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‘In 1460… a Tuscan monk rode unobtrusively into Florence on a donkey. Attached to his side was a bundle of cloth in which a small collection of books had been packed. Leonardo da Pistoia who had travelled a long way, took his precious cargo directly to the Doge of Florence, Cosimo de’ Medici (1389-1464). An intellectual [and doctrinal] nuclear bomb was about to explode.’--- (Hancock & Bauval. Talisman, Penguin Books, 2004.)
Republished in many languages by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) - an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance - and spread throughout Europe, it was these books that resurrected the heresies and false philosophies of the ancient pagans under the pretense of a ‘scientific’ Enlightenment that changed beliefs in both Church and State in so many ways. It was the Earth moving around a fixed fire at the centre of the universe in these books that uniquely inspired Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) to compile his De revolutionibus, published in 1543 with the help of the Lutheran Georg Rheticus (1514-1574). It was Rheticus who conjured up the quip that ‘the Bible only teaches us how to go to heaven not how the heavens go,’ in order to pave the way for further changes to Scripture as the Protestant Reformation was inclined to do. Martin Luther’s best-known doctrine explains the connection between the two:
‘If someone equipped with the tools of reading could reinterpret the text of either the Bible or the Book of Nature – independent of intervening layers of authority – whole new possibilities of understanding could emerge in the natural sciences as well as in theology.’--- Prof. Danielson: The First Copernican, p.21.
‘Before he left Varmia in 1541 Rheticus had composed his own small tract to demonstrate the absence of conflict between heliocentrism and the Bible…. He went on to make a distinction that is still part of the faith-science dialogue: In the Bible the Holy Spirit’s intention, declared Rheticus, is not to teach science but to impart only spiritual truths “necessary for Salvation.”’--- Dennis Danielson: The First Copernican, 2006, p.108.
Neither Copernicus or his book, printed by a Protestant publishing company by the way, were ever condemned by the Catholic Church in his time because in De revolutionibus’s preface, another Protestant, Andreas Osiander, stated its heliocentrism was not offered as a truth, but only as a new way to calculate mathematical movements in the universe. And that is how Copernicus and De revolutionibus managed to avoid a Church condemnation in the 16th century.
‘And if [this book] constructs and thinks up causes - and it has certainly thought up a good many - nevertheless it does not think them up in order to persuade anyone of their truth but only that they provide a correct basis for calculation… Maybe the philosopher demands probability instead; but neither of them will grasp anything certain or hand it on, unless it has been divinely revealed to him.’--- De revolution.
Two years later, in 1545, the Council of Trent was convoked in response to the Protestant reformation and rebellion against various Catholic dogmas, doctrines and Biblical revelations. Its twenty-five sessions lasted eighteen years (1545-1563) and were presided over by four popes, Pope Paul III (1534-1549), Julius III (1550-1555), Marcellus II (1555) and Pius IV (1559-1565). In session four of April 8, 1546, the Council ruled:
‘No one shall dare interpret the said Sacred Scripture contrary to that sense held by Mother Church, whose duty it is to judge regarding the true sense and interpretation of Scripture, or even contrary to the unanimous consent of the Fathers.’---Trent.
Here above the Council of Trent teaches that whatever is in the Bible held by the Church and all the Fathers as a revealed truth, that cannot be denied or changed. In Trent’s 1566 Catechism teaching on the Fathers’ Creation, we find the following placed under ‘Catholic belief in God the Creator:’
‘I Believe in God, Almighty Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth. He followed no external form or model; but contemplating, and as it were imitating, the universal model contained in the divine intelligence, the supreme Architect, with infinite wisdom and power created all things in the beginning. He so ordered the celestial bodies in a certain and uniform course that nothing varies more than their continual revolution, while nothing is more fixed than their variety…. The Earth God commanded to stand in the midst of the world, rooted in its own foundations [Psa. 103:5: You fixed the Earth upon its foundations, not to be moved forever].’
After Copernicus, the old sun-centred heretical doctrines began to attract new recruits like Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). Bruno, a priest who defrocked himself to spread Copernicus’s heliocentrism and other condemned associated heresies throughout Europe, was caught and put on trial by the Inquisition in 1593. Prof. Martinez, in his Pythagoras, Bruno Galileo: The Pagan Heresies of the Copernicans, records 54 accusations of heresies and false philosophies dealt with in Bruno’s seven-year trial. They included that Bruno said the Scriptures were just a series of dreams, that humans existed before Adam and Eve, that there is no eternal Hell, that all go to Heaven eventually, that Moses was a wise magician, that Christ was one too, and that when Bruno was in prison he said many blasphemous things against Christ, like that as God, Jesus was a traitor who doesn’t govern the world well. Bruno was also accused of saying substance cannot be created or destroyed, that the universe is infinite, that there are many worlds with rational beings on them, that the Earth has a soul so therefore moves, and the soul of the universe is the Holy Spirit. We see then, what began with Copernicus’s moving Earth, other pagan heresies and false philosophies arose as a result. Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for refusing to repent some of his heresies lest they caused other souls to be lost to Hell. Nevertheless most of these pagan beliefs, under the disguise of empirical science, began to spread further abroad, becoming an integral part of the Renaissance and following it, the so-called Enlightenment of mankind.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
The next Earthmover to emerge was the astronomer, philosopher and physicist Galileo Galilei, who, in his 1613 Letters on Sunspots, unequivocally asserted the Mediterranean tide proved the Earth spins and orbits a fixed-sun. In the same year, Galileo wrote his Letter to Castelli that included:
‘The Holy Scriptures can never lie or err, and its declarations are absolutely and inviolably true. Though the Bible cannot err, nevertheless some of its interpreters and expositors can sometimes err in various ways. One of these would be very serious and very frequent, namely, to want to limit oneself always to the literal meaning of the words… It seems to me in disputes about natural phenomena, the Bible should be reserved to the last place… In order to adopt itself to the understanding of all people, it was appropriate for the Scripture to say many things that are different from absolute truth. Given this, and moreover it being obvious that two truths can never contradict each other, the task of wise interpreters is to strive to find the true meanings of Scriptural passages agreeing with those physical conclusions of which we are already certain and sure from clear sensory experience or from necessary demonstrations.’--- Galileo: Letter to Castelli, 1613.
In 1615, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, in a letter to Fr Paolo Foscarini, wrote:
‘Nor may it be answered that this [geocentrism] is not a matter of faith, for if it is not a matter of faith from the point of view of the subject matter (ex parte objecti), it is a matter of faith on the part of the ones who have spoken (ex parte dicentis). It would be just as heretical to deny that Abraham had two sons and Jacob twelve, as it would be to deny the virgin birth of Christ, for both are declared by the Holy Ghost through the prophets and apostles.’
In 1616, Galileo completed and expanded on his opinion, addressing it this time to the Grand Duchess Christina in which Galileo’s arrogance and pride in himself was manifest, and in which he again claimed that the Earth moved. In that same year, Pope Paul V and Cardinal Bellarmine - two of the Inquisition consultors at Bruno’s trial from 1593 to 1600 when this pagan heliocentric heresy was once again condemned - having consulted the astronomers of the 1616 Vatican if any proof for heliocentrism was true, were told absolutely not, they then asked theologians of the Holy Office to confirm the Church’s ruling on this matter as defined in the past. Hereunder the result:
(1) “That the sun is in the centre of the world and altogether immovable by local movement,” was unanimously declared to be “foolish, philosophically absurd, and formally heretical [the denial of a revelation by God already defined as heresy] inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the declarations of Holy Scripture in many passages, according to the proper meaning of the language used, and the sense in which they have been expounded and understood by the Fathers and theologians.”
(2) “That the Earth is not the centre of the world, and moves as a whole, and also with a diurnal movement,” was unanimously declared “to deserve the same censure philosophically, and, theologically considered to be at least erroneous in faith.”
On the 5th March 1616, Pope Paul V as Prefect of the Holy Office, ordered the above decree confirming it as a formal heresy, be made known to all, and that books and docuмents of the time presenting the heresy were to be banned and placed on the Index. Galileo, was warned by Cardinal Bellarmine and we believe Fr de Lauda of the Inquisition, never again to promote Biblical heliocentrism in any way. In 1621, Pope Paul V and Cardinal Bellarmine died. With both gone, Galileo bided his time waiting for the chance to challenge the ban on his heliocentrism as the true meaning of Scripture. This he did in his 1632 book Dialogue. After reading his book, the new pope, Urban VIII, a friend of Galileo’s, put him on trial in 1633 for disobedience and heresy. It was, Pope Urban VIII said, a matter that ‘put Christianity in danger.’ The Pope knew that if Galileo’s heliocentrism was spread throughout Christian lands, then other Pythagorean heresies and false philosophies would follow as a result. Knowing the consequences of being found guilty of heresy, Galileo, before the Inquisition in 1633, swore that he was never a convinced Earthmover, nor meant to present heliocentrism in his book as a certain truth.
Topic: The Earthmovers (Read 1686 times)