Cardinal Bellarmine

Cardinal Bellarmine wrote to his good friend of Galileo's writing that while he understood the elegance and attraction of the sun-centered (or decentered) universe, there was too great a danger in abandoning the common sense perception that the sun rises in the east, and sets in the west over a fixed ground, in saying that REALLY no such thing occurred.

It may be that this was simply a science vs religion clash of an unenlightenable faith putting an intelligent man in the wrong. But I think you can see another instantiation of the Athens / Jerusalem distinction. You will recall that in Athens, the more abstractaction from the human sphere the more truth. In the Jerusalem pattern, God, ultimate reality, meets you in a particular place, enters a committed reationship with you. This ground is Holy Ground. Truth is local, humans are in contact with it. Bellarmine is aware that in Christianity (which Catholicism was for him), human life (weelll except for Jewish and muslim and other life) had been declared (paradoxically) at once very precious, and utterly unworthy. But if you say that Really what is most familiar is wrong, what is most assumed is flawed, you undo human being. What has been called 'the view from nowhere' is now Reality - object has distinguished itself from subject and killed indepent george (- I mean subject).

It's something I've been thinking about for a little while - civilisation is a process of creating social value with little more than hot air (declarations of love, esteem, fealty, and their negatives excluding from the circle of society with death, disease, judgement and war).

Cardinal Bellarmine need not have been a catholic to feel that claiming the Earth REALLY orbits the sun is destructive of social value, declaring the common sense understanding of the Earth simply false, and the entire structure of common life therefore suspect at best.

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