Postscript
Cleyn’s painting is perhaps the first to make use of Galileo as a symbol. The intent was subtle: the preceding analysis, which cannot reasonably be faulted for skirting possibilities, has not established just what Cleyn or Bankes or Williams understood by it. Not until the nineteenth century did painters and sculptors exploit Galileo in ways that left no doubt about their intent.
Perhaps the most powerful of these imaginings originated in Jean Antoine Laurent’s drawing of 1822, which shows the hero chained in a dungeon contemplating a diagram he has scratched on the wall. The drawing immediately became an emblem for the opposition against a resurgent Catholic Church for control of public instruction in France. An equally fanciful depiction, best known from Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury’s rendition of 1847, gives us Galileo before the Inquisition, rising from his knees muttering “still it moves,” Eppure si muove, “after begging pardon from a conclave of imbeciles for having discovered the truth.”1 Robert-Fleury’s fancy remains in use, suitably tweaked. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences used it to set the tone of Daedalus for fall 2018, which is devoted to “the challenge of getting courts to recognize and accept sound science.”2
With the French contribution to Galilean imagery Eppure si muove became the watchword of those convinced that no human force could stay “the movement of ideas in the life of a nation and the course of humanity any more than [it could stop the motion] of the earth and stars around the sun.”3 Galileo was the exemplar of this truth: his ideas moved worlds and eventually overcame the force that would stifle them. He was both the progenitor of modernity and its martyr. As progenitor he had some collaborators, Italians, of course, among them Sarpi, for Italy is the cradle of innovation and civilization.4 The Municipality of Paris recognized these claims and, in celebration, proposed to build an international pantheon in which Galileo, the “founder of science” and “hero and martyr of scientific freedom,” would have been the Prometheus. But building is more expensive than talking, and the proposal died of poverty.5 And also, perhaps, from the discovery of a defect in Galileo’s patent of martyrdom.
In 1870, a hero of the Risorgimento, who was also a physicist and a historian, Silvestro Gherardi, published most of the surviving documents from Galileo’s trial. They were a disappointment. They showed that Galileo had not been subjected to torture and had not confronted his persecutors in the manner of a martyr. That confirmed the view of David Brewster, a physicist and biographer of Newton, who had complained a generation earlier that the martyr had not allowed himself to be murdered. The reviewer of a French play about Galileo, staged in 1867, embroidered this uncharitable complaint: “never had a man a better chance to be a hero, to prove that science too had a moral force to die for. Galileo missed his opportunity. He is the first of too many scientists for whom vast knowledge and novel discoveries sum to a deplorable moral skepticism.”6 With Galileo’s unexpected delivery from torture and demotion from martyr to milksop, the Church acted to redeem its stolen lamb. It allowed that Galileo had proved himself to be a believing and obedient Catholic by abjuring his errors when ordered to do so by benevolent priests better informed than he.7
The struggle between church and state for the soul of Galileo was particularly intense in his hometown. An early skirmish took place in 1839, when the Congress of Italian Scientists held its inaugural meeting in Pisa. The delegates attended the unveiling of a statue of Galileo at the university and visited places in the city associated with him, notably the Piazza dei Miracoli with its cathedral and Leaning Tower. The connection of the great discoverer with the structures of the Church was made portable in a medal coined for the congress by the City of Pisa and given to every participant. It has Galileo in profile on one side and the tower and cathedral on the other.8 We may count this a draw.
When the congress met again in Pisa, in 1864, on the third centennial of Galileo’s birth, some of its members, encouraged by the progress of unification, proposed to promote Galileo to apostle of all Italy and move his statue from the university to the burial ground within the Square of Miracles. The university demurred, unwilling to lose its statue to the enemy. Church authorities also refused, seeing a perversion of religious rites in the scientists’ pilgrimages to Galilean shrines, in their Te Deum of “thanks to Providence for giving such a discoverer of truth to Pisa, to Italy, and to the world,” and, not least offensive, in their retrograde rhetoric extolling Galileo as “an exemplary martyr.”9 The statue of 1839 would remain in the university, now not just to encourage scholarly pursuits, but to give students “faith in the unity of the common fatherland.” Placards scattered through the university announced that Eppure si muove is “today the cry of Italy and the civilized world.”10
Galileo’s admirers objected to having to enter the university to profit from viewing him. They set up many committees to raise money and to negotiate a public secular space for a statue to their saint, and always were stymied by fights over possession of the saint’s image. A socialist newspaper calling itself Eppure si muove took up the battle; it folded after one issue, in 1897. An organization invoking Galileo’s name brought 15,000 anarchists onto the streets in 1901.11 The Church came forward, in the plausible person of an astronomer, Pietro Maffi, who was also the Cardinal Archbishop of Pisa. By 1922, Maffi had raised enough cash to erect a statue in the Piazza dei Miracoli and offered to do so; Galileo would stand looking at the cathedral and Leaning Tower from a pedestal with appropriate references to the discoveries he made there. The Catholic press welcomed the offer; the municipal government opposed it. Such monuments should be paid for by the public, said its representatives, not by an individual, and should not reside in an ecclesiastical space.12 A century later, a big bronze Galileo at last came to stand, though only temporarily, in the city center. In welcoming him, the official responsible for culture in Pisa, Andrea Buscemi, underlined that what had secured the long-postponed homecoming was the bottom line, domestic and foreign. “The object is to overcome the typical Pisan paradox regarding the figure of Galileo: a ‘brand’ that has never been exploited fully notwithstanding that the city of Pisa produced him and that he can also be a tourist attraction.”13
Meanwhile Rome continued to wrestle with the legacy it had created in 1633. To go back no further, Galileo’s ghost stalked sessions of Vatican II devoted to bringing the Church into the intellectual and cultural neighborhood of the twentieth century. Modern-minded delegates with a wary eye to the past warned that mishandling the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, or the results of the higher criticism, or the use of contraception might precipitate another Galileo event.14 The time was right for rehabilitation. Galileo would be 400 years old in 1964. Scientists called on the pope, Paul VI, to seize the occasion. The pope responded weakly and perhaps disingenuously by releasing the biography commissioned by the Vatican to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death. This major work had been in the custody of the Society of Jesus for over twenty years. Its author, an erudite priest named Pio Paschini, had blamed the Jesuits for Galileo’s troubles. When Paschini’s biography appeared in 1964 as the Vatican’s concession to Galilean pressure, it had been censored more severely than Copernicus’s dangerous De revolutionibus.15
In an attempt at a definitive resolution, Pope John Paul II put in motion a full examination of the theological, philosophical, scientific, and historical context of Galileo’s trial and condemnation. As an earnest of the Church’s good intentions, he mentioned the publication of Paschini’s bowdlerized biography. A steering committee containing several disposable octogenarians set up subcommittees to pursue the investigation. Death and lethargy stultified the project for almost a decade. At John Paul’s request, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Paul Poupard, pulled its pieces into a conclusion following a line developed by one of the project’s productive collaborators, Walter Brandmüller, a German Jesuit. The conclusion: the affair was an unfortunate no-fault collision between misunderstandings of
the natures of natural science and of Scripture. The misunderstandings were not what the ordinary mind might suppose. According to Brandmüller and Poupard, it was Galileo who had grasped the correct principles of biblical hermeneutics and the Inquisition’s theologians who knew what it took to establish a scientific theory. Galileo could not draw an unanswerable proof of the Copernican system from his observations and deductions, and the theologians could not find one against it in Scripture and Aristotle.16 John Paul accepted this surprising contrivance in 1992.
This was to put Galileo on the level of the theologians who condemned him. There are signs that he might rise higher, even unto official sainthood. Holy relics exist in the form of body parts and the cracked lens with which, when not cracked, Galileo made his greatest discoveries, all preserved in reliquaries at the Museo Galileo in Florence. His right forefinger is the most popular exhibit in the museum. The martyr recently came within an ace of taking up residence in the Vatican itself, as a statue in the palace gardens that was to be erected in time for the 400th anniversary of the publication of Sidereus nuncius. But no. Pope Benedict XVI reacted to charges that he condoned the Church’s actions against Galileo by substituting for the statue a promise to review the no-fault decision of 1992.17
Eppure si muove! Not long ago a big bronze statue, promoted by Antonino Zichichi, a physicist close to the Vatican, reached the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome. It came from China through the good offices of a Nobel laureate in physics, T. D. Lee, who, as artist, designed the statue, and, as President of the China Center of Advanced Science and Technology, found the money for it. The message of the “Divine Man,” as the statue’s pedestal introduces Galileo, had spread further than the gospel of Christ. According to the Chinese ambassador, his countrymen never would have heard of Italy had it not been for the man “who discovered the cosmos.”18
Although Galileo’s image has been harnessed most often in connection with the Roman Catholic Church, it has not lacked exploiters in fringe contexts. For example, August Comte placed Galileo in the pantheon of positivist paladins for his destruction of the metaphysical phase of intellectual development.19 As a paladin, Galileo had the defect referred to earlier of being unwilling to die for his worldview. Ernest Renan found a clever way to paper over the problem. He distinguished between martyrs who die for their cause because they are not sure it will prevail without their sacrifice and heroes like Galileo, who preserve themselves because they know their cause will win.20
A more sinister use of the hero suggested itself to the Nazis. In his bestseller, Galileo und die Inquisition (1938), Ludwig Bieberbach drew a parallel between Pope Pius XI’s condemnation of Nazi racial policy in 1937 and the Church’s banning of Galileo’s work some 300 years earlier; which, he said, was just what Germans should expect from a church that still prohibited Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Ranke’s History of the Popes. But the truth will out. Galileo’s case shows that papal condemnation virtually guarantees the correctness of the ideas condemned. Does it not follow that Catholic strictures prove Nazi dogma? There is more. During his visit to Mussolini in 1938, Hitler praised Italy for having given “the world the great inventor and scientist Galileo.” Piping the theme further, the Nazis made Galileo and Kepler symbols of the Axis alliance, an “intellectual brotherhood in arms” against the forces of reaction in religion and science. Just as Galileo had destroyed the cobwebbed science of Aristotle, so the champions of Deutsche Physik broke the mystical Jewish physics of Einstein’s relativity.21
Contrarily, some Creationists blame Galileo for his part in creating the myth that the Bible is inimical to science. Galileo brought his troubles on himself, forfeited the support of the Jesuits by his arrogance and conceit, and insisted on the truth of a system that was no more than a supposition. “[S]cience and faith, for complex reasons, were almost driven into opposition for the first time because of one man’s insistence that a working hypothesis was a proven fact.” Following this unreasonable man, scientists have become ever more confident in their unproven ideas and have set up impostors to enforce the orthodoxy of evolution, which is no better than a working hypothesis.22 And, perhaps worse, Galileo’s hermeneutics, which has imposed itself on many interpreters of the Bible, has precisely the wrong polarity. It teaches that the passages in Scripture in conflict with natural science must not be taken literally, whereas the correct approach requires that “the book of nature must never take precedence over the Book of Scripture when it comes to understanding the origin of things.”23 The depreciation of Galileo’s character on which these defenders of Creationism drew comes from Arthur Koestler’s quasi-history of cosmology, The Sleepwalkers, published in 1959. The image of a strident, arrogant, and uncompromising Galileo appears also in the several versions of Berthold Brecht’s famous play and, with dishonesty added to complete the subversion of his character, in the historical writings of the philosopher Paul Feyerabend.
Despite all attacks on Galileo’s person, the inventors of commercial advertisements thought and think of him as an asset. Countless products have carried his image, some appropriately, as the inventor of the telescope, such as Bausch and Lomb optics and Argus cameras; and as the man who rushed to modernity, such as Pirelli tires and Shell Oil. The food industry cannot get enough of him: Cinzano, Vermouth, brandy, and salami, all happily chosen, for Galileo knew his meat and drink; but also chocolates, coca cola, and meat extract, from which he probably would have abstained. Perhaps the most apt of the slogans that went with these images runs “Bitter Compari is a delicious reality.”24 The counterintuitive may be the truth.
There is still another Galileo available for exploitation: the humanist. Galileo loved music and literature. He could play the lute at a professional level and quote voluminously from the Italian classical poets, Dante, Petrarca, Ariosto, and Tasso. His training in drawing helped him to interpret the lunar features he observed as mountains and valleys, and sunspots as revolving blotches on the solar surface. The image of a creative humanist–scientist, of an exemplary bonding of the arts and sciences, may be in the offing. As Aristotle observed, in one of his few pronouncements that no one questions, the road from Athens to Sparta also runs from Sparta to Athens. May the image of Galileo the humanist–scientist inspire humanists who know no science and scientists disdainful of the humanities to widen their horizons!
Glossary of Names
The following list includes protagonists of the first and second level and a few tertiary actors who appear at widely different places in the text or whose names might occasion confusion. Transcendental people, such as Adam, Plato, Hippocrates, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Satan, and God, are considered sufficiently notorious not to require further specification.
The Lords appear under their family names: Arundel, Northampton, Suffolk, under Howard; Buckingham under Villiers; Clarendon under Hyde; Devonshire and Newcastle under Cavendish; Essex under Devereux; Falkland under Cary; Northumberland under Percy; Portland under Weston; Russell under Bedford; Salisbury under Cecil; Saye and Sele under Fiennes; Somerset under Carr; Strafford under Wentworth.
ABBOT, George (1562–1633). Calvinist Archbishop of Canterbury, 1611; helped publish Sarpi’s Trent.
AESCULAPIUS, son of Apollo, god of medicine.
ALBERT VII, Archduke of Austria (1559–1621). Co-ruler of the Spanish Netherlands, 1598–1621.
ALBUMAZAR (Abu Ma’shar), Muslim astrologer (787–886). Comedy performed at Cambridge in 1615.
ALLEN, Thomas (1540?–1632). Mathematician and antiquarian, fellow of Catholicizing Gloucester Hall.
ANDREWES, Lancelot (1555–1626). Leader of the Arminian sympathizers in the Church of England; preacher admired by James I and Sir John Bankes; ended career as Bishop of Winchester.
ANNA OF DENMARK, Queen of England (1574–1619). Sister of Christian IV, King of Denmark.
ANSTRUTHER, Sir Robert (1578–1644/5?). Diplomatic agent for James I and Christian IV; patron of Cleyn.
ARMINIUS, Jacobu
s (1550–1609). Eponymous advocate of an anti-Calvinist theology.
ASHMOLE, Elias (1617–92). Antiquary, royalist, alchemist, and astrologer.
AYLESBURY, Sir Thomas (1576–1657). Surveyor of the Navy 1628, Master of the Mint 1635.
BACON, Sir Francis (1561–1626). Chancellor of England, lawgiver to science.
BAINBRIDGE, John (1582–1643). Physician and astronomer, Savilian Professor of Astronomy.
BANKES, Sir John (1589–1644). Parliamentarian, Attorney General, Chief Justice of Common Pleas.
BANKES, John junior (1626–56). Son and heir of Sir John Bankes, the young man in Cleyn’s painting.
BANKES (née Hawtrey), Lady Mary (?–1661). Wife of Sir John Bankes, defender of Corfe Castle.
BANKES, Sir Ralph (1631–77). Lawyer, younger brother and heir of John Bankes junior.
BARBERINI, Francesco (1597–1679). Nephew of Pope Urban VIII, Cardinal Protector of England.
BARLOW, William (1544–1625). Mathematician, clergyman, tutor, and chaplain to Henry, Prince of Wales.
BASTWICK, John (1595?–1654). Medical doctor from Padua, zealous convert to Puritanism.
BEDELL, William (1572–1642). Wotton’s chaplain in Venice, friend of Sarpi; later Bishop of Kilmore.
BELLARMINE, Saint Robert (1542–1621). Jesuit, Cardinal, and hardened controversialist.
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