For Sylvia Jane III

Yet if free will in the sense under discussion  is bound up with the notion of the autonomous individual soul we ought to consider the argument of Averroes (Ibn Rushd).

The Moors of the 12th century had access to the writings of Aristotle -- the Christian world didn't rediscover Aristotle until they started winning back large parts of Spain, and ended up in the possession of some of the (formerly Moorish) libraries.

Anyway, Averroes wrote a learned commentary on the works of Aristotle, and the part of his commentary that most concerns us right now involves the idea of the human soul. Simplifying the matter considerably, one may say that Averroes --
invoking Aristotle's authority -- believed that there is only one true immortal human intellect, or soul. Our individual selves, our personalities, come about because this one common soul is mixed with a lot of different individual bodies.

Perhaps our bodies are so many stained-glass windows in a Church. The underlying mind, the “active intellect,” is the same –the light of the sun outside the Church. But the streams of light are differentiated as the various “passive intellects” once they have passed through the material of the windows.

If anything like this is so, where will we locate our notions of freedom? In the passive or in the active intellect? Or perhaps in the stained glass itself?

The Tree of Jesse

In Christian iconology, the "tree of Jesse" refers to Isaiah 11:1, and the imagery it inspired.

The pertinent text (KJV) says: "And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots".

In the Latin Vulgate, the passage reads: "Et egredietur virga de radice Iesse et flos de radice eius ascendet," so we see that a Latin term for a tender green shoot, "virga," [with the near-pun, obvious enough to western Europe for centuries before King James' day, to "virgo" or "Virgin"] became the sturdier-seeming "rod" in English.

But I'm thinking just now of the window in Chartres Cathedral in which a tree rises from a sleeping Jesse, and the rod, the trunk of the tree, consists of figures of David, Solomon, then two other crowned but uncertain referents, then Mary and at the tree's peak -- Jesus.

The 19th century French architect and theorist, Viollet-le-Duc, rhapsodized about this window, as an achievement in color. Then he turned to the issue of perspective -- not something, in his opinion, that can possibly enter into the particular form of art that produced this window.

"The radiation of translucent colors in windows cannot be modified by the artist; all his talent consists in profiting by it, according to a given harmonic scheme on a single plane, like a rug, but not according to an effort at aerial perspective. Do what you like, a glass window never does and never can represent anything but a plane surface; its real virtues even exist only on that condition. Every attempt to present several planes to the eye is fatal to the harmony of color, without producing any illusion in the spectator."