The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang

3 | The Sun, the Church, and the New Astronomy

❍ 3 THE SUN, THE CHURCH, AND THE NEW ASTRONOMY What? Can I not everywhere behold the Sun and the stars? Can I not under any sky meditate on the most precious truths? —Dante Alighieri he awakening was slow, a lazy spring fighting the cold embrace of winter. For centuries the medieval mind was immersed in dogmatic theology. The wisdom of the past was forgotten, the splendor of the Greek and Roman civilizations a distant memory , condemned by the Church as pagan knowledge, the root of all evil. During the fifth century, St. Augustine forged a tenuous link to the past through false Neoplatonism that despised any interest in natural phenomena, while encouraging a purely rational approach to religious themes. All answers to cosmological or astronomical questions were to be found in the Bible. The heavens were not spherical but shaped like a rectangular tent (a tabernacle), because in Isaiah it states that God “stretches out the heavens as a curtain and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.” Similarly, the Earth was viewed as either a rectangle or a disk, depending on what biblical source was consulted. Why did this happen? What is the relation between the ascendancy of the Church and its almost complete severance with the wisdom of the classical world? To answer this question, we have to consider the political situation in Europe around the time of St. Augustine. T By the fourth century a.d., the once mighty Roman empire was crumbling, both from within and from without. Divided into a Latin-speaking Western empire and a Greek-speaking Eastern empire (known as the Byzantine empire) roughly where the Danube River meets Serbia and Romania, the Romans suffered continuous waves of attack from several Germanic tribes, such as the Vandals and the Goths, and the Persians in the east. From the inside, corruption and moral decadence combined to undermine the “Roman pride.” Change was badly needed, something that would restore the sense of direction to a confused and divided society. In 324 Constantine the Great, ruler of the Eastern empire, embraced Christianity as his faith. He changed the name of his capital from Byzantium to Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey), which quickly became the new center of Christian power. As the Byzantine empire grew in strength, it attempted to recapture the West from the Germanic invaders, spreading Christianity to new tribes and strengthening the many already existing Christian communities throughout Europe. Even though the empire eventually failed and Rome fell to the Germans during the fifth century, Christianity survived, guided by such leaders as St. Augustine and Pope Gregory I (590–604). It became the most civilizing influence in Western Europe, imposing religious discipline as an antidote to “barbarian pagan rituals.” To lives filled with violence, pestilence, and unrest, the Church offered eternal salvation in Paradise. Its power was such that during the fifth century, when Attila the Hun wanted to march into Rome, the Patriarch persuaded him to turn back, something that no army in the world was powerful enough to do. In a sense, “the Church had conquered its conquerors.” The Church’s condemnation of knowledge for knowledge’s sake was based on the grounds of spiritual purity. The barbarism corrupting the body was the same that corrupted the mind; anything to do with the appropriation of information through the use of the senses was a sure route to depravity. The temptations of the flesh and all sensorial experience were dangerous distractions from the true path toward eternal salvation. Since an interest in the workings of nature linked people to external reality, it was deemed “pagan ” knowledge, a corrupting influence on Christian virtue. In the words of St. Augustine, 64 THE AWAKENING At this point I mention another form of temptation more various and dangerous. For over and above that lust of the flesh which lies in the delight of all our senses and pleasures . . . there can also be in the mind itself, through those same bodily senses, a certain vain desire and curiosity, not of taking delights in the body, but of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge. . . . Thus men proceed to investigate the phenomena of nature—the part of nature external to us— though the knowledge is of no value to them: for they wish to know simply for the sake of knowing. Certainly the theaters no...