VIRGINIA: No. He dictated his book to me, as you know. You’ve had pages 131 and 132, and those were the last.
THE MONK: He’s an old fox.
VIRGINIA: He’s doing nothing contrary to instructions. His repentance is genuine. I’ll keep an eye on him. Tell them in the kitchen they’re to fry the liver with an apple and an onion. She goes back into the large room. And now let’s consider our eyes and leave that ball alone and dictate just a bit more of our weekly letter to the archbishop.
GALILEO: I’m not well enough. Read me some Horace.
VIRGINIA: Only last week Monsignor Carpula was telling me – and we owe him so much, you know; another lot of vegetables only the other day – that the archbishop keeps asking him what you think of those questions and quotations he sends you.
She has sat down to take dictation.
GALILEO: Where had I got to?
VIRGINIA: Section four: with respect to Holy Church’s policy concerning the unrest in the Arsenal in Venice I agree with the attitude adopted by Cardinal Spoletti towards the disaffected rope-makers …
GALILEO: Yes. He dictates: I agree with the attitude adopted by Cardinal Spoletti towards the disaffected rope-makers, namely that it is better to hand out soup to them in the name of Christian brotherly love than to pay them more for their hawsers and bell ropes. Especially as it seems wiser to encourage their faith rather than their acquisitiveness. The apostle Paul says ‘Charity never faileth’. – How’s that?
VIRGINIA: That’s wonderful, Father.
GALILEO: You don’t think a suspicion of irony might be read into it?
VIRGINIA: No, the archbishop will be delighted. He is so practical.
GALILEO: I trust your judgement. What’s next?
VIRGINIA: A most beautiful saying: ‘When I am weak then I am strong’.
GALILEO: No comment.
VIRGINIA: Why not?
GALILEO: What’s next?
VIRGINIA: ‘And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge’. Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, iii, 19.
GALILEO: I am particularly grateful to your Eminence for the splendid quotation from the Epistle to the Ephesians. Stimulated by it I looked in our incomparable Imitation and found the following. He quotes by heart:‘He to whom speaketh the eternal word is free from much questioning.’ May I take this opportunity to refer to my own affairs? I am still blamed for once having written an astronomical work in the language of the market-place. It was not my intention thereby to propose or approve the writing of books on infinitely more important matters, such as theology, in the jargon of pasta merchants. The argument for holding services in Latin – that it is a universal language and allows every nationality to hear holy mass in exactly the same way – seems to me a shade unfortunate in that our ever-present cynics might say this prevents any nationality from understanding the text. That sacred matters should be made cheaply understandable is something I can gladly do without. The church’s Latin, which protects its eternal verities from the curiosity of the ignorant, inspires confidence when spoken by the priestly sons of the lower classes in the accents of the appropriate local dialect. No, strike that out.
VIRGINIA: All of it?
GALILEO: Everything after pasta merchants.
There is a knock at the door. Virginia goes into the antechamber. The monk opens. It is Andrea Sarti. He is now a man in his middle years.
ANDREA: Good evening. I am leaving Italy to do research in Holland and they asked me to look him up on the way through so I can say how he is.
VIRGINIA: I don’t know that he’ll want to see you. You never came.
ANDREA: Ask him. Galileo has recognised his voice. He sits motionless. Virginia goes in to him.
GALILEO: Is that Andrea?
VIRGINIA: Yes. Shall I send him away?
GALILEO after a moment: Show him in.
Virginia brings Andrea in.
VIRGINIA to the monk: He’s harmless. Used to be his pupil. So now he’s his enemy.
GALILEO: Leave us, Virginia.
VIRGINIA: I want to hear what he’s got to say. She sits down.
ANDREA coolly: How are you?
GALILEO: Come closer. What are you doing now? Tell us about your work. I’m told you’re on hydraulics.
ANDREA: Fabricius in Amsterdam has commissioned me to inquire about your health. Pause.
GALILEO: My health is good. They pay me every attention.
ANDREA: I am glad I can report that your health is good.
GALILEO: Fabricius will be glad to hear it. And you can tell him that I live in corresponding comfort. The depth of my repentance has earned me enough credit with my superiors to be permitted to conduct scientific studies on a modest scale under clerical supervision.
ANDREA: That’s right. We too heard that the church is more than pleased with you. Your utter capitulation has been effective. We understand the authorities are happy to note that not a single paper expounding new theories has been published in Italy since you toed the line.
GALILEO listening: Unhappily there are still countries not under the wing of the church. I’m afraid the condemned doctrines are being pursued there.
ANDREA: There too your recantation caused a setback most gratifying to the church.
GALILEO: Really? Pause. Nothing from Descartes? No news from Paris.
ANDREA: On the contrary. When he heard about your recantation he shoved his treatise on the nature of light away in a drawer.
Long pause.
GALILEO: I feel concern for certain scientific friends whom I led into error. Did they learn anything from my recantation?
ANDREA: The only way I can do research is by going to Holland. They won’t permit the ox anything that Jove won’t permit himself.
GALILEO: I see.
ANDREA: Federzoni is back to grinding lenses in some shop in Milan.
GALILEO laughs: He doesn’t know Latin.
ANDREA: Fulganzio, our little monk, has given up science and gone back to the bosom of the church.
GALILEO: Yes. Pause.
GALILEO: My superiors hope to achieve a spiritual cure in my case too. I am progressing better than anyone expected.
ANDREA: Indeed.
VIRGINIA: The Lord be praised.
GALILEO roughly: See to the geese, Virginia.
Virginia goes out angrily. The monk speaks to her as she passes.
THE MONK: I don’t like that man.
VIRGINIA: He’s harmless. You heard them. Walking away:
There’s some fresh goats-milk cheese arrived.
The monk follows her out.
ANDREA: I have to travel all night if I’m to cross the frontier early tomorrow. May I go?
GALILEO: I don’t know why you came, Sarti. Was it to unsettle me? I’ve been living prudently and thinking prudently since coming here. Even so I get relapses.
ANDREA: I have no wish to arouse you, Mr Galilei.
GALILEO: Barberini called it the itch. He wasn’t entirely free of it himself. I’ve been writing again.
ANDREA: Indeed.
GALILEO: I finished the ‘Discorsi’.
ANDREA: What? The ‘Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences: Mechanics and Local Motion’? Here?
GALILEO: Oh, they let me have pens and paper. My masters aren’t stupid. They realise that deeply engrained vices can’t be snapped off just like that. They shield me from any undesirable consequences by locking the pages away as I write them.
ANDREA: O God!
GALILEO: Did you say something?
ANDREA: They’re making you plough water. They allow you pens and paper to keep you quiet. How can you possibly write when you know that’s the purpose?
GALILEO: Oh, I’m a creature of habit.
ANDREA: The ‘Discorsi’ in the hands of the monks! With Amsterdam and London and Prague all slavering for it!
GALILEO: I can hear Fabricius grumbling away, insisting on his pound of flesh, meanwhile sitting safe and sound himself in Amsterdam.
ANDREA: T
wo new branches of science as good as lost!
GALILEO: It will no doubt relieve him and one or two others to hear that I’ve been risking the last pathetic remnants of my own comfort by making a transcript, more or less behind my back, by squeezing the very last ounce of light out of each reasonably clear night for the past six months.
ANDREA: You’ve got a transcript?
GALILEO: So far my vanity has stopped me destroying it.
ANDREA: Where is it?
GALILEO: ‘If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out’. Whoever wrote that knew more about comfort than me. I suppose it’s the height of folly to part with it. However, as I haven’t managed to keep clear of scientific work you people might as well have it. The transcript is inside that globe. Should you think of taking it to Holland you would of course have to bear the entire responsibility. In that case you would have bought it from someone who had access to the original in the Holy Office.
Andrea has gone to the globe. He takes out the transcript.
ANDREA: The ‘Discorsi’! He leafs through the manuscript. Reads:‘It is my purpose to establish an entirely new science in regard to a very old problem, namely, motion. By means of experiments I have discovered some of its properties, which are worth knowing.’
GALILEO: I had to do something with my time.
ANDREA: This will found a new physics.
GALILEO: Stuff it under your coat.
ANDREA: And we thought you had deserted! No voice against you was louder than mine!
GALILEO: Very proper. I taught you science and I denied the truth.
ANDREA: This alters everything. Everything.
GALILEO: Really?
ANDREA: You were hiding the truth. From the enemy. Even in matters of ethics you were centuries ahead of us.
GALILEO: Elaborate that, will you, Andrea?
ANDREA: Like the man in the street we said ‘He’ll die, but he’ll never recant.’ You came back: ‘I’ve recanted, but I’m going to live.’ – ‘Your hands are stained’, we said. You’re saying: ‘Better stained than empty’.
GALILEO: Better stained than empty. Sounds realistic. Sounds like me. New science, new ethics.
ANDREA: I of all people should have known. I was eleven when you sold another man’s telescope to the Venetian Senate. And I saw you put that instrument to immortal use. Your friends shook their heads when you bowed to that boy in Florence: science gained an audience. Even then you used to laugh at heroes. ‘People who suffer are boring,’ you said. ‘Misfortune comes from miscalculation’. And ‘When there are obstacles the shortest line betweeen two points may be a crooked one.’
GALILEO: I remember.
ANDREA: So in ’33 when you chose to recant a popular point in your doctrine I ought to have known that you were simply backing out of a hopeless political wrangle in order to get on with the real business of science.
GALILEO: Which is …
ANDREA: Studying the properties of motion, mother of those machines which alone are going to make the earth so good to live on that heaven can be cleared away.
GALILEO: Aha.
ANDREA: You gained the leisure to write a scientific work which could be written by nobody else. If you had ended up at the stake in a halo of flames the other side would have won.
GALILEO: They did win. And there is no scientific work that can only be written by one particular man.
ANDREA: Why did you recant, then?
GALILEO: I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain.
ANDREA: No!
GALILEO: They showed me the instruments.
ANDREA: So it wasn’t planned?
GALILEO: It was not.
Pause.
ANDREA loudly: Science makes only one demand: contribution to science.
GALILEO: And I met it. Welcome to the gutter, brother in science and cousin in betrayal! Do you eat fish? I have fish. What stinks is not my fish but me. I sell out, you are a buyer. O irresistible glimpse of the book, the sacred commodity! The mouth waters and curses drown. The great whore of Babylon, the murderous beast, the scarlet woman, opens her thighs and everything is altered. Blessed be our horse-trading, whitewashing, death-fearing community!
ANDREA: Fearing death is human. Human weaknesses don’t matter to science.
GALILEO: Don’t they? – My dear Sarti, even as I now am I think I can still give you a tip or two as to what matters to that science you have dedicated yourself to.
A short pause.
GALILEO professorially, folding his hands over his stomach: In my spare time, of which I have plenty, I have gone over my case and considered how it is going to be judged by that world of science of which I no longer count myself a member. Even a wool merchant has not only to buy cheap and sell dear but also to ensure that the wool trade continues unimpeded. The pursuit of science seems to me to demand particular courage in this respect. It deals in knowledge procured through doubt. Creating knowledge for all about all, it aims to turn all of us into doubters. Now the bulk of the population is kept by its princes, landlords and priests in a pearly haze of superstition and old saws which cloak what these people are up to. The poverty of the many is as old as the hills, and from pulpit and lecture platform we hear that it is as hard as the hills to get rid of. Our new art of doubting delighted the mass audience. They tore the telescope out of our hands and trained it on their tormentors, the princes, landlords and priests. These selfish and domineering men, having greedily exploited the fruits of science, found the cold eye of science had been turned on a primaeval but contrived poverty that could clearly be swept away if they were swept away themselves. They showered us with threats and bribes, irresistible to feeble souls. But can we deny ourselves to the crowd and still remain scientists? The movements of the heavenly bodies have become more comprehensible, but the peoples are as far as ever from calculating the moves of their rulers. The battle for a measurable heaven has been won thanks to doubt; but thanks to credulity the Rome housewife’s battle for milk will be lost time and time again. Science, Sarti, is involved in both these battles. A human race which shambles around in a pearly haze of superstition and old saws, too ignorant to develop its own powers, will never be able to develop those powers of nature which you people are revealing to it. To what end are you working? Presumably for the principle that science’s sole aim must be to lighten the burden of human existence. If the scientists, brought to heel by self-interested rulers, limit themselves to piling up knowledge for knowledge’s sake, then science can be crippled and your new machines will lead to nothing but new impositions. You may in due course discover all that there is to discover, and your progress will nonetheless be nothing but a progress away from mankind. The gap between you and it may one day become so wide that your cry of triumph at some new achievement will be echoed by a universal cry of horror. – As a scientist I had a unique opportunity. In my day astronomy emerged into the marketplace. Given this unique situation, if one man had put up a fight it might have had tremendous repercussions. Had I stood firm the scientists could have developed something like the doctors’ Hippocratic oath, a vow to use their knowledge exclusively for mankind’s benefit. As things are, the best that can be hoped for is a race of inventive dwarfs who can be hired for any purpose. What’s more, Sarti, I have come to the conclusion that I was never in any real danger. For a few years I was as strong as the authorities. And I handed my knowledge to those in power for them to use, fail to use, misuse – whatever best suited their objectives.
Virginia has entered with a dish and come to a standstill.
GALILEO: I betrayed my profession. A man who does what I did cannot be tolerated in the ranks of science.
VIRGINIA: You are accepted in the ranks of the faithful.
She moves on and puts the dish on the table.
GALILEO: Correct. – Now I must eat.
Andrea holds out his hand. Galileo sees the hand but does not take it.
GALILEO: You’re a teacher yourself now. Can you afford to take a hand l
ike mine? He goes to the table. Somebody passing through sent me some geese. I still enjoy eating.
ANDREA: So you no longer believe a new age has started?
GALILEO: On the contrary – Look out for yourself when you pass through Germany, with the truth under your coat.
ANDREA unable to tear himself away. About your opinion of the author we were talking about. I don’t know how to answer. But I cannot think your devastating analysis will be the last word.
GALILEO: Thank you very much, sir. He begins eating.
VIRGINIA escorting Andrea out: We don’t like visitors from the past. They excite him.
Andrea leaves. Virginia comes back.
GALILEO: Got any idea who might have sent the geese?
VIRGINIA: Not Andrea.
GALILEO: Perhaps not. What’s the night like?
VIRGINIA at the window: Clear.
15
Galileo’s book, the ‘Discorsi’, crosses the Italian frontier
The great book o’er the border went
And, good folk, that was the end.
But we hope you’ll keep in mind
He and I were left behind.
May you now guard science’s light
Kindle it and use it right
Lest it be a flame to fall
Downward to consume us all.
Yes, us all.
Little Italian frontier town in the early morning. Children are playing by the barrier. Andrea, standing beside a coachman, is waiting to have his papers checked by the frontier guards. He is sitting on a small box reading Galileo’s manuscript. On the other side of the barrier stands the coach.
THE CHILDREN sing:
Mary, Mary sat her down
Had a little old pink gown
Gown was shabby and bespattered.
But when chilly winter came
Gown went round her just the same.
Bespattered don’t mean tattered.
THE FRONTIER GUARD: Why are you leaving Italy?
ANDREA: I’m a scholar.
THE FRONTIER GUARD to his clerk: Put under ‘reason for leaving’: scholar.
I must examine your luggage.
He does so.
THE FIRST BOY to Andrea: Better not sit there. He points to the but outside which Andrea is sitting. There’s a witch lives inside.
Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) Page 15
