The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.