Chapter 8
Becoming a Cultural
Icon (1616–2016)
The Subsequent Galileo Affair
The subsequent Galileo affair, the controversy about the original episode that started in 1633 and continues to this day, is much more complex than the original one, because of the longer historical span, the broader interdisciplinary relevance, the greater international and multilinguistic involvement, and the ongoing cultural import. To begin to make sense of it, we need to consider three aspects: the historical aftermath; the reflective commentary; and the critical issues.
By historical aftermath I mean the events directly stemming from the trial and condemnation of Galileo. Some of these involve actions taken by the Catholic Church, such as the partial unbanning of Galileo’s Dialogue by Pope Benedict XIV in 1744, and most recently the rehabilitation of Galileo by Pope Saint John Paul II (in 1979–92). The historical aftermath also includes actions by various non-ecclesiastic actors, such as René Descartes’s decision (in 1633) to abort the publication of his own cosmological treatise The World; and the attempts in the middle of the twentieth century by various secular-minded and left-leaning intellectuals, such as Bertolt Brecht, Arthur Koestler, and Paul Feyerabend, to blame Galileo for many current social and cultural problems.
The reflective commentary on the original trial consists of countless interpretations and evaluations advanced in the past four centuries by scientists, theologians, historians, philosophers, writers, cultural critics, and many others. These comments have appeared sometimes in specialized scholarly publications, sometimes in private correspondence or confidential ecclesiastical documents, and sometimes in classic texts. Among the latter are Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637), John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), Blaise Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1657), Gottfried Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding (1704), Voltaire’s Age of Louis XIV (1751), Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert’s French Encyclopedia (1751–77), Auguste Comte’s Positive Philosophy (1830–42), John Henry Newman’s (1801–90) writings, Brecht’s Galileo (1938–55), and Koestler’s Sleepwalkers (1959). Here we have a historiographical or meta-historical labyrinth in which it is easy to get lost unless one uses some tentative guidelines; for example, by distinguishing accounts that are circumstantial from principled, one-dimensional from multifaceted, pro- from anti-Galilean, pro- from anti-clerical, and neutral from polemical.
The critical issues of the subsequent controversy in part reflect the original issues, which involved questions like whether the Earth is located at the center of the universe; whether the Earth spins around its own axis daily and orbits the Sun; whether and how the Earth’s motion can be proved, experimentally or theoretically; whether the Earth’s motion contradicts Scripture, and whether a contradiction between terrestrial motion and a literal interpretation of Scripture would constitute a valid reason against the Earth’s motion; whether Scripture must indeed always be interpreted literally and, if not, when it should be interpreted figuratively. However, the subsequent controversy has also acquired a life of its own, with debates over new issues such as whether Galileo’s condemnation was right; whether science and religion are incompatible; what useful lessons can be derived from the original episode about scientific methodology and human rationality in general; how science and religion do or should interact; whether individual freedom and institutional authority must always clash; whether cultural myths can ever be dispelled with documented facts; whether political expediency should prevail over scientific truth; and whether scientific research must bow to social responsibility.
Although distinct, these three principal aspects of the subsequent Galileo affair are obviously interrelated. For example, much of the reflective commentary consists of attempts to formulate or resolve one or more critical issues, and such formulations often represent important developments of the historical aftermath. Each moreover has substrands and finer subdivisions as well as broader groupings. For example, the ecclesiastical part of the historical aftermath includes at least two distinct clusters of developments: one is aimed to repeal the censures against the Copernican doctrine and books; the other strives to “rehabilitate” the person Galileo or apologize for his persecution. Similarly, the lay part can usefully be divided into several clusters, including a series of scientific discoveries and developments that demonstrate the reality of the Earth’s motion, and the many post-trial and posthumous attempts by some to defend and re-affirm the Inquisition’s condemnation, and by others to defend Galileo and criticize the Inquisition. In this chapter, I focus on some of the most interesting and consequential aspects of the subsequent Galileo affair, without pretending to give a complete account.
Unbanning Books
The two main books prohibited by the decree of the Index in 1616, at the end of the first phase of Galileo’s trial, were Copernicus’s Revolutions and Paolo Foscarini’s Letter on the Pythagorean Opinion. Moreover, the decree explicitly prohibited all other books teaching the same doctrines.
Thus, in 1619, when a new supplement to the Index of Prohibited Books was published, it included these books, as well as an entry that read: “all books that teach the motion of the earth and the immobility of the sun.”1 This supplement also listed Kepler’s Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, which had just been banned the same year. In 1633, the sentence against Galileo included the banning of his Dialogue, and so the book was included in a formal decree of the Index the following year.
The net effect of these prohibitions was that Catholics were not allowed to read such books unless they received special formal permission from the Church. With regard to holding geokinetic beliefs, the situation was less clear. The safe thing to do was to avoid the topic altogether, although one was allowed to engage in a so-called “hypothetical” discussion.
Eventually, these prohibitions were lifted. The unbanning process was gradual and slow, and took about two centuries. In 1620, as we have seen, the Index issued the corrections to Copernicus’s book promised in 1616; with the stipulated passages deleted and others appropriately changed, the book could be read. In 1744, during the papacy of Benedict XIV, Galileo’s Dialogue was republished for the first time with the Church’s approval, as the fourth and last volume of his collected works; in the volume, the text of the Dialogue was preceded by the Inquisition’s sentence and Galileo’s abjuration of 1633 and by a supposedly neutralizing introduction. In 1757, upon request from Pope Benedict XIV, the Congregation of the Index dropped from the forthcoming edition of the Index the clause “all books that teach the motion of the earth and the immobility of the sun,” and so the following year’s edition no longer listed as an entry this general prohibition; but it continued to include the previously prohibited books by Copernicus, Foscarini, Kepler, and Galileo. In 1820, the Inquisition gave the imprimatur to an astronomy textbook by a professor at the University of Rome named Giuseppe Settele that presented the Earth’s motion as a fact; in so doing, it overruled the objections of the chief censor in Rome, the so-called master of the sacred palace. Two years later, the Inquisition decided that in the future this official must not refuse the imprimatur to publications teaching the Earth’s motion in accordance with modern astronomy; but a decision about removing from the Index the listed particular Copernican books was postponed. In 1833, while deliberating on a new proposed edition of the Index, Pope Gregory XVI decided that it would omit these books, but without explicit comment. So the 1835 edition of the Index for the first time omitted from the list Copernicus’s Revolutions, Galileo’s Dialogue, and the other books. This was the final and complete retraction of the book censorship begun in 1616.
The Index itself continued a while longer. In 1912, Pope Benedict XV abolished the Congregation of the Index as a separate department of the Church, and he made book censorship one of the tasks of the Congregation of the Holy Office, that is, the Inquisition. In 1966, the very institution of a list of prohibited books was abolished when the supreme Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the new name of the Inquisition) decreed that the book censorship now under its jurisdiction no longer has the force of ecclesiastical law, but only the status of moral advice.2
Rehabilitating a Heretic
With regard to the condemnation of Galileo the individual, the history of its ecclesiastic aftermath is more elusive, complex, and controversial.3 The climax, though not the conclusion, of this strand of the story is an episode that unfolded at the end of the twentieth century, having begun in 1979 and having had a formal conclusion in 1992. This is what some have called the rehabilitation of Galileo by Pope Saint John Paul II. However, others have described it as an attempt at a self-rehabilitation by the Church based on Galileo; and still others regard it as a new myth about Galileo—the myth that the Church has rehabilitated Galileo.
The alleged rehabilitation began very promisingly in 1979, when the pope included many pro-Galilean comments in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, occasioned by the celebration of the centennial of Albert Einstein’s birth. This was followed in 1980 by an announcement of the creation of a Vatican Commission on Galileo. Then, for the next several years, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Vatican Astronomical Observatory sponsored conferences and publications meant to improve the documentation of the facts of the original trial and to clarify the issues. The process was formally concluded in 1992 at a meeting of the Pontifical Academy, when the pope made a speech accepting a report by Cardinal Paul Poupard, the head of the Galileo Commission.
The upshot, in my view, was as follows. In his two speeches to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and other statements and actions, John Paul admitted that Galileo’s trial was not merely an error, but also an injustice. Moreover, the pope was clear and explicit that Galileo was theologically right about scriptural interpretation, as against his ecclesiastical opponents. Furthermore, the pontiff added an important point concerning the pastoral aspect of the affair: pastorally speaking, Galileo’s desire to disseminate novelties was as reasonable as his opponents’ inclination to resist them. Finally, according to the pope, Galileo provides an instructive example of the harmony between science and religion; and the example involves both words and deeds, in the sense that he both lived such harmony and justified it with good arguments.
This rehabilitation was informal because the pope was merely expressing his personal opinions and not speaking ex cathedra. It was also partial because he deliberately avoided talk or action regarding a formal judicial retraction or revision of the 1633 Inquisition trial and sentence. Furthermore, the rehabilitation was muddled; it was opposed by various elements of the Church, including some in the Vatican Commission on Galileo, such as Cardinal Poupard himself. They attempted to repeat many of the traditional apologias, for example, the account elaborated by Pierre Duhem, who, as we shall see, claimed that Church officials understood better than Galileo the limitations of his pro-Copernican arguments and of scientific argumentation in general. Nevertheless, the rehabilitation was significant, indeed epoch-making; and in this regard, it should be mentioned that John Paul was the first Polish pope since Copernicus, and the first non-Italian pope since Galileo.
One final point about John Paul’s rehabilitation of Galileo: it was not unprecedented. Indeed, it was the sort of process one would have expected in light of precursors in the previous four centuries of the Galileo affair. One of these episodes is still unfolding, but pertains to a development going back more than half a century. The occasion was provided by the 1942 tricentennial of Galileo’s death. In fact, the tricentennial engendered a first partial, informal, and muddled rehabilitation.
In the period 1941–6, various pro-Galilean pronouncements were expressed by several clergymen who held the top positions at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Catholic University of Milan, the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, and the Vatican Radio. They published accounts of Galileo as a Catholic hero who upheld the harmony between science and religion; who had the courage to advocate the truth in astronomy even against the Catholic authorities of his time; and who had the religious piety to retract his views outwardly when the 1633 trial proceedings made his obedience necessary.
But there is another, darker, side to this episode. In 1941, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences commissioned Monsignor Pio Paschini to write a book on Galileo’s life and work and their historical background and significance. Paschini completed his manuscript in 1944 and submitted it for approval. During the following year, various ecclesiastic authorities (the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Vatican Astronomical Observatory, and the Holy Office) judged Paschini’s manuscript to be unsuitable for publication, on the grounds that it was too favorable to Galileo and too critical of the Jesuits and the Church. After various initial appeals, Paschini abandoned hope of having his work published, and remained silent about it for the rest of his life.
Paschini died in 1962, and then his legal heir undertook a successful effort to have the manuscript published. At this time, the Church favored publishing the book, partly to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s birth in 1964, and so the book was published that year by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In part, the Church wanted to have an intellectual foundation for some of the deliberations at the Second Vatican Council; in fact, in some of the published documents of that Council, there are footnote references to Paschini’s book.4
However, in 1979–80, at about the same time that Pope John Paul was starting his rehabilitation, the original manuscript of Paschini’s book began to be examined by various scholars, and to be compared to the published book. They discovered that the published version contains so many and such significant emendations that it must be regarded as an adulteration of the original. In fact, in 1964, when the Church re-examined the question of publishing Paschini’s book, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences had charged Jesuit father Edmond Lamalle with reviewing and revising the manuscript. The published book is a Jesuit version of Paschini’s manuscript. Ironically, it is Paschini’s published book that is most frequently referred to in Pope John Paul’s various speeches and essays. And the unadulterated version of the book has not been published to date.
So, intriguingly, in the period 1979–92, two developments were occurring simultaneously: the alleged rehabilitation of Galileo by Pope John Paul and the second phase of the Paschini episode. An uncharitable interpretation would be that in the past four centuries the Galileo affair has undergone a metamorphosis: from the censoring of science books to the censoring of history-of-science books.
Another important milestone was also a kind of precursor of John Paul’s rehabilitation, but antedates it by about a century. In 1893, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical letter entitled Providentissimus Deus. This document put forth a view of the relationship between biblical interpretation and scientific investigation that corresponded to the one advanced by Galileo in his letters to Castelli and Christina. To be sure, the encyclical did not mention Galileo, but it was written in response to the controversy known as “the biblical question.” This was concerned with the nature, methods, and implications of the scientific study of the Bible and the validity of the scientific criticism of Scripture.
The problem of the scientific criticism of Scripture was the reverse of what Galileo had to deal with: he was trying to defend astronomical theory from objections based on scriptural assertions, whereas Pope Leo was discussing how to defend Scripture from attempts to criticize its content based on physical science. But their respective answers hinged on essentially the same point: the denial of the scientific authority of Scripture. Not only were both Galileo and Leo asserting the same principle, they also shared crucial aspects of the reasoning to justify this principle.
In fact, one of Leo’s key arguments should ring familiar in light of our earlier discussion of Galileo’s Letter to Christina: he claimed that natural science and scriptural assertions cannot contradict each other, because both nature and Scripture derive from God. So if there appears to be a contradiction, the conflict is only apparent and not real, and must be resolved. This is normally done by interpreting the biblical statement in a nonliteral fashion, which means we have to say that Scripture is not a scientific authority. Given this, the principle of accommodation also follows.
Besides the formal similarity of problems, the substantive overlap of content, and the deep correspondence of the reasoning, Leo’s account was reminiscent of Galileo’s even in its appearance, in quotations from St. Augustine and how they were interwoven with the rest of the argument. In fact, Leo’s two main passages from Augustine had also been quoted by Galileo in his Letter to Christina: Augustine’s statement of the priority of demonstrated physical truth (“whatever they can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature, we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scripture”5) and his statement of nonscientific authority of Scripture (“the Holy Ghost … did not intend to teach men … the things of the visible universe”6).
It’s not surprising that Leo’s encyclical has been widely perceived to have been the Church’s belated endorsement of the second fundamental belief for which Galileo had originally been condemned, namely that Scripture is not an authority in astronomy. And besides being belated, the endorsement was silent and merely implicit. However, as we have seen, on this issue, Pope John Paul II made such a vindication of Galileo explicit.
The history of this strand of the subsequent Galileo affair is by no means limited to recent events. In fact, this aspect of the story began immediately after his death, when questions were raised about whether a convicted heretic like him had the legal right to have his will executed and to be buried on consecrated ground. These issues were decided in his favor, after they were investigated by lawyers and some formal legal opinions were formulated. However, the same did not happen regarding the question whether it was proper to build an honorific mausoleum for Galileo in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence. This was initially vetoed by the Church in 1642, but it was brought about a century later in 1737. Since that time, Galileo’s body has been buried in such a mausoleum across from Michelangelo’s tomb (see Figure 19).
Figure 19. Galileo’s tomb, at the Church of Santa Croce, Florence
Finally, we should mention the story of the publication of the special Vatican file containing the manuscripts of the original trial documents. In 1780, an inquiry was made by Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti, a pioneer in the history of science, who was the first to publish many important documents of seventeenth-century Italian science. He reported with disappointment, having been told by Inquisition officials, that there were no documents pertaining to Galileo’s trial in the Archives of the Holy Office. This was indeed true, for the trial documents were not kept in the relatively obvious place where Tozzetti inquired, but rather in the so-called Vatican Secret Archives, befitting their special status and significance. This was discovered in 1810, when, by order of the French emperor Napoleon, the file was taken to Paris, as part of his decision to transfer to France all archives of the Vatican, the Inquisition, and other Church congregations in Rome. For the next seven years, the Church tried unsuccessfully to retrieve the file before giving up, having concluded that it had been lost or destroyed. It finally re-surfaced in Vienna in 1843 and was promptly delivered back to Rome.
This kind of attention received by the file soon led to its publication by lay scholars who received the Church’s permission to consult it. A partial edition was first published in 1867 by the French scholar Henri de L’Epinois. Then the complete dossier was published in 1876 by the Italian Domenico Berti, and in 1877 by the Austrian Karl von Gebler. These Vatican documents and many others were then included in the National Edition of Galileo’s collected works published in 1890–1909. As a result, the discussion of the affair moved to a qualitatively higher plane.
The publication of the trial proceedings in the 1860s and 1870s led to a new controversy and eventually to a consensus concerning a previously inaccessible aspect of the trial. This was the controversy concerning the authenticity, accuracy, and legal validity of Commissary Seghizzi’s injunction to Galileo, not to hold, defend, or teach the Earth’s motion in any way whatever. A common scholarly opinion at that time was that the document is a forgery, and hence factually questionable and legally invalid. But as we have seen, the most tenable position is that, although the document is authentic and not a forgery, the injunction was certainly illegitimate, and the report is probably inaccurate.
Proving the Earth’s Motion
The key scientific claim for which Galileo was tried and condemned, the proposition that the Earth revolves on its axis and orbits the Sun,7 inflamed a scientific controversy. It was a controversy which had existed since Copernicus’s Revolutions of 1543, but it now took a more intense and more definite form: more definite, because it now focused on whether the Earth moves and whether this motion can be proved or disproved experimentally by either terrestrial or astronomical evidence; and more intense, because scores of books were published, new experiments devised and performed, new arguments invented, and old arguments re-hashed.
The most important of these developments happened in 1687, when Isaac Newton published his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (the Principia). The Newtonian system of celestial mechanics has two important geokinetic consequences, among others. First, the relative motion between the Earth and the Sun corresponds to the actual motion of both bodies around their common center of mass; but the relative masses of the Sun and the Earth are such that the center of mass of this two-body system is a point inside the Sun; so, although both bodies are moving around that point, the Earth is circling the body of the Sun. Second, the daily axial rotation of the Earth has the centrifugal effect that terrestrial bodies weigh less at lower latitudes, and least at the equator, and that the whole Earth is slightly bulged at the equator and slightly flattened at the poles; and these consequences were verified by observation. In other words, these observational facts can be explained in no other way than by terrestrial rotation.
However, these Newtonian proofs were still relatively indirect, and so the search for more direct evidence continued. In 1729, English astronomer James Bradley discovered the aberration of starlight, providing direct observational evidence that the Earth has translational motion in space. In 1806, Giuseppe Calandrelli, director of the astronomical observatory at the Jesuit Roman College, claimed to have measured the annual parallax of the brightest star in the constellation Lyra; the variation was about 5 seconds of arc, yielding a distance of about 250 light days, which is a value about 15 times smaller than the actual 11 light years. Thus, the discovery of annual stellar parallax is usually attributed to German astronomer and mathematician Friedrich Bessel, who observed it for the star 61 Cygni in 1838. Annual stellar parallax provides direct proof that the Earth revolves annually in a closed orbit. In 1851, Léon Foucault in Paris invented the pendulum that bears his name and provided a spectacular demonstration of the Earth’s rotation; the experiment was ceremoniously repeated in many other places. Finally, in 1910–11, Jesuit J. G. Hagen, at the Vatican Astronomical Observatory in Rome, invented a new instrument (called isotomeograph) to demonstrate and measure the Earth’s rotation in a new way.
Of course, by now we are relatively far removed from the Galileo affair or even the motion of the Earth. The challenge in these latter experiments is not to prove or confirm something which is uncertain, but rather to measure with a very high level of precision a phenomenon which is uncontroversial. There are various technical challenges, as physicists now try to take into account such things as the detailed shape of the Earth, which is not perfectly spherical, the density variations within falling bodies, and even the effect of lunar gravitational attraction.
To bring us back to the Galileo affair and the Earth’s motion, let’s consider the contribution of an Italian priest and mathematician named Giambattista Guglielmini, in 1789–92. It was he who pioneered the detection of the eastward deviation of falling bodies, thus confirming eastward terrestrial rotation.
Recall the Aristotelian objection to terrestrial rotation based on vertical fall: if the Earth were rotating eastward, bodies in free fall would be left behind, and so would exhibit a trajectory slanted westward, landing at a spot on the ground west of the point of release; and since observation reveals that bodies fall vertically, it follows that the Earth does not rotate. In the Dialogue, Galileo answered this objection in great detail, as we will see. Here, I will simply mention one point in his answer: he argued that if the Earth were rotating, the horizontal motion which a body would have before being released would be conserved, and it would combine with the downward motion during the fall to bring the body exactly under the point of release without deviation, so that we would observe the same vertical fall as we would on a motionless Earth.
This reply is correct as a first approximation. But Galileo himself gives various hints elsewhere in the book to the effect that, on a rotating Earth, falling bodies would actually advance forward horizontally as they fall, and so would be deflected eastward.8 The basic reason for this is that on a rotating Earth a body at the top of a tower is moving horizontally with a faster linear speed than the base of the tower, due to the fact that the geocentric circumference at the top of the tower is longer than that at the base by an amount which is a function of the height of the tower. Following up on such hints, Guglielmini computed the amount of such an eastward deviation, devised some experiments to detect it, and confirmed the predictions. The predicted deviation is of course very small; for a height of about 160 feet used by Guglielmini, the deviation was calculated to be about 2/3 of an inch. Thus, all kinds of precautions had to be taken and devised, involving such things as the mechanism of release; stopping microscopic pendular vibrations before release; minimizing disturbances from outdoor traffic, winds, and temperature; and averaging out the spread of deflections from one trial to another.
In 1804, the eastward deviation was also confirmed in Germany by Johann Benzenburg. In the meantime, more sophisticated and precise calculations were worked out by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749–1827) in France and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) in Germany, working independently of each other and using different methods and principles; they predicted an eastward deviation with a value about 2/3 of that calculated by Guglielmini. As late as the first decade of the twentieth century, the phenomenon continued to attract some attention; in 1903–10, physicist Edwin Hall, from the Jefferson Laboratory at Harvard University, gave an updated sophisticated experimental confirmation of Guglielmini’s eastward deviation of falling bodies and also of a predicted negligible southward deviation.
Finally, it is intriguing to note that when Guglielmini first conceived his experiments, he happened to be in Rome, attached to the entourage of a powerful cardinal. His idea was to exploit the greatest height of fall available at the time, which happened to be the dome of St. Peter’s church. So he dreamed initially of providing an experimental proof that Galileo was scientifically right by dropping balls from the ceiling of that same church which had been the physical focus of his troubles.
Retrying Galileo
There were also various attempts after the trial to criticize Galileo and defend the Church, and these form the subject of much of the reflective commentary.9 The anti-Galilean critiques and the pro-clerical apologias involve various points of view—scientific, logical, philosophical, theological, legal, moral, etc. Here, we will deal primarily with the main factual details of this story, and I will come to a critical interpretation of it later.
After Galileo’s condemnation in 1633, it was only natural to want to know why he was condemned. It was equally natural to consider whether he had been unjustly persecuted by the Inquisition, and this varies depending on whether one is taking the point of view of science, philosophy, theology, law, morality, or practical utility. The first question pertains to the interpretation of the condemnation, the second to its evaluation. These two interrelated issues have been persistent themes of the subsequent Galileo affair.
One initial response by critics of Galileo and pro-clerical thinkers was to hope or try to show that he had been scientifically wrong. For example, in 1642–8, a controversy developed regarding the correctness of his science of motion; a controversy that has been called “the Galilean affaire of the laws of motion … a second ‘trial’.”10 It started in 1642, when Pierre Gassendi elaborated the connection between the new Galilean physics of motion and Copernican astronomy, strengthening each. The focal point was Marin Mersenne, whose correspondence and contacts facilitated and encouraged discussion. The result of this first “retrial” was a vindication of Galileo, who, ironically, had died the year the controversy began.
Similarly, in 1651, Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli published a monumental work claiming that the Inquisition had been right and wise in condemning Galileo, both scientifically and theologically. Scientifically speaking, Riccioli argued that this was so chiefly because neither the Ptolemaic nor the Copernican, but rather the Tychonic, system was the correct one, so Galileo was wrong in holding that the Earth moves. Riccioli made a comprehensive examination of all the arguments to support his scientific choice. He even invented a new geostatic argument based on Galilean ideas, a Galilean argument against Galileo, so to speak. Although this particular argument was originally ignored, it was widely criticized after 1665, when it was republished in another book by Riccioli. The controversy spawned at least nine books, before subsiding four years later.11 The consensus was that Riccioli was scientifically wrong, insofar as he was misunderstanding Galileo’s physics. Even Riccioli himself seemed to admit scientific defeat. Once again, the objections of Galileo’s scientific critics backfired against them, and they ended up being discredited, and he vindicated.
Eventually, as we have seen, the Earth’s motion became an incontrovertible fact, conclusively proved beyond any reasonable doubt. However, long before that happened, as it was becoming clearer that Galileo had been right in believing that the Earth moves, another genre of anti-Galilean criticism and apologia of the Inquisition had been emerging. He began to be charged with believing what turned out to be true for the wrong reasons, on the basis of flawed arguments, or with the support of inadequate evidence.
Even during Galileo’s own lifetime, his geokinetic argument from the tides had seemed not completely convincing. After Newton’s correct explanation of the tides as caused by the gravitational attraction of the Moon (and also of the Sun), one could also claim that there was definitely an error in Galileo’s theory that the tides were caused by the Earth’s motion. And so the anti-Galilean critics started to mention the tidal argument as one of Galileo’s bad reasons for believing what turned out to be true. Today this criticism continues to be one of the most common charges against Galileo.
In 1841, an anonymous article in a German journal inaugurated this kind of apologia in an explicit manner. It argued that the Inquisition rendered a service to science by condemning the Copernican theory when it had not yet been demonstrated to be true, and by condemning Galileo for supporting it with scientifically incorrect arguments. This anonymous article was originally attributed by some to a certain professor Clemens of the University of Bonn, but it was later shown (in 1878) by Karl von Gebler to be a translation of an Italian essay authored by Maurizio B. Olivieri, commissary of the Roman Inquisition and former general of the Dominicans. The original essay circulated widely in manuscript form and was published only posthumously in 1872. Olivieri claimed that the mechanical objections to the Earth’s motion depended crucially on the assumption that air has no weight; that therefore they could not be answered until the discovery that air has weight; that Galileo was not aware of this fact; and that the discovery was made after his death by Evangelista Torricelli and Blaise Pascal.
As I said earlier, there is more to being right than that one’s beliefs and conclusions happen to be true, i.e., correspond to reality. It is also important that one’s motivating reasons and supporting arguments be right. One’s reasoning is at least as important as the substantive content of one’s beliefs.
However, most such anti-Galilean charges are misapplied and can be refuted. Galileo’s reasoning can be successfully defended; indeed, as I will argue later, it can be shown to be a model of critical thinking. For example, the just-mentioned criticism by Olivieri is historically untenable since Galileo was clearly aware that air has weight; this can be seen from Galileo’s letters to Giovanni Battista Baliani of 1614 and 1630, and from a discussion in Galileo’s 1638 book, Two New Sciences. The criticism was also scientifically misconceived because most of the mechanical difficulties depended on such questions as conservation and composition of motion and the principles of relativity and inertia, and not on the weight of air.
In any case, other issues were bound to arise, and did arise, in the process of coming to terms with the condemnation of Galileo. As we have seen, he got into trouble with the Church, and was formally condemned, in part for holding the principle that Scripture is not a scientific authority, that Scripture is irrelevant to the assessment of provable or probable claims about nature. This methodological and theological principle is much more elusive and controversial than the astronomical and scientific claim that the Earth moves, and the corresponding issues are more complex.
At first, some anti-Galilean critics mentioned this principle as one of Galileo’s main errors. For example, in 1651 Riccioli, besides criticizing the geokinetic theory scientifically, elaborated a very conservative version of biblical fundamentalism, according to which the literal meaning of biblical statements must be held to be physically true and scientifically correct; thus, allegedly, the Inquisition had been theologically wise in upholding the fundamentalist view against Galileo.
Again, however, eventually it turned out that Galileo was essentially right regarding this principle as well. As we have seen, a crucial episode in the theological vindication of Galileo came in 1893, with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus. About a century later, Leo’s implicit vindication was made explicit in Pope Saint John Paul II’s rehabilitation of Galileo. In his 1992 speech, John Paul stated that “the new science, with its methods and the freedom of research that they implied, obliged theologians to examine their own criteria of scriptural interpretation. Most of them did not know how to do so. Paradoxically, Galileo, a sincere believer, showed himself to be more perceptive in this regard than the theologians who opposed him.”12
However, once again, as it became increasingly clear that Galileo’s theological principle was correct, his critics started to emphasize the reasons and arguments he had given to justify it. They tried to find all sorts of incoherences and inconsistencies in it: that his Letter to Christina contains not only assertions denying the scientific authority of Scripture, but also assertions affirming it; that on the one hand he objects to the use of biblical passages against his own astronomical claims, but on the other hand he tries to interpret the passage in Joshua 10:12–13 in geokinetic terms (i.e., he wants to have it both ways); that he tries to illegitimately shift the burden of proof by pretending that he is not obliged to prove Copernicanism, but rather theologians are obliged to disprove it; and that he wants both to appeal to the theological tradition (for example, by frequent quotations from St. Augustine) and to overturn it by a radically new principle.
However, Galileo can be defended from this criticism of his reasoning, for the criticism is itself criticizable as invalid. In fact, in this case its invalidity should be obvious from my earlier account of the Letter to Christina.
Still, the greater complexity of the scriptural issue created new possibilities for anti-Galilean criticism. Independently of the truth or falsity of the principle denying the scientific authority of Scripture, and independently of the validity or invalidity of Galileo’s reasoning to justify it, he is sometimes criticized for his theological intrusion. It is objected that Galileo was not a professional theologian, and so he had no right to interfere with, or get involved in, exegetical and hermeneutical discussions. One reply is that Galileo did stay away from theological discussions until his scientific ideas were attacked on scriptural grounds; after that, he had every right to defend himself by refuting those attacks as fully as he did.
Another common criticism of Galileo charges him with pastoral imprudence. Many Catholic authors have argued that, although Galileo may have been right in astronomy and biblical hermeneutics, he was definitely wrong from the pastoral point of view; this requires that the mass of believers not be scandalized or misled by new discoveries, and so the dissemination of truth (if not its pursuit) must be careful not to upset popular beliefs too suddenly and must be mindful of the social and practical consequences of truth. To answer such criticism, I have little hesitation in appealing to Pope Saint John Paul II. As we saw earlier, one aspect of his rehabilitation of Galileo dealt precisely with this pastoral issue. Instead of siding with Galileo’s opponents, John Paul’s opinion was “that the pastor ought to show a genuine boldness, avoiding the double trap of a hesitant attitude and of hasty judgment, both of which can cause considerable harm.”13 He was not reversing the traditional anti-Galilean criticism, but rather he was denying it, and pointing out that the correct pastoral position is one of arriving at a judicious mean between the two extremes of too much conservation and too much innovation. So while he was not really siding with Galileo on the historical substantive issue, his rejection of the opposite side was in this context a pro-Galilean position.
More strangely, at one point in the subsequent affair, Galileo was blamed for holding and doing the opposite of what he actually held and did: it was alleged that he preached and practiced the principle that biblical passages be used to confirm astronomical theories. This criticism got started in 1784–5 with an apologia of the Inquisition by Jacques Mallet du Pan in a French magazine and with the printing of an apocryphal letter attributed to Galileo (but forged by Onorato Gaetani) in Girolamo Tiraboschi’s History of Italian Literature. The view proved to be long-lasting and widely accepted for more than a century. It became a slogan, that “Galileo was persecuted not at all insofar as he was a good astronomer, but insofar as he was a bad theologian.”14 The myth seems to have acted as a catalyst in encouraging the proliferation of pro-clerical accounts and the articulation of pro-Galilean ones, making the discussion of Galileo’s trial the cause célèbre it is today.
Another strand of anti-Galilean criticism focused on his alleged legal or judicial culpability. It claimed that the trial did not really deal with the astronomical and biblical issues just discussed. Galileo was condemned neither for being a good astronomer nor for being a bad theologian, but rather for something else—disobedience or insubordination. His crime was the violation of the ecclesiastical admonition which he received in February 1616. Admittedly, it is uncertain whether this admonition amounted simply to Cardinal Bellarmine’s warning not to hold or defend the Earth’s motion as true or biblically compatible, or to Commissary Seghizzi’s special injunction not to hold, defend, or teach the theory in any way whatever. But in either case, Galileo’s Dialogue violated the admonition. In this view, the violation of the special injunction is clear, direct, and incontrovertible. And a violation of Bellarmine’s warning can be claimed to have occurred because the book does defend the truth of the Earth’s motion by criticizing all arguments against it and advocating some arguments in favor.
Whether valid or invalid, this criticism cannot be summarily dismissed. It can be dated as far back as Tiraboschi’s apologia in 1793, and it continues to be repeated, refined, and embellished. In my opinion, however, such criticism is untenable.
When it comes to Commissary Seghizzi’s special injunction, as we have seen, it turned out that the relevant defense is contained in the documents and manuscripts that make up the special Vatican file of Galilean trial proceedings, which became available to scholars in the decade 1867–78. A consensus soon emerged that the special-injunction document has enough irregularities that this aspect of the proceedings must be regarded as embodying a legal or judicial impropriety. It isn’t necessary to question the authenticity or factual accuracy of Seghizzi’s injunction. It suffices to question its legal validity. From this point of view, the legal criticism of Galileo again backfired against the critics. It emerged that Galileo had been the victim of an injustice in a way that had been previously unsuspected.
There remains, of course, the criticism that Galileo violated Bellarmine’s milder warning. A possible answer to this criticism relates to what I said earlier about the interpretation and the evaluation of Galileo’s Dialogue. The Dialogue discusses the Earth’s motion by examining all the (non-theological) arguments on both sides; the examination includes not only a presentation and an analysis of the arguments, but also their assessment. Galileo was indeed taking the liberty of evaluating the arguments; but he was hoping that if he carried out the evaluation fairly and validly, his having engaged in the assessment of the arguments would not be held against him. He was taking the gamble that a correct assessment of arguments would not be seen as an objectionable defense of Copernicanism.
Although such a defense of Galileo has never, to my knowledge, been fully articulated and justified, traces of it can be found in the historical record. In February 1633, soon after Galileo reached Rome to stand trial, Francesco Niccolini (the Tuscan ambassador) had a meeting with Cardinal Francesco Barberini (the Vatican secretary of state and a member-judge of the Inquisition tribunal) to discuss the forthcoming proceedings. To the cardinal’s charge that Galileo’s Dialogue amounted to “reporting much more validly what favors the side of the earth’s motion than what can be adduced for the other side,” the ambassador replied that “perhaps the nature of the situation indicated this, and therefore he was not to blame.”15 In 1635, Nicholas Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637) hinted at it when he interpreted the Dialogue as a “philosophical play,” by which he meant a problem-oriented discussion of the arguments, evidence, and reasons on both sides. And in 1943, Pio Paschini explicitly formulated such a defense of Galileo by stating that “it was not his fault if the arguments for the heliocentric system turned out to be more convincing.”16
Moreover, with regard to Galileo’s alleged disobedience of Bellarmine’s warning, was the disobedience really illegitimate, or conversely, was the warning really legitimate? There is no conclusive argument justifying the legitimacy of the warning. It may have been one of the many abuses of power in this story. If the warning was not legitimate, then Galileo disobeyed an illegal order. And even if the warning was proper from the point of view of canon law, we may ask whether it was also proper from the moral point of view. Again, at worst Galileo may have committed a legal “misdemeanor” while in pursuit of a morally desirable aim, or while exercising a basic human or civil right.
One might think that the implicit theological vindication of Galileo by an influential pope in 1893, coming soon after his judicial rehabilitation by the meticulous scholarship of the 1870s, on top of the older and more gradual scientific vindication provided by the proofs of the Earth’s motion climaxing with Foucault’s pendulum (1851), would prevent or discourage further indictments or re-trials of the victim. However, to think so would be to underestimate the power of human ingenuity or the unique complexity of the Galileo affair. In fact, a novel apologia was soon devised by a great scholar who combined knowledge of physics, history, and philosophy—Pierre Duhem (1861–1916). In 1908 he advanced the new charge that Galileo was a bad epistemologist.
The criticism of Galileo as a bad epistemologist is often confused with, and is indeed related to, the criticism that he was a bad arguer or reasoner, that he did a poor job in proving the Earth’s motion, in defending Copernicanism. But the two criticisms are distinct. The epistemological criticism of Galileo attributes to him wrong or untenable epistemological principles and practices, and then it connects such epistemological errors or naïveté with the tragedy of the trial.
The epistemological doctrine which Duhem found especially objectionable is “realism”: it states that science aims at the truth about the world, and scientific theories are descriptions of physical reality that are true, probably true, or potentially true. Duhem was an advocate of epistemological “instrumentalism,” according to which scientific theories are merely instruments for making mathematical calculations and observational predictions, and not descriptions of reality, and so they are not the sort of things that can be true or false, but only more or less convenient. Duhem tried to blame Galileo’s trial on epistemological realism, allegedly shared by Galileo and his Inquisition persecutors, and also on their failure to appreciate instrumentalism, which in that historical context was being allegedly advocated by Cardinal Bellarmine and Pope Urban VIII. Duhem’s view was “that logic was on the side of Osiander, Bellarmine, and Urban VIII, and not on the side of Kepler and Galileo; that the former had understood the exact import of the experimental method; and that, in this regard, the latter were mistaken.”17 Here, Duhem’s word “logic” should be taken to mean primarily “epistemology,” and not reasoning.
Duhem’s epistemological criticism of Galileo is important and influential. Nevertheless, it is untenable, primarily because under the heading of Galilean realism Duhem subsumes too many other epistemological principles besides the ideal of truth and description of reality; but these other attributions are conceptually arbitrary and textually inaccurate.
Another example of this genre of criticism may be gleaned from the work of more recent scholars. It claims that Galileo subscribed to the traditional Aristotelian ideal of science as strictly demonstrative, which he was never able to give up despite some flirtations with fallibilism or probabilism; that he believed he had provided a strict demonstration of the Earth’s motion (with arguments such as his explanation of the tides); that much opposition to him was an attempt to make him aware of the nondemonstrative status of his arguments or the nonviability of the demonstrative ideal; and that the operative role of this problem is visible in such documents as Bellarmine’s letter to Foscarini (1615), Galileo’s “Discourse on the Tides” (1616), the Dialogue (1632), and the consultants’ reports on the latter book produced during the 1633 proceedings. Such an account could be labeled the criticism of Galileo as a failed Aristotelian, or a failed demonstrativist.
This criticism overlaps with both Duhem’s epistemological criticism and the criticism of Galileo’s reasoning mentioned earlier. For in part this criticism faults Galileo’s epistemological doctrine of demonstration or his epistemological awareness of the nature of his own geokinetic arguments; and in part this criticism impugns the reasoning used by Galileo to arrive at or to justify his geokinetic beliefs. However, such criticism can be rebutted, and it emerges that rather than being a failed Aristotelian demonstrativist, Galileo is someone who was able to assimilate and transcend the Aristotelian ideal of science as demonstration.18
A measure of Duhem’s influence is that it has spawned a genre of anti-Galilean criticism in which Galileo is charged with having held all kinds of implausible epistemological doctrines, and then a questionable connection with the trial is made. For example, a recent popular book revealingly entitled Galileo’s Mistake19 portrays Galileo as a kind of positivist who held that only science provides the truth about reality, and that this mistake was the root cause of his condemnation.
Current Cultural Developments
The subsequent Galileo affair shows no signs of abating to date. This is obvious not only from the recent rehabilitation efforts by the Catholic Church, but also from the recent anti-Galilean critiques by left-leaning social critics.20
At about the same time that Galileo was being rehabilitated by various Catholic officials and institutions, he became the target of unprecedented criticism from various representatives of secular culture. It was almost as if a reversal of roles was occurring, with his erstwhile enemies turning into friends, and his former friends becoming enemies.
These critics articulated what may be called social and cultural criticism of Galileo; they tried to blame Galileo by holding him personally or emblematically responsible for such things as the abuses of the Industrial Revolution, the social irresponsibility of scientists, the atomic bomb, and the gap between the two cultures (science vs. humanities). They were mostly writers with backgrounds and sympathies on the political left. The most outstanding and original examples of such criticism came from central-European German-speaking writers. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s work Galileo was first written in 1938, then revised into a second version in 1947, and a third in 1955, and became a classic of twentieth-century theater. The Hungarian-born writer, novelist, and intellectual Arthur Koestler published The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe in 1959, and it became an international bestseller. And Austrian-born philosopher Paul Feyerabend advanced his version of social criticism in the book Against Method, first published in 1975 and revised in 1988 and 1993.
These developments have not yet been properly assimilated. For example, the Catholic “rehabilitations” tend to be either unfairly criticized (even by Catholics) or uncritically accepted (even by non-Catholics). Moreover, a very recent and highly intellectual pope, Benedict XVI, seems to have displayed an ambivalent attitude toward this issue; his ambivalence is emblematic and revealing, but continues to polarize and confuse. And the left-leaning social critiques tend to be summarily dismissed by practicing scientists, whose professional identity is thereby threatened, or dogmatically advocated by self-styled progressives, who seem not to have learned much from Galileo and to want to turn the clock back to pre-Galilean days.
Feyerabend portrays Galileo’s trial as involving a conflict between two philosophical attitudes toward, and historical traditions about, the role of experts. Galileo allegedly advocated the uncritical acceptance by society of the views of experts, whereas the Church advocated the evaluation by society of the views of experts in the light of human and social values. Feyerabend extracts the latter principle from Cardinal Bellarmine’s letter to Foscarini, asserting that “the Church would do well to revive the balance and graceful wisdom of Bellarmine, just as scientists constantly gain strength from the opinions of … their own pushy patron saint Galileo.”21 More generally, Feyerabend claims that “the Church at the time of Galileo not only kept closer to reason as defined then and, in part, even now; it also considered the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s views. Its indictment of Galileo was rational and only opportunism and a lack of perspective can demand a revision.”22
I believe Feyerabend’s thesis is untenable. In part, it is not really supported by the texts to which he refers. However, the principal difficulty is that he seems to perpetrate a fallacy of equivocation. For the principle in question could mean either that social and political leaders should evaluate the use of experts’ views in light of human and social values, or that scientists should evaluate the truth of each other’s views in light of human and social values.
Now, under the first interpretation, Galileo did not reject the principle, but rather would have agreed with it. Moreover, when Feyerabend attributes this principle to Bellarmine, the documentation is unclear and unconvincing. In any case, in this regard, their difference was not one of principle but of application. For example, they would have disagreed on who the relevant experts were, in particular whether theologians should be counted as experts in physics and astronomy; another disagreement would have been whether the views of theological experts should be subject to the same requirement.
Under the second interpretation, the principle was indeed rejected and criticized by Galileo. However, it is in fact untenable. For this version of the principle cannot survive the objections (which we have inherited from Galileo) against teleological and anthropomorphic ways of thinking; such thinking reduces to arguing that something is true because it is useful, beneficial, or good, and false because it is useless, harmful, or bad.
But whether untenable or not, Feyerabend’s criticism is important because of the effects it has had. In fact, it has become involved in one of the latest twists to the controversy.
On the one hand, Feyerabend’s apologia was politely rejected in 1989–90 by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who at the time was the chairman of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the new name of the Inquisition), and who in 2005 became Pope Benedict XVI. In a scholarly essay, in the context of an analysis of the role of faith in the revolutionary geopolitical changes happening in 1989–90, Cardinal Ratzinger quoted several anti-Galilean critiques, including Feyerabend’s. However, Ratzinger went on to criticize such views as expressions of skepticism and philosophical insecurity, which he regards as unjustified.
On the other hand, there seems to be a very widespread tendency that confuses or conflates Feyerabend’s view with Ratzinger’s. Some authors have claimed simply that Cardinal Ratzinger or Pope Benedict accepts Feyerabend’s view. Others have gone so far as to attribute this claim directly to Cardinal Ratzinger or Pope Benedict XVI, without giving any indication that he was quoting Feyerabend. There have been some attempts to clarify the situation, but apparently to no avail.
In January 2008 such confusion triggered a cultural clash. A few months earlier, Pope Benedict XVI had accepted an invitation by the rector of the University of Rome to deliver the keynote address at the formal ceremony inaugurating the new academic year. This plan, however, triggered protests by students and faculty, especially in the university’s distinguished department of physics. They objected primarily on the grounds of the principle of separation of Church and State, but also in part because, as they stated, they felt offended and humiliated by the pope’s view of Galileo’s condemnation, expressed some twenty years earlier when the pope was still a cardinal; that is, by his sharing Feyerabend’s view. In the light of such opposition, and the potential for unrest and violence, the pope cancelled his speech.
This controversy is not helped, but rather exacerbated, by what seems to be a recurrent pattern of thinking or lecturing on the part of Benedict XVI, by flirting with equivocation by means of quoting controversial views. For example, an analogous issue arose as a result of a lecture he delivered at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006, in which he quoted a remark made by Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus in 1391 regarding Islam and holy war.23 Now, given the current geopolitical situation, Benedict did make a sustained effort to clear up the latter misunderstanding. But he made no such effort regarding the approval of Galileo’s condemnation.
On the other hand, this appearance may not correspond to reality. In fact, a few months later a story surfaced in the global news media that there was a plan to erect a statue to Galileo within the Vatican walls. Without knowing more, some speculated that such a statue was a gesture to suggest that Cardinal Ratzinger had really meant to criticize Feyerabend, and that today’s Church does not really approve the 1633 condemnation of Galileo. However, some time afterwards, it emerged that the Vatican statue to Galileo had been proposed by a private firm, who wanted to pay for the cost but to remain anonymous. But the latest development in this episode is that the private donor has withdrawn the offer, perhaps afraid of the unwanted publicity and controversy which the idea was generating.
However, the story did not end there. On December 21, 2008, Pope Benedict delivered the weekly Sunday speech at noon from a window of the Vatican palace to the people assembled in St. Peter’s Square. Besides the usual pieties, the pope exploited the time and place to mention Galileo and the International Year of Astronomy. The pretext was provided by the fact that the feast of Christmas was originally scheduled to come around the winter solstice, and by the fact that the obelisk at the center of St. Peter’s Square casts its longest shadow on the winter solstice. Then the pope went on “to greet all those who will be taking part in various capacities in the initiatives for the World Year of Astronomy, 2009, established on the fourth centenary of Galileo Galilei’s first observations by telescope.”24
As usual, such a brief reference was widely reported, commented on, and amplified. The Associated Press compiled and circulated an article entitled “Good Heavens: Vatican Rehabilitating Galileo.”25 And Church critics sprinkled the blogosphere with their share of invective and abuse.
Then on January 30, 2009, the Pontifical Council for Culture announced several projects related to the International Year of Astronomy. One project was an exhibition at the Vatican Museums entitled “Astrum 2009: The Historical Legacy of Italian Astronomy from Galileo to Today,” organized jointly with the Italian Institute of Astrophysics and the Vatican Observatory, and running from October 2009 to January 2010. Another project was a conference entitled “1609–2009: From the Birth of Astrophysics to Evolutionary Cosmology,” to be held in November 2009 at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome. It is obvious that the Church was attempting to exploit the International Year of Astronomy to project an image of herself as more friendly to and harmonious with Galileo and science.
Next, on May 26–30, 2009, there was a conference in Florence entitled “The Galileo Affair: A Historical, Philosophical and Theological Re-examination.” It was conceived and organized by the Florentine Jesuits, who are based at the Niels Stensen Institute in the Tuscan capital. However, its institutional sponsors represented a who’s who of Italian and Vatican academic, cultural, and political institutions, including the Lincean Academy, National Research Council, Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pontifical Council for Culture, and Vatican Observatory, as well as the President, Prime Minister, and Culture Ministry of the Italian Republic. Moreover, besides an organizing committee consisting of members and staff of the Stensen Institute, there was a scientific committee consisting of several well-known Galileo scholars. And many public and private institutions provided funding and financial support.
This conference had a very ambitious agenda, as its title suggests. The various announcements available at the website of the Stensen Institute indicated that the underlying motivation of the organizers was not only the celebration of the International Year for Astronomy, but also the continuing and lingering dissatisfaction with some aspects of Pope John Paul II’s attempt at rehabilitation in 1979–92. The program included keynote addresses, presentations, and panel discussions by many distinguished scientists, historians, theologians, and philosophers. The variety of sponsoring organizations indicated that there was a general desire for fruitful dialogue not only across the divide of science and religion, but also across the separation of Church and State. The last point is especially significant, given that in Italy the Galileo affair has an additional significant complication which is absent or minor in other national contexts: the historical enmity between the Church and the political ideal of a unified Italian state.
The conference proceedings were published soon thereafter, in a volume edited by three distinguished lay scholars.26 Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the conference’s stated ambition, initial promise, and great potential were not realized. Indeed, such events have a way of frustrating the aims and expectations of even the most astute planners and efficient organizers. In any case, dialogue between science and religion, between Church and State, and even between scholarly disciplines (such as history and philosophy) is easier said than done. Too often, instead of a real dialogue, the result is primarily a proliferation of monologues.
The year 2009 also saw the publication by the Vatican Secret Archives of a volume containing all Vatican documents relating to the trial of Galileo and dating from 1611 to 1741.27 It was edited by the director of the Archives, Mons. Sergio Pagano. All these documents were previously known and available in print; they consist of such things as trial proceedings, minutes of Inquisition meetings, and correspondence. But their collation into a single volume was valuable and convenient for scholars. Additionally, the editor contributed a monograph-length introduction and detailed annotations. This publication contains no explicit or claimed connection with the International Year of Astronomy, and so its occurrence during that year may be just a fortuitous coincidence. On the other hand, Mons. Pagano is explicit that this volume is an expanded and improved edition of a similar but less inclusive collection which he edited in 1984; and that earlier edition was explicitly presented as a contribution to Pope John Paul’s efforts at a re-examination of Galileo’s trial.
After the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, a new pope, Francis, was elected in March 2013. Pope Francis is widely known to be more pastorally inclined and less intellectually minded than his predecessor and to focus on alleviating concrete human suffering and dealing with down-to-earth problems. Thus, it is not surprising that there have been no ecclesiastic words or deeds explicitly involving the Galileo affair. However, its issues are so fundamental that they have a way of emerging in all sorts of contexts. So, for example, in 2015, Pope Francis published an encyclical entitled Laudato Si’, dealing with climate change. Whatever its merits, the encyclical could be (and has been) criticized for having failed to learn, from the Galileo affair, the lesson that the Church should be wary of interfering in scientific matters.
Finally,28 the year 2016 was the four-hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s first confrontation with the Inquisition. Recall that, although he was neither condemned nor tried in 1616, Cardinal-Inquisitor Bellarmine gave him a friendly warning, Commissary Seghizzi was alleged to have issued him a special injunction, and the Index condemned the Copernican doctrine as scientifically false and theologically contrary to Scripture. The Church actions of 1616 were thus instrumental in causing Galileo’s trial and condemnation of 1633, and hence the subsequent and ongoing controversy.
As was to be expected, this anniversary was observed by several scholarly and cultural institutions; and so there was at least one international scholarly conference, at least one serious notice in a serious Internet publication, and at least one book exhibit in a library.29 Of course, such observances were more in the nature of commemorations rather than celebrations. But as far as I know, there was nothing but silence on the part of the Church.
And so here we are well into the twenty-first century, still trying to come to terms with the trial of Galileo and the Galileo affair: how and why the 1633 condemnation happened; whether and why it was right or wrong; and what can be learned from it. Must this controversy continue forever? Is there not a way of resolving it?