Posts Tagged ‘religion’
“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going”*…
As Anne Lawrence-Mathers explains, centuries before Neo instantly mastered Kung Fu in The Matrix, and AI emerged promising quick command of any subject to any of us, medieval scholars found a shortcut to years of difficult study: a magical manuscript that promised to fast-track advanced learning. Anne Lawrence-Mathers investigates the Ars notoria, its supposed powers, and the demonic influence it had upon some users…
Mastering the full range of subjects taught in medieval universities normally required many years of hard and expensive study. From the thirteenth century on, however, an anonymous work known as the Ars notoria promised, through diagrams, incantations, and arcane rituals, to rapidly transmit to scholars the total knowledge of anything they might need. Condemned by church authorities, the fifty-six extant manuscripts nevertheless testify to the seductiveness of that offer.
Its complex diagrams were at the center of its appeal. Unlike diagrams in other magical texts, those in Ars notoria do not illustrate what the text is seeking to communicate. Nor do they act as models to be replicated in three-dimensional form as pieces of magical equipment. Instead, they supposedly work almost in the same way as religious icons. That is, faithful possession and use of them can offer direct contact with powerful and benign supernatural forces — and ultimately even with God. The diagrams themselves are the route to magic and consist of arrangements of symbolic and geometric forms, patterns, and symbols, interspersed with “words”, which are frequently unintelligible combinations of letters.3 Practitioners who opened their minds to receive and imprint these labyrinthine images, while reciting complex verbal formulae and strings of mysterious, almost unpronounceable words and names, are engaging in a significant act of trust.
Several factors made the Ars notoria fundamentally different from other magical texts. First, this is not a text in conflict with the church. In fact, the rituals framing and shaping usage of the images are presented as extremely pious, and the texts to be recited are identified as prayers. The alien words, names, and characters are explained as coming from ancient languages such as Greek, Hebrew, and “Chaldean”, and are claimed to preserve both the names of angels and words used to communicate with them. Second, the advantages offered are relatively virtuous: contact with spiritual beings and full knowledge of the subjects taught in medieval universities. Such claims cut little ice with thirteenth-century theologians, however, who saw clear links to things condemned as superstitious and demonic by St Augustine, despite the text’s assertion that it contains wisdom revealed to King Solomon.
St Thomas Aquinas was worried enough by the Ars notoria to name and condemn it specifically in his Summa theologiae — one of the most authoritative summaries of Christian teaching. He dealt with the very serious issue of superstition in Book Two, Part 2 — Question 96 is effectively devoted to the Ars notoria. Aquinas’ conclusion is wholly negative: the “art” is both “unlawful and futile”. It is futile because it cannot deliver what it promises. Still more seriously, its “signs” are neither understood by humans (like ordinary words and letters) nor sent by God (as sacraments are), and thus are precisely the type of thing that lures humans into contact and compact with demons.
That may seem a conclusive case for the rejection of the Ars notoria, especially as Aquinas’ objections were echoed by other major theologians. However, the number of surviving medieval copies of the work, and the fact that it was copied and owned in religious institutions until the end of the medieval period, show that the church ultimately had neither the interest nor ability to stamp it out. Moreover, it was translated in the early modern period and also went into print, demonstrating an ongoing — and more widespread — interest…
[Professor Lawrence-Mathers explains how the Ars notoria was used…]
… For some users, the rituals were so powerful that they seemed demonic. One of these was Brother John, an early fourteenth-century monk of the abbey of Morigny, near Étampes. John’s account of his introduction to the text, his powerful attraction to it, and the terrifying experiences he underwent while using it, was given in several chapters of John’s own, visionary work, the early fourteenth century Liber florum celestis doctrine.6
The great attraction of the Ars notoria for John was its promise of quick access to advanced scholarly knowledge. He recounts his continuing wish to study, and how he was lent a copy of a book of necromancy by “a certain cleric”. He copied much of it and wanted more. This led to an encounter with a “medical expert” from Lombardy, who informed John that what he needed was the Ars notoria, and that a copy of it was to be found within the walls of the school (at Orléans) where John had been sent. These details provide important evidence of the liminal status of works of ritual magic. They were recognised as dangerous, and were far from being officially approved, and yet were well known, owned and recommended by educated individuals, including monks and clerics.
For John, the Ars notoria was dangerous not in some abstract way, but very directly. He confesses that it struck him at first as beautiful and holy, and seemed to offer miraculous gifts rather than demonic temptations. It became apparent, however, that the book was utterly deceptive, a work of the Devil, a “sick pleasure” that was actually fatally poisonous to the soul, not only to the body…
Medieval “technology”: “Artificial Intelligence– Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
Pair with: “The Cost of Seamlessness” from @taotuner.bsky.social, and “Experience vs. Efficiency: Why the Human Still Matters in Learning,” from @lnddave.bsky.social.
Also a (vaguely) apposite, but (very) amusing (in a macabre kind of way) report on a piece of OpenAI’s handiwork: “US government map of Africa mislabels every country at global conference.”
* Beverly Sills
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As we do the work, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that Frank Herbert’s Dune was published.
Herbert published a three-part serial Dune World in the monthly Analog, from December 1963 to February 1964. The serial was accompanied by several illustrations that were not published again. After an interval of a year, he published the much slower-paced five-part The Prophet of Dune in the January–May 1965 issues. The first serial became “Book One: Dune” in the final published Dune novel, and the second serial was divided into “Book Two: Muad’dib” and “Book Three: The Prophet”. The serialized version was expanded, reworked, and submitted to more than twenty publishers, each of whom rejected it. The novel, Dune, was finally accepted and published in August 1965 by Chilton Books, a printing house better known for publishing auto repair manuals. Sterling Lanier, an editor at Chilton, had seen Herbert’s manuscript and had urged his company to take a risk in publishing the book. However, the first printing, priced at $5.95 (equivalent to $60.79 in 2025), did not sell well and was poorly received by critics as being atypical of science fiction at the time. Chilton considered the publication of Dune a write-off and Lanier was fired. Over the course of time, the book gained critical acclaim, and its popularity spread by word-of-mouth to allow Herbert to start working full time on developing the sequels to Dune, elements of which were already written alongside Dune.
– source
Herbert died in 1986; his son Brian Herbert and author Kevin J. Anderson continued the series in over a dozen additional novels since 1999. Among them was Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, a prequel which chronicles the fictional Butlerian Jihad, a crusade by the last free humans in the universe against the thinking machines, a violent and dominating force led by the sentient computer Omnius.
“In the last analysis, a pickle is a cucumber with experience”*…
In an excerpt from their book, The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles, Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder explore the evolution of fermentation across the ages…
Pickling vegetables began in Mesopotamia around 2400 BCE, where brining cucumbers addressed the challenge of preserving food in a hot climate. Brine, a mixture of water and salt, proved effective at inhibiting spoilage while enhancing the flavor of food. This innovation quickly spread to neighboring civilizations, embedding itself in the culinary practices of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
Cleopatra, one of Egypt’s most iconic figures, believed that pickles contributed to her legendary beauty. This association between pickles and vitality reflected a broader cultural fascination with preserved foods. Julius Caesar ensured that his soldiers carried pickles on their campaigns, claiming that the preserved vegetables fortified their strength and stamina. This notion of pickles as both nourishment and tonic was echoed by Greek philosophers like Aristotle, who praised their medicinal properties.
The culinary sophistication of ancient Rome brought pickling into sharper focus. The Roman cookbook attributed to the Roman merchant and epicure Apicius, De Re Coquinaria, included numerous references to preserved vegetables, particularly olives and cucumbers. Apicius wrote of the importance of balance in brining, using spices like dill, mustard seed, and coriander seed to create complex flavors that complemented meals. The ability to elevate simple ingredients through preservation became a hallmark of Roman gastronomy, showcasing pickling as both art and science.
The spread of pickling innovations along trade routes like the Silk Road and the Spice Route highlights its significance in cultural exchange. Roman traders, for example, likely encountered Asian pickling techniques through the Silk Road’s bustling networks of goods and ideas. Spices such as cinnamon, peppercorns, and cumin—integral to pickling recipes—traveled vast distances, linking the culinary practices of the Mediterranean, India, and China.
In Asia, pickling developed independently but with striking parallels. Chinese records from the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256 BCE) mention fermented vegetables, including pickled radishes and cabbages, which were essential for sustenance during harsh winters. Similarly, Indian achar evolved as a culinary treasure, incorporating local spices like turmeric, fenugreek, and mustard to enhance preservation and flavor. Japanese pickling methods, such as nukazuke (fermentation in rice bran), emphasized minimalism and balance, reflecting the cultural values of harmony and simplicity.
The maritime trade routes of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean allowed pickling traditions to travel across vast regions, influencing cuisines from the Malay Archipelago to the Arabian Peninsula. The Indian Ocean trade ensured that spices like cloves and nutmeg became integral to pickling recipes worldwide, enriching their flavor profiles and preserving their cultural legacies.
Pickling’s role extended beyond culinary practices, becoming intertwined with religious and cultural rituals. In Jewish tradition, the Talmud makes numerous references to pickled vegetables, particularly turnips, which symbolize abundance and endurance. Pickled foods often accompanied bread during blessings, emphasizing their role as both sustenance and spiritual connection.
Their transformation through pickling—turning a simple, earthy root into a tangy, vibrant dish—was often seen as a metaphor for renewal and the endurance of the Jewish people through adversity. During the springtime Jewish holiday of Purim, which commemorates the triumph of the Jewish people over oppression in ancient Persia, the giving of food gifts (mishloach manot) occasionally included pickled vegetables, reflecting the value of sharing preserved foods that sustained communities through lean times. And colorful Yiddish sayings like er drayt sich arum vie a forts in roosl (he wanders around like a fart in a pickle barrel) highlight the humorous associations with pickling, eating, and bodily functions.
Hindu culture imbued pickles with sacred meaning. The balance of flavors in achar—salty, sour, sweet, and spicy—was seen as a reflection of life’s harmony. Pickles were often prepared as offerings during religious festivals, symbolizing prosperity and the nurturing of the human spirit.
Christian monastic traditions adopted pickling during the Middle Ages as a way to sustain communities through long fasting periods. Pickled fish and vegetables became essential components of monastic diets, reflecting the intersection of faith, practicality, and culinary ingenuity.
In Islamic cultures, pickles played a central role in Ramadan feasts, their tangy flavors providing refreshment after a day of fasting. Preserved lemons, a staple in Moroccan cuisine, became symbolic of hospitality and were often served to honored guests. Ancient Chinese rituals also celebrated the cultural significance of pickling, with fermented vegetables used in ancestor worship as symbols of continuity and filial piety.
Trade routes such as the Silk Road and those across the Sahara were pivotal in spreading pickling techniques and ingredients across diverse cultures. These routes facilitated the exchange of goods like salt and vinegar, essential to pickling, along with the culinary knowledge that transformed them into staples of global cuisine…
Read on for medieval and early modern innovations, pickling evolution in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, industrialization and the modern culinary renaissance, and pickles in pop culture: “A Brief and Essential History of the Most Important Food Ever Invented: The Pickle,” from @lithub.com.web.brid.gy.
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As we break out the brine, we might spare a thought for a man who put fermentation to a different kind of use, André Tchelistcheff; he died on this date in 1994. An oenologist, he was a pivotal figure in the revitalization of the California wine industry following Prohibition (1919-33) and used his (French) training in viticulture and wine-making to define the style of California’s best wines, especially Cabernet Sauvignon, and to pioneer such techniques as the cold fermentation (now widely used in producing white and rose wines) and the use of American oak barrels for aging. He also developed frost-prevention techniques and helped curb vine disease in Napa Valley. In addition to managing Beaulieu Vineyards in Napa for 35 years, Tchelistcheff operated a private wine laboratory in St. Helena for 15 years. He also assembled a fabled library of wine literature.
“Memento mori”*…
Via Matt Muir and his wonderful newsletter, Web Curios…
Do YOU want to feel INCREDIBLY OLD? I mean, I imagine you already feel incredibly old, what with, well, your age, and the terrifying pace of everything, and the fact that nothing makes sense, but if you would like to feel EVEN OLDER then you will ‘enjoy’ this site which presents a whole load of ‘XX was closer to WWII than Y’-type facts to help you realise quite how much time has passed since you’ve been alive and how transient and ephemeral your existence in fact is. You can even plug in your birthday to get personalised horrordata…
Try it for yourself at: “Another day closer to the end.” No extra points for guessing that the example illustrated in the pic above was generated with your (very old) correspondent’s birthday.
On the other hand?: “Your future self has good news: you’re doing pretty well.”
* Latin phrase: “remember that you will die”
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As we muse on mutability and mortality, we might note that this is Good Friday… and that in 1983, British scholars Colin Humphreys and W.G. Waddington used NASA research into historical eclipse to place the Crucifixion on this date in 33 CE.
“Here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the doors, and see all the people”*…
It’s Sunday, and war is raging (again) in the Middle East. This time around, the strains of fundamentalist Christian thought are hard to miss in the justifications of the role of the U.S. in the conflict. The widely-circulated reports of troops being briefed that the war in Iran is meant to hasten the Biblical End Times may or may not be true. But it seems clear that the millennial contingent in Trump’s movement is all in on an apocalypse. (And here.) As the right-wing site Media Matters reports, “Christian media figures have claimed that the Iran war could signal ‘the second coming’ or the ‘End Times’ and said ‘we are watching incredible prophecy in this time come to pass’.”
Tal Lavin has reached back to the work he did for his book Wild Faith to help us understand…
As chaos and violence break out across the Middle East in a war led by the US with Israel as junior partner, I wanted to revisit my research on Christian apocalyptic prophecy… about the evangelical Christians eagerly looking forward to the end of the world—and influencing foreign policy to bring it closer. It’s difficult to conceive of willful courting of disaster for religious reasons, but decades of modern Christian prophecy eagerly foresee mass bloodshed in the Middle East as a prelude to Christ’s triumphant return. Evangelicals of this stripe form a crucial part of Trump’s base and governing coalition…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Yearning for the Apocalypse,” from @swordsjew.bsky.social.
And lest we think that this inveighling is in any way unprecedented, Matthew Avery Sutton, reminds us that there’s a long history of politics using religion (and vice versa). In an excerpt from his new book, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, he tells the story of Reconstuction, during which churches were mobilized on both sides of the divide-that-never-went-away…
… In the aftermath of the Civil War, federal leaders sought help from Christian groups… as they sought to reassert their power across the entire United States. The US Army had won on the battlefields, and now governing authorities and their protestant collaborators sought to secure the peace. They aimed to reconstruct the nation, to rebuild Americans’ shattered sense of their nation’s exceptional history and manifest destiny, and to reinvigorate their commitment to the United States’ Christian mission. But to succeed, policymakers knew they needed to limit dissent—including religious dissent.
Christian activists played key roles in every part of postwar reconstruction. In the South, Black ministers and White missionaries welcomed the formerly enslaved into the faith and worked with them to establish independent social and political lives. Defeated Southern Whites launched a multi-generation effort to defend their treason by reimagining the causes of the Civil War and God’s role in it. In the West, a series of Indian wars led to the US government’s creation of a comprehensive reservation system, where government-sponsored missionaries sought to Christianize tribes and “civilize” their children. In Utah Territory the US government cracked down on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its impressive theocracy, seeking to quell religious dissent.
Across the nation, Reconstruction policies provided new opportunities for church leaders in collaboration with the government to impose their ideas and values on the land and its peoples. Protestant activists believed that they alone had the tools and expertise to integrate Black and Native peoples, former Confederates, and religious dissenters into the body politic, while bringing healing and reconciliation to all Americans on their terms. Rocked by the split over slavery and then the war, they worked to build unity by identifying common threats and enemies and organizing Christians against them. Their actions demonstrated that after the conflict, just as before, the free exercise clause did not apply to all equally. But minority groups constantly challenged the power of mainstream Christian leaders…
… Only about one-third of enslaved Americans considered themselves Christian at the start of the Civil War. But in the Reconstruction era Black church going skyrocketed. And just about all of those who converted chose to attend Black-led churches. The days of Southern Black Christians submitting to second-class treatment in the house of the Lord had ended. In urban areas, African Americans could usually join churches that Black activists had founded before the war. In rural areas, they had fewer options. They sometimes had to settle for makeshift meetings in vacant buildings or arrange outdoor services until they could build rudimentary houses of worship.
Black clergy became some of the strongest advocates for full equality and rights in the postwar South. Seeing Jesus as a liberator, they aimed to make the egalitarianism of the gospel and the Declaration’s line that “all men are created equal” the reality in the United States. Many engaged directly in politics, understanding that while slavery might have ended, securing political equality required vigilance…
… Black ministers’ political engagement made them targets of violence. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, a [Protestant-led] terrorist organization founded by Southern Whites shortly after the war, burned down churches and threatened Black activists. A journalist testified to the US Senate about his interview with a minister. While “he had been preaching on the circuit,” Klansmen dragged the preacher from bed in the middle of the night and “beat him severely.” They “told him that if he returned to the county he would suffer for it.” This was one example of many. As racial violence escalated in the South, serving as a minister proved dangerous…
… Historian, sociologist, and Black activist W.E.B. Du Bois summarized in 1903 the role that churches played in Black life, especially in the postwar South. “The Negro church of today is the social centre of Negro life in the United States,” he wrote, “and the most characteristic expression of African character.” Postwar Black churches, as Du Bois understood, represented the heart of Black efforts to secure social, political, and religious equality. Church leaders had engineered the Christian faith into a tool of liberation, which made them a threat to the White Christians of the South and much of the rest of the United States.
In addition to working to suppress Black political and religious power, many Southern Whites launched a quasi-religious campaign to reshape the memory of the Civil War. Rather than acknowledge their deep investment in slavery, they recast the conflict as a tragic clash between two honorable forces—the North fighting to preserve the Union, and the South struggling to defend local autonomy and states’ rights. The authors of this revisionist account reduced slavery to a secondary issue, incidental to the “real” causes of the war. As a result, by war’s end, many White Southerners felt they had no reason to repent, no moral reckoning to face, and no obligation to embrace Black equality or suffrage. For them, the war had simply preserved the Union and, almost as an afterthought, ended slavery. Nothing more.
Christianity became central to this new Southern narrative. In defeat, White Southerners cast themselves in the role of Christ, imagining their suffering as redemptive. They claimed they had sacrificed for the greater good of the nation, their values—chivalric protection of White women, paternalistic care for those they enslaved, and Christian devotion—positioned them as the rightful moral leaders of the country. In their view, God had chosen them to guide the nation toward righteousness, but first he had humbled and purified them through the bloodshed of war…
Also eminently worth reading in full: How Christianity Was Used By the Powerful and the Marginalized to Shape Post-Civil War America,” from @literaryhub.bsky.social.
We are reminded why our founding fathers– so many of them, Deists— so wisely insisted on freedom of religion and separation of church and state.
Apposite: “The ‘Straight White American Jesus’ podcast covers the history, philosophy, theology, and politics of Christian nationalism” (from Boing Boing)
Also, (under the general heading “things aren’t always what they seem”): “The Iran War’s Most Precious Commodity Isn’t Oil,” (gift article from Bloomberg)
And finally: only vaguely related, but fascinating: “Preached Whales“– (landlocked) Central European pulpits shaped like fish, whales, and boats.
* classic children’s fingerplay rhyme
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As we celebrate separation, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that “Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan was released.
Johnny’s in the basement, mixin’ up the medicine / I’m on the pavement, thinkin’ about the government…
The opening sequence of D. A. Pennebaker‘s Dont Look Back (the apostrophe is absent in the title… and yes, that’s Allen Ginsberg in the background)
“Stercus accidit”*…
As we try to understand the rifts afflicting our nation and world, many turn to Marx and his framework of class. But in a provocative essay, Catherine Nichols suggests that it was David Hume (in an 1752 essay that identified the unfettering of wealth from land) who identified the origin of our political divisions…
Describing the political map in terms of Left and Right is an accepted convention all over the world, almost to the point of cliché. Yet it is surprisingly complicated to explain whose interests lie on each side of this spectrum. For example, if the Left supports the interests of workers over the interests of employers, why are Left-leaning regions of the United States and elsewhere in the world among the richest? When Japan and South Korea sought to become economic powerhouses in the later 20th century, they adopted Leftist policies such as strong public education, universal healthcare and increased gender equality – if countries seeking to compete in capitalist arenas adopt broadly Leftist policies, then how do we explain why Leftists are always talking about overthrowing capitalism? And if the Left is somehow both the party of workers’ rights and the party of material wealth, then whose interests are supported by the Right? Given such contradictions, how did these terms become so central to modern politics?
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines. According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate) were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left. This Third Estate included peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of business owner and worker. Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single, world-wide class struggle. The trouble with both these ways of parsing Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class. Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are so rich. Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote against their material interests, year in and year out, across generations?
The 18th-century philosopher and political theorist David Hume had answers to these questions, though he was writing decades before the French Revolution. While his essay ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752) was a warning about the dangers of Britain’s increasing reliance on debt financing, his apocalyptic vision of the future turned out to describe some features of our current political map surprisingly well. Hume was writing because he believed that debt financing had the power to upend Europe’s traditional power structure and culture by creating a new source of money divorced from tradition or responsibility: stocks and bonds. Unlike land, anyone with some cash could buy war bonds and get an immediate passive income in the form of interest. This was the thin end of the wedge caused by the debt financing that Hume believed was destroying every part of society. The governments of antiquity, Hume argued, saved money to use in battle and then waged wars in self-defence, or else to expand their territory. But the British had invented a new form of warfare that Hume saw no precedent for, even in the merchant states of Nicollò Machiavelli’s Italy: war for trade, funded with money borrowed from private stockholders…
[Nichols unpacks Hume’s observations (centrally, that three groups with stakes in the status quo, heretability, and the sanctity of “family and family hierarchy”tradition”– landowners, aging parents, and want to preserve old power structures, including the family– and traces their relevance, from Hume’s time to ours…]
… There are many reasons for people aligning Right or Left, which is why analyses of class and material interests fall short of describing the realities of people’s politics. Hume foresaw that these specific groups would resent the economic sea-change of the 18th century – and he was correct. Many people would rather have land and power than money and liberty.
Still, the power of the Right hasn’t doomed the Left – no more than the Spanish Inquisition doomed the rise of the Left in 18th-century England and France. As long as governments want to keep the value of their currencies from falling, someone in their ranks will be using the methods of the Left and inventiveness that brought us everything from our banking system to gay marriage. We don’t need to resurrect communism or focus narrowly on class, following Marx. The experiments are far from over, and we should remember that the Left is generally where money comes from in modern times. We give away too much power when we forget it…
Rethinking Right and Left: “Landholder vs stockholder,” from @catherinenichols.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
As for how it’s going at the moment (and further to Hume and the quote in this post’s title), see: “MAGA’s Betrayal of Small Business,” from @pkrugman.bsky.social.
* “shit happens”– often attributed to David Hume, reflecting his skeptical view that human understanding, particularly of cause-and-effect, is limited to habitual belief from experience, implying that unforeseen, messy outcomes (“shit”) inevitably occur in life despite our reasoning.
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As we sort the Whigs from the Tories, we might recall that it was on this date 1656 that Blaise Pascal (writing under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte) published the first of his Provential Letters (Lettres provinciales), a series of eighteen polemical letters using humor to attack Jesuits for their use of casuistry and their moral laxity. Though the Letters were a popular success, they had little immediate effect on politics or the clergy. But they influenced later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and ultimately persuaded Pope Alexander to condemn “laxity” in the church and order a revision of casuistic texts.
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