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Uh, no. You are the one reading too much revisionist history. On the morning of June 22, 1633, Galileo, dressed in the white shirt of penitence, entered the la
by transfire 10y ago
Uh, no. You are the one reading too much revisionist history.
On the morning of June 22, 1633, Galileo, dressed in the white shirt of penitence, entered the large hall of the Inquisition building. He knelt and listened to his sentence: "Whereas you, Galileo, the son of the late Vincenzo Galilei, Florentine, aged seventy years, were in the year 1615 denounced to this Holy Office for holding as true the false doctrine....." The reading continued for seventeen paragraphs...
"And, so that you will be more cautious in future, and an example for others to abstain from delinquencies of this sort, we order that the book Dialogue of Galileo Galilei be prohibited by public edict. We condemn you to formal imprisonment in this Holy Office at our pleasure."
"As a salutary penance we impose on you to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week for the next three years. And we reserve to ourselves the power of moderating, commuting, or taking off, the whole or part of the said penalties and penances."
"This we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, order and reserve by this or any other better manner or form that we reasonably can or shall think of. So we the undersigned Cardinals pronounce."
Seven of the ten cardinals signed the sentence.
Following the reading of the sentence, Galileo knelt to recite his abjuration:
"Desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Christians, this strong suspicion, reasonably conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Holy Church; and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me...."
"I, the said Galileo Galilei, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration, and recited it word for word at Rome, in the Convent of Minerva, this twenty-second day of June, 1633."
"I, Galileo Galilei, have abjured as above with my own hand."
- benbreen 10y agoYou're both right. No one who studies Galileo disputes that he ran afoul of the Inquisition. The question is whether the specifics of his case justify framing it as part of an epic battle between science and religion (or reason and ignorance, or any other binary opposition really), and I think the parent comment is correct in suggesting that most historians today would answer "no" to that. Mario Biagioli's book Galileo Courtier is a really excellent work of history that I recommend to anyone interested in the details - it's more about the role of patronage in supporting Galileo's work, but gives a lot of insight into the systems of authority at the time, and Galileo's unique personality.
- cygx 10y agoBe that as it may, but the fact remains that his sentencing explicitly stated that the heresy he was officially censored for was supporting an opinion as probable after it had been declared contrary to Holy Scripture.
- carlob 10y agoThere was also a third camp at the time: Jesuits. Apparently Galileo met with Jesuit astronomers at the Vatican Observatory, and they suggested he might save both scientific evidence and theological correctness by adopting the Tychonic system, where the center of the universe is still the earth, but all the planets revolve around the sun, which revolves around the earth. As it turns out, we now know that both the Copernican and the Tychonic are exactly equally wrong.
- gpderetta 10y ago"As it turns out, we now know that both the Copernican and the Tychonic are exactly equally wrong. " It seems to me that one is less wrong than the other. In particular one was a significantly better fit for the evidence available at that time. edit: typo
- qb45 10y agoI don't think they were exactly equally wrong. The Tychonic system doesn't quite predict stellar parallax, for example. I'd say it's the worse model of those two. And it looks less pretty on pictures, too. EDIT: Ironically, the lack of observable (at the time) parallax was reportedly used by Tycho Brahe to argue against heliocentrism, because "stars obviously can't be far enough to make prallax unobservable". Now, that's clearly wrong.
- huxley 10y agoTycho Brahe was wrong but on stronger scientific ground given the observations available, stellar parallax wasn't observed until around 1806 by Giuseppe Calandrelli and not definitively measured until 1838 by Friedrich Bessel.