by Dava Sobel
Sunspot drawing by Galileo
Prince Cesi liked the idea so well that he not only initiated preparations for printing but also inducted Welser into the academy. Soon Welser and Galileo were both signing themselves proudly as “Lyncean” in their letters and politely commiserating with each other on their physical complaints. When Cesi published Welser’s four relatively short notes together with Galileo’s three very long replies as History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and Their Phenomena in Rome in the spring of 1613, he retained all the chitchat about Welser’s gout and Galileo’s miscellaneous infirmities.
“I have read [your letter], or rather devoured it, with a pleasure equal to the appetite and longing I had for it,” Welser wrote Galileo on June i, 1612. “Let me assure you that it has served to alleviate for me a long and painful illness that has been causing me extreme discomfort in the left thigh. For this the physicians have not yet found any effective remedy; indeed, the doctor in charge has told me in very plain words that the first men of his profession have written of this disease that ‘some cases are cured, but others are incurable.’ One must therefore submit to the fatherly disposition of God’s providence; “Thou art the Lord, do what is good in Thy sight.’”
Poor Welser would be dead within two years, escaping the pain of his disease through suicide, but meanwhile he worried how Cesi could accomplish the printing of the many meticulous drawings, which Galileo appended to his letters, of sunspots ingeniously observed. Galileo rendered these near-photographic records by letting the telescope image of the Sun fall on a piece of white paper instead of on his retina. There he faithfully traced them— and later retraced them, reorienting the telescope’s inverted vision— to avoid any damage to his eyes.
More than a month’s worth of excellent engravings embellished the finished book, tracking the Sun day by day from the first of June through mid-July of 1612. The ideas espoused in the book, however, exacerbated the existing tensions between Galileo and his avowed opponents. Book discussions attracted additional new opponents among people who had not even read the text. And, since Copernicus had died in silence in another country years before, Galileo began to be credited—or rather blamed—for having fathered the Sun-centered universe.
Although the “pigeon league” attacks on Bodies in Water had held up the books of Aristotle to oppose Galileo, critics of the Sunspot Letters now appealed to the even higher authority of the Bible.
[VI]
Observant
executrix of
God’s commands
The reorganization of the heavens according to Copernicus struck some individuals as suspiciously heretical.
“That opinion of Ipernicus, or whatever his name is,” an elderly Dominican father wagged in Florence in November of 1612, “appears to be against Holy Scripture.” Neither Copernicus nor Galileo, however, both Catholic believers, intended any such criticism of the Bible or attack against the Church. Copernicus had in fact dedicated De revolutionibus to Pope Paul III (the pontiff who excommunicated King Henry VIII of England and established the Roman Inquisition). Galileo, in the course of writing the Sunspot Letters, had sought the expert opinion of Carlo Cardinal Conti on the subject of change in the heavens. Cardinal Conti had assured him that the Bible did not support Aristotle’s doctrine of immutability; in fact, he said, Scripture seemed to argue against it.
None of his experience parrying angry attacks from academics prepared Galileo for the intimations of heresy—a crime he considered “more abhorrent than death itself"—that now swirled around him. Given these circumstances, he must have felt relieved in October 1613, when Ottavio Cardinal Bandini, another prelate of his acquaintance, finally secured the dispensation of age for Galileo’s daughters. The immediate admission of both thirteen-year-old Virginia and twelve-year-old Livia into the nearby Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri was apparently facilitated by the coincidence that the mother abbess, Suor Ludovica Vinta, was sister to a Florentine senator who had served as secretary of state under Grand Duke Ferdinando. No sooner were the girls secured within the enclosure walls than the pitch of the Copernican controversy escalated.
In November, Galileo’s best and most beloved student, the Benedictine monk Benedetto Castelli, who had followed him from Padua, left Florence to take over Galileo’s old chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa. Castelli not only had devised the safe method of observing the Sun on paper used by Galileo to such good effect, but had actually drawn the numerous sunspot diagrams published in Galileo’s book. Galileo had further relied on Castelli to answer all four published attacks on Bodies in Water. Newly arrived at Pisa, Castelli was warned by the university overseer never to teach or even discuss the motion of the Earth. The monk agreed to these terms, naturally, pointing out that his mentor, Galileo, had followed the same course throughout two-plus decades of lecturing at both Pisa and Padua. Within weeks, however, Castelli found himself specifically questioned on the matter of Copernicus in a private but most influential setting, when the Medici family and full entourage arrived in Pisa for their annual winter visit. Holding court for the season at their Pisan palace, Their Serene Highnesses Cosimo II, Archduchess Maria Maddalena, and Grand Duchess Mother Madama Cristina filled the seats around their table three times a day with interesting conversationalists who could inform them on a variety of subjects.
Benedetto Castelli
“Thursday morning I was dining with our Patrons,” Castelli wrote Galileo on Saturday, December 14, “and when asked about the university by the Grand Duke I gave him a complete account of everything, with which he showed himself much pleased. He asked me if I had a telescope; saying yes, I began to tell about an observation of the Medicean planets I had made just the night before. Madama Cristina wanted to know their position, whereupon the talk turned to the necessity of their being real objects and not illusions of the telescope.”
Instead of receding from court life following the death of her husband, Ferdinando I, in 1609, the influential grand duchess Cristina had changed her dress to black and donned a widow’s cap with a voluminous black veil in place of her ducal crown. She had held fast to her rank of grand duchess, leaving her daughter-in-law— Cosimo’s wife, Maria Maddalena—to be content with the “archduchess” title that had come with her from Austria.
On this particular December morning, Madama Cristina found Castelli’s talk of planets disturbing—despite their ties to the House of Medici. Notwithstanding her fondness for Galileo, who had tutored her son, and over and above her respect for Castelli’s monastic robes, she much preferred the conversation of another breakfast guest from the university faculty, the Platonic philosopher Doctor Cosimo Boscaglia.
“After many things, all of which passed with decorum,” Castelli’s letter continued, “breakfast was over. I left, but I had hardly come out of the palace when I was overtaken by the porter of Madama Cristina, who had recalled me. But before I tell you what followed, you must first know that while we were at table Doctor Boscaglia had had Madama’s ear for a while, and while conceding as real all the things you have discovered in the sky, he said that only the motion of the Earth had in it something of the incredible, and could not occur, especially because the Holy Scripture was obviously contrary to that view.”
Friends of the court all knew Madama Cristina to be a devout Catholic who leant her ear most frequently to her confessor, other priests, cardinals, and of course the pope, even when His Holiness’s opinions ran counter to the best interests of the Medici dynasty or the Tuscan government. She had read her Bible and could quote from the Book of Joshua—wherein the Sun is ordered to stand still, presumably because it had been moving—as well as the Psalms:
O Lord my God, Thou art great indeed. . . . Thou fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever. [103:1, 5]
“Now, getting back to my story,” Castelli went on,
I entered into the chambers of her Highness, and there I found the Grand Duke, Madama Cristina and the Archduch
ess, Don Antonio [de’ Medici], Don Paolo Giordano [Orsini], and Doctor Boscaglia. Madama began, after some questions about myself, to argue the Holy Scripture against me. Thereupon, after having made suitable disclaimers, I commenced to play the theologian with such assurance and dignity that it would have done you good to hear me. Don Antonio assisted me, giving me such heart that instead of being dismayed by the majesty of their Highnesses I carried things off like a paladin. I quite won over the Grand Duke and his Archduchess, while Don Paolo came to my assistance with a very apt quotation from the Scripture. Only Madama remained against me, but from her manner I judged that she did this only to hear my replies. Professor Boscaglia said never a word.
The troubling news of Madama Cristina’s displeasure inspired an immediate response from Galileo. Even more than he regretted her opposition, he dreaded the drawing of battle lines between science and Scripture. Personally, he saw no conflict between the two. In the long letter he wrote back to Castelli on December 21, 1613, he probed the relationship of discovered truth in Nature to revealed truth in the Bible.
“As to the first general question of Madama Cristina, it seems to me that it was most prudently propounded to you by her, and conceded and established by you, that Holy Scripture cannot err and the decrees therein contained are absolutely true and inviolable. I should only have added that, though Scripture cannot err, its expounders and interpreters are liable to err in many ways . . . when they would base themselves always on the literal meaning of the words. For in this wise not only many contradictions would be apparent, but even grave heresies and blasphemies, since then it would be necessary to give God hands and feet and eyes, and human and bodily emotions such as anger, regret, hatred, and sometimes forgetfulness of things past, and ignorance of the future.”
Grand Duchess Cristina of Lorraine
These literary devices had been inserted into the Bible for the sake of the masses, Galileo insisted, to aid their understanding of matters pertaining to their salvation. In the same way, biblical language had also simplified certain physical effects in Nature, to conform to common experience. “Holy Scripture and Nature,” Galileo declared, “are both emanations from the divine word: the former dictated by the Holy Spirit, the latter the observant executrix of God’s commands.”
Thus no truth discovered in Nature could contradict the deep truth of Holy Writ. Even Madama Cristina’s objection regarding the Book of Joshua could be put to rest in terms of the Sun-centered universe; indeed, Copernicus made more sense of the passage than either Aristotle or Ptolemy, as Galileo spent almost half of this letter explaining.
On this day, when the Lord delivered up the Amorrites to the Israelites, Joshua prayed to the Lord, and said in the presence of Israel: Stand still, o sun at Gabhaon, o moon, in the valley of Aialon! And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, while the nation took vengeance on its foe. Is this not recorded in the Book of Hashar? The sun halted in the middle of the sky; not for a whole day did it resume its swift course. Never before or since was there a day like this, when the Lord obeyed the voice of a man; for the Lord fought for Israel. [Josh. 10:12-14]
The Ptolemaic system granted the Sun two motions. One of these, a slow annual progression from west to east, belonged strictly to the Sun itself. The other, more apparent, motion of the Sun across the sky over the course of the day—most probably the motion Joshua had sought to halt—actually belonged to the Ptolemaic Primum Mobile, the sphere of the highest sky, which spun all the other spheres containing Sun, Moon, planets, and stars around the Earth every twenty-four hours. God’s stopping only the Sun would not have achieved Joshua’s desire. On the contrary, it would have made night arrive about four minutes early.
As Copernicus viewed the sky, however, the passage of day to night resulted from the turning of the Earth. Galileo agreed with Copernicus that the Earth somehow drew this motion from the Sun. Galileo had further observed the Sun to have its own monthly rotation, which he discovered during his studies of sunspots. Just as the light of the Sun illuminated all the planets, so too its motion energized them to pursue their orbits. Therefore, if God had stopped the Sun’s rotation, the Earth would have stopped, too, and the day stretched out to accommodate Joshua’s needs.
Later Galileo would point out that when the Sun stood still in the biblical account, it did so “in the middle of the sky”—precisely where the Copernican system placed it. This reference to location could not be taken to mean the Sun had been standing in the high noontime position, for then Joshua would have found time enough to fight his battle without praying for a miracle to prolong the day.
Despite the strength of his argument, Galileo personally wished to abandon all such astronomical interpretations, on the grounds that the Bible spoke to a more important purpose. As he had once heard the late Vatican librarian Cesare Cardinal Baronio remark, the Bible was a book about how one goes to Heaven—not how Heaven goes.
“I believe that the intention of Holy Writ was to persuade men of the truths necessary for salvation,” Galileo continued his letter to Castelli, “such as neither science nor any other means could render credible, but only the voice of the Holy Spirit. But I do not think it necessary to believe that the same God who gave us our senses, our speech, our intellect, would have put aside the use of these, to teach us instead such things as with their help we could find out for ourselves, particularly in the case of these sciences of which there is not the smallest mention in the Scriptures; and, above all, in astronomy, of which so little notice is taken that the names of none of the planets are mentioned. Surely if the intention of the sacred scribes had been to teach the people astronomy, they would not have passed over the subject so completely.”
Castelli shared this exquisite exposition with friends and colleagues, who hand-copied it and forwarded it numerous times. Galileo now returned to predicting the positions of the Medicean satellites and to penning responses to various published attacks against his own published works. When his health faltered in March, Castelli, who had been begging Galileo to take better care of himself, stepped in to help him.
In the early days of summer, at the Convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, Virginia and Livia began to wear the dark brown religious habits of the Franciscan orders. Although both children were still too young to take their vows, mother abbess Suor Ludovica Vinta told the ailing Galileo that she desired to see them appropriately outfitted before she relinquished her elected office.
Young girls received into the monastery before the age required by law shall have their hair cut off round and, their secular dress being laid aside, shall be clothed in religious garb as it shall seem fitting to the Abbess. But when they have reached the age required by law, they shall make their profession clothed after the manner of the others, [RULE OF SAINT CLARE, Chapter II]
Meanwhile Galileo’s letter to Castelli continued to circulate, traveling from hand to hand, and eventually falling into the wrong hands. On December 21, 1614, exactly one year to the day after Galileo wrote the letter, he found himself denounced from the pulpit of the Church of Santa Maria Novella, right in the city of Florence, by Tommaso Caccini, a hotheaded young Dominican priest with ties to the “pigeon league.”
Men of Galilee, why do ye stand looking up to heaven? [Acts 1:11]
Beginning his sermon with this barb, Caccini moved quickly to the biblical text for that Advent Sunday, which happened to come from the Book of Joshua, and included the “Stand still, O sun” command that had sparked Madama Cristina’s original complaint. Caccini wound up branding Galileo, Galileo’s followers, and all mathematicians in general “practitioners of diabolical arts . . . enemies of true religion.”
The vitriol of the language brought Caccini a reprimand, and Galileo a written apology from the preacher’s Dominican superior. But soon another Florentine Dominican, Niccolo Lorini, submitted a copy of Galileo’s now widely read letter to Castelli—to an inquisitor general in Rome. Hearing this news, Galileo feared that crucial passages might have been
altered (as indeed proved to be the case) either by mistakes in copying or through malevolent distortion. He sent a true copy to his friend at the Vatican, Piero Dini, who in turn copied it repeatedly for various cardinals who might help clear Galileo’s name.
Through the spring and summer of 1615, Galileo sustained yet another long bout of incapacitating illness—aggravated, perhaps, by his recognition of the forces arrayed against him. Indeed he saw himself the focus of a conspiracy. While bedridden, he recast his informal letter to Castelli into a much longer, more referenced treatise addressed to Madama Cristina herself. (Though no printer dared publish the Letter to Grand Duchess Cristina until 1636, in Strasbourg, manuscript copies enjoyed a wide Italian readership.)
“Some years ago,” he began,
as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors— as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset Nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution or destruction.
Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth, they . . . hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly, and which were ill suited to their purposes.
