Burned Alive: Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition
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to construe the Resurrection of Jesus as a kind of transmigration
of his soul. Furthermore Galileo’s eccentric advocate, Campanella,
insisted that Catholics should use a better philosophy (instead of
Aristotle) for interpreting scriptures, arguing that the Bible should
be interpreted ‘according to the philosophy of Pythagoras’. All
such Pythagorean interpretations violated the Council of Trent.
Inquisitors viewed heresy as one of the worst possible crimes and
their obligation was to purify the faith. Therefore both Bruno and
Galileo were condemned as heretics. Whereas Cardinal Bellarmine
was converted into a saint.
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Bellarmine’s Innumerable Suns
Cardinal Bellarmine did not believe in Bruno’s innumerable worlds,
but he did believe in the world of the afterlife, Paradise, complete
with ‘innumerable angels’. Echoing the Bible, he described it as a
kingdom, a city and ‘a house full of mansions’. The year when he
confronted Galileo, 1616, Bellarmine published a book about that
heavenly kingdom. In 1584 Bruno had written that ‘innumerable
suns’ exist, and now Bellarmine also said that they certainly do, but
in heaven itself. He mentioned the biblical miracle in which Jesus
Christ shone with the brightness of the Sun. Bellarmine then said
that in God’s kingdom all persons who are blessed and just will
also shine like the Sun. And he said that all the saints, the Virgin
Mary and Christ will also shine gloriously: ‘What then will it be, to
behold innumerable Suns,’ he asked – and he replied that one’s eyes
would be blessed, ‘so that they may observe without injury not one
Sun, but innumerably many’.37 At the time, the expression innumerabiles Soles was extremely rare: I have found only one earlier instance of it, in Bruno’s book of 1584. Therefore I suspect that Bellarmine
appropriated the phrase from none other than the heretic from Nola.
According to both Bruno and Bellarmine, the innumerable suns
‘glorified’ God.38
Bellarmine also mentioned the superior pleasure of eventually
and ultimately, in death, learning directly from God about nature and
astronomy, instead of from one’s feeble observations and thoughts
during life. He wrote:
But not only is the sight of God promised to holy men in
heaven, but also of all things which God has made. Here
on Earth we observe by our eyesight the Sun, & Moon,
& stars, & lands, & seas, & rivers, & animals, & trees, & metals. But our mind observes nothing, that is, it does not
perfectly know any created substance, no essential differences, no properties, no powers; man does not even see his own soul, but like the blind it [the mind] palpates the effects,
and by discoursing by reason it acquires some knowledge.
Therefore, what a joy will it be, when to our intelligence will
be revealed, manifestly, the nature of all things, differences,
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properties, powers? And with what great exultation, amazed,
will we see the army of innumerable angels, none of whom
resembles each other, and shal clearly see the differences and
singularities of all! For such a theatre will be, how desirable,
how lovable, when holy men from the beginning of the
world until the end will all be congregated with Angels,
and we will be allowed to see each of their merits, palms [of
victory] and crowns! Not without delight and pleasure will
we see the crimes and torments of the damned; in which the
sanctity of the pious, and God’s justice, marvellously shines;
then His hands will be washed in the blood of the sinners,
as the Prophet predicted so long ago.39
In Bellarmine’s vision of heaven, he would finally enjoy seeing the
bloody torments of heretics such as Bruno.
The founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius of Loyola, had encouraged
them to meditate on the great fires of Hell, to hear the wailings,
smell the filth, taste the sad tears of the damned, and feel how the
fires burn the soul.40
During the last years of his life Bellarmine was head of both
the Inquisition and the Congregation of the Index. His last days
were described by an English Jesuit who witnessed his death.41
Bellarmine became very ill in late August 1621, when he was almost
79 years old. After days of illness, he prepared the last confession of
his life, but as that English Jesuit reported, ‘such was the innocency
of the man, that albeit he were in his perfect sense, yet could he
hardly find what to confess.’ Bellarmine found a few minor defects,
for which a Father absolved him. The next day the Pope visited him
and Bellarmine reportedly spoke: ‘nothing troubles my conscience;
for God (His goodness still be thanked therefore) hath so preserved
me hitherto, as that I do not remember in the whole course of my
life to have committed any scandalous action.’ Was his memory
clear? He said that he felt no weakness of mind yet.
Bellarmine was notified that he would soon die, so he requested
the sacraments. He then ate ‘the body of Christ’, the wafer, and
tasted His blood, the wine, and was anointed. Many men visited
him – cardinals, bishops and clergymen – ‘not only to see him, but
to kiss his hands, his head, or some other thing about him; and
when therein they had satisfied their devotion, they would touch his
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body with their books, their beads, handkerchiefs, crosses, medals
and other similar things, and that very reverently on their knees’.
Many cardinals asked for his blessing, ‘and they seized his hand,
and blessed themselves with it’. While he was unconscious or unresponsive, the cardinals, bishops and prelates sent many little caps of silk, which they would wear, and such caps were placed one by one
on Bellarmine’s head, ‘and with them they sent also little crosses of
gold and silver, reliquaries, prayer books, and other things to touch
him, and that in such multitude, as there were more than one hundred and fifty red, white and other caps put on and taken from his head during this time’, and more afterward. Medical attendants
applied leeches to reduce his inflammation, and ‘they used clean
white handkerchiefs whereon the creatures might disgorge, and carried them away, stained with sacred blood, for distribution among their friends.’
The Pope then gifted a plenary indulgence to frail, old Bellarmine
to cancel any and all temporary punishment due to sins, to thus send
The embalmed corpse of Cardinal Bellarmine, at the Church of St Ignatius, the
chapel of the Collegio Romano. His body wears the red robes, hat and shoes of a
cardinal, displayed behind glass and under bright lightbulbs.
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The golden mask of
Bellarmine’s corpse.
Beneath the mask,
one can see the back
of his skull.
‘the hammer of the heretics’ straight to heaven. Finally they laid ‘a
great crucifix’ upon his lips, and let it rest upon his shoulders.
On the morning of 17 September 1621 Bellar
mine was dead.
Allegedly some people in the city miraculously heard his voice that
morning, saying, Addio, adesso me ne vado in paradiso, ‘Farewell, I am
now going into paradise.’ Many people kneeled before his body and
kissed his fingers. The Pope’s physician took the body to embalm it,
and he distributed towels, handkerchiefs and sponges stained with
Bellarmine’s blood. The physician carved out and kept a piece of
bone from the back of the skull, esteeming it ‘a peerless jewel and
inestimable treasure’. The embalmed corpse was then displayed in a
church for veneration, guarded by soldiers. Yet the clergymen and
the adoring mob stole nearly all of its clothing. Marvellous tales
spread through the city about the miracles done by his relics.
In 1627 Pope Urban viii nominated Bellarmine to be canonized.
Three centuries later, in 1930, he was finally canonized as St Robert
Bellarmine by Pope Pius xi. Can he now tell the innumerable angels
how the noble Romans treated saints? Can he finally delight in
seeing the innumerable suns? But not everyone agreed about his
saintliness. In 1853 one Protestant commentator criticized him for
sins that Bellarmine did not confess on his deathbed:
‘Such was the innocency of the man!’ Aye, such was his
selfsatisfaction. No misgiving as to the tendency of his
teaching troubled him. No doubt as to the lawfulness of
the rebellions and civil wars that he had promoted. Two of
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his disciples had assassinated two Kings of France; but he
did not hear the voice of their blood crying from the ground.
Victim after victim had he seen bound, weeping, racked,
burning; but no image of anguish or death came before
his eyes. Prayers from Syrians of India, remonstrances from
invaded churches, groans from the pits of Minerva, deprecations of the dying, curses of the living, troubled him not while searching his memory for sin, just for something to
be pardoned. Neither cruel deaths nor treasons were sins to
his apprehension, if only the victims were heretics. He said
that he had no sin. He was a liar, therefore, and the truth
was not with him.42
Critiques after Galileo’s Death
In 1641 a professor at Pisa, Paganino Gaudenzi, managed to publish
a book that censors had first sequestered until it could be corrected.
They worried that it seemed to endorse pagan ideas. Its title was On
the Pythagorean Transmigration of Souls. In his manuscript Gaudenzi
took the opportunity to mention Galileo, whom he praised as clarissimus: most enlightened. One of Galileo’s friends at Pisa, Vincenzo Renieri, then informed old Galileo in a letter:
Final y I end by tel ing you a beautiful fact. Paganino, in
the book he published On the Pythagorean Transmigration
of Souls, named Your Excellency at a certain point; he had
written most enlightened Galileo, but the Father Inquisitor
did not allow that most enlightened, and with difficulty he
[Gaudenzi] managed to obtain at least wellknown Galileo. 43
The following year Galileo died, in January 1642. Gaudenzi promptly
composed sonnets about him.44 In a later book Gaudenzi returned to the topic of transmigration, to defend Tertullian’s claim that the
Pythagorean theory that souls take new bodies is false.45
Galileo’s body was deposited not in his ancestors’ tomb, but in a
modest chamber under the bell tower of the Church of Santa Croce,
Florence. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando ii de’ Medici,
wanted to transfer the body to an impressive monument that would
be a counterpoint to the monument of Michelangelo in the great
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Galileo’s body was initially entombed in this small chamber, located at the back wall of the chapel of the novices at the Church of Santa Croce in Florence.
nave of Santa Croce.46 But when Pope Urban viii heard about the plan he summoned Niccolini and voiced objections:
he [the Pope] wanted to tell me that it would not be a good
example to the world for Your Highness to do that [monument], because he [Galileo] had been here before the Holy Office for an opinion so very false and so very erroneous,
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with which he had also impressed many others there, and
had given such a universal scandal to Christianity with a
doctrine that had been damned.47
The same day Cardinal Francesco Barberini gave a message to the
Florentine Inquisitor to be delivered directly to Ferdinando ii: ‘It
is not good to build mausoleums for the cadaver of someone who
has been punished by the Tribunal of the Holy Inquisition, because
it might scandalize good people, with prejudice toward the piety of
His Highness. ’48
Weeks after Galileo died, a commentary on the Book of Joshua
was published. Cornelius Lapide was a Flemish Jesuit who had
lived in Rome since 1616 and had written long commentaries on
almost all the books of the Bible. In the 1630s he was working on
his commentary on Joshua, but he died in 1637, almost sixty years
old. When it was finally published in 1642 it was with the approval
of Riccardi. The published version has an interesting passage about
the biblical miracle by Joshua:
[Joshua 10:12] ‘ Sun, do not move over Gibeon, and Moon over
the val ey of Aijalon. ’ In Hebrew is: Sun settle down, by which Solomon understood the Pythagorean harmony of heaven.
That is, ‘Sun I cannot hear the suns, orders are given to be
quiet and listen to the voices; mine, and pause a degree.’ But
truly this is ridiculous and futile: Sun settle down, thus being
the same as Sun be quiet, do not move.49
Father Lapide argued that this Pythagorean interpretation is ridiculous, and that instead the true, literal meaning is that by God’s omnipotence the Sun really did stop moving.
Was Lapide aware of Galileo’s Pythagorean interpretation of the
Joshua miracle? Yes, Lapide did not mention Galileo, but he succinctly rejected Galileo’s main argument. In his Dialogue Galileo had focused on one argument that he obstinately thought was the best
evidence in favour of Copernicus: Galileo argued that the Earth’s
motion causes the tides. Kepler and others had explained that this
is false, that instead the tides are caused by the Moon. Accordingly,
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Lapide explained that when the Sun and the Moon miraculously
stopped moving, the tides also stopped, because, he said, the tides
are really caused by the Moon’s motion. In one brief passage, without even mentioning Copernicus, even this biblical scholar thought that he could easily refute Galileo. One way or another, the Catholic
clergy men rejected Pythagorean interpretations of Sacred Scriptures,
whether pertaining to a moving Earth, a stationary central Sun, the
immortality of souls, the harmony of the spheres, or many worlds.
Meanwhile, Galileo’s last assistant, Vincenzo Viviani, sought
a suitable memorial for his master. When his requests too were
denied, he constructed the monument in his own house. It seems
that Viviani himself cultivated questionable beliefs. In November
1646 Viviani me
t with a French scientist, who summarized their
conversation in his diary: ‘I went for a walk with Mr Viviani who
had been three years with Mr Galilei. He told me his opinion
about the [sun] that he believed is a fixed star, the necessity of all
things, the nullity of evil, the participation of the universal soul, the
conservation of all things. ’50
The margin of the published version specifies that these were
the ‘Opinions of Mr Viviani’, yet historian David Wootton conjectures that such beliefs came from Viviani’s mentor, given that in 1615 Galileo had privately written about the spirit that spreads
throughout the universe, accumulates in the Sun and vivifies all
beings. Wootton argues that since Galileo ‘never’ wrote about Christ,
Galileo did not accept Christ, except perhaps in 1639.51 Wootton
conjectures that Galileo really was not a Christian, but secretly
believed in the soul of the world.
Viviani voiced three Pythagorean beliefs that Bruno had
defended: that the Sun is a star, that there is a universal soul, and
the conservation of all things, or in Bruno’s words, that nothing is
really new because primal matter is eternal. Furthermore, Viviani
embellished his biography of Galileo with a Pythagorean fiction: he
misreported the date of Galileo’s birth as being not 15 February 1564,
but four days later. Thus, it seemed to immediately follow the death
of Michelangelo: 18 February 1564. Readers could surmise that the
soul of the great artist had transmigrated into Galileo.
When later writers referred to Galileo’s death, they often said
(some stil do) that Newton was born in the year Galileo died.
Consider one account:
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It is singular that Galileo died in the year (1642) in which
Newton was born. It was almost as if the soul of the one had
transmigrated into the other, as if Galileo’s spirit, spurning the
leaden laws of Italy’s faith, and leaving, with a sigh, its golden
climate, had sprung unsaddled to the more congenial land. 52
But the dates are confused. The mistake stems from using the
Gregorian calendar to date Galileo’s death while using the Julian
calendar for Newton’s birth.53