From Copernicus to Galileo: How Christianity Becomes Intolerant
Deconstructing Christianity: Science is only seen as incompatible with Christianity when people become reactionary and unable to adapt to new information.
An interrelated raft of new ideas was modernizing European society, culture, material conditions, worldviews, and religion during the sixteenth century. It would take time for people to absorb and react to these new ideas. Developments in physical cosmology illustrate this reaction gap. In the 1530s, Polish-born church administrator and Renaissance man Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) completed a manuscript called On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium), arguing from his mathematical observations that the sun was at the center of the universe.
Biblical cosmology had a disc-shaped or square earth floating on its waters, with heaven and its bodies above and the underworld below. From about the twelfth century, medieval Europeans accepted a cosmology based on Aristotelian physics and popularized by the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy (ca. 100–ca. 170). In the Ptolemaic system, the earth was at the center of the universe, surrounded onion-like by eight concentric revolving spheres made of a rarified, elastic substance called æther, with the successively distant heavenly bodies of the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the stars embedded in each. Ptolemy accounted for the seemingly irregular motion of planets with an inelegantly complex system of “epicycles.” The whole system was made spiritually and morally satisfying under the assumption of increasing perfection moving outward from the inconstant, decaying earth toward the absolute perfection of heaven beyond.
Copernicus essentially retained this view, including the spheres, simply switching the central position of the earth and moon with that of the sun and accounting for the rotation of the stars and annual motion of the sun by the earth’s rotation and orbit. This was based on his return ad fontes to ancient sources proposing such a system, coupled with a working out of their mathematical implications. His system could account for celestial phenomena as accurately as Ptolemy had, but in a far more mathematically elegant way—one that Copernicus considered a better credit to the Creator.
Copernicus’ heliocentric universe defied intellectual reality on at least three levels: common sense (the earth is clearly static while celestial bodies move), the accepted scientific explanation of the heavens, and the academic assumption that the observations of physics supersede those of mathematics. There was initially little objection on religious grounds: Catholics were not obliged to interpret scripture literally; they accepted Augustine’s principle of interpretative accommodation. Luther found the idea irritating, though not on religious grounds. Calvin fully accepted accommodation, asserting that scripture has nothing substantive to say about astronomy and that its students should look elsewhere for instruction.
The German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) also understood that mathematics was key to understanding the cosmos, to be verified by rigorous empirical observation. He justified Copernicus’ theory, further refining it by calculating elliptical orbits for the planets rather than the circular orbits of the spheres. Arguably, his greatest contribution was the creation of the first precise, verifiable, and universally applicable natural laws.
It is sometimes assumed that modern science and religion have always clashed, but during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, natural philosophy and religion were tightly welded together. For Kepler, divine reality lay behind the physical universe, and geometry was a form of Logos, present with God before creation and identical with God. For Kepler, God was a divine geometer. Significantly, the theological truth that Kepler saw in the cosmos was dependent on mathematics, empirical observation, and measurement. In this way, pioneering scientists were developing what amounted to a secular theology.
For more on the truth of myth vs. the truth of empirically-based science, see my post Stories of Our Christian Faith are MYTHS in the Truest Sense.
Toward the end of the sixteenth century, the intolerant strain of modernism came to the fore in Italy. After a decades-long series of wars fought over the Italian peninsula from 1494 to 1559, during what was essentially the twilight of the Renaissance, and after the close of the Council of Trent in 1563, the church hierarchy sought to assert absolute control over its subjects. The Vatican no longer regarded theology as a speculative process; the theology of Thomas Aquinas and the philosophy of Aristotle, including natural philosophy, were transformed into a rigid system of orthodox dogma, while a succession of popes set up and oversaw an ongoing program of Vatican censorship. Under a series of condemnations, imprisonments, forced recantations, and executions, it became dangerous to critique any aspect of Aristotelian cosmology.
In this climate, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) published his 1610 astronomical treatise, Starry Message (Sidereus Nuncius). Galileo had perfected the refracting telescope. Through it, he described his observations and showed how they constituted proof positive of the Copernican hypothesis. In 1616, the Roman Inquisition ordered Galileo not to hold, teach, or defend his Copernican opinions.
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In 1632, he published Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (in vernacular Italian), in which a proponent of the Ptolemaic system is portrayed as a simpleton whose arguments are frustrated by a philosopher and a layman arguing the Copernican position. In 1633, Galileo was ordered to stand trial, was found ‘vehemently suspect’ of heresy, and was sentenced to formal imprisonment, commuted to house arrest (under which he remained for the rest of his life). His book Dialogue was banned, and he was forbidden to publish anything that he had ever written or would write.
To those for whom science and religion are incompatible, Galileo is a cause célèbre. However, Galileo was not the victim of religion per se, but rather of the Catholic Church at a time when it was in a repressive and reactionary mode of perceived self-preservation. Galileo himself seemed to have a dogmatic streak. He tended to present his views in terms of certainty rather than hypothesis or probability, and though he considered the poetic symbolism of scripture and the observations of science to be separate and non-contradictory, he seemed perversely intent on reconciling his discoveries with the Bible, mixing his thorough empiricism with the mythos of scripture.
In De revolutionibus, Copernicus presented his heliocentric hypothesis per tradition as imaginative speculation, and when his treatise was read at the Vatican, the pope gave cautious approval. Ninety years later, it was placed on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum and banned. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the notion of what constituted truth had changed. Thomas Aquinas would not have recognized his theology as it was being taught. Karen Armstrong puts it this way in The Case for God:
“His apophatic delight in unknowing was being replaced by a strident lust for certainty and a harsh dogmatic intolerance. The spirituality of silence was giving way to wordy debate; the refusal to define (a word that literally means to ‘set limits upon’) was being superseded by aggressive definitions of ineffable dogma. Faith was beginning to be identified with ‘belief’ in man-made opinions—and that would, eventually, make faith itself difficult to maintain.”[1]
For more on apophatic theology and the spirituality of silence, see my post, Christianity was a Religion of Silent Meditation from the Start
[1] Armstrong, Karen. The Case for God. New York: Random House, 2009, p. 187.