Ur-Caecus

St. Jerome Bible tips: 1. Psalter, your recreation. 2. Proverbs, your way of life. 3. Ecclesiastes, how to trample the world. 4. Job, learn patient virtue. 5. Gospels, always in hand. 6. Acts+Epistles, be steeped in them. 7. Prophets, commit to memory. 8. Canticles, have no fear.

Absolutely sublime. m.youtube.com/watch?v=WyEAsi…

This is the night, when Christ broke the prison-bars of death and rose victorious from the underworld. Our birth would have been no gain, had we not been redeemed.

From an ancient homily for Holy Saturday

Isidore of Seville died this date in 636. The last scholar of the ancient world and he patron saint of the internet. His Etymologiae, the bridge from late antiquity to Scholasticism, was the first Christian summa of universal knowledge. Suppressed Arianism and Monophysitism.

Easter Eve is traditionally the time of the Harrowing of Hell, when Christ descended into the underworld and set its captives free. This story inspired many powerful retellings in medieval literature and art, including this majestic Anglo-Saxon poem: aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2015/04/open-w…

TIL, I was supposed to be named Paschal because I was born on an Easter Sunday many moons ago.

"DANES" "HEATHENS" "VIKINGS" "uh... æthelred, that's not how it works" "WELSH"

@JimmyLevendia Me in a few hours

At the in-laws’ Good Friday Feast of Fishes…

Early medieval custom was for monks to wash the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday, and give them food and money (as described here in the Anglo-Saxon Regularis Concordia). Kings and queens later imitated this custom - the origin of the Royal Maundy that continues today.

You may have heard of Keats's "negative capability", but have you heard of Ellman's "affirmative capability"?

I'm not American, so whence does the insult of Americans having a short attention span or amnesiac qualities stem from? Is it a recent phenomenon or does it have a long past?

Modernist Alchemy, pg. 3, Timothy Materer

In contrast, postmodern irony is "suspensive: an indecision about the meanings or relations of things is matched by a willingness to live with uncertainty."

In Horizons of Assent, he [Alan Wilde] maintains that modernist irony registers the disparity between the past and the present, or between an ideal world and a depressingly real one, without any hope of healing the breach.

The labyrinthine quality of literary Modernism is at least intelligible. I'd have no idea where to start with post-Modernism or if I'd even want to do so.

Because most forms of occultism . . . assume a universal spirit or Yeatsian anima mundi as the repository of archetypes and images, Jung's psychoanalysis has always seemed more attractive to occultists than Freud's. Modernist Alchemy, pg. 88, Timothy Materer

Ah, midwinter spring blanched for an hour, With transitory blossom of snow, Fresh and unlike the worn-out world of Comets that weep and Leonids fly.

I guess I should memorize Yeats's "Magi" as I have Eliot's.

If Surette's intuitions are correct then we need to reexamine--once again!--the relation between Romanticism and Modernism and to question whether Modernism ever separately existed.

in the introduction to Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition he wonders if twentieth century Modernism might not be a "decadence" of the larger philosophical and historical modernity that began with Descartes.