March 29 is the 363rd anniversary of the Great Eclipse of 1652, which, despite the relatively late date, terrified people in Europe. In this paper from 2007, I attempt to explain the persistence of this fear by examining the historiography of seventeenth century eclipse and comet lore.
As the year 1651 neared its end, England was experiencing a small but steadily increasing panic. On March 29, 1652, there was to be a total solar eclipse. Fanning the flames of unrest were those who distributed pamphlets predicting that all manner of terror and disaster would accompany the inevitable darkening of the sun. The pamphlets forecast “darkness, sudden death and ‘great madness, raging and terrifying thousands of the people.’”[1] Workers stayed home; the poor begged God for deliverance. The fear was not confined to the lowly and downtrodden; the rich ran away. [2] The powerful and the would-be powerful engaged in a flurry of optimism, predicting the collapse of the religious and political institutions to which they were opposed.[3] The government issued rational-sounding opinions, assuring the public that there was nothing to fear, and “explaining that eclipses were natural events which could have no political effects.”[4]
Comets, too, aroused great fear among high and low during this period, for they were widely regarded as portents of disaster. One commentator, writing in 1684, predicted that a comet would cause “dearth, scarcity and famine.” Illustrating the conventional wisdom that kings and other leaders were more susceptible to the ill effects of comets than were ordinary people, he added, “As the inevitable effect . . . we must expect sickness, diseases, mortality, and more especially the sudden death of many Great Ones.”[5] So terrifying were comets in this regard that people credited Queen Elizabeth I with almost superhuman courage when she defied her advisors and insisted upon seeing the comet of 1577 for herself.[6]
Had the above-described fear and tumult occurred in the fifteenth or even the early sixteenth century, it would hardly have been worthy of notice. During those times, changes in the supposedly inalterable heavens were regularly met with fear of divine judgment and imminent calamity, and state officials would likely have been as terrified as their people would. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the learned had largely accepted the growing body of naturalistic explanations for celestial phenomena. Scientifically minded men such as Galileo had embraced the heliocentric model set forth by Copernicus in the 16th century. The discoveries that they based upon their acceptance of this model—discoveries that they applied to both eclipses and comets—seemed, at first glance, to discredit Aristotle’s teachings about the nature of matter and the universe, teachings that most in the West had accepted since antiquity.
Despite the popular upheaval of 1652, most seventeenth century elites probably understood the fundamental nature of eclipses, and they were beginning—in a rudimentary way—to understand comets as well. There is little doubt that naturalistic explanations for such occurrences won increasingly widespread acceptance during the seventeenth century, at the expense of metaphysical explanations, including those proffered by the ancients. Why, then, were eclipses and comets still capable of creating such widespread fear so late in history?
The answers lie, in part, in the complex interaction between the waxing naturalism and waning scholasticism of the period, the exaggerated universality of both models, and the stubborn persistence of cultural beliefs, especially in the face of fear and confusion. A growing body of historical research suggests that neither the change from one worldview to the other nor people’s adherence to one or the other view was as complete during this period as is commonly believed. Indeed, even the scientists and philosophers popularly supposed to have been firmly wedded to one or the other paradigm can now be viewed as straddling, to varying degrees, the gulf between the two.
One common misconception is that rigid adherence to the tenets of Aristotelian cosmology was nearly universal prior to the seventeenth century. In The Age of the Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands, Tabitta Van Nouhuys challenged this view. Van Nouhuys argued that “the Aristotelian world view had never been as rigid and monolithic as has often been assumed.”[7] Further, Aristotle’s teachings on such matters as comets, she suggested, had “never reached western Europe in [their] original form.” Instead, they were modified and adjusted by others and challenged by competing worldviews, notably Christianity.[8] In short, modified versions of Aristotle’s teachings on the cosmos existed in early modern Europe, but they did not represent pure, rigid Aristotelianism, nor did they have an unchallenged hold over the minds of people. Furthermore, suggested Van Nouhuys, Aristotle was not the only ancient authority to whom people looked for explanations of the modern world. The ancient Stoics, in particular, offered explanations that could better accommodate the emerging naturalism.[9]
If Medieval times were not ruled by a rigid Aristotelian view, neither did those views, such as they were, utterly collapse or fade with the arrival of Tycho, Galileo, or Halley. Van Nouhuys documented the endurance of Scholastic thought well into the seventeenth century. Scholars had long pondered, she suggested, whether God might break his own fundamental laws, allowing something manifestly impossible (under scholastic thinking) to take place.[10] They possessed, therefore, a passing familiarity, at least, with the idea that Aristotle’s teachings might be violable, in some theoretical context, without discrediting his authority. Even when new ideas such as the superlunary nature of comets began to take hold, they seemed to violate only a small number of Aristotle’s tenets concerning the cosmos, especially so long as one could maintain the idea of a geocentric universe.[11]
Another scholar who found evidence of the survival of Aristotelian thought throughout the seventeenth century was Roger Ariew.[12] In “Theory of Comets at Paris during the Seventeenth Century,” Ariew asserted that even those aspects of Aristotle’s teachings most widely assumed to have collapsed under the weight of scientific scrutiny—“the incorruptibility of the heavens and the explanation of comets”—actually survived to some degree into the eighteenth century.[13] Ariew insisted that “Aristotelianism in the seventeenth century was able to deal straightforwardly with the post-1610 celestial novelties,” an obvious reference to Galileo’s telescopic observations, which many commonly regard as having sealed the demise of scholastic cosmology. “In fact,” he continued, “instead of looking intransigent, the Aristotelians seem, more like some ancient civilizations, able to absorb and assimilate all invaders.”[14]
Ariew clearly showed that, contrary to many accounts, defense of the Aristotelian worldview did not whither after the comet of 1577, or even in the years following Galileo’s sunspot observations and his discovery of Jupiter’s moons. Indeed, scholastic writers of the era absorbed the undeniable facts of Tycho’s and Galileo’s discoveries, as well as earlier less dramatic scientific challenges to scholasticism, and put forth multiple theories that instead sought to incorporate them into Aristotelian thought.[15] They even co-opted the emerging scientific worldview in support of Aristotle. Some of these writings have an air of class-conscious defensiveness. Scipion Dupleix dismissed as “ignorant” “the common people” (among others, including some of the ancients) because they had no knowledge of parallax and thus continued to believe that comets were stars. He then adopted parallax measurements in support of an even less tenable position. “This ignorance [of parallax] is too crass,” he wrote, “given that stars are all in the heavens and comets are in the region of air below the moon.”[16]
If we accept that later scholastics (and perhaps even earlier ones) were not as fixated on Aristotle as people sometimes suppose and that Aristotelian beliefs survived, in some form, longer than is commonly assumed, then the relationship between these two competing worldviews was a complex one indeed. Complicating this dynamic is an idea supported by Sara Schechner-Genuth. In Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, Schechner-Genuth suggested that Newton and Halley did not abandon popular, and ancient—and, by modern standards, decidedly unscientific—ideas about comets; instead they simply redirected them. “It is often said,” wrote Schechner-Genuth, “that Newton and Halley were instrumental in sweeping aside ‘superstitious’ comet lore when they mathematically demonstrated that comets traveled in closed orbits in our solar system.” She continued:
My own research challenges this assertion in two ways—first, by showing that neither scientific discoveries nor philosophical debates were sufficient causes for the decline in cometary devination; and second, by showing that Newton, Halley, and their followers continued to embrace key tenets of popular lore despite their hostility to vulgar astrological predictions. . . . They apparently desired to see the moral order reflected in the natural world and were led . . . to rehabilitate comet lore by redescribing it in natural philosophical terms.[17]
Thus, Newton and Halley borrowed old ideas about the predictive power of comets, dismissed most of their clearly metaphysical content, and then proceeded to suggest cometary involvement in “the renovation of the earth, Noah’s Flood, the creation of new worlds, and perhaps the end of this one.”[18]
The point of Schechner-Genuth’s book, and one that supports and elucidates the other points discussed above, is that ideas in popular culture, what she calls “comet lore,” did not exist independently of the ideas of “high culture”—that of the learned.[19] Rather, the old ideas, embraced by the common people and associated at least in part with Aristotelianism, blended with the new ideas of the scientifically-minded elites, producing rich “intellectual alloys.”[20] This convergence allowed the former to survive in various forms and the latter to thrive and ultimately prevail. One is reminded again of Duplaix’s use of a scientific concept to belittle the “common people” while enlisting the same concept in defense of one of Aristotle’s most unsustainable ideas.
The widespread fear of the 1652 eclipse, and even of subsequent celestial events, was very real. This fear had been nurtured in and passed down from a time when people thought the heavens incorruptible, and few could conceive of natural causes that might produce such phenomena. By the middle of the seventeenth century, some people knew much about what caused them, but this seemed to make little difference. As Alice Walters observed in “Ephemeral Events: English Broadsides of Early Eighteenth-Century Solar Eclipses,” “the almost visceral fear prompted by dramatic astronomical phenomena like eclipses seemed to blur the distinction between ‘rational’ scientific cause and ‘irrational’ astrological effect.”[21] By the beginning of the 18th century, one could find, on the same street, broadsides thoroughly explaining the basics of naturalistic eclipse theory as well as others pronouncing doom upon the world. At times, the same broadside seemed to be conveying both messages. [22] Perhaps that is the point.
Letting go of ancient ways of thinking is difficult. People are likely to resist it for as long as they can and then to adapt gradually to the new, not replacing the old views, but finding ways to make the new fit into the old. People questioned Aristotle long before the naturalistic revolution and clung to Aristotle’s and similar teachings long after they had become untenable. The return of Halley’s Comet in the 1980s produced “broadsides” in the form of tabloids, and these rivaled the ignorance and alarmism of anything produced in early modern Europe. In 2017, a solar eclipse will sweep across the United States. Half a century after men traveled to the very moon that will block the sun on that day, it seems likely that this event will produce on earth the same curious blend of science, pre-science, pseudo-science, religion, and fantasy as did the events of the seventeenth century.
Bibliography
Ariew, Roger. “Theory of Comets at Paris during the Seventeenth Century.” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (1992): 355 –372.
Calder, Nigel. The Comet is Coming! The Feverish Legacy of Mr. Halley. New York: Viking Press, 1980.
Schechner-Genuth, Sara. Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.
Van Nouhuys, Tabitta. The Age of the Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands. Leiden: Brill, 1998.
Walters, Alice N. “Ephemeral Events: English Broadsides of Early Eighteenth-Century Solar Eclipses.” History of Science 37 (1999): 1 –43.
NotesFile:Antoine_Caron_Astronomers_Studying_an_Eclipse.jpg
[1] Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971). 300.
[5] Nigel Calder, The Comet is Coming! The Feverish Legacy of Mr. Halley (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 22 –23.
[7] Tabitta Van Nouhuys, The Age of the Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 567.
[9] Ibid., 579, but Stoicism is discussed throughout.
[12] Roger Ariew, “Theory of Comets at Paris during the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 3 (1992): 355 –72.
[17] Sara Schechner-Genuth, Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 217 –218.
[19] Ibid., 4, and throughout.
[21] Alice N. Walters, “Ephemeral Events: English Broadsides of Early Eighteenth-Century Solar Eclipses, History of Science 37 (1999): 2.
If you were writing contemporary commentary, what conflicting world views would chose to examine?
I’m not sure. Though I am deeply disturbed by the modern belief that rights (the natural rights of life, liberty, and property) are the product of government. This is a full-bore perversion of the founding principles of the United States. Government needs to be taught at first principles.
…would you chose. ..