Today is the fourth anniversary of the death of the best man I ever knew. He was my Godfather and while he is not the Clifford the song was actually written for ... I don't care, it is for me.
Friday, January 24, 2014
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
What what I read really says about me
Here's a quote.
Two things jumped out at me. I wasn't the only one. The first was shared by many wags who posted comments along the line of, "I passed this along without reading it." The second was shared by the commenter who wrote, "What pushes people to do something as anti-social as cutting articles out of a newspaper in the library?!"
The article itself bears out the first criticism. You can see it in the paragraph above: "I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different ...". Furthermore, Berger's research suggests that people share not because of the content of the article but because of the impression it created about themselves. That is why they wouldn't necessarily read what they pass along. They could achieve that by skimming just enough of the article, and "just enough" may be no more than the teaser, to determine what it is about and that this is the sort of thing that will create the impression they want, and hit "share". I dare guess that at least 70 percent of the things that get shared fit into that category.
(A practical joke immediately comes to mind: post a link of cute puppy pictures that actually goes to hard core porn. I'm sure it's already been done. Also, like a lot of practical jokes, it's only funny in the abstract. It get's a lot less funny when some 14 year old sends the link to her grandfather. It's sort of like cutting articles out of the newspaper at the library.)
Closer to home, I realized that this is why I read Ulysses and Lolita. I disliked both books, found reading them to be boring and tiresome, but read them until the end. I thought, as I was doing it, that this would make me better than the nine million people who claim to have read them without cracking the cover but it made me, if anything, worse. I gave up a chunk of my life deliberately prolonging unhappy experiences because that, I felt, bought me membership in the club of people who actually have read the stuff they talk about. That's pure vanity. The honest solution would have been to not read either and stop hanging out with pretentious gits and make friends with the sort of people who read Wodehouse
I don't doubt, by the way, that lots of people get genuine pleasure out of reading both. That doesn't make the case any better though as both books trade on your joining into a little parlour game with the writer that trades on this not being really about what first appears to be about and aren't we both smart for playing this game. In the end, the man who goes surfing for "barely legal" porn is, like Saint Augustine's drunk, morally superior than the person who reads Lolita for the reasons that Nabokov wanted it to be read.
When Jonah Berger was a graduate student at Stanford, in the early aughts, he would make a habit of reading page A2 of the Wall Street Journal, which included a list of the five most-read and the five most-shared articles of the day. “I’d go down to the library and surreptitiously cut out that page,” he recalls. “I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different, and I wondered why that would be.” What was it about a piece of content—an article, a picture, a video—that took it from simply interesting to interesting and shareable? What pushes someone not only to read a story but to pass it on?Does anything about that rouse your suspicions? I don't mean, is there anything here that you KNOW to be wrong. I mean, is there anything here that makes you think that you're not sure this is quite right.
Two things jumped out at me. I wasn't the only one. The first was shared by many wags who posted comments along the line of, "I passed this along without reading it." The second was shared by the commenter who wrote, "What pushes people to do something as anti-social as cutting articles out of a newspaper in the library?!"
The article itself bears out the first criticism. You can see it in the paragraph above: "I noticed that what was read and what was shared was often different ...". Furthermore, Berger's research suggests that people share not because of the content of the article but because of the impression it created about themselves. That is why they wouldn't necessarily read what they pass along. They could achieve that by skimming just enough of the article, and "just enough" may be no more than the teaser, to determine what it is about and that this is the sort of thing that will create the impression they want, and hit "share". I dare guess that at least 70 percent of the things that get shared fit into that category.
(A practical joke immediately comes to mind: post a link of cute puppy pictures that actually goes to hard core porn. I'm sure it's already been done. Also, like a lot of practical jokes, it's only funny in the abstract. It get's a lot less funny when some 14 year old sends the link to her grandfather. It's sort of like cutting articles out of the newspaper at the library.)
Closer to home, I realized that this is why I read Ulysses and Lolita. I disliked both books, found reading them to be boring and tiresome, but read them until the end. I thought, as I was doing it, that this would make me better than the nine million people who claim to have read them without cracking the cover but it made me, if anything, worse. I gave up a chunk of my life deliberately prolonging unhappy experiences because that, I felt, bought me membership in the club of people who actually have read the stuff they talk about. That's pure vanity. The honest solution would have been to not read either and stop hanging out with pretentious gits and make friends with the sort of people who read Wodehouse
I don't doubt, by the way, that lots of people get genuine pleasure out of reading both. That doesn't make the case any better though as both books trade on your joining into a little parlour game with the writer that trades on this not being really about what first appears to be about and aren't we both smart for playing this game. In the end, the man who goes surfing for "barely legal" porn is, like Saint Augustine's drunk, morally superior than the person who reads Lolita for the reasons that Nabokov wanted it to be read.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Saint Agnes Eve
Is tonight. They are predicting -26 Celsius so it will indeed be bitter cold.
She used to be remembered every time the mass was said:
Anyway, do celebrate with song and food. Here are some culinary suggestions from Keats:
She used to be remembered every time the mass was said:
Nobis quoque peccatoribus, famulis tuis, de multitudine miserationum tuarum sperantibus, partem aliquam et societatem donare digneris, cum tuis sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus: cum Ioanne, Stephano, Matthia, Barnaba, (Ignatio, Alexandro, Marcellino, Petro, Felicitate, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Agnete, Caecilia, Anastasia) et omnibus Sanctis tuis: intra quorum nos consortium, non aestimator meriti, sed veniae, quaesumus, largitor admitte. Per Christum Dominum nostrum.Alas, no longer.
Anyway, do celebrate with song and food. Here are some culinary suggestions from Keats:
Friday, January 17, 2014
A little light culture: spiritual versus material
Do you remember Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda? I do. Just barely. He was a Japanese soldier who kept fighting the second world war until 1974. A superior officer told him to hold his position and fight until they came back for him. He said it might take years.
Onoda held out for 29 years.
When people tried to tell him the war was over, he assumed they were trying to trick him. The whole story is fascinating. But there is also something rather intriguing about the way the New York Times has chosen to cover the story today. As Ann Althouse notes, the obituary seems to be trying to tell us something else.
Onoda seems to have become something of a hero in Japan and the obituary quotes admirers framing their praise of him in terms of lessons about the "evils of materialism".
Althouse speculates that the NYT is deliberately trying to send us some message in this obituary. I think something else is at work. I think the entire intellectual class has lost the ability to think intelligently about the material and the spiritual. "Materialism" has become a catch-all tag for everything we don't like and is applied without thought. (Think of how people who say they are fighting poverty, a 100 percent material concern, claim to be opposed to "materialism".) The "spiritual" meanwhile has lost all connection with the belief that there is another level of existence beyond the material. Spiritual has come to me, having to do with the life of the mind.
Worse, we have forgotten that there is good and evil on both sides of the dividing line between material and spiritual. There are many, many material pursuits that are good (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless for example) and there are many things that are spiritual that are evil. Developing a level of fanaticism such that you might spend 29 years hiding out in a cave in devotion to a corrupt and racist regime should stand out as an obvious example of the evil side of the spiritual life. That it does not is a rather sad marker of how depraved our moral culture has become.
Final thought: Why does it never seem to have occurred to Onoda that he was doing something wrong during those 29 years?
Onoda held out for 29 years.
When people tried to tell him the war was over, he assumed they were trying to trick him. The whole story is fascinating. But there is also something rather intriguing about the way the New York Times has chosen to cover the story today. As Ann Althouse notes, the obituary seems to be trying to tell us something else.
Onoda seems to have become something of a hero in Japan and the obituary quotes admirers framing their praise of him in terms of lessons about the "evils of materialism".
In an editorial, The Mainichi Shimbun, a leading Tokyo newspaper, said: “To this soldier, duty took precedence over personal sentiments. Onoda has shown us that there is much more in life than just material affluence and selfish pursuits. There is the spiritual aspect, something we may have forgotten.”And notice how quickly it was forgotten that Onoda killed innocent villagers he took to be guerrillas whenever they got too close to the places where he was hiding. That's not much of an advertisement for "the spiritual aspect". Also forgotten is the fact that Japan launched itself into war for reasons of greed and conquest, that its soldiers often conducted themselves abominably and that millions at home and abroad suffered needlessly. That was what Onoda was fighting for those 29 years in the jungle. That was his "duty".
Althouse speculates that the NYT is deliberately trying to send us some message in this obituary. I think something else is at work. I think the entire intellectual class has lost the ability to think intelligently about the material and the spiritual. "Materialism" has become a catch-all tag for everything we don't like and is applied without thought. (Think of how people who say they are fighting poverty, a 100 percent material concern, claim to be opposed to "materialism".) The "spiritual" meanwhile has lost all connection with the belief that there is another level of existence beyond the material. Spiritual has come to me, having to do with the life of the mind.
Worse, we have forgotten that there is good and evil on both sides of the dividing line between material and spiritual. There are many, many material pursuits that are good (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless for example) and there are many things that are spiritual that are evil. Developing a level of fanaticism such that you might spend 29 years hiding out in a cave in devotion to a corrupt and racist regime should stand out as an obvious example of the evil side of the spiritual life. That it does not is a rather sad marker of how depraved our moral culture has become.
Final thought: Why does it never seem to have occurred to Onoda that he was doing something wrong during those 29 years?
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Saint Elizabeth: What Charles Kingsley was reacting to
Okay, Kingsley publishes The Saint's Tragedy in 1848. Why, I asked last time, did he pick Elizabeth from the wide range of Catholic saints he might have used as the basis of his story?
I think the answer lies in a number of events from around the time he began writing it. First, there was a Romantic reconsideration of Catholicism. Second, there was an immensely popular "biography", really a romance, of Elizabeth that had appeared twelve years before.
Before going on, let's stop and consider the word "Romantic". We read it now and he here the word "rebellion" coming following after just as "Fortnum" seems to demand "Mason" should come after it. It wasn't always so. Originally, the genre that we today call Gothic was called "romance". It was called that because it was like the romance tales of the high middle ages. These stories featured beautiful ladies and brave men pursuing love in a world where the lines between magic and reality and history and legend where very blurred. "Romantic" originally meant something that was romance-like.
And the truth is that there was much more of that sort of thing about the Romantic era than there is of the spirit of rebellion that you get when you study this stuff at university.
Now, one of the problems that romance-like Romanticism brings with it for English writers is Catholicism. There is necessarily a huge dose of it as all the characters of these tales are Catholic. Whether they meant to or not, the early writers of Gothic fiction made the old Catholic world seem appealing.
A sort of reconsideration of Catholicism and of England's Catholic past were triggered by this. In the decade before The Saint's Tragedy appeared, this reconsideration reached its peak with the Tractarian movement leading up to the conversion Newman in 1845.
Long before Kingsley wrote, there was a tradition in England of balancing the thrills of romance writing with rational explanation. This is what Ann Radcliffe did in her novels and, I think, it is what Keats is up to in The Eve of St. Agnes.
Another thing that happened in the years before Kingsley wrote his work is that Charles Forbes René de Montalembert wrote a book about Elizabeth. He didn't hold back on the Romance at all. In fact, his aim was the exact opposite. We was writing in a post-revolutionary France and was part of a movement that was trying to gather the debris that Catholicism had been reduced to in order to restore its former glory.
I'm just learning about this movement now. It looked to the medieval past as the height of Catholic practice but it was modern and liberal (in the sense of believing in individual freedom). It's a weird but attractive mix. The story tells us, I've just started reading it, is as unrestrained a romance as you'll ever find.
And that is all I have to say for now ...
I think the answer lies in a number of events from around the time he began writing it. First, there was a Romantic reconsideration of Catholicism. Second, there was an immensely popular "biography", really a romance, of Elizabeth that had appeared twelve years before.
Before going on, let's stop and consider the word "Romantic". We read it now and he here the word "rebellion" coming following after just as "Fortnum" seems to demand "Mason" should come after it. It wasn't always so. Originally, the genre that we today call Gothic was called "romance". It was called that because it was like the romance tales of the high middle ages. These stories featured beautiful ladies and brave men pursuing love in a world where the lines between magic and reality and history and legend where very blurred. "Romantic" originally meant something that was romance-like.
And the truth is that there was much more of that sort of thing about the Romantic era than there is of the spirit of rebellion that you get when you study this stuff at university.
Now, one of the problems that romance-like Romanticism brings with it for English writers is Catholicism. There is necessarily a huge dose of it as all the characters of these tales are Catholic. Whether they meant to or not, the early writers of Gothic fiction made the old Catholic world seem appealing.
A sort of reconsideration of Catholicism and of England's Catholic past were triggered by this. In the decade before The Saint's Tragedy appeared, this reconsideration reached its peak with the Tractarian movement leading up to the conversion Newman in 1845.
Long before Kingsley wrote, there was a tradition in England of balancing the thrills of romance writing with rational explanation. This is what Ann Radcliffe did in her novels and, I think, it is what Keats is up to in The Eve of St. Agnes.
Another thing that happened in the years before Kingsley wrote his work is that Charles Forbes René de Montalembert wrote a book about Elizabeth. He didn't hold back on the Romance at all. In fact, his aim was the exact opposite. We was writing in a post-revolutionary France and was part of a movement that was trying to gather the debris that Catholicism had been reduced to in order to restore its former glory.
I'm just learning about this movement now. It looked to the medieval past as the height of Catholic practice but it was modern and liberal (in the sense of believing in individual freedom). It's a weird but attractive mix. The story tells us, I've just started reading it, is as unrestrained a romance as you'll ever find.
And that is all I have to say for now ...
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
Some advice on dealing with family bullies
I had an encounter with a aggressive bully of the type you meet on the schoolyard the other day. We were, in fact, on the bus and not in a schoolyard. He was easy to deal with. I stood up to him and he backed down. Thinking about it, it occurred to me that that is why we don't see many such bullies once we leave childhood behind. Their tricks only work on children.
But there is another type of bully who trades on a different kind of power and that is your family relationship with them. They are, in a sense, people who wish you and they were still like you were when you were children.
This really jumped out at me at a family reunion that happened in Quebec City last year. At any family gathering there is a tendency to revert to the old rules and relationships that applied back when you were all brothers, sisters and cousins together. You can spot the family bullies more clearly in that sort of atmosphere. Two in particular really stood out.
The experience was liberating. From that day I started to treat those two differently from how I had treated them up until that reunion because I realized that the many, many unpleasant interactions I had had with them over the years were caused by their being bullies. And when I started treating them differently, things got better. They didn't get better. They are still the manipulative, bullying jerks they always were. But I got better. Slowly. At first there was barrage of testing challenges from them on FaceBook that went on for a few months. That was emotionally trying. But every one of these bullying tricks made me stronger. Eventually, I stopped getting worked up at their tricks.
For whatever it's worth, here are the lessons I've learned:
Caveat: don't think of this as a way of winning. Trust me, you will be strongly tempted to try and win but that way madness lies. That is just lowering yourself to their level. Be honest with yourself about the pain they have caused you and the pain that a final break, should it come to that, will cause you. Otherwise you will get tricked into playing a sort of bluffing game with your family and family are too special to bluff with.
Instead, go back to those virtues that really matter—go back to the man you are and the man you want to be—and if you conclude that being that man is more important than staying in touch with this cousin, sister, brother, father, mother, or even, God forbid, child or spouse, keep living those virtues. They can go or stay. Never state it, that's issuing an ultimatum. Just live it.
But there is another type of bully who trades on a different kind of power and that is your family relationship with them. They are, in a sense, people who wish you and they were still like you were when you were children.
This really jumped out at me at a family reunion that happened in Quebec City last year. At any family gathering there is a tendency to revert to the old rules and relationships that applied back when you were all brothers, sisters and cousins together. You can spot the family bullies more clearly in that sort of atmosphere. Two in particular really stood out.
The experience was liberating. From that day I started to treat those two differently from how I had treated them up until that reunion because I realized that the many, many unpleasant interactions I had had with them over the years were caused by their being bullies. And when I started treating them differently, things got better. They didn't get better. They are still the manipulative, bullying jerks they always were. But I got better. Slowly. At first there was barrage of testing challenges from them on FaceBook that went on for a few months. That was emotionally trying. But every one of these bullying tricks made me stronger. Eventually, I stopped getting worked up at their tricks.
For whatever it's worth, here are the lessons I've learned:
- The things that really matter to you are things that don't need to be said so DON'T SAY THEM. If you really want to be an honest person, then you will simply be that person. The compulsion to announce that "These are my values," is a sign of weakness and will be recognized and exploited as such by the family bully. "Values" are just crap we spout, virtues are strengths we have internalized.
- Only apologize when you have done something wrong. Conversely, never apologize simply to placate someone who is acting angrily in response to something you said or did. That person is a bully and needs to be stood up to.
- One of the primary indicators that you are dealing with a family bully is that they will pretend to discuss an issue rationally while actually being manipulative. Be especially on the look out for the following seemingly rational but actually deeply manipulative arguments:
Sometimes a family relationship will seem like it is not worth saving and it may be that it is not worth saving but there is never any point in breaking it off. First, do your best to be a good person but do not become someone other than the man you want to be simply to gain a family member's approval. They’ll eventually get the message and change or leave of their own accord.
- “I think you know what is wrong with what you did,” or, “If you think about this honestly, I think you will see the problem.” Say to them, “Let’s pretend I’m stupid and you explain it to me.”
- “I don’t think you can stop/help yourself.” The correct response is, “I wasn’t trying to stop myself. Why should I?”
- Attributing emotions to you that you aren’t feeling: e.g. "I don’t know why you are so angry," or "I don’t know why you are so bitter about this," and, especially, "I don't know why you can't be rational about this". More often than not, the person who does this is in fact telling you how they feel about you without realizing they are doing so.
Caveat: don't think of this as a way of winning. Trust me, you will be strongly tempted to try and win but that way madness lies. That is just lowering yourself to their level. Be honest with yourself about the pain they have caused you and the pain that a final break, should it come to that, will cause you. Otherwise you will get tricked into playing a sort of bluffing game with your family and family are too special to bluff with.
Instead, go back to those virtues that really matter—go back to the man you are and the man you want to be—and if you conclude that being that man is more important than staying in touch with this cousin, sister, brother, father, mother, or even, God forbid, child or spouse, keep living those virtues. They can go or stay. Never state it, that's issuing an ultimatum. Just live it.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Saint Elizabeth: Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley wrote a play about Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in which she, as she dies, renounces the life of denial that (at least as Kingsley sees it) was foisted on her by Konrad of Marburg and announces that she is looking forward to reunion with her husband in heaven, with all that implies.
Kingsley doesn't seem to have put much weight on Jesus's teaching that in heaven, "neither do they marry nor are they given in marriage."
I should tell you that, even though you have probably never heard of him, Charles Kingsley was a huge figure in his day. As one of the leaders of a movement that united male virtues with Christianity, and known as Muscular Christianity, Kingsley was one of the most influential thinkers of the Victorian era.
He was also what feminists would today call "sex positive". Feminists wouldn't like him much for reasons I'll get to.
I'm rather fond of the guy and the whole notion of Muscular Christianity myself. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I accept the original concept uncritically but I do think that current Christianity could do with some masculinity; actually, I think it could do with a lot of masculinity but that's a subject for another day.
To get back to Kingsley, he wrote the play, which he dedicated to his future wife, shortly before he got married and he was rather looking forward to the big night. Here is a nice little excerpt from one of the letters he wrote her in anticipation of their 'union".
In any case, sex was what he wanted and he believed that Catholic teaching about the value of a life of self-denial was a false and misleading. Okay, but why would he pick Saint Elizabeth as his subject? Why not pick one of those virgin martyrs who renounced marriage? What made Saint Elizabeth such a likely subject? The full answer to that will come next Thursday but, for now, suffice to say that he admired Saint Elizabeth. He both admired and feared Catholicism: he thought that the saints had a lot to offer and worried that by excluding them, his faith didn't risk losing adherents to teh Catholic church.
This was not an unusual sentiment at the time.
Kingsley, by the way, was just as certain that sex was going to be really good for his wife as it would be for him, which contradicts the stereotype we have of Victorian men. The subject of the play was Elizabeth after all and Kingsley saw that sex as liberating for her too. To get at how he might see this, we need to consider something that will seem quite weird to us. For, contrary to what we project onto them, moralists of that era did not think that women did not experience pleasure in sex so much as they worried that they were prone to enjoy it so much that it would put them in danger. The self-image of the Victorian lady of high standing who seems impervious to passion was an image of stability and success. The sexual freedom that Kingsley proposed in his play about Saint Elizabeth was freedom within marriage to a man who would protect her. Presumably, this protection involved the predictable home and hearth but it must also, by implication, have included a promise on the part of the man to fully satiate his wife's desires, which he would be able to do because he was a good Muscular Christian who was healthy in mind and in body.
It's a view that is almost modern. Almost. Most, and probably all, feminists would disagree with his views. There is an old Latin saying to the effect that (I don't have the Latin at hand) , "protection drags subjection in its wake", and that would certainly apply here.
For my purposes, though, the question going ahead is, Does Kingsley understand why a woman like Saint Elizabeth would make her great renunciation? He can only see it as something imposed on her by Konrad. But such renunciations were not unique to her and there are good reasons to think that a woman like Elizabeth would have seen this life as a way to freedom. More on that come Thursday.
Kingsley doesn't seem to have put much weight on Jesus's teaching that in heaven, "neither do they marry nor are they given in marriage."
I should tell you that, even though you have probably never heard of him, Charles Kingsley was a huge figure in his day. As one of the leaders of a movement that united male virtues with Christianity, and known as Muscular Christianity, Kingsley was one of the most influential thinkers of the Victorian era.
He was also what feminists would today call "sex positive". Feminists wouldn't like him much for reasons I'll get to.
I'm rather fond of the guy and the whole notion of Muscular Christianity myself. I wouldn't go so far as to say that I accept the original concept uncritically but I do think that current Christianity could do with some masculinity; actually, I think it could do with a lot of masculinity but that's a subject for another day.
To get back to Kingsley, he wrote the play, which he dedicated to his future wife, shortly before he got married and he was rather looking forward to the big night. Here is a nice little excerpt from one of the letters he wrote her in anticipation of their 'union".
When you go to bed tonight, forget that you ever wore a garment, and open your lips for my kisses and spread out each limb that I may lie between your breasts all night.He meanwhile, would be having similar thoughts in his bed far away and, he goes on to say, they could achieve a kind of union in prayer even though they could not physically unite just yet,
At a quarter past eleven lie down, clasp your arms and every limb around me, and with me repeat the Te Deum aloud.Kingsley saw sexual bliss as a foretaste of what was to come in heaven. Strictly speaking, that view is a lot more orthodox than you might guess. With Kingsley's version, however, we might raise two questions. The more important of which is whether he keeps the priority in the right order. If sexual bliss is only a foretaste then his Saint Elizabeth need not look forward to reunion with her husband in heaven as something even better awaits her there. The second, a little more trivial, question is how it is that Kingsley, an unmarried man at this point, is so absolutely sure that sex is going to be great.
In any case, sex was what he wanted and he believed that Catholic teaching about the value of a life of self-denial was a false and misleading. Okay, but why would he pick Saint Elizabeth as his subject? Why not pick one of those virgin martyrs who renounced marriage? What made Saint Elizabeth such a likely subject? The full answer to that will come next Thursday but, for now, suffice to say that he admired Saint Elizabeth. He both admired and feared Catholicism: he thought that the saints had a lot to offer and worried that by excluding them, his faith didn't risk losing adherents to teh Catholic church.
This was not an unusual sentiment at the time.
Kingsley, by the way, was just as certain that sex was going to be really good for his wife as it would be for him, which contradicts the stereotype we have of Victorian men. The subject of the play was Elizabeth after all and Kingsley saw that sex as liberating for her too. To get at how he might see this, we need to consider something that will seem quite weird to us. For, contrary to what we project onto them, moralists of that era did not think that women did not experience pleasure in sex so much as they worried that they were prone to enjoy it so much that it would put them in danger. The self-image of the Victorian lady of high standing who seems impervious to passion was an image of stability and success. The sexual freedom that Kingsley proposed in his play about Saint Elizabeth was freedom within marriage to a man who would protect her. Presumably, this protection involved the predictable home and hearth but it must also, by implication, have included a promise on the part of the man to fully satiate his wife's desires, which he would be able to do because he was a good Muscular Christian who was healthy in mind and in body.
It's a view that is almost modern. Almost. Most, and probably all, feminists would disagree with his views. There is an old Latin saying to the effect that (I don't have the Latin at hand) , "protection drags subjection in its wake", and that would certainly apply here.
For my purposes, though, the question going ahead is, Does Kingsley understand why a woman like Saint Elizabeth would make her great renunciation? He can only see it as something imposed on her by Konrad. But such renunciations were not unique to her and there are good reasons to think that a woman like Elizabeth would have seen this life as a way to freedom. More on that come Thursday.
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