Temper, temper!

[Note to reader: this post was written hastily, so there is no intended figure today. Sorry!]

I recently had a brief dispute--brief meaning 4.7 seconds--about the classic theory of the four temperaments. Just in case I need to reference this theory in the future in persona Ignorami, I want to lay out my thoughts.

The best treatment I know of the subject is Art and Laraine Bennet's The Temperament God Gave You. Until I read that book I thought I understood how to discern the temperaments but in fact had only a fuzzy grasp of things. For example, my own dominant temperament, the melancholic, can mimic the anger or aggressiveness of the choleric at times; my subdominant phlegmatic side can play together with the melancholic to look almost like a sanguine.

Someone once suggested to me that the irascible and concupiscible powers explain the four temperaments. A strong irascible power makes one choleric, while a weak irascible power makes one phlegmatic; a strong concupiscible power makes one melancholic, while a weak concupiscible power makes one sanguine. Here is where the dispute arose a couple of days ago, so let me clarify.

Picture the irascible and concupiscible powers mapped on a grid, with the vertical line representing the irascible and the horizontal line representing the concupiscible. To be choleric you have to be towards the top of the vertical line, while to be phlegmatic you have to be near the bottom of the vertical line. To be melancholic you have to be at the far right side of the horizontal line, while to be sanguine you have to be at the far left side of the horizontal line. To find your overall personality mix, you find your point on the horizontal, your point on the vertical, and then do the standard graph maneuver of locating the point next to both of these on the grid. The result will have both slope, indicating which side is dominant, and length, indicating the overal strength of temperament.

Note that the temperaments are plotted on a continuum. You could be right at the center of the line and therefore neither choleric nor phlegmatic strictly speaking. In that case, you might have some features of one and some of the other, but the overall result would not be particularly strong in either direction. The same goes for the melancholic/sanguine continuum. You could not be strongly choleric and strongly phlegmatic, or strongly melancholic and strongly sanguine.

However, you could be strongly melancholic and phlegmatic, melancholic and choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic, or sanguine and choleric--one strong mix for each quadrant of the graph. In this case you can have both temperaments strictly speaking, although in practice one will tend to be dominant over the other, if only slightly.

Lastly, we have to recall that temperament is not destiny. The saints are often very difficult to place on the temperament continuum because they have overcome the vices of their temperament and acquired the virtues of the other temperaments. One cannot be natively disposed both a strong choleric and a strong phlegmatic reaction, but by living well one can acquire the reactions of a choleric in one circumstance and of a phlegmatic in another circumstance, depending on what is appropriate. Acquired virtue makes hash of my temperament grid.

Oh gee, sis!

A quick post just to have something up, here. The figure for the last two posts was Auxesis, Arranging words or clauses in a sequence of increasing force:

First it chowed my extra reading, then it gobbled up my evening relaxation, then it swallowed my sleeping hours, and now it is eating my blog.

First they said that cats are machines, then they undertook to build machines like the cat, then they thought to build machines better than the cat, and finally they flew to the moon.

I am quite at a loss for a mnemonic image on this one. Any immediate thoughts?

The Scandalous Success of Atheistic Intellectual Projects

Any number of post-enlightenment intellectual projects have started in error and achieved tremendous success: modern biblical studies began as an attack on Scripture and ended by contributing mightily to our understanding of Scripture; the theory of evolution seemed to its original audience to remove God from the equation, and yet has explained all manner of conundrums of zoology; modern science in general began with the rejection of formal and final causality and gained an almost unimaginable power over the material world.

A quick and general account of this phenomenon is that man is an imperfect knower. Sometimes what is in itself an error actually counterbalances one of our flaws and leads to truth, like a man who aims away from the target because his gun doesn't shoot straight.

One example of this has been on my mind lately. Only after philosophers denied the "Cat First" principle did technology achieve its modern miracles. First they said that cats are machines, then they undertook to build machines like the cat, then they thought to build machines better than the cat, and finally they flew to the moon. Why would mechanical mastery depend on philosophical loss?

Basically, it is because all men at all times and in all places are tempted to substitute imagining for reasoning.

When men could not see the tiny, tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they imagined the tissues of the cat as continuous; when they tried to imagine how the cat's tissues achieved their various functions, the result was rather blurrily attributed to the "powers" due to the "nature" of the cat and its tissues. In other words, imagination favored thinking of cats as one thing.

But once men discovered the tiny parts that make up the mechanical aspect of a cat, they could imagine the mechanical processes leading to the various operations of the cat. More importantly, they inevitably imagined the cat as made up of billions of little wholes, because substantial unity is in fact extrasensory and so unimaginable. So then imagination favored thinking of cats as many things.

In an odd way, then, the belief that a cat is one thing prevented men from achieving a mechanical mastery of the world by encouraging an imaginative error, just as mechanical mastery of the world now prevents men from seeing a cat as one thing by encouraging another imaginative error.

This is the way of the Moose: imagine, don't think. He loves pictures and hates words. But our universal tendency to go with the more sensible and vivid--with the imaginable--makes it difficult indeed to ignore Ray Moose.

Hot blog with mustard

The process of moving is eating my blog. First it chowed my extra reading, then it gobbled up my evening relaxation, then it swallowed my sleeping hours, and now it is eating my blog.

Perhaps this blog is of no account in the face of Ray Moose's mega-corp hippy big-brother free-thinking organization, but I still feel bad about missing a week at a time.

Star lichen

What a week! Between work and packing I’ve barely been able to post, and even when I get to the computer I never have time to put on my special Ignoramus mask and cape.

And the figure I was stuck with is as boring as they come: asterismos, adding an unnecessary word to emphasize or draw attention to what follows:

…and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists".

So unobtrusive is this figure—and I begin to wonder whether it is a figure at all—that I simply couldn’t make it the most striking sentence in a long post. The only way to catch it would have been to focus on the short post with just a few lines.

Boring or not, useful or not, I must memorize the figure, so: Picture a gentle hill on which has been placed a completely unnecessary stone staircase; in fact, it was only put there to emphasize the fact that there is a hill. So unnecessary is this staircase on such a gentle hill that no one ever uses it, so it is so covered with moss that you can’t see the stone at all. In fact, on closer examination, it turns out that “a stair IS moss.”

Lucky me

While the Moose has confined all matters religious and moral to gushy emotionalism, he has somehow managed to persuade the world that we need a scientific study to tell us that we have noses on our faces. When the Moose Media try to be objective about things that really matter, the result is a poll:

Survey indicates Bible hard to understand

...A survey commissioned by the Catholic Biblical Federation found that even those who reported reading the Bible said it was not easy to understand.

Well now that's a relief. I make my living teaching Scripture, and if it were a breeze then my children would have no bread on the table. Having spent several years trying to explain Scripture to college freshman, I'm glad to know at last that the Bible is not easy to understand. My students will be glad to hear that, too.

But the disturbing part of the survey was this, the attempt to define "fundamentalists":

Diotallevi described as fundamentalist those who chose the response: "The Bible is the actual word of God, which must be taken literally, word for word."

Would the Catholic position be that Scripture is the potential word of God? Virtually the word of God? Metaphorically the word of God? Not really the word of God?

But a Catholic who had read 1Thess 2:13, or even his Catechism, and wanted to respond that Scripture is actually the word of God, would probably not want to say it "must be taken literally" as a blanket statement. Surely everyone knows there are metaphors in Scripture!

On the other hand, what does it mean to take a text "word for word"? Is the alternative to skip some words? Surely a Catholic would not endorse snipping up the Scriptures.

Wrap these stumpers into one sudden polster's puzzle, undoubtedly sprung in an Italian accent over the telephone during dinner, and what you get is literally this: con-fusion.

The Shrine of the Moose

I'm a bit worried about the Mass we attend. We were told it would be an extraordinary experience, and it does look and smell like a Catholic Mass, but stop: the priest begins every prayer by lifting his hands and intoning, "Oh Ray Moose!"

The subliminal effect on my children could be devastating.

But what to do? Hey, our nearest other option is the Mass with four movie screens in the sanctuary and synthesized, soft rock moose ick. Subliminal effects are bad, but conscious and over effects are worse.

A brief respite from words

I sinned = debt on

As usual, the Duck nailed it: Asyndeton, the ommision of a conjunction, was the featured figure of the past few posts. And the way he can rattle off other figures I didn't even know I was using is frightening.... But in reply to Fr. Barry, I did mean "deadly" in the sense you took it.

For the mnemonic image, picture a donkey selling the word "AND" to a pawn shop. That should link "Ass in debt" on to the omission of a conjunction in your memory.

Starship Capitalism

My father-in-law still has a ticket, given him some thirty years ago I think, to the moon. While the technology did not exist for private space travel when the ticket was sold, nonetheless it guarantees that whenever such technology becomes available the holder of the ticket will get a ride.

Well, Dad, it's almost time to claim your seat. Private space flight is real, and the galaxy's first spaceline, Virgin Galactic, is building ships and selling tickets. The company's founder is deadly serious.

Why does anyone want to go to outer space? I can think of three reasons.

First, everyone loves a good adventure. We all like to read about voyages to the end of the world, to the center of the earth, past the cave of the Cyclops, through the valley of Shangri La. Now a company with offices and brochures offers a guaranteed romantic trip for a preset price, and anyway if anything goes wrong you can sue them, so there we have it: adventure for the average man!

Second, it resonates with the evolutionary mythology of our day. At least since the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, popular imagination has connected space travel with evolving on, becoming the superman, achieving wisdom. While science and popular science are equally steadfast in denying that nature acts for an end--that plants grow leaves for the purpose of imbibing the sun, that spiders spin webs for the purpose of catching flies--popular science at least has endowed the cosmos as a whole with a purposeful striving towards its destiny. The same purpose impossible in the parts is the point of the whole: the whole universe has been groaning in travail until now, awaiting the revealing of the Ubermensch--and beyond. While the scientific proponents of an evolutionary world view may honestly intend to exclude all purpose, by making it a world view they make it a popular mythology, and by making it a mythology they cast it in the role of giving purpose and direction to life. Space travel offers hope to modern man.

Third, generalizing a little from that last point, we all want to find the ultimate realities of life. Since modern man is trained to think of all things, including himself, as a machine, he finds no depth in the world immediately around him. No use probing further in, so all he can do is probe further out: he travels around the world, explores the forests, climbs the mountains; when that is old he goes around the world faster, makes satellite maps of the forests, computer generates the mountains; when that is old, he either retreats into the imaginary world of television or probes further out to the real domain of outer space. Not coincidentally, his imaginary world of television feeds him a regular diet of imaginary space travel.

But to be honest, I don't think the average man today would go to space if television signals didn't reach that far. To hope for space travel in the future may give hope to life, but actually to have been there might be a desolating experience. The earth seen through the pressurized windows would look like the photographs we have already seen; weightlessness would be neat for a while, but would hardly feel like evolving to the next level; in general, space is an environment reduced rather than enlarged, unfit for man not because it is beyond him but because it is beneath him, unable to support life because of its poverty rather than because of its greatness.

When the first manned space flight broke through the atmosphere in 1961, the Russian communist astronaut looked around briefly and radioed triumphantly to the home base that he had not seen God. Atheism demonstrated--and a telling symbol of what awaits the average man in outer space.

The most thrilling adventures are in the rich world around us. When we have traveled the world, mapped the world, computer generated the world, made a video game of the world, there remains yet the return to real natures. Grant that a cat is a cat, not a machine, and untold vistas of discovery await us.

"Further up and further in!"