Brain Dump #1
From time to time, I’ll publish an article here, to be entitled “Brain Dump #x,” in which instead of a single medium-ish length essay on one theme I write several somewhat shorter takes on topics that have been, for whatever reason, on my mind. Here’s the first such essay. (How often will I do this, by the way? I honestly have no idea. I’m making up this whole Substack thing as I go along.) We proceed thus to today’s first topic.
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Back-of-the-envelope calculate before you post
Everyone makes mistakes. Heaven knows that I do. “Thinking before you speak/write/post” can certainly help avoid whoppers, even though it doesn’t infallibly do so. There is one particular kind of thinking here that I want to recommend as sometimes very helpful: the back-of-the-envelope calculation. (I believe this is similar to what some people - my wife, who spent her career with NASA, told me this - call a scientific wild-ass guess, or S.W.A.G., which is not to be confused with a plain wild-ass guess, or W.A.G.)
On Friday or Saturday, a Catholic intellectual and influencer I know both personally and through her history of admirable work posted on social media that the Biden-Trump debate (which I didn’t watch) had gotten a viewership of one million, whereas the Kennedy something-or-another that ran at the same time on some platform or another (which I obviously didn’t watch either) got five million.
For all I know, the five million figure might be right. But the one million figure is obviously wrong. Here’s a way of showing that without doing any looking-up of anything. You only need to know two things, that - I think - most educated adults know.
The first is that the U.S. population, rounded to the nearest hundred million, is 300 million.
The second is that the 2020 election was a high-turnout election.
That’s all the knowledge you need as your starting point.
Now, here’s your calculation. What percentage of Americans vote in a high-turnout election? We’ll guess - and this is the only guess here - 50%. That would mean about 150 million people voted in 2020. Is that the actual number? Darned if I know. But I think we can say with a fair amount of confidence that it was 150M ± 50M, that is to say, 100 - 200M. As we’ll see in a second, where the actual number falls in that very generous interval really doesn’t matter at all for our purposes.
It seems awfully likely that this year’s is going to be another high-turnout election (unless everyone throws him/herself off a cliff into the ocean in despair - and in ignorance of a third-party alternative, which will be my choice for the third presidential election in a row). So, once again this year, there will be 100 - 200M voters.
What that means is that, if the debate audience was only 1M, then only 1/200 - 1/100, i.e., only 0.5 - 1%, of voters watched the debate.
That, I suggest, is obviously low.
By-the-way #1: when I saw my friend’s claim, I ran this check in my head (no actual envelope needed) very quickly (in well under a minute). I’m sure she could have done so too. I don’t get why she didn’t think to do so before she posted a number that was meant to seem very surprisingly small, in order to see if it it even made sense.
By-the-way #2: according to something called the US Elections Project, in 2020 158M people cast ballots for president. See how close a back-of-the-envelope calculation - or more specifically, a guess that is part of such a calculation - can get you?
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My favorite heresy
I honestly don’t remember where, but I am positive that, sometime in the last eight years at the very most, I read that one is entitled to have one’s favorite heresy. Mine is miaphysitism. Actually I’m cheating a little here, since it is barely a heresy, even if it is technically one. Let me explain. I’ll try to keep this succinct (I could go on at much greater length that I’m going to).
In the early AD 300s, a heretic named Nestorius - who had gotten himself made Patriarch of Constantinople! - taught that Jesus Christ was two hypostaseis (kinda-sorta-not-really-well-if-we-really-must-… “persons”), a divine one and a human one - and, consequently, that, since Mary was the mother only of his human one (a divine hypostasis by definition doesn’t have a mother), Mary was not Theotokos, Mother of God (more literally, God-bearer; Mother of God in Greek is Mētēr tou Theou, and on icons of her you will usually see the monogram for this latter title, consisting of the first and last Greek letters, in caps, of Mētēr and Theou, Mu Rho Theta Upsilon, MP ΘY).
I suspect that if Nestorius had kept his yap shut about Mary, even though he would still have been adjudged a heretic, his name wouldn’t have been “mud” quite to the extent that it soon was. Most Christians in Constantinople probably didn’t really care about hypostaseis - that was something for the theologians (like Nestorius) to debate. But to deny (as was the totally logical consequence of his teaching about Christ) Mary her by-then-traditional title, and this from the pulpit of the Cathedral of Constantinople - that was something else. Out came the torches and the pitchforks.
The great hero (to pretty much everyone except Nestorius and his followers - of which there remain some, but that’s a story for another day) of the ensuing controversy was one of the most important, and one of my very favorite, of the Fathers of the Church: St. Cyril of Alexandria - as in Patriarch, or, as remains the title of the occupant of that See of St. Mark to this day, Pope of Alexandria. Again keeping this short, at the Council of Ephesus in 431, the Third Ecumenical Council (after Nicaea I and Constantinople I in the 300s), the bishops assembled, led intellectually by St. Cyril, declared Nestorius a heretic (and deposed him from his position as Patriarch of Constantinople), and taught, following Cyril, that Christ has but one, divine, hypostasis, and that Mary is consequently Theotokos.
So far, so good. A question remained lurking in the background, though. How many physeis - natures - does Christ have?
Cyril was somewhat flexible regarding the answer to this question, but by far his usual answer was: one. His by-far standard way of speaking of the union of divinity and humanity in Christ was to speak of mia physis tou theou logou sesarkōmenē: “one nature of the Word of God Incarnate.” (In the icon of St. Cyril above, it’s inscribed on the pillar next to him.) He had a hard time seeing, for reasons more complex than I want to get into here, how Christ could have two natures but only one hypostasis.
And for some years, until and after St. Cyril’s death in 444, Cyril’s way remained in fact a popular and generally uncontroversial way of talking about Christ. It is what is meant by miaphysitism - “one-naturism.” And one of my reasons for saying that it’s barely a heresy is precisely that none other than a St. Cyril of Alexandria held it, and no orthodox Christian at the time objected, and no one now thinks him a heretic. We Latin-rite Catholics just celebrated his feast last week (June 27) - which is in fact why all this is on my mind.
What unavoidably complicated the picture a lot was the appearance of a monk named Eutyches, who adopted a belief called monophysitism, with which miaphysitism is somewhat often - and very wrongly - confused. Very much unlike miaphysitism, monophysitism, also and perhaps preferably known as Eutychianism to avoid the linguistic confusion, holds that Christ’s humanity is dissolved into his divinity like a drop of honey into the ocean. It is not that Eutychians didn’t think that Christ’s human body and soul are real - that is yet another heresy with which Eutychianism in turn shouldn’t be confused; rather, it holds that they are, in a sense, no longer a human body and soul because of the way that they are dissolved into his divinity.
“Even” the miaphysites - the Cyrillians, really - recognized that this was unacceptable and heretical.
But when the Council of Chalcedon (the Fourth Council) met in 451 to deal with the problem of Eutychianism, it decided, influenced by the famous “Tome” of Pope St. Leo the Great, that the only way really to rule out Eutychianism was by adopting dyophysitism - “two-naturism.” Chalcedon therefore gave us the teaching about Christ with which we are familiar: he is one, divine hypostasis (“person”), with two natures - a divine nature and a human nature.
One wonders, though. But for Eutyches (or someone like him), would the dogmatization of dyophysitism have been necessary? Or would St. Cyril’s miaphysitism still be regarded as a valid way of talking about Christ - perhaps alongside dyophysitism?
This is an important question not only because of St. Cyril’s own importance in the development of small-“o” orthodox Christology. It is also so because a significant number of Christians - those making up the so-called Oriental Orthodox communion - broke away after Chalcedon. This divide within Christianity persists to this day. And yet there have been agreed statements on Christology between Oriental Orthodox Christians and Chalcedonian (dyophysite) Christians, including the Catholic Church. Might we hope that it will be possible for a reconciliation, even with continued diversity of Christological language? It would really be a blessing for all concerned to have reconciliation with the ancient Christian communities in Egypt, Ethiopia, Syria, and Armenia, and if reconciliation with diversity of credal formulae sounds unlikely, adoption of the dyophysite formula for the first time ever by these churches sounds even more unlikely.
So: miaphysitism is my favorite heresy, not because I hold it - I don’t, and I wouldn’t even were I somehow given the option; indeed I think that “one divine hypostasis with two natures” was a positive development in any case (even apart from Eutyches’s having forced the issue) - but because I have great reverence for St. Cyril, and miaphysitism is just Cyrillianism; and because I have have an understanding of the position of, and desire for union for, those ancient Christian bodies that especially see St. Cyril as the “Pillar of Faith.”
(… that was longer than I meant it to be …)
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Ignatian spirituality
(… this won’t be …)
In my previous article, I made mention of Ignatian spirituality, as in, St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. This is not a bad time of year to be thinking about him, since his feast day is at the end of the month (July 31). I can’t resist throwing just this one little thing in today.
St. Ignatius’s tomb is in the Jesuit mother church, the Gesù, in Rome. I’ve been there. (I wonder how many Jesuit churches around the world have that title - there’s a Gesu in downtown Milwaukee that I’ve also been to, a time or two ...)
Above his tomb, there are statues of angels tearing out pages of books of the errors of, if memory serves, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli.
I have said more than once, and I will surely say more than once again, that no explanation of “Ignatian spirituality” is complete without reference to this imagery.
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Vigils of feasts
Speaking once more of saints, Saturday was the big feast (rank of Solemnity for Latin-rite Catholics) of Sts. Peter and Paul. It is in fact celebrated on June 29 by the Eastern Orthodox as well as by Catholics (and some Protestants). It is one of a small number of feasts that, in the Latin rite, have a Vigil. All Solemnities begin the evening before, with First Vespers, and, optionally, an “anticipated” Mass that “counts” when the feast is a Holy Day of Obligation. A Vigil is something more than this: some of the prayers and the Mass readings are different from those of the next day.
I was told, several years ago, that when a feast has a Vigil, this is a mark of its antiquity. It is therefore not surprising that the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul - like the feast of St. John the Baptist, on June 24 - has a Vigil; we know that these are ancient feasts (they are referred to by St. Augustine in texts now used at Matins on those feasts). I wouldn’t mind - I’ve said this once or twice before - seeing Vigils created for a newer feast or two. I’m thinking especially of the Sacred Heart and the Immaculate Conception.
And along with this - really, since otherwise there’d be a lot less point - I’d like to see the Church do more to educate Catholics about the value of preparing to celebrate, and then celebrating, feasts, at home, perhaps by looking at the Mass readings, or praying a small portion of the Office, even when the feast is not a Day of Obligation. It is good for the whole Church that some people in the Church pray for the others on these feasts. It is even better when more people in the Church pray along too.
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One more on Trump, the debate, … and Kayleigh McEnany
My first Substack article concerned the inappropriateness of the National Right to Life Committee’s choice of Trump’s 2020-21 WH press secretary as its conference speaker last weekend. Lucky me! - looking at something having to do with last week’s debate sent me down a rabbit hole in which I found, once again … Ms. McEnany. Briefly (I hope) …
For reasons that I can’t now recall, over the weekend I wanted to get a very quick sense of just how bad Biden was. I was not going to put myself through the experience of watching any video. So I looked up the transcript. In Biden’s first statement, I found this: “The pandemic are so badly handled, many people were dying. All he said was, it’s not that serious. Just inject a little bleach in your arm. It’d be all right.”
This bleach business rang a bell, but, what exactly was it that Trump had said at that infamous press conference?
So I Googled trump bleach covid, and found a Politico piece from the following year, quoting Trump:
“A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world,” Trump began, clearly thinking the question himself, “So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that, too. It sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs, and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.”
It’s hard to say whether this is better or worse than Biden’s paraphrase …
Anyway, at that point, I lost interest in the debate.
But I read on in the Politico article, and, lo, there was Ms. McEnany:
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted he was being taken out of context.
“President Trump has repeatedly said that Americans should consult with medical doctors regarding coronavirus treatment, a point that he emphasized again during yesterday’s briefing,” McEnany said in a statement issued the next day. “Leave it to the media to irresponsibly take President Trump out of context and run with negative headlines.”
What “context” was she talking about? To find out, I had to find a full transcript of that April 23, 2020 press conference.
The lung thing happens at 29:46. It turns out that Politico cut off the end of a sentence. Trump said,
“So it would be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
Also, if you scroll down to 54:03, you find this:
“I would like you to speak to the medical doctors to see if there’s any way that you can apply light and heat to cure. You know? If you could? And maybe you can, maybe you can’t. Again, I say maybe you can, maybe you can’t. I’m not a doctor.”
Does that supply much “context,” let alone much helpful “context”? Is Ms. McEnany’s description of that - Trump is emphasizing that Americans should consult with medical doctors - really accurate?
Call me skeptical.
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Ceterum autem censeo Putin et Cyrillum esse deponendos.