Michael Elazar

Honor Fabri and the Concept of Impetus A Bridge between

Paradigms

This dissertation discusses the impetus-based physics of the Jesuit natural philosopher and
mathematician Honor Fabri (1608-1688), a senior representative of Jesuit scientists during
the period between Galileo's death (1642) and Newton's Principia mathematica (1687). It
concentrates mainly on Fabri's theory of motion, dominated by the concept of impetus, but
addresses also his theory of matter, in which "innate" impetus (equivalent to "heaviness")
played a key role.
Fabri, initially a French College professor, taught scientific subjects in Lyon's Collge
de la Trinit, but in 1646 he was removed from teaching and transferred to a bureaucratic
post in Rome. He spent there his remaining years, publishing many books, taking part in
countless controversies and cooperating with the experimental activity of the renowned
Accademia del Cimento.
During his lifetime Fabri was well-known, and appreciated by figures like Leibniz,
Oldenburg, Gassendi and Mersenne. However, over the years he became almost forgotten,
and today he is a rather anonymous, if not infamous, character. Anneliese Mayer, who
convincingly refuted Pierre Duhem's contention that Jean Buridan from the fourteenth
century should be seen as the "father of inertia", relied on a letter Fabri wrote in 1673 to a
fellow Jesuit (in which he takes pains to disassociate himself from Cartesian philosophy) and
unhesitatingly deemed Fabri a sworn enemy of the New Science, employing (in her opinion)
the old concept of impetus to combat Galileo's and Descartes' "mechanics of inertia". Mayer
was thus only reinforcing Alexander Koyr's preceding observation, that impetus in general,
as an efficient reason of motion, is consumed by merely causing motion and is consequently
self-consuming and alien to the idea of inertia, which involves endless and undisturbed
motion.
Following Koyr and Maier, other historians repeated this opinion and declared the
total incompatibility between Fabri's impetus and the idea of inertia, advocating the identity
between Fabri's concept of impetus and Buridan's. Two of them, Stillman Drake and David

Lukens, not only ascribed to Fabri unconditional loyalty to the scholastic traditional concept
of impetus, but also regarded his discrete mathematical analysis of free fall as merely an
elaborate version of a view formulated in the fourteenth century. Others depicted Fabri as a
staunch enemy of vacuum, whether from blind allegiance to Aristotelian principles or due to
theological considerations (connected to the issue of the Eucharist), or presented Fabri as
nothing more than a representative of the Inquisition. It should be added, though, that
concerning subjects not related to the theory of motion, or marginal issues within it,
historians have conveyed less biased (and more flattering) views on Fabri.

The purpose of my dissertation is not to deal with marginal aspects of Fabri's theory of
motion, but to refute once and for all the opinion which since Maier's account has dominated
the prevailing view, namely that Fabri's theory is inherently contradictory to the New
Science in general and inertia in particular. This dissertation, based on Fabri's scientific texts
from the 1640s (and not a letter from 1673) shows that his concept of impetus should not be
seen as a backward device serving to fight the New Science, but should rather be deemed a
sophisticated tool for assimilating it. In particular, regarding Fabri's concept of impetus as
alien to inertia is simply wrong; for Fabri carefully redefined the concept of impetus, as well
as the causal connection between impetus and motion, so as to be able to smoothly assimilate
the basic idea behind "inertia", i.e. the tendency of a moving and unhindered object to
continue its motion with uniform velocity and along a straight line ad infinitum. Fabri, eager
to adopt linear conservation of motion officially and explicitly published only in Descartes'
Principia (1644) achieved this by defining (in 1646) impetus as a formal (rather than
efficient) cause of motion, thus evading the argument Koyr would raise (three centuries
after Fabri) against the compatibility of impetus and inertia. In order to ensure the linearity of
the motion conserved, Fabri followed Giovanni Battista Benedetti, against the medieval
impetus tradition, in limiting the action of impetus to straight lines. Moreover, although Fabri
unlike Descartes before him and Newton after him did not define linear conservation of
motion as a law of nature, nevertheless it was an integral part of what could be described as
his "inertial framework", which was expressed also by the analysis of natural phenomena in
vacuum, by support for Galileo's claim concerning the universal velocity of fall in the void,
and by the abstraction of air resistance from the analysis of motion. Fabri actually used linear

conservation of motion within the discrete analysis he developed as a "mirror image" of

Galileo's (continuous) treatment of free fall, and took pains to prove that this discrete
analysis a product of the seventeenth, not the fourteenth, century converges (assuming
infinitesimal instants) to Galileo's famous "odd numbers" law.
Fabri is indeed far from being an opponent of vacuum, and contrary to Buridan and
many of his contemporaries never denies motion devoid of any resistance, i.e. motion in the
void. Rather, Fabri claims that the (full) universe is immersed in an infinite vacuum, and
passionately defends the scientific validity of the concept of void, both by sharply attacking
the "paradoxes" formulated by Aristotle to prove the "absurdity" of the concept of void, and
by severely criticizing Descartes' anti-vacuist reduction of matter to extension. While
Aristotelian principles clearly were not used by Fabri to attack the void, neither was the
sacrament of the Eucharist: this dissertation also discusses the theory Fabri developed to
account for this sacrament, featuring the quality (qualitas) of (innate) impetus, which is
promoted to the status of substance (substantia) following the conversion of bread and wine
to Christ's flesh and blood. This theory served Fabri not to attack the void, but to aggrandize
his omnipotent concept of impetus.
In this dissertation I am adopting Rivka Feldhay's "dialogical" approach, which (unlike
Maier, Drake and their followers) does not assume an "automatic dichotomy" between the
New Science and Jesuit natural philosophy, but regards the latter as participating in the
widespread process of inspecting, assimilating and criticizing New Science ideas, which took
place during the critical period culminating in the Newtonian revolution. Fabri himself
cannot be seen as a "disciple" of Galileo or Descartes, but depicting him as their "enemy"
totally distorts his views. Fabri's physics of motion, particularly his concept of impetus,
should rather be seen as a means of combining important New Science essentials (especially
linear conservation of motion and Galileo's law of fall) with the Aristotelian and scholastic
traditions. Hence, Fabri's impetus should be regarded not as an instrument which served him
to combat Galileo and Descartes, but as a tool cunningly employed by him to insert their
ideas into the Jesuit college "through the back door".