Category: Latin

Abusus non tollit usum

The abuse of a thing is no argument against its proper use. For example, the occasional abuse of State power by its agents is entirely consistent with the State's moral legitimacy.  

You say you don't like the roundup of illegal aliens and their incarceration in detention centers such as the one in the heart of the Florida Everglades prior to their deportation? I don't like the roundup either, and it is to be expected that abuses will occur when a small minority of ICE officials overstep their legitimate authority.  But the rule of law must be upheld.

It is also perfectly plain that the roundup would not be necessary had the previous (mal)administration enforced the borders and upheld the rule of law. So the Dems should look in the mirror and own the mess that they have created.

Nancy Pelosi spoke truly when she said that no one is above the law, not even the President of the United States. What she said is true; too bad she didn't meant it. 

Abusus non tollit usum.

Vincit qui se vincit

"He conquers who conquers himself." Or as a cognate aphorism of mine has it:

Self-mastery is the highest mastery.

Self-mastery requires the mastery of both desire and aversion, not unto their extirpation as in Pali Buddhism, but sufficiently to render ordinate what is inordinate. The problem is not desire as such, but inordinate desire. Similarly for aversion.

Along the same line, and in paraphrase of Augustine,

The vicious man has as many masters as he has vices.

Or as I say, with maximal pith and precision:

Vices vitiate.

An Argument for the Preservation of the Latin Rite

Étienne Gilson, writing in 1962:

Latin is the language of the Church. The sorry degradation of the liturgical texts by their translation into a gradually deteriorating vernacular emphasizes the need for the preservation of a sacred language whose very immutability protects them from the decay of taste. (The Philosopher and Theology, Cluny Media, 2020, p. 6)

Now why hadn't that argument occurred to me? It is so plainly cogent, and more apropos now than it was at the beginning of Vatican II.

'Thanks' to the internet, the degeneration of the various vernaculars is accelerating.  Attempts to hold the line are rear-guard actions in the main. There is need of a dead language to offset the liturgy's slide into the morass of leftist cultural crapola.

Death renders  immutable what was.

USA 2024

Manebant vestigia morientis libertatis: there still remained traces of dying liberty (Tacitus).

Liberty on the wane, yet traces remain. Traces enough for a foothold forward.  Time to  join the fight, Fight, FIGHT. Which side are you on? Trump-Vance 2024.  Long live the republic!

Melum ut in pluribus

I am having trouble understanding the above Latin expression. I encountered it in Theodor Haecker, Kierkegaard the Cripple (tr. C. Van O. Bruyn, New York: Philosophical Library, 1950) in the passage:

Not only for Augustine, but also for that Christian whose teaching is most perfectly harmonious, Thomas Aquinas, the evil in the world was always in the majority. Melum ut in pluribus. This must never be forgotten, nor was it in Kierkegaard's judgment. (pp. 29-30)

My first question: why melum and not malum?

Second question: where in Thomas can we find melum ut in pluribus?

Wiktionary informs us:

Borrowed from Ancient Greek μῆλον (mêlon). Doublet of mālum, from dialectal Ancient Greek μᾶλον (mâlon). First attested in Petronius.

Now mēlum n (genitive mēlī) means apple, and malum, mali means evil, adversity, torment, misery, punishment, etc.  This answers my first question but gives rise to a third: Is there some connection here with the Adam and Eve story in the Garden? 

Fourth question: I don't recall ever seeing the word 'apple' in my English versions of Genesis. Is there in the original text of Genesis a word that translates as 'apple'?  

Fifth question:  I don't understand ut in this context.  Wiktionary says it can be used as an adverb or as a conjunction. But it doesn't seem to be used in either way in melum ut in pluribus.

Here are some other Latin phrases most of which my astute readers already know. 

Too Old to Lead

Bede, History of the Abbots, 16 (on Abbot Ceolfrith; tr. Christopher Grocock):

Now he saw that, being old and full of days, he could no longer prove to be an appropriate model of spiritual exercise for those under him either by teaching or by example because he was so aged and infirm. He thought over the matter long and hard, and decided that it would be more appropriate for an instruction to be given to the brothers that they should choose a more suitable father-abbot for themselves from among their own number, following the statutes of their privilege and the rule of the holy abbot Benedict.

uidit se iam senior et plenus dierum non ultra posse subditis, ob impedimentum supremae aetatis, debitam spiritalis exercitii, uel docendo uel uiuendo, praefigere formam; multa diu secum mente uersans, utilius decreuit, dato fratribus praecepto, ut iuxta sui statuta priuilegii iuxtaque regulam sancti abbatis Benedicti, de suis sibi ipsi patrem, qui aptior esset, eligerent.

Reproduced verbatim from classicist Michael Gilleland's Laudator Temporis Acti weblog. Commentary unnecessary.

If you need an app to pray . . .

. . . I will say a prayer for you.

You don't even need the 'closet' referred to at Matt 6:6:

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." (KJV)

Tu autem cum oraveris, intra in cubiculum tuum, et clauso ostio, ora Patrem tuum in abscondito: et Pater tuus, qui videt in abscondito, reddet tibi. (Biblia Vulgata)

Related words: closet, claustra, enclosure, claustrophobia, exclaustration.