The Center of the Universe: Earth?

One controversy which has reappeared in recent years is that which concerns the thesis that the Earth is the center of the Universe.

The Question: What is the center of the Universe? Is it the Earth?

Is a question which, like all questions, needs to be clarified as the precise meaning of the terms, before it can be adequately answered.

I will omit a discussion of what the term "the Earth" means, and of "the Universe".

For the key term ostensibley is "the center".

The center of something is that point which is most nearly equidistant from all other points in that something.

If that is you definition center, you are speaking of "center" in reference to spatial dimensions.

"The center" can also be defined as any place where in there gathers a community, as when there is said, "The parish Church is the center of the local Catholic Community."

Likewise the same term can mean "a primary, constituting or constivutive principle of a thing", as when there is said, "The human heart is the center of the body", or "Christ is the center of creation", or "God is at the center of all things", or "the Mother is the center of the family".

In all these senses "the center" is a term which respects relations, and it means in all these senses some sort of terminus from which all others are in some sense measured, dependent, or united.

But even when we say something is spatially the center, we are speaking about that in which spatially the measured distance of all to all is united.

And likewise Christ is the center of creation, because in Him creation finds not only it primary reason for being, and thus measure, but also Him who is the uniting purpose and power in the Cosmos.

So "center" as a term signifies a unitive principle in some order of being.

Now the question, what is the center of the Universe, can thus be answered in respect to several differing orders of being.

We usually mean the question in regard to spatial dimensions. But it can also be said in regard to the human community, or the community of intelligent, corporeal beings. Or in a religious sense, because though God is present to everyplace according to His Omnipotence and Being and Omniscience, yet in the Sacred Humanity the Second Person assumed, which is only present in this material world in the Most Blessed Sacrament, the Earth is the center of the cosmos, because here alone the Most Blessed Sacrament resides.

The Earth can also be called the center in regard to the order of the redemption, because it was here that Christ redeemed the cosmos. It could also be said to be the center of creation, in that man, the summit of creation, was created here on Earth.

But if we speak spatially, since there is no apparent order in the cosmos by which to measure a center, there being an apparent equal distribution of heavenly bodies as far as human science can now measure this, there is nothing to measure a center by, except in the sense that all things being viewed more or less always from the point of view of an Earth bound observer, this de facto, but not formally, makes the Earth the center, that is, as a point of view.

And thus we can understand the question "What is the center of the Universe? Is it the Earth?"

And thus we can see that the question has as many correct answers as the term "center" has senses; and that to argue one answer according to one sense against another is neither reasonable nor sensible.