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

Conclusions

What can be drawn from all of this?  I would suggest a few conclusions for further discussion.  The first is that quite plainly from the scientific standards of his own time, and, just as important, the criteria he set for himself, Galileo did not prove heliocentrism.

The second, then, is that however much we might lament the Pope, the Inquisition, and others attempting to preserve their power through silencing someone, nonetheless they were the ones demanding proper scientific procedure be secured which Galileo himself could not secure, but relied on his own arrogance and force of personality in many instances.

The third is that the Galileo controversy is a tragedy; but it is not a tragedy of science being suppressed by religion but a tragedy of personalities, of betrayed friendship, of the trauma of a fractured church.  Amidst what the Pope felt was at least a three-fold personal betrayal, along with heightened institutional factors, the church seems to be somewhat tolerant of Galileo in an intolerant age.  For one, that “gorgeous abode” we spoke of above?  This was the mansion provided for Galileo when he was put under house arrest after his condemnation.  A gilded cage is, of course, still a cage (even if it is staffed with your own team of servants as Galileo’s was)—true.  And yet when we read Voltaire’s Letter XIV—On Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton, he writes “the great Galileo at the age of fourscore, groaned away in the dungeons of the Inquisition, because he had demonstrated by irrefragable proofs the motion of the earth.”[1]  He may have groaned—but there were no dungeons.  This perhaps seems a small thing, little more than a simple bit of fanciful embroidery put upon the Galileo story—a lamentable but ultimately harmless bit of color added to the dry bedrock of history. Yet, it is both hard to understate how influential Voltaire’s general thoughts were on Western culture at large,[2]

The fourth is that the Church did not blindly assert scripture against science; rather in holding to a widely held, predictively successful theory, they had good reasons at the time to maintain belief that their interpretation of scripture was in alignment with the best science of their day.

The fifth is that Galileo’s concept of the accommodation of scripture speaking the language of the everyday person and not the scientist was shared by both him and his opponents.  This truth became obscured both because Galileo too readily assumed he had proved his scientific points, and because the Catholic theologians were in a frenzy to refute the Reformation.  It is not without significance that in the Catholic church adopted Galileo’s hermeneutic (which was also Augustine and Aquinas’) nearly verbatim.

The sixth is that we cannot understand the Galileo controversy apart from its historical context.  When we forget the incarnate, interpersonal nature of these conflicts they tend to slip out of the framework of history and bloat into abstractions that spill across time, neatly dividing history into camps like “Religion” and “Science” that never truly existed:

Legend is at work here: or, a measure of illusion. The conflict [of science and religion] was hypostatized [that is, given its own life apart from historical actors], Science and Religion were blown up into balloon duelists, Science containing all knowledge, Religion containing no knowledge, and the two set side by side, with know-nothing using sabre to keep know-all from his place.  Once it had been hypostatized, it became possible to read back the antipathy throughout history, and see … [the] duel through centuries, Science invented by the Macedonian campaigns of Alexander the Great, Christianity suppressing the schools of Alexanderia which were schools of Science, Church putting earth at the centre of the universe and Galileo proving it was not …[3]

Finally, seventh, the Galileo affair was, in terms of science and faith (if one were to take it as such) an anomaly.  Historically, the church was not only the largest monetary contributor to the sciences until the twentieth-century, its theological and spiritual ideas and attitudes[4] invented hospitals and increased their mission and organization;[5] presented the valuation of children as people,[6] even the very notion of the “self” blossomed in a particularly Christian environment;[7] and the spate of works detailing the complex ways Christianity related (and even fostered) emerging social-scientific[8] and even hard-scientific discourse cannot be ignored.[9]

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[1] Voltaire, “On Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton,” in Essays on Literature, Philosophy, Art, History, in The Works of Voltaire trans. William F. Fleming (Paris: Du Mont, 1901), 37:167.

[2] John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

[3] Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind, 162-163.

[4] Gary Ferngren, Medicine and Health-Care in Early Christianity (Maryland: John-Hopkins University Press, 2009).

[5] Guenter B. Risse, Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 69-167.

[6] O.M. Bakke, When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005).

[7] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992).

[8] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2009); Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Meaning of History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1957); Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau: The Transformation of the Divine Into the Civic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Robert H. Nelson, Reaching for Heaven on Earth: The Theological Meaning of Economics (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993).

[9] Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Reijer Hooykaas, Religion and the Rise of Modern Science (British Columbia: Regent College Publishing, 2000); Eugene M. Klaaren, Religious Origins of Modern Science (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 1977); Margaret Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).