Part Two - Galileo, Descartes and Giordano Bruno - Technical and Magical Dominion over Nature
Galileo the experimenter, Bruno the magician, and Descartes the cunning
Second Part (2/5)
Sacred Scripture teaches us that there are three degrees of the dominion of the spirit over matter: there is the divine, that of the angel, and that of man. God creates the material world, the multiplicity of substances and contingent beings, each with its specific, precise, defined, and determined form or essence. He establishes the immutable and necessitating physical and spiritual laws of activities, motions, and their becoming, analogous to His causal and driving action, making them efficient and driving causes of substances subordinate to them.
Based on an eternal paradigm conceived by His mind, identical to it and its being, God conceives in His Logos, orders, connects, and implements with rationality, wisdom, and infinite power all physical and spiritual substances with each other. Each is calculated, measured, defined, delimited, and determined by a given quantity and quality, action and passion, inclinations and properties, attraction and repulsion, in space and time.
God brings into action through the substances He creates all the energies, forces, and powers of the universe in a wonderful beauty and harmony, in a mutual affinity, relation, opposition, influence, similarity, correspondence, proportion, and collaboration of all with all: no conflict, no contradiction, no annulment, no disorder, no disproportion or disharmony, no imperfection or incompleteness, no lack or deprivation, no inaccuracy, indeterminacy, or confusion, no chance or disorganization. The corruption of one is the generation of the other. Nothing is created, nothing is destroyed, but everything transforms. God has arranged everything according to number, weight, and measure (Wisdom 11:21).
The spiritual creature, angel, and man have an ordering, constructive, architectural, engineering, and productive power over nature – technology – which God Himself has assigned to them. This power is similar to His, with the difference that while He is limitless because He is the creator of being and constitutive of the essence, substance, accidents, powers, laws, and purposes of nature, the power of intelligent substances is limited by the operative power specific and individual to each of them.
Furthermore, they cannot act on physical entities, move them, transform them, and use them, promote their activity, evoke their forces and energies, and regulate their functioning, by operating directly on their essence or substance or essential accidents, giving or determining the substantial form to matter. Instead, by their essential constitution and the laws of their operation, they can achieve these ends only by using natural or artificial tools.
Descartes' physics is a physics-mathematics like that of Galileo, with the difference that while Galileo accepts the realistic epistemology derived from the Bible and recommended by the Church in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Descartes considers his physics as deduced from his epistemology and idealistic metaphysics.[1]
Thus, both for Descartes and Galileo, it is possible to establish the laws and functioning of physical nature according to mathematical formulas. However, while Galileo starts from sensible experience and considered objective to grasp the nature and laws of natural phenomena and thus establish the physical theory, always subject to revision, whose truth is confirmed by verifications offered by sensible observation, Descartes, who does not believe in the objectivity of the sensible qualities of bodies, reduces his cosmology to a purely mechanistic theory formulated in the mode of mathematical knowledge.
Galilean science has nothing to do with Descartes' claim to establish knowledge and therefore reality in one's self. Instead, it is the knowledge of common sense, already theorized by Aristotle. According to this perspective, starting from sensory experience and based on experimental verification, we investigate the causes and the manner of proceeding of natural phenomena. We discover the physical laws and, based on that knowledge, build technology and master the forces of nature, just as God conceived, desired, and created them.
Giordano Bruno [2] fits into this magical mentality, which he likely absorbed from his contacts with the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, with whom Descartes also had contact [ 3]. However, a significant difference remains between Bruno on the one hand and Galileo and Descartes on the other. While the latter firmly believe in physics and mathematics, Bruno, entirely immersed in a pantheistic view of man and the universe, harbors the deepest contempt for it as false knowledge of "pedants." In this critique, he involves not only Aristotle but even Christianity.
Giovanni Gentile…
[ Here are some hints about this important Italian thinker.
“In the goals to be achieved and in the consequences to be drawn from some general premises, (the Historicism of Benedetto Croce and the absolute Actualism of Giovanni Gentile, the main Italian neo-idealists) agreed without reservations. In supporting, for example, the thesis that religion should constitute a subject of instruction, his thought did not differ from that of Croce except for the "manner" and the different position that he reserved for religion in the system of the spirit. His idea, in short, was that, just as to reach the fullness of oneself in (the history of) philosophy, the spirit passes through the ideal and opposing phases of art (subject) and religion (object), so too in school, this rhythm should find a kind of temporal or phenomenological transcription, as if, to reach philosophy there too, one should traverse the region of the myth in which religions are interested (...)
(But) his agreement with Croce was more on the conclusions than on the "method." This is the same as that which is seen in the idea that presided over the introduction of the State examination because Gentile implied the concept that in it the State realized one of the dimensions of its "ethics" (...)
The structure of the reformed (Italian) school (performed by Gentile) provided for compulsory elementary education for all, in which the sense of national tradition, religion, and literature would hold the center and constitute the criterion for the formation of the young, who would certainly not lack elementary notions of arithmetic and science. In addition to the gymnasium-lyceum, intended to train the future ruling elites and, in any case, the higher strata of the population, the reformed school provided for four fundamental directions to which, as S. Romano wrote, "four distinct social roles" corresponded (...)
The need that Gentile sought to realize, and which in some respects resulted in inadequate educational institutions, aimed to instill in minds that "culture" means, above all, the great difficulty encountered in the attempt to achieve it: a successful attempt only if one engages in the acquisition of technical, historical, linguistic, philosophical, and scientific tools, without which the world of knowledge does not reveal its treasures (...)
The enterprise to which, between 1925 and 1943, Gentile dedicated the most vibrant part of his energy as a great cultural organizer was that of the “Enciclopedia Italiana” (...)
In addition to the work of the Encyclopedia, one must not forget his other great commitment, which was constituted by the “Scuola Normale Superiore” in Pisa (...)
Two questions, simple, obvious, and equally inevitable, arise and have been posed, regarding his last political choice and the reasons that determined the decision to kill him. The answer is not, as far as the second question is concerned, as simple as that which can and must be given to the first. To the Social Republic, Gentile adhered for reasons he stated; because it was not a matter of choosing again, but of reaffirming, in the moment of supreme danger, the choice made twenty years earlier. No political calculation was sufficient to put this decision in crisis because the entire universe concentrates and lives in the pure act, and what remains outside is nothing but calculation, cunning: that is, strictly speaking, nothing. The second question can be adequately answered when new documents come to shed light on the many dark areas that still prevent seeing the whole truth; it will emerge when and if it emerges: and then it will be seen to what extent in the decision to kill Gentile, who had renewed his ties with fascism and Mussolini, political evaluations not directly known to those who, on the Florentine hill, severed the thread of his life, have also entered. Here it is enough to recall that in the church of S. Croce, in Florence, Gentile's name indicates, on the floor, the place of his burial.” (source: https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-gentile_(Dizionario-Biografico)/) Ed.]
… provides an interesting synthesis of Bruno's soul in his work "Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Rinascimento" [4]. He sees Bruno as the initiator of a "new philosophy" in which God is no longer the creator of the world, an infinite and eternal Being transcending the finiteness and temporality of man and nature. Instead, God is the "divinization of nature and man in their infinite and eternal aspects." In this perspective, God is the world’s apex, and the world is the realization of God.
Gentile states:
"With all his strength in the extreme hour to the ministers of that God, whom he had indeed left behind: the new soul" (of Bruno), "that we would always honor because when that God, whom she (the soul, Ed.) had allowed to survive alongside and beyond her new Infinite, rose against her with all the energy of logic and demanded her abjuration of her philosophy, she held unshakable faith in the ideas that human thought would later unfold to establish the reign of the new God within itself" (p.116).
What "human thought" is Gentile referring to? And what is this "new God"? It is nothing other than the idealistic thought and the idealistic concept of God, which, starting from the Cartesian ego, would develop in the centuries following Gentile, Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. It is the God of my will and not the God to whom we say, "Thy will be done."
Bruno's principle is the same as that of Descartes: I posit my being, for which I do not need a God to posit it. Only Descartes, tainted by the vice of duplicity and fiction, cleverly covers this principle with a Catholic guise to avoid the intervention of the Inquisition, while Bruno, with straightforwardness, candor, and consistent Dominican coherence, does not hesitate to openly express his ideas, not even stopping in the face of death.
It is understandable, then, how Gentile, in these enthusiastic pages, praises Bruno as the founder of modern philosophy, which, for the idealist Gentile, is nothing but what the idealists consider Cartesian philosophy, proclaimed with fanfare for four centuries as "modern philosophy."
Now, this so-called modern philosophy is nothing but the soul of modernism. For this reason, if Pius X had wanted to mention the two names of the founders of modernism, he could have mentioned the names of Bruno and Descartes, certainly not the honest and unfortunate Galileo, who was perfectly in line with Aristotelian-Thomistic realism. Moreover, the thought of Descartes and Bruno is recognized in the pantheistic and Promethean phenomenalism denounced by the holy Pontiff.
In any case, skepticism about the knowability of sensible qualities remains in Descartes, unlike Bruno and Galileo, while he readily admits the objectivity of quantities. On the level of sensibility, Descartes is therefore unable to distinguish the phenomenon (phainomenon) from appearance (doxa), what appears and manifests itself, from what seems (videtur). Kant distinguishes, respectively, between Erscheinung and Schein. The former is nothing but the appearance of the thing, thus the object of necessary universal knowledge, precisely the science of phenomena; the latter is the unverifiable appearance, which can deceive.
Aristotelian science makes magic impossible
Even before Galileo and Descartes, Aristotle had discovered the possibility of a science of nature not only based on simple sensory experience but approached with a mathematical method, as Maritain points out when he refers to:
"Aristotle, in Book II of Physics, c.2, 194a7, speaks of mathematical knowledge and discusses the parts of mathematics that are more physical than others, which relate more to physical things, what he calls “ta fysikòtera ton mathemàthon,” and translators reasonably render as 'the more physical parts than mathematical ones.' St. Thomas, in his third lecture on Book II of Physics, understands that it is not about the more physical parts of mathematics but about sciences more physical than mathematical, “magis naturales quam mathematicae,” (…) “quia harum scientiarum consideratio terminatur ad materiam naturalem, licet per principia mathematica procedat”, because the consideration of these sciences terminates in natural matter, one needs to proceed through mathematical principles [5].
Aristotle deserves credit for having founded both the certainty of sense, which establishes empirical sciences and thus the philosophy of nature, and mathematical certainty, which establishes the physical-mathematical knowledge of nature. Descartes, on the other hand, to establish sensory certainty, resorts to a non-existent prior or innate knowledge or consciousness of God, which might belong to angels but certainly not to humans, who start from the sensory experience of external things, “per ea quae facta sunt,” as St. Paul says in Romans 1:20.
Certainly, God knows that snow is white not because He has seen snow but because He created it. Similarly, for Descartes, I know that snow is white not because I have experienced it with my senses, but because God, whose existence I have decided based on my thinking, assures me that the sensation of whiteness in my eyes corresponds to the truth.
In other words, I do not come to know that God exists because I start from the sensory experience of the whiteness of snow. Instead, since I know that God exists, because I want Him to exist based on my thinking, starting from this consciousness of God's existence that I have decided, I can know that snow is white. Descartes reverses the human order of knowledge and equates it with the divine one. As (Fr. Cornelio, Ed.) Fabro rightly said Cartesian cogito is a flight because Cartesian evidence is not the result of intellectual necessity but of the will's decision.
What does all this imply in terms of practical application? For Descartes, the whiteness of snow is not an objectively presupposed sensory quality independent of my perception but is the result of my will as a consequence of my thinking as wanting. Admitting this is only a small step to the epistemological-metaphysical foundation of magic. It is enough for me, as Fichte will do, to say that I am the one who posits myself, and the game is done: I am the one who posits reality, and it is not God.
Aristotle also speaks of appearance (doxa), but he specifies that it does not always deceive. We then have the appearance of the true sensible, and thus Aristotle acknowledges the truthfulness of the senses, even while admitting that the senses are not infallible. Galileo, unlike Descartes, well aware that the senses do not deceive, is not afraid to look through the telescope, knowing he is discovering the truth. He knows very well that if it seems to the senses that the sun revolves around the Earth [6], the reality is that it is the earth that revolves around the sun [7]. Science is not about stopping at appearances, but about verifying whether these appearances correspond to reality or not. And if, even after careful examination, appearances persist, we must temporarily accept them. However, if, as a result of more accurate experiences, we realize that our explanatory system no longer holds, scientific honesty will require us to develop a different system that adapts to new experiences.
If it concerns philosophical acquisitions such as the distinction between body and spirit, man as a rational animal, the distinction between art and nature or between living being and machine, the body composed of matter and form, the world created by God, or the truthfulness of the senses, we can be sure that no new experience will invalidate these absolute certainties. If today we cannot build a thinking machine, it is not because our technology is not yet capable, but it is a sign that we will never succeed.
Thus, while on the philosophical level, Aristotle's physics is an immutable heritage of humanity and not just a specific legacy of "Greek culture," on the experimental level, physical systems succeed one another as our technical means of investigation and experimental methods progress.
The philosophy of nature, considering the sensible and mobile being, introduces metaphysics, which considers being as being, and theology, which considers the Creator of being. Physics and mathematics, on the other hand, lead humanity to the mastery of nature, enabling modification and utilization through technology, as well as embellishment through art and poetry [8].
For this reason, we must assert that Galileo's physical mathematics does not at all replace, as idealists and materialists would like us to believe, Aristotle's philosophical physics but constitutes a distinct science of a lower epistemological degree. It can be introductory and preparatory to philosophical cosmology, equipped with its mathematical method, to which Aristotle refers when to demonstrate the acceptability or plausibility of the Ptolemaic theory, he states in "De Caelo" (306a 29-30) that it is such as to save the hypothesis (sozein ten hypothesis), i.e., the phenomenal appearances. This does not exclude the possibility that, with a better understanding of the phenomena, a new conceptual arrangement may become necessary to better explain the same phenomena that are better known.
This means that the concept of phenomenon (phainòmenon) already exists in Aristotle, 2000 years before Kant, with the advantage that Aristotle does not exclude at all that the knowledge of the phenomenon may lead to the essence of the thing in itself, something that Kant excluded.
St. Thomas speaks of this method in these terms:
"There are two ways to account for something. There is a sufficient way to prove a certain hypothesis (radix), as in natural science, we obtain sufficient reason to prove that the motion of the sky is always of uniform speed [9]. In another way, a reason is posited, which does not sufficiently prove the hypothesis but, assuming the hypothesis, shows that the consequent effects are congruent with it, as in astrology, the reason for eccentric and epicyclic orbits is posited based on the fact that, assuming this hypothesis, sensible appearances (apparentia) - today we would say phenomena - regarding the movements of the sky can be saved. However, this reason is not sufficiently demonstrative because perhaps the appearances could be saved even by positing another hypothesis (‘alia positione facta’)"[10].
While Descartes continues, following Plato, to be wary of experimental science and confines himself to physical mathematics, Galileo, in the footsteps of Aristotle and St. Thomas, establishes the science of phenomena, which presupposes trust in the truthfulness of the senses. Hence, it is readily admitted here that appearances can deceive; at first glance, it seems that the sun is moving; however, through more attentive and methodical experimental observation, assuming the truthfulness of the senses, one realizes that it is the earth that is moving.
In this way, a clear distinction emerges between an experimental science of nature and a philosophical science of the same nature. The former considers the phenomenon of the thing as it appears to the senses; the latter contemplates the thing itself as intuitively grasped by the intellect.
Kant, drawing from Aristotle, founded the science of phenomena. Unfortunately, however, constrained by his Cartesianism, he lost sight of the knowability of the thing in itself, i.e., the material physical substance, rendering the intellect incapable of grasping the quiddity of material reality. In its place, he introduced an intellectual activity that shapes reality, responding only to the pretense of magic.
From this, we see how rationalism, which would seem to be an antidote to magic, is its subtle accomplice and the unsuspected secret justifier. The Galilean operates on the plane of science and rejects magic. The Brunian, whose heir is Schelling, places magic above science. The Cartesian navigates between realism and idealism, science and magic, politics and religion, and the heavens and the earth, depending on convenience and circumstances.
Therefore, if I cannot have ontological knowledge [11] of a lion, a tiger, electromagnetic waves, light rays, or the structure of the atom, it does not mean that God did not create them with their precise essence, of which I only know the sensible-measurable phenomenon, an essence realized in their existence.
If in the realm of microphysics, software, or quantum physics (the second scientific revolution, Ed.)– something Galileo understood for macroscopic astronomical phenomena – I cannot use Aristotelian categories of essence, form, prime matter, substance, and accidents, it does not mean that the birth of the Galilean-Cartesian scientific method has rendered those categories obsolete. It simply signifies that they, belonging to philosophical cosmology, could not be employed as explanatory categories for experimental science.
There is no doubt that electromagnetic waves or electrons are composed of matter and form; otherwise, they would not be material entities created by God. However, this simply means that, instead of precisely and definitively knowing this matter and form, we indirectly know and measure them through probabilistic laws, using appropriate mathematical calculations based on our technical observation instruments. The phenomenon may appear indeterminate to us, as warned by Heisenberg [12], because, for the moment and in certain cases, due to the limits of the calculating and measuring capacity of our tools, we can only make probability calculations, as if we were playing dice. However, we can be certain that what happens is well determined by the wisdom and power of God who created it.
End of Part Two (2/5)
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, May 10, 2023
source: https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/2023/05/galileo-cartesio-e-giordano-bruno_13.html
[1] Etienne Gilson, Studies on the Role of Medieval Thought in the Formation of the Cartesian System, Vrin, Paris 1975, pp. 143-184.
[2] See Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Edizioni Laterza, Bari, pp. 486-488.
[3] J. Maritain, The Dream of Descartes, Buchet&Chastel, Paris 1932, pp. 294-295.
[4] The Letters, Florence 1991, pp. 110-120.
[5] Philosophy of Nature, Morcelliana, Brescia 1974, pp. 35-36.
[6] On the Galilean question, cf. J. Maritain, On the Church of Christ. The Person of the Church and Its Personnel, Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges 1970, pp. 345-361; C. Journet, The Church of the Incarnate Word. Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges 1962, vol. I, pp. 457-467.
[7] Today biblical exegesis is more familiar with ancient ways of expression. When the Bible says that Joshua stopped the sun (Joshua 10:12), it did not intend to assert a miracle inherently absurd, but it was simply a way of saying that the battle lasted until late at night, as if to say that Joshua obtained from God that the day extended until achieving victory over the enemy. The error of Galileo's judges was to mistake for divine revelation an ancient way of expression now abandoned. Furthermore, one cannot expect people of that time to use the exegetical method that we have acquired only since the 19th century, carefully distinguishing what depends on the hagiographer from what is the true Word of God. The inerrancy of Scripture is not the inerrancy of the hagiographer. Of course, the Church did not formulate any dogmatic doctrine on that occasion. The exegetes were mistaken; the Church was not. One cannot, therefore, use this painful episode as an argument to deny the infallibility of the Church's Magisterium.
[8] Cf J. Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Morcelliana, Brescia 1957; Art et Scolastique, Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges 1965.
[9] Today we will speak of the rotation speed of the Earth around its axis and around the sun. Back then, it was the sky that seemed to rotate around the earth. However, the proof given by Galileo of this rotation was certain and sufficient.
[10] Summa Theologica, I, q. 32, a. 1, ad2m.
[11] Cf. J. Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge, Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges 1959, pp. 286-302; Philosophy of Nature, Morcelliana, Brescia 1974.
[12] Cf. the commentary that Maritain makes on Heisenberg's position in The Degrees of Knowledge, Desclée de Brouwer, Bruges, 1959, pp. 295, 296, 373, 376.