The Ash Wednesday Supper

FIRST DIALOGUE

...entrust the business, the reasoning, and the art with which these men were victorious; but rather to one who has experience and better judgment in the military art. Thus to the Theban Manto The daughter of Tiresias; she possessed the gift of prophecy but lacked her father's deeper insight., who saw but did not understand, Tiresias The famous blind prophet of Greek mythology, known for seeing truths that those with sight could not.—blind, but a divine interpreter—said:

A great part of truth is hidden from one who lacks sight,
But where my fatherland calls me, where Phoebus The sun god Apollo, associated with prophecy and light. leads, I shall follow.
You, daughter, guiding your father in his lack of light,
Recount the clear signs of the sacred prophet.
original: "Visu carentem magna pars ueri latet, / Sed quo uocat me patria, quo Phœbus sequar, / Tu lucis inopem gnata genitorem regens, / Manifesta sacri signa fatidici refer." These lines are from Seneca’s tragedy Oedipus.

Similarly, what could we judge, if the many and diverse verifications of the appearances of the superior bodies The stars and planets, which in traditional cosmology were considered "higher" or "more perfect" than the Earth. or those surrounding us had not been declared and placed before the eyes of reason? Certainly nothing. Nevertheless, after having given thanks to the gods—the distributors of gifts that proceed from the first and infinite omnipotent light—and having magnified the study of these noble spirits, we know most clearly that we must open our eyes to what they have observed and seen, and not grant consent to what they have conceived, understood, and determined.

SMITH: Please, let me understand: what opinion do you have of Copernicus? Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), the astronomer who proposed that the Earth revolves around the Sun.

THEOPHILO: He had a serious, refined, diligent, and mature intellect; a man who is not inferior to any astronomer who existed before him, except by his place in succession and time. He was a man who, regarding natural judgment, was far superior to Ptolemy, Hipparchus, Eudoxus Ancient Greek and Hellenistic astronomers who developed the geocentric (Earth-centered) model of the universe., and all the others who walked in their footsteps. He achieved this by freeing himself from certain false presuppositions of common and popular philosophy—I will not say blindness. Yet, he did not move very far from it, because he, being more a student of mathematics than of nature...