Galileo looked quizzically at both sides of the document, turning it back and forth rather ostentatiously. He began his reply very slowly, as if working his way around the edges of a trap. For the first time his answers included some admissions of uncertainty. That he could speak at all after such a shock was yet another testament to his quickness of mind.
“I do not recall that the injunction was given to me any other way than orally by Lord Cardinal Bellarmino. I do remember that the injunction was that I could not hold or defend … and maybe even that I could not teach. I do not recall, further, that there was the phrase in any way whatever, but maybe there was. In fact, I did not think about it or keep it in mind, having received a few months thereafter Lord Cardinal Bellarmino’s certificate dated 26 May, which I have presented, and in which is explained the order given to me not to hold or defend the said opinion. Regarding the other two phrases in the said injunction now produced, namely not to teach and in any way whatever, I did not retain them in my memory, I think because they are not contained in the said certificate, which I relied upon and kept as a reminder.”
It was the best he could do, and it was a pretty good defense at that. He had a signed injunction, after all, while the Inquisition did not. He pursed his lips and stared back at Maculano, still a bit pale, and with a sheen of sweat now on his forehead. Probably it had not occurred to him until that moment that they might forge evidence to get him. It was a bad realization.
Maculano let the moment hang for a while. Then he said, “After the issuing of the said injunction,” gesturing at his document, not Galileo’s, “did you obtain any permission to write the book identified by yourself, which you later sent to the printer?”
“After the above-mentioned injunction,” Galileo said, gesturing at his own certificate, not Maculano’s, “I did not seek permission to write the above-mentioned book, which I have identified, because I did not think that by writing this book I was contradicting at all the injunction given me not to hold, defend, or teach the said opinion, as after all I was refuting it.”
Maculano had been looking down at the injunction—now his head shot up. Staring incredulously at Galileo, he started to speak, paused; put a forefinger to his lips. He returned his gaze to the papers on the table, stared at them for a long time. He picked up the pages covered by his notes.
Finally he looked up again. His expression now was hard to puzzle out, as he seemed both pleased and upset that Galileo had been so bold or so foolish as to utter a bald-faced lie while under oath before the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Up until this point, Galileo had been saying that his book described the Copernican view suppositionally as one of two equally possible explanations. That was already questionable. Now he was claiming that he had actually been refuting Copernicus’s view! In the Dialogo, a book containing hundreds of pages of gentle criticism and sharp scorn aimed at poor Simplicio! It was so untenable a point that it could be taken as insulting. The book itself would easily serve as proof of the lie, and so … Possibly Maculano’s anger was not only at being insulted, but at the way Galileo had put both of them in a very tricky situation, having said such a dangerous thing. He stared at Galileo for a long time, long enough for Galileo also to grasp the possible repercussions of his rash answer.
Finally Maculano spoke. He backtracked, as if to give Galileo another chance to avoid such a spectacular error. “Did you obtain permission for printing the same book, and if so by whom, and for you or for someone else?”
Galileo, buying time in order to rethink the matter, launched into a long, detailed, and impressively coherent description of the complicated interactions he had had with Riccardi and the Holy Office in Florence. The book had been approved by all of them. To that he added a detailed account of the convoluted chain of events by which the book had finally been printed in Florence rather than Rome, blaming this shift on the advent of the plague, rather than on Cesi’s death. This was a very little lie, compared to the other one, and perhaps not important; although it was true that since Cesi’s death the Linceans had fallen far out of favor with the Jesuits, so that here and now it was perhaps better not to mention him.
After perhaps ten minutes of steadily talking his way through the previous couple of years—really a testament to his powers of mind, as he had to be thinking hard about other things, Galileo finished. “The printer in Florence printed it strictly observing every order given by the Father Master of the Sacred Palace.”
Maculano nodded. Implacable, he returned to his question a third time.
“When you asked the above-mentioned master of the Sacred Palace for permission to print the above-mentioned book, did you reveal to the same Most Reverend Father Master the injunction previously given to you concerning the directive of the Holy Congregation, just mentioned?”
Now Galileo, his eyes bulging slightly outward, swallowed and then spoke slowly. “When I asked him for permission to print the book, I did not say anything to the Father Master of the Sacred Palace about the above-mentioned injunction, because I did not judge it necessary to tell it to him—having no scruples, since with the said book I had neither held nor defended the opinion of the Earth’s motion and the sun’s stability. On the contrary, in the said book I show the contrary of Copernicus’s opinion, and show that Copernicus’s reasons are invalid and inconclusive.”
He was sticking with the lie.
The room was silent. For a moment they all seemed frozen.
Maculano put down his notes and the copy of the injunction. He looked over at Father Sinceri, stared again at Galileo. His silence grew longer and longer; his face reddened slightly. Galileo held his ground and did not look away, or blink, or spread his hands. He did not make any move at all. His face was pale, that was all. For what seemed an endless moment everyone was still, as if they had all together fallen into one of Galileo’s syncopes.
“No,” Maculano said. He gestured to the nun.
With this the deposition ended, and Signor Galilei was assigned a certain room in the dormitory of the officials, located in the Palace of the Holy Office, in lieu of prison, with the injunction not to leave it without special permission, under penalty to be decided by the Holy Congregation; and he was ordered to sign below and was sworn to silence.
I, Galileo Galilei, have testified as above.
His handwriting in this signature was very shaky. By the time he had finished scratching out the letters of the sentence, Maculano had left the room.
For Galileo to assert under the stricture of an oath both legal and sacred that in his Dialogo he had been trying to refute Copernicus’s world system was astonishing to everyone who heard about it. Maculano had not been expecting it; no one could have, it went so against the grain of the evidence in hand, there on almost every page.
What did Galileo expect them to do? Accept a blatant lie? Did he think they could not tell it was a lie, or would not say it was if they knew it? Or did he think that the existence of a few feeble disclaimers in his final pages would obscure the work of the previous three hundred? Could anyone be that stupid?
No. No one could be so stupid as to miss the point of the Dialogo. Galileo had been very deliberate when he wrote it. As in all of his writing, he had worked hard to achieve clarity and to be persuasive, to win the debates with his philosophical foes by means of impeccable logic and telling examples. All his gifts as a writer had been put to use, and in Tuscan Italian at that, so anyone could read it and not just scholars trained in Latin. Everyone could see that the book’s purpose was clear.
The special commission of three clerics that Urban had convened to report on the book was now called on, and they were unanimous in judging it to be a piece of advocacy for Copernicanism, not that it took Jesuitical expertise to do so. The first commissioner, Oreggi, made his evaluation in a single paragraph, concluding the opinion is held and defended which teaches that the earth moves and the sun stands still, as one gathers from the whole thrust of the work.
The second commi
ssioner, Melchior Inchofer, was a livid, choleric, second-rater of a priest, pulled out of the inner depths of the Holy Office of the Index specifically for this job. His report on Galileo’s book was a vituperation that filled seven dense pages, complaining bitterly that Galileo ridiculed those who are strongly committed to the common scriptural interpretation of the sun’s motion as if they were small-minded, unable to penetrate the depth of the issue, half-witted, and almost idiotic. He does not regard as human those who hold the earth’s immobility.
This last statement referred to one of Galileo’s jokes, a passage in the book where he said some of the anti-Copernican arguments were not worthy of man’s definition as homo sapiens: “rational animals,” he wrote, here has only the genus (animals) but lacks the species (rational). Inchofer did not appreciate the joke.
The third commissioner’s report, by one Zaccaria Pasqualigo, was less angry than Inchofer’s, but even more detailed, and ultimately the most devastating. It described the Dialogo argument by argument, pointing out errors in fact and logic, the best of which was: He tries to show that, given the earth’s immobility and the sun’s motion along the ecliptic, the apparent motion of sun spots cannot be saved. This argument is based on a premise about what de facto exists and infers a conclusion about what de facto may exist.
In other words, a tautology. What joy for a theologian to identify a tautology in Galileo’s supposedly superior reasoning!
So these three commisioners’ reports lay there on the desks of the Vatican like coffin nails, along with the nun scribe’s transcript of the first deposition. Galileo versus the evidence of his own book. An assertion under oath that black was white. It was so blatant it could even be taken as insolence, as contempt of the court. He wasn’t stupid, he must be enacting some kind of a plan—but what? And what should the Inquisition do in response?
Day after day passed in which nothing seemed to happen, while behind the scenes the machinations of the Holy Office gnawed at the situation with a grinding that was almost audible throughout the city. The accused was under arrest in the Vatican, and going nowhere. Only his single servant was allowed him. The more time that passed, the more nervous he might become concerning his supremely risky tactic, whatever it was.
During these suspended days, which slowly turned into weeks, Niccolini reported what he could to Cioli and Grand Duke Ferdinando. He had inquired of Maculano’s secretary what could be expected next. Maculano’s secretary had replied that the matter was being considered by His Holiness the Pope, but that Galileo was being treated in extraordinary and agreeable ways, being held in the Vatican as opposed to Castel Sant’Angelo, where those on trial before the Inquisition were usually held. They even allow his servant to wait on him, to sleep there, and what is more, to come and go as he pleases, and they allow my own servants to bring him food in his room. But Signor Galilei must have been enjoined from discussing or disclosing the contents of the cross-examination, since he did not want to say anything to us, not even whether he can or cannot speak.
More days passed. It resembled an impasse. By ordering Galileo to come to Rome and face trial, Urban had already committed the Church to rendering a judgment against him; this was understood by all, including Galileo. That was why he had tried so hard to dodge the summons. Now that he was here, some kind of judgment was going to be rendered. It was not possible to find that the Church had made a mistake and Galileo therefore innocent of all wrongdoing. Yet that was what he was claiming had happened.
Did he not realize he could make things tremendously worse?
More days passed. The Church had all the time in the world. Archbishop de Dominis had been held for three years, before dying after an interrogation. Giordano Bruno had been held for eight years.
Galileo’s room was in one of the little Vatican dormitories used by priests working in the Holy Office. The dormitory had been evacuated for the period of his confinement, so Galileo had the entire drafty hall to himself. His servant Cartophilus was on hand, but none of his Roman friends and acquaintances were allowed to call, and none of the Vatican’s clerics visited him either. It was very close to solitary confinement.
The quarters themselves were adequate, but the hours stretched out and grew long. Again Galileo had time to think—too much time, which of course was the point. He began to lose his appetite, and as a result his digestion and excretion. His sleep was disrupted. He was always prone to insomnia, and it often hit him in times of crisis. Now, in the depths of the chill spring nights, Cartophilus would be called in to him, asked to bring a basin of warm water, or a loaf of bread. In the candlelight Galileo’s bloodshot eyes stared as from out of a deep cave. Once Cartophilus came back from the little brazier he kept outside the entryway, balancing a basin of steaming water, only to find the old astronomer frozen in something like one of his syncopes. “What’s this?” the servant said wearily.
But it was only an ordinary trance or dream, the old man asleep on his feet. He whimpered once or twice as Cartophilus helped him out of his paralysis and put his hands in the warm water.
In this suspended manner sixteen long days passed, during which nothing whatsoever happened, as far as anyone outside Maculano’s office could tell. Of course the spies were everywhere, but they were now hearing almost nothing, and what they heard was contradictory. Galileo frequently urged Cartophilus to find out more, and the ancient one had been trying, but his opportunities from inside the Vatican were limited. Galileo’s nerves had begun to fray by the third or fourth day of his confinement. By the end of the second week, he was a wreck.
“You have to sleep, maestro,” Cartophilus suggested for the thousandth time.
“I have the certificate from Bellarmino himself, signed by him, forbidding me from holding the belief but not from discussing it ex sup-positione.”
“Yes you do.” This had been said at least a thousand times.
“Their own supposed injunction wasn’t signed by anyone. It was written on the back of some other document, a letter with a 1616 date on it. I’m sure it’s a forgery. They pulled out something from the files from that year and wrote it up, probably this winter, to frame me, because they have nothing.”
Cartophilus said, “It must have been a shock when you saw it.”
“It was! I couldn’t believe my eyes. Everything became obvious the moment I saw it. Their plan, I mean.”
“And so you decided to deny everything. You claimed that your book refutes Copernicus.”
Galileo frowned. He knew perfectly well that the claim was absurd and unsupportable. Possibly it had been a panic response to Maculano’s sudden deployment of the forged injunction. Possibly it was a move that he now regretted. Sixteen days was a long time.
Cartophilus persisted. “Didn’t Ambassador Niccolini advise you to go along with them, to say whatever they wanted? To allow them to slap you on the ear and let you go?”
Galileo growled.
Cartophilus observed him wrestling with all this. “You know they cannot admit the accusation was wrong.”
Another growl, his bear’s growl.
“Perhaps you could write to the pope’s nephew,” the old one suggested. “Didn’t you help him to get his doctorate, and his position in Padua?”
“I did,” Galileo said grimly. After a time he said, “Bring me paper and ink. Lots of paper.” Even at the best of times, Galileo’s letters could be very long. This one would be thick, but not as thick as some; Cardinal Francesco Barberini was already familiar with the situation.
As Niccolini had reported to Florence, servants from the Villa Medici were allowed to cross town and bring Galileo his meals every day, and so it was no great difficulty to get messages back and forth. Word finally came by way of this conduit, conveying Cardinal Francesco Barberini’s reply to Galileo’s appeal for help. His Holiness was still too angry about the matter to be approached. A way would have to be found within the normal procedures of the Holy Office. Given Galileo’s stated position, impossible to believe—
and an affront to the process—it would be difficult. Happily, given all this, a letter from Maculano to Francesco had recently arrived, which made it clear that Maculano too was trying to broker a solution. A manuscript copy of this letter was enclosed, under the cloth holding a loaf of bread in a basket:
I reported to the Most Eminent Lords of the Holy Congregation, and then they considered various difficulties in regard to the manner of continuing the case and leading it to a conclusion, for in his deposition Galileo denied what can be clearly seen in the book he wrote, so that if he were to continue in his negative stance it would become necessary to use greater rigor in the administration of justice, and less regard for all the ramifications of this business.
Meaning if they had to torture him to obtain a confession, not only would it be bad for him, but as he was one of the most famous people in Europe, and had been so for twenty years, it would be bad for the Church. More important still, it would be bad for Urban. Urban had favored Galileo as something like his personal scientist for many years. If Galileo’s punishment was harsh, it would be obvious to all that Urban had been made to sacrifice one of his people to satisfy the Borgia, and this would weaken him further in his struggle against the Spanish. So in his own interest, Urban could not be forced into harming Galileo too much—not even by Galileo himself, in the form of his most egregious lie under oath before the Holy Office.
Was this Galileo’s point? Could he have risked so much to force the realization of this truth on Urban? Was this what he had been hoping for? If so, it was one hell of a gambit.