Man's Place in Nature, as affected by the Copernican Theory.
When we study the Divine Comedy of Dante--that wonderful book wherein
all the knowledge and speculation, all the sorrows and yearnings, of the
far-off Middle Ages are enshrined in the glory of imperishable verse--we
are brought face to face with a theory of the world and with ways of
reasoning about the facts of nature which seem strange to us to-day, but
from the influence of which we are not yet, and doubtless never shall
be, wholly freed. A cosmology grotesque enough in the light of later
knowledge, yet wrought out no less carefully than the physical theories
of Lucretius, is employed in the service of a theology cumbrous in its
obsolete details, but resting upon fundamental truths which mankind can
never safely lose sight of. In the view of Dante and of that phase of
human culture which found in him its clearest and sweetest voice, this
earth, the fair home of man, was placed in the centre of a universe
wherein all things were ordained for his sole behoof: the sun to give
him light and warmth, the stars in their courses to preside over his
strangely checkered destinies, the winds to blow, the floods to rise, or
the fiend of pestilence to stalk abroad over the land,--all for the
blessing, or the warning, or the chiding, of the chief among God's
creatures, Man. Upon some such conception as this, indeed, all theology
would seem naturally to rest. Once dethrone Humanity, regard it as a
mere local incident in an endless and aimless series of cosmical
changes, and you arrive at a doctrine which, under whatever specious
name it may be veiled, is at bottom neither more nor less than Atheism.
On its metaphysical side Atheism is the denial of anything psychical in
the universe outside of human consciousness; and it is almost
inseparably associated with the materialistic interpretation of human
consciousness as the ephemeral result of a fleeting collocation of
particles of matter. Viewed upon this side, it is easy to show that
Atheism is very bad metaphysics, while the materialism which goes with
it is utterly condemned by modern science.[1] But our feeling toward
Atheism goes much deeper than the mere recognition of it as
philosophically untrue. The mood in which we condemn it is not at all
like the mood in which we reject the corpuscular theory of light or Sir
G.C. Lewis's vagaries on the subject of Egyptian hieroglyphics. We are
wont to look upon Atheism with unspeakable horror and loathing. Our
moral sense revolts against it no less than our intelligence; and this
is because, on its practical side, Atheism would remove Humanity from
its peculiar position in the world, and make it cast in its lot with the
grass that withers and the beasts that perish; and thus the rich and
varied life of the universe, in all the ages of its wondrous duration,
becomes deprived of any such element of purpose as can make it
intelligible to us or appeal to our moral sympathies and religious
aspirations.
And yet the first result of some of the grandest and most irrefragable
truths of modern science, when newly discovered and dimly comprehended,
has been to make it appear that Humanity must be rudely unseated from
its throne in the world and made to occupy an utterly subordinate and
trivial position; and it is because of this mistaken view of their
import that the Church has so often and so bitterly opposed the teaching
of such truths. With the advent of the Copernican astronomy the
funnel-shaped Inferno, the steep mountain of Purgatory crowned with its
terrestrial paradise, and those concentric spheres of Heaven wherein
beatified saints held weird and subtle converse, all went their way to
the limbo prepared for the childlike fancies of untaught minds, whither
Hades and Valhalla had gone before them. In our day it is hard to
realize the startling effect of the discovery that Man does not dwell at
the centre of things, but is the denizen of an obscure and tiny speck of
cosmical matter quite invisible amid the innumerable throng of flaming
suns that make up our galaxy. To the contemporaries of Copernicus the
new theory seemed to strike at the very foundations of Christian
theology. In a universe where so much had been made without discernible
reference to Man, what became of that elaborate scheme of salvation
which seemed to rest upon the assumption that the career of Humanity was
the sole object of God's creative forethought and fostering care? When
we bear this in mind, we see how natural and inevitable it was that the
Church should persecute such men as Galileo and Bruno. At the same time
it is instructive to observe that, while the Copernican astronomy has
become firmly established in spite of priestly opposition, the
foundations of Christian theology have not been shaken thereby. It is
not that the question which once so sorely puzzled men has ever been
settled, but that it has been outgrown. The speculative necessity for
man's occupying the largest and most central spot in the universe is no
longer felt. It is recognized as a primitive and childish notion. With
our larger knowledge we see that these vast and fiery suns are after all
but the Titan like _servants_ of the little planets which they bear with
them in their flight through the abysses of space. Out from the awful
gaseous turmoil of the central mass dart those ceaseless waves of gentle
radiance that, when caught upon the surface of whirling worlds like
ours, bring forth the endlessly varied forms and the endlessly complex
movements that make up what we can see of life. And as when God revealed
himself to his ancient prophet He came not in the earthquake or the
tempest but in a voice that was still and small, so that divine spark
the Soul, as it takes up its brief abode in this realm of fleeting
phenomena, chooses not the central sun where elemental forces forever
blaze and clash, but selects an outlying terrestrial nook where seeds
may germinate in silence, and where through slow fruition the mysterious
forms of organic life may come to take shape and thrive. He who thus
looks a little deeper into the secrets of nature than his forefathers of
the sixteenth century may well smile at the quaint conceit that man
cannot be the object of God's care unless he occupies an immovable
position in the centre of the stellar universe.