The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  The irony – which is seldom mentioned by modern historians of science – is that the main pro-Copernicus argument that Galileo puts forward in the Dialogue, his old ‘proof’ based on the tides, was wrong. His original title was, in fact, Dialogue on the Ebb and Flow of the Sea. The Inquisition in Florence forced him to change the title, which is odd, as the new one made it more obvious that the book was about the heliocentric debate. Galileo was careful to keep to the rule of discussing Copernicanism without actually advocating it. Nevertheless, the book caused rumblings, especially among the Jesuits, and Urban came under pressure to act.

  Despite the myth of the ‘clash of egos’, it is clear that Urban had to be pushed into action. His position as pope was far from secure, as many in Rome thought him too soft on Protestantism – there was even talk of deposing him.21 This was largely because Urban was concerned about the power of the Hapsburg dynasty, which ruled Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, both of which were locked in battle with the Protestant nations. For his own political reasons he had refused to give his sanction to the war or to lend it diplomatic or military support, but it did lead some to wonder where his sympathies really lay. His many opponents among the Cardinal Inquisitors were making much of his endorsement of the Dialogue’s publication as another sign of his softness on heresy. He therefore had to take action to keep his own position secure. This was no clash of egos. Urban was just running scared.

  As a result of Jesuit pressure, Urban appointed a commission to investigate whether Galileo had broken his ban of sixteen years earlier. Some historians believe that this was an attempt to keep the Inquisition out of the matter, another sign of the Pope’s reluctance to let the Inquisition loose on his old friend. If so, it was remarkably unsuccessful. In September 1632 Urban instructed the Inquisition in Florence to deliver a summons to a shocked Galileo to present himself in Rome to answer questions about his book. He appeared before the Inquisition in April the following year, no doubt with Campanella’s advice to stand firm – because of the theological (that is, Hermetic) importance of establishing that the sun was at the centre – ringing in his ears.

  Galileo’s defence was that his book had not upheld Copernican theory, but had merely discussed it. He declared that until the decree of 1616 he had regarded neither the Copernican nor Ptolemaic hypothesis as beyond dispute (contradicting his statements to Kepler thirty-six years earlier), but since then he had held the Ptolemaic view ‘to be true and indisputable’.22 While few would blame Galileo for reneging on his own opinions and weaselling out of the situation – after all, this was the Inquisition he was facing – these were hardly the words either of a noble defender of intellectual freedom or willing would-be martyr. And yet neither does he seem an arrogant old man who refused to admit he was wrong.

  Galileo lost. The inquisitors decided that the Dialogue was a disingenuous attempt to promote heliocentricity, which it probably was, and that his attempts to disguise it as a mere discussion were totally unconvincing. He was found ‘veementemente sospetto d’eresia’ – vehemently suspect of heresy – just one degree below actually being a heretic. The only way out was to ‘abjure, curse and detest’ the very ideas that caused the suspicion.

  Galileo had to admit his error and renounce his ideas, kneeling before the altar of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the same basilica from which Bruno had set out to his horrendous death thirty-three years earlier. Publication of anything by Galileo – anything he had written or would write in the future – was forbidden (although in the event he did manage to get some works printed in Germany). He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but as he was over seventy years old, was instead committed to house arrest. He stayed first with a supporter, the Archbishop of Siena, where one of his first visitors was none other than Tomasso Campanella … 23

  Later, Galileo was allowed to return to his own villa outside Florence, where he died in 1642. Less than a year before his death he wrote to the Florentine ambassador in Venice that:

  The falsity of the Copernican system ought not to be doubted in anyway, and most of all not by us Catholics who have the undeniable authority of Holy Scripture, interpreted by the best theologians.24

  Perhaps Galileo had an unusually over-developed sense of irony.

  But what of Campanella? In 1634, the year after Galileo’s trial, there was another attempt to organize a revolt in Calabria. Whether Campanella was directly involved is unclear, but the leader was certainly one of his followers. So it was expedient, to say the least, for him to leave Rome for Paris – a well-worn route for fugitive Italian Hermeticists. There he became a favourite of Cardinal Richelieu, who persuaded the king to give him a pension. Encouraged by this, he transferred his hopes to the French monarchy, urging Richelieu to make Paris into his City of the Sun. His big hope settled on the future Louis XIV, born in 1638, who he expected to rule the world in partnership with a reformed papacy. Campanella was the first person to call the infant Louis the Sun King, as an acknowledgement of his great Hermetic potential.25

  After Campanella’s dizzyingly strange and extreme career, which took him from castle dungeons to the favour of some of the greatest figures in Europe, he died in Paris in May 1639. But there can be no doubt that his legacy lived on.

  GALILEO’S SECRET

  Although during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries researchers perceived a connection between the trials of Bruno and Galileo, the notion of Bruno’s fate being a more severe foreshadowing of Galileo’s persecution, dying for his Copernican beliefs, is not borne out by the facts. There was indeed a connection between the two, but it is the other way round. Action was taken against Galileo because of the Hermetic – the Brunian – implications of his views.

  Yet while not often recognized, the connection between the two trials is hugely significant. Although Galileo’s trial is always cited as the moment when forces of reason and dogma collided head-on, the Hermetic factor is arguably the most important. It was, after all, the reverence that heliocentricity was accorded by Hermeticists in general and Bruno’s followers in particular that was the major reason the Church sought to damn heliocentricity, and therefore Galileo himself.

  Neither side could admit what Galileo’s trial was really about. While being aware of the Hermetic implications of the Dialogue, Galileo never made them overt, which meant that the Church couldn’t use that against him. It is unlikely it would have wanted to draw attention to the importance of heliocentricity for the Hermetic revolution in any case. The Hermetic factor was therefore present, however, but simply relegated to the background – which is why there is a distinct sense of something missing in the conventional story of the trial.

  Given the uncompromising Bruno and the revolutionary Campanella, the Inquisition and the Jesuits would have undoubtedly been only too fearful of the threat posed by Hermeticism. They would have traced the same connections we have outlined – beginning with Copernicus’ references to Hermes Trismegistus, through Bruno’s reforming career and the hidden presence of the Giordanisti, to Galileo’s links with Pinelli and, most damningly, Campanella. They may even have seen the connection between Galileo’s Dialogue and Bruno’s The Ash Wednesday Supper. Even if they were putting two and two together and coming up with five – a not uncommon occurrence with the Inquisition – these connections would still have shaped their fears and consequently their actions.

  It seems, however, Galileo was by no means as innocent as he tried to appear. There are valid questions, for example, about his relationship to the secret Hermetic reform movement. There is his continued association and correspondence with Campanella to take into consideration, especially his wish to see him in the wake of his warning-off in 1616. What would Galileo get out of such an association? Campanella was a religious, esoteric and political theorist – not a mathematician or scientist. For an ambitious man like Galileo, conscious of his image, Campanella was hardly the kind of company he should have wanted to keep.

  And then there is Galileo’s appa
rent use of Bruno’s The Ash Wednesday Supper – which contains the first mention of the concept of the Copernican sun as the trigger for a new Hermetic age – as a model for his Dialogue Concerning the

  Two Chief World Systems. Was this merely a belated, and necessarily covert, acknowledgement of Galileo’s intellectual debt to Bruno, rectifying the failure for which Kepler had criticized him? Or was it a covert signal to the Giordanisti that he was a sympathizer – perhaps even one of them? It is safe to say that at the very least Bruno’s work influenced Galileo’s, which yet again places Hermeticism at the centre of the scientific revolution.

  Chapter Three

  1 Ferris, pp. 85–6.

  2 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 360.

  3 Ibid., p. 363.

  4 Mason, p. 462.

  5 Ibid., p. 468.

  6 See Morley for a translation of City of the Sun.

  7 Interviewed in Burstein and de Keijzer, p. 242.

  8 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 233.

  9 Quoted in Olaf Pedersen, ‘Galileo’s Religion’, in Coyne (ed.), p. 75.

  10 In his notes to Galileo, Salusbury translation, p. 15.

  11 Oxford University science historian Allan Chapman, quoted in Couper and Henbest, p. 154.

  12 In his forward to Stillman Drake’s translation of Galileo, p. xvii.

  13 Pedersen, ‘Galileo’s Religion’, in Coyne (ed.), pp. 80–1.

  14 Quoted in ibid., p. 80.

  15 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 383.

  16 This was in a conversation in 1610 with Martin Hasdale, the librarian at Rudolph II’s court, who relayed Kepler’s remarks to Galileo in a letter. (Singer, Giordano Bruno, p. 189.)

  17 Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, pp. 122–3.

  18 Quoted in Finocchario, p. 88.

  19 Pedersen, ‘Galileo’s Religion’, in Coyne (ed.), p. 97.

  20 Ibid., p. 92.

  21 Finocchiaro, p. 13.

  22 Quoted in Pedersen, ‘Galileo’s Religion’, in Coyne (ed.), p. 81.

  23 Ibid., p. 97.

  24 Quoted in ibid., p. 81.

  25 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, p. 361.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FALSE ROSICRUCIAN DAWN

  The Hermetic cause suffered several major setbacks in the early years of the seventeenth century, and for a time it must have seemed as if its hopes for a new golden age had been dashed once and for all. The first setback was, of course, the grisly execution of audacious prime mover Giordano Bruno in 1600, but the second came fourteen years later and was to provide even more ammunition for those opposing the Hermetic movement.

  When the Corpus Hermeticum was rediscovered in the mid-fifteenth century everybody – whether they supported or opposed Hermeticism – accepted that the texts dated from the most ancient days of the Egyptian civilization. But suddenly a learned work exploded onto the scene that made the startling claim that the texts were of a much later provenance, not being written until the second or third century CE. The bombshell was Of Things Holy and Ecclesiastical (De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis), by one Isaac Casaubon. Born to refugee Huguenot parents in Geneva in 1559, he was widely regarded as the most learned man in Europe, his speciality being classical languages. After a glittering academic career in Switzerland and France he found himself working at the royal library in Paris under the patronage of Henri IV, the great hope of the Hermetic reformers. In May 1610 Henri, like his predecessor, was assassinated by a Catholic fanatic. This prompted a lurch towards ultra-orthodox Catholicism in France, which made life decidedly uncomfortable for Protestants such as Casaubon, who was more than happy to accept an invitation from James I to move to England.

  Upon his arrival, the King of Scotland and England asked Casaubon to work on a rebuttal of a key text of the Counter Reformation, the gargantuan multi-volume Ecclesiatical Annals (Annales Ecclesiasti) by the Catholic cardinal Caesar Baronius – a sweeping history of Christianity that set out the historical case for the primacy of the Catholic Church and the correctness of its teachings. Unsurprisingly it articulated the conventional view accepted by many Catholic theologians that Hermes Trismegistus was one of the pagan prophets of the coming of Christ.

  Casaubon only managed to write the first of many intended volumes giving a point-by-point critique of Baronius, as he died in July 1614, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. But in that single volume he still managed to deal Hermeticism a blow that to some seemed terminal, although ironically he had intended to demolish the Christian tradition that accorded Hermes Trismegistus a privileged place in pagan history, rather than to attack Hermeticism itself.

  Casaubon began with the observation that no ancient author – nobody, in fact, before early Christians such as Lactantius and Augustine – even so much as mentioned Hermes Trismegistus, still less cited him as the fount of all wisdom. Intrigued by this, Casaubon compared the Hermetic texts with other works to try to establish their sources. He concluded that, contrary to tradition, the writers of the Hermetica had drawn upon the works of Plato and the books of Old and New Testaments. He argued, for example, that the sections of the Pimander that had once been thought to prefigure the opening chapter of John’s Gospel were themselves really based on it.

  Since most European readers had used Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation, Casaubon revisited the original Greek to analyse the language, using a printed edition that had been published in 1554. His heavily annotated copy is now in the British Museum. Discovering that the Hermetica’s Greek dated from the early centuries CE rather than from antiquity, not unnaturally he concluded that the Hermetic texts were forgeries, created early in the Christian era in order to convert pagans to Christianity by building a bridge between their respective beliefs – a kind of ecclesiastical white lie. He accepted that although there had been a real person known as Thrice-Great Hermes in the high civilisation of ancient Egypt, the Hermetica was falsely attributed to him.

  The implications for Hermeticists, particularly those who followed Bruno’s extreme interpretation that Hermeticism represented the true original religion, were devastating. Their sacred books did not represent the wisdom of the ancient days of Egypt that produced the pyramids and the Great Sphinx after all. Their sacred books were no longer sacred.

  For the historian Garth Fowden, Casaubon’s work is ‘the watershed between Renaissance occultism and the scientific rationalism of the new age’.1 Yates called the medieval and Renaissance belief in the antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum ‘the great Egyptian illusion’.2 Ironically, of all illusions, this had been remarkably productive – after all, it had created the Renaissance – but it was an illusion nevertheless.

  The great disillusionment, however, was not an overnight sensation. It took a while for Casaubon’s arguments to filter through, especially as they were buried in an otherwise obscure and scholarly critique of Baronius. Tommaso Campanella, for example, who continued his campaign for a Hermetic reform for another quarter of a century after De

  rebus was published, was either unaware of it, or rejected its message. And with a huge irony, it also failed to galvanize Catholic Europe. If the Church’s scholars even bothered to read Casaubon, they preferred to side with Baronius and retain their traditional view of Hermes. As we will see, it took ten years for Casaubon’s discovery to be used against Hermeticists, and a full half a century to become widely known and accepted.

  Despite this blow, Hermeticists often argued that if the philosophy worked, its age and provenance were pretty much irrelevant. Particularly in England, some argued that while the texts themselves might be later than had been thought, the philosophy and cosmology that they contained were much more ancient, having been passed down throughout the centuries before being committed to writing. Perhaps along the way they had absorbed ideas from other philosophies, such as Plato’s, but they still retained the essential beliefs of the Egyptians – a reconstruction that fits perfectly with recent fin
dings. In fact, there were some glaring flaws in Casaubon’s line of argument, which were recognized in his day and have become more apparent with the passage of time. Although we will deal with this more fully in a later chapter, suffice it to say here that modern discoveries show that Egyptian thinking was indisputably a major influence on the Hermetica. In addition, Casaubon’s key argument that New Testament books such as John’s Gospel had a direct influence on the Hermetica was refuted long ago. Whatever the Hermetic texts are, they are emphatically not Christian forgeries.

  What was lost as a result of Casaubon’s book, though, was the underlying belief, whipped up by Bruno, that the great reform would mark a return to the most ancient religion of all, the prisca theologia. Even so, the zeal to reform did not simply disappear, instead it found a new mode of expression. Indeed, in the years immediately following the execution of Bruno and incarceration of Campanella, the reforming spirit was already being repackaged with the aid of another major 1614 publication. And this was to cause high anxiety and even paranoia among Catholics for many years, and is still the subject of many conspiracy theories, hotly debated to this day.

  ‘EUROPE IS WITH CHILD’

  The second book of 1614 had a much more immediate impact than Casaubon’s De rebus, one that has never really faded away. This was the appearance of the first of what became known as the ‘Rosicrucian manifestos’, which represented a key development of the reforming side of the Hermetic and esoteric tradition and launched a new and enduringly evocative term. The first of the two manifestos was Fama Fraternitatis (Fame of the Fraternity), or, Discovery of the Order of the Rosicrucians (Fama Fraternitatis, dess Löblichen Orden des Rosenkreutzes), usually known simply as the Fama. Written in German, it was published in Hesse-Cassel in Germany, but according to contemporary references had been circulating in manuscript for at least four years prior to being printed.