3 June 1265

We believe that woman is naturally subject to man. Man possesses more discernment of reason; he receives a soul in the womb, while woman does not; woman is intended by God to be directed to the work of procreation and is not a complete human being, as Aristotle teaches, and so on. If women are not human beings, however, what may we say they are? While trying to unblock the tunnel leading below the monastery to an adjacent property this afternoon, the following triad of possibilities was revealed to me:

a) They are shellfish;

b) They are phantasms engendered by a moist south wind;

c) They are an admixture of blood, slime and excrement.

Now, these possibilities may be further subdivided in turn in accordance with the following Aristotelian categories:

a) pink things;

b) things that cause the perceiver to move in an upward direction;

c) hirsute things.

Thus, to exhaust all possibilities: women may be (i) pink shellfish; (ii) upward-movement-causing shellfish; (iii) hairy shellfish; (iv) pink moist phantasms; (v) moist southerly-originating roseaceous phantasms tending to produce upward motion; (vi) hairy apparitions from southern regions; (vii) bloody slimy pink things; (viii) excremental, sanguinous and slime-covered creatures that cause the perceiver to rise; or (ix) demons from nether regions in the form of shifting piles of whelks, in substance an amalgam of hair, slime, blood and excrement.

4 June 1265

Having negotiated the first door of the tunnel and heard drifting music and squeals today it occurred to me that morally obligatory acts are a sub-category of morally good acts. Not all morally good acts are obligatory. One is not morally obliged to pet a horse, for example (vid. On Horses, vi, IIa, 13), even though doing so would be an act of kindness. Some acts, however, are morally obligatory. If I am walking by a river and a
child is drowning, I am obliged to save the child in order to avoid a morally bad act, that is, to let it
drown (On Rivers and Children, i, IIIf, 9). Again, one is ipso facto obliged to resist morally bad acts, for example in the case where one refrains from sexual intercourse with another man's wife (On Not Having Sexual Intercourse with Another Man's Wife, iii, IId, 5). However, these two classes of obligations, that

is, performing morally good acts and avoiding morally bad ones, may lead to a conflict between possible courses of action in certain special circumstances, for example where I can only save another man's wife from drowning by having sexual intercourse with her (for example, to resuscitate her); or where I am walking on a narrow path between two rivers, and, seeing two children drowning, one in each river, am forced to have sexual intercourse with their mother in order to encourage them both to stay afloat longer to witness the spectacle (Ibid., v, IVa, 7).

5 June 1265

Emerging into the adjacent property today, blackened with grime, and greeted by gasps of astonishment and envy, it occurred to me that suicide is wrong and eating meat on Friday is wrong, but the first act is contrary to the universal moral law and the second merely contrary to an ecclesiastical precept (On Eating Meat, 1, VId, 8). Suicide on a Friday, however, or suicide by eating meat on a Friday, would be wrong in this universal sense, as would going to the toilet while committing suicide. One may postulate that for a seducer to go to the toilet while committing suicide would not be wrong if it prevented him from seducing another man's wife, or sister, or members of his household, or a nun in holy orders in an adjacent property, or from eating meat, or from eating meat provided by a nun in holy orders on the toilet; but this is easily seen to be fallacious if one considers that the suicidal act need not in itself be intended as a deliberate moral strategy by the seducer in order to avoid the evil of seduction, wherever or with whomever it took place, neither does it mitigate the act of going to the toilet, or eating meat on the toilet, or, in an extreme case, of eating the toilet.

Now, I have said that it is deducible that acts such as suicide or sexual intercourse with nuns are wrong in this universal sense, and all those who carefully consider the teachings of Aristotle in this matter are liable to begin to vibrate, at first gently, then more rapidly. Sed contra, any act has some circumstance by which it can be drawn into the class of good acts from those of bad, or bad from those of good (On Good Philosophical Excuses, ix, IIg, 56), as may be seen from the case in which a priest, attempting to bless a nun, inadvertently slips and falls on top of her while blinded by filth from a tunnel and in a state of rigidity caused by fasting, a distended bladder, the presence of any type of vegetable or plant, skin-lesions from badly-prepared vellum, and so on.

Sealing up the tunnel, I began to reflect that the consolations of philosophy are very great indeed...