The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition

Admirers of Wolfgang Smith’s previous works will welcome this new volume, which is an anthology of articles (plus a new essay) that together constitute nothing less than an ontology. New readers will find a world opening around them that is as ancient as Aristotelian metaphysics and as new as quantum mechanics: a world that not only raises the mind to God, but that actually reveals Him-a world that is theophanic.

Modern science bills itself as the great demythologizer, and it claims to show us the world the way it really is. The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology demythologizes modern science.

What is this myth that Smith exorcises? It is the reduction of the natural (“corporeal”) world to the mere physical, which is only an abstraction. It is only to this abstraction that the instruments of modern science have access: objects emptied of their essence. The universe, Smith shows us, is neither a mere aggregate of particles, nor a mere aggregate of galaxies; the world is an icon to be read.

This book is no rejection of the findings of modern science-Smith is himself a physicist and mathematician. Rather, it is a dialogue between “the wisdom of ancient cosmology” and modern physics, from quantum mechanics to astrophysics. And it is the ancient that sheds light upon the new.

The book consists of twelve chapters (the summaries in parentheses are mine):

I. Sophia Perennis and Modern Science: (Smith explains the split between the ancient and modern cosmological world-view)

II. From Schroedinger’s Cat to Thomistic Ontology: (how the distinction between the corporeal and the physical, and the Aristotelian categories of potency and act, shed light on quantum mechanics-an astounding thesis)

III. Eddington and the Primacy of the Corporeal

IV. Bell’s Theorem and the Perennial Ontology

V. Celestial Corporeality: (the resurrected body)

VI. The Extrapolated Universe: (a discussion of the “discrepancy between contemporary physical cosmology and the Patristic teaching concerning the creation and early history of the world”)

VII. The Pitfall of Astrophysical Cosmology: (a theological objection to Big-Bang cosmology on the basis of an understanding of ontological hierarchy)

VIII. The Status of Geocentrism

IX. Esoterism and Cosmology: From Ptolemy to Dante and Cusanus

X. Intelligent Design and Vertical Causality: (Smith addresses Darwinism and Intelligent Design theory)

XI. Interpreting Anthropic Coincidence: (the new essay)

XII. Science and the Restoration of Culture

Included as an appendix is Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s reply to the first chapter

Rating: 5 / 5