Astronomer Copernicus reburied as hero in Poland

FROMBORK, Poland – Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

His burial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped usher in the modern scientific age.

Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in a remote part of northern Poland, far from Europe's centers of learning. He had spent years laboring in his free time developing his theory, which was later condemned as heretical by the church because it removed Earth and humanity from their central position in the universe.

His revolutionary model was based on complex mathematical calculations and his naked-eye observations of the heavens because the telescope had not yet been invented.

After his death, his remains rested in an unmarked grave beneath the floor of the cathedral in Frombork, on Poland's Baltic coast, the exact location unknown.

On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005.

A black granite tombstone now identifies him as the founder of the heliocentric theory, but also a church canon, a cleric ranking below a priest. The tombstone is decorated with a model of the solar system, a golden sun encircled by six of the planets.

The first sentence of this article --- stating that Copernicus was condemned by the Catholic Church as heretical --- is pure rubbish.

A year after Copernicus completed his book on the movement of the earth around the sun, hia fellow-scholar Johann Widmannstetter delivered lectures in Rome outlining Copernicus' theory. Pope Clement VII and several Catholic cardinals heard the lectures -- they were scholars themselves ---and were favorably impressed.

Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg wrote to him that "everybody" held him in high regard because of his "new cosmology." He continued, "I entreat you, most learned sir, unless I inconvenience you, to communicate this discovery of yours to scholars, and at the earliest possible moment to send me your writings on the sphere of the universe together with the tables and whatever else you have that is relevant to this subject ..."

Copernicus subsequently dedicated his masterpiece to Pope Paul III.

As to his burial --- after his death in 1473, he was buried in the Frauenburg (Frombork) Cathedral itself. Does any think that indicates he died in disgrace?

BTW, Galileo didn't die in disgrace, either: he died reconciled to his old friend Pope Urban, and was buried inside the Church of Santa Croce in Florence. Interesting info on that here: See #3 and #4 (Link).

But as Chesterton wrote 100 years ago, "Any stick is good enough to hit the Catholic Church with..." (Sigh.)

But anyway, DogByte, I love that Matejko painting!

This story is a regurgitated liberal myth which I suppose is standard for the MSM.

It should be “Father Copernicus”, he was a priest.

His theory was lock stock and barrel a product of of the Catholic Church.
“His reputation was such that as early as 1514 the Lateran Council, convoked by Leo X, asked through Bishop Paul of Fossombrone, for his opinion on the reform of the ecclesiastical calendar. His answer was, that the length of the year and of the months and the motions of the sun and moon were not yet sufficiently known to attempt a reform. The incident, however, spurred him on as he himself writes to Paul III, to make more accurate observations; and these actually served, seventy years later, as a basis for the working out of the Gregorian calendar.”

He was funded (including the funds for publishing) by other Catholic clergy.
Also, he was quite famous during his lifetime and his theory was positively received at the Vatican and negatively received in Wittenberg.

His theory was never considered heresy. His book went on the list of forbidden books because of nine sentences which did not have the required provisional language (something which is now standard for scientific theories) . Once those were changed De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium was republished.

Religious Objections to Copernicus by Prof. Richard W. Pogge, January 2, 2005

A Brief Note on Religious Objections to Copernicus:

I get asked about this a great deal, in large measure because the common lore is that the Catholic Church immediately condemned Copernicus and his system, while enlightened Protestants eagerly embraced both. In fact, the response from the leading Protestant theologians of Copernicus' time was swift and negative, though even this response was mostly remarks in passing in conversation or sermons, nothing resembling an organized anti-Copernican campaign. The Catholic Church, despite later official hostility, was largely silent at first. Silence, however, does not necessarily imply approval, as the events of the following century were to so forcefully prove.

The specific response one of the most important contemporaries of Copernicus, Martin Luther, is telling. The quote below is actually in response to the publication of the brief Commentariolus, which appeared a decade before De Revolutionibus. It comes from Luther's Tablebook (Tischreden), or record of dinner-table conversations:

"There is talk of a new astrologer who wants to prove that the earth moves and goes around instead of the sky, the sun, the moon, just as if somebody were moving in a carriage or ship might hold that he was sitting still and at rest while the earth and the trees walked and moved. But that is how things are nowadays: when a man wishes to be clever he must needs invent something special, and the way he does it must needs be the best! The fool wants to turn the whole art of astronomy upside-down. However, as Holy Scripture tells us, so did Joshua bid the sun to stand still and not the earth."

The scriptural passage to which Luther refers is Joshua 10:10-15. Elsewhere Luther refers to Copernicus as "a fool who went against Holy Writ". It is this latter quote that usually makes it into the textbooks.

Despite these more dramatic objections, overall the initial response to Copernicus was somewhat ambivalent. The full implications of his revolutionary ideas only began to sink in over the decades following the publication and slow dissemination of De Revolutionibus. Luther's sarcastic comments aside, Copernicus' ideas were seriously discussed in Lutheran as well as Catholic universities during subsequent years, both for and against (though mostly against at first). While in detail Copernicus' system used more circles than Ptolemy's, it did not use the equant, which was mathematically more challenging to use in practice. As a consequence, mathematically speaking the Copernican system was relatively easier to use. Indeed, computations based on the Copernican system were used to create accurate tables of planetary positions (the Prutenic Tables computed by Erasmus Reinhold), and Copernical computations were used in part of the Gregorian Calendar Reform of the 1570s. At issue at the time was whether one viewed Copernicus' Sun-centered system as merely a convenient computational artifice, or whether the Sun and not the Earth really was at the center. Copernicus clearly believed in the latter, but this conviction was muted by Osiander's preface to De Revolutionibus that suggested otherwise.

In many ways the initial cautious ambivalence of Catholic authorities is unsurprising. Copernicus was a loyal Catholic and a canon of Frauenberg Cathedral, making him a relatively minor member of the Catholic hierarchy. He had followed all of the proper procedures required to secure formal permission from Church authorities to publish his book, and he even dedicated it to the reigning Pope at the time (Paul III). That their response was ambivalent is not to say that the Church did not take the matter seriously, or fail to study it. By all accounts the Church did both. However, in the 16th century the Catholic Church found itself beset by many radical ideas, a number of which were direct and unambiguous frontal assaults upon its spiritual and political authority in Europe. So long as Copernicus' ideas remained a mathematical argument (in Latin) among scholars and did nothing to threaten either the beliefs of the common man or the Church's ultimate authority in such matters, the Church had no need to respond.

By the beginning of the 17th century, however, the Church found it could no longer treat these ideas with silence.

Lecture 16: The Starry Messenger by Prof. Richard W. Pogge, 10/4/2007

Troubles with the Church.

1616:

The Church officially declares that the heliocentric theory is "philosophically false and at least an erroneous belief."
De Revolutionibus was officially banned.
Galileo was called to an audience with Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who cautioned him verbally to stop teaching and defending the Copernican model in public.

1624:

Galileo writes "A Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems", ably defending the Copernican system.
Seeks permission from Pope Urban VIII to publish it, but is rebuffed.

1632:

Galileo's Dialogue is published in Florence, written in Italian (Tuscan), not Latin.
It was an instant success & widely acclaimed.
Galileo unfortunately played directly into the hand of his enemies.

The Trial of Galileo

1633:

Galileo is summoned by the Roman Inquisition and a document is produced alleging that Bellarmine in 1616 specifically forbade him to discuss the Copernican system in any way (modern scholarship has shown that this document is a forgery, or at best trumped up).

Galileo faced two specific charges:

Disobedience of Bellarmine's 1616 order.
Misleading censors who published his book.

What was really going on in the background was that enemies of Galileo convinced Pope Urban VIII that a character in the Dialogue named Simplicio who ineptly defended the Ptolemaic system was a thinly veiled caricature of the Pope himself. This provided a pretext for making an example of Galileo, albeit on trumped up charges. Galileo was his own worst enemy in this situation, as he vastly overestimated his influence in Rome, and the degree to which his well-deserved fame would protect him.

Publicly humiliated and threatened with torture, Galileo had no choice but to admit guilt, and "abjure, curse and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies..."

House Arrest

Galileo was placed under house arrest at his villa in Arcetri near Florence until his death in 1642.

Despite this, in 1636 he finished "The Two New Sciences" describing his experiments in mechanics.

Unable to get published due to his conviction, the manuscript was smuggled out of Italy and published in Protestant Leyden in 1638.
This book helped lay the foundations of classical physics.

Eppur si muove (and still, it moves)

Galileo died, blind and under house arrest, on January 8, 1642.

On Christmas Day of that same year, Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe England.

In 1992, 350 years later, Pope John Paul II officially declared Galileo innocent.

Perhaps we're off on the wrong foot because you missed the link I posted here (Link), in which I stated that the trial of Galileo, and his conviction of "vehement suspicion of heresy," was "stupid and unjust" (my words); I am not, and have never been, a defender of this trial.

Nevertheless, it makes me sad, Deadrock, that you have chosen to argue by means of insult ("Catholic Church propaganda... sickening") rather than by means of evidence. I still am convinced that it's by the sharing of evidence that we can get a more adequate understanding of the history of science.

Do you think Arthur Koestler and Thomas Huxley were Catholic propagandists? No? If not, then perhaps you would do well to look further into what they wrote about the Galileo controversy, for it is not the neat little morality-play you may be familiar with, framed by many who ignore (or are perhaps unaware of) large chunks the record.

For it was Arthur Koestler, a secular Jew, a defender of intellectual freedom and opponent of every sort of intellectual fraud, who, in his remarkable history of astronomy “The Sleepwalkers,” began his section on Galileo thusly:

The personality of Galileo, as it emerges from works of popular science, has ever less relation to historic fact than Canon Koppernigk’s [Copernicus’]. He appears.in rationalist mythography as the Maid of Orleans of Science, the St. George who slew the dragon of the Inquisition. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the fame of this outstanding genius rests mostly on discoveries he never made, and on feats he never performed. Contrary to statements in even recent outlines of science, Galileo did not invent the telescope; nor the microscope; nor the thermometer; nor the pendulum clock. He did not discover the law of inertia; nor the parallelogram of forces or motions; not the sun spots. He made no contribution to theoretical astronomy; he did not throw down weights from the leaning tower of Pisa and did not prove the truth of the Copernican system. He was not tortured by the Inquisition, did not languish in its dungeons, did not say 'eppur si muove'; and he was not a martyr of science.

(The Sleepwalkers, p. 358).

Koestler accurately notes that both Bellarmine and Urban parted from Galileo expressly because of the way he presented his ideas as absolute truths, and his failure to support his ideas appropriately, as hypotheses, with adequate mathematical proofs.

And it was the Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, (surely you know of him, and he was no friend of the Catholic Church), who investigated the documentary history of the Galileo case and reached the conclusion that, as to the science of the matter, Bellarmine had the better of the argument.

None of this is to defend the trial and sentencing of Galileo by Church courts, whose conclusions were wrong-headed. (The sentence was a compromise. Galileo was judged to be vehemently suspect of heresy, placed under house arrest, required to pray the seven penitential psalms every week for three years, and required to abjure his teachings that the sun was "immovable" and "the center of the Universe" -- neither of which are, by the way, accurate.) He was not found guilty of maliciously violating the prior order or of formal heresy.)

The evidence, rather, suggests to me that

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