The Ghost of Galileo
Page 19
Galileo met Conn in 1630 during a visit to Rome to discuss the printing of his Dialogue. They got along well. An anecdote told by Ciampoli suggests Conn’s familiarity with Galileo’s cranky concept of comets as optical illusions and other ideas. The context was a discussion about the nature of fire with Ciampoli and Sforza Pallavicino, a conscript in Ciampoli’s teaching scheme. Unlike them, Conn did not suffer for his attachment to Galileo. Ciampoli fell from Urban’s favor permanently during the turmoil over the Dialogue; Pallavicino was ostracized but eventually returned to Rome to join the Jesuits. When he came to edit Ciampoli’s papers for publication he omitted all material relating to lynxes and suppressed the fiery dialogue in which, in the sunny days before Galileo’s condemnation, he had engaged with Conn. His superiors thought Pallavicino so good at rewriting history that they charged him to redo and refute Sarpi’s Council of Trent.12
After some negotiation with the censors, Galileo’s Dialogue saw the light nine years after Urban gave permission to reopen the Copernican question. Galileo’s spokesmen Salviati and Sagredo devote the first day of their conversation to sapping the foundations of Aristotelian physics, weakly defended by Simplicio, on which the qualitative geocentric world picture rested. During the next two days they neutralize all physical arguments against the possibility of a spinning and revolving earth and brush away Simplicio’s objections as scholastic cobwebs that catch people who cannot think mathematically. On the fourth day Salviati derives the diurnal tides from the two Copernican motions and traces their monthly and annual variations to the influence of the sun and moon. Sagredo declares that he has never heard anything so brilliant and persuasive. Simplicio cannot find an objection to it among his cobwebs but knows it must be wrong. He extricates himself and Galileo by recalling Urban’s wise philosophy of science. The three exhausted colloquists then shake hands and go for a restorative ride in a gondola.
Although Galileo denied that he had intended to favor the Copernican side and offered to write a fifth day’s discussion demolishing the strongest arguments he had put forth for it, the Inquisitors did not accept his offer. Instead, they “vehemently [strongly] suspected [him] of heresy” for having written a book defending a system that he knew to be contrary to Scripture. They forced him to abjure, required him to recite the penitential psalms once a week, and sentenced him to detention at a place of their choosing. The Supreme Inquisitor General was almost as despondent at this outcome as Galileo.
God knows how much I grieved to see an Archimedes made so miserable by his own hand, for having decided to publish his new opinions on the motion of the earth against the true common interpretation of the Church. Opinions that brought him to the Holy Office in Rome…I tried to help his cause as much as I could.13
The conflicted Supreme Inquisitor was Bentivoglio.
The confiscation and prohibition of his masterwork vehemently depressed its author. His old friend Micanzio wrote to cheer him up. “One of your friends now in heaven wrote a History of the Council of Trent… Rome prohibited it…I have it in Italian, Latin, English, French: be assured that the same thing will happen with your Dialogue.”14 Within a year of this reassurance the Latin edition appeared. The translator was Matthias Bernegger, professor of history at the Gymnasium of Strasburg, a friend of Kepler and a reliable computer of horoscopes. Bernegger liked to stress the importance of mathematics for history: mathematics to master geography and chronology, and the astrology necessary for searching out causes. The complete historian must be able to include such cometary effects as the fogs of 1618, which depressed agriculture, impeded military operations, and brought on the Thirty Years War.15
Bernegger had studied in Italy and returned scorning Romanists but hopeful of Christian peace and concord under other auspices. He readily appreciated the polemical value of the Dialogue and its analogy to Sarpi’s Trent and set out to do it justice. He had translated Galileo’s booklet on the military compass, knew the style, and completed the translation in eighteen months. To it he added a passage from Polybius on the triumph of truth over error, an extract from Kepler’s book on Mars, a Copernican pamphlet banned by the Index, and, as a measure to protect Galileo, a misleading account of how the material came into his hands.16 Galileo’s letter to Christina, which Bernegger had intended to include, appeared a year later.17 Strasburg’s Protestant theologians liked Bernegger’s activities little more than the Inquisition did Galileo’s. They condemned him for his liberal views and dangerous friends, hobnobbing with Jesuits, hoping for a reunion of the churches, and rejecting theological hairsplitting.18
The translations of the Dialogue and the Letter to Christina (printed in 800 and 500 copies, respectively) spread quickly around northern Europe. The translator of the Letter, Elie Diodati, also disseminated Sarpi’s works. It was a family affair. Elie Diodati was the cousin of the Jean Diodati of Sarpi’s circle who had translated the Council of Trent into French. The Genevans supposed that Sarpi and Galileo combined would make a mighty ally in fighting Rome. Bernegger pointed to a higher purpose: Galileo and Sarpi proved the value of freedom of thought. From Alcinous, a follower of Plato, Bernegger took the admonition, “if you want to be a philosopher, you must have an open mind;” and from Seneca the advice, “among none more than among philosophers should impartial freedom prevail.”19 In the Latin of the learned, Galileo’s Dialogue, like Sarpi’s Trent, advertised what humanity could lose by the suppression of bold and innovative ideas.
Bernegger made an important change in the Dialogue’s frontispiece in addition to having the figures redrawn: he corrected the title to Systema cosmicum, which made it clear that the book was not an even-handed consideration of world pictures.20 Its publication refreshed the reputation that Galileo had won beyond the Alps for his telescopic discoveries. Several copies of the Systema existed in Oxford by the time Cleyn painted his portrait of Bankes and Williams. With the help of a popularization published in Oxford in 1640 by a future bishop, John Wilkins, English scholars and virtuosi had almost enough information to recognize Cleyn’s reference to Galileo.21
Galileo in England
Tentative Starts
Among the first Englishmen to notice the sun-centered system were seagoing mathematicians, and among them none went further than Thomas Harriot. After an Oxford education (BA, St Mary’s Hall, 1580), he had the opportunity as mathematical consultant to Sir Walter Raleigh to test his theories in voyaging to, and mapping out, the ill-fated Roanoke settlement in Virginia. When Raleigh’s star faded, Harriot found a patron in Henry Percy, the “wizard” ninth Earl of Northumberland, the father of Sir John Bankes’s patron, the tenth earl. Harriot had a pension to do what he pleased while the Wizard Earl resided in the Tower for alleged involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. During his sixteen years of detention, the wizard built up a large library and laboratory in the Tower and had the occasional company of Harriot and other mathematicians drawn by his books (he had works by Tycho, Kepler, Gilbert, Palladio), table (he lived well in prison), and conversation.22
Harriot used his freedom to make himself a telescope and observed, independently of Galileo, some lunar features and solar spots. But, as he missed the moon’s mountains and Jupiter’s satellites, he and the small group of virtuosos around him were flabbergasted by the revelations of Sidereus nuncius. “Methinks [one of them wrote] my diligent Galilaeus hath done more in his discoverie [our moon’s mountains, the Milky-Way’s stars, Jupiter’s satellites] than Magellan in opening the straights to the South Seas.”23 Harriot did not circulate his important observations widely. Probably fewer people in England had access to, or could have profited from, his calculations than knew, or knew of, the manuscripts on the tides and scriptures that Galileo had composed to instruct the Roman Inquisition.
The earl pensioned two other Oxford mathematicians who, with Harriot, made up what playful contemporaries called his magi: Walter Warner (BA, 1579), who served as librarian and curator of instruments and left many unpublished tracts on mathematical subjects
, and Robert Hues (BA, also 1579), who filled out the magi in 1615.24 Like Harriot, Hues had studied at St Mary’s Hall and went voyaging across the Atlantic, to Virginia and elsewhere. Concerned that his countrymen lacked the “reasonable competency of skill in Geometry and Astronomy” necessary to overtake the Spanish in exploration, he composed an excellent practical manual, a Treatise on the Globes and their Use (1594 and often reprinted), which would have been more useful still if he had not written it in Latin. Hues referred often to Copernicus for up-to-date values of parameters and defended him against the ignorant who judged “Copernicus his writings [to] deserve the spunge, and the Author himself the bastinado.” As to world systems, however, Hues stayed with Ptolemy and “the Rapture of the first Movable.”25
Hues’s introduction to the spheres attracted the attention of a Dutch polymath, Johannes Isaacsz Pontanus, who enriched it with notes and friendly nods to Copernicus, “that great restorer of astronomy,” “that great Schollar, and second Ptolemy,” “[that] never sufficiently commended man.” These honorifica come from the first English edition of Hues’s Tractatus, made in Oxford by a canon of Christ Church, Edmund Chilmead, and published in 1638 and 1639. It is very likely that young John Bankes studied this book while learning to use the globe in our picture. If so, he would have run across Pontanus’s remark that astronomical systems are based on mathematical hypotheses made by men and not on immediate truths delivered by nature. “The office of these Hypotheses is only to show the measure of the apparent motion of the Heavenly bodies by circles and other figures.”26 Which is to say that there is no truth in the devices of mathematical astronomy apart from their predictions and that figures other than circles are admissible. Thus was a space cleared for Kepler at Oxford.
Two Oxford mavericks further enlarged the spectrum of cosmological inquiry. One was Nicholas Hill, who matriculated at St John’s in 1587 and left the university on converting to Catholicism. He followed Bruno, whose transit through Oxford was not forgotten, into a Copernican, atomistic, eternal, infinite universe of many worlds. He dismissed the capital problem of the cosmologist, whether earth or sun stood at the center, as nonsensical: the universe, being infinite, has no middle. Still, the question of the earth’s motion remained. Hill gave nineteen reasons in its favor, including the ocean tides and terrestrial magnetism, for which he offered half a dozen proofs. He set these ideas forth in his only book, Philosophia epicurea democritiana theophrastica (1601), whose title abundantly expresses his eclecticism. Jonson had fun with
all those atomi ridiculous
Whereof old Democrite and Hill Nicholas
One said, the other swore, the world consists.27
The other maverick was “the greatest Monster that England produced,” Thomas Lydiat, astronomer and chronologist, “the veryest Fool in the whole World.” Lydiat did not earn these distinctions for his odd idea that the sun might move in a curve different from a circle, but for his chronology. Since rival chronologists often addressed one another as if they were theologians or astrologers, neither Prince Henry, who engaged Lydiat as his cosmographer, nor Archbishop Ussher, who used his calculations, took the insults seriously. After Henry’s death, Lydiat retired to a country vicarage, overspent his income, and went to prison until rescued by Laud and Ussher. His bad luck held so well, however, that he joined Galileo as emblematic of the harassed scholar.
[Oh] mark what ills the scholar’s life assail
Toil, Envy, Want, the Garrett, and the Jail
. . . . .
If dreams yet flatter, once again attend
Hear Lydiat’s life and Galileo’s end.28
The first professor of astronomy at Oxford was a Cambridge man, John Bainbridge, a working physician and astronomer who rose on the tail of the comet of 1618. In a pamphlet dedicated to James, he interpreted the comet as “a good omen for the new year and a symbol of the good astronomy yet to be established” (Figure 24)29 Bainbridge was exact where he could be: from his telescopic observations he could place the comet 291,000 miles above the moon. And careful when he needed to be: “I can…scarcely refrain from the Samian Philosophy of Aristarchus [a forerunner of Copernicus] in the earth’s motion;” but he feared backlash from vulgar folk, who included many of his patients, and so “reserve[d] these mysteries for a more learned language.”30
Figure 24 John Bainbridge, The Late Comet (1619), folding plate at end; the figures portray constellations, Serpens, Virgo, and so on.
While waiting he used the vulgar tongue vulgarly: “These…filthy and brutish swine…wallowing in the mire of voluptuous sensualitie, little regard the apparition of these new celestial signes…These Epicurean pigs in stead of sober Elegies grunt forth their wanton ditties.” The pigs are astrologers who do not recognize comets as calls to repentance. The new sidereus nuncius (the comet) warns against “sumptuous and presumptuous apparell, with strange inconsistent fashions.” We have grown effeminate. “Where are our muskets?” Are they not turned into tobacco pipes? “Where are our English Valour and Courage? Are they not with that outlandish weed vanished into smoke?”31 And where is the information we require to prepare against the “equivocation, fraud, periurie, tracherie, assassinations, and murders” comets always bring? We need a patron for “these ravishing (and impoverishing) studies, by whose gracious bountie the most recondite mysteries of this abstruse and divine science shall at length be manifested.”32 Sir Henry Savile, the universal scholar who had worked on the King James Bible, heard and gave. He did not insist on a world system. Fifty years earlier, he had included the Copernican system in his college lectures with the odd justification that “it [is] all one to me in sitting at Dinner, whether my Table be brought to me, or I go to my Table, so I eat my meat.”33 His generous gift to Oxford of professorships in astronomy and geometry provided for a small library and some instruments, which very probably furnished the props for Cleyn’s painting.
As Savilian professor, Bainbridge balanced new and old, teaching Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo, searching for Dee’s manuscripts with the help of Ussher and Cotton, showing the use of the telescope, and calculating with logarithms, but also restoring ancient astronomical texts as acts of piety to their authors and of acknowledgment to Savile. He enriched the lives of his many students (undergraduates aiming at a master’s degree had to hear the Savilian professors) with astrology as well as astronomy.34 An astrology based on reason and experience, in contrast to the art of most practitioners, who built “a Babylonian tower on sand, nay, on cobwebs” (arenas, imò et araneas).35 Correct astrology announced the death of King James in the spring before it occurred to those who understood what the presence of Saturn in the tail of the Lion signified: obiit noster Regius ille Leo, “our royal lion is dying.”36 Bainbridge taught his students that the best astronomical system was the Copernican and that astronomy must be learned at the telescope, “from the Heavens rather than from books.”37
Bainbridge was at or near the center of several “networks of association,” as Mordechai Feingold terms the informally connected students, fellows, and lecturers in and outside the universities who shared interests in mathematics and natural science. The expertise of the participants ran from sampling the sweets of cosmology to doing time in the discipline of chronology. These subjects intersected with geography and astrology at the foundation of them all, astronomy. History, so necessary for those about to repeat it, could not see without its twin eyes of geography and chronology. Consequently, Laud as Chancellor of Oxford and his successor Bishop Juxton encouraged the study of astronomy and its allied subjects, as did heads of houses like Savile, Warden of Merton for thirty-six years until his death in 1621, and Abbot, Master of University College for thirteen years before his promotion to Archbishop of Canterbury. Students and fellows disputed about the motion of the earth and the existence of Lunarians. Contacts with influential fellow travelers outside the university, like Ussher and Selden, who drew on its expertise in astronomy for their chronology and his
tory, and Bishop Andrewes, who read Bacon and Copernicus, helped further to diversify and enlighten the study of the mathematical sciences at Oxford.38 Probably most people who spent a few years there had more up-to-date information about the motions and constitution of the heavens than the average university graduate does today.
Two well-known books published five years on either side of 1630 may indicate the scholarly environment into which Galileo’s Dialogue first fell in England. The earlier writer, Ussher’s protégé and later chaplain, Nathaniel Carpenter of Exeter Hall, preferred Tycho’s system with a spinning earth to Copernicus’s and ranted against “Popes and Dictatours [who] have taken it upon them an Universal authority to censure all which they never understood …To seeke for a determination of a Cosmographicall doubt in the Grammaticall resolution of two or three Hebrew words…were to neglect the kernell, and make a bouquet of the shells.”39 He must have had the banning of Copernican books in 1616 in mind. The second witness, Henry Gellibrand, professor of astronomy at Gresham College, London, had learned his subject from Savile and Bainbridge. He inclined towards “that admirable Copernican Hypothesis” embraced by all the best continental astronomers, but hesitated to declare its truth; fearing, from the “imbecility of Mans apprehension,” of falling into great absurdity. But an observation Gellibrand quoted in Italian from the Dialogue by that “most acute and learned mathematician,” Galileo, almost convinced him.40 His successor Samuel Foster adopted the Copernican system, while other pedagogues preferred to save physics and theology with Tycho or, less frequently, Ptolemy. But the direction of travel was clear: among students of astronomy, Galileo’s would soon be the winning side.41