Burned Alive: Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition
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be impossible to move it in a circle. He further argued that the
Earth is not ‘animated, and (what is worse), a rational soul, which
is absurd and ridiculous’. He insisted that the claims of Orpheus,
Philolaus, Heraclitus and Copernicus were ‘false and impossible’.147
Lagalla defended Aristotle’s physics by echoing arguments to deny
Earth’s motion.
Next, Lagalla dedicated an entire chapter to discussing
and refuting ‘The Opinion of Democritus: that there are many
Worlds’.148 Lagalla griped that that opinion was voiced by ‘Kepler in his Discussion with the Starry Messenger, and by a recent author who
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was found guilty with his laughing insanity’. Did he mean Bruno?
Lagalla explained at length that Democritus believed that space is
infinite and full of infinitely many atoms that are ungenerated and
incorruptible, which interact by chance to produce many worlds that
are infinite or innumerable. Lagalla asked whether anything prevents the Moon from being one of those terrestrial worlds, having its own mountains, valleys, seas, lakes and so on, given Galileo’s telescopic observations. Such inferences would suggest, Lagalla said, that animals and beings live not only in the spheres of air and fire,
but in the ethereal globes, beings that he called ‘such lunar or solar
or Jupiter’s Daemons for each star’. 149 Such claims, said Lagalla, were absurd, baseless, empty, impossible and manifestly contradictory. These were all the senseless consequences of having supposed that the universe is infinite and full of atoms. Lagalla said that therefore he had shown the falsity of such assumptions. He rehearsed arguments by Aristotle and also by the great authority of the Jesuits,
Thomas Aquinas.
In sum, Lagalla gave dozens of additional reasons against the
opinion of many worlds. At one point he even mentioned Bruno
by name: ‘among whom was Bruno, the latest proponent of this
proposition, who according to Elizabeth of England deserved to
be called Ἂπιςιος, καὶ Ἄςευῆ, καὶ Ἄθεὼς – that is, infidel and impious and atheist’.150 Thus Lagalla used foreign insults or English royal gossip against the notorious heretic. Without attributing specific
arguments to Bruno, Lagalla proposed the opposite. For example,
Bruno had argued that since God is omnipotent then He must have
created many worlds, infinitely. Lagalla argued instead that although
God has the power to make many worlds, He in fact did not, since
the Gospel of John explicitly says, ‘the World was made by Him’,
in the singular. Almost incessantly, Lagalla insisted that only one
world exists. Finally, he ended his long chapter against the plurality
of worlds, writing:
it is not true that there are mountains on the Moon, or valleys, or Seas, as perhaps someone not sane of mind might think. If it were true, then necessarily the Moon would be a
terrestrial globe, another World, and there would be other
living beings, other men, who inhabit the lunar orb, as well
as other inhabitants, that which hardly seemed absurd to
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the ancient Philosophers we mentioned above: Orpheus,
Thales, Philolaus, as well as Plutarch, yet this proposition
is exposed and refuted not only as absurd, but truly as false
and impossible.151
And if this were not enough, Lagalla included more chapters further arguing about the nature of the Moon. He cited numerous ancient writers and works: Xenophanes, Anaxagoras, Anaximander,
Plato’s Timaeus, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plotinus, Ptolemy, Plutarch’s ‘On the Face in the Orb of the Moon’, Hipparchus, Pliny, Jerome, Averroes,
Augustine, Bernardino Telesio and others, but Aristotle above all.
And in another chapter he mentioned Bruno again: ‘unless one
thinks of the Moon as an Earth, and that vapours can rise up to it,
mixing the ambient and surrounding air: which is not only around
the Moon, but also around the other planets as believed by Giordano
Bruno; but I’ve refuted this more than enough’.152
The point of Lagalla’s expansive attack was that Galileo seemed
utterly mistaken and temerarious in upending matters in astronomy,
physics and even religion. Hence, Lagalla’s tract answered the question that Cardinal Bellarmine had sent to the Collegio Romano: were the phenomena described by Galileo true or false? Lagal a
answered: such phenomena are false and impossible!
And what did Bellarmine do? He was not an astronomer or
mathematician, yet he could analyse claims about the world and
the heavens from a more authoritative field: theology. I have said
that we should expect that at some point in Bellarmine’s extensive
writings he could have noted some of his views of Bruno’s heresies
– and he did.
In a book of 1605 Bellarmine explicitly denied that the Earth or
the heavenly bodies are divine, soulful or alive: ‘God is not an inanimate thing; hence [God] is not the Earth, not Heaven, not the Sun, not the Moon, not the Stars: because all these things are inanimate,
and inferior to the animate things. ’153
Subsequently, Bellarmine denied one of Bruno’s principal claims:
that God is the soul of the world. Bellarmine’s remarks appear in his
commentaries on the Book of Psalms, first published in 1611 and again
in 1612. While some philosophers used the Psalms to justify their
eccentric beliefs, when Bellarmine analysed the Psalms he took the
opportunity to deny eccentric philosophical beliefs. While discussing
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Psalm 41:5, ‘These things I remembered, and poured out my soul in
me: for I shall go over into the place of the wonderful tabernacle, even
to the house of God,’ Cardinal Bellarmine commented:
The soul does not move in the body, and entirely moves,
rules and vivifies the body; and gives it sense; we know that
in death the soul departs from it, the body gradually falls,
and motion, sense, species, and whatever good it had; in a
moment the body loses that which is the soul, it is a thing
of universal God, but properly speaking, this does not mean
that God is the soul of the world, what the Philosophers
seem to have thought; but the likeness that souls seem to
have: He remains immobile in Himself, the word carries all
of His power, and in Him we live, move, and are.154
The last phrase is a quotation from Acts 17:28, which had earlier
been quoted by Calcidius and Bishop Agostino Steuco in discussing
the very same topic. Likewise, Bellarmine echoed the characteristic
verb ‘to vivify’, which had been used by Novatian, Abelard, Ficino,
Bruno, Campanella and Kepler – all to describe a universal spirit
that animates living beings.
Bellarmine did not specify which philosophers thought that God
is the soul of the world, in whatever sense, although, as we have seen,
among them were Plotinus, Porphyry, Abelard, Ficino, Campanella
and Bruno. All of them elaborated upon the notion in Plato’s Timaeus
and which the Placita attributed to the Pythagoreans. This was the
notion that Ficino attributed to Apollonius the Pythagorean, and
which Ficino pinpointed in Virgil’s Aeneid. It was the controversial
‘Pythagorean doctrine�
�� for which Bruno too praised his ‘Pythagorean
poet’, Virgil, even when confronted by Inquisitors. As we will see,
Bellarmine trashed this notion again in 1615.
Catholic lists of heresies blamed Peter Abelard for the heresy
that the soul of the world is the Holy Spirit. Bel armine was a
member of the Congregation of the Index, and in 1592 he prepared
his own alphabetical list of ‘Heresiarchs, that is, those who invented
or fomented heresies, or were the leaders of heretics’. Heresiarchs
were worse than heretics. And Bellarmine’s list includes Abelard
as a heresiarch – alongside Calvin, Luther, Melanchthon, Andreas
Osiander and others.155 Since then Bellarmine’s role in Roman 134
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censorship had grown: he became the prefect of the Index in 1605
(serving in that capacity until 1621).156
Bellarmine further criticized other heretical views about the
soul. In a book of 1613, about sins, he criticized six propositions
by the ‘pagan philosophers’ about the origins of human souls. Two
are relevant to our discussion because Bruno and the Pythagoreans
advocated them. Bellarmine wrote: ‘The First proposition is that
human souls are fragments [ particulas] of the substance of God,
therefore are not properly created’, but are somehow breathed [ inspirari] by God.157 Bellarmine objected that since the divine substance is really immutable and inviolable, whereas souls are not, then this
proposition had been ‘rightly condemned [ damnata] as heretical’.
Instead, he said, God makes human souls from nothing. Latin
expressions such as damnata had a stronger meaning than our judicial sense of condemned, they could also mean the stronger, Catholic sense of damned.
Next, the ‘second proposition’ was the claim that souls inhabited
heaven until ‘God cast down souls into bodies as into prisons.’158
Bel armine complained that this ‘error’ entailed multiple ‘utter
absurdities’. Some statements in the Bible would mean their opposite. For example, by killing people with the Flood, God would be liberating their souls, while punishing Noah’s by keeping him in
his bodily prison. Also, God’s benedictions such as ‘Go forth and
multiply,’ in Genesis, would become ‘maledictions’: commands to
imprison more souls from heaven.
Bellarmine did not mention the Pythagoreans. Yet both of
these ‘erroneous’ propositions about souls had been attributed to the
Pythagoreans by Cicero, St Hippolytus, Justin Martyr, Philostratus,
Lactantius, St Jerome and Erasmus. And Bellarmine had read many
of their works. Both of these propositions were consonant with the
transmigration of souls. If the Pythagorean interpretations of scriptures were true then certain passages in the Bible would mean the opposite of what they say.
Furthermore, Bellarmine reasserted traditional interpretations
of scriptures. So he denied the Earth’s motion. In 1611 Bellarmine
quoted Psalm 103:5 from the Latin Vulgate, that God ‘established
the Earth on its foundations, it cannot be moved forever and ever’.
Bel armine commented that God put Earth in the centre of the
world, and that its ‘weight rests on its eternal stability’.159 He also 135
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quoted Psalm 118:8, that God ‘established the Earth and permanently’. Bellarmine explained this phrase: ‘it almost says that you
[God] established the Earth immovable, and it always remains
immobile.’ He added: ‘God ordained, on the contrary, that heaven
or the Sun move always.’160 These statements matter, because they show Bellarmine truly believed that the Earth does not move. So,
its motion was not one of the questions he sent to the Collegio
Romano. He only asked about the telescopic phenomena Galileo
had described.
The Earth’s motion had been censured by the consultors of the
Inquisition in the works of Bruno. Strangely, historians hardly ever
mention this key point when discussing Galileo.
Similarly, in 1611 the mathematical astronomer Nicholas
Mulerius published a book on tables specifying positions of the
Moon and the Sun, and warned about the theory of the Earth’s
motion: ‘The Sacred Scriptures should have such a great authority
among us, and our minds should be moved by such great reverence for it, that we would not dare to fall into the opinion of the Pythagoreans, which is openly contrary to Scripture. ’161
Nicholas de Nancel was another writer who linked the
Pythagoreans with heresies. De Nancel discussed ‘various opinions’
about the location and motion of the Earth and the existence of
many worlds. He attributed to Pythagoras the belief that ‘there are
two Earths’, and he credited Democritus, Epicurus and Origen with
the belief that many worlds exist. De Nancel mentioned theorists
who wrote about Earth’s motion, including Philolaus, Heraclides,
Ecphantus the Pythagorean, Seleucus and Copernicus. And then
de Nancel said:
And indeed long before (so that in religion, and also in the
ancient opinions of philosophy, what heresies are spoken
without fear, countless, met by new proponents who among
the ignorant dare to sell the first authors) the sectarians of
Pythagoras, who had that part of Italy known as Greater
Greece, who as Cicero conveyed, said that the centre of the
universe contains a fire, and that the Earth moves around it.162
De Nancel decried the ‘Heresies of the ancient philosophers, and
their innovators’ but didn’t elaborate the point. Meanwhile, Kepler
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praised Galileo’s telescopic discoveries of the ‘Pythagorean and
Copernican world’.163
As we have seen, several writers attacked pagan cosmological
notions. Lipsius, Possevino, Padiglia and Bellarmine obliquely criticized Bruno’s beliefs, while asserting Earth’s immobility. Schoppe demonized Bruno. Lipsius, Serarius, Mulerius and de Nancel criticized the Pythagoreans for advocating the theory of the Earth’s motion. Horky and Lagal a ridiculed Galileo’s claims alongside
Bruno’s. Meanwhile, Kepler and Wedderborn defended Galileo,
but linked his claims with Bruno’s.
In 1611 Galileo became a member of the exclusive Accademia
dei Lincei, which had been founded in 1603 by Prince Federico
Cesi with Johann van Heck and two other founding members.
They had chosen the name ‘Lincei’ from the book Natural Magic
by Giambattista della Porta, which celebrated the eyes of the lynx,
which sharply examine things. They modelled their small Academy
on the school of Pythagoras, stating that, ‘if you sometimes hear
of the Lynxes as Philosophers; this name lacks all pride, because
it is not explicitly the Knowledgeable [men], but only Friends and
Lovers of Pythagorean Knowledge, as they want to be called. ’164
Galileo in Danger
In November 1612 Galileo heard that an old Dominican preacher,
Niccolò Lorini, had badmouthed the Copernican theory. Father
Lorini was a professor of Church history at the University of
Florence. So Galileo sent him a letter, now lost. Lorini promptly
retorted that ‘the opinion of that Ipernicus, or whatever his name
is, seems to oppo
se the Divine Scriptures. ’165 Then Galileo just shrugged him off as a ‘clumsy speaker’.166
Undeterred by critiques, Galileo published more findings in
March 1613: his Letters on Sunspots.167 Again he argued: ‘with absolute necessity we conclude, in agreement with the opinions of the Pythagoreans, and of Copernicus, that Venus revolves around the
Sun; around which are moving all the other planets too, as the
centre of their revolutions. ’168 Galileo chose to ignore the critiques of Horky and Lagalla, who had mixed Galileo’s views with Bruno’s,
insisting that only one world exists. 169 However, Galileo wrote:
‘positing inhabitants in Jupiter, in Venus, in Saturn and on the Moon
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Galileo in 1613,
when he was 49
years old. Engraving
by Francesco
Villamena.
is false, and damning, meaning by “inhabitants” animals like ours,
and above all, men. ’170 He voiced agreement with ‘Apelles’ (the Jesuit Christopher Scheiner), who had recently said that ‘the proposition
that Jupiter, Venus, Saturn and the Moon have inhabitants is easily
repudiated, since it is absurd.’171 But then Galileo said he neither affirmed nor denied that there were some living beings or vegetation
on the planets or the Moon.
In 1614 the German astronomer Simon Marius published a
booklet describing Jupiter’s moons. He claimed to have discovered
them with a telescope before Galileo, back in 1609. He also claimed
to be able to see the discs of some stars, meaning that the stars
couldn’t be as far away as Copernicus said. But most importantly for
our discussion, Marius repeatedly described Jupiter as ‘a World’.172
At the same time, George Locher (a student of Scheiner) criticized the ‘Controversies and Novelties in Astronomy’. He criticized Copernicus and rejected as ‘impossible’ the ancient theory that the
universe is infinite and that many worlds exist, which are born
from combinations of atoms. Locher wrote: ‘the true and Christian
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philosophy has repudiated this fiction already long ago; in order to
establish its own subjectmatter. ’173
In December, during a Sunday sermon at the church of Santa