The Crime of Galileo

The 30th of November is approaching, and this brings back to me memories of the time when I first read some excerpts of The Dialogue on the Great World Systems and the Starry Messenger. This must have happened during my last year at the High School (1984). In the occasion of the IYA2009 I re-read them. While doing this I stumbled upon two interesting books: The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955) by Giorgio de Santillana (professor at MIT) and Vita e Opere di Galileo Galilei (Rome: Herder, 1965), by Pio Paschini (professor at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome). In the next post I’ll tell you how the second is related to a very interesting story. To wet your appetite I’ll just tell you that the book was commissioned by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences for the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death in 1942. The book was ready by 1943, but it was rejected by the Church and remained concealed until 1965, when it was published. As a matter of fact, Giorgio de Santillana was not aware of it when he published the Crime of Galileo, which is the subject of this post.

Most of you probably know de Santillana because of his famous Hamlet’s Mill, written together with Hertha von Dechend. It is a dense, multidisciplinary book about the astronomical roots of myth. An interesting reading, indeed. But he has worked a lot on Galileo. His edition of the Dialogue won rich praise from the critics. It was right during this hard work that the seed of The Crime of Galileo was planted. Here follows an excerpt from the Preface:

“This work is not the result of a plan afterthought. As I tried to clear up the astonishingly complex background of Galileo’s Dialogue on the Great World System, I was drawn to the drama which played a decisive part in that fateful event of modern history, the secularization of thought. It seemed strange to me that, after so much research and controversy, the story events as I found it should make so little sense. As I worked, it became clear that a large area of the puzzle had remained oddly disassembled to the present day, by what looks like an inexplicable tacit agreement between the warring factions.”

And further down:

“Galileo did not come to grief as “the scientist” facing a religious credo. […] Both his friends and and his enemies saw in him a unique type of creative personality, whose essential achievement might very well be conceived to stand or fall with him. He was a classic type of humanist, trying to bring his culture to the awareness of the new scientific ideas, and among the forces that he found aligned against him religious fundamentalism was by no means the strongest.

It is difficult to see the actual shape of the conflict in these matters so long as we remain under the spell of a misunderstanding tacitly accepted by both sides: the idea of the scientist as a bold “free-thinker” and “progressive” facing the static resistance of conservatism.”

Here de Santillana’s unconventional vision of the Galileo case starts to emerge in its far reaching aspects:

The Crime Of Galileo -The University of Chicago Press - 9th Impression - 1970.

“The confusion goes on unremittingly even today, for the Galileo affair is far from dead, and every decade brings a new “line” and new suggestions meant to explain it away, just as it brings a repetition of the ancient rationalist war whoops. The side that stands for the authorities neither is, nor by any means has been, all Catholic. […] Most of the literature through which one has to wade deserves no mention at all. It ranges from average casual incompetence to prevarication and plain filth. Let it go back to whence it came from.”

During the painstaking research work for his edition of the Dialogue, de Santillana realizes that things did not go exactly the way we have always been told.

“The long-drawn-out polemic is not strictly, I hope to have made it clear, one between the confessional and the anticonfessional faction. It has been made to look like that; in reality it is a confused free-for-all in which prejudice, inveterate rancor, and all sorts of special and corporate interests have been the prime movers. Those who dragged and keep dragging the Church into it are no candid souls. As L’Epinois says rightly, the Church has all to gain and nothing to lose from the truth.”

And it becomes more explicit here:

“It has been known for a long time that a major part of the Church intellectuals were on the side of Galileo, while the clearest opposition to him came from secular ideas. It can be proved further (or at least I hope I have done so) that the tragedy was the result of a plot of which the hierarchies themselves turned out to be the victims no less than Galileo – an intrigue engineered by a group of obscure and disparate characters in strange collusion who planted false documents in the file, who later misinformed the Pope and the presented to him a misleading account of the trial for decision.”

If you read this carefully, you will understand the implication is a very serious one, one I had never been made aware before. Far from claiming the Church was innocent, de Santillana points the finger towards unsuspected/unsuspectable people: academics, the very colleagues of Galileo. And this rises the important question about how the scientific novelty is received by the academic establishment. At the time of Galileo as well as of today. A matter to be deeply meditated by us scientists.

“An objective account ought to be more relevant to a decent understanding than all the innuendoes, diversions, and stage sets invented around it on both sides. By pinpointing the culpability of a few individuals, it tends to absolve a far greater number who had stood hitherto under the darkest suspicion […]. Once recognized, the facts should lead us forward to the problems of present reality and disperse this perennial battle wit windmills”.

An eye-opener, illuminating book, built on documents and not on philosophical speculations. Definitely a must read for someone who wishes to reach an informed opinion on the Galileo affair.

Very interesting and intriguing is also the case of Vita e Opere di Galileo Galilei. But for this you will have to wait for the next post…