Galileo's Dream

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  That the earth is neither the center of the world nor motionless but moves with diurnal motion is philosophically equally absurd and false, and theologically at least erroneous in the faith.

  Whereas, however, we wanted to treat you with benignity at that time …

  Maculano, reading the judgment aloud, went on to describe how Paul V had used Bellarmino’s injunction to warn him, also to issue a decree against the publishing of any books about the matter. Then:

  And whereas a book has appeared here lately, the title being Dialogue by Galileo Galilei on the two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican, the said book was diligently examined and found to violate explicitly the above-mentioned injunction given to you; for in this book you have defended the said opinion already condemned, although you try by means of various subterfuges to give the impression of leaving it undecided and labeled as probable; this is still a very serious error, since there is no way an opinion declared and defined contrary to divine Scripture may be probable.

  Therefore, by our order you were summoned to this Holy Office.

  The judgment went on to describe the process of the trial in some detail, ending with a sharp dismissal of all Galileo’s arguments, including the worth of the signed certificate from Bellarmino that Galileo had brought with him.

  The said certificate you produced in your defense aggravates your case further since, while it says that the said opinion is contrary to Holy Scripture, yet you dared to treat of it, defend it, and show it as probable; nor are you helped by the license you artfully and cunningly extorted, since you did not mention the injunction you were under.

  Because we did not think you had said the whole truth about your intention, we deemed it necessary to proceed against you by a rigorous examination. Here you answered in a Catholic manner, though without adequate defense to the above-mentioned matters confessed by you and deduced against you about your intention. Therefore, having solemnly considered the merits of your case, together with the above-mentioned confessions and excuses and with any other reasonable matter worth considering, we have come to the final sentence against you:

  We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, the above-mentioned Galileo, because of the things deduced in the trial and confessed by you, have rendered yourself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy.

  This was a technical term, a specific category. The categories ranged from slight suspicion of heresy, to vehement suspicion of heresy, to violent suspicion of heresy, to heresy, to heresiarchy, which meant not only being a heretic but inciting others to heresy as well.

  Maculano, having paused briefly for Galileo and everyone else to take in the relevant phrase, continued:

  Therefore you have incurred all the censures and penalties imposed by the sacred canons against such delinquents. We are willing to absolve you from them provided that first, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, in front of us you abjure, curse, and detest the above-mentioned errors and heresies, in the manner and form we will prescribe to you.

  Furthermore, so that this serious and pernicious error and transgression of yours does not remain completely unpunished, and so that you will be more cautious in the future and an example for others to abstain from similar crimes, we order that the book Dialogo by Galileo Galilei, Lincei, be prohibited by public edict.

  We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure. As a salutary penance we impose on you to recite the seven penitential Psalms once a week for the next three years. And we reserve the authority to moderate or change, wholly or in part, the above-mentioned penalties and penances.

  This we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, order, and reserve by this or any other better manner or form that we reasonably can or shall think of.

  So we the undersigned Cardinals pronounce:

  Felice Cardinal d’Ascoli

  Guido Cardinal Bentivoglio

  Fra Desiderio Cardinal di Cremona

  Fra Antonio Cardinal di Sant’Onofrio

  Berlinghiero Cardinal Gessi

  Fabrizio Cardinal Verospi

  Marzio Cardinal Ginetti

  The missing signatures, therefore, were from Francesco Barberini, Laudivio Zacchia, and Gasparo Borgia.

  A compromise had prevailed.

  The white-robed old man was then handed his abjuration, to be read aloud in the formal ceremony ending the trial. It was as formulaic as any mass or other sacrament, but Galileo first read over it silently, very intent on it, turning the pages as he went. His face was pale, so that in his white robe, and with his previously reddish hair all mixed now with white and gray, and gaunter than he had ever been, he looked like a ghost of himself. It was a cloudy day, and the massed candles and light from the clerestory windows still left the room slightly in gloom, so that he stood out.

  While he read, Cartophilus was standing outside the open door with the other servants, shaking Buonamici by the hand and breathing deeply for the first time in months, maybe years. Confinement, book banned, et cetera: success.

  But then Galileo suddenly gestured to Maculano. Cartophilus sucked down a breath sharply and held it, as Galileo began to tap hard at one of the pages of his abjuration. “What is he doing?” Cartophilus whispered in agony to Buonamici.

  “I don’t know!” Buonamici whispered back.

  Galileo spoke loudly enough that all the cardinals in attendance could hear him, indeed everyone in the room and in the hall outside. His voice had a hoarse ragged edge, and his lips were white under his mustache.

  “I will abjure my error willingly, but there are two things in this document that I will not say, no matter what you do to me.”

  Dead silence. Out in the hall Cartophilus was now clutching Buon-amici’s arm in both hands, whispering, “No, no, why, why? Say whatever they want, for Christ’s sake!”

  “It’s all right,” Buonamici whispered, trying to calm him. “The pope only wants him humiliated, not burned.”

  “The pope may not be able to stop it!”

  They held each other as inside the room Galileo showed the relevant page to Maculano, poking at the objectionable phrases. “I will not say I am not a good Catholic, for I am one and I intend to stay one, despite all that my enemies can say and do. Secondly, I will not say that I have ever deceived anybody in this affair, especially in the publishing of my book, which I submitted in full candor to ecclesiastical censure, and had it printed after legally obtaining a license for it. I’ll build the pyre and put the candle to it myself if anyone can show otherwise.”

  Maculano, taken aback at the penitent’s sudden ferocity, looked to the cardinals. He took the abjuration over to them, pointed out the passages Galileo had objected to. Out in the hallway Cartophilus was hissing with dismay, almost hopping up and down, and Buonamici had stopped trying to reassure him and was peering anxiously through the doorway at the cardinals.

  Bentivoglio was whispering to the others. Finally he nodded to Maculano, who took the document to the scribe and had her mark two passages for deletion. While she did so, Maculano faced Galileo with a stern eye that seemed also to contain a gleam of approbation. “Agreed,” he said.

  “Good,” Galileo said, but not thank you. Tears suddenly poured from his eyes down his cheeks into his beard, and he wiped them away before taking the revised document from the commissary general. “Give me a moment to compose myself.” He looked over the document again while he wiped his face and whispered a prayer. He pulled a small necklace crucifix out from under his white robe to kiss and then replace it. After that he nodded to Maculano and walked to the center of the room, before the table where the pad for kneeling had been placed. He crossed himself, handed the abjuration to Maculano, kneeled on the pad, adjusted his penitential robe, and took the document from Maculano. He held it in his left hand, put his right hand on the Bible that stood on a waist-high stand before him. When he spoke his voice was clear and penetrating, but flat and void of all expression.

  “I, Galil
eo, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei of Florence, seventy years of age, arraigned personally for judgment, kneeling before you Most Eminent and Most Reverend Cardinal Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity in all of Christendom, having before my eyes and touching with my hands the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, I believe now, and with God’s help I will believe in the future all that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church holds, preaches, and teaches.

  “However, whereas, after having been judicially instructed by the Holy Office to abandon completely the false opinion that the sun is the center of the world and does not move and the earth is not the center of the world and moves, and not to hold, defend, or teach this false doctrine in any way whatever, orally or in writing; and after having been notified that this doctrine is contrary to Holy Scripture; I wrote and published a book in which I treat of this already condemned doctrine and adduce very effective reasons in its favor, without refuting them in any way; therefore, I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, namely of having held and believed that the sun is the center of the world and motionless, and the earth is not the center and moves.

  “Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of Your Eminences and every faithful Christian this vehement suspicion, rightly conceived against me, with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the above-mentioned errors and heresies, and in general each and every other error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Church; and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, orally or in writing, anything which might cause a similar suspicion about me; on the contrary, if I should come to know any heretic or anyone suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Holy Office.

  “I, the above-mentioned Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and obliged myself as above; and in witness of the truth I have signed with my own hand the present document of abjuration and have recited it word for word in Rome, at the convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June 1633.

  “I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above, by my own hand.”

  And he took the pen from Maculano and carefully signed the bottom of the document.

  In the hall outside, Cartophilus collapsed into Buonamici’s arms. Buonamici stood stalwart and held the old man to his chest, whispering to him, “The wound was small, if we consider the force behind the dart.”

  Cartophilus could only clutch his mouth and nod. It had been a close-run thing. He could feel the younger man’s heart pounding hard; he too had been shaken. We had seen what could happen. We had seen too much.

  At the Villa Medici that night, Ambassador Niccolini wrote to Cioli in Florence to give him the news of the trial’s conclusion. It is a fearful thing to have to do with the Inquisition, he concluded. The poor man has come back more dead than alive.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Eppur Si Muove

  Ancora imparo. I’m still learning.

  —MICHELANGELO, age 87

  CONFINED AGAIN to the Villa Medici, Galileo spent his days smoldering with rage and despair. He did not seem to appreciate that he had escaped a dire fate. He was too bitterly angry for that to matter. He spoke only in low outbursts to himself: “Fake documents—broken promises—betrayal. Liar. Liar! Who could imagine a man breaking his word when he didn’t have to? But that’s just what he did.”

  He spent his waking hours in the villa’s big kitchen, eating compulsively. His moaning by day came mostly from the jakes. While in the hands of the Inquisition he had been unable either to eat or shit. Now he made up for lost time at both ends. Occasionally he would afterward limp around the formal garden, looking at plants as if trying to remember what they were. Everyone who approached him heard the same thing. “That lying bastard has eaten my life. From now on when people think of me, they’ll think of his trial. It’s the ultimate power.”

  “Ultimate,” Cartophilus would scoff under his breath.

  “Shut up,” Galileo would growl, showing Cartophilus the back of his hand and stumping away.

  This was all bad enough, although predictable. But at night it was much worse. In the late hours, on his bed half asleep and half awake, he would roll in agitation, groan, moan, even shout—even shriek in agony. No one in that wing of the villa could sleep well in those pathetic hours, and Niccolini and his wife Caterina were beside themselves. The ambassador ignored the usual niceties of protocol, and returned to the Vatican repeatedly to beg some relief for the astronomer. Caterina rallied the servants and the villa’s priest to hold midnight masses, with lots of chanting and singing, the music echoing down the dark halls from the chapel to the east wing. Sometimes it seemed to help him.

  Word of Galileo’s nocturnal fits got around, of course, and a couple of weeks after the abjuration, Cardinal Francesco Barberini worked on his uncle in private. The Sanctissimus finally agreed to shift Galileo’s house arrest to the palazzo of Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini, in Siena. Piccolomini, another ex-student of Galileo’s, had requested it, and Urban agreed to the plan, perhaps hoping to remove Galileo and his histrionics from the rumor mill of Rome, to get rid of him at last.

  It was July 2, 1633 when Galileo left Rome for the last time, in a closed ecclesiastical carriage. In Viterbo, just outside the capital, he yelled for the carriage to stop, got out, gestured rudely back at the city, spat at it, and then walked for four or five miles down the road before he would agree to get back in.

  In Siena, however, his night terrors only got worse. He seemed to have lost the ability to sleep, except in snatches near dawn. Red-eyed, he would stare up at his caretakers and rehearse all the crimes committed against him, and then rail against all his enemies, a list that now ran well into the scores, so that if he described them all individually and in order of their appearance, as he sometimes did, it could take him close to an hour to run through them. He used set phrases that he always repeated, like Homeric epithets. The lying horsefly. The blind astronomer. The back stabber. That fucking pigeon. Eventually his rants would exhaust him to incoherency, and these epithets would be the only words left that anyone could understand, after which he would fall into bouts of piteous moaning, interspersed with sharp thin cries, even short high screams, as if he were being murdered.

  Everyone rushed to him at those times, and tried to comfort him and get him back to bed. Sometimes he didn’t even recognize us, but reacted as if we were jailers, beating at our arms and kicking our shins. There was something upsetting enough about these panics that for a while we would all fall headlong into his nightmare, whatever it was.

  But Archbishop Ascanio Piccolomini was a persistent man. He was almost as short as Bellarmino had been, and indeed he resembled what Bellarmino must have looked like in his forties, with the same neat handsome triangular head, sharpened to a point by a trim goatee. This graceful intellectual had never forgotten his childhood lessons with the maestro, when he had been lucky enough to be designated one of young Cosimo’s friends. When teaching Cosimo, Galileo had tried to be as Aristotle to Alexander, authoritative yet charming, entertaining, instructive, transformational—the perfect pedagogue. Piccolomini had been immersed in the bath of that performance, and it was indeed a baptism to a different life, for from that time on, the young aristocrat had explored mathematics and engineering with a passion, and taken a lively interest in everything; in short he had been a better pupil than Cosimo, and become a true Galilean. And so now it was a real shock for him to witness the broken old man wandering like a lunatic through his palazzo. His hope had been to provide a sanctuary for the scientist, something very like the Lincean Academy, but with the added comfort of being located inside the Church, thus implying that Galileo’s sentence was not a unanimous judgment, and definitely not an excommunication, no matter what people said. Now that Piccolomini saw how distressed the old man was, he realized it was going to be a more complicated process of recovery than he had imagined. Every night the spell of insomniac horrors returned. At times Galileo seemed to have lost his wits entirely, eve
n by day.

  One morning, after a particularly grueling night, the archbishop drew Galileo’s old servant aside. “Good man, do you think we should restrain him? Should we tie him to his bed to keep him from doing himself a hurt? These fits that come on him are so violent, it seems they could lead to a fatal fall.”

  Cartophilus bowed. “Oh, Your Eminence, thank you, of course you are right. Although, possibly, I wonder if he may now be past the, the …”

  “Past the worst of it?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s always one thing at a time with him, Your Serenity.”

  “Yes? Oh, yes. Well, I have been trying to give him something else to think about. But maybe it should be more direct.”

  “A fine idea, Your Grace.”

  The archbishop’s grin was like a schoolboy’s. “I’ve got just the man in mind.”

  “Not an astronomer, I trust.”

  Piccolomini laughed and gave the old servant a touch to the head that was half blessing, half schoolboy tap. And in the days following he invited several of the local natural philosophers of Siena to come to the palazzo and speak with Galileo. He asked them to initiate discussions about the strength of materials, magnetism, and similarly earth-bound topics. They did that, keeping resolutely away from the old man’s sore point, even to the point of spending much time looking through a microscope at the spectacular articulations of moths and fleas.

  And while in these men’s company, it was true that Galileo seemed calmer. He attended to whatever they brought up, clearly relieved at the distraction. And the men were happy to be in his presence. They saw that the moment had finally arrived when one could safely condescend to Galileo. There was a real benevolence in the air as they enjoyed this new pleasure—something like sharing the room with a caged tiger.