Over at The American Scene, Alan Jacobs does the public service of reminding us that those medieval Christians didn’t put Earth at the center of the universe because they were arrogant:
One big stroke of modern arrogance, is the presumed centrality of . . . centrality. The ‘central’ truth of Cartesian spatial awareness is that it’s two-dimensional. There is no axis of hierarchy, and no way of plotting the Highest. All the time we slip into the language of centrality, often when what we’re really trying to say only has the purchase we want it to in terms of altitude. "Central values" are different in two ways from "highest virtues."
The center of the medieval cosmos is not the most important place, but the stillest and deadest place, the place farthest from the full presence of God in the Empyrean . And if you doubt this, just read Dante’s Inferno : there the Earth is at the center of the cosmos, and what’s at the center of the Earth? Satan — who has fled there to escape as best he can from the Divine Presence that he loathes.
We moderns like the idea that medieval Christians believed that they were the most important beings in the whole cosmos, because we like thinking that our ancestors were more arrogant than we are. But come on: has anyone ever been more arrogant than we are?
