The Sleepwalkers
I have criticized Galileo freely, but I do not feel at liberty to criticize the change in his behaviour before the Inquisition. He was seventy, and he was afraid. That his fears were exaggerated, and that his self-immolatory offer (which the Inquisitors discreetly allowed to drop as if it had never been made) was quite unnecessary, is beside the point. His panic was due to psychological causes: it was the unavoidable reaction of one who thought himself capable of outwitting all and making a fool of the Pope himself, on suddenly discovering that he has been "found out". His belief in himself as a superman was shattered, his selfesteem punctured and deflated. He returned to the Tuscan Embassy, in Niccolini's words "more dead than alive". From then on he was a broken man.
He was called again ten days later, on 10 May, to a purely formal hearing, at which he handed in his written defence. 36 In the first part he argued – "in order to demonstrate the purity of my intention, ever foreign to the practice of dissimulation or deceit in any operation I engage in" – that he was unaware of a specific and absolute injunction in 1616, and made out a convincing case for this. The main point of his defence was that "those faults which are seen scattered throughout my book, have not been artfully introduced with any concealed or other than sincere intention, but have only inadvertently fallen from my pen, owing to a vainglorious ambition and complacency in desiring to appear more subtle than the generality of popular writers, as indeed in another deposition I have confessed; which fault I shall be ready to correct with all possible industry whenever I may be commanded or permitted by Their Most Eminent Lordships."
He concludes on a tone of a humble personal appeal:
"Lastly, it remains for me to beg you to take into consideration my pitiable state of bodily indisposition, to which, at the age of seventy years, I have been reduced by ten months of constant mental anxiety and the fatigue of a long and toilsome journey at the most inclement season – together with the loss of the greater part of the years to which, from my previous condition of health, I had the prospect. I am persuaded and encouraged to do so by the faith I have in the clemency and goodness of the most Eminent Lords, my judges; with the hope that they may be pleased, in answer to my prayer, to remit what may appear to their entire justice the rightful addition that is still lacking to such sufferings to make up an adequate punishment for my crimes, out of consideration for my declining age, which, too, humbly commends itself to them. And I would equally commend to their consideration my honour and reputation, against the calumnies of ill-wishers, whose persistence in detracting from my good name may be inferred from the necessity which constrained me to procure from the Lord Cardinal Bellarmine the attestation which accompanies this."
The remainder of the trial was now expected to be a mere formality. Throughout the proceedings Galileo had been treated with great consideration and courtesy. Against all precedent he was not confined to the dungeons of the Inquisition, but was allowed to stay as the Tuscan Ambassador's guest at the Villa Medici, until after his first examination. Then he had to surrender formally to the Inquisition, but instead of being put into a cell, he was assigned a five-roomed flat in the Holy Office itself, overlooking St. Peter's and the Vatican gardens, with his own personal valet and Niccolini's majordomo to look after his food and wine. Here he stayed from 12 April to the third examination on 10 May. Then, before his trial was concluded, he was allowed to return to the Tuscan Embassy – a procedure quite unheard of, not only in the annals of the Inquisition but of any other judiciary. Contrary to legend, Galileo never spent a day of his life in a prison cell.
The sentence did not come until six weeks later. On 16 June, the following decision was entered into the acts:
"... Sanctissimus decreed that said Galileo is to be interrogated as to his intention [in writing the Dialogue] under the threat of torture; and if he kept firm he is to be called upon to abjure before a plenary assembly of the Congregation of the Holy Office, and is to be condemned to imprisonment at the pleasure of the Holy Congregation, and ordered not to treat further, in whatever manner, either in words or in writing, of the mobility of the Earth and the stability of the Sun; otherwise he will incur the penalties of relapse. The book entitled Dialogo di Galileo Galilei Linceo is to be prohibited. Furthermore, that these things may be known by all, he ordered that copies of the sentence shall be sent to all Apostolic Nuncios, to all Inquisitors against heretical pravity, and especially the Inquisitor in Florence, who shall read the sentence in full assembly and in the presence of most of those who profess the mathematical art." 37
Two days after this decision was taken, the Pope received Niccolini in audience, hinted at the sentence to come, and added:
"However, after the publication of the sentence we shall see you again, and shall consult together so that he may suffer as little distress as possible, since matters cannot be let pass without some demonstration against his person."
Another three days later Galileo was convoked for his third and last examination. After he had taken the oath, he was questioned about his real conviction concerning the two cosmological systems. He answered that before the decree of 1616 he had considered that either Ptolemy or Copernicus might be true in nature, "but after the said decision, assured of the wisdom of the authorities, I ceased to have any doubt; and I held, as I still hold, as most true and indisputable the opinion of Ptolemy, that is to say, the stability of the Earth." 38
He was then told that by the manner in which the subject was treated in the Dialogue, and the fact alone that he had written the said book, he was presumed to have held the Copernican opinion, and was asked a second time to state the truth freely. He answered that he had written the book to confer a common benefit by setting forth the arguments for both sides, and repeated again "I do not now hold the condemned opinion, and have not held it since the decision of the authorities." 39
He was admonished a third time that on the contents of the book he was presumed to hold with Copernicus, or at least to have done so at the time he wrote it, and that therefore "unless he made up his mind to confess the truth, recourse would be had against him to the appropriate remedies of the law." Galileo answered: "I do not hold, and have not held, this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it; for the rest I am here in your hands – do with me what you please." When he was for a last time bidden to speak the truth, under threat of torture, Galileo repeated, "I am here to obey and I have not held this opinion since the decision was pronounced, as I have stated." 40
If it had been the Inquisition's intention to break Galileo, this obviously was the moment to confront him with the copious extracts from his book – which were in the files in front of the judge – to quote to him what he had said about the sub-human morons and pygmies who were opposing Copernicus, and to convict him of perjury. Instead, immediately following Galileo's last answer, the minutes of the trial say:
"And as nothing further could be done in execution of the decree, his signature was obtained to his deposition and he was sent back." 41
Both the judges and the defendant knew that he was lying; both the judges and he knew that the threat of torture (territio verbalis) * was merely a ritual formula, which could not be carried out; and that the hearing was a pure formality. Galileo was led back to his five-room apartment, and on the next day the sentence was read out to him. † It was signed by only seven of the ten judges. Among the three who abstained was Cardinal Francesco Barberini, Urban's brother. The Dialogue was prohibited; Galileo was to abjure the Copernican opinion, was sentenced to "formal prison during the Holy Office's pleasure"; and for three years to come, was to repeat once a week the seven penitential psalms. He was then presented with the formula of abjuration, ‡ which he read out. And that was the end of it.
____________________
*
As opposed to territio realis where the instruments of torture are shown to the accused, as in the case of Kepler's
mother.
†
See the full text, Note 42.
‡
See the full text, Note 43.
The "formal prison" took the form of a sojourn at the Grand Duke's villa at Trinita del Monte, followed by a sojourn in the palace of Archbishop Piccolomini in Siena, where, according to a French visitor, Galileo worked "in an apartment covered in silk and most richly furnished". 44 Then he returned to his farm at Arcetri, and later to his house in Florence, where he spent the remaining years of his life. The recital of the penitential psalms was delegated, with ecclesiastical consent, to his daughter, Sister Marie Celeste, a Carmelite nun. 45
From the purely legal point of view the sentence was certainly a miscarriage of justice. If one works through the maze of verbiage, it appears that he was found guilty on two counts: firstly, of having contravened both Bellarmine's admonition, and the alleged formal injunction of 1616, and having "artfully and cunningly extorted the licence to print by not notifying the censor of the command imposed upon him"; and secondly, of having rendered himself "vehemently suspect of heresy, namely, of having believed and held the doctrine which is contrary to sacred Scripture that the sun is the centre of the world". Concerning the first count, no more need be said about the dubious character of the document referring to the alleged absolute injunction; as for the second, the sun-centred universe had never been officially declared a heresy, since neither the opinion of the Qualifiers, nor the decree of the Congregation of 1616, had been confirmed by infallible pronouncement ex cathedra or by Ecumenic Council. Had not Urban himself said that the Copernican opinion "was not heretical but merely reckless"?
On the other hand, the judgement hushes up the incriminating contents of the book by stating that Galileo had represented the Copernican system as merely "probable" – which is a whale of an understatement. It also hushes up the fact that Galileo had been lying and perjuring himself before his judges by pretending that he had written the book in refutation of Copernicus, that he had "neither maintained nor defended the opinion that the earth moves", and so forth. The gist of the matter is that Galileo could not be legally convicted without completely destroying him – which was not the intention of the Pope or the Holy Office. Instead, they resorted to a legally shaky concoction. The intention was, clearly, to treat the famous scholar with consideration and leniency, but at the same time to hurt his pride, to prove that not even a Galileo was allowed to mock Jesuits, Dominicans, Pope and Holy Office; and lastly, to prove that, in spite of his pose as a fearless crusader, he was not of the stuff of which martyrs are made.
The only real penalty inflicted on Galileo was that he had to abjure his conviction. On the other hand, up to the age of fifty Galileo had been hiding that conviction, and at his trial he had twice offered to add a chapter to the Dialogue refuting Copernicus. To recant in the Basilica of the Convent of Minerva, when everybody understood that this was an enforced ceremony, was certainly much less dishonourable for a scholar than to publish a scientific work contrary to his convictions. One of the paradoxa of this perverse story is that the Inquisition had thus in fact saved Galileo's honour in the eyes of posterity – no doubt unintentionally.
Shortly after the conclusion of the trial, a copy of the prohibited Dialogue was smuggled out to Kepler's old friend, the faithful Bernegger in Strasburg, who arranged for a Latin translation; it was published in 1635 and circulated widely in Europe. A year later, Bernegger also arranged for Italian and Latin versions of the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina to be published in Strasburg.
Galileo himself spent the year following the trial in writing the book on which his true and immortal fame rests: the Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences. At long last, in his seventies, he rediscovered his real vocation: the science of dynamics. He had abandoned it a quarter century before, when he embarked on his propaganda crusade for the heliocentric astronomy of which he had only a sketchy knowledge. The crusade had ended in a fiasco; and out of the shambles modern physics was born.
The book was completed in 1636, when Galileo was seventy-two. As he could not hope for an imprimatur in Italy, the manuscript was smuggled out to Leyden and published by the Elzevirs; but it could also have been printed in Vienna where it was licensed, probably with Imperial consent, by the Jesuit Father Paulus.
In the following year his right eye was blinded by an inflammation, and by the end of the year both eyes were lost.
"Alas," he wrote to his friend Diodati, "your friend and servant Galileo has been for the last month hopelessly blind; so that this heaven, this earth, this universe, which I, by marvelous discoveries and clear demonstrations, have enlarged a hundred thousand times beyond the belief of the wise men of bygone ages, henceforward for me is shrunk into such small space as is filled by my own bodily sensations." 46
Yet he kept on dictating additional chapters to the Two New Sciences, and received a stream of distinguished visitors; among them Milton in 1638.
He died at the age of seventy-eight, in 1642, the year Newton was born, surrounded by friends and pupils – Castelli, Toricelli, Viviani.
His bones, unlike Kepler's, were not scattered into the wind; they rest in the Pantheon of the Florentines, the Church of Santa Croce, next to the remains of Michelangelo and Machiavelli. His epitaph was written for him by posterity: eppur si muove – the famous words which he never uttered at his trial. When his friends wanted to erect a monument over his grave, Urban told the Tuscan Ambassador that this would be a bad example for the world, since the dead man "had altogether given rise to the greatest scandal throughout Christendom." That was the end of the "perilous adulation", and the end of one of the most disastrous episodes in the history of ideas; for it was Galileo's ill-conceived crusade which had discredited the heliocentric system and precipitated the divorce of science from faith. *
____________________
*
An unexpected confirmation of the view expressed in the foregoing sections came my way belatedly, when the text was already in page proof, and can therefore be mentioned only briefly. It is a well-known fact that the Jesuit missionaries in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries owed their influence at the court in Peking in the first place to their services as astronomers; but I was surprised to discover that the type of astronomy they taught, from the end of the seventeenth century onward, was the Copernican system of the world; and that the rapid spreading through China and Japan, of the doctrine of the earth's motion was thus primarily due to the Society of Jesus, working under the supervision of the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda in Rome. See B. Szczesniak "The Penetration of the Copernican Theory into Feudal Japan", Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1944, Parts I and II; and C. R. Boxer Jan Compagnie in Japan, The Hague, 1936, p. 52 seq.
III THE NEWTONIAN SYNTHESIS
I. 'Tis all in Pieces
ON the opening pages of this book, 2,300 years earlier in this story, I compared the intellectual situation of Greece in the sixth pre-Christian century to an orchestra which is tuning up, each player absorbed in his own instrument, while waiting for the entrance of the conductor. In the seventeenth Christian century, the second heroic age of science, the situation repeated itself. The conductor who pulled the orchestra together and made a new harmony out of the caterwauling discords was Isaac Newton, born on Christmas Day, 1642, eleven months after Galileo had died.
It is appropriate that this survey of man's ideas about the universe should end with Newton for, in spite of more than two centuries that have p
assed since his death, our vision of the world is by and large still Newtonian. Einstein's correction of Newton's formula of gravity is so small that for the time being it only concerns the specialist. The two most important branches of modern physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, have not so far been integrated into a new universal synthesis; and the cosmological implications of Einstein's theory are still fluid and controversial. Until a new maestro emerges, or perhaps until space travel provides new observational data on our cosmic environment, the blueprint of the universe remains essentially the one that Newton drew for us, in spite of all disturbing rumours about the curvature of space, the relativity of time, and the runaway nebulae. There, after the long voyage from the Babylonian star gods, the Greek crystal spheres, the medieval walled universe, our imagination has temporarily come to rest.
During the last quarter-millennium of unprecedented human change, Newton has enjoyed an influence and authority only comparable to that of Aristotle in the two previous millennia. If one had to sum up the history of scientific ideas about the universe in a single sentence, one could only say that up to the seventeenth century our vision was Aristotelian, after that Newtonian. Copernicus and Tycho, Kepler and Galileo, Gilbert and Descartes lived in the no-man's-land between the two – on a kind of table-land between two wide plains; they remind one of stormy mountain streams, whose confluence finally gave rise to the broad, majestic river of Newtonian thought.
Unfortunately, we know very little about the intimate working of Newton's mind and the method by which he achieved his monumental synthesis. I shall not go into his life; any attempted contribution to the vast literature on Newton would be a separate undertaking. Instead, I shall briefly describe the scattered cosmological jigsaw puzzle as it presented itself to the young Newton; how he succeeded in perceiving that the odd disjointed bits were pieces of a single puzzle, and how he managed to put them together, we do not know. What he achieved was rather like an explosion in reverse. When a projectile blows up, its shiny, smooth, symmetrical body is shattered into jagged, irregular fragments. Newton found fragments and made them fly together into a simple, seamless, compact body, so simple that it appears as self-evident, so compact that any grammar-schoolboy can handle it.