xiii
Introduction
In Dr. Ileana Chinnici’s excellent biography of Angelo Secchi, Decoding the Stars:
A Biography of Angelo Secchi, Jesuit and Scientist, Secchi’s scientific achievements
were treated as milestones in his personal life. Now in this volume, a series of
experts in Secchi’s many different fields of interest expand on the details what he
accomplished. But in addition to describing his science, the authors of the papers
that follow have extended this study of Secchi’s activities in three fascinating
dimensions.
The first is an examination of how Secchi’s philosophy and theology interacted
with both the Jesuit tradition in which he was educated and the controversial philosophical and theological currents that surrounded the 1860s and 1870s.
This epoch, the period of Secchi’s most intense activity, was also the time surrounding the First Vatican Ecumenical Council. As other historians have described
(see John W.O’Malley’s 2018 book, Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the
Ultamontane Church), one might argue that this council in many ways failed spectacularly in responding to the intellectual currents of its time.
The reason behind this failure was fundamentally that the currents themselves
were not yet mature. But it was exactly out of those first false steps that the progress
leading to the Second Vatican Council was made possible. And in seeing how they
played out in Secchi himself, we can appreciate both the causes of those problems
and the ways that they would eventually be addressed.
The second dimension is to explore how science in Italy developed after Secchi.
It is fascinating to see how the politics and personalities of those times effectively
strangled the growth that one might have expected in the fields of spectroscopy and
astrophysics, in geomagnetism, or in meteorology, in spite of the excellent foundations that Secchi had laid. By contrast, however, his often-neglected contributions to
science for the public good, from the timekeeping system to public health and environmental concerns, did take root in Italy so completely that today they are taken for
granted, and thus generally unremarked.
The third dimension, reflected in the title of this volume, is the fundamental
change in the nature of science itself during the quarter century of Secchi’s greatest
activity, from 1850 to 1875. Though for all that we honor Galileo and Newton as the
Introduction
In Dr. Ileana Chinnici’s excellent biography of Angelo Secchi, Decoding the Stars:
A Biography of Angelo Secchi, Jesuit and Scientist, Secchi’s scientific achievements
were treated as milestones in his personal life. Now in this volume, a series of
experts in Secchi’s many different fields of interest expand on the details what he
accomplished. But in addition to describing his science, the authors of the papers
that follow have extended this study of Secchi’s activities in three fascinating
dimensions.
The first is an examination of how Secchi’s philosophy and theology interacted
with both the Jesuit tradition in which he was educated and the controversial philosophical and theological currents that surrounded the 1860s and 1870s.
This epoch, the period of Secchi’s most intense activity, was also the time surrounding the First Vatican Ecumenical Council. As other historians have described
(see John W.O’Malley’s 2018 book, Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the
Ultamontane Church), one might argue that this council in many ways failed spectacularly in responding to the intellectual currents of its time.
The reason behind this failure was fundamentally that the currents themselves
were not yet mature. But it was exactly out of those first false steps that the progress
leading to the Second Vatican Council was made possible. And in seeing how they
played out in Secchi himself, we can appreciate both the causes of those problems
and the ways that they would eventually be addressed.
The second dimension is to explore how science in Italy developed after Secchi.
It is fascinating to see how the politics and personalities of those times effectively
strangled the growth that one might have expected in the fields of spectroscopy and
astrophysics, in geomagnetism, or in meteorology, in spite of the excellent foundations that Secchi had laid. By contrast, however, his often-neglected contributions to
science for the public good, from the timekeeping system to public health and environmental concerns, did take root in Italy so completely that today they are taken for
granted, and thus generally unremarked.
The third dimension, reflected in the title of this volume, is the fundamental
change in the nature of science itself during the quarter century of Secchi’s greatest
activity, from 1850 to 1875. Though for all that we honor Galileo and Newton as the