The Ascent of Man

by Jacob Bronowski

  I know better than all the cardinals put together! The sentence of a living Pope is worth more than all the decrees of a hundred dead ones,

  he said imperiously. But in fact, Barberini as Pope turned out to be pure baroque: a lavish nepotist, extravagant, domineering, restless in his schemes, and absolutely tone-deaf to the ideas of others. He even had the birds killed in the Vatican gardens because they disturbed him.

  Galileo optimistically came to Rome in 1624, and had six long talks in the gardens with the newly elected Pope. He hoped that the intellectual Pope would withdraw, or at least by-pass, the prohibition of 1616 of the world picture of Copernicus. It turned out that Urban VIII would not consider that. But Galileo still hoped – and the officials of the Papal court expected – that Urban VIII would let the new scientific ideas flow quietly into the Church until, imperceptibly, they replaced the old. After all, that was how the heathen ideas of Ptolemy and Aristotle had become Christian doctrine in the first place. So Galileo went on believing that the Pope was on his side, within the limits set by his office, until it came to the testing time. And then he turned out to be most profoundly mistaken.

  Their views had really been intellectually irreconcilable from the beginning. Galileo had always held that the ultimate test of a theory must be found in nature.

  I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations … Nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.

  Urban VIII objected that there can be no ultimate test of God’s design, and insisted that Galileo must say that in his book.

  It would be an extravagant boldness for anyone to go about to limit and confine the Divine power and wisdom to some one particular conjecture of his own.

  This proviso was particularly dear to the Pope. In effect, it blocked Galileo from stating any definite conclusion (even the negative conclusion that Ptolemy was wrong), because it would infringe the right of God to run the universe by miracle, rather than by natural law.

  The testing time came in 1632 when Galileo finally got his book, the Dialogue on the Great World Systems, into print. Urban VIII was outraged.

  Your Galileo has ventured to meddle with things that he ought not to and with the most important and dangerous subjects which can be stirred up in these days,

  he wrote to the Tuscan ambassador on 4 September of that year. In the same month came the fateful order:

  His Holiness charges the Inquisitor at Florence to inform Galileo, in the name of the Holy Office, that he is to appear as soon as possible in the course of the month of October at Rome before the Commissary-General of the Holy Office.

  The Pope, Maffeo Barberini the friend, Urban VIII, has personally delivered him into the hands of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, whose process is irreversible.

  The Dominican cloister of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva was where the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition proceeded against those whose allegiance was in question. It had been created by Pope Paul III in 1542 to stem the spread of Reformation doctrines, being specially constituted ‘against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Commonwealth’. After 1571 it had also been given the power to judge written doctrine, and had instituted the Index of Prohibited Books. The rules of procedure were strict and exact. They had been formalised in 1588 and they were, of course, not the rules of a court. The prisoner did not have a copy either of the charges or of the evidence; he had no counsel to defend him.

  There were ten judges at the trial of Galileo: all Cardinals and all Dominicans. One of them was the Pope’s brother and another was the Pope’s nephew. The trial was conducted by the Cornmissar-General of the Inquisition. The hall in which Galileo was tried is now part of the Post Office of Rome, but we know what it looked like in 1633: a ghostly committee room in a club for gentlemen.

  We also know exactly the steps by which Galileo came to this pass. It had begun on those walks in the garden with the new Pope in 1624. It was clear that the Pope would not allow the Copernican doctrine to be avowed openly. But there was another way, and the next year Galileo began to write, in Italian, the Dialogue on the Great World Systems, in which one speaker put objections to the theory, and the two other speakers, who were rather cleverer, answered them.

  Because, of course, the theory of Copernicus is not self-evident. It is not clear how the earth can fly round the sun once a year, or spin on its own axis once a day, and we not fly off. It is not clear how a weight can be dropped from a high tower and fall vertically to a spinning earth. These objections Galileo answered, as it were, on behalf of Copernicus, long dead. We must never forget that Galileo defied the holy establishment in 1616 and in 1633 in defence of a theory not his own, but a dead man’s, because he believed it true.

  But on his own behalf Galileo put into the book that sense that all his science gives us from the time that, as a young man in Pisa, he had first put his hand on his pulse and watched a pendulum. It is the sense that the laws here on earth reach out into the universe and burst right through the crystal spheres. The forces in the sky are of the same kind as those on earth, that is what Galileo asserts; so that mechanical experiments that we perform here can give us information about the stars. By turning his telescope on the moon, on Jupiter, and on the sunspots, he put an end to the classical belief that the heavens are perfect and unchanging, and only the earth is subject to the laws of change.

  The book was finished by 1630, and Galileo did not find it easy to get it licensed. The censors were sympathetic, but it soon became clear that there were powerful forces against the book. However, in the end Galileo collected no fewer than four imprimaturs, and early in 1632 the book was published in Florence. It was an instant success, and for Galileo an instant disaster. Almost at once from Rome the thunder came: Stop the presses. Buy back all the copies – which by then had been sold out. Galileo must come to Rome to answer for it. And nothing that he said could countermand that: his age (he was now nearly seventy), his illness (which was genuine), the patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, nothing counted. He must come to Rome.

  It was clear that the Pope himself had taken great umbrage at the book. He had found at least one passage which he had insisted on, put in the book in the mouth of the man who really makes rather the impression of a simpleton. The Preparatory Commission for the trial says so in black and white: that the proviso I have quoted which was so dear to the Pope has been put ‘in bocca di un sciocco’ – the defender of tradition whom Galileo had named ‘Simplicius’. It may be that the Pope felt Simplicius to be a caricature of himself; certainly he felt insulted. He believed that Galileo had hoodwinked him, and that his own censors had let him down.

  So, on 12 April 1633, Galileo was brought into this room, sat at this table, and answered the questions from the Inquisitor. The questions were addressed to him courteously in the intellectual atmosphere which reigned in the Inquisition – in Latin, in the third person. How was he brought to Rome? Is this his book? How did he come to write it? What is in his book? All these questions Galileo expected; he expected to defend the book. But then came a question which he did not expect.

  Inquisitor:

  Was he in Rome, particularly in the year 1616, and for what purpose?

  Galileo:

  I was in Rome in the year 1616 because, hearing doubts expressed on the opinions of Nicolaus Copernicus, I came to find out what views it was suitable to hold.

  Inquisitor:

  Let him say what was decided and made known to him then.

  Galileo:

  In the month of February 1616 Cardinal Bellarmine said to me that to hold the opinion of Copernicus as a proven fact was contrary to the Sacred Scriptures. Therefore it could be neither held nor defended; but it could be taken and used as an hypothesis. In confirmation of this I have a certificate from Cardinal Bellarmine, given on 26 May 1616.

  Inquisi
tor:

  Whether at that time any other precept was given him by someone else?

  Galileo:

  I do not remember anything else that was said or enjoined upon me.

  Inquisitor:

  If it is stated to him that, in the presence of witnesses, there is the instruction that he must not hold or defend the said opinion, or teach it in any way whatsoever, let him now say whether he remembers.

  Galileo:

  I remember that the instruction was that I was neither to hold nor to defend the said opinion. The other two particulars, that is, neither to teach, nor consider in any way whatsoever, they are not stated in the certifi cate on which I rely.

  Inquisitor:

  After the aforesaid precept, did he obtain permission to write the book?

  Galileo:

  I did not seek permission to write this book because I consider that I did not disobey the instruction I had been given.

  Inquisitor:

  When he asked permission to print the book, did he disclose the command of the Sacred Congregation of which we spoke?

  Galileo:

  I said nothing when I sought permission to publish, not having in the book either held or defended the opinion.

  Galileo has a signed document which says that he was forbidden only to hold or defend the theory of Copernicus, which means as if it were a proven matter of fact. That was a prohibition laid on every Catholic at the time. The Inquisition claims that there is a document which prohibits Galileo, and Galileo alone, to teach it in any way whatsoever – that is, even by way of discussion or speculation or as a hypothesis. The Inquisition does not have to produce this document. That is not part of the rules of procedure. But we have the document; it is in the Secret Archives, and it is manifestly a forgery – or, at the most charitable, a draft for some suggested meeting which was rejected. It is not signed by Cardinal Bellarmine. It is not signed by the witnesses. It is not signed by the notary. It is not signed by Galileo to show that he received it.

  Did the Inquisition really have to stoop to the use of legal quibbles between ‘hold or defend’, or ‘teach in any way whatsoever’, in the face of documents which could not have stood up in any court of law? Yes, it did. There was nothing else to do. The book had been published; it had been passed by several censors. The Pope could rage at the censors now – he ruined his own Secretary because he had been helpful to Galileo. But some remarkable public display had to be made to show that the book was to be condemned (it was on the Index for two hundred years) because of some deceit practised by Galileo. This was why the trial avoided any matters of substance, either in the book or in Copernicus, and was bent on juggling with formulae and documents. Galileo was to appear deliberately to have tricked the censors, and to have acted not only defiantly but dishonestly.

  The court did not meet again; the trial ended here, to our surprise. That is to say, Galileo was twice more brought into this room and allowed to testify on his own behalf; but no questions were asked of him. The verdict was reached at a meeting of the Congregation of the Holy Office over which the Pope presided, which laid down absolutely what was to be done. The dissident scientist was to be humiliated; authority was to be shown large not only in action but in intention. Galileo was to retract; and he was to be shown the instruments of torture as if they were to be used.

  What that threat meant to a man who had started life as a doctor we can judge from the testimony of a contemporary who had actually suffered the rack and survived it. That was William Lithgow, an Englishman who had been racked in 1620 by the Spanish Inquisition.

  I was brought to the rack, then mounted on the top of it. My legs were drawn through the two sides of the three-planked rack. A chord was tied about my ankles. As the levers bent forward, the main force of my knees against the two planks burst asunder the sinews of lily, hams, and the lids of my knees were crushed. My eyes began to startle, my mouth to foam and froth, and my teeth to chatter like the doubling of a drummer’s sticks. My lips were shivering, lily groans were vehement, and blood sprang from my arms, broken sinews, hands and knees. Being loosed from these pinnacles of pain, I was hand-fast set on the floor, with this incessant imploration: ‘Confess! Confess!’

  Galileo was not tortured. He was only threatened with torture, twice. His imagination could do the rest. That was the object of the trial, to show men of imagination that they were not immune from the process of primitive, animal fear that was irreversible. But he had already agreed to recant.

  I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors general against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Republic, having before my eyes and touching with my hands, the holy Gospels – swear that I have always believed, do now believe, and by God’s help will for the future believe, all that is held, preached, and taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church. But whereas – after an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the centre of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture – I wrote and printed a book in which I discuss this doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favour, without presenting any solution of these; and for this cause I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the centre and moves.

  Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church; and I swear that in future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfil and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by this Holy Office. And, in the event of my contravening (which God forbid!) any of these my promises, protestations, and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents. So help me God, and these His holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands.

  I, the said Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word at Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June, 1633.

  I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above with my own hand.

  Galileo was confined for the rest of his life in his villa in Arcetri at some distance from Florence, under strict house arrest. The Pope was implacable. Nothing was to be published. The forbidden doctrine was not to be discussed. Galileo was not even to talk to Protestants. The result was silence among Catholic scientists everywhere from then on. Galileo’s greatest contemporary, René Descartes, stopped publishing in France and finally went to Sweden.

  Galileo made up his mind to do one thing. He was going to write the book that the trial had interrupted: the book on the New Sciences, by which he meant physics, not in the stars, but concerning matter here on earth. He finished it in 1636, that is, three years after the trial, an old man of seventy-two. Of course he could not get it published, until finally some Protestants in Leyden in the Net
herlands printed it two years later. By that time Galileo was totally blind. He writes of himself:

  Alas … Galileo, your devoted friend and servant, has been for a month totally and incurably blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which by my remarkable observations and clear demonstrations I have enlarged a hundred, nay, a thousand fold beyond the limits universally accepted by the learned men of all previous ages, are now shrivelled up for me into such a narrow compass as is filled by my own bodily sensations.

  Among those who came to see Galileo at Arcetri was the young poet John Milton from England preparing for his life’s work, an epic poem that he planned. It is ironic that by the time Milton came to write the great poem, thirty years later, he was totally blind, and he also was dependent on his children to help him finish it.

  Milton at the end of his life identified himself with Samson Agonistes, Samson among the Philistines,

  Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves,

  who destroyed the Philistine empire at the moment of his death. And that is what Galileo did, against his own will. The effect of the trial and of the imprisonment was to put a total stop to the scientific tradition in the Mediterranean. From now on the Scientific Revolution moved to Northern Europe. Galileo died, still a prisoner in his house, in 1642. On Christmas Day of the same year, in England, Isaac Newton was born.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE MAJESTIC CLOCKWORK

  When Galileo wrote the opening pages of the Dialogue on the Great World Systems about 1630, he said twice that Italian science (and trade) was now in danger of being overtaken by northern rivals. How true a prophecy that was. The man that he had most in mind was the astronomer Johannes Kepler who came to Prague in the year 1600 at the age of twenty-eight and spent his most productive years there. He devised the three laws that turned the system of Copernicus from a general description of the sun and the planets into a precise, mathematical formula.