The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  The book might have brought Galileo less grief and renown had it not been for its beginning and its end. Said the preface “to the discerning reader”:

  Several years ago there was published in Rome a salutary edict which, in order to obviate the dangerous tendencies of our present age, imposed a reasonable silence upon the Pythagorean opinion that the earth moves. There were those who impudently asserted that this decree had its origin not in judicious inquiry, but in passion none too well informed. Complaints were to be heard that advisers who were totally unskilled in astronomical observations ought not to clip the wings of reflective intellects by means of rash prohibitions.110

  This was in effect to notify the reader that the dialogue form was a dodge to elude the Inquisition. In the dialogue two characters, Salviati and Sagredo—the names of two of Galileo’s warmest friends—defend the Copernican system; a third character, Simplicio, rejects it, but with transparent sophistry. Near the end of the work Galileo put into Simplicio’s mouth, almost verbatim, a statement that Urban VIII had insisted on being added: “God is all-powerful; all things are therefore possible to him; ergo the tides cannot be adduced as a necessary proof of the double motion of the earth without limiting God’s omniscience.” Upon which Salviati comments sarcastically, “An admirable and truly angelic argument.”111

  The Jesuits, several of whom were roughly handled in the Dialogue (Scheiner’s ideas were called “vain and foolish”), pointed out to the Pope that his statement had been put into the mouth of a character who throughout the book had been represented as a simpleton. Urban appointed a commission to examine the work; it reported that Galileo had treated the Copernican system not as hypothesis but as fact, and that he had secured the imprimatur by clever misrepresentations. The Jesuits added, with foresight, that the doctrines of Copernicus and Galileo were more dangerous to the Church than all the heresies of Luther and Calvin. In August 1632 the Inquisition forbade further sale of the Dialogue, and ordered the confiscation of all remaining copies. On September 23 it summoned Galileo to appear before its commissioner in Rome. His friends pleaded his sixty-eight years and many infirmities, but to no avail. His daughter, now a fervent nun, sent him touching letters begging him to submit to the Church. The Grand Duke advised him to obey, provided him with the grand-ducal sedan chair, and arranged with the Florentine ambassador to house him in the embassy. Galileo reached Rome February 13, 1633.

  Two months passed before the Inquisition called him to its palace (April 12). He was charged with having broken his promise to obey the decree of February 26, 1616, and was urged to confess his guilt. He refused, protesting that he had only presented the Copernican view as hypothesis. He was kept a prisoner in the palace of the Inquisition till April 30. There he fell sick. He was not put to torture, but may have been led to fear it. At a second appearance before the commission he humbly confessed that he had stated the case for Copernicus more strongly than against him, and offered to correct this in a supplementary dialogue. He was allowed to return to the house of the ambassador. On May 10 he was examined again; he offered to do penance and begged consideration for his age and ill health. At a fourth examination (June 21) he affirmed that after the decree of 1616 “every doubt vanished from my mind, and I held and still hold Ptolemy’s opinion—that the earth is motionless and that the sun moves—as absolutely true and incontestable.”112 The Inquisition countered that Galileo’s dialogues made quite clear his acceptance of Copernicus; Galileo insisted that he had been anti-Copernican since 1616. The Pope had kept in touch with the examination, but had not attended in person. Galileo hoped that Urban VIII would come to his aid, but the Pope refused to interfere. On June 22 the Inquisition pronounced him guilty of heresy and disobedience; it offered him absolution on condition of full abjuration; it sentenced him to “the prison of this Holy Office for a period determinable at our pleasure,” and prescribed as penance the recitation of the seven penitential psalms daily for the next three years. He was made to kneel, repudiate the Copernican theory, and add:

  With a sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally every other error and heresy contrary to the … Holy Church, and I swear that I will nevermore in future say or assert anything … which may give rise to a similar suspicion of me; and that if I shall know any heretic or anyone suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office. … So may God help me, and these His Holy Gospels which I touch with my own hands.113

  The sentence was signed by seven cardinals, but did not receive papal ratification.114 The story that on leaving the trial chamber Galileo muttered defiantly, “Eppur si muove!” (And yet it does move!), is a legend not traceable before 1761.115 After three days in the prison of the Inquisition he was allowed, by order of the Pope, to go to the villa of the Grand Duke at Trinità dei Monti in Rome; a week later he was transferred to comfortable quarters in the palace of his former pupil, Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini, at Siena. In December 1633 he was allowed to remove to his own villa at Arcetri, near Florence. Technically he was still a prisoner, and he was forbidden to wander outside his own grounds, but he was free to pursue his studies, teach pupils, write books, and receive visitors—here Milton came in 1638. His nun daughter came to live with him, and took upon herself the penalty of reciting the psalms.

  4. The Patriarch

  Apparently he was a broken man, defeated and humiliated by a Church that felt herself the guardian of the faith, hopes, and morals of mankind. His abjuration, after months of imprisonment and days of questioning that could have shattered the mind and will of a young warrior, was forgivable in an old man who remembered Bruno’s burning thirty-three years before. But he was not really defeated. His book spread through Europe in a dozen translations, and his book did not recant.

  He solaced his grief at Siena and Arcetri by summing up his physical researches in another major work, Discorsiedimostraúoni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze (Dialogues … Concerning Two New Sciences). As the Italian press was closed to him by his condemnation, he negotiated secretly with foreign printers, and finally the Elzevir firm issued the book at Leiden in 1638. It was acclaimed throughout the learned world as raising the science of mechanics to a higher level than ever before. After its publication he continued to prepare additional dialogues, in which he studied the mechanics of percussion and adumbrated Newton’s second law of motion. “In the last days of his life,” says his first biographer, “and amid much physical suffering, his mind was constantly occupied with mechanical and mathematical problems.”116 In 1637, just before his eyesight began to fail, he announced his last astronomical discovery, the librations of the moon—the variations in that side of the moon which always faces the earth. And in 1641, a few months before his death, he explained to his son a plan for making a pendulum clock.

  The portrait that Sustermans painted of him at Arcetri (now in the Pitti Gallery) is of genius incarnate: immense forehead, pugnacious lips, searching nose, penetrating eyes; this is one of the noblest faces in history. The eyes lost their sight in 1638, perhaps from too arduous gazing. He consoled himself with the thought that no man since Adam had seen so much as he. “This universe,” he said, “that I have extended a thousand times … has now shrunk to the narrow confines of my own body. Thus God likes it; so I too must like it.”117 In 1639, suffering from sleeplessness and a hundred pains, he was allowed by the Inquisition to visit Florence, under strict surveillance, to see a physician and hear Mass. Back in Arcetri he dictated to Viviani and Torricelli and played the lute, till his hearing also failed. On January 8, 1642, aged almost seventy-eight, he died in the arms of his disciples.

  Grotius called him “the greatest mind of all time.”118 He had, of course, some limitations of intellect and character. His faults—pride, temper, vanity—were literally the defects or price of his qualities: his persistence, courage, and originality. He did not recognize the importance of Kepler’s calculations on the planetary orbits. He was slow
to credit the work of his contemporaries. He hardly realized how many of his discoveries in mechanics had been made before him—some by another Florentine, Leonardo. The views for which he was punished are not precisely those that astronomers hold today; like most martyrs, he suffered for the right to be wrong. But he was not wrong in feeling that he had made dynamics a full-fledged science and had widened the human mind and perspective by revealing, in greater measure than ever before, the frightful immensity of the universe. He shared with Kepler the honor of winning acceptance for Copernicus, and with Newton the distinction of showing that the heavens declare the glory of law. And, like a good son of the Renaissance, he wrote the best Italian prose of his time.

  His influence pervaded Europe. His very condemnation raised the status of science in northern lands, while lowering it for a while in Italy and Spain. Not that the Inquisition destroyed Italian science: Torricelli, Cassini, Borelli, Redi, Malpighi, Morgagni carried the torch on to Volta, Galvani, and Marconi. But Italian scientists, remembering Galileo, avoided the philosophical implications of science. After the burning of Bruno and the intimidation of Descartes by Galileo’s fate, European philosophy became a Protestant monopoly.

  In 1835 the Church withdrew the works of Galileo from her Index of Prohibited Books. The broken and defeated man had triumphed over the most powerful institution in history.

  * * *

  I. For superstition, science, and philosophy in England in this period cf. Chapter VII.

  II.Jena (1558), Geneva (1559), Lille (1562), Strasbourg (1567), Leiden (1575), Helmstedt (1575), Wilno (1578), Würzburg (1582), Edinburgh (1583), Franeker (1585), Graz (1596), Dublin (1591), Lublin (1596), Harderwijk (1600), Giessen (1607), Groningen (1614), Amsterdam (1632), Dorpat (1632), Budapest (1635), Utrecht (1636), Turku (1640), Bamberg (1648).

  III. Ideally the calendar would have thirteen months, each of twenty-eight days, with a dateless holiday (or, in leap years, two) at the close of the year. Such a one-page calendar, with rotary devices to indicate the month and the year, could serve for every month indefinitely; each day of the week would fall on the same dates every month and every year; the business year would be evenly divisible into equal months and equal quarters. But, alas, this would confuse the saints.

  IV. Aristotle’s writings are often syncopated notes, which he probably amplified or modified in lecturing. The passage in De Coelo may have meant that in a resisting medium, including open air, objects of concentrated mass, like a coin, fall faster than articles great in size but small in weight, like a sheet of paper; this, of course, is true. But in a vacuum the coin and the paper—or a ball of lead and a feather—fall at the same speed; and even in the open air the paper, if crumpled into a compact mass, falls at nearly the same speed as the coin. If we note the modification in Viviani’s statement—that the objects must be “of the same material … falling through the same medium”—the divergence between the Athenian philosopher and the Pisan scientist is much reduced.

  V. By the humor of history this is a proposition that no astronomer holds today. Perhaps all astronomy, like all history, should be taken as hypothesis. Of the beyond, as of yesterday, there is no certainty.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  Philosophy Reborn

  1564–1648

  I. SKEPTICS

  UNDER and amid the conflicts of national states, economic forces, political parties, and varieties of religious belief, the essential drama of modern European history was taking form: the fight for life of a great religion besieged and sapped by science, sectarianism, epicureanism, and philosophy. Is Christianity dying? Is the religion that gave morals, courage, and art to Western civilization suffering slow decay through the spread of knowledge, the widening of astronomic, geographical, and historical horizons, the realization of evil in history and the soul, the decline of faith in an afterlife and of trust in the benevolent guidance of the world? If this is so, it is the basic event of modern times, for the soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith. To Bruno and Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza, Pascal and Bayle, Holbach and Helvétius, Voltaire and Hume, Leibniz and Kant, it was no longer a question of Catholicism versus Protestantism, it was a question of Christianity itself, of doubts and denials rising about the dearest fundamentals of the ancient creed. The thinkers of Europe—the vanguard of the European mind—were no longer discussing the authority of the pope; they were debating the existence of God.

  Many factors made for unbelief. The principle of private judgment, condemned by the Catholic Church as an invitation to doctrinal and moral chaos, had been proclaimed, established, and then condemned by nearly all the Protestant bodies; meanwhile it had undermined the citadel of belief. Multiplying sects fought one another like superabundant progeny, exposed one another’s weaknesses, and left faith naked to rationalist winds. In their war they called both Scripture and reason to their support; the study of the Bible led to doubts of its meaning and infallibility, and the appeal to reason ended the Age of Faith. The Protestant Reformation achieved more than it desired. The assaults of Biblical criticism especially damaged a Protestantism that had recklessly based itself upon a divinely inspired Bible. Improvements in social order and human security softened terror and cruelty; men felt compelled to reconceive God in gentler terms than those of Paul and Augustine, Loyola and Calvin; hell and predestination became incredible, and the new morality shamed the old theology. The growth of wealth and pleasure made for an epicurean life, which sought a philosophy to justify it. Religion was a casualty in the wars of religion. The increasing knowledge of pagan morals and philosophies, of Asiatic cults and rituals, led to disturbing comparisons with Christianity; have we not heard Erasmus praying to “Saint Socrates,” and seen Montaigne reduce religious creeds to the accidents of geography and the arbitrament of war? The growth of science revealed the operation of “natural law” in many cases—e.g., the path of comets—where faith had seen the hand of Providence. The educated classes found it harder to believe in miracles, even while the letterless gloried in them. And this earth which, in the fond mythology of the people, had felt the feet of God—was it, as Copernicus and Galileo implied, only a bubble and a moment in a universe immeasurably too vast for the jealous, vengeful deity of Genesis? Where had heaven gone, now that up and down changed places twice a day?

  The mildest skeptics were the Unitarians, who in Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Holland, and England suggested doubts about the divinity of Christ. There were already a few deists, who professed belief in a God loosely identified with Nature, rejected the divinity of Christ, and wished to make Christianity an ethic rather than a creed; they were as yet sporadic and cautious, except when, like Edward Herbert of Cherbury, they had sufficient status to frighten the hangman; we shall find them more vocal after 1648. Bolder were the “Epicureans” of Germany, who laughed at the Last Judgment, which took so long in coming, and at hell, which was probably not so terrible after all, since all the jolliest company gathered there.1 In France such men were called esprits forts (tough minds) or libertins, whose loose ways began to give its modern meaning to a word that had originally meant “freethinkers.” In 1581 Philippe Duplessis-Mornay wrote a book of nine hundred pages, De la Vérité de la religion chrétienne, contre les athées; in 1623 the Jesuit François Garasse published a quarto of over a thousand pages, in which he denounced the beaux esprits who “believe in God only by way of form or as a maxim of state” and accept only Nature and destiny.2 In that same year Marin Mersenne estimated the “atheists” of Paris at fifty thousand,3 but that word was then so loosely used that he may have meant deists. In 1625 Gabriel Naudé explained that the divine revelations of laws to Numa Pompilius and Moses were fables invented to promote social order, and that the monks of the Thebaid had fabricated their stories of combats with the Devil to raise their reputation and milk the credulous mob.4 François de La Mothe Le Vayer, secretary to Richelieu and tutor to the future Louis XIV, published in 1633 his Dialogues of Orasius Tabero, professing a gener
al skepticism: “Our knowledge is asininity, our certainties are fictions, our whole world is … a perpetual comedy.”5 He was one of those whose faith faded before the multiplicity of infallible creeds. “Amongst that infinity of religions there is no man who does not believe that he possesses the true and condemns all the rest.”6 Despite his skepticism he married at seventy-eight and died in bed at eighty-four. Like a good skeptic, he had made his peace with the Church.

  Much of this French skepticism was a negative echo of Montaigne. It became a positive and constructive force in Montaigne’s friend Pierre Charron, a Bordeaux priest who gave him the last rites and inherited his library. Charron’s Traité de la sagesse (1601), a three-volume description of wisdom, has been inadequately described as a systematization of Montaigne; it is, rather, an independent treatise, owing much to the Essays, but bearing the stamp of Charron’s grave and courteous character. All knowledge, he says, is derived from the senses and is therefore subject to the many mistakes and limitations of the senses; truth is not for us. Fools argue that truth is proved by universal consent, and that vox populi est vox Dei; Charron believes rather that the voice of the people is the voice of ignorance, of opinions manufactured for them, and that one should be especially skeptical of what is widely believed.7 The soul is a mysterious, restless, searching activity connected with the brain and apparently dying with the body.8 Religion is composed of unprovable mysteries and many absurdities, and has been guilty of barbarous sacrifices and intolerant cruelties. If (as Voltaire would repeat) all men were philosophers, lovers and practicers of wisdom, religion would be unnecessary, and societies would live by a natural ethic independent of theology; “I would have a man virtuous without heaven and hell.”9 But considering the natural wickedness and ignorance of mankind, religion is a necessary means to morality and order.10 Consequently Charron accepts all the fundamentals of Christianity, even to angels and miracles,11 and he advises his sage to observe all the religious rites prescribed by the church to which, however accidentally, he belongs.12 A true skeptic will never be a heretic.13