The Spanish Inquisition was an aberration in the, (still too eager to harm people for the sake of pushing their beliefs about God), Office of the Inquisition. However, there are two aspects of it that tend to be misunderstood.
A number of Protestant historians, (or, at least, polemicists), seriously overstated the nature of the Spanish Inquisition, exaggerating the numbers of people harmed and the efficiency of the SI in rooting out people to torture. (They also tended, somehow, to miss the fact that every single one of the religious groups in Europe who achieved any power resorted to exactly the same sort of mindset and actions; the Catholics had an office to run the operation, but the Lutherans, Calvinists, Puritans, and others all found reasons and ways to murder people who believed the “wrong” ideas.)
Beyond the tragedy and horror that possessed all Europe throughout the Renaissance period of using torture to impose beliefs, the Spanish Inquisition was used as a tool by Torquemada and the Spanish crown to harrass and subjugate the Jews on the Iberian penninsula far more than the typical attacks on “heretics” that occurred throughout the rest of Europe. (Technically, they were not attacking Jews, who could not be accused of heresy, but their searches for marranos led to attacks upon people who openly practiced their Jewish faith as supporters of the marranos. Torquemada was virulently antisemitic and was a principle agent in persuading Ferdinand and Isabella to expel all the Jews from Spain in 1492. Torquemada’s stint as Grand Inquisitor probably resulted in about 2,000 deaths. Various anti-Catholic polemecists have claimed as many as 8,000 deaths in a year with the actual totals running to the tens of thousands. There is no excuse for the actions of the Inquisition, but the exaggeration is not a valid way to condemn them.
(Marranos, meaning pigs, was the name given to Jews who pretended to convert to Catholicism, (called conversos), but who were suspected of being sham Christians and maintaining their Judaism.)
One of my questions was about “openly mocking” the pope. It seems that the pope was convinced the character Simplicio was based on himself; some sources contend he was convinced of this by Aristotelians, and it’s not clear Simplicio was a stand-in for Urban VIII.
The case that it can be called “open mocking” is weak. Disguised mocking possibly.
As for his confinement (house arrest), it was indifferently enforced, but in effect till his death. And in violating it GG was probably risking further punishment (the same thing that you’re attacking him for in the OP: violating conditions set by the pope.)
And from the same source regarding the question of whether Galileo violated his promise not to endorse heliocentricism:
That sounds like he got it legitimately approved by multiple offices of the Inquistion. And of course, Galileo didn’t agree with the restrictions on him because he thought they were fair, but because nutty people with power wanted him to.
I figure not only do have to not stop telling the Galileo story, we should continue to use it and similar accounts of religion-fired-abuses to fight any freedom-restricting faith-based initiatives that some people might try to get written into law.
Since D’souza was presumably not working from memory when he wrote his book and had ample opportunity to research his cites and in fact the quote never appears in Sagan’s book, what should we surmise about D’Souza’s credibility?
But even if the quote was accurate you still have not proved it is a myth. I bet at some point during Galileo’s ordeal he may have seen the inside of a dungeon and he certainly was threatened with torture for his heretical view that the earth moved about the sun. So remind me again what your point was?
As you say, Jews were allowed to leave or to convert and stay. They were not killed, they were not enslaved or sold into slavery, they were allowed to leave or convert and stay. Which, given the tenor of the times was not a bad deal.
If they wanted to stay they had to “integrate”. How is that different from politicians in America and Europe today saying immigrants have to integrate? We want them to integrate in aspects we consider important today and then they wanted them to integrate in aspects they considered important then but it is the same thing: we pay lip service to diversity and we like “diversity” in the superficial things but humans want to be surrounded by others like themselves. This has not changed one bit in all these hundreds of years.
Converted Jews were specially targetted because they were suspected of having converted outwardly for convenience and continuing to practice their faith in private. This has not changed either. The concealed enemy inside the walls is always the most feared and the most likely to be a target. Pretty much every people and regime have been like this. During WWII America sent Japanese Americans to concentration camps. Did they have the choice of leaving the country? Did they have the choice of affirming their support for America?
During the cold war America went on a wild witch hunt for communists and quite a few people suffered the consequences.
Today it is people of middle eastern descent, Muslims, etc. who suffer the same fate. If you are in those groups the Homeland Security people do not trust you and will keep close tabs on you. How can we condemn what happened almost five centuries ago when we pretty much continue to do the same today? We now see even torture has not quite fallen out of style and many Americans support its use.
So I think it is a bit naive to blame the 16th century Inquisition for keeping a close look on people who they suspected may be “enemy infiltrators”.
I support a moratorium on the misuse of Galileo’s story.
Most often these days this doesn’t involve people invoking religious abuses; instead it’s those who promote pseudoscience and health quackery. When their pet theories are held up to criticism and ridicule, they compare themselves to Galileo battling the forces of orthodoxy. It is to barf.
Yes, but my point is that we think we have advanced a lot since then and yet a lot of people today think it is OK.
My point is that mostly we find things are OK if “my people” do them and are terrible if “they” do it. Put any distance, either geographical or historical and we condemn things which we are ready to condone if done by “our people” today.
People today are justifying lying, cheating, killing and torturing solely on the basis that “it is in our interest” to do so. And yet those same people are ostensibly appalled that the same thing was done 500 years ago by someone else.
In my view what was bad then is much worse today because we have advanced morally. Slavery was bad but understandable in the 16th century, indefensible in the 19th century and a major crime in the 21st century. Things have changed and it would be silly to judge what happened 500 years ago by the standards of today. That is my point.
Apropos of nothing: During the inquisition, torture could be a very, very bureaucratic procedure, ponderous and rule-bound. It was scheduled in advance, certain officials were expected to be there, certain tortures were expected to be used during that session, and there was a definite agenda to stick to with specific time limits.
Many torture sessions got postponed or cancelled due to scheduling conflicts, illness, lost memos, and so forth.
One victim said that in the hands of ordinary professional torturers, he’d have told them anything they wanted to hear within 15 minutes, but in the hands of the inquisition, he held out for 2 months before authorities lost interest (one key committee member died) and let him go.
It sounds so much like our current committee process at work. Or at least my own operating schedule.
I’m hardly a constant critic of the Catholic church, but I do not consider telling a large number of people that “all” they have to do is change their religious beliefs or leave their homes and move to new lands to be “not a bad deal.” They were required to sell all their property, but were forbidden to take with them gold or coin when they left. Prior to the expulsion, there had been a twelve year period during which a number of Jews had been accused of trying to convert Christians away from their faith, for which the Jews were tortured and slain.
By the Alhambra Decree, any Jew who failed to leave or convert was to be killed. Those who converted were then harrassed by Torquemada and his minions for any sign that they might have not “truly” converted, (such as using a habitual expression spoken among Jews or declining to eat pork).
While comparing the expulsion to the immoral detention and removal of the Nisei Japanese during WWII might establish that we are still liable to behave wrongly, that hardly mitigates the actions taken against the Jews in Iberia who were not even related to any group threatening Spain. (Granada, the last Muslim state in Iberia, had already been a vassal state to Aragon for years and was not a threat in any sense. It was overthrown simply as an expansion of Ferdinand and Isabella’s desire for power and the Jews, while suffering less persecution in Granada, were hardly fomenting insurrection from that state.)
The number of deaths attributed to the (Spanish) Inquistition has been greatly exaggerated and the fact that Protestant lands engaged in the same sort of behavior has been downplayed in many cases, but I don’t think there is any reason to minimize what actually happened.
The facts are what they are and I am not minimizing anything; I am trying to put things in their historical context, out of which they are meaningless. Trying to judge people who lived hundreds of years ago by the standards of today makes no sense, specially when those standards of today are more theoretical than real and are broken at the first convenience. Demanding that people who lived centuries ago behave according to moral rules of today which even today we do not really respect is just not fair.
Let us put things in context. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Three hundred years later, much closer to our times, Catholics were being persecuted in Scotland. In the second half of the 18th century, Scots were forbidden to practice Catholicism, own arms, wear their traditional clothes, children were forced to say school prayers for the King and Royal family, etc. After the battle of Culloden the treatment the Scots got was ruthless, brutal. I do not know when Catholics were allowed to own property and practice their religion again but it was probably well into the 19th century.
My (Catholic) ancestors had to flee Scotland for their lives and found refuge in Spain. There is the story of how one managed to escape the English by hiding in a hole in the floor while his wife sat on a chair over it.
Do the English find their treatment of Catholics as morally condemnable and repulsive as that of Jews by Spain 300 years earlier? Of course not. Again, it is bad when “they” do it and if “we” do it it means we have a pretty good reason. It is the history of humanity.
The English all know about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. But what do they have to say about the horrors they have inflicted on some other groups? The Spanish Inquisition is the stereotype of something bad and is often cited as an example of religious persecution. Why isn’t the persecution of Catholics by the English cited and remembered? It is much closer in time and in geography and history.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to criticism of what happened 500 years ago if it were done by peoples who would be well past such actions and who would in no way allow such things to be done by their own governments today. But when they have done similar things much more recently and fail to acknowledge them and condemn them, then I become quite cynical. When the US government is criticizing other countries for their Human Rights records it just tells me that there is indeed two different standards: one for “us” and one for “them”.
True, and I would add, the torture sessions were meticulously documented. Every question, action, utterance, gasp, and cry of pain were noted for the record.
The formality and bureaucracy of those times are just amazing. I have the records of several trials and it is amazing how everything was meticulously recorded and how, just like today, lawyers managed to talk a lot and hide even more with their words. Trials would give cause for more trials and matters would drag on for years until they no longer mattered. (Not much has changed in Spain in this respect. Lots of formalities, lots of bureaucracy and a judicial system which is a shame for any advanced country and which resolves little and when it no longer matters. )
Antonio Perez, secretary of King Philip II, suffered through several trials and the records of some are still in existance. One of them has been published as Los procesos de Castilla contra Antonio Pérez (The Judicial Processes of Castile Against Antonio Pérez) and documents how he was subjected to torture one day in 1590. Every turn of the rack and every cry are right there. The fact is that he never confessed what he knew, even under torture. As someone of the period observed, whay would you confess? If you admitted to anything you were just in for more trouble and saying “no” is just as easy as saying “yes”, torture or no torture.
Look, the Holy Church has clearly explained that those engravings were the work of a few bad apples, not the result of any organized policy from higher up.
Coming at this four pages in, I’m hardly going to wrestle with the whole thread. The following are specific comments on the OP:
Of course.
Factions within the Catholic Church supported him. Just as factions within it opposed him.
The “may have helped him take data” strikes me as particularly odd. That Clavius and Grienberger looked through one of his telescopes and duly testified to what they’d seen is amply recorded. Grienberger then went on to be generally a Galileo supporter in the decades that followed (Clavius died in 1612, so is much less significant in the debate). But “may have helped him take data”?
And “Orthodox Catholics” were never Aristoleleans?
The first two sentences here are misleadingly vague. The 1616 proceedings were probably prompted by the complaint against Galileo written in February 1615 by Father Niccolo Lorini. An academic - he was professor of church history at Florence - but also a Dominican priest. And it’s the latter position he particularly emphasises in the document. For, contrary to the assertion above, we know exactly what Lorini said, because the document survives in the Vatican. (See Finoccchiaro’s translation in his The Galileo Affair, California, 1989, p134-5.)
I’d agree that the 1632 process probably has to be seen as a very human screwup rather than as a symbolic clash. But every statement here can be argued about - and has been in detail over the centuries.
Thus, for example, the argument that the Dialogue “openly mocked the Pope” is one that was fashionable amongst the specialists about twenty years ago, but that has tended to fall out of favour since. I tentatively suspect that it was its deployment by Owen Gingerich in his Scientific American article for the 1982 anniversary (it’s reprinted in his The Great Copernicus Chase, Cambridge, 1992) that brought it to wider attention and led to it being repeated by apologists ever since. There are those historians of science, notably David Lindberg, who do still emphasise the point, but the most important recent Galileo scholarship has reacted against the hypothesis. Most obviously, while not addressing the specific point explicitly, Biagioli’s massively influential Galileo, Courtier (Chicago, 1993) was the argument that he was the superb contemporary debater, negating the idea that would somehow boorishly blunder into a dispute with the Pope in this way. More explicitly, Maurice Finocchiaro’s excellent Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992 (California, 2005) has pointed out the weakness of the “insult” argument: there isn’t any immediately contemporary evidence that anyone explicitly thought the Pope was insulted by the book before or during the trial.
That said, I think Finocchiaro slightly overstates his case. One Vatican official involved did think that the Pope might take offence. There’s just no explicit evidence that he did.
For these - and other - reasons, the statement that the book “openly mocked the Pope” is an example of an interpretation of the Galileo affair. It’s certainly a possible version of events and clearly one that some specialists have argued is correct. But it’s insane to pretend that it’s somehow the obvious interpretation of those events.
It is certainly a myth that he was ever in prison. But this is otherwise trivialising the conditions. Some of the houses he was initially restricted to were grand, but the villa in Arcetri is rather modest. He was allowed to routinely travel the very short distance to visit his daughters in the convent of San Matteo in the village, virtually round the corner, but that was about it. Otherwise, the only visit I’m aware of that he was allowed to make was to Poggibonsi iin October 1636 to meet the French ambassador, a trip for which the latter had to apply for him to be allowed to make. By contrast, Galileo’s own appeals to be allowed to travel to seek medical attention were turned down.
It is more accurate to say that he was clearly at least formally threatened with torture and that there has been a centuries-long, somewhat technical, academic debate about the significance of this. Certainly some scholars of the matter have argued that this was just a formality and understood as such by all involved. Other experts have argued that threatening someone with torture was, um, threatening them torture. Similarly with the potential of a death sentence. Simply ignoring this range of opinions is whitewashing over a significant debate within Galilean historiography.
The experts are agreed that he wasn’t actually tortured.
A slippery argument. Yes, especially stupid people might assume that the Spanish Inquisition had authority in Italy. So what?
I’d personally tend to guess that he never said Eppur si mouve, but the likes of Stillman Drake have argued that the story can be traced back to 1643 and hence may be reliable in some form (Galileo at Work, Chicago, 1978, p357). Dogmatism on the matter is probably inappropriate.
Even the secondary literature by historians of science on Galileo is immense. And often constructs very different interpretations based on the same evidence. The tertiary literature cherrypicking from that isn’t to be recommended.
Entirely as a redundant footnote to that thread, I’ll take this opportunity to note that the forthcoming Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins by Desmond and Moore, two out of the three leading Darwinian biographers, is apparently the detailed explicit argument that his work was driven by anti-slavery and anti-racism motives.