Roger Pearse

Odds and ends today.

I was thinking again about Severian of Gabala, and the glowing prose that he wrote.  I must do something about getting more of his stuff into English.  There’s a bunch of homilies in Armenian, which might be attacked; and intermingled with them, some by Eusebius of Emesa.  The one sermon of the latter that I encountered was really good!  It was translated by Solomon Caesar Malan, an oriental prodigy who appears as a character in Tugwell’s Remniscences of Oxford.

Someone has kindly sent me an article about the sermon by John Chrysostom, Quod nemo laeditur (CPG 4400, PG 52 459-480, SC 103), written from exile.  The article also gives “BHG 488d” as a reference — I wonder what that is! *  The article discusses a fragment of a Coptic version.  The letters of Chrysostom don’t exist in English, as far as I know, aside from selections.  They’re probably too lengthy for me.  They would be a good choice for some monastic translator, tho.

Into town, and at the library I ordered Festugiere’s La Reveletion d’Hermes Trismegiste, vol. 3.  The appendix 2 to this contains a French translation of Porphyry Ad Gaurum.  Let’s see if it can be run into English.

The new John Maddox Roberts “SPCK XIII” novel has arrived — or rather, I was able to collect it from the Royal Mail depot this morning.  This afternoon I shall consume it!  I don’t have nearly enough escapist literature available to me, sadly.

* Apparently BHG is Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, and there is a BHL for the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina Antiqua et Mediae Aetatis.  If it includes letters of Chrysostom, it must be an index to all sorts of works by all the saints.

I’m reading Juvenal again.  This time I keep noticing the portions which the translator omitted, of some length in some cases, such as in the Sixth Satire.  The grounds for the omission is obscenity, of course, but even so, it is a pity.  And I could use more of a commentary than the old Loeb edition gives me.

I was also reading an article on the life of Juvenal, which propounded the idea that the scholia on Juvenal, which are found in the Pithoeanus manuscript (=P) were compiled prior to 399 AD.  The scholia also contain an old biography of Juvenal, which I have not yet found in English.  The best edition of the scholia seems to date from 1931, which is an unfortunate age — too recent to be online, but too old to be accessible.  Hum.

The same article told me that Juvenal was the last writer of “Silver Age” Latin, and is not quoted by any writer thereafter for a century and a half.    It would be interesting to see what sort of testimonia there are for the classics, wouldn’t it?

Home, to find a red card on the mat.  Even since the advent of Amazon, these have been regular sights when I came home at night, and I thought non-UK readers might be interested to see these common yet ephemeral items.

OK, they tried to deliver at 10:05 am.  Naturally I was at work then, like everyone else.  But I knew they would, and I expected to go and pick it up from the depot. 

Unfortunately the card tells me — this bit is new — that I can only do so between 9am and 2pm.  That more or less makes it impossible, because, like everyone else, I am at work then.

This is yet another degradation of service from the Royal Mail.   The sorting office used to be open into the evenings, so you could pick up undelivered mail, such as Amazon deliveries.    Then they decided not to open after 2pm — the posties naturally want to go home early –, but they did open from 7am.    This made sense — the posties are supposed to be up early, so why not?   But no longer.   I’ve also heard rumours that Royal Mail wants to charge people to collect the mail from the sorting office.  

If you wanted to stop people shopping online, what else would you do?  But why would a postal service want to do that?   So no more home deliveries for me.  I’ll try sending stuff to work, but this can be hazardous at many workplaces.  And why did it take them four days to try to deliver it?

What Amazon need to do is start their own delivery business, I suspect.  How long will it take before they do?

UPDATE:   I went to collect my mail this morning and was told that the postman had simply used an old card!  Apparently I could have collected my mail yesterday morning at 7am if I had wanted to (and I did want to).  I was also told that Royal Mail, in fact, is extending hours, not curtailing them.  That is good news!

We all know the Amazon.com book ordering process — you register an account, choose the book, hit the button, enter the delivery address, hit the button, choose a credit card, hit the button, display the order, and hit go.

I’d always thought of that as pretty streamlined, until today when I ordered a copy of the Loeb edition of Aulus Gellius’ Attic Nights from Book Depository.  They didn’t make me create an account, or do most of that.  I clicked to add the book to the basket.  I clicked to check out, entered my address and card details on one spartan screen, pressed one click and it was all done.

Very nice!

I’ve decided that I must read the Attic Nights.  Bill Thayer at Lacus Curtius has the Latin and part of the English online, which I was looking at this lunchtime.  But I can’t read this sort of book on-screen, useful as it is. 

In book 1, I read the first story, about how the Greeks calculated the shoe-size of Hercules, as measured from the length of the race-track at Olympia. 

Another anecdote related how Demosthenes secretly approached the whore Lais, who demanded an enormous sum.  Demosthenes replied that he would not purchase shame for 10,000 drachmas.

A quotation from Metellus Numidicus on marriage followed:

If we could get on without a wife, Romans, we would all avoid that annoyance; but since nature has ordained that we can neither live very comfortably with them nor at all without them, we must take thought for our lasting well-being rather than for the pleasure of the moment.

It seems like it might be a good book to read on the sofa in front of the TV on these wintry nights.

I find that the Wikipedia Mithras article is currently being vandalised by an anonymous atheist who has read one article (by Marvin Meyer) in one non-scholarly book on the subject, and is determined that all articles in Wikipedia shall reflect what he believes is the truth — that Christianity and Mithras are somehow connected. 

With such people it is not possible to reason, so, after a couple of hours of vain and polite attempt at reason, I have withdrawn and left him to it.  Such people come along from time to time.  Over time, his changes will get reverted, and I have other things to do than explain the obvious to the dishonest and obtuse.

But it is a reminder that no learning and scholarship and objectivity is proof against the determination of a scumbag.  In Wikipedia the scholar and the troll meet on equal terms; and thus most Wikipedia articles on controversial subjects are of no real value, for the same reason.  

But I was amused that this troll proceeded, in order to advance his goal, to object to my suggestion that only professional Mithras scholars should be quoted; to complain that the footnotes quoted the sources verbatim; to demand that I translate Renan’s book for him — he did not see reading it as a necessary prelude to editing the remarks in the article about it — ; to launch personal accusations against me; and finally — the new nadir — to complain about me because, when referring to the (untranslated) commentary of Servius, I ventured to provide a link to a post on this blog with a translation of it.  Usually people are grateful, when I do such things.

Of course none of this was honest; it was merely an attempt by someone who knew he was in the wrong to “win” by any means over someone he knew to be better informed than himself.  Such is the moral standard of rather too many atheists.

It is hard not to despise atheism, when you encounter this kind of atheist.  It seems to produce such selfish, dishonest and hateful people.  Whatever happened to the atheism of J. S. Mill, the sort of atheism which was based on reason and logic rather than violence and dishonesty?  That valued freedom of conscience, and abhorred the inquisition?  It seems to have been a casualty of the last century.  

If so, we live in poorer times.   Superstition is rampant in our society, thanks to the New Age movement, and the power of priests and mullahs over uneducated people in the Third World has not attentuated conspicuously.  A rational, intelligent, gentle atheism would be a valuable contribution at such a time.  But where is the atheist who will put it forward?

Curious Presbyterian has a charming story, which I reproduce below.

A story is told of a young businessman sharing a compartment on a train with an elderly gentleman.  When he noticed that the old fellow was quietly and intently praying with his rosary, the young man chided him for his ‘superstition’ and told him that science had rendered the beliefs of religion irrelevant.

“How did you come to discover that?” the old gentleman asked.

His companion didn’t really know how to answer the question fully right then and there, so he offered to send him a few texts and public lecture notes on the subject for his enlightenment.  “What’s your address?’ he asked, “I’ll send you the material via the Post Office.”  The old man rummaged in his coat pocket and produced a tattered business card that read, Louis Pasteur, Paris Institute of Scientific Research.

Louis Pasteur was the 19th century giant of microbiology who proved the germ-theory of disease and invented the rabies vaccine.  His humility certainly didn’t hinder his greatness and his commitment to science did not preclude his belief in God.

I hope this is true.  It is a very nice story.

I don’t want to be a party-pooper, and I would very much like to believe this story.  But before I give my assent, I would like to know that it is actually true.  I have grown into the habit of questioning things which I find convenient, in case they are “too good to be true.”  And the story comes with no reference, which should always make us wary.  I wonder what a search would find…

 The story comes, so Curious Presbyterian tells us, to him from Father Tim Moyle, who uses it as an introduction to an excellent article here.  There can be no question but that both repeat it in good faith.  But … is it true?  How do we know?  It does not take long to find an atheist site which claims Pasteur as an atheist.

This link takes us to a preview of Maurice Crosland, Science Under Control: The French Academy of Sciences 1795-1914, p.199 which identifies Pasteur as a Catholic, and references an anti-atheist position to Pasteur, Oeuvres, vol. 6, part 1, pp.56-7, in a discussion of fermentation at the academy of medicine, and another as Correspondance, vol.2, p.151, 154.

I have no more time to search now, but I think we must be wary.