Copernicus, born a year after the prognostications of the Byzantine Patriarch Gennadius Scholarius and already twenty-eight years old at the time of Columbus's prophetic calculations, did see something new in the good news of Columbus and the newer news of Amerigo Vespucci. But there was, too, something old already even in the novel vision of the Polish astronomer, something that had been so terribly disconcerting to the orthodox and orthodoxy's cosmic order that it was gripped tightly between the jurisdictional parentheses of that order for a very long time, lest the drama's plot be altered and the expected final act thwarted.The notion that the earth was not the center of the cosmos and that the course of its providential history was not identical to the history of the cosmos was already advanced some 1,800 years before the similar claims of the ill-starred Copernicus. Heliocentric astronomy had already been proposed in the fourth century B.C. by Aristarchus of Samos. And Aristarchus himself, by the way, was no slouch when it came to the computing tables of time, having added 1/1623rd part of a day that Callippus had left out of his calculation of a 365 1/4-day year. That indispensable leap addendum comes to 0.89 minutes, or 53.23 seconds. But even this fraction was more than the time of day Copernicus would be given by those who brokered the ideological futures of a futurity on which our New World would be founded. Copernicus's De Revolutionibus proved revolutionary, indeed; so much so that the tailspin into which it sent the Protestant Puritans' ideological forefathers kept the Catholic Church from condemning it officially from its first publication in 1543 until after the end of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, Giordano Bruno was eventually burned at the stake by the Inquisition for revealing the Polish astronomer's theory in his Ash Wednesday sermon of 1584. Bruno was thrown into a dungeon in Rome, where he was lured from Venice, in 1592, exactly one hundred years after our Columbian annus mirabilis , and was burned eight years later on the threshold of the seventeenth century. The Catholic Church did not admit the Copernican recycling of Aristarchus's idea until 1820.
Other religious leaders and intellectuals faired no better. The former Augustinian monk Martin Luther, quicker than most, assessed the significance of Copernicus's work in 1539, four years before its publication: "There is mention of a new astrologer who endeavors to prove that the earth, not the firmament, moves and revolves in circles. . . . This crackpot wants to disrupt the whole art of astronomy. Nonetheless, as the Holy Scriptures indicate, Joshua ordered the sun, and not the earth, to stay still." John Calvin, even less inclined to disruptions of preordained order than Luther, simply asked: "Who can dare place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Scriptures?" And the distinguished German Humanist Philip Melancthon felt terribly chagrined by the audacity of such talk: "A certain man, eager for novelty," Melancthon wrote, obviously oblivious to Aristarchus, "or wishing to make ostentation of his ingeniousness, has come to the conclusion that the earth moves, and proclaims that the sun and the heavenly spheres do not move. To assert such a thing publicly is to be lacking in honesty and decency."
The drama occupying center stage at the time was providential history's and, clearly, Copernicus did not figure in its plot.