β Scribed by A.G. Pacholczyk
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The Infinite Universe of the Enlightened and the Dark Night Sky
The relatively slow reception of Copernicanism was the result not of ecclesiastical attitudes but rather of astronomical data. The heliocentric theory Was known in Roman Catholic circles before the publication of De revolutionibus orbium celestium in 1543 through the Commentariolus (~507-I5I4) and was received favorably by Pope Clement VII when presented to hun by Nicholaus Cardinal Schoenberg. This attitude lasted for over sixty years after the publication of De revolutionibus. In the trial of Giordano Bruno in 1600 no mention of Kopernik's astronomy was made. Kopernik, a Catholic P~iest1 and a canon of the Frombork cathedral, did not experience himself any dIffiCUlties from the Catholic Church although he was firmly condemned by the Protestants (by Luther in 1539 and by Melanchton in 1541). It was the observed lack of stellar parallax that constituted the most serious astronomical argument against the Earth's motion. The implications of Galileo's telescopic observations Were more anti-Aristotelian. than pro-Copernican as all of his observational results, including those of the phases of Venus, could be explained well by the sYstem of Tycho Brahe. Brahe, himself anti-Aristotelian, disposed of crystalline spheres in 1588 in De mundi aetherei recentioribus phaenomenis as a Consequence of his observations of a comet in 1577.
The ecclesiastical intellectual circles generally preferred a Brahe-type cOsmology to heliocentrism, as the former, while accounting for the same astronomical observations as the latter, had added advantages of not requiring the presence of parallax and of being in harmony with the existing philosophical Views as well as with the literal interpretation of the Holy Scripture. Those advantages were clearly noted by a Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598-1671) in his Almagestum novum (1651) (see Figure 1). Some ecclesiastic astronomers, however, preferred Kopernik's system (pierre Gassendi, 1592(pierre Gassendi, β’1655;;
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