The Scientific Revolution

Lesson 5: The New Philosophers

Galileo's trial

Few events in the history of the scientific revolution are better known than Galileo’s trial in 1633. But the trial remains mysterious in some ways, and is explained in different ways by historians. Galileo’s troubles began with the publication of his Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World in February 1632. (Oster includes an extract as document 4.4).

The book was dangerous in two ways. It boldly supported the Copernican system, banned by the Church in 1616. The Pope, Urban VIII, also became convinced, after the dialogue’s publication, (which in all probability he himself had licensed), that the dull-witted Aristotelian imaginary character, Simplicio, was meant to be him. Being Pope was a stressful job, and the always hot-tempered Urban was under particular pressure due to the Thirty Years War.

The conviction that Galileo was mocking him shattered what had been a very strong relationship between the two going back before Urban’s pontificate. This relationship shattered at a time when Galileo had lost the support of other Roman patrons such as Federico Cesi, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei, who died in 1630. Without the support of powerful men, Galileo was exposed to the attacks of his enemies, notably the Inquisition and the Jesuits.

A furious Urban suppressed the Dialogue and set up a commission to investigate the matter. After reading the commission’s report, Urban referred the matter to the Inquisition. The Inquisition summoned Galileo to Rome in the winter of 1632/33, a savage requirement to impose on a sick old man during a plague.

On his arrival in February, he was imprisoned under fairly humane conditions. The Inquistion charged him with violating an injunction given him in 1616 by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine not to assert or defend Copernicanism in any way. Galileo responded by claiming that Bellarmine had allowed him to discuss Copernicanism as a hypothesis. Negotiations between Galileo and the Inquisitors involving the threat of torture produced a public confession.

The story that after publicly abjuring Copernicanism Galileo audibly muttered “And yet it moves!’ referring to the earth, is a myth. On June 22, 1633, Galileo was condemned to house arrest and the recitation of penitential psalms. He spent his arrest first in Rome and from the end of 1633 to his death at his own house outside Florence.

Galileo’s condemnation had a chilling effect on science in the Catholic world, particularly Italy. The Frenchman Rene Descartes, who we’ll be discussing next, abandoned plans to publish his Copernican The World, and turned from natural philosophy to metaphysics. It was also a public relations disaster for the Papacy and the Catholic Church with consequences lasting to our own time.

Protestants pointed (and continue to point) to the trial to claim that Catholicism is particularly anti-science, and it also useful to those who argue that science and religion are by their very nature hostile. The generally positive role of the Papacy in the scientific revolution as a patron, (the establishment of the Gregorian Calendar, for example) has been unjustly forgotten.

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