Forensic Braiding

Pippin found the sound very pleasant to listen at first; but gradually his attention wavered. After a long time (and the chant showed no sign of slackening) he found himself wondering, since Entish was such an 'unhasty' language, whether they had yet got further than Good Morning; and if Treebeard was going to call the roll, how many days it would take to sing all their names.

 I wasn't particularly happy with my last post.    When I look at its individual elements, I can't see anything irredeemably bad, but the parts don't fit together that well.   I think I was going for a kind of braiding essay, but ended up with more of a tangle.    I'll let it stand, though.  Blogging is a way of thinking through time... a kind of temporal braiding.  

My main intention in writing it was to emphasize that the skills involved in encountering other peoples' opinions -- in reading discernment, if you will, in honor of St Ignatius whose feast day is today -- are not "expert" skills.   They are skills available to the ordinary literate human.   They involve a basic understanding of how things are, of what used to be called common sense.  

Furthermore, I was trying to bring out the role of faith even in the most stringent rationalistic take on human reason.    Any rationalist, no matter what definition of reason he gives, will be found to be operating on the basis of any number of assumptions he makes on (presumably justified) faith rather than on strict empirical knowledge of his own.   You can't define reason without some proper attribution to the idea of natural faith.  That was how Pope John Paul II came into it.

Finally, I was trying to approach the art of reading from a rhetorical point of view -- the classic and still employed elements of pathos, ethos, and logos.   But I could only reference them in passing, because I already had a lot to work with.    It was like braiding a dryad's hair by that time, one of the giant sequoia ones we get up here in our part of the California Sierras.

Finally, I wanted to explore a rather speculative point that came up while I was writing the rest out.   It seemed to me that while mind, will and heart are usually considered in distinction from each other (and correspond loosely to logos, ethos, and pathos) -- they are all ordered to what might be called intellect.   Intellect is one of those words that is often misunderstood, like "doctrine" perhaps.    I'm going to use the definition with the most capacious meaning: 

The ability to learn and reason; the capacity for knowledge and understanding.

I will have to take that one up some other time because to be honest I am not sure what qualifications would have to be made to the point.    It seems a bit arguable as I stated it in my last post, though I think it is entirely fine in the specific context I was using it for -- that is, how to read. 

As for Newman and the Duke and the Prime Minister -- really, the connection there was mostly in my own mental train of thought.   Though I do think Newman is extremely relevant, both in his methods and his principles, to the questions of faith and reason and discernment.  

That's enough forensics for now!