Shea and Artigas - Galileo in Rome

by William R. Shea

  As far as I am concerned, any discussion of Sacred Scripture might have lain dormant forever; no astronomer or scientist who remained within proper bounds has ever got into such things. Yet while I follow the teachings of a book [Copernicus’s] accepted by the Church, there come out against me philosophers quite ignorant of such matters who tell me that they contain propositions contrary to the Faith. So far as possible, I should like to show them that they are mistaken, but my mouth is shut and I am ordered not to go into the Scriptures. This amounts to saying that Copernicus’ book, accepted by the Church, contains heresies and may be preached against by anyone who pleases, while it is forbidden for anyone to get into the controversy and show that it is not contrary to Scripture.

  Galileo describes the philosophers he is supposed to convince as too stupid to understand what astronomy is all about, but he says that he would not despair if he could use his tongue instead of his pen. This is why he has to go to Rome. In his mind this was the only honorable course, and he genuinely believed that it was also in the best interest of the Church. Bellarmine and Maffeo Barberini believed that Copernicus had proposed his theory as pure speculation. But they were wrong, as Galileo knew. To defend Copernicus on such grounds would be a paltry evasion.

  THE CORRECT INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE

  Galileo completed his revision of the Letter to Castelli, which became known to posterity as the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine, his most brilliant treatise on how scriptural texts should be used in matters of science. In that work, he considers what the Council of Trent said about the consensus of the Fathers, but he does not see this as an obstacle. A proposition that was understood in the same way by all the Fathers is not binding unless it was actually examined and discussed. In others words, unexamined ideas, however common, have no doctrinal status. The motion of the Earth is a case in point. It was never discussed adequately and, in any case, the Council of Trent was concerned with matters of faith and morals, not natural science.

  Galileo agreed with the theologians that everything in the Bible is inspired. He also held that two truths cannot contradict each other: There can be no fudging the issue by claiming that something can be true in philosophy but false in theology. But here is the rub: Bellarmine and Maffeo Barberini considered that the question of truth did not arise in the case of astronomical models because they thought they were just tools for calculation. Theologians expected astronomers to remain within the confines of this instrumentalist interpretation of scientific knowledge, which Galileo refused to do. He believed that the Earth really moved.

  The fact that the Bible contains metaphorical language gave Galileo his entry: Descriptions of God as walking, talking, and using his hands were used by the sacred writers in order to be understood by simple and unlettered common people. Scripture clearly accommodates itself to human limitations and speaks a language that ordinary folk can grasp. This is why it refers to astronomical events in everyday terms and avoids technical discussion.

  Galileo could have rested his case here, but he wanted more. He was convinced of his ability to persuade any open-minded person that Copernicanism was a solid theory “of which we have,” he wrote, “or firmly believe we could have, undoubted certainty, through experience, long observations and conclusive demonstrations.” Were it merely a conjecture that contained something contrary to Scripture, then it should “be reckoned undoubtedly false and shown to be so by every possible means.” Had Galileo been able to demonstrate the truth of Copernicanism, all would have been well, but he did not have and was never to have such proof.

  What Galileo proposed was not only damaging to his own position but seriously misconceived. Science progresses by conjectures that are refuted but even more so by conjectures that are confirmed, and theologians were right to be cautious about ideas that lay outside their domain of expertise. The sensible thing to do is often to “Wait and see,” as Cardinals Bellarmine and Barberini preached. We cannot dismiss, however, a legitimate concern that is often overlooked: If science is always to take precedence, might Scripture not be left undefended against wild and subversive ideas put forward in the name of science? The structure of the created universe is something fundamental to the Christian faith in an omnipotent and benevolent creator. If science cannot be derived from Scripture but only from reason and observation, it has nonetheless to be compatible with Scripture rightly understood. If necessary, those passages in Scripture that allude to natural things should be reinterpreted to fit with what is known through science. But the case for a particular scientific theory has to be made and, in the case of Copernicanism, Galileo never had a proof positive that it was true.

  A BUSINESS TRIP

  Galileo’s Roman friends were confident that he would see the point and exercise some restraint, and, on 16 May 1615, Dini suggested that he come to Rome as soon as possible to “be welcomed by everybody because I am told that many Jesuits secretly share your position although they remain silent.” In June, Cesi expressed the hope that Foscarini’s letter would create a favorable climate, especially when the revised edition, which he expected anytime, came out. Meanwhile, Galileo would do well to speak hypothetically, and not say that heliocentrism was physically true.

  Galileo completed his Letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina and resolved that Rome had to be faced and conquered, and he convinced the secretary of state that the trip was necessary. On 28 November 1615, Grand Duke Cosimo wrote to the Tuscan ambassador in Rome, Piero Guicciardini, to say that Galileo had requested leave to go to Rome “to defend himself against the accusations of his rivals,” and that he had gladly given his assent. Galileo was to be provided with two rooms at the Villa Medici because “he needed peace and quiet on account of his poor health,” and the ambassador was to help him in every way possible. On the same day, Curzio Picchena, the secretary of state, wrote to Annibale Primi, the administrator of the Villa Medici, spelling out that he was to give Galileo two of his best rooms and provide “full board for himself, a secretary, a valet, and a small mule.”

  The Tuscan ambassador was less than enthusiastic about Galileo’s impending arrival. After acknowledging receipt of the grand duke’s instructions, he could not refrain from adding in his letter of 5 December 1615:

  I do not know whether he has changed his theories or his disposition, but this I know: certain friars of St. Dominic, who play a major role in the Holy Office, and others are ill disposed toward him. This is no place to come and argue about the Moon and, especially in these times, arrive with new ideas.

  The grand duke wrote letters of recommendation for Galileo to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, and Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of the pope, and he contacted his two cousins, Paolo Giordano Orsini and his brother Alessandro, who were influential in Rome. Paolo Giordano Orsini had sided with Castelli at the famous luncheon in Pisa when the Grand Duchess Christina has asked about science and Scripture. Alessandro Orsini, who was only 22, was a rising star, and he was created cardinal in December 1615, a few days after Galileo’s arrival in Rome.

  Galileo was in the dark about what had happened to his Letter to Castelli. He was justifiably annoyed at the secret proceedings of the Tribunal of the Inquisition, but there is one aspect that he could appreciate: confidentiality. When a complaint was deposed before the Holy Office, an investigation was initiated but the name of the accused was not publicly divulged. It was only after the matter had been judged serious enough to warrant opening proceedings against the incriminated person that the affair became known. For instance, Cesi, Dini, and Ciampoli were not told how the letter that Foscarini had published was going to be handled. When Foscarini left Rome early in May 1615, Cesi could still write to Galileo that he had not been denounced and had even befriended Cardinal Giovanni Garzia Millini, the vicar general of Rome and a prominent member of the Holy Office. Cesi was too sanguine as events were to show.

  REPORTING BACK HOME

  Galileo arrived in Rome on 10 December 1615, and, as
on his second trip, immediately rushed out to call on the persons for whom he had letters of recommendation. He also made it his duty to keep the Tuscan court informed. Between 12 December 1615 and 20 February 1616, he wrote no less than ten letters to Curzio Picchena, and Picchena sent nine to him. This is practically one a week. In the first letter, written two days after his arrival, Galileo was anxious to let Picchena know that everyone he had seen was delighted at his coming and understood that he wanted to clear his good name against detractors and slanderers. In his correspondence he often mentions his determination to protect his reputation. What did he mean by this word? From his letters, it is clear that he was intent on defending himself from the insinuation that he was a masked heretic when he believed himself to be a good Catholic and an obedient son of the Church. This was not merely a political move. It expressed the ideal of a Christian scientist that had matured in his mind and that he saw himself as embodying. He may have been arrogant and naive; he was not being dishonest.

  From his next letter, dated 26 December 1615, we learn that Galileo was continuing his long round of visits to cardinals and other dignitaries. He complained that he found this tiring, but he was determined to soldier on even if the task might take months and months. How Galileo was seen by a man about town can be gathered from the frequent letters that Monsignor Antonio Querengo sent to his patron Cardinal Alessandro d’Este in Modena. On 30 December 1615 he reported that Galileo was giving virtuoso displays of his formidable argumentative powers at meetings, usually held in the home of Virginio Cesarini, who was considered one of the brightest young poets in Rome and whose mother was an Orsini. But persuading friends at social gatherings was a far cry from convincing the Holy Office!

  Galileo loudly proclaimed that he had come to save his honor. But if he was as white as snow, why bother to travel all the way to Rome? Rumors began to fly. “Perhaps he is not here on his own volition,” someone said to Monsignor Querengo. When Cardinal Alessandro d’Este heard this he passed it on to Florence, where Curzio Picchena became worried and wrote to Galileo to say that he was “most anxious to have news” about the outcome of his affairs. On 8 January 1616, Galileo penned a long letter in which he lamented a dreadful rumor alleging that he had fallen into disgrace in the eyes of the grand duke and had been banished to the outskirts of Florence. Fortunately, everyone could now see that he was the honored guest of the grand duke at the Villa Medici. Nonetheless, he had come to realize that he needed at least as many days to justify himself as his enemies had had weeks and months to spread falsehoods about him. The next sentence reveals that Galileo was becoming nervous. Is it true, he asked, that the grand duke is about to order me back to Florence? He beseeched Picchena to assure him that this was not the case because he did not want to leave Rome without having seen his reputation restored. By return of post, Picchena hastened to inform him that the rumor was baseless. He had read his letter to their Highnesses, who wanted him to know that he could stay in Rome as long as he wanted.

  Greatly comforted, Galileo took up the cudgels as we know from yet another letter of Monsignor Querengo to Cardinal d’Este, dated 20 January 1616:

  You would be delighted to hear Galileo argue, as he often does, in the midst of some fifteen or twenty persons who attack him vigorously, now in one house, now in another. But he is so well buttressed that he laughs them off; and although the novelty of his opinion leaves people unpersuaded, yet he shows that most of the arguments, with which his opponents try to overthrow him, are spurious. Monday in particular, in the house of Federico Ghisilieri, he performed marvelous feats. What I liked most was that, before answering objections, he improved on them and added even better ones, so that, when he demolished them, his opponents looked all the more ridiculous.

  Galileo’s eloquence and his brilliant repartee made for great sport in the literary circles to which he was repeatedly invited, but the applause that he won had little to do with a genuine understanding of the nature of the argument. Most people enjoyed the liveliness of the discussion but treated the whole matter as a suitable topic for a debating society rather than a serious scientific enquiry. The young Cardinal Alessandro Orsini, who was a genuine admirer of Galileo, recognized the danger and asked Galileo to put his best argument in writing, namely his claim that the tides imply a moving Earth. With remarkable speed, Galileo wrote down in a few days in January his Discourse on the Tides, which later became the Fourth Day of the Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. The water of the oceans, wrote Galileo, are contained inside a moving vessel that turns on its axis once a day and goes around the Sun once a year. The combination of these two motions, which are periodically in the same or in the opposite direction, causes the flow and ebb of the water. The time and magnitude of the tides vary in different locations because of numerous local factors, such as the length and depth of the body of water (this is why small lakes lack tides), and the way it is oriented (the Mediterranean that runs east-west experiences stronger tides that the Red Sea, which is north-south). The theory is ingenious and Galileo argued for it very skillfully, but it happens to be wrong.

  The reception that Galileo met with in social gatherings was flattering, but it was difficult for him to reach and speak plainly to the ecclesiastical authorities he wanted so much to convince. On 23 January 1616, he gave Curzio Picchena an account of what he had to cope with:

  My business is far more difficult and takes much longer, owing to outward circumstances, than the nature of it would require, because I cannot speak openly with those persons with whom I have to negotiate, partly to avoid causing a prejudice to any of my friends, partly because they cannot communicate anything to me without running the risk of grave censure. And so I am compelled, with much pain and caution, to seek out third persons who, without even knowing my purpose, may serve as mediators with the principals, so that I can set forth, incidentally as it were, and at their request, the particulars of my case. I have also to set down some points in writing, and to arrange that they should come privately into the hands of those I want to read them, for I find in many quarters that people are more ready to yield to dead writing than to live speech, for the former allows them to agree or dissent without blushing and, finally, to yield to the arguments since in such discussions we have no witnesses but ourselves. This is not done so easily when we have to change our mind in public.

  Galileo must have met with some success for a week later, on 30 January, he was so buoyed up that he wrote to Picchena that “his reputation was growing every day” and that his enemies were in full disarray. Why even Caccini, who had stirred up all the trouble in the first place, had asked if he could come and see him. In the next letter of 6 February, he describes the interview but in guarded language:

  The very person who, from the pulpit over there and then here in some other places, first spoke and plotted against me, stayed with me for over four hours. In the first half-hour, when we were alone, he tried with a great show of submission to make excuses for what had happened over there and offered to make all the amends I could wish.

  Galileo did not take Caccini’s apologies at face value, but the friar would not have been so abject if he had not been told that Galileo had powerful friends and was in no danger of being personally reprimanded. This left the issue of heliocentrism unresolved, and placed Galileo in something of a quandary. “I have terminated the business as far as my own person is concerned,” he wrote in the same letter to Picchena,

  and I could go back home any time, but at issue is a certain doctrine and opinion not unknown to Your Excellency which no longer concerns my person but all those, who in the last eighty years, have approved it in private or public, in sermons, or in published or unpublished works . . . I owe it to my conscience as a devout Catholic, to provide what help I can from the knowledge I derive from the science that I profess.

  Galileo pinned his hope on the young Cardinal Alessandro Orsini, who was willing to become his spokesman and even speak to the pope.

  The gra
nd duke was asked to signify his approval with a letter that was promptly dispatched and reached Orsini on 20 February. By the twenty-fourth he had had a word with the pope, but, as we shall see, it was too little, too late.

  THE AXE FALLS

  The next thing Galileo heard was that he was being summoned to see Cardinal Bellarmine on the twenty-sixth. When he presented himself, he was ordered not to argue in favor of Copernicanism. This was a bolt out of the blue for Galileo, but it was the logical outcome of a quick succession of events that we must now consider.

  The grand duke had told Cardinal Orsini to consider Galileo’s affairs as his very own, but it was neither the cardinal nor Galileo who notified him about the melancholy outcome of Galileo’s campaign in favor of Copernicanism. The bad news arrived in the form of a letter from the Tuscan ambassador, written on March 4:

  Galileo has relied more on his own counsel than on that of his friends. Cardinal del Monte and myself, and also several Cardinals from the Holy Office, tried to persuade him to be quiet and not to go on irritating the issue. If he wanted to hold this Copernican opinion, he was told, let him hold it quietly and not spend so much effort in trying to have others share it. Everyone feared that his coming here might be prejudicial and dangerous and that, instead of justifying himself and triumphing over his enemies, he could end up with an affront. As he felt people were not very warm about what he intended, he pestered and wearied several cardinals, then threw himself on the favor of Cardinal Orsini and extracted to that purpose a warm recommendation from Your Highness. Last Wednesday in Consistory, the Cardinal, I do not know with what circumspection and prudence, spoke to the Pope on behalf of Galileo. The Pope told him it would be well if he persuaded him to give up that opinion. When Orsini replied, and insisted, the Pope cut him short and told him he would refer the business to the Cardinals of the Holy Office. As soon as Orsini had left, His Holiness summoned Bellarmine and, after brief discussion, they decided that Galileo’s opinion was erroneous and heretical. The day before yesterday, as I hear, they had a Congregation on the matter to have it declared such. Copernicus, and the other authors who wrote on this, will be amended and corrected, or prohibited. I believe that Galileo is not going to suffer personally because, being prudent, he will feel and desire as Holy Church does.