We saw at the beginning of Chapter 2 the absurdity of the popular belief that there was no science in the Middle Ages, and how the myth of the medieval church’s persecution of scientists is exploded by sheer historical evidences to the contrary. Not only were classical Greek astronomy and geometry taught as standard in the medieval universities of Europe, but it was monks and priests in pursuit of a deeper understanding of divine light who first began the process of unravelling the mathematical physics of the rainbow. Moreover, a succession of monastic alchemists from Friar Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century to George Ripley in the late fifteenth were free to undertake major researches into reactive and metallurgical chemistry, while burgeoning medical schools in Paris, Montpellier, Bologna, and Padua taught human and animal anatomy and even dissected human corpses before students. The papal physician Guy de Chauliac investigated the new fourteenth-century scourge, bubonic plague – he caught it himself, and survived – as well as producing his formidable clinical masterpiece Chirurgia Magna (“Great Surgery”), the greatest single treatise on surgery from the entire Middle Ages, in 1361. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, moreover, Merton College, Oxford – all the dons of which were in holy orders – became a European “centre of excellence” in the study of the mathematics of motion and acceleration. Merton’s William of Heytesbury’s research into the acceleration of falling bodies, in the “mean speed theorem” of around 1360, even preceded Galileo’s, and William pioneered, and may have invented, the use of block graphs as a means of representing increasing mathematical proportions. Several brass instruments of the “Merton Geometers” are still preserved in Oxford. So if this was persecuting science, one wonders what encouraging it would have looked like!
But four names are always wheeled out in the persecution litany: Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, and Darwin. So let us look at them one by one, although we will save Darwin for Chapter 9.
Copernicus, so the mythology goes, dared to break silence and state the truth that the earth rotated around the sun in the teeth of the church’s suppression of the fact. But he only dared to publish his great book declaring the truth as he lay on his deathbed in 1543, for otherwise the Inquisition would “get him”. I have probably heard this tale more times than I have eaten the proverbial hot dinners, and it is pure nonsense, dispelled by the hard facts themselves.
For one thing, the Catholic Church had no doctrinal statement one way or the other on cosmology in 1543. Yes, the geocentric (earth-centred) cosmology was the accepted one, but only because it was the system that accorded with (a) common sense, and (b) the writings of the pagan Greek astronomer Ptolemy, whose mathematical cosmology was taught across Europe, and (c) it was implied on a common-sense level in Scripture. For does not the earth appear to be rock solid and stable, and do not all the heavenly bodies appear to rise and set around it? And if the earth were rotating on its axis, would we not all be flung off into space?
The well-documented Nicholas Copernicus of history was a churchman: a canon of the Polish cathedral of Frombork, probably a lay canon and a Church lawyer. He came from a high-status family, being the nephew of a bishop, and had been educated first in Cracow, then in several leading Italian Renaissance universities, before taking up his canonry. He was a sincerely devout man with a lifelong passion for astronomy, and by his thirties had become concerned about the problems implicit in the geocentric cosmology because the observed motions of the planets often differed from the predicted ones. His sun-centred system, one should not forget, had, as he reminded his readers, classical Greek antecedents; and he was discussing it in writing with friends as early as 1510–13, probably including his bishop friend, Johannes Dantiscus. It had clearly come to be known across Europe by 1536, for in that year Cardinal Schönberg in Italy wrote a friendly and admiring letter to Copernicus requesting technical details. And Copernicus was so clearly delighted with this request that he printed it in full as part of the prefatory pages to his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies”) in 1543. And far from there being a backlash, Copernicus’s Lutheran disciple, Joachim Rheticus of Wittenberg, further published a printed synopsis of the sun-centred system, Narratio Prima (“First Account”), in 1540, with a second edition in 1541. And no one, Catholic or Protestant, got arrested or punished!
So why did Copernicus wait until he was dying before he published his magnum opus? The truth is that he did not. While his health was already deteriorating the sixty-nine- or seventy-year-old Copernicus seems to have suffered a stroke as yet another Lutheran disciple, Andreas Osiander, was seeing De Revolutionibus through the press in Nuremberg, and he was within a few days or even hours of death when the first copies arrived after their over-600-mile journey across eastern Europe.
But there were probably two other factors involved in the delay: firstly, Copernicus was a perfectionist, and all too aware of mathematical anomalies in his sun-centred theory. Secondly, being a quiet man, he probably feared ridicule, as he realized that his theory seemed to fly in the face of common sense. We must never forget that De Revolutionibus was a deeply mathematical book, dealing with problems in technical astronomy, and in no way conceived as a challenge to established ideas. Copernicus was too much of a conservative figure for that. Yet very importantly, from our point of view, the church did nothing whatsoever. And a second edition went peacefully through the press, in Basel, in 1566.
Giordano Bruno was a very different kettle of fish, however, for he was openly provocative, often downright insulting to Christianity, and what might be styled a triple-starred “Grade A” heretic, who was not an astronomer, but did become fascinated by certain philosophical ideas which he drew from Copernicanism. Born in Naples in 1548, and becoming a Dominican friar, he abandoned the doctrine of transubstantiation – where the bread and wine become the body and blood of Jesus at the Eucharist – and went to Geneva. But he was too outrageous for the Calvinists, and had to get out. He then caused uproar in Toulouse, Wittenberg, and Oxford – where he poured contempt on the university and its Aristotelian philosophy.
In many respects, it was the dominant teleological philosophy of Aristotle of the European universities which, along with wider Christian thought, was Bruno’s main target. He had moved away from the orthodox position of a God–creation separation to a sort of classical pagan pantheism in which God was everything, and everything was divine. It was, of course, quintessentially heretical in so far as it erased any distinction between God and humanity, and did away with Jesus as saviour, and with sin and grace, making Christianity (along with Judaism and Islam) an irrelevance.
The appeal of Copernicanism to Bruno was not scientific, but metaphysical. If the earth were not at the centre of creation, cosmologically and spiritually, then could there not perhaps be myriads of other worlds and beings unmentioned in Scripture, throughout a pantheistic infinity?
And Bruno cherry-picked ideas not only from the devout Copernicus, but even from the mid fifteenth-century German Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, whom many see as a founder of the north European Renaissance. Some of Cusa’s ideas on relative motion, moreover, had even influenced Copernicus, and had themselves been coloured in turn by the fourteenth-century Oxford don Thomas Bradwardine, who had asked whether an infinitely powerful creator God could have created an infinity of worlds if he had chosen to do so. And to give some idea of the openness of debate in “High Medieval” academic Christendom, not only was Cusa a cardinal, but Bradwardine had died in office as Archbishop of Canterbury.
Yet whereas Bradwardine, Cusa, Copernicus, and the Merton College geometers had explored relative motion and infinity within the context of their common Christian faith, Bruno did so within a pagan metaphysic. And while he could well have got away with that in itself, he tipped things over the edge of tolerance when he began to lash out and treat traditional learning and Christendom with ridicule. And it was that, not astronomical science, which really brought him to the stake in Rome in February 1600.
Traits similar to those found in Bruno figured prominently in Galileo Galilei, although the “martyr of science” myth adroitly sidesteps them.
Galileo’s first brush with the Roman Inquisition had come in 1604, when he was forty years old, and a professor of mathematics at the great Italian University of Padua. Yet the brush had not come from his defending truth against mumbo-jumbo: quite the opposite, in fact, for he got into trouble for calculating horoscopes! For at that time Galileo was trying to support a lady friend, Marina Gamba, and their three love children on a small academic salary, and whatever earnings he could pick up besides. And oh, how he wanted fame, wealth, and position!
His opportunity came in 1609, when, hearing of the invention of the telescope in Holland, he made one himself, got a reward from his employers, the Serene Republic of Venice, then between November that year and January 1610 used the telescope to discover that the moon was rough and mountainous, Jupiter had four moons, and the stars seemed to recede to infinity. By 1612, moreover, he had also discovered spots on the sun and the phases of Venus – all in contradiction to existing cosmological ideas.
Yet far from getting into hot water, Galileo found the celebrity he desired. Everyone wanted to meet him, including great churchmen, and Cosimo II Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, made him his court philosopher. Central, however, to Galileo’s getting into trouble were two factors. Firstly, his acrimonious dispute with Jesuit astronomers about the nature of sunspots; and secondly, his often adversarial and mocking style of argument, for Galileo could be formidable in debate and, it was said, resembled a lion among sheep. Of course, there was nothing wrong with that in itself, for the universities of medieval and Renaissance Europe often ran on fierce intellectual confrontation, as had been the case with Bruno. But things could easily get out of hand if one misjudged the time, place, and context.
By 1610 Galileo had become firmly convinced of the physical and not just philosophical truth of Copernicanism, and felt that his recent telescopic discoveries, which had made him famous across Europe overnight, tipped the balance of evidence in favour of the sun-centred cosmology. What was still missing, however, were crucial mathematical measurements to clinch the moving earth argument. The Jesuit mathematicians, being cautious men, and many others too, were well aware of this lack, and did not like it when, instead of solid physical and mathematical proofs, Galileo could supply only analogies from his telescopic discoveries – and even resorted to ridiculing his questioners.
This led to his being formally warned by the very learned Cardinal Roberto Bellarmine and the Inquisition in 1616. But then in 1623, Galileo’s patron and friend Cardinal Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, which truly gave him friends at the Vatican Court, for Urban was a sophisticated thinker who fully understood all the astronomy involved. Feeling by 1631 that the Vatican might be more sympathetic, Galileo produced his famous Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemy’s and Copernicus’s. Yet far from coming over as an even-handed debate – conducted between three philosophical characters – it could be read as blatantly one-sided. The fixed-earth philosopher Simplicius invariably comes off worst, and Galileo even uses denigrating phrases like “mental pygmies” and “dumb idiots” about the anti-Copernicans.
Pugnacious men like Galileo never lack enemies, and once the Pope and the Inquisition had become riled at Galileo’s advocacy of Copernicanism in the light of his warning of 1616, then the skids were under him, and things quickly went to trial and condemnation. Yet let us be quite clear about why Galileo was on trial, for, unlike Bruno, no one ever questioned his Catholic Christian orthodoxy. Galileo’s heresy, rather, was the relatively minor one of effectively breaching the conditions of the 1616 restriction not to teach the Copernican theory as true, especially as he was still unable to prove it. His views about God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, salvation, and redemption were never once called into question. His heresy was technical, and about obedience, not Christian belief.
Indeed, in 1615, he had published his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, which still stands today as one of the most powerful arguments in print on the subject of the profound compatibility of science and Christian theology. In it, Galileo argued that God had written two books: his word (the Bible) and his works (nature), and these could never contradict one another when read and interpreted correctly and prayerfully. He also cited his contemporary Cardinal Boronius, who said that the Bible is to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
Of course, it would be false to claim that there were not churchmen who did attack Galileo’s interpretation of Scripture to accommodate a moving earth – such as the Dominican Fra. Tommáso Caccini, who preached furiously against him. On the other hand, Galileo had many clerical defenders, and was even sent an apology from Fra. Luigi Maraffi, Master General of the Dominican Order, who admired him. For the church as a body was not fundamentalist on the matter of scriptural interpretation.
Many factors came together in the Galileo affair, including factional politics between the Roman Catholic religious orders, the Vatican–Spanish political stand-off (the Spanish Inquisition, of all bodies, refused to condemn Galileo), the overweening pride of Pope Urban VIII and many cardinals, Vatican Court politics, and the international stresses across Christendom caused by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. And perhaps to top it all was Galileo’s love of academic rough-and-tumble, name-calling, and rival-ridiculing, which were just about permissible when directed against conservative Aristotelian philosophers in Padua, but could have horrendous consequences when indulged in throughout high-ranking international ecclesiastical circles.
Yet all of this was quietly overlooked by the anti-Christian myth-builders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who ignored Galileo the vigorous wrangler and saw only Galileo the pitiful old man confessing before the cardinals.
But all other circumstances apart, let us not forget Galileo’s genuine standing as a scientist, and as a physicist and astronomer of the very front rank. Yet equally importantly, let us remember that Galileo lived and died an obedient if disputatious son of the church, and that to see him as a martyr striving to make the world a cosy place for secularist ideologists to live in is pure mythology.