Contradiction? Or Contrast?

Someone else pointed this out to me — some other 'blogger, and I forget who, it was a "long" time ago, but anyways...

The Lord looks different to folk of different dispositions. Lege (Malachi 4):

1 For behold the day shall come kindled as a furnace: and all the proud, and all that do wickedly shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall set them on fire, saith the Lord of hosts, it shall not leave them root, nor branch. 2 But unto you that fear my name, the Sun of justice shall arise, and health in his wings: and you shall go forth, and shall leap like calves of the herd.

Again, just to rearrange things, See: "the day shall come", and "the Sun [...] shall arise"; they are "kindled as a furnace" and "health in his wings", respectively; in one and the same movement the "proud ...", they "shall be stubble", and "you that fear my name", they "shall leap like calves of the herd".

My dear foreign Justices (who have chosen an Alien god),

"Do you mean," asked Syme, "that there is really as much connection between crime and the modern intellect as all that?"

"You are not sufficiently democratic," answered the policeman, "but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's."

The Man who was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton

And so, be ye welcomed among the "philosophers":

[...] But the petitioners, far from seeking to de-value marriage, seek it for themselves because of their respect—and need—for its privileges and responsibilities [...]

A mathematician, of all sorts

What makes an Old-Testament Hero?

As I've said before (and will doubtless repeat), Father Abraham is a Very Odd Fellow. Naught to do with being so obedient of Offer Isaac for a holocaust, but his relations with Sarah. Either he is being awfully crafty and knows in a supernatural way that she won't be in any actual danger, or he is being rather shrewd and careless with her.

If I were the suspicious- and bible-is-history-in-code sort of person, I might wonder if the poor dear Mother of Isaac were infected with something to which she was outwardly asymptomatic but otherwise virulent and communicable — the reason given for her barenness is considerable age, but at the same time it is implied that her appearance captures the eye of at least two local kings (including the current Pharaoh). The reason given for Abraham's dissembling w.r.t their state-in-life is that he fears for his life, should this or that royal figure behold and desire Sarah's beauty --- on which point, do remember the story of that other towering figure of David, his friend Uriah, and his wife Bathsheba. But twice, the result of Abraham and Sarah dissembling on their state is: the court of this or that King is soon stricken with some uncomfortable plague! I don't actually entertain the suspicious-minded reading as a likely subtext, but that there is some subtext to the repeated story seems more than likely.

So, what is it that makes Abraham a Hero, in the Old Testament? To be sure, it is clear that, when God instructs him, Abraham does. I don't know why God is content to hold the Protection of the Bond in His own capable hands rather than telling Abraham to do his sponsorial duty and actually protect his other-in-one-flesh. It is very strange to me, and Abraham's character certainly seems to imply he would obey --- for he does obey in other much-more-uncomfortable things; but there it is. But above this obedience, and over Abraham's gift of recognizing God (when, at the same meeting, Sarah seems not to), is a genuine interest in Justice. That is: Abraham does make so bold as to dispute with God whether it is right to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, if it should chance there be many righteous people living there. And I certainly think there was more in it than not wanting his earlier rescue expedition to go wasted. While you and I might disagree whether Abraham was (at the start of his story) a very good husband or father, it is more than possible that he was the most upright man between Babylon and Egypt.

I've not thought much about Isaac, but Jacob... sneaky Jacob, Jacob "the Usurper"... On the one hand, he was a combative fellow, one-to-one; on the other hand, he was alternately shrewd and cagey about his neighbors (and his cousins). But the symbolic key, I think, is that famous image: Jacob wrestles with the Angel.

And again I will skip over Joseph and the Pharaohs who knew him; but I will remark that, apart from his making-excuses and his hesitation, it is Moses who asks of God "If they should say to me 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" The rest is clearly fear and trembling (not in themselves bad, but sometimes misplaced), but this... underneath it is a genuine and fascinating Question, which many another might never have thought of, or bothered to ask.

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This Bible, this scripture, is not an easy book to read or understand; in particular it is full of tension, and I rather think that that's something of the point. God expects us to wrestle with it, to wrestle in our own consciences against our disordered inclinations, and to ask of God why, and whether, and how.

On Bakeries

Bakeries just might have an interesting pedagogical tool at their disposal, in that bakers are interested in successful substitutions and unsuccessful substitutions.

For instance, a baker might substitute a small volume of liquid oil for a greater volume of solid fat; mayonaise for fresh eggs, on occasion; different choices of leaven, depending on the desired effect.

And furthermore, a baker knows that certain substitutions won't work. Using starch instead of soda, for instance, won't work. Using vinegar instead of oil won't work. An egg won't replace cocoa.

And, what's even more niftier, the baker can demonstrate these unsuccessful substitutions, in short order, in much less time than it takes (for instance) to hatch and raise an adopted child.

Frustration

Today’s new arXivals in math.AT suggest to me that it’s very possible someone else will finish or obsolete my primary project before I do.

At least, the kind of results they are claiming are very${}^2$ similar to the kind of results I’m looking for, if not the particular conjectures I was trying to decide along the way.

What to do, what to do…

Last week's ad Communionem, gussied-up by (Catholic) James MacMillan



It's loud, and the accoustics of the place "favour" the soprano end of the spectrum. The building was built by and for the use of the protestant established church of Norway. Some things just don't like to die.

Musings on the Law

The first words recorded in the Bible as spoken to Man, "be fruitful and multiply", are sometimes called a commandment, but this is misleading. They are a blessing. For some, there is a greater blessing prepared in this world already, but this does not diminish the first blessing.

It is said, sometimes, that there are "613 Commandments" (or some such number) in the Old Testament. Some of them are famous, such as

____ the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. 3 Thou shalt not have strange gods before me. 4 Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, nor of those things that are in the waters under the earth. 5 Thou shalt not adore them, nor serve them: ____ the Lord thy God, mighty, jealous, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me: 6 And shewing mercy unto thousands to them that love me, and keep my commandments.

It's a bit wordy, and includes command, revelation, and warning. It is a command, in that it outlines a necessary principle of human life in general: we owe our very being (reflected in deliverance out of Egypt) to the foundation of all being, who exists-by-nature; and so primacy of worship belongs to the same Creator, not to be supplanted in our devotion by any creature (though we may be glad of them for their instrumentality in our present life, or delight in them as rejoicing the senses, so far as that is good), and especially not any of our creatures — "graven images".

Another expression in the imperative follows soon after those famous ten,

And if thou make an altar of stone unto me, thou shalt not build it of hewn stones: for if thou lift up a tool upon it, it shall be defiled.

We might call this a command, but it certainly isn't a principle of human life in general. Firstly, it is already a conditional sentence, opening with "if". Secondly, it seems to come with an explanation, if one whose poetry remains obscure to me. (It occurs to me that, today, dedicated altars in Catholic churches all incorporate hewn stone reliquaries; hewing them is the most practical means of keeping a chalice level.) I've a sneaking suspicion that the intent is to keep not only hand-made idols away from worship, but to separate even the crafts of image-making from worship, for the moment, though I'd rather have a clear explanation...

These are the judgments which thou shalt set before them. If thou buy a Hebrew servant...

the translation chosen here is "judgment", and the whole of what follows is of quite a different class of Law than the Decalogue; it outlines what might today be called jurisprudence and sentencing guidelines. Like the liturgical law "if thou make an altar..." it is a series of conditionals. And every judgment is invoked only with particular manifest evidence.

The condition in the very first judgement raises an interesting question! Who, at the contextual moment, owns a Hebrew servant and might sell? If there are any in the present company, those servants will be free in the Seventh year. That is, this chapter opens, not with the sanctioning of slavery, but with a recipe for delivering captive Hebrews out of Pagan servitude! The ransomed Hebrew indeed owes his life and eventual freedom to whoever paid his ransom, and the law emphasizes this — though, note that it doesn't say anything against early release of a ransomed servant.

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I think it is a mistake to suppose that God intended the sentences of Sinai to be understood by Moses as his last word to the People of Israel on the subject; and therefore neither did He intend Israel to think the Law was finished. The modern tendency to find this Law unbearably harsh ("If a man curse his father or his mother"... but what is meant by "cursing"?) I think speaks of a tacit assumption that this Law was given in a vacuum — that because Israel are currently sitting in the Desert they have no proper law or legal habits, and that they also have no problems that the Law is needed for to solve. But on the contrary there is a ... joke? ... about laws: if there is somewhere a statute explicitly forbiding, say, the blindfolding of a Cow on the Highway, and a specified fine for it, one must suppose that at least two people have at some point blindfolded cows on highways.

Or, let me put it this way: according to tradition, the Sinai legal Maxim "an eye for an eye" was written by the same human hand as Lamech's lament, "Sevenfold vengeance shall be taken for Cain: but for Lamech seventy times sevenfold;" (and, of course, we Christians all remember how many times to forgive our brother?). The Law given at Sinai may well be (and, I suggest, should be read as) the very first iteration of legal restraint in Israel's history. Do ransom captive Israelites, and retain their debt in servitude, but no more than six years. Yes, in the Desert you are wandering and cannot hold prisoners but must chastise crime, nonetheless don't get fancy or messy with execution— I do shudder to think it, but today probably the "cleanest" execution available is "firing squad", and... well, that's what stoning-or-arrows were, (c.f. "David and Goliath") and it was supposed to be done quickly. Anyways, read this way, supposing a progression from seventy-times-sevenfold vengeance to strictly equal vengeance... it's not that this, in itself, has to culminate with the Sermon on the Mount, but that once you get there, it is a most fitting conclusion.

But neither is this the end of thinking about this Law, these "judgments".