Professor Stanley Jaki was a Catholic priest of the Benedictine order. He
was born in Hungary in 1924 and his country’s history affected him deeply.
He confided in me how traumatized he was by the communists coming to
power backed by the Soviet Army. Consequently, his monastic order was a
victim of the oppression. After finishing his studies in Rome, he wasn’t allowed
to return home and emigrated to the USA. That experience strongly
influenced his historian work. The passion of his words and work can be
divided into three points.
Firstly, Fr Stanley Jaki’s work target was to clarify the relations between
the sciences of nature and the Catholic Church. He did it on the epistemological
level. He promoted Gödel’s theorem on philosophical interpretation
concerning the incomplete formal systems in order to thwart the
rationalist philosophy which set science as an absolute knowledge. He did
it in physics and cosmology. His books,
The Relevance of Physics (1966), and
God and the Cosmologists (1989)
brought him to receive the Lecomte de Nouy
Prize (1970) and the Templeton Prize (1987). And in addition, he was invited
to serve as a Gifford Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.
The second significant feature of Professor Stanley Jaki’s works was historical.
In his writings he presented his wide perspectives about science
since its Greek origins. As a consequence, he was objective enough to put
the options of the modern science into perspective. His works were inspired
by Pierre Duhem, a famous French historian of sciences he venerated so
much. Unfortunately, Pierre Duhem wasn’t well-known including in
France, so Stanley Jaki’s research compensated such a great deficiency.
The third feature of Professor Stanley Jaki’s works was theological in a particular
way. Actually, he intended to use science to reveal the spiritual dimension
of intellectual research. He did it as a Gifford Lecturer, as well as in his last
works titled
The Savior of Science (1988, 2000) and
Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth (1999).
He spread his apologetic will both against materialists and scientists engaged
in basic research as we can see in the Study of his interpretation of the first
Chapter of the Book of Genesis,
Genesis 1 through the Ages (1992).
This multidisciplinary approach combined history and epistemology. He
passionately argued his spiritual position of the scientific research and the immanent
rationality to cosmos, which made Professor Stanley Jaki somebody
who imparted between different worlds and made him somebody who awoke
those who refused to confine themselves in a unique specialization.
Professor Stanley Jaki’s generosity and critical mind were inseparable
from his spiritual behaviour which became evident at the end of his life,
based on his great admiration for John Henry Newman, showing his ultimate
aim to be Peace.
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