Galileo’s Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love. Dava Sobel

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       [VII] The malice of my persecutors

      GALILEO ISSUED HIS CALL for a distinction between questions of science and articles of faith at an anxious moment in Church history.

      Stunned by the Protestant Reformation fomented in Germany around 1517, the Roman Church struck a defensive posture throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries called the Counter-Reformation. The Church hoped quickly to close the rift that had split Protestantism from Catholicism by convening an ecumenical council, but intrigues and obstacles of all sorts – including disputes over where to stage the event – postponed the meeting for many years, while the rift continued to widen. Finally Pope Paul III (the same pontiff honoured in the dedication of Copernicus’s book) convened bishops, cardinals and leaders of religious orders at Trent, where Italy bordered the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. On and off over a period of eighteen years, from 1545 to 1563, the Council of Trent debated and voted and ultimately drafted a series of decrees.^* These dictated how the clergy were to be educated, for example, and who was empowered to interpret Holy Scripture. Rejecting Martin Luther’s insistence on the right to a personal reading of the Bible, the council declared in 1546 that ‘no one, relying on his own judgment and distorting the Sacred Scriptures according to his own conceptions, shall dare to interpret them’.

      After the council finally concluded the twenty-five sessions of its long-drawn-out deliberations, its decrees became Church doctrine through a series of papal bulls (so named after the bulla, or round lead seal, affixed to pronouncements from the pope himself). In 1564, the year Galileo was born, certain important points from the debates were formulated into a profession of faith, worded by the Council of Trent and solemnly sworn over the ensuing decades by untold numbers of Church officials and other Catholics:

      I most firmly accept and embrace the Apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and the other observances and constitutions of the Church. I also accept Sacred Scripture in the sense in which it has been held, and is held, by Holy Mother Church, to whom it belongs to judge the true sense and interpretation of the Sacred Scripture, nor will I accept or interpret it in any way other than in accordance with the unanimous agreement of the Fathers.

      Galileo’s Letter to the Grand Duchess Cristina indirectly charged his opponents with violating this oath by bending the Bible to their purposes. His opponents, on the other hand, judged Galileo guilty of the same crime. His only hope of winning the argument lay in producing proof positive for the Copernican system. Then, since no truth found in Nature could contradict the truth of Scripture, everyone would realise that the Fathers’ judgment about the placement of the heavenly bodies had been hasty, and required reinterpretation in the light of scientific discovery.

      December 1615 thus brought Galileo to Rome brandishing new support for Copernicus – derived from observations of the Earth, not the heavens. The tidal motions of the great oceans, Galileo believed, bore constant witness that the planet really did spin through space. If the Earth stood still, then what could make its waters rush to and fro, rising and falling at regular intervals along the coasts? This view of the tides as the natural consequence of the turning Earth had originally occurred to him nearly twenty years previously, at Venice, when he boarded the barges that carried drinking water into the city from Lizzafusina. Watching the way the large cargoes of water sloshed in response to any changes in the ships’ speed or direction, he had found a model for the ebb and flow of the Adriatic and the Mediterranean.

      Now, lodged at the Tuscan embassy in the Villa Medici, Galileo passed the early part of January 1616 setting down in writing for the first time his theory of the tides. His social life during this labour consisted of meeting with fifteen to twenty men at a time in the homes of various Roman hosts, where he argued Copernicus’s cause in his most compelling style. The nervous Tuscan ambassador, Piero Guicciardini, fairly choked through these evenings, for he dreaded the possible cost of Galileo’s actions.

      ‘He is passionately involved in this fight of his’, Guicciardini complained to the grand duke, ‘and he does not see or sense what it involves, with the result that he will be tripped up and will get himself into trouble, together with anyone who supports his views. For he is vehement and stubborn and very worked up in this matter and it is impossible, when he is around, to escape from his hands. And this business is not a joke, but may become of great consequence, and the man is here under our protection and responsibility.’

      Galileo needed the evidence of the tides to support Copernicus because his astronomical findings СКАЧАТЬ