[net.origins] Did Galileo disobey the Church?

michaelm@3comvax.UUCP (Michael McNeil) (03/08/86)

In article <18300001@iuvax.UUCP> kitchel@iuvax.UUCP (Sid Kitchel) writes:
>	[Re: Galileo and the Church]  The comments about "inertial frames"
>are well taken vis-a-vis Einstein and dynamics.  

(As I've pointed out elsewhere, inertial frames are required only for
Einstein's *special* theory of relativity, not his *general* theory.  
Thus, comments ruling out non-inertial frames are *not* well taken.)  

>... Galileo and his Jesuit opponents were practicing well
>established scholastic games.  There was no final way for the church to hold
>Galileo guilty for a personal opinion about mathematical theories.  However,
>the church felt threatened by the Protestant heresies and saw any challenge
>to the system as a serious threat, to it, to accepted astronomy and to
>the church's old friend Aristotelianism.  

I agree that the Church was caught up in the politics, intolerance,
and viciousness of the Reformation, and Galileo's attack on Ptolemy
was seen by the Church as his allying with the enemy.  I quote from
Jacob Bronowski's *The Ascent of Man*, where the trial is discussed.   

	Catholics and Protestants were embattled in what we should
	now call a cold war, in which, if Galileo had only known it,
	no quarter was given to a great man or small.  The judgment
	was very simple on both sides:  whoever is not for us is --
	a heretic.  Even so unworldly an interpreter of the faith as
	Cardinal Bellarmine had found the astronomical speculations
	of Giordano Bruno intolerable, and had sent him to the stake.  
	The Church was a great temporal power, and in that bitter
	time it was fighting a political crusade in which all means
	were justified by the end -- the ethics of the police state.  

	Galileo seems to me to have been strangely innocent about the
	world of politics, and most innocent in thinking that he could
	outwit it because he was clever.  For twenty years and more he
	moved along a path that led inevitably to his condemnation.  
	It took a long time to undermine him; but there never was any
	doubt that Galileo would be silenced, because the division
	between him and those in authority was absolute.  They
	believed that faith should dominate; and Galileo believed
	that truth should persuade.  

>So what was Galileo actually tried for and found guilty of?  The
>basic charge was disobedience.  He had been told to shut up about
>Copernicus.  His disobedience is clear to us today in "Dialogue
>on the Great World Systems."

It is *not* true that an open-and-shut case of disobedience can be
proved against Galileo.  Bronowski traveled to Rome, where he was
allowed to review the Secret Archives of the Vatican concerning the
case.  Bronowski writes, again in *The Ascent of Man*, as follows:  

	And there [i.e. in the Archives] is the famous Codex 1181,
	*Proceedings Against Galileo Galilei*.  The trial was in
	1633.  And the first remarkable thing is that the documents
	begin -- when?  In 1611, at the moment of Galileo's triumph
	in Venice, in Florence, and here in Rome, secret information
	was being laid against Galileo before the Holy Office of the
	Inquisition.  The evidence of the earliest document, not in
	this file, is that Cardinal Bellarmine instigated inquiries
	against him.  Reports are filed in 1613, 1614, and 1615.  By
	then Galileo himself becomes alarmed.  Unbidden, he goes to
	Rome in order to persuade his friends among the Cardinals
	not to prohibit the Copernican world system.  

	But it is too late.  In February of 1616, here are the formal
	words as they stand in draft in the Codex, freely translated:  

		Propositions to be forbidden:  
		that the sun is immovable at the centre of the heaven;
		that the earth is not at the center of the heaven,
		and is not immovable,
		but moves by a double motion.  

	Galileo seems to have escaped any severe censure himself.  At
	any rate, he is called before the great Cardinal Bellarmine
	and he is convinced, and has a letter from Bellarmine to say,
	that he must not hold or defend the Copernican world system --
	but there the document stops.  Unhappily, there is a document
	here in the record which goes further, and on which the trial
	is going to turn.  But that is all seventeen years in the
	future.  

	Meanwhile Galileo goes back to Florence, and he knows two
	things.  One is that the time to defend Copernicus in public
	is not yet.  And the second, that he thinks that there will
	be such a time.  About the first he is right; about the
	second, no.  However, Galileo bided his time, until --
	when?  Until an intellectual Cardinal should be elected
	Pope:  Maffeo Barberini.  That happened in 1623, when
	Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII.  [...]

	Galileo optimistically came to Rome in 1624, and had six long
	talks in the gardens with the newly elected Pope.  He hoped
	that the intellectual Pope would withdraw, or at least by-
	pass, the prohibition of 1616 of the world picture of
	Copernicus.  It turned out that Urban VIII would not consider
	that.  But Galileo still hoped -- and the officials of the
	Papal court expected -- that Urban VIII would let the new
	scientific ideas flow quietly into the Church until,
	imperceptibly, they replaced the old.  After all, that was
	how the heathen ideas of Ptolemy and Aristotle had become
	Christian doctrine in the first place.  So Galileo went on
	believing that the Pope was on his side, within the limits
	set by his office, until it came to the testing time.  And
	then he turned out to be most profoundly mistaken.  

	Their views had really been intellectually irreconcilable
	from the beginning.  Galileo had always held that the
	ultimate test of a theory must be found in nature.  

		I think that in discussions of physical problems we
		ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural
		passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary
		demonstrations ... Nor is God any less excellently
		revealed in Nature's actions than in the sacred
		statements of the Bible.  

	Urban VIII objected that there can be no ultimate test of
	God's design, and insisted that Galileo must say that in
	his book

		It would be an extravagant boldness for anyone to
		go about to limit and confine the Divine power and
		wisdom to some one particular conjecture of his own.  

	This proviso was particularly dear to the Pope.  If effect,
	it blocked Galileo from stating any definite conclusion
	(even the negative conclusion that Ptolemy was wrong),
	because it would infringe the right of God to run the
	universe by miracle, rather than by natural law.  

	The testing time came in 1632 when Galileo finally got his
	book, the *Dialogue on the Great World Systems*, into print.  
	Urban VIII was outraged.  

		Your Galileo has ventured to meddle with things that he
		ought not to and with the most important and dangerous
		subjects which can be stirred up in these days,

	he wrote to the Tuscan ambassador on 4 September of that year.  
	In the same month came the fateful order:  

		His Holiness charges the Inquisitor at Florence to
		inform Galileo, in the name of the Holy Office, that
		he is to appear as soon as possible in the course of
		the month of October at Rome before the Commissary-
		General of the Holy Office.  

	The Pope, Maffeo Barberini the friend, Urban VIII, has
	personally delivered him into the hands of the Holy Office
	of the Inquisition, whose process is irreversible.  

	The Dominican cloister of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva was where
	the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition proceeded against
	those whose allegiance was in question.  It had been created
	by Pope Paul III in 1542 to stem the spread of Reformation
	doctrines, being specially constituted "against heretical
	depravity throughout the whole Christian Commonwealth."  
	After 1571 it had also been given the power to judge written
	doctrine, and had instituted the Index of Prohibited Books.  
	The rules of procedure were strict and exact.  They had been
	formalised in 1588 and they were, of course, not the rules
	of a court.  The prisoner did not have a copy either of the
	charges or of the evidence; he had no counsel to defend him.  

	There were ten judges at the trial of Galileo:  all Cardinals
	and all Dominicans.  One of them was the Pope's brother and
	another was the Pope's nephew.  The trial was conducted by
	the Commissar-General of the Inquisition.  The hall in which
	Galileo was tried is now part of the Post Office of Rome, but
	we know what it looked like in 1633:  a ghostly committee room
	in a club for gentlemen.  

	We also know exactly the steps by which Galileo came to this
	pass.  It had begun on those walks in the garden with the new
	Pope in 1624.  It was clear that the Pope would not allow the
	Copernican doctrine to be avowed openly.  But there was
	another way, and the next year Galileo began to write, in
	Italian, the *Dialogue on the Great World Systems*, in which
	one speaker put objections to the theory, and the two other
	speakers, who were rather cleverer, answered them.  

	Because, of course, the theory of Copernicus is not self-
	evident.  It is not clear how the earth can fly round the
	sun once a year, or spin on its own axis once a day, and we
	not fly off.  It is not clear how a weight can be dropped
	from a high tower and fall vertically to a spinning earth.  
	These objections Galileo answered, as it were, on behalf of
	Copernicus, long dead.  We must never forget that Galileo
	defied the holy establishment in 1616 and in 1633 in
	defence of a theory not his own, but a dead man's,
	because he believed it true.  

	But on his own behalf Galileo put into the book that sense
	that all his science gives us from the time that, as a young
	man in Pisa, he had first put his hand on his pulse and watched
	a pendulum.  It is the sense that the laws here on earth reach
	out into the universe and burst right through the crystal
	spheres.  The forces in the sky are of the same kind as those
	on earth, that is what Galileo asserts; so that mechanical
	experiments that we perform here can give us information
	about the stars.  By turning his telescope on the moon, on
	Jupiter, and on the sunspots, he put an end to the classical
	belief that the heavens are perfect and unchanging, and only
	the earth is subject to the laws of change.  

	The book was finished by 1630, and Galileo did not find it
	easy to get it licensed.  The censors were sympathetic, but it
	soon became clear that there were powerful forces against the
	book.  However, in the end Galileo collected no fewer than
	four imprimaturs, and early in 1632 the book was published
	in Florence.  It was an instant success, and for Galileo an
	instant disaster.  Almost at once from Rome the thunder came:  
	Stop the presses.  Buy back all the copies -- which by then
	had been sold out.  Galileo must come to Rome to answer for
	it.  And nothing that he said could countermand that: his age
	(he was now nearly seventy), his illness (which was genuine),
	the patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, nothing counted.  
	He must come to Rome.  

	It was clear that the Pope himself had taken great umbrage
	at the book.  He had found at least one passage which he had
	insisted on, put in the book in the mouth of the man who really
	makes rather the impression of a simpleton.  The Preparatory
	Commission for the trial says so in black and white:  that the
	proviso I have quoted which was so dear to the Pope has been
	put "in brocca di un sciocco" -- the defender of tradition whom
	Galileo had named "Simplicius."  It may be that the Pope felt
	Simplicius to be a caricature of himself; certainly he felt
	insulted.  He believed that Galileo had hoodwinked him, and
	that his own censors had let him down.  

	So, on 12 April 1633, Galileo was brought into this room, sat
	at this table, and answered the questions from the Inquisitor.  
	The questions were addressed to him courteously in the
	intellectual atmosphere which reigned in the Inquisition -- in
	Latin, in the third person.  How was he brought to Rome?  Is
	this his book?  How did he come to write it?  What is in his
	book?  All these questions Galileo expected; he expected to
	defend the book.  But then came a question he did not expect.  

	Inquisitor:  Was he in Rome, particularly in the year 1616,
		and for what purpose?  
	Galileo:     I was in Rome in the year 1616 because,
		hearing doubts expressed on the opinions of
		Nicolaus Copernicus, I came to find out what
		views it was suitable to hold.  
	Inquisitor:  Let him say what was decided and made known to
		him then.   
	Galileo:     In the month of February 1616 Cardinal Bellarmine
		said to me that to hold the opinion of Copernicus as
		a proven fact was contrary to the Sacred Scriptures.  
		Therefore it could be neither held nor defended; but
		it could be taken and used as a hypothesis.  In
		confirmation of this I have a certificate from
		Cardinal Bellarmine, given on 26 May 1616.  
	Inquisitor:  Whether at that time any other precept was
		given him by someone else?  
	Galileo:     I do not remember anything else that was said
		or enjoined upon me.  
	Inquisitor:  If it is stated to him that, in the presence of
		witnesses, there is the instruction that he must not
		hold or defend the said opinion, or teach it in any
		way whatsoever, let him now say whether he remembers.  
	Galileo:     I remember that the instruction was that I was
		neither to hold nor to defend the said opinion.  The
		other two particulars, that is, neither to teach, nor
		consider in any way whatsoever, they are not stated
		in the certificate on which I rely.  
	Inquisitor:  After the aforesaid precept, did he obtain
		permission to write the book?  
	Galileo:     I did not seek permission to write this book
		because I consider that I did not disobey the
		instruction I had been given.  
	Inquisitor:  When he asked permission to print the book, did
		he disclose the command of the Sacred Congregation
		of which we spoke?  
	Galileo:     I said nothing when I sought permission to
		publish, not having in the book either held or
		defended the opinion.  

	Galileo has a signed document which says that he was forbidden
	only to hold or defend the theory of Copernicus, which means
	as if it were a proven matter of fact.  That was a prohibition
	laid on every Catholic at the time.  The Inquisition claims
	that there is a document which prohibits Galileo, and Galileo
	alone, to teach it *in any way whatsoever* -- that is, even
	by way of discussion or speculation or as a hypothesis.  The
	Inquisition does not have to produce this document.  That is
	not part of the rules of procedure.  But we have the document;
	it is in the Secret Archives, and it is manifestly a forgery --
	or, at the most charitable, a draft for some suggested meeting
	which was rejected.  It is not signed by Cardinal Bellarmine.  
	It is not signed by the witnesses.  It is not signed by the
	notary.  It is not signed by Galileo to show that he
	received it.  

	Did the Inquisition really have to stoop to the use of legal
	quibbles between "hold or defend," or "teach in any way
	whatsoever," in the face of documents which could not have
	stood up in any court of law?  Yes, it did.  There was nothing
	else to do.  The book had been published; it had been passed
	by several censors.  The Pope could rage at the censors now --
	he ruined his own Secretary because he had been helpful to
	Galileo.  But some remarkable public display had to be made to
	show that the book was to be condemned (it was on the Index
	for two hundred years) *because of some deceit practised by
	Galileo*.  This was why the trial avoided any matters of
	substance, either in the book or in Copernicus, and was
	bent on juggling with formulae and documents.  Galileo
	was to appear deliberately to have tricked the censors,
	and to have acted not only defiantly but dishonestly.  

	The court did not meet again; the trial ended here, to our
	surprise.  That is to say, Galileo was twice more brought
	into this room and allowed to testify on his own behalf;
	but no questions were asked of him.  The verdict was reached
	at a meeting of the Congregation of the Holy Office over which
	the Pope presided, which laid down absolutely what was to be
	done.  The dissident scientist was to be humiliated; authority
	was to be shown large not only in action but in intention.  
	Galileo was to retract; and he was to be shown the instruments
	of torture as if they were to be used.  [...]

	Galileo was not tortured.  He was only threatened with torture,
	twice.  His imagination could do the rest.  That was the object
	of the trial, to show men of imagination that they were not
	immune from the process of primitive, animal fear that was
	irreversible.  But he had already agreed to recant.  

		I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei,
		Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally
		before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, most
		Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors
		general against heretical depravity throughout the
		whole Christian Republic, having before my eyes and
		touching with my hands, the holy Gospels -- swear
		that I have always believed, do now believe, and by
		God's help will for the future believe, all that is
		held, preached, and taught by the Holy Catholic and
		Apostolic Roman Church.  But whereas -- after an
		injunction had been judicially intimated to me by
		this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether
		abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre
		of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold,
		defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or
		in writing, the said doctrine, and after it had been
		notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to
		Holy Scripture -- I wrote and printed a book in which
		I discuss this doctrine already condemned, and adduce
		arguments of great cogency in its favour, without
		presenting any solution of these; and for this cause
		I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be
		vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of
		having held and believed that the sun is the centre
		of the world and immovable, and that the earth is
		not the centre and moves:  

		Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your
		Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this strong
		suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with
		sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and
		detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally
		every other error and sect whatsoever contrary to the
		said Holy Church; and I swear that in future I will
		never again say or assert, verbally or in writing,
		anything that might furnish occasion for a similar
		suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any
		heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce
		him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and
		ordinary of the place where I may be.  Further, I swear
		and promise to fulfil and observe in their integrity
		all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed
		upon me by this Holy Office.  And, in the event of my
		contravening (which God forbid!) any of these my
		promises, protestations, and oaths, I submit myself to
		all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in
		the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and
		particular, against such delinquents.  So help me God,
		and these His holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands.  

		I, the said Galileo, Galilei, have abjured, sworn,
		promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of
		the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed
		the present document of my abjuration, and recited it
		word for word at Rome, in the Convent of Minverva,
		this twenty-second day of June, 1633.  

		I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above with my own
		hand.  

	Galileo was confined for the rest of his life in his villa in
	Arcetri at some distance from Florence, under strict house
	arrest.  The Pope was implacable.  Nothing was to be published.  
	The forbidden doctrine was not to be discussed.  Galileo was
	not even to talk to Protestants.  The result was silence
	among Catholic scientists everywhere from then on.  Galileo's
	greatest contemporary, Rene Descartes, stopped publishing in
	France and finally went to Sweden.  

	Galileo made up his mind to do one thing.  He was going to
	write the book that the trial had interrupted:  the book on
	the *New Sciences*, by which he meant physics, not in the
	stars, but concerning matter here on earth.  He finished it
	in 1636, that is, three years after the trial, an old man of
	seventy-two.  Of course he could not get it published, until
	finally some Protestants in Leyden in the Netherlands printed
	it two years later.  By that time Galileo was totally blind.  
	He writes of himself:  

		Alas ... Galileo, your devoted friend and servant,
		has been for a month totally and incurably blind; so
		that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which by
		my remarkable observations and clear demonstrations I
		have enlarged a hundred, nay, a thousand fold beyond
		the limits universally accepted by the learned men of
		all previous ages, are now shrivelled up for me into
		such a narrow compass as is filled by my own bodily
		sensations.  

	Among those who came to see Galileo at Arcetri was the young
	poet John Milton from England preparing for his life's work,
	an epic poem that he planned.  It is ironic that by the time
	Milton came to write the great poem, thirty years later, he
	was totally blind, and he also was dependent on his children
	to help him finish it.  

	Milton at the end of his life identified himself with Samson
	Agonistes, Samson among the Philistines,

		Eyeless in *Gaza* at the Mill with slaves,

	who destroyed the Philistine empire at the moment of his death.  
	And that is what Galileo did, against his own will. The effect
	of the trial and of the imprisonment was to put a total stop to
	the scientific tradition in the Mediterranean.  From now on the
	Scientific Revoluation moved to Northern Europe.  Galileo died,
	still a prisoner in his house, in 1642.  On Christmas Day of
	the same year, in England, Isaac Newton was born.  

>Our world (luckily) is much brighter than Galileo's.  
>Evolution does not challenge church authority.

Try telling that to quite a few (fundamentalist) churches!  They would
love to be able to tell evolutionists to shut up, too -- and then burn
us at the stake for heresy (as Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600) or
threaten us with torture (as Galileo was threatened) if we didn't!  

-- 

Michael McNeil
3Com Corporation     "All disclaimers including this one apply"
(415) 960-9367
..!ucbvax!hplabs!oliveb!3comvax!michaelm

	Thus let this surface be what it will, I must always put the
	question, what is beyond?  If the reply is NOTHING, then I
	call that the VOID or emptiness.  And such a Void or Emptiness
	hath no measure and no outer limit, though it hath an inner;
	and this is harder to imagine than is an infinite or immense
	universe....  There are then innumerable suns, and an infinite
	number of earths revolve around those suns, just as the seven
	we can observe revolve around this sun which is close to us.  
		Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake in the
		Campo dei Fiori in Rome, February 17, 1600;
		from *On the Infinite Universe and Worlds*,
		written on a visit to England in 1585-1587.

garys@bunker.UUCP (Gary M. Samuelson) (03/19/86)

In article <442@3comvax.UUCP> michaelm@3comvax.UUCP (Michael McNeil) writes:
>In article <18300001@iuvax.UUCP> kitchel@iuvax.UUCP (Sid Kitchel) writes:

I enjoyed reading Michael McNeil's article on the trial of Galileo.
Unfortunately, not content with presenting facts, he has to stoop
to the following:

>>Our world (luckily) is much brighter than Galileo's.  
>>Evolution does not challenge church authority.
>
>Try telling that to quite a few (fundamentalist) churches!  They would
>love to be able to tell evolutionists to shut up, too -- and then burn
>us at the stake for heresy (as Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600) or
>threaten us with torture (as Galileo was threatened) if we didn't!  

>Michael McNeil

Can we expect that he will document the above charge as well as he
documented the mistreatment of Galileo Galillei?  Is h going to
post his 400 lines of quotes showing that "quite a few fundamentalist
churches" want to burn anyone at the stake or threaten anyone with
torture?

Gary Samuelson