Fools grant whatever ambition craves

 

 

Ye Gods! what justice rules the ball?
Freedom and arts together fall;
Fools grant whate'er ambition craves,

And men, once ignorant, are slaves.
Oh curs'd effects of civil hate,
In ev'ry age, in ev'ry state!

-- Alexander Pope, Chorus of Athenians

The right words, the right schools, the right political party, the same old dull conformity

 

 

 

 

First slave to words, then vassal to a name,

Then dupe to party; child and man the same.

-- Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book IV.500

The brave bend fate to their will

The weak low spirit
Fortune makes her slave;

But she's a drudge,
when hector'd by the brave.

-- Dryden

One Kyle Harper grasps Paul's vision of "virginity as the highest mode of life and marriage as second best"

In a worthwhile essay in First Things which shows how early Christian sexual morality is fundamentally different from Stoic. 

Here:

Paul charted the future course of Christian sexual discipline: Virginity as the highest mode of life and marriage as second best, yet also infused with a divine significance that jealously reserves sexual union for itself.

The rich offender

 

 

 

 

So like a fly the poor offender dies;

But like the wasp, the rich escapes and flies.

-- Denham

Thy lovingkindness is better than life

[[A Psalm of David, when he was in the wilderness of Judah.]]

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is;

To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.

Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.

Thus will I bless thee while I live: I will lift up my hands in thy name.

My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness; and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips:

When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on thee in the night watches.

Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the shadow of thy wings will I rejoice.

My soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me.

But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go into the lower parts of the earth.

They shall fall by the sword: they shall be a portion for foxes.

But the king shall rejoice in God; every one that sweareth by him shall glory: but the mouth of them that speak lies shall be stopped.

Want of figure, and a small estate

   

 To the world, no bugbear is so great,

As want of figure, and a small estate.

-- Alexander Pope

 But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart. 

 

-- I Samuel 16:7

O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever. Who remembered us in our low estate: for his mercy endureth for ever.

 

 -- Psalm 136:1, 23

Unwholesome law, one reason for the near universal distaste for jury duty

The man who laught but once to see an ass

Mumbling to make the cross-grain'd thistles pass,

Might laugh again, to see a jury chaw

The prickles of unpalatable law.

-- John Dryden

Human "progress"

The life of quiet obscurity

 

 

 

 

Then let me, fameless, love the fields and woods,

The fruitful water'd vales and running floods.

-- Thomas May (1595-1650)

N.T. Wright's problem is that he can't imagine that Jesus' Judaism wasn't normative and had long since been "paganized"

For example, by the ideas of the Two Ways, resurrection from the dead, and an elaborate angelology adapted from Greek mythology and other beliefs over long centuries after the dispersion and Babylonian Captivity, to name but three. 

Here:

We would have to suppose that, within the first fifty years of Christianity, a double move took place: from an early, very Jewish, high Christology, to a sudden paganization, and back to a very Jewish storytelling again. The evangelists would then have thoroughly deconstructed their own deep intentions, suggesting that the climax of YHWH's purpose for Israel took place through a pagan-style miraculous birth.

The simplest explanation for the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke sees them as defenses of Jesus' divinity against the charge that he was a bastard. Wright does not consider that it was the Pharisees who were obsessed with the sexual, while Jesus wasn't.

The inward foe

  As, in habitual gout or stone,

The only thing that can be done,

Is to correct your drink and diet,

And keep the inward foe in quiet;

-- Matthew Prior, Alma, or The Progress of the Mind (1718)

The torture of writer's block

 

 

 

 

 

Some strain in rhyme;

the muses on their racks

Scream, like the winding of ten thousand jacks.

-- Alexander Pope

A really good question it never occurred to Eve to ask The Serpent, for some reason

 

 

If the taste of this Fruit maketh the eaters like Gods, why remainest thou a Beast?

-- Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica I.2

Knowledge is made by oblivion

 

 

 

Knowledge is made by oblivion, and to purchase a clear and warrantable body of truth, we must forget and part with much we know.

-- Thomas Browne (1605-1682)

The unlearned zealot

This zealot

Is of a mongrel, divers kind,

Clerick before, and lay behind.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

Sura 7:158 –  Say: "O men! I am sent unto you all, as the Apostle of God, to Whom belongeth the dominion of the heavens and the earth: there is no god but He: it is He That giveth both life and death. So believe in God and His Apostle, the Unlettered Prophet, who believeth in God and His words: follow him that (so) ye may be guided."

As with most Christians, Luther's basic failure was to misunderstand the apocalyptic setting of repentance

What does it all mean, Bertie?

As here:

"When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent,’ He called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence." This was the first of Martin Luther’s 95 theses, pinned to the door of a Wittenberg church in 1517—and the beginning of the movement that would ultimately fracture the church and alter the trajectory of the West.

The crux of the matter is in the phrase "entire life". Luther's excellence is that he grasped the difference between what was self-evidently not authentic about Christian civilization and what it should have looked like, but himself fell short of the implications. Well, who hasn't? Haven't all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God?

Jesus did not imagine generation upon generation of millions of repentant believers across the globe spending their long lives daily drowning the Old Adam in the waters of baptism in fervent hope of eternal life as they pursued their vocations to the glory of God. Instead he imagined a few chosen ones from his own generation of Jews repudiating their lives, their relationships, obligations and values, all of which held them back from the righteousness of God, in firm expectation of the imminent in-breaking of the kingdom of God and the final judgment. The history of Christianity is nothing more than a long list of compromises with this radicalism, more or less trying to corral this elephant in the chancel, disguise it or shoot it.

Schweitzer at least let it return to the jungle.  

They say you can die of a broken heart, and I believe it

Yesterday I noticed an unusual development on the nail of my right thumb.

A little research indicated "Beau's lines" had formed, about which Wikipedia says "typically in healthy populations fingernails grow at about 0.1mm/day" and "with this in mind the date of the stress causing Beau's lines and other identifiable marks on nails can be estimated. As the nail grows out, the ridge visibly moves upwards toward the nail edge."

So I had my son with his keener eyes measure the distance from my cuticle to the leading edge of the first Beau's line. He came up with 12 millimeters, which works out to 120 days ago, or approximately September 1, 2017, the day my wife lost a job.

As fate would have it, I was diagnosed with a 90% blockage in my left anterior descending coronary artery in November, which has since been mitigated thanks to the wonders of modern medicine. Obviously problems like coronary artery disease are many years in the making and I didn't suddenly come down with it in the month of September because my wife lost her job. It is noteworthy, however, that among the several causes of Beau's lines is . . . "coronary occlusion", aka "partial or complete obstruction of blood flow in a coronary artery".

In "broken heart syndrome" one experiences compromise of left ventricular function triggered by emotional stress but without such an occlusion.

"Evaluation of individuals with Takotsubo cardiomyopathy [broken heart syndrome] typically includes a coronary angiogram to rule out occlusion of the left anterior descending artery, which will not reveal any significant blockages that would cause the left ventricular dysfunction. Provided that the individual survives their initial presentation, the left ventricular function improves within two months."

Perhaps in my case the chicken stressor produced an egg occlusion.

Or was it the other way around?

"We agree in nothing but to wrangle,

About the slightest fingerfangle."

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras