Listening to Edward Feser lecture about the metaphysics of...

The will at 1700. Dr Pecknold was interesting last week; I know Professor Feser's name and reputation but have never heard him speak.

A beautiful afternoon here! The high temperature will be about 80 degrees F. i.e. more or less ten degrees cooler than it has been these last few days.

I don't know how Ann Althouse blogs day after day for 20 years or whatever length of time it has been. Not that I am at all comparing my nonsense here to her typically excellent writing (infuriating at times but excellent qua writing): even in my position doing this every single day becomes onerous in a pale sort of way. Of course, when I don't, I don't, and I don't lose any sleep over it, but the goal, or one of them, is 'each day, some paragraph of nonsense'.

Yesterday, the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, Penitent, I read a translation of a sermon of Honorius Augustodunenis (am fairly sure that is Autun in what is now France) at Canticum Salomonis. A lovely exercise in Christian rhetoric, certainly. I caught what turns out to be a typo although I spent a happy fifteen minutes or so wondering if perhaps it wasn't an error. The venerable abbot is about to launch into a major part of his argument.

Et si hactenus, karissimi, in malis sudamus, saltem hodie exemplo huius mulieris transacta bonis sequentibus contegere satagamus.
And if, my best beloved, we have hitherto prespired from our evildoing, at least today by the example of this woman let us strive to hide what we have done with the good we will do.

By 'hiding' our sins, he's not using 'to hide' in the sense of putting the ball in a hidden spot where it will eventually be discovered by the winner of the game; contegere is 'to cover' but it also figuratively is used to mean 'to bury, inter'. The Vulgate mirrors the Septuagint's use of the verb ἐπικαλύπτω.

In any event, it was the phrase 'in malis sudamus', 'we have prespired from our evildoing', that caught my eye, 'we have sweated in, at our sins'. The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't give any examples of that spelling but does note that it is a 'US regional' usage. So then I wondered if perhaps one of the two translators is a native son of that 'region', whichever one that might be, or if the choice of spelling was intended to suggest a certain old-fashionedness that might be considered to comport with Honorius's attitude. So I took what was obviously the next step: I wrote to Mr Eger, who this morning confirmed that it was simply a typographic error. "We meant perspired."

Professor Feser has a wonderfully huge number of books in his office.

Have been listening to Handel's Tolomeo re d'Egitto today.




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I baked two more coffeecakes yesterday morning (using up the last of that two pounds of blueberries) before the heat locked me into my cubiculum. The landlady's diabetes is not in fact preventing her from enjoying some of it so I imagine that none of it will make it into the freezer.

Professor Feser was participating with the Thomistic Institute folks (who are, I believe, in DC) via Zoom from California and on many occasions the lag made it sound as if he were practicing his long and short Latin vowels-- but the connection held, Deo gratias, until after the first of the post-lecture questions at least.


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