A common impression prevails that there is serious, if not invincible, opposition between science and religion. This persuasion has been minimized to a great degree in recent years, and yet sufficient of it remains to make a great many people think that, if there is not entire incompatibility between science and religion, there is at least such a diversity of purposes and aims in these two great realms of human thought that those who cultivate one field are not able to appreciate the labors of those who occupy themselves in the other. Indeed, it is usually accepted as a truth that to follow science with assiduity is practically sure to lead to unorthodoxy in religion. This is supposed to be especially true if the acquisition of scientific knowledge is pursued along lines that involve original research and new investigation. Somehow, it is thought that any one who has a mind free enough from the influence of prejudice and tradition to become an original thinker or investigator, is inevitably prone to abandon the old orthodox lines of thought in respect to religion.
Like a good many other convictions
and persuasions that exist more or less as commonplaces in the subconscious
intellects of a great many people, this is not true. Our American humorist said
that it is not so much the ignorance of mankind that makes him ridiculous as
the knowing so many things "that ain't so." The supposed opposition
between science and religion is precisely an apposite type of one of the things
"that ain't so." It is so firmly fixed as a rule, however, that many
people have accepted it without being quite conscious of the fact that it
exists as one of the elements influencing many of their judgments - a very
important factor in their apperception.
Now, it so happens that a number of
prominent original investigators in modern science were not only thoroughly
orthodox in their religious beliefs, but were even faithful clergymen and
guiding spirits for others in the path of Christianity. The names of those who
are included in the present volume is the best proof of this. The series of
sketches was written at various times, and yet there was a central thought
guiding the selection of the various scientific workers. Most of them lived at
about the time when, according to an unfortunate tradition that has been very
generally accepted, the Church dominated human thinking so tyrannously as
practically to preclude all notion of original investigation in any line of
thought, but especially in matters relating to physical science. Most of the
men whose lives are sketched lived during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and first
half of the seventeenth centuries. All of them were Catholic clergymen of high
standing, and none of them suffered anything like persecution for his opinions;
all remained faithful adherents of the Church through long lives.
....
There is no doubt that at times men
have been the subject of persecution because of scientific opinions. In all of
these cases, without exception, however--and this is particularly true of such
men as Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and Michael Servetus--a little investigation of
the personal character of the individuals involved in these persecutions will
show the victims to have been of that especially irritating class of individuals
who so constantly awaken opposition to whatever opinions they may hold by
upholding them overstrenuously and inopportunely. They were the kind of men who
could say nothing without, to some extent at least, arousing the resentment of
those around them who still clung to older ideas. We all know this class of
individual very well. In these gentler modern times we may even bewail the fact
that there is no such expeditious method of disposing of him as in the olden
time. This is not a defence of what was done in their regard, but is a word of
explanation that shows how human were the motives at work and how
unecclesiastical the procedures, even though church institutions, Protestant
and Catholic alike, were used by the offended parties to rid them of obnoxious
argumentators.
In this matter it must not be
forgotten that persecution has been the very common associate of noteworthy
advances in science, quite apart from any question of the relations between
science and religion. There has scarcely been a single important advance in the
history of applied science especially, that has not brought down upon the
devoted head of the discoverer, for a time at least, the ill-will of his own
generation. Take the case of medicine, for instance. Vesalius was persecuted, but
not by the ecclesiastical authorities. The bitter opposition to him and to his
work came from his colleagues in medicine, who thought that he was departing
from the teaching of Galen, and considered that a cardinal medical heresy not
to be forgiven. Harvey, the famous discoverer of the circulation of the blood,
lost much of his lucrative medical practice after the publication of his
discovery, because his medical contemporaries thought the notion of the heart
pumping blood through the arteries to be so foolish that they refused to admit
that it could come from a man of common sense, much less from a scientific
physician. Nor need it be thought that this spirit of opposition to novelty
existed only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost in our own time
Semmelweis, who first taught the necessity for extreme cleanliness in
obstetrical work, met with so much opposition in the introduction of the
precautions he considered necessary that he was finally driven insane. His
methods reduced the mortality in the great lying-in hospitals of Europe from
nearly ten per cent for such cases down to less than one per cent, thus saving
many thousands of lives every year.
Despite this very natural tendency
to decry the value of new discoveries in science and the opposition they
aroused, it will be found that the lives of these clergymen scientists show us
that they met with much more sympathy in their work than was usually accorded
to original investigators in science in other paths in life. This is so different
from the ordinary impression in the matter that it seems worth while calling it
to particular attention. While we have selected lives of certain of the great
leaders in science, we would not wish it to be understood that these are the
only ones among the clergymen of the last four centuries who deserve an
honorable place high up in the roll of successful scientific investigators.
Only those are taken who illustrate activity in sciences that are supposed to
have been especially forbidden to clergymen. It has been said over and over
again, for instance, that there was distinct ecclesiastical opposition to the
study of chemistry. Indeed, many writers have not hesitated to say that there
was a bull, or at least a decree, issued by one or more of the popes forbidding
the study of chemistry. This, is not only not true, but the very pope who is
said to have issued the decree, John XXII, was himself an ardent student of the
medical sciences. We still possess several books from him on these subjects,
and his decree was meant only to suppress pseudo-science, which, as always, was
exploiting the people for its own ends. The fact that a century later the
foundation of modern chemical pharmacology was laid by a Benedictine monk,
Basil Valentine, shows how unfounded is the idea that the papal decree actually
hampered in any way the development of chemical investigation or the advance of
chemical science.
Owing to the Galileo controversy,
astronomy is ordinarily supposed to have been another of the sciences to which it
was extremely indiscreet at least, not to say dangerous, for a clergyman to
devote himself. The great founder of modern astronomy, however, Copernicus, was
not only a clergyman, but one indeed so faithful and ardent that it is said to
have been owing to his efforts that the diocese in which he lived did not go
over to Lutheranism during his lifetime, as did most of the other dioceses in
that part of Germany. The fact that Copernicus's book was involved in the
Galileo trial has rendered his position still further misunderstood, but the
matter is fully cleared up in the subsequent sketch of his life. As a matter of
fact, it is in astronomy particularly that clergymen have always been in the
forefront of advance; and it must not be forgotten that it was the Catholic
Church that secured the scientific data necessary for the correction of the
Julian Calendar, and that it was a pope who proclaimed the advisability of the
correction to the world. Down to our own day there have always been very
prominent clergymen astronomers. One of the best known names in the history of
the astronomy of the nineteenth century is that of Father Piazzi, to whom we
owe the discovery of the first of the asteroids. Other well-known names, such
as Father Secchi, who was the head of the papal observatory at Rome, and Father
Perry, the English Jesuit, might well be mentioned. The papal observatory at
Rome has for centuries been doing some of the best work in astronomy
accomplished anywhere, although it has always been limited in its means, has
had inadequate resources to draw on, and has succeeded in accomplishing what it
has done only because of the generous devotion of those attached to it.
To go back to the Galileo
controversy for a moment, there seems no better answer to the assertion that
his trial shows clearly the opposition between religion, or at least
ecclesiastical authorities, and science, than to recall, as we have done, in
writing the accompanying sketch of the life of Father Kircher, S.J., that just
after the trial Roman ecclesiastics very generally were ready to encourage
liberally a man who devoted himself to all forms of physical science, who was
an original thinker in many of them, who was a great teacher, whose writings
did more to disseminate knowledge of advances in science than those of any man
of his time, and whose idea of the collection of scientific curiosities into a
great museum at Rome (which still bears his name) was one of the fertile
germinal suggestions in which modern science was to find seeds for future
growth.
It is often asserted that geology
was one of the sciences that was distinctly opposed by churchmen; yet we shall
see that the father of modern geology, one of the greatest anatomists of his
time, was not only a convert to Catholicity, but became a clergyman about the
time he was writing the little book that laid the foundation of modern geology.
We shall see, too, that, far from religion and science clashing in him, he
afterwards was made a bishop, in the hope that he should be able to go back to
his native land and induce others to become members of that Church wherein he
had found peace and happiness.
In the modern times biology has been
supposed to be the special subject of opposition, or at least fear, on the part
of ecclesiastical authorities. It is for this reason that the life of Abbot
Mendel has been introduced. While working in his monastery garden in the little
town of Brünn in Moravia, this Augustinian monk discovered certain precious
laws of heredity that are considered by progressive twentieth-century
scientists to be the most important contributions to the difficult problems
relating to inheritance in biology that have been made.
These constitute the reasons for
this little book on Catholic clergymen scientists. It is published, not with
any ulterior motives, but simply to impress certain details of truth in the
history of science that have been neglected in recent years and, by presenting
sympathetic lives of great clergymen scientists, to show that not only is there
no essential opposition between science and religion, but on the contrary that
the quiet peace of the cloister and of a religious life have often contributed
not a little to that precious placidity of mind which seems to be so necessary
for the discovery of great, new scientific truths.
Source:
Walsh, James J. Catholic
Churchmen in Science. Philadelphia: American Ecclesiastical Review, The
Dolphin Press, 1910
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