God, stars, and hermeneutics
Astronomical observation and protestant theology in the age of the reformation
By Charlotte Methuen
Charlotte Methuen (Foto: privat).
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Historically, the study of the heavens has often been a response to the biblical conviction that the heavens are God's handiwork. The Book of Nature must be studied alongside the Book of Scripture, the Bible. This raises the question of how religious ideas influenced the development of what we now call the Copernican Revolution. Obviously its causes are complex. The late middle ages saw the development of new technologies which gave rise to new observational methods: the Renaissance was flourishing; Humanism was calling for a return to original texts; mathematics was developing. And the church, too, was changing, and with it theology.
The most significant development of the sixteenth century, the century in which Copernicus' "De revolutionibus" was published and heliocentric cosmology began to be discussed, was the series of events that came to be known as the Reformation. One cause - and also one result - of the Reformation was a massive loss of confidence in the authority of the Roman Church and the philosophical and theological systems it had supported. Philosophers, theologians and astronomers found themselves embarking on a search for new ways of establishing the truth. For the theologians of the Protestant Reformation, truth was revealed through the Bible, the highest authority; the proper study of the scriptures would reveal truth. Philosophers turned their attention to the texts of ancient teachers, rejecting medieval traditions of interpretation. Astronomers went a step further: taking seriously the injunctions of the Psalmist to glorify the heavens, they turned from the works of Ptolemy to observe the heavens.
Astronomers such as Caspar Peucer in Wittenberg and Michael Maestlin, teacher of Johannes Kepler in Tübingen, could justify their observational approach by appealing to the work of the Reformer Philip Melanchthon (Peucer's father-in-law). Drawing on Stoic ideas, Melanchthon understood the order implicit in nature, and in particular the heavens, to be a reflection of the divine order and a model for the order that God wants for human society. Following Aristotle, Melanchthon distinguished between the sub-lunar sphere, which extended from the earth to the moon, made up of the four elements and subject to generation and corruption, and the supra-lunar sphere, the spheres in which the sun and planets moved around the earth, made up of the perfect quintessence and bounded by the fixed sphere of stars. The motion of the heavenly bodies was thought to be circular and thus perfect. Melanchthon believed that the region above the moon had been unaffected by the fall and that its mathematically predictable movements offered an accurate reflection of the geometrical nature of the mind of God. To understand the motions of the heavens was thus to be offered a glimpse into God's mind; to read the heavens correctly to read the revelation of God. He assumed that the Book of Nature would confirm the truths revealed in the Book of Scripture.
Aristotelian cosmology allowed for change only in the sub-lunar sphere. Comets and meteors were understood as sub-lunar phenomena; comets occurred when the noxious results of corruption rose and ignited just beneath the lunar sphere. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, however, new observations of a number of celestial phenomena, including a nova in 1572 (variously described as a comet or a new star by contemporaries), and comets in the winter of 1577-78 and 1581, convinced a number of astronomers in Germany that these phenomena must be supralunar, and not sub-lunar, as Aristotelian cosmology taught. Michael Maestlin's observations of the nova and both comets placed them above the moon. Fully aware of the audacity of his conclusions and their implicit criticism of Aristotle's cosmology, Maestlin drew upon the authority of the Bible to justify his observations, explaining that all people were commanded by God to praise the works of the Creator, and that such praise included taking precise observations in order to discover just how the created world functioned rather than relying on the reports of others.
The knowledge gained through precise observations of the heavens was knowledge to the glory of God which would enable the mistaken theories of ancient authors to be corrected. Maestlin thus appealed to Scripture to justify his criticism of Aristotle's cosmology. Casper Peucer, in contrast, whilst agreeing that the 1572 nova was above the moon, retained his faith in Aristotelian physics, arguing that God had chosen to overrule the rules governing the cosmos and to introduce supra-lunar change by placing a new star in the heavens. Scripture showed that God had used celestial phenomena to communicate with the world in the past (the star marking Jesus' birth at Bethlehem) and would do so again in the future (the dominical warning that celestial signs and portents will precede the end of the world, cf. Luke 21:11). Most observers interpreted the 1572 nova as a certain sign that the end of the world was about to come, wherever they placed it in the sky. Maestlin is a clear example of the way in which this scriptural authority could be used by astronomers to justify a critique of Aristotelian cosmology. His pupil Johannes Kepler used similar arguments to justify his surprising discovery that the orbit of Mars was not, as he had expected, a perfect circle, but an ellipse (Kepler himself continued to think of the structure of the cosmos in terms of perfect spheres). The close study of the Book of Nature was beginning to gain authority through arguments drawn from the authority of the Book of Scripture.
The problem was that more precise observations, and in particular Copernicus' suggestion that the earth moved around the sun rather than the sun around the earth, pointed towards a cosmology which appeared to contradict not only Aristotle, but also the Bible. This was additionally problematic in the case of the Copernican hypothesis, for although it offered simpler explanations than Ptolemaic astronomy, it was initially not at all clear that it was supported by observation. Biblical passages which were held to be contradicted by a heliocentric cosmology included Psalm 93:1 ("He has established the world; it shall never be moved"), Ecclesiastes 1:5 ("The sun rises and the sun goes down") and Joshua 10:13 ("The sun stopped in mid-heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day"), all of which suggested that the earth did not move. Opponents of the Copernican hypothesis could and did cite these passages, condemning proponents of the theory for contravening Scripture. Many astronomers, including the Lutherans Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, but also the Catholic Galileo Galilei, responded by providing a hermeneutical justification for their revised understanding of the universe, offering a variety of arguments. Their hermeneutics drew upon the doctrine of accommodation (the understanding that the Bible is written in language intended to be understood by the people to whom it was directed); it emphasized that the Bible was not a work of natural philosophy or astronomy; it further began to recognize that the writings of Scripture were themselves historical texts. Thus Kepler argued that Psalm 104 was not a philosophical treatise, but a doxological commentary to the creation story in Genesis 1. These are some of the first indications of historical awareness in hermeneutics.
The conviction that the Copernican hypothesis reflected the true structure of the universe demanded that the interpretation of Scripture be reconciled with the empirical observation of the natural world. Increasingly, the book of nature was shaping how the book of Scripture could be read.
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