In December of 1613, Galileo received a letter from Father
Castelli, a close friend of his and a fellow astronomer. Castelli
had recently dined with the royal family of Tuscany, and he reported
how the Grand Duchess Christina had criticized the heliocentric
theory for its repudiation of Holy Scripture. Galileo fired back
a letter to his friend that would later be published, with the
author's permission, across Italy. In it, he declared that scriptural
literalism had no place in scientific inquiry. "Inasmuch as the
Bible calls for an interpretation differing from the immediate
sense of the words," he wrote, "it seems to me that as an authority
in mathematical controversy it has very little standing... I believe
that natural processes which we perceive by careful observation
or deduce by cogent demonstration cannot be refuted by passages
from the Bible." Had he halted there, all might have been well,
but he went on to offer his own positions on matters of theology:
"The primary purpose of the Holy Writ is to worship God and save
souls," he argued; his imperious, lecturing tone ruffled feathers
and, in its apparent contempt for the teaching authority of the
Church, smacked of Protestantism.
The anti-Galilean powers in the Church now had their ammunition.
In December 1614, a Dominican priest named Tommasso Caccini viciously
condemned the astronomer in a sermon in the Florentine church of
Santa Maria Novella. Caccini took as his text a verse in the New Testament's
Book of Acts, in which an angel asks Christ's disciples, "Ye men
of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into the heavens?" The verse
supplied an excellent pun on Galileo's name–the "men of Galilee"
could be understood as the followers of Galileo–although it did
not comment on astronomy. In Caccini's hands, however, the words
became an assault on the new astronomy, which, he sermonized, ran
completely contrary to Christian faith and sacred scripture. The
sermon provoked a furor, and although Caccini's superiors in the
Dominican order hastily repudiated his words, the damage was done.
In mid-March of 1615, Caccini issued a formal complaint against
Galileo with the Inquisition, the Church office responsible for
rooting out heresy. The Inquisition began to gather evidence against
the astronomer in preparation for a trial.
Galileo fought back. He corresponded with Bellarmine,
offering the cardinal alternate interpretations of scripture that
would accommodate a heliocentric cosmology. He wrote to Grand
Duchess Christina of Tuscany, hoping for support from the Medici,
and declaring that "nothing physical which sense-experience sets
before out eyes, or which necessary demonstrations prove to us,
ought to be called into question (much less condemned) upon the
testimony of Biblical passages which may have some different meaning beneath
their words." Then, in December of 1615, he decided to travel
to Rome himself, perhaps remembering his successful tour through
the holy city five years before. Once there, he hoped, he could
convert the Catholic hierarchy to the Copernican cause. He carried
with him new evidence, as well: a "Treatise on the Tides" which
linked the ebb and flow of the ocean to the movement of the earth
around the sun. (Ironically, this new "evidence," intended to augment
the earlier findings, in fact contained no legitimacy: as we now
know, the moon's gravity causes the tides, though Galileo's false
hypothesis would not be disproved in his lifetime.)
Meanwhile, upon reaching Rome, Galileo found that he had underestimated
the obstacles in his path. Bellarmine was an intelligent man,
who seems to have genuinely liked Galileo, but his mind was made
up: to accept the Copernican theory would require a wholesale rethinking
of the Church's view of the natural world, and while he allowed
that such a reconsideration might be necessary, it was not something
to be rushed into without definite, ironclad proof that Ptolemy
and Aristotle were mistaken and Copernicus correct. Therefore,
while heliocentricity could be suggested and discussed as a hypothesis,
Galileo's insistence that it was definitely and positively true
constituted a breaching of proper boundaries. Of course, the level
of "proof" that Bellarmine demanded could never be achieved–in
his view, no empirical findings could override the Bible's authority–and
the effect of Bellarmine's position was thus to paralyze scientific
inquiry.
Worse still, the Church soon took up a position exceeding
Bellarmine's cautious hostility. In March 1615 a commission appointed
by Pope Paul V delivered its opinion on the heliocentricity-geocentricity
debate, declaring solemnly (and irrationally) that "the view that
the sun stands motionless at the center of the universe is foolish,
philosophically false, and utterly heretical... the view that the
earth is not the center of the universe and even has a daily rotation
is philosophically false, and at least an erroneous belief." The
Pope, no intellectual heavyweight himself, gave his blessing to
the pronouncement. (Ironically, of course, the sun does not stand motionless at
the center of the universe–it rotates at the center
of the solar system–so the commission was partially, albeit unintentionally,
correct.) Bellarmine was delegated the duty of requesting Galileo's
submission to this edict, and it was for this that the aging cardinal,
one of the great minds of his age, would be forever remembered.
His mind–conditioned by the long struggle to defend the Church
from Protestantism at all costs–could not make the leap of vision
necessary to recognize the terrible error being made by his beloved
Church.
With the threat of the Inquisition looming over his head,
Galileo agreed to submit to the edict. He lingered in Rome for
a few months, and then departed in June 1615, forlornly writing
to a friend that "of all the hatreds, none is greater than that
of ignorance against knowledge."
