Based on a talk given at the All Things That Were Made Conference of the Sacra Doctrina Project at The St. Paul Seminary, St. Paul MN, June 7, 2024 (A pdf version of this essay is available at this Dropbox link.)
Introduction
By way of background, I am retired from a career in theoretical atomic, molecular, and optical physics. I am an Emeritus Fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of NIST and the University of Maryland. Our Institute studies quantum science, fundamental and applied. I have recently been taking graduate classes in philosophy and metaphysics at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC, and have participated the past couple of years in a once-monthly Thomas Circle meeting of scholars interested in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. In this presentation, I wish to highlight briefly a few basic principles I have learned from St. Thomas that are relevant to bringing a more adequate metaphysics to the sciences than the tacit reductive metaphysics we normally see.[2]
Science has been enormously successful in understanding the world across a vast range of space and time, from the incredibly small size and fast time scale of atoms and molecules to the incredibly large scale of stars and galaxies in the whole cosmos. Much of what science finds is surprising, or counterintuitive, as many popular books on physics or quantum physics discuss.[3] But science has undoubtedly been stunningly effective in transforming our world from the world of our ancestors of even a few generations ago.
Albert Einstein was struck with wonder that we can understand the amazing order of the universe so well. One of his most profound statements was given in an essay he wrote in 1936 entitled “Physics and Reality.”[4] Einstein said: “The eternally incomprehensible thing about the world is its comprehensibility.” He continued with “… The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”[5] That we can understand so much is truly a source of wonder. But this points to an answer to the question: Why is science possible? It is because there is order in reality, and we are beings attuned to seeing and articulating it. Articulation is a key—only human beings have rich symbolic language that extends across the whole of reality and let us do science and communicate that science to one another.[6] This is what we should expect if indeed human beings are made in the image and likeness of God.
A key point to keep in mind is the following: “Praxis is always and without exception rooted in and expressive of theory.”[7] Praxis refers to what human beings do and how they act in the world, including in the practice of science. Theory takes its meaning from the Greek theoria, the act of viewing or observing, as well as the sight or spectacle seen.[8] Praxis depends on what we see the world to be. Do we, like so many modern people, see the world through a tacit metaphysical lens of matter in motion within a purely horizontal frame of ultimately meaningless matter? Or can we see the wholeness of the world as a creation, as a gift of a good giver, and all that implies? Our imaginative grasp of the whole makes an enormous difference in how we live, including how we conceive of what science is doing and what is its purpose.
The Implicate Order of Being
Physicist David Bohm gave us a powerful concept that will help us tune our vision, namely, that of an implicate order.[9] Although Bohm applied this to interpreting the quantum theory, the concept is general and has a much wider application. I do not wish to imply that I accept Bohm’s particular mathematical formulations or other notions regarding the implicate order of the world, which raise complex issues that are beyond the scope of this essay. However, his basic insights regarding an implicate order are powerful ones that help to articulate principles within St. Thomas’s metaphysics of being, including the necessity of drawing upon both cataphatic and apophatic dimensions in the articulation of being. The implicate, or “enfolded,” order is a deeper and more fundamental order of reality that underlies the explicate, or “unfolded,” order of normal perception. Such an order gives a priority of the whole such that the parts must be understood in light of the whole. In such an order, everything is interconnected.
Human beings have a capacity to see the whole, for as David Schindler tells us:“Human reason is essentially catholic, kath’ holon, ‘according to the whole.’”[10] St. Thomas gives us a way to get a grasp on the deeper hidden order of the whole so that we can see being as an intelligible mystery—with both intelligible and hidden aspects embedded in the implicate order of being itself.
Thomist Josef Pieper tells us: “In the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, there is a fundamental idea by which almost all the basic concepts of his vision of the world are determined: the idea of creation, or more precisely, the notion that nothing exists which is not creatura, except the Creator Himself; and in addition, that this createdness determines entirely and all-pervasively the inner structure of the creature.”[11] Pieper also points out that “… this fact is not evident; it is scarcely ever put forward explicitly.” If this is so, we had better pay attention, for the notion of creation ex nihilo orients us towards an integrated vision of the whole of reality.
Neither science nor modern philosophy are interested in the question of being. But St. Thomas’s philosophy is most essentially a philosophy of being and calls our attention to the radical difference between the being of God and the being of created entities. The Being of God (Ipsum Esse Subsistens) is by essence (per essentiam) and is thus uncaused.[12] The being of creatures is by participation (per participationem) and isthus caused.[13] Participation is a deep concept in Thomas’s thought pertaining to being, causation, human understanding, and law.[14] Participation means having from beyond, from outside oneself.[15]
It is crucial to know that creation ex nihilo expresses a relation, not a change. It expresses the relation between the world and God, that is, what the world is. St. Thomas puts it this way: “Creation denotes the accomplished fact, …[not] a change effected by the Creator but … a relation to the Creator from whom the creature receives its being.”[16] That relation bears upon literally everything, if only implicately. The notion of creation does not give us details about topics like cosmology or evolution that are properly studied by empirical science. Rather it gives us guiding principles that govern the nature of being and its intelligibility.
Another key point in Thomas is the distinction between God’s primary causation and the secondary causation of creatures.[17] God, the first cause of all things, acts by primary causation, whereas Creatures act by secondary causation. Thomas gives a simple example from the Bible to help us understand: “… the operations of nature are attributed to God as operating in nature, according to Job 10:11: ‘Thou hast clothed me with skin and flesh: Thou hast put me together with bones and sinews.’”[18] Did God make Job? Yes, of course, according to his mode of primary causation. Did the natural process of nature make Job, growing from an embryo according to the rules of genetics and according to normal developmental biology? Yes, of course, according to the mode of secondary causation proper to the created things in the world. There is no competition between God’s causation and that of natural agents. They operate in different orders. The explicate order of natural secondary causes studied by the sciences is enfolded within an implicate order of God’s primary causation. A lot of confusion about how God acts in the world can be avoided if we keep this distinction in mind.[19]
Another key in St. Thomas has to do with the necessity to use analogical language in speaking of God. “… things are said of God and creatures analogically, and not in a purely equivocal nor in a purely univocal sense. For we can name God only from creatures.”[20] Analogical predication has an “is” and “is not” structure, consistent with Canon 2 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215AD), which says that between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude.[21] Analogical language is essential in physics too, as became evident when the quantum theory was developed in the early 20th century.[22] For example, Werner Heisenberg said:[23] “Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand the behavior of a thing [mathematically] and at the same time know that we can only speak of it with pictures and parables.” And Niels Bohr said: “We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.”[24]
Language is essential to being human, and Bohm shows how language itself represents an implicate order.[25] Words are not linguistic atoms but participate in wholistic semantic fields of unbounded scope. Furthermore, Genesis opens with God creating by speaking. John’s Gospel opens with “In the beginning was the Word and the word was with God and the Word was God… And all things were made through him.” Scientists, philosophers, theologians and poets all use language to communicate to one another. Yet, whether we are talking about God or atoms, despite its scope, language has limits on what it can say, and we have limits on what we can know. The explicate form of the world, including the atomic world, is enfolded in a deeper implicate order which we cannot always articulate. To say it again for emphasis, being is intelligible mystery—fully intelligible while remaining a source of endless wonder.
According to St. Thomas truth involves far more than a mere proposition. He tells us “This is what the true adds to being, namely, the conformity or equation of thing and intellect.”[26] Josef Pieper points out that all created things are “between two intellects,” the divine intellect, from which they are creatively thought and to which they must conform according to their nature, and the human intellect which comes to know them through its conformity with them. According to St. Thomas the divine intellect “measures” all things, whereas things “measure” our intellect, which can only “measure” things we make (artifacts).[27] Here “measure” clearly means far more to St. Thomas than “number measure” means in the sciences.[28]
As a transcendental property of being, truth reflects the implicate order of creation. Pieper tells us that things have natures and can be known because they are created. But Pieper also tells us that while all things have a clarity and intelligibility that enables them to be known by us, they also have an unfathomable depth that exceeds our knowing: we can never know how God creatively thinks beings since we cannot know the divine essence and we cannot see things “from the side of God,” so to speak. Since we can only see from the side of the creature, created things have a depth of intelligible light that exceeds our capacity to see. Pieper sees this knowable yet unfathomable character of creatures as an essential part of St. Thomas’s understanding of truth and being.[29]
The unbounded capacity of the human mind
In discussing the true as a correspondence between beings, St. Thomas quotes Aristotle in a most remarkable phrase, “The soul ‘in some way is all things.’”[30] Our intellectual soul has the capacity to take up within itself an unbounded range of things. And our knowledge comes about through the similarity or likeness in the mind of the knower to the thing in the world.
It is impossible to explain briefly how this happens, but this is the point where St. Thomas will be most radically different from modern thought, in a way that is profoundly subtle and beautiful and which I would say remains consistent with what we know from the sciences. Thomas says: “We must therefore assign on the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligible, by abstraction of the species from material conditions. And such is the necessity for an active intellect.”[31] Our senses take in input from a thing in the world, and through the joint work of the common sense and the cogitative and estimative powers of the soul, give rise to what St. Thomas calls a phantasm, or sensible species, all of this being the work of our material bodily organs. But to St. Thomas, the act of the intellect in understanding is not the work of a corporeal organ—understanding is an immaterial act, made possible by the intellective power of the soul. So the corporeal sensible species of the individual concrete thing needs to be, as it were, immaterialized, abstracted, universalized, in order to become an immaterial intelligible species in the intellectual soul. That is where the active intellect comes in. In a subtle and most remarkable act, this agent intellect shines light on the phantasm, like a participated light—to use St. Thomas’ image—enabling the abstraction of immaterial universal intelligible form from material sensible form of the individual sensed thing.[32] Once the intelligible form is in the possible intellect, we can form judgments and concepts and off we go into the process of ratio, or reasoning.
The key here is that the form of a hylomorphic entity in the world, an existent substance composed of form and matter, comes to be in the intellect of the knower in a manner appropriate to the knower. As Aristotle and Thomas both say, if we see a stone, “the stone is not in the soul, but its likeness is.”[33] A thing has a double existence, as it were, as the thing itself and in the knower as known. We might even think of form as having a triple existence: as exemplar in God,[34] as form in composition with matter in the hylomorphic substance, and as noetic form in the human soul. The world and human beings are so made that the world is intelligible to us.
Now let us return to physics through a rhetorical question about the equations of physics that Stephen Hawking posed in his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” The equations are mathematical speech through which we articulate the form of the world. The equations represent the order of formal causation, not the order of efficient (existential) causation. Equations don’t make anything exist; they only mathematically show the form of its possible existence. Physicists will say that all matter is dressed matter, that is, already so constituted as to conform to the equations. Or as St. Thomas would say it, with the potency of matter already joined to the act of form and composed with esse. The breathing of the fire to make actual things is the work of creation. The world is such that its actuality conforms to the form of the equations, which we might say, in the case of quantum mechanics, are determinately indeterminant. Following Pieper’s line of thought, how we go from the formal order to the existential order is beyond our capacity to understand. Esse is the actuality of all acts, the perfection of all perfections[35]—we see only the product, the completed thing—the thing in act. Granting the gift of esse is only something God can do. If we are to get the most intelligible interpretation of the world of atoms and fundamental particles, we must understand the difference between essence and existence, and the different implicate orders of causation. There is a lot more going on with an atom than we typically dare to imagine. The explicate world of material being is enfolded in an implicate order of formal being, which is as it is in order to serve an end. All things are in principle understandable at least in part by human beings, because our minds have a capacity for all things. If form, as an immaterial principle represented by the equations, is “materialized” in a real thing by way of creation, the form in turn is “immaterialized” again in the act by which our “intellectual soul” comes to know the thing such that we can speak forth intelligibly what we know.
Let us close by hearing from Thomist Charles De Koninck, who had a lifelong interest in matters of science and scholastic philosophy. His 1934 Ph. D. thesis topic was the great English physicist, Arthur Stanley Eddington, and both De Koninck and Eddington had a lot to say about the philosophical implications of the new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.[36] The following quotes are taken from a 1962 essay in French that was reprinted in the journal Logos in English 10 years ago, under the title The Universe: Desire for Thought.[37] The opening paragraph is: “Nature realizes its primordial and definitive trajectory in human intelligence. Creatures, we have shown, cannot find their explicit return to God, their first cause, except in thought. If God creates, necessarily he creates in order to manifest his glory exteriorly and not to manifest himself to himself, as if, by creating, he could better himself in his own sight. Creation is essentially a communication. Creatures must be able to understand the free gift of this communication, and creation must terminate in an intelligent creature who can glorify its Source.” The essay ends with this closing paragraph: “In human intelligence the corporeal universe not only becomes present to itself; in addition that presence opens it to all being and thus man can effect an explicitly lived return to the Source of being, God—God who draws the universe to himself in order to be “said” by it and who in this way prepares an abyss where the divinity can live.”
Here De Koninck is expressing the Patristic and scholastic theme of exitus/reditus—all things come forth from God and return to him through his human image-bearer who stands in the middle, a microcosm of the macrocosm, in whom all the fullness of being is implicate, waiting to be unfolded according to our human mode of being and knowing on our way to our final end, our theosis. To one informed by a Christ-centered vision of reality, as De Koninck was, all human science transpires within such an implicate order.
__________________________
Concluding Postscript
A concluding coda is needed to this brief presentation, which primarily discussed the order of the true, emphasizing form and formal causes in the order of creation. To St. Thomas, the formal cause is closely tied to the final cause, or end of a thing, which is of the order of the good. The true and the good are both transcendental properties of being. Modern culture, like the modern sciences, has separated fact and value, the order of the true from the order of the good.[38] One might claim that this separation has been devastating for world civilization and threatens all humanity with a dystopia of amoral technology—we know too much about the world but too little about what we ought to do with that knowledge. A return of formal and final causality to the order of the sciences is needed if the true and the good are to be intelligible categories with respect to the generation and use of scientific knowledge. But formal and final causes can only be intelligible if there is an intelligible transcending order—let us say an intelligible transcending implicate order—that grounds the explicate order of the immanent visible world and its mode of material and efficient causality that provides the usual subject matter of the sciences. If science refuses to consider a transcending order of intelligible form and finality, it simply blinds itself to the truth of being itself. The sciences need a new order of vision, theoria, to see why science is possible, what it accomplishes, and why the scientist desires to pursue his art. A vision of the implicate whole is essential because, to return to the opening of this essay, our action is guided by our vision, our theoria, and to miss the whole is to miss the whole point
To St. Thomas, the end of all created things is the divine goodness[39]Furthermore, we learn that all things, even inanimate things, can be said to desire God as their end: “All things desire God as their end, when they desire some good thing, whether this desire be intellectual or sensible, or natural, i.e. without knowledge; because nothing is good and desirable except forasmuch as it participates in the likeness to God.”[40]While this language of “desire” may sound strange to modern ears, it, of course, is an analogical “desire,” not a univocal one. Modern science also uses anthropological language about inanimate material things: they are “governed” by “natural laws” and must “obey” such “laws.” This is the language of politics, rule, and power, not the older language of desire and love, and is quintessentially modern.[41] Did not Dante, mirroring Aristotle, tell us rather that all things are moved by love?[42] And is not the desire to pursue science, in the broadest sense of the term, very natural to us, for as Aristotle says in the opening line of his Metaphysics: “All human beings by nature desire to know.”[43]
It is worth keeping in mind the beautiful picture of the multitude and distinction of things that St. Thomas gives us. This touches on the most fundamental question of philosophy, that of the one and the many, or, more importantly for our age, the closely related matter of identity and difference. Before looking at St. Thomas’s compelling vision, let us recall the ancient reductive account he mentions first: “The distinction of things has been ascribed to many causes. For some attributed the distinction to matter … Democritus, for instance, and all the ancient natural philosophers, who admitted no cause but matter, attributed it to matter alone; and in their opinion, the distinction of things comes from chance according to the movement of matter.”[44] This sounds very modern: the whole is simply the atoms and the void of Democritus, which, lacking transcendence, leaves the whole ultimately meaningless, grounded in chance and not in goodness, and thus ultimately the whole reduces to an unintelligible puzzle.
St. Thomas’s account of the great variety we find in our cosmos is worth quoting in full: “… we must say that the distinction and multitude of things come from the intention of the first agent, who is God. For He brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to creatures and be represented by them; and because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided and hence the whole universe together participates the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever.”[45]
Science is the study of the many and diverse aspects of the cosmos that human beings are capable of knowing. Near the end of his book, No God, No Science, Michael Hanby articulates a vision for science that is grounded in the orders of the true and the good that does not neglect the goodness of the whole: “A science commenced in wonder and love rather than a science predicated on control would yield profoundly different questions and answers, and perhaps even conceive of its subject matter differently. … If a science predicated on creation and commenced in love is preferable to a science predicated on the nihil and commenced in a quest for control, it is because its objective logic is truer to the logic of being and thus more adequate to the truth of a world commenced in love.”[46]
Can we find wisdom to give expression to this powerful and attractive vision? The rich order of being that we encounter in our universe [47] is grounded in an order of truth, goodness, beauty, and indeed love, if seen kath’ holon. And the human being, bearing the image of the Source of all things, gets to put it all into words—words of science, words of poetry, and words of praise and thanksgiving. To say being in all its depth is a vision worthy of serving. It is why science is both possible and desirable. May science in elucidating the vast diversity of our cosmos never lose sight of the mystery of being and its intelligibility, precisely as intelligible mystery, to be sure.
[1] psj@umd.edu With respect to my background in science, I am retired from the Joint Quantum Institute, NIST and the University of Maryland, College Park MD, and am a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
[2] Michael Hanby says in No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) 13, 17: “The relation of science to metaphysics and theology is not fundamentally a scientific question, nor is it fundamentally an empirical, historical, sociological, or even philosophical question, though of course it is all of these. Rather it is fundamentally a theological question, logically consequent upon the question of the relation between God and the world. … To say, then, that science is intrinsically constituted in relation to metaphysics and theology is to say, first, that it remains dependent upon a tacit metaphysics and theology in the very act by which it distinguishes itself from them.” It is easy to do tacit metaphysics in an unsound manner, and scientists, if they insist that science has no interest in metaphysics, are invoking inadequate metaphysics in need of correction. For the meaning of “tacit,” see Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1966). The tacit is closely related to the notion of an implicate order discussed in this essay.
[3] A good recent summary regarding the quantum theory is by popular science writer Philip Ball. Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different (University of Chicago Press, 2018). A classic short summary is by physicist Sir John Polkinghorne, The Quantum World (Princeton, 1984).
[4] The English translation of Einstein’s article appears along with his original German in the March 1936 edition of the Journal of the Franklin Institute with the English title “Physics and Reality.” Einstein’s original sentence is, “Das ewig Unbegreifliche an der Welt ist ihre Begreiflichkeit.” The German verb greifen (a root of Begreiflichkeit, “comprehensibility”) means to grab, to grasp, to take hold of.
[5] Einstein used the German word for miracle, “ein Wunder.”
[6] The uniqueness of human language in relation to what studies with animals has shown is demonstrated, for example, in Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky (MIT Press, 2016) or Philosophy in a New Key, A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, by Susanne K. Langer (Harvard University Press, 3rd edition, 1957).
[7] D. C. Schindler, “Truth and the Christian Imagination: The Reformation of Causality and the Iconoclasm of the Spirit,” Communio 33 (Winter, 2006).
[8] The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, ed. By F. Montanari, et al. (Brill, Leiden, 2015); theoria also bears the sense of contemplation, or receptive beholding, thus playing an important role in the Christian tradition.
[9] A presentation by Bohm with critiques from various respondents at a 1984 conference at the University of Notre Dame is given in a book edited by D. L. Schindler: Beyond Mechanism: The Universe in Recent Physics and Catholic Thought, (University Press of America, 1986); see “Introduction: The problem of mechanism,” by D. L. Schindler (1-12) and “The Implicate Order: A new approach to the nature of reality,” by David Bohm (13-37). See also D. Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1980).
[10] D. C. Schindler, The Catholicity of Reason (Eerdmans, Grand Rapids MI, 2013), 3.
[11] Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays (St. Augustine’s Press, 1957), 46.
[12] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.Q3.A4: “I answer that, God is not only His own essence, as shown in the preceding article, but also His own existence. This may be shown in several ways.”
[13] Ibid., I.Q44.A1: “Therefore all beings apart from God are not their own being, but are beings by participation. Therefore it must be that all things which are diversified by the diverse participation of being, so as to be more or less perfect, are caused by one First Being, Who possesses being most perfectly.”
[14] See, for example, Cornelio Fabro, Selected Works, Volume 1, Selected Articles on Metaphysics and Participation (IVE Press, 2016); W. Norris Clarke, S. J., Explorations in Metaphysics: Being, God, Person (University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), Chapter 5, “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas;” David C. Schindler, “What’s the Difference? On the Metaphysics of Participation in a Christian Context,” The St. Anslem Journal 3.1 (Fall, 2005).
[15] The philosophical concept of participation is associated with the Greek noun μέθεξις and the related verb μετέχω, compounded from the preposition μετά, meta, and the verb ἔχω, echo, “to have” or “to possess.”
[16] De Potentiae Dei, Q3.A3.
[17] De Potentia Dei, Q3.A1: “… being is by creation, whereas life and the like are by information: …the causation of all that is in addition to being, or specific of being, belongs to second causes which act by information, on the presupposition as it were of the effect of the first cause.” Through God’s act of creation, the various things in the universe are given their being (esse, their act of “to be”), as well as their “essence,” “quiddity,” or “what they are.” Saint Thomas adds that the various activities of the beings in the world, “life and the like,” are “by information” (per informationem). Here “information” does not have the same technical meaning we use today. It rather refers to the “form” that things have (their God-given nature which defines what they are) such that the activities and relations of things affect their “form,” thus one thing “in-forming” another (it changes in some way). Things in the world act according to their natures and thereby can cause events to happen in the world. Such causes, effected by God as the “first cause,” are “second causes” which are the “natural” causes of things within Thomas’s metaphysical framework. Such secondary causes are the kinds of relations and causes that are studied by the sciences today. St. Thomas’s notion that these operate per informationem is a matter worthy of further exploration in terms of the modern notion of information.
[18] Summa Theologica I.Q101.
[19] Modern univocal thought fails to recognize this. See Michael J. Dodds, O. P., Unlocking Divine Action: Contemporary Science and Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press, 2012).
[20] Summa Theologica I.Q13.A5, in which St. Thomas also quotes Romans 1:20: “The invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” To St. Thomas human knowing comes from taking in sensory impressions from the created things of the world, but God is invisible, uncreated and unboundedly exceeds all created things. Consequently, our language based on things that we can see and hear and touch or experience in the world (“creatures”) can only bear rightly on God and convey real truth when used in an analogical sense.
[21] “The Fourth Lateran Council’s Defintion of Trinitarian Orthodoxy,” by Fiona Robb, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge University Press), Vol. 48, Issue 1 (1997) 22-43. The Latin is “inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitude notanda.” See also H. Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma (Loreto Publications, 2002) 432.
[22] In Nature and the Greeks (Cambridge University Press, 1954) 129-130, Erwin Schrödinger gave this striking picture: “As our mental eye penetrates into smaller and smaller distances, and shorter and shorter times, we find nature behaving so entirely differently from what we observe in visible and palpable bodies of our surroundings that no model shaped after our large-scale experience can ever be ‘true’. A completely satisfactory model of this type is not only practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable. Or to be precise, we can, of course, think of it, but however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle’, but much more so than a ‘winged lion.’” Analogical language is often used in the various “models” deployed by the sciences. For example, quantum theory introduces the notion of “wave” or “particle” to talk about atoms. To say an atom “is” a particle (or a wave) would be too univocal; to say it is not at all like a particle (or a wave) would be too equivocal. What it “is” is an entity that transcends the category of particle (or wave), although an atom can act in a particle-like way in many circumstances (and a wave-like way in others). “Particle” makes a good analogical term that is neither univocal nor equivocal. It bears rightly on the situation within the “is and is not” scope of analogy. Being is both intelligible and mysterious.
[23] In a newspaper article, “Kein Chaos, aus dem nicht wieder Ordnung würde,” Die Zeit, No. 34 (22 August 1969), as translated in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversation (1971).
[24] As quoted by Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (1971). The words are not verbatim but as later recollected by Heisenberg describing his early encounter with Bohr in 1920.
[25] D. Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Chapter 1 (Routledge, 1980).
[26] Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate 1.1.
[27] Pieper, Silence of St. Thomas, 54; see De Veritate 1.2.
[28] In Summa Theologica I.Q79.A9, St. Thomas says “… to ‘judge’ or ‘measure’ (mensurare) is an act of the intellect, applying certain principles to examine propositions. From this is taken the word ‘mens’ (mind).”
[29] Silence of St. Thomas, 68: Pieper says “the ‘negative element’ in the philosophy of St. Thomas, which we set out to formulate, must be envisaged against the background of an embracing affirmation. That the essences of things are unknowable is part of the notion of the truth of Being. But so little does this denote objective inaccessibility, the impossibility of cognition, or darkness on the part of things, that there is, on the contrary, this striking paradox: In the last resort, things are inaccessible to human knowledge precisely because they are all too knowable.”
[30] In De Veritate 1.1 St. Thomas gives his understanding of the true and the good “based on the correspondence (convenientiam) one being has with another. This is possible only if there is something which is such that it agrees with (convenire) every being. Such a being is the soul (anima), which, as is said in The Soul, ‘in some way is all things (quae quodammodo est omnia).’ The soul, however, has both knowing and appetitive powers. Good expresses the correspondence (convenientiam) of being (entis) to the appetitive power, for, and so we note in the Ethics, the good is ‘that which all desire.’ True expresses the correspondence (convenientiam) of being (entis) to the knowing power, for all knowing is produced by an assimilation (assimilationem) of the knower to the thing (res) known, so that assimilation is said to be the cause of knowledge.” It is precisely in the “agreement” (convenientiam), or “similarity, likeness” (assimilationem), between the mind or soul and a thing (res) that accounts for what it means for something to be “true.”
[31] Summa Theologica, I.Q79.A3.
[32] Ibid., I.Q76.A4, “we must say that in the soul is some power derived from a higher intellect, whereby it is able to light up the phantasms. … the power which is the principle of this action must be something in the soul. For this reason Aristotle (De Anima iii, 5) compared the active intellect to light, which is something received into the air: while Plato compared the separate intellect impressing the soul to the sun, as Themistius says in his commentary on De Anima iii. But the separate intellect, according to the teaching of our faith, is God Himself, Who is the soul’s Creator, and only beatitude; as will be shown later on (Q90.A3).”
[33] Ibid., I.Q76.A4, “what is understood is in the intellect, not according to its own nature, but according to its likeness; for ‘the stone is not in the soul, but its likeness is,’ as is said, De Anima iii, 8. Yet it is the stone which is understood, not the likeness of the stone; except by a reflection of the intellect on itself: otherwise, the objects of sciences would not be things, but only intelligible species.”
[34] Ibid., I.Q44.A3, “I answer that, God is the first exemplar cause of all things … divine wisdom devised the order of the universe, which order consists in the variety of things. And therefore we must say that in the divine wisdom are the types of all things, which types we have called ideas—i.e. exemplar forms existing in the divine mind.”
[35] De Potential Dei, Q7.A2, Reply to the ninth objection: “Being (esse), as we understand it here, signifies the highest perfection of all: and the proof is that act is always more perfect than potentiality. Now no signate form is understood to be in act unless it be supposed to have being. Thus we may take human nature or fiery nature as existing potentially in matter, or as existing in the power of an agent, or even as in the mind: but when it has being it becomes actually existent. Wherefore it is clear that being (esse) as we understand it here is the actuality of all acts, and therefore the perfection of all perfections.”
[36] The thesis, “The Philosophy of Sir. Arthur Eddington,” is found in English in The Writings of Charles De Koninck, Vol. 1, edited and translated by Ralph McInerny (University of Notre Dame, 2008) 142-325. The thesis gives a positive assessment of Eddington’s ideas about the controversial new sciences of relativity and the quantum theory. It defends Eddington against both his scientific and philosophical critics, the latter including Jacques Maritain. I would say that De Koninck’s thoughts expressed in his thesis are still valuable today.
[37] “The Universe: Desire for Thought,” translated by J. M. Hubbard, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Volume 17, Winter 2014, 172-184 (Original: “Le Cosmos comme Tendence vers la Pensée,” Itinéraires 66 (1962) 168–88.
[38] See, for example, Peter Harrison, The Territories of Science and Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2015).
[39] Summa Theologica I.Q44.A4: “Every agent acts for an end: otherwise one thing would not follow more than another from the action of the agent, unless it were by chance. … it does not belong to the First Agent, Who is agent only, to act for the acquisition of some end; He intends only to communicate His perfection, which is His goodness; while every creature intends to acquire its own perfection, which is the likeness of the divine perfection and goodness. Therefore the divine goodness is the end of all things.”
[40] Ibid., reply to objection 3.
[41] See C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1964) 222-223: “The question at once arises whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive. The answer in general is undoubtedly no. … If we could ask the medieval scientist ‘Why, then, do you talk as if they did,’ he might (for he was always a dialectician) retort with the counter-question, ‘But do you intend your language about laws and obedience any more literally than I intend mine about kindly enclyning? Do you really believe that a falling stone is aware of a directive issued to it by some legislator and feels either a moral or a prudential obligation to conform?’ We should then have to admit that both ways of expressing the facts are metaphorical. The odd thing is that ours is the more anthropomorphic of the two. To talk as if inanimate bodies had a homing instinct is to bring them no nearer to us than the pigeons; to talk as if they could ‘obey laws’ is to treat them like men and even like citizens.”
[42] Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, Canto XXXIII.
[43] Metaphysics A 980a 21, πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει. In Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Green Lion Books, 1999) J. Sachs renders this closer to the literal Greek as “All human beings by nature stretch themselves out towards knowing.” The verb ὀρέγονται in the middle voice means to stretch oneself out, to extend oneself, or to grasp. It correlates with human desire, appetite, ad petere, striving for. The infinitive εἰδέναι comes from the very rich and polyvalent verb εἴδω, which bears the sense to see, perceive, look at, regard, but also to know, understand, and, poetically, to appear, be visible, and even to become like or similar (Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek). The noun for form, εἶδος, derives from εἴδω. Sachs, in his Aristotle’s Physics (Rutgers University Press, 1995) Book 2, Chapter 1, 193a 30, characterizes εἶδος, form, as “the look that is disclosed in speech.” The full sentence is “In one way then, nature is spoken of thus, as the first material underlying each of the things that have in themselves a source of motion and change, but in another way as the form, or the look that is disclosed in speech.” The form is the “invisible” principle or meaning of a thing that by virtue of a thing being seen by the eyes is capable of being grasped by the mind and thus articulated in human speech. This coheres with St. Thomas’s understanding of human perception by which form in the world, reflecting the exemplar causation of the Creator, comes to be form in the intellect of the human perceiver. The very words and striving of human beings in pursuit of science are implicate in a transcending order of both form and finality. If science cannot perceive that, it fails to understand what it is doing as human scientists pursue their natural and powerful desires to do good science and comprehend the form of the world.
[44] Summa Theologica I.Q47.A1.
[45] Ibid.
[46] No God, No Science, 378.
[47] The word “universe” is derived from Latin roots that mean to be turned towards one, unity.
Word and Fire 