By his seventieth birthday, Bernard Shaw was one of the most famous people in the world. Yet despite intense scrutiny, perhaps no other figure of his stature and visibility has been so thoroughly misunderstood. The only Nobel laureate also to win an Academy Award (for the screenplay of Pygmalion), he was recognized as much for his wit and his eccentric personality as for his writings. Certainly the celebrity made unfailing good copy as he voiced opinions on everything from European dictators to childraising. But for too long he insisted on caricaturing himself as a clown and buffoon. Late in life, he lamented that he had been all too persuasive, the overexposed G. B. S. figure trivializing views of both man and artist. Then, too, there had always been an undercurrent of antagonism toward the selfproclaimed genius who insisted on the satirist's right to skewer societal foibles - that insistence marked him as guilty of a disconcerting detachment from the mass of his fellow human beings according to his detractors, a detachment noticeable in the personal sphere as well.

Although very much a participant in the secular fervor of his times, Bernard Shaw, like his creation Andrew Undershaft, was also a confirmed mystic, and gradually this mysticism led him to a long-range solution to human problems, a solution he called the Life Force and a philosophy he called Creative Evolution. Over time, Shaw's plays became less social diatribes and more parables addressing what he saw as the basic human paradox: by the time the human mind begins to achieve its potential, the human body is ready for the dustbin. Creative Evolution, and its concurrent human development, were therefore based on a premise that that which furthered the evolution of the species toward the true development of the intellect was good, and that which hindered it was bad.

From the end of World War I to the onset of the Great Depression marked the most dynamic period in the history of the American stage. Over the course of this era, the theatre experienced unprecedented growth. Expansion, stimulated by mounting economic prosperity and a burgeoning urban, middle-class population, resulted in an increased demand for theatrical entertainment. Demand sparked competition and an openness to invention and change, forcing the theatrical establishment to vie with new emerging talents and innovative approaches for audiences and critical attention. O'Neill's career, which began on the cusp of this theatrical Renaissance, was impacted by theatre's expansionist tendencies and the prevailing tensions between the forces of tradition and those of change. A survey of the existing conditions and innovative trends manifest in this milieu illuminates O'Neill's artistic and commercial success in the theatre of his time.

On 2 February 1920 Eugene O'Neill saw his first major play, Beyond the Horizon, open at the Morosco. It was his first opening and first performance in a mainstream theatre. Beyond was about the thirtieth play he had finished since he began writing plays in 1913; he wrote it early in 1918 when he was twenty-nine. When it opened two years later, New York was in the throes of a lethal influenza epidemic, and the opening was an unpublicized “special matinee.” Late in rehearsals, O'Neill took over direction from the lead actor, but despite all efforts, despaired of the production. Nevertheless, an audience came and accepted the play as a serious and absorbing work, and reviewers admired it. Though it is no great compliment, Beyond was clearly the best play yet written by an American and would win O'Neill the first of four Pulitzer Prizes. The production ran 144 performances and brought O'Neill over $6,000 which made him, at thirty-one, finally independent of his father's purse-strings.

In 1890, before he even began his career as a playwright, Shaw identified what he considered to be the defining quality for a new, non-traditional form of drama. From Aristotle on, action had been the core of drama; now Ibsen offered a radically different model. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism Shaw presented Ibsen as a socialist and a realist, whose naturalistic drama exposed all collective abstractions as damaging illusions, and promoted the “individual will” against “the tyranny of ideals.” But beyond this, the key factor was that instead of the standard final-Act climax, Ibsen's characters sat down and talked. The clash of opinion replaced physical conflict, so that a play's resolution was the outcome of discussion.

As with so much of Shaw's writing, all this may seem an idiosyncratic distortion of its subject, but reveals a great deal about its author. The pamphlet was published in 1892, shortly before his first play Widowers' Houses appeared, and served as a manifesto for his theatrical aims. When Shaw delivered it as one of the lectures for a Fabian Society series on "Socialism in Contemporary Literature" two years earlier "The Quintessence of Ibsenism" had a more immediate target; and its politics were deliberately provocative in attacking the collectivist beliefs of other leading Fabians, such as Annie Besant (who had chaired Shaw's lecture) and Sidney Webb. However, the switch from action to discussion, that Shaw detected in Ibsen's work, corresponds with the fundamental Fabian approach to social change.

This essay is concerned with the myth of Galileo and, thus, with his image as a hero and martyr. It does not endeavor to state who Galileo was or what he did, but deals rather with people's expectations of who he was; in other words how his image and the image of his science have evolved from his time to the present day.

Galileo's great qualities and skills as a scientist are well known, but he was also an accomplished writer, wielding his sharp pen as a major protagonist in an age of upheaval, and he was the most famous martyr of science. His fate is, therefore, an endless source of material for an epic, enough to satisfy every age's demand for hero worship. This is why Bertolt Brecht chose to write his famous play Galileo.

It is nothing new that Galileo has been a subject of worship since his own day. It is agreed among Galilean scholars that the Galileo story is often distorted by popular as well as scholarly literature. Moreover, Galileo is naturally idolized. If we cannot, or do not wish to, safeguard historical description from circumstantial influences or fashions, let us at least try to explore the twilight zone between "true" history and myth.

Galileo's life and works, like Gaul, has generally been divided into three parts. There is his work on mechanics and local motion (with the science of the strength of bodies grudgingly admitted), his work on astronomy and Copernicanism, and, finally, his relations and tribulations with the Catholic Church. Occasionally, some scholars under the anachronistic rubric of methodology have attempted to tie the two scientific parts together to obtain a more coherent picture.

In the space of this essay, I cannot overcome this tripartite division that the centuries have sanctioned. I can, however, sketch a picture of Galileo that will be a step toward this goal. It seems to me that Galileo had only a few basic conceptions that directed his life and work in all these three areas. His first belief concerned the role of the properly thinking and working individual scientist as being able to obtain knowledge and certainty. This belief showed up in his writings about the role of the scientific elite individual, who saw and understood things that were not seen by the masses, or, especially, by groups dedicated to the authority of Aristotle. It also seems to lie at the heart of his thoughts about Biblical exegesis. This individualism is apparent in Galileo's texts by his ubiquitous and consistent use of the first person singular "I" ("io") and the use of proper names or descriptions to talk about insights, discoveries, and all the accomplishments of good science.

INTRODUCTION

On the second day of the Two New Sciences the three interlocutors Sagredo, Simplicio, and Salviati suspend their learned conversation on forces of fracture and resistance to indulge in yet another digression among many that have become well known as characteristic marks of Galileo's texts. Sagredo, the aristocratic amateur of natural philosophy and mathematics addresses Simplicio, the Aristotelian philosopher, with the following remark:

Simplicio, portrayed in this not very polemical text as an openminded scholar, graciously responds:

When Galileo left the University of Pisa without taking a degree in the spring of 1585, he was a promising young mathematician with an experimental bent, but there was nothing to foretell his later interest in astronomy. He earned his living by giving private lessons in Florence and Siena, and it is probably at this time that he wrote a short Treatise on the Sphere or Cosmography for the use of his pupils.

This elementary textbook of spherical astronomy is based on the thirteenth-century Sphere of John Holywood, better known under his Latinized name of Sacrobosco. It is conventional in its geocentrism and makes no mention of Copernicus. Galileo may have used it when he became a Professor of Mathematics at Pisa (1589-92) and during the first years of his professorship at Padua (1592-1610).

In Pisa, Galileo made the acquaintance of Jacopo Mazzoni, a philosopher who sought to combine the insights of Plato and Aristotle, and with whom he stayed in touch after he had left Tuscany for the Venetian Republic. It was this friend who, in 1597, provided Galileo with his first opportunity of stating his opinion that the heliocentric theory of Copernicus was more probable than the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy.

AT THE ROOT OF THE GALILEO AFFAIR

In Bertolt Brecht's play, Galileo, an aged cardinal denounces the upstart astronomer from Florence:

Brecht puts in the mouth of the old cardinal what he himself may well have believed the primary motive to be on the church's side of the “Galileo affair” Certainly, this reading of history has been a common one from the time of the Enlightenment onwards. Why were Galileo's Copernican views met with such hostility on the part of his Church? What could have explained the violent opposition of the Roman authorities to the views of someone who was after all recognized by these same authorities as the leading astronomer in the Italy of his day? Why would they have risked such a clash where the stakes were obviously so high?

Galileo made essential contributions to the development of inertial mechanics. His two most basic contributions were to collect the set of problems that held the keys to inertial mechanics and then address them all with an effective, consistent mechanics.

Classical mechanics is still taught by referring new students to the core set of problems that had to be solved by the original investigators like Descartes, Gassendi, Huygens, Wallis, Wren, Hooke, and Newton, all following Galileo's original line of attack. These problems include the analysis of motion on an inclined plane, the motion of a pendulum, the action of a lever, the force of a spring or pull in a rope, the result of collisions between impacting and moving bodies, and so on.

Inertial mechanics was extended to a far wider range of problems, but no writer before Galileo had put so many of the basic problems together in a single, articulate discussion. For that reason alone we may describe Galileo's work as modern in character and properly within the bounds and spirit of classical mechanics, even though the elements of the latter system were not successfully elaborated for almost fifty years after his passing and in spite of the fact that he sometimes proposed mistaken ideas to solve the basic problems.

The aura surrounding Galileo as founder of modern science disposes many of those writing about him to start in medias res with an account of his discoveries with the telescope, or with his dialogues on the world systems and the two new sciences, or with the trial and the tragic events surrounding it. Frequently implicit in such beginnings is the attitude that Galileo had no forebears and stands apart from history, this despite the fact that he was forty-six years of age when he wrote his Sidereus Nuncius and then in his late sixties and early seventies when he composed his two other masterpieces.

Attempts have recently been made by scholars to dispel this myth by giving closer scrutiny to the historical record – closer, that is, than one gets from perusing the National Edition of Galileo's works. This was a masterful collection, but begun as it was in the last decade of the nineteenth century and completed in the first decade of the twentieth, it perforce could not benefit from the historiographical techniques developed in our century. During the past twenty years, in particular, much research has been done on Galileo's manuscripts, and it sheds unexpected light on what has come to be known as Galileo's "early period" – that covering the first forty-five years of his life.

Galileo died on January 8, 1642, in the unpleasant predicament of a man who had been condemned and then forced to abjure, as “vehemently suspected of heresy.” His will indicated that his remains should be placed beside those of his father Vincenzo and of his ancestors, in the Basilica of Santa Croce, where the family tomb can still be seen.

The death of such a remarkable person was not marked by solemn ceremonies or orations attesting either to his virtues as a man or to his sensational discoveries as a scientist and astronomer. On the day after his death, Galileo's body was removed to the Basilica of Santa Croce without the slightest hint of pomp or ceremony, accompanied by his son Vincenzo, by the Curate of S. Matteo in Arcetri, by Vincenzo Viviani, by Evangelista Torricelli, and by a few members of his family. The Grand Duke remained in Pisa, and no other important igures of Florentine public life made an appearance.

Galileo's researches in astronomy were more than original, they were unprecedented. He was not an astronomer in the sense of Copernicus, Tycho, and Kepler, making observations, devising models, and deriving parameters in order to compute tables and ephemerides for finding the positions of the Sun, Moon, and planets. Nor did he search for the physical principles governing the motions of the heavens as Kepler and later Newton did. Most of his work was concerned with two issues, the refutation of the Aristotelian and the defense of the Copernican “System of the World”, and his originality lies not so much in what he found as in how he interpreted his discoveries. Even his discoveries with the telescope, as interesting as they are in themselves - and it is hard to think of more surprising discoveries in the entire history of science - are of still greater interest for the conclusions that he drew from them, for nearly all of them could be turned to the criticism of Aristotle and the defense of Copernicus, and in his Dialogue on the Two Great Systems of the World that is just what Galileo did. Our concern here, however, is with his initial discoveries and his initial interpretations, which, although not as far-reaching as the conclusions he reached in the Dialogue, were upsetting enough to anyone who was not already a friend of Copernicus.

In his theological writings, Galileo maintained what might be called the “independence principle” – science and religion belong to, and are competent on, two distinct and different domains: the factual domain of natural phenomena and the domain of faith of supernatural phenomena. As he put it, a distinction is to be drawn between “purely physical propositions which are matters of faith [and] supernatural propositions which are articles of faith.” Accordingly, Galileo held the view that all factual statements about natural phenomena contained in the Scriptures have no value for salvation and, therefore, can be revised or dismissed on scientific grounds.

Bellarmine adopted a different principle, which can be called the "limitation principle." According to it, certain factual statements contained in the Scriptures are necessary for their salvation value and, therefore, cannot be revised in the light of any contrary scientific theories. This has the consequence that, if such theories are advanced, they cannot be held to be true and, at the most, have to be treated as "hypotheses," in the technical sense of devices for calculating or systematizing phenomena, deprived of truth and epistemic value.

In this essay, I will examine the relationship between Galileo's physics and his theology, focusing primarily on the latter. It is not my intention to minimize his commitment to physics - quite the contrary. But Galileo's interest in theology might seem remote given the secular status held by science today and, as a result, it would be tempting to dismiss theology as a textual relic corresponding to a fideistic atavism that is no longer present. However, it is precisely this secular perception of history that forces us to consider cultural relics of this sort.

Several recent studies of Galileo have tended to present his religious beliefs in one of two ways: as reflecting "genuine piety and devotion to the Church" or else as grounded in Baroque-court rhetoric and compliance with the Church's position. Otherwise, because of his Copernican campaign and trial, Galileo has also been included in the group of other theologically minded scientists such as Descartes, Boyle, and Newton – not to mention Pascal or Leibniz. Compared to these figures, Galileo's theological concerns appear as self-defense in the struggle between Copernican astronomy and biblical exegesis and completely separate from his physics.