The Forbidden Universe (2 page)

This extraordinary tradition is set out in a collection of texts that have had the greatest impact on western culture of any book apart from the Bible, and the greatest impact on the modern world than any book
including
the Bible. Surely that in itself is a major reason for rediscovering these ancient secrets. And the best part is that they are not merely ancient, not just some historical curiosity – they even have something important to teach science of the
twenty-first
century.

Lynn Picknett

Clive Prince

London, 2010

There are three key events that science historians cite as landmarks in the long journey from superstition to
intellectual
enlightenment: Copernicus’ proposal of the heliocentric theory (1543), the prosecution of Galileo by the Church for promoting that theory as fact (1633) and the publication of Isaac Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
(1687), which
established
key physical laws, primarily those of motion and gravity. As a leading historian of science put it: ‘The series of developments starting with Copernicus in 1543 and ending with Newton in 1687 maybe be labelled the Scientific Revolution.’
¹
However, these great leaps forward were not made because Copernicus, Galileo and Newton elevated pure reason above religious irrationality, but because they were all inspired by the same unashamedly metaphysical and magic-oriented philosophy – one that also excited and motivated other great minds of the time, including our own special hero Leonardo da Vinci.

To today’s materialist-rationalists, the unpalatable fact is that a magical mindset not only bubbled along through the Renaissance, but it was magic that inspired and drove the whole of that era’s explosion of thought and
achievement
. In a very real way, magic made the modern world.

The event that is considered
the
watershed moment, the
beginning of the parting of the ways of science and religion, is the proposal of the heliocentric, or ‘sun-centred’ theory of the cosmos, which posited that the Earth circles around the sun and not, as had been thought, the other way around. The radical new notion was proposed by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) as the Polish canon Mikolaj Kopernik styled himself in the manner of contemporary scholars.

Until then astronomy and its esoteric twin astrology had traditionally been based on the belief that the Earth was at the centre of the universe. It was a natural assumption, since the sun, moon and stars appear to move around us in regular cycles, while the world we stand on seems to be static. The only complication with this system was
presented
by the movement of the five planets visible to the naked eye, which despite demonstrating a pattern, did not appear simply to circle the Earth. In the second century CE the Greek-Egyptian astronomer and mathematician Claudius Ptolemaeus, who is known as Ptolemy, devised an Earth-centred model with a complex system of cycles and epicycles to account for the movements of the planets. He was the single great astronomical authority until Copernicus took centre stage.

Strangely, for such a monumentally influential figure, very little is known about Copernicus the man, although the outline of his life is well documented. He was born in Torun in Poland in 1473 to a copper merchant, hence the name. His father died when Copernicus was young, leaving an uncle, who was a canon, to raise him. After studying church law, he extended his stay in the stimulating environment of Renaissance Italy by studying law and medicine at Padua in the Republic of Venice. A gifted artist and draughtsman, his real passion was astronomy, to which he devoted much of his free time.

When his uncle became a bishop, he secured Copernicus a job as a church administrator, or canon, in the town of
Frombork. He lived out the rest of his life, based in a tower – now known as Copernicus’ Tower – in the courtyard of the cathedral. His remains were only discovered under the cathedral as recently as 2000. As an ordained clergyman Copernicus was forbidden to marry, but it seems he may not have been totally celibate, according to rumours linking him to his housekeeper. This did not go down well with the Church authorities.

His duties gave him enough leisure time for his passion for astronomy, which he indulged in his tower. Like many astronomers at the time, Copernicus was dissatisfied with the fixes and fudges that were needed to make Ptolemy’s system work, and so set out to address the problem. But unlike the vast majority, the results Copernicus achieved would change astronomy for ever.

Copernicus developed his radical new theory in the first decade of the sixteenth century, but refrained from going public for many years, contenting himself instead with scholarly discussions and penning an account for private circulation in the early 1510s. He only published what he termed his ‘new and marvellous hypothesis’,
On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres
(
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium
) at the end of his life – the last page proofs were delivered to him on his deathbed in 1543. The popular science writer Paul Davies calls the book ‘perhaps the very birth of science itself’.
²

Contrary to common belief, Copernicus did not delay publication until death made him safe from the Vatican’s wrath. He was only reticent about going public because of the academic controversy his theory would generate, and only agreed to write his book under pressure from colleagues who were excited by his theory. Even Pope Paul III had listened enthusiastically to a lecture on the subject given by his secretary, the German scholar Johann Widmannstetter, ten years before
On the Revolutions
was published. A cardinal
who attended the lecture, the Archbishop of Capua, was one of those who urged Copernicus to write and publish his theory. So much for today’s perception of the Church’s hostility.

On the Revolutions
put forward three new controversial ideas: That the Earth moves in space, revolves on its own axis and that it and the other planets circle the sun. Copernicus pointed out flaws in the old Ptolemaic system and set out the observations that led him to propose a new model of the universe. On the thirty-first page he reveals his groundbreaking, even shocking, proposition in the form of a diagram that shows the planets, in their correct order, circling the sun. And just four lines beneath the
all-important
diagram he makes an extraordinary statement:

Copernicus was linking the sun’s physical place in the solar system to resolutely transcendental concepts: that the sun is the universe’s ‘mind’ or the seat of the power that rules all creation, or ‘Trismegistus’ visible God’. And it is in those three words that the greatest clue to understanding Copernicus’ theory lies, for they reveal a hint of the
real
heresy that was to rock the Vatican to its foundations.

To discover why Copernicus’ reference was – and in certain respects still is – so earth-shaking we have to look back at another seminal document, published over half a century earlier, which cited the same mysterious authority.

Here was a tract that many have called the manifesto of
the Renaissance,
⁴
as it crystallizes and embodies the spirit and purpose of that new era. Published in Rome in 1487, it has become known as the
Oration on the dignity of man
(
De hominis dignitate
). Intended to be given as a public lecture, but never delivered, it was written by the
twenty-four-year-old
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94). As the youngest son of the ruler of the city-state of Mirandola in northern Italy, and Prince of Concord, Pico’s name was already known. Although his family may have been only B-list nobility it was related by marriage to illustrious dynasties such as the Sforzas of Milan and the Estes of Ferrara. Pico had inherited influence, which he was happy to exploit.

When he arrived in Rome from Florence, after attending various universities, including Paris, Pico had with him a set of nine hundred theses – statements from various philosophical, mystical and esoteric traditions – which, he claimed, were mutually consistent and reconcilable. He said he would demonstrate this in a public debate before Rome’s intelligentsia. But as the majority of his sources were not Christian, his request for a public debate was refused and his work condemned. This was Rome, after all.

Pico was, however, not to be dismissed so easily. With astonishing courage and foolhardiness (a combination that distinguishes many Renaissance heroes), he published an
Apology
– in fact, a defence – which included his nine hundred theses and what would have been his opening speech in the debate, the
Oration on the Dignity of Man.

As his chosen title suggests, Pico’s fundamental point concerned the brilliance of humankind and its privileged place in creation. To him, a human being’s defining faculty is his intellect, the hunger for knowledge and the ability to satisfy it.

According to Pico’s parable, after God made the universe and populated it with the angelic beings of heaven and the
beasts of the Earth, each with its specific nature and function, he still needed a creature ‘to think on the plan of his great work’.
⁵
As every niche in the cosmological ecosystem had already been filled, God decreed that Man should ‘have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature’.
⁶
Furthermore, being of an ‘indeterminate nature’ that was ‘neither of heavenly nor earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal’,
⁷
Man could choose with his own free will the attributes of any other created being, earthly or celestial. Only Man has the flexibility to choose his own path:

Aligning humanity with angels was fundamentally
anathema
to the Church of Rome, for whom the doctrine of original sin means that humans are born physically and spiritually soiled, only reaching Heaven if they submit to the Church’s dogma and the pronouncements of its priests. And perhaps not even then.

Pico’s landmark
Oration
opens with an appeal to two authorities. The first is ‘Abdala the Saracen’, the
ninth-century
Muslim scholar Abd-Allah ibn Qutaybah, who declared there was nothing more wonderful in the world than Man. Pico follows with a quotation from the same mysterious sage whom Copernicus would also come to cite: ‘the celebrated exclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, “What a great miracle is man, Asclepius” confirms this [Abdala’s] opinion’.
⁹

It is easy to see why Pico found himself in such hot water. It was not the best idea to start a debate with Holy City scholars by appealing to the authorities of both a Muslim
and a resolutely non-Christian sage, Hermes Trismegistus. Notably, his theses also gave pride of place to the Cabala, the Jewish mystical system (which is very different from the modern cult popularized by Madonna).

Pico’s
Apology
only made matters worse. Under pressure from Roman scholars, Pope Innocent VIII swiftly banned it. In the interests of self-preservation Pico retracted his claims, before prudently fleeing to Paris. But the Pope’s arm was long, and even there he was imprisoned. Yet, as we will see, just when all seemed lost, Pico’s fortunes were to turn around.

Pico’s
Oration
is illuminating about the Renaissance for several reasons. It reveals the era’s defining characteristic, a dramatic shift in attitudes about humanity: Man suddenly became a being of wonder with limitless abilities and possibilities rather than a miserable creature innately blighted and damned by original sin. It also highlights the clash between two mindsets: the new, open, questioning, eclectic spirit of the Renaissance – in particular its
willingness
to take seriously sources of wisdom outside the Christian domain – and the old, blinkered, Bible-bound attitude of the Middle Ages. The Church had always been wary of learning for learning’s sake, frowning on novelty and intellectual challenge. The frenzy of interest in new ways to explore the universe and humankind’s place within it was the direct result of being freed from the old shackles. Effectively, the Renaissance represented a great surge of collective self-confidence.

To ‘think for oneself’ today often implies a rejection of established religion and all forms of ‘superstition’, however this was emphatically not the case among the intellectuals of Renaissance Europe. Most of the traditions from which Pico drew his theses were not established works of physics or mathematics, but metaphysical, mystical and what we have come to know as occult sources. Above all it was
the works of Hermes Trismegistus that drove Pico with a passion.