Which brings us to Galileo’s hopes for Copernicanism. He must have reminded Cesi about his friendly correspondence with Urban VIII when he was still a cardinal and spoken of his high hopes of persuading him to allow a free discussion of heliocentrism. It is equally certain that he did not breathe a word of the admonition he had received from Cardinal Bellarmine in 1616. The Roman agendas of Cesi and Galileo were not quite the same, and they did not see into each other’s cards. Cesi was interested in the promotion of learning and the freedom of research that is necessary for scientific progress, but he was also a man with growing debts who found it useful to use the renown of his academy as a way of securing goodwill. However much Cesi enjoyed the company of prominent figures, he neither wished, nor could, challenge the status quo.
READING THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES
Galileo left Acquasparta on Sunday morning, 21 April and arrived in the Eternal City late at night on the following day. As on his previous journeys, the excitement gave him a sudden burst of energy, and on the morning following his arrival he called on Urban VIII, with whom he spent an hour in the company of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the brother of the pope, who had arranged the interview. On the next day, Wednesday, he was received for the same amount of time by the Pope’s nephew, Cardinal Francesco Barberini. He also paid a visit to Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici to present the letters from Grand Duke Ferdinando and Archduchess Christina. “The rest of the time,” he wrote on 27 April to the secretary of state, Curzio Picchena, “I spend on various visits that, in the end, make me realize that I am old, and that to be a courtier one has to be young with the physical strength and the hope of preferment that render it possible to endure this kind of labor.”
He must have written in the same vein to Federico Cesi, who replied on 30 April: “The court, my dear sir, is a source of infinite trouble and, beyond the official visits, there are innumerable calls of courtesy to be made . . . I recommend that you take your time and think above all of your health.” Cesi’s letter does not bear an address but we know from a letter the Lyncean Johann Faber wrote to Cesi on 11 May that Galileo lived close to the Church of Santa Maria Maddalena, roughly 50 meters from the Pantheon. Galileo was not staying with the Florentine ambassador as in 1611 or in the Villa Medici as in 1616. He may have been the guest of Mario Guiducci, who is the person with whom he will mainly correspond after his return to Florence.
In his letter to Cesi, Johann Faber, who was a physician, makes much of the fact that Galileo had given his patient and patron, Cardinal Frederick Eutel von Zollern, a microscope for the duke of Bavaria. Von Zollern had worked in the Curia under Clement VIII and had been created cardinal by Paul V in 1621. He had recently been appointed bishop of Olmütz in Bohemia and was about to leave for his diocese. Galileo showed von Zollern and Faber how to use the microscope, and together they studied a fly. Astonished and delighted, Faber called Galileo “another Creator” because he rendered visible things whose very existence had been unknown until then. This praise and an offer of help did not impress Galileo, who did not tell him anything about his business, as Faber later remarked. Now past 60, Galileo was growing more cautious about the persons who should be informed of the progress of his Copernican campaign. His own letter to Federico Cesi, written four days after Faber’s, is studiously circumspect. He says that he could forge ahead “on some of the issues that we discussed together” if he had enough time and patience, but he does not spell out what these issues are. Three days earlier he had been invited by Cardinal Scipione Cobelluzzi to dine with several prominent intellectuals. They had had a long conversation “but without tackling specifically any of our main propositions.” Again these propositions are not spelled out, and the next paragraph of the letter is equally short on details:
I spoke at length with Cardinal Zollern on two occasions. Without being an expert in our field, he grasps the point at stake and knows what is to be done in this case. He told me that he wants to raise the matter with His Holiness before his departure in some eight or ten days from now. I shall gladly hear what he finds out, but there are so many issues that are considered infinitely more important than those I mentioned, and these absorb all the time available so that our questions are neglected.
The larger issue that dominated the papal states was the problem of maintaining an uneasy neutrality between the two major contenders of the Thirty Years’ War: Catholic France and its Protestant allies on the one hand, and the House of Habsburg in Spain and Germany on the other. Urban VIII felt that the papacy’s independence was constantly threatened by the presence of Spanish power both north and south of the papal states. The energy and diplomacy needed to ward off the menace of becoming an imperial puppet left him little time for astronomical speculation.
It is clear from this letter that as late as 15 May Galileo had not spoken to the pope about Copernicanism, and that he doubted whether Cardinal Zollern would succeed in doing so. Cesi and Galileo may have talked well into the night when they were together in Acquasparta in April, but they do not seem to have come up with any concrete strategy of persuasion. Galileo was feeling the strain, and on 23 May he told Johann Faber that he intended to leave Rome in six days time. “I hope,” Faber remarked to Cesi, “that Cardinal Zollern will be able to get something from the Pope concerning the Copernican system.” The cat was out of the bag: Nothing had really been achieved and the last hope was Cardinal Zollern, who was willing to speak to Urban VIII personally.
A week later, Galileo was still in Rome and Zollern had not yet seen Urban VIII. On 1 June Faber reported to Cesi that he attended a meeting at Cardinal Zollern’s lodgings with Galileo; Father Niccolò Riccardi, the Dominican who had licensed The Assayer; and a German named Gaspar Schopp, a Lutheran who had converted to Catholicism. “We found that Father Monster [Riccardi] was very much on our side,” wrote Faber, “but he does not recommend that we re-open at this time a debate that has cooled down.” The best would be for Galileo to make his point in writing, but in such a way that his enemies could not attack him. The fact that Cardinal Zollern had not, thus far, seen the pope may explain why Galileo had not left for Florence as he had planned. Zollern did manage to see Urban VIII just before his departure for Germany on 7 June, but we must not interpret this as the result of a specific request to discuss the ban on Copernicanism. It was customary for Cardinals who were about to leave Rome to pay a courtesy call on the sovereign pontiff, and during the interview Zollern brought up the topic. The pope, as Zollern informed Galileo, told him that the Church had not condemned nor was about to condemn Copernicanism as heretical but that the theory was rash and that, furthermore, astronomical theories were of such a kind that they could never be shown to be necessarily true.
Galileo also offered in his letter an ironical, and somewhat patronising, account of the discussion he had had with Niccolò Riccardi, the “Father Monster,” and Gaspar Schopp. “They might not be as versed in astronomy as one might wish,” he wrote,
but they are nonetheless firmly of the opinion that this is not a matter of Faith and that Scripture should not be brought in. As far as truth or falsehood is concerned, Father Monster is neither for Ptolemy nor for Copernicus, but rests content with his own convenient way of having the heavenly bodies moved, without the slightest difficulty, by angels.
Whether Father Monster really believed that angels have such kinetic power is unclear, but there can be no doubt that he was skeptical about the possibility of finding the physical cause of planetary motion. Like Urban VIII, he was happy to let astronomers play around with any model they liked because he was convinced that they could never provide a genuine insight into the workings of nature, even if they rushed where angels fear to tread.
Galileo was anxious to get home to “purge” himself as he confided to Cesi in the same letter, and he planned to leave on the following Sunday, 16 June, in company of his Florentine friends, Michelangelo Buonaroti and Bishop Francesco Nori. Galileo particularly wanted Cesi to know that he had been granted si
x audiences by the Pope from whom he had received “great honors and favors.” He could indeed be pleased with himself as far as his more practical and mundane tasks were concerned. He had the promise of a pension for his son, Vincenzio, and for his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, the assurance that her convent would be provided with a better chaplain. On his departure the pope presented him with a painting (which Galileo describes as fine but of which he does not indicate the subject matter), two medals, one of gold, the other of silver, and several Agnus Dei, as were called the cakes of wax stamped with the figure of a lamb bearing a cross or a flag. There is no indication that the motion of the Earth had been so much as broached. All Galileo really had was what Cardinal Zollern had told him. Encouraging news, no doubt, but still secondhand. The pope had been reported as saying that the Church had not condemned Copernicanism as heretical. But every theologian worth his salt knew that the De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium had been placed on the list of proscribed books for being “rash” rather than perverse.
Urban VIII believed that the sun-centered universe was an unproven idea without any prospect of proof for the future since astronomical systems are by their very nature mere conjectures. We can devise mathematical games about the cosmos, but we can never know what the building blocks really are. It is silly to make a fuss about what will never be open to confirmation. The pope’s position was neither new nor outlandish, and it could be found in Andreas Osiander’s preface to Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus: Astronomical hypotheses are calculating devices; they have nothing to do with questions of truth or falsity. A better way of computing positions is not a theory that can become more credible as evidence increases. As we know from his personal theologian, Agostino Oregio, Urban VIII added a theological justification to his philosophical instrumentalism. It is a commonplace but no less important for that: God is omnipotent and can make in a variety of ways what we know to be possible in one way only, for what is beyond our senses is beyond our ken. We look up to heaven to pray; the rest is mere speculation. Galileo had heard this from Urban VIII, then Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, and there was no reason to believe that the pope had changed his mind.
Galileo made a last visit to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, who gave him letters of greeting f or the Grand Duke Ferdinand II and the Archduchess Maria Maddalena. Galileo also left Rome with an ornate Latin letter of Urban VIII to the grand duke, in which Galileo is called “my beloved son who has entered the aetherial spaces, cast light on unknown stars, and plunged into the inner recesses of the planets.” The text goes on in this way for several lines and, lest we attach too much importance to its glowing prose, it must be added that it was neither written nor signed by the pope but by the secretary for official correspondence, none other than Ciampoli.
BACK TO COPERNICANISM
Galileo returned to Florence with the feeling that his long-delayed book on the system of the world could be now attempted, but his mind was not completely at ease, and he immediately wrote to Guiducci to ask what had become of his adversaries. On 21 June, Guiducci replied that the Jesuit camp was astir.
I hear from all sides rumors of the war with which Grassi is threatening us to the point that I am tempted to believe that his reply is ready. On the other hand, I cannot see where he can attack since Count Virginio Malvezzi is almost certain that he cannot gain a foothold on your position concerning the nature of heat, tastes, smells, and so on. The count says that you wrote about that to start a new controversy for which you must be armed to the teeth.
This is the first mention of the problem of the so-called secondary qualities (color, smell, and so on) in the polemic with the Jesuits and, as we shall see, it will prove a sensitive issue.
What Galileo needed was a trial run and he chose as his foil a short anti-Copernican work that Ingoli had written in 1616 and that Galileo had considered unwise to answer after discussion about the motion of the Earth had been censored. Meanwhile, Ingoli had been appointed secretary of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, and Galileo was eager to spread his own Copernican belief. Ingoli’s work had been circulated in Italy and abroad, and the Protestant Johann Kepler had even submitted it to a critical review. It was time for a Catholic to take Ingoli down a peg or two, and Galileo made it his summer assignment for 1624. He avoided saying that he had not answered Ingoli earlier because of the condemnation of Copernicus’s book in 1616 and implied instead that he had not done so because it would have been a waste of time. “However,” he continued,
I have now discovered that I was completely wrong in assuming this. Having recently gone to Rome to pay my respects to His Holiness Pope Urban VIII, to whom I am bound by old acquaintance and the many favors I have received, I found it is firmly and generally believed that I have been silent because I was convinced by your demonstrations. . . . Thus I find myself forced to answer your work, though, as you see, very late and against my will.
Galileo stressed that, as a good son of the Church, he wanted Protestants to know that Catholics were not all ignoramuses like Ingoli.
They knew the arguments in favor of Copernicus, and if they did not subscribe to them this was because they placed their faith above scientific reasoning. “I hear,” declares Galileo,
that the most influential of the heretics accept Copernicus’ opinion, and I want to show that we Catholics continue to be certain of the old truth taught by the sacred authors, not for lack of scientific understanding, or for having failed to consider the numerous arguments, experiments, observations and demonstrations that they have, but rather because of our reverence for the writings of the Fathers, and our zeal for religion.
Protestants should not be misled into thinking that Catholics’ attachment to Scripture and the Fathers is the product of ignorance of astronomy and natural philosophy. Galileo rams it in that it is the result of deep faith. This was a dangerous game to play. Placing one’s faith in sacred authors above the conjectures of natural philosophers is one thing; insinuating that the arguments deployed by churchmen like Ingoli are worthless is another. Galileo earnestly believed that Christianity is based on revealed truths, and he was convinced that these truths concern faith and morals exclusively and have nothing to do with astronomical hypotheses. He was compelled to conceal this conviction after 1616. What he needed after the election of Urban VIII was elbow room, and paying lip service to the official ruling of the Church seemed a reasonable price. From this position, less secure than Galileo assumed, he once more resumed his defence of Copernicus:
For, Signor Ingoli, if your philosophical sincerity and my old regard for you will allow me to say so, you should in all honesty have known that Nicolaus Copernicus spent more years on these very difficult problems than you spent days on them. You should have been more careful and not allowed yourself to be lightly persuaded that you could knock down such a man, especially with the sort of weapons you use, which are among the most common and trite objections advanced in this subject, and when you add something new it is no more effective than the rest.
Having unburdened himself in this way, Galileo let down his guard and risked the following emphatic declaration of his own position: “If any place in the world is to be called its center, this is the center of celestial revolutions, and anyone who is competent in this subject knows that it is the Sun rather than the Earth that is found there.” The reason Galileo could get away with this statement is that all astronomical models had a purely “hypothetical” status in the eyes of people like Urban VIII. There was no real epistemological dissonance between Scripture and astronomy simply because astronomy made no truth claims.
Galileo proceeded to outline his arguments for heliocentrism, many of which he later developed in his Dialogue of 1632, such as the discussion of why a stone dropped from the mast of a ship falls at the foot of the mast whether the ship is stationary or in motion, or why a cannon ball fired on a revolving Earth has the same range whether it is aimed to the east or to the west.
Galileo completed his 50-
page Reply to Ingoli by the end o f Sept ember 1624 and sent it off to his Roman friends. Guiducci was full of praise, and Ciampoli read a few passages to the pope, who was reported to have remarked on the aptness of the observations and the experiments. Ingoli soon heard about the reply and asked to see it. After some hesitation, Galileo agreed and Guiducci prepared a clean copy with deletions and emendations suggested by Ciampoli. Meanwhile Prince Cesi had had time to read the reply, and he strongly advised against showing it to Ingoli or anyone else. On 18 April 1625 Mario Guiducci wrote to Galileo to explain what he thought were Cesi’s reasons. Several months earlier The Assayer had been denounced to the Holy Office, and Guiducci assumed that this was because Galileo spoke favorably of the Copernican theory. But since the discovery, in 1981, of an anonymous denunciation in the archives of the Holy Office by the historian Pietro Redondi, we know that Galileo was accused of something very different and much more serious, namely endangering the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. By endorsing the atomic theory of matter he had rendered himself suspect of denying the concept of transubstantiation.
Shea and Artigas - Galileo in Rome Page 13