For the lastest research on the Galileo/Church controversy members may want
to listen to this lecture given in January at the Perimeter Institute in
Waterloo, Ontario Canada.
David C. Lindberg, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin
³The Florentine Heretic? Galileo, the Church, and the Cosmos²
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/activities/community/generalpublic/publicle
ctures.php
(You need windows media player 9. For residents of Ontario it was also
broadcast on Rogers cable and TV Ontario's Big Ideas, so it will likely
be rebroadcast again.)
After hearing this lecture, I am now of the impression that Galileo was not
afraid of what his peers might say about him. Contrary to what Keostler
supposes, it is possible that his letter expressing his intention to
"suppress the truth" was a way of mocking his peers for not valuing the
truth.
Harry
Grimer wrote:
>
> Dealing with them in historical order I would like to quote an eminent
> liberal whom I'm whom I'm sure you would approve, to wit, Koestler, Fellow of
> the Astronomical society and, amongst other honours, nominated for a Nobel
> prize
> on no less than three occasions. No Papist apologist he - just an truthful
> liberal - so liberal he even committed suicide ;-)
>
> In The Sleepwalkers (1959) he writes,
>
> ==========================================================
> Page 362
>
> The letter is important for several reasons. Firstly, it
> provides conclusive evidence that Galileo had become a
> convinced Copernican in his early years. He was thirty-
> three when he wrote the letter; and the phrase 'many
> years ago' indicates that his conversion took place in
> his twenties. Yet his first explicit public pronouncement
> in favour of the Copernican system was only made in 1613,
> a full sixteen years after his letter to Kepler, when
> Galileo was forty-nine years of age. Through all these
> years he not only taught, in his lectures, the old
> astronomy according to Ptolemy, but expressly repudiated
> Copernicus. In a treatise which he wrote for circulation
> among pupils and friends, of which a manuscript copy,
> dated 1606, survives, [Kretschner, The Psychology of Men
> of Genius, trans. R.B.Cattell (London, 1931)] he adduced
> all the traditional arguments against the earth's motion:
> that rotation would make it disintegrate, that clouds
> would be left behind, etc., etc. - arguments which, if
> the letter is to be believed, he himself had refuted many
> years before.
>
> But the letter is also interesting for other reasons.
> In a single breath, Galileo four times evokes Truth:
> friend of Truth, investigating Truth, pursuit of Truth,
> proof of Truth; then apparently without awareness of the
> paradox, he calmly announces his intention to suppress
> Truth. This may partly be explained by the mores of late
> Renaissance Italy ('that age without a super-ego' as a
> psychiatrist described it); but taking that into account,
> one still wonders at the motives of his secrecy.
>
> Why, in contrast to Kepler, was he so afraid of publishing
> his opinions? He had, at that time, no more reason to fear
> religious persecution than Copernicus had. The Lutherans,
> not the Catholics, had been the first to attack the
> Copernican system - which prevented neither Rheticus nor
> Kepler from defending it in public. The Catholics, on the
> other hand, were uncommitted. In Copernicus' own day,
> they were favourably inclined towards him - it will be
> remembered how Cardinal Schoenberg and Bishop Giese had
> urged him to publish his book. Twenty years after its
> publication, the Council of Trent re-defined Church
> doctrine and policy in all its aspects, but it had nothing
> to say against the heliocentric system of the universe.
> Galileo himself, as we shall see, enjoyed the active
> support of a galaxy of Cardinals, including the future
> Urban VIII, and of the leading astronomers among the Jesuits.
> Up to the fateful year 1616, discussion of the Copernican
> system was not only permitted, but encouraged by them - under
> the one proviso, that it should be confined to the language
> of science, and should not impinge on the theological matters.
> The situation was summed up clearly in a letter from Cardinal
> Dini to Galileo in 1615: 'One may write freely as long as one
> keeps out of the sacristy.' This was precisely what the
> disputants failed to do, and it was at this point that the
> conflict began.
>
> But nobody could have foreseen these developments twenty years
> earlier, when Galileo wrote to Kepler.
> Thus legend and hindsight combined to distort the picture, and
> gave rise to the erroneous belief that to defend the Copernican
> system as a working hypothesis entailed the risk of
> ecclesiastical disfavour or persecution. During the first
> fifty years of Galileo's lifetime, no such risk existed; and
> the thought did not even occur to Galileo. What he feared is
> clearly stated in his letter: to share the fate of Copernicus,
> to be mocked and derided; ridendus et explodendum - 'laughed
> at and hissed off the stage' are his exact words. Like
> Copernicus, he was afraid of the ridicule both of the unlearned
> and the learned asses, but particularly of the latter: his
> fellow professors at Pisa and Padua, the stuffed shirts of the
> peripatetic school, who still considered Aristotle and Ptolemy
> as absolute authority. And this fear, as will be seen, was fully
> justified.
> ================================================================
