The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe

by Arthur Koestler

Why did Copernicus, after ten years spent in the bubble-bath of Renaissance Italy, adopt this arrogantly obscurantist and anti-humanistic attitude? Why did he hug that apocryphal letter for forty years so close to his heart, like a talisman, make a new translation of it and quote it to the Pope? How could a Renaissance philosopher, a contemporary of Erasmus and Reuchlin, Hutten, and Luther, approve of the preposterous notion that one should not pour the clear water of truth into the muddy wells of the human mind? Why was Copernicus so afraid of the Copernican Revolution? The answer is given in the text: because the pure water would be wasted and the dirt would only get agitated. Here is the core of that anxiety which paralysed his work and crippled his life. The hocus-pocus about the Pythagorean mysteries was a rationalization of his fear of getting sprayed with dirt if he published his theory.