Preparing for the Miraculous

eing human and the copernican principle 139to his dwelling-place ... The centre of the world was not aplace of honour; it was rather the place farthest removedfrom the Empyrean, the bottom of the creation, to which itsdregs and baser elements sank. The actual centre, indeed,was Hell; in the spatial sense the medieval world was literallydiabolocentric.” Though surprising, this is logical becausehell, the abyss or bottomless pit, was always felt tobe located below the earthly life. And Lovejoy quotes JohnWilkins, who wrote in 1640 about “the vileness of our earth,because it consists of a more sordid and base matter thanany other part of the world; and therefore must be situatedin the centre, which is the worst place, and at the greatestdistance from those purer incorruptible bodies, the heavens.”24Galileo Galilei seems at one time to have been of thesame opinion, if only for matters of expediency. “Galileocirculated La Bilancetta in manuscript form and it becamea success. It established him as a mathematician to be reckonedwith. The academic establishment welcomed him withopen arms, and asked him to apply his mathematical abilityto what was to them a far more important problem: thecalculation of the exact location and dimensions of Hell, asdescribed in Dante’s Inferno. Galileo took his assigned taskseriously ... Over the course of two lectures to the FlorentineAcademy he used mathematical arguments to demonstratethat Hell must have a shape like a cone, with the point atthe centre of the earth and the circular boundary of the surfacepassing through Jerusalem. ... His argument convincedthe aristocratic audience, and he was rewarded with a lectureshipin mathematics at the University of Pisa, where hesoon realized that he had got the mathematics of Hell badlywrong.” (Len Fisher ) 2524 Arthur Lovejoy: The Great Chain of Being, pp. 101-02.25 Len Fisher: Weighing the Soul – The Evolution of Scientific Beliefs, p. 94.