New Jesuit
Review
2011
Vol. 2, # 8
Deum Creatorem Venite Adoremus:
A Jesuit Astronomer’s Musings on the Cosmos
by David Brown, S.J.
Fr. David Brown, S.J., works at the Vatican Observatory in Rome.
I. “Faith Seeking Understanding”
As a Jesuit astronomer working for the Vatican’s observatory, the Specola Vaticana, I am often asked, “Why does the Vatican have an astronomical observatory?” I offer three reasons for the Catholic Church’s patronage of such an institution: 1) for the sake of the truth; 2) in order to promote and to foster dialogue between the world of faith and the world of science, especially in an age when many people believe the two worlds to be fundamentally incompatible; and, 3) for the benefit of providing answers to people of faith who deserve substantive and sensible responses to the genuinely good questions that arise either through curiosity or from their interactions with others. The second and third answers are certainly of paramount importance in these times, especially in light of challenges facing the Church in a scientific age, which include stereotypes often attached to it in the aftermath of the Galileo affair since the 1600s. However important these two reasons may be for providing a rationale for the continued involvement of the Church in the sciences, they are not the primary reason for why the Church founded the Specola (and its predecessors). From a historical point of view and with regard to its fundamental mission, the first answer -- for the sake of truth -- is the most important justification for the existence of the Specola: it reveals much about the Catholic Christian worldview and about its engagement with science.
Nevertheless, another question arises: “Why does (or should) the Church take an interest in any science, not just astronomy, especially when there are many other pressing problems in the world?" One can almost hear the faint echoes of the famous question once asked by Tertullian in times of antiquity: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” The Catholic Christian answer has always been “everything”, and the “pursuit of truth” is the proper way to understand this. It was crucial to the Church’s capacity to engage Greco-Roman culture and philosophy as Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire. Since then, it has been essential to the faith’s understanding of humanity’s place in God’s creation as seen by the multitude of great monasteries, universities, and other educational institutions that have arisen up until the present, places where men of intellect and education and faith have striven to provide a unified vision of reality around them.
“The pursuit of truth” is a characteristic so basic to human beings (something that does not necessarily require religious faith) that the Church supports institutions which participate in the universal desire to make sense of it all. It encourages something that other human beings have always done because it is part of the human family. Human beings behold a universe and a reality in which they live, and they wonder about it. They ask fundamental questions about the meaning of what they behold: “how” and “why.” Among the sciences, astronomy lends itself most easily to provoking a sense of wonder from nearly everyone on Earth. A person need only look up at the night-time sky and marvel at the beauty of the stars, the vastness of the cosmos, and the sublimity and mystery of its nature to be confronted by questions of meaning and existence. Consider the following: in the known universe, there could be up to one million million galaxies, each containing one million million stars, which itself might constitute 4% of a much larger unseen universe (if theories of dark matter and dark energy are true), the totality of which might have any number of dimensions -- between 4 and 57, depending on which theory is invoked. According to current theory, this universe came into existence in a Big Bang 14 thousand million years ago at what is taken to be the beginning of time, and it may be one of an infinite number of universes. From the smallest scales (microscopic aspects) of our universe which confront us with quarks as fundamental building blocks of matter (as we know it at the moment), to the possible existence of the Higgs Boson (the ‘God’ particle), to notions of quantum foam and virtual particles in a quantum vacuum, to the large-scale structure of the cosmos which presents us with exotic objects such as black holes, the reality which we call the cosmos provokes wonder and leads to fundamental questions which affect every human being: “What is the nature of this reality”, “what does it all mean”, “what is my place in this cosmos”, “what is the origin and fate of what I behold”, “what is the meaning of life”, and, simply, “why”.
Of course, one does not have to be a scientist or a philosopher to ask these existential questions. Moreover, astronomy is one of the few sciences in which a person does not have to be an astronomer or a physicist in order to appreciate its subject matter and to be led subsequently to deeper questions of meaning. This is one of the reasons why the Church has always had a long tradition of doing astronomy in one way or another throughout the centuries.
Confronted by the majesty, intricacy, and vastness of the cosmos, the person becomes aware of being part of something that goes beyond him, of something which is greater than he, but of which he is intrinsically connected at some deep level. For the believer, it is a moment of being struck by the existence of the One God who is the source of all that is. Pope Benedict XVI echoes this sense of seeing the divine fingerprint in the grandeur of the universe in his address to Germany prior to his 2012 state visit:
the capacity to perceive God, a capacity that exists in us. We can intuit something of God's grandeur in the grandeur of the cosmos. We can use the world through technology because it is made in a rational manner. In the great rationality of the world we can intuit the creator spirit from which it comes, and in the beauty of creation we can intuit something of the beauty, of the grandeur and also the goodness of God” (Benedict XVI, “Seeing God Again on the World’s Horizon”).
The intuition about which the Pope speaks is an instance when the human mind and heart experience a pre-philosophical moment of knowledge, guided by a primordial movement of the natural reason of a person, which allows the person to grasp the existence of God. This is very reminiscent of what Jacques Maritain calls the intuition of being, which he says is “a natural reasoning, that is, intuitive-like or irresistibly maintained in, and vitalized by, the intellectual flash of the intuition of existence which, seizing in some existing reality Being-with-nothingness, by the same stroke makes the mind grasp the necessity of Being-without-nothingness” (Maritain, Approaches to God). This is neither pure intuition nor a type of articulated knowledge. It is the intuition of one’s own existence and the existence of other things, most of all the existence of things --- that there is anything at all.
That in the grandeur of the cosmos many people see the action and effect of God has always been a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Consider Psalm 19, which eloquently gives witness to this:
“The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19, RSV).
Likewise, Psalm 8 is similar in words:
“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! You whose glory above the heavens is chanted…When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have established; what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you do care for him? Yet you have made him little less than God, and do crown him with glory and honor” (Psalm 8, RSV).
For the writers of those psalms the heavens are a testament to the glory of their Creator. The celestial objects contained in them are the wondrous effects of the Lord Who made them. They point to the God who lies beyond them. More examples throughout the history of the Church include St. Francis of Assisi:
“Most high, all powerful, all good Lord! All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To you, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name. Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness. Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars; in the heavens you have made them, precious and beautiful” (St. Francis, “Canticle of the Sun”).
Three centuries later St. Ignatius of Loyola remarked that
It was his greatest consolation to gaze upon the heavens and the stars, which he often did, and for long stretches at a time, because when doing so he felt within himself a powerful urge to be serving our Lord (St. Ignatius of Loyola, Autobiography, 11).
Here Ignatius and other people of faith give voice to the belief that man knows his very purpose, his meaning, and his destiny to be somehow intimately bound with the greater existence of the cosmos which surrounds him, even if he cannot know particulars immediately. Each and every person knows that somehow he is a part of the greater whole in which he lives, and to the extent that he can fathom something of the mystery of the cosmos around him, he can also see something of the mystery of himself, of his own identity, and of his own meaning. To this end, the sense of wonder and curiosity aroused by the cosmos do not remain static; there is the desire to understand reality, to know it more deeply. One can sense the verity of Aristotle’s first sentence in The Metaphysics: “All men by nature desire to know.”
The desire to probe deeper into the mysteries of the cosmos holds the basic presupposition that there is something to understand. That the cosmos can be understood means that it can be known by reason, that it is reasonable. Pope Benedict notes this when he says, “In the great rationality of the world we can intuit the creator spirit from which it comes, and in the beauty of creation we can intuit something of the beauty, of the grandeur and also the goodness of God” (Pope Benedict XVI, “Seeing God Again on the World’s Horizon”). This is nothing new in the Catholic tradition. In the early centuries of the Church’s history, Christian theologians and philosophers were able to dialogue with the Greco-Roman philosophers of their day because of their shared belief in an intelligible universe, permeated by “logos” or reason. Whatever their differences, at least there was the belief in a common reason to which both could appeal. Moreover, there was the belief among early Christian apologists that the faith itself was reasonable, a belief that presupposed a harmony between faith and reason. In fact, the interplay between the desire for understanding and religious faith has been a hallmark of Catholic theology throughout the centuries, something summarized nicely by the phrases credo ut intelligam (I believe that I may understand), intellego ut credam (I understand that I might believe), and fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) as stated by Augustine, Abelard, and Anselm, respectively. Such sayings imply not only a coexistence between faith and reason but also a certain intrinsic connection between the two whereby faith sees reason as something not merely to be tolerated but as something good and necessary.