From sarto!jhpb@uunet.uu.net Wed Nov 11 01:17:15 1992 Received: from rodan.UU.NET by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.5/3.08) id AA01741; Wed, 11 Nov 92 01:17:15 EST Received: from relay1.UU.NET by rodan.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-mail-drop) id AA21963; Wed, 11 Nov 92 01:17:12 -0500 Received: from uunet.uu.net (via LOCALHOST.UU.NET) by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AA11323; Wed, 11 Nov 92 01:17:11 -0500 Received: from sarto.UUCP by uunet.uu.net with UUCP/RMAIL (queueing-rmail) id 011648.27420; Wed, 11 Nov 1992 01:16:48 EST Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Path: jhpb From: jhpb@sarto.budd-lake.nj.us (Joseph H. Buehler) Subject: Re: The pope and Galileo In-Reply-To: rolls@cis.umassd.edu's message of 8 Nov 92 06:12:01 GMT Message-Id: Sender: jhpb@sarto.budd-lake.nj.us (Joseph H Buehler) Organization: none References: Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 00:17:56 GMT Content-Type: text Content-Length: 4503 Apparently-To: I think the moderator asked for a summary of the Galileo case, so here's one. There is a good article in the old Catholic Encyclopedia on Galileo Galilei. There is a tendency for some parties to try and paint it as "Dark Ages Catholic Church Mentality" vs. "Enlightened Modern Scientific Mentality", with the palm being awarded to the latter, and boos and hisses to the former. That's a bit too simplistic. According to the CE, Professor Huxley (recognize the name?), after examining the evidence, stated that the opponents of Galileo "had rather the best of it." As far as heliocentrism goes, it should be remembered that Copernicus was a Catholic cleric, and published his work covering heliocentrism with the approbation of a Cardinal and a Bishop. Interestingly, for 75 years after Copernicus's publication, no scriptural or philosophical criticisms were raised on the Catholic side, though Luther and Melancthon condemned the book in no uncertain terms (this according to the CE). It should also be kept in mind that Galileo's scientific proofs of heliocentrism were scientifically inadequate. He had no conclusive proof. He failed to convince men such as Tycho Brahe and Lord Bacon with what he had. Scientifically speaking, heliocentrism wasn't a sure thing yet. Galileo was actually treated as a sort of conquering hero for some time after he made his discoveries with his telescope. He was well-received in Rome. He had friends in high places in Rome. Where the problems came from was that Galileo was totally convinced, conclusive evidence or not. His character was such that he could get pretty vehement about propagating and defending his ideas. This turned out to be not good, considering certain popular beliefs current at the time. It wouldn't have mattered whether Galileo got vehement about heliocentrism, except that the popular mind had come to assume that Sacred Scripture taught geocentrism. The main concern of the Roman authorities was to not shake people's belief in Sacred Scripture with unseasonable attacks on geocentrism. Remember that the Reformation was not that old yet! Cardinal Bellarmine, in charge of the case, I think, put it this way: I say that if a real proof be found that the sun is fixed and does not revolve around the earth, but the earth around the sun, then it will be necessary, very carefully, to proceed to the explanation of the passages of Scripture which appear to be contrary, and we should rather say that we have misunderstood these than pronounce that to be false which is demonstrated. Galileo was a bit too vehement in his claims that heliocentrism was a *fact*. He probably should have limited himself to saying it was an attractive hypothesis, and worked the masses into it gradually. The men in Rome judging the case, of whom Robert Cardinal Bellarmine was one, for these reasons, decided to prohibit Copernicus's work (for the first time), but only until the various editions were corrected to teach heliocentrism as a hypothesis, and not as an established fact. Scholars could still read the inedited originals, if they wanted. Galileo promised to abide by this, and things were smoothed over for a while. His character defects got the better of him eventually, though, and he started agitating for heliocentrism again. At this point, the Holy Office tried and sentenced him. He was confined for about the last 10 years of his life. Galileo's Protestant biographer von Gebler puts Galileo's trial this way: One glance at the truest historical source for the famous trial, would convince anyone that Galileo spent altogether 22 days in the buildings of the Holy Office (i.e., the Inquisition), and even then not in a private cell with barred windows, but in the handsome and commodious apartment of an official of the Inquisition. The Catholic Encyclopedia then goes on to note that Galileo's places of "confinement" was allowed to be his friends' houses! He was certainly never tortured in any way. The famous phrase "But it does move!" that he is supposed to have uttered has no solid historical evidence for it; it first appears in writing more than a century after Galileo's death. A comment in passing: Cardinal Bellarmine, who was involved in the trial of Galileo, is nowadays St. Robert Bellarmine, a Doctor of the Church, one of the Catholic Church's best theologians. It is not likely that he made serious prudential errors in the trial of Galileo. From spk@aber.ac.uk Fri Nov 13 07:19:30 1992 Received: from rodan.UU.NET by aramis.rutgers.edu (5.59/SMI4.0/RU1.5/3.08) id AA27549; Fri, 13 Nov 92 07:19:30 EST Received: from relay1.UU.NET by rodan.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-mail-drop) id AA01573; Fri, 13 Nov 92 07:19:28 -0500 Received: from ben.uknet.ac.uk by relay1.UU.NET with SMTP (5.61/UUNET-internet-primary) id AB16998; Fri, 13 Nov 92 07:19:18 -0500 Received: from eros.uknet.ac.uk by ben.uknet.ac.uk via UKIP with SMTP (PP) id ; Fri, 13 Nov 1992 12:19:00 +0000 Received: from aber.ac.uk by eros.uknet.ac.uk via JANET with NIFTP (PP) id <29787-0@eros.uknet.ac.uk>; Fri, 13 Nov 1992 12:18:18 +0000 Received: by uk.ac.aber.aberdb (5.57/aberclient-4.0) id AA24933; Fri, 13 Nov 92 12:19:25 GMT Date: Fri, 13 Nov 92 12:19:25 GMT From: spk@aber.ac.uk Message-Id: <9211131219.AA24933@uk.ac.aber.aberdb> To: soc-religion-christian Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Path: spk From: spk@uk.ac.aber (Stephen Kingston) Subject: Re: The pope and Galileo Message-ID: <1992Nov13.121907.24845@aber.ac.uk> Sender: spk@aber.ac.uk (Stephen Kingston) Organization: Computer Science Dept., University of Wales at Aberystwyth. References: Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1992 12:19:07 GMT clh writes: > However there's been enough ill-informed discussion in other groups > about this topic, that it's probably worth having someone who knows > the background giving us an explanation of the real history behind the > original judgement against Galileo, and possibly some explanation of > why the Church decided to act now. I'm not going to be willing to > accept comments based on erroneous assumptions. --clh] The following article was posted to the group bit.listserv.christia by James Kiefer maybe two or three years ago: --- Since the subject of Galileo has come up, I should like to try to clear up some misunderstandings. My chief reference here is THE CRIME OF GALILEO, by Giorgio Santillana, Professor of the History of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, available in paperback from Midway Reprint Service, University of Chicago Press, for 14 dollars. Since I have lost my own copy in the usual way (lent it to someone who did not return it), I write from memory. In Galileo's day, almost every government required a permit to print a book, and the Papal States (central Italy, ruled directly by the Pope as temporal sovereign) were no exception. When Galileo finished his book, A DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO GREAT WORLD SYSTEMS (meaning the earth-centered system of Ptolemy and the sun-centered system of Copernicus) he applied directly to Pope Urban VIII, with whom he was personally acquainted, for the necessary permit. The Pope granted the permission, on condition that the book give a balanced presentation, and in particular that it contain his own favorite argument against Copernicus, one that he had invented himself and was particularly proud of. Galileo agreed and got the permit. When the book came out, the Pope was chagrined to find that his argument was indeed presented, but not as he had expected. The book was written in the form of a conversation among friends, and the Pope's argument had been put into the mouth of a character called Simplicio (=the idiot). Moreover, the other speakers then covered the argument with ridicule. The Pope responded (or so it appears) by giving the Inquisition orders to get Galileo for something or other. He was accordingly brought up on charges, but could properly plead that he had sought and obtained a permit for the book. The prosecution replied that about sixteen years earlier he had received a private admonition from Cardinal Bellarmine that his views were of questionable orthodoxy, and that if the Pope had known of this, he would have been more cautious about giving the permit, and therefore Galileo's failure to mention the Cardinal's admonition amounted to obtaining a permit by fraud, which invalidated the permit, etc. Galileo said that he could not remember receiving any such admonition, but under pressure admitted that he could not swear he had not. The upshot was that Galileo signed his famous "recantation" and was condemned to life imprisonment. This was a blatant injustice, but not as harsh as it sounds. The prison was one of the Pope's summer palaces, which was turned over to him for life, and he continued to conduct experiments, to receive visitors without restriction, and to publish on any subject except astronomy. He here developed and perfected his works on terrestial physics, works which undermined the theoretical basis of Ptolemaic astronomy. The wording of the "recantation" is of some interest. The key sentence reads pretty much as follows: I, the undersigned, Galileo Galilei, renounce and condemn the belief that the sun is at the center of the world, and that the earth rotates on its axis, and also has a daily motion. Now the word "world" (=mundus) is ambiguous. It can refer to the universe, or to the earth. Similarly, the daily motion of the earth, according to Copernicus, is precisely its rotation once a day on its axis. It is therefore false (according to Copernicus) to say that the earth has two motions, one rotation and the other a daily motion. It is also false to say that the sun is at the center of the earth. Thus Galileo should have had no difficulty about signing the document. Is there any evidence that this is not just ingenious twisting of words? Four considerations come to mind. (1) Torricelli, Galileo's friend and pupil, best known as the inventor of the barometer, when he heard that Galileo had repudiated Copernicanism under oath, said, "Alas, he is damned. He has sworn falsely." But when he saw the text of the recantation, he said, "Oh joy, he is not damned." (2) When the tribunal presented Galileo with their draft of a recantation, he flatly refused to sign it. He then negotiated a revised text, which he did sign. (3) Both Galileo and the members of the tribunal were men who chose their words carefully, and who knew the art, essential in politics whether ecclesiastical or otherwise, of wording a document to as to convey the impression of saying more, or less, than is actually said. (4) At least some of the tribunal members (Santillana argues a majority of them) were themselves of the Copernican persuasion, and would be sympathetic to a resolution of the matter that gave the Pope his personal revenge but without forcing Galileo to repudiate what he and they believed to be the truth. The Galileo episode has often been cited as evidence that Science and Religion (some prefer to say, Science and Theology) are by their very nature irreconcilable enemies. In fact, a close look at the Galileo episode seems to me to yield two morals both quite different from this. One moral, of course, is that if you need a permit from a board in order to do something, whether publish a book or have your property rezoned, it is unwise to pull the nose of the chairman of the board in public. Another moral is that if you establish a government committee to safeguard public morals, the committee members will assume as self-evident that nothing could be more subversive of public morals, and therefore of the very foundations of society, than a deed that strikes at the guardians of morality by making the members of said committee look personally ridiculous. Example: The Watergate scandal began because the press was obtaining confidential reports out of the Nixon Administration, and high officials were determined to learn who was responsible. In the process of trying to learn, they cut corners. One might have expected the investigating committee to be keenly aware that there are things more important than stopping leaks to the press. However, some stories appeared in the press about the committee, including, for example, a statement by one committee member that another member was apparently incapable of answering any question, including, "What time is it?" without first frowning and staring at the ceiling for several seconds. (A perfectly correct observation, by the way, which is precisely why it caused such a commotion.) The committee responded by taking off a full week from the job of saving the country to conduct a full-time investigation into the question of who had been betraying his sacred trust by reporting confidential information to the press, information that, by making the committee, the guardians of the Constitution, look silly, amounted to an attack on the Constitution itself. (My source here is an article in the WASHINGTON MONTHLY at the time.) The over-all theological atmosphere of Galileo's time and just before was far from a rigid commitment to the idea of a fixed earth. Nicolas of Cusa, who died a century before Galileo was born, wrote, "When we say that the earth does not move, we mean simply this, that the earth is the point from which man makes his observations of celestial phenomena." A modern physicist discussing relativity theory could not improve on that. During Galileo's lifetime, the Inquisition was officially asked whether someone who revealed in the confessional that he held the Copernican view and was not about to give it up should be denied absolution as an impenitent heretic. The official answer was "no". I conclude that the punishment of Galileo was based, not on any conflict between his view and Church doctrine, but on the Pope's regrettable but unsurprising conviction that anyone who publicly makes a laughing-stock of the Pope is striking at the foundations of all that is good and decent and must not be permitted to get away with it. Urban VIII is by no means the only public figure to reason like this. I feel the urge to give several more examples, but this post is already too long. James Kiefer --- Stephen (James Kiefer's user id is JEK@GOV.NIH.CU - you may want to ask him about makeing this file a FAQ document). -- Stephen Kingston - spk@uk.ac.aber | */^^-| | If you can do a better map spk%uk.ac.aber@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk | ./| | | of Wales then this in just Computer Science System Support | _/' < | four lines, then I would Group - U. of Wales, Aberystwyth | `-\__/- | like to hear from you!