Page:EB1911 - Volume 11.djvu/426

 sacristy.” Unfortunately, he had already committed himself to dangerous ground. In December he repaired personally to Rome, full of confidence that the weight of his arguments and the vivacity of his eloquence could not fail to convert the entire pontifical court to his views. He was cordially received, and eagerly listened to, but his imprudent ardour served but to injure his cause. On the 24th of February 1616 the consulting theologians of the Holy Office characterized the two propositions—that the sun is immovable in the centre of the world, and that the earth has a diurnal motion of rotation—the first as “absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical, because expressly contrary to Holy Scripture,” and the second as “open to the same censure in philosophy, and at least erroneous as to faith.” Two days later Galileo was, by command of the pope (Paul V.), summoned to the palace of Cardinal Bellarmin, and there officially admonished not thenceforward to “hold, teach or defend” the condemned doctrine. This injunction he promised to obey. On the 5th of March the Congregation of the Index issued a decree reiterating, with the omission of the word “heretical,” the censure of the theologians, suspending, usque corrigatur, the great work of Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, and absolutely prohibiting a treatise by a Carmelite monk named Foscarini, which treated the same subject from a theological point of view. At the same time it was given to be understood that the new theory of the solar system might be held ex hypothesi, and the trivial verbal alterations introduced into the Polish astronomer’s book in 1620, when the work of revision was completed by Cardinal Gaetani, confirmed this interpretation. This edict, it is essential to observe, the responsibility for which rests with a disciplinary congregation in no sense representing the church, was never confirmed by the pope, and was virtually repealed in 1757 under Benedict XIV.

Galileo returned to Florence three months later, not ill-pleased, as his letters testify, with the result of his visit to Rome. He brought with him, for the refutation of calumnious reports circulated by his enemies, a written certificate from Cardinal Bellarmin, to the effect that no abjuration had been required of or penance imposed upon him. During a prolonged audience he had received from the pope assurances of private esteem and personal protection; and he trusted to his dialectical ingenuity to find the means of presenting his scientific convictions under the transparent veil of an hypothesis. Although a sincere Catholic, he seems to have laid but little stress on the secret admonition of the Holy Office, which his sanguine temperament encouraged him gradually to dismiss from his mind. He preserved no written memorandum of its terms, and it was represented to him, according to his own deposition in 1633, solely by Cardinal Bellarmin’s certificate, in which, for obvious reasons, it was glossed over rather than expressly recorded. For seven years, nevertheless, during which he led a life of studious retirement in the Villa Segni at Bellosguardo, near Florence, he maintained an almost unbroken silence. At the end of that time he appeared in public with his Saggiatore, a polemical treatise written in reply to the Libra astronomica of Padre Grassi (under the pseudonym of Lotario Sarsi), the Jesuit astronomer of the Collegio Romano. The subject in debate was the nature of comets, the conspicuous appearance of three of which bodies in the year 1618 furnished the occasion of the controversy. Galileo’s views, although erroneous, since he held comets to be mere atmospheric emanations reflecting sunlight after the evanescent fashion of a halo or a rainbow, were expressed with such triumphant vigour, and embellished with such telling sarcasms, that his opponent did not venture upon a reply. The Saggiatore was printed at Rome in October 1623 by the Academy of the Lincei, of which Galileo was a member, with a dedication to the new pope, Urban VIII., and notwithstanding some passages containing a covert defence of Copernican opinions, was received with acclamation by ecclesiastical, no less than by scientific authorities.

Everything seemed now to promise a close of unbroken prosperity to Galileo’s career. Maffeo Barberini, his warmest friend and admirer in the Sacred College, was, by the election of the 8th of August 1623, seated on the pontifical throne; and the marked distinction with which he was received on his visit of congratulation to Rome in 1624 encouraged him to hope for the realization of his utmost wishes. He received every mark of private favour. The pope admitted him to six long audiences in the course of two months, wrote an enthusiastic letter to the grand-duke praising the great astronomer, not only for his distinguished learning, but also for his exemplary piety, and granted a pension to his son Vincenzio, which was afterwards transferred to himself, and paid, with some irregularities, to the end of his life. But on the subject of the decree of 1616, the revocation of which Galileo had hoped to obtain through his personal influence, he found him inexorable. Yet there seemed reason to expect that it would at least be interpreted in a liberal spirit, and Galileo’s friends encouraged his imprudent confidence by eagerly retailing to him every papal utterance which it was possible to construe in a favourable sense. To Cardinal Hohenzollern, Urban was reported to have said that the theory of the earth’s motion had not been and could not be condemned as heretical, but only as rash; and in 1630 the brilliant Dominican monk Tommaso Campanella wrote to Galileo that the pope had expressed to him in conversation his disapproval of the prohibitory decree. Thus, in the full anticipation of added renown, and without any misgiving as to ulterior consequences, Galileo set himself, on his return to Florence, to complete his famous but ill-starred work, the Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo. Finished in 1630, it was not until January 1632 that it emerged from the presses of Landini at Florence. The book was originally intended to appear in Rome, but unexpected obstacles interposed. The Lincean Academy collapsed with the death of Prince Federigo Cesi, its founder and president; an outbreak of plague impeded communication between the various Italian cities; and the imprimatur was finally extorted, rather than accorded, under the pressure of private friendship and powerful interest. A tumult of applause from every part of Europe followed its publication; and it would be difficult to find in any language a book in which animation and elegance of style are so happily combined with strength and clearness of scientific exposition. Three interlocutors, named respectively Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio, take part in the four dialogues of which the work is composed. The first-named expounds the views of the author; the second is an eager and intelligent listener; the third represents a well-meaning but obtuse Peripatetic, whom the others treat at times with undisguised contempt. Salviati and Sagredo took their names from two of Galileo’s early friends, the former a learned Florentine, the latter a distinguished Venetian gentleman; Simplicio ostensibly derived his from the Cilician commentator of Aristotle, but the choice was doubtless instigated by a sarcastic regard to the double meaning of the word. There were not wanting those who insinuated that Galileo intended to depict the pope himself in the guise of the simpleton of the party; and the charge, though preposterous in itself, was supported by certain imprudences of expression, which Urban was not permitted to ignore.

It was at once evident that the whole tenor of this remarkable work was in flagrant contradiction with the edict passed sixteen years before its publication, as well as with the author’s personal pledge of conformity to it. The ironical submission with which it opened, and the assumed indetermination with which it closed, were hardly intended to mask the vigorous assertion of Copernican principles which formed its substance. It is a singular circumstance, however, that the argument upon which Galileo mainly relied as furnishing a physical demonstration of the truth of the new theory rested on a misconception. The ebb and flow of the tides were, he asserted, a visible proof of the terrestrial double movement, since they resulted from inequalities in the absolute velocities through space of the various parts of the earth’s surface, due to its rotation. To this notion, which took its rise in a confusion of thought, he attached capital importance, and he treated with scorn Kepler’s suggestion that a certain occult attraction of the moon was in some way concerned in the phenomenon. The theological censures which the book did not fail to incur were not slow in making themselves felt. Towards