I.
POPULAR ASTRONOMY IN ITALY
IN DANTE’S TIME.
In the first part of this book we have sketched the story of man’s thoughts about the stars, from primitive days until the thirteenth century of our era. We have seen what a wealth of imagination and invention the Greeks brought to bear on the purely empirical science of Egypt and Babylon and Homeric Greece, and how out of all the systems devised by them between 600 b.c. and 100 b.c. one survived, which was completed and expounded by Ptolemy in the second century after Christ in his great Syntax or Almagest. Its fundamental principles were that Earth is a sphere, at rest in the centre of the Universe, surrounded on all sides by spherical heavens, and that the movements of all the heavenly bodies are explained by a combination of uniform circular movements.
In the succeeding centuries there were few who could appreciate his work, and during the Dark Ages it was scarcely known in Europe, but was preserved by Nestorian Christians in schools and monasteries of Persia, whence it was unearthed by Mahomedan princes, five centuries after Ptolemy’s death; and when another five centuries had passed it was brought back to Europe, tinged with Oriental thought, and almost immediately became immensely popular among scholars.
Then there arose one of the world’s greatest poets, and, a thousand years after Ptolemy’s death, immortalized his work, writing in a tongue unknown to Ptolemy, and for nations which in his day were only just struggling into existence. As Homer reflects to us man’s primitive conceptions of the Universe, so Dante reflects the ideas of Ptolemy and his school.
And because he lived just at this time he was able to write with perfect confidence, quoting Ptolemy and the Catholic Faith side by side as infallible authorities in astronomy. Had he lived in the early Christian centuries he would have been obliged to choose between classical and orthodox views; had he been born three centuries later, he would have found Copernicus and Galileo ranged against Ptolemy and the Church. Even Milton writing a hundred years after the death of Copernicus, could not make up his mind which system to adopt, and the astronomy of Paradise Lost is a curious jumble of ancient, modern, and transitional ideas. He describes the Primum Mobile as a “firm opacous globe”[71] on which Satan alights and walks about, yet later on tells us that we need not believe in its existence if Earth is turning on her axis;[72] the archangel Raphæl describes to Adam the Creation, at which he was present, yet declares that he himself does not know whether the sun circles round Earth, or Earth round the sun. This the great Architect had wisely concealed from man and angel,
“perhaps to move His laughter at their quaint opinions wide, Hereafter when they come to model heaven, And calculate the stars, how they will wield The mighty frame, how build, unbuild, contrive, To save appearances; how gird the sphere With centric and eccentric scribbled o’er, Cycle and epicycle, orb in orb.”[73]
Such inconsistencies are not found in Dante’s work, and nothing could have been further from his thoughts than to imagine the Creator mocking at man’s mistakes and ignorance. Like the angelic doctor, Thomas Aquinas, he considered man’s desire for knowledge as one of his highest attributes, and believed that it had been given to him in order to be satisfied.
But before we examine Dante’s writings, it will be interesting to form an idea of the spirit in which astronomy was generally regarded by his fellow-countrymen, and what were his opportunities of studying it.