In the earliest phase, fear of the new is articulated firmly within the coordinated system of Christian theology. The argument commonly runs as follows: if it is plausible to suppose the existence of other, possibly even more sophisticated “races” in the universe, would not we, the descendants of Adam and Eve, lose our singular privilege of being the apple of God’s eye? This anxiety provides one of the reasons for the Church’s initial hostility towards post-Copernican speculation about the plurality of worlds. Holy Scripture certainly only told of one Creation, one eloquent reptile, one Original Sin, and one Redeemer.
Belief in other worlds and other peoples (who, after all, could hardly be descended from Adam and Eve) was thus tantamount to heresy, long before Thomas Paine and Percy Bysshe Shelley, around 1800, triumphantly declared such belief to be the rock on which Christianity would ultimately founder. And the debate was not simply a matter of theological hair-splitting either, such as we find in Melanchthon’s physics textbook Initia doctrinae physicae, published in 1550, at the height of the age of geographical and ethnological discovery, where Melanchthon worries about what religions the extraterrestrial might have, and whether these may even enter into competition with our own.7 No, this was not a debate confined to the rarified atmosphere of theological nit-picking as a fine art: the flames of hellfire that theoretically awaited the heretic in the next world were already blazing up in this one, namely on 17 February 1600, on the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. As we know from Hans Blumenberg, Giordano Bruno’s heresy consisted not merely, but certainly not least, in his public speculations on the plurality of worlds.8 A passage from Kepler’s 1610 Dissertatio cum nuncio sidereo, verbatim echoes of which continue to haunt the pages not only of Robert Burton but also of H G. Wells, may illustrate the point:
Well, then, someone may say, if there are globes in the heaven similar to our earth, do we vie with them over who occupies the better portion of the universe? For if their globes are nobler, we are not the noblest of rational creatures. Then how can all things be for man’s sake? How can we be the masters of God’s handiwork?9
In other words: he who supposes the existence of populated worlds in the universe on the basis of scientific extrapolation must, ipso facto, come under the suspicion that Kepler was careful to reject: “For the revered mysteries of sacred history [and thus the fundamentals of the Christian faith] are not a laughing matter to me.”10 Such anxieties prompted some remarkable intellectual acrobatics on the part of astronomers and
7 Philipp Melanchthon, Initia doctrinae physicae (Frankfurt, 1550), fols. 43–44.
8 Hans Blumenberg, ed. Bruno, Das Aschermittwochsmahl (Frankfurt, 1969), 47, 50, implicitly countering the influential view of Francis A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964), 355.
9 Kepler’s Conversation with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger, ed. Rosen, 43 (Gesammelte Werke, IV, 307).
10 Conversation, 40 (Gesammelte Werke, IV, 305).
theologians alike. If, unlike Athanasius Kircher, for example, one did not reject a limine the theoretical possibility of a populated cosmic world on the grounds that this would be incompatible with the teachings of the Bible, the symbolism inferred from the earth’s position within the cosmic constellation had to serve, as in Kepler’s Dissertatio, for example, as proof of our privileged existence as God’s favourite creatures in the universe. And yet, even if one could console oneself by quoting similar sentiments from the Bible itself, vague worries nevertheless persisted in the minds of many intellectuals. John Donne writes in “The First Anniversary”: “And freely men confesse that this world’s spent, / When in the Planets, and the Firmament, / They seeke so many new.” Pascal, meanwhile, was frightened by the idea that the “infinite spaces” might contain countless other inhabited realms, “royaumes,” intelligent worlds that “know nothing of us.”11
On the other hand, Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius would not necessarily have spread such theological anxiety or worry. It could equally well have been read as a new gospel, particularly by those endowed with a specifically literary imagination. Among these we should count Kepler himself, who, in 1609, wrote his Somnium, the world’s first ever science-fiction novel, to which a “Geographical Appendix” was added in the 1620s. In this book, the Moon is populated by creatures that have unmistakably human characteristics. Admittedly, ever since the publication of Marjorie Nicolson’s pioneering work on Voyages to the Moon, conventional wisdom has held that Kepler’s Lunarians are definitely “not humans” but, at best, mere amphibians.12 Yet a reading (and not just between the lines) of the Latin original reveals that Kepler indicated quite unequivocally that the inhabitants of his Moon are creatures of a higher order, intelligent beings, interested in astronomy and unmistakably human—Swiss, in fact. For when his Lunarians build the craters that are supposed to shelter them from the sun and from
11 John Donne, “The First Anniversary,” lines 209–211, Poems of John Donne, ed.
Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford, 1912), I, 237; Blaise Pascal, The Pensées, trans. J. M.
Cohen (Harmondsworth, 1961), no. 90; Pensées, eds. Zacharie Tourneur and Didier Anzieu (Paris, 1960), no. 41: “Combien de royaumes nous ignorent!”; “Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie” (no. 199; Cohen, no. 91).
12 Cp. Jörg Hienger, “Das Motiv der ersten Begegnung in Bewohnbarkeitsphantasien der Science Fiction,” Exotische Welten in populären Lektüren, ed. Amselm Maler (Tübingen, 1990), 117. The classic text remains Marjorie Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (New York, 1948).
robbers, their skilled communal land surveying and construction efforts suggest a civic-spiritedness that has a decidedly Helvetic flavour.
Kepler’s Moon-dwellers, at least the Subvolvans among them, not only live in crater-cities with suburban gardens and other familiar paraphernalia; they also, and quite literally, have divided the Moon into orderly “cantons.” Does it thus follow that Earth-dwelling man will henceforth have to share with his Lunar neighbours the privilege of being the pride of creation—and feel himself diminished as a result? Not at all; in fact, quite the opposite is the case: our prime cosmic location has ensured the development of an incomparably more advanced culture than the Lunarian peoples—for people they are—could imagine even in their wildest dreams. As Kepler describes in vivid detail, the Lunarians, within (and outside) their craters, eke out a dreary existence with barely enough for human subsistence: in perpetual flight from the unremitting rays of the sun, they are caught in a treadmill of seeking out shadowy shelter and thus wander from place to place forever, like primitive nomads or, as Kepler has it, “peripatetics in the true sense of the word.”13 This is the most they can ever hope to achieve. Not a trace of high culture—though, it may be added, not a trace of religious witch-hunts either (shadows of which were, of course, looming over Kepler’s family at this time). All in all, then, it is clear that we earthlings lead an almost utopian existence by comparison—in spite of our ancestors’
expulsion from Paradise, and thus in spite of our sins.
In spite of our sins—this is the cue for another early modern attempt to transform, in a literary manner, the theological anxieties over man’s place in a universe of multiple worlds into trust in God’s loving kindness. As late as the eighteenth century (and certainly somewhat belatedly in terms of the history of ideas), theologians such as Joachim Böldicke (Abermaliger Versuch einer Theodicee, 1746) and Andrew Fuller (The Gospel Its Own Witness, 1799) resolve the threat to our uniqueness by suggesting that the humanities of other planetary worlds must be without sin and hence not in need of redemption as we are: we ought to take pride in our sinfulness. We are God’s problem children—and hence his favourite ones: we alone are (as Pierre Gassendi in particular emphasised in the seventeenth century) the object of that divine love
13 Kepler’s Somnium, trans. with commentary by Edward Rosen (Madison, Milwaukee, and London, 1967), 152.
that had placed Jesus Christ in our midst, on our planet, to save us from the malaise that had had its beginnings in the apple-orchard of Eden.
The others, in their better worlds, may be without sin, but they do not receive preferential treatment on account of it. We are the preferred ones—we sinners, who may, at present, not amount to much, but who nevertheless can look forward to a future in heaven if we manage to behave ourselves on Earth.
Literary practitioners eagerly embraced this blank spot on the map of Christian dogma and piously set about transforming it into an imaginary theological utopia. In German, we have Eberhard Christian Kindermann’s solidly researched 1744 science-fiction novel Geschwinde Reise auf dem Luft-Schiff nach der obern Welt. Here, a spacecraft lands on the newly discovered Martian moon, where the astronauts encounter a fairy-tale world of colourful vegetation, the perfect shoot also for the once-a-month huntsman, populated by strange mythical creatures—
and humans. At first, the astronauts are frightened by what they see, but their fears soon turn out to be unfounded. For the Martian moon-dwellers wander about their natural paradise in “love and amicability,”
without “want or ailment,” god-fearing, happy people with not the slightest interest in space-travel technology—all unmistakable signs that they exist in a state of sinlessness, rather than being “fallen” like us.
And yet, for the space-travelling earthlings barred from such blessings, the experience of this utopian world is by no means depressing. Rather, Kindermann takes precisely the insights of terrestrial science that had posited the “twinkling stars” as “populated by creatures” to suggest that we, too, will soon return to Paradise—and, this time round, to a serpent-free Paradise.14
Kindermann’s credentials, by the way, also included a handbook on astronomy. And it was just such a manual that Miles Wilson, a Yorkshire vicar, sought to combine with some practical instruction on the lives and customs of the inhabitants of the various planets of our solar system in his 1757 novel The History of Israel Jobson. Travelling in a flying chariot, Elias’ preferred and Biblically tried and tested method of transport, Wilson visits one planetary human race after another.
Yet he, too, is primarily interested in these peoples’ theological status.
Accordingly, his extraterrestrials inhabit, without exception, a universe
14 Eberhard Christian Kindermann, Geschwinde Reise auf dem Luft-Schiff nach der obern Welt (Rudolstadt, 1744), 19–24 (quoted from the facsimile edition, Berlin, 1923).