STANLEY L JAKI: SURREALIST by Paula Haigh
Paula P. Haigh
personal letter dated April 23, 2000
It is not my purpose at the moment to argue against the assertion that the church-men of Galileo's day took "a purely formalistic and quasi-agnostic view about physical 5cience" (page 2) -- a view that later on in other contexts Fr. Jaki, following his hero Pierre Duhem, will recommend. (See, for example, Defusing Science, by Pierre Conway, O.P., Homiletic and Pastoral Review. August-September, 1990, pages 9-2l.) The issue here is the realism involved.
Fr. Jaki takes to task Pope Urban VIII and Cardinal Bellarmine for failing "…to realize that the dogma of the Word became Flesh committed them to a thorough-going and universal realism." (page 3) This realism of the truths of Faith, especially Incarnation and Redemption, because involving matter, Fr. Jaki in some way equates with the realism of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo who all "asserted a one-to-one correspondence between a particular geometrical ordering of data and physical reality." (page 2)
The real irony is not that the churchmen held as hypothetical the physical theories of the astronomers but that the astronomers themselves, whom Fr. Jaki holds up for us as models of virtuous realism, should assert as real a view of the cosmos that continuously assaults and insanely denies every evidence of universally common sense-experience. Amongst the many philosophers who wrote against the Copernican theory from before Galileo's hey-day until well into the 18th century, there is a constant appeal first of all to Holy Scripture and secondly, to common experience. A Royal Swedish astronomer writing in l667 a kind of catechism for the common people, summarized the arguments for and against the Copernican theory, inviting his readers to exercise their freedom of choice and adopt the position that appealed to them the most. .
2 Joshua bade the sun stand still -- which would not be notable were it not [sic] already at rest.
3 The earth is the heaviest element, therefore it more probably is at rest.
4 Everything loose on the earth seeks its rest on the earth; why should not the whole earth itself be at rest?
5 We always see half of the heavens and the fixed stars also in a great half circle, which we could not see if the earth moved, and especially if it declined to the north and south. …
6 A stone or an arrow shot straight up falls straight down. But if the earth turned under it, from west to east, it must fall west of its starting point.
7 In such revolutions, houses and towers would fall in heaps.
8 High and low tide could not exist; the flying of birds and swimming of fish would be hindered and all would be in a state of dizziness.
2 That you believe that the heavens revolve is due to ocular deception similar to that of a man on a ship leaving shore.
3 That Joshua bade the sun stand still, Moses wrote for the people in accordance with the popular misconception.
4 As the planets are each a special created thing in the heavens, so the earth is a similar creation and similarly revolves.
5 The sun fitly rests at the center as the heart does in the middle of the human body.
6 Since the earth has in itself its especial centrum, a stone or an arrow falls freely out of the air again to its own centrum, as do all earthly things.
7 The earth can move five miles in a second more readily than the sun can go forty miles in the same time.
(In Dorothy Stimson, The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe. 1917. Gloucester, MA. Peter Smith, 1972, page 78 )
Notice that the Copernican view requires at every point a denial either of the plain meaning of Holy Scripture or the denial of common experience, thus necessitating sophistical reasonings. In other words, the Copernican view is anti- and/or sur- realism. It is not a realistic view of the cosmos.
The Swedish astronomer, Royale, gives no answer to number 8, but the common answer is given in other places, as in the open published Letter of Catholic Professor of Medicine at Louvain, Thomas Feyens, in 1619: the air is swept along with the earth, as an envelope which protects it from the friction of passage. This, Feyens says, is pure evasion and a worthless answer for many reasons, the principal of which is based on the never-disproved Aristotelian dictum that whatever is moved is moved by some agent. "For what should move the earth?" asks Professor Feyens. See Stimson, ibid., page 126)
Historian Dorothy Stimson continues
The high-water mark of opposition after Galileo's condemnation was reached in the Almagestum Novum (Bolgna,1651) by Father Riccioli of the Society of Jesus. It was the authoritative answer of that order, the leaders of the Church in matters of education, to the challenges of the literary world for a justification of the condemnation of the Copernican doctrine and of Galileo for upholding it. Father Riccioli had been professor of philosophy and of mathematics for six years and of theology for ten when by order of his superiors, he was released from his lectureship to prepare a book containing all the material he could gather together on this great controversy of the age. He wrote it as he himself said, as "...an apologia for the sacred congregation of the Cardinals who officially pronounced these condemnations, not so much because I thought... such great height and eminence needed this at my hands but especially in behalf of Catholics; also out of the love of truth to which every non-Catholic, even, should be persuaded; and from a certain notable zeal and eagerness for the preservation of the Sacred Scriptures intact and unimpaired; and lastly because of that reverence and devotion I owe from my particular position toward the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church." (Stimson, ibid, pp.79-80)In the conclusions to his work which Stimson gives us (page 83), we find that the first in order is based on a strikingly contemporary -- for us --judgment: "If the celestial phenomena alone are considered, they are equally well explained by the two hypotheses [Ptolemaic and Copernican]." The second conclusion is based on the physical evidence, i.e., that of common experience, and "is all for immobility" of the earth. The third conclusion, again, reminds us of today: "One might waver indifferently between the two hypotheses aside from the witness of the Scriptures, which settles the question." Would that today, too, the Scriptures carried such weight of their true authority in people's minds. The fourth and last, as given by Stimson: "But with the Scriptural evidence he adduces the decree of the Index under Paul V against the doctrine and the sentence of Galileo, so that the sole possible conclusion is that the earth stands by nature immobile in the center of the universe, and the sun moves around it with both a diurnal and an annual motion." (Stimson, page 83)
What we garner from all this is the stark reality that we know of the geocentric nature and structure of the universe by two infallible means:
1) the evidence of our senses and intellect, the only natural realism that guarantees our remaining in contact with external reality; and
2) Divine Revelation which constitutes an object of Faith carrying and bringing with it the secure joy of absolute certitude.
These two certainties arm us against the errors of a scientism built on a diabolical denial of created reality and divinely revealed truth.
When all is said and done with the pros and cons of physical science, the most compelling case for natural realism is that of the metaphysical realism taught by Saint Thomas Aquinas and implicitly, if not explicitly, recognized by all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church before him, even those of a most Platonic tinge. And this metaphysical realism of St.Thomas is the realism to which every Catholic must cling if he would retain his sanity, especially in this modern world of pseudo-science. Most briefly and simply put, this realism acknowledges that all our knowledge comes to us through the senses, that the intellect invariably corrects certain "optical illusions" such as the stick bent in the water and the ship leaving the shore, not the shore leaving the ship. Basically, our first apprehension of reality is the immediate recognition or judgment that things exist outside of and independently of the mind and/or of those instruments through which modern scientists receive all their information of the celestial bodies. Etienne Gilson in his Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, l986, page 20) quotes the perfect summation by St. Thomas himself: veritas fundatur in esse rei magis quam in ipsa quidditate. The truth is founded in the actua1existence of the thing much more than in its whatness, which latter is to be found in its definition. This is the famous and necessary distinction between existence and essence. If essence is emphasized at the expense of actuality in external reality, then, as happened with Plato, one eventually becomes entrapped in the mind, in mental constructs, in the mathematical second degree of abstraction. In a word, one 1oses immediate contact with reality. This is why Plato and all his descendants bequeath to us a philosophy of idealism. This philosophy appeals in a special manner to those who are gifted mathematically. And it is one of the great values of empirical and experimental methods that it keeps the scientist in touch with reality, with what actually is. But empiricism needs metaphysics and the realism of that higher science as much as mathematics does. All of which is subject for other papers.
The instruments of modern scientists also raise a very large problem with respect to a healthy realism and with the very possibility of achieving it. Now Fr. Jaki does not deal with these problems in his works but he does dissociate himself more than once with the Copenhagen interpretation of Heisenburg's uncertainty principle. This is simply to say that he aligns himself most emphatically with what he seems to think is Thomistic realism. But he by-passes and tends to down-play the quasi-gnosticism of Pierre Duhem: "Duhem died early in this century, just before science fully entered its post-Newtonian phase." In other words, Jaki seems here to be a disciple of Albert Einstein's Relativity which, according to him, has moved the scientific world from a metaphysics-denying empiricism and a Kantian rationalism. He says:
But the cubbyholes of empiricism and rationalism were burst by the great breakthroughs of science made in the early twentieth century: the discovery of the world of atoms and nuclei, their account by quantum mechanics, the tracing out of the evolution of stars, and the world of galaxies as interpreted by General Relativity. A philosophy different from empiricism and rationalism was to be accepted if the great twentieth-century forward move of science was to be explained at all. In fact, no less a figure than Einstein -- an unabashed agnostic --admitted that his scientific work implied a realist philosophy and that it could support priests busy with the cosmological proof of the existence of God. (page 16)At this juncture, Fr. Jaki steps back from Einstein and asks: "Should we Catholics accept only from Einstein that science is for Catholics? Have we no head to think for ourselves? And have we listened to those among us who sedulously kept recalling some of Einstein's most telling admissions?" This last seemingly refers to what Fr. Jaki himself tells us in The Purpose of It All (Regnery, Gateway, 1990, pages 181-182) that Einstein held his mathematical construction absolutely to be a one-to-one correspondence with reality. Einstein failed to see "the distinctness of mental processes from purely physical ones" and especially, Fr. Jaki also fails to insist when those mental processes take place in that purely quantitative realm of abstraction from the totality of reality, the realm of mathematical constructs. Quantity is but one aspect of reality, and yet, Fr. Jaki apparently would reduce all of creation to it. Thus his near obsession with that text of Wisdom 11:20 with which he ends this chapter on "Science for Catholics":
I suppose that the "demonstration" we may before long have of the truth of Wisdom 11:20 alludes to Einstein's recognition of the finitude of the universe. But there is also the implication that mathematical physics has gained a kind of exclusive superiority over all the other sciences. What does Fr. Jaki intend to say when he tells us that "These three are the only ... objects of science"? Measure, number and weight refer to quantity alone. Does Fr. Jaki reduce all of science to the study of quantitative aspects of reality only? Quantity is not even the most important aspect of reality: being(existence) is. And the unchanging substantial natures and forms of things that exist -- these are much more important than quantity because they are its foundation, they are that in which quantities inhere. Quantity is but one of the several accidents of individual substances. And a science that reduces its objects to measure, number and weight alone is a very restricted science, indeed; it is hardly the "enormously rich" science that Fr. Jaki praises. Fr. Jaki is guilty, it seems to me, of very serious distortion. It is, in fact, that surrealism with which I characterized Fr. Jaki in the title of this essay.
For the hopeful, and the faithful is always a man of hope, there is a constructive perspective. Through science we may before long have a demonstration of the truth of the Book of Wisdom (one of the deutero--canonical books recognized as truly inspired only by the Catholic Church) in which supreme praise is rendered to God who disposes everything according to measure, number, and weight (Wisdom 11:20). Each measure, each number, and each weight is therefore a God-ordered note in the praise which the universe renders to God through its being strictly limited to one overall measure, number, and weight. These three are the only, though enormously rich, objects of science. They are also an integra1 part of the praise which man owes to his Maker. (page 21)
The surrealist painters of the earlier decades of this century delighted in portraying reality cut up into pieces which they brought together in unnatural, unreal juxtapositions, such as Dali's "Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach". "The Surrealists' intention was to discover and explore the 'more real than real world behind the real' -- in other words, the world of psychic experience as it had been revealed by psychoana1ytical research. In l924 the French poet André Breton formulated their intentions in his Surrealist Manifesto. The aim was to resolve the two contradictory states of dream and reality into a new and absolute reality, a super-reality (surrealité) and so "…to re-establish man as psychology instead of anatomy.'" So says Helen Gardner in her Art Through the Ages (l959 edition, page 713). The Surrealists opted for mind instead of matter. Their inspiration was ultimately idealist rather than realist. It was a deliberate departure from reality."
And so it is with Fr. Jaki. By reducing all of science and thus reality to "measure, number and weight" he claims that the really real is the abstract construction of the scientific mind. By claiming that the heliocentric view of the cosmos is the real representation of physical reality, though it flies in the face of all common sense-experience and judgment (and he knows there is no proof from any kind of realism except the intra-mental reality of the mathematicians' imagination) he is playing the same kind of game with us that the surrealist painters do. This is not a science for Catholics -- or for anyone:
There is another passage in the same inspired Book of Wisdom that Fr. Jaki founds his science upon. It is the first verse of Chapter 8, and it says of Divine Wisdom that "She reacheth … from end to end mightily, and ordereth all things sweetly." This is just as much God as he Who disposes everything according to measure, number, and weight. In fact, traditional interpretation finds in the personifications of Wisdom in all these "Wisdom" books, typological references to:
1) the.Second Person of tbe Blessed Trinity;
2) to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity; and
3) to the Mother of God, the Seat of Wisdom, Our Blessed Lady, the Virgin Mary.
Wisdom refers not only to the uncreated divine attribute but also to the created participation and gift given to men. And so, if we are to look to the Book of Wisdom for some indication of the objects of science, meaning knowledge in its fullest sense, we can see that it encompasses all that exists, even God Himself.
But to be more specific. The first verse of Chapter 8 indicates that power and sweetness are also characteristics of the wise Providence of God, and these attributes are qualities. Nor may we reduce power and sweetness to subjective states of mind and/or sensation, for there is nothing in us that can be explained by itself alone. Nothing, not even subjective states, are caused by themselves. And so, just as much as measure, number and weight, the power and sweetness of God's Providence characterize the created order through all its changes and are reflected in every created being that is potentially an object of science.
In the light of the realism of Catholic philosophical theology, Fr. Jaki appears to be a surrealist heretic, for his science is both distorted in its lack of correspondence with reality while claiming to be one-to-one with reality, and greatly diminished in its reduction of all things to their quantitative aspects alone.
Hilaire Belloc in his classic The Great Heresies (1938, reprinted by Trinity Communications, Manassas, Virginia in l987) says (pages 10-11):
Heresy is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essentialNow Einstein's General and Special theories of Relativity are generally acknowledged to be but logical developments of Newtonian physics. And Newton was definitely a devotee of the Copernican cosmology as modified by Kepler. And so, Fr. Jaki's "science" fits with the Newtonian system, and Fr. Jaki would not be regarded as a heretic by modern physicists because his cosmology does not disarrange any element in the Newtonian or Einsteinian cosmology. Add to this the fact that despite his disavowal of Darwinism, Fr. Jaki is a committed evolutionist (this is discussed in another paper), there is no way that Fr. Jaki's "science" can be reconciled with the metaphysical realism of the Catholic philosophical theology we inherit from the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, nor with any physical science that is harmonious with that realism.
part therein. We mean by "a complete and self-supporting scheme" any system of affirmation in physics or mathematics or philosophy or what-not, the various parts of which are coherent and sustain each other. For instance, the old scheme of physics, often called in England "Newtonian" as having been best defined by Newton, is a scheme of this kind. The various things asserted therein about the behaviour of matter, notably the law of gravity,
are not isolated statements any one of which could be withdrawn at will without disarranging the rest; they are all the parts of one conception, or unity, such that if you but modify a part, the whole scheme is put out of gear.
There are two realisms involved:
1) the geocentric Scriptural traditional realism of Divine Revelation and common experience, and
2) the heliocentric, anti-Scriptural and anti-existential, anti-ontological realism of mathematical constructs.
Belloc says that heresy means "the warping of a system by 'Exception': by 'Picking out' one part of the structure and implies that the scheme is marred by taking away any one part of it, denying one part of it, and either leaving the void unfilled or filling it with some new affirmation." (pages 10-11)
Fr. Jaki leaves intact some basic aspects of the system such as the Existence of God and the proving of His Existence by the cosmological argument. But the Jakonian system is warped because he has replaced the geocentric cosmos with a heliocentric or an a-centric (Einsteinian) one. This really more than warps the system: it turns it inside out. In addition to that, Fr. Jaki has removed the vertical order of creation given in Genesis 1-3 and replaced it with a horizontally ordered development of all things. In this case, he has left a void unfilled -- the unchangeable order of creation, the basis of all morality. And so, while he affirms the relation of the moral to the physical order, it is difficult if not impossible to see how the moral and the physical orders are related within a time-span characterized by the progress of a science that knows nothing of moral qualities but only physical quantity.
Belloc concludes:
The denial of a scheme wholesale is not heresy, and has not the creative power of a heresy. It is of the essence of heresy that it leaves standing a great part of the structure it attacks. On this account it can appeal to believers and continues to affect their lives through deflecting them from their original characters. Wherefore, it is said of heresies that "they survive by the truths they retain." (page 12)This is an all-too-accurate description of Fr. Jaki's science! He has retained enough of the total structure of the Catholic world view to lure believers into following his labyrinthine ways which are truly sophistically brilliant in their exposition.
But such a warped and warping view has not the creative power of a heresy, either, and for this I suppose we should give thanks to God. For, in the manner of a parasite, it lives and nourishes itself on the truths it retains. Thus Fr. Jaki frequently refers in devout fashion to the great truths of our Faith, such as the Blessed Trinity, Creation ex nihilo and in time, the Incarnation and Redemption. He often claims that these mysteries of Faith are miracles -- a theological gaffe if ever there was one! He should know better. Perhaps he could be pardoned such imprecisions if it were not for the fact that he doesn't scruple to cast doubt upon the real miracle of Joshua's Long Day (Joshua 10:13), to speak ambiguously and in naturalistic fashion of Our Lord's miracles (as if they could be measured by the physicist!), and to quote with apparent approval the statement of Descartes that "God performed three miracles: the creation of things out of nothing, the freedom of the will and the Incarnation." (Miracles and Physics. Christendom, 1987, pages 18, 39, and 101). Really, such a confusion of the natural and the divine is inexcusable in a Benedictine priest-scholar-theologian of Fr. Jaki's international reputation!
But it is of just such contradictions, confusions and sophistical reasonings that the surrealistic works of Fr. Jaki are composed.
Paula P Haigh
Nazareth Village I #102
POB 1000
Nazareth KY 40048-1000
USA
Other titles in this series by same author:
Fr. Stanley L. Jaki: Sophist
Fr. Stanley L. Jaki: Revisionist
Fr. Stanley L. Jaki: Evolutionist
