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Some books are
dangerous and men would rather believe in them than the evidence of
their own eyes. Some books tell the truth and they bear the brunt of
criticism. Some books are declared anathema and are burned despite
the secrets they carry. Other books are lost and they hold the vision
that is needed…alas!
One day in 1300, when Dante was 35 years old he had a vision of
heaven and hell and he slowly wrote it down as the ‘Divine Comedy’.
He only just finished it before he died in 1321. The first popular
published version was not properly formed until 1472 but before that,
the book was circulated in sections such as L’Inferno and Purgatorio.
Leonardo Da Vinci had been given the original manuscript sections before
he died in 1519; gathering up these parts and adding some scrappy pages
concerning early astronomy to it from an acquaintance who had met
Copernicus. This odd compilation of papyrus, rough parchment and smooth
vellum bound in the skin of a stag, eventually came into the hands of
Galileo via friends in
Florence
. It rested on the shelf in Galileo’s laboratory in
the
School
of
Mathematics
at the
University
of
Padua
for some eighteen years.
Many miles from Galileo, out in the fields on the Great Padana
Plain were two snake hunters; young boys out for adventure and to make
some money. They were travelling Florentines, Cristoforo and Rafaello,
speaking a dialect that one day would become the lyrical language of the
whole of
Italy
. The heat was ferocious that day and thunderheads
were building as the afternoon drew on.
‘The snake is fast.’ said one boy. ‘If we could stop time
then we could just walk up and grab it.’
‘Ha!’ said his companion. ‘If we wanted time to stop we
would have to stop the sun in its journey across the sky, for that is
the measure of time. It is impossible.’
‘No, it is not - for my mother has told me that Joshua managed
this trick for one whole day! Now look, there’s a snake down in the
reeds by the river!’ cried his companion. They ran and pinned it with
a forked stick and then trod on its head.
‘We are crushing the very Devil himself and thus will gain the
eternal love of God!’ the boys exclaimed.
Now that we have done this’ said the Rafaello, ‘let us try to
stop the sun. Since your name is Cristoforo you must be nearer to God
than me so you shall shout - maybe like Joshua. But are you perhaps
frightened of shouting at God?’
‘Huh! A man such as me who grapples with snakes is not
frightened of anyone!’
So Cristoforo called loudly upon God to stop the sun and lo, a
dark cloud came and for a while they could not tell if the sun had
stopped its motion. Both boys felt their chilled skin rippling as waves
of fright crawled down their backs.
That evening, the long banded Aesculapian snake they had captured
and killed was left on the roof of their house to dry in the sun.
Impassive to the works of Man, the sun continued to burn brightly and to
move across the sky. Each day the two metres of skin became stiffer and
stiffer until it could be cut into bookmarks and sold in the market in
Padua
. There was good money in long snakes.
Archimbaldo, who had been to the market that day had given
Galileo a piece of this snakeskin It was a small 'tante grazie' gift to
repay Galileo for showing the man’s son how to add and subtract. When
reading Dante’s Divine Comedy that night, Galileo carefully laid the
snakeskin on the page as a bookmark intending to read the rest of the
chapter for the sixth time. He had seen a scrawled note in the margin
and intended to examine it more closely, but it was in a language he
could not understand. Time and a pressing list of experiments conspired
against him; in his busy life, he did not return to the book. When
Galileo moved to
Florence
he did not remember to take the book because it had
fallen down behind a crate of wine jars. It lay in the folds of a
curtain hem, in darkness, forgotten.
In 1609, when he was talking with colleagues about the wonders of
God’s Universe he was told by a traveller that a man called Lippershey,
a Dutch optician, had found a way to grind and smooth a piece of glass
and place it in a tube, causing distant objects to be suddenly nearer
than before. Galileo made such a device, firstly capable of bringing an
image three times nearer and then, with improvements made, thirty-two
times nearer. Using this ‘telescope’ he found that the inner planets
had phases just like the moon and therefore could only be going round
the sun, as Copernicus indicated. However that was not the
problem; the problem was the Book of Joshua.
As many realise now, the whole of formal and organised
Christianity has been built in ‘Ossa on Pelion’ fashion, a titanic
heap of appalling errors by well-meaning people. Only the essential
message of everlasting love remains, barely perceived or remembered;
lost behind a mist of fatuous golden frippery. Joshua is the sixth book
of the Old Testament; and the last book of the Hexateuch. Origen, the
precocious genius born in 185 called it the ‘Ship of Jesus’ wherein
the world is saved. This was unfortunately a gross error since the
Hebrew said ‘Jesus, Son of Nun’ and Origen mistook ‘Nun’ for
‘Nave’ = ship.
Galileo knew that more than two thousand years before him, five
and a half miles north north west of Jerusalem lay the land of the
Hivites in the ownership of the tribe of Benjamin and that here a
tabernacle had been built. This place was called
Gibeon
and it was here that the sun ‘stood still’.
People were fleeing to Beth-horon and when they reached Azekah in
Gibeon
many were killed by a storm of great hailstones.
Here Joshua cried out: ‘Sun,
stand thou still upon
Gibeon
; and thou, Moon, in the
valley
of
Ajalon
.’
The writer of Joshua, one of a group of scribes cobbling together
various old bits and pieces of jottings, a compilation on goatskin
parchment written by the unknown ‘Jasher’ from even earlier times,
then recorded:
‘And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people
had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in
the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven,
and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
And there was no day like that before it or after it that the LORD
hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the LORD fought for
Israel
.’
Copernicus had said that the earth went around the sun.
Galileo’s great dilemma was how to tell the Pope that this single day
of celestial aberration was not proof that Copernicus was wrong, nor was
Galileo’s telescope wrong. But how to do it? It was, after all, a
subject for the Inquisition and Galileo was made to retract the
assertion that the earth revolved around the sun because in Holy
Scripture, as we have seen, Joshua said that for one day, the sun and
the moon stood still in the sky, in the thrall of mother earth.
After Galileo’s first appearance before the Inquisition he
began to talk to Cardinal Bellarmine. Some empathy developed and
Bellarmine was later and most grudgingly heard to voice this supportive
statement:
‘I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and
does not revolve round the earth, but the earth round the sun, then it
will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the
passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather
say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false
which is demonstrated.’
So Galileo, sad, despondent, rejected and accused, looked about
him for the one thing that would make the Pope alter his
‘worldview’; but there was nothing.
Galileo, now in Arcetri and still under the threat of
imprisonment, grew old, as we all do and it seemed that he would die.
As he lay on his bed with the light from the window bathing the eyelids
of his blind eyes, he began to dream his last dream. He could see a
curtain and it was the curtain of heaven. The right hand veil stood a
million cubits high and the left one also. In the gap between the two
veils he could see a shining light. The light grew brighter and there
was a Great Hand beckoning. The hand had long fingers with perfect nails
and one finger began to point. The finger was pointing down to the
hem of the left hand curtain and there in its folds lay the lost book.
Galileo looked at the book and he saw the snakeskin bookmark. In
his minds eye he could see that the book had dropped open at the marked
page and he could see what was written on that page. They were words
that he had read many times but he had never grasped their true
significance. Those words by Dante that would make his proof to the Pope
complete. Dante was making his journey in the realms of Heaven,
Purgatory and Hell. On that page he had written ‘the love that moves
the sun and the other stars.’
But in the margin he could see that it was Da Vinci who had
written in his notorious reversed code ‘Aristarchus of Samos has a
proof that the earth encircles the sun and I have sewn the proof into
this book – seek the papyrus if you will.’ Sure enough, in his dream
he could see the page made of papyrus and the words of Aristarchus
explaining that a sun rotating around the earth would need to reach such
a velocity that it would burst apart.
These were the very proofs that Galileo needed. Since God was the
essence and epitome of love and the love of God maintained the Universe
- then if the sun had stopped its motion in the sky, for that period of
time there could be no love from God. Joshua was therefore in error.
Since God was the essence of goodness he could never have withdrawn his
love, even for one second for then he would have been a mere fair
weather friend and not the mighty all-embracing power that Galileo hoped
to meet after his last breath. True enough also, if the sun went round
the earth in a day then its great mass would be torn asunder by the
velocity at its edges just as Aristarchus had revealed.
Then he looked at Dante’s word ‘other’; that the sun was
just another ordinary star – ‘the sun and the other stars’. He
knew then that Dante had secretly believed all those years ago that the
sun moves ceaselessly in the heavens like any other star upon its course
embedded in the rotating galaxy; if the sun could move, then also the
earth. He knew that his telescope had shown him the truth; that he was
right and Copernicus was right. The planets went around our star and our
star went around the galactic centre. The Great Proof was within his
grasp. With agonising difficulty he sat up in his bed and he reached out
for the book in his dream. God smiled upon him and the Great Hand came
gently through the curtain and took him into Paradise…
…Later that year, on Christmas Day 1642, far away in
Woolsthorpe Manor in Lincolnshire, the sickly premature child Isaac
Newton was being born. Beneath the apple tree in the garden crawled a
snake… and the snake was smiling.
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