Kenneth J. Howell. God's Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science.

Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002. viii + 320 pp. index, illus, tbls. bibl. $39.95. ISBN: 0-268-01045-5.

When Copernicus published his De revolutionibus in 1543, the idea of God's two books had long been a commonplace. God had revealed Himself in two great books, they said, the book of Scripture and the book of nature, and though it was not always apparent how the two might be reconciled where they seemed to clash, there could never be any real disagreement. But Copernicus' heliocentrism presented a particular challenge, partly because the scriptural evidence against it seemed so plain, and partly because of the circumstances presented by the Protestant Reformation. In their controversies over Christian doctrine, Protestant reformers rejected the figurative or allegorical interpretation of Scripture in favor of the plain meaning of the words, and they of course also rejected the traditional Catholic sources of authority reasserted at the Council of Trent. Increasingly, both Protestant and Catholic alike tended to emphasize the literal sense of Scripture and to appeal to the authority of the Fathers of the church in finding it. Into this maelstrom of controversy over authority and interpretation Copernicus launched his De revolutionibus.

In this book, Kenneth J. Howell proposes to examine the reception of Copernicanism in Protestant and Catholic Europe in the century after 1543 and to show how it was affected by biblical interpretation. Generally, proponents of the new astronomy argued either that mathematical astronomy makes no claims about the physical reality of the heavens, or that Scripture was written to accommodate the common understanding at the time and so has no bearing on science. Its opponents for their part insisted on the literal interpretation of those scriptural passages that allude to the motion of the heavens or the fixity of the earth. Howell's rather vague main purpose is to show that arguments on both sides were often more subtle and complex than these general positions.

Some Protestant astronomers, including Reinhold and Maestlin, took the medieval view that astronomy merely saved the appearances and did not make cosmological claims, a position notorious from Osiander's anonymous preface to the De revolutionibus. But the Protestant Rheticus, according to Howell, defended the reality of his master's heliocentric cosmos by distinguishing in the Bible not between authoritative and non-authoritative passages (as Relier Hooykaas had argued), but between high-level passages with theological intent (e.g., creation) and low-level ones with none (e.g., the motion or fixity of the earth). In this way, Howell concludes, Rheticus could defend Copernicus and at the same time assert the clarity of Scripture as required by Luther. The trick, as always, is deciding which passages are which.

Tycho Brahe, Howell argues, devised his geoheliocentric system not as a hypothetical compromise between Copernicus and Ptolemy (the widely received view, according to Howell), but as the true description of the real heavens. Tycho found it unnecessary to discuss the scriptural evidence against heliocentrism, not because he thought it irrelevant, but because he rejected the mobility of the earth for physical reasons. But when he came to discuss the solidity of the celestial spheres, which his own system called into question by requiring the intersection of the spheres of Mars and the sun, he took pains to square Scripture. But it seems to me then that the Bible was largely irrelevant for Tycho--he didn't need it to disprove the motion of the earth, and where he needed it, he twisted its nose and dissolved the spheres.

Kepler similarly sought an astronomy that described the true system of the world, which some scholars have tried to attribute to his Neoplatonism or to historical precedents. Howell, however, sees in Kepler a "sacramental" view of creation, in that he held that theological truths such as the Trinity are written into the book of nature. Accordingly, he credits Kepler's realism to three causes: his commitment to determine the truth of the cosmos as made by God; his view that nature embodies God's truth; and his belief in the unity of truth. But the first is merely a restatement of Kepler's realism, while the other two were held in common with all of Christendom. Kepler and Tycho, Howell concludes, advanced a "convergent realism," by which he means that the truths of theology, natural philosophy, and astronomy converge to present a true account of the world.

In the most interesting part of this book, Howell examines the reception of Copernicanism and Cartesianism in the Low Countries (or the "low lands," as he frequently calls them). Here he sketches several seventeenth-century controversies between Calvinists and Catholics and between Calvinists of various stripe, with the purpose of showing, again rather vaguely, that Reformed theology did not predetermine the reception of Copernicanism but rather provided a distinctive context for it. In the first of these, Philipp and Jacob Lansbergen (pere et fils) and Libert Froimond argued inconclusively at one point over whether cannonshots could prove or disprove the motion of the earth, each reading the evidence to favor his own view (Howell does not mention Galileo's decisive treatment several years later in the Dialogue of 1633). And in this same spirit they approached the scriptural passages that suggest the earth's immobility, Froimond insisting on a literal interpretation, the Lansbergens urging accommodation. In the controversies between Johannes Cocceius and Gisbert Voet, and between Jacob de Bois and Lambert Velthuysen, Copernicanism was linked by all parties with Cartesianism. Predictably, all the controversialists appealed to the clarity of biblical texts when it suited them and to accommodation and the freedom of the individual Christian when it did not. Howell concludes in general that the Dutch rebellion against Spanish rule encouraged the reception there of all three contentious movements: Cartesian philosophy and Copernican astronomy as well as Reformed religion itself.

Finally, Howell considers the Catholic reception of Copernicus, which he asserts was determined more by institutions--the Roman Curia, the Inquisition, the Index--than by individuals. Thus "the decision of the Congregation of the Index in Rome in 1616," he suggests, "would probably never have happened in Protestant lands" (186)--and indeed it never did. His discussion of Galileo, Foscarini, Ingoli, and Campanella adds little to the much more thorough historical treatments of Maurice Finocchiaro in The Galileo Affair (1989) and Richard Blackwell in Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible (1991). The Jesuits are hardly mentioned.

Howell's main purpose in studying biblical interpretation and the reception of Copernicus is to illustrate from the past the relation between science and religion. For those with a similar interest, his book may prove useful. It will be less so for historians of early modern science and biblical interpretation. Unfortunately for everyone, this book is marred by lapses in syntax, word-use, and copy-editing frequent enough to be alarming in a book published by a university press.

W. R. LAIRD

Carleton University