September 2024 Print

By Fr. Frédéric Weil, SSPX

The case would seem to be closed: the general consensus is that the anthropocentrism of ancient times was the primary reason for which Canon Copernicus’ heliocentric theory was rejected, particularly at the time of the Galileo affair. Considering the Earth as the center, as everyone did at the time, flattered our pride. Copernicus would have had earthlings believe they were not the center of the world, thus inflicting upon them a terrible humiliation. Freud expressly develops this idea: “the central position of Earth was for him [man] a guarantee of his dominant role in the universe and seemed in perfect keeping with his tendency to feel like the lord of this world.” It would have made man worthy of God’s attention. But science would soon dissipate this “narcissistic illusion,” and “human self-esteem was dealt its first blow.” The father of psychoanalysis goes on to describe two other “wounds” inflicted upon human narcissism: first Darwinism supposedly showed man that he is no longer the center of his species, then Freud himself, in all humility and with no narcissism whatsoever, singlehandedly inflicted an ultimate wound upon all of humanity by “proving” to men that they are no longer masters of themselves but driven by their unacknowledged instincts.¹ This very widespread idea has been adopted by all the leading names in psychoanalysis as well as by historians and philosophers, and a number of mainstream works have contributed to its success.²

The idea of the first wound does seem plausible at first. Indeed, from Aristotle until Copernicus, the geometric centrality of Earth was universally affirmed. What is more, the opposition the new theory [of heliocentrism] met with is a known fact, albeit excessively exaggerated and deformed by the myth established since.³ The idea of a prideful anthropocentrism does seem valid at first glance. However, it is also surprising given that the prideful exaltation of “Man” with a capital “M” does not seem to have been the prerogative of Christianity, but rather a consequence of the coming of the Renaissance and the revolutionary eras.

The Medieval Cosmos

It thus seems worth our while to take a succinct look at medieval cosmology, as it will help to understand the way scientific knowledge has developed. Doubts will immediately arise as to the validity of the Freudian theory. Indeed, while Aristotelian cosmology—which the Church was careful not to incorporate into her Magisterium—does place the Earth at the center, this geometric center does not present [to the medieval mind] the ontological nobility we imagine. The universe is closed, finite and spherical. The Moon and the planets are held up by spheres englobed within each other, and these spheres are the different heavens, each rotating on its own axis. After the spheres of the planets comes the sphere of the firmament that contains the fixed stars, then comes the “crystalline” heaven, then the “first moving body,” which is set in motion by God and transmits its movement to the inferior heavens. On the exterior outskirts of these spheres is the empyrean heaven, which is the habitaculum Dei, the home of the angels and of the blessed, Heaven with a capital H. The nobility of the heavens thus increases by increments. “The first movement of the firmament,” says St. Thomas, “is nobler than the second movement, which is that of the planets, just as the superior orbit is the noblest.”⁴ The Moon and the heavens above are the realm of the eternal, where everything remains in its perfection without the shadow of a change. This realm is made up of the fifth incorruptible element: quintessence. Whereas the “sublunar” world, that is to say, Earth and everything surrounding it up to the Moon, is the realm of generation and corruption. Things are born, live and die. It is the world of instability and imperfection where nothing can persist in its being without perishing someday, irrevocably doomed to corruption and death. The dichotomy between the eternal and the corruptible illustrates the baseness of earth as opposed to the splendor of the heavens.

The Middle of the World

Perhaps, one might think, these time-related considerations could be overcome by a spatial position that is to the Earth’s advantage? Is not the center clearly the noblest place? That would be a purely mathematical way of seeing things. The ancients would rather say that “Earth is in the middle of the world.”⁵ That is for them a pejorative term: the middle is not on any side, it is inconsistent, indecisive, and is the etymological origin of the term “mediocre.” St. Thomas is clear on this point: “Earth is among those bodies whose location is in the middle and which are the most material and vilest (ignobilissima) of bodies.”⁶ According to the primitive conception of gravity, “all heavy bodies move toward the middle of the world.”⁷ The middle is therefore a place that is “lowly.” To quote Avicenna, this middle is “beneath all things.”⁸ It is the place of heaviness. Bede the Venerable says that the Earth, “situated in the center or at the pole of the universe, as its heaviest body, occupies among creatures the humblest and most central place (humillimum…ac medium locum…tenet), whereas water, air and fire take higher precedence over it both by the lightness of their nature and by their position.”⁹ That which is lighter tends to rise towards the heights: it is nobler. Hence the nobility of fire and the physical and moral baseness of the earth as an element, as St. Albert the Great points out: “The earth is indeed as an excrement among the simple bodies, and of the elements, fire is the noblest and partakes the most in form.”¹⁰ Macrobius speaks of earth as “that which falls, torn from the elements and having become refuse (defaecatis), and settles all the way to the bottom.”¹¹ As this recipient of all the mire of the universe, Earth becomes its cesspool. The very term “humility” comes from humus which means earth.

Man’s Habitat

Man, who dwells on Earth, finds himself far from anything noble, being too small, too lowly, too heavy. No matter where he is on his planet, he finds himself at a maximum distance from Heaven. Being at the center thus makes one distant. According to Master Eckhart, “Earth is the farthest thing from heaven. It is curled up in a corner and ashamed.”¹² This is what leads Alain de Lille to say that “man is like an immigrant (alienigena) living in the suburbs (suburbium) of the world.”¹³ For Dante, “the farther the spheres are from the center, the more divine they are.”¹⁴ If we extend this view to the center of the Earth, we can understand why Dante and certain theologians situated hell there. Man lives on an isolated cesspool, a slum that could never draw the eye of superior beings. This only magnifies even more the mercy God who looks down upon the human creature in his refuse.

Man’s Worth

The ancients did indeed maintain that man is endowed with a certain nobility, but this in no way implied a geometrically privileged location. His nobility is rather expressed in metaphysical terms of finality. For St. Thomas, for example, the purpose of the Sun is not to shed light upon the Earth, since the Earth is viler than the Sun and it would be disordered for the nobler being to serve the viler being. However, the purpose of the Sun is to shed light upon men, who are more noble than the stars due to their spiritual nature.¹⁵ These metaphysical considerations are not dependent upon man’s physical cosmological condition.

Pagans had already noticed man’s specifically vertical architecture, which allows him to raise his eyes in order to rise above Earth in thought. “The divinity,” writes Ovid, “gave man a sublime face and commanded him to look to heaven and raise his face to the stars.”¹⁶ Human nobility therefore is not a result of man’s central position but rather of his capacity to escape this position and spiritually attain the heavens through the theological virtues: man lifts his soul up above earthly things. Modern times have only further revealed this human desire in that modern man has sought to fulfill the desire in a material and technical way by means of space travel programs. This physical, spiritual and technical stature of man transpires in an evident way and even evolutionists cannot cast doubt upon the superiority it manifestly confers upon him over the animals who have neither a spirituality nor a space travel program.

Heliocentrism as a Promotion

Overturning ancient cosmology was consequently seen as a promotion. Even before Copernicus, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa questioned Earth’s centrality and immobility. From his new theory, he drew the conclusion that “it is not true that Earth is the vilest and basest of all the stars,”¹⁷ but that “Earth is a noble star.”¹⁸

In his early writings, Galileo, while still an Aristotelian, called Earth “ignobilissima.”¹⁹ But once he had become a partisan of heliocentrism, he rejected the Aristotelian idea of the Earth as the “refuse of the world” and a “cesspool of all unclean things.”²⁰ To the contrary, “as for Earth, we seek to ennoble it and make it more perfect when we strive to assimilate it to the heavenly bodies and in a certain way, to place it as it were in heaven whence your philosophies had banished it.”²¹ Earth is thus delivered from its mediocre commonness and acquires a noble title among the superior stars. In the end, the further developments of cosmology have assigned to Earth a marginal position with which the ancients would have been satisfied.

Conclusion

Freud saw heliocentrism as the perception of a decline whereas its protagonists saw it as a promotion. The contradiction between the two positions is absolute. The Freudian theory was nothing more than that: a theory plastered over reality, a preconceived notion that did not even bother to take the data of experience into consideration. The simple fact of having thought it up seemed enough to him to dispense him from finding proof.

In the same way, with complete disregard for history, a movie on the Galileo affair directed by Claude Allègre,²² channels the Freudian theory, placing the following dialogue on the lips of the inquisitor: “Since man is the most perfected creation of the Lord, he has been placed in the center of the world.”²³ Yet it would have sufficed to read Galileo’s famous book to find the opposite position expressed. The university studies²⁴ that we cite in this article have long demonstrated the falsity of this theory, but as the historian of science Paolo Rossi says, “it is useless to cite texts, and many true statements seem destined to fall into oblivion when they oppose the idola theatri, who have a broader impact.”²⁵

In our days, men do indeed seem inclined to prefer the pleasant inventions of their own minds to facts. Freudian psychology has a particular tendency to this flaw. Take for example the anecdote of an apologist seeking to defend the existence of God based on reason. He is face to face with a man imbued with Freud who informs him of the frustrations, unacknowledged desires, and “sublimation of the father” subconsciously teleguiding him to this conclusion. In so doing, he claims to know the apologist better than he knows himself. He attributes to himself a superiority over him and dispenses himself from weighing his opponent’s arguments. The dispute on heliocentrism has been reduced to supposed psychological factors in the same exact way, without any effort to evaluate the properly scientific difficulties, real though they are.

In this inversion of thought, we can see the harmful legacy of Kant, who attributes to the thinking subject such a priority that he obliterates the objective scope of knowledge. Kant metaphorically assimilated this upheaval to the Copernican revolution. This epistemological Kantian revolution²⁶ was indeed, more than any other, an anthropocentric revolution that established man as “the measure of all things,” to use the expression of Protagoras. In Descartes’ time, Bossuet had already decried this imposture: “The greatest disorder of the mind is to believe things because we want them to be, and not because we have seen that they indeed are.”²⁷

Endnotes

¹ Sigmund Freud, Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse, cited by Rémi Brague, Au Moyen du Moyen-Âge, Éditions de la transparence, 2006, p. 364.

² We cite at random J. Lacan, Rudolf Carnap, Paul Ricoeur and Berthold Brecht. See Jean-François Stoffel, La révolution copernicienne et la place de l’Homme dans l’Univers, in the Revue Philosophique de Louvain. Quatrième série, tome 96, n. 1, 1998, p. 8-9.

³ Copernicus, a Catholic canon, began his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium with a dedication to Pope Paul III in which he thanked the churchmen who had encouraged him to publish the work, especially Cardinal Schönberg and Tiedmann Giese, bishop of Kulm. The book was graced with a glowing preface by the same Cardinal Schönberg. Likewise, the following century, Pope Urban VIII was a personal friend of Galileo and wrote an ode in honor of the learned man; he encouraged Galileo to write his book on the heliocentric theory, although he did ask him to speak ex hypothesi. It was his infraction of this prudent restriction that warranted Galileo his trial.

⁴ St. Thomas Aquinas, De cœlo et mundo, L. 1, lec. 9.

⁵ St. Thomas Aquinas, ibid., L. 2, lec. 20.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ St. Thomas Aquinas, ibid., L. 2, lec. 26.

⁸ Avicenna, Notes sur Aristote, Métaphysique, in A. Badawî, Aristote chez les Arabes, Koweït, 1978, p. 33, 14, cited by Rémi Brague.

⁹ St. Bede the Venerable, De natura rerum, Ed. Ch. W. Jones et Fr. Lipp, cited by Rémi Brague.

¹⁰ St. Albert the Great, De Cœlo et Mundo, I, 4, 6, p. 16, 27-29, Hassfeld, cited by Rémi Brague.

¹¹ Macrobius, Commentaire sur le songe de Scipion, I, 22, 4, cited by Rémi Brague.

¹² Eckhart, Sermon 14, Deutsche Werke, ed. J. Quint, Stuttgart, 1936, vol 1, p. 233-234, cited by Rémi Brague.

¹³ Alain de Lille (12th-century Cistercian theologian), De planctu naturae, P.L., vol. 210, col. 4444b.

¹⁴ Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradise, 28, 49-51, cited by Rémi Brague.

¹⁵ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, Ia, q. 70, a. 2, ad 4.

¹⁶ Ovid, Metamorphoses, I, 85.

¹⁷ Nicholas of Cusa, De la docte ignorance, trad. L. Moulinier, p. 156 (II, 12), cited by Jean-François Stoffel.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 157.

¹⁹ Galileo, Iuvenilia/cura A Favaro, p. 48 (Tractatio de cœlo, quæstio secunda), cited by Jean-François Stoffel.

²⁰ Galileo, Dialogue sur les deux grands systèmes du monde, trad. R. Fréreux, Ed. du Seuil, 1992, n. 122, p. 159.

²¹ Ibid., n. 65, p. 131.

²² French geochemist, member of the Academy of Science and Minister of National Education from 1997 to 2000.

²³ Galilée ou l’amour de Dieu, 2006. The same idea is to be found in several of the central dialogues of the movie, which also contains a large number of other historical errors.

²⁴ See the articles by Rémi Brague and Jean-François Stoffel cited at the beginning of this article. Rémi Brague in particular offers a series of previous sources on the issue that have unfortunately been ignored.

²⁵ Paolo Rossi, “Nobility of Man and Plurality of Worlds,” cited by Rémi Brague.

²⁶ Note that the word “revolution,” which initially means the circular movement of a star around its axis, has taken on the sense of an overturning of the established order.

²⁷ Bossuet, Traité de la connaissance de Dieu et de soi-même, c. 1, 16.