In what is quite pos­si­bly the most famous pas­sage of the « De revo­lu­tio­ni­bus », Coper­ni­cus implies that nobo­dy could ever place this supreme fla­ming torch that is the Sun in ano­ther or bet­ter place than that from which it can illu­mi­nate eve­ry­thing simul­ta­neous­ly, name­ly the centre of this extre­me­ly beau­ti­ful temple that is our world. Consi­de­ring the fact that he leaves an inter­ro­ga­to­ry twist to this argu­ment of conve­nience, and since he makes this sta­te­ment without any jus­ti­fi­ca­tion as it seems enti­re­ly evident to him, cer­tain Coper­ni­cans choose to illus­trate this by means of an ana­lo­gy : if indeed the Sun must be posi­tio­ned thus, it is because the most appro­priate place for the torch inten­ded to illu­mi­nate the room is at its centre, and not in one of its cor­ners. Des­pite the helio­so­phy of the Renais­sance having been sha­red by both geo­cen­trists and Coper­ni­cans alike, this « torch » argu­ment does not appear to have achie­ved much suc­cess : rare­ly adop­ted by the Coper­ni­can camp, it was even contes­ted by some of them ; as for the geo­cen­trists, it held no appeal for them what­soe­ver. Did this argu­ment of conve­nience the­re­fore not bene­fit from the self‐evidence attri­bu­ted to it by Coper­ni­cus, and from, in his wake, it’s conti­nued sup­port by a good many com­men­ta­tors ? As is often the case when it comes to the his­to­ry of thought, the pseudo‐obviousness of this argu­ment is mere­ly the fruit of a bla­tant ana­chro­nism : pre­sen­ting helio­cen­trism as the cos­mo­lo­gi­cal sys­tem that final­ly grants the Sun its wor­thy cen­tra­li­ty by pla­cing it in the centre of the room and not in a cor­ner, is to ignore the fact that this star of the day alrea­dy enjoyed, in geo­cen­trism, a cen­tra­li­ty estee­med to be per­fect­ly in kee­ping with both its digni­ty and its inherent illu­mi­na­tive func­tion. Having lost their grasp on this world­view that no lon­ger belon­ged to them, the Coper­ni­cans thus put for­ward an argu­ment which, for the geo­cen­trists, is worth­less. Yet they could have argued the objec­tive super­io­ri­ty of their cen­tra­li­ty over that accor­ded to the Sun by geo­cen­trism : while the lat­ter is only nume­ri­cal, on a pure­ly pla­ne­ta­ry scale, and frank­ly fic­ti­tious, the for­mer is tho­rough­ly spa­tial, of cos­mic pro­por­tions and, at least on first approxi­ma­tion, very real. In order to pro­duce argu­ments of conve­nience that could car­ry their own weight, the pro­ta­go­nists of the new cos­mo­lo­gy would have bene­fi­ted from get­ting to know the world vision of their adver­sa­ries a lit­tle bet­ter ins­tead of addres­sing them from their own point of view ; simi­lar­ly, ins­tead of trea­ting as an obvious fact that which is only evident to one of the two par­ties present, his­to­rians of scien­ti­fic thought would also be well advi­sed to have a bet­ter unders­tan­ding of the world vision of those who his­to­ry now consi­ders as the losers !