While the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World
Systems initially enjoyed a favorable response, Galileo's
enemies soon went on the attack, and he had given them plenty of
ammunition in his new work. The Dialogue harshly
criticized the Jesuits, now his dedicated foes; the work referred
to one Jesuit, Father Christopher Scheiner, as "vain and foolish."
These unnecessary barbs were typical of the undiplomatic and combative
Galileo, and they proved his undoing. The Jesuits closed ranks
against him, and as the Inquisition began to look more closely
at the work, they went to Urban VIII and pointed out a particularly
unfortunate passage in the Dialogue, in which
Simplicio, the anti-Copernican foil, repeats almost verbatim
arguments that the Pope himself had made to Galileo nearly a decade
before. Seeing his own arguments repeated by the "simple" character
in the dialogue, Urban felt betrayed, and his long-held sympathy
for Galileo evaporated. "He did not fear to make sport of me,"
the Pope declared. The Inquisition now took charge, forbidding
further sale of the work in August 1632, and on September 23, Galileo
was summoned to Rome. His friends protested that his advanced age
made such a trip unadvisable, but their arguments fell on deaf
ears; the Church insisted on his appearance in trial, and in February,
1633 Galileo made his way to the holy city.
The astronomer was an old man now, nearing seventy, and
weakened by ailments real and imaginary. For two months, the Inquisition
delayed, and Galileo stayed in the home of the Tuscan ambassador,
his mood fluctuating between hope and despair. Then, on April 12,
authorities summoned him to the Palace of the Inquisition, in the
Vatican, and interrogated him for the first time. He was accused
of having violated Cardinal Bellarmine's 1616 injunction against
regarding teaching Copernicus's system as "fact"; in response, he
protested that he had taught it as hypothesis only, and not as truth,
and defended the publication of his Dialogue by
insisting that he had received all the necessary permissions by
the Church. His interrogators made little headway, and after the
end of this first session, they kept him as a prisoner in the Vatican
until April 30, where he lived in well appointed but confining quarters.
He hoped for the intervention of Urban VIII, whom he still counted
as a friend, but the Pope was deliberately distancing himself from
the proceedings. Meanwhile, Galileo had fallen ill, and his inquisitors
took advantage of his condition, by hinting at the tortures that
might await him if he did not confess his errors.
Letters from his daughter Virginia–now the deeply pious
Sister Maria Celeste–urged him to submit to God's will, and the
first cracks appeared in Galileo's armor. On April 30, he confessed
to having been too prideful in this Dialogue, and
having stated the Copernican case too strongly; he offered to write
a hundred additional pages to correct this difficulty. This suggestion
was a fantasy, but authorities permitted him to return to the Tuscan
embassy. On May 10, the Inquisition examined him again, and now
he begged for mercy, asking his judges to consider his advanced
age and take pity on him. Everyone now wanted a speedy resolution
to the matter, but somehow it dragged on into June, when the Inquisition
finally broke its famous prisoner: they declared him guilty of
heresy and promised mercy only on the condition that he renounce
his errors; Galileo, his will to resist gone, declared himself
to be firmly convinced of the truth of Ptolemy's system. Publicly
kneeling before his tribunal, he declared, "with a sincere heart
and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the said errors
and heresies, and generally every other error and heresy contrary
to the... Holy Church, and I swear that I will nevermore in future
say or assert anything... which may give rise to a similar suspicion
of me." Later legend would assert that he added, under his breath,
"Eppur si muove!" (And yet it does move!), but
this is mere dramatic additive. The Inquisition had won. Galileo
was sentenced to "the prison of this Holy Office for a period determinable
at our pleasure;" he was first confined in Rome, then transferred
to a friend's house in Siena, and then allowed to live under house
arrest in his own villa outside Florence. He would remain there
until his death eight years later.
The trial of Galileo brought to fruition what had begun
with the mistaken decision of Paul VI's 1616 commission that the
Church turn its back on the Copernican system. The event constituted
a personal disaster for Galileo, and his rash behavior and talent
for making enemies and alienating friends must bear some of the
blame for the tragedy. But the real guilt lay with the Church,
and the cardinals and inquisitors who could not muster vision when
vision was required; they had dealt Catholicism, and all of European
culture, a terrible blow: Counter-Reformation zeal had triumphed
over Renaissance creativity, and in the great Catholic countries–Italy, Spain
and France–a pall fell over scientific endeavor and philosophical
speculation. Nothing, not even prohibition by the Inquisition, could
halt the spread of the Dialogue and the triumph
of the Copernican system, but after Galileo, science and philosophy
would lose its Renaissance vibrancy. Meanwhile, a terrible example
had been set, a martyr had been made, and a great, unnecessary
divide had been opened between religion and science, when they
might have walked together in their search for truth about the
universe, at least for the next few centuries.
