According to Online Etymological Dictionary,* the noun whirl took on a figurative meaning of “confused activity” in the 1550s. The beginning of that decade also saw the birth of Pope Paul V, the pontiff under whom Galileo faced an inquisition over his support for heliocentric cosmology and under whom Copernicus’ book on the subject was proscribed. It is a tale well told by many. Why should we retell it here? Indulge me.
First a retelling:
The Church’s leader met with Galileo in 1616 (the year when both Shakespeare and Cervantes died). It was in February of that year that a Church committee of “qualifiers” denounced heliocentrism as an idea "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture...." By March 5 of that year, the Congregation of the Index had placed Copernicus’ work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium on the famous list of forbidden books. Six days later Galileo had his meeting with Pope Paul.
By the seventeenth century the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology had been the standard model of celestial bodies for more than a thousand years. People were used to it. In that cosmology, all the bodies whirled around Earth, the center of the universe. For centuries there was no apparent confusion on the subject. And it made theological sense because geocentrism places the Creator, called the Prime Mover—that is, the One who started the orbiting movements of the celestial bodies—outside and above all. As a corollary, geocentrism placed the Satan, the Adversary, farthest from God—that is, in the center of Earth.
Thus, the hierarchy of moral authority for Paul V and his predecessors and contemporaries seemed soundly based on a physical reality: The Ultimate Moral Authority of God passed from “on high” through angels to the Church, its Pope and Prelates, and finally to the laity. The Great Chain of Being ran from God to the deeply buried devil whose existence seem to lie beneath even the plants and rocks. It was a truly a moral system without confusion. Then those two troublemakers came along.
Copernicus and Galileo discerned the end of that whirling geocentric cosmos and replaced it with a different model, and by doing so ended the moral certainty of the ancient and medieval minds. In introducing a new order, they introduced moral confusion. The ancient and medieval moral authorities long associated the physical cosmos with a spiritual one. Overturning one meant overturning the other.
Copernicus and Galileo placed the Sun—the source of light and by association the most godlike of physical objects—in the position formerly occupied by the devil, a position that became a disturbing threat to the prevailing theology. What was one to think about the new proximity of God and the Adversary? How could the new model serve as a physical analog of moral authority?
Second, some questions about the bases of your moral system:
Now centuries after the fall of the Ptolemaic model, optical and radio telescopes, space explorers and spacecraft, and a massive collider at CERN have elucidated whirling from the universe’s largest objects to the smallest. We have little or no confusion about the physics of whirls. But we now have about a half millennium of confusion about moral authority. Yes, there are still those who crave a hierarchy and see a need for it, and yes, there are those who see just confusion, a meaningless jumble that is independent of any physical analog of order.
How does this play out for you? Do you see in yourself any ambivalence in accepting authority? Do you have an affinity for an overriding stability while desiring individuality? Do you want, for example, a top-down hierarchy unless it interferes with your concept that you are a personal center of the cosmos? Or do you want bottom-up model unless it fails to protect individual freedom? Are you a proponent of an overriding ethical system or a proponent of unbridled freedom? Somewhere in between? Do you recognize any moral center? Or, following Giordano Bruno, a contemporary of Paul V, do you accept an acentric cosmos as your moral analog? And in that instance, do you accept a moral system without an identifiable order?
Overturning the geocentric model of Ptolemy might be categorized as one of the chief early steps along the road to the moral confusion of our era. The events of 1616 exacerbated confusion about a hierarchy of moral authority that Martin Luther had questioned 99 years earlier. Mainstream western moral life was simpler during geocentric times. It became more complex under heliocentric times. Today, under the acentric models of either the Big Bang or colliding branes in a multiverse, moral life is often a whirling confusion.
Can you see a connection between your morality and your world model? Is your moral system an order imposed on whirling confusion? If it is, is it an order that you devised or one that you accepted? Is your moral system Ptolemaic? Is it based on an ostensible order that, in reality, is no more accurate than geocentrism?
The western world has whirled in moral confusion for 500 years. Will you be a modern Copernicus or Galileo and define a new model as the basis for moral certainty?
* http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=whirl&allowed_in_frame=0
First a retelling:
The Church’s leader met with Galileo in 1616 (the year when both Shakespeare and Cervantes died). It was in February of that year that a Church committee of “qualifiers” denounced heliocentrism as an idea "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture...." By March 5 of that year, the Congregation of the Index had placed Copernicus’ work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium on the famous list of forbidden books. Six days later Galileo had his meeting with Pope Paul.
By the seventeenth century the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology had been the standard model of celestial bodies for more than a thousand years. People were used to it. In that cosmology, all the bodies whirled around Earth, the center of the universe. For centuries there was no apparent confusion on the subject. And it made theological sense because geocentrism places the Creator, called the Prime Mover—that is, the One who started the orbiting movements of the celestial bodies—outside and above all. As a corollary, geocentrism placed the Satan, the Adversary, farthest from God—that is, in the center of Earth.
Thus, the hierarchy of moral authority for Paul V and his predecessors and contemporaries seemed soundly based on a physical reality: The Ultimate Moral Authority of God passed from “on high” through angels to the Church, its Pope and Prelates, and finally to the laity. The Great Chain of Being ran from God to the deeply buried devil whose existence seem to lie beneath even the plants and rocks. It was a truly a moral system without confusion. Then those two troublemakers came along.
Copernicus and Galileo discerned the end of that whirling geocentric cosmos and replaced it with a different model, and by doing so ended the moral certainty of the ancient and medieval minds. In introducing a new order, they introduced moral confusion. The ancient and medieval moral authorities long associated the physical cosmos with a spiritual one. Overturning one meant overturning the other.
Copernicus and Galileo placed the Sun—the source of light and by association the most godlike of physical objects—in the position formerly occupied by the devil, a position that became a disturbing threat to the prevailing theology. What was one to think about the new proximity of God and the Adversary? How could the new model serve as a physical analog of moral authority?
Second, some questions about the bases of your moral system:
Now centuries after the fall of the Ptolemaic model, optical and radio telescopes, space explorers and spacecraft, and a massive collider at CERN have elucidated whirling from the universe’s largest objects to the smallest. We have little or no confusion about the physics of whirls. But we now have about a half millennium of confusion about moral authority. Yes, there are still those who crave a hierarchy and see a need for it, and yes, there are those who see just confusion, a meaningless jumble that is independent of any physical analog of order.
How does this play out for you? Do you see in yourself any ambivalence in accepting authority? Do you have an affinity for an overriding stability while desiring individuality? Do you want, for example, a top-down hierarchy unless it interferes with your concept that you are a personal center of the cosmos? Or do you want bottom-up model unless it fails to protect individual freedom? Are you a proponent of an overriding ethical system or a proponent of unbridled freedom? Somewhere in between? Do you recognize any moral center? Or, following Giordano Bruno, a contemporary of Paul V, do you accept an acentric cosmos as your moral analog? And in that instance, do you accept a moral system without an identifiable order?
Overturning the geocentric model of Ptolemy might be categorized as one of the chief early steps along the road to the moral confusion of our era. The events of 1616 exacerbated confusion about a hierarchy of moral authority that Martin Luther had questioned 99 years earlier. Mainstream western moral life was simpler during geocentric times. It became more complex under heliocentric times. Today, under the acentric models of either the Big Bang or colliding branes in a multiverse, moral life is often a whirling confusion.
Can you see a connection between your morality and your world model? Is your moral system an order imposed on whirling confusion? If it is, is it an order that you devised or one that you accepted? Is your moral system Ptolemaic? Is it based on an ostensible order that, in reality, is no more accurate than geocentrism?
The western world has whirled in moral confusion for 500 years. Will you be a modern Copernicus or Galileo and define a new model as the basis for moral certainty?
* http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=whirl&allowed_in_frame=0
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