Others speak freely, mutter, and would persuade the world, as Marin Mersenne complains, that our modern theologians are too severe and rigid towards mathematicians; ignorant and perverse in refusing their true demonstrations and certain observations. They tyrannize over art, science, and all philosophy by suppressing their work, says Pomponazzi, forbidding them to write or speak a truth, all to maintain their superstition and for their own profit.

As for the passages of Scripture that oppose it, they maintain that these speak “according to the understanding of ordinary people” and, if rightly understood and favourably interpreted, are not against it at all. As Otto Casmann notes in part 1, chapter 1 of his Astronomy, many great theologians, as well as Porphyry, Proclus, Simplicius, and those pagan philosophers “venerable for learning and antiquity, accuse Moses’ account of the world’s creation of some ill-defined popular crudity, far removed from the true learning of philosophers.”

For Moses mentions only two planets, the sun and the moon, and no four elements, and so on. Read more in him, in Grossius, and in Junius.

But to proceed: these and similar audacious, bold ventures, astonishing paradoxes and inferences, must necessarily follow once we grant what Rothmann, Kepler, Gilbert, Digges, Origanus, Galileo, and others maintain about the earth’s motion—that it is a planet and shines as the moon does, containing both land and sea as the moon does. For so they find through their telescopes: of the markings on the moon’s face, the brighter parts are land, the darker sea, as Thales, Plutarch, and Pythagoras formerly taught. They plainly discern hills and valleys and similar hollows, if we may accept and believe Galileo’s observations.

But to avoid these paradoxes of the earth’s motion—which the Church of Rome has lately condemned as heretical, as appears from the writings of Blancanus and Fromondus—our more recent mathematicians have turned over every stone that can be moved. To explain all appearances and answer all objections, they have invented new hypotheses and fabricated new systems of the world from their own Daedalian heads.

Fracastoro would have the earth stand still as before; to avoid the supposition of eccentrics and epicycles, he has devised seventy-two concentric spheres to explain all appearances. Nicolaus Reimers would have the earth at the centre of the world but movable, the eighth sphere immovable, the five upper planets moving above the sun, and the sun and moon around the earth.

In this arrangement of spheres, Tycho Brahe makes the earth the immovable centre and the stars immovable; for the rest he agrees with Reimers. The planets wander through the air without spheres, keeping their times and distances and their proper motion, according to the power God has given them.

Helisaeus Roeslin criticizes both, together with Copernicus, whose hypothesis “on the earth’s motion” Philippus Lansbergen has lately vindicated and demonstrated with solid arguments in a substantial volume, and Janssonius Caesius has illustrated with a sphere. The said Johannes Lansbergen has since, in 1633, defended his assertion against all the objections and slanders of Fromondus’s Anti-Aristarchus, Jean-Baptiste Morin, and Petrus Bartholinus. Fromondus wrote against him again in 1634; F. Ross of Aberdeen, and so on—sound drums and trumpets!

Meanwhile Roeslin, I say, criticizes them all, and Ptolemy himself, as inadequate. One offends against natural philosophy, another against optical principles, a third against mathematical ones, by failing to correspond to astronomical observations. One sets a great space between Saturn’s sphere and the eighth sphere; another makes it too narrow. In his own hypothesis he makes the earth the universal centre as before, and the sun the centre for the five upper planets. He assigns daily motion to the eighth sphere, and eccentrics and epicycles to the seven planets—devices previously rejected. And so,

While fools avoid one fault, they run into its opposite,

As a tinker stops one hole and makes two, he corrects them and does worse himself: reforms some things and spoils everything.

Meanwhile the world is tossed in a blanket among them. They hoist the earth up and down like a ball, making it stand still or move as they please. One says the sun stands still; another, that it moves. A third comes in and catches them all on the rebound. And lest any paradox should be missing, he discovers certain spots and clouds in the sun with the help of telescopes, which, Kepler says, make an object appear a thousand times larger in area and bring it thirty-two times nearer to the observer’s eye. But see Tarde’s explanation of this instrument: its evidence requires either the sun to turn about its own centre or the spots to move around the sun.

Fabricius allows only three, and places them in the sun; Apelles fifteen, and outside the sun, floating like the Cyanean Islands in the Black Sea. Tarde the Frenchman has observed thirty-three, and takes them to be neither spots nor clouds, as Galileo supposes in his Letter to Welser, but planets moving regularly in orbits centred on the sun and not far from it.

Christopher Shemer, a German Swiss Jesuit, divides them in his Ursica Rosa into “spots and bright patches.” He maintains that they are fixed “on the sun’s surface” and complete their regular periodic motion in twenty-seven or twenty-eight days, also holding that the sun rotates about its centre. They are all so confident that they have drawn diagrams and tables of these movements.

The Dutchman, in his Little Discussion with Apelles, criticizes them all. Thus they disagree among themselves, old and new, irreconcilable in their opinions. Thus Aristarchus, Hipparchus, Ptolemy, al-Battani, al-Farghani, Tycho, Reimers, Roeslin, Fracastoro, Copernicus and his adherents, Clavius, Magini, and the rest, with their followers, differ and pronounce upon these celestial spheres and bodies.