Holy Fathers of the Church of course occupied a separate category. Yet several of these, Galileo complained, usurped scriptural authority to pronounce judgments in physical disputes, while ignoring any evidence of science to the contrary:
Let us grant then that theology is conversant with the loftiest divine contemplation, and occupies the regal throne among sciences by dignity. But acquiring the highest authority in this way, if she does not descend to the lower and humbler speculations of the subordinate sciences and has no regard for them because they are not concerned with blessedness, then her professors should not arrogate to themselves the authority to decide on controversies in professions which they have neither studied nor practised. Why, this would be as if an absolute despot, being neither a physician nor an architect but knowing himself free to command, should undertake to administer medicines and erect buildings according to his whim – at grave peril of his poor patients’ lives, and the speedy collapse of his edifices.
Galileo took pains to establish the antiquity of the Sun-centred universe, which dated all the way back to Pythagoras in the sixth century BC, was later upheld by Plato in his old age, and also adopted by Aristarchus of Samos, as reported by Archimedes in the Sand-reckoner, before being codified by the Catholic canon Copernicus in 1543. Galileo had good reason to suspect that this theory stood on the verge of suppression, and his Letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina argued passionately against such action:
To ban Copernicus now that his doctrine is daily reinforced by many new observations and by the learned applying themselves to the reading of his book, after this opinion has been allowed and tolerated for those many years during which it was less followed and less confirmed, would seem in my judgment to be a contravention of truth, and an attempt to hide and suppress her the more as she revealed herself the more clearly and plainly. Not to abolish and censure his whole book, but only to condemn as erroneous this particular proposition, would (if I am not mistaken) be a still greater detriment to the minds of men, since it would afford them occasion to see a proposition proved that it was heresy to believe. And to prohibit the whole science would be but to censure a hundred passages of Holy Scripture which teach us that the glory and greatness of Almighty God are marvellously discerned in all His works and divinely read in the open book of Heaven. For let no one believe that reading the lofty concepts written in that book leads to nothing further than the mere seeing of the splendour of the Sun and the stars and their rising and setting, which is as far as the eyes of brutes and of the vulgar can penetrate. Within its pages are couched mysteries so profound and concepts so sublime that the vigils, labours and studies of hundreds upon hundreds of the most acute minds have still not pierced them, even after continual investigations for thousands of years.
Having hereby framed his thoughts on paper, Galileo felt the gravity of the situation propelling him to Rome, where he intended to free his reputation of any whisper of heresy, and also to defend the burgeoning study of astronomy with new weapons of his own devising.
Grand Duke Cosimo gave Galileo permission to make the journey – over the objections of his Tuscan ambassador there, who judged Rome a dangerous place for the court philosopher ‘to argue about the Moon’. Corridors leading to the Vatican and the Holy Office of the Inquisition already hummed with the controversy of his doctrines.
[VII] The malice of my persecutors
GALILEO ISSUED HIS CALL for a distinction between questions of science and articles of faith at an anxious moment in Church history.
Stunned by the Protestant Reformation fomented in Germany around 1517, the Roman Church struck a defensive posture throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries called the Counter-Reformation. The Church hoped quickly to close the rift that had split Protestantism from Catholicism by convening an ecumenical council, but intrigues and obstacles of all sorts – including disputes over where to stage the event – postponed the meeting for many years, while the rift continued to widen. Finally Pope Paul III (the same pontiff honoured in the dedication of Copernicus’s book) convened bishops, cardinals and leaders of religious orders at Trent, where Italy bordered the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. On and off over a period of eighteen years, from 1545 to 1563, the Council of Trent debated and voted and ultimately drafted a series of decrees.* These dictated how the clergy were to be educated, for example, and who was empowered to interpret Holy Scripture. Rejecting Martin Luther’s insistence on the right to a personal reading of the Bible, the council declared in 1546 that ‘no one, relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them’.
After the council finally concluded the twenty-five sessions of its long-drawn-out deliberations, its decrees became Church doctrine through a series of papal bulls (so named after the bulla, or round lead seal, affixed to pronouncements from the pope himself). In 1564, the year Galileo was born, certain important points from the debates were formulated into a profession of faith, worded by the Council of Trent and solemnly sworn over the ensuing decades by untold numbers of Church officials and other Catholics:
I most firmly accept and embrace the Apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and the other observances and constitutions of the Church. I also accept Sacred Scripture in the sense in which it has been held, and is held, by Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge the true sense and interpretation of the Sacred Scripture, nor will I accept or interpret it in any way other than in accordance with the unanimous agreement of the Fathers.
Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina indirectly charged his opponents with violating this oath by bending the Bible to their purposes. His opponents, on the other hand, judged Galileo guilty of the same crime. His only hope of winning the argument lay in producing proof positive for the Copernican system. Then, since no truth found in Nature could contradict the truth of Scripture, everyone would realise that the Fathers’ judgment about the placement of the heavenly bodies had been hasty, and required reinterpretation in the light of scientific discovery.
December 1615 thus brought Galileo to Rome brandishing new support for Copernicus – derived from observations of the Earth, not the heavens. The tidal motions of the great oceans, Galileo believed, bore constant witness that the planet really did spin through space. If the Earth stood still, then what could make its waters rush to and fro, rising and falling at regular intervals along the coasts? This view of the tides as the natural consequence of the turning Earth had originally occurred to him nearly twenty years previously, at Venice, when he boarded the barges that carried drinking water into the city from Lizzafusina. Watching the way the large cargoes of water sloshed in response to any changes in the ships’ speed or direction, he had found a model for the ebb and flow of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean.
Now, lodged at the Tuscan embassy in the Villa Medici, Galileo passed the early part of January 1616 setting down in writing for the first time his theory of the tides. His social life during this labour consisted of meeting with fifteen to twenty men at a time in the homes of various Roman hosts, where he argued Copernicus’s cause in his most compelling style. The nervous Tuscan ambassador, Piero Guicciardini, fairly choked through these evenings, for he dreaded the possible cost of Galileo’s actions.
‘He is passionately involved in this fight of his’, Guicciardini complained to the grand duke, ‘and he does not see or sense what it involves, with the result that he will be tripped up and will get himself into trouble, together with anyone who supports his views. For he is vehement and stubborn and very worked up in this matter and it is impossible, when he is around, to escape from his hands. And this business is not a joke, but may become of great consequence, and the man is here under our protection and responsibility.’
Galileo needed the evidence of the tides to support Copernicus because his astronomical findings
