple symbol of recursion. Recursion is nothing by itself - a mirror shows nothing in the dark. But there is something strange - something mystical about this idea, just as there is something about recursion and the divine design of life (the biological or the kind Jesus meant when He said "I am the life").

Ah well. Since I didn't do so well with this prose approch, I will try a poetic one, and then leave you to ponder the matter. Some years ago I wrote a poem which tries to explain about mirrors and glass - or what a friend of mine calls "the strange color of the nearby" - but perhaps that too is a mystery. Well, try it anyway.

Mirror and Glass
"But glass is a very beautiful thing, like diamonds; and transparency is a sort of transcendental colour."
G. K. Chesterton, The Poet and the Lunatics

There are some colors none have seen:
Like ultra brown and infra green,
Fluorescent black and vivid gray;
All those I hope to see some day...
(Perhaps, because I’ve dropped some hints
The colorists will brew those tints!)
But there are two I see quite near
And on reflection it is clear
Neither one will ever be made
While the laws of light are obeyed.

[Copyright © 1998 by Dr. Thursday. This poem appeared in Something Good To Read for April 29 1998 and is used by kind permission of the Editor-in-Chief.]

Er - having quoted myself I felt it not appropriate to end that way. So I shall give you one further bit of GKC which may help a little:

The sublime words of St. John's Gospel permit of a sympathetic parody; if a man love not God whom he has not seen, how shall he love God whom he has seen? [1 John 4:20, also John 1:18, 6:46] If we do not delight in Santa Claus even as a fancy, how can we expect to be happy even if we find that he is a fact? But a mystic like Blake simply puts up a placard for the whole universe, like an old woman letting lodgings.
[GKC William Blake 102]

P.S. On re-reading this, I think it will be necessary to say some more about "mystery". But I will do that another time. If you want a thrill, however, try re-reading the scene from Easter Sunday about the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, and re-think it in terms of the classical "detective fiction" you know about. It's uncanny.

Behold and See 5

2010-08-24T15:35:00.000-05:00

New for homeschoolers, Science for grade 5, written by our own Gilbert columnist David Beresford.

First Day of the 3rd Year of Chesterton Academy

2010-08-23T21:24:00.000-05:00

These are the lucky kids who attend Chesterton Academy, a school based on ideals put forth in Chesterton's writings.

This is the third year of operation, and the school is obviously growing by leaps and bounds.

Congratulations, Chesterton Academy!

To See Things As They Are

2010-08-19T11:25:00.002-05:00

As I mentioned last week, I had to leave the Conference early when something came up at home requiring my presence on-site. What I forgot to mention then - either at the Conference or in my LENGTHY gurgling last week - was the splendid relevance to one of the truly great quotes from our centennial text, one which I delight in appending to my e-mails, and which is a constant source of irritation to Luddites:

I have often thanked God for the telephone.
[GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:112]

As I have read the book, I am well aware of the context; I know, far better than most, how difficult technology can be, to use or to be burdened with. (Hee hee! Like the centurion I know what it means to be under authority [Mt 8:9]: to have my cell phone go off and summon me to assist!) Nevertheless, let us recall that it is GOOD to thank God for the telephone, just as we should thank Him for beer and Burgundy. [See Orthodoxy CW1:268] These are indeed human constructions, but they are made with divine gifts. Oh yes: do not make the mistake (as some environmentalists do) of thinking man-made things have nothing to do with God. Beer and telephones are made from materials of physical creation - which are God's gifts, just as wood enters into violins and ground up minerals into tubes of oil paint. But how much more should we thank Him when we recall that these things have been devised by the great gift of the human intellect, and indeed not just by a single man, but by the cumulative power of millennia, summed up and passed on. The gifts of language, of coherent speech - indeed, of coherent thought.... did WE HUMANS invent them ex nihilo from nothing, all by ourselves? Oh no, they were given to us, by God, if only by inspiration. Why would anyone have thought to drink water in which some wheat grains had rotted, or some long-forgotten grape juice? Perhaps it was the 99 percent desperation (hee hee) of a thirsty farmer... Ah, inspiration. But more importantly, education. Most of the time we do no more than pass such gifts on to others. Baking bread or weaving cloth, brewing beer or designing telephones - all these arise in the same fashion as art.

Caution: do not imagine there is some distinction between art and technology. As GKC mentions about science and agnosticism in The Thing CW3:170, this is an error caused by not knowing Latin and Greek, since techne is
Greek for "art", a set of rules or method of doing.

You may call it art or you may call it technology, but under either sense we must be grateful. It is, as we say at Holy Mass, truly right and just to give thanks to God, and a telephone no less than a sunset glorifies Him - in fact, the telephone glorifies Him more than the sunset, for human choice and human activity enters into its making, and even the work of a fallen human is worth far more than a mere stellar furnace, no matter how "artistic" (with the casual sense of "pretty"), how useful, or how large.

I mentioned the concept of "passing on" of human abilities, and used that mystical word "education" - which is what I wish to write about today. And it relates to my introductory, since when my call came and I left the Conference, I was absent from the lecture on Newman and Chesterton - and this man, John Henry Cardinal Newman, is one whom we as Chestertonians ought to know more about.

Perhaps someday there will be a real study made of JHN vis-à-vis GKC... I know that Father Jaki has a book and several essays on Chesterton, and at least four books and several essays on Newman, but (as far as I know) he has not set them adjacent and examined them together. Possibly the lecturer (whom I missed) did this; perhaps others have, and hopefully others will, very soon. We need it. But let us see just a little, in a kind of exploratory manner. I think some interesting things will arise.

But let us, as Chesterton often did, begin our investigation in another place. The following quote is not from either GKC or JHN, but from a mystery fiction detective novel book. In it, a wise and ornery detective is comforting and assisting a young girl who had been seduced by Bad Books...

"...here are these three Russian crutch-walkers on the table by the bed. We'd better get rid of them now."
There was a whirr of leaves and then three separate thuds as Dostoevski, Tolstoy and Checkov flew out of the open window and struck the bole of an oak tree.
"The idea is," explained H.M. [the detective] "I want you to read some fellers named Dumas and Mark Twain and Stevenson and Chesterton and Conan Doyle. They're dead, yes; but they can still whack the britches off anybody at tellin' a story..."
[John Dickson Carr writing as Carter Dickson, Night at the Mocking Widow 219, emphasis added]

Oh yes!

Now, before you get up in arms about this censorship - or the even more curious list of recommendations, let us visit something even more anger-making. I want you to be good and emotive now so that in a little while you'll have gotten it all out, and THEN you can sit back and read this again and then begin to think about things.

So let us next visit the Index. Oh yes. The horrible intrusion of Papal Power into the literary realm! Yes, well... Just a word or two, you know. I think it is rather funny, especially since I obtained a copy of the Index for 1930 and explored the more than 500 pages of titles and authors it contains. I've bumped into many things in my travels as a computer scientist, but I would guess that over 99 percent of these forbidden titles are unknown, except to scholars, and I doubt that even they could summarize the contents of even one. What's funny for me to imagine is that these days the only thing on the New Index (as devised by the Media and Higher Education) would be papal encyclicals. (I feel the urge to misquote Chesterton here: "We do not need censorship by the Pope. We have censorship of the Pope." [cf Orthodoxy CW1:321]) Hee hee!

But to return to the Index: There were very few that I had ever heard of, even as titles, though a couple were surprising, like Victor Hugo's "Les misérables" and Blaise Pascal's "Pensées". I was discussing this with another young friend at the conference, and I pointed out that the reason for the Index was NOT to stop real intellectual study, but to restrain uninformed people from following dubious or misleading arguments. I said there is a really big difference in the various forms of censorship. Specifically, no reasonable person would give a book on calculus to a first grade student! But this is NOT censorship. It is merely the acknowledgement that one who does not know even the basics of addition, to say nothing of algebra, cannot fathom how that long curly S-shaped integral sign stands for an infinite number of additions... (Not precisely, I know, but let us not do calculus today.)

Ah... perhaps you begin to see what I am trying to point out?

No? Not yet. Perhaps I wondered off too far. (Not likely... ahem!) Ah well, I am just trying to sketch something. Let's keep going - but let us go into Newman now, and maybe he will help illuminate the matter...

Certainly a liberal education does manifest itself in a courtesy, propriety, and polish of word and action, which is beautiful in itself, and acceptable to others; but it does much more. It brings the mind into form, - for the mind is like the body. Boys outgrow their shape and their strength; their limbs have to be knit together, and their constitution needs tone. Mistaking animal spirits for vigour, and over-confident in their health, ignorant what they can bear and how to manage themselves, they are immoderate and extravagant; and fall into sharp sicknesses. This is an emblem of their minds; at first they have no principles laid down within them as a foundation for the intellect to build upon; they have no discriminating convictions, and no grasp of consequences. And therefore they talk at random, if they talk much, and cannot help being flippant, or what is emphatically called "young." They are merely dazzled by phenomena, instead of perceiving things as they are.
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

Did your "Chesterton Quote" alarm just go off? Ah, good - I thought it would. YES, now do you see why I am so thrilled? Is this not the very focus, the burning hearth, the altar of the gods of the home - or what Tolkien calls the Secret Fire of Anor? Well, maybe not, but it certainly is something remarkable. Yeah, yeah, I know some of you want to debate what "liberal education" means - or what "liberal" means, or quarrel about this view of boys. But let's just hear that critical phrase again, but set into first-person plural, and whatever tense (iussive?) this might be:

We must begin to perceive things as they are.

Where's that in Chesterton? Oh, you goose. It's just a hair's-breadth away from the THE QUOTE, better (and more accurately) known as this grand statement of Father Brown:

"It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense, and can't see things as they are."
[GKC "The Oracle of the Dog" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

And this, in a nutshell, is Newman's argument of at least two of his Discourses from his masterful The Idea of a University.

So what is Doc getting at? Keeping calculus books away from little kindergardners? Chucking Russian novels out the window? Huh? Some old-fangled education scheme? What?

At the very least, I am getting at the real relevance of Newman to our work, and to an application of Chesterton to our consideration of Newman's writing. Sure, I advocate chucking certain books out of windows - yes, even calculus, if the child is not prepared. (Not for always, you understand. But the first time your son holds a bat in his hand you don't ask a pro pitcher to show him a fast ball.) And I advocate the reading of exciting stories with distinct good and even more distinct evil - and not just for children. Let me quote Newman again:

Our desideratum is, not the manners and habits of gentlemen; - these can be, and are, acquired in various other ways, by good society, by foreign travel, by the innate grace and dignity of the Catholic mind; - but the force, the steadiness, the comprehensiveness and the versatility of intellect, the command over our own powers, the instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us, which sometimes indeed is a natural gift, but commonly is not gained without much effort and the exercise of years.
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

Ah, did your GKC quote sensor beep at you again? Check this out:

To become a Catholic is not to leave off thinking, but to learn how to think... The Catholic convert has for the first time a starting-point for straight and strenuous thinking. He has for the first time a way of testing the truth in any question that he raises. As the world goes, especially at present, it is the other people, the heathen and the heretics, who seem to have every virtue except the power of connected thought.
[GKC The Catholic Church and Conversion CW 3:106]

But I find that GKC's mention of "connected thought" leads me right back to the very same place in Newman:

When the intellect has once been properly trained and formed to have a connected view or grasp of things, it will display its powers with more or less effect according to its particular quality and capacity in the individual. In the case of most men it makes itself felt in the good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view, which characterize it. In some it will have developed habits of business, power of influencing others, and sagacity. In others it will elicit the talent of philosophical speculation, and lead the mind forward to eminence in this or that intellectual department. In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession. All this it will be and will do in a measure, even when the mental formation be made after a model but partially true; for, as far as effectiveness goes, even false views of things have more influence and inspire more respect than no views at all. Men who fancy they see what is not are more energetic, and make their way better, than those who see nothing; and so the undoubting infidel, the fanatic, the heresiarch, are able to do much, while the mere hereditary Christian, who has never realized the truths which he holds, is unable to do anything. But, if consistency of view can add so much strength even to error, what may it not be expected to furnish to the dignity, the energy, and the influence of Truth!
[JHN The Idea of a University, Preface]

There is far more on this which we must explore, but it will have to be on another occasion. If you have a copy of Newman's book, please read it - or re-read it. If not, I urge you to GET a copy. No, not just borrow it; you will want it, more and more, as time goes on. Please do continue your reading of GKC, but also make a start at Newman. If you want to really deal with what GKC "Education, or the Mistake About the Child" you will need Newman.

And please keep this famous Chesterton line in mind:

...the object of my school is to show how many extraordinary things even a lazy and ordinary man may see if he can spur himself to the single activity of seeing.
[GKC Tremendous Trifles]

Don't you feel an urge to study in Chesterton's own school? Remember that this was nearly the last command of our Lord, "Go and make disciples of all nations". [Mt 28:19] Some translations say "go and teach"; remember that the "disciple" in Latin has the sense of "student". You may get upset if I tell you the Greek looks a lot like "mathematics", but it does. Let us beg our Lord for the grace the blind man begged:

Lord, that I may see! [Luke 18:41]

P.S. I find, upon re-reading this, that I present a certain tone respecting "Catholicism" in regard to education. I don't have any brief way of decomplexifying this just now, except to claim that I could write a lengthy distinguo about what it means. Just as a simple caution, it is not said as a way of "dissing" or condemning those of other beliefs. Perhaps it may help if you recall that "University" and "Catholic" differ only as "Latin" and "Greek" - but even that will mislead. I will just have to let it stand as it is, and hope to address the matter more fully, at another time, in another place.

Also: I have, as you may infer, a very special interest in this matter. You see, I am involved in the foundation of a new University, much as Newman was, and facing the same trials and difficulties. But I have at least this advantage: not only do I have Newman's own writing. I also have Chesterton's. I also hope and pray for their intercession in the effort, and the support of some brilliant young people, some of whom were in attendance at the Conference. Well, actually, perhaps I support them. We work together on such things, after all; we know there are many gifts but the same Spirit.

How to Explain?

2010-08-17T20:19:00.000-05:00

It is so difficult when people crucify others for misspeaking during a public speech.

If you go here, you'll find some particularly difficult people making fun of James O'Keefe. This seems to be an afternoon's pastime for some of them, who have never misspoken themselves.

What I think James meant to say was that people in public office should be monitored, and that this was a good use of one's moral judgment: To keep watch over what those who claim to represent us do and say.

They don't know Belloc (spelled Beloch on the site). They think Mount St. Mary's invited James to speak.

Just Discovered: lost comments

2010-08-17T20:17:00.000-05:00

I was wondering what happened to the comments that usually come when one posts. Apparently Blogger took it upon itself to moderate the comments without my knowing where the comments lingered while waiting my moderation.

James O'Keefe at the Conference

2010-08-13T15:22:00.001-05:00

Your Blog Authors at the Conference Dr. Thursday (AKA Peter Floriani, PhD and Nancy C. Brown)

2010-08-13T15:19:00.001-05:00

Positive and Negative Triangles

2010-08-12T09:47:00.001-05:00

After the excitement of last week's conference, it is good to turn back to our usual dull and LENGTHY ploddings, where you can just double-click away from me if I am boring you. But I ought to note something about it, since I was there, and I had a good time, even though it was truncated somewhat for me, due to matters beyond my control.

I saw several old friends, and met several new ones, and it was an awesome time. I laughed a lot, had some beer, and some food, and I think I might have also slept, but I forget. Not that it matters, hee hee. I think some people were surprised to learn that there really is a "Dr. Thursday" and he is not just a pen name of someone else.

The one talk which our esteemed blogg-mistress did not mention in her commentary was (in my own opinion) the best. It also happened to be the one SHE gave! It was titled "The Woman Who Was Chesterton" and (as she remarked) perhaps it sounds as if it was going to be some sort of "gender studies" approach to GKC's writing, his "inner female" or some such. Here, she could have quoted the very famous lines from GKC's letter to - er - to someone else. (I'll tell you who a bit later.) The lines I shall quote will earn you swift and immediate condemnation in the modern world, though the great ranks of the Scholars of the Middle Ages will welcome you among their number, since the lines are indubitably true:

I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.
[GKC writing to (someone) quoted in Ward Gilbert Keith Chesterton 108-9]

Very impressive. Anyway, the talk discussed the life of a certain person about whom we as Chestertonians ought to be interested in. I didn't take notes, as I was too entranced to do such mundane things, and I knew there would be a recording. Besides, it was scattered with most delightful humour, suggesting how Chesterton would handle life in the INTERNET age - I especially liked the bit that went something like this:

"I say! Shaw has accepted my FRIEND request!"

But anyway, there was one particular pun which was left out. And you can find that pun here, but it may be made more clear - that is, the real topic of that talk will be revealed if I say it in this fashion:

There was one thing in particular in which GKC anticipated our modern "connected" electronic age. It was this: Long before the INTERNET came to be, G. K. Chesterton got his very own Blogg on June 28, 1901.

Ah well... if you are still confused I will spell it out in ASCII for you: That was the day on which Gilbert Chesterton married Frances Blogg. (Yes, that really was Mrs. Chesterton's maiden name, and she was the topic of Nancy's excellent talk: she was the Woman Whe Was Chesterton.)

As it happens, just before the conference I was looking into a very interesting puzzle, one which has tormented computer science for some time... but I won't go into that just now, since it may irritate some of my readers, and unduly attract attention from - er - various government agencies. Not that I have any insights, of course! Indeed, all I had was a new question. And from that question I was led to study some very curious things, some of which almost do not make sense until you poke around a little and try to understand why the words are used in that way. It's far more magical than any magic - in fact, it's precisely the true difference between magic and technology, the difference which poor Arthur C. Clarke happened to miss. But I cannot lecture on that matter just now; besides I've already put it into a story, and it's much better there. So let us proceed.

Just yesterday (or maybe Tuesday) I found out that a triangle can be "positive" or "negative". This sounds hilarious, and perhaps not very Chestertonian, until you recall that Gabriel Gale asked:

"Were you ever an isosceles triangle?"

in "The Yellow Bird" in GKC's The Poet and the Lunatics. In fact, you can find quite a bit of homage to Euclid and triangles in Chesterton - and they often lead to even more amazing truths. For example:

There is one element always to be remarked in the true mystic, however disputed his symbolism, and that is its brightness of colour and clearness of shape. I mean that we may be doubtful about the significance of a triangle or the precise lesson conveyed by a crimson cow. But in the work of a real mystic the triangle is a hard mathematical triangle not to be mistaken for a cone or a polygon. The cow is in colour a rich incurable crimson, and in shape unquestionably a cow, not to be mistaken for any of its evolutionary relatives, such as the buffalo or the bison. This can be seen very clearly, for instance, in the Christian art of illumination as practiced at its best in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Christian decorators, being true mystics, were chiefly concerned to maintain the reality of objects. For the highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material.
[GKC William Blake 132ff]

Ah! Read it again: "The highest dogma of the spiritual is to affirm the material." It's simple, too: you cannot feed the hungry or clothe the naked by theology. It requires knowledge of cooking and sewing, of agriculture and textiles, but it also means CHEMISTRY and BIOLOGY and all sorts of theoretical and practical disciplines. But then we already knew that: "It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning." [GKC WWWTW CW4:43]

Ahem. To revert to the positive and negative triangle.

The idea is quite simple, and in fact links in to a very great concept - the idea of "chirality" or "handedness" - the idea of RIGHT and of LEFT. When we "name" a triangle, that is, we go out onto our lands with our surveying tools, our transits and chains and plumb bobs, and we select (much as the Roman augurs would) the three points which are the three "GONs" - the angles or corners - why, depending on the ORDER IN WHICH we choose those three points, we give that triangle either its positive or its negative state. The Romans, of course would label it fas or nefas - lucky or unlucky. But this is a simpler idea, even if there is still something sinister about it! (Latin pun, hee hee) I won't give the equation here, but there is a way of computing the area of a triangle from the coordinates of its three corners, and the FUN thing about this equation is the SIGN of the area tells you whether you went around the triangle in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.

Ah, you sigh. So that's what the Doctor is ranting about today. Directions. Clockwise and counterclockwise. Right and Left.

Yes. We could always quote St. Matthew about right and left - you know, the Last Judgement, the sheep and the goats - but you may also recall this famous snippet of dialog from Chesterton:

"First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish government?"

"To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."
"And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."
[GKC The Man Who Was Thursday CW6:490]

Yes, and the funny thing is that right and wrong - I mean right and left really are a matter of life and death, not simply at the end of time, but even in our daily lives. You may wonder (if you know any Latin at all) why there is a sugar called DEXTROSE and another called LEVULOSE. (The Latin dexter means "right" and laevus means "left".) And the secret of all this was discovered only 26 years before GKC was born.

I am sure you know the name Louis Pasteur. The first of his astounding discoveries was made in 1848 when he was studying certain organic salts called the tartrates. (An aside: if you are a baker (like me) you may have something called "Cream of Tartar" in your pantry - it is NOT the same as the "Tartar sauce" used on fish, but a fine white powder. The tartrates are compounds of tartaric acid, a weak acid found in certain fruits. It is used with baking soda as a leavening agent.) Anyway, Pasteur established that a given tartrate came in TWO DIFFERENT FORMS. They are made up of the exact same elements, in exactly the same proportions, and many of their properties are identical.

BUT NOT ALL OF THEM ARE IDENTICAL.

Specifically, the property which Pasteur studied was NOT identical: the rotation of polarized light: one form went right, another form went left, and there was one which didn't have any effect.

That is because they are related as your right hand is related to your left hand: they are MIRROR IMAGES of each other. They are "chiral" (from the Greek word for "hand") because they have "handedness". (The one which had no effect was an equal mixture of the right and left forms.)

As it turns out, just about ALL the compounds found in living things are chiral. Most importantly, the various amino acids which build proteins, and the various sugars which form the most useful of our body's energy sources.

You may be wondering what all this has to do with my moaning and berating and all that. It's simply my attempt to point out how even the deep and hidden truths of our real world bolster the greater, deeper and even more hidden truths about God and our relation to Him. It's not enough for us to sit and listen to lectures, or sit and read bloggs, even this one. Here is Chesterton's own admonition about it:

I do not know Mr. Eustace Miles personally, but I must confess that I like him: he seems to me to be sincere, and much simpler as well as much saner than many of his followers. But he is chiefly in danger rather from his leaders than his followers. He allows himself to be lectured by a lot of Pundits who suppose they have a true explanation of life when they have only got a false simplification of it. I remember a man of this sort who told me he was on a spiritual plane ("we are on different planes") on which yes and no, black and white, right and wrong, right and left, were all equal. I regarded him as I should any boastful aviator who told me that from the height to which he had risen all London looked like an exact chess-board, with all the squares and streets the same size. In short, I regarded him as a liar. London streets are not equally long, seen from a flying-ship or from anywhere else. And human sins or sorrows are not equally serious, seen in a vision or anywhere else.
[GKC Aug 15 1914 CW30:145]

Indeed. Don't be caught by a false simplification. At the end of time, we're going to see that right and left really are different - and a number of other things, too. As GKC said about male and female, what God has put asunder, let no man join. [see "Two Stubborn Pieces of Iron" in The Common Man]

ChesterTen

2010-08-09T09:54:00.000-05:00

The conference is over, but the energy lives on. All the way home I was thinking, what can I do? How can we spread the Gospel? How do we live an authentic life?

There were so many amazing people at the conference, so many great conversations and discussions and debates took place. What fun, and how stimulating for the mind. One line of one speech caused hours of debate after hours, defining terms, asking why, what and how, figuring out what God wants, what dogma means, how that translates to life here on earth while we await heaven (hopefully!).

There was inspiration to read more, do more, think more, and act more. From the start of the conference, and Tom Martin's thoughts about social science (and his very helpful description of what the logo of the conference meant) to James O'Keefe's talk about journalism and activism and the role of the independent journalist (just like Chesterton) to Dale's closing cry to live like Jones and Mrs. Jones in a world that denies and disbelieves there is such a normal couple.

If you missed it, or even if you were there, you will probably want the CDs or DVDs or both, a set to own and a set to give away. The videographer will need about a week to process everything, and when the recordings are available, you'll be the first to know.

Next year, St. Louis!

Notes from Joseph Pearce's Talk on The Mistake about Progress

2010-08-07T06:46:00.000-05:00

Joseph Pearce
The Mistake about Progress

“Progress is the mother of problems.” GKC

Joseph doesn’t like the word conservative because so many conservatives are idiots.

Chesterton says that even if you want something to stay the same, you have to keep interfering with it, because otherwise things devolve, if left on their own. (The gate post needing constant re-painting example.)

Reality is not in the process of becoming, whether you think it’s becoming better or worse, it simply is. The laws that govern reality is unchanging. Original sin is as real as thermodynamics. We can’t progress beyond what we are, which is the Image of God.

This age is decaying in terms of its understanding of virtue. Yet, we have these dangerous technological gadgets. Its not a very clever thing to do.

Rousseau’s big thing was that there was no such thing as original sin. He was behind the French Revolution. The danger of that idea is if you can make the system better, the government, the state, the environment, people will become better. Pearce believes Obama thinks this way.

To Chesterton, history isn’t linear. Christ’s incarnation was the center, and everything before it pointed to it, and everything since then, points back to it.

Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man was a response to H.G. Well’s Outline of History, although he never quite says that, it is, says Pearce.

Wells’s assumption is that the world is progressing. Wells’s assumption is that the past was worse or inferior to now.

Chronological snobbery is a bit like racism. You treat people as inferior because of the time which they were born.

DWEM the new acronym, Dead White European Male, progressives dismiss DWEMs, even though it’s a racist attitude.

Progressivism is poisonous.

Richard Aleman on Distributist

2010-08-06T18:12:00.000-05:00

Notes from the talk:
Richard Aleman (Editor of the Distributist Review) speaking on the Mistake about Distributism

What people think distribustism is and isn’t.

Distributism finds it’s base in the church’s social teaching, Rerum Novarum.

Wide ownership makes the best sense politically.

Neither wage slavery nor slavery to the state.

Common errors:
•It’s just another form of capitalism

•It’s just another form of socialism
•Distributist don’t believe in competition

Distributists believe in cooperation, based on uniqueness, creativity, the competition should be healthy.

•Distribustism is dying

Reprints of older books, and new books are being written

Workers must be seen as a partner, paid a living wage, and have the choice to own if he chooses.

How do we start distributism?
American Chesterton society meetings, talk about it, begin with a study group, using the local Chesterton society’s as a model. Meet once a week to learn the form of distrubutism.

Run for politics, run on a distributist platform.

Examine the failures of your local area. School, politics, parents teach your children distributism. Economics for Helen adapted into the homeschool program.

Working on the Distrubutism Catechism, Q&A

Micro-credit lending, community land trust

•We cannot meet large technological needs, and we can’t regain the farms that were lost

Distributists want to restore localism

Mass production can’t be centralized, but if it’s decentralized, it may work.

Richard speaks very quickly.

A community should produce, the essential goods, the majority of goods, in it’s own community.

If a mass producer collapses, so do we.

If a mass producer leaves a community, and it was the small town’s sole source of employment, the town dies.

Cooperatives, worker-owner businesses are the answers.

Cooperative, is a multi-partnership. The employees are the owners.

Utility, construction, utility companies, insurance, law firms, restore the Made in the USA label.

•you can’t change the current culture

Small business is the life source of this country.

David Zach: Futurist

2010-08-05T21:28:00.003-05:00

David Zach spoke about the Mistake about Technology
A Great Many Clever Things: the Mistakes about Technology

Neal Stephenson author The Diamond Age book David recommends.

Mistakes
Cell phones are tools of disconnection, we don’t talk to new people or strangers like we did before. We are afraid of strangers today. WE use cell phones to connect with people we know.

Teens prefer texting to face to face communication.

If you work on a computer, research shows, you touch your computer more than anything else you touch in your life.

The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr multitasking makes everything a distraction.

Distracted, by Maggie Jackson What are we doing to ourselves?

Silence is an endangered species.

If we’re afraid of silence, we’re afraid of ourselves.

The self is becoming empty because of external distractions.

Your attention is your most valuable asset.

We are distracted by the unknown future, the promise of all answers, the seduction of upgrades. We’re afraid of looking at the truth.

We don’t respect eloquence. We tweet.

The Mistake about Pandora

Worldbuilder (a movie on the internet) by Bruce Branit

The conference has begun....

2010-08-05T21:27:00.002-05:00

The conference has begun, old friends have been hugged, new friends have already met and had supper together.

Tom Martin is our opening speaker, and he is speaking on the problem of social sciences.

The good news is that although we don't have live streaming video, we do have video, and DVDs will be on sale along with the audio CDs this year. Yahoo! I think this is excellently good news.

An award will be given, a wine glass that has the inconvience is only an adventure quotation, to the person who has the most inconviences this weekend, donated by Su Morton, who had an inordinate amount of inconviences last year in Seattle.

Clerihew contest: Clerihews are due 12:59pm tomorrow, Friday.

There seems to be no wifi or internet available at this conference, so I'm not sure who will be able to read this but non-conference attendees, unless you, like me, are able to get on in the library or by another of your own private networks.

For those who like stories....

2010-08-03T12:33:00.002-05:00

A Quayment short story for you to enjoy courtesy of Loome...

You may be wondering where the Chesterton connection is here.

That will become apparent eventually. It is rather in the nature of a surprise.

Stay tuned.

Dale in Rome

2010-07-30T20:59:00.000-05:00

88 and 55, or, The Mystery of Repetition

2010-07-29T09:28:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow, Friday, the 30th of July, is the 88th anniversary of the reception of G. K. Chesterton into the Roman Catholic Church. The next day, Saturday, the 31st of July, is the 55th anniversary of my own baptism into the same Mystical Body. I thought this repeated appearance of multiples of eleven to be quite wonderful. Eleven is an interesting number - it is the only prime palindrome which has an even number of digits. (I have a proof for this, but people will moan if I post it here. In other words, "the margin is too small", though it surely is not a problem worthy of Fermat, hee hee. You lit'ry folks can ignore this very "3+4i" math pun. Sorry, I know you EE's call this "3+4j". Ahem.)

Repetition is a curious idea, and it may sound redundant to say that it comes up again and again in GKC's writing. (hee hee) We all know the great law GKC states:

Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
[GKC The Napoleon of Notting Hill CW6:227]

We also recall his triple exemplification with the drama of the spoken word:

[Holbrook Jackson:] XIV. Familiarity breeds not contempt, but indifference.
[GKC] But it can breed surprise. Try saying "Boots" ninety times.
[HJ/GKC Platitudes Undone 15]

There is a truth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature often shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in this very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a single shape until the shape shall turn terrible. ... Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as "dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like "snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition. In the end a dog walks about as startling and undecipherable as Leviathan or Croquemitaine.
[GKC Alarms and Discursions 30-31]

It may sound strange to say that monotony of its nature becomes novelty. But if any one will try the common experiment of saying some ordinary word such as "moon" or "man" about fifty times, he will find that the expression has become extraordinary by sheer repetition. A man has become a strange animal with a name as queer as that of the gnu; and the moon something monstrous like the moon-calf.
[GKC The New Jerusalem CW20:211]

In previous columns I've mentioned the huge repetitions of three words - "the", "of", "and" - which comprise over ten percent of all GKC's writing. I've also mentioned the deeply mystical and significant repeated phrase within GKC's The Everlasting Man, which I found by applying my extension of DNA pattern-matching software to the text:

"Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away."
[GKC TEM CW2:327 and 392, quoting Lk 21:33]

Remember, I am not suggesting this statement applies to GKC. No, I think it is clear (even if utterly unintentional) that this repeated phrase of our Lord's own words is Chesterton's signal homage to our Lord's words: the One Who is Engineer ("Bridge-builder") is also Author, for He granted "a real romance to the world". [GKC TEM CW2:380] Or, to take a far more delightful avenue:

We must certainly be in a novel;
What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters.
[GKC quoted in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 63]

An aside: Remember, too, that "The Everlasting Man" is Chesterton's own mystic title for Jesus Christ. For proof, see The Thing CW3:302.

The mystery of repetition is a terribly common one, even if this sounds confusing to some. I mean that most of life is repetition. Not only in the sense that our bodies are built from the same things applied over and over - both DNA and proteins are polymers, though they are built as words are built (or perhaps I ought to say STORIES are built) not by pure iteration of the same letter, but by judicious selection - indeed, authorship. But we need not even delve so deep. Even from the most casual examination of a human face we see repetition - though we must not carry this idea too far:

Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:285]

In fact, it is the error of Aristotle and of Marx (and many others from the Dark Side of Thought) who try to apply this apparent repetition to Man, thinking that each human is UNimportant since he is just "yet another" proles - existing merely to give more offspring to the State. This error Chesterton corrects with all the emphatic power of Christianity in a most elegant statement:

For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King.
[GKC Charles Dickens CW15:44]

Wow! High drama, for those who can stand it, and a brutal slap against followers of the Dark Power! It's not that we are (from one perspective) just a duplicate, a penny, a proles, existing only to replicate. No; we are IMAGES OF THE KING and therefore have immense value. But then we were told: "the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: you are of more value than many sparrows." [Lk 12:7] If this romance-granting Author (Whose image we bear) "takes such care about Him minor characters" that He tracks even the dull details of every one of our hairs, how much more must He care about what we do. And that takes us to the next aspect of today's exploration.

Repetition is a fact of human life, whether it is in cooking yet another meal, washing yet another load of laundry, making yet another part, or whatever task one is employed in doing. It is a puzzle that so many people think that life - and especially work - must somehow be so dynamically variable... it isn't, not for artists or musicians or authors - who MUST use the same pigments, the same instruments and pitches, the same letters and punctuation over and over and over. What is it people think work is supposed to be? I dunno. But here too GKC gives us instruction:

the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else. He has to put one dull brick on another dull brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another dull figure, and do nothing else. ... the bricklayer cannot put the bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without disaster to himself and others. ... A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.
[GKC ILN Apr 7 1906 CW27:161]

Ahem! That was funny, and insightful, and does apply, but that was NOT the quote I wanted. Excuse me just a moment while I berate the programmer: This stupid software, who wrote it? (Well, I'll just take a look at the code.) Gosh, a computer program has the same lines of stuff over and over again, oh my it looks REALLY BORING to write such drivel, and I thought computer software development was supposed to be GLAMOROUS... Ahem!
Ah, here's the quote I wanted:

...there is one thing that no realist, however daring, however frantic, would venture to depict upon the stage. He may make indecencies walk naked in the open day. He may cry from the housetops the things of shame which humanity has kept secret for centuries. But there is one thing that no dramatist dare produce upon the stage. That thing is the thing called " Work." There is no playwright who would reproduce upon the stage the first four hours of an ordinary clerk's day. Nobody would send up the curtain at 8 o'clock on a man adding up figures, and send it down at 10 o'clock on a man still adding up figures. Even an Ibsenite audience would not support the silent symbolism of three scenes all of which were occupied with the same bricklayer laying bricks. We dare not say in artistic form how much there is of prose in men's lives; and precisely because we cannot say how much there is of prose, we cannot say how much there is of poetry.
[GKC "Ibsen" in A Handful of Authors 140]

But if the bricklayer did not repeatedly lay those bricks, there would be no houses, if the dairyman did not repeatedly milk the cows, there would be no milk, if the programmer did not write drivel, there would be no INTERNET and no bloggs - and the same is true for many (if not all) other forms of employment, even those deemed "artistic" and "free" by the Media! Ah. (More on this mystery another day - it ties into an important idea in one of St. Paul's letters...)

But perhaps the greatest of GKC's studies of repetition is the one in Orthodoxy, which comes up in his brilliant study of what is usually termed "the Laws of Nature" in the chapter called "The Ethics of Elfland". I've quoted it here before - this is the one which has the famous "Beach Boys" quote, the three-word cheer used by the sports teams at Chesterton University (er, actually there's only one - Gype)... and we've studied it at length some time ago. But please read it again, and think about it some more:

...the mere repetition made the things [of the natural world] to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.
...
A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:262-3,263-4]

Now that I've quoted that, let me conclude by giving you two mystical excerpts which deal with baptism. There is some wondrous mystery here, a mystery touching "repetition" - but then is not baptism our entry into Life? Is not that Life a form of Work? Are we not bidden to "Do whatever He tells you"? [See John 2:5] Did not Jesus Himself seek to be about His "Father's business" [Luke 2:49] and did He not spend the next 18 years after He said that working in a carpenter shop? He weren't writing no theology journal articles... oh no. He was about His father's business, making tables and chairs and doors and Useful Things... Very Engineer of Him, oh yes, and very Common Man too, laying bricks for hours on end for the sake of His neighbor.

But I promised two quotes about baptism - one about GKC's own, the other in general. They are very Newman - that is, both tech and lit - which is just like being Augustine, very old and very new. It's a Catholic thing, you see... but you may have to read them several times before they sink in.

Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. I do not allege any significance in the relation of the two buildings; and I indignantly deny that the church was chosen because it needed the whole water-power of West London to turn me into a Christian.
[GKC Autobiography CW16:21]

I know only one scheme that has thus proved its solidity, bestriding lands and ages with its gigantic arches, and carrying everywhere the high river of baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.
[GKC The Thing CW3:156]

Pre-registration for the conference ends today!

2010-07-26T17:48:00.000-05:00

Pre-register today for the conference. Or else!

My Error! Or, "like the Pantheist's Boots"

2010-07-22T09:21:00.003-05:00

As you know, this year is the 100th anniversary of GKC's What's Wrong With the World. Allied to this particular title is a rather famous quote - not THE quote (about "when a man stops believing in God") but another, which so far has not been located. It is said that some newspaper or other asked several authors to give their own answers to the question as to what is wrong with the world, and, the legend says, that GKC responded with this:

Dear Editor:
I am.
Sincerely,
G. K. Chesterton

CAUTION: Please note: to our present knowledge, this is legendary, like "THE quote" and we do not know that GKC actually did such a thing. But it does sound possible. (As you see there isn't a bibliographic reference to the above, as I always put on GKC quotes.)

Clearly, there are many things wrong with the world, and, just as clearly, all too often we are the cause of those faults. It is strange, therefore, that when the usual song about "problem solving skills" is sung by the educologs, they omit this important concept. I cannot fault them too much; I've seen it myself in my own discipline. I've seen tenured faculty who use their powerful computers to typeset their journal articles, because they don't know enough about programming to begin to convert their theory into anything at all. I've seen pompous professors who brag that they can "prove" that programs are "correct" but the library software they sell has major bugs of the kind which are most insidiously difficult to detect... all because they prefer the appearance of academic complexity to the usefulness of simple real-world engineering. (To put it into the classical tongue, Conspici quam prodesse.)

Ah, engineering. It provides the bumper, the thick padding, the safety equipment, for science... It is the mental discipline which assumes there are problems, maybe even unforeseen ones, lurking in our world. It is science made practical: it is the professor dragged, kicking and screaming, from the ivory tower and thrust into the mire of the real world. Not that he abandons his discipline - he must apply others in order to augment his skills. There is a very famous line which demonstrates this:

It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning; but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.
[GKC WWWTW CW4:43]

Engineering is the honest man's reply, like GKC's (if he really did say it): Yes, there IS something wrong, and in some cases, it is I who am wrong - but since I am honest, I hope to do something about it, in the hope of keeping it from happening again. It's the point of Christ saying "Go and sin no more". He could have changed the law - sure, He is God and He wrote the law - but it was more Godly to forgive. (If you want to know more about why He didn't, you need to read GKC about fences in The Thing CW3:157.) Now we are to go and do likewise, even if we are not engineers - because we will most certainly deal with mistakes and flaws and crimes and sins and errors... with what's wrong in the world. And sometimes these errors are a bit worse than a mere error of typography that changes "cosmic" to "comic". [As accurate as that error may be. See GKC ILN June 9 1906 CW27:206]

For example. Here is a famous line of Chesterton's which a very serious student has complained about. "Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false." [GKC ILN Sept 28 1907 CW27:558] But as most of us who balance our own checkbooks know, it is easy to make mistakes in simple addition. Is Chesterton wrong?

Maybe that is not a suitable quote. Let me try one with a known error, yes, where Chesterton really is wrong. Oh, are you upset? Well... there are plenty of others, but I don't know why you are whining. Maybe I have to pull that Caesarea Philippi thing [see Mt 16] and ask: "Who do YOU say that G. K. Chesterton is?" Ah, yes. Very good. You are right; GKC is not God. But let us stay on the topic.

For example, in GKC's masterwork The Everlasting Man we read:

Somewhere along the Ionian coast opposite Crete and the islands was a town of some sort, probably of the sort that we should call a village or hamlet with a wall. It was called Ilion but it came to be called Troy, and the name will never perish from the earth.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:211-2]

At one point in my many explorations, I was curious about something else, and pulled out an atlas - and I found that the Ionian Sea is on the west side of Greece, and the Aegean Sea is on the east. Moreover, Troy was, even in legend, assumed to be on the west coast of Turkey, not the west coast of Greece. So that means...

Is this picky? Maybe a little. Chesterton isn't writing orders for a navy fleet, after all, and most people will guess that the Ionian Sea is somewhere at the eastern end of the Mediterranean - as it is. Yes, it would have been more accurate for him to say the Aegean - but the important thing for us to know is not where Troy was located, but that this little "village or hamlet with a wall" has a name with an enduring meaning to human history.

Here is another interesting and elegant statement of Chesterton's. It is important, too, and we'll explore it further a little later, but for the moment, I want you to look at just one little bit:

Ice is melted into cold water and cold water is heated into hot water; it cannot be all three at once. [see below for citation]

Uh, not quite. Water can be in all three states at once, and this is not some dogmatic lunacy of the Catholic Church, either! One of my other projects involves a number of curious facts about that wonderful substance called water, and one of those curious facts tells us that water certainly can be all three - ice, liquid, and steam - all at once! This happens at the temperature called the "Triple Point" of water, which is 273.16°K (0.01°C, or 32.018 °F) at 610 millibars (according to my CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics).

All right, Doc. What's going on here?

How nice of you to ask. In this case, as in others of this kind, whether in Chesterton or in other authors, we have to be careful about what we are doing. We are NOT trying to "show up" the author as "wrong" - where we take "wrong" to mean "useless" or "untrustworthy". We are not trying to dethrone him, or put him into a "bad light" - what is sometimes called an ad hominem argument. That's Latin for "to the man" - when you argue against a person himself, rather than against the issue at hand. You may not know how this is done, and since I am from the tech side of the world I don't get to see it very often, but I have seen it done, and it will be useful for you to know. So I will write it up for you, and then you can print it out and have it ready for use should the opportunity present itself:

Dr. Thursday's Guide To... (drum roll)
The Ad Hominem Argument.

This is best done in full academic regalia. So get out your frayed old gown with the little beanie, and get 'em on. Don't worry about whether the color matches your degree, people don't know those color codes these days; most of 'em don't even know what color acid turns litmus paper! If your shoes are scuffed, so much the better, but don't be wearing sneakers which will make you look like a student. Your hair ought to be a bit wind-blown, as if you had just been playing Quidditch (hee hee!) - this is easy enough to effect with your hand (DON'T use a comb!), even if you do not have a broom, or don't know what Quidditch is. Your glasses ought to be at the end of your nose. You can take them off and wave them for emphasis - this looks extremely professorial, and will earn you all sorts of brownie points from any deans who happen to be in the audience. If you don't normally wear glasses, get some to keep with you just for this purpose - but not sunglasses, which make you look like a student.

Next, you should obtain a copy of the offending book. This is where you may wish to use a grad student, assuming you can find one who isn't surfing the net or grading your latest test; grad students are quite adept at finding books in the library, and of course it would not DO to have anyone (like a Dean) see you in the library! If a Dean (or, Darwin forbid, the Provost) sees you in such an odd place, it's easy enough to make an excuse, but be sure to speak loud, look annoyed, and wave your glasses.

Now, once you have the offending book, use a little sticky-note to mark the page (and line) with the error. The grad student can usually help here, since most books are now stored in electronic form, though it may take a bit of searching to find the equivalent place in the actual book, but a stern threat or two will work wonders. Of course in certain disciplines, you won't need to actually acquire the book itself, though in that case you will have to implicitly appeal to Authority - or to Technology, which is the same thing. If you are pompous enough no one will notice your hypocrisy - and you can always wave your glasses.

Have the book in your hand when you are speaking, and wave it. Or hold it up, open to the offending page (the one with the sticky note) and point to it. Wave your glasses.

Now, for the important bit - what to say. Please note it's very important to get all this said in one breath, so you may want to practice it beforehand. Practice keeping your face pompous and magisterial; you are RIGHT about this, so don't let your emotion get in the way. All right, ready? Sya this:

"This author was wrong about this..."

[If the author is present, you may for greater effect revise this to "You were wrong about this..."]

Here you cite the book and page with the error, and perhaps quote the offending text with a very snide chuckle, but don't take too long, since you have to say the rest of this on the breath you started with!

"and so you are WRONG about everything else!"

(Now you can take a breath if necessary, but keep going.)

"I don't CARE how right you are elsewhere. It doesn't matter. You were wrong here, so you're wrong everywhere!"

Then you slam the book down, and walk out of the room. If it was a library book, send a grad student to return it to the library eventually.

There. Wasn't that fun? (Yes, I thought so too, but you see, I have actually been there, and seen how it works, but that was a long time ago, and I've got my degree. I live in the real world now, which has other sorts of problems. Seen any cable TV commercials lately? How about them prerolls, guys? Audio levels balanced? You're not pixelating, I hope... Hee hee!)

If that playlet sounds vaguely familiar, I can assure you, I am NOT quoting from GKC's Thursday. But since I happen to like that bit, I will quote if for you so you can compare:

I made myself up into what was meant for a wild exaggeration of the old Professor's dirty old self. When I went into the room full of his supporters I expected to be received with a roar of laughter, or (if they were too far gone) with a roar of indignation at the insult. I cannot describe the surprise I felt when my entrance was received with a respectful silence, followed (when I had first opened my lips) with a murmur of admiration. The curse of the perfect artist had fallen upon me. I had been too subtle, I had been too true. They thought I really was the great Nihilist Professor. I was a healthy minded young man at the time, and I confess that it was a blow. Before I could fully recover, however, two or three of these admirers ran up to me radiating indignation, and told me that a public insult had been put upon me in the next room. I inquired its nature. It seemed that an impertinent fellow had dressed himself up as a preposterous parody of myself. I had drunk more champagne than was good for me, and in a flash of folly I decided to see the situation through. Consequently it was to meet the glare of the company and my own lifted eyebrows and freezing eyes that the real Professor came into the room.
I need hardly say there was a collision. The pessimists all round me looked anxiously from one Professor to the other Professor to see which was really the more feeble. But I won. An old man in poor health, like my rival, could not be expected to be so impressively feeble as a young actor in the prime of life. You see, he really had paralysis, and working within this definite limitation, he couldn't be so jolly paralytic as I was. Then he tried to blast my claims intellectually. I countered that by a very simple dodge. Whenever he said something that nobody but he could understand, I replied with something which I could not even understand myself. "I don't fancy," he said, "that you could have worked out the principle that evolution is only negation, since there inheres in it the introduction of lacunae, which are an essential of differentiation." I replied quite scornfully, "You read all that up in Pinckwerts; the notion that involution functioned eugenically was exposed long ago by Glumpe." It is unnecessary for me to say that there never were such people as Pinckwerts and Glumpe. But the people all round (rather to my surprise) seemed to remember them quite well, and the Professor, finding that the learned and mysterious method left him rather at the mercy of an enemy slightly deficient in scruples, fell back upon a more popular form of wit. "I see," he sneered, "you prevail like the false pig in Aesop." "And you fail," I answered, smiling, "like the hedgehog in Montaigne." Need I say that there is no hedgehog in Montaigne? "Your clap-trap comes off," he said; "so would your beard." I had no intelligent answer to this, which was quite true and rather witty. But I laughed heartily, answered, "Like the Pantheist's boots," at random, and turned on my heel with all the honours of victory. The real Professor was thrown out, but not with violence, though one man tried very patiently to pull off his nose.
[GKC TMWWT CW6:549-51]

Glorious! Some of the best humor in all of GKC. You see, that is the important thing for us to learn. If Chesterton is canonized, it will be due (at least in part) to his strong lessons about pride and humility - and knowing where we fit into the scheme of things. Please, please, I've told you before - if you have not yet read it, please do read (and re-read) GKC's "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" in The Common Man!

What is the point, Doctor? You wonder. Well - we do not throw out the Bible because there are typos in it, or even curiosities of writing caused by an archaic view - the firmament, the motion of the earth, the pillars that hold up the "corners" of the earth and all that. (The correct view was exposed long ago by St. Augustine, but perhaps you think it was Glumpe, and believe in it as much.) I was just struck the other day by the reading where Jesus says "the Queen of the South will rise and condemn this generation". He goes on to say how she came from the "ends of the earth" to see Solomon, yet there is a greater than Solomon here. [Mt 12:42] Do you think that Jesus didn't know the earth was round? Hee hee! Oh my. Do not be confused. I impute no error to our Lord, I am not committing blasphemy. (Compare GKC's famous bit about God writing a book on the Evolution of Grant Allen in The Everlasting Man!) This is a form of talking, and it's obvious to everyone, except the guy in academic robes we heard about a few minutes ago.

Let's try another realm of knowledge. Do you think astronomers get fined for saying "oh what a lovely sunset?" Hee hee! What about Aristotle, that Greek guy that so many people think was so smart. Maybe he was, but you do know what he said? He says that the Milky Way comes from a swamp! Oh yes, it's in his Meteorologica, Book I chapter 8. (See Jaki on this in The Milky Way Chapter 1.) Does that mean we junk all of Aristotle? Not quite - and the same is true for other authors, some of whom have phrases that are just as funny and just as wrong.

But let us resume poking our stick at Chesterton, which is lots more fun - he poked at himself too, you know. So, for a change, let us take an instance where he notes his own error. It is found in the hilarious essay called "The Real Journalist" in the collection of his Daily News essays called A Miscellany of Men. This is a famous case, and I have alluded to it previously. Here is an essay worth study - if not literal memorisation - by every journalist and media-being in the cosmos, as well as every blogger and blogg-commenter. It reveals how easy it is to make mistakes, and how even easier it is to have these mistakes be blown out of proportion. The essay tells the story of how GKC wrote a certain essay, and how, in the heat of the moment, or perhaps we might more charitably say, in the urgency of the situation, he stated that "Shakespeare" had written a certain line of poetry - a line which had, as a matter of fact, been written by "Thomas Gray". (In my own case, several columns ago, when *I* was what is wrong with the world, I had torn the authorship of "Trees" from Joyce Kilmer and assigned it to Rudyard Kipling! Hee hee!)

But GKC's case gets better, and the error is magnified in a way that both Bible scholars and computer scientists can both rejoice in. You see, he tried to "correct" this mistake, and he wrote a letter to the editor in which he made another mistake by spelling the poet's name "Grey".

An aside: Now, if you use just about any form of computer these days, you know how serious the smallest letter, or smallest part of a letter, [see Mt 5:18] can be - when you go to type in your password. It's not only the Ephraimites who can't say "Shibboleth" - see Judges 12:5-6. Ahem!

But that wasn't all that went wrong. This "correction" article was supposed to be titled

"G.K.C." Explains

but it actually appeared under the title

Mr. Chesterton "Explains"

And, as you know about the sometimes emotive use of quotes, that made it far worse! But you'll have to read the essay itself if you want all the details as to what really happened, and why. It is truly funny, and quite instructive as well as admonitory.

Now, I mentioned "engineering", and whined about some abstruse matters of software, and whatever. My point could be brought out by appealing to another sort of engineering, like bridge-building - I might note that John Roebling likely did not envision our modern automobiles crossing his proposed "Brooklyn Bridge" - but he "overdesigned" (as some say) and made the resulting edifice more than sufficiently strong to handle them. (It is worth mentioning here that it is also one of the most elegant of such structures, and well worth your study.) But the point is that in engineering, we must take errors into account. For example: we computer people spend an awful lot of time writing code that (hopefully) will NEVER be used, as it is there only to handle the hundreds of ridiculously unlikely cases of something going wrong! Or, if you don't like that, take your car, and consider that nice smooth paint job, those shiny bumpers... They're not really there to look cool, but to help keep you safe. Or take those circuit breakers... gosh, there are lots of things.

Here's an even more relevant one: you know that roughly every sixth character in all of Chesterton is the BLANK? Also called the SPACE - you know that long thing at the bottom of the keyboard. Don't forget I told you about the smallest letter... in computers, the space is just as important as any other letter or number or symbol, even if you cannot see it! I've told you elsewhere about how the ancient Romans didn't use spaces; they just rantheirwordsupagainsteachother - yeah, EVENONMONUMENTS. Sheesh. But if you have some philosophical aversion to the mystical details of things that no one can see but everyone believes in and relies upon, consider this: Ten percent of Chesterton's total writing consists of three words: "the", "of", "and" - and if you want a quarter of all of Chesterton you can have it with just another handful of words, all very common and boring. Sure, it is rare that any of these working words are critical to the discussion, though I am sure I could find examples where they matter... but the point is that these things are just like the rivets of the Brooklyn Bridge, or those almost-never-used bits of my code. They are there to help hold things together. These tiny things matter, like the space, even if they are almost never seen... BUT if they are gone how quickly will you notice! TRYITAGAINANDSEEHOWMUCHYOURELYONTHATSPACE! It's even worse in speech: try sucking out the silence between words and you get the same effect, like the fine print in a contract... Yo! What did that announcer just say???

The final point is this. It is easy enough to miss such minor details, of spelling, or niceties of grammar, or even more factual matters - (Say, GKC, who DID write "antique roots peep out"? And on what sea did you say Troy was located? How about the Triple Point of water? Hee hee!) The point is to fix such things and go on. We don't deny these things are flaws, but we do not discard the entire work because of them either. We recall the warning about the plank in our own eye, which is too big to be seen. [see "The Three Tools of Death" in The Innocence of Father Brown, also Lk 6:41-2]

And now, since there was something more to that quote about water, I shall give you its conclusion. Since we Chestertonians are always catholic even if we are not Catholic, we ought to consider it very carefully. Dogmatic accuracy is no insurance against a building fire; we need to keep up our study of hydraulics as well as ontology.

Ice is melted into cold water and cold water is heated into hot water; it cannot be all three at once. But this does not make water unreal or even relative; it only means that its being is limited to being one thing at a time. But the fullness of being is everything that it can be; and without it the lesser or approximate forms of being cannot be explained as anything; unless they are explained away as nothing.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:530]

Recall my recent voluminous gurglings about finite state machines? There is here revealed part of the mystery - the mystery of the limitation of being. It helps reveal why a quarter (or more) of Chesterton is working words, and an entire sixth is not even readable at all, being mere empty space. It helps reveal why the Brooklyn Bridge has to be so strong, or why software has so much code that is never executed, or why our bodies are mostly water - though not at its Triple Point, ahem! It even helps explain why God loves us so much, despite our failings, even though we are what is wrong with the world... but there I think I shall let you ponder the matter, and say good-bye for today.

Comment Moderation

2010-07-21T19:45:00.000-05:00

Sorry folks, one bad spam-bot apple got past the word verification and created chaos for me. Until Blogger improves their ability to hold off blog spam, I'll have to put this on moderation. Otherwise, you would see some pretty immoral stuff, and that's not what this blog is all about.

This spam bot was awfully clever. It took words either from the post or from the comments already posted, and re-posted them, sounding almost as if they were contributing to the conversation. If it weren't for their "special" user name, I might not have noticed.

Singer Needed for the ChesterTones

2010-07-16T13:57:00.000-05:00

From Bob Cook:

Are there any other members of the Barbershop Harmony Society planning to attend the 2010 Chesterton Conference? Or anyone who can, and would like to, sing lead (melody) in a Barbershop Style quartet? We need a lead.
The Chestertones, an as yet unrehearsed quartet, had planned to sing, at least in the hallway, at the upcoming conference. However, due to circumstances beyond our control, one of our members has had to drop out. We need a lead.
We plan to sing only 3 songs. They are: My Wild Irish Rose, Let Me Call You Sweetheart, and a newly arranged version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy (in Barbershop Style). The words for Ode to Joy are those of G.K. Chesterton’s poem, from The Flying Inn, Song of Right and Wrong.
I can FedEx the Ode to Joy words and music to any volunteer. The other two songs will be recognized by any Barbershopper as Barber Pole Cats, songs all Barbershoppers know. I can FedEx learning tracks and music to any volunteer for the Pole Cats. Also, the Pole Cats (My Wild Irish Rose, Let Me Call You Sweetheart) are immediately available if you have internet access at http://barbershopharmony.ca/LearningLounge/
If you’d like to join us at the Conference for some singing fun, please volunteer. Contact Bob Cook at 740-703-5651 if you can help us out or have any questions.

Just a little more about that secret treasure...

2010-07-15T08:28:00.001-05:00

Today we'll finish our little glimpse of automata, those fun games which make computing possible. Of course we have not actually explored the subject, but taken a view of the trails from a lookout. I'm not sure why anyone who likes to read would fear this topic, since the things are so interrelated, but then there are a variety of mental diseases around these days. Speaking of diseases in such discussions, I always like to recall this handy little piece of dialog:

"Well, that's all I can tell you about the new religion," went on Flambeau carelessly. "It claims, of course, that it can cure all physical diseases."
"Can it cure the one spiritual disease?" asked Father Brown, with a serious curiosity.
"And what is the one spiritual disease?" asked Flambeau, smiling.
"Oh, thinking one is quite well," said his friend.
[GKC "The Eye of Apollo" in The Innocence of Father Brown]

In line with this, since we ought to strive for humility even while we are striving to enlarge our knowledge and and wisdom, we must also remember the precision teaching GKC gave on that topic:

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself.
[GKC "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach" in The Common Man]

The strange thing about automata theory is that it IS characteristic of literature as well as mathematics, since it underlies the whole realm of words and stories - and games - even though it seems to be so intractable a topic...

The principle is this: that in everything worth having, even in every pleasure, there is a point of pain or tedium that must be survived, so that the pleasure may revive and endure. The joy of battle comes after the first fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes after the bore of learning him; the glow of the sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the sea bath; and the success of the marriage comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All human vows, laws, and contracts are so many ways of surviving with success this breaking point, this instant of potential surrender.
In everything on this earth that is worth doing, there is a stage when no one would do it, except for necessity or honor.
[GKC WWWTW CW4:69]

Yes, the joy of reading Virgil entails the bore of learning Virgil - which means learning the conjugations and declensions and all that... why then should you refuse the joy of automata? Ah, well - alas, I have no time to make such an intricate argument, especially at this intermediate state of things, so let us proceed.

Last week I said we needed to talk a little more about the game-board. I gave you a little example last time, and as we know, good teachers give examples, and then explain the idea or principle using that example. The problem with giving you almost any example of a Finite State Machine or Automaton - our "game" of last week - is that the example contains many uses of the simple ideas - and they are very simple ideas.

It is the true paradox of such fundamental truths, which is why GKC was so insightful with his "too big to be seen" phrase. For example, when we begin to learn to read we pay lots of attention to the letters and their shapes. We learn them first - but then, as soon as we get started actually reading, we stop paying attention to the letters on their own, and begin to pay attention to how they are arranged - we read words and think about words, not the separate letters comprising each word.

The same thing is true about automata - that is, about the "playing board" for our game. But just like the mysterious method by which letters form words, there is a mystery about the board as well. And now I am going to explain it.

The playing board actually consists of two parts. The first is the "places" where your token may reside. In the actual theory we call these "states". Here we must apply our quote about limitation: there are always a finite number - and that number is fixed - that is, decided upon, and unchanging. You must draw your playing board, and once you've drawn it you must play with it - or discard it and and make another. You aren't allowed to edit your board during play! (Imagine a chess game where one player adds an extra row or column, or a card game where a player comes up with the 13 of ampersands, the 20 of roses, or the senator of clubs! (hee hee) In the real study of automata theory, we call this the "Set of States" - and it is always a finite set. Most often when we do this for real in computing, we simply give each state a number, and call the "starting state" zero - you can call it "Go" if you like, and are willing to risk some sort of copyright infringement. Traditionally, we write states as the letter "q" with an integer as a subscript - perhaps because it begins the Latin word quid, meaning "which" - that is which state we're in. But when we draw these states, we just make circles or ovals, and maybe write their names inside. If you like you can think of them as rooms, rather like that murder game with Mr. Mustard in the Conservatory with the lead pipe... ahem. We'll come back to this idea of rooms shortly. But remember, the set of states is a very simple idea, as simple as the rooms of a house or mansion... it's a real mansion, and it so it has a fixed, definite shape, and finite number of rooms.

The second part of our board is what we'll call "the rules of travel". That is, when you are in any given place (or state, or room), and you take up your next little tile with a symbol on it, you must move based on the possible lines which go out of your room. (Yes, you may end up coming right back to the same place - we permit that, even if it's kind of boring during actual play.) Now here is where we get technical - but just a little. It's not very hard, though.

What is a rule of travel? It simply means that when we are in a certain room and we take up a tile with a certain symbol, we must proceed to another certain room. In the theory we call this the "state transition function": that is given the pair which we'll call "an origin-state and a motion-symbol" there is just one single state which corresponds to that pair. That state is called the "destination state". It's a function, which is just another mathematical object... you know, a fancy kind of box, with smaller boxes inside. We look through them to find one where our given pair is in the left-hand box, and whatever state is in the right-hand box is the one we want.

Yeah, yeah, that's SO technical! you whine. It's not. If I wanted to be technical, I can be, and write

s:Q * A ® Q

which says the same thing and far more tidily. But really, I don't want you to worry about that. I want you instead to think about it like the game board. The "rules of travel" are very simple. All it means is that there are pathways that start in each room, and go to other rooms (or perhaps the same room). Each path has written beside it the characters which permit that path to be taken. So when you play, you take your little tiles one at a time, and you move your token according to the rules. Now, if the game is made correctly, you will always know what to do in every case. In other words, you won't try to move to two places at once, or suddenly find that there isn't any possible path for you to take! You'll cry and moan, and toss the game onto the floor - or, if you're a bit more mature, you'll take it back to the store.

Now, these cases are interesting ones... but here is where I must remind you that this is just an introduction to the topic. If you'd like to know more, you'll have to take a course in Automata Theory. You'll be surprised, since you do NOT need lots of math to deal with it. Nor is it exceedingly complex... at least not for Finite State Automata. Why - because of that self-limitation thing! Hee hee! It's wonderful.

But now for the treasure, which is the really grand part of this.

Every computer that exists, that has existed, or that will exist, is necessarily a finite thing. And that means every computer, and (a fortiori) every conceivable program which runs on such computers, can be represented by this simple little idea called a Finite State Automaton.

As you will learn if you ever take a course in this, these FSA are "well-known". That is, we understand what they do - and what they cannot do. We know them so well we are able to describe them formally using symbols, and explore them... and yet every part of computing, that is or that will be, is contained therein.

You are gagging - you are disgusted with me and this topic. You ought not be. Don't you realize that every possible writing - the Gospels and Chesterton and Marx and Aquinas and Nietzsche and Duhem and Belloc and Hitler and Tolkien, adventures and essays and poems and my own columns - anything and everything, good, bad, dull, instructive, misleading - is constructed from a mere handful of symbols? That does not put a stop to creative writing. You might as well say that God's limiting chemistry to about 100 elements puts a stop to creation!

No... this mystery of limit reveals the parallel truth which we need to ponder, whether we build
automata or mix chemicals or write poems about automata or chemicals - or about poetry:

The more simple an idea is, the more it is fertile in variations.
[GKC ILN Dec 14 1907 CW27:607]

Just for your reference, I will summarize the FSA here, but you may ignore this and go to another site to read about some meaningless sports figure or politician or theologian or playwright.... but remember, as you are using your computer, within it you are depending upon these automata.

A Finite State Automaton is a game (mathematical object)

< A, Q, s:Q*A®Q, q₀, Q_f >

where

1. A is the "alphabet" - a box full of tiles, each engraved with a symbol (like scrabble). Or you can think of these as "motion cards": at each move of the game you take the next one and play it.

2. Q is the "set of states" - the regions on the playing board.

3. s is the "state transition function" - the Rules of Motion. These are the pathways between the regions on the playing board, each of which is governed by some symbol from the alphabet. For any particular "origin state" and any particular symbol in the alphabet, you proceed to the "destination state".

4. q₀ is the starting state - or starting place on the board.

5. Q_f are the "final" or winning states. In order to WIN the game, you must be in one of the WINNING regions when you finish your playing tiles. Otherwise you lose.

And now, since you've been so patient and worked so hard to try to have just a tiny bit of acquaintance with this marvel, I will give you a bonus.

The bonus has to do with the "first" computer game - the real progenitor of just about every video game worth playing. That game is called "ADVENT" (short for "ADVENTURE"). It is a bunch of rooms, and some rooms have treasure, and others have little dwarves which throw knives at you (and sometimes kill you!) and mazes and a pirate and all sorts of other fun things. It had no graphics and was all done by simple text - but it was fun. All modern video games in which you struggle through mazes or complex layers of geography are derived from that game.

BUT...

All of them can easily be reduced to a FSA!!! Yes, think about it: your "states" are the rooms, or locations in the maze. The "state-transition function" is just "rules of travel" - how you may move from place to place. Instead of an alphabet, you yourself are the "input" or playing tiles, since you choose the next move...

Well, what does that mean? It means that in grasping the idea of FSA, you grasp the Ultimate Master Key to all such games. You understand how they exist, and what their underlying structure is... you can in fact write you own games, and you do not even need a computer!

This, of course, is why I said you can make them at home, and they are great gifts... you merely need the discipline and care to make sure you do not build an impossible arrangement.

This, incidentally, gives some insight into plot-design and other topics relating to fiction - and translation:

...no man has ever reproduced the atmosphere and magic of one single word by the use of another word. Nobody could put the exact equivalent of 'revisit thus the glimpses of the moon' into any other English words; and he certainly could not put it into German or Russian or Chinese words. It is this separation that makes necessary such intermediate explanations as these; it may be that the Tower of Babel was indeed the chief tragedy of mankind. But anyhow, it is strictly true that we can translate anything in reason. We cannot translate anything that is beyond reason; like the way in which mere sound and spelling can be a spell.
[GKC Chaucer CW18:317]

I mention translation because one of the three uses of automata is to translate - the other two are generating and recognizing, which we have seen in our example: you win when you recognize a winning pattern. (The changes to make a translator or a generator are trivial, and you might wish to work them out for yourself.)

But I see I am out of time for today, and so I will let you ponder all this until next time.

Remember: with automata theory you are touching the fundamental structure which underlies language itself - and be grateful for this secret treasure!

Let's Play a Game: FSA were made for Man...

2010-07-08T10:24:00.004-05:00

I had debated today's topic several times since last week - especially because yesterday was the Nones of July, and that is a very special day for me and a major day in the Saga I am writing... but I must not tease you with that. Also (speaking of Sagas) last evening I watched a movie called "National Treasure" which had some hilarious moments besides some goofy distortions of history and physics... so perhaps maybe there is hope even for my Saga, which distorts geography as well. Mine has some cool hidden treasures too, and very difficult cyphers - and even more awesome history to go with my distorted geography. Ahem.

Having brought up geography, let us therefore resume my distorted literary presentation of automata theory in a Chestertonian style. This may sound like a game - but then it is a game. Most of us know a fair number of games - let us ignore typical sports for the time being, and stick with what are typically called "board games". As I was saying, one of the delights of a childhood Christmas is to receive a new game. You open it - there's the usual board which you unfold and put on the table (after your mom yells to tidy it up first!) Underneath the board is a funny little container, probably plastic, with the various parts in their compartments - and the all-critical instruction book. One or two games might have come with something out of the ordinary - a little egg-timer, perhaps, or something with a spring you wound up, or maybe it needed two batteries. But most of the time there were these things: the board, and the instructions, and the parts - and finally the thing that made it a GAME and not something else: THE PLAYERS. Here, a certain famous line pops into my head - "Tennis was made for Man and not Man for Tennis." [GKC The Thing CW3:168] In other words, there was something which made the game live - the Latins called that the anima or soul. In our modern computer game world, the word "animation" is used to signify that something is in motion. We'll talk about that more in a bit. But for now I want to call your attention as a Chestertonian to something larger.

It is, as I delight in recalling for you, something "too big to be noticed" [See "The Three Tools of Death" in The Innocence of Father Brown.] You may recall that last week I said how the mystery of the box as a container (we tech people call this "set theory") was merely the very curious idea that there is no reason why a "container" cannot contain OTHER containers! And so it is. In our particular idea of some general board game, we have a box - the one you found underneath the Christmas tree and unwrapped and pried open. But within that box we had at least one smaller "box" - perhaps the playing tokens, maybe money or dice or other items used in the game.

But this is not just a box - as if it were a trunk, or perhaps a suitcase. It is (as the Scholastics would phrase it) a thing-in-itself. Granted, it is a complex of simpler items. But the box, as it came to you under the Christmas tree and unwrapped, is a Whole Game. (We ignore for today the possibility that it was defective from the factory, another day we can consider this interesting case, which alters my larger topic from a Scientific into an Engineering Matter.)

Since I am trying to lecture you about something called the Finite State Automaton, which is NOT a Board Game (though it could be, as you will eventually learn), you will want to know what the correct word is for this very special sort of container. Yes, it is a "set" just as your board game is a "box" - but it is a special sort of set, because it contains an organized collection of things. Other experts might use other terms, but I will use the term "mathematical object" - that is nothing more than an organized collection of things. This idea is very simple - just think back to some Christmas gift, of some board game with lots of components - or even one of those awesome "art kits" with all sorts of stuff, all nestled in their little plastic depressions in the box. You have the sense that the box contains an arrangement of items, but they are organized. What a wonderful word!

Why is this word so wonderful? What is the mystery of "organization"? Is it simply a synonym for "order"? Well - no. There's something else added. It's another one of those Greek roots - "erg" - which means work or deed or action. The arrangement is made for the sake of DOING something. This sense is very powerful, and is one of the hidden delights of such diverse things as an orderly kitchen, or workshop, or the glory of the board game or art kit when first opened... everything is there, waiting to be used - to be worked with.

Now, at last, we have our various ideas - all except the last one. If this thing, this finite state automaton, is meant to be worked with, what is it we're going to accomplish when we work it?

Ah. This is the very famous question, another from the depths of the Middle Ages, which I myself learned from my mother: dic cur hic = "tell why you're here". Why do this? What is the Purpose?

We can just as readily ask what is the purpose of a board game - and the simple kid's answer is "to have fun" - but there is a simpler one, which exists at the level of the game, and not at the level of the child. Which is why some kids passionately hate board games, or sports - I think of the famous comic "Calvin" who detested the real game of baseball and favored his variants with 12th base or where the outfielder may tackle the goalie... such correctives would do much to ameliorate the corruption in our world... Ahem. But let us proceed. The point is that the "reason" for the game (to be distinguished from "the reason for John or Sally playing the game") is to find out who wins. And the finite state automaton has the very same reason: it is a device arranged to find out who wins.

This is no mere entertainment - or if it is, then all human actions are entertainment, and we might as well change our species from Homo sapiens (Man, the wise) to be Homo ludens (Man, the player). Sure, we can say this by some awkward analogy: An engineer works to design a bridge to "win" - that is, he wins if it stays up. I think of the fabulous Brooklyn Bridge in New York, opened in 1883, or the even more amazing Roman bridges built about two millennia ago. In order to play that game of Bridge (which is not played with 52 cards and a dummy) you need to know a lot about phsyics and materials and design and things like that - it's not an easy game to play. So let us take something far simpler - an example which you encounter from time to time when you use a computer. You are, let us say, need to tell the computer how many copies of this column you wish to print. There is a little box where you may type the quantity. This is a nice little game, perhaps too simple for you to bother with - but someone needs to bother with it. The milk in your refrigerator had to come from a cow - and someone needed to know about cows for you to get it. In the same way, someone needs to know how to play this very simple little game called "You win if you type in a valid number". Granted, you need to know what makes a "valid" number - but this is lots easier than deciding what makes a valid bridge. Or even a valid cow.

So. Here's our game - the "Valid Number Game". It comes in a box, and we unpack it. What's inside?

Oh boy oh boy!

Let's see. There's a playing board...

And there are a stack of tiles, just like those in Scrabble, but there are all the characters on your computer keyboard, the ampersand and F12 and stuff like that. There is your playing piece... I will let that up to your imagination. Then there's this little instruction book.

1. Draw a series of tiles - choose as many as you like - and put them in a row in front of you face down.

2. Place your playing piece on the blue-ringed starting location labelled "Start".

3. When it is your turn, take the leftmost tile from your row, and turn it over. Depending on what that character is, move to the correct location on the board. You must move your playing piece along the track that leads away from your current location, depending on the tile in play - and leave your piece in the new location as the track may direct. It may happen that you will not move from your present location; this is permissible, but only when there is such a track. After you have moved, you must discard that tile; your row will now be one tile shorter than it had been.

4. When you have no more tiles in your row, you WIN if you are in a green circle, you LOSE if you are in any other color.

And that's all. What a nice little game. It's very kindergarten, yes, of course it is. But we can make it lots more complicated... but not just now.

Instead, let's see what we have in our game box.
(1) a playing board
(2) a bunch of tiles with various symbols on them.
(3) a rule-book
(4) a place to start
(5) and places to win

We shall have to talk more - especially about that playing board - but not today.

You might try playing this yourself - you'll have to make your own tiles, but like Chesterton's Gype, the whole point is that you do it yourself. It's anti-Chestertonian to "buy" such a thing. Which is another reason why automata are so Chestertonian - they are so easy, it is silly to buy them... you might want some assistance if you have a really big one to build, but that's different. Not even the great master-builder John Roebling tried to span the East River by himself.

Hey. If you think all this is not Chestertonian, here are a few quotes which may help out:

"What is the shortest journey from one place to the same place?"
["Homesick at Home" in TCL; also CW14:64

The object of a street is to lead from one place to another...
[GKC NNH CW6:321]

...it is the definition of a story that it ends differently; that it begins in one place and ends in another.
[GKC TEM CW2:378]

For my part, I think it rather more foolish merely to rush from one place to another and back again, and pay money for wind (not to mention dust) than to pay money for wine, with its not quite extinct accompaniment of wit.
[GKC Sidelights CW21:491]

People go from one place to another place; but not from one place to another place on the road to everywhere else.
[GKC Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens CW15:344]

The story begins in one place and ends in another place, and there is no real connection between the beginning and the end except a biographical connection.
[ibid]

Celebrating the Fourth on the Fifth

2010-07-05T08:38:00.003-05:00

Speaking of "verbal fireworks" - Chesterton would have laughed out loud about the silliness of celebrating the Fourth of July on the fifth of July - so perhaps you will enjoy this excerpt which is quite humorous - but also very thought-provoking.

--Dr. Thursday

Prohibition is a joke; and its most optimistic supporters can only pretend that it is a practical joke. But the absurdity of a foreign nation having to take seriously what the natives take flippantly adds a sort of final flourish of frivolity to this triple tangle of falsity. Take first the case of the Fourth of July. The Anglo-American rhetoric in honour of it has run so long in official ruts that it has become utterly formal and fictitious. We know exactly what the British Minister and the American Ambassador will say about the Fourth of July, and we know, alas! that, considered as history or practical prophecy, it would be more suitable to the First of April. Independence Day is, in fact, the most fantastic of all feasts. The Americans celebrate it because they have forgotten what it meant. The English now celebrate it because they have never found out what it meant. It is comic enough, in all conscience, that an Empire should be called upon to jump for joy because it has lost its largest colonies, and dance with never-ending delight on receiving the repeated news of its own defeat. But it is funnier still that it should show a warm and generous agreement with the ideals of the victors; ideals which, rightly or wrongly, the English disbelieved in then, and mostly disbelieve in still. The orators tell us a hundred times that the English and the Americans had ultimately the same ideal of liberty; which is exactly what they did not have. They had two opposite ideals of liberty, for both of which there is a great deal to be said. One was the aristocratic ideal of liberty, with its sense of humour, its instinct for leisure, its loose local custom, and casual compromise. The other was the democratic ideal of liberty, with its dogmatic abstractions, its generalizations about millions, its universal type of citizen, and its wide level of human dignity. I believe I am one of the very few Englishmen who really do believe in the doctrine of the Fourth of July. That is why I am one of the very few Englishmen who flatly refuse to celebrate it. I have enthusiastic admiration for Jefferson; I have a very warm respect for Lord North. But to pretend that Jefferson, but for a mere misunderstanding, would have been as Imperial as Lord North, is a lie. To pretend that Lord North, but for a mere blunder, would have been as democratic as Jefferson, is a lie. Lord North, as a matter of fact, was a very good specimen of an English gentleman; but the ideal of an English gentleman and of an American citizen are not the same and never will be, and it is nonsense and clap-trap to pretend that they are. I am enough of a democrat to wish seriously that England had developed as a democracy; but I do not think the case is met by America developing snobbery.
[GKC ILN July 31 1926 CW34:134-5]

The FSA - One of the Secret Treasures of Life

2010-07-01T09:45:00.003-05:00

Ah, yes - today is the Kalends of July, and also a Thursday. Those of you who are audacious travellers are no doubt busy climbing Sneffels, or, perhaps, already descending into its depths. But I don't know how you could be reading this if you are. Perhaps when you return. Ahem.

Last time I wandered at great length down the middle of the road, trying to suggest an idea about "middle" - and thereby suggest Grammar as a fundamental Problem-Solving Skill. Unfortunately some readers will most likely think I am making a very complex figure of speech from the so-called "Three Ways" (or Trivium) which puts Grammar together with Rhetoric and something else - oh, yeah, Logic - as the first things one ought to learn. Dumb, sir - very dumb. There are other things which must precede these as I shall show... Ahem! But I have no time to debate such trivia today. There are larger things to do, and we ought to be doing them while we can.

Doing what? you ask.

Well - to put it simply, doing automata theory in a Chesterton blogg.

I have been pondering this matter for a little - I've told you I have other things going on, and time seems to vanish past my fingertips - but the thing strikes me as so poetic that I must do it. In fact, the answer struck me as I was searching GKC for a motif-phrase for the next episode of my Saga. I found something, it was quite good, and in fact you can blame it for my resolve to proceed with this topic. Here it is:

"There are two Christian virtues," said Hope with dogmatic emphasis, "the first is unselfishness, and the other is cheerfulness."
[GKC "Wine Of Cana" in CW14:562]

I was told long ago that I think of myself as "God's Gift to Computer Science" - and that is true. We are God's gifts, after all - so we ought to strive to live so as to be worth of that position. But do I keep my knowledge of finite state machines to myself, gloating that I know about them, and YOU don't? Horrors, no! How can I be a Doctor and not teach? (Latin docere = to teach) Or do I find automata dull and boring - and lightyears away from usefulness? Of course not! I like this subject very much, and I wish others to know it and delight in it.

Well - come on, Doctor (you moan) Do you expect the Common Man to prove the Pumping Lemma? Or demonstrate the algorithm to convert a non-deterministic automaton into a deterministic one? No. Hardly. But I told you previously about my friend who said he "knew" 20 or 30 computer languages, and proceeded to list their names. I may be a tech, and only by courtesy a "literary man" since I read GKC. But I know a little about language (English, I mean) and about grammar, and about literature. I can tell the difference between a verb and an essay, or a dependent clause and a metaphor - I even can distinguish a superlative adjective from dramatis personae. If you, O reader, can grasp why Hamlet is not a preposition, and why one cannot conjugate a sonnet, why should you not have a small sense of the far more splendid - and in fact primordial distinctions between sets and variables and functions - or have some insight into the grand device we call a "mathematical object"? Especially when I assure you that all these things are very easy to grasp - simple enough for children to handle, and much less dangerous than certain forms of literature - and that these ideas, as mathematical as they may be, are the strong and elegant foundations - the basement jammed full of utilities - water, heat, lighting and building support - on which most other intellectual work is built.

Oh yes - the Three Ways start in one place - and that place is mathematical. Yet, it is thoroughly literary as well, as you shall see.

Now, my poor distressed and fearful reader, you bring Chesterton against me. I shall quote him for you:

It is certainly time that someone protested, apart altogether from the merits of this particular play, against the absurd assumption which seems to exist in the minds of many people, that any good novel not only may be, but must be, put upon the stage. That a good novel should make a good play is not only rare, it is intrinsically unlikely. If it is a good novel it will probably make a bad play. We should see this at a glance in connection with any other two forms of art. Anybody can see that if a thing is a good sonnet it will probably be a bad song. Anybody can see that if a thing is a good three-volume novel it will probably be a bad epic in twelve books. We all realise that if a thing is a good wall-paper the chances are that it will be a rather loud waistcoat. Nobody proposes to adapt carpets into curtains. Yet all this is in no way more essentially false or foolish than the perpetual assumption that the art of fiction is akin to the art of drama, and that therefore the merits of the former will provide material for the latter.
[GKC ILN June 30 1906 CW27:222-3]

You are right - but I am not doing this. I am not proposing to "mathematize" Hamlet - or Chesterton. I am trying, very poorly, to convey a grand truth from my world by using terms from yours. The Literary Man uses terms to describe and distinguish various kinds of writing and their even more varied components - even though the elements of writing are just a mere handful of things, as simple as the tiles upon a Scrabble Board. But from these profoundly mystical and powerful keys we humans have built so many incredible things - the Psalms, the Divine Comedy, The Phantom Tollbooth - Sherlock Holmes - all made from letters, with a handful of things like punctuation and judicious use of space. A very large part of the art of writing is knowing your medium - your tools. You may not know the name of this pigment or that oddly shaped brush, just as you may not know what a "synecdoche" or a "dependent clause" is - even while you are using them.

That is my point. You can begin to have a basic knowledge of automata - and once you have it, you will begin to see more of even the world of literature.

It will also help immunize you against Stupidity - against claiming powers for a computer which the computer does not have, and cannot have, whether in our present day or at any future time. It will keep you from bringing the wrong measure when you wish to understand something - against applying "reason" to things which are "patterns" or "intelligence" to "computation". You will have some sense of what the computer really is - and it is a very simple thing inside, even though it is large and powerful and useful in some sense, it is small and weak and exceedingly dull in others. Sort of like this:

Who will deny that height, or the appearance of height, is one of the effects of architecture? Who has not read or said or felt that some wall seemed too enormous for any mortals to have made, that some domes seemed to occupy heaven, or that some spire seemed to strike him out of the sky? But who, on the other hand, ever said that his sonnet was printed higher up on the page than somebody else's sonnet? Who ever either praised or disliked a piece of verse according to its vertical longitude? Who ever said, "My sonnet occupied five volumes of the Times, but you should see it pasted all in one piece"? Who ever said, "I have written the tallest triolet on earth"?
[GKC ILN Jul 11 1914 CW30:125]

Did you note the hilarious pons asinorum there? Oh... you didn't. Gosh, and here I thought you were the literary man.

A sonnet is always only 14 lines long, so it's not really possible to have it occupy five volumes of a newspaper. And, in case you didn't know, a pons asinorum is a trick question for some field or specialization which will sound impossibly complex to an outsider but is trivially simple to even a beginner in the field.

So - you see, I am trying to build a very goofy looking simile - and yet it is not goofy at all. Since all our human language is finite, to study Language is to study Automata Theory - and vice versa. And the nice thing is that as you learn more about your own language, you will also learn a little about computers, and begin to realize their proper place in the world.

In order to begin, I must give you some tools. These tools are well-known in my own world, but will probably not make any sense to you literary people. However, you already have very similar tools, and use them constantly - you just don't know they come from my world. Let us start with the very famous little thing called the VARIABLE. Please note I am NOT going to give FORMAL precise statements today. This is just a introduction. We don't lecture on the rhyme schemes of sonnets (versus triolets for example) when we are just beginning to address poetry in the general sense - versus prose, or versus a sentence, or the parts of speech. And with the term "variable" we are at the level of "parts of speech". (Actually I wonder what the generic word is for the other structures within language - what is the general term for "sentence" and "verb" and "essay" and "paragraph" and "phrase" and....? Maybe something like "logoid"? Hmmm, another research problem.)

People get scared with this term "variable" as they get scared with some other words we use. I find it rather sad:

Because I could not bear to make
An Algebraist cry
I gazed with interest at X
And never thought of Why.
[GKC from "True Sympathy or Prevention Of Cruelty To Teachers" CW10:486]

The funny thing about the "variable" in math is this. It has just the same power and use as the word "pronoun" in grammar - and we all know how powerful they are! A pronoun is a name - well, maybe a nickname - for something else. But then that's all WORDS are. "Cow" is not a cow - it is a word that stands for the bovine creature that gives milk, the mystic progenitor of cheese. "It" is an incredibly powerful word, it stands for one thing in one place, and something else in another place - it's tricky that way, even sometimes two different things in the same sentence - but it makes sense when we use it that way. For math people, X is not a number (yes, I know it meant 10 for the Romans!) A variable is like a pronoun: X stands for a number. But for our purposes today, X might also stand for other things - and is far more like a pronoun than the silly term "place-holder" the grade-school teachers use.

Variables, it might be said, are the angelic pronouns. For the pronouns of human language typically vary depending on who is speaking (or writing) - maybe we OUGHT to call them variables, since they vary! I know very little Vietnamese, but I do know that the word for "I" depends on who you are in relation to who you are speaking with: a child calls himself con (son) when he addresses his father, but "anh" (older brother) when he addresses his younger sister - if you don't know the person you call yourself "tôi" (servant), as courtesy demands you honor others - which is why they call the unknown stranger ông (grandfather) or bà (grandmother) regardless of their actual ages, for it is the height of honor to refer to someone as old. (Oh yes.)

A pronoun, after all, is really just a verbal trick of finger-pointing - you indicate who or what you mean by pointing, and we have agreed to let certain sounds (or symbols) stand for the gesture. It permits us to hold onto the things we are talking about - even though the hold is a very loose one. A variable is like a pronoun - it is a way of holding onto something loosely, as if by an angelic glance. And that is the idea I wish you to have. We want to understand that a variable is somehow like a kind of pointer. It points to something. When GKC's Algebraist uses it, as most high school students will grasp, it points to a number. But for us today, it may point to something different.

But what? In order to answer that, we need the second tool. If this "variable" is a kind of pronoun - something that stands for a noun - then we need our box full of nouns. I rather like the word "box" (meaning a carton or container, not the act of fist-fighting) but that isn't the tech term we use. We use one of the most over-loaded words in English - the word "set" - in its sense of "a collection of items". This word "set" has a nasty name, something vaguely despised, almost dated. It is like a "lava lamp" or "tie-dying" or "disco" - people always think of it as "modern" math. But they forget the word "modern" is NOT modern - it was invented in the Middle Ages. And the word "set" is not modern either, even if modern math rather tainted it for too many casual readers. I could try to give a technical explanation but that may be too annoying. Besides, the idea is simple very simple - and you all know what Chesterton said about that sort of thing:

The more simple an idea is, the more it is fertile in variations.
[GKC ILN Dec 14 1907 CW27:607]

You know how some grade school teachers "simplify" the word "variable" to "place-holder". We could "simplify" the word "set" to something even grade school teachers might possibly know: the term "box".

A set is a box. In other words, it's a thing which holds OTHER THINGS.

And these boxes are very awesome boxes. They're like computers - that is, they are MAGIC boxes, because you can produce multiple copies of the things inside them - and do stuff with them.

They are also magic because they can contain the most amazing things. And if you know even a little about computers, you may already grasp this idea - the strange truth that one of the things that a box can contain is ANOTHER box. (In today's computers, a directory can itself contain another directory... but there are other sorts of containing which can go on... er... another time I will tell you a scary secret about this idea, but not today.)

A set is a container for other things, which could themselves be containers. I know that sounds either overwhelmingly simple, or trivially complex - but all you need to think about is moving cartons into which you put several shoeboxes, which contain matchboxes and little candy boxes and stuff like that... Maybe you collect stamps, or tiny shells, or sequins, or pebbles. Or maybe we're talking about one of those COOL Christmas presents like the old "Erector Sets" with lots of metal parts and nuts-and-bolts and wheels and axles and motors - it all came in a really neat box with lots of little indentations where everything fit...

But I have run out of time. I will have to proceed further next time.

Just so you will have a little more to read, I will give you the motivating quote from which I drew today's title. This excerpt will also give you a very good Chestertonian introduction into automata theory - which is really just a very simple and fun game... but I shall let you ponder this until next week.

The ordinary poetic description of the first dreams of life is a description of mere longing for larger and larger horizons. The imagination is supposed to work towards the infinite; though in that sense the infinite is the opposite of the imagination. For the imagination deals with an image. And an image is in its nature a thing that has an outline and, therefore, a limit. Now I will maintain, paradoxical as it may seem, that the child does not desire merely to fall out of the window, or even to fly through the air or to be drowned in the sea. When he wishes to go to other places, they are still places, even if nobody has ever been there. But, in truth, the case is much stronger than that. It is plain on the face of the facts that the child is positively in love with limits. He uses his imagination to invent imaginary limits. The nurse and the governess have never told him that it is his moral duty to step on alternate paving-stones. He deliberately deprives this world of half its paving-stones, in order to exult in a challenge that he has offered to himself. I played that kind of game with myself all over the mats and boards and carpets of the house; and, at the risk of being detained during his Majesty's pleasure, I will admit that I often play it still. In that sense I have constantly tried to cut down the actual space at my disposal; to divide and subdivide, into these happy prisons, the house in which I was quite free to run wild.
And I believe that there is in this psychological freak a truth without which the whole modern world is missing its main opportunity. If we look at the favourite nursery romances, or at least if we have the patience to look at them twice, we shall find that they all really support this view; even when they have largely been accepted as supporting the opposite view. The charm of Robinson Crusoe is not in the fact that he could find his way to a remote island, but in the fact that he could not find any way of getting away from it. It is that fact which gives an intensive interest and excitement to all the things that he had with him on the island; the axe and the parrot and the guns, and the little hoard of grain. The tale of "Treasure Island" is not the record of a vague desire to go on a sea voyage for one's health. It ends where it began; and it began with Stevenson drawing a map of the island, with all the bays and capes cut out as clearly as fretwork. And the eternal interest of the Noah's Ark, considered as a toy, consists in its complete suggestion of compactness and isolation; of creatures so comically remote and fantastic being all locked up in one box; as if Noah had been told to pack up the sun and moon with his luggage. In other words, it is exactly the same game that I have played myself, by piling all the things I wanted on a sofa, and imagining that the carpet around me was the surrounding sea.
This game of self-limitation is one of the secret treasures of life. As it says in the little manuals about such sports, the game is played in several forms. One very good way of playing it is to look at the nearest book-case, and wonder whether you would find sufficient entertainment in that chance collection, even if you had no other books. But always it is dominated by this principle of division and restriction, which begins with the game played by the child with the paving-stones. But I dwell upon it here because it must be understood as something real and rooted, so far as I am concerned, in order that the other views I have offered about these things may make any sort of sense. If anybody chooses to say that I have founded all my social philosophy on the antics of a baby, I am quite satisfied to bow and smile.
[GKC ILN Feb 8 1930 CW35:253-4, emphasis added]

A Postscript:
In case you were wondering, yes - I forgot to explain what "FSA" is. An FSA is a Finite State Automaton - it is the simplest of the kinds of automata, and in the final analysis, the only one which really matters, since we cannot buy infinite amounts of memory. In future columns I will tell you more about the FSA and you'll get to see how much fun they are... they make excellent gifts, and are very inexpensive. And you do NOT need a computer to make them... but you'll have to stop back if you want to know how. It's fun - you'll see.
--Dr. T.

Call for Chestertonian Papers

2010-06-29T15:11:00.000-05:00

This from Jill:

Once again, I'm asking for you to share the information about the Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association conference. This year it will be held in Washington, DC. This will mark the third year of an official Chesterton panel at this event, a panel that was precipiated in the fall of 2007, when I presented a paper on Tolkien and Chesterton on the well-established Tolkien/Lewis panel. It is only thanks to Chesterton admirers and scholars of ACS that I've been able to make this little panel a reality.

In the official Call for Papers, you'll note the Chesterton panel (G.K. Chesterton
Jill Kriegel, Florida Atlantic University. Please note that although the CFP states a submission deadline of June 30, there is now an extension until July 19. I humbly apologize for this still-late notice. I admit that the whirlwind of finishing up my dissertation distracted me from other professional tasks that also deserved attention.

Please, at your convenience, disseminate this information on your blog...and in any other way you can. If anyone mentions needing a little time beyond 7/19, I believe I can get a little wiggle room.

Thanks, blessings, Jill

Call for Papers (CFP) MAPACA 2010
CROWNE PLAZA HOTEL, ALEXANDRIA, VA
October 28, 2010 to October 31, 2010

The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) invites academics, graduate and undergraduate students, independent scholars, and artists to submit papers for the annual conference, to be held in Alexandria, VA, in 2010. Those interested in presenting at the conference are invited to submit ONE proposal or panel to ONE of the areas listed below by June 30, 2010. Include a brief bio with your proposal. Single papers, as well as 3- or 4-person panels and roundtables, are encouraged. For further information, updates on areas and area chairs, please visit MAPACA’s web site at www.mapaca.net.

Dawn Eden Completes her Master's Thesis with Chesterton

2010-06-25T05:22:00.004-05:00

This in from Kamilla:

I thought this might be a nice notice for the blog. Dawn Eden's master's thesis, "Towards a 'Climate of Chastity': Bringing Catechesis on the Theology of the Body into the Hermeneutic of Continuity" begins with a quote from Orthodoxy, "G. K. Chesterton's vision of the Church as a 'heavenly chariot [that] flies thundering through the ages," swerving "to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles," was never truer than in the Magisterium's responses to the moral upheavals of the 20th century."

Cool!

A copy of her thesis can be obtained by following the link on this page:

The Dawn Patrol

Kamilla

Journey to the Middle (or, halfway between Gamma and ut)

2010-06-24T09:45:00.003-05:00

Today is the last Thursday in June, and also the feast of the birthday of St. John the Baptist. As usual, I am nearly overwhelmed with thoughts and material to apply to these thoughts - while at the same time I am overwhelmed with other urgencies to keep me from expressing them to you. But I shall do what I can while I have time.

First, I wish to give my traditional warning which must be given at this point in the year - and it is a warning which reminds us of that marvellous contraption called the Calendar, that so very Roman a thing - a scheme of feasts and fasts, but also a scheme of anticipation. Those big husky Romans, who so often seem to be the adults in the ancient world, were very much like little children when it came to their calendars. That is because unlike ours, their calendars were count-downs, not count-ups... but I have no time to lecture on that. My point of bringing up the old Roman calendar scheme is to remind you - that is, to give my traditional warning - about the approach of that most glorious day, the Kalends of July. You can keep your Ides of March, with its murder in the Forum. Give me the Kalends of July, with its mysterious depths...

You do not recall the allusion? Alas for you!

There are many great messages which have appeared in history - and in fiction, and I should list them here but I will unduly lengthen this essay. One of the greatest of these, one which epitomises some of my points from last week about problem solving, is the famous parchment, just 3 inches by 5, found within the Heims-Kringla of Snorre Tarleson, and scrawled with incomprehensible runes. After much difficulties, the message was found to read as follows:

In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delebat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges.
Kod feci.
Arne Saknussem.

Which dog Latin being translated gives the following, one of the great secret messages of all literature:

Descend into the crater of Yocul of Sneffels which the shadow of Scartaris caresses, before the Kalends of July, audacious traveler, and you will reach the center of the earth.
I did it.
Arne Saknussemm

Yes - next Thursday is the Kalends of July - so if you are going to try to get to Sneffels-jokull to follow Arne Sakneussemm - yes, it is REALLY there, check a map - you had better get over to Iceland real soon. I am not sure if the eruption of that other jokull (which Verne tells us is Icelandic for "glacier") will give us any grief, but it should be quite an adventure in any case.

You don't know what I am talking about? Hurry to the library and read Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne.

Now, of course you wonder - what did Chesterton have to say about such fantasies? You know as well as I do that he loved mysteries, so much so that he wrote them. You know as well as I do that he often expressed his thanks for the work of Arthur Conan Doyle - and even admiration for the writing of sci-fi guys like H. G. Wells: there's a very famous allusion to Wells' The Time Machine in GKC's The Everlasting Man, a lovely sed contra in the Scholastic form against Evolution and all its pomps.... but what about Verne? Well, there is not a lot but there is a little, and what there is, is delightful:

It would be grand (as in Jules Verne) to fire a cannonball at the moon; but would it not be grander to build a railway to the moon?
[GKC "The Wings of Stone" in Alarms and Discursions]

And there is this, somewhat more intricate, and I will give you the entire paragraph for your delight:

I have just been entertaining myself with the last sensational story by the author of The Yellow Room, which was probably the best detective tale of our time, except Mr. Bentley's admirable novel, Trent's Last Case. The name of the author of The Yellow Room is Gaston Leroux; I have sometimes wondered whether it is the alternative nom de plume of the writer called Maurice Leblanc who gives us the stories about Arsene Lupin, the gentleman burglar. There would be something very symmetrical in the inversion by which the red gentleman always writes about a detective, and the white gentleman always writes about a criminal. But I have no serious reason to suppose the red and white combination to be anything but a coincidence; and the tales are of two rather different types. Those of Gaston the Red are more strictly of the type of the mystery story, in the sense of resolving a single and central mystery. Those of Maurice the White are more properly adventure stories, in the sense of resolving a rapid succession of immediate difficulties. This is inherent in the position of the hero; the detective is always outside the event, while the criminal is inside the event. Some would express it by saying that the policeman is always outside the house when the burglar is inside the house. But there is one very French quality which both these French writers share, even when their writing is very far from their best. It is a spirit of definition which is itself not easy to define. To say it is scientific will only suggest that it is slow. It is much truer to say it is military; that is, it is something that has to be both scientific and swift. It can be seen in much greater Frenchmen, as compared with men still greater who were not Frenchmen. Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, for instance, both wrote fairy-tales of science; Mr. Wells has much the larger mind and interest in life; but he often lacks one power which Jules Verne possesses supremely - the power of going to the point. Verne is very French in his rigid relevancy; Wells is very English in his rich irrelevance. He is there as English as Dickens, the best passages in whose stories are the stoppages, and even stopgaps. In a truly French tale there are no stoppages; every word, however dull, is deliberate, or directed towards the end.
[GKC "The Domesticity of Detectives" in The Uses of Diversity

It is this sort of thing which I wish to inspire - no, not that my writing is like that - but I mean to urge you to attempt to treat each word, however dull, as being deliberate and directed to the end.

That is why I want you to consider that word "middle" which I put in the title - a word which alluded to "Center" - but which I chose for other - what some call "pedagogical" - reasons.

The middle often is the center. And often the center is akin to the ends, or at least in harmony with them. But sometimes the center (or middle) is very much at odds with the ends. Since today is the feast of St. John the Baptist, you ought to go about your business singing the famous Do-re-me song from "The Sound of Music" - or, preferably, the far more appropriate song called "Ut queant laxis":

[from Elson's Music Dictionary, 21. For more see here.)

Ut queant laxis
resonare fibris
mira gestorum
famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
labii reatum,
Sancte Joannes.

That is,

That thy servants may be able to sing thydeeds of wonder with pleasant voices, remove, O holy John, the guilt of our sin-polluted lips.

[Matthew Britt, OSB, The Hymns of the breviary and Missal256-7]

This hymn was written by Paul the Deacon (720-799) and was chosen by Guido of Arezzo (990-1050) for the syllabic naming of the notes of the scale (given in bold).
Now, what is the middle between ut (the old name for "do") and Gamma (which also indicates the same note, middle C) ? It lies halfway between "fa" and "sol" - what the chromatic crowd call "F-sharp". This note, you may know, makes a dissonance with C (the augmented fourth), and you get the scary diminshed seventh (C-D#-F#-A) if you put two of them together... but let us proceed on our journey.

You may get a certain feeling of latent humor here - and you should. There's a schoolboy delight in realizing the foundation-keys of music arise in an ancient hymn to St. John the Baptist, and there's more where that came from. Chesterton uses a schoolboy error to warn us of the paradoxical dangers of the "middle":

All thinking people for thousands of years have agreed that, when all is said and done, there is such a thing as a golden mean, though perhaps the particular phrase is not very satisfactory. The true ideal is, rather, equilibrium, or, in other words, uprightness. There is something rather mean about the word "mean"; yet it is by no means easy to suggest a substitute devoid of such idle associations. No one can well be expected to talk idealistically about his "middle"; "balance" is associated with arithmetic and finance; while "medium" is associated with Spiritualism and with some sorts of gum. The schoolboy made a good shot at it when he translated "medio tutissimus ibis" as "the ibis is always safest in the middle." But under whatever form we take it, that ibis of the higher moderation, a chivalric and passionate moderation, must always be the crest of Christendom and of all sane civilisation. Unless that sagacious bird is allowed to be in the middle, there will be no place for the pelican of charity, the owl of wisdom, or the dove of peace.
[GKC Jan 20 1912 CW29:226]

The Latin "medio tutissimus ibis" means "You will go more safely in the middle" and I am told is from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Here is some fodder for those who hunt for Chestertonian error. Does GKC urge us to stay in the middle, or to stay at the edge? Doesn't he tell us how Christianity had "a healthy hatred of pink"? [Orth CW1:302] Obviously we are not done with our journey to the middle.

Indeed. This is why I moaned last week about "problem-solving skills". Here is the same thing. When I first contemplated today's essay, I wanted to give some sort of brief introduction to automata theory - not to scare you, but to attract you. Instead, when I realized it was nearing the Kalends of July, and saw the mystic union of thought centering on the "center", I saw an even larger treasure to point towards. And yet, I find I am half-way to my desire!

For the real mystery of the middle is in grammar, which is of a deeper stratum than the mathematics of "middle" which we can simply express as (a+b)/2, and grammar is of the same order of thought as automata. In fact, for finite purposes, the two are one - a machine or automaton (the singular of "automata") is shown to be IDENTICAL to its grammar, and vice versa... but now I am like a lit'ry scholar boasting of why the Soothsayer bids Caesar "beware the Ides of March" - and why it wasn't just a copyist's error for "the Ideas of March" - or for the "Nones of April"... so let us defer that. Instead, I must tell you a very brief story, which may help.

Once I happened to meet a certain person who had taken some sort of introductory class which mentioned "computers" or something like that. Perhaps he felt somewhat uneasy in meeting me, an experienced computing professional, though I was then not yet a Doctor of computer science. But he wanted to show that he had truly learned something in that class, and indeed he was very excited about having taken it. So he asked me, "How many computer languages do you know?"

And I responded, "Oh, I'm pretty good at three or four. Maybe five."

To which he answered, "Well, I know over twenty."

And then he proceeded to list them.

You see, he meant he knew the NAMES of those languages - whereas I meant their USE. I could read them and write in them. He knew their names, and nothing more besides.

Now, when it comes to human languages, as soon as one begins to study them from within, one obtains a universal key to others - the key which is called GRAMMAR. (This, of course, is one of the primordial "problem-solving skills" - and hence it is hated by the moderns who find it loathsome instead of thrilling...) As soon as you know enough to grasp the sense of something like "word" or "sentence" or "verb" you have the master key to other things - yes, even to computing... but we must not go there today.

It is that hilarious word "verb" to which I must call your attention. No, not the ibis of safety, but rather the puzzle set up by the bratty little kid called "Calvin" (who played with a stuffed tiger called "Hobbes"). One of the more interesting strips went something like this:

Calvin: I like to verb words.
Hobbes: What?
Calvin: I take a noun and put verb endings on it.
Hobbes: (looks confused)
Calvin: Verbing weirds language.
Hobbes: Eventually we can make language an impediment to communication.
[quoted from memory]

Of course I felt a bit sad for Calvin, since poor English is so periphrastic - even in the best case, there's only five possible forms for a verb: eat/eats/eating/ate/eaten. And some other languages like Vietnamese have only one. But imagine if he had been speaking in Latin! Wow. Or even better - in Greek.

Now, here, I warn you. I admit to knowing ABOUT Greek - a very little ABOUT Greek. I do not pretend to KNOW Greek. You may recall what Chesterton says about this:

I myself have little Latin and less Greek. But I know enough Greek to know the meaning of the second syllable of "enthusiasm," and I know it to be the key to this and every other discussion.
[GKC The Thing CW3:139]

The second syllable, in case you did not know, means "God". I also have little Latin and less Greek, but I have learned some interesting things about these languages, and one of the most interesting is about the Greek verb. Greek seems, in almost every way, to be a far more powerful and delicate tool than English. It always seems to have something extra, something which we don't have in English, and would not even think about having. It was startling enough when I found out their nouns had an additional number. (That's the grammar word, not the math word!) You know, we can have one cat or several cats, one mouse or seveal mice - we have singular and plural.

The Greek noun has something called the DUAL. (I am told English used to have it also, it shows up in some odd ways, when things regularly come in pairs, and why there's a mess in the uses of "between" and "among". Ahem.) What a handy idea! Greeks can have cat-2, (I don't know the real ending, so I write it this way). Having cat-2 is twice having one cat, and fewer than having several cats. Feel free to substitute the animal of your choice, if you prefer hippogriffs or dragons, use them: "A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs." [GKC Heretics CW1:72]

Now, if that wasn't enough, to make extra endings for your nouns and pronouns (and adjectives and articles) to indicate one, or two, or many - the verbs are even more elaborate!

Of course verbs have to have the dual number. That proves handy for a husband-and-wife to speak with the dual voice - what a grand homage this makes to the sacrament of matrimony. (Which reminds me: let us not forget the anniversary of Gilbert and Frances is coming up next week...)

Greek also has multiple moods - not just indicative and subjunctive - who even knows what subjunctive is in English these days? (If I were a teacher... ahem.) And there are extra tenses, which someone like Marty McFly might have found useful when he went "back to the future"... I'm still not sure when "Aorist" fits in, but then I've never been sure about perfect and imperfect either. (If I could just get that flux capacitor to work, hmm.... where am I going to get 1.21 gigawatts?)

But here's the really stunning one, the one you've been waiting for.

The English verb has two voices: active and passive. Active is when I act: "I wash the car." Passive is when I am acted upon: "As a baby I was washed by my mother."

But - the Greek verb has three voices. Guess what the third one is called.

Yes. It's called the Middle Voice. It means I act upon myself: "I wash myself every morning."

Now, that's another handy problem solving skill - and you didn't even have to go to Iceland.

Schedule Changes for ChesterTen

2010-06-22T16:22:00.000-05:00

This just in from Dale Ahlquist:

A schedule change at the conference:

Msgr. Swetland, from the host institution, can’t be there. He’s just taken a new job: President of Seton Hall University.

Dr. William Marshner, a theology professor from Christendom College to speak instead on “What’s Wrong with Theology?” (He’s brilliant. It will be a great talk.)

Joseph Pearce is moved to Friday evening, thereby moving Tom Martin to Thursday evening, and so Dale's talk is getting kicked to Saturday afternoon.

GKC and Problem-Solving Skills

2010-06-17T09:40:00.001-05:00

Having just examined the schedule of topics for this year's Moveable Feast (also known as The Chesterton Conference) I had thought it would be fun to do a series of essays orthogonal to the usual talks on the schedule. You know, instead of "the Mistake about Science" have "the Mistake about Literature" or instead of "the Mistake about Technology" have "the Mistake about Philosophy" - but such bitter sarcasm is not suitable for our use. We have larger things to do here, and should first consider our own mistakes before we take up those of others - whether they are truly mistakes, or just our own flawed interpretations. This is why the Scholastics worked so hard at writing up the arguments of their opponents: it is a very humbling method, and besides you may be surprised. First, sometimes you find that your opponent is right. Second, sometimes you may find that your opponent has formulated his own counterargument for you. It's quite a time-saver. You may wonder whether any of that is Chestertonian. It is, and it shows up in a very strange place... it's something I am still researching, but I keep getting diverted from that particular study. Ahem. Here's the quote:

I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murder. I didn't actually kill the men by material means; but that's not the point. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material means. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realised that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action. It was once suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a sort of religious exercise. I believe he got it from Pope Leo XIII, who was always rather a hero of mine.
[GKC "The Secret Of Father Brown" in The Secret of Father Brown]

There's far more we could say about Mistakes... in pondering the pleasant little word game called "proof-texting" (I think that is the usual term) I began to see a very interesting way of applying the methods of the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem - well, its style, or maybe its results - to other things like the Faith and Art - yes, even to Literature. But I shall save that for another time. Instead, I'd like to take this rather seething verbal porridge and do something else with it. It may be a good deal less controversial than the sort of thing I've been hinting at - but then again it may be worse. At the least, it is a bit easier to write about, and I think a good deal more humorous.

So... let us begin. what am I talking about when I say "GKC and Problem-Solving Skills"?

Since we are Scholastic in attitude (let us hope) we expect to find a definition of this odd phrase - but that is the one thing that never seems to be presented to us by those who insist on it so vehemently. The one thing that seems clear to me is that whatever a Problem-Solving Skill is, it is nothing like any of the usual subjects I learned in grade school, nor like the famous old Trivium and Quadrivium. Nor does it mean what we mean in computer science about the classical methods for problem-solving. (Yes, doesn't it sound funny to use the term "classical" when referring to computer science?) But then people like to say how the typical grade school student must become "technically competent" - when the most they learn about computers is how to double-click the mouse. I really expected they would begin to learn Automata Theory or at least Boolean Algebra... but I must not get ahead of myself.

No, I am NOT trying to re-write, or even re-tell, Chesterton's argument in What's Wrong With the World. Nor am I trying to rebut the usual nonsense as argued in the so-called graduate schools of education. Rather, I wish to do something else - make a practical suggestion or two, and begin the process of pointing to the real problem-solving skills - which (as Father Brown would say) are "too large to be seen". [See "The Three Tools of Death" in The Innocence of Father Brown]

The first required Skill is to understand the problem - any problem. Does this sound tautological? Well... perhaps - but it is an instance of the "too large to be seen" trait. You might also call it the ostrich-with-its-head-in-the-sand effect. Obviously, if you don't know there is a problem, you can never begin to solve it. If you didn't know there were strange dark lines in the spectrum of the sun, you'd never wonder why they are there... yet that is the modest and dull beginning of the concept of "quantum" - the keystone of modern atomic and nuclear science, and the explanation of many mysteries of chemistry. But there is a more grand truth than that to learn from those dark lines: they tell us the true composition of the sun itself! Yes, there is a message in the light from the sun, as Chesterton noted of Alice Meynell:

She could always find things to think about; even on a sick bed in a darkened room, where the shadow of a bird on the blind was more than the bird itself, she said, because it was a message from the sun.
[GKC Autobiography CW16:269]

But we need not go so far, into science or into space, for an example. If you do not know these very symbols -
AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz
- the marvellous and grand Alphabet - you are in a much worse position than Alice Meynell on her sickbed. You cannot get a message at all.

So if the first Skill is Understanding - that is, the first Mental Skill - we immediately have the result that the first Practical Skill must therefore be Reading. Yes, we can extend this concept to the general idea of any form of natural language - speech, Morse, Ann Sullivan's hand-signals, the interesting ideas proposed in "The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd" in GKC's The Club of Queer Trades, and so forth - but since you are READING this, we shall apply synecdoche and let the message of the printed word stand for the whole realm of human communication.

In making our selections - that of Understanding and of Reading - we have made a significant advance upon our topic. In fact, we are really finished. The key to problem-solving - at the very least, the problem solving which anyone can expect from a young child - is simply the mystery of what the Middle Ages called "The Appeal To Authority". Chesterton has a lovely bit on this which we examined at length some time ago...

When your father told you, walking about the garden, that bees stung or that roses smelt sweet, you did not talk of taking the best out of his philosophy. When the bees stung you, you did not call it an entertaining coincidence. When the rose smelt sweet you did not say "My father is a rude, barbaric symbol, enshrining (perhaps unconsciously) the deep delicate truths that flowers smell." No: you believed your father, because you had found him to be a living fountain of facts, a thing that really knew more than you; a thing that would tell you truth to-morrow, as well as to-day. And if this was true of your father, it was even truer of your mother; at least it was true of mine...
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:360]

Ah, but so many people will whine about this - the famous Appeal To Authority - even though they are compelled to abide by it even as they whine - or they would by no means be comprehensible to others. It is the truth lurking in Chesterton's great epigram:

Free speech is a paradox.
[GKC Browning]

But even that will not soothe - because they fear that the Authority people like Chesterton or the far sillier and duller writer you are reading presently mean is THE POPE. No, this does NOT mean every child in grade school must instantly become a Roman Catholic! You need to read it a bit more slowly and think about it. What is the Appeal to Authority? It simply means that the First (and often the Last) form of Problem Solving is GO AND SEE WHAT SOMEONE ELSE DID THE LAST TIME HE HAD SUCH A PROBLEM. And that means "go and read it".

Now, you may already be quite good at reading, even if you most likely haven't yet read enough Chesterton. Indeed, you may need to be re-reading Chesterton. But it's not so much that we should resort to Chesterton as our first authority when we have a problem. (This is what we could call the "Mistake About Chesterton" - alas, some forget that GKC followed Jesus Christ. It's all written up in his book about St. Francis, I won't repeat it here.) But I didn't want to go that deep. Rather, I was thinking of an interesting bit I happened to encounter, which is yet another example of How To Be Chestertonian. You may dispose of all my rantings in today's column, but please do read this bit:

As there is a thing called intensive cultivation, so there ought to be a thing called intensive reading; the reading of a sentence at a time, so as to feel the full weight of the common words we use. It would resemble, more than anything else, the verbal vigilance used in the atrocious task of proofreading, on which I have been engaged for some days; that task in which one must be always on the look-out for the rising sun appearing as a rising bun, and in which the powdered flunkey of romance sent out to call a cab must be watched over to see that he does not call a cat instead. But while the proofreader must be on the lookout for words that make nonsense, the intensive reader should be on the look-out for words that make sense, and seek to extract the real sense of them. If he takes any quite ordinary sentence, such as "Mary had a little lamb," he will find vistas of branching thought in every word. The word "Mary" reveals a forest of legends, creeds, and controversies. The word "had" is the pivot on which Socialism, Capitalism, Syndicalism, and the whole dizzy wheel of our industrial age is perpetually turning. The word "little" opens the bottomless chasms of the philosophic arguments about relativity and differences of degree: as well as suggesting, when taken with its context, the mystery of affectionate diminutives and the love of limited things. At first sight it seems needless to speak of a little lamb, lambs being seldom gigantesque. But the poet talks of a "little" lamb as the patriot talks of a "tight little" island; because we all make a thing little when we want to make much of it. And as for the word "lamb," there really seems to be nothing from hagiology to housekeeping that could not be talked about in connection with it. There is something more in a word than its first derivation or its last definition. There is its value, the power and magic in it; and the learned even more than the unlearned seem to-day to be singularly listless and reckless about the value of words.
[GKC ILN Sept 21 1912 CW29:361-2]

All right - now read it again. Then think about it - and try to use it yourself. (Take a stab at that "Free speech is a paradox" just for the sheer thrill of the effect.) And you thought you understood what reading was all about? Something you learned when you were little, and hardly give a thought to, as you browse through the web-sites and flip through the newspapers and magazines? You may be surprised at how powerful a problem-solving tool it can be... but you need to know more about your tools. (Notice, you are doing it now...)

A Deep, Dark, Cryptic, Thing

2010-06-10T09:47:00.002-05:00

Oh, I wish I had time to write all the things I want to write to you today! But I can only write a little, and then I have to go and do ... uh ... other things. Like writing. In particular, I would like to give you some of the presently-under-development episode of the Great Saga I am writing - but that would not be fair, since you'd have to read a lot more first, since there are certain, er, mechanical or maybe I mean to say dramatic aspects about the order in which you read the thing. I mean, come ON people - you can't read about the road to Emmaus until after you've read about the road to Calvary! Remember how Dickens points out that Marley was dead, to begin with? Or take the famous episode in Acts of the Apostles about the Eunuch and Philip. It's sort of like that. But, rather like Virgil (if not Philip) I can give you some hints. And yes, it is very, very Chestertonian.

You see, what I am writing is rather like an Italian dinner. It's about Family, it's about Tradition. It's about very normal and natural things - like food - which are brought together in remarkably inventive ways. There are a lot of very simple things in my story, some of which may remind you of other stories - or perhaps of The Story - since every story must carry its brand-mark of The Story, or it is no more than a lie, or what I like to call "Thesaurus-in-a-Blender": words blended and torn and thrown together, without rhyme or reason. And we know who has to rescue Rhyme and Reason - a small boy. Ahem.

But let us get back to Chesterton.

One of the many many threads of Story which I am weaving is a certain tantalising line from one of the Father Brown stories. It is, unfortunately, fiction, and yet it is so steeped with a strong perfume of truth that... well. It has that tang of long-simmered tomato sauce, ah...

Say, Doc, didn't you tell us you were going to try to stop writing these things before lunch?

Yeah, well. Anyway, here is the line:

...in the coffin is a chain with a cross, common enough to look at, but with a certain secret symbol on the back found on only one other cross in the world. It is from the arcana of the very earliest Church and is supposed to indicate St. Peter setting up his See at Antioch before he came to Rome.
[GKC "The Curse of the Golden Cross" in The Incredulity of Father Brown]

Ah, please read that again and I hope you might feel a thrill as I do: "from the arcana of the very earliest Church ... St. Peter setting up his See..."

Now, there is a reality about this. Not about a cryptic symbol on the back of a cross, not about Antioch. A reality which is so much more profound it ought to be the origin point for dozens of stories, whether Catholic or Christian or merely secular. There really is a place wherein lies arcana from the very earliest Church.

It is in (or below) the crypt of St. Peter's basilica in Roma.

I am not going to review this architectural wonder, or the various studies (and debates) about it. It's a bit too fascinating just now for me to try that. Maybe another day. It would be rather like trying to write a journal article on the aerodynamics of Santa's sleigh, or on the geology of Orodruin and Sammath Naur. Or even on the ontological joke of the "aletheiometer", that poor atheist's handheld God. Oh, how I laughed when I heard of that! I thought of two ideas at once: one was GKC's famous aphorism about computers:

"No machine can lie," said Father Brown, "nor can it tell the truth."
[GKC "The Mistake of the Machine" in The Wisdom of Father Brown]

And of course the other is the famous epigram he quotes in his amazing essay on the Papacy:

There is a famous saying which to some has seemed lacking in reverence, though in fact it is a support of one important part of religion: "if God had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent Him." It is not at all unlike some of the daring questions with which St. Thomas Aquinas begins his great defence of the faith.
[GKC The Thing CW3:325]

No sooner does that unimaginative writer deny God than he immediately conjures Him up, if only in a hand-held form. No, I never read the book, and cannot even recall the title, but I heard that there was such a thing, and have been laughing ever since, it's really quite witty.

But the point of my essay today is this deep dark secret of the crypt, and the even darker one of the grave. Not just the one deep beneath St. Peter's - which as I said I hope to write about as time may permit. But MY grave, and yours. It may not be in a crypt, except in what we might call a grammatical sense. Ah, how to say what I mean? Hmm... It's a pity English is so periphrastic. Some days I wish I had a tool like the very lovely "Dative of Purpose" that Latin has. I need to put it into the Dative, because, you see, there is a Purpose for a grave, and that is storage...

Every church ought to have a crypt, because a crypt is handy for storing things...
[John O'Connor, Father Brown on Chesterton 19]

Yes, in case you didn't know, Father O'Connor was the real priest from whom GKC designed Father Brown - just as I am told there was a Dr. Bell from whom the never-sufficiently-to-be-praised Arthur Conan Doyle designed Sherlock Holmes. Ahem.

Now what is the point of this Dative of Purpose (of a grave) being "storage"?

There is something very amazing I learned from one of the books I have read recently about the archaeological explorations under St. Peter's. My gosh I would be here for weeks if I told you all of it, there's so many splendid things! So many, many ideas, layers and cross-links and revisions in three-space, hints of the growth akin to that in the developing fetus, all shot through with the sense of the sacred, the reverent, the clever, the criminal, the destructive, the artistic, and so much more... But the best of all is what I wish to tell you about. For it proclaims the VERY SAME MESSAGE which G. K. Chesterton proclaims in his masterwork, The Everlasting Man.

It's not a very archaeological matter, except in that it was observed by archaeologists. It's not even all that scientific, or all that literary, or even all that theological, though of course as in the very best things (like that Italian dinner) it is a subtle and sagacious blend of them. It's very short, and so easy enough to contemplate:

...it contains an undoubted Christian grave. The name and the span of years are no longer preserved, only the words "Anno(s)" and the decisive, though somewhat mutilated "Deposita". The use of the word deponere for burial is for practical purposes exclusively Christian. The body is entrusted to the earth but only as a depository, that is, on condition that it may be recalled. This simple word thus encloses a belief in the resurrection of the body.
[Engelbert Kirschbaum, S. J. The Tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul 32]

You recall the parallel line in Chesterton... it's perhaps the most grand line of so many grand lines:

Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:382]

You've got to expect this sort of thing. It's the whole thrill of the Story, don't you know? I must stop here, or I will be writing a whole book about it, and I have another book to be writing just now - besides, you can read a far better rendering in TEM just a few pages back, where he says "if there be indeed a God, his creation could hardly have reached any other culmination than this granting of a real romance to the world." (CW2:380)

The point is that our graves, even if they don't have deposita or another part of the verb deponere, really are "for deposit only". There's a way out, and like The Story, they really ought to have that wonderful and thrilling line that reads:
To Be Continued...

Now, now - that's not the end of our story today. I really wish I could give you more about the marvels of that exploration beneath St. Peter's... it's something which all but shouts "Chesterton" at me. But then of course that's because GKC was always speaking of our Lord, of God...

VOICES

The axe falls on the wood in thuds, "God, God."
The cry of the rook, "God," answers it
The crack of the fire on the hearth, the voice of the brook, say the same name;
All things, dog, cat, fiddle, baby,
Wind, breaker, sea, thunderclap
Repeat in a thousand languages -
God.
[GKC, collected in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 64]

I also wish I could give you more of my Saga - or even just a short story, perhaps based in the same world - but then I am not sure whether people would like to have this column distorted by fiction. I can always post it on my story-blogg, but, well, I'll see if you have any comments to make about that. It depends on how soon I come to the conclusion of the present episode. But for now, we'll proceed. Incidentally, speaking of the present, don't forget tomorrow is the feast of the Sacred Heart - perhaps I will write about that next week, since I am too far behind today to try to do it now. And Saturday is the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. These are the last two lingering gleams of light from Easter, the last of the "moveable feasts" which shift through the calendar depending on the moon and sun. Also, I am told that there is information now available about another "moveable feast" which is called names like "ChesterCon" and other things. It is already less than two months away... and it may be that I shall get there this year - in which case I shall delight in meeting any of you who may also be attending. It is in God's hands...

ChesterTen Conference Registration Open!

2010-06-08T22:17:00.002-05:00

The Solution of a Large Place

2010-06-03T08:56:00.001-05:00

It's a DEUCE of a business to have two calendars to track feast days with! Today, as "Feria V Post Festum Sanctissimae Trinitatis", is the Feast of the Most Holy Body of Christ, the famous "Corpus Christi" for which St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the office:

The Corpus Christi Office is like some old musical instrument, quaintly and carefully inlaid with many coloured stones and metals; the author has gathered remote texts about pasture and fruition like rare herbs; there is a notable lack of the loud and obvious in the harmony; and the whole is strung with two strong Latin lyrics.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:509]

Of course, in some parts of the world, this feast is transferred to Sunday, and thus we don't get the famous "Sunday in the Octave of Corpus Christi" - the feast day on which G. K. Chesterton died. Which is a shame, not only liturgically - since there are elegant and very deep foundation-type reasons for the arrangement of feast days... do you know why Christmas "floats" through every day of the week and Easter is tied to Sunday? Ah. Well, you can do that one for homework. But there is another loss, and this one even those who have no interest in liturgy or celebrations can commiserate with us about.

You see, the Introit for the "Sunday in the Octave of Corpus Christi" has a famous Chesterton pun, which was reprinted on his memorial card. Here it is:

Factus est Dominus protector meus, et eduxit me in latitudinem: salvum me fecit, quoniam voluit me. Diligam te, Domine, virtus mea: Dominus firmamentum meum, et refugium meum, et liberator meus. [Ps 17:19-20, 2-3]

The Lord became my protector and he brought me forth into a large place. He saved me because he was well pleased with me. I will love Thee O Lord my strength. The Lord is my firmament and my refuge and my deliverer.

A "LARGE" place.. .I should say! Well, it is quite consistent with what our Lord told us, isn't it? "My father's mansion has many dwelling places"... of course people like Aquinas and GKC no doubt get larger ones - but we are glad for that. (I've heard a rumor that Little St. Thérèse has the largest room of all... but then I really ought not spread these things around. Hee hee)

So - whether you consider Corpus Christi today, or Sunday, we'll talk about the mystery just a little now, and you can read it today or save it for Sunday, or both. There are one or two famous lines which I've quoted before - two which leap out in my own memory:

As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room.

We have got to explain somehow that the great mysteries like the Blessed Trinity or the Blessed Sacrament are the starting-points for trains of thought far more stimulating, subtle and even individual ... to accept the Logos as a truth is to be in the atmosphere of the absolute, not only with St. John the Evangelist, but with Plato and all the great mystics of the world. ... To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections.
[GKC The Thing CW2:180, 299-300]

There's a good bit more in that book, and some very nice things in his book on Aquinas - but if you want a handy research project, try collecting GKC's thoughts on the Sacraments. You will be impressed.

But the one quote which perhaps gives us more of GKC's inward views (outside of his poetry) is the very famous conclusion to "The Insoluble Problem" - which is NOT his commentary on the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem, hee hee. Here you go:

[Father Brown] raised his eyes and saw through the veil of incense smoke and of twinkling lights that Benediction was drawing to its end while the procession waited. The sense of accumulated riches of time and tradition pressed past him like a crowd moving in rank after rank, through unending centuries; and high above them all, like a garland of unfading flames, like the sun of our mortal midnight, the great monstrance blazed against the darkness of the vaulted shadows, as it blazes against the black enigma of the universe. For some are convinced that this enigma also is an Insoluble Problem. And others have equal certitude that it has but one solution.
[GKC "The Insoluble Problem" in The Scandal of Father Brown]

The only other one I shall give you today - since I must leave you rather abruptly, alas - is this other, which is quite relevant but sadly very poorly known, since it is from the uncollected collection in CW14:

Marjory was watching him keenly: she had just had a gleam of hope. His eyes were slowly filling with the pale blue fire she knew well: it was so he used to look when she read him a poem, or when the sunset grew red and gold over the wooded hill. At such moments he would say something which she couldn't understand. At length the words came, with a kind of timid radiance.
"May I have jam?"
"Certainly," she said, raising her eyebrows wearily.
He only smiled ravenously, but she felt sure that if any earthly chair had been high enough he would have kicked his legs. There was another silence.
"Some fellows like butter and jam," said the religious enthusiast of the morning's conversation. "I think that's beastly."
"The main benefit of existence," said Marjory bitterly, "seems to be eating."
"Hardly the main benefit surely," said Petersen calmly, "though I agree with you that it is a neglected branch of the poetry of daily life. The song of birds, the sight of stars, the scent of flowers, all these weak. admit are a divine revelation, why not the taste of jam?"
"Not very poetical to my fancy," said Marjory, scornfully.
"It is uncultivated," said Petersen, "but a time may come when it will be elaborated into an art as rich and varied as music or painting. People will say, 'There is an undercurrent of pathos in this gravy, despite its frivolity,' or 'Have you tasted that passionate rebellious pudding? Ethically I think it's dangerous.' After all, eating has a grander basis than the arts of the others senses, for it is absolutely necessary to existence: it is the bricks and mortar of the Temple of the Spirit."
And he took a large bite out of the bread and jam.
[GKC "The Man With Two Legs" in CW14:786-7]

Why the deuce (you ask) do I quote THAT?
The answer is very simple. GKC provided it elsewhere:

Mythology had many sins; but it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:308]

It all comes down to whether we're going to have a God Who "pervades the universe" or one Who can walk into the room: "I stand at the door and knock. If you open to Me, I shall come in and sit down and we shall eat together" [see Apo/Rev 3:20]Let us pray that He shall lead us, like GKC into a Large Place, as the priest calls, just before he administers the sacrament of Corpus Christi: "Blessed are they that are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb." [ibid 19:9]

"Twice on Thursdays"

2010-05-27T09:01:00.001-05:00

I was dipping into the Pooh stories last evening, and noticed several little things which made me think of GKC. Something about "twice on Thursdays", and how the opposite of an "introduction" is a "contradiction". And how Owl could spell "Tuesday" and many other things. Ahem.

Anyway, today May 27 is the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury. No, not the "Late have I loved thee" Augustine, the former heretic whose mother was Monica and who prayed and wept for YEARS until he converted - he's Augustine of Hippo. This Augustine was sent to England... There's a famous quote, which some find strangely insulting, though of course it isn't, or rather it is insulting, but not in the way one thinks. It's very curious. If anything, the laugh is on Father Brown (or rather on Chesterton), but then he was smarter than his interlocutor:

"As I say, if you're English, you ought really to be on my side against these Dagos, anyhow. Oh, I'm not one of those who talk tosh about Anglo-Saxons; but there is such a third as history. You can always claim that America got her civilization from England."

"Also, to temper our pride," said Father Brown? "we must always admit that England got her civilization from Dagos."

Again there glowed in the other's mind the exasperated sense that his interlocutor was fencing with him, and fencing on the wrong side, in some secret and evasive way; and he curtly professed a failure to comprehend.

"Well, there was a Dago, or possibly a Wop, called Julius Caesar," said Father Brown; "he was afterwards killed in a stabbing match; you know these Dagos always use knives. And there was another one called Augustine, who brought Christianity to our little island; and really, I don't think we should have had much civilization without those two."
[GKC "The Scandal of Father Brown"]

Some perhaps will think this is not appropriate - but then they have missed the point. It's not really that America is founded upon English culture - she is founded upon Rome, in both senses of the term. And that may be even more insulting, but then perhaps we also need to temper our pride.

Which is always a good thing to do. Remember how GKC responded to the famous question, "If I Only Had One Sermon to Preach":

If I had only one sermon to preach, it would be a sermon against Pride. The more I see of existence, and especially of modern practical and experimental existence, the more I am convinced of the reality of the old religious thesis; that all evil began with some attempt at superiority; some moment when, as we might say, the very skies were cracked across like a mirror, because there was a sneer in Heaven.
[GKC The Common Man]

I strongly urge you to read this essay - read it frequently. It is worth seeking. (If one of our readers happens to be able to cite the electronic location for it, please do so.) Here is just a little more for you to ponder, perhaps the richest nugget in the lode:

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill, because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself. Now in the general clouding of clear and abstract standards, there is a real tendency today for a young man (and even possibly a young woman) to fall back on that personal test, simply for lack of any trustworthy impersonal test. No standard being sufficiently secure for the self to be moulded to suit it, all standards may be moulded to suit the self. But the self as a self is a very small thing and something very like an accident. Hence arises a new kind of narrowness; which exists especially in those who boast of breadth. The sceptic feels himself too large to measure life by the largest things; and ends by measuring it by the smallest thing of all. There is produced also a sort of subconscious ossification; which hardens the mind not only against the traditions of the past, but even against the surprises of the future.
[ibid.]

Please read this again, and learn it:

Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making the truth the test.

We could, if we had time, make a wonderful study of how Chesterton ponders the matter of pride - and of humility. People talk - especially the media people talk - about today's modern science, which seems to be one big ego trip of people patting each other on the back - when they are not patting themselves. It is actually a clear sign that whatever it is, it is not science. Science is humility in the face of the universe. It is making truth the test, and not one's personality. But I don't have time to do it today. Perhaps some candidate in one of the Roman colleges, or some little liberal-arts school, will take up the challenge to explore all of GKC and sort out his studies on pride and on humility. And lest you think my point is only aimed at the sciences, it applies a fortiori to the arts. Let us not forget how GKC illuminated the unutterably splendid link between fairy-story and the One True Story:

the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat - exaltavit humiles.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:253]

That Latin quote is from the Magnificat, the great song of Mary which is sung every evening by the Church united in prayer. It means, "He has lifted up the lowly." [Lk 1:52] That of course applies to all of us, scientist or artist - providing we are willing to make truth the test and not our selves.

I wish I had time to pursue this more today, but I have other tasks to accomplish - yet before I leave, I must remind you about Saturday, May 29, which marks the 136th anniversary of the birth of our Uncle Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Please celebrate it properly, in a fitting Chestertonian manner, and remember that "we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them." [Orth CW1:268]

Martin Gardner, RIP

2010-05-24T12:14:00.001-05:00

The New York Times reports that Martin Gardner died Saturday evening at the age of 95.

Mr. Gardner was the author of numerous prefaces or forewords for Chesterton re-printed editions, as well editor of my favorite edition of Innocence of Father Brown.

A great mind, a popularizer of mathematics, and a wonderful Chestertonian.

Happy Pentecost!

2010-05-23T08:58:00.002-05:00

Happy birthday, Christians!

Spiritus Dominus replevit orbem terrarum, alleuia:
et hoc quod continet omnia, scientiam habet vocis,
alleuia, alleluia, alleluia.
[Sap 1:7]

Only time for a quick note today... It burst upon me as I was reading today's Introit that a certain word appears in the introits for both Easter and Pentecost...

And no I do NOT mean "alleluia".

It is scientia, the Latin for "knowledge". I know we're not talking about lab coats and test tubes, or integrated circuits and software here, but it sure is a pleasing thought to be reminded of Science and Engineering while we also think of Art and Literature and Philosophy... it is the same God Who inspires all such gifts - there are indeed MANY gifts, but the Same Spirit.

Let us rejoice, with voice and pen and keyboard, with Art and Science, and give Him thanks:

Thou on those who evermore
Thee confess and Thee adore
in Thy sevenfold gifts descend.
Give them comfort when they die,
Give them life with Thee on high,
Give them joys which never end. Amen. Alleluia.
[from the Sequence of Pentecost]

Ninth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

2010-05-22T12:19:00.003-05:00

Today is the last day of the Great Novena - it seems to have flown by, as the whole of Paschaltide has flown by. But, as I pointed out a few days ago, every Sunday of our lives is a "Sunday after Pentecost" - we live in the world which has been enlightened by the Holy Spirit, Who continually reminds us of everything that Jesus told us.

The gospel today is that strange teaser from St. John, about how the "whole world couldn't contain the books" about all the things Jesus did while He was here. I forgot to change "world" to "cosmos", since that of course is the Greek word, and I think a bit more suitable to our Space Age lives. That line is a lot like the famous phrase from Michael Ende's great Never-Ending Story: "That is another story, and will be told another time." Providing we do not throw out our own chapter of the Story, we shall get to hear the rest of it when we move on to the "next chapter". It is this grand sense of Story produced by Chesterton and Tolkien and Sayers (not to exclude others, but these three have written more about the thing than others have, at least to my knowledge) which ought to excite us ion our daily lives. We tend to forget that the stories we read are just the exciting parts of what are most likely lives just as dull as ours are, and even the story of our Lord has that mysterious 18-year period where we know nothing except that Jesus was "the Carpenter's Son". It is, however, the kind of thing that Chesterton helps us grasp, with quips like these:

We must certainly be in a novel; What I like about this novelist is that he takes such trouble about his minor characters.
[GKC quoted in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 63]

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.
[GKC Heretics CW1:66]

So we are minor characters... but ones about whom the Author has taken "such trouble"? Hm. How does this relate to our topic of prayer?

Well, this is very interesting. As in so many cases, it ties into both my scientific studies, and to the highest of all technologies, which is the technology of the human body - as well as into the Arts (as we shall see in just a moment) and also to the Sacred Scriptures: specifically to one of those grand letters from St. Paul. It is of course, even more delightfully, sealed and stamped with the most elegant of all possible seals, that of the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul points out. So let us proceed.

I shall start with the Art. In my little book about Subsidiarity, I quote a line from the composer Robert Schumann:

If we were all determined to play the first violin, we should never have a complete orchestra. Therefore respect every musician in his proper place.
[quoted in Music: a Book of Quotations 42]

My analogy is akin to his: our roles as children of God may be considered in the same way as the many instruments of the orchestra. There are a whole lot of violins, and lesser numbers of violin-like things - and then a remarkably few others which have very strange sounds (like the oboe) or very loud sounds (like the trumpet). Some only play a very limited range of notes (like the chimes) or only one that has to be adjusted before use (the tympani) or no note at all (the cymbals or the snare-drum). And yet, every one is needed - maybe not all the time, but they have to be there at the right time! It's a marvel.

The analogy would be even more glorious if I transposed it to the pipe organ, but there are not as many people who will recognize the parallels... so I shall save that for another day. Except to tell you this: any given pipe in the organ is responsible for exactly one note. Also, the pipe requires two things: the authorization of the Organist, and a bountiful supply of Wind... what more fitting analogy could one seek on the Eve of Pentecost, when the Spirit was heard as a great Wind?

So, let us now proceed to the second portion of the analogy: the tech one, which is derived from a very observant statement in St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians:

For as the body is one and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body: So also is Christ. [1 Cor 12:12]

This is the origin of what I have called "mystical histology". Histology is the branch of biology which studies the makeup of the various organs of the body (human as well as animal), be it at a larger scale of "tissues" or the smaller scale of cells. The Pauline analogy addresses the various gifts and powers of a person - his role, not only in the spiritual, but even in the mundane realm - and shows that these gifts are as varied and distinct - and yet cooperative and necessary - as are the varied "members" (tissues, or cells) of the body. Yes. Now, I grant you that St. Paul didn't study biology; certainly he didn't have a microscope, and likely he never did a dissection. But his insight was accurate, and it applies to more than just the "Mystical Body" of Christ, the Church, or to the human body. It even applies to things like sports teams, social organizations, corporations, even governments - since it is linked to the very tech idea of Subsidiarity, and to those words of our Lord about how we are the branches on His vine. But I must not get off the track here, since I am saying all this for a reason.

And this is the reason: the fact that there are a variety of gifts (all given by the Holy Spirit) and a variety of roles, as distinct from one another as the bones are from the blood - or from a muscle or from the cornea of the eye - this fact of variety implies that there are varieties of prayer life as well. Obviously, everyone can and will participate in certain public forms of prayer: the Mass, the Divine Office, a burial service, a group recitation of the Rosary. But when it comes to personal prayer, or the prayer of small groups, then there will be a multitude of prayer-forms, paralleling the multitude of praying members.

Let me give a very poor analogy. The erythrocyte, or red blood cell, can readily be seen to analogize the holy priesthood, since it is celibate (it has no nucleus and cannot divide), it has no fixed home (it travels through the bloodstream) and it spends its life bringing the gift of fresh air to the rest of the body. (I think you can grasp what that might be.) Any given cell is constantly returning to the heart and lungs, again and again - its very special duties set up a most definite rhythm, and hence the priestly duty to daily recite the Divine Office makes sense: in the daily recitation of the Psalms, the priest makes a continual return to the Source of the Spirit and to that Beating Heart which impels him on his journey... but this is just a poetic glimpse.

How about the laity? But there we see so many possible things - let us not try to construct an analogy. Let us simply note that there is stability of another kind, while there is also growth - for any given cell, its task is to achieve its proper role in the body - you might just try it for yourself. St. Paul hints at it when he talks about the eye versus the hand, or the foot, and the other, somewhat veiled statement about the "less honorable" members... it may be a bit squeamish to explore the whole of the analogy, and it takes a strong sense of reverence for the mystery of the body - but it is worth the effort.

Ahem - but Doctor - What does that have to do with prayer?

The point here is simply that there are bound to be different kinds of personal prayer, just as there are different kinds of persons. The thing that is common to all is the necessity of prayer, and the understanding that the prayer itself is bound for one-and-the-same destination. I will try another analogy. It's not that you write your letter with a quill on parchment, and I write mine with a laser printer on standard copier paper - or that I misspell every fifth word, and yours is elegant in diction and tender in emotion - or that I write mine sitting at my desk in the busy afternoon and you write yours in a desperate hour while the world sleeps. We will both drop them into the same mailbox, and they are both addressed to the same Destination.

But there is one other truth to the matter of prayer - one other thing which every member of the Body must have in common - one other attribute I wish to conclude by mentioning. And that is this:

We ought to pray often - not just because Jesus told us, or because it gives glory to God, or is our only hope of obtaining what we need and cannot possibly get otherwise. But because it is the way in which we practice for what we shall do in heaven.

Oh - you never thought of that, did you?

Just what do we do in heaven? Did you ever think? I can pretty much guarantee we don't flop around with harps - there's far too much to do. No, it's not like I have had a revelation or hacked into God's systems (hee hee) - it's just straightforward reasoning, but I don't have time to go into all of it. One of the things that is clear, of course, is that the messy forms of communication that we use here on earth will all be transcended. We've all seen fantasies where a person "mind-reads" another - that's a little of what it would be like. Since heaven is about truth, and about true and total union with God, we'll likewise be united with each other. We'll have all eternity to explore God, and we'll be in constant contact with each other in the delights we discover - but here's the best part of all: we won't be sitting on clouds, stumbling over words to describe things! We won't have to backtrack to explain things to each other. We'll all know whatever we need to grasp the thoughts and delights of the others who are there too. Don't get frantic about (let us say) understanding automata theory, or quantum mechanics - or the ontology of grace, or the dynamics of a dramatic plot or other such literary technical stuff. You'll have it INFUSED. Furthermore, you will share in those things we don't usually talk about as "communication" except when we mean "poetry" or something of that sort: the warm love of a mother, the honor of a soldier, the excitement of a child, the thrill of the martyr's love, the unspeakable mystery which is the priest's during the consecration... But we shall have all this, since in heaven the barriers of this cosmos that bar our souls from each other are abolished. In heaven we shall be able to commune - that is shall PRAY as we ought.

This is not really a theological principle, but a mathematical one. It might (as GKC says, for the pleasure of pedantry) be called the Celestial Transitive Property of Prayer. If, in the Beatific Vision, I am in direct and total intimate contact with God, and you are also, then (by the CTPP) you and I must likewise be in direct and total intimate contact with each other. There is nothing scandalous about it - we are no longer bound by earth, nor could we do, or want to do, anything other than God's Holy Will... so it is clear that something in the Celestial System will enable this form of communication. It's quite clear, even though I have very little formal theology to go on, that we must somehow "see" in God what His will is for us, and so we share in an intimacy that is not possible on earth. One more item must be added to this silly little hypothesis of mine. Or two. Such intimacy must be fruitful, for no gift is given without a reason. What is the fruit? What is the reason? Simple: we share our persons and our personal perceptions of God with each other in order to glorify God. The other item concerns the angels. What are they doing? Obviously, they share in the same communication, and thereby also glorify God. It's what they sang - remember, we've already gotten TWO chunks of angelic communication on record: the one which starts "Glory to God in the highest", and the other which says "Holy, holy, holy... heaven and earth are full of His glory."

So Doc you really think Heaven is like this?

Well - no. but parts must be true, as far as it goes. Actually I think it will be far better than any of us can imagine - but it must be orderly, and it must be "in the form of" communication - which means it ahs the form of prayer. So if we expect to spend eternity doing it, I think it wise that we practice prayer here and now.

My best wishes for a grand Pentecost - and do try to spend some time in prayer, not only today, but often. It's what our Lord wants us to do.

Eighth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

2010-05-21T10:35:00.002-05:00

I glanced, very briefly, at yesterday's post, and found that I had neglected a major point in my discussion on "repetition". I don't mean to quarrel - no - the issue is a very interesting one, and I do see a very large issue here - both in the sense that our Lord was warning us about "praying as the pagans" as well as in the sense that we must be steadfast in prayer, even while we are asking over and over again for the same thing.

But there is a far larger issue - one which I wonder about, since I am a computer scientist, and deal with words (and with repetitions) in very unusual ways. You might say that I get to see the "plumbing", the "basement" of such things - but then as Mark Weaver likes to say, "Somebody has to do the hard jobs". It's this sort of pondering which makes me speculate like this:

If a certain Protestant opposes my use of (for example) the Rosary because "we must avoid repetition in prayer", am I therefore permitted to pray the Our Father (the Lord's Prayer) only once in my entire life?

Would it be "repetition" to say it once a year, or week, or day?

And would it be "repetition" if we used just SOME of the same words?

Just where is the limit?

Well... not being a theologian, I cannot deal with that issue directly. But there are some interesting things I've learned from my own field, and from my Chestertonian style of poking around in other fields.

There are really three points I wish to make. Two of them come from something I told you the other day: in automata theory, which is the mathematics which governs all language and the theoretical producers of linguistic patterns - a study which includes all existing as well as all future computers as a trivial case - there is a very simple formula, A*, which we call "A-star". I won't try to teach you the fundamentals of automata theory here, though it would be fun if we could, maybe just five or six lectures would do it... Ahem! But this formula is simply the symbol to represent all possible "strings" of characters. Taking the set A to be the usual ASCII characters you see on your computer, A* contains every e-mail, every blogg-posting, every comment, the text from every web site - it contains the Bible and every other book - as well as every version of every book, pristine or full of typos. It contains all of Chesterton's writing (yes, even the stuff he tore up and threw out before it was printed!) and every word or phrase or sentence which can be written or spoken or typed or represented using ASCII, whether it be meaningful or nonsense, holy or silly, good or evil...

How? Simply because this A* contains every possible pattern of characters drawn from our starting set - in our current case, the ASCII characters you are presently staring at. This is possible simply because of two very simple reasons.

The first reason is because the starting set is FINITE. We usually call that set the "alphabet", though in ASCII we have the space and punctuation and digits and other things besides both upper-case and lower-case letters.

Now, I want you to think about this. (No I am NOT making an "anti-protestant" argument. I am pointing out something very splendid about the gift we call language.) Our ASCII characters are really just the usual English letters, together with some punctuation. Those English letters are just the old Roman letters, with J and W thrown in to help out, and a distinction made between U and V. If you go to Roma, you will be able to read inscriptions which are over 2000 years old - even if you don't know Latin, you will at least be spell out the words. And those Roman letters are just an adoption of the Greek alphabet - we call it "alphabet" from the Greek "Alpha, Beta" you know. If I had time, I'd explain about how G used to be third, and how Z got demoted from the seventh place and other fun things - or how those Greek letters came from an older Phoenician - or some Semitic characters... But this is not a history lesson. The point here is that this scheme of writing, unlike the hieroglyphs of Egypt, the ideograms of China, or certain other schemes, is a scheme which represents a certain vocal sound (they call this a phoneme) with a certain symbol. And one more thing - one VERY critical thing: there are ONLY JUST SO MANY OF THESE. Maybe about 40 or so in English.

All right. You get that? Our speech, and our writing, are founded upon a FINITE collection, either sounds we make with our mouths, or shapes we write (or type) - just this many, and no more. Now, we need to consider the second reason.

The second reason is because the length of the pattern (the "string" of characters) we compose from that starting set is also FINITE! I know, I've been told many times that I write lengthy postings. When I see you can purchase a terabyte-size disk drive (that means a trillion characters, or 1,000,000,000,000) for less than a hundred dollars, why should we worry about another few hundred words? The typical photograph takes up between 2 and 3 million, just for comparison, and the longest of my writings so far during the Great Novena is about 20,000. So there. Ahem! I could point out that the novels of (NAME of FAMOUS AUTHOR OMITTED) are lengthy too. But the point is not that these are lengthy... I remember Tolkien's comment in his introduction to the trilogy where he said the one complaint he got is that his work was TOO SHORT. Amazing! The point is that they are FINITE. They do come to an end. You buy the book, or download the web page - and there it is. Sure, I know near the bottom it may say those most dramatic of all possible words, "To Be Continued" - but I want you to hear how GKC puts it:

Life (according to the faith) is very like a serial story in a magazine: life ends with the promise (or menace) "to be continued in our next." Also, with a noble vulgarity, life imitates the serial and leaves off at the exciting moment. For death is distinctly an exciting moment.
[GKC Orthodoxy CW1:341]

Now, this phrase happens to appear elsewhere in GKC's writing, and it forms a major link in the larger study, the study of Story writ large, which he takes up in The Everlasting Man. (Yet I didn't mean to foretell this by mentioning Tolkien; you're just seeing the master structure put there, not by me, but by the Author. And no I do NOT mean Chesterton.) Here is the other quote, which will reveal a little of the point I have been babbling about:

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. Life may sometimes legitimately appear as a book of science. Life may sometimes appear, and with a much greater legitimacy, as a book of metaphysics. But life is always a novel. Our existence may cease to be a song; it may cease even to be a beautiful lament. Our existence may not be an intelligible justice, or even a recognizable wrong. But our existence is still a story. In the fiery alphabet of every sunset is written, "to be continued in our next." If we have sufficient intellect, we can finish a philosophical and exact deduction, and be certain that we are finishing it right. With the adequate brain-power we could finish any scientific discovery, and be certain that we were finishing it right. But not with the most gigantic intellect could we finish the simplest or silliest story, and be certain that we were finishing it right. That is because a story has behind it, not merely intellect which is partly mechanical, but will, which is in its essence divine. The narrative writer can send his hero to the gallows if he likes in the last chapter but one. he can do it by the same divine caprice whereby he, the author, can go to the gallows himself, and to hell afterwards if he chooses.
[GKC Heretics CW1:143-4]

The point, you see, is that the prayer when it is just a finite string, be it written or verbal, is just that. Something has to repeat, since there are only so many letters to arrange, and only so many words: I expect one could find prayers to Ra or Apollo which are strangely similar to ones spoken to Jesus. (Chesterton examines the ubiquity of the externals of religion in (e.g.) Orthodoxy CW1:333, but I have no time to go into that today.) The point is not the "simple" repetition which may occur, intended or not, in the verbal forms. Nor is it the point of recapitulating a theme - that wonderful technique in music, about which nearly every single detail I have above stated must also apply, providing you transpose (hee hee) into the new idiom.

The point is that we are the baby in his mother's arms, murmuring the same simple things. We don't speak God's language - when He gave us the Our Father, He Himself "transposed" a little for us, into a key even a novice can handle - but you are forgetting what we have been told. You see, we've only mentioned two parts of the picture. There's one more thing... there is a trinity here too. There is not only the finite alphabet, and the finite sentence. There is a third something - and it is in essence infinite, and though it may be so far beyond our senses as to appear not merely finite, but empty, in reality it is the great mystery which permits the others to operate.

Are you BARKING MAD, Doctor? What on earth are you jabbering on about?

Oh... it's just the usual Chestertonian paradox of a thing being "too big to be noticed" ["The Three Tools of Death" in The Innocence of Father Brown] It often happens, so you need not feel dull. It's quite easy, like forgetting the identity of the free monoid. Ahem, sorry, that's the closest tech thing I can come to expressing the idea... but wait. Here's a better line, from a very wonderful Chestertonian text:

"Oh dear, all those words again," thought Milo as he climbed into the wagon with Tock and the cabinet members. "How are you going to make it move? It doesn't have a -"
"Be very quiet," advised the Duke. "It goes without saying."
[Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth near the end of chapter six]

If we are speaking, there is a necessary silence.

If we are writing, there is a necessary blank page.

If we are typing, there must be - er - let us say - sufficient empty memory.

And if we are praying, there is Our Gift, Who makes it possible for us to begin the communication. In this context, the Holy Spirit might be grasped as the "medium" of prayer, the Divine Network, the Mystic Page, the Holy Silence... No, I didn't invent this idea. I read it up in a letter from St. Paul:

Likewise, the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity. For, we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit himself asketh for us with unspeakable groanings.
[Romans 8;26]

Hence, even a little child repeating the same simple sounds with love (another name for the Holy Spirit) may be praying in a far richer manner than anyone but God can know...

Our point, then, is not so much to dwell on the mere mechanics of the words, though we should be concerned with propriety and with beauty. If we are going to a wedding banquet we ought to be properly dressed. [see Mt 22:11-14] And hence we begin to understand the point we heard about previously, about having the right intention. It is just as possible to babble on as the pagans by a non-repeating, non-traditional extemporaneous prayer as it is to be in deep communion with God through the repetition of simple phrases... But at this point we shall stop, and consider the subsequent point tomorrow.

Seventh day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

2010-05-20T09:38:00.003-05:00

Today, the Thursday within the Great Novena, I wish to speak about a prayer very important to me - yet something which may cause a bit of bother to some Christians who are not Catholic. I mean the Rosary. Before we begin, I wish to show something which you might not expect. There is a line in one of the more famous Father Brown stories, a line which was always very suggestive to me, and which became even more powerful once I had parsed it further. Have you ever wondered about it? Check it out:

[The General said,] "I don't see why you should come to me about it. I ought to tell you I'm a strong Protestant."
"I'm very fond of strong Protestants," said Father Brown. "I came to you because I was sure you would tell the truth.
[GKC "The Chief Mourner of Marne" in The Secret Of Father Brown

Do you understand what Father Brown really means here? Here is how I have interpreted it, and how I (for lack of any other evidence) hope to proceed today:

To Father Brown, a "strong Protestant" means that he is strong in Christian faith - that he loves Jesus. Hence he desires truth - and will strive to tell it.

So if you are a "strong Protestant", I hope you will grasp my points here. You may be a bit surprised, because you will hear how a modern high-tech computer scientist looks at this ancient devotion - not in a lot of detail, but enough to be suggestive. I will also bring in some various points GKC makes, not so much to bolster the argument, since I don't really wish to MAKE an argument, but to set forth what it is I do - er - what those who say the rosary are doing, and why they do it.

The first thing to understand is that we are NOT worshipping Mary. That's forbidden. Protestants and Catholics might not number the commandments the same, but nobody who understands the rosary thinks he is "worshipping" Mary. He never says anything more to her than God ordered an angel to say [Lk 1:28], or inspired Elizabeth to say [Lk 1:42] - or (in the second half of the prayer) anything more than St. Paul repeatedly said to the Thessalonians [2Thes3:1] or the Ephesians [Eph 3:13] or the Hebrews [Heb 13:18] or the Romans [Rom 15:30] - that is "pray for me, pray for us". (If necessary we can discuss the phrase "Mother of God" - but then that phrase has always been a sticking point for some people. Another time for that.)

Next, the issue of repetition. We've already seen instances from both the Old Testament (Ps 135 has 27 repeats of "for His mercy endureth forever") and New Testament (Mt 26:39,42,44 where Jesus prays with the exact same words three times) how authentic prayer can be repeated - but - to the amazement of many, including many Catholics, when the rosary is said correctly, there is only an apparent, and not an actual repetition!

Ah... you have never heard this before?

Well... rather than taking examples from computing, let's try this. Have you ever heard of the musical form called a "passacaglia"? That is "a species of chaconne, a slow dance on a ground-bass in triple rhythm."[Elson's Music Dictionary 195] A ground-bass is "a bass line consisting of a few simple notes, intended as a theme, on which, at each repetition, a new melody is constructed." [Ibid.] That - yes - that is what the Rosary is. The series of an Our Father, ten Hail Marys, and a Glory Be - that is the "ground-bass". On this "simple theme" we build a "new melody" based on one or another of the 20 "mysteries" - that is, major episodes in the Birth, Preaching-Life, Passion, or Resurrection-Life of our Lord Jesus Christ. Yes, the Rosary is simply a method (Greek hodos=way) of studying the life of JESUS.

(Now you see why I quoted that line about Strong Protestants...)

I'm not going pursue this topic at length, since the Rosary, like the Mass, is the kind of thing that can turn into two or three fat volumes. Just to give you a hint or two of the matters which can arise:

There is the amazing discovery I made during my doctoral residency, when I was at a little church with a another tech Catholic friend. There was a public recitation of the Rosary, but to our surprise at one of the decades, the leader changed into another language (one of the central European tongues, I never did learn which, maybe Slavic). We had recently attended a lecture about the various forms of parallel processors in computer science - and the incredible encounter of a group of people speaking to one another in two different languages was most instructive - it gives some very strong hints about the nature of heaven, about the nature of prayer, and indeed the nature of spiritual communication - and many other things - it was the whole Pentecost thing all over again! No, there was no "mystic" experience - it was all there, visible (or rather I should say audible, hee hee) but the intellectual intensity was amazing.

Then there is the idea I hinted at the other day, which so many people know from experience: they hear a song on the radio or their personal music player, and into their minds comes the feeling, the emotion, the whole experience of where they were when they first heard that song. The feeling is likely to be totally disjoint from the music, from the lyrics, from the "setting" intended by the rock group - but the thing happens. This might be called a "little mystery" of your own life, and you re-live it when you hear the tune. Now, there weren't no rock groups in Judea during the reign of Caesar Augustus or Tiberius - so we can't use them to "feel" - but we can come close with the rosary.

The Catholic calls this form of mental work "meditation". There is a bit of confusion about this word, since it is used by another... er, well, I can't say "philosophy" there, and "religion" isn't quite right either. The word "meditation" is used, let us say, by another "view or way of life": for them "meditation" is as distinct from Catholic meditation as darkness is distinct from light. The Catholic meditates with his intellect not only enabled, but running at full throttle, wide open, all circuits active and engaged - it is Reason trying to incarnate the memory. (For the other view/way, "meditation" is an abandonment of reason, a disabling and emptying and suppression of the intellect - but we are not writing about that here.) I must point this out because someone may get confused by the appearance of the same word. But then people get confused about Chesterton's own comments, or with technical terms, and so forth. It's why the Scholastics were always careful to define and distinguish.

One of the most amazing things for a Chestertonian to explore is the application of his writings to the various mysteries. I've not yet made a complete collection, but since Chesterton was extremely interested in the life of Jesus, one can hardly help running into Chestertonian thoughts as one proceeds through the Liturgical Cycle of the mysteries of Christ's life...

I should warn you - some of them are quite profound. If once you read "The God in the Cave" from GKC's The Everlasting Man you will never say the Third Joyful mystery, or go to midnight Mass - or even think of Christmas - in quite the same way. It has a very strong and enduring power, well worth your time reading, and re-reading. I can hardly tell you why this is so (though I might speculate on it). Chesterton does not reveal unusual truths, as (for example) Father Ricciotti does in his wonderful part-archaeology/part-theology text, The Life of Christ. Chesterton merely gives you a new way of looking at something you always knew - he finds an angle from which to view those familiar scenes and you see things you never saw before.

So I will give you just a few examples so you can get a hint of what I mean. Yes, I've intentionally left some empty - you will either have to wait until I have more time, or else try to fill them in for yourself. And you may find far better quotes than I have - this is just a beginning. Certainly TEM has a good deal of material since its entire second half is "On the Man Called Christ".

Joyful:

First: the Annunciation

Second: the Visitation
There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat - exaltavit humiles.

Third: the Nativity
A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox; that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle. Upon this paradox, we might almost say upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.
[GKC TEM CW2:301]

Fourth: the Presentation

Fifth: the Finding in the Temple

Luminous:

First: the Baptism in the Jordan

Second: the Wedding at Cana
If there is one incident in the record which affects me personally as grandly and gloriously human, it is the incident of giving wine for the wedding-feast. That is really human in the sense in which a whole crowd of prigs, having the appearance of human beings, can hardly be described as human. It rises superior to all superior persons. It is as human as Herrick and as democratic as Dickens. But even in that story there is something else that has that note of things not fully explained; and in a way here very relevant. I mean the first hesitation, not on any ground touching the nature of the miracle, but on that of the propriety of working any miracles at all, at least at that stage, "my time is not yet come." What did that mean? At least it certainly meant a general plan or purpose in the mind, with which certain things did or did not fit in. And if we leave out that solitary strategic plan, we not only leave out the point of the story, but the story.
[GKC TEM CW2:336-7]

Third: the Proclamation of the Kingdom

Fourth: the Transfiguration
It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life - other things superficially, but this always in our depths. "It is good for us to be here - it is good for us to be here," repeating itself eternally.
[GKC letter to Frances, quoted in Ward Gilbert Keith Chesterton 110]

Fifth: the Institution of the Eucharist
They seemed to be saying that God was dead and that they themselves had seen him die. This might be one of the many manias produced by the despair of the age; only they did not seem particularly despairing. They seemed quite unnaturally joyful
about it, and gave the reason that the death of God had allowed them to eat him and drink his blood. [TEM CW2:295-6]

As to Transubstantiation, it is less easy to talk currently about that; but I
would gently suggest that, to most ordinary outsiders with any common sense, there would be a considerable practical difference between Jehovah pervading the universe and Jesus Christ coming into the room.
[GKC The Thing CW3:180

Sorrowful:

First: the Agony in the Garden

At the foot of the hill is the garden kept by the Franciscans on the alleged site of Gethsemane, and containing the hoary olive that is supposed to be the terrible tree of the agony of Christ. Given the great age and slow growth of the olives, the tradition is not so unreasonable as some may suppose. But whether or not it is historically right, it is not artistically wrong. The instinct, if it was only an instinct, that made men fix upon this strange growth of grey and twisted wood, was a true imaginative instinct. One of the strange qualities of this strange Southern tree is its almost startling hardness; accidentally to strike the branch of an olive is like striking rock. With its stony surface, stunted stature, and strange holes and hollows, it is often more like a grotto than a tree. Hence it does not seem so unnatural that it should be treated as a holy grotto; or that this strange vegetation should claim to stand for ever like a sculptured monument. Even the
shimmering or shivering silver foliage of the living olive might well have a legend like that of the aspen; as if it had grown grey with fear from the apocalyptic paradox of a divine vision of death. A child from one of the villages said to me, in broken English, that it was the place where God said his prayers. I for one could not ask for a finer or more defiant statement of all that separates the Christian from the Moslem or the Jew; credo quia impossibile.
[GKC The New Jerusalem CW20:353]

Second: the Scourging at the Pillar

Third: the Crowning with Thorns

Fourth: the Carrying of the Cross
But if ever realism could be called ruthless, and ruthlessness could be called right, it is in the rending story of insult and injustice that has been imbodied in the Stations of the Cross. Christians are enjoined to think about it; but I must confess that I simply have not the courage to write about it. It is rather too real, or realistic, for one commonly in contact with the milder modern realism. Anything so grim in every detail as that would be recognised as beating all the moderns at their own game, if only it had been on what is called the modern side. Details like the repeated failure to carry the Cross have an inhuman horror of humiliation, that would make the fortune of a modern novelist writing on concentration camps to prove there is no God, instead of writing to prove that a God so loved the world. Now, through this trailing tragedy of torture, this Procession of Protracted Death, to use the phrase of one of our cheerful modern poets, Brangwyn has stuck grimly in the main to the grim old tradition of exhaustion and defeat. He almost exaggerates, if anybody could exaggerate, the paradox of the impotence of omnipotence and the hopelessness of the hope of the world. Christ appears again and again prone as a felled tree or a fallen pillar, faceless in that His face is already turned away to nothingness and night. And yet it all works up, as it seems to me, to one central design in which Christ lifts His head, looks sharply over His shoulder, and his eyes shine with defiance and almost with fury. And that one flash of fierceness is shot back at the Women of Jerusalem weeping over Him.
GKC Way of the Cross CW3:542]

Fifth: the Crucifixion
But there was present in this ancient population an evil more peculiar to the ancient world. We have noted it already as the neglect of the individual, even of the individual voting the condemnation and still more of the individual condemned. It was the soul of the hive; a heathen thing. The cry of this spirit also was heard in that hour, "It is well that one man die for the people." Yet this spirit in antiquity of devotion to the city and to the state had also been in itself and in its time a noble spirit. It had its poets and its martyrs; men still to be honoured forever. It was failing through its weakness in not seeing the separate soul of a man, the shrine of all mysticism; but it was only failing as everything else was failing. The mob went along with the Sadducces and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.
[GKC TEM CW2:343-4

Glorious:
First: the Resurrection
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at daybreak to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realised the new wonder; but even they hardly realised that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.
[GKC TEM CW2:345]

Second: the Ascension

Third: the Descent of the Holy Spirit
The general impression [GKC had of the statues in the Lateran Basilica in Rome] is that the Twelve Apostles always preferred to stand in a draught, but that they inhabited a curious country where the wind blew in all the opposite ways at once. Perhaps some such licence might be allowed to the supernatural wind of Pentecost, which was truly a wind of liberty in the sense of a wind of isolating individualism; bringing different gifts to different people; a good wind that blew nobody harm.
[GKC The Resurrection of Rome CW20:340

Fourth: the Assumption

Fifth: the Coronation

"Long years and centuries ago our fathers or the founders of our people drank, as they dreamed, of the blood of God. Long years and centuries have passed since the strength of that giant vintage has been anything but a legend of the age of giants. Centuries ago already is the dark time of the second fermentation, when the wine of Catholicism turned into the vinegar of Calvinism. Long since that bitter drink has been itself diluted; rinsed out and washed away by the waters of oblivion and the wave of the world. Never did we think to taste again even that bitter tang of sincerity and the spirit, still less the richer and the sweeter strength of the purple vineyards in our dreams of the age of gold. Day by day and year by year we have lowered our hopes and lessened our convictions; we have grown more and more used to seeing those vats and vineyards overwhelmed in the water-floods and the last savour and suggestion of that special element fading like a stain of purple upon a sea of grey. We have grown used to dilution, to dissolution, to a watering down and went on forever. But Thou hast kept the good wine until now."
[GKC TEM CW2:391]

No - I didn't goof, and misplace that last one. I put it there intentionally, since it is in keeping with the whole design of the Detective Story of the Gospels, and because GKC himself liked to speak of the "good wine poured in the inn at the end of the world." [NNH CW6:371] It's something we are looking forward to. And here is the final quote of all. It is a bit tricky to grasp - but perhaps you will see it if you meditate on it for a little...

[Clare Nicholl wrote:] We always made a great feature of our table decorations and used to compete with each other to think up new things every year. This particular Christmas the table was a concerted family effort. We made them wait in the hall while we arranged the final dramatic effect. When the door to the dining-room was opened, the room was in darkness except for the firelight. In the middle of the table was a seascape (the big looking-glass from the hall) and a ship in full sail towards a high rocky harbour (representing the cobb at Lyme). On the edge of the harbour wall was a toy lighthouse. A nightlight inside made the windows revolve so that the miniature beams shot through the darkness and lit Up the sea and the ship, its sails full set for home.
We of course expected pleasure and surprise and plenty of appreciation of our labours. What we were not prepared for was G.K.'s reaction. He came in last, being "taken into dinner" by one of us. He said no word at all, but paused in the doorway and stared and stared. And the sister whose arm was in his was stirred out of all proportion and heard herself muttering her thoughts aloud to G.K. (one of his rarest qualities was that one could literally think aloud to him without fear or self-consciousness). "It reminds me," she said, "of the Salve Regina." And G.K. said below his breath, "Yes - nobis, post hoc exsilium ostende . . ."
[in Ward, Return To Chesterton 315]

I can't leave with out some word to guide you here. The "Salve Regina" is the prayer recited at the very end of the Rosary - in English it is "Hail Holy Queen". The Latin phrase means "after this exile, show"... But here I will let you ponder it for yourself.

P.S. I say the rosary with the hope of getting closer to Jesus... and yes, I say it every day, since I'm in the Confraternity, the same which assisted the Pope by doing back-up support to Don John of Austria during the battle of Lepanto... Oh, yes. If you want to know more, go here.

Sixth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

2010-05-19T10:00:00.002-05:00

Previously I mentioned the "Liturgy of the Hours", also called the "Divine Office" - and it is possible that some of our readers - even some of our Catholic readers - will not know anything about this wonderful public formal prayer. This "Office" is the daily prayer recited or chanted by all priests, monks, nuns, and religious orders of all kinds, and also by a growing number of laity. It is simply a formal arrangement of praying those most beautiful and ancient prayers called the Psalms - those 150 poetic entities inspired by God.

Now, as with the Mass, my problem is to throttle back the vast flow of thought, and try to reduce it to something manageable in this short (?) column, as well as show some connections to our Mister Chesterton. The striking thing about the Office, of course, is that like the Mass, it is totally biblical, literary, scientific - it is a grand fusion of all Art, of all Science - so that "all flesh bless his holy name forever". [Ps 144:21]

Where is the science? Ah. It's to be found in the Larger Creation Story: "And God said: Let there be lights made in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day and the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years." [Gen 1:14] While it is clear that TIME existed already, since LIGHT already existed, the creation of the Great Lights implies the ordaining of what we now call metrology - the science of measurement. As you may know, the sacred text does not use the pagan names for those Great Lights, so I shall avoid them also. But we all know that the apparent diurnal motion of our local star gives us our "day", and by division our hours, while the motion of our large natural satellite suggests what we now call a "month" which also has a division into weeks - though these are likewise groupings of days. Another apparent motion gives us the "year" but we know all this, so let us proceed.

As you may already know, there are 150 psalms. These are poetic prayers, inspired by God, and recited by pious Jews from the time of David onward. As I mentioned previously, Jesus Himself recited them - we know he quoted two even on the cross! (Ps 21 and 30) There are others hinted in various places like the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5:5 vs Ps 36:11, Mt 5:8 vs Ps 23:4, Mt 5:35 vs Ps 47:3) - clearly Jesus knew the Psalms. And it is clear that the Apostles did too: it is fitting for us to note this now, during the Great Novena, since it is proven by Peter's words regarding the replacing of the Betrayer [Acts 1:20] at this very point in time between the Ascension and Pentecost - he quotes Psalm 68:26! Obviously, the Psalms were important - and they remained so as the Church grew. But sooner or later someone must have asked, there are 150 psalms - how should we use them?

There are some religious orders (the Benedictines, I am told) which recite all 150 every day - but this does take some time. Also, the Church in her wisdom realized that this extreme wealth might overwhelm people, so she arranges them to be governed like time itself, by the Great Lights. There are liturgical seasons - Advent and Christmas and Epiphany, Lent and Easter and Pentecost. (Let us defer discussion of "Ordinary Time" - like it or not, every Sunday for nearly 2000 years has been a "Sunday After Pentecost"!) But the Church also uses another tactic, which comes from the Psalms themselves:

Seven times a day I have given praise to thee... [Ps 118:164]

This idea, now perhaps around 3000 years old, gave rise to what are called the seven "canonical hours": Matins together with Lauds, Prime and Terce and Sext and None, Vespers and Compline. These, like so many other things, have been renamed - the two "cardinal" or hinge-hours are Matins or Morning Prayer, and Vespers or Evening Prayer. These are dignified with a larger ritual which includes among other things, the liturgical recitation of the Lord's Prayer (the Our Father) and the chanting of the great canticles of the Gospel - at Matins, the "Benedictus" of Zachariah, and at Vespers, the "Magnificat" of Mary.

Why do I give all this detail? Partly to acquaint you with something which is too poorly known, even though you can get the Office in English and do it yourself - it's not difficult. Partly to indicate that this technique of time-based prayer, even if reduced to the "cardinal" hours, will rapidly give you a working awareness of the Psalms, and a sense of admiration for them which is not easy to get, even if you have actually read the entire Book of Psalms. The difference is akin to the difference between reading a book about something - say hiking - and going on a hike. The Psalms are prayers, and should be prayed, not read as if they were just another bunch of literary efforts. The wise design of the Church in arranging the fixed structure of the Office is thereby revealed - by praying the Office, you will not merely learn something, but will begin to gain practice in a time-honored method of communicating with God. David and Jesus and Peter knew them - why shouldn't you?

I didn't plan to link the Office to a "literary" view of the Psalms - but it turns out that Chesterton linked them:

Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent: thus the Hebrew songs appeared turgid to Voltaire and the critics of the eighteenth century; thus the epigrams of the French Revolution appear turgid to ourselves. The reason is not that the Hebrew psalmists or the French Revolutionists were affected, but that we are not so interested in religion as the Hebrew psalmists, nor so interested in democracy as the French Revolutionists.
[GKC "Victor Hugo" in A Handful of Authors]

There is also an excellent essay from the ILN collection, from which I will give just a sample:

Some time ago half the Freethinkers in Fleet Street were defending the Bible against the Bishops. Churchmen began to expurgate the Psalms, because they are so naughty. Journalists began to read the Psalms, and to discover how good they are. It was a funny situation...

...this very notion of a presence perverting the body has not only come as natural to many pens noting the contemporary madness of the enemy, but is the real criticism of the contemporary quarrel about the Psalms. Paradoxical as it may appear, the true meaning of the language about breaking the teeth of the tyrant and eater of men is connected with the high mysticism about the body as the temple of the Holy Ghost. It is the true warning to the wicked man that he may so become, as it were, a theatre or seat of usurpation. And it is simply the sign of it that his very face becomes provocation and his very body an obstacle. All that is at war with wrong really wishes to break his teeth, as it would wish to break the portcullis of an ogre's castle. Whether we believe in demons or no, the ultimate thing to be avoided is really this incorporation with badness, this incarnation of blasphemy. Physical metaphors, and even physical acts, are very far from being irrelevant to it. And it is no mere flippancy to say that, if such a man really does not know that he is ugly, it is the first and highest spiritual duty to, tell him he is ugly. The second is to hit him in the face.
[GKC ILN Jul 28 1917 CW31:131, 134]

Perhaps it would have been better to post the whole thing somewhere, but it might get a bit complex to discuss, as it touches on a number of issues which would also need discussion, and it is the point about the Devil and the Psalms which is the critical one here. (Incidentally, the Psalm referred to is likely the one which reads "For thou hast struck all them who are my adversaries without cause: thou hast broken the teeth of sinners." [Ps 3:8]

The point of course is not merely the "verbal fireworks" or the incidental commentary on World War I, or even on the debate between journalists and some churchmen. The point is that the Psalms indeed form a chief weapon against the Powers of Evil, which are quite real, and must be fought against. And this is another reason for the power of the Office - that by praying God's Own prayers, dictated by the Holy Spirit and prayed by Jesus Himself, we work against our Enemy. (It ought to be noted here that our Enemy does know the Psalms - he quoted them in the Temptation: see Mt 4:6 which quotes Ps 90:12)

But you say, what if a person can't read the Psalms - or hasn't that kind of time? Chesterton gives us the answer in a curious place:

More than one portrait of Chaucer remains to give a general idea of his appearance, though that was the time of the first beginnings of the portraiture in paint, at least in this country, as Chaucer himself may be called the beginning of portrait-painting in literature. The pictures we have represent him as he was in later life, ... The best existing portrait is that published by the poet Occleve, to illustrate one of his own poems. It shows the head in a black hood against a green ground; two tufts of grey beard and a wisp of whitish hair rather recall, at least to modern associations, the elvish comparison; but the face is sober and benevolent, not without something of that sleepiness touched with slyness, that is the mood of much of his later work. Red cords on his dress support writing materials and he appears to be carrying a rosary; at least, as it is certainly a string of beads, it seems most likely that it is a rosary. For I cannot suppose that Chaucer's quarrel with the Friar even if it went to the point of assault and battery, would have prevented him from carrying what has been called the Layman's Breviary, devoted to the Virgin to whom he had so much devotion, merely because the instrument happens to have been invented by St. Dominic.
[GKC Chaucer CW18:232-3]

A "breviary" is nothing more than the book of the Divine Office, which we see Father Brown carrying in the famous episode of the "Flying Stars" (in The Innocence of Father Brown).

The "Layman's Breviary", as GKC tells us, is the Rosary - and that formal prayer we shall consider tomorrow. But for today I have one more point to make - the same point as I have been struggling to communicate in previous discussions. That is, if we have something formal and ritualistic, such as the Office - or even any given individual Psalm - how can it be OUR prayer - how does MY OWN particular message enter into such existing formalism?

There is a famous quip of Chesterton's which implies the answer. It is funny, and maybe flippant - but there is a clue in it, and I wish you to ponder it.

A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.
[GKC Apr 7 1906 CW27:161]

We are not free to alter the composition of a Psalm - or the Office - yet we can use it artistically, just as an organist can exert his art in performing the most rigidly precise Bach fugue. He is not a computer governing a MIDI synthesizer, or a CD player regurgitating thousands of samples through a D-to-A converter. It is not the mathematics of the Psalm which provides the art, just as it is not the chemistry of the paint in the portrait. When Jesus gasped "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" He did not alter the text - but He stamped His own suffering into those words in an unutterably personal way. (Yes, I have noted the comments, made some time ago, surrounding GKC's views on this particular phrase, and perhaps someday will be able to address it at length.) If we are to be like our Master, according to His own last, most specific and most generative command "teaching them to do everything I have commanded" [see Mt 28:20] then we ought to pray as He did - and let our hearts and minds add that wordless but authentic "personal and imperceptible alteration" to our Work: yes, even to the Psalms.

Remember too, that "Master, teach us how to pray" is itself a prayer. If you need help, ask Him.

Fifth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

2010-05-18T10:47:00.002-05:00

As we know, there are both public and private forms of prayer. The public forms are those in which there are more or less regular structures or formulas - the "rituals" which follow printed scripts - yes, just like the script of a theatrical production, it specifies what is to be done and what is to be said. Such things have existed as long as human records have existed to record them - there are fragments from Egypt dating back perhaps five millennia. It is important to note, as we noted last time, that the script is not the prayer. This ought to be clear to us technical folks: we know that the orchestral score is not the symphony, the source code is not the program-in-execution, the CD is not the rock-and-roll drums and guitars blasting out of the speakers - even while there is some strong relation between these things.

The problem, of course, is that us technical folks don't even quite believe this - which is clear and easy. Oh yes. It takes quite some practice for someone to learn to perform a given piece of sheet music on a given musical instrument - but the concept of performance, and the general ideas governing that mystical five-line thing with the splendid squiggly treble clef and those clusters of black dots - why, that can be learned in an hour or maybe even less. You don't gasp at the complexity of a cookbook set next to the prepared meal, do you? Why should you then gasp at those other mystical pairs? Please. Sure it is hard to learn the physics and the electrical engineering and various other stages of development necessary to produce a CD (I mean a compact disk, not a certificate of deposit!) - but again, you could learn the general method, the why and the wherefore, of those stages in an hour. Yes it would take longer than the time it takes for you to pull the CD out of its plastic case and wedge it into your player - but you mean to say you BELIEVE IN IT as if it were MAGIC? Oh, no, no no!

I will omit, for obvious reasons, a repeat of this emphasis about computer programs - but believe me, I could make it, and at even greater length. (Some of my friends and I have started calling computers "the magic box" - the thing about which almost no one knows what it does or how it works, but which when you touch it, you become intelligent beyond the power of words to describe! How sad.)

But the same thing applies also to prayer - and especially to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. I don't know why - unless it is that people don't want to spend even an hour to learn what it's all about. I know not everyone is going to spend the requisite time to really learn its structure, its whys and wherefores, its history and so forth - but surely we can learn enough to appreciate its wisdom and beauty.

Since I am a computer scientist, I could draw the obvious links to operating system design - and there are plenty... Here you whine - Doctor, please, aren't you forgetting this is the CHESTERTON blogg? Oh, no I am not. Indeed, one of the best hints of this strong link comes from GKC's writing! It is quite surprising:

In the course of a certain morning I came into one of the quiet squares of a small French town and found its cathedral. It was one of those grey and rainy days which rather suit the Gothic. The clouds were leaden, like the solid blue-grey lead of the spires and the jewelled windows; the sloping roofs and high-shouldered arches looked like cloaks drooping with damp; and the stiff gargoyles that stood out round the walls were scoured with old rains and new. I went into the round, deep porch with many doors and found two grubby children playing there out of the rain. I also found a notice of services, etc., and among these I found the announcement that at 11.30 (that is about half an hour later) there would be a special service for the Conscripts, that is to say, the draft of young men who were being taken from their homes in that little town and sent to serve in the French Army; sent (as it happened) at an awful moment, when the French Army was encamped at a parting of the ways. There were already a great many people there when I entered, not only of all kinds, but in all attitudes, kneeling, sitting, or standing about. And there was that general sense that strikes every man from a Protestant country, whether he dislikes the Catholic atmosphere or likes it; I mean, the general sense that the thing was "going on all the time"; that it was not an occasion, but a perpetual process, as if it were a sort of mystical inn.
[GKC "The Conscript and the Crisis" in A Miscellany of Men]

A perpetual process - this is about as literally precise a term from operating systems theory in computing as you will ever find. But it is far more. It is biblical:

For from the rising of the sun even to the going down, my name is great among the Gentiles, and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to my name a clean oblation: for my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts.
[Malachias 1:11]

From the rising of the sun to the going down. Yes, the kind of thing that is "going on all the time". In your computer, there are perpetual processes, programs unlike all the rest, that run without ending. (It is a superlative scholastic joke to say that their "end" is to not end!) But the mystery of the operating system is far more than this. It is most Christian, and most Eucharistic. The operating system seems to some to be the thing in control - they think of the "Master Control Program", the famous electronic villain in "TRON" - but they do not understand the truth of its existence, the purpose of every Program is to serve its User!

You must begin to think as Chesterton - no, you must begin to APPLY the Chestertonian methods to other things, not just to World War I or to Shaw's plays or to Blake's paintings. There is here, in your operating system, hidden deep within your computer, a mysterious suggestion of a great biblical dictum:

Even as the Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give his life a redemption for many. [Matthew 20:28]

The word "minister" is just the Latin for "servant", hence this passage is also translated: "The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve..." The system is there to serve.

Ah, but you do not like this electronic technology? You find it too magical? It's not. It's very straightforward, and can be taught, that's why it is called "technology", the study of an art! (Oh, you didn't study Greek? Neither did I, but I know enough to help, and I have Liddell and Scott too!) Well, let's try something else, maybe closer to you, and more familiar.

Do you know about the engine in your car? Do you serve it, or does it serve you? You must give it gas and oil and other maintenance, but does it not wait patiently in your driveway, in the parking lot, does it not go when you press the gas and stop when you press the brake? Ah... but then you have learned that a great lesson, indeed, the most amazing of all lessons to be found in the Gospels, since it was not taught by Jesus, but by a pagan.

Huh?

Oh yes. It is so marvellous, that the very words of that pagan are recited in every Mass, yes, we Catholics are so catholic (the Greek for universal) that we adopted a pagan prayer and use it "from the rising of the sun to its setting". Because, if you understand that the car obeys, that it is under your authority, then you have grasped the famous Pagan Parable preached by the Centurion to Jesus:

And when Jesus had entered into Capharnaum, there came to him a centurion, beseeching him, And saying, Lord, my servant lieth at home sick of the palsy, and is grievously tormented. And Jesus saith to him: I will come and heal him. And the centurion, making answer, said: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst enter under my roof; but only say the word, and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man subject to authority, having under me soldiers; and I say to this, Go, and he goeth, and to another Come, and he cometh, and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. And Jesus hearing this, marvelled; and said to them that followed him. Amen I say to you, I have not found so great faith in Israel.
[Mt 8:5-10, emphasis added]

Yes indeed. Those emphasized words are spoken at every Mass - and they are indeed a prayer (a petition for assistance) coming from a pagan (the Centurion). But the parable is a lesson in the nature of authority, and it is good that we study it.

I have one other point to make about the Mass, which might be a bit quarrelsome, but I wish to propose it for your consideration, since it gets to a difficult matter, and is intimately connected with the question of how such a spectacular and public prayer can also simultaneously be most private and personal. Here it is:

The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is a re-presentation of Calvary, and is sometimes referred to as the "Unbloody" sacrifice of the cross - though of course the blood is there, just as it was that Good Friday almost 2000 years ago. In some mystical manner, without concern for space and time, we who attend Mass are made to be present in actuality at the One Sacrifice on that little hill that afternoon in early spring... The question about "participation" might therefore be voiced as "How do we participate in the Crucifixion?" Are we the soldiers, nailing hands and feet, gambling on His robe, standing guard in bored indifference? The on-lookers jeering and challenging? Or are we standing silent nearby, opening our hearts and minds to the mystic truth of the God Who Became the Victim? Perhaps you might recall how Chesterton put it, in trying to emphasize the novel truth of the Mass, something missed perhaps because (as Father Brown says in "The Three Tools of Death") it is too big to be seen:

...nobody notices it, because it is not secret but public; because it is not cruel but humane; and because in that antique Italian idolatry, it is not the priest but the god that died.
[GKC The Resurrection of Rome CW21:455]

In other words, we can and should participate with our heart and mind, even if we are not otherwise called upon to move or speak according to the specified script. It is a profound mystery that we can be there at all, and we need to begin to take it to heart. Chesterton tried, again and again, by his use of novel vantage points of description, to bring the common things which everyone neglects back into view. It is the same thing with Mass. We are to try to bring this Great Event back into our view, daily if possible, even if we resort to automotive mechanics or to operating systems theory, for by that means "my name is great among the Gentiles, saith the Lord of hosts."

After all, even these things, the work of human hands, are not to be excluded from singing the Divine Praise:

And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard all saying: To him that sitteth on the throne and to the Lamb, benediction and honour and glory and power, for ever and ever.
[Apocalypse/Revelation 5:13]

Perhaps we need to begin to think again that all human work, be it software or cars or CDs, ought to be fit to the praise of God. We might rejuvenate our world - and that, as you may recall, is the first psalm of the Mass:

Introibo ad altare Dei.
Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

I will go in to the altar of God.
To God who gives joy to my youth.

Fourth day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

2010-05-17T14:35:00.000-05:00

In considering my comments yesterday, I was struck by what some will think is a serious discrepancy, or perhaps a failure to distinguish properly. The discrepancy is that there are different kinds of prayer, though they all have the same primary purpose: communication with God, just as they all have the same four "ends": Adoration, Contrition, Thanksgiving, Supplication. What "kinds" are there? Of course there are various "dimensions" to prayer: public and private, formal and informal, verbal and nonverbal. But then there are different kinds of Art - music, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry - and here too there can be public and private, formal and informal, verbal and nonverbal.

The discrepancy is not a discrepancy. Like so many other things, it is a matter of intention Now, lest some people cry out a famous old epigram regardin intentions, I shall repeat what Chesterton says. It is necessary for us to be dogmatic, just as it is necessary in painting to discuss the nature of light and dark and color, or in music the nature of pitch and duration - and it is helpful to both the many Arts and Sciences, as well as to the Chief of All Arts, which is Language, and the chief work of that Art, which is prayer:

To understand the medieval controversy, a word must be said of the Catholic doctrine, which is as modern as it is medieval. That 'God looked on all things and saw that they were good' [Gen 1:31] contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow, or is too hasty to notice. It is the thesis that there are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:485]

Yes - this is why a computer or a parrot cannot pray, even though they "speak" the words of prayer. They cannot have any intention in their action. Therefore, once one has the intention of praying, any action subsequent to that intention can be, and is, a prayer.

Indeed, this is a bit hard to grasp for us, since we are used to so many pre-arranged formulas. But we need to repeat the definition: prayer is "the lifting of mind and heart to God". Yes, any action at all can be a prayer.

Now, what about formulas? Well, we use formulas in our every-day discourse, it's how we do things. We greet others in formula, we use them in letters and e-mails and on the phone. Whole new truncated formulas - "shorthand" or "tachygraphy" - have arisen to reduce the button-pressing on cell-phones. The ancient Egyptians actually had a shorthand, and both Greeks and Romans had forms: Plutarch says that Cicero introduced shorthand at Rome, calling it the greek term dia shmeiwn, suggesting that the Latin version derives from the Greek. ["Tachygraphy" in The Oxford Classical Dictionary 876] But we are talking about formulas in general. The Greek caire is readily translated as "Greetings" but has a fuller sense "rejoice, be glad". The Latin greeting Salve! is "Be healthy!" and the farewell Vale! is "Be strong!" We say "Hello" and "Good-bye"; in the days of Morse Code, there is "CQ" a kind of broadcast greeting; "73" means "best wishes" and "88" means "love and kisses" - but there are more rigorous rules, akin to those we use in written communication. For example, the letter "K" is sent at the end of a transmission and means "go ahead" to the guy on the other end. Finally, if you study even the most elementary parts of network computing, you will learn that there are messages just like these which keep the various computers working in harmony with each other.

So there are formulas in human discourse, and even in mechanical "communication". But prayer?

Let's look and see what Jesus did. The first observation is His response when the disciples asked "Master, teach us how to pray". The "Our Father" or "Lord's Prayer" is repeated countless times a day by Christians - the Church uses it in Holy Mass and also in the two cardinal "hinge" points of the official daily prayer, the "Divine Office" or "Liturgy of the Hours" which we'll discuss in a future column.

The second observation is to see how He prayed in the Garden of Gethsemani. It was a very simple prayer, and He said it again and again: "Father not My will by Thine be done." Here, we find the simple deflating of any possible rebuttals against "repetition" of prayer - if any could possibly exist after having heard His other comment about being steadfast in prayer (See Luke 18). Some may propose the words of Mt 6:7 against this, but there is a difference - and the difference is where it really is: in the intention and not in the volume (that means the quantity, not the decibel level). Or, to use a Gospel parallel: if a mother would not tire of hearing her little child make "ma" sounds over and over - how much more will our Heavenly Father not tire of hearing us repeat our heartfelt prayers? We are adults, yes, and can think with our minds and feel with our hearts - sometimes there are other works of Art which we are constructing while our mouth repeats simple but meaningful words, in the way Jesus did.

The third observation is to see the greatest and most profound use of prayer in the entire Gospel. It was while Jesus was suffering on the Cross. It is not readily recognized, but He quoted Psalm 21(22), which begins "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" You need to read it. The people who heard Him begin it knew how it went, and some of them must have stared, aghast, at seeing the prophecy fulfilled. And that was not the only Psalm He quoted. His very last words were these: " Into thy hands I commend my spirit" which are from Ps 30:6(31:5). If Jesus could quote someone else for His dying words, we surely can also resort to quoting others when our own words fail us. Henceforth, if anyone complains about using formula-prayer, just point out that you know a worthy example Whom you're imitating.

Obviously, the simple fact that prayer is an Art, and hence has multiple levels of meaning, suggests that we can pray in more than one way at a time. When we hear one of our favorite songs, we might attend to the tune, or the rhythm, or the words - or we might recall where we were, who we were with, how we felt, when we first heard it. This is the key to the great formula-prayers, in particular the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Divine Office, and the Rosary - but we shall explore those in future episodes.

Third day: the Great Novena to the Holy Spirit

2010-05-16T10:31:00.002-05:00

Yesterday we considered briefly the mysterious power of language - itself so wonderful and so transcendent that it would take several books to begin any real study, and that before we begin to address specifics like grammar or writing style.

It is this strange and somewhat lopsided treatment of the subject which can disturb some engineers and scientists. They proceed, much as our present-day Luddites do, to attack the tool with itself! You see it everywhere: web-sites and bloggs and political societies and even some academic institutions, arguing bitterly against "technology" as if it were somehow opposed to the liberal arts. Yet, all these always have web sites, and electric lights and word-processing software and laser printers. It might be understandable if they skinned their sheep to make their parchment, and scraped soot from their chimneys to make their ink... but of course they are bound to the tradition of a much higher technology, just as the cranky old "liberal" hypocrites who speak of "change" and "questioning authority".

All of these have forgotten Chesterton's great epigram on the subject:

A cosmos one day being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." Moral. You should not look a gift universe in the mouth.
[GKC quoted in Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton 49-50]

The greatest technology is language, which also happens to be a great tradition, formally bound to ART writ large, that is, formed by human contrivance in all its parts; a thing far more unchanging than it is subject to change, and a thing which exists only, and most strictly, upon the force of authority.

All right. But what do we do with this language? Granted, the mathematicians have finished their studies of it: we know, and can assert, that all possible phrases, indeed, every possible collection of symbols of every human tongue, be it ancient and lost, or yet to exist, natural or contrived, Esperanto, Klingon, Quenya and the rest - every sentence, paragraph, book, volume, poem, and utterance, is contained in the simple symbol A*. That is, the star-closure of the free monoid over a given alphabet A. Sure, it's true - but what does that give us?

You are lost due to my symbols. I will paraphrase in the classical tongue. The A* of the automata theoreticians might be nothing more than the Greek hexameters on the palm-leaves of the Cumaean Sibyl, the ancient prophetess...

In her cave she was accustomeed to inscribe on leaves gather from the trees the names and fates of individuals. The leaves thus inscribed were arranged in order within the cave, and might be consulted by her votaries. But if perchance at the opening of the door the wind rushed in and dispersed the leaves the Sibyl gave no aid in restoring them again, and the oracle was irreparably lost.
[Bullfinch's Greek and Roman Mythology 220]

Yet, as with all prophecies, there ought to be an interpretor - even St. Paul points this out. Moreover, as we know from the real study of ancient tongues: the Egyptian hieroglyphs or the Cretan Linear, we need a "rosetta stone" to link one tongue to another, or the meaning of the text will forever lie beyond our grasp.

We do not even need to go quite so far back in history to see examples of such confusion. At the beginning of the chapter called "The Age of the Puritans" in Chesterton's A Short History of England there is an example of how distorted some histories have become:

We should be very much bored if we had to read an account of the most exciting argument or string of adventures in which unmeaning words such as "snark" or "boojum" were systematically substituted for the names of the chief characters or objects in dispute; if we were told that a king was given the alternative of becoming a snark or finally surrendering the boojum, or that a mob was roused to fury by the public exhibition of a boojum, which was inevitably regarded as a gross reflection on the snark.
[GKC A Short History of England CW20:535]

I happen to like his two examples: a "most exciting argument or string of adventures" - but there is a better example which links the ancient Sibyl forward to something even more exciting:

That St. Francis would have burned all the leaves of all the books of the Sybil, in exchange for one fresh leaf from the nearest tree, is perfectly true; and perfectly proper to St. Francis. But it is good to have the Dies Irae as well as the Canticle of the Sun.
[GKC St. Francis of Assisi CW2:129]

Now you may not know that the Dies Irae is the Sequence (the poetic text) which is (or should be) used at Masses for the dead; it mentions the Sibyl as prophetess along with David. But you may not know what the "Canticle of the Sun" is. You may recall Chesterton's famous epigram "The greatest of poems is an inventory." [GKC Orthodoxy CW1:267] The "Canticle of the Sun" is the great poetic inventory written by St. Francis, enumerating the various members of the Creation and praising God Who made them. (You may have sung a version called "All Creatures of Our God and King".) It has quite a strong pagan tone, except that instead of deifying the various beings, it praises God their creator - much as Psalm 148 or the famous "Song of the Three Young Men" in Daniel 3.

Ah.

So this must rank as the first of all uses of language - praise and thanksgiving to the Creator for all His creation. And it is. When we speak of prayer, there is often taught a simple mnemonic (an aid to memory) to remind us of the Four Ends (purposes) of Prayer. It is not in Greek hexameter, but it is an acrostic, and you may regard it as something quite a bit more authentic than the the leaves of the Sibyl... the mnemonic is ACTS:

A - Adoration
C - Contrition
T - Thanksgiving
S - Supplication

And the first, "adoration" is hardest of all.

According to the Five Verbs of the Gloria, about which I hope to write some other time... oh, you are wondering what they are? Here you go:

Laudamus te. = We praise You.
Benedicimus te. = We bless You.
Adoramus te. = We adore You.
Glorificamus te. = We glorify You.
Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam. = We give You thanks for Your great glory.

Now, as I was saying, according to the Five Verbs, "praise" is not the same as "adore" - and yet praise is a form of adoration. It would go beyond the scope of our study to proceed on this, but the very fact that these five verbs are specifically addressed to God, and are somehow parallel to the first three "Ends of Prayer" I listed above - this suggests something important in our use of Language.

It suggests that we must have knowledge about the basics - the sun, the earth, the food we eat, the air we breathe - even the death we must one day face - and see them all as gifts of God. This is nothing more than our knowing the meaning of words - we link our mental, spoken, written (typed) phrases - be they mere fonts or phonemes or symbols, members of A* or leaves of the Sibyl - to REALITY.

And in bowing down humbly to this awesome truth, we likewise acknowledge the Artist Who arranged it for us, to serve, to inspire, to delight. You may not be a scientist in a lab coat, but you were once a child, and you and I are both children and shall always be children when we touch Reality, when we look around:

He sees around him a world of a certain style or type. It seems to proceed by certain rules or at least repetitions. He sees a green architecture that builds itself without visible hands; but which builds itself into a very exact plan or pattern, like a design already drawn in the air by an invisible finger. It is not, as is now vaguely suggested, a vague thing. It is not a growth or a groping of blind life. Each seeks an end; a glorious and radiant end, even for every daisy or dandelion we see in looking across the level of a common field. In the very shape of things there is more than green growth; there is the finality of the flower. It is a world of crowns. This impression, whether or no it be an illusion, has so profoundly influenced this race of thinkers and masters of the material world, that the vast majority have been moved to take a certain view of that world. They have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the world had a plan as the tree seemed to have a plan; and an end and crown like the flower. But so long as the race of thinkers was able to think, it was obvious that the admission of this idea of a plan brought with it another thought more thrilling and even terrible. There was someone else, some strange and unseen being, who had designed these things, if indeed they were designed. There was a stranger who was also a friend; a mysterious benefactor who had been before them and built up the woods and hills for their coming, and had kindled the sunrise against their rising, as a servant kindles a fire.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:396]

Prayer is the Language by which we communicate with that Mysterious Benefactor...