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 the 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 Paris faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne, 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.[i] 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.[ii]
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 impressed with Buffon, who, when not hypothesizing about origins, was a very skillful and engaging author, the future Pope nevertheless condemned 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.
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.
Showing himself to be a firm believer in the constant tradition of the Church regarding the geocentric-geostatic structure of the universe with its “revolutions of the stars,” the Cardinal reaffirms the constant teaching of the Church and of sound philosophy which holds that God who created all things supernaturally at the beginning of time continues to hold all things in existence with His love:
Nothing can be more beautiful than the history of Nature, when it is united to that of Religion. Nature is nothing without God; it produces everything, vivifies everything by his help. Without being any part of what composes the universe, he is the movement, the sap, and the life of it. Let his activity cease, there will be no more movement in the elements, no more vegetation in plants, no more spring in second causes, no more revolutions of the stars. Eternal darkness must take place of light, and the universe become its own grave. The same thing would happen to this world, were God Almighty to withdraw his hand, which happens to our bodies when all motion ceases. They fall into dust, they are exhaled in smoke, and it is not even known that they ever had existed.
If I had sufficient knowledge to undertake a history of Nature, I would begin my work by displaying the immense perfections of its Author; then treat of man as his masterpiece; and successively from substance to substance, from kind to kind, I would descend to the smallest ant, and show in the smallest insect, as well as in the most perfect angel, the same wisdom shining forth, and the same almighty hand employed. A picture of this nature must have engaged the lovers of Truth; - and Religion herself, who would have traced out the design, would have rendered it infinitely precious. Let us never speak of the creatures, except to bring us nearer to our Creator: they are the reverberation of his never-failing light, and these are ideas which either raise or debase us; for man is never more diminutive nor more grand than when he considers himself in his relation to God. He then perceives an Infinite Being whose image he is, and before whom he is but as an atom: two apparent contradictions which must be reconciled to give us a just idea of ourselves, that we may not run into the excesses of the proud angels, nor into those of unbelievers, who level themselves with the beasts that perish.
Almost two hundred and seventy years after Cardinal Ganganelli’s letter was penned, it is sobering to think how different the world would be if his wisdom had prevailed within the intellectual leadership of the Catholic Church. But perhaps the final paragraph of his letter to the Prince of Sansevero explains why the Catholic intelligentsia were already beginning to capitulate to the errors of naturalism and uniformitarianism that St. Peter had warned against in Chapter 3 of his Second Epistle:
Your Letter, my Lord, led me to these reflections; and I confess to you at the same time that I have no greater satisfaction than when I find an opportunity of speaking of the Deity. He is the element of our hearts, and it is only in his love that the soul blossoms. Happily, I was sensible of this great truth in my earliest years, and in consequence I chose the Cloister, as a retreat where, separated from creatures, I could commune more easily with the Creator. The commerce of the world is so turbulent, that while we are in it we scarcely know the recollection necessary to unite us with God. I thought of writing a Letter, and I have written a Sermon; except that, instead of finishing with Amen, I conclude with the respect which is due to you . . .
It could very well be that the abandonment of devout prayer, interior recollection, and the spiritual life lies at the root of the Cartesian revolution against the Catholic doctrine of creation and that only a spiritual revival, like the one initiated by Our Lady of Fatima with the Five First Saturday’s, can lay the foundation for a restoration of the intellectual life of the Church, with Theology as the Queen of the Sciences, Philosophy as her handmaid, and the natural sciences restored once again to their proper boundaries.
Christian Bergsma
All Souls Day, November 2nd, 2024
Footnotes:
[i] See Interesting Letters of Pope Clement XIV (Ganganelli), 1st Edition (1777), Vol. II, pgs. 2-8 & 5th Edition (1781), Vol. II, pgs. 29-36. Darwin himself had the Italian edition of this compilation of Ganganelli’s letters in his personal library, perhaps as reference material on the Church’s historical opposition to evolutionism.
[ii] “His probe, constitutis, dicimus, inter tot varias de Natali Christi anno sententias... eam placere magis sententiam eruditis viris, quae statuit Christum natum esse anno quater millesimo ab Orbe condito.” / “Having established these well, we affirm, among so many different opinions about the year of Christ’s birth... the opinion most pleasing to learned men, which establishes that Christ was born in the 4,000th year from the foundation of the world.” (De Festis Domine Nostri Jesu Christi, part 1, para. 651. See page 242 in the 1745 edition found here).
Christian Bergsma is a member of the Kolbe Center’s Advisory Council.
