The Roman Inquisition. Thomas F. Mayer
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argument rests on a distinction between a “private and extrajudicial admonition” given by Bellarmino and Seghizzi’s “judicial precept.”63 Instead of demonstrating the nature of Bellarmino’s action, Frajese rests his case on the claim that the precept minute is a forgery. In addition to most of the timeworn arguments dating back to Wohlwill, especially the allegation that the precept minute is an unicum, contradicting all the other documents, and that the putative original should have been signed by Galileo and the witnesses—a claim constantly repeated, even though, given the lack of any original precepts, one necessarily without evidence—he bases his conclusion on more or less original codicological and palaeographical grounds.64 First, the minute is in an odd place, beginning on the verso of one sheet and continuing on the recto of another, the reverse of what should have happened according to the papal chancery’s customs.65 The minute began in that spot because the notary Pettini had to work around a date already entered, which Frajese thinks was that of the presentation to the pope of the theologian consultors’ opinion condemning two propositions allegedly drawn from Galileo’s Sunspot Letters.66 Instead of entering the pope’s decision about the opinion (because he took none), Pettini began the precept minute following Seghizzi’s orders.67 Second, Frajese makes a great deal of changes in the hand over the course of the minute’s text. Although constantly qualifying the point with phrases like “if we are dealing with him,” Frajese seems to agree with Beretta that the whole of the minute is in Pettini’s hand, the only time it occurs in Galileo’s dossier.68 Based on a change in the size of the text on the initial verso, he theorizes that the minute was not written continuously but in three separate blocks. He thinks it highly significant that the hand begins to shrink as it approaches the word successive and becomes smaller thereafter, a point once more adapted from Wohlwill. Therefore the text must originally have ended with the word “deserat.” After the interruption, the notary resumed with another pen or ink. Frajese concludes that Seghizzi ordered Pettini to enter the precept minute instead of leaving the two sheets blank; Bellarmino’s extrajudicial action should have left no record.69 Third, a point about the document’s form. While allowing that the text is an imbreviatura, that fact deprives it of legal validity since such documents were intended only for internal use and in the absence of the proper signatures (again) lacked legal validity.70 Finally, an argument from content. Frajese alleges that the precept minute was modeled—with suitable alterations to the truth—on the the text of Paul’s order located immediately before it in Galileo’s dossier.71 The notary had no choice but to do that, since he had “no real referent” (that is, a legitimate precept) to follow. From this, Frajese concludes that no original precept ever existed.72 The blame for all this falls on Seghizzi.73
Pagano has disposed of most of Frajese’s points, while operating within the same undemonstrated opposition between an “admonition” and a “formal precept.”74 Like Frajese, he makes assumptions about the Inquisition’s record-keeping practices, especially that it was normal for its notaries to write up documents later. This point happens to be true, but Pagano infers it from a couple of sixteenth-century examples of Holy Office officials visiting suspects at their houses.75 He further alleges without evidence that the Inquisition often used the resulting minute (which following Beretta he calls an imbreviatura or matrix seu originale instrumentum) during an informative process, a point he then contradicts by incorrectly claiming that Galileo did not undergo such an investigation in 1615–1616.76 More substantial criticisms of Frajese follow. First, Pagano easily disproves Frajese’s largest codicological claim. The precept minute’s location is not unusual: Pagano cites a number of instances of documents in Galileo’s dossier beginning on the reverse of sheets and in the middle of the page.77 Next, he almost as easily quashes Frajese’s palaeographical evidence. Pagano sees no change in the hand’s size on the initial verso, calling the allegation “unconvincing” and the supposed change in the ink as due to the degradation of oak gall ink over time.78 The abbreviations Pettini used and to which Frajese pointed as evidence of the writing’s compression are also found throughout the dossier and are those usually found in documents generated by the papal bureaucracy.79 Thus Pagano sees no evidence of any interruption. Nevertheless, he thinks it “very possible” that Seghizzi directed Pettini, while absolving the commissary of malicious intent.80 Pagano also makes at least one large mistake in his criticism of Frajese. He alleges that Paul’s order of 25 February is not found in the decree register because no actions taken in the secret part of corams were recorded there. This is not true.81
Bellarmino’s “Certificate”and Evidence from the Second Phase of Galileo’s Trial in 1633
In his reports on what happened, Galileo failed altogether to refer to the precept.82 Since he also made light of the Index’s decree of 5 March against Copernicus, it might seem that Galileo took neither event seriously.83 Indeed he did, especially when he learned of rumors that he had been forced to abjure.84 Those rumors gave rise to the seventh document. Galileo asked Bellarmino for an affidavit (fede) that he had not abjured or suffered other punishment.85 The cardinal, apparently acting as a member of the Index rather than as an Inquisitor, agreed. He wrote at least one draft of his text before settling on the final form.
The fede is dated 26 May 1616 and reads as follows:
We, Roberto Cardinal Bellarmino, having understood that Signor Galileo Galilei is being slandered or accused of having abjured in our hands, and also of being “penanced” [punished] for this with salutary penances, and having been sought out about the truth, we say that the said Signor Galileo has not abjured in our hands nor in those of others in Rome, nor anywhere else that we know, any opinion or doctrine, nor even more has he received salutary penances nor of any other sort, but has only had announced to him the declaration made by Our Lord [the pope] and published by the Sacred Congregation of the Index, in which is contained that the doctrine ascribed to Copernicus that the earth moves around the sun and the sun is at the center of the world without moving from east to west is contrary to Holy Scripture and therefore cannot be defended nor held. And in testimony of this we have written and signed this document with our own hand.86
The text manifests Bellarmino’s skill as a rhetorician. While carefully avoiding assigning responsibility for the precept, he also smoothly, almost casually noted the warning specifically to Galileo not to defend or hold either of the two condemned propositions. And he changed the draft’s link between its first and second sections to take away some of the force of what he was about to say, or perhaps he was trying to keep the Inquisition’s action secret by deflecting attention from it. Instead of the original “of any other sort ma si bene,” which literally means “but although,” he switched to “ma solo” (“but only or merely”).87 So, condemned in terms of the Index decree, or maybe not, Bellarmino left it to the reader to decide. Galileo read the text in one way, his judges in 1633 in another. Galileo perhaps naturally enough concentrated on those two little words “ma solo,” whereas his judges looked past them to Bellarmino’s statement that Galileo knew all about the Index decree, whatever else Bellarmino and Seghizzi might have ordered him to do. Galileo’s judges in 1633 took this passage as further incriminating him. In doing so, they forced the sense of Bellarmino’s fede in the opposite direction that many modern historians do. Neither can safely draw on it, since it says nothing directly about the event of 26 February.88
The last piece of evidence is Galileo’s deposition of 12 April 1633, on which those same historians have often relied almost as heavily as on Bellarmino’s document, and even more unwisely. None have allowed for its obvious nature as a self-interested statement. Even without such an allowance, as Pagano and I more clearly have demonstrated, Galileo’s testimony supports the reconstruction argued here.89
After an opening that may have been meant to steer his interrogator away from the precept, Galileo quickly produced a copy of Bellarmino’s fede.90 Even as he did so, he tried to change its meaning by glossing it in light of Bellarmino’s letter of 12 April 1615 to Paolo Antonio Foscarini. While the fede drawing on the consultors’ opinion correctly said that Copernicus’s ideas were “contrary to Holy Scripture