Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics)

by Bertolt Brecht

  BARBERINI (laughs) You can’t catch that man. I tell you, Bellarmin, his moons around Jupiter are hard nuts to crack. Unfortunately for me I happened to glance at a few papers on astronomy once. It is harder to get rid of than the itch.

  BELLARMIN Let’s move with the times. If it makes navigation easier for sailors to use new charts based on a new hypothesis let them have them. We only have to scotch doctrines that contradict Holy Writ.

  (He leans over the balustrade of the well and acknowledges various Guests)

  BARBERINI But Bellarmin, you haven’t caught on to this fellow. The scriptures don’t satisfy him. Copernicus does.

  GALILEO Copernicus? “He that withholdeth corn the people shall curse him.” Book of Proverbs.

  BARBERINI “A prudent man concealeth knowledge.” Also Book of Proverbs.

  GALILEO “Where no oxen are, the stable is clean, but much increase is by the strength of the ox.”

  BARBERINI “He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city.”

  GALILEO “But a broken spirit drieth up the bones.” (Pause) “Doth not wisdom cry?”

  BARBERINI “Can one walk on hot coals and his feet not be scorched?” – Welcome to Rome, Friend Galileo. You recall the legend of our city’s origin? Two small boys found sustenance and refuge with a she-wolf and from that day we have paid the price for the she-wolf’s milk. But the place is not bad. We have everything for your pleasure – from a scholarly dispute with Bellarmin to ladies of high degree. Look at that woman flaunting herself. No? He wants a weighty discussion! All right! (To Galileo) You people speak in terms of circles and ellipses and regular velocities – simple movements that the human mind can grasp – very convenient – but suppose Almighty God had taken it into his head to make the stars move like that … (He describes an irregular motion with his fingers through the air)… then where would you be?

  GALILEO My good man – the Almighty would have endowed us with brains like that … (Repeats the movement) … so that we could grasp the movements … (Repeats the movement) … like that. I believe in the brain.

  BARBERINI I consider the brain inadequate. He doesn’t answer. He is too polite to tell me he considers my brain inadequate. What is one to do with him? Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. All he wants to do is to prove that God made a few boners in astronomy. God didn’t study his astronomy hard enough before he composed Holy Writ. (To the Secretaries) Don’t take anything down. This is a scientific discussion among friends.

  BELLARMIN (to Galileo) Does it not appear more probable – even to you – that the Creator knows more about his work than the created?

  GALILEO In his blindness man is liable to misread not only the sky but also the Bible.

  BELLARMIN The interpretation of the Bible is a matter for the ministers of God. (Galileo remains silent) At last you are quiet. (He gestures to the Secretaries. They start writing) Tonight the Holy Office has decided that the theory according to which the earth goes around the sun is foolish, absurd, and a heresy. I am charged, Mr. Galilei, with cautioning you to abandon these teachings. (To the First Secretary) Would you repeat that?

  FIRST SECRETARY (reading) “His Eminence, Cardinal Bellarmin, to the aforesaid Galilei: The Holy Office has resolved that the theory according to which the earth goes around the sun is foolish, absurd, and a heresy. I am charged, Mr. Galilei, with cautioning you to abandon these teachings.”

  GALILEO (rocking on his base) But the facts!

  BARBERINI (consoling) Your findings have been ratified by the Papal Observatory, Galilei. That should be most flattering to you …

  BELLARMIN (cutting in) The Holy Office formulated the decree without going into details.

  GALILEO (to Barberini) Do you realize, the future of all scientific research is …

  BELLARMIN (cutting in) Completely assured, Mr. Galilei. It is not given to man to know the truth: it is granted to him to seek after the truth. Science is the legitimate and beloved daughter of the Church. She must have confidence in the Church.

  GALILEO (infuriated) I would not try confidence by whistling her too often.

  BARBERINI (quickly) Be careful what you’re doing – you’ll be throwing out the baby with the bath water, friend Galilei.

  (Serious) We need you more than you need us.

  BELLARMIN Well, it is time we introduced our distinguished friend to our guests. The whole country talks of him!

  BARBERINI Let us replace our masks, Bellarmin. Poor Galilei hasn’t got one.

  (He laughs. They take Galileo out)

  FIRST SECRETARY Did you get his last sentence?

  SECOND SECRETARY Yes. Do you have what he said about believing in the brain?

  (Another cardinal – the Inquisitor – enters)

  INQUISITOR Did the conference take place?

  (The First Secretary hands him the papers and the Inquisitor dismisses the Secretaries. They go. The Inquisitor sits down and starts to read the transcription. Two or three Young Ladies skitter across the stage; they see the Inquisitor and curtsy as they go)

  YOUNG GIRL Who was that?

  HER FRIEND The Cardinal Inquisitor.

  (They giggle and go. Enter Virginia. She curtsies as she goes. The Inquisitor stops her)

  INQUISITOR Good evening, my child. Beautiful night. May I congratulate you on your betrothal? Your young man comes from a fine family. Are you staying with us here in Rome?

  VIRGINIA Not now, Your Eminence. I must go home to prepare for the wedding.

  INQUISITOR Ah. You are accompanying your father to Florence. That should please him. Science must be cold comfort in a home. Your youth and warmth will keep him down to earth. It is easy to get lost up there. (He gestures to the sky)

  VIRGINIA He doesn’t talk to me about the stars, Your Eminence.

  INQUISITOR No. (He laughs) They don’t eat fish in the fisherman’s house. I can tell you something about astronomy. My child, it seems that God has blessed our modern astronomers with imaginations. It is quite alarming! Do you know that the earth – which we old fogies supposed to be so large – has shrunk to something no bigger than a walnut, and the new universe has grown so vast that prelates – and even cardinals – look like ants. Why, God Almighty might lose sight of a Pope! I wonder if I know your Father Confessor.

  VIRGINIA Father Christopherus, from Saint Ursula’s at Florence, Your Eminence.

  INQUISITOR My dear child, your father will need you. Not so much now perhaps, but one of these days. You are pure, and there is strength in purity. Greatness is sometimes, indeed often, too heavy a burden for those to whom God has granted it. What man is so great that he has no place in a prayer? But I am keeping you, my dear. Your fiancé will be jealous of me, and I am afraid your father will never forgive me for holding forth on astronomy. Go to your dancing and remember me to Father Christopherus. (Virginia kisses his ring and runs off. The Inquisitor resumes his reading)

  Scene Seven

  Galileo, feeling grim,

  A young monk came to visit him.

  The monk was born of common folk.

  It was of science that they spoke.

  Garden of the Florentine Ambassador in Rome. Distant hum of a great city. Galileo and the Little Monk of Scene Five are talking.

  GALILEO Let’s hear it. That robe you’re wearing gives you the right to say whatever you want to say. Let’s hear it.

  LITTLE MONK I have studied physics, Mr. Galilei.

  GALILEO That might help us if it enabled you to admit that two and two are four.

  LITTLE MONK Mr. Galilei, I have spent four sleepless nights trying to reconcile the decree that I have read with the moons of Jupiter that I have seen. This morning I decided to come to see you after I had said Mass.

  GALILEO To tell me that Jupiter has no moons?

  LITTLE MONK No, I found out that I think the decree a wise decree. It has shocked me into realizing that free research has its dangers. I have had to decide to give up astronomy. However, I felt the impulse to confide in
you some of the motives which have impelled even a passionate physicist to abandon his work.

  GALILEO Your motives are familiar to me.

  LITTLE MONK You mean, of course, the special powers invested in certain commissions of the Holy Office? But there is something else. I would like to talk to you about my family. I do not come from the great city. My parents are peasants in the Campagna, who know about the cultivation of the olive tree, and not much about anything else. Too often these days when I am trying to concentrate on tracking down the moons of Jupiter, I see my parents. I see them sitting by the fire with my sister, eating their curded cheese. I see the beams of the ceiling above them, which the smoke of centuries has blackened, and I can see the veins stand out on their toil-worn hands, and the little spoons in their hands. They scrape a living, and underlying their poverty there is a sort of order. There are routines. The routine of scrubbing the floors, the routine of the seasons in the olive orchard, the routine of paying taxes. The troubles that come to them are recurrent troubles. My father did not get his poor bent back all at once, but little by little, year by year, in the olive orchard; just as year after year, with unfailing regularity, childbirth has made my mother more and more sexless. They draw the strength they need to sweat with their loaded baskets up the stony paths, to bear children, even to eat, from the sight of the trees greening each year anew, from the reproachful face of the soil, which is never satisfied, and from the little church and Bible texts they hear there on Sunday. They have been told that God relies upon them and that the pageant of the world has been written around them that they may be tested in the important or unimportant parts handed out to them. How could they take it, were I to tell them that they are on a lump of stone ceaselessly spinning in empty space, circling around a second-rate star? What, then, would be the use of their patience, their acceptance of misery? What comfort, then, the Holy Scriptures, which have mercifully explained their crucifixion? The Holy Scriptures would then be proved full of mistakes. No, I see them begin to look frightened, I see them slowly put their spoons down on the table. They would feel cheated. “There is no eye watching over us, after all,” they would say. “We have to start out on our own, at our time of life. Nobody has planned a part for us beyond this wretched one on a worthless star. There is no meaning in our misery. Hunger is just not having eaten. It is no test of strength. Effort is just stooping and carrying. It is not a virtue.” Can you understand that I read into the decree of the Holy Office a noble motherly pity and a great goodness of the soul?

  GALILEO (embarrassed) Hm, well at least you have found out that it is not a question of the satellites of Jupiter, but of the peasants of the Campagna! And don’t try to break me down by the halo of beauty that radiates from old age. How does a pearl develop in an oyster? A jagged grain of sand makes its way into the oyster’s shell and makes its life unbearable. The oyster exudes slime to cover the grain of sand and the slime eventually hardens into a pearl. The oyster nearly dies in the process. To hell with the pearl, give me the healthy oyster! And virtues are not exclusive to misery. If your parents were prosperous and happy, they might develop the virtues of happiness and prosperity. Today the virtues of exhaustion are caused by the exhausted land. For that my new water pumps could work more wonders than their ridiculous superhuman efforts. Be fruitful and multiply: for war will cut down the population, and our fields are barren! (A pause) Shall I lie to your people?

  LITTLE MONK We must be silent from the highest of motives: the inward peace of less fortunate souls.

  GALILEO My dear man, as a bonus for not meddling with your parents’ peace, the authorities are tendering me, on a silver platter, persecution-free, my share of the fat sweated from your parents, who, as you know, were made in God’s image. Should I condone this decree, my motives might not be disinterested: easy life, no persecution and so on.

  LITTLE MONK Mr. Galilei, I am a priest.

  GALILEO You are also a physicist. How can new machinery be evolved to domesticate the river water if we physicists are forbidden to study, discuss, and pool our findings about the greatest machinery of all, the machinery of the heavenly bodies? Can I reconcile my findings on the paths of falling bodies with the current belief in the tracks of witches on broom sticks? (A pause) I am sorry – I shouldn’t have said that.

  LITTLE MONK You don’t think that the truth, if it is the truth, would make its way without us?

  GALILEO No! No! No! As much of the truth gets through as we push through. You talk about the Campagna peasants as if they were the moss on their huts. Naturally, if they don’t get a move on and learn to think for themselves, the most efficient of irrigation systems cannot help them. I can see their divine patience, but where is their divine fury?

  LITTLE MONK (helpless) They are old!

  (Galileo stands for a moment, beaten; he cannot meet the little monk’s eyes. He takes a manuscript from the table and throws it violently on the ground)

  LITTLE MONK What is that?

  GALILEO Here is writ what draws the ocean when it ebbs and flows. Let it lie there. Thou shalt not read. (Little Monk has picked up the manuscript) Already! An apple of the tree of knowledge, he can’t wait, he wolfs it down. He will rot in hell for all eternity. Look at him, where are his manners? – Sometimes I think I would let them imprison me in a place a thousand feet beneath the earth where no light could reach me, if in exchange I could find out what stuff that is: “Light.” The bad thing is that, when I find something, I have to boast about it like a lover or a drunkard or a traitor. That is a hopeless vice and leads to the abyss. I wonder how long I shall be content to discuss it with my dog!

  LITTLE MONK (immersed in the manuscript) I don’t understand this sentence.

  GALILEO I’ll explain it to you, I’ll explain it to you. (They are sitting on the floor)

  Scene Eight

  Eight long years with tongue in cheek

  Of what he knew he did not speak.

  Then temptation grew too great

  And Galileo challenged fate.

  Galileo’s house in Florence again. Galileo is supervising his Assistants Andrea, Federzoni, and the Little Monk who are about to prepare an experiment. Mrs. Sarti and Virginia are at a long table sewing bridal linen. There is a new telescope, larger than the old one. At the moment it is covered with a cloth.

  ANDREA (looking up a schedule) Thursday. Afternoon. Floating bodies again. Ice, bowl of water, scales, and it says here an iron needle. Aristotle.

  VIRGINIA Ludovico likes to entertain. We must take care to be neat. His mother notices every stitch. She doesn’t approve of father’s books.

  MRS. SARTI That’s all a thing of the past. He hasn’t published a book for years.

  VIRGINIA That’s true. Oh Sarti, it’s fun sewing a trousseau.

  MRS. SARTI Virginia, I want to talk to you. You are very young, and you have no mother, and your father is putting those pieces of ice in water, and marriage is too serious a business to go into blind. Now you should go to see a real astronomer from the university and have him cast your horoscope so you know where you stand. (Virginia giggles) What’s the matter?

  VIRGINIA I’ve been already.

  MRS. SARTI Tell Sarti.

  VIRGINIA I have to be careful for three months now because the sun is in Capricorn, but after that I get a favorable ascendant, and I can undertake a journey if I am careful of Uranus, as I’m a Scorpion.

  MRS. SARTI What about Ludovico?

  VIRGINIA He’s a Leo, the astronomer said. Leos are sensual. (Giggles)

  (There is a knock at the door, it opens. Enter the Rector of the University, the philosopher of Scene Four, bringing a book)

  RECTOR (to Virginia) This is about the burning issue of the moment.

  He may want to glance over it. My faculty would appreciate his comments. No, don’t disturb him now, my dear. Every minute one takes of your father’s time is stolen from Italy. (He goes)

  VIRGINIA Federzoni! The rector of the university brought this.
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  (Federzoni takes it)

  GALILEO What’s it about?

  FEDERZONI (spelling) De maculis in sole.

  ANDREA Oh, it’s on the sun spots!

  (Andrea comes one side, and the Little Monk the other, to look at the book)

  ANDREA A new one!

  (Federzoni resentfully puts the book into their hands and continues with the preparation of the experiment)

  ANDREA Listen to this dedication. (Quotes) “To the greatest living authority on physics, Galileo Galilei.” – I read Fabricius’ paper the other day. Fabricius says the spots are clusters of planets between us and the sun.

  LITTLE MONK Doubtful.

  GALILEO (noncommittal) Yes?

  ANDREA Paris and Prague hold that they are vapors from the sun.

  Federzoni doubts that.

  FEDERZONI Me? You leave me out. I said “hm,” that was all. And don’t discuss new things before me. I can’t read the material, it’s in Latin. (He drops the scales and stands trembling with fury) Tell me, can I doubt anything?

  (Galileo walks over and picks up the scales silently. Pause)

  LITTLE MONK There is happiness in doubting, I wonder why.

  ANDREA Aren’t we going to take this up?

  GALILEO At the moment we are investigating floating bodies.

  ANDREA Mother has baskets full of letters from all over Europe asking his opinion.

  FEDERZONI The question is whether you can afford to remain silent.

  GALILEO I cannot afford to be smoked on a wood fire like a ham.

  ANDREA (surprised) Ah. You think the sun spots may have something to do with that again? (Galileo does not answer)

  ANDREA Well, we stick to fiddling about with bits of ice in water. They can’t hurt you.

  GALILEO Correct. – Our thesis!

  ANDREA All things that are lighter than water float, and all things that are heavier sink.

  GALILEO Aristotle says –

  LITTLE MONK (reading out of a book, translating) “A broad and flat disk of ice, although heavier than water, still floats, because it is unable to divide the water.”