Franklinly Speaking . . .

Lucky Franklin

Having been poor is no shame, but having been twice poor likely is!

Misunderstood Sayings

Gecko with a Knowing Look

At a workshop to prepare for the upcoming semester, another instructor there used the expression "to know from the get-go," but I heard "to know from the gecko."

But maybe that other instructor is - with my help - on to something, as the image above would seem to show, so go to the gecko for to be in the know-know . . .

Birds do it, bees do it, even constipated fleas do it . . .

My Uncle Harlin spent the last decade and a half of his life going birdwatching nearly every day - "birding," they call it - and these feathered bipeds do have something fascinating about them, probably their ability to fly (most of them, anyway), a capability that fascinates us bipeds of the featherless sort.

My wife is now getting into birds, not yet birding, but finding birds online and drawing them, as below:

This first one's an Eastern Oystercatcher, but I don't know what this second one is:

Is it a fat little wren? I don't actually think so. What do readers think? Feel free to comment.

A Stately Raven?

Stately, Nothing!

I Am The State!
Photo by My Wife

Or just old cousin crow?

Poetry Break: Wild and Crazy One-Liner

Swallow
Google Images

And here it is:

Meteorology

One swallow does not a summer thirst slake.

Not wild and crazy, you say? Well then, imagine a tornado . . .

Yeah, they talk big . . .

Some Real Howlers!

Wikipedia

. . . but can they back it up, or are they just a little nutty:

The howler monkeys whose guttural calls reverberate through Central and South American rainforests possess a secret that the males of the species may prefer to be left unrevealed, . . . [for even though they] make among the loudest, deepest sounds of any land animal, . . . [using] their roars to attract the ladies for mating and [to] intimidate other males, . . . scientists on Thursday said they have discovered a curious paradox: males that make the . . . [deepest] calls[, which are] considered the most alluring to potential mates[,] are endowed with the lowest reproductive potential [and] the littlest testes for sperm production[,] . . . an "evolutionary trade-off" for male howler monkeys between vocal tract and testes size. (Will Dunham, "Howl of a good time: Deep monkey roars come with intimate secret," Reuters, October 23, 2015)

It's all about image, I guess. Or vocaledge . . .

Uncle Harlin's 692nd Bird: The Rufous-Backed Robin

Rufous-Backed Robin
Wikipedia

Dan Kopp, one of my late Uncle Harlin's birding friends, provided me with a link to a brief article about Harlin: "Life Lister Almost 700 – Birds, That Is!" Field Notes: For Members of the Nature Conservancy in Arizona (Spring 2015). Here are some of those field notes:

[O]n January 17, [2015,] 87-year-old Harlin Perryman came to the Patagonia-Sonoita Creek Preserve from his home in Sacramento, California. He was searching for the rufous-backed robin, which would be the 692nd bird on his life list . . . . Jim and Gloria Lawrence, the bird walk leaders that morning, directed Harlin to the preserve's Spring Trail, where they had seen that bird earlier in the morning. Once there, Harlin saw his 692nd bird . . . . "Harlin got the bird bug when he was 67 . . . . He was out cycling and was almost hit by a bird with red on its wings. He wasn't sure what it was, so he bought a birding identification book and was hooked . . . . Harlin has a big smile and enjoys telling his story, which is an inspiration to all of us who became interested in birding late in life," [says Keith Krejci, the preserve's site host].

Apparently, Harlin had been visiting the preserve for the past twenty years. The article has a photo of Harlin smiling big and looking very Cherokee. I don't know if the photo was recent, and I wish I could reproduce it here, but I can't do that with pdf files. Go there, and take a look.

I wonder if Harlin reached 700 . . .

Caterpillars and Butterflies: Two Different Species?

Butterfly Hunter
Der Schmetterlingsjäger
Carl Spitzweg (1840)

Not being an expert (even though my 4H project was entomology), I don't know what to make of this theory to be explained below, namely, that caterpillars and butterflies are different species. I first learned about this theory in an article by Ted Olsen titled "Are Butterflies a New Creation After All?" (Behemoth, Issue 16, February 19, 2015), but links to more scientific information are given below:

In 2009, the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published an article by British zoologist Donald Williamson. He argued that butterflies and caterpillars essentially evolved separately, as two different organisms - and that somewhere along the line the two species accidentally but successfully mated.

The theory makes a lot of sense, University of Vermont biologist Bernd Heinrich wrote in his 2012 book on animal death, Life Everlasting. During metamorphosis, caterpillar DNA is essentially "turned off," and butterfly DNA, which had been suppressed, is "turned on." Heinrich writes:

A new theory claims that because the metamorphosis . . . is so radical, with no continuity from one to the next, that the adult forms of these insects are actually new organisms. . . . In effect, the animal is a chimera, an amalgam of two, where first one lives and dies and then the other emerges. . . . Regardless of how it came about, there are indeed two very different sets of genetic instructions at work in the metamorphosis . . . and these are as different as different species, or even much more so. They thus represent a reincarnation, not just from one individual into another, but the equivalent of reincarnation from one species into another.

As Heinrich notes, it's an aberrant view among biologists. Williamson was ridiculed for proposing it, and PNAS quickly published a rebuttal (but not a retraction).

I've only glanced at the scientific arguments, but whether they prove valid or not, the possibility is intriguing that caterpillars and butterflies were distinct species that somehow accidentally though successfully mated (or united through parasitism or through some sort of virus infusion of DNA).

I suppose we'll hear more about this if the theory holds up . . .

Biking on a Busy Day . . .

We went biking yesterday together, Sun-Ae and I, something we've not had time to do for a couple of years now, so busy we've been with our editing and translation work, and we saw both old and new scenes on our bike trip up the Jungnang Stream to a pathside place where we used to stop for lunch and beer, back when we had more time, and the woman there, the proprietress of the outdoor food-and-drink place, was glad to see us, and maybe for the final time since we have so little time to spare for such trips, and little time for stopping and taking a few photos, such as this one of a fisher bird of some sort:

He looks like a lone sentry in a landscape of Brutalist architecture, awaiting friend or foe, but encountering us, a couple of puzzling creatures who capture him in this, his De Chirico moment.

And then, there's this:

Reeds that grow between biker and stream . . . albeit with highrise apartments looming in the obscure distance . . .

'Twas a chilly day, but worth the trip.

Good Ol' Bowhead Whales

Bowhead Whale
Photo by Paul Nicklen
IIP Digital

I found the new information (new for me!) so interesting in this "Old Soul" article (IIP Digital, June 24, 2013) by Lauren Monsen on the lifespan of bowhead whales that I'm excerpting it extensively even though (or maybe because?) I actually know very little about these whales:

[Living i]n the Arctic waters off Alaska's coast, bowhead whales . . . are now thought to be the world's longest-lived mammals . . . . Craig George, a biologist with the North Slope Department of Wildlife Management in Barrow, Alaska, said it wasn't until the 1990s that scientists suspected bowheads can live more than 200 years . . . . [But] a bowhead in 1992 . . . showed signs of advanced age[, so] . . . George . . . examine[d] it.

"Old whales have really tough blubber, and they're heavily scarred . . . . They're marked with killer-whale bites, ice scars and puncture marks" that testify to the long, eventful lives they've led.

The . . . bowhead was determined to be 130 years old through an age-analysis technique developed by Jeffrey Bada, a marine chemist at the University of California, San Diego. Bada studies whales' eye lenses, which contain amino acids that increase at predictable rates over time.

When scientists sent eyeballs from additional . . . Alaska bowheads to Bada's laboratory, Bada found that several came from whales more than 100 years old and judged one whale to be 211 years old.

"Those figures are conservative; the whales are probably older," Bada said.

Bada's findings are supported by additional evidence. Some . . . bowheads . . . [have] antique harpoon tips in their bodies, indicating they survived skirmishes with 19th-century whalers.

According to Wikipedia, this baleen whale can grow to 20 meters long (nearly 70 feet). I have nothing of special interest to say about this whale, given my ignorance. I merely wished to register my astonishment.

Astonishment! At their long lives, I mean . . .

Nature Denatured . . .

Veryln Klinkenborg

Google Images

One of my favorite NYT writers, Veryln Klinkenborg, is residing in southern California this semester, and he recently wrote an article on industrial farming in the San Joaquin Valley, "Lost in the Geometry of California's Farms" (May 4, 2013), an unsettling literary piece depicting a complex agricultural monstrosity that leaves nature entirely artificial, utterly alien, boundlessly inhumane:

There is something stunning in the way the soil has been engineered into precision. Every human imperfection linked with the word "farming" has been erased. The rows are machined. The earth is molded. The angles are more rigid, and more accurate . . . . This is no longer soil. It is infrastructure . . . . The vast regiments of nut and fruit trees, casting sparse shade on bare earth, seem to defy the word "orchard" . . . . A kind of landscape that once seemed barely imaginable now seems inevitable and necessary: that's the logic and the illusion . . . . I can't help marveling and despairing at the transformation, the way agriculture, here and elsewhere, has created a landscape that is fundamentally inhuman, devoid of people.

How different from Klinkenborg's own farm in upstate New York, a farm with a variety of animals, both domesticated and wild, that change with the changing seasons, undergoing the rhythms of life and death.

What Klinkenborg describes here is neither alive nor dead, but undead, a terrain "[t]ransformed but not entirely unrecognizable," a zombie landscape . . .

Precision Dragon Flies . . .

Dragonfly

NYT

The New York Times has a fascinating piece on dragonflies by Natalie Angier, "Nature's Drone, Pretty and Deadly" (April 1, 2013). Among the various intriguing skills is the dragonfly's incredible flying ability:

Dragonflies are magnificent aerialists, able to hover, dive, fly backward and upside down, pivot 360 degrees with three tiny wing beats, and reach speeds of 30 miles per hour, lightning for an arthropod. In many insects, the wings are simple extensions of the thoracic box and are moved largely as a unit, by flexing the entire thorax. In the dragonfly, the four transparent, ultraflexible wings are attached to the thorax by separate muscles and can each be maneuvered independently, lending the insect an extraordinary range of flight options.

Back in my Ozark childhood, I would watch dragonflies do these very maneuvers, not that I realized at the time that they were sometimes flying upside down, but I did see them dive, hover, and suddenly dart backwards through the air with extraordinary quickness, acceleration, and speed. You can watch some of this, too, for the article has a number of time-lapse images showing their flight ability in slow motion, so take a look. The US military is certainly looking:

Perhaps not surprisingly, much dragonfly research both here and abroad is supported by the United States military, which sees the insect as the archetypal precision drone.

That's not just for its flying, but for its combination of skills, including extraordinary eyesight and a 95 percent kill rate when it takes off after prey!

The future is a different, dangerous country we're headed for . . .

Dario's Signature Sighting of the Sigh of Nature

SighNature

Dario Rivarossa

This very abstract artwork by my friend Dario reveals a very attenuated, displaced relation to a line in my story, The Bottomless Bottle of Beer: "feeling as though all of nature were as trembling with intoxication." Dario's connecting it to Milton's lines in Paradise Lost 9.782-784:

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.

Or as Dario describes the image in his email: "the universal meaning of the SighNature." The image draws together several scenes in my story -- Azazello drawing blood, the Naif signing the contract in blood, and the Naif plucking the bottle from the table -- that collectively contribute to nature's own intoxication.

I'd never realized that the single-fanged Azazello connotes a mosquito, but that's a signature work by Dario, whose artworks are filled with bug-eyed monsters (or 'mansters'), and what better as a sign of fallen nature than the bloodsucking mosquito?

As for the various puns at work, they're in Dario's DNA.

Chuseok Festival - Hiking up Mt. Cheonma

Last Sunday was the Korean Harvest Festival, Chuseok, so my family and I took the day off and hiked up Mt Cheonma, as I've previously mentioned, and as usual, my wife took photos. She's good with a camera, but most of the pictures came out fuzzy, leaving only a few to choose among. The first clear one with a view from a lookout point follows:

Here's another view from a lookout:

The area you're looking at is east of Seoul, by the way. In the next photo, we are nearing the peak, with only 559 meters remaining, albeit steep hiking, sometimes even climbing!

Nearing the top, we saw these lovely evergreen trees, almost like bristlecone pines:

Again an evergreen, plus a view of the valley:

More of a single evergreen -- they don't all resemble bristlecone pines!

Back to bristleconey-type grandeur:

Having reached the top, I pose near the flag, emblem of my flagging energy (and note my Razorbacks shirt):

Here's my daughter, Sa-Rah, relaxing:

You see here a rare photo of my camera-shy wife, Sun-Ae, gazing into the obscure distance on that hazy day:

Here, you find me remonstrating with my son, En-Uk, who hadn't enjoyed those final 559 meters up:

Looking pensive here, and I think you can see the hint of Cherokee in my face:

An artistic rendering with the camera, evidence of my wife's aesthetic eye:

Descending along a different path:

Ah . . . civilization. Or at least a paved road:

Strangeness of the heavens . . . perhaps preparing for their opening on Wednesday, i.e., today:

And no trip into the wilds of Korea would be complete without wildlife:

By then, the day was getting late, so we hurried on to the closest town for a meal of gamjatang and well-earned beer . . . as mentioned in a previous post.

And today is another holiday, so Happy Gaecheonjeol to all . . .

Jeju Island: One of the New Seven Wonders of Nature?

Horsehead Nebula

Wikipedia

Readers who keep up with Korean affairs will have heard the 'wonderful' news that Jeju Island is ahead in the running for one of the top seven natural wonders in a contest known as the "New7Wonders of Nature." The winners are determined by counting up votes received by telephone. Many non-Koreans who've visited Jeju Island will testify that the place is lovely and charming, yet demur that it might be one of the top seven wonders of nature. The issue has become quite controversial and is the subject of some rather heated debate over at the Marmot's Hole. I've grown weary of the chauvinism of many of the earthlings who gather at that rodents' watering hole, so I finally posted my genuine reaction:

I don't know why so many commenters persist in touting the relative merits of other spots around the world compared to Jeju Island. It's all so provincial.

The Great Red Spot of Jupiter is pretty neat for a persistent anticyclonic storm, and for my money, it's a greater natural wonder than anything on earth and surely deserves to be among the top wonders in the solar system. This storm has lasted for at least 181 years and possibly longer than 346 years, and it ranges from 24,000 to 40,000 kilometers east-to-west and 12,000 to 14,000 kilometers north-to-south, large enough to contain two or three planets the size of Earth!

But would I reckon it as one of the top seven? Ridiculous! While it's obviously better than Jeju Island, it isn't nearly as stunning as the rings of Saturn, and even those don't qualify among the seven greatest.

Besides, why're we limiting ourselves to just our little corner of the universe? The Horsehead Nebula is better than either Jupiter's Great Red Spot or Saturn's rings!

The egregious fact that Jeju Island won out over the truly awesome wonder that is the Horsehead Nebula simply proves just how biased this contest was. At 1,500 light years distant, who could afford the phone calls that would quickly mount up astronomically in cost? Even so, I think that the voting time should be extended by 3,000 years to allow any beings that might inhabit the Horsehead Nebula time to cast their vote.

It's only fair in such an unfair scam.

And that's how I truly feel about this issue!

A Calvinist Reading of Romans 1:19-32?

Skull Galaxy
Weird Creation as Intelligent Design?

(Wikipedia)

Some weeks ago, I questioned a Calvinist reading of Romans 1:19-20:

I don't see that this passage in Romans provides strong evidence for the Reformed (i.e., Calvinist) view. Look again at Romans chapter 1, verse 20, quoting this time from the Morphological Greek New Testament (though it looks to be identical this time to the Textus Receptus):

τὰ γὰρ ἀόρατα αὐτοῦ ἀπὸ κτίσεως κόσμου τοῖς ποιήμασιν νοούμενα καθορᾶται ἥ τε ἀΐδιος αὐτοῦ δύναμις καὶ θειότης εἰς τὸ εἶναι αὐτοὺς ἀναπολογήτους.

I'll just borrow a translation from the New King James Version:

For since the creation of the world His invisible [attributes] are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, [even] His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.

As I noted above, the translation of "καθορᾶται" in verse 20 reads "are clearly seen." The Greek verb comes from καθοράω and means "to see thoroughly, perceive clearly, understand." The sense of this verb seems to run counter to the Reformed view of "total depravity" since it appears to insist that human beings can infer the invisible attributes of God from the visible creation, and this human capacity for natural theology is precisely what leaves human beings "without excuse."

Whether or not Paul is right about this human capacity, his argument seems to assume that humans have the ability even in their sinful state, and that doesn't appear to be consistent with Reformed views on "total depravity."

My interlocutor, Professor Adolfo García de la Sienra, responded:

You cannot interpret Romans 1:20 leaving aside the next verse, 1:21, where it is said that "their foolish hearts were darkened". The whole passage seems to describe the condition of the human race which, at the beginning, had the capability to find God in creation.

I've only now had some time to reply to the professor's remark. The verse that he cites occurs within a longer passage that speaks of God allowing human beings to descend into reprobation. It does not seem to refer to a one-time event, such as the Fall, but to a process of darkening described in verses 21 through 32. But even this darkening of the heart, i.e., the understanding, does not extinguish knowledge of God, notes Paul, nor even of God's judgment concerning their sin, for verse 32 points out:

Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

The word Greek term here for "knowing" (ἐπιγινώσκω, epiginōskō) means not only "to know" but even "to become thoroughly acquainted with, to know thoroughly." The tense of the Greek is "second aorist active participle," which I suppose could be translated as "having known," as in Young's Literal Translation, but the other eleven translations offered by the Blue Letter Bible prefer "knowing" or "know." Even the YLT, however, presupposes that those whose hearts were darkened had known of God's judgment, and given that verses 21-32 describe a process that does not seem relegated to a one-time event, then I would read this process as one that every individual might undergo.

Moreover, even if individuals "did not like (cf. οὐ, ou + δοκιμάζω, dokimazō) to retain God in [their] knowledge" (verse 28), this translation seems to imply a choice in the matter, a point that the other eleven translations offered seem to agree upon.

The natural man can therefore gaze at the form of the galaxy in the image above and see the hand of God forming a cosmic man, for the skull and brain are already visible! Okay, just kidding about the specifics there. But I would like to note that Christianity has from its inception argued for a natural theology and has developed this form of theology rather highly. Modern theologians such as William Lane Craig engage in such theological reasoning as evidence for God's existence, pointing to the so-called "fine-tuning" of the universe's fundamental constants as suggesting an intelligence designing the world. Whatever one might think of the particular arguments, the presupposition seems to be that Christianity can defend God's existence on the basis of evidence interpreted by reason and that the non-Christians are capable of following such reasoning.

I suppose that some Calvinists would disagree . . .

Meanwhile in Arkansas . . .

For various reasons, my family and I didn't make an Ozark trip back to Arkansas this summer, but I won't let that stop me from offering a couple of Arkansas photographs from the rugged Buffalo River region of the Ozark Mountains, courtesy of professional wilderness photographer Tim Ernst, who lives in a cabin with his wife in the roughest wilds of the Ozarks.

This first image was made during a storm between four and five in the morning on August 11, 2011:


Here's what Mr. Ernst tells us of the shooting:

The lights were on in heaven all night long, with flashes coming from all directions. I got up at four and spent the next hour out on the back deck watching, soaking in as much glory as I could. So many times it would all start with a single flash low on the horizon, and it seems to ignite the rest of the sky as the lightning would spread upwards and out in both directions, fanning out wider and taller until the entire visible sky was filled with tiny streaks of light. And the sky behind it lit up purple! Each one was unique, and just when I thought I had seen the most amazing one ever, the next one would top it!

I wish he'd gotten one of those quicksilver web designs on film, but what he's provided is already sufficiently sublime.

In case you're wondering what the landscape looks like by day, here's the same overview, more or less, at 7:18 in the morning eleven days later, on August 22, 2011:


You're looking across part of the Buffalo River watershed, a deep valley cut by America's first National River, a stretch of wild nature in a wilderness area, as you can see.

Mr. Ernst explores all over the area for points of interest to photograph, as described in the following adventure on August 3, 2011 with a fellow adventurer named "Jason":

The Ozark Jungle was very kind to us on the hike in, and in fact the woods were beautiful. Then we hit the dry Whitaker Creek creekbed and had a grand time exploring the geology that was normally underwater and now exposed for easy view. Most folks hate being outdoors here in the summer, but this is the only time I know of to see and experience all the great hidden treasures of the creekbed! I really enjoyed it. But then, all good things must come to an end and we needed to CLIMB nearly straight up the hillside to reach the tall waterfall, but I was getting pretty good at doing that while down on all fours so I was OK. There was even a narrow deer trail we found that led up to the base of the bluffline.

I sent Jason to the top of the bluff from there while I scrambled to the bottom of the waterfall. Along the way I stepped in a hole and messed up my fragile knee, then lost control and slide down an incline out of control for about 20 feet and landed at the very bottom -- good thing Jason was not witness to this comedy! And then WOW!, what an incredible location!!! 'Tis very humbling to be witness to such beauty on a grand scale, with the bluff towering high above, guarded on top by a giant old cedar tree leaning far out over the edge, and everything surrounded by tall umbrella magnolia trees. Sure it would be even nicer with lots of water, but really, I find most of these dry waterfalls to be very scenic spots and I always shake my head when someone talks about being disappointed by a lack of water flow in the summertime -- OPEN YOUR EYES!!!

Jason appeared at the top of the bluff and lowered the measuring tape. At 76 feet tall this waterfall is the second tallest waterfall in all of the Buffalo River headwaters, with only Hedges Pouroff being taller (it is a lot taller at 113 feet). Next we measured Wild Burro Falls and Jason got to explore upstream a bit in the hanging valley above this falls -- there are more waterfalls up there but they are really tough to get to. Wild Burro Falls is much shorter, but it is quite unique and a very scenic spot that is much easier to reach than Beagle Point Falls.

As Mr. Ernst says, just open your eyes to the beauty . . . but I'd still like to see the waterfalls in motion.

Anyway, be sure to visit Mr. Ernst's website and look around through his many hundreds of nature photographs, and don't forget that the man has to make a living, so be willing to fork over a few dollars for a print or a calander . . .

Poetry Break: "Match-Mater"

Crocogator or Alloguile?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Some mornings, I need a break from the seriousness of life, so I bring you this morning a bit of contrary-to-fact doggerel:

Match-Mater

Now if you cross a crocodile with an alligator,
Do you get an alloguile or a crocogator?
Then if you cross a crocogator with an alloguile,
Do you get an allodater or a crockoguile?
And if you cross a crockoguile with an allodater,
Do you get an allodile or a crockodater?
Or if you cross a crockodater with an allodile,
Do you get an allocrater or a crackadile?
But if you've hypo-theti-cized enough as a match-mater,
Be satisfied with crocodile, and also alligator.

Well, I hope that this was fun for you. It was for me, and that's what matters because I have to live with myself, but you can always just click away.

Click: "Away."

More Greenery . . .

Green's Spectral Coordinates

It's all so complicated . . .

(Image from Wikipedia)

Searching for more on that green knight on a green horse, I came upon an interesting fact. According to the Online Etymological Dictionary, "green" is related to the word "grow":

O.E. grene, earlier groeni, related to O.E. growan "to grow," from W.Gmc. *gronja- (cf. O.Fris. grene, O.N. grænn, Dan. grøn, Du. groen, Ger. grün), from PIE base *gro- "grow," through sense of "color of living plants."

Compare with the entry for "grass":

O.E. græs, gærs "herb, plant, grass," from P.Gmc. grasan (cf. O.N., Ger., Goth. gras), from PIE *ghros- "young shoot, sprout," from base *gro-/*gre- "that which grows" (cf. L. gramen "grass"); related to grow and green.

And we might as well check out "grow":

O.E. growan (of plants) "to flourish, develop, get bigger" (class VII strong verb; past tense greow, pp. growen), from P.Gmc. *gro- (cf. O.N. groa, O.Fris. groia, Du. groeien, O.H.G. gruoen), from root of grass (q.v.).

These dictionary entries inform us only about the etymologies for the English words "green," "grass," and "grow," but the proposed etymology for "verdure" suggests a parallel in the Romance languages:

c.1300, "fresh green color," from O.Fr. verdure "greenness," from verd, variant of vert "green," from L. viridis (cf. Sp., It. verde), related to virere "be green," of unknown origin. Perhaps ult. from a root meaning "growing plant" and cognate with Lith. veisti "propagate," O.N. visir "bud, sprout," O.E. wise "sprout, stalk, etc."

That, however, is speculation.

So is this: perhaps green is subtly associated with a 'supernatural' ability to regenerate. That might explain the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has the supernatural power to survive having his head chopped off:

The green knight got ready, feet firm on the ground;
leaned his head a little to let the cheek show,
and raised the rich riot of his hair
so the nape of his neck was naked and exposed.
Gawain held the ax high overhead,
his left foot set before him on the floor,
swung swiftly at the soft flesh
so the bit of the blade broke through the bones,
crashed through the clear fat and cut it in two,
and the brightly burnished edge bit into the earth.
The handsome head fell, hit the ground,
and rolled forward; they fended it off with their feet.
The red blood burst bright from the green body,
yet the fellow neither faltered nor fell
but stepped strongly out on sturdy thighs,
reached roughly right through their legs,
grabbed his graceful head and lifted it from the ground,
ran to his horse, caught hold of the reins,
stepped in the stirrup, strode into the saddle,
the head dangling by the hair from his hand,
and seated himself as firmly in the saddle
as if he were unhurt, though he sat on his horse without
a head.

(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Stanza 19, translation by Paul Deane)

Rather gruesome, but it makes my point. The Green Knight survives decapitation. Also noteworthy is that he appears in the dead of winter but at the new year's beginning, when the darkest days are just being left behind, bearing -- in an earlier stanza -- a sprig of the evergreen holly, a winter promise of life in the coming springtime.

I've written "supernatural," but I'm not entirely satisfied with the term, for the growing of green grass -- as with all greenery -- is a purely natural process, presumably not just for us Moderns but also for Medieval people. But what does "natural" mean in such a context? Perhaps the green growth of springtime was considered natural but also mysterious, even uncanny.

A natural miracle.

Hans Blumenberg: Augustine's Voluntarist God

Papal Keys

One for reason,

one for voluntarism?

(Image from Papal See Site)

According to Hans Blumenberg, Augustine enters into a discussion of miracles and the regularity of nature and emphasizes God's role in disrupting nature's 'regularity' because "he fears a lawfulness to which appeal can be made, which would give legitimacy to the human inquisitive drive and would leave behind it on account of its insistence on rationality, only a restricted acknowledgment of God's free will" (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, page 320).

Augustine notes a report in the work Roman Genealogy, by Marcus Terentius Varro (BC 116-27), and Blumenberg summarizes Augustine's use of Varro's report:

[A]n account is given of an alteration in the color, size, shape, and path of the planet Venus in the early epoch of the kings, a unique phenomenon never observed before or after. This testimony is cited in order to show the possibility of a natural object at a particular point in time exhibiting behavior different from what it had been seen to exhibit at all other times and what had been held to be its essential nature. From such a beginning, he could quite well have gone on to explain the unusualness of the phenomenon as subjective, in accordance with the formula that the miracle contradicts not nature but merely the nature that is known to us. This would have meant a broadening, but not an alteration, of the 'cosmos' concept: The regularity of nature would have been assumed as not indeed universally verifiable but still pregiven in principle. But Augustine does not hold to this line, and it was to have incalculable consequences for the history of Christian theology that he feared involvement in the cognitive pretension and in the exclusion of voluntarism more than he sought rationality. "So great an author as Varro," Augustine writes, "would certainly not have called this a portent had it not seemed to be contrary to nature. For we say that all portents are contrary to nature; but they are not so. For how is that contrary to nature that happens by the will of God, since the will of so mighty a Creator is certainly the nature of each created thing? A portent, therefore, happens not contrary to nature but contrary to what we know as nature."

So far he seems to have succeeded in reconciling to some extent the rationality of the cosmos and the volitional nature of the biblical God. But evidently this result does not satisfy Augustine's theological zeal, and consequently he forces the concept of law and the metaphor of the ruler into an antithesis that is certainly unexpected after what has just been said: "What is there so arranged by the Author of the nature of heaven and earth as the exactly ordered course of the stars? What is there established by laws to sure and so inflexible? And yet, when it pleased Him Who with sovereignty and supreme power regulates all He has created, a star conspicuous among the rest by its size and splendor changed its color, size, form, and, most wonderful of all, the order and law of its course!" It is not evident at first glance why Augustine goes further here than is required by his premise of the subjectivity of 'miracles' in nature. But on closer inspection it turns out that the train of thought contains a point directed against curiositas: Augustine believes that he has found the meaning of God's forcible intervention in the lawfulness of nature in the fact that it breaks through and frustrates the presumptuous claim of scientific exactitude to know the laws of nature and with their help to predetermine events... (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 320-321).

On this point, Blumenberg observes wryly that "Only the sovereign act of intervention, putting in question all claims to theoretical 'exactiness' (inerrabilis computatio), is seen as the point of the story" (Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 321). He then adds some elaboration:

Nature is not set free as the final authority and embodiment of everything dependable, on which the human relation to reality can be based. The conflict between the idea of the cosmos and voluntarism is decided for the Middle Ages, and at the same time those premises are designated, by implication, whose secural had to become necessary in order to constitute an idea of science that was to make the absolute dependability of nature a condition of human self-assertion (Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 321-322).

Here, Blumenberg alludes to an irony unintended by Augustine, namely, that the latter's emphasis upon theological voluntarism implied what would be necessary for overcoming that voluntarism -- and in that ironic sense contributed to the emergence of science in early Modernity.

Although Pope Benedict XVI, in his Regensberg address, contrasted the theological voluntarism of Islam's Allah with the more rational concept of God in Christianity, while acknowledging that such voluntarism was also present as a Nominalist 'episode' in the development of Christian theology, from Blumenberg's discussion of Augustine, we see that the problem posed by theological voluntarism runs deeper in Christianity.

Moreover, Augustine is no peripheral theologian like Ibn Hazm but a major figure who has left his mark on all succeeding Western Christian theology, whether Catholic or Protestant, and Augustine's oscillation between a rational and a voluntarist God suggests that the Hellenization of Christianity was less synthesis and more unstable coalition.