Was there an association made between Geocentrism and Anthropocentrism before the Copernican Revolution?

Abstract

Some post-Copernican authors, such as Bernard de Fontenelle and Cyrano de Bergerac, mention an association between geocentrism and anthropocentrism that was broken by the Copernican model. This argument has been criticized by authors such as A. O. Lovejoy, Remi Brague, and Dennis R. Danielson, who argue that the geocentric model of the Universe humiliated man rather than glorified him, since the Earth, as the center of the Universe, was seen as the filthy part of the Universe. So, living on the Earth was not considered a noble status for Man. In this paper, however, I will show that living in the coarser part of the Universe had also been seen in conjunction with having a noble status, and that there was indeed an association made between geocentrism and anthropocentrism before the Copernican Revolution.

Keywords

• anthropocentrism, copernicus, geocentrism, giovanni pico della mirandola, thomas aquinas, bernard de fontenelle, cyrano de bergerac.