This is a rather long-winded excerpt but part of a fascinating article "The Copernican Myths" by Mano Singham that I've been thinking a lot about lately as well as another million things.
It's important to always question and think critically about what people tell you, and history, which was always presented in such a boring, dry way to me as a teenager. History has become much more interesting to me now as I grow older, and just as importantly, now that I've travelled to some nice parts of world where these events took place. The two-dimensional stories, dry texts and fairytales grow fleshed out and colorful and full of many more social, political and economic implications than i could ever imagine!
Let us start with the myth that the Copernican model was opposed because it was a blow to human pride, dethroning Earth from its privileged position as the center of the universe... (Scholar Dennis Danielson) points out that in the early 16th cenutry, the center of the universe was not considered a desirable place to be. "In most medieval interpretations of Aristotelian and Ptolemaic cosmology, Earth's position at the center ofthe universe was taken as evidence not of its important but... its grossness."
In fact, ancient and medival Arabic, jewish and Christian scholars believe that the center was the worst part of the universe, a squalid basement where all the muck collected. One medieval writer described Earth's location as "the excrementary and filthy parts of the lower world." "We humans, " another asserted, are "lodged here in the dirt and filth of the world, nailed and rivetted to the worst and deadest part of the universe, in the lowest story of the house, and the most remote from the heavenly arch." In 1615 Cardinal Robert bellarmine, a prominent persecutor of Galileo, said that "the Earth is very far from heaven and sits motionless at the center of the world."
In Dante's Divine Comedy, hell itself is placed in Earth's innermost core. Dante also speaks of hell in ways consistent with Aristotelian dynamics--not full of flames, which would be displaced skyward by the heavier Earth, but as frozen and immobile.
By contrast, heaven was up, and the further up you went, away from the center, the better it was. So Copernicus, by putting the sun at the center and Earth in orbit around it, was really giving its inhabitants a promotion by taking them closer to the heavens.
...The actual religious reaction to the heliocentric model also differs from folklore. For one thing, Copernicus did not seem to fear religious opposition to his ideas. After all, he was a reputable cleric himself. He even dedicated his book to Pope Paul III with a letter in which he apologized for the seemingly outlandishness of his suggestion that the Earth moved. He explained that he was forced to his hypothesis by the inadequacy of the Ptolemaic system for constructing calendars and predicting the positions of the stars. A cardinal and a bishop were among those who urged him to publish his book. In fact, for 60 years after Copernicus' death for just two months after its publication, De Revolutionibus was read and least partially taught at leading Catholic universities...
For many years after the publican of De Revolutionibus, while Copernicus' ideas remained within the mathematical astronomy community, authors of more popular books on astronomy and cosmology were either unaware of his work or chose to ignore it. A few nonastronomers did ridicule it--not for being heretical but for promulgating the patently absurd idea of a moving earth.
It was through popularizers, some of them poets, that Copernicus' ideas became more widely known and began to spark religious opposition. But here too, the actual history is surprising. Opposition arose initially among Protestant groups rather than from the Roman Catholic Church.
(Martin) luther spoke out against heliocentrism in 1539, saying that the idea of a moving Earth moving around a stationary Sun clearly went against the account in the book of Joshua that says Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still...
The conflict between scripture and Copernicanism was not limited to verses that involved the motion of Sun or Earth. The realization was growing that acceptance of Copernicanism raised other profound theological difficulties as well...the problems just kept multiplying:
(Kuhn: )" If... the Earth were merely one of six planets, how were the stories of the Fall and Salvation, with their immese bearing on Christian life, going to be observed?.. If the universe is infinite, as many of the latter Copernicans thought, where can God's Throne be located? In an infinite Universe, how is mant o find God or God man?"
As time went on, Copernicus' ideas were seen as seriously disturbing to Christianity; they had to be countered. Soon the Bible became the main weapon used against Copernicus... Religious bodies undertook what was essentially a propaganda war against Copernicus.
People started calling Copernicans infidels and atheists and urged their repression... What probably happened was that after the heliocentric model had been well established, the location of the Sun did come to be perceived as a privileged place. So people ready back into history the newly believed excellence of the center... The demotion idea may have been introduced as part of the effort to rally nonscientific religious people to turn against Copernicanism by appealing to their pride as human beings.
(The Catholic Church's) ban on Copernicus remained until 1822, and his book remained on the forbidden list until 1835. In fact it was only in 1992 that Pope John Paul II lifted the edict of inquisition against Galileo....
What can we learn from all this? The story of the Copernican revolution shows that the actual history of science often bears little resemblance to the popular capsule versions that are learned in school or college or portrayed in textbooks and the popular media. Steve Weinberg calls them "potted history." The true story is much more complicated, but it's also a lot more interesting.
