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By William E. Steinman:
Part 70, Socinus, Gilbert, and Tycho:
July 26, 2004:
Let us now take a look at the worlds very first Unitarian though he did not call himself that. It is a latter conclusion. Actually Faustus Socinus (1539-1604) was an Italian religious reformer who founded what was called Socinianism. He was really an uneducated lay theologian.
Socinus had been a Roman Catholic, but he had to leave the church because he did not accept the notion of the trinity. Here we are again at that infamous sticking point. How much grief could have been avoided if the original Jewish Christians had not needed to invent that piece of hocus-pocus? Whatever! Because of his rejection of the trinity, he was denounced by the Inquisition and had to hide out in Zurich from 1559 to 1562.
A lot of this stuff was just more of that theological hair splitting for which these religious folks are notorious. For example, Socinus wrote an interpretation of the prologue of the Gospel According to John, in which he decided that Jesus was divine by office rather than by nature. We might say, who cares, but this is exactly the kind of stuff that caused people to kill each other back then.
Later in 1578 Socinus spent several years as secretary of the Florentine court where he completed a book called De Jesu Christo servatore. For some unexplained reason, this was not published until 1594. From Florence he travel to Transylvania then to Krakow. There he got into the Minor Reform Church and eventually became its leader.
He proposed and taught that a person could achieve eternal life just by studying divinely revealed Scripture. He saw Christ as just a man who was unique in that he was without sin. It was through the example of his suffering that he showed others how to bear their own sufferings. He thought it was not enough to believe the teaching of Christ as truth. One must also repent for sins and lead a life of obedience.
he did not make many more friends in Krakow that he had in Italy. In 1598 a lynch mob came for him and he showed some prudence in a quick departure. He ended up in a nearby village of Luclawice, That is where he spent his final years. His final major work Christianae religionis institutio was incomplete. However it is most likely the source material for the Racovian Catechism which is a thorough exposition of Socinian thought.
Perhaps Socinus' largest influence was not on the theology of his time, but its influence on the Unitarian theology, in England. Socinianism was stamped out in Poland by vigorous Roman Catholic persecution. However, the writings of Socinus were brought to England in the seventeenth century. That is where they probably influenced John Biddle, the father of English Unitarianism. Biddle will show up in English history during the Enlightenment. We'll get to that.
For now, lets take a look at well known English scientist and Physician. He is William Gilbert (1544-1603). Gilbert was court physician to both Elisabeth I and James I of England. However, the work the made him famous was his book On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the Great Magnet of the Earth. This book is the account of his entire experiments and research on magnetism and electrical attraction.
He made the profound conclusion that the earth is, in fact, a huge magnet with the north and south poles being at the polar extremes of the earth. He was also the first to use the terms electrical attraction, electrical force, and magnetic pole. For his pioneering work, he became the most distinguished man of science in England. He is usually considered to be the founder of the modern sciences of electricity and magnetism .
He also began a work A New Philosophy of Our Sublunar World that was completed by his brother and published posthumously. In that he expressed his agreement with Copernicus that the earth rotates on its own axis. He also concluded that stars are not all the same distance from the earth and planets were held in their orbits by magnetism. Although Gilbert's work was in every way pioneering, it came out of a growing body of scientific knowledge which was characteristic of the Renaissance.
Let's stay with science now and check out Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). Brahe was a Danish astronomer who made very accurate astronomical observations. For that he had to develop his own instruments. Using them and meticulous observation he was able to accurately fix the positions of more that 770 so-called fixed stars. His work formed the basis for Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion.
Tycho got into astronomy when he was impressed by some natural events. Not the least of these was the total eclipse of the sun on August 21, 1560. The important thing to Tycho was that science was able to accurately predicted this eclipse. From then on, he was hooked. It was a rough go at first, because his uncle, who had raised and educated him, insisted that he continue in his field of jurisprudence as a lecturer. This left him his nights to keep vigil on the stars. Even worse, the only work he could study on astronomy turned out to be Ptolemy's writings which described a geocentric universe. Not much help there.
When his uncle sent him to the University of Leipzig he observed the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. This observation caused him to conclude that the current almanacs and ephemerides were dead wrong. For the record an ephemeris is a table giving the celestial coordinates of a heavenly body at specific times during a given time period. Suddenly Tycho had a cause. He would devote his life to correcting these tables by making his own accurate observations.
So he began to travel, study, and acquire the instruments needed for his undertaking. In 1571 he finally constructed a small observatory. That was when he made his most important discovery. He found a new star in a place where no star should have been. It was, by his observations, in the Cassiopeia constellation. that was in the realm of the so-called fixed stars, those beyond the moon.
The intellects of that tine found his discovery to be disconcerting. Between Tycho and Copernicus, Aristotle's theory of the inner and continuous harmony of the world was coming unglued. It seemed the stars were not so permanent and unchanging as had been imagined. These intellects were being forced to consider the unthinkable. Perhaps chaos ruled the heavens after all.
For his part, Tycho remained dedicated to his work. He published his observations and findings in De nova stella in 1573. Now instead of a amateur star gazer, he became an European astronomer. Then he decided to build a large observatory in Germany. King Frederick II of Denmark would have none of that. He was determined to keep his celebrity at home. To seal the deal, Fred gave him the Danish island, Ven in the sound between Copenhagen and Helsingor.
It was there Tycho built his observatory which he called Uraniborg after Urania. in Greek religion, Urania is one of the nine Muses, and the patron of astronomy. In that observatory, with the help of his assistants and scholars from everywhere, he collected data to correct every known astronomical record.
When Frederick died in 1588, his son Christian IV took over
and Tycho's support diminished. He finally left and went to Prague
and the protection of Emperor Rudolf II. Though Tycho did some
work there, his major work was already done. He died in 1601 and
left all of his data to Kepler who had become his pupil at Prague.
What Tycho shows us in his work is the true life of a scientist.
Research is a process of systematic meticulous, mind-numbing attention
to detail. It is not glamorous at all. The results are sometimes
glamorous, but the work never is.
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