Indeed, stopping the sun would shorten the day. This was a clever sally against Ptolemaic and Aristotelian astronomers, unhorsing them, as Galileo might have said, with one of their own central concepts. Either Ptolemy was wrong about the Primum Mobile, or the literal sense of the scripture was in saying sun instead of Primum Mobile. Nor could God have stopped the sun alone, since that would have caused unnecessary disruption of “the entire course of nature,” that law-governed behavior on which Galileo had earlier insisted.
Instead Galileo offered in a few lines a simple Copernican solution. Since the sun gave movement to the earth, to stop the earth one had only to stop the sun, just as the Bible said (55). And that was that.
The matter was not so simple to Galileo’s opponents. Although we have no direct response to the “Letter” from any of them, we can infer from the underlining in the copy in Galileo’s dossier that Galileo’s science, including his alternative explanation of the text of Joshua, interested them not at all. Instead, his handling of scripture drew all their attention.
And quickly. Not ten days after Lorini’s letter, Galileo knew that a copy of the “Letter to Castelli” was circulating among his enemies, apparently including in Rome, who found “many heresies” in it and used it to “open a new field to injure me.”28 Writing to Dini, whom he thought to be one of his closest allies in Rome, Galileo also casually, perhaps too casually, suggested that “whoever transcribed it [the ‘Letter to Castelli’]” had “inadvertently changed some words,” which, together with “a little disposition to censures, could make things appear much different from my intention.” He had also heard that Caccini had gone to Rome “to make some other attempt” against him. (Whatever he knew about Lorini’s actions, chronology makes it seem certain that Caccini’s departure triggered Galileo’s letter. The two events came at most two days apart.) As a prophylactic, Galileo enclosed a copy “in the right manner that I have written it.” He hoped Dini would show the correct version to the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Grienberger, Galileo’s “greatest friend and patron,” and, even better, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, “to whom these Dominican fathers have let it be understood that they intend to rally around” (“al quale questi Padri Domenicani si son lasciati intendere di voler far capo”). While it is not terribly surprising that Galileo knew Lorini had a copy, it does raise eyebrows that he thought it necessary to distribute others. Since one of the recipients was to be Bellarmino, an Inquisitor, and Galileo feared that Lorini was headed to the Inquisition, why worry about getting a copy directly to the cardinal? Did Galileo really fear that Lorini had altered the text, a charge nearly all historians have made? The letter exists in multiple versions, and the one Lorini sent differs in several significant ways from what Galileo claimed as his authentic text.29 It may be coincidence, but the Inquisition’s anonymous expert assigned to read the letter singled out three of these differences in his report on the possible heresy in the document. This fact may seem to incriminate Lorini, but Galileo’s strategy for dissemination instead almost has to mean that Galileo and not Lorini altered the text. Thus Galileo told his first big lie and blamed it on Lorini. He did that a great deal.
In most of his letter, Galileo indulged in one of his specialties, giving at least as good as he got. Galileo complained about a verbal assault by the bishop of Fiesole, Baccio Gherardini, in front of some of his friends. Galileo fired back one of his best shots (in his eyes), accusing his enemy of thinking that he, Galileo, had written On the Revolutions of the Spheres. Besides, Galileo had defended its real author Copernicus on the extrinsic grounds that he was “not only a Catholic man, but a religious and a [cathedral] canon” (“uomo non pur cattolico, ma religioso e canonico”).
It may be that Galileo was right about what “the Dominican fathers” had planned and that Lorini was using Sfondrato as a conduit to his real target, Bellarmino, the recipient of Sfondrato’s complaint about the Index’s lack of power. Lorini may have thought it diplomatically inadvisable for a Dominican to approach a Jesuit directly in the wake of their orders’ violent and still unresolved dispute over the role of grace in salvation, not to mention his own difficulties with them in 1602. He may have known that Sfondrato had been among those trying to make Bellarmino pope in 1605.30 He must have known that Bellarmino had severe doubts about Copernicus. Galileo’s friend and patron, Federico Cesi, founder of the Academy of the Lynxes, certainly was aware of Bellarmino’s views and made sure Galileo knew them. In the context of Caccini’s reading, Cesi wrote Galileo that Bellarmino had told him Copernicus’s ideas were heretical and the “motion of the earth without any doubt is against scripture.” Cesi added that, if the Index considered Copernicus’s book, it would be banned.31 He urged Galileo to proceed very carefully indeed in responding to Caccini and warned that the most Galileo could hope for was a private censure of the friar. Cesi knew what he was talking about and so did Bellarmino. He was in a position to consult some of the best scientists at the Jesuits’ Collegio Romano, as he did on several occasions. But not now. He had no need.
Bellarmino was not a scientist, but he already had his mind made up on the burning scientific question of the constitution of the universe before Lorini and Caccini hatched their plot.32 Even if he ever had, he no longer had the slightest interest in matters of science. No, his thoughts had turned all to his own mortality. Just before Caccini’s sermon, Bellarmino finished Ascent of the Soul to God.33 As the title makes plain, this is an intensely mystical work. Not even the command of theology on which Bellarmino had once prided himself mattered any more.
The key point for Bellarmino, as for Caccini, was the role of scripture and its interpreters. It looks at first blush as if he changed his mind on this point right in the midst of things in March 1615. On 7 March, Dini passed to Galileo what amounted to an invitation from Bellarmino to lay out his interpretation of how scripture fit his case.34 Bellarmino had carefully pointed out that any republication of Copernicus’s book would require a note added to it that his system was intended merely “to save the appearances,” that is, it was a theory, no more. Then came the implicit invitation. Bellarmino suggested that only one scripture verse caused trouble, and it was not the one in Joshua Caccini had used. Instead, Bellarmino pointed to Psalm 19.4–5: “[Yet] their voice goes out through all the earth, and their message to the end of the world. High above, he pitched a tent for the sun, who comes out of his pavilion like a bride-groom, exulting like a hero to run his race.” The problem to Bellarmino was that this passage appeared to say the sun had been permanently fixed in that “tent.” (Neither he nor Galileo seems to have had any problem with the verse representing the sun as a person.) Galileo, who had already risen to similar bait in his “Letter to Castelli,” seized the invitation and barely two weeks later fired off by express a much more succinct letter to Dini, responding directly and bluntly to the invitation.35 Meanwhile, Bellarmino changed his mind, again in a talk with Dini, but reported at second hand by another of Galileo’s circle, Giovanni Ciampoli, that Galileo should not meddle in scripture because he lacked the proper qualifications as a theologian, more or less Cardinal Maffeo Barberini’s opinion, as Ciampoli summed up.36 Did Bellarmino really change his mind, or does what he said depend on who reported it, especially since it could be that Ciampoli was describing the same conversation as Dini had earlier? If Bellarmino’s change of mind is real, the “Letter to Castelli” was precisely what changed it. In the version Lorini sent via Caccini, Bellarmino and five other Inquisitors—not including Sfondrato—had discussed it on 25 February in a meeting at his palazzo, Palazzo Gabrielli in via del Seminario at the end next to Piazza Macuto.37 The day before Ciampoli’s letter, Caccini had testified before the Inquisition, although Bellarmino probably did not learn the content of his deposition until it was reported in the secret part of a congregation of 2 April, Sfondrato this time in attendance.38 In that context, Galileo’s letter to Dini looked like more provocation, and in consultation with Cesi Dini decided to suppress it.39
Even with Bellarmino’s expected support, Lorini still did not have easy sledding, as his conspiracy began to mesh with the independent and more important “motor” of developments in Rome.40 Galileo had powerful defenders there as he did in Florence. To begin
