They would experience some friction along the way, of course, particularly from Puritan writers of the 1630s who relied on Scripture to rule out heliocentrism and on common sense to ridicule it. Henry Burton’s strong, healthy “earthy brain” was immune to the “braine-sicke giddinesse” afflicting “Philosophicall Heretickes, or Hereticall Philosophers,” or Copernicans. Bishop Christopher Wren, the father of the architect, deduced, correctly, that Joshua’s stopping of the sun was among the greatest of miracles; from which he inferred, less reliably, that those who “raise[d] such a hellish suspition in vulgar minds” as the Copernican system accused God of asserting one thing in Scripture after having practiced another in Creation. It was also a miracle to Wren, though a lesser one, that people could still be found who followed crazy ideas that “the learned Tycho…hath by admirable and matchlesse instruments, and many years exact observations proved to bee no better than a dreame.”42
The Cavendish Circle
Gellibrand was lucky to have a copy of the Dialogue. When Thomas Hobbes sought one in London in 1634 for his then current patrons, the Newcastle Cavendishes (cousins of his earlier patrons, the Devonshire Cavendishes), he discovered that none could be bought for love or money. He did better in Florence. In 1635, he visited Galileo in his villa prison and acquired several manuscripts, perhaps including Galileo’s “Mechanica.” Such a manuscript did reach the Cavendish seat at Welsbeck, where Robert Payne translated it.43 Payne was an Oxford man (Christ Church) with a “very witty searching brain” and amiable character, who joined the Cavendishes as chaplain after failing to secure a senior position in the university.44 Eventually a copy of the Dialogue, a “booke that will do more to hurt [the Catholic] religion than all the books of Luther and Calvin, such opposition [do Papists] think that there is between their Religion, and naturall reason,” came to light. A Cavendish hanger-on, a Dr Webbe, translated it.45 When Galileo learned about the translation from Hobbes’s visit, he thought that it could only do him harm in Italy.46 He had trouble enough over his Dialogue without the English treating it as a sequel to Sarpi. He did not need to worry. Webbe’s translation was never published, and Galileo’s masterpiece seldom appeared in public discourse during King Charles’s personal rule.
Webbe did not make his translation for the purpose Galileo feared if, as seems secure, he was that Joseph Webbe who owned a patent for teaching Latin without passing through grammar. The Webbe of painless Latin was a Catholic with degrees in medicine and philosophy from the universities of Padua and Bologna. The combination inspired a booklet on medical astrology that specifies, in a marvelously compact form, disease conditions aggravated by the stars and planets on every day in 1612.47 Soon thereafter Webbs returned to England with his easy Latin, designed, according to a perceptive detector of popish traps, to turn Protestants into Catholics.48
Hobbes developed an admiration for Galileo just short of adulation.49 This was Galileo the physicus who worried about the Copernican difficulty of the descent of separated bodies to a moving earth. “Striving with this difficulty,” Galileo “opened to us the gate to universal physics”— that is, the theory of motion. During the trip that took him to Galileo’s villa, Hobbes recognized that “the cause of all things is to be sought in the differences between their motions.”50 Working out the details with the help of Galileo’s thought experiments took over twenty years.51 About halfway along, Hobbes tried out his principles against an attempt by one of his more unusual friends, Thomas White, to create an embracing natural philosophy incorporating the discoveries of Galileo—the first such philosophy, it is said, developed by an Englishman. White revolved around the Cavendish circle in an epicycle centered on Digby.52
As the brother of that Richard White who knew about tides and brought Galileo’s work to England, Thomas White had a privileged insight into the methods and results of the “sublime Galileo,” who (as Richard put it) had “overcome the tides below and penetrated the heavens above.” “The eyes of all students, including mine, were on him.”53 Brother Thomas returned to England after ordination in Douai to combat Jesuit efforts to reconvert the kingdom.54 In and out of England, he spiraled like another Sarpi toward some Protestant positions and promoted, under the alias of Blacklo, a plan to establish English bishops relatively free from Rome.55 The first business of “Blacklo’s cabal” was to try again to revise the Oath of Allegiance. Many lay English Catholics approved their version, as did seven theologians in Rome. The moment seemed propitious: Charles had relaxed the oath in 1639 to smooth recruitment of Catholics into his militias. Once again, however, the pope rejected compromise.56
White presented his eclectic natural philosophy, which paralleled his broad-church Catholicism, as a conversation among characters similar to those in Galileo’s Dialogue: a knight whose visor has no eyeholes, a confident man of sense, and an overconfident man of science.57 White’s world resembled Bruno’s, sun-centered and filled with extraterrestrial life; but it was also Christian, created in time and finite in space, and anti-Roman, full of unauthorized, reckless, and doubtful innovations. The Roman Index eventually banned all White’s books.58 Among his errors was a direct affront (so Hobbes) to “the greatest natural philosopher not only of our time but of all times.”59 The affront was a tidal theory worse than Galileo’s. No matter. White’s main objective was not to invent physics but to defeat extremism within Christendom and rampant skepticism inspired by the irrepressible spirit of innovation and the stultifying epistemology of voluntarism.60
In this noble battle White had the aid of the philosopher, pirate, and gentleman who constituted Sir Kenelm Digby. After participating in Charles’s siege of the Infanta, Digby had enjoyed a career of seaway robbery. His greatest exploit, the capture of a fleet of French merchantmen chaperoned by Venetian warships, earned him respectability and appointment as a commissioner of the Navy. Now and again Catholic (and permanently so from 1635), Digby worked with White, Conn, and Henrietta Maria to raise Catholic money for Charles’s military adventures.61 For this parliament imprisoned him in 1642, which gave him leisure to write down much of the philosophy he had developed with the help of White.62
Digby’s Two Treatises (1644) move from description of an atomistic–mechanical material world to proof of the immortality of the incorporeal soul. This achievement, which attracted the favorable attention of Hobbes and Descartes, began with an unusual Oxford education. At Gloucester Hall (now Worcester College), “a notorious haunt of Papists,” Digby had absorbed much from Thomas Allen, “the best astrologer of his time,” also a fair alchemist, dedicated teacher, and compulsive collector. Allen conjured with papers and utensils he had acquired from John Dee and presented manuscripts to his friends Arundel, Bodley, Cotton, Selden, Ussher, and Digby to support their studies and enrich their polemics.63 Bringing the diverse sciences he had from Allen and White together with the wide knowledge he had picked up as a pirate, administrator, traveler, and lover, Digby joined the fight against skepticism. He found his strongest weapon in “that miracle of our age,” Galileo, who had discovered that true natural knowledge was discoverable. Why then did skeptics abound? The repulsiveness of traditional learning! “For what a misery it is, that the flower and best wittes of Christendom, which flocke to the universities, under pretence and upon hope of gaining knowledge, should be there deluded; and…be sent home againe…with a persuasion that in truth nothing can be knowne?”64
Copernican Bishop
John Wilkins, the son of an Oxford goldsmith, spent a decade at Oxford, studying and teaching, from 1627 to 1637. He learned religion and astronomy so well that he became bishop in both: a real bishop in the Church of England and an authoritative proselytizer for Galilean astronomy.65 It was Wilkins who brought the Dialogue into the public sphere in England. Although from a Puritan background, Wilkins acted with equal effectiveness as chaplain to Royalist and Parliamentarian, Calvinist and Arminian. During his last years at Oxford, he employed the leisure gained from refraining from polemics in writin
g two books, one, published in 1638, to show that the moon resembles the earth, and the other, published in 1640, to show that the earth is a planet. For both of them he drew heavily on Galileo and on Tommaso Campanella’s Defense of Galileo. Drafted in 1616, published in 1622, and banned in 1623, Campanella’s Defense reformulated Galileo’s hermeneutics, endorsed the discoveries of Sidereus nuncius, and wrote off most philosophers as fools.66 Wilkins supplemented this helpful resource with material from Kepler’s account of moon men.67
The lunar market was booming in England when Wilkins printed his Discovery of a World in the Moon. The travelogue of Domingo Gonzales, the posthumous work of the then late Bishop of Hereford, Francis Godwin, was becoming a bestseller. Godwin had drawn his inspiration from “this our discovery age: In which our Gallilaeusses can by advantage of their Spectacles gaze the sun into spots, and descry mountains in the Moon.” As Gonzales escaped from the magnetic attraction of the earth to enter that of the moon he noticed that the earth moved as Copernicus would have it. The Ptolemaic world evidently was “a very absurd conceit.” “Philosophers and mathematicians…confesse the wilfulnesse of [your] owne blindnesse!”68
The reading public was prepared for Gonzales’s trip if not for his cosmology by Kepler’s posthumous dream (Somnium (1634)), describing astronomical observations made from the moon, and reprintings of Donne’s Ignatius his Conclave (1635) and Harington’s translation of Orlando furioso (1634). It also had before it an arresting report preserved in a dialogue by Lucian then newly rendered into English. Lucian detailed the flight of the cynical traveler Menippus to heaven to learn directly from the gods the truth about matters surprisingly contested among terrestrial philosophers, who knew nothing despite “the grimnesse of their countenances, the paleness of their complexion, and the profundidite of their beards.” Observing the earth from the moon to which he ascended on wings taken from an eagle and a vulture, Menippus saw that everything here below is absurd, peevish, paltry, petty, hypocritical, and futile.69
Wilkins’s two popularizations can be considered as a single enterprise paralleling Galileo’s Dialogue. The Discovery of a World in the Moon, corresponding to the Dialogue’s Day 1, destroys the Aristotelian universe. A Discourse Concerning a New World removes objections to a moving earth, as in Days 2 and 3. In his parallel to Day 1, Wilkins “insist[ed] on the observation of Galilaeus, the inventor of that Perspective, whereby we may discern the Heavens hard by us, whereby those things that others had formerly guest at, are manifested to the eye, and plainly discovered beyond exception or doubt,” notably, mountains, valleys, and seas on the moon, and a fuzziness indicating an atmosphere.70 Taking into account also that inconstant comets dwell above the moon, it followed, first, that there is no quintessence, no sphere of fire, no music of the spheres, and, secondly, that, since the moon has the same physical features as the earth, it may well be inhabited.71
Lunarians have a moon, which is the earth, and, being bound to their abode as we are to ours, believe themselves to be at rest. Although not much more could be deduced about these moon-dwellers, Wilkins reported, on Campanella’s authority, that they are more intelligent than we are.72 Therefore they know, if they have read our Bible, that it is not the place to look for answers to cosmological questions: “’tis besides the scope of the Holy Ghost whether in the new Testament or in the old, to reveale anything unto us concerning the secrets of Philosophy.” And they know, if they read the book of nature, that it is “an indignity much mis-becoming a man who professes himselfe to be a Philosopher” to have recourse to super- or preternatural explanations of physical phenomena.73
Wilkins’s widely read assimilation of the moon to the earth aroused a nodding Simplicio, Alexander Ross, a chaplain-at-a-distance to Charles I. Ross enjoyed the distinction of having written (in 1634) published, in 1634, the first treatise against Copernicus published in England. Relying on schoolboy Aristotelian physics and some scraps of Scripture, Ross brought against the diurnal motion that ice could not form on a spinning earth since motion is the principle of heat and biblical stories about sundials would have no basis. “If the sun is stationary, how does the shadow move in a sundial? From the motion of the earth? If anyone can prove that, Phyllida solus habebit, “he will have Phyllis to himself.” The allusion is to Virgil’s third Eclogue, which promises Phyllis for an answer to the poser, “Where do flowers grow inscribed with the names of kings?”74 Ross lived in the past. “[F]rom my youth I have been more conversant among the dead than the living.”75
Wilkins’s rebuttal to Ross ran, in its entirety, “Ha, ha, he.”76 Ross replied in the smoldering style of Prynne, who had lumped together “purblinde, squint-eyed Arminian Novellists” with the imbeciles who “sottishly enquire, whether the Sunne stands centred in one constant Climate, whiles the massy Earth wheeles around, because one brainsicke Copernicus out of the sublimitie of his quintessential transcendentall Speculations, has more senselessly than metaphysically, more ridiculously than singularly averred it.”77 Ross read Galileo’s recantation as a willing escape from brainsickness. “[B]eing both ashamed, and sorry that he had been so long bewitched with so ridiculous an opinion; which was proved to him both by Cardinall Bellarmine, and by other grave and learned men…Galilei on his knees did abjure, execrate, and detest, both in word and in writ, his errour.” How could he have fallen for so “false, absurd, and dangerous [an opinion], having neither truth, reason, sense, consent, antiquity, or universality to countenance it”? “Philosophical libertie”! Who needs it? “The world is pestered with too many opinions already.” Ha, ha, he!78 But the laugh, and the world, was against him. Ross had to concede defeat in the fight against atheism, ignorance, profanity, unbelief, heresy, and the “dreams and fantastical whimsies” of freely philosophizing nuts.79
Wilkins went beyond Galileo in separating religious belief altogether from natural knowledge. It was wrong of Galileo, he said, to try to prove to his Grand Duchess that the stoppage of the sun and moon at Joshua’s command could be understood more readily in a Copernican than in a Ptolemaic universe.80 Mixing Scripture with physics was to play the enemy’s game. Wilkins adopted Galileo’s refutations of objections to the earth’s motions and affirmed them without invoking tides. Instead, he emphasized the convenience, proportion, and reasonableness of moving the tiny earth rather than the huge heavenly vault. The machinery required for that would be gargantuan, “altogether beyond the fancy of a poet or a madman.” A cook does not roast his meat by carrying the fire around it. Placing the earth in the third orbit from the sun not only achieved the expected relation between meat and fire, but also brought all the periods and distances of the planets into line and gave a simple and natural explanation of the limited elongations of the inferior planets and the retrogradations of the superior ones.81
Wilkins’s Discourse ends with an affirmation against the Bellarmines and Rosses who would constrain the study of astronomy. Properly undertaken, its study increases “the endowments of our Souls, the enlargement of our Reason.” “The demonstrations of Astronomy, they are as infallible as truth.” They prove God, enlarge our admiration of His omnipotence, confirm the truth of Scripture, show the pettiness of our preoccupations, and “may also stirre us up to behave ourselves.”82 From this uplifting exit, we can return profitably to the entrance to Wilkins’s Galilean astronomy, the title page of the joint printing of 1640. It asserts without reservation that the moon is an earth and the earth a planet. Again there are three figures, but now, instead of Aristotle and Ptolemy, we have Galileo and Kepler, and not much of Kepler (Figure 25); they stand together, separated by the world system from its creator Copernicus, who now represents the ancients. He asks, as Tycho does in the frontispiece to Kepler’s tables, “what if it is like this?” Galileo replies that he has the means of finding out, his new eyes, the telescope. Kepler wants more; he wants to know about the Lunarians invisible even through the best glasses: “would that [the glasses were] wings.” The sun at the center claims to give light,
heat, and, by its axial rotation, animation to everything.83
Figure 25 William Marshall, frontispiece to John Wilkins, New World (1640).
More Star Talk
Common Parlance
Many people acquired concepts for discussing the world picture through popular astrology as presented in general literature, almanacs, and the theater.84 The works of the Reformers are not free from it. Melanchthon consulted astrology often, and yet not often enough: for, had he looked at his future son-in-law’s ominous birth chart in good time, he would not have sacrificed his daughter to a ne’er-do-well. Like many believers, Melanchthon moved readily from the sun’s production of the seasons and the moon’s of the tides through cosmic regulation of the weather to planetary causes of lightning strikes and earthquakes.85 Among worrisome heavenly signs were adverse conjunctions. A repetition in 1560 of the rendezvous of Mars and Saturn that had spoiled his son-in-law so frightened Melanchthon that he had his university, Wittenberg, stockpile food against the event.86 Nothing happened, perhaps because he had used tables drawn up on Copernicus’s system, in which he did not believe.87
Although Calvin took the trouble to write a little book against the “devilish superstition” of astrology, he did not doubt that all creatures are “subject to the order of heaven to draw from it some qualities.” Oysters are plump and bones full of marrow when the moon is full or waning and physicians know to “ordeyne bloode lettings or drinks or pilles & other things in due time.”88 Although Calvin knew it was wrong, “vaine and unprofitable…[and] derogatynge from [God’s] honour and diminishing his glorye,” to attempt to predict the future, he did it.89 The stars influence our characters, although not, as fake astrologers proclaim, at birth, but rather at the time of conception, “which for the most part is unknowen.” It is secure, nonetheless, that the stars work on things that “concerneth the worlde and doth apperteine to the body.”90 What about comets? Again ambiguity: “I do not denye but that when God wyll stretch out his hande to execute some judgment to be remembered in the worlde, he wyll some tymes admonishe us by comets.” Calvin exits this labyrinth with a memorable parable. There is the same difference between wholesome and judicial astrology (prognostications about individuals) as there is between praising wine and recommending drunkenness.91 Another church leader, King James, quite agreed, although he had nothing against drunkenness; he decisively rejected judicial astrology (in his Daemonologie) but accepted the study of celestial influences on the elements as a mathematical science.92
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