The Geocentric Universe

Hildegard von Bingen (1098 to 1179), Benedictine abbess, canonized on May 10, 2012 and named a Doctor of the Church on October 7, 2012, recorded visions of the cosmos in her native medieval German. The last of her three series, The Book of Divine Works (1163 to 1173), is the one examined here, by way of the reproduction and analysis of Dr. Helmut Posch in Das wahre Weltbild nach Hildegard von Bingen, to which Sungenis adds his own reading in light of more recent scientific work.

What he finds in her account is a universe of six layers with the Earth at the center, water in the remote recesses of space, a rotating firmament, and planets circling the sun while the sun circles the Earth: a Tychonic arrangement described four hundred years before Tycho Brahe and in the middle of the reigning Ptolemaic age. The chapters follow her cosmology through the days of creation, then take up gravity, inertia, the four elements, the cause of the seasons, the analemma, Keplerian anomalies, and the Church Fathers on geocentrism, arguing that her visions answer questions modern physics has left open.