Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
The story of Copernicus's and Galileo's revolutionary challenges to the Ptolemaic earth-centered system, which had prevailed in people's minds since antiquity, is well known. The system served to explain the appearances of heavenly bodies for centuries, and yet as time wore on, people became increasingly aware that it required refinements in order to hold up under careful observation. The solution was for scientists to propose epicycles, smaller cycles within the main cycle of the sun and planets around the earth, to explain variations in the motions of heavenly bodies within the larger framework. As we know, Copernicus suggested that reversing the entire framework and centering the universe around the sun would be a "neater" solution. The developments that followed from this suggestion created what would become a chasm between the world of the past and the world of the present.
You have in the course of this semester read neo-Platonic texts, which proposed a chain of being uniting the material world to the heavenly world. You have also read some of Dante's Divine Comedy and viewed charts of his concept of the physical relationship between earth, hell, purgatory, and heaven. The heliocentric universe was to upset all of that poetic, philosophical, and theological structure. It is hard for people today to imagine what this must have felt like to people of the past. While the church plays the role of the villain in its suppression of Galileo, we should perhaps step back and sympathize with those who were unable to assimilate such a drastic alteration to their world-view. What would become of the traditional theological explanations if these scientists were allowed to have their way? How could faith continue in what God had ordained?
As we know, some scholars have looked on the Renaisssance as the first dawnings of modernity. Others see this period, which we are about to leave as our semester draws to a close, as a time that is irretrievably lost, on the other side of that chasm. King points out that it was not humanists and artists, but scientists, who opened up new ways of thinking, just as explorers opened up new continents to Europeans. Both phenomena would change the ways in which people looked at the world. With the new trade routes to the west, the Mediterranean would no longer be the "center of the earth," as its name proclaims. Venice, at the crossroads between east and west, and Italy as a whole, would lose its dominance as the Atlantic became the new conduit to wealth and power, while scientific would eventually replace aristotelian, platonic, and biblical explanations of phenomena.
During the very time when all of these changes were taking place there would be a religious upheaval unlike anything Christendom had experienced before, the Protestant Reformation. Again, I challenge you to think about what this must have been like for people at that time. The atrocities of the witch hunts can be at least partly explained as a reaction to the unimaginable insecurity and anxiety these changes provoked. Science would eventually be the means by which the craze died out. As we today look back on the 16th and 17th centuries, we can easily define the period as the triumph of reason over faith, yet such a conclusion creates other simplifications. I leave you to ponder that question.
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Laurel Carrington carringt@stolaf.edu
Most recent update: January 25, 2008