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Updated: June 29, 2025
If Milton, having abandoned his earlier Arthurian scheme, and chosen in preference these antique Biblical protagonists, had therewith placed them on the contemporary cosmogonic stage of the Renaissance he would have perpetrated, as he must have felt, a hideous incongruity of geocentric and heliocentric conceptions, and set himself a task which could only work out absurdly.
The geocentric system of astronomy, with its eccentrics and its epicycles, was an hypothesis utterly at variance with fact, which nevertheless did great things for the advancement of astronomical knowledge. Kepler was the wildest of guessers.
It is obvious that the old geocentric view of the world, which thought of the earth as the center of the universe, was nothing more than a statement of the apparent relations of the visible heavens to the broad earth which stretches out on either hand as far as eye can see. That this natural view of things was taken up into the religious picture of the universe was the occurrence to be expected.
The conception of law which is unmistakably conveyed by Kepler's discoveries, and the evidence they gave in support of the heliocentric as against the geocentric theory, could not fail to incur the reprehension of the Roman authorities.
It is the belief of all nations in all parts of the world in the beginning of their civilization: geocentric, for it makes the earth the centre of the universe; anthropocentric, for it makes man the central object of the earth.
For a century or two the modern world would take pleasure in seeing itself reflected in literature and art by its most decadent spirits, in vibrating to the pathos and picturesqueness of all the periods of man's mysterious existence on this queer little planet; while the old geocentric ethics, oddly clinging on to the changed cosmogony, would keep life clean.
When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic Greece and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of authorship of the Iliad was successfully assailed by scientific literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life upon it to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed no prophetic gift to see that, sooner or later, the Jewish and the early Christian records would be treated in the same manner; that the authorship of the Hexateuch and of the Gospels would be as severely tested; and that the evidence in favour of the veracity of many of the statements found in the Scriptures would have to be strong indeed if they were to be opposed to the conclusions of physical science.
At this point the geocentric doctrine is being abandoned and the heliocentric takes its place. As the circle is the most perfect of forms, the movements of the planets are circular. They maintained that the moon is inhabited, and like the earth, but the people there are taller than men, in the proportion as the moon's periodic rotation is greater than that of the earth.
Being the Astronomers of their day, and mistaking the apparent for the real, the ancient Magi constructed that erroneous system of nature known as the Geocentric, and, in conformity thereto, composed a collection of Astronomical Allegories, in which the emanations from the imaginary great soul of nature, by which they believed all materialities we're impressed with life and motion, were personified and made to play their respective parts.
On this system the apparent motion of each planet in the epicycle was represented by a motion of the earth around the sun, and the problem of correcting the position of the planet on account of the epicycle was reduced to finding its geocentric from its heliocentric position. This was the greatest step ever taken in theoretical astronomy, yet it was but a single step.
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