that his church, at its frequent best and in his words, “is one gigantic debating society.” Papal pronouncements may debar further official and public disagreement, but the internal dialogue never abates. Consider only the legendary patience and stubbornness of Job [13:15]: “Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him; but I will maintain mine own ways before him.”)
Moreover, one defining historical incident—the trial and forced recantation of Galileo in 1633—continues to dominate our cultural landscape as a primary symbol, almost automatically triggered whenever anyone contemplates the relationship of science and Catholicism. The usual version stands so strongly against NOMA, and marks Pope Urban VIII as such a villain, with Galileo as such a martyred hero, that a model of inherent warfare between the magisteria seems inevitable.
The subject deserves volumes rather than the few paragraphs available here, but we must reject the cardboard and anachronistic account that views Galileo as a modern scientist fighting the entrenched dogmatism ofa church operating entirely outside its magisterium, and almost ludicrously wrong about the basic fact of cosmology. I would not urge an entirely revisionist reading. The basic facts cannot be gainsaid: Galileo was cruelly treated (forced to recant on his knees, and then placed under the equivalent of house arrest for the remainder of his life), and he was right; his conflict with the Pope did, to cite the best modern work on the subject
(Galileo, Courtier
, by Mario Biagioli, University of Chicago Press, 1993), represent “the clash between two incompatible worldviews,” and Urban did defend the traditional geocentric universe as established dogma. But when we begin to appreciate even the tip of the complex iceberg represented by seventeenth-century life at the court of Rome—a world so profoundly different from our own that modern categories and definitions can only plunge us into incomprehension—then we may understand why our current definitions of science and religion map so poorly upon Galileo’s ordeal.
As Biagioli shows, Galileo fell victim to a rather conventional form of drama in the princely courts of Europe. Maffeo Barberini had been Galileo’s personal friend and a general patron of the arts and sciences. When Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Galileo, now nearing sixty years of age, felt that his moment of “now or never” had arrived. The Church had banned the teachings of Copernicus’s heliocentric universeas a fact of nature, but had left a conventional door open in permitting the discussion of heterodox cosmologies as purely mathematical hypotheses.
But Galileo moved too fast and too far in an unnecessarily provocative manner. He had lived his life in necessary pursuit of courtly patronage, but now he fell from grace and into a common role of his time and place. In Biagioli’s words: “Galileo’s career was propelled and then undone by … patronage dynamics … The dynamics that led to Galileo’s troubles were typical of a princely court: they resemble what was known as ‘the fall of the favorite.’ ”
As a prod for questioning our misleading modern categories, ask yourself why a spiritual leader could compel Galileo at all. Why did the great physicist even consent to argue his case before a Church tribunal in Rome? Then remember that no country called Italy existed in the 1630s, and that the Pope held full secular authority over Rome and much surrounding territory. Galileo had to appear before the Inquisition because this body represented “the law of the land,” with full power to convict and execute. Moreover, the papal court may have been uniquely volatile among the princely institutions that held sway over segments of Europe: times were particularly tough (as the Roman Church faced the expanding might of the Reformation, right in the midst of the devastating Thirty Years’ War); the popeheld unusual power as both the
Moreover, one defining historical incident—the trial and forced recantation of Galileo in 1633—continues to dominate our cultural landscape as a primary symbol, almost automatically triggered whenever anyone contemplates the relationship of science and Catholicism. The usual version stands so strongly against NOMA, and marks Pope Urban VIII as such a villain, with Galileo as such a martyred hero, that a model of inherent warfare between the magisteria seems inevitable.
The subject deserves volumes rather than the few paragraphs available here, but we must reject the cardboard and anachronistic account that views Galileo as a modern scientist fighting the entrenched dogmatism ofa church operating entirely outside its magisterium, and almost ludicrously wrong about the basic fact of cosmology. I would not urge an entirely revisionist reading. The basic facts cannot be gainsaid: Galileo was cruelly treated (forced to recant on his knees, and then placed under the equivalent of house arrest for the remainder of his life), and he was right; his conflict with the Pope did, to cite the best modern work on the subject
(Galileo, Courtier
, by Mario Biagioli, University of Chicago Press, 1993), represent “the clash between two incompatible worldviews,” and Urban did defend the traditional geocentric universe as established dogma. But when we begin to appreciate even the tip of the complex iceberg represented by seventeenth-century life at the court of Rome—a world so profoundly different from our own that modern categories and definitions can only plunge us into incomprehension—then we may understand why our current definitions of science and religion map so poorly upon Galileo’s ordeal.
As Biagioli shows, Galileo fell victim to a rather conventional form of drama in the princely courts of Europe. Maffeo Barberini had been Galileo’s personal friend and a general patron of the arts and sciences. When Barberini became Pope Urban VIII in 1623, Galileo, now nearing sixty years of age, felt that his moment of “now or never” had arrived. The Church had banned the teachings of Copernicus’s heliocentric universeas a fact of nature, but had left a conventional door open in permitting the discussion of heterodox cosmologies as purely mathematical hypotheses.
But Galileo moved too fast and too far in an unnecessarily provocative manner. He had lived his life in necessary pursuit of courtly patronage, but now he fell from grace and into a common role of his time and place. In Biagioli’s words: “Galileo’s career was propelled and then undone by … patronage dynamics … The dynamics that led to Galileo’s troubles were typical of a princely court: they resemble what was known as ‘the fall of the favorite.’ ”
As a prod for questioning our misleading modern categories, ask yourself why a spiritual leader could compel Galileo at all. Why did the great physicist even consent to argue his case before a Church tribunal in Rome? Then remember that no country called Italy existed in the 1630s, and that the Pope held full secular authority over Rome and much surrounding territory. Galileo had to appear before the Inquisition because this body represented “the law of the land,” with full power to convict and execute. Moreover, the papal court may have been uniquely volatile among the princely institutions that held sway over segments of Europe: times were particularly tough (as the Roman Church faced the expanding might of the Reformation, right in the midst of the devastating Thirty Years’ War); the popeheld unusual power as both the
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