The Case for God (33 page)

Galileo was not a lone voice; he belonged to a “family” of Catholic progressives who supported his Copernican ideas but constantly advised him not to tangle with the Vatican authorities.
⁷⁷
And yet despite his conviction that theology and science were entirely separate disciplines, he seemed perversely intent on reconciling his discoveries with scripture. In his
Letters on Sunspots
(1612), he produced biblical quotations proving that his theory was “most agreeable to the truths of holy writ”
⁷⁸
and was furious when the papal censors insisted that he delete them. When opposed, Galileo could be just as scornful and impatiently self-righteous as any cardinal. But why, given his clearly stated views, had he included the quotations in the first place? Hypothetical thinking had been acceptable to Copernicus and would continue to be essential to scientific procedure. Was Galileo’s insistence on absolute certainty another sign of the dogmatism of the age?

In 1615, the learned Carmelite friar Paolo Foscarini arrived in Rome to make a calm but forceful plea for the heliocentric universe. In the Bible, Foscarini argued, God revealed only those truths that could not be discovered by natural reason and had left the rest to human beings. When Bellarmine read his treatise, he replied that as far as he knew there was no definitive proof of the Copernican theory. If there were, it would be a different matter: “Then we would have to use great care in explaining the passages of scripture that seem
contrary. … But I cannot believe that there is such a demonstration until someone shows it to me.”
⁷⁹
Galileo immediately pointed out that the Council of Trent upheld the authority of the Bible only in matters of faith and morals and that heliocentric theory fell under neither category. It did not seem to have occurred to him that it was probably unwise to correct Bellarmine, the principal spokesman of reformed Catholicism, about the Council’s rulings. He then further muddied the waters by overstating his case, arguing that his experiments
had
provided the definitive proof that Bellarmine declared to be missing.
⁸⁰
But this was not the case: Galileo’s observations on sunspots, the phases of Venus, and the tides were suggestive but not conclusive. On both sides, there was a clash of misplaced certainty.
⁸¹

Galileo was right to argue that poetical remarks in the Bible should not be read as definitive scientific observations; this had been standard exegetical practice in the West since the time of Augustine, and in failing to recognize this, Bellarmine was theologically at fault. But Galileo had not been able to meet his own high standards of scientific verification and had not fully appreciated the importance of hypothetical and probable reasoning in science. In mixing science and religion, he had violated his own principles and entered the now dangerous minefield of scriptural interpretation.
⁸²
If he had presented his view as the probable theory it actually was, he could have remained at peace with the Church. Instead, he insisted that he was in possession of a proof that he had not achieved. In 1616, Copernicus’s
De revolutionibus
and Foscarini’s treatise were put on the Index. Galileo himself was not threatened, and Bellarmine even gave him a certificate stating that he had not been asked to recant any of his theories.
⁸³

But in 1623, Galileo entered the lists again when his old friend Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII. When they met in Rome, Urban feted Galileo and agreed that he could write what he chose about heliocentric theory, as long as he presented his theories as hypothetical in the usual way. Galileo returned to Florence to work on his
Dialogues on the Two World Systems
. But after this promising beginning, two of Galileo’s patrons were implicated in Spanish political intrigues at the papal court and were disgraced, and Galileo was damaged by association.
⁸⁴
To make matters worse, he had added a final paragraph to the
Dialogues
. “Simplicio,” the character who represented
the new Aristotelian orthodoxy and performed throughout the dialogue as the “fall guy,” argued that Copernican theory was “neither true nor conclusive” and that it “would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the divine power and wisdom to one particular fancy of his own.”
⁸⁵
These words were a direct quotation of published remarks by Urban himself, who would not have been pleased to see them on the lips of Simplicio, whose name was an insult in itself. On April 12, 1633, Galileo was summoned to the Holy Office and was judged guilty of disobedience. On June 22, he was forced to recant on his knees, and returned to Florence, where he was confined to his country estate.

When Copernicus had presented his ideas in the Vatican, the pope had given his approval; ninety years later,
De revolutionibus
was placed on the Index. In 1605, Francis Bacon (1561–1626), counselor to King James I of England, had declared that there could be no conflict between science and religion. But that openness was giving way to dogmatism and suspicion. There would soon be no place in the new Europe for the skepticism of Montaigne or the psychological agnosticism of Shakespeare. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the notion of truth had begun to change. Thomas Aquinas would not have recognized his theology in its post-Tridentine guise. His apophatic delight in unknowing was being replaced by a strident lust for certainty and a harsh dogmatic intolerance. The spirituality of silence was giving way to wordy debate; the refusal to
define
(a word that literally means “to set limits upon”) was being superseded by aggressive definitions of ineffable dogma. Faith was beginning to be identified with “belief” in man-made opinions—and that would, eventually, make faith itself difficult to maintain.

The first modern Western atheists, however, were not Christians who had been alienated by the terrible convictions of their clergy but Jews living in the most liberal country in Europe. Their experience tells us a good deal about our current religious predicament. By the early seventeenth century, while the rest of Europe was in the grip of severe economic recession, the Dutch were enjoying a golden age of prosperity and expansion. They did not share the new sectarian dogmatism. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, some of the
Marrano Jews had been permitted to leave Portugal and migrated to Venice, Hamburg, London, and, above all, Amsterdam, which became their New Jerusalem. In Holland, Jews were not confined to ghettos, as they were elsewhere in Europe; they became successful businessmen and mingled freely with gentiles. When they arrived in Amsterdam, the Marranos were eager for the opportunity to practice their faith fully.

But they found conventional religious life bewildering. For decades the Iberian Jews had lived without communal religious life and had no experience of ritual observance. The Dutch rabbis had the difficult task of guiding them back into the fold, making allowances for their problems without compromising tradition, and it is a tribute to them that most of the Marranos were able to make the transition.
⁸⁶
But initially their reaction was similar to that of people today who find the “beliefs” of religion arbitrary and incredible because they have not fully participated in its transformative rites. The abstruse laws of diet and purification must have seemed barbaric and meaningless to the Marrano sophisticates, who found it difficult to accept the rabbis’ explanations because they were used to thinking things out rationally for themselves. According to Isaac Orobio de Castro, a philosophy professor who had lived in Iberia for years as a closet Jew, some of them had become “unspeakable atheists”:
⁸⁷
they were “full of vanity, pride and arrogance,” loved to display their learning “by contradicting what they do not understand,” and felt that their expertise in the modern sciences put them above “those who are indeed educated in the sacred laws.”
⁸⁸

A tiny minority of the Marranos found the transition to full cultic observance impossible. One of the most tragic cases was that of Uriel da Costa, who had experienced Portuguese Christianity as oppressive, cruel, and composed of rules and doctrines that bore no relation to the gospels.
⁸⁹
He had formed his own idea of Jewish religion by reading the Bible, but when he arrived in Amsterdam he was shocked to find that contemporary Judaism was just as far removed from scripture as Catholicism. Outraged, he published a treatise attacking the Torah and declaring that he believed only in human reason and the laws of nature. He caused such ferment that the rabbis were forced to excommunicate him. There was as yet no notion in Europe of a “secular Jew,” and as an excommunicate da Costa was
shunned by Jews and Christians alike; children jeered at him in the street. In despair, he returned to the synagogue, but he still could not adapt to a faith that seemed incomprehensible. In 1640, he committed suicide.

In 1655 Juan da Prado, who had been a committed member of the Jewish underground in Portugal for twenty years, arrived in Amsterdam. He too had found that without the spiritual exercises that produced them, the ideas of conventional religion lacked substance and had succumbed to Marrano deism, seeing God as identical with the laws of nature.
⁹⁰
He too was shocked by his first encounter with a fully functioning Jewish community and was loud in his complaints. Why did the Jews think they were God’s chosen people? Was it not degrading to imagine that the First Cause was a Personality? Two years after his arrival, Prado was excommunicated and became more extreme in his views, arguing that all religion was rubbish and that reason, not “revelation,” was the sole arbiter of truth. We have no idea how he ended his days.

The unhappy stories of Prado and da Costa show that the
mythos
of confessional religion is unsustainable without spiritual exercises. Reason alone can produce only an attenuated deism that is easily abandoned, as its God is remote, abstract, and ultimately incredible. And yet at the same time as the Jewish community in Amsterdam was being torn apart by these conflicts, the Christians of Europe had begun to develop their own form of deism; like Prado, they too would regard scientific rationality as the only route to truth and would seek a rational certainty that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers had long held to be impossible in matters of faith.

Scientific Religion

I
n 1610, the English poet John Donne (1572–1631) lamented the state of the world, which he thought was entering its final phase. A deeply conservative man, Donne was a casualty of the Reformation. Born into a devout Catholic family, he had abjured his faith after his brother had died in prison for sheltering a Catholic priest and had become bitterly hostile to the new Catholicism. He was profoundly disturbed by the recent scientific discoveries that seemed wantonly to have destroyed the old cosmic vision of perfection and harmony. These were hard times. Europe was in the throes of economic recession and the social unrest attendant on modernization, and yet in the midst of this confusion, the “new Philosophy”
*
called “all in doubt.”

It was as though the universe had suffered a massive earthquake. New stars had been sighted in the firmament, and others had disappeared. The heavens no longer enjoyed their “Sphericall … round proportion embracing all,” and planets were said to wander in “Eccentrique parts” that violated the “pure forme” that men had observed for so long.
²
When these fundamentals had shifted, how could anybody be certain of the truth?

Donne was not alone in his pessimism. That same year Henry IV
of Navarre, who had seemed the only monarch capable of stemming the tide of denominational violence that was threatening to engulf the whole of Europe, had been assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. This was immediately recognized as a tragic turning point and had the same kind of impact in seventeenth-century Europe as did the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in twentieth-century America.
³
Henry had been determined to contain the religious passions that were becoming murderously divisive in France and had followed a policy of strict neutrality. He had granted civil liberties to French Protestants, and when the
parlement
expelled the Jesuits, Henry had reinstated them. His death, which shocked moderate Catholics and Protestants alike, sent a grim message: a policy of toleration had been tried but it had failed. By 1600, England was drifting into a civil war and the principalities of Germany were struggling to achieve independence from the Holy Roman Empire and form nation-states. Sweden supported the Protestant princes, and the Austrian Hapsburgs the Catholics. In 1618, this strife escalated into the full-scale Thirty Years’ War, which killed 35 percent of the population of central Europe, which was reduced to a charnel house. Religion was clearly incapable of bringing the warring parties together. The more Roman Catholic zealots gloried in the slaughter of Protestants and the more Protestants exultantly burned Catholic strongholds to the ground, the more people of moderation and goodwill despaired of a solution.