THE EARTHMOVERS:
PROLOGUE
Prologue
As early as 1530, in his book De Revolutionibus, the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) had proved that the Sun was the centre of the universe . . . A century later, the Pisan astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) using his new refractor telescope, once again showed that the Earth revolved around the Sun. He published his proofs several times . . . - - - The New Rights of Man. (J.E. Lewis: The New Rights of Man, Robinson, 2003, p.233.)
They call it the Copernican revolution, the ‘scientific’ advancement that changed the world. While by no means the innovator, it is named after the Polish canon Nicolaus Copernicus, who in the sixteenth century broached the old heliocentric principle that the sun, not the earth, occupies the centre of our cosmos. For this to be, the earth had to be moved. Until then, mankind had been loyal to the senses, the witness of the eyes that show us the stars, sun, moon and planets turning about us on earth once a day, with the sun also moving mid-north and mid-south and back again once a year.
For centuries now, in the wake of the 'proofs' attributed to Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Bradley, Foucault, etc., mankind has abandoned the geocentric view of the universe around us and transferred all to a mind-view of a spinning earth, orbiting the sun like a planet, the idea taught to us at schools, colleges and universities from the age of five onwards. This upheaval, in turn, brought about a change in human reasoning, with both Church and State abandoning the old concept, adopting instead a new way of thinking about the heavens, God, the Bible, the earth, mankind and everything else. All this, and much more, was brought about by the Earthmovers.
With the victory of the Copernican revolution now absolute in the minds of nearly all today, be they popes, astronomers, philosophers, theologians, historians, etc., we have no choice but to acknowledge that no upheaval in the history of the world affected mankind like the Earthmovers’ revolution. History books abound with expressions of this, one of the greatest shifts in human reasoning ever known, the effects of which have moulded how mankind thinks, believes and indoctrinates.
The German poet, Johann von Goethe (1749-1832), said of it: Among all the discoveries and convictions, probably not a single fact has had a deeper influence on the human spirit than the teaching of Copernicus ... Humanity has probably never been asked to do more; for consider all that went up in smoke as a result of realising this change: a second paradise, a world of innocence, poetry and piety, the witness of the senses, the conviction of a poetic and religious faith; small wonder that one did not want to give this up, that people in every possible way resisted such a doctrine, which those who accepted it justified and summoned to a so far unknown, yet unthought of freedom of thinking and greatness of vision. (J. von Goethe: Geschichte der Farbenlehre, Chicago, University Press, p.67.)
More recently, Arthur Koestler describes the transition like so: Their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in Universe, with its fixed hierarchy of moral values, and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet. (Arthur Koestler: The Sleepwalkers, Grosset & Dunlop, New York, 1963, p.13.)
To which we can add language, wherein ‘this planet’ has long replaced the ‘earth’ for most now, as the above quote illustrates. The Copernican revolution then, was undoubtedly more profound and ‘earth-moving’ than any of the great shifts of belief recorded throughout history. It moved men’s thinking far more than the Greek philosophers did, far more than the astrologers of China, India, Arabia and so on. It had a greater effect than any of the spiritual, population, cultural, and ethnic shifts recorded by historians or discovered by archaeologists and anthropologists. It surpassed the effects of religious and ideological wars of humanity in both East and West. It far outdid the influence of Europe’s colonial occupations and retreats, even the Communist uprising and domination throughout many countries in the twentieth century and the materialism that followed it into the twenty-first. The reason, of course, is because unlike any other revolution in history recorded and studied by man, the whole world, nearly every last man, woman and child, became Copernican.
The Copernican revolution, while promulgated as an advance in the discoveries of astronomy, cosmology and knowledge itself, was, of course, first and foremost a revolution against the long secure comprehension of God, the earth, the universe and mankind - a bond of reasoning between the four that also manifested itself fully in the Catholic Church, in its Sacred Scriptures, in tradition and society, in scholastic theology, philosophy and metaphysics. Soon we will read exactly how this doctrine was understood and how it used to form the thinking of mankind up to the eighteenth century.
The reason for this teleological distinction is because when studying the universe, man’s natural reasoning can discern in the order and harmony of the movements of the celestial bodies a divine intelligence and especially as observed, that is, earth-centred, geocentric and geostatic. An analogy of this could be made in that if, shipwrecked on an island, we came upon a beautiful farm at its centre, with its own water source and cattle, sheep and fowl feeding in its fields, plus rows of grain, vegetables and fruit trees, with its seasons of growth and harvests, we would deduce the existence of an intelligent designer around and seek him or her out. Consider then how men comprehended things when they viewed the universe as geocentric, with the earth and its countless life and man at its centre. Once this realism was shattered, as we can imagine, the very essence of metaphysics was flung into chaos. [The field of philosophy concerning first principles, which includes the study of being (ontology), the study of the origin and structure of the universe (cosmology), and concerns itself with the science of knowledge (epistemology)].
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