On Trial for Reason: Science, Religion, and Culture in the Galileo Affair

"There are so many good books on Galileo and I hope these five will encourage people to read and dig in further. I’ve chosen this one because it was published recently, it came out in 2019. It’s specifically written for a general audience, but is by somebody, Maurice Finocchiaro, who has spent his life thinking about Galileo. Finocchiaro is a philosopher who is also deeply interested in the history of science, but has done more translating than almost anyone—save possibly for Stillman Drake (a great Galileo scholar of an earlier generation) and my colleagues Al van Helden and Eileen Reeves—and therefore has a very close and careful reading of Galileo’s words. When we want to read the documents of Galileo’s trial in English, and many allied documents, we turn to the works of Maurice Finocchiaro. He’s spent his entire career thinking about Galileo. I want people to benefit from that long, hard thinking, because this is the kind of subject that deserves that. What I like about On Trial for Reason is that it very economically gives you a lot of basic things that you want to know about Galileo. What exactly is the nature of Galileo’s scientific innovation? What has he done? What are the controversies? What are the problems of it from a scientific perspective, from a philosophical perspective, and then, of course, ultimately, from a religious perspective? He also reads the trial like a forensic analyst. He’s not a lawyer, he’s a philosopher, and he’s very interested in questions of logic. He does this logical analysis with the full benefit of a lot of the interesting new documents that have come to light over the last few decades, as people have done more and more archival research. Believe it or not, it’s still possible to find new documents related to the trial of Galileo. In fact, I just got an email this week from a young Italian researcher, Leonardo Anatrini, telling me about his forthcoming publication of one of the new documents that he found. Finocchiaro is up to date on all the things that have happened up to the point the book is published, and he’s going to give you the full benefit of his reading these different, tricky, documents. For example, the famous injunction that Cardinal Robert Bellarmine personally gives to Galileo, in Rome, in 1616, after the Congregation of the Index has placed Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres on the Index of Prohibited Books, pending its revision to conform with Catholic doctrine. Finocchiaro does a careful reading of this document that resurfaces during the trial that people have long forgotten about, and Galileo now has to reckon with. There have been many different interpretations of the slight differences in wording in the sparse documentation of this injunction by Robert Bellarmine. What did it really mean? What did he really say to Galileo? Why does it seem to be somewhat different in the inquisition’s archive versus Galileo’s own version? Finocchiaro does a very good job of sorting through these kinds of subtleties and discrepancies. That’s why I think this is a terrific starting point – then you can go from his reading of these things into the documents themselves. That’s right. It goes back to the very thing that Galileo was trying to anticipate and provide his own answer for. I always tell my students that the trial of Galileo is like a murder mystery—except we already know who did it, we just don’t know what the crime was. What did he do? People have been asking this question ever since 1633. Finocchiaro reminds us that the trial is a never-ending story. We’re still finding new ways to talk about it and rethink it. This is not a closed history, that happens and ends in 1633. It’s going to keep going, and we’re going to keep returning to it—and we need to look at the evolution of the ways people have responded to the trial ever since. The title of the book reveals Finocchiaro’s understanding of the trial. Galileo’s use of reason over revelation, his foregrounding of the role of observation, of instruments, his definition of a hypothesis, his emphasis that when he is speaking hypothetically about something he is on a path to what he believes to be a better scientific truth: all of these things raise questions about the relationship between science and religion. “I don’t think that Galileo, on his own, would ever have talked about religion and its relationship to science” In 1543, when Copernicus published his book as a deathbed contribution, very few people—other than Copernicus himself—recognized that there might be a potential conflict. But that potential was written into the introduction of Copernicus’s book. It took almost a century to fully realize the level of the conflict that it engendered, that science is developing its own epistemology and its own path to truth, and that this may not fit comfortably with the way people understand nature from a religious perspective. In other words, if your point of reference is always how nature has been described in the Bible, and you allow no possibility for the distinction Galileo wishes to make—between why we write about nature in the Bible, for reasons of belief, versus how we write about nature, when understanding nature scientifically is our primary focus—what we see is a world of clashing expertise and, therefore, completely incompatible views about which truth to foreground. Galileo’s way out of this is, I think, brilliant. He says, in the Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina , that two truths cannot contradict each other. Ultimately, he thinks that one has to trust that there will be a harmonious reconciliation, which is what the church believes nowadays. This is the great irony that Finocchiaro is really good at pointing out. What people refused to accept in Galileo’s own time we have accepted as a modern proposition. Not everyone, to be sure, but the Roman Catholic Church institutionally has accepted this since the end of the 19th century—and, in fact, moved towards it in stages ever since the trial of Galileo. People have long puzzled over that. As a specialist, I will say that Bruno is an out-and-out heretic. First of all, he is an ex-Dominican who has not only left behind his religious order, but tried out every version of religion in Europe and been rejected or rejected himself from all of them. Then he returns to Italy, after having flirted with Protestantism in many different places. He’s a radical philosopher, a radical theologian. He believes in the plurality of worlds. I am quite confident that Galileo read Bruno and made sure to never once cite him explicitly because he understood how controversial that would be. People still debate whether Galileo was actually a radical thinker from a religious perspective. Is he rejecting the Catholic Church? I have to say no, because there are many people in his world who do precisely that. They tend to exit, if they can. Sometimes they come back, like Bruno, and challenge the church’s authority to define orthodoxy, and it ends badly. Galileo certainly could have fled. He could have stayed in Venice, where this might not have happened because while Catholic, Venice was very antagonistic to Rome. We’ll never know, of course. But Bruno sees Copernicanism as a kind of sign, he reads it allegorically. For him, it’s like an avatar. His The Ash Wednesday Supper , which is his most Copernican publication, is like a Renaissance Tao of Physics , if I can put it in those terms. He has a whole different style. He’s not interested in empiricism. He really is trying to create a new philosophy that also is tied to a new theology. He’s a radical thinker and utterly unrepentant about it. “The more his ideas are challenged, the more he thinks about scientific methodology” I don’t think that Galileo, on his own, would ever have talked about religion and its relationship to science. He was pressed to do so because, increasingly, the church was taking an interest in his science in a way that he didn’t like. He was trying to find a way out of this mounting difficulty. Think of him as someone who finds himself at the center of a labyrinth and is trying to exit. Returning to Brecht’s use of his condemnation at the trial and Galileo’s famous abjuration of everything he believed in—what kind of moment is this? Maybe Brecht’s vacillatio is a recognition that it’s hard to be an absolutely pure hero. And sometimes it’s hard—under these circumstances anyway—to be entirely a victim, let alone a collaborator. You’re all of the above. Galileo certainly decided that he did not want to suffer the ultimate punishment for the conflict he has found himself in with the church. He wants détente, he wants to survive this moment. To do so, he has to demonstrate very publicly, in a way that is quite contrary to his intellectual beliefs and to his entire raison d’être, that he is an obedient Catholic more than anything else. So, he demonstrates that obedience in this official and public way and then he goes home and does a lot of things under house arrest that actually demonstrate quite the opposite. He gets into no trouble for it, even though he’s being closely monitored. That’s a really fascinating aspect of the story. This is something that Maurice doesn’t fully get into, but I’m especially fascinated with – what does it mean to live with the consequences of the trial for Galileo? For his society? For the church? How do they handle those initial years? What are people doing? No one ever calls him on his use of a network that allows his publications to appear in Protestant Europe, even those that are prohibited. Nobody ever says anything, even though it would have been fairly easy to trace some of this back directly to him if they wanted to. Finocchiaro raises these issues in his book, as others have also done. Is Catholic regret there right from the start? We love to think of the Roman Inquisition as this bloodthirsty thing: they can’t wait to kill people. As I point out to my students, it’s bad PR for your religion to kill people. The best thing is to redeem and rehabilitate. Virtually no one really wants to do these things, least of all to Italy’s most famous scientist. He has already been given a lot of latitude—in 1616, he is warned but not condemned and his books are not put on the Index of Prohibited Books then, unlike 1633 when only one of his books is condemned this way. That’s important. There was an effort made to forestall what some of his most virulent critics already would have liked to see happen by 1616. Instead, it happens in 1633. There are many different kinds of Catholics, even within the church, and that’s one of the things that you see in the story. Many people have accepted Galileo’s observations and the utility of the telescope; they recognize that these new observations might indeed open up new questions about how we understand the physical nature of the heavens, and that, over time, those questions might indeed lead us to want to discard old theories of the cosmos. They’re wondering what the implications will ultimately be for the relationship between cosmology as a scientific endeavour and faith. He’s hardly the only person thinking through these issues. There are many Catholic astronomers who feel it was a mistake to condemn Galileo and who would have liked to see it otherwise. After the trial, there’s a reason the Vatican has an observatory, even today. Part of the legacy of the trial is that they become some of the great observational astronomers of the next couple of centuries. Many of them are actively trying to see if they can resolve some of the technical issues of observation that could be decisive in proving or disproving heliocentrism. At many moments, they think they’re almost on the verge of resolving these issues. Ultimately, though, you really do need better telescopes to be able to see and calculate things like stellar parallax. It is a matter of the time needed to develop the technology of a science and of course, the skills then to observe and calculate what you see. But there’s an enormous amount of optimism that if they just keep observing, eventually, they’ll be able to prove that Galileo is right. “Critiquing Galileo is not just about resisting new ideas” Catholic scholars lobby for a rethinking of Galileo’s condemnation, almost as soon as the trial ends. Maybe if I just talked to my friend in Rome, who really trusts me, he’ll see not only that this was wrong—maybe he already knows that this is wrong—and he will work with me to help figure out a way to resolve this. There were no easy answers for that in the short term. But, in the long term, by 1744, there are some concessions, as Finocchiaro discusses. The decision not to put any new books that advocate heliocentrism on the Index of Prohibited Books is important. It’s a sign of begrudging acknowledgment. Institutions are complex things. They move slowly, and they rarely acknowledge failure. Some years ago, I wrote an essay on a Jesuit life of Galileo written in the late 17th century that was never published and all the correspondence around it. It is a good example of the negotiations underway, within as well as outside of the church, to rewrite this episode. It led me to write about how people talked about the trial in biographies of Galileo, both in his own lifetime and afterwards, and to examine how this curiosity led to a desire to reconstruct the Galileo archive in full that still animates the research we see today."