RICHARD BLACKWELL
9 Could there be another Galileo case?
Galileo's conflict with the Roman Catholic Church has long held a very special fascination. The prime reason for this, of course, is that the Galileo affair has come to be seen as the paradigm case of the troubled interaction between science and religion.
Another reason is the sheer dramatic power of the events involved, which continue to attract the attention of the scholar, the novelist, and the playwright. Images easily multiply of the flawed tragic hero, of the struggle for intellectual freedom, of the unprotected individual pitted against a powerful institution committed to its self-preservation, and of plots and subplots and counterplots worthy of the best mystery writer.
At yet another level, the Galileo case has, unfortunately, long provided many with an ideal arena for ideological posturing for and against both the scientific and the religious world views.
Still another reason for our fascination with the Galileo case is that it irresistibly invites comparisons with the unstable interactions between science and religion in other ages as well as in our own. What can we learn from it, and what have we learned from it, for our understanding of the relations between contemporary scientific culture and our inherited religious beliefs and traditions? Are we now confident that we have reached a stage of peaceful coexistence between science and religion? And, if so, why? Or are we still uneasy about the possibility of future conflicts arising between the two? In short, could there be another Galileo case?
At first sight, there seems to be no grounds for concern here at all. No one today would seriously wonder whether the Earth revolves around the Sun, or vice versa, no matter what the literal sense of the Bible might be. This is a completely settled issue. Even the Catholic Church, in its most recent formal reassessment of the Galileo case, which was announced on the last day of October of 1992, has frankly admitted that the Church was wrong in its decisions and that its errors were based in large part on its use of erroneous principles of biblical exegesis. With these admissions, the Galileo case has supposedly come to an end.
We might mention in passing that Pope John Paul II's address1 on the occasion just mentioned is peculiar in several respects. First, in some ways it develops its own line of thought about the Galileo case, one not based on the findings of the four study groups of the Commission which the Pope himself had established a dozen years earlier, specifically to reexamine the case for him.
Second, although it is admitted that errors were committed, these errors are not specifically identified. Moreover, they are attributed repeatedly to the theological advisers at the time of the Galileo case, and not to the members of the hierarchy who made the decisions, nor to the two popes who approved them.
Third, it is not clear from the documents whether the errors admitted relate to the doctrinal decision that Copernicanism is false, or to the later judicial decision that Galileo was personally guilty of heresy, or to both. We will see later how important that distinction is.
These ambiguities in the latest Vatican statements will no doubt keep the issue alive among Galileo scholars for years to come. Nevertheless, there is no present concern that the Galileo case itself will reoccur, if by that we mean a rekindling of the same specific debates.
But this leaves the more general question unanswered. Could something reasonably similar to what happened in the Galileo case happen again in the future over some other scientific theory, for example, evolution or a comprehensive neurophysiological account of the human mind, if such were to be discovered some day? This is the fallout issue in the contemporary scene to which the Galileo case invites attention.
Even on this more general level, Pope John Paul II is quite optimistic. At the same meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences referred to above, at which the Galileo case was to be closed, the Pope said:
From the Galileo affair, we can learn a lesson that remains valid in relation to similar situations that occur today and that may occur in the future … There exist two realms of knowledge, one that has its source in revelation and one that reason can discover by its own power. To the latter belong especially the experimental sciences and philosophy. The distinction between the two realms of knowledge ought not to be understood as opposition. The two realms are not altogether foreign to each other; they have points of contact. The methodologies proper to each make it possible to bring out different aspects of reality.2
The Pope's views here are quite in keeping with the tradition and break no new ground. He is saying that in regard to their subject matters, science and religion usually encompass different realms, and thus they do not come into confrontation in such cases. But they do overlap on some topics. It is in this relatively small but often quite significant area of common subject matter that conflicts can arise. But such conflicts can be avoided, we are told, if we are sufficiently attentive to the different sources from which the two bodies of knowledge are derived, namely, revelation for religion and the power of human reason based on empirical facts for science. As a result, we are presented in science and religion with two quite distinct realms of knowledge. And, most importantly, these two bodies of knowledge are declared not to be in opposition but to be complementary to each other.
This latter point is, of course, the key claim. Why is there – or, at least, why should there be – no conflict? The answer given is that the methodologies of science and religion are different, a point that was not at all adequately understood by the contestants on both sides in the Galileo case, as the pope correctly indicates elsewhere in his address. If this be granted, then these different methodologies reveal different aspects of reality, thus making science and religion not merely consistent but even complementary.
As an ideal, one can hardly quarrel with this analysis. But does it hold up when embedded in the concrete daily life of science and religion? The focus is on the methodologies. But does a more finegrained analysis and comparison of the method of appealing to revelation in religion and of the method of appealing to reasoned empirical facts in science support the optimistic view of a peaceful coexistence between science and religion?
We are skeptical as to whether this is so. We wish to argue, rather, that such a fine-grained analysis uncovers what we will call a “logic of centralized authority,” which is essentially required by the scripturally based revelation that serves as the source of religion, at least as this has been understood in the Catholic tradition.
Furthermore, this “logic of centralized authority” is in certain respects antithetical to the scientific method, which is based on an authority, indeed, but on an authority of a quite different type. If so, then no matter how much agreement there may be between science and religion at the level of their respective world-views, there still remains a potential locus of conflict between the two at the level of competing authorities. Their methodologies can and do lead to conflict. That is the root of the problem.
The above remarks constitute the main thesis that we wish to defend in this paper. The historical and philosophical analyses that follow are an attempt to defend this thesis.
GALILEO'S TWO TRIALS
So we ask again, “Could there be another Galileo case?” The first step toward answering that question is to take a close look at precisely what happened to Galileo in the seventeenth century. This will reveal quite explicitly that what we have called the “logic of centralized authority” was at the heart of the matter in the Galileo case.
The central point to be noted at the outset is that the Galileo affair consisted of two trials, not one. The first occurred in February 1616, and the second seventeen years later in the spring of 1633. Both trials were conducted by the Congregation of the Holy Office in Rome, and in each case, the final judgment of the Congregation was submitted to and approved by the reigning pope.
The similarities end there. In the two trials, there were very substantial differences in the defendants being judged, in the complaints brought against them, in the character of the relevant evidence and theological argumentation, and even in the judicial processes and technical legal grounds used to justify the proceedings.
In the trial of 1616, the defendant was actually a scientific idea, namely, the Copernican hypothesis about the structure and motion of the solar system. To submit an idea to a trial may sound odd to us now, but this was not so in Galileo's day of high sensitivity to heretical views. The charge brought against Copernicanism was that it seemed to contradict numerous passages in Scripture that speak of a stationary Earth and of the motion of the Sun. To be more specific, the issue was whether the following two propositions were unorthodox:
1. That the Sun is the center of the world and, thus, is immobile of local motion.
2. That the Earth is not the center of the world, nor is it immobile, but it moves as a whole and also with a diurnal motion.3
Both of these claims were judged to be false because they contradict the Bible. The promulgation of this decision and its consequences took the form of a decree issued by the Congregation of the Index on March 5, 1616. This decree publicly announced that the Copernican hypothesis was “false and completely contrary to the divine Scriptures” and then proceeded to condemn several books that taught heliocentrism, including the writings of Copernicus himself.
However, none of Galileo's own writings were mentioned. As far as the Church was concerned thereafter, the substantive topic of the assessment of Copernicanism was a closed issue. This disastrous decision at the first trial was so erroneous from our present day perspective that a few words are in order to throw some light on how it came about.
First, on the scientific side, everyone involved realized that no strict proof had yet been found for Copernicanism. Galileo's observations with the telescope, and in particular his discovery of the phases of Venus, made the new theory more probable, but not conclusive. He fully realized this, and for the remainder of his life he searched without success for definitive proof.
However, Cardinal Bellarmine, who at the time served as the chief theological adviser to the pope, admitted frankly that the traditional interpretation of Scripture would have to be changed if a conclusive proof of Copernicanism were forthcoming. But as no such proof was either at hand or on the horizon, he concluded that no scriptural reinterpretations were in order.
Second, on the theological side, two developments heavily influenced the theologians of Galileo's day. The first was the decree concerning the interpretation of the Bible, which had been adopted as official church teaching at the Fourth Session (April 8, 1546) of the Council of Trent in response to Luther's doctrine of private interpretation of the Bible. The relevant passage, which was used as part of the legal grounding of the first trial, reads as follows:
Furthermore, to control petulant spirits, the Council decrees that, in matters of faith and morals pertaining to the edification of Christian doctrine, no one, relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them contrary to that sense which Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge of their true sense and meaning, has held and does hold, or even contrary to the unanimous agreement of the Fathers, even though such interpretations should never at any time be published. Those who do otherwise shall be identified by the ordinaries and punished in accordance with the penalties prescribed by the law.4
It is important to note that this statement is not about the principles to be used for biblical interpretation. Rather, it is about who has the authority to undertake an interpretation or reinterpretation of the Bible. It is unequivocally clear that on matters of faith and morals, this authority is claimed to belong to the Church (i.e., to the hierarchy). Any individual, for example, Galileo, who would suggest a new interpretation, thus faced a double jeopardy: 1. Is the content of the new interpretation a correct or incorrect reading of the Scripture?, and 2. even if it is correct, is the person presuming to make that interpretation authorized to do so?
As a result, if Galileo's work took him into this terrain, he had to lose on the second question, even if he had won on the first. This simply was not his business, but a matter for church authority. And after the recent struggles of the Reformation, the Church was especially concerned about defending and maintaining that authority.
Moreover, in the half century that had passed since the Council of Trent ended, Catholic biblical exegesis had become increasingly more literalistic. This, again, was part of the highly defensive posture assumed by the Church during the Counter-Reformation. The result was a great hesitation to introduce any novelties or to depart in any way from the common opinions of the church fathers, who, of course, spoke of the world in terms of the common-sense viewpoint of geocentrism. Perhaps the cause of the church's overreaction of condemning Copernicanism was the fear of facing a second Reformation, growing this time out of science. It seems so obvious to us now that a mere suspension of judgment on the matter would have been much wiser and quite adequate for the church's interests.
It should be noted that Galileo personally was not involved at all in the first trial. We know that, at that time, he had long been personally convinced of Copernicanism, and three years earlier he stated so publicly in one of his books. However, he did become involved indirectly in a curious way. The pope at the time, Paul V, directed Bellarmine to meet with Galileo to explain to him the Holy Office's decision at the first trial and to ask Galileo to accept that decision under the threat of an injunction. Discussion of the merits of the substantive question of the truth of Copernicanism was not the purpose of this meeting. Rather, the issue was Galileo's acceptance of the decision as a matter of personal obedience to the Church.
This famous meeting took place on February 26, 1616. Precisely what happened is not known, since there are two inconsistent and ambiguous accounts of the interview, which no one has yet been able to reconcile. One version is contained in the relevant record in the files of the Holy Office; the other is in a later letter requested by Galileo from Bellarmine to summarize the gist of the meeting.
The key issue is whether, and in what sense, Galileo had understood and accepted the wording of the injunction which said that he should not “hold, teach or defend (Copernicanism) in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing.” The inconsistency arises from the fact that Bellarmine's letter to Galileo contains the much weaker language that Copernicanism “cannot be defended or held” (period). That seems to rule out only definite claims that Copernicanism is true but to allow hypothetical discussion, orally and in writing, of the merits of both theories, as Galileo himself seems to have understood the matter. It is one of the terrible ironies of history that such a basic confusion rules the day in a proceeding that was to poison the relations between science and religion ever since.
Be that as it may, in the proceedings of 1616, one could hardly have a stronger distinction between two quite different levels of concern. First, there is the intellectual content issue of Copernicanism, which was the explicit focus of the first trial. The second is the authority issue of implementing that decision, which was partially carried out through the injunction imposed on Galileo. To put this in another way, there are two aspects of the religious revelation operating here: the meaning content of the message (which Copernicanism was judged to offend) and the centralized authority of the Church itself, which gives credence to the revelation (and which Galileo was asked to accept in the injunction.) It was essential, and perhaps even more essential for the church authorities, that the latter be asserted and defended as well as the former.
This key distinction becomes even clearer when we look at what happened at the second trial in 1633. This time, Galileo was directly involved as the defendant. In the previous year, he had published what was to become his most famous book, the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Using the model of a Platonic dialogue, he presented all the evidence and arguments for and against the theories of both Ptolemy and Copernicus, with the latter clearly having the advantage. The charge against Galileo was that the publication of this book had violated the conditions of the injunction of 1616.
It is essential to notice that the charge against Galileo in 1633 was the purely technical issue of his obedience to the terms of the earlier injunction, and had nothing whatever to do with the original substantive question of whether or not Copernicanism contradicts the Bible. As far as the Holy Office was concerned, that issue had been settled for good in 1616, and was not up for reconsideration. When one reads through the testimony at the second trial, one finds no mention of scientific discoveries or theories, nor any discussion of reinterpreting the Bible, nor of the principles of scriptural exegesis, nor of the views of the earlier theologians of Church Fathers. Rather all the testimony relates to the injunction and its proscriptions, and to the securing of Church permissions for the publication of the Dialogue.
This time no scientific theory was on trial. Rather it was Galileo's acceptance of, and obedience to, the 1616 decision that came under question. It was a matter of authority now, not truth. And this authority was making new and quite different demands on Galileo. He was found guilty, of course, for indeed his new book did seem to violate the conditions of the injunction. And the famous formula of adjuration, which he was forced to read, was intended to bend – or break – his will rather than his reason.
In summary what this examination of the Galileo affair rather clearly shows is that the appeal to revelation as the source of religion is a two-fold appeal. In one sense it is an appeal to the meaning content, the religious message, the world view, which the revelation communicates. In this sense the revelation is either true or false – which was the concern of the first trial. In a second sense the appeal to revelation is an appeal to the authority which stands behind the message, which “authorizes” the message, as it were, in the sense of empowering it as credible and reliable. In this sense of appealing to revelation the issue is not its specific truth or falsity, but rather whether the authority behind the message is freely accepted or rejected as legitimate – which was the concern of the second trial.
Seen in this light the heart of the matter in Galileo's personal trial in 1633 was not whether a scientific theory was consistent with the Bible, but rather was whether Galileo had attacked the centralized authority of the Church by his apparent violation of the injunction of 1616.
If we now return to our original distinction of revelation as the source of religion and reasoned empirical facts as the source of science, the picture has become more complex. Science and religion can and do interact at the first level of their respective messages or world-views. At this level, science may or may not be in agreement with religion. Hopefully, disagreements are in principle avoidable here, if both science and religion stay within their proper and complementary realms. That was also Pope John Paul II's point.
But science and religion also intersect at the meta-level in regard to the character of the authorities giving each its legitimacy. Each is indeed based on an authority at this second level. However, the authorities are quite different, and we cannot claim that these authorities will not conflict with each other without closer examination.
THE LOGIC OF CENTRALIZED AUTHORITY
Our central theme then boils down to these questions: What is the nature of the foundational authorities that give legitimacy to science and to religion, and how are these authorities related to each other? Although the nature of each of these authorities is well known and has been studied in detail, surprisingly little effort has been made to compare them.
On the scientific side, the foundational authority of the entire enterprise is the appeal to empirical facts. If this appeal is rejected as illusory, then science as a whole collapses. From this factual base science proceeds by induction to form generalized empirical laws and ultimately to the genesis of explanatory theories. The second phase of the scientific enterprise consists in testing these laws and theories by use of the methods of verification and falsification. Here, again, empirical facts serve as the authority of last appeal for the acceptance or rejection of scientific laws and theories.
It has long been recognized, of course, that both the methods of induction and of verification are logically invalid. As a result, since at least the time of Galileo, the brief sketch of scientific method outlined above has undergone an elaborate evolution to soften the impact of these logical objections to the authority of science. For example, complex models of probability logic have been developed to supplement, or to supplant, the straightforward use of induction and verification in science.
To make matters more complex, it has gradually come to be realized, especially in recent years after the influential work of Thomas Kuhn, that the appeal to empirical facts in science is not itself theory-neutral. To put this in another way, it is now widely granted that interpretive perspectives on facts are unavoidable in the scientist's observations of the world and that these interpretations can and do change over time.
In contrast, unlike verification, the logical process of falsification is formally valid. In effect, no finite number of positive cases can prove that a scientific law is conclusively true, but one negative case does prove that it is false. In the latter case, the negative instance prompts a reexamination of the previously accepted body of truths to see where a correction is needed. As a result, authority in science is self-corrective and the scientific attitude is characteristically one of fallibilism, to use the term standardized by C. S. Peirce. This means that the mind of the scientist should always be open to the possibility that whatever is accepted as true to date in science may, in time, turn out to be false or only partially true. Epistemological humility is, thus, a virtue built into the mindset of scientific authority, precisely because the logic of scientific method requires it.
But, despite all these complications, the appeal to empirical facts has always remained the foundational authority of science, serving as both its starting point and final guarantor of truth. Furthermore, the very nature of scientific method requires that this authority be exercised in a pluralistic and democratic way. The work of one individual scientist, or a small group of scientists, can never embody the full authority of science. Rather, that work must be submitted publicly for others to repeat it and to verify or falsify it independently.
Witness the recent much publicized dispute in science over the alleged discovery of cold fusion. Such open and public assessment is essential to science, as the means it uses to move beyond the subjective convictions of the original worker to the public status of the truth it claims to seek. The authority that grounds science is thus pluralistic, democratic, public, fallibilistic, and self-corrective.
In regard to religion, the parallel situation is equally well understood. The foundational authority of the entire religious enterprise is God as the author of the religious revelation. If this appeal to God is rejected as illusory, then religion as a whole collapses. However, a truthful God would give us only an absolutely reliable and truthful message. This notion is so basic and so ancient that it is even preserved in the etymology of the terms we have been using. An “authority” was originally understood to be an “author” – namely, God as the author of the revelation.
A favorite metaphor used in Galileo's day was to speak of God both as the author of the book of nature, which is the object of science, and as the author of the book of Scripture, which grounds religion. If the one, truthful God is seen as the author of both “books,” then we are guaranteed a unity of truth between the two. This is the oldest and still the most common argument for the conclusion that, in the last analysis, science and religion cannot come into conflict, no matter how we may at the moment understand either.
Like the authority that stands behind science, the authority behind religion has also undergone a considerable evolution over time. The original oral revelation and the later Apostolic tradition were gradually – and perhaps only partially – committed to writing. This in turn generated an immense body of devotional and explanatory literature at a secondary level of authority.
Meanwhile, in the early centuries after the death of Christ, the Catholic Church, which saw itself as the custodian of the revelation, slowly became institutionalized, and thus so did the original authority behind the revelation. For complex historical reasons over many centuries, which are too involved to examine here, that institution became progressively more centralized through such developments as the conciliar movement, the Reformation debates over the individual versus the church as the ultimate interpreter of the Scriptures, and the declaration of papal infallibility in the late nineteenth century. As an outgrowth of these issues, the protection of the inherited religious authority has become all important to the hierarchy of the Church. This concern may be the reason for the ambiguities pointed out earlier in the present pope's address on the Galileo case.
The situation is considerably complicated by another factor. Unlike science, religious belief is not purely, or even primarily, an intellectual matter. It is also based, in part, on an act of the will. This, in turn, influences the ways in which religious authority is exercised.
This role of the will in religious belief is twofold. First, such belief is not simply a matter of understanding the meaning of the religious message. It requires, in addition, a willingness to accept the authority that guarantees its truth, an authority that, as we have seen, has evolved in the Church in complex ways through history. Second, the religious believer is also expected to choose a practical life-style that embodies the religious message and its values. As a result, authority in religion is as much, if not more, concerned with the pursuit of goodness in the world as with the pursuit of truth.
The result is that the contemporary sense of religious authority, at least in the Catholic tradition, is monolithic, centralized, esoteric, resistant to change, and self-protective. By contrast, authority in science, as we have seen earlier, is pluralistic, democratic, public, fallibilistic, and self-corrective. It is obvious that these two modes of authority are quite different, and understandably so.
Despite these differences, it does not follow that the exercise of authority in science and in religion must result in conflict. That conclusion would be too strong. These authorities can function harmoniously; and they often do. The important thing to see is that the mindset of each is quite different from the other. Those who have become habituated to think in only one of these modes, unfortunately, often find it difficult to understand and to communicate with those who think otherwise.
To make matters worse, the way we train scientific and religious professionals in our universities seems almost designed to exaggerate and to perpetuate the gulf between these two mindsets. The theologian who really understands science from the inside and the scientist who really understands religion from the inside are indeed rarities. Such a situation almost invites conflict.
Applying all this to the Galileo case, we saw that what happened in the seventeenth century was due, in significant part, to a clash of these two types of authority. In the nearly four centuries since, the characteristics of these two types of authority have not lessened but have become even more accentuated.
So the conclusion must be that the same forces that produced the Galileo affair are still in play now. As a result, it is quite possible that another Galileo affair could occur today. How likely it is that this will happen again is, however, quite another matter. All we are arguing for is that the possibility remains. But, of course, there are some major differences as well.
In the seventeenth century, the power of the Church was dominant in Western society, while science was a weakling just entering the picture. Today, these roles are almost completely reversed. Science and technology are the overwhelmingly dominant cultural forces of our day, while religion continues to have less and less vitality and influence in modern life. This perennially puts the Church in a reactionary and defensive posture as innovation in the sciences continues to shape the debate. This role reversal, plus today's candid admission of how great the damage to religion was from the Galileo affair, may make a recurrence rather unlikely. However, should a new and sufficiently great threat to religion arise from science, the conditions for the possibility of a recurrence may come into play.
THREE FANCIFUL SCENARIOS
In conclusion, we will break one of the basic rules of philosophical discourse by talking about some concrete cases. Three very brief scenarios suggest themselves.
First, what would have happened if Darwin had been a Catholic? Evolution is even more apparently in conflict with the Bible than was Copernicanism. Moreover, the origin of the human species is of much greater concern to religion than is the topic of how the heavens move. Furthermore, in the late nineteenth century, the Catholic Church was again in a very defensive posture, this time in reaction to the Italian Resorgimento. Papal infallibility was defined at the First Vatican Council.
Under all these circumstances, could there have been another Galileo case? Was the Church simply lucky that Darwin was not a Catholic? It is, of course, impossible to answer these counterfactual questions, but if our suggestion has caught your imagination, then perhaps the thesis of this paper may be worth a second thought.
Second, has another Galileo case actually happened in our own day? We are thinking of Teilhard de Chardin, who was not only a Catholic but a Jesuit priest. As a scientist, he was convinced of the truth of evolution. He then proceeded to construct a new evolutionary philosophy and theology, for which he has since become famous. These writings were so upsetting to the authorities in Rome that he was forbidden to publish them during the last twenty years of his life. Only after his death in 1955 did copies of these writings, left with friends, find a public audience.
Third, let us assume that in the near future science succeeds in developing an as-yet-unknown theory that successfully accounts for all the operations of the human mind, purely in terms of neuro-physiological functions. This may seem impossible to us now, especially if we are thinking of reducing consciousness to matter in the Newtonian sense of inert, passive matter. But twentieth-century science after Einstein has long since replaced this with a new conception of matter as dynamic energy.
Some of my well-informed professional friends are of the opinion that this sort of reduction of mind to matter as energy is actually taking place at present. As a minimum, we can say beyond doubt that many investigators are today hard at work on this project. If they are successful, what will be the reaction of the Church to the prospect of seeing human consciousness accounted for naturalistically and without appeal to any transcendent factors? If this fanciful scenario were to actually occur, the impact on the Church's interests would be truly monumental. Would there then occur again something very much like what happened in the Galileo case?
EPILOGUE: THE ADULTERATION OF PIO PASCHINI'S Vita e Opere di Galileo Galilei
In many ways, the Galileo affair centered around issues of intellectual honesty and the freedom of human thought. This was recognized explicitly, even in Galileo's own day, as can clearly be seen in Tommaso Campanella's eloquent defense of these values in his defense of Galileo.5
However, present-day concern for intellectual freedom is certainly much stronger than it was then. Consequently, one might argue that for this reason alone, anything resembling a repetition of the Galileo affair is exceedingly unlikely – if not impossible – in our day.
Our response to this objection is to call attention to a series of developments in the Vatican in recent years, which indicate that concern for intellectual honesty and freedom of thought may still not be strong enough within the Church to prevent a reoccurrence. Ironically, these events, which themselves constitute another scandal, dealt directly with the Galileo affair and how it should be assessed by the contemporary Church. These developments were first uncovered by Italian scholars in 1979, but because they are still relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, a brief summary of them is in order here.6
The year 1942 was the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death. That prompted a decision by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, whose president at the time was Agostino Gemelli, to sponsor the writing and publication of a new book on Galileo. In an article in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano for Dec. 1–2, 1941, Gemelli announced that Msgr. Pio Paschini, the rector of the Pontificio Ateneo Lateranense, had been selected to undertake this new project, which was described as being not merely a biography of Galileo but also a study of his work in the intellectual context of his own times, so as to place “the great astronomer in his true light.”
Gemelli went on to characterize the book as follows
The projected volume will be an effective proof that the Church did not persecute Galileo, but helped him considerably in his studies. It will not be an apologetic book, for that is not the task of scholars, but will be a historical and scholarly study of the documents.
Announcing the expected results before the research on the project had even begun was not an encouraging sign.
Pio Paschini (1878–1962), a native of Friuli, had lived in Rome since 1913, where he was a seminary professor who had become a widely experienced, highly respected, and scrupulously honest scholar working on the textual resources of the Vatican libraries. His field of expertise was church history, but he had no background in the history of science, and he had undertaken no previous studies of the Galileo case. After some initial but futile objections expressed to Gemelli that this was outside his area of expertise, Paschini began his research into the Galileo documents. His work occupied the next three years, the darkest days of World War II in Italy, and was completed in 1944.
Following regular procedures, Paschini next submitted his manuscript for the book to the Vatican authorities for prepublication review. To make a long story short, the book was then rejected as “non opportuna” (unsuitable) for publication. Because the Holy Office (today called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) has, to date, still not made public the relevant documents relating to this judgment of the book (e.g., the assessments and the identities of the reviewers), we do not know the specific points of objection that were raised.
However, other indirect sources, including especially Paschini's extensive correspondence with his close friend Guiseppe Vale, indicate that the objections did not relate primarily to factual errors or to misstatements of scientific ideas, both of which could, in due course, have been easily corrected by Paschini before publication. Rather, it appears that the book was withheld from publication because of its interpretive judgments, namely, it was too pro-Galileo, too critical of the role of the Jesuits (especially Christopher Scheiner, S. J.) in the Galileo affair, and too forceful in assigning responsibility to the Church for the condemnation of Galileo. Thus, it seems quite clear that ideological, not factual, issues were the central concern.
Paschini objected vigorously, but fruitlessly, to this decision and refused to modify the book, although even he did not receive a full account of the rationale behind the rejection. From then on up to his death in 1962, he simply dropped the matter and remained silent about what had happened, as was requested of him “for the good of the Church.” But in his will, he left the manuscript of the book to his literary heir M. Maccarrone, who, a few years later, gave it to a public library in Udine, where it is still held today.
Oddly enough, the book that was originally intended to be published on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death was destined to be published on the 400th anniversary of his birth. In 1964, a considerably revised version of Paschini's book was published, for reasons to be explained below, by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, whose president now was the eminent scientist Msgr. George Lamaître. The changes in the book were made by the noted textual scholar, Edmond Lamalle, S. J., the archivist of the Archum Romanum Societatis Iesu in Rome.
Lamalle's changes are not identified in the textual apparatus of “Paschini's book,” and in an introductory note, Lamalle says merely that his changes in the texts and in the footnotes are “deliberately very moderate, being limited to some corrections which seem to us to be required and to a minor updating of the bibliography.”7 The impression given is that this is essentially Paschini's book with minor editorial changes.
This impression could have been verified by comparing the published book with Paschini's original draft, but no one did this until 1979. It was then found that the changes were extensive, not “moderate.” There are several hundred modifications in both the body of the text and in the footnotes. They range from relatively trivial one-word substitutions to complete reversals of the sense of the text. Some whole passages are dropped, others added, and others replaced; the overall interpretive thrust of the book has been reversed to a view less favorable to Galileo and more favorable to the Church and to the Jesuits.
To present this book as if it were essentially Paschini's own work was intellectually dishonest, to say the least. There is little room to doubt that Paschini would have disowned “his own” book if he had lived to see it in print. This was a large-scale adulteration of his work (earlier judged to be “unsuitable” for publication) if not simply a forgery.
To complicate matters further, we should add that the occasion to publish the adulterated version of Paschini's book was the need to deal with the Galileo affair at the Second Vatican Council, which was then nearing its conclusion. The theme of that Council was “the church in the modern world,” and its central closing document, Gaudium et spes, could not avoid the question of the relationship between science and religion. Early drafts of that Council document show that some of the bishops wished to mention Galileo by name in the body of the text as having been unjustly treated by the Church, in the hope of putting an end to the matter. Other speakers strongly disagreed.
A compromise was introduced into the Council's debates by Msgr. Pietro Parente, ironically a former student of Paschini, who apparently was one of the few participants in the Council who knew about Lamalle's changes in Paschini's book. The compromise was that the body of the text would include only a general statement affirming the autonomy of scientific research and the compatibility of science and religion, while any explicit mention of Galileo would be moved to a footnote. As a result, the key sentence in paragraph 36 of Gaudium et spes, approved on December 7, 1965, at the Council, reads as follows:
One can, therefore, legitimately regret attitudes to be found sometimes even among Christians, through an insufficient appreciation of the rightful autonomy of science, which have led many people to conclude from the disagreements and controversies which such attitudes have aroused, that there is opposition between faith and science.
At the end of this sentence there is attached the following footnote #7: “See P. Paschini, Vita e Opere di Galileo Galilei, 2 vols. Pont. accademia delle scienze, Vatican City, 1964.”
The ironic impact of this situation is forceful. Here we have a religiously authoritative statement asserting the “rightful autonomy of science” that is itself partially justified by a reference to an intellectually dishonest source. Here we have an attempt to put an end to the Galileo affair that has become yet another intellectual scandal. Here we find that an attempt to remove opposition between science and religion may actually have increased that opposition.
In the years that have passed since the end of the Second Vatican Council, paragraph 36 of Gaudium et spes has often been quoted in Church circles in discussions of the relationship between science and religion, thus reemphasizing its official status. For example, the key sentence quoted above, along with its footnote, is restated verbatim in Pope John Paul II's speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the November 10, 1979, Einstein centennial celebration when he asked scholars to reexamine the Galileo case to “dispel the mistrust that this affair still raises in many minds.”8 Although at that time, the adulteration of Paschini's book was not publicly known, this same paragraph 36 was also quoted by the pope in his October 31, 1992 address.
There may be more to this unfortunate story that could throw a more favorable light on what happened in 1945, when Paschini's original text was rejected as “unsuitable” for publication, and in 1964, when the adulterated version was prepared and published. But we will not know the full saga until the full documentation of what happened, still held in secret, is made public. In the meantime, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that intellectual honesty and freedom of thought may still not be strong enough in the Church to prevent the recurrence of another clash between science and religion, one similar to the Galileo affair.
NOTES
1 For the Pope's statement and the report of the Pontifical Commission presented at the same time by Cardinal Paul Poupard, see Origins 22:(22) (November 12, 1992), 370–5.
2 Ibid., 373.
3 For the origin and an analysis of these two statements, see R. J. Blackwell, Galileo, Bellarmine and the Bible, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991, pp. 112–25.
4 Quoted from Blackwell, op. cit., p. 183.
5 Campanella, Thomas, O. P., A Defense of Galileo, the Mathematician from Florence. Translation by R. J. Blackwell, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.
6 For more detailed scholarly and documentary accounts of the origin and the fate of Pio Paschini's Vita e Opere di Galileo Galilei, see the following sources: P. Bertolla, “Le vicende del ‘Galileo’ di Paschini,” in Atti del convegno di studio su Pio Paschini nel centenario della nascita: 1878–1978, Udine: Poliglotta Vaticana, 1980, pp. 172–208; P. Nonis, “L'ultima opera di Paschini, Galilei,” Ibid., pp. 158–72; M. Maccarrone, “Mons. Paschini e la Roma ecclesiastica,” Ibid., pp. 49–93; S. Tramontin, “Galileo Galilei nella recente storiografia,” in Galileo Galilei e Padova (Padua: Studia Patavina, 1982), pp. 159–67; P. Scandaletti, Galileo privato (Milan: Camunia Editrice, 1989); Annibale Fantoli, Galileo per il Copernicanesimo e per la Chiesa (Vatican City: Specola Vaticana, 1993), pp. 406–9; and especially Paolo Simoncelli, Storia di una censura: “Vita di Galileo” e Concilio Vaticano II (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992).
7 Lamalle, Edmond, S. J., “Nota introduttiva all'opera,” in Miscellanea Galileiana, Vatican City: Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 1964, vol. I, xiii.
8 See Science, 207 (March 14, 1980):1166.