By

the same author

Les tendances nouvelles de 1'ecclesiologie

The Relevance of Physics

Brain, Mind and Computers (Lecomte du Nouy Prize,

1970)

The Paradox of Olbers' Paradox

The Milky Way: An Elusive Road for Science

Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe

Planets and Planetarians:A History ofTheories of the Origin of

Planetary Systems

The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Gifford Lectures:

University of Edinburgh, 1975 and 1976)

The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin (Fremantle

Lectures, Oxford, 1977)

And on This Rock: The Witness of One Land and Two Covenants

Cosmos and Creator

Angels,Apes and Men

Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem

 Chesterton:A Seer of Science

The Keys of the Kingdom: A Tool c Witness to Truth

Lord Giford and His Lectures:A Centenary Retrospect

Chance or Reality and Other Essays

The Physicist as Artist: The Landscapes of Pierre Duhem

The Absolute beneath the Relative and Other Essays

The Savior of Science

(Wethersfield Institute Lectures, 1987)

(continued on p. 311)
Stanley L. Jaki
 Introduction vii

1. A Mind's Coming of Age 1

2. Theological Roots 17

3. A Mind's Delight 31

4. A Sheer Delight 49

5. A Kindred Mind 69

6. The Gifford Lectureship 87

7. To Save Our Souls 105

8. Theology Matters 123

9. Biblical Matters 141

10. Doing Philosophy 161

11. A Christian's Philosophy 181

12. Heavy Matters 199

13. A Portuguese Proverb 223

14. As Crystals Grow 241

List of Publications 259

The word "intellectual" in the subtitle stands emphatically for the kind of
autobiography which this book is meant to be. By writing it I did not intend to
satisfy mere curiosity, let alone to cater to psychohistorians, who, at any rate,
seem to know in advance everything and nothing besides. The book is mainly for
those who, because they have found the message of my books instructive, would
like to see its development through the eyes of their author.

Persons will appear in this book only inasmuch as they had a role, direct or
indirect, in the development and orientation of my mind and of its reactions to
some encounters and situations. Therefore I could not include in my narrative
references to a number of people, often dear friends, even though my
indebtedness to them is at times very great. True friends as they are, they know
that I follow this policy with great regret.

Not being a strict history of my mind, this book contains no scholarly

apparatus of notes and documentation. Only a few references are given at the
end of each chapter. The List of Publications that follows the narrative provides
sufficient guidance to anyone who wishes to see various points in detail.

In a narrative like this, some repetitions are inevitable, partly because the
same matter, if it truly matters to one's mind, attracts the mind again and again,
though with ever new nuances. The mind never works on virgin soil, but
encounters everywhere structures already in place. It is especially true of the
intellectual level that those structures are not dead stones, but living entities, be
they called concepts and ideas. All these have their own lives, as if they were so
many living species locked in a grim struggle with one another. However one
may wish to live in a peaceful world, it is not given us here below and certainly
not on the level of the intellect. The proverbial peace of ivory towers is the
dubious commodity of those who refuse to come out and enter the ring, to give
and take at least a few punches.

The intellectual world is driven by "the wild living intellect of man," to recall
a most pertinent observation from Newman's Apologia pro vita sua. His remark
would have been even more felicitous had he spoken of the wildly living human
intellect. There are several reasons for that "wild" mental activity in man. The
least reprehensible and the least inevitable is the fact that the mind, utterly
dependent as it is on sensory impressions that are in a wild flux, cannot help
responding to them in a wild variety of ways.

In the midst of that wild flux, the mind naturally looks for some fixed point,
some lodestar, or at least tries to construct one in order to coordinate those
impressions into a coherent whole. All systems, indeed all fixed ideas, are so
many witnesses to this natural urge in man. In the middle of the second century
B. C. the Roman playwright, Terence, could still think that his dictum, homo
sum; humani nil alienum puto, could raise no questions about the completeness
of humanism. There must have been a great appeal to the view that man as a
microcosmos was a condensation of the macrocosmos and therefore human
nature comprised everything and was wholly sufficient to itself.

When about that time the Romans first made an official contact with a small
and strange people off the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, they did not
suspect how differently that people, or at least some of them, kept thinking of
nature, including human nature. It must have appeared enormously strange that
the Maccabees refused to fight at the end of the week as they counted it. But
even stranger had to appear their reason for doing so. The reason was an
experience which by then the Jews had shared for over a millennium, an
experience utterly transcendental to all humanism. They were convinced that
they, or rather their forefathers, had been exposed to something really
supernatural. It burst the framework of what is merely human and natural.

This experience, which kept the Jews in its grip, received an even more
powerful manifestation in those whom the Romans first took for a Jewish sect.
At that time they were still Jews in great numbers, but the other Jews had already
disavowed them in no uncertain terms. What could not be ignored, either by the
Jews or by the Romans, was that members of that sect, whose supreme
allegiance was to a Jew, Jesus the Christ, displayed even more concretely and
persuasively the grip of the supernatural. By the time of Decius the Roman
Empire itself felt threatened by the growth of the Christian Church, and within
another two generations the Empire capitulated, without knowing what that
outcome was really about.
 But almost exactly at that point, at the Council of Nicaea, the Church itself
was forced, by an internal dissension within it, to take stock of what that
supernatural was ultimately about. It meant nothing less than that the heavenly
Father effected a most spectacular entry of the supernatural into the natural by
sending His only Son in the form of man among men in the fullness of time.
However human, the Son remained what He always was, consubstantial with the
Father, having joined a human nature to a divine nature in one single divine
person.

The dogma defined at Nicaea was therefore, among other things, also a
thorough corrective to the humanist perspective as capsulized in Terence's
dictum. There was now on hand a human experience that demanded a rewriting
of that dictum. In order to do justice to the completeness of his experience man
henceforth had to say: homo sum; humani divinique nil alienum puto. Most
importantly the divine in question was something truly transcendental, unlike the
immanently divine within paganism. The latter created the gods in man's image
and did so at a total variance to the basic tenet of the new experience according
to which man was created in God's very image. This also meant that, left to his
own devices, man remained radically insufficient to the ideal of his
completeness as specially set by God.

As one would expect, there had to be some who were most resentful of even a
whiff of that new experience. But the emperor Julian was just as ineffective in
reversing the rising tide of the supernatural, as were some pagan philosophers,
Ammianus Marcellinus, for instance. The Church, as the carrier of a supernatural
dispensation for man, kept gaining terrain and within a few centuries began to
build a new civilization, steeped in the supernatural, although fully cultivating
the natural.

It was not until Renaissance times that Western man tried to shake off the
supernatural from the cultural scene and from public discourse. For such was the
real aim of most humanists. Instead of wanting to add the natural to the
supernatural, they decided to restore the old pagan autonomy of the natural. The
Renaissance was not man added to God, but man minus God, the God of the
supernatural dispensation. The Renaissance wanted to dispense man of any
concern about that God.
 What the humanists were unable to achieve, the philosophes conspired to
implement. They boasted of their aim to construct, anew, by force if necessary,
the intellectual and political order to their own specifications. In that effort they
loved to posture as the champions of reason, and especially of a reason equated
with science, although many of them knew about science little more than names,
such as Galileo and Newton. After the French Revolution had run its convulsive
course, concessions began to be made to Christianity, in spite of its having been
closely tied to the ancien regime. Thus Auguste Comte, who aimed at a
Catholicism minus Christianity, was willing to admit that the Church had done
much in the field of letters, of philosophy, of arts, and even of social
organization. But he would have been the last to admit that Christianity had ever
had anything to do with the development of science except to thwart its
development. On that point Comte remained as adamant as were the
philosophes.

The resolve to deny any tie, factual or possible, between Christianity and
science, has become essential to modern secularism. Whatever concessions it
might be willing to make, modern secularism will not yield an inch on that point,
which serves as the basic rational foundation of its radical rejection of the
supernatural. And since only the Catholic Church still stands as a distinctly
identifiable body on behalf of the supernatural, the animosity of secularism ever
more heatedly centers on the Catholic Church. In an age that disavows any
abusive reference to any group, Catholics remain the only free game.

Anyone who has not resorted to wearing the thickest blinders can readily cite
examples of this. For my part, let me recall one such example insofar as it relates
to some pivotal point in this intellectual autobiography. As a historian of science,
or rather the kind who, precisely because he is also a theologian and a priest, this
author found nothing irritating in findings made early in the 1900s about the
medieval, Christian origins of Newton's first law. And since those findings are
well documented, he cannot be blamed for taking great delight in them and for
finding them most seminal for a reinterpretation of intellectual history in a sense
almost diametrically opposite to the one bequeathed by the philosophes to
modern Western Europe. Its academic establishment is ruled by intellectuals
who write lengthy books, among other things, about discoverers and discoveries
as modern man's chief achievement but keep turning a blind eye to what made it
intellectually possible for a Copernicus to remove the earth from the center of
the universe and still retain his Catholic peace of mind, a mind firmly anchored
in the supernatural.

One can understand the resentment which seizes those who rest their
naturalism and secularism on science whenever they are confronted with the
Christian origins of science. Resentment, bordering on rage, can make one resort
to strange footwork that cannot be explained on purely intellectual grounds
except as a visceral reaction of the modern "noble pagan" to the specter of the
supernatural. Counter-supernatural motivations, and not purely intellectual
considerations, had to drive that physicist at Michigan State University, who was
the official respondent to my presentation there on "Medieval Creativity in
Science and Technology."' In that role he could be expected to comment on the
data and arguments presented by me on exclusively medieval material. Instead
of doing anything of the sort, he spoke almost twenty minutes on what he
believed to be a fundamental connection between modern science (physics) and
Eastern mysticism.

Beneath such a strange performance there must have lain some strong
motivations which should not be difficult to pinpoint. They bespeak of some
desperate salvage operation at work. What has to be saved is the secularist's hope
that modern science justifies man's dechristianization of his Christian heritage.
Therefore if that man has to concede something important in his culture to
Christianity, to the supernatural, he has to try to offset this concession by making
claims such as that there is a connection between modern physics and Eastern
mysticism, which is indeed a most religiously coated denial of the supernatural,
properly so-called.

It takes some naivete to overlook the true nature of all this. Whether one likes
it or not, one is engaged in a battle, and if such is the case, it is better to fight. I
certainly do not dislike a spirited encounter or two, and I read with great delight
that Newman readily joined a battle whenever he saw one. This is not to suggest
that I have always fought wisely, or even to the purpose. But I have no doubt
about the very essence of the great contestation which has taken on a frightening
vigor for the past two or three decades and got into high gear during the 1990s. It
is a wholesale attack by the champions of naturalism and secularism on the
supernatural as mainly represented by the Catholic Church. For them, the
Catholic Church is the chief enemy of a mankind that wants its autonomy from
anything superhuman, that is, supernatural. Their view of the Church echoes the
invectives hurled at her by T. H. Huxley who in that respect was at least
consistent as an ideological Darwinist. In modern America, embarked on the
Third Millennium, everything is defined, overtly or covertly, with a reference to
the Catholic Church.

I simply could not stand on the sideline. I felt I had to contribute whatever I
could to stem the onrush of the juggernaut of secularism, insofar as it invokes
science on its behalf. But my aim was not so much to attack some spokesmen of
that juggernaut as to strengthen those ready to resist it but often are at a loss for
arguments that would convince them that they are on the winning side, or at least
on the side against which no force, no factor, shall ever prevail. It is the side that
for now two thousand years could say with confidence about the forces opposing
it: non prevalebunt. Its success in holding out for two millennia augurs well for it
now that mankind has entered a third millennium counted from the birth of
Christ.

Those on that side derive their sense of invincibility not from themselves but
from that very Christ who promised them His Spirit, who would convict the
World of sin, justice, and judgment (John 16:8). He was the kind of victor who,
unlike other victors, held out no easy prospects even when He assured them of
having achieved a victory over the World. In the same breath He foretold their
being forever under pressure. Indeed if they are so, it is only because the World
is resolved to discredit all claims about the Word's divine status. And so are
resolved even those who otherwise fight the World, such as Jews and Muslims.
"Monotheism will become victorious," so said the President of Iran, visiting in
the Vatican, to the pope as if to taunt him. A few years ago the Chief Rabbi of
Israel told Cardinal Lustiger visiting in Jerusalem that it was better for a Jew to
die in the gas chamber than to become a Christian. In both cases Christ was the
real target, whose worship remains a sheer idolatry in the eyes of Jews as well as
Muslims. He surely remains an intolerable challenge to a world that does not
want to be bothered as it tries to have true culture without true cult.

So the war, a veritable culture war, which is about Cult writ large and not
about conservatism, fiscal or educational, is in full swing, and will remain so,
perhaps even more intensely than ever. My first thirty or so years were largely a
preparation for fighting in that war, though without any preconceived method of
preparing for a specific role. Life is too unforeseeable to chart all its turns in
advance, and this is no less true about the life of the intellect. But the last four
decades of my life reveal a fairly consistent effort as to what tools, what
weapons, what ar-mor to forge for the benefit of others, ready to join the battle
or even to cheer from the sidelines.

I did not use incidentally the word "forge." A secularist reviewer of my book,
The Relevance of Physics, for The Atomic Scientist had to admit that I "forged a
powerful book." But he took a violent exception to my quoting James Clerk
Maxwell's words about the irrelevance of physics concerning the reality of the
soul's personal immortality, this crucial point for all true religion. Secularists
cannot tolerate some points even if made by most eminent scientists.

Those on the other side appeared to me, to say the least, rather inconsistent,
although some of them seem patently short on good faith. At the risk of being
judgmental, I have found too many cases that bring out the truth of Paul's
warning to Timothy that "the time will come when people will not tolerate sound
doctrine, but following their own desires, will surround themselves with teachers
who tickle their ears. They will stop listening to the truth and will wander off to
fables" (1 Tim 4:3-4). We are up to our ears in times that found a most accurate
description in the words about "carnal allurements, enticements for the eye, the
life of empty show" (1 John 2:16) whose agents want to take over the entire
public and private domain.

And this only three decades after so many Catholics thought that the opening
of the Church to the world at Vatican II would result in a reciprocal opening on
the part of the world to the supernatural. On the contrary, the world keeps its
mind closed to the supernatural more than ever and is launching the "ultimate"
campaign against it in the hope of a "final" solution that leaves no problems
unsolved because it denies the existence of man's major problems that derive
from his radical incompleteness without God as given in Revelation.

At least Saint Paul still found it constructive to call a spade a spade. He knew
he had fought the good fight to the end and never said anything less than the full
truth. Whether I uttered some truths moderately well, or whether I fought wisely,
should seem less important than the fact that I did not shy away from fighting. In
the following pages I try to take stock of what mattered most to my mind as it
developed so that it might fight the only fight which can be qualified as good,
with no qualifications and ambivalence whatsoever.
When one's energy is largely spent on writing books (now over forty), the first
major among them may represent the mind's coming of age. I was forty-two
when, in late 1966, the University of Chicago Press brought out my book, The
Relevance of Physics, a volume of over six hundred pages. By then I had earned
two doctorates, one in theology, another in physics. The mind is greatly enlarged
by absorbing the material comprised in a doctorate, let alone in two, especially
when these relate to very disparate fields. But the mind really matures or takes a
measure of its powers-and here anyone who has written a serious book would
agree-through the effort to produce something new from the material it has
absorbed.

Forty-two may appear to be rather late to come to maturity, but those who
have read The Relevance, or even glanced at it, may have sensed that it
demanded many years of indirect preparation. Physics, philosophy, history of
science, to say nothing of a number of languages, cannot be mastered in "twenty
easy lessons." The task easily demands twenty or so years. The effort may not
have been in vain. This was at least implied in the reaction of Walter Heider, a
founder of quantum mechanics and eventually the grand old man of the Zurich
Polytechnic. In the March 1967 issue of American Scientist he suggested
nothing less than that The Relevance be made compulsory reading for all
physicists, indeed for all scientists, if they truly want to enlarge their minds. The
Relevance may also serve, he added, as a potent antidote to some of modern
society's major cultural ills and woes.

Physicists who looked in The Relevance for suggestions of some new

experiments, or for a technical discussion of some of the latest in physics, were
disappointed. In reviewing the book in The New Scientist, Abdus Salam, a
Nobel laureate, focused on a remark of mine in chapter 4 on "The Layers of
Matter," where I wondered why the radius of the proton is of the same order of
magnitude as that of the electron, although their respective masses differed by a
factor of about a thousand. His comment was that my wonderment either
contained something very profound or was rather trivial, if not meaningless. In
general he deplored the wasting of a beautiful style on something that all
physicists knew, namely, that science is never complete.

Now that following Abdus Salam's death one reads so many beautiful things
about his many-sidedness and wide-ranging empathy, I feel even more puzzled
at his reaction. As a fundamental particle physicist he apparently found interest
only in that chapter and hardly in the book as a whole. His review of it seems to
have been written hastily as most reviews are. Even in that chapter he failed to
note many statements by physicists which illustrated their belief, reasserted at
regular intervals, that the final form of physics and especially an ultimate system
of fundamental particles were within sight. Why else should a particle be named
"omega" and be readily accepted as such? Can the letter "omega" symbolize
something other than the very last word? Only now and then did a prominent
physicist compare the search for fundamental particles to the peeling of an onion
that apparently has an infinite number of layers. So much about chapter 4, "The
Layers of Matter."

In chapter 5 of The Relevance I portrayed the fact that the ultimate frontiers of
the cosmos keep eluding astronomers, who at times are unduly surprised by this
fact. In view of the explosive expansion of the frontiers of cosmology and
astronomy, and the availability of instruments still undreamed of in the
mid1960s, astronomers have ever fresh reasons to be surprised. There is a
general reason as well, the topic of chapter 6, "The Edge of Precision." There I
showed, by taking examples from the various fields of physical research and
from its various phases, that the drive after ever more precisely measured data
works in science like a sword with two edges: Whenever it establishes the truth
of a theory, it also opens up new puzzles and keeps thereby the business of
physics unfinished.

Part of that chapter was reprinted in The Ascent of Man: Sources and
Interpretations.' About the same time physicist readers of The New Scientist
were advised that The Relevance should certainly be among the books they
should take along for vacation.' Clearly, there must have been some mature fruits
in The Relevance. The book was certainly original in that its various themes
were heavily documented with statements made by physicists. The limitations of
a field, especially one so prestigious as physics, are most credibly put forward by
its best practitioners. Otherwise the whole enterprise may provoke the kind of
rebuke that was hurled forty or so years ago at Jim Brosnan, a baseball player,
after he came out with The Long Season. He should not have written the book,
some of his teammates objected, because in their view he "did not pitch well." I
do not remember what Jim Brosnan said in reply, but my "pitching" in physics
can be summed up in a line or two. In experimental physics I did a doctoral
research in radioactivity. In theoretical physics I merely rearranged Heisenberg's
uncertainty relation in a form that no one thought of before me and apparently no
one thinks of now. Both of which will be taken up later. However, a philosopher
and a historian of physics may safely remind the physicist that just doing physics
very well does not enlighten one about what happened during the complex
history of physics. Doing physics well does not even equip the physicist to talk
well of his own philosophy, let alone of the various philosophies that have been
grafted onto physics.

A mere glance at the various philosophical assumptions constantly used and

abused in physics should make this all too clear. Yet those assumptions, at times
sheer illusions, are no less relevant for a broader understanding of physics than
all the technical details of it, however marvelous. Three such assumptions in
succession dominated physics, all three of them with basic shortcomings of their
own. They form the subject of the first three chapters of The Relevance. They
represent three major assumptions about what the physical world basically is.
Accord ing to the first the world is a quasi-living organism; according to the
second the world is a huge machine; according to the third, the world is a
construct in numbers.

Nothing is easier than to dismiss the first, or the assumption that the world is a
sort of living organism, and see nothing perennially instructive in its failure to be
useful for physics. The assumption could certainly operate as a sort of
introspective method and thereby give some information about one's own
organism. But with respect to the physical world the same assumption generated
rank apriorism time and again. Therein lies the cause of the radical failure of
Aristotle's physics, and not merely in the fact that he was inattentive to what was
scientifically good in the guesses of the Ionians and of the atomists about the
physical world and its processes. One does not see beneath the surface of that
failure if one simply speaks of Aristotle's lack of proper appreciation for things
mechanical.

There are still some who, like Goethe and Hegel in their times, deplore the
dehumanization of man's world view by what they call a mechanistic science and
as a remedy they try to unfold quasi-human "volitions" in nature. This they do by
falling back on introspection which always invites some aphorism. An example
can be found in wistful remarks about passion-at-adistance as an explanation of
some strange coincidences in particle physics. Other examples are the idea of an
"implicate" order in nature, the idea of "selfish" genes, and the idea of an earth
that regulates itself as if it were a living entity. As such it is appropriately named
Gaia, once revered as a deity in ancient Greece. Recourse to such ideas is far
more difficult to avoid than it may appear. The difficulty illustrates the truth of
the old observation that human nature keeps demanding its rights even when
sidelined by the pitchfork of a remorseless scientism, or the contempt for
everything non-quantitative. To cure sickness with germs works in medicine
insofar as the procedure is fully controlled. In scientific explanation, which is a
branch of philosophy, misplaced ideas can easily run amok and throw everything
out of kilter. This happens whenever one espouses scientism, which is the
general ideology of those who define science as the art of eliminating God from
the ultimate equation. This equation, or rather explanation, insofar as it is the
ultimate, cannot be purely quantitative. It remains true that non-quantitative
words are needed even to define a mere quantity or number.

Now that mechanistic or classical physics is a thing of the past, it is easy to

speak of the shortcomings of the second assumption according to which the
world is a machine. It is not so readily granted that there was much more to the
failure of classical physics to give a final explanation of the physical world than
its inability to cope with, say, the specific heat of gases. The failure was
intertwined with a mistaken generalization of a philosophical idea, namely, that
there are mechanical interactions. Mechanistic or classical physics unfolded a
great variety of such interactions, and did so with a stunning success as
recounted in chapter 2 of The Relevance. But not even such a success could
justify the creed that everything, including human actions, happened
mechanically. In insisting on this point I did not claim to say something original.
Readers of that chapter, which is on "The World as a Mechanism," would find
there, however, a collection of statements by leading figures of classical physics,
a collection fairly novel in its massiveness. It illustrates their often startling
blindness to the basic revisability and incompleteness of their findings and
views. Yet even that chapter contains much more than a plethora of Lord
Kelvin's encomiums of the soon to be discredited ether. Someone, who in a
conference introduced me to an audience of scientists as "the author of The
Relevance where one finds the full list of Kelvin's strange dicta," proved that
one's reading of a book often can turn into reading into it only the narrow
interests of one's mind.

Since much has been written about mechanistic physics, it was relatively easy
to put together the material of chapter 2. Here too, as in other chapters of The
Relevance, I was careful to verify any quotation, which I found in secondary
sources, against its original provenance. Out of the thousand or so references in
The Relevance I failed to do this in three cases, trusting secondary sources that
did not give the context of the passages I quoted. In two of those cases my use of
those quotations gave them a thrust which, in their own context, they certainly
did not have. There is no substitute to the perusal of primary texts, which,
incidentally, hardly ever fail to reveal something that has not yet been noticed by
others. Engrossment with the secondary literature can readily trap one's vision
along tracks that have little in common with the thrust of the primary sources. In
the third case, of which more in the next chapter, I gave the wrong year of the
publication of an important document. This eventually gave me away as one
who had known it only from publications whose authors themselves failed to
consult the original.

Of all the fourteen chapters of The Relevance, the third, which deals with the
idea of the world as a construct in numbers, contains the most substantial news
for physicists. There is a certain Platonism or Pythagoreanism implied in that
idea, which many leading modern physicists kept voicing as if they found in it
the ultimate in philosophy. In 1966 they were still oblivious to the fact that their
dreams about a final theory had been doomed to failure more than three decades
earlier, in spite of the incredible successes of quantum mechanics that uses a
very special form of mathematics. Particularly stinging in that failure may
appear the fact that the mathematics in question is being rooted in rules that
govern the basic manipulations of numbers, or the science of arithmetic.

To be sure, no physics was mentioned when in 1930 Godel presented his now
famous theorems about the radical incompleteness of arithmetic, the basic form
of mathematics. But physics, too, was hit by the blow which such a prominent
mathematician as Hilbert felt had struck at his and others' hope of constructing a
necessarily true, final form of mathematics. Concerning physics one need only to
recall that modern physics is eminently mathematical, both in its relativistic and
in its quantum mechanical forms. It follows therefore that, in its mathematical
part, modern physics cannot contain within itself its proof of consistency.
Physical theories, be they as arcanely mathematical as the string theory, which
lack that proof can hardly be considered as the necessarily true last word.

In 1966, or well over thirty years after Godel submitted his epoch-making
paper, physicists were still writing and speaking as if Godel's incompleteness
theorems did not exist. Ten years later, in 1976, as a panel member of a Nobel
Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College, I heard Murray Gell-Man, a
Nobellaureate fundamental particle physicist, reveal his lack of familiarity with
those theorems in front of an audience of two thousand. He did so after he had
assured his listeners that within three months, and certainly within three years,
he would be able to tell why the system of fundamental particles should be what
it is and cannot be anything else. Obviously he had in mind the theory based on
quarks with charms, colors, flavors, and other recondite properties. In the panel
discussion I wished him good luck in the full hearing of those two thousand, but
also warned him that he would not be successful. "Why?" he asked with
illconcealed indignation. "Because of Godel," was my reply. "Because of
whom?" he shot back. "Godel," I repeated. He did not seem to have heard that
name before.

Apparently my reference to Godel was not in vain. Two months later, in early
December 1976, I gave a lecture on cosmology at Boston University. In the
lecture I made much of the point, with emphatic reference to Godel's theorems,
that a final cosmological theory was not possible to construct. After the talk
somebody walked up to me and suggested that I plagiarized. A month earlier, he
said, he had heard in Chicago a Nobellaureate telling his audience that a final
scheme of fundamental particles could not be devised because of Godel's
theorems. The physicist in question was the one whom I had told, in front of two
thousand, that he would not succeed. In his latest book, The Quark and the
Jaguar, he briefly refers to Godel's theorems, though not in the chapter where he
tries to come to grips with the problem that the actually known "fundamental"
particles are too numerous to be all fundamental.

Another prominent physicist, Steven Weinberg, eventually a Nobel-laureate,

was also on the panel at Gustavus Adolphus, and was equally surprised on
hearing the name of Godel. On his way back to Harvard, Weinberg travelled
with Hilary Putnam, also a panel member, who, as he told me later, tried to
instruct his colleague about Godel. Apparently, in vain. In 1994 Weinberg came
out with a book, Dreams of a Final Theory, in which one would look in vain for
a single reference to Godel. Of course, Weinberg was right, but hardly original,
in stating that in physics nobody can ever be sure that some totally unexpected
data would never float into the physicist's ken and demand a radical overhauling
of most cherished theories.

With respect to Godel's theorems the very title, What Remains to be

Discovered? of a recent book by John Maddox hit the book itself before hitting
any of its intended targets. Maddox, a former editor of Nature, who often
ignored a warning of a predecessor of his in that august office that the editor of
Nature is not the author of Nature, wrote there of Godel's theorems without
seeing their relevance to physics and cosmology. Instead, Maddox reported
Roger Penrose's pondering the question of whether the past history of homo
sapiens could ever prompt the evolution, by natural selection, of a mental faculty
capable of formulating theorems of undecidability. This is, of course, a problem
for those who are unable to see an elementary point. Like any other theory,
including mathematics, evolutionary theory has to be proposed in the medium
called language which remains even today as unexplained on a Darwinian basis
as it was when Darwin tried to cope with it. Whenever Darwinists catch a sight
of this, they either do not take it seriously (Wallace, the codiscoverer of
evolution by natural selection was an exception) or they answer, as Darwin did,
with an imperious No! as a substitute for arguments. Apart from this, Maddox
was simply wrong in claiming that Godel worked out those theorems while
already in America.

No prominent physicist or philosopher of physics has ever given me in print a

single word of acknowledgment about having made the connection between
physics and Godel's theorems, let alone of having been the first to make it.
Should I assume that a large book on physics, published by a prominent
University Press and prominently reviewed in all leading Journals, may remain
unknown to many physicists? Can this easily be assumed about a book which
was reprinted within three years and brought out again in 1988? Yet still another
prominent physicist at that panel learned about the existence of The Relevance
only when, just before coming to that conference from MIT, he decided to find
out about me as another panel member. So V. F. Weisskopf, the physicist in
question, went to the library there and of my various books he picked up The
Relevance. He, too, failed to start referring to Godel's theorems, although this
would have been most proper in a collection of essays of his that came out under
the title, The Privilege of Being a Physicist. Is it the privilege of physicists to
ignore most decisive points relevant to their work and thinking? Or are they
under the influence of some curiously non-scientific motivations in their
selectivity when it comes to most relevant information?

Although nobody gave me credit on that score, my ideas on Godel were

resisted on some occasions of which the very latest ought be recalled, partly
because it appeared in a book with the title, Impossibility, written by John D.
Barrow. The book is fairly behind times as far as my statements on Godel are
concerned. Though an Englishman, Barrow does not seem to know of my
Farmington Institute Lectures, given in 1989 in Oxford, and published under the
title, God and the Cosmologists, by Scottish Academic Press. The book contains
a long chapter, "Godel's Shadow," of which more later. Barrow quotes from an
earlier book of mine, Cosmos and Creator, the following passage: "Clearly, then,
no scientific cosmology, which of necessity is highly mathematical, can have its
proof of consistency within itself as far as mathematics goes. In the absence of
such consistency, all mathematical models, all theories of elementary particles,
including the theory of quarks and gluons . . . fall inherently short of being that
theory which shows in virtue of its a priori truth that the world can only be what
it is and nothing else. This is true even if the theory happened to account with
perfect accuracy for all phenomena of the physical world known at a particular
time."

That quotation should by itself cast doubt on Barrow's claim that in The
Relevance, from which the other quotation comes, I saw in Godel's theorem "a
fundamental barrier to understanding the Universe." The point of dispute is, of
course, about "understanding." For even if somebody takes quantities for the
only true understanding, which I never have done, the barrier exists only if one
takes mathematics for something necessarily true. But in order to make this
plausible one has to have a subjectivist philosophy, though couched in idealism,
Platonist or Hegelian. Tellingly, those two quotations introduce a chapter,
"Impossibility and us." Godel himself failed to see that he was merely advising a
jump from the frying pan of Comtean positivism into the fire of idealist
subjectivism as he interpreted his theorems as a final refutation of all sorts of
positivism.

I have to make it clear that I was not the first to connect Godel's theorems with
physics. The first to do so was not Godel himself, although in his later years he
did much work in cosmology. He even proposed a cosmological model which he
cherished as a final theory. About five years after The Relevance came out, I
stumbled on a better-grade discussion of modern physics3 which contains a brief
but explicit assertion that Godel's theorems render void any effort aimed at
constructing a final form of physical theory. Quite possibly there are other books
as well, published before 1966, in which Godel's theorems are discussed in a
similar vein. The subject may be worth exploring.

Sometime in the mid-1970s I learned that Carnap tried to alert the members of
the Vienna Circle to the bearing of Godel's theorems on their own ideas on valid
knowledge. Typically, Carnap failed to see the point that logical positivism, for
that reason alone, cannot provide the guidelines for a final theory of physics,
which in turn would serve as the standard of truth. Fully aware of Carnap's
efforts must have been Popper, who once described himself as an "informal"
member of the Circle. Popper, too, failed to pay proper attention to Godel's
theorems in his voluminous writings on the philosophy of physics. He does not
seem to have ever suspected that Godel's theorems struck at the root of his
favorite brainchild, the principle of falsifiability. Wryly amusing was a letter
which I received around 1990 from a philosopher of physics in San Diego, who
at that time meant to publish a paper on Godel's theorems and physics, hoping
that he would be the first to point out the important connection between the two.
At the last minute he stumbled on The Relevance. In a letter, which was
bittersweet and slightly contemptuous, he let me have the joy of having been the
first.

Chapters 7-10 of The Relevance illustrate the limitations or irrelevance of

physics in relation to biology, metaphysics, ethics, and theology. Here again, as
in the previous chapters, I let physicists, old and new, make various points. The
limitations of physics are brought out in chapter 11 with an eye on scientism, an
idea which subsequently turned up often in my writings. The manhandling and
straitjacketing of physics by Auguste Comte is traced in that chapter to his
resolve to find in the physics of his younger days a final set of verities. He felt
that he needed such a set if he were to come up with a final form of the
reorganization of human society. Comte's vagaries promoted with great
effectiveness the cultural disease called scientism, which received a terribly
harsh implementation in the Soviet Union's policy about science and scientists.
The need for a keen awareness of the limitations of science could be articulated
with some persuasiveness after so many pages in chapter 12, entitled, "Physics:
Master or Servant?" There C. P. Snow's once popular glorification of one
culture, the scientific, in the guise of calling for a balance of two cultures,
received its proper share of criticism.

Such a one-culture oracle is that legal pundit of constitutional jurisprudence at

Harvard who tried to sell a "liberal," that is, flexible, interpretation of the
Constitution to the Congress and the Supreme Court by insisting on the
flexibility and suppleness of relativity and quantum mechanics.' It is bad enough
to assume that either the former or the latter are intrinsically unrevisable. Even
worse would it be to assume that the interpretation in question is reliable, let
alone definite. An undergraduate degree in physics, even from Harvard, may not
be enough to make one competent to speak of those theories. But even a doctor's
degree in physics is by itself not enough to make its proud possessor perceive an
elementary fact: contrary to the widely entertained cliche, relativity theory is the
most absolutist, and in that sense, most inflexible theory ever proposed in the
history of physics. This may indicate something of the enduring relevance of
some arguments in The Relevance.

So much for the moment for The Relevance, which in fact was just as much
about the irrelevance of physics as about its relevance. The word relevance was
very trendy in the 1960s, though not so much its reverse, which is irrelevance.
At a time when so many new trends tried to sell themselves by claiming to be
relevant, no serious publisher would have considered, even for a moment,
bringing out a book with the title, "The Irrelevance of Physics." Still, as I
showed in the book, some prominent physicists missed no opportunity to warn
that wholesale disaster was in the making if mankind continued to lull itself into
believing that science in general and physics in particular were relevant to the
point of eventually ushering in the golden age.

The 1960s were the glamorous age of physics, which in that respect has now
yielded to molecular biology. Today many a talented postdoc physicist keeps
knocking on the doors of insurance companies and brokerage houses, which are
eager to find people with excellent grounding in partial differential equations.
They are not so lucky as Donald A. Glaser, a Nobel laureate for his discovery of
the bubble chamber. With the Prize money in his pocket, he could afford to shift
to biophysics. He at least foresaw the trend that blew in the face of many a
physicist when the US government found no more money for the
superconducting supercollider in Texas.

But even those readers who take well the foregoing warning together with my
supporting arguments as set forth in The Relevance, and appreciate the plethora
of material available there, may still wish to know something. Is there something
more in my preoccupation with the limitations of physics than a purely cultural
concern? There is one, though not the kind that would be intrinsically needed to
discuss the limitations of physics and of the scientific method. That physicists
have time and again been overconfident about the finality of their attainments
can be discussed and documented in a factual way and the conclusions remain
independent of any ulterior motivation. Still fairness demands that I say
something about the ultimate motivations that urged me on with the task of
seeing a fairly vast project to its completion. The motivation relates to the word
"culture." Culture is more than a plethora of information. Culture is more than
the skill of acquiring the art of being "mainline," let alone being trendy. In that
case chameleons should be the mascots of culture. Culture is also the art of
thinking deeply and a readiness to face up to the deepest questions of human
existence. Culture therefore has to be more than mere aestheticism bent on
cultivating beauty in its manifold forms. Culture implies vastly more than
learning for the sake of learning or amassing ever more information. The growth
of functional illiteracy bred by ever heavier reliance, first on videos, then on
computers, shows that the information-highway is not necessarily the road to
culture.

Real culture must include an intense attention to questions that most agitate a
human being. One need not be religious (Jung was not) to recognize that at the
bottom of all psychological anxiety there lies a failure to resolve questions that
are distinctly religious in character. Religion cannot, however, exist without
taking the form of a cult. Healthy human nature must therefore include a cultic
or religious attitude as well.

Real cult means real religion, that is, a religion with a God in its center to
whom man can be truly "re-ligated" (the etymology of the religion) so that he
may truly worship. No true worship is deserved by a God who is the product of a
cosmic process, let alone the distillation of a process theology. The only God
who deserves a proper cult, which is worship, is much more than the Creator
who brings forth the universe out of nothing. All the deists, old and new,
professed to believe in the Creator, without ever feeling the need to pray to Him.
Only that God inspired real worship who was believed to have conveyed to man
a specific message concerning the manner in which He is to be worshipped. In
other words, by real cult I mean a religion steeped in Revelation and in particular
in the Christian Revelation, which I take to be the fulfillment of the message
Abraham received in the first place.

I am a Roman Catholic, and a priest and a religious (Benedictine) at that, who

happened to receive a thorough training in theology and considers this not only a
great intellectual but an existential benefit as well. Existential, because religion,
whatever the blind alleys it may lead into, is the most thorough search for
ultimate meaning and purpose insofar as this search is predicated about a
logically ultimate entity. Any ultimate which is not an ultimate in the sense in
which a personal Creator alone can be, is the evasion of strict logic about the
ultimate. Partly because of these parenthetical remarks I must insist on a
particular facet of The Relevance. Only at its very end is a reference to Christ
and only in terms of a statement of Whitehead, who, as a professed pantheist,
certainly did not worship the Babe, who alone, in Whitehead's own words, made
a greater stir in all human history than science did. To say this in 1926, and from
a lectern at Harvard, could appear shocking to any science worshiper. To repeat
Whitehead's statement in 1966, when the space age was already upon us, could
appear to many as an inept harking back to a once-and-for-all outmoded age of
mankind. Was it not a fashion to claim, in connection with man's landing on the
moon, that this great technical feat would become the clue to many humanistic
puzzles as well and, above all, to the puzzle of man's destiny?

The fashion has since become a fad. In 1992, in connection with a lecture tour
in Puerto Rico, I visited the Arecibo radiotelescope that also scanned the sky for
messages from outer space. A project leader at Arecibo showed me around as
one of a small group from the faculty of the University of Puerto Rico. On
seeing my Roman collar, he must have taken no small delight in elaborating on
the spiritual enlightenment that would come to mankind from establishing
contact with other civilizations.

This is not to suggest that if I had chosen another phrase than that of
Whitehead to conclude The Relevance, its reader would have put it down
without sensing something similar to the thrust of that phrase. I know of people
who, upon returning from World War II, insisted on law and order and, while
their friends taunted them, found themselves drifting toward Catholicism as the
only logical answer to their perplexities. Yet, when science is vastly documented
to be irremediably incomplete and its practitioners as being subject to regularly
recurring illusions, it is natural to look for remedy outside science, and in areas
that provide more lasting cure than aesthetics can deliver, even if reinforced by
hallucinogens. One simply cannot help wondering about something being truly
beyond the physical if the history of physics shows its heavy dependence on
some metaphysical presuppositions.

The first to gain this impression about The Relevance was none other than the
first reader of its typescript for the University of Chicago Press. The typescript
reached that Press only because a faculty member at the University of Chicago,
who in the fall of 1965 had no manuscript to offer, suggested mine, of which he
learned through friendship, this ever indispensable aid in the "purely objective"
realm of scholarly recognition. The Press did not seem to be overly happy to
take the typescript. For a first reader they asked a professor of electronic
engineering in a midwestern university, who, being an agnostic Jew, could easily
be expected not to see any real relevance in The Relevance and therefore not to
recommend its publication. This would have been the end of the story, had that
reader, enthralled by the manuscript, not suspected that the same end would have
been in store for the book were he to praise it too highly. But he could not
restrain himself from concluding his report, a copy of which he sent me two
years later, with a reference to King Agrippa's remark to Paul's speech: "If you
go on talking, you will make me a Christian."

Three months before the book came off the press in late December 1966, the
same reviewer wrote to me from Herakleon (Crete) of all places. A paragraph
from his letter relates to his having served as the first reader of the typescript of
The Relevance: "The style in which I wrote the report was designed to conceal
the extent of my enthusiasm, not to reveal it. It seemed to me most important
that this book should be published. Had I given an unqualified approval, the
natural reaction of other people (I know the minds of academics) would have
been to oppose its publication. I therefore tried to find as much fault with it as I
could, but I believe I was influential in getting it published, and I take no credit
for that. I felt that I was somehow an instrument only, doing a sort of religious
duty in supporting something that must succeed inevitably. This is strange
because I am not religious. Forgive therefore the slightly impertinent tone in my
report."

Since the first review was markedly favorable, the Press had to proceed to ask
another reader's opinion to comply with its policy. He was a professor of physics
at the University of Chicago who did not know what to make of the book. This
did not surprise me. Most physicists (like most professional people) are
interested only in their technicalities and can be extremely unappreciative of
considerations not directly and immediately useful to them. So the typescript
went to Herbert Feigl, a champion of "scientific philosophy." Later, through
personal contacts with Feigl, I learned about his strong resolve to be open and
about the large measure of his openness. Were he still alive, he would not mind
my saying that I hold the expression, "scientific philosophy" to be an oxymoron.
He wrote to the Press that they should by all means publish a book whose author
"displays a remarkable erudition on every page." By then two university presses
and three big commercial publishers had rejected the typescript.

One sympathetic official at the Press told me that they expected news about
the book to spread mainly by word of mouth. This is not to suggest that they had
not advertised it vigorously. Clearly, they sensed that for all its professed respect
for humanistic values, our academic world does not take kindly to a vast
portrayal of the limitations of science. Such a portrayal is unpalatable except to
those who refuse to ignore the ultimate questions of human existence. They
know that such questions logically follow the more immediate question of, for
instance, why freedom should not be construed as a justification of
licentiousness under specious cover names. Such intellectuals are entitled to
claim that nothing human and nothing divine is, in principle, alien to them. By
trying to do justice to both, they show themselves at least open to questions of
theology. They alone will appreciate my decision to say something about my
theological training as shedding light on my ultimate motivation in writing The
Relevance.
My mind's first published product was a doctoral dissertation in theology, Les
tendances nouvelles de 1'ecclesiologie. It came out in print seven years after I
defended it in the Benedictine Pontifical University of Sant' Anselmo in Rome in
late November, 1950. The book was reprinted during Vatican II. It is the first
book cited in Hans Kung's The Church. This I simply mention as indicative of
the measure of the impression it has made even on those who champion an idea
of the Church rather different from what I stood for and still do. A few years
ago, Cardinal Ratzinger told me in a chance encounter that he has for Les
tendances "a place of honor" in his library. Had I stuck with ecclesiology, I
might have become one of the periti at Vatican II. Not having been an official
part of it, I feel therefore no guilt on a score that cannot give any pleasure to that
Council's periti still alive.

One of those periti subsequently became known as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger,

the most authoritative theologian today in the Catholic Church. A few years ago
he suggested nothing less than that most periti failed to read correctly the signs
of times.' A devastating indictment indeed, if one recalls that those who set the
tone of Vatican II set themselves up as the ones who knew best how to read
those signs. They succeeded all too well partly because the secular press lulled
them into thinking about those signs in its own way. The results meant the
greatest self-inflicted wounds which theologians have ever inflicted on the
Church in the shortest conceivable time. Now that John Paul II has had to forbid
national episcopal conferences to proclaim their decisions without first receiving
Rome's approval, the principle or rather policy of collegiality, as distinct from its
principle, appears to be a failure. More of this in some later chapters.

At this point I should make it very clear that I did not become a scientist as if I
had become disappointed in theology. True, my first intellectual experience,
which may be indicative of my mind's eventual coming of age, had a distinctly
scientific touch to it. The event takes me back to the fall of 1937. I was then just
turning twelve, attending the third form of the Gymnasium run by Benedictines
in my native town, Gyor, Hungary. One of them taught me mathematics in all
eight forms, that is, from 1934 till 1942. He also gave occasional public lectures
on the latest advances in science, one of which had cosmic rays for its subject. I
attended and, though only twelve, I felt I understood everything. If this was true,
the credit should go to the invariably clear presentation of that Benedictine
priest. Little did I suspect then that I would eventually do my doctoral research
in 1956-57 in physics under the direction of Dr. Victor F. Hess, who, in 1936,
received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of cosmic rays.

Another Benedictine was teaching French in the upper four forms, five to
eight. Neither he nor I suspected in 1942, when I graduated at the age of
eighteen, that I would eight years later write in French, and in Rome, my
doctoral dissertation in theology. This certainly shows his quality as a teacher.
He also, together with other Benedictines, had a very constructive influence on
the call to the priesthood, which I distinctly felt from the age of seven or eight.
But I must say that I responded eagerly to any opportunity, however small, to
enlarge my mind in a fair number of directions. In other words, I have always
been very pleased to read books and learn. I may have been an inchoate "culture
vulture," though not to the point of cultivating learning for its own sake,
immensely pleasurable as the acquisition of new information could appear to me.
I wanted to learn for a higher purpose. It was to understand, propagate, and
defend my Roman Catholic religion, which, on the intellectual level, is a set of
propositions with enormously wide ramifications. Indeed, there is no theology so
wide in its scope and reach as Catholic theology. Comparisons may, of course,
be odious in this age of "ecumenical" leveling, where all cultures, all
philosophies, all theologies must be taken to be equally comprehensive or else
the charge of elitism would be levelled at once.

I have never made any apologies concerning my ultimate intentions about this
eagerness of mine to learn anything, including what physics unveils about the
fantastically intricate workings of nature. I hope that I shall never apologize,
however slightly or indirectly, for that motivation of mine. I have met a great
many physicists for whom nothing would be more uninteresting than to discuss
the limitations of physics even when, unlike quite a few, they are totally free of
ill will towards the Catholic Church. It was not a pleasure to learn from a friend
of mine, a professor at a big American university, that he was told by the
director of the Press there that they wished I would not wear a Roman collar in
stepping in for a visit. "Were he to come in a sportsjacket, we would be on our
knees in front of him," somebody there, fairly high on the totem pole, remarked
to my friend. The remark stood for a typical attitude in an America where anti-
Catholicism is the only form of anti-Semitism in which some liberals liberally
indulge. When Peter Viereck, himself not a Catholic, pointed out that "Catholic-
baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals,"' he did not suspect how much more
valid his observation would be fifty years later. On reading any major American
daily nowadays, a Catholic cannot help feeling that Catholics especially are free
game and perhaps the only such game.

I spent the years 1942-1947 in the Benedictine Archabbey of Pannonhalma,

the Hungarian Montecassino, which was greatly privileged to celebrate in 1996
its millennium with a visit by Pope John Paul II. Those years were increasingly
war years even in the western part of Hungary; consequently the philosophical
and theological training had to be limited to the bare minimum. In winter the
coal had to be hauled in, in summer the harvest to be gathered. It was a most
profitable "pastoral" experience to live the life of those weighed down by hard
physical labor day after day. Having been an Eagle Scout in the Gymnasium, I
found some fun in that unintellectual and non-theological physical exertion.
Honest to goodness scouting should be made part of the seminary training
everywhere in the "developed" world, or perhaps something much more serious,
such as a month-long stint as an orderly in hospitals.

There was no fun when, during the harvesting of the grapes in 1946, stray
Soviet soldiers, with machine guns dangling from their shoulders, insisted on
being provided with women. Lest the reader get the wrong impression, I was
spared all the atrocities of the War, though on occasion I had a close escape or
two. Still I grabbed every spare moment to still my hunger for more knowledge.
With the Bible always in my pocket I memorized all the letters of Saint Paul as
well as much of Isaiah and Jeremiah. Spare moments were also good for learning
languages, at least on the reading level. The Russian I learned in 1945-46 I soon
forgot so thoroughly that I could not recognize all the letters of the Cyrillic
alphabet. I found that out, when in December 1950 I arrived from Rome in Paris
to make my final preparation to go to the United States and picked up a French-
Russian language book. There were not a few at that time in France who
thoughtsome with pleasure (Sartre was one of them), some with horror (Gilson,
for instance)-that the Soviets would soon take over Western Europe.

In Rome I greatly profited from the historical method which was stressed in
Sant' Anselmo in the teaching of various theological subjects, especially in
systematic theology. It certainly suited my mind, which was never satisfied until
it grasped the history of the topic. The exposure to Rome's cultural riches and to
its monuments recording two millennia of history remained a lifelong experience
to cherish. I would have been most pleased to stay in Rome, but I started going
back there regularly only from 1992 on, following my appointment as an
honorary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

I landed in New York on December 21, 1950. A week later I arrived at St.
Vincent Archabbey in western Pennsylvania, where half a year later I started
teaching systematic theology at the major seminary attached to it. The subjects I
taught included questions relating to the existence of God, to his creating work,
as well as to theological anthropology, all with strong ties to philosophy and
science. To familiarize myself with the latter I began to devour the works of
Eddington and Jeans, both first rate popularizers of science in addition to being
first-rate scientists. Some writings of Eddington seemed to suggest the
possibility of proving the fact of creation with the help of the law of entropy. I
was, of course, wholly mistaken both in gaining this impression and also in
respect to the merit of the idea. It took me a few years to realize this and also to
see the pantheism lurking behind Jeans' celebration of God as a mathematician.

Nor yet did I see in full the value of Gilson's God and Philosophy in which he
chastised some scientists who, like Jeans, took final refuge in a "mysterious"
universe. Maritain came to St. Vincent College in 1952 to give the annual
Wimmer Lecture, named after Boniface Wimmer, the founder of the Archabbey.
The printed form of the lecture shows that Maritain said nothing new in addition
to what was contained in any good treatise on the dangers of fideism. He, of
course, said all that with his customary finesse and commitment. Still Maritain
did not become a favorite with me, unlike Gilson in whose writings I was to find
an ever fresh source of inspiration. The reason for this lies in Gilson's invariable
concreteness and, most importantly for me, in his unfailing attention to the
historical evolution of any topic he treats.

In order to further my grasp of physics, a subject heavily mathematical, I

decided to take courses in advanced calculus, number theory, and the theory of
equations in the College, where, incidentally, I taught a course in introductory
French. In addition to those courses I also took courses in American history and
English literature. Together with my earlier philosophy courses and language
studies, those courses were judged to be sufficient for a B. Sc. degree. I had no
idea what to do with that degree, but for the moment it seemed to be worth
having at least for the cultural fun of it. I loved to enlarge my mind.

Events totally unplanned soon gave a meaning to something that seemed to

lack it in a proper sense. In early December 1953 my tonsils were taken out in
St. Joseph's Hospital in Pittsburgh. On the fifth and tenth days following the
operation I had a major hemorrhage. In both cases I was rushed back to the
hospital. In the first instance it took three hours to stop the bleeding, in the
second, six hours. This was my way of learning that having a tonsillectomy at
the age of twenty-nine may mean that one is in for a major operation. Fully
aware of this was my general-care physician who came to watch the surgery.
Since I had only local anaesthesia, I heard him remark after the surgeon showed
him the two tonsils: "They are decomposed from the inside." Indeed the surgeon
had to cut very deep in order to remove all infected tissues. This and the two
hemorrhages deprived me of much of my ability to use my voice for the next ten
years.

I did not realize what was in store for my voice when, with the beginning of
the second semester, I resumed teaching in early February 1954. By late March
1954 all my teaching came to an end. A laryngologist in Pittsburgh found that
my two vocal chords were swollen as if they were two walnuts. He also found
them covered with lines of blood. He asked me about my work. I did not want to
bother him with such details of Benedictine life as the spending of hours every
day in choir, reciting and singing the psalms. I merely said that I was teaching.
"Well," he said quietly but firmly, "you may not do it again."

These details should not in the least be construed as a hint at medical

malpractice. A physician, no less than a priest, can, however, cause much harm
by being less than careful with words of warning. I have not the slightest doubt
that both that surgeon and the laryngologist did their very best. It was not,
however, medicine that let me recover, though not completely, the erstwhile use
of my vocal chords. Cold and damp weather eventually worked the "miracle."
This, however, began to be evident only about ten years after the operation. By
then I was half way through writing The Relevance, a task which deeply
immersed me in the excruciating as well as fascinating task of matching my
thoughts with words and phrases. The carrying out of this task forms the material
for this book about my mind's matter. Biographical details are offered in this
book only inasmuch as they are relevant to matters about the major concerns and
efforts of my mind.

Because of my throat condition it was thought best that I should remove

myself from constant opportunities and obligations to use my voice, all
inevitable in a monastery, even if no school is attached to it. My freshly acquired
B. Sc. came as a godsend. To bury myself in studies seemed to be the best
remedy, certainly in line with my insatiable hunger for more knowledge. The B.
Sc. made it possible to enroll in Fordham University's graduate program in
physics where another Hungarian Benedictine, in exile like myself, was working
for a Ph. D. in biology. And since luck, like adversity, seems to come in
bunches, at Fordham I found on the physics faculty none other than Dr. Hess. He
was very touched by my very weak and hoarse voice, and on learning about its
cause he told me that he himself was speaking with one vocal chord. The other
chord, after becoming cancerous through his work with radioactive gases, had to
be removed in the early 1920s. On that basis, and because I hailed from a town
not too far from his birthplace in Austria, he adopted me as "Herr Kolleg." Years
later his widow told me that he had in his heart a special niche for me.

My original hope was that I would do a doctoral thesis in mathematical

physics, preferably in something relating to entropy in cosmology. The
department head wisely steered me to some experimental work, especially
because Dr. Hess was willing to take me on, although he was just about retiring.
This doctoral research, on the distribution of radon and thoron from 1 meter
above to 1 meter below the ground; was the only work about which I can say
that it was science. Doing experimental work is very different from concern
about what is being done in science and what is being done to it. Exposure, on
the doctoral level, to experimental work in physics (or in any other of the hard
sciences) is, in my view, a part of the minimum qualification for discoursing
competently about that concern as specified above. The same exposure is still
well-nigh indispensable if one is to portray reliably the relation of science to its
own history, to cultural history in general, and to the various branches of
humanistic lore, including religion. Otherwise the execution of the task may run
a heavy risk of ending up in platitudes that are all the more misleading the more
they are wrapped in arcane, convoluted phraseology, to say nothing of mere
trendy phrases. The contents of such phrases are usually not inquired into by
those who thrive on them and certainly not when they replace one set of trendy
phrases with another.
 The reason for my emphasis on a doctoral program and especially on its final
experimental phase, relates to what exact science ultimately consists of. Even if
one's doctoral dissertation in physics is on something strictly theoretical, it must
issue in some experimentally verifiable inferences, which means the giving of
exact numerical figures. Otherwise the math department has to step in with the
business of authorizing the degree. The mathematicians most likely won't come
to the rescue. They seem to guard jealously the view that their subject matter is
independent of the physical world. They indeed can say whatever they want, but,
as some sharp tongues remarked, physicists must remain partially sane. In view
of the latest fad in scientific cosmology about an infinite number of universes, all
popping up "literally out of nothing," this partial measure of sanity seems to
approach the vanishing point.

As I said, I agreed only with some reluctance to take on an experimental work

for my doctorate. Nothing short of a state of exultation is the joy one can derive
from going through for the first time, say, the mathematics of Maxwell's
equations, of Boltzmann's statistical mechanics, of the fine structure of the
hydrogen spectrum, and of the equivalence of the electroweak force with the
electromagnetic force. Still, as every theoretical physicist knows, the ultimate
truth of physics lies in experimental verification. There, the measure of the
mathematical beauty of a theory, a beauty far more difficult to define than, say,
the beauty of a statue, is measured up against the quantitative properties of
tangible matter. That beauty has to be more than mere symmetry in both sides of
the equation, because if an equation of physics is fully symmetrical, it becomes
inapplicable to the physical world. There every change means asymmetry, or a
balance tilted however slightly. Some cosmological speculations
notwithstanding, the universe, as far as the evidence goes, is running down.

Experimental verification, a work at times exceedingly tedious, demands more

than ordinary determination and patience. Lab work was tedious and at times
odious for me, especially after I was almost electrocuted by putting my fingers in
the wrong place. I can still almost feel the shock that went through my right arm.
Decades later I have found myself to be no more at ease, even with connecting
laptops with scanners. Jazz drives and other jazzy computer paraphernalia can
easily drive me to despair.

To make matters even less promising for me as a physicist, I found myself

from the start true to my penchant to seek understanding also through the
historical perspective. This applied to my doctoral research only in a tangential
way. As during the first six months I obtained no useful data whatsoever, I
sought occasional solace for my impatience by inquiring about the antecedents
of this or that latest device for measuring the ionization of gases by radioactive
materials or by cosmic rays. But satisfaction along these lines did not benefit my
experimental work at all. Further, I could but antagonize others in the lab by
asking them questions that related to historical details of instrumentation and to
broader aspects of the history of physics. They simply did not like being
confronted with their indifference to such matters. To most practicing physicists
it does not matter whether Euler preceded Lagrange or vice versa, or whether
Maxwell came first and Boltzmann afterwards.

Professors were not to be troubled with such inquiries. I still remember the
embarrassment of an excellent teacher of quantum mechanics, whom I asked in
class as to why certain very useful polynomials are called Hermite polynomials.
He answered that probably because of their mysterious character they were
found to resemble those elusive figures, called hermits. Perhaps he was joking.
But that was the last time I raised such questions in class. As I came to see later
on, only one out of ten textbooks of quantum mechanics would reveal that
Hermite was a 19th-century French mathematician. None of those textbooks
contained a single word on a historically far more intriguing, and
epistemologically far more revealing, fact of modern physics. Both in relativity
theory and in quantum mechanics a crucial role was played by mathematical
functions that had been worked out decades, at times a century earlier before
physicists found them useful, indeed, indispensable. Gradual enlightenment on
this point, which only interest in the history of physics could provide, constituted
my first groping toward the recognition of what has become an integral part of
my mind's maturity: The scientific truth is no more than what quantities can
convey but also includes all they can convey.

In other words, physics, this quantitatively most exact of all sciences, is both
enormously relevant and also most irrelevant at the same time. My gaining a
doctor's degree in physics was meant to provide one of the foundations on which
to articulate, for over forty years now, this message, which can only irk scientists
who think, thematically or not, that science alone counts. Following a lecture of
mine at a big engineering university, one of the professors there stood up and
said that I came to the wrong place with my message. But I was invited to
another such place after a professor there read, to his great astonishment, in The
Relevance Bertrand Russell's admission that what this world, being on the brink
of a nuclear holocaust, really needs is Christian love.

Such invitations go usually together with a dinner where half a dozen faculty
are also invited. There (I am talking of the engineering university of the Air
Force in Dayton) someone at the dinner table began to extol the superiority of
science over the humanities. I was able to shift the discourse to the question of
whether the scientific method is capable of deciding whether Michelangelo or
Renoir was greater as an artist. Suddenly all those professors of engineering and
physics found themselves arguing with one another. In doing so they merely
proved the fallibility of their presumed artistic competence or the lack of it.
Meanwhile I could enjoy my dinner undisturbed. During that visit, the professor
who invited me there incidentally remarked that history is written by the victors.
Leaving aside political history, where this remark is all too obviously true,
though hardly recognized, its applicability to the way in which the history of
science is being written is vast, to say the least. More of this in the next chapter.

I found no similar opportunity to divert humanists from futile discussions

about the humanities to some scientific matter, which they usually know only
from hearsay. But I found time and again how dangerous it is to inform
humanists about the basic limitations of science. They are apt to take this
information for a proof that their expertise in their own fields entitles them to
take science lightly. Quite a few of them love to debunk or slight science,
without taking stock of the enormous extent to which science makes possible the
communication of their humanistic message and even their own daily survival.

Such reflections ripened within me only some time after I finished my

doctoral research in physics. Waiting for useful data to come gives one time to
reflect. By the time I got my doctorate in physics in June 1957, it had become all
too clear to me that the real issues between science and religion are embedded in
the history of science. I had plenty of time to focus on those issues during the
next three years, because my throat condition prevented me from teaching in a
new Benedictine preparatory school for boys, which refugee Hungarian
Benedictines had set up near Stanford and where I stayed from July 1957 till
August 1960. The closeness of Stanford University, and the easy access to its old
physics library at the southwest corner of the main quadrangle, provided me with
ample opportunity to delve into the history of physics.
 Meanwhile I began to write short articles for a Hungarian language quarterly,
published in Rome, on various scientific questions relating to religion. They
contain in a nutshell more than one idea which I was later to develop in full in
The Relevance. The extent to which this long book anticipates themes of many
of my subsequent writings dawned on me only when I had to see through press
the publication of its Hungarian translation in 1996. It was then that I read again
each line of The Relevance and found out that it was truly the coming of age of
my mind.

Authors as a rule do not like to read what they have already published, let
alone to re-read their books in their entirety. By the time a book appears in print,
its author has had to read it easily a dozen times. Authors read their books as
they write them and soon find that the art of writing is rewriting, which means
rereading as well. Then they read their books as they proofread them, and again
as they make the name and subject index. Narcissistic would indeed be that
author who would still be in love with his or her book after all the reading,
almost tediously repetitious, that precedes the actual publication of the book.
Unless the book is a miscarriage of truth, the author is allowed, of course, to
remain in love with his or her book but hardly will find in it again the kind of
enjoyment which comes only with the freshness of novelty. My fondest
reminiscences about any book of mine relate to the moment when their main
idea was born in my mind. As to The Relevance, I distinctly remember that
moment. Its idea flashed through my mind as I walked down from the steps of
Princeton's Post Office on Palmer Square. Ten minutes later the main outline of
the book stood out clearly in my mind as I got back, on that sunny afternoon in
the fall of 1962, to Aquinas Institute, the Catholic chaplaincy at Princeton. I
stayed there from September 1960 till July 1965, partly because from 1961-63 I
was a visiting fellow in the History of Science Program at Princeton University.

Shortly before my stay at Aquinas Institute came to an end, the dean of Seton
Hall University dropped by to visit the chaplain. By then the University of
Chicago Press was reading the typescript of The Relevance and the dean invited
me to lecture at Seton Hall. In fact, I was not asked to do more than to give a
seminar a week, since, in holding a seminar, the professor can easily shift the
task of talking to the participants. The opportunity of relying on such a tactic
was imperative in view of the condition of my vocal chords. In return for that
extremely light teaching load, Seton Hall expected from me a steady flow of
publications.

Seton Hall was certainly pleased with the Lecomte du Nouy Prize which was
awarded to my Brain, Mind and Computers in 1970. Added to their pleasure was
the fact that the Prize was handed over to me at Rockefeller University, where
Lecomte du Nouy, a French physical chemist, worked for a number of years
prior to his death in 1950. They were even more pleased when in May 1973
word came from Edinburgh that I was invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures at
the University of Edinburgh in 1974-75 and 1975-76. It was then that Seton Hall
raised me to the rank of Distinguished University Professor and left me with the
same light teaching load as before. I tried to be grateful. I did not abandon Seton
Hall when, shortly after I received the Templeton Prize in May 1987, Harvard
sounded me out about my availability for its Stillman Chair of Catholic Studies.
I chose to stay at Seton Hall, a decision that I did not come to regret. I doubt that
any other university would have left me so unencumbered with the razzle-dazzle
of academic politics and with the tedium of administrative work either on the
departmental level or in connection with the Faculty Senate. Apart from this I
think that the tripartite division of functions at a college or university should be
carefully respected: students should learn, instead of trying to teach; the faculty
should teach instead of trying to run the place; the administration should do its
job unfettered, though not to the point of aggravating the teachers by over-
administering them.

One who greatly loved The Relevance was the noted physical chemist Sir
Hugh Taylor, of Princeton University and also the editor-in-chief of American
Scientist. But he also feared for it. He told a friend of mine that the time had not
arrived yet to say, on a vast scale, that science is limited indeed, that many of its
conclusions are highly revisable, and that even some of its chief practitioners can
be very close-minded. That friend of mine failed to press Sir Hugh as to when
that propitious moment would come. Being still a relatively young man, and at
the beginning of my public career as a historian and philosopher of physics
(including astronomy), I thought that perhaps the time would come soon.
Otherwise I would not have added book after book as further illustrations of
some of the basic themes of The Relevance. One of them was the witness of
history that physical science was incomplete in a far more than trivial sense.

Such witness is less and less welcome in an increasingly scientistic, that is,
science-worshiping age. One has to be the victim of utopistic expectations to
hope for the contrary. But the witness is extremely powerful in disarming
contentions that theology, or humanism in a broader sense, can be worth
considering only inasmuch as a scientific seal can be put on it. Those seriously
interested in matters theological, where so many items seem to be very spotty,
can at least find a liberating experience in learning that science has indeed a very
spotty history and its history will not cease to be such. I found rather amusing
the report that, in the wake of the false alarms they had given in mid-March 1998
about an asteroid heading towards the earth, astronomers agreed to agree about
what their findings were before saying anything further. No more than leopards
can scientists, or theologians for that matter, change their spots.

Therefore even if I was wrong in expecting a quick change of mind on the part
of the scientific community, my work on the history of science (and especially of
astronomy) could seem to have usefulness for some. I mean those who have a
gut feeling that science is not all, and that the mind's legitimate range extends far
beyond science. This they may feel in their bones, but because their education
did not provide them with factual information on that score they therefore could
not articulate that feeling of theirs in a way convincing even to them, let alone to
others.

Before my attention could be freed to elaborate on that witness, I had to bring

out a book, Brain, Mind and Computers, which originally was meant to be an
additional chapter in The Relevance. It will be discussed in a chapter that will
further deal with my theological motivations in doing work in the history and
philosophy of science. I may therefore safely turn to first telling something about
my mind as that of a historian of science.
About those books of mine that deal with the history of science I should say
above all that they were invariably a delight to write. This should be of no
surprise if one's basic bent of mind is to home in on the history of whatever one
wants to understand. Apart from this, historical research implies the reading of
original sources which in turn are an inexhaustible source of novelty. Satisfying
as it does an inveterate sense of curiosity, the flow of ever new details into one's
ken can but delight one's mind. There is further the excitement of finding data
that have been ignored beforehand, at times a long chain of documents and data
that generations of scientists (and historians of science) failed to notice, or if
they did, they passed them up. This last point should be particularly attractive to
someone who finds great significance in the limitations of science and of
scientists, and does so for cultural reasons, explained in the preceding chapter.
Finally, there is the hope and the task, if not burden, of finding something new.
A historian, no less than a scientist, is supposed to make discoveries. This he has
to do either by unearthing new documents or by putting old ones in a new light.

From the moment I first came across, sometime in the late 1950s, the
expression "Olbers' Paradox," it intrigued me a great deal, as did almost anything
with a cosmological bearing. My brief reference to the paradox in the chapter
"Frontiers of the Cosmos" of The Relevance was not commensurate with my
fascination with it. The paradox was one of the several topics which the writing
of The Relevance prevented me from exploring in full right away. But no sooner
had The Relevance appeared than I wrote an article, "Olbers', Halley's, or Whose
Paradox?" which was quickly accepted by the American Journal of Physics. The
article gave only some salient points about the contents of my rapidly growing
dossier on the paradox, although it gave those points without mincing words.
Physicists, in this case astronomer-cosmologists, who in their own field
demanded utmost carefulness with data, were shown to act in a cavalier manner
with respect to historical facts relating to their topics.

The title of that article pointed away from Wilhelm Olbers (1758-1840) and
Edmund Halley (1656-1742), and even away from the paradoxical darkness of
the night sky. The article's main target were the champions of the steady state
theory, who around 1950 coined the phrase, "Olbers' Paradox." Their interest in
the darkness of the night sky stemmed from their resolve to show that the
universe has always been in an energy equilibrium, although the galaxies were
running away from one another. They were fond of reconstructing Olbers'
thoughts on the paradox in an axiomatic form, which they all gave in slightly
different phrasings that at times plainly contradicted what Olbers actually wrote
on the subject. The conclusion was inevitable that the steady-state theorists (I
mean Hoyle, Sciama, Bondi, Bonnor, and others) had not read Olbers' paper.
Their default was all the more reprehensible because Olbers' paper had been
available since 1827 in English translation in the Edinburgh Review, a periodical
that could be found in all major British libraries.

They did not take with good grace the fact that they had been shown to be
sloppy. The American Journal of Physics reached far beyond the USA, and even
The Paradox of Olbers' Paradox, which followed that article within a year or so,
became widely known. G. J. Whithrow gave a withering review of it by claiming
that The Paradox was not so much about the paradox of the scientific mind as
about the paradox of one mind, its author's. His animosity was understandable.
His name is in a long footnote of the concluding chapter of The Paradox where I
list modern authors of books on astronomy who gave 1826 as the year of the
publication of Olbers' essay.

I must admit, however, that a boomerang was hidden in my insistence that the
year 1826 strongly suggested unfamiliarity with Olbers' article. Olbers' article
was part of Bode's Astronomi- sches Jahrbuch fur 1826, but published, as was
the case with all other volumes of that series, three years earlier, in this case in
1823. In The Relevance I myself spoke of its having been published in 1826 (a
regrettable error) and this indeed proved that my brief discussion of it was based
on second-hand information. This was eventually pointed out by Michael
Hoskin, a meticulous historian of astronomy.

I hastened to correct matters at my earliest opportunity, which was in fact a

very large one. For I knew that once the Brain, Mind and Computers had been
written, I would devote undivided attention to the full history of that paradox.
The Paradox of Olbers' Paradox, with A Case History of Scientific Thought as
its subtitle, came out almost simultaneously, in the spring of 1969, with Brain,
Mind and Computers. Obviously, I wrote The Paradox in "white heat," in fact in
a mere ten weeks, between late August and early November 1968.

One reason for that breakneck speed, which at that time could not yet be
accelerated by word processors and e-mail, was my compulsive interest in the
topic. Princeton was possibly the best place to get hold of almost all the source
material in the shortest time. At that time the Firestone Library of Princeton
University was still a scholar's paradise, as it still had in the open shelves three-,
and even four-hundred-year-old books. Access to the shelves was open to
anyone who cared to walk in, a policy rooted in the assumption that inside such a
library (and in such a university town) everybody behaved as a gentleman.
Indeed, losses due to theft were minimal until the late 1960s. Then Firestone
Library gained some unsolicited publicity. A New York real estate agency,
which developed large tracts of land in Princeton's Cherry Valley area,
advertised its houses with the remark that they go together with the free use of a
three-millionvolume library. Firestone Library received world-wide notice when
a French graduate student in physics informed Le Monde in Paris that in
Princeton the libraries were open twenty-four hours a day, a report that must
have hit the French as utterly unbelievable. This was true only of the physics
library. Firestone opened at eight o'clock in the morning and closed at one
o'clock after midnight, an "eternity" compared with the typical "horaire" of
libraries in France and elsewhere in Europe.

I certainly took great advantage of all this when writing The Relevance of
Physics, and all the more, because it was still possible during the late evening
hours to drive straight up to the entrance of Palmer Physics Laboratories and
park there. The security guard merely asked for one's library card, and not even
for that after one's face became familiar to him. Before long I had to realize that
the 1960s were the last decade of a paradisiacal situation for a researcher like
myself. By 1970 or so, various social transformations began to turn that
assumption about voluntary gentleman-like behavior into one of the many
illusions of democracy. This happens inevitably when democracy is no longer
taken for a political system that demands far more selfrestraint than any other
form of government. But once democracy is promoted as the invitation for any
and all to cut as large a slice out of the common pie as possible, strange
symptoms begin to appear. One of them was the policy which students in
Princeton jokingly referred to as "the five-finger discount" of which the
University Store, at that time under the management of a real gentleman, was the
chief victim. The joke turned into shock when the University had no choice but
to dismiss summarily some students for what legally might still have passed for
mere petty thefts. At that time students would not yet have thought of suing the
University for "unfair" disciplinary actions.
 But back to the "paradise" which Firestone Library remains even after three
restrictions on access had to be imposed in the mid-1970s. Outsiders (townies)
could no longer walk to the stacks; terms of borrowing became less generous;
and books published before 1800 were transferred to the Rare Books section.
Just before this happened, a zoologist friend of mine in the Midwest asked me to
show Princeton to a friend of his from Germany who happened to be in transit.
At that time, most of the older periodicals for zoology and related subjects had
not yet been transferred to Guyot Hall, the center of biological and geological
instruction and laboratories. The friend, a zoologist from the Max Planck
Institute, told me, after I showed him the stacks full of periodicals of his field,
that to his knowledge no library in Germany had a similarly rich collection of
German periodicals from the 19th century.

The first and second of those restrictions did not affect me as a former
Visiting Fellow at the University, although the third would have somewhat
slowed down the writing of The Paradox. On having read The Paradox, Robert
Dicke, with whom on occasion I discussed questions of cosmology, expressed
his astonishment over the richness of the material in that book. He was even
more astonished when I told him that about 95 percent of the source material
was readily available in Firestone Library and its astronomy and physics
divisions. A. Dauvillier, director of the Observatory of Pic du Midi in the
Pyrenees, also wondered how it was possible to gather all that material. He did
not know how fast it was gathered.

And fast I had to act, because somehow I felt that I was not the only one
interested in writing a monograph on the topic. This turned out to be the case,
and therefore it was right for me to burn the candle at both ends. Each Tuesday
for eight weeks in a row I drove at six in the evening from Seton Hall in South
Orange to Barnard College of Columbia University where an undergraduate, the
daughter of a friend of mine, was borrowing for me odd volumes, mostly in
German, from the astronomy library there. By doing so she earned the reputation
of a budding scholar, although she knew neither astronomy nor German. After
that stopover at Barnard College, I checked in around nine pm at the New York
Public Library, which at that time was open until midnight and had not yet
transferred many of its periodicals to a not-so-easily accessible warehouse near
the Hudson River. Then I drove back to Princeton.

Being only forty-four at that time I could still cope with the fatigue, partly
because of the delight of finding the right publications. The record amply proved
my view that Olbers' Paradox was the paradox of the scientific mind, a mind
very open in some respects but very closed in some others even when these are
still strictly scientific. This was the thrust of the article I sent to the American
Journal of Physics and also the thrust of The Paradox. They contain a discovery
only in the sense of putting in a new light documents, old and recent. All the
documents presented in The Paradox had already been printed. Mainly because
of the urgency I felt about having the book promptly printed, I had to postpone
the project of exploring some archives, above all the ones in Bremen.

I was not disappointed when in July 1969, only a few months after the
publication of The Paradox, I had the opportunity to spend some days in
Bremen's Staatsbibliothek. There, in an early notebook of Olbers I found
evidence that around 1783 he had excerpted various material from that very
book of Cheseaux in which the latter, in 1743, discussed the paradox. This
finding was written up in the July 15, 1969 issue of Bremer Nachrichten, under
the headlines: "Olbers-Forscher kam aus Amerika" and "Professor Dr. Jaki
machte Entdeckung in der Staatsbiliothek." The report also carried a fairly large
photo of me, which showed the cover of The Paradox as well.

From Bremen I went to Hungary, which I did regularly since 1967 whenever I
was in Europe. My mother was already seventyfive in 1969. She felt each time I
saw her that this would be the last time. The last time I saw her was in the fall of
1993, when she was in her hundredth year. During my visit with her in the
summer of 1971, I picked up some old books of mine, among them one on
dogmatic theology that I used thirty years earlier. I failed to note that it
contained a yellowing page from a notebook, which had pencil markings on it
similar to the ones in crossword puzzles. The Communist borderguard took those
markings for coded messages. I quickly became a suspect and all the more as I
carried a dozen still undeveloped 35mm rolls of film with all the archival
material relating to Olbers. Then my address book was searched thoroughly.
Meanwhile I was thinking both about the plane I was supposed to take in Vienna
within two more hours and about many more hours that I might spend in a
Communist jail. What disarmed my investigators was a copy of the Bremer
Nachrichten with my photo there. This made them understand that bad publicity
might be the sole recompense for their avid search of my luggage and briefcase.
There is some advantage to having newspapers.
 But back to Olbers. My finding made acute the question why Olbers, who in
1823 referred to Halley's brief papers on the subject, did not refer to Cheseaux,
who incidentally was the first to propose absorption of the starlight in the ether
as the explanation of the darkness of the night sky. My educated guess was that
in forty years Olbers could have conveniently forgotten about Cheseaux's book. I
must admit, however, that my admiration for Olbers made me put him in the best
possible light.

The publication of The Paradox and my visit to Bremen drew on me the

attention of the directors of Olbers Gesellschaft, an affiliate of the Hochschule
fur Nautik in Bremen. The celebration of the Gesellschaft's golden jubilee came
up in October 1970 and its directors invited me to deliver the Festrede. Bremen
was still to have a University or was just about to establish one. At the end of my
speech I urged the city to call the new university "Olbers Universitat." This
brought the large audience to its feet and made me a welcome visitor in Bremen.
My proposal, reported in the Bremen newspapers, came to nothing. Incidentally
I also came "to nothing" after the festive dinner at the Rathaus where the main
course was Indonesian Reistafel, a rice dish consisting of some twenty
ingredients, some of them strange spices. One of these quickly and rather
violently upset my stomach. Luckily there were pretzels and beer, too, on the
table. Soon I noticed that many eyes became fixed on my feasting on those
pedestrian fares.

During several visits in Bremen I found that North Germans could be very
friendly. Officers of the Olbers Gesellschaft took me to Worpswerde, a
hauntingly beautiful colony of landscape artists around the turn of the century.
They helped me visit all the places around Bremen that had relevance to Olbers'
astronomical work, with Lilienthal being chief among them, where Schroter did
his work around 1800, the golden age of amateur astronomers. Some of them
knew no celestial dynamics, which was, however, Olbers' forte. I could freely
use my imagination to see his house on Sandstrasse, with his 10 cm refractor in
the window, that helped him spot the first asteroids. To use my mind in this way
has always been one of its chief delights.

The fascination I had with Olbers' paradox had, of course, much to do with my
interest in scientific cosmology, particularly in its philosophical and theological
aspects. Apart from this, the paradox raised various questions about the scientific
mind. Was it simply true, for instance, that the idea of cosmic infinity had but a
purely scientific appeal to it? My study of the history of the paradox certainly
revealed that the idea of an infinite Euclidean universe did not become popular
with scientists until the 1830s or so. Its cultural popularity was largely the work
of the champions of scientistic materialism, who seized on the alleged infinity of
the universe as if it were a proof of its uncreatedness. A hundred years later
Hoyle and others viewed in the same light the eternity of the universe as
postulated by the steady state theory. While in this connection Hoyle's writings
speak louder than words, in a story about him I found an added confirmation of
his delight in acting as the professional atheist of the scientific village.
According to that story he berated the Christian belief of a fellow cosmologist as
the source of the latter's refusal to throw logic to the wind. The incident took
place in the School of Advanced Studies in Trieste.

But back to Olbers' paradox. The historian of science could rightly speculate
as to what course science might have taken if Gauss had taken the paradox
seriously insofar as it had a gravitational counterpart. The latter could have been
rigorously formulated after Green submitted the theory of potential in 1829. The
application of non-Euclidean geometries to cosmology might have then issued
during the 19th century in something much more than a few embryonic
proposals, such as the ones made by Riemann, Zollner, and Schwarzschild.

The fact that in science not everything is taken note of, though clearly
recognizable and relevant at a given phase of its history, has a similar illustration
in reference to the Milky Way. Very much delayed was the recognition of the
reason for its visual appearance as an irregular whitish band stretching all across
the sky. This delay formed the subject of my next book on the history of
astronomy, which came out in 1976 under the title, The Milky Way: An Elusive
Road for Science. The reason eluded Galileo, Newton, Euler, and countless
others until a self-taught genius, Johann Heinrich Lambert, stumbled on it in a
bright August night in 1749. Then the kind of drama begins, whose tracing out is
no longer a matter of delightful speculation of what might have been but of what
has actually taken place. Here, too, the actual story turned out to be very
different from widely accepted cliches.

The outcome meant the additional delight of tracing out the fallacies of one
particular cliche, the center part of which is Kant, insofar as he was very cagey
about the vast measure of his dependence on Thomas Wright. The latter could
not, of course, be expected to know in 1750 that a year earlier Lambert, who at
that time was still in complete anonymity as a private tutor near Chur in
Switzerland, hit upon the right explanation, though he did not publish it until
1761. Kant was far from being candid as he claimed that a detailed report about
Wright's book, which he read in a Hamburg weekly in 1751, hardly influenced
him in his own explanation of the Milky Way. Kant turned that explanation into
a minor part of his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte and Theorie des Himmels,
published in 1756, in which he certainly made a first by suggesting that
"nebulous stars" were so many other Milky Ways. It was interesting to find that
Kant himself did not care to say more of his cosmogony until Herschel spotted
galaxies in large numbers in the 1780s. Then Kant urged some of his admirers to
present his dicta on nebulous stars as a proof that the mind can effectively
anticipate the work of observation. Herschel himself proposed the correct
solution of the visual appearance of the Milky Way as if nobody had formulated
it before him.

Kant's was certainly an eagerness-invariably ignored or soft-pedaled by

historians of science, to say nothing of historians of philosophy-to appear much
more of a scientist than he actually was. In that book of his he even claimed that,
if required, he could give with "all the mathematical parade" the stepby-step
evolution of our planetary system. Kant spoke condescendingly of Newton, who
found that task so daunting as to invoke God's intervention again and again in
that process, which, let it be noted, is still very arcane even today. Kant never
mastered even the elements of calculus. This should be clear also from the career
of Martin Knutzen, a Konigsberg professor, from whom Kant received private
instruction in mathematics and physics, at least according to his first
biographers, who, sixty years later, reported this on the basis of hearsay. Having
never been impressed by Kant the philosopher, it was for me a delight to get the
first inkling of Kant's utter amateurism in physics and mathematics. The
delightful task of cutting down to size Kant, the scientist, did not have to wait
long. It came out as the third in a series of works, all relating to the history of
astronomy, of which more shortly.

Before I part with The Milky Way I must say something of my delight in
discovering the remarkably intelligent accounts of the Milky Way by many
medieval and Renaissance scholastics. Here again the fact that emerged from the
study of original documents gave a very different picture from what is handed
down in typical books on the history of science and astronomy. Respectful as
they were of Aristotle in general, practically none of those scholastics endorsed
Aristotle's pathetic explanation of the Milky Way as the incandescent belt of
vapors rising from a hypothetical marshy zone of the earth. They preferred
Democritus' hunch that the Milky Way was the fusion of the light of many small
stars. The alleged darkness of the Middle Ages turned out to be once more the
work of those who write intellectual history from the dark recesses of their
prejudices.

Apart from deriving much delight from writing the history of this or that topic
in astronomy, I gained much stimulus from suspecting that what I was doing
could pass for a first in some sense. This was also true in reference to my next
book on the history of astronomy, Planets and Planetarians: A History of
Theories of the Origin of Planetary Systems. Here, too, as in connection with the
Milky Way, there were, of course, essays that covered this or that phase of the
story. A historian never starts from absolute scratch. Still, apart from offering a
fairly long monograph in which meticulous attention was paid to the original
publications, there was something original in my focusing on the motivations
that compel the scientist to prefer one particular explanation, or one specific type
of explanation.

In fact, one could notice a pattern: phases of sanguine hopes and

generalizations about countless other planetary systems were again and again
interrupted by the suspicion that our planetary system may indeed be a rather
unusual case in cosmic history. Hopeful visions about a cosmic brotherhood
gave much support to the temptation to consider uncritically theories in which
planetary systems readily form around rotating stars. This explains the main part,
Planets and Planetarians, of the title of that book. Researching and writing it
gave me the opportunity to delve once more into the true stature of Kant, the
scientist, which again turned out to be very puny indeed. The record also showed
that there is no ground for speaking of a Kant-Laplace theory, one of the
hallowed cliches of cultural history. It is a very hollow cliche indeed, coined in
the Second Reich, and mainly by Helmholtz who in this connection showed
himself to be a greater patriot than a man of science.

Writing the Planets and Planetarians also gave me a close look at some very
hollow aspects of present-day infatuation with extraterrestrials. The infatuation
has strong ideological components that derive from markedly materialistic and
agnostic beliefs. In this case they certainly act like a blindfold. The socalled
scientific mind here, too, showed (and still does) a rugged resistance to facts and
principles whenever they go against pet theories and expectations. The fact that
much of the solar system's angular momentum is in the planets whereas much of
its mass is in the sun, should have made Laplace very diffident in proposing his
nebular hypothesis. Once more other scientists acted like a pack of hounds
where the loudest sets the direction for the rest.

The story is also rich in philosophical vagaries. One is the expectation that an
allegedly homogeneous primordial state can serve as a starting point towards a
most inhomogeneous actual state of the cosmos. Another is the trust, fueled by
the role assigned in Darwinism to chance, that since planetary systems are
readily generated by stars, species similar to Homo sapiens also appear
everywhere in the universe. Since my story ended around 1970, it could not
include the entirely new look at the formation of the Earth-Moon system which
was imposed by the analysis of rock brought back from the Moon by manned
landings there from 1969 on. The true bearing of the results, that impose the
assumption of a rare catastrophic event as the origin of the Moon, is strongly
resisted, or artfully skirted. The reason is obvious. They undermine expectations,
based largely on the Drake-equation, that we humans are chance products and
that such a chance outcome would readily repeat itself elsewhere in the universe.
Years later I repeatedly called attention to the fact that the Drake-equation lacks
an important factor, the probability of a Moon around the Earth. Once the
enormously low degree of that probability is taken into account, the search for
extraterrestrials would appear outright unpromising.

Underlying those expectations is the broader view that the universe has to
produce everything and does so everywhere. The idea played a central part in the
thinking of Giordano Bruno, as shown already by his first notable publication,
La cena de le ceneri. A rambling record of Bruno's disputation with some
scholars in Oxford, the book became the first book on Copernicus when
published in 1584. The fact that it had not been yet translated into English would
have alone made this an attractive project, which, with the fifth centenary of
Copernicus' birth coming up in 1973, took on some urgency. The translation,
The Ash Wednesday Supper, did not appear on time because the publisher,
Mouton in The Hague, used a typesetter in Hungary in order to reduce the cost
of production. Since the typesetter did not care to look up the English rules of
hyphenation, ever new phases of proofreading became necessary. Although The
Ash Wednesday Supper did not appear until 1975, or two years after the
Copernican anniversary, it still stole the march on another translation by a full
year.'

I would not have undertaken the work of translation had I not learned from
Frances Yates' Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition that the "standard"
view of Bruno was wholly misleading. Armed with the massive evidence which
Yates presented about Bruno's pantheistic obscurantism, I found the study of his
Cena quite rewarding. It quickly became clear to me that Bruno was interested in
Copernicus only as the destroyer of the clear contours of a geocentric universe as
if this had justified Bruno's resolve to eliminate all clear contours and structures
from the cosmos. No wonder that unlike Kepler and Galileo, who sang the
praises of geometry, Bruno resented whatever he found geometrical in
Copernicus' work, because he saw threatened his radical animization of the
universe by what he called Copernicus' use of the "file of geometry."

Bruno, who argued against the distinction between planets and stars, clearly
had no scientific mind. Nor did he have a grasp of the intricacies of Copernicus'
arguments. He was no match to those Oxonian scholars and had to disappear
from the scene in disgrace. My translation of Bruno's work was therefore a
demotion of Bruno from his scientific pedestal, the most effective way of
discrediting certain philosophical prophets of modernity. This was not, of
course, to the liking of those fond of presenting Bruno as the first major
scientific battering ram against the ramparts of Catholic orthodoxy. They ignore
the fact that Bruno's attack on geocentrism was a very minor point among his
hundred or so heretical views for which he was burned on the day after Ash
Wednesday in 1600. They also carefully keep under cover the fact that had
Bruno stayed in Geneva in 1582 for one more day, he might have been burned
right then and there.

Frances Yates, who in reviewing that other translation in 1977 still did not
know about mine,2 was certainly pleased on hearing from me that the
introduction of my translation of La Cena had a thrust that echoed her views on
Bruno. I still vividly see the flowing black cape she wore when, after we met at
the Warburg Institute in London, she took me out to lunch. She looked a sort of
magus but with no trace whatever of that malice which consumed poor Bruno.
Some, who should know better, still see in Bruno a paragon of reason, though in
terms of the ideology of the Enlightenment. There science was set up as the great
debunker of the supernatural, and a proof that anyone engaged in that debunking
almost automatically counted as an expert on science. Hence Bruno's high
standing in all cliche histories of science, where nothing is said about the
obscurantism of the first book on Copernicus and hardly anything about Bruno's
heavy borrowing from Nicholas of Cusa, a devout and most learned cardinal.
Yates' books on Bruno and on "enlightened" Renaissance times were the first
major salvo against the idolization of Bruno as the forerunner of the
Enlightenment. No wonder that a latter-day product of it from the City of Light
wrote a very hostile review of my translation and dismissed me as a disciple of
Yates.' This I took for a compliment, and still consider it such in view of Yates'
indisputable scholarship.

With Yates having done the groundwork for a proper portrayal of Bruno's
mental physiognomy, I could safely concentrate on the history of early
Copernicanism and on the late-16thcentury Neapolitan dialect in which Bruno
wrote La Cena. Luckily, Firestone Library had on its shelves a huge dictionary
of the Italian language based on historical principles. But this was only part of
the problem, and the easier one. The other was common to all translators. None
of them can entirely escape the truth of the Italian saying: traduttore, traditore.
For one thing, no two languages are isomorphic, a point of which more in
another chapter. For another, and this is the crux of the matter, a translator has to
decide whether fidelity or beauty is to be honored more. What is true, according
to an Italian dictum, of women, is also true of translations: if beautiful not
faithful, if faithful not beautiful....

Instead of stylistic beauty, I chose fidelity to the original as my chief

guideline. This is true of my two other translations as well. The fact that both
works were written in mid-18th-century German made the task somewhat easier.
And certainly so with respect to Johann Heinrich Lambert's Cosmologische
Briefe uber die Einrichtung des Weltbaues, first published in 1761. He hardly
wrote a phrase longer than five lines, a great contrast with the syntax in
Immanuel Kant's Allgemeine Naturgeschichte and Theorie des Himmels. There
one encounters on occasion phrases that are twenty-five or even thirty lines long.
Sentences half as long are typical in it. This can only make for obscurity of
expression even when the thought is clear. Lambert's was certainly a clear mind
as befitted a first-rate mathematician and logician. About Kant, let me recall here
a remark of E. Rommel, the son of the "Desert Fox," who, as Mayor of Stuttgart,
once complained to a scholarly gathering there about the fact that Kant had made
obscure diction de rigueur for German academics. Herr Rommel would have hit
his target better had he pointed out that Kant set a standard for academic
excellence by promoting obscure thought through convoluted phraseology.

My translation of Lambert's book came out in April 1977 under the title
Cosmological Letters on the Construction of the World Edifice, or half a year
before the bicentenary of his death was celebrated in Mulhouse, the town of his
birth, in the form of an international Conference. A prominent role in the
organization of the Conference was played by Mr. Roger Jaquel, an elderly
gentleman from Mulhouse, who had for decades devoted all his spare time to
research on Lambert's life and work. He clearly knew much more about Lambert
than I did, although my fund of information was not meager, partly because in
1975 I was able to study the rich manuscript material on Lambert in the Stadts-
archiv in Basel, where Mr. Jaquel was a frequent visitor. He was quickly alerted
to my visit there, and soon I was receiving reprints of his numerous publications
on Lambert. Mr. Jaquel meanwhile prevailed on the "authorities" in Paris to
invite me to the Conference and give one of the principal talks there. The
encomiums which dear old Mr. Jaquel heaped on me as he introduced my talk
still make me blush. A chief of those authorities was Rene Taton, then director
of the history of science section of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. My
meeting him in Mulhouse triggered a chain of events that belongs to another
chapter.

Strangely, Lambert did not say a word about the gravitational and optical
paradoxes of an infinite Euclidean universe, although he must have been fully
aware of them. He certainly insisted on setting the total mass of the universe as
strictly finite but his sole reason for doing so was characteristic of a total devotee
of logic. Still I find it difficult to assume that the idea of the impossibility of an
actually realized infinite quantity, which he mentioned in a mere line, would
have been a sufficiently strong motivation for him to work out his hierarchically
organized finite universe. There the gravitational force was balanced by the
centrifugal force of all bodies rotating around ever larger black stars (he called
them "Dunkle Regenten" or "Dark Regents") that gravitationally ruled the bodies
revolving around them. Their presumed darkness led me to trace out a possible
connection between them and the black holes of modern scientific cosmology. A
vain effort, to be sure, as this was forced on me after a public lecture at the
University of Gottingen on that topic. I am more fond of remembering the
fountain, with the statue of Ganseliese on top of it, in the old town of Gottingen
to which graduates of Gottingen University pay a nostalgic visit after having
passed their final exams, even if not with flying colors.

The most rewarding part of my researches on Lambert related to my

investigations of the place of his cosmological ideas in 17th- and 18th-century
German cosmological and astronomical literature. The result was an Introduction
and a set of Notes, more than a hundred pages long, which prompted the
reviewer in Scientia to state that because of the material presented there, the
history of 17th- and 18th-century cosmology should be entirely rewritten.' It is
still to be recognized, for instance, that the idea of an infinite universe came into
vogue only from the mid-19th century on. A large number of other points ought
to be taken note of as well, for instance, the late 17th-century origin of the word
"cosmologia." Even such an otherwise valuable work as the Cosmogonies of our
Fathers by Katharine B. Collier (1934), which has the subtitle, Some Theories of
the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth Centuries, teems with untenable cliches.

I wonder what the reviewer of my translation of Lambert in Scientia would

have said three years later when there appeared my translation of Kant's work,
Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. The book, which I
intended to serve as a warning against the idolization of Kant on the occasion of
the 200th anniversary, in 1981, of the publication of his Kritik der reinen
Vernunft, came out only toward the end of that year. Kant's text in that
translation is merely a hundred or so pages and equally long are both the
Introduction and the Notes. Although by bibliographical rules the book may
therefore be mine even more than Kant's, bibliographers, fortunately, did not
start associating me with the Sage of Konigsberg.

A very long introduction and a plethora of notes were needed to put beyond
the pale of doubt the fact that Kant's knowledge of the science of his day was
abysmally low, and that he had no proper scientific training and no scientific
mind at all. This finding stood in stark contrast to widely entertained ideas about
Kant. I have also found that Laplace had no inkling of Kant's work. This was one
more, and very revealing, indication of the dubious status of the so-called Kant-
Laplace nebular hypothesis. The latter is the product of the Second Reich, which
wanted intellectual and scientific heroes as numerous as its chief antagonist,
France, could boast of. Helmholtz, who was chiefly responsible for raising Kant
to a scientific pedestal, merely proved that all too often excellence in physics
readily sets one up as an authority in the history of physics.

Helmholtz said nothing about the Third Part of Kant's work, where one finds
the Sage of Konigsberg talking confidently about the intellectual and moral
characteristics of the denizens of other planets. Tellingly, Hastie, the first
English translator of the work, carefully left out that Third Part. At the age of
thirty-one, Kant should have been mature enough not to take fiction for facts. A
quarter of a century later, when he came out with the Critique of Pure Reason, he
merely provided a vast version of the apriorism that blares forth from all his
"youthful" works. So much for my contribution to the bicentennial of the
publication of that book which proves that Kant was not merely a misfortune in
the history of Western philosophy, as Bertrand Russell would have it, but a sheer
tragedy.

With the research that went into the writing of those three monographs and
into doing those three translations, I have accumulated a vast amount of material
on the history of cosmology prior to the 20th century. For a while I toyed with
the idea of writing such a history, but it remained a mere project. Out of that
material there came only smaller writings, such as essays on the Bode-Titius law
of planetary distances, a topic that also had to do with anniversaries. Cosmology
was not altogether forgotten, but when my interest turned to it again, it was not
in the form of a thematic history of it. It came back as something with heavy
ramifications for philosophy and natural theology.

Meanwhile I was amused when a letter came from Popper, who wrote: "Let
me tell you that I am most impressed by your writings (so far as I know them). I
am not a historian of science; but it seems to me that you are not only an
extremely competent historian of science but also an outstanding philosopher of
science. Your criticisms of my views of Kant's Cosmology are very fair and
probably right. But I love Kant (in spite of his a priori validity claims which I
think were almost unavoidable at the time) and I even venerate him: this may
bias me."5 These words of Popper's, who incidentally never referred to my
writings in his publications, may give a glimpse of Popper's forcing the facts of
the history of science into preconceived molds.

Popper must have learned about my writings from john C. Eccles, who
contacted me shortly after The Relevance was published. As an enemy of
reductionism and scientism, Eccles thought he had found a kindred soul in me.
He eagerly read for the publisher the typescript of my Brain, Mind and
Computers, but was not so pleased with the typescript of Science and Creation,
which I originally offered to the same publisher. Eccles could not understand
why I started with the Hindus of old and not with the Sumerians whom he
considered as the creators of the oldest civilization. But he missed my point or
perhaps he did not really like it. When years later it became clear to me why, it
considerably saddened me. The great scientist turned out to be a perplexed soul
who wove ever more intractable webs around his mind. Clearly, he could not
warm up to the message of Science and Creation. He expected it to be about the
history of civilizations and not about the history of science in its relation to
civilizations, ancient and modern. The difference lay in the role of religion in
civilizations. Because of this, the book had to start with the ancient Hindus,
which becomes clear in the next chapter. There I shall deal with those books of
mine that were not merely a delight, but a sheer delight to write.
There is little delight to be had from reading Nietzsche, apart from the pleasure
one can take in his artfully tailored aphoristic phrases. Nietzsche is a master of
style as long as he knows that brevity is a mark of genius. But the pleasure turns
into pain as soon as one is exposed at length to the tragic, indeed nihilistic, thrust
of many of his aphorisms, and especially to his celebration of the idea of an
"Ewige Wiederkehr," or eternal returns. The idea cannot help conveying the
prospect of being caught in a treadmill with no hope of ever escaping from it. All
this forms a most instructive contrast to the joy which a Christian finds in the
perspective of a straight trend from creation as an absolute starting point to a
similarly absolute end point or consummation. A Christian should find it very
telling that neopagans, especially their Nazi variety, found most germane to their
thinking the symbol known as the swastika, the quintessence of the ancient
pagan world view and its age-old emblem.

It was not the futility of "heroic hopelessness" exuding from Nietzsche's

celebration of eternal returns that made me collect, sometime in the spring of
1965, his relevant dicta. At that time, shortly after I had completed writing The
Relevance, my mind was still riveted on anything that stood for an abuse of
physics. The perspective of eternal returns, standing for a cyclical cosmology,
appeared to me to be such an abuse. A truly ironic aspect of Nietzsche's
infatuation with eternal returns was that he, a classicist, began to teach himself
physics in order to prove that the idea of a cyclic universe, going eternally
through the same motions, was not simply scientific but the touchstone of truth
for science. He merely took an egregious error for truth.

There was more to Nietzsche's farcical enterprise than the futility of

dissipating the specter of the law of entropy which shows all physical processes
to be set on a one-directional course. Contrary to the expectation of Nietzsche or
of anyone committed to the idea of eternal returns, the idea is no better than the
vain hope that one can get something for nothing, because actually one cannot
even get exactly what one pays for. These two statements stand for the first two
laws of thermodynamics. The third law can be rendered in a no less
understandable way: there is no end to the depreciation of one's currency. It is, of
course, possible to prime any system by borrowing from outside it. But since
there is nothing outside of the universe, there can be no domain within it that
would reverse for the whole system the fate of running down. The fate of the
universe is being set on a course toward its "heath-death" at the temperature
called absolute zero. The latter is best thought of as the absolute absence of any
motion, of any stirring, a state of absolute and universal rigor mortis. There,
nothing can decay any further, let alone come alive again. There, it is not
possible to locate even that minimum of energy difference which is needed by a
body to reflect the slightest physical impact from the outside.

I do not know whether all this was summed up already in Nietzsche's time in
the form that one cannot win, one cannot even break even, nor can one get out of
the game-an accurate rendering of the three laws of thermodynamics. At any rate
no scientist of any note doubted the validity of the three laws of thermodynamics
around 1890. No physicist took seriously Rankine's gratuitous speculations about
concave ether walls in faraway spaces that would refocus the light of stars into
certain points of space and thereby produce new stars.

Nietzsche did not seem to know about those speculations,' though almost
certainly he would have seized on them. It is not difficult to guess that he would
have brushed aside with contempt another aspect of the idea of eternal returns,
had it been called to his attention. That aspect, or the fact that engrossment with
the idea of eternal returns was widely noticeable whenever science suffered a
stillbirth, exercised a powerful appeal on my mind from 1969 or so on. The
stillbirth took place in all great ancient cultures: especially in India, but also in
China, in Egypt, in Babylon, and in Greece as well. They all were dominated by
the idea of eternal returns and delighted in drawing swastikas on a wide variety
of objects, ranging from pitchers to pavements. The only viable birth of science
took place in a culture steeped in a vision wherein history, cosmic and human,
appeared to be subject to a single one-directional movement, for which a straight
arrow may be the most appropriate symbol.

The culture was Western Europe, about which the obvious is stated in Belloc's
famous dictum: "Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe." The faith was
Christian faith. Whenever in Europe's modern phase there was on hand a resolve
to restore paganism and its cyclical world view, science was threatened. This
happened, it is well to recall, not only in the neopagan dispensation of Nazism,
but also in institutionalized forms of Marxism. Diehard Marxists, who find
welcome refuge in academe, would grind their teeth on being reminded of the
structural similarity between the swastika and the hammer and sickle. But when
in The New York Times, so eager to sing the praises of the Lincoln Brigade, one
finds the admission that, in view of what is emerging from the KGB archives,
McCarthy appears to have been closer to the truth than his antagonists, it may
not be a cultural crime to insist on that similarity'

An intellectual should never take an inordinate pride in whatever may be

original in his insights. The expressions, "the stillbirths of science" and "its only
viable birth," have originated with me, although they are still to be widely
adopted, if ever. Here let me register that I have found great mental satisfaction
in the perspective which those expressions convey. The perspective may stand
for nothing less than a Copernican turn in the historiography of science. It
certainly runs counter to the received view about the origin of science. Here let
me first speak of the working out in detail of that connection between the
stillbirths of science and the idea of eternal returns. The work demanded a
thorough study of the world views of those ancient cultures and of the fate and
fortunes of science in each of them.

As to the world views one could learn from reading Nietzsche alone that the
idea of eternal returns was very popular with the Greeks of old. Widely known,
of course, was the Hindu's infatuation with the doctrine of yugas, or the set of
four great ages that return an infinite number of times. No reference could,
however, be found to the idea of eternal returns in studies on the history of
science in various ancient cultures, although all of them were dominated by that
idea. Nor did the authors of those studies stress the fact that in all those ancient
cultures promising steps were made toward science, but they all came to a halt
fairly soon. Was there any connection between that idea and this fact?

It is not a pleasant task to call attention to the obvious. To make others appear
to be shortsighted, let alone blind, may easily evoke resentment. But it had to be
obvious and clearer than daylight that in none of those cultures, although they
lacked no talent and ingenuity, did science become a self-sustaining enterprise in
which every discovery generates another. In all those cultures the scientific
enterprise came to a standstill. It is this phenomenon which I called the stillbirths
of science. I could not help noticing that they are the most monumental and yet
most studiedly ignored symptoms in the history of science. Further, it quickly
became clear to me why historians of science shied away from the subject. Most
of them simply did not want to face up to something that would have shaken
their confidence in presenting science as the savior of mankind.

The putting of new labels, such as "stillbirths" and "viable birth," on well-
known, though never really appreciated, phenomena, could seem innovative
insofar as it put in a new, and perhaps disturbing, light something that has
usually been shrugged off by historians of science and by historians of those
cultures. Their nonchalance should reveal its hollowness as soon as one
considers the possibility of a Galileo or of a Newton being a product of, say,
ancient India. In that case ancient Rome might have been patrolled by Gurkhas
and, horribile dictu, the tribal chiefs of the British Isles might have paid tribute
not to Rome but to some maharajahs in Delhi. The scenario would include
princely visits from India to those isles, with maharajahs landing where
eventually Greenwich Observatory was to rise and setting up their tents on plots
where much later Buckingham Palace was to loom large.

Or suppose that Newton had been a Chinese of old, who had given a scientific
explanation of the working of the compass and of the trajectory of rockets, two
instruments first devised in China. It is then tempting to imagine the Chinese of
old venturing along the Aleutian Islands, colonizing what is now Alaska, and
then spreading out all over the North American continent. After all, their
ancestors did it, though with only bow and arrow in their hands. But now the
colonization would have been carried out by a people that navigated with
compass in hand, and with the science of ballistics in their head to make their
rockets truly effective. Big and small cities in North America as well as in the
South would now carry Chinese names. On landing on the shores of San
Salvador, Columbus would have been in for a very different surprise, if he could
have surprised its inhabitants at all. Political history would have been very
different if the history of science had taken a different course.

Historians who often write on what might have been, even when they write up
what had taken place, would have a great opportunity were they to focus on
those stillbirths. They should take for a tell-tale sign the fact that not one but all
major ancient cultures were dominated by a cyclic world view, and that none of
them came up with a Newton, or rather with the three laws of motion that
constitute the basis and backbone of exact science. The reading of the great
classics of those cultures suggests more than a mere coincidence. All those
cultures exude a tone of pessimism or dejectedness. None of them conveys a
crisp idea of progress. At best their principal thinkers took the actual state of
things for the highest that could be reached by human inventiveness. Aristotle
emphatically stated this about his own times. Strange as such complacency may
appear in a great mind, it revealed logic. Why make much effort to come up with
innovations if the same would recur in every Great Year? That Year was the
chronological specification of the rotation of the swastika, a sanskrit word,
which means, farcically enough, "being well." Could the prospect of the return
of the same, again and again, be a cheerful prospect? Was it not rather conjuring
up existence as caught up in a huge treadmill?

The reader may sense that I say all this in a way that betrays the excitement I
felt as such questions forced themselves on me. I cannot hide my enthusiasm as I
recall further steps of this intellectual journey of mine into the stillbirths and
birth of science. For me this journey was into the unknown because when I had
studied scholastic philosophy I heard no references to Aristotle's infatuation with
the idea of eternal returns. Of course, he meant that things return only in a
generic way. Peripatetics would return as a school, but not as individuals. And so
with the Platonists. But other Greek sages held that each and every one would
return individually. This could only generate fatalism, which incidentally
decided the fate of the last stronghold of the Maya in the Yucatan peninsula,
who were equally under the spell of eternal returns. In their defeatism they even
told some Spaniards not to come until the fateful moment had struck for them
according to their calendars.

There was another side to the coin, to which my reading of Duhem's Systeme
du monde opened my eyes. Never one to mince words, Duhem put it bluntly:
"The doctrine of the Great Year, held by all Greek philosophers and scientists,
held by all the Rabbis of medieval times, and held by all Muslim philosophers as
well, had to be first overthrown so that science might eventually rise. And this
overthrow could only be effected by Christianity."3 But Duhem did not elaborate
on two facts: First he did not explore the fate of science outside the Greek and
Muslim ambience and even there he did not cast his net widely. Second, he did
not explore the very special role which belief in Christ, as something much more
than mere monotheism, played in this respect. To work this out fell to me,
though I came to it more than a dozen years after I wrote Science and Creation.
Duhem merely hinted at the fact that the richness of a Christ-centered
monotheism helped overcome man's poverty even in respect to science.
 A devout Catholic and a great mind, Duhem was not a theologian. All he said
about the background of Buridan's formulating around 1348 or so the idea of
inertial motion, or Newton's first law, was that it related to Buridan's assertion of
creation out of nothing and in time. But Duhem did not delve into the question:
In what sense was that assertion for Buridan also a Christian dogma? Was that
dogma for Buridan something specifically Christian, that is, directly and
intimately relating to and rooted in belief in Christ as the only begotten Son of
the Father? Could it be a Christian dogma if both Jews and Muslims also held it?
Or was their monotheism less effective in prompting them to embrace
emphatically the doctrine of creation out of nothing and in time? Did not
cabalism, a characteristically Jewish preoccupation, cast a strange shadow on
their belief in the Creator? Was not Averrhoism a typically Muslim
phenomenon?

As I was writing Science and Creation, I did not go beyond stating that such a
Christian belief certainly played an explicit role in the Christian rejection of the
idea of eternal returns, especially as that rejection was memorably articulated by
Saint Augustine. But as I was to realize years later, the only viable birth of
science took place in a matrix that was not merely monotheistic, but also
christologically monotheistic. Further, it contained a specifically christological
prompting for a firm espousal of the dogma of creation out of nothing and in
time.

Meanwhile I took immense delight in enlarging my mind by delving into

ancient Hindu, Chinese, pre-Columbian American, Egyptian, Babylonian, and
Greek history, into a re-reading of biblical history and of patristic literature.
They contained many indications that I was on the right track in unfolding a new
vision of the history of science, not attempted beforehand. Some of the
indications were a sheer delight to stumble on. I would not have found a waste
all the effort that went into researching Science and Creation, if it had acquainted
me with but one gem, a gem hidden in Moses Maimonides' Guide for the
Perplexed. There the "great Moses," as Aquinas called him, sums up the futility
of the speculations of Muslim sages about the physical world in a simile: the
Creator rules nature in the same unpredictable way as a caliph decides on the
spur of the moment whether he would turn right or left as he leaves his palace
for an afternoon ride.4

The instructiveness of that simile proved to me inexhaustible. It was in the

back of my mind when, years later, I had opportunities to take up the question of
the failure of Muslim civilizations to become the cradle of a science that did not
suffer a stillbirth. One of those occasions was an invitation to present a paper at a
conference in Islamabad. Because of organizational mismanagement I was
assured of an airplane ticket only two days before the opening of the conference.
I therefore did not go, but I sent my paper, "The Physics of Impetus and the
Impetus of the Koran."5 Some Muslim fundamentalists used it as a weapon
against me instead of finding in it an explanation for their own predicament.
While Muslim countries may inveigh against this or that kind of Western Satan,
they cannot help espousing Western science. This in turn will force upon them a
reconsideration of their fundamentalism. Meanwhile I have to take it in stride
when a public lecture of mine is interrupted by Muslim demonstrators, waving in
their hands a copy of Science and Creation, which, in its chapter, "Delay in
Detour," contains a number of quotations from the Koran that reveal its world
view to be markedly voluntaristic and therefore antiscientific.

Writing Science and Creation forced upon me my first sustained study of the
history of science during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The latter began
to loom as a period as much antiscientific as scientific. There was a dark side to
the Renaissance in the measure in which it stood for a reinstatement of the idea
of the Great Year, with its periodic rebirths or renaissances. The rise of
Newtonian science showed a decisive aversion to the idea of eternal returns,
whereas 19th-century materialism tried to give it respectability, with potentially
disastrous results for science.

During the 20th century the idea of an oscillating universe was seized upon by
materialists who greeted it as something germane to the Great Year. Very
recently the same perception propels the praises of the idea of an inflationary
universe and, what it logically leads to, the idea of many universes, and the
replacement of the idea of the Universe with that of a Multiverse. There, to
anticipate a point to be discussed later, even the word "cosmology" is no longer
applicable. In its place inflationary theorists should introduce the term
"cosmetology," or the art of sprucing up mere cosmic fiction with the semblance
of science. All this further illustrates that the basic choices in cosmology are
only two: cyclic or linear, or rather, chaos or order.

The reception of Science and Creation varied according to one's preference of

any of those alternatives. Catholic historians of science should have been greatly
pleased. But with the exception of one, who hoped that my book would start a
debate,6 they did not seem to wish to jeopardize their academic reputation in the
eyes of their secularist counterparts in leading universities by focusing on a
feature that spoke well of Catholicism. The Journal of Victoria Institute, an
association of believing scientists in Great Britain, was jubilant. And so were
some Protestant missionaries in Japan. But the reviewer for the British Journal
for the History of Science could hardly hold back his scorn.

Clearly, I must have touched some raw nerves in academe. No wonder. For
most in academe the basic dogma is that science is the savior of mankind, and is
already liberating mankind from that highest form of superstition, which is
Christian belief in the supernatural. To them my thesis had to appear as nothing
short of spitting on the flag. But the facts, told in over half a million words,
could not be disputed. They could only be ignored in the manner in which
ostriches behave when they feel threatened. So one of those prominent academic
ostriches declared me to be the Number One enemy. Another, again a historian-
philosopher of science, declined to review my next book with the remark that he
(actually she) would not touch my writings even with a ten-foot pole. She also
loved to parade as a Christian. But that was in Britain, the land where the calm
toleration of contradictions passes for profundity of thought, for cultural
harmony, and for human probity.

That "next book" to be discussed here was "next" to Science and Creation
only in the sense of being the second of my books in the category discussed in
this chapter. Actually six full years and six other books came between Science
and Creation and The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origins. The latter
is the enlarged text of the Fremantle Lectures I gave in the Spring of 1977 at
Balliol College, Oxford. Balliol then was in a transition. Its master, the Marxist
historian Christopher Hill, was about to retire. The place was run by Anthony
Kenny, who eventually succeeded Hill as Master of Balliol. It was Kenny who
picked up a chance suggestion of Peter Hodgson of Corpus Christi about me as a
possible Fremantle lecturer. Kenny had not yet come out with his
autobiographical The Road from Rome in which he specified his having found
inconclusive Thomas' five ways of proving the existence of God as the reason
for his having given up priesthood and faith as well. Unlike Hill, who was
spoken of as the "absentee abbot" of Balliol, Kenny was solicitous about invited
guests there. I could always count on the warm hospitality of Father James
Forbes, Master of St. Benet's Hall, at five minutes' walk from Balliol. As a
young monk of Ampleforth, around 1937 he spent a year in my abbey in
Hungary, of which he spoke glowingly from a distance of forty years. At the end
of my lectures, all of which he faithfully attended, Father James threw a big
party in my honor at St. Benet's, which greatly contrasted with the "standing on
your feet" reception that brought my lectureship to an end at Balliol.

Right outside Balliol there is a memorial plaque for Ridley and Latimore.
Both would wonder today what has become of the candle of faith which they
thought they had lit forever for England as they were burned to death by the
minions of Mary. One afternoon as I walked by that plaque someone from
Balliol pointedly asked me what I thought of that memorial. He did this with a
touch of provocation. He clearly wanted to put a Catholic priest on the
defensive. Had I known at that time of The Monstrous Regiment, Christopher
Hollis' gripping account of Elizabeth's reign, I would have parried his question
by asking him what he thought of that book. Even if he had known of it, most
likely he would have never heard of what inspired its title, because Hollis
himself did not prominently refer to John Knox's "First Blast of Trumpet against
the Monstrous Regiments of Women," written against Mary. Elizabeth's
accession to the throne quickly turned the pamphlet into a source of great
embarrassment not only for Knox, but for Calvin as well.

It was during those lectures that I received a briefing about the true spiritual
status of the Oxford Colleges, hardly a concern to the gentleman who pointed at
that plaque. He had even less concern for Newman, who a century and a half ago
had tried to rekindle the embers from the ashes into which the flame of that
candle had turned. The briefing came from an impeccable source, the outgoing
President of Trinity College. He held that at most 10 percent of the fellows and
students still had some faith. I wonder whether he would not lower that figure
today to about 5 percent or less. His gracious wife, the close friend of some
friends of mine in France, told me that she, though of the Church of England, felt
the urge to genuflect whenever she walked by Newman's bust in Trinity's
gardens. Twenty years later, the Church of England inscribed Newman in its
liturgical calendar. Such pretensions are symptoms of that decay that is the wish
to have it both ways. The intonation in most Oxford Colleges of the words
"Benedictus" and "Benedicat" before and after dinner is indicative of the illusion
that it is proper to have the veneer of Christian faith without its substance.
 But back to the Fremantle lectures. Someone who read the text of the lectures
for Oxford University Press, wrote that one would expect from Jaki something
more convincingly argued. Such was an artful way of avoiding the problem of
whether, except in relatively trivial matters, one could convince academics about
anything. The reviewer was silent on whether the lectures were original, whether
their aim was achieved within the limits set by those lectures, and, finally,
whether the documentation was scholarly. On the last count alone the reader
should have admitted that the lectures contained much material nowhere else to
be found in the literature dealing with the topic. It was suggested that I rewrite
the lectures.

This, of course, would have turned the lectures into something different.
Whenever a topic or material is presented in the form of lectures aimed at a
broader audience rather than at a seminar of specialists, the lecturer's hands are
tied indeed. Somebody high on the ladder at the Press brought me the bad news
and felt very much embarrassed. Academic Presses are often the victims of
readers of manuscripts whenever these find in this or that manuscript a threat to
their own position. Therefore they damn the manuscript with faint praise that
makes the author wonder whether the manuscript was read at all. The official in
question urged me to publish the lectures as they were. Dr. Douglas Grant,
director of the Scottish Academic Press at that time, eagerly picked up the book.

Personally I am very satisfied with having published the lectures in almost

exactly the same form as they were delivered. Usually I look up my published
books only for a reference or two. To re-read one's books is not usually a
rewarding experience. It is equivalent to looking at one's old photographs. Every
phrase one writes is the product of one's mind at a particular time. Whatever the
power of one's mind to help one re-live past moments, the mind stubbornly lives
in the present tense. But now that I had to re-read The Origin of Science and the
Science of its Origin in connection with writing this chapter, I found it a very
rewarding experience.

This was partly so because its argument will forever remain greatly enjoyable
for me. I find it a sheer delight to catch empiricists, agnostics, rationalists, and
sensationalists, to say nothing of their even more confused 20th-century
counterparts, in inconsistencies and in incorrect or sloppy reading of their source
material. For such were all those who, from Bacon on, discussed the question of
the origin of science. Because of their assumptions, they were forced either to
underplay the role of the mind in doing science, or to run roughshod over plain
facts. If one stressed, as Bacon and Herbert Spencer did, the role of everyday
needs, the problem of why science came so late in human history became
unanswerable. There has never been a day without such needs for any and all.
Similarly self-defeating was Turgot's claim that only when there were many
tinkerers could great discoverers also arise. But no sooner had Turgot declared
that England could boast of no great painters because it had few mediocre ones,
than Blake, Turner, Gainsborough, and others appeared on the scene. Thus was
Turgot refuted and much later those who espoused the Marxist fallacy that
quantities generate qualities.

I found even more amusing some answers to the strictly historical problem
which is posed by the inchoate states of science present in all ancient and
backward cultures. If they were fragments of one highly developed scientific
culture, where was it to be located? The French astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly
located that mythical culture in what is today Mongolia, or perhaps Outer
Mongolia. And he did so in all seriousness. Extremely amusing was his
insensitivity to the following dilemma: If one praised too highly the acumen of
the Chinese of old, as it was customary to do during the 17th and 18th centuries,
how could they also be described as not being inventive? For already when the
first Jesuit missionaries entered China around 1600, its science was no match to
what the West possessed just before Galileo, even if one kept mum, as the
Jesuits did, on Copernicus. (Their "crime" was incomparably less than the crime
of those academics and newspaper editors who in our times kept mum about the
millions of victims of Mao tse-Tung, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and other
"progressive" leaders in genocides and democides.) And if Christianity was set
up as the enemy of the scientific quest, how could it be that long before the
philosophes made unbelief fashionable, science had made great strides in
believing Western Europe?

The more one probed into such and similar problems of the early explanations
of the origin of science, the more one could see the noose tightening around the
necks of their spokesmen. To take delight in the purely intellectual spectacle of
such discomfitures could hardly pass for bloodthirstiness. Rather, it reflected a
sense of liberation from the stranglehold which certain champions of intellectual
freedom foisted on Western consciousness. The same sense could but gain
strength as one confronted the theories which such luminaries as Comte,
Whewell, Mach, Sarton, Koyre, Kuhn, and Needham presented about the origin
of science. Their ideas were duly dissected as my Fremantle lectures followed
one another.

Then came the no less delightful probing into the reason of why all those
luminaries shied away from the medieval centuries or tried to talk themselves
out of the Age of Faith. The latter tactic hardly credited a Sarton, who loved to
describe himself as a historian of medieval science. No less strangely, the same
tactic found a chief articulator in Koyre, whose principal aim was to minimize
Duhem's presentation of the medieval preparation of Newtonian physics. It was a
pleasure to show how all these had an axe to grind, while they tried to parade in
the garb of pure, disinterested scholarship. The wielding of the axe served to
shore up some secularist ideology, including Freemasonic universalism, and to
cut down Christianity. The facts and themes presented in Science and Creation
stood out ever more strongly. In sum, I could argue that only patently
unsatisfactory theories could be formulated about the origin of science as long as
one tried to overlook the question of ultimate origin. The only answer to this
question had to be the doctrine of creation out of nothing and in time. This
doctrine, as viewed within the history of science, loomed ever larger as a very
Christian doctrine, that is, a doctrine riveted in Christ. That all this was sheer
delight to contemplate by a priest unwilling to sell out to the secular academe
should seem fairly obvious.

Tellingly, Scientia, which shortly beforehand hailed my translation of

Lambert's Cosmological Letters, refused to publish reports, written by an Oxford
don, about the lectures, although the reports were sent at request. Clearly, in
some circles scholarship was not to be attributed to an author, once he suggested
that science owed something, and indeed something most substantial, to
Christianity, let alone to Christ. And some of those who should have lent their
support seemed to look the other way. Alistair Crombie came to the lectures, or
to most of them. In view of his slighting of Duhem in his Medieval and Early
Modern Science, he could not take much delight in my thesis. For the rest of his
life he failed to see Duhem's greatness. Crombie's few references to Duhem in
the three thick volumes of his Style of Scientific Thinking in the European
Tradition remain a classic in disproportionality.

As to the word "style" in the title, it bespoke a desperate search for originality
after words like "revolutions," "paradigms," "research programs," "images," and
the like have almost emptied the vocabulary. These ever new verbal keys were
looked for so that the secrets of scientific thinking might be unlocked. Even
worse was the juxtaposition of the words "style" and "European." Until well into
the 19th century, where Crombie's investigations came to an end, Europeans
stood for truth before they bartered it for style. This was true even of the
Enlightenment. Suffice it to recall Condorcet's list of what he and other
philosophes owed to the Scholastics, and to recall Comte, whose bequest was
Catholicism minus Christianity. Only after they were swayed by evolutionism
did Europeans begin to fall for styles, under the labels of pragmatism, relativism,
progressivism, reformism, and the like, in all of which style dominates
substance. Standing for truth, rightly or wrongly, was the Europeans' style until
the 20th century, when they cast themselves on currents where ever changing
fashions are the permanent wave.

It is most likely that Crombie never studied my long monograph on Duhem's

life and work, although he listed it in the 300-page bibliography. There one
would look in vain for The Origin of Science, or for Science and Creation, let
alone for the third book, The Savior of Science, to be discussed in this chapter.
When I met him for the last time in the Pontifical Academy of Science, where he
was elected in 1994, he assigned the origin of science to the Greeks' rationality
and to the modern formulation of the experimental method. In his Style of
Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition Crombie moved even further away
from the Christian perspective as he cast the development of science into a
Darwinian mold. And just as in Darwin's case the "origin of species" meant
merely the transformation of an already existing species into another, but not the
origin of the biological entity known as species, in Crombie's case, too,
preoccupation with changes of style in an already existing science blocked out
interest in its very origin insofar as it coincides with the formulation of inertial
motion. Crombie, a great gardener, was a botanist by training, attentive to every
small detail but hardly alive to the incisive aspects of the problem. He loved to
return to the study of the many volumes of the correspondence of Mersenne,
whose writings (suffice it to think of his Quaestiones celeberrimae in Genesim of
eight hundred folio columns) are an epitome of the art of not seeing the forest for
the trees.

For all his attention to details, Duhem never lost sight of the great ideas that
animated the scientific enterprise. His incisiveness, evident in pregnant
formulations of what is essential, helped me a great deal to keep some great
themes in focus. But it was not in his writings that I found a phrase that almost
pushed me to write The Savior of Science. The phrase, to be quoted shortly, is in
the last of three letters which Darwin dictated to his son Francis as a reply to an
anxious inquiry by a 17-year-old German student, who first wrote to Darwin on
April 2, 1879. From those replies alone one could sense that the young man felt
his religious beliefs to be greatly threatened by Darwin's theory, a mixture of
poor philosophizing and good science.

The situation was particularly acute in Germany where Ernst Haeckel had just
set up Darwinian evolution as the refutation of all spiritual and supernatural
reality, an interpretation which Darwin did not disavow. Darwin's first reply
assured the young man that evolution was not incompatible with belief in God-
by which Darwin did not specify what he meant. Frustrated as he was, the
student wrote to Haeckel, quoting him Darwin. Haeckel had no choice but to
express his agreement with Darwin on belief in God, a strange tactic on
Haeckel's part who combined biological research with the presidency of the
Monistic League.

The student refused to let Darwin off the hook. In his third letter to Darwin, he
asked him to speak plainly on the subject of whether evolutionary theory is
compatible with belief in biblical revelation in general and in Christ in
particular. Darwin now had no choice but to come clean. He did so by stating
that he did not think that there ever was a revelation. This was preceded by his
remark: "Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of
scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence."7 Such was a
roundabout way of stating that anyone whose mind had been imbued with the
scientific spirit, must take for spurious any evidence presented on behalf of
belief in Christ.

Darwin's words, which I first encountered in 1975 or so, stayed with me as if a

bullet had lodged itself in the back of my brain. I knew I had to answer him at
the first opportunity. I knew that I was in a lucky position similar to the one in
which Huxley found himself when Bishop Wilberforce taunted him with the
question of whether he descended on his mother's side or on his father's side
from the apes. At that point Huxley slapped his thigh and turned to someone
next to him: "The Lord hath delivered him [the bishop] into my hands." Huxley
must have thought of the Amalekites falling into the hands of Joshua. My
opportunity to turn the table on Darwin on account of his remark on Christ came
in 1988 when I was invited to deliver a series of lectures sponsored by the
Wethersfield Institute and I was given the liberty to choose any topic within the
broader context of the relation of Catholic religion and science.

Instead of Wethersfield Institute I should speak of its President, Chauncey

Stillman, whom I first met in the summer of 1986. I came into his life during his
last years and I still cherish the days I spent as his guest in his stately home near
Amenia on the New York-Connecticut border. He had, some twenty years
earlier, set up Wethersfield Institute as an organ to promote Catholic culture. A
Harvard graduate and eventually a convert to Catholicism, he also set up, in
memory of his father, the Stillman Chair of Catholic studies at Harvard. He was
rather disappointed when, in late 1987, I declined to make a move to secure the
Chair for myself, although a mere declaration of my candidacy might have been
enough.

I made it clear to Chauncey that I saw rhyme and reason in promoting

Catholic culture only if I could address those who were seriously interested in
and sympathetic to it. This meant that attendance of the lectures was to be by
invitation and implied some participation on the part of those who attended. The
result was a sort of closed seminar lasting several days, which he generously
underwrote. Thirty or so came, ten or so of them from Europe. We stayed
together for five days in a hotel, formerly a hunting lodge, in the hills not too far
from Amenia. Five among the participants formed a panel. It was their duty or
privilege to start the discussion after each lecture. They were all academics, one
of them a historian of science, noted for his work on Herschel's correspondence.

To see the full context of Darwin's statement it was not enough to read his
replies in the three-volume edition of his letters, although even in that form they
were telling enough for anyone who had eyes to see. One also had to see the
letters, very agonizing letters indeed, of the young German student, most likely
an evangelical type of Lutheran, still an upper classman in the Gymnasium.
Since Darwin and his son had read those letters, I was possibly the first to pay
attention to them. Once I received from the Library of Cambridge University the
photocopy of those letters, I had the stimulus and the sheer delight to write the
five lectures that came out in print as The Savior of Science.

I introduced the lectures with a presentation and analysis of the exchange of

letters between Darwin and that young student. The first of the lectures, "The
Stillbirths of Science," was a summary of the argument of Science and Creation,
though with new material. The argument of the second, "The Birth that Saved
Science," was entirely original. It was there that I set forth for the first time the
scientific impact of the Logos doctrine as defined against the Arians. In setting
forth the doctrine of the divinity of the Logos, or the consubstantial Son, Saint
Athanasius clearly perceived an all-important implication: The divinity of the
Logos demanded that the universe created by the Father in the Son be fully
logical, that is, fully ordered as befitted a truly divine Logos. Newton had no
inkling that in denying, as a latter-day Arian, the divinity of Christ, he parted
from the cultural tradition that alone assured him of the full coherence and
consistency of the physical universe. This alone could support the crux of his
gravitational theory, namely, that the fall of the moon had to obey the same law
as the fall of any stone on earth. While this could be but an anathema for the
pantheistic Greeks, it was a logical corollary of the Christian view of the
cosmos. This is why that view could in the long run be weaned from its erstwhile
association with geocentrism and Aristotelian cosmology, of which two the latter
is unabashed pantheism.

But the Savior played an even more directly scientific role in rescuing science
from its repeated stillbirths. Scientifically speaking, the essence of that fiasco
consisted in the inability to formulate the first law of motion, the law of inertia.
Only when it became a climate of opinion that there was an absolute beginning
for physical processes, was it possible to think of the beginning of any motion in
an entirely new way. The novelty was rooted in the autonomy which only a truly
transcendental Creator could impart to a created entity without diminishing the
latter's dependence on the former. Only within that perspective was it possible to
think of the imparting of an initial quantity of motion, which, when friction was
absent, such as in outer space, bodies could retain without any diminution.

What needed to be emphasized against Koyre and others was the following:
The crucial breakthrough did not consist in the step from a circular motion
(which could not in fact be really inertial) to a linear inertial motion, but the step
from the pantheistic Aristotelian notion of a continuous contact between the
Mover and the moved to the view that such a contact did not have to remain
physical between the Creator and the created body. In addition one had to show
that, historically speaking, the doctrine of creation out of nothing and in time
could not maintain itself without a specifically Christian support. Only with a
flesh and blood being, Jesus of Nazareth, revered as the only begotten
(monogenes, unigenitus) Son of God, was it possible to ward off the ever-present
lure of pantheism. In classical pantheism the cosmos was called monogenes (the
universe unigenitus) or the prime manifestation of the divine, connatural with it
and never really different from it while enjoying eternity with it. A Christian was
faced with the choice: either Jesus or the universe was only-begotten. Pantheism
could therefore make no inroads into a Church riveted on the doctrine of
Incarnation.

The third and fourth of the lectures dealt with the bearing of christology on
cosmology and evolution. The fifth lecture dealt with the ethical force or resolve
which belief in Christ provided for coping with the grave ethical problems posed
by the tools of science. The sixth related to the origin which is encapsuled in the
doctrine of original sin. The repeated stillbirths of science were for me so many
monumental cases of the human mind's proneness to error, of its chronic
readiness to ignore truth, and of its bent on glorifying fallacies, among which I
prominently listed the vagaries of creationism. No scientist, rightly resentful of
creationists, could say that I did not try to be evenhanded.

I certainly did not try to be "the savior of science," the comment which a
Protestant theologian busy with the relation of science and religion offered when
I presented him with a copy of the freshly printed book. Upon realizing that his
remark revealed some adverse sentiments, perhaps jealousy, he tried to offset the
damage with inept comments as to how designers of book covers should never
put the author's name above the title. Actually, a heavy line ran between my
name and the title, and, no less importantly, much of the cover was taken up by
the figure of Christ as presented in the apsis of one of the Norman cathedrals in
Sicily. Neither before nor after did the person in question care to study Duhem's
works on the medieval origins of Newtonian science. He knew of those works
only from passing references to them in Michael Foster's inept defense of the
role of Protestantism in the birth of science.

Foster, as I showed in an essay on him,' seemed to realize that if the Middle

Ages produced the spark that made science come alive, there was one less reason
for the Reformation. Its champions did not cease claiming that their aim was to
rescue not only Christian religion from darkness but also to liberate learning
from the shackles of slavishly Aristotelian monks. Their inventiveness in
technology and science formed the subject of still another essay of mine,
presented at a symposium at Michigan State University,' of which I have already
spoken in the Introduction.

I could not have delved into the study of medieval science, had Latin not
become a second language for me from early on. But equally important was my
early training in French. It enabled me not only to write my doctoral dissertation
in theology in French, but also gave me an easy access to the riches in the
writings of Duhem. It certainly opened for me the door to those very few who
had known him and were still alive sixty years after his untimely death in 1916.
It is to them and to Duhem, above all, that I must now turn.
For five or six years, or roughly from 1978-83, I literally lived most of my days
with tangible ties to the memory of Pierre Duhem, the famed French physicist
and philosopher as well as historian of science. I retraced his steps almost
everywhere he went. I looked up the house, 42 rue des Jeuneurs in Paris, where
he was born; visited the church where he was baptized and there I photographed
his baptismal records. In the baptismal registers I also found his first extant
signature. It showed that he and his younger twin-sisters, Marie-Julie and
Antoinette-Victorine, served as the godparents at the baptism of the last child,
jean, born in September 1872 to the Duhem household. Baby Jean died at the
tender age of seven weeks. A few weeks later Antoinette followed the baby to
heaven as another angel. So were they remembered in the family. Pierre was left
with Marie, who loved to take advantage of his enormous patience as she kept
pulling his long blond hair. Many years later she still remembered him as a very
patient brother.

I followed young Pierre, as his father accompanied him to Notre Dame des
Victoires, where he eventually saw the ravages wrought by the Communards in
May 1871. Whenever in his adult life he returned to Paris, he always took time
out to make a visit to that Church, built by Louis XIII in 1629 to commemorate
his victory at La Rochelle. Duhem loved to recall that he lived through the
notorious Commune. He could have avoided its hardships had his mother not
returned with him and his two sisters to Paris. After the Prussians broke through
at Sedan in September 1870, Mme. Duhem and the children had, at Mr. Duhem's
urging, left the capital for Chateaudun where Mme. Duhem had relatives. Before
long the Prussians encircled Chateaudun, their deepest penetration into the
South. I saw the cellar in the hospital of Chateaudun, where a stray bullet strafed
Pierre's head, just before he led the family's escape from cellar and town as the
Prussians were breaking down the resistance of the franc-tireurs. Had I had the
opportunity to rent a haywagon, I would have gladly relived Pierre's delight in
traveling in that way a part of their journey to Bordeaux. From there they
returned to Paris, just before the Communards plunged the City of Light into
darkness.

I peeked into the courtyard where he played as a child; went along the streets
he followed daily to a private elementary school near the Church of St. Roche;
then trotted with him to College Stanislas. In the latter I studied the bust which
the sculptor H. Chapus made after Pierre's sketches (he was then fifteen) of Abbe
Lagarde, the director of Stanislas, when Pierre entered there at the age of ten,
and whom he venerated as a saint for the rest of his life. Needless to say I had to
use my imagination rather heavily to reconstruct all the details he described
graphically in an essay in 1905, which dealt with his student life there. On seeing
the memorial plaque which, on the wall of an old building, commemorates the
Abbe Biehler as one who PRO DEO ET SCIENTIA VIXIT, it was easy to recall
young Pierre, only seventeen, as he was being introduced to Hermite, a
mathematician famed for his work on polynomials, who often came to visit
Biehler, a favorite student of his.

I went to the Recamier compound at 1 rue du Regard where Joe Recamier,

Pierre's best friend at Stanislas, lived and where Pierre often dropped in. Joe
eventually became a famous surgeon. I met his grandson, Mr. Pierre Recamier, a
resident in the compound, carefully guarding various items which linked his
grandfather to Duhem. It was clear to me that among the descendants of
Duhem's friends his memory was sacred. Mr. Recamier provided me with my
first glimpses of some sketches from Pierre's school years and also regaled me
with a rare copy of the album, a sort of a musical spoof of the anticlerical govern
ments of the 1880s, to which Pierre contributed splendid cartoons that showed
noted politicians with gorilla faces surrounded by simians. He had to do this
under a pseudonym or else he would never have been accepted at the Ecole
Normale. Eventually I saw to it that the illustrations be republished.'

I looked up the Seine near Argenteuil where he used to sail with Joe. I walked
around in the old parts of the Ecole Normale, where he was the undisputed first
among the best from all France; I retraced his steps to every nook and cranny of
what remained of the old universities of Lille, Rennes, and Bordeaux. In the
latter I stepped into the Amphitheatre Duhem, a large lecture hall, gathering dust
and waiting for some unspecified new use. Of the two great amphitheaters for
physics lectures in the new university of Bordeaux I found neither of them
named after Duhem. There after a public lecture of mine on Duhem in 1985,
somebody from the audience asked me whether I was not making a legend of
Duhem. Yes, a legend, I answered, but only in the sense of urging that his
writings should be looked upon as "legenda," that is, documents to be read and
studied if the interpretation of physics and of its philosophy and history were not
to lose all ties with facts and with the sanity which common sense alone can
provide.
 In Lille I visited the house where his wife struggled in vain to give birth to
their second child, a boy, whom the disconsolate father hastily baptized Joseph,
after his paternal grandfather, and buried with his mother. In Rennes I found the
house he rented, though I could not see the garden of which his first child Helene
spoke charmingly in a book she published in 1936 about her father, whom she
emphatically called on the title page un savant francais. But I could follow him
along the streets he took from home to the old university and, at the halfway
point, I knelt down, as was his wont, in the small church of the Carmelite nuns
for a brief prayer. More than once I dined in the house, 18 Rue de la Teste (since
1921 Rue Pierre Duhem) which was his home in Bordeaux for the last twenty-
two years of his life. There I sat by the fireplace and tried to evoke his voice as
he, a born performer, read aloud to his mother who until her death in 1906 kept
house for him and Helene.

I was not introduced to Mr. and Mme. Andre Jarreau, the present owners of
that house, which Duhem rented from the consul of Monaco, during my first
visit to Bordeaux in July 1978. At that time I went to Bordeaux with no advance
introduction to anyone. At any rate, since I was to spend not more than four or
five hours in Bordeaux on that day, I thought I should first go to Rue Pierre
Duhem, trusting in good luck that somehow I would find that house. Once in that
street, so I thought, one would most likely meet a passerby who would provide
the needed information. The street was empty, as befitted a residential area of a
French town on any late morning in summer. Finally two or three people came
along, but none of them had the slightest idea who Duhem was, let alone in
which house he had lived.

My foreign accent could not endear me to anyone. The French, especially in

the provinces, can be signally suspicious of foreigners. I was sort of giving up
my effort when a lady appeared in the balcony of the second floor of the house I
just happened to walk by. I called out to her: "S'il vous plait, Madame, voulez-
vous me dire, ou se trouve la maison de Pierre Duhem?" "De qui, Monsieur?"
she asked. "De Pierre Duhem, le grand physicien," I replied. "Ah! bon, alors.
Mon mari, qui est professeur de physique a l'Universite, pourra vous le dire. II
retournera a midi." With that she disappeared into the house, marked Nr. 44. The
"midi" or noon was still an hour away.

The professor, Mr. Andre Charru, arrived on the dot. For what Frenchman
would not return home for the midday meal if he could? And as I was to find out
during my next visit in Bordeaux, Mme. Charru was a first-rate cook and a very
kind hostess. I owe it to the Charrus that my researches on Duhem yielded
whatever there was to be found, whether in the Universite or in the city archives,
or anywhere else in Bordeaux. For Bordeaux still speaks a great deal of Duhem
to anyone who goes there well informed. Now all that information is in Uneasy
Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem and in Reluctant Heroine: The Life
and Work of Helene Duhem for anyone who wants to commune with Duhem in
Bordeaux where he arrived in October 1894, thinking that within a few months
he would be called to Paris. He never arrived there.

My chances of meeting the Charrus on that hot July day should seem
astronomically small, which may give a glimpse of the subtle working of
Providence. I would not give credit to Providence so directly in connection with
my meeting Mr. Norbert Dufourcq, who played an even more crucial role in my
researches on Duhem. I received Mr. Dufourcq's address in Paris, where he lived
in retirement as a former organist at St. Sulpice and the editor at Larousse for
matters musicological, from Mr. Donald Miller, a physical chemist at Livermore
Laboratories. Mr. Miller, the author of a widely read article on Duhem,z was an
obvious person to contact, and all the more so as he most generously shared with
me whatever material he had on Duhem.

Norbert Dufourcq was the son of Albert Dufourcq, the Church historian and
Duhem's younger colleague and best friend at the University of Bordeaux.
Eventually he became the indispensable support, until his death in 1952, of
Helene. My first visit with Mr. Dufourcq took place in 1981 in his summer home
in Anjou where he showed me an album that contained about forty or so ink
drawings by Duhem. It was inscribed to him by Helene as a token of her
gratitude. Very modest reproductions of two of them appeared in Uneasy
Genius, together with illustrations from the material which Mr. Recamier put at
my disposal. The photos of Duhem, of his wife, of his parents and sisters came
through the courtesy of Mr. Miller, who obtained them from Helene in the late
1960s. More of this later. He also let me photocopy much of the scientific
correspondence of Duhem which Helene had lent to him. I found that those
letters added nothing essential to what could be learned from Duhem's
publications. The correspondence was eventually acquired by the Academie des
Sciences in Paris. So much about the personal aspects of my mind's exposure to
Duhem's human and historical reality prior to the writing of Uneasy Genius.
 Needless to say, I read much of what Duhem published, and he published
enormously much. I perused all the manuscripts, scholarly and personal, which
he left behind. I went through everything that related to him in the Archives of
those three universities and the Academie des Sciences in Paris. I contacted as
many as possible of those who wrote about him after World War II, only to find
that none of them found dear what was dearest to Duhem's mind: the vast
intellectual and spiritual context of his Catholic faith, the faith of a first-rate
scientist, philosopher and historian of science. Some slighted what was dearest
to him, although they, as Catholics, should have known better. Others, non-
Catholics and plain agnostics, did the same, only to reveal the smallness of their
minds. Those who dismissed him or vilified him certainly showed their true
colors while they were eager to appear as the blameless knights of unprejudiced
reason.

The text of Uneasy Genius was about half a million words long when its
typescript was sent to Nijhoff in late 1982. The University of Chicago Press had
already returned it with the remark that it should be largely rewritten, though
they did not suggest what to rewrite or why I should rewrite it, or who was that
Duhem specialist who knew everything about Duhem much better than I did. It
was a blessing in disguise that much interesting material came into my ken only
after the publication of Uneasy Genius. An already long book might have
doubled in length and not been published.

Once Norbert Dufourcq received a copy of Uneasy Genius, he offered to show

me his real riches of "Duhemiana," of which more shortly. A complimentary
copy of Uneasy Genius broke down the reservations of Norbert Dufourcq's
niece, Mlle. MarieMadeleine Gallet, whom I first met in 1978. I learned about
her for the first time from Mr. Rene Taton, a noted French historian of science,
who was present at the Lambert conference in Mulhouse in the fall of 1977. I
rightly thought that, if anyone, then Taton should have some information as to
where to look for Duhem's manuscripts and correspondence apart from the
material, relatively meager at that time, in the Archives of the Academie des
Sciences in Paris. Taton reacted to my inquiry in a manner which revealed that
he had ample information on the subject. He, however, added in almost the same
breath that access to what I was looking for was difficult because Mlle. Gallet
was in and out of hospitals and often away from Paris.

The next May I was in Paris and asked Taton whether he would put me in
contact with Mlle. Gallet. His first reaction was negative; then he dialed her
number, adding that she would not be found anyhow. The telephone rang and
she answered. Moreover, to Taton's great surprise, she expressed her wish to see
me in her apartment the following day. I slept very little during that night. After
I arrived and explained my background and purpose, she simply said that I was
the answer to her many years of prayer. She showed me what appeared to me to
be nothing less than a veritable treasure chest of "Duhemiana." I did not know
whether to exult or to faint. But this auspicious start only brought frustration for
the time being.

For almost five years afterwards my communications to her went unanswered.

Once the ice broke after a copy of Uneasy Genius reached her, she explained
matters. For one, she had been by then approached by several Duhem specialists
who gave her ample reasons to become suspicious. She told me of one such
specialist, who sang to her the praises of Duhem and vouched for his own
Catholicism. He returned in half an hour very agitated. He asked Mlle. Gallet
whether she had found his Communist Party membership card. What happened
was that as he presented his university identification card, somehow he pulled
out with it that telltale card, which Mlle. Gallet found lying on the floor. This
was his last visit there. Then she recalled that as I had briefed her at our first
meeting about my background as a historian of science, I told her about an
American historian of science who once told me that he did not believe in
reincarnation but he sort of looked on me as a reincarnation of Duhem. Possibly
this aroused in her the suspicion that I might not be the answer to her prayers.

Mlle. Gallet first met Helene in 1958, and the latter immediately took a great
liking to her and eventually designated her as her heiress. After Helen's death in
1973, Mlle. Gallet inherited the ancestral house of Duhem's mother in
Cabrespine, where Helene lived the last forty years of her life. Had Mlle. Gallet
put at my disposal already in 1978 the plethora of material to be described in the
following paragraphs, I would have never been able to finish Uneasy Genius and
could have hardly confined it to less than two large volumes, which publishers
are most unwilling to consider.

At my second visit in Paris, Mlle. Gallet let me page through a big pile of
Duhem's albums of sketches and watercolors and eventually she let me carry
them to the States for photographing. She told me of her sickness, tuberculosis,
that eventually was brought under control. She told me of a major operation that
saved her life at the last minute. She told me of the frustrations she experienced
in the hands of the French academic establishment, both secular and Catholic.
She told me of her many visits and conversations with Helene. She and Helene
were also at one in not having a university education, which greatly hampered
them in their efforts to promote Duhem's memory. Somehow, setbacks seemed
to be an integral part not only of Duhem's and Helene's lives, but also of anyone
who in their spirit tried to carry on with studies on Duhem. I could certainly fill a
smallish volume with my own setbacks.

Some months later Mlle. Gallet showed me around in Cabrespine, near

Carcassonne, where Duhem spent much of his summer vacations during his last
twenty or so years and where Helene retired after 1932. There I saw the old
furniture he used. I held in my hands the blotter that shows the traces of his last
signature. I listened to the tick-tack of the small pendulum clock on his desk, as
if he himself had wound it up only yesterday. I followed Duhem around in the
narrow, winding streets of Cabrespine. There I met some old villagers whom he
had instructed in the catechism in his home after Sunday Masses and regaled
them with pieces of chocolate and candy. In the village church I knelt in the pew
where he had knelt, followed him everywhere in his summer treks, along the
course of Tarn, of Ardeche, into the wilderness of Montpellier le Vieux, to Les
Beaux, to various Cathar strongholds, to the Roman ruins of Aigues, to almost
all the places which he rendered in exquisite pen drawings and water colors.

I stood and prayed in the very center of the cemetery of Cabrespine where his
daughter laid him to rest and where she herself was laid to rest in 1974. I prayed
there to him as to the one who must have pulled a string or two in heaven that I,
a poor refugee from distant Hungary, would eventually become his major
biographer. Incidentally I met Mme. Henriette Gallet (Marie-Madeleine's mother
and Norbert's oldest sister), who proudly showed me a sumptuously printed
biography of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, which she had received as a twelve-
yearold from Duhem for her confirmation. Standing in that cemetery I also
communed with the stark vista of craggy mountains and dark cypresses bathed in
blazing sunshine against an azure sky, a scene from which he drew so much
strength. In sum, I tried to relive his life, with all its hopes and sorrows, with all
its great achievements and keen frustrations.

And I did the same eventually with respect to his daughter, Helene, who
inherited her father's mind and resolve. She needed both to carry on a struggle of
almost twenty years to force the publishing house Hermann to live up to its
contractual obligation and publish volumes 6-10 of the Systeme du monde in the
same quick order as was the case with volumes 1-5. I told the story in Reluctant
Heroine (1992), which has been strangely ignored by academics who are
consumed with zeal in disclosing cases of sundry discrimination against
intellectuals and leave no stones unturned to find heroes of feminism. Obviously,
some are always more equal than others among supposedly equals, especially
after egalite or similar catchwords had been volubly trumpeted. Incidentally,
prior to the writing of Reluctant Heroine I tried to learn as much as possible
about the Atelier or home for single Catholic working women, in a Paris suburb,
where she spent the years 1909-1932, that is, her late teens and all her twenties
and thirties.

By the time the Reluctant Heroine was published, the Uneasy Genius had
come out in a second (paperback) edition in 1987 and in the same year there also
appeared my edition of Duhem's early philosophical essays, Premices
philosophiques. By having called them " premices," I did not want to suggest
that they are not worthy of Duhem's great philosophical classic La Theorie
physique. In fact, they retained a crispness, sweep, and penetration that happily
complement that great classic. The next year (1988) saw the publication of The
Physicist as Artist: The Landscapes of Pierre Duhem, a quarto album with about
250 illustrations (ten pages in color) of Duhem's landscapes, lavishly printed
owing to the personal interest of Dr. Douglas Grant, director of the Scottish
Academic Press. Later, he told me that in displaying the book somewhere in
Paris, people asked him who Pierre Duhem was. Well, Duhem would not have
approved of the infatuation of Parisians with Disneyland. They do not learn
much there about the best of their own cultural heritage.

My activities on behalf of Duhem's message spurred a genuinely French mind

in Paris into action. I should recall with much appreciation Jacques Vauthier,
professor of mathematics at the Sorbonne, who directed for Beauchesne a series
on Catholic scientists. It was at his urging that I wrote Scientist and Catholic:
Pierre Duhem. Its publication followed by six months its French version, Pierre
Duhem: Homme de science et de foi. Eventually it appeared also in Spanish as
Pierre Duhem: Cientifico y catolico. The book's first part is a presentation of
Duhem the Catholic, both in his personality and in his research; the second part
is a set of twenty-seven texts taken from his writings, to illustrate the same.
 This book was followed a year later, again through the good offices of Jacques
Vauthier at Beauchesne, by Lettres de Pierre Duhern a safille Helene (1992).
The book contains a large selection from the total of four hundred or so letters
which Duhem wrote between 1906 and 1916 to his daughter. They had been
handed over by Mlle. Gallet, prior to 1984, to the Academie des Sciences, which
gave me free access to them when, around 1990, I could once more concentrate
on Duhem. Without the study of those letters (and without the dossiers Mr.
Norbert Dufourcq kindly lent me) I could not have written the Reluctant
Heroine. This work also owes much to the correspondence between Helene and
Mr. Miller from 1959 to 1969, which he kindly put at my disposal.

If someone now asked me to single out what I have found among Duhem's
writings the most expressive of his personality, I would name two: first, his
reminiscences of his years at Stanislas which he wrote in 1905 for its centenary.
They show him as the perennial young boy and the boy who already saw,
reflected, and felt as a man; second, the address he gave to the Group of Catholic
Co-eds at the University of Bordeaux in June 1916. It provides rare glimpses
into the inner sanctum of his most personal feelings. It is also a classic in sane
feminism. Both were duly inserted in Scientist and Catholic. To present a
concise mirror image of his mind in a more philosophical or ideological sense, I
would unhesitatingly choose the long letter he wrote in 1911 to Pere Bulliot,
then dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Institut Catholique in Paris. I do so,
following the example of Helene who reproduced that letter in full in her
biography of her father. It graces in English my Scientist and Catholic: Pierre
Duhem.

That I am not biased in my estimate of that letter may be seen from a remark
which George Sarton, hardly a friend of Duhem, made as he reviewed in 1937
Helene's biography of her father. Sarton saw the chief value of the biography in
the fact that it contained the full text (ten pages) of that letter. It took more than
half a century before it became available in English translation, a fact that hardly
reflects well on Catholic scholars of the English speaking world, especially on
scientists, historians and philosophers of science among them.

I first read that letter shortly after I arrived in Princeton in the fall of 1960 as a
visiting fellow in the history of science program. I was browsing through some
shelves in the library when I stumbled on Helen's biography of her father. Lucky
me, because a few months afterwards I heard at a seminar the professor declare
that Duhem was a priest. The context was the no less revealing claim that only
Catholics are interested in medieval science, such as Crombie and Duhem. I
deflated the professor in question by simply remarking that Duhem's own
daughter wrote his biography and that it could be found on the shelves only a
few paces from the seminar room.

I resonated to each and every phrase in Duhem's letter to Pere Bulliot as if

they expressed my deepest intellectual aspirations. Since I see in that letter the
quintessence of my mind's matter, it is appropriate to recall its main points, and
all the more so as Duhem wrote it on learning that the Institut Catholique in
Paris planned to set up two new chairs, one for the philosophy and another for
the history of science.

Pere Bulliot, the recipient of the letter, had by then repeatedly met Duhem in a
village in the Cabrespine area, where Duhem used to spend his vacations, and
often was accompanied there by one or another professor from the Institut
Catholique. In the letter Duhem first noted the urgency of doing something that
clear-sighted Catholics should have done much earlier, namely, counter in a
formal way the various philosophies tagged onto science. Duhem felt that he had
some unsolicited, though most welcome, advice to give. He began by recalling
that he worked among non-Catholic academics and therefore knew their way of
thinking, especially with respect to their way of exploiting science in support of
their various ideologies.

The battle line, so Duhem argued, between them and Catholicism concerned
not this or that particular scientific discovery, but the manner in which they
opposed science to religion. Science, they claimed, was the embodiment of final,
rigorously proved propositions, whereas religious dogmas were vague opinions,
incapable of being demonstrated. To this argument drawn from the logical
analysis of the scientific method, the opponents of religion added the one which
they derived from the history of science. According to them, history showed that
religion-by which Duhem meant, of course, the Catholic faith-was at cross
purposes with the findings and progress of science. "It is high time," Duhem
wrote, "that Catholic higher education should rise and hurl into the face of its
enemies the word lie! Lie in the domain of logic, lie in the domain of history!"

The truth was, Duhem continued, that the human intellect relied on the same
presuppositions both in science and in theology. The difference merely related to
the respective aspects of reality and to the conclusions to be reached about them.
Duhem did not go into details. After all, his Theorie physique had by then been
in circulation for five years. In 1911 he was still to publish much of his epoch-
making discoveries that related to the medieval and indeed Christian origins of
Newtonian science. But the second volume of his Etudes sur Leonard de Vinci
had already been available since 1909. There he brought to light important
material from the writings, still unpublished at that time, of Buridan and Oresme
to justify his presentation of Copernicus and Galileo as the continuators of some
14th-century scholastics at the Sorbonne. He referred to their orthodoxy as a
further proof of the truth of the words of the Gospel that to those who first seek
the Kingdom of God, the rest, too (in this case, science), would be given for
good measure.

The incisiveness and courage of this letter of Duhem's could not help inspiring
and shaping my mind, which for some time had tried to articulate its message
along much the same lines. Duhem's reference to the words of the Gospel I
found very expressive, and used them in that sense ever more frequently. The
subject matter being so large and so rich in nuances, it was possible to be fully
inspired by Duhem without jeopardizing one's originality. There were wide areas
in the history of physics and astronomy that Duhem never touched upon, and he
noted many fine points without elaborating them.

But the time had not yet arrived for me to set forth my perspective in a more
or less systematic manner. For the time being, my mind was still more that of a
historian than that of a philosopher. Whatever philosophical point I tried to make
I still did so by expressing it as contained in this or that phase of the history of
science. The message, so I thought, could be set forth in terms of the dicta of
those who were part of a given phase. The historical approach still played the
principal role in what may be considered my first major work in philosophy and
not merely in the philosophy of science. That work, my Gifford lectures on
natural theology, will be taken up in the next chapter.

As to Duhem proper, I found it most telling to vindicate him in a manner

which, relating though it did to our contemporaries, was still essentially
historical. I was not interested in the picking apart of the so-called Duhem-Quine
thesis, which I consider to be a plain oxymoron. It is applauded by those who
read but superficially what Duhem actually wrote and merely selected isolated
dicta of his in order to hang on them their own very un- Duhemian notions. That
the proponent of ontological relativism invoked Duhem's name was for me a
telltale sign of Duhem's towering figure. Compared with various present-day big
names in the philosophy of science, Duhem was a genius. Few details gave me
so much comfort in my efforts to portray Duhem's greatness as a remark of C.
Truesdell, the foremost historian of analytical mechanics and himself an
outstanding expert in it. Duhem, he wrote, towered as a genius among prominent
historians of science. I always felt this way, but such epithets as "genius" are
more fittingly applied if a biographer of Duhem finds it expressed by one who
cannot be suspected of having succumbed to a danger that threatens all
biographers. As a wit put it, they all are, in a sense, hagiographers.

But I certainly was original and felicitous, too, in adding the word uneasy to
genius. The truth of the matter is that Duhem made uneasy all those who wrote
in this century on the history and philosophy of science. Some coped with that
uneasiness of theirs by keeping mum on Duhem, although they borrowed much
from him. It was as a historian above all that I pointed this out, for instance,
about Thomas Kuhn. And I did so by raising the question: Why did the evidence
remain buried in a doctoral dissertation-available only on microfilm-that Kuhn
borrowed from Duhem the idea of certain conceptual frameworks (Kuhn called
them paradigms and therein lay all his originality) ruling this or that phase of the
history of physics?

Kuhn's procedure appears particularly distasteful if seen against what Helene

Metzger did when, as she defended her thesis at the Sorbonne in 1922, she was
told that one of her basic tools of explanation was very similar to a theme
already developed by Duhem. She did not refuse to surrender to the evidence,
nor did she fail to give ample credit to Duhem. But Kuhn, who listed Metzger as
one of his teachers, acted very differently after he had read Metzger's pointed
reference to Duhem. Again I looked with the eye of a historian of science at one
of the last postcards which Lakatos sent to Feyerabend, telling him that Popper
has done "nothing over and above Duhem."3 Of Duhem, Popper rarely said a
word. I have now two boxes full of xeroxed pages taken from books of modern
historians and philosophers of science, as so many illustrations of their curious
slighting of their debts to Duhem, or of their crass ignorance of him.

I found that the weirdest details were imagined about Duhem. Some fancied
that he accompanied on the piano Einstein playing the violin, and that Duhem
worked with a team of research assistants. Some others tried to penetrate the
secrets of Duhem's summer vacations in Cabrespine in order to find the "other
woman" in his life. Their sole proof was their conviction that no Frenchman,
who became a widower at the age of thirtyone, would continue living without a
paramour or a mistress. Academics can readily become the victims of perverse
imagination, while insensitive to far from imaginary material right under their
noses.

As to the latter point, I emphasized it in a talk I gave in the context of the

Boston Colloquia on the Philosophy of Science on March 13, 1979. The talk,
"Damned with Faint Praise, or the Fate of Pierre Duhem,"4 drew quite a few
people some of whom were obviously shocked by what I set forth about George
Sarton's handling of Duhem's researches on Leonardo. The one asked to respond
to my talk simply felt himself at a loss for words. I was not surprised that the
editor of those Colloquia chose not to publish my talk, although it was full of
still unpublished material. Obviously the secular world has its own saints, or
rather "super-saints," but they are raised onto a pedestal before being exposed to
the searching eyes of a "devil's advocate," a central figure in genuine
canonizations.

While all this did not overly surprise me, I was rather shocked at the surfacing
of some perverse imagination about Duhem during the dinner given in my honor
prior to the talk. Eight or so academics formed the dinner party, during which the
conversation quickly turned to my researches on Duhem. Some tried to pry some
of the gist of my recent findings, still to appear in Uneasy Genius. But one
dinner guest simply wanted to know whether I found the smoking gun or the
identity of Duhem's mistress. I gasped. He brushed aside my reference to Duhem
the practicing and devout Catholic, as being of no consequence to him. He kept
insisting in a starkly aprioristic tone that Duhem must have had a mistress
because all Frenchmen do. With some difficulty I was able to shift the topic of
conversation, not because I had anything to hide about Duhem, but simply
because I did not want to ruin my appetite.

In an age when historians and philosophers of science make so much of

psychological and sociological factors that shaped or mirrored the mind of a
scientist, I could not help refraining from the task of producing an album of
Duhem's landscapes. Surely, just think of the Rohrschach tests, one's drawings
and paintings should reveal much of one's psychology and thinking. But first I
had to train myself as a photographer. An arduous work it was that found me in
my University's darkroom on many a late evening. But the result was worth the
effort. In respect to Duhem one could draw a convincing parallel between his
thinking in physics and in his drawing of landscapes. In both cases, he works
with clear lines and presents a strong structure. My album appeared twenty years
after the publication of a vast and richly illustrated "study of the relations
between painting and the natural sciences in this century." Such is the subtitle of
a book,5 whose main title, Behind Appearance, may evoke Duhem, famed for
his insistence that the method of physics consists in hewing to the Platonic
dictum, "to save the appearances," or the phenomena. Duhem would have
strongly disagreed with that book, though not so much because he disliked what
was "modern" in art around 1900 or so, let alone decades later. His disagreement
would have, above all, aimed at the interpretation of modern physics as if it
refuted clear lines just because quantum mechanics could do no more about the
world of atoms than "to save the appearances" through applying statistical
probabilities.

I mention this partly because my first published writing on Duhem was an

introduction which Morris Philipson, the director of the University of Chicago
Press, asked me to write around 1968 for an English translation of Duhem's
famous essay on the idea of physical theory from Plato to Galileo, "To Save the
Phenomena."6 By then I had declined his suggestion that I translate the work
itself. I felt I had other things to do. At any rate, even if I had written an
introduction of a hundred pages to an essay about that long and filled it with
passages from Duhem's work showing that he was anything but a positivist, it
would not have convinced many. I do not know of anyone who would have
parted with his or her view of Duhem as a positivist, after reading the long
chapter on Duhem the philosopher, indeed the epistemological realist, in Uneasy
Genius. Certain labels seem to have the power to attach themselves almost
inextricably.

One tries to cope with this with resignation, but I could not help being irritated
on finding the final printed form of the article on Duhem which I contributed to
the Encyclopedie Philosophique Universelle.7 In the first part of that article it is
emphasized that Duhem espoused positivism merely as a method in physics, but
never as an epistemology, let alone as a rebuttal of metaphysics. But the last
paragraph of the article extolled Duhem the positivist! That paragraph was
attached by the editor, who did not care to notify me, let alone to ask my
permission, which I would certainly have denied, even if, as a consequence, my
article had been discarded. This was one of a number of cases of rude high-
handedness that I encountered on the part of editors. Had Dante lived a few
centuries after the invention of printing and publishing, he would not have had
any trouble in finding candidates with whom to populate the bottom circuit of
the Inferno.

Some Duhemians are convinced that Duhem was a modernist Catholic. One
such "expert" on Duhem did not even refrain from saying in print that he, a
Protestant, took great delight in hunting down Catholic modernists wherever he
could find them. With that in mind, he saw traces of modernism in Duhem
regardless of the latter's staunch adherence to the Catholic faith and Catholic
devotional practices. The expert in question, an "evangelical" Christian, seemed
to shore up his own uncertainty by digging up the incertitude, real or imaginary,
of some noted Catholic intellectuals.

Unfortunately, uncertainties have become almost a rule among Catholic

intellectuals. No wonder that an appeal of mine fell on deaf ears, although I
made it in the context of a public lecture at the University of Notre Dame. There,
just when I started writing the Uneasy Genius, and just back from one of my
research trips to France, I proposed the formation of a Duhem Society of
Catholic historians and philosophers of science. Catholic physicists ready to take
a serious look at philosophy and history would have been welcome to join, of
course. Needless to say, non-Catholics would have been welcome, provided their
interest in Duhem was genuine. Those who are convinced that Duhem was a
positivist would not have been considered. Would flat-earth fanciers have been
welcomed in the Accademia dei Lincei or promoters of the phlogiston in
Lavoisier's club?

That my proposal came to nothing should be no surprise. Twice I met a prime

candidate for membership in the Society. On the first occasion, all he said about
my work was that he did not expect me to be so young. I was then approaching
fifty. On the other occasion, we dined together in connection with a conference.
To everything I said, he invariably replied, "I know it. I know it." To hear this,
and practically nothing else for an hour or so, could easily upset not only one's
mind but also one's stomach. If, in joining a society, one merely wants to teach
but never to learn, he may foment only general indigestion at its repasts or
symposia.
 A Duhem Society, if centered on the study of what Duhem wrote and not on
what one may think he should have written, might be a potent tool to
disseminate sound information about him. The proceedings of such a Society
could greatly help in drawing attention to his commitment to Truth writ large.
Surely, if anyone, a Catholic intellectual should not have for his or her prime
objective the gaining of the applause of secular academics. The latter are
interested only in Catholics in whom they can spot real or potential traitors to
Truth. If only such Catholics suspected the value of enduring riches which they
barter for very transient handouts! I mean intellectual riches, valid very much
even for science. The airing of this patently philosophical proposition is to be
left to the next chapter.
The fact that my enthusiastic studies of Duhem's work began only in the late
1970s may alone justify this chapter in which I first should recall something set
forth in chapter 4. Undoubtedly, I saw something pivotal in Duhem's claims
about Buridan's formulation of inertial motion from the moment I first saw a
reference to them, sometime in late 1960. But Duhem merely hinted at the fact
that Buridan's monotheism was very much that of a Christian. Ignore this fact,
and Buridan's great breakthrough becomes even more unexplainable than it is.
For if Buridan's monotheism was just a monotheism, the difficulty of explaining
his breakthrough becomes the task of explaining why Jewish and Muslim
readers of Aristotle had failed to steal the march on Buridan. But if one takes
into account that Buridan's monotheism was riveted in his belief in Christ, the
explanation can appear logical, even though hard to digest for many.

It is, of course, difficult to gain a hearing nowadays for anything seriously

intellectual about Christ. One can only expect disbelief, if not derision, if one is
to suggest that science, as I said earlier, owes enormously much to Christ. It is in
that sense that I added a new aspect to Duhem's remark that to those who first
seek the Kingdom of God, the rest (which if truly such must include science as
well) too will be given. In this age when Jews and Muslims are vying even in the
West with Christian cultural heritage, one can easily produce a shock by asking
why that scientific breakthrough did take place in a decidedly Christian
monotheistic framework and not elsewhere. I had not made a sport of
administering that shock, but I did not refrain from doing so when
circumstances, at times big lecture halls filled to overflow, called for it.

Also, I went far beyond Duhem in portraying the dark background of that
breakthrough, or the invariable stillbirths of science in all great ancient cultures.
Again, there is little in Duhem's writings about the often baffling oversight of the
obvious which I portrayed in my various monographs on the history of
astronomy. While Duhem emphasized the gradual, though often very slow
accumulation of scientific knowledge, I put the emphasis on what is negative,
namely, on the baffling persistence of an oversight of the obvious. To recall only
one example, for science the Milky Way proved to be a forward road that was
very elusive indeed. The recognition of the reason for the appearance of the
Milky Way as a whitish band did not come about in a stepwise fashion. And
when I stressed the positive in that accumulation, it was with an eye on
something which one would look in vain for in Duhem's writings.
 That something is the central thesis of my Gifford Lectures, given at the
University of Edinburgh in 1974-75 and 1975-76. According to that thesis, all
great creative advances in science were achieved in terms of what is best called
an epistemological middle road between empiricism and idealism. This middle
road is often called moderate realism, but I would prefer to call it "methodical
realism," an expression of Gilson's. My first encounter with Gilson's thought
consisted in reading, sometime in 1951, his God and Philosophy. Although I
liked that smallish book very much, it did not prompt me at that time to delve
into his other books. It was by chance that I came across his The Unity of
Philosophical Experience in late 1973, which struck me as if a philosophical
lifebelt had been thrown to me. Then I was in the throes of creating my Gifford
Lectures, though not entirely ex nihilo. I knew I was to give those Lectures on
science and natural theology, but this still left me in a quandary as to what their
specific point should be. Gifford Lecturers are expected to present something
original from their field, which in my case was the philosophy and history of
science. But what sort of originality could still be mined in that jungle of
interpretations of science that luxuriated during the 1960s and 1970s?

Ideas or rather concepts were being worked to death by philosophers of

science who delighted in sheer verbalizations. They vied with one another to
produce a catchy phrase or word as the magic clue to the manner in which
science was being done and, in particular, scientific discoveries were being
made. Such hunts for words could easily distract from rigorous thinking. It
became a fashion among philosophers and historians of science to pay little
attention to the fact that Nobel Prizes were not awarded to scientists for the
manner of thinking about this or that but for the measurable content of the
winner's thought. The fashion began with the word "revolutions," appropriately
enough, for at the height of the Cold War almost every other bit of news was
about revolutions, big and small, or about their threat, real or perceived.
Revolutionaries, in a very broad sense, were the heroes of the day. Student
revolts were hailed as breeding places of insights that one could not learn in
classrooms.

Revolutions are, like fashions, rather short-lived. The phrase, "paradigm

shifts," the shibboleth of the next fashion, seemed to have more academic hue to
it, although fewer and fewer among the young seemed to know that paradigms
came from Latin grammars where one could not shift them at will. A noun of the
first declension is always parsed accordingly. Moreover one does not undergo a
mental transformation when passing from the parsing of a first-declension noun
to that of a second- or a thirddeclension noun. Schoolboys undergo agonies
before Latin exams, but they still have the same mind regardless of whether they
passed or failed them. Not so with the paradigm shifts in science as some
historians would have it. According to them the changes paradigm shifts
represent are radical: what was seen before and after are incommensurable, so
those historians claimed. The price to be paid for espousing their view was to let
one despair of the development of science as a case of genuine progress. That I
never for a moment had use for such extravaganzas I owed to a great extent to
my mind's fondness for the clarity of Duhem's discourses. He may have been
wrong on the extreme slowness of the accumulation of scientific lore, but an
organic accumulation it has always been, not the piling of disconnected units, all
of them of different nature, on one another.

Worse, once the notion of paradigm shifts became a fad, they began to
multiply in imitation of the proliferation of a piece of apparel known as shift. A
prominent taxologist complained that some historians of Darwinism began to see
more paradigm shifts in the hardly more than one-century-long history of
evolutionary theory than he could count genera and families. Then the paradigm
shifts became the mental equivalents of genetic mutations. Paradigm shifts were
followed by "images" and by "research programs." In all these, it was the
manner of knowing that was emphasized, while the question of what was known
was conveniently shoved under the rug. One did not even have to have a precise
and consistent definition of such terms. It was the height of academic
mannerism, in imitation of mannerism in the arts where it produced stilted and
stretched bodies, which, owing to their contrived attractiveness, cannot be
viewed too long.

Nothing could, however, be clearer to me than that discourse about natural

theology made little sense if it amounted to the analysis, mostly psychological
and sociological, of how one was thinking about something called God. I
wondered how I could break out of that tropical jungle of words and phrases,
still talk intelligently about science, and cast my findings into such a framework
of natural theology that was not a mockery of it. For mockeries of that sort
found, in the 1960s, a very recipient atmosphere. Paperbacks appeared by the
dozen about natural theology that somehow made it natural to think that God
was merely one's thought and nothing more.

I was beset with such perplexities as I was discarding one scheme after
another for the lectures. And the ample time of almost two years to prepare the
first set of ten lectures began to diminish with every further week spent in vain
search for a topic that would set my mind and imagination on fire. Quite gone
was the leisurely feeling which I had in the summer of 1973 after I received
word that the Gifford Lectureship Committee of the University of Edinburgh
would ask me to deliver two sets of ten lectures in terms of the specifications
laid down by Lord Gifford in 1885. Well, whether or not one knew anything of
Lord Gifford, of whom I later learned a great deal, by 1973 those lectures had a
venerable past that exacted the best from anyone honored with the invitation to
deliver a series, let alone two of them.

It was in June 1971 that I received the first intimation that I would eventually
be invited to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Primarily
responsible for this was The Relevance of Physics, or rather the impression it
made on Thomas F. Torrance, professor of Christian dogmatics at the University
of Edinburgh and a member of the Gifford Lectureship Committee there. He
learned about the book from his elder son, Thomas, who was teaching
philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. I doubt, however, that I had heard of
Torrance prior to the moment when in June 1971 Robert Montgomery, the
Presbyterian chaplain at Princeton University, told me that he and Torrance
would like to have me for lunch. Sometime during that lunch Tom Torrance
simply told me that I would be invited to give the Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh.
He became also very interested in the typescript of Science and Creation that had
just been returned by Herder & Herder in New York, who had already published
two books of mine in quick succession. One of them was The Paradox of Olbers'
Paradox, already discussed, the other the Brain, Mind and Computers, to be
taken up later. This time they declined, because, as I mentioned, Eccles, the
reader of the typescript, misunderstood the aim of the book. Torrance strongly
urged me to send the typescript to Douglas Grant, director of the Scottish
Academic Press in Edinburgh. He would have published it sooner than 1974, had
it not been for an energy crisis during which many firms in Scotland worked
only three days a week.

I saw both Torrance and Grant in Edinburgh sometime in 1972, but hardly
anything was said about the Gifford Lectures. By the spring of 1973 I almost
forgot to the whole thing when I received an airmail letter from Torrance, in
which he told me that I would soon get a formal invitation from the Committee
in Edinburgh. Somehow I learned that Torrance was at that time in Ethiopia
talking with some Coptic churchmen. I was able to ring up a place through
which he was supposed to pass, but I could not exchange a single word with the
person, possibly a Coptic monk, who picked up the phone. There was no point
wasting my money on further calls to Ethiopia, as the rates were stiff at a time
when AT&T did not yet have such competitors as MCI and Sprint. Finally, four
weeks later I received the official invitation, which came by boat mail with
airmail postage on it.

But back to the intellectual history of my writing of the Gifford Lectures and
in particular to the role which my reading of Gilson's Unity of Philosophical
Experience played in it. By the time I was halfway through reading that book, I
knew that there was a way out of that jungle of pseudo-sophistication with
"revolutions," "paradigms," "research programs," "images," and the rest. One
had to make a Copernican turn by focusing not on the manner in which the mind
knows but on the mind's ability to know something, which is above all to know
things. For I could not fail to notice a most important point: Long before
philosophers became preoccupied with science as a form of knowledge and
began to ignore most other forms of it, they had already anticipated the delusion
of latter-day philosophers and historians of science. They took the manner of
knowing, historically or not, for philosophy as if it mirrored the thinking of
scientists. They ignored the fact that in their non-philosophical hours scientists
always wanted to know something that had a strict connection with things, or
else all their experimentation would have been a sheer waste of time.

Philosophers from Descartes on began to think that their chief concern was to
clarify to themselves what it meant to know. And in the measure in which they
underplayed the value of knowing something, they focused on the manner that
seemed to give them the assurance of knowing with certainty. As a result they
ended in doubts and subjectivism, although not to the extent of making scientists
think that they knew nothing. And scientists particularly felt sure of knowing
something whenever science drastically extended its range. It seemed promising
therefore to ask whether there was invariably present a specific epistemology in
those periods or phases of science in which scientists made a truly creative
forward step in acquiring new knowledge.
 As a historian of science I set myself the task of giving the answer to a
question which itself was historical, by unfolding the history of the answer as if
deposited in its very history. Here, too, the history of the question could play the
role which laboratories play in science. In brief, the answer could be put as
follows: Whenever a great creative advance took place in science, one could
notice that those chiefly responsible for that step cast their vote, however
unconsciously, for a realist epistemology. But the converse of this was also
amply revealed by history: whenever a method of science was proposed that ran
counter to or excluded a realist epistemology that lay somewhere between
empiricism and idealism, a real or potential threat was posed to science. By
science I largely meant its most exact kind, physics and astronomy. Here my
training as a physicist could only help my efforts.

The bearing of all this on natural theology had to be obvious, because the
articulation of the classical proofs of the existence of God rest on a realist
epistemology. Therefore theologians could only rejoice on seeing that the same
epistemology was instinctively adopted whenever science made a really creative
step forward. The negative of this was also important. The futility of idealist or a
priori proofs of the existence of God could be seen against the pattern pointed
out in the preceding paragraph: whenever science or its method was interpreted
in terms of an empiricist or an idealist epistemology, a threat was posed to the
vitality of science. But I was most careful not to give the impression that science
demonstrated the existence of God; in fact I deplored time and again the
expectation that science could perform that service, let alone that holes in
scientific knowledge were to be filled with a reference to God.' It was possible,
however, to claim, which I did emphatically, that a careful study of science
could help expose the inanity of some "scientific" objections to natural theology.

In order to have one's mind riveted on all this, one's philosophical sanity had
to be revitalized. In my case there had to come a spark, which, as I have
mentioned earlier, happened to be Gilson's Unity of Philosophical Experience.
The book re-energized my philosophical acumen, dulled by too much attention
to the history of science, although one could not help seeing there the role which
the philosophy of this or that individual scientist played in his scientific
endeavors. Hardly anything was more telling in this respect than an overview of
the philosophical assumptions that made scientists endorse, over two centuries,
the reality of the ether. Compared with Gilson's book I found the fourteen
paperback volumes of Copleston's History of Philosophy at most very
informative. My main work consisted in reading the works of those scientists
and interpreters of science, whose cogitations I could present as proofs of my
positive and negative thesis as set forth above.

The lectures were divided into two parts. The first covered twice twenty
centuries, or a period lasting to the end of the nineteenth century. The second ten
lectures were entirely about the history of my topic during the twentieth century.
My method consisted in portraying the natural theology of a particular thinker
and then relating it to what he said on, or did in, science. In some cases the field
had already been well researched, but the re-reading of the original texts
disclosed not a few novel aspects and details. The writings of Francis Bacon,
who did not receive high marks from me, were especially telling when combed
for specifics. This was also the case with David Hume's writings. One lecture
was entirely devoted to him, which it was particularly enjoyable to deliver in
Edinburgh, where on occasion one still finds him spoken of as "Saint David."
His saintliness was, of course, peculiar, to say the least. One day, so the story
goes, Hume slipped into the marshy bog as he walked on a causeway from the
Old Town to the New. A charwoman came by and recognized him, the notorious
village atheist. She expressed her readiness to help, provided Hume first recited
the Our Father, which he duly did. Few atheists are paragons of consistency
when faced with truly existentialist needs.

My studies preparatory to the lecture on Kant, which subsequently helped me

a great deal in coping with the English translation of his cosmogonical work,
gave me the first glimpse of the horrors he had jotted in respect to science in his
Opus postumum. They were matched by what I found in the writings of Fichte
and Hegel. In sum, nothing could seem more telling than to correlate the
wilfulness of their natural theology with the same in their dicta on science. I
found that Comte's rejection of natural theology mirrored his dismissal of the
best in the science of his day. Mach, who opposed natural theology (and
metaphys ics) in the name of his sensationism in which he saw the best method
for science, also resented Einstein's relativity as smacking of idealist absolutism.
Mach was certainly consistent in espousing Buddhism towards the end of his
life.

Here I can only give some glimpses of details that must have surprised most
readers of The Road of Science and must have also impressed them because
every factual statement there was meticulously referenced. The contrast had to
appear as clashing with, say, Will Durant's tales of cultural history and with
Bertrand Russell's history of philosophy. The former may have some excuse in
his never having had scientific training, but the latter's sole excuse could only be
his fame as a mathematical logician. Fame once more covered a multitude of
shortcomings about matters intellectual, to say nothing of morality.

Contrary to some standard myths of the historiography of science, I found

Newton to be no disciple of Bacon, in spite of the latter's popularity in the
nascent Royal Society. In fact, in order to vindicate his scientific creativity,
Newton instinctively tried to tie it to a middle-road epistemology, intent as he
was not to appear in the same boat either with the empiricist Bacon or with the
rationalist Descartes. Interestingly, Newton's great forerunners, such as Galileo,
Copernicus, Oresme, and Buridan, all endorsed natural theology insofar as they
held that reflection on the natural world could propel the mind to recognize the
Creator. I was pleased to marshal evidence that Buridan and Oresme had nothing
in common with Ockham's occasionalism, in which natural theology was
explicitly rejected.

My discussion of the twentieth-century part of my story had, of course, to

open with Planck and Einstein, the two who created modern science and were
careful not to identify it with their philosophical interpretation of it, let alone
with their philosophies at large. Whatever philosophy they knew as being part of
their culture, it was empiricist, or idealist, or rationalist, or often a strange
mixture of all these. Both Planck and Einstein had to fight it out with Mach. The
latter rightly suspected that metaphysics was raising its head in Planck's
postulating a basic, indivisible lump of energy and even more so in Einstein's
postulate that the value of the speed of light remains the same in all reference
systems. There was indeed something metaphysical, and not something merely
aesthetic, in Einstein's view that Maxwell's equations of electromagnetics had a
beauty that deserved to be kept invariant.

Eventually both Planck and Einstein espoused a philosophical position

equivalent to metaphysical realism. While Planck found nothing disturbing in
the fact that the reality of God arose on the horizon of such a philosophical
perspective, Einstein, in an attitude typical of many agnostic Jews, strongly
resisted that vision. Nothing of this was said by Gerald Holton, who took great
pride in his shedding light on Einstein the metaphysician, or, in Holton's words,
the rational metaphysician. It fell to me to expose the Kantian rationality of
Einstein's metaphysics as it blares forth from letters he wrote around 1950 to M.
Besso. Einstein, who held with Kant that there was no way of going beyond the
universe, failed to note that Kant would have reproached him for having gone as
far as the universe. Apparently Einstein's reading of Kant stopped where he first
found him, at the age of 13, when he thought he fully understood the Sage of
Konigsberg as the one who made everything clear.

Unlike Planck and Einstein, who, I found, kept their physics at a safe distance
from their philosophizing about it, Bohr was all too eager to graft a dubious
mixture of pragmatism and sensationism on his theory of the atom. Worse, in the
form of complementarity, he kept preaching that mixture for the rest of his life
as the ultimate form of philosophy which, as such, should also serve as the only
true religion! It was not popular to raise warnings about Bohr and to recall his
strange sympathies for the Soviet Union. But in view of the growing perplexities
of physicists about what quantum mechanics really teaches them, a warning
should have been in order long before I made it. An integral part of that ideology
of complementarity, or rather its most conspicuous scientific support, is
Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy. Compared with my very tactful and
perhaps vague criticism of that principle in The Relevance, what I said of it in
the Gifford Lectures should appear strongly disapprovingbut the latter is still
very mild compared with what I was to say in a few more years.

From what I have just said it should be clear that I used Koyre's and Kuhn's
disapproving dicta on the role of natural theology as illustrations of the
irrationality which these two grafted onto our understanding of science. I was
only pleased when a few years later the Australian philosopher, David C. Stove,
came out with a book,' in which Kuhn was presented as the chief of the four
principal irrationalist interpreters of science. The three others were Feyerabend,
Lakatos, and Popper, the latter of whom I discussed in another lecture in which I
took up the defense of the mind. I did this against the attacks by sundry modern
philosophers of science who tried to cope with the act of discovery. This act is
clearly impossible to account for on an empiricist or on a rationalist basis and
certainly not when the mind is turned into a mere object of psychological or
aesthetic investigation.

This defense of the mind was crucial before I could turn to my positive task,
namely, to set forth three proofs of the existence of God. One was the
cosmological argument, which I presented with an eye on scientific cosmology.
There the universe invariably appeared as something specific, a feature which,
somewhat unfortunately, I presented as the singularity of the universe. By that
term I meant that the universe was singularly or signally specific. Of course,
scientific cosmologists meant that, at a singular point way back in the past, their
equations broke down as being saddled with various infinities. They thought,
and still do, that they might cope with this, provided they could quantize the
gravitational field, which, after more than half a century, is still to be done. At
any rate, I readily took Einstein's cosmology for a real grasp of the Universe,
writ large, which it is not. I did not pay enough attention to the fact that the
scientific method is incapable of proving that there is a Universe, or a strict
totality of consistently interacting things. The reason for this is very simple:
scientists cannot go outside the Universe to observe and measure it, which is,
however, an integral desideratum of the scientific method. To develop these
points I did not have an opportunity for ten or so more years.

In another lecture I took up the design argument. Here, too, I presented my

own ideas couched in views or comments made by various people during the
previous hundred years or so. I made much of Darwin's contradictory statements
about design and purpose, to say nothing of natural selection and chance. The
topic demanded more space, but it was not for another twelve years that I had the
opportunity to devote a set of eight lectures to the design argument taken as a
particular aspect of the much broader question of purpose. I have, however,
made it clear that, regardless of the defects of the mechanism of evolution, the
fact of evolution had to be held by a theist even more firmly than by a
materialist. For a materialist merely the power of matter is at stake, whereas for a
theist the honor of the Creator as one who can endow matter with all power
proper to matter.

Clearly, a notion of a Creator who had to interfere with natural processes

whenever a new species was to arise, had to appear unworthy of God, who can
and ought to be worshiped, and of a theology that has such a God for its object.
By evolution I simply meant that the powers of matter are wholly sufficient to
account for any material transformation insofar as it is observable and
measurable, be it the transformation of species. For the scientist any species as
such has to be a strictly material entity. In that respect the competence of the
scientist is unlimited. By the same token, the scientist cannot argue against some
non-material directive force in nature as long as that force remains nonmaterial,
that is, metaphysical. Such a force cannot be considered non-existent just
because the scientific method forecloses its being observed, weighed, and
measured. Philosophy is required to prove the existence of such a force, though
without ever attributing to it any material characteristic. The scientist may safely
ignore it, though in order to be consistent, he should then also say that he cannot
observe life. Life is not merely the motion of bits of matter and the replicating of
their configurations. Fully satisfactory thinking about evolution implies the often
frustrating recognition that one has to handle at the same time two balls, standing
for two mutually irreducible sets of concepts. Here I touch on a point which
since then has become an increasingly crucial part in my mind's workings. The
point, as will be seen in a later chapter, has become for me a guiding principle on
a wide range of topics. In retrospect I now see that it has from the start guided, at
least implicitly, my thinking about physics and its relation to other fields of
inquiry.

As to the ethical proof of the existence of God, my presentation of it stressed

the negative more than the positive, simply because my perspective was fixed on
science. I argued that the scientific method provided no guidelines for the proper
handling of the awesome tools science provides. Further, I quoted prominent
scientists who frankly admitted that they could derive no ethical insights from
science. It therefore had to appear a delusion to see in science a shield against
relativist, that is, purely statistical approaches to ethics. These had to be seen as
so many invitations to social suicide.

If one were to ask what is the basic claim which underlies my Gifford
Lectures, I would say that one's idea of the ultimate in being and intelligibility
has an inevitable bearing on anything one says provided one tries to be
consistent. For that reason I should perhaps have entitled my Lectures as
"Science and the Ultimate." The actual title, The Road of Science and the Ways
to God, is, of course, more expressive of the basic connection between natural
theology and science. It is a strictly philosophical connection, although in its
historical reality revealed religion enters into that connection. There has never
been a purely natural theology. The world, to recall a phrase of Thales, has
always been thought of to be full of gods who somehow spoke to man. The least
"superstitious" among the Greek sages sacrificed to the gods, of whom we like to
speak as personifications of this or that force in nature, but to those sages the
gods were more than that. At any rate, natural theology flourished in the measure
in which supernatural claims were made by religionists. Natural theology as a
fully developed subject is a child of Christian theology, which, of course, was
not to be a subject matter for lectures founded by Lord Gifford in 1885.

On this point I can make a few observations not only as a Gifford lecturer, but
also as the one who wrote the history of Gifford Lectures. I was not the first to
do so3 but certainly the first to publish something of that sort. The idea started
when it occurred, sometime around 1993, to Pere M. Regnier, S. J., editor of
Archives de philosophie, that in view of the approaching centenary of the
founding of the Gifford Lectureships, a comprehensive essay on them would be
in order. He broached the idea to Torrance, who in turn submitted my name to
him as one who does things. The result was a long article that quickly appeared.'
Although Pere Regnier liked the article, he did not like my dislike of idealists,
Kantian or Hegelian. His fondness for them was a telltale sign of the spread
among Jesuit philosophers and theologians of "transcendental Thomism," which
by then I had on more than one occasion called Aquikantism, or a miscegenation
of Aquinas and Kant.

Soon after that article appeared in French, its English text became a not too
long book, Lord Gifford and His Lectures, which was reissued in an updated
edition in 1994. In addition to an analytical survey of the Gifford Lectures and
their full list, the book also comprised a discussion of Lord Gifford's ideas and
actions, as well as excerpts from his various publications. He cultivated natural
theology as an avocation in his exacting life on the bench where he rose
eventually to the rank of Lord Advocate of Scotland.

My work was greatly facilitated by the fact that the lectureship Committees of
the four Scottish Universities-Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen-
gave me full access to the material in their archives. Details about the invitation
of lecturers could cast an interesting light on the material they presented, but the
essential task remained the perusal of well over a hundred volumes of Gifford
Lectures, many of which had been familiar to me for some time. The task was at
times very pleasant, at times rather boring, at other times somewhat annoying.
To be sure, Lord Gifford left great latitude for the lecturers, whose
renumerations at that time were really fabulous, amounting to more than their
annual salaries at their respective universities. He expected the lecturers to be
"earnest enquirers after truth" but also stipulated that they avoid "sectarian"
topics. Beyond that they could freely set forth their reasoned convictions,
whatever they were, about the Absolute, which Lord Gifford carefully left
undefined. He was a sort of a Hegelian, or perhaps an Emersonian
transcendentalist, with a touch of Buddhist proclivities. One of his published
essays was on the eight avatars of Buddha.

Of course, if one is to write an analytical survey or a sort of general appraisal

of more than a hundred series, some of them great classics, such as William
James' Varieties of Religious Experience, one has to adopt some standards of
evaluation. I gave short shrift to those who boldly ignored the wide latitudes
allowed to them by Lord Gifford and offered lectures that cannot, even by the
wildest stretch of imagination, be considered as having natural theology for their
subject. Again, it was not proper to evaluate the material on hand on the basis of
whether a particular lecturer was witty or dull. There had to be some standard to
plumb depths, or else anything below the surface could be taken for profundity.
Lord Gifford's stipulations were of no help in devising such a standard. A
yardstick, a fathoming line, is something always specific. The yardstick I
adopted was specific in the sense that I expected natural theology to be about a
God who could be worshiped, that is, One whom a human person could address
as another person, and implore, say, with the words of the Lord's Prayer, hardly a
sectarian text. Such a God could not be a mere personification of some natural
force or some supreme elan vital, or a nisus, or Process writ large.

I discussed the lectures by grouping them according to their authors'

professions: philosophers, historians of religion, Church historians, scientists,
anthropologists, theologians, and so forth. I could not help expressing sympathy
for those few, such as Gilson and Mascall, who had philosophical convictions,
also dear to me, that may be called moderate realism. For this I was chided by N.
Spurway, who in 1993 published a volume on those who gave Gifford Lectures
at the University of Glasgow. He gave a brief survey of the entire history of the
Lectures which in some places reads like my history of them. Nor did he seem to
have have read extensively. At times he did not even see that the back cover text
of a given Gifford Lecture could have given him a fair appraisal of what the
author wanted to say. This was certainly true of my lectures, about which he
merely said that they were very learned but difficult to sum up. I still cannot
understand why my choice of standards of evaluation was to be dismissed with
the remark that in Scotland, unlike in Jaki's native Hungary, there was freedom
of opinion.5 Was I responsible for the Communist oppression there? Or was it I
who in the West spoke of Communism in the East as a variant of democracy? I
could easily fill a page with the names of prominent Western avatars of this
myopia, some of them Gifford lecturers.

Others who likewise did not share my "Thomism," a label which, for reasons
to be explained later, should be used with caution, could still be truly gracious.
One of them was Dr. James McCord, director of the newly founded Center for
Theological Inquiry where I spent several years as a member in its opening years
(1984-87). Of Jim I keep fond memories. In his somewhat corpulent figure I saw
an expression of a very big heart. In 1981, when he was still president of
Princeton Theological Seminary, he invited me to give a course on the relation
of science and religion. He was ecumenical in the sense in which that word
means openness and friendly attitude, though not an invitation to syncretism. I
did not press him with further questions when in a quiet conversation at the
Center, he turned the topic to Hans Kung, whom he had years earlier invited to
speak at the Theological Seminary. "I told Hans," Jim told me, "never to become
a Protestant." Did Jim mean to say that Protestantism was best promoted in the
Catholic Church by insiders? Or, and I cannot help thinking so, did Jim, deep in
his heart, see something special in Rome?

On another occasion he asked me to join him and Paul Ramsey, a Methodist,

who taught moral philosophy in the Religion Department of Princeton
University. They were tasting a bottle of red wine in the kitchenette of the
Center as I walked in. Jim thought that three could better cope with the task than
just two. Wine once more loosened tongues. Ecumenism came up and Ramsey
volunteered the remark: "The true Church is where you feel comfortable," which
made me feel so uncomfortable as to seek comfort in silence. On still another
occasion, when members of the Center's Board of Trustees visited, Jim asked me
to make a presentation to them of the work I was doing there on the relation of
science and religion. After the presentation of about fifteen minutes was over,
Jim commended it with the remark: "Stanley, you have a strong christology."
The remark struck me as a bit strange. I have always thought that christology
was either true or false and not strong or weak, let alone conservative or liberal,
traditional or progressive.

Still, I am sure that Jim's Christian heart was in the right place. He clearly saw
the pitfalls of ecumenism. The fact that the panel members and speakers of
ecumenical symposia, still in great vogue in the early 1980s, were usually the
same was for him an ominous sign. He saw in it a sign of dubious
professionalism, although he was generous in his appreciation of any serious
endeavor. Such was certainly the case when, after having read my book on the
Gifford Lectures, he turned to me: "I admire the skill with which you dance
around all those authors." Then he explained that by "dancing" he meant the skill
of not getting bogged down in details for fear that some would complain of not
having found references to their pet interests.

By then I had twenty or so years of intensive writing behind me, which taught
me the truth of a saying of John Henry Newman: "Nothing would be done at all
if a man waited until he could do it so well that no one would find fault with it."
It was around 1968 that I first saw that passage, not in a book but on a poster
hanging in the kitchen of a friend, a radiologist, whose wife was also one.
Perhaps the poster was the wife's shield against criticism of her performance in
the kitchen. I made a copy of the poster and put it above my typewriter. It made
my life much easier. One has to have a certain measure of confidence in one's
mind and not be overly concerned about other minds. Or else one never talks of
the matter of one's own mind. For this is what one does even when one writes
about apparently very different matters.

It was about that time, or 1968, that I was putting the finishing touches on my
book, Brain, Mind and Computers. It is autobiographical in the sense that it is
unabashedly a sort of apologetics or a plea on behalf of a Christian's most
cherished conviction. Now if a Christian has to be convinced about anything, it
is about the reality of his soul as an entity, an essence which is purely spiritual or
non-material. I know, of course, of the new fad among Christian theologians
who think that by emphasizing bodily resurrection they can safely ignore the
mind-body problem. But if with bodily death everything in the human being
dies, he no longer exists. Can God resurrect something non-existent? Even an
infinite power has limits insofar as it is genuinely rational. Or as Thomas
Aquinas put it in the Summa theologiae, even God cannot do what implies
contradic-tion.6

Apart from this theological point, which is also strictly philosophical, there
are some cultural questions raised by the status assigned or denied to the soul.
Can inalienable rights and personal dignity be attributed to what is supposedly a
mere lump of cells run by selfish genes? An imperishable essence, whether
called soul, or mind, or spirit, clearly cannot be generated by such a lump. Those
who take Darwinist evolutionary theory for a scientific proof of materialism are
wont to take that theory for a scientific rebuttal of the notion of essence, not only
in the spiritual, but also in the biological sense. George Gaylord Simpson took
that rebuttal for Darwin's essential achievement.' Just this morning as I am
writing these lines, an op-ed editorial in The New York Times (March 14, 1998,
p. A17) pleads for the legalization of cloning humans on the grounds that
objections to it are mere "essentialist" fears. Efforts to vindicate, that is, to save
our souls on the intellectual level, should seem to have taken on even greater
urgency since the publication of Brain, Mind and Computers, the first of my
efforts in that direction. They constitute the subject of the next chapter.
Any book is autobiographical at least in that it mirrors its author's mind about the
readers he expected to respond to his message. In 1969 I still imagined that
scientists would be intrigued by a negative defense of the soul. Such would be
the claim, if true, that the scientific method is incapable of sizing up the human
mind. But scientists are no more willing to face up to the limitations inherent in
their procedures than are professionals in other fields. Years before computers
helped man land on the moon and decades before PC's landed on one's desk,
scientific conferences began to resound with references to thinking machines. To
be sure, the late 1960s were still fairly free of wild speculations about computers
consciously setting their own agenda and lovingly siring their progeny. Stephen
Hawking, though, prophesied that computers would replace theoretical
physicists. It would not be bad, of course, to replace those who claim that there
are as many universes as there are observers and that science has now proved the
universe to be eternal, to say nothing of those scientists who assert that they can
create entire universes literally out of nothing. To their meager excuse, such
scientists have not yet claimed that computers would one day do all that, and
Lord knows what else.

Those responsible for creating the modern electronic computers, both digital
and analogue, concluded almost to a man that such instruments, however
ultrafast, did no thinking whatsoever. And since to devise computers was
essentially a task for physicists, it seemed right to assume that their conclusion
told much about the limitations, that is, the irrelevance of physics in some
regards. I further assumed that for a typical physicist today it would be
significant to know that Pascal and Leibniz, the first to construct mechanical
calculating machines, most emphatically rejected the idea of a mechanical
imitation of the mind. It was perhaps less daring to assume that my hypothetical
audience would be interested in knowing that Babbage, who around 1830
produced a vast calculating machine (Difference Engine) operating with punch
cards, had but scorn for the idea of artificial intelligence.

By meticulously reporting all this in the first chapter, "Computers and

Physics," in Brain, Mind and Computers (henceforth BMC for brevity's sake) I
certainly satisfied my bent for making clear the history of the question. Most
physicists (for I imagined that I was speaking mostly to them) did not really care
to learn that H. H. Aiken, John von Neumann and other creators of the hardware
and software of electronic computers held these to be ultrafast robots. In stating
this in various ways, they brought into focus the irrelevance of physics in respect
to a crucial matter, which is especially crucial for the champions of artificial
intelligence. Indeed they cannot muster courage to confront arguments that the
idea of artificial intelligence is something most artificial. I have found this idea
most repulsive, a sentiment which could not fail to transpire through the pages of
BMC, a fact pointedly noted by the author of Godel, Escher, Bach as one of his
counterpoints. Although he admitted that I raised some "interesting points" in
BMC, he did not care to inform his readers about them.

The second chapter, "Computers and the Brain," made quite an impression on
John C. Eccles, who in 1963 received the Nobel Prize in medicine for his
investigations of the synapses connecting brain cells. He felt that, in spite of my
being an outsider to his field, I had read much of the literature, grasped the
essentials well, and spotted many a relevant detail. The literature had its amusing
features. Such was the prediction by Lord Brain, a leading brain researcher, that
the workings of the brain would be clarified in four hundred years. Even a palm
reader could not have offered something more evasive. In John von Neumann's
lectures on brain and computers, I found telling arguments on behalf of my
thesis in that second chapter: supporters of artificial intelligence had little
chance, if they wanted to make it a reality by replicating electronically the
workings of the brain. Thirty years after the publication of BMC, brain research
still has to cope with a most elementary task, namely, the clarification of the
manner in which the brain registers and stores memory. Contrary to one point in
that chapter, a future electronic replica of the brain need not be a machine that
keeps losing some of its components. Such a replica still would have to do what,
according to recent findings, the hippocampus of the brain of some monkeys
does: it produces new brain cells to replace the wornout ones.' It remains, of
course, a sheer speculation as to how cells and their working can be simulated in
computers.

It was less arduous and more fun to write chapter three, "Computers and the
Psyche." It was fun to survey the hapless efforts of some psychologists who
wanted to quantify their subject matter and emulate thereby the exactness of
physics. Atrocious claims of some behaviorists, such as "Rats, not men. Gross
behavior, not verbal reports," could be pilloried to good effect, as in doing so
one could echo psychologists who had not yet thrown common sense to the
wind. Physicalist reductionism was my bete noir at that time, and it was a joy to
lampoon its intrusion into psychology. But it was only in my reflections on the
mind in the Gifford Lectures that I included a psychologist's devastating
summary of certain trends in the field: "Psychology having first bargained away
its soul, and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as it faces an untimely end, to
have lost all consciousness."2

If I had a free hand, which publishers hardly ever allow to authors, I might
have been tempted to include an appendix on Clio-history, or the idea that the
study of history can be made exact only if done in quantitative terms. I shall
never forget the bewilderment I felt when, on May 11, 1967, I heard that idea
proposed at a faculty seminar in the history department at Princeton University.
There Prof. L. Benson of the University of Pennsylvania set forth the thesis that
no student of the American Civil War would figure out its cause until the entire
voting record of all members of Congress from 1830 till 1860 would be fed into
a computer. One could not help thinking that this was another illustration of
"garbage in, garbage out," or at least the equivalent of thinking that one can
multiply six by seven only if one considers that operation as a limiting case in
integral calculus.

In 1968 or so I was still confident that physicists would be interested in

reading the fourth chapter, "Computers and Thought." But it became
increasingly fashionable to try to solve the strictly philosophical questions of
artificial intelligence in terms that allowed only lip service to be paid to
philosophy. Logical positivism was at that time still ruling all major departments
of philosophy, with the minor ones eagerly following suit. Within such a climate
of opinion it was futile to expect some echo to BMC's appendix in which I drew
a parallel between that climate and the one which Samuel Butler described in
"The Book of the Machines," the most prescient section of his Erehwon.

Incidentally, I never made much of the chronic failure of computers to beat

chess masters. The latter had to meet their Waterloo sooner or later. This
happened in May 1997 when the computer program Deep Blue, designed by
IBM, beat Gary Kasparov. Clearly, the program could be perfected to the point
where it could anticipate all possible movements of its human opponent to eight
or so steps in advance, which involved an astronomically high number of
electronic memory units. Deep Blue was not a laptop with 3-4 GB hard drive but
a huge metal box with many multiples of that number. In addition, that fearsome
contraption was assisted by a team of human operators. And unlike Kasparov,
whose attention could sag, the Deep Blue had no such specifically human
problems. The really inhuman aspect of the aftermath of the event was the
charge made by some journalist defenders of thinking machines that the IBM
people unjustly emphasized the purely machinelike character of Deep Blue. All
the philosophical arguments in the chapter, "Computers and Thought," would, of
course, leave unmoved those who argued as follows in reference to Deep Blue's
victory: "If the unconscious version yields intelligent results, and the explicit
algorithmic version yields essentially the same results, are not both methods
intelligent?"3 The answer remains a resolute No! as long as one cares to see the
difference between a real leaf and its mimicry by a bug and also cares to admit
that by seeing this one still does not see beneath the surface where the real issue,
the question of meaning, lies hidden.

The typescript of BMC was first submitted to the University of Chicago Press,
where a professedly non-reductionist faculty member, specializing in the
interface between psychology and brain physiology, found the book to be too
anti-reductionist. Later 1 met more and more of this kind of intellectual whose
professed anti-reductionism was equivalent to holding the view that a woman
can be "almost pregnant." There is no medium between being reductionist and
anti-reductionist, just as the chemical composition of the atmosphere is either
"reducing" or not. These "subtly" or "moderately" anti-reductionist gurus
deserve the stricture which around 1900 the leading British Hegelian McTaggart
hurled at those who thought that Hegel can be turned into an ally of Christians.
A convinced non-Christian, McTaggart warned them that Hegel was "an enemy
in disguise, the least evident, and the most dangerous."4 The "almost"
antireductionist is such an enemy.

BMC, eventually published by Herder & Herder, received some high praise.
Eugene P. Wigner spoke of it as a "book fascinating in its content as well as in
style . . . which every scientist should read." Once more the "should" proved
itself not to be the equivalent of "would." Scientists do not necessarily listen to
Nobel laureates, which, of course, may at times be a blessing in disguise. Robert
A. Nisbet of Columbia University, who had made a name for himself with a
great monograph on the history of the idea of Progress, wrote: "Dr. Jaki's book is
the most informed, penetrating, and lucidly written treatment of the subject that I
have read anywhere." I was most pleased with Herbert Feigl's appraisal: "Dr.
Jaki presents a sustained, wellinformed and persuasive argument for mind-body
dualism.... My own predilections are exactly opposite to Dr. Jaki's conclusion,
but I welcome his challenge.... ..

As I later learned, Feigl asked Judith Economos, one of his best students, to
refute my book. She did not do it, perhaps because of the bereavement she felt
when her six-year-old Maria was run down by an automobile near their home, at
the point where Green House Drive meets Mercer Street in Princeton. Of Maria I
have fond memories. I saw her only once, at a party. She climbed into my lap
and stayed there for the entire span of the evening. She would not recognize
anyone else. Mr. and Mrs. Oppenheim were also there. As we left, Mrs.
Oppenheim turned to me and said: "Father Jaki, children are good judges." I
hope she was not entirely wrong. After Maria's mother moved out of Princeton, I
occasionally visited little Maria's grave in the Princeton cemetery. Whenever I
drive by the spot where little Maria died, and this I have to do almost daily, I
cannot help feeling a pang in my heart even thirty years after that sad event.

The Mr. Oppenheim in question was, of course, the wellknown logical

positivist and a good friend of Hempel who taught in Princeton. I was often
invited by the Oppenheims into their home, sumptuously fitted out with
paintings by famous impressionists. Oppenheim himself was interested in my
thoughts precisely because of his wrestling with the brain-mind relationship. His
rejection of dualism, of which more later, rested on his being enamored, as was
the case with all logical positivists, with clear and precise concepts. Once at his
suggestion I met him outside the context of his informal "seminars" periodically
held in his home. He chose his upstairs study because he wanted to sound me out
on the conceptual status of religion. Most of its conceptual tools do not, of
course, fit into "clearly" definable contours as, say, numbers and all quantitative
data of physics do.

Still, religion has its own attraction even to some logical positivists who are
not entirely confined to the straitjacket of logic. Oppenheim was willing to
consider religion, provided it was merely an emotive issue. The religion he had
in mind was not something vague. Under the glass top of his desk there were
several pictures, with a reproduction of Rembrandt's "Descent from the Cross" in
the center. I had to tell him that Christian faith challenged the whole man,
including his emotions but also had a clarity not to be fathomed by a very
narrow type of philosophy. I asked him whether his judgment that the glass
cover right under our nose existed there was purely emotive just because
existence statements could not be "clear" in the sense demanded by logical
positivism. He deflected my question. He obviously did not want to face up to an
elementary consideration utterly destructive of spurious ideals of clarity.

On another occasion he spoke of the obligation deriving from the scientific

method to recognize only empirical realities. He fell silent when I pointed out
that the universe, the principal object of scientific cosmology, was not an
instance of empirical knowledge. On still another occasion I did not press him
when the topic of his "seminar" was ethics. He extolled the Benthamian principle
of the greatest good for the greatest number. It was most painful for me to see,
then and on other occasions, that some refugees from Hitler's horrors failed to
find a better ground than the one on which Hitler himself could have
conveniently made a stand. Bentham's principle was welcomed by Darwinists
and Freudians. At the last "seminar" I attended, Oppenheim asked the entire
group, "Do we not owe to Freud our deepest insights into the soul?" I could not
help remarking that Freud merely stole the soul of a great many who tried to
recover it on the couch. Such were some instances of my struggle for souls
mesmerized by science or rather by their myopic view of it.

There were other forms, of course, of that struggle, such as my priestly

ministry, of which I would like to recall only those years, about ten or so, when
on Sundays between 1971 and 1981 I said Mass in a correction center (prison, in
ordinary English) not too far from Princeton. Only a handful out of a hundred or
so inmates there came to Mass. Once a terribly agitated 18-yearold turned up
whom the police had caught with marijuana in his pockets. He was a Methodist.
He begged me to have him removed from the midst of hard-core criminals. It
was hell, he kept saying. One wondered whether our much vaunted "correction
centers," that just began to be equipped with computers, were of any help to
people, old or young, with souls, who served time there. I found time and again
that some of the correction officers there did not take kindly to my coming. They
seemed to be much more in need of some thorough correction than that poor
black man, who turned up for a few weeks every six months or so. "Well"-he
said to me one day-"whenever I am too hungry or cold, I break a shopwindow or
two and then the cops bring me in. Here the coffee is good, cake goes with it,
and the place is heated in winter."

But back to BMC, which impressed Eccles so much that he volunteered the
following for its back cover: "It is rewarding and refreshing to read such
penetrating criticism of a field in which gratuitous theorizing and dogmatism are
able to flourish because our scientific understanding is so small." Before long he
nominated me for the Lecomte du Nouy Prize. Since Lecomte du Nouy did his
research at Rockefeller University from the mid-1920s on, the ceremony took
place there. My acceptance speech must have impressed the members of the
Prize committee, because soon I was asked, and rather insistently, to accept the
position of secretary. I accepted it against my better judgment, as in such
assignments I could but prove myself a distinct failure. It took a quarter of a
century before I went to Rockefeller University again, this time to talk on a far
more concrete topic than the vindication of the humanities in the teeth of
scientism. I talked on Rockefeller Institute's first Nobel-laureate, Alexis Carrel,
the great pioneer of modern surgery. Although I often gave talks on him, I
always found fresh food for thought in a major but usually slighted or distorted
facet of his life: After he witnessed a miraculous cure in Lourdes in 1902, he
struggled against the evidence for almost forty years before he let it save his
soul.

Eccles I met on a number of occasions following our first meeting at that Prize
ceremony. Once I visited him in Buffalo on a particularly harsh winter day. He
drove me out to Niagara Falls, almost entirely frozen over. On the road he made
me freeze inwardly by informing me that he was certain that in some biological
laboratories severed human heads were kept alive, that is, activated by electric
impulses. Back at home we had dinner, and after that he decided to turn me into
a devotee of Popper's three-world explanation of the mind. This unfroze me only
in the sense of making me very sleepy. Eccles, who might have become a first-
rate missionary, was still trying to persuade me when the clock struck two after
midnight. It was a strange performance on his part, not so much because he
pushed things a bit too strongly, but because he failed to note an oddity. He told
me repeatedly that he used to upbraid Jacques Monod for using the prestige of
the Nobel Prize to promote rank materialism. Instead of pressing Monod on
materialism, Eccles should have taken him to task on a rank inconsistency. It
was illogical, to say the least, to harness into one team two such incompatible
horses as chance and necessity as if they could pull the wagon of human and
spiritual values. Why then was anti-reductionism championed by Eccles, who
also held high Popper's "three worlds," although it left no logical room for souls
as essentially different from matter? The answer may lie in the fervent
Catholicism of Eccles' first forty years. They must have impressed some
intangible guidelines on his mind.

In 1978 I obtained for Eccles an invitation to a week-long Symposium in

Portaria, north of Volos, sponsored by the Hellenic Society for Humanistic
Studies, the brainchild of Konstantin Vourveris, professor of classical Greek at
the University of Athens. He used that Society, among other things, as a means
to promote the study of classical Greek in Greece's high schools and universities,
where the subject was quickly turning into an almost defunct species. I knew, of
course, that Latin had a similar fate in Italy, although the Greek case struck me
more forcefully. Modern Greek seemed to me to be much closer to classical
Greek than Italian to the tongue of Cicero and Tacitus. Incidentally, I owed my
introduction to Vourveris to Paul Weiss of Rockefeller University, who, I
believe, was also on the Lecomte du Nouy Prize committee. Eventually Weiss
invited me to his home, where I could not help admiring a large painting of
Christ agonizing in the Garden. I would have been more pleased if that painting
had become the center piece of our conversation instead of the fact that his father
and my father had served as reserve officers in the Austrio-Hungarian Army
during World War I.

Eccles came to Volos and delivered his talk, one of his staple speeches, larded
with many references to Popper's "three worlds." There sat in the first row a
priest, Gerard Verbeke, perpetual secretary of the Belgian Academie des
Sciences and a leading authority on the medievals' "Aristotle," as well as on the
Stoics of old. He asked Eccles a question about the permanence of the mind, or
soul. Unfortunately, Verbeke mixed a scholastic term or two into his question,
which prompted Eccles to express his contempt for the Scholastics. Yet I
remembered that in Buffalo he had pulled out Gilson's Spirit of Medieval
Philosophy from his shelves and had done so with admiration for its author.
Eccles also took it for his greatest honor that Sherrington considered him as his
intellectual heir especially in one crucial respect, which is the soul's immortality.
Eccles kept informing the world about Sherrington's having said just before his
death that he had come to believe in the immortality of the human soul. But then,
if one disdained the Scholastics, one had to find some new terminology, if one
was to articulate one's belief in the soul's immortality, because it was not
possible to do this on the basis of Popper's "three worlds."

The last time I saw Eccles was in 1994 at the Plenary meeting of the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences. He was a missionary to the end, preaching with great zeal
something about synapses and intelligence, which, because of the complexity of
the subject, was very difficult to follow. With his pointing stick he kept hitting
the desk in front of him, trying to illustrate the rapid firing of synapses. Only he
failed to say a word about the cognitive content of those rapid firings. He said
not a word about the mind, much less anything about the soul. Three years
before that I had visited at the Canberra headquarters of the Australian Academy
of Sciences. Right in its main foyer there is a striking portrait in oil of Eccles.
When around 1966 he left Australia, he gave up enormous prestige, and family
ties, to boot. To the end he remained a tortured soul. May he rest in peace.

Herder & Herder in New York, the original publisher of BMC, was one of
those older Catholic publishers who took Vatican II for a signal to become
trendy. For a while the firm flourished on the income from the English
translation of the Dutch Catechism that caused many a Catholic soul "to be in
Dutch." Then the firm produced in quick order a Marxist encyclopedia as well as
one on sex which contained literally everything on the subject except Catholic
teaching. When I first met the younger publisher, I was greeted with the remark
that since he had taken charge of the firm I happened to be the first priest to
come into his office wearing a Roman collar. The windowsill of his office was
filled with a dozen or so bottles of whisky and liquor. I saw right away that
spirits were readily served there but no souls. Before long Herder & Herder of
New York gave up the ghost as an independent publisher.

I was therefore free to offer BMC for a second edition to Mr. Henry Regnery,
who had turned from a New Dealer into a confirmed conservative. His Memoirs
of a Dissident Publisher taught me a great deal about prewar America. He was
now grooming his younger son, Henry Jr., a most delightful individual, to
become his successor in the firm, which by then was known as Regnery
Gateway. Young Henry perished in that horrible airplane crash at O'Hare that
took over 300 lives. By then he had brought out the second edition of BMC with
a cover which was not too fortunate. The ribbon, indicating the Lecomte du
Nouy Prize, never failed to remind me of decorations handed out in dog shows.
His older brother, Alfred, eventually took over the running of the firm and
quickly slated BMC for still another edition. This third edition came out
enlarged with a fairly long chapter called "Language, Logic, Logos." It was my
new effort to fight for the cause of souls and save thinking about the soul from
becoming the prey of artificial intelligencers.
 The latter could not have been more brazen about what they really had in
mind: the construction of an "omniscient" machine. Worse, they showed no trace
of doubt that they would succeed. They merely differed from one another in
drawing up the timetable, which ranged from ten years to fifty. Some of them are
now hedging their bets, remembering that their elders miserably failed as
prophets. Some others, and this is the far more important point to note, realized
that such a state of omniscience would lock the hacker into his own world.
Cultivation of artificial intelligence can only bring along the omniscience of
which only solipsists can be proud. This was one of the points made in that new
chapter and under the subheading, "the phenomenology of artificial
intelligence," which might have just as well been called "the climate of thought
among artificial intelligencers." That climate cannot be studied long and well
enough. For if it is not taken for what it is, namely, the intellectual equivalent of
marshlands that exude deadly gases with the sweet fragrance of opiates, it will
certainly undermine the sanity of many a soul.

The sanity in question depends on one's keen realization of what may seem
trivially elementary: No one can take the second step before taking the first. It
was in "Language, Logos, Logic" that I first likened much of modern philosophy
to playing baseball where the participants think that it is possible to steal second
base before touching first. Such a trick is the name of the game played by
artificial intelligencers. They invariably overlook the fact that meaning comes
first before its symbolization, be it a word or a phoneme or a stream of
digitalized electronic impulses. They also love to forget, and in a rather arbitrary
fashion, that all such symbols are free choices of the human mind. And they fail
to see that their arbitrary forgetfulness is a mere abuse of their free will, another
of those first steps, irreducible to anything else.

It was not, however, in that chapter, but in a talk given at a conference in

Madrid that I drove this point home. "Computers: Lovable, but Unloving," so
went the title of my talk. By love I meant something more general than what that
word usually stands for. My principal target was the fact that the act of knowing
never lacks some volitional aspect. In fact the deeper the intellect's grasp, the
greater its commitment to the object it investigates. This volitional commitment
is part of the knower's innermost consciousness. Just as love can have a great
variety of objects and can still be spoken of as love, this more intellectual kind of
commitment, too, is not specific to this or that cherished idea. It is not the mental
equivalent of temperature, although it varies according to one's temperament.
Love lends itself much less to verbalization than do objects or even abstract
ideas. Love forever remains the cherished property of the one who knows, that
is, knows something, and finds this something to be cherished, or, if the case be,
to be loathed. If even words about tangible objects cannot have their meanings
transformed into bursts of electric impulses, words that convey the love of any
such meaning are so many rebuttals of brazen programmers. Computers are
lovable, but they forever remain unloving and therefore worlds removed from
that mind that loses its human ness in the measure in which it fails to love and
love truth above all, or else love degenerates into infatuation with oneself.

Tellingly, when Western thought made its first gigantic reach towards
superhuman heights with Plato's efforts, truth was intimately tied to love, and
both were tied to the good. Augustine, who had for his motto, "intellectum valde
ama" (greatly love the intellect) never expected any love from the scrolls he
filled with such and similar dicta that remain attractive in a way wholly different
from, say, the manner in which two electric charges attract one another. Their
attractions and repulsions in the brain will forever represent a different world
from the one in which the possessors of human brain can love or hate one
another. Dear as some parchments were to the one who said that he was a hollow
brass if he had no love, Paul of Tarsus might refer today to the hollow sound
which metal boxes that house PCs give when knocked by a screwdriver. When
on the tenth anniversary of the appearance of the first PCs the Happy Birthday
was sung at an IBM party, only some clever though hollow intelligencers took
the notes, which now PCs readily reproduce, for the melody they carry for the
soul's enjoyment.

A particular target of mine was the weird claim of Hans Moravec, the artificial
intelligencer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, about computers
loving one another and duplicating themselves out of love. Of course, in this
culture of ours that makes a mockery of love and does not see the difference
between Mother Theresa and Princess Diana, let alone the difference between
Mother Theresa and Madonna, it makes little sense to warn against the further
mechanization of love by computerized paraphernalia, among them that ugly
ersatz of love which is pornography, this most widely available commodity on
the Internet.

In that new chapter in the third edition of BMC there appeared first another
observation of mine about the insuperable hurdles which artificial intelligencers
have to face. There I called attention to the fact that even the meaning of objects
with strict contours escapes a visual representation which then would be seized
as easily transformable into a set of physical data and therefore readily
programmable. Take, for instance, a bench and begin to make it smaller. At what
point does a bench turn into a chair? Or at what point does a brook grow into a
river, a hut into a house, a mound into a mountain? Similar examples could be
multiplied to no end. Herein lies a practical, but profound and omnipresent
obstacle to computer simulation of human speech, the main carrier of human
intelligence.

It was, I believe, in a talk I gave at the Illinois Institute of Technology in the

spring of 1993 that I first illustrated this practical problem by calling attention to
the difference between words that denote numbers and all other words. Let us
take the easiest case, the number 1, an integer. Its crisp notional contours are
aptly represented, say, by a square, as the latter's strictly circumscribed area
would stand for the exact meaning of that integer. Juxtaposing squares to one
another would then represent further integers. Programming these into
computers would present no problem. Problems, however, arise with such
quantitative magnitudes as the length of the hypotenuse of a right-angled
equilateral triangle. Pythagoreans of old, looking for a construction of the world
from integers, were already terrified by the "irrationality" of that magnitude,
equally irrational for a computer. The latter can at most greatly improve the
approximations of the exact value of the magnitude in question. But unlike the
computer, the human mind knows this, in addition to knowing that the length of
the hypotenuse is exact though "irrationally" so.

In the context of that talk, or perhaps in the discussion period following it, I
spoke of the idea of artificial intelligence as the most sinister form of cultural
abomination. Some artificial intelligencers present there did not take this kindly.
Still other professors expressed their gratitude for my coming. Strangely, while
one often hears about the former, hardly ever does one hear of the latter. This
strange imbalance, which is carefully cultivated by the media, is part of that
abomination. Still worse, the imbalance is promoted by the use of words most of
which have nothing to do with numbers.

Words referring to realities other than integers (and to numbers in general)

cannot be given a crisp representation of the extent of their meaning. To be sure,
this problem already arises with the integer 1, because to define it one needs
several words that are not referring to integers. But with words that are not
integers and do not refer to quantities, the problem of representation becomes
intractably acute. If the definition of such a word takes, say, six other words, the
not strictly circumscribed areas representing the meanings of each must be
partially superimposed. The area which all of them cover would represent the
vague extent of the meaning of the word in question, but this area is even more
deprived of strict contours than any of the area standing for the meaning of the
individual words used in the definition. In fact, words, all of which are apt to
take on new nuances of meaning, are even less definable than amoebas. The
latter at least have a well-defined membrane. Words are best likened to patches
of fog, which show clear contours only when seen from a great distance. This is
hardly good news for promoters of artificial intelligence, however artificial may
appear to them the task of doing justice to words, which are the constituents of
phrases, these basic carriers of understanding.

This is what I emphasized in a paper, "Words: Blocks, Amoebas, or Patches

of Fog? Artificial Intelligence and the Conceptual Foundations of Fuzzy Logic,"
which I presented to the Conference of the International Society for Optical
Engineering, in Orlando, Florida, on April 11, 1995. The reader may ask at this
point, what brought me to such a meeting? Friendly connections, which all too
often play an important part in obtaining for one an invitation, let alone a call for
an invited paper. The friend, in this case, Bruno Bosacchi, a physicist, who came
from Italy to Bell Telephone Laboratories in Hopewell, New Jersey, and had
been active in that Society, is to be mentioned here for a far more important
reason.

I first met him on an October evening outside Firestone Library of Princeton

University in 1987. He was there with some friends and flagged me down. He
told me that a few months earlier he had come to a talk of mine on cosmology at
Princeton University and that he was familiar with my writings. That was the last
I saw of him for about five years when on another October evening I walked into
Firestone Library, at a time (half an hour after five) when I am hardly ever there.
At the desk, where books are checked out, I saw a shortish man with a big beard,
whose face seemed familiar to me. He recognized me and introduced himself.
This was on a Friday evening. On Monday afternoon I had to fly to Rome, to
deliver a paper there, and in Italian at that. I knew that by leaving the work of
translation to be done in Rome, I was taking a great risk. Now here was Bruno,
of whom I had not thought at all for five years and who by Sunday evening had
the translation done. He saved, if not my soul, at least my hide, from blushing
four days later in front of a distinguished audience.

Such most improbable encounters, and some far more improbable than
astronomical happened to me on more than one occasion. They are to me so
many concrete pointers to a Providential Hand at work, about which the Book of
Wisdom says that it disposes us "with great reverence" (Wis 12:18). True
reverence is not ostentatious, and the reverence, which God shows to us, is never
such. But its instances are far more decisive in thinking about God, than are all
abstract arguments in support of the existence of a soul, or even of God for that
matter. Not that such arguments do not have their own importance. In fact, when
in 1978 I gave my first and very brief sample of my intellectual autobiography, I
wrote that "interest in theology led me first into the deep waters of modern
physics, and from there to the even deeper currents of the history and philosophy
of science. The work I have done in that field was dedicated to the defense of
certain theses-the existence of mind as distinct from matter; the fundamental
importance for scientific method of an epistemology embodied in the classical
proofs of the existence of God; the limited validity or relevance of exact science
or physics; the crucial importance of Christian belief in creation for the unique
rise of science.",

Four years after this was written an article appeared in Religious Studies
under the title, "Stanley L. Jaki's Critique of Physics." The author, K. J. Sharpe,
a university chaplain in New Zealand, did not give the impression that he had
ever had more than undergraduate training in physics, if even that much. At any
rate, he had a theological, indeed an anti-theological, ax to grind, which should
appear rather strange on the part of a Christian chaplain. His main objection was
that, contrary to my claim, "from a logical point of view, belief in the rationality
of the cosmos does not derive from Christian belief."' Of course, it was only
after 1982 that I presented detailed historical material about the logical
connection of christology and belief in the full rationality of the universe. But
the very fact of the failure of all non-Christian cultures, as set forth in my
Science and Creation, to come up with an unqualified form of that belief,
strongly indicates its Christian provenance.

Sharpe's reference to my first objective, the defense of the soul, had a touch of
condescension to it. I have met more than one such chaplain or clergyman who
smiled at me when I defended, say, the reality of biblical miracles. They fail to
see that the shoe is on the other foot. For what is the point of participating in a
conference on creation if one cannot grant the Creator the ability to perform
miracles? And what purpose can be assigned to miracles if these are not for the
benefit of souls? The logic of this should be obvious but not in this age of "in-
depth" reconsideration of everything in theology.

The point is well illustrated in the following true story. I was about forty-six
and had already published BMC when a Catholic priest, ten years my junior,
came to lunch with me in Princeton, where he did some research in the Seminary
Library. He was writing a book on 2nd-century gnostics and took a dim view of
St. Irenaeus' unmasking of them. He advocated cremation and objected to the
keeping of the ashes in an urn. He replied with a superior smile after I told him
about my BMC and about its main thrust in reference to thinking machines. The
smile froze on his face when I asked him as if he were Father Smith: "Is there
still going to be a Father Smith after his ashes have been duly scattered on the
flower bed of the monastery garden?" At least he gave an honest answer: "I have
not given much thought to that."

I wonder what his reaction would have been had I reminded him of the fact
that Einstein ordered his ashes to be scattered into the Delaware river precisely
because he had most emphatically dissociated himself from any belief in
immortality. Little of this can be found in the vast Einstein literature, which is
equally silent about Einstein's explicit denial of the reality of free will! Since
immortality corresponds to the state of eternal now, Einstein was at least logical
or consistent in that he viewed one's consciousness as being purely subjective.
His reason, if it be called reasoning at all, was that the experience of now, this
central feature of one's consciousness, could not be tackled with the method of
physics.' On that basis he might have just as well considered all declarations of
human dignity and inalienable rights to be mere phrases. But for one to show
revulsion over mere verbalism can only be justified if one is willing to reveal
one's theology.
Theology has always been my mind's principal matter. To some this may suggest
a mistaking of weakness for strength for which one should promptly apologize.
Of course, if in doing theology one would merely offer "belief" propositions and
their logical analysis, I would be the first to admit the need for apology. Indeed
repentance and a total change of heart and mind, including appropriate
amendment, would be in order. "Belief' propositions are mere intellectualizations
of subjectivist conveniences. But doing theology means for me the resolve to
keep in focus whatever one takes as the ultimate in being and intelligibility. All
articulate thought with some sweep is therefore theology. Whether one calls that
ultimate being God or something else is secondary. What matters is that in doing
theology in that broad sense one should be consistent to the point of taking all
the consequences of one's definition of the ultimate.

Not too long ago, it was still acceptable to guide the human mind to heights
where the ultimate was synonymous with the absolute. Today the fashion is to
see in the mind an ultimate, though only in a relative or pragmatic sense. One is
less and less concerned about the fact that pragmatism provides no basis for
invoking unchangeable, ultimate principles, and in fact cannot justify
pragmatism itself. Pragmatism does not entitle one to see ultimate standards
being trampled when, say, the police are found corrupt. I cannot help recalling
the reaction of Eugene Wigner to an egregious police scandal in New York City:
"Don't you think, Stanley," he turned to me, "that the police should behave like
angels?" "Hell, no," was my answer which almost made the sherry glass slip
from his fingers. He looked at me in disbelief. He obviously asked himself: How
could a man of the cloth endorse corruption? I had to explain myself. I began by
noting that the police were part of a society where belief in angels, who
presumably symbolized eternal standards, was rapidly diminishing. "Those," I
went on, "who do not believe in angels have no right to policemen that behave
like angels." Like the rest of a markedly pragmatic society, policemen are fully
entitled to limit their ethics to their skill of outwitting the law. They merely have
to take the legal consequences.

The presidential drama of 1998 made one thing absolutely clear: Society cares
much about economic prosperity, but hardly about morality. The latter has
turned into a matter of legal skill, which differs more and more from
jurisprudence, let alone from an ethics anchored in genuinely ultimate principle.
Perjury is no longer perceived as a crime, but as a mere legal mishap, and
certainly not a sin. Famous preachers rushed to offer forgiveness to Clinton,
without demanding confession and repentance. But already in 1975, when the
psychiatrist K. Menninger shocked America with his question, "Whatever
happened to sin?" his answer boiled down to the claim that the only sin is to put
undue pressure on one's psychic sensibilities. Such a deploring of the dilution of
the sense of sin could but further societal malaise.

Within that malaise the proofs of the existence of God will hardly make a
ripple. Still, the pondering of the limitations of any object may propel the mind
to the level where one's mental horizon should be dominated by an inference
about the Ultimate. If one starts from the mind, one gets hardly above the
shallows of apriorism, be they made to reflect the ontological argument. To find
the true Ultimate, so different from one's mind, one has to begin with things,
with objects, with facts. Among the latter particularly challenging are the ones
that form the chain known as the history of salvation. Many of those facts are
nothing short of being miraculous, that is, explainable only if God's finger is
seen behind them.

The survival of the Jewish people even during the OldTestament period is a
miraculous fact. One may credit it either to the national genius, or rather genes,
which is a sort of racism in disguise, or one should ascribe it to Providence.
Single miraculous facts did not cease to happen almost two thousand years ago.
Indeed, unless one takes seriously post-biblical miracles, it is not possible to put
up a reasoned defense of their biblical counterparts. But to gain a hold on latter-
day miracles, one first has to learn to hold fast to plain facts or objects. The art
of knowledge is a seamless garment. Only Humeans, who steeped knowledge in
mere habits, could continue attacking miracles, while conveniently
discriminating between facts so that they may turn reason into a matter of habits
which one may change as if they were mere garments.

As to those who still smile on theology as if it were the articulation of mere

beliefs and not a most serious intellectual concern for the ultimately real, I ask
from them only a modest measure of consistency. Many of them must have read
in that secularist weekly sermonizing, The New York Times Magazine, Erica
Manfred's autobiographical essay, "I was a Red-Diaper Baby."' The justification
was given in the subtitle: "O.K., so my parents were Communists. But at least
they believed in something." She with many others looked with contempt at
those who from their chosen vantage point could only appear to be on the Right.
They all seemed to her and her comrades to be oblivious to the suffering of
others. From that vantage point it was not possible to see the self-imposed
blindness of those who refused to believe reports about purges and gulags. They
find the justification of their principle, "to believe in something," in leaving that
"something" carefully unspecified. At least the theology I hold never allows me
to leave unspecified that "something" in which I believe. Of all faiths
Christianity alone has specific formulas known as credal statements. It is the
supporters of other "belief propositions" who should feel on the defensive.

Those credal statements are inseparable from the Church and in particular
from the Catholic Church which is a unique case of survival. Hardly a friend of
Roman Catholicism, Macaulay acknowledged this in a celebrated passage. I was
sixteen when I first read that passage, which, as I learned much later, Churchill
knew by heart.2 Ever since my mind has never tired of that passage, which
appeared to me even more intriguing when eventually I read it in its full context.
There Macaulay attributes that survival to mere cunning. It should have been his
duty as a historian to explain in a credible way the incredible fact that a clearly
identifiable entity, such as the succession of the popes, could perpetuate itself
across so many centuries and vicissitudes and that no other institutions could in a
similar way profit by cunning, although many of them made a professional art of
it. Macaulay therefore stretched the credulity of his readers beyond limit when
he credited to cunning that incredible thing. He should have realized that it was
one thing to say that individuals (including historians) were prone all too often to
cunning. It was another thing to rest one's argument with a very different type of
cunning that could institutionalize itself across vast stretches of the turmoil of
history.

Only a month or so before I first drafted this chapter in March 1998, I

stumbled on a passage by Anthony Froude, no less an enemy of the Catholic
Church than Macaulay and perhaps an even greater master of style among
British historians than Macaulay. This time it was not the particular succession
of popes, but the steadfast succession of Catholic bishops that received a similar
encomium, though far less remembered. In speaking of the papacy, Macaulay
could not use for comparison a succession of heretical or schismatical popes, for
there was no such thing. Macaulay was too astute to bring in the case of
occasional antipopes. He had to refer to the comparatively fleeting lifespan of
dynasties. But there was, and certainly in Froude's England, an episcopal
succession other than Catholic. After admitting that the succession known as part
of the Establishment displayed merely the appearances but not the substance of
the thing, Froude wrote: "A Catholic bishop holds his office by a tenure
untouched by the accidents of time. Dynasties may change, .. . the Catholic
prelate remains at his post; ... when the waters sink again into their beds, the
quiet figure is seen standing where it stood before, . . . , like a rock on the
adamantine basements of the world."3 Again, just as Macaulay did not make a
case of antipopes, Froude did not find it useful to refer to the extinction of
Catholic succession of bishops in countries that succumbed to the Reformation.
Extinction in some parts was no argument against succession in others,
especially when the Catholic Church compensated with the gain of entire
continents for the loss of Northern Europe.

Neither Macaulay nor Froude, nor countless others, who praised the Catholic
Church to the skies, while also damning it to hell's bottom, could be expected to
articulate the theological gist of that peculiar endurance through the vicissitudes
of history. The endurance is not merely the perpetuation of an institution from
one generation to the next, with no reliance on family trees. The Catholic
hierarchy is not an hereditary dynasty, but the transmission of an unheard of
claim. Every bishop claims to speak in the name of Christ as being one of a body
of bishops, who are united around the bishop of Rome. But, logically speaking,
the bishop can say only this: I profess to have this authority, because it was
handed down to me by one who professed it and had inherited it from someone
who, through the rite of ordination, entrusted that very claim to him. And so
forth, all the way back to that point where that chain of claim-transmission is
anchored in Peter and the Twelve. These in turn started out with the claim that it
was Christ Himself who sent them into the world and with nothing less than His
very authority that included all authority in heaven and on earth.

The factuality of this chain is the Catholic Church in its historic reality. In
rejecting that chain, the Reformers opted for a very shallow view of
ecclesiastical history, apart from slighting some momentous passages of the New
Testament. Newman put matters tersely: "To be deep in history is to cease to be
Protestant."" No special studies are needed to see the obvious, even if one
restricts oneself to the Reformers' ace card, the use of the Bible. Prior to the
Reformers, no significant Christian mind presented the Bible and its reading by
individuals as something that did not depend on the bishops' authoritative
preaching. On the contrary, Irenaeus had already tied the profitable reading of
the Bible to its being read by the bishop himself.' Catholic theologians merely
analyze that preaching and unfold its contents. But whatever new phraseology
they come up with, it becomes authentic theology only insofar as it is approved
by the hierarchy, which can do that in various ways.

The theologian's work varies according to times and circumstances. Now this,
now that aspect or part of the authoritative teaching comes into the focus. The
theological idea of the Church became the subject of intense reflections from the
middle of the 19th century and gained further strength during the 20th. As I was
thinking in early 1949 about a suitable topic for my theological dissertation, a
chance remark turned my attention to the new trends in ecclesiology. Had my
mind not been already impressed by the magnitude of the Church as a
theological idea and historical reality, I doubt that the remark would have had
the effect similar to that of a spark on a combustible material already piled up.
What I surveyed of that material in my dissertation, Les tendances nouvelles de
1 'ecclesiologie, was just a small but significant part of something much wider.
The decision of John XXIII in 1959 to call an Ecumenical Council found ready a
broadly shared theological interest in the idea of the Church. But in the spring of
1949 nobody could suspect that there would be a Vatican II, and with
ecclesiology as its central theme.

The dissertation owed much to Dom Cipriano Vagaggini who taught

systematic theology at Sant' Anselmo from 1945 till 1962 when he became the
personal theologian of Cardinal Lercaro, Archbishop of Bologna and a chief
figure at Vatican II. Dom Cipriano, who died recently at the age of eighty-seven,
endeared systematic theology to me for two reasons. First, he never separated the
system from its historical development. Second, he insisted that the system, if it
was truly encompassing, must include all aspects of the truth, even its
existential, psychological, and sociological aspects. Of the so-called dry
scholasticism his lectures gave no taste whatsoever. But this was no invitation to
subjectivism, and much less to some system-making at a disregard of
authoritative teaching. A theologian must not be ashamed, he once said, if, on
the face of it, he adopts the tactic of the opportunist. To illustrate the tactic, he
licked his index finger and held it high as a way of finding out from which
direction the wind was blowing. Then he spelled out the lesson in words that
could not be plainer: The weathervane of the theologian should always line up
along the wind that blows from the Vatican. Such a graphic image could be
misconstrued, but as a rule of thumb it has stood the test of time in countless
cases and it certainly served me well. I saw too many of my contemporaries not
making use of that rule and, indeed, disdaining it. Instead, they took the sucking
of their thumbs for the source of theological information. They lingered on as a
"loyal opposition," always hoping for "better" times that somehow never come.

I quickly earned among fellow students the reputation of being a Romanist, an

ultramontane. A dozen or so years before Vatican II, which unintentionally gave
free course to antipapalists in the Church, not a few young clerics came to Rome
with distinctly anti-Vatican sentiments, especially from Western Europe. I was
able to make one of them, who came from England, see the purely pragmatic
reason why in an age of global interconnection a central organ is the only
effective means to assure a properly prompt reaction. Hence the need, I argued,
for a pope in the Church. In his next letter to his abbot, he set forth my
arguments and gave the impression that he liked them. He received a stern letter
back in which he was urged to hold fast to the idea of the autonomy of local
churches. Later I met with many more such instances that should make the
English martyrs turn in their graves. I have even heard the head of an English
Benedictine House dismiss John Paul II as "crowdaholic."

Vagaggini was not the kind of mentor who would have forced his doctoral
students to spend five to six years digging up all sorts of minutiae, lest any of his
peers would find his pet theory unmentioned. He also insisted that since my
topic was on modern trends in ecclesiology, I should write it in French, the
language of a good deal of the literature. The final phase of writing my
dissertation took place in the summer of 1950, in France, in the abbey of Liguge,
not too far from Poitiers. In the abbey's vicinity was that narrow valley where St.
Martin set up his monastery. My memory could roam freely into distant
centuries. The abbey itself was an amusingly austere place. The utensils were
washed only on Saturdays. On weekdays one had to give one's fork, spoon, and
knife a generous licking at the end of each meal before wrapping them up in
one's napkin.
 Several of the monks were former career officers in the French Army,
including the abbot, who was enamored of the writings of Paul Claudel, and
especially of his Soulier de satin. He insisted that I read it. I did not get too far
into it, but the motto on the first page, a Portuguese proverb, "Deus escreve
direito por linhas tortas" ("God writes straight along crooked lines,") became
fixed in my mind. It was much later that I began to discern in it the Ariadne
thread of my life's strange course. Its straightness may be seen perhaps in
retrospect, but nothing of this was apparent to me as time and again I felt I was
being carried along sharply bending curves or simply dropped into the ditches.
The pull of centrifugal force can easily unsettle one's sense of stability and the
status of lying in the ditch deprives one of any sense of direction.

But back to the dissertation, which consisted of four parts. In the first I
surveyed the ecclesiology of Moehler, Newman and others insofar as they
influenced ecclesiological writings published in the first half of the 20th century.
In the second part I analyzed how the new thinking, less legalistic and more
existential, about the Church guided new biblical and patristic studies. The third
part dealt with ecumenical ecclesiology. Here I was particularly concerned with
recent theological works on the Slavophile movement. The fourth part dealt with
the new trends of thinking about the Church in systematic works, especially the
ones that related to the idea of the Church as the mystical body of Christ. The
formal defense of the thesis was attended by a fairly large crowd in late
November 1950.

By then my request that I might return to Hungary was turned down by my

superiors. My hope of staying in Europe proved illusory. I sailed to America. I
derived no small comfort from the fact that I did not go there on my own
volition, just as I did not leave Hungary on my own. This helped me to trust in
Providence. The latter is not easy to implore when one merely begs help on
behalf of one's own designs.

My first stopover was Paris, where I went up, with a refugee Hungarian priest,
to the Sacre Coeur Basilica on Montmartre to take part in the adoration of the
Blessed Sacrament that goes on there day and night. Parishes from Paris never
fail to provide worshipers, partly because there is a hall with cots where one may
take a short rest between hours spent in prayer. At the hall's entrance a guard
took our application for two cots. To my request made in fluent but accented
French, he replied: "You are Hungarians, aren't you?" "Is it my accent that
makes you think so?" I asked. "No," he said. "I am from Turkey myself and I
know that apart from Turks only Hungarians are so obsequiously polite as you
are." Two days later I was on the train to Cherbourg. There in the port I caught
sight of the Queen Elizabeth which had just arrived from Portsmouth on its way
to New York. Once in America I learned that politeness can often be taken for
weakness. So I hardened somewhat and also became more and more confirmed
in my appreciation of the opportunities which America offers for scholarly work.

I was already doing graduate work in physics, when, in 1955, opportunity

arose to publish my theological dissertation. I therefore had to rework it
somewhat, though not to the point of updating it. Les Tendances was brought out
by Herder and Herder in Rome in 1957. Five years later the American branch of
the firm approached me about a translation into English, but I was by then
deeply absorbed in writing The Relevance. In view of the vast amount of
additional material that had accrued since 1950, there was little point in bringing
out in English translation a work that did not cover the last decade or so. Of
course, the book, insofar as it dealt with the origins of recent trends, retained its
value. Some periti and many self-styled periti of the Council wanted to have a
copy of the book, which prompted the publisher to reprint it while the Council
was still in session.

My at times feverish involvement in some topics of the history of science did

not block out entirely my interest in ecclesiology. For one, Vatican II made the
Church a steady source of news for the media. For another, the recital of the
Breviary was shifted from Latin to English. It was the reading of the Psalms in
English that suddenly alerted me to something potentially significant in the
recurrent presence of the word rock in the English text of the Psalms. In the
Latin (Vulgate) version the same word was, in imitation of the Septuagint,
rendered as fortitudo or strength, to convey the idea that God alone is the only
safe rock of refuge. While in Rome I always looked at the grave of Saint Peter as
the rock on which Christ built the Church. Now, suddenly, a new perspective
emerged in which "God the Rock" seemed to put in an unexpected light "Peter
the Rock." The working out of this new perspective resulted in a book, And on
This Rock: The Witness of One Land and Two Covenants, but not before I had
studied a specific rock in the Land itself.

When I was on my way for the second time to Greece, in 1974, I carried along
with me a set of notes, with all the passages in the Old Testament about God the
rock. My aim was to study on the spot the scenery at Caesarea Philippi where
Christ told Peter: "You are rock and on this rock I will build my Church." I
decided therefore to fly from Athens to Tel Aviv and return from there to Greece
to the conference I was invited to attend. The airport of Tel Aviv had the number
25 displayed in huge neon lights. It was the 25th anniversary of the State of
Israel. As I tried to find a hotel for four nights, I found next to me at the airport's
information desk a gentleman who asked for the phone number of St. George's
College in Jerusalem. He was a British gynecologist, who once served the Royal
Family and lived in retirement in South Africa. He had just been on a visit to
England and decided to regale himself with a visit to the Holy Land on his way
back. He took me under his wing and I took him under my guidance along the
narrow streets of Jerusalem, but he soon found my pace too fast for him. I owe it
to him that I had a safe and pleasant place for five days in a city which is always
tense. God not only writes straight along crooked lines, but also brings together
paths that nobody would ever expect to meet.

Caesarea Philippi seemed to be beyond reach. After the 1973 war tourism still
had to recoup. There were no buses or minivans to the north beyond Lake
Genesareth. Then, suddenly, I bumped into a group of American Protestants who
wanted to go up to the Golan Heights and from there down to Lake Genesareth.
They offered me a seat on their minibus run by the Israeli Tourist Agency. We
took the new road along the Jordan's West Bank. One could see to the left, at
almost arm's length, Arab villages, totally empty since 1948, an eery sight
indeed. On another bus trip to Hebron, the Israeli guide pointedly remarked that
had it not been for persecutions, Jewish world population would today stand at
300 million. He vented his anger when he found that none of those coming with
the bus bought souvenirs from Arab vendors. This was not the way to befriend
them, the guide berated us. One could not help wondering as to who was to
befriend whom. The guide's machine gun looked a bit uninviting.

After we arrived at the Golan Heights and had our fill of burnt out tanks and
shattered gun emplacements, I suggested that we drive on to Caesarea Philippi.
The name did not ring a bell with my companions, all Protestants. My
explanation did not make them more enthusiastic for making the detour which I
promised to take only a good hour but which added about three hours to our
voyage. Once at Caesarea Philippi I knew I would be back again. Indeed, I was
back the next year, alone, but armed with cameras and rolls of film. As I was
trying to find a good position to take the photo of the huge wall of rock rising
just above one of the three sources of the Jordan, I noticed that I was walking in
a field from which pieces of wire were sticking out. It was a minefield, possibly
not yet cleared. Meanwhile Israeli jets and helicopters were buzzing all over.
Syria was fifteen miles away, Lebanon only at three miles. I could not help
feeling that anything could happen at any moment.

I quickly became convinced that Jesus could not have found a more
convincing backdrop for His words to Peter than a spot where a huge rocky
precipice rises just north of Caesarea Philippi. By then I knew, of course, that
from 1822 on various travelers to the Holy Land mentioned that wall, made
drawings of it of different merit, and some of them, Protestants, wondered why
Catholic theologians failed to make the most of it. In that respect I think I
achieved something original among Catholic theologian-exegetes, although I had
to go against the view of the famed Pere Lagrange, who saw the place and
dismissed its relevance for reasons I did not find convincing at all. And on This
Rock was brought out first in 1976 by Ave Maria Press whose director, with
liberal theological convictions, wanted, in disregard to our prior agreement, to
publish it without illustrations, including old drawings and some of my photos.
When the Press found that Collins, still allegedly a Catholic publisher in
London, would not co-publish it, relations grew cool and in a few years the
publication rights were returned to me, with a large number of copies. Liberal
trends in theology were at that time at their height. Paul VI seemed to have lost
control and expectations ran high for a truly "liberal" successor.

Cardinal Wojtyla's rising to the chair of Peter was indeed a most unexpected
event, not just because John Paul I died most unexpectedly. It is said that in the
morning of his entering the second conclave of 1978, Cardinal Wojtyla was
making a pilgrimage to a remote Marian shrine in the lower Abruzzi and his car
broke down. A stranger came along from nowhere with a car and deposited him
at the door of the conclave just before he would have been barred from entering.
My prediction was that either Cardinal Wojtyla or Cardinal Hume would come
out as pope from the conclave. There was no prophecy in that. A non-Italian
pope had to come almost of necessity, especially in view of the fact that the
sudden death of John Paul I prevented Italian cardinals from forming a solid
voting block.

I was at a priestly gathering when the TV brought word of Cardinal Wojtyla's

election and showed him appearing on the balcony of St. Peter's to give his first
blessing urbi et orbi. I was the only priest who knelt down to receive it. Just an
illustration of the high tide of ecclesiological "liberalism." The regiments of
"loyal opposition" were resolved not to see the handwriting on the wall and some
diehards even now refuse to see the measure of their rout. Nothing is so
mistaken as to bank on the coming of a "liberal" pope. Even Paul VI, whom John
XXIII called "my Hamlet," and who could go on looking now at this, now at that
side of the coin without using it, had his resolve stiffened on occasion. He acted
as a pope when he issued Humanae vitae, which his successors can only further
endorse. The same is the case with the Apostolic Letter of John Paul II about the
ordination of women, a document about which I wrote within two weeks of its
publication that it authoritatively (and therefore infallibly) stated that the Church
has no authority to ordain women.

Some conservatives think that John Paul II does not use the coin often enough.
However that may be, it is appropriate that I recall here President Johnson's visit
to Princeton, in 1967, to dedicate the new Woodrow Wilson School of Political
Science, which at that time graduated about a fourth of those in the American
Diplomatic Service. He knew he came to face a Faculty and student body hostile
to direct participation in the Vietnam conflict. They preferred endless
discussions about the fate of Southeast Asia, ignoring the dictum of their idol,
John F. Kennedy: "Come hell or high water, I must hold on to South Vietnam."
During his speech Johnson pulled out a silver dollar from his pocket, turned it
right and left, and made a statement which I quote from memory: "There is a
difference between academics and statesmen. The former can go on discussing
the two sides of a question, but a statesman must act because the next moment
may be too late." Some say that Paul VI was too late in issuing Humanae vitae. I,
however, argued in a leaflet that had he issued it sooner, he would have been
charged for not having given enough room for theological debates. It is difficult
to please theologians, let alone their liberal brand.

Theology matters to me especially in two crucial respects. One is the dogma

of the divinity of Christ, which I saw with some originality in reference to the
only viable birth of science. The other is the Church as an authoritative
continuation of Christ. Clearly, if Christ was God, He could not leave behind a
Church that was to break into several parts, contradicting one another. Countless
others before me noted this logic, which, incidentally, led quite a few converts
into the Church as the institution that stands with rock-like solidity for revealed
truth and which is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And just as the
concreteness of the image of the rock and the no less concrete wall of rock at
Caesarea Philippi could fire my imagination and mental powers of association, I
had a similar experience with another concrete thing, a key. It led me to explore,
again with some originality, the authority deposited in the Church, and above all
in the successors of Peter.

Here my interest in the history of science came handy. I left no stone unturned
to achieve as full a picture as possible about the history of key making, a worthy
project in the history of technology. One fact emerged forcefully. In saying to
Peter that He was giving him the keys of the Kingdom, Christ fully knew what a
key was. Then as now the conferring of a key was the conferring of an exclusive
power over some thing kept under lock. Christ did not confer on Peter the mere,
let alone Hegelian, idea of a key, so that its user could swing back and forth
between assertions and denials and never find a lasting synthesis.

Some rabbinical texts about keys may strike as novel even some learned
readers of my The Keys of the Kingdom: A Tool's Witness to Truth. Whereas I
did not strike out an original path in my survey of patristic commentaries on the
keys given to Peter, some details from the time of the Counter-Reformation may
appear novel to most readers. The book ends with an interpretation of Saint
Peter's Square in Rome, including the avenue leading to it that was opened only
after World War II. Taken with that avenue, Saint Peter's Square, as surrounded
by Bramante's colonnade, looks on any good aerial photograph like a huge
keyhole, a view which Bramante could not, of course, have in mind. But here
too, as in countless other instances, things work out surprisingly well for the
papacy, which so many so often expect to be buried shortly. But the papacy
survives all of them, and those siding with it also survive.

Nobody put this better than Newman in a much-ignored text of his, which I
had the honor of rescuing from relative oblivion. The text has the title, "Cathedra
sempiterna," and dates from 1853. It first appeared posthumously in 1895 and
was not reprinted until I appended it to Newnan Today, the text of lectures
delivered under the sponsorship of Wethersfield Institute in 1990 to celebrate the
centenary of Newman's death. In that text Newman stated: "Those who take part
with Peter are on the winning side." A hard pill to swallow by those liberals who
tried to expropriate Newman to their cause of "loyal opposition."
 All that Newman's writings mattered to my mind will have to be treated in a
separate chapter. Here, in reference to my mind's attachment to the papacy, let
me recall a project of mine, which I may or may not have the time and energy to
carry out. It would consist in collecting ill-conceived prophecies about the
eventual demise, at times very short-term demise, of the papacy. Luther gave the
papacy a few decades. Renan held it for certain that upon the death of Pius IX,
the College of Cardinals would break into two factions, one conservative, the
other liberal, each electing a new pope, an outcome effectively marking the end
of the papacy. One can easily imagine what Renan must have felt on seeing his
own death approaching in 1892 and Leo XIII completing the fourteenth year of
his pontificate, with the international repute of the papacy reaching new heights,
to say nothing of its internal strength. I reported about this in some detail in the
second edition of And on This Rock.

My researches on Duhem made me stumble on the prophecy made in 1830 by

Victor Cousin, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne, about the quick demise
of Catholicism in France. I am sure that any Church historian might recall
similar incidents, say, from the pontificate of Pius VII, whom Napoleon handled
as a mere pawn in his hands. A massive presentation of such details would
certainly dismay the liberals who love to paint Church history as a chief support
of their stance. Yet the painting they offer is invariably a piling up of vague
generalizations which is a characteristic of liberalism all across the board.

This is the point of my article, "Liberalism and Theology." It begins with a

presentation of the inability of the pundits of political liberalism to give a clear
definition of what liberalism stands for, unless it is merely the continual
abolition of existing clear contours, norms, and practices. In theology the efforts
of liberals ultimately aim at the abolition of clear distinction between the natural
and the supernatural. They find unwitting allies in not a few whom I would not
suspect even for a moment of having ever wished to undermine the special status
of the supernatural.

Of these I have to mention only two as ones whose writings made at first a
considerable appeal to my mind only to be disappointing eventually. I had been
through for some years with Father Teilhard de Chardin's thought and said so
both in my Gifford Lectures and in my second series of Farmington Lectures,
when I came across a very early writing of his, an animated defense of the
miracles in Lourdes. It is still the most concise and penetrating vindication of
those miracles, which I quote with strong approval in my little book, Miracles
and Physics. On reading that defense one cannot help speculating on the
enormous good which Father Teilhard could have done had he not strayed into
visionary tales about nature's instinctive drive towards an omega point. To write
bad poetry in good prose should deserve particularly little praise when even the
prose is not original. In reading Teilhard de Chardin in the original French, one
cannot help hearing the suave diction of Bergson and of his disciple and
successor Edouard Le Roy. Apart from a style, ominous in its unoriginality,
there was also some ominous silence in the books of Father Teilhard who earned
the reputation, somewhat undeservedly, of having been a great scientist. Now, a
scientist has to pay attention to facts before he pays attention to anything else. Of
all Catholic dogmas none is more factual than the one about original sin. Its
effects belong not only to the pages of theology, but also to those of
anthropology. Of no other part of Catholic teaching had Teilhard de Chardin
spoken less than of that most factual and fundamental part of it, which is the sad
truth of original sin.

I know it is not popular to have a low regard for him. Once, I believe it was
around 1985, a French Jesuit, himself a scientist, warned me that in France it
was not yet proper to criticize Teilhard de Chardin. I could not help thinking of
Gilson's view which Father de Lubac (subsequently Cardinal) made public. In a
letter to de Lubac, Gilson stated that he had not yet found a single Catholic
whose enthusiasm for Teilhard de Chardin had not resulted in spiritual damage.
As to de Lubac's apology for his famous confrere,6 I found it very poorly argued
indeed.' That was not the only time that de Lubac appeared to me as one very
skillful in skirting most relevant facts and data.

I was sorry to discover this, because I still remember the kind of ecstasy I felt
when I first read de Lubac's Le drame de 1'humanisme athee and after that his
Catholicisme, on the social aspects of Catholic dogma. Years later, as the
theological turmoil unfolded, I grew puzzled and at times bewildered. In 1990 I
read Catholicisme again, now with eyes that had seen much. I thought that the
book should have had a different subtitle, perhaps: "How to exaggerate in order
to recover aspects of the dogma that seemed to recede from the focus of the
awareness of some." But with such a subtitle the main title would have appeared
out of place, as Catholicism, taken for a norm, is always something balanced. It
always cries out for the sentence pattern, "not only, but also." Is that balance
kept in de Lubac's most influential theological work, Le surnaturel?

My modest efforts to shore up the cause of the supernatural related to concrete

matters, such as miracles and celibacy, which most concretely cuts into priestly
existence, this most concrete representation of a sacramental system of the
supernatural. Priestly celibacy has for centuries been the target of naturalist
trends, both inside and outside the Church. One need not have a special sense to
see that nothing would give so much pleasure to the secularist juggernaut than a
demise of priestly celibacy, or at least its turning into a mere option. I had kept
collecting material on celibacy for a long time when finally I was prompted to
turn it into a book, The Theology of Priestly Celibacy.

The prompting was a circular, issued in 1996, by the National Council of

Priests in England, in which its young president urged the bishops to take a
"deepened approach" to the optional celibacy. Now if there is anything which
irks me in the vast literature called new theology, it is the ubiquitous reliance
there of mere phrases of which this "deepened approach" is a chief example. Of
the six chapters of my book let me recall the next to last, a question: "A New
Theology?" There I contrasted the inspired defense of celibacy by Moehler,
Newman, and Scheeben with the dicta of Schillebeeckx and Rahner. The former
three conveyed a much deeper Catholic view than the last two. They did so
because they voiced categorically the supernatural components of that delicate
topic. Few things commend so well that supernatural perspective than Gibbon's
dictum that for a philosophe the virtues of the clergy are more dangerous than its
vices. The dictum, buried in Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire,
graces my book as its motto.

In that book I unfold the theology of priestly celibacy in its historical reality.
At the age of seventy-seven there is no point in speculating as to what kind of
future course I would follow if my remaining years would be entirely devoted to
theology. However, since I have by now behind me forty-five years of sustained
attention to science, I find that this engraved on my mind a respect for facts
which science can teach with a special force. I owe it to my exposure to science
over so many years that even in theology I came to attach more importance to
facts and factual data than theologians usually do. Yet Christian theology,
insofar as it is anchored in the factually incarnate Son of God, should be replete
with reverence for facts, regardless of science. I was therefore very pleased to
find in C. Cochini's Apostolic Origins of Priestly Celibacy a most impressive
presentation of all the relevant texts from the first six centuries.

The Theology of Priestly Celibacy is riveted on facts that relate to the

supernatural, the only perspective within which priestly celibacy makes sense.
This is why I gave prominence to theologians who were saints as well. They
stressed the supernatural because they rightly saw the essence of priesthood to be
a sharing in that most supernatural reality which is the priesthood of Christ, who
was altar and victim at the same time. It is this reality which the younger
generation of priests does not seem to be sufficiently aware of, while they are
prolific on slogans such as openness, in-depth-consideration, and the like.
Theological matters are brutally plain, they can be seen by anyone willing to
look. Those who try to invoke depths where everything is on the surface should
ponder the Bulgarian proverb: "Those who want to drown should not torture
themselves in shallow waters." What this means for exegesis, as part of my
theological matter of interest, is taken up in the next chapter.
To deal with the relation between science and religion is to deal above all with
facts, if one is not to bog down in mere ideas about either or both. Moreover, one
has to go about that relation in a more exacting manner than one may with any
other reasoned discourse. Relating as they do to the quantitative measure of
things, the facts of science have a special exactness. And if the Bible is held to
be a document of more than mere human make, it exacts a special devotion to
truth. Thus when the Bible refers to tangible facts, their reality should more
powerfully challenge the mind's critical faculties than do other facts. Whenever
facts, or tangible realities present themselves in a robust way, as they often do
both in science and in the Bible, clever games with ideas should appear
particularly suspect.

Just as science is full of facts, the Bible, too, is replete with references to
tangible, visible things. Especially and very methodically is this true of the
Bible's first chapter, Genesis 1, the famed creation story. Anyone fearful of the
challenge of facts can only feel as that retired Navy chaplain did, who once
sighed to me: "If only that first chapter of the Bible had never been written!" The
remark is typical of well-meaning Protestants who try to navigate around two
treacherous shallows: One is a blind devotion to the literal truth of whatever the
Bible says, including what it says about the physical world. The other is the
turning of a blind eye to the facts which science establishes about that world. For
a blind eye is being used whenever wishful thinking is at work to reconcile the
biblical account of the genesis of the world with the data of scientific
cosmogenesis. If one is asked to believe that the divine command "Let there be
light!" refers to electromagnetic radiation, as this was done shortly after Maxwell
formulated his famous equations, or if one is asked today to believe that the 2.7
°K cosmic background radiation was meant by that famed command, one may
just as well be requested to believe anything.

Even if a historian of science is not working directly on topics where science

and religion patently touch upon one another, he will continually stumble on
pages and books that will contain a reference to Genesis 1. Two or three decades
of studies of the history of science would allow him to register a number of
efforts to reconcile Genesis 1 with the science of the day. If he takes the Bible
for the word of God, he may derive some comfort from the fact that scientists are
mainly to be blamed for the acrimonious debates that began to flame up as the
science of geology came into its own in the early 19th century. Blame or not,
two series of dicta, so disparate from one another, seemed to call for a
reconciliation. The human mind is not construed to live for long in the
straitjacket of double truth.

No wonder that from almost the moment when exact science emerged during
the 17th century, efforts followed one another to reconcile Genesis 1 with the
science of the day. Such efforts continually came within my view as I was
writing Planets and Planetarians in the mid-1970s. Although in the 17th and 18th
centuries man's vista clearly extended beyond the solar system, what passed for
cosmogony often remained equivalent to explanations of the origin of our
system of planets. This changed from the early 19th century on, when the
formation of individual galaxies became the practical extent of cosmogonical
speculations. Ill-advised references to Genesis 1 were at that time of no special
interest to me because my attention was riveted on the shortcomings of the
scientific explanations of the formation of our planetary system. I felt no urge to
reconcile patently mistaken scientific theories with Genesis 1, whatever its
"scientific" truth might be.

It was one thing, and relatively easy, to notice the patent inadequacies of
various reconciliations of Genesis 1 with this or that scientific cosmogenesis. It
was another thing, and far from easy, to give some specifics about the right
explanation of that chapter. In retrospect it is clear that had I been pressed on
that score I would have been at a loss for specifics. But in the measure in which I
felt that pressure, there began to emerge the contours of the explanation which, I
believe, gives to both Bible and science their due. Several articles which I
published in the 1980s indicate my groping toward that explanation.

The idea which first gave me confidence that I was on the right track related
to the very first verse of Genesis 1. There was, of course, nothing original in
noting that the expression, "the heaven and the earth," stands for the totality of
things. But something novel began to emerge once I started pondering the reason
for this. The reason seemed to be twofold. One related to the expression itself as
a rhetorical device, the other to its contents. The expression functioned as a case
of that rhetorical device which conveys the idea of a totality by listing its main
parts. The contents of the expression meant the world edifice as the Hebrews of
old, in agreement with all surrounding peoples and civilizations, conceived it.
For them that edifice, their universe, looked like a grandiose tent with the earth
as its ground floor and with the firmament as its roof. The simultaneous
reference to floor and roof meant the whole edifice.

The question then gradually arose in my mind: Could it be that Genesis 1 was
not a recital of a stepwise making of the world, but a repeated assertion that God
made all? Clearly, if the answer could be affirmative, the conflict between
science and Genesis 1 simply disappeared for an obvious reason. Even the most
advanced forms of scientific cosmology are not about the true all, or the
Universe writ large. For that reason, too, they cannot pose objection to the claim
that God made all. This claim is genuine metaphysics, both insofar as it refers to
the object of the act, the all, the universe, or the true, all-encompassing totality,
and to the act itself, a genuine act of creation, whereby all is given existence.
Furthermore, once that claim is seen in its context as something subordinate to a
different proposition, there remains even less ground for a comparison of the
world-making of Genesis 1 with the genesis of the universe as given in
premodern and modern scientific cosmologies.

As usual, one's first effort to present a complex set of ideas fails to put proper
emphasis on all that needs to be said. It was clear to me that I must go far
beyond the observations I made in Science and Creation and certainly beyond
the few relevant dicta in Cosmos and Creator, published in 1979. The first
opportunity to come to grips with the topic as it was emerging in my mind came
with an invitation to give a talk at the Third Neumann Symposium at Princeton
Theological Seminary in 1987.1 I chose for my topic the universe (as well as its
origin) as it appears in the Bible and in modern science. Although in that talk I
emphasized the role which the device of enumerating the main parts plays in
conveying the idea of the whole, I did not yet use the expression totum per
partes, which denotes something very different from the far better known pars
pro toto. I soon found out that although orators from classical times on have
frequently fallen back on totum per partes, this phrase does not occur in books
on rhetoric, which, anyhow, are rapidly becoming an extinct species.

Although I longed to delve deeply into studies about Genesis 1, other

commitments left me with little free time. I had to use spare hours that could not
be used for much else. One such occasion remains engraved in my memory,
partly because I felt really "freed," when once, in the Moscow airport, still run
by grim-faced KGB agents, I got beyond the last checkpoint and entered the
international waiting room. I felt the very opposite of what I felt when in
September 1964 I returned to Hungary, for the first time in seventeen years, and
entered the dimly lit arrival hall in the airport of Budapest, so strikingly different
from its present shiny replacement.

Incidentally, I was in Moscow with a group of American scholars who had

been invited by the Academy of Science of the Soviet Union as part of the
"glasnost," initiated by Gorbachev. In fact our group was the first to be
accommodated in the best hotel in Moscow, reserved until then for foreign
Communist delegations. The hotel, all in marble and with its rooms, or rather
suites, beautifully paneled everywhere, was a KGB stronghold. In walking from
there to the Kremlin, a distance of about a mile and a half, one could see,
however, the true face of Communism: half-empty stores with long queues-all
this almost within shouting distance from the Kremlin. That those stores were
still a cornucopia for people from the provinces told much of the situation there.
At the Kiev station in Moscow one could see crowds of people with makeshift
baggage, packed with all the items they could lay their hands on in those half-
empty shops.

I gave two talks, one on creation and modern scientific cosmology, the other
on the Christian origins of science. Although I wore civilian clothes, at the very
outset I made it clear to a distinguished audience of academicians, some of
whom came up from Kiev, that I was a Catholic priest. In the front row there sat
Frank Shakespeare, the American ambassador to the Vatican, who traveled by
train from Vienna to see the vast stretches of the workers' paradise at a close
range. On returning to Rome he spoke of my talks to the Cardinal Secretary of
State, who, as Ambassador Shakespeare later told me, took copious notes. Two
years later John Paul II appointed me as an honorary member of the Pontifical
Academy of Science.

But back to the international waiting room in Moscow's airport, where I can
still see myself sitting in front of elegant Western-looking duty-free shops, with
a Bible in my hands. This was noted by a fellow traveler, or rather passenger,
also on his way to London, but I did not encourage him to strike up a
conversation. I did not want to be deprived of the few hours when the constraints
of travel left me free to scan page after page in the Bible. I was looking for
passages that could be used as illustrations of my idea about Genesis 1, that is,
for biblical expressions that conveyed the idea of some totality in terms of its
main parts. I also looked for passages where the main object was an edifice or
some such structure. It is in connection with these that I hoped to find instances
in which the idea of totality is reasserted in terms of the main parts as a
methodical way of conveying that idea.

As to the first objective, my mind was well-prepared. The daily reading of the
Psalms enabled me to find there (once I was looking) many an idiomatic
expression that conveyed the idea of all in terms of the main constituents. The
Psalms alone contained about two dozen such idioms. Particularly effective was
the use of such idioms in Psalm 148, which by its very structure is patterned on
"the heaven and the earth" perspective, on the main constituents of both and the
main occupants of both.

Before long there was no doubt in my mind that the work of days 2 and 3 was
a reassertion, in a more elaborate way, of the lapidary initial declaration that God
created all (heaven and earth). The same was also clear about the work of days 4
and 5. About day 1, the production of light, I took it simply as the logical first
step in starting one's work. Any modern construction begins with the setting up
of a floodlight in order to discourage illegal borrowing from the piled-up
material. Those who still wanted some biblical analogy, I referred to the Gospel-
parable about the woman who lost one of her ten drachmas and, intelligently
enough, first lit a lamp before searching for it. The sixth day was explained as
another logical step on the part of a builder who could not be less intelligent than
any human who provides a manager for what he had built.

Such are, in a nutshell, the main points when one takes Genesis 1 for a very
special and very Hebraic way of stating that in the beginning God made all.
While such a presentation of Genesis 1 put it at a safe remove from any
scientific objection, be it made on a Ptolemaic, or Copernican, or Newtonian, or
Einsteinian basis, the question could be raised whether all this did not miss the
real point in Genesis 1. Science could even more effectively be removed from
the range of Genesis 1 by calling attention to the thrust of that chapter. The
thrust is the sabbath rest, or rather the importance of observing it. In Genesis 1
God is set up as a role model for man to observe the sabbath. Hence the author
of Genesis 1 had to choose such work, the making of the all, that alone was
suitable to God's eminence. The same author also had to distribute the work into
six days, or else the resting of God could not have been presented as a seventh-
day rest, or Sabbath.

Looking at Genesis 1 in this way gave me no small intellectual comfort, partly

because I could not help feeling that there was some originality to it. But the
same feeling was mixed with anxiety: Is it possible that so many, and far more
intelligent people before me, have failed, over so many centuries, to see what to
me appeared obvious? It was clear to me that I could reassure myself on that
score only if I made a systematic study of all significant commentaries on
Genesis 1 that have been written. That number is legion. To undertake such a
study demands not only resolve and time, but also some external circumstance,
such as a series of lectures to be given on the topic.

It was a great help that Monsignor Eugene Clark, president of Wethersfield

Institute, accepted with pleasure my suggestion that I give a series of eight
lectures on that history. With such a project in place, one's work on it could go
on apace. The lectures were delivered in New York in the spring of 1991 and
came out in 1992, under the title, Genesis 1 through the Ages. Preparing the
lectures meant the looking up of hundreds of commentaries on Genesis 1,
beginning with rabbinical discussions. The work yielded not a few moments of
sheer enjoyment similar to those in my researches on the history of science and
astronomy. I could now once more spend endless hours on finding extremely
rare books and paging through them. The effort spent on looking up the original
texts once more paid off well. I spotted many a novel thing that I did not expect
to find and which could not be found in the secondary literature.

My greatest reassurance of doing the right thing came when I looked up the
volume on Genesis in Curs us scripturae sacrae, a fifty-odd-volume set of the
exegesis of the entire Bible. It was put together by Jesuit professors of exegesis
in the decades immediately preceding World War I, and published by
Lethellieux in Paris. An enormous enterprise it was, and a display of the best
scholarship, unafraid to dismiss some claims of "Higher Criticism." Though
"conservative" in that sense, that scholarship showed full respect for facts. Father
Hummelauer, the author of the volume on the Book of Genesis, did not want to
put in a favorable light what was clearly erroneous in the exegesis of Genesis 1
prior to the advent of "Higher Criticism." As he finished his survey of some
twenty pages of the history of that exegesis, he seemed to exclaim as he wrote:
"At long last, let there be light!" This was a clear enough admission that previous
commentaries on Genesis 1 did not provide the key to it. Nor did Hummelauer,
who suggested that the six days of creation were six dreams given to Moses.
Dreams about what? For if the dreams were about the real world, then one could
but feel, once awakened, the full force of questions: How could light come
before the sun? How could the sun, the moon, and the stars appear together?
Where was the firmament? How could plants come before the sun?

It was easy to see that taking Genesis 1 as a myth did not help either. Those
Catholic exegetes who followed Gunkel and later Von Rad in presenting Genesis
1 as a myth or legend, ended up by making complex schemes plainly
convoluted. The complexity of those schemes, especially the one by Beauchamp,
contrasted sharply with the simple diction and structure of Genesis 1, which no
less an adversary of "scholastic" exegesis than Loisy held to be an almost
scholastic treatise. Indeed it is easily the most systematically simple and, in that
sense, "scholastic" chapter in the entire Bible. In claiming that the author of
Genesis 1 used his material freely, Danielou provided a perfect example of the
rhetorical ease which the interpretation of Genesis 1 taken as a legend or a myth
could inspire. As will be seen shortly, that author could not proceed freely at all
once he decided what his principal message was and how to present it.

It was, however, in Danielou's exegesis of Genesis 1 that I found quoted the

experience of a famous worker priest, the Abbe Michonneau, active in the 1930s
and 1940s in the banlieux of Paris. According to him, the clash of Genesis 1 with
science turned more workers away from the Church than did their being
exploited by their capitalist employers, many of them nominally Catholic and
some of them regular churchgoers. Clearly, the finding of a satisfactory
explanation of Genesis 1 was much more than a purely academic matter for
exegesis. I found this to be the case when in 1991 I gave several talks in
Hungary on Genesis 1 and science. Hungary had just shaken off almost fifty
years of Communist dictatorship-military, political, and cultural. After I finished
one of my lectures, somebody from the audience asked for the opportunity to
make a comment. He recalled that in the ideological indoctrination that was part
of the compulsory military service, officers in charge of that duty always began
by pointing out the clash between Genesis 1 and science. This made Genesis 1
look bad even though science was equated with dialectical materialism.
Theologians and exegetes in the West, safely ensconced in their religious
liberties, still have to take stock of the scientistic propaganda that makes so
much hay of Genesis 1. This matter cannot be handled except by hard-nosed
thinking about that chapter, with no quarter given to some sacred cows of
exegesis, old or new.
 The explanation of that chapter has to be such as to render full justice to the
realistic tone of Genesis 1 and to exempt that chapter from questions which
science could rightly pose to its various statements about the world. Science,
which cannot go outside the all or the Universe writ large, had no competence
about Genesis 1 if this chapter meant to say that all was made (created) by God,
that is, all owed its existence to God. Nor could science pose any objection to the
principal message of that chapter, or the moral importance of the observance of
the sabbath rest. Taking this perspective on Genesis 1, exegetes and theologians
then might argue that it was not justifiable to consider "physical" details of the
world's making as something on which the spiritual message of Genesis 1 would
essentially depend.

For those who read the Bible as a supreme instruction about God's Covenant
with man, nothing was more natural than to find that chapter placed at the very
head of God's written word. Problems arose only when the Bible began to be
taken for something which it was never meant to be, a tool of cultural instruction
and ultimately a textbook on science. The process began with the exposure of
Jews and Christians to Hellenistic culture. Philo and Eusebius equally tried to
make the Bible "culturally" respectable. In doing so they formulated a
perspective which generated in the long run the plague of concordism. Baronius
in vain warned in Galileo's time, and by echoing Augustine, that the Bible did
not teach us how the heavens go but how to go to heaven. This wise counsel had
a bearing not only on such passages of the Bible which state the fixity of the
earth, but on many other passages as well that relate to the physical world.

Concordism had an oppressively vast history by the sixteenth century and

obtained then further impetus in a zeal to return to the Bible. Strangely, it was
then that some points, which I found so useful for my explanation, were also
clearly perceived, though without being pulled together. As my survey of the
history of interpretations of Genesis 1 shows, approach to that chapter was from
its start motivated, at least in part, by a mistaken zeal to let the Bible appear as a
source of wisdom in matters which it was never its purpose to serve.

So much for the new interpretation of Genesis 1. It was, I believe, presented

clearly enough in the last chapter of Genesis I through the Ages as to appear
very different from previous interpretations, especially from the ones that
present Genesis 1 as a myth or legend. Yet the conceptual labyrinths which the
idea of myth generates, and the ingrained penchant for reconciling Genesis 1
with the latest in science, prevented the novelty of my interpretation from being
widely noted. Perhaps the outcome will be more felicitous now that Genesis 1
through the Ages has come out in a second edition, with that explanation
forming in it a separate chapter and with the idea of the sabbath rest duly
emphasized as the key to the first chapter of Genesis.

In the last chapter of the new edition I included details which I first presented
in 1995 in an article, "The Sabbath Rest of the Maker of All."' There I made
much use of a section in the last chapter of the Book of Nehemiah, where in the
span of eight verses Nehemiah refers ten times to the sabbath rest. This strongly
suggests that it may have been Nehemiah himself, or a rabbi in his entourage,
who drafted Genesis 1 and put it at the head of the Bible.

In the new edition I also elaborated on the usefulness of seeing Genesis 1 in

the perspective as set forth above. It seems to me that once the mind is locked on
that perspective, it may be especially protected against the lure of concordism, or
the desire to make Genesis 1 appear concordant with science, and therefore
"culturally correct." In a scientific age, such as ours, this lure is truly
treacherous. Of course, there was no such lure for the Hebrews of old prior to
their exposure to Hellenistic culture. But once their learned men came under the
influence of Hellenism, they felt the pressure of concordism as well. Philo of
Alexandria turned Moses into a Platonist allegorizer. As to Christians, the trail
for concordism was blazed by the claim of Eusebius, who insisted that whatever
the Greeks knew in philosophy and science, they learned it from Moses.

While modern creationists would not say this, they insist on taking the Bible
for the kind of oracle of truth which is valid even for science. Their
hardheadedness is proverbial. I have already given easily a hundred or so
lectures all over the United States, Europe, and Australia on Genesis 1 and I
hardly ever fail to get some objections from creationists. They turn up in most
unexpected places and times. The word "Genesis" attracts them from as far
afield as pollen does honeybees. Usually it is effective to undercut their
credibility by calling their attention to the firmament and ask: do astronauts wear
helmets in order to protect their heads as they go through the firmament into
outer space? For the firmament of the Bible is something very solid indeed.
Some creationists are so hardheaded that if put on such a journey they would not
have to wear hardhats. Still others give the impression that my interpretation of
Genesis 1 makes no dent on their comprehension of that chapter. At the end of
my talks, in which I never miss flaying concordist interpretations of Genesis 1,
people still come up with questions that show their minds to be firmly locked in
the tracks of concordism. In this age of science it still does not make sense to
many that Genesis 1 is not about how God made the world, and not even
primarily that he made it, but about something unrelated to cosmology and
therefore to science, the something being the sacredness of the sabbath rest.

Needless to say, this shocks quite a few as something very novel. I find this
whenever I give a public talk for whose title I increasingly choose "In Six Days
or One Big Bang?" But once the initial shock wears off and people begin to
reflect, they feel a sort of liberation. The result is quite similar to my public
lectures on "The Stillbirths and Birth of Science." Whenever I give the two talks
in the same place in one or two days, the response is enthusiastic. Illustrations of
this are two letters, written to the organizing committee of two such talks at
Oregon State University at Corvallis. The writer of one letter stated: "I attended
both talks. His [Jaki's] insight on the history and development of western thought
was fascinating and valuable to anyone trying to understand cultural evolution....
Dr. Jaki's ability to reveal his thought by integrating broad knowledge of so
many disciplines is quite unique and impressive." According to the writer of the
second letter, "His [Jaki's] manner in presentation causes me to liken him to a
combination of master violinist and master fiddler."

In public lectures one can afford to use a forceful phrase or two. In connection
with Genesis 1, I found myself compelled to refer to that chapter as a parable
about the sabbath rest. It can but raise the hackles of literalists, who are unable to
understand that in doing so I want to save the literal meaning of Genesis.
Perhaps if Genesis 1 were a bit poetical, it would be easier to put across that it is
a sort of parable. But the style of Genesis 1 is realistic throughout, which is a
warranty on behalf of its genuinely biblical character. Genesis 1 speaks truly
about the world as the Hebrews of old saw it. It presents a real sun, a real moon,
and real stars as seen by the naked eye. It presents a primitively real world
picture, a sort of cosmic tent. It presents a God who has an unchallenged
superiority over any and all. Such a God does not mind to interfere with the
world when He sees fit. In fact the Bible ascribes to His direct action a vast
range of purely natural events, such as lightning, the eruption of volcanoes,
heavy rain, earthquakes, and so forth. And yet it is that Bible which provided
perspectives on the physical world that alone made possible the unique rise of
science in the West.

There is much more to this than the linear world view which is so
characteristic of the Bible and so markedly absent in other cultures. This
characteristic of the Bible I set forth thematically in the chapter, "The Beacon of
the Covenant," in Science and Creation. Of that chapter Cal Levich, once a
colleague of mine in the physics department of my University, and a Hebrew
scholar as well as an orthodox rabbi, grew so enthusiastic that he wanted it to be
enshrined. But there are numerous other points, too, concerning the indebtedness
of science to the Bible that kept crystallizing in my mind since I wrote that
chapter in the early 1970s. Only the opportunity or rather the stimulus had to
come so that those points might be set forth appropriately.

The stimulus consisted of my coming across, sometime in 1991, a reference to

an article by James Barr, professor of Hebrew in Oxford and a biblical scholar of
great repute. In his article, a lecture originally presented under the sponsorship of
the John Rylands Library of Manchester University, he spoke dismissively of the
widely made claim that science owes its birth to biblical religion. The article
made it clear to me that the history of science was not Barr's field. Worse, he
tagged his thesis to the growing concern about the threat posed by science to the
environment, a threat often laid at the door of Christianity. Once more a good
mind failed to notice that it made little sense to blame Christians for the abuses
of science, if at the same time they were not credited with its erstwhile use or its
very rise. The intrinsic merit of Barr's essay was indeed meager, but because of
its author's prominence it had to be answered.

First I planned an article of about equal length, which did not bode well for
the venture, as Barr's article was rather long. I soon found out the obvious,
namely, that it was far easier to set forth a thesis than to refute one presented in
great detail. The refutation, to be effective, has to give a fairly detailed account
of the thesis to be refuted, contain its rebuttal, and also present in detail the
opposite thesis. As I tried to do all this, the number of pages of my essay was
growing fast. Here, too, the adding of important new material or a new point of
view demanded the rewriting of much of what I had already put in writing.

Five or six increasingly lengthier drafts had been completed and discarded
before I realized that a not-too-long book was called for. It now carries the title
Bible and Science, which would not have been written if I had not meanwhile
found some very useful points in Barr's Gifford Lectures, Biblical Faith and
Natural Theology. To be sure, he recalled approvingly his earlier dismissal of the
idea (he now spoke of it as "an oddity of our century") that the Bible served
somehow as the source of science. Still I found several useful points in Barr's
book that came into my ken when I had to produce a revised and enlarged
edition of my history of the Gifford Lectures. It was from Barr's book that I
learned how exaggerated was the stereotype opposition between the Hebrew
mind and the Greek mind. And since the mind finds its principal expression in
language, biblical Hebrew and classical Greek had to be seen through that
stereotype as two languages expres-sive of two ways of thinking radically
opposed to one another.

I never liked endorsements of that opposition. Also, the very fact that
Providence let the New Testament be written in Greek seemed to me a strong
argument against the alleged disparity of the respective spirit of those two
languages. This, of course, was a purely theological consideration, not to be used
in a basically historical approach to the question. I could never bring myself to
believe that, say, the Hebrew "dabar" was most inadequately rendered by the
Greek "logos," by the Latin "verbum," let alone by the English "word." I saw in
such a contention another case of taking one side in its potential richness and the
other in its alleged penury. I am not, of course, a Hebrew scholar. But Barr is
certainly an eminent one, who can say with some authority that even the syntax
of biblical Hebrew is not so alien to Western European languages as often
claimed. Also I found him free of epistemological extremism. He admitted that
there is some natural theology in the Bible, an enormous concession if one views
it from the standpoint of Protestants, especially as staked out by Barthians.

I therefore felt free to develop my thesis about the biblical basis of science and
set forth that basis as widely as possible. The first thing to be done was to
portray as unsparingly as possible whatever appeared to be rudely or subtly
unscientific in the Bible's world view. I remembered that in defending
something, nothing is so effective as to portray almost enthusiastically the
objections to it. It therefore had to be pointed out that the Bible offered not even
a geocentric universe in the Greek sense. It had to be said aloud that the world of
the Hebrews does not contain a word of speculation as to what physical factor
may keep the upper and lower waters together. The Bible simply assigns to
God's power the stability of the earth as it floats on unfathomable waters. There
is no suggestion in the Bible that the downward protrusions (pillars), which the
Hebrews of old imagined to go with the earth, would do anything with that
stability. There is no trace in the Bible of that kind of rationality that comes
through already in the cosmogonical speculations of the Ionians, who looked at
the sky as part of a sphere which enclosed all things. The bowl-like firmament of
the Hebrews' world contains trapdoors on it, which God opens and closes as He
lets clouds and rain come through them to do their work on earth. There is no
trace of a science of precipitation in the Bible.

I found that upon closer inspection the Book of Job appears to be a

particularly unscientific piece of literature, whatever its moral superiority to
anything contemporary. There man is presented as one who would forever be
baffled by the workings of nature and therefore should not object to God's moral
guidance, however baffling at times. The list of unfathomable material processes
as given in the Book of Job is almost painful to read in view of what science
later found out about all of them. Written just before Judea became exposed to
Hellenistic cultural influences, the Book of Job still reflects all the primitiveness
of the world view of the Hebrew Bible.

Yet all that primitiveness goes together with a proclamation that God is the
embodiment of stability, order, and wisdom, qualities in which His creation had
to share if it was to reveal Him. That in the Bible one does not find a personified
nature, propelled by volitions, can also be seen to be of great future significance
for science. Further, the Bible holds that human and cosmic history proceed
along a linear track from beginning to end, a process which is unfailing because
it is ordered by a Creator infinitely above any failure. Last but not least, it can be
shown that the Bible contains notions about man's cognitive power that
eventually would be most germane to scientific work. If there is any
epistemology in the Bible, it is the epistemology of moderate and, therefore,
metaphysical realism.

To see philosophy present in the Bible, it should be enough to read Psalm 138
(139) which would have done credit to the greatest Greek philosophical poets, or
even to Plato. Reference to that psalm can effectively undermine the stance of
those who see the intrusion of non-biblical Greek rationalism whenever one
points out the presence of natural theology in the Bible. That psalm is not
deuterocanonical. It is an integral part of the Hebrew Bible. Together with
passages that proclaim the mind's ability to recognize from nature its Maker, that
psalm capsulizes a metaphysics, and in doing so it reflects genuine Old
Testament mentality. It is totally at variance with occasionalist Ockhamism, so
dear to the Reformers and to the entire Protestant tradition. They fully knew that
their continual re-covenanting of the Covenant was incompatible with any
philosophy that rationally assured the continuity of the Church across space and
time. Without such a philosophy assured by the historically continuous Church,
and not by a Church that had to be reinvented again and again, the phoenix of
science would not have had a chance to arise once and for all, after it had
repeatedly turned into ashes in great ancient cultures.

Those eager to discourse meaningfully on the relation of science and religion

with an eye on the Bible, had better begin with setting forth their own
epistemology and go on pondering the epistemology as it exists in the pages of
the Bible. The Bible is exposed to utter ridicule when it is claimed, for instance,
that the gates in the firmament existed for the Hebrews of old only inasmuch as
they were operated by God.' Yet on page after page the Bible testifies that those
Hebrews of old had a very realist view of nature, a sense which conflicts with
exegetical efforts to read vague mythologies into the Bible. But this is always the
case whenever an exegete skirts the task of setting forth his or her own
epistemology. This task is not achieved when an exegete takes other exegetes to
task for not having outlined their epistemologies, but keeps mum about his own.'
The result is the intrusion into exegesis of ill-concealed unbiblical
epistemologies.

The realist epistemology of the Bible, which I tried to trace out to some extent
in Bible and Science, imposes a ready acceptance of biblical miracles, and
especially those that involve a major interference with the physical laws of
nature. Such are the ten plagues, the crossing of the Red Sea and of the Jordan,
of Isaiah's pushing back the sun's shadow, the miraculous multiplication of the
bread by Jesus, and the darkening of the sun at the hour of His death. For if one
does not see in those events some real interference with the laws of nature by the
Author of nature, one begins to tamper with the realist language of the Bible and
ultimately undermines the possibility that it can carry a real message to real men
immersed in a real world.

Of course, one can go a long way in having recourse to the interplay of purely
natural forces in explaining those miracles. One should, however, refrain from
taking them for purely natural events, however fortuitous. Also, the God who
performs miracles should not be thought of as a supreme master of stunts. In
Bible and Science I took for my guideline the verse in Psalm 76 (77) which
states that, although God Himself passed through the storm that pushed back the
waters of the Sea of Reeds, no one could see His footprints. God does not make
a miraculous event so overwhelmingly obvious as to literally force man's free
will to accept it. No one respects man's free will more than that very God who
created it and creates every act of it. Only a man who worships freely can offer a
service that pleases God.

Therefore miracles should have a certain chiaroscuro to them, although here,

too, the exegete should be aware of some limits. The chiaroscuro always finds a
potent source in man's proverbial forgetfulness which begins at the very moment
when the sensory impression is no longer in the focus of one's perception. The
principle, "out of sight, out of mind," is valid not only of that marvel which a
woman can be, but also of immensely greater marvels. Shortly after the
miraculous multiplication of the bread, Our Lord had to remind the Twelve,
almost in vain, of what they had just seen with their very eyes and grabbed with
their very hands. One may be prompted to deplore the Twelve or to commiserate
with them, but one should not fasten on them the idea that the multiplication of
the bread was for them the fruit of the outpouring of brotherly love: all
knapsacks were opened, all loaves and fish shared, and all had their fill.

Such an idea, fully discredited a century ago, has lately become a fad among
some Catholic exegetes. Any victim of such a fad would assert that he accepts
on faith what his "scientific" method of exegesis forbids him to accept by his
reason. Apparently, nothing is remembered about the Church's condemnation of
fideism and about the earlier battle of the Church against the principle of double
truth. But about the theological training in vogue even in Pontifical Universities,
let alone in lower-level Catholic theological faculties, where anyone, including
students, can freely pontificate, one cannot say anything more appropriate than
melius silere quam loqui. I do not wish to waste much time on "leading"
Protestant schools of theology. In more than one I was greeted with a
condescending smile as I stood up on behalf of the physical reality of biblical
miracles. The wages of theological liberalism are not only spiritual death, but
also a chronic and contagious intellectual schizophrenia.

Victims either of the plague of double truth, be it dressed in fideism or in

creationism, or of the contagion just described, cut an even more pitiful figure as
they strike a scientific posture. All too often they are merely posturing without
knowing even a modicum about science. They have no inkling of the manner in
which the Bible, or rather the authentic teaching of the biblical message (because
the Church came first and then the Gospels) became the trigger for science. That
message, as crystallized in various credal formulas, effected nothing less than
the formulation of Newton's first law of motion. In Bible and Science I tried to
present for the benefit of serious Bible readers the steps that led to the
formulation of Newton's first law, centuries before Newton, a fact that can never
be pondered enough. It is not, however, a fact which a secularist historiography
of Western thought would be pleased to recall. If the Christian exegete cannot
muster confidence in the incomparable benefit which the world has already
derived from being exposed to the Christian creed, he should stop doing
exegesis. Even according to its etymology, exegesis has to be the art of drawing
out something of what is already there and not the trick of reading into it
something which exists only in the exegete's mind.

The Christian creed is a fact of history and lives through history. Therefore
new phases of history will help to unfold more and more of its message. Not all
new developments will be of signal help to the exegete. I think that it is a total
mistake to find justification in the Bible for that worship of evergreen nature,
which I called "ecologism."5 A Christian should never be ashamed that the
injunction, "subdue nature and multiply," inspired mankind to develop what is
known as technological mastery over nature. It does injustice to the Bible to scan
it for passages that can be turned and twisted as so many votes on behalf of
ecological consciousness. First, there should come a thorough examination of
conscience as to whether the ecological movement does not benefit from plain
egotism in the developed parts of the world. That a typical member of the Sierra
Club has three to four cars per household speaks louder than words.

The exegete should therefore be careful lest he pay too much attention to the
latest fads and see in the Bible what is not there or is there only incidentally.
There has been on hand, however, a tragic procedure since time immemorial,
and certainly from classical times on, which should have been an eye-opener for
exegetes. I mean the tragedy of abortion. The Church Fathers fought it tooth and
nail. In calling abortion an abominable sin, Vatican II merely echoed the
conviction of all Christian ages. The Bible is silent on the matter, simply because
it condemns a number of other sins, too, only on occasion. Of course, the moral
teaching of the Bible is always subordinate to its principal message or salvation
history. Were this not the case, the New Testament would be full of
denunciations of sexual depravity, all too widespread in the big cities of the
oikumene. Yet even when writing to the Christian community in Corinth, a
notoriously immoral city, Paul did not draw up a long list of immoral acts.

The exegete must therefore often read between the lines of the Bible to see its
full message. I still wonder why there is no exegetical tradition in seeing in
Mary's visit to Elizabeth a powerful defense of the fetus. Few things surprised
me more than when, in writing my essay " Christ, Catholics and Abortion"
(1985), I found no reference in great modern commentaries on Luke of that
visit's bearing on abortion. Of course, three generations ago, when, for example,
Pere Lagrange wrote his commentary on Luke, abortion was not yet a cultural
curse and a flash point of huge social clashes. But the fact that excommunication
was the canonical punishment for abortion witnessed sufficiently to its sad
reality. Yet I had to put down commentary after commentary without finding a
single reference there to the possible bearing of that visit on the sacredness of the
fetus and to its being a fully human being. Did not John, still in the womb, greet
the Savior, still a fetus of hardly more than two weeks old?

I must say, however, that my exegesis of Mary's visit to Elizabeth was a case
of "multiple discovery." Having sent a copy of my essay to my late dear friend
Jerome Lejeune, the discoverer of the genetic source of Down's syndrome, he
sent me an article of his on the same, published a year or two earlier. He was
present when the incident took place which I am about to recount.

My essay appeared in the March 1990 issue of Homiletic and Pastoral

Review. Two months later a friend of mine heard in Washington a sermon that
sounded to him an echo of my article. Then another two months later a
physician, one of the rival leaders in the pro-life movement, published an essay
in which certain phrases and exegetical expressions could appear as being taken
straight out of my article. First I thought about exposing that pious chicanery,
but I had more important things to do. Five years later, at an International pro-
life meeting, I gave a talk in which I briefly recounted my biblical argument.
After the talk somebody upbraided me in the full hearing of some six hundred
for having repeated the argument of Dr. such and such, adding that his essay, of
which more than half a million copies appeared in leaflet form, could not be
unknown to me. In reply I merely pointed out some chronological order. By then
that doctor's prolife movement was withering away.

I could merely remind myself of the comment Pierre Duhem made on finding
that his principal ideas on chemical thermodynamics were literally stolen by
someone who, as a reward, was given a chair in Paris. The important thing,
Duhem remarked, is that truth advances. If that remark had been a sort of Stoic
resignation, I would not find it worth recalling. But coming as it did from
Duhem, the Christian, it was Christian philosophy at its best. The role which
Christian philosophy, no less philosophical than Christian, played in my mind's
shaping forms the topic of the next chapter.
It is in The Relevance that I first quoted the pithy observation that "the only way
to avoid becoming a metaphysician is to say nothing."' This means that by
writing three dozen books I could not help becoming a philosopher. The writing
of books teaches one many things, among them the art of becoming
philosophical about a large variety of matters. Also, one cannot help becoming a
philosopher of physics, if one learns physics not in order to be a wizard with
complex instrumentations, but to see what physics is really about. And what is
true of any teacher is also true of authors: Nothing teaches one so effectively
about a given topic than the effort to explain it to others.

My first initiation to philosophy was in terms of scholasticism and hardly in a

genuinely scholastic spirit. The latter, as I learned later, demands a continual
recourse to the basic questions that originally gave rise to scholasticism as a
form of Aristotelianism. I was unable to wax enthusiastic about a philosophical
or metaphysical superstructure erected on a less than vivid discourse about the
physical. Later the study of theology brought along exciting confrontations with
philosophical questions, but never in a systematic way. Nevertheless it helped
me gain some gut feeling for the primacy of the tangibly real over mere ideas
about it. More of this later.

Earning a doctorate in physics teaches one a great deal about the physical
world, though relatively little in a reflective way. It was in writing The
Relevance that I learned much along that way, mainly because I had to confront
all the time the reflections of eminent physicists on what they were doing. And
in writing up all that with a view to explaining certain things to others, I clearly
had to become a philosopher. What then is my philosophy? This question was
indeed raised within a year or so following the publication of The Relevance. It
happened at a reception following some lectures I gave on science and culture at
Assumption University, in Windsor, Canada. A priest on the faculty there, who
was also a physicist, told me that, as he perused that book he often could not
figure out where I stood as a philosopher. As someone with a strong training in
Aristotelo- Thomistic philosophy, he naturally looked for something of that sort.
There is little direct trace of that philosophy in The Relevance, not even in its
chapter "Physics and Metaphysics."

It had to be clear to any reader of that book that I had no sympathy for
Comtean positivism and dialectical materialism. My illustrations of the fact that
the interpretation of physics did not fare well at all in the hands of physicists
who have idealist or empiricist leanings, foreclosed the possibility that my
philosophy would be of a piece with theirs. Therefore my philosophy had to be
located somewhere in the middle.

As is well known, Aristotle was the first major philosopher to stake out a
median position. He did so by trying to find something better than Plato's ideas
as a bridge between two extreme positions about the most obvious experience,
which is to experience change everywhere and at all times. One extreme was
Heraclitus' view that there was but change; the other the claim of Parmenides
that all changes were illusory. Ever since, the main challenge faced by
philosophers is either to agree or to disagree with Aristotle's answer which I held
to be basically correct even when I was writing The Relevance. Yet almost the
very first thing to be read in The Relevance was an unsparing criticism of
Aristotle's sundry dicta on physical science. I quoted with full approval E. T.
Whittaker's dictum that almost all of Aristotle's assertions relating to terrestrial
and celestial physics (mostly contained in his On the Heavens and
Meteorologica) are hopelessly wrong. Like Whittaker, I failed to point out in the
next breath that this did not vitiate some basic points in Aristotle's philosophy.
My failure to do so could in part be justified by the specific purpose of The
Relevance. Still a failure it was.

My philosophical interest was at that time entirely controlled by my

instinctive appraisal of what was good or bad in the dicta of physicists
concerning the measure of the relevance of physics. Insofar as I quoted those
dicta either with approval or disapproval, I willy-nilly revealed something of my
philosophy. It would have been foolish to endorse either the vitalism that plainly
vitiated Aristotle's physical science, or the mechanistic philosophy that so badly
served the great attainments of classical physics. All the great successes of
modern physics could not make me blind to the untenability of Pythagoreanism
or Platonism which some modern physicists saw embodied in quantum
mechanics. At that time already I found significant the fact that Einstein himself
groped for a middle ground in epistemology.

This middle ground became the theme that held together my Gifford Lectures.
There I argued, as I mentioned in some detail in an earlier chapter, that the great
creative steps made by Newton, Planck, and Einstein pushed them towards a
realist epistemology and metaphysics. Conversely, whenever a major scientist or
a philosopher of science espoused empiricism (sensationism) or idealism
(rationalism), the progress of physics was found to be threatened at least
indirectly. In citing example after example from the history of physics in support
of that argument, I could not help becoming a philosopher at least in the sense in
which Dionysius of Halicarnassus defined historiography: "History is
philosophy teaching by examples."' But, in addition to choosing my examples in
terms of a specific philosophical standard, I also made much more effort in those
Lectures than previously in working out my own philosophy.

This became even more the case in connection with the books I wrote around
1990, especially in God and the Cosmologists, The Purpose of it All, and Is
There a Universe? In the first I came to grips with the cosmological argument,
an eminently philosophical topic, insofar as modern scientific cosmology
provided material for articulating that argument. I reduced the gist of that
argument to the question of specificity, that is, to asking why the cosmos as
found by scientists was such and not something else? Any specific and therefore
finite thing entitles one to raise that question in such a way as to find a proper
answer to it in an inference to the existence of a being not limited by any
specificity and therefore in full possession of its own existence. Whether
Chesterton or someone else said it, it was rightly said that even the registering of
the existence of a telephone pole is enough to prove the existence of God. Of
course, the act of registering reality in that sense implies a median position in
epistemology.

God and the Cosmologists contains philosophical lessons that can be drawn
from the unphilosophical statements, at times truly pathetic, of leading scientific
cosmologists. The lessons are almost as instructive as the enlightenment gained
from studying vastly articulated false philosophical systems. Every error teaches
some truth just as any crime can teach much about virtue and ethics. The more
vastly articulated is a mistaken philosophical system, the more vivid are the
lessons it provides about pitfalls to be avoided. The same is true in science, and
especially in scientific cosmology, this most philosophical branch of science. It
is there that the parody of philosophy reaches its climax. For nothing more
stultifying can be conceived than the claim that modern scientific cosmology
gives its cultivators the power (in theory at least) to create entire universes
literally out of nothing. Actually they are victims of the illusion that they really
deal with matter as they claim to bring it forth out of nothing.

The illusion is the fruit of that pathetic state of mind often noticed in
kleptomaniacs, who usually begin with petty thefts. Once skilled there, they
routinely will do bigger things and make themselves readily believe that there is
no such a thing as cheating. This scenario fits the genesis of the crediting of
science with Genesis writ large, or creation. Although it can be shown even with
a mathematical formula that cheating is on hand, it is not to be hoped that such
an unmasking of the hubris of a scientific creation of universes out of nothing
would make impression on its advocates. Still, since that formula is also a piece
of my doing philosophy, I have to recall it here. In doing so I make good a
promise voiced in Chapter 1 of this book by identifying my sole contribution to
theoretical physics.

The piece is a simple rewriting of Heisenberg's uncertainty relation Ax.Ap >_

h, which means that the product of the uncertainties in measuring the position
Ax and momentum Ap in an interaction cannot be smaller than h or Planck's
quantum divided by 4it. Shortly after Heisenberg proposed in 1927 that relation
or inequality, it was recognized that it has an equivalent form in AE.At >_ h,
where E is energy and t is time. But although no formula of physics has been
better known than E = mc2, nobody cared to rewrite AE.At >_ h as dmc2.dt >_
h. In this form the inequality reveals that, since c or the speed of light is
invariable, there will necessarily be on hand an uncertainty in measuring m or
mass. Further, this uncertainty or margin of error increases or decreases
inversely with the error of measuring t. Suppose then that in terms of the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics one takes operational
uncertainties for ontological ones. Then the uncertainty in measuring, say, the
time of the emission of an alpha particle from a radioactive nucleus turns the
uncertainty of measuring the mass into an ontological uncertainty. This can only
mean that the mass defect Am must come from nothing, unless one assumes that
the Creator supplies it in each radioactive decay, which, of course, would be
absurd to assume.

In the case of an alpha emission, that defect may not exceed 10-31grams, an
unimaginably small amount of matter. Why then should one worry about
accounting for its provenance? No petty theft could be more "petty" than a
swindling with such a small quantity. But endless acts of swindling can only
make one insensitive to what is actually being done. At the end, the Heisenberg
uncertainty relation would then inspire an oversight of matter of cosmic
amounts, such as entire universes. And this is actually what happened. Details
can be found in the Postscript to the new edition of God and the Cosmologists.

Chapter 5 in that book contains my detailed rebuttal of Heisenberg's own non-

causal interpretation of the principle of indeterminacy. Unlike the latter, which is
good physics, the former is the kind of elementary misstep in philosophy for
which the Greeks of old already had a name: metabasis eis allo genos. Here the
misstep is a jump from the operational to the ontological, which is done
whenever one reasons as follows: an interaction that cannot be measured exactly,
cannot take place exactly.

This phrase is merely my rephrasing of an incisive remark which J. E. Turner,

professor of philosophy at Liverpool, made as early as 1930, in a letter to
Nature, that carried it to the four corners of the scientific world.3 The remark
hardly made a ripple. It was not in the "mainstream" literature that I first saw it
quoted, but no sooner had I seen it than I saw its incisiveness. Whether the
concise character of my reformulation of it, that appeared in many of my
writings, would be also effective in awakening some minds from their
infatuation with the anticausal interpretation of the principle of indeterminacy is
another matter. That infatuation can make its victims myopic to various degrees,
some of which are simply unbelievable. I speak from experience.

Quite believable will sound, I think, the indignation which a President of the
German Philosophical Society voiced on hearing me expound the anticausal
misinterpretation of Heisenberg's principle. Do you mean, he asked me, that we
have to return to universal mechanical causation, which swallowed up even
man's free will? The question illustrated the fact that one can hardly endorse a
philosophical error without endorsing some other as well. It was erroneous to
identify causation with mechanical causation: the former is an ontological
matter, whereas the latter is merely a manner of causation. But once that error
was made, and the universality of mechanical causation firmly asserted, it was
easy to draw the inference that this also meant the refutation of the reality of free
will. One could, of course, retort that the refutation itself could not be a blind
mechanical reaction if it was still a valid refutation, which has to be an act of
free reasoning. Apart from this the question revealed a confusion between the
manner or the how of causal interaction among physical bodies and the
ontological reality of that causation. This confusion is endemic in the literature.
No wonder that so many saw in the indeterminacy principle a scientific
vindication of free will. One can hardly imagine a less reliable life belt thrown to
humanists who still care about free will.

Still believable could sound that Nobel-laureate physicist who simply brushed
aside my formulation of the anticausal interpretation of the indeterminacy
principle. No, he said, it is not true that according to that principle an interaction
that cannot be measured exactly, cannot take place exactly. But he did not say
that this inference was not fallacious. Nor did he specify the ground on which
one could say that a mathematical formula could have by itself an ontological
meaning. Incidentally, the topic came up because someone else at the lunch table
claimed that Platonism alone can provide grounds for vindicating spiritual soul
and free will.

But quite unbelievable sounds the remark of still another Nobel laureate, who
took exception to my dismissal of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum
mechanics as based on the anticausal interpretation of Heisenberg's principle. To
his credit, he drew the ultimate inference of that interpretation and held that there
was no external reality except sensory impressions of what we think to be such a
reality. I asked him whether, if a pickpocket had come and taken his wallet, he
could still say that his wallet had been stolen, or only say that he had the sensory
impression of this. He was visibly taken aback by my question, but he also
admitted that he had no right to say anything else. Being a good friend, I had no
heart to drive the dagger deeper by telling him that he should be careful not to
complain to the police that he had just had the sensory impression of his wallet
having been taken from his pocket.

Only by taking an uncompromising stance against the noncausal interpretation

of quantum mechanics is it possible to dissipate the ever heavier fog of loose talk
about absolute chaos and absolute randomness. I exposed such loose talk in a
chapter in God and the Cosmologists, a work in which I presented a case for the
cosmological proof of the existence of God. Such a proof assumes that there is a
cosmos or universe, or a strict totality of consistently, and not "chaotically,"
interacting things. The proof must begin with the demonstration of the reality of
the universe. Can such a demonstration be made? And is not such a
demonstration a pivotal philosophical matter, if it is indeed true that, to recall
Kant's dictum, the universe, together with the soul and God, is one of the three
major subjects of metaphysics? That Kant declared all three to be the bastard
products of the metaphysical cravings of the intellect tells a great deal about the
metaphysics he claimed to have put on critically safe grounds.

As I said in an earlier chapter, for a long time I took Einstein's cosmological

model for a proof of the existence of the universe. In doing so I was wrong. To
be sure, the idea of a universe which is infinite in the Euclidean sense had to
appear even more suspect ever since Einstein came forth with that model as part
of his general relativity. Further, that model has specificities, such as the total
mass of the universe and the permissible path of motion with the least curvature
which gives the "radius" or "size" of the universe. Such specificities raise
philosophical questions, which are pushed into the background by the alleged
homogeneity of an infinite Euclidean universe. But the Einsteinian model itself
does not necessarily stand for the Universe, or the totality of consistently
interacting things. Therefore the model cannot be taken for a strict refutation of
Kant's claim that the mind is unable to achieve a valid knowledge of the
universe.

Kant's claim was based on his contention that the first and second antinomies,
as he set them up, contradicted one another, and therefore there could be no valid
knowledge about the cosmos as such. But since one antinomy was empiricist, the
other idealist, they could not contradict one another. More importantly, in order
to reopen the question of whether the mind can achieve that knowledge, one first
has to recognize that such a knowledge cannot come from scientific cosmology.
Improve as they may their cosmological models, scientific cosmologists can
never be sure that they have the universe in their grasp. In a strict sense they
cannot lay claim to a science of cosmology, which is strictly about the cosmos
and not merely about a large number of galaxies. This is forcefully put in my Is
there a Universe?, the expanded text of my lectures given at the University of
Liverpool in 1992. On looking at the book, a distinguished astronomer from
Cambridge asked me what word cosmologists should then use? Perhaps
"supergalactology," I said in reply. Eventually he opted for the word
"multiverse"4 as if mere verbalism would answer the question of whether those
many "universes" interacted with one another or not. In the latter case, they
cannot be known even by scientists, to say nothing of lesser mortals. In the
former case they constitute a single universe.

The question of whether there is a universe or a totality of consistently

interacting things, which is my definition of the physical universe, is a
philosophical question and therefore can be given only a philosophical answer.
My first intimations of that answer were given in a lecture, "Thomas and the
Universe." There I argued that Thomas' dicta on the universe (he mentions it
about three thousand times in his writings according to the IBM analytical index
of his works) provide elements out of which one can put together an argument
that proves the existence of a universe. I further considered this in the next-to-
last chapter of my Liverpool Lectures.

Does this mean that I am, therefore, a Thomist? Unless one equates
metaphysical realism with Thomism, one does not become a Thomist by
formulating an argument which, in brief, proceeds as follows: There obviously
exist material entities, a proposition which one takes for a principle that cannot
be traced to any other proposition and therefore cannot be proven in that sense.
One can invoke on behalf of that principle a sort of reductio ad absurdum:
Whenever one conveys the refutation of that principle to others, who are
intelligent beings, though not immaterial as angels are, one admits that there are
material entities. Again, material means, such as books or words, must be relied
upon to convey that refutation.

The second step in the argument relates to the fact that all material entities
contain quantitatively determinable, that is, measurable properties, at least in the
sense, that they can be counted. Therefore such entities constitute a coherent
system insofar as its parts reveal some basic quantitative properties whereby
they can be counted. One can further argue that counting cannot go on ad
infinitum, or else one would have on hand an actually realized infinite quantity,
which is a contradiction in terms. This contradiction would arise even if the
counting is not done actually, but one merely is confronted with it, say, by the
existence of an infinite number of atoms that would be on hand in an infinitely
large universe. Clearly, then, an actually existing universe has to be finite.
Moreover, such a universe has quantitative properties everywhere and this
assures it some basic coherence or rationality, valid throughout its compass.

This is in a nutshell my proof of the existence of a universe as a totality of

consistently interacting things. Its various elements can be found in Thomas,
who held that, although one could divide a given piece of matter an infinite
number of times, one could not have matter in infinite quantity. But one would
look in vain in Thomas for a systematic proof of the universe. He could not feel
a particular need for such a proof, as he believed he had seen with his naked eye
that there was a totality insofar as it was being confined by the vault of the sky.
Here, too, as in countless other instances, he went along with his common sense
perception and with Aristotle who staked so much on it. Indeed, although in a
number of cases Thomas could have disagreed with Aristotle's explanation of
physical processes, Thomas always gave the benefit of the doubt to the
Philosopher. Ultimately, this did not devolve to the benefit of Thomistic
philosophy.

Thomists must take seriously the fact that there is hardly a page that can be
salvaged from Aristotle's physical, astronomical, and chemical science, apart
from what is purely geometrical there. Commonsense perception of reality is, of
course, as fundamentally valid today as it was in Aristotle's time. But no less
valid in his time than it is today is the fact that whatever is quantitative in our
registering of reality, it can be verified or disproved only by the quantitative
method, however primitive. Now commonsense observation amply reveals that
various kinds of matter move in various ways. It is, therefore, not inherently
mistaken to put bodies into two classes, some (indeed most of them) that move
downward and others (such as fire and air) that move upward. Of course, this
classification may be vitiated by other, especially quantitative considerations.
Such considerations refute Aristotle's claim that the greater is the mass of a
body, the greater is its readiness, or propensity to move along the direction
appropriate to its class. According to Aristotle's own example (On the Heavens,
I, 6) a body with twice the weight of another would fall twice as fast as the other.
One only need step on a chair and drop simultaneously a hammer and a coin in
order to see that although the two masses vastly differ, they hit the ground at the
same time. Clearly, there has to be something very wrong with the reasoning
underlying Aristotle's statement.

The reasoning was first formulated by Socrates in his resolve to oppose the
soulless mechanistic philosophy of the Ionians and vindicate the reality of the
soul as something that survives bodily death. This is the gist of Phaedo in which
Socrates defined the purpose of the study of nature as the task of saving purpose
for anything and for anybody. If there is a major fault in The Relevance, it is my
failure to see early enough that Aristotelian or organismic physics was rooted in
Socrates' existential effort to save the soul. This effort Socrates carried out by
attributing some sort of soul to everything, so that no one could object to his
attributing a soul to each flesh and blood individual. He claimed that all objects
moved in order to attain what was best for them and the best was to be in the
place "natural" for each. Such is the gist of the Aristotelian notion of natural
motion and natural place. It is not a doctrine distilled from "pure" reason; rather
it is an existentially inspired wild generalization.

This and similar wild generalizations still have a hold on Aristotelians and
Thomists who insist on the legitimacy of a philosophy of nature as practically
independent of the physical science of nature. Authors of such books invariably
skirt the patently wrong quantitative inference drawn by Aristotle. At times they
resist the obligation of facing up to it. I can still almost feel the mental vertigo
that seized me when a graduate student of Thomistic philosophy took violent
exception to my criticism of Aristotle's laws of motion. I hope he was a rare
case. But authors of books on scholastic philosophy of nature systematically
ignore the problem. A study of the history of commentaries on that passage in
On the Heavens would be an eye-opener about good intentions blocking the
recognition of the obvious. But back to the inspiration of Socrates and Aristotle.

I feel deep sympathy for that inspiration. All our cultural ills and woes, the
disintegration of Western culture unfolding before our very eyes, are due to a
growing loss of the sense of purpose. Those who try to fill the hole caused by
that loss with a recourse to biomedical means are just as mistaken as those who
attribute a purposeful drive to matter so that the individual may feel propped up
in his own sense of purpose. The former try to get purpose (quality) from
quantities, the latter presume that quantities may be reliably gained from purely
qualitative considerations. Whenever quantities are obtained in such a manner
they turn out to be patently wrong.

The fateful reasoning of Socrates inspired not only that imbalance, but also
denied legitimacy to the quantitative study of matter as urged in at least some
implicit way by the Ionians and the atomists. In other words, Socrates threw out
the baby (the quantitative study of the physical world) with the bathwater (the
ugly mechanistic philosophy attached to that study). But it was not until twenty
years after the publication of The Relevance that I wrote my essay, "Socrates or
the Baby and the Bathwater." It was still another ten years later that I dealt
systematically with the conceptual root of the dilemma to which Socrates gave
such a one-sided solution and inspired countless others to follow suit. I did so in
an essay, "Words: Blocks, Amoebas, or Patches of Fog: or the Limitations of the
Applications of Fuzzy Logic" where I first quoted a pithy remark of Aristotle's in
his Categories (6a). There he voiced a truth, the depth of which is still to be
fathomed, although it appears almost trivial. He remarked that only of notions
belonging to the category of quantities is it not possible to say "more or less,"
whereas this can be said of notions that belong to any of the other nine
categories.

This point controlled much of my concern about the relevance and irrelevance
of physics or scientific method. It was, therefore, most satisfying when many
years after writing The Relevance I saw that point pregnantly formulated by such
a great mind as Aristotle. It was also very instructive to see that such a great
mind failed to notice its pivotal importance. Although Sir Thomas Heath could
put together a nice volume on Aristotle's dicta on mathematics,' they never
inspired the cultivation of exact physical science, partly because Aristotle
himself was not fired up by them. He certainly failed to see the fact that science,
which measures, even if "qualitatively," is applicable everywhere in the realm of
experience.

That applicability, though extremely wide in its range, is extremely narrow in

its results, because it relates only to the quantitative aspects of experience. But it,
and it alone, gives an indispensable mastery over them, while leaving untouched
a range of matters that call for mastery by man, though in a very different sense.
Those who from Galileo on made it a program to overcome the one-sidedness
built into peripatetism, did so by advocating a one-sidedness no less radical.
They originated in Western thought an overweening respect for quantitative
considerations, which in turn bred insensitivity for a great many broader
philosophical notions. Both sides failed to recognize that mastery of one side
gives no mastery of the other. The reason for this is very simple. There are no
conceptual acrobatics (unless in the form of Hegelian delusion) which can build
a smooth transition from the category of quantities to all the other categories and
vice versa. Those two realms live on in a splendid conceptual isolation from one
another. Man may chafe over his inability to secure that transition, but he does
better if he tries to live with it by paying both sides their due.

Herein lay a central point in my philosophical interests, which governed my

relentless criticism of the cult of the quantitative method known as scientism,
physicalism, and reductionism. They all are rooted in impatience with concepts
that do not lend themselves to precise definitions in the pattern of quantitative
concepts. This impatience generates contempt for most concepts, because only a
small portion of concepts is quantitative. While these can be handled with
relative ease, the handling of most other concepts demands simultaneous
attention to more than one parameter. They demand the skill of jugglers who
play with several balls at the same time. The impatience then inspires shortcuts
in philosophy, well illustrated by logical positivism that aims at a scientific
heaven in the handling of all earthly concerns.

But there is a deeper aspect to this very philosophical problem. Quantities are
always on the surface except, of course, for Pythagoreans, old and new, who
take them for the bedrock of reality. Considerations other than quantitative
unfold depths against which the one-dimensional man of reductionism appears
very flat indeed. Even those who make a philosophical profession of promoting
such an ideal of man would not say that they do this for no purpose. They prefer
not to spell out rigorously all the inferences that follow from scientistic
ideologies, one of which is Darwinism taken for philosophy and not just for
science.

The status of purpose was uncertain, to say the least, in Darwin's Origin of
Species. In adding The Descent of Man Darwin made a mockery of any effort
that tried to see his system as having room for purpose. Still, the mere thought of
the eye, an organ so wonderfully serving some purpose and in so many different
ways, made him very uneasy. The sight of a peacock's tail gave him fits. Both
appeared to him as overwhelming evidence of design whenever he did not stifle
his instinctive common sense. But his system prevented Darwin from
considering the possibility of both a designer and a design expressive of a
purpose built into nature. He never considered the implication of the fact that all
his books were written for a purpose, namely, to discredit once and for all the
idea of a special creation of any species. He was right in seeing something
basically wrong in that idea, but nonetheless he attacked it for a purpose, and
there he laid bare the Achilles' heel of his system.

For it was one thing to insist that in science nothing could be gained by
introducing non-measurable parameters, such as purposive behavior, however
unconscious. It was another to ignore the fact that in fighting purpose tooth and
nail, scientists themselves acted for a purpose. The farcical nature of this
inconsistency found an inimitable expression when in 1929 Whitehead spoofed
those who devoted their entire life to the purpose of proving that there was no
purpose,' a dictum which I kept quoting whenever opportunity arose. There has
been no better one-liner that would evoke the basic futility of Darwinistic
philosophy as distinct from science, evolutionary or not. At any rate, the
evidence of design, indicative of some purpose, is overwhelming everywhere in
nature. Yet those who make the most of this claim cannot measure that evidence
but only love it with that love of wisdom which is philosophy. For one does
philosophy, not science, whenever one argues on behalf of design, speaks of
purpose, and just does anything for a purpose.

The project of disentangling from one another all these parameters of

Darwinism (or of evolution) was, however, just one of the tasks that I set for
myself when the success of my first series, "God and the Cosmologists," of
Farmington Institute lectures in Oxford prompted its directors to invite me to
give another series the following year. What particularly impressed one of the
directors in that series of lectures was the seventh, which under the title, "The
Earth's Luck," dealt precisely with the earth having the moon for satellite. About
the earth-moon system one could point out a set of parameters so unlikely as to
appear well-nigh miraculous. The director in question saw in those parameters so
many telling proofs of a direct divine intervention and therefore proofs of a
higher purpose. He was so sure of this point that he wanted to have a say in the
choice of topics for the lectures of the next series. A rather brash suggestion on
the part of a retired colonel of the British Army, but not entirely uncharacteristic
of an imperial frame of mind. Needless to say I conveyed to him that I was the
lecturer. He withdrew his objection to the general title, "The Purpose of It All,"
only when I told him that the phrase came from C. S. Lewis.

The lectures were devoted to an analysis of the various (most of them futile)
heuristic sources of the idea of purpose, beginning with that of Progress. The
individual titles of the lectures made it clear to the good colonel that my
formulation of the design argument was not to be based in marshalling a in Paley
improbable occurrences in nature. In fact, in one of the lectures I dealt very
severely with Paley and the type of argumentation he made famous. As
subsequent development brought this out, the progress of biology overcame
again and again notorious improbabilities. Suffice it to think of Wohler's success
in 1828 of synthesizing urea, a feat that broke down the apparently
insurmountable wall between organic and inorganic substances. This and other
feats failed, however, to sink into the minds of those who keep resurrecting the
design argument in terms of improbabilities. The lure of that argument lies in
that it offers a "scientific" end run around the task of articulating philosophically
the design argument insofar as it wants to demonstrate some purpose at work in
nature.

The positive task of The Purpose of It All lay precisely in setting forth the
analogous realizations of purpose. Now nothing is so crucial yet so ungrateful a
task in philosophy as to articulate the doctrine of analogy, although certain
points should seem elementary. It should seem obvious that one cannot assert
that a stone, a plant, an animal, a man, an angel, and God exist in the same sense.
Their respective acts of existence represent degrees of it which are not marked
out quantitatively on the same, univocal scale. Their acts of existence are not,
however, totally different from one another. For in that case the use of the same
word "exist" would be sheer equivocation. Between these two cases there must
lie a third, the case of analogous realizations of the same reality, in this case of
existence. If one does not like the old terms, analogy and analogous, let him
offer a better word, but he must offer one. Not to take note of a problem is
sloppiness at best; but to take note of it and fall silent about it is an intellectual
cop-out, even though widely practiced in academe.

The task of articulating the analogous realization of purpose consisted in

doing justice to the difference between man's acting consciously for a purpose
and the overwhelming evidence about some sort of purpose carried out by
animals and plants at least for the purpose of assuring the survival of their
species. What I did was largely an elaboration of what I had learned from
Gilson's D'Aristote a Darwin et retour, a book eventually translated at my
suggestion by John Lyon into English. This was one of my little contributions to
the cause of philosophy. Later he also translated, again at my suggestion,
Gilson's Linguistique et philosophie, a book which is still to be discovered by
those who feel instinctively that there is something perverse in any endorsement
of artificial intelligence. Any honest consideration of any word in any language
as a carrier of universal meaning should be sufficient to dispose of that
intellectual perversity. Sufficient, if there is enough philosophical sensitivity on
hand, which is nowadays a sorely missing cultural commodity.

My sensitivity to philosophy certainly received a spark when I found quoted a

statement of Gilson's in E. Mascall's Gifford Lectures, The Openness of Being, a
work I read a year or two after its publication in 1971. There Mascall opened his
vindication of philosophical realism by quoting over three pages from a section
of Gilson's Realisme methodique that had for its title the quaint phrase, "Le
Vade Mecum du debutant realist." The first three phrases quoted by Mascall
became indelibly engraved in my mind: "The first step on the path of realism is
to recognize that one has always been a realist; the second is to recognize that,
however much one tries to think differently, one will never succeed; the third is
to note that those who claim that they think differently, think as realists as soon
as they forget to act a part. If they ask themselves why, their conversion is
almost complete."

Ever since I read those three precepts I was on my way to becoming an

articulately confirmed realist. I saw to it that this book of Gilson was also
translated into English. This time Philip Trower, a gentleman philosopher and
theologian in England, did the job and did it most creditably. For him the book
was a revelation inasmuch as it informed him about subjectivist intrusions into
Neothomism already in the 1930s. Not all problems of present-day Catholics
began with Vatican II. The book certainly explained to me the true nature of that
miscegenation of Aquinas and Kant, which many who called themselves
Neothomists had hoped to bring about, though none of them in such a systematic
way as Marechal. My dislike of that trend led me to coin the term
"Aquikantism." It is not catching on, partly because those who are described by
it have become the trendsetters in Catholic philosophical circles. Still I do not
understand why Gilson's Realisme methodique failed to be translated into
English while he still ruled from the Medieval Institute in Toronto. Had that
translation been made, it might have forestalled a Gleichschaltung of Catholic
departments of philosophy. Lonergan's dismissal of Gilson as a mere
perceptionist speaks louder than words. There is also something fishy in
Copleston's effort to undermine Gilson's concise exposure of the contradiction in
Kant's basic claim that knowledge must start with critical knowledge. Copleston
notwithstanding, critical knowledge has to be knowledge first before it can
become "critical."

In the chapter on my Gifford Lectures I have already spoken of the debt which
I owe to Gilson, the author of The Unity of Philosophical Experience. Here let
me turn to what I have learned about the basics in philosophy from my readings
of Duhem. I found him to be a realist and a most consciously realist at that. He
could also articulate this in graphically telling passages, one of which I made the
centerpiece of my long chapter on Duhem the philosopher in Uneasy Genius. I
also found his analysis of physical theory as indicative of his awareness of the
enormous importance of the distinction between quantitative and nonquantitative
kinds of knowledge. Still, on further reflection, of which more shortly, I could
not see as convincing his insistence on natural classification, a very Aristotelian
notion, as something gradually approximated by physical theory in its
mathematical formulation. Duhem overlooked the fact that he had already made
a most valuable observation: The broader a physical theory is, the less its
constituent parameters can be identified with this or that physical reality under
experimental investigation.

I found very instructive Duhem's early efforts to help some Neothomists to see
the pitfalls of Aristotelianism. If he was not successful, it was only because he
himself did not see the importance of that distinction between quantities and
qualities fully enough. Otherwise, he would not have taken thermometry as a
case where quantitative considerations issued in qualitative ones. For the same
reason there remains something unconvincing in his explanation of why the
scientific concept of inertial motion leaves intact the metaphysician's concern
about it. The metaphysician, the famed Garrigou-Lagrange, kept asking Duhem
why the change of position of an inertially moving body did not imply some
ontological surplus and therefore the need to relate it to God as the ultimate
source of anything ontological. But then could the motion be truly inertial? Such
was the problem for the metaphysician. For the physicist the problem consisted
in taking a close look at his use of the term "inertial." Did he use it in a
philosophical sense, or in a purely quantitative sense? The latter referred to the
fact that the inertially moving body covered the same distance in equal times.
Distance is a purely relative notion. It is not something "ontological." Hence if
the physicist is careful to point out that his concept of inertia is void of
ontological connotation, the metaphysician cannot raise non-quantitative, let
alone ontological, questions about it.

The distinction between the quantitative and the nonquantitative classes of

concepts served as one of the two pillars on which I built my own system of
philosophy, published under the title, Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth.
That I wrote it in my seventy-third year may support the truth of Aristotle's
remark in the Rhetoric that whereas young men can readily become wizards in
mathematics, mature age is needed to do philosophy well. The other pillar in that
philosophical synthesis of mine is the primacy of objects in the process of
knowledge. What seems, however, to be truly original in that system of mine is a
technique of arguing which is anchored in the fact that philosophy is something
communicated. About the value of a solipsist's philosophy nothing can be
learned as long as the solipsist remains consistent. At the same time any
argument against realism when made known by being communicated, implies
the recognition of external reality.

This is, however, not to be taken for a position of functionalism in philosophy,

or even for an implicit claim that it is the act of communication that creates
reality. It merely states that the philosopher must use some means of
communication and that his philosophy must contain the full justification of the
use of that means as well as the account of its objective reality. Otherwise the
philosopher becomes an artist in sleights of hand. By driving home relentlessly
through fourteen chapters the need to consider above all the means before one
considers the message, I perhaps achieved something original. At least I do not
remember that any philosopher of note had ever used this sort of approach.

My starting point, a chapter on objects, is in part a warning that unless a

philosopher begins with objects that do object to the mind and thereby spark
knowledge, he becomes a sort of a cheater. That some sort of cheating has
become de rigueur in all departments of philosophy was a concern for
Wittgenstein, and he pointedly called the attention of a fresh Ph. D. to the fact
that he would be expected to be part of that cheating. Wittgenstein had in mind
economizing with clarity, whereas in my view a far more serious cheating, that
with objective reality, is endemic in the profession. It is only after I elaborated
on the primacy of objects that I turned to the question of conceptual clarity. I did
so in a perspective which Wittgenstein and others did not perceive. I discussed
conceptual clarity with an eye on the difference between quantitative and non-
quantitative concepts. I did this in order to cut down to size science, from which
so many modern philosophers expect the salvation of their subject matter. They
merely take slaughterhouses for tools of life preservation.

In conclusion let me merely list the titles of the remaining chapters in Means
to Message: free will, purpose, cause, change, mind, universe, ethics, God,
miracles, history. The last chapter is called Alone?, or my answer to the vagaries
promoted by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). In that chapter I
focused, in line with the realism of my philosophy, on the fact that the promoters
of SETI showed systematic disregard of some very factual considerations as
well. They certainly disregard the role which the moon played in various
physical, biological, and intellectual developments on earth, a point I
emphasized in 1996 in a paper given at the Plenary Meeting of the Pontifical
Academy of Science, a meeting devoted to the ubiquity of life.

Since several SETI champions were among the invited speakers, I did not
probe there into the personal reason of their antiscientific posture. Obviously,
one has to look for some ideology at play. In their case one often finds distinct
hostility toward the Christian notion of man, although they are careful not to be
forthcoming about it. In this secretiveness they at times eagerly use statements of
some Christian theologians who clearly fail to see that within the Christian
perspective the soul cannot be the necessary outcome of random biochemical
diversification.
 Since sincerity should be a primary duty of any lover of wisdom, it is only
proper that I should devote the next chapter to my strongest motivation for being
devoted to objects and facts as the basis of my philosophical realism.
As I have already mentioned in the preceding chapter, I learned from Gilson the
conscious resolve to put external reality always in the first place. Once such a
resolve becomes ingrained in one's mind, it may grasp with new similes very old
truths in proof of their perennial vitality. The richness of language never fails to
come to one's aid if there is a thought that deserves to be helped. Part of that
richness comes nowadays from sport. Therefore at least in parts of the globe
where baseball is a prime pastime, much may be conveyed by likening honest
philosophy to the way in which honest baseball is played. The player must touch
first base before rushing to the second.

If the history of philosophy teaches anything, it is the decisive influence

which the first step taken by a philosopher has on his system. This had been on
my mind for some time when during a visit of mine in England the Australian
cricket team handed England its worst defeat ever. For days the papers were full
of that "national disaster." I wonder whether any British philosopher had noted
that success in philosophy, too, depended on what Bob Simpson, the captain of
the Australian cricket team, held to be the key to his team's smashing victory: "In
sport everything depends on the first move. If you interfere with it, you are in
trouble."'

The validity of this in philosophy constitutes a theme that deserves a careful

study even as a purely historical topic. For even if one eschews the task of
weighing the merit of one's first move against another's such move, one thing at
least should be clear. Philosophical systems depend on first tenets, which,
precisely because they are taken to be first, are not to be traced to something
else. The philosopher has to be committed to the truth of his first move as if it
were the first tenet in his credal declaration. He can at most discuss the
advantage of this or that first move taken in its consequences, but he cannot
prove any such move in terms of something else. First moves are like the
"antecedent assumptions," to recall a phrase that often recurs in Newman's
Grammar of Assent. They rest on their immediately perceived reasonability;
only their respective consequences remain open to discussion.

I say all this partly because of a rather animated debate that arose in a
Christian context. The day after I delivered my Pere Marquette Lecture for 1992
at Marquette University, a dozen or so faculty, mostly from the theology and
philosophy departments, had lunch with me. My lecture, subsequently published
as Universe and Creed, struck several of them as being so dogmatic as to
foreclose dialogue with people with other philosophical persuasion. Indeed, I
must have sounded dogmatic all the more because I repeatedly hit the lectern to
underline the point: The reality of the universe, that grounds the very first article
of the Creed about the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, cannot
be argued unless one stops arguing whether ideas of objects or objects
themselves come first. Unless one stops arguing on that point, the presumed
dialogue may readily turn into a specious shadow boxing about secondary
points.

Luncheons are not the best occasion to articulate fine points or even first
points. The guest lecturer is usually forced into the position of a chess-master
who has to play against a number of other chess players without being able to
handle systematically the moves of each of them. Worse, while the others can
enjoy their lunch, the lecturer hardly has time to swallow a morsel. But I can
recall with great satisfaction that nobody present disputed my remark that no
philosopher of any worth was ever willing to engage in a dispute about the first
move in his system.

The more politically minded philosophers, whose number nowadays is legion,

may consider a dictum in Mao's once ubiquitous but today hard to find Little
Red Book. There one reads that nobody can begin a march with the second step.
I am not sure whether anyone before me, at least in the Western world, saw
philosophical significance in that dictum. A quick consideration of modern
Western philosophy may suggest that most philosophers would have reacted to
that dictum with an urbane variety of the ridicule which Khrushchev poured on
it. Yet, he should have known that the Soviet Union would have fared better had
its economic policy makers paid attention to what is really the first step in an age
in which money counts much more than its real worth. Of course, in this case
there would not have been a Soviet Union in the first place. And it may even be
safely said that if philosophers in the West had adhered to the primacy of facts or
objects, there would not have been a Western philosophy as known for the last
half a millennium or so. For almost every trend in that philosophy is an attempt
to march forward by starting out with what can be only the second step, and at
times only the third.

It would not be correct to say that a keen sense for that primacy diminished in
the West in the measure in which it weaned itself from its Christian heritage. For
that sense was more a gut feeling even among Christians who philosophized,
rather than a keenly articulated sense, until they saw it diminish among those
who eventually formed the vast domain of secularized Western philosophy. The
crisp crystallization of a theme or of a doctrine cannot take place until it is
opposed or controverted. At any rate, the gradual de-Christianization of the West
logically brought about a progressive turning away from the objectively real to
the subjectively perceived.

The logic is rooted in a fact, or rather in the measure to which the fact, known
as the Logos Incarnate, began to be unappreciated in the West. Kant deserves
some gratitude for the frankness with which he dismissed belief in christological
dogmas in his Religion within the Limits of Reason. Other chief figures of
modern Western philosophy were less forthright. Worse, those whose
intellectual existence depends on belief in the fact of Christ failed to keep in
focus the significance, for example, of Husserl's thematic irreligion, which he
considered to be a pivotal feature of his phenomenology. (There is much more
than meets the philosophical eye in Max Scheler's defection from the faith he
had once embraced). I could not help wondering when, on the occasion of a talk
I gave in Louvain, I was shown around in its Husserl Institute. What made me
wonder was the almost religious reverence accorded to Husserl at a University
that was a chief cradle of the Neothomist revival.

The medievals baptized Aristotle, a procedure which nonChristian modern

Aristotelians consider illogical, as Aristotle would most likely have sided not
with Thomas but with Averroes. It is not so problematic to guess Husserl's
reaction to Edith Stein's pouring baptismal water on his phenomenology. There
is no hint in Husserl's writings that he took the phenomena in a sense really
different from the one endorsed by Kant, this chief proponent of irreligion whose
essence is a radical selfcenteredness that operates by subjugating the objective to
the a priori categories of the mind. This allows the subjective will to parade as
the objective and the latter will be dissolved into a patently willful subjectivity.
Such is the first move in the intellectual divinization of the self, as if it could be
turned into the source of all. It is up to the Christian philosopher to unfold the
logic of what happens when philosophy turns its back on the greatest of all facts,
the Incarnate Logos.

Christian faith or creed has always been a powerful means of making its
devotee focus on objective reality, on facts that exist even when they are not
phenomena, or actual perceptions. The world of phenomena taken for a
congeries of such perceptions should seem utterly insignificant when compared
with a single object, let alone with their totality, or the all, which owes its
existence to a creative act of the Father Almighty, the Maker of heaven and
earth, in whom a Christian has to believe in the first place. A Christian's
monotheism, however, is riveted in the fact of a flesh and blood being, the
Incarnate Son of God. The apostle John put down the basic line not only for
Christian theology, but also for Christian philosophy as he wrote that the Word
became flesh. John did the same when he asserted that he and his fellow apostles
proclaimed what they had seen with their eyes and touched with their hands,
namely, the Word of life.
 If one looks for the first momentous case when German and other forms of
idealism, including even the pristine forms of phenomenology, were dismissed
well in advance, one has to go not merely generations, not merely centuries, but
two thousand years back in history. One has to go back to the first chapter of
John's Gospel and to the very first verse of the first chapter of his first letter, just
quoted above. Typically, it was in Germany that I found my assertion of
Christian realism opposed by a professor with a reference to Jesus' statement that
His words were spirit and truth. What triggered his opposition was my reference
to Christ's bodily resurrection. The professor professed himself to be a Christian,
although one who had for some years dispensed himself from going to church on
Sundays. He no longer believed, yet he still protested at the mere whiff of a
supernatural that became incarnate in the natural.

A Christian can only be a realist, even if he does find much of value in Plato.
A chief case in point is Augustine, who often, unbeknownst to himself, poured
baptismal water on Platonism which the latter badly needed. Long before
Christians knew much about Aristotle, they were realists when they were
philosophizing. And this happened because for centuries Christians
philosophized for the sole reason of understanding better the propositions of the
various credal formulas, all of which are about reality, natural or supernatural. In
our times Gilson was the one who elaborated on this in the most sustained way.
He also gave it a capsule formulation by speaking of "Christian philosophy." He
was immediately misunderstood and disputed by many of his fellow Christian
philosophers. Soon he wished that he had never coined that phrase, although
without it he would have never put together the essays known as Methodical
Realism. There he showed that even the most refined forms of "critical realism"
advocated by some Neothomists were refined versions of Kantianism.

Yet contrary to his critics, who were afraid that Neothomism would be
ignored by other philosophers unless it was "critical," Gilson did not say that
Christian philosophy was not thoroughly rational just because it was Christian.
He did not mean that one had to be a Christian in order "to understand" (a word
very different from "to appreciate") what Augustine, Thomas, and many other
Christian philosophers were saying. He simply meant the historical fact: they all
philosophized only inasmuch as they wanted to understand better the
propositions of the Christian creed. Also, they would not have speculated on
certain topics had they not been forced to do so by some supernatural
propositions of the creed they tried to understand. But their speculations still
remained purely natural.

My mind greatly resonated to all this when, in preparing my Gifford Lectures,

I perused not only Gilson's Unity of Philosophical Experience but also his
History of Christian Philosophy during the Middle Ages as well as some of his
shorter works, such as Christianity and Philosophy and Reason and Revelation in
the Middle Ages. The facts of history, insofar as they generated intellectual
propositions, were for me as real as the facts of daily contact with physical
reality. I never abstracted from history, even when I speculated. Moreover,
salvation history (including the history of the Church) has been for me the most
significant of all histories. It was an enormous inspiration for me to find an
outstanding intellect of our times, such as Gilson, again and again making an
intellectual profession of faith. In Gilson's essay, "The Intellect in the Service of
Christ," I found a close parallel to Duhem's letter to Pere Bulliot on the
philosophy and history of science, of which I spoke in an earlier chapter. I hope
that my recent essay on "The Catholic Intellectual" will not be found unworthy
of either of them.

Soon I began to realize that what happened to Gilson was a pattern for me,
too, and by the sheer force of logic. I could not help noticing that quite a few
Christian academics, indeed Catholic philosophers and historians of science,
would find it uncomfortable to focus on Christian facts and perspectives in those
fields. It was not possible to assume that they had not learned about pivotal facts
in the history of science that were thoroughly Christian. It was particularly
painful for me to enter the frame of mind of one of them who wrote that "la
pensee de Duhem ne vaut pas une these."2 It was difficult for me to assume that
the remark was motivated by an incurable myopia for facts and not by a desire to
please some powers in the Sorbonne for whom the facts unearthed by Duhem
posed a lethal threat, because they were eminently Christian and Catholic facts.

As I said in an earlier chapter, my original interest was in facts that illustrated

the limitations of physics and in the fact that physics was gravely misinterpreted
whenever those limitations were overlooked. It was only later that I noticed
some outstanding and characteristically Christian facts, such as the formulation
of the idea of inertial motion by Buridan, a fact very Christian when seen both in
its immediate and broader contexts. This apparently illogical temporal sequence
appeared to me rather natural when years later I found, on reading Gilson's
intellectual autobiography, The Philosopher and the Theologians, that such was
the sequence in his case too. He unintentionally discovered medieval philosophy
when, in writing his doctoral dissertation on Descartes' philosophical terms, he
found that many of them were borrowed from the scholastics. Descartes'
originality lay in pouring new meanings into old terms. He blissfully ignored
that the parable about the danger of not matching new wine with new skins may
hold true for philosophy as well.

If a Christian has to philosophize, it is best for him if he does so with full

consciousness of objective physical reality and of events that make human
history, events no less objective. For it remains true, even of the philosopher's
mind, what is true of every mind. The facts of history, individual and social,
recent and remote, have a far more formative power over the mind than the facts
of nature. This is partly so because the latter kind of facts, such as the ever
vertical fall of a stone, are repeatable and are indeed repeated by nature ad
nauseam, so to speak. As such they may lose their effectiveness in shaping the
mind. For, as the Romans of old noticed long ago, quotidiana vilescunt. What
they did not notice was the fact that truth is an everyday matter, and therefore
never out of date.

Unlike the facts of nature, the facts of history and especially its truly great
facts, are novel in every instance. The facts of history do not repeat themselves,
even though some historians may do nothing more than just repeat one another.
If facts are measured by their impact, the greatest fact of history is Christ by any
count. Even on a purely empirical basis, it should be clear that no one made a
more massive and more lasting impact on history than He did. There is no need
to quote as confirmation of this some of those who recognized Christ's
incomparable greatness, even though they never bent their knees before Him.
His life does not fail to be studied, although increasingly less and less as a fact.
Within academe and public discourse He is becoming more and more the mere
idea of some theologians, exegetes, and interpreters of religion. He appears more
and more as a disembodied spirit, or rather a mere Geist that those in the
community of the faithful (and nowadays in the gatherings of the unfaithful too)
are busily creating and recreating for their amusement taken for inspiration.
Recent standard bearers of "Catholic" scholarship deny Him Bethlehem for His
birthplace and close His life with His death as if either the Nativity or the
Resurrection narratives had no strikingly factual character to them. They fail to
explain why so many, who have at least the same intellectual credentials as the
best among them, still sacrifice their lives to His "mythical" dicta and
"unprovable" course of life, and believe in the value of suffering for His sake.

Tellingly, those who do so are also the ones who have taken for facts the
miracles attributed to Him. Miracles are a very philosophical topic, or else David
Hume was not a philosopher. If I can consider myself a Christian philosopher, it
is in part because more than once I took up the topic of miracles. About the latest
time I did this, I will speak in a later chapter, which is entirely dedicated to a
miracle. My first coming to grips with miracles still reflected my preoccupation
with physics or rather with its drastic limitations to deal with problems other
than purely physical. Part of my book-length essay, Miracles and Physics, was
taken up by a discussion of these limitations. I found those limitations wholly
ignored in two books, both written by physicists and believing Christians. One,
Chance and Providence, by W. G. Pollard, a nuclear physicist at Oak Ridge and
also an Anglican clergyman, had for its subtitle: God's Action in a World
Directed by Scientific Law. The other, Science, Chance and Providence, had D.
M. MacKay for its author, who professed to be a Calvinist. I met him once in
Princeton and we could not come to a common understanding as to what the
word "chance" may or may not mean. We had no more success in finding a
mutually agreeable meaning for the word "faith." I am afraid, this would have
been the case had I had an opportunity to sit down with Dr. Pollard.

In their books, both Pollard and MacKay took chance or randomness for a
constitutive element of nature in line with the pseudo-ontological interpretation
which Bohr foisted on quantum mechanics. Needless to say, insofar as the
former two mentioned miracles, these always related to biblical miracles, though
neither of them took up any such miracle in any detail. Much less would they
have been willing to explain in what sense was the appearance of Christ, to say
nothing of His deeds, a basically random event. Both took the Resurrection of
Christ, to say nothing of His other miracles, to be fruits of one's faith. Such was
the curious footwork on the part of physicists who could be expected to be
attentive above all to facts before they turned their attention to ideas about them.
But for the same reason they also failed as Christian thinkers. For what remains
of the Christian faith if it is no longer anchored in reverence for facts as
demanded by Christ? The personal good faith of those two is, of course, quite
another matter.
 In demanding reverence for facts seen by one's very eyes, Christ certainly did
not depart from Moses and the prophets who time and again reminded others of
what their very eyes had shown them. The procedure was also a favorite with
Christ who, in His reliance on it, was much more scientific than that noted
American physicist who once asked me for a stroll in the Vatican Gardens as we
were both participating in a Plenary Meeting of the Pontifical Academy of
Science. I had met him for the first time about twenty years earlier, in 1976, at a
Nobel Conference in Gustavus Adolphus College, where we both gave talks and
were members of a panel of six. As he started using the blackboard in giving his
talk, he jotted on the blackboard some Hebrew letters, his way of professing his
faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Now he wanted to know what my opinion was of a much publicized

"experiment" for evaluating the effectiveness of prayer in producing miraculous
cures. In the experiment patients were put into two groups. The first group
comprised those who did not pray, nor were prayed for by others. In the other
group were those who both prayed and were also prayed for. It was found that
those in the second group experienced startling improvement in their condition
more often than the ones in the first group. Furthermore, the difference could not
be explained by statistical errors. He voiced, and in no uncertain terms, his
indignation as if the "experiment" had been unworthy of science as well as of
religion, and asked for my opinion.

I agreed with him up to a point. Personally I was not impressed by such

"scientific" proofs of the effectiveness of prayer, let alone when taken for proofs
of miraculous cures. Authentic Christian prayer must be predicated on the
readiness to accept God's will that cannot be dictated to, even on a "statistical"
basis. But my disagreement with him related to a particular point, which
illustrates the need of considering the first step before considering other steps.
Logic alone would demand this. I found rather illogical my colleague's question
and indignation as they revealed his apparent indifference to the fact of
miraculous cures. Did not a genuinely scientific mentality demand first of all the
consideration of a single such cure before one began to find fault with the
statistical vindication of the effectiveness of prayer? Not once did he care to
study a single such cure, not even the one that earned some secular fame since
the chief witness was a Jewish doctor and it followed prayers addressed to the
Carmelite nun, Sister Teresa Benedicta, formerly known as Edith Stein. The
prayers were addressed to her on behalf of a young girl, also called Teresa
Benedicta.

My colleague was at least a believer, though he did not see that the history of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob made no factual sense if it was emptied of miracles
as facts. But at least he believed in the God of Revelation, while many modern
Jewish intellectuals don't. Can there be a more incongruous phenomenon than an
unbelieving Jew? The incongruity has its intellectual projection. It hardly
reflected well on Carl Sagan, the scientist, who dismissed spectacularly fast
cancer cures in Lourdes as accelerated cases of usually slow remissions of
cancer, which, so he claimed, occurred once in every ten thousand cancer cases.
He gave this figure without documentation,3 a procedure worthy of a village
atheist but not of a scientist.

Here I must deal above all with the keen interest which any Christian who
philosophizes must show in miracles. There is much food for thought in this
respect in the difference between the early Teilhard de Chardin and the one
whose mind became locked in the vision of an upward evolutionary trend that
carries waves after waves of diverse life forms toward the Omega point. For if
there is a passage worth pondering in Miracles and Physics, it is a passage from
an early essay of Teilhard de Chardin on the miracles of Lourdes. It appeared in
the Etudes in 1909, but is hardly ever mentioned in the vast literature on
Teilhard. It shows him possessed of a genuinely cogent ability to reason and to
summarize. There he portrays the enormous variety of miraculous cures that had
taken place in Lourdes and the no less significant variety of beneficiaries,
together with the invariant role of trust that has no doubt.

The passage is worthy of a truly philosophical mind, or at least of one who

presumably received a true philosophical training, whatever he did with it later.
But the heights of Teithard's philosophizing about Lourdes and its miracles are
puny compared with some words of the true visionary of Lourdes, Bernadette. A
few months after her visits to the cave of Massabieille were over, a priest of no
real devotion came to see her, evidently trying to catch her in a moment of doubt
so that he might have greater comfort in his own doubts. Her final words to him
were a basic lesson in philosophy where so many overlook the fact that
evidence, however overwhelming, is not tantamount to convincing: "It is my
duty to tell you what I have seen, it is not my duty to make you believe in what I
saw."'
 I was twice in Lourdes, apart from going once to Nevers where Bernadette
lived as a nun during her last fifteen years. There, too, she was a model of
commonsense, the very opposite of a "visionary." I went to Lourdes for the first
time in September 1948, after my first year in Rome. One of the clear
reminiscences I have of that visit relates to a photograph displayed in the
Medical Bureau. It shows the right leg of Pieter de Rudder (18221898), a
Belgian woodcutter, which was suddenly healed as he visited a Lourdes Grotto
in Flanders. The cure was spectacular, to say the least: a two-inch section in the
right leg had been crushed four years earlier by a falling tree. The two ends of so
impaired a leg protruded into the open, and could not be reset at all. The
suppurating wound was examined by more than one physician on several
occasions. Following the sudden cure, one doctor objected to taking it for
something miraculous because the wound had not been attested by a medical
commission. This prompted de Rudder's physician to exclaim in words worthy
of any sane, and therefore realist, philosopher: "It does not take a tailor to see
that there is a big hole in a coat."5

One could only wish that all Christians who philosophize had a similar
appreciation for the obvious. In that case they would display a genuine scientific
spirit as well, which is almost invariably missing in those who oppose science to
miracles. The most egregious case in this respect is Renan, who proved himself a
most mediocre philosopher in his L'avenir de la science, a youthful work of his
which he should not have published as he reached old age. He not only displayed
there a painfully naive view of the exact sciences as they stood in 1848, let alone
of their future, but he also revealed why he came up with a truly inane defense
against miracles. No one who lived in the world of scientific academia would
take as practicable, let alone convincing, the conditions which Renan set for
validating any event for a miracle: The event should take place under the
searching eyes of delegates from five academies of science. The stipulation
implied that God should notify those academies well in advance as to what He
intended to do. Such is surely a signal misunderstanding of God's ways with man
and also of the ways of some men, be they men of science or not.

My second trip to Lourdes was occasioned by one of my visits to Bordeaux in

connection with my research on Duhem. Research must alternate with periods of
prayer, this most penetrating search of the recesses of one's often dull mind and
even more frequently wayward heart. At any rate, a philosopher, if he is a
Christian, must always be in pursuit of facts, of which miracles are the most
significant and instructive. It was in pursuit of a miracle in Lourdes that I went
there for the third time, though only in spirit, a visit made somewhat tangible by
my fax machine. This "visit" was necessitated by my decision to repub lish
Carrel's Voyage to Lourdes. My reference in Miracles and Physics to Carrel was
my first printed reference to him, though hardly my first encounter with that
work of his, which probably goes back to the early 1950s. The book is about a
spectacular cure of a twenty-three-year-old woman, whose condition of acute
tubercular peritonitis disappeared, within twenty or so minutes, under the
searching eyes of Carrel in the early afternoon of May 26, 1902. Carrel, twenty-
nine at that time, had just made an epoch-making breakthrough in vascular
anastomosis, for which he was to receive the Nobel Prize in 1910.

He wrote down almost immediately what he saw, although his script saw print
only in 1948, four years after his death. He did not refer to his own deposition
and other medical documents connected with that spectacular cure. In obtaining
such material I was greatly helped by Dr. Roger Pilon, director of the Medical
Bureau in Lourdes, who faxed me scores of pages from the pertinent Dossier.
The material confirmed my feeling that I was right in deciding to republish The
Voyage to Lourdes as the second title in the Real View Books series, of which I
shall say more in the next chapter. I was largely motivated by the fact that an
increasing diffidence toward physically real miracles asserted itself in the "new"
theology. There the emphasis on the spiritual seemed to be lacking a firm footing
in the physical, in a telling witness to a "new" approach to the Incarnation. In
that "new" approach Christ increasingly appeared either as a mere man or a
disembodied spirit, conjured up by the community of the early faithful. At the
same time, references to the non-materialistic spirit of modern physics
proliferated. Theologians would do well to learn that it is in the best interest of
physics to remain utterly materialistic, that is, rooted in the material and not to
grow branches that are void of matter.

I found further motivation to republish Carrel's book in the difference between

the introduction written to the French original and the one which, from the pen
of Charles Lindbergh, graced or rather disgraced the English translation. The
author of the former, a French Benedictine, made no secret of the fact that Carrel
returned to the sacraments before he died. Lindbergh kept mum on this point and
others. Moreover, the most widely read biography of Carrel presented his
spiritual odyssey in a distinctly Teilhardian fashion and gave little information
about his fortyyear-long struggle against the factuality of a miracle.' Carrel's
book could also serve as a case history in which all the scientific and factual
aspects of an extraordinary event were on hand to counterbalance a "theological"
spiritualization of plain facts.

My sole regret about the effort that went into this project was that the
September 1994 issue of the Medical Science section of Scientific American
came out with an article on the history of vascular anastomosis, just after The
Voyage to Lourdes had come off the press. Much of the article dealt with the
significance of Carrel's work, with half a column on his visit to Lourdes. Almost
every statement there was either partly or wholly false. Much less had the
authors of the article entered into the meticulous care with which the Medical
Bureau of Lourdes handles the cases. But why should one expect this from that
often scientistic monthly interpreter of science when factual information about
miracles that play an essential part in processes of canonization are practically
unavailable even to the Catholic public? This should seem a particularly timely
point to make in these very decades-I mean the pontificate of John Paul II-when
more saintly Catholics have been beatified and canonized than during the
previous ten or so pontificates taken together.

One may indeed say that impressively large is the number of well-attested and
thoroughly sifted miraculous cures for which the Church vouches with its
infallibility and therefore must be very sure about their factuality. Even today the
guidelines for evaluating a given cure follow the ones which Prospero
Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV, laid down in four quarto volumes that
form only a fourth of his collected works. They are the fruit of some thirty years
of the studies, which he, as the Devil's Advocate, made of countless cures
submitted to Rome that in turn are rejected in their overwhelming majority.
Compared with the efforts Lambertini spent on the subject, Hume's attention to it
should seem less than fleeting. On several occasions I felt the urge to study those
four volumes, an urge which I could not postpone after I spotted in the Princeton
Theological Library a small modern biography of Benedict XIV. It appealed to
me all the more because its author rightly thought that Lambertini's careful
distinction between psychic and physical cases had great interest to modern
readers with some familiarity with Aldous Huxley's and others' ideas on the
same.
 To me an additional interest in those volumes lay in their being an important
document for the history of medicine during the first half of the 18th century.
Historians of medicine still have to discover them. Incidentally, Lambertini, as
still Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, founded the Academy of Medicine there.
Last but not least, Lambertini reports the case of a Protestant English nobleman
visiting in Rome around 1710, eager to expose Rome in the matter of
canonizations. He received from Lambertini a dossier on miraculous cures. The
perusal of that material wholly disarmed our nobleman whose surprise was all
the greater when Lambertini told him that none of those cases had been accepted
as miracles. All this forms a central part in the chapter, "Miracles," in my Means
to Message, in which I set forth my realist philosophy as explained here in the
preceding chapter.

A year or so before writing that chapter, I wrote an essay on "Newman and

Miracles." I did so because I found him to be an enthusiastic advocate of the
reality of miracles. Putting it bluntly, I found him a maximalist. Indeed, the last
attack on Newman during his lifetime was made on that score and by none other
than T. H. Huxley, who found ample grist for his agnostic mill in Newman's
enthusiastic endorsement of miracles, old and new. For Huxley this was a case
of an uncritical, indeed credulous mind, which sharply contrasts with Newman's
widely accepted mental physiognomy as an "imperial mind," a mind in full
command of all facts and above all of logic. Of course, Huxley could not share
Newman's firm attachment to the reality of a supernatural dispensation, which in
Newman's views had to be an ever fresh source of miraculous events. This may
shock many latter-day Newman fanciers who take him for a champion of liberal
Catholicism. More of this in the next chapter.

Here let me recall that Miracles and Physics begins with a quotation of
Chesterton's dictum: "The most incredible thing about miracles is that they
happen." This dictum is worth quoting not only on account of its paradoxical
strength, but also because it is part and parcel of the vast and ever fresh outflow
of the thought of a truly Christian philosopher. I did not put it this way either in
my book, Chesterton: A Seer of Science, or in my essay, "G. K. C. as R. C.", and
much less in my first publication on Chesterton, a study of his criticism of
Blatchford, a prominent British atheist of the turn of the century, whose books
sold at that time by the millions. That they are now totally forgotten may suggest
that atheism may not be the best assurance for a book to be kept in print.
Atheism has to be reinvented again and again. Only the unadvised see in it
originality as it finds ever new spokesmen for some antiquated arguments.

My original encounter with Chesterton goes back to the mid1950s, when I

read through his Orthodoxy, though I hardly plumbed its depth. One phrase in it,
however, became engraved in my memory, and I found it very effective in
disarming young atheists, increasingly numerous among Catholic college
students. In that phrase, Chesterton exposed the rationalist, who tries to put
heaven in his head and finds his skull split in the effort. Years later, when I took
a more sustained look at Chesterton's major works, my interest in him was
certainly aroused on seeing his remarkable battling of scientism, my bete noire.
But since I had already flayed that dead horse more than it deserved, I doubt that
I would have been prompted to delve into Chesterton's thought for that reason
alone.

Two further promptings had to come so that in the back of my mind there
should slowly emerge the plan of Chesterton: A Seer of Science. One of the two
was the falling into my hands of an unpretentious volume in the Pocket Books
series, Great Essays in Science, put together by Martin Gardner. Most of the
essays reprinted there were familiar to me. But I was utterly surprised to find
among them "The Logic of Elfland," a chapter from Chesterton's Orthodoxy.
When I first read it sometime in 1956 I was utterly blind to the extraordinary
grasp which Chesterton displayed there of what science was truly about. The
other prompting came when I read, about ten years later, Chesterton's St.
Thomas Aquinas and Gilson's astonished comment on it. Gilson had just
delivered his famed Gifford Lectures, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, but on
reading Chesterton's book he became convinced that Chesterton seized the gist
of Thomas' thought in a way that could not be improved upon.

As I did my research on Chesterton: A Seer of Science I found that this was

not Gilson's first encounter with Chesterton. He had already heard, around 1927,
Chesterton lecture at the University of Notre Dame. Gilson felt that he was in the
presence of a firstclass philosopher who in addition had a facility with phrases
that philosophers usually cannot match. Forty or so years later Gilson
emphatically repeated this erstwhile evaluation of Chesterton, the philosopher.
Chesterton was, of course, a Christian who philosophized without trying to
become a philosopher. Like Gilson, Chesterton came to Christian philosophy
rather unintentionally. By battling solipsism as a deadly enemy, Chesterton
could find life and sanity only in that realism which dogmatic, orthodox
Christianity alone could assure. Chesterton soon saw that Catholicism was the
only form of Christianity that consistently and firmly stood for facts and reality.
The evidence is already in Heretics where Chesterton gives his reasons why
Christ chose Peter, the fumbler, to be the rock foundation of His Church. One of
the greatest challenges of Chesterton's biographers is to explain why it took a
dozen years before Chesterton formally joined the Church. They must, of course,
take into account the inscrutable workings of God's sovereign grace.

In my book on Chesterton I dealt strictly with the richness of his reflections on

science, which would have done credit to any accomplished philosopher and
historian of science. The chapters of that book came from lectures delivered at
the University of Notre Dame, to the dismay of some professors there who found
it intolerable that so many "conservatives" came to hear me. Liberals once more
displayed their illiberality as well as their shallowness of mind, which resorts to
easy categorizations instead of serious appraisals of the matter on hand. One of
those professors dismissed Chesterton as a "mere journalist." He did not take
note when I personally called his attention to Gilson's testimony about
Chesterton's greatness as a philosopher.

Chesterton was also a Catholic who never tried to conceal that he was a
Catholic. He knew that concealment in that respect is its most counterproductive
form. For it is an ageless truth that man is a religious being and those prove this
best who use philosophy to show that they are not. Man is a being who lives by
religion whether he admits this or not. By trying to live without religion man can
all too readily succeed in turning into an animal, a fact which philosophers have
the primary duty to consider, unless they care only for their own ideas.
Increasingly they do not care for matters that weigh most heavily on men's
minds. The next chapter is about some matters that weigh most heavily on this
author's mind.
In spite of my repeated inveighing against the liberals, and of my occasional
positive references to conservatives, I do find both words misleading. Both can
easily become a distraction from the duty to confront the gist of the matter,
indeed, of all matter. The progressive versus reactionary antithesis is patently
prejudicial. Worse, it can also imply that any change is good in itself and that to
oppose this is something inherently mistaken, indeed gravely reprehensible.
Another cheap escape from the duty of hard and honest thinking is the
expropriation of certain words by certain people. Thus the word concern has
come to stand for the claim that anyone who does not agree with the policy of
some "concerned" people is incapable of showing concern.
 There is, of course, much in modern life that should cause the gravest concern.
The Western world, and America in particular, is less and less what it professes
to be. And if America "is still the cynosure in the world's eyes," as a British
historian put it to endear his book to the American public,' the world had better
be greatly concerned. Extremely grave though it is, Bill Clinton's Monica-gate is
less alarming than the fact that the majority of Americans took it in stride. They
at most bemoaned his misfortune of having been caught with his hand in the
cookie jar, or its modern equivalent, a DNA test.

Public discourse no longer tolerates anyone deploring the matter as the

breaking of a moral law. Much of what passed only fifty years ago for rank
immorality is nowadays a mere question of illegality. Any behavioral pattern, if
acted out by a "statistically significant" number of people, can claim legal
recognition. Public revulsion still may appear in some cases, such as the push for
the legal recognition of prostitution, but only for a time. Indeed the junior of the
two female members of the Supreme Court had, prior to her appointment to that
august bench, suggested the legalization of that oldest of all professions. Clearly,
if "consent between adults" suffices to make any private act legal, prostitution
cannot be denied legal status. In that perspective, moral principles become
equivalent to mere numerical patterns, especially when these are dressed up in a
pseudosophisticated invocation of theoretical physics. Most of those in the know
pay hardly any attention. I did not expect pundits of the law to react to an article
of mine, "Patterns or Principles: The Pseudoscientific Roots of Law's Debacle,"
in which I pointed at this ominous game with science. Of course, the law journal'
that carried it is hardly read by non-Catholics. But Catholics themselves, of
whom more shortly, paid no attention.

Regardless of one's legal philosophy, the law, as noted by Justice Antonin

Scalia, "does not create a general civility code for the American workplace." In
quoting these words with editorial approval, The New York Times,; a chief
advocate and arbiter of a civil behavior minus morality, tried to uphold some
standards, though not to the point of invoking morality in reference to a
president who disgraced himself as well as his office.

This was hardly the only disingenuous performance of that august daily
concerning that matter. Its editorial writers have become past masters in
sounding regretful as well as selfrighteous. Shortly after the Monica-affair made
headlines all over the world, one of those writers admitted that the Democratic
Party struck a "Faustian bargain" when, in the summer of 1992, it took Bill
Clinton for its presidential candidate.' They decided not to track down various
ominous trails of his because he could serve as their point man in promoting
such "right causes" as abortion and homosexuality. Should one assume that they
bemoaned their Faustian bargain as if they never heard of Mephistopheles? Or
did they assume that, for a change, someone, and they with him, could fool all
the people all the time?

Those who were party to that bargain, or any similar bargain, have no right to
complain when their viscerally anti Catholic logic catches up with them.
Whereas that logic imposes on them the view that the Catholic faith is no
different from any other, they would hardly take part in Catholic rites, although
they find it most natural and advantageous to put on the yarmulke. They would
for several days ignore the fact that Bill and Hillary Clinton took communion in
a Catholic Church in South Africa. Catholics have, however, little right to
complain about that brazenly unjustified participation in the most awesome and
central part of the Catholic faith. It was the fault of Catholics that Bill Clinton
could safely ignore the nine million postcards sent to him by Catholics to protest
his support of partial birth abortion. He knew that at least as many Catholics, if
not more, would find nothing outrageous in that murderous procedure.

Catholics have made their own Faustian bargain as they opened up to the
world about forty years ago when they came up with the idea of an "Open
Church." But if the Church is an open house, there remains little need for a
doorkeeper with keys in hand. For many Catholics it is no longer of any moment
that Christ handed over to a specific human being the keys of the Kingdom of
Heaven. Thus a young priest in South Africa could feel that clear guidelines
were not to be followed if one could thereby accommodate the head of the
foremost political power in the world and his formidable spouse. Let us hope
that the young priest in question will one day be as perceptive as John Henry
Newman was at the age of seventy-five, when he wrote to a correspondent that
"to touch politics is to touch pitch."5

A Faustian bargain imposes more than one dissimulation. It had to appear a

most unwelcome task to report even in the gutter of the paper, let alone on the
first page, that according to Catholic belief communion is the attestation of one's
faith in the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic wafer. This faith has always
been for liberals the quintessence of superstitious irrationality, but for the
faithful a "frighteningly awesome mystery," to quote Newman again. Liberals
can only smile at Paul's words that to eat unworthily the body of Christ is to
invite one's own eternal condemnation. One wonders if liberals would have kept
mum if Bill Clinton, who is referred to here as a type, had begun to add a prayer
rug to his political paraphernalia.

When a liberal takes selective advantage of others' most sacred beliefs and
when the organs of liberalism do not explode in indignation, one may easily
warm up to conservatism. This word still stands for conserving some precepts or
standards inherited from the past. But liberalism has come to stand for liberation
from the yoke of all but one of the Ten Commandments. Twenty-five years ago,
as I took up the ethical proof of the existence of God in my second series of
Gifford Lectures, I had to note that the proof's impact may be nil in a society that
had eliminated all but the seventh of those commandments, and respects even
this only as a legal protection of self-interests. One wonders whether John Locke
had foreseen this when he argued three hundred years ago that the political State
existed only for securing the liberal or unfettered use of private property.

The gist of this liberalism is well conveyed by a small fresco in the refectory
of my abbey in Hungary. It shows streams of wine bursting forth from a barrel
from which the hoops are falling off. Under the fresco stand the words: libertate
periit. Since this liberal society no longer believes in God, there is no point in
quoting the words mene, tekel, peres, which a mysterious hand once wrote on
the banquet hall of the palace where Nebuchadnezzar, his chief officials, and
their assorted lady companions yielded in full to the leading motto of liberal
society, carpe diem. They were studiedly oblivious of the need to pray, "give us
this day," which were, incidentally, the last words of Father Bill Cummings, the
spiritual hero of the Bataan march that allowed no illusions.6 A society which is
now slouching towards Gomorrha claims as its birthright each and every one of
its illusory days.

Theological liberals are a sorry lot even though they think they still stand on a
much higher point of the incline on which the laws of logic and ethics allow one
only to move downward. To compound the farce, they succeeded in creating the
broad perception that Newman is their patron saint, although they pray little for
his beatification as it requires a miracle in which they no longer believe. But
Newman again and again predicted the coming collapse of the liberal Western
world's intellectual and moral fabric. He began doing so already as an Anglican
curate of Saint Mary's. In 1834 he delivered four Advent sermons on the
Antichrist, without relying ever so slightly on apocalyptic imagery or evoking
the smell of brimstone and the smoke of hellfire. On the contrary, he conjured up
all the refinement of a civilized, technologically progressive culture as the
irresistible lure used by the supreme master of deceit, Mephistopheles.

I say all this as a background to my telling of a matter that weighs

increasingly heavily on my mind. I have spoken of this more and more during
the last ten years, and most of the time in my writings on Newman, all of which
belong to this period. What basically turned me to him was the sight of that
slouching which has its counterpart in a newfangled theological glorification of
naturalism. Portrayal of Newman's loud and sustained protest against naturalism
may be the most effective means of waking up those in the Church who have
been dulled by a most effective propaganda means of Catholic liberals, which is
to invoke Newman as if he had been one of them.

Yet nothing would more distort Newman's mental and spiritual physiognomy
than to invoke him this way. To see this it is enough to glance at Newman's
biglietto speech which he read on receiving the official notification from the
Vatican about his having been created a cardinal. There he characterized his
entire life as a struggle against the principle of liberalism. He specified it as the
natural man's standard that all religions are equally good, that there had been no
supernatural revelation, that man never experienced a Fall and therefore stood in
no need of a supernatural salvation. While theological liberalism does not
proclaim such principles from its housetop, its house is an open house to all that
and much more. Liberals, who chafe under John Paul II and look back wistfully
to the pontificate of Paul VI, would do well to refresh their memory. It was in
the mid-1970s, when they felt they were on the point of gaining hold of the
Church, that Paul VI summed up the situation by stating that the devil was
roaming free in the Church. By then ten years had gone by since Maritain, the
revered master of Giovanni Battista Montini, shocked Paul VI as well as the
liberals, by coming out with The Peasant from the Garonne.

I feel a certain satisfaction over two features of my studies of Newman. One is

that although here, too, my first specific interest in him related to his views on
science, I saw what his chief concern was in a matter on which he spoke with far
more competence than most theologians of his day. Unlike those who spoke of
science on the basis of hearsay or mere popularizations, Newman did so on the
basis of first-hand studies. No less importantly, in his Idea of a University
Newman did not speak of science as if it were an unmitigated blessing. Had he
done so, he would have proved himself one of the trendy theologians of his day
who in the mid-1850s (it is enough to think of Kingsley) took science for the
pledge of Progress, even in a spiritual sense. Had Newman followed suit, he
would have contradicted his standard which was to be consistent. For already in
1836 he deplored efforts to flood public libraries with a science literature whose
aim was to present science as mankind's savior. Even earlier, in 1833, when the
fledgling British Association first met in Oxford, he deplored the meddling of
men of science in matters theological and biblical. He did the same thirty and
forty years later when the British Association, robust and powerful, met in
Birmingham. Newman complained about the scientists' chronic inability to
refrain from pontificating on matters about which the method of science was
totally incompetent.

The other feature was that I refused from the start to be an uncritical admirer
of Newman. I refused to join the bandwagon whose blissful riders keep vilifying
Manning in order to put Newman in the best possible light. In my essay,
"Newman's Logic and the Logic of the Papacy," Newman appears as a
remarkably parochial mind in one respect. He was ready to take the peculiar
sensitivities of Oxford, a most peculiar place then as now, for a global standard.
He seemed to forget two things, both of which he had already spoken in all
candidness. One was that "the liberals," that is, those who at best paid lip service
to Christian faith, won the contestation about the future of the spirit of Oxford,
which the Tractarians tried in vain to resuscitate from a long gone past. The
other may be best called the "constant" of the ecumenical equation with respect
to Anglicans, a constant as valid today as it was in Newman's time.

A century and a half ago Anglicans who went to Church on Sundays were less
than ten percent of the population at large. Less than ten percent of those
Anglicans were Tractarians, and less than ten percent of these converted to
Rome. Ten years ago, when, following the ordination of women in the Church of
England, some Catholics expected a mass conversion of AngloCatholics, less
then ten percent of these (themselves a ten percent or less of Anglicans)
perceived the handwriting on the wall of their Catholic hopes. The historic visit
of John Paul II to Canterbury now appears as a saving hand stretched out to
some who failed to grab it, although it could be the last moment for saving the
semblance of the "Catholic" intention of their episcopal consecration, and
thereby their Catholicity. Few among Catholic ecumenicists took seriously
Ronald Knox's reminiscences about his own father, the Anglican bishop of
Birmingham, who did not think that bishops were necessary in the Church.7

But back to my disagreement with Newman, in spite of all my admiration for

him, and to the reason for that disagreement. According to Newman it was only
a matter of time before the Church of England would turn into a tool of plain
unbelief. He also held that there was no middle ground between Rome and
atheism, and here he differed not a whit from Manning. Therefore Newman
could have no sound theological reason to oppose the definition of papal
infallibility in which he firmly believed anyhow. Liberal Newmanists love to
focus on the blindness of some Curia officials who, with the help of Manning,
blocked Newman's steps to set up a Catholic college in Oxford. They prefer to
overlook the fact that, as a Catholic, Newman never wavered in holding that
obedience to the Pope implied obedience to his Curia officials as well, difficult
as such an obedience could be at times for him. It gave me a particular pleasure
to point out that the foregoing dictum of Newman's, dating from 1876, and
widely available in print, was quoted in a truncated form by the liberal author of
a study on Newman and the Church, a study much applauded by liberals.

I did not go along with cliche endorsements of Newman 's Grammar of Assent
as an unqualified masterpiece of a Catholic philosophy freed of the shackles of
scholasticism. No less a Newmanist than Fr. Bouyer voiced his astonishment
after he had heard my talk, "Newman's Assent to Reality, Natural and Super
natural," which I delivered at the Wethersfield Institute's Newman Conference at
Columbia University in 1988. For I made it clear that in the Grammar Newman
had gone time and again to the edge of an epistemological precipice by extolling
the value of the concrete, the personal, the individual over general notions.
Further, I argued that it was not philosophical considerations, which were hardly
Newman's forte, that saved him from going over the edge. What saved him was
his total dedication to supernatural realities, to the great reality of salvation
history that began with the Jewish people and lives on in the Church. "If this is
true," said to me Fr. Bouyer, a dear soul, though too romantic for my taste, "then
a thorough reconsideration is in order about our views on Newman." Those
"our" views are the views of most well-meaning Newmanists, who can hardly be
suspected of promoting a less than genuinely Catholic Newman, though they try
to present him as little Roman Catholic as possible and they do this with no
small success.

At that time, in 1988, the first wave of new publications prompted by the
centenary of Newman 's death had just begun to appear. The second wave which
is now peaking in connection with the bicentenary of Newman 's birth, shows no
less curious features. A leading Catholic Newmanist claimed, and in the leading
Catholic weekly in Britain, that the time has arrived to draw the benefits of
Newman's writings from his Anglican period. The claim can only be sustained
through a rank disregard of colossal evidence in Newman's Letters and Diaries
that, incidentally, contain about thirty thousand letters of his, the half of what
survived from all his letters. The evidence is not only colossal in its extent, but
also part of that feature which Newman himself emphasized in saying that a man
is really in his letters and not in biographies written on him. Letters, he wrote,
are facts. A very factual man he was, and factually anything but a liberal in
either the refined or the hackneyed sense of that word. More of that epistolary
evidence shortly.

One should not, of course, think that Newman's great books should have ever
given real comfort to liberals. This is particularly true of the twelve lectures he
delivered in London in the spring of 1850, lectures that became known as
Anglican Difficul ties. In republishing this book in 1994, as the first title in the
Real View Books series, of which more later, I literally rescued from oblivion a
masterpiece which liberal Newmanists wish had never existed. There Newman
reminded the Tractarians that they had to convert because it was not possible to
have Catholicism within the Church of England and that to embrace Roman
Catholicism was not a luxury but a duty imposed from on high. Newman, of
course, fully knew that in some mysterious ways, known only to God, those in
invincible ignorance about the true Church could still be saved. But he never
catered to learned ignorance about the marks of the true Church, which it
became the fad of liberal theologians to cultivate, so that a false ecumenism may
flourish. Indeed, as I am going to discuss shortly, it was overwhelmingly evident
for Newman that the Catholic Church had done an immense amount of good
which no other body, spiritual or secular, could match. And that good was for
him not only cultural, but also spiritual, indeed supernatural, the good of eternal
salvation.

But this is not really seen even by many admirers of Newman who are not
liberal by any stretch of imagination. They are stuck with the antithesis, liberal
versus conservative. One of them, on reading my "Newman and His Converts"
in Catholic Dossier, took that essay for a gripping portrayal of that antithesis. To
his excuse, the other essays in that issue of Catholic Dossier entirely dedicated to
Newman's thought, focused on his revulsion of liberalism as an implicit
endorsement of conservatism. Yet nothing helps the liberals more than their
ability to sell that antithesis for the chief perspective on Newman. Forced into
that perspective, Newman's image would not reveal that he was an arch-
conservative in many ways, although he was a liberal in other respects. But he
never took the liberty of being now a liberal, now a conservative for a licence to
dilute the supernatural in a flood of talk about the natural. The real issue for him
was eternal salvation that could be had only in terms of a supernatural plan
revealed by God. He did not cease repeating that he would have never left the
Church of England if eternal salvation could be had in it. To Tractarians who
hesitated to convert he invariably wrote that it was their duty to convert.

I therefore had to insist to my friend that for Newman the real issue was not a
decision between liberalism and conservatism, but between the supernatural and
the aims and standards of a merely natural man, however civilized and bathed in
spiritual perfume. I am saying this both on the spur of the moment and also
regardless of it. It was not a moment's work to write Newman to Converts: An
Existenial Ecclesiology that deals with all the letters Newman wrote to
prospective converts. I cannot recall the exact moment when, in October 2000, I
felt suddenly sucked into the vortex of a project that first appeared to me a work
of two or three months. It took eight months of most intensive work, including
three trips to the Archives of Newman's Birmingham Oratory within five
months.

That moment also came just after I have been able to put together a collection
of nineteen essays on Catholic topics. The first of them, "The Gist of
Catholicism," which gives the title to the collection, was the last to appear. It is
followed by an essay on "The Catholic Intellectual." The third is "The
Immaculate Conception and a Conscience Immaculate" in which it appears that I
added something original to the "aboriginally" old topic of theological
reflections on original sin. Surely, in this age that witnessed the torch pass from
fundamental particle physics to molecular biology, it may not be amiss to add a
biological twist to the imperative necessity of that conception. Whether the
genome project would identify the gene that makes man a genetic prisoner of his
sexual urges, there can be no doubt about the symbiosis between a mother and a
foetus in her womb. All urges of the mother become urges of the new life still to
be born. Now if that life was Life itself, that is, the divine source of all Life, or
God himself, then the life had to be purity incarnate, free of any organic contact
with any sinful proclivity. Hence the mother had to be absolutely free of any
inordinate inclination, and free from the moment of her own conception.

So much about my mind when it suddenly felt free of pressing projects, except
perhaps one. It was a project of summing up my views on science and religion, a
project originally born about ten years ago, but shelved again and again for
various reasons. Other projects intervened, but, more important ly, the project
itself failed to find a form in my mind that would have really appealed. What one
has put on the back burner several times, can suffer the same fate again. Here let
me simply say that the project or book will have for its title: Questions on
Science and Religion. What I find especially intriguing is that working it out will
give me the opportunity to apply a very clear notion of both science and religion
to a number of topics. I will do so by submitting to searching questions a number
of "received" views on this or that aspect of science and religion and their
presumed connections.

I have no doubt that the book will be original in an age that takes fog-making
for intellectual virtue and for a sure token of scholarly recognition. Well, just as I
was writing these lines (July 23, 2001) the editors of Encylopedia of Science and
Religion asked my collaboration. In view of what I have just said, obvious
should seem my reaction to their policy that the topics "in a 500,000-word
reference work ... will not be discussed in light of the Judeo-Christian values of
North America." In what light then? Surely there has to be some light, or else its
absence generates a studiedly neutral grayness. It is equivalent to the tactic of
taking no stand whatever, a tactic very enlightening to many nowadays, although
they should be greatly perplexed about groping in a darkness of their own
making.

No perplexity will exude from Questions of Science and Religion. I can only
pity those religionists who in their mental insecurity hanker for support in
science. They engage in the most self-defeating bargain conceivable, because
they have already admitted defeat, the defeatism of a religious experience that
has no confidence in philosophy, which science assumes but does not provide.
That confidence I have never lost. Therefore I can safely say, that contrary to the
impression which some readers could gain from this or that book of mine,
questions about the relation of science and religion never were all that important
for me. They are questions of second order for any ordered mind that knows
about basic priorities. Both science and religion are governed by philosophy.
Religious worship has to be a logike latreia or reasoned service, as Saint Paul put
it in his Letter to the Romans, this greatest testimonial to grace. So much in
explaining that the relation in question is of light weight in comparison with the
topic that seized my mind in October 2000.

Let me therefore take up this topic, which, though of great weight, had several
aspects to it that made it easy to live with. One was the enormous attractiveness
it had for me. Suddenly I was back to ecclesiology, the topic of my first book. It
also made matters more attractive that, as I delved into the topic, I found that
Newmanists, and their number is large, have so far failed to take it up in a
systematic form. Another such aspect lay in a physical or material fact: I did not
have to leave my study to have the principal source material on hand, that is, the
volumes of Newman's Letters and Diaries, which, with the exception of two,
have been printed. In fact volumes XI - XXXI that comprise Newman's
correspondence from his Catholic period have all appeared twenty-five years
ago. But I did not have any concrete idea of why I started collecting them (some
of them out of print, and exceedingly difficult to find) about ten or so years ago.
I certainly found some of those volumes very useful for writing that little
booklet, "Newman to Converts" that skimmed only Newman's first ten Catholic
years. But those twenty-one volumes proved to be indispensable (if one is to
save time, this most precious commodity) for working out all the instructions
Newman gave to converts over a period of forty years. If printed together those
letters would form a book of about 700 pages, hardly a negligible amount for
any serious Newmanist. Newman began to write those instructions from the very
moment of his conversion and stopped only when even the use of a pen proved
to be exhausting to him. About thirty fortunate people received from him
epistolary instructions on their way to the Catholic Church. Those instructions
form the subject of my Newman to Converts: An Existential Ecclesiology.

Catholic theology has for the last forty years suffered a failure of nerve, and in
no other branch of it is this more evident than in ecclesiology. There is, surely, a
reassessment in the making, but while the work of destruction can be quickly
implemented, it is otherwise with construction, let alone with reconstruction.
From what I have written so far in this chapter on Newman, the reader will not
think that I expected to find a liberal Newman in his letters. But I was surely
surprised by being exposed to his existential agony over sensing that as an
Anglo-Catholic he was living in the sin of schism, a sin mortal in that
existentially supreme sense which only the prospect of eternal damnation can
convey. The study of what he had written to converts made it also very clear to
me that Newman's overriding concern was for Anglo-Catholics. He was one of
them. He was their principal teacher and support for ten years during which he
propelled and led the Oxford Movement. He was not concerned for Anglicans in
general because he knew that they were Protestants and for him Catholicism and
Protestantism were two different religions.

One had to page through volumes and volumes of his letters to stumble, for
instance, on such a revealing passage as the one in which he states to an
Anglican that he was unable to rewrite in a Catholic vein any of his Anglican
sermons. And yet it is those Sermons that prompt Catholic Newmanists
nowadays to promote the Anglican Newman. The letters give them the lie at
every turn and especially the pages which carry his instructions to prospective
converts. Those letters vibrate with an inexpressible zeal for saving the souls of
others. Composing the index for a more than five-hundred-page-long book, was
not a time for protracted reflections or for savoring one's enthusiasm. Yet it was
impossible not to feel being hit on the solar plexus as one's eyes spotted once
more one priceless passage after another. Priceless, literally, because Newman
never tired of reminding prospective converts that whatever they have to give up
an incomparably greater treasure was waiting for them, once they entered the
One True Fold, the sole Ark of Salvation. He told them that the Notes of the
Church were a "luminous fact," that only the Church possessing those Notes had
a Creed, with an Object and a System, that it alone was a "safe religion." If there
was a period in my scholarly life that I should consider very rewarding, it would
be those eight months. They provided my mind with a matter which it has
always cherished but now encountered in an existential richness undreamed of
beforehand.

But back to somewhat more prosaic though still very weighty matters, and
first in reference to Newman. My dozen or so earlier encounters with him
through writing so many essays on his thought have now appeared as Newman's
Challenge. For if he challenged himself and others, he did so because he felt, as
only a saint would feel, the challenge of the supernatural. This was the most
weighty matter for him and this should remain the matter that should weigh most
heavily on the mind of any and every Catholic. Herein lies Newman's challenge
to Catholics who opened up to the world and now find little ground to deplore
Bill Clinton's taking political advantage, though in faraway Africa and not in the
full glare of America, of the most awesome supernatural mystery, the Eucharist.

Here in America not a word appeared in "leading" dailies as to what Clinton

did when communion was distributed in St. Thomas More Catholic Church in
New York during the mass for the tragically deceased John F. Kennedy, Jr. No
reporters were allowed inside the church. Such was a strange departure from
rules but not contested by the media, many of whose members would gladly
overhear any sacramental confession in the name of free flow of information,
while claiming to themselves the seal of sacramental confession obeyed by
priests. As to the eulogy delivered by the deceased's paternal uncle, it was a
piece with that flood of artful make-belief that had by then for a full week
washed over all America. However "virtuous" the deceased could appear in
comparison with his profligate paternal grandfather, with his paternal uncles, to
say nothing of many of his male cousins, all that flood of words could not help
remind one of a passage in Augustine's Confession about his own eulogy of a
deceased emperor: "I was to utter many a lie, and lying was to be applauded by
those who knew I lied." At least even then, some time before his conversion, he
felt "miserable." His dejection was not matched by Clinton, who has lied so
much that "he had no one left to lie to," to quote David Schippers' words to the
House Judiciary Committee. Yet more than half of the younger Catholic clergy
voted for Clinton in two presidential elections.

Newman, so keen on observing his own political times, would have now
dashed off a withering Tract for the Times. All that vendorship of words would
have been for him a blatant example of that darkening of the intellect and of the
weakening of the will which are the first two chief effects of original sin,
according to any printing of penny catechisms. Of that sin, of which there is
hardly a word in the documents of Vatican II, Newman spoke in some of his
most graphic phrases, among them "aboriginal calamity." All of them are quoted
in my essay, "A Gentleman and Original Sin," which opens Newman's
Challenge. For if Newman's challenge to post-Vatican II Catholics, lost in the
pursuit of the natural, is about the supernatural, then a focusing on original sin is
a matter of elementary logic.

And so is a focusing on Newman's maximalist stance on miracles, the second

chapter in Newman's Challenge. Already in his time which took the Great
Exhibition of 1850 in the Crystal Palace for a display of true miracles brought
about by science and technology, that maximalist stance had to appear jarring.
Indeed, "Darwin's bulldog," better remembered as T. H. Huxley, found, as
already noted, Newman's two books on miracles to be documents of credulity
where every page could be turned into grist for the mills of agnosticism and
unbelief. Of course, those mills could operate only if it was antecedently true
that the supernatural could not exist. In that case there would be no justification
for talking of angels. Yet Newman's style, always so graphic and evocative, was
perhaps never so touching as when discoursing on angels. Above all, his dicta on
them are never void of stark intellectual content.

Would, today, a "progressive" theologian repeat with Newman that we know

much more about angels than we know about brutes, or the animal kingdom? All
his dicta on angels are a proof that the reality of angels is the touchstone of truth
of the reality of the supernatural order. This was emphasized a hundred years
after Newman by Maritain, another luminary whom Catholic liberals are so
wrong in claiming to themselves, precisely because they are so lukewarm on the
supernatural. If Maritain was a democrat it was only because of his supernatural
idea of the individual and not because he ever wanted to divinize the individual
and the democratic form of government. One could only wish that Maritain had
the insight of Churchill, who once endorsed democracy on the grounds that it
was merely the best of all bad forms of government. Churchill knew politics
from the inside out, beginning, of course, with his own political innards. So
much for the first three essays in Newman's Challenge.

I have already spoken briefly of the next six essays there that deal in turn with
Newman's attitude toward converts, with his notion of what the Tractarian
Movement was truly about, with his views on the papacy and on Church history,
with his philosophy of the concrete, and with his views on science. I have to say
something specifically of the essay on Newman's views on evolution, views
more misconstrued than perhaps any other view of his. Newman was never a
Darwinist, not even an evolutionist. Although the word "evolution" had been
very popular by 1845, he did not publish in that very year, the year of his
conversion, a book on "The Evolution of Christian Doctrine" but a book on its
development. The word "evolution" is prophetically missing in it.

Prophetically, because the word "evolution" eventually became synonymous

with randomness and chance and therefore with discontinuity. Evolution no
longer means that something evolves because it has been there at least in embryo
in the first place. But continuity is still a part of the meaning of development,
which was precisely uppermost in Newman's mind. He wanted to know whether
the Roman Catholic Church of his day was the continuation, the development of
the Church of Athanasius and of Ambrose, a Church of orthodoxy because it was
a Church of saints as well. By then he knew that the Church of England had no
right to be considered a legitimate part of such a Church. Once Newman had
come to the conclusion that the Church of Rome fits the bill, he drew the
conclusion that it was his duty to convert right away because "time is short,
eternity is long." This phrase, which brings to a close The Development, made
sense only if there was for man a supernatural destiny.

Newman's mind was immune to the illogicalities of Darwin's arguments.

Newman, if anyone, could have exposed them for what they were: at times
pitifully naive efforts to talk from both corners of the mouth. Thus Darwin
profusely spoke of chance and only occasionally warned that he did not mean by
chance an effect without a cause. Along these lines Newman could have ripped
Darwin's work apart as not proving evolution on the basis on which Darwin
thought to prove it. In fact, had Newman been less charitable, he could have
raised the question, "What does Mr. Darwin mean?" as a hint that Darwin was
disingenuous. Newman's answer to that question would not have been less
devastating than his answer to Kingsley's similarly worded question. Newman
could have easily exposed the hollowness of Tyndall's encomium of Darwin as
an intellect who could not tell a lie. Perhaps not a lie, but certainly a great many
non-sequiturs, equivocations, and at times plain dissimulations.

No argument that Newman had nothing to do with evolution as Darwin held it

would ever make a dent in the contrary perception so effectively promoted by
liberals, who fear nothing more than the specter of identity in the welter of
change. Nor should they be expected to pay attention to a story, which in
published form is already two generations old. Yet they should have picked it up
all the more as it was told by no less a liberal than Baron von Hiigel about his
first and only visit in June 1876 with Newman, who took him out to the
Botanical Garden "all gloriously abloom with rhododendrons and azaleas." In
von Hiigel's published recollections of that visit, available since 1931, Newman
is described as one who dived "in and out behind and around the plants, full of
ecstasies and admiration" and "exclaimed: `But what argument could the
Evolutionists bring against this as evidence of the work of Mind? "'8

It was the same Newman who had already jotted down in his Philosophical
Notebooks that he could go "whole hog with Darwin's theory of natural
selection." Did he contradict himself? Far from it. If anyone did, Newman knew
the difference between a scientific theory and a scientistic ideology, a difference
which so many liberal Catholics fail to take seriously in their eagerness to appear
"scientific." Theirs is an unconscious wish to claim the liberty to see nothing
truly lasting in Catholic dogma, especially when it relates to questions of
morality, where truth cuts deepest into flesh and blood. They would push to the
extreme the distinction between truth and its formulation, especially after John
XXIII made that distinction in the full hearing of Vatican II. But unlike them, the
Pope still put the emphasis on the unchanging truth even if its formulation
changed. Fully conscious of the duties of his office, John XXIII would have
been the last to suggest that quasi-mystical intuition, void of clear
conceptualization, should become the avenue to truth.

Newman would certainly have had no use for that avenue. For all his
enthrallment with the marvels of nature that force on the mind the idea of a
design at work in nature, and for all his delight in giving expression to his
religious feelings in poems, and for all his, at times almost sickly, sensibility, he
was not a mystic. He was a hard-headed man, who declined the honor of being
considered a theologian. He viewed himself as a controversialist, though he
never argued for the sake of arguing. He had always a wider purpose to serve, a
purpose that I would gladly characterize as cultural were this word still to
convey something of its original connotation. But in the presence of the word
culture one may feel as did Confucius when asked what he would do were he
suddenly appointed the lord of the universe: "I would restore the meaning of
words." He also argued that the remedy for the ills of the times consisted in
"purifying the language."

If there is a word that has become deprived of its original meaning, it is the
word culture. It has been also a concern of mine from the start, as shown by the
last chapter of The Relevance, and from "Culture and Science," two lectures
delivered in 1975. In both, I am somewhat ashamed to say now, I still thought
that it makes much sense to defend humanistic culture from the onslaught of
scientism without bluntly raising the question of cult or religion. There was
some merit in showing that it was treacherous on the part of C. P. Snow to
deplore the split of modern culture into two, and to claim at the same time that
only men of science had the future in their bones. I found myself to be alone in
denouncing the perverse logic of his argumentation in The Two Cultures and the
Scientific Revolution which, of course, could easily be overlooked by anyone
ready to be charmed by his graphic stories. They all aimed at dulling the mind to
the fallacy of generalizing from one incident, however expressive. In general, C.
P. Snow argued in that once-famous but now duly forgotten book of his that
scientists have more sense than humanists, that exact scientists have a better
grasp of what culture is than other scientists, and that engineers, since they are in
closer touch with reality than theoretical physicists, are the key to the future. Not
satisfied with the preposterousness of all this, Snow went on to saying that since
the Soviet Union educated many more engineers than the United States, the
future was tied much more to the Soviets than people in the West dared imagine.

Now with the collapse of the Soviet Union being history, the United States
seems to lack a strong sense of purpose. Clearly, there is more to the sense of
purpose than to react to threats posed by foreign powers or to respond to the
opportunities of unbridled profit taking. It should therefore be clear that it makes
little sense to speak of culture without being frank about one's own cult or
religion. For originally culture meant that cultic or worshipful attitude which can
have only one worthy object, the supernatural. To be sure, even today culture
stands for cultivation. It is, however, the cultivation of the strictly natural, the
cultivation of all sorts of self-centered fads and fancies. They are turning into
ever more unashamed invitations to patterns of behavior that make some liberals
wish the return of old morality.

Such a wish is wishful thinking. Man is a fallen being and will not rise
without the help of supernatural grace. Culture, Western culture, was the
creation of those who preached this truth against the greatest odds among the
ruins of classical culture. Theirs was an uphill battle all the time, even in times
which Catholic historians love to paint as the High Middle Ages and the High
Tide of Baroque. These terms have, for the most part, little basis in facts. Their
sole justification, though not a small one, is that in those times sin was generally
taken for sin, virtue for virtue, truth for truth, and a lie for a lie. In other words,
those times still retained the sense of the absolute. This sense they obtained from
being steeped in Christian cult.

Today we witness our culture being engaged in systematically shredding the

last bits of its Christian cultural inheritance. This is what weighs most heavily on
my mind. Many, I am sure, are no less concerned. It is another matter whether
all of them see that the cultural loss in question cannot be remedied without a
return to the cult that created that culture in the first place. It seems that too
many of those truly concerned think that culture can be implemented by some
reorganization, by reintroducing old courses of instruction, by making
instruction more interac tive, and, last but not least, by increasing awareness of
cultural diversity.

But it is in respect to this last point that the effort should seem to be doomed
to failure, or at least to amount to no more than a surface treatment of a
malignancy that ravages the body inside. To recover culture, which is steeped in
cult, one cannot rely on taking any cult as good as any other. I know that to say
this is to blaspheme the democratic dogma of equality and to counter the dogma
which is to have catholicism without Catholicism writ large. This dogma is
widespread among educated Catholics and is preached to them by Catholics who
now more or less control most Catholic universities and colleges.

I am often sought out by educated Catholics who rightly bemoan the loss of
Catholic culture even in Catholic contexts. They dream about some steps
whereby culture will be imposed by some sort of authoritative fiat. Yet, whereas
the Pope can command, his commands do not necessarily generate, let alone
promptly, compliance from the faithful. One can also misread the signs of the
times. Newman did so when he conjured up a Second Spring. One does not need
to read a prophecy into the present Pope's references to the onset of a springtide
of Christian culture. He is certainly right to encourage, but no pope can be
certain about the particular course the future will take, not even in the short, let
alone in the long run.

One thing is, however, certainly at the disposal of those who watch with a
heavy heart (as I do) the increasing unfamiliarity of educated Catholics with
eloquent documents of Catholic culture. In a very modest way this is what I tried
to remedy with a new publishing venture, Real View Books. I was a bit amused
when in the spring of 1997 I was introduced to the Philadelphia Society as a
publisher, among other things. I am not a publisher and would never try to
become one, as I would only prove myself a dismal failure after I had become a
total wreck. I therefore owe considerable debt to a dear friend, Mr. Harry
Veryser, who acts as the publisher of Real View Books.

I am not even an editor, technically speaking. I merely select books to be

reprinted for a strictly non-profit venture and then bury myself in the task of
writing a properly researched intro duction to them, for no pecuniary gain
whatsoever. I have already spoken of Newman's Anglican Difficulties, the first
in the series, which I shall call "Classics of Catholic Culture." From the time,
when around 1982 I made a thorough study of that book, I knew that it would do
much good to Catholics, provided it were preceded by an introduction that sheds
light on its context. Without such a preliminary study most readers would not see
that book's significance, which is vast, to say the least.

What I said in an earlier chapter about the second title in the series, Carrel's
Voyage to Lourdes, supports the same point. This book, too, stuck in my
memory from the moment when sometime in the early 1950s I first read it. Even
more so is this the case with the third title in the series, The Shakespeares and
the Old Faith. From the moment it fell into my hands, easily thirty years ago, I
often thought of it as a potential big gun in the culture war that has moved into
high gear the last ten years or so. If not a big gun, the story of William
Shakespeare's and his father's Catholicism (the playwright's sister ran the risk of
being persecuted for the "old faith") can at least work as a shock treatment to
those who love to frown on Catholicism as the center of cultural backwaters.

For them a word about Shakespeare having been a Catholic may be all the
more shocking, as the author of that book, John de Groot, was, as I found out, a
Presbyterian minister before he took up teaching English literature in Brooklyn
College. He therefore could hardly be suspected of Catholic bias. To write a
telling Postscript to the re-reprinting of his book, one did not have to be really
familiar with Shakespeare's plays, which have been sifted through many times
for any indication of his religious convictions. I needed only to read the
literature, fairly extensive, on Shakespeare's religion and register the silent
treatment given there to De Groot's book, a Columbia University dissertation.
Although it was reviewed in the New York Times and praised there as
something of an eye opener, it fell into oblivion within ten years even in
Catholic colleges where it should have stayed permanently on the list of
compulsory readings. But unless Catholics keep in mind the great cultural
achievements of their fellow Catholics, they will contribute, and to their great
disad vantage, to the truth of Chesterton's sad observation: "Catholics first, and
to be forgotten."

Being a theologian I was on far more familiar grounds when I wrote

introductions to Manning's The True History of the Vatican Council, to St. John
Fisher's Defense of the Priesthood, and to Bossuet's History of the Variations of
the Protestant Churches, three other titles in the Real View Books series. The
last work had for several decades intrigued me before there arose the possibility
of inserting it into the series. The same is true of still another title, Karl A.
Kneller's Christianity and the Leaders of Science, which first came out in
English translation in 1911. I first found it in 1958, in a visit to the Library of the
Jesuit University of Santa Clara. Writing an introduction to it made it possible
for me to call attention to some basics concerning the relation of science and
theology. In addition I pointed out that it was possible to write a valuable book
on the subject, provided one's respect for facts was profound. This was certainly
the case with Kneller, a Jesuit historian who greatly assisted Ludwig Pastor in
the final years of his famed research on the history of the papacy.

The thickest volume in the Real View Books series is Barruel's History of
Jacobinism which was a pet project of Harry Veryser. I learned a great deal
about the antecedents of the French Revolution in studying that book, but I also
had to notice that Barruel, who was right in talking about a conspiracy taken in a
broad sense, had no eyes for some rank failures of the French monarchy and for
the undeniable cultural achievements of the French Revolution. A Catholic can
at best bemoan the fact that Fenelon, who made remarkable suggestions in the
early 18th century about how to meet the needs of the times, was not listened to
by the Court, by the aristocrats, and by the Church in France, all of which stood
in dire need of reform.

But of all titles in the Real View Books series none gave me so much
enlightenment as Christopher Hollis' Erasmus. I stumbled on it quite by accident
in the spring of 1997 as I was browsing in the Library of the School of Theology
at Seton Hall University. Once home with that book, it kept me up all night long.
It made me discover not only the true Erasmus, which was hardly a pleasant
matter, for it is not a joy to see a great talent trapping himself in continual
dissimulations. But it was a sheer joy to be led by Hollis to his chief source, and
a very surprising one at that. Joseph Mangan, the author of what may pass for
the most carefully written monograph on Erasmus, a two-volume work
published by Macmillan in 1927, was a Catholic physician from Lynn,
Massachusetts. His work was praised briefly and then quickly forgotten, partly
because Catholic Erasmus scholars let this happen. They did the same with
Hollis' book and for the same reason. They wanted a myth to arise and flourish
about Erasmus as the prophet of an "enlightened" Catholicism, a patron saint of
a Europe which is "ecumenically" Catholic.

In Hollis I found an author wholly dedicated to the cause of Catholic culture.

The son of an Anglican bishop, he converted to Catholicism in 1922, while a
student at Oxford, because he could not believe that Christ established a Church
of different parts whose unity consisted in their agreement to disagree. He wrote
a score of books to bring out the splendor of Catholic culture, a work in which
he was much aided by his teaching history at the Jesuits' college at Stonyhurst.
After Vatican II he felt that there still remained one indisputable
recommendation for the Catholic Church: its ability to produce saints. He must
have thought of Mother Teresa and others.

In referring to that ability, Hollis must have also thought of what may be his
best work, a biography of Saint Ignatius. He exaggerated in stating that Ignatius
was the greatest saint ever. But he unerringly grasped the gist of Ignatius' aim as
a resolve to make Catholics better Catholics, and in a strictly spiritual,
supernatural sense at that. This was Hollis' way of stating that Ignatius, who
hardly ever referred to Protestants, had no wish to be a controversialist and an
activist. Ignatius simply wanted to become a saint from the moment when, lying
in bed with a leg shattered by a cannon ball, he chanced on a "Lives of the
Saints." From there on he strove for the rest of his life to be a saintly Roman
(yes, Roman) Catholic. His striving is crystallized in the reply he gave, not too
long before his death, to a Jesuit who complained about the failure of Pope Paul
IV to act in some matter. The reply was a question: "How many popes are in the
Church?" No question is more timely nowadays.

Hollis' best work was done in the 1930s and 1940s, decades of a culturally
more cohesive Catholicism because Catholics still knew that there was no
catholicism unless there was one written with a capital. It weighs most heavily
on my mind that today there are so many Catholic intellectuals who make light
of this most weighty matter. For if cultural history teaches anything it is the
lesson that there can be no defense of the natural unless one espouses the
supernatural and does so with no reservations.

This correlation is the essence of a catholicism which is also Catholic. It was a

few years before my encountering Hollis' works that I turned to that correlation
in an essay, "Life's Defense: Natural and Supernatural." But I owe it to a passage
in Hollis' unsparing story, The Monstrous Regiment, of Elizabeth's reign, that I
wrote an essay, "The Catholic Intellectual." The passage, quoted at some length
in chapter 8 above, is all the more demonstrative as it comes from James A.
Froude, no friend of Catholics. There he contrasts the stability of Catholic
bishops with the "hierarchy" established by Elizabeth, who wanted bishops
content with being glorified civil servants.

In that essay I spoke, of course, of Duhem, partly to illustrate the duty of a

Catholic intellectual to drop everything else once he spots a topic of great
moment for Catholic culture. Some such topic suddenly emerged on my mental
horizon in late March 1998. The next chapter gives the details.
The proverb, "Deus escrive direito por linhas tortas," or God writes straight
along crooked lines, first struck my eyes a little over fifty years ago. I remember
the place vividly, the office of the abbot of Liguge, who kindly extended the
abbey's hospitality to me during the late summer and early fall of 1950. It was
there, in that historic area of the Church in Gaul, that I was writing up my
doctoral dissertation in theology, eventually published as my first book, Les
tendances nouvelles de 1'ecclesiologie. Before he became a monk, the abbot was
a career officer in the French Army and apparently an avid theater-goer. I cannot
recall why he recommended to me Claudel's play, Le soulier de satin. I doubt
that I got very far into it. Then as later, the reading of plays had little appeal to
me. But as I have mentioned earlier, the play's motto, that Portuguese proverb,
became indelibly engraved in my memory.

Almost fifty years later, in mid-March 1998, I began to be drawn into the
subject, usually referred to as the miracle of the sun that took place over a
hollow field, Cova da Iria, outside Fatima, on October 13, 1917. The fifty
thousand or so who gathered there, many of them at great personal sacrifice,
certainly witnessed something extraordinary. Then Avelino de Almeida, a
prominent Portuguese journalist, made history. He did so by introducing with the
headline, "Como os sol bailou ao meio dia em Fatima" (How the sun danced
over Fatima at midday) his front-page report in 0 Seculo, a leading Lisbon daily.
The phrase, which he borrowed from the peasants in the Cova, stuck, and for
better or for worse put a stamp on the vast Fatima literature.

I myself held in mid-March 1998 that the sun was indeed a chief actor in the
phenomenon witnessed by that vast crowd, most of whom went there in the firm
expectation of a huge miracle. Some others went there out of curiosity, still
others in the hope that they would witness another discomfiture of superstitious
credulity. The phenomenon was colossal and all the more so because three
simple children of the land-Lucia, and her two cousins, Francisco and Jacinta-
acted as messengers of a patently supernatural apparition, who before long came
to be known as Our Lady of Fatima. On May 13, 1917, they first saw her
descend on a small holm oak ("azinheira") on the western edge of the Cova,
where they used to pasture a few sheep. She told them to return there on the next
13th, when again she spoke to them. What she told them sounded unbelievable.
With an uncanny instinct the oldest, Lucia, begged her on the next 13th to give a
sign so that others might believe.

The apparition promised them a big sign for October 13th, but they were also
instructed to come back on the 13th of August and of September. They could not
come on the 13th of August because by then all Portugal was abuzz with what
happened in the Cova and therefore champions of "enlightened views" felt
impelled to act. The three children were kidnapped by the mayor of Ourem, who,
after he had kept them in jail for three days, was compelled by popular demand
to let them return to Fatima in a sort of triumphal procession. On September 13th
about twenty thousand people came to the Cova and witnessed strange events,
among them the darkening of the sky at noon. The stars themselves became
visible, while there were no clouds in the sky.

The day before October 13th huge columns of pilgrims were moving towards
the Cova from all over Portugal. Many of the nearby villages became literally
empty. While only a few expected the sun to do something miraculous, most of
them did not doubt that they would see something extraordinary. They came,
they saw, and believed. Once more, as throughout the history of salvation, there
was a sign to support a message.

My training as a physicist, as a historian, and (yes) as a theologian alike

imposed on me the conviction that whatever can be known about the miracle of
the sun, it must come from eyewitness accounts. Before long the study of those
accounts appeared to be a much greater task than I originally thought. In the
measure in which I delved into that study it became clear to me that the story of
our knowledge of what the sun appeared to do is far less straightforward than
intimated, let alone admitted, in typical accounts of Fatima. But precisely
because the story is full of strange detours, it shares in the genuineness of all true
stories. It is a story with a sound moral, for no true history is devoid of some
moral parameters. Even for those who have only the foggiest idea of what the
miracle of the sun consisted of, the uninterrupted flood of conversions tied to the
story of Fatima should speak louder than miracles. Still the miracle of the sun
remains the chief external sign of the authenticity of Fatima's message, which is
chiefly about the need to convert from one's old self, if some terrible turn in
history is to be forestalled.

Whether God and the Sun at Fatima will be judged as one of my best books, I
cannot decide. For me it ranks high among those books of mine that I most
enjoyed writing. Had I not enjoyed writing it, I would not have written it in a
feverish haste, almost from the moment when I was seized with the idea of
writing a book on the miracle of the sun. It was not, of course, around March 20,
1998 (I wish I had jotted down not only the day, but also the hour, when that
idea suddenly seized me) that I first pondered that miracle. The suddeness had,
however, something similar to the manner in which the idea of writing some of
my other books, such as The Relevance and The Milky Way, came to me. But
unlike in these cases, I had no clear idea as to how God and the Sun at Fatima
would be structured. For the structure heavily depends on the material, which I
did not suspect at that time to turn out to be so vast, varied, and on occasion
showing me the very opposite of what I expected.

I could not rely on any clear reminiscence of what was said about the miracle
of the sun when I first heard about it sometime in 1944, when Catholics in
Hungary, soon to be shifted from imprisonment by Nazis to enslavement by
Communists, began to pay attention to the story of Fatima. Only some fifty years
later, when I was writing Miracles and Physics, did I pick up some books on
Fatima, xeroxed pages from them that related to the miracle of the sun, and
stacked them away in a far from thick folder. Although the contents of that
folder tripled when, in late March 1998, I paged through a dozen or so books on
Fatima readily available in English, I still thought that the writing of God and the
Sun at Fatima would be a straightforward application of some basic principles on
miracles and science. I was in for a great surprise, though a very pleasant one.
Nothing should please a historian more than the opportunity to delve into the
kind of story that delights detectives.

Detectives know all too well that eventually they have to consult much more
material than what was originally within their ken. They also have to count on
strange coincidences whose connection is anything but straightforward.
Although in retrospect their connection may appear logical, when they actually
follow one another they resemble a zig-zag if anything, with no connection
between the zigs and the zags. In my case their succession still appears to me to
be something bordering on the miraculous.

I cannot, of course, see anything "miraculous" in my having been seized

suddenly with the idea of writing that book in midMarch 1998. At that time I had
just completed the first twelve chapters of this book and I felt that it would be
best to let it simmer for a while on the back burner. In that sense my mind was
ready for a new topic. Nor was there anything special in the fact that once I was
seized with the idea, I would readily use any opportunity to promote my research
on the subject. Still, there was something very special in that some opportunities
came by as if they had been responses to my shooting, if not in the dark, at least
on the spur of the moment.

The first of these shots occurred toward the end of March, when I was invited
by a friend of mine to have lunch with a friend of his, a priest in New Jersey. It
was not the first lunch we had had together over some ten years, but in none of
those occasions did the word Fatima come up, much less the word Portugal. It
was with no advance plan that I suddenly turned to that priest with the question
of whether he had connections with Portuguese people. I knew, of course, that
Newark had a sizeable Portuguese population, but I also knew that he did not
serve there. I was therefore surprised when he answered that Mr. Antony
Matinho, the publisher of Luso-Americano, the largest Portuguese semiweekly
in the USA, published in Newark, was a former parishioner as well as a good
friend of his.

Mr. Matinho could not have been more helpful, although he could give me
only vague answers to the questions I posed when I first called him by phone. He
assured me that he had a multivolume Portuguese encyclopedia in his office. I
considered this to be a godsend, as the largest Portuguese encyclopedia in
Princeton's Firestone Library comprised only four volumes. Within a week I
visited Mr. Matinho in his office in Newark, hardly a great journey for me as his
office happened to be a quarter of an hour's drive from Seton Hall. He not only
gave me free access to his twenty-volume encyclopedia, Verbo, but also
volunteered some family information. He himself was born in Fatima, and his
father, who happened to be visiting them about that time, saw the miracle of the
sun as an eight-year-old boy.
 By the time I met that charming man of eighty-seven two months later, I had a
good deal of documentation on Fatima and Portugal. While it was most exciting
to speak with someone who saw the miracle of the sun, the meeting made me
only more aware of something which I had begun to suspect almost from the
start. The propitious time to contact eyewitnesses of the miracle of the sun and
solicit their depositions was now long over. Even if I had begun my work on
Fatima thirty years ago, I would have seized practically the last moment for the
purpose. The contact which a zealous American made in Portugal around 1960
with still-living eyewitnesses should seem therefore all the more valuable in
spite of the shortcomings of the result. Mr. Matinho's dear old father could not
recall anything specific about the sun. He said that as he went home with his
parents, "some people said this, some people said that."

I began, of course, with books available in English on Fatima, which I picked

up in the library of my university. Among them was a book whose value I
quickly noticed, precisely because it contained more eyewitness accounts than
did the other books. Its author was Costa Brocado, a prominent Portuguese
historian around 1940. Just as I perused the English translation of his book,
which came out in 1952, I saw a copy of it listed in a quarterly circular of
second-hand books of interest to Catholics. I quickly grabbed it. I have not seen
it listed either before or after. Before long I had a copy of the Portuguese original
as well. The English translation of Brocado's book, which failed to be issued in
paperback, made little impact in America where Fatima quickly drifted into the
focus of Catholic consciousness during the years immediately following the end
of World War II. Had proper attention been paid to two chapters in that book, it
might have helped create the healthy suspicion that the miracle of the sun was an
essentially meteorological phenomenon, though still markedly miraculous.

Already by early May 1998 enough material was in my hand for me to see
that my story about Fatima, the story of eyewitness accounts, would further
prove that God writes straight along crooked lines. That such was the character
of the story could but greatly appeal to my concerns, a bundle of the
preoccupations of a theologian, a historian, and a scientist. A theologian can
never ponder long and deeply enough the universal truth of the words that "light
shines in darkness," that is, against an often very dark background. Indeed, the
two often appear thoroughly interwoven. In the eyes of a historian the chain of
human events is the concomitance of bright and dark threads, very much like the
combining of two DNA threads into a double helix. The scientist in turn would
only fool himself by thinking that relevant data are promptly recognized for what
they are. In fact, as will be seen shortly, they are not necessarily accepted as such
even after the insight is spelled out. Nothing happened when in 1958 it was
suggested in a prominent context that the miracle of the sun had to be something
meteorological.

That such was the right perspective on the miracle of the sun began to emerge
in my mind after my first exposure, in early July, 1998, to the riches of the
Archives of the Sanctuary of Fatima. My way there was paved by the good
offices of a fellow Hungarian priest, Fr. Kondor, whose name is a byword in
Fatima. Countless people all over the world know him as the Vice Postulator of
the cause of the beatification of Francisco and Jacinta, a cause which has just
reached a happy conclusion. Many pilgrims to Fatima visit Fr. Kondor's Museo
dos Pastorinhos, full of large photos of the persons and places connected with
the beginnings of Fatima. Some of those who make the Way of the Cross in the
outskirts of nearby Aljustrel may also learn that Fr. Kondor inspired the
construction of the fourteen Stations as well as of a beautiful chapel on the
highest hill around Fatima. I owe it to his hospitality that I met by "chance" an
American priest who happened to be on a brief visit to Fatima. He was most
pleased to take me around in his rented car whenever I was not working in the
Archives. One afternoon, he rushed me in four hours from Fatima to Coimbra
and back, so that I might establish a contact at the University Library. Indeed on
that very occasion I stumbled on a piece of invaluable information.

But this was the only afternoon out of four days which I did not spend in the
Archives. Other trips to Ourem, Chao de Macas, Leiria, and Batalha had to take
place either during the lunch hours or in the evenings, which in July were still
bathed in sunlight until eight or so. Apart from that, all the mornings and the
afternoons had to be spent in the Archives where the director, Dr. Luciano
Cristino, and his chief assistant, Ana Teresa Neto, could not have been more
helpful. During that first exploration of the Archives, I certainly realized the
vastness of my project. I came away with some 500 xeroxed pages that gave me
a firm hold on what was printed during the first two weeks following the miracle
of the sun. I could not, however, adequately cover the material relating to the
next two months.

I knew I had to return, which I did in early November. By then my book had
been "completed" for the third time, and stretched to almost 300 pages. During
that second visit, I covered meticulously the archival material relating to
November and December 1917, which I began to work into my book no sooner
than I had returned to the USA in mid-November. By the end of November it
was clear that I must study the archival material relating to the 1920s. By
December 5, I was back in Fatima for a ten-day-long stay, during which I went
through every issue of Voz da Fatima, a monthly newspaper that began
publication in October 1922. By mid-January 1999, I felt that the book, now 380
pages, was essentially ready.

It was the material gathered during that third visit that showed me the process
whereby Fatima turned into the fact which it is, the source of a spiritual tidal
wave that began to sweep all over Portugal and then far beyond. But in this
development the spiritual message of Fatima began to take on an existence
which may seem almost independent of the miracle of the sun. This is clearly
what emerges from reading the first ten years of Voz da Fatima.

Here let me state something about that shift in perspectives. It may be best
highlighted with a quotation from a book which E. F. F. Chladni, the founder of
the modern science of meteoritics, published in 1817. There he recalls that when
in May 1751 a large meteor shower hit Hraschina, a village near Zagreb, the
bishop there ordered his consistory to have the eyewitnesses of the event make
sworn depositions, which he sent to the emperor (who happened to be Maria
Theresa) in Vienna. This, Chladni, remarks, "was all that could be done in the
circumstances."'

In view of the enormous merits of bishop Jose da Silva in turning Fatima from
"nothing" into what it is, I point out only with the greatest reluctance that, with
respect to the miracle of the sun, he did not do what could and should have been
done in the circumstances. Of course, almost three full years had gone by since
that miracle when he took charge of the Leiria diocese to which Fatima belonged
both before the diocese of Leiria was suppressed by Rome in 1878 and after its
restoration by Rome in 1918. In between those two dates the Leiria diocese was
attached to the Lisbon archdiocese.

Most books on Fatima contain one or two paragraphs on the hostility with
which the leaders of the archdiocese of Lisbon, including its Cardinal Patriarch,
treated the news from Fatima. But the authors of those books say not a word as
to how the first bishop of the newly restored diocese of Leiria (subsequently
Leiria-Fatima) handled the question of the miracle of the sun. To be sure, the
archdiocese of Lisbon had already initiated a "parochial investigation" in
November 1917, but it turned out to be very parochial indeed. Hardly anything
specific was obtained from the dozen or so parishioners, mostly illiterates, who
volunteered to state under oath that they saw the sun dance. No effort was made
by the archdiocese to ask those who went from Lisbon, Santarem, Coimbra,
Tomar, and Leiria to Fatima, including well-educated people among the crowds,
to volunteer their deposition. The initiative of an elderly Catholic scientist, who
saw the miracle, to collect testimonies from other educated eyewitnesses, fell
upon deaf ears. To find this out was a very unpleasant, though also a very
rewarding moment in my researches on Fatima as such moments are never
absent in true stories and in their truthful reconstruction.

A similar moment came when I had to conclude that some important things
were not initiated and carried out by that otherwise so meritorious Bishop da
Silva, after he had taken possession of his See in 1920. Two years later he issued
a "Pastoral Provision," partly with the aim of gathering information on what
happened in Fatima. When the commission set up by him presented its lengthy
report seven years later, it contained not a word on the miracle of the sun. Yet in
that Provision the bishop referred to the extreme care with which Rome handled
reports about miraculous events and cures.

Such were the beginnings of a story, the story of eyewitness accounts about
the miracle of the sun, that appears to be written along crooked lines indeed. The
continuation of that story, the growing preponderance of the message of Fatima
over its chief external sign, the miracle of the sun, could be gathered from the
first ten years of the issues of Voz da Fatima. Further chapters in that story could
be culled from books written on Fatima from the 1930s on. Their authors
invariably failed to make a search of the sources, that is, the eyewitness accounts
already in print, let alone of those still unpublished.

No wonder that the Fatima literature came to be dominated by brave and

vague accounts of the miracle of the sun, on the basis of which it was not
possible to approach the question scientifically. Although some of the better
books contained a few eyewitness accounts, their contents were ignored by Pio
Scatizzi, an Italian Jesuit, who first undertook the "scientific investigation" of the
miracle of the sun. Scatizzi enjoyed some reputation among leading Italian
mathematicians and this could lend to his book, published in 1947, scientific
credibility.' Although the book saw little circulation, it began to be referred to as
the definitive study on the subject. No writer on Fatima who cited that book
noted the scientific oddity of the absence in it of eyewitness accounts already in
print, the indispensable basis of a scientific analysis of the miracle of the sun, or
of any miracle for that matter.

Those accounts were certainly absent in an excerpt from Scatizzi's book that
first appeared in the second edition of a work which quickly established itself as
"the book" on Fatima. It had for its author an Italian missionary, Father De
Marchi, who first arrived in Fatima in 1943. During my first visit to Fatima I
sought out Fr. De Marchi, and asked him specifically whether he had any direct
contact with Fr. Scatizzi. His answer was a categorical "no." Nor could he
provide me with information as to who made that excerpt for his book.

At any rate, that excerpt from the chief "scientific" study of the miracle of the
sun served as a proof of its "absolutely miraculous" character. Nobody noticed
that Scatizzi's investigation was based on a wholly false premise. The latter
consisted in the claim that as the sun appeared in the zenith all the clouds moved
down to the horizon leaving the air utterly clear and dry. Scatizzi therefore felt
entitled to claim that the miracle of the sun could not be meteorological. Had
eyewitness accounts, already in print by 1947, been paid attention, this claim
would have appeared without any foundation right then and there.

Scatizzi's failure to see this should seem all the stranger because, as a faculty
member of the Gregorian University in Rome, he had there for his colleague Fr.
Fonseca, a professor of historical theology who also taught at the Biblical
Institute. From the late 1920s Fonseca, a Portuguese by birth, had been in close
contact with Bishop da Silva and soon became a chief orator at the big national
pilgrimages in Fatima. He could therefore have had easy access to both the
published and the still unpublished material on what was witnessed on that great
day. He should have certainly been expected to make a study of the eyewitness
accounts already in print. There is no trace of such a study in his book, first
published in 1932. It contained only a generic summary of what had been seen
about the sun. The book's subsequent enlarged editions did not present a great
improvement on that situation.

Yet a major eyewitness account, available in print since 1921 in the very first
book on Fatima,' indicated the continued presence of clouds all across the sky,
and anything but a dry atmosphere. This was, in fact, one of the main points
made by Dr. Amorin, professor of mathematics at Coimbra, as he read a paper at
an International Congress at Lourdes in 1958. As an explanation he merely
hinted at the possibility that the phenomenon may have been an air lens. He read
about air lenses in Flying Saucers, a book by the Harvard astronomer, D.
Menzel, who explained on that basis the various sightings of UFO's.
Unfortunately, or rather tellingly, Amorin did not say a word about Scatizzi.
Amorin, however, disclosed that he undertook his investigation on "higher
encouragement." In all evidence that encouragement came from Cardinal
Cerejeira, Archbishop Patriarch of Lisbon from 1929 on, but it did not prompt a
discussion of Amorin's paper which appeared in print only in 1963 and was
never translated from Portuguese into French or English. Nor did Amorin's paper
prompt Portuguese Fatimists to initiate at the last minute (we are in the early
1960s) a nationwide appeal to still-living eyewitnesses to volunteer their
depositions.

To discover and put together all this and many other details which are
contained in my book on Fatima, was not a pleasant experience, though very
instructive. At every step I could not help seeing the kind of "Catholic" action
that consists in big words and in the omission of most elementary steps. But such
are most true stories, and stories that are truly instructive. The Fatima story
proved once more the age-old truth that God can achieve His aims even when
human co-operation leaves too much to desire and makes a straight line appear a
zig-zag.

However, enough data are on hand to force one to recognize the

meteorological nature of "the miracle of the sun" and to look askance at the
phrase, "the sun danced over Fatima." That the miracle was not solar, that it did
not imply any "solar activity" in the scientific sense of that term, is indicated by
the fact that nothing unusual was registered by observatories about the sun at
that hour. Prior to that hour rain was coming down heavily over the area from
the late morning hours on, with the clouds being driven fast by a westerly wind
across the sky. A cold air mass was obviously moving in from the Atlantic, only
at about 40 kms from Fatima, which itself is at about 15 kms to the east from the
line where the land begins to form a plateau well over 300 meters above sea
level. The hollow field, Cova da Iria, outside Fatima is itself at about 370 meters.
An actual view of the geographic situation is a great help for an understanding of
the true physical nature of "the miracle of the sun," especially when one takes a
close look at cloud patterns typical over the Cova.

I feel that at this juncture I must summarize my explanation of the miracle. It

began at about 12:45 pm, solar time, after the rain suddenly stopped, and lasted
about ten to fifteen minutes. During all that time, the sun, that had not been seen
for hours, appeared through thin clouds, which one careful observer described as
cirrus clouds. Suddenly the sun's image turned into a wheel of fire which for the
people there resembled a "rodo de fuogo" familiar to them in fireworks. The
physical core of that wheel was, as we now have to conjecture, an air lens full of
ice crystals, as cirrus clouds are. Such crystals can readily refract the sun's rays
into various colors of the rainbow.

The references to the strong west-east wind and to the continued drift of
clouds may account for the interplay of two streams of air that could give a twist,
in a way analogous to the formation of tornadoes, to put that lens-shaped air
mass into rotation. Since many present there suddenly felt a marked increase in
temperature, it is clear that a sudden temperature inversion must have taken
place. The cold and warm air masses could conceivably propel that rotating air
lens in an elliptical orbit first toward the earth, and then push it up, as if it were a
bomerang, back to its original position. Meanwhile the ice crystals in it acted as
so many means of refraction for the sun's rays. Some eyewitnesses claimed that
the "wheel of fire" descended and reascended three times; according to others
this happened twice. Overwhelmed by an extraordinary sight that prompted most
of the crowd to fall on their knees, even "detached" observers could not perform
as coolly as they would have wished. Only one observer, a lawyer, stated three
decades later that the path of descent and ascent was elliptical with small circles
superimposed on it.

Such an observation would make eminent sense to anyone familiar with fluid
dynamics or even with the workings of a boomerang. There is indeed plenty of
scientific information on hand to approach the miracle of the sun scientifically.
This is, however, not to suggest that one could reproduce the event say in a wind
tunnel. The carefully co-ordinated interplay of so many physical factors would
by itself be a miracle, even if one does not wish to see anything more in what
actually happened.
 Clearly, the "miracle" of the sun was not a mere meteorological phenomenon,
however rare. Otherwise it would have been observed before and after,
regardless of the presence of devout crowds or not. I merely claim, which I did
in my other writings on miracles, that in producing miracles God often makes
use of a natural substratum by greatly enhancing its physical components and
their interactions. One can indeed say, though not in the sense intended by some
Fatima writers, that the fingers of the Mother of God played with the rays of the
sun at that extraordinary hour at Fatima.

Some sober minds soon noted that following that day some people began to
see the miracle again and again, and rightly suspected that some wishful thinking
was at work. In none of those cases was a detailed account given as to what was
actually seen. Disputes quickly arose among those in support of the miracle and
those against it, but neither side stressed the primary importance of facts
observed or not observed. Rather faith was opposed to counter-faith or disbelief,
for which it is a basic dogma that miracles are impossible and therefore one
should not bother about what was seen at all. Such a counter-faith could be
opposed only by a sedulous collection of details about what had been observed
and by as many people as possible.

Still it remained true that the hour of the miracle of the sun was extraordinary
even in a broader sense. It may indeed appear as a critical turning point in
modern history. Fatima quickly reenergized Portuguese Catholics to the point
that voting patterns began to change in disfavor of militant secularists, who from
1911 on had been doing their utmost to eradicate faith in Portugal. The shift in
mood certainly helped the military coup of December 1917 that swept those
secularists out of power, and thereby nipped in the bud hopes that Lisbon,
considered by Lenin as the most atheistic capital in Europe, might serve as the
Western bastion of a Marxist revolution.

In retrospect it should be easy to see that had Fatima not saved Portugal for
Christendom, the Iberian peninsula would have turned within a decade or two
into a stronghold of international Marxism ruled from Moscow. The France of
"Front Populaire" would have readily yielded to the Red juggernaut. About the
rest any reader of this book may wish to speculate as he pleases. It is not,
however, a matter of speculation that such gurus of political science as Kissinger
and others firmly held in the mid-1980s that the Soviet Union would remain the
"other" great world power for the next hundred years or so.
 One would look in vain for a reference to John Paul II in Kissinger, a vast
biography published in 1997. From the vantage point of that year, such an
omission should seem stunning, to say the least. By 1997 Kissinger was a largely
forgotten name, whereas the name of John Paul II was intimately tied to the
demise of the Soviet Union. Political scientists would not, of course, take kindly
to the injection of some "supernatural" perspectives into their very natural
reasoning. But at least some dates may appear telling. The first, 1981, was the
year of the attempt made, on May 13, on the life of the pope. Did Agca's
superiors in Moscow choose that date in defiance of the sacred, or were they
made, by supernatural powers, oblivious to the significance of that day?

In all evidence the bullet should have felled the pope on the spot. Agca, a
master shot, used a powerful gun. In fact when a year later the pope visited him
in prison, Agca's first words to the pope conveyed his puzzlement over the
pope's failure to die. But as the medical bulletins showed, the bullet followed a
path resembling a W in the pope's abdomen. Bullets are known to change
suddenly their path in the human body, but it is not scientific to assume that a
bullet should change its path three times, and just at the moment when it is about
to penetrate and destroy a vital organ.

Then comes the year 1984. Political scientists would care least about what
happened during that year on March 25 in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore
in Rome. There, surrounded by 2000 bishops, the Pope performed a consecration
to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which Lucia, the only survivor of the three
videntes, declared to be the kind of act that should have been done long ago.
Word about the consecration was brought to her by the papal nuncio in Portugal,
who somewhat facetiously remarked: "Now we wait for the [political] miracle."
"It will certainly come," was Lucia's answer.

Most people familiar with the Fatima lore would say that the miracle of
Fatima was to bring about the conversion of Russia, even if the latter was only a
part of the miracle. In retrospect the matter should be clear. In 1986 Gorbachev
came to power; in five more years the Soviet Union was formally declared to
have ceased to exist. But what about the conversion? To expect a large-scale
conversion to take place within a year or even within a decade is to ignore
Church history, to say nothing of theology. Even in the early Middle Ages the
conversion of entire nations took several generations and even longer.
 Fatima was certainly not meant to be a heavenly pledge about a universal
peace, provided there would be enough who lived up to some divine
requirements. Had Fatima not done more than put an end to the slavery of
Christians in Eastern Europe, it would have already fulfilled its promise. But the
slavery which the pleasures of Western consumerism represent are an even more
serious matter. Compared with either, the secularization of Christians in many
parts of the affluent world constitutes, most serious matter. A keen awareness of
the message of Fatima is needed more than ever if further, even bigger disasters
are to be averted.

That message will forever be anchored in its sign, the miracle of the sun and
not in vain speculations about the Third Secret, whatever it may be. A proper
understanding of the sign remains basic for a healthy cultivation of the message
of Fatima. The sign was not a heavenly stunt whose acceptance would demand
nothing less than a raping of one's intellect. While it was a supernatural deed, it
was, like other miracles, rooted in the natural, in the physical. It was partly in
that perspective that my study of the miracle of the sun mirrored the dispositions
of my mind, and therefore my recollections of it fully fit into the framework of
this book.

My study of the miracle of the sun, which I undertook in my seventy-fourth

year, also confirmed some earlier inclinations of my mind. I found God once
more writing straight along crooked lines. It is a minor miracle that we have as
many eyewitness accounts of the miracle as we do. But why should the story of
Fatima be more privileged in that respect than the Gospel story? The four
Gospels, however reliable as eyewitness accounts, served a higher purpose than
instructions in history. The stunning scarcity of outside testimonies about
Christians, let alone about Christ, during the first hundred years of the Church
should be eye opening. One can also marvel at the fact that the miracle of the
sun and the message of Fatima survived the manner in which, in spite of most
noble efforts and intentions, it has been mishandled by zealous Fatimists.

All this is nothing peculiarly Fatimist or Portuguese. The proverb, that God
writes straight along curved lines, is alive in more than one language. Time and
again, my reference to that proverb as something Portuguese met with the
spontaneous reaction that it is an English proverb. Some took it for an Italian
proverb, still others for something Spanish. I would not be surprised if the
Russians and the Chinese would also claim it as part of their cultural heritage.
 For the thrust of that proverb is clearly universal. It would perfectly pass for a
biblical phrase. Does not the biblical phase of salvation history, which stands for
a straight arrow, moving from a beginning to an end, follow some very crooked
lines in some places? The history of the Jewish people is full of strange detours,
beginning with the wanderings of Abraham. Humanly speaking it was most
unlikely that the Jews should ever return from Egypt or that they should be able
to move into the Promised Land and establish themselves there. In another five
hundred years only one tribe, Judah, remained of the original Twelve, and, by
human standards, even Judah appeared to be slated for extinction.

And so was another group of Twelve, the apostles. Tellingly, hardly anything
tangible survived about the fate of most of them. Paul himself should have easily
perished several times, with his work largely not done. His course was anything
but straight from the very moment when he was taken to a street, called
"Straight" in Damascus. "The Road to Damascus" has become a phrase to mean
abrupt reversals. The Church suffered almost wholesale extinction in areas that,
culturally speaking, were its foremost strongholds. Asia Minor and North Africa
readily come to mind. The history of missions is as much a chain of setbacks as
it is a sequence of triumphs.

Instances of this are many, though perhaps none so well documented and
gripping as what happened in Japan in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. A
spectacular blossoming of newly planted Christian faith was followed by a most
cruel persecution that apparently left no trace of Christians. The survival of
Christians in some valleys outside Nagasaki constitutes one of the most stunning
pages in the history of missions, especially when taken together with the story of
how they recognized the coming of missionaries when Japan was forced by
Commodore Perry to open its doors. That a group of Jesuit missionaries in
Nagasaki, all zealous promoters of devotion to Our Lady of Fatima, survived the
atomic bomb, adds another link in a long chain of miraculous turns represented
and triggered by Fatima.

As to those who view cultural history as a manifestation of Progress, the line

of advance should seem anything but straightforward in many an instance. About
that part of cultural history which is politics, little comfort can be taken from
Churchill's characterization of democracy as the best of all bad forms of
governments. Democracy can readily degenerate into the worst of Party politics.
Against that danger already George Washington felt impelled to warn, though
apparently to no avail. In his old age, Jefferson reached the conclusion that had
he foreseen certain developments in the United States, he would not have
worked for independence from Great Britain. Clearly, it cannot be viewed as
progress that the Electoral College, that was supposed to inject mature wisdom
into the most crucial election, soon turned into a rubber stamp of the "will of the
people." The latter is now increasingly being manipulated by the College known
as the Media whose branches are growing and multiplying as if they were the
arms of a gigantic polyp. Instead of elections at every two and four years,
America now has an ongoing election in terms of instantaneous opinion polls,
many of them carefully manipulated.

Even science came to be viewed as a succession of revolutions after it had

been viewed as the classic locus of straight progress. And why, one may ask,
should science pose an exception in that much broader picture in which the
emergence of man is the latest phase of a succession of events, many of which
are catastrophic in a global sense? Still, however blind the evolutionary process
may be pictured, it is pictured by man whose mind sees some clarity even in
blindness.

It would be contradictory, even on a purely logical basis, to set up incoherence

as the ultimate category. Therefore hope must not be eliminated from one's
perspective of the future, though it should be a very tempered hope. Few things
would call more effectively for a sober and. sobering outlook than a
consideration of what is in store for man as he enters the new millennium. For
man makes that step equipped with the know-how of duplicating himself in a
test-tube, the strangest twist in his now severalmillion-year-long history. Can
man's history, therefore, be taken for something straight, as it appears to be
boomeranging on man himself? In the next chapter I deal with this question. I do
partly so because the question especially agitates my mind as I am preparing a
paper to be delivered in the context of a conference on medical ethics on the
threshold of the third millennium.
Nobody can see a blade of grass grow. Crystals also grow imperceptibly. But
there is an obvious profit in pondering one point about crystals. The smallest and
the largest forms of a crystal are the same, because both are subject to the same
laws or limitations. To a great extent this is also true of the growth of a human
being.

The recognition of one's limitations cannot come early enough, but should be
especially imperative after one has lived three quarters of a century. At that age,
there is added reason to agree with the remark that, after one has reached
seventy, one should not pronounce on new developments. So stated Arthur
Schuster, a noted British physicist, in 1911 when physics seemed to turn inside
out. Assumptions and procedures that until then appeared illogical suddenly
worked, and did work undreamed of marvels. Yet Schuster showed, in spite of
his advanced years, marked appreciation for the striking novelties in physics. I
myself heard, when I was twenty, a spritely nonagerian reply to toasts offered in
his honor, with Horace's words: Non sum laudator temporis acti (I am not one to
praise the good old days). From a distance of almost sixty years I can still hear
those words praising not the past but the future.

Whatever guesses one can make at seventy-seven about the future, one has a
certain right, indeed a duty, to reflect on one's past course from that vantage
point. One would find that the child is the father of the man, just as the first
shape of crystals is also their latest. Good educators have always known that
their task is to "e-ducere," that is, to draw out what is already there in the pupil.
Maria Montessori innovated in education because she saw the advantage of
focusing on the child's budding talents. Only some grim behaviorists spin
theories about how to turn any child into anything, from saints to criminals. Still
none of those behaviorists hinted that their theories were the inevitable outcome
of their own behavioral conditioning. Determinism, as I argued in my Means to
Message, can never be a logical first step insofar as it is stated by man. For
unless he states it freely, he merely parrots something without even remembering
things past. As to subjectivism, one clearly makes a generalization by asserting
it, and this is equivalent to voicing some objective reality.

It should seem safe, therefore, to launch with the simile of crystal growth this
chapter, which at this point is meant to be the last chapter of this book about
what matters to my mind. A decade from now, if I happen to be granted that
extra span of life, I suspect I will find what I am finding now. As one reaches
seventy-seven one's convictions are apt to be as rigid as the edges and faces of
crystals. But this is what secures the crystals' relative transparency. For if indeed
the man is anticipated by the child, he becomes ever more transparent as he
enters deeper and deeper into his second childhood. Just as children find things
simple and uncomplicated, so can even the most complex matters begin to
appear very simple to anyone who has lived half a dozen decades beyond
childhood. At the least, some of one's most considered views emerge so often
into one's awareness that they appear to be one's oldest convictions.

If there is a conviction that has grown in me during these last four or five
decades, it relates to something with very sharp edges and well-defined faces. I
mean the decisive role which quantities play in science and their inability to play
that role elsewhere. On re-reading various books of mine on science, I find more
than one proof of my having been aware of this difference early on. It certainly
shows up in The Relevance. Today I can merely wonder why I waited for thirty
years before seizing on that difference in a methodical way, at least to the extent
of a chapter as it now stands in Means to Message. I also wonder now why
commentators of Aristotle have written so little on one of his most portentous
remarks, which I feel impelled to recall once more. In section 6a of his
Categories Aristotle states that only about words belonging to the category of
quantities can one not apply the phrase "more or less," whereas this can be done
about all words in all the nine other categories. An action, a quality, a state can
be so "more or less," and this is even true of time and place, to say nothing of
affection, another among the ten categories listed by Aristotle. But, as he
concisely observed, a given number, say, five, cannot be "more or less" five.
 It was only almost thirty years after I wrote The Relevance that the seminal
importance of this seemingly trite remark of Aristotle's struck me with an
unusual force. Yet had that remark not contained something truly significant for
my thinking, a remark of Koyre in his Newtonian Studies, which I read shortly
after its publication in 1965, would not have lodged in my memory. There he put
the difference between the old and the new physics in this form: Whereas in the
new or Newtonian physics every proposition aimed at quantitative exactness, in
the old or Aristotelian physics "more or less" was enough. Such was a good
characterization of the difference, but it would have been even better had Koyre
referred to Aristotle. Perhaps he thought that the connection was obvious. Yet
had this been so, Koyre, who tried to draw unduly much from that difference,
could have been expected to refer explicitly to that dictum of Aristotle's. Indeed,
he could have been expected to write an essay on that dictum and on its impact.
Had he tried to do so, he might have been in for a surprise. He would have found
that Aristotle's commentators said very little on that dictum in the Categories.

Had that dictum made a real impact, one might detect some awareness of it in
works on the philosophy and history of science. There is certainly no trace of it
in a collection of essays that came out under the title, Quantity and Quality, in
1961, when it was highly fashionable to discuss the opposition between the two
cultures, scientific and humanistic.' In that book essay after essay gave the
impression that quantities can dominate qualities, as if the two were basically of
the same domain.

Not surprisingly, this dubious contention came wrapped in science. In one of

the longest essays of the book, a prominent physicist presented quantum
mechanics as a science of quantities and of qualities.This obfuscation of the
difference between quantities and qualities (or everything else) was anticipated
in the book's first statement, a misquotation of a dictum of Seneca, taken over
from a widely hailed book whose editor himself did not care to look up what
Seneca said. "It is quality rather than quantity that matters," went the quote,
which in the original merely stated that "what counts is not the number of books
you have but how good are the books you have" (Letter 45.1).

The facile introduction of the word "quantity" is more than the proverbial
high-handedness of many a translator with the original. It reveals a reluctance to
get to the root of the difference between the sciences and the humanities. The
difference will stand as long as it remains impossible to state only about
quantities that they are "more or less" what they are. This means that since there
remains a mutual conceptual irreducibility between quantities and all the other
categories, there remains an irreducible difference, indeed an opposition,
between the sciences and the humanities.

The opposition is certainly aggravated by man's reluctance to act out his

intellectual life as a juggler, forced to play with two balls at the same time and
all the time. Man wants to escape that predicament because it forces him to
remain always on his toes and this is anything but comfortable. Man is longing
for an apparently relaxed condition where his attention need not be divided as he
thinks that he can rush forth along a one-track path. It is in that process that man
turns into a one-dimensional being in two possible forms: He becomes either a
dreamer living in his world of qualities and values, as if they could be
implemented with no regard to quantities, or he becomes a grim reductionist
who thinks that quantities are all he needs. These two forms can be seen in the
Hegelian Right and Left. The former float on their conceptual cloud formations
without ever taking note of the features of the ground, whereas the latter take
their crawling along those features for the finest soaring man can think of.
Whatever their differences, they have been at one in following Hegel's
contention that quantities generate qualities and from qualities there is a direct
transition to quantities. They were also at one in their taking lightly the
illogicalities on hand in each instance when Hegel tried to derive a quantitatively
valid physical law from qualitative considerations. A notorious example of this
was his "derivation" of the elliptical orbit of planets, with no recourse to
mathematics, and certainly not to Newton's Principia, for which he had only
scorn.

The chasm that separates the two domains cannot be bridged from materials
available either on the one or the other side. Only a mind that admits its
paradoxical ability to coordinate into one understanding those two mutually
irreducible sets of materials can pass across that chasm. Once this is admitted, it
makes sense, indeed, it is supremely instructive to state that the really crucial
demarcation line between the sciences and the humanities lies in the difference
between "the metric and the non-metric." This felicitous expression is
Eddington's, who failed to develop it. Nor did I notice its importance when I first
read it, sometime in the early 1960s, in his The Nature of the Physical World and
wrote it out on an index card. Only years later, when I found that card in one of
my many folders, did I "rediscover" that it crystallized a deep intellectual
groping of mine.

The difference between the metric and the non-metric may appear an
oversimplification, but it is far from being a superficiality. The difference is
precise, like the edge of a crystal, and is also transparent to the extent to which
the face of any crystal can be. I seized with relish on that difference in writing
my essay, discussed in ch. 11, "Words: Blocks, Amoebas, or Patches of Fog:
Artificial Intelligence and the Conceptual Foundations of Fuzzy Logic,"
published in 1996. As I have already noted, the gist of that essay is the
difference between the sharp contours which one can give to a spatial
representation of the meaning of integers, representing all quantities, and the
fuzziness of the contours that is on hand whenever one wants to represent the
extent of the meaning of non-quantitative words.

I can only bemoan that I was not seized forty years ago by that difference. I
could have given a really sharp edge to my writings on the two cultures and also
put in a sharper light a number of things in my writings on science and religion.
As one whose education was certainly not foreign to a broadly Aristote- Tian
context of humanistic lore, including religion, I can now doubly bemoan that in
that context I have found no pointer whatsoever toward the importance of that
dictum of Aristotle's in the Categories. A categorically fatal omission which the
champions of classical education still have to remedy.

Even more so would this be the duty of those who insist on a philosophy of
nature as distinct from a "natural philosophy" taken for a science which is cast in
the molds of mathematics. They are just as mistaken in entertaining the idea of a
philosophy of nature, as if it could be worked out without considerations of
quantitative data, as are those who think that chairs of physics are really chairs
for "natural philosophy." Some such prestigious chairs in England still carry that
label. It is a twist of luck that the chair Newton held and made famous was
remembered as the Lucasian Chair, because there should be much food for
thought in the fact that Newton called his great work "mathematical principles of
natural philosophy." Fortunately for the Principia, it did not contain philosophy,
except Newton's gut feeling for reality. Similar was Einstein's procedure in his
strictly scientific papers. But no less than Newton, Einstein waxed philosophical
in his quasi-scientific hours, and in a rather amateurish way. He never tried to
articulate that all important gut feeling, although it rests on the consideration of
quantities.

Aristotle himself, who insisted that it is through a thing's quantitative features

that its reality is recognized, failed to exploit the philosophical bearing of this.
Also, instead of things (a word that may evoke the very philosophical nuances of
substance or essence), he should have spoken of objects, but his Greek did not
contain a word close enough to the English "object." This was all the more
regrettable, because Aristotle was certainly a realist. The word "object" may
indeed carry far more effectively the meaning of the "real" than perhaps any
other word. To see this, one merely should seize on the "object" as if its main
function should be to object to the mind and keep objecting to it whether the
mind pays attention or not.

It is that function of objects that I would now specify as the factor that makes
possible the primary step in philosophy. This point is made at least implicitly in
the first chapter of my Means to Message. Since all chapter titles in that book are
single words, I would not be able to change the title "Objects" of that first
chapter to "Objects object." I, however, would now say several times in that
chapter that objects are here to object, and that a mind becomes a knower only to
the extent that it resonates to the act whereby each and every object does indeed
object. That book was already being printed when the possibility of this
rephrasing of my message occurred to me. But such is one of the frustrations that
go with writing books. Time and again one's mind forms a felicitous phrase only
when it is too late to go into print with it at the most propitious moment.

Heavy reliance on the phrase, "objects do object," or some equivalent of it,

such as "objects are here to object," could at least convey the measure to which
commitment to realism has become with me nothing short of a methodical
obsession. For in order to be a realist it is just not enough to stand by the
primacy of objective reality. As a historian and philosopher of physics I saw
some egregious examples of how inadequate such a stance can be. Einstein's is a
classic case. So are Pauli's words to Born that Einstein's refusal to accept the
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics was rooted not so much in a
connection between causality and exact measurements as in an obsession with
the primacy of the physically real. Pauli had only ridicule for that obsession. But
in the absence of such an obsession the most inadequate, indeed half-baked,
philosophies can be grafted onto excellent physics. These philosophies may
amount to no more than the individual physicist's rumination about his own
universe. Obsession with the real ought to be articulated systematically, if it is to
turn into a well reasoned message.

Yet, this means much more than just to be systematic in one's realism.
Preoccupation with a system may, in fact, distract one's attention from what
gives life to the system, namely, the very starting point of one's philosophizing.
Realism has to be methodical, that is, a continual return to what one has most
consciously taken for one's primary step. This is something more than what I
said about the importance of the first step taken in any activity. Continual return
to that first step, to an ever fresh reconsideration of what it means, of what it
implies, is what gives life to one's realism in philosophy. What I would say now
is that a true realist, a true objectivist should never tire of taking an ever fresh
look at that primary step of his. He should be ready to test it again and again
against ever new problems, tasks, and possibilities, in fact against all of one's
major concerns.

One of such concerns of mine is the epidemics into which liberalism has
turned during the second half of my life, that is, from the 1960s on. I always
fancied myself to be a liberal, which may surprise, even shock, those who have
read some of my books, let alone who heard me talk in public or in private. Too
many speak of me as a rigid conservative. I have heard someone remark that I
am more papal than the pope himself, which today can only mean
"conservative." Yet liberals, who look askance at the papacy, love to "play
Church," which is just as self-defeating as to "play Pope." Liberal theologians
and their journalist allies writing on religion hand down in any given month
more infallible statements than all the popes in two thousand years. At the same
time they keep denouncing dogmatism.

The liberalism I believed in from early on simply meant an openness to the

immense variety in which the real encounters us and, hopefully, we encounter
the real. In other words, my liberalism seems to have been an integral aspect of a
realism that held me in its grip from early on. My hot pursuit as a boyscout of
the acquisition of all sorts of merit badges was an expression of my fascination
with the manifold challenge of the real.

But as anyone who tried to shape matter knows, matter does not yield to all
conceivable fantasies, although it is possible to do fantastic things with it. Matter
as something real has a limitation to its potentialities. This is why there is a
materials science. The more marvelous new shapes one wishes to bring out of
matter, the more carefully one has to follow specific rules of its pliability. Matter
can lend itself to unimaginably new projects but only because it is governed, as
every physicist knows, by strict rules of conservation. It is in that sense that a
realist has to be profoundly conservative, so that he or she may remain open, that
is open-minded, without taking his mind for the real world.

Recently liberals failed to understand that without conservatism one's

liberalism runs the risk of turning into sheer permis siveness. Conservatism in
turn becomes dead wood if not liberally open to the real. An old lesson for both
is the myth about Antaeus who regained his strength as a wrestler whenever his
body touched the ground. It is in good part because of scorn for the good old
foundations that in the land of the brave and the free the cultivation of freedom
has largely become the cult of licentiousness. A systematic fanning of that cult
has turned into a veritable culture war in the so-called Western culture.

It is with both sadness and pride that I register here the fact that in that
stampede toward licentiousness, under the flag of liberty, there has remained
only one stable and consistent voice that upholds the difference between right
and wrong. It is the voice of the Catholic Church as spoken mainly by the pope,
a voice which keeps gaining strength in spite of wishful predictions that the days
of the papacy are numbered. The reason for the pride should be obvious. It fans
one's pride to see that one picked (by the grace of God) the winning horse, even
though it appears at one point or another a very dark horse, with hardly a chance
of winning. One of the reasons for sadness is the suddenness with which
licentiousness came to parade in much of the media and through much of
academe as the right attitude. The other reason concerns the naivete with which
many a liberal Catholic theologian (liberal Protestant divines may be left to
divine their own predicament) looked at the prosperity and good feeling that set
in from the late-1950s on as a valid vote on behalf of their appraisal of human
nature.

The gist of that appraisal was a misjudgment of a trend that emerged with the
Enlightenment as institutionalized by the French Revolution. There was a
profound symbolism in the enthronement of an actress on the main altar of Notre
Dame in Paris in 1793. Brazen overreaches do not last long, but they cast a long
shadow. In the same way, the drastic revulsion against man's worst self that was
triggered by the horrors of World War II, did not endure. The unsuspected
opportunities for comfort and pleasure which atomic and semiconductor physics
(that opened a new era in materials science) ushered in, soon turned the heads
that had already for generations been turning away from the supernatural toward
the purely natural.

Before long, the culture war began. By the 1980s it was in full swing, and by
the late 1990s the champions of new morality (standing for the old immorality)
crowed their victory. The dearth of outrage that accompanied the Clinton scandal
was a victory song for licentiousness. No wonder that this deeply flawed leader
of Western democracies characterized as a "moral imperative" his order to bomb
Serbia in spite of his having served as the political point man in the culture war
against morality. Public reference to the latter is now permissible only inasmuch
as it does not block the further advances of that new morality which is the old
immorality.

Clinton's academic entourage, which had already lost its discrimination

between the subjective and the objective, would not have warned him that the
phrase, "moral imperative" had its origin in Kant's subjectivist idealism, within
which Kant even claimed, and repeatedly, that he was God. Clearly, "the gods of
the antenna" eagerly cultivated their political Jupiter so that his sexual
voraciousness, as well as his lies and perjury, might get the same benevolent
appraisal that was granted to Jupiter of old. Clinton was just a symptom, not a
cause, and so was the manner in which the media covered up for him, as well as
for his Party which is more interested in power than in a demos taken with no
discrimination between some people and some other people.

It is that Party, a party of willful partisans who would no longer tolerate a

George Meany among them, which is responsible for much of the reverse
discrimination, taken for justice. Its percolation into young and innocent minds
found a priceless manifestation in the following incident for which I alone can
vouch. It took place on an early Saturday afternoon in mid-July of 1963, at the
height of civil rights marches, when hardly a soul could be seen in Princeton's
Palmer Square. A few steps from the Post Office a black boy hopped up to me
and chanted: "More power to the people, more power to the people, Reverend,
more power to the people." He was a nice-looking lad, unable to sound
adversarial. So I replied: "Fine. This is a deal. More power to you and more
power to me." He looked at me as if he did not understand a word. So I said
again, "More power to you and more power to me." Then he began to grasp the
issue. His eyes popped wide open. He pointed at me as to underline the point he
wanted to make: "You? People?" And he hopped away.

The silent intrusion of this counter-discrimination between people and people

as if it were a virtue was symptomatic of an erosion of that sense of virtue that
springs forth from a sense of an absolute difference between good and evil and,
conversely, of a basic equality among human beings. The root of the problem of
the present sad predicament of Western culture is a human nature which is being
let loose by all sorts of phony sophistication, after having been under the
watchful eyes of the supernatural for almost two millennia. Of that supernatural,
as defined in the Christian creeds and embodied in the Church, nothing remains
if one dismisses the dogma, that is, the firm and definite assertion about a deep
wound inflicted on human nature in its very origins. Dogmas are usually thought
of as arbitrary presumptions. Yet an overwhelming and empirical evidence
should force any unbiased mind to conclude that such a wound is real indeed and
that it cannot be healed by wishful thinking. Nothing is more evident day in and
day out than that man's intellect is befogged all too often, that man's will to do
the good has greatly weakened, and that the measure of suffering has not really
diminished but merely changed in its manifestations. As to death, it remains as
certain as taxes in spite of some physicists who write books about the physics of
immortality.

Speaking only of theological liberalism, I would note that it began to cause

havoc in the Church from the heady 1960s on. The repair of that havoc will not
begin in earnest until the dogma of original sin will be once more given the
recognition which it deserves. Until then little will be noticed of the illusion of
those noble pagans who preach the cause of a humanism pruned of the last
vestiges of the supernatural. Yet those pagans might profitably ponder a telltale
admission in Condorcet's Esquisse historique du progres humain, this modern
"Gospel of salvation without revelation." There, in discussing the seventh state
of progress, or the revival of learning in the West, Condorcet makes a grudging
admission without suspecting its far-reaching nature: "We owe to the schoolmen
more precise notions concerning the ideas that can be entertained about the
Supreme Being and his attributes; the distinction between the first cause and the
universe which it is supposed to govern; the distinction between spirit and
matter; the different meanings that can be given to the word liberty; what is
meant by creation; the manner of distinguishing the various operations of the
human mind; and the correct way of classifying such ideas as it can form of real
objects and its properties" (emphasis added).

What Condorcet failed to see or was afraid to admit was the full awareness of
the schoolmen and of all Christians who philosophized before them that
whatever they added in precision to those notions they owed it to much more
than mere intellectual acumen. They owed it to their firm conviction about the
reality of the supernatural. The latter was real for them because of the reality of
the Incarnation. Had Hegel lived in patristic or scholastic times, the Fathers and
the schoolmen would have opposed him by quoting the opening words of John's
First Letter: "This is what we proclaim to you: what was from the beginning,
what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked
upon and our hands have touched- we speak of the word of life." Whatever one
may say of the thrust of such words, they are certainly incompatible with
Hegelian idealism, which fails to cherish even the domain of sensory
impressions that Kant still claimed as an integral part of rational discourse. The
word or Wort as celebrated by Hegel is a mere idea. As such it cannot be heard,
seen, let alone be touched by one's bare hands. Logically speaking, it cannot
even be uttered because this needs real tongues and not merely ideas about them.

Hegel's stance represents the theoretically complete divesting of Western

culture of its Christian foundations. The practical implementation of this
program regained its vigor once the crimes committed by the Revolution against
humanity had been conveniently forgotten. In its latest phase the culture war
against Western culture simply wants from the defenders of the latter to
acknowledge as fully moral what it has considered rank immorality for the past
two thousand years. In Rome of old, Christians would have been left alone had
they burnt a handful of frankincense in front of an idol. Today they are under
mounting pressure to pay homage to the views of their sworn enemies in all
conceivable facets of life, public and private. And this in the name of human
dignity and freedom.

There are indeed strong indications that both dignity and freedom are turning
into shibboleths to promote rank coercion. At the same time, the evidence
mounts that Western society approaches the limit at which it can contain crime
and even preserve its physical health against the assaults of drug abuse and
sexual perversions. The question therefore arises about the truth of the old
perception that there are limits to which one can expect ideas to flourish once
totally separated from the matrix which gave them birth in the first place.

Such concerns of mine are certainly visible between the lines in the
concluding chapters of The Relevance of Physics and are very much in the open
in the last two chapters of my Gifford Lectures, The Road of Science and the
Ways to God. Those concerns are very acute in my The Purpose of It All and so
is my growing conviction that Western culture cannot survive without seeking a
spiritual rebirth in its erstwhile Christian faith. In this respect I have once more
to invoke the way crystals grow.

But in one respect I cannot, I am afraid, do the same. Today, I can but smile
on encountering hopeful expectations about a new Middle Ages to come. As I
am writing this chapter, I came across one such expectation voiced half a century
ago, when, being only in my twenties, I would have readily agreed with it. Don
Sturzo, that famed intellectual inspiration of Christian democracy in postwar
Europe, brings his book Church and State to a conclusion by referring to
Maritain's notion about the coming of a new Middle Ages. To be sure, Maritain
expected this to happen not through a political reorganization but through the
impact of God's grace, as channelled through the faithful formed in large
numbers by that grace.

I disagree, not because, having grown old, I have seen too many failures of
hopes, all promising a millennium to set in within a decade or so, perhaps even
sooner. I disagree because I have looked for a theological reason for such
invariable failure and found it lying on the very surface. There was no need to
apply profound, let alone merely sophisticated or hopelessly convoluted
reasoning and notions. One only had to resonate to the obvious, though I must
say, the obvious may escape even the one who surveys matters from the highest
possible vantage point. I mean an encyclical and an observation of Paul VI,
whose papacy is often spoken of as a tragedy.

His tragedy may have much to do with the fact that he was too eager a disciple
of Maritain. Unlike Maritain, always a professor, Montini was never a professor,
but possibly always wanted to be one. He was a professor manque, if one is
allowed a word that may sound disrespectful but is not meant to be such. It
merely registers a fact about human limitations that accompany one even after he
had reached that exalted chair which is Peter's.
 The encyclical in question is Paul VI's Populorum progressio, which strikes a
tone very different from notable utterances of Pius IX and Leo XIII. The tone of
Populorum progressio is in line with Paul VI's impassioned call for putting an
end to the vicious cycle of poverty. He had, of course, in mind the availability,
for the first time in history, of technical means of producing plenty for everyone.
But was the availability of means to do away with shortages a justification for
removing from focus the ever present shortcomings of the human will? Once
those shortcomings slipped out of focus, the vision of Paul VI had to be different
from Leo XIII's statement in his great social encyclical Rerum novarum. There
the promise about the total abolition of poverty is characterized as a cruel sin,
the sin of dangling false hopes before others' eyes.

Surely, Paul VI knew far better than that. Otherwise he would not have made,
in another context, the observation that Jesus' parable about the field into which
the enemy sowed tares is the most timely parable for our times. What makes this
parable so timely is that it is timeless. For according to the parable, the sowing
of those tares would go on to the end of time. Moreover, it is also stated in that
parable that the servants must not try to rush into the field and pull out the tares.
Crash reform programs will do more harm than good, whether in politics or in
Church polities. Equally harmful is to try to have culture without cult, because
such a culture is the cultivation of the self or of society.

In 1994 it was in this vein that I argued the correlation among science, culture,
and cult, at a Plenary Meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Science.2 I would
not have spoken so categorically had that view not taken hold of me for some
time, although I can hardly trace it back to the 1970s, except in a broader sense.
Feeling oneself in the thick of a veritable culture war, one has only one choice:
to fight. This readiness of mine to fight had been noted by others for some time.
The latest of such cases came at the Plenary Meeting of the Academy in
November 1998. Then, more than on previous occasions, a very large number of
guest speakers were invited.

Since this book is the account of the history of my mind, I do not think it
appropriate to expand on some organizational problems connected with the
working of the Academy, although a few words might help some Catholics.
They are rightly puzzled by some printed Proceedings of some recent Plenary
Meetings of a Scientific Academy which is Pontifical. Suffice it to note that to
let scientists, however prominent, tackle grave philosophical and ethical (and
theological) problems should appear a dubious venture to anyone who takes
seriously the distinction between quantities and qualities and who also knows
that expertise with quantities does not provide the proper touch to handle the
vast realm of qualities and values in a competent manner.

Quite a few of the invitees to that Meeting came with a distinctly agnostic and
atheistic agenda. Even some of these felt that some of their numbers had drifted
too far from matters scientific into matters ideological. One of these, from
Cambridge, had some points of Darwinism for his subject, but used more than
half of his talk ranting and raving about religion as the source of greatest evils in
human history. He thought he was original with his claim, which Lucretius had
already made two thousand years ago. Lucretius also messed up whatever was of
good science in his time. Nothing is new under the sun.

Clearly, some points had to be voiced on the difference between science and
ideologies grafted on it, and especially when the ideology in question rested on
some glaring illogicality. I reminded one speaker, who was praising the value of
absolute pragmatism, that such pragmatism was sheer dogmatism. It was rather
pathetic to listen to his reply in which he wanted to eat his "pragmatist" cake and
still have it. Another, a Nobel laureate physicist, who tried to parade as a
humanist, suddenly reversed himself when I noted that the verb "is" cannot be
measured by inches, or by ounces, or by gallons. The context was the brain-mind
relationship, which he wanted to be left exclusively to the scientific method,
because, he said, science taught us the supreme validity of "unitary
explanations." Without knowing it, he was lost so hopelessly in reductionism as
to be oblivious to elementary non-sequiturs. Humanists, who in this age of
science try to live as so many babes in the woods, may also take note.

Not everybody was incensed by my interventions. One guest-participant from

Brazil thought that my remarks were the highlights of the Meeting. Another
participant, invited to comment on one of the major papers, was Bill Shea, an
historian of science, who in 1972 came out with an excellent book on Galileo
and whom I was pleased to recommend for tenure at McGill University. On the
third day of the Meeting, after he had heard several of my interventions, he
pulled me aside and said: "Stanley, you are still fighting."

I have been fighting, and consciously so, ever since in the early 1940s I read a
series of public lectures on "God in History," given by a noted Hungarian
theologian at the University of Budapest. The book came to a close with a
quotation from the Book of Sirach: "Fight, and the God of truth will fight for
you." This I loved to rephrase as in the form: "Fight for the truth and the God of
truth would fight for you." For a long time, I hoped for a quick success, provided
one fought well. In that sense I cannot apply the metaphor of the manner in
which crystals grow and grow very slowly. But I was not reluctant to re-engage
in the fighting, although it usually earns one more resentment than favors, at
times even from those for whom one keeps fighting.

The resentment stems from the wish to drift with the mainstream where option
for comfort rules supreme. The mainstream was profoundly disturbed on
September 11, 2001. Suddenly the comforts of technology lay fully vulnerable to
its very tools. A technocratic world, which has parted with the faith that had
provided its scientific foundations, was suddenly reminded of the power of faith,
yet it could not see the difference between blind faith and a faith that has done
justice to all the reasonable demands of reason, including science. That world is
unable to see the reason why Islam is powerless to let its faith come to terms
with technology, whose world is a far cry from the voluntarism of the Koran.
Copies of my Science and Creation, with its chapter on the detours that science
was forced to take in the Muslim world, were on occasion burned by zealous
Muslims. One of my Farmington Institute Lectures was interrupted by some
Muslims studying at Oxford University. The same type will be infuriated by my
booklet, "Jesus, Islam, Science," which September 11 prompted me to write.' A
Western world so reluctant to mention the name of Jesus even in the context of
the Christmas holidays would hardly take note of that booklet. In confronting
Muslim fundamentalism that world does not want to confront its own
fundamentals.

The booklet is another instance of my readiness to join the culture war in

which a part of the West is a myopic agressor and another part is a perplexed
defender. Whether fighting wisely or not, whether fighting in the hope of a quick
victory or regardless of victory in the short run, I have been fighting, and the
fight has always been on behalf of a Christian culture in an age which is not only
that of science, but also becomes more so at an accelerated rate. In that sense the
metaphor of the crystal growth fully applies. In addition, I did not find too
inconveniencing my being cast in the role of a fighter. Apparently it suited my
nature. Most importantly, I noted that one must remain truthful to the role one
has been given or else no role worthy of that name is left for one.

Others in whom I found an ideal did the same. At one time or another they
even gave impressive capsule formulations to their individual way of fighting.
One of these is Newman's dictum, unusquisque in sensu suo abundet. He did not
say it on the spur of the moment, nor in an insignificant context. The dictum
occurs in Newman 's Grammar of Assent, his most mature work, partly because
he literally wrote it over twenty years. I know of serious students of that work
who failed to note that dictum there, let alone notice its significance. Having
now ploughed through most of the heavy volumes of Newman's letters and
diaries, I saw that dictum of his or some equivalent of it appear again and again.

The dictum may, of course, be misconstrued as a vote on behalf of

subjectivism, which Newman certainly did not want to promote. He knew why
he became a Catholic. Also, as one so keen on the reality of the effects of
original sin, he was, in spite of a very sensitive nature, never overly upset by
being misinterpreted. He might have found a stanza in Dante's Purgatorio very
much to his liking as the best way of shrugging off unjust criticism: "Vien dietro
a me, e lascia dir le genti: sta come torre ferma, the no crolla gia mai la cima per
soffiar de' venti."4 So did Virgil encourage Dante as they had to negotiate a
treacherous bend in their journey through Purgatory.

Life is a purgatory, indeed a crucible at times, for purposes partly hidden.

Some of those purposes become clear in the retrospect of a few years and
perhaps in a few decades. Others remain hidden, to be unveiled only when the
phrase sub specie aeternitatis will stand for a retrospect on all time and not
merely for a hopeful prospect to be had before one's time is over.

Until then one must feel satisfied with the fact that "militia est vita hominis
super terram" (on this earth man's life is a military service), to recall from the
Vulgate a sober reflection of the much tried Job. Our soldiering must go on, with
the phrase "Only a few good marines are needed" in our focus, a phrase which
summerizes a truly existential theology. The phrase also conveys the theological
equivalent of a mere private, which is the rank of a useless servant, who merely
does his duty. May this remain the matter foremost in my mind.
The list of titles that were published prior to June 30, 1991, first appeared almost
entirely in Paul M. Haffner's work, Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study
in the Thought of Stanley L. Jaki (Front Royal, VA: 1991), pp. 173-200. The
present list is enlarged with titles that appeared between that date and December
31, 2001, together with titles that have been accepted for publication in 2002.

1941

1. "Szechenyi igy gondolta," ["Such was Szechenyi's view"] A Sziv [The Heart]
(Budapest, Dec. 1, 1941), p. 1.

1951

1. "Protestans visszhang - Katolikus valasz" ["Protestant Echo - Catholic

Reply"], Katolikus Szemle ["Catholic Review," published in Rome in
Hungarian] 3 (1951), pp. 32-34 in 4°.

1952

1. "Uj torekvesek as Egyhaz hivo megertesere" ["New Trends toward an

Understanding of the Church"], Katolikus Szemle 4 (1952), pp. 19-22 in 4°.

1953

1. "Stockholmtol Lundig: Az ekumenikus mozgalom iranya es szelleme" ["From

Stockholm to Lund: Direction and Spirit of the Ecumenical Movement"],
Katolikus Szemle 5 (1953), pp. 16-19 in 4°.

1954

1. "Ekumenikus Kongresszus Evanstonban" ["Ecumenical Congress in

Evanston"], Katolikus Szemle 6 (1954), pp. 103-107 in 4°.

2. "Szent Pal - Krisztus harsonaja" ["Saint Paul: Christ's Trumpet"], A

Delamerikai Magyar Hirlap Evkonyve ["Yearbook of the South-American
Hungarian News"] (Sao Paolo: Delamerikai Magyar Hirlap, 1954), pp. 19-23.

3. "In His Image," Image [mimeographed Literary Bulletin of Saint Vincent

Seminary, Latrobe, Pa.] 1/2 (May 1954), pp. 3-6.

4. "Istenhez lancolva" ["Chained to God"], Delamerikai Magyar Hirlap, March

21, 1954.

5. "Krisztus mint regenyhos" ["Christ as novel-hero"], Delamerikai Magyar

Hirlap, March 28, April 4, and April 11, 1954.

6. "Harom R es ami utana kovetkezik" ["The Three R's and Beyond"],

Delamerikai Magyar Hirlap, April 25, 1954.

7. "Az ehes emberiseg" ["Mankind in the Grip of Hunger"], Delamerikai Magyar

Hirlap, May 2, 1954.

8. "Keresztenyseg es irodalom" ["Christianity and Literature"], Delamerikai

Magyar Hirlap, May 9, and May 16, 1954.

9. "Ismet a harom R" ["The Three R's Again"], Delamerikai Magyar Hirlap, May
23, 1954).

10. "Washington magyar ezredese" ["Washington's Hungarian Colonel"],

Delamerikai Magyar Hirlap, June 6, 1954.

11. "Magyar fiataloknak: Gettysburgtol a Don Kanyarig" ["To Young

Hungarians: From Gettysburg to the Don's Bend"], Delamerikai Magyar Hirlap,
June 13, 1954.

12. "McCarthy es a macartizmus" ["McCarthy and McCarthyism"], Delamerikai

Magyar Hirlap, July 4, 1954.

13. "Az en rogeszmem" ["My Fixed Idea"], Delamerikai Magyar Hirlap, July 4,
1954.

1956
1. "Chance and Evolution," Civitas Dei: A Magyar Katolikus Tudomanyos es
Midveszeti Akademia Kd1di Gyorgy Tarsasaga Evkonyve ["Yearbook of the
Kaldi Gyorgy Society of the Hungarian Catholic Academy of Arts and
Sciences"] (Saint Norbert College, West De Pere, Wis.: 1956), pp. 46-67.

1957

1. Les tendances nouvelles de 1'ecclesiologie [Doctoral Dissertation for S.T.D.,

Pontificio Ateneo S. Anselmo, Roma, 1950] (Rome: Herder and Herder, 1957),
274pp.

1958

1. "A Study of the Distribution of Radon, Thoron, and Their Decay Products
above and below the Ground," jointly with Victor F. Hess, Journal of
Geophysical Research 63 (1958), pp. 373-390.

2. "A csillagaszat uj utjai" ["The New Paths of Astronomy"], Katolikus Szemle

10 (1958), pp. 26-32.

3. "A vilagegyetem kialakulasa" ["The Evolution of the Universe"], Katolikus

Szemle 10 (1958), pp. 71-78.

4. "Az elet eredete" ["The Origin of Life"], Katolikus Szemle 10 (1958), pp.
123-129.

5. "Van-e Met mas egitesteken?" ["Is There Life on Other Celestial Bodies?"],
Katolikus Szemle 10 (1958), pp. 169-176.

1959

1. "The Ecclesiology of Abbot Vonier," The American Benedictine Review 10

(1959), pp. 163-175.

2. "Relativitas es abszolutum" ["Relativity and the Absolute"], Katolikus Szemle

11 (1959), pp. 41-54.

3. "A vilagur kiiszoben: A Nemzetkozi Geofizikai ev eredmenyei" ["On the

Threshold of Outer Space: The Results of the International Geophysical Year"],
Katolikus Szemle 11 (1959), pp. 123-134.

4. "Hit es tudomany Newton muveiben" ["Faith and Science in Newton's

Works"], Katolikus Szemle 11 (1959), pp. 210-220.

1960

1. "A titokzatos anyag" ["The Mysterious Matter"], Katolikus Szemle 12 (1960),

pp. 132-136 and 203-211.

1961

1. "A klasszikus fizika utja" ("The Road of Classical Physics"), Katolikus

Szemle 13 (1961), pp. 42-53

2. "A titokzatos gravitacio," ["The Mysterious Gravitation"], Katolikus Szemle

13 (1961), pp. 125-136.

3. "Radiocsillagaszat" ["Radioastronomy"], Katolikus Szemle 13 (1961), pp.

210-219.

4. "A termeszettudomany sziiletese" ["The Birth of Natural Science"], Katolikus

Szemle 13 (1961), pp. 282-293.

1962

1. "A modern tudomany kezdetei" ["The Beginnings of Modern Science"],

Katolikus Szemle 14 (1962), pp. 134-144.

1963

1. Les tendances nouvelles de I'ecclesiologie, reprinting of 1957(1).

1965

1. "Uj fejezet a csillagaszatban?" ["A New Chapter in Astronomy?"], Katolikus

Szemle 17 (1965), pp. 77-79.

2. "Van-e elet mas egitesteken?" ["Is There Life on Other Celestial Bodies?"],
Katolikus Szemle 17 (1965), pp. 362-365; reprint of 1958(5).
 1966

1. The Relevance of Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966),

604pp.

1967

1. "Recent Orthodox Ecclesiology," English translation by J. M. Desjardins of

pp. 99-105 of 1957(1), Diakonia 2 (1967), pp. 250-265.

2. "The Role of Faith in Physics," Zygon 2 (1967), pp. 187-202.

3. "Olbers', Halley's, or Whose Paradox?" American Journal of Physics 35

(1967), pp. 200-210.

1969

1. Brain, Mind and Computers (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 267pp.

2. The Paradox of Olbers' Paradox: A Case History of Scientific Thought (New

York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 269pp.

3. "Goethe and the Physicists," American Journal of Physics 37 (1969), pp. 195-
203.

4. "Introductory Essay" to Pierre Duhem. To Save the Phenomena: An Essay on

the Idea of Physical Theory from Plato to Galileo, trans. E. Doland and C.
Maschler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. ix-xxvi.

1970

1. Festrede am Jubilaumstage der Olbers-Gesellschaft (Bremen: [Olbers

Gesellschaft], 1970), 15pp.

2. "Olbers als Kosmologe," Nachrichten der Olbers Gesellschaft 79 (October

1970), pp. 5-13 in 4°.

3. "Drei kosmologische Vortrage von Wilhelm Olbers," Nachrichten der Olbers

Gesellschaft 79 (October 1970), pp. 14-28.
4. "New Light on Olbers' Dependence on Cheseaux," Journal for the History of
Astronomy 1 (1970), pp. 53-55.

5. "Re: 'Jaki and Goethe'," American Journal of Physics 38 (1970), p. 546.

6. The Relevance of Physics, reprint of 1966(1).

1971

1. "The Milky Way before Galileo," Journal for the History of Astronomy 2
(1971), pp. 161-167.

2. "Le Prix Lecomte du Nouy: Discours de remerciements. Rev. Stanley Jaki,

Laureat du Prix americain Lecomte du Nouy," Cahiers de l'Association Lecomte
du Nouy 3 (Spring 1971), pp. 9-15.

1972

1. The Milky Way: An Elusive Road for Science (New York: Science History
Publications; Newton Abbott, England: David & Charles, 1972), xi + 352 pp.

2. Address given on accepting the Lecomte du Nouy Prize for 1970, Cahier
bilingue de 1'Association Lecomte du Nouy (Spring 1972), pp. 48-54.

3. "The Original Formulation of the Titius-Bode Law," Journal for the History of
Astronomy 3 (1972), pp. 136-138.

4. "The Milky Way from Galileo to Wright," Journal for the History of
Astronomy 3 (1972), pp. 199-204.

5. "Das Titius-Bodesche Gesetz im Licht der Originaltexte," Nachrichten der

Olbers Gesellschaft 86 (October 1972), pp. 1-8.

6. "The Early History of the Titius-Bode Law," American Journal of Physics 40

(1972), pp. 1014-1023.

7. "Brain, Mind and Computers," Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation

24 (1972), pp. 12-17.
8. "No Other Options," Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation 24 (1972),
p. 127.

9. "The Titius-Bode Law: A Strange Bicentenary," Sky and Telescope 43

(1972), pp. 280-281.

10. Review of P. T Gunter (ed. and trans.), Bergson and the Evolution of Physics
(Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1969), Zygon 7 (1972), pp.
138-139.

1973

1. "God and Creation: A Biblical-Scientific Reflection," Theology Today 30

(1973), pp. 111-120.

2. "Science morale et ethique scientifique," Cahier bilingue de l'Association

Lecomte de Nouy (Spring 1973), pp. 15-30.

3. "Ethical Science and Scientific Ethics," English version of 1973(2) Cahier

bilingue de l'Association Lecomte de Nouy (Spring 1973), pp. 47-61.

4. "The Last Century of Science: Progress, Problems and Prospects,"

Proceedings of the Second International Humanistic Symposium (Athens:
Hellenic Society for Humanistic Studies, 1973), pp. 248-264.

5. Review of M. N. Richter, Science as a Cultural Process (Cambridge, Mass.:

Schenken Publishing, 1972), Isis 64 (1973), p. 544.

6. Review of L. S. Swenson, Jr., The Ethereal Aether: A History of the

Michelson-Morley-Miller Aether-Drift Experiments 1880-1930 (Austin, Texas:
University of Texas Press, 1972), American Scientist (JanuaryFebruary 1973), p.
104.

7. Articles in The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Biography (New York:

McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973) on the following scientists:

Ampere 1:164-165

Becquerel 1:453-454
Bohr 2:44-47

Boltzmann 2:52-54

Born 2:82-83

Bothe 2:100-101

Brahe 2:140-141

Carnot, S. 2:380-381

Chadwick 2:459-460

Clausius 3:25-26

Cockcroft 3:61-62

Copernicus 3:61-62

Curie, M. 3:213-215

Debye 3:213-215

Dirac 3:389-390

Fizeau 4:131

Fourier 4:173

Fraunhofer 4:207-208

Fresnel 4:233-234

Galileo 4:289-292

Hamilton 5:62-64

Helmholtz 5:177-179
Hertz 5:243-244

Joliot-Curie 6:50

Kepler 6:176-179

Kirchoff 6:214-215

Lorentz 6:568-569

Napier 8:61-62.

Oersted 8:183-185

Ohm 8:191-192

Regiomontanus 9:133-134

Roentgen 9:247-249

Vesalius 11:132-133

Waals, van der 11:197-198

Wigner 11:357-358

Wilson, C. 11:397-398

1974

1. Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe

(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press 1974), 367pp.

2. "Scientific Ethics and Ethical Science," Philosophy and Humanistic

Literature: Three Scientific Communications (Athens: Hellenic Society for
Humanistic Studies, 1974), pp. 39-53.

3. "The Better Part of Kohoutek," Hallmark News (S. Orange, N. J.: Seton Hall
University) 5 (Spring 1974), pp. 4-5.
 1975

1. Translation from the Italian, with an Introduction and notes, of Giordano

Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 174pp.

2. The Milky Way: An Elusive Road for Science, paperback reprint of 1972(1)
(New York: Science History Publications, 1975).

3. "A Hundred Years of Two Cultures," The University of Windsor Review 11

(1975), pp. 55-59.

4. "Knowledge in an Age of Science," The University of Windsor Review 11

(1975), pp. 80-103.

5. Culture and Science, reprint with new pagination of 1975(3) and (4).
(Windsor, Canada: University of Windsor Press, 1975), 52pp.

6. "The Edge of Precision," reprint of 1966(1), pp. 273-279, in John F. Hanahan

(ed.), The Ascent of Man: Sources and Interpretations (Boston: Little Brown and
Company, 1975), pp. 257-262.

7. Review of N. R. Hanson, Constellations and Conjectures, W. C. Humphreys,

Jr. (ed.) (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1973), Isis 66 (1975), pp. 110-112.

1976

1. Translation from the German, with an Introduction and notes, of J. H.

Lambert, Cosmological Letters on the Arrangement of the WorldEdifice (New
York: Science History Publications, 1976), 245pp.

2. "Theological Aspects of Creative Science," in W. A. McKinney (ed.),

Creation, Christ and Culture: Studies in Honour of T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T.
& T. Clark, 1976), pp. 149-166.

3. "Von subjektiven Wissenschaftlern zur objektiven Wissenschaft," German

translation of 1977(1), in W. Becker and K. Hubner (eds.), Objectivitat in den
Naturwissenschaften (Hamburg: Hoffman and Campe, 1976), pp. 154-168.

4. "The Five Forms of Laplace's Cosmogony," American Journal of Physics 44

(1976), pp. 4-11.

5. Review of F. Ferre, Shaping the Future: Resources of the Post Modern World
(New York: Harper and Row, 1976), Theology Today 33 (1976), pp. 315-317.

1977

1. "From Subjective Scientists to Objective Science," Proceedings of the Third

International Humanistic Symposium (Athens: Hellenic Society for Humanistic
Studies, 1977), pp. 314-336.

2. "Lambert: Self-taught Physicist," Physics Today 30 (September 1977), pp. 25-

32.

3. "Dunkle Regenten als Vorlaufer schwarzer Locher," Nachrichten der Olbers

Gesellschaft 107 (December 1977), pp. 3-10.

4. "The History of Science and the Idea of an Oscillating Universe," in W.

Yourgrau and A. D. Breck (eds.), Cosmology, History and Theology (New
York: Plenum Press, 1977), pp. 233-251.

5. "An English translation of the Third Part of Kant's Universal Natural History
and Theory of the Heavens," in W. Yourgrau and A. D. Breck (eds.),
Cosmology, History and Theology (New York: Plenum Press, 1977), pp. 387-
403.

1978

1. Planets and Planetarians: A History of Theories of the Origin of Planetary

Systems (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press; New York: The Halstead Press
of John Wiley Inc., 1978), vi + 266pp, with 42 illustrations.

2. The Road of Science and the Ways to God: The Gifford Lectures 1975 and
1976 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Edinburgh: Scottish Academic
Press, 1978), 475pp.

3. Brain, Mind and Computers, reprint with a new Introduction of 1969(1)

(South Bend, Ind.: Gateway Editions, 1978), 267pp.
4. And on This Rock: The Witness of One Land and Two Covenants (Notre
Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 1978), 128pp.

5. The Origin of Science and the Science of its Origin (Edinburgh: Scottish
Academic Press; South Bend, Ind.: Gateway Editions, 1978), 160pp.

6. "Decision-Making in Business: Amoral?" in Trends in Business and Ethics.

Nijenrode Studies in Business 3 (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 1-10.

7. "Ethics and the Science of Decision-Making in Business: A Specification of

Perspectives," in Trends in Business and Ethics. Nijenrode Studies in Business 3
(Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), pp. 141-156.

8. "The Chaos of Scientific Cosmology," in D. Huff and O. Prewett (eds.), The

Nature of the Physical Universe: 1976 Nobel Conference (New York: John
Wiley, 1978), pp. 83-112.

9. "A Forgotten Bicentenary: Johann Georg von Soldner," Sky and Telescope 6
(June 1978), pp. 460-461.

10. "Johann Georg von Soldner and the Gravitational Bending of Light. With an
English translation of his Essay on it published in 1801," Foundations of Physics
8 (1978), pp. 927-950.

11. "Lambert and the Watershed of Cosmology," Scientia (Milano) 113 (1978),
pp. 75-95.

12. "Lambert e lo spartiacque della cosmologia," Italian translation of 1978(11),

Scientia (Milano) 113 (1978), pp. 97-114.

13. "The Metaphysics of Discovery and the Rediscovery of Metaphysics,"

Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 52 (1978), pp.
188-196.

14. Review of H. Schwarz, Our Cosmic Journey: Christian Anthropology in the

Light of Current Trends in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Theology
(Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg, 1977), Theology Today 35 (1978) pp. 360-362.

15. "Paradoxes in Cosmology," Cahiers Fundamenta Scientiae (Strasbourg) 82

(1978), pp. 33-36.

1979

1. "Das Gravitations-Paradoxon des unendlichen Universums," Sudhoffs Archiv

63 (1979), pp. 105-122. English version in 1990(24).

2. "The Reality Beneath: The World View of Rutherford," in M. Bunge and W.

R. Shea (eds.), Rutherford and Physics at the Turn of the Century (New York:
Dawson and Science History Publications, 1979), pp. 110-123.

3. "The Forces and Powers of Nature," Theology Today 36 (1979), pp. 87-91.

4. "Sur 1'edition et la reedition de la traduction francaise des Cosmologische

Briefe de Lambert," Revue d'Histoire des Sciences 32 (1979), pp. 305-314.

5. "The Cosmological Letters of Lambert and His Cosmology," Colloque

International Jean-Henri Lambert (1728-1777) (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1979),
pp. 291-300.

6. "'And on This Rock ...' Divine Origin of the Papacy," The Wanderer
(December 13, 1979), pp. 1 and 6.

7. "Science and Christian Theism: A Mutual Witness," Scottish Journal of

Theology 32 (1979), pp. 563-570.

8. Review of H. Reichenbach, Selected Writings, 1909-1953, M. Reichenbach

and R. S. Cohen (eds.) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), Nature 282 (November 1,
1979), pp. 114-115.

9. Review of E. M. Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science: Belief in

Creation in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman,
1977), Theology Today 35 (1979), pp. 496-497.

10. Review of R. Jaquel, Le savant mulhousien jean-Henri Lambert (1728-

1777): Etudes critiques et documentaires (Paris: Editions Ophrys, 1977), Isis 70
(1979), p. 178.

1980
1. Cosmos and Creator (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1980), xii +
168pp.

2. The Road of Science and the Ways to God, Phoenix Paperback reprint of
1978(2).

3. Review of A. R. Peacocke, Creation and the World of Science: The Bampton

Lectures 1978 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), Nature 284 (24 April 1980), pp.
667-668.

4. Review of G. Tauber, Man's View of the Universe. A Pictorial History:

Evolving Concepts of the Universe from Ancient Times to Today's Space Probes
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1979), Isis 71 (1980), p. 668.

5. "'And on This Rock ...' Divine Origin of the Papacy," reprint, (Wanderer
Press) in brochure form with new Foreword, of 1979(6).

6. "A Brief Reminiscence," in Henry Francis Regnery, 1945-1979: In Memoriam

(Three Oaks, Mich.: 1980), p. 91.

1981

1. Translation, with Introduction and Notes, of Immanuel Kant, Universal

Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic
Press, 1981), 302pp.

2. Cosmos and Creator, American edition of 1980(1) (Chicago: Gateway

Editions, 1981).

3. "Chance or Reality: Interaction in Nature versus Measurement in Physics,"

Philosophia (Athens) 10-11 (1980-81), pp. 85-105.

4. "De la science-fiction a la philosophie," in Science et antiscience. Collection:

Recherches et debats (Paris: Centurion, 1981), pp. 37-51.

5. "Lo absoluto bajo lo relativo: Unas reflexiones sobre las teorias de Einstein,"
Anuario Filosofico (Pamplona: Universidad de Navarra) 14/1 (1981), pp. 41-62.

6. "Religion and Science: The Cosmic Connection," in J. A. Howard (ed.),

Belief, Faith and Reason (Belfast: Christian Journals, 1981), pp. 11-28.

7. "The Business of Christianity and the Christianity of Business," Conference

on World Religions and Business Behavior. Documents (Nijenrode, The
Netherlands: The Netherlands School of Business, 1981), pp. 206-229.

8. Author's Abstract of The Road of Science and the Ways to God 1978(2), The
Monist 64 (1981), p. 126.

9. Author's Abstract of Cosmos and Creator 1980(1) and 1981(2), The Monist 64
(1981), p. 420.

10. "Il caos della cosmologia scientifica," Italian translation of 1978(8) in D.

Huff and 0. Prewett (eds.), La natura dell'universo fisico (Torino: P. Boringhieri,
1981), pp. 88-114.

1982

1. "The University and the Universe," in J. R. Wilburn (ed.), Freedom, Order and
the University (Malibu, Ca.: Pepperdine University Press, 1982), pp. 43-68.

2. "Il caso o la realta," Italian translation of 1981(3), Il Nuovo Areopago 1/2

(1982), pp. 28-48.

3. "Zufall oder Realitat," German translation of 1981(3), Philosophia naturalis 19

(1982), pp. 498-518.

4. "From Scientific Cosmology to a Created Universe," Irish Astronomical

journal 15 (1982), pp. 253-262.

5. Author's Abstract of Universal Natural History 1981(1), The Monist 65

(1982), p. 281.

1983

1. Et sur ce Roc: Temoignage d'une terre et de deux testaments, French

translation of 1978(4) (Paris: Tequi, 1983), 111pp.

2. Angels, Apes and Men (La Salle, Ill.: Sherwood Sugden and Company, 1983),
128pp.

3. "The Wronging of Wright," in A. Van der Merwe (ed.), Old and New
Questions in Physics, Cosmology, Philosophy and Theoretical Biology. Essays
in Honor of Wolfgang Yourgrau (New York: Plenum, 1983), pp. 593-605.

4. "E su questa pietra ...," Italian translation of pp. 45-52 and 93-102 of 1978(4),
Il Nuovo Areopago 2/4 (1983), pp. 197-214.

5. "The Greeks of Old and the Novelty of Science," Arete Mneme: Konst
Vourveris. Vourveris Festschrift (Athens: Hellenic Humanistic Society, 1983),
pp. 263-277.

6. "The Physics of Impetus and the Impetus of the Kuran," International

Conference on Science in Islamic Polity - Its Past, Present and Future: Abstract
of Papers, 19-24 November 1983, Islamabad (Islamabad: Ministry of Science
and Technology, Government of Pakistan and Organisation of Islamic
Conference, 1983), pp. 36-37. For full text see 1985(7).

7. "Cosmology as Philosophy," 16. Weltkongress fur Philosophic 1978

(Frankfurt: a. M./Bern; New York: Peter Lang, 1983), pp. 149-154.

1984

1. Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem (Dordrecht: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1984), xii + 472pp.

2. "Maritain and Science," The New Scholasticism 58 (1984), pp. 267-292.

3. "Chesterton's Landmark Year: The Blatchford-Chesterton Debate of 1903-

1904," The Chesterton Review 10 (1984), pp. 409-423.

4. "God and Man's Science: A View of Creation," Christian Vision: Man in

Society (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 1984), pp. 35-49.

5. "The Creator's Coming," Homiletic and Pastoral Review 85/3 (December

1984), pp. 10-15.

6. Introduction to E. Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again, trans. J.

Lyon (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), pp. xii-xviii.

7. "From Scientific Cosmology to a Created Universe," reprint of 1982(4) in R.

A. Varghese (ed.), The Intellectuals Speak out about God (Chicago: Regnery-
Gateway, 1984), pp. 61-78.

8. "An Author's Reflections," The Dawson Newsletter 3 (Summer 1984), pp. 6-

8.

9. "The History of Science and the Idea of an Oscillating Universe," reprint of

1977(4) with a new postscript, The Center journal, 4 (1984) pp. 131-165.

10. Review of P. Redondi, Epistemologia e storia della scienza. Le svolte

teoriche da Duhem a Bachelard (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1978), Revue d'Histoire des
Sciences 37 (1984), pp. 85-87.

11. Review of A. R. Peacocke (ed.), The Sciences and Theology (Stocksfield:

Oriel Press, 1984), The Heythrop Journal 25 (1984), pp. 391-393.

12. Review of L. Bouyer, Cosmos et la gloire de Dieu (Paris: Cerf, 1982), The
Downside Review 102 (1984), pp. 301-307.

13. Review of P. Bowler, The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti Darwinian Theories in

the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins Press, 1983), The
Tablet 238 (February 11, 1984), pp. 135-136.

14. "Scientists on Science and God," review of F. Hoyle, The Intelligent

Universe (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984); Sir John Eccles and D.
Robinson, The Wonder of Being Human: Our Brain and Our Mind (New York:
The Free Press, 1984); P. Davies, Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified
Theory of Nature (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), Reflections (The
Wanderer Review of Literature, Culture and the Arts) 3 (Fall 1984), p. 9.

15. Review of V. Long, Upon This Rock (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press,
1983) Reflections 4 (Winter 1984), p. 20.

1985

1. Angels, Apes and Men, reprint of 1983(2).

2. Introductory Essay to Pierre Duhem, To Save the Phenomena, paperback
reprint of 1969(4).

3. "The Absolute Beneath the Relative: Reflections on Einstein's Theories,"

English version of 1981(5), Intercollegiate Review 20 (Spring/Summer 1985),
pp. 29-38.

4. "Christ, Catholics and Abortion," Homiletic and Pastoral Review 85 (March

1985), pp. 7-15.

5. "The Creator's Coming," reprint of 1984(5), Faith Magazine 17/3 (1985), pp.
10-14.

6. "On Whose Side is History?" National Review (23 August 1985), pp. 41-47.

7. "The Physics of Impetus and the Impetus of the Koran," Modern Age 29
(1985), pp. 153-160; see 1983(6).

8. "Chance or Reality," reprint of 1982(2), Freiheit and Notwendigkeit in der

Europaischen Zivilisation: Perspectiven des modernen Bewusstseins. Referate
and Texte des 5. Internationalen Humanistischen Symposiums 1981 (Athens:
Hellenic Humanistic Society, 1985), pp. 303-322.

9. "Christian Culture and Duhem's Work," reprint of 1984(8), Downside Review

103 (1985), pp. 137-143.

10. Review of J. Polkinghorne, The Way the World Is (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 1984, National Review (22 March 1985), pp. 53-55.

11. Review of P. B. Medawar, The Limits of Science (New York: Harper and
Row, 1984), Reflections 5/1 (Winter 1985) p. 9.

12. "Creation and Monastic Creativity," Monastic Studies (Toronto) 16

(Christmas 1985), pp. 79-92.

13. "The Teacher: Dr. Victor Hess. The Student: Rev. Stanley Jaki," Fordham
(New York), (Fall 1985), pp. 10-11.

14. Foreword to Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity,

Place, Time, Void and the Plurality of Worlds, R. Ariew (ed. and trans.),
(Chicago: University Press, 1985), pp. xi-xviii.

15. "Science and Hope," The Hillsdale Review 7/2 (1985), pp. 3-16.

16. "Dawson and the New Age," review of C. Dawson, Christianity and the New
Age, reprinted with an Introduction by John J. Mulloy (Manchester, N.H.:
Sophia Institute Press, 1985), The Hillsdale Review 7/3 (1985), pp. 57-60.

1986

1. Science and Creation, reprint with a postscript of 1974(1), 377pp.

2. Lord Gifford and His Lectures: A Centenary Retrospect (Edinburgh: Scottish

Academic Press, 1986; Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986), 138pp.

3. The Keys of the Kingdom: A Tool's Witness to Truth (Chicago: The

Franciscan Herald Press, 1986), 226pp.

4. Chesterton: A Seer of Science (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), x +

164pp.

5. Chance or Reality and Other Essays (Lanham, Md and London: University

Press of America; Bryn Mawr, Pa.: The Intercollegiate Studies Inc., 1986), viii +
250pp; reprint of 1967(2), 1969(3), 1975(3), 1975(4), 1976(2), 1977(1), 1981(3),
1982(1), 1983(5), 1984(2), 1984(3), 1984(8), 1985(6).

6. "Order in Nature and Society: Open or Specific," in G. W. Carey (ed.), Order,

Freedom and the Polity (Critical Essays on the Open Society) (Lanham, Md. and
London: University Press of America; Bryn Mawr, Pa.: The Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, 1986), pp. 91-111.

7. "Man of One Wife or Celibacy," Homiletic and Pastoral Review 86/4 (January
1986), pp. 18-25.

8. "Un siecle de Gifford Lectures," French translation of Chapter 1 of 1986(2),

Archives de Philosophic 49 (1986), pp. 3-49.

9. "The Case for Galileo's Rehabilitation," Fidelity 5 (March 1986), pp. 37-41.
10. "A Most Holy Night," review of R. Laurentin, The Truth of Christmas
Beyond the Myths: The Infancy Narratives of Christ (Petersham, Mass.: St.
Bede's Publications, 1986), Reflections 5 (Summer 1986), pp. 1 and 21.

11. "Cosmic Stakes," review of J. D. Barrow and F. J. Tipler, The Anthropic

Cosmological Principle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); J. D.
Barrow and J. Silk, The Origin and Evolution of the Expanding Universe (New
York: Basic Books, 1983); and H. R. Pagels, Perfect Symmetry: The Search for
the Beginning of Time (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), Reflections 5
(Summer 1986), p. 8.

12. "Monkeys and Machine-Guns: Evolution, Darwinism and Christianity,"

Chronicles 10 (August 1986), pp. 15-18.

13. "The Intelligent Christian's Guide to Scientific Cosmology, or Intelligence

and Cosmology," Faith and Reason 12 (1986), pp. 124136.

14. "Science and Censorship: Helene Duhem and the Publication of the Systeme
du monde," Intercollegiate Review 21 (Winter 1985-86), pp. 41-49.

15. "The Impasse of Planck's Epistemology," Philosophia (Athens) 15-16 (1985-

86), pp. 467-489.

16. "Science for Catholics," The Dawson Newsletter 5 (Winter 198687), pp. 5-
11.

17. "Das Weltall als Zufall - ein Mythos von kosmischer Irrationalit- at," in H.
Lenk et al. (eds.), Zur Kritik der Wissenschaftlichen Ratio- nalitdt (Freiburg:
Verlag Karl Alber, 1986), pp. 487-503.

18. "G. K. C. as R. C." Faith and Reason 12 (1986), pp. 211-228.

1987

1. And on This Rock: The Witness of One Land and Two Covenants, second
edition, revised and enlarged of 1978(4), (Manassas, Va: Trinity
Communications, 1987), 128pp.

2. Uneasy Genius: The Life and Work of Pierre Duhem, second (paperback)
edition of 1984(1).

3. Edition with introduction in English of early essays on the history and

philosophy of physics by Pierre Duhem, Premices philosophiques (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1987), xiii + 239pp.

4. "Address on receiving the Templeton Prize," (Nassau, Bahamas: Lismore

Press, 1987), pp. 14-17.

5. "Miracles and Physics," The Asbury Theological Journal 42 (1987), pp. 5-42.

6. "Teaching Transcendence in Physics," American Journal of Physics 55

(October 1987), pp. 884-888.

7. "Religion and Science," The World Encyclopaedia of Religions (New York:

Macmillan, 1987), vol. 13, pp. 121-133.

8. "A Theologian and Scientist Talks about Creator and Church," interview with
M. L. Mudde, The Wanderer (August 13, 1987), p. 3.

9. "Newman's Logic and the Logic of the Papacy," Faith and Reason 13 (1987),
pp. 241-265.

10. "Scienza, Dio, Progresso," in R. Barbieri (ed.), Uomini e Tempo Moderno

(Milano: Jaca Book, 1987), pp. 181-183.

11. "Maritain and Science," in D. W. Hudson and M. J. Mancini (eds.),

Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend (Macon, Ga: Mercer University
Press, 1987), pp. 183-200; reprint of 1984(2).

12. "Le physicien et le metaphysicien. La correspondance entre Pierre Duhem et

Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange," Actes de I'Academie Nationale des Sciences,
Belles-Lettres et Arts de Bordeaux 12 (1987), pp. 93-116.

13. "The Modernity of the Middle Ages," Modern Age 31 (Summer/ Fall 1987),
pp. 207-214.

14. "Normalcy as Terror. The Naturalization of AIDS," Crisis 5/6 (1987), pp. 21-
23.
15. "Science: From the Womb of Religion," The Christian Century 104/28
(1987), pp. 851-854; reprint of 1987(4).

16. "Hit, Tudomany, Haladas," Vigilia (Budapest) 52/8 (1987), pp. 620-624;
Hungarian translation of 1987(4).

17. "El hambre basica de la humanidad," Nuestro Tiempo (Madrid) 71 (October

1987), pp. 48-61; Spanish translation of 1987(4).

18. "The Absolute beneath the Relative: Reflections on Einstein's Theories," in

Einstein and the Humanities, ed. D. P. Ryan (New York: Greenwood Press,
1987), pp. 5-18; reprint of 1985(3).

1988

1. The Savior of Science (Washington, D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1988), 268pp.

2. The Absolute Beneath the Relative and Other Essays (Lanham, Md., and
London: University Press of America; Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Intercollegiate Studies
Institute, 1988), 233pp; reprint of 1972(7), 1973(4), 1974(2), 1978(13), 1984(4),
1985(3), 1985(7), 1985(14), 1985(15), 1986(6), 1986(12), 1986(14), and two
hitherto unpublished essays listed below as 1988(17) and 1988(18).

3. The Physicist As Artist: The Landscapes of Pierre Duhem (Edinburgh:

Scottish Academic Press, 1988), 188pp in 4° (Introduction with 235 illustrations
in half tone and ten color plates).

4. La strada della scienza e le vie verso Dio, Italian translation of 1978(2)

(Milano: Jaca Book, 1988), 482pp.

5. "Bible, Science, Church," review of C. A. Russell, Cross-Currents:

Interactions between Science and Faith (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1985), Reflections 7/1 (Winter 1988), p. 2.

6. "The Universe in the Bible and in Modern Science," in Ex Auditu Volume III
(Pittsburgh: Pickwick Publications, 1988), pp. 137-147.

7. "The Three Faces of Technology: Idol, Nemesis, Marvel," The Intercollegiate

Review 23/2 (Spring 1988), pp. 37-46.
8. "Physics and the Ultimate," Ultimate Reality and Meaning 11 (March 1988),
pp. 61-73.

9. "Evicting the Creator," review of S. W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time.

From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988),
Reflections 7 (Spring 1988), pp. 1, 20, 22.

10. "Big Bang di errori," review of S. W. Hawking, Dal Big Bang ai buchi neri.
Brevi storia del tempo (Milano: Rizzoli, 1988), 11 Sabato (15-21 ottobre 1988),
pp. 33-34. Abbreviated Italian version of 1988(9).

11. "Language, Logic, Logos," The Asbury Theological Journal 43/2 (1988), pp.
95-136.

12. "La science: enjeu ideologique," interview in L'Homme Nouveau (August 7-

21, 1988), p. 4.

13. "The Only Chaos," This World 22 (Summer 1988), pp. 99-109.

14. "The Role of Faith in Physics," reprint of 1967(2) in W. C. Booth and M. W.

Gregory (eds.), The Harper and Row Reader. Liberal Education Through
Reading and Writing (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 648-663.

15. "Monos y metralletas: evolucion, darwinismo y cristianismo," Nuestro

Tiempo 75 (Mayo 1988), pp. 116-123; Spanish translation of 1986(12).

16. "Address on receiving the Templeton Prize," reprint of 1987(4) in The

Templeton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion, ed. W. Forker (Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press, 1988), pp. 208-218.

17. "The Role of Physics in Psychology: The Prospects in Retrospect," in

1988(2), pp. 85-101.

18. "The Demythologization of Science," in 1988(2), pp. 198-213.

1989

1. God and the Cosmologists (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway; Edinburgh:

Scottish Academic Press, 1989), 286pp.
2. Miracles and Physics (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1989), 114pp;
reprint with an Introduction and minor changes of 1987(5).

3. Brain, Mind and Computers (Washington, D.C.: Gateway Editions, 1989),

316pp; reprint with a new Foreword of 1978(3) and 1988(11).

4. "Science: Revolutionary or Conservative?" The Intercollegiate Review 24

(Spring 1989), pp. 13-22.

5. Introduction to P. Duhem, Au pays des gorilles (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989), pp.

iii-xi.

6. "The Physicist and the Metaphysician," The New Scholasticism 63 (1989), pp.
183-205; English version of 1987(12).

7. "Meditations on Newman's Grammar of Assent," Faith and Reason 15 (1989),

pp. 19-34.

8. Contributions to Meeting '88. Cercatori di Infinito. Costruttori di Storia

(Rimini: 1989), pp. 55-57, 62-63, 203-204.

9. Introduction to S. L. Jaki (ed.), Newman Today (The Proceedings of the

Wethersfield Institute, Volume 1, 1988) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989),
pp. 7-16.

10. "Newman's Assent to Reality, Natural and Supernatural," in S. L. Jaki (ed.),

Newman Today, pp. 189-220.

11. "L'assoluto al di la del relativo: riflessioni sulle teorie di Einstein,"

Communio 103 (January-February 1989), pp. 103-109; Italian translation of
1972(7).

12. "Thomas and the Universe," The Thomist 53 (1989), pp. 545-572.

13. "The Virgin Birth and the Birth of Science," The Downside Review 107
(1989), pp. 255-273, with five illustrations.

14. "Evicting the Creator," reprint of 1988(9), Science and Religion Forum.
Reviews 14 (May 1989), pp. 5-16.
15. "Cosmologia e religione," Synesis 6/4 (1989), pp. 89-100; Italian translation
of 1990(26).

1990

1. The Purpose of It All (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway; Edinburgh:

Scottish Academic Press, 1990), 297pp.

2. The Only Chaos and Other Essays (Lanham, Md.: University Press of
America; Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1990), reprint, with a
new Introduction, of 1988(13), 1987(13), 1984(9), 1989(4), 1988(7), 1987(14),
1988(9), 1987(6), 1988(8), 1988(6), 1987(4) and first publication of 1990(14),
1990(15), 1990(16), 1990(17), 1990(18), 1990(19).

3. Catholic Essays (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1990), reprint, with an
Introduction, of 1986(14), 1986(9), 1984(5), 1986(10), 1985(4), 1986(7),
1986(18), 1981(7), 1986(13), and first publication of 1990(20).

4. Cosmos in Transition: Essays in the History of Cosmology (Tucson, Arizona:

Pachart, Publishing House, 1990), reprint, with an Introduction, of 1971(1),
1972(4), 1978(11), 1983(3), 1976(4), 1972(6), 1978(10), 1978(8) and 1990(24).

5. The Savior of Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1990); UK

edition of 1988(1).

6. A Tudomdny Megvdltoja (Budapest: Ecclesia, 1990), 278pp.; Hungarian

translation by Kinga Scholtz of 1988(1).

7. Science and Creation: From Eternal Cycles to an Oscillating Universe

(Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1990); American edition of
1986(1).

8. Ciencia, Fe, Cultura (Madrid: Libros MC, 1990), 208pp, Spanish translation
by Ana Artigas, with an Introductory essay ("La Obra de Stanley L. Jaki") by M.
Artigas, of 1975(3), 1975(4), 1977(1), 1967(2), 1976(2), 1974(2), 1988(15).

9. "Socrates, or the Baby and the Bathwater," Faith and Reason 16 (1990), pp.
63-79.
10. "Determinism and Reality," Great Ideas Today 1990 (Chicago: Encyclopedia
Britannica, 1990), pp. 277-302.

11. "Science and the Future of Religion," Modern Age 33 (Summer 1990), pp.
142-150.

12. "Christology and the Birth of Science," Asbury Thelogical Journal 45/2
(1990), pp. 61-72.

13. "Cosmology and Religion," Philosophy in Science, Volume 4 (1990), pp. 47-
81.

14. "The Cosmic Myth of Chance," English original of 1986(17) in 1990(2), pp.
17-30.

15. "The Transformation of Cosmology in the Renaissance," in 1990(2), pp. 46-

62.

16. "Extra-terrestrials and Scientific Progress," in 1990(2), pp. 92-103.

17. "Physics or Physicalism: A Cultural Dilemma," in 1990(2), pp. 162-178.

18. "Science and Antiscience," revised English original of 1981(4), in 1990(2),

pp. 179-200.

19. "The Hymn of the Universe," in 1990(2), pp. 233-245.

20. "Commencement," in 1990(3), pp. 166-176.

21. "Pierre Duhem: Physicien et paysagiste," in Colloque Pierre Duhem (1861 -

1916). Scientifique, Ancien Eleve de Stanislas. Samedi 3 Decembre -Dimanche
4 Decembre 1988. Actes du Colloque (Paris: Stanislas. Classes Preparatoires,
[1990]), pp. 47-54.

22. "Katolikus Tudomany," Vigilia (Budapest) 55 (March 1990), pp. 168-174;

Hungarian translation of 1986(16).

23. "Krisztol6gia as a modern tudomany sziiletese," Jel ["Sign"] (Budapest) 2/5

(1990), pp. 7-12; Hungarian translation of 1990(12).
24. "The Gravitational Paradox of an Infinite Universe," English original of
1979(1) in 1990(4).

25. "The Virgin Birth and the Birth of Science," reprint in booklet form (Front
Royal, Va.: Christendom Press, 1990), 32 pp., of 1989(13), with five illustrations
in color.

26. "Cosmology and Religion," Atheisme et Foi 25/3 (Citta del Vaticano:
Pontificium Consilium pro dialogo cum non credentibus, 1990), pp. 252-265;
English original of 1989(15).

27. "Newman and Science," Downside Review 108 (1990), pp. 282-94.

28. "Science: Western or What?" Intercollegiate Review 26(Fall 1990), pp. 3-12.

29. Review of D. L. Sepper, Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for
a New Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), American
Historical Review 95 (1990), pp. 1492-1493.

30. Introduction to E. Gilson, Methodical Realism (Front Royal, Va.:

Christendom Press, 1990), pp. 7-15.

31. "A modern tudomanyos kozmol6gia es a kozmologiai istenerv," Jel 2/6

(1990), pp. 9-17; Hungarian translation of 1990(13).

32. "La cristologia e la nascita della scienza moderna," Annales theologici 4/2
(1990), pp. 334-348; Italian translation of 1990(12).

33. "Sushchestvnet li Sozdatel?" ["Does a Creator Exist?"] in Obsh- chestvennye

nauki Akademiia nauk SSSR [Moscow] 6 (1990), pp. 170180; Russian
translation of a lecture delivered in English in Moscow, June 22, 1989.

34. "La fisica alla ricerca di una realty ultima," Cultura e Libri (maggio-giugno,
1990), pp. 21-41; Italian translation of 1988(8).

35. "Energetisme," Encyclopedie philosophique universelle, II. Les notions

philosophiques Tome I. Philosophie occidentale: A-L (Paris: Presses
Universitaires Francaises), pp. 784-785.
 1991

1. Pierre Duhem: Scientist and Catholic (Front Royal, Va.: Christendom Press,
1991), 204pp.

2. Pierre Duhem: Homme de science et defoi, tr. F. Raymondaud (Paris:

Beauchesne, 1991), 275pp; French translation of 1991(1).

3. Olbers Studies: With Three Unpublished Manuscripts by Olbers (Tucson,

Arizona: Pachart Publishing House, 1991), 96pp; publication in English of
1970(1), 1970(2), 1970(3) and reprint of 1970(4).

4. Erre a sziklara (Budapest: Ecclesia, 1991), 156pp; Hungarian translation by Z.

Jaki and C. Schilly of 1987(1)

5. Dio e i cosmologi (Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1991);

Italian translation by Maria Luisa Gozzi of 1989(1).

6. "The Mind: Its Physics or Physiognomy," essay review of R. Penrose, The

Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics
(Cambridge: University Press, 1989), 480pp.; in Reflections 10/2 (1991), pp. 1
and 14-15; also in Science and Religion Forum. Reviews (February 1991), pp. 9-
16.

7. "Newman and Evolution," The Downside Review 109 (January 1991), pp. 16-
34.

8. "Los cientificos y la filosifia," interview in Atlkntida (Madrid) (enero-marzo

1991), pp. 76-82.

9. "An Interview with Dr. Stanley Jaki," The Observer of Boston College 9
(April/May 1991), pp. 12-13 and 17 in 4°; English text of 1991(8).

10. "Undeceivably Infallible," The Wanderer, July 25, 1991, pp. 4. 6.

11. Commencement Address. Christendom College, May 12, 1991 (Front Royal,
Va.: Christendom Press), a brochure of 16pp. Also in Faith and Reason 17/2
(1991), pp. 123-35.
12. "Beyond the Tools of Production," pp. 5-7 in "Reflections on the 100th
Anniversary of Rerum Novarum," a Wanderer Supplement (May 16, 1991), pp.
5-7 in 4°

13. Foreword to P. Duhem, The Origins of Statics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic

Publishers), pp. vii-xv.

14. "Teremtes es a monasztikus kreativitas," in Corona fratrum (Pannonhalma,

Hungary, 1991), pp. 77-90; Hungarian translation of 1985(12).

16. "A Teremto kilakoltatasa," Jel 3/1 (1991), pp. 5-7; Hungarian translation of
1988(9).

17. "Krisztus, a katolikusok es az abortusz" Jel 3/3 (1991), pp. 70-74; Hungarian
translation of 1985(4)

18. "Meg nem csalhato csalatkozhatatlansag," Jel 3/4 (1991); Hungarian

translation of 1991(11).

19. "Kell-e Galileit rehabilitalni?" Jel 3/5 (1991); Hungarian translation of

1986(9) with some additions.

1992

1. Reluctant Heroine: The Life and Work of Helene Duhem (Edinburgh: Scottish
Academic Press, 1992), 335pp (with illustrations).

2. Genesis I through the Ages (London: Thomas More Press, 1992), 315pp,
(with illustrations).

3. Universe and Creed. The Pere Marquette Lecture 1992 (Milwaukee, Wis.:
Marquette University Press, 1992), 86pp.

4. A Seminar with Father Stanley Jaki. Proceedings of ITEST Workshop,

October 18-20, 1991, ed. R. A. Brungs and M. Postiglione (St. Louis, Missouri:
ITEST Faith/Science Press, 1992), pp. 63-159.

5. The Relevance of Physics, a reprinting (by Scottish Academic Press) in

paperback of 1966(1) with a Preface to the new edition, pp. v-x.
6. Il Salvatore della scienza (Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana,
1991), 228pp; Italian translation by Dr. Bruno Bosacchi of 1988(1)

7. Spacitel nauki (Moscow: Greko-latinskii kabinet, 1992), 313pp; Russian

translation of 1988(1).

8. Az orszag kulcsai: Egy eszkoz tanusagtetele (Budapest: Ecclesia, 1992);

Hungarian translation of 1986(3).

9. Isten es a kozmologusok (Budapest: Ecclesia, 1992), 291pp; Hungarian

translation of 1989(1)

10. Krisztus, Egyhaz, tudomany ["Christ, Church, Science: A Collection of

Essays"] (Budapest: Jel, 1992), 174pp. Contains, with a new Preface, 1987(16),
1992(16), 1990(23), 1991(16), 1992(18), 1991(14), 1990(22), 1991(19),
1991(17), 1991(18), 1992(17).

11. Csodak es tudomany (Budapest: Ecclesia, 1992), 91pp; Hungarian

translation of 1989(2).

12. "Telltale Remarks and a Tale Untold," in Creation, Nature, and Political
Order in the Philosophy of Michael Foster (1903-1959), ed. C. Wybrow
(Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), pp. 269-96.

13. "Christ and Science," The Downside Review 110 (April 1992), pp. 110-130..

14. "Creation Once and for All," Proceedings of the 24th Annual National
Wanderer Forum, October 18-19, 1991 (St. Paul. Minn.: The Wanderer Forum
Foundation, 1992), pp. 6-11 in 4°.

15. "The Nonsense and Sense of Science," in A Warning is Given, ed. H. Owens
(Woodstock, Md.: Apostolatus Uniti, 1992), pp. 43-46.

16. "Universe and Creed" [Preliminary Remarks to the Pere Marquette Lecture],
The Wanderer, May 14, 1992, p. 7.

17. "L'evidenza scientifica della finalita," in Cultura e libri, N.80 (agosto-

settembre, 1992), pp. 13-18; Italian translation of pp. 170-74 of 1990(1).
18. "Cristo, los catolicos y el aborto," Premio Fundacion Adevida (Madrid:
1992), brochure of l5pp; Spanish translation of 1985(4)

19. "Krisztus es a termeszettudomany," 16pp; Hungarian translation of 1992(11).

20. "Egynejii vagy notlen papsag," Jel 4/1 (1992); Hungarian translation of
1986(7).

21. "Az elme fizikaja vagy fiziognomiaja," Jel 4/2 (1992), pp. 40-43; Hungarian
translation of 1991(6)

22. "Lehet-e kereszteny szint6zis?" ["Is a Christian Synthesis Possible?"] Jel 4/4
(1992), pp. 105-08.

23. "Genezis 1. fejezet: A kozmosz keletkezese?" Jel 4/6 (1992), pp. 167-72;
Hungarian translation of 1993(10).

24. "Christology and the Birth of Modern Science," reprint of 1990(12) in

Church and Theology: Festschrift for Dr. Jong Sung Rhee's Seventieth Birthday
(Seoul, Korea: The Christian Literature Society, 1992), pp. 769-85.

25. "L'absolu au dela du relatif. Reflexions sur Einstein," Communio 17/4

(1992), pp. 135-49; French translation of 1985(3).

26. "Duhem, Pierre," Encyclopedie philosophique universelle, III. Les oeuvres

philosophiques Tome I (Paris: Presses Universitaires Fran- caises), pp. 2376-
2378.

27. Newman oggi (Libreria Editrice Vaticana), 229pp; Italian translation by

Sever I Voicu of 1990(9) and (10).

1993

1. Is There a Universe? (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press; New York:

Wethersfield Institute, 1993), 138pp.

2. Bog i kozmologi (Moscow: Allegro Press, 1993), 321pp; Russian translation

of God and the Cosmologists 1989(1).
3. Mi az egesz ertelme? (Budapest: Ecclesia, 1993), 280pp; Hungarian
translation of 1990(1).

4. Vildgegyetem is hitvallds (Budapest; Ecclesia, 1993), 85pp; Hungarian

translation of 1992(3).

5. "Medieval Creativity in Science and Technology," in Technology in the

Western Political Tradition, ed. M. R. Zinman et al (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1993), pp. 46-68.

6. "Gilson and Science," in Essays in Honor of F. Wilhelmsen (New York: Peter

Lang, 1993), pp. 31-47.

7. "The Last Word in Physics," Philosophy in Science 5 (1993), pp. 9-32.

8. "History as Science and Science in History," Intercollegiate Studies (Fall

1993), pp. 31-41.

9. "Patterns versus Principles: The Pseudo-scientific Roots of Law's Debacle,"

Notre Dame Law Review 38 (Fall 1993), pp. 135-57.

10. "Genesis 1: A Cosmogenesis?" Homiletic and Pastoral Review 94/3 (Fall

1993), pp. 28-32 and 61-64.

11. "The Purpose of Healing," The Linacre Quarterly 60/1 (February 1993), pp.
5-15.

12. "Az ember igazi eredete" [The true origin of man], Lecture delivered at the
Hungarian World Congress on Bioethics, Budapest, 6-8 June 1992. Jel 5/1
(1993), pp. 3-6 in 4°.

13. "A hala ertelme," ["The meaning of gratitude"] Jel 5/2 (1993), pp. 80-81 in
4°.

14. "Bioetika es kereszteny kovetkezetesseg" [Lecture given at the International

Congress of Christian Bioethics, Budapest, June 16, 1993] Jel 5/4 (1993), pp.
105-08 in 4°; Hungarian version of 1994(9)

15. "Az elet kettos vedelme: termeszeti es termeszetfeletti," Jel 5/5 pp. 135-40 in
4°; Hungarian translation of 1994(8).

16. "A termeszettudomany eredete," [Discourse at the dedication of the Jedlik

Anyos auditorium. Szechenyi Istvan Technical University, Gyor, November 25,
1991] (Gyor: Kereszteny Ertelmiek Szovetsege, 1993), 15pp.

17. "Adam Lord Gifford," Dictionary of Scottish Theology (Edinburgh: R. & R.

Clark, 1993), p. 358.

18. "Peter's Chair: a Professorial Chair?" [Lecture given at the International

Congress of Human Life International, Houston, April 17, 1993], (Gaithersburg,
Md: Human Life International, 1993), 16pp.

19. "The Relationship between Theology and Science." Interview on the Galileo
case, Our Sunday Visitor (February 14, 1993), pp. 8-9.

20. Narodziny z Maryi panny a narodziny nauki (Wroclaw: Wydaw- nictwo twe,
1993), 36pp; Polish translation of "The Virgin Birth and the Birth of Science"
1990(25).

21. "La realty dell'universo," ["The reality of the universe"], Physica,

Cosmologia, Naturphilosophie: Nuovi approcci, ed. M. Sanchez Sorondo
(Roma: Herder e University Lateranense, 1993), pp. 327-41.

22. "A gyogyftas celja," Jel 5/6 (1993), pp. 167-72 in 4°; Hungarian translation
of 1993(11).

1994

1. Lettres de Pierre Duhem a sa fille Helene, presentees, avec une introduction et

notes, par Stanley L. Jaki (Paris: Beauchesne, 1994), 237pp.

2. Lo scopo di tutto (Milano: Ares, 1994), 283pp; Italian translation of 1990(1).

3. Zbawca nauki (Woznan: W drodze, 1994), 211pp; Polish translation of The

Savior of Science 1988(1).

4. Introduction to the reprinting of J. H. Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt by

Anglicans in Catholic Teaching (1850; Fraser MI: Real View Books, 1994), with
introduction, pp. v-xliii, and notes on Anglican theologians mentioned by
Newman, pp. 277-283.

5. Introduction to the reprinting of A. Carrel, Voyage to Lourdes (Fraser MI:

Real View Books, 1994), pp. 1-34.

6. "Ecology or Ecologism," in Man and His Environment. Tropical Forests and

the Conservation of Species. Papers given at the Study Week of May 14-18,
1990, of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences (Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 1994), pp. 271-93.

7. "Liberalism and Theology," Faith and Reason 20 (Winter 1994), pp. 347-68.

8. "Life's Defense: Natural and Supernatural," Lecture given at the World

Congress of Human Life International. Houston, April 17, 1993, Linacre
Quarterly 61 (Feb. 1994), pp. 22-31.

9. "Consistent Bioethics and Christian Consistency," English version of

1993(13), Linacre Quarterly 61 (August 1994), pp. 87-92.

10. "Genesis 1: A Cosmogenesis?" Faith (London) reprint of 1993(9).

11. "Teol6gia es liberalizmus" Jel 6 (September 1994), pp. 201-07. Hungarian

version of 1994(7).

12. A Sziizi szules es a tudomany szuletese (Budapest: Ecclesia, 1994), 35pp;

Hungarian translation of 1990(25).

13. "Szent Peter szeke: egy professzori katedra?" Jel (January and February,
1994), pp. 4-7 and 39-40; Hungarian translation of 1993(18).

14. "Computers: Lovable but Unloving," Downside Review 112 (July 1994), pp.
185-200.

15. "Authoritatively no Authority to Ordain Women," The Wanderer (June 30,

1994), pp. 1 and 8.

16. "Two Miracles and a Nobel Prize: The semicentennial anniversary of the
death of Alexis Carrel" Catholic World Report (November 1994), pp. 60-63.
 1995

1. Patterns and Principles and Other Essays (Bryn Mawr, PA.: Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, 1995), 246pp. Contains 1993(9), 1994(6), 1990(9), 1993(5),
1992(12), 1990(10), 1993(8), 1990(28), 1993(6), 1992(15), 1991(6), and
1993(7).

2. Lord Gifford and His Lectures, 2nd revised and enlarged edition (Edinburgh:
Scottish Academic Press, 1995), 170pp.

3. Bog i kosmologowie (Raciborz-Wroclaw: RAF SCRIBA-TWE 1995), 215pp;

Polish translation of God and the Cosmologists 1989(1).

5. Postscript to the reprinting of J. H. de Groot, The Shakespeares and the "Old

Faith" (Fraser: MI.: Real View Books, 1995), pp. 258-276.

6. Introductory Essay to the reprinting of K. A. Kneller, Christianity and the

Leaders of Modern Science: A Contribution to the History of Culture during the
Nineteenth Century (Fraser, MI.: Real View Books), 1995, pp. i-xxiv.

7. Introductory essay to the reprinting of A. Barruel, Memoirs illustrating the

History of Jacobinism (Fraser, Mi.: Real View Books, 1995), pp. vii-xxxiv.

8. "Cosmology: An Empirical Science?" Philosophy in Science 6 (1995), pp. 47-

75.

9. "To Awaken from a Dream Finally!" Essay review of S. Weinberg, Dreams of

a Final Theory, Philosophy in Science 6 (1995), pp. 159-173.

10. "Angels, Brutes and the Light of Faith," Crisis (January 1995), pp. 18-22.

11. "The Sabbath Rest of the Maker of All," Asbury Theological Journal 50
(Spring 1995), pp. 37-49.

12. "Beyond Science," in W. A. Rusher (ed.), The Ambiguous Legacy of the

Enlightenment (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America; Claremont, Ca.:
Claremont Institute, 1995), pp. 228-23.

13. "The Ethical Foundations of Bioethics," Linacre Quarterly 62 (November

1995), pp. 74-85.

14. Introduction to the Chinese translation, Wi Li Li Lun De Mu De Yu Jie Gou,

by Zhang Lai-ju of Duhem's La Theorie physique (Beijing: State Publishing
House, 1995), pp. 1-11.

15. Hungarian translation of the introduction 1994(5) to Carrel, Utazks

Lourdesba (Budapest: KESZ, 1995), pp. 1-34.

16. "Kenyszerzubbony viselese n6lkiil," ["Without wearing a straitjacket"],

interview in Magyar Nemzet, April 15, 1995, p. 15, in 4°.

17. "Cosmologia: LUna ciencia empirica?" in J. A. Gonzalo et al (eds.),

Cosmologia astrofisica: Cuestiones fronterizas (Madrid: Alianza Universidad,
1995), pp. 248-270.

18. Introduction to Pierre Duhem et ses doctorands: Bibliographie de la

litterature primaire et secondaire, compiled by J.-F. Stoffel (Louvain-la- Neuve:
University catholique de Louvain, 1995), pp. 9-19.

19. "Fede e ragione fra scienza e scientismo," Cristianita 23 (marzo 1995), pp.
15-20.

20. "A Gyori Bences Gimnazium Jedlik termynek felavatasa," [Dedication of the
Jedlik room of the Benedictine Gymnasium in Gyor], A Czuczor Gergely
Bences Gimnazium Evkonyve 1994-1995 (Gyor: 1995), pp. 17-23.

21. "Angyalok, allatak es a hit fenye," Communio (Christmas, 1995), pp. 32-42;
Hungarian translation of 1995 (10).

22. "Ket csoda es egy Nobel-dij," Jel November 1995, pp. 3-4. Hungarian
translation of 1994(16).

1996

1. Bible and Science (Front Royal: Christendom Press, 1996), 225pp.

2. L'origine de la science et la science de son origine, French translation by M.

Bouin of 1978(5) (Paris: ESKA Editions, 1996), 144pp.
3. A fizika latohatkra (Budapest: Abigel, 1996), 612 pp; Hungarian translation of
The Relevance of Physics 1966(1).

4. Ciencia y Fe: Pierre Duhem, Spanish translation of 1991(1), (Madrid:

Ediciones Encuentros, 1996), 259pp.

5. Van-e Univerzum? (Budapest: Abigel, 1996), 143pp; Hungarian translation of

1993(1).

6. Introductory essay to H. E. Manning, The True Story of the Vatican Council

(Fraser, MI.: Real View Books, 1996), pp. vii-xxxi.

7. Introductory essay to Saint John Fisher, The Defence of the Priesthood

(Fraser, MI: Real View Books, 1996), pp. vii- xix.

8. Introductory essay to J.-F. Stoffel, Pierre Duhem et ses doctorands:

Bibliographic de la litterature primaire et secondaire (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1996),
pp. 9-19.

9. "A Gentleman [Newman] and Original Sin," Downside Review (July 1996),
pp. 192-214.

10. "Catholic Church and Astronomy," in History of Astronomy: An

Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing Co, 1996), pp. 127-31.

11. "The Inspiration and Counterinspiration of Astronomy," Asbury Theological

Journal 51 (1996), pp. 71-87.

12. "Words: Blocks, Amoebas, or Patches of Fog: Some Basic Problems of

Fuzzy Logic." Application of Fuzzy Logic Technology 3. ed. B. Bosacchi and J.
C. Bezdek (Proceedings of the International Society for Optical Engineering,
Orlando, Fl., April 10-12) (Bellingham WA: SPIE, 1996), vol. 2761, pp. 138-
143.

13. "A Telltale Meteor," The Wanderer (August 22, 1996), p. 5, in 4°.

14. "What Would the Darwinists Say?" The Wanderer (November 28, 1996), p.
9, in 4°.
15. "Egy arulkod6 meteorit," Jel (November 1996), pp. 3-4; Hungarian
translation of 1996 (13).

16. "Van-e utols6 sz6 a fizikaban?" Fizikai Szemle (Budapest) 1996/8, pp. 274-
280. Hungarian translation of 1993(7).

17. "Jedlik Anyos: Az utols6 magus," (principal address for celebrating the
100th anniversary of Jedlk Anyos at the Hungarian Academy of Science,
Budapest, Dec. 12); Magyar Villamos Muvek Rt. Kozlemenyei (Budapest,
1996/1-2), pp. 77-78, in 4°.

18. Excerpts from the above 1996 (23) Elektrotechnika 1996 April, pp. 180-181
in 4°.

19. "Meg sok a megoldatlan kerdes a fejlodestanban," Magyar Nemzet

(Budapest, Nov. 5, 1996), p. 12.

20. "Le sabbat du Createur de 1'univers," Revue des Questions scienti- fiques
167 (1996), pp. 355-373; French translation of 1995(11).

21. "A Kozepkor talalekonysaga a tudomanyban es technikaban" Orszdgos

Muszaki Muzeum Evkonyve (Budapest, 1996), pp. 11-32; Hungarian translation
of 1993(5).

23. Interview in Termeszet Vilaga ["The World of Nature"] Budapest, 1996/8,

pp. 361-63.

24. "Shectodniev: Kozmogenezis," Philosophskii poick 3 (1997) (Minsk:

Propilei), pp. 63-74. Russian translation of 1993(10).

1997

1. Theology of Priestly Celibacy (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press), 223pp.

2. And on this Rock (Fort Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 1997), 3rd enlarged
edition, 169pp.

3. Vildg es Vallds ["World and Religion"] (Budapest: Abigel, 1997), 163pp, a

collection of the following essays already published in Hungarian 1993 (12),
1993 (15), 1993 (22), 1993 (14), 1992 (22), 1994 (13), 1994 (11), 1995 (21),
1996 (15), 1996 (19), 1995 (16), 1995 (22), 1995 (20), 1996 (17), 1993 (13), and
ch. 1 from P. Haffner, Creation and Scientific Creativity: A Study in the Thought
of S. L. Jaki (see p. 255 above).

4. Biblia es Tudomany (Budapest: Abigel, 1997), 240pp; Hungarian translation

of 1996(1).

5. "Did the Pope Surrender to Evolutionary Theory?" The Wanderer (January 30,
1997), p. 4, in 4°.

6. "1 limiti di una scienza senza limiti" in II Fare della scienza: I fondamenti e le
palafitte, Con-tratto (Modena, Italy, 1997), pp. 13-30.

7. Introductory essay to J.-B. Bossuet, A History of the Variations of the

Protestant Churches (Fraser, MI: Real View Books, 1997), pp. viixxxiv.

8. Introductory essay to Chr. Hollis, Erasmus (Fraser, MI: Real View Books),
pp. vii-xxxii.

9. "Newman and Miracles," Downside Review (July 1997), pp. 193-214.

10. "Natural Reason and Supernatural Revelation," Fellowship of Catholic

Scholars Quarterly (Fall 1997), pp. 24-29.

11. "The Biblical Basis of Western Science," Crisis (October 1997), pp. 17-20.

12. "The Origin of the Earth-Moon System and the Rise of Scientific
Intelligence," in Commentarii (Pontifical Academy of Sciences), vol. IV, Nr 3,
Plenary Session on the Origin and Early Evolution of Life, 22-26 October 1996.
Part I (Vaticn City State), pp. 321-31

13. "Science, Culture and Cult," Science in the Context of Human Culture
(Vatican City State: Pontifical Academy of Science, 1997), pp. 93-118.

14. "Ordenadores: Maquinas Amables pero incapaces de amar," in Tecnologia.

Hombre y Ciencia (Madrid: Associacion Juve, 1997), pp. 183-93; Spanish
translation of 1994(14).
15. "Los limites de una ciencia illimitada," in Tecnologia. Hombre y Ciencia
(Madrid: Associacion Juve, 1997), pp. 242-256; Spanish translation of 1997(5).

16. "Klonozas es erveles," Magyar Bioetikai Szemle [Hungarian Review of

Bioethics] (1997/3), pp. 1-9; also in Communio (Budapest), (1997/3), pp. 48-60;
(Hungarian version of 1998(3).

17. " Jaki Szaniszlo Szechenyi dijas, ' Jel (Budapest) (October 1997), pp. 252-53.

18. "A Fold-Hold rendszer es a tudomany megjelenese," A Czuczor Gergely

Bences gimndzium Evkonyve 1996-1997 Gyor (Hungary), pp. 1626; Hungarian
translation of 1997 (12).

1998

1. God and the Cosmologists (2d enlarged ed.; Edinburgh: Scottish Academic
Press; Royal Oak. MI: Real View Books), 286pp.

2. Genesis 1 Through the Ages (2d enlarged ed.; Royal Oak, MI: Real View
Books; Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press), 301pp.

3. The Virgin Birth and the Birth of Science (revised and reset ed; Fraser, MI:
Real View Books), 32pp.

4. Tudomdny es Vildgnezet (Budapest: Lexica), 268pp. A collection of essays in

Hungarian, it contains the Hungarian translation of 1997(6), 1996(11), 1997(5),
1996(12), 1994(6), 1997(11), 1998(6) and the reprinting of 1996(21), 1997(17),
1997(10), 1998(14), 1997(13).

5. A papi colibdtus teol6gidja (Budapest: Agape/Ecclesia), 256pp; Hungarian

translation of 1997(1).

6. "Pluralism in Education and Education in Pluralism," Journal of Education

180 (Nr 3, 1998), pp. 67-84.

7. "Cosmic Rays and Water Spiders," in Spiritual Evolution: Scientists Discuss

Their Beliefs, ed. J. M. Templeton and K. S. Giniger (Philadelphia and London),
pp. 67-97.
8. "Cloning and Arguing," Linacre Quarterly 65/1 (February 1998), pp. 5-18.

9. "Newman: A Mystic?," Downside Review (April 1998), pp. 143-45.

10. "Newman and his Converts," Catholic Dossier 4/1 (JanuaryFebruary, 1998),
pp. 17-28.

11. One True Fold: Newman and his Converts (Royal Oak, MI: Real View
Books), 32pp; reprint in a booklet form of 1998(10).

12. "Believe in Extraterrestrials? You'd be better Moonstruck," National Catholic

Register (February 15-21, 1998), p. 9 in 4°.

13. "A lenyeg lenyegtelenftese," ["The dilution of essence"] Magyar Bioetikai

Szemle [Hungarian Review of Bioethics] (1998/3), pp. 15-21.

14. "Mas vilagok iizengetnek? Vagy inkabb figyeljiink a Holdra?" ["Do other
worlds beckon? Or should we rather watch the Moon?"] Jel 9/8 (September), pp.
3-4; Hungarian version of 1998(12).

15. "Eutanazia, Bioetika es Tarsadalom" ("Euthanasia, Bioethics, and Society"),

Jel (Budapest) 10/2 (February 1998), pp. 42-46.

16. "A Valtozas paradoxona" ("The Paradoxon of Change"), Jel (Budapest)

December, 1998, pp. 291-93. Hungarian version of ch. 14 in 2000(2).

17. "Science and Religion in Identity Crisis," Faith and Reason 23 (1997-98),
Nos. 3-4. 201-223.

18. "Two Miracles and a Nobel laureate," Secretariat for Scientific Questions.
Pax Romana, Bulletin No. 60E, pp. 7-12.

1999

1. Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.

Eerdmans), 233pp.

2. God and the Sun at Fatima (Fraser, MI: Real View Books), 386pp.
3. Miracles and Physics (revised and reset ed; Front Royal, VA: Christendom
Press), 104pp.

4. The One True Fold: Newman and His Converts (Royal Oak, MI: Real View
Books), 32pp.

5. The Creator's Sabbath Rest (Royal Oak, MI: Real View Books), 32pp.

6. Advent es Tudomdny [Advent and Science] (Budapest: Ecclesia), 73pp.

7. To Rebuild or not to Try? [re: the Temple of Jerusalem] (Royal Oak, MI.:
Real View Books), 32pp.

8. "The Limits of a Limitless Science," Asbury Theological Journal 54 (Spring

1999), pp. 23-39.

9. "Two Lourdes Miracles and a Nobel Laureate: What Really Happened?"

Linacre Quarterly 66 (February 1999), pp. 65-73. Also in Proceedings of the
World Congress of Catholic Physicians, New York, September 1998 (in press).

10. "Retroscena della Humanae vitae. Il seggio di Pietro: Un seggio

cattedratico?" (Roma: Vita Umana Internazionale), 16pp. Italian translation of
1993(18).

11. "Simplicity before Complexity" or "Second General Commentary" on papers

given at the Plenary Session of October 27-31, 1992 of the Pontifical Academy
of Sciences, and reprinted under the editorship of B. Pullman as The Emergence
of Complexity in Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology (Vatican City
State: Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Proceedings. Scripta Varia. Nr 89), pp.
423-31.

12. "Mit is JELent KESZnek lenni?" [What does it mean to be Ready?] Jel 11
(September 1999), pp. 195-99.

13. "A jovo bioetikaja es a lelek jovoje" [The Future of Bioethics and the Soul's
future], Magyar Bioetikai Szemle [Hungarian Review of Bioethics] (1999. Nr.
4), pp. 1-7.

14. "Newman es az evoluci6" [Newman and Evolution] Communio (Budapest) 7

(Nr 2), pp. 43-70. Hungarian translation of 1990(27).

15. "A Tudomany nem kepes felismerni a vilagegyetem letet" [Science cannot
demonstrate the existence of the universe]. Interview in Uj Ember, (Budapest),
Nov. 28, 1999, p. 6.

16. "A Szentiras mas, mint fizikakonyv" [Holy Scriptures are not a physics
textbook], Interview in Magyar Nemzet (Budapest), Dec. 1, 1999, p. 12.

2000

1. Newman's Challenge (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans), viii + 321pp.

With the exception of chapter 1, "Always Challenged and Forever Challenging,"
and chapter 8, "Faith and Church History," it contains the following essays
already published: 1996(9), 1997(9), 1995(10), 1998(9), 1994(4), 1987(9),
1989(10), 1989(7), 1990(27), 1991(7) (1998(8), and pp. 159-170 from 1997(1).

2. The Limits of a Limitless Science and Other Essays (Wilmington DE:

Intercollegiate Studies Institute), viii + 247pp. In addition to "Science and
Religion in Identity Crisis" (ch. 12) and the English text of 1993 (21) and of
1998(15), it contains the reprinting of 1999(6), 1998(11), 1994(14), 1997(11),
1996(11), 1996(12), 1995(12), 1996(13), 1995 (8), 1995(9), 1998(6).

3. Praying the Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans), 248pp.

4. Christ and Science (Royal Oak, MI.: Real View Books), 32pp.

5. Giordano Bruno: A Martyr of Science? (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books),

32pp.

6.-Maybe Alone in the Universe, after All (Pinckney, MI: Real View Boooks),
32pp.

7. The Sun's Miracle or of Something Else? (Pinckney, MI: Real View Boooks),
32pp.

8. Advent and Science (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), 92pp. English version
of 1999(6).
9. The Savior of Science, 2nd entirely reset edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.
Eerdmans), vi + 253pp.

10. The Paradox of Olbers' Paradox: A Case History of Scientific Thought (2nd
entirely reset and enlarged edition (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), 325pp.

11. Fourteen Stations ["Tizennegy allomas"-Meditations on the Stations of the

Cross] with illustrations by Judit Kopp (Pinckney. MI: Real View Books), 32pp

12. Isten es a nap Fatimkban (Budapest: Ecclesia), 340pp. Hungarian translation

of 1999(2).

13. "Numbers Decide: or Planck's Constant and Some Constants of Philosophy,"

in J. Gonzalo (ed.), Planck's Constant 1900-2000: An Academic Session at UAM
April 11, 2000 (Madrid: UAM Ediciones, 2000), pp. 108-134.

14. "Nature, God, and Science," The History of Science and Religion in the
Western Tradition: An Encyclopedia (New York: Garland Publishing), pp. 45-
52.

15. "The Catholic Intellectual," Catholic Dossier 6. Nr. 1, pp. 8-16.

16. "Faith, Reason and Science," Quarterly of Catholic Scholars (23 Nr.2
Spring), pp. 8-15.

17. "The Immaculate Conception and a Conception Immaculate," Catholic

Dossier, 6, Nr. 4, pp. 4-11.

18. Introduction to K. Stern, The Pillar of Fire (New Hope, KY: Urbi et
Orbi/Remnant of Israel), pp, vii-xxv.

19. Miert el a kerdes: Van-e Isten? ["Why the question: Is there a God?"]
(Budapest: Igazsagert Alapitvany), 75pp.

20. Preface to the re-edition of V. Ferenczy, Jedlik Anyos elete es alkotksai [The
Life and Work of Anyos Jedlik] (Gyor: Bences Gimnazium, 683pp, with 36
plates), pp. ix-xi.

21. "Bioetika es kulturhaboru," [Bioethics and Culture War] Magyar Bioetikai

Szemle (Hungarian Review of Bioethics) 4, pp. 12-19.

22. A szamok dbntenek: a Planck allando es a filozofia allandoi," (Budapest:

Igazsagert Alapitvany), 39pp (Hungarian version of 2000 (11).

23. "Egy varos, egy Jedlik, egy egyetem" ["A City, a Jedlik, a University"].
Address given on February 22, 2000, in the City Hall of Gyor at the presentation
of 2000(13) (Gyor: City Council), 15pp.

24. "A Katolikus ertelmisegi," Communio [Budapest] 8/3 (Karacsony), pp. 49-
70. Hungarian translation of 2000(15).

25. Review of R. Taton and C. Wilson, (eds.), Planetary Astronomy from the
Renaissance to the Rise of Astrophysics. Part B. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries (General History of Astronomy 2.; New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), in Isis 91 (June 2000), pp. 329-331.

26. "The Origin of the Earth-Moon System and the Rise of Scientific
Intelligence," reprinting of 1997(12) in Anales defisica (Madrid) 95 (2000), pp.
197-202.

2001

1. Newman to Converts: An Existential Ecclesiology (Pinckney, MI: Real View

Books), xii + 531pp.

2. The Gist of Catholicism and Other Essays (Pinckey, MI: Real View Books),
viii + 255pp. A collection of the following essays already published: 2001(13),
2000(15), 2000(16), 2000(17), 1994(7), 1991(10), 1993(18), 1994(15),
1993(11), 1994(8), 1995(13), 1996(10), 1998(18), 1992(14), 1991(12) and the
English version of 1993(12), 1998(13) and 1999(13).

3. The Keys of the Kingdom: A Tool's Witness to Truth (2nd entirely reset
edition; Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), viii + 231pp.

4. Fourteen Stations (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), 32pp with 16

illustrations.

5. Galileo Lessons (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), 32pp.

6. Jesus, Islam, Science (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), 32pp.

7. Why the Question: Is there a God? (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), viii +
71pp.

8. Chesterton: A Seer of Science (new ed.; Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), xvi
+ 164pp; reprinting with a new introduction of 1986(4).

9. Foldontuliak a vilagegyetemben? A Holdunk valasza (Budapest: ValoVilag),

64pp, Hungarian translation of 2000(6).

10. Tizennegy allomas (Budapest: ValoVilag), 32pp. Hungarian version of

2001(14), with illustrations by Peggy Peplow Gummere.

11. Miert el a kerdes: van-e lelek? ["Why the Question: Is there a Soul?"]
Budapest: VA1oVilag), 65pp. Hungarian version of 2001(7).

12. "A Thousand Years from Now," Modern Age (Winter 2001), pp. 6-15.

13. "The Gist of Catholicism," Catholic Dossier 7 (Jan-Feb 2000), pp. 17-28.

14. Introduction to H. Wilberforce, Why I Became A Catholic? (Pinckney MI:

Real View Books), pp. 1-10.

15. "The Christological Origins of Newton's First Law." Lecture delivered at the
Jubilee Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Science, November 10-13,
2000. in Science and the Future of Mankind (Vatican City: Pontificiae
Academiae Scripta Varia 99), pp. 393-407.
16. "Newman: Facts and Myths," The New Oxford Review, October.

17. "The Power and Poverty of Science," The Asbury Theological Journal, Fall
2001.

18. The Relevance of Materials Science," invited talk for the Tenth World
Congress on Ferroelectricity, Madrid, September 3-6, 2001. To be published in
its Proceedings.

19. "A Feltamadas logikaja" ["The Logic of Resurrection"], JEL May, pp. 3-6
and June, pp. 3-7.

20. "Jakob letr6j6t6l a kanai mennyegzoig" ["From Jacob's ladder to the

Wedding in Cana"] JEL 13 (October), pp. 5-7.

21. "Newman: Mitoszok es tenyek" JEL December, Hungarian version of

2001(16)

22. "Az egeszseges hazasfel es a hazassag egeszsege" [The healthy marriage

partner and the health of marriage"] Magyar Bioetikai Szemle [Hungarian
Review of Bioethics].

2002

1. A Mind's Matter: An Intellectual Autobiography, (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B.

Eerdmans), xiv + 309pp; with a full list of the author's publications (pp. 259-
309).

2. Why the Question: Is There a Soul? (Pinckney, MI: Real View Books), vii +
68pp).

3. Questions on Science and Religion (in preparation).

4. L'heroine malgre elle: La vie et l'oeuvre d'Helene Duhem, French translation

by Armelle Bresson of 1992(1) (Paris: Harmatton).

5. Eszkozadta Uzenet, Budapest: Jel Kiad6. Hungarian translation of 1999(1).

6. "A szo elsobbsege: A vallas es tudomany viszonya," ["The primacy of the

word or the relation of science and religion"] JEL February.

7. "Mennyisegek es minden mas" ["Quantities and everything else"], Invited talk

at the Symposium of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, April 16,
2001. To be published in its Proceedings.

Miracles and Physics

God and the Cosmologists (Farmington Institute Lectures, Oxford, 1988)

The Only Chaos and Other Essays

The Purpose of It All (Farmington Institute Lectures, Oxford, 1989)

Catholic Essays

Cosmos in Transition: Studies in the History of Cosmology

Olbers Studies

Scientist and Catholic: Pierre Duhem

Reluctant Heroine: The Life and Work of Helene Duhem

Universe and Creed

Genesis 1 through the Ages

Is There a Universe?

Patterns or Principles and Other Essays

Bible and Science

Theology of Priestly Celibacy

Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth

God and the Sun at Fatima

 The Limits of a Limitless Science and Other Essays

Newman's Challenge

Praying the Psalms: A Commentary

Advent and Science

The Gist of Catholicism and Other Essays

Newman to Converts: An Existential Ecclesiology

Why the Question: Is There a God?

Translations with introduction and notes:

The Ash Wednesday Supper (Giordano Bruno)

Cosmological Letters on the Arrangement of the World Edifice (J.-H. Lambert)

Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (I. Kant)

Stanley L. Jaki, a Hungarian-born Catholic priest of the Benedictine Order, is
Distinguished University Professor at Seton Hall University, South Orange, New
Jersey. With doctorates in theology and physics, he has for the past forty years
specialized in the history and philosophy of science. The author of over forty
books and nearly a hundred articles, he served as Gifford Lecturer at the
University of Edinburgh and as Fremantle Lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford.
He has lectured at major universities in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
He is honorary member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, membre
correspondant of the Academie Nationale des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts of
Bordeaux, and the recipient of the Lecomte du Nouy Prize for 1970 and of the
Templeton Prize for 1987.

1 For the text see List of Publications 1993(5).

I Edited by J. F. Hanahan (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1975), pp.

257-62. See List of Publications, 1975(6).

2 The New Scientist, March 3, 1977, p. 543.

s Unfortunately I forgot the author's name and the title of the book, which may
have been published around 1962.

4 I refer to Laurence H. Tribe. See "The Pseudoscientific Roots of Law's

Debacle," 1993(9), also in Patterns or Principles and Other Essays, 1995(1).

' Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger, Salz der Erde. Christentum and katholische
Kirche an der Jahrtausendwende. Ein Gesprnch mit Peter Seewald (Stuttgart:
Deutsche Verlags-anstalt, 1996), p. 79. The book is also available in English
translation, The Salt of the Earth, tr. A. Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1997).

2 P. Viereck, Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals (Boston: Beacon Press,

1953), p. 45.
 3 A condensed form of the dissertation was published under my and Dr. Hess'
joint authorship. See List of Publications, 1958(1).

'See Times Literary Supplement, June 3, 1977, p. 674.

5 Letter of April 5, 1982.

4 Scientia (Milano), 112 (1977), pp. 841-42.

1 Published by Archon Books (Connecticut), 238pp.

3 See Revue d'histoire des sciences, 3 juillet 1976, pp. 274-75.

' The reference to Rankine in A. Mittasch's monograph, Friedrich Nietzsche

als Naturphilosoph (Stuttgart: A. Kroner, 1952), p. 24 is not related to any of
Nietzsche's dicta.

z The New York Times Book Review, January 3, 1999, p. 6.

6 W. Wallace in American Scientist, 63 (1975), p. 721.

8 List of Publications, 1992(12).

List of Publications, 1993(5).

3 Duhem, Le Systeme du monde, vol. 2 (Paris: Hermann, 1914), p. 390.

Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, Part I, ch. 73.

List of Publications, 1983(6) and 1985(7).

See The Savior of Science, 1988(1), pp. 5-6.

' It proved to be a total publishing failure, as I was told later by Beauchesne.

The fault for this may have been the publisher's presentation of the book as a
piece of "humour" instead of social criticism.

2 "Ignored Intellect," Physics Today, December (1966), pp. 47-53.

Quoted in Feyerabend's autobiography, Killing Time (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995), p. 130.

4 In the invitation it was not suggested that I talk on Duhem.

By the geneticist C. H. Waddington (Edinburgh University Press; Cambridge,

MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1968).

6 In Greek, of course, ES2ZEIN TA (DAINOMENA.

'See List of Publications, 1992(26).

' Willem B. Drees, Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God (La
Salle, IL: Open Court, 1990), p. 18.

z Popper and after: Four Modern Irrationalists (New York: Pergamon Press,
1982).

List of Publications, 1986(8).

I Humanity, Environment and God: Glasgow Centenary Gifford Lectures

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 1. See also pp. 16 and 20.

6 Pars Prima, Qu. 7, art. 7 and Qu. 25, art. 4.

The New York Times Book Review, February 14,1988, p. 15.

s The first to do so was Bernard E. Jones, with a doctoral dissertation

(University of Leeds, May 1966). For details, see 1986(2), p. 13 (note 25).

2 C. Burt, "The Concept of Consciousness," British Journal for Psychology 53

(1962), p. 229.

s Drew McDermott, professor of computer science at Yale, in his op-ed

editorial, "Yes, Computers Can Think," The New York Times, May 14, 1997, p.
A21.

See The Road of Science, p. 141

And on this Rock: The Witness of One Land and Two Covenants (Notre
Dame, IN.: Ave Maria Press, 1978), p. 13.
 6 K. J. Sharpe, "Stanley L. Jaki's Critique of Physics," Religious Studies 18
(1982), p. 64.

Some of Einstein's evasive remarks about the reality of free will as well as his
calling it an illusion are given in The Purpose of it All, 1990(1), pp. 182-83.

R From the late 1980s on I referred to this whenever opportunity arose. See,
for instance, the 3rd enlarged edition of Brain, Mind and Computers, 1989(3), p.
286.

See report in The New York Times, March 17, 1998, p. Fl.

1 November 2, 1997, p. 84.

'As reported by Lord Moran, Churchill's personal physician. See Bible and
Science, 1996(1), pp. 147-48.

3 J. A. Froude, History of England (new ed.; London: Longmans, Green and

Co., 1870), vol. vii, p. 174.

4 J. H. Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (new

ed.; London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1878), p. 8.

Several such statements of Saint Irenaeus are quoted in Bible and Science,
1996(1), pp. 81-83.

6 H. de Lubac, The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin (New York: Desclee,

1967), a translation from the French, published in 1962.

With respect to his defense of Teilhard, de Lubac certainly did not emulate
Newman who, in order to disarm his opponents effectively, set forth their case
against his position as convincingly as possible.

I See Bible and Science, 1996(1), p. 43. The exegete in question is T. Boman.

2 List of Publications, 1995(11).

4 One such prominent exegete is the late Raymond E. Brown.

 List of Publications, 1994(6).

"The Universe in the Bible and Modern Science," 1988(6).

E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (2d

ed.; New York: Harcourt, 1932), p. 227.

4 I am referring, of course, to Before the Beginning (Reading, MA: Addison

Wesley, 1997) by M. Rees.

A. N. Whitehead, The Function of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 1929), p. 12.

2 De arte rhetorica, xi, 2.

' December 27, 1930, p. 995.

Mathematics in Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949).

The captain, Bob Simpson, quoted in The Times (London), August 31, 1989.

2 The Jesuit philosopher of science, Pere Francois Russo, in a letter to Joseph

O'Malley, on January 18,1965. See List of Publications, 1992(1), p. 264.

s C. Sagan, "Channeling or Faith Healing-Scam or Miracle?" Parade

Magazine, December 4, 1994, pp. 14-15. Sagan ignored also the fact that
"accelerated" cases were still very different from the practically instantaneous
cures which alone are considered by the Church as possible miracles.

6 J. T. Durkin, Hope for Our Time: Alexis Carrel on Man and Society (New
York: Harper & Row, 1965).

4 See List of Publications, 1999(3), p. 93.

Ibid., p. 84.

' Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: HarperCollins,
1998), p. 976.

' Thomas L. Friedman, "Character Suicide," The New York Times, January
27,1998, p. A19.

5 Letter of April 4, 1875, to his nephew, Prof. J. R. Mozley.

6 Those words became the title of the book by the late Sidney Stewart, one of
the survivors of that march.

See E. Waugh, Monsignor Ronald Knox (Boston: Little, Brown and

Company, 1959), p. 34.

8 The Reality of God, and Religion and Agnosticism: Being the Literary
Remains of Baron Friedrich von Hugel (London: J. M. Dent, 1931), pp. 53-54.

'Notre Dame Law Review. See List of Publications, 1993(9).

April 3, 1998, p. A26.

' The book by Ernest F. F. Chladni (1756-1827) was his Ueber Feuer- Meteore
(1819).

2 Fatima alla luce della fede e della scienza by Pio Scatizzi, published in
1947.

I Os epis6dios maravilhosos de Fatima by Canon Formigao.

' Quantity and Quality: The Hayden Colloquium on Scientific Method and
Concept, ed. D. Lerner (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961).

4 Canto V, stanza 5. "Follow me and let the people talk, stand as a firm tower,
which never shakes its summit for the blast of winds."

2 See List of Publications, 1997(16).

See List of Publications, 2001(6).

 Table of Contents
Introduction
1. A Mind's Coming of Age
2. Theological Roots
3. A Mind's Delight
4. A Sheer Delight
5. A Kindred Mind
6. The Gifford Lectureship
7. To Save Our Souls
8. Theology Matters
9. Biblical Matters
10. Doing Philosophy
11. A Christian's Philosophy
12. Heavy Matters
13. A Portuguese Proverb
14. As Crystals Grow
List of Publications
One can understand the resentment which seizes those who rest their naturalism
and secularism on sci
Part of that chapter was reprinted in The Ascent of Man: Sources and
Interpretations.'
About the same time physicist readers of The New Scientist were advised that
The Relevance should
I have to make it clear that I was not the first to connect Godel's theorems with
physics. The first
Such a one-culture oracle is that legal pundit of constitutional jurisprudence at
Harvard who tried
One of those periti subsequently became known as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger,
the most authoritative t
I have never made any apologies concerning my ultimate intentions about this
eagerness of mine to le
My original hope was that I would do a doctoral thesis in mathematical physics,
preferably in someth
Underlying those expectations is the broader view that the universe has to
produce everything and do
Frances Yates, who in reviewing that other translation in 1977 still did not know
about mine,2
wrote a very hostile review of my translation and dismissed me as a disciple of
Yates.'
The most rewarding part of my researches on Lambert related to my
investigations of the place of his
fair and probably right. But I love Kant (in spite of his a priori validity claims
which I think wer
Nietzsche did not seem to know about those speculations,'
The culture was Western Europe, about which the obvious is stated in Belloc's
famous dictum: "Europe
There was another side to the coin, to which my reading of Duhem's Systeme du
monde opened my eyes.
Meanwhile I took immense delight in enlarging my mind by delving into ancient
Hindu, Chinese, pre-Co
opportunities to take up the question of the failure of Muslim civilizations to
become the cradle of
The reception of Science and Creation varied according to one's preference of
any of those alternati
The student refused to let Darwin off the hook. In his third letter to Darwin, he
asked him to speak
Foster, as I showed in an essay on him,'
seemed to realize that if the Middle Ages produced the spark that made science
come alive, there w
ments of the 1880s, to which Pierre contributed splendid cartoons that showed
noted politicians with
My chances of meeting the Charrus on that hot July day should seem
astronomically small, which may g
Kuhn's procedure appears particularly distasteful if seen against what Helene
Metzger did when, as s
As to the latter point, I emphasized it in a talk I gave in the context of the Boston
Colloquia on t
that found me in my University's darkroom on many a late evening. But the
result was worth the effor
I mention this partly because my first published writing on Duhem was an
introduction which Morris P
One tries to cope with this with resignation, but I could not help being irritated
 on finding the fi
The bearing of all this on natural theology had to be obvious, because the
articulation of the class
From what I have just said it should be clear that I used Koyre's and Kuhn's
disapproving dicta on t
centenary of the founding of the Gifford Lectureships, a comprehensive essay on
them would be in ord
I discussed the lectures by grouping them according to their authors' professions:
philosophers, his
the human being dies, he no longer exists. Can God resurrect something non-
existent? Even an infinit