The Heretic with Clergy Supporters

Real conflicts are generally not simple, black-and-white situations.  Take the story of Galileo’s trial and conviction for arguing that the earth goes around the sun instead of the sun around the earth.  Everyone knows that was a classic case of a brave scientist standing up against the oppressive forces of religion, right?  Except—there were real divisions among the Catholic clergy on the matter, and the science of that day did not all agree with Galileo.  This tragic chapter has some lessons for us today about handling disagreements and discounting views of the other side.

In 1632, Galileo published his most famous book, A Dialog Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World.  A year later, after a long trial before the Inquisition in Rome, Galileo was convicted of heresy for supporting the idea that the earth goes around the sun as opposed to the sun going around a stationary earth.  While Galileo has often been portrayed as a tragic hero bravely standing against and being crushed by an oppressive institution.  But there are multiple things that show that is an inaccurate, over-simplified view.

1. Galileo had many friends and supporters among Catholic clergy.  One of Galileo’s closest, long-term personal confidants was a nun, Sister Maria Celeste, his daughter with whom he carried on decades of correspondence. (The inset image above is believed to be of her.)  Both of Galileo’s daughters became nuns with his support for them and their convent.  During and after his trial, there were many clergy who expressed personal support for Galileo (though not necessarily his position on cosmology).  One of the most prominent was Archbishop of Siena, who received Galileo live at his estate after the trial. Officially this was to help Galileo in his acts of penance, but the Archbishop treated Galileo like an honored guest, hosting distinguished visitors and helping Galileo with his scientific work.  When the Pope learned about this, Galileo was then “allowed” to go home to house arrest.
2. Galileo never sought to challenge the church’s authority; rather he sought to work through the system to create more freedom for discussing the sun-centered cosmos.  Galileo followed the rules in submitting his book to the church censors and obtained the official license for printing; in addition he submitted his text to and incorporated the requested changes from Niccolo Riccardi, one of the Pope’s top theologians and advisors.  Galileo personally knew Pope Urban VIII who had earlier responded favorably to Galileo’s work; Galileo (mis)judged that he would be willing to relax the restrictions on discussing a sun-centered cosmos.
3. At the time, there were scientific arguments both for and against the sun-centered cosmos.  While the Copernicus’ sun-centered universe was conceptually and mathematically simpler than Ptolemy’s model with nested epicycles, it wasn’t more accurate; that required the elliptical orbits of Kepler.  Galileo presented a theory of tides that he believed to be a key argument for the earth’s rotation, but was actually flawed because he did not believe that the moon was involved.  Furthermore, astronomers of the day were able (or so they thought) to measure the angular width of the stars, which meant if they could determine their distance, they could calculate their size.  Since no one could at that time measure any relative motion of the distant stars during the year, that meant either the earth didn’t move or the stars were extremely far away, which in turn would make them extremely large, larger than the size of our solar system, which was problematic.
4. Galileo’s trial happened within a larger political context where the Pope’s authority was being questioned, making it harder to tolerate Galileo’s challenge.  The Protestant reformation had started a century before, and Europe at that time was engulfed in the Thirty Years War, which had started as a religious war but eventually saw some Catholic forces, including the Pope, allied with protestant forces against other Catholic forces, who accused him of betraying the faith.  The Pope had also taken sides in local political disputes and had recklessly run up debts in military campaigns and building projects, to the point that within an hour of his death a stature of him was destroyed by the local population in Rome.
5. While Galileo had many supporters, he had also made many personal enemies; he was an intelligent, proud man with a debating flair that could leave his opponents humiliated.  From his observations of heavenly objects to motions of terrestrial ones, Galileo had done a lot to undermine the natural philosophy system of Aristotle, which at that time was the dominate scientific framework among scholars.  Given that many scholars of the day were clergy and how Thomas Aquinas had synthesized it into his theology, it was almost inevitable that what was originally a scientific dispute took on religious overtones.

Maybe if there had been more recognition of the complex nature of the disagreements as opposed to a simple “us vs. them.”  Maybe if there had been a little less pride and drive to be “right” as opposed to understanding other’s perspectives.  Maybe if there had been less of a rush to employ political means to settle disputes; political interventions are more likely to simply deepen the divisions and may even harm the “winners.”  In the long run, the Catholic Church’s ban on Galileo’s work did not stop the advance of the sun-centered model, just put a chill on Catholic scientists allowing northern Europe to take the lead in science.  Galileo’s trial and conviction was a tragic chapter, but it was not a simple either-or conflict, like many of the persistent clashes today.

Some further reading

• Dava Sobel, Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, (Penguin Books, 1999)
• Christopher M. Graney, Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo, (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015)