Page:The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe.djvu/125

 dwelling (like the gleaming stars) among the heavens. By these words one can plainly understand the essence and figure of the angels as well as of the celestial beings; for while other beings have their places in this universe assigned to them for their habitation, as the fish the sea, the cattle the fields, and the wild beasts the mountains and forests, even as Origen, Eusebius, and Diodorus say, so the stars are assigned positions in the heavens. This can also be understood by the curtains of the tabernacle which Moses, the great Lawgiver, had ornamented with the images of cherubim showing that the heavens were indicated by the angelic faces of the stars. While St. Augustine, Jerome, Thomas Aquinas and Scotus most fitly called this universe a being, nevertheless Albertus, Damascenus, and Thomas Aquinas deny that the heavenly bodies are animated. But Thomas Aquinas shows himself in this inconsistent and contradictory, for he confesses that spiritual substances are united with the heavenly bodies, which could not be unless they were united in the same hypostasis of an animated body. If this body is animated, it must necessarily be living and either rational or irrational. If, on the other hand, this spiritual substance does not make the same hypostasis with the celestial body, it will necessarily be that the movement of the sky is accidental, as coming from the mover outside to the thing moved, no more nor less than the movement of a wheel comes from the one who turns it: As this is absurd, what follows from it is necessarily absurd also.

How many spheres are there?

It is difficult to determine their number because of the variety of opinions among the authorities, each differing from the other, and because of the inadequacy of the proofs of such things. For Eudoxus has stated that the spheres with their deferents are not more than three and twenty in number. Calippus has put it at thirty, and Aristotle at forty-seven, which Alexander Aphrodisiensis has amended by adding to it two more on the advice of Sosigenes. Ptolemy holds that there are 31 celestial spheres not including the bodies of the planets. Johan Regiomontanus says 33, an opinion which is followed by nearly all, because in the time of Ptolemy they did not yet know that the eighth sphere and all the succeeding ones are carried around by the movement of the trepidation. Thus he held that the moon

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