There is a science to-day which calls itself "positive" meaning that it is founded on well-attested facts. It is indeed good to rely upon facts. Facts should undoubtedly be the basis of natural science. Still the natural sciences are not the only ones which should be sustained by facts. The moral order, as well as the physical, appears to be a magnificent assemblage of facts. Humanity with its reason, its conscience, its sublime inclinations, its immortal yearnings—is not humanity a grand fact? Then this great fact must be considered as it really exists, in its entirety, and not as mutilated by the false spirit of a system. If the order of facts to which positivism would limit us were the only order, do you know what humanity would be? An ant which disputes with the grains of sand. But humanity will never allow itself to be thus dishonored.
To the moral fact of humanity corresponds that which we have seen triumph over centuries—the fact of revelation. I say it corresponds to them, because Christian revelation offers the only satisfactory reply to questions which philosophers have always asked and never answered. I say it corresponds, because Christian revelation has alone thrown a flood of light upon the mysteries of the positive state of humanity, and it alone affirms that it bears a sovereign remedy for the moral disorder of our nature: "Come to me, and I will refresh you." Do we really possess science, then, if, in the presence of these two great facts and of this divine appeal to experience, we obstinately close our eyes and shut our ears? Have we science when, without investigation, we assert as the first condition the gratuitous denial of the possibility of the things that were to be examined? What is really this pretended scientific position? It is the attitude of fear. If science would be perfect, it must investigate every order of facts, investigate their character, declare their harmony. It is when it states the harmony of the facts of the natural order with the facts (I say facts) of the supernatural order, the harmony of the actual condition of the human race with the revelation which enlightens its depths, then it is that science becomes perfect, or at least always tends more and more toward perfection. The very names which represent this harmony are, as you are well aware, the greatest names of science.
But will science be free, some one asks, if it is bound by revelation? Does it cease to be free because it is bound by nature? That which troubles certain minds on this point is due to a false and pitiable notion of liberty. In what respect is liberty everywhere distinguished from license? In this, that liberty always moves within the sphere of law, and license always beyond it. In the order of science, the law is the truth established. The liberty of science is not, then, absolute in its independence, as has been recently declared by an academician. No; liberty is not the independence of science, for it consists precisely in the fact of its dependence upon truth. The servitude of science, on the contrary, consists in its dependence upon opinion. Indeed, it is not the freedom of the human mind, but license, mother of servitude, which pretends to-day to reduce everything to opinion. This pretence is the negation of science. To possess science is to know with certainty; to have only opinions is to doubt; and to submit to doubt is slavery. The true man of learning never asserts when he is ignorant; but science does not require less certainty, and only becomes science when she can attain it. Science is therefore science only because the truth controls it, and by controlling it, preserves it from the servitude of opinion, so that this shining sentence of our Lord concerns also the learned: "The truth shall make you free."
"But does not experience show that in bearing the yoke of truth we are sure to yield to illusions?" I answer, is it not proven that those who resist the evidence of a divine order, whether in the work of revelation or in the work of nature, bend beneath every breath that passes, turning to every wind of doctrine, yield to every caprice of intellect, and frame their convictions according to the phrases which are daily set forth by the press of both hemispheres? Have you never met with one of these slaves? They are ready to believe anything that is affirmed without evidence, provided it is contrary to the faith, and they are willing to accept any theory as a demonstrated fact, so long as it can be used against Christianity. What is this but the credulity of incredulity?
The notion of progress is not less false among them than that of liberty. Do they not say every day that faith is incompatible with progress, because revelation is immutable? Is not nature also immutable? Is the immutability of nature an obstacle to the progress of natural science? Why, then, is the immutability of revelation, which we have seen clothed with the same divine sign as nature—why, then, is this immutability an obstacle to the progress of the moral sciences? Is it not concerning the progress of these sacred sciences that Pius IX. has recently adopted the words of Vincent of Lerins, and made them his own? "Progress exists, and it is very great; but it is the true progress of faith, which is not constant change. It must be that the intelligence, the science, the wisdom of all ages, as well as of each one in particular, of all ages and centuries of the whole church, should, like individuals, increase and make great, very great progress; so that posterity may have the good fortune to understand that which antiquity venerated without comprehending; so that the precious stones of divine dogma may be cut, exactly adapted, wisely ornamented, that they may enrich us with their grace, their splendor, and their beauty, but always of the same kind, that is to say, the same doctrine, in the same sense and with the same substance, so that, when we use new terms, we do not say new things." You understand then, my brethren, that the immutability of revelation does not offer a greater obstacle to the progress of sacred science than the immutability of nature places in the way of the natural sciences.
The popes were not only the friends of the progress of the sacred sciences; they were the most ardent supporters of all science, as well as of the progress of letters and arts. The facts which prove this are so numerous that I shall content myself with recalling those which concern you more directly. Who founded the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in England? The popes. Who founded the universities of Paris, Bologna, Ferrara, Salamanca, Coimbra, Alcala, Heidelberg, Prague, Cologne, Vienna, Louvain, and Copenhagen? Again the popes. Who instituted the professorships of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic Languages at Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca? A pope—Clement V. By whom, during two centuries, were sustained, encouraged, recompensed, the works of savants which finally led to the knowledge of the system of the world? By the popes and the cardinals of the holy Roman Church. This is what those ignore who do not blush to perpetuate the fabulous condemnation of Galileo by the Church. Neither the Church nor the sovereign pontiffs have ever condemned Galileo. Galileo was condemned by a tribunal of theologians, who soon withdrew this condemnation to give astronomy the same liberty which was granted to Galileo himself, whose sombre prison is only a romance. Where was this system of the movement of the earth adopted by Copernicus, and then first taught by Galileo? At Rome, in 1495, by Nicholas de Cusa, professor in the Roman University, forty-eight years before the birth of Copernicus, and one hundred and thirty-nine before that of Galileo. Nicholas de Cusa defended at that time this system in a work, dedicated to his professor, Cardinal Julian Cesarini. Pope Nicholas V. raised Nicholas de Cusa to the cardinalate, and named him Bishop of Brixen, in Tyrol. Again, it was at Rome, toward the year 1500, that Copernicus explained and defended this system before an audience of two thousand scholars. Copernicus was made Canon of Königsberg. Celius Calcagnini, who taught the system of Cusa and Copernicus, in Italy, about 1518, was appointed apostolic prothonotary by Clement VIII., and confirmed in this position of honor by Paul III.; it was to Paul III. that Copernicus dedicated his work De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium. At last, when the renowned Kepler, who developed and completed the system of Copernicus, was on this account persecuted by the Protestant theologians of Tübingen, the Holy See used its utmost endeavors to place in the University of Bologna this savant, so Christian in his ideas, and who had not merely embraced the system of Galileo, but had given it an immense weight by the authority of his immortal discoveries. If I insist on this episode, it is because bad faith is stubborn in its efforts to find an argument against the conduct of the popes in the great history of the moral progress of science. The Church never fears the light. She knows and teaches that the light of reason and the light of faith come from the same source. She knows that one of these truths will never contradict the other, and that among the proofs of revelation we must not forget its harmony with the sciences. The sects cannot withstand the presence of science; never has pagan or mussulman become a savant without losing his poor, bewildering faith. It is not so of the true religion. From Clement of Alexandria and Origen to Descartes, Leibnitz, Pascal, Kepler, and De Maistre, to say nothing of our contemporaries, science and faith have dwelt together in the greatest minds of Christendom.
Continue this glorious tradition, young men of the Catholic university, and remain always worthy of your Alma Mater! Become truly men, and you will be men the more powerful and useful the more faithful Christians you are.
And you, city of Louvain, be justly proud of remaining, through your university, the object of noble envy to the nations which surround you. Ireland has taken you for her model; France and Catholic Germany look upon you, and endeavor that they too may possess something which resembles you. Never cease to be yourself, the city of science and of religion, that your children, ever faithful to these two lights, may be consoled, during their life and at the hour of death, by the thought that their love has never divided these two great things which have been united by the infinite wisdom of God.