historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 6. New tidings
that the earth revolved around the sun with great sympathy, although he did not
dismiss the geocentric model outright. But most Dutch scholars, such as Heereboord,
do not seem to have been much interested in the astrological debate. 72
However, with the eruption of the scholarly dispute about Cartesian philosophy,
the Dutch academic landscape changed. Since Descartes agreed with Copernicus
and Galileo that the earth revolved around the sun, the question if this contention
was true suddenly became of great philosophical and theological importance.
73 A choice for the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus now came to be
seen as a choice for Descartes and the Frenchman’s heretical ideas.
There are some clues that Boxhorn, like Stevin and his former tutor Burgersdijk,
was favourably disposed towards the heliocentric cosmology advocated
by Copernicus and Galileo. In one of his first published orations, the
Oratio de eversionibus rerumpublicarum et earum caussis (Oration on the Destructions
of Commonwealths and their Causes), for example, Boxhorn describes the
earth as a moving object in a continuous cycle of growth and decay.
187
The world is a play, in which man puts on and takes of a mask, until
he reveals [his] real persona. For all things are lost in this cycle of
growth and decay. Nothing of great age in this machine is eternal.
Lift up [your] eyes with me, and behold the changing circumstances
of human affairs. It goes almost unnoticed that the revolutions of the
stars change and that, as the astrologers now say, the earth forwards,
that the sea is stirred by the tides, that large structures are hit by ruin,
[and] that even kingdoms and empires are brought to an end by the
sword, wars, [and] crimes. 74
Besides the strong Platonic overtone, the fact that he describes the earth as a
moving object in a cycle that is depicted as a ‘machine’ at least seems to suggest
that Boxhorn was aware of the mechanical worldview that was making
headway in his days. 75
72 Van Bunge, From Stevin to Spinoza, pp. 32, 48.
73 Jorink, Wetenschap en wereldbeeld in de Gouden Eeuw, p. 59ff, and Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans,
p. 158ff.
74 Boxhorn, “Oratio de Eversionibus Rerumpub. et Earum caussis”, pp. 1-2. ‘Ita agitur cum rebus
humanis ut occulto quodam naturae instinctu subinde immutentur. Orbis Fabula est, in qua personam,
& accipit homo, & deponit: donec veram absolvat. Abeunt quippe omnia in hunc nascendi et pereundi
gyrum. Longaevum aliquid in hac machina nihil aeternum. Attollite mecum oculos & rerum humanarum
vices videte. Parvum est, syderum cursus mutari, &, ut astrologi jam dicunt, terram moveri, mare
aestu agitari, moles ruina consumi, regna etiam & imperia per clades, bella, flagitia ad metam feruntur.’
Thus, the oration was published in the same year of Galileo’s famous trial and the open condemnation
of the heliocentric model of the cosmos by the Roman church.
75 Descartes, for example, believed the whole universe to be one, big mechanical clockwork, of