““With hindsight, it is truly remarkable that, as early as the sixteenth century, Copernicus and his disciple Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514–74) resolved the issue to their satisfaction by invoking the patristic distinction between the Bible’s teaching on spiritual and eternal realities and its descriptions of the natural world in the language of ordinary people. Rheticus specifically appealed to Augustine’s doctrine of “accommodation,” asserting that the Holy Spirit accommodated himself on the pages of Scripture to the everyday language and terminology of appearances.””
