Why Red Letter Bibles Are Dumb

In 1901, Louis Klopsch published the first Bible in which those words "universally accepted as the utterances of our Lord and Saviour" were printed in red—the first "red letter Bible." They've been extremely popular ever since, especially amongst Protestants. Here's the problem with red letter bibles: nothing in the Bible is more or less important than anything else. It's all the Word of God, not just the stuff presented as quotations of Jesus.

Even though the Gospels are eyewitness accounts, and we believe the Apostles were given a special grace to be able to recall all of Jesus' teachings and recount them faithfully (cf. John 14:26), the Gospels aren't word-for-word, moment-by-moment, exact histories of what happened. The Gospels are history, yes, but the Apostles didn't conceive of history in the same way we do. I'm not suggesting that what they say happened didn't happen. I am saying that they're not, nor were they ever intended to be, perfectly factually accurate accounts with exact quotations.

To say that everything the Bible says is the Word of God and absolutely true is not to say that every part of it should be interpreted in the same way. Obviously the Gospels aren't the same kind of literature as 1 Corinthians or Revelation. Different books and sections of the Bible have to be interpreted in light of how they were intended to be read.

For example, when John says that angels in heaven are singing (cf. Rev. 5:8-13) he clearly doesn't mean that literally, because it's not possible. The angels are purely spiritual beings, they have no bodies. A being without vocal cords can't sing. What John is saying is something like: "the angels declare the glory of God and worship him." In order to get this idea across, he likens it to human songs of praise. In other words, it's a metaphor. It's still absolutely and undeniably true. But it's true metaphorically, not literally.

This principle must be extended out over the entirety of Scripture. The question is, How do we determine which parts should be interpreted in which way? Well, there are several answers. First, the Church, carrying on the Apostolic Witness to Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit is custodian to the truth of the Word of God, of which Scripture is the special, written testimony. Second, theologians determine how we must interpret particular passages of Scripture in light of what we know to be true about God and Christ. Third, bible scholars, archaeologists and the like are always coming up with new information about the people and times which produced Holy Scripture, giving us new insight into their culture and, as a result, literature.

To be sure, there are portions of Scripture which it's less crucial to read than others. Someone once suggested a new Christian read the New Testament twice before he ever read the Old Testament. Obviously, every last ceremonial precept in Leviticus and Deuteronomy don't need to be memorized to get the idea. Nevertheless, we ought not to treat the "words of Jesus" in the Gospels as exact quotations. Nor should we devalue the rest of Scripture as any less authoritative (when interpreted properly).

Temperaments And Personality Types, Part Four: Modernity

As we saw in the last post and the post on the Middle Ages' perspective, Humorism and the traditional view of the temperaments had become a part of the European consciousness. Modernity started out no different. To quote again from David Keirsey's Please Understand Me II:

"When William Harvey discovered the circulation of blood in 1628, he argued that blood was simply the most sovereign of the four humors, and he came to look on the Sanguine temperament with special favor. And philosophers of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, Bruno in Italy, Hume in Scotland, Voltaire and Rousseau in France, Kant in Germany, took the idea of four humors as a matter of course, as part of the air they breathed.

"19th-century novelists, from Jane Austen and the Brontës to George Eliot and Tolstoy, had these four patterns of human attitude and action clearly in mind when they framed their characters. In War and Peace, for example, Tolstoy divides the members of a lodge of Freemasons into what he described as 'four classes' of character: some looking for social 'connections' and opportunities, some interested in the lodge's 'external form and ceremony,' some seeking a 'fully understood path for themselves,' and some occupied exclusively with 'the scientific secrets of the order.'

"Even some early 20th-century writers demonstrated detailed knowledge of the roots of temperament and character theory. D.H. Lawrence not only saw human nature as organized around 'four poles of dynamic consciousness,' but he actually described a ruddy, sanguine character in his novel Sons and Lovers (1913) as Paracelsus' Salamander," (24-25).

As medicine progressed, though, the rupture the Modern Age sought to establish between it and the traditions of the past affected even Humorism, and it came to be disregarded as a legitimate scientific theory. While a staunch supporter of the central role of tradition in all things, this was, of course, a good thing, as the advances in the physical sciences and anatomy have proven that Humorism, strictly speaking, is false.

Since Galen in AD 190, the medicinal and psychological elements in the traditional theory had remained wedded to one another. It was the balance of the bodily fluids which caused the differences in behavior and personality. As such, when medicine disproved the existence of the humors, it assumed it had also disproved the existence of the temperaments. In essence, they threw the baby out with the bath water:

"In the behavioral sciences what had been the prevailing current of thought for centuries—that temperament determines character—gradually decreased to a tiny trickle in the latter part of the 19th century, owing mainly to the ideas of two men, Sigmund Freud and Ivan Pavlov. Freud reduced mankind to mere animal, nothing more than a creature of blind instinct. Similarly, Pavlov reduced mankind, not to animal, but to machine, its actions nothing more than mechanical response to environmental stimulation. And the 20th century was nearly swept away by these two new theories," (Ibid. 25).

There were some, however, who developed theories of behavior along similar lines to the personalogical elements of Ancient thought. Erich Adickes, working in 1905 without knowledge of the traditional temperaments, "said that mankind could be divided into four 'world views'—Innovative, Traditional, Doctrinaire, and Skeptical," (Ibid.). Adickes' "Innovatives" clearly correspond to Plato's creative and productive Artisans; his "Traditionals" to Plato's duty-, history-, and rule-obsessed Guardians; his "Dogmatics" or "Doctrinaires" to Plato's ethical and harmony-oriented Idealists; and his "Skeptics" or "Agnostics" to Plato's intellectual, theory-minded Rationals.

Not long after Adickes' work, Eduard Spränger "wrote of four 'value attitudes' which distinguish one personality from another—Artistic, Economic, Religious, and Theoretic," (Ibid.) Spränger, like Aristotle before him, was driving at people's motivations, what they seek out and admire. Obviously Artisans value the "aesthetic;" the "economic" is synonymous with the Guardians' "property," as is the "religious" with Idealists' "morality" and the "theoretic" with "rationality."

A few years later Ernst Kretschmer took a slightly different approach and "proposed that both normal and abnormal behavior can be understood in terms of four 'character styles' similar to those of Adickes and Spränger—Hypomanic, Depressive, Hyperesthetic, and Anesthetic," (Ibid.) These four are more obviously correlated to Galen's Temperaments than Plato's, "hypomanic" meaning emotional and excitable, "depression" recalling melancholy, "hyperesthetic" meaning passionate and ambitious, and "anesthetic" meaning generally emotionless and self-content.

"Rudolph Dreikurs, a disciple of Alfred Adler, pointed out in 1947 what he called four 'mistaken goals' which different kinds of people pursue when their self-esteem declines too far for safety—Retaliation, Service, Recognition, and Power. Also in 1947 Eric Fromm, looking at both negative and positive sides of personality, as did Kretschmer, attributed four different 'orientations' to the four styles—Exploitative, Hoarding, Receptive, and Marketing," (Ibid.)

This last group of four "orientations" may seem out of place, but if we consider "exploitation" in terms of a person who sets out to experience as much as possible, seeking sensation, then it starts to sound an awful lot like Aristotle's Hedonics. Likewise, "hoarding" can be thought of as property-acquisition and "reception" as submission of oneself in favor of harmony. According to Fromm, a "marketer" is a person who knows very little of emotion and social matters and so focuses more on a theoretical and strategic understanding of them and less on actually experiencing them, much like a "logical" and "calculating" Rational would do.

We can now add the following additions to the chart:

Next up: Carl Jung reinvents the wheel.

Why "CE" And "BCE" Make No Sense

In the year AD 525, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus calculated a set of tables laying out several of the future dates of Easter. The dates on previous such tables were notated in the customary manner, anno Diocletiani, or "in the year of Diocletian," counting forward from the first date of that Roman Emperor's reign.

Though many Christians had begun to use anno martyrum, or "in the year of the martyrs," as a result of Diocletian having ordered the last major Christian persecution, Dionysius thought it less than desirable to reckon years on a Christian calendar in reference to such a man. As such, he invented a new system, anno Domini, or "in the year of the Lord," counting forward from the date of Christ's Incarnation and providing an explicit conversion from Years of Diocletian to Years of Our Lord.

The practice became widespread in Europe when, in 731, the Venerable Bede used it in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, gradually gaining more and more traction over the succeeding centuries. We now know that Dionysius' calculations were somewhat mistaken and Christ was most likely born a year or two before 1 BC. Nevertheless, the Gregorian calendar, using such a system, has proved so accurate and become so standard, that no one dare change it.

Until now. The BBC is the latest in a string of respected institutions and publishers to reject AD and BC in favor of the "religiously neutral" CE and BCE ("Common Era" and "Before the Common Era").

But wait, because the reckoning of years from the traditional date of Christ's birth is so universal, it would be all but impossible to attempt to force an actual change in the system of dating. Instead, to try and avoid an explicit reference to Christ, they just changed the terminology. The thing is, though, they're still counting from Jesus' birth; they're just trying to pretend they aren't.

My thinking is, if you're really going to try to entirely excise religion from the public sphere, you should do it right. Devise a completely new dating system and impose it on everyone carte blanche. Maybe they'll react the way the French did when the revolutionaries tried the same thing, maybe they won't. Don't know if you don't try.

Is it really so offensive, though? Yes, it refers to Christ, but it's not like putting AD or BC before a date means you think he's God like we do or came back from the dead. They're not even religious terms anymore. They've been so utterly and completely absorbed into Western culture that the majority of people don't even know what they stand for.

Just relax. You won the battle for academia, and you're winning the battle for the West. You don't have to rub it in.

Zombies: The Post-Modern Horror

The above map illustrates the frequency with which the word "zombie" was entered into Google's search bar by geographical area. It is clear at first glance that only the developed world, and especially only the developed English-speaking world, seem concerned.

I have a theory that zombies are the quintessential Post-Modern horror. Gone are the days when vampires and werewolves scared the piss out of people, contemporary culture even finds them "sexy" now. Why?

Modernity, generally defined as that period that lasted from around 1517 through 1914 or so, is characterized chiefly by a breakdown of the Medieval Synthesis between Christianity and traditional philosophy. As such, in the Modern Era thought on every topic fractured into two opposing camps: realists vs. idealists, rationalism vs. fideism, rationalism vs. idealism, etc. This polarization of ideas manifested itself culturally as the cold, calculating Enlightenment on one side, and the mushy, nostalgic Romantic Movement on the other.

As a result of this fracturing, throughout the Modern Era we can pick up on two chief currents in what frightened people. Those of a more rationalistic bent were frightened by the prospect that they might be wrong about the operation of the supernatural in the world. The Puritans were famously willing to go to great lengths to rid their communities of suspected witchcraft. Likewise, Bram Stoker's Dracula seems to me to be the tale of a sorcerer first, and a "vampire" second. We can also include "mummy" horror here, as essentially a fear of magic.

On the other hand, those who reacted against the Enlightenment and embraced the opposing sentimentality of the Romantic Movement were frightened by the prospect that they might be wrong, and the world might just be a kind of Deistic experiment. Thus Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which told a story in which it was proved that the world is mere mechanism.

Historically, the Romantic Movement was a reaction against the Enlightenment. It sought, by a last ditch effort to appeal to our emotions, to restore some of what the Enlightenment had destroyed of the old culture. Interestingly, following this challenge of the Romantic Movement, the fears of the more rationalistic bent began to shift from witchcraft and the supernatural, to over-sentimentality—a reaction against a reaction.

In this category we find the later vampire mythology, in which they are presented as over-stimulated "romantics" with a metaphorical "lust for blood." Much the same can be said of werewolves, who are ruled by bestial passion.

Post-Modernity, though, is characterized chiefly by a denial of any meaning or purpose to anything. Where Modernity (in both Enlightenment and Romantic forms) sought to replace the traditional culture and philosophy with its own, Post-Modernity offers no contrary hypothesis, it simply denies that there is culture. To put it another way, Modernity sought to reform the truth, Post-Modernity seeks to abolish it outright.

Not surprisingly, Post-Modernity is accompanied by a whirlwind of technological innovation. In a world where actions have no moral repercussions, and men no responsibility, we might as well build the bomb, if only because we can.

The Post-Modern world is founded on technology. If the Middle Ages were founded on religion (albeit in cooperation with reason), and Modernity was founded on ideas, Post-Modernity is founded on stuff. In other words, when you throw religion, morality, and, finally, reason and truth itself out the window, all you've got left to do is seek your own comfort and pleasure. And that's exactly what we have done, and been marvelously successful—the crowning achievement of this technological pleasure-seeking being the removal of the consequences of sex.

What, then, could possibly frighten Post-Modern Man, tucked away in his fortress of comfort (I think they call them Man-Caves now)? Simple, a world in which one has no time to seek pleasure because he's too busy fighting for his very survival. I can't be the only one who's noticed the really astounding frequency with which tales of a post-Apocalyptic, dystopian horror have been produced in the decades since the '70s, especially if you include disaster movies, which are basically the same thing.

Like the Moderns before us, we look at the things that terrify us and see ourselves gone wrong. Mary Shelley looked at Dr. Frankenstein and saw a man willing to do awful things as a result of his inability to see life and humanity as more than just machines and scientific principles. Bram Stoker looked at Dracula and saw a man that terrified him because of the incredible things he could do as a result of his sorcery. Post-Modern Man looks at zombies and sees creatures who care nothing for comfort or pleasure, who desire only to feed a ravenous and insatiable hunger and, as a result, are capable of destroying anything that stands in their way.

The map above illustrates this point rather well. If, at its core, the fear that zombies and other post-Apocalyptic tales inspire is based in our fear that we might have to give up our technological conveniences, then it would only affect the first world. After all, it's sad to say in a way, but if Mad Max came true, life in Central Africa wouldn't change that much. It doesn't make a lot of sense that they would be too worried about it.

The Top Ten Creatures I Can't Buy A Good God Created, Part Three

Last post we discovered that we contributed to the downfall of Nature when we sinned in the Garden. We also realized that, because fangs and poison and death and other bad stuff seem to have been around before us, they must be due to some other evil influence on the world.

There can only be one answer to who that could be, seeing as, before us, there's only one other source of evil: the Devil and his fallen angels. But why should the Devil have anything to do with God's Creation?

In The Silmarillion, Tolkien recounts his creation myth, called the "Ainulindalë," meaning, "Music of the Ainur." The Ainur ("Holy Ones") are Middle Earth's angels, beings of pure spirit, issuing out of the mind of God before time itself. Together, they perceive God's plan for Creation, and begin to sing their respective parts in harmony with one another, which causes the universe, in all its splendor, to jump into being.

Granted this is a work of fiction, but what Tolkien has done is to synthesize two seemingly contradictory myths of creation, the classical and the Judeo-Christian. God is still the Creator of the universe, and exterior to it, as in Genesis, but his creative act is performed through others, each of which has a domain which they create in accordance with the will of God, and later rule on his behalf. In the end, then, there are Ainur of the sky, and sea, and craftsmanship, and so on, just as in the pagan pantheons.

All of this is to say that God's act of Creation needn't be direct in order for it to be his. It is entirely consonant with Christian theology and what we know from the Book of Genesis for God to have created via the angels, whom he has given charge over the disparate categories of Being.

C.S. Lewis picks up on this idea in his Space Trilogy, when he has different angels (he calls them "eldila") as the caretakers of the various planets in the Solar System. The hero discovers that the rest of the universe refers to Earth as "the silent planet" because Lucifer its caretaker, and when he rebelled against God, he cut us all off with him.

In Tolkien, this notion of the fallen angel occurs when Melkor decides to rebel against the will of God for Creation and begins singing his own, discordant tune, and thus bringing a level of disorder and chaos to the things being made. I think something similar happened at the beginning of time, the Devil doing his best to mess things up even as God and the angels were creating the universe. "Really?" Really:

Last time we saw pictures of messed-up mammals. Today we're obviously looking at birds, reptiles, and amphibians. Technically speaking, I would put birds in between mammals and reptiles, but since they're basically just slightly less terrifying, slightly more highly-evolved reptiles anyway, I decided to include them here.

More than just this list of horrible animals, we see in Genesis that things had already gone wrong long before Mankind showed up. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." This verse is likely more of a title than a verse. Oftentimes Jewish literature begins with a short summary of the story it will tell in detail. The story really begins with Genesis 1:2: "The earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep."

"Formlessness," "void," "darkness," does that sound like the work of God to you? It seems to me that Satan was there from the beginning, trying to corrupt everything as best he could. The story of history, then, turns out to have been a rescue mission from the beginning, God fighting a war with the Devil for Creation, in order that he might fashion a world fit for his Son to inhabit, and thus undergo the ultimate act of redemption on behalf of the fallen universe.

UPDATE: Part Four to be found here.

Temperaments And Personality Types, Part Three - Christianity

Given the fact that Galen actually comes after Irenaeus, speaking strictly chronologically, I should have included the following Christian thought in the Classical post. However, seeing as the advent of Christianity is in itself the advent of the Medieval Age (i.e., of the Medieval Synthesis of Classical and Christian thought), it seemed most appropriately included in the previous post, but it ended up running long, so here we are.

Writing about the year 180, St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons says the following concerning the canon of Scripture:

"It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four zones of the world in which we live, and four principal winds, while the Church is scattered throughout all the world, and the 'pillar and ground' (1 Tim. 3:15) of the Church is the Gospel and the spirit of life; it is fitting that she should have four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh," (Adversus Haereses III.11.8).

The number four has carried symbolic meaning throughout Western history (as all numbers do). Dino Marcantonio did a fantastic article outlining the significance of the number four and the quincunx in art and architecture. In the chapter entitled "The Numbers Game" in Why Do Catholics Do That?, Dr. Kevin Johnson says this of the number four:

"[The number 4] carries the connotation of...stability.... There are four seasons to a year and, in classical thought, four elements that make up the material universe (fire, water, earth, and air). Four evangelists told the whole story of Christ and everything we need for salvation. The Church divides Advent into four weeks, marked with four candles, because with the coming of Christ the cycle of times is brought to completeness. Sometimes the halo shown on Christ's head contains a four-armed cross, but that's not a reference to the Passion. It means that Christ, uniquely, is a complete being, God as well as a man," (262).

There is a symbolic dimension to the fact that the foundational symbol of our faith is the four-armed cross. In Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton compares the fundamental image of Christianity to that of Buddhism, the circle:

"Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms for ever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travellers," (50).

A horizontal line (or horizontality itself) refers to the horizon, to the boundary between heaven and earth that humanity can never cross. A vertical line (verticality itself) is symbolic of the path the Sun traces across the Sky, and the direction of the heavenly in general. The Cross is, then, the intersection of the earthly and the heavenly, the union of God and Man in Christ, who, by virtue of his action on the Cross, brings that union to us all. This is why traditionally-designed church buildings always feature two elements most prominently: a long, horizontal path that represents Man's journey to union with God, and lofty heights that represent the descent of God to Man. At "the crossing" the vertical dimension opens out onto a horizontal one, and the two intersect visually at the altar, the tabernacle of the "God with us," which (even from the sky) radiates out in the four cardinal directions, encompassing all there is.

Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, where the blue line represents the architectural horizon, the
farthest point Man can reach in his long journey to God (the green line), except that God, in his
mercy, has deigned himself to descend to Man in Man's own flesh via the Cross (the red line).

Irenaeus goes on to correlate masterfully the four Gospels with the four Living Creatures of Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4 as well as to four chief characteristics of Christ himself. The Gospel according to Matthew corresponds to the Man, because it emphasizes Christ's humanity, especially by beginning with his genealogy; Mark corresponds to the Lion, because it emphasizes Christ's divine kingship; Luke corresponds to the Bull, because in it Christ is presented as the servant and the sacrificial offering on behalf of sin; and John corresponds to the Eagle, because its clarity of vision pierces the highest things.

Though not explicit in Irenaeus, these groups of four can be correlated to the four temperaments quite easily. If we compare them in terms of Plato's societal roles, his Guardians are like the Bulls of the community, solemnly bearing the burden for the greater good; Plato's Artisans are the courageous and outgoing (Sanguine) Lions; Plato's Idealists are the passionately ethical, harmony-oriented Men; and Plato's Rationals are the intellectual, head-in-the-clouds Eagles.

Interestingly, though Irenaeus himself doesn't draw the connection between Plato's temperaments and the Four Evangelists, he does adopt Plato's system, giving the four temperaments his own labels, which are more behaviorally and less role-oriented: Artisans he calls "spontaneous;" Guardians, "historical;" Idealists, "spiritual;" and Rationals, "scholarly."

So, we have a few new things to add to our chart:

Stay tuned for the next post in this series which will look at how Modernity dealt with the question of temperament.

Temperaments And Personality Types, Part Two - Medieval Times

When we left off in Part One, Aristotle had just defined our four temperaments in terms of what makes them happy. Subsequently, Humorism and its corresponding Personology was quietly incorporated into the corpus of Western thought. To again quote David Keirsey's account in Please Understand Me II:

"We see Geoffrey Chaucer (in 1380) describing a Doctor of Physic as knowing 'the cause of every malady, And where they were from, and of what humour.' [...] Shakespeare points out dozens of times what he called the 'spirit of humours' in his enormous gallery of characters: a soldier's sanguine appetite or a Countess's sorrowful melancholy a lover's impassioned choler or a physician's phlegmatic detachment. Moreover, Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson developed a whole style of play he called the 'Comedy of Humors,' creating his characters according to a formula he articulated in 1599: 'Some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his affects, his spirits, and his powers In their confluctions, all to run one way,'" (23-24).

The work of Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Galen persisted throughout the Middle Ages without any substantive contributions until we come to the Renaissance physician Paracelsus:

"[Paracelsus] proposed four totem spirits which symbolized four personality styles, and which ran parallel to the temperament types of Galen and the character types of Plato. Paracelsus characterized human beings as 'Salamanders,' impulsive and changeable; as 'Gnomes,' industrious and guarded; as 'Nymphs,' inspired and passionate; and as 'Sylphs,' curious and calm," (24).

Paracelsus was kind of a strange fellow, happily intermixing traditonal science and philosophy with the occult and alchemy. But that wasn't really uncommon in those days, as we know from the most famous Renaissance Man, Leonardo da Vinci. Nevertheless, his contribution to the topic at hand is not without merit, adding one more level of clarity to our understanding of the four temperaments. Nodding to Aristotle's "sources of happiness," Paracelsus calls his Sylphs "curious," indicating that they seek knowledge and rational understanding. Likewise he refers to his Gnomes as "industrious," in that they seek material goods. He refers to Plato's intuitive Idealists when he calls his Nymphs "inspired."

Interestingly, though, his Salamanders, which correspond to Plato's Artisans, he calls "changeable," rather than "sensitive" or something of that sort. But isn't that what it means to be sensitive? To allow oneself to conform to the world around oneself? That's part of what makes an artist an artist. He is better able to receive impressions from things in the world, seeing them more clearly and deeply, and thus able to recreate them more completely and beautifully. Likewise, by choosing Slyphs (which are similar to Angels) to represent Rationals, more than referring to their rationalistic and logical tendencies, he has indicated that they are more spiritual and abstract, more "head in the clouds" in general, than other types.

While not explicit in Keirsey's works, a correlation can also be seen in the four Feudal Castes. Plato's Guardians becoming the Peasant/Soldier class, Artisans becoming the Merchant/Craftsman class, Idealists corresponding to the Clergy, and Rationals to the Nobility, seeing as they were the only ones with access to education and the ones Plato wanted to run the kingdom. Maybe the Medieval World would have fared better in the long run had its leaders actually been intelligent philosopher-kings. Of course, these castes likewise correspond to the four French suits of cards that originated in the Middle Ages and the numbers 1 through 4.

Even more interestingly, though not traditional as far as the West is concerned, the Middle Ages in India saw the rise of the Bhakti movement, which emphasized a personal and loving God and required our reciprocal devotion and service. The Bhakti movement distinguished four "yogas," or paths of salvation, that one can follow in order to devote oneself rightly to God, and which correspond well with the four temperaments we've been outlining.

Combine everything we've looked at so far and we can put together a new chart:

Next up: What Christianity has to say on the topic.

UPDATE: Great Commentary On Papal Infallibility

À la the last post's dealings with the Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility, I highly recommend The Sacred Page's running treatment of the subject:

Part 1

Part 2

Head on over and check it out. It's simple, thoughtful, and concise.

UPDATE: Part 2a and Part 3 have been added recently.

One Night Only

For those in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a special seminar presented by The Walsingham Society. It's the last in a series on the Anglican Patrimony and will focus on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, the other Inklings and Anglicanism in the 20th century.

Tonight, Tuesday, 6 September 2011 at 7:00pm

Church of the Holy Cross, Dallas

Click for Map

Temperaments And Personality Types, Part One - The Ancients

In the middle of the last century, Isabel Briggs Myers and her mother Katherine Briggs dusted off a copy of Carl Jung's 1923 work Psychological Types and began developing a questionnaire based on it designed to "sort" people into one of sixteen possible personality types called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Neither the work of Mrs. Myers nor Carl Jung was particularly revolutionary, however. They stand at the near end of a long tradition of personality "sorting" that can be traced back to the beginning of Western Civilization. This post will be the first in a short series tracing the development of that tradition.

In his book Please Understand Me II, David Keirsey recounts the early history of "personology" thusly:

"It was the Roman physician Galen who, developing the ideas of Hippocrates, proposed (around 190 AD) that it is neither the stars nor the gods that determine what we want and what we do; rather, it is the balance of our bodily fluids, the four 'humors,' as they were called. If our blood predominates Galen called us 'Sanguine' or eagerly optimistic in temperament; if our black bile or gall predominates, then we are 'Melancholic' or doleful in temperament; if our yellow bile predominates, then we are 'Choleric' or passionate in temperament; and if our phlegm predominates, then we are 'Phlegmatic' or calm in temperament," (23).

An artist's unflattering rendition of the Four Temperaments.

Of course, we all know how the application of Galen's theory of Humorism worked out when applied medicinally. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the personological element has merit, technically unrelated to bodily fluids as it may be. If you think about it, it's probably pretty easy to sort everybody you know into one of Galen's four temperaments. Try replacing his terms with some more familiar ones: "Sanguine" with "cheerful," "Melancholic" with "broody," "Choleric" with "excitable," and "Phlegmatic" with "calm."

"Nearly six hundred years before Galen, Plato had written in The Republic of four kinds of character which clearly corresponded with the four temperaments attributed to Hippocrates. Plato was more interested in the individual's contribution to the social order than in underlying temperament, and so he named the Sanguine temperament the iconic (artisan) character, endowed with artistic sense, and playing an art-making role in society. He named the Melancholic temperament the pistic (guardian) character, endowed with common sense, and playing a caretaking role in society. He named the Choleric temperament the noetic (idealist) character, endowed with intuitive sensibility, and playing a moral role in society. And he named the Phlegmatic temperament the dianoetic (rational) character, endowed with reasoning ability, and laying the role of logical investigator in society," (Ibid.).

The Greek words Plato has used here to identify the driving forces behind Hippocrates' four temperaments can be translated as follows: icon = "image", pistis = "trust", noein = "insight", and dianoia = "reason". In other words, if you're Sanguine, you're driven by imagery (iconography) and will likely be drawn to the arts, crafts (such as carpentry or masonry), and creativity in general; if you're Melancholic, you're driven by honor, duty, and trust in others and society, and you'll likely be drawn to traditional leadership (guardian) roles; if you're Choleric, you're driven by intuition and insight and will likely be drawn to activities involving ethics, relationships, and establishing harmony; and if you're Phlegmatic, you're driven by cold and calm reason, and you'll likely be drawn to logical, mathematical fields.

"A generation [after Plato], Aristotle defined character in terms of happiness, and not, as his mentor Plato had done, in terms of virtue. Aristotle argued that there are four sources of happiness: 'The mass of men,' he said, find happiness either in 'sensual pleasure' (hedone) or in 'acquiring assets' (propraietari), while some few find happiness either in exercising their 'moral virtue' (ethikos) or in a life of 'logical investigation' (dialogike)," (Ibid.).

 Not surprisingly, the categories we have thus far established (humors, temperaments, drives, societal roles, sources of happiness) were eventually seen as corresponding to other groups of four like the seasons, the major organs, and the four elements. After a brief survey of the Classical temperaments, then, we end up with the following chart:

Next up: the Medieval World's contributions.

Great Commentary On Papal Infallibility

À la the last post's dealings with the Catholic doctrine of Papal Infallibility, I highly recommend The Sacred Page's running treatment of the subject:

Part One

Part Two

Head on over and check it out. It's simple, thoughtful, and concise.

Talk On The Anglican Patrimony

The Walsingham Society has uploaded the audio from a talk they hosted a couple of days ago. It was the first in a series of four on the topic of the "Anglican Patrimony."

Mosey on over to their iTunes store and download it for free.

Can't get a better deal than that.

Inaugural Post

There was a time I considered the personal blog to be something of an exercise in egotism. Or, as Gabriel Marcel termed it in his work Homo Viator, “reflection.” As a person self-absorbed, “I treat the other person merely as a means of resonance or an amplifier, I tend to consider him as a sort of apparatus which I can, or think I can, manipulate, or of which I can dispose at will.” The way in which this phenomenon can play out in one’s everyday life is evinced masterfully by one Madame Bovary. The very idea that one could consider one’s own thoughts and ramblings as being of any interest to anyone else seemed inherantly self-important, others becoming objects serving only to “reflect” our own image of ourselves back towards us.

Roman Forum - Taken by the Mrs.

That being said, I now consider the truth of the matter to be that, while this is in fact true for those blogs at one end of the spectrum, at the other stand a good many which are anything but self-indulgent. My experience guest-posting a couple of times on a friend’s blog taught me that the endeavor to maintain a successful blog sinks or swims not chiefly on the blogger and how interesting he is (or thinks he is), but on his readers. This is testament to the fact that a blog can be more than a megaphone for an overconfident blogger. It can be a means of community—a forum in which persons come to interact with one another, share their thoughts and experiences with each other respectfully and to mutual benefit. In other words, a conversation writ large, the blogger himself serving only as moderator. More than that, as with any converstaion, it is through the sharing of these ideas that a sharing of one’s very personhood may occur, so that what might be mere communication may perhaps become true communion; that is, an intersubjective co-union of unique persons who view each other as just that. This quality of ego-centrism which I once attributed to blogging as essential, turns out to be only accidental. The difference is whether or not the blogger “become[s] preoccupied about the effect [he wants] to produce on the other person,” or sees the blog as a means to the true and meaningful interaction of persons. Pope Benedict himself said that “if used wisely, [new communications technologies] can contribute to the satisfaction of the desire for meaning, truth and unity which remain the most profound aspirations of each human being.” It is precisely in communion (even that which a blog might foster) that this search for Truth is to be undertaken, never by one man thinking to himself and locked in a stove-heated room.

It is in the spirit of mutual enrichment and above all communion that I inaugurate this blog. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (a.k.a. the single greatest linguistic resource known to Man), our word “inaugurate” stems ultimately from the Latin augur. In Ancient Rome, augurs were important priests responsible for divining the will of the gods from the movements and activity of birds. Amongst their other duties, whenever a new town was to be founded, an augur would stand in the center of the town-to-be and lay out the main east-west road (called the Decumanus) and north-south road (called the Cardo). (See Dino Marcantonio's fantastic post related to this topic.) at the intersection of which would stand the local forum, complete with miniature replica of the Temple of Jupiter at Rome. On that model, let us say that our chief thoroughfares will be more-or-less intelligent, thought-provoking content on the one hand, and the resolution to discuss that content with dignity and respect on the other. At the intersection of these two principles will stand the blog itself—the forum which develops out of that intersection and serves as the heart of our little community.

Hopefully you will have gleaned to what extent the life of this blog rests in your hands. Please remember to pass the word to others who might like to join the discussion. Also, you should know that not every post will be quite so serious as this one. Particularly those about Star Trek. There will be a lot of those.