Although angels, or some kind of beings, move the spheres, the Sun and the stars; prayer is more powerful than they are, since it impedes motion, as when the prayer of Joshua made the Sun stand still."[1] This may explain why Copernicus apparently disregarded the Cardinal's paradox, for he made no reference to it in his book; and the statement itself, to judge by the absence of contemporary comment, aroused no interest at the time. But of late years, the Cardinal's position as stated in the De Docta Ignorantia has been repeatedly cited as an instance of the Church's friendly attitude toward scientific thought,[2] to show that Galileo's condemnation was due chiefly to his "contumacy and disobedience."
Copernicus[3] himself was born in Thorn on February 19, 1473,[4] seven years after that Hansa town founded by the Teutonic Order in 1231 had come under the sway of the king of Poland by the Second Peace of Thorn.[5] His father,[6] Niklas Koppernigk, was a wholesale merchant of Cracow who had removed to Thorn before 1458, married Barbara Watzelrode of an old patrician Thorn family, and there had served as town councillor
- ↑ Cusanus: Opera, 549: Excitationum, Lib. VII, ex sermone: Debitores sumus: "Est enim oratio, omnibus creaturis potentior. Nam angeli seu intelligentiæ, movent orbes, Solem et Stellas: sed oratio potentior, quia impedit motum, sicut oratio Josuae, fecit sistere Solem."
- ↑ Di Bruno. 284, 286a; Walsh: An Early Allusion, 2-3.
- ↑ Nicolaus Coppernicus (Berlin, 1883-4; 3 vol.; Pt. I, Biography, Pt. II, Sources), by Dr. Leopold Prowe gives an exhaustive account of all the known details in regard to Copernicus collected from earlier biographers and tested most painstakingly by the documentary evidence Dr. Prowe and his fellow-workers unearthed during a lifetime devoted to this subject. (Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie.) The manuscript authority Dr. Prowe cites (Prowe: I, 19-27 and foot-notes), requires the double p in Copernicus's name, as Copernicus himself invariably used the two p's in the Latinized form Coppernic without the termination us, and usually when this termination was added. Also official records and the letters from his friends usually give the double p; though the name is found in many variants—Koppernig, Copperinck, etc. His signatures in his books, his name in the letter he published in 1509, and the Latin form of it used by his friends all bear testimony to his use of the double p. But custom has for so many centuries sanctioned the simpler spelling, that it seems unwise not to conform in this instance to the time-honored usage.
- ↑ Prowe: I, 85.
- ↑ Ency. Brit.: "Thorn."
- ↑ Prowe: I, 47-53.
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