His key ideas in science were to restore an ontologically hierarchical and non-reductive understanding of cosmology that led him to distinguish between the corporeal and physical domains as aspects of an integrated reality, and to view creation as the actualization of potentiae through grace and intelligent design rather than through the purely reductive epistemically closed explanations of modern science.
Readers of Sacred Web, who will be familiar with Wolfgang Smith, will be pleased to learn of the publication of an anthology titled ‘Wolfgang Smith for Everyone’ (Angelico Press, 2026), which features several essays and other materials that have appeared previously in this journal. The book is introduced below through its Table of Contents, a Preface by Bruno Bérard, and a formal Introduction by Dr. Sebastian Morello, occupant of the Wolfgang Smith Chair at St. Mary’s University in London, England. The new publication contains personal tributes which are described by the publisher as “accessible introductions to the major themes of Smith’s work: quantum physics, cosmology, metaphysics, scientism, evolution, Christian wisdom, and the recovery of a meaningful and intelligible universe. Together they provide an ideal gateway into a body of thought that has influenced philosophers, theologians, scientists, artists, and seekers around the world.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE 1
Bruno Bérard
INTRODUCTION: Wolfgang Smith and Initiation 3
Dr Sebastian Morello, Wolfgang Smith Chair, St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London
TESTIMONIALS & TRIBUTES 8
Marie-José Jolivet, Bruno Bérard, Olumakinde Ogunnaike, John Taylor, Ali Sebetci, Father Luke Bell, Father Richard Escudier
PART ONE: PERSONAL DETAILS 21
Chapter I: Significant Biographical Details 23
Bruno Bérard
Chapter II: Essential Bibliography 31
Bruno Bérard
PART TWO: PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS: MATERIA 37
Chapter III: Metaphysics into Physics 39
William M. Briggs
Chapter IV: Wolfgang Smith’s Philosophy of Physics: A Personal Reflection 52
John Taylor
Chapter V: The Metaphysics of the Measurement Problem 65
Charles Upton
Chapter VI: The Measure of Things: Quantum Physics and the Rediscovery of Meaning 69
Richard Smith
Chapter VII: Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics:top-down or bottom-up ontology? 89
Ali Sebetci
Chapter VIII: Newtonian and Aristotelian Physics: Wolfgang Smith’s Path to Reconciliation 113
John Taylor
Chapter IX: Restoring an Integral Ontology: Wolfgang Smith on the Limitations of Scientism 130
Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
PART THREE: PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS: COSMOLOGY 141
Chapter X: The Restored Foundations 143
Hugh Owen
Chapter XI: Pondering Wolfgang Smith’s Platonist Cosmology 146
John Taylor
PART FOUR: SCIENCE, METAPHYSICS AND RELIGION 161
Chapter XII: Response to Wolfgang Smith 163
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Chapter XIII: Wolfgang Smith, Traditionalist Catholic 173
Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
Chapter XIV: Against Teilhard de Chardin’s Theology-Fiction 182
Denis Sureau
Chapter XV: Putting an End to Evolutionism 185
Marie-José Jolivet
AS A CONCLUSION: The End of Quantum Reality: A Conversation with Wolfgang Smith 197
Samuel Bendeck Sotillos
“Wittgenstein and the Tao” 216
M. Ali Lakhani
CONTRIBUTORS
SAMUEL BENDECK SOTILLOS, writer and psychotherapist, holds a doctorate in psychology from California Southern University.
LUKE BELL, priest and Benedictine monk at Quarr Abbey. Author of The Meaning of Blue: Recovering a Contemplative Spirit, The Mystery of Identity, and Truth in Person.
BRUNO BÉRARD, author of books on metaphysics and editor, doctorate from EPHE-Sorbonne.
WILLIAM M. BRIGGS, writer, philosopher, and scientist, PhD from Cornell University.
FR. RICHARD ESCUDIER, director at the Paris Seminary, episcopal vicar for communities of foreign origin in the Diocese of Paris.
MARIE-JOSÉ JOLIVET, translator of Wolfgang Smith into French.
M. ALI LAKHANI, KC, founding editor of Sacred Web, is a lawyer and author. Raised in England, he lives in Canada, and writes on traditional metaphysics, modernity and literature.
SEBASTIAN MORELLO is a philosopher in the Western intellectual and spiritual tradition, specializing in classical realism, mysticism and esotericism, political traditionalism, philosophy of science, and ecological ethics. He is the author of numerous books, including The World as God’s Icon, Conservatism and Grace, and Mysticism, Magic, & Monasteries. He holds the Wolfgang Smith Chair in Philosophy at St Mary’s University, London.
SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR, Iranian philosopher, professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University.
OLUMAKINDE OGUNNAIKE, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics from Harvard University, a master’s degree in philosophy of physics from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in theoretical physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
HUGH OWEN attended Princeton University, New York University, and Bank Street College of Education in New York, where he earned a master’s degree in education, supervision, and administration. After twenty-five years of teaching, he founded the Kolbe Center for the Study of Creation and is a member of the John Paul II Academy for Human Life and Family.
ALI SEBETCI is a Turkish computational physicist and professor at OSTİM Technical University, whose intellectual work lies at the intersection of the philosophy of nature, metaphysics, and the limits of scientific explanation. He has translated Wolfgang Smith’s books The Quantum Enigma and Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions into Turkish and writes on the critique of scientism and the rediscovery of traditional metaphysical principles in scientific discourse.
RICHARD SMITH, mathematician and systems scientist, earned his PhD under the supervision of George Klir on the topic of uncertainty and information after completing his bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley. A close collaborator of Wolfgang Smith during the latter years of his life, he directed the Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation and contributed to the publication of Smith’s films and books. He currently serves as executive chairman of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles.
DENIS SUREAU, publisher and author of theological essays.
JOHN TAYLOR holds a master’s degree in philosophy of science from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from University College London (UCL). Knowing Wolfgang Smith, he wrote an article with him, published in his latest book: Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology.
CHARLES UPTON, poet and esotericist.
PREFACE
This book was intended as a tribute to Wolfgang Smith on his 95th birthday; published posthumously, it remains a tribute, coupled with an introduction to his work, particularly to physics stripped of all scientism.
Wolfgang was a friend since 2008, and Marie-José Jolivet is the translator of his more recent works. That being said, the following texts are the work of each contributor in their own name.
The fact that Wolfgang Smith was a mathematician, physicist, and metaphysician is rare enough to be worth mentioning at the outset. There have certainly been others—Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz—but in this age of scientific overspecialization, a cross-disciplinary approach is most welcome and valuable.
While one of the characteristics of Wolfgang’s writings is that they are clear and precise—“to the point,” as we would say in English—it might seem surprising to consider this presentation. However, as we shall see, it was not useless to provide an overview of the many subjects covered: quantum physics, perception, cosmology, evolutionism, Teilhardism...We will then discover a coherent thought process, a Weltanschauung—a worldview—capable not only of offering a way out for physics, which is trapped in an impasse, but above all of providing an understanding of the world and of man, under the gaze of an irrefutable transcendence.
Of course, the aim here is not to develop a thesis on the life and work of Wolfgang Smith; however, the following elements should provide an overview and facilitate understanding—without failing to refer to the master’s books.
Bruno Bérard
INTRODUCTION
Wolfgang Smith and Initiation
When exactly I’m not sure, but at some moment in my own intellectual development I discovered a group of thinkers who revealed to me the deep initiatory dimension of philosophical enquiry. This dimension, of course, was central to philosophy’s origins, but was lost concurrently with—and not unrelatedly to—the discipline’s secularization.
The thinkers I have in mind are Stratford Caldecott, Jean Borella, Wolfgang Smith, and some others. These men were connected in at least two ways: they had all been profoundly influenced by the French thinker and critic of modernity René Guénon and other twentieth-century “Traditionalists” or “Perennialists”; and they had each brought new life into Catholic discourse by integrating that prior learning into their Christian thought in marvellously creative ways. Moreover, they had all had their writings published by Sophia Perennis and Angelico Press.
Smith, on whom the present volume focuses, especially captured my attention due to the sheer wholeness of his project. For there are philosophers who devote their lives to one question, constantly developing and tweaking their answer to it. There are also philosophers who devote their lives to many questions and never seem to offer satisfactory answers to any of them. But Smith stands among a tiny number of thinkers throughout the history of mankind who answered many questions and did so comprehensively. And Smith not only did so with remarkable depth, but he presented to his readership how his manifold insights fitted together as a unified and coherent account of reality—that, of course, is what we really mean, or ought to mean, by wisdom.
Smith’s was not, though, a “system.” A philosophical “system” implies conceptual ownership—or worse, conquest—of the reality of which that system purports to give an account. Smith, on the other hand, remained a humble beggar at the feet of Lady Sophia his entire life. Hence, his works do not offer us a schematic structure by which we might reduce the world to an assemblage of abstractions. Quite the reverse; his thought breaks us free from the chamber of unanchored abstractions and by stages initiates us back into the corporeal world of our experience, indicating all the implications of such an initiation along the way.[[1]]
Were I (perhaps foolishly) to attempt a summary of Smith’s key contribution to our civilization’s intellectual culture, I would say that contribution was threefold: 1) a new, richer dialogue between, and reconciliation of, modern science and classical philosophy (occasioning the overcoming of reductionist materialism); 2) a creative dialogue between the Catholic intellectual tradition and the great spiritual and philosophical traditions of the world; and 3) a retrieval of gnosis as integral to the Christian Weltanschauung.
By presenting the major themes of his corpus in this way, one can see that “wholeness” is exactly what characterized Smith’s scholarship: wholeness in cosmology; wholeness in human wisdom, encompassing all truth wherever it is found; and wholeness with regard to the union of man with his Creator.
As is well known among his readership, in developing his case Smith challenged the largely unscrutinized and thus prejudicial option in favor of a lingering Cartesian bifurcationism, which he identified as the false epistemology enabling many physicists to posit the quantum realm and the corporeal realm as coextensive within the same horizontal plane of reality. He challenged this paradigm by retrieving the ancient notion of a tripartite structure to all being, a structure found in all traditional religions and wisdom traditions, albeit presented diversely.
What implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—ran through all his writings was the notion that investigation into the nature of any given level of reality entailed a moral response on the part of the enquirer. And in this regard, I insist that his writings are in strict continuity with the ancient philosophical tradition in being essentially initiatory.
The physical world—the world explored by the physicist—reveals through mathematical and experimental investigation a realm of indeterminacy, in which materia prima is being called forth—or actualized—by the reception of quality. In turn, the physical world reveals the power of the Creator in the created order, as He brings into being the corporeal world of our experience, which in its actualization reveals to us something of the inner life of its Author. The world is, then, truly theophany.[[2]] And effecting the actualization of this corporeal world of our experience is the spiritual world, or aeviternal world, which is vertically contiguous with—and thus causally related to—the corporeal world. Hence, intellectual and spiritual enquiry at each level leads to some intimation of God and His self-revelation in the cosmos, pointing us in different ways to the pursuit of divine wisdom, or, to adopt Smith’s preferred term, gnosis.
But how does gnosis differ from, say, catechesis? Smith makes a remark (almost in passing) in a little-known essay entitled “Science and Myth: The Hidden Connection”:
It is not the function of doctrine to take us out of the founding myth: to “explain it away.” On the contrary, its function is to bring us into the myth; for indeed, the pearl of truth resides in myth as in a sanctuary. Authentic doctrine can take us to the threshold of that sanctuary; but like Moses before the Promised Land, it cannot enter there.[[3]]
This is probably the pithiest presentation I have ever encountered of the distinction—of especial importance to Clement of Alexandria—between the pistic Christian and the gnostic Christian. Here, “gnostic” is not meant in the pejorative sense of Manichaeism and its antecedents and successors in the Western world. Indeed, against such phony “gnosis” Smith railed.[[4]] Rather it is a gnosis at which Smith himself arrived firstly by the rejection of two types of dualism.
The first dualism was that of the above-mentioned Cartesian bifurcationism that long ensorcelled the Western mind and continues to undermine credence in the world of our experience, reducing “reality” to quantity and measurement. The second dualism was older, namely that of “double-truth” that posits supposed truths of rational and scientific enquiry to be unrelated to—and likely in conflict with—the truths of religious belief and spiritual experience.
Smith’s response to such dualisms was that of placing scientific findings within a framework of classical participation metaphysics, combining the ontology of the Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions with the corporeal realism of the Thomistic tradition. The result has entailed a renewed and serious dialogue between contemporary science and classical philosophy, a retrieval of our world after a centuries-long dominance of epistemological skepticism, and a recovery of the theophanic cosmos as a ladder of being by which to ascend to spiritual transformation through union with God.
Consequently, Smith’s achievement also entails the recapture of personal meaning and purpose, for no one can hope for a meaningful and purposive life in a meaningless and purposeless universe. Hence, inadvertently, Smith has rejuvenated the discipline of philosophy as a pathway of initiation, which is what it always should have been. What I refer to in this last point, I have witnessed unfolding before my eyes as I have introduced my students to Smith’s teachings since being appointed to the Wolfgang Smith Chair in Philosophy at St Mary’s University, London. I am immensely proud to hold a chair named in his honor. It is clear to me that his mission has only just begun.
Dr Sebastian Morello
Wolfgang Smith Chair, St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London
September 29, 2025, Michaelmas
[[1]]: See Wolfgang Smith, The Vertical Ascent: From Particles to the Tripartite Cosmos and Beyond (Philos-Sophia Initiative Foundation, 2020), 59–70.2
[[2]]: The Vertical Ascent, 140.3
[[3]]: http://www.worldwisdom.com/public/viewpdf/default.aspx?article-title=Science_and_Myth--The_Hidden_Connection_by_Wolfgang_Smith.pdf.4
[[4]]: The Vertical Ascent, 137–54