Part Three - Galileo, Descartes, and Giordano Bruno - Technical and Magical Dominion over Nature
Part Three (3/5)
In the dominion over nature, man cannot claim to exceed the powers that God has assigned to him.
However, Descartes, under the pretext of the inapplicability in the field of experimental physics of Aristotle's categories, which are nothing more than the universal and indispensable categories of common sense and natural reason, claims to replace ontological knowledge with mathematical knowledge in physics. This way, he relegates sensory qualities and vital forces to the realm of subjectivity and considers physical reality only from the perspective of quantity and extension.
It is evident that in Cartesian physics, with the objectivity of sensory qualities and virtues disappearing, the scientist loses that attitude towards observation and experimental verification that characterizes Galilean physics. It becomes clear that in such a conception of the science of nature, the branches suffering the most are biology and experimental psychology, whose objects are reduced to the pure deterministic and mechanistic aspects of material reality.
Conversely, in Cartesian physics, unlike Galilean physics, which modestly and honestly stays within the limits of its epistemological and operational possibilities, there arises the extravagant ambition of the human spirit to master nature beyond its actual powers, invading the realm of operations dependent on the institutor and creator of nature. We have thus entered the realm of magic, which is precisely the claim of humans to arrogate to themselves powers over cosmic nature and human nature that belong only to God.
Therefore, Cartesius's opposition to Galileo is not so much on the plane of physics but rather on the background of epistemology and metaphysics. While Galileo stays within the realm of normal epistemological realism based on common sense and theorized by Thomistic philosophy, Cartesius, as is known, claims to rebuild metaphysics on the basis of his cogito, which is nothing more than a revival of ancient sophistry already refuted in its time by Aristotle.
So, while realism allows Galileo a theology in which God reveals Himself to reason as the creator of the substantial forms of bodies and their sensible, qualitative, quantitative, and dynamic accidents, both active and passive, the Cartesian conception of knowing as self-awareness - on the other hand - implicitly contains a profession of pantheism and atheism. This would be brought to light three centuries later by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx. The will of the self to posit itself, emerging from the cogito, makes it impossible to admit the existence of an extra-mental God as the creator of the self, but at most a God as an innate idea in the self, as clarified by two centuries later by Kant.
The Galilean man is the one who, starting from experimental knowledge, opens himself to metaphysics and theology, entering into a filial relationship with God, protected from diabolical suggestions; while Galilean science, in its honesty, lays the foundations for engineering and technical production, ensuring man a reasonable and fruitful dominion over nature because he is the first to obey its laws, the Cartesian man, a res cogitans closed in on itself, with a res extensa before consciousness, which is an entity of reason, like Galileo, is certainly capable of possessing a mathematized knowledge of nature, of one's own body, and of other bodies. Still, closed as he is to the extra-mental entity, that is, to true metaphysics and therefore to the perception of divine transcendence, he is not open to the beneficial influence of divine providence. In his self-reference, while on the one hand, he can build machines as in Galilean technology, on the other, he is open to that impure and rebellious spirit toward God, namely the demon, who can make him believe he is a god and has an exorbitant power over nature, determining forms and structures at will to obtain effects and forces from nature that surpass its limits. And this is nothing but magic.
In this way, while with the knowledge of the divine and natural, human and cosmological law, we establish the rules of moral conduct towards God (religious ethics), ourselves (personal ethics), the opposite sex (family ethics), others (social ethics), and nature (ecological ethics), and also establish norms for technical and artistic work, letting ourselves be seduced by that false wisdom that puts ourselves in the place of God, the demon takes advantage of our foolishness and pride and is worshipped in place of God, and so religion is transformed into idolatry, virtue gives way to vice, and dominion over nature get expressed in a magical way.
Descartes, with his cosmology, in which the study of the phenomena of nature is approached, as Galileo also does, with the mathematical method, on one hand, promotes experimental science and technical progress and makes divine worship possible. On the other hand, succumbing to the pride of wanting to be the cause of one's own being and transforming God into an innate idea, he grants space to the diabolical arts of magic. The magical outcome of idealism was well diagnosed by Julius Evola in a collection of essays titled precisely "Essays on Magical Idealism" [1].
Cartesian physics, by rejecting substantial forms and accidents of substance, and replacing them with the mathematical schematization of "res extensa," claims to subject the essence of physical nature to the power of human intelligence and will. It takes away from God the power to determine and shape matter and accidents in physical nature. Thus, nature, whether the human body or the physical body, is no longer a reality external to the human mind and will, falling under the senses and existing independently of man. It is no longer created, formed, and moved by God and subject to laws established by God. Instead, it becomes a machine built and buildable by humans.
In Cartesianism, the human spirit not only governs nature through tools constructed by humans but directly operates on corporeal matter reduced to "res extensa" as an entity of reason. This entity provides human reason with mathematics (emphasizing the left hemisphere, Ed.) and the will with the ability to implement the mathematical content of this entity of reason, translating and practically applying it in concrete reality.
In this view, life no longer belongs to the lower nature beneath humanity. Vegetative and sensory life are ignored. For Descartes, only the life of the human spirit exists, which directly imparts its practical design onto the body reduced to res extensa. It activates at its will those potentialities according to mathematical measures that humans themselves establish through reason and implement through a will.
In Descartes, reason not only adds an accidental form to the substantial form of a presupposed natural matter existing independently of thought. It claims to give mathematical form and mechanical activation to a human or physical body that is wholly immanent to mathematical thought, in which the same human matter is resolved. Thus, if the being of this matter is its own very being perceived as res extensa, as Berkeley will later say, it eventually happens that, conversely, thought is materialized and confused with imagination and sense, as will occur with Hume. Thus, Cartesian spiritualism, seemingly sublime, turns (tragically, Ed.) into materialism, positivism, and empiricism.
Now it is evident that in this regard, Descartes attributes to humans powers over nature that belong only to God. It is true that human technology can build machines capable of providing humans with performances, services, advantages, and conveniences that the simple operations of nature cannot provide. Furthermore, certain forces of nature are even hostile to them.
However, Descartes attributes to humans powers that go beyond what they can actually do, deceiving them by presenting powers that belong only to God. In doing so, Descartes tickles human pride and steers them away from humility and wisdom, which consist of accepting the limits that God Himself has placed on the power of human nature and being content with what one is naturally capable of obtaining from nature. This involves waiting, if necessary, for divine omnipotence to supplement the forces of nature through the operation of miracles.
Descartes attributes to humans the same power or dominion that God has over nature. He takes away from material substance its substantial form, replacing it with res extensa, a mathematical entity produced by reason. Consequently, he assigns to human will the power over nature, no longer seen as a substantial entity created and regulated by God, but as a mathematical and mechanical entity of reason put into practice by will. Thus, humans come to treat nature as if it were a machine conceived by them. Humans themselves become a machine conceived and operated by humans, a machine that operates independently of the mind and will of humans as if it were another human being.
This project can be found in Kabbalah, which provides instructions for the fabrication of the golem, a statue that would acquire speech through the magical application of the name Yahweh on the forehead [2]. A similar project through the application of cybernetics is found in David Fergusson's book "Artificial Humanity" [3].
However, as I have already mentioned, in Descartes' philosophy, man, prideful of a power he does not truly possess, exposes himself to the danger of being seduced and deceived by the spirit of falsehood and pride, which is the demon. After the original fall, the son of Adam is inclined to subject himself to this evil spirit, to confide in it, to leverage its power, and easily becomes an instrument when, in a Cartesian manner, he trusts in himself and not in God.
Now, this perspective of dominion over nature has nothing to do with the honest engineering art based on the Galilean method of natural and human sciences. Instead, this irrational and unfounded dominion is nothing but the natural and Christian ethics called by the name of magic. It is the claim of man to acquire a power over nature that surpasses what God has granted, and by belonging only to God, man deludes himself into thinking he can achieve it. However, all he can achieve with his unreasonable and reckless endeavors is to unleash mechanical energies and uncontrollable forces of nature, which may turn against him and destroy him.
It's the recent alarm raised by the English scientist Geoffrey Hinton [4], who, as reported by the article, speaks of
"enormous risks associated with the development of machines capable of reasoning and making decisions autonomously. Hinton doesn't paint science fiction scenarios of computer rebellions gaining self-awareness, but notes that artificial intelligence is allowed not only to generate its own code but also to manage it entirely autonomously and end up formulating reasoning and making decisions that cannot be foreseen by the creators of the programs."
Regarding that, what we can reasonably infer from Hinton's statements is certainly not the risk that humans can produce intelligent machines because that is absolutely excluded, as I demonstrate in this article, and it is indeed the futile dream of magic. What can actually happen is that these machines escape control and cause trouble that we cannot prevent or repair.
[Cf. John Lennox Unlocks the Truth about AI, Consciousness, and God; Source: YouTube/Practical Wisdom Ed.]
Based on what I have said, it is clear that for humans, concerning their relationship with God and the practical-operational relationship with nature, two possibilities are offered: engineering or magic. Engineering is the art by which humans, respecting the laws and dynamics set by God in nature, perfect the creations by adding works of their ingenuity and labor to meet their physical and spiritual needs. On the other hand, there is magic, the art of performing wonders through either silent or expressed collaboration with the demon. It involves the persuasion of possessing a superhuman or semi-divine power over nature, either by nature or by the concession or influence of the demon, so as to bend God to do one's will [5].
While, on the one hand, Descartes, with his mathematical method of the science of nature, aligns himself with Galileo, on the other hand, with his idealistic epistemology and the reduction of nature to a simple mechanism manipulated by man, he opens the doors to magic and thus to a cosmology like that of Giordano Bruno [6], who openly professes magic [7], considering it not at all disgraceful, let alone as diabolical art, but, on the contrary, as wisdom and the science of nature that makes man the master of the world.
Why was the Inquisition so severe with Bruno? Because it rightly saw in his ideas and practices the danger of not only destroying Christianity but also of religion itself and civil coexistence. The damage that Cartesianism would do in the centuries that followed until today would not be less than that produced by Bruno but exactly along the same lines: the Promethean arrogance of human pride, which wants to equate itself with divine science, does not tolerate the yoke of divine law and the overarching power of God. Instigated by the ancient serpent, it wants to be the principle and apex of reality, the mistress and creator of it according to the unlimited arbitrariness of its will.
Unlike Bruno, who ended up on the stake, Descartes managed to escape ecclesiastical justice, attracting in 1663 [8] a simple condemnation from the Holy Office, which went unnoticed. Furthermore, he obtained from his immense "claque," to which many Catholics belonged, the prestigious title of the founder of modern philosophy.
In truth, Dominican theologians and philosophers immediately noticed the deceptions of Cartesianism and have refuted them since then until today. However, such was Descartes' cunning that he presented himself, I would not say as a Catholic, but even as the champion of Catholic thought better founded than that which started from Aristotle to reach Thomas Aquinas. He always managed to obtain honorable citizenship not only in the circles of scholastic theology but also in those of Catholic denominations.
Certainly, Descartes refrains from defending magic, yet he dedicated a now-lost work to the secret society of the Rosicrucians with these words: "to the wise of the whole world and especially to the Rosicrucian brothers, illustrious in Germany, erudite throughout the world and especially renowned in Germany" [9].
On the other hand, Bruno took no precautions to refrain from an open defense of magic, firmly believing he could persuade the learned and even the Pope of the goodness of his ideas. To this end, he traveled to Italy, but, as we know, his venture achieved the opposite result from what he had hoped for.
The epistemological and metaphysical foundations of magic
The theoretical framework underlying the action or perspective of magic is the confusion between chemical substance and living substance and the joint and presupposed belief that one can artificially construct the substantial form of material substance.
Furthermore, there is a confusion between the intentional immanent action proper to the living being and the transitive physical action proper to chemical substance. Generation, the act of the living being that produces life according to the laws of biology, is confused with the engineer who constructs machines, surgical prostheses, or computers according to the laws and formulas of rational mechanics or quantum physics.
It is believed that mathematics, differential equations, analytical geometry, algebraic calculus, algorithms, or statistics are sufficient to understand, produce, and reproduce living beings as if they were industrial products. It is thought that life can be the result of a suitable technical action on a chemical substance. This means not knowing what life is.
This confusion arises because the substantial form of a chemical substance is confused with the soul (panpsychism of Campanella, Bruno, and Leibniz) or with the geometric figure (deterministic mechanism of Descartes and Spinoza). In both cases, humans claim to achieve dominion over matter and therefore over nature, enabling them to mechanically or magically construct life up to its highest degree, namely intelligence. Hence, practices of artificial fertilization (ART, Ed.), the current project of AI, transhumanism, and the metaverse.
We have here a clear misunderstanding of the principle of causality, whereby it is believed that the lesser can efficiently cause the greater, when in fact it is the opposite, according to the scholastic axiom "propter quod unumquodque et illud magis": every effect has a cause, and this cause is more valuable, for otherwise it would not sufficiently explain the why of the effect. Nothing, in itself, produces nothing. If the cause did not already virtually contain the effect, it could not produce it. Therefore, the cause cannot be less than the effect but must be more, higher on the plane of being.
Magical action claims to obtain the living from the chemical or the machine, the spiritual from the material, the divine from the human, and the soul from the body; but all these forces are insufficient to cause those effects because they are ontologically superior. If anything, it is the supposed effects that dominate the supposed causes and govern them. Magic inverts the order of reality, disrupts the functioning of the principle of causality, and can only produce vain hopes, failed projects, dangerous illusions, trickery for the unwary, and falsehoods for the credulous.
One should not even confuse magic with creation. The magician does not create from anything but adds and produces an accidental form to a presupposed substantial form, like any created agent. The magical work is nothing more than an artifact produced with the collaboration of the demon, who, as a creature, cannot operate directly on the prime matter (the material substrate, Ed.) but on an already constituted body and operates not directly but through a tool used by the magician [10].
The creative cause certainly produces a being from nothing; but even here, the producer is not nothing; the producer is God, the supreme being. Nothing is only presupposed to the created being, in the sense that before it existed, evidently, there was the nothingness of its being, meaning it did not exist.
The greater can come from the lesser, can be derived from the lesser, but not produced by the lesser. The animal soul in the generator educes the generated from the matter of the seed, but it remains that the form of the living being has more being than the matter, which does not produce the soul from itself but it is the soul of the generator that educates the soul of the generated from the matter of the generated.
Certainly, it is not always easy to distinguish the works of magic from those of thaumaturgy. And it is not always easy to distinguish certain extraordinary and supernormal operations of nature from actions caused by preternatural angelic forces or true miracles.
In this regard, we can mention the difficult and complex issue posed by the rich phenomenology of parapsychology, about which, excluding obviously impostures and false or exaggerated information, we have immense documentation of facts, especially from the late 18th century onwards. However, these facts are presented in a very difficult interpretation, as the nature of the causes of such extraordinary phenomena rarely appears, and they do not lend themselves to systematic scientific observation due to their occasional nature or the unavailability of the actors, although many facts are documented with absolute reliability due to the seriousness of the testimonies and the empirical traces they leave.
We are faced with supernormal psychic powers of an extraordinary nature [11], for which science has not yet been able to find a secure and satisfying explanation to spread, encourage, and systematically use, if possible, as well as to educate and enhance these powers for the good of humanity.
The New Testament introduces an additional element into this phenomenology of human power over nature: the institution of the priesthood by Christ, with the power to transubstantiate the offerings into the body and blood of Christ. Here, man attains a true divine power, not the illusory and deceptive power of the magician, who, as Saint Thomas points out, relies on the assistance of the demon, a superhuman knower of the secrets of nature, to perform deceitful wonders. Jesus himself, as we know, was a source of scandal because his miracles were mistaken for magical operations (Mark 6:3), and similarly, the Pharisees interpreted them as actions done with the power of the demon (Matthew 12:24).
Thus, while the priest is a true minister of God to work salvation through sacred signs that are the sacraments, a man to whom God has given sacramental power to make material substance, oral speech, and physical gesture instruments and channels of grace, the magician is a narcissistic impostor who exploits popular credulity to gain fame by inducing people to disobey God's laws, promising a false power over nature and obtaining substantial gains through fraud and deception.
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, 10 maggio 2023
source: https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/galileo-cartesio-e-giordano-bruno_14.html
[1] Mediterranee Editions, Rome 2006.
[2] Gershom Scholem discusses this in his book: "La Cabala," Mediterranee Editions, Rome 1982.
[3] Quoted from Wikipedia under the entry TRANSUMANISM.
[4] Information obtained from the Corriere della Sera website on May 2nd, in the article by Massimo Gaggi, "The two most frightening risks of Artificial Intelligence according to Geoffrey Hinton, his 'godfather.'"
[5] See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q.110, a.4; q.114, a.4; Commentary on the Sentences, Book II, Dist. VII. q.3. a.1; De potentia, q.6, a.5; De malo, c.16, a.9, ad 13m; Contra Gentes, Book III, c.103-107; Quaestiones quodlibetales, IX, q.4, a.5; Compendium Theologiae, c.136; Commentary on Matthew, c.24; Commentary on II Thessalonians, c.2, lect.II; De sortibus, c.4.
[6] Cf. Michele Ciliberto, "Giordano Bruno," Laterza Editions, Bari 1992; Giovanni Gentile, "Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Rinascimento," Le Lettere, Florence 1991.
[7] One of Bruno's works is formally dedicated to magic: "De magia. De vinculis in genere," Biblioteca dell'Immagine Editions, Padua 1991.
[8] See the entry DESCARTES in the Dictionnaire de Théologie catholique: "donec corrigantur."
[9] J. Maritain, "Le songe de Descartes," Buchet & Chastel, Paris 1932, pp.294-295.
[10] See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q.110, aa.2 and 4; q.114, a.4; De malo, q.16, a.9; De potentia, q.6, a.10.
[11] From the age of four, I demonstrated an ability in drawing typically belonging to an adult subject trained or instructed in this field. I was classified by experts as a "wunderkind." It was an activity I carried out with complete ease, spontaneity, and without errors. Over the course of eight years, I produced 10,000 drawings, many of which are now in a museum in Florence dedicated to children's drawings. In my case, no one has been able to provide a satisfactory explanation. I can only thank the Lord for this gift He deigned to give me. See a reference to my case in Leo Talamonti's book, "Universo proibito," Sugar Editore, Milan, 1967, pp.145, 169.