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‘The Miraculous Mathematics of the World’: Proving the Existence of God in Cardinal Péter Pázmány’s Kalauz
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
This paper offers a brief examination of Cardinal Péter Pázmány’s meditation on the role of the beauty and wonder of the natural world in leading to the true knowledge of God, which is placed at the beginning of his most important work, the Guide to the Divine Truth (Isteni Igazsàgra Vezérlô Kalauz). Pázmány’s treatment of this subject offers an insight into the Catholic intellectual milieu which ultimately rejected the Copernican cosmology championed by Galileo in favour of a geocentric and geostatic universe. In this regard, the confidence with which Pázmány asserts the harmony and compatibility between secular knowledge and apprehension of nature and the conviction of the existence of a creator God is of particular importance. An analysis of this section of his work also points up a surprising contrast with Calvin’s treatment of the same subject in the Institutes of the Christian Religion.’ Pázmány was raised within the Reformed tradition until his teenage years and as a Catholic polemicist he devoted great attention to Calvin’s writings. Indeed, to some extent it can be suggested that the Institutes served as both target and model for his own great work. Yet his handling of the topic of nature as a proof of the existence of God, an area where relatively little difference might have been expected in view of its non-salience as a polemical issue, not only offers a revealing insight into the confident intellectual perspective of seventeenth-century Catholicism, but also suggests some additional ramifications of the great sola scriptura debate which split European Christianity in the early modern period.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 248 - 259
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010
References
1 J. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.1.6.
2 For an excellent, though unpublished, examination of his career and of the history and reception of the Kalauz, see Peter Schimert, ‘Péter Pázmány and the Reconstitution of the Catholic Aristocracy in Habsburg Hungary, 1600–1650’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, 1989).
3 The best English-language analysis of the Habsburg system in Hungary, including some pertinent observations on Pázmánys role, remains Evans, R. J. W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700: An Interpretation (Oxford, 1979), 235–74.Google Scholar
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5 Őry and Szabó, ‘Pázmány Péter’, 39–40, 57.
6 From Bellarmine, , Pázmány naturally draws mostly on Disputationes de controversiis Christianae fidei adversus huius temporis haereticos, 3 vols (Ingolstadt, 1586)Google Scholar. Stapleton, Thomas was also a very important source: it is not clear if Pázmány possessed Stapleton, Opera Omnia, 4 vols (Paris, 1620)Google Scholar, but he refers frequendy to Stapleton’s, Principiomm fidei doctrinalium relectio scholastica et compendiaria, per controversias, quaestiones et artículos tradita. Accessit per modum appendicis triplicatio inchoata adversus Gulieìmum Whitakerum, anglo-calvinistam, pro authoritate Ecclesiae … (Antwerp, 1592).Google Scholar Another important authority was Becanus, Martin(us), Quaestiones miscellaneae de fide haereticis servanda, contra Batavum Calvinistam (Mainz, 1609); I have only seen the version of that text in Becanus, Opusculorum theologicorum tomi quattuor (Mainz, 1610).Google Scholar
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9 Calvin, , Institutes, 1.5.1, ed. McNeill, John T., trans. Ford Lewis Battles, LCC 20–21, 2 vols (London, 1960), 1: 52.Google Scholar
10 Biblia Sacra Vulgatae Editionis Sixti V & Clementis VIII Pont. Max. auctoritate Recognita Edilio Novo Notis Chronologicis et Historieis Illustrata (Paris, 1666). We may translate this as:‘For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made: his eternal power also and divinity’.
11 Pázmány, Kalauz, 2.
12 The New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ Conferred Diligently until the Greek and Best Approved Translations – A Facsimile reprint of the Celebrated Genevan Testament (Geneva, 1558) (London, 1842).
13 Calvin, Institutes, 1.6.1 (ed. McNeill, trans. Bardes, 1: 69).
14 Ibid.
15 ‘Quis appendit tribus digitis molem terrae’: Biblia Sacra Vulgatae.
16 Pázmány, Kalauz, 9.
17 Gellius, Noctes Atticae 1.1.
18 Pázmány, Kalauz, 10; cf. Basil, Hexaemeron 1.11.
19 Basil, Hexaemeron 6.1.
20 Pázmány, Kalauz, 11.
21 Augustine, De civitate Dei 22.24.
22 Basil, Hexaemeron 5.2, 6.
23 Pázmány, Kalauz, 12.
24 Lattis, James M., Between Copernicus and Galileo: Christopher Clavius and the Collapse of Ptolemaic Cosmology (Chicago, IL, 1994), 1—29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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26 Pázmány, Kalatiz,14— 15, citing Clavius, Sphaeram, fol. 236.
27 Basil, Hexaemeron 3.7.
28 There was an abundant literature which could have been looked at if Pázmány had truly been interested; cf. Ogilvie, Brian W., The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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32 Ibid. 53; cf. Calvin, Institutes, 1.5.2.
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