Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern ... - Newberry Library

Newberry Essays in Medieval and Early Modern Studies 7Yet neo-Platonic conceptions emerged again in the century preceding the work of Copernicus,Kepler, and Galileo. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Florentine humanist Marsilio Ficino(1433-1499) brought the work of Plato and the neo-Platonists into the Italian intellectual milieu withhis translations and commentaries. 17 In his own writings as well, Ficino reaffirmed the stars’ living,fiery nature. ―Every star,‖ he writes in his commentary on the Timaeus, ―through its rotation aboutits own center, imitates the action of its soul around its own mind.‖ 18 Much has been made ofpossible neo-Platonic influences on Copernicus’s thought, and he is known to have read Ficino’s Desole, in which Ficino refers to the sun as the ―greatest of stars‖ and the spiritual center of theuniverse. 19 Regarding the stars themselves, though, Copernicus seems to have had a moreAristotelian conception; even though he made the sun the center of the universe, it resided at thecenter of a fixed shell of immensely distant stars.Neo-Platonic influences regarding the nature of the stars are easier to see in the work of Kepler.In his work on the appearance of the new star in 1604, Kepler speculates on its elemental nature,claiming that its scintillation hints at the presence of water or fire. The star was definitely new,though, and in a departure from Proclus or Plotinus, Kepler’s speculations on its elemental originsincluded the assumption that objects in the heavens could be formed in the same manner as objectson the Earth. 20 In addition, Kepler followed the neo-Platonists in making the sun the true source oflife and force in the cosmos, specifically the center of force for the motion of the planets.If the beginnings of modern astronomy are seen to have arisen with a healthy infusion of neo-Platonic concepts, how do we get to Beagle’s lifeless stars falling like stones through space? I haveargued that Platonic ideas of living stars provided a distinct intellectual tradition from the aetherialbodies of Aristotle. But our modern conception of the stars came about largely through theiridentification with the sun: a universe filled with sun-like spheres of burning gas. This identity—unknown to Copernicus, unarticulated by Kepler, but famously expounded by Bruno—seems tohave found its first systematic exposition in the work of Descartes in the mid-1600s. Yet it foundfertile ground for acceptance in a blending of Platonic heritage and revived Epicurean speculationson an infinite universe. The Cambridge Platonist Henry More, for instance, in 1646, published anEssay on the Infinity of Worlds out of Platonick Principles, in which the identification of stars as suns is17 See for instance James Hankins, ―The Study of the Timaeus in Early Renaissance Italy,‖ in Anthony Grafton andNancy Siraisi, eds., Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999),77-119, and John Monfasani, ―Marsilio Ficino and the Plato-Aristotle Controversy,‖ in Michael J. B. Allen and ValeryRees, eds., Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Boston: Brill, 2002): 179-202.18 Arthur Farndell, All Things Natural: Ficino on Plato’s Timaeus (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2010), 116.19 Farndell, All Things Natural, 82. See also Dilwyn Knox, ―Ficino and Copernicus,‖ in Allen and Rees, Marsilio Ficino,399-418, and Hankins, ―Study of the Timaeus,‖ 84-85.20 Kepler sets out these views in his 1606 De stella nova, and they are discussed in Steven J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: TheOrigins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1982), 72-73.Dick also quotes a letter of Kepler in which the astronomer writes, ―You think the stellar globes are pure and simple . . .they seem to me to be similar to our Earth. As a philosopher you quote a philosopher [likely Aristotle]: if he is asked, hewill point to experience. But experience is silent, since no one has been there. . . . I myself argue the probability byanalogy. . . . Therefore I attribute [elemental] humors to the stars.‖ Kepler to Brennger, November 30, 1607, GesammelteWerke, XVI, 86, quoted in Dick, Plurality of Worlds, 73.39