Log24

Friday, April 30, 2004

Friday April 30, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:24 am

Library

These are the folios of April,
All the library of spring

Christopher Morley

The above quotation is dedicated to Quay A. McCune, M.D., whose copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations I purchased for two dollars at a Friends of the Library sale on July 2, 1999.  Dr. McCune's copy of Bartlett was the twelfth edition, of November 1948, in a February 1952 reprint.  It was edited by Christopher Morley.

Incidentally, Morley's father Frank, a professor of mathematics, is the discoverer of Morley's theorem, which says that the angle trisectors of any triangle, of whatever shape, determine an equilateral "Morley triangle" hidden within the original triangle.

    

Those familiar with Dorothy Sayers's explication of the Trinity, The Mind of the Maker, will recognize that this figure represents a triumph over the heresies she so skillfully describes in the chapter "Scalene Trinities."  From another chapter:

"… this is the Idea that is put forward for our response. There is nothing mythological about Christian Trinitarian doctrine: it is analogical. It offers itself freely for meditation and discussion; but it is desirable that we should avoid the bewildered frame of mind of the apocryphal Japanese gentleman who complained:

'Honourable Father, very good;
 Honourable Son, very good; but
 Honourable Bird
     I do not understand at all.'

'Honourable Bird,' however, has certain advantages as a pictorial symbol, since, besides reminding us of those realities which it does symbolise, it also reminds us that the whole picture is a symbol and no more."

In the Morley family trinity, if Frank is the Father and Christopher is the Son, we must conclude that the Holy Spirit is Christopher's mother — whose maiden name was, appropriately, Bird.

Saturday, January 24, 2004

Saturday January 24, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:09 am

Taking Lucifer Seriously:

Michael Sprinker
versus
The Society of Jesus

As the previous entry indicates, I do not take Christian poetry too seriously.  The Prince of Darkness is another matter.  I encountered him this morning in a book on the Christian poet Hopkins by the late Michael Sprinker.

“You were never on the debating team when you were in high school, were you, ace? When you’re in a debate, you don’t try to convince the other side; they’re never going to agree with you. You try to convince the judges and the audience.”

— Michael Sprinker, quoted in The Minnesota Review, 2003

“For Hopkins, poetry was the act of producing the self, one version of that selving which he associated not only with Christ but with Lucifer.”

— Michael Sprinker, “A Counterpoint of Dissonance” — The Aesthetics and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p. 95

A counterbalance to Sprinker on Hopkins and Lucifer is Hopkins, the Self, and God, by Walter J. Ong, S. J. (University of Toronto Press, 1986).  From p. 119:

“The interior dynamism of the Three Persons in One God was not for Hopkins some sort of formula for theological juggling acts but was rather the centre of his personal devotional life and thus of his own ‘selving.’ ….  He writes to Bridges 24 October 1883…

‘For if the Trinity… is to be explained by grammar and by tropes… where wd. be the mystery? the true mystery, the incomprehensible one.’ “

For the dynamics of the Trinity, see the Jan. 22 entry, Perichoresis, or Coinherence.  Another word for coinherence is “indwelling,” as expressed in what might be called the

Song of Lucifer:

Me into you, 
You into me, 
 Me into you…

Atlanta Rhythm Section

For a Christian version of this “indwelling,” see

Coinherence,
Interpenetration,
Mutual Indwelling

See also last year’s entries of 9/09.

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Thursday January 22, 2004

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:19 am

Perichoresis, or Coinherence

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI

Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as

“… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….

59 … The perichoresis or ‘circumincessio,’ is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.  And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 146, translated by Walter Kaufmann

Perichoresis does NOT mean “dancing around” ….

From a mailing list message:

If [a correspondent] will but open a lexicon, she will see that perichoresis (with a long o, omega) has nothing to do with “the Greek word for dance,” which is spelt with a short o (omicron).  As a technical term in trinitarian theology, perichoresis means “interpenetration.”

Perichoresis in Theology

Interpenetration in Arthur Machen

Interpenetration in T. S. Eliot:

“Between two worlds
     become much like each other….”

On the Novels of Charles Williams

Coinherence in Charles Williams

Readings on Perichoresis

Saint Athanasius

Per Speculum in Aenigmate

The Per Speculum link is to a discussion of coinherence and the four last films of Kieslowski

La Double Vie de Veronique (1991),

Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993),

Trois Couleurs: Blanc (1993), and

Trois Couleurs: Rouge (1994).

See, too, previous log24 entries related to Kieslowski’s work and to coinherence:

Moulin Bleu (12/16/03),

Quarter to Three (12/20/03), and

White, Geometric, and Eternal (12/20/03).

Sunday, June 15, 2003

Sunday June 15, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Readings for Trinity Sunday

  1. Triune knot:
    Problems in Combinatorial Group Theory, 7 and 8, in light of the remark in Section 8.3 of Lattice Polygons and the Number 12 
  2. Cardinal Newman:
    Sermon 24
  3. Simon Nickerson:
    24=8×3.

For more on the structure
discussed by Nickerson, see

Raiders of the Lost Matrix:

For theology in general, see

Jews Telling Stories.

Confession in 'The Seventh Seal'

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