calendar moment: on the anniversary of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium being formally banned

On this day in 1616, Nicolaus Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, that is, being interpreted, “On the Revolution of Heavenly Spheres,” was officially banned by the Catholic Church. I’ve treated the significance, complexity, and popular misunderstandings of this saga on prior occasions but I am returning to it on the occasion of the edict indicated above for the reason that this saga is paradigmatic of many tensions around which the mythology of Modernity is constellated.

Some eight days prior (since 1616 was a leap year), on the 26th of February, 1616, Galileo had been formally banned by the Catholic Church from insisting that the Copernican theory was true in an absolute and not merely a scientific sense and thus that Scripture needed to be amended or reinterpreted to reflect this theory as fact. The official prohibition of Copernicus’ seminal text on the subject was another moment to this single event, which is almost always misrepresented. 

This is due, in part, to the fact that, as the old adage goes, “the victors write the history,” and the centuries since that time have seen, by and large, a progressive decline of the influence of the Christian worldview at the hands of the Scientific one. In other words, the tale of history is popularly told from the standpoint of the ascendancy of Science. I have noted on prior occasions that, with the advance of time, the divergence between the Church and Science increased. This might seem like an obvious or trivial point until the temptation to back-project the apparently categorical difference that exists today onto a time before the two outlooks had actually diverged. Just as “Adam” before Eve was really Adam-Eve, so up until the critical revolutionary moment in the 17th century, “The Catholic Church” was the bearer of not only the religious, cultural, philosophical, intellectual, and doctrinal elements that we might associate with it today, but also the scientific ones. Technically, it is an anachronism to talk about elements of science as we know it in a time before the discipline had been stipulated and designated to which the term was applied just as it would present a somewhat usual use of language to refer to Eve before she was differentiated from Adam’s side.

But another, more essential reason that the events in question are almost always misrepresented is an absence of critical reflection on the nature and philosophy of Science as such. Specifically, we can ask, like Pilate, Quid est veritas? “What is truth?” While the Christian religion gives one answer, summed up in the doctrine of Transcendentals promulgated by the Platonists, early Church Fathers, and Scholastics, and which was summed by Aquinas’ statements that:

“Nothing is known except Truth, which is the same as Being”

and

“as the Good is convertible with Being, so is the True”

Science gives a substantially different one. “Truth,” in science, does not directly refer to Being. Indeed, these are hardly scientific concepts. Instead, “truth” has no other standard in Science than “the ability to make accurate predictions.” Confer Stephen Hawking in a somewhat rare moment of humility in respect to the boundaries of his field:

Although it is not uncommon for people to say that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong, that is not true...one can use either picture as a model of the universe...the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest....If there are two models that both agree with observation, then one cannot say that one is more real than another.

In other words, popular opinion notwithstanding, the saga indicated above is not really a question of competing theories of planetary motion, but of competing theories of truth, with the Church upholding the traditional conception of truth and Science advancing a novel one. 

One note on the latter: once the standard of truth is untethered from Being, it becomes impossible to establish definitively. Indeed, the quest for falsification of existing theories and periodic revolution of paradigms constitute the very engine and driving force of scientific progress. Obviously, in respect to the case in question, it is senseless to consider the Copernican view the last word on the matter, even in the scientific sense, let alone the absolute one because:

(1) it wasn’t until Kepler came along decades later and incorporated the elliptical orbits into the model that the Copernican theory was able to compare with the Ptolemaic one merely in respect to the accuracy of its predictions and 

(2) the decision to limit the model to the specific location of the sun in respect to our particular solar system is scientifically arbitrary and any other stipulated center around which planetary motion should be modeled would give a very different picture.