bade Galileo follow him to his chair. There he told Galileo about the independent panel’s ruling against the Sun’s placement at the centre of the universe. Speaking as the pope’s representative, Bellarmino admonished Galileo to abandon defending this opinion as fact. No record survives of Galileo’s spontaneous reaction to this dashing of all his hopeful efforts, but he doubtless bowed to the cardinal’s command.
Several other people showed up unexpectedly at the cardinal’s house to see Galileo, led by Father Michelangelo Seghizzi, the Dominican commissary general of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, who had been one of the eleven voting theologians on the recent panel. He also claimed to speak for the pope, telling Galileo to relinquish the opinion of Copernicus or else the Holy Office would proceed against him. Again Galileo acquiesced.
The following week, on 5 March, the Congregation of the Index published a proclamation that expounded the official position on Copernican astronomy – namely, that it was ‘false and contrary to Holy Scripture’. The decree also named names and called for action. It suspended Copernicus’s book until corrections were made in it, ‘so that this opinion may not spread any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth’. It also cited another book, by the Carmelite father Paolo Antonio Foscarini, who had enthusiastically supported Copernicus by quoting chapter and verse from both De revolutionibus and the Bible, to show how the two texts could be reconciled. Foscarini fared far worse than Copernicus in the decree, because his book was condemned outright – prohibited and destroyed. Nor did the dismal aftermath end there. The printer in Naples who had published Foscarini’s book was arrested soon after the March edict, and Father Foscarini died suddenly in early June, at the age of thirty-six.
Given the specificity of the edict, Galileo saw clearly that only the book attempting to square Copernicus with the Bible had been singled out for the harshest treatment. The two other books cited – that of Copernicus himself and another called On Job by Diego de Zuñiga – were merely suspended pending certain deletions and corrections. Galileo’s own book, the Sunspot Letters, which was also circulating at the time, escaped any mention in the edict, though it strongly supported Copernican astronomy. While Galileo had delved deeply into the Bible and its interpretation with his Letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina, this work had not yet been published; his ‘Treatise on the Tides’ likewise existed in manuscript only.
Having been omitted from the text of the edict, and having escaped any personal censure, Galileo brightened. True, the theory he defended had been condemned, but he emerged free to consider it hypothetically, and to nurture the hope that the decree might one day be repealed. He remained the pre-eminent figure in Italian science, as well as the representative of the Florentine House of Medici. Galileo stayed on in Rome another three months, during which time he met again with Cardinal Bellarmino and spent nearly an hour in a private audience with Pope Paul on II March.
‘I told His Holiness the reason for my coming to Rome,’ Galileo wrote home to the Tuscan secretary of state,
and made known to him the malice of my persecutors and some of their calumnies against me. He answered that he was well aware of my uprightness and sincerity of mind, and when I gave evidence of being still somewhat anxious about the future, owing to my fear of being pursued with implacable hate by my enemies, he consoled me and said that I might put away all care, because I was held in so much esteem both by himself and by the whole congregation of cardinals that they would not lightly lend their ears to calumnious reports. During his lifetime, he continued, I might feel quite secure, and before I took my departure he assured me several times that he bore me the greatest good will and was ready to show his affection and favour towards me on all occasions.
In the wake of the edict against Copernicus, gossip of heresy and blasphemy continued to smear Galileo’s name, though he had not been tried or convicted of any crime. In Venice, word spread that Galileo had been summoned to Rome to account for his beliefs and had now been called to account in the strictest sense. Gossip rumbled through Pisa of how Cardinal Bellarmino had forced Galileo to renounce his beliefs and repent. At the end of May, just before Galileo returned to Florence, he appealed to the cardinal for redress and received this vindicating letter of endorsement:
We, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, having heard that it is calumniously reported that Signor Galileo Galilei has in our hand abjured and has also been punished with salutary penance, and being requested to state the truth as to this, declare that the said Signor Galilei has not abjured, either in our hand, or the hand of any other person here in Rome, or anywhere else, so far as we know, any opinion or doctrine held by him; neither has any salutary penance been imposed on him; but that only the declaration made by the Holy Fathers and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index has been notified to him, wherein it is set forth that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus, that the Earth moves around the Sun and that the Sun is stationary in the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, is contrary to the Holy Scriptures and therefore cannot be defended or held. In witness whereof we have written and subscribed these presents with our own hand this 26th day of May 1616.
Silenced but exonerated, Galileo confined himself for the next several years to the safe application of his great discoveries, such as using the moons of Jupiter to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea – especially as success might win him the lucrative prize offered by the king of Spain – and studying the companion bodies of Saturn to try to determine their true size and shape.
On 4 October, the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, Galileo heard his elder daughter profess her vows at the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, about a mile from Florence, where she had already lived for three years. It is possible that when Galileo first arranged for his girls’ entry into the convent, he had only their immediate future in mind, and not a lifetime plan. Nevertheless, no husbands had been found.
The form of life of the Order of the Poor Sisters which the blessed Francis founded is this: to observe the holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, by living in obedience, without anything of one’s own, and in chastity.
THE RULE OF SAINT CLARE, chapter I
At the ceremony of her investiture Virginia relinquished her given name to be known henceforward as Suor Maria Celeste – the name God had chosen for her and whispered in her heart.
From then on, it shall not be permitted her to go outside the monastery.
THE RULE OF SAINT CLARE, chapter II
The next autumn, on 28 October 1617, Livia followed her sister to become Suor Arcangela. Both girls would spend the rest of their lives at San Matteo.
He Himself deigned and willed to be placed in a sepulchre of stone. And it pleased Him to be so entombed for forty hours. So, my dear Sisters, you follow Him. For after obedience, poverty and pure chastity, you have holy enclosure to hold on to, enclosure in which you can live for forty years either more or less, and in which you will die. You are, therefore, already now in your sepulchre of stone, that is, your vowed enclosure.
THE TESTAMENT OF SAINT COLETTE
In a desultory manner, Galileo continued to share his abortive theory on the tides with friends in Italy and abroad. ‘I send you a treatise on the causes of the tides’, Galileo replied in 1618 to a request from Austrian archduke Leopold for a sample of his work, ‘which I wrote at the time when the theologians were thinking of prohibiting Copernicus’s book and the doctrine enounced therein, which I then held to be true, until it pleased those gentlemen to prohibit the work and to declare the opinion to be false and contrary to Scripture. Now, knowing as I do that it behooves us to obey the decisions of the authorities and to believe them, since they are guided by a higher insight than any to which my humble mind can of itself attain, I consider this treatise which I send you to be merely a poetical conceit, or a dream…this fancy of mine…this chimera.’
