Introduction

Abstract

Modernity is not new. Marshall Berman (2010) places some of the earliest significant modern thought at around the turn of the sixteenth century and in doing so, identifies Copernicus’s heliocentrism as a significant early modern idea. Heliocentrism is a modern idea in at least two ways. It is part of a process of secularization — demystification in Weber’s terms — which continues today and as such constitutes part of the foundation of modern thought. In a pre-modern world, faith in a Deity or Deities displaces the need for certainty: faith drains paradox of all its power. Copernicus’s discovery that the earth travels round the sun was part of a process that served to undermine that faith. For the pre-modern, God creates man in His own image and measures him by His (God’s) own standards. Since it is impossible for God to be immediate to man, these standards are mediated by The Church. If man is created in the image of God then it follows that mankind must be rather special and it is therefore not surprising if God places mankind at the centre of the universe. For the pre-Copernican — the Ptolemaian — this was confirmed by the ‘simple’ observation that the sun went round the earth on a daily basis.