Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: AGREE TO DISAGREE (05/04/17)
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TITLE: At the center of it all | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jack Taylor
05/11/17 -
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“You know the church will struggle with what you’re thinking.”
“But Clavius, how can I avoid these conclusions? It is clear that Venus has similar phases to the moon. This means that the sun and not the earth is the center of it all.”
“You know the authorities don’t like change. Especially when you threaten what we hold as truth.”
“But you surely understand. Didn’t you change the history of the world? Can’t the theologians just agree to disagree until they read my studies?”
Christopher Clavius had already outlived many men of his day. He had accepted Pope Gregory XIII’s request to solve the problem of why the Julian Calendar used by Christians was out of sync with the rhythm of nature. The scholar figured out that the common calendar was out by 674 seconds a year. He formulated a new calendar including a system of leap years. An 800 page volume of mathematical work supported his efforts.
Clavius handed the telescope back to Galileo. “Come and show me what you see. Sometimes even science is not enough to convince those whose minds are made up.”
In order to fix the dating problem the Pope had proclaimed in 1582 that the day after October 4th in this one year would be October 15th. Protestants and Catholics had battled across Europe over more than just the missing two weeks. Catholic Italy accepted Clavius’s calendar while Protestant Britain refused to fall for the 'trickery of some Roman pontiff'.
Galileo held the torch and patiently followed the seasoned mathematician up the stairs to the roof. “How did you decide to give your life to astronomy?”
The old man smiled. “I was twenty-three, just beginning my studies. I was on my knees when the afternoon sun was swallowed up. I wasn’t sure whether the demons of hell had conquered the source of light or whether the end of the world had come, but I wanted to know all I could know.”
“Surely you understand that the earth is circling the sun.”
Clavius shook out the dusty folds of his ankle-length robe and felt for the stone-block wall near the top of the stairs. Cool moisture still filled the small crevices after the recent rains. Now, the clouds had moved on and the heavens were clear. “Son, I have spent my life defending the position of the church. Publish what you observe carefully.”
“Without your support this truth will be destroyed.”
“Since the times of Ptolemy we have embraced no other truth but that the earth is at the center of it all. There is no other theory to which we can all agree.”
“Perhaps it is time to disagree and to find a new theory to answer the questions we refuse to consider. To explain what we can no longer explain.”
The rookie astronomer was challenging a lifetime and an eon of church doctrine. He was putting his life on the line. To support the Copernican theory of heliocentricity was heresy.
The senior Jesuit endured that night and several others observing the skies through Galileo’s telescope. After one such episode he declared. “Tomorrow, I shall bring the rest of my students to this roof and we will consider your findings together. The telescopes we now have are better than anything I’ve ever seen.”
Twenty years after Clavius published a cautious support for keener observation of the celestial patterns and years after he had passed away, Galileo was on his knees at the mercy of the Vatican inquisition. Without the support of his mentor, in order to live with those who refused to allow him to disagree with their truth, he disavowed what he had written.
Yet, hidden in the final edition of Clavius’s definitive work on astronomy, lay a note encouraging true students to consult the “reliable work by Galileo Galilei, printed at Venice in 1610 and called Siderius Nuncius.”
The old Jesuit had walked a fine tight rope - enraging those who refused to accept that disagreement was possible and acceptable. With his own student, whose work undermined much of his own, he agreed to disagree.
After all, they both understood that the Son was at the center of it all.
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It is interesting that scientific views are always changing (the earth was also thought to be flat), but the Word of God remains unchanged.