2.
Bruno will be remembered for a long time as a
bold and audacious
soul, gifted with an unusually fiery
temperament. It was, however, by
following the path
of observation that astronomy leaped forward with
Kepler and Galileo; the spirit of the times was all for
observation. It was
a novel thing to devote so much
time and effort to determining the orbit of
Mars, and
especially to do what Kepler did, not without anguish,
namely, to sacrifice doctrine for facts and the dogma
of the perfect circle
for the evidence of the ellipse.
It would have been unthinkable, a half
century earlier,
to perfect, as Galileo did, a magnifying lens as a tele-
scope directed towards unknowable
celestial bodies,
and to accept the facts of a moon with mountains, a
sun soiled with spots, and celestial bodies woven out
of the same elements
as the earth.
However, the victory of the sons of Heraclitus was
hotly disputed. What
resisted change and the infinite
was not primarily, as is commonly
believed, the con-
servatism of the Church and the Aristotelian School-
men, but rather a bundle of prejudices which
occupied
the framework of their inner lives. It is hard to under-
stand today the moral collapse which the
crumbling
of the immutable Firmament signified for the sons of
Parmenides. After losing the physical shelter and moral
asylum of that
deathless sphere towards which he could
look for a refuge, man felt as
exposed as a mollusk
whose shell is broken. In the
Dialogues of Bruno and
of Galileo, the Parmenidean role is played
by car-
icatured persons: “Where
then is that beautiful order
and that elegant hierarchy of
Nature?” moans Bruno's
critical interlocutor. Still the
bewilderment and confu-
sion of Simplicius and
his like are natural and worthy
of compassion. John Donne spoke the same
language:
“... all coherence gone.” Even in the soul
of the
innovators opposing reactions conflict with one another
and
block progress.
The case of Kepler is typical. This great mind
brought together within
himself in tense opposition
Heraclitus and Parmenides. He started from a
dream
of classical harmony, from a Pythagorean worship of
numbers and
shapes. He shied away from the Infinite,
because nobody could locate any
determinate place
in it (De stella nova,
1606). He needed a hierarchy,
a special nobility for the Sun and the Earth.
His uni-
verse has a center, it remains
spherical, and his pro-
portions are based
on the regular solids, perfect poly-
gons, and
musical harmonies (Harmonice mundi, 1619).
Kepler made sure to integrate into this equilibrium the
discoveries of his
own calculations: the elliptical orbits
of the planets and the inequalities
of their motion.
But Kepler's geometric God is also an energetic God;
the fusion of these two
natures was achieved at the
summit of Kepler's genius. The sun, image of
the Fa-
ther, is the source of life and motion;
from the central
astral body, there emanates a “moving
force,” an “im-
material substance” which draws the planets, an idea
which came close to Newton's universal force of at-
traction. In Kepler's Pythagorean cosmos, we have the
first
model of a dynamic universe, the first hint of
Energy.
