Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) Read Online Free PDF

of the physical cosmos made for a greater appreciation of God’s beautiful, complex creation, and a greater love for God, especially since, as the long-held belief went, everything in the earthly realm was connected through a great chain of being—through graduated correspondences and affinities—to the celestial realm above.
    The Catholic authority on theology was Thomas Aquinas, for whom the authority on “physics” wasAristotle, for whom the universe was perfect and finite. All things not only had substance and form but a “sake,” or final cause, or nature. The final cause, or nature, of an acorn, as the well-known example went, was to be an oak tree. It was the nature of things that were composed of earth, such as stones, to fall down toward the center of the earth. Water sought its place at the earth’s surface, air sought its place above the earth, and fire sought its place above the air. Anything that didn’t behave according to its form, or substance, or its presumed nature, was given either a different underlying nature or a hidden virtue.
    Earth itself was fixed at the center of the cosmos, and beyond the realm of the earth everything was made of a fifth element, or “quintessence,” called ether. The perfect spheres of the sun, moon, and the
five
planets, as well as the fixed stars, were contained within their own perfect celestial spheres, which, with the help of certain “intelligences,” were moved around Earth in perfect circles. The final cause of these spheres: to be moved by the divine intelligences as objects of love.
    According to Aristotle, nature abhorred a vacuum. The speed at which a thing fell was inversely proportional to the density of the medium it fell through—the lesser the density, the faster the thing fell—so a void or vacuum could not exist without having everything fall through it at infinite speed. Infinity itself was also not something that could exist‚ in part because anything infinite would have to be composed of things that were themselves finite, sensible, and therefore measurable.
    As the old story of the dawn of the modern age goes, Aristotle was the figure who had to be toppled by the new men of science and reason. But it wasn’t that established Aristotelian ideas sounded strange; nothing felt more intuitively right, for example, than the idea that the ground you stood on was immobile and at the center of things, and that it was the sun that moved across the sky. Although published by Copernicus in 1543,
De Revolutionibus
(
On the Revolutions
) had been condemned only recently by the Church.
    The Jesuit professor of philosophy “shall not depart from Aristotle in matters of importance,” instructed the order’s plan of studies. “He shall be very careful in what he reads or quotes in class from commentators on Aristotle who are objectionable from the standpoint of faith.” But adhering to Aristotle wasn’t as straightforward as it sounded. Over the centuries, hundreds of commentaries on Aristotle’s dozens of works had been produced. The eight-volume effort by Jesuits of the university at Coimbra in Portugal, published in many official and unofficial and fraudulent editions, was used to consider philosophical complexities related to, say, astrological influence on Earth.
    Although the use of astrological study for divinatory purposes (forecasting) had been condemned by the pope in 1586, it was otherwise an integral feature of astronomical study. Almost no one imagined a world in which some kind of astral influence wasn’t exerting itself. If not, what were the planets and the stars for? And why bother banning a futile endeavor? Any number of assumptions went unchallenged. No one thought, for example, to doubt the concept of spontaneous generation; it was simply assumed that small creatures such as worms, flies, ants, and even frogs and snakes, grew from nonliving matter,