What do they teach them in these schools?

Increasingly, I realize that I've been screwed by a very superficial, procedural, and sophistical legal education system. We should be sitting around reading Montesquieu and Blackstone and Justinian. Roman law, which is still taught I believe, in many English programs, is completely ignored by our faculty.

Another reason to hate law school, I guess.

Tallis' Spem in alium is really something marvellous. I think that it and Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 are probably my favorites from that period. Something Augustinian about the scale.

I met a guy at Barley's Friday evening with the surname of Mastroianni. I asked if he was related to Marcello Mastroianni, the lately living symbol of existentialized Latin manhood. He claimed to be a second cousin. It may have been just me, but they looked a little similar even. Anyways, this guy got really excited and lamented the fact that no one these days knows who Marcello was.

Remember the scene in La Dolce Vita when Marcello asks his father why they never talk? Why is it like that too often when I see old friends? Why must true communication depend on so many silly accidents?

Great Books

At the urging of Dr. DeCarlo I went to SBX today to peruse a special book sale. I arrived and found that the collection of a (deceased?) classics prof was being liquidated. Wandered around picking up volumes, muttering jayida jiddan! I finally bought a pile of volumes for $80:

Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, (Penguin)
D. G. Lyon, Beginner's Assyrian (reprinted)
Arthur A. MacDonell, A Vedic Grammar for Students, (Oxford)
Arthur A. MacDonell, A Vedic Reader for Students, (Oxford) (I also own his big Sanskrit Dictionary)
J.S. Rusten, Thucydides: Peloponnesian War, Book II (Cambridge commentary)
R.L. Hunter, Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautica, Book III(Cambridge commentary)
Gordon Kirkwood, Selections from Pindar (American Philological Association) (intro, text, commentary)
David West, The Imagery and Poetry of Lucretius (Oklahoma)
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding(Oxford ed.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Routledge std. German-English ed.)
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Prentice-Hall, 3rd ed.)

Will use the Classics stuff. Want to use the Vedic stuff, someday. Should read Wittgenstein so I can understand Ryan Oprea.

Autumn

Break is ending. Nothing really accomplished, except creating a huge mess in my flat and brushing up on arabiyya. I played a computer game for several hours. And took my fellow alumnus Matt Hisrich to see a raunchy Spanish film (which confused him), and allowed him to watch me drink Tetley's on tap (which amused him). And read a little Locke. And stayed up until after 4:00 a.m. twice doing arabiyya. Does that count?

I can start reading parts of the Qur'an now. It's really not at all hard. Sortalike Homer was at first. On the other hand, it's really more fun to talk to Dr. Dicarlo about his theories of what the Prophet was really up to. Dr. Dicarlo is pretty amazing. No, he's not the prof, but actually my fellow student in 104. He already has a B.A. and an M.A. in classics, a B.S. in chemistry, doctorates in chiropracty and osteopathy, and wants to go to medical school in Damascus. Of course, what he really wants to do is write a thesis arguing that heretical Christian monks influenced the Prophet's devotional technique and ultimately his whole theology.

I need to come to terms with Vitoria and Ockham, not to mention Grotius. This paper will either make or break me. Probably a little of both. Hitherto, I've been more or less like anti-transubstantiational, anti-purgatory Protestant with boundless admiration for the sweeping theocratic claims of the Papacy. (As in, Boniface VIII was hero and tragic figure, not bad guy.) Now I'm realizing that there are good arguments on both sides.

This is why Nice Reformed Boys shouldn't go to law school. They'll learn to be involuntary agnostics as to matters conceptual and factual (which is a huge turn-off to Nice Reformed Girls :( ) or else narrowly clever sophists more interested in provocation than reflection (which is possibly worse).

And I have so much email to write to old friends and new enemies. :(

Books, book, books

I keep collecting. Made some exciting recent purchases. Basic Cambridge political thought series volumes of Bodin, Ockham, and Vitoria. (For a paper.)

Loebs of Pindar. (So I can read his little corpus in translation and remind myself that I must master lyric if I'm ever to achieve a truly graceful prose style.)

Have also started to collect Aeneid commentaries. (Vergil's is such a central work, the central work, I am tempted to say, for literary purposes.) Now have V, VIII, IX, and XI. (XII is coming out soon!) Have read I-VI with the aid of the Pharr edition (in bars and dance clubs, at that, LOL).

Am reorganizing my books into three categories: (1) use and display; (2) not useful, but keep; (3) not useful, sell or discard. The last category should total at least 10%.

Breaking the waves...

1. No law classes this week. That doesn't mean I'm not *really* busy.
2. Arabic is going better. Still stammer in conversation, but am rebuilding vocab.
3. Ockham sits like patience on a monument waiting for my eager attention.
4. A markupable copy of Vitoria is in the mail.
5. There's a microbrewery in Columbus that has an exceptional "Russian Imperial Stout. As one of the Iron Chef judges says, "It tastes so good, I want to cry!" I say: "With beer like this, who needs women?" LOL.

Less than fourteen points.

1. My Arabic is rusty. La aarafu.
2. My sleep patterns are totally inverted now.
3. I need to outline a term paper which still requires too much initial research.
4. Patents is of cool intellectual interest. In other words, *almost* boring.
5. Family law continues to be a stimulating class. We did Roe and Griswold today.
6. Hobbes and Locke don't apply outside the insular context of the Blessed Isle. The U.S. is a sui generis political-religious order. 7. Saranac's Black Forest is the best adult beverage sold off the slopes of Mt. Olympus.
8. Godfather isn't the best film ever made. (That would be Rules of the Game, Vertigo, or L'Avventura.) But it is awfully good on a scratched library DVD.
9. Lucía y el Sexo is worth seeing, but wait for R-rated DVD version. A little too soft-core (even for me), but has some amazingly beautiful existential moments.
10. There are good used book bargains in Columbus. Recent finds include: Summa Theologica, II, in Latin ($6, was rare); Gransden's Cambridge commentary on Aeneid VIII ($4, was $23); T. M. Knox's edition of Hegel's Philosophy of Right ($5, was $20-30).
11. I've come to the realization that it is necessary to come to terms with the Moderns, and with all of the Moderns. Lady, were I to go where my heart wills, even now would I be walking in Firenze with Dante, speaking of Avveroes, Aquinas, and Vergil. But there can be no victory for our side without facing their new labyrinth and the great Machine.
12. I'm in canto XVI of Tasso now. Still surprised by his pervasive use of Vergil and his singular anticipation of Milton. Want to read Camoes next.

Preliminary Middle East Conflict Paper Topic

Some of the central issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict center around access of Jews, Christians, and Muslims to the religious shrines and holy places, and ultimately implicate the status of Jerusalem itself, viz., whether as Holy City, prize of conquest, or neutral corpus separatum. Inasmuch as rights of pilgrimage and the very concept of such “sacred space” are patently anachronistic to modern international law, I wish to examine and compare the development and usage of some of these norms.

Greek law, within the context of Panhellenism, developed norms governing access to religious sites by members of competing poleis. The greatest examples of this are perhaps the festival of Zeus at Olympia or the Oracle at Delphi, which seem to have achieved something like a corpus separatum status. (Further research into Roman and Mesopotamian law may reveal further examples of parallel phenomena.)

Within the order of Islamic civilization, a similar problem may be seen with respect to the access of the Faithful, in their several striving sects, from many parts of the empire, to the holy places of Mecca and Medina. Indeed, given that the emphasis on pilgrimage comes much later in Christian thought, one is tempted to wonder to what degree the whole Christian idea of pilgrimage (which, in its definite expression, comes much later) was conditioned by the prior Islamic experience. Certainly, how the Muslims customarily regarded norms of religious access to Mecca, Medina, and Al-Quds conditioned their own response to the Crusades, and ultimately to the modern Zionist crusade.

Through the Crusades and their aftermath (which is, ultimately, colonialism itself), Roman Christianity developed a set of legal norms governing pilgrimage (including the “Peace” and “Truce of God”) and justifying expeditions to make the Levant safe for pilgrimage, which ultimately led to the establishment of the short-lived kingdom of Jerusalem. (I would like to compare and contrast this with any Byzantine norms regarding the holy places and pilgrimage, which I suspect were pretty non-existent.)

Two leading examples of corpora separata in the modern world are Vatican City and Washington D.C. In both instances, the corpora were instituted to free the administration of a precinct of wider religious or civil-religious significance from the influence of the “host” State. Both D.C. and the Vatican represent examples of how a corpus separatum regime may be used to administer a precinct of great symbolic significance, while assuring its access to pilgrims and tourists.

Comparison with norms used by related cultures to govern pilgrimage and holy places, and to preserve their neutrality in the face of traditional territorially-defined political conflict, helps us to understand a key part of the background of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Preliminary Jurisprudence Paper Topic

The following represents my basic concept for a paper topic. It is admittedly wide-ranging in time, but I believe that it can be focused topically in a very apt manner. I intend to refine and restate this concept further over the next few days, leading to a final paper topic statement by this Monday.

I intend to treat of the idea of the right to property (i.e., as estate) as (1) an immutable right under natural law, as (2) a creature of social contract, and as (3) a creature of positive law, together with various jurisprudential implications of these three traditions. Conceptually and doctrinally, my material will be roughly threefold: (1) property as a natural right in a late medieval and/or “silver age” Scholastic philosopher (Ockham, Vitoria, Suarez?); (2) property as a natural right in early modern social contract theory (Grotius and/or Locke); (3) property as a fundamental right (or not) in Welfare State legal philosophy (Lochner, New Deal, Rawls). I expect to distinguish these three jurisprudential approaches are more or less representative of (1) medieval Christendom, (2) political liberalism, and (3) socialism. I expect to apply this material to two historical problems: (A) late-medieval debates on ecclesiastical property (i.e., on whether the Church necessarily requires jurisdiction over property in order to realize its mission in the world) and (B) twentieth-century debates over substantive due process (i.e., over whether property rights are necessarily part of those rights and liberties guaranteed under the Amendments to the U.S. Constitution). I believe that there is a hitherto overlooked parallel between problems (A) and (B) inasmuch as the liberties secured by the medieval Western Church (e.g., as set forth in the opening §§ of the Magna Carta) have served, historically, as prototype for those liberties acquired by individuals over that long liberal march of progress. See Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. I expect to conclude with very pointed criticisms of the Court-packing crisis of 1937, from the standpoints of traditions (1) and (2), but also with a renewed appreciation for the limitations of traditions (1) and (2), as cogent jurisprudential and viable philosophical alternatives for postmodern man, in the face of starkly changing social conditions.

I expect that this research will be practically helpful inasmuch as it should directly inform my understanding of Rawls’ two principles of justice and indirectly contribute to my understanding of Aristotle’s conception of justice as set forth in Nicommachean Ethics, V.

Annoyance at not being able to develop intellectually at all?

LOL. A friend mentioned that and it sounded too familiar. I hate the “at all” part. It really stings! I walk around the law school killing time right before classes reading Vergil or looking at a real book, and people ask me if I’m reading that for “fun.” Or, worse yet, being caught in a bar on Friday night curled up with some great book and a beer and told that I need to “loosen up.” :-( I talk to my friends in history or English or classics and I turn a little green from envy. I'm in my fifth semester of law school, and it's the second one that I'm actually enjoying. Sometimes, I wish I could just push the rewind button in life and erase the whole affair. Nearly walked away from it twice before—am really only finishing because, with funding for this year, nothing's ventured beyond my time. But enough complaining!

For me, the experience has been positive inasmuch as it has allowed me to understand how liberal socialist atheists think, and generally how contemporary society is trying to enforce its value-choices. That's an internal perspective that I didn't acquire at my little conservative Mecca of a college. The experience has also helped me to become a more versatile apologist, in the sense of learning how to argue ruthlessly for things one doesn't "believe in" at all.

What do I want to do with it? Well, get on with the "real project" as soon as possible. For me, this means extending and refining the sort of theologically-driven social critique articulated by people like Machen, Schaeffer, and (most of all) Rushdoony in an historically-conscious, legally-sophisticate, and literarily-allusive mode. In other words, work on rewriting De Civ. Dei for an American audience, addressing the history and destiny of the American experiment in terms, not of redemptive history b.c., but of ecclesiastical history a.d. Hopefully involves heavy study of the epic tradition of imaginative, civilization-defining literature, and of medieval and early modern political philosophy.

At this point, I don't especially want to practice at all. Feel vaguely like a seminary student who's lost his faith in "god" (i.e., the people or their legislatures). Practically, I guess I'd like to practice in an anti-regulatory posture serving small businesses and farmers. Sortalike what the Institute for Justice does. But I'm still working on the whole "what next" question. One option is clearly to enter a terminal program in political philosophy or history of ideas and practice locally while in that program. A career in service abroad is another option.

Does that sound terribly jaded? Perhaps it explains some of dark allegories. LOL.

Dull blog

I guess I need to come up with some interesting content for this blog. Soon. My attempts to publish a spiritual mediation are not exactly going anywhere. Maybe I should try writing about more ordinary things. LOL

Between the Darkness and the Light:
III. Orientation and Alienation

In two epiphanies Philosophia had revealed herself to me.

The first—oh, the first! how its white light, its angel choirs, its Platonic intertext made me like some young god sent out to resolve the cosmos in dialectics! It was as if I were on a mission from God to live out in life what others only studied, in so much moive fai, as merely intellectually stimulating ancient history. I remember being happy, possessed, consumed bright Apollonian optimism and so firmly convinced that it is the love of questions that conquers all.

In her second epiphany, my mistress came—not out of some logos but as if out earth itself—and led me up above Thebes and acquainted me, not with Apollo, or even Diana, but with that other god. Instead of the proud and stirring periods of Plato’s holy martyr, I hear the brutal, overbearing hexameters of that materialist magician, Lucretius, who believes without believing. In place of that shrine of gleaming marble, I saw only a dark wood. Ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Is my end my beginning? Or is that just a stolen line?

what a wretch I have become! I dig up old papers and can't believe that I used to have active research interests. i surf the web for names of fellow classmates and find they they're teaching Greek in California or participating in conference panels in Kenya or busily writing dissertations on relatively important historical topics. ah! would that i could master the worm at my breast. why was I made to be curious about despairing things?

Back to School

Started classes again today. Family law is a little crazy. I wonder about my instructor. He has a nasal tone, no wedding band, and wears a bow tie. The Jurisprudence seminar looks very good though. I described myself as a sort of Christian Platonist and a borderline monarchist who has a low view of democracy. Now all I have to do is find a suitable paper topic. (It's actually an important paper because I haven't done very much real academic writing since undergrad. I need a fresh writing sample.)

2002 NY40

Found the asteroid at about 03:30 UT or Zulu time night. Faint (10th magnitude) and drifting west few degrees southwest of Vega at a rate of about an eighth of a degree per minute. The rock is only about 800 m or so across, and passes within about 500,000 km of the earth about the distance of the moon's orbit. It was really cool though to see it move slowly and steadily against the background stars, just drifting along. Daniel, Andrew, Mom, and Dad were all able to spot it before the clouds rolled in. Hurrah!

Feminism and the New Asceticism

Celibacy is an oft-discredited and overlooked model. Many great men were celibate—at least, e.g., the greater part of those dusty old premodern dead white guys. I am not suggesting that I personally have the gift or even the doom, but the idea does have a undeniable rational appeal. But beyond any idiosyncratic sentiments, I wonder if the whole culture would be the better from self-examination here.

The instant crisis of American culture in particular and of Western socialist-democratic culture in general, does not, I suggest, consist simply in the decline of the family, but is, certainly, bound up in its erosion. Part and parcel of that erosion are two related doctrines: romanticism and self-realization. We are perhaps accustomed to identify the latter with some porn-pushing ACLU type or, what is worse, with some dying gay coughing up blood. What we perhaps overlook is the true identity of the former.

Contemporary Christian conservatives tend to counter the worship of sex with what is really only another idol: the bourgeois home. In reality, may I suggest that the final product of this belief in “family values” is the broken home, just as self-slaughter is sequel to amor sui. Is this so strange? Men divorce, desert, and betray women for all sorts of common and relatively bestial reasons. This has pretty much always been the case. (The “poor,” in this sense, are always with us.) But the great tide towards divorce is something very different. Modern divorce is simply the endgame of an autonomous, historically feminist dream of romance which posits marriage as a mystical union in which two people become one not on the basis of the oaths they swear or the children born of their genetic union, but on the basis of a shared emotional, quasi-spiritual experience. In her own way, the divorcee is doing nothing more than asserting her ultimate faith in “family values.” She cannot continue in a marriage without “love,” with a spouse whom she perceives as, at bottom, essentially a failure because unequal to her idol of an ideal.

It is not my place to fault my mother’s gender as such. This is the Adamic sin. But it is crucially important for Christian evangelicals to understand that they can only lose at kulturkampf, so long as romantic love is enthroned as the sine qua non of marriage. It is not secret that this ideal of romance is, characteristically, a feminine weakness. Men, taken categorically, do not buy feel-good greeting cards. Nor are they the primary consumers of those tangible tokens in which the marketplace tries to sell the intangible. Men, rather, are typically and ordinarily content with vice of simple lust.

If in classical Rome, Christianity faced a culture glutted on lust, today, in our secular democracies, Christianity faces a market gorged on love, “love” exhausted into impotence by the kitschy sentimentality of the valentine. If the Playboy ethos represents essentially a reversion to the spirit of old paganism, with its depersonalization of the feminine, perhaps we may identify the idolization of romance, with its hopeless burden on the male, as the final realization of apostate, secular consumer culture.

What am I trying to say? Well, I am rather wondering aloud as to whether single Christians of both sexes might be called to forswear the cult of romance in a similar way to that in which they seek to guard their chastity. Furthermore, I am suggesting that the presence of this grand idol should inspire a fresh wave of exemplary asceticism, in which some men and women individually not only reject the romantic illusion as normative but also reject as false that bourgeois ideal which identifies marriage and parenthood as universal norms irrespective of religious or secular vocation.

Between the Darkness and the Light:
II. Philosophy, Poetry, and the Void

The shades of Plato and Boethius rose up from their tomes and offered to guide me to some obscure chapel among the spires of the Kashmir. I went through the narthex, right through the flaming walls of the world, found Philosophia standing at the altar, and married her on the spot. She was an older woman, old like Galadriel in Tolkien, stern, wise, terrible, beautiful. We honeymooned among the clouds of thought. In every sense, I thought I knew her. Between multiple intellectual epiphanies, she showed me the kingdoms of the earth and explained their histories. As I was now a man, she gave me her ring, and sent me down to hunt legends in the world below, a world of which she could never really be a part.

Philosophia had bid me look for her old ally and erstwhile rival, Poetry, who could only live upon the green earth, under broad elms amidst echoing woods. I passed through vales sounding with epic thunder. I picnicked besides the golden streams of lyric. At last, in a secluded meadow, I found her. She was a young girl, dressed in warm pastels, probably still in high school. (I didn’t ask.) I lay in her myrtle-strewn bower and held her a little with chalk-dirty hands. She began to chant to me of Love and his mother, and the generation of things, and lo! the scales fell from my eyes and I saw before me not … Poetry, but Philosophia herself, fey in her beauty and majesty, terrible as the storm and the wind and the flares of our star.

The meadow-bower faded around me and I found myself on the roof of the world, bloody fingers jammed amidst the ice, searching for granite. The height made me dizzy and sky with mountain swam before my eyes. I felt as though I were looking not up but down, down at a black sky filled with an infinity of bright, hard diamonds endlessly removed. It seemed as though I would fall through that void and be dissolved between those particles of light. And then I felt her hands around my biceps, holding me, her nipples hard against my shoulder blades.

“Look, behold, and tremble,” she was saying. “This is the universe as it really is. As a child, you squinted from your backyard through the veil of your little world up out at this immense whole of being. You laughed at those who found themselves alone out in its depths, between the ice and the fire. And now, at last, you are with them.

“But you were always falling in the void. Only now, now that you are mine, do you know it. You see the majesty and terror of the face of the universe, and your fear it. Here, on the edge of the apeiron, you are not so sure now that there really is a God behind those stars. Perhaps he is not quite the person, the father, as of whom you had thought your own. Are you so sure that that man, so great in your little world, the prophet of Nazereth, was really one with the infinity of number which upholds these atoms in their being?

“That shudder on your spine is my gift to you. You are free to try and stop it with food and drink, and Viennese music and cheap poetry. But you will never forget what you have seen here.”

I went black and found myself stumbling in una selva oscura. Almost involuntarily, I began to rub a cord which I found at my breast and numbly to intone, “Ave Maria, plena gratia . . .”

Between the Darkness and the Light:
I. The Ghetto

I grew up in the Jesus movement, and finished growing up in the Homeschool movement. (I could have said Reconstructionist movement, but Rushdoony's shadow is certainly larger than those who have named themselves by his label.) I was, accordingly, exposed, on the one hand, to a sort of heady countercultural dissidence which burst the drywall of American society to cast about for roots and find, at length, Constantinople and Geneva, but also, on the other, to an anticommunist, survivalist siege mentality which rejected so large a part of American history as to emerge, notwithstanding its superficial patriotism, profoundly anti-American. My experience of Christianity was, from the first, supposed to be both radically biblical and intellectually curious.

My radically biblical pedagogy precluded me from much exposure to classical literature as a youth, but I was able to steal some long draughts of Shakespeare and Milton, which I drank much too quickly. Tolkien and Lewis were my early Vergils—guides in a realm of what I now consider poetry. They introduced me to another world, of mystery, of unreconstructed nature. They taught me that the most beautiful thing in the world is allusion to a larger story, expressed concisely in alliteration of simple, common words.

My teachers were conservative in an essentially utilitarian way. They loved Mill, Rothbard, and even old Augustine as clubs and hammers with which to beat that hideous strength, the young Olympian, the messianic State. But their classical liberal or even Whig sociologies were unequally yoked to a vision of the world out of tune with all later modernity, a vision whose finest hour was a Puritan theocracy never so fully realized as in spectacles of reprint publishers. These teachers made me to call into question everything which had happened in America and Europe since at least 1800, yet they forbade me to read the old poets and the old philosophers, as so many pagan homosexuals drunk on dreams of human autonomy. I would complete my training. I would not rush to face Vader.

To medieval history I then turned my eager eyes, eyes then eager to know the causes of things. Gazing into the dark ages, I looked into the fat book of its morning star, and devoured Augustine. In his pages, I read about a world which was lost—the Roman empire—and about another world which had come and gone, a world pregnant to him and expiated to me—the Old Christian West. For all their strict Calvinism, Augustine was the real progenitor of my teachers, the original Christian social critic; I felt as though I had meet Rushdoony’s distant ancestor—and so I put down Gary North.

I remember wanting to get inside the African’s mind, to understand what it meant to be a Roman and a Christian in love and in hate with that city founded upon a fratricide. For this reason, I began Latin. When Vergil came to me, he was a revelation, and I felt as though, “somehow . . . I’ve always known.” I quickly learnt Greek and found myself smack in Homer and Plato. Hellenism was not something alien to me, but was really stock and stone of that realm I knew and loved. I felt almost like Luke Skywalker at the end of Empire, when he discovers that Vader is his father. Only, for me, it seemed more like some comic eucastastrophe.