Off the Shelves 3

Today we present two French Thomists, Fr. A.D. Sertillanges OP and Jacques Maritain. The first extract is from the formers’ book The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (Cork: The Mercier Press, 1948)

Contact with genius is one of the choice graces that God grants to humble thinkers; we should prepare for it as according to the Scripture we should prepare for prayer, as we pull ourselves together and assume an attitude of respect when we are to meet a great personage or a saint.

We think too little of the privilege of this bond with the greatest minds. It multiplies joy and profit for living, it enlarges the world and makes it a nobler and more precious place to live in, it renews for each man the glory of being a man, of having his mind open on the same horizons as the greatest, of living on high levels and of forming with his fellows, with those who afford him inspiration, a society in God. “Next after men of genius come those who recognize their worth,” said Therese Brunswick, speaking of Beethoven.

To recall from time to time the names of those who shine with special brilliance in the firmament o the intelligence is to dip into the record of our titles to nobility; and this pride has the same beauty and efficacy as the pride that a son takes in an illustrious father or a great ancestry.

If you are a man of letters, do you not appreciate the advantage o having behind you Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Pascal? If you are a philosopher, would you be without Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas of Aquin, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Bergson? As a scientist, do you realize all that you owe to Archimedes, Euclid, Aristotle again, Galileo, Kepler, Lavoisier, Darwin, Pasteur? As a religious man think how much poorer all souls would be if they had not, along with St. Paul, saints Augustine, Bernard, Bonaventure, the author of the Imitation; St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa, Bousset, St. Francis of Sales, Newman.

The Communion of Saints is the support of the mystical life; the Banquet of the Sages, perpetuated by our assiduous cult, is the invigoration of our intellectual life. To cultivate the faculty of admiration and because of it to keep constantly in familiar touch with illustrious thinkers, is the means, not of equaling those whom we honor, but of equaling our own best self; and that, I repeat, is the objective to be visualized and pursued.

Contact with writers of genius procures us the immediate advantage of lifting us to a higher plane; by their superiority alone they confer a benefit on us even before teaching is anything. They set the tone for us; they accustom us to the air of the mountain-tops. We were moving in a lower region; they bring us at one stroke into their own atmosphere. In that world of lofty thought, the face of truth seems to be unveiled; beauty shines forth; the fact that we follow and understand these seers makes us reflect that we are after all of the same race, that the universal Soul is in us, the Soul of souls, the Spirit to whom we have only to adapt ourselves in order to burst into divine speech, since at the source of all inspiration, always prophetic, there is “God the first and supreme author of all one writes.”

Our second extract comes from Maritain's essay "God and Science" in On the Use of Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961) .

To conclude, let us remark that our knowledge of the created world naturally reverberates in the very reverence and awe with which our reason knows the Creator, and on the very notion, deficient as it is and will ever be, that we have of His ways.

By the very fact that science enlarges our horizons with respect to this world, and makes us know better - though in an oblique way - that created reality which is the mirror in which God's perfections are analogically known, science helps our minds to pay tribute to God's grandeur.

A number of the most basic notions and explanatory theories of modern science, especially of modern physics, recoil from being translated into natural language, or from being represented in terms of the imagination. Nevertheless a certain picture of the world emerges from modern science; and this picture (unification of matter and energy, physical indeterminism, a space-time continuum which implies that space and times are not empty pre-existing forms but come into existence with things and through things; gravitational fields which by reason of the curvation of space exempt gravitation from requiring any particular force, and outwit ether and attraction; a cosmos of electrons and stars in which the stars are the heavenly laboratories of elements, a universe which is finite but whose limits cannot be attained, and which dynamically evolves toward higher forms of individuation and concentration) constitutes a kind of framework or imagery more suited to many positions of a sound philosophy of nature than that which was provided by Newtonian science.

Furthermore, at the core of this imagery there are a few fundamental concepts which, inherent in modern science and essential to it, have a direct impact on our philosophical view of nature.

In the first place I shall mention all the complex regularities (presupposed by statistical laws themselves) and the mixture of organisation and chance, resulting in a kind of elusive, imperfectly knowable, and still more striking order, that matter reveals in the world of micro physics. It makes our idea of the order of nature exceedingly more refined and more astonishing. And it makes us look at the author of this order with still more admiration and natural reverence. In the Book of Job, Behemoth and Leviathan were called to witness to divine omnipotence. One single atom may be called o witness too, as well as the hippopotamus and the crocodile. If the heavens declare the glory of God, so does the world of micro particles and microwaves.

In the second place comes the notion of evolution: evolution of the whole universe of matter, and, in particular, evolution of living organisms. Like certain most general tenets of science, evolutions is less a demonstrated conclusion that a kind of primary concept which has such power in making phenomena decipherable that once expressed it becomes almost impossible for the scientific mind to do without it. Now if it is true that in opposition to the immobile archetypes and ever-recurrent cycles of pagan antiquity, Christianity taught men to conceive history both as irreversible and as running in a definite direction, then it may be said that by integrating in science the dimension of time and history, the idea of evolution has given to our knowledge of nature a certain affinity with what the Christian view of things is on a quite different plane. In any case, the genesis of elements and the various phases of the history of the heavens, and, in the realm of life, the historical development of an immense diversity of evolutive branches ("phyla"), all this, if it is understood in the proper philosophical perspective, presupposes the transcendent God as the prime cause of evolution - preserving in existence created things and the impetus present in them, moving them from above so that superior forms may emerge from inferior ones, and, when man is to appear at the peak of the series of vertebrates, intervening in a special way and creating ex nihilo the spiritual and immortal soul of the first man and of every individual of the new species. Thus evolution correctly understood offers us a spectacle whose greatness and universality make the activating omnipresence of God only more tellingly sensed by our minds.