(no subject)

[timelets]

“The genius of Augustine is that he concerns himself more with tensions than with their sources: order versus justice, war versus peace, Caesar versus God. He treats polarities as gravitational forces without trying to say what gravity is. Man’s choices lie between the polarities, but no formulae reveal what those choices should be. For every “thou shalt not kill,” Augustine finds commendations, within sacred texts, of opposite behavior.17 He questions authorial intent centuries before post-structuralism. He’s comfortable, up to a point, with contradictions.”
...
“Augustine framed his standards as a checklist, not as commandments. He knew how often prophets had thundered prohibitions, only to reverse them in the face of necessity or new instructions from On High.”

“...Augustine preferred persuasion on issues of war and peace: “have you thought about this?” or “wouldn’t it make sense to do that?”

“That’s because checklists adapt better to change than commandments.”

“Checklists pose common questions in situations that may surprise: the idea is to approach these having, as much as possible, reduced the likelihood that they will.”

...
“You’re aligning aspirations with capabilities, for in Augustine’s thinking justice, peace, and God fit the first category, while order, war, and Caesar inhabit the second.”

[this "alignment" can be modeled as an equalizer. aspiration, i.e. desire: J->j2bd; capability: T->j2bd. see also the choice problem, i.e. a section s: j2bd->T]

-- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”

Is there a formal way to distinguish between checklists vs commandments? Checklists are more like probability distributions, while commandments are like laws, i.e. defined state transitions. Hard to say.