The mathematician who tried to convince the Catholic Church of infinity

may be The laity survived at the time, but for some observers, Leo Georg Cantor’s original “naive” set theory caused a revolution and revolt in mathematical circles, with some adopting his ideas and others rejecting them.

Cantor was deeply disappointed by the negative reactions, of course, but not by his own ideas. Why? Because he held to the belief that he had a main line to the Absolute, that is, that his thoughts came directly from him Divine intelligence (Divine Mind). And like blues brothers Jake and Elwood, he was on a mission from God. So when he became soured in the mathematician community in 1883, he sought new audiences in the Catholic Church of Pope Leo XIII.

This was during Cantor’s final years, a period when his mind became disoriented. He developed what I call Isaac Newton Complex: A sickening, pathological hatred of publishing, inspired by the paranoid certainty that your contemporaries want to ruin you. Either they’re a bunch of haters who are ignorant of your work, or, much worse, they’re jealous of your genius and selfishly despise you because of it. (Newton himself had sworn off publishing for years due to criticism of his early works.)

“My own inclinations do not induce me to publish,” Cantor wrote in 1887, echoing what Newton had said two centuries earlier. “I am happy to leave this activity to others.”

Over the next several years, Cantor increasingly focused on new audiences and attempted to make inroads with the Catholic authorities. The 1880s was a period in which the Catholic Church became more interested in scientific discoveries than ever before. Leo XIII, who became pope in 1878, paid special attention to the sciences, especially cosmology. He claims that science is the way forward, and he maintains an astronomical observatory in the Vatican, the construction of which he personally supervises. He fills it with the best modern equipment and keeps professional astronomers on staff.

Cantor believed that the Church had a lot to offer and that set theory had a lot to offer in return. He wants the Catholic Church to become aware of his views because set theory is a way to understand the infinite nature of God, and perhaps even the mind of God, which is reflected in mathematics. Isn’t this worth it? Looking?

It’s a tough sell.

Cantor shares his work with Cardinal Johannes Franzelin of the Vatican Council, one of the leading Jesuit theologians of his time. Franzelin wrote a letter to Cantor on Christmas Day 1885, saying that he was delighted to receive Cantor’s work. What pleases me a lot, he says, is that “she seems to take not a hostile stance, but a positive one regarding Christianity and Catholic principles.” Having said that, Franzelin adds, Cantor’s ideas are perhaps indefensible and “in a certain sense, although the author does not seem to mean it, may contain a pantheistic error.”