Chapter six — THE STARRY MESSENGER

The first science in the modern sense that grew in the Mediterranean civilization was astronomy. It is natural to come to astronomy straight from mathematics; after all, astronomy was developed first, and became a model for all the other sciences, just because it could be turned into exact numbers. That is not an idiosyncrasy on my part. What is an idiosyncrasy is that I should choose to begin the drama of the first Mediterranean science in the New World.

The rudiments of astronomy exist in all cultures, and were evidently important in the concerns of early peoples all over the world. One reason for this is clear. Astronomy is the knowledge that guides us through the cycle of the seasons — for example, by the apparent movement of the sun’. In this way there can be fixed a time when men should plant, should harvest, move their herds, and so on. Therefore all settled cultures have a calendar to guide their plans, and this was true in the New World as it was in the river-basins of Babylon and Egypt.

An example is the civilization of the Mayans that flourished before AD 1000 in the isthmus of America between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. It has a claim to be the highest of the American cultures: it had a written language, skill in engineering, and original arts. The Mayan temple complexes, with their steep pyramids, housed some astronomers, and we have portraits of a group of them on a large altar stone that has survived. The altar commemorates an ancient astronomical congress that met in the year ad 776. Sixteen mathematicians came here to the famous centre of Mayan science, the sacred city of Copan in Central America.

The Mayans had a system of arithmetic which was far ahead of Europe; for example, they had a symbol for zero. They were good mathematicians; nevertheless, they did not map the motions of the stars, except the simplest. Instead, their ritual was obsessed with the passage of time, and this formal concern dominated their astronomy as it did their poems and legends.

When the great conference met at Copan, the Mayan priest astronomers had run into difficulty. We might suppose that such a major difficulty, calling for learned delegates to come from many centres, would turn on some real problem of observation. But we would be wrong. The congress was called to resolve an arithmetical problem of computation that perpetually troubled the Mayan guard­ians of the calendar. They kept two calendars, one sacred and one profane, which were never in step for long; and they spent their ingenuity trying to stop the drift between them. The Mayan astronomers had only simple rules for the planetary motions in the heavens, and they had no concept of their machinery. Their idea of astronomy was purely formal, a matter of keeping their calendars right. That was all that was done in AD 776 when the delegates proudly posed for their portraits.

The point is that astronomy does not stop at the calendar. There is another use among early peoples which, however, was not universal. The movements of the stars in the night sky can also serve to guide the traveller, and particularly the traveller at sea who has no other landmarks. That is what astronomy meant to the navigators of the Mediterra­nean in the Old World. But so far as we can judge, the peoples of the New World did not use astronomy as a scientific guide for land and ocean voyages. And without astronomy it is really not possible to find your way over great distances, or even to have a theory about the shape of the earth and the land and sea on it. Columbus was working with an old and, to our minds, crude astronomy when he set sail for the other side of the world: for instance, he thought that the earth was much smaller than it really is. Yet Columbus found the New World. It cannot be an accident that the New World never thought that the earth is round, and never went out to look for the Old World. It was the Old World which set sail round the earth to discover the New.

Astronomy is not the apex of science or of invention. But it is a test of the cast of temperament and mind that underlies a culture. The seafarers of the Mediterranean since Greek times had a peculiar inquisitiveness that combined adventure with logic — the empirical with the rational — into a single mode of inquiry. The New World did not.

Then did the New World invent nothing? Of course not. Even so primitive a culture as Easter Island made one tremendous invention, the carving of huge and uniform statues. There is nothing like them in the world, and people ask, as usual, all kinds of marginal and faintly irrelevant questions about them. Why were they made like this? How were they transported? How did they get to the places that they are at? But that is not the significant problem. Stonehenge, of a much earlier stone civilization, was much more difficult to put up; so was Avebury, and many other monuments. No, primitive cultures do inch their way through these enormous communal enterprises.

The critical question about these statues is, Why were they all made alike? You see them sitting there, like Diogenes in their barrels, looking at the sky with empty eye-sockets, and watching the sun and the stars go overhead without ever trying to understand them. When the Dutch discovered this island on Easter Sunday in 1722, they said that it had the makings of an earthly paradise. But it did not. An earthly paradise is not made by this empty repetition, like a caged animal going round and round, and making always the same thing. These frozen faces, these frozen frames in a film that is running down, mark a civilization which failed to take the first step on the ascent of rational knowledge. That is the failure of the New World cultures, dying in their own symbolic Ice Age.

Easter Island is over a thousand miles from the nearest inhabited island, which is Pitcairn Island, to the west. It is over fifteen hundred miles from the next, the Juan Fernan­dez Islands to the east, where Alexander Selkirk, the original for Robinson Crusoe, was stranded in 1704. Distances like that cannot be navigated unless you have a model of the heavens and of star positions by which you can tell your way. People often ask about Easter Island, How did men come here? They came here by accident: that is not in question. The question is, Why could they not get off? And they could not get off because they did not have a sense of the movement of the stars by which to find their way.

Why not? One obvious reason is that there is no Pole Star in the southern sky. We know that is important, because it plays a part in the migration of birds, which find their way by the Pole Star. That is perhaps why most bird migration is in the northern hemisphere and not in the southern.

The absence of a Pole Star could be meaningful down here in the southern hemisphere, but it cannot be meaningful for the whole of the New World. Because there is Central America, there is Mexico, there are all sorts of places which also did not have an astronomy and yet which lie north of the equator.

What was wrong there? Nobody knows. I think that they lacked that great dynamic image which so moved the Old World — the wheel. The wheel was only a toy in the New World. But in the Old World it was the greatest image of poetry and science; everything was founded on it. This sense of the heavens moving round their hub inspired Christopher Columbus when he set sail in 1492, and the hub was the round earth. He had it from the Greeks, who believed that the stars were fixed on spheres which made music as they turned. Wheels within wheels. That was the system of Ptolemy that had worked for over a thousand years.

More than a hundred years before Christopher Columbus set sail, the Old World had been able to make a superb clockwork of the starry heavens. It was made by Giovanni de Dondi in Padua in about 1350. It took him sixteen years, and it is sad that the original has not survived. Happily, it has been possible to build a duplicate from his working drawings, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington houses the marvellous model of classical astronomy that Giovanni de Dondi designed.

But more than the mechanical marvel is the intellectual conception, which comes from Aristotle and Ptolemy and the Greeks. De Dondi’s clock is their view of the planets as seen from the earth. From the earth there are seven planets — or so the ancients thought, since they counted the sun also as a planet of the earth. So the clock has seven faces or dials, and on each face rides a planet. The path of the planet on its dial is (approximately) the path that we see from the earth — the clock is about as accurate as observation was when it was made. Where the path looks circular from the earth, it is circular on its dial; that was easy. But where the path of a planet loops back on itself when seen from the earth, de Dondi has a mechanical combination of wheels which copies the epicycles (that is, the rolling of circles on circles) by which Ptolemy had described it.

First, then, the Sun: a circular path, as it seemed then. The next dial shows Mars. Its motion is running on a clockwork wheel inside a wheel. Then Jupiter: more complex wheels within wheels. Next Saturn: wheels within wheels. Then we come to the Moon — her dial is simple, because she truly is a planet of the earth, and her path is shown as circular. Lastly we come to the dials for the two planets that lie between us and the Sun; that is, to Mercury, and finally to Venus. And again the same picture: the wheel that carries Venus turns inside a larger, hypothetical wheel.

It is a marvellous intellectual conception; very complex — but that only makes it more marvellous that in AD 150, not long after the birth of Christ, the Greeks should have been able to conceive and put into mathematics this superb construction. Then what is wrong with it? One thing only: that there are seven dials for the heavens — and the heavens must have one machinery, not seven. But that machinery was not found until Copernicus put the sun at the centre of the heavens in 1543.

Nicolaus Copernicus was a distinguished churchman and a humanist intellectual from Poland, born in 1473. He had studied law and medicine in Italy; he advised his govern­ment on currency reform; and the Pope asked his help on calendar reform. For at least twenty years of his life, roughly, he devoted himself to the modern proposition that nature must be simple. Why were the paths of the planets so complicated? Because, he decided, we look at them from the place where we happen to be standing, the earth. Like the pioneers of perspective, Copernicus asked, Why not look at them from another place? There were good Renaissance reasons, emotional rather than intellectual reasons, that made him choose the golden sun as the other place.

In the middle of all sits the Sun enthroned. In this most beautiful temple, could we place this luminary in any better position from which he can illuminate the whole at once? He is rightly called the Lamp, the Mind, the Ruler of the Universe: Hermes Trismegistus names him the Visible God, Sophocles’ Electra calls him the All-Seeing. So the Sun sits as upon a royal throne, ruling his children, the planets which circle round him.

We know that Copernicus had thought of putting the sun at the centre of the planetary system for a long time. He may have written the first tentative and non-mathemat­ical sketch of his scheme before he was forty. However, this was not a proposal to be made lightly in an age of religious upheaval. By 1543, near seventy, Copernicus had finally braced himself to publish his mathematical descrip­tion of the heavens, what he called De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, The Revolution of the Heavenly Orbs, as a single system moving round the sun. (The word ‘revolution’ has an overtone now which is not astronomical, and that is not an accident. It comes from this time and this topic.) Copernicus died in the same year. It is said that he only saw a copy of his book once, when it was put into his hands on his deathbed.

The coming of the Renaissance as a single rush — in religion, art, literature, music, and mathematical science — was a head-on collision with the medieval system as a whole. To us the place of Aristotle’s mechanics and Ptolemy’s astronomy in the medieval system seems inci­dental. But to the contemporaries of Copernicus, they represented the natural and visible order of the world. The wheel as the Greek ideal of perfect motion had become a petrified god, as rigid as the Mayan calendar or the figures carved on Easter Island.

The system of Copernicus seemed unnatural to his age, even though the planets still run in circles. (It was a younger man, Johannes Kepler, working later in Prague, who showed that the paths are really elliptical.) That was not what bothered the man in the street, or in the pulpit. They were committed to the wheel of the heavens: the hosts of heaven must march around the earth. That had become an article of faith, as if the Church had made up its mind that the system of Ptolemy was invented not by a Levantine Greek but by the Almighty Himself. Clearly the issue was not one of doctrine but of authority. The issue did not come to a head until seventy years later, in Venice.

Two great men were born in the year 1564; one was William Shakespeare in England, the other was Galileo Galilei in Italy. When Shakespeare writes about the drama of power in his own age, he twice brings the scene to the Republic of Venice: once in The Merchant of Venice, and then in Othello. That is because in 1600 the Mediterranean was still the centre of the world, and Venice was the hub of the Mediterranean. And here ambitious men came to work, because they were free to work without restraint: mer­chants, and adventurers, and intellectuals, a host of artists and artisans crowded these streets, as they do now.

The Venetians had the reputation of being a secret and devious people. Venice was a free port, as we would say, and carried with that some of the conspiratorial air which haunts neutral cities like Lisbon and Tangier. It was in Venice that a false patron trapped Giordano Bruno in 1592 and handed him to the Inquisition, which burned him in Rome eight years later.

Certainly the Venetians were a practical people. Galileo had done deep work in fundamental science in Pisa. But what made the Venetians hire him as their professor of mathematics at Padua was, I suspect, his talent for practical inventions. Some of them survive in the historic collection of the Accademia Cimento in Florence, and are exquisitely conceived and executed. There is a convoluted glass apparatus for measuring the expansion of liquids, rather like a thermometer; and a delicate hydrostatic balance to find the density of precious objects, on the principle of Archimedes. And there is something which Galileo, who had a knack for salesmanship, called a ‘Military Compass’, though it is really a calculating instrument not unlike a modern slide-rule. Galileo made and sold them in his own workshop. He wrote a manual for his ‘Military Compass’ and published it in his own house; it was one of the first works of Galileo to get into print. This was sound, commercial science as the Venetians admired it.

So it is no wonder that when, later in 1608, some spectacle-makers from Flanders invented a primitive form of spyglass, they came to try to sell it to the Republic of Venice. But, of course, the Republic had in its service, in the person of Galileo, a scientist and mathematician immensely more powerful than any in Northern Europe — and a much better publicist who, when he had made a telescope, bustled the Venetian Senate to the top of the Campanile to show it off.

Galileo was a short, square, active man with red hair, and rather more children than a bachelor should have. He was forty-five when he heard the news of the Flemish invention, and it electrified him. He thought it out for himself in one night, and made an instrument about as good, with a magnification of three, which is only about a rather superior opera glass. But before he came to the Campanile in Venice, he stepped the magnification up to eight or ten, and then he had a real telescope. With that, from the top of the Campanile, where the horizon is about twenty miles, you can not only see the ship at sea, you can identify it two hours’ sailing and more away. And that was worth a lot of money to the brokers on the Rialto.

Galileo described the events to his brother-in-law in Florence in a letter that he dated 29 August 1609:

You must know, then, that it is nearly two months since news was spread here that in Flanders there had been presented to Count Maurice a spy-glass, made in such a way that very distant things are made by it to look quite close, so that a man two miles away can be distinctly seen. This seemed to me so marvellous an effect that it gave me occasion for thought; and as it appeared to me that it must be founded on the science of perspective, I undertook to think about its fabrication; which I finally found, and so perfectly that one which I made far surpassed the reputation of the Flemish one. And word having reached Venice that I had made one, it is six days since I was called by the Signoria, to which I had to show it together with the entire Senate, to the infinite amazement of all; and there have been numerous gentlemen and senators who, though old, have more than once scaled the stairs of the highest campaniles in Venice to observe at sea sails and vessels so far away that, coming under full sail to port, two hours or more were required before they could be seen without my spy-glass. For in fact the effect of this instrument is to represent an object that is, for example, fifty miles away, as large and near as if it were only five.

Galileo is the creator of the modern scientific method. And he did that in the six months following his triumph on the Campanile, which would have "been enough for anyone else. It occurred to him then that it was not enough to turn the Flanders toy into an instrument of navigation. It could also be turned into an instrument of research, an idea which was altogether new to that age. He stepped up the magnification of the telescope to thirty, and he turned it on the stars. In that way he really did for the first time what we think of as practical science: build the apparatus, do the experiment, publish the results. And that he did between September of 1609 and March of 1610, when he published in Venice the splendid book Sidereus Nuncius, The Starry Messenger, which gave an illustrated account of his new astronomical observations. What did it say?

[I have seen] stars in myriads, which have never been seen before, and which surpass the old, previously known, stars in number more than ten times.

But that which will excite the greatest astonishment by far, and which indeed especially moved me to call the attention of all astronomers and philosophers, is this, namely, that I have discovered four planets, neither known nor observed by any one of the astronomers before my time.

These were the satellites of Jupiter. The Starry Messenger also tells how he turned the telescope on the moon herself. Galileo was the first man to publish maps of the moon. We have his original water-colours.

It is a most beautiful and delightful sight to behold the body of the moon . . . [It] certainly does not possess a smooth and polished surface, but one rough and uneven, and, just like the face of the earth itself, is everywhere full of vast protuberances, deep chasms, and sinuosities.

The British ambassador to the Doge’s court in Venice, Sir Henry Wotton, reported to his superiors in England on the day that The Starry Messenger came out:

The mathematical professor at Padua hath . . . discovered four new planets rolling about the sphere of Jupiter, besides many other unknown fixed stars; likewise . . . that the moon is not spherical, but endued with many prominences . . .The author runneth a fortune to be either exceeding famous or exceeding ridiculous. By the next ship your lordship shall receive from me one of the [optical] instruments, as it is bettered by this man.

The news was sensational. It made a reputation larger even than the triumph among the trading community. And yet it was not altogether welcome, because what Galileo saw in the sky, and revealed to everyone who was willing to look, was that the Ptolemaic heaven simply would not work. Copernicus’s powerful guess had been right, and now stood open and revealed. And like many more recent scientific results, that did not at all please the prejudice of the establishment of his day.

Galileo thought that all he had to do was to show that Copernicus was right, and everybody would listen. That was his first mistake: the mistake of being naive about people’s motives which scientists make all the time. He also thought that his reputation was now large enough for him to be able to go back to his native Florence, leave the rather dreary teaching at Padua which had become burden­some to him, and leave the protection of this essentially anti-clerical, safe Republic of Venice. That was his second and, in the end, fatal mistake.

The successes of the Protestant Reformation in the six­teenth century had caused the Roman Catholic Church to mount a fierce Counter-Reformation. The reaction against Luther was in full cry; the struggle in Europe was for authority. In 1618 the Thirty Years War began. In 1622 Rome created the institution for the propagation of the faith from which we still derive the word propaganda. Catholics and Protestants were embattled in what we should now call a cold war, in which, if Galileo had only known it, no quarter was given to a great man or small. The judgment was very simple on both sides: whoever is not for us is — a heretic. Even so unworldly an interpreter of faith as Cardinal Bellarmine had found the astronomical speculations of Giordano Bruno intolerable, and had sent him to the stake. The Church was a great temporal power, and in that bitter time it was fighting a political crusade in which all means were justified by the end — the ethics of the police state.

Galileo seems to me to have been strangely innocent about the world of politics, and most innocent in thinking that he could outwit it because he was clever. For twenty years and more he moved along a path that led inevitably to his condemnation. It took a long time to undermine him; but there was never any doubt that Galileo would be silenced, because the division between him and those in authority was absolute. They believed that faith should dominate; and Galileo believed that truth should persuade.

That clash of principles and, of course, of personalities came into the open at his trial in 1633. But every political trial has a long hidden history of what went on behind the scenes. And the underground history of what came before the trial lies in the locked Secret Archives of the Vatican. Among all these corridors of documents, there is one modest safe in which the Vatican keeps what it regards as the crucial documents. Here, for example, is the application of Henry VIII for divorce — the refusal of which brought the Reformation to England, and ended the tie to Rome. The trial of Giordano Bruno has not left many documents, for the bulk were destroyed; but what exists is here.

And there is the famous Codex 1181, Proceedings Against Galileo Galilei. The trial was in 1633. And the first remarkable thing is that the documents begin — when? In 1611, at the moment of Galileo’s triumph in Venice, in Florence, and here in Rome, secret information was being laid against Galileo before the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The evidence of the earliest document, not in this file, is that Cardinal Bellarmine instigated inquiries against him. Reports are filed in 1613, 1614, and 1615. By then Galileo himself becomes alarmed. Unbidden, he goes to Rome in order to persuade his friends among the Cardinals not to prohibit the Copernican world system.

But it is too late. In February of 1616, here are the formal words as they stand in draft in the Codex, freely translated:

Propositions to be forbidden:

that the sun is immovable at the centre of the heaven;

that the earth is not at the centre of the heaven, and is not immovable,

but moves by a double motion.

Galileo seems to have escaped any severe censure him­self. At any rate, he is called before the great Cardinal Bellarmine and he is convinced, and has a letter from Bellarmine to say, that he must not hold or defend the Copernican World System — but there the document stops. Unhappily, there is a document here in the record which goes further, and on which the trial is going to turn. But that is all seventeen years in the future.

Meanwhile Galileo goes back to Florence, and he knows two things. One is that the time to defend Copernicus in public is not yet. And the second, that he thinks that there will be such a time. About the first he is right; about the second, no. However, Galileo bided his time, until — when? Until an intellectual Cardinal should be elected Pope: Maffeo Barberini.

That happened in 1623, When Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. The new Pope was a lover of the arts. He loved music; he commissioned the composer Gregorio Allegri to write a Miserere for nine voices, which long afterwards was reserved for the Vatican. The new Pope loved architecture. He wanted to make St Peter’s the centre of Rome. He put the sculptor and architect, Gianlorenzo Bernini, in charge of completing the interior of St Peter’s, and Bernini boldly designed the tall Baldacchino (the canopy over the Papal throne), which is the only worthy addition to Michelangelo’s original design. In his younger days the intellectual Pope had also written poems, one of which was a sonnet of compliments to Galileo on his astronomical writing.

Pope Urban VIII thought of himself as an innovator. He had a confident, impatient turn of mind:

I know better than all the cardinals put together! The sentence of a living Pope is worth more than all the decrees of a hundred dead ones,

he said imperiously. But in fact, Barberini as Pope turned out to be pure baroque: a lavish nepotist, extravagant, domineering, restless in his schemes, and absolutely tone — deaf to the ideas of others. He even had the birds killed in the Vatican gardens because they disturbed him.

Galileo optimistically came to Rome in 1624, and had six long talks in the gardens with the newly elected Pope. He hoped that the intellectual Pope would withdraw, or at least by-pass, the prohibition of 1616 of the world picture of Copernicus. It turned out that Urban VIII would not consider that. But Galileo still hoped — and the officials of the Papal court expected — that Urban VIII would let the new scientific ideas flow quietly into the Church until, imperceptibly, they replaced the old. After all, that was how the heathen ideas of Ptolemy and Aristotle had become Christian doctrine in the first place. So Galileo went on believing that the Pope was on his side, within the limits set by his office, until it came to the testing time. And then he turned out to be most profoundly mistaken.

Their views had really been intellectually irreconcilable from the beginning. Galileo had always held that the ultimate test of a theory must be found in nature.

I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations . . . Nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.

Urban VIII objected that there can be no ultimate test of God’s design, and insisted that Galileo must say that in his book.

It would be an extravagant boldness for anyone to go about to limit and confine the Divine power and wisdom to some one particular conjecture of his own.

This proviso was particularly dear to the Pope. In effect, it blocked Galileo from stating any definite conclusion (even the negative conclusion that Ptolemy was wrong), because it would infringe the right of God to run the universe by miracle, rather than by natural law.

The testing time came in 1632 when Galileo finally got his book, the Dialogue on the Great World Systems, into print. Urban VIII was outraged.

Your Galileo has ventured to meddle with things that he ought not to and with the most important and dangerous subjects which can be stirred up in these days,

he wrote to the Tuscan ambassador on 4 September of that year. In the same month came the fateful order:

His Holiness charges the Inquisitor at Florence to inform Galileo, in the name of the Holy Office, that he is to appear as soon as possible in the course of the month of October at Rome before the Commissary-General of the Holy Office.

The Pope, Maffeo Barberini the friend, Urban VIII, has personally delivered him into the hands of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, whose process is irreversible.

The Dominican cloister of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva was where the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition proceeded against those whose allegiance was in question. It had been created by Pope Paul III in 1542 to stem the spread of Reformation doctrines, being specially consti­tuted ‘against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Commonwealth’. After 1571 it had also been given the power to judge written doctrine, and had instituted the Index of Prohibited Books. The rules of procedure were strict and exact. They had been formalized in 1588 and they were, of course, not the rules of a court. The prisoner did not have a copy either of the charges or of the evidence; he had no counsel to defend him.

There were ten judges at the trial of Galileo: all Cardinals and all Dominicans. One of them was the Pope’s brother and another was the Pope’s nephew. The trial was con­ducted by the Commissar-General of the Inquisition. The hall in which Galileo was tried is now part of the Post Office of Rome, but we know what it looked like in 1633: a ghostly committee room in a club for gentlemen.

We also know exactly the steps by which Galileo came to this pass. It had begun on those walks in the garden with the new Pope in 1624. It was clear that the Pope would not allow the Copernican doctrine to be avowed openly. But there was another way, and the next year Galileo began to write, in Italian, the Dialogue of the Great World Systems, in which one speaker put objections to the theory, and the two other speakers, who were rather cleverer, answered them.

Because, of course, the theory of Copernicus is not self — evident. It is not clear how the earth can fly round the sun once a year, or spin on its own axis once a day, and we not fly off. It is not clear how a weight can be dropped from a high tower and fall vertically to a spinning earth. These objections Galileo answered, as it were, on behalf of Copernicus, long dead. We must never forget that Galileo defied the holy establishment in 1616 and in 1633 in defence of a theory not his own, but a dead man’s, because he believed it true.

But on his own behalf Galileo put into the book that sense that all his science gives us from the time that, as a young man in Pisa, he had first put his hand on his pulse and watched a pendulum. It is the sense that the laws here on earth reach out into the universe and burst right through the crystal spheres. The forces in the sky are of the same kind as those on earth, that is what Galileo asserts; so that mechanical experiments that we perform here can give us information about the stars. By turning his telescope on the moon, on Jupiter, and on the sunspots, he put an end to the classical belief that the heavens are perfect and unchanging, and only the earth is subject to the laws of change.

The book was finished by 1630, and Galileo did not find it easy to get it licensed. The censors were sympathetic, but it soon became clear that there were powerful forces against the book. However, in the end Galileo collected no fewer than four imprimaturs, and early in 1632 the book was published in Florence. It was an instant success, and for Galileo an instant disaster. Almost at once from Rome the thunder came: Stop the presses. Buy back all the copies — which by then had been sold out. Galileo must come to Rome to answer for it. And nothing that he said could countermand that: his age (he was now nearly seventy), his illness (which was genuine), the patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, nothing counted. He must come to Rome.

It was clear that the Pope himself had taken great umbrage at the book. He had found at least one passage which he had insisted on, put in the book in the mouth of the man who really makes rather the impression of a simpleton. The Preparatory Commission for the trial says so in black and white: that the proviso I have quoted which was so dear to the Pope has been put ‘in bocca di un sciocco’ — the defender of tradition whom Galileo had named ‘Simplicius’. It may be that the Pope felt Simplicius to be a caricature of himself; certainly he felt insulted. He believed that Galileo had hoodwinked him, and that his own censors had let him down.

So, on 12 April 1633, Galileo was brought into this room, sat at this table, and answered the questions from the Inquisitor. The questions were addressed to him cour­teously in the intellectual atmosphere which reigned in the Inquisition — in Latin, in the third person. How was he brought to Rome? Is this his book? How did he come to write it? What is in his book? All these questions Galileo expected; he expected to defend the book. But then came a question which he did not expect.

Inquisitor: Was he in Rome, particularly in the year 1616, and for what purpose?

Galileo: I was in Rome in the year 1616 because, hearing doubts expressed on the opinions of Nicolaus Copernicus, I came to find out what views it was suitable to hold.

Inquisitor: Let him say what was decided and made known to him then.

Galileo: In the month of February 1616 Cardinal Bellarmine said to me that to hold the opinion of Copernicus as a proven fact was contrary to the Sacred Scriptures. Therefore it could be neither held nor defended; but it could be taken and used as an hypothesis. In confirmation of this I have a certificate from Cardinal Bellarmine, given on 26 May 1616.

Inquisitor: Whether at that time any other precept was given him by someone else?

Galileo: I do not remember anything else that was said or enjoined upon me.

Inquisitor: If it is stated to him that, in the presence of witnesses, there is the instruction that he must not hold or defend the said opinion, or teach it in any way whatsoever, let him now say whether he remembers.

Galileo: I remember that the instruction was that I was neither to hold nor to defend the said opinion. The other two particulars, that is, neither to teach, nor consider in any way whatever, they are not stated in the certificate on which I rely.

Inquisitor: After the aforesaid precept, did he obtain permission to write the book?

Galileo: I did not seek permission to write this book because I consider that I did not disobey the instruction I had been given.

Inquisitor: When he asked permission to print the book, did he disclose the command of the Sacred Congregation of which we spoke?

Galileo: I said nothing when I sought permission to publish, not having in the book either held or defended the opinion.

Galileo has a signed document which says that he was forbidden only to hold or defend the theory of Copernicus, which means as if it were a proven matter of fact. That was a prohibition laid on every Catholic at the time. The Inquisition claims that there is a document which prohibits Galileo, and Galileo alone, to teach it in any way whatsoever — that is, even by way of discussion or speculation or as a hypothesis. The Inquisition does not have to produce this document. That is not part of the rules of procedure. But we have the document; it is in the Secret Archives, and it is manifestly a forgery — or, at the most charitable, a draft for some suggested meeting which was rejected. It is not signed by Cardinal Bellarmine. It is not signed by the witnesses. It is not signed by the notary. It is not signed by Galileo to show that he received it.

Did the Inquisition really have to stoop to the use of legal quibbles between ‘hold or defend’, or ‘teach in any way whatsoever’, in the face of documents which could not have stood up in any court of law? Yes, it did. There was nothing else to do. The book had been published; it had been passed by several censors. The Pope could rage at the censors now — he ruined his own Secretary because he had been helpful to Galileo. But some remarkable public display had to be made to show that the book was to be condemned (it was on the Index for two hundred years) because of some deceit practised by Galileo. This was why the trial avoided any matters of substance, either in the book or in Copernicus, and was bent on juggling with formulae and documents. Galileo was to appear deliberately to have tricked the censors, and to have acted not only defiantly but dishonestly.

The court did not meet again; the trial ended here, to our surprise. That is to say, Galileo was twice more brought into this room and allowed to testify on his own behalf; but no questions were asked of him. The verdict was reached at a meeting of the Congregation of the Holy Office over which the Pope presided, which laid down absolutely what was to be done. The dissident scientist was to be humiliated; authority was to be shown large not only in action but in intention. Galileo was to retract; and he was to be shown the instruments of torture as if they were to be used.

What that threat meant to a man who had started life as a doctor we can judge from the testimony of a contemporary who had actually suffered the rack and survived it. That was William Lithgow, an Englishman who had been racked in 1620 by the Spanish Inquisition.

I was brought to the rack, then mounted on the top of it. My legs were drawn through the two sides of the three-planked rack. A chord was tied about my ankles. As the levers bent forward, the main force of my knees against the two planks burst asunder the sinews of my hams, and the lids of my knees were crushed. My eyes began to startle, my mouth to foam and froth, and my teeth to chatter like the doubling of a drummer’s sticks. My lips were shivering, my groans were vehement, and blood sprang from my arms, broken sinews, hands and knees. Being loosed from these pinnacles of pain, I was hand-fast set on the floor, with this incessant imploration: ‘Confess! Confess!’

Galileo was not tortured. He was only threatened with torture, twice. His imagination could do the rest. That was the object of the trial, to show men of imagination that they were not immune from the process of primitive, animal fear that was irreversible. But he had already agreed to recant.

I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors general against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Republic, having before my eyes and touching with my hands, the holy Gospels — swear that I have always believed, do now believe, and by God’s help will for the future believe, all that is held, preached, and taught by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church. But whereas — after an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Holy Office, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the centre of the world, and moves, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to Holy Scripture — I wrote and printed a book in which I discuss this doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favour, without presenting any solution of these; and for this cause I have been pronounced by the Holy Office to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the sun is the centre of the world and immovable, and that the earth is not the centre and moves:

Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect what­soever contrary to the said Holy Church; and I swear that in future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office, or to the Inquisitor and ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfil and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by this Holy Office. And, in the event of my contravening, (which God forbid!) any of these my promises, protestations, and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delin­quents. So help me God, and these His holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands.

I, the said Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word at Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June, 1633.

I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above with my own hand.

Galileo was confined for the rest of his life in his villa in Arcetri at some distance from Florence, under strict house arrest. The Pope was implacable. Nothing was to be published. The forbidden doctrine was not to be discussed. Galileo was not even to talk to Protestants. The result was silence among Catholic scientists everywhere from then on. Galileo’s greatest contemporary, Rene Descartes, stopped publishing in France and finally went to Sweden.

Galileo made up his mind to do one thing. He was going to write the book that the trial had interrupted: the book on the New Sciences, by which he meant physics, not in the stars, but concerning matter here on earth. He finished it in 1636, that is, three years after the trial, an old man of seventy-two. Of course he could not get it published, until finally some Protestants in Leyden in the Netherlands printed it two years later. By that time Galileo was totally blind. He writes of himself:

Alas . . . Galileo, your devoted friend and servant, has been for a month totally and incurably blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which by my remarkable observations and clear demonstrations I have enlarged a hundred, nay, a thousand fold beyond the limits universally accepted by the learned men of all previous ages, are now shrivelled up for me into such a narrow compass as is filled by my own bodily sensations.

Among those who came to see Galileo at Arcetri was the young poet John Milton from England preparing for his life’s work, an epic poem that he planned. It is ironic that by the time Milton came to write the great poem, thirty years later, he was totally blind, and he also was dependent on his children to help him finish it.

Milton at the end of his life identified himself with Samson Agonistes, Samson among the Philistines,

Eyeless in Gazaat the Mill with slaves,

who destroyed the Philistine empire at the moment of his death. And that is what Galileo did, against his own will. The effect of the trial and of the imprisonment was to put a total stop to the scientific tradition in the Mediterranean.

From now on the Scientific Revolution moved to Northern Europe. Galileo died, still a prisoner in his house, in 1642. On Christmas Day of the same year, in England, Isaac Newton was born.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 731