The Galileo Affair, 1633-1893

GALILEO'S DIALOGUE:  WOULD ARISTOTLE HAVE BEEN PERSUADED BY GALILEO'S EVIDENCE FOR THE COPERNICAN SYSTEM?

From 1616 to 1624, Galileo obeyed the "Special Injunction" that he had received from Cardinal Bellarmine in 1616--that Galileo would "abandon completely" the Copernican view of the Universe and "henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend it in any way whatsoever, either orally or in writing."  But then in 1624, he began to write the book that would be published early in 1632 under the title Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican.  That book provoked the Inquisition in 1633 into proceedings against Galileo that would force him to sign a document of abjuration and to be imprisoned (under house arrest in his villa outside Florence) for the rest of life, until his death in 1642.

In 1623, the old pope died, and Cardinal Maffeo Barberini was elected Pope Urban VIII.  Urban was a well-educated Florentine, who admired Galileo, and who had helped to keep the Inquisition from publicly condemning Galileo and Copernicanism in 1616.  Urban's position had been, and continued to be, that as long as the Copernican system was treated as a mere "hypothesis" that could not be absolutely demonstrated to be true, then it should not be considered a heretical denial of the Bible.  He insisted that if Copernicanism were affirmed to be a truth about nature, that would deny God's omnipotence by denying God's arbitrary power to design the cosmos in any way He wished.

In the spring of 1624, Galileo went to Rome and stayed there for six weeks to pay his respects to the new pope.  He met weekly with Urban, and the two had friendly conversations that led Galileo to think that the Pope might be his supporter.  But when Urban read the Dialogue in July of 1632, he felt betrayed because he saw in the book, beneath the shallow pretense of treating the Copernican system as a mere hypothesis, a clear defense of that system as a probable truth based on the best evidence and demonstrative arguments.

Galileo had written his book as an imagined dialogue with three interlocutors.  Salviati defended the Pythagorean and Copernican system.  Simplicio spoke for the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic system.  Sagredo acted as an educated gentleman who commented on the debate.  Like a Platonic dialogue, Galileo did not speak in his own name, but the reader could see that Salviati was his spokesman; and the reader could also see that Salviati was allowed to make the stronger arguments.  It was also a good joke that Simplicio's name suggested he was a "simpleton."

It should be noted that while these three characters in the Dialogue discuss the cosmological, astronomical, physical, and philosophical aspects of Copernicanism, they say nothing about the biblical issues.

It is also noteworthy that Galileo has Salviati argue that he, not Simplicio, is the true Aristotelian philosopher, because Aristotle would have accepted the modern scientific evidence for the Copernican system.  Consider this passage:

"SALV.  Whenever you wish to reconcile what your senses show you with the soundest teachings of Aristotle, you will have no trouble at all.  Does not Aristotle say that become of the great distance, celestial matters cannot be treated very definitely?"

"SIMP.  He does say so, quite clearly."

"SALV.  Does he not also declare that what sensible experience shows ought to be preferred over any argument, even one that seems to be extremely well founded?  And does he not say this positively and without a bit of hesitation?"

"SIMP.  He does."

"SALV.  Then of the two propositions, both of them Aristotelian doctrines, the second--which says it is necessary to prefer the senses over arguments--is a more solid and definite doctrine than the other, which holds the heavens to be unalterable.  Therefore, it is better Aristotelian philosophy to say, 'Heaven is alterable because my senses tell me so,' than to say, 'Heaven is unalterable because Aristotle was so persuaded by reasoning,'  Add to this that we possess a better basis for reasoning about celestial things than Aristotle did.  He admitted such perceptions to be very difficult for him by reason of the distance from his senses, and conceded that one whose senses could better represent them would be able to philosophize about them with more certainty.  Now we, thanks to the telescope, have brought the heavens thirty or forty times closer to us than they were for Aristotle, so that we can discern many things in them that he could not see, among other things these sunspots, which were absolutely invisible to him.  Therefore, we can treat of the heavens and the sun more confidently than Aristotle could" (Galileo 2001, 63-64).

One could see this as Galileo agreeing with my argument that Aristotle doubted the truth of his cosmology, because he saw that the fundamental premises of his reasoning about cosmology were not based on observational evidence, since in studying astronomical phenomena, "there is so little evidence available to our sense experience," and therefore his cosmological astronomy was based on ancestral myths about the divinity of the heavens that were believed only by faith.  Consequently, Aristotle would have been open to the observational evidence provided by Galileo's telescope that supported modern astronomy.

I have written about Hobbes's suggestion that the "vain philosophy" of the Aristotelian Scholastic theologians was based on what Aristotle knew to be "false Philosophy," which Aristotle professed to believe only because of his "fearing the fate of Socrates."  This suggests the possibility that Aristotle's secret teaching in his natural science supports Galileo's modern science in challenging the medieval model of the cosmos.

This also suggests that Leo Strauss was wrong in claiming that Aristotelian natural right requires an Aristotelian cosmic teleology that has been refuted by modern science.  Aristotle saw that natural right could be rooted in the immanent teleology of his biological science that was better grounded in sense experience than his cosmology.  And, as I have argued, Aristotle's biological teleology was confirmed by Charles Darwin's evolutionary biology.

Moreover, Galileo suggested that Aristotle would have accepted the empirical evidence for modern biology--for example, the anatomical evidence for the primacy of the brain (rather than the heart) in the human nervous system as the natural biological ground for the human mind (Galileo 2001, 124-26).

Galileo observed that people like Simplicio who identify their Aristotelian philosophy with repeating what is said in Aristotle's texts without considering the new empirical evidence for modern science are not really philosophers, because they are actually "historians or memory experts" rather than philosophers (Galileo 2001, 130-31).

THE INQUISITION PROCEEDINGS AGAINST GALILEO IN 1633

In the summer of 1632, the Pope ordered a ban on the recently published
Dialogue, and he commissioned a special committee of three people to study the Dialogue and send him a report with their assessment of it.  In September, their report concluded that Galileo had violated the orders of the Inquisition and the Pope, because "many times in the work there is a lack of and deviation from hypothesis, either by asserting absolutely the earth's motion and the sun's immobility, or by characterizing the supporting arguments as demonstrative and necessary, or by treating the negative side as impossible" (Finocchiaro 1989, 221).  The Pope then submitted the case to the Inquisition in Rome, and Galileo was summoned to Rome to stand trial.

In April and May of 1633, Galileo sat for four depositions before the Inquisition, in which he answered questions.  In his first deposition, he said that he had understood that Cardinal Bellarmine's special injunction in 1616 meant that he could hold Copernicus's opinion only "suppositionally" (ex suppositione) or "hypothetically" (ex hypothesi), because to hold it "absolutely" true would be repugnant to the Bible; and he claimed that in the Dialogue, he had done that because he had never advocated Copernicanism in absolute terms.

But then the Inquisition received commissioned reports from people who had read the Dialogue and offered their assessments of what Galileo had done in that book.  The report from Melchior Inchofer was meticulous in quoting many passages in the book where Galileo "teaches, defends, and holds the opinion of the earth's motion" (Finocchiaro 1989, 262-70).

In his second deposition, Galileo said that he had reread his book to see if "against my purest intention, through my oversight," he had conveyed the impression to his readers that he was defending Copernicanism as simply true.  He explained:

". . . Now, I freely confess that it appeared to me in several places to be written in such a way that a reader, not aware of my intention, would have reason to form the opinion that the arguments for the false side, which I intended to confute, were so stated as to be capable of convincing because of their strength, rather than being easy to answer. . . . I resorted to that of the natural gratification everyone feels for his own subtleties and for showing himself to be cleverer than the average man, by finding ingenious and apparent considerations of probability even in favor of false propositions. . . . My error then was, and I confess it, one of vain ambition, pure ignorance, and inadvertance. . . ." (Finocchiaro 1989, 277-78).

Galileo lied.  And the members of the Inquisition knew that he had lied to them.  Any attentive reader of the Dialogue would know that Galileo was lying here because nothing in that book suggested that Galileo "intended to confute" the "arguments for the false side"--for the Ptolemaic system.  The sentence of the Inquisition against Galileo in June included the remark that "we did not think you had said the whole truth about your intention" (Finocchiaro 1989, 290).  Galileo felt compelled to lie to avoid the severest punishment.  

In the sentence of punishment, Galileo was declared to be "vehemently suspected of heresy."  This was a technical term because it was one of three religious crimes, in descending order of seriousness: formal heresy, vehement suspicion of heresy, and slight suspicion of heresy.

The punishment had four parts.  Galileo was ordered in front of the Inquisition to "abjure, curse, and detest" his errors and heresies.  It was also ordered that his book Dialogue would be prohibited and placed on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.  He was condemned to "formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure."  And he was ordered to recite the seven penitential Psalms (Psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143) once a week for the next three years (Finocchiaro 1989, 291).

Galileo presented his abjuration on June 22:

". . . I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and motionless and the earth is not the center and moves."

"Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of Your Eminence 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; and 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."

"Furthermore, I swear and promise to comply with and observe completely all the penances which have been or will be imposed upon me by this Holy Office; and should I fail to keep any of these promises and oaths, which God forbid, I submit myself to all the penalties and punishments imposed and promulgated by the sacred canons and other particular and general laws against similar delinquents.  So help me God and these Holy Gospels of His, which I touch with my hands" (Finocchiaro 1989, 292).

Galileo was seventy years old.  He would live another nine years, dying in 1642.  During those nine years, he saw the beginning of what came to be called the "Galileo Affair"--the debate over the Inquisition's punishment of Galileo that has lasted for over 350 years.  Ultimately, this has been a debate about the character of modern natural science and philosophy in its denial of the medieval theological model of the cosmos, and about whether a liberal social order can safely allow philosophic freedom of thought in the public discussion of such questions.

THE GALILEO AFFAIR, 1633-1893

Acting under the express orders of Pope Urban VIII, in the summer of 1633, the Roman Inquisition sent copies of the sentence against Galileo and his abjuration to all papal nuncios (the Pope's ecclesiastical diplomats) in Europe and all local inquisitors in Italy, with orders to publicize them.  This was the first and only time that the Inquisition has so widely publicized an inquisitorial trial.  This was the Pope's warning to Catholics not to question the authority of the Church and his presentation of himself as a defender of the faith in the Counter-Reformation's attack on Protestant heretics and on all those who thought they could interpret the Bible for themselves rather than following the interpretation forced upon them by the Church.

Since the Inquisition publicized only the sentence against Galileo and his abjuration without releasing the entire proceedings, there was not enough information to determine clearly exactly what punishment Galileo had suffered.  The sentence says: "we deemed it necessary to proceed against you by a rigorous examination."  Many people assumed that the Inquisition's "rigorous examination" included torture.  Later, when the trial proceedings were released in 1867, people saw in Galileo's fourth deposition that "he was told to tell the truth, otherwise one would have recourse to torture."  But now historians generally agree that while Galileo was threatened with torture, he was not actually tortured (Finocchiaro 2009).  The official manuals for the Inquisition included procedures for torture.  But there is no evidence that Galileo was made to suffer any kind of physical torture.

The sentence against Galileo declares: "We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure."  This refers to the jail at the Inquisition palace in Rome.  But when the correspondence surrounding Galileo's trial and punishment was published in 1774, it became clear that Galileo was probably never confined in a jail.  While Galileo was in Rome for his trial, the Inquisition permitted him to lodge either in the Tuscan embassy or in the prosecutor's six-room apartment.  After he was sentenced, Galileo was permitted to travel to Siena and live under house arrest at the residence of the archbishop, a friend of Galileo's.  In December of 1633, Galileo was allowed to go to his own villa in Arcetri, near Florence, where he remained under house arrest until his death.

So, the old story that Galileo was tortured and imprisoned is mistaken (Finocchino 2009).  But still being under house arrest for nine years was a serious punishment.  And that his Dialogue remained on the Index of Prohibited Books was also an important part of his punishment, although the book was published in parts of Europe that were free from the Inquisition.

And what about the order that Galileo recite the seven penitential Psalms once a week for three years?  There's no clear evidence that he performed this act of penance.  In October of 1633, Galileo's daughter--who had become the cloistered nun Maria Celeste--wrote to him and said that she would take upon herself the obligation to recite the seven psalms one time each week "to relieve you of this care" (Sobel 2011, 312-15).  This is strange because it was not legally or theologically possible to substitute one person's penance for that of another.

Far from showing penance for what he had done, Galileo often insisted in his correspondence after 1633 that he had been "unjustly condemned" (Finocchiaro 2005, 59-60).  He complained of this injustice to the many prominent people from around Europe who visited him in Arcetri.  These visitors included people like Thomas Hobbes and John Milton.  This provoked a debate that has lasted for over 350 years as to whether Galileo should be seen as a persecuted martyr of philosophy and science, and how this might illustrate the conflict between science and religion or reason and revelation.  Many people have compared Galileo's trial and punishment to that of Socrates.

Milton might have been the first person to present Galileo's case as showing the need for protecting philosophic freedom of thought and expression against the coercive enforcement of religious and intellectual orthodoxy.  Milton had visited Galileo in 1639.  Then, in 1644, he published his Areopagitica, in which he argued against a censorship law enacted by the English Parliament in 1643, which prohibited books from being published without legal licensing by governmental censors.  

Milton's primary argument for "the liberty of unlicensed printing" is that licensing manifests the tyrannical evil of the Catholic Inquisition--"this project of licencing crept out of the Inquisition" (Milton 1999, 8).  He observes:

". . . I could recount what I have seen and heard in other Countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes; when I have sat among their lerned men, for that honor I had, and bin counted happy to be born in such a place of Philosophic freedom, as they suppos'd England was, while themselvs did nothing but bemoan the servil condition into which lerning amongst them was brought; that this was it which had dampt the glory of Idalian wits; that nothing had bin there writt'n now these many years but flattery and fustian.  There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old, a prisner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Franciscan and Dominican licencers thought. . . ." (Milton 1999, 31-32).

One can see what's at issue here by contrasting Milton's scorn for the Inquisition as denying "philosophic freedom" and Robert Bellarmine's advocacy of the Inquisition as showing the spiritual authority of the Pope to enforce Christian orthodoxy and punish heretics.  As I have already indicated, Bellarmine was one of the most influential theologians of the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church and a member of the Inquisition both when it attacked Copernicanism in 1616 and when it sentenced Giordano Bruno to be burned at the stake in 1600 for theological and scientific heresies.

While many Catholic theologians had said that the pope had the "fullness of power" (plenitudo potestatis) in temporal matters, Bellarmine claimed that the pope had only "indirect power" (potestas indirecta) in temporal matters.  Political rulers have their own autonomous power grounded in natural and divine law that is separated from the spiritual authority of the pope.  But still, Bellarmine explained, there is a point where the temporal and spiritual realms merge.  The pope must advance humanity's ultimate end, which is the eternal salvation of souls in Heaven.  To achieve this end, the pope can order political sovereigns to punish heretics and pagans--even to the point of torturing and killing them--when they deny those orthodox Christian doctrines necessary for eternal salvation (Bellarmine 2012, 87-120)  

Against those Christians who asserted that political governments should secure religious and intellectual liberty as a way to promote peace among Catholics and Protestants, Bellarmine insisted that the pope must promote the punishment and even killing of Protestants who deny the authority of the Catholic Church to interpret the Bible for them.  Against the argument that the New Testament Christians did not use secular political power to persecute heretics, Bellarmine claimed that when Constantine gained control of the western part of the Roman Empire in 312 and converted to Christianity, this fulfilled the prophecy of Psalm 2:10-11--"Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth.  Serve the Lord with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling" (Bellarmine 2012, 119-20).  But one can easily see that Psalm 2 celebrates the coronation of a new king in ancient Israel as a theocratic ruler, which differs from the teaching in the New Testament.  Bellarmine cannot show that the New Testament supports his defense of theocracy.

As I have argued previously, libertarian Protestants like Milton, Roger Williams, John Locke, and C. S. Lewis have noted that in contrast to the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament, the New Testament churches were voluntary organizations that did not use violent coercion to compel belief in an established orthodoxy.  In that way, the New Testament supports the classical liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration.

Over the past three hundred years, the popes and the Catholic Church have gradually moved towards these liberal principles as the only grounds for resolving the Galileo Affair by avoiding the apparent conflict between the Bible and science.  

As we have seen, the "vehement suspicion of heresy" for which Galileo was condemned was based on two ideas.  The first was Galileo's scientific claim that the Earth revolves daily on its own axis and revolves yearly around the Sun.  The second was his hermeneutical claim that the Bible was not an authority for natural science but an authority only on questions of faith and morals.

The Church began to accept the scientific claim in 1757 when the Congregation of the Index withdrew the decree that prohibited all books teaching the Earth's motion, although Galileo's Dialogue and a few other books remained on the list of prohibited books.  Then, in 1822, the Congregation of the Holy Office (the Inquisition) allowed the Catholic astronomer Joseph Settele could teach the motion of the Earth as an established fact.  Finally, in 1835, the new edition of the Catholic Index of Prohibited Books for the first time omitted the Dialogue.  Oddly, however, there was no public statement from the Church about this.

Then, in 1893, the Church began to accept Galileo's hermeneutical claim about biblical interpretation in the light of science.  In Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Providentissimus Deus, without ever naming Galileo, Leo adopted Galileo's view for how to interpret the Bible so that it is always harmonious with natural science; and Leo employed the same reasoning that Galileo had advanced in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina.

The correct interpretation of God's revelation through the Bible must be guided by the Holy Spirit.  But we must see that Augustine was correct in teaching that the Holy Spirit did not intend to teach human beings scientific truths about the visible universe that were not necessary for salvation.  The Bible's accounts of the natural world use figurative language that would have been familiar to people in biblical times, figurative language that should not be taken literally as a statement of scientific fact.  Quoting the same passages from Augustine quoted by Galileo, Leo argued that when scientists demonstrate some truth about the natural world, Christians must interpret the Bible as compatible with that scientific truth.  As Augustine said, "whatever they can really demonstrate . . . . we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scripture."

Leo also employed Galileo's metaphor of the "two books":  God speaks through the Book of the Bible and through the Book of Nature, and these two truths cannot contradict; so that whatever scientists discover about the Book of Nature must determine our reading of the Bible so that it harmonizes with this natural truth.

In my next post, I will show how Pope John Paul II followed in the path taken by Pope Leo to finally resolve the Galileo Affair--and also the Darwin Affair--and showed how the Church could allow for the Reason/Revelation debate to be conducted in a Lockean liberal social order.

REFERENCES

Bellarmine, Robert. 2012. On Temporal and Spiritual Authority.  Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Finocchiaro, Maurice. 1989. The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Finocchiaro, Maurice. 2005.  Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Finocchiaro, Maurice. 2009. "Myth 8. That Galileo Was Imprisoned and Tortured for Advocating Copernicanism." In Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, and Other Myths About Science and Religion, 68-78.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Galilei, Galileo. 2001. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems. Trans. Stillman Drake. New York: The Modern Library.

Milton, John. Areopagitica, and Other Political Writings of John Milton. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Sobel, Dava. 2011. Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love. New York: Bloomsbury.