The Doctrine of Plenitude and Space as the Abode of Man in 17th Century Theology

I’ve blogged before on the doctrine of Plenitude in 17th and 18th century theology. This was the view that God had created the various planets and stars of the cosmos as homes for extraterrestrial, intelligent beings. It was held by theologians and Christian apologists such as Christian Wolf in Germany, as well Fontanelle in France and Thomas Burnet, Charles Blount and Robert Jenkin, the subject of my last blog post. Burnet wrote in his Sacred Theory of the Earth that

‘We must not … admit or imagine, that all nature, and this great universe, was made only for the sake of man, the meanest of all intelligent creatures that we know of; nor that this little planet, when we sojourn for a few day6s, is the only habitable planet of the universe: these are thoughts so groundless and unreasonable in themselves , and also so derogatory to the infinte power, wisdom and goodness of the first cause, that as they are absurd in reason, so they deserve far better to be marked and censured for heresies in religion, than many opinions that have censured for such in former ages.’

Robert Jenkin on Possible Colonisation of Space before the Fall and after the Resurrection

Robert Jenkin believed that the various worlds of the cosmos may have been deliberately created by the Almighty to house humanity before the Fall. After this, he considered that they may have been designed to serve as further homes for humanity after the end of the time and the resurrection. Then they would serve as homes for the righteous, and places of punishment for the wicked. In the present, however, they served to keep the world in its proper place in the universe and maintain the equilibrium of the whole system through their gravitational attraction:

‘I observe, that though it should be granted, that some planets by habitable, it doth not therefore follow, that they must be actually inhabited, or that they ever have been. For they might be designed, if mankind had persisted in innocency, as places for colonies to remove men to, as the world should have increased, either in reward to those that had excelled in virtue and piety, to entertain them with the prospect of new and better worlds; and so by degrees, to advance them in proportion to their deserts, to the height of bliss and glory in heaven; or as a necessary reception for men (who would then have been immortal) after the earth had been full of inhabitants. And since the fall and mortality of mankind, they may be either for mansions of hte righteous, or places of punishment for the wicked, after the resurrection, according as it shall please God, at the end of ht eworld to new modify and transform them. And in the meantime, being placed at their respctive distances, they do by their several motions contribgute to keep the world at a poise, and the several parts of it at an equilibrium in their gravitation upon each other, by Mr. Newton’s principles’.

Religious Attitudes in Russian Biocosmism and Western Transhumanism

A similar attitude survives today in the thinking of the Russian biocosmists. This arose in the late 19th century. Its gaol was the scientific attainment of immortality and the resurrection of the dead. It also advocated the colonisation of space to provide homes for the new, resurrected humanity. The great Soviet rocket pioneer, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, was a member. Biocosmism wasn’t a specifically Christian movement. It also included elements of theosophy. Nevertheless, it can be seen as a secularisation of the theological attitude expressed by Jenkin. The Communist authorities initally tolerated Biocosmism after the 1917 Revolution before banning and persecuting it in the 1930s as a dangerous, heretical ideology. It re-appeared after the Fall of Communism, and has formed links with western Transhumanism. The similarity between the views of the Biocosmists, Transhumanists and Jenkin’s appears to bear out a remark on their identity of purpose by one of Transhumanism’s founders, the robotics engineer Mark Moravec. Moravec’s wife is a Methodist minister, and he once stated that Christians and Transhumanists wanted the same thing. They just went about it differently.

Moral Perfection and Cosmic Awe in Star Trek and Cosmos

You can also see a certain similarity with Jenkin’s views in Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and the vision of human expansion in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, has said in interviews that he believed the show’s popularity lay in its optimism. It envisages a future in which humanity has overcome its social and political problems, survived the horrors of the twentieth century, and gone on to produce an ideal, tolerant society in the Federation. Star Trek is very definitely a secular show, and its attitude to religion is ambivalent. Some episodes have a positive view of it, while others consider it a negative force holding humanity and alien races back from achieving their true potential. Nevertheless it shares with Jenkin a view of the cosmos that sees it as an area for colonisation by a perfected and morally regenerate humanity.

In his TV series and book, Cosmos, the late Carl Sagan expressed a profound awe of the vastness and intricacy of the universe. A Humanist and member of the Sceptics’ group, CSICOP, now the Centre for Scientific Inquiry, Sagan also campaigned for the human colonisation of space and contact with other alien civilisations. Cosmos was a truly inspiring series, and prepared the way for later scientific blockbusters like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Sagan’s attempts to show the universe as an object of literal cosmic awe approaches the religious feeling of the numinous, the sense of awe before the presence of God or the gods. His campaign for spaceflight and extraterrestrial contact therefore partakes of the same religious nature as Jenkin’s view that the other worlds revealed by science, with the difference that Jenkin’s believed that they would only be colonised by a humanity that had attained and been transformed through God’s grace.

Despite the rationalism and secularism of mdoern SF and the movements for space exploration and colonisation, they still contain much of the religious sense of wonder and human destiny expressed by 17th and 18th century theologians like Fontanelle, Burnet, Blount and Jenkin. For them, the heavens not only proclaimed the glory of God, but also offered a future home for humanity and other intelligent beings through God’s providential grace.

Secondary Causation and God’s Purpose in Protestant Aristotelianism

In the fifty years between 1610 and 1660 Protestant Scholasticism developed a number of traits that distinguished it from its Roman Catholic counterpart. One of these was the concept of God’s concurrence. This was the idea that the world was shaped through secondary causes, which were nevertheless created and operated through God’s will. The German theologian, J.H. Heidegger, wrote:

‘Concurrence or co-operation is the operation of God by which He co-operates directly with the second causes as depending upon Him alike in their essence as in their operation, so as to urge or move them to action and to operate along iwth them in a manner suitable to a first cause adn adjusted to the nature of second causes’.

Nevertheless, the use of secondary causes did not rule out the possibility and reality of direct intevention by God:

‘Government is direct, when God either does not use second causes or uses them above, beyond and counter to their nature … But he is not said ever to have done anything contrary to universal nature, i.e., the order of the whole universe, to whihc He bound Himself of His own free will. But He frequently operated iwthout means, beyond and counter to them, to show that all things are by Him or His proximate and direct goodness.’

More recently theologians like Alister McGrath, a former microbiologist, have pointed out that the neither the Bible nor the early Church Fathers never used a particular Greek term for miracle that implied the breakdown or absence of scientific law. For the Gospel writers and the early church, a miracle was not the absence or violation of the laws of nature, but their suspension through the operation of a superior law. Thus in this view, Christians are perfectly free to accept that humanity may have been deliberately created by God through the agency of evolution while also believing in God’s miraculous intervention in ‘special acts of grace’.

Robert Jenkin: Science Demonstrates the Unimaginable Grandeur of God and His Creation

Although some Christians in the 17th century felt that the new scientific advances attacked and undermined Christianity, others believed the complete opposite. One of these was Robert Jenkin. In his The Reasonableness and Certainty of the Christian Religion, published in London in 1700, Jenkin stated that the new scientific advances not only demonstrated the power and majesty of God through His creation, they also showed how transcendent His works were. The Law of Gravitation seemed to have no rational explanation. It was nevertheless true, and a major scientific advance. It also showed how far beyond human understanding God’s construction and management of the cosmos was. He wrote:

‘Indeed infidelity could never be more inexcusable than in the present age, when so many discoveries have been made in natural philosophy, which would have been thought incredible to former ages, as any thing perhaps that can be imagined, which is not a downright contradiction. That gravitating attractive force, by whihc all bodies act one upon another, at never so great a distance, even through a vacuum of prodigious extent, lately demonstrated by Mr. Newton; the Earth, together with the planets, and the sun and stars being placed at such distances, and disposed of in such order, and in such a manner, as to maintain a perpetual balance and poise throughout the universe, is such a discovery, as nothing less than a demonstration could have gained it any belief. And this system of nature being so lately discovered, and so wonderful, that no account can be given of it by a hypothesis in philosophy, but it must be resolved into the sole power and good pleasure of Almighty God, may be a caution against all attempts of estimating the divine works and dispensations by the measures of human reason. The vastness of the world’s extent is found to be so prodigious, that it would exceed the belief not only of the vulgar, but of the greatest philosopher, if undoubted experiments did not assure us of the truth of it.’

In fact, gravitation only appeared inexplicable because Aristotelian science denied action at a distance. For the Aristotelians, for something to have an effect it had to be in physical contact with whatever it acted upon. This was not the case in Platonic philosophy, which considered that things could operate through a system of similarity and attraction/ repulsion. This, however, was associated with the occult. It was, for example, the explanation for the supposed effect the stars had on the creatures on Earth in astrology. Newton himself was very much aware how his theory contradicted Aristotelian notions of causation, and had indeed drawn his inspiration for the theory from Neoplatonism.

Modern physicists consider that gravitation is caused by sub-atomic particles of force called gravitons. In Star Trek, gravitons are the force used by the space ships’ tractor beams to tow other space ships and other objects. No gravitons have so far been detected. Some cosmologists believe that they are unnecessary to explain gravity. These scientists instead consider that gravity is the effect mass has when it bends the fabric of space-time, as described in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Whatever the precise explanation of gravity may turn out to be, one can agree with Jenkin that although its cause may have a rational explanation, that explanation in its turn demonstrates the wonderful construction of the universe by the Almighty.

Girolamo Fracastoro: The Christian Father of Modern Pathology

Until the 19th century the favoured explanation for the origin and spread of disease was the miasma theory. This followed the ancient authors, who believed that disease was caused by bad smells. It’s the reason malaria has its name – mala aria, bad air. The germ theory of disease only became dominant in the 19th century, when medical science was able to confirm that disease was spread by micro-organisms. It is nevertheless a surprising fact that some physicians from the 16th century onwards came very close to a germ theory of disease. One of these was the classical Humanist and polymath Girolamo Fracastoro.

Fracastoro became a student at the University of Padua in 1501, the same year as Copernicus also enrolled at the university. He was interested in a wide range of scientific subjects, pursuing research and writing on medicine, pathology, physics, geology and astronomy. He also had good relations with the Church. In his long poem De Contagione et Contagiosis Morbis (Concerning the Contagion and Contagious Disease), published in 1546, Fracastoro advanced a modern theory of the spread of epidemics. He believed they were spread by little particles or seeds, and identified three different types of illness.

The first were those spread by person to person contact, such as leprosy, scabies and respiratory tuberculosis. The second were spread by utensils, beclothes and other items, with which infected people had come into contact. These were the vectors – the causes of transmission – of some of the fevers. The third type were diseases such as smallpox, that could travel great distances.

A similar explanation for the spread of disease was later advanced in the 18th century by the French Academy of Science to explain outbreaks of plague. These later physicians considered that it was spread by small spores. In this instance Fracastoro was clearly far ahead of his time.

Apart from his medical writing, he was the first to recognise and describe the magnetic poles, and one of the first to propose the modern origin of fossil beds. He can thus be considered a true Renaissance Christian man of science.

Robert Owen: Utopian Socialist, Promoter of ‘Rational Religion’

The founder of British Socialism was the 19th century Welsh reformer, Robert Owen. The son of a saddler and ironworker who was also the local postmaster, Own moved from Newtown in Wales to take over the mill at New Lanark in Scotland. There he improved the conditions of his workers through paternal management. Unlike other contemporary businesses, he did not employ children under ten, and the children of his workers were educated in the factory school. Owen later went on to denounce the social division, inequality, poverty and crime which he believed had their roots in private property, and advocated instead a series of utopian communities based on co-operation and the sharing of produce. He initially enjoyed the support of many members of the clergy and ruling aristocracy, including dukes and archbishops. He alienated them through his religious scepticism. His lecture on the New Religion given at the Freemason’s Hall in 1830 is essentially an attack on revealed religion. He believed that the revealed religions of the world kept people in ignorance and so prevented them from improving themselves, as well as creating bitter hatreds that served only to divide humanity. He also campaigned against the idea of marriage for life, which he viewed as chaining unhappy couples together permanently and consequently creating vice and crime through broken families that could nevertheless not be dissolved.

The 19th century was an age of social and political upheaval, with groups like the Chartists emerging to demand the extension of the franchise to the working class. The Christian Chartists, who were particularly strong in Scotland, objected to co-operation with the Owenites as they disliked being associated with ‘Socialists and infidels’. In fact, Owen was a Deist, and then later a Spiritualist, and took many of his ideas from the 17th century Quaker, John Bellers, the Moravians, and the Shakers and Rappites in America. He was also a firm advocate of freedom of conscience. Law 12 in his 1840 Manifesto states

‘That all facts yet known to man indicate that there is an external or internal Cause of all existences, by the fact of their existence; that this all-pervading cause of motion and change in the universe, is that Incomprehensible Power, which the nations of the world have called God, Jehovah, Lord, etc., etc.; but that the facts are yet unknown to man which define what that power is.’

He believed that God created human nature at birth, but that the good qualities of humanity could be brought out if developed in accordance with natural, rational laws.

‘Human nature in each individual is created, with its organs, faculties, and propensities, of body and mind, at birth, but the incomprehensible Creating Power of the universe; all of which qualities and powers are necessary for the continuation of the species, and the growth, health, progress, excellence and happiness, of the individual and of society; and these results will always be attained when, in the progress of nature, men shall have acquired sufficient experience to cultivate these powers, physical and mental, in accordance with the natural laws of humanity.’

He was also radical in arguing for complete religious freedom. Law 8 of his Manifesto states that ‘everyone shall have equal and full liberty to express the dictates of his conscience on religious and all other subjects.’ Law 9 laid down that ‘No one shall have any other power than fair and friendly argument to control the opinions or belief of another.’ Law 10 stated that ‘No praise or blame, no merit or demerit, no reward or punishment, shall be awarded for any opinion or beliefs’. Finally, Law 11 stipulated that

‘But all, of every religion, shall have equal right to express their opinions respecting the great Incomprehensible Power which moves the atom and controls the universe; and to worship that power under any form or in any manner agreeable to their consciences – not interfering with others.’

In many ways, Owen’s views are a product of 18th century rationalism. After the Fall of Communism, few would argue that a completely socialised economy can be successfully run. Nevertheless, the success of New Lanark did show 19th century businessmen that working conditions could be improved and the working classes provided for while still making a healthy profit. It also differs from later radical socialism in that, unlike later Communism, it was not atheist and specifically provided for freedom of conscience. Indeed, Owen is interesting for making the belief in God an article of his Manifesto, even if he looked to science, rather than revelation for establishing the Lord’s nature.

New Book on History of Science: John Freely, Before Galileo

Looking through Waterstone’s yesterday I found a new book on the history of science, John Freely’s Before Galileo. I didn’t buy it, and so can’t really comment on its quality. It did, however, appear to be a straightforward history of science from ancient Greece to the early modern period. Hopefully it marks a renewed interest in the history of science, following James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers.

Christian Wolf’s Other Edens

Way back in the 1970s there was an anthology of Science Fiction stories entitled Other Edens, probably referring to the strange worlds and bizarre futures envisaged by the stories’ authors. In the 18th century, however, many European intellectuals took the idea of extraterrestrial life very seriously. One of the Christian apologists of the 18th century was the German, Christian Wolf. Wolf was a follower of Natural Theology. He believed that the Book of Nature did indeed testify to the presence of an almighty and beneficient God. Some of his views now seem quaint or ridiculous. He followed many 18th century philosophers and theologians in believing that the Earth’s creatures had been formed for the benefit of humanity. The moon and stars, for example, had been made so that humans could perform at night some of the activities they also did during the day, such as going fishing. This idea was widely mocked even in Wolf’s time. Wolf did not believe that these celestial bodies had been formed only for humanity’s benefit. He reasoned that as there were so many different worlds in the universe that astronomy was increasingly revealing, so they must have been made by God for the benefit of these planets’ different inhabitants. These beings naturally would be adapted to the very different conditions on their worlds.

This view, that the universe was full of inhabited planets, formed the intellectual background for the early, proto-SF tales of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as Cyrano de Bergerac’s The States and Empires of the Sun and Voltaire’s Micromegalas. This last was a satire, in which two vast aliens, thousands of miles huge and with a multitude of different sense beyond the five of humans, travel to Earth from the star Sirius. They are greeted by a delegation of terrestrial scientists, eager for the aliens’ superior knowledge of the cosmos. The aliens duly grant the scientists’ request for a book containing their knowledge of the universe. They give them a book the size of the present day Baltic states. Looking through the book, the scientists find every page empty, and duly complain. The aliens have broken their bargain with the international scientific research team. No, the creatures from Sirius reply, they have kept their word. That is precisely what they know about the universe. It shows Voltaire’s satiric wit about the nature of science, and the idea that the universe may be far more vast and unkowable than we can ever truly know. The 20th century British biologist, J.B.S. Haldane, said that ‘Not only is the universe queerer than we imagine, it is queerer than we can possibly imagine’.

The idea that God had formed the various worlds of the universe to support different intelligent species was known as the doctrine of plenitude. It was seriously shaken in the late 19th and 20th centuries when increased astronomical investigation revealed the worlds of the solar system to be mostly barren rocks, either too scorching, boiling hot or icily cold to support life. Far from the notion of alien life attacking the belief in God or Christianity, it was the opposite – the notion of a vast, sterile universe devoid of intelligent beings except humanity, that led many to atheism. Despite this the recent discoveries of a vast and increasing number of extra-solar planets has led people to consider the possibility once again that humanity may not be alone in the universe. A few years ago there was a scientific conference called by the White House to debate the consequences and possible approaches to alien contact. One of the subjects discussed was the effect such contacts would have on terrestrial religion. Would it undermine religious faith? All of the representatives of the world’s religions consulted, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and so on concluded that alien contact would not affect their particular faith, but they weren’t sure of the others. There is still much speculation that alien contact would somehow undermine human religions. Historically, however, the opposite has been true: the existence of alien life has been seen as proof of the Almighty’s existence, rather than His absence.

Huxley: Evolution Does Not Rule Out Teleology

Not only did Darwin’s Bulldog, Thomas Huxley, argue that evolution did not necessarily lead to atheism, he also considered that it did not entirely rule out teleology. He considered that it demolished the older teleological view, that organisms possessed particular organs for a particular function. Nevertheless, he felt that evolution left untouched a wider teleological view, that viewed the structure of living creatures as flowing from the forces and patterns of molecules contained in the gaseous nebula of the primordial universe. He also noted that William Paley, the great defender of special creation, had stated in his Natural Theology that creatures could be produced through a series of mechanical processes established and maintained by an intelligence. Huxley wrote:

‘A second very common objection to Mr. Darwin’s views was (and is) that they abolish Teleology, and eviscerate the argument from design. It is nearly twenty years since I ventured to offer some remarks on this subject, and as my arguments have as yet received no refutation, I hope I may be excused for reproducing them. I observed “that the doctrine of Evolution is the most formidable oppoent of all the commoner and coarser forms of Teleology. But perhaps the remarkable service tot he philosophy of Biology rendered by Mr. Darwin is the reconciliation of Teleology and Morphology, and the explanation of the facts of both, which his views offer. The teleology which supposes that the eye, such as we see it in man, or one of the higher vertebrata, was made with the precise structure it exhibits, for the purpose of enabling the animal which possesses it to see, has undoubtedly received its death-blow. Nevertheless, it i snecessary to remember that there is a wider teleology which is not touched by the doctrine of Evolution, but is actually based upon the fundamental proposition of Evolution. This proposition is that the whole worle, living and not living, is the result of the mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe was composed. If this be true, it is no less certain that the existing world lay pontentially in the cosmic vapour, and that a suifficient intelligence could, from a knowledge of th eproperties of the molecules of that vapour, have predicted, say the state of the fauna of Britain in 1869, whcih as much certainty as one can say what will happen to the vapour of the breath on cold winter’s day …

‘… The teleological and mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences, and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primoridal molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe.”

‘The acute champion of Teleology, Paley, saw no difficulty in admitting that the “production of things” may be the result of trains of mechanical dispositions fixed before hand by intelligent appointment and kept in action by a power at the centre, that is to say, he proleptically accepted the modern doctrine of Evolution; and his successors might do well to follow their leader, or at any rate to attend to his weighty reasonings, before rushing into an antagonism that has no reasonable foundation’.

Now Huxley here appears to assume a Newtonian ‘clockwork’ universe, in which the action of every atom is predetermined and one could predict the future state of the cosmos by observing the pattern of atoms and the interactions in the present. This conception of the cosmos has been seriously challenged by quantum physics and its discovery that atoms and sub-atomic particles follow probabilistic laws. The late palaeontologist and writer on evolution, Steven Jay Gould, denmied that the pattern of life was predetermined. He believed that if the history of the Earth was replayed, then it would be completely different with entirely new creatures arising. The Roman Catholic theologian, John F. Haught, in his God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, has nevertheless argued that evolution is teleological, in that new, higher forms of life have successively appeared from more primitive forms. Alister McGrath, in his Darwinism and Divine, also notes modern philosophers and theologians who have argued that God could act in nature to create new forms precisely through quantum indeterminacy. Thus Huxley, and some contemporary theologians and scientists, still consider that evolution is still teleological. For these contemporary theologians, God is still acting in the world, shaping His creatures through the evolutionary process. It’s a view that Paley was prepared to accept. This also means that Paley’s conception of special creation could also extend into something like modern Intelligent Design theory. Huxley was an opponent of special creation, but he did not argue, and indeed respected Paley, for considering the possibility of evolution, even if Paley believed that it was driven by a divine intelligence.

Sources

John F. Haught, God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder: Westview Press 2008)

Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘ON the Reception of the Origin of Species’ (London, 1887), in D.C. Goodman, ed., Science and Religious Belief 1600-1900: A Selection of Primary Sources (Dorchester: John Wright and Sons/ The Open University 1973) 455-82.

Alister E. McGrath, Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2011).

The Jesuits: Pioneers of Mathematics as University Subject

There were chairs of mathematics at the Italian Universities from the late fourteenth century onwards. There was a chair of arithmetic in Bologna in 1384-5. When Leo X reformed the University of Rome in 1514 he appointed two professors of mathematics. Pisa had a chair of mathematics in 1484. Galileo was appointed a ‘mathesis praeceptor’ at the University of Pisa in 1589 through the influence of Cardinal Francesco del Monte. Galileo’s own influence on the teaching of mathematics in Italian universities was immense. His pupils Benedetto Castelli and Bonaventura Cavalieri respectively held the chairs of mathematics at Pisa, the Sapienza in Rome, and Bologna. Evangelista Torricelli, one of Castelli’s pupils, succeeded Galileo as the court mathematician of the Dukes of Tuscany. Another of Castelli’s pupils, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli became the mathematics lecturer at Messina in 1635. Malpighi, Borelli and Borelli’s pupil Lorenzo Bellini introduced Galileo’s mathematical programme into biology.

It was the Jesuit Order, which made mathematics an explicit and integral part of the educational curriculum. The Order’s Constitutiones of 1556 stated that the Society’s aim was ‘to aid our fellow men to the knowledge and love of God and to the salvation of their souls’. The principal subject at the Jesuit universities was therefore theology, as the subject best suited to this. A wide range of other subjects were also taught in addition to it, including literature and history, classical and oriental languages, and the arts and natural sciences. These were included because they ‘dispose the intellectual powers for theology, and are useful for the perfect understanding and use of it, and also by their own nature help towards the same end’. St. Ignatius de Loyola himself stated that ‘logic, physics, mathematics and moral science should be treated and also mathematicss in the measure suitable to the end proposed’. The person, who was chiefly responsible for establishing Jesuit policy in mathematics and their achievements in the subject was Christopher Clavius. Clavius held the chair of mathematics at the main Jesuit university, the Collegio Romano from 1565 until his death in 1612. Clavius defended the role of mathematics at the University agains the doubts of other colleagues, establishing a school of mathematics at the Collegio. Clavius lamented the low value many pupils placed on maths and philosophy, noting that

‘Pupils up to now seem almost to have despised these sciences for the simple reason that they think that they are not considered of value and are even useless, since the person who teaches them is never summoned to public acts with other professors’. He also considered it a great shame and disgrace, that members of the order, who had little knowledge of maths, became speechless during conversations with leading men, who were much better educated mathematically. He artgued that a proper grasp of maths was necessary for understanding the rest of philosophy. He stated that

‘these sciences and natural philosophy have so close an affinity with one another that unless they give each other mutual aid they can in no way preserve their own worth. For this to happen, it will be necessary first that students of physics should at the same time study mathematical disciplines; a habit which has always been retained in the Society’s schools hitherto. Folr if these sciences were taught at another time, students of philsophy would think, and understandably, that they were in no way necessary to physics, and so very few would want to understand them; though it is agreed among experts that physics cannot rightly be grasped without them, especially as regards that part which concerns the number and motion of the celestical circles, the multitude of intelligences, the effects of the stars which depend on the various conjunctions, oppositions and other distances between them, the division of continuous quantity into infinity, the ebb and flow of the sea, winds, comets, the rainbow, the halo and other meteorlogical things, the proportions of motions, qualities, actions, passions and reactions etc. concerning which ‘calculatores’ wirte much. I do not mention the infinite examples in Aristotle, Plato and their more celebrated commentators, which can by no means be understood without a moderate understanding of the mathematical sciences…’

Clavius’ influence is strongly shown in the Jesuit ‘Ratio Studiorum’ – educational curriculum – of 1586 and 1599. This was strongly Aristotelian, except where Aristotle conflicted with Christian theology, and included the whole range of Aristotelian natural philosophy and mathematics. The section on mathematics in the Constitutiones argued it was included because

‘without mathematics our academies would lack a great ornament, iindeed they would even be mutilated, since there is almost no fairly celebrated academy in which the mathematical disciplines do not have their own, and indeed not the last, place; but much more because the other sciences also very much need their help, because for poets they supply and expound the risings and settings of the heavenly bodies; for historians the shapes and distances of places; for the Analytics examples of solid demonstrations; for politicians admirable arts for good administration at home and in time of war; for physics the forms and differences of heavenly revolutions, light, discords, sounds; for metaphysics the number of spheres and intelligences; for theologians the main parts of the divine creation; for law and ecclesiastical custom the accurate computation of times; not to mention what advantages redound to the state from the work of mathematicians in the care of diseases, in navigations and in the pursuit of agriculture.’

Dawkins and the other militant atheists have sneered at the idea of people of faith as teachers. But the great pioneers in teaching mathematics at university the level were the Jesuits, who taught it as a vital aid to faith, and as a vital and indispensible tool for the other sciences. They were certainly not unaware that improving the standards of maths teaching in the order would also raise their status in contemporary society. Neverthless, they did much to establish maths as a suitable and necessary subject for Christians to study. Some of these early Jesuit mathematicians were also friends of Galileo. They included Clavius’ pupil and successor at the Collegio, Christopher Grienberger. Despite the aim of the Society to promote Roman Catholic Christianity, Jesuit scientists also co-operated and corresponded cordially with Protestant people of science. Recent Jesuit historians have noted that the Jesuits in West Africa collaborated with their Dutch scientific counterparts in their exploration of the region’s wildlife, and contacted Scandinavian scientists in Norway or Sweden for the scientific information they had. Their science was still strongly aristotelian, but they were despite this able to make valuable contributions to science.

Source

‘Mathematics and Platonism in the Sixteenth-Century *Italian Univrsities and in Jesuit Educational Policy’ in A.C. Crombie, Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought (London and Rio Grande, Ohio: The Hambledon Press 1996).

Robert Boyle: Religious Knowledge also Entirely Suitable for Scientists

Atheist scientists like Richard Dawkins have stated and suggested, that real scientists should somehow not have an active religious faith or deep religious knowledge. Boyle in his Christian Virtuoso also challenged this attitude. He believed that just as people were rightly concerned to obtain a little scientific knowledge of subjects that did not have any use, like astronomy, so the scientist of Christian faith should also rightly be interested in the immaterial world of the divine. He wrote

‘I do not think the corporeal world, nor the present state of things, the only or the principal subjects, that an inquisitive man’s pen may be worthily employed about; and that there are some things, that are grounded neither upon mecfhanical nor upon chemical notices or experiments, that are yet far from deserving to be neglected, and much less to be despised, or so much as to be left uncultivated, especially by such writers, as being more concerned to act as Christians, than as virtuosi, must also think, that sometimes they may usefully busy themelves about the study of divine things, as well as at other times employ their thoughts about the inspection of natural ones. There are some subjects, whose nobleness is such, that though we derive no advantage from them, but the contentment of knowing them, and that but very imperfectly too; yet our virtuosi themselves justly think much pains and time, and perhaps cost too, well spent in in endeavouring to acquire some conjectural knowledge of them: as may be instanced in the assiduous and industrious researches they have made about the remote celestial parts of the world, especially the stars and comets, that our age has exposed to their curiosity. For most of these, though they require chargeable telescopes, and tedious, as well as unhealthy nocturnal observations, are objects, of which we can know very little with any certainty; and which, for ought appears, we can make no useful experiments with. Since therefore we so much prize a little knwledge of things, that are not only corporeal, but inanimate; methinks we should not undervalue the studies of those men, that aspire to the knowledge of incorporeal and rational beings, which are incomparably more noble than all the stars in the world, which are, as far as we know, but masses of seseless and stupid matter. Sinice also the virtuosi deservedly applaud and cherish the laborious industry of anatomists, in their inquiries into the structure of dead, ghastly, and oftentimes unhealthfully as well as offensively fetid bodies; can it be an imployment improper for a Christian virtuoso, or unworthy of him, to endeavour the discovery of the nature and faculties of the rational mind, which is that, that ennobles its mansion, and gives man the advantage he has of the beasts that perish?’

Thus Boyle also urged the study of the soul and God, as well as the subjects of earthly, scientific study. Astronomy has advanced considerably since Boyle’s time, and we now know far more about the nature of the stars, planets and cosmos. Nevertheless, his central point remains the same: religion, and religious knowledge, is still an eminently suitable subject for a scientist.