7. The Decree of the Holy Office
Thus it came about that on 23 February, A.D. 1616, four days after they had been summoned, the Qualifiers (i.e. theological experts) of the Holy Office met to give their opinion on the two following propositions submitted to them:
1. The sun is the centre of the world and wholly immovable of local motion.
2. The earth is not the centre of the world nor immovable, but moves as a whole, also with a diurnal motion.
The Qualifiers unanimously declared the first proposition to be "foolish and absurd, philosophically and formally heretical inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the doctrine of Holy Scripture in many passages, both in their literal meaning and according to the general interpretation of the Fathers and Doctors".
The second proposition was declared "to deserve the like censure in philosophy, and as regards theological truth, to be at least erroneous in faith". 42
But the Qualifiers' verdict was, for the time being, overruled under pressure of the more enlightened Cardinals; it was only published a full seventeen years later. Instead of it, on 5 March, the General Congregation of the Index issued a more moderate decree, in which the fatal word "heresy" does not appear:
"... And whereas it has also come to the knowledge of the said Congregation that the Pythagorean doctrine – which is false and altogether opposed to the Holy Scripture – of the motion of the Earth, and the immobility of the Sun, which is also taught by Nicolaus Copernicus in De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, and by Diego de Zuniga [in his book] on Job, is now being spread abroad and accepted by many – as may be seen from a certain letter of a Carmelite Father, entitled Letter of the Rev. Father Paolo Antonio Foscarini, Carmelite, on the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and of Copernicus concerning the Motion of the Earth, and the Stability of the Sun, and the New Pythagorean System of the World, at Naples, Printed by Lazzaro Scoriggio, 1615: wherein the said Father attempts to show that the aforesaid doctrine of the immobility of the sun in the centre of the world, and of the Earth's motion, is consonant with truth and is not opposed to Holy Scripture. Therefore, in order that this opinion may not insinuate itself any further to the prejudice of Catholic truth, the Holy Congregation has decreed that the said Nicolaus Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium, and Diego de Zuniga, On Job, be suspended until they be corrected; but that the book of the Carmelite Father, Paolo Antonio Foscarini, be altogether prohibited and condemned, and that all other works likewise, in which the same is taught, be prohibited, as by this present decree it prohibits, condemns, and suspends them all respectively. In witness whereof the present decree has been signed and sealed with the hands and with the seal of the most eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinal of St. Cecilia, Bishop of Albano, on the fifth day of March, 1616." 43
The document had consequences which are still felt today. It represents, as it were, the crack in the wall which led to the falling apart of Science and Faith. It is therefore important to examine its exact meaning and intent, as distinct from its psychological effect and its historic consequences.
In the first place, it must be repeated that the Qualifiers talked of heresy, the decree did not. The Qualifiers' Opinion became known to the public only in 1633, when Galileo forced a second showdown, and the Opinion was quoted in the verdict of his trial. Even then, it remained a judicial opinion, without endorsement by Papal authority, and therefore not binding on members of the Church. Accordingly, the immobility of the earth never became an article of faith, nor the immobility of the sun a heresy.
Similar considerations of a judicial nature apply to the decree itself. It was issued by the Congregation of the Index, but not confirmed by papal declaration ex cathedra or by Oecumenical Council, and its contents therefore never became infallible dogma. All this was deliberate policy; it is even known that it was urged upon Paul V, who would have liked to make Copernicus a heretic and basta, by Cardinals Barberini and Gaetani. These points have been stressed over and again by Catholic apologists, but on the man in the street such subtleties were lost; whether it became dogma or not, the condemnation of the Copernican system as "altogether opposed to Holy Scripture" in 1616, and as "formally heretical" in 1633, was quite enough to have its disastrous effect. A quite different question is how the decree affected the freedom of scientific discussion. First we must note that although Galileo is the chief culprit, his name is not mentioned in the proceedings, and his works are not put on the Index. Equally striking is the distinction made in the treatment of Copernicus' Revolutions and of Foscarini's book. Copernicus' book is "suspended until it be corrected"; but Foscarini's book is "altogether prohibited and condemned". The reason is given in the preceding sentence in the decree: Foscarini had attempted to show that the Copernican doctrine is "consonant with truth and not opposed to Holy Scripture", whereas Copernicus is charged with no such thing. Galileo himself commented a few days after the decree that the Church:
"has gone no further than to decide that [the Copernican] opinion does not concur with the Bible. Hence they have forbidden only such books which professionally attempt to sustain it as not discordant with the Bible... From Copernicus' own Book 10 lines will be taken from the preface addressed to Pope Paul III where the author says that his doctrine does not seem to him contrary to the Bible, and I hear that here and there a word may be removed where the earth is called a star." 44
The Letters on Sunspots were the only printed work by Galileo * which contained a favourable reference to the Copernican system; but since that reference treated it merely as a hypothesis, it escaped censure.
____________________
*
The Letter to Castelli and the Letter to the Grand Duchess had not appeared in print.
†
"Nine sentences, by which the heliocentric system was represented as certain, had to be either omitted or changed." 45 As Santillana remarks, "the feeling seems to have been current in Rome that the Index was a kind of administrative misadventure that occurred sooner or later to anyone writing on serious subjects and that it was a matter of waiting until the official line changed again. Of the three theologians of the Inquisition who were the experts at Galileo's trial, two subsequently incurred prohibition – and one of them a cardinal, Oregius." 45a
Thus the effect of the decree on scientific discussion and research was to leave things almost exactly where they had been. Astronomers could discuss Copernicus and compute the course of the planets as if they were moving round the sun, provided that they spoke hypothetically. Galileo had refused to compromise, and the compromise had been enforced by decree. But what the decree conveyed to simple sons of the Church was that to talk of the earth's motion was a Bad Thing and contrary to faith; and what it conveyed to the sceptic was that the Church had declared war on Science.
Canon Koppernigk's book remained on the Index for exactly four years. In 1620 the "corrections" were published and turned out to be of the trifling nature predicted by Galileo. † They were designed by the same Cardinal Gaetani who, together with the future Urban VIII, had carried the day against the angry Paul V. From then onward, any Catholic publisher was free to reprint the Book of Revolutions – but no Catholic, or Protestant, publisher felt moved to do so for another three hundred years. The surviving copies of the first edition of 1543 had become treasured collectors' pieces. The book itself had become, apart from being unreadable, a mere curiosity and completely out of date – owing to Tycho's observations, Kepler's discoveries, and the revelations of the telescope. Copernicanism was a slogan, but not a defendable system of astronomy.
To sum up: the temporary suspension of Copernicus' book had no ill effects on the progress of science; but it inj
ected a poison into the climate of our culture which is still there.
It would, of course, be naive to believe that the Church objected to the Copernican system only, or even mainly, because it seemed to disagree with the miracle of Joshua or other scriptural passages. The Council of Trent had decreed that "petulant minds must be restrained from interpreting Scripture against the authority of tradition in matters that pertain to faith and morals"; but the "petulant minds" at which this was aimed were the Lutherans, and not mathematicians like Copernicus, whose book had been published two years before the Council assembled, and twenty years before it ended. The real danger of removing the earth from the centre of the universe went much deeper; it undermined the whole structure of medieval cosmology.
Bellarmine had once said in a sermon: "Men are so like frogs. They go open-mouthed for the lure of things which do not concern them, and that wily angler, the Devil, knows how to capture multitudes of them." 46 The people in Rome were indeed beginning to discuss questions such as whether other planets were inhabited; and if so, could their inhabitants descend from Adam? And if the earth is a planet, it needs, like the other planets, an angel to move it; but where is he? They were interpreting the messages of Science in the same fundamentalist and frogmouthed way as the theologians were interpreting Faith. But Christianity had, in the past, overcome similar crises; it had digested the rotundity of the earth and the existence of the antipodes in replacement of the tabernacular universe covered by the Upper Waters. The Christian world-view had progressed from Lactantius and Augustine to the medieval cosmos of Aquinas and Albert the Great; and beyond that, to Bishop Cusa's first intimations of infinity, to the Franciscans' post-Aristotelian physics, and the Jesuits' post-Ptolemaic astronomy.
But it had been a gradual and continuous progress. The walled-in universe, the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being could not be given up lightly, before some equally coherent vision of the world could take its place. And that vision did, as yet, not exist; it could only take shape when the Newtonian synthesis provided a new focus for the eye. Under the circumstances, the only possible policy was one of ordered retreat; to yield positions when they became untenable – such as the immutability of the sky, disproved by novae, comets and sunspots, and the earth as centre of all heavenly motions, disproved by the moons of Jupiter. In all these "dangerous innovations" astronomers of the Jesuit Order, of which Bellarmine was the General, had played a prominent part. They had quietly abandoned Ptolemy, and progressed to the Tychonic system: the planets circle the sun, and with the sun the earth (just as the four "Medicean stars" circle Jupiter, and with Jupiter, the sun). This is as far as both metaphysical prudence and scientific caution permitted them to go – even if some Jesuits were Copernicans at heart. The reasons for metaphysical prudence were theological; the reasons for scientific caution empirical: so long as there existed no observable stellar parallax, no apparent displacement in the position of the fixed stars caused by the earth's motion through space, that motion remained unproven. Under these circumstances, the system of the universe which seemed to agree most closely with observed fact, was the Tychonic system. It also had the advantage of a compromise; by making the sun the centre of planetary motion, it prepared the way for a complete heliocentric system, should a stellar parallax be found, or some other discovery tilt the balance in its favour. But that, as we shall see, was another compromise that Galileo rejected.
Galileo's followers, whom his brilliant ways of arguing had converted, had (with a handful of exceptions) only the haziest notions of astronomy. But Bellarmine was in constant touch with the astronomers of the Roman College. He was sufficiently open-minded to know – and to say so in his letter to Foscarini – that Christianity could be reconciled with the earth's motion, as it had been reconciled with its rotundity. But he also knew that this would be a difficult readjustment, a metaphysical reorientation on a major scale, which must be undertaken only in the case of absolute necessity. And that necessity, so far, did not exist.
The situation is summed up in a passage by Professor Burtt, which I have already quoted in part:
"It is safe to say that even had there been no religious scruples whatever against the Copernican astronomy, sensible men all over Europe, especially the most empirically minded, would have pronounced it a wild appeal to accept the premature fruits of an uncontrolled imagination, in preference to the solid inductions, built up gradually through the ages, of men's confirmed sense experience. In the strong stress on empiricism, so characteristic of present-day philosophy, it is well to remind ourselves of this fact. Contemporary empiricists, had they lived in the sixteenth century, would have been the first to scoff out of court the new philosophy of the universe." 47
It is not surprising then, that the decree of 5 March, however fateful its consequences proved to be, and however much dismay it caused to the Galileans, was greeted with a sigh of relief by others, and not only by the fanatics and backwoodsmen. It is reflected in a letter by Monsignor Querengo, that sharp-witted observer whom I have quoted before:
"The disputes of Signor Galileo have dissolved into alchemical smoke, since the Holy Office has declared that to maintain this opinion is to dissent manifestly from the infallible dogmas of the Church. So here we are at last, safely back on a solid Earth, and we do not have to fly with it as so many ants crawling around a balloon..." 48
8. The Injunction
Galileo's name had not been mentioned in public. Immediately after the decree had been issued, he wrote nonchalantly to the Tuscan Secretary of State:
"As may be seen from the very nature of this business, I am not in the least concerned, nor would I have been involved had it not been for my enemies, as I have said before." 49
Six days after the decree, Galileo was received by the Pope, in an audience which lasted three quarters of an hour. But while everything was done to spare him public humiliation, he had been confidentially but firmly enjoined to keep within the prescribed limits. This had happened between the session of the Qualifiers on 23 February, and the publication of the decree. On Thursday, 25 February, there is the following entry in the Inquisition file (my italics):
"Thursday, 25 February 1616. The Lord Cardinal Mellini notified the Reverend Fathers, the Assessor, and the Commissary of the Holy Office that the censure passed by the theologians upon the propositions of Galileo – to the effect that the Sun is the centre of the world and immovable from its place, and that the Earth moves, and also with a diurnal motion – had been reported; and His Holiness has directed the Lord Cardinal Bellarmine to summon before him the said Galileo and admonish him to abandon the said opinion; and, in case of his refusal to obey, that the Commissary is to enjoin on him, before a notary and witnesses, a command to abstain altogether from teaching or defending this opinion and doctrine and even from discussing it; 50 and, if he do not acquiesce therein, that he is to be imprisoned."
One of the principal points of controversy about the trial of Galileo in 1633 hinges on the question whether the procedure envisaged "in case of his refusal to obey," took place or not. If it did, Galileo was bound by an unconditional and absolute injunction not only not to defend, but not even to discuss Copernicanism. If it did not take place, the obligation placed on him could be interpreted elastically.
There exist three documents bearing on this point, and they contradict each other. One was found among the Decreta of the Congregation. It is the minutes of a meeting on 3 March, of which the relevant passage reads:
"The Lord Cardinal Bellarmine having reported that Galileo Galilei, mathematician, had in terms of the order of the Holy Congregation been admonished to abandon the opinion he has hitherto held, that the Sun is the centre of the spheres and immovable and that the Earth moves, and had acquiesced therein..."
This seems to indicate that the absolute injunction foreseen "in case of his refusal to obey" was not served. The second document seems to point to the same conclusion. To counter rumours that he had been humiliated and punished, Ga
lileo asked Bellarmine for a certificate on the proceedings that had taken place, and Bellarmine wrote as follows:
"We, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmine, having heard that it is calumniously reported that Signor Galileo Galilei has in our hand abjured and has also been punished with salutary penance, and being requested to state the truth as to this, declare that the said Galileo has not abjured, either in our hand, or the hand of any other person here in Rome, or anywhere else, so far as we know, any opinion or doctrine held by him; neither has any salutary penance been imposed on him; but that only the declaration made by the Holy Father and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index has been notified to him, wherein it is set forth that the doctrine attributed to Copernicus, that the Earth moves around the Sun, and that the Sun is stationary in the centre of the world and does not move from east to west, is contrary to the Holy Scriptures and therefore cannot be defended or held. In witness whereof we have written and subscribed these presents with our hand this twenty-sixth day of May, 1616."
There is no mention here of a formal injunction, and the operative words are that the Copernican doctrine cannot be defended or held. 51 There is no prohibition to discuss it.
The third document is a minute in the Vatican files which seems to contradict the previous two by alleging that Galileo was formally forbidden "to hold, teach, or defend in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing" 52 the Copernican doctrine. This minute, of doubtful reliability, has given rise to one of the most embittered controversies in the history of science, which has now been raging for nearly a century. It may be thought that to attribute such importance to the difference between an absolute injunction and an admonition is splitting hairs. But there is, in fact, a world of difference between the admonition not to "hold or defend" a doctrine, and the command not to teach or discuss it "in any way whatsoever". In the first case, it could be discussed as before, in terms of a mathematical hypothesis; in the second case, not (see note 52a ).