Galileo Again: Reevaluating Galileo’s Conflict With the Church and Its Significance for Today (Part Four)
When the Inquisition—which, while we
cannot go into it here, is also a much misunderstood and complex length of
history[1]—could
act and execute orders without the Pope knowing, this should also lead us to caution
about speaking in broad terms of Galileo vs. “The Church” as if the latter were
a homogenous institution. While Galileo
still had many supporters, his ego and temper made him quite good at alienating
his other friends within the church as well.
Earlier in 1623 he published a work on comets attacking a lead Jesuit
astronomer named Orazio Grazzi—calling him, among other things, a “fraud” a
“simpleton” and accusing him of intellectual thievery, fundamentally alienating
the powerful Jesuits who had until then remained on friendly terms with Galileo
despite many disagreements.[2] At this point in time, we might suspect, if
one had alienated both the Pope and the Jesuits, one would be in a precarious
situation.
To make matters worse, we must also
understand that Galileo’s relationship to various factions within the church,
including the Pope, was situated in the wider context of the Catholic church’s
reaction to the Protestant Reformation.
To betray the Pope is never a good idea, but it is especially unwise in
an environment in which the Church is on high alert and driven for political
considerations into very conservative positions that just a hundred years
earlier would have been considered extreme.
As historian Richard Blackwell aptly puts it:
If Copernicus’
book had been published either one hundred years earlier, or one hundred years
later, the Galileo affair would probably not have happened. But, in fact, it was published in 1543, when
the Reformation was in full bloom, and the [Catholic] Counter Reformation was
just beginning. Hence it was by 1616 all
of the actors and cultural forces were in place for the drama of the Galileo
affair to begin.[3]
From its inception, Copernicanism had
been paired with Protestantism because of its early acceptance and promotion
among the theologians of Wittenberg.
Later Copernicanism as a revolution of worldview would be paralleled by
the Reformers themselves as the necessary counterpart to their reform of the
church (in fact, later polemic of science against Christianity is often merely
secularized discourse borrowed from early Protestant polemics against
Catholics).[4] This goes a long way to explain the pushback
against Galileo in the form of Biblical passages, but it also reveals how
complex the situation was, and our inability to reduce it to simply two sides.
To demonstrate this let us play a brief
game, where I will cite two passages, and you can guess to yourself which was
written by Galileo, and which was written by Cardinal Bellarmine, who had the
task of admonishing Galileo on behalf of the Inquisition in 1616:
1.) I say
that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the
world and the earth in the third heaven, and that the sun does not circle the
earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great
care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we
do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.
2.) In
the learned books of worldly authors are contained some propositions about
nature which are truly demonstrated., and others which are simply taught; in
regard to the former [that which is demonstrated] the task of wise theologians
is to show that they are not contrary to Holy Scripture; as for the latter
(which are taught but not demonstrated with necessity), if they contain
anything contrary to the Holy Writ, then they must be considered indubitably
false and must be demonstrated such by every possible means.
Both statements appear to say that if
heliocentrism could be demonstrated, then we would have to be cautious about
our understanding of the meaning of scripture in those passages that appear to
teach geocentrism. On this they are
united. The second statement appears,
however, slightly more reactionary: propositions taught but not demonstrated
with certainty that conflict with scripture must be considered false and
“demonstrated [false] by any means necessary.”
Since I told everyone up front this is a game, you might guess my
trickery: Galileo’s is actually the second, more conservative sounding
statement, while Bellarmine’s is the first, more “liberal” sounding![5]
Thus the complexity of the situation
regarding reading scripture appears: both Bellarmine and Galileo are here
embodying the ancient practice of reading scriptures according to principles
of “accommodation” that goes back to
scripture itself. Many of us may not like the term “accommodation” because it
sounds like we are compromising truth.
But in fact accommodation is an attempt precisely to preserve truth by
understanding scripture’s meaning. When, for example, we say we love the
Lord our God with all of our “heart,” we do not thereby have to commit our
anatomy textbooks to the flame when we learn contrary to some Hebrew concepts
of anatomy the heart is not the literal seat of emotions.[6] Or, when we say “the sun rises,” or “God’s
strong arm,” we understand this language is accommodated to our frame of
reference and the structure of our language.
Because of the Reformation, Bellarmine
and the official position at the Council of Trent did harden. Because of the
Protestant emphasis on scripture alone, the Catholic church at this time
vehemently opposed individual interpretation which in turn reflected poorly on
Galileo, making him seem a Protestant to many.
Regarding this, we can obviously lament—though I think we also must
accept how important tradition is for every individual interpretation
(acknowledged or not). But the important
point is that our lamentations here do not amount to “Church vs. Science.”
The fact that the Church Fathers
believed in geocentrism was added as well as a nearly unbreakable witness. And of course the reigning paradigm of
Aristotelianism (which itself hardened in reaction to Protestant rejection of
transubstantiation) reinforced Biblical texts that could imply a geocentric
universe. Galileo countered by noting
that the Fathers did not explicitly teach geocentrism, they merely assumed it,
not ever being presented with alternatives.
All of these factors were relevant.
Perhaps above all was the fact Galileo thought he had scientifically
proven his point, while Bellarmine and others did not. It is on this
point that the readings of scripture turned.[7]
The obvious question needs to be asked then:
didn’t Galileo prove the earth moved
around the sun? Since our time is now
brief the answer has to be on all accounts: no.
Of course, he ended up being
right, though not always for the right reasons (what he thought was his
strongest argument, the movement of the tides indicating the sloshing of the
earth in motion, turned out to be completely wrong). And, to be sure, he had many fantastic arguments
against Aristotelianism, but this is
not the same as proving heliocentrism,
which still had a number of strong arguments against it. For one, if the earth moved, many reasoned,
why do the stars not display parallax (that is, the apparent shift of position
of a star against background objects).
The only reason we would not see parallax from a moving earth was if the
universe was many orders of magnitude larger than all sides agreed upon (we must remember the size of the universe
was not at issue until much later). By
Galileo’s own estimation of the size of the universe, parallax should have been
visible. And we have to remember the
above quote: it was Galileo who
placed the burden of absolute certainty upon himself before scriptural
interpretation would change!
Heliocentrism as a scientific
hypothesis for Galileo was really more of a cluster of aesthetic intuitions and
anti-Aristotelian arguments held together by assertion and the force of
Galileo’s wit. It never rose to the
level of proof.[8] In a famous article “Crisis or Aesthetic,”
Owen Gingerich (the same man who proved the existence of a wide network of
scholars who had read Copernicus) argues against Thomas Kuhn[9]
that (at least in this case) scientific theories do not, in fact, face “crises”
as they transition into new theories, but are rather the assertion of a new
intuition or aesthetic sense.[10]
Gingrich contests the long-held story
that the transition to heliocentrism happened in part because the Ptolemaic
system began to falter under the increasing complexity needed to maintain its
predictive accuracy.[11] This is in fact not the case, and Gingerich
argues that for any given prediction we would be hard pressed to discern the
difference in accuracy between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems.[12] Copernicus in fact mainly asserted
heliocentrism because he thought it produced a more beautiful and harmonious
system (for example, having the earth rotate on its axis in a twenty-four hour
period, rather than the entire universe), and so displayed God’s glory
better—as such Copernicanism, far from being opposed to the Church at the time,
was built on fundamentally theological premises!
Moreover, Galileo is sometimes painted
as an empiricist over and against a Church that refuses to “see things as they
are” (remember the inscription on the column next to the Villa de Medici, where
Galileo is condemned “because he saw” what the Church did not). It is true that through his telescope (which
he contrary to some legends, did not invent, though he did improve) he did see
many things that contradicted the Ptolemaic (and Aristotelian) systems. For example the heavens for Aristotle were,
from the moon and beyond, supposed to be immutable and perfect. However, Galileo clearly saw craters and
pocks on the moons surface through his newly crafted lenses, refuting this
notion (and, in addition, putting to one side the objection that the earth as
rocky and bulky, could not move—as the moon clearly moved through the sky and
yet now was understood as made of the same stuff as the earth). He saw moons around Jupiter, proving our moon
was not alone in rotating around a non-central body (an “ugly and ad hoc
hypothesis” according to Galileo’s critics).[13] Most decisively, he observed Venus as a full
disk in the night sky, which by the accounts of the Ptolemaic system should never
be possible.
Nonetheless, as we close here, three
brief things must be mentioned. The
first is that tales of Galileo doing experiments have been proven to be false,
or at least incredibly dubious based on historical evidence.[14] That Galileo did thought experiments to demonstrate his position is surely
correct—but in this he is following the method of his Medieval predecessors.[15] The second point will again seem strange to
us, nonetheless it must be emphasized in order to bring out the character of
the real nature of the conflict. We
think of Galileo as a defender of common sense against the Church who was so
stubborn and ignorant as to think they could suppress through injunction what
one could plainly see through the telescope.
But the fact is that Galileo was the one who was attempting to overturn
common sense and pry it apart from reasoned argument. Galileo was not relying
on experience against the church, so much as creating an entirely new
theoretical framework in which to see common sense observation; so that when we
see “the sun rise and set” or when we drop a stone from a tower and it does not
land four-hundred feet away as we might expect if the earth itself moved,[16]
these are not automatically observational
refutations of heliocentrism. [17]
Moreover, not only did Galileo’s
telescopic observations not prove heliocentrism by any stretch of the
imagination, Galileo was—we do well to remember—asking us to trust observation
through an instrument over observation by sense alone. When we think of Galileo’s telescope, we may
be imparting images of our own modern giant observatories, or even modern
personal telescopes. But such precision was
unheard of in Galileo’s day—where many professional astronomers across Europe with aid of Galileo’s personal telescope could
not duplicate his findings. Johannes
Kepler’s pupil, with the funny name of Horky, wrote on the 24th and
25th of April 1610 for example that Galileo had taken his own
personal telescope to the house of the astronomer Magini of Bologna to demonstrate
to twenty-four professors in attendance: “I never slept on the 24th
or 25th of April,” writes an almost breathless Horky:
But I
tested the instrument of Galileo in a thousand ways, both on things here below
and on those above. Below it works wonderfully [emphasis added]; in the heavens it deceives [emphasis added] … as some fixed stars
are seen as double. I have as witnesses
most excellent men and noble doctors … and all have admitted the instrument to
deceive … This silenced Galileo and on the 26th he sadly left quite
early in the morning … not even thanking Magini for the splendid meal.[18]
Magini himself, writing a letter to
Kepler, added regarding the occasion at his abode:
He
[Galileo] has achieved nothing; for more than twenty learned men were present
yet nobody has seen the new planets distinctly; he [Galileo] will hardly be
able to keep them.[19]
Then Kepler himself—the great champion
of heliocentrism!—sent a letter to Galileo that must have stung deeply: “I do not
want to hide it from you that quite a few Italians have sent letters to Prague
asserting that they could not see those stars [the moons of Jupiter] with your
own telescope.”[20] Later, in his Optics, Kepler in fact uses naked
eye observations against Galileo’s telescope: “It seemed [as I looked
through Galileo’s telescope] that something seemed to be missing on the
outermost periphery [of the moon],”[21]
as the telescope seemed to warp and smooth the outermost edges of observation.
If replication of results was a sign of
good science, Galileo’s was not necessarily of that sort.
[1] One of the most measured introductions remains Edward
Peters, Inquisition (New York: The
Free Press, 1988).
[2] Lindberg, “Galileo, The Church, And the Cosmos,” 50.
[3] Richard Blackwell, “Galileo Galilei,” in Science & Religion,
108.
[4] John Hedley Brooke, Science
and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014), 110-158; Peter Harrison, The
Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge
University, 1998), 64-121.
[5] For Bellarmine’s statement cf. “Cardinal R. Bellarmine to
P. Foscarini, 12 April 1615” in Maurice Finocchiaro, ed., The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (California: University
of California Press, 1989), 68; for Galileo’s statement, cf. Galileo “Letter to
the Grand Duchess Christina (1615)” in Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair, 101-102.
[6] For this example cf. John Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins
Debate (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2015), 201.
[7] Cf. Howell, God’s Two
Books, 209-227.
[8] Lindberg, “Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos,” 43: “So
Galileo had arguments, rather than proof.”
[9] Thomas Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions 3rd ed. (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1996).
[10] Owen Gingerich, “Crisis versus Aesthetic in the Copernican
Revolution,” Vistas in Astronomy 17:1
(1975): 85-95. Not just against Kuhn,
Gingerich’s theory is also an interesting counterpoint to the otherwise
excellent work of George Steiner, Real
Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 76 who contrasts
scientific with aesthetic theory.
Steiner writes “no interpretive critical analysis, doctrine, or program
is superseded, is erased, by any later construction,” but in science it is
otherwise: “in Copernicanism they did and correct that of Ptolemy.” In this sense this is to Steiner’s benefit,
as his general thesis regarding the aesthetic nature of the humanities
revealing God can to this extent be also extended to the sciences.
[11] Cf. Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 69.
[12] Gingerich, “Crisis versus Aesthetic,” 89.
[13] Lindberg, “Galileo, The Church, and the Cosmos,” 42.
[14] Cf. John L. Heilbron, “Myth 5: That Galileo Publicly
Refuted Aristotle’s Conclusions About
Motion By Repeated Experiments Made From the Campinile of Pisa,” in Newton’s Apple and Other Myths About Science,
40-47.
[15] Funkenstein, Theology
and the Scientific Imagination, 152-179.
[16] The tower argument against a moving platform of earth can
be found in Aristotle, De Caelo 296b22;
Ptolemy, Syntaxis i.8.
[17] See the lengthy but absolutely fantastic discussion of
Galileo and Copernicus in relation to general scientific method in Paul
Feyerabend, Against Method (London:
Verso, 2010), 61-147.
[18] Quoted in Feyerabend, Against
Method, 85.
[19] Quoted in Ibid.
[20] Quoted in Ibid.
[21] Quoted in Ibid., 89.
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