This Is No Place, but Here I Am

One group of the religious looked upon the absorption with secondary causes as a deflection from contemplation of the divine Primary Cause and hence suspect, if not heretical, especially when propositions like the Copernican hypothesis, touted as absolute truths, contradicted the literal sense of the Bible. ¹

Utopian Thought in the Western World

If there was an infinity of worlds, as Bruno maintained, for whom
in particular had Christ died on this earth? If the universe was eternal, what would become of God the Creator? Acceptance of the Copernican cosmology was a religious act that bore serious consequences in its contradiction of the biblical texts. ²

Utopian Thought in the Western World

Moon voyages became popular in the 1630s, their underlying inspiration Galileo’s telescope and the curiosity it piqued about the planet; but the way of reaching the new world on the moon was more important than the substance of an ideal society. Kepler’s Somnium of a man on the moon viewing the earth was in the service of the Copernican hypothesis. ³

Utopian Thought in the Western World

It was taken for granted that spiritual power was to be founded upon scientific knowledge as the Pansophists understood it. Though Comenius once possessed a copy of Copernicus’ famous work in manuscript, he never committed himself to the heliocentric hypothesis. ⁴

Utopian Thought in the Western World

The rebirth of the solar religions has been associated with the growth of centralized dynastic states and the Copernican heliocentric theory of the universe. Utopian sun cults were doubtless inspired by both of these developments, as well as the Renaissance revival of images from what was believed to be Egyptian hermeticism. Accounts of Mexican and Peruvian sunworship fortified the idea that this was the primordial natural religion of man, to which he would return when theological Christianity had disappeared. ⁵

Utopian Thought in the Western World

Once we are committed to this ideology of cosmic evolution, the narrow five millennia of recorded history with their minor progressions, regressions, cycles, and sinusoidal curves appear terrifyingly diminished. And yet the neo-evolutionists would insist that their teachings are raising man to a higher rather than a lower place in the scheme of things. Far from being dethroned as the king of nature, he is restored to a grander position than he occupied before the Copernican revolution.

The earth may now be a mere planet moving around the sun, but man is no longer confined to it. His spiritual energy, his reason, his brain power, his psyche, his consciousness have become the center and the purpose of the whole universe, of the cosmic process. The old Adam was ruler of the beasts but subservient to his Creator and on a lower rung than the angels. The new Adam, as a result of his own will and struggle, towers in the forefront of all being, the end of billions of years of history—an intoxicating conception, frightening in its hubris, if there are gods to envy him. ⁶

Utopian Thought in the Western World