Caelum recusat

The Concord's device, engraved for the Communications: the world beneath its dome, and beneath that the motto. The form of the tablet was the engraver's, and is not remarked upon in the minutes.

Caelum recusat (Latin: "the heavens decline") was the motto of the Aetheric Concord, adopted at its founding in 1855 and adapted – without acknowledgement, and apparently without research – from lumen recusat ("the light declines"), the motto and epitaph of the Bavarian optician Hieronymus Unlonn.^[1]

Where Unlonn's lumen recusat held that light arrives where it pleases, the Concord's caelum recusat enlarges the claim from a single ray to the whole firmament: the heavens themselves decline – to move, to curve, or to be other than a flat plane beneath a still aether.^[2] The historian Thomas Vogel notes that the Concord, borrowing the construction, did not look up its source, and so adopted as a banner of confidence a phrase first cut as a dead man's epitaph.

Meaning

In the Concord's usage the phrase asserts that the sky is settled: its apparent motions real, its bodies exactly where they appear, and its refusal to behave as a globe requiring no explanation beyond the plane.^[2] It is lumen recusat promoted – the same resignation, enlarged to a cosmology.

Use

The motto appears on the Concord's serial Communications, beneath the device of a flat disc under a starred dome, and on the cutaway plate of the Concordant Orrery.^[1] Josiah Grimble, who chose it, is said to have preferred Latin to plain English on the ground that it "settled the matter" – a property he valued in mottoes as in members.

See also

• Lumen recusat – the original, and an epitaph
• Firmament – the sky this motto says declines to curve
• The Aetheric Concord – whose motto it was, and whose position it states
• Hieronymus Unlonn – whose own motto it answers, one word changed
• Reluctant light – the doctrine promoted from light to the whole sky

References

1. ^ Adopted 1855; it appears on the Concord's Communications and on the Concordant Orrery plate.
2. ^ On the adaptation from lumen recusat and the failure to look it up, see Thomas Vogel.