Darwin Climbs a Cathedral

When I started making a video on the platform halfway up the cathedral in Strasbourg (which is the highest point that is open to the public and which can be reached on foot), I wondered how I could possibly tie it in with science. My YouTube channel, after all, is about science. I cannot simply post nice tourist videos showing the cathedral spire and the roofs of new and old Strasbourg.

But it didn’t take me long to come up with a science angle for the video. When they started building the cathedral in 1015, no one knew how old or big the world, or certainly the universe, was. People, especially the laborers who built the cathedral, lived in a cloak of darkness. Any question that could not be answered by the church was not worth asking. Scholars knew the world was not flat, but it might as well have been.

The builders kept adding to the height of the cathedral, and it reached its current height in 1439. This was before Copernicus was born. For over a century afterwards, people believed the sun, moon, and stars orbited around the Earth which was the center of God’s attention. From 1647 to 1874, the cathedral in Strasbourg was the tallest structure in the world. It is still the tallest building that was constructed entirely in the Middle Ages.

When Copernicus died, the idea that the Sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system was still heresy. But within a century, all of that changed. By the time the current Horlogue Astronomique (astronomical clock) was installed on the ground floor of the cathedral in 1843, everyone knew the planets orbited around the sun and that Copernicus was right. The giant clock even had the planets that were known at the time moving around the sun, and even had a portrait of Copernicus, the man the church would have killed in 1543 except that he was already dead. Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Copernican view of the universe. The Vatican even has an observatory and an official astronomer.

 

But by the time the cathedral had already reached its full height, the church and world were still in scientific darkness.

Another thing you can tell by looking at the roofs of Strasbourg from the cathedral is that Strasbourg has existed for a long time, at least since Roman times, when it was called Argentoratum (city of silver). Everyone is aware of the ancient legacy of Europe, Asia, and even Africa and Central and South America. But North America also had an ancient legacy of civilization. As I explain in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes, the big cities of North America (such as Cahokia and Spiro) have been forgotten by nearly everyone. Cahokia is now just some mounds of dirt, and Spiro not even that. The historical legacy of my Native American ancestors has been effaced from the surface of the planet.