Martyr of Thought

THE CRIME OF GALILEO (338 pp.)--Georgia de Santillana--University of Chicago ($5.75).

In the gallery of what might be called martyrs of thought, the image of Galileo recanting before the Italian Inquisition stirs the minds of educated modern men second only to the picture of Socrates drinking the hemlock. That image of Galileo is out of focus, in the view of M.I.T.'s Professor Georgio de Santillana, because it has been distorted by three centuries of rationalist prejudice and clerical polemics.

To refocus it clearly, within the logic of its own time, Author de Santillana has written The Crime of Galileo, a masterly intellectual whodunit which traces not the life but the mental footsteps of Galileo on his road to personal tragedy. Brilliant, but rarefied, the book will appeal especially to those who like to watch a drama of ideas played out against the baroque backdrop of 17th century Italian intrigue.

Stuffed Flues. Galileo Galilei was born in 1564, a vintage year of the Renaissance that saw the birth of Shakespeare and the death of Michelangelo. He was himself one of the last universal figures of the age. At 22, he produced a hydrostatic balance (a device for measuring the specific gravities of objects), went on to construct the first astronomically usable telescope and perfect the law of the motion of falling bodies. He was equally at ease pruning his Florentine vineyards or penning satiric verse. For years, Galileo grubbed away in underpaid mathematical teaching posts without losing his love of learning or his abiding contempt for the ossified scholars of his time. He subscribed delightedly to a painter friend's proposed coat of arms for pedants: "A fireplace with a stuffed flue, and the smoke curling back to fill the house in which are assembled people to whom dark comes before evening."

In 1610, the 45-year-old Galileo tried to poke his telescope through the stuffed flue of the Ptolemaic-Aristotelian universe, and ran into trouble. In any other hands, the telescope might have been only a passing novelty. In Galileo's it pointed back to a neglected but explosive treatise called Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, written a half-century before by Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. On mathematical grounds, Copernicus had questioned the natural philosophy of Aristotle and the astronomy of Ptolemy which taught that the earth stood still in the center of the universe while the heavens revolved around it every 24 hours, and had gone on to suggest that, perhaps, the earth revolved around the sun. Everything Galileo could see through his telescope convinced him that Copernicus was right.

40,000 Brothers. The more thoughtful members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy still had open and even somewhat divided minds on the subject, and the Copernicus-Galileo theory might have prevailed if disgruntled scholars and disputatious monks had not begun a muttering campaign against Galileo which forced the issue prematurely. Yet Galileo was held in such esteem that when a Dominican monk thundered that mathematics was of the Devil, and that mathematicians should be banished from Christian states, the preacher-general of the order apologized to Galileo by letter: "Unfortunately, I have to answer for all the idiocies that thirty or forty thousand brothers may and do actually commit."

The spreading controversy looked like a "scandal" to Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, then the church's chief theologian. The rebuke which Galileo received at the hands of Bellarmine's Holy Office in 1616 (year of the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes) was mild. In sum, he was ordered not to "hold or defend" the proposition that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo did not interpret this as a gag order, and over the next eight years cautiously busied himself, in letters and pamphlets, with thinly disguised proselytizing for the Copernican view.

Tactical Affront. Ironically enough, it was under the prompting of Pope Urban VIII that Galileo began Dialogue on the Great World Systems, the masterpiece for which he was to be punished by the Inquisition. Warily checking his signals with the Pontiff. Galileo found that the Pope had only two reservations: i) the Copernican theory must be treated as a hypothesis, not as a certainty, and 2) since God was omnipotent and might create and govern the universe in any way He chose, Galileo was to put forth no proposition which "necessitated" God to operate in any one fixed way. Galileo abided by the Pope's injunctions, but committed the tactical affront of putting Urban VIII's words and viewpoint in the mouth of the simplest-minded character in the Dialogue, a doctrinaire Aristotelian named Simplicio. The powerful Jesuit faction, which advised the Pope, had no trouble convincing him that he had been made a fool of and that Galileo's views were "potentially more disastrous than Luther or Calvin." In 1633 Galileo stood before the Inquisition.

The ten cardinals of the Inquisition were legally embarrassed. The charges against Galileo were a flimsy rehash of the 1616 affair, and the evidence fell some distance short of proving heresy. In the end, Galileo was condemned largely on the ground that he had willfully violated Bellarmine's so-called "injunction" of 1616. Aside from its melodramatic trappings, e.g., the threat of torture (the use of which was never remotely contemplated, according to De Santillana), the drama of the Inquisition lies in Galileo's abject recantation of his life's work. For this, Author de Santillana offers plausible reasons. Galileo was in his 70th year, ill and afraid. Moreover, he was a devout Catholic. "He had realized at last that the authorities were not interested in truth but only in authority . . . Moralist historians . . . forget that he was a member of the Apostolic Roman communion and had to submit in some way."

Policemen of the Mind. It was the misfortune of Galileo to be caught in the crossfire between a retreating age of faith and an advancing age of reason. It was the misfortune of his inquisitors to think that they could be better defenders of the faith by becoming policemen of the mind. Author de Santillana unobtrusively underlines the story's modern parallels and quotes Galileo's ominous comment when he felt the first stirrings of thought control: "These are the innovations which are bound to lead to the ruin of states and to the subversion of commonwealths." The Inquisition banned the Dialogue and put the old man under house arrest to live out his eight remaining years. And in 1893, he won the fight he had lost 260 years before: by papal encyclical his views became official church doctrine.

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