This summer’s holiday was spent in Italy – some of it in Rome, where I stood in line for one hour and a half to get into the Musei Vaticani. It was worth the wait. This museum, mostly known for the Sistine Chapel and Rafael’s frescoes, is huge and has treasures on almost any wall. It is quite fascinating to watch the Athens School in the original, for instance.
The items most interesting to me, however, were these two unassuming monters found in the library section, opposite a stand selling postcards. They are mechanical demonstrations of two world systems – the heliocentric system of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, and the geocentric system of Ptolemy and Aristoteles. (After writing this, I have to confess I am a little uncertain about the monter on the left – I am pretty sure it is Ptolemaic, with some modifications. Experts?)

The monters stand there, without sign or commentary, unmentioned on the audio guide that otherwise will tell you about each room in tedious detail. Yet they represent the Catholic church’s loss of scientific legitimacy: As the Church clung to the increasingly untenable position that the Earth was at the center of the universe, scientists increasingly ceased to see the church as a legitimate sponsor or even legitimate actor in scientific endeavors. Science and church split – and what science remained in the church was increasingly limited to increasinly obscure theological interpretation – while science went on to triumph based on what Leonardo da Vinci called “the addiction to experience.”
According to Richard Tarnas (in The Passion of the Western Mind,) a “unique and potent combination of circumstances” led the church to reject the heliocentric hypothesis. Quite a few of the high clerics were ready to accept Galileo’s proposition that the earth rotated and circled around the sun – the Pope was a friend of Galileo, and one cardinal wrote about the necessity to “proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of Scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true.” (p. 260ff.)
However, the church (already under pressure from the Reformation) had participated in the elaboration of the spherical theories of Aristoteles and Ptolemy, to the point of assigning responsibility for the movement of some of the planets to specific arch-angels. So, if Galileo (who wrote in vernacular Italian and was of the “vitriolic personality” so often found in innovators) was not necessarily contradicting the bible, he certainly was contradicting centries of increasingly refined theologically founded natural philosphy, and by accepting Galileo’s propositions, the church would have to admit being wrong – hard to do in a climate where the church was also battered by charges of corruption and with a decided lack of enthusiasm for the divine powerty espoused by increasingly numerous charismatic movements.
This rejection of heliocentrism failed, of course. Tarnas again:

That decision caused irreparable harm to the Chruch’s intellectual and spritual integrity. Catholicism’s formal commitment to a stationary Earth drastically undercut its status and influence among the European intelligentsia. The Church would retain much power and loyalty in the succeeding centuries, but it could no longer justifiably claim to represent the human aspiration toward full knowledge of the universe. […] In Galileo’s own forced recantation lay the Church’s own defeat and science’s victory.

John Keegan: The Second World War, Penguin 1990

I am currently unpacking books from storage crates and finding many a jewel for rereading. This is one of them.

This relatively short (600 pages) book is a strategic and military history of WWII – John Keegan, lecturer at Sandhurst, concerns himself with maneuvres, logistics, weapons and the thoughts and deliberations of military and political leaders about how to conduct war. Largely missing from the story is partisan warfare, the Holocaust, resistance movements, and the political and ideological side of the conflict. This is WWII as seen from military headquarters, where deaths are counted in the thousands and losses deemed acceptable based on percentages.

And that is OK, for the book makes no pretence at trying to be anything else – and as a military history, it is brilliant. The best part of the book are careful analyses of some of the great battles (particularly Crete, which taught both the Germans and the Allies some important lessons, is well described). Where Ambrose describes the hardships of the individual soldiers, Keegan makes us understand the importance of decisions at the strategic and tactical level – how politicians and generals depend on communications, intelligence, rapport with subordinates and peers, and luck. In particular, the book counters the rather disparate view of Montgomery espoused by Ambrose. Montgomery was more careful with his men and more calculating than the American generals – but Britain had exhausted its supply of manpower and could not depend on hordes of enthusiastic young men to be flung against entrenched and experienced Germans.

Keegan does not moralize either this way or that: He evaluates decisions made based on the information available at the time and leaves judgment largely up to the reader, based on his careful and understated analysis, delivered in logical rather than chronological chapters. He discusses Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt and their generals largely in terms of decision style and strategic insight (or delusion).

Read this book for the understanding of technology and maneuver and the decisions faced by military leaders. Highly recommended.