Galileo Recants

This series has three easy 5 minute installments.

Introduction
From Socrates to Galileo, as from the Church’s early martyrs to its latest victims, runs the same story of conflict between the free human spirit and the repressive environment of custom acting through personal will or through constituted power.

When in 1633 Galileo, standing before the Inquisition at Rome, denied his own great work and swore that earth stood still, science staggered under the heavy blow. Galileo was being punished, not directly for the great astronomical discoveries he had made with his telescope but for asserting that they proved or that he believed in, the Copernican system. This declared that the earth moved, while the churchmen had interpreted the Bible to mean that it did not.

Thus science, threatened in the person of its greatest leader, terrified by his sufferings, no longer dared proclaim the thing it saw. Descartes and many another thinker, though throbbing with the eagerness of the new dawning light, hushed their voices, hid their views. They were philosophers, not martyrs. What this newly roused vigor of thought might have accomplished except for the repressive hand of the Church we cannot tell. As it was, the supremacy of intellect passed away from Catholic Italy, turned from the South to the North, from Galileo to Newton and Leibnitz. The forced recantation of the great astronomer thus stands out as one of the events which have changed the course of destiny.

This selection is by Sir Oliver Lodge.

Time: 1633
Place: Rome

In 1615 Pope Paul V wrote requesting Galileo to come to Rome to explain his views. He went, was well received, made a special friend of Cardinal Barberino — an accomplished man in high position, who became, in fact, the next Pope. Galileo showed cardinals and others his telescope and to as many as would look through it he showed Jupiter’s satellites and his other discoveries. He had a most successful visit. He talked, he harangued, he held forth in the midst of fifteen or twenty disputants at once, confounding his opponents and putting them to shame.

His method was to let the opposite arguments be stated as fully and completely as possible, himself aiding and often adducing, the most forcible and plausible arguments against his own views; and then, all having been well stated, he would proceed to utterly undermine and demolish the whole fabric and bring out the truth in such a way as to convince all honest minds. It was this habit that made him such a formidable antagonist. He never shrank from meeting an opposing argument, never sought to ignore it or cloak it in a cloud of words. Every hostile argument he seemed to delight in, as a foe to be crushed and the better and stronger they sounded the more he liked them. He knew many of them well, he invented a number more, and, had he chosen, could have out-argued the stoutest Aristotelian on his own grounds. Thus did he lead his adversaries on, almost like Socrates, only to ultimately overwhelm them in a more hopeless rout. All this in Rome, too, in the heart of the Catholic world. Had he been worldly-wise, he would certainly have kept silent and unobtrusive till he had leave to go away again. But he felt like an apostle of the new doctrines, whose mission it was to proclaim them even in this center of the world and of the Church.

Well, he had an audience with the Pope — a chat an hour long — and the two parted good friends, mutually pleased with each other.

He writes that he is all right now and might return home when he liked. But the question began to be agitated whether the whole system of Copernicus ought not to be condemned as impious and heretical. This view was persistently urged upon the Pope and college of cardinals and it was soon to be decided upon.

Had Galileo been unfaithful to the Church he could have left them to stultify themselves in any way they thought proper and himself had gone; but he felt supremely interested in the result and he stayed. He writes:

So far as concerns the clearing of my own character, I might return home immediately; but although this new question regards me no more than all those who for the last eighty years have supported those opinions both in public and private, yet, as perhaps I may be of some assistance in that part of the discussion which depends on the knowledge of truths ascertained by means of the sciences which I profess, I, as a zealous and Catholic Christian, neither can nor ought to withhold that assistance which my knowledge affords and this business keeps me sufficiently employed.”

It is possible that his stay was the worst thing for the cause he had at heart. Anyhow, the result was that the system was condemned and both the book of Copernicus and the epitome of it by Kepler were placed on the forbidden list, * and Galileo himself was formally ordered never to teach or to believe the motion of the earth.

[*  They remained there till 1835, when they were dropped.]

He quitted Rome in disgust, which before long broke out in satire. The only way in which he could safely speak of these views now was as if they were hypothetical and uncertain and so we find him writing to the Archduke Leopold, with a presentation copy of his book on the tides, the following:

This theory occurred to me when in Rome while the theologians were debating on the prohibition of Copernicus’ book and of the opinion maintained in it of the motion of the earth, which I at that time believed: until it pleased those gentlemen to suspend the book and declare the opinion false and repugnant to the Holy Scriptures. Now, as I know how well it becomes me to obey and believe the decisions of my superiors, which proceed out of more knowledge than the weakness of my intellect can attain to, this theory which I send you, which is founded on the motion of the earth, I now look upon as a fiction and a dream and beg your highness to receive it as such. But as poets often learn to prize the creations of their fancy, so in like manner do I set some value on this absurdity of mine. It is true that when I sketched this little work I did hope that Copernicus would not, after eighty years, be convicted of error; and I had intended to develop and amplify it further but a voice from heaven suddenly awakened me and at once annihilated all my confused and entangled fancies.”

Continued.

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