Pope Clement XIV

Bergsma on Clement XIV

Dear Friends of the Kolbe Center,

Glory to Jesus Christ!

One of the wonderful things about the Kolbe apostolate has been the way that members of our leadership team have been inspired to research different topics relevant to our mission, resulting in all kinds of fruitful, complementary discoveries.  In recent months, the newest member of our advisory council, researcher Christian Bergsma, has brought to our attention two documents that highlight the Church leadership’s vigorous defense of the literal historical truth of the first chapters of Genesis from the height of the so-called Enlightenment in middle of the eighteenth century well into the twentieth century.  In this newsletter I would like to highlight Christian’s article on a letter by the future Pope Clement XIV in which he contrasted the authoritative character of God’s supernatural Creation Revelation with the wild, naturalistic speculations of fallible human scientists.  I have quoted the first part of his article here; the rest of the article can be read in its entirety on the Kolbe Center website.

In 1749, the popular naturalist author Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count de Buffon, began publishing volumes of what was later collected together in his L'Histoire Naturelle. The volumes which immediately caused a stir were Théorie de la Terre, Histoire Générale des animaux and Histoire Naturelle de l’homme, as in them he argued for an old earth that formed over long geological epochs, ignored the possibility of a global deluge, denied the reality of formal species, posited that all animals had descended from a few common ancestors, and emphasized homology between men and apes. For this, Darwin would later acknowledge Buffon as first “modern” evolutionary scientist, and Darwinist biologist Ernst Mayr would dub him “the father of evolutionism”. The volumes were translated into most major languages and became the most widely read scientific texts at the time, popular with both academics and the educated public. The Sorbonne and the Paris faculty of Theology, already thoroughly infected with the ideas of the Enlightenment, merely made Buffon promise that he believed in the truth of Genesis, in some undefined sense, and allowed him to keep publishing the volumes. A letter written by the future Pope Clement XIV, Cardinal Ganganelli, in regard to Buffon’s Natural History gives us a view of what the really faithful members of the hierarchy thought of the work. The reigning Pope, Benedict XIV, continued to publish his treatise Di Festis Domine Nostri Jesu Christi, in which he argued that Christ was born 4,000 years after the creation, in several editions throughout the 1750s, regardless of the popular scientific conceptions about the history of the earth.

Pope Clement XIV

Cardinal Ganganelli wrote his letter, dated December 13, 1754, to Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, as part of a longer correspondence about the Prince’s scientific work. Prince di Sangro was an occultist and a Freemason, but at the time was publicly distancing himself from such associations to remedy his tempestuous relationship with the Church authorities. Cardinal Ganganelli probably did not realize the true extent of the Prince’s shady activities, and in any case the prince was a very influential figure who would have been hard to avoid associating with, especially for a patron of the sciences like Ganganelli. Though himself a fan of Buffon, who, when not hypothesizing about origins, was a very skillful and engaging author, he nevertheless condemns his attacks on Genesis in the letter. Here is the relevant text:

You will be enchanted, my Lord, with the undertaking of Mons. Buffon, the French Academician, and with the volumes which have appeared. I know them only by the extracts that have been given from them, and they appear admirable. [Yet] I am sorry that the Author of a Natural History should declare for a system; it must be a means of having many things which he advances doubted, and oblige him to combat all those who are not of his opinion. Besides, wherever he wanders from the book of Genesis on the creation of the world, he has no support but paradoxes, or, at best, hypotheses.

From a twenty-first century perspective, Cardinal Ganganelli shows remarkable insight into the crux of the debate between the infallible divine supernatural account of creation and any fallible human naturalistic account of the origins of man and the universe.  The former rests on the authority of God Himself.  The latter rests on mere hypotheses “without even the least probability.”  He continues:

Moses, as an inspired Author, is the only one who could instruct us in the formation and unfolding of the world. He is not an Epicurus, who has recourse to atoms; a Lucretius, who believes matter to be eternal; a Spinosa, who admits a material God; a Descartes, who prates about the laws of motion; but a legislator, who announces to all men without hesitation, without fear of being mistaken, how the world was created. Nothing can be more simple or more sublime than his opening: In the beginning God created the Heaven[s] and the Earth. He could not speak more assuredly if he had been a spectator; and by these words, mythology, systems, and absurdities shrink to nought, and are mere chimeras in the eyes of reason. Whoever does not perceive the truth in the relation of Moses was not formed for the knowledge of it. Some people are constantly attached to hypotheses, without even the least probability, and yet are unwilling to believe what gives the highest idea of the power and wisdom of God.

St. Moses

Reacting to attempts by Enlightenment thinkers to revive the idea of an eternal universe, Cardinal Ganganelli proceeds to lay bare its philosophical weaknesses:

An eternal world offers a thousand greater difficulties than an eternal intelligence; and a co-eternal world is an absurdity which cannot exist, because nothing can be so ancient as God himself. Not to mention that he is necessary, and that the world is not necessary; from what right shall matter, a thing quite contingent, absolutely inert, pretend to the same prerogatives with an all-powerful and immaterial spirit? These are extravagances which could only be produced by a distracted imagination, and prove the astonishing weakness of man when he will only hearken to himself. The history of Nature is a book shut for all generations if we do not perceive the existence of God, and his being a creator and preserver; for nothing can be more evident than his action. The Sun, all magnificent as he is, although adored by different nations, has neither intelligence nor discernment; and if his course is so regular as never to be even for a moment interrupted, it is through the impulse received from a supreme agent, whose orders he executes with the greatest punctuality. Wherever we cast our eyes over the vast extent of the universe, we see the immensity of a Being, before whom this world is as nothing. It would be very extraordinary, since the smallest work cannot exist without a maker, that this world could have the privilege of owing its existence and its beauty to itself alone.

Cardinal Ganganelli then turns his attention to the tendency of sensual and immoral men to seek an explanation for the origins of man and the universe that denies the justice of God as set forth in the Gospel:

Reason digs frightful precipices for itself when it hearkens only to the passions and senses: and reason without faith is to be pitied. All the Academies of the universe may fancy systems on the creation of the world; but after all their researches, all their conjectures, all their combinations, their multitudes of volumes, they will tell me much less than Moses has told me in a single page; and will tell me things, too, that have not any probability. Such is the difference between the man who speaks only from himself, and the man who is inspired. The Eternal smiles from on high at all these mad systems, which fancifully arrange the world; sometimes giving chance for its parent, and sometimes supposing it to be eternal. Some people love to persuade themselves that matter governs itself, and that there is no other deity; because they well know that matter is stupid and inactive, and therefore need not dread its effects; while the justice of a God, who sees everything and weighs everything, is dreadful to the sinner.

Christ the Judge by Fra Angelico

With this observation, the future Pope Clement XIV zeroed in on the motivation behind many an atheist evolutionists’ embrace of molecules to man evolution.  In the words of Aldous Huxley, the brother of Sir Julian Huxley, one of the leading atheist evolutionist scientists of modern times:

I had a motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.

Through the prayers of the Mother of God and of all the Saints, may the Holy Ghost deliver us from all error and lead us into all the Truth!

In Domino,

Hugh Owen