In vain did Galileo try to protect himself by his famous letter to the duchess, in which he insisted that theological reasoning should not be applied to science. The rest of the story the world knows by heart; none of the recent attempts have succeeded in mystifying it. The whole world will remember forever how Galileo was subjected certainly to indignity and imprisonment equivalent to physical torture;[1] how he was at last forced to pronounce publicly, and on his knees, his recantation as follows: "I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my knees, and before your eminences, having before my eyes the Holy Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest, the error and heresy of the movement of the earth."[2]
He was vanquished indeed, for he had been forced, in the face of all coming ages, to perjure himself. His books were condemned, his friends not allowed to erect a monument over his bones. To all appearance his work was overthrown.
Do not understand me here as casting blame on the Roman Church as such. It must, in fairness, be said that some of its best men tried to stop this great mistake; even the pope himself would have been glad to stop it; but the current was too strong.[3] The whole of the civilized world was at fault, Protestant as well as Catholic, and not any particular part of it. It was not the fault of religion, it was the fault of the short-sighted views which narrow-minded, loud-voiced men are ever prone to mix in with religion, and to insist is religion.[4]
Were there time, I would refer at length to some of the modern mystifications of the history of Galileo. One of the latest seems to have for its groundwork the theory that Galileo was condemned for a breach of good taste and etiquette. But those who make this defense make the matter infinitely worse for those who committed the great
- ↑ It is not probable that torture in the ordinary sense was administered to Galileo. See Th. Martin, "Vie de Galilée," for a fair summing up of the case.
- ↑ For text of the abjuration, see "Private Life of Galileo," Appendix. As to the time when the decree of condemnation was repealed, various authorities differ. Artaud, p. 307, cited in an apologetic article in Dublin Review, September, 1865, says that Galileo's famous dialogue was published in 1744, at Padua, entire, and with the usual approbations. The same article also declares that in 1818 the ecclesiastical decrees were repealed by Pius VII., in full Consistory. Whewell says that Galileo's writings, after some opposition, were expunged from the "Index Expurgatorius," in 1818. Cantu, an authority rather favorable to the Church, says that Copernicus's work remained on the "Index" as late as 1835. Cantu, "Histoire Universelle," vol., xv., p. 483.
- ↑ For Baronius's remark see De Morgan, p. 26. Also Whewell, vol. i., p. 394.
- ↑ For an exceedingly striking statement, by a Roman Catholic historian of genius, as to popular demand for persecution, and the pressure of the lower strata, in ecclesiastical organizations, for cruel measures, see Balmès, "Le Protestantisme comparé au Catholicisme," etc., 4th ed., Paris, 1855, vol. ii. Archbishop Spaulding has something of the same sort in his Miscellanies. L'Epinois, "Galilée," p. 22, et seq., stretches this as far as possible, to save the reputation of the Church in the Galileo matter.
