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An Angel's View of Heaven: The Mystical Heliocentricity of Medieval Geocentric Cosmology

2012; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 50; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1177/007327531205000102

1753-8564

Keith A. Hutchison,

History and Developments in Astronomy

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)1. A PROBLEM AND ITS CONTEXTThis essay is about medieval heliocentricity. It pursues a surprising conclusion. Put starkly, I seek to show that the scholastic universe was widely understood to have a heliocentric design. This heliocentricity had, however, been defectively realized in the final materialization of God's cosmic plan, so was very different to the heliocentrism later pursued by Copernicus, and certainly did not put the Earth in motion. As my title suggests, the central Sun was far more visible in the immaterial universe, the world of spirits, which functioned (in much medieval thought, following Plato's central ontological claim) as a pattern for the mundane world. Though much neglected in modern literature, this 'mystical heliocentricity' (as we might call it) was quite familiar to pre-Copernican audiences, and very common in pictorial representations of the cosmos. It is 'heliocentric' because its Neoplatonic geometry placed God qua true Sun (i.e. qua Platonic form of the familiar material Sun) at the centre of the angelic orbits of the Christian Heaven.1 Such heliocentricity lived sideby-side with other very different localizations of God, most notably the geocentric one (well known to historians) where Heaven was placed outside the stellar sphere. Both these arrangements were often interpreted metaphorically, but they were also interpreted realistically. The two schemes were alternatives rather than competitors, different conceptualizations of the same basic reality.A preliminary illustration of the contrasting models is provided by comparing an early sixteenth-century Coronation of the Virgin, by Pintoricchio2 and Caporali3 (Figure 1), with another Coronation from c. 1340 (Figure 2). In the fourteenthcentury depiction, the stellar sphere of medieval cosmology is quite recognizable, and is clearly concave towards Earth, even though the Earth is not included, for the picture shows Mary on her way to Heaven in the space between a central Earth and the stellar sphere. The subsequent coronation is also shown,4 in Heaven, outside the mundane universe, on the convex side of the stellar sphere. This is exactly the arrangement one would expect, given the medieval assimilation of Aristotle's cosmology.But depictions of the coronation often display a very different geometry, that evident in our sixteenth-century example (Figure 1). Pintoricchio' s composition has a completely different design, and what seems to be his stellar sphere (the obvious almond-shaped 'mandorla' framing the action, blue with yellow dots) is concave towards the coronation, so concave towards Heaven. It has thus been given a curvature that is quite enigmatic, the very opposite of that evident in the fourteenth-century example (Figure 2), and thus the reverse of that demanded by geocentric cosmology. The bulk of the essay below is devoted to explaining this inverted curvature, for once that is understood, we will quickly be able to understand a second deviation in Pintoricchio's composition: the fact that his picture seems (especially when viewed in full colour5) to portray a heliocentric arrangement of the universe, even though it dates from around 1503, the period of Copernicus's student days in Italy. For a Sunlike entity is placed at the centre of Pintoricchio's stellar sphere.It is important to realize that these two deviations are by no means unique to our sixteenth-century example, or restricted to coronations. Both are very widespread indeed, and not at all unusual.6 (If anything, our fourteenth-century coronation on the convex, 'Aristotelian', side of the stellar sphere is the rarity, but again our example is by no means unique.7) The Pintoricchio deviations can be readily traced back to at least the thirteenth century, in all sorts of subject matter - though coronations do tend to display them particularly vividly; and our 1503 specimen presents both deviations together in a particularly clear fashion. …