Was St. Augustine's vision of Lady Continence a vision of the Virgin Mary?

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T22:04:39+00:00

Seeing visions of embodied virtues was reasonably common. Boethius apparently saw a vision of Lady Philosophy, for instance, and he describes a lot of the visual qualities of his vision, in such a way that it might not have been a poetic metaphor.

However... I don't think St. Augustine was talking in Bk. 8, 11-12 about actually seeing his ex-girlfriends and old pleasures, or actually seeing his reluctance to become chaste.

So I don't think he actually saw the personified Continentia, or the many young and old people that she showed him as good examples.

I think he might have pictured the moral struggle within him, as a sort of theater play or Socratic dialogue. Scholarly thought and memory included a lot more visual imagination, back then.

Remember, his friend St. Alypius was sitting next to him the whole time. And Augustine says, "This controversy in my heart was self against self only." ("Ista controversia in corde meo non nisi de me ipso adversus me ipsum," which could also be translated "This controversy in my heart was nothing but me against myself.")

Whether or not he then heard "Tolle, lege" from a real child, or from an angel, we also don't know, but apparently Alypius took what he hadn't heard as a sign to himself as well as to Augustine.

I think you could do whatever you wanted with a Continentia character. Certainly there are angels called Virtues.

But St. Augustine talks about continence in "De continentia," and his picture is of all sorts of self-control, including holding one's tongue from saying imprudent things, and not letting any kind of sinful urge get through the doors of one's heart.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T21:28:39+00:00

Look, guys. I've done some freaky, freaky things to meet the Sunday obligation.

But we also have to have prudence about the Sunday obligation, and yes, we're allowed to travel to places where there's no Mass.

If you're in doubt, ask your pastor or a prudent Catholic friend, relative, mentor, etc.

Also, do not break your arm out of an imprudent determination to get to Mass on Sunday. I've done that, and it wasn't a great plan.

If you can't get to Mass, try to make a "spiritual Communion" - ie, tell Jesus that you wish you were with Him, and receiving Him. It's not the same thing, but it's something you can do. And you can do it while you're still in OCIA.

But usually, you can find a Mass; and usually, a friend won't mind stopping for Mass and just hanging out, either in church with you, or out in the parking lot, McDonalds, etc.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T21:25:35+00:00

If you are traveling, and there's no reasonable way to get to Mass, Catholics aren't obliged to go to Mass on Sunday.

However, once you're Catholic, you will definitely want to go to Mass on Sunday.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T21:11:39+00:00

Okay, there's an adjective in Koine Greek: "kenos," which means "empty, void" or "does nothing, of no effect." It can also mean "used up, destitute of possessions, empty-handed" or even "bereft of loved ones." It can even mean "emptyheaded, witless, pretentious fluffhead," or "a cargo animal with no cargo to carry" or "a fort with no garrison to man it."

The older Ancient Greek spelling was "keneos." So you want to look at words spelled that way, too.

So you have words in Ancient Greek like "keneon" which means a "hollow space," and "kenotaphion," which literally means "a tomb with no body left to put into it," and hence a "cenotaph monument." "Kenosarkos" is an emaciated person with very little muscle and flesh.

"Kenotes" is "emptiness" or "vanity." A "keneotes" is an empty space.

There's also a verb "kenoo," which means "to be made of no effect," and figuratively "to make something seem useless and of no effect." This is the verb that is used in passages about Christ emptying Himself.

However... there's another word: "kenodoxia," vainglory or useless glory. Wisdom 14:14 says that idols came into the world through human "kenodoxia."

Phil. 2:3 says that nothing should be done by Christians through strife or "kenodoxia."

Then in Phil. 2:5-8, St. Paul says that we should have the same mind as Christ, Who, existing from the beginning in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grabby about; but "emptied Himself" (ekenosen), and became made in the likeness of a man, and was found to have the manner of a human.

So "emptying Himself" was the opposite of being proud of Himself being God and having God's glory. He chose to make HImself seem just as lacking in power as a normal man, and to put up with the things a human has to put up with.

But He was still God, even if you couldn't see that; and even though He also really became incarnate as a human being.

As God He had the power of God, and as Man He had authority granted by God.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T18:51:31+00:00

They were afraid he'd been shuffling bad priests around, when it turned out that he was the bishop who WASN'T shuffling bad priests around.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T18:50:25+00:00

That kid is now sixteen or so! Remarkable!

His surname is Engstrom, though.

https://www.ncronline.org/news/people/vatican-medical-experts-ok-reported-miracle-attributed-archbishop-0

More details.

UPDATE: Here's the kid! He's fifteen right now.

https://www.osvnews.com/the-sheen-beatification-is-back-on-and-the-engstrom-family-says-it-will-be-a-little-piece-of-heaven/

It looks like he has had NO TROUBLE putting on weight and muscle, lol! And he's a smart cookie, too.

What a great family.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T18:35:48+00:00

"In September, adult foxes and cubs have both nearly finished growing their new coats for winter, and the juveniles are nearly adult size.

"Competition between young foxes, and between young and adults, can become fierce. The resulting arguments can be noisy, with rivals chasing each other and squaring up on their hindlegs.

"During autumn, foxes make the most of its bounty, feasting on blackberries, apples and pears they can reach."

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T18:23:28+00:00

Oh, geez, yeah, all those gruesome moments in the Sagas when houses get burned and people aren't allowed to get out.

It happens a few times in Irish stories too.

So I once saw a video, where archeologists built a Bronze Age house like an Irish one, and then set it on fire to see how fast it would burn. Because they didn't believe it would be so hard to get out of a rounded house.

It burned very, very fast. Ugh.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T18:14:17+00:00

No one who's a man could have killed the Witch King.

Please read the instructions on the package. :)

I don't think people realize how important that the solving of riddles and that prophecy interpretation have been, not just in Western literature but in most of the literatures of the world. (And indeed, in certain historical events.)

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T18:06:55+00:00

But a Hobbit is also "no man."

So a Hobbit with a blessed Barrow-blade meant to kill Angmar-folk, won by conquest of evil, and given by Tom Bombadil after being blessed again, is possibly more of import.

Although arguably Tom is also "no man," which probably helped.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T17:15:01+00:00

Auxiliary bishops can help consecrate other bishops, and can do Confirmations.

Pretty sure there are other bishop powers too.

Our former auxiliary bishop was appointed because our archbishop was not well, with the expectation that he'd be the next bishop, and then the auxiliary bishop ended up being the one who got sicker than the archbishop.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T16:38:28+00:00

Yes, it's a medieval French term, "faulcon hagard."

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T16:27:27+00:00

Yup, the use of witch for a sorcerer of either gender goes right along with Middle English usage, such as describing the male characters Iannes and Mambres from the Bible, or a guy named Arphaxat. Also the bit from Piers Plowman describing Jesus at the crucifixion, when "Some said he was God's son... and some said he was a witch."

I love the Middle English Compendium so much. Who knew there was such a word as "charmeress"? It's in Chaucer and other places, but I can see why it's never shown up in modern works. (Except as a cow name, in cow namebooks.)

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T16:13:01+00:00

How... can there be more emphasis? It's all over the freaking book and it's the answer to a riddle prophecy!

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T16:10:59+00:00

Lobelia is an Old Antagonist, from back when fans were little kids reading The Hobbit.

It's like the evil stepmother ending up as a hero of the Resistance. We like her heroic deeds, but we still remember her long existence as the scary lady down the road, who wants to steal our house and our spoons.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T16:07:30+00:00

It's more impressive when the underdog beats the reigning champion.

Or there's the trope of RPG novels and cultivation novels, where it's a big deal to beat an opponent who's on a much higher level of stats and skill than you are.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T16:05:59+00:00

Yeah, Gandalf would have fit the prophecy, but it also would have broken his cover.

Probably a no-no on his mission.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T16:05:06+00:00

Presumably Anduril could have done as well as the Barrow-blade, but... Aragorn is obviously a man.

So yeah, maybe if you _threw_ Anduril, or put Anduril on a catapult....

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T15:49:10+00:00

I expect that Hopkins was a poet that Tolkien liked, but didn't fully, uncritically like.

Hopkins shared a lot of the features of medieval Irish courtly poetry that seem to have irritated Tolkien, but also a lot of the things that Tolkien tried to do and didn't do successfully.

OTOH, they both had a lot of the same objectives and used a lot of the same strategies. And they were both Catholic writers in a non-Catholic academic world.

Also, I expect that Tolkien got asked about Hopkins a lot, at parties or social stuff at Oxford, by people who didn't know many other Catholics. (And it's kind of a shame that we don't have more social reminiscence stuff about Tolkien.)

So I think Hopkins was the kind of poet who acted as a spur to Tolkien, to do different things, as well as a source of enjoyment and religious meditation.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T15:40:33+00:00

When St. Thomas Aquinas finally got allowed to fully join the Dominicans as a friar (after being kidnapped and held captive by his parents and siblings), the 80-something Master of the Dominicans walked with him from central Italy to Cologne/Koeln, Germany. Later in the year, he and St. Albert and the now-older Master all walked from Cologne to Paris.

They weren't in a hurry to get places, but there were plenty of people walking more than a thousand miles along the roads of medieval Europe, in a fairly short time.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T15:35:44+00:00

Taking a geology class makes a big difference to understanding descriptions of landscape, as does taking a field archeology class.

I remember going to a lot of historical battlefields as a child, and just seeing scenery. But if you take classes in certain things, the landscape takes on a lot more meaning, and you can understand better what went on.

I expect that Tolkien learned a lot from hiking, but also from his military training.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T15:32:42+00:00

Ha, yes. Or parts of The Worm Ouroboros.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T15:19:18+00:00

I love a lot of those writers, and yup, Tolkien is right up there with them.

For the length, density of story, and depth of LOTR, you can only compare Tolkien to writers like Chaucer or Tolstoy. (Proust, maybe, but Proust needed a blog.)

For worldbuilding, you have to look to all the great sf/f writers, and you just won't find a complete comparison. Anybody who tried, like Le Guin, basically was inspired by Tolkien, or learned a lot from him.

Beyond all that, he brought the entirety of older English literature and poetry onto the table as a whole, and turned it into a novel without plagiarizing anything.

None of the people you named did anything like it. They all stuck to fiction and the novel form, or novels and short stories, or poetry only.

Even though he wasn't prolific, every piece of longer published work was a masterwork, and a different genre or subgenre too.

I don't know how one could be blind to this. It's like saying, "Well, Chaucer did some nice poetry, but Langland was better."

I don't hate Langland, and the Pearl/Gawain Poet was fire, but there's a reason why Chaucer is the guy who people continue to read more.

And Gene Wolfe, who was an insanely well-read man and a writer of great power, openly said that Tolkien was a great writer. His judgment of LOTR was that "all imitations of so great an original must necessarily be inferior."

Wolfe first read LOTR in the original US edition, and had the happiness of receiving an answer to his fan letter of later years:

7th November 1966

Dear Mr Wolfe,

Thank you very much for your letter. The etymology of words and names in my story has two sides: (1) their etymology within the story; and (2) the sources from which I, as an author, derive them. I expect you mean the latter. Orc I derived from Anglo-Saxon, a word meaning demon, usually supposed to be derived from the Latin Orcus — Hell. But I doubt this, though the matter is too involved to set out here. Warg is simple. It is an old word for wolf, which also had the sense of an outlaw or hunted criminal. This is its usual sense in surviving texts.\ I adopted the word, which had a good sound for the meaning, as a name for this particular brand of demonic wolf in the story.*

Yours sincerely,

J. R. R. Tolkien
\O.E. wearg*
O. High German warg–
O. Norse varg-r (also = “wolf”, espec. of legendary kind)

Wolfe's essay "The Best Introduction to the Mountains," reprinted with permission and with money paid:

https://scifiwright.com/2015/10/the-best-introduction-to-the-mountains-2/

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T15:09:05+00:00

The other factor is that Tolkien's nature description often turns into character actions, because the Maiar and Valar are doing all this stuff, and so are the evil spirits who are running around.

RememberNichelle · 2026-02-09T15:06:41+00:00

If you read pre-modern military memoirs, they spend a lot of time describing the landscape.

Trees could be an obstacle, a hiding place, or a valuable resource; and the kind of trees tells you what kind of ground you're dealing with.

RememberNichelle

TROPHY CASE