Recently I read a new “Copernican Revolution” sourcebook, oriented toward students and the general reader. It’s called The Dawn of Modern Cosmology, From Copernicus to Newton, edited by Aviva Rothman and published by Penguin Books/Random House in 2023. It is not perfect. In fact, it has a huge flaw. But it is valuable, nonetheless. I think Sacred Space Astronomy readers should check it out.
The book features seventy-one illustrations and readings (English, or translations into English). The first is an illustration of the geocentric universe from Hartmann Schedel’s 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle. Then the selections proceed in chronological order, ending with James Ferguson’s 1756 Astronomy, Explained upon Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles, and Made Easy to Those Who Have Not Studied Mathematics. Rothman includes expected authors (like Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo) but also others (like Bellarmine and Riccioli). Her inclusion of women engaged in the Revolution (pp. 484-485, 496 — primarily Elisabeth Hevelius), and poetry from John Donne, John Milton and Edmond Halley (as in Halley’s comet) brightens the text.
I particularly liked her inclusion of Diego de Zúñiga’s 1584 On Job (of the Bible) and Paolo Foscarini’s 1615 “Letter on the Copernican Opinion”. These are the two Copernican texts that were named, along with Copernicus’s On the Revolutions, in the March 5, 1616 decree of the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books that publicly declared the Copernican hypothesis both contrary to scripture and false. Only Foscarini’s letter was actually prohibited; the other two were “suspended until corrected”. Thus in Zúñiga and Foscarini readers see pro-Copernican commentaries that Church authorities deemed to be redeemable and irredeemable, respectively.
Rothman then includes Bellarmine’s April 1615 letter to Foscarini “and Mr. Galileo [263]”. There is so much that is interesting here. For example, Foscarini argues (251-252) that Scripture has always been interpreted in light of science. He brings up the question of Genesis 1:16. I have discussed here at Sacred Space (click here) how whereas Genesis 1:16 says God created “two great lights” (sun and moon) and “the stars also”, even ancient astronomers convincingly demonstrated that the moon is small in size, and certainly not great compared to the other celestial lights.
“According to the truth of the matter,” Foscarini says, “Saturn or even some of the bright fixed stars” are almost the size of the sun, and thus “…far greater than the moon”. Citing the principle that Scripture can speak to “our manner of considering”, he continues: “By this reasoning,” if the Copernican opinion is true, “the authority of Sacred Scripture can be easily reconciled with it”. Interestingly, Foscarini does not mention that Augustine and Aquinas both discussed the “great lights” question in arguing this principle, both noting that the stars do appear lesser.
Bellarmine answers yes, but (264). “I have great doubts,” he says, regarding any claim that Copernicanism had been demonstrated true, “and in case of doubt one should not reject the Holy Scripture interpreted by the Holy Fathers”. The Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battisti Riccioli concurred. Rothman includes a small piece from his huge 1651 New Almagest. Allow Copernicans to re-interpret Scripture without need, he says (and he says “there is no need, either from the principles of astronomy or the principles of physics,” despite Copernicanism being “preferred by some very clever and skilled men”) and people will do the same for “other more sacred doctrines [469].” Rothman notes Riccioli’s calculation, hard to dispute at the time, that Copernicanism required a single star to be larger than an entire geocentric universe (467). She also includes the New Almagest’s remarkable map of the moon (475). Rothman’s selections therefore let the reader see something more than a stereotypical ‘steady march of science’. That is refreshing.
The selections also illustrate the role of faith in the work of these scientists. For this reason, you will find The Dawn of Modern Cosmology in the Vatican Observatory Faith & Science Resource Center (click here). Rothman includes Newton’s General Scholium from his Principia in which he speaks of the solar system clearly being God’s work. She includes Ferguson writing of how —
our very faculties are enlarged with the grandeur of the ideas it [astronomy] conveys… and our understandings convinced, and affected with the conviction, of the existence, wisdom, power, goodness and superintendency of the SUPREME BEING! So that without hyperbole, ‘An undevout Astronomer is mad.’”
But my favorite “faith and science” quotation is from Kepler (whose material in Dawn is full of such quotations):
O telescope, much-knowing and more precious than any scepter: is not one who holds you in his right hand ordained as king and lord of the works of God?
I do not think Rothman was intending to create a “faith and science” book. But she clearly did not seek to Bowdlerize her selections of religious content, and so many of these writers included religious content in their writing that the “faith and science” aspect is just naturally there.
Rothman’s treatment is not without flaws. For example, she neither makes it clear that the all-important anti-Copernican argument regarding the absurdly giant stars required by a Copernican cosmos goes beyond simply “parallax” (242), nor includes any selection from a Copernican that clearly shows where the observations and measurements that underpinned that argument went wrong. A selection from Christiaan Huygens’ 1659 System of Saturn that includes his discussion of how he has discovered that the apparent sizes of stars seen through a telescope are altered by filtering the light passing through that telescope, thus revealing those sizes to be spurious, would have served in this regard.
But the worst flaw is that, in her effort to reach “the general reader” with “a smooth reading experience”, Rothman opts “not to include the ellipses indicating the places of abridgement” in her much-abridged selections (xli-xlii). Readers have no idea whether they are getting all of On Job and Foscarini’s letter, or just parts. This flaw is huge. Someone in the publishing process should have insisted it be fixed. If ellipses are not good, then some little symbol, like this ◦ might have worked.
But, The Dawn of Modern Cosmology is valuable despite even this huge flaw!