The Warfare of Science. Andrew Dickson White
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took the trouble to try to show the astronomer his errors by argument. Other opponents were less considerate. Works appeared attacking his ideas—works all the more unmanly, since their authors knew how Galileo was restrained by force from defending himself; and, as if to accumulate proofs of the fitness of the Church to take charge of advanced instruction, his salary as professor at the University of Pisa was taken from him. Sapping and mining began. Just as the Archbishop of Pisa some years before had tried to betray Galileo with honeyed words to the Inquisition, so now Father Grassi tried it; and after various attempts to draw him out by flattery, suddenly denounced his scientific ideas as "leading to a denial of the real presence in the Eucharist."
And here science again loses ground. Galileo had announced his intention of writing upon the theory of the tides, but he retreated, and thus was lost a great treatise to the world.
For the final assault, the park of heavy artillery was at last wheeled into place. You see it on all the scientific battle-fields. It consists of general denunciation; and Father Melchior Inchofer, of the Jesuits, brought his artillery to bear well on Galileo with this declaration: that the opinion of the earth's motion is, of all heresies, the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous; that the immobility of the earth is thrice sacred; that argument against the immortality of the soul, the Creator, the incarnation, etc., should be tolerated sooner than an argument to prove that the earth moves. 52
But this state of things could not be endured forever. Urged beyond forbearance, Galileo prepares a careful treatise in the form of a dialogue, exhibiting the arguments for and against the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems. He then offers to submit to any conditions the Church tribunals may impose, if they will but allow it to be printed. At last they consent, imposing the most humiliating condition of all, which was a preface written by Father Ricciardi and signed by Galileo, in which the whole work was virtually exhibited as a play of the imagination, and not at all as opposed to the truth laid down in 1616 by the Inquisition.
The new work met with prodigious success; it put new weapons into the hands of the supporters of the Copernican theory. The preface only embittered the contest; it was laughed at from one end of Europe to the other as ironical. This aroused the enemy. The Jesuits, Dominicans, and the great majority of the clergy, returned to the attack more violent than ever; and Pope Urban VIII., his personal pride being touched, after some halting joined the clerical forces.
The first important piece of strategy was to forbid the sale of the work; but the first edition had already been exhausted and spread throughout Europe. Urban now became angry, and both Galileo and his works were placed in the hands of the Inquisition. In vain did the good Benedictine Castelli urge that Galileo was entirely respectful to the Church; in vain did he say that "nothing that could be done could now hinder the earth from revolving." He was dismissed, and Galileo was forced to appear in the presence of the dread tribunal without defender or adviser. There, as was so long concealed but as is now fully revealed, he was menaced with torture by express order of Pope Urban, and, as is now thoroughly established by documentary evidence, forced to abjure under threats, and subjected to imprisonment by command of Urban, the Inquisition deferring in the most servile manner to the papal authority.
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; 53 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 the heresy of the movement of the earth."
He was vanquished indeed, for he had been forced, in the face of all coming ages, to perjure himself; and, to complete his dishonor, he was obliged to swear to denounce to the Inquisition any other man of science whom he should discover to be supporting heresy—the "heresy of the movement of the earth."
Nor was this all. To the end of his life, nay, after his life was ended, this bitter persecution was continued, on the supposition that the great truths he revealed were hurtful to religion. After a brief stay in the dungeons of the Inquisition, he was kept in exile from family, friends, all his noble employments, and held rigidly to his promise not even to speak of his theory. When, in the midst of intense bodily sufferings from disease and mental sufferings from calamities in his family, he besought some little liberty, he was met with threats of a recommittal to his dungeon. When, at last, a special commissioner had reported to the ecclesiastical authorities that Galileo had become blind and wasted away with disease and sorrow, he was allowed but little more liberty, and that little tempered by the close surveillance of the ecclesiastical authorities. He was forced to bear contemptible attacks on himself and on his works in silence; he lived to see his ideas carefully weeded out from all the church colleges and universities in Europe; and when, in a scientific work, he happened to be spoken of as "renowned," the Inquisition ordered the substitution of the word "notorious." 54
Nor did the persecution cease with his death. Galileo had begged to be buried in his family tomb in Santa Croce; the request was denied: his friends wished to erect a monument over him; this, too, was refused. Pope Urban said to the embassador Niccolini that "it would be an evil example for the world if such honors were rendered to a man who had been brought before the Roman Inquisition for an opinion so false and erroneous, who had communicated it to many others, and who had given so great a scandal to Christendom." 55
In accordance, therefore, with the wish of the pope and the orders of the Inquisition, Galileo was buried ignobly, apart from his family, without fitting ceremony, without monument, without epitaph. Not until forty years after did Pierozzi dare to write his epitaph. Not until a hundred years after did Nelli dare transfer his remains to Santa Croce and erect above them a suitable monument. Even then the old conscientious hostility burst out: the Inquisition was besought to prevent such honors to "a man condemned for notorious errors;" and that tribunal refused to allow any epitaph to be placed above him which had not first been submitted to its censorship. Nor has that old conscientious consistency in hatred yet fully relented; hardly a generation since has not seen some Marini, or De Bonald, or Rallaye, or De Gabriac, suppressing evidence, or torturing expressions, or inventing theories, to blacken the memory of Galileo and save the reputation of the Church. 56
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