possible” that Seghizzi directed Pettini, while absolving the commissary of malicious intent.80 Pagano also makes at least one large mistake in his criticism of Frajese. He alleges that Paul’s order of 25 February is not found in the decree register because no actions taken in the secret part of corams were recorded there. This is not true.81
Bellarmino’s “Certificate”and Evidence from the Second Phase of Galileo’s Trial in 1633
In his reports on what happened, Galileo failed altogether to refer to the precept.82 Since he also made light of the Index’s decree of 5 March against Copernicus, it might seem that Galileo took neither event seriously.83 Indeed he did, especially when he learned of rumors that he had been forced to abjure.84 Those rumors gave rise to the seventh document. Galileo asked Bellarmino for an affidavit (fede) that he had not abjured or suffered other punishment.85 The cardinal, apparently acting as a member of the Index rather than as an Inquisitor, agreed. He wrote at least one draft of his text before settling on the final form.
The fede is dated 26 May 1616 and reads as follows:
We, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, having understood that Signor Galileo Galilei is being slandered or accused of having abjured in our hands, and also of being “penanced” [punished] for this with salutary penances, and having been sought out about the truth, we say that the said Signor Galileo has not abjured in our hands nor in those of others in Rome, nor anywhere else that we know, any opinion or doctrine, nor even more has he received salutary penances nor of any other sort, but has only had announced to him the declaration made by Our Lord [the pope] and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, in which is contained that the doctrine ascribed to Copernicus that the earth moves around the sun and the sun is at the center of the world without moving from east to west is contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended nor held. And in testimony of this we have written and signed this document with our own hand.86
The text manifests Bellarmino’s skill as a rhetorician. While carefully avoiding assigning responsibility for the precept, he also smoothly, almost casually noted the warning specifically to Galileo not to defend or hold either of the two condemned propositions. And he changed the draft’s link between its first and second sections to take away some of the force of what he was about to say, or perhaps he was trying to keep the Inquisition’s action secret by deflecting attention from it. Instead of the original “of any other sort ma si bene,” which literally means “but although,” he switched to “ma solo” (“but only or merely”).87 So, condemned in terms of the Index decree, or maybe not, Bellarmino left it to the reader to decide. Galileo read the text in one way, his judges in 1633 in another. Galileo perhaps naturally enough concentrated on those two little words “ma solo,” whereas his judges looked past them to Bellarmino’s statement that Galileo knew all about the Index decree, whatever else Bellarmino and Seghizzi might have ordered him to do. Galileo’s judges in 1633 took this passage as further incriminating him. In doing so, they forced the sense of Bellarmino’s fede in the opposite direction that many modern historians do. Neither can safely draw on it, since it says nothing directly about the event of 26 February.88
The last piece of evidence is Galileo’s deposition of 12 April 1633, on which those same historians have often relied almost as heavily as on Bellarmino’s document, and even more unwisely. None have allowed for its obvious nature as a self-interested statement. Even without such an allowance, as Pagano and I more clearly have demonstrated, Galileo’s testimony supports the reconstruction argued here.89
After an opening that may have been meant to steer his interrogator away from the precept, Galileo quickly produced a copy of Bellarmino’s fede.90 Even as he did so, he tried to change its meaning by glossing it in light of Bellarmino’s letter of 12 April 1615 to Paolo Antonio Foscarini. While the fede drawing on the consultors’ opinion correctly said that Copernicus’s ideas were “contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended nor held,” the earlier letter read instead that Foscarini could safely defend Copernicus only hypothetically. Galileo alleged that was also what Bellarmino had told him in 1616.91 Introducing Bellarmino’s fede and thereby contradicting his testimony proved to be a serious mistake. “In any manner whatsoever” (as the precept minute reads) almost becomes redundant.92
Galileo’s interrogator continued with a series of questions about the interview with Bellarmino. Asked whether anyone else had been present and whether they or anyone else had also given him a precept, he replied, “It could be that some precept was given to me that I not hold nor defend the said opinion, but I do not remember because this is a matter of some years ago.”93 Damaging as this admission was, Galileo quickly made his situation worse in his reply to a question whether he would remember the precept’s content were it read to him: “I do not claim not to have broken that precept in any way.” After having been told what the precept said, he once more exacerbated matters by saying, “I remember that the precept was that I could not hold nor defend, and it could be that there was also nor teach. I also do not remember that there was that detail, in any fashion, but it could be that it was there.” In short, he admitted that he might have received the precept in the strongest wording including quovis modo. The “Summary” (No. 5) recorded Galileo’s statement with scrupulous accuracy: “he confesses the precept.”94
In his brief defense of 10 May, Galileo first denied that he had received a precept (twice called a comandamento) and then claimed to have an oral order from Bellarmino that did not contain “in any manner whatsoever,” in both cases relying again on Bellarmino’s fede. He concluded that “when the said two details [teach, and quovis modo] are removed, and only the two noted in the present affidavit are retained [that is, not defended or held], there is no point in doubting that the command given in it is the same precept given in the Sacred Congregation of the Index’s decree.”95 But as Pagano points out, in between Galileo made another damaging admission, or at least accepted without demur a serious point his interrogator had made. The “command” had been “given to me and registered.”96 That last word can only refer to the precept minute, which, of course, contains the strongest form of the order to Galileo. In his last interrogation on 21 June he spoke of “that precept” he had received as the watershed in his intellectual life, after which he scrupulously and sincerely adhered only to Ptolemy’s cosmology, as he continued to maintain throughout the balance of this interrogation he had always done.97 Galileo’s sentence the next day brims with the charge that he had violated the precept. so it is no surprise that he confessed to doing so in his abjuration the same day, saying that he had been properly condemned for having published the Dialogue “after having been judicially warned with a precept by the same [Holy Office] that I was completely to leave the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and immobile and that the earth is not the center of the world and moves, and that I could not hold, defend nor teach in any way whatsoever, orally or in writing, the said false doctrine.”98
Thus, except in his defense of 10 May, Galileo admitted that he received a precept, probably from Bellarmino, and at least left open the possibility that it took the strong form. Galileo’s own testimony isolates document No. 3 all the more.
Successive ac incontinenti
Now that the precept minute has been established as authentic, one phrase in it demands careful attention, mainly because it has been taken to mean that Seghizzi violated his instructions to give Galileo a chance to accept whatever Bellarmino had said, going on successive ac incontinenti.
The words “successive ac incontinenti” are linked by “et” to the last word in the warning Bellarmino gave, “deserat” (“abandon”). Right from the first, the phrase has been translated as linking the two actions without any temporal interval between them whatsoever. Wohlwill, while translating the phrase
