Galileo Again: Reevaluating Galileo’s Conflict With the Church and Its Significance for Today

Exactly three-hundred and eighty-three years ago and four days, on April 12^th 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition (also known as the “Holy Office”) for “holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the sun is the center of the world.”[1]  If one were to make the trek to the Villa Medici, a gorgeous abode that sits bright-eyed on Rome’s Pincian Hill in Italy, next to it one can read engraved in a column “it was here that Galileo was kept prisoner by the Holy Office, being guilty of having seen that the earth moves around the sun.”[2]  The implication being, of course, that Galileo saw the truth, and so was condemned. Galileo to many is a name more or less equated with scientific genius.  Moreover, he is also representative—much like the Scopes trial is for us in America[3]—of science suffering at the hands of a backward Christian religion.  The situation is ripe for drama.  Indeed the twentieth-century German playwright Berthold Brecht took this quite literally and put it on stage in his 1938 Life of Galileo.  When the actor Richard Griffiths, who at that point had been playing the part of Galileo, reviewed a then-recent biography of the man, he wrote his oft-quoted phrase: “by stifling the truth, which was there for anyone to see, the Church destroyed its credibility with science.”[4]  

Similarly, when scientist Alice Dreger visited Italy with her mother to gaze upon several sacred objects of scientific history—Galileo’s telescopes—she recounts a very humorous (and somewhat disturbing) encounter with an object of another kind: Galileo’s mummified middle finger.  Like the relic of a saint it stood in its repellant glamor beneath glass, and she looked down tentatively at her English guidebook in curiosity at such a strange sight.  A century after his death Galileo was moved into a grander grave as his reputation grew.  During the transition, an unnamed devotee cut off Galileo’s middle digit, and another man named Tommaso Perelli provided a shrine with the engraving: “This is the finger, belonging to the illustrious hand that ran through the skies, pointing at the immense spaces, singling out new stars, offering to the senses a marvelous apparatus of crafted glass, and with wise daring they could reach where neither Enceladus nor Tiphaeus [both giants of Greek mythology] ever reached.”  Dreger notes, of course, that the middle-finger does not mean for Italians what it does for Americans and the English,

But the more I thought about it—about Galileo’s contentious nature, his belief in the righteousness of science, his ego, his burning knowledge that he and Copernicus were right, and especially about what the Church put him through—the more amusing the middle finger thrust skyward seemed.  … Eventually I couldn’t stand it anymore, I burst out laughing, dropping the tour brochure on the floor.  I picked it up and found the docent giving me a rather severe look.  But I couldn’t help myself and started laughing uncontrollably again.[5]

It will be our purpose in this brief presentation to question just this caricature.  While we will get into details in a moment, we will see that by using categories familiar to us like “church vs. science” or “reason vs. faith” we not only distort how historical actors would have understood themselves (lest we forget, for example, that even after his condemnation Galileo considered himself a good Catholic) but we also misperceive and overlook the actual issues.  Again, as we will talk about momentarily, Galileo in fact did not prove by the standards and resources available at the time that the earth rotated around the sun.  The initial opposition was not that Galileo taught such things, but that he boasted of its truth when he in fact could not demonstrate it.  As such, far from this conflict being one of theology against science in this instance, the church found fault in Galileo for not following the rigors of scientific demonstration.  This clash was as much about a conflict between differing concepts of scientific reason as it was about theological truth.  Moreover, the interesting lines of battle were not necessarily between Copernicans (that is, those who taught the earth went around the sun) and non-Copernicans.  As Kenneth J. Howell as recently argued, the main issue was rather between “realists and antirealists” in science.[6]  Just what this means will hopefully become clearer in a moment, but for now suffice it to say many of the conflicts that caused blood to boil were not what we would think of them today.

To make our case we will—like any good sermon—proceed in three sections.  The first section will be trying to undo a few misunderstandings that we may bring with us regarding how the Galileo affair relates to the general history of the church.  Sometimes other associations—with things like the Dark Ages of Church ignorance, or the concept of a flat earth—shape how we perceive Galileo’s significance.  While we certainly cannot undo all prejudice in this regard, we will hopefully be able to unburden ourselves of a few misunderstandings.  Then, in the second section, we will go over the actual conflict that Galileo had with the Church, to understand what was actually at stake and how the actors understood themselves.  In the final section we will briefly ask about what all of this might mean, and what the relevance of the Galileo affair might have for us today.

            I. Mythic History: Getting Rid of Some Preconceptions

            I.a The Dark Ages

“Clever metaphors die hard,” as the opening line to James Moore’s seminal book, The Post-Darwinian Controversies reads.  Moore is referring in this instance to the tenacious persistence of “military metaphors” used in literature—both academic and popular—to describe the historical relationship between science and religion: “Through constant repetition in historical and philosophical exposition of every kind, from pulpit, platform, and printed page, the idea of science and religion at ‘war’ has become an integral part of Western intellectual culture.”[7] “One of the most remarkable developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” concurs historian and scientist Alister McGrath, “has been the relentless advance of the perception that there exists a permanent, essential conflict between the natural sciences and religion.”[8]  “The secular public,” writes the historian of science Ronald Numbers, “if it thinks about such issues at all, knows that organized religion has always opposed scientific progress. … The religious public knows that science has taken the leading role in corroding faith.”[9]  Histories, perceived and imagined, all-too-real or otherwise, mark and inscribe day-to-day judgments about the general course of relationship between Christianity and the sciences.

In his book The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan introduces us to what he calls his “baloney detector.”  Sadly, he never turns it on himself.  In his famed booked Cosmos he fabricates the story that Christians burned down the library of Alexandria, invents the Christian murder of the female Greek philosopher Hypatia, and presents a chart that nothing scientific happened between A.D. 415 and A.D. 1543.  These stories may as well have been drawn in crayon for all their credibility—and yet their popularity as stories spread like a virus.

Such is the level of saturation that these warfare and military metaphors have taken in the popular imagination, and even in some academic quarters,[10] that it will no doubt come as a surprise that very few—if any—historians of science speak in this manner any more.  In fact, in the last thirty years or so not only do historians of science not speak in terms of “Warfare,” they have “mount[ed] a sustained attack on the thesis.”[11]  The concept of warfare really only exists “in the cliché-bound mind” of some popular works of polemical history.[12]  The Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart laments this reality with his typical panache: we are, he says, often left with little more than “attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty … ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors.”[13]

A first important thing to consider is the very concept of what is often called “The Dark Ages.”  This period of time is considered to follow what many lament as the fall of classical Greek science, which languished under Christian obscurity until it was revived by Copernicus and Galileo.  As such Galileo’s trial is made all the more stark, as these figures not only display like marionettes a timeless conflict between faith and science playing itself out, but they now stand against a one thousand year history of pitch darkness.  Galileo, as a precursor to science, seems to be a figure desperately trying to claw his way toward the light, as priests merely drag him back into the pit. As one historian puts it:

The aura surrounding Galileo as founder of modern science disposes many of those writing about him to start in media res [that is, in the middle of things] with an account of his discoveries with the telescope, or with his dialogues on the world systems and the two new sciences, or with the trial and the tragic events surrounding it.  Frequently, implicit in such beginnings is the attitude that Galileo had no forebears and stands apart from history, this despite the fact that he was forty-six years old when he wrote his Siderius Nuncius [Starry Messenger] and then in his late sixties and early seventies when he composed his two other masterpieces.[14]

Charles Freeman for example, in his popular book The Closing of the Western Mind laments something he (quite peculiarly) labels the “Greek empirical tradition.”  He continues: for more than a thousand years after the “last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world [he says by Proclus (c.410-485)]” such studies then lay dormant “until Copernicus [1473-1543].”[15] 

It is a little difficult to know where to start with this statement because it is so thoroughly wrong.[16]  Edward Grant in his book The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages notes that some of the advances made must not “obscure the historical fact that [Galileo] inherited … a tradition [of mathematical and physical reasoning] that is directly traceable to the Latin Middle Ages, to Avempace, and beyond to Philoponus.”[17]  That John Philoponus lived in the fifth and sixth centuries should tell us something of how far and wide the tradition spreads.  Grant argues as such “The revolution in physics and cosmology was not the result of new questions put to nature in place of medieval questions.  It was, at least initially, more a matter of finding new answers to old questions, answers that sometimes involved experiments, which were exceptional occurrences in the Middle Ages.”[18]  No longer then can we represent Copernicus, Galileo, or even the Scientific Revolution at large as somehow being independent of what came before, or produced apart from a fervently Christian theological environment.

In fact, the Middle Ages (admittedly somewhat counterintuitively) have been something of a hot topic in studies that are attempting to reevaluate the significance of religious contributions to modern science,[19] or indeed in simply overturning the ridiculous mythology that serves as a placeholder for actual engagement with this intellectually rich and diverse period.[20]  Margaret Osler notes that such reevaluations of contributions in the previously denounced “Middle Ages” have the simultaneous effect of calling into question certain interpretations of the “Scientific Revolution.”  And since both periods are in general taken as pictures and symbols for religion and science in general these reevaluations of the “periodization”[21] of history into something called the “Dark” or “Middle” ages and something called “The Scientific Revolution” and “Enlightenment,” simultaneously lead to affecting “general assumptions of the relationship between science and religion.”[22]  In fact one commentator (an atheist moreover) recently dubbed that this idea of a “conflict narrative” and a “Christian Dark Ages” that gets drudged up time and again is “the most wrong thing on the Internet Ever.”[23] For those familiar with this thing called “The Internet” and just how wrong things can be on there, that is certainly saying something.

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[1] For the full condemnation cf. Maurice Finnochiorro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (California: University of California, 1989), 287-292. Quote on 288.

[2] Quoted in “The Contemporary Relevance of the Galileo Affair,” in John Brooke and Geoffery Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 106.

[3] The Scopes Trial itself is not what many often make of it.  Cf. the wonderful recent study of Adam Shapiro, Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks, and the Anti-Evolution Movement in American Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2013).

[4] Richard Griffiths, “Very, very frightening,” The Daily Telegraph (5^th of November, 1994): 6.

[5] Account taken from Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholars Search for Justice (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 17-18.

[6] Kenneth J. Howell, God’s Two Books: Copernican Cosmology and Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern Science (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 2002), 210.

[7] James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwinism in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 19.

[8] Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (N.L.: Doubleday, 2006), 79.

[9] Ronald Numbers, “Introduction,” in Ronald Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail, And Other Myths About Science and Religion (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2009), 6.

[10] Cf. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 77-101.

[11] Collin A. Russell, “The Conflict of Science and Religion,” in Gary B. Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4.

[12] Ronald Numbers, “Science and Religion,” Osiris, 2^nd ser. (1985): 65.

[13] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale, 2009), 19. 

[14] William A. Wallace, “Galileo’s Pisan Studies in Science and Philosophy,” in Peter Machamer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Galileo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 27.

[15] Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise and Fall of Reason (New York: Knopf, 2003), 322.

[16] Michael H. Shank, “Myth 1: That There Was No Scientific Activity Between Greek Antiquity and the Scientific Revolution,” in Ronald Numbers and Kostas Kampourakis, eds., Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015), writes “ironically, this is just the sort of behavior that is imputed to those stupid medieval folks” (8).

[17] Edward Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional, and Intellectual Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[18] Grant, The Foundations of Modern Science, 198.

[19] James Hannam, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2011); Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

[20] See the wonderful study by the former Curator at the Louvre, Regine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000).; On the emergence of this trend in scholarship, cf. H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), esp. 45-151.

[21] Cf. Jacques Le Goff, Must We Divide History Into Periods? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania, 2008).

[22] Margaret Osler, “Religion and the Changing Historiography of the Scientific Revolution,” in Thomas Dixon, Geoffery Cantor, and Stephen Pumfrey, eds., Science and Religion: New Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 71.; Peter Harrison, “Was There a Scientific Revolution?” European Review vol.15 no.4 (2007): 445-457; Peter Dear, “Historiography of Not-So-Recent Science,” Hist. Sci. 1 (2012): 197-211.

[23] Tim O’Neil, “The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews ‘God’s Philosophers,’” at http://www.strangenotions.com/gods-philosophers/ accessed April 06, 2016 at 3:15pm.