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A revolution in science occurred beginning in the 16th century, in large part due to Nicholaus Copernicus’ book On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, arguing for a heliocentric universe. Copernicus was a canon of the Church and a highly educated man—not just a mathematician and astronomer but a physician of note. He believed that his Catholic Faith was consistent with his role as a philosopher and mathematician, for God welcomed people to spend their lives seeking the truth. He was supported in his endeavors by many Catholic officials who were themselves scientists, and he dedicated his book to the scholar Pope Paul III.
The Renaissance and New Thought
Copernicus’ work came about during the Renaissance, when scholars—historians, philosophers, philologists, scientists, artists, writers, and poets—increasingly relied on new discoveries and new translations of the works of ancient Greek and Roman historians, philosophers, scientists, and writers. The works of Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Virgil, Horace, Polybius, Livy, and others, inspired new forms of thought and new ways to express it.
Although Renaissance thinkers and writers were still very religious, there began a greater emphasis on human existence, human experience, and expression, coined by the world humanism. Renaissance humanists began to break away from the heavy reliance on revealed religion and belief in a providential god to focus more on what humans thought and did. This was the beginning of a trend that would continue for the next five centuries to today.
The Renaissance inspired a new approach to science based at first on the explorations of the Portuguese and Spanish, such as Vasco Da Gama and Christopher Columbus, that disproved the theories of ancient Greek and Roman geographers, who assumed a world with three continents and two oceans. If the ancients were so wrong about world geography, Renaissance thinkers asked, what else were they wrong about?
Ptolemy and the Planet Problem
The most important ancient geographer was also the most important ancient astronomer: Claudius Ptolemy of Alexandria, Egypt. Ptolemy’ Almagest was the seminal work that astronomers and geographers relied on for fifteen hundred years. It was the work that most influenced Copernicus, who, like Ptolemy, was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer.
Ptolemy’s theory of the universe was geocentric, earth centered. He theorized that the universe was about the size of our solar system and that it encompassed spherical bodies that could be ascertained by observation.
The Greeks had referred to the particular stars that did not follow the same, unending pattern in the night sky but moved about against the pattern of the stars as wanderers, or planets. The Greek-identified planets were then named for the Greek and Roman gods: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The stars and planets orbited the Earth, as did the Moon and the Sun.
The problem of why the planets appeared to move night after night from east to west then backtrack bothered the Greeks. Ptolemy derived an ingenious theory to explain this movement. He claimed that, as the planets orbited the earth, they also orbited around a deferent on epicycles. This explained the retrograde motion of the planets.
Copernicus Identifies the Discrepancy
Astronomers in the centuries after Ptolemy assumed that something like what he theorized must be the case, and numerous scientists in the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance periods tried to fine-tune his predictive scheme. But Ptolemy’s scheme never quite matched the observed phenomena.
Many astronomers did not much care whether his theory was true; they just wanted something that worked to predict the motions of the heavens. Still, there was something out of whack with it. The Church calendar was inexact. It was Copernicus who spent much of his life trying to figure out what was wrong.
Copernicus’ Influences
Copernicus, like his predecessors in the late Middle Ages and his contemporaries during the Renaissance, was heavily influenced by ancient thinkers, particularly Plato and Aristotle. Copernicus was more of a theoretician than an empiricist, so he turned more to Plato than Aristotle. He also discovered some of the interesting ideas of the ancient thinker Pythagoras and his followers (the Pythagorean school) and came into contact with the work of the polymath Plutarch as well. Plutarch had recorded the Pythagorean idea that the earth moved, perhaps even orbited. And Copernicus was familiar with the work of the Greek scientist Anaxagoras, who alone among Greek astronomers argued for a sun-centered, or heliocentric, universe.
Ancient peoples had long studied the universe that humans can see with the naked eye: the immensity of stars, the Milky Way, the planets, the Moon, and the Sun. That ancient people named these celestial objects after divine beings revealed that they believed the universe was divine in origin, mystical, metaphysical, almost unknowable—as would be the case with the divine. Copernicus would not have been so different from the Chaldean astrologers, mentioned by the Gospel writer Matthew, who followed the signs of the stars to direct them to the child Jesus.
People in the sixteenth century were not yet incredulous and skeptical, like those in the twenty-first century; the ancients still believed in the divine origins of life and the universe. Copernicus was a Christian, a canon of the Church, a native of Poland and a student in Italy who learned mathematics and astronomy; and nothing that he learned contradicted what he had read in the first book of Genesis, that God made the heavens and the earth.
Publishing His New Findings
Copernicus had doubts as to whether he should publish his new discoveries, but he was encouraged by many friends and supporters, including Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg. When he finally relented, he dedicated On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres to Pope Paul III, writing of his fear to introduce so novel an idea that the earth moves, lest opponents “will cry out that, holding such views, I should once be hissed off the stage.” He informed the pope that he had spent years investigating the different conclusions of mathematicians, which irritatingly “could by no means agree on any one certain theory of the mechanism of the universe, wrought for us by a supremely good and orderly Creator.” In dedicating his work to Alexandro Farnese, Paul III, Copernicus assumed that many of his critics would pause to consider that if so great a man as the pope could accept his theory, then others might safely do so as well.
Church Politics and Copernicus’ Piety
Indeed, the fallout over Copernicus’ heliocentric theory occurred first with Protestants, and not until much later with the Church. Many astronomers accepted Copernicus’ theory, including Galileo Galilei, a brilliant mathematician and physicist, who vehemently defended the theory and ridiculed those who opposed it. Galileo, by turning the telescope to peer at the heavens, provided important, empirical evidence to support Copernicus’ theory. It was his vehemence rather than his science that encountered the opposition of the Inquisition. The Church at this time could not countenance a theory that disproved Scripture, though one of Galileo’s opponents, Cardinal Robert Francis Romulus Bellarmine, wrote wisely:
…if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it will be necessary very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated.
In the end, Copernicus was a devout Roman Catholic, a pious scientist, who was bothered by mathematical errors failing to explain the movement of the heavenly bodies. He genuinely believed that his mathematical correction to Ptolemy’s theories would help the Church to develop accurate calendars upon which to fix the Church year.
On his deathbed, viewing his book just published, he might have thought: “Let the Revolution begin!”
Editor’s Note: Read the previous installments of The Pious Scientist series here.
Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash
