see it clearly
Galileo's Problems With the Church
Although he had no desire to raise the theological issue, it must be admitted that, the discussion once set on foot, he threw himself into it with characteristic impetuosity, and thus helped to precipitate a decision which it was his interest to avert.
In December 1613 a Benedictine monk named Benedetto Castelli, at that time professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa, wrote to inform Galileo of a recent discussion at the grandducal table, in which he had been called upon to defend the Copernican doctrine against theological objections. This task Castelli, who was a steady friend and disciple of the Tuscan astronomer, seems to have discharged with moderation and success. Galileo’s answer, written, as he said himself, currenle calamo, was an exposition of a formal theory as to the relations of physical science to Holy Writ, still further developed in an elaborate apology addressed by him in the following year (1614) to Christina of Lorraine, dowager grand-duchess of Tuscany. Not satisfied with explaining adverse texts, he met his opponents with unwise audacity on their own ground, and endeavored to produce scriptural confirmation of a system which seemed to the ignorant many an incredible paradox, and to the scientific few a beautiful but daring innovation.
The rising agitation on the subject, fomented for their own purposes by the rabid Aristotelians of the schools, was heightened rather than allayed by these manifestoes, and on the fourth Sunday of the following Advent found a voice in the pulpit of Santa Maria Novella. Padre Caccini’s denunciation of the new astronomy was indeed disavowed and strongly condemned by his superiors; nevertheless, on the 5th of February 1615, another Dominican monk named Lorini laid Galileo’s letter to Casteili before the Inquisition.
Cardinal Robert Bellarmin was at that time by far the most influential member of the Sacred College. He was a man of vast learning and upright piety, but, although personally friendly to Galileo, there is no doubt that he saw in his scientific teachings a danger to religion. The year 1615 seems to have been a period of suspense. Galileo received, as the result of a conference between Cardinals Bellarmin and Del Monte, a semi-official warning to avoid theology, and limit himself to physical reasoning. “Write freely-,” he was told by Monsignor Dini, “but’ keep outside the sacristy.”
Unfortunately, he had already committed himself to dangerous ground. In December he repaired personally to Rome, full of confidence that the weight of his arguments and the vivacity of his eloquence could not fail to convert the entire pontifical court to his views. He was cordially received, and eagerly listened to, but his imprudent ardor served but to injure his cause. On the 24th of February 1616 the consulting theologians of the Holy Office characterized the two propositions: that the sun is immovable in the center of the world, and that the earth has a diurnal motion of rotation, the first as "absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical, because expressly contrary to Holy Scripture," and the second as "open to the same censure in philosophy, and at least erroneous as to faith."
Two days later Galileo was, by command of the pope (Paul V.), summoned to the palace of Cardinal Bellarmin, and there officially admonished not thenceforward to "hold, teach or defend" the condemned doctrine. This injunction he promised to obey. On the 5th of March the Congregation of the Index issued a decree reiterating, with the omission of the word heretical, the censure of the theologians, suspending, Usque Corrigatur, the great work of Copernicus, De revolutioni bus orbium coeleslium, and absolutely prohibiting a treatise by a Carmelite monk named Foscarini, which treated the same subject from a theological point of view. At the same time it was given to be understood that the new theory of the solar system might be held, and the trivial verbal alterations introduced into the Polish astonomer’s book in 1620, when the work of revision was completed by Cardinal Gaetani, confirmed this interpretation. This edict, it is essential to observe, the responsibility for which rests with a disciplinary congregation in no sense representing the church, was never confirmed by the pope, and was virtually repealed in 1757 under Benedict XIV.
Galileo returned to Florence three months later, not ill-pleased, as his letters testify, with the result of his visit to Rome. He brought with him, for the refutation of calumnious reports circulated by his enemies, a written certificate from Cardinal Bellarmin, to the effect that no abjuration had been required of or penance imposed upon him. During a prolonged audience he had received from the pope assurances of private esteem and personal protection; and he trusted to his dialectical ingenuity’ to find the means of presenting his scientific convictions under the transparent veil of an hypothesis. Although a sincere Catholic, he seems to have laid but little stress on the secret admonition of the Holy Office, which his sanguine temperament encouraged him gradually to dismiss from his mind. He preserved no written memorandum of its terms, and it was represented to him, according to his own deposition in 1633, solely by Cardinal Bellarmin’s certificate, in which, for obvious reasons, it was glossed over rather than expressly recorded.
For seven years, nevertheless, during which he led a life of studious retirement in the Villa Segni at Bellosguardo, near Florence, he maintained an almost unbroken silence. At the end of that time he appeared in public with his Saggiatore, a polemical treatise written in reply to the Libra astronomica of Padre Grassi (under the pseudonym of Lotario Sarsi), the Jesuit astronomer of the Collegio Romano. The subject in debate was the nature of comets,. the conspicuous appearance of three of which bodies in the year 1618 furnished the occasion of the controversy. Galileo’s views, although erroneous, since he held comets to be mere atmospheric emanations reflecting sunlight after the evanescent fashion of a halo or a rainbow, were expressed with such triumphant vigor, and embellished with such telling sarcasms, that his opponent did not venture upon a reply. The Saggiatore was printed at Rome in October 1623 by the Academy of the Lincei, of which Galileo was, a member, with a dedication to the new pope, Urban VIII., and notwithstanding some passages containing a covert defense of Copernican opinions, was received ‘with acclamation by ecclesiastical, no less than by scientific authorities.
Everything seemed now to promise a close of unbroken, prosperity to Galileo’s career. Maffeo Barberini, his warmest friend and admirer in the Sacred College, was, by the election of the 8th of August 1625 seated on the pontifical throne: and the marked distinction with which he was received on his visit of congratulation to Rome in 1624 encouraged him to hope for the realization of his utmost wishes. He received every mark of private favor. The pope admitted him to six long audiences in the course of two months, wrote an enthusiastic letter to the grand-duke praising the great astronomer, not only for his distinguished learning, but also for his exemplary piety, and granted a pension to his son Vincenzio, which was afterwards transferred to himself, and paid, with some irregularities, to the end of his life.
But on the subject of the decree of 1616, the revocation of which Galileo had hoped to obtain through his personal influence, he found him inexorable. Yet there seemed reason to expect that it would at least be interpreted in a liberal spirit, and Galileo’s friends encouraged his imprudent confidence by eagerly retailing to him every papal utterance which it was possible to construe in a favorable sense. To Cardinal Hohenzollern, Urban was reported to have said that the theory of the earth’s motion had not been and could not be condemned as heretical, but only as rash; and in 1630 the brilliant Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella wrote to Galileo that the pope had expressed to him in conversation his disapproval of the prohibitory decree. Thus, in the full anticipation of added renown, and without any misgiving as to ulterior consequences, Galileo set himself, on his return to Florence, to complete his famous but ill-starred work, the Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo. Finished in. 1630, it was not until January 1632 that it emerged from the presses of Laodini at Florence. The book was originally intended to appear in Rome, but unexpected obstacles interposed. The Lincean Academy collapsed with the death of Prince Federigo Cesi, its founder and president; an outbreak of plague impeded communication between the various Italian cities; and the imprimatur was finally extorted, rather than accorded, under the pressure of private friendship and powerful interest.
A tumult of applause from every part of Europe followed its publication; and it would be difficult to find in any language a book in which animation and elegance of style are so happily combined with strength and clearness of scientific exposition. Three interlocutors, named respectively Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio, take part in the four dialogues of which the work is composed. The first-named expounds the views of the author; the second is an eager and intelligent listener; the third represents a well-meaning but obtuse Peripatetic, whom the others treat at times with undisguised contempt. Salviati and Sagredo took their names from two of Galileo’s early friends, the former a learned Florentine, the latter a distinguished Venetian gentleman; Simplicio ostensibly derived his from the Sicilian commentator of Aristotle, but the choice was doubtless instigated by a sarcastic regard to the double meaning of the word. There were not wanting those who insinuated that Galileo intended to depict the pope himself in the guise of the simpleton of the party; and the charge, though preposterous in itself, was supported by certain imprudence of expression, which Urban was not permitted to ignore.
It was at once evident that the whole tenor of this remarkable work was in flagrant contradiction with the edict passed sixteen years before its publication, as well as with the author’s personal pledge of conformity to it. The ironical submission with which it opened, and the assumed indetermination with which it closed, were hardly intended to mask the vigorous assertion of Copernican principles which formed its substance. It is a singular circumstance, however, that the argument upon which Galileo mainly relied as furnishing a physical demonstration of the truth of the new theory rested on a misconception. The ebb and flow of the tides were, he asserted, a visible proof of the terrestrial double movement, since they resulted from inequalities in the absolute velocities through space of the various parts of the earth’s surface, due to its rotation. To this notion, which took its rise in a confusion of thought, he attached capital importance, and he treated with scorn Kepler’s suggestion that a certain occult attraction of the moon was in some way concerned in the phenomenon. The theological censures which the book did not fail to incur were not slow in making themselves felt.
Towards the end of August the sale was prohibited; on the 1st of October the author was cited to Rome by the Inquisition. He pleaded his, age, now close upon seventy years, his infirm health, and the obstacles to travel caused by quarantine regulations; but the pope was sternly indignant at what he held to be his ingratitude and insubordination, and no excuse was admitted. At length, on the 13th of February 1633, he arrived at the residence of Niccolini, the Tuscan ambassador to the pontifical court, and there abode in retirement for two months. From the 12th to the 30th of April he was detained in the palace of the Inquisition, where he occupied the best apartments and was treated with unexampled indulgence. On the 30th he was restored to the hospitality of Niccolini, his warm partisan. The accusation against him was that he had written in contravention of the decree of 1616, and in defiance of the command of the Holy Office communicated to him by Cardinal Bellarmin; and his defense consisted mainly in a disavowal of his opinions, and an appeal to his good intentions.
On the 21st of June he was finally examined under menace of torture; but he continued to maintain his assertion that after its condemnation by the Congregation of the Index, he had never held the Copernican theory. Since the publication of the documents relating to this memorable trial, there can no longer be any doubt, not only that the threat of torture was not carried into execution, but that it was never intended that it should be. On the 22nd of June, in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Galileo read his recantation, and received his sentence. He was condemned, as “ vehemently suspected of heresy,” to incarceration at the pleasure of the tribunal, and by way of penance was enjoined to recite once a week for three years the seven penitential psalms. This sentence was signed by seven cardinals, but did not receive the customary papal ratification. The legend according to which Galileo, rising from his knees after repeating the formula of abjuration, stamped on the ground, and exclaimed, Eppur si muove! is, as may readily be supposed, entirely apocryphal.
Galileo remained in the custody of the Inquisition from the 21st to the 24th of June, on which day he was relegated to the Trinita de Monti. Thence, on the 6th of July, he was permitted to depart for Siena, where he spent several months in the house of the archbishop, Ascanio Piccolomini, one of his numerous and trusty friends. It was not until December that his earnest desire of returning to Florence was realized, and the remaining eight years of his life were spent in his villa at Arcetri in the strict seclusion which was the prescribed condition of his comparative freedom. Domestic afflictions combined with numerous and painful infirmities to embitter his old age. His sister-in-law and her whole family, who came to live with him on his return from Rome, perished shortly afterwards of the plague; and on the 2nd of April 1634 died, to the inexpressible grief of her father, his eldest and best beloved daughter, a nun in the convent of San Matteo at Arcetri. Galileo was never married; but by a Venetian woman named Itlarina Gamba he had three children: a son who married and left descendants, and two daughters who took the veil at an early age.
His prodigious mental activity continued undiminished to the last. In 1636 he completed his Dialog delle nisove scienze, in which he recapitulated the results of his early experiments and mature meditations on the principles of mechanics. This in many respects his most valuable work was printed by the Elzevirs at Leiden in 1638, and excited admiration equally universal and more lasting than that accorded to his astronomical treatises. His last telescopic discovery, that of the moon’s diurnal and monthly librations, was made in 1637, only a few months before his eyes were for ever closed in hopeless blindness. It was in this condition that Milton found him when he visited him at Arcetri in 1638. But the fire of his genius was not even yet extinct. He continued his scientific correspondence with unbroken interest and undiminished logical acumen; he thought out the application of the pendulum to the regulation of clockwork, which Huygens successfully realized fifteen years later; and he was engaged in dictating to his disciples, Viviani and Torricelli, his latest ideas on the theory of impact when he was seized with the slow fever which in two months brought him to the grave.
On the 8th of January 1642 he closed his long life of triumph and humiliation, which just spanned the interval between the death of Michelangelo and the birth of Isaac Newton. The direct services which Galileo rendered to astronomy are virtually summed up in his telescopic discoveries. To the theoretical perfection of the science he contributed little or nothing. He pointed out indeed that the so-called “third motion,” introduced by Copernicus to account for the constant parallelism of the earth’s axis, was a superfluous complication. But he substituted the equally unnecessary hypothesis of a magnetic attraction, and failed to perceive that the phenomenon to be explained was, in relation to absolute space, not a movement but the absence of movement. The circumstance, however, which most seriously detracts from his scientific reputation is his neglect of the discoveries made during his lifetime by the greatest of his contemporaries.
Kepler’s first and second laws were published in 1609, and his third ten years later. By these momentous inductions the geometrical theory of the solar system was perfected, and a hitherto unimagined symmetry was perceived to regulate the mutual relations of its members. But by Galileo they were passed over in silence. In his Dialogo del massimi sistemi, printed not less than thirteen years after the last of the three laws had been given to the world, the epicycles by which Copernicus, adhering to the ancient postulate of uniform circular motion, had endeavored to reduce to theory the irregularities of the planetary movements, were neither expressly adopted nor expressly rejected; and the conclusion seems inevitable that this grave defection from the cause of progress was due to his perhaps unconscious reluctance to accept discoveries which he had not originated. He still deserves credit for his innumerable observations, which are some of the greatest foundations for the science of astronomy.