JF Ptak Science Books Post 1938
Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) published this God's-eye-view of creation a few years after his death in the fourth volume (Astronomica) of his six-volume Opera Omina. His friends and supporters of course saw to the publication of this mathematician/philosopher/logician's work1 back there in 1658, so Gassendi--a very prominent thinker from a long-line of thinkers nearly on the verge of great discovery here and there and certainly a witness to it--made his greatest adventure in publishing only in death.
Imaging a physical god is a tricky business in the history of the printed book. Bits of the creator of the universe turn up in book illustrations over hundreds of years, though I am not sure when the very first picture of a part of god appears. The hand of the creator (generally seen as the Primum Mobile) is not terribly uncommon in images of a scientific nature in the 17th and 18th centuries, and is perhaps best exemplified by Robert Fludd's famous Monochord:
Of course there are many instance of the full-bodied god being seen through a break in the clouds, though in all the instances of this that I have seen the tantalizing peak into whatever region it is that this god exists is left entirely blank, a small white space. As so:
(Title page is for the narrative poem Le Metamorfosi, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translated into Italian by Gioseppe Horologgi, and published in Venice in 1563. See an earlier post on this blog, A History of Blank and Empty Things: God in a Hole in the Sky, here.)
The eye of god is also not very uncommon, and is represented by an eye and also in a sacred triangle. Less common though are images like Gassendi's, which in a way, in an odd and almost offhand way, give the reader a sense of what it is that god might be seeing in agodly-lineof-sight Perhaps this is incorrect--but in judging his image with others in my experience it seems to me that the representation is a little more "personalized" here than just about anywhere else.
Notes:
The book was published by Sumptibus Laurentii Anisson & Ioannis Baptistae Devenet (Lugduni), 1658. Edward Gibbon paid him the very high compliment of being of the highest order in what was seen as not his strongest fields: "Le meilleur philosophe des littérateurs, et le meilleur littérateur des philosophes"
From the Dictionary of Scientific Biography: "Although he excited the curiosity and attention of others, Gassendi did not seek to do so. He was not the leader of the “libertines” and the future “philosophes.” Olivier Bloch, in his authoritative thesis, sees in Gassendi a belated humanist rather than an avantgarde thinker.1 There is no reason to question the sincerity of his testimonies of allegiance to a church of which he was a respected dignitary, as were his best friends, Peiresc and Mersenne. His true intellectual master was Galileo. In the Exercitationes of 1624 Gassendi had demonstrated his philosophic independence, and as early as 12 July 1625 he wrote to Galileo that he shared his Copernican ideas. But he never had to suffer the anxieties of the great Florentine. His choice of Epicurean atomism as a framework for the exposition of his ideas appears to have been more a revolt against Scholasticism than the expression of any profound conviction. Moreover, his erudition embraced all doctrines, including those of the church fathers, whereas he rejected such important elements of Epicureanism as the vertical fall and swerving of atoms..."-- The considerably shortened (but free) version of the DSB is available at the Linda Hall library, here.
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