Click here to get this post in PDF

Thoughts on Father Stanley Jaki’s Writings by Stacy Trasancos (Link to Trasanco’s book above)

“John writes, ‘And the Word was made flesh, and came to dwell among us; and we had sight of his glory, glory such as belongs to the Father’s only-begotten Son, full of grace and truth.’ (Et Verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis: et vidimus gloriam ejus, gloriam quasi unigeniti a Patre plenum gratiæ et veritatis.) John used the Greek words μονογενοῦς παρὰ, translated as monogenes, the ‘only begotten’ Son of the Father, and in Latin as unigeniti.

“Jaki developed this concept in several of his essays. In ancient Greece the word monogenes referred to the eternally emanating cosmos, unigenitus, also universum or universe. To Plato, for instance, the monogenes was the Unknown God, the cosmos itself. Plotinus, six hundred years after Plato, still referred to the monogenes as the Unknown God. When John called Christ by the same words, it marked a radically different view of God: the Unknown God
was named the Christian God, a Trinitarian and Incarnational God. The god of the pantheists in ancient Greece is drastically different from the God of the Gospels. If this theological point is missed by historians, the rationality of the Greeks will not appear all that different from the rationality of the Christians, but to miss that point is to miss the mindset, the worldview, the radically different psychology of Christianity.

“This theological point is connected with Jaki’s description of ‘science’ and ‘religion’ as entities separated by God Himself, as discussed at the end of the chapter on the definition of ‘science.’ Since science deals with quantities and measurement of objects in motion and religion deals with the ultimate purpose of mankind, Jaki also noted that Jesus indirectly warned that science should be kept in its secondary place. When Jesus taught his followers to ‘Seek first the Kingdom of God and all else will be given to you,’ he was telling them that His Kingdom is supernatural, not natural, just as he told Pilate,
‘My Kingdom is not of this world.’ Though not usually used as such, those words from Our Lord offer excellent advice to scientists.

“The fruits of Christ’s divinity certainly have been relevant for this world, including the scientific aspect of history, but the main lesson of that divinity is that it points to a world beyond this world, beyond the cosmos, beyond the universe. Why is that lesson important when considering science or the history of science? The lesson is important because it is a reminder that the questions religion can answer are far more important questions to humanity than the questions science can answer. If one is in agreement, then, with the late Fr. Stanley Jaki, it can be asserted with demonstrated confidence that for natural sciences to be born, supernatural revelation was needed. ‘There had to come a birth, the birth of the only begotten Son of the Father as a man, to allow science to have its first viable birth.’ ”

Trasancos, Stacy (2013-12-05). Science Was Born of Christianity: The Teaching of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki (Kindle Locations 2255-2283). Kindle Edition. Footnotes omitted.