Galileo has always had a reputation for being a strong advocate of Copernicus’s view that the earth moved around a stationary sun. The story that he defiantly muttered ‘Eppur si muove’Footnote 1 at his trial has long been recognized apocryphal. But the notion that he was an outspoken supporter of Copernicus is an overstatement that needs to be rectified. We will see that he never showed full approval for the heliocentric system at any time during his life, and he finally even repudiated it without being required to do so. Specifically, in 1616, when the cardinal members of the Congregations of the Roman Inquisition (the Holy Office) and the Index of Prohibited Books condemned the ideas that the sun stood still in the centre of the universe and that the earth circled around it, they were so sure that Galileo advocated precisely these theories that they called them ‘Galilean Propositions’ and warned him ‘to hold them no longer’. But it turned out that he had always been so cautious in expressing himself in these matters that the cardinals were unable to find any work of his to put on the Index. In fact, he never insisted on the earth’s movement or the sun’s centrality, whether before these doctrines were prohibited, or before his conviction in 1633. He was, however, first forced to repudiate them as if he had held them, and next constrained to swear that he had never held them and then to abjure them. And, later on, in 1641, he made another repudiation of the Copernican system on his own, insisting that it was undoubtedly false. But then he qualified: it was merely defective and could not yet be proved.
In recounting these events in the pages that follow, I will attempt to summarize Galileo’s dealings with the Inquisition. Much has been written on this subject by various historians, but many of them have been led astray because of a lack of knowledge of the Inquisition’s operations. We now have the advantage of the facts and insights provided by the late Thomas Mayer in his monumental study of its personnel and general functions,Footnote 2 and by his additional large study of its specific connections with Galileo, in accord – and disaccord – with the rules of canon law.Footnote 3 I have added further details from the field of inquisitorial criminal procedure, including the fact that his actual trial took place on a single day.Footnote 4
The upshot is that, when it came to the Copernican system, church politics was always a factor, and Galileo never said he thought it was true, though everyone thought he did; and sometimes he insisted that it was wrong.
I
Galileo was impressed with the explanatory strengths of the Copernican system from early on. This was already manifest in his letter to Kepler in 1597, and his favourable view was clear in his Sidereus nuncius, published in 1610, as well as in his Letters on sunspots, which came out in 1613. However, as noted, he never went on record as championing Copernicus over Ptolemy’s geocentric system, in spite of his public reputation of doing so.Footnote 5 This fact may come as a surprise to some modern students of Galileo who are convinced that they can find explicit endorsements of Copernicus in these early works.Footnote 6
A favourite example of such an alleged endorsement is the passage in the Sidereus where Galileo addresses the difficulties that some Copernican believers have with Copernicus’s idea of the moon circling the earth which in turn circles the sun. He has now found the same thing happening with Jupiter and its four ‘stars’. Let us look at Stillman Drake’s translation:
Here we have a fine and elegant argument for quieting the doubts of those who, while accepting with tranquil mind the revolutions of the planets about the sun in the Copernican system, are mightily disturbed to have the moon alone revolve about the earth and accompany it in an annual rotation about the sun. Some have believed that this structure of the universe should be rejected as impossible. But now we have not just one planet rotating about another while both run through a great orbit around the sun; our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon around the earth, while all together trace out a grand revolution about the sun in the space of twelve years.Footnote 7
One of the early reviewers of Drake, Edward Rosen, asserts that Galileo here ‘unequivocally endorses the Copernican thesis that the earth revolves around the sun’.Footnote 8 Drake himself, however, assumes that Galileo at this stage was simply explaining Copernicus and not advocating his system.
The fact of the matter is that Galileo did originally intend to endorse the Copernican system in this passage – not as certainly true, however, but as being, in his judgement, closest to the truth.Footnote 9 At the last minute, he must have decided against it, and the statement was omitted from the printed version. We can only conjecture why he removed it, whether because of scientific caution, or by reason of political prudence, or for some other motive.
II
Our account begins on 19 February 1616: on that day in Rome, the Holy Office called a meeting of its theologians for Tuesday, 23 February 1616, to censure two ‘Galilean Propositions’, namely, the stability of the sun and the movement of the earth.Footnote 10 On the next day, Wednesday the 24th, the theologians declared the first proposition ‘formally heretical’ and the second ‘at least erroneous in faith’.Footnote 11 It is noteworthy that one of the theologians was the Dominican friar Michelangelo Seghizzi, who was also the new commissary or deputy inquisitor of the Holy Office, who acted on behalf of the cardinal inquisitors.Footnote 12
These ‘propositions of the mathematician Galileo’ were relayed to Pope Paul V, either on that same day or the next. Consequently, the pope ordered that Cardinal Inquisitor Robert Bellarmine should summon Galileo and ‘warn him to abandon (ad deserendas) the said opinions’. If he refused to obey, Commissary Seghizzi was to intervene: in the presence of a notary and witnesses, he was to give Galileo a formal precept or command ‘to abstain altogether from teaching such a doctrine and opinion, or defending it, or treating of it (tractare de ea [in writing])’. If he did not acquiesce, he was to be imprisoned (that is, proceeded against). The order was conveyed to Seghizzi on 25 February.Footnote 13
On the very next day, Friday, 26 February, Cardinal Bellarmine had Galileo appear before him in his own residence, in front of Seghizzi with his notary and witnesses. Bellarmine ‘warned Galileo about the error of the above opinion, and that he should abandon it’ (Galileum monuit de errore supradictae opinionis, et ut illam deserat). Immediately thereafter (that is, without waiting for any recalcitrance on Galileo’s part), Seghizzi gave him a precept in the pope’s name ‘to relinquish the above opinion entirely, and thenceforth in no way hold, teach, or defend it, in word or in writing’, or else the Holy Office would proceed against him. Galileo acquiesced to the precept and promised to obey.Footnote 14 Surprisingly, Seghizzi failed to give him a copy of this carefully recorded undertaking. It is not evident from this record whether Galileo was told of the recent actions by the Inquisition theologians and the pope in condemning the heliostatic/geocyclic theory of Copernicus. In any case, it still remained to proclaim the condemnation to the world at large. At some point, it was decided to promulgate the prohibition through a decree of the Congregation of the Index of Prohibited Books, of which Bellarmine was also a member (another member was Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who would become Pope Urban VIII in 1623).
In giving his warning, Bellarmine used the same term of abandoning or ‘deserting’ the condemned conclusions as did the pope, indicating that he thought Galileo actually held them. And when Bellarmine reported to the pope and the cardinal inquisitors on 3 March, he said that he had warned Galileo to abandon this opinion, ‘which he held up to now’ (quam hactenus tenuit).Footnote 15
But there was a problem. It was one thing for Pope Paul in a closed session of the Congregation of the Inquisition to announce that he was condemning ‘the propositions of Galileo’; but it was another thing to attribute them to Galileo in public. For the awkward fact of the matter was that Galileo had stated no such propositions, at least not in any way that could be verified.
Many members of the Holy Office may have taken it on faith that Galileo had made such positive statements, because their prize denouncer, the Dominican friar Tommaso Caccini, had told them so a year before. In his deposition on 20 March 1615, taken by Seghizzi himself before he became commissary, he had testified, in effect, that everybody in Florence knew that it was so: for there was ‘extremely public fame’ (publichissima fama) that Galileo held and taught that the sun was immobile.Footnote 16 By using this language, Caccini clearly intended to provoke a trial against Galileo, since by law the sufficient ‘probable cause’ for initiating an inquisitorial trial was that solid public opinion held that some particular person was guilty of a crime.
When Seghizzi asked him how he knew that Galileo taught the immovable sun and moving earth, Caccini responded he had heard it not only by public fame but also from two persons, namely, Bishop Bardi of Cortona, and a follower of Galileo’s named Attavanti; and, furthermore, he had read this doctrine in Galileo’s book on sunspots.Footnote 17
Caccini’s testimony went into Galileo’s permanent dossier: according to the official summary of his case after his trial on 10 May 1633.Footnote 18 The cardinal inquisitors repeated this testimony in their sentence on 22 June 1633: Galileo explained the doctrine as true in that book.Footnote 19
After Caccini’s denunciation early in 1615, it took the better part of a year before the Holy Office in Florence interrogated Attavanti and sent his deposition to Rome.Footnote 20 It was only then that a follow-up was advised on Galileo’s book. A notation was entered on his deposition on 25 November 1615: ‘Some letters of Galileo published in Rome under title of On sunspots should be looked at.’Footnote 21
We cannot be sure whether the Holy Office in Rome got around to examining Galileo’s 1613 book Letters on sunspots before the ‘propositions of Galileo’ were censured three months later, in the flurry of activity in February of 1616 detailed above, or not until after Galileo was warned off the propositions. Whenever they read his book, however, the most they could have found would be a rather flowery expression of Galileo’s high hopes for the validity of the Copernican system.Footnote 22
The learned and saintly Cardinal Bellarmine deserves our special attention. Back around the time of Caccini’s denunciation, after seeing Galileo’s ‘Letter to Castelli’, which was rather favourable to Copernicus,Footnote 23 Bellarmine wrote that he believed that both Copernicus and Galileo were speaking only hypothetically.Footnote 24 How did he come to believe that Galileo actually advocated the theory?
One possibility is that he saw a copy of Galileo’s new treatise, ‘Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina’, finished around the end of 1615, in which he says that his enemies know that he holds the Copernican propositions.Footnote 25 Bellarmine had heard that Galileo was working on such a treatise, and said that he would willingly read it when it was finished.Footnote 26
As for the Congregation of the Index, there was no question of including Galileo in their pronouncement; his book on sunspots would not now (and never would be) placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. The cardinals’ discussion took place in their meeting on 1 March,Footnote 27 and Bellarmine reported their decision to the pope and the Congregation of the Inquisition on 3 March, and the pope ordered the decision published.Footnote 28 The resulting decree, concluded on 5 March 1616, condemned and prohibited all books that taught, contrary to Scripture, the Pythagorean doctrine of the moving earth and unmoving sun, which had been taken up by Nicholas Copernicus’s Revolutions of the heavenly spheres (1543) and Diego de Zúñiga’s biblical commentary On Job (1584, reprinted 1591). Only the Letter on the opinion of Pythagoras and Copernicus of the Carmelite friar Paolo Antonio Foscarini (Naples 1615) was named as an example of such condemned publications. As for the books of Copernicus and Zúñiga, they were only suspended until corrected.Footnote 29
Like all Index decrees, it was published as a broadside by the printer of the Apostolic Camera,Footnote 30 to be posted in appropriate places. In the weeks that followed, the report began to circulate that Galileo had been tried and convicted by the Holy Office, made to abjure before Bellarmine, and sentenced to punishment. Galileo returned to Cardinal Bellarmine and asked him to quelch the rumour. Bellarmine produced an affidavit on 26 May, explaining that Galileo had only been informed of the declaration made by the pope and publicized by the Congregation of the Index, that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus that the earth moved around the sun (and so on) was contrary to Holy Scripture, and therefore could not be defended nor held.Footnote 31
This, of course, was quite different from what Bellarmine had told Galileo on 26 February. There, he assumed that Galileo had actively embraced the theory, and he warned him to stop doing so; and Seghizzi reinforced the message. Now, however, he certified that it had merely been an impersonal warning that the theory was off limits.Footnote 32 And since nothing in writing had been given to Galileo on the earlier date, as noted above, no matter how he remembered what was said then, Bellarmine’s certification was the only document he had or knew about, apart from the printed Index decree.
The practical upshot at this point would seem to be the same. Galileo had agreed not to publicly hold or defend the Copernican theory from then onwards. What he held in his own mind was, of course, between him and God, and his confessor.
III
On 15 May 1620, four years after Galileo’s first ‘abandonment’ of Copernican theory, the Congregation of the Index issued an Admonition to the reader of Nicholas Copernicus, and his correction. Although the original intention was to ban Copernicus’s Revolutions of the world altogether, it would be allowed because it contained much that was useful. The non-hypothetical passages about the earth’s movement were to be corrected in existing copies, as detailed below. Any new editions were to attach the corrections to Copernicus’s preface. Thus could Copernicus be read again!Footnote 33
One might think that this would be an important event; but little seems to have been made of it. After this edict, it should have been possible to use Copernicus’s book without further ado, whether in the original edition of 1543 or the second edition of 1566 or the Dutch printing of 1617 (itself reprinted in 1640), by simply calling attention to the required emendations. In practice, however, as Hannah Marcus shows, a licence would still be sought for such corrected books, and, if granted, it would be with the proviso that the reader himself ‘expurgate’ the book with the stipulated corrections.Footnote 34 In fact, Marcus has found thirty-two requests for licences to read Copernicus between 1616 and 1632.Footnote 35 The decree emending Copernicus’s book appeared in its chronological place in the listing of forbidden books published in Rome in 1624, and in supplemented editions.Footnote 36 In later editions of the Index, the book would simply be listed as prohibited, ‘unless corrected according to the 1620 decree’.Footnote 37
As far as we know, Galileo did not react to that decree. He claimed to have started writing again on Copernicus after he came to Rome in 1624 to congratulate his former ally Cardinal Maffeo Barberini on becoming pope.Footnote 38 He eventually produced a large treatise, published in 1632 under the simple title of Dialogue, with an expansive subtitle describing it as a discussion of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems ‘with no decision as to which is correct’.Footnote 39
The subject of his Dialogue is introduced in the preface (‘To the Discerning Reader’), but whatever Galileo originally wrote, it was revised by the Roman censor, a Dominican friar named Niccolò Riccardi, master of the sacred palace.Footnote 40 Here, Galileo is presented as a defender of the Index decree of 1616. He calls it a ‘salutary edict’ that imposed an opportune silence on the Copernican theory of the earth’s movement. However, Galileo continues in the preface, because there have been criticisms that this edict was ill-informed, he has decided to come forward now and prove those criticisms to be unjust. He shows that there was full knowledge of Copernican heliocentrism in Rome at the time when the edict was issued. He therefore takes the Copernican side and establishes its theoretical superiority to the faulty arguments of the Ptolemaic side.
Master Riccardi said that Pope Urban himself wanted it reiterated that the Index decree was issued with full knowledge of the science involved.Footnote 41 We remember that Urban was one of the Index cardinals who issued the decree, and he was still a member when Copernicus’s book was corrected in 1620.Footnote 42
However, when Galileo’s book appeared, it immediately raised questions. It first came out in Florence in February of 1632, and when Riccardi saw the first copies in Rome in July, he judged that Galileo had not followed his directions, and, on command of the pope, he ordered all copies seized.Footnote 43 A disorganized report appeared, probably by a Holy Office official, who criticized Galileo’s perceived deceptions in getting the book approved, including his silence about the private precept that he was given in 1616 (which they had recently discovered). It had only vague objections about its substance, saying, for instance, that ‘many times in the work there is a lack of, or deviation from, hypothesis’ (mancarsi nell’opera molte volte e recedere dall’hipotesi), without giving specific examples. But it does admit at the end that all such matters could be emended, if the book were judged to have some utility.Footnote 44 Instead, however, the pope decreed that Galileo was to be summoned to Rome to appear before the commissary general of the Holy Office.Footnote 45
In keeping with the Holy Office’s distortions of inquisitorial procedure and violations of due process,Footnote 46 Galileo was not to be told why the Inquisition wanted to see him. Instead, he would be interrogated, with the object of getting incriminating admissions from him to use against him at trial. When the Tuscan ambassador challenged the pope on these matters and asked for a list of charges and other means of defence, Urban replied testily that this was not the custom of the Holy Office.Footnote 47
The commissary who was to try Galileo was the current successor to Seghizzi, another Dominican, named Vincenzo Maculano. The real judge, of course, was the pope, in consultation with ten cardinal inquisitors, who would deliberate upon a summary of the proceedings when the trial was completed. The official prosecutor (fiscal procurator), who interviewed Galileo along with Maculano, was Carlo Sincero; his task was to formulate and present charges at trial.
The interrogation was held on 12 April 1633. After taking an oath to tell the truth, Galileo was asked if he could guess why he had been summoned. He supposed it was to give an account of his book, sales of which had recently been prohibited. ‘What kind of a book is it?’ He said it was a discussion of the two theories of the heavens and earth. The questions led to his encounter with Cardinal Bellarmine and his warning. He granted that a precept may also have been given. Whatever precept there was, he did not violate it, because his book did not defend Copernicus but rather showed his reasoning to be invalid and inconclusive.Footnote 48 He must have been well prepared for their tactics, because he did not come close to admitting any wrong-doing.
At their meeting on 21 April, the cardinal inquisitors decided that Galileo’s book defended and taught the condemned theory, which rendered him suspect, and so the matter could be expedited – meaning that he could be charged at trial.Footnote 49
Then they had second thoughts. Since he would not admit that he held the theory, they foresaw ‘difficulties’ if it came to a trial. Maculano suggested a ploy for obtaining the desired confession: telling Galileo that if he did not plead guilty to the not-yet-stated charges against him and he were convicted, the Holy Office would deal very harshly with him; but, alternatively, if he pleaded guilty to whatever they charged him with, its treatment of him would be lenient. Maculano’s proposition, offered privately (extra-judicially), was accepted by Galileo.Footnote 50
In a formal session on 30 April, which Galileo himself requested, he made this admission: that a reader who was uninformed (non consapolevole) could have reason to think the arguments for heliocentrism to be convincing – though that was not Galileo’s intention.Footnote 51 This admission should have thrown Galileo into a terrible ordeal: namely, a ‘rigorous examination’ subjecting him to torture, to see if he really did intend it.Footnote 52 But that did not happen to him – yet.
The actual trial took place on 10 May 1633. We have to reconstruct what the precise charges were that were brought against Galileo by Prosecutor Sincero, since, as usual, they were not recorded. They would have been revealed to Galileo himself only at that point, but he was given a week to respond. According to usual Holy Office procedure, he could have accepted the help of a lawyer. Instead, he entered an immediate plea, effectively ending the trial within an hour or so. As arranged, he pleaded guilty to the expected charge of favouring heresy by giving the appearance of advocating heliocentrism in his Dialogue. He then submitted a statement in which he addressed other expected charges: in effect he pleaded not guilty to the likely charge of violating the 1616 precept (submitting the evidence of the affidavit from Bellarmine), and not guilty to any charge of malfeasance for failing to mention the precept to the censor of his book. As for whatever else might be levelled against him, he left himself to the ‘customary pity and clemency of this tribunal’.Footnote 53
He may have expected prompt sentencing, but it was only on 16 June that Pope Urban and the cardinal inquisitors in private session reviewed a summary of the proceedings of his caseFootnote 54 and came to a verdict. The pope declared that Galileo would first have to submit to the very mysterious and misunderstood business of the ‘rigorous examination of determining intention’, which included torture, or, in his case, the threat of torture, and, if he sustained it (that is, did not confess to actual heresy) he would be convicted only of the crime of aiding and abetting heresy (technically, ‘vehement suspicion of heresy’). He would be required to abjure the condemned belief under penalty of relapse into heresy, swearing ‘never to treat of it again’ by word or in writing; and his book was to be prohibited.Footnote 55
The penalty of relapse into heresy meant that another conviction would bring an automatic sentence of death by burning at the stake. The question arises, how could one be convicted of relapsing into heresy if one did not lapse into it in the first place, but only into ‘suspicion of heresy’? The answer is provided in canon law, in the decretal Accusatus of Alexander IV (Liber sextus 5.2.8): the first offence would be construed as actual heresy ‘by a certain fiction of law’.Footnote 56
The rigorous examination was scheduled for 21 June. Galileo was put under oath and told that, from the way that arguments were presented in his book, the presumption was that he believed that the sun was the centre of the world. He stoutly denied it, and maintained that, although before the decree of the Congregation of the Index he considered the Ptolemaic and Copernican opinions equally possible, afterwards he held the Ptolemaic to be most true (verissima) and undoubted. Even after being shown the instruments of torture, he said the same. Then, suddenly, the process ended, without his being actually tortured, since the pope had stipulated only that the threat of torture should be imposed.Footnote 57
Did Galileo perjure himself in making these sworn statements? The practice of forcing out admissions of secret sins was absolutely contrary to the canonical principle that church tribunals do not judge secret matters, which are to be left to private sacramental penance. If Galileo knew about this principle, it may have assuaged any pangs of guilt he felt over his technical untruths. It could very well be, however, that he rationalized his responses in another way: he recognized that the Ptolemaic system was generally held to be ‘mostly true and undoubted’, while acknowledging to himself that the Copernican alternative might eventually be proved true.
On the very next day, 22 June, the sentence designed for Galileo’s ears and for public consumption was pronounced by the cardinal inquisitors. After a long summary of his history with the authorities, he was convicted of the vehement-suspicion crime, in effect, ‘misprision of heresy’ – that is, of deliberately giving the impression that he believed in the false doctrines of the stable sun and moving earth.Footnote 58 Thereupon, he was given a statement of abjuration to recite aloud: he swore that he had always believed what the church held and would continue to do so. He then abjured ‘the above heresies and errors’ and swore never to say or write anything in the future that would give rise to suspicion that he held them. Lastly, it was announced that his book was to be publicly proclaimed as prohibited, as an example to others to abstain from similar crimes.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, no such public proclamation was made about Galileo’s Dialogue (apart from public repetitions of the sentence). When the announcement of the book’s prohibition was finally made, it was done in the most discreet possible way, as we shall see below.
Galileo spent only one night in the prison of the Holy Office (the pope himself ordered his release).Footnote 60 The rest of his life he remained not only under house arrest, but also under constant threat of re-imprisonment – or worse. If Galileo had been prosecuted fairly, according to the still-mandatory rules set forth at the Fourth Lateran Council, he would have been flanked by his attorneys when summoned to the Holy Office tribunal. It would doubtless have been a lost cause to appeal against the pre-trial interrogation as illegal, since it would be justified as established by centuries of custom. But if, after holding his own against Maculano and Sincero in the interrogation, he had turned down the plea-bargain, Sincero would have been hard-pressed to prove any heretical favouritism in the Dialogue, since Galileo would have been able to mount a defence against any such allegations, complete with witnesses for his side.
However, if Galileo had stood firm and not pleaded guilty, it might have resulted in no trial at all. Perhaps they would have accepted Galileo’s counter-bargain, his offer to correct his Dialogue to reinforce the argument against the heliocentric system,Footnote 61 which the 1632 anonymous report had also suggested. If that had happened, then the only repudiation of Copernicus to be made at this point would be to give reassurances that he did not take his system to be reflective of the real world, but only of a possible one, precisely what Copernicus’s book was now taken to be saying, after the corrections of 1620 were made.
IV
In the long narrative leading up to their sentence against Galileo, the cardinal inquisitors wrongly stated that the Congregation of the Index in 1616 prohibited all books treating of heliocentrism.Footnote 62 Rather, as we saw, it condemned and prohibited all books teaching it, except for two, including Copernicus’s, which it only suspended until corrected. Perhaps the cardinals did not know or remember that Copernicus’s book had been corrected. Furthermore, the cardinals did not follow through on Urban VIII’s decree of 16 June that Galileo was to be prohibited from treating heliocentrism in any way. Instead, he was made to swear to be careful about seeming to approve of heliocentrism in speech or in writing. In the event, he proved inconsistent in keeping this oath. He seems to have succeeded in public communications that he might have made, but not always in his private correspondence, where he at times clearly supported the sun-centred universe.
However, in one letter, addressed to the Tuscan ambassador to Venice, Francesco Rinuccini, dated 29 March 1641, only nine months before his death, he repudiated heliocentrism once again.Footnote 63 Antonio Favaro, the editor of Galileo’s works at the turn of the twentieth century, said that Galileo was being ironic in making this statement.Footnote 64 But Francesco Beretta in a 2003 article presented it, at least on its face, as a straightforward rejection, a second abjuration as he called it,Footnote 65 and I myself, in the article cited at the beginning (‘Galileo’s non-trial’, 2016), accepted it as such without further ado.Footnote 66 I now see it as something other than that.
First, it should be noted that, in spite of an occasional letter going astray (see below), Galileo seems to have had no fear that his regular mail was in danger of interception.Footnote 67 He saw no reason to write in code,Footnote 68 but felt free to speak his mind. One example can suffice, a letter sent to his old acquaintance, the Protestant Elie Diodati in Paris, written a year into his confinement, on 25 July 1634.Footnote 69 He tells him of his past and present troubles, and speaks of ‘the rage of my persecutors’, and of their vigilance. He has finally been allowed to stay in his little villa in Arcetri, a mile or so from Florence; but, as he tells Diodati, he was recently informed by the local vice-inquisitor of an order from the new secretary of the Holy Office, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, that if he continued to write for permission to visit Florence, he would be put back into the real prison of the Holy Office.Footnote 70
He then relates a letter from the transalpine regions mistakenly addressed to him in Rome, praising his Dialogue, which was intercepted and shown to Secretary Barberini and others. He goes on to recount some writings against him, including one by Libert Froidmont, ‘who was reduced to submerging the moving earth into heresy, all the way up to the mouth’. He addresses the Tractatus syllepticus of the Jesuit Melchior Inchofer,Footnote 71 who finds the opinion of the earth’s mobility ‘so horrible, pernicious, and scandalous that it would threaten the great dogmas of the faith, such as the immortality of the soul, creation, and the incarnation, if it were allowed to be debated’. He examines the treatise published against him by Antonio Rocco, ‘whose stupid brain understands nothing’ about his writings. Galileo ponders responding to all of his many opponents but realizes that to examine everything would be a very long enterprise, and of little use. Instead, he considers producing a book of comments, like notes on the margins of their works, pointing out their most egregious errors, and attributing it to someone else.
If it was rash for Galileo to say such things in a letter, it was even more rash for him to send batches of his marginalia against Rocco to his ally Fulgenzio Micanzio, the official theologian of the doge of Venice, all during 1634; for Micanzio distributed them among his friends, and they even reached Rocco himself, and Rocco prepared a reply.Footnote 72 They could easily have come to the attention of the inquisitor of Venice.
As I noted above, there had been no follow-through on the order of the cardinal inquisitors at the end of Galileo’s sentence in 1633 that there be a public proclamation prohibiting his book. It was not until over a year later, on 23 August 1634, that a notice appeared, in the next official announcement of prohibited books. The Dialogue is simply listed here in its alphabetical place. Footnote 73 One reaction to this announcement came to Galileo in the following October from Roberto Galilei in Lyons: ‘The newly arrived prohibition of your book by the Index is truly ridiculous, and a joy to the book’s printer, since it now puts a lot of good farthings into his purse, and the same is true of many booksellers here.’Footnote 74 He goes on at length to say that people there care nothing about such prohibitions.
This approbation must have been gratifying for Galileo, but worrying as well, because he was in the process of violating the prohibition himself: he was consulting with Diodati on a Latin translation of the Dialogue, which was published the next year in Strasbourg.Footnote 75 This effort on his part has been called ‘Galileo’s last Copernican battle’.Footnote 76 But in view of what we will see below, that verdict seems premature.
The following year, 1636, Micanzio wrote to tell Galileo that, ever since the book of the Dialogues Footnote 77 came out, everyone doing mathematics was ‘jumping into Lake Copernicus’, so to speak, such was the profit that the prohibitions had made.Footnote 78 Galileo answered immediately to say that this news much displeases him: it could cause trouble among the authorities, and cause the pope to limit the granting of licences to himself alone – and then he can reasonably fear that even the memory of the Dialogues will in the end be reduced to nothing.Footnote 79 Seemingly, he expresses no fear that further punitive action will be taken against him.
Various persons and entities other than the pope customarily gave licences to read prohibited books at this time, namely, the master of the sacred palace, the Holy Office, the Congregation of the Index, local inquisitors and bishops, and even parish priests.Footnote 80 Galileo assumed that this had been the case so far for his book. Whether it was so or not, we know only that all petitions to the Holy Office were turned down. Beginning in March and October of 1635, the cardinal inquisitors refused to give licences to two residents of Mantua to read Galileo’s Dialogues.Footnote 81 At the turn of the next year, the local inquisitor of Reggio Emilia referred to the Roman inquisitors the request of an eminent Jesuit, Domenico Grini, Doctor of Both Laws, to read the Dialogues.Footnote 82 The fate of this request is not given, but a year and a half later, in October of 1637, a request came from the inquisitor of Malta for a knight of Malta to read the Dialogue, and it was refused by the pope, who was at the meeting with the cardinal inquisitors.Footnote 83 In 1640, the Holy Office refused a licence to Fortunio Liceti of the University of Bologna.Footnote 84 Finally, in 1641, the cardinals rejected the two Mantuans again.Footnote 85
In 1638, Galileo’s long-time disciple Benedetto Castelli had written for permission to visit Galileo more often, to discuss various subjects like the moons of Jupiter, promising to avoid topics prohibited by the church.Footnote 86 Pope Urban instructed the inquisitor of Florence to permit it, but to warn Castelli specifically not to speak with Galileo about the condemned (damnata) opinion of the movement of the earth, under pain of automatic excommunication reserved to the pope himself.Footnote 87 The pope undoubtedly remembered the letter that Galileo had written to Castelli in 1613, which came to the fore in 1615 or 1616. Suspect propositions were extracted from it at that time,Footnote 88 which made it into the summary after the trial in 1633.Footnote 89 That summary, of course, was the basis upon which Urban arrived at his verdict.
Interestingly, Castelli had brought up the forbidden subject, at least indirectly, in a letter he wrote to Galileo two years earlier, in 1636. He recounted his pleasure (gran gusto) in hearing a Bolognese doctor frequently lecturing against Copernicus at the University of Rome. One of his ‘convincing arguments’ was that the sun was in the midst of the fixed stars like the hub of a wagon wheel.Footnote 90 Castelli was referring sarcastically to Giacomo Accarisi, who soon produced a Disputatio against the Copernican thesis. In May of 1637, Galileo’s disciple Vincenzo Renieri offered to send it to him, if he had not seen it.Footnote 91 In the following year, Micanzio informed Galileo that Frans van Weert (who had recently translated the Dialogue into Flemish)Footnote 92 had written a good response to Accarisi’s treatise, in French, drawing almost entirely on the Dialogue.Footnote 93
V
To return to Francesco Rinuccini, Galileo’s correspondent, he was a member of the prominent family of that name in Florence. He was born in 1603 and received a law degree in Pisa. He served as the grand duke of Tuscany’s ambassador to Venice from 1637 to 1642.Footnote 94 His first connection with Galileo that we know of occurred on 12 July 1633. He was among those invited by the inquisitor of Florence to hear a special reading in Florence of the sentence passed against Galileo in Rome on the previous 22 June. The abjuration that he was required to make was also read.
In light of what Rinuccini would write to Galileo in 1641 in favour of Copernicus, we must conclude that he did not take in the implications of the formulas recited that day in 1633. One part of the abjuration read by Galileo that I did not mention above was that, if he should come to know of any heretic, or anyone suspect of heresy, he pledged to turn him in.Footnote 95 The formula seemed to refer to any heresy or any kind of heretic that Galileo might happen to encounter. In Mario Guiducci’s report of the Florence event to Galileo a few weeks later, in a letter of 27 August, the abjuration was more definite: he was to denounce ‘anyone who held the detested opinion’. And if he himself ever held it again, he would be subjected to the penalty of perpetual imprisonment.Footnote 96
After Rinuccini took over his position as ambassador in Venice, he began to act as expediter of correspondence between Galileo in Arcetri and Micanzio in Venice.Footnote 97 On 23 March 1641, Rinuccini wrote of his delight in hearing from Captain PieroniFootnote 98 that he had observed through a telescope a definite movement of the fixed stars, as clear as with the naked eye – a gratifying proof of the validity of the Copernican system. But Rinuccini was disturbed to read in a new book just now that, if it were true that the earth made a great orbit around the sun during the year, as Copernicus held, we would not be able see the full half of the sky during the night. He asked Galileo to resolve the problem.Footnote 99
Galileo replied within a week, on 29 March.Footnote 100 By this time, he was blind, and he dictated his letters to his disciple, Vincenzo Viviani. He also knew, as Beretta reminds us, that he was under surveillance.Footnote 101 He begins by reminding Rinuccini of the official condemned position of geocentrism, saying that the falsity of the Copernican system must not be doubted, ‘especially by us Catholics’, since the irrefutable authority of Scripture is against it, as interpreted by the greatest theologians: they agree in saying that the stable earth is at the centre and the sun moves around it. Here are his words:
La falsità del systema Copernicano non deve essere in conto alcuno messa in dubbio, e massime da noi Cattolici, havendo la inrefragabile autorità delle Scritture Sacre, interpretate da i maestri sommi in teologia, il concorde assenso de’ quali ci rende certi dalla stabilità della terra, posta nel centro, e della mobilità del sole intorno ad essa.
[The falsity of the Copernican system must not be questioned in any way, especially by us Catholics, who have the irrefutable authority of Holy Scripture as interpreted by the greatest masters in theology. Their unanimous consent makes us certain of the stability of the earth, located in the centre, and of the mobility of the sun around it.]
After this resounding statement, Galileo adds (poi, ‘next’) that there is another way in which Copernicus can be disregarded:
Le congetture poi per le quali il Copernico et altri suoi seguaci hanno profferito il contrario si levono tutte con quel saldissimo argumento preso dalla onnipotenza di Iddio, la quale, potendo fare in diversi, anzi in infiniti, modi quello che alla nostra oppinione e osservazione par fatto in un tal particolare, non doviamo volere abbreviare la mano di Dio, e tenacemente sostenere quello in che possiamo essere ingannati.
Here is Stillman Drake’s translation:
The conjectures of Copernicus and his followers offered to the contrary are all removed by that most sound argument, taken from the omnipotence of God. He being able to do in many, or rather in infinite ways, that which to our view and observation seems to be done in one particular way, we must not pretend to hamper God’s hand and tenaciously maintain that in which we may be mistaken.Footnote 102
That is, the Copernican possibility finds its place along with other possibilities, and it would be rash to insist upon it, which would be like constraining the hand of God.
This was the argument that Pope Urban instructed Galileo to use in the preface and conclusion of his Dialogue, as Riccardi reminded him.Footnote 103
But then Galileo goes on to contrast the Copernican and Ptolemaic theories: in his view, he says, the observations and conjectures of Copernicus are merely insufficient; but those of Ptolemy and Aristotle and their followers are fallacious and erroneous, and one can easily show how they are non-probative:
E come che io stimi insuffizienti le osservazioni e conjetture Copernicane, altr’e tanto reputo più fallaci et erronee quelle di Tolomeo, di Aristotele, e de’ loro seguaci, mentre che, senza uscire de’ termini de’ discorsi humani, si può assai chiaramente scoprire la non concludenza di quelle.
[And just as I consider the Copernican observations and conjectures insufficient, I also consider those of Ptolemy, Aristotle, and their followers to be more fallacious and erroneous. Regarding these latter, one can quite easily uncover their inconclusiveness, without going outside the limits of human reason.]
By saying that the Ptolemaic conclusions are more fallacious and erroneous, Copernican conclusions by implication are also fallacious and erroneous, as well as being insufficient. Perhaps this is a nod to his original statement that Copernicus’s system is to be considered false.
Next, Galileo refutes what the author Rinuccini is worrying about. He is arguing in a circle: he already has the centrality of the earth fixed in his mind, and that is what he concludes: the earth is at the centre.
As for Captain Pieroni’s alleged results, Galileo points out that ordinary instruments are not precise enough to make such small measurements. He ends by saying that he could bring up more points, but what he said in his ‘misfortuned’ Dialogue can suffice.Footnote 104 Undoubtedly, the passage of the Dialogue that he had particularly in mind was towards the end of the third day, where Salviati describes an experiment that could discern the stellar parallax, if a much stronger telescope were available.Footnote 105
Galileo’s words at the beginning of the letter, about the falsity of the Copernican system, are not the same kind of repudiation of heliocentrism that was forced on him in the abjuration in his trial. Rather, he has made it more sectarian. He states that the Copernican system must be seen as false by those who accept the decision of Catholic theologians on the point – as if to say that Protestants, like Diodati and others who had translated and published his Dialogue and other pro-Copernican works,Footnote 106 would not be so constrained. It is noteworthy that he does not refer to the judgement of the Inquisition against him, or to the decree of the Index banning all books teaching the Copernican system – except for Copernicus’s own book, which was no longer off bounds, after it was corrected twenty years ago.
Of course, he does most certainly have the judgement against him in mind, and doubtless also the pledge in his abjuration to turn in any heretic who was holding the doctrine of heliocentrism. We can see him as warning Rinuccini, and at the same time covering his own back, as if to say: Rinuccini was not a true heretic who needed to be denounced to the Inquisition; rather, he was simply a mistaken soul who needed to be set straight, and that is what Galileo has just done.
To review the message of the letter: the Copernican system is judged as false by Catholic theologians; it is one of many possibilities under God; it is insufficient, but less defective than the Ptolemaic system; it is certainly not yet provable by current instrumentation; more light can be thrown upon it in the Dialogue. One can also see further implications, if one wishes.
VI
Let us summarize what we have seen. Galileo was well aware from the beginning that Copernicus’s attractive deviation from the astronomical consensus that the earth was the centre of the universe was a delicate matter, because of its theological implications. He showed himself open to it without actually espousing it, but he gained a reputation for holding it, and it became known as ‘Galileo’s doctrine’. The Inquisition’s theologians decided that it was against Scripture, even heretical, and privately admonished Galileo to give it up, to which he agreed. Meanwhile, Copernicus’s book, once it was made clearly hypothetical, was allowed.
When, years later, Galileo obtained imprimaturs for a large book discussing the theoretical pros and cons of the geocentric and heliocentric explanations, he thought he was on safe ground, but the Inquisition’s readers believed that the heliocentric disputant veered away from hypothesis to reality, and Galileo was summoned for interrogation. He avoided the trap of incriminating himself, but accepted a plea-bargain and confessed to the crime of favouring heresy without believing it. He was forced to disavow the Copernican theory under pain of harsh prison or death.
Later, in defiance of this threat, he privately showed himself as favouring the theory in his correspondence, at least indirectly, but he did not actually address the subject until 1641, when hearing of a claim that the Copernican system had been proved. He knew it was not so, and he started his reply by saying that he and other Catholics are assured that the Copernican system is false, because theologians say the earth is central and unmovable. Unlike the Ptolemaic system, however, its defects are not insuperable, even though it is not yet possible to prove its veracity with ordinary instruments. In other words, Galileo was content to repudiate it as false until it was proved to be true.
Let me conclude by noting that Cardinal Bellarmine speculated on the possibility of the heliocentric system being proved true in a letter he wrote to Friar Foscarini. If that happened, he said, one would have to proceed with great care in explaining away the Scriptures that appear to be contrary to it.Footnote 107 Galileo expressed a similar opinion to himself in the notes that he added to a printed copy of the Dialogue. He warned theologians that, by making the earth’s fixity a matter of faith, they might one day have to condemn those who hold it as heretics, if the earth’s motion is proved.Footnote 108
It did not come to that. Rather, the earth’s motion was simply accepted, and the geocentrists were left alone. Before the stellar parallax was definitely measured in the 1840s, we find the Inquisition’s current commissary in 1820, Maurizio Olivieri, OP, writing thus:
Although there is no universal consensus among the experts in the field about the annual parallax of the fixed stars, the aberration of the fixed stars and of the planets has been verified for at least a century and is regarded by all astronomers as a true physical demonstration of the earth’s annual motion.Footnote 109
In 1822, the Inquisition allowed Catholics to accept the earth’s motion as a fact; and the 1835 edition of the Index librorum prohibitorum silently dropped Galileo’s Dialogue and the works of Zúñiga and Foscarini named in the 1616 decree, and also, of course, the un-emended Copernicus.Footnote 110 The theological and scriptural implications were no longer a concern.
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