SOURCE: "Galileo and the Church," in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, University of California Press, 1986, pp. 114-35.

The condemnation of Galileo (1564-1642) is perhaps the most dramatic incident in the long and varied history of the relations between science and religious faith. Honest seekers after truth have been shocked by the attempt to suppress the claim that the earth moves and have seen in the trial of Galileo decisive evidence that religion is dangerous, not only when willfully perverted to secular ends but also, and perhaps more especially, when pursued by sincere men who consider themselves the stewards of God's revealed truth.' But Galileo's condemnation must be seen in historical perspective. We must remember that he was born in 1564, the year after the close of the Council of Trent, which may be considered as setting the tone of Roman Catholicism until a new spirit came to prevail with John XXIII in our own century. The opposition he encountered can only be understood if it is related to a period in which modern liberal values were far from commanding the assent that we have come to take for granted.

An Age of Restrictive Orthodoxies

For the cultural historian and the student of the development of dogma, sixteenth-century Italy is notorious for its return to the rigor of an earlier age. This has conventionally been blamed on the Counter-Reformation, but to see it in this light is to take the symptom for the cause. The Counter-Reformation must not be viewed as an external and reactionary movement or wave of obscurantism that suddenly banished all intellectual creativity. It was rather a crisis of confidence that took place within the Italian mind.² The sack of Rome in 1527 and the collapse of the Florentine Republic in 1530, followed by Spanish domination over most of the peninsula, left Italians sorely disillusioned. Many lost faith in reforms aimed solely at the improvement of political institutions and became not only willing but anxious to exchange the burden of freedom for the security of regulated order. One notices this in the greater emphasis on the authority of princes and the new accent on the importance of titles, even if those who bore them had to be fixed up with spurious genealogies and endowed with the nobility somehow inherent in the cities of their birth.

The writings of Aristotle that had earlier stimulated lively discussion were increasingly turned into rigid dogma and a mechanical criterion of truth. Other philosophical systems were viewed with suspicion. When the Platonic chair of Francesco Patrizi (1529-1597) at the University of the Sapienza in Rome fell vacant at his death, Pope Clement VIII consulted Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621), who had recently been called from Naples as papal theologian and counselor to the Holy Office. Bellarmine judged that Platonism contained more insidious subtleties than Aristotelianism—not because it was more erroneous but on account of its deceptive affinity with Christianity. Platonism was therefore more dangerous than paganism, and Bellarmine recommended suppression of the chair.³ The widely accepted authority of Aristotle helped to make his disciple Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) the most popular guide to the meaning of the faith in the late sixteenth century. Named a doctor of the church in 1567, Aquinas was considered the supreme authority in theology by Cardinal Bellarmine. The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum, although permitting deviation from Aquinas's theology on particulars, prescribed dismissal for any professor who showed himself hostile to the system as a whole. The task of theology under these circumstances was chiefly to systematize and to clarify the faith, conceived as a body of coherent intellectual propositions, in such a way as to maximize its certainty and finality. The articulation of Catholic belief almost became an administrative problem, and Bellarmine an administrator of doctrines. He organized them into systems so that they might be directed, in their most unequivocal and effective form, against doubt and heresy. Indeed, to make confrontation easier he even systematized the views of his opponents.⁴

The cultural authoritarianism of the papacy was greatly assisted by the Italiamzation of the papal court and the growth of a centralized bureaucracy within the church. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the Sacred College of Cardinals numbered thirty-five, of whom twenty-one (60 percent) were Italians. By 1598, when the number had risen to fifty-seven, forty-six (more than 80 percent) were from Italy.⁵ A similar reduction in the proportion of foreigners was occurring at the lower levels of the papal bureaucracy. The Italian influence had already been decisive at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), called to formulate a response to the Protestant challenge; there, of 270 bishops attending at one time or another, 187 were Italian, 31 Spanish, 26 French, and 2 German. Moreover, by the procedural rules adopted in 1545, only bishops and the generals of a few religious orders could vote in the full sessions. This decision strengthened the Italian contingent, many of whom were financially dependent on the papacy and therefore under its influence. The sharp increase in the number of cardinals reduced the importance of individual figures, as, in an aristocratic age, did the elevation of clergy of low social origins. The sudden appointment, in 1583, of nineteen new cardinals by Gregory XIII, without consultation or advance notice, ruffled the feathers of those already belonging to the Sacred College but led to little open resistance. Sixtus V (1585-1590) took the further step of dividing the papal bureaucracy into fifteen smaller bodies that functioned separately and henceforth rarely assembled as a whole. This effectively converted the Curia from a quasi-constitutional agency into an appointive and specialized bureaucracy. In his justification of papal claims, the Controversia Generalis de Summo Pontifice, Cardinal Bellarmine argued that a monarchical form of government was preferable to a democratic one because it was more natural.⁶ And Bellarmine did not hesitate to tell Catholic princes that they had a moral obligation to enforce true belief among their subjects.⁷

This reassertion of pontifical authority is likely to appear anachronistic. European life had been too thoroughly secularized to give any hope of success to the effort to impose an ecclesiastical tutelage. But none of this was obvious in Italy during the latter half of the sixteenth century: the sufferings, the fragmentation, and the weakness of Italy made the new secular accomplishments appear singularly vulnerable. Ecclesiastical authority appeared to triumph and thus to fulfill the values of the Counter-Reformation.⁸ But the aspirations of Rome were also based on faith in the ultimate course of history arising not from a scrutiny of actual conditions but from divine promise. For Rome, what ought to be must eventually be. Meanwhile she would do everything in her power to hasten the event.

At the end of the sixteenth century her efforts intensified. Heartened by signs that the Turks could be beaten, and supported by powerful new religious orders, such as the Jesuits, and a reorganized and efficient bureaucracy, the papacy mounted a systematic campaign against the dangerous political and philosophical ideas of the Renaissance and the Reformation. The chronology of the papal counteroffensive is significant. In 1559 Paul IV issued the first official Roman Index of Prohibited Books, an undiscriminating list, which included all the works of Erasmus, all the production of sixty-one printers, and all translations of the Bible into vernacular languages.⁹ Its harshness was mitigated by the Council of Trent in 1562, but shortly thereafter, under the pontificate of Pius V (1566-1572), it became implacably severe. Pius changed the nature of the Index, intending it no longer as a fixed list of condemned writings but as a continuous action of vigilance and censorship; in 1571 he set up a special Congregation of the Index to oversee this enterprise.

Thus by the end of the sixteenth century, the Catholic church appeared to have emerged from the struggle against Protestantism with renewed strength. It continued to keep an eye on theologians, such as Michel Baius and Bartolomé de Carranza, but it now extended its vigilance to all manifestations of social and spiritual life; that is, it reached beyond the religious realm to ethics, politics, philosophy, art, and even manners and customs.

The last decade of the sixteenth century and the early years of the seventeenth produced a wave of ideological assaults and condemnations. Although Niccolò Machiavelli had been on the Index since 1559, he was systematically refuted only after 1589; in that year Giovanni Botero's Delia ragion di stato appeared, closely followed by the conservative works of Antonio Possevino and Tommaso Bozio and by Pedro de Ribadeneira's Princeps Christianus. The works of Jean Bodin were condemned in 1592; two years later his political doctrines were refuted by Fabio Albergati. It was also at this time that the Platonism of Patrizi was denounced and the old philosopher forced to profess his total submission. The work of Bernardino Telesio was proscribed as subversive in 1596, and nine years later his views were sweepingly condemned. During the same period Pietro Pomponazzi's condemnation was renewed, and Tommaso Campanella, Francesco Pucci, and Giordano Bruno were imprisoned for their ideas. Pucci perished at the stake in 1597, Bruno in 1600.¹⁰

During the pontificates of Gregory XIII (1572-1585) and Sixtus V (1585-1590) the radical papism of Augustinus Triumphus (fourteenth century) was revived in the form of his Summa de Potestate Ecclesiastica. This work, printed four times between 1582 and 1585, encouraged the view that all particular kingdoms and republics are subordinate to a world state under papal leadership. Gregory and Sixtus were convinced that Christendom must become an effective political reality. Any fragmentation of the social order was judged intrinsically evil, the expression and consequence of sin. Individuals and governments were considered subject to a single eternal system of justice based ultimately on eternal and divine law, of which the Catholic church was sole guardian and interpreter. In this climate of opinion a revolution in science or any other field of human endeavor could easily be perceived as a threat unless shown to agree with the teachings of the church.

Galileo's Exegetical Challenge

The heliocentric theory had been given scientific status by Nicolaus Copernicus in his De Revolutionibus Orbium Caelestium of 1543, but it was not until the invention of the telescope in the first decade of the seventeenth century that it received sufficient confirmation to pose a problem to the traditional imagery embedded in the Christian worldview. When Galileo turned his looking glass to the heavens in 1609, he discovered fresh arguments for the centrality of the sun in the phases of Venus and the satellites of Jupiter. Although the new observations were suggestive, they were by no means conclusive, and the debate over Copernicanism, which had flagged, received new impetus. Galileo's Sidereal Messenger, published in 1610, was an instant success, as was his trip to Rome the next year, when the Jesuits publicly confirmed his telescopic discoveries and Prince Federico Cesi (1585-1630) made him a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. So great was the applause that Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte wrote to the grand duke Cosimo II: "Were we living in the ancient Roman Republic, I have no doubt that a statue would be erected in the Campidoglio in honor of his [Galileo's] outstanding merit."¹¹

Galileo was elated by his warm reception in Rome, but an editorial incident that occurred when Prince Cesi offered to publish his Letters on Sunspots in 1612 should have made him wary of theologians. The cavils of the censors forced successive revisions upon him, and it is perhaps in an editorial incident of this kind that we can appreciate the day-to-day workings of the Counter-Reformation.

The book was to have opened with a letter from Marc Welser in which he quoted from Matthew 11:12: "The kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and men of violence take it by force." The censors objected to the quotation as likely to give the impression that astronomers hoped to conquer a domain that was the prerogative of theologians. To allay these fears, the passage was paraphrased to read: "Already the minds of men assail the heavens, and the more valiant conquer it."¹² Although there was no significant change in content, the biblical passage had disappeared! In a second passage Galileo had written that "divine goodness" had directed him to display the Copernican system publicly. The censors had him substitute "favorable winds."¹³ A third amendment reveals the censors' desire to save the incorruptibility of the heavens, a doctrine to which they still subscribed.¹⁴ In his original version Galileo had described the immutability of the heavens as "not only false, but erroneous and repugnant to the indubitable truths of the Scriptures," and had attributed the new astronomy to divine inspiration. When the censors demurred, he produced a new draft in which he called his own theory "most agreeable to the indubitable truths of Holy Writ" and praised his predecessors for their subtlety in finding ways of reconciling biblical passages on the mutability of the heavens with the conflicting evidence in favor of their immutability.¹⁵ The tacit implication was that, since theologians had long interpreted the texts to show their agreement with Aristotelian doctrine, there already existed in the church a nonliteral way of reading biblical passages on astronomy. The censors deemed the revision inadequate and demanded a third version, in which Galileo reluctantly excised all mention of Scripture.

The attitudes of both the censors and Galileo are instructive. On the one hand, the censors adamantly refused a layman the right to meddle with Scripture. On the other, Galileo was inclined to describe his own point of view as "divinely inspired" and to brand that of his opponents "contrary to Scripture." The popular conception of Galileo as a martyr for freedom of thought is an oversimplification. That his views were different from those of the majority of the academic establishment did not make him a liberal. In philosophy he replaced the dogmatism of Aristotle with an equally dogmatic faith in the validity of a mathematical interpretation of nature. In politics he was weary of the time-consuming demands of democracy and longed for the haven of a princely court. In 1610 he pointed out in no uncertain terms that he had left the Venetian Republic for the grand duchy of Tuscany because freedom from teaching duties could only be granted by an absolute ruler.¹⁶

Galileo no doubt cherished the hope that the church would endorse his opinions. Along with many of his contemporaries he looked to an enlightened papacy as an effective instrument of scientific progress. But what Galileo does not seem to have understood is that the Catholic church, attacked by Protestants for neglecting the Bible, found itself compelled, in self-defense, to harden its ground. Whatever appeared to contradict Holy Writ had to be treated with the utmost caution.

Galileo's favorite pupil, the Benedictine priest Benedetto Castelli (1578-1643), was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa in November 1613. In December of that year he was invited to dine with the grand duke Cosimo II, his mother the grand duchess Christina of Lorraine, and several dignitaries. The conversation turned to Galileo's celestial discoveries. Everyone praised them except the grand duchess, who, prompted by a professor of philosophy, began to raise objections from Scripture against the motion of the earth. Castelli replied as best he could and later reported the conversation to Galileo, who sent him a letter in which he outlined his views on Scripture. This was to form the basis of his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of 1615, the fullest statement of his views on the relations between science and religion.¹⁷

A Florentine layman, Lodovico delle Colombe, had criticized Galileo as early as 1610 for contradicting Scripture, but it was not until the fourth Sunday of Advent, 1614, that the matter became serious when Tommaso Caccini, a Dominican friar, preached against the motion of the earth and blasted mathematicians for promoting it. Galileo, incensed, complained to a distinguished preacher-general of the order, Fr. Luigi Maraffi, who apologized most courteously for the misdemeanor of a member of his order known for his intemperate and ill-advised rhetoric.¹⁸ Galileo also wrote to Federico Cesi, asking how he could obtain redress. The advice of the religious, yet worldly-wise, prince could have taught him much about the Roman milieu he was so sorely to misjudge:

Concerning the opinion of Copernicus, Bellarmine himself, who is one of the heads of the Congregation that deals with these matters, told me that he considers it heretical, and that the motion of the earth is undoubtedly against Scripture; so you can see for yourself. I have always feared that if Copernicus were discussed in the Congregation of the Index, they would proscribe him.¹⁹

Matters were brought to a head by the arrival in Rome, at the beginning of 1615, of a Carmelite priest, Paolo Antonio Foscarini (ca. 1580-1616), who had just published a letter on the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus Regarding the Motion of the Earth. Foscarini made a forceful but serene plea for the compatibility of the Copernican hypothesis with Scripture. He did not assert that the new theory was true, but argued that the Bible was written to be understood by all men and hence employed popular rather than scientific language. God chose to reveal only what could not be discovered by the light of reason; the rest he left to human disputation.²⁰ Foscarini was anxious to make his views known and therefore wrote to Bellarmine himself, enclosing a copy of his book. The cardinal tactfully replied that, to the best of his knowledge, the motion of the earth had not yet been proved and that it was best treated as a convenient device rather than a physical truth since it ran counter to clear biblical assertions about the rising and setting of the sun. Bellarmine then added:

It cannot be answered that this is not a matter of faith, for if it is not a matter of faith ex parte objecti [with respect to the subject matter], it is a matter of faith ex parte dicentis [with respect to the one who asserts it]. Hence a man who denied that Abraham had two sons and Jacob twelve would be as much a heretic as one who denied the Virgin Birth of Christ, since both are declared by the Holy Ghost through the mouths of the prophets and the apostles.

The cardinal, however, was far from taking an intolerant and inflexible stance:

If there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world and the earth in the third sphere, and that the sun does not revolve around the earth but the earth around the sun, then we would have to use great care in explaining those passage of Scripture that seem contrary…. But I cannot believe that there is such a demonstration until someone shows it to me.

Bellarmine proceeded to point out that using a theory to compute the position of the planets is not tantamount to affirming its physical reality. He was unmoved by the analogy, already invoked by Copernicus, of the beach that appears to recede when we leave the harbor aboard ship. No one, he pointed out, ever argued that the shore and not the ship was in motion.²¹

The cardinal's letter was sent to Galileo, who wrestled with the theological arguments. Replying to the objection that the motion of the sun is a matter of faith ex parte dicentis if not ex parte objecti, Galileo claimed that the Council of Trent upheld the authority of Scripture only in matters of faith and morals:

Having said therefore in rebus fidei [in matters of the faith], we see that the Council meant in rebus fidei ratione objecti [in matters of the faith by reason of the object]. It is much more a matter of faith that Abraham had sons and that Tobit had a dog, because it is stated in Scripture, than that the earth moves …, for since there have always been men who have had two, four, six, or no sons … there does not appear any reason or cause why the Holy Spirit should state in such matters anything but the truth, since the affirmative and the negative are equally credible for all men. But this is not so with the motion of the earth and the immobility of the sun. These propositions are far removed from the comprehension of the common people.²²

Galileo's Conception of Science

Galileo seems to have been oblivious to the danger of trying to enlighten the foremost Catholic theologian of the day on the interpretation of the decrees of the Council of Trent. He also jeopardized his case by overstating the degree of proof that he could provide:

It is prudent to believe that there is no proof that the earth moves until it has been produced, and we do not ask that anyone believe such a thing without proof. On the contrary, for the good of the church, we have no other wish than that what is adduced by the followers of this doctrine be strictly examined and that nothing be granted unless it greatly outweighs the rival arguments. If they are only 90 percent right, we shall consider them refuted…. We can afford to be so generous because it is clear that those who are of the wrong position cannot have any valid reason or experiment, whereas for those on the right side everything necessarily fits.

Commenting on the relative motion of the boat and the shore, he wrote:

The error of regarding the apparent motion of the shore and the immobility of the boat is clear to us once we have observed several times the motion of the boat from the shore, and the shore from the boat. Thus if we could stand on the earth and then go to the sun or some other planet, perhaps we would gain certain and sensory knowledge as to which moves.²³

But would such sensory evidence in fact yield certainty? A lunar inhabitant would see the earth and the sun revolve around his planet, and he would feel himself to be at rest.

Why did Galileo thus overstate his case? To make sense of his claims, we must understand his conception of science. We can hardly overestimate the importance of the ideas that a scientist brings to his scientific work, especially those that concern what he looks for and how he goes about finding it. Before a scientist can even begin to work, he must have some idea about what it means to know—that is, to know scientifically—and at least a general plan for advancing toward his knowledge. These ideas we may call the scientist's heuristic structure.

Galileo never vouchsafed a definition of science or a systematic account of scientific procedure. Yet his practice is eloquent. There is no doubt that he considered himself a disciple of Archimedes and that he believed mathematics to be the key to the interpretation of nature:

Philosophy is written in this great book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first studies the language and the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which is it humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.²⁴

This view of nature is the hidden root of natural science in the Renaissance. Galileo loathed people who reiterated "trumpetlike" everything that was old, but he adhered dogmatically to the notion that the world was written in mathematical symbols. His instinct for theoretical elegance told him that Copernicus was right, and although the actual observations were only partially in his favor, he was certain that he would be vindicated in the end. He displayed a scornful impatience with the complexity of data, a kind of self-righteousness characteristic of minds whose goals, when they address themselves to nature, are order and simplicity.

How did this outlook agree with early-seventeenth-century attitudes? Despite considerable opposition, Aristotle's view that true theories are discoverable still held sway in physics, while astronomy was dominated by the Ptolemaic reliance on geometrical arguments to "save the phenomena" without necessarily claiming that these arguments were true in nature. Hence, the orthodoxy of the day called for naive realism in physics and instrumentalism in astronomy.

Aristotle's position is particularly important because, however much his latter-day opponents attacked him, they usually retained more of his philosophy than they would have been fond of admitting. Galileo attacked several of Aristotle's ideas, but he never queried Aristotle's scientific realism—namely, the view that there is a uniquely true physical theory, discoverable by human powers of reason and observation, and that alternative theories are consequently false. Where Galileo differed from Aristotle was in his conception of the nature of this physical reality. To speak very broadly, Aristotle looked at nature as a process by which things fulfill their potential, and this turned speculation away from questions of structure and mechanism toward questions of function and development. This concern with teleology was allied with the belief that natural philosophy could be built directly on perception and that mathematics could not explain the colorful and qualitatively determined facts of common experience. Galileo considered such an approach naive and misleading, and he sought to transcend the limitations of Aristotelian empiricism by claiming that reality is mathematical in form and that mathematical theory should determine the very structure of experimental research. In this he was following the ancient mathematician Archimedes, who was commonly regarded by Galileo's contemporaries as a Platonist. Galileo's mathematical essentialism (the view that nature is basically mathematical) must, in fact, be seen against the background of the Platonic revival of the period, especially in Florence, despite the fact that Galileo differed from Plato in the character of his essentialism. Plato had held that the physical world was a copy or likeness of a transcendent, ideal world of mathematical forms; it was an inexact copy, and therefore physics could never yield absolute truth but only likely stories. Galileo, by contrast, held that the world actually consisted of the mathematical primary and secondary qualities and their laws and that these laws were discoverable in detail and with absolute certainty.

Conflict and Condemnation

It was in this frame of mind that Galileo, encouraged by his admirers, expanded the letter to Castelli into a brilliant treatise on hermeneutics, which he dedicated to Cosimo's mother, the grand duchess Christina. His friends, however, warned him "to keep out of the sacristy" and urged him to reiterate frequently his willingness to submit to the proper authorities.²⁵ The specific shoals Galileo had to avoid were issues that are little dwelt on now but that were of paramount importance to men of his time. The four main ones were the possible existence of rational creatures on other planets, the location of hell, Christ's ascension, and the anthropocentric purpose of creation.

Giovanni Ciampoli (ca. 1590-1643), who was later to be involved in the publication of Galileo's Dialogue, wrote from Rome on 28 February 1615, warning Galileo of the dangerous speculations to which his astronomical discoveries gave rise:

Your opinion of the phenomena of light and shade on the clear and spotted surfaces of the moon assumes some analogy between the earth and the moon. Someone adds to this and says that you assume that the moon is inhabited by men. Then another starts discussing how they could be descended from Adam or how they could have gotten out of Noah's ark, and many other extravagant ideas that you never even dreamed of. It is indispensable, therefore, to remove the possibility of malignant rumors by repeatedly protesting of one's willingness to defer to the authority of those who have jurisdiction over the human intellect in matters of the interpretation of the Scriptures.²⁶

That people should have been exercised over the location of hell will come as a surprise to the modern reader, be he Christian or agnostic. Yet the belief that hell was a real place situated in the center of the earth was widely held among Christians well into the seventeenth century. Francesco Ingoli, the first secretary of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, one of the most successful ventures of the new bureaucracy of the Counter-Reformation, objected to Galileo on precisely this point.²⁷ Characteristically, he appealed for support to the Roman authority of the day, Cardinal Bellarmine. The cardinal's influential views are worth rehearsing. In a chapter of his Controversia Generalis de Christo entitled "Hell is a subterranean place distinct from the tombs," he gives several arguments, and concludes:

The last is natural reason. There is no doubt that it is indeed reasonable that the place of devils and wicked damned men should be as far as possible from the place where angels and blessed men will be forever. The abode of the blessed (as our adversaries agree) is heaven, and no place is further removed from heaven than the center of the earth.²⁸

Phrases such as "natural reason" and "it is indeed reasonable" illustrate how "reason," like its yokefellow "nature," could be made equivalent, in less guarded moments, to the usual assumptions of contemporary good sense, where "good sense" was implicitly defined by the Council of Trent.

Centuries of theological insight had purged the Christian supernatural order of cruder elements, and by the seventeenth century the spatial location of hell was no longer held by all Christians to be an article of faith. But side by side with this rational religion, or concealed beneath it, there still persisted mental habits more deep-rooted and more ancient, which expressed themselves in the pictorial beliefs Bellarmine was defending. It is, of course, easier to think pictorially than abstractly; hence the vitality, for instance, of popular demonology. The factual basis of Christ's ascension seemed also to be imperiled by the motion of the earth. Here again the diagrammatic representation of theory that placed the sun at the center of the universe and the earth above or below it added to the difficulty of visualizing Christ ascending into the uppermost region of the heavens.²⁹ Finally, the notion that the world had been created for mankind set up psychological barriers to accepting the earth as merely another planet revolving about the sun. After his interview with the archbishop of Pisa in 1615, Benedetto Castelli wrote to Galileo: "He took but a single reason from his stock, omitting all others, and the gist of it was that since all things are created for man, it is clearly a necessary consequence that the earth cannot move like the stars."³⁰

It was with these difficulties in mind that Galileo set out to reconcile the Scriptures with the Copemican theory by reinterpreting contentious passages in the Bible and confuting current "misinterpretations." Galileo's solution was to affirm that the "Word of God" can be read not only in Scripture, where it is often to be understood metaphorically (as when God is said to have hands and feet, or that he is angry and repents) or according to the common parlance (as when it is stated that the sun rises and sets), but also in nature, where it is to be interpreted with all the rigor of mathematical language. Nature, which is the undoubted word of God, we are never to renounce. What, then, are we to do when Scripture, which we acknowledge to be supernaturally inspired, appears to conflict with nature? In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Galileo offered two quite different views of the relation between the Bible and natural science. One series of arguments was to become the characteristic reply of the latter part of the seventeenth century. According to this line of argument, there can be nothing in Scripture contrary to reason, but there are many things that are above reason. Moreover, where Scripture appears to contradict reason it requires reinterpretation, since God, the author of the two inspired books, cannot contradict himself. No one prior to Galileo spoke with such clarity of the relationship between science and Scripture:

I think that in discussing natural problems we should not begin from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sensory experiences and necessary demonstrations; for Holy Scripture and nature proceed alike from the divine Word, the former as the dictate of the Holy Spirit and the latter as the faithful executrix of God's commands. Furthermore, Scripture, adapting itself to the understanding of the common man, is wont to say many things that appear to differ from absolute truth as far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned. Nature, on the contrary, is inexorable and immutable; she never transcends the limits of the laws imposed upon her, and she is indifferent whether her secret reasons and ways of operating are understood by men. It would seem, therefore, that nothing physical that sense experience sets before our eyes, or that necessary demonstrations prove to us, should be called in question, not to say condemned, because of biblical passages that have an apparently different meaning. Scriptural statements are not bound by rules as strict as natural events, and God is not less excellently revealed in these events than in the sacred propositions of the Bible.³¹

Quoting the bon mot of Cardinal Baronius—"The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes"—Galileo added that the aim of Scripture is not to disclose what we can know by our senses and intellect (for then why would God have endowed us with these faculties?) but what surpasses human understanding.³² In his view, therefore, incidental references to physical phenomena in the Scriptures are simply irrelevant to problems of natural science: the conveyance of scientific truth is not the Bible's purpose.

But Galileo also made use of another line of argument that leads to a different conclusion. It was inspired by the traditional hermeneutics of Saint Augustine, who made clear that the literal interpretation of any given biblical passage that is not clearly allegorical or metaphorical is to be preferred at all times. Only when a demonstrated scientific truth conflicts with a passage as literally interpreted can that passage be reinterpreted. Galileo quotes Saint Augustine with approval on this point and then proceeds to observe:

In the books of the sages of this world, some natural things are truly demonstrated while others are merely stated. As to the former, it is the office of wise theologians to show that they are not contrary to the Holy Scriptures; as to the latter, which are asserted but not rigorously demonstrated, if they contain anything contrary to Holy Writ, they are to be considered undoubtedly false and proved so by every possible means.³³

The question, of course is: into which category does the heliocentric theory fall? Galileo was convinced that he had found a compelling physical proof of the motion of the earth. This is his celebrated, but unfortunately mistaken, argument from the tides. Galileo believed that the ebb and flow of the sea was caused by a combination of the earth's daily rotation on its axis and its annual revolution around the sun.³⁴ Confident that his new proof would take Rome by storm, Galileo journeyed to the Eternal City at the end of 1615. When the Tuscan ambassador, Pietro Guicciardini, heard that Galileo was coming, he quickly dispatched a letter to the secretary of state in Florence reminding him that Rome was hardly "a place to discuss things on the moon." Pope Paul V (1605-1621), apprised of Galileo's theory by the young Cardinal Alessandro Orsini, immediately replied: "You would do well to dissuade him from holding such a view."³⁵ The matter was referred to the Holy Office. The result was that Copernicus's De Revolutionibus and Foscarini's Letter were placed on the Index of Prohibited Books. Galileo, however, was spared any unpleasantness and even given a certificate by Cardinal Bellarmine to the effect that he had not been asked to recant any of his theories.

Galileo had practically resigned himself to silence when Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, a native Florentine, was elected pope in 1623 under the name Urban VIII (1623-1644). In the following spring Galileo journeyed to Rome where Urban VIII granted him no less than six audiences; gave him a painting, two medals, several Agni Dei, and the promise of a pension for his son; and, last but not least, agreed that he could write about the motion of the earth provided he represented it not as reality but as a scientific hypothesis. During his stay in Rome, Galileo made the acquaintaince of Cardinal Frederic Eutel Zollern, who offered to discuss the Copernican question with the pope before his return to Germany. Zollern represented to the pope that the German Protestants were all in favor of the new system and hence that it was necessary to proceed with the utmost caution before the church attempted to settle the Copernican question. The pope replied that the church had never declared the view of Copernicus to be heretical and would not do so, but that there was no reason to suppose that a proof of the Copernican system would ever be forthcoming.³⁶ Galileo returned to Florence with this encouraging news and set to work on his Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems. Unfortunately, Cardinal Zollern died in 1625, and Galileo lost a friend who could have been a key witness at his trial eight years later. Misfortune also struck in the form of ill health; between 1626 and 1629 Galileo was unable to work with any regularity, and it was only in January 1630 that he managed to finish his long-awaited masterpiece. He hoped that it would be steered through the shoals of Roman censorship by his friends Cesare Ciampoli and the Dominican Niccolò Riccardi, who had become Master of the Apostolic Palace and whose duty it was to authorize the publication of books.

When Riccardi received the manuscript of the Dialogue from Galileo's hands in the spring of 1630, he passed it on to a fellow Dominican, Raffaello Visconti. Visconti was sympathetic to astronomy, but his interests extended to astrology and the occult sciences as well. He was a personal friend of Orazio Morandi, the abbot of S. Prassede in Rome, who was known to have spent a considerable time in the company of Antonio and Giovanni de' Medici, mastering the secrets of the Hermetic tradition. In the spring of 1630, probably in the first fortnight of May, Morandi published certain prophecies based on astrological computations, among them one that predicted the early death of the pope. Galileo, who had arrived in Rome on 3 May, was almost certainly unaware of this incident when he received, on the 24th of May, an invitation to dine with Morandi in the company of Visconti; but Roman gossip had already linked his name with theirs. Galileo left Rome on 26 June, and shortly thereafter Morandi was imprisoned in the Tor di Nona. Galileo requested information from a mutual friend, who replied on 17 August that the trial was so secret that there was no way of knowing what was happening. At the trial an "Astrological Discourse on the Life of Urban VIII" bearing Visconti's name was brought forward. Visconti must have been at least partly successful in his plea of innocence, since he was only banished from Rome, while several others received heavy sentences. Morandi himself died in prison on 9 October 1630, before the completion of his trial.

In the spring of 1631 Urban VIII issued a bull (renewing the prescriptions of Sixtus V's bull Coeli et Terrae Creator of 5 January 1586) against astrologers who claimed the power of knowing the future and of setting in motion secret forces for the good or harm of the living. Urban commanded that an eye should be kept on such magical arts as were directed against the life of the pope and that of his relatives down to the third degree. Guilty parties were to be punished not only with excommunication but also with death and confiscation of property. That Galileo's name should have been associated with those of Morandi and Visconti was unfortunate, to say the least. Little did he suspect that his intimacy with Ciampoli would prove even more damaging.

Urban VIII was a poet in his leisure hours and enjoyed the company of literary men, one of whom was Giovanni Ciampoli, his secretary of briefs. Ciampoli's relations with the pope were quite intimate, and he became confident that he could read his master's mind. He was also impatient to secure the cardinal's hat that Urban VIII distributed to men whom Ciampoli considered his inferiors. In his frustration he became reckless and allowed himself to be befriended by acquaintances of the Spanish cardinal Gaspare Borgia, the spokesman of Philip IV and a thorn in Urban's flesh. When Cardinal Borgia publicly protested against the pope"s position in the struggle between France and the House of Hapsburg in a stormy consistory on 8 March 1632, Urban decided to purge his entourage of pro-Spanish elements. He was particularly incensed upon hearing of Ciampoli's relations with the Spaniards. He stripped Ciampoli of his considerable powers and in August 1632 exiled him to the governorship of the small town of Montalto; Ciampoli was never allowed to return to Rome.

Ciampoli's downfall was to have important consequences for Galileo. In 1630 and 1631 Ciampoli had played a vital role in securing permission for the printing of Galileo's Dialogue. Visconti had informed Riccardi that he approved of the book and that it needed only a few minor corrections. Riccardi, after considerable anguish and delay, granted the imprimatur, first for Rome, later for Florence where it was to be censored by the local consultor of the Inquisition. He insisted, however, that the preface and te conclusion be forwarded to him. When the Florentine censor gave permission to go to press in September 1630, Riccardi began to raise difficulties and to claim that Galileo had agreed to return to Rome to discuss the final draft. Meanwhile, an outbreak of plague had rendered travel between Florence and Rome difficult, and Riccardi proposed that a copy of the work be sent to Rome "to be revised by Monsignor Ciampoli and myself."³⁷ Even this requirement was eventually waived, and thereafter Riccardi heard no more of the book until a printed copy reached him in Rome; above the Florentine imprimatur he discovered, to his horror, his own approbation. As Urban VIII remarked to the Tuscan ambassador, "the name of the Master of the Holy Palace has nothing to do with books printed elsewhere."³⁸ Summoned to account for his behavior, Riccardi excused himself by saying that he had received orders to license the book from Ciampoli himself.³⁹

The Dialogue had gone to press in June 1631. The publisher had decided to print a thousand copies, a large edition for the time, and the work was not completed until 21 February 1632. Copies did not reach Rome until the end of March or early April, thus bursting onto the Roman scene only a few weeks after the consistory in which Cardinal Borgia attacked Urban VIII. Any "Ciampolata," as Urban put it,⁴⁰ was bound to be looked at closely. Moreover, the Roman imprimatur on a Florentine publication was bound to arouse suspicion. Riccardi was instructed to write to the Florentine inquisitor and have a ban placed on the sale of Galileo's book pending further notice. In the climate of deep suspicion that followed the Borgia incident, even the emblem of three dolphins (which could be associated with Hermetism) on the frontispiece caused concern. It was with relief that Riccardi learned that the device was not Galileo's but the printer's and appeared on all of his publications.

In the summer of 1632 Urban VIII ordered a Preliminary Commission to investigate the licensing of the Dialogue. In the file on Galileo in the Holy Office the Commission found an unsigned memorandum of an injunction, allegedly received by Galileo in 1616, "not to hold, teach or defend in any way whatsoever" that the earth moves.⁴¹ The authenticity of the document is now contested, but the commissioners considered it genuine and concluded that Galileo had contravened a formal order of the Holy Office.⁴² In the light this discovery Galileo was summoned to Rome, arriving, after much delay, on 13 February 1633; he remained in Rome as guest of the Tuscan ambassador while three theologians read his Dialogue to ascertain whether he had presented the Copernican doctrine as a proved fact rather than a hypothesis. The closing paragraph of the Dialogue contained a statement, proposed by Urban himself, to the effect that the Copernican view was "neither true nor conclusive" and that "it would be excessive boldness for anyone to limit and restrict the divine power and wisdom to one particular fancy of his own."⁴³ Unfortunately, Galileo had put these words into the mouth of Simplicio, the Aristotelian pedant, who cuts such a poor intellectual figure throughout the Dialogue. The theologians were quick to spot this; and

the pope, when it was called to his attention, was personally affronted.

On 12 April Galileo was summoned to the Holy Office; there he was kept in custody and twice interrogated, before being allowed to return to the residence of the Tuscan ambassador. He appeared again before the tribunal on 10 May and 21 June, but at no time was he physically tortured or molested. In the end, despite a vigorous denial that he had intended to argue in favor of the truth of the heliocentric system, Galileo was judged to have contravened the orders of the church. On the morning of 22 June 1633 he was taken to a hall in the convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, where he was made to kneel while the sentence condemning him to imprisonment was read. Still kneeling, Galileo was ordered to abjure his error. He recanted in the following words:

I, Galileo Galilei, son of the late Vincenzio Galilei of Florence, aged seventy years, tried personally by this court, and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General throughout the Christian Republic against heretical depravity, having before my eyes the most Holy Gospels, and laying my own hands on them, do swear that I have always believed, do now believe, and with God's help will in the future believe all that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church does hold, preach, and teach. But since I, after having been admonished by this Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the sun is the center of the universe and immovable, and that the earth is not the center of the same and that I was neither to hold, defend, nor teach in any manner whatsoever, either orally or in writing, the said false doctrine, … did write and cause to be printed a book in which I treat of the said already condemned doctrine, and bring forward arguments of much efficacy in its favor, without arriving at any solution; I have been judged vehemently suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the sun is the center of the universe and immovable and that the earth is not the center of the same nor immovable.

Nevertheless, wishing to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies…. And I swear that for the future I will neither say nor assert in speaking or writing such things as may bring upon me similar suspicion….⁴⁴

Galileo was not formally incarcerated but was allowed to leave for Siena and later Florence, where he was confined to his country estate.

Galileo sought comfort in work, and within two years he completed the Two New Sciences, the book to which his lasting fame as a scientist is attached. When he cast about for a publisher, he came up against a new problem: the church had issued a general prohibition against printing or reprinting any of his books. Through a friend in Venice, Galileo's manuscript reached the famous publisher Louis Elzevir in Holland, a Protestant country over which the Roman church had no power. At once Elzevir undertook the printing; Galileo feigned surprise and pretended not to know how the manuscript had left Italy. Although it is unlikely that anyone believed his story, the church let the publication of the Two New Sciences in 1638 go unchallenged. Galileo, however, was never successful in obtaining the pardon he longed for and was still under house arrest when he received the visit of the young English poet John Milton. Of this visit little is known, but the context in which Milton mentions it is highly significant. It occurs in the Areopagita, a speech addressed to Parliament against an ordinance requiring the licensing of all books:

I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries where this kind of Inquisition tyrannizes … that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fustian. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner of the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.⁴⁵

In fact, Galileo's condemnation was the result of the complex interplay of untoward political circumstances, personal ambitions, and wounded prides. Nevertheless, Milton was right in believing that the whole episode had the effect of inhibiting scientific speculation in Catholic countries. He was also right in sensing the underlying conflict between the authoritarian ideal of the Counter-Reformation and the nascent desire and need for freedom in the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Had Galileo been less devout, he could have refused to go to Rome; Venice offered him asylum. Had he been less convinced of the truth of his theory, he could have treated it as mere conjecture and remained at peace with the church. But Galileo could not resign himself to either course. He pressed for a prompt acceptance of his theories, and Urban VIII responded with a stern reaffirmation of the authority of the pope. Science and religion were both to suffer from the clash, and what could have been a fruitful dialogue proved to be a bitter feud. It was not until 1832 that Galileo's Dialogue was dropped from the Index of Prohibited Books and Catholics allowed to teach Copemicanism with complete freedom.

Notes

¹ For an introductory account of Galileo's difficulties with the church see Jerome L. Langford, Galileo, Science, and the Church, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1971); also Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1955). Pietro Redondi has recently argued, in Galileo eretico (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), that the trial for teaching that the earth moves was a cover-up for the more serious charge that Galileo's atomism imperiled the Catholic dogma of transubstantiation. Redondi's case rests on the highly conjectural attribution of an anonymous letter to the Jesuit Orazio Grassi.

² For a general account of the Counter-Reformation see Arthur G. Dickens, The Counter Reformation (London: Thomas & Hudson, 1968); Marvin R. O'Connell, The Counter Reformation (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

³ Luigi Firpo, "Filosofia italiana e contriforma," Rivista di filosofia 41 (1950): 166, relying on I. Fuligatti, Vita Roberti Bellarmini Politiani S.J. (Antwerp, 1631), pp. 189-190.

⁴ Another great systematizer was the Dominican Melchior Cano, whose De Locis Theologicis Libri Duodecim was published in 1563 and reprinted six times before 1605; see P. Mandonnet, "Melchior Cano," Dictionnaire de théologie catholique 2:1538.

⁵ Jean Delumeau, Vie économique et sociale de Rome dans la seconde moitié du XVI^e siècle, 2 vols. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1957-1959), 1:219.

⁶ Robert Bellarmine, Controversia Generalis de Summo Pontifice 1.2, in Opera Omnia, 12 vols. (Paris: L. Vivès, 1870-1874), 1:464-465.

⁷ Bellarmine, De Officio Principis Christiani Libri Tres 1.11, in Opera Omnia 8:109-110.

⁸ See H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 109-110.

⁹ Heinrich Reusch, Die "Indices Librorum Prohibitorum" des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1961), pp. 176-208.

¹⁰ Luigi Firpo, "I1 processo di Giordano Bruno," Rivista storica italiana 60 (1948): 542-597; 61 (1949): 5-59; Luigi Firpo, "Processo e morte di Francesco Pucci," Rivista di filosofia 40 (1949): 371-405.

¹¹Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio Favaro, 20 vols. (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1899-1909), 11:119 (letter of 31 May 1611). On Galileo and Copernicanism see William R. Shea, Galileo's Intellectual Revolution, 2d ed. (New York: Science History Publications, 1977); Maurice Clavelin, The Natural Philosophy of Galileo, trans. A. J. Pomerans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978); Ernan McMullin, ed., Galileo: Man of Science (New York: Basic Books, 1967); Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor, 1957); and Alexandre Koyré, Galileo Studies, trans. John Mepham (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978).

¹² Galileo Galilei, Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari, in Opere 5:93.

¹³ Ibid., p. 238, and critical apparatus for lines 29-30.

¹⁴ As late as 1618 Federico Cesi found it necessary to argue that the heavens are not crystalline spheres. See his letter of 14 Aug. 1618 to Cardinal Bellarmine, "De caeli unitate, tenuitate fusaque et pervia stellarum motibus natura ex sacris litteris," and Bellarmine's reply, in Christoph Scheiner, Rosa Ursina (Bracciano, 1630), pp. 777-783.

¹⁵ Galileo, Istoria e dimostrazioni, in Opere 5:138-139, and critical apparatus for line 24.

¹⁶ Galileo's letter to a Florentine correspondent, Feb. 1610, Opere 10:233.

¹⁷ An incomplete translation of this work is given in Drake's Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, pp. 175-216.

¹⁸ Letter from Luigi Maraffi to Galileo, 10 Jan. 1615, Opere 12:127.

¹⁹ Letter from Cesi to Galileo, 12 Jan. 1615, Opere 12:129.

²⁰ Paolo Antonio Foscarini, Lettera sopra I'opinione de Pittagorici e del Copernico della mobilità della terra (Naples, 1615).

²¹ Letter from Bellarmine to Foscarini, 12 Apr. 1615, in Galileo, Opere 12:171-172.

²² "Considerazioni sopra l'opinione Copernicana," Opere 5:367-368.

²³ Ibid., pp. 368-370.

²⁴ Galileo, The Assayer, in Discoveries and Opinions, trans. Drake, pp. 237-238. Here and in what follows I have made substantial alterations to Drake's translations. See Opere 6:232.

²⁵ Letter from Piero Dini to Galileo, 2 May 1615, Opere 12:175.

²⁶ Letter from Ciampoli to Galileo, 28 Feb. 1615, Opere 12:146. As early as 1611 Campanella had used Galileo's discovery of similarities between the earth and the moon as a peg on which to hang some of his most daring speculations: "There is much to be discussed about the shape of the stars and the planets and the kind of government to be found among the inhabitants of celestial bodies…. If the moon is more contemptible than the earth … its inhabitants are less happy than we are" (letter to Galileo, 12 Jan. 1610, in Galileo, Opere 11:22). As such ideas became widespread, Galileo felt it necessary to write to Cardinal Giacomo Muti in 1616 to deny that he assumed the existence of rational creatures on the moon (letter to Muti, 28 Feb. 1616, Opere 12:240-241).

²⁷ Ingoli, De Situ et Quiete Terrae contra Copernicum Disputatio, in Galileo, Opere 5:408.

²⁸ Robert Bellarmine, Controversia Generalis de Christo 5.10, in Opera Omnia 1:418. Bellarmine also located purgatory and limbo at the center of the earth, near hell (Controversia Generalis de Purgatorio, 2.6, in Opere Omnia 3:109-112).

²⁹ This was felt to be a serious difficulty by J. G. Locher, Disquisitiones Mathematicae de Controversiis et Novitatibus Astronomicis (Ingolstadt, 1614), p. 23; Paolo Foscarini, Lettera sopra I'opinione de Pittagorici, pp. 15-16; Marin Mersenne, Quaestiones Celeberrimae in Genesim (Paris, 1624), col. 897. Galileo sought to allay such fears in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, trans. Stillman Drake, 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1967), p. 357.

³⁰ Castelli to Galileo, 12 Mar. 1615, in Galileo, Opere 12:154.

³¹Discoveries and Opinions, trans. Drake, pp. 182-183; Opere 5:316-317. This letter was first published by Matthias Bemegger in Strassburg in 1636, but it had already enjoyed a wide manuscript circulation; for example, in the "Fondo Corsiano" of the Roman Accademia dei Lincei alone, Ada Alessandrini found four manuscript copies (Galileo Galilei: Celebrazioni del IV centenario della nascita [Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 1965], p. 174).

³²Discoveries and Opinions, trans. Drake, p. 186; Opere 5:319.

³³Discoveries and Opinions, trans. Drake, p. 194; Opere 5:327.

³⁴ For Galileo's argument see Shea, Galileo's Intellectual Revolution, pp. 172-189.

³⁵ Guicciardini to Curzio Picchena, 5 Dec. 1615, in Galileo, Opere 12:242.

³⁶ Letter from Galileo to Federico Cesi, 8 June 1624, Opere 13:182.

³⁷ Letter from Castelli to Galileo, 21 Sept. 1630, Opere 14:150.

³⁸ Letter from Niccolini to Andrea Cioli, 5 Sept. 1632, Opere 14:384.

³⁹ From an account of Galileo's trial written by Giovanfrancesco Buonamici, in Galileo, Opere 19:410.

⁴⁰ Letter from Niccolini to Cioli, 26 Feb. 1633, Opere 15:56. Ciampoli was not the only dignitary to incur the wrath of the pope. In July 1633 Cardinal Roberto Ubaldini, suspected of sympathizing with the Spaniards, was deprived of "the share of the poor cardinals," namely the emolument paid by the Holy See to prelates who had no independent means of subsistence. Ubaldini was one of the cardinals to have received a telescope from Galileo, and in his letter of acknowledgment had professed himself eager to help Galileo (letter of 29 July 1618, Opere 12:401).

⁴¹Opere 19:322.

⁴² On this document see de Santillana, Crime of Galileo, pp. 261-274. Langford, Galileo, Science, and the Church, pp. 93-97; Stillman Drake and Giorgio de Santillana, in appendices to Ludovico Geymonat, Galileo Galilei: A Biography and Inquiry into His Philosophy of Science, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 205-225.

⁴³Opere 7:489. The pope's argument had already appeared in print in Agostino Oregio, De Deo Uno (Rome, 1629), pp. 193-195; quoted in Antonio Favaro, Gli oppositori di Galileo VI: Maffeo Barberini (Venice: Antonelli, 1921), pp. 26-27.

⁴⁴Opere 19:406-407; see also Langford, Galileo, Science, and the Church, pp. 153-154.

⁴⁵The Essential Milton, ed. Douglas Bush (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949), p. 183.