Shea and Artigas - Galileo in Rome

by William R. Shea

  Galileo was devastated by his ordeal and returned to the embassy “half dead,” as Ambassador Niccolini reported to the Florentine secretary of state. As Galileo waited in suspense, the Tuscan government, increasingly short of cash, confirmed that it would not pay for his expenses beyond the month they had agreed upon. Ambassador Niccolini withheld the information from Galileo and informed the secretary of state that he would cover the expenses himself. The ambassador made this pledge in the full knowledge that the trial could drag on for another six months. The only good news (if it may be called by that name) was that by staying in Rome Galileo avoided a new outbreak of the plague in Florence, where one to four persons died every day.

  After the pope’s return from Castel Gandolfo, Ambassador Niccolini was granted an audience on 21 May. Urban VIII was in a good mood and said that he expected that Galileo’s case could be settled by the following week. Niccolini left with the impression that the Dialogue would not be banned outright as long as Galileo published an acknowledgement of his errors and expressed his regrets. The violation of the injunction given to him in 1616, however, would have to be punished in some way or other. For the time being, Niccolini kept up Galileo’s morale and did everything to ease the suspense. He even managed to obtain permission for Galileo to be taken out for drives in his carriage provided the shutters were kept half shut. In this way Galileo was able to go to the Villa Medici to stroll in the gardens, and, on one occasion, he went as far as Castel Gandolfo.

  Galileo’s case was no longer a priority, and more urgent matters were being discussed at the Holy Office. It was only on Thursday, 16 June, when Urban VIII was in the chair, that the Tribunal was seized with the problem of determining the sentence. It was decided that Galileo was to be summoned for one final interrogation to determine what had been his true purpose in writing the Dialogue, even using the threat of torture should that prove necessary. The book itself was to be condemned and prohibited, and a prison sentence imposed on Galileo along with some kind of penance in the hope that his public humiliation would serve as a warning for others.

  THE LAST INTERVIEW

  Galileo was ushered into the office of Commissioner Maculano for the fourth and last time on the morning of Tuesday 21 June. He maintained that he had never held the Copernican theory after its condemnation in 1616 and that he had not advocated it in the Dialogue, where he had merely set out the arguments for and against the motion of the Earth.

  The commissioner reminded him that, after the enquiry, he was presumed to have held the Copernican theory at the time that he wrote the Dialogue. He enjoined him to speak the truth, “otherwise it would be necessary to have recourse to the remedies of the law.” Galileo answered, “I do not hold this opinion of Copernicus, and I have not held it after being ordered by injunction to abandon it. For the rest, I am here in your hands; do with me what you please.” He was then formally commanded to tell the truth, “otherwise one would have recourse to torture,” to which he replied, “I am here to obey, but I have not held this opinion after the determination was made, as I said.” Galileo signed his declaration and left the room. We can almost hear his judges heaving a sigh of relief.

  THE FORMAL ABJURATION

  On the next day, Wednesday, 22 June, Galileo was ushered into a room adjoining the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in what is now part of the library of the Italian parliament. This was to be the most unpleasant part of the trial. Galileo was ordered to kneel down while his sentence was read out. “You have rendered yourself,” the document declared, vehemently suspect of heresy, namely of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the Sacred and Divine Scriptures, that the Sun is the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, and that the Earth moves and is not the centre of the world; and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to Holy Scripture.

  The tribunal was ready to absolve him if he formally abjured his errors, but his book would be proscribed and he would be condemned to imprisonment for an undetermined period of time. As a religious penance they imposed upon him the duty to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week for the next three years. This would have taken him about 20 minutes, but his daughter Maria Celeste relieved him of the burden after securing ecclesiastical permission to take it upon herself.

  Of the ten cardinal inquisitors seven were present, the average number at meetings. The most conspicuous absence was that of Francesco Barberini, the pope’s nephew, who had always advocated clemency. The second absentee was Cardinal Gaspare Borgia, who had recently inveighed against the pope at a meeting of the cardinals and was probably unwilling to condemn anyone who caused embarrassment to Urban VIII. The third was Cardinal Laudivio Zacchia. No documents explaining these absences have survived, and the three cardinals may simply have been ill or bound by other duties on that day.

  After the sentence had been read, Galileo, still on his knees, was made to recite and sign a formal abjuration in which he admitted having violated an injunction not to discuss Copernicanism. “As a result,” he continued,

  I have been judged vehemently suspect of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the centre of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the center of the same, and that it does move. Wishing, however, to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. And I swear that in the future I will neither say nor assert orally or in writing such things as may bring upon me similar suspicion. If I know any heretic, or one suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and Ordinary of the place in which I may be. I also swear and promise to adopt and observe entirely all the penances that have been or may be imposed on me by this Holy Office. And if I contravene any of these said promises, protestations, or oaths (which God forbid!) I submit myself to all the pains and penalties which by the Sacred Canons and other Decrees general and particular are imposed and promulgated against such offenders. So help me God and the Holy Gospels, which I touch with my own hands. I Galileo Galilei have abjured, sworn, and promised, and hold myself bound as above; and in token of the truth, with my own hand have subscribed the present document of abjuration, and have recited it word for word. In Rome, at the Convent della Minerva, this 22nd day of June 1633.

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

  In popular accounts it is sometimes said that when Galileo rose from his feet he muttered under his breath, “Eppur si muove” (And yet it moves!). This may have been his inner conviction, but he was wise enough not to express it on that dramatic occasion before his judges. His confession had been part of a deal and the next day, 23 June, his imprisonment was commuted to house arrest in the Villa Medici. Soon thereafter the ambassador requested that Galileo be allowed to leave Rome for Siena, where his friend Ascanio Piccolomini was archbishop. This was granted at a meeting of the Holy Office presided by the pope on 30 June. Three days later Urban VIII decided to allow Galileo to stay with the archbishop rather than in a convent as had been originally planned. Ambassador Niccolini recognized that this was a genuine favor.

  BACK IN FLORENCE . . .

  Meanwhile in Florence, Geri Bocchineri and Niccolò Aggiunti, who had received no news for some days after the promulgation of the sentence, feared that officials of the Inquisition might be sent to make a search of Galileo’s villa. They called on Sister Maria Celeste at her convent and asked for the keys to do what Galileo had told them might be necessary for his safety should certain contingencies arise. Maria Celeste gave them the keys and wrote to her father, with her usual caution: “They feared you were in trouble and seeing how exceedingly anxious they were on your account, it seemed to me right and necessary to prevent any accident
that might possibly happen. So I gave them the keys, and permission to do as they thought fit.”

  What “they thought fit” was probably removing from the house such writings in Galileo’s library as might be used further to incriminate him. This may account for the disappearance of those incomplete writings of which mention is made in Galileo’s correspondence but of which no trace remains.

  NOTIFICATION

  The text of Galileo’s mortifying sentence was communicated to inquisitors all over Italy and to apostolic nuncios (i.e., papal ambassadors) in the courts of Europe. In Florence it was ordered that it should be read publicly at a meeting to which professors of natural philosophy were to be invited. Anyone who had a copy of the Dialogue was to surrender it to the local inquisitors, but just the opposite seems to have happened as people tried to lay hands on the book before it became unavailable. The price of the Dialogue, originally half a scudo, rose to four and then to six in the summer of 1633. Fortunio Liceti, the Aristotelian professor of philosophy in Galileo’s former university in Padua, complied and brought his copy to the inquisitor. Meanwhile, north of the Alps, everyone clamored for a Latin version. Mathias Bernegger, a professor at the University of Strasbourg, undertook the task of translation, which he completed in 1635. The copies that were sent to Frankfurt and Paris rapidly sold out. Catholics who purchased the Dialogue, after Galileo’s condemnation knew that a sentence of the Holy Office did not involve the infallibility (the technical term for absence of error) of the Church or the pope, which can only be invoked in special circumstances when an ecumenical council or the pope, acting as the head of the Church, solemnly defines a matter concerning faith or morals. Urban VIII, who was not a modest man, once declared that the pronouncement of one living pope (meaning himself) outweighed all the decrees of one hundred dead ones, but he never considered claiming infallibility in matters concerning natural science.

  This was understood by the French philosopher and scientist René Descartes, who thought that the condemnation would eventually be rescinded just as the denial that people could live below the equator, once maintained by some ecclesiastical authorities in the eighth century, was quietly dropped. Nonetheless, the ban on Copernicus was a serious one, and Descartes withheld the publication of his own book in which he described the Earth as moving around the Sun.

  HOMECOMING

  In Siena, Archbishop Piccolomini did not treat Galileo as a confessed heretic but as a good Catholic and an honored guest. He invited scholars to dine with them and provide Galileo with the opportunity of a lively conversation. Tongues began to wag and someone sent an anonymous letter to the Holy Office in which he claimed that Galileo had disseminated in Siena ideas that are not quite Catholic with the support of the Archbishop, his host, who has told several people that Galileo was unjustly sentenced by this Holy Congregation, that he is the first man in the world, that he will live for ever in his writings even if they are prohibited, and that he is followed by all the best modern minds. And since such seeds, sown by a prelate might bear pernicious fruit, I hereby report them.

  In December 1633 the Holy Office authorized Galileo to return to his villa in Arcetri, but his movements were restricted. He was free to receive members of his family or friends, but under no circumstances was he to hold meetings or entertain a large number of people. He was not allowed to go down to Florence, but he could visit his daughters in the neighboring convent. Unfortunately, Sister Maria Celeste became ill and died shortly after her father’s return on 1 April 1634.

  Later that year, Galileo’s sister-in-law, Chiara Galilei, came to live with him with her three daughters and her son, but they all perished of the plague shortly after their arrival. Some time after their deaths, finding the solitude of his house at Arcetri insupportable, Galileo invited his nephew Alberto to join him. During the Thirty Years’ War this boy had lost the little his mother had had to leave him and was maintaining himself and his younger brother Cosimo on the small amount of money he earned as a violinist and lute player. He stayed with Galileo for a while but eventually returned to Munich, married, and re-entered the service of the elector, so that the old man was again alone. Nevertheless, Galileo managed to complete the manuscript of his greatest scientific work, the Two New Sciences, which was given to the Protestant publisher, Louis Elzivier, and appeared in the Netherlands in 1638.

  In this new book, Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio meet once more to consider, over another period of four days, how bodies move, bend, break, and fall. In the course of their discussion they examine the two fundamental laws of physics that Galileo had discovered. The first is the law of freely falling bodies, which states that all objects (be it an apple dropping from a branch or a boulder falling off a cliff) pick up speed at the same rate regardless of their weight. The second law states that the path traced through space by a missile (be it a stone, an arrow or a bullet) is not just somehow curved but is precisely a parabola.

  Galileo feigned surprise that the manuscript of the Two New Sciences had found its way to a foreign printing press, but since the book did not mention Copernicanism, the Church decided to let the matter drop. During these years Galileo kept up a correspondence with two friends in France. One was Elia Diodati, who had the Dialogue translated and was instrumental in getting the Two New Sciences published. The other was the famous aristocrat and scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, who had written to Cardinal Francesco Barberini to beseech him, on behalf of the scientific community, to grant Galileo a full pardon. To Diodati, Galileo railed against his enemies; to Peiresc he repeated his conviction that he had committed no crime. “I have two sources of lasting comfort,” he wrote,

  first, that in my writings there cannot be found the faintest shadow of irreverence towards the Holy Church; and second, the testimony of my own conscience, which only I and God in Heaven thoroughly know. And He knows that in this cause for which I suffer, though many might have spoken with more learning, none, not even the ancient Fathers, has spoken with more piety or with greater zeal for the Church than I.

  DEATH AND POSTERITY

  Galileo’s eyesight began to deteriorate rapidly in 1637 and blindness was soon added to his miseries. In 1638 he obtained permission to stay in Florence at the house of his son but was still kept under house arrest to the point that he needed a special permission to attend, at Easter, the Church of St. Giorgio a few yards away. In 1639 he was back at Arcetri, where a young scientist, Vincenzio Viviani, came to live with him. Toward the last, Evangelista Torricelli was to join him as amanuensis and companion. Galileo became gravely ill in the autumn of 1641, and after two months of suffering died on the evening of 8 January 1642. His body was brought from Arcetri to the church of Santa Croce in Florence, and preparations were made for a public funeral. The sum of 3,000 scudi was quickly voted by the grand duke to cover the expense of a marble mausoleum. This and other particulars were instantly reported to the Holy Office at Rome. The ambassador of Tuscany received orders to communicate to the grand duke that his intention concerning Galileo’s remains would, if carried out, prove most distasteful, and that he must remember that Galileo had during his life caused scandal to all Christendom by his false and damnable doctrine. The ambassador advised that the project both of a public funeral oration and a mausoleum be laid aside, at least for a time.

  The grand duke yielded to the pressure from Rome, and Galileo was not buried in the Church of Santa Croce itself but at the end of the corridor leading from the south transept to the sacristy. There, in an obscure corner, on the gospel side of the altar dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian, the body rested for nearly a century. The master of the novices, Father Gabriello Pierozzi, placed an epitaph on the wall in 1673, with the tacit consent of the Florentine inquisitor. When Vincenzio Viviani died, in 1703, he conditionally willed his property to his nephew Panzanini and his heirs, charged with the condition of erecting a proper monument to Galileo in Santa Croce as soon as permission could be obtained to do so. Panzanini died in 1733 and the
property passed to Giovan Battista Clemente Nelli, who, in 1737, carried out Viviani’s pious intention during the pontificate of Clement XII (Lorenzo Corsini), a Florentine. On 12 March 1737, the mortal remains of Galileo were solemnly transferred from the chapel to the main body of the Church and placed in a mausoleum with the approval and in the presence of the ecclesiastical authorities.