Geoff's Miscellany

The site will be down for a couple days/weeks while I solve some problems on it.

Thanks for reading.

Beauty, according to the Thomists, is rightproportion, brilliance, and integrity. Evolutionary theorists have tried, and in some cases managed, to find biological grounding for our concepts of beauty. For instance, they at least seem to grasp the relationship between human beauty and reproductive viability, but even these relationships are associational rather than necessary.

But it is more ineffable than that. David Bentley Hart is more expansive:

Dallas Willard noticed and described in detail the process by which mass media led to replacing beauty and wisdom with the clever and cute. The process he describes is worth the price of The Divine Conspiracy. The book is about how to connect to Christ in a world where absurdity reigns, even in the Christian churches. But the opening chapters explain the philosophical, theological, sociological, and ecclesiastical trends that made things so weird in the United States. Willard had obviously become very suspicious of mass media. One principle he outlines elsewhere in his book is that the results you get are the precise outcome of the system you use or have designed. So he had to see that a great deal of what he describes below was intentional.

Below is Josephus' comment on the superiority of Moses's legislation to the Greek laws:

The reason why the constitution of this legislation was ever better directed to the utility of all than other legislations were, is this, that Moses did not make religion a part of virtue, but he saw and he ordained other virtues to be parts of religion; I mean justice, and fortitude, and temperance, and a universal agreement of the members of the community with one another; (171) for all our actions and studies, and all our words [in Moses’s settlement] have a reference to piety towards God; for he hath left none of these in suspense, or undetermined; for there are two ways of coming at any sort of learning and a moral conduct of life; the one is by instruction in words, the other by practical exercises. (172) Now, other lawgivers have separated these two ways in their opinions, and choosing one of those ways of instruction, or that which best pleased every one of them, neglected the other. Thus did the Lacedemonians and the Cretans teach by practical exercises, but not by words: while the Athenians, and almost all the other Grecians, made laws about what was to be done, or left undone, but had no regard to the exercising them thereto in practice.

The Philokalia includes excerpts from Evagrius of Pontus’ Texts on Watchfulness. This one really caught my eye:

A monk should always act as if he was going to die tomorrow; yet he should treat his body as if it was going to live for many years. The first cuts off the inclination to listlessness, and makes the monk more diligent; the second keeps his body sound and his self control well balanced.

Day by day you must keep before your eyes death and exile and everything else that seems frightening, but most especially death; and then you’ll never harbour any mean thought, nor will you desire anything beyond due measure. (Enchiridion 21)

In the mid 2000s, it became popular for atheists to define their point of view as "lacking belief in a God." But as it turns out, the older literature is clear:

An atheist is one who denies the existence of a personal, transcendent creator of the universe, rather than one who simply lives life without reference to such a being. Atheist is one who asserts the existence of such a creator. Any discussionof atheism, then, is necessarily a discussion of theism.