Hello, and welcome to Western SIEV Episode two hundred and seventy four, Galileo,
Part six. Today will be our last in depth episode on Galileo for
a little while. We will walk right up to Galleo's inquisition, and then
we're going to pull back for a deep look at the Inquisition in general before
proceeding. Now, there's a couple of reasons why I'm going to do that.
One, I think everyone could use a bit of a break from the
history of science at this point. I love the history of science, but
even I will admit it can get a little tedious at times, with discussions
of the tides and how different planets move, and this experiment and that experiment.
Number two. I'm sure you'll all remember quite easily that Galileo runs a
foul of the Inquisition for allegedly advocating Copernicanism. A few wakes away won't cause
you to forget that, and I'm going to remind you anyway, it's not
that big of a deal. Three. Understanding how the Inquisition functions will make
it a lot easier to understand Galileo as a trial. Before we get there,
Galileo needs to publish. He needs to make the claim that's going to
get him into trouble now. Trouble's already been brewing for some time, but
the pot continues to boil today as Galileo is confronted by a new fact that
seemingly disproves ptolome comments. Between August and November sixteen eighteen, Galileo observed three
comments in the night sky. One was visible to the naked eye. In
fact, we are told that Europeans were so fascinated by this new heavenly body
that everyone seemingly was willing to give up a night's sleep to observe it.
Interestingly, Galileo did not devote time to studying these comments, certainly not the
time that he had devoted to other heavenly bodies. The reason is simple.
He was sick. Galleo was ill during the latter half of sixteen eighteen and
was unable to make the observations we might have expected him to. His illness,
of course, was to genuine, but it was also partly political.
It's highly likely that Galileo could sense the growing storm clouds on the horizon emanating
from the general direction of Rome. If he did not observe the commets,
then he would be under no obligation to comment on them, which at the
moment seemed like the smart move. According to traditional astronomy, which held that
change was impossible in the heavens, comets had to be a terrestrial phenomenon,
they had to be located somewhere in the upper atmosphere. According to the new
astronomy, new stars and commets were obviously located in the heavens. They were
until the discovery of sunspots, the crucial evidence in favor of change in the
heavens. The most important work on both of these phenomenon had been done by
Tico Brahe, who had published on the New Star of fifteen seventy two and
the comment of fifteen seventy seven. In both cases, the main argument was
from parallax, the idea that if novas or comets were close to the Earth,
then observers looking at them from different places on the Earth's surface ought to
see them located differently against the backdrop of fixed stars. Galileo had used precisely
this argument in relation to the nova of sixteen oh four. Now you can
see how this works for yourself right now. If you hold up a finger
before your eyes and you look at it first with one eye, and then
with the other. The finger will appear to move against the background of whatever
is in front of you. The closer the finger is to you, you'll
notice the greater the movement. Such measurements can be carried out with the Moon
and can be used to calculate the Moon's distance from the Earth. Since no
parallax could be measured in the case of new stars and comets, they simply
had to be further away. The comets of sixteen eighteen were therefore important for
astronomers, but they were particularly important for Catholics, but they came hard on
the heels of the condemnation of Copernicanism. If Galileo's Copernicanism was false, then
there were two alternatives available, both of which placed the Earth on moving at
the center of a universe of fixed size. Aristotelian Tolomega astronomy, which denied
the possibility of change in the heavens and held that all heavenly objects circled around
the Earth, and the astronomy of Tico Brahe, which recognized the existence of
change in the heavens and held that the planets circled around the Sun, while
the sun circled around the Earth. Every single one of Galileo's astronomical discoveries were
at odds with the teachings of the Aristotelians, though every single one of them
was compatible with the new astronomy of Tikobrie. For the Jesuit scientists in Rome,
who had followed Galileo's discoveries closely and who carried out their own observations with
telescopes, the conclusion was straightforward. Ptolemy was wrong. Their acknowledged leader,
Clavius, had before he died in sixteen twelve, expressed in print the view
that the old cosmology would have to be abandoned. It simply was not compatible
with the evidence. There had to be a new astronom to me. But
Copernicus was now forbidden, and so by elimination that left only Tico Braje.
The reason was so straightforward that the Jesuit scientists were convinced that even Galileo would
adopt it. Interestingly, then, in sixteen nineteen, Galileo co authored a
pamphlet essentially defending the Aristotelian view on comets. Many of his friends and supporters
were shocked. They shouldn't have been Galleo's argument was never a complete defense of
Aristotle. It was much more nuanced than that. Galileo accepted Aristotle's claim that
comments were far away, that they inhabited the upper atmosphere, but he rejected
Aristotle's assertion that comments were burning fires. He believed that they were visual distortions,
like rainbows. Galileo's arguments were stronger than Aristotle's, but they still had
major flaws. For example, rainbow's move when we move, that's because they're
quite close to us. The comets don't, so how could they be like
rainbows. Some historians actually believe Galileo is simply being provocative here. Given Galileo's
preference for theory, I'm not so sure. It seems likely here that what
Galileo was doing was not attacking Aristotle. He was attacking Tico Brahe. Brahe
believed that comets were much closer to Earth than Copernicus. Galileo was firmly on
Copernicus's side, Hence his argument was in truth directed at Brahe, not Aristotle.
Galileo and his main opponent, a gentleman by the name of Oracio Grassi,
continued to openly debate the matter However, neither Anne had any thing significant
to say. Though still the debate is significant for two reasons, First because
it tells us something important about Galileo, and second because it provoked him to
publish The Essayer, which is his most extended discussion of scientific methodology. So
what does it tell us about Galileo? There was nothing in the Astronomical Balance,
which was written in response to Galleo's position on the Comments, that might
have been expected to offend Galileo. Galileo was the one who picked the fight
in the first place, and here his attitude is probably typical of many brilliant
people. You simply could not abide anyone less brilliant than he. Most of
his colleagues, Galileo felt, could not keep up with him intellectually, so
there was little point in arguing with them. But they is the more important
point here First and foremost, this book contains Galileo's clearest exposition on the role
of facts in scientific argument. Prior to the seventeenth century, it was sufficient
to accumulate stacks of works by learned authorities to prove your case. Whoever had
the bigger stack one. Galileo thought this was nonsense. He rejected all the
authority of the ancients in favor of his own experience and the facts derived therefrom
In other words, what Galileo's really doing here is redefining what we call evidence.
And the key was the telescope. With it, Galileo could see much
more than Aristotle or Ptolomy. So there was just wasn't worth as much as
Galileo's observations. It wasn't their fault, per se, it just had terrible
technology. The second major assertion Galleo makes is that philosophy is not fiction.
It's something that we must discover by reading the Book of Nature. Quoting Galileo,
here, philosophy is written in this very great book which always lies open
before our eyes, I mean the universe. But one cannot understand it unless
one first learns to understand the language and recognize the characters in which it's written.
It is written in a mathematical language, and the characters are triangles,
circles, and other geometrical figures. Without these means, it is humanly impossible
to understand a word of it. Without these, there is only clueless scrabbling
around in a dark labyrinth. End quote. This is perhaps the most famous
passage in all of Galileo, and it represents a firm commitment to the realist
theory of knowledge. The Essayer was not without its controversy, though in it
Galileo espoused a clearly atomist view of the universe. But if atoms are fixed
and do not magically change, then transubstantiation cannot be. And that really mattered
in the seventeenth century because transsubstantiation, the sort of magical transformation of the bread
and the wine during the Catholic Mass into the body and blood of Christ,
had become a major dividing point between Protestants and Catholics, and of course,
as a result, the Essayer was denounced by the Inquisition. And that gives
us to a fundamental question. If Galileo had been banned from advocating Copernicanism,
why did he seem to do so now, or at the very least,
why did he argue against Aristotle and Ticobrie, which was tantamount to advocating Copernicanism.
I think the answer is that Galileo was in too deep, had gone
so far in the Starry Messager, that trying to pull back now simply wasn't
going to happen. Galileo was determined not to be his father. He would
not die of failure. He knew the truth, and he was willing to
fight for it, at least for now. Late in sixteen twenty two,
after he had sent the manuscript of the Essayer off to Rome to be printed,
Galileo began to revise his Discourse on the Tides. It seemed he was
preparing to reopen the question of Copernicanism, despite the fact that he had been
forbidden to do so. What made him think that circumstances had changed? True,
his major opponent the first time around, Cardinal Berrami, had died the
year before, so maybe Galileo assumed that animosity died with him. Even so,
Galileo surely knew there was no prospect of publishing or even circulating a manuscript
in defense of Copernicanism in Italy under the present circumstances, So what would be
the point of updating his discourse on the Tides? We have is a puzzle,
and unfortunately there's a missing piece. Fortunately, it's not too difficult to
discover a piece that fits that enables us to make sense of Galileo's behavior in
sixteen thirty three, leon A Laqui published a book on the intellectual life in
Rome titled The Urban Bees. While the herbs in question is Rome, the
title is also a pun. It's a reference to Pope Urban the eighth,
the bee binging the symbol of the Babarini family, and in it we find
the following passage quote, the French have a high opinion of Galileo, that
some of them have come to Italy with the sole purpose of meeting with him.
Indeed, I have learned from a reliable source that a person called Did'ati,
of noble birth, known for his science and his virtue, hurriedly came
from France to Florence for this sole reason, and that having spent the whole
of thirteen days talking to Galileo about various mysteries of nature in order to satisfy
his intellectual curiosity. Judging that he was, as far as he was concerned,
seeing Italy at Galileo's side was all the Italy he needed to see,
he returned to France, dropping all his other business and traveling in long stages
end quote. Diodotti had written to Galileo in sixteen twenty asking if he had
plans for publication and offering him help to get around any quote unquote local obstacles.
News of the conbination of Copernicanism was now beginning to circulate among French intellectuals.
Galileo replied, making it clear that he was prevented from publishing. The
surviving correspondence would seem to suggest that there was no further contact between Galileo and
Didati for five years, but it seems unlikely that matters were allowed to rest
there. How she reports, it's exactly what one would expect a semi clandestine
vision by Diodati to discuss the probabilities of publishing abroad. Essentially, what do
that they brought with him was news of different individuals publishing abroad under both pseudonyms
and in different ways that avoided contacting the ire of the Inquisition. He was
providing Galileo with a model, a way to publish his findings without creating further
controversy. Now, if Galileo had gone in that direction, there's every possibility
that he never would have come into contact at the Inquisition again, But as
we're about to see, he doesn't, and why he doesn't doesn't have anything
to do with a lack of strategic sense. On August sixth, sixteen twenty
three, Mafeo Babrini, a Florentine, was elected Pope Urban the eighth.
He would be the pope during Galileo's inquisition battles. In October of that year,
Galileo's work The Essayer was also published. As soon as the book was
printed, a local secretary to the pope began reading it to him at meal
times. This was, as Galileo would later recognize a quote marvelous combination of
circumstances end quote. But to take full advantage of it, he needed to
come to Rome. Yet Galileo delayed. The weather was bad, he was
ill, He had to arrange for his orphan nephews to enter monasteries. We
can imagine, though, that after the experiences of sixteen sixteen, he was
reluctant to revisit the scene of his defeat. When he finally set out in
April of sixteen twenty four, he delayed his arrival further, staying two weeks
with his friend and patron Rico Sessi. It was during this visit that Galileo
performed the only experiment of which we have an eyewitness account. One day they
went out on a boat ride on a local lake. While riding on the
boat, which was powered by oars, Galileo asked his friend if he had
anything heavy with him. His friend said, yes, he did, a
lock and key, which at the time would have been quite bulky. Galileo
took the lock and key from him tossed it up in the air. We
know from his friend's later recollections that he was immediately distraught. He assumed that
the lock and key was gone forever, that the boat would continue to move
forward, but the lock and key would go backwards. Of course, it
didn't. Landed right back in Galileo's hand, and thus, with a simple
experiment, Galileo had shown how objects don't lose their motion when affected in another
direction. Now, getting back to the much more important issue at hand,
Pope Urban laid down two conditions for any publication of Copernicanism. First, it
had to be presented as an arguable theory with arguments for and against. Second,
Galileo had to concede that there were limits, profound limits when it came
to human knowledge of scientific questions. In the end, all Urban wanted was
another a sayer and so Galileo retreated into isolation to write. He wanted to
give him one, but he also desperately wanted to defend Copernicanism. He began
then writing a series of letters that analyzed the Copernican system of the universe and
the Ptolemaic Some may ask, well, why not Tko Brahe's system. Well,
Galileo believed because he had proven that Venus orbits the Sun, no one
could take Brahe seriously anymore. Galileo viewed the Taikan, which is Tico Brahe's
system, as an adaptation of the Ptolemaic system. Tico had done little more
than adopt Aristotle's physics while following Copernicus's astronomy. Galileo believed all this was nonsense.
But of course there's something worth pointing out here. Galileo had a telescope.
Tico Brahe did not. This innovation, not Galileo, was really what
had shown Brahe to be mistaken. Galileo did not need to waste more ink
proving the matter. Galileo wanted to push the topic forward, not go over
old territory. He was now pressing the claim that the universe was spectacularly large.
This was dangerous territory. The Church held that the Earth had to be
the center of the universe because Christ has visited Earth. If the universe was
populated by innumerable inhabited planets, well then there might be innumerable Jesus Christs.
That the Church asserted was impossible. Galileo was on thin ice, indeed,
But then by sixteen twenty eight his work had ground to a standstill. This
was supposed to be his great opus on the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, yet
it was not finished. But why Well to answer that question, we need
to remember that Galileo was a real person, not a painting, not some
name in a history book. He had real world relationships to deal with,
and those were taking the prime position in his life at that moment. Sometime
in sixteen twenty seven, Galileo encouraged his nephew to marry Anna di Cosimo di
Khalidi. Well, this might not seem like anything of any importance. Consider
this, Galileo paid for Anna the bride's wedding dress and held the wedding in
his home. But why why pay for some random person's wedding dress. The
answer is that Anna wasn't random at all, she was Galileo's illegitimate daughter.
This seems more likely the case after the wedding, when Galileo subsequently took responsibility
for Anna's daughter. In fact, he treated his grandchild just like all the
others. But this was just one piece of family drama that Galileo was dealing
with. Galileo's younger brother, Michelangelo, had always been a bit of a
disappointment. Sometime in August of sixteen twenty eight, just as Galileo was struggling
to write, Michalangelo returned to Florence to get his wife and children and take
them away. Galileo had been supporting them and told his brother that his family
was better off staying here. The two brothers parted on bad terms, and
Michelangelo died shortly thereafter, on January the third, sixteen thirty one. But
there's more to the story, more headaches. If you ask Galileo, you
see, Michelangelo had a son, and back in sixteen twenty eight, his
son, Vincenzo, got into trouble in Rome. It seemed like, unfortunately,
Vincenzo was a bit of a chip off the old block. His father
had been a great disappointment and he was prepared to also become a great disappointment.
Galleo's friend Castelli had been looking after Vincenzo for Galileo, and Castelli was
at the end of his rope. Vincenzo refused to abide by any lessons he
said unless he beat him. Vincenzo wanted to be a musician, just like
his father as well and his grandfather before him. Matters came to a head
when he got into this altercation with his landlord. In a sort of moment
when he forgot himself and forgot where he was Rome, Vincenzo tried to insult
his landlord by telling him, you are a fool. You do nothing but
worship quote painted mosaics end quote. Well, this was of course pure blasphemy,
and one was allowed to worship images of Christ and Mary and all the
rest throughout churches in Italy, so to suggest that those were not representations of
the real deities while that was something indeed, Castelli tried to intervene, but
it was too late. Vincenzo found himself denounced to the inquisition, and though
we do not have all the details, it appears that he was tortured Galileo
was ultimately able to intervene on the part of his nephew and spirit him away,
although the young man who was never a success in life and wound up
dying very young. We don't know exactly what kind of interactions happened between Vincenzo
and Galileo after Galileo got his nephew out of Rome, but based off of
Galileo's later incredible fear of the Inquisition, I think it's safe to assume Vincenzo
told him some pretty awful war stories. We know that it was very common
for the Inquisition to torture those who were not willing to admit their guilt right
away. Vincenzo probably was tortured, and the stories that he heard from his
nephew, Wow. They haunted Galileo until his own interaction with the Inquisition,
and quite frankly, perhaps even beyond. In March of sixteen twenty nine,
Galileo fell seriously ill for the first time he came face to face with the
reality that he might not finish his life's work. Within a few weeks he
was well again, but it was not until October sixteen twenty nine that he
began writing once more. This time, he was encouraged by good news the
appointment of Nicolo Ricardi as Master of the Sacred Palace. The Master of the
Sacred Palace was the Pope's personal theologian. Essentially, he was the person responsible
for censoring books or for giving them the green light, and Ricardi had written
words of praise for Galileo's essayer years earlier. If Galileo was ever to get
a work on Copernicus through the Vatican, now was the time. Galileo had
hoped to finish his manuscript by the spring, but it was not until the
end of January sixteen thirty that he finally finished work on the Dialogue, a
book he first began in fifteen ninety seven. It was just in the nick
of time. His sight was failing, and with cataracts growing in both eyes,
he knew soon he would be unable to read or write at all.
In February, Galleo agreed to travel to Rome to make arrangements for publication,
but he did not leave until April. Galleo arrived in Roma on May the
third and left on June the twenty ninth, sixteen thirty. He met with
the Pope and Ricardi and left with assurances he only needed to make a few
small changes before he could publish. Ideally, Galileo wanted to dedicate the book
to the Pope if his eminence would allow it. Galileo hoped to return to
Rome with an edited manuscript that fall. There were three people Galileo had to
convince in order to obtain permission to publish. First, there was the cardinal
and nephew to the Pope, Francisco Barberini. Babarini had had a long private
conversation with Castelli in February sixteen thirty, in which Castelli had outlined Galileo's theory
of the tides caused by the movement of the Earth. Baberini had had one
objection, if the Earth moved, did that not mean that it was a
new star? And was that not theologically unacceptable? Castelli had reassured him Galileo
would certainly prove that the Earth was not a star, and certainly, after
discussing the matter with Galileo, Castelli did just that. He worked to reassure
Babardini that this argument over whether the Earth was a star was pure semantics and
nothing more. Clearly, Galileo's telescope had shown that no two planets were alike.
Thus the distinction between the Earth and stars was as unnecessary as this distinction
between the Earth and other planets in the universe. He argued, no two
things were exactly alike. The argument appeared to work, but while Babaiini might
have been convinced, it is telling that after Galileo's condemnation, in the years
ahead he would remove any paintings or other representations from his home illustrating a Copernican
universe. His support would prove not to be as strong as Galileo might have
hoped. The second person Galileo had to convince was Rafaelo Viscanti, and the
third was the Pope. These two men had very similar concerns. Really,
all they needed Galileo to do was admit that there was more than one explanation
for things. So long as Galleo made it clear that Copernicanism was one explanation
for the universe, he was fine. Galleo needed to acknowledge that God could
do things beyond human comprehension, which might might and that's underlined make talome write
frankly. Given the context of the early seventeenth century, this doesn't seem like
a big ask. The way that Galileo's book is ultimately laid out is in
a dialogue, which makes sense because the title of it is the Dialogue.
It's a fictional dialogue between Copernicus, Aristotle, and Ptolome. These men present
their different arguments for how the universe is situated and discuss the merits of each.
However, there's a fourth voice in the book. Throughout the margins,
Galileo writes helpful notes for the reader. These notes are essentially Galileo speaking,
even if he doesn't use his own voice, and Galileo speaking is firmly in
Copernicus's corner. The book that Galileo took to Rome in sixteen thirty was identical
to that which was ultimately published. Hence, when Galileo put it to the
press, he had to have known that he was not respecting the Pope's wish
that he explained Copernicanism as the one explanation for the universe. After all,
he kept in the argument about the tides, and the sole purpose of that
argument was to proclaim Copernicanism as the only possible account for the structure of the
heavens. Nevertheless, By the time Galileo left Florence, both Ricardi and Visconti
had read the book and were determined not to stand in its way. Unfortunately,
Galileo's luck did not hold. On August, the First PRINCESSI, who
I mentioned earlier, one of Galileo's biggest supporters, died. Had he lived,
what followed might not have happened. Geopolitical events were also turning against Galileo.
On July the sixteenth, Spain took Mantua from France in one of those
never ending Italian wars between the two great powers were still Sweden had just invaded
Germany this is during the Thirty Years War, and would soon ally itself with
France, despite Sweden being a Protestant country. Hope Urban's position in all this
was an unenviable one. He had spent crucial years as the Pope's representative in
France, where he had formed connections that continued to shape his thinking. Moreover,
France was the only power that could counterbalance Spain, and if Spain gained
undisputed control over the Italian peninsula, the Papacy would lose all of its freedom.
Urban was thus consistently pro French, but the Thirty Years War had begun
in sixteen eighteen, and in June of sixteen thirty Sweden, encouraged by France,
entered the war against the Habsburgs. If the Pope was an ally of
France, then he was also an ally of the Protestants and an enemy of
Catholicism. This was not a comfortable position for Pope Urban to be in,
nor was this good news for Galileo. Florence, like the Pope, wanted
to avoid the irreversible choice between the two sides. But if the Pope was
instinctively and consistently leaning towards France, then the grand Dukes of Tuscany were,
when the chips were down, allies of the Spanish. Indeed, in sixteen
thirty two, two princes of the Medici family, Francisco and Medeas, were
in Germany fighting the Protestants. In sixteen twenty four. Urban had been proud
of his Florentine origins and surrounded himself with fellow Florentines. Now he began to
worry that their loyalties were divided. Rumors circulating in sixteen thirty that he had
fallen out with his secretary Galileo and Urban were now potentially on opposite sides of
a pan European conflict. In sixteen thirty, there were bitter divisions in Rome
between the supporters of France and Spain, the two sides coming to blows in
the streets. The Spanish were putting pressure on the Pope by every means.
At their disposal early in sixteen thirty, they managed, at least for a
moment, to persuade Pope Urban and Francisco Babarini to stop meeting with someone who
was a known enemy of Spain. When Galileo arrived in Rome, there were
rumors that he and this same person, who happened to be the greatest astrologers
of the day, had predicted that the Pope would die that summer. It
was reported that Spanish cardinals were setting out from Spain on the long journey to
Rome in order to arrive in good time for the conclave that would elect the
next Pope. The Spanish, in fact, were behaving as though Urban were
already dead. As for the French, their cardinals also felt obliged to start
towards Rome, fearing that a new pope would otherwise be elected in their absence.
Urban, who took astrology seriously was profoundly alarmed. He couldn't sleep at
night, and he had all the birds and the papal gardens killed because the
dawn chorus woke him from his fitful slumbers. While this moment of astrological history
might not seem important, it turned out to have a lot to do with
Galileo. In the end, Galileo didn't have anything to do with this prediction
about the Pope's death, but it turned out that someone else close to him
did. The man was the name of Orazio Morandi. He was the abbot
of a nearby monastery, and he was arrested that August and tortured. On
the seventh of November sixteen thirty, he was found dead in his prison cell.
Some say that he had been poisoned. The problem was that the two
Galileo and Morandi had known each other since sixteen eleven and been very close.
Morandi, in fact, was trying to use his influence in order to get
Galileo's book published. This now was incredibly problematic. Urban was anxious and suspicious
of anyone who had been close to Morandi. Galileo, who had been on
his way to Rome in an effort to try to get the book published there
now received advice from Castelli to reverse course. Galileo, who had anxiously followed
the affairs surrounding Morandi, could not but agree. The book, he decided,
would not be able to be published in Rome after all. But at
the moment Galileos certainly had plenty of imports things to worry about. The wife
of the Florentine ambassador in Rome, who was also a good friend of Galileo's
and who could not be thought to represent the Florentine government, entered into negotiations
with Ricardi on Galileo's behalf. At first he demanded that the final text of
the book be sent to him, but then he agreed to sign off on
the book on two conditions. He had to see the beginning and the end,
and the book must be reviewed in its entirety by a censor in Florence.
He was happy for Galileo to suggest whoever he wanted. Now, if
the book was going to be published in Florence, then full responsibility should have
been transferred to the Florentine censors, and Galileo should not have been allowed to
choose the censor. Galileo chose was a Dominican, Giacantos Stefani, and he
chose well. According to Galileo, Stefani wept as he read the manuscript,
so touched he was by Galileo's obedient submission to the requirements of the church.
Ricardi, on the other hand, began to get cold feet. He was
coming to think that Stefani was the wrong man for the job, and kept
stalling when asked to give the final approval to the beginning and end of the
book, evidently regretting the concessions he had made. In March sixteen thirty one,
Galileo asked the Grand Duke to intervene and put the ambassador himself to work
on his behalf. His life, Galleo complained, was slipping away, and
he was, he frankly confessed, in a state of anxiety, and had
been forced to take to his bed. He could neither eat nor sleep.
He felt as if he was lost on an ocean without any prospect of making
landfall. Galleo, of course, had never seen an ocean, but to
make matters worse, he had become convinced that his intellectual prowess was fading away,
and so the Grand Duke instructed the ambassador himself to come to Galleo's aid,
and Ricardi agreed to write a memo to the Florentine Inquisitor explaining what the
pope wanted. But the biggest problem was that Galileo's views were not popular with
those in charge, especially the Babenini family. Rather, Galleo himself, frankly,
was not popular. The shift and official attitude towards Galileo that Castellini had
predicted the previous August was the underlying reason for a lot of his difficulties.
This was also a bad moment for the Medici to try to exert influence in
Rome. Between sixteen twenty five and sixteen thirty one, Urban had, in
a series of steps, annexed the Duchy of Urbino to the Papal States.
The heir to the last Duke, who died on the twenty third of April
sixteen thirty one, was Vittoria del Rovre, who was betrothed to Ferdinando the
Second in Medici. And annexing Urbino, Urban was thus demonstrating complete disregard for
the wishes of the Florentine government. Nonetheless, Galleo, through his intermediaries continued
to put pressure on Ricardi, and eventually, on the nineteenth of July,
after Ricardi and the full weight of the Duke's authority had been brought to bear,
there was the revisions that he required to make to the preface. Meanwhile,
printing had already begun. Riccardi was not going to have any opportunity to
have second thoughts. When the dialogue came out, many people were kind of
interested to pick up a copy, and one of the people who was interested
to read what he did was a Jesuit opponent. This Jesuit opponent, when
the book appeared in sixteen thirty two, couldn't help but notice that a lot
of the arguments about sun spots were very similar to a previous book written in
sixteen thirty called or Ascenes Rose. In fact, modern historians, and I
have to be honest here, have all concluded that there simply is no way,
given the almost exact similarity between the two arguments, that Galileo came up
with it on his own. Frankly, it seems likely that as Galileo was
writing his book, he had a copy of Verses Rose next to him as
he was doing so, So what I have to say is unfortunately for many
Galleo flans out of there, one of the biggest components of the dialogue was
entirely plagiarized. Perhaps the most radical arguments in the Dialogue are directed at undermining
providentialist assumptions. We have no way of knowing, Galleo insists, whether the
universe exists for our sake, for quite different purposes, or whether much of
the universe serves no purpose at all. We have no way of judging whether
it be thought of as large or small, assuming as it is not it
may be finite. More remarkably still, Galileo's arguments preceeded by considering the theoretical
possibility of non terrestrial life. Here, Galileo argues through an intermediary that there
might be life on the Moon, although if it is, we can be
sure that it's nothing like life on Earth. Quote. I am certain that
a person born and raised in a huge forest, among wild beasts and birds,
and knowing nothing of the watery element, would never be able to frame
in his imagination another world existing in nature different from his, filled with animals
which could travel without legs or fast beating wings, and not upon its surface
alone like beasts upon the earth, but everywhere within its depths, and not
moving, but stopping motionless wherever they pleased, a thing which birds in the
air cannot do. And that men lived there too, and build palaces and
cities, and traveled with such ease that without tiring themselves at all, they
could proceed to far countries, with their families and households and whole cities.
Now, as I say, I am sure that such a man could not,
even with the liveliest of imagination, ever picture himself fish, ocean ships,
fleets, and armadas. Our understanding, therefore, Galileo insists, is
just limited, and is limited by our immediate experience. Even our imagination can
work only upon the material that's provided by experience. It follows that we cannot
possibly judge the purpose served by the universe. What could we possibly know about
the purpose of the celestial bodies? He would write, quote, it is
great folly for us terrestrials to want to be arbitrators of the sizes and regulators
of local dispositions, we, being quite ignorant of all their affairs and interests,
end quote in place of a universe with humanity at its center, a
universe made to serve humanity's purpose, a universe designed to make possible humanity salvation.
Galileo offers a mysterious universe whose purposes are unknown, whose size is unfathomable,
and which may contain other things quite different from our selves. We are
not simply terrestrials. The Moon may be uninhabited, but you do not have
to force the text to find in it elements of heresy. Around other stars,
Galileo rites, there may be other planets and other worlds which make the
mistake of thinking that they are at the center of everything, and that their
experiences are the true measure of reality. Ultimately, in writing the dialogue,
Galileo ignored Urban's requests. He did not posit Copernicanism as one of several options.
He posited Copernicanism as the option, and he removed the Earth from the
center of the universe, both from a geographic situation as much as he also
did from a theological standpoint. He had written his own death warrant. Now,
as I mentioned, we are going to come back to Galileo's infamous trial
with the Inquisition. In fact, his trial is probably one of the most
famous of any trials that the Inquisition would hold certainly one of the most that
we have the most resources for, I'll put it that way. But we're
going to take some time to really understand the Inquisition. So starting next week,
I'm going to turn back the clock a little bit to the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries and analyze the origins of the Inquisition, because, as you may
be surprised to find out, the Inquisition was quite old as an institution when
it met Galileo, and some of the gene was already coming off now.
In the meantime, if you're interested in additional content, just check out the
website or any of the links in the show notes to Western CIV. Two
point zero or the ad free versions of the show. Those are all there,
and there's always free trials a