A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [45]
THE VIGOR of the new age was not found everywhere. Music, still lost in the blurry mists of the Dark Ages, was a Renaissance laggard; the motets, psalms, and Masses heard each Sabbath—many of them by Josquin des Prés of Flanders, the most celebrated composer of his day—fall dissonantly on the ears of those familiar with the soaring orchestral works which would captivate Europe in the centuries ahead, a reminder that in some respects one age will forever remain inscrutable to others.
Yet almost everywhere else there was an awareness of both endings and beginnings. Enormous cathedrals, monuments to the great faith which had held the Continent in its spell since the collapse of imperial Rome, now stood complete, awesome and matchless: Chartres, with its exquisite stained-glass windows and its vast Gothic north tower; Canterbury, the work of over four centuries; Munich’s Frauenkirche; and, in Rome itself, St. Peter’s, begun nearly twelve hundred years earlier and still, it seemed, unfinished, for Pope Julius II laid the first stone of a new basilica in 1506, proclaiming indulgences which required all sovereigns in Christendom to pay for its renewed splendor, thereby demonstrating their royal fealty to a Church still undivided.
But these achievements were culminations of dreams dreamed in other times, familiar and therefore comfortable to those loyal to the fading Middle Ages. Their day was ending; for every house of God now there were thousands of new words and thoughts challenging the bedrock assumptions of the past. Among the masses, for example, it continued to be an article of faith that the world was an immovable disk around which the sun revolved, and that the rest of the cosmos comprised heaven, which lay dreamily above the skies, inhabited by cherubs, and hell, flaming deep beneath the European soil. Everyone believed, indeed knew, that.
Everyone, that is, except Mikolaj Kopernik, a Polish physician and astronomer, whose name had been Latinized, as was the custom, to Nicolaus Copernicus. After years of observing the skies with a primitive telescope and consulting mathematical tables which he had copied at the University of Kraków, Copernicus had reached the conclusion—which at first seemed absurd, even to him —that the earth was actually moving. In 1514 he showed friends a short manuscript, De hypothesibus motuum coelestium a se constitutis commentariolus (Little Commentary), challenging the ancient Ptolemaic assumptions, and this was followed by the fuller De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs), in which he concluded that the earth, far from being the center of the universe, merely rotated on its own axis and orbited around a stationary sun once a year.
In the sixth volume of his Story of Civilization, Will Durant notes that Pope Leo X, who succeeded Julius, made no summary judgment of Copernicus. Being a humanist, the pontiff sent Copernicus an encouraging note, and liberal members of the Curia approved. But the astronomer’s work was not widely circulated until after his death, and his peers then were divided into those who laughed at him and those who denounced him. The offended included some of the brightest and most independent men on the Continent. Martin Luther wrote: “People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. … This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astrology; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth.” John Calvin quoted the Ninety-third Psalm, “The world also is stabilized, that it cannot