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This astronomer couldn't be accused of having his head in the clouds

by Mark Galli

Nicholas Copernicus was born the youngest of four children on February 19, 1473, in the Polish city of Torun, then part of Prussia. His father was a successful merchant, and his mother, Barbara, was from a prosperous German family. When Copernicus's father died in 1483, Barbara's oldest brother became the children's guardian.

In 1491, Nicholas and his brother Andreas were sent to the University of Cracow, where Nicholas first took an interest in astronomy ("most beautiful and most worth knowing," he said). After four years, Nicholas continued his studies at the University of Bologna. There he met scholars who challenged Aristotle's (based on Ptolemy's) cosmology—that the earth was at the center of the universe. Copernicus himself thought it an inelegant arrangement for something "built for us by the Best and Most Orderly Workman of all." At Bologna, Copernicus made his first astronomical observations—done with the naked eye.

After a brief visit home to be installed as canon (a salaried staff position in a cathedral), he returned to Italy to complete his doctorate of law and to study medicine at the University of Padua. In 1506, he returned to Poland, having mastered all the knowledge of the day in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and theology.

As a canon, Copernicus served as confidant and secretary to his uncle, the bishop, and as a physician to the poor. Though weighed down with administrative and medical duties, he found time to formulate his ideas on astronomy into a booklet he called his Little Commentary (1512). He was not treading popular ground. Medieval theologians had nearly made it a point of orthodoxy that the earth was the center of the solar system, proof that humankind was the center of God's attention. Still Copernicus considered it his "loving duty to seek the truth in all things, in so far as God has granted that to human reason."

In 1514, the pope asked if Copernicus could help revise the calendar. Copernicus replied that "the magnitude of the years and months … had not yet been measured with sufficient accuracy." But he took this as a personal challenge and turned his tower apartments into a night observatory. His daylight hours were spent on his official duties with the sick, in administration, and guiding the diocese through a war between the Teutonic Knights and the King of Poland.

Eventually Copernicus passed on his official responsibilities to younger men and settled into semi-retirement in his private observatory. This might have been the end of a full life had not a young Lutheran mathematician and disciple, George Joachim von Lauchen (known as Rheticus), visited the old astronomer in 1539. His "visit" lasted two years.

Copernicus, invigorated by Rheticus's fervor, finally agreed to publish theories he'd been developing for a lifetime. In his On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543), he appealed to Pope Paul III to judge between him and the "idle talkers" who "although wholly ignorant of mathematics … distorting the sense of some passage in Holy Writ to suit their purpose … attack my work."

His work passed into the hands of the less courageous. His editor inserted an anonymous preface indicating that the work was a mathematical construct to better explain the motions of the planets, not a description of how the solar system actually worked.

Copernicus's ideas (though anticipated by some ancient astronomers like Greece's Aristarchus) were too much for contemporaries; even a revolutionary like Martin Luther found it impossible to believe the sun, not the earth, anchored the solar system.

It wasn't until Galileo (1564-1642) that Copernicus's ideas were seen for what they were—a revolution in how humankind conceived of itself. Copernicus, as much as Luther, revolutionized how Europeans thought of themselves, their world, and their God.

A Christian Reader original article.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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