This is an experiment. Let me know if you like this format. I am also now on Goodreads, and am trying to write a ~200 word review for every book I read—if you’re interested in more of my thoughts, please add me.
Anti-Catholicism in Yeats
This month, I learned ‘Among School Children’ by Yeats off by heart. It’s a brilliant poem, justly famous. One under-remarked-upon aspect of the poem is the (transmuted) presence of sectarian anti-Catholic polemic right at its climax. Here’s the relevant bit:
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candle lights are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts…
Ok, so he says ‘nuns and mothers worship images’. What does he mean, why is he saying this? In the case of mothers, Yeats has already explained in stanza five. But what about the nuns? Well, ‘a marble or a bronze repose’ lets us know that Yeats is thinking of the way that Catholics really buzz off statues (unlike Protestants, who don’t so much).
But of course, Catholic nuns would never say that, when they pray before a statue of (say) Mary, they are ‘worshipping images’! They would say that they are using the statue as a focus for a prayer that is actually directed to Mary in heaven; and even that prayer is not worship, but rather a request for intercession by the saint before God; they only worship God himself. The idea that praying before statues is ‘worshipping images’ is actually a classic bit of anti-Catholicism, used by many Protestant polemicists to claim that Catholicism isn’t ‘really’ Christianity and is actually a form of idolatry: see, for example, here.
Yeats came from a Protestant background, and so rather than understanding Catholicism from ‘within’, using Catholics’ own interpretative categories, he naturally defaulted to using Protestant interpretative categories. But weirdly enough, he flipped the script when he did this: rather than condemning the worship of images, he actually comes close to celebrating it, because (he thinks) it gets at an important truth about the occult and spiritual ‘Presences’ who give power to religious and poetic images.1 That is, he is writing a poem celebrating nuns for doing a thing that the nuns themselves don’t think they’re doing!
I think there are some very interesting cultural dynamics going on in the background here. I hope to write about the wider context behind this soon for Fitzwilliam Staff, in relation to Roy Foster’s famous ideas about nineteenth-century ‘Protestant magic’ in Ireland; keep an eye out.
The Fitzwilliam
On that note, I am now an editor at The Fitzwilliam! I think they do extremely cool work and I am very pleased to be here. We have gotten an Emergent Ventures grant to bring the blog output back up after a quieter period, as well as to support wider work, including a very active Dublin reading group, occasional ‘mini-conferences’, and all sorts of other stuff. Already in the last two months The Fitzwilliam has managed to save the Irish Maths Olympiad!
We pay for pieces, so please pitch me if you have anything you think we might be interested in. We have a broadly progress-y editorial approach, and we love hearing about any interesting or under-covered topics in history or policy or culture (ideally with an Irish slant). Probably my favourite Fitzwilliam piece is the one by Will O'Brien about the extremely deep history of innovation at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin: I bring it up far too often to friends and family. A close second is the one by Hollis Robbins (@Anecdotal) about how Dracula is actually about time zones (it is genuinely convincing!). Modesty forbids me to also mention three pieces written by an extremely dashing Derryman currently based in Glasgow: one on organ donation policy, one on Northern Irish demographics, and one (from this week, my first in the role as editor!) on foreign aid.
Macbeth, fortune and uncertainty, and SBF
As part of my editorial role, I travelled to Dublin to co-host the Fitzwilliam reading group, with Fergus McCullough and special guest Henry Oliver. It was great fun. Our reading was Macbeth. No matter that I’ve read it before, it was better than I could have possibly imagined. No doubt the next time I read Macbeth it will also be better than I can possibly imagine, because I’ve probably already forgotten exactly how good it is. You’d think that it is extremely improbable that there is one guy who is obviously the greatest writer of all time and it’s not even close or debateable—especially a guy who lived in Elizabethan England (relevant Sam Bankman-Fried take)—but Shakespeare is so obviously the greatest that it’s a joke.2
I had the chance as well to catch a performance the night before at the Gaiety Theatre. I thought it was pretty good, three-and-a-half or four stars out of five. I liked both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth individually (she was quite an old Lady Macbeth, which I think is a smart interpretation—a good way to make sense of ’I have given suck’—and one I don’t see enough), but I wasn’t such a fan of their interactions on stage: I think the director did a bit too much ‘psychosexualising’ of the relationship in ways that veered a bit too close to absurdity. The witches were good (especially their understated costuming) and the apparitions of the head etc. were subtle and cool.
One interesting thing I noticed this read-through was an interesting theme in the play about ethical attitudes towards risk and uncertainty. In Act 1 Scene 2, we are told that Fortune smiled upon the rebellion and that she was the traitorous Macdonwald’s ‘whore’; but Macbeth, ‘disdaining Fortune’, was nonetheless able to win the day by making himself ‘Valour’s minion’. The lesson seems to be that it doesn’t matter how much Fortune smiles upon you, attempts at decision-making under uncertainty will (in the end) be defeated by those who follow the simple, exceptionless, non-probabilistic norms of Valour. And then, in the next scene, the witches begin to cause Macbeth to consider whether ‘chance will have me king’; and this acceptance of probabilistic thinking seems to signal that his downfall and moral corruption have begun.
On this reading, Shakespeare is attacking (avant la lettre) the arguments of people like Barbara Fried and her famous crypto-king son, that ethical norms must incorporate considerations of probabilities and trade-offs made under uncertainty, and that simple black-and-white norms that apply under all situations are simply unsuitable for making practical decisions in the real world, where risk, luck, and uncertainty are pervasive. Shakespeare’s proximate target was more likely the kind of Renaissance political theories that are most famously found in Machiavelli: politics is so dictated by luck and fortune (‘events, dear boy, events’) that people who follow black-and-white moral strictures will be unable to ride the wave; what you need is flexibility, maybe even moral flexibility. Shakespeare seems to be saying that, in fact, putting aside the simple black-and-white norms will just inevitably morally corrupt you, and tempt you to do terrible things to satisfy personal ‘vaulting ambition’. The story of Barbara and her son might be taken as evidence in favour of this view!
But consider. In Act 1 Scene 7, Macbeth begins to doubt: ‘If we should fail—’; to which Lady Macbeth’s response is simple: ‘We’ll not fail’. Whatever the rhetoric, Lady Macbeth isn’t actually doing decision-making under uncertainty, isn’t actually giving consideration to the vicissitudes of Fortune; she’s as certain, as black-and-white, as can be. Then in Act 3, Scenes 1 and 2, we hear Macbeth professing: ‘To be thus is nothing, | But to be safely thus’; he demands certainty!3 This suggests a different interpretation. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth profess a Machiavellian choice-under-uncertainty realism, but in actual fact, they are scared by risk and uncertainty. Their moral failings are deeper, and the language of chance and risk are just a rationalisation. This suggests that maybe there’s room for an ethic that is able to incorporate Machiavelli’s lesson about the importance of Fortune—but not in the crude manner of Fried and Bankman-Fried. This might be something like Max Weber’s Verantwortungsethik or Bernard Williams’ theory of ‘Politics and moral character’, that we should feel the weight of the responsibility for our actions even as we make them, feel the ‘moral cost’, so that flexibility in the face of uncertainty does not become a temptation to abandon ethics altogether.
This is an appealing interpretation to me, because I am personally drawn to the views of Weber and Williams. But ultimately, I think it’s wrong. For—after all—how can one have a stronger sense of the ‘moral cost’ of one’s decisions, of the weight of responsibility, than Macbeth felt as he is ‘rapt’ by the horror and bloodiness of his murder? or Lady Macbeth, driven to scrubbing her hands of blood that isn’t there, and ultimately (it is suggested) to suicide? But that deep psychological sense of the moral cost didn’t stop them from committing evil: it just made them paranoid and unstable while they did it. We might think less of SBF, and more of many dictators in history.
Maybe the Macbeth couple’s attitude to risk and uncertainty is not the rational one prescribed by Weber or Machiavelli. But maybe all that tells us is that Weberian Verantwortungsethik is unstable: that human beings can’t, actually, rationally deal with uncertainty, and that they will always be afraid in the face of it; better, then to be ‘afeard’ of one’s own ambitious desires (as Lady Macbeth accuses her husband of being in Act 1 Scene 7), and stick to eternal norms of valour, than to face the paranoid and corrupt fear that afflicts the ambitious couple. And indeed, Shakespeare puts into Lady Macbeth’s mouth an explicit endorsement of the same logic, that of ‘practical necessity’, that Weber would later commend to the youth of Munich:
… thou’dst have, great Glamis,
That which cries, ‘Thus thou must do’, if thou have it;
And that which rather thou dost fear to do,
Than wishest should be undone. [Macbeth, Act 1 Scene 5.]
… it is immensely moving when a mature person who feels with his whole soul the responsibility he bears for the real consequences of his actions, and who acts on the basis of an ethics of responsibility [Verantwortungsethik], says at some point, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ [Weber, Politik als Beruf, trans. Ronald Speirs.]
If Lady Macbeth and her husband are indeed following Weberian logic as best as any human can, then the sight Weber describes is no longer ‘moving’ but rather horrifying.
Shakespeare’s sonnets
I spent the trip over the Dublin listening to a bunch of podcasts about Shakespeare, as part of my preparation. By far the best I listened to was the In Our Time on Shakespeare’s sonnets. The two academic guests are good and Melvyn is his usual interesting self, but the episode is absolutely transformed by the presence of Don Paterson, the Dundee poet, who brings some of the best insights into the sonnets (some of the best insight into any poetry) that I have ever seen. Incredibly opinionated but unbelievably deep. I have learned that he wrote a book on the sonnets in 2010, and reviews are mixed, but on the basis of his performance on In Our Time I am inclined to say ‘fuck the reviews’ and recommend the book before I’ve even bought it myself. A Goodreads review says: ‘I can’t think of any time that I found [Paterson’s] allegations completely ridiculous—which is really saying something in this particular sub-genre of scholarship!’ This tracks with his In Our Time appearance: bold and often probably wrong but always serious.
John Collison in the Irish Times
Getting away from Shakespeare and back onto Irish progress-y stuff. Irish readers may have already heard about John Collison’s piece in the Irish Times: ‘Ireland is going backwards. Here’s how to get it moving.’ (Not paywalled.) It’s gotten a lot of pickup in Irish politics, and I can only explain this by saying that it is extremely good, far better than it has any right to be, and far better than you might expect it to be if you’re familiar with the genre—usually this kind of ‘public figure makes rare intervention into politics to call for a “reset”’ is a recipe for meaningless truisms, maybe interspersed with a small number of extremely bitty ideas that are unlikely to help anything but have good vibes (‘is there anything to be said for having another citizens’ assembly?’). But not in this case.
I’ve never seen anyone put the point so clearly about the inability of bureaucratic agencies to make big-picture tradeoffs: it’s not an original idea (it’s quite Weberian!), indeed it’s something I myself have inchoately gestured towards before, but Collison puts it so sharply and exactly that it hit me square in the face. There’s also a line which can be read esoterically as claiming John XXIII as a yimby hero.
Philosophy of maths, jokes, and hypercomputation
The excellent Gavin Leech has two new posts about the foundations of mathematics: one serious, one a joke. As I suggested in my most recent books post, I think jokes are among the best formats for doing serious philosophy of mathematics, so I salute him.
But his mention of computational limits in his serious post reminded me about how much I hate the way compscis and philosophers of computation talk about computability limits and ‘hypercomputation’, I think the whole thing is hideously confused and will make no progress in its current state. If you are interesting in hearing the rant, please email me, otherwise it will take up this whole email.
Artificial human resources
While trying to use AI models’ chain of thought to evaluate their capability to ‘scheme’, Apollo Evals confess that they ‘found CoT hard to interpret at times’. I am no expert, but when I look at the examples given, I also find them hard to interpret but my brain gives me an analogy: the models are using something like the analogue of HR corpo-speak jargon, literally talking about ‘synergy’. I am forced to imagine a terrifying possibility—that we live in a world where we get alignment-by-default, but the answer to ‘aligned to who?’ is ‘HR’. Paper here.
One Battle After Another
My thoughts. First, it’s great but the ending is very weak. Indeed, it undermines some of the sharpest messaging of the film itself, especially as regards ‘punching left’: from the first act alone, you’d get the message that the revolutionaries are all larping cowards, but this is muddied by the end.
Second, it’s much less Pynchonesque than Pynchon himself, but I like that. PTA has real-life maga freaks to depict, and he is drawing on Pynchon for the creative resources to depict them. He wants to have some degree of realism rather than pure Pynchonesque paranoia, while also being aware that being realistic about the modern American conservative movement does require a little bit of Pynchonesqueness.
Relatedly, I have heard the criticism that the bad guys are ‘cartoonish’, and I disagree with this. What we’re looking at is a creative and impressionistic representation of evil people; that pattern-matches to ‘cartoons’, but it needn’t have the low artistic value implied by that. American creatives like PTA do have to somehow represent their country’s modern conservative movement, which is straightforwardly full of evil people. I could tell some of the specific individuals that Sean Penn was trying to caricature in his performance: if doing a good caricature of person X makes an actor come across like Skeletor, that’s not necessarily a problem with the actor’s performance, person X might just genuinely be evil.
Science slowing down and Western esotericism
You may be aware of the debate as to whether scientific progress is slowing doing because of [regulation / culture / the structure of modern academia / bioethicists / quant trading / wokeness / the Jews / the lack of Jews / insert your favourite bogeyman here], or for the more trivial reason that we’ve just ‘plucked all the low-hanging fruit’ in science. The latter camp tells us that we should expect science to reach the ideas that provide the most ‘bang-for-buck’ (big fundamental ideas that have a lot of explanatory power, or small ideas that are very easy to figure out) first. If this is correct, then it’s basically inevitable that scientific progress will slow down over time as we move away from the big questions and the easy questions and onto questions that are both niche and difficult; and maybe this is all there is to it, and there’s no need to appeal to any other explanation to explain scientific slowdown.
I take no stance on which side of this debate is correct. However, I think that it is important for thinking about this if we can observe an academic field that is still in the process of plucking the ‘low-hanging fruit’. This is my pitch for learning about the academic field of Western esotericism. These guys study the oogly-boogly—occultism, kabbalah, mysticism, Neoplatonism, hermeticism, tarot, mystery religions and initiatory orders, the whole nine yards—and they generally do it with great scholarly rigour and historical clarity.4
This is also a field that only really dates back to the 60s and 70s,5 for the interrelated reasons that (a) most people who are interested in this stuff are (obviously!) extremely unscholarly, and (b) historians and scholars have mostly been deeply suspicious. This means that there is still ‘low-hanging fruit’ to pick—ideas of great importance that are nonetheless (relatively) easy to figure out and understand—and that much of what they’ve already ‘picked’ has yet to be incorporated into the wider culture.
I am a rabid fan of the Secret History of Western Esotericism podcast (SHWEP), and less fan-y but still respectful of the Esoterica youtube channel. I specifically recommend any of the SHWEP podcasts on Plato, or this video on St Paul. Especially if intellectual, cultural, or religious history are your jam, you will almost certainly disagree with many of the specific interpretative claims; but I’ll be damned if you’re not bowled over by many of the less specific, more ‘obvious’ and ‘easy’ ideas—like ‘hey maybe we should compare Paul’s mystical experience with contemporary mystical ideas?’—as you realise how fruitful they are. This is what low-hanging academic fruit (heh) looks like.
Black Economic Empowerment
In the FT Weekend a few weeks back there was an astonishing piece about South Africa’s famously corrupt ‘Black Economic Empowerment’ scheme. As I say, it’s famously corrupt; but how corrupt!
One significant flaw of BEE, say detractors, is how relatively few people have benefited. More than R1tn ($57bn) had been transferred into the hands of just 100 people under the scheme, said William Gumede, a professor at the Wits University School of Governance.
That is $570 million each! Each! I had to re-read this three times when I saw it to make sure I was reading it correctly, and then I had to take out a calculator to make sure I had divided by 100 correctly, because I simply could not believe it.
D-Day and philosophy
I have recently been reading M. W. Rowe’s 2023 biography of the philosopher J. L. Austin. Rowe is a philosopher, and he wanted to write a philosophical / intellectual biography. Like many of us who have some philosophical interest in Austin, Rowe had heard a couple of hearsay anecdotes (told at third- or fourth-hand) claiming that Austin did some important intelligence work before D-Day. Unlike the rest of us, Rowe did not just go ‘huh, that’s neat!’, but actually decided to go verify the claims with proper research. Several years (and untold hours in the military archives) later, and Rowe emerged with a picture of a man who was absolutely integral to the Western Allies’ military intelligence and never told a soul.
Austin commanded his own intelligence section from early in the war, an incredible level of achievement for someone with no prior experience, and was one of <50 people fully ‘read in’ to Bletchley Park decrypts. Rowe cannot prove decisively, but makes an extremely good circumstantial case, that Austin was the first person in Britain to figure out that Rommel was about to move into North Africa. He also cannot prove decisively, but makes a quite good circumstantial case, that Austin and Matthew Pryor from MI14 jointly figured out that the ‘ski sites’ were for V-1 ‘doodlebugs’ months before Constance Babington Smith. And he proves decisively that Austin was the single most important person in invasion planning intelligence: his section was in charge of planning for an invasion of France from early 1942 until it became fully integrated into Ike and Monty’s operation (after which, it retained its organisational independence); it produced extremely detailed and vitally helpful intelligence guides to northern France for all officers; it spent a lot of time on Fortitude and deception operations… It’s very clear from Rowe’s evidence that Austin’s importance was very much appreciated at the time: the most fun example is the minutes of a meeting where senior Army and Navy figures have a big fight over whether Austin should be attending Army meetings or Navy meetings more!
So why is his name not better known? Rowe relates that Austin shows up occasionally in existing writing on D-Day, but his section’s contributions are often largely missed or glossed over. This isn’t any sort of conspiracy, it’s just the difficulties of the historical method. Intelligence work was obviously secret during the war! and often didn’t come out until decades later, when those involved started writing memoirs. Maybe Austin planned to tell all after he retired; but he died young and never had the chance. Of course, the information is mostly now all there in the archive files. But the archives are huge! D-Day was one of the most complicated logistical feats in all of human history, involving hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of people! You need to have some idea of what you’re looking for before you start looking, otherwise you’ll not be able to find anything. Previous war historians might have seen the name ‘Austin’ every so often but had their attention focussed elsewhere—eminently reasonably—and so in the existing literature he’s either not mentioned or given a quick discussion. Whereas Rowe went in trying to find trivia about a philosopher, and unearthed a treasure trove. It raises the question: how many other people like this are there, absolutely vital but forgotten?
After all, a fact that might seem trivial until you feel it viscerally is that the second World War involved so many people. My favourite (English-language) line about the war was written right at its outbreak: ‘When there are so many we shall have to mourn … of whom shall we speak?’ But now, standing at the other end, we can also see another related phenomenon: there are so many we have to thank, so many individuals to whom we (at least in Western Europe) owe more than we could ever pay. In telling Austin’s story, Rowe also has to relay the stories of dozens of other heroes (not just the likes of Ike and Monty) to whom you and I owe an unspeakable debt. Some of them—like ‘Bill’ Williams, who Austin was unjustifiably hostile towards and who accorded Austin great honour regardless—are somewhat well-known but not household names; some (like the many heroic French resisters who were vital in Austin’s intelligence efforts) are known in the aggregate but not individually; and some are like Austin himself, basically forgotten.6 This is essentially inevitable, but it is still unjust. If you live under a free government it is good, every now and then, to give yourself a reminder of the number of your creditors and the size of your debt. This was a good reminder.
The middle section of the book (about the war) is basically a book unto itself, while the pre- and post-war sections constitute the philosophical biography that Rowe had planned to write. As a philosophical biography, I didn’t like it so much. There’s a bit of a debate as to whether Austin was indeed the technical, puzzle-driven philosopher that his donnish disposition suggested, or (alternatively) whether his work actually had a deeper ethical and aesthetic significance, as argued most famously by Stanley Cavell. My friend Nikhil’s book7 tries to balance these perspectives and I mostly like where he ends up. By contrast, Rowe takes the former, more standard approach. But while it’s totally justifiable to read Austin as a technical, puzzle-driven thinker, Rowe doesn’t seem to like Austin’s solutions to the puzzles! For example, Rowe is fairly scathing about Austin’s book Sense and Sensibilia, where Austin criticises the ‘sense-data theory’: Rowe accuses Austin of missing the most important arguments in favour of the theory, which are rooted in ideas about scepticism. (I happen to disagree with Rowe on this, and think Sense and Sensibilia is successful.)
By the end of the book, I was left wondering why Rowe had even started this project: he clearly didn’t warm to Austin as a person, nor did he think Austin’s technical contributions were super vital, nor did he think that underneath the technical contributions Austin had a deeper ethical or existential message. But whatever his reasons, I’m glad he did start it, because it took him down a D-Day rabbit hole; and now, thanks to him, we are closer to knowing how great a debt all the people of Western Europe owe to J. L. Austin. How many such debts do we owe?
Lamarckism in Western Christianity
You probably know that Jews don’t have the concept of ‘original sin’, that that particular way of understanding the Adam and Eve story is peculiar to Christianity. You maybe also know that Eastern Christianity doesn’t have this exact concept either, although it’s certainly much closer. If you know all that, then maybe you know that the idea of original sin, as it is found in all Western Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant), comes from the work of the fifth-century bishop Saint Augustine.8
What you might not have known—what I didn’t know before this week—is that the canonical statement of his theory of original sin, in the City of God, assumes Lamarckian inheritance! When explaining how Adam’s sin could be passed down to his descendants, here’s what Augustine has to say:
Therefore the whole human race was in the first man, and it was to pass from him through the woman into his progeny, when the married pair had received the divine sentence of condemnation. And it was not man as first made, but what man became after his sin and punishment, that was thus begotten, as far as concerns the origin of sin and death.
… human nature in [Adam] was vitiated and altered, so that he experienced the rebellion and disobedience of desire in his body, and was bound by the necessity of dying; and he produced offspring in the same condition to which his fault and its punishment had reduced him, that is, liable to sin and death. [City of God, book 13, chapter 3.]
Augustine is absolutely crystal clear about this. Adam sinned, this altered his nature, and he passed on that altered nature by inheritance to his progeny (meaning, the entire human race). Unambiguously, the theory relies on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It’s Lamarckism. Which is to say, it’s rubbish—we today, post-Darwin and post-Mendel, know that heredity doesn’t work like that.
You might want to try to save the doctrine of original sin from this accusation by saying that natural / physical / biological inheritance is Mendelian, but that original sin is about something supernatural / metaphysical / spiritual in humanity. I think there are absolutely no grounds for accepting that Augustine believed in anything like this distinction (the closest he had was the matter/form distinction from Aristotle via Plotinus, but he’s clear that the matter for both Fallen and unFallen humans is mere dust, so that can’t serve to mark the right difference), and more importantly I don’t think it makes sense within the Christian context.9
The category of ‘the natural’ or ‘the physical’ is perfectly coherent within an atheist materialist worldview: for us, it’s the exact same category as ‘actually-existing stuff’! But for a Christian, all of creation is supposed to be suffused with the supernatural (sustained by God); human behaviour results from the joint actions of body and soul. I just don’t think this idea—that human begetting can be cleanly separated into a ‘natural’ component that is entirely autonomous and perfectly obeys Mendelian laws, and a ‘supernatural’ component that is cleanly separable from that and is the only part infected by original sin—can be made to work in a Christian framework: not least because death, a biological process if ever there were one, is supposed to result from original sin. (I think the tendency of Christians to appeal to distinctions like this only demonstrates the degree to which we naturalists have the upper hand in the war of ideas, at least for now; they don’t even know when they’re using our concepts.)
No: Western Christianity must hold that human behaviour and human bodily decline are affected by original sin; and original sin results from the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It’s Lamarckism.
Yes, Yeats was weird.
At least, greatest in the English language. Though actually, I suspect this is probably a less important qualification than it might seem. Francophones / russophones / teutophones / etc. all seem to love Shakespeare way more than we anglophones love Molière / Tolstoy / Goethe / etc.
Ditto Lady Macbeth in Act 3 Scene 2: ‘’Tis safer to be that which we destroy | Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.’
Some of them are a bit too personally sympathetic to the oogly-boogly for my taste; but that’s basically inevitable, and generally they observe the right methodological strictures to minimise the issues.
The rigourous study of specifically Jewish esotericism and mysticism dates back a bit further, to the 30s and 40s (usually Gershom Scholem is given the title of ‘founder’), and to a certain degree has developed in parallel to the wider ‘Western esotericism’ stuff. But obviously there’s a lot of overlap.
This is not even to mention the last category, namely, those who were actively spurned or shunned by society even while making heroic contributions. Those who worked at Bletchley Park maybe did more for their country and for the cause of liberty than anyone else who has ever lived—but we chemically castrated Alan Turing, and drove him to suicide, anyway.
Disclosure: I provided some very minor assistance to Nikhil on this book, and am thanked in the acknowledgments.
Of course Augustine didn’t make it up all himself; he was building on Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and (most importantly) Saint Paul. But the term ‘original sin’ was his, and it was his theory that became incorporated fully into both Catholic and Protestant theology.
To be sure, Thomas Aquinas has a distinction between the natural and the supernatural (and a third category, the praeternatural) that does fully make sense in a Christian context, but it’s not the distinction in question here, he’s using ‘natural’ differently. In particular, Aquinas thinks that original sin pertains to the natural (rather than the supernatural); indeed, it is the ‘sin of nature’. So appeals to distinctions like this can’t save Western Christianity from accusations of Lamarckism; nor were they intended to, Aquinas wouldn’t have known why Lamarckism is bad.
I like this format.
Hey, great read as always. Thanks for unpacking Yeats like that. It’s always fascinating to see how subtle historical biases manifest, even in such celebrated works. Your breakdown of the "worshipping images" bit was particulary sharp. Keep these literary deep dives coming!