Two Views of the Cosmos

Two Views of the Cosmos

Martin Luther described Copernicus as “an upstart astrologer… This fool wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy. But Sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth.” Even some of Copernicus’ admirer argued that he had not really believed in a Sun-centered universe but had merely proposed it as a convenience for calculating the motions of the planets.

The epochal confrontation between the two views of the Cosmos – Earth-centered and Sun-centered – reached a climax in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the person of a man who was, like Ptolemy, both astrologer and astronomer. He lived in a time when the human spirit was fettered and the mind chained; when the ecclesiastical pronouncements of a millennium or two earlier on scientific matters were considered more reliable than contemporary findings made with techniques unavailable to the ancients ; with deviations, even on arcane theological matters, from the prevailing doxological preferences, Catholic and Protestant, were punished by humiliation, taxation, exile, torture or death.

Nicolaus Copernicus. In an inventory of nearly every sixteenth-century copy of Copernicus’ book, Owen Gingerich has found the censorship to have been ineffective : only 60% of the copies in Italy were “corrected”, and not one in Iberia. Image : Spicy Pink and Lilac Fractals © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

The heavens were inhabited by angels, demons and the Hand of God, turning the planetary crystal spheres. Science was barren of the idea that underlying the phenomena of Nature might be the laws of physics. But the brave and lonely struggle of this man was to ignite the modern scientific revolution.

Johannes Kepler was born in Germany in 1571 and sent as a boy to the Protestant seminary school in the provincial town of Maulbronn to be educated for the clergy. It was a kind of boot camp, training young minds in the use of theological weaponry against the fortress or Roman Catholicism. Kepler, stubborn, intelligent and fiercely independent, suffered two friendless years in bleak Maulbronn, becoming isolated and withdrawn, his thoughts devoted to his imagined unworthiness in the eyes of God. He repented a thousand sins no more wicked than another’s and despaired of ever attaining salvation.

But God became for Kepler more than a divine wrath craving propitiation. Kepler’s God was the creative power of the Cosmos. The boy’s curiosity conquered his fear. He wished to learn the eschatology of the world; he dared to contemplate the Mind of God. These dangerous visions, at first insubstantial as a memory, became a lifelong obsession. The hubristic longings of a child seminarian were to carry Europe out of the cloister of medieval thought.