54
Like Stoppani and Faà di Bruno, Angelo Secchi is part of the tradition of a
Catholic Church that promoted science. For much of the nineteenth century this still
represented the majority viewpoint, due to the widespread work in school and university education that several religious orders, Jesuits and Barnabites in particular,
had undertaken over time. As mentioned above, at that time the involvement of the
Catholic Church in astronomy was quite evident, but it was also significantly
involved in the fields of mathematics, physics, meteorology, botany, and biology.
It should not be forgotten that at the time of Angelo Secchi the debate between
scientific thought and Catholic theology was certainly being influenced by positions
that were on opposite political sides: on one side, the temporal power of papacy and,
on the other, a good part of Italian and European intellectual culture. This contrast,
whose primary characteristic was the opposition of views on the mission of the
Catholic Church and its relationship with the secular power of the papacy in Rome,
was carried through into an opposition between a religious and a scientific worldview. The contrast was read ultimately in terms of a conflict between faith and reason, something that should have been dealt with within a more appropriate
epistemological framework and deeper than what the political circumstances of a
specific country could dictate.
In Italy, for instance, the nineteenth century reading of the Galileo affair saw it as
a radical opposition between him and the ecclesiastical authorities. This interpretation was a way in which the Freemason ruling class of the new Kingdom of Italy
could strengthen its status after regaining its capital in Rome via the fall of the
Pontifical States. Political reasons also conditioned the academic life of some
Catholics in France and Italy, as is shown by some of the vicissitudes experienced
by Pierre Duhem and Francesco Faà di Bruno.
On a philosophical level, the years in which Angelo Secchi lived and worked
were characterized by currents of thought that were critical toward Christianity. The
greatest of these currents was undoubtedly the progressive rise of materialism in
Germany and (also partly) in France. In the second half of the eighteenth century,
the widely read Système de la nature (1770) by Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach
had stated that everything that did not belong to phenomena studied by science
should be considered pure imagination. In the same years, in his work De la Nature
(1761), Jean-Baptiste Robinet expressed the idea of a progressive evolution of
nature as a succession of increasingly complex and sophisticated mechanisms, having at the top the human being whose psychic faculties and individual freedom were
only the mere result of physico-mechanical processes alone.
The idea of a “naturalistic materialism” was thus well established. Its main components were, on the one hand, the historicism coming from Hegelian philosophy
and, on the other hand, the anticipation of a philosophical evolutionism. The latter
proposed a wholly materialistic reading of the place occupied by the human being
within the animal world, denying any transcendent causality in the origin of man,
something well beyond Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) intentions. Naturalistic
materialism had a strong anti-spiritualist perspective, seeking support specifically in
the results of science. It is difficult to establish whether it was a truly majority
G. Tanzella-Nitti
Like Stoppani and Faà di Bruno, Angelo Secchi is part of the tradition of a
Catholic Church that promoted science. For much of the nineteenth century this still
represented the majority viewpoint, due to the widespread work in school and university education that several religious orders, Jesuits and Barnabites in particular,
had undertaken over time. As mentioned above, at that time the involvement of the
Catholic Church in astronomy was quite evident, but it was also significantly
involved in the fields of mathematics, physics, meteorology, botany, and biology.
It should not be forgotten that at the time of Angelo Secchi the debate between
scientific thought and Catholic theology was certainly being influenced by positions
that were on opposite political sides: on one side, the temporal power of papacy and,
on the other, a good part of Italian and European intellectual culture. This contrast,
whose primary characteristic was the opposition of views on the mission of the
Catholic Church and its relationship with the secular power of the papacy in Rome,
was carried through into an opposition between a religious and a scientific worldview. The contrast was read ultimately in terms of a conflict between faith and reason, something that should have been dealt with within a more appropriate
epistemological framework and deeper than what the political circumstances of a
specific country could dictate.
In Italy, for instance, the nineteenth century reading of the Galileo affair saw it as
a radical opposition between him and the ecclesiastical authorities. This interpretation was a way in which the Freemason ruling class of the new Kingdom of Italy
could strengthen its status after regaining its capital in Rome via the fall of the
Pontifical States. Political reasons also conditioned the academic life of some
Catholics in France and Italy, as is shown by some of the vicissitudes experienced
by Pierre Duhem and Francesco Faà di Bruno.
On a philosophical level, the years in which Angelo Secchi lived and worked
were characterized by currents of thought that were critical toward Christianity. The
greatest of these currents was undoubtedly the progressive rise of materialism in
Germany and (also partly) in France. In the second half of the eighteenth century,
the widely read Système de la nature (1770) by Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach
had stated that everything that did not belong to phenomena studied by science
should be considered pure imagination. In the same years, in his work De la Nature
(1761), Jean-Baptiste Robinet expressed the idea of a progressive evolution of
nature as a succession of increasingly complex and sophisticated mechanisms, having at the top the human being whose psychic faculties and individual freedom were
only the mere result of physico-mechanical processes alone.
The idea of a “naturalistic materialism” was thus well established. Its main components were, on the one hand, the historicism coming from Hegelian philosophy
and, on the other hand, the anticipation of a philosophical evolutionism. The latter
proposed a wholly materialistic reading of the place occupied by the human being
within the animal world, denying any transcendent causality in the origin of man,
something well beyond Charles Darwin’s (1809–1882) intentions. Naturalistic
materialism had a strong anti-spiritualist perspective, seeking support specifically in
the results of science. It is difficult to establish whether it was a truly majority
G. Tanzella-Nitti