Galileo

by Mario Livio

  In other words, Maculano started to think of ways to finish the trial as quickly as possible, perceiving that a certain level of guilt had already been established. In the seventeenth century, just as today, a clear and simple method to shorten legal processes was through a plea bargain.

  One Galileo scholar therefore suggested that this was precisely what Maculano was trying to achieve: Galileo would plead guilty to some relatively minor offense, such as being “rash,” in writing the Dialogo, and the prosecution would impose a lighter penalty. A letter written by Maculano to Cardinal Francesco Barberini on April 28 seems to support this interpretation. In it, Maculano first describes how he had been successful in convincing the cardinals in the Congregation of the Holy Office “to deal extrajudicially with Galileo.” He then adds that in a meeting he had with Galileo, the latter also “clearly recognized that he had erred and gone too far in his book,” and that “he was ready for a judicial confession.” Maculano concludes by saying he believes that in this way the trial could be “settled without difficulty,” with the court maintaining its reputation and with Galileo knowing that a favor was done to him. Everything appeared set, therefore, for a rapid and relatively benign end to the trial, with a ruling stating that, in Maculano’s words, “he [Galileo] could be granted imprisonment in his own house, as Your Eminence [Cardinal Barberini] mentioned.”

  SESSIONS 2 AND 3: A PLEA BARGAIN?

  If Maculano and Galileo had indeed struck some sort of deal, then at least the format of the next two sessions would have been prescribed: Galileo should have confessed in session 2, and then he would have been allowed to present a defense in the following session. The trial indeed seemed to proceed along these lines. In the second session, Galileo asked for permission to make a statement, and when this was granted, he explained that he had spent the time since the first session reviewing the Dialogo to check whether he had inadvertently disobeyed the injunction of 1616. Through this scrutiny, he said, he discovered “several places to be written in such a way that a reader, not aware of my intention, would have had reason to form the opinion that the arguments for the false side [Copernicanism], which I intended to confute, were so stated as to be capable of convincing, because of their strength.” Galileo was again repeating here his questionable claim that his intention in the Dialogo was to refute Copernicanism. Given that he had time to reflect on the matter, it could be that he was deliberately using the same language he had employed in the first session, to make his confession more credible. “My error then was, and I confess it, one of vain ambition, pure ignorance, and inadvertence,” he added. Finally, and sadly, Galileo even proposed that he could extend by a day or two the discussion in the Dialogo in a new book, to clarify the falsity of the Copernican view. The court ignored this suggestion.

  Galileo’s preposterous overture could, it seems, be justified only in two ways. Either in spite of Maculano’s generally friendly demeanor, the astromer still had a mortal fear of being tortured, or he thought that in this way he could perhaps still salvage the Dialogo from being condemned. Either way, Galileo’s reaction was a clear demonstration of what intimidation could cause even to the most independent of thinkers, thus evoking horrifying memories of totalitarian regimes past and present. Cases such as those of self-exiled dissident Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko, both murdered by their native countries’ governments, immediately come to mind. Following the second session, Galileo was allowed, after signing the deposition, to return to the Tuscan ambassador’s house, “having considered the bad health and advanced age.”

  Maculano’s plan to end the trial rapidly and relatively benevolently is further suggested by a note from Ambassador Niccolini dated May 1, in which he wrote: “Father Commissionary himself [Maculano] also manifests the intention of wishing to arrange it that this cause be dropped and that silence be imposed on it; and if this is achieved, it will shorten everything and will free many from troubles and dangers.”

  Whether or not a plea bargain had indeed been reached, the third session was certainly consistent with such an agreement. Galileo presented the original of Bellarmino’s letter, as well as a personal statement of defense in which he explained that he had used this document as his only guide. Consequently, he clarified, he felt that he was “quite reasonably excused” from having to inform Father Riccardi, and if he had violated the more stringent restrictions imposed by the injunction, which he had totally forgotten, this was “not introduced through the cunning of an insincere intention, but rather through the vain ambition and satisfaction of appearing clever above and beyond the average among popular writers.” In conclusion, Galileo expressed his willingness to make any amends ordered by the court, and he asked for leniency, based on his age and infirmity. This last request raises doubts about a plea bargain having been accepted, for if it had indeed been in place, presumably the penalty had also been discussed already. It may be, however, that this was a formality required to further justify a less severe punishment.

  The only procedural step left to be carried out was for a legal summary of the proceedings to be written and delivered to the Inquisition and the Pope. Ambassador Niccolini had an audience with Urban VIII on May 21, and was assured by him and by Cardinal Francesco Barberini that a painless conclusion of the trial was imminent. The fact that Galileo was allowed to leave the house for short walks at this stage also hinted at a sympathetic resolution. Galileo himself wrote an optimistic letter to his daughter, Sister Maria Celeste, thanking her for her prayers on his behalf.

  CHAPTER 13 I Abjure, Curse, and Detest

  To assist the inquisitors in reaching a verdict, protocol required that the assessor in the staff of the Holy Office, Pietro Paolo Febei, write a summary of the trial proceedings. That internal document, which was inaccessible to Galileo, was to be distributed only to the Congregation and the Pope.

  As it turned out, the summary revealed a clear intention to present Galileo in the worst possible light. It included misleading, irrelevant, and even some downright false material that could be perceived as incriminating, while it deliberately omitted details that could have helped Galileo’s case.

  Instead of dealing directly with the Dialogo, the summary started with a synopsis of the old complaints made against Galileo in 1615 by the Dominican Niccolò Lorini and the preacher Tommaso Caccini, which had been based largely on vague hearsay. Some of those ridiculous and false accusations alleged such things as Galileo’s having been heard to state that God was an accident, or that the miracles performed by saints were not true miracles. Even references to the famous Letter to Benedettó Castelli and Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina found their way into the summary, without mentioning the fact that Letter to Castelli (or at least the slightly moderated version of it) had been vetted and judged to be inoffensive and the case dismissed. There is no question that the inclusion of all these old files and others was done with the aim of enhancing the impression of a serial offender. To this end, the summary also contained Caccini’s fallacious claim that in his Letters on Sunspots, Galileo had explicitly defended Copernicanism. While Galileo undoubtedly thought that the observations of sunspots supported the Copernican model, his book never made any categorical statements. Even in the description of Bellarmino’s warning and Seghizzi’s injunction, the summary contained small but important inaccuracies. In particular, the summary did not mention at all the fact that this was supposed to be a two-step process, and that, in fact, the stricter injunction was unjustified. Crucially, the summary played down the fact that Bellarmino’s letter did not contain the additional restrictions of “not to teach” and “in any way,” saying that it was Bellarmino himself, not Seghizzi, who issued the more specific injunction. In this way, rather than conveying the correct fact that Bellarmino’s letter and Seghizzi’s injunction were in conflict with each other, the summary gave the impression that they were complementary.

  Why was the summary so biased against Galileo? And
perhaps even more intriguingly, if indeed there was a plea bargain, what had happened to it? We shall probably never know the precise answers to these questions. The summary itself was most probably written by the assessor in the Holy Office, Febei, who was perhaps aided by Cardinal Maculano’s in-court interrogator, Carlo Sinceri.

  Why would these two, perhaps with the help of others, write such a flawed, unfair, and damning summary report of the trial? We can only speculate. Presumably, among the cardinals in the Congregation and among the officers of the court, there were some—perhaps even a majority—who disagreed with the attempt to reach a rapid conclusion and a reduced sentence. This “severe” group may have included the Pope himself, and certainly Inchofer. After all, the special commission that had examined the Dialogo did conclude unanimously that, in this book, Galileo disobeyed the injunction of 1616. Galileo’s statement that he tried to refute Copernicanism in the book could not be taken seriously by anyone who had read it or at least read Melchior Inchofer’s report. Consequently, these severe cardinals, who were perhaps less inclined to be forgiving with Galileo from the start, would have voted against any plea-bargain-like endeavor and for a more rigorous punishment—especially after having read the summary. The more hard-line cardinals may have also wanted, for political reasons, to keep the Pope as distant as possible (as perceived by all Catholics) from the Galileo scandal, while having to justify a condemnation of the celebrated scientist.

  While the Pope almost certainly had made up his mind long before and wasn’t involved in the details of the trial itself, once the summary was brought to his attention, surely any hope for a benign ending was doomed. Based on the Pontiff’s earlier complaints about Galileo to Ambassador Niccolini, it seems quite plausible that Urban VIII had not fully recovered from the feeling that in writing the Dialogo, Galileo had deceived and betrayed him—even though he claimed otherwise, in a later conversation with the French ambassador—and he sought revenge. When coupled perhaps to his political sense that he needed at that time to demonstrate toughness on religious matters and that Galileo’s book was in his words, “pernicious to Christianity,” the Pope was probably pleased with having been given the opportunity to impose serious punitive consequences on Galileo. One can even speculate that the summary could not have been as harsh as it was without its authors being aware of the Pope’s insinuated approval.

  In the first English biography of Galileo, Thomas Salusbury’s Life of Galileo (only one copy of which survived the Great Fire of London in 1666), Salusbury, a Welsh writer who lived in London in the mid-seventeenth century, advanced an original thesis even for the root cause of Galileo’s trial itself. According to Salusbury, a personal reason combined with a political backdrop prompted the Pope to put Galileo on trial. The personal motive was supposedly Pope Urban’s uncontrolled rage about being caricatured as Simplicio. While this is not altogether implausible, there is no documented evidence for this being the source of the original charge against the book, and, in fact, this particular accusation first surfaced only in 1635, more than two years after the trial. There is no question that Galileo never intended to insult the Pope in this way, and even after the rumor started circulating, the French ambassador and Castelli managed to convince the Pontiff that there was no truth in it. The political hypothesis was even more intriguing. Salusbury wrote:

  “Add to this, that he [the Pope] and his fastidious Nephews, Cardinal Antonio and Cardinal Francisco Barberini (who had embroyled all Italy in Civil Wars by their mis-government) thought to revenge themselves upon their Natural Lord and Prince, the Great Duke, by the oblique blows which they aimed at him through the sides of his Favourite.”

  In other words, Salusbury suggested that Galileo’s trial represented a papal retribution to Galileo’s patrons, the Medicis, for their rather lukewarm military support in the Thirty Years’ War.

  Either way, on June 16 the Holy Office met and issued a hard-hearted decision:

  Sanctissimus [the Pope] “decreed that the said Galileo is to be interrogated on his intention, even with the threat of torture; and this having been done he is to abjure under vehement suspicion of heresy in a plenary session of the Congregation of the Holy Office; then is to be condemned to the imprisonment at the pleasure of the Holy Congregation, and ordered not to treat further, in whatever manner, either in words or in writing, on the mobility of the Earth and the stability of the Sun or against it; otherwise he will incur the penalties of relapse.

  In addition, the Pope decided that the book entitled Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo would be placed in the Index of Forbidden Books. The Church also took steps to make this decision widely known, both to the public and to other mathematicians. While torture would almost certainly not have been applied to a person of Galileo’s age, the mere formal threat with torture must have been horrifying for him.

  On June 21 Galileo was summoned for the official interrogation about his “intentions,” to establish whether he had committed his crimes innocently or deliberately. As part of this ritual, he was asked specifically—in three different ways—whether he believed in the Copernican model. The by now broken and defeated old man answered that following the decree of 1616, he concluded that the Ptolemaic, geocentric scenario was the correct one. We can only imagine how much it must have pained Galileo to utter these words. He further insisted that in the Dialogo, his goal was only to demonstrate that on the basis of science alone, no conclusive opinion could be reached, and one therefore had to rely on the “determination of more subtle doctrines.” In other words, the Church’s opinion.

  What happened on the following day remains one of the most shameful events in our intellectual history. In front of the inquisitors, Galileo, on his knees, was informed that he had rendered himself “vehemently suspected of heresy, namely, of having held and believed a doctrine which is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture: that the sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west, and the earth moves and is not the center of the world, and that one may hold and defend as probable an opinion after it has been declared and defined contrary to the Holy Scripture.”

  The cardinals of the Holy Office then added, as if mercifully:

  “We are willing to absolve you from them [all the censures and penalties] provided that first, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in front of us you abjure, curse, and detest the above-mentioned errors and heresies, and every other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Church, in the manner and form we will prescribe to you.”

  The verdict included “formal imprisonment” at the pleasure of the Holy Office; having to recite seven penitential Psalms once a week for three years; and the Dialogo’s being banned.

  We do not know if Cardinal Francesco Barberini’s (and two others’) absence at the signing of the sentence reflected their disapproval of the condemnation or was merely the result of a scheduling conflict. We do know that at the time of the abjuration itself, Francesco Barberini had a meeting with Pope Urban VIII.

  Again on his knees, Galileo read the text of the abjuration given to him:

  I, Galileo, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei of Florence, seventy years of age, arraigned personally for judgment, kneeling before you Most Eminent and Most Reverend Cardinals Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity in all Christendom, having before my eyes and touching with my hands the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, I believe now, and with God’s help I will believe in the future all that the Holy and Apostolic Church holds, preaches, and teaches.

  Then, after committing “to abandon completely the false opinion” of Copernicanism, Galileo read the essence of the abjuration:

  Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of Your Eminences and every faithful Christian this vehement suspicion, rightly conceived against me, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I abjure, curse, and detest the above-mentioned errors and heresies, and in general each and every other error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Church, a
nd I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, orally or in writing, anything which might cause a similar suspicion about me; on the contrary, if I should come to know any heretic or anyone suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I happen to be.”

  The humiliation associated with having to utter these words, which undermined much of his life’s work, must have been unimaginable. Those historians of science who attempt to argue that had Galileo been generally less combative, things would have ended better, ignore the simple fact that he was forced to abjure his deep convictions under the threat of torture. Galileo’s judges could not know that over the following four centuries, this denigrating event would be transformed into one of the most deplorable acts of the Inquisition.

  Legend has it that upon leaving the scene, Galileo mumbled, “E pur si muove”—“And yet it moves”—referring to the Earth. The earliest source of this story was claimed to be a painting from the mid-seventeenth century (1643 or 1645). In this painting, Galileo is depicted in prison, looking at a diagram of the Earth orbiting the Sun that he had scratched on the wall, with those words underneath it. Assuming that the painting was indeed from 1643 or 1645, this was taken as proof that the legend started circulating very shortly after Galileo’s death. A thorough investigation I conducted in 2019 raised some serious doubts about the authenticity of this painting.