The Ascent of Man (20 page)

And there is the famous Codex
1181,
Proceedings Against Galileo Galilei
. The trial was in 1633. And the first remarkable thing is that the documents begin – when? In 1611, at the moment of Galileo’s triumph in Venice, in Florence, and here in Rome, secret information was being laid against Galileo before the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The evidence of the earliest document, not in this file, is that Cardinal Bellarmine
instigated inquiries against him. Reports are filed in 1613, 1614, and 1615. By then Galileo himself becomes alarmed. Unbidden, he goes to Rome in order to persuade his friends among the Cardinals not to prohibit the Copernican world system.

But it is too late. In February of 1616, here are the formal words as they stand in draft in the Codex, freely translated:

Propositions to be forbidden:

that the sun is immovable at the centre of the heaven;

that the earth is not at the centre of the heaven, and is

not immovable, but moves by a double motion.

Galileo seems to have escaped any severe censure himself. At any rate, he is called before the great Cardinal Bellarmine and he is convinced, and has a letter from Bellarmine to say, that he must not hold or defend the Copernican World
System – but there the document stops. Unhappily, there is a document here in the record which goes further, and on which the trial is going to turn. But that is all seventeen years in the future.

Meanwhile Galileo goes back to Florence, and he knows two things. One is that the time to defend Copernicus in public is not yet. And the second, that he thinks that there will be such a time. About
the first he is right; about the second, no. However Galileo bided his time, until – when? Until an intellectual Cardinal should be elected Pope: Maffeo Barberini.

That happened in 1623, when Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. The new Pope was a lover of the arts. He loved music; he commissioned the composer Gregorio Allegri to write a Miserere for nine voices, which long afterwards was
reserved for the Vatican. The new Pope loved architecture. He wanted to make St Peter’s the centre of Rome. He put the sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini in charge of completing the interior of St Peter’s, and Bernini boldly designed the tall Baldacchino (the canopy over the Papal throne), which is the only worthy addition to Michelangelo’s original design. In his younger days the intellectual
Pope had also written poems, one of which was a sonnet of compliments to Galileo on his astronomical writing.

Pope Urban VIII thought of himself as an innovator. He had a confident, impatient turn of mind:

I know better than all the cardinals put together! The sentence of a living Pope is worth more than all the decrees of a hundred dead ones,

he said imperiously. But in fact, Barberini as
Pope turned out to be pure baroque: a lavish nepotist, extravagant, domineering, restless in his schemes, and absolutely tone-deaf to the ideas of others. He even had the birds killed in the Vatican gardens because they disturbed him.

Galileo optimistically came to Rome in 1624, and had six long talks in the gardens with the newly elected Pope. He hoped that the intellectual Pope would withdraw,
or at least by-pass, the prohibition of 1616 of the world picture of Copernicus. It turned out that Urban VIII would not consider that. But Galileo still hoped – and the officials of the Papal court expected – that Urban VIII would let the new scientific ideas flow quietly into the Church until, imperceptibly, they replaced the old. After all, that was how the heathen ideas of Ptolemy and Aristotle
had become Christian doctrine in the first place. So Galileo went on believing that the Pope was on his side, within the limits set by his office, until it came to the testing time. And then he turned out to be most profoundly mistaken.

Their views had really been intellectually irreconcilable from the beginning. Galileo had always held that the ultimate test of a theory must be found in nature.

I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to
begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations … Nor is God any less excellently revealed in Nature’s actions than in the sacred statements of the Bible.

Urban VIII objected that there can be no ultimate test of God’s design, and insisted that Galileo must say that in his
book.

It would be an extravagant boldness for anyone to go about to limit and confine the Divine power and wisdom to some one particular conjecture of his own.

This proviso was particularly dear to the Pope. In effect, it blocked Galileo from stating any definite conclusion (even the negative conclusion that Ptolemy was wrong), because it would infringe the right of God to run the universe by
miracle, rather than by natural law.

The testing time came in 1632 when Galileo finally got his book, the
Dialogue on the Great World Systems
, into print. Urban VIII was outraged.

Your Galileo has ventured to meddle with things that he ought not to and with the most important and dangerous subjects which can be stirred up in these days,

he wrote to the Tuscan ambassador on 4 September of that
year. In the same month came the fateful order:

His Holiness charges the Inquisitor at Florence to inform Galileo, in the name of the Holy Office, that he is to appear as soon as possible in the course of the month of October at Rome before the Commissary-General of the Holy Office.

The Pope, Maffeo Barberini the friend, Urban VIII, has personally delivered him into the hands of the Holy Office
of the Inquisition, whose process is irreversible.

The Dominican cloister of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva was where the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition proceeded against those whose allegiance was in question. It had been created by Pope Paul III in 1542 to stem the spread of Reformation doctrines, being specially constituted ‘against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Commonwealth’.
After 1571 it had also been given the power to judge written doctrine, and had instituted the Index of Prohibited Books. The rules of procedure were strict and exact. They had been formalised in 1588 and they were, of course, not the rules of a court. The prisoner did not have a copy either of the charges or of the evidence; he had no counsel to defend him.

There were ten judges at the trial
of Galileo: all Cardinals and all Dominicans. One of them was the Pope’s
brother and another was the Pope’s nephew. The trial was conducted by the Cornmissar-General of the Inquisition. The hall in which Galileo was tried is now part of the Post Office of Rome, but we know what it looked like in 1633: a ghostly committee room in a club for gentlemen.

We also know exactly the steps by which Galileo
came to this pass. It had begun on those walks in the garden with the new Pope in 1624. It was clear that the Pope would not allow the Copernican doctrine to be avowed openly. But there was another way, and the next year Galileo began to write, in Italian, the
Dialogue on the Great World Systems
, in which one speaker put objections to the theory, and the two other speakers, who were rather cleverer,
answered them.

Because, of course, the theory of Copernicus is not self-evident. It is not clear how the earth can fly round the sun once a year, or spin on its own axis once a day, and we not fly off. It is not clear how a weight can be dropped from a high tower and fall vertically to a spinning earth. These objections Galileo answered, as it were, on behalf of Copernicus, long dead. We must
never forget that Galileo defied the holy establishment in 1616 and in 1633 in defence of a theory not his own, but a dead man’s, because he believed it true.

But on his own behalf Galileo put into the book that sense that all his science gives us from the time that, as a young man in Pisa, he had first put his hand on his pulse and watched a pendulum. It is the sense that the laws here on earth
reach out into the universe and burst right through the crystal spheres. The forces in the sky are of the same kind as those on earth, that is what Galileo asserts; so that mechanical experiments that we perform here can give us information about the stars. By turning his telescope on the moon, on Jupiter, and on the sunspots, he put an end to the classical belief that the heavens are perfect
and unchanging, and only the earth is subject to the laws of change.

The book was finished by 1630, and Galileo did not find it easy to get it licensed. The censors were sympathetic, but it soon became clear that there were powerful forces against the book. However, in the end Galileo collected no fewer than four imprimaturs, and early in 1632 the book was published in Florence. It was an instant
success, and for Galileo an instant disaster. Almost at once from Rome the thunder came: Stop the presses. Buy back all the copies – which by then had been sold out. Galileo must come to Rome to answer for it. And nothing that he said could countermand that: his age (he was now nearly seventy), his illness (which was genuine), the patronage of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, nothing counted. He must
come to Rome.

It was clear that the Pope himself had taken great umbrage at the book. He had found at least one passage which he had insisted on, put in the book in the mouth of the man who really makes rather the impression of a simpleton. The Preparatory Commission for the trial says so in black and white: that the proviso I have quoted which was so dear to the Pope has been put ‘in bocca di
un sciocco’ – the defender of tradition whom Galileo had named ‘Simplicius’. It may be that the Pope felt Simplicius to be a caricature of himself; certainly he felt insulted. He believed that Galileo had hoodwinked him, and that his own censors had let him down.

So, on 12 April 1633, Galileo was brought into this room, sat at this table, and answered the questions from the Inquisitor. The questions
were addressed to him courteously in the intellectual atmosphere which reigned in
the Inquisition – in Latin, in the third person. How was he brought to Rome? Is this his book? How did he come to write it? What is in his book? All these questions Galileo expected; he expected to defend the book. But then came a question which he did not expect.

Galileo has a signed document which says that he was forbidden only to hold or defend the theory of Copernicus, which means as if it were a proven matter of fact. That was a prohibition laid on every Catholic at the time.
The Inquisition claims that there is a document which prohibits Galileo, and Galileo alone, to teach it
in any way whatsoever
– that is, even by way of discussion or speculation or as a hypothesis. The Inquisition does not have to produce this document. That is not part of the rules of procedure. But we have the document; it is in the Secret Archives, and it is manifestly a forgery – or, at the
most charitable, a draft for some suggested meeting which was rejected. It is not signed by Cardinal Bellarmine. It is not signed by the witnesses. It is not signed by the notary. It is not signed by Galileo to show that he received it.

Did the Inquisition really have to stoop to the use of legal quibbles between ‘hold or defend’, or ‘teach in any way whatsoever’, in the face of documents which
could not have stood up in any court of law? Yes, it did. There was nothing else to do. The book had been published; it had been passed by several censors. The Pope could rage at the censors now – he ruined his own Secretary because he had been helpful to Galileo. But some remarkable public display had to be made to show that the book was to be condemned (it was on the Index for two hundred years)
because of some deceit practised by Galileo
. This was why the trial avoided any matters of substance, either in the book or in Copernicus, and was bent on juggling with formulae and documents. Galileo was to appear deliberately to have tricked the censors, and to have acted not only defiantly but dishonestly.