Closed Worlds, Infinite Universes (A Snapshot of the intro to Chapter 9 of Flat Earths and Fake Footnotes)

Oh, and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space

Gnaws at our faces. … Fling the emptiness out of your arms

Into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds

will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying. …

Appearance ceaselessly rises … like dew from the morning grass

What is ours floats into air, like steam from a dish

Of hot food. O’ smile, where are you going? O’ upturned glance:

New warm receding wave on the sea of the heart …

Alas, but that is what we are. Does the infinite space

We dissolve into, taste of us then?

—Rilke, Duino Elegies, excerpted from the First and Second Elegies

Santa Maria degli Angeli with light entering upon the floor

Beneath the wandering sun making its practiced course westward sits the half-orbed dome of the Santa Maria degli Angeli (Saint Mary of the Angels), a grand basilica constructed in the 16th century by Michaelangelo Buanarroti. (Yes, that Michaelangelo). The sunlight, having made its eight-minute journey through the blackened void of space approaches Saint Mary of the Angels and effortlessly falls through an opening in the ceiling painted with rays resembling the sun. Passing through as a thin column, a small disc of white and yellow light then opens upon the polished marbled floor as an exhalation of the morning where the day stretches its limbs and welcomes itself into this place of worship. A menagerie of subtle colors embedded in the marble in turn greet this small breath of light, and stir as if alive. As the seconds pass, the trembling column of day slowly moves in a straight line, creeping steadily toward solar noon. There, it will intersect with an inlaid track of thin brass running through the floor. The meridian line.

One can easily miss it, distracted by the grandeur of the building which surrounds and enframes and pronounces the glory of God. But as scripture notes—where God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness—the line’s frail bronze whisper through the floorboards may nonetheless stand out: far from being in symmetry with the construction of the building, the track obeys its own, apparently arbitrary course cutting through all architectural sense and heading where it will. Like Christ, it’s kingdom is not of this world. In other cathedrals such as the Basilica de San Petronio in Bologna, Italy, such lines run their apparently random race for a length of almost two-hundred and twenty feet. To deepen the mystery of the headstrong little trail, on either side signs of the Zodiac appear. But this is no callback to paganism. Rather, it is an astronomical calendar that recalls for many an unknown past: cathedrals as solar observatories. And much like the Israelites plundered Egyptian gold to use for the purposes of worshipping, not the Egyptian coterie of divinities, but YHWH, so here the band of the celestial zodiac has been marshalled for a new purpose: to calculate the resurrection of the Son of God, and more precisely locate the date of Easter. 

This is no simple task. By official decree, Easter was declared to occur on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. This means that Easter has no set date to fall upon—neither solar nor lunar calendars have an even number of days, or an even number of full moons, and—what is to restate much the same—Sundays do not reoccur yearly on the same dates. One of the easiest ways to determine Easter was therefore to set up a line running north and south in such a way that one could observe “how long the sun’s noon image took to return to the same spot on the line.” But this itself was not so simple, and its accuracy relied on a myriad of factors being as precise as possible—the construction and orientation of the cathedral, proper positioning of the hole letting the sunlight in to speak of its secrets, the placement of the meridian rod, the perfect leveling of the floor. Much as a star announced the birth of the Lord by peering down over Bethlehem, so in these cathedrals theologians look upward as they listened in to the secret languages of the heavens to determine the Savior’s magnificent reversal of death.

Yet, in a theme that has frequented these pages, even to historians this is something of a forgotten segment of history. “I can say I literally tripped over the subject,” says historian John Heilbron to journalist Geoff Manaugh in an interview with Atlas Obscura. As he continued the interview, he began to laugh. The lesson, he said, “is that in a church you need to look down as well as up.” [1] To step over the meridian line is not merely to pass over an odd sliver in the flooring, but as one eighteenth century commentator noted it marks “an epoch in the history of the renewal of the sciences.” Indeed, the story of this delicate strand, as Heilbron records in his book Sun in the Church recording his lost discoveries in a manner reminiscent of Duhem (though Heilbron refers to it as the Catholic variation on the “Merton thesis”), ties together “many fields now usually held apart.” Not just theology, but “architecture, astronomy, ecclesiastical and civil history, mathematics, and philosophy.”[2] What a marvel it is to watch the amber heavens run across a misfit little line, set askew centuries ago like a prophecy into stone, and follow its adventuring course as if it were fate itself. “Shafts from the sun fall through the dome and windows of the cathedral to make puddles of light on the marble floor. Shadows cast by the obelisk in the square outside serve as a gigantic solar clock. At sunset, rays shining through the stained-glass window over the western altar dramatize the presence, and indicates the aptness, of the sun in the church.”[3] To stand there in a cathedral is to gaze upward toward God, yes—but through that infinitely glittered ladder of the universe, that Dalmatian horizon that urges the earth onward through space.

Heilbron’s discovery, like many others we have spoken of, unweaves the long war of Christianity and science. More than that, it reveals that the opposite was more often the case: “The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, probably all other, institutions.”[4]

So many stories have come down to us indicating theologians hated the heavens, and cowered before its infinity. These stories and images come in all shapes and sizes. One thinks of the accusation of the churchmen Cesare Cremonini, who would not even acquiesce to look into Galileo’s telescope to view the roof of nature as it was. Or, for example, the courageous tale of the mathematician Pierre Simon de la Place telling Napolean Bonaparte he had no need of God as a hypothesis which we briefly saw at the end of chapter two. Or, yet another, the ludicrous example of Pope Calixtus III (AD 1378-1458) who is condemned in the collective memory of textbooks for excommunicating Halley’s comet after seeing it as an ill omen. Every time a notable comet jaunts through the sky in recent memory, one news agency or another brings up this humorous canard. One is reminded of a moment in The Simpsons when Grandpa Abe Simpson—a character known for his senility, irrelevance, and irrational anger—is lampooned by the local Springfield newspaper with a picture of him shaking his fist at the sky under the caption “Old Man Yells At Cloud.” The tale of Calixtus is not true (in fact, it was invented by Pierre Simon de la Place),[5] and though it is certainly less subtle than some of the myths we have been covering, it too takes its place in the menagerie of examples of warfare. Even such easily debunked examples reinforce a grand story of church buffoonery and scientific heroism.

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[1] Geoff Manaugh, "Why Catholics Built Secret Astronomical Features into Churches to Help Save Souls," Atlas Obscura (November 15, 2016). https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/catholics-built-secret-astronomical-features-into-churches-to-help-save-souls

[2] Heilbron, Sun in the Church, 5.

[3] Heilbron, Sun in the Church, 21.

[4] Heilbron, Sun in the Church, 3.

[5] See: Williams F. Rigge, “An Historical Examination of the Connection of Calixtus III with Halley’s Comet,” Popular Astronomy vol. 18 (1910): 214-219, who summarizes a lengthier 40-page document released by the Vatican that year debunking the myth. “Laplace, Daru, Arago, Littrow, Smyth, Grant, Babinet, Chambers, Flamarion, Draper, Newcomb, Jamin, White, Henkel, Dean, and The Scientific American [all use this apocryphal tale]. It is very interesting to read many variations that these writers put upon the story. Some of these [can be] trac[ed] to previous writers, whose words have been marvelously misstated or added to. … Saint Antoninus, Aeneas Sylvius, Saint John Capistran, ten Italian and seven foreign chroniclers, not a single one of whom connects Calixtus III in any way with Halley’s comet, although they all more or less mention the bull, the prayers, the processions, the Turks, the comet, and other items.” (215). Accessible online: http://adsbit.harvard.edu//full/1910PA.....18..214R/0000214.000.html. Accessed October 5^th, 2019).