Friday I took from the shelves Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness, purchased some time ago but not yet read. The last sentence of the third paragraph runs
The just man fall seven times daily.
Unfortunately, she does not offer a source for the statement, and I remain in the dark.
In A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer, S.J., I noticed in the chapter "Dominance and Subjection" the remark that
The self-certainty with which this whole thing [the dialectical progress of self-consciousness] began inevitably involves a sort of universal self-affirmation (we see this in children).
We do.
Quite a while ago, a friend who had no children asked me what the "terrible twos" were about. I thought about this, and said that they were about discovering the subject-object distinction. Some years later, at the Paulist Center in Boston, I heard the homilist say exactly that. My recollection is that he implied that many of mature years still hadn't mastered the distinction.
A while ago, I happened on Proverbs 18:2,
A fool takes no pleasure in understanding,
but only in expressing personal opinion.
That struck me as describing a great deal of social media.
I had been looking for Proverbs 24:16,
for though [the just] fall seven times, they will rise again;
but the wicked are overthrown by calamity.
A math teacher of mine in high school, a member of the Christian Brothers (FCS) quoted that as saying that the just man falls seven times a day. He inferred from this that if you made only seven mistakes a day you were perfect. I don't think he graded that way; perhaps he said it to excuse his own occasional errors at the blackboard. The period of a day to cover the seven falls or stumbles must have been his own, I think.
I have once or twice quoted 24:16, to ESL classes, when students have preferred silence to the chance of making a mistake.
(All quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.)
The cabinets with our plates is in a corner of our kitchen with two exterior walls. During the winter that is the coldest corner. From at least December through February it is well to get dinner plates out of the cabinet to warm up for some time before dinner.
I was struck some years ago in reading Disraeli's novel Coningsby by the paragraph beginning
Lord Monmouth’s dinners at Paris were celebrated. It was generally agreed that they had no rivals; yet there were others who had as skilful cooks, others who, for such a purpose, were equally profuse in their expenditure. What, then, was the secret spell of his success? The simplest in the world, though no one seemed aware of it. His Lordship’s plates were always hot: whereas at Paris, in the best appointed houses, and at dinners which, for costly materials and admirable art in their preparation, cannot be surpassed, the effect is always considerably lessened, and by a mode the most mortifying: by the mere circumstance that every one at a French dinner is served on a cold plate.
Disraeli goes on to blame the custom on the poor quality of French porcelain:
The reason of a custom, or rather a necessity, which one would think a nation so celebrated for their gastronomical taste would recoil from, is really, it is believed, that the ordinary French porcelain is so very inferior that it cannot endure the preparatory heat for dinner.
No doubt French manufactures have improved over the last couple of centuries.
As a present for a recent birthday, I received a copy of Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare. It is a short book, quickly read. Much of the matter will be familiar to anyone who has read Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo. Conybeare gives greater emphasis to the African context of Augustine's life and work.
On a number of points I wondered about her approach. She has an eye for the dramatic, and she exercises it in recounting the struggles with the Donatists. The question of the objective validity of the sacraments--in this case, baptism--gets a paragraph. The struggle with the Pelagians also gives one more of the drama of personal conflict than of doctrinal concerns. Yet Jaroslav Pelikan in a couple of places quotes Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield to the effect that the Reformation was the triumph of Augustine's theology of grace over Augustine's theology of the church. Given the importance of the Donatist controversy to the development of his doctrine of the church, and of the Pelagian controversy in refining his doctrine of Grace, the author might have given more space to the doctrinal concerns, and less to the ambiguous place of North Africa, or one North African, in the Roman system.
The diction is also of our time. One finds "dog-whistle" where in one case "proof text" would be better, and in another perhaps "catch words". A chapter on the disorientation felt by Romans (broadly understood) after the Sack of Rome is "Roman Fragility". Of course I understand these, but will the readers of 2050 or 2100?
I am glad to have read the book, and will read it again. I may want to have more of St. Augustine's work handy for reference when I do.
For two mornings, a bike was parked on the sidewalk of the bridge that carries 16th St. NW over Piney Branch Parkway. The second morning, I half wheeled, half dragged it south thirty yards or so to where I could leave it on some grass. The injunction "no riding on sidewalks"
About two thirds of the way through The Moviegoer, Walker Percy's narrator is reflecting on how certain encounters are supposed to work, according to fiction:
Or--do what a hero in a novel would do: he too is a seeker and a pilgrim of sorts and he is just in from Guanajato or Sambuco where he has found the Real Right Thing, or from the East where he apprenticed himself to a wise man and because proficient in the seventh path to the seventh happiness. Yet he does not disdain this world either and when it happens that a maid comes to his bed with a heart full of longing for him, he puts down his book in a good and cheerful spirit and givers her as merry a time as she could possibly wish for. Whereupon, with her dispatched into as sweet a sleep as ever Scarlett enjoyed the morning of Rhett's return, he takes up his book again and is in an instant ten miles high and on the way.
(The movie version. which precedes this, was necessarily tamer sixty-odd years ago.)
Some days ago, in the course of clearance reading, I happened to pick up The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham, which in a couple of chapters matches Percy's description well. The Razor's Edge was published in 1944, The Moviegoer in 1961. In the intervening years, I imagine that a lot of lesser writers drew on Maugham.
