The gradual acceptance of the Copernican theory of the universe Part 9

[Footnote 267: Doc. in Favaro: 74.]

[Footnote 268: Ibid: 75.]

[Footnote 269: Ibid: 76.]

[Footnote 270: Ibid: 80-81.]

Four times was the old man summoned into the presence of the Holy Office, though never when the Pope was presiding. In his first examination held on the 12th of April, he told how he thought he had obeyed the decree of 1616 as his _Dialogo_ did not defend the Copernican doctrine but rather confuted it, and that in his desire to do the right, he had personally submitted the book while in ma.n.u.script to the censorship of the Master of the Sacred Palace, and had accepted all the changes he and the Florentine Inquisitor had required. He had not mentioned the affair of 1616 because he thought that order did not apply to this book in which he proved the lack of validity and of conclusiveness of the Copernican arguments.[271] With remarkable, in fact unique, consideration, the Holy Office then a.s.signed Galileo to a suite of rooms within the prisons of the Holy Office, allowed him to have his servant with him and to have his meals sent in by the amba.s.sador. On the 30th after his examination, they even a.s.signed as his prison, the Amba.s.sador's palace, out of consideration for his age and ill-health.

[Footnote 271: Ibid: 80-81.]

In his second appearance (April 30), Galileo declared he had been thinking matters over after re-reading his book (which he had not read for three years), and freely confessed that there were several pa.s.sages which would mislead a reader unaware of his real intentions, into believing the worse arguments were the better, and he blamed these slips upon his vain ambition and delight in his own skill in debate.[272] He thereupon offered to write another "day" or two more for the _Dialogo_ in which he would completely refute the two "strong"

Copernican arguments based on the sun's spots and on the tides.[273]

Ten days later, at his third appearance, he presented a written statement of his defence in which he claimed that the phrase _vel quovis modo docere_ was wholly new to him, and that he had obeyed the order given him by Cardinal Bellarmin over the latter's own signature.

However he would make what amends he could and begged the Cardinals to "consider his miserable bodily health and his incessant mental trouble for the past ten months, the discomforts of a long hard journey at the worst season, when 70 years old, together with the loss of the greater part of the year, and that therefore such suffering might be adequate punishment for his faults which they might condone to failing old age.

Also he commended to them his honor and reputation against the calumnies of his ill-wishers who seek to detract from his good name."[274] To such a plight was the great man brought! But the end was not yet.

[Footnote 272: Doc. in Favaro: 83.]

[Footnote 273: Ibid: 84.]

[Footnote 274: Ibid: 85-87.]

Nearly a month later (June 16), by order of the Pope, Galileo was once again interrogated, this time under threat of torture.[275] Once again he declared the opinion of Ptolemy true and indubitable and said he did not hold and had not held this doctrine of Copernicus after he had been informed of the order to abandon it. "As for the rest," he added, "I am in your hands, do with me as you please." "I am here to obey."[276] Then by the order of the Pope, ensued Galileo's complete abjuration on his knees in the presence of the full Congregation, coupled with his promise to denounce other heretics (i.e., Copernicans).[277] In addition, because he was guilty of the heresy of having held and believed a doctrine declared and defined as contrary to the Scriptures, he was sentenced to "formal imprisonment" at the will of the Congregation, and to repeat the seven penitential Psalms every week for three years.[278]

[Footnote 275: Ibid: 101.]

[Footnote 276: Doc. in Favaro: 101.]

[Footnote 277: Doc. in Favaro: 146.]

[Footnote 278: Ibid: 145.]

At Galileo's earnest request, his sentence was commuted almost at once, to imprisonment first in the archiepiscopal palace in Siena (from June 30-December 1), then in his own villa at Arcetri, outside Florence, though under strict orders not to receive visitors but to live in solitude.[279] In the spring his increasing illness occasioned another request for greater liberty in order to have the necessary visits from the doctor; but on March 23, 1634, this was denied him with a stern command from the Pope to refrain from further pet.i.tions lest the Sacred Congregation be compelled to recall him to their prisons in Rome.[280]

[Footnote 279: Ibid: 103, 129.]

[Footnote 280: Ibid: 134.]

The rule forbidding visitors seems not to have been rigidly enforced all the time, for Milton visited him, "a prisoner of the Inquisition"

in 1638;[281] yet Father Castelli had to write to Rome for permission to visit him to learn his newly invented method of finding longitude at sea.[282] When in Florence on a very brief stay to see his doctor, Galileo had to have the especial consent of the Inquisitor in order to attend ma.s.s at Easter. He won approval from the Holy Congregation, however, by refusing to receive some gifts and letters brought him by some German merchants from the Low Countries.[283] He was then totally blind, but he dragged out his existence until January 8, 1642 (the year of Newton's birth), when he died. As the Pope objected to a public funeral for a man sentenced by the Holy Office, he was buried without even an epitaph.[284] The first inscription was made 31 years later, and in 1737, his remains were removed to Santa Croce after the Congregation had first been asked if such action would be un.o.bjectionable.[285]

[Footnote 281: Milton: _Areopagitica_: 35.]

[Footnote 282: Doc. in Favaro: 135.]

[Footnote 283: Ibid: 137.]

[Footnote 284: Fahie: 402.]

[Footnote 285: Doc. in Favaro: 138; and Fahie: 402.]

Pope Urban had no intention of concealing Galileo's abjuration and sentence. Instead, he ordered copies of both to be sent to all inquisitors and papal nuncios that they might notify all their clergy and especially all the professors of mathematics and philosophy within their districts, particularly those at Florence, Padua and Pisa.[286]

This was done during the summer and fall of 1633. From Wilna in Poland, Cologne, Paris, Brussels, and Madrid, as well as from all Italy, came the replies of the papal officials stating that the order had been obeyed.[287] He evidently intended to leave no ground for a remark like that of Fromundus about the earlier condemnation.

[Footnote 286: Doc. in Favaro: 101, 103.]

[Footnote 287: Ibid: 104-132.]

Galileo was thus brought so low that the famous remark, "Eppur si muove," legend reports him to have made as he rose to his feet after his abjuration, is incredible in itself, even if it had appeared in history earlier than its first publication in 1761.[288] But his discoveries and his fight in defence of the system did much both to strengthen the doctrine itself and to win adherents to it. The appearance of the moon as seen through a telescope destroyed the Aristotelian notion of the perfection of heavenly bodies. Jupiter's satellites gave proof by a.n.a.logy of the solar system, though on a smaller scale. The discovery of the phases of Venus refuted a hitherto strong objection to the Copernican system; and the discovery of the spots on the sun led to his later discovery of the sun's axial rotation, another proof by a.n.a.logy of the axial rotation of the earth.

Yet he swore the Ptolemaic conception was the true one.

[Footnote 288: Fahie: 325, note.]

The abjuration of Galileo makes a pitiful page in the history of thought and has been a fruitful source of controversy[289] for nearly three centuries. He was unquestionably a sincere and loyal Catholic, and accordingly submitted to the punishment decreed by the authorities. But in his abjuration he plainly perjured himself, however fully he may be pardoned for it because of the extenuating circ.u.mstances. Had he not submitted and been straitly imprisoned, if not burned, the world would indeed have been the poorer by the loss of his greatest work, the _Dialoghi delle Nuove Scienze_, which he did not publish until 1636.[290]

[Footnote 289: For full statement, see Martin: 133-207.]

[Footnote 290: Gebler: 263.]

Even more hotly debated has been the action of the Congregations in condemning the Copernican doctrine, and sentencing Galileo as a heretic for upholding it.[291] Though both Paul V and Urban VIII spurred on these actions, neither signed either the decree or the sentence, nor was the latter present at Galileo's examinations. Pope Urban would prefer not so openly to have changed his position from that of tolerance to his present one of active opposition caused partly by his piqued self-respect[292] and partly by his belief that this heresy was more dangerous even than that of Luther and Calvin.[293] It is a much mooted question whether the infallibility of the Church was involved or not. Though the issue at stake was not one of faith, nor were the decrees issued by the Pope _ex cathedra_, but by a group of Cardinals, a fallible body, yet they had the full approbation of the Popes, and later were published in the Index preceded by a papal bull excommunicating those who did not obey the decrees contained therein.[294] It seems to be a matter of the letter as opposed to the spirit of the law. De Morgan points out that contemporary opinion as represented by Fromundus, an ardent opponent of Galileo, did not consider the Decree of the Index or of the Inquisition as a declaration of the Church,[295]--a position which Galileo himself may have held, thus explaining his practical disregard of the decree of 1616 after he was persuaded the authorities were more favorably disposed to him. But M. Martin, himself a Catholic, thinks[296] that theoretically the Congregations could punish Galileo only for disobedience of the secret order,--but even so his book had been examined and pa.s.sed by the official censors.

[Footnote 291: See Gebler: 244-247; White: I, 159-167; also Martin.]

[Footnote 292: Martin: 136; and Salusbury: _Math. Coll._ "To the reader."]

[Footnote 293: Galileo: _Opere_, XV, 25.]

[Footnote 294: Putnam: I, 310.]

[Footnote 295: De Morgan: I, 98.]

[Footnote 296: Martin: 140.]

When the Index was revised under Pope Benedict XIV in 1757, largely through the influence of the Jesuit astronomer Boscovich, so it is said,[297] the phrase prohibiting all books teaching the immobility of the sun, and the mobility of the earth was omitted from the decrees.[298] But in 1820, the Master of the Sacred Palace refused to permit the publication in Rome of a textbook on astronomy by Canon Settele, who thereupon appealed to the Congregations. They granted his request in August, and two years later, issued a decree approved by Pope Pius VII ordering the Master of the Sacred Palace in future "not to refuse license for publication of books dealing with the mobility of the earth and the immobility of the sun according to the common opinion of modern astronomers" on that ground alone.[299] The next edition of the _Index Librorum Prohibitorum_ (1835) did not contain the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Foscarini, a Stunica and Kepler which had appeared in every edition up to that time since their condemnation in 1616, (Kepler's in 1619).

[Footnote 297: _Cath. Ency._: "Boscovich."]

[Footnote 298: Doc. in Favaro: 159.]

[Footnote 299: Ibid: 30, 31.]

CHAPTER III.

THE OPPOSITION AND THEIR ARGUMENTS.