Conjectural Epilogue on the Sun

The 6 planets go around and make the harmonies to the motionless Sun at the center of all the orbits revolving on his own axis.

There is the most complete harmony between the extreme motions of the planets, not in the sense of the true speeds through the ethereal air, but in the sense of the angles which are formed by the ends of the daily arcs of the planets’ orbits, joined to the center of the Sun.

Yet the harmony does not ornament the ends, that is, the individual motions, in themselves, but insofar as they are linked and compared with each other and are made the object of some mind; and since no object is arranged vainly, and without something which is moved by it, those angles seem in fact to presuppose some agency, like our sight, or certainly the sensation of it, on which see Book IV. Sublunary nature perceived the angles formed at the Earth by the radii from the planets.

Indeed for dwellers on the Earth it is not easy to conjecture what sort of vision, what eyes, there may be on the Sun, or what other instinct for perceiving these angles, even without eyes, and of estimating the harmonies of the motions which enter the forecourt of the mind by whatever door, indeed what Mind there is on the Sun. Yet however that may be, certainly this positioning of the six primary spheres round the Sun, honoring him with their perpetual revolution, and, so to speak, adoring him (just as Jupiter’s globe separately by four moons, Saturn by two moons, and the Earth and we its inhabitants by a single moon are girded by their course, honored, cherished, and served) and this special matter of the harmonies which is now added to that consideration, a very clear trace of the highest providence in the affairs of the Sun, wrings from me the following confession.

Not only does light go out to the whole world from the Sun, as from the focus or eye of the world, as all life and heat does from the heart, all motion from the ruler and mover; but in return there are collected at the Sun from the whole cosmic province, by royal right, these, so to speak, repayments of the most desirable harmony, or rather images of the pairs of motions flowing to it are linked together into a single harmony by the working of some mind, and so to speak stamped into coin out of rough silver and gold; and lastly in the Sun is the Senate, Palace, and Government House or Court of the whole kingdom of nature, whatever Chancellors, Princes, or Prefects the Creator has given to it, and everything with which He has provided those seats, whether it was created by Him straight away at the beginning or whether they had at some time to be transported thither. For that terrestrial embellishment also for the chief part of itself lacked the investigators and appropriators, for which it was nevertheless destined, and the seats were vacant.

Therefore, the enquiry steals into the mind, what did the ancient Pythagoreans mean in Aristotle’’’^ when they used to call the center of the world (to which they referred the Fire, though their underlying meaning was the Sun) the sentry of Jupiter ([in Greek] “the Guardian of Zeus”); and what was the ancient translator^^^ turning over in his mind, when he rendered the verse in the Psalm as “In the Sun He has placed His tabernacle.” But I have also just chanced on the hymn of Proclus the Platonic^’® philosopher, written to the Sun, Which is often and packed with venerable secrets, if you remove from it the one phrase mentioned in the earlier “Hear me”; though the ancient translator, already quoted, excused that books.

very phrase in it to a certain extent, as when of course he is invoking the Sun he takes as the underlying meaning, “He Who placed His tabernacle in the Sun.” For Proclus lived in the time when it was a Under crime to proclaim Jesus of Nazareth our Savior as God and despise Constantine, Maxentius, and the gods of the gentile poets, which was punished with every torment Julian the by the monarchs of this world and indeed the people themselves.*’’ Apostate. Therefore, Proclus, who even by his own Platonic philosophy had per­ ceived the Son of God from far off by the natural light of his own mind as the true brightness which comes into this world and The judgement of the ancients illuminates every man, who already knew that it was in vain on his book “The Temple of the Mother of God” was that in it to seek divinity along with the superstitious populace, yet the universal doctrine about preferred to seem to seek God in the Sun than in Christ God was set out with a certain divine rapture, and the the living man. Thereby he at the same time both deceived author’s many tears which the gentiles by honoring the Titan of the poets in words alone; were evident in it took away all and served his own philosophy, with the intention of draw­ suspicion from his audience. Yet the same man wrote 18 ing both the gentiles and the Christians away from sensible Theses against the Christians things, the former from the visible Sun, the latter from the which John Philoponus opposed, criticizing his Son of Mary, as he rejected the mystery of the incarnation, ignorance of Greek matters trusting too much in the natural light of his mind; and lastly, which he had nevertheless what the Christians held as most divine, and most in agree­ undertaken to defend.‘™ ment with the Platonic philosophy, he took over from them and adopted into his own philosophy. Thus to the doctrine of the Gospel of Christ,

contrary to this hymn of Proclus, is granted activity for its own pur­ pose. Let this Titan have what belongs to him, the “golden reins” and “the storehouse of light, the midmost seat in the ether, the brilliant circle at the heart of the cosmos,” an appearance which Copernicus also bestows on him. Let him also have his “returning chariot drivers,” though he does not have them among the ancient Pythagoreans, but instead of them he has “the center,” “the guardian of Zeus” (a dogma of theirs which, distorted by the oblivion of the centuries, as if by a flood, was not recognized by their successor Proclus) and “offspring sprouting” from himself, and everything natural. In return let the phi­ losophy of Proclus give up to Christian doctrines, let the sensible Sun give up to the Son of Mary, that Son of God whom Proclus addresses under the name of Titan, of “sustainer of life, king, holder of the key of the fountain,” and in the words “thou who hast filled all things with thy providence that stirs the soul”; and that immense power of destiny, and what was read in no* philosophy before the promulgation of the Gospel, the demons that dread his threatening scourge, the demons that lie in wait for souls, “so that they may forget the brilliant court of the father on high”; and who but the word of the Father is the “image of the god who is father of all, on whose appearance from the begetter who must not be named the din of the clashing elements ceased” according to the saying “The Earth was a rough and formless mass, and there was darkness over the face of the abyss,” and “God divided the light from the darkness, the waters from the waters, and the sea from the dry land,” and “all things were brought about by the word itself”? Who but Jesus the Nazarene, the Son of God, “the bringer up of spirits,” the shepherd of souls, to Whom must be offered “the prayer of many tears,” that He may purge us of our sins and snatch us out of the filth of “the offspring” (as if He admitted the kindling of orig­ inal sin), and guard us from punishments and evils, “making mild the swift eye of justice,” that is to say the anger of the Father? And what else do we read, as if taken from the hymn of Zacharias,^^" scattering the man-destroying, venom-born mist,” that is to say that when souls are in the midst of darkness and the shadow of death He gives us the “holy light” and “unshakable bliss from beautiful reverence”: that is, to serve God in holiness and justice all our days.

Therefore, let us now set aside this and similar matters, and relinquish them to the doctrine of the Catholic Church, to which they properly belong; but let us now look at the chief reason why the Hymn has been mentioned. For the same Sun which “draws off the rich flow of harmony from on high,” the same from whose stock Phoebus sprang,

and “playing wondrously with his lute lays to rest the great surge of his loud-roaring offspring,” and whose partner in the chorus is Apollo Paean, “who filled the broad cosmos with harmony that takes away pain,” the same Sun, I say, is saluted in the very first line of the Hymn as “king of the intellectual fire.” By this beginning he indicates what the Pythagoreans understood by the word “fire” (so that it is remark­ able that the disciple disagreed with the masters on the position of the center, which they gave to the Sun itself), and at the same time transfers his whole hymn from the body of the Sun, and from its na­ ture by daylight, which are sensible, to intellectual things; and he has assigned the royal seat on the body of the Sun to that “intellectual fire” of his (perhaps the creative fire of the Stoics), that created God of his own Plato, his chief Mind or “pure intellect,” confusing together the creation and Him through Whom all things were created. But we Christians, taught to distinguish better the eternal and uncreated Word, which was “with God,”^®^ ^nd which is not kept in any abode, though it is within all things, excluded from none, and though it is itself out­ side all things, know that the flesh was taken up from the womb of the most glorious Virgin Mary into the unity of the Person, and that when the ministry of the flesh was completed He occupied as His royal seat the heavens, in which the heavenly Father also is acknowledged to dwell, as a part of the world which in some way excels all others, that is in glory and majesty, and that He also promised to His faithful dwelling places in that house of His Father. For the rest we consider it to be quite useless to enquire after any further detail about that seat, and to summon the natural senses or reason to hunt out what the eye has not seen, the ear has not heard, and what has not ascended into the heart of man. Indeed we deservedly subject the created mind, however great its pre-eminence may be, to its Creator; and we do not introduce Intelligences as gods with Aristotle and the gentile philos­ ophers, nor innumerable armies of planetary spirits with the Magi, and we do not put them forward to be adored or to be stirred up by magic superstitions to carry on mutual intercourse. Taking careful pre­ cautions against that, we freely enquire what the nature of each mind may be, particularly if in the heart of the world it plays the part of the soul of the world, and is more tightly tied to the nature of things (or even if some intelligent creatures, of different nature from the hu­ man, happen to inhabit a globe which is in that way animated, or will inhabit it). But if we may follow the thread of analogy and pass through the labyrinths of the mysteries of nature, it would not, I think, be absurd for someone to argue that the disposition of the six spheres towards their common center, and therefore the center of the whole world is the same as that of “thought” to “mind,” as these faculties are distinguished by Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, and others; and again, that the disposition of the local revolutions of the individual planets round the Sun towards the Sun’s “immutable” gyration in the central space of the whole system is the same as the disposition of the “thinkable” to the “understandable,” of the manifold processes of reasoning towards the completely simple understanding of the mind.

For as the Sun in its revolution about its own axis moves all the planets by the emanation which it sends out from itself, so also the mind, as the philosophers tell us, understanding itself and all that is in itself, stimulates the use of reason, and by spreading and unfolding its simplicity causes all things to be understood. And so closely are the motions of the planets round the Sun and the processes of reasoning linked and tied to each other that if the Earth, our home, did not measure out its annual circuit in the midst of the other spheres, changing place for place, position for position, human reasoning would never strug­ gle to the absolutely true distances of the planets, and to the other things which depend on them, and would never establish astronomy.

On the other hand, the counterpart of the immobility of the Sun at the center of the world, by a beautiful symmetry, is the simplicity of the understanding, because hitherto we have always taken for granted that those solar harmonies of the motions are not delimited either by the difference of directions or by the breadth of the spaces of the world.

Of course if any mind is viewing those harmonies from the Sun, it lacks the props of motion and different positions for his seat, to which to bind the reasoning and the reflection necessary for measuring out the distances of the planets.

Therefore, it compares the daily motions of each planet, not as they are in their orbits, but as they glide through their angles at the center of the Sun.

Thus if it has knowledge of the size of the spheres, that must necessarily belong to it a priori, without the labor of reasoning; and it has been made clear above from Plato and Proclus that that is true to a certain extent both of human minds and of sublunary nature.

It would not be surprising if someone who was heated by taking too liberal a draught from this cup of Pythagoras, which Proclus pledges straight away in the very first verse of his Hymn, if he was put to sleep by the delightful harmony of the chorus of planets, were to begin to dream that among the other globes passing from place to place round the Sun were disseminated reflective or reasoning faculties, of which that on the middle one of those globes, that is on the human Earth, must be reckoned certainly the most outstanding and most absolute, whereas on the Sun dwells simple Understanding, the “intellectual fire” or “mind,” the fount of all har­ monies, whatever it may be.

If Tycho Brahe, considering the bare immensity of those globes, believed that it did not exist pointlessly in the world, but was packed with inhabitants, how much more convincing will it be for us, perceiving the variety of the works and intentions of God on this globe of Earth, to adopt a conjecture about the others as well?

For He has created species to inhabit the waters, though there is no place under them for air, which living things draw in; He has sent into the immensity of the air birds propped up by feathers; He has given to the snowy tracts of the north white bears and white foxes, and as food the monsters of the sea to the one, the eggs of the birds to the other;

He has given lions to the deserts of burning Libya, camels to the far spread plains of Syria, and endurance of hunger to the one, of thirst to the other.

Has He then used up all His skill on the globe of the Earth so that He could not, or all His goodness, so that He would not wish to adorn with suitable creatures other globes also, which were commended either by the amplitude or brevity of their revolutions, or the nearness and remoteness of the Sun, or the difference of their eccentricities, or the brightness or dimness of their bodies, or the properties of the figures on which every region is supported?

For see! as the generations of living creatures on this globe of the Earth have an image of the masculine in the dodecahedron, of the feminine in the icosahedron (the former of which supports the sphere of the Earth on the outside, the latter on the inside), and lastly an image of procreation in the divine proportion of that marriage and in its inexpressibility, what shall we suppose the other globes have from the other figures?

For whose benefit do four moons gird Jupiter, and two Saturn, in their courses, as this single Moon of ours does our home? In fact we shall also reason in the same way about the globe of the Sun, and we shall, so to speak, incorporate conjectures drawn from the harmonies, and the rest, very weighty by themselves indeed, with other conjectures, tending rather towards the bodies, and fitted rather for catching the crowd.

Is that globe empty, but the others full, if everything else corresponds more closely? if just as the Earth breathes out clouds, the Sun breathes out black soot? if just as the Earth is moistened and grows green with rains, the Sun grows bright with those burning spots springing out from its body, which is wholly on fire, with brighter flamelets? What use is this furnishing, if the globe is empty? Do not the very senses themselves cry out that fiery bodies inhabit it, which have the capacity for simple minds, and that in truth the Sun is, if not the king, at least the palace of the “intellectual fire”?

I deliberately break off both the sleep and the immense speculation, only exclaiming with the royal psalmist:^