Cosmic Glory

Cosmic Glory

The sciences of classical antiquity had been silenced more than a thousand years before, but in the late Middle Ages, some faint echoes of those voices, preserved by Arab scholars, began to insinuate themselves into the European educational curriculum. In Maulbronn, Johannes Kepler heard their reverberations, studying, besides theology, Greek and Latin, music and mathematics. In the geometry of Euclid he thought he glimpsed an image of perfection and cosmic glory. He was later to write: “Geometry existed before the Creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God… Geometry provided God with a model for Creation… Geometry is God Himself”.

In the midst of Kepler’s mathematical ruptures, and despite his sequestered life, the imperfections of the outside world must also have moulded his character. Superstition was widely available nostrum for people powerless against the miseries of famine, pestilence and deadly doctrinal conflict. For many, the only certainty was the stars, and the ancient astrological conceit prospered in the courtyyards and taverns of fear-haunted Europe. Kepler, whose attitude toward astrology remained ambiguous all his life, wondered whether there might be hidden patterns underlying the apparent chaos of daily life. If the world was crafted by God, should it not be examined closely? Was not all of Creation an expression of the harmonies in the mind of God? The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader.

Space Ships. “God provides for every animal his means of sustenance. For the Astronomer, He had provided the astrology” (Johannes Kepler). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)

In 1589, Kepler left Maulbronn to study for the clergy at the great university in Tübingen and found it a liberation. Confronted by the most vital intellectual currents of the time, his genius was immediately recognized by his teachers – one of whom introduced the young man to the dangerous mysteries of the Copernican hypothesis.

A heliocentric universe resonated with Kepler’s religious sense, and he embraced it with fervor. The Sun was metaphor for God around Whom all else revolves. Before he was to be ordained, he was made an attractive offer of secular employment, which, – perhaps he felt himself indifferently suited to an ecclesiastical career – he found himself accepting. He was summoned to Graz, in Austria, to teach secondary school mathematic s, and began a little later to prepare astronomical and meteorological almanacs and to cast horoscopes.

Kepler was a brilliant thinker and a lucid writer, but he was a disaster as a classroom teacher. He mumbled, he digressed. He was at time utterly incomprehensible. He draw only a handful of students his first year at Graz; the next year there were none. He was distracted by an incessant interior clamor of associations and speculations vying for his attention. And one pleasant summer afternoon, deep in the interstices of one of his interminable lectures, he was visited by a revelation that was to alter radically the future of the astronomy. Perhaps he stopped at mid-sentence. His inattentive students, longing for the end of the day, took little notice (I suspect) of the historical moment.

A space ship traveling near a star. Illustration by Elena

Understanding the Cosmos

The Humans have discovered an elegant and powerful way to understand the Cosmos, a method called science; it was revealed to us a universe so vast and so ancient that human affairs seem at first sight to be of little consequence.

We must admit that we have grown distant from the Universe and the Cosmos has seemed remote and irrelevant to our everyday concerns.

The science has found not only that the Cosmos is accessible to human reeling and ecstatic grandeur, not only that it is equally accessible to human understanding, but also that we are, in a very real and profound sense, a part of the Cosmos. We are born from it and our fate is deeply connected with it. The most basic human events and the most trivial actions trace back to the universe and its origins.

We are positive from our own experience that an enormous global interest exists in the exploration of the planets and in many kindred scientific topics – the origin of life, the Earth, the Cosmos… the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, our connection with the universe.