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

II. The Galileo Controversy: What Was It About?

Now that we have eliminated a few misconceptions up front, we can turn to Galileo’s feud with the church itself.  We saw, by way of summary, that Galileo cannot really be seen as a solitary scientific genius nearly single-handedly rekindling the spirit of Greek science after Christians quenched the flame in the Dark Ages.  Nor can the church’s rejection of Galileo’s heliocentrism be equated with the idea of a flat earth, the demotion of the status of humanity, or indeed a more generalized rejection of Copernicanism by theologians like Calvin.  So, then, what was it?

A first key question that we should ask is: why Galileo?  If, as many suppose, this was just revolutionary science necessarily conflicting with a dogmatically repressive church—why did the church not persecute Copernicus, whose work clearly did challenge the reigning Aristotelianism of its day, and had at the time of Galileo’s condemnation been circulating for nearly ninety-years?  For contrary to some popular opinion, Copernicus’ work caused hardly a stir in the Catholic church during that time.

Initially this was explained by several scholars who said quite simply that nearly no one had read Copernicus’ On the Revolution of the Heavens due to it being filled with four-hundred pages of technical detail, and being hard to acquire to boot.  This has since become an indefensible thesis due to the meticulous and life-long work of Owen Gingerich, Senior Emeritus Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.  Gingerich, by visiting nearly every existing first and second edition copy of Copernicus’ On the Revolution of the Heavens around the world, tracked the intricate network of early scholars that read and appreciated the book by way of chasing down the notes written in the margins of these copies.[1]  In fact, some of the main proponents of Copernican theory were Martin Luther’s colleagues at Wittenberg, though as Robert Westman notes a diverse array of theologies attached themselves to Copernican interpretation.[2]

In truth, there really is no single answer to the “Why Galileo” question.  We will only be able to cover a few.  As the famed historian of science David C. Lindberg puts it, we tend to forget (and these large-scale versions of the Galileo story tend to obscure) that “strictly speaking, ideas cannot clash and theoretical claims cannot, of themselves, engage in combat.  It is people who fight over theoretical and methodological claims, people who clash over ideological issues. And when people are involved, human interests and local circumstances are inevitably present as well.”[3] Or, as he says elsewhere “We must constantly remind ourselves that ‘science,’ ‘Christianity,’ ‘theology,’ and ‘the church’ are abstractions rather than really existing things,” and it is a serious mistake to allow our abstractions to become absolute objects serving as placeholders for scholarly historical analysis.[4]

As such even something like Galileo’s personal relationship to Maffeo Barbarini—who became Pope Urban VIII—come into play.  Indeed, it may surprise a few that Galileo was initially very good friends with the same Pope who eventually condemned him.  Maffeo Barbarini was known widely as a man of letters and learning, and Galileo was delighted to hear of his ascendancy to the Papal throne.  When the controversy over the motion of the earth first arose, Barbarini himself reported later in a letter that he had not approved of the wording of the prohibition against Copernicanism: “It was never our intention [to prohibit Copernicanism]; and if [it] had been left to us, that decree … would not even have been made.”[5]  Barberini had even written a poem exalting astronomy as a moral and glorious enterprise.[6]

So what went wrong?  For one, Galileo ended up placing a pro-Aristotelian argument with which he disagreed deeply into the mouth of one of his characters, Simplicio, often the dullard in Galileo’s work Dialogue Considering Two Chief World Systems.  The problem was that this was the exact argument related to Galileo by the Pope in a personal conversation, so its source was unmistakable.  This did not, as one might imagine, amuse the Pope, who became enraged that his friend would betray his trust and defame the Papacy in this manner.

Worse still was another feature of Copernicanism in Galileo’s Dialogue that will take a bit of explanation.  Above, we saw the claim by Kenneth Howell that the really interesting division was not between Copernicans and non-Copernicans.  Rather it was between realists and non-realists in science.  In Aristotelianism, which was the reigning scientific paradigm of the day, there was a hierarchy of the different sciences that placed physical considerations above mathematics.  This was because mathematics was thought to only describe static systems such as perfect geometrical shapes, but could not describe dynamical change.[7] 

Since it was obvious to all that things appear to change in physical reality, this meant that mathematical reasoning could not describe physical, dynamic systems.  As such, mathematical reasoning could at most “save the appearances” of motion, that is, mathematics could give adequate prediction (say, of stellar movements) but such mathematical considerations said nothing about the literal physical layout of the cosmos.  In this sense mathematics were often seen as functional, not realist.  This is perhaps too simplistic, but it does nonetheless reveal that the indebtedness of many circles of theologians and the church to Aristotle makes the Galileo case hardly so clear-cut as a “science” vs. “faith” situation.  The question in one sense was how much “the church was bound to protect Aristotelian principles.”[8]

Initially, part of the reason Copernicanism did not excite caution from the churches is because of an introduction by the Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander arguing that what was contained therein was only mathematical hypothesis, not physical theory.  As such, it could be used fruitfully to predict stellar motion and help set the calendar, but should not be taken as physically describing the layout of the cosmos.  This introduction was written anonymously, so until Johannes Kepler discovered that Osiander had written it, many assumed this was Copernicus’ gloss on his own system.

This leads us back to Galileo and the Pope.  In an earlier conversation, the Pope told Galileo:

Let us grant you that all of your demonstrations are sound and that it is entirely possible for things to stand as you say. … [Yet] you will have to concede to us that God can, conceivably, have arranged things in an entirely different manner, while yet bringing about the effects that we see.  And if this possibility exists, which might still preserve in their literal truth the sayings of Scripture, it is not for us mortals to try to force those holy words to mean what to us, from here, may appear to be the situation.[9]

Here arises an immediate curiosity for the “science vs. faith” narrative.  At this time there was a rising emphasis on the effects of the fall on man’s capacity to know.  One might think this would prohibit scientific investigation but this is not so.  As Peter Harrison has argued it led to an increased emphasis on the necessity of empirically verified results, so that one could be sure the weakness of human nature not interfere with understanding.[10]  Quite ironically then, the theological attitude that led to the rise of empiricism in Francis Bacon and later in Robert Boyle (for example),[11] is here being used by the Pope against Galileo!

Regardless, Galileo took the Pope’s agreement with his hypothesis here as tacit permission to write on heliocentrism as long as he presented it as a mathematical hypothesis.  Unbeknownst to the Pope (and, if we are to believe him, unbeknownst to Galileo as well) an injunction from the Inquisition had already been issued that Galileo had to “abandon completely” the idea that the sun stood motionless at the center of the world.”  And so the Pope’s fury redoubled: not only did Galileo’s representation in the Dialogue seem to strongly recommend heliocentrism as physically true against the Pope’s explicit caution that Galileo did not have proof of this, the Pope again felt betrayed that Galileo should have approached him about this at all without informing him about the standing order from the Inquisition.  To the Pope’s mind, if one included these along with the mocking character of Simplicio, Galileo had now betrayed his friendship three times (we are reminded here of Peter denying Jesus of Galilee, only in reverse: now a Galileian denies Peter). 

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[1] For this fascinating story, see Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus (New York: Walker Books, 2004).

[2] Westman, “The Copernicans and the Churches,” 98.

[3] David C. Lindberg, “Galileo, The Church, and the Cosmos,” in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago: 2003), 33.

[4] Ronald Numbers, “Medieval Science and Religion,” in Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, 57.; William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: The Invention of a Modern Concept (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale, 2012); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology (Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

[5] Quoted in Brooke and Cantor, Reconstructing Nature, 109.

[6] Ibid., 110.

[7] Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 34.

[8] Brooke and Cantor, Reconstructing Nature 111.

[9] Quoted in Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 166.

[10] Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

[11] On this as well, see: Steven Shapin and Simon Schaeffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2011).