Quotes Suitable for Framing: Leo XIII
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
One has only to consider for how long Euclid’s fifth postulate (the parallel postulate) was received as a self-evident truth; in fact, for two millennia, until 1823, when Janos Bolyai and Nicolai Lobachevsky independently realized that entirely self-consistent “non-Euclidean geometries” could be created in which the parallel postulate did not hold. It is worth noting that Girolamo Saccheri SJ had already shown this in his 1733 work, entitled, ironically enough, “Euclides ab Omni Naevo Vindicatus” [Euclid vindicated against every blemish], but he appears not to have realised the implications of his own theorems. Saccheri may have been wise; Lobachevsky not only lost his chair, but ended up briefly in an asylum. The more fortunate Bolyai was an army officer, who dabbled in maths as a hobby; even if suspected, madness was no disqualification from garrison duty in the Austrian service.
The much briefer history of classical Newtonian mechanics furnishes another example, which began to unravel with the discovery of the difference between the theoretical and observed precession of the perihelion of Mercury.
More contentiously, perhaps, we have the breezy assumption of Aristotle and his successors that the structure of reality could be deduced from the grammar of description – a quite staggering piece of linguistic realism which few philosophers would defend today.
:”… Hence, in their interpretations, we must carefully note what they lay down as belonging to faith, or as intimately connected with faith – what they are unanimous in. …”
Providentissimus Deus is a powerful title.
Donald— divinely clever contrast. PROVIDENTISSIMUS DEUS–required reading…..for popes.