It is often asserted that the whole medieval way of thinking about man has been destroyed beyond hope of repair by the discovery that our planet, the Earth, is not the material centre of the Universe. We are constantly being told that our earth is but a whirling grain of dust, one among millions of millions of such grains. How, then, we are asked, can anything very dignified be perceived in human nature? And anyhow, the medieval notion of man’s being the crown of creation, and of all things else having been created for his sake, must be once and for all abandoned.
Those who write this are, first of all, victims of their imagination as never the medievals were; and further, have but a faulty knowledge of history, philosophical and theological; and finally, are guilty of logical lapses in their reasoning. For (1), medieval thinkers were never so silly as to suppose that man was great in origin or in destiny because he lived in a place that was centre of the universe: it was because they saw that man, being part spiritual, was intrinsically great, that it seemed appropriate to them that his domicile should hold even physically a central position among places where there was no reason to suppose there were any inhabitants at all. But (2), they are not to be supposed to have been the victims of such a notion, as they would have been if they had held that anything depended on a mere physical centricity of the earth. That would have been to succumb to the vulgarest of illusions, one, that is, of the imagination. But the thinkers who worked out the theory of, say, transubstantiation were the very last persons to succumb to the imagination, since the exclusion of all imaginative date is the most obvious of prerequisites if anyone is even to begin to understand the dogma– and discussion often shows that non-Catholic controversialists are quite unable to grasp what Catholics mean by transubstantiation because, precisely, they are unable to divest themselves of their imagination, and persist in thinking that Substance means a lump of something. Medieval writers surrounded their doctrine with all sorts of imaginative decorative, but they never confused the two, any more than our Lord did, when he described heaven in terms of feasting. And (3) even if there are “inhabitants” on e.g. the planets, even we are able to perceive that they are not “men,” since human life could not be lived on gaseous Jupiter or frozen moon and so forth. But that our Universe is densely “populated” by beings other than men, which indeed far outstrip men in natural dignity, the Christian tradition has always maintained, and tells of spiritual beings manifold in grade of excellence– indeed, St. Thomas was perfectly prepared to admit (by way of a quite different line of reasoning) that every “angel” or “pure spirit” was a species in itself! So since the Christian religion does not even profess to exist save for man’s sake, and to tell us more about man and his destiny and how he should achieve it, and since the centre of that religion is Christ who was Man and upon this earth, the earth most certainly is and ever must be the physical centre of the Christian’s universe, and, for him, everything else lies round it. Of what may exist upon other planets or in the stars, and what wonders God may work there, we know nothing at all, save the general truth that through the Second Person of the most Holy Trinity God wills to establish a communion between himself and all that he has created. Enough for men that they live upon this earth, are what they are, and achieve what they were created for by means of Jesus Christ, true God and true Man. There is indeed a singularly beautiful poem by the late Mrs. Alice Meynell on this very subject. Neither the geocentric theory, then, nor the heliocentric theory, have anything whatsoever to do with the view we take of Man, nor ever had.
The Teaching of the Catholic Church, Man and His Destiny, p. 302-303.
