Strangely, I’ve run across two references to Galileo recently. Glenn Beck referred to Galileo as someone brave enough to stand up for the truth against overbearing authorities. (Um, sorry, not exactly.) Another blog mentioned that a creationism museum (literal 7-day creation “science”) decried Galileo for pushing reason over faith… but also slammed the Catholic Church for doing the same thing. (Weird; usually people pick one side or the other.)
It’s funny, but we accept so much of what we’ve been told, that we rarely question whether or not it’s true.
During the Enlightenment, there was a concerted effort to discredit the Catholic Church. Why? Well,
a) many Enlightenment thinkers claimed they were purely rational, which meant they didn’t believe anything they couldn’t prove, hence, they were atheists, since it’s pretty well impossible to prove God to someone who starts on the assumption that He can’t be proved. The Church is not atheistic, hence, it had to be fought.
b) The Enlightenment was trying very, very hard to claim that they were special. They didn’t need those who came before them (especially those unthinking believers of Christianity); the Enlightenment thinkers had the brilliance of their own minds! Since most of the scientists of the Western world to that point had been not just Catholic, but often directly employed by the Catholic Church, well, that was a problem, too. Time to erase that particular section of history. (The Enlightenment writers also seized on the term “Dark Ages”, originally meant simply to describe a lack of literature and written records, then used by Protestants as an anti-Catholic barb to deride the centuries of Catholic unity and justify their break. The Enlightenment writers meant to emphasize that they were going to wipe out the gross errors of previous generations.)
Enter Galileo. He had had a rather public dust-up with Church authorities and wound up under house arrest for it. By conveniently ignoring Galileo’s important friends and sponsors in the Catholic hierarchy and adding the line, “And yet, it moves,” to the end of the account of his trial, voila! instant nearly-martyr for the rationalist cause!
Whenever someone dares comment that maybe, just maybe, science ought to stop and consider not just can a thing be done, but should it be done, people plug their ears and start screaming “Galileo! Inquisition!” until the conversation is declared dead.
Except that the Enlightenment version isn’t quite how it happened.
Copernicus (more properly called Nicolaus Copernic, but we usually use the Latinization of his name) wrote on heliocentrism (the theory that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around) safely. He was a “canon” in the Catholic Church, succeeding to various higher offices, although it is unclear if he was ever ordained a priest. His initial treatise on heliocentrism received good attention, including encouragement from the Archbishop of Capua, who had heard a series of lectures in Rome on Copernicus’ theories. The theory circulated widely, and, assured by the positive receiption of his novel ideas, Copernicus’ book was finally published just before his death.
Galileo did not have Copernicus’ tact, apparently. He dedicated several of his works to prominent men in the Church, perhaps because he worried about Church disapproval, perhaps because the cardinals had the money and inclination to sponsor scientists. Each of his books, including the ones that were condemned, were published with Church permission.
So, what’s the problem? For starters, Galileo didn’t have the data to make his argument. The earth-centric astronomers he mocked could predict the motions of the planets in the sky better than Galileo’s heliocentric equations.
Additionally, Europe was continuting to struggle under the wars of religion and the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation, which was rapidly splintering into multiple, arguing denominations. The last thing anyone needed, argued some within the Church, was some scientist with bad data confusing people into thinking that the Bible wasn’t true, particularly the many references to the stability of the Earth and Joshua 10: 12-14:
Then spoke Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the men of Israel; and he said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand thou still at Gibeon, and thou Moon in the valley of Ai’jalon.”
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD hearkened to the voice of a man; for the LORD fought for Israel.
Nowadays, most Christians would say that God worked a miracle, whether He made the sun stand still, the earth stand still, or simply made it appear to remain daylight longer so that the Israelites could complete their victory on the battlefield. Not a big issue, and certainly not scientific evidence for or against heliocentrism, right?
Not so much in Galileo’s day. Yes, educated people could understand that heliocentrism did not necessarily render the Bible untrue. Galileo argued that he was taking St. Augustine’s position, that the Bible was not trying to be a science or history textbook. The concern about Galileo’s books was that he was writing in Italian. Educated people read Latin; many more people could read Italian. Even Luther began with the bare modicum of tact to write the 95 theses in Latin, for discussion and argument among the faculty and student body of the University of Wittenberg.
In 1610, Galileo published The Starry Messenger in Latin, detailing the use of his newly improved telescope to view mountains on the moon, stars invisible to the naked eye, and the moons of Jupiter. Current theory said that the heavens were perfect and unblemished; critics said that Galileo’s telescope was the problem. In 1616, after debate and discussion, and Galileo’s increasingly loud advocacy of heliocentrism, he was instructed by Cardinal Bellarmine to cease teaching or advocating for heliocentrism.
In 1623, a cardinal who admired Galileo became Pope Urban VIII; Galileo promptly published The Assayer.
Although The Assayer contains a magnificent polemic for mathematical physics, ironically its main point was to ridicule a mathematical astronomer. This time, the target of Galileo’s wit and sarcasm was the cometary theory of a Jesuit, Orazio Grassi, who argued from parallax that comets move above the Moon. Galileo mistakenly countered that comets are an optical illusion.
Galileo’s polemical tone sealed the opposition of the Jesuit order to Galileo. However, the book was read with delight at the dinner table by Urban VIII, who had written a poem lauding Galileo for his rhetorical performances. [quote from the Wikipedia article]
This book was allowed to pass, with a few warnings to tone it down a bit. However, the whole thing was finally sealed by Galileo’s remarkable, and repeated, lack of tact. In 1632, Galileo published The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, where he again ridiculed his opponents’ views and seriously sang his own praises. Using the tides, Galileo purported to prove heliocentrism. After a series of good arguments for heliocentrism, Galileo finishes with a discussion of the tides as proof of Earth’s motion. Again, he got it wrong, on what was allegedly the main point of his book. And, again, he managed to insult a number of people.
In 1633, Galileo was called before the Inquisition. While in Rome, he stayed in the luxurious house of a friend, but things did not look good. His former supporter and admirer, Pope Urban VIII, was beset with problems of his own and probably a little irked that Galileo flagrantly ignored his advice not to advocate for heliocentrism in Dialogue, but to present both sides of the argument honestly and let the evidence do the rest. When Galileo named the apologist for his scientific opponents “Simplicio”, which could be taken as “Simpleton”, he obviously wasn’t trying very hard to be even-handed. Even worse, Galileo used some of the pope’s words in Simplicio’s mouth, quite literally adding insult to injury.
Found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, Galileo was sentenced to house arrest and his books were banned. After time with the Archbishop of Siena, Galileo arrived at his own villa in 1634, from which he kept up his long correspondence with his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste. Except for permitted travel for medical treatment, Galileo would remain in his house until his death in 1642. And yet, no, there is no contemporary account of Galileo muttering, “And yet, it moves…” as he left his trial. That legend first appears a century after the event. Galileo appears to have been bitterly disappointed to have been so disgraced.
In spite of having his books (current and future) banned at his trial in 1633, Galileo managed to write and publish (in the Protestant Netherlands) Two New Sciences, which covered the emerging sciences of the strength of materials and the motion of objects. Older and wiser, Galileo resurrects his three protagonists from Dialogues, but, now, Simplicio is the reasoned defender of the older views, while his companions are looking to experiments and new scientific inquiry. Finally, Galileo learned tact and wrote something like the resonable presentation of both sides that would have kept Dialogues out of trouble.
Following Galileo’s trial, several of his supporters within the Church continued to press for his rehabilitation. It did not happen within his lifetime; however, in 1718, Galileo’s books (except Dialogue) were allowed to be published again in Italy. In 1741, even a slightly edited version of Dialogue was published. In 1758, the general ban on books advocating heliocentrism was dropped, perhaps aided by Kepler’s improved theories, including eliptical orbits and the causation of the tides by the moon, which Galileo had dismissed as foolish.
Galileo is not the saint of the scientific revolution that some would like to paint him as. Neither is he the great proto-scientist fighting religious superstition. Galileo tried to be a faithful Catholic. Like all of us, he had his failures, some of them spectacularly played out in public.
He would find his current image strange.
(I highly recommend Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter, covering all of Galileo’s life, illustrated and commented on often by excerpts from the letters of his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, a cloistered nun, to her father.)
It sure does seem his mouth got the best of him.
He had the sort of temperament and a gift for insulting people. I think Mark Twain had his wife preview all his letters – too bad Galileo did not have someone to help him out.
Thanks for sharing this. I get so tired of Galileo used as “proof” that the Church is against Science. What I have read was the restriction of his work was that although it could be discussed in his classroom and writing, it could not be presented as being factual because he did not have enough proof.
Excellent post. Thank you for taking the time to write this up.