37
example is his letter (January 4, 1870), L’uomo nella creazione e il materialismo
nella scienza moderna, which praised Pietro Giuria for his polemical essay on the
thesis of the evolutionary origin of the human species. (The letter was published by
Giuria in his subsequent book, L’uomo, la scienza e la società, Genova 1871.) And,
above all, one can see this in the two communications to the Tiberina Academy
which appeared posthumously, La grandezza del creato nello spazio e nel tempo
(The Greatness of Creation in Space and Time, 1876) and La grandezza del creato
nelle combinazioni costitutive dell’Universo (The Greatness of Creation in the
Constitutive Combinations of the Universe, 1877). These were published in the
appendix to Secchi’s Lezioni elementari di fisica terrestre, Torino-Roma 1879,
p. 185 ff. Of course, this only regards the published papers and the few unpublished
notes that have been studied; an investigation into Secchi’s intimate thinking would
need to take into account his letters and the large set of his manuscripts. The essential ones are described in I. Chinnici and W. Gramatowski (2001).
These writings showed a growing bewilderment at evolutionism and its application to the origin of humans, which he had initially considered simply bizarre. His
reaction combined a religious repulsion with the defense of a cosmologicalepistemological framework that combined some of the presuppositions of the presuppression Society with the scientific changes that occurred in those years and
which he had internalized during his studies. The cosmos described in the courses
of the Roman College was no longer geocentric. Its connotations were radically different from those of the tradition of scholastic cosmology; the estimates of its antiquity were increasing; the Earth, the other planets, and the stars were no longer
bodies that changed only on their surfaces but dynamic entities shaped by continuous internal processes. The possibility that living beings, even intelligent beings,
might be found in regions very far from the Earth had been discussed since the
Middle Ages, and it was not ruled out by some philosophers of the old Society; it
had been seriously considered by Boscovich even before it was asserted by Secchi.
And yet the universe remained ahistorical, in the sense that the immense mutations
on an astronomical and geological scale, progressively admitted by the physicists of
the Roman College (and partly by philosophers), remained within the general structure chosen by the Creator. And in this view, alterations of living species demanded
specific acts of that Creator: if their organization could not result from physical–
chemical processes but implied a divine design, phylogenesis was excluded and
there was space only for variations within a species. In essence, therefore, science
remained—on a large scale—a description of permanent structures and—on a
smaller scale—of changes produced by permanent laws in a fundamentally stable
general framework.
Ruling out the necessity of design, not merely within the structure of inanimate
matter but even extending to life, implied that the same sort of evolution might even
account for the passage of the human animal from the physical to the spiritual. This
de-Christianized, and at the same time radicalized, the way one thought of nature.
Secchi believed one must stop that trend in order to maintain a Christian understanding of the universe. As a believer, he considered the intimate encounter in
prayer with the God found in Scripture an adequate and sufficient justification for
2 The Scientific Tradition of the Society of Jesus and the Formation of Angelo Secchi
example is his letter (January 4, 1870), L’uomo nella creazione e il materialismo
nella scienza moderna, which praised Pietro Giuria for his polemical essay on the
thesis of the evolutionary origin of the human species. (The letter was published by
Giuria in his subsequent book, L’uomo, la scienza e la società, Genova 1871.) And,
above all, one can see this in the two communications to the Tiberina Academy
which appeared posthumously, La grandezza del creato nello spazio e nel tempo
(The Greatness of Creation in Space and Time, 1876) and La grandezza del creato
nelle combinazioni costitutive dell’Universo (The Greatness of Creation in the
Constitutive Combinations of the Universe, 1877). These were published in the
appendix to Secchi’s Lezioni elementari di fisica terrestre, Torino-Roma 1879,
p. 185 ff. Of course, this only regards the published papers and the few unpublished
notes that have been studied; an investigation into Secchi’s intimate thinking would
need to take into account his letters and the large set of his manuscripts. The essential ones are described in I. Chinnici and W. Gramatowski (2001).
These writings showed a growing bewilderment at evolutionism and its application to the origin of humans, which he had initially considered simply bizarre. His
reaction combined a religious repulsion with the defense of a cosmologicalepistemological framework that combined some of the presuppositions of the presuppression Society with the scientific changes that occurred in those years and
which he had internalized during his studies. The cosmos described in the courses
of the Roman College was no longer geocentric. Its connotations were radically different from those of the tradition of scholastic cosmology; the estimates of its antiquity were increasing; the Earth, the other planets, and the stars were no longer
bodies that changed only on their surfaces but dynamic entities shaped by continuous internal processes. The possibility that living beings, even intelligent beings,
might be found in regions very far from the Earth had been discussed since the
Middle Ages, and it was not ruled out by some philosophers of the old Society; it
had been seriously considered by Boscovich even before it was asserted by Secchi.
And yet the universe remained ahistorical, in the sense that the immense mutations
on an astronomical and geological scale, progressively admitted by the physicists of
the Roman College (and partly by philosophers), remained within the general structure chosen by the Creator. And in this view, alterations of living species demanded
specific acts of that Creator: if their organization could not result from physical–
chemical processes but implied a divine design, phylogenesis was excluded and
there was space only for variations within a species. In essence, therefore, science
remained—on a large scale—a description of permanent structures and—on a
smaller scale—of changes produced by permanent laws in a fundamentally stable
general framework.
Ruling out the necessity of design, not merely within the structure of inanimate
matter but even extending to life, implied that the same sort of evolution might even
account for the passage of the human animal from the physical to the spiritual. This
de-Christianized, and at the same time radicalized, the way one thought of nature.
Secchi believed one must stop that trend in order to maintain a Christian understanding of the universe. As a believer, he considered the intimate encounter in
prayer with the God found in Scripture an adequate and sufficient justification for
2 The Scientific Tradition of the Society of Jesus and the Formation of Angelo Secchi