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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31649 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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That's fair! I will add another thought, once again trying to put in perspective why these differences between two large numbers matter due to how the macro impacts the micro.

There's a John Calvin quote about relics:

There is no abbey so poor as not to have a specimen [of the True Cross]. In some places there are large fragments, as at the Holy Chapel in Paris, at Poitiers, and at Rome, where a good-sized crucifix is said to have been made of it. In brief, if all the pieces that could be found were collected together, they would make a big ship-load. Yet the Gospel testifies that a single man was able to carry it.

So, if X churches claim to have Y amount of the True Cross, and X times Y is far greater than the possible dimensions of the True Cross, then obviously some of those churches are lying or have been taken in.

Similarly, at some point when the numbers go low enough (even with those numbers still being more than enough to be well into the realm of the truly monstrous/genocidal!) one is implicitly accusing living Jews of lying (or, at best, having been lied to by other relatives) about their relatives who died in the Holocaust. Does it make sense why that would be seen as at least in the same ballpark as denial?

So, if X churches claim to have Y amount of the True Cross, and X times Y is far greater than the possible dimensions of the True Cross, then obviously some of those churches are lying or have been taken in.

There was a Catholic guy who was obstinate and autistic enough to dig into these kinds of claims about how many such relics were out there (and Calvin and the other Reformers had good incentives on their side to ridicule relics and make outsized claims to mock the whole enterprises, so while indeed there were fakes, mistakes and outright frauds - read Chaucer and the Palmer's Tale - they weren't being anything but rhetorical in their claims) and he came up with figures that were not "a big ship-load":

Conflicting with this is the finding of Charles Rohault de Fleury, who, in his Mémoire sur les instruments de la Passion of 1870 made a study of the relics in reference to the criticisms of Calvin and Erasmus. He drew up a catalogue of all known relics of the True Cross showing that, in spite of what various authors have claimed, the fragments of the Cross brought together again would not reach one-third that of a cross which has been supposed to have been three or four metres (9.8 or 13.1 feet) in height, with transverse branch of two metres (6.6 feet) wide, proportions not at all abnormal. He calculated: supposing the Cross to have been of pine-wood (based on his microscopic analysis of the fragments) and giving it a weight of about seventy-five kilogrammes, we find the original volume of the cross to be 0.178 cubic metres (6.286 cubic feet). The total known volume of known relics of the True Cross, according to his catalogue, amounts to approximately 0.004 cubic metres (0.141 cubic feet) (more specifically 3,942,000 cubic millimetres), leaving a volume of 0.174 m3 (6.145 cu ft), almost 98%, lost, destroyed, or from which is otherwise unaccounted. Four cross particles – of ten particles with surviving documentary provenances by Byzantine emperors – from European churches, i.e. Santa Croce in Rome, Caravaca de la Cruz, Notre Dame, Paris, Pisa Cathedral and Florence Cathedral, were microscopically examined. "The pieces came all together from olive." It is possible that many alleged pieces of the True Cross are forgeries, created by travelling merchants in the Middle Ages, during which period a thriving trade in manufactured relics existed.

That's interesting! I wonder if there's even less today given the damage done to European towns and cities in WW2? It seems the far easier criticism would have been things like Saint's bones (I thought there was a similar quote from a protestant or atheist about all the Saints that walked around with many extra fingers but couldn't find it), though in both cases it isn't like the Church is saying that no one has ever made a forgery.

That being said, my purpose was more that despite that quote not directly saying "these churches are wrong/lying", Calvin's (apparently wholly incorrect) estimates of mass would necessitate that, independent of Calvin's estimates being accurate.

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