Galileo's punishment "tragic, mutual misunderstanding"

Great Debates
1

1992 called. I was going to warn them about a bunch of stuff, but it was a collect call and I figured outside my light cone had to be long distance.

As I hung up they blurted “In 1981 Pope John II established a commission to reexamine the affair. Pope Paul II concluded the affair by describing the affair as a “tragic, mutual misunderstanding.””. What was I asked? Galileo’s punishment. I hung up, 1992 is kind of weird like that, but it’s basically a good year.

Curious what Galileo misunderstood I tried googling, but it didn’t help.
So what did Galileo misunderstand?

Seriously I know I’m digging up an old quote, but even in 1992 “mutual” seems kind of an odd thing to say. What did Galileo get wrong, other than bruising their ego?

2

The dispute and his subsuquent arrest was not so much the fact of heliocentrism as because he mocked the Pope in one of his writings.

3

No it wasn’t. There were some rumors that the character of Simplicio in his Dialouge was meant to mock the Pope, but there wasn’t much evidence for it, and it wasn’t part of the charges against him.

Here’s the Papal Condemnation of Galileo, it doesn’t mention mocking the Pope, and its pretty clear that what Galileo is being accused of his advocating for Heliocentricity despite the order of the Church.

The “misunderstanding” was whether Galileo had been told by the Church earlier to cease teaching heliocentricism altogether or whether he was still allowed to examine it as a hypothetical

4

And which of his writings would that be?

5

Aside from the references by such contemporaries as Filippo Magalotti and Fr. Niccolò Riccardi of the Inquisition actually discussing the ways that the character of Simplicio espoused the positions of Pope Urban and Urban’s reaction to those characterizations, of course.

I would agree that the bigger “misunderstanding” was whether or not the letter found in the files from the 1616 trial, abjuring Galileo to keep silent, had ever actually been seen by Galileo or was inserted after the trial, (or even on the eve of the second trial), by someone maliciously trying to destroy Galileo. Mocking the pope was never part of any charge brought against Galileo, but angering the pope by having the words of the pope spoken by the character of the fool probably did nothing to mitigate against having charges brought.

6

aaaagh! A ghost!

7

Galileo misunderstood the complexities of internal Vatican politics. He thought that just because the new pope was the most progressive, modernizing thinker on the Papal throne for generations, he would be able to modernize Church policies as he pleased. It is a bit as though the Reverend Jeremiah Wright thought that as soon as Obama was elected, Guantanamo would be closed, single-payer, universal healthcare would be rammed through congress, every African American family would be give 40 acres and a mule, and he (Wright) would be appointed White House chaplain.

Galileo very likely thought that by pushing the envelope and showing his colors as a radical modernizer again (he had been pretending to be a “good boy” since 1616 when heliocentrism was first formally condemned), he could get himself appointed to Urban’s staff as his personal natural philosopher. Urban may even have given him some encouragement to think this; they were old friends and allies after all. However, by the time the Dialog of the Two Great World Systems was published, Urban’s political position was extremely weak (to the extent that there was nearly a fist fight in the curia between the pope’s brother, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, and one of the conservative Spanish cardinals). The Thirty Years War was raging, and going very badly for Catholic forces. The protestant Swedish army of Gustavus Adolphus was cutting a swath through Catholic and Spanish-controlled lands in Germany. There was even, I think, a real fear around that time that the triumphant Swedes might carry their advance all the way into Italy. Urban’s political support had come mainly from the modernizing French cardinals, but the French were on the wrong side of the war, de facto allied with protestants against the against the much more loyally Catholic, and more religiously and socially conservative, Spanish. Urban had an urgent need to wag the dog, to suck up to the Spanish cardinals, and show he was not such as crazy, modernizing, French-loving radical after all. The well known modernist thinker Galileo made the perfect scapegoat, and (in his ignorance of the desperate in-fighting within the Vatican) he made his ill judged move at just the right time for Urban (and just the wrong time for himself).

Urban felt bad about it though. He made sure that Galileo’s actual punishment was extremely lenient by the standards of the time. Very likely he also arranged for the word to be slipped to Galileo that he had better damn well cop a plea, or else things might get very nasty indeed for both of them. (Galileo defended himself stoutly on the first day of his trial, but after some private conversations with court officials, he very quickly folded on the next day.)

OK, I cannot prove much of the above - Vatican politics was then (and remains) an extremely closed, secretive world, and many of the records the events surrounding concerning Galileo’s trial have been conveniently lost by the Vatican archives - but it fits the actually known facts better than any other explanation I have heard. It explains Galileo’s sudden rush of boldness (after 16 years of pussyfooting), and why Urban so suddenly and unexpectedly turned on him. It also explains why he was ostensibly tried for promoting such a theologically trivial idea as heliocentrism (and, technically, not even for that, but for disobeying the now-deceased Cardinal Bellarmines order not to promote it, an order which he had probably actually followed in the letter, even if not in the spirt). And it explains, why, having been found guilty, he was actually given no more than a light slap on the wrist. It is also consistent with what was going on in the wider world at the time. Heliocentrism, and the 1616 ruling against it (which Urban is known to have disapproved of), was more a pretext than the real reason for condemning Galileo. He was a patsy.

8

This article tries to show that he was condemned mostly for being associated with Giordano Bruno’s band of heretics.

9

Yeah, well. Fortean Times.:rolleyes:

Bruno was an extremist hermetic*, and a heretic* by anyone’s standards, scarcely a Christian at all. He had zero understanding of astronomy, and pretty clearly only liked the Copernican theory because it was so weird and far out.

[*Note: these are different words.]

But although the churches (both Catholic and Protestant) did not like it very much, lots of intellectuals at the time were influenced by hermeticism, including Copernicus, Kepler and Newton (and many who were more interested in magical spells than anything we would call science). With a handful of exceptions, the vast majority of them were much more moderate than Bruno, and (again, including Copernicus, Kepler and Newton) did not get in any real trouble for their hermetic leanings. Some of them, like Copernicus, were well respected Church officials.

Galileo, on the other hand, was totally opposed to the hermetic outlook, and in everything but his heliocentrism always remained a theologically orthodox Catholic. That is why he never accepted Kepler’s laws of planetary motion (despite the fact that they fit the observed data way better than anything Galileo could come up with), or Kepler’s theory that the ocean tides are caused by a force emanating from the moon: it all smelled too much of mystical hermeticism to proudly rational Galileo. The Church authorities knew this. Galileo had been a prominent celebrity for decades by the time of his trial, and you can be sure the inquisition had checked him out throughly (and found him to be clean) years before. Besides, he was a personal friend of Pope Urban.No way did they think he was a hermetic, let alone one of the dangerous sort like Bruno.

Of course, confusing together the stories of Galileo, who was a great scientist and rationalist who got slapped on the wrist by the Inquisition, and Bruno, who was a fanatical, mystical loon who got burned at the stake (some 30 years earlier), has long been a staple of the myth makers. They were very different in both their personalities and their ideas. Galileo was right, but he was prepared to deny it to save his skin; Bruno martyred himself (he was given three chances to recant, and refused them all) for a mass of nonsense.

Galileo was brilliant and arrogant, but he was not particularly heroic. He was on the make, probably trying to advance in his career from the post of personal philosopher to the Grand Duke of Florence to that of personal philosopher to the Pope himself. And the Church was not deeply opposed to heliocentrism. It just happened to be politically expedient for Pope Urban and some of his close associates to appear to be opposed to heliocentrism (indeed, to anything that might have looked radical and untraditional) at just the moment when Galileo was trying to advance his reputation by publishing a brilliant defense of this radical and controversial theory, trying to impress he man whom he believed (rightly, really) to be a radical, modernizing Pope.

10

Not that this excuses the Church’s actions, but it’s worth noting that Galileo’s punishment was not execution, torture or even true imprisonment. Rather, he was sentenced to a loose house arrest, and died of natural causes as a fairly old man.

Most SDMB regulars probably know that, but I’m regularly astonished to encouter people who are sure he was burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, or beheaded.

11

I’d venture to say that house arrest *is * true enough imprisonment to count.

12

Perhaps- but the howls of outrage over Bernie Madoff’s house arrest suggest that not everyone agrees with you.

13

I think that would be because of the scale of their crimes. Galileo didn’t do anything wrong. Madoff ruined thousands of lives.

I’ll admit, the church was softer than it could have been. But holding a man captive until he dies is still evil. As I recall, Galileo couldn’t even go to his daughter’s funeral.

14

Well I think people are a lot more sympathetic Galileo, who didn’t deserve any punishment at all. Where as if Madoff was drawn and quartered they’d still think he got off too easy.

njtt your posts are really interesting reading. Thanks!

15

No, it was a mutual misunderstanding. Galileo did not understand that the Pope did not understand that “heliocentric” is not some kind of sexual fetish involving the feet. His Holiness actually asked for a personal copy of Galileo’s book, you know, just between friends, for a laugh, but he never wanted that kind of thing published! :eek:

16

Slightly off topic, but Kim Stanley Robinson’s fairly recent Galileo’s Dream has large sections on his dispute with the Church. It also contains a science fiction novel constructed around his life, but it’s fairly easy to see what is fact-based, and what is fiction.
I said a bit more about it here.

17

You are joking, I suppose, but in fact it is pretty clear that Galileo thought the Pope had given his personal permission, even, perhaps, encouragement, to publish (although I would not be surprised if Urban’s actual words to Galileo were not fully explicit). Galileo was also under the impression that everything had been cleared with the censors of the Vatican bureaucracy too (indeed, I think I remember reading that the censors were badly taken aback when, after the book had gone on sale, they suddenly got orders from on high to suppress it.

All the indications are that whatever went wrong happened (very soon) after the book became publicly available. It might have been that Urban found something that personally offended him in the final revised version of the text, but frankly I think that is unlikely. After all, Galileo knew Urban personally, had already spent decades negotiating his way very successfully through the minefield of renaissance intellectual politics, and was a seriously smart guy. He was not going to risk insulting the Pope, and had no motivation to do so. That is why I think that by far the most likely explanation of Urban’s sudden change of direction was some shift in the behind-the-scenes balance of power within the Vatican, probably one that threatened Urban’s power, and perhaps even his very position as Pope. There are good reasons to believe (as outlined in my previous posts here) that Vatican internal politics were in an extremely volatile state at the time.

Maybe if that fist fight between the cardinals had been allowed to proceed, Galileo would have gotten off scot free. :slight_smile:

18

No, no, completely different fetish.

19

Tell 1992 to bring some of those sneakers with pumps built in next time!

20

Another widespread misconception is that the Catholic Church had a long-standing policy of insisting on the absolute truth of Aristotle’s cosmology and squashing anyone who challenged it, and Galileo was the first person to present real scientific challenges to it. In truth many scholars had been noting the flaws in Aristotle’s system for centuries before Galileo’s time, and in fact most of them were clergymen. Scholars like Jean Buridan, Nicole d’Orisme, and Nico da Cusa should be better known than they are.