This is part 7 in a series, using an article by Kirsten Birkett tracing the historical flow of Galileo’s run in with the church. So far we’ve seen how complicated the whole story is, and today we’re ready to answer the question: Why did the Catholic Church set itself against Galileo and his findings?
As Birkett explains, a certain group of people who Galileo had made enemies of banded together and then drew on church officials who were disgruntled with him as well. This “Liga” (as it was known) began to publicly accuse Galileo of contradicting the Bible, “creating popular suspicion against Galileo in order to catch the attention of the church authorities.”
It was an unfair move, and it is possible to speculate that without this deliberate opposition Galileo’s trial may never had happened. Theologians had traditionally allowed philosophers space in which to develop ideas. The medieval church was not Orwell’s Big Brother. Philosophical speculation and discussion was the province, and lifeblood, of the universities, and though the church secured the boundaries of admissible doctrine it did not normally dictate what could be discussed. The church was not out to silence Galileo. Indeed, Galileo’s telescopic discoveries had been accepted and endorsed by Jesuit astronomers when he travelled to Rome in 1611: he was not without church support.
But then things got hairy for Galileo. He got called out in a court debate (at which he wasn’t present) and wrote a letter in response defending his ideas. The issue: did the idea of a moving earth contradict scripture? The “Liga” picked up the letter and sent it to the Inquisition. Then one of their members traveled to Rome to personally denounce him. He was called before the inquisition and faced a trial before a powerful Cardinal named Bellarmine.
Unfortunately for Galileo, he had already publiclay offended Bellarmine by writing several treatises essentialy educating theologians in theology(so that they would leave him alone). In one of the pieces, he confronted Bellarmine head on by using Augustine as his authority. This was a problem for several reasons, as Birkett explains:
Cardinal Bellarmine, a Jesuit, had spent his life fighting Protestantism…He was a polemicist, not a speculative philosopher, and though he was intellectually quite capable of understanding Galileo’s arguments he was used to making definitive judgments in the ‘life and death’ battle against heresy. He had spent his life fighting Protestants who claimed freedom to interpret the Bible as they wished…
Galileo’s treatise challenged Bellarmine on his own ground, which was hardly tactful. Galileo quoted extensively from Augustine as part of his argument, in the confident tone of a professional. Bellarmine, a serious patristic scholar, would have known far more about Augustine’s view of Scripture than Galileo could, and would hardly have taken kindly to Galileo instructing him in what Augustine said. To make it worse, Galileo could not, or did not, hold back his sarcastic wit. He lampooned theologians as narrow-minded—not a good idea when Bellarmine was one of them.
The matter had become official, and was dealt with quickly. Galileo came to Rome, and the matter of Copernican theory was considered by a panel of theologians for a brief three days.
This series is getting long… We’ll have to find a way to wrap it up soon. Let me know if it’s been worthwhile to you to go through it slowly like this, and if this type of thing interests you.
In the next couple posts we’ll wrap up what happened with Galileo and take a look at Birkett’s very applicable observations about what we can learn from his story.