Galileo Again: Reevaluating Galileo’s Conflict With the Church and Its Significance for Today (Part Two)

I.b Getting Rid of More Preconceptions: Christians Believed in a Flat Earth

In addition to putting Galileo in the context of a larger tradition of inquiry that took place within the Christian tradition (thereby already softening many of the exaggerated features of his “scientific heroism” over and against a scientifically backwards Church), we might also mention a few more misconceptions related to this.  The first would undoubtedly be that of the myth of the “flat earth.”  This idea will often cause Galileo to be linked to other individuals lionized for their apparent rebellion against an ignorant church, such as Christopher Columbus. [1] 

As Jeffrey Burton Russell puts it in his book-length study on the myth of the flat earth, however: “in reality, there were no skeptics [of a round earth].  All educated people throughout Europe knew the earth’s spherical shape and its approximate circumference.”[2]  C.S. Lewis (who, we sometimes forget because of his popular fiction and apologetic works, had an actual day-job holding the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge) wrote in his survey of the Medieval period: “Physically considered, the earth is a globe; all the authors of the High Middle Ages are agreed on this. … The implications of a spherical earth were fully grasped.”[3]  The list of who knew this is so vast as to constitute essentially every educated person for the last two and a half millennia: Aristotle, Plato, The Venerable Bede, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Eratosthenes, Ptolemy, and on and on.  In fact we have a record of five authors who did not believe in a spherical earth, but no one liked them much anyway.  Lactantius was condemned for many of his views, and the other main contender, Cosmas Indicopleustas, was completely unknown until he was rediscovered in 1706: “No medieval author knew Cosmas, and his text was considered an authority of the ‘Dark Ages’ only after its English publication in 1897!” says Umberto Eco.[4] A question thus emerges: how did the myth of the myth of the flat earth, start?

In a remarkable piece of detective work, Jeffery Burton Russell traces the emergence of the myth through history.  We cannot follow all of his footsteps here, but he traces it back in its first form to Copernicus, who likened those who did not believe the earth rotated around the sun to Lactantius, “though Copernicus was careful not to blanket either ancient or medieval Christianity with Lactantius’ error.”[5]  The real perpetrator comes with a man named Washington Irving (1783-1859). Irving’s work was the Da Vinci Code of its day: he was writing fiction with historical research thrown in, in order to satirize his distaste for pedantic historians.  “Irving knew how to use libraries and archives, and the public was fooled into taking his literary game as history.”[6]  In this work, a very artful and elaborate account of Columbus standing before the Inquisitors attempting to convince them of his journey appears.  Where they cite scripture, Columbus recounts facts.  One does not need much imagination to see how this mimics perceptions of the Galileo affair (and one would think, now also reinforces such a scene).  The account is hard to resist, “but it is a fabrication.” Irving wanted to turn Columbus into a mythical figure, “the hero of a romantic novel, or an epic modern Odysseus or a Faust … or an American Adam, the First Man of the New World …” Irving’s work was a sensation, but its intent, it seems, lost on everyone. 

From there Irving’s work found its way into the pages of two men who will frequently show up in the concept of warfare between science and religion, as they essentially invented the genre: John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White, both of whom were the most responsible for propagating the images of an “eternal war” between Science and Religion.  Given that the title “Flat Earther” is still used to indicate anyone who holds dogmatically to an outlandish view in the face of science, one can imagine the sort of currency Irving’s tale had for men who wanted to portray the length of history as one of the heroic struggles of science in the face of dogmatic repression.  “[White and Draper] saw the Flat Error as a powerful weapon.”[7]  And so they shaped their histories around it.  Indeed it is in this context as well that White dusted off the mostly-forgotten tale of Galileo to make the most of what he saw as the parallel between him and Columbus.  

White, a better scholar than Draper, knew that those like Augustine and Aquinas—quite inconveniently for his thesis—were in full support of a round earth.  So he painted them as unique lights, lost in the majority of Christian faith.  Yet, if your argument relies on painting Augustine and Aquinas as a “minority” in the Christian thought of the West, something has gone wrong. At one point, White cites Irving in support of the Columbus tale.  When Russell traces this citation in White’s work back to Irving, he finds a footnote supporting Irving’s story for the Flat Earth and Columbus which reads in total: “Mss. Bibliot. Roi. Fr.” Though this is academic shorthand, it may as well have been a sorcerer’s incantation, for all the good it did.  Literally it reads: “manuscripts in the French royal library.”[8]  Which is to say, at this point Irving is having a laugh by saying: “somewhere in the French royal library there are unnamed documents which totally support my story.” 

            I.c Getting Rid of More Preconceptions: Copernicus and the Theologians

Nor is this the only fabrication or misinterpretation that factors into how we preconceive Galileo.  While obviously there would be too many other examples to recount we will end this section with two more that are quite pertinent to reinforcing this generally stereotypical image of a dogmatic church attempting to repress the advance the of sciences.  Both topics have to do with Copernicus’ relation to theology.

The first notion is the widely repeated idea that by moving the Sun, not the Earth, to the center of the cosmos, he demoted human significance as seen in Scripture.  Naming what he perceived as the “three great shocks” to the pride of man (including his own work and Darwin), Sigmund Freud writes of Copernicus that mankind was stunned “when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable.”[9]

While this is a widely held conception it is in fact a complete misinterpretation.[10]  First, while scripture certainly does have a view of the dignity of humankind, this is hardly expressed because of human centrality.  Scripture articulates frequent bewilderment that God should care about humanity at all (e.g. Psalm 8) and, as Jonah found out the hard way, it scarcely matters where one is located, as God is right there with you.

Such an interpretation of Copernicus is, moreover, to misinterpret the center as being the best piece of real estate—which is not how Aristotelian physics worked, either.  The center was a place of heaviness, where the material refuse of the cosmos gathered, with the outer spheres of the heavens becoming more and more spiritual and pure the further out you went.  In Dante’s Inferno, for example, the center of the universe is lowest circle of Hell itself.  In fact, some of the initial scandal of Copernicanism was (quite humorously) the exact opposite of what is typically supposed: by moving the earth from the center it was elevating the status of mankind into the celestial heavens and demoting the sun![11]  Moreover, in a real way Copernicus’ universe was—however vast—quite finite.  He merely inverted the Ptolemaic universe, so though the sun now sat at the center with the earth moving in its course, yet the whole was still quite sealed by the outer lid of stars.  It was not until Giordano Bruno that Copernicanism was linked to an infinite universe, and even then only intermittently.[12]

As such though it is often thought to be so, the Galileo controversy actually had nothing to do with any supposed heliocentric diminution of the cosmos.  The origin of this myth? Eighteenth-century French philosophes like Voltaire and, you guessed it, later John William Draper and Andrew Dixon White who are always our two prime suspects.

To close this section with one more myth affecting our interpretation of Galileo, we turn to some remarkable detective work reminiscent of what we opened with regarding the flat earth. The famed Copernican scholar Edward Rosen traced down another quite bizarre myth. He noticed that in Bertrand Russell’s immensely popular History of Western Philosophy[13] Russell puts a very anti-Copernican phrase into the mouth of Calvin, thus reinforcing the idea that in general the church was against the scientific revolution of heliocentrism[14]: “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” 

Rosen, who is an expert on the reception of Copernican theory, was quite interested in this juicy quote.  Now, Russell’s book was originally based on lectures, and so Russell up front apologizes and says that he has not tracked all his sources down for citation.  This is what happened here.  As Russell did note, however, he was “quite indebted” to Andrew Dixon White.  Thus Rosen turns to this work next to find the source for this quotable Calvin.  When he compared how a similar quote appeared in a later work from White, to the one in Russell, Rosen concluded “we shall feel fully justified that it was from White, not Calvin, that Russell took the anti-Copernican exclamation that interests us.”[15]  White himself got the quote from one F.W. Farrer, but from there the trail again goes cold, as Farrer does not cite where he got the quote in Calvin’s works.  In fact, as his journey continued, Rosen came to the conclusion that not only did Calvin never utter this sentence, looking over the entirety of Calvin’s works, Calvin had most likely never even heard of Copernicus.  “What was Calvin’s attitude toward Copernicus?  Never having heard of him, Calvin had no attitude towards Copernicus.”[16]  And yet, in addition to Russell, Rosen notes nine other prominent historians had used this phantom quote to push the historical Warfare agenda.  Indeed, if you walk into a Powell’s bookstore today, you will still see Russell’s work in the “recommended reads” section despite its age.

---

[1] Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 109.

[2] Jeffery Burton Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (Connecticut: Prager Publishers, 1997), 2.

[3] C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 140-141.

[4] Umberto Eco, “The Force of Falsity,” in Serendipities: Language and Lunacy (New York: Columbia University, 1998), 5.

[5] Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth, 70.

[6] Ibid., 50.

[7] Ibid., 43.

[8] Ibid., 96n.148.

[9] Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: A Course of Twenty-Eight Lectures Delivered at the University of Vienna trans. Joan Riviere (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922), 240-241.

[10] Dennis R. Danielson, “Myth 6: That Copernicanism Demoted Humans from the Center of the Cosmos,” in Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail: And Other Myths About Science and Religion (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008), 50-59.

[11] Ibid., 54.

[12] Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 91ff.

[13] Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), 528.

[14] Edward Rosen, “Calvin’s Attitude Toward Copernicus,” in Copernicus and His Successors (London: Hambledon Press, 1995), 161-173.

[15] Ibid., 163.

[16] Ibid., 171.