I was, but I think I wasn't as bad as I fear. I was definitely acting, bellowing and sneering as I never do in real life, as well as drinking myself into unconsciouness, talking to God and making lewd overtures at women. Quite a trip! (Good thing it wasn't a staged reading.)Besides adding to my credentials as a wannabe thespian, I also had an agenda with regard to this particular play. It's the work of one of my colleagues (David), who teaches physics and the history and philosophy of science, and focuses on what historians of science see as a shameful episode in that history - shameful for religion. For when Nicholas Copernicus completed the manuscript for his masterpiece De Revolutionibus Orbium, he let a Lutheran theologian named Andreas Osiander look it over. Unbeknownst to Copernicus, Osiander added a preface which said, among other things,
it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. Then he must conceive and devise the causes of these motions or hypotheses about them. Since he cannot in any way attain to the true causes, he will adopt whatever suppositions enable the motions to be computed correctly ... For these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. ... they are not put forward to convince anyone that they are true, but merely to provide a reliable basis
for computation. However, since different hypotheses are sometimes offered for one and the same ... the astronomer will take as his first choice that hypothesis which is the easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps rather seek the semblance of the truth. But neither of them will understand or state anything certain, unless it has been divinely revealed to him.Therefore alongside the ancient hypotheses, which are no more probable, let us permit these new hypotheses also to become known, especially since they are admirable as well as simple and bring with them a huge treasure of very skillful observations. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy, which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose, and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it. Farewell.
It wasn't until Kepler's time that the authorship of the preface was established. The play imagines that Copernicus' book was not taken seriously because readers assumed the unsigned preface to be his own work, and seeks to understand why Osiander - who was an able mathematician as well as a cleric - will have done so underhanded a thing. It opens with Copernicus
seeing the preface, cursing, and dying in a fit of rage!My knowledge of early modern history makes me skeptical of the premise. Nobody believed that prefaces were meant in earnest. Prefaces at this time were designed to flatter patrons and reassure censors; if anything, they tended to overstate the importance of the work so generously supported by the patron. So a preface like this one would have whetted the appetite of a 16th century scholar, not dampened it. Books of calculations and hypotheses aspiring only to amusing diversions wouldn't come with such a preface! So I'm inclined to think that Osiander's reason (if indeed it was done without Copernicus' knowledge) was to ensure the book got published and noticed, but without its author and publisher getting in trouble. He may have been its best friend, not its traducer. (I gather there are others who think so too.)
Happily, the play is better than its premise. So while in outline it's about religion trying to hold back the progress of science (the old Enlightenment story...), the drama of it is all in Osiander, who is presented as torn between a serious interest in science, and a serious commitment to the goals of the Reformation: he wants not to prevent the book's publication, but to prevent its arguments from distracting from or undermining the religious revolution of Martin Luther. The play's neatest conceit (but hard to play!) is to depict Osiander's inner wranglings on this issue as dream dialogues with the aging Galileo, 100 years later: on one level Osiander knows Copernicus is right. He ends up deciding that the preface is God's work, that the world isn't ready for the possibility that human observations might provide a more accurate account of
the world than Scripture, let alone that the earth moves (Galileo issues). But he does this as a believer in God and science.The play was read last year as well, and the actor reading Osiander (a Jesuit priest!), made him a nasty piece of work. My agenda in securing the role this time around (I can admit it now) was to defend Osiander, to prevent the play from confirming simplistic religion-vs.-science views. Not so easy, since I couldn't change the script (though, as I've said, it presents a complex portrait of Osiander). It only goes so far to have the director of the religious studies program lending Osiander a voice, and is not without risk. If only I could have added ... a preface!
