Chapter 1: the Crime of Galileo

Chapter 1: The Crime of Galileo When did the notion emerge that knowledge about the natural environment ought to go public rather than be kept as the special preserve of a few adepts? Perhaps at various times across the centuries. But never was it so hotly contest- ed as in the seventeenth century; by no one was it so powerfully supported as by Galileo Galilei. After he joined the hitherto distinct genres of scientific prose and vernacular rhetoric in a powerful, new, and persuasive synthesis and sent his works to the printer for distribution, the communication of natural knowledge would never be the same again. The dramatic changes that occurred between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries in the disciplines loosely grouped under the label “natural philosophy” and later to be known as “science” seem to be summed up in his career. Let us place this now somewhat neglected aspect of the “Galileo Affair” into clearer focus. 1 Within the context of late Renaissance theories of reading, the dangers that ecclesiastical and university authorities perceived in Galileo’s effort to diffuse his discoveries make much more sense, and his innovations seem all the more strikingly original. 2 Among the many readings of the “Affair,” one that takes account of the role of the marketplace for natural knowledge seems to answer more of the lingering questions and promises to provide a more meaningful basis for our investigations of the period that followed. It might be helpful to recall the major issues. 3 In 1616, partly in response to writings by Galileo, Nicholas Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres , written over half a century before to prove that the earth moved about the sun, was prohibited “until corrected.” The implication of this action was that heliocentrism was a dangerous topic; and Galileo received a friendly warning to this effect from none other than Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. It was an unusual intrusion of the Church into what seemed to some observers (including Galileo) like purely intellectual matters out of its purview. Believing that the truth should and would eventually prevail, he went on to complete the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems , a heliocentric tour de force. He an- ticipated some trouble from the prepublication censorship mechanism that was currently used in all the states of Italy as well as everywhere else in early mod- ern Europe. To stay on the safe side, he had the work approved not by just any 1 2 Chapter 1 censor but by the Master of the Sacred Palace in Rome, and later by the Floren- tine Inquisitor so it could be printed in Florence. None of this sufficed; and he was condemned for his views as well as for paying insufficient attention to the warning of Bellarmine, who was now dead and unable to defend him. One problem of interpreting the events is that the evidence itself is fraught with ambiguities. To cite just one example, Galileo carried with him to the trial an affidavit signed by Bellarmine in 1616 saying that there had been no person- al censure against him in the Copernicus condemnation and repeating the friendly warning, given in person at their meeting, to steer clear of such matters. If this is all that happened at the meeting, Galileo could be expected to publish the Dialogue , as long as he was careful. The officials at the 1633 trial produced a transcript of the Bellarmine meeting in which Galileo was specifically en- joined not to write or say anything concerning heliocentrism. In this case, the Dialogue was a foolhardy violation. One theory, still unverified, is that the transcript was scribbled into the register by Galileo’s enemies after the Bellarmine meeting, to ensure his downfall. Over the years, the events have been scrutinized from two basic standpoints. One approach, let us call it “epistemological,” has examined the contents of the debates, attempting to trace the emergence of a new cosmology and the faith- science controversy in the history of thought. Another approach, let us call it “sociological,” has focussed on circumstances external to the debates them- selves that may have determined the outcome—the personalities of the protago- nists, the private grudges, the public interests, the structure of authority. Recent scholarship, attempting to combine these two approaches, seems to have raised more questions than it has answered. In one version, a cryptographic reading of certain hidden innuendoes in the documents, combined with a microscopic view of the cultural environment, reveals that the controversy was not about heliocentrism at all. 4 Instead, Gali- leo’s misfortunes derived from his support for the matter theory known as atomism. By contending that the outward appearances and properties of things came from the various combinations of tiny particles that made them up, he put himself in the center of what was to become, after heliocentrism, the second noisi- est debate of seventeenth-century science. And for the Church, the stakes in this debate were almost as high as they were in the heliocentric debate. If atomism took root, what would happen to views about the Eucharist during Transubstan- tiation, based on the scholastic form-plus-substance analysis of matter? The transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ seemed somehow comprehensible in terms of a change of substance with unchanged form. If the appearances of things were produced not by form but by various combinations of tiny particles, how could the body of Christ seem like bread? No wonder Church officials ganged up on Galileo. And their campaign against the Dialogue was merely a convenient pretext for an attack on The Assayer , where Galileo gave the bare outlines of a theory of matter based on tiny particles. But perhaps, as another version suggests, Galileo’s downfall was not due mainly to his ideas at all. Perhaps it was due to his involvement with the structure of baroque authority known as the “court.” 5 Surely, the key to advancement The Crime of Galileo 3 in seventeenth-century society was successful courtiership, and Rome was the court par excellence. Moreover, from the point of view of the ruler’s prestige, executing swift and unmitigated justice on a turncoat courtier was as important as having good courtiers around. Galileo, having gained renown by his courtiership in Florence, experienced a precipitous fall from grace as a client of Pope Urban VIII. Although not officially a papal courtier, by taking his own argu- ments and himself too seriously in the Dialogue , this interpretation goes, Gali- leo showed himself to be a potential nuisance and a bore. And just then, the pope was in need of eliminating all potential nuisances and bores around him who might detract from his prestige and interfere with his task of facing down the French and the Spanish in the Thirty Years’ War. The trial was merely the formal mechanism for bringing about this predetermined outcome. There is some truth in all of these views. No doubt, the Galileo Affair belongs to the history of ideas just as much as it belongs to the history of society or politics. No doubt Galileo’s ideas on many subjects collided with contempo- rary conceptions, and not just those concerning the movement of the earth. And no doubt networking was as helpful for advancement in seventeenth-century society as disappointing one’s patrons was dangerous. But even if we look at events strictly from the perspective of the history of ideas, Galileo’s crime lay less in what he said than in how he said it. After all, few of the ideas in the case originated with him; some, for instance, came from Copernicus. 6 And many contemporaries who held similar ones were not perse- cuted—for instance, the French philosopher-cleric Pierre Gassendi and his fel- low countryman, the mathematician Gilles Personne de Roberval. Nor was the crime directly concerned with his patronage arrangement. From the outset of his career, Galileo deliberately sought to transcend the narrow boundaries of courts and to secure his position by gaining a broad base of support for his ideas out- side among the general public. In his now-classic book, The Crime of Galileo , Giorgio de Santillana sug- gested that Galileo’s crime lay in his effort to appeal over the heads of contem- porary authorities by taking his case for a new scientific approach and a new cosmology directly to the people. There were significant problems with the way Santillana presented his thesis. To some degree his argument was flawed by his pressing desire to show parallels between the Galileo case and the case of J. Robert Oppenheimer in his own time. In both cases, he argued, a respectable institution (the Church on the one hand, the U.S. government on the other) had been badly served by the misguided zeal of its own bureaucrats and the benign neglect of its leaders. However, unlike in the 1950s, there was no witch hunt in the first decades of the seventeenth century. 7 These were decades of relative relaxation in the activities of the Inquisition, at least compared to earlier decades. Furthermore, Galileo’s adversaries directed their anger almost exclusively at Galileo himself. And the case of the philosopher Giordano Bruno from Cam- pania was not, as Santillana suggests, of the same sort; although the documents have been lost, he was burned in 1600 most probably for his views about the transmigration of souls, an almost exclusively religious question, and not for his astronomical ideas. 4 Chapter 1 Nonetheless, a better understanding of the novelty of the way Galileo com- municated his scientific ideas suggests that Santillana’s thesis may be well worth modifying and presenting anew.

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