CHESTERTON, A SEER OF SCIENCE
Stanley L. Jaki
University of Illinois Press, 1986
164 pp., $12.50
CHANCE OR REALITY, AND OTHER ESSAYSS
Stanley L. Jaki
University Press of America, 1987
249 pp., $13.75
Sometimes a distinction is drawn between the word 'sage' and the word 'philosopher.' The latter term tends to imply systematic study within certain confines. But 'sage' may suggest intuition, remarkable insights by powers difficult to explain; at the very least, John Henry Newman's "illative sense." Thus the Seven Sages of ancient Greece were presumed to possess wisdom beyond ordinary private rationality. A "seer" may be blind, as was Homer; that does not matter, for he opens doors of perception forever closed to most men and women, he sees truth that a thick veil conceals from other folk.
So it is that Stanley Jaki quite rightly calls G.K. Chesterton a seer of science. A Christian apologist, a master of paradox, a romantic poet, a creator in fiction of ingenious parables, an accomplished journalist and tractarian - so we ordinarily think of the author of Orthodoxy and the Father Brown stories. Chesterton, nevertheless, was something more than a versatile man of letters: He perceived truths about the modern temper and the modern intellect which today's professors of philosophy obdurately refuse to glance at - after the fashion of Professor Eames in Chesterton's romance Manalive.
Nor is Jaki precisely the person one might expect to deliver a lively series of lectures on Chesterton. A well-known historian of science and a Benedictine priest, born in Hungary, Jaki is the author of several books discussing the relationships between the natural sciences and Christianity, particularly his Gifford Lectures, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (University of Chicago Press, 1978). Recently there was published at The Hague his Uneasy Genius: the Life and Work of Pierre Duhem, the great French theoretical physicist and historian of science (Martinus Nijhoff, 1984). But Jaki discovered Chesterton's sagacity in 1973, having come upon Chesterton's remark "about the divine strategy that based the Church's superhuman strength upon Peter's miserable weakness." At that time Jaki was writing his little book And on This Rock (Ave Maria Press, 1978), concerned in part with the literal rock or cliff at Caesarea Philippi at which Jesus of Nazareth called the fisherman Peter his rock. On reading Chesterton's Heretics, Jaki writes in his preface to this new book, "From the first chapter it was all too clear to me that Chesterton must be a gold mine for a philosopher and historian of science. "
Doubtless bound up with a growing reaction against the decadence of what is called "Western civilization" near the end of the twentieth century Anno Domini, the reputation of G.K. Chesterton stands high today. Several books about him have been published recently; three anthologies drawn from the huge bulk of his writings have appeared during the past few months; and the Ignatius Press plans to bring out his complete works, volume upon volume, for the first time. There flourishes a serious but very readable quarterly journal, The Chesterton Review, published at the
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