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original formulation of the impetus theory. Jaki’s position on the tradition of the Parisian
school is nuanced, noting that Augustinian and Franciscan schools of theology were
behind Tempier’s condemnation of the 219 theses, and these had a voluntaristic tendency.
Jaki’s theological interest thus provided a much needed corrective to Duhem’s one-sided
esteem of Ockham, who went so far along the road suggested by the decree of Bishop
Tempier as to put in jeopardy the “inherent and coherent rationality” of God’s creation. It
was not long before Ockham upset the philosophical balance by making the nominalist
distinction between “God’s absolute will and ordained will.” It left him free to cavort in
paradoxical phrases celebrating inconsistency, such as the statement that there could be
starlight without any stars. By overemphasizing God’s absolute will, Ockham prevented
the unicity of God from being accessible to the mind via reason alone. Thereafter, as Jaki
notes, “the recognition of the unity of material beings, or a unitary vision of the universe,
so indispensable for science, was also beyond the mind’s powers.”
Jaki also diverges from Duhem concerning his interpretation of St Thomas Aquinas.
The latter’s benevolent approach to Aristotle did not result in a diluting, however slightly,
of that all-important Christian tenet that God was able and free to create any kind of
universe, or not to create at all. For Jaki, Duhem overlooked the great importance of
Thomas’ insistence on the full rationality, that is, consistency, of creation by an infinitely
rational God. It was the Thomistic balance that alone made possible the view, so
important for the future of science that, to quote Jaki, “the contingency of the universe
obviates an a priori discourse about it, while its rationality makes it accessible to the mind
though only in an a posteriori manner.” In the medieval vision of the cosmos, above all
exemplified by St. Thomas, the two massive pillars of importance for Christianity and for
science are the rationality and the contingency of the universe.
If properly heeded, that insistence, as Jaki argues, could have forestalled two mistaken
developments: one was the Ockhamist, and subsequently Reformed, emphasis on
contingency in the wrong-headed sense that God could not set consistently valid laws in
the universe. The other was the Renaissance sympathy accorded to the Greek idea of the
Great Year, beneath which lay hidden a cosmic view riveted in the abolition of all distinct
contours. The surface problem here was an uncritical neo-Platonism. The most instructive
case for Jaki, in this latter respect, is the pantheistic thinking of Giordano Bruno, whose
claim to “scientific expertise” is demolished by Jaki in a special monograph. Bruno, who
held the universe to be infinite in time and cyclic, first found an echo among the anti-
scientific and crypto-pantheistic protagonists of German idealism and Naturphilosophie,
a fact traced out by Jaki in careful detail.
Jaki also shows that during the Renaissance it was Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo da
Vinci, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Benedetti, and Kepler who represented not only the best
in science but also attested “the inspiration and safeguard which faith in the Creator
provided for scientific endeavour during an age that witnessed a hardly concealed desire
on the part of many to bring about a ‘re-naissance’ of classical paganism.” Nicholas of
Cusa was able to employ such Platonic notions as the world-organism to illustrate
harmony in the cosmos, because from the start, he was clear about the Christian sense of
creation. However, when faith was lacking there was a real regression from civilized
Christian culture to a pagan view of the cosmos.
Jaki regards Galileo as a conscious and Newton as an unconscious heir to that
scientific tradition which commenced with Buridan and Oresme. He also shows that

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